Hasta La Ideas

Talk about timely! I couldn’t wait to dish with this week’s Lunch date now that we’re living in the age of  “alternative facts.” I was joined today by “recovering journalist” Scott Conroy, co-creator and executive producer of the new digital series Embeds, now streaming on go90.com and available on the free go90 app. The series was inspired by Scott and Peter Hamby’s lives as embed reporters for CBS and CNN on both Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in 2008. “When I was covering Sarah Palin, I thought we’d seen the most insane [presidential] election we’ll ever have,” Scott told me. “Boy, was I wrong.”

Scott is also the co-author of the bestseller Sarah From Alaska. His next book, Vote First Or Die—a book that weaves his personal narrative as a reporter with interesting anecdotes about the New Hampshire presidential primary through the years will be published in April by PublicAffairs.

Diane Clehane and Scott Conroy

In light of the barrage of nonstop news of President Donald Trump’s continuous and escalating feud with the press, I was eager to get Scott’s insider take on things. “Sarah Palin is the Rosetta Stone for all of this,” he began. “I don’t think a lot of people know that Steve Bannon was her consigliere. He latched on to her.” Scott first met Bannon in 2011 when he was the mastermind behind her exploratory campaign for a possible presidential campaign run. When Palin decided not to make a run for the White House in 2012 Scott was “surprised” but, he said, “Bannon regrouped and found his guy — Trump.”

Bannon, said Scott, was smart enough to recognize the Tea Party rhetoric about crony capitalism and ‘draining the swamp’ that resonated with Palin supporters had struck a nerve among a certain segment of voters that weren’t going away. “People used to thinks of Republicans as the wealthy country club set, but Bannon basically crafted a new identity for a disaffected working class, a voting block that was big enough to carry Trump to the White House. Bannon realized this and executed his campaign strategy for Trump brilliantly. He’s an ideologue to a degree, but more than anything he’s an operator. He knows exactly what buttons to push to fire up the base.”

And one of those well-worn buttons is selling voters on the idea that the media is the enemy. “Palin did that with the ‘lame stream media,’ but Trump took it to a whole new level,” said Scott between bites of Cobb salad. Trump’s tendency to point out individual reporters like Katy Tur to the crowds attending his rallies was clear evidence that he has “no shame” in his dealings with the media. “I heard him tell supporters at a rally in Fort Worth he’d like to change the libel laws to make it easier to sue journalists. The crowd loved it.”

We both agreed that the bitter irony is that a largely acquiescent media and its 24/7 coverage played a huge role in Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency. “I think the coverage is getting better,” said Scott. “In the last few weeks it’s gotten more aggressive, but it’s too little, too late.” Yup.

In today’s reality-show nation, “There is a direct line from The Apprentice in 2004 to Jeff Zucker to Sarah Palin and Steve Bannon to Trump,” said Scott. With the presidential playbook of yesteryear out the window, it’s not just journalists and citizens that are trying to figure out what the “most unpredictable president in history” is going to do at any given time. “I can just imagine the Chinese ambassador preparing for his first sit-down with Trump being told, ‘The first thing to do is to praise The Apprentice,” said Scott.

With Trump threatening to ‘hand-pick’ which outlets he’ll talk to or let into the White House, the media needs to thrown down the gauntlet, warned Scott. “They need to get away from ‘access journalism’ because access journalism in the Trump era is a fool’s errand.”

During an appearance last week on The Daily Show, Scott told Trevor Noah that the media needs to break away from the “spoon fed” spin that comes out of the White House press room. “The political media needs to get outside the bubble. Instead of adding another body to White House press room, they should send young hungry reporters that have been embeds to a swing states outside the context of the election to report on the Trump presidency instead of having them in the White House listening to Sean Spicer spout off lies.”

Scott, who is married to NBC News correspondent Jo Ling Kent (they met on the campaign trail), has spent more than his fair share of time outside of Washington — and that’s what makes Embeds so intriguing. The half-hour scripted comedy, which was shot mainly in Iowa (except for one episode shot in Los Angeles), focuses on five recent college graduates working as embedded reporters for various national news organizations on the presidential campaign trail. Scott and Peter (now Head of News at Snapchat and host of the political show, Good Luck America) spent almost a decade covering presidential campaigns — of which makes for plentiful fodder for Embeds.

