Sunday blog: Stevie Smith's cats

---

It suddenly struck me that today is Halloween, and it might be nice to do something seasonal.  So, instead of the lovely mini-anthology of Snooki quotations I’d planned, here’s one of my favorite Stevie Smith poems. 

Stevie loved reading her poetry aloud; she would sing it and act it out.  It would have been great fun to see her recite this one.

MY CATS

I like to toss him up and down

A heavy cat weighs half a Crown

With a hey do diddle my cat Brown.

I like to pinch him on the sly

When nobody is passing by

With a hey do diddle my cat Fry.

I like to ruffle up his pride

And watch him skip and turn aside

With a hey do diddle my cat Hyde.

Hey Brown and Fry and Hyde my cats

That sit on tombstones for your mats.

---

Charlie being Charlie

---

I saw a big advertisement on a bus stop today for “Two And A Half Men.”  Charlie Sheen, literally big as life, wearing one of those ugly bowling shirts, was leaning out of the frame and leering at me.  Oh, I thought: this is the guy who just trashed his hotel room at the Plaza with some escort.  And then I suddenly realized (literally for the first time!) that Charlie actually plays a character named “Charlie” on the show: a womanizing boozehound who pretty much does whatever he wants.  I then realized that his sometime wife Denise Richards had also been on the show for a while. 

Now that’s reality TV.

There seems to be a whole mini-industry for celebrities whose private indiscretions match their public personae.  The famously loony Tracy Morgan plays a nutjob named Tracy Jordan on “30 Rock.”  Lindsay Lohan is making a whole new career of playing dissolute bad girls (check out “Machete,” if you haven’t already seen it).   I saw Randy Quaid’s arrest photo the other evening on TV, and he looked just like the derelict character he played in “Independence Day.”   And Andy Dick – well, it’s a day's work just figuring out how much trouble he’s in on any given day.

If you’re a New Englander, you will remember Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox.  Manny acted like a jerk much of the time, and he acted crazy most of the time.  But he was a decent baseball player, so the crowd forgave him his peculiarities.  “It’s just Manny being Manny,” we said, and the phrase became a byword, meaning: Whaddya gonna do?  Sometimes you take the bitter with the sweet.

Entertainers are different.  Their careers are tangled up in their roles.  If you are a handsome leading-man action-hero type, probably you should not act too K-R-A-Z-Y in public á la Tom Cruise.  Ditto Russell Crowe.  Ditto Mel Gibson.

But if your persona is goofy, or boozy, or generally a hot mess, you can be in character twenty-four hours a day.  You may even enhance your reputation!

Athletes are judged more harshly, for some reason.  I don’t care about Brett Favre one way or the other, but I think the whole text-plus-pantsless-pic thing is overhyped.  He’s not a saint, that’s for sure.  Ditto Tiger Woods.  But who cares, really? Stupid and careless, both of them, but not violent.

There’s still a limit, however, even for Hollywood celebrities.  How much bad behavior is too much bad behavior?  At what point do people actually stop watching someone’s movies or TV shows just because the star is a felon or a mental case?

Murder, I suppose.  Rape, probably.  Significant brutality (although we seem to have forgiven Russell Crowe and Chris Brown, not to mention Michael Vick on the sports side of the aisle). 

I’m not Mister Morality.  Violations of public propriety don’t bother me at all, nor sexual misadventures, nor drug use.  Hey, we’re all malefactors once in a while, right?  Look at Keith Richards.  Not long ago he was a walking joke.  Now Maureen Dowd has called him (without irony) “the voice of chivalry.”   Ozzy Osbourne may be the Prince of Darkness, but now I think of him shambling around his kitchen making himself a burrito. He does not alarm me.

It’s only when they tear themselves apart that it becomes sad.  Anna Nicole Smith.  Andy Kaufman.  Janis Joplin.  
Remember what your mama said? “It's funny until someone gets hurt. You'll see. It'll end in tears.”

Are you listening, Charlie?

---

Flocking hilarious

---

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a sort of middle-of-the road conservative social critic / political analyst.  He has a way of dealing with issues that I think of as the Brooks Method:

• Define a social issue or trend (either significant or insignificant).  For example: “People are certainly eating a lot of salad these days.”
• Throw a lot of tsk-tsk analysis at this trend, like this: “People didn’t eat much salad when I was young.  And the Founding Fathers didn’t eat salad at all.  Where is this trend leading us?”
• Come up with a spoofy / belittling neologism or catchphrase to encapsulate the trend, e.g.: “This new Salad Socialism is taking us down a new road.  Is it a better road?  I don’t know.”

It’s really pretty formulaic after a while; I think a machine could do it.  Come to think of it, he’s kind of shiny-looking in his Times photo; maybe he is a machine.

