Another Fortnight I'm Not Exactly Looking Forward To

OUR story so far: somebody at the USOC--which, by the way, has an award named for George Steinbrenner despite the fact that Steinbrenner didn't pay for it--got Ralph Lauren to design the Team USA getups, proving once again that there may be someone with money in this country who also has taste, but if so he keeps it secret. This is the result, cleverly combining the feline athleticism of professional yachting, the classic, buttoned-down spiffiness of amateur yachting, and just the right hint of Mormon paramilitary commando cadre, topped off with the traditional American headgear:

Plus the one-foot square Polo by Ralph Lauren ™ logo. Of course. Because who th' fuck else could design a blue blazer and white pants?

The criticism caused someone to ask Ann Coulter for her opinion, because, you know, that's what this country was reduced to a couple decades ago at least.

Right-winger Ann Coulter said the Polo logo on the Olympic uniforms is "huge," but, "If you want athletes to wear un-logo'd uniforms, you have to sponsor them instead of Polo. That's just how life is."

Yes, that's how life is. There's no possible way around it. An Olympics without the skidmarks of corporate shit stains everywhere is unimaginable. And will someone please apologize to the shade of Jim Thorpe? A few million times?

I do have to admit there's a certain appropriateness to Ann's idea. 

Meanwhile, this so riled the DAR that even the DAR had to disavow the reaction of its members ("who control some of the most exclusive country clubs in the nation", sez the Post, and thank'ee for that), who had envisioned something more along these lines:

Which at least would cut the pretense.  

And are threatening to exclude Polo™ merchandise from pro shops and society charity-scam auctions from Palm Springs to Augusta.

Th' fuck did the rest of us do to deserve any of these people?

There's Never Anything On Teevee

Victor Davis Hanson, "Confessions of a Cultural Drop-out". October 17

ROY points us at Hanson; wise commenters nail down what little he doesn't; commenter Riley, still battling respiratory crap and attendant five-thousand things left undone just as the leaves start to fall, decides mid-novella to just hijack the thing. Y'all can have your money back if not satisfied.

Now the first problem we ran into, about six paragraphs into our rough draft, was that there was no seamless way to work in the ad hominem attack on Hanson we'd been harboring since we saw him on the Military History channel a week ago, commenting on Cannae. You may recall (hope so; I'm too lazy to look it up) that one insomniac night a couple months back we innocently let run the final fifteen minutes of a replay of some History Channel Thermopylae thing which had been designed for a homoerotic piggyback ride on the PR campaign for 300, because we were interested in what came on next. It didn't occur to us, in the cognitive twilight, that 1) Victor Davis Hanson would turn up as a commenter, or 2) that, having done so, he'd blather something about urination and defecation, which, while perhaps the legitimate focus of the odd academic thought or two, yet required some measure of self-control to avoid guffawing loudly enough to wake my Poor Wife, especially when set against the Tom of Finland animation.

That one was my own fault. But the other day I clicked on the Cannae story and ran headlong into him. Which was objectionable on the grounds that 1) I can't believe my karma is that bad; and 2) Hanson's Great Battles Retold As Simple Moral Lessons For Kids From Eight to Ninety-Eight is particularly exposed by Hannibal's textbook double envelopment (see Robert Bateman). The only thing I had to add was this: Thank you, Professor Fucking Sominex. I'm guessing that either the tables at the War College are padded, or they recommended everyone attending Hanson's lectures keep his helmet on.

There are two salient beauties to this approach: one really needn't worry all that much about substantive criticism of an approach to historical scholarship that was outmoded before one's birth when potential critics have to decide, early on, whether to continue reading/listening to you or whether to continue breathing; and it's almost perfectly transferable to any other endeavor where facts may be discounted or dismissed as irrelevant. For instance, right-wing political commentary.

Anyhooo, I've always been fascinated by how this Degenerate (now also Liberal Anti-Capitalist) Pop Culture routine has managed to surf along behind the crest of the zeitgeist all these years and still remain in one spot.

Why not DVDs?

If I watch DVDs, they surely are not of recent vintage. I couldn’t tell you a single release in the current most rented 100. I rewatch instead Westerns—Peckinpaugh, John Ford, the classics like Shane and High Noon, the greats like Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, John Wayne, etc., and, as I wrote a few months ago, almost anything with a brilliant, but now forgotten character actor such as a Jack Palance, Richard Boone (cf. Cicero Grimes in Hombre), Ben Johnson, or Warren Oates—if only for their accents, ad-libbed lines, and carriage. Only the greats like DeNiro or Pacino, or a Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and a few others (a Hackman, Eastwood, or Hopkins) approximate the old breed. (A Mickey Rourke, Gary Oldman, or John Malkovich are at least originals and, like real people, look the worse for it). So I find myself replaying something like a Das Boot or Breaker Morant, or supposedly corny 1930s and 1940s classics like How Green Was My Valley or The Best Years of Our Lives. If I want to watch a film that failed at the box-office, I’ll take One-Eyed Jacks or Major Dundee or Pat Garret and Billy the Kid; their failures are better than today’s “successes”.

Now, as several of Roy's commenters pointed out, this condition, in the less inclined to attribute every minor irritation in life to the cryptic machinations of Big Liberal, is known as "getting old." But as Hanson and I are the same age, I note it's also something more: it's fake. Not that one can't adopt a nostalgia for an era one never knew, although this has it in spades, but for the sense that today's Hollywood has suddenly departed from a norm when in fact Hanson and I have grown up and grown old with his very complaints in our ears.

Not that the Right hasn't been chomping on roast leg of Hollywood since the Silents, but, y'know, how does a 55-year-old limn Peckinpah without recalling the uproar his work created at the time? Movies were too sexy, too violent, anti-American, morally relativist, and insufficiently uplifting forty fucking years ago. If you don't care to watch anything made after Todd-AO, fine by me. Just quit trying to pretend it's a recent development. Movies started blowin' shit up--I mean, started being about shit blowing up--with Jaws and Star Wars, not Transformers. You're sure going to miss 85% of what's worthwhile in the 30s if "anti-corporate" pushes your gorge to your throat. How can you watch even a standard Sheepherders vs. Cattlemen oater without flying off the handle? If "some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups" ruin the cinematic experience for you, what of a few thousand hours of crock o'shit representations of The American Indian? If moral relativism gives you the fantods, skip noir, dude. For that matter you might want to concentrate on Grace Kelly's corset, and not the story line, in future screenings of High Noon.

In fact, let's just make this a general maxim: If you want to walk through Life guided by the idea that the American Railroad Baron is the victim of calumniously bad PR, finding suitable entertainment is not your biggest problem.

Deeply Fried

MY Poor Wife watches CBS Sunday Morning, which is where the old movie house newsreels went to die, and which, incidentally, as CBS's abiding legacy of Charles Kuralt, is the second greatest monument to polygamy in the country. She does this because there is usually a fine arts segment which she tapes to show her classes. I mean she would, if doing so didn't violate copyright laws. (Seriously. She's scrupulous about that; I think you're permitted something like a one-week time-shift, and that's it.) She still tapes 'em.

