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Pop Culture We're Thankful For

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EVerything I Know About Love I Learned from Pedro Almodovar

Run!

Newsweek is taking flak for its decision to use a photo that Sarah Palin posed for when she did a shoot for Runners World as its cover image, accompanying a story timed to coincide with the publication of Big Moose's new memoir. The emerging consensus among all right-thinking people is that, by not respecting the invisible divide that Palin expects the media to honor between those moments when she's playing regular gal slash pin-up queen and those when she expects to be Taken Seriously (such as when she has a book out), the magazine has indulged in sexist behavior. I dunno, maybe. For my part, when I saw the cover, I immediately thought of the dust-up from a year ago, when Newsweek ran a cover photo of Palin that was attacked for giving a too-close view of the candidate's insufficiently airbrushed face. I don't expect Newsweek to acknowledge this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the real point the magazine was making is that, with Palin, you can't win for losing: the same people who get angry if you take her on her own terms--and the Runners World photo was widely disseminated earlier this year, with no complaints that I can recall about the way Palin looked, though there were a few murmurs from people who felt that they'd seen more respectful uses of the American flag--will also complain if you just shoot her as a normal person and hold back on the glamour lighting and makeup and frame the image in a way that's seen as less than laudatory regarding her looks.



Is there a double standard regarding the way Palin is treated in the media? "Double standard" may not begin to scratch the surface. Conservatives like to pretend that the media treat Palin as mentally vacant and unqualified because they're stereotyping her as a dumb woman (and also as a dumb small-towner, and a dumb gun owner, and a dumb believer i family values, etc., etc.), but at the same time, a lot of the hipper conservatives like to talk up her sexiness, and not just because the post-Reagan Republican party will be looking for another charismatic leader with "movie star" qualities until the last dog dies. They also think that, by celebrating Palin as a woman who, in the words of the Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez, is "embracing her femininity in a very strong and powerful way", they can help her seem looser and more appealing than the liberal feminists who would never vote for Palin but see something offensive in the "exploitation" of her MILF-ness. Palin is a prime exploiter of it herself, but even as she winks and poses her way through public appearances, she still reserves the right to complain about not being taken with the kind of air-stiffening solemnity reserved for dying elder statesmen who once leaned over to light Churchill's cigar at Yalta. There's not anything especially unique in that: she poses as the mom who's still got it the same way that George W. Bush posed as a regular guy you'd like to have a beer with and never feel intellectually inferior to. But it turned out, to the shock of many, that deep down, Bush actually wanted to be respected for his brilliant, bold decision-making. That's where the danger really lies.

There's probably no danger that Palin will ever rise as high as Bush did, and you can take the inclusion of the word "probably" there as proof that I'm inclined to hedge my bets in case of, say, an extraterrestrial attack wiping out half the population or somebody dropping acid into the water supply on Election Day. The poll numbers that everyone has been citing as she does her book tour show that six out of every ten Americans think she's unqualified to be President, and the real question that raises is, what the hell is wrong with four out of ten Americans? I suspect the number would drop to at least three in town if there were some way to filter out the number who claimed to think her qualified to be President just to be contrary, whether this is the latest way to show all-purpose scorn for politics of any kind--it might be the new "there's not a dime's worth of difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore", and it wouldn't be any more or any less stupid--or if it's just people showing their resentment by thinking that, while Palin's an idjit, people would be more respectful of her is she weren't both an idjit and a mother or an idjit and a hunter or whatever category through which they relate to her and feel that the barbs thrown her way are somehow directed at them, too.

Other politicians, from Reagan to Bush the Younger, have buffed their personal images to a fine glow and run on them, so that they were able to snag the votes of people who didn't really agree with them on much. But they did have agendas. At least since TV came in, it's been the politicians who didn't have some strong, appealing presence to serve as a counterweight to their ideas and beliefs who've suffered at the polls. If Palin brings anything new to the game, it's that what hard-core cynics claimed about Reagan and Clinton and maybe all of them is actually true for her: she has the personal story (which is largely untrue, but which she loves so much that she probably believes it, just as Bush probably believes to this day that he was the real war hero in the '60s, protecting Texas from the Vietnamese) and the camera-friendly act but no real beliefs or goals towards which they might serve a purpose. I find it hard to believe that she really wants to be President, though I can see her getting so determined to rub it in the doubters' faces that she might end up running just to prove them all wrong. And her way of explaining this line of reasoning will invoke motherhood and demand to know who dares say that if you've raised a pack of kids, you're not qualified to take on the world. Palin may not be much of a reader, but somewhere inside her, the soul of Erma Bombeck is alive and churning out copy.

