All I Have to Say About "Mad Men" Season Three Is...

...that last night's season finale shows how much better the show works when the sixties vibe they're emulating is closer to The Thomas Crown Affair, or even Ocean's Eleven, than L'eclisse.



Bored to Death also wrapped up its brief first season last night, and while the show may be a modest pleasure, it has proven something about Jason Schwartzman that I never would have guessed: when he's surrounded by the right people, it is possible to hardly mind him at all. The finale included especially standout work by Ted Danson, who at one point could be seen preparing for his big fight against Oliver Platt by hitting a punching bag as if he were the world's shyest bear gingerly tapping a beehive to ask if they could spare any honey, and three sexy minxes: Jenny Slate as Schwartzman's new stoner-chick love interest, a comedienne so spirited and flexible that she swung her dead-weight co-star around like a sack of potatoes while actually convincing you that she was into the little drone; Heather Burns as Zach Galifianakis's girlfriend, turned on by the sight of him stepping into the ring but then urging him to stay down for the count because "I want you in one piece tonight"; and Laila Robins, a born trouble maker who once damn near got Sam Waterston disbarred on Law & Order. The show is refreshing, and easy to forgive in its lapses, because the current of real, cross-generational affection between its characters feels real and prevents its cleverness from settling into something smug and preening. I liked the quiet moment at the end when Schwartzman asked Danson, the ever-immature father figure, if he thought they'd learned anything from their experience. "No," said Danson, "but that's okay. It's good to stay in the dark about things. It keeps life interesting."

Intentionally or not, that line stirs up memories of Larry David's famous dictum about imposing a "no learning, no hugging" rule on Seinfeld, even as Curb Your Enthusiasm's current season has focused on David's staging a Seinfeld reunion. Curb has two more episodes to go this year, which doesn't give David much time to remember that Leon, the black Katrina refugee who hasn't been seen since half a dozen episodes ago, is presumably still camping out in his house. If David never gets around to showing us Leon's introduction to Michael Richards, I'm going to end up wondering why he went to the trouble.

The Fag End

South Park has been uncharacteristically soapboxy this past season, which is especially noticeable because the South Park guys can get on their soapbox over some peculiar issues, such as last week, when they went after some cable reality series about self-promoting whale lovers that I'd never heard of with all the venom of David Levine or Hunter Thompson going after Nixon circa 1971, if not Simon Wiesenthal beating the bushes for Josef Mengele. This sort of thing is hard to mind, in part because Trey Parker and Matt Stone do have interesting minds, and partly because they're funny; the "Whale Whores" episode twisted and turned in on itself as it produced its ironies about the inherent uncoolness of doing good and the lust for fame and the role it plays in the decision to get off the couch and how different atrocities look from different cultural vantage points, and for most of the world it was still just a delivery system for Cartman's performance of "Poker Face." One nice thing about the episode's high degree of entertainment value is that it suggested that, at some point between the time they felt the fire in the belly that inspired the whole thing and the time they wrapped production on it, Parker and Stone had sort of realized that there was something silly about wanting to grind the Whale Wars guy into the dust as if he'd fucked their sisters, a possibility that speaks well of their sanity.

The other night, Parker ans Stone sprang upon the world "The F Word", an episode so thoroughly lacking in entertainment value that you just knew that it touched upon something very important to them, more important than the economic meltdown or censorship or racism or immigrant hysteria or the Mormon religion or Scientology or homelessness or Osama bin Laden or Tom Cruise's sexual orientation, all subjects that they've managed to be devil-may-care about for twenty-two minutes or so. It's probably a good thing for every satirist, no matter how scathing and fearlessly all-encompassing his capacity for mockery may be, to have one subject that hits him so deeply on such a personal level that he cannot cool off enough to successfully make fun of it. It does not speak well of the South Park guys that the one thing that apparently matters to them more than anything else is the right of straight guys to deploy the word "fag" as a term of abuse while insisting that it has no homophobic connotation. The episode began with a framework about a bunch of bikers--who, it was explained in dialogue pounded onto the soundtrack with a ten-ton sledge, did everything they chose to do in their noisy lives because they wanted to be "noticed", real killer stuff, rapier-wit insightful stuff--so far from being smart or funny that it was obvious that it had been cobbled together and rushed through so that it could serve as a Trojan horse for something, and this--the "fag" business--turned out to be it.

