Job Qualification

It's interesting to see just how indignant some media folks are over Matt Lauer's passive, enabling "candidate forum" the other night. It's as if they expected some other -- any other -- outcome from having a morning-show hack from a key corporate media monopoly "interview" a reality-teevee actor from one of that same network's shows from the past decade. Did anyone expect anything other than inept softballs?

I mean, yes, Lauer is certainly welcome to fuck off and die; that shitshow the other night was just a ramped-up continuation of what Lauer has done his entire career, which is to hurt America. And now that hurt is on the verge of becoming quite literal. Not that it hurts Lauer, of course; he makes more money in a year than you and I will see in our entire lives. The only thing that would hurt him is if he lost his elite status.

People who fancy themselves as media-watchers, implying that they are savvy to what the corporate media minions are really all about, miss the point by a mile when they start trying to suss out the political preferences of this or that reporter. I have no idea whether Lauer considers himself liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. Probably votes Democrat more often than not, maybe even fancies himself a good and generous citizen by contributing to the Clinton Foundation, if properly invited to the appropriate appletini soiree in the Hamptons. Whatever. Such considerations are irrelevant.

Ask Them No Questions, They'll Tell You No Lies

Doop-de-doop -- oh gee, what's this, media monkeys defending their cohort's foolish behavior? There must be a hard-hitting "water is wet" headline on the cover of the next issue of No Shit, Sherlock magazine. Good thing we all have a subscription, whether or not we want one, right?

"I'm proud of what I did," [Financial Times Washington bureau chief Megan Murphy] said Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "When you have a campaign like that and they are not going to let us ask her any questions in any settings, what are we supposed to do as journalists?"

Wow. Hokay, here's the deal -- if I can answer that question, seriously rather as an amateur blog smartass, then maybe I should be a capital city bureau chief at a major magazine. Jesus Christ, these people literally do not know what they're supposed to do as journalists when a career politician kicks off an extended process of yanking their collective chain.

Welp, just in case there are any news orgs out there looking for people who actually understand what journalists are supposed to do, here is the answer for Megan Murphy, so pay close attention folks, 'cause this is highly complimicated shit here:

If, as Murphy whines, "they are not going to let us ask her any questions in any settings," then they should do some research -- on her, on the campaign, on the people running the campaign. Whether it's debunking Benghazi or poking holes in her pseudo-populist bullshit, do something, anything.

Hell, maybe just ask why we continue to have these stupid "traditions" where candidates are supposed to legitimize themselves by genuflecting to states with more livestock than humans. Why is a candidate considered legitimate if they can win over a state with literally 1% of the population, mostly by promising ethanol subsides and opposing humane treatment of food animals? Why are we talking now about an election that is still eighteen months away? Why do we have a system where billions of dollars are thrown at a perpetual campaign machine, and where does all that money go? Hunh, I dunno, let's just run after her van like a gaggle of fucking maroons, so she can blow us off face to face, instead of from a distance.

Are these people for real? Do they seriously not understand why the average person does not respect the vaunted integrity of their so-called profession? You do not gather useful information for public consumption, you engage in increasingly desperate antics in the hope of bamboozling the public to watch your hastily-scrawled chyron, just long enough to hang around for the commercials, and support the many fine sponsors in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries.

Which is precisely what sportscasters do for the athletes they cover. But the thing is, Tom Brady isn't going to determine policies that may result in fracking chemicals poisoning your water table, or your job getting outsourced to some third-world shithole so your CEO can buy another vacation home and send his asshole kid to Phillips Andover.

One thing's for sure, and this is true of any politician: the more unfavorable the research, the sooner said candidate will adjust their attitude and start answering some goddamned questions. Until then, why should they?

But none of this occurs to any of these chumps, so yes, they run after a van (strangely dubbed "Scooby," maybe because "Mystery Machine" would be a little too on the nose) like kids after an ice cream truck, as one critic in the Post article rightly pointed out. And I doubt they're terribly well-compensated for it; it seems safe to assume that these stringers are the equivalent of the classic bit about the guy shoveling elephant shit at the circus for minimum wage, but not wanting to quit "show business."

I can't imagine what sort of mouth-breathing, window-licking, up-to-the third-knuckle nose-picking halfwit would actually sit and watch a bunch of dopey court stenographer wannabes chase futilely after a minivan, and think that it means anything at all. There's not much point to having a 24-hour news cycle and instantaneous technology, if this is the fecal matter that gets shunted out of the alimentary canal of the Fourth Estate. But then, we get the media machine we're willing to put up with.