He recently wrote a column about the “new” television comedies like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Cougar Town.”  For Brooks, and for Neal Gabler of the LA Times, these are – wait for it – “flock comedies.”

Do you know how, when someone comes at you with a squirt gun, you scrunch up your face in anticipation?   That’s how I read a Brooks column.  I prepare myself for the inevitable squirt in the face when he hits me with his catchphrase.

So.  “Flock comedies.”  Let me grit my teeth and get through this.

“Flock comedies” are comedies that revolve around a group of friends.  They are depicted as spending a lot of time together – eating, socializing, watching TV, generally interacting.  I’m thinking “Friends,” “Seinfeld” –

Whoops.  Recent?  How about “Mary Tyler Moore”?  “Dobie Gillis”?  “Gilligan’s Island,” for God’s sake?

Anyway, this “trend” reflects our changing attitude toward friendship.  Virtual friendship a la Facebook has made us long for the real thing.  So we like watching people sit around dorm-room style and chat and argue and fight.  What a shame! Brooks and Gabler say.  It doesn’t reflect our real lives at all!

(Any show that reflected my real life would have to depict a fiftyish man lying on the couch reading a magazine, and getting up to go to the bathroom every ten minutes or so.  It would not do well in the ratings.)

The Brooks/Gabler argument is old-fogyism disguised as social commentary.  A television program has to be propelled by something – dramatic situations, funny dialogue, something.  You can do it around a dinner table, or a bar, or on a couch.  You can do it in a family setting, or a workplace setting, or a casual setting like a bar or living room.  You can’t really do it without depicting people interacting with people.

But! Brooks and Gabler say.  The quality of friendship has changed!  Living in our hurry-scurry World of Tomorrow (see blog title, above), we have sacrificed Real Traditional Friendship!  Statistics show that we have less friends than we used to, and that we are less likely to form dyadic one-on-one friendships. 

Gabler (whom Brooks calls “apocalyptic”) says that the intimacy portrayed on TV is “phony.”  Hmm.  Now why would situations presented in a half-hour comedy program be “phony”?

Brooks and Gabler both say that this ersatz TV “friendship” is wish fulfillment: it depicts the way we wish our lives really were, full of “deeply intimate” friends.  (I don’t know about you, but I’m glad I don’t have either Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory” or Kramer from “Seinfeld” living across the hall.)

Neither Brooks nor Gabler seems very comfortable with talking about family relationships in this context.  Gabler says “Modern Family” is “incomparable,” but then tut-tuts about the unreality of its depiction of family togetherness.  Brooks says that “young people” live in “diverse friendship tribes” (squinch!  I didn’t see that one coming!), but he really doesn’t talk about the family aspect at all.

Gabler isn’t just apocalyptic; he’s post-apocalyptic.  According to him, we are already completely deracinated by our television viewing.  It has gotten into our heads, made us unhappy, made us depressed, taken all of our friends away, etc., etc.  We wander the streets desolately, looking for another video injection to soothe our existential heartache.  (Evidently he subscribes to my “television makes your head explode” theory, which you can read about here.)

Brooks is more tragic than apocalyptic.  He acknowledges, somberly, that friendship – one-on-one, buddy-buddy stuff – still exists, but is being replaced by the Facebook model: cool virtual friendships that don’t really amount to anything.  Brooks thinks that TV is presently showing us our true selves: lonely, emotionally inept, willing to replace real friendships with friendships of convenience. 

Oh, my.

It makes me want to run right down to the coffee shop and tell Ross and Rachel all about it.

---

Age, I do defy thee

---

Partner and I were in a fragrance boutique the other day (some stereotypes are true, once in a while).  The manager gave us some free samples, in molecule-sized packets.  This was one of those places that slaps a French name on everything, so I got a little giggle out of the following label: CONCENTRE JEUNESSE / YOUTH CONCENTRATE.  Like Wednesday Addams, who thought that Girl Scout cookies were made from Girl Scouts, I wondered idly how many youths had given their lives for this little dab of concentrate.

I tried the stuff, by the way, and it was very nice.  But it did not make me young again.

Getting old is a tricky business.  I was a jerky awkward young man, and I wanted desperately to be older, so that people would respect me.  Now – well, ahem, I’m still waiting for the respect.  I have rapidly degenerated into a stick figure with a big bulbous head and wispy gray hair.  If I wore overalls with suspenders, I would look exactly like one of my paternal uncles.

Adding insult to injury, I work on a college campus.  The students never age; they leave when they hit 21 or so, and a new supply arrives every year.  This means that I find myself getting older and older, right in the middle of a group of people who never get older at all.  About a month ago, I was walking across campus and ran into a former coworker, a woman about my own age.  We were having a lively little chat about the old days, but then I noticed the students on the sidewalk looking at us funny, and suddenly I had a vision of the way the students saw us: a skinny old man with a high shrill voice, talking to a fat old woman with a deep scratchy voice.