I pity anyone who has either the time or inclination to tear through the nearly two hundred episodes of South Park with the intention of diving a coherent political philosophy, but to the degree that a crude version of one can be arrived at, it seems to be that Parker and Stone are think-for-yourself libertarian types who wouldn't violently object to people being rescued from starvation and plague but who pride their right to say whatever the fuck they want above all other things and see it as something like their duty to be skeptical of anything that being skeptical about might irritate the right people. Whatever else is or isn't admirable about this stance--from a practical standpoint, it means that, for instance, they feel obligated to appear stupid by believing that climate change must be a hoax because Al Gore is a loser-- it's a supremely useful point of view for someone hoping to be funny and looking to commit satire. As such, they've managed to be funny about some issues on which they're, well, wrong. "The F Word" stood out from the main body of their work because they managed to be both wrong and unfunny, and it's the unfunny part that's most revealing, because they came across as being committed to their wrongness on this issue on a personal, entitled level that flirted with what Parker and Stone have often seemed to think is the ultimate sin in their most despised targets: smugness.

Bitching about "political correctness" is one thing, albeit one very 1992 thing. It's another to have to listen to a couple of millionaires lament their having a particularly idiotic term of abuse taken away from them because some "fags" might object--with the understanding that "fags" doesn't mean gays anymore, it just means "lame people." And as my daddy would have said as he threw his support to them, everybody knows that "niggers" doesn't mean "black people", it just means the kind of black people who deserve to be called "niggers." It's disheartening to imagine Trey Parker and Matt Stone becoming so ossified and unimaginative in their old age that they can't give up one single word that has a clear, offensive meaning; has it really become so hard for them to think up insults that they need to hang onto this one, as a matter of life and death? (Just think--it's been thirty years now since Richard Pryor renounced the use of the word "nigger", after giving every indication that he could barely get through three consecutive sentences without it, and Parker and Stone still need the word "fag" like a fish needs water--or, to really hit below the belt, the way that Kevin Smith needs the word "fag".)

Of course, if you don't get it, they'll say, you're just an oversensitive old fart who doesn't understand that "kids today" have given "fag" its own, non-homophobic meaning. Regular viewers of The Daily Show who hear this argument may automatically recall the footage of the religious rightist explaining that we know that homosexuality is wrong because teenage boys, who instinctively have clear vision and pure hearts, express loathing of gays more readily and enthusiastically than anyone. One may also recall, way back when, Tim Robbins explaining that he campaigned for Nader in 2000 because he was taking his political cues not from grotty older people who were confused from too much book learning and worldy experience but from "the kids at the Gap, who don't compromise." If my midlife crisis, which I've been wrestling with since I was about sixteen, ever becomes so pathetically overgrown that I start making announcements about how I'm looking to teenage boys and Gap shoppers and "kids today" so as to know how to comport myself, I hope there'll still be someone around who loves me enough to protect whatever's left of my good name by killing me with a ball peen hammer.

A few years ago, Robert Fiore proposed that, since the early '90s or so, The Simpsons and then South Park are what we've had in place of a national humor magazine on the order of the classic Mad and its various Kurtzman-produced offshoots and the National Lampoon of the early '70s and finally Spy. If there's something to this idea, and I think there kind of is, then South Park is the closest kin to the Lampoon in the days of Michael O'Donoghue and Doug Kenney and Henry Beard and all those other post-counterculture, post-campus wits who didn't pick their targets along any kind of ideological lines. By now, Parker and Stone have maintained a certain level of brilliance for twice as long as the Lampoon did at its peak, and with a bare fraction of the writing staff.