Arrested Development

Definitely enjoyed deBoer's review of A.O. Scott's cultural critique, but I feel the urge to add another layer of meta to the proceedings. Scott's assessment of changing male TV and movie archetypes ring true enough, but his observations on music are maybe thinner than one would like:

And while Queen Bey may be the biggest, most self-contradicting, most multitude-containing force in popular music at the moment, she is hardly alone. Taylor Swift recently described how, under the influence of her friend Lena Dunham, she realized that “I’ve been taking a feminist stance without saying so,” which only confirmed what anyone who had been listening to her smart-girl power ballads already knew. And while there will continue to be hand-wringing about the ways female singers are sexualized — cue the pro and con think pieces about Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, Lady Gaga, Kesha and, of course, Madonna, the mother of them all — it is hard to argue with their assertions of power and independence. Take note of the extent and diversity of that list and feel free to add names to it. The dominant voices in pop music now, with the possible exception of rock, which is dad music anyway, belong to women. The conversations rippling under the surfaces of their songs are as often as not with other women — friends, fans, rivals and influences.

[emphasis mine]

Couple things here. First is the "rock....is dad music anyway" dismissal. In some ways it is, sure; the traditional triumvirate of vocals-drums-guitars that tethered rock music for a half-century now are, in its various incarnations intact, even static in its hipster retro iterations. But there are plenty of newer and younger fans for that kind of music. The dichotomy of rock and metal fandom, versus the AutoTuned, over-processed pap that passes for pop these days, is less age-based and more gender-based.

Just a few days ago, I chastised at great length the emptiness of Gene Simmons' contention that rock is dead, and elaborated on what a piss-poor idea it is to go into "music" as some sort of lucrative career option, like being a lawyer or plumber or criminal financier. But the flipside of that question deserves to be asked as well -- is there a way one can increase their chances of being a successful musical entrepreneur?

Reader, there is, I assure you. The best and most efficient path to huge mega-music-mogul-successmanship is simply to go down to the mall, find the Hot Topic store or the food court or anywhere 15-year-old girls are congregating, and listen to what they're listening to. Try to get about 4-6 weeks ahead of that sound if you can. Get the hang of Pro Tools, AutoTune, drum machines, beat programmers, and any other tools that the hep cats are using to make their crunk swang, yo.

And not to be sexist, I swear, but Scott's entire list of empowered pop chicks falls well into that rough categorization. It is useful to critique the products of these ladies on Scott's own terms -- both as "music," however subjectively you want to define that, and as evidentiary exhibits of cultural sea change, and then decide whether either of those things qualify as a step forward. The fact of the matter is that most of Scott's list is mallrat music.

And that's the second thing -- especially when we're younger and our musical consumption ritual is more communal, less personal, guys are more likely to throw on whatever they think the nearest nubile young women will want to hear. What we listen to at a party is obviously much different than what we'll listen to at home alone, with the headphones on. The personal versus communal experiences define how each of us, male or female, old or young, interact with our various media artifacts. Because of the brevity of the typical song, nowhere is this more true than with music.

I submit that a grown woman listening to Nicki Minaj or Iggy Azalea is precisely the same thing that Scott decries when he sees a 35-year-old woman reading a Hunger Games book. All that means is that, contra Scott's assumptions re Sandler and Apatow, both genders can be culturally infantilized with relative ease.

But what I really want to get into is deBoer's theme of cultural stultification as a barometer of demographic lassitude. That pop culture pieces become routinely more infantilized is simply a reflection of the society itself, which is as it should be.

It makes sense that comic-book franchises dominate the big screen in a society where people will sit and watch literally just about anything; where conventions of plot and narrative become less and less necessary; where people will convey idiotic opinions to random strangers about events that have zero effect on their lives, but can't be bothered to vote; where gun fetishists treat their totems both as toys and as bulwarks of self-defense against rampant crime and the jackbooted state, even though the violent crime rate continues to decline, and these are the selfsame people who, when a cop shoots an unarmed minority or kid, will reflexively jump to the defense of that same jackboot they profess to defend themselves from.

