That Stan Dubinsky veck, being the sort with a large gulliver, has drawn a comparison, oh, my brothers, between the rioters in England and your own Humble Narrator’s loyal droogs.
There may be a slight resemblance to one’s glazzies at first glance, but note that those grahzny bratchnies are not dressed in the heighth of fashion; they do not wear our platties of the night! Consider that before thou dost make up thy rasoodocks.
One thing is true: There aren’t enough millicents to put their rookers on them all, much less put them in the staja where they belong…
Those whose attention is on the London riots of 2011 might recall that Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick anticipated all this 50 and 40 years ago, respectively. Time to dig out your copy of A Clockwork Orange, and read or watch it again.
It’s available for streaming on Netflix, by the way. But the book’s better.
I’ve always been aware, on a superficial, untested level, that “The Graduate” stood in a league of its own, defying characterization.
I suppose you could call it a sort of dark comedy, if you like, or social satire, or whatever. But try to think of another movie that makes you think and feel anything like what “The Graduate” does. You can’t.
I had empirical confirmation of that tonight. I saw it among the “Watch Instantly” flicks on Netflix. I didn’t need it in my queue because I have it on DVD, but I clicked on it to put it in my queue just to see how the algorithms of Netflix dealt with it.
And as I suspected, it could not come up with movies like “The Graduate.” Look at the lame attempt above. “Kramer vs. Kramer?” “The Paper Chase?” Both fine films, but neither of them anything like “The Graduate.” Aside from the incidental presence of Dustin Hoffman in one of them, which is meaningless.
And please, do not mention the execrable, silly “Tom Jones” in the same conversation.
Netflix is far from infallible. But it generally does a better job than this. Take another quirky film, “The Usual Suspects.” A challenge, yes?
OK, there’s nothing exactly like it maybe, but some of these selections — “Memento,” “Blue Velvet,” a Hitchcock or two — at least get its range, landing in a loose pattern around it. I’d throw some of these out, though (“Eight Men Out?” Fine film, but doesn’t fit here), and throw in a Tarantino, or “The Professional.” None score a direct hit. But they come a lot closer than anything does to “The Graduate.”
The U.S. subscription-TV industry first showed a small net loss of subscribers a year ago. This year, that trickle has turned into a stream. The chief cause appears to be persistently high unemployment and a housing market that has many people living with their parents, reducing the need for a separate cable bill.
But it’s also possible that people are canceling cable, or never signing up in the first place, because they’re watching cheap Internet video. Such a threat has been hanging over the industry. If that’s the case, viewers can expect more restrictions on online video, as TV companies and Hollywood studios try to make sure that they get paid for what they produce…
Tim was sympathetic in his comment about it, saying, “Don’t you hate it when you feel like just part of a trend?”
Yes, I do. Makes me feel… common. Low. Might as well start watching “reality TV” on my few remaining channels. That appears to be about all those channels show, anyway.
For the record, I have NOT moved home with my parents — yet. But I am one of those who is watching cheap Internet video instead of cable. I’m halfway through the first season of “Lost” on Netflix so far. The HD picture is awesome. “Lost” is… well, about like I thought “Lost” would be. I am not what you’d call enraptured. But at least I’m finding out what all the fuss was about. Sort of.
I’m going through some old boxes of stuff, and ran across a wallet I carried in my college days. I scanned for you three of the items I found in it.
The first, above, shows what I paid for a semester at Memphis State University on Jan. 14, 1974. As you can see, the total cost for 16 credit hours — as usual, crammed with journalism classes I had to take, history and English classes I didn’t have to take but wanted to, and some PE to force me to get some exercise — was $174.00.
That’s one HUNDRED — not even thousand — and seventy-four dollars.
Me, at about that time.
Below, I include a receipt for my room and board for the previous semester — $235. This was not for a regular dorm. This was for a room in a private dorm, right on the edge of campus. Few people actually stayed on campus at Memphis State; it was a huge commuter school (a lot of people called it “Tiger High” because people just continued on there from high school without leaving their parents’ homes). Housing was such a low priority there that there were a lot of us who couldn’t find official campus dorm space at all, but who were willing to pay private rates (that is to say, my parents were willing to pay) for the experience of staying there.
Central Towers was two 10-story towers with the boys on one side and girls on the other, although the procedures were keeping us apart were not what you would call stringent. Making this an even more fun community was the fact that the dorm would periodically throw FREE beer busts with no limit. Enough said about that.
And all of that, including pretty decent food, cost $235 a semester.