Eek!

I have also become acquainted with the aches and pains of age.  I am reminded constantly that I’m Not As Young As I Used To Be.  I was talking to a coworker about a vacant position in our department and found myself saying “This would be ideal for someone young and energetic,” and as soon as I said it, the words turned to ashes in my mouth.  That young energetic person ain’t me.

And not to be morbid, but I probably don’t have more than another fifty or sixty years in me before my batteries run out entirely.

A friend of mine theorized a long time ago that we stop aging emotionally at a certain age, and stay that way for life.  I think it’s absolutely true.  Partner, for example, is about eight years old inside: beginning to feel grown up, but still vulnerable.  I, on the other hand, stopped aging emotionally at five: easily distracted, easily amused, easily hurt. 

Now, all you young nymphs and shepherds, think of how it feels for that five-year-old to look into the mirror and see Abe Vigoda looking back.

And do you know why it hurts?  Because life is so much fun.  There are still so many things I want to do.  The idea that I’m running out of carnival tickets is a bad nasty thing.

I started in French, so I’ll end in French.  This is Erik Satie:

“Quand j’etais jeune, on me disait: Vous verrez quand vous aurez cinquante ans.  J’ai cinquante ans.  Je n’ai rien vu!”

“When I was young, people told me: Just wait until you’re fifty years old, and you’ll see.  Well, I’m fifty years old, and I haven’t seen a thing!”

---

Waiting for the Grand Unification

---

When we were in Manhattan recently, Partner and I saw a demo of Google TV. It's very neat: it makes your TV screen do everything your computer screen does, in addition to showing broadcast TV. There are still two small problems, however:

• The remote is the size of a VW Beetle.
• Lots of content providers are staying aloof from it, so there's a lot of programming you still can't access with it.

It's a step in the right direction, though. Ultimately, everything – your phone, your netbook / laptop, your desktop computer, your MP3 player, your TV – will access the same content and have the same capabilities. You'll be able to make a phone call with your TV, and access the Net with your phone, and watch TV programming on your laptop. (Actually you can do most of this now; they're still filling in some of the gaps). The main difference will be the size of the screen and keyboard in each case.

Now that's a grand unification.

The borders are already blurring. “The Social Network” was a movie about a website, written by a TV mogul. “Prince of Persia” - urk – was a movie based on a video game and marketed virally. (I mention it because Partner and I saw it on Cape Cod in June, during a moment of weakness. It was stinkeroo. But I digress.)

I would love to live to see the Grand Unification happen, but I also have my doubts. Anything heavily tech-oriented is also fragile. One good catastrophe – war, natural disaster - could knock out so much: delivery, content, availability.  Even a really good solar flare can bring the Net to its knees.


Time will tell.  The world is supposed to end in 2012.  There's that damn asteroid out there with our name on it that's due in 2029.  Barring any of that, there are the actuarial odds.  I'm fifty-three now; depending on which side of my genome wins out, my father's or my mother's, I have anywhere from ten to forty years left on earth.

Unless I get hit on the head by a falling safe tomorrow.

(But listen.  Seriously.  If you haven't seen the movie version of “Prince of Persia,” save yourself the grief. No one needs that.)

---

Tact

---

Imagine my shock when I came back from lunch yesterday and read the following headline on the Internet:

• RI Dem: Obama can 'shove it' for not endorsing him (AP)

My goodness!


For those of you not fortunate enough to live in southern New England, here’s a primer on Rhode Island politics:


This is a small crowded state, and you get to know all kinds of people here. You even get used to seeing your elected officials on the street. (A former state attorney general used to wink at me every morning in the street as we passed on our way to work. What do you suppose that was all about?)


Given the friends-neighbors-and-relations atmosphere, political mini-dynasties are everywhere. Everybody is somebody’s son, or sister, or mother, or uncle.


The two main contenders for governor at the moment are Frank Caprio (Democrat) and Lincoln Chafee (Independent). There’s a Republican too, John Robitaille, but he’s way behind in the polls, so we will disregard him for the moment. (Some other time I will explain how the governor of a heavily Democratic state can time and again be a Republican. But I digress.)


Caprio is the son of the chief judge of the Providence Municipal Court. His brother is a state representative. Caprio himself has been a state rep, a state senator, and (most recently) state treasurer. He’s earnest and very sure of himself.


Chafee is the son of former US Senator John Chafee. He was mayor of the city of Warwick, and served one term as US Senator. He’s intelligent and rather passive. He was a Rhode Island Republican - relatively liberal, especially compared to the hoot 'n holler Republicans out in the rest of the country. Chafee is now running for governor as an independent. His campaign signs (which are the size of bedsheets) say TRUST CHAFEE. When I saw the signs, my first reaction was: “Trust Chafee to do what?”