One difference, though, is that the Lampoon writers managed to select the ripest targets from every point on the ideological map while (mostly) sticking to the rule that satire deserves to be used against the comfortable and powerful instead of as an insult added to the injuries of the poor and afflicted. Parker and Stone probably think they do the same thing in their own way; the problem is that they so enjoy their ability to be offensive on an eight-grade level that they really think that taking the word "fag" out of their playpen, not by any legal decree but just according to a shared agreement about what kind of social behavior is smells like that new Famous Bowl at KFC, is more an act of oppression and intolerance than having to listen to anti-gay slurs thrown around freely. And they're wrong. Usually when they're wrong, they can take comfort in knowing two things: one, that whoever thinks they're wrong is a douchebag, and two, they're still funny. On this one, they can only try to reach for the first defense, and the fact that number two is finally completely out of their reach ought to give them something to worry about.

Happy 40th Birthday, Sesame Street!

Daringly Unconventional Use of Language, or Functional Illiteracy? You Make the Call!

"... a process that is at once tedious and entirely engrossing"

--A. O. Scott, reviewing Frederick Wiseman's documentary La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet in The New York Times

"Juvenilia, sure, but that's hardly a pejorative."

--Zach Baron on Luc Sante's My Life in the Village Voice

Coming to Terms: Update

So Michael Bloomberg wound up winning re-election with a five-point margin of victory over his nameless opponent (Bill Thompson, his mama calls him), in spite of all those confident predictions (mine included) that he'd steamroller his way to victory. The local news has been full of theories about why Bloomberg suffered a victory that's being described as a crushing defeat, and the general consensus is that a shitload of people voted against him because they were so mad about his maneuvering to get the City Council to overturn the term limits law so he could run again. (The national news is only interested in the various elections that went down this week inasmuch as their results can be spun as evidence that President Obama's magic wand is broken. As little real use as, say, New Jersey Republican Chris Christie's victory over the incumbent Democratic Governor, Jon Corzine--a race between two unattractive candidates that finally came down to referendum on whether Corzine could be given a pass on having tried to make it a key campaign issue that his opponent is a fat porker--ought to be for this purpose, the New York Mayor's race is a real dry run. Bloomberg is Bloomberg; people are talking about reasons why anyone would have voted for him because the thought that anyone would have wanted to vote for someone else in the race simply isn't taken seriously. Bloomberg himself is also pretty much his own party, having changed his registered affiliation to Republican at the last minute during his first run for Governor, because the Democratic candidacy was already taken.

What I find most interesting about the whole thing, though, is this: in no small part because the race was said to have already been decided, tens of thousands of New Yorkers didn't bother to vote, in an election that, because of public anger over Bloomberg's getting the term limits law changed, inspired a lot of passion, or at least a lot of yelling. Because most people view voting as a hassle, they only need a decent excuse not to bother, and the media gave them a dandy one by assuring Bloomberg supporters that their votes weren't needed and Bloomberg haters that their votes wouldn't count. It's impossible to tell how different things would have looked the next morning if all those people had voted; on the other hand, if enough of the people who've been calling Bloomberg an enemy of democracy had taken the time to vote for Thompson to nudge his numbers up more than five lousy points, they would have been able to take credit for the upset of the decade, at least. I can't help but wonder if some of them would have preferred to not do that after all, because it would have made them look a little silly in light of all that time they spent yelling about how democracy was being subverted and there really wasn't anything the little guy could do about it.

As I have already indicated, I don't happen to regard Bloomberg as an enemy of democracy, not because he's rich enough to buy a lot of TV time and not even because, by going to the City Council with his little problem instead of calling for an election on the matter, he took the simplest and surest route to making it possible for the voters to give him, or deny him, another four years. Maybe this just proves that I lived in Louisiana too long, but that just makes me regard him as a politician. (Oddly enough, I do consider terms limits laws, whether they are inflicted on the voters by the politicians or by the voters themselves, to be the enemy of democracy. The electorate should be allowed to make the mistake over and over and over as many times as they like, just like some ex-girlfriends of mine.) But what about people who scream that democracy is being subverted, assure you that because of big money and the media that it's all in the bag and no single person's vote counts, then sleep late on Election Day and awake the learn that they missed out on what looks, in retrospect, like an easy way to make history?