Because the core base of the Republican party is this seething mass of resentment, and because nobody likes hearing motherhood dissed, there will always be a small but strong section of the conservative movement that, heedless of its effect on any election, will always be ready to break away from "the elites" and follow Palin to Hell, or at least to the edge of the Bering Strait. What this means is that people like David Brooks, who'd like to have their party back in a way that won't embarrass the hell out of them at the weekend barbecues, but who feel some obligation to keeping the party alive and spread out, will be forced to spend Palin's moments in the sun making appropriate noises about how awful it is that some people don't love their mothers and aren't comfortable with their sexuality and would rather read a book while sipping a latte than go to a hootenanny or the church square dance, while praying to God that Palin gets offered a TV show or something and just goes away and can fracture their party no more. There are double standards, and there may even be triple and quadruple standards, and then there's Sally Field in Sybil...

The State of Limbo

Of all the arguments made criticizing the decision to "prosecute... the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in a Manhattan federal courtroom", the idea that it's intolerable because (in the words of New York Representative Peter King) "We should not be increasing the danger of another terrorist strike against Americans at home and abroad,” has to be the most adorable. I thought New Yorkers were supposed to be a tough people who'd be eager to get a shot at somebody who'd tried to bring them down, not a pack of wusses who are terrified that putting a mass murderer on trial is to be avoided because some other potential mass murderer might take offense. Seriously? Of course, King is a Republican, which means that he belongs to a party that thinks that the previous President of the United States and the people in charge of his Justice Department proved that they were the right people to deal with terrorism by taking their eye off the ball and letting an atrocity take place on U.S. soil. When Bill Clinton had his last meeting as outgoing President with George W. Bush, he urged him to regard al-Qaeda as his top domestic security priority, and Bush, maintaining consistency with his new administration's comprehensive "A.B.C. (Anything But Clinton) policy, brushed the advice aside and gave John Ashcroft his leave to focus on such important matters as the rumors that New Orleans had a whorehouse in it. In a Republican politician's notion of Real America, you prove that you're tough enough to deal with terrorism by not taking it seriously as a threat, and then you show that you're keeping our country safe, and paying tribute to the values that Islamic extremists find so offensive, by circumventing the legal system and digging a hole to stick terrorist suspects in, then making speeches about how manfully you're dealing with the problem and hoping they'll quietly die in their cells.

Rudy Giuliani, the guy known in Republican circles as America's mayor who couldn't get elected dog catcher now in the city he ran for eight years, has complained that by actually putting terrorists on trial instead of pretending they've been projected into the Phantom Zone, “we have regressed to a pre-9/11 mentality with respect to Islamic extremist terrorism.” He adds that "This is the same mistake we made with the 1993 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center. We treated them like domestic criminals, when in fact they were terrorists.” I had no idea that anybody thought that, by trying the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack and sticking them in a cell for the rest of their lives, the government had made a terrible mistake. What downside was there to that strategy that I missed? It didn't result in an unnecessary and distracting war, it didn't give al-Qaeda a recruiting tool that stayed on the front pages for years and years, it didn't amount to a shrugging admission from top U.S. government officials that any lunatic with a bomb who said that our system doesn't work kind of had a point, and it fucking got done. I kind of doubt that Giuliani would think it was a testament to the effectiveness of our system if Mahmud Abouhalima had still been cooling his heels in some detention center at the end of the Clinton administration, seven years after the WTC bombing, and if I have a pretty good idea of what he'd say if the official explanation for this was that if he were put on trial and the case achieved closure, it would put the country in danger. I suspect that his response would include the exclamation "Mwah-hah-hah!!"