Just for fun, I’ve included a ticket stub, also from that wallet, from when my then-fiancee and I went to see Elvis — Presley, not Costello — on March 16, 1974. It was one of seven shows in a row he did at the Mid-South Coliseum. It was originally going to be fewer than that, but the hometown demand was so great they kept adding shows. It was the first time he had performed publicly in Memphis since 1961, and almost the last time ever.
I don’t know how much it cost, but in those days it was almost certainly less than $10. The usual price I remember paying for concerts then (Bob Dylan with The Band, Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez and the like) was $5.
A packed house watches "Page One" at the Nickelodeon last night.
Last night, I went to see “Page One: Inside The New York Times” at the Nickelodeon. I had been asked to watch the movie, a 2010 documentary, and then stay to be a panelist for a discussion — along with Charles Bierbauer of USC and Dan Cook of the Free Times.
As I arrived, I felt a pang of guilt that yet again, I was making a public appearance and forgetting to tell you, my readers, in advance, in the remote chance you’d like to attend. But I needn’t have worried. The show was sold out. The audience included a lot of familiar faces, such as my old boss Tom McLean, who hired me at The State and was my predecessor as EPE, and the paper’s long-time attorney Jay Bender.
On the way in, I ran into Bill Rogers, head of the state Press Association. He said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to hear me, because the show was sold out. I told him they had given me two tickets, and my wife was at a book club meeting instead, so he could be my guest. When he sat next to me at the back of the theater (I couldn’t sit at the front because of my neck thing, for which I’m going to get another shot next to my spine today), I took advantage of his slightly owing me to make a pitch: Look Bill, I see that the Press Association is offering online, multi-publication ad packages, and advocacy-ad packages as well. Why not throw come blogs in? It might add some value for the buyer, and I need somebody to sell ads for me.
Shameless, huh? Well, that’s the state of news media in America today.
In fact, one of the most meaningful lines in the film, to me, was spoken by David Carr, who was essentially the star. He’s a great character. A former crack addict, he’s now a media columnist for the NYT — a brilliant reporter, and an awesome bark-off spokesman for why a dying industry matters. (Favorite momentThe movie wasn’t so much about the Times as it was about the horrific troubles of the MSM, using the media desk of the NYT as a window on that world.
Great Carr moment: He’s interviewing the founder of Vice, and said founder is going through the usual mantra about how the MSM don’t cover the real story, so you need the gutsy, edgy fringe guys to tell you what’s really going on and Carr interrupts:
Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.
Excuse the language, but one of the things this movie does is show the way people talk in newsrooms. And Carr was talking to a guy who pumped that up to the nth degree to show how hip and edgy he is, so Carr used his own terminology to put him in his place. By the way, here’s the story Carr wrote from that interview.
But that wasn’t his most meaningful line to me. That came when he had been researching an in-depth story about how the boorish Sam Zell had run the Chicago Tribune the rest of the way into the ground, and had done the obligatory interview with the Trib’s spokesman in which you say, Here’s what I’ve got; what’s your reaction? After the ritual comments about “hatchet job” and “I’ll get back to you,” Carr hangs up the phone. Sometime later, after communications from the Trib’s lawyers, he says,
The muscles of the institution are going to kick in at some point. It’s not up to me.
Exactly. And that’s one of the virtues of working in the MSM. There’s somebody to sell the ads, and you’re not even supposed to talk to them (usually, you don’t know them). There’s somebody else to worry about threats of legal action. You just worry about getting your story, and getting it right. And people who’ve never worked at such an institution — or even the somewhat smaller ones like it, across the country — have no idea how liberating and empowering that is.
Frequently, people ask me today whether I find I have greater freedom as a blogger than I did as editorial page editor of the state’s then-largest newspaper. That’s a really stupid question, although I don’t say that, because the asker has no way of knowing that.
Part of the stupidity of the question is based in the notion that when you work at a newspaper, “They tell you what to write.” I’m not entirely clear on who “they” are, but I suppose it’s the owners of the paper. I suppose, and I’ve heard, that when you work at a locally-owned paper where your masters are intricately tied into the community you cover, there are sacred cows, and positions you are told to take and others you are told not to take. But that doesn’t happen when you’re a part of a publicly-traded corporation. In all my years as editorial page editor, only once did anyone at corporate made even a suggestion about editorial content: Tony Ridder tried to make the case to Knight Ridder editorial page editors that the company’s papers should not endorse in presidential elections. His reasons for saying that appeared to be a) that we needed to concentrate on local issues; b) that what we said on our local levels about national politics didn’t matter; and c) that such endorsements only made about half of our readers furious at us. That last reason was, as I recall, more implied and stated; he really concentrated on reason a).