In a nation of 320 million inhabitants, one expects various niches of culture, politics, taste, etc. But these episodes of cognitive dissonance frequently come from the same niches. DeBoer's plaint about the self-appointed pop-culture aesthetes, "the aggressive nerds who police our artistic discourse like prison camp screws" (wonderful turn of phrase, that), rings true, as so much pop criticism comes pre-soaked in post-ironic "we know it's bad but it's so bad it's good" meta-commentary.

So you have a pop-culture mega-industry that produces trilogies of overlong movies based on comic-book franchises, and then remakes all three movies within a decade, a clear signal that technological advances, rather than peripheral elements such as acting and writing and such like, drive the bus. You have an industry that, so far, has made four movies totaling some eight or ten hours or so about sentient robots that turn back-and-forth into cars, planes, kitchen appliances perhaps.

I could be a smug, pretentious asshole and declaim this sort of thing as mere childishness, but the Transformers did not make sense to me when I was a child. I can't believe that that's because I had no imagination or whimsy as a child; I was steeped in sci-fi and fantasy books, and watched just about every '70s cartoon imaginable. But when people become immersed in this hacky, dopey stuff, they get used to it -- and when that's the majority of what's offered anymore, there is no longer any objective context, nothing to compare it to as a reference point. All you can do with the rebooted Spider-Man [rolls eyes] movie is compare it to its earlier rendition from a few years ago.

One of deBoer's commenters asserts glibly that "[w]e ought to be suspicious when you say you like foie gras but you are bored by birthday cake," which sounds true enough on its face, but when the majority of the menu is now birthday cake, one ought to be even more suspicious. No one in their right mind expects that the proles will suddenly set down their celebrojourno ass-sniffing periodicals in favor of Cahiers du Cinema or the Utne Reader.

But there's no balance, no real countervailing force to shitty, machine-made music promoted by manufactured personalities, or trite Hero's Journey narratives cobbled together one more blessed time, but with fresher graphics. Disposable pre-fab things that have already been manufactured before, and better. I honestly believe we are approaching a point where entire movies can and will be made without seeing a live human on the screen, they'll just create a generic, agreeable persona and hire some random ape to mo-cap the action and dub the dialogue.

There should be more salient criteria to getting a movie made than "shiny thing go boom" or "fat guy married to Salma Hayek." In a larger sense, it is an accurate reflection of a society that has given up, and is content with its CGI gruel. If the only goal of experiencing any new music or movie or teevee show is to kill an afternoon or evening, to just mark time and run down life's clock one by one until the eventual end, then what is the point?

Hatesong

Why did I not know about this before? I'm just now discovering Hatesong, and there is something noteworthy about, say, David Lynch despising It's a Small World so much, he won't let the interviewer refer to it by name.

Fortunately, I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't encounter most of these awful songs. I mean, I've never heard Katy Perry's Firework, like not a single note. I've never heard more than a few seconds of My Heart Will Go On. I've never heard a Justin Bieber song, again, not so much as a single note or word or melody. Life is too short.

Still, I think we've all had jobs in the past where workplace radio is plopped onto some lowest-common-denominator shit sandwich, endless streams of commercials sandwiching three-song blocks of heavy-rotation dreck. No wonder the American worker is stressed out to the point of a breakdown.

But most of us are certainly familiar enough with some of these songs, so when you turn a fine, observant mind such as Steve Coogan on the aerosol can of cheese The Lady in Red, hijinks are bound to ensue. Yet there are still people who listen to it on purpose, there are nostalgia radio stations that play this sort dreck deliberately.

This makes me sad, really. It makes me think of a person who has been stuck in a basement or a cornfield in Kansas their entire life, with no radio or TV or internet, and so they think that the entire world is a desolate cornfield, because they've never seen anything else. Not that I expect other people to like exactly what I like; far from it.

But there are songs (and Lady in Red is a prime example) where, as Coogan points out, creativity is absent, nothing but trite greeting-card sentiments are listed. It's the musical equivalent of having sex through a hole in a bed sheet, missionary only. To enjoy -- or even to be not offended by -- inert, lifeless crap just seems to be a symptom of missing out on a whole 'nother universe of great stuff.

Most of this stuff is very fish-in-a-barrel; honestly, do you know anyone who likes a floater like Mambo No. 5? But pairing the right person with the right song is just magic in this context, as the legendary Matt Pike demonstrates in his evisceration of the Aerosmith handjob Dude (Looks Like a Lady). Pike hates not just that song, but the band with a level normally reserved for someone who you just watched run over your dog. On purpose. Fun stuff. Check it out if you haven't already.