Nobody thought that treating people who performed terrorist act as criminals was wimpy or ineffective before September, 2001, and in fact, if the subject had come up--say, in reference to Bill Ayres or somebody--a law and order type like Giuliani would likely have taken the position that to accept such characters' claims to be soldiers at war with the state would be to dignify and flatter their fantasies that they were something other than common crooks. Anyone who suggests that it's too dangerous to have people like Khalid Shaik Mohammed awaiting trial on domestic soil is simultaneously flattering the old boy and revealing a very poor grasp of the state of the U.S. prison system. It's much more likely that someone who's been exonerated by DNA evidence or shown to have been framed by prosecutors and the cops will have trouble getting released from prison than that anyone, even someone who's Islamofascistic as all the bedamned, is going to bust out.

The real reason that the Bush administration went to work selling the idea that terrorists are, like Roman Polanski, some sort of superior race of uber-villains who cannot be beaten by normal means is that this fantasy simultaneously flatters those in authority--especially those who are by nature weaklings, incompetents, and cowards, who need authority to indulge in strongarm tactics to just feel that they're up to their jobs--while giving them absolution for their mistakes. It means that they have to be given absolute power to grapple with monsters who in turn are so powerful themselves that you can't really blame our fearless leaders if they can't actually defeat them--and in fact, the first couple of years of the War on Terror were full of reminders from the administration spokesman that another big attack was all but inevitable and that it would be wrong to blame these well-meaning good people in charge for not being able to prevent it.

The new book The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, details the confusion that reigned on September 11, 2001 and describes how much time and energy were devoted, in those early days of a new era, to drafting a false narrative describing the response to the attacks as unified, clear-headed, and supremely competent. Given the form that response ultimately took, it would be a strange thing if it had been the final result of a chain of action set in motion by smart, clear-thinking people who knew what they were doing. The Bush administration and other conservatives, both in government and the media, were quick to see 9/11 as an opportunity to justify their own desire for power and secrecy, which they could claim were essential tools in a new kind of fight that had rendered traditional niceties and basic common sense "quaint."

That they saw a national cataclysm as an opportunity doesn't make them monsters: FDR must have seen Pearl Harbor, on some level, as an opportunity to finally get us into World War II, and while Martin Luther King was surely horrified to see fire hoses and dogs turned on civil right marchers, he would have been a fool to not also see that the violent excesses of the worst segregationists would rebound to his benefit. But the results of the Republican response to 9/11 was monstrous, because they politicized terrorism and overreached in their lust for power without doing much in the way of actually, productively fighting terrorism, to the point that Bush could effectively call off the search for Bin Laden because it was an unwanted distraction from bringing regime change to Iraq. In 99 cases out of a hundred, "secrecy" in government seems to end up being less about protecting the country from dangerous forces than about protecting those in power from having their own crimes and blunders made public knowledge, and after the first steps were made in the War on Terror, Bush and company had to devote an increasing amount of their time in office to pushing for measures designed to keep the legal process in limbo so that they could continue to pretend that they hadn't fucked up. By beginning to decide, more than nine years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, who among those accused can be prosecuted and where and how, the Obama administration is actually doing something. For a Republican party that doesn't believe in governing, only in P.R., that has to seem like a low blow, if not a violation of natural law.

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@#$%&*!!

The first thing you have to understand about the New York Times' decision to run a front page story about the increasing frequency of the use of the word "douche", as a term of abuse, on network TV is, it was not a slow news day. Why did they do it? Certain things are obvious at the outset. Obviously, someone must have lost a bet. And for reasons that I cannot know and may be outside the bounds of media criticism, someone with the power to decide what stories get covered in the Times thinks it is very important that the children of the reporter, Edward Wyatt, be pelted with rocks and dogshit every second of their public lives and be held upside down in the toilet stalls for a certain portion of every school day. Still, after Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee, and the WMDs in Iraq, it's easy to forget that, tucked in among its large-scale bullshit hoaxes that affect world events, the Times also likes to make mischief with the occasional story that is both ridiculous and trivial. Remember that, at the time when actual journalism about the Bush administration's ad campaign for a new war was most urgently needed, then-Times editor Howell Raines instructed his minions to mount a full-scale assault on Tiger Woods for his failure to devote his life and career to ending gender segregation at certain golf courses. I don't know what chain of command sanctioned the douche report, but I do not doubt that, at some point, someone examined the project, looked up to the skies, and humbly murmured, "This one's for you, Howell."