I thought that was a fine theory for a guy who lived and worked in California, but a pretty silly one for an editor in the home of the first-in-the-south primaries. For months before a primary, I had media from all over the country, and from abroad, contacting me to know what I, and we, thought about the candidates. I wasn’t going to tell our readers what we thought? How absurd. I ignored Tony’s suggestion. So did most of the other editors, to the best of my knowledge — I didn’t check, because I didn’t care what they did.
There’s another comment I used to get from people a lot, when I was at the paper. They used to commend me for my “courage” for taking a certain stand. That, too, was ridiculous. I got paid no matter what I wrote. I wasn’t taking any risk, beyond the inconvenience of maybe a source not talking to me any more. So I might as well take stands that mean something rather than write pap, right? I had that whole institution standing behind me, that warm blanket of security.
Here’s what I wrote a while back about the “liberating” effect of no longer working for the MSM:
The first casualty of unemployment is the truth.
OK, maybe not the first. First there’s the blow to one’s bank account. Then the loss of self-confidence. But truth is right up there. Especially for me. Until I was laid off in March, I was editorial page editor of South Carolina’s largest newspaper. A colleague once said to me, accusingly, “You don’t think this is the opinion page. You think it’s the truth page.” I just looked at her blankly. Of course it was the truth page.
Readers expected me to tell everything I knew, and plenty that I only thought I knew – about South Carolina’s feckless politicians (Mark Sanford, Joe Wilson – need I say more?), or whatever struck me, without reservation. And I delivered.
My reputation survives my career. Recently, a friend warned me that people feel constrained in talking to me, because their confidences might turn up on my blog. After all, bloggers tell all, right? Ask Monica Lewinsky. Ask ACORN.
“HAH!” say I.
As a blogger who answers to no one, I am not nearly as frank and open as I was as a newspaper editor who thought he had a secure job.
I haven’t disclosed whom I have worked for on consulting gigs since leaving the paper, because my clients haven’t been crazy about the exposure. Every word I write, I think: Might this put off a prospective employer? And I know it has, despite my caution.
There are things I have not written – pithy, witty, dead-on observations on the passing parade, I assure you – because I think, “Do you have to write that and run the risk of offending this person who MIGHT point you to a job? Can’t you just write about something else?”
And where am I applying for jobs? Well, I’m not going to tell YOU, am I?
People used to praise me for my courage for taking on powerful people at the paper. But I was taking no risk whatsoever. As long as I was supported by advertising, a transaction I was ethically barred from even thinking about, I had impunity.
But an unaligned blogger still trying to function as a journalist stands naked and alone, and is not nearly as free and honest as he was writing from the once-impregnable citadel of an editorial page. At least, this one isn’t. Keep that in mind, citizen, as newspapers fall around you.
Watching that movie launched me on many different streams of thought; I could have talked about them all night. What I just told you describes part of my reaction to a single line. As Tom McLean said after one long-winded response I gave as a panelist, I always needed an editor.
You may have heard about John McCain’s speech excoriating the likes of the South Carolina delegation, and the Tea Party in general. Here’s the full text. Here’s an excerpt:
I will take a backseat to none in my support of the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I have voted for it 13 times. I will vote for it tomorrow. What is amazing about this is, some Members are believing we can pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution in this body with its present representation, and that is foolish. That is worse than foolish. That is deceiving many of our constituents by telling them that just because the majority leader tabled the balanced budget amendment legislation that, through amending and debate, we could somehow convince the majority on the other side of the aisle to go along with a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That is not fair. That is not fair to the American people to hold out and say we will not agree to raising the debt limit until we pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It is unfair. It is bizarro. Maybe some people who have only been in this body for 6 or 7 months or so believe that. Others know better. Others know better.
I especially like the way he ended it:
It is time we listened to the markets. It is time we listened to our constituents. Most of all, it is time we listened to the American people and sit down and seriously negotiate something before we face a situation where we are depriving the American people of the fundamental right of having a government that doesn’t deprive them of the essential services, goods, and entitlements which they have earned.
Oh, and in case you wondered where the “hobbits” part come in. That was from when McCain was quoting from this piece in the WSJ. An excerpt from that:
The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.
Going an entire summer without Mad Men is frustrating. Thanks to illustrator Paul Rogers, you can get your fix of the stylish era right now. Rogers created a version of the opening credits taking a cue from “classic film and television titles from the early 1960s.” The clip might not be enough to hold you over until January (when the new season of Mad Men begins), but it will make you crave an ice cold martini.
I like it; I think it’s cool. It makes me eager to see the next season.