And it's not like I'm a young man, or like I don't enjoy croquet, word games, and naps, but CBS Sunday Morning is seriously, pointedly, self-consciously wizened. And one of their regular vaudevillians is a guy named BIll Geist, who's like Andy Rooney without the good material. He's the author of several best-selling books, including The Big Five-Oh! Facing, Fearing, And Fighting Fifty. They are the sort of best-selling book which features the author on the cover pulling a face which indicates his basic, decent, regular guy confusion over one or more of life's little foibles. Perhaps you've read one, on a bet.

It's not like I walk down the street purposely destroying any whimsical yard ornament I see. Live, let live, and give terminal suburbanites whose IQs barely exceed their golf handicaps a wide berth, I always say. But then my Poor Wife watches this show, and it's on in the blasted AM of a Sunday, when going outdoors to escape it is frequently out of the question. And this week, apparently under the impression that Injury requires Insult to achieve what they call on Oprah "closure", Bill Geist went to a Politically Incorrect burger joint.

Yeah, a politically-incorrect burger joint, the Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, AZ, which specializes in the, let's say, massive, theatrically-presented dosages of fat and grease, lard-dipped, fried, and topped with sufficient cheeselike substance to physically camouflage two-to-four pounds of meat underneath shown above. This is known, in the Business, as schtick. When it is done to the exclusion of, or likely, for want of, actual good ideas the practitioner is known as "Carrot Top".

It is, in other words, the business concept of some guy who figured that the joke was good enough that you'd laugh just as hard the fiftieth time you heard it, and that furthermore there were enough people in, or passing through, the vicinity of Chandler, AZ so dedicated to striking a blow against Health Naziism that they'd spend money on this stuff. In this, the latter, we agree that the evidence suggests he's onto something; we are currently in the twenty-seventh year of the notion that saying something--anything, practically--which "violates" the "rules" of the "PC police" is as high as one need reach on the comedy or punditry scale. Although, for good measure, there's the hydraulically-enhanced waitresses in the Hooker Nurse outfits.

So we are not questioning the business acumen on display here; nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public, as P.T. Barnum, or H. L. Mencken, or Milton Friedman once said. It is, from all appearances, just good old-fashioned hucksterism, and harmless, unless you actually eat the stuff, or care about the aesthetics of the plate, or have reached adulthood. No, rather, we walked into the room just as some culinary yahoo was stuffing parts of one of those treats directly into his gizzard, and were immediately struck with two questions. The first was, "What th' hell happened that the former haunt of Charles "Warm and Fuzzy Americana" Kuralt, the man who drove around the country for twenty-five years, looking for authentic feature stories of the 'Real America', as well as any wives or children he might have stashed somewhere and forgotten?" Do we really find that authentic America in strip malls now, or is it just that they're easier to get to? (The camera work, by the way, and Geist's leering old man knee-slappers, suggested it was, in fact, the nurse outfits.) The second--you may have tumbled onto this--was "How long is pre-packaged 'political incorrectness' going to amuse the easily amused and profoundly shallow?" Hasn't Political Incorrectness pretty much reached the point where it, too, is a series of someone else's strictures imposed on a powerless public at large? If one endures a quarter-century of any and every act which does not further the cause of White Guys Continuing To Run Everything being condemned as "PC", hasn't the mere passage of time set that in stone, too? Unless I eat a stick of bacon-wrapped lard, on a bun, extra cheese, I'm spoiling someone else's fun?

There was one other thing we wondered, namely, "Is Bill Geist gonna say 'You can almost feel your arteries clogging' six more times, or seven?"

Of course the point about "Political Correctness" was always the political; the correctness was pure construct, born of the spurious notion that the nation's colleges and universities were "censoring" "conservative" thought, which, of course, will remain nonsense so long as there are business schools and economics programs, and which, in the particular, was akin to complaining that the nation's symphony orchestras unfairly blacklist the works of Lynnerd Skynnerd. It managed to thrive for some reason, like aerosol cheese, Objectivism, and Chevy Chase, among people who are too lethargic to think things through. It collected petty grievances about warning labels, child-proof caps, and handicapped parking like a serge suit collects lint, and to much the same effect. The Politically Incorrect universe demands you share in the offense of the white male forced to think before he speaks. It has never asked you to share the offense of the people he used to offend with impunity.

Because, of course, it's bullshit. It's a collection of the chips from various right-wing establishment shoulders which happened to click at a time when the Democrats were running around pissing themselves because Ronald Reagan had been named King of America in perpetuity. And because, in all this time, it's those same wingers who are really PC. They're the ones who've talked around what they really wanted to say. Which is why I was amused by the reaction to the Letterman business which accused the Right of "adopting" Political Correctness when it suits them. The fact is that they've been its main practitioners all along, and it's only in the recent, dark days (dark clouds, dim prospects, dusky First Family) they've been driven to abandon it.

But not on a plate.

Sunday Soup Blogging

THE third bag of onions I've bought this (last) month has confirmed, in its vermiform green intention to Get Growing!, what the previous two suggested: that Spring is just around the corner. Goodbye, hearty soups and stews! Farewell, twenty-two quart pot of chicken stock left on the deck overnight to cool with lid weighted down so the raccoons can't get in it! We repeat, with allowances for variations in your own milage, that we can't figure out why you'd wanna live where it's warm all the time.

Soup is a touch item, like dumplings, fried chicken, or home-baked goods. The best comes from people who make it every day, not from people who "know" "how" to "cook". It's not amenable to chef tricks. Good soup requires balance and finesse, not raw power; you can't dump a bunch of spices in a batch in an act of contrition. (Anybody know a fancy restaurant that'll fry you up a plate of chicken? I don't. They can't stand the competition from Popeyes.)

I'm a pretty decent cook, but I don't think there are as many as ten soups in my repertoire I'd risk on guests. Here's one, though: easy, fast, and three-seasonal:

Tortellini Soup

1 large onion, sliced
2T olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced, roasted preferred by me
1 qt. good-quality chicken stock, or vegetable stock
1 c. water
8oz. fresh cheese tortellini
couple handfuls of spinach, depending on your hands

crutons; romano; pepper to taste

•saute onion in oil over medium-high heat; let it burn a little. c'mon. always let 'em burn a little

•add minced garlic and cook very briefly. never trust a cook who tells you to saute garlic all the while onions are sauteing

•add stock and water, bring to boil. add tortellini, return to boil, reduce to low boil and cook 6-7 minutes

•cut spinach in chiffonade stir into soup, turn off heat, and let sit for a minute while spinach wilts

•serve topped with crutons and grated romano. and yes, that means fresh grated romano.

4 servings

All Right, Jamesy. Let Me Up, I'm Fuckin' Serious This Time.