Wyatt, who is good enough to concede right in the body of the text that there's no story here, because "the word 'douche' is neither obscene nor profane" (adding, a bit sheepishly that "this usage is certainly offensive to many people"), naturally references George Carlin's thirty-seven-year-old "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine, which is about what the Times article were about if it were about something. (Since "the word 'douche' is neither obscene nor profane" and so has never been the subject of any official ban that current use of the word violates or overturns, it goes without saying that the article isn't about anything.) That routine appeared on Carlin's 1972 album Class Clown, which I first got ahold of some years after it was released, at which time I was quick to conclude that its first side was probably among the greatest works of art ever made. "Seven Words" was hidden away on the second side, but it was that side's high point and did make for a rousing finale.

The words, which I have been able to remember much more easily than the ten commandments or the names of the seven dwarfs, were "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits". I remember listening to it and getting the impression that I was receiving actual, de-classified information about the inner workings of society, and I also remember feeling disappointed, and a little betrayed, when I found out that Carlin had slapped the list together based on his own observations rather than that he had jotted the details down from some memo he'd liberated from the Department of Broadcast Standards and Practices. I actually made this discovery when I listened to the sequel to "Seven Words" that was included in the follow-up album Occupation: Foole, in which Carlin noted that, by including both "fuck" and "motherfucker" as separate individual entities, he may have double-dipped. On reflection, he also confused the issue a little by including "cocksucker" as one the seven deadlies while adding, as a sort of footnote, that "cock" itself was a "two-way word" that was acceptable or unacceptable depending on its intended meaning. I learned on my own that it's possible for a word to graduate to two-way status when it becomes so familiar from popular usage that it's decided, by whatever cabal decides these things, that it must be okay to use it so long as it's not used in the most graphic possible sense of its meaning. Thus it was that I was startled, at some point in the 1980s, to hear someone on my TV set say "pissed off", and then to hear it again and again, so that it seemed that a memo had been circulated announcing that it was okay to use that variant of "piss", and everyone who got it resolved to make up for lost time.

The climactic high point of the Times article itself comes when Wyatt writes, in classic Timesspeak, that "Users of the recently popular word 'douche' defend its use, noting that it was invoked, usually with the suffix 'bag,' in the 1990s by the character Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue, an ABC series that frequently pushed the boundaries of network acceptability." What's left unsaid is that just saying the word "douche", without the suffix "bag", really lacks something. This is, of course, a judgement call. (I once got into a disagreement with a colleague who deplored the use of the word "asshat", because it seemed such a half-assed substitute for the more direct "asshole." I conceded the point but maintained, as I still do, that, partly because of its patent absurdity, the word non-word "asshat" is a tickling and pleasing word, maybe more so than the more graphically emphative "asshole", that lands with a satisfying thunk because of the concluding sound of the hard "t." "Douche" lands with a splat, though the adjective "douchey" is satisfying to my ears, so long as it is used sparingly.

Oddly enough, George Carlin did weigh in on the full and proper term "douchebag" back in the day, but mainly to make a point that is no longer applicable: he insisted, back in 1973, that it could only be applied to women. He would live to see a day when it came to be almost exclusively used as a term of abuse aimed at men, but so far as I know, he never acknowledged this or indicated whether he came to view this development as a triumph for feminism. Of course, "douchebag" also has a literal and non-pejorative meaning--helpfully summed up by Wikipedia as signifying "a piece of equipment for douching"--and the Times article goes for a big finish by bringing in "Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and the author of Cursing in America,” who speculates that “I would bet most kids today couldn’t tell you what a douche bag is.” There's not much you can do with a line like that besides file it under "Too easy to touch", cross-referenced with "Some of the jokes just write themselves."