But I prefer the real credits, with the silhouette guy falling down the side of the building. It suggests the strange darkness of Don Draper’s journey, his alienation, his insecurity. It’s way existential.
He would interrupt the grumbling and harrumphing with calls to order that were occasionally starchy (such as when he said this is the “Mother of Parliaments,” and therefore should show the world how it’s done with decorum), but occasionally with jolly good humor.
“Can’t is Not An Option”. I guess her editor and publisher don’t not believe in double negatives. Essentially the title means “Can is an Option.” More Sarah Palindromisms, inventing the language as you speak…
OK, so let’s see if we can do better. Here are some, for want of a better word, options:
Failure Is Not An Option — The original, as spoken by Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in “Apollo 13,” works a lot better. More compelling. Better use of the English language. Of course, it doesn’t work for Nikki Haley. In fact, it’s about as wildly inappropriate as you can get. The phrase epitomizes the can-do spirit of a man leading a bunch of government employees determined to work together to accomplish something remarkable. No way Nikki would want any part of that. In Kranz’ place, she would have insisted that NASA was the problem, not the solution, and would be going on about how the space agency needed to be run like a business as the spacecraft ran out of oxygen.
Can’t Is Not a Doctrine — I like it, but I think she would disagree.
Can’t Do Cooperation
Can’t is Not a Contraction
Can I Have a Conniption?
Canned Heat, Fried Hockey Boogie
Can It, Knothead Unction
OK, so I’m running out of actual ideas here, although I don’t see that necessarily as a disqualification.
What do y’all have?
I’m just trying to pass the time here. It’s SO hard waiting until January, when the book comes out.
Just thought I’d share this, so that if there’s anyone among you who is as big a George Smiley fan as I, you, too, can start being frustrated waiting for this movie to come out in November. (Why does it take so long? If they’ve got it edited enough to put out a trailer…)
I was putting off posting this, after Mike Fitts brought it to my attention, until I could write a longer post I’ve been meaning to write ever since January, about my own successful Quest for Smiley (yes, Circus fans, that is an allusion to the Quest for Karla). But until I do that, here’s a picture of me standing in front of George’s actual house in London. Sort of a blog trailer, if you will. I think the picture captures a Le Carre kind of feel, doesn’t it? It was taken at dusk in winter, which is appropriate. Very Cold War.
Remember I said, in a post sent from the airport in Detroit, that I was going to look for signs of Smiley in London? Well, I did. More about that later…
CUSTOMER: Al, did you read Mercy’s article?
Al: Why should I read it? I heard it.
— “The Natural”
I sort of figure that if you were interested, you also heard — or rather, watched — the Gamecocks beat Florida last night, bringing them… Well, never mind where it brings them. Don’t want to jinx anything.
So I’m not going to attempt a written description here.
But Bud mentioned the game back here on an unrelated subject, and in case some of y’all would like to discuss it here, I thought I’d give you a place to do it.
Michele Bachmann spent plenty of time Monday letting everyone know that she was born in Waterloo, Iowa, a small industrial town she credits with instilling within her many of her conservative ideals.
But in one interview surrounding her formal campaign rollout, the Tea Party favorite seems to have gotten a little confused about some of the finer points of the Hawkeye State’s history.
Speaking to Fox News, Bachmann said that she had the same spirit as Waterloo’s own John Wayne. One can only assume that she was referring to the movie star, who was born in Winterset, Iowa, roughly a three-hour drive from Waterloo. The problem, however, is that Waterloo appears to have much closer ties to serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the “killer clown” who had his first criminal conviction there.
OK, I was kidding about that. I have only Denis Leary to go by on the Duke being frozen. But I do have a question — didn’t she launch her campaign a couple of weeks ago? She announced it at the debate…
Well, that was quick. Earlier this week, I read in the WSJ that the FBI was trying something it had never tried before — a major ad campaign aimed at a Ten Most Wanted fugitive. Or rather, at his moll. Or frail. Or whatever they say now.
Fitting, given James “Whitey” Bulger’s pop-culture profile — he was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed.”
Somebody got the bright idea — based upon the belief that Whitey’s girlfriend, Catherine Greig, was not being as reclusive as he was — of advertising where women would see it. Women who just might have seen her at the beauty parlor or something. From Tuesday’s paper:
On Tuesday, the agency will begin airing public-service announcements in 14 U.S. cities during shows such as “The Dr. Oz Show” and “The View,” focusing not on Mr. Bulger but on his girlfriend, Catherine Elizabeth Greig. Images of the couple also are featured on digital billboards in New York’s Times Square.
The FBI says the advertising campaign is the first of its kind in hunting a most-wanted figure.