Andy Newman, "Irony is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right." November 23

NEVER again:

Its ill health was noted by, among others, no less an ironist than Joan Didion, the nation’s poet laureate of disillusion. The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”

Look, here's the thing: I'm from the Midwest. It simply did not occur to me to seek out Joan Didion's take on the election. Or Tina Brown's. Or George Plimpton's. In fact it didn't even occur to me to wonder if the election had brought Plimpton back to life for one last bon mot and Grey Goose martini, or to bother figuring out who's a part of the New York literati scene this century. That's how long ago my Poor Wife's subscription to Vanity Fair ran out, and how small a shit I give about it.

I mean, is someone actively preventing Joan Didion from being ironic in public these days? Does she mostly hang out with 18-to-20-year-old Obama fans? She got to write about the election in VF and lecture about it at the New York Public Library. What fucking more resuscitation does poor ol' Irony need? Maybe the woman should blog.

Oh, wait, here comes Conservative Humorist P.J. O'Rourke to give Dame Irony the Kiss of Life. Really, really side-splittingly funny Life:

But are ironic sensibilities like Ms. Didion’s — the detachment of mind, the appreciation of the folly of taking things at face value — really disappearing?

Not according to the conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke, who reported from his New Hampshire office on Wednesday that he was finishing a piece for The Weekly Standard with the working title, “Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?”

Zing! Y'know, I believe at this point we might safely conclude that Irony is doing fine, but some of her hangers-on got some bad salmon paté. 

Look, when you reach middle-age, let alone roar past it, it's fine to pile on the comic infirmities, but it's unseemly to pretend you've forgotten the last thirty years, at least so long as you still want to make public pronouncements. There were/are irritating, humorless twits who supported Obama, just as there were Irritating Twits for Ron Paul, Irritating Twits for Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and Vexatious Fops for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, probably. Those of us of an historical bent might cast our eyes all the way back to 2000 C.E., when the contentious selection of George W. Bush, and the launch of the most ideologically-cracked administration in the history of the Republic (an ungracious Inaugural, the transparently ginned-up Clinton Scandals Redux, Dick Cheney's secret meetings with the real US government) resulted in a blistering 17% negative rating for Mr. Bush. Maybe there's such a thing as a honeymoon. Maybe Irony just needs to practice her aim a little. Or stop behaving like a whining seven-year-old with a full bladder staring at the candy shelves in the supermarket check-out line. The Droning Obama Gloriously Non-Sectarian Cloistered Monk Chorus was last fucking winter; since then he's dropped in the polls, fallen behind John McCain, started sounding like a Democrat, and won in a landslide. As we emerge from the Worst Presidency in History By A Factor of Two At Least (there's a fertile Irony field for you, Mr. O'Rourke) it's hardly surprising that a sizable chunk of the public is permitting itself some small degree of hope despite the bleak news on every possible front involving Presidential decisions of the past eight years (got a shovel, P.J.?).  

(Same with this phony Oh my God the Change Candidate is appointing former Clintonites routine. For fuck's sake, who do you expect him to appoint--Joe the Fucking Unlicensed Plumber? He's a Centrist Democrat and he's appointing Centrist Democrats. Too bad if he didn't unilaterally disarm. And same for the "Look, no phony quotas" routine. The reason Barack Obama can appoint people without a seeming, or obvious, regard for complexion, gender, or facial hair is that we have given minorities a leg up now for a generation. This is not an excuse to stop trying to rectify 400 years of intentional harm.)

Go ahead and hate Obama, if you wish, but quit fucking hating him by proxy; that was what the election was for. Mindless idiocy, wholly-unsupportable optimism, and ill-informed personal choices are going to be with us always. That is, in fact, the bulk of the recipe for the last thirty years of Republican dominance. Treat them the same, or avoid politics, but, as they say in baseball, act like you fucking been there before, huh?

Okay, I Am Willing To Admit The Flintstones Chewable Contraceptives Were Over The Top

Jessica Bennett, "The Pornification Of A Generation". October 7

IT'S the week for pull quotes to tell more of the story than probably desired, apparently:

A new book traces the migration of porn
culture from adult theaters to the
mainstream--and asks what that means for kids.

So now the first thing I sez to myself here is, Adult theatres? I'm pretty sure the last one closed around 1979, or about the time the VHS Revolution brought porn directly into America's willing bedrooms.

Then I realized I'd forgotten about Pee Wee.

The book in question is Carmine Sarracino and Kevin Scott's The Porning of America. Now, it's possible that by "theater" Newsweek meant "bookstore" or "sex shop", what in Indiana were, for a glorious two-year period, known as Museums of Adult Literature, because one of The World's Third Worst State Legislature's periodic attempts to circumvent the First Amendment involved prohibiting the display of prurient materials, but exempting museums. This must've been twenty years ago, now, but it's still, by far, my favorite piece of crackpot legislation ever enacted anywhere. Apparently the legislators actually imagined that come January 1 every porn shop would have to close its doors. I believe the first inkling they got that the results would be other than expected was when the Yellow Pages arrived that October, and all the dirty bookstores were listed as Museums.  I'm not sure you can truly appreciate how great it was to be alive on that day, and every day until the next session, when they took the law out back and shot it in the dead of night. It was like Christmas morning every dawn. It was like walking the streets of a small town which had lost a bet, and everyone was wearing clown shoes. It was like every block hosted a live America's Funniest Home Videos, with men being hit in the groin by whiffle-bat-wielding toddlers, children with inverted ice cream cones on their heads, or Afghan hounds fucking energetically on the sidewalk in front of shocked minister's wives.  Everything was brighter, and funnier, even the stupidity. Especially the stupidity. Driving past one of the actual store signs put you at risk of collapsing in a heap and rolling the car into a ditch. If only the Legislature had returned and found some obscure state law prevented them from changing the name back for a hundred years.

Anyway, the question about "theaters" was relevant, because pretty soon this sort of thing gets around to making spurious claims that let you know where its real sympathies lie, as if you hadn't already figured that out for yourself:

It's too early to know exactly how kids who grow up in this hypersexualized environment will be affected in the long term

So either the authors believe that we've reached some new critical mass of sluttiness, previously undreamt, or all the people who've grown up with porn in the house since the mass consumer acceptance of home video, which would be the majority of people over the majority of the past three decades, don't count for some reason, probably involving the fact that most of them have grown up and pass for normal, thus compromising our righteous ire.

So then I jumped over to Amazon to check out the reviews, of which there are none aside from the Professional one.   But there are several quotes that appear to be book-jacket blurbs, and one is from Dr. Annie Sprinkle, and another from Al Goldstein, which led me to believe that either Newsweek was overplaying the Child/Porn Threat Level (shocking, I know) or both my legs were being pulled at once. Amazon did inform me that the book indeed traces the history of porn, but back to the Daguerrotype, not back to the raincoat matinee. We're more than willing to concede that few, if any, Victorian-era five-year-olds played with hooker dolls. We're just not willing to concede they were therefore better off than their modern descendants.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Professor Scott relates what led him to write the book in the first place:

The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."