“Peter and I had an idea about writing a show about a presidential campaign but then we thought, instead of focusing on the campaign, we would write about us.” They wrote the Embeds pilot in 2012 and began shopping it around. “In spite of shows like Veep, it’s hard to do politics,” he told me. He gave the script to his book agent Alice Martell (“She’s the best!”) and she showed it to CAA’s Bruce Vinokour. Another “big shot” at CAA, Matt DelPiano, showed it to his client Megyn Kelly and, said Scott, “She wanted to get involved, too.”

Besides contributing a female reporter’s point of view (“That was very important to me,” said Scott) Kelly (who got an executive producer credit) made another important contribution to the show. James Caan, a “huge fan of Megyn’s” came on board and appears in the series’ fourth episode. “Per his request the credits for the episode actually say, ‘For the love of Megyn Kelly … James Caan.” Teeny bopper alert: Austin Swift  — yes, brother of Taylor Swift — appears in the fourth and sixth episodes.

The series is executive produced by three-time Academy Award-nominated producer (who is also producing this year’s Oscar telecast) Michael De Luca (The Social Network, Moneyball, Captain Phillips) and Lucy Kitada. Other executive producers include Bryan Haas, who developed the idea with Scott and Peter and oversaw production; Kevin Mann, Brendan Bragg, and Jordana Mollick for Haven Entertainment; and Justin Killion and Cory Stern for Complex Networks’ Seriously.TV. Danny Jelinek directed all six episodes. Todd Waldman serves as showrunner and executive producer.

All of it came together in record time, said Scott, who was working at Vice on the launch of the network’s nightly news show on HBO when the series got picked up. “That was a Thursday and I quit my job the next day. Monday I was in the writer’s room. A month later we were in production and two months later we were in post-production. This could not have happened this fast anywhere else.” Now, Hollywood beckons. The Boston native, currently living in New York, told me he and Jo Ling are headed to Los Angeles  “for a few months”

Complex Networks, formed from the joint acquisition of Complex by Verizon and Hearst, is the studio which funded the project. Last night they sponsored a press screening in Dumbo at the Made in New York Media Center by IFP with a panel discussion moderated by Katy Tur with the cast. Next week, Scott is doing an event at his alma mater Georgetown at the university’s Institution of Politics with some embedded reporters and Scott’s mentor Robert Draper. Whatever will they talk about?

Here’s the rundown on today’s crowd:

1. Hollywoodlife.com’s Bonnie Fuller and Penske Media’s vice chair Gerry Byrne hosting Megan Murphy, editor in chief, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Quentin Schaffer, EVP Corporate Communications, HBO, Jim Rich, former editor in chief, NY Daily News, Maia McCann of LittleThings.com, Page Six TV’s Kathleen Rajsp, Lauren Kern, executive editor, New York Magazine, Paul Wahlgren, CEO/ COO, Bio Mimetic Laboratories & Erasa Skincare, Stacey Bossard of Hirepurpose & Task & Purpose, Hilary Smith, SVP Corporate Communications, NBCUniversal and Nicole Kerr of FRANK PR.

2. Dan Abrams with Vicky Ward who told me she is keeping quite busy these days writing for Town & Country and Esquire.

3. Eva Mohr

4. Freddie Gershorn and Linda Janklow

5. Jim Abernathy

6. Andrew Stein

8. PR maven Norah Lawlor

9. Legendary lenswoman Pamela Hanson

11. Barry Frey

12. Meryl Gordon presiding over a very full table of pals

14. British Heritage Travel’s CEO Jack Kliger (We missed you last week) and Marshall Cohen

15. Producer Larry Spangler

16. Alicia Volk

17. Ferragamo’s Vincent Ottomanelli

18. LAK PR’s CEO Lisa Linden with her associate Hannah Arnold

20. Larry Hackett

21. Michael Christenson

22. Ira Akselrad

24. Joannie Danielides hosting a birthday luncheon for Donna Hanover (whose birthday is actually February 15th, but why wait to celebrate?) There were plenty of media mavens in attendance: Gayle King, Paula Zahn (long time no see!), The New York Daily News’ Linda Stasi,  Cathy Black, producer Blair Breard, Sue Leibman, Ann Moore, owner of The Curator Gallery and Dr. Terry Fulmer.

25. Steve Forrest

26. David Baum

27. Scott Conroy, Complex’s SVP of communications Jennifer St. Clair and yours truly

And what was going on in the Garden Room? I spotted several red carpet photographers  — Sonia Moskowitz and Robin Platzer among them — headed that way for an off-duty confab. The new ladies who lunch perhaps?