[Update:  Also, too. Certainly a valid point here, in that someone's taste -- or lack of -- doesn't pick anyone else's pocket or break their arm, so why sweat these poor folks on their schmuckery?

Two reasons, says I:  one, it's frequently funny (and some of the commenters in the Hatesong pieces are flat-out hilarious); two, beyond the subjectivity of mere pop-culture aesthetics, the fact is that when these objets de merde are popular, however long that toxic half-life may be, it's tough to get out of range of the smell.

I've never seen so much as an episode of Survivor, American Idol, or really any reality teevee, and yet a certain amount of "informational" oxygen and media space gets taken up with coverage of this sock-drawer-sorting nonsense, so I know way more about these things than I would ever have wanted to. You can only change the channel so fast; you have to read the headline before you can choose to skip past it. This stuff becomes very difficult to completely avoid. The same can be said when it comes to music, for those poor folks who are compelled to share communal space with aficionados of said dreck.

It's one thing to posit that someone who lurves them some Mambo #5 is no worse or better than someone who knows every Beethoven string quartet by number and key; it's quite another to have the mambophile blaring their crap over the cubicle wall every day.]

Mommie Dearest

It's easy (and accurate) to pick on the spate of  "celebrity" (or used to be) mothers who write books chock-full o' "parenting" and "lifestyle" advice, usually nonsense about vaccines and toilet training. Mostly these things are just the artifacts of a desiccated cultural landscape, where wealthy, pampered dingbats can preach to the peons about lives of "simplicity" and such.

But what we really should be curious about is, what sort of moron purchases and reads these things? Who are these simpletons out there that think Jenny McCarthy has better ideas about how to raise their children than, hell, just about anyone else on the planet? How does the chick from Clueless show up on the short lists of mothers and mothers-to-be (not to be overly sexist, but I promise you, right here, right now, that no man on the planet is buying any of these books) as a repository of sound advice?

Seriously, now. The problem is not solely that this "advice" comes from people who have, for the most part, lived cosseted lives away from the working-two-jobs-to-survive, one-paycheck-from-the-street reality that most people live. It's that "living well," contra received dingbat wisdom, really does cost more. Good food and good health care, the immediate vitals, cost more. All the ancillary things that add to a quality of life -- roads, schools, jobs, activities, etc. -- those things cost more, because you get what you pay for.

This is what happens when you have a population that is willfully illiterate and innumerate. There are too many people who can no longer parse statistical data, tell it apart from mere anecdata. There are a preponderance of folks out there who cannot critically think, who are simply too lazy to read up on how many different ways the "anti-vax" legends have been debunked.

Worst of all, this is what happens when you have a swath of people out there who can barely find their intemellectual asses in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight, but will hang their hopes and opinions on someone they've heard of, some D-lister who was on that show a million years ago, or who used to be famous for showing her tits. (Five years ago, my response to Surgeon General McCarthy would simply have been, "shut up and take your top off," but she's been so heavily sculpted and botoxed at this point, it would be like looking at a plastic fuck doll.)

Really, much to the chagrin of this bullshit "parenting and lifestyle" industry, you do not need a parenting book at all. Maybe good old Dr. Spock if you really must, but so much of it is just common sense. Apparently Voltaire was an optimist on that count.

Having children is one of the things humans do better and more than just about anything else they do; rearing children is simply a matter of considering their interests at the same or higher level than your own. Looking to some useta-be-famous name for help is just a failure of attention and thought.

True Detective

If you haven't yet seen the HBO series True Detective, you really should. It comes compellingly close to the rarefied heights achieved by The Sopranos and The Wire, but appears to be much more finite in scope. The interplay between Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey (and the last couple years for McConaughey have been nothing short of spectacular) is outstanding, and the narrative taut and energetic.

Anyhoo, this extended piece rings eerily close to what True Detective is all about -- dead shithole towns, corrupt cops, the ability for the wrong person in the wrong place to get away with literally anything. Check it out.

Same Old Trip It Was Back Then

In the week since Philip Seymour Hoffman's untimely demise, I find myself taken aback by two entirely predictable sentiments:  one, the obvious sadness of a vibrant talent squelched in its prime; and two, the small but noticeable segment of know-it-all commenters around the internets who feel comfortable in judging Hoffman's final actions.