Okay, so I'm the first to admit that in my effort to ignore to the best of my ability every disposable piece of crap foisted on the innocent in the name of Popular Culture and Even More Popular Cash Flow I may have missed something. But Bratz? They're, like, dolls, right? And they've got their own Saturday morning informercial? And a movie? Vaguely ethnic-looking, vaguely Street (is that the real problem)? They're dolls. Would you be freaking out if she wanted a Barbie? Or is that the "other doll" you gave her to sate her preschool acquisitiveness for the nonce?

I don't mean to dismiss such concerns out of hand, but, y'know, I have two nieces fast entering dating age. Their parents have been fairly strict in their upbringing, and the whole clan comes across as fairly chaste, if not prudish. And when they were younger we'd go over there Christmas morning and just be appalled at the fucking volume of fucking plastic disposable Must-Have Junk of the Moment, though little if any of it was ever even remotely sexualized. If they'd have been costumed as miniature demireps snorting piles of sugary Kidz Blo™ it wouldn't have been much worse. We've had several generations grow up, as the saying goes, in precisely this sort of mindless consumerist utopia--is it still too early to know how they might have been effected?  Or just too unprofitable to ask?

But Scott and his coauthor say it's not too soon—or too prudish—to sound the alarm, and to look critically at the sexualized culture we're exposed to every day. The authors don't suggest banishing porn to back alleys, however. Both grew up when people were crying out for sexual liberation. And, they contend, porn certainly played a role in achieving it. But somehow between then and now, porn themes have gone from adult entertainment to prime time, seeping into nearly every aspect of popular culture. Sarracino and Scott define "porning" as the way advertising and society in general have borrowed from the ideas and characteristics central to most American pornography: sex as commodity, sexuality as overt, narrow views of women and male-female relationships, bad girls and dirty boys, domination and submission.

What's sex got to do with it, really (try substituting "patriotic" or "militaristic" in the above)? Five-year-olds shouldn't be sexualized, and nine-year-old girls shouldn't be taught that Fashionable Penis Enticer is their best, let alone only, path to career advancement.

But here's an observation, and it's not based on nothing; I'm married to an urban high school teacher, who sees hundreds of hormonal train wrecks on a daily basis, including a wholly-unacceptable level of pregnancy: sex seems to be fairly popular. I don't really see that half-fucking-measures or wishy and washy greyscale renderings have had much, if any, effect, and I do believe that forty years of people roiling these waters over and over is enough time for that behavior to have been evaluated, and found counterproductive. It's time to fish, or go work in a bait shop.  I realize that my real beef here is probably with Newsweek, not the book, but still; this defense of sexual freedom business does not impress me much (it's sort of the ultimate I Got Mine argument, innit?). If you're going to write the young century's eighty-second published meditation on Porn, you're either for the underlying Sex part, in which case you at least sound normal, or you're Ben Shapiro, in which case only people who are crazier than you buy it. (And with as tiny a market slice as that you've gotta rely on multiple corporate purchases if you ever want to write another.)  So it sounds less like bona fides and more like good marketing skills.  If you're not going to directly address the people who are creating the problem, then at least explain to the rest of us what ought to be done about it without tearing down the World's Most Popular Amusement Park Ride. If my car breaks down I have one decision to make: is it worth it to repair it? I can't decide that unless I get an estimate. This is the ground the Religious Right, and its political arm, the GOP, has occupied for forty years, and the same ground people who attack public education hurl long-range artillery from: four hundred different views of The Problem, and no one willing to propose any solution not constructed entirely of Vapor, because every such solution is draconian, wildly unpopular, and probably unconstitutional, whatever that means these days, and instead of fixing the problem it would fix the wagons of the people who make a comfortable living off it. We'll note, again, that we're pretty skeptical about the empirical method being this much of a mystery, even to Professors of English (Economists, okay). You could begin by demonstrating that Bratz was in some percentage sexualizing your preschooler, instead of wholly feeding a penchant for grubbing at whatever shiny object is dangling in front of her at the moment, which we already know has been fully developed, and under your Watch.

Doghouse Riley's Real-Life Do-It-Yourself Project File™

Project: Mosaic-topped potting bench

Materials: 2x4 treated lumber, 3/4" plywood, 1x4 construction-grade lumber, carriage bolts, deck screws, exterior nails, construction adhesive, exterior paint, urethane, assorted sandpaper, ceramic tile, exterior grout, sealer, moulding

Tools: circular saw, power drill, sander, hammer, paint brushes, grout float, margin trowel, sponge, terry-cloth towels, magnifying glass, mosquito repellant, tweezers, assorted bandages, bacitracin, tetanus vaccine

Estimated time: 6 years

Estimated cost: $7000, labor included

Instructions: 2002: build potting bench at wife's insistence, paint. Later, in response to her "Shouldn't you do something about the (rain) water standing on the table?" resolve to do nothing about rain water standing on the table. 2003: replace tabletop, paint, urethane. 2004: urethane. 2005: urethane, repaint to match new garden decor, urethane. 2006: urethane, decide to tile top as more permanent solution to weathering, buy tile, leave lying on bench. 2007: pharmaceutical testing. 2008: resolve, post-arthroscopy, to clean up mess. Replace tabletop, repaint, decide to actually get tiling done this time, decide to try mosaic, on the grounds that increasing the time required to finish the project by a factor of 12 will similarly increase the likelihood of its completion. Peruse grout aisle at local Lowe's. Discover, not surprisingly, that grout aisle, like every other aisle in the store, is dominated by the company which shows the greatest degree of quality control in selecting and distributing perks to Lowe's executives. Select color ("platinum") and exterior, sand-positive grout. Get home and use magnifying glass to decipher print on container; discover it's still gibberish, but that product must in fact be mixed with a proprietary liquid and not water, which must have cost the executives at the grout company at least a dozen extra hookers. Return to Lowe's, only to discover that the hole where said liquid is supposed to reside--several feet and a couple products separated from the huge selection of colors which are actually useless without it. Find Lowe's employee to confirm that shelf hole does mean they're out of the product, and not just that it's stored twenty-five feet above and no one wanted to get it. Also learn that unavailability is common, due to color and liquid mixture being packaged in one of those 6 hot dogs/ 8 buns relationships. Drive to next-closest Lowe's, find item in stock. Learn, additionally, that I had fallen for Standard Do-It-Yourselfer Ploy, where smaller, "Come On" packaging of tint was married to Stupid All-In-One bucket, exorbitantly priced and including convenient sponge and rubber gloves, "convenient" in the sense that they were right there in the bucket and I didn't have to go into the garage to get any of the countless examples I already owned, and which I was now required to purchase at pain of starting all over again. Smash tiles with hammer, begin lay-out process. Decide first idea doesn't work, start over. Reject second effort, begin third. Live through two weeks of torrential downpours and concomitant clean-up. Return to project to discover every piece ("tesserae") must be removed and tabletop cleaned again. Make aesthetic decision that whatever the next one turns out it be is The Fuckin' Design No Matter What. Complete. Rig tarp over table to wait out predicted rains. Return, glue down ever last motherfucking piece ("tesserae"), which goes pretty smoothly, assuming you like mind-numbing operations that take two days. Let dry. Mix grout. Apply diagonally using float. "Cut" excess to assure cleaner surface. Discover that there is very little excess. In fact, there's not quite enough grout to cover the entire project, despite the fact that the size of the color component suggested twice what was needed.  As a result, endure wife, who never, ever, reads directions, asking, "Did you read the directions?" Decide to wait and see. Clean with vinegar/ water solution after 30 mintues. Clean again one hour later. Dismantle rain fly. Inspect next morning. Decide that hairline gaps present aesthetic problem, albeit small, and that small untiled area in front will collect water. Realize at about this time that lack of moulding on front of table makes grouting problematic at best; return to Lowe's for moulding plus large-sized colored grout ("platinum") originally avoided as "too much". Employing "go home, use magnifying glass" method, learn that this grout mixes with fucking water. Cut moulding to fit; nail and glue in place. Mix small amount of grout, apply. Worry that color doesn't match. Ponder covering entire tabletop again just as unpredicted rain starts. Throw tarp over table. Return in 30 minutes, clean with vinegar/ water. Return in one hour, clean again, just as unpredicted rain begins pouring. Curse wife. Allow new grout to dry 12 hours. Return for inspection, decide color match is acceptible, decide to take picture to accompany hilarious "Do-It-Yourself" blog post. Retrieve green paint from basement for moulding. Decide to touch up back-splash for picture to cover remaining grout stains. Discover paint is, in fact, a slightly different green used in a different project. Repaint entire backsplash, and moulding. Tidy up bottom shelf of bench by removing unsightly materials to ground behind bench, forgetting it has been freshly painted. Take picture. Run to kitchen to rinse paint out of shirt. Resume pharmaceutical testing.