I'm sure that some of the yellers did vote--Thompson had to get that 46& of the vote from somewhere, and he probably only has one mother--but I can't shake this impression, as someone who walks in the city almost every day, that the anti-Bloomberg mood inspired a lot more street theater and radio call-in bitching than it did voter registration drives, the truly heroic work of any election season. Even the people who gave us Florida 2000 worked hard to get out the vote, even if they did encourage people to throw it away on a reptilian load because, they proudly boasted, they were incapable of perceiving any difference between a future Nobel Prize winner and Little Lord Peeshispants von Warpresident in the clear sunlight. They, too, would tell you in a private moment that it really didn't matter because no single person's vote counts. Maybe the real enemies of democracy are the people who are don't want to outgrow their beloved junior-high-level cynicism --about how unfixable and rigged The System is, and how you can only hope to give the bosses the finger by Sending a Message--for fear that they won't be able to still fit into their good jeans.

Small Minds in the Long Run

So that sad old jackass of a Louisiana justice of the peace who'd been referring interracial couples who wanted to get married to other justices less devoted to the olden ways then himself has yielded to pressure from above and decided that he needs to spend a lot more time with his long-suffering family. Nobody who knows the good justice has accused him of not being a good guy. He is a prince, the very living embodiment of niceness and sweet reason, who would give you the shirt off his back and never steal candy from a baby or drop a sack of kittens off a bridge into the river below. All he did, after all, was voice a thought--i.e., that non-whites, whom he has nothing against, and whites should not marry because his big soft heart can't bear the possibility that their children might have hard time of it-- that would have seemed well within the bounds of majority opinion at some point in his adult lifetime.

If Justice Flapdoodle had said this as recently as forty years ago, he would have been on thin ice but not clearly and violently at odds with what the world at large agrees is permissible. He would, in fact, have touched many with the delicate way in which he couched his bigotry as an expression of concern for the children who the would-be race mixers, in their intemperate, lust-crazed indifference to the feelings of correct society, have failed to properly take into account. And indeed, many people who, while occupying much more high-profile political positions, expressed racist opinions that are much more openly vile in those years managed to keep their careers going by publicly atoning, as George Wallace did, or simply not making them anymore, as any number of prominent Dixiecrats did.

There's a period where whites can say that they don't think blacks should be allowed to live next door to them because they think they're animals. That's followed by a period where everyone understands that you can't call black people animals, but you don't want them living next to you because you think the culture shock would be too much for everyone involved, and because of that, you think the black people probably want to be protected from having the chance to live next door anyway. After the black people make it clear that they're very willing to risk that, you talk about how thrilled you'd be to have black people live next door, if only you weren't sick from worrying about how having to live around all those other white people less tolerant than yourself might affect their kids. The good justice's sin was to go on thinking what he said he believed long after the point that anyone in his position had to change his mind, or pretend to do so. When Wallace and Strom and all the rest said racist things forty or more years ago, their sentiments weren't any less racist, but they fit in with mainstream opinion at the time. It's not saying something despicable that gets you tarred as an abomination on two legs, it's not getting your despicable opinions in under the wire. With something like racial segregation, despicable opinions don't just suddenly die out overnight, they go through a process of evolution.