Perhaps we've all become inured to the jabber of various internets morons, but still, one holds out hope that once in a great while, some of these bozos find occasion to do something more productive, like jerking off, or eating mayonnaise straight from the jar. But of course, there's always a pocket of dipshits who can feign outrage and indignation over any little thing, no matter how little it actually affects them.

People are welcome to agree to disagree over whether addiction is a clinical or a behavioral disease; perhaps, like homosexuality, there are different factors of causation. So for some it may be biological, some environmental, or some combination. The idea that complete strangers and onlookers can somehow intuit what Hoffman's problem was is ludicrous. Hopefully, given the man's body of work, everyone can at least agree that this was a man of prodigious talent and artistic courage, given that he had very few true commercial successes -- indeed, for the most part, commerce did not seem to factor into most of his role choices.

It's a common trope that the "artistic temperament," as it were, leaves one more open to issues of substance abuse. You can probably chicken-egg that one to the end of time, trying to figure out which is causal or effectual. I can tell you firsthand, from my long-ago years of slugging it out as a dive-bar musician, that it's not always as simple (as opposed to easy) as it might appear. A touring musician's life is certainly not torture, but it's also not a picnic, and a steady diet of fast food, alcohol, speed, and random women can, to say the least, be dissociative after a while.

For a successful stage and film actor, it must be several orders of magnitude past what I saw and experienced in my decade on the road. Film shoots, from what I've always read, are intensive, weeks or months of long days, frequently in strange locations, hours of tedium in between short bursts of activity. And any time you're on a stage, in front of an audience, your task, whether you're an actor, musician, or cat juggler, is to get a roomful of (possibly hostile or at least indifferent) complete strangers to like you.

Like most fans, I feel sad for the brilliant future work we will no longer get to experience from Philip Seymour Hoffman, just as I wonder what sort of magic Jimi Hendrix or Randy Rhoads would have produced had they not died tragically young. And fortunately the dumbass detractors seem to be a minority, albeit an obnoxious one. Sometimes it's just best to murmur a hope of peace for Hoffman and his family and friends, and move along, and hopefully one day those folks will find something better to do than piss on someone's grave for no good reason.

The Universe Thinks I Deserve a Worsening

Dammit, how is it that I didn't know about this site? Nothing against Jeff Bridges or Ryan Reynolds, but R.I.P.D. looks DOA, and few things are better than funny bad reviews.

James Gandolfini

I happened to catch the awful news about James Gandolfini just minutes after it hit the news outlets, and thought for a split second about jumping on the instant "oh noez!" wagon. But more and more I'm coming to appreciate the value of "slow news", in correlation with "slow food."

Really, as dysfunctional as Americans' relationship with their food is, the news is so much worse, as it is compelled to fill every fucking moment with whatever's there, which usually ain't a whole lot, unless endless iterations of the same goddamned thing punches your ticket. Sometimes, we need to take a few minutes and let news -- good or bad -- sink in.

Anyway, Gandolfini. As a huge fan of The Sopranos, and of Gandolfini (even before Sopranos; his bit part in True Romance stood out in a movie full of wonderful small parts), it's always a horrible thing for someone of such talent to be cut down in their prime. And if half of the "nice guy" encomia are remotely true -- and I'm sure they are --  then it's also the loss of a working-class dog, a regular guy uncomfortable with the irregularity his status granted him. You can never have too many people like that.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the success of The Sopranos changed the face of television. In a pustulent wasteland of "reality" diarrhea gravitating to every low nook and crevice of the people's airwaves, never to be completely rinsed out, there are diamonds to be found, rich story arcs populated by vivid, complex characters and compelling scenarios.

You definitely have no Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men without Sopranos, as they were created by folks who got their pedigree on David Chase's watch. But you probably also don't have the rest of the quality basic cable stable:  Breaking Bad, Justified, Sons of Anarchy, the late great Southland. Hell, anything good that's come on HBO since Sopranos probably owes at least part of its existence to the success of that show; HBO had foundered after Larry Sanders closed shop and needed something to boost its stock. Instead it captured lightning in a bottle, a sprawling, rambunctious mob epic with heart and grit and a stellar ensemble cast.