We’re a week away from the election, and – whoo-ee! The mud is fairly flying!


Chafee has suggested an additional 1% sales tax on certain goods, to make up part of the state’s budget shortfall. Caprio has fastened on this as The Sin Against The Holy Ghost. (There’s another long story about Chafee’s father and the state income tax bound up in here, but I’m trying to keep this short.)


Then we learned a few weeks ago that Chafee’s campaign manager may have received some unemployment benefits unfairly, around the time he began working for Chafee’s campaign. This looked not so good for Chafee. Then it was pointed out the only way this information could have been leaked was by the man’s former employer, who was – surprise! – Judge Frank Caprio, the other candidate’s father. Oops!


Then the Caprio campaign started showing (and showing, and showing) a campaign commercial in which Bill Clinton gives Frank his full-throated endorsement during a public appearance. Unfortunately, Clinton lays it on so thick in his speech that it becomes uncomfortably apparent that he’s never heard of Caprio before, and is just endorsing him because he’s the Democratic candidate.


Now Obama's in town for a political fundraiser. And Obama does not endorse Caprio.


So Caprio tells a local journalist that Obama can “take his endorsement and shove it.”


Caprio appears to be furious that he’s being painted as an insider, and seems to think that this will give him some credibility as a “maverick.” (My god, that word sticks in my throat.) He’s also very evidently furious that he’s being snubbed by Obama.


The election could go either way; it’s neck and neck, last I heard. But really: all this acrimony!


And such language!


Ladies and gentlemen, you mustn’t think that all Rhode Islanders are like that. We are a peaceful people, drinking coffee and eating donuts. We are known for giving incomprehensible directions, using landmarks that no longer exist. We are the birthplace of George M. Cohan and Nelson Eddy.


Above all, we are tactful.


Or at least we normally don't tell the President of the United States to take his endorsement and shove it.

---

Three futures

---

It is deadly to write about the future.  It's just so easy to be wrong about it.

Most of the Biblical “prophets” didn't write about the future at all; they just commented on their own times, with lots of moralizing. When they did go out on a limb and talk about the future, they dressed it up with multiheaded monsters and glowing cities and horses' bells with HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD on them. They threw in an occasional invasion or overthrow, but those are pretty safe; sooner or later, someone's bound to invade and/overthrow someone else. Voila! Prediction fulfilled.

The best futurologist I know, Alexis de Tocqueville, didn't set out write about the future; he looked at the present, unflinchingly, with great precision and insight, and wrote about it. Reading “Democracy in America,” written over 150 years ago, is like reading today's newspaper.

I can think of three main ways in which the future can unfold:

The Happy Future. This is the idea that things will get better and better as time passes. People will get smarter, and also wiser. Bad things will happen less often.

Variations:

• The neverending road upward. Things just get better and better and better without end. Think of the end of the Narnia books. Also Teilhard de Chardin, though (speaking as a backslidden Catholic) I have a hard time with him.
• The apocalyptic eucatastrophe. The ultimate happy ending, usually preceded by an Armageddon-type disaster. Also usually preceded and accompanied by lots of religious foofaraw. Usually also accompanied with the final destruction of your enemies and the salvation of your friends / co-religionists.
• The mellow nirvana. Everything just sort of fades into a groovy fog. (I like this one myself.)

The Sad Future. Things get worse and worse. Stuff blows up. Stars go out. Things die.

Variations:

• The technological dystopia. We did it to ourselves. Think of the end of the first Planet of the Apes movie, or Soylent Green.
• The entropic catastrophe. The universe started with a bang, and it's been running out of steam ever since. The mainspring is winding down. One by one, the protons decay. Goodbye, protons!
• The whiz-bang hellfire catastrophe. Asteroid collisions. Black holes. Crash! Bang! Boom! Urk!

The Steady State Future. Nothing really changes. There are ups and downs, but no real progress, either upward or downward. There's no end. The universe just keeps going on and on and on.

Variations:

• The non-recurrent steady state. Best defined as “stuff happens.” A little of this, and a little of that, but none of it makes any real difference. Yawn.
• The recurrent steady state. A sort of variation of the Steady State Future, except that everything just happens over and over again. Think “Groundhog Day.” This one seems okay, until you really think about it. Then it gets screamingly awful. You know how the Buddhists talk about getting off the Wheel of Life? This is what they're talking about. You really don't want to get caught in this future. It's pretty dreadful.

I think I know which future I'd prefer.

But I'm just afraid that's not how it works.