That's all there is to it! As always, readers are urged to send in pictures of their own completed projects, and the winner could receive a prize package consisting of whatever's left of my stash. But don't count on it.

Le Mot Juste

“I was never on his show,” Gore Vidal, with whom Mr. Buckley had a famous feud, said on Thursday. “I don’t like fascism much.”

I Blame Reagan

David Brooks, "The Segmented Society." November 20

MAYBE I'm mistaken--there was that long period before the Wall came down when I read Brooks only on Sunday--but it seems as though every time the man hangs some wingnut wash out in public he's back within 72 hours with one of these Why Can't We All Just Get Along routines. I can't quite decide if it's calculated or just the natural defense mechanism of the AV Club nerd.

The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three. These mega-groups attracted gigantic followings and can still fill huge arenas.

But cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.

Dave, I'm just spitballin' here, but y'know, maybe the reason nobody today has that sort of longevity is that they'd have to be that old. Dr. Dre's pushing 25 years in the business, and Chuck D thirty. George Clinton's got a stage somewhere. But they're disqualified because they don't bring in the coveted 50-58 white concertgoer demographic?

Back in the Days of USENET I would frequently be forced to remark on how every argument eventually turned into an epistemology lecture. Today it seems every issue requires an explanation that the history of a thing does not begin at the point you become aware of it, and it is not appreciably broadened by bits of its history acquired contemporaneously. There's no substitute for doing some of the actual digging yourself.

When little Steven Van Zandt (b. 1950) and I were lads it was possible to pick up a considerable chuck of the history of Rock and Roll from listening to it on the radio--it was but a decade old, after all--where hourly Golden Oldies slots introduced you to Bill Haley and Elvis and Chuck and Little Richard and Jerry Lee. We heard doo-wop. We heard the Everly Brothers. We heard the officially sanctioned history of mostly black music as packaged for and sold to young white audiences. We didn't hear Louis Jordan, Chicago blues, Roy Brown or Wynonie Harris, or, for that matter, any of the gospel, jump, country, mountain, barrelhouse, boogie-woogie, swing, stride, or various folk musics that were present at the conception. Those required digging and diligence.

The 70s were the end of that musical integration, not its heyday, as a little diligence would have informed Brooks. National programming fragmented audiences. Black artists disappeared from rock stations once the Album Oriented Rock format descended (in fairness, it's tough to work in many artists of whatever color if you're dedicated to playing "Stairway to Heaven" three times an hour). In 1967 Stax died with Otis Redding, shortly after Motown self-destructed by losing Holland-Dozier-Holland. It was the lush soul of Gamble & Huff and Gladys Knight that crossed-over in the early 70s, but by then they had a home in urban radio, and why not?; they were not exactly a programming match for The Doobie Brothers. The soundtracks to Shaft and Superfly reached rock audiences, but between then and Disco white kids heard "Sweet Home Alabama," not "Living in America".

It's the Balkanization of the audience, not the music, Mr. Brooks. In the early 1970s I listened to the Stones, The Who, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Leon Russell, King Crimson, Van Morrison, Richard Thompson, Pink Floyd, Randy Newman, Nick Drake, Sly Stone, Dave Edmunds, Santana, Little Feat, Dr. John, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks--all subsumed by the rubric "Rock and Roll". How many genres is that today, without counting James Brown or Miles Davis or Hugh Masekela, or Muddy and Wolf and Sonny Boy, whom you sought out in the other sections of the record store?

People have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters. But year after year, the segmentation builds.

Your honor, the prosecution rests; if Time sussed it out by 1982 I think we can safely date the actual occurrence to 1973 at the latest.

Is this important? Well, for one thing, I think it's curious that Mr. Road To Damascus At A Milton Friedman Lecture discounts the role of the market:

Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices.

Now, without questioning the validity of market research which tells the four guys who own radio stations in this country that people want to hear the same six songs over and over again, and that their attention spans are so short that any variation will send them screaming for the dial, and without pointing out that it is the relaxation of restrictions on ownership that permits them this sort of unlimited power, we will simply ask where the notion comes from? Why should those Prisoner of Science marketeers want to slice consumers into ever more narrow specimens?

I guess I'm just unclear on the theology. The Market is an all-powerful, scythe-wielding arbiter wholly at the mercy of what people tell market researchers? And Free Will, tapdancing angels, and Adam and Eve's navels come into it where, again?

If you haven't heard me say it before, believe me: I revere pop radio of the mid-1960s, when The Beatles were followed by Aretha was followed by Dylan was followed by Jackie Wilson. But like the man sez, when times are gone they're not old, they're dead. Top 40 radio didn't disappear due to new technologies; it disappeared due to new trends in separating the consumer from his currency. And in a market where the subject/object is literally or metaphorically fifteen years old, with a fifteen-year-old's discernment, attention span, and disposable income, we're now nearly three generations removed from that happy time when white audiences began to accept black music on its own terms. If anything stops The Market from trying to re-integrate pop music, beyond the marketeers themselves, it's that they've trained the consumer to expect a high level of familiarity and a zero-tolerance for anything "foreign".

And what of it, anyway? The Fascists made the runners train on time, The Market provides these warm-bath spaces for people to soak and be soaked in. Why should young urban audiences be listening to some California mope singing about his shirt? Why should blue-collar white teenagers be listening to Sufjan Stevens? Why shouldn't jazz fans feel superior to all of the above? I believe I've found one man's answer:

But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.