But every ensemble needs its gravitational force, and that was Gandolfini to a T, at turns charming and menacing, communicating subtleties of character with a cold glint of the eye and a slight Doberman grin. I always felt that Sopranos was the funniest show of its era, still do. It was the darkest of humor, but hilarious all the same, and much of that was due to Gandolfini's tremendous timing and facial cues.

I recall reading once that Chase originally wanted DeNiro for the role of Tony Soprano, and as great as DeNiro is, Gandolfini used is bulk to inhabit the character and make it larger than life. Where DeNiro is almost catlike in his presence, stealthy and clever, but not physically overpowering, Gandolfini made Tony more like a bear, pleasant one moment, imminently dangerous the next. Like Michael Chiklis in The Shield, Gandolfini was a force of nature in his signature role, compelling and unstoppable.

So there ya go. It's not hyperbole -- James Gandolfini really did change teevee in this new millennium, helped create a redoubt for quality, storytelling, and acting as a true craft. That he was apparently a great person as well is icing on the cake. Gone far too soon. Go rent True Romance, which is just a great movie from front to back anyway, and check out Gandolfini's interview with James Lipton.

Bring It On

You know, as much as I pick at Obama and his many misgivings, I did vote for the guy, if primarily because the alternative really was much worse, at least by sheer degree. So while I'm glad that at least one of this mouthy dunce's listeners had the integrity to call in and repudiate her (supposedly rhetorical) call to violence, there are probably plenty more who agree with her, and maybe even a few of those who might act on her exhortation.

Should someone actually get hurt, Tantaros will no doubt hide behind the same sort of mealy-mouthed crap that Sarah Palin and her ilk did when Jared Loughner emptied the 30-round clip of his Glock into a supermarket parking lot. It's just entertainment, they'll say, or satire, not meant to be taken literally.

But see, morans don't do nuance. They can't spell it or pronounce it, they don't know what it means, they have no use for it, so they don't know or care how to distinguish it. The people who watch this nonsense do so for the same reason they watch reality teevee, whether it's interchangeable "court" shows or swamp-dwelling hillbillies:  to affirm the things they think they know, maybe stoke some imaginary grievances in the process. Really, 90% of the guff most of these halfwits engage in could be communicated in grunts.

I will say this, though -- contrary to the hokey Fixed Noise / Rash Limpballs conventional wisdom about lefty milquetoasts, we're not all Alan Colmes. Some of us actually have been in fights, and don't mind scrapping, and own and use guns.

The idea that this "hey, it's all good fun, go pimp-slap a pussy-ass librul" shit, if acted on, could have any sort of positive outcome for either the tough-guy Obama-hater or the presumed victim of his righteous wrath, is almost literally impossible. Andrea Tantaros told her audience to "punch [Obama voters] in the face." There's only two possible responses -- ignore it, or act upon it. All it takes is one person, that's all it ever takes, and then their chickenshit "we wuz jes' sayin'" Cracker Barrel caveats don't mean a goddamn thing.

The only way the flying monkeys are ever going to shut their gaping, jabbering cakeholes is ironically when someone happens to take them seriously one of these days. Hope they're not too surprised when the target of their bullying actually fights back.

Spin City

Well, if Chris Dodd can do for the dry-heaving movie industry what he did for the ass-pounding predation of Wall Street finance, we should be balls deep in a huge vat of pig shit, torture porn, and reboots of comic book franchises in no time. You know, pretty much like we have been at the local cinemascope. CinemaCon indeed, these assholes work the long con, always.

This is how the movie industry functions:  for years they have been acting as if frowning at the portrayal of smoking a cigarette in a scene is a sign of moral fortitude. They might now do the same with the portrayal of guns, and the use thereof. [Ed.:  Good luck with that; are action heroes supposed to point a fucking banana at the villain and yell, "Bang!"?] This is known in the industry parlance as Being Seen Doing Something. Feel safer now?

The MPAA's supposed values have always been warped; a dozen people can get blown away in a barrage of gunfire in a PG-13 movie. You can have just shy of a metric fuckton of violence and maintain that rating, but Flying Spaghetti Monster help your sorry ass if the eff-word is dropped more than twice, or (gasp!shriek!) a nipple is viewed.

A female nipple, that is. Male nipples are fine, but apparently the sight of funbags, and the nozzle thereof, will send your tiny little brain into shock, and start an early rutting season. Why, even the shadow of areolae (probably the worst of the mid-'70s prog-rock albums) will get you the R, while as in the above linked example, you can pound a person's face into a table so that an implanted pencil rams through his eye, and keep that PG-13 rating.