The duo went underground just before Mr. Bulger’s 1995 federal indictment for his alleged role in 19 murders during the 1970s and ’80s, according to the FBI. Ms. Greig isn’t implicated in those crimes, but was indicted in 1997 for harboring Mr. Bulger….
While the FBI has sought Mr. Bulger all over the world, it says the new publicity campaign explores the possibility that clues to his whereabouts may lie with friends or co-workers of the 60-year-old Ms. Greig. The agency believes she may carry on a relatively normal routine of frequenting beauty parlors, visiting the dentist and caring for or spending time with animals.
“Have you seen this woman?” asks the 30-second TV spot…
The focus on Ms. Greig is “part of a unique initiative” aiming to reach women her age, said Special Agent Greg Comcowich, an FBI spokesman in Boston. “Our hope is that a friend, or co-worker, or someone she goes to the beauty salon with or interacts with on a daily basis will see it,” he said.
My daughter noted to me that there were a number of WWII movies on cable today, probably because that’s the TV industry’s idea of what Dads want. I like me a good WWII flick, but I think that having recently dragged out all the good ones for Memorial Day, the programmers were sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel today. The first one I ran across was the execrable “Pearl Harbor,” for instance. Boy I had really looked forward to that one, based on the preview where you see the kids playing baseball (an odd thing to be doing at 7:55 a.m. on a Sunday, but whatever) and the Japanese planes flying by at eye level. And it was visually impressive. Sort of the way “Top Gun” was visually impressive at the time. But even less well-written. And with Ben Affleck.
I saw that TCM was showing “Father of the Bride” (the Spencer Tracy version) which is the opposite end of the spectrum of TV’s concept of Dads and their tastes. I think that particular classic is more entertaining to daughters and mothers than to Dads, though. I mean, Dad looks like an affectionate idiot, right? Now, I see, “A Few Good Men” is showing. Well, that’s a good flick, no doubt. But who is Dad? Jack Nicholson? Not a flattering picture… Oh, wait, doesn’t Tom Cruise have kind of a father issue in that? But it’s kind of backstory.
So I got to thinking: What WOULD be a good “Father’s Day movie?”
Well… Dads would enjoy “Tin Cup,” which was on today on TCM. Although it doesn’t actually have a fatherhood theme. Speaking of Kevin Costner, there’s always “Field of Dreams” — that certainly has a Dad theme (“Hey… Dad?… You wanna have a catch?” And everyone tears up.)
Speaking of WWII movies, I did record “Saving Private Ryan” on Memorial Day weekend, and watched it again a few days ago. Not exactly about fatherhood, but Capt. Miller does have a sort of model fatherly relationship with Ryan, and with his own men.
On the lighter side, “Overboard,” which TCM showed, is the sort of romantic comedy guys tend to enjoy, and the central character is a Dad, desperate for a Mom for his kids. Really desperate.
OK, it’s not a movie, but how about a “Sopranos” marathon? That’s definitely about being a Dad — and the “head of a family.” Of course, the kids can’t watch it with you. So let me see if I can come up with some better stuff:
“Raising Arizona.” ‘Nuff said.
“The Natural”… “”My Dad always wanted me to be a baseball player…”
“The Paper,” with Michael Keaton. A newspaper editor (whom I really identified with my younger self), struggling with balancing work and familial responsibilities in the 24 hours before his child is born.
“The Wind and the Lion.” The Raisuli becomes a surrogate Dad to the Pedicaris boy.
“Tender Mercies.” Awesome portrait of a failed Dad, trying to become a good stepdad.
Current and former Columbia Free Timeswriters are teaming up to produce a black-and-white graphic novel on the bizarre rise and fall of South Carolina’s Alvin Greene.
Last year the unemployed Greene unexpectedly won the South Carolina Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, giving him the chance to face off against — and eventually lose to — incumbent Tea Partier Jim DeMint. Greene’s primary victory came despite the fact that he didn’t campaign, didn’t have a website, and was virtually unknown to the voting public.
“What happened in the summer of 2010 was the strangest American political story in modern times,” says Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins, who gained national attention by exposing Greene. “It’s no wonder that it came out of South Carolina, the state that James Petigru famously called ‘too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’ more than 100 years ago.”
Hutchins is teaming up with former Free Times staff writer David Axe and artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner to serialize the comic online beginning in early 2012, following with a print edition in the spring.
That’s pretty cool. Cool enough that it make me feel bad I never followed through on my own idea.