---

Sunday blog: Erik Satie, by Jean Cocteau

---

The above (the original of which hangs in our living room) is an engraving of Erik Satie by the French author / artist / provocateur Jean Cocteau. Cocteau dashed it off from life around 1915, liked it, and reproduced it many times during his lifetime; it made him a lot of money.

Here is the provenance of my copy:

• It was one of a number of engravings in a portfolio given by Cocteau to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in the 1950s.
• Upon Shostakovich's death, it went to his daughter Galina.
• Upon Galina's death, it went to her widower,
• who sold it to a dealer,
• who sold it to me.
  
  

Satie (who died in 1925) was a well-known crackpot. If he knew I had this engraving hanging on my wall, he'd probably be furious that Cocteau made so much money off his image. On the other hand, he might get a kick out of it.

Cocteau (who died in 1963) would be delighted that his work was still being admired, though he'd probably find my living room too bourgeois. Given that he was a capitalist to the teeth, he'd also want to know how much I paid for his work.

Shostakovich (who died in 1975) would probably just shrug. I imagine him saying: “Oh, was that mine? Yes, I think I remember. Oh, well. I'm glad it didn't get thrown away, anyway.”

I'm glad too.

---

Happy fun science time

---

Where is George Gamow when we need him most?

Gamow was an eminent twentieth-century physicist. He was also quite the jokester. He was also, miracle of miracles, a competent and entertaining popularizer of science.

Popularization is a difficult thing to do well, but Gamow had the knack. He could explain things simply, using effective and appropriate analogies, and he was never ridiculous or condescending. He could be funny, and witty, and sharp, and never childish.

Which brings me to the state of modern science programming on television.

The PBS of my childhood was education, education, education. It had the production values of a community-college class, with only half the charm. Then in the late 1960s PBS learned to be sexy and sophisticated, with programs like “Masterpiece Theater,” and funny/folksy, with programs like “Sesame Street.”

Then came “Cosmos.” Even thirty years later, it's a beautiful program: poetic and sweet, full of good solid information, much of which is still valid. Most importantly, it does not talk down to its audience. It's a little twee at times, with its dandelion-seed spaceships and huge closeups of Carl Sagan's mug, but these are small flaws.

Then PBS took a wrong turn. Instead of learning from the success of “Cosmos,” they drew the wrong conclusion from “Sesame Street.” If you can teach kids the alphabet by showing them thirty-second clips of fuzzy blue monsters singing catchy tunes, can't you dress up the sciences in the same way? It can be bouncy and fun and magical, and -

Okay. Go watch an episode of “Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman” and see if you can figure out the problem.

Do you see what I mean? The analogies are suddenly strained and silly. The effects, instead of explaining the science, are just Matrix foofaraw, science-fictionish and cute.

Worst of all, we have the Scientist as Rock Star.

In “Through The Wormhole,” for example, we have Garrett Lisi, the theoretical physicist / surfer. He explains quantum physics to us on the beach in Hawaii while wearing a wet-suit. Radical!

There's a 1990s series called “The Astronomers” that's just as unwatchable, for all the same reasons. It features astronomers – perfectly nice people, smart, devoted to their craft – and presents them as dynamic entertainers and fascinating people in their own right.

Well, the science may be fascinating, but the people aren't, usually.

And if I see one more archaeologist in an Indiana Jones hat, I will throw something heavy at the TV screen.

The high priest of this whole Science Is Fun! movement is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's the life of the science fair, and his sense of humor is perfectly adequate to keep fourth-graders amused. He attached himself early on to the Pluto-is-not-a-planet movement, which got elementary school children involved - not in learning science, but in writing adorable letters to Neil deGrasse Tyson about how much they love the planet Pluto. (Anybody remember Art Linkletter?) Tyson squeezed a TV program out of it, somehow.

There's definitely a wonderful science program to be made about the outer solar system, but this isn't it.

I vividly recall an episode of Stephen Colbert's show when Colbert invaded the Smithsonian and assaulted Tyson with some real honest-to-God straight-faced adult satire, asking ridiculous questions with a straight face. Tyson looked alternately bewildered, angry, and terrified. He had no idea what was going on.

Prancing around a stage will get you attention, especially from children. But you need something a little deeper, more solid, to make a real impression. It's no good encouraging children to believe that physicists get to surf all day. It's far better to throw the science out there – as well-presented as you can manage – and hope it falls on a few patches of fertile soil; a few children who might grow up to be scientists, a few adults who might feel enriched by the experience.

George Gamow, wherever you are, please come back. We need you badly.

---

The ballad of Sonny Tufts

---

When I was a kid, there was a recurring joke on the old Jay Ward cartoon shows.  Someone would invoke the name of an old forgotten celebrity, and everyone would react with incredulity and amazement.  It was a combination of “Who the hell are you talking about?” and “Why the hell are you talking about him?”