Or again, consider the wave of grotesque torture porn schlock that proliferated through much of the last decade, assorted schlubs molested and butchered in the most gratuitous methods possible by unrepentant psychopaths, sometimes portrayed to be almost sympathetic characters. Same rating as the movie that showed a titty, or had a couple f-bombs. As bad aesthetically as it might be for a movie to have a scene where a kid fucks an apple pie, it seems somehow more benign than someone blowtorching a girl's eye out of her head. Yet those two movies have identical ratings. I am going to go out on an enormous limb and assert that if you want to lessen violence and improve people's happiness in entertainment product, make fewer movies about bright thing go boom, and more movies about Salma Hayek's prodigious cans (possibly NSFW).

Whatever's clever. What's a slam-dunk guarantee is that the MPAA, which is a lobbying organization cut from much of the same cloth as the NRA, will sooner rather than later skulk into Warshington seeking some sort of emolument or favor. This will be in return for its supposed concessions in this ricockulously arch aesthetic conceit, that if fewer guns are shown on-screen, if the violence is portrayed secondarily, that there will be some sort of societal benefit, fewer school massacres or what have you.

This is the same sort of moronic line of thought that, back in the '80s, presumed that heavy metal was "making" teenagers kill themselves, as if their shitty lives and meaningless futures had nothing to do with anything. The kids today, with their Call of Duty and their Grand Theft Auto, desensitizing their tiny little brains until they have no other option but to take Mommy's Glock to the local primary school and tune it up on a classroom of first-graders. Right?

We're all just easily impressionable automatons, hopelessly compelled to imitate our entertainment experiences, doomed to end up as YouTube fodder on Tosh.0 or Jackass, until some do-gooder asshole senator decides to Save The Children with a decree of holy writ that any entertainment product should be bowdlerized enough so that a seven-year-old can watch without getting traumatized. That seems to be the line of thought implicit in the actions and words of organizations such as the MPAA, which is infinitely more concerned about digital piracy of their lousy comic-book movies and public-domain retreads, than about anything else, such as whether their ratings system makes any sense in the first place.

This is your gubmint in a nutshell, friends 'n' neighbors -- mired in inertia and clutter, besotted by lobbyist pelf, they act as if they seriously think that taking some sort of pretend moral stand on gun violence might prevent actual gun violence. This is sort of like presuming that if they sought or even created newer and better source material, they would stop making the same shitty movies over and over again.

The Ballad of Frito Pendejo

Looks like 'murka's ongoing love affair with watching nobodies sort their sock drawers is safe for the time being, praise Jebus:

“I don't see anything mind-blowing this year,” says Karoline Spodsberg of Banijay International. “The trend, if you can call it a trend – is that people are reworking already existing genres and existing shows. Almost everything “new” is set in something we already know and already is successful.”

Sooo....the laziest conceivable form of popular entertainment is going to continue down that discount path, saving tons of money on talent (writers, actors, directors, etc.) while charging the same ad rates for all those boner pills and pick'em up trucks? Color this hombre shocked.

 

It's not like anyone expected anything else, but I suppose the characterization of anything being potentially "mind-blowing" is, well, a bit weird, even by the depressingly low standards of the industry. Was anyone's mind really "blown" by the Candid-Camera-meets-Lord-of-the-Flies aesthetic of Survivor when it mutated the prime-time landscape, then metastasizing into the myriad indistinguishable karaoke-dancing-bachelor contest shows that now proliferate?

 

Perhaps they were blown away by the realization that people would actually tune in to what appears to be roughly ten minutes of actual content stretched into an hour with pregnant pauses and an overabundance of commercials. Surely the money they're raking in hand over fist, peddling total dreck, is pretty mind-blowing, I'll grant them that.

 

A charitable way to observe the phenomenon might be to note that the extreme abundance of satellite channels basically provides something for just about anyone at almost any time. (This is not exactly true, at least in my case -- I'm willing to watch a variety of stuff if I'm in the house, working on the laptop, whatever. But there is never going to be a situation where I would leave, say, Baby Geniuses 2 -- yes, sadly, it is a real movie -- going, even as background noise, yet I'm paying HBO $15/month to lard their extra channels such crap, presumably so that they can then afford Game of Thrones and Bill Maher. But I digress.)