The Short-Timers

My dear friends at the Onion A.V. Club (okay, "dear friends" might be pushing it, but seriously, I do know some of them) recently went end-of-the-decade crazy and published a string of ten-best lists, including one for "the best one-season wonder of 'oos. As with everything they do over there, it was a well-informed, thoughtful selection presented with wit and enthusiasm, but you can't agree with everybody on everything. That said, at the risk of sounding proprietorial (or confusing "proprietorial" with "pahtetic"), failed but good TV series are kind of my thing. I don't want to get into some pissing match with a swell bunch of guys who do recognize the virtues of Karen Sisco, Now and Again, and Pasadeno (generously included, albeit only as part of a "Bonus Five" of honorable mentions), even if they do rate them below such loads as Aliens in America, Invasion, and Jack & Bobby, and even if they do seem to be under the impression that Boomtown only lasted one season. (It's true that it was only good for one season, but that's not the same thing, not the same thing at all.) So think of this post as a supplement, not a correction, that's for sure.

(P.S. Firefly didn't make the list because it made it onto the A.V. Club's list of the best TV series, period, of the decade. You'll understand why I want to stress this point if you read the comments section at the original list, but I would never recommend that.)

1. ROBBERY HOMICIDE DIVISION (2001; 13 episodes): This intense, poker-faced crime series was created by Barry Schindel (Law & Order) and had Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files among its producers, but it was executive producer Michael Mann, not legendary for getting along and playing well with others, who took over its concept and shaped the finished product in his image. The show merits at least a footnote to Mann's filmography because it served as his introduction to the high-definition digital cameras that he's been using in his movie work since 2004's Collateral. The show itself was striking-looking, fascinating, and entirely out of fashion with the forensics trend then taking over network crime shows. It also doubled as a vehicle for career redemption for its legally challenged star, Tom Sizemore, who had served so admirably in Mann's Heat, and who delivered a no-nonsense performance here as the head of a bunch of reassuringly experience-looking crimebusters housed in the Los Angeles Police Department. Sadly, it turned out to be Sizemore's last hurrah; his drug problems, for a start, resurfaced and probably helped nudge CBS in the direction of canceling the series after nine episodes had aired. USA later aired the whole run (as they would later do with Karen Sisco), but the series remains unavailable on DVD.

2 & 3. KINGPIN (2003, 6 episodes) & KIDNAPPED (2006-2007, 13 episodes): In the cable-and-Internet era, NBC has developed a weird habit of developing brave-new-world projects, giving its creators the freedom to do them right, and then getting cold feet when they hit the airwaves. This approach reached its zenith this year with Kings, but you could see it on display with both these shows. Kingpin, which seemed meant to be the network's attempt to woo both Sopranos fans and the emerging Latin audience, was a crackling serial thriller starring Yancey Arias, a terrific actor last seen lending some much needed and wholly unappreciated suavity to the doomed reboot of Knight Rider, as a Mexican drug dealer who, with no small degree of encouragement from his Lady Macbeth, an ice-blonde lawyer played by Sheryl Lee, decided to go all Scarface on his colleagues and competitors. The show was created by David Mills and employed a raft of smart writers (including Lloyd Rose, once the theater critic for the Washington Post) and hungry actors, but NBC chose to burn the whole thing off in a week as a misconceived "event" and then pointed to the disappointing ratings as an excuse not to keep the show going. Kidnapped was a more conventional but surprisingly snappy and hard-edged action soap, with Jeremy Sisto and Delroy Lindo trying to get Timothy Hutton and Dana Delaney's kid back from a band of villains that included Dr. Venture himself, James Urbaniak. Both series are available on DVD.



4. THE KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY (2007, 13 episodes): This is the show that was originally pitched (by creators Rob Burnett and Jeff Beckerman) as Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum, only to be refitted as Let's Rob Mick Jagger after the actual Jeff Goldblum, who had originally considered participating, bowed out to take the starring role in a miserable pseudo-Monk cop show where he played an eccentric brainiac detective who spent entirely too much screen time talking to his dead partner for my comfort. (Oddly enough, Goldblum has since enjoyed a bit of a triumph doing pretty much the same act on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, minus the Haley Joel Osment angle.) The show actually stars Donal Logue as the leader of a gang of urban dogfaces (including the hilariously lugubrious, deep-voiced Kevin Michael Richardson and the oh-my-God-who-is-that-looking Sofia Vergara, currently featured on ABC's new concession to the oddball comedy audience, Modern Family) whose master plan to better their lives comes down to trying to concoct the perfect scheme to, yes, rob Mick Jagger. The premise would seem to have a short shelf life built into it, but the Jagger arc percolated with a very pleasant strain of insanity, and after it ended, the crew made plans to rob Ray Romano, which gave the series a chance to stage special guest star Romano's dramatic acting debut in a drug-fiend play. Not a lot of people saw that, because ABC stopped showing the series after nine months, then waited almost half a year and decided to show a couple more before pulling the plug permanently. The series remains unavailable on DVD.