The name was Sonny Tufts.

Here’s the story (paraphrased):

Radio show, early 1940s.  An  established movie star is finishing up his run as the announcer on a dramatic series.  He doesn’t know who his replacement is; he’s just doing a cold reading of the script he’s been handed.  It goes something like this:

“Thank you for tuning in tonight.  This is my last broadcast, and I have been glad to spend time with you every Sunday evening.  Tune in next week, when your new announcer will be – “

(Long pause.  Now, in a voice of total amazement:)

“ - Sonny Tufts?”

I do not need to tell you that this never really happened.  This story came from the same bizarre fantasy world that spawned the Uncle Don story, and the Bozo no-no story, and the day Julia Child dropped the turkey on the floor.

But no matter.  Sonny Tufts became a byword.  You couldn’t say his name without everyone in the room chorusing, in mock disbelief, “Sonny Tufts?”

Sonny was an actor. He was pretty cute, actually. His body of work, however, is scanty.  You may peruse it at IMDB, and I will bake you a batch of brownies if you have ever seen any of this movies (with the exception of “The Seven Year Itch,” and quite frankly I don’t think of that movie as a star vehicle for Sonny Tufts).

Then, of course, there were Sonny’s personal eccentricities.  Here is a summary, taken from snopes.com:

• 1948: Actor Edward Troy fractured his knee while “riding piggyback on Movie Star Sonny Tufts” at an Arizona resort motel.
• 1950: Sonny and three companions were arrested for public drunkenness after Los Angeles police spotted them “tight-rope walking” down the white line in the center of a busy street.
• 1951: Sonny’s wife sued him for separate maintenance, claiming that he had been jobless for over a year and was “dissipating their community property” on alcohol and luxurious living.
• Also 1951: Sonny and Hawaiian actress Luukiana Kaeola (of whom I can find no trace in IMDB, or Google for that matter) were arrested as “transient drunks” after arguing with a night-club cook over an unpaid bill for $4.55 worth of fried chicken.
• 1954 (this is my favorite): Sonny was sued by two female dancers who claimed he had bitten both of them on the thighs.  In separate incidents.
• 1955: Sonny was sued by a 22-year old woman who claimed he had approached her in a restaurant, “mauled her, then pinched her so hard she screamed.”
• And finally, 1957, the year of my birth: Sonny and a female companion were jailed for public drunkenness after the two of them collapsed in a heap on the Sunset Strip.  Sonny managed to get a cut above his left eye in this incident.

Ahem.

There’s a great lyric in the Kinks’ song “Can’t Stop The Music”: “Let’s all raise a glass / To the rock stars of the past: / Those who made it, those who faded, / Those who never even made the grade, / And those that we thought would never last.”

Sonny definitely never made the grade.  He devolved into a walking joke.  And yet: here we are, talking about him, reminiscing about that warm evening in 1948 when he took Edward Troy for a piggyback ride in Arizona.

There are worse kinds of immortality.

To your health, Sonny.

---

Mazel tov, George and Brad

---

The legendary Lana Turner was fortunate enough to count the handsome Lex Barker, one of the movie Tarzans, among her husbands.  (He was quite a specimen, if you can't quite remember him.)  After their wedding, a reporter asked Miss Turner (only in Hollywood are you still “Miss” immediately after the wedding): “What’s the first thing you’re gonna do on your honeymoon, Lana?” 

And Miss Turner, gloating over her brand-new cutie-pie husband like a glutton over a bucket of fried chicken, said: “I’m just gonna look at him for a while.”

Trust me, I am the last person in the world to believe in Hollywood romance.  I was born just before the whole Eddie Fisher / Debbie Reynolds / Elizabeth Taylor fiasco, and I think there must have been something in the air in those days that conferred immunity to studio publicity.

But I get all mooshy when I see photos like the above.

You’ve got to understand that gay people have never had the opportunity to see nice pictures of our favorite gay stars cavorting down the steps of the Elvis Chapel after getting hitched.  Heaven knows we didn’t even have “favorite gay stars” (although we know very well now who was who and what was what – don’t we, Tab Hunter?).

I am the last person in the world to insist on Rita Moreno’s Law (“Stick to your own kind”).  Gay people can act straight and vice versa.  I am in a paralysis of joy when I watch the oopsy-daisy delicacy of Eric Stonestreet portraying Cam on “Modern Family.”  And Neil Patrick Harris is satisfyingly straight ‘n sleazy on “How I Met Your Mother,” and did an adorable straight ‘n sentimental in the “Dr. Horrible” series.

But it is immensely satisfying to see gay people on the screen, and point at them, and holler: “Comrade!”