Yesterday, in one of those heartening reminders of the wisdom of the voters as opposed to the horrors forced on us by government decree, such as abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, New York City's term limits law, and for that matter racial desegregation itself, voters in Maine repealed same-sex legislation, overturning the state's efforts to ram a standard based on respect for basic decency down the people's throats. It was interesting to listen to the victory speech delivered by Marc Mutty, the campaign chairman of the anti-same-sex-marriage group Stand for Marriage Maine. "Let's be clear. What the people of Maine had to say was that marriage matters and it's between a man and a woman. This has never been about hating anyone, hating gays or anything. This has been about marriage and only about marriage and preserving it." In his tone, and his carefully chosen weasel words, you could hear the soon-to-be-outdated voice of the average good guy of today who, even in his moment of triumph, is backpedaling and trying to locate the latest spot where open bigotry is still socially acceptable, for now. A few years ago, a man in his position would not have felt the need to make it clear that what he was fighting for had nothing to do with hating gays, even if he didn't see hating gays as anything he ought to apologize for. And by saying that his cause has nothing to do with hating gays, he certainly cleared that up, just as Richard Nixon firmly established his innocence of any wrong-doing by taking up TV time to declare that he wasn't a crook.

What this is about, you see, is the sanctity of marriage. The sanctity of marriage, like the phrase "under God", which was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in 1954 to shut up religious conservative idiots who wanted some Christian Kryptonite included in school children's daily patriotic routine to protect them from socialism, is one of those recent developments that people who've known about it all their lives not only regard as sacrosanct but believe that Moses must have toted it down the mountain with him after his face-to-face with Cecil B. DeMille.

The idea of marriage as a sacred institution that combines the stirring and heart-warming elements of a long-term romantic union with the practical benefits of two equal partners building a better life together than either could as a solo act--this is a relatively new thing, born of movie-fed dreams and Reagan-era celebrations of "the family" as a constituency deserving of special consideration at tax time. I could be wrong, but I don't get the feeling that people in the 1950s, the golden period that produced and inspired the pop culture upon which the idea of America as a conformist postwar golden age is founded, thought they were making America stronger and more virtuous by getting married, even if they saw marriage as something that you just had to do. Certainly nobody saw marriage that way in the divorce-happy '70s. It was the more self-aware (and, truthfully, more mealy-mouthed) '80s, a time that promoted a Leave It to Beaver America even as a changing economy made a two-income household a virtual necessity for a comfortable life, that produced a new brand of political rhetoric devoted to recasting married families as America's Best. There's nothing wrong with that, except that it's sick-making to see people using the lie that it's been the model of marriage that everyone has been working from for centuries, just so they can claim to be protecting that ideal from attack by people who are willing to fight and march and donate money and go on Larry King and Fox News to be insulted by genetic throwbacks with bad hair, all for the right to call themselves married. Seriously, how fucked up does your relationship to the sanctity of marriage have to be to feel that your exclusivity is more sanctifying that the heartfelt petitions of people who, by the very nature of what they're doing, must surely qualify as among the romantic believers in marriage who've ever lived?

Thirty years ago, the most popular line among gay-bashers was the scary pervs had to be kept out of school teaching jobs for fear that their malign influence would turn whole classroom assemblies gay and the human race would stop multiplying and die out within a couple of generations. Is the argument that letting gays marry--marry each other, Christ almighty, as if finding yourself a good beard and untouched life aprtner hadn't been good enough for Charles Laughton--an improvement, a step back, or is it a lateral move? That's not a rhetorical question: I honestly can't tell. But I do think that we all have the God-given right to make assumptions about what's going on inside people's twisted hearts and understocked heads based on how unignorably stupid their stated arguments are. In a recent review of a new biography of that malignant screwhead Ayn Rand, Adam Kirsch wrote that "if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem." That's what bigotry is all about at its core, and people who are casting about for some reason to think they're better than the average person or cockroach and coming up empty can convince themselves of some jaw-dropping things, just as Rand convinced herself that her prose was readable.