5. THE COMEBACK (2005, 13 episodes): This HBO series stars Lisa Kudrow, then fresh from the end of Friends, as a veteran TV sitcom star named Valerie Cherish who is looking to jump to her next success, even as she inches away from the age where networks are comfortable casting women in leading roles. Her new project, Room and Bored, casts her in a wacky supporting role as "Aunt Sassy", drawing laughs and backing up a squad of uninhabited young bodies shoved up front of camera range. (The sweetest of these empty vessels is played by a way-young Malin Åkerman.) The Comeback, which Kudrow created with Michael Patrick King, is deep-inside show business comedy, complete with a cameo by the legendary sitcom director James Burrows, who, playing himself, couldn't look more cynically jaded if he were wearing a toga and sipping hemlock. When the show was first broadcast, I thought it might be a little too pitilessly far-inside (and said so here); the humiliations visited on the likable, decent Valerie by younger, meaner people as she tries to keep herself employed in an industry that wouldn't miss her as much as it pretends it would go beyond the comedy of embarrassment into something authentically painful. But Kudrow gives a fearless performance, and every year that Entourage hangs around for another damn season, this alternative view of Hollywood as a company town and fame as a trap seems a little more valuable. If you missed it and would like to make up your own mind, it's avaialble on DVD.

6. UNDECLARED (2001-2002): At the time, this comedy about college life among the freshmen (starring Jay Barchel, Seth Rogen, Carla Gallo, and Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam) was Judd Apatow's inevitably doomed follow-up to Freaks and Geeks. Now it can be savored on DVD as a tasty morsel that kept Apatow and his talent trust occupied before conquering the world, or at least the movies. At the time, some people carped that it wasn't as great as Freaks and Geeks, and by God, it isn't. But then, with all due respect, neither are most of the movies, and it's sure a hell of a lot better than Funny People.

7. THE TICK (2001, 8 episodes): Patrick Warburton as a superhero dressed as a purple parasitic arachnid. Honestly, what else do you need to know? (Well, for one thing, it co-stars Liz Vassey, who has never looked more terrific or sullen.) Arguably the silliest thing on a list that already includes The Knights of Prosperity, but its silliness stems from its nobility of intent: like the underrated 1999 Mystery Men movie,it mostly eschews campy parody in favor of a weird kind of character comedy set in a world where costumed crimefighting is a part of regular life. (It's based on a comic book that I have never read and which had already inspired a '90s animated series that I have never seen.) Unfortunately, Fox never seemed able to get past its level of embarrassment over being associated with the show, despite the fact the A-list talent level involved. (Barry Sonnenfeld directed the pilot, Larry Charles was executive producer, and the writers included Christopher McCulloch, A.K.A. Jackson Publick. It was through his chores on the show that McCulloch first made the acquaintance of Warburton, which means that The Tick is the missing link in the evolutionary chain that eventually spit out The Venture Bros.) Reportedly upset by the high production costs that had been racked up in the process of the creators' drive to achieve what Cagney and Lacey fans used to call quality television, Fox waited forever to put the show on the air and were them quick to declare it a failure, but the whole show can now be enjoyed as God apparently intended, on DVD.

8.TV FUNHOUSE (2000-2001, 8 episodes): Robert Smigel's spinoff of his Saturday Night Live cartoons was structured as a parody kiddie show with sequences that paved the way for the even nastier yet somewhat better received Wonder Showzem. Some of the transgressive live-action stuff was more funny in theory than it was to watch, and Smigel, as later did Trey Parker and Matt Stone on Team America: World Police, found out the hard way that dreaming about doing freaky stuff with puppets may be a lark but actually working with puppets is back-breaking hard work that often looks it. But the show added to the bounty of the planet's supply of TV Funhouse cartoons by the rate of at least a couple an episode, and there's no way to not make that sound like the very good thing it is.

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