So, when I see Neil Patrick Harris arm in arm with his partner David Burtka, and David Hyde Pierce with Brian Hargrove, and Alan Cumming with Grant Shaffer, and Jane Lynch at the Emmys with her new wife Lara Embry, I shed a genuine tear of joy.

I have no illusions that these are perfect relationships.  There ain’t no such animal.  But I rejoice that we get to see those incandescent moments of happiness, those brightly-lit newlywed photo ops, for gay couples too.

Finally we – gay people! possessors of a genetic predisposition for movie appreciation! – get to moon over romantic Hollywood photo spreads and say: “Don’t George Takei and his husband look nice in their white tuxes?”

The above picture, with its double punch of domestic bliss and Star Trek nostalgia, hits me with a double whammy. It's delicious. It's a moment of pure perfect bliss in an ocean of Tea Party insanity.

I'm with Miss Turner. I'm just gonna look at it for a while.

---

The death of the bedroom TV

---

It's been a long time since I've actually watched a TV die.

It's like watching a family member get sick.  You notice odd little things - cough, weight loss, pallor - and all of a sudden they're thrashing in delirium.

Well, the bedroom TV has evidently decided that it is reaching the end of its days.  We were watching some stupid movie on Saturday morning, and all of a sudden Partner said, "Look at the corners of the screen!"

Green.  Bright green.  The picture was bleeding outward, and the four corners of the screen were bathed in an eerie Shrek-colored glow. 

It's not all the time.  I think it only happens after the TV's been on for a while.  It's an old TV anyway - probably between ten and fifteen years; Partner bought it from a coworker some years ago for twenty-five bucks, I think.  It's a real dinosaur anyway, big and fat and heavy, the way TVs used to be as a rule.  And it generates heat like a sumbitch.

It makes me remember the black-and-white TV I grew up with.  It was probably purchased not long after I was born - a big console model, a Zenith, I think.  Then, after ten years or so, for no apparent reason, its picture began to shrink, bit by bit, the longer the set was on.  Finally, after four or five hours, the picture would disappear completely - kapow! - into a demonically bright little pinprick of light in the middle of the screen.  (I held my eye up to that tiny spot of light more than once, and I swear to you that I was sure I could see the entire TV image in there.  In retrospect, of course, putting my eyeball directly in line with a pure beam of cathode-ray emissions probably wasn't the smartest thing I could have done.)  You had to turn the TV off and let it cool down when that happened, and sometimes, if the moon was in the right phase, you could resume your viewing after a while.

But we all knew the TV was doomed.  That's when we bit the bullet and got our color TV.  The sick black-and-white model moved into my dad's den in the basement, where it lived in fitful retirement for many years; Dad mostly watched “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” anyway, so the picture quality didn't make too much difference.

TVs don't seem to break down the way they used to.  I somehow don't believe they're better made than they used to be, so there must be something else going on.  But then, we don't use them up the way we used to; we replace them.  In the old days, a TV was a serious investment, and you used it until it broke or exploded.  Nowadays you're always shopping for a good deal, or a better model, or something a little sleeker.  You're not replacing a broken device; you're just buying a slightly better/newer one.

Partner and I are of two minds on this subject.  Partner likes to replace things.  I, on the other hand, am a grim Calvinist, and believe in riding the horse until it whimpers in exhaustion and dies.  (Well, not always.  The lure of shiny new things speaks to me too.)

But the TV in the bedroom is spitting up rancid electrons as we speak, so there's not too much debate over what happens next. 

See you at Best Buy.

---

The continuing story of Peyton Place

---

The late lamented Harry Golden wrote that, when he was a boy, he kept a scrapbook of all of the top news stories of the day. Years later, when he rediscovered it, he found that the news stories weren't really that interesting; the really interesting stuff was on the reverse side of each clipping – peaches for two cents a pound, a fire on 43^rd Street, a birth, a death. History is one thing; everyday life is another thing, and a greater thing.

A few weeks ago I found a DVD set of the first season of “Peyton Place” - thirty-one episodes – for a couple of bucks. Peyton Place! My god, my mother and sisters used to live for that show in the mid-1960s. I wasn't allowed to watch; it was too racy. Since the 1960s, the show has mostly been just a memory; there have been a few airings – apparently the Romance Classics Network (!) showed it some time back. But getting my hands on this DVD set was too good to be true. Finally, at last, forty-six years later, I was going to get to see what my family wouldn't let me see in 1964.

It has been a revelation. The pacing is slow, much slower than modern shows, and the dialogue goes in misty circles. It is amazing how much gets said without even using the right words. One of the characters, Betty Anderson (a lovely young Barbara Parkins), gets P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T by town playboy Rodney Harrington (handsome Ryan O'Neal) – and somehow the show gets the message across without using the word, or even a euphemism. Betty looks troubled. She walks around the old pillory in the town square and meditates on being shamed publicly. She goes to the doctor. She's upset. “Does Rodney know?” the doctor says sympathetically. And there you have it.