Today, people who, when it was acceptable to do so, convinced themselves that it was a mark of their specialness that they had the right skin color to use the better water fountains, are today holding on for dear life to the idea that they're special because they're married, or at least have the option to get married, for the first time or again after their current spouses just can't take it anymore. These same mental giants complain that the gay people they don't hate are trying to get married so they can make marriage less special, thereby making them less special, and the only proper answer to the question, "How in hell can this be seen as anything other than bigotry, motivated by the usual steaming mess of low self-esteem and social anxiety?", goes something like this: "Er, um, uh, ah, isthatmyphone, sorryI'vegottotakethis, okay 'bye!" Perhaps the most surprising thing about this is the tone of much of the reaction I've seen to the vote in Maine, which has taken a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attitude towards the whole thing, perhaps on the assumption that the people fighting same-sex marriage can be persuaded to see the light so long as no one questions the goodness of their hearts and motives and talks to them in soothing tones.

I don't know how many of these people would make the same assumption about the justice of the peace in Hammond, and the arguments against same same-sex marriage are too close to the ones made against interracial marriage for anyone to need think that maybe the emotions behind it are any different. The fact is that people who oppose same-sex marriage because they're trying to prevent marriage as an institution from being "devalued" are causing unnecessary pain to other people who are doing them no harm, just because they themselves have no accomplishments to be proud of other than that, by getting married, they proved, as Alec Baldwin so movingly put it in The Departed, that there's at least one person in the world who can stand to be around the sons of bitches. In many if not most of these cases, that might be one person too many. The Marc Muttys of this world could probably do with a little less positive reinforcement. The fate of the Hammond justice is a warning to them that they might want to use the time they've bought for themselves to start working on the attitude adjustments they'll need to continue to fit in with a world that's going to continue changing, for the better, around them.

Coming to Terms

It's election day here in New York, though it would be easy to have missed this. By early tonight, Michael Bloomberg will have officially sewn up his third term as Mayor. Nobody appointed me as Mr. Voice of the People, but based on whatever feeling I have for the street, I would describe the city's mood regarding this as "grudging but not unrelieved." I arrived in New York a few months before the election that thrust Bloomberg into office. At that time, I was perfectly ready to buy into the attitude that he was a bored gazillionaire buying himself a city to play with to go with his mid-life crisis. His manner of playing with something turned out to manage it quietly and competently in a way that those locals who are always eager to find something to keen over found deeply confusing. The man's first trick was to steer the city out of the path of a scheduled economic disaster and not make a big deal out of it, and he did this even as a presidential administration that had paid no attention to warnings of a major domestic terrorist operation was taking bows for being the only people tough enough to deal with the kind of high-profile mass murder that didn't know how to avert. There are still reasons for dissatisfaction with Bloomberg, but the most telling thing about Gawker's bold call to not vote for the guy never mentions his opponent's name, let alone suggest that anyone vote for him instead; apparently the cool thing is to just to not vote at all and so cut into Bloomberg's perceived mandate.

As the first Mayor of the post-Giuliani era, Bloomberg deserves tremendous credit for many things that largely add up to one thing: he proved conclusively that it's possible to hold the city together without maintaining a constant pitch of shrill hysteria and by giving the impression that the city's police are engaged in open, all-out warfare with the citizens, especially the non-white ones, and publicly declaring that he's sided with the cops no matter what. As such, he has done more than anyone in deflating the dangerous cult of Giuliani than Giuliani himself, who is no slouch at all when it comes to making the ever-dwindling ranks of Giuliani supporters look ridiculous. There was a time when it was a lot easier to find people who were prepared to shrug and resign themselves to the idea that there was no way to keep crime down in the city and make the trains run on time without a fearless leader who acted like a deranged cross between Tony Soprano and Rip Taylor at a Dean Martin roast and who kept racial tensions ratcheted up to the boiling point. After eight years of Bloomberg, the only people left who claim to believe that, or even to see any merit in Giuliani's guide to life, are those peculiar souls who actually want to be living in an urban war zone and name-calling academy. (The last time such people were really happy in the city was when Bloomberg banned smoking in restaurants, setting off a period of about six months when it was considered acceptable, or at least tolerable, to call the Mayor "a Nazi." It was like being trapped in a stuck elevator with Glenn Beck while he was going through caffeine withdrawal.)

