Nothing stops a bullet like a cello?

Sunday’s 60 Minutes featured a profile of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s next music director, the astonishingly young (26-years-old), astonishingly curly-headed, and just plain astonishing Gustavo Dudamel, who is slated to take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009.

The video of the segment, which can be found on the 60 Minutes website, is worth watching to get a preview of the wunderkind’s wondrous style, but also because of what it has to say about the unusual program that led Dudamel to music:

He was in a music program, which is a Venezuelan innovation. It is called El Sistema, the system, and it takes children - a quarter of a million children - almost all from poor neighborhoods, and teaches them how to play instruments.

This has led to hundreds of youth orchestras sprouting up all over the country.

But El Sistema is less a music program than a profound social movement that takes kids off the streets, takes them away from crime and drugs and despair.

“The music saved me. I’m sure of this. With all these bad things around you, you are exposed to these things, very close. The music give me a way to be far of these things,” Dudamel says

Dudamel says that when he takes over in 2009, he hopes to do for many of LA’s inner city kids what was done for him.

“Now we will start a project with the young people from the poor communities here in LA, like in Venezuela,” he says.

May it be so, Gustavo, may it be so.

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“How come there’s cuts in the newsroom when the company’s still profitable,” says an unhappy editor when a new round of staff buyouts are announced.

No, this quote didn’t come from someone on the LA Times editorial staff (pointing out that the LA Times has a very healthy 20 percent profit margin) after the news broke yesterday about the firing of Jim O’Shea for refusing to again slash the Times editorial staff. It was said by a fictional Metro editor working for the (fictionalized version) of the Baltimore Sun on last night’s episode of the brilliant HBO series The Wire.

In the scene in question, the Sun’s editor-in-chief has to make drastic cuts in the newsroom as demanded by management in Chicago, namely the Tribune company.

As with last year’s season of The Wire— which illuminated problems in public education (including the grindingly counterproductive teach-to-the-test downside of No Child Left Behind) with more precision and intelligence than any news or magazine story—this season’s focus on the news media is already stunningly insightful….and depressingly accurate.

The only character missing was Sam Zell.

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AN IRONIC SIDE NOTE: As most hard core fans of the series know, The Wire’s creator David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun until 1995, when he took a buyout during one of that paper’s cost cutting frenzies. According to Simon, his bete noir in the Sun’s cost-cutting battles was the paper’s then editor-in-chief John Carroll who, a decade later, became the first of three editors-in-chief at the LA Times to take a figurative bullet for his opposition to demanded newsroom cuts. (Next would come Dean Baquet and now Jim O’Shea.) UPDATE: Carroll, who led the Times to five Pulitzers, is quoted in today’s Editor and Publisher.

The real John Carroll during the first round of the ongoing cost cut battles that have now cost three top editors their jobs.

The fictional but remarkably Carrollesque-looking editor explaining the “need” for draconian cost cuts at the fictional paper on The Wire.

UPDATE: Again LA Observed is the place to go to monitor unfolding gossip and news about the latest LA Times plot twists. This morning, among other pieces of news, he quotes USC Annenberg professor Marty Kaplin:

“Haven’t I seen that movie before?” Kaplan said. “It certainly makes the replacement want ad very peculiar. ‘Wanted: Great journalist with superb firing skills.’ “

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If you didn’t see Bruce Springsteen on Sunday’s 60 Minutes…..Well, I’m just sad for you.

But, not to worry. Fortunately, I’m able to provide you with the last few paragraphs of the segment. (Regrettably, for the musical parts of the segment, you’re on your own.)

“I guess I would say that what I do is I try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality. That’s how my music is laid out. It’s like we’ve reached a point where it seems that we’re so intent on protecting ourselves that we’re willing to destroy the best parts of ourselves to do so,” Springsteen says.

Asked what he means, Springsteen tells Pelley, “Well, I think that we’ve seen things happen over the past six years that I don’t think anybody ever thought they’d ever see in the United States. When people think of the American identity, they don’t think of torture. They don’t think of illegal wiretapping. They don’t think of voter suppression. They don’t think of no habeas corpus. No right to a lawyer … you know. Those are things that are anti-American.”

[snip]

Springsteen says, “It’s unpatriotic at any given moment to sit back and let things pass that are damaging to some place that you love so dearly. And that has given me so much. And that I believe in, I still feel and see us as a beacon of hope and possibility.”

Springsteen sees himself following a long American tradition reaching back through Vietnam and on to the Great Depression.

“There’s a part of the singer going way back in American history that is of course the canary in the coal mine. When it gets dark, you’re supposed to be singing. It’s dark right now,” Springsteen says. “And so I went back to Woody Guthrie and Dylan and the people who said, say take Pete Seeger, who wants to know, doesn’t want to know how this song sounds, he wants to know what’s it for.”

“What needs to be said, in this country at this moment, in your opinion, what needs to be said?” Pelley asks.

“I think we live in a time when what is true can be made to seem a lie,” Springsteen says. “And what is lie can be made to seem true. And I think that the successful manipulation of those things have characterized several of our past elections. That level of hubris and arrogance has got us in the mess that we’re in right now. And we’re in a mess. But if we subvert, the best things that we’re about in the name of protecting our freedoms, if we remove them, then who are we becoming, you know? Who are we, you know? The American idea is a beautiful idea. It needs to be preserved, served, protected and sung out. Sung out.”

BRU-U-UUU-U-U-UUUCE! ….Ahem….. Alright, now back to our regularly scheduled programing.

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UPDATE: I wrote this in a light tone, as I happen to be an unrepentant Springsteen fan, and was poking fun at myself. But the points he makes are not trivial at all, they are essential.

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