You know, I wanted to do a graphic novel about Mark Sanford back in 2009. I even had a couple of exchanges with someone with publishing contacts in New York. But when I didn’t find an artist who was interested right away (I felt like it had to be done immediately for readers to be interested), I dropped it. I was really busy job-hunting and stuff at the time. The images were key, and while I could have written the whole thing without them, I think it would have been an inspiration to see some sketches as I went along.
I had this one really vivid image in my mind as I tried to picture the visual style of the book. It was NOT of Mark Sanford, actually. It was black-and-white. It would have been an extreme closeup, taking about half a page, of Jake Knotts as he began the process of spreading the report that Sanford was missing, in his big bid to bring down his nemesis…
The image was inspired by images of The Kingpin in Spiderman (see this or this or this or this) … Only darker…
Anyway… I actually wrote a sort of treatment for my New York contact. I was really riffing on it at the time. I wanted it all to be told by a seedy, self-hating ex-journalist narrator, sort of based on Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. The narrator would be all conflicted and guilt-ridden, because he felt responsible for having created the central character. This would give his narration a certain bitterly ironic tone. (This character would of course in no way be based on any living former editors who maybe sorta kinda endorsed Mark Sanford in 2002.)
It had levels. It had edge. It had irony. Sort of Gatsby meets Robert Penn Warren meets “Citizen Kane” meets, I don’t know, “Fight Club.”
But now I can’t even find the blasted treatment. I think I lost it in that major Outlook meltdown of my e-mail.
I was WAY busy last night with real-life stuff until about 1:30 a.m. (just wait until YOU have five kids and four grandchildren and everybody’s coming and going and having to be picked up at the airport in the middle of the night), and barely found time to watch some of that presidential debate. I didn’t even have time to think about Nikki Haley’s national TV appearance. Good thing, too.
I did glance at the coverage of it on CBS, and even managed to read on a bit after the horrible shock of the opening words:
Four of the biggest names in the Republican Party – Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Rep. Allen West of Florida, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahom…a
Really. “Biggest names.” Take THAT, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Jeb Bush… I could go on, but what does it matter? They’re nobodies! The peanut gallery is taking over!
It is just absolutely stunning how little one has to accomplish to be one of the “biggest” these days. In fact, in the GOP, accomplishing anything actually counts against you. Look at Romney and health care.
Of course, Nikki Haley is about as accomplishment-free as anyone can get, and by the new standards, that makes her golden. Of course, she likes us to think that she wants to accomplish stuff, but that uncontrollable forces prevent her.
What, you ask, has kept our gov free of the blemish of achievement? Could it be that she lacks good ideas? Could it be that she is clueless when it comes to working with other people who would have to be involved in making these things happen, such as the Republican leadership of the General Assembly? Could it be because of her inept, ham-handed approach to everything from USC trustee appointments to her own tax returns?
No, it’s none of that. There’s another villain, one that no rational person would have suspected in a million years:
Haley went on to say that “everything I’ve tried to do to govern in South Carolina has been stopped by President Obama,”…
Yep, it’s her favorite Snidely Whiplash, the guy she ran so hard against in her election last year (Vincent Sheheen? Who’s he?). He is still foiling her beautiful plans! Curses!
I’m at Barnes & Noble, engaged in my favorite leisure activity of getting a cup of coffee and wandering among the books and maybe blogging a bit. And moments ago I got a text from my wife. She is out of town, has been for several days. She’s somewhere in the Ozarks having a reunion with her high school friends from St. Agnes Academy in Memphis (37 in the graduating class, all girls). Here’s what she texted:
Who directed & starred in easy rider & supported andy warhol?
This is my function in the world. Perhaps it is why she married me. Anyway, I quickly responded, “Dennis Hopper. Why?” That was an easy one. We just saw him in that Warhol thing last week.
It was at Spoleto. There was this show that was very, um, Warhol. It was called, “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.” We went with my artist daughter and a friend of hers. It was enjoyable, even artistically impressive. But if you thought about it too much, it was disturbing. And I tend to do that. That’s the other thing I do. I keep trivia in my head, and I think about stuff until I ruin it.
Warhol did these things he called “screen tests” in which he had various people in his orbit sit in front of a camera loaded with a short piece of film — I want to say about 100 feet; in any case, it would last exactly four minutes. In this way, the artist fulfilled his own prophecy to a certain extent — immortalizing these people for at least four minutes of their allotted 15. He shot people he thought were beautiful in one way or another. Some were quite conventionally beautiful the way I would use the word, such as this one (who bizarrely kept her eyes open the whole time, causing tears to flow). But all were interesting.