Plus, how come it's okay to have Black History Month, but they won't let you have White History Month?

Apart from the fact that I'm willing to pay good money for every working white musician you can name who doesn't earn a living to some degree "appropriating African-American styles", I think we glimpse the real problem here: popular music now longer kowtows to a white middle-class sensibility. If only They would let us rap! Then it'd be something The Whole Family could enjoy!

Shoe a mite snug when They switch it to the other foot, Mr. Brooks?

Look, I not only admire Fats Domino, I still listen to him. This position is no longer supported, even in elevators. Big whoop. There never was an arts-loving public. I have no idea why my pubescent nieces would, or should, want to listen to him; good luck changing that by making him a school subject. Let them discover him on their own, if the time comes. Let 'em treat music as something that goes on in the background if they'd rather. And let David Brooks accept the results of that Free Market he worships so long as "higher earnings estimates" is at the top of his personal chart, even when somebody other than The Man gets him some.

The Plop Sickens

Janelle Nanos, "Bran Identity: A new and disgusting cereal ad that simulates human excretion". Slate, October 15

HERE'S the thing I like about Slate's "Ad Report Card" column: they either can't, or won't, apply their patented Reverse Double Counter-Intuitive Disestablishment Contrarianism ("Didn't see that comin'? Ha! You're wrong!") to it. One suspects that to the Lazy Libertarian advertising is the only thing like a Sacred Text they've got going. Or else "Report Card" is their way of saying, "Okay, this time we mean it. Ha-ha! Not really!"

(The thing I always forget is that the tagline for the column reads "Advertising Deconstructed", by which they mean "mostly banal half-chewed musings on mostly banal subjects". Double Ha! Just forget I brought it up. Anybody who really wants to do that sort of thing can exhaust the reader without breaking a sweat themselves.)

Who is the All-Bran ad targeting? It begs to be watched over and over, and is filled with juvenile elements that seem designed to make Web-savvy youngsters giggle before e-mailing it along. (Indeed, the spot has notched more than 100,000 views on YouTube.) Could the company be banking on the viral element to bring young people to a brand more popular among older consumers? Is the ad a stealth effort to reach frat boys with dodgy digestive systems?

Nope. According to the company, it's an effort to charm constipated old people with a little frat-boy humor. Kellogg's spokeswoman Allison Costello said the ad's not geared toward the young: "All-Bran has always been marketed to adults and we have no plans to change our approach." All-Bran's target demographic is grown-ups—those 45 and older—and the spot is a nod to the fact that such people can still appreciate potty humor, even at their advanced age. "Talking about regularity is a really tough thing to do," admitted senior brand manager Matt Lindsay, who helped create the ad. "We liked the idea of leveraging visual metaphors to make it a more approachable subject."

Wait...Allison Costello?

Okay, I've seen the ad once, and after the audaciousness of whatever the first visual gag was had set in I found myself rooting for them to keep topping it. It's funny. It'll stop being funny the second or third time I see it. ("It begs to be watched over and over?" It's advertising.) If it's excretory disgust you're looking for, try that Pepto-Bismol campaign where costumed line dancers perform the Diarrhea Lambada. If you can't stand crass, you're in the wrong column, not to mention the wrong country.

Now, I read Slate only so I can appear With It, so I was trying not to fall into the trap of believing that the writer wanted me to think what she was saying was what she thought, but I still wound up off on a tangent (or is that the point?). Being a grown-up, I'm utterly, blissfully, intentionally unaware of the eating habits of those outside my demographic. Of course a little information gets through, but it can hardly be trusted too far: advertisers seem to think people are "into" healthy eating, though I haven't noticed any McDonald's shuttered and plastered with "For Lease" signs lately; there's Soy Dogs at the grocery, but the regular, ground-hooves-and-rectum dogs still command a large amount of cooler space. It never occurred to me that All-Bran was aimed at the Gray Demo. The grown-ups I know do not discuss breakfast choices, bowel movements, or industrial milling processes very often, if at all, and if they occasionally veer off into colonoscopy it's more for the thrill of it than anything else. Kids today might be throwing All Bran parties where everyone eats the stuff with different food coloring and...damn, I hope Katie Couric doesn't read this.

Anyhow, since I actually got the joke, instead of getting bogged down (sorry) in turd-based musings, it was a little disconcerting to get lumped in with a wheelchair-bound demi-monde of teevee-watchin' Mrs. Grundies. For chrissakes, Blazing Saddles was released in 1974. Pink Flamingos is from '72, which means if you're a grown-up of 45 today you were ten when it opened. Who does Nanos imagine was the audience for those things? Or does she think they were parked on a shelf until today's generation of You-Tube peristalsis connoisseurs could show up?

I mean, fine, we've got warehouses of surplus bluenoses and humorless drones if we could just find another country that wants 'em. But it's hardly a function of middle age, just as it's no shining accomplishment to be open-minded enough to laugh at fart jokes. Do the math. Do some research. I suppose it's possible that every Boomer was a drug-and-sexed out hippie in his youth and has now settled into a comfortable Judge Hardy twilight, but the odds are against it, and the reality is, too. You can go on thinking of middle-aged people as, well, middle-aged, right up until you join them (Tip: that's sooner than you imagine), but then drop the pretense that social liberalism was hegemonic in your parents' day, and start earning your right to that cultural superiority on your sleeve.

Nuts: Real, Imaginary, Metaphorical, and Interjectory

I KNEW I was going to regret it, but The Editors had so much fun at Camille Paglia's expense that I clicked on the link, like I expected it might have wiped the smug off her caricature or somethin'. And the title was "Art Movies: R.I.P. Long before Bergman and Antonioni died, the mystical art-house film experience faded to black." And I was fucking stuck reading it. Nothing forces me to link to it, though, and I'm sure you can find your way there if you simply have to.

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s.

Well, it's a touching tribute. With any luck, cold douching will replace Taps.

Is there some container somewhere for that "my narcissistic generation of the 60s" bit, or have we discovered the Universal Solvent? Leaving aside the atrocious phrasemaking, is it perhaps time now, after an intervening four generations' respective Decades, to ask ourselves whether her generation of the 1960s was a particularly narcissistic one? Have you noticed a pronounced lack of self-absorption in those born in the 1970s, say? Is it possible that this supposed narcissism is an artifact of life lived in the Global Village, or buried under a constant barrage of Advertising and manufactured acquisitiveness and consumerism run amok? Or an artifact of our reaching a critical mass of people paid to say stupid shit? Or is it just an artifact of looking at people as though they're defined by what somebody said in a magazine somewhere?

It's one thing to use The Sixties as shorthand for the commonly accepted laundry list of poorly-understood and facilely-connected major events that occurred within its Gregorian borders (or within the popular imagining of those borders). It's another to hold a loaded metaphor to everyone else's head and deprive them of loose change. Camille Paglia watched European films while in her twenties. Wow. It was The Sixties. Wow again. She saw them in art houses in the company of friends. Totally unexpected. I'd have guessed "on DVD, while playing Tetris™".