In the last year, Bloomberg's reputation as an all-seeing financial wizard has bent dented by the same events that dented all the other candidates for Gandolf, but the most popular current excuse that people have latched onto for calling him a Nazi has to do with the city's term limits law; at his, let's call it his "urging", the city council changed the rules by making it possible for a mayor to serve three consecutive terms instead of two. The stupidest woman alive, who happens to work at my day job--I think her name is Jackie, but because of her cotton-candy bouffant, thick makeup, popping eyes behind colorfully constructed fun-house glasses, and perpetual demented smile, I usually just refer to her as Dame Edna--has had a field day performing her stump speech on the issue, which usually builds to describing getting the term limits law changed as "the essence of pure dictatorship", though I'm not sure how many dictators actually pulled strings and broke arms to make it possible for them to run in a fairly judged democratic election.

Term limits laws are interesting, because they persist despite the fact that there is no evidence that any sane person has ever supported them in earnest, that is, based on an actual belief that they're the right thing based on their merits. The only real reason any sane person has ever supported them is that someone that person disapproved of got elected too many times in a row and it seemed necessary to make sure that never happened again. The reason that there is an official limit on the number of terms that someone can serve as President of the United States is that Republicans wanted to be prepared in case Franklin Delano Roosevelt happened to come back from the dead; these same persons would later regret that law when Ronald Reagan was riding high, only to again see great wisdom in term limits when it seemed the best way to get some goddamn long-serving Democrats the hell out of Congress. The 1994 Congress, the ones who ran that revolutionary manifesto in TV Guide, were all aglint for term limits, and a couple of elections later, their numbers were nicely split between those who turned out not to have really meant it and wanted to keep their seats and those who, in holding true to their beliefs and stepping down from office, revealed that they had always been too deranged for public service.

The law that the city council changed to suit Bloomberg's ambitions was presumably an attractive one when Ed Koch was only four years gone from Gracie Mansion and you could still smell the sulfur. After a brief flurry of outrage over the whole thing, feelings in New York seem to have mostly shifted towards consternation that Bloomberg, feeling obligated to pretend that he's fighting for his political life, has clogged the airwaves with so many commercials when he could have taken the money he spent on them and just offered to pay everybody's rent through Christmas. I myself am torn between the absolute conviction that he'll screw the pooch badly in his third term--just because he seems due for it--and a reluctance to give up this nice, muzzy feeling that Daddy is still on watch. However, the polls are still open, and I suppose I could yet give in to temptation to deliver a blistering tirade that will sway public opinion and cost him his 70% of the vote, Mike, if you're reading this, the donate button is that yellow thing on the right side of the screen, and my rent is in the high three figures...

The Best of the Phil Nugent Experience

Halloween is past, Thanksgiving is three and a half weeks away, and the new cans of Coke in the bodega downstairs have pictures of Santa Claus on 'em. This time of year, I tend of get a little reflective. I remember somebody once linking to this site and writing that, while he liked it, he wasn't sure what "the purpose of this blog" is meant to be. I could sympathize, even as it occurred to me that I could say the same thing for at least 98% of everything in this world that's given me pleasure and satisfaction. Growing up when the Internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore's eye, I always had a certain awe and admiration for talkers (and sounded as if their spiel was written) and writers (who seemed to be winging it) who claimed a space for themselves and held forth on whatever was in the news or on their minds. It was an admiration that was not unmixed with envy, and envy not just for the fact that they had a forum--on TV, on the radio, on stage, in the newspaper or magazines--but also for the fact that these people had lived a little and learned a lot and so earned the right to a listener or reader's attention by virtue of their, well, experience.