Diane Clehane is a FishbowlNY contributor. Follow her on Twitter @DianeClehane. Send comments and corrections on this column to LUNCH at MEDIABISTRO dot COM.

The other night I was walking back to the subway after 11pm, and on Madison Avenue I was pleased to see that Thomas Moser’s showroom has moved to the ground floor. There just aren’t too many traditional American furniture makers left, and as Madison Avenue has some of the most expensive retail rents in the world—we’re talking $500 to $1,000 per square foot per year—I’m hopeful that Moser’s business is good.

Moser, rightly so, has chosen the high end, and seeing his solid wood wonderfully-made pieces in a lit window at night next to stores with thousand dollar bathing suits and three thousand dollar purses made me hopeful.

Last Friday my son and I wandered by the 42nd Street Library, and once again the architectural woodworking caught my eye. The ceilings of the entire library are grand but, frustratingly, a little too high up to get a good look at:

So let’s take a look at some of the details that are closer by.

This bench below is one of many set all around the library and it’s very simple, at least in concept. The library was built between 1897 – 1911, well after the Industrial Revolution, so this bench would most probably have been made by machine. Looking at the detail, there is a lot of shaper and pin router work.

The big difference between it and public furniture from the post-Depression period is that while machinery was used in its construction the design, especially the details of the design, the flowing curves and worked moldings, go back to an earlier Victorian age of detailing.

The Bauhaus movement argued that something made by machine should also look like it was made by machine and there was no need for detailing. But this bench, from a previous generation of design, really uses machines to enable detail. The designers still want to entertain our eyes, even while creating a comfortable place to sit.

The last photo is of a bit of molding on a wall near the bench. In contrast to the bench, this must have been done nearly entirely by hand. I don’t know if work like this was done to blueprints and installed, or if the rough moldings were fitted, then taken down for carving.

In any case this is a tour de force of architectural carving. This period was at the height of decorative architectural detail in the U.S. and it shows. It’s just a decoration but it is solid – because it is at human height and it needs to withstand damage. It’s detailed without being prissy, and fairly big. And the building is full of it. In wood, stone, and plaster. This isn’t a single carving that is a centerpiece of something, it’s a fairly nondescript decoration in a room full of decorations and a killer ceiling.

Lastly, I must say I was very annoyed when a remodeling of our local library removed lots of indestructible oak chairs and tables and replaced them with…melamine. I don’t often use emoticons but if there was ever a time for it, this is it. 🙁

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This “Tools & Craft” section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.

I figured this had to be a gag, but the UK’s Drones Direct is apparently selling the RainP4, a DJI Phantom 4 with an umbrella attachment.

For £1,299 (USD $1,640) you get a:

– Simple to use hands-free umbrella that hovers above your head
– Hands-free piloting – the drone automatically follows you via your smartphone’s GPS
– Perfect for walking the dog, riding a bike, watching a sporting event, etc…..
– Long battery life – up to 30 minutes flight time
– Built-in collision avoidance technology for maximum safety
– Can be also used as a regular drone to fly in the rain

Unsurprisingly, YouTube footage of this contraption in action does not appear to exist. And, uh—watching a sporting event? Yeah, I’m sure the folks behind you in the stands won’t mind!

Via Technabob

Still one of our favorite records from 2016, Kishi Bashi’s Sonderlust is beautifully uplifting despite its pathos. Deeply personal and yet universally relatable, the record features all the sparkle we’ve grown to expect and adore from the singer/songwriter……

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Navigator 1 is big… really big! Its 50mm diameter watch face features GMT world time function to show times in different cities, dedicated hour and minute cases, as well as sailing-inspired elements like a nautical sextant, vintage map fonts and graphics depicting the history of medieval sailing. The result is an eye-catching world-time timepiece for travellers with a classic style.

Structurally, the watch mechanism uses two separate basic movements instead of a complex GMT movement. The movement on the left indicates the hours with a rotatable case. Another movement on the right shows the minutes with a fixed case. Normally, the arrow on the bezel of the hour case is pointed towards one’s hometown to show the home time. To know the time in another city, the user only has to turn the big crown to direct the arrow towards the city in question and the global time will show up immediately.

Designers: Ivy Leung & Dragon Har