Th' fuck? It's like me saying "The Sixties. The Decade When My Generation Played Little League Baseball." Antonioni's mature period, by proclamation, falls inside The Sixties based on release dates, but L'Avventura, from 1960, and La Dolce Vita, from the year before, are the capstones of 50s European cinema, as well as bellwethers for the decade ahead. Bergman was a rehab project by the mid-60s, when Persona restored some luster from his Fifties output. But has there ever been an artist working in a collaborative medium who was so strikingly individualistic? It's not just that Bergman doesn't "belong to" the Sixties. It's that I can't understand anyone watching The Virgin Spring and Wild Strawberries on a double bill in the Village in 1967 stepping back onto the streets saying, "Well, that was groovy."

We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces -- what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" or "Persona"? Perhaps only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film "Star Wars" epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

Shit. Merde. Cockie-doody.

Okay, I may be in the minority here, but 1) I don't consider Stanley Kurbrick to be a Sci-Fi director, and 2) I don't recall any flashbacks in The Godfather, nor Part II, which moves forward and backward in time as a story-telling device but doesn't do so by triggering some character's memory, and if your definition of "gritty realism" includes "epically expensive period scenes shot on a backlot" then it differs from mine. I'm not trying to put Coppola down; The Godfather, particularly viewed in Saga form, deserves a place in the pantheon, if perhaps somewhat lower than idol worship and an unfamiliarity with the competition put it on the Internet. I'm just trying to point out that tossing off a couple of pop-Auteur theory boneheadisms does not salvage that gawdawful "Where is this generation's Bergman?", especially when they don't even apply. Francis Ford Coppola is Francis Ford Coppola, not the answer to something else, and he is also Not a Boomer, which would make things even worsest still if that were possible. And Martin Scorsese is, apparently, chopped liver.

Meanwhile, is it permissible to ask that if Paglia can't do either of the two things she's paid to do she at least familiarize herself with their rudiments? Film is collaborative. It is also enormously expensive. One might, by talent, determination and some good luck, manage to get noticed and permitted to direct motion pictures with something like the budget required for general release and sufficient marketing to get a shot at wide viewership. Those tens of millions of dollars will not come one's way so that one may comment on the Social Condition, the Conflict between our Inner and Outer Lives, nor even the Dearth of Great Cinema. Teapots that talk, telekinetic kids who solve crimes, and lasers blowing shit up is more like it.

For which we may, if we wish, thank George Lucas and that talented director pal of his who also has nothing whatsoever to say but does so in a way that pleases the ticket-buyer. Their success in the mid-70s ended the brief American Golden Age, and relegated art films to the back of the video store. But why blame them? It's money, which neither of them invented. Money has everything to do with it. Narcissism nothing at all, except perhaps as a driving force behind talentless self-promoters grabbing seats on the gravy train. So what? There was a magical time in the cinema when in the ruins of Europe and Japan young talented people were able--in part because it was both financially and culturally feasible--to take film into audacious new directions. If it's Bergman you want, watch Bergman, and be glad to have it. And let us remember that it was the Academy Awards recognizing the great achievement of post-war Italian and Japanese filmaking which led to both critical acclaim and a surprising popularity of foreign film in the 19-fucking-50s, which made their continuing production financially feasible. Sure, it was partly tits, but it was also serious art speaking to people in serious times. Trendies watching that stuff in the 60s were, for the most part, worshiping at an altar which had been erected by their predecessors. If we're more frivolous now--and more solitary--well, let's just note that people who call Star Wars a "classic" aren't really helping matters.

(Almost forgot: Paglia says the title of Sexual Personae was an "explicit homage" to Bergman. I'm not about to try to discover just when and where that was made explicit, but I am required to state that if so it's like filling a Twinkie with birdlime and calling it an homage to Carême.)

Wicked and Bristling With Dots

LAST week we alluded to our upcoming AT&T U-Verse installation, which went by pretty painlessly Friday excepting an apparently standard glitch with sending email. In exchange we now have DSL (3 down, 1 up) and 190 channels of IP-video television, plus DVR recording of four shows at once, live pause, and a free year of all the premium channels that aren't part of the HBO universe, and I have just finished watching 71 hours of television.

The whole thing is an accident. I had recently explained the continuing dial-up misery of our existence to my Poor Wife (akin to explaining the difference between convection and conduction roasting to a vegetarian) viz, that our long-time service provider did not have DSL yet in Indianapolis for some reason, and that I had begun pondering severing a link that dates back to the mists of BBS dial-up. A few days later I was cooking dinner on a stove jutting at odd angle into the remains of our kitchen when she got a sales call, heard "DSL", and made an appointment to meet with a salesman the next morning. Next thing I know I'm dragging the card table up from the basement (the dining room table being buried under mounds of items that used to be in what used to be the kitchen), so the guy can whip out his laptop and start trying to sell me a replacement for cable teevee. Any other topic, save, probably, robot monkey household servants or a combination home cappuccino maker and mescaline factory, and I'd've thrown him out on his ear. As it was, I signed up greedily, and so far so good, especially since the math works out that we get this service for the cost of the old basic cable plus one of the two dial-up accounts, and we get to boot a dedicated phone line, plus we're rid of Comcast.

All this is almost enough to quiet the little voices in my head (I mean, the ones specific to this project, not the permanent consort) which have, as you might expect, been saying that getting more teevee is traveling in the wrong direction, and adding on occasion that I should consider that it takes twenty minutes now just to check what is on teevee in the first place, let alone the time spent in brain-softening "enjoyment". For a brief time they had been drowned out by a splinter group with a quite inventive a cappella rendition of "It may be the last advance in entertainment technology you live to see, and it's at least even money you won't be able to understand the next one, and you damn sure won't be reading the fine print on any diagrams six months from now. Drink up, sailor." This ended after a bit, but left me strangely elated, like good church singing; I've regained some of the old fondness for the seventeen cubic meters of still-halfway-organized videotape I've stashed in various locations around town. I'm not quite sure why that is.

It's too much teevee, and it's too much time spent working on the minutiae of personal emotional assuagement at a time when the world is going to hell faster than ever. On the other hand, when wasn't it? Plus I got to see several minutes of An Inconvenient Truth, which is probably about all I'd have wanted to see anyway, and without wasting any gas, although, to be fair, there's a Gogolplex three blocks away. Then again, at one point this evening I think I had my pick of four movies starring former Saturday Night Live funnymen, and none of them was Chevy Chase. In rebuttal (shut up, voices!) Comcast's most recent Allow Us To Yank A Portion of the Ugly Stained Rug You Rented From Us Out From Under You maneuver was to remove The Game Show Network off to Digital Cable Land and replace it with a sign saying There's No Longer Anything on Channel 34 You Drooling Apes. Go Ahead, Choose Another Cable Company. P.S. You Can't. Ha Ha Ha. And without the newly returned GSN I wouldn't have realized that Dennis Miller's New Last Career Move is to co-host an in-house Game Show Network Production. Co-host. Maybe Kennedy should have warned him.