Who am I talking about here? I could reel off some familiar names who had a lot to do with shaping my tastes and priorities later on, but in the beginning, I had a strong, shaping passion for--get ready for it--Hughes Rudd and Lloyd Dobyns. Rudd was a gravelly-voice, gravelly-faced newsman who anchored the CBS Morning News in the 1970s, when he was in his fifties, which meant that, at the time, I figured he'd probably read updates over the P.A, system on Noah's ark, and Dobyns hosted the should-be-legendary monthly late-night TV newsmagazine Weekend, when he was roughly the age I am now. Both of them had mastered a fish-eyed brand of deadpan sarcasm that I regarded as the very definition of cool beyond cool: Robert Mitchum, Lenny Bruce, Joe Frank, and Ed Murrow rolled together in a package designed to win the heart of impressionable geeks forever. They were soon joined in my personal pantheon by Russell Baker, the only one of the Big Three whose work (in the form of books culled from his classic New York Times op-ed column) I've had easy access to for many years now. At their best, these guys filled me with a desire to use outdated slang and refer to ancient prehistorical events, like the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the Beatles landing at JFK, as if I'd been there myself, and to cultivate an air of jaded amusement. In short, because these sons of bitches made me laugh, they made me want nothing so much, when I was a child, as to be a middle-aged burnout.

I leave it to others to decide how well I've done. In the meantime, though, I've been trying to get this blog right for the better part of half a dozen years now, including the times when, due to my being an oversensitive lad inclined to be too hard on myself, just as I have sometimes been way too nice to some pigfucking bastards who shall remain nameless-- I stomped out of here and even burned the place to the ground once or twice. For now, though, as the first decade of the millennium winds down, I'm letting my ego hang out and treating myself to this. In the unlikely event that anyone has any favorites that got left out, I may even decide to do a follow-up in a month, when and my fortysomething birthday rolls around and I really need cheering up. But for now, here, chosen by popular acclaim and my own perverse theories about which of my children are the prettiest, are:

The Phil Nugent Experience's Greatest Hits

Best Lines Spoken by William Peterson Just Before the Opening Titles of "CSI"

The Profaci Meditations

Freedom to Snooze

Mind Games

If You Could See Him Through My Eyes, or Gorilla My Dreams

Making Carefully Nuanced Distinctions Regarding the Totally Unacceptable

Bigfoot at Midlife

White Noise

Hearts and Mindlessness

In the Heart of the Heart of the Library

"Those Satisfactions Are Permanent"

Everyone's a Critic

Special Weekend Awesomeness Alert Update

Speaking as an old school hard-copy periodical freak, The London Review of Books has long been one of my favorite periodicals. I got my hands on my first copy when I was still in high school in the early 1980s, and at the time I just assumed that I was coming in at a late moment in its august, storied history; surely something called The London Review of Books must have been around forever, providing the occasion for dueling challenges to be meted out in Mother Swithins's Grog and Steak House while Samuel Johnson hogged the free copy and sat in a corner, chuckling at the cartoons. A very pretty thing, eh, Bozzy? Admire the fine, knobby detail on the trunk of the tree into which Milton has been to heedlessly walk face-first, ker-thunk! It wasn't until many years later, when I began picking up the paperback anthologies drawn from the LRB's back issues, that I learned that I was actually pretty close to being unfashionably early at the Review's party; it only began publication in the fall of 1979.

Now, to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, the LRB has finally made its full archives available online to subscribers, because even with the archives of The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Harper's all there online, I was still managing to spend enough time away from the computer to shower every other day. (I only subscribe to the current version of Harper's so that I can continue to dip into the crystal-clear waters of its salad years; i.e., whenever Lewis Lapham was barred from the premises.) Of course, you have to subscribe to get the full effect, and I wouldn't advise doing that until you've first punched that yellow donate button on the right side of the screen and send me some damn money!, but after that, anyone with a curious mind, an Internet connection, and a few bucks to spare really owes it to him- or herself. Because then, you will gain easy access to an alternate account of our times from the dawn of Thatcherite-Reaganism to the present day: a rich cross-section of opinions about literature, art, politics and history. Anyone who can't afford it right now can take solace in the fact that I plan to start running amok there, with my poaching sack in hand, in a constant search for opinions and turns of phrase that I'm sure I would have come up with myself if I had more time and had deep-fried fewer brain cells in my wayward youth. This place is about to get a whole lot smarter.