 

Rather than endlessly kvetching about the nonstop ludicrousness of the whole operation, or engaging in pointless chacun à son gout diversions, the meta aspects are more interesting to observe. I am old enough to remember watching (for example) Hee Haw on the teevee on Sundays when it wasn't football season, but there were no computers or video games, and we had literally only three channels in Northern California. (Even in Los Angeles, in the early '70s, I think we only had maybe 8-10 channels.) So we didn't have much else to choose from.

 

I am unable to just sit and passively watch the teevee; even if it's something I genuinely enjoy and look forward to -- Daily Show, GoT, Justified -- I have the laptop or a book handy, or a pad and paper to take notes on whatever project I have going. (I know, I must be a really fun date, right?) I honestly can't conceive of just sitting and watching a dancing show or an infomercial, unless they bring in weapons for the participants to use on each other. But they're on, so even with all the other cool choices, someone's got that kind of time on their hands. I can't disparage it, because it's just incomprehensible to me. But society and the workplace have a way of burning people out to where they just sit and accept, I suppose.

 

It's not all dreck; technology has enabled so much high-quality content, from video games to books to music, it's impossible to get to it all. And it's actually a bit strange that so many people continue to bother with old-format teevee and movies. Length of format is one thing that is ripe for change -- why does a show have to be an hour or half-hour, or a movie 90-120 min.? -- especially as mainstream content becomes more and more repetitive, recursive, ripped from comic books or board games or what have you.

 

That's the blessing and curse of having infinity channels:  something for everyone, but also the overall dilution of the importance of creativity, originality, quality. I have probably 400 channels at my disposal; I don't think I use more than nine or ten of them, like ever. I suspect we're all in that boat, of paying a thousand dollars a year for content we might value at a tenth of that. And hell, it may the sole remaining choice of employment before too much longer.

 

You can catch my upcoming reality-fest, Sortin' Sock Drawers with the Kardashians, on the E! Channel next summer.

Living in the Past

Terrific article in the NYT Magazine on the continued travails of America's Favorite Prolonged Trainwreck. Where to start? A washed-up child star, used up and turned out by her grasping, scumbag parents, once-promising career now completely ruined, destined to be an escort for minor Saudi princes (assuming she lives long enough). A crowdsourced movie made in borrowed locations by a porn star and a once-shining screenwriter, whose own wife warned him about the dubious merits of this project.

(For much more insight on Schrader and other classic '70s Hollywood characters, I highly recommend Peter Biskind's excellent Easy Riders Raging Bulls. Schrader, among several other high-strung artistes, seemed at times too driven by their inner demons, when they maybe should have trusted at least one other human enough to solicit and accept their opinion.)

It's worth noting that, in an extended piece littered with a variety of memorable people, that the most redeeming one out of all of them appears to be James Deen, the erstwhile porn star. The most consistent message I could glean from this narrative is that, while there may have been a point in time in Hollywood where your work ethic could afford to be inversely proportional to your star value (i.e., if Lohan was still marketable, no one would give a shit if she showed up late, drunk, or not at all), those days are long gone.

Even the days of "they can make you or break you" are done. What percentage of major-release movies per year now are staked on rehashed public-domain stories, CGI-green screen sets and action, half-assed script-doctoring, cardboard characters, indifferent directing? Actors are a commodity now; the era of true superstardom is over.

You know the PLR craze in internets marketing, where you take something that's been done a million times, reword it slightly, slap a new cover on it, and then sucker people into paying fresh money for it? That's what Hollywood does now, but with old public domain stuff. Don't believe me, while you're all moony-eyed over Les Miserables? Ask yourself how much Victor Hugo's estate gets from that, or L. Frank Baum's estate gets from the upcoming Oz movie. You can thank the mouse cult for that there bidness model.

Anyhoo, the sad thing about Lohan is not that her career is shot, it's that she doesn't seem to realize it. Even if she somehow got her shit together, there's no upside for any producer, micro or mainstream, to take the risk on her. And since she literally doesn't know how to do anything else, she can't fathom the notion that if you can't even keep from getting fired from a microbudget NC-17 gig that couldn't have gotten a real release in the first place, you have zero value to them. There's simply too many people there with close-enough talent who would crawl through broken glass to show up sober and on time.