(Is the standard right-wing best-seller sinecure not enough money for Dennis? Is this Objectivism in action? Z-List=Z-List? Tell me, does Howard Roark wind up supervising Stuckey's remodels for the Southwest Region? Really, tell me. I never finished it. Which is not surprising, since I never started it, either.)

The channel line-up is, briefly, every cable channel there is, plus the west coast feeds. This means I now have Sundance, BBC-America, Sleuth, IFC, Military History, and a half-dozen things I haven't discovered yet. I get two gay channels, which is only one fewer than the number of country music channels I was receiving as recently as last Thursday. I can order, a la carte, TV Japan, which means if I can find somebody who reads Kanji I'll be able to tape every Sumo honbasho. Please do not tell my wife this, as I've already begun hinting I needed to learn Japanese for professional development.

This embarrassment of riches reminded me that I was among the suscribers of one of the earliest CATV systems (Bloomington, Indiana, caught as it was in a sort of no-man's market in the rolling hills between Indianapolis and Louisville) and one of the most tardy (Indianapolis, outside the old city limits, when the city, which had sold the rights in the late 60s, figured that this did not include the area it annexed in '68 and managed to sell a second monopoly to a different company). And I remembered how, once we finally did get big-city cable television, it provided about the same fucking number of stations as basic cable today, for something like one-third the price adjusted for inflation (kudos, Minneapolis Fed for the online consumer price index calculator). I think it's curious that, when we do decide that government-sanctioned monopoly is the only way to provide a service, we allow the "provide increasingly crappier service while costs rise faster than inflation model" to overcome any potential public admiration for the process. Think Post Office. Is there any earthly reason why Fed-Ex should kick the Post Office's ass? Do not tell me it's The Genius of Free Enterprise or Innovation Born of Personal Investment or any such nonsense (and not, for that matter, that the Postal Service is required to deliver all sorts of mail, either). No. When the wind is right there's a UPS plane over my head every two minutes all night long. Tell me the government couldn't have thought that up. No. The first guy who ever suggested that found himself inspecting the levers on those stamp machines they used to have in grocery stores, in Alabama, for the rest of his career. The government, or the people who manage its private monopolies, do not want the service to be too good, lest people start to ask why they don't go ahead and run gas stations and doctor's offices while they're at it.

I have no idea how cable is run in your neck of the woods, but I suspect "Poorly" would be the way to bet. For a while, when it was just basic cable plus whatever "premium" channels you forked out for, Comcast added channels at a rate just far enough above Glacial to keep subscribers satisfied. Once digital showed them a path to removing services in order to charge more for them in another guise they showed they could move a little faster. When the premium channels left the dial the channels were never reassigned; I think the old Cinemax number eventually became another shopping channel, maybe. They didn't even move anyone off the channels with really crappy reception. The last channel added to the basic line-up was FAUX News, whenever that was. As far as I can tell the only money they did spend went into annoying advertising about how the evils of satellite dishes is especially visited on stay-at-home Moms, and how your family would remarkably stop hating each other's guts the minute you bought their digital phone service. I think they might have had a little left over for lobbying against the phone companies getting into the cable business. As they would.

Central Indiana's other Chinatown, Geist reservoir, the area northeast of town where in the 50s the Water Company flooded an existing town so it could sell waterfront lots in a new one, was in a tizzy this week after a warning that the blue-green algae now covering what's left of the "lake" this blistering August is toxic. This resulted in some charming soundbite television, as many of the residents of this little slice o' Caucasian boating heaven blame the government for not dredging the thing so they'd have unlimited recreational opportunities paid for by the descendants of the ratepayers who built the reservoir under the impression it was, well, a reservoir. The complaints were often accompanied by some anti-property tax rhetoric of the sort that erupts when you gently squeeze a white person of a certain age anywhere in the Central Indiana region. The refrain is familiar to anyone who's listened to the idea that we could continue to send troops to police whatever we felt like policing forever, yet no one would have to serve. These same people want the nearby interstate expanded to relieve the traffic congestion caused by thousands of white people fleeing to the suburbs buying "lakefront" property along a glorified drainage ditch, in an area whose infrastructure was designed for the passage of the occasional tractor. I do have to admit, all that blue-green algae looked mighty impressive on my new IP-teevee. Gonna have to spring for Hi-Def someday.

Friday Color Scheme Blogging

[Cute but gratuituous cat picture omitted due to problems with New Blogger (!)]

1. You had to change templates to board the new Blogger and its many improvements, or so they tell me, and that meant discarding color changes (I thought I'd done considerable tweaking on the last one, but then jackd pointed out it was still nearly identical to Kung Fu Monkey). There are, roughly, two templates from which to choose. Okay, maybe a dozen, plus two or three color schemes for each, but a third of them are variations on each other, a couple more look like sympathy cards or personal checks, and one appears to be aimed strictly at the Barbie™ collector. So you pretty much see yourself coming and going unless you get extensive (for me) HTML work done.

2. So I chose one, old layout but new colors. Greenish. One of the promised NEW! IMPROVEMENTS! of the new Blogger was the ease of changing colors. This is the point where I should note that in 1985, back when I was first forced to use one of those DOS machines with floppies the size of a lady's evening bag (having graduated from college the same year the first softwareless Heathkit™ build-it-yerself became available) changing color schemes was the only thing I was good at.

3. So after a couple a' housekeeping chores I started playing with the new color controls. I soon learned that the new controls didn't control every background field, so as I moved farther away from the original green some of it remained, like algae in the birdbath.

4. And this is where we come to aesthetics. I'm a guy. I like to imagine myself an arts-lovin' guy, but still, my idea of a tolerable level of concern with décor is cleaning under the toilet seat once a week. I like green. It's one of my seven favorite colors. But I'm allergic to Lime, and considering the amount of exposure to it the entire country has suffered over the past decade and a half (is it fucking over yet?) it's a wonder I still feel alone about that. And the dark greens just don't do it for me as web colors, for whatever reason. I migrated organically from there to a more earthtoned scheme. It's decidedly not in the range of colors I'd own shoes of, but it felt, if not daring, at least an unexpected choice.

5. It took until last night to get my Poor Wife to get around to checking it out. Her verdict? "It's safe," she said, meaning C, C+. I'm not the sort of student who takes a C lying down, unless I was too stoned to move.

6. I went upstairs to discuss the particulars with her. Which is when I realized, or remembered, that my monitor is considerably darker than hers or probably yours. That's when set to maximum brightness. Always has been, but I tend to forget. I thought the page looked awful in IE (I use Mozilla), and switching to Safari didn't improve things much.

7. So it actually became an Ongoing Project last night, and I can now explain that what looks like Gold or Mustard to you is Café au Lait to me, and that the attraction of the title bar background is that it is #666. Sadly, that's probably headed for the scrapheap, but I do have a new idea I think is pretty good, and I'll try to implement it this weekend, assuming the lawn doesn't take up too much time. I think you'll find it just as exciting as I find the New Blogger.