You had Dennis Hopper doing his thing. Jane Holzer brushing her teeth. Lou Reed drinking a Coke. Edie Sedgwick being big-eyed and lovely. The live, original music performed on the stage below the screen was very engaging. The hall was pretty full, and the crowd seemed engrossed. On the row in front of me I thought I recognized Allison Skipper from the Ports Authority. And sure enough, after we exchanged Tweets about it, she was to share this account with me:
13 MOST BEAUTIFUL…SONGS FOR ANDY WARHOL’S SCREEN TESTS
Call Andy Warhol what you will – genius, whack job, or some combination of the two – the man certainly had an eye for pretty people.
In 13 Most Beautiful, indie rock/pop musicians Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips pair hypnotic musical compositions against a backdrop of black and white projections of some of Warhol’s famous (or infamous) screen subjects. The footage itself is grainy and subjects range from the familiar (Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Nico) to the obscure. You can imagine Warhol himself off-screen, directing the subject to spontaneously cry, drink a Coca-Cola, look melancholy, or choreographing a slow curl of cigarette smoke or light reflected from the lens of sunglasses. Wareham and Phillips give an understated performance, demonstrating a conscious effort to take a backseat to the screen stars. The music serves to connect the audience with the subjects, in doing so achieving what they wanted all along. We love them, we adore them, we are fascinated by them. They are all famous, for at least 13 songs.
Our arty barometer says: It’s Warhol. It’s weird. Embrace it – with or without some mind-altering substance.
While the screen is dark for the show’s run at Spoleto, a recorded version is available to Watch Instantly on Netflix. Happy viewing.
–Allison Skipper
I pretty much agree with that. But at first, I didn’t think I would be able to sit through it. The very first “test” consisted of the totally impassive, androgynous Richard Rheem doing nothing but staring at the camera for the full four minutes. The band had not yet come out, so I didn’t have them to watch (of course, when they did come out, the stage was dark enough that all you could see really clearly was the whiteness of Britta Phillips’ shapely legs below her very short black dress as she played guitar and sang, but that was quite enough to make up for anything lacking on the screen), and this period was extremely tedious.
But it got better. Lots better. We weren’t bored again. And the experience was greatly enhanced by Dean Wareham’s narration, telling us a bit about the subject we were to see or had just seen.
And we watched, and were fascinated, as master showman Warhol had intended us to be.
But as for the disturbing part… well, look no further than “Ingrid Superstar’s” obsessive fingering of her face (and giving us the finger, but we don’t mind, the poor girl) throughout the four minutes, in which we see her with her hair cut to look like Edie Sedgwick. Right after we were told she was a junkie. And a sometime prostitute and temp (I liked the way he added “temp” anticlimactically). She was to go out for cigarettes years later and not come back — presumed dead, but her body never found. Her dysfunction is on display on the screen, we stare at it almost as unblinking as Ann Sheridan. Her being so obviously f___ed up is a source of entertainment for us, or of aesthetic edification if we choose to dignify it that way.
Then there was the guy who that same summer, deep in his own problems, was taking a bath at a friend’s house when he heard his favorite piece of music playing in the next room, upon which he leapt from the bath, ran into the room and danced about naked to the music, then jumped out a window to his death.
And here we were, staring at him making self-conscious faces for the camera. And I thought about this. Eventually, I was struck that what we were doing, sitting there so patiently, was a form of worship. Modern-day secular worship of celebrity, of hipness, of the various forms physical beauty can take, and of tragedy and dysfunction. I got to thinking of the Catholic practice of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This is a practice I’ve never been able to get into — not that I’ve ever tried. As a post Vatican II convert, it is alien to me, and smacks of idolatry. I recently heard that Pope Benedict wants it to make a comeback, which does not surprise me. But hey, I didn’t vote for him.
But while Perpetual Adoration to me seems strange and even vaguely wrong, here we were staring, for a period lasting longer than a Mass, at all these seriously messed up, self-involved people. And I found it fascinating, even enjoyable. What does that say about me, about us? I decry Reality TV, but I got into this.
It suggests that my priorities are seriously out of whack.
But at least it helps me keep the part of my brain devoted to cultural trivia sharp and active. My wife relies on me for that.
A few days ago, I saw on Facebook where a mutual friend had visited Doug Nye, and he wasn’t doing well. And I thought, “I need to check on him,” and now he’s gone. My mom called me last night to say it was announced at the USC baseball game…
It’s funny the things you remember about people. Doug was a great guy to talk to about all sorts of things, and not just westerns. To many people he will be remembered as the Father of the Chicken Curse, in terms of having popularized the concept. There are complex permutations on the Curse beyond what Bill Starr wrote about this morning that I could get into, but that’s not what I remember best about Doug.
Here’s what I remember best, and most fondly: Doug and I had a number of conversations sharing our childhood memories of watching “Spaceship C-8,” a kiddie show on WBTW out of Florence, hosted by the late “Captain Ashby” Ward, who was also the news anchor. I really didn’t have all that many specific memories about the show (Doug, being older, remembered more), despite having spent many an hour watching it during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Bennettsville. (Doug watched it from another end of the coverage area — I want to say Sumter.) But I enjoyed talking about it with Doug on multiple occasions.
It was about way more than one kid’s show; it was about remembering an era, a time before media saturation. A time when WBTW was the only station you could reliably get clearly in B’ville with a home antenna (WIS also came in, depending on the weather). Then, in the late 60s, along came cable to small town America, LONG before it came to cities. That way, you could get all three networks, plus some duplicates from different cities. There was less demand in cities, because they could already get three or four channels.
Consequently, we spent an awful lot of time doing stuff other than watching TV, or engaging any other mass medium. A time that in many ways was about as close as Huck Finn’s fictional existence as it was to what kids experience today.
Odd, I suppose, that the thing I would remember best from knowing the longtime TV writer was talking about days that were practically pre-TV. But that’s what I remember. It won’t really mean anything to you, I suppose, but I’m confident it would make Doug smile.
I remember that, and the fact that, as I said, Doug was a great guy to talk to about anything. Always a ready grin (that’s why I know he’d smile at my trivial remembrance), the kind of naturally affable guy who you took a moment to chat with rather than just rushing past in the course of getting through a day’s deadlines. He stood out among newspapermen that way. Not that newspapermen were so awful; I just mean Doug stood out. Which is why so many will remember him fondly.
Yeah, I know it’s a cliche — here we are in the high-tech future, a whole other century from when most of the sci-fi we grew up on was written, and there are no flying cars. It’s been said many times before.
But I just got to thinking about it in terms that hadn’t occurred to me before.
My wife was reading a book out on the deck this morning (while the weather was still pleasant), and referred to it having been written 50 years ago.
That’s the shocking thing, you see. It seems that 1961 is no longer just a brief while back. It’s 50 years ago now.
As anyone who has read Gene Sculatti‘s delightful and authoritative Catalog of Cool knows, 1962 was the Last Good Year. But the year before had much to recommend it as well. It’s the year that the iconic 60’s cult novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, made its appearance. Heinlein assumed that by the end of the 20th century (there is one vague reference to the date that places it at the end of a long, hard century — and Jubal Harshaw had served in North Africa in WWII), there would be flying cars — flying cars that flew to one’s destination without being guided by a human occupant. Say your destination aloud, and the car would take you there.
Now we have the technology for most of that. We can do voice commands, and something like Google Maps and GPS working together, along with the ability that SUVs and some other cars have now for sensing the proximity of other vehicles, etc. — we could make the car go where we wanted without guiding it, although personal I wouldn’t want to be one of the first few thousand people to trust my life to it.
It’s the flying part that’s tricky. Heinlein wasn’t specific about how the cars flew. He mentioned the “Lyle Drive” for spacecraft, but not the means for making the cars fly. Aldous Huxley, years before, had had people routinely flying helicopters, but Heinlein was not so explanatory, although one gets the impression that they flew Jetson-style. His characters took such transport for granted, suggesting the technology had been around awhile, so we are expected to take it for granted as well.
There were other things — such as a form of 3D TV called “stereovision,” which I sort of gathered was holographic, and watched in a “tank” like an aquarium. And videophones — although apparently landline-based. And most dramatically (and centrally to the plot) there had been two rather significant manned flights to Mars, the second one leaving colonists.
The assumption in those days seemed to be — with jets relatively new, and JFK pushing us to the moon — that our main technological advances would be in the area of transportation. Little thought was given to information technology. While a number of the things he imagined would have been unlikely without computers — such as doors that opened to spoken commands, and “bounce tubes” replacing elevators — the idea of the personal computer, as an important element of the typical consumer’s life, from the desktop to the smartphone — was completely absent. No email, no texting, no Skype (except from the landline). Hilariously, when a character wanted to send a written message and have a record of it rather than speaking by TV phone, he went to something that sounded like a telegraph office and sent a “statprint.” Ben Caxton, a nationally syndicated columnist in the novel, has such an advanced office that it has its own “statprinter.”
A lot can change in 50 years. Especially the future. What I can’t believe is that it’s been so long.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Mine is on the back seat of my car, all wadded up with a bunch of other junk. But I know where it is. Because today is Towel Day.