I generally think of soap operas as slow, slow, slow. Not “Peyton Place.” In the first couple of episodes – the first disk of the set – I was treated to teen pregnancy, infidelity, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and “frigidity,” not to mention broad hints about intimations of illegitimacy, mental illness, and lots of other spectator sports. (Am I the only one who thinks Norman Harrington was maybe gay? Or as close to gay as 1964 TV could make him?) Censorship is jabbed at early on by Constance Mackenzie, the owner of the town bookstore, who wishes that a book would be “banned in Boston” so that it would sell better. (Don't forget that the original novel was pretty scandalous in its day, with heaping helpings of incest and rape on top of everything else.) Matt Swain, the avuncular newspaper editor, makes a thoughtful little speech about the Bill of Rights. Rodney joshes about joining the Peace Corps. We get constant reminders that, in a little New England town like Peyton Place, everyone knows everything about everyone, and scandals and rumors lie thick on the ground.

Now I understand why my mother and sisters ate up this show so eagerly. It was real life, everyday life, dressed up with a fancy hairdo. It was actually smart sometimes. The young people are dreamily beautiful. The older people, like characters in a mystery play, look exactly the way they're supposed to look: tired, intense, severe, gentle, thoughtful, troubled, angry. The street scenes and exteriors are Anytown USA. There are pregnancies, and marriages, and romances, and breakups, and estrangements, and reconciliations.

At one point, Alison Mackenzie, talking about her dreams for the future, says: “I want everything to happen.”

And everything does.

And that's everyday life, in the continuing story of Peyton Place.

---

American idiots

---

Emily Dickinson said real poetry made her feel as if the top of her head had been taken off.

I had that experience on Saturday.

Partner and I went to see “American Idiot” on Broadway. If you're as out of touch with popular music as I am, you will need to be told that this show is based on the Green Day album of the same name. Partner had seen some scenes on the last Tony Awards telecast and was very interested in it. I was a little dubious; I had bad memories of a road production of “Movin' Out,” the Billy Joel-inspired ballet/musical, and after an hour's worth of Twyla Tharp-style leaps and twirls to the tune of “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” I decided that stage shows and pop music do not mix.

I was wrong.

This is an amazing show. Everything pops. The set is a busy amalgam of rock concert, living-room furniture, fire escapes, and a compact car suspended by chains over stage right. And video screens everywhere, chattering through the whole show. And light projections, sometimes mimicking the action, sometimes commenting on it, sometimes disagreeing with it.

The talent – well, it's Broadway, you really don't make it onto the stage unless you're pretty good. Everybody in the cast was able to sing, and dance, and act, and do gymnastics, and play the guitar. I kid you not. Everybody.

And the dancing! This is not Twyla Tharp. This is angry dancing. This is ugly dancing. When the choreography was supposed to communicate fighting, or sex, I found myself holding my breath, thinking: Oh my god they're actually doing it.

And then there are the songs. Every new musical I've been to for years has had dead spots and meaningless songs. “We need a song here – go write one. How about a ballad?” (The “Spamalot” number “The Song That Goes Like This” says it better than I ever could.) “American Idiot” does not have a single wasted song or dead spot. The ballads, when they come along, are actually a welcome relief from the propulsive energy of the show; you get a chance to catch your breath before the next onslaught.

When we came out, Partner and I were both incredibly buzzed, and had to walk around for a while to get rid of the energy we'd built up during the show. New York is always sensory overload for me anyway, so I was deaf and blind for a few minutes as we jostled our way down 44^th Street.

But Partner told me a story later about something he'd seen right after we came out of the theater.

In among the crowd, he saw a mother dragging two kids – a boy around thirteen, a girl maybe fourteen - out of the theater. The boy had a rapturous look on his face; he'd obviously really enjoyed the show. And then his mother shrieked: “I don't want you to get any ideas! I don't want you to come home smelling like drugs and dragging girls home with you!”

Partner said the boy shrank into himself, going from ecstasy to sullen defensiveness in a matter of seconds. The boy turned to his sister. “You liked it,” he said accusingly. “I saw you crying.”

“I was not crying,” the sister said. “I thought it was boring.”

The mother did not get it. Maybe the sister got it and maybe she didn't.

But the boy got it.

Once the top of your head gets taken off, there's no getting it back on again.

---

Sunday blog: Pata pata

---

Ladies and gentlemen: let's have a nice restful day. Thinking makes my head hurt sometimes.

Let us therefore contemplate the divine Miriam Makeba, and let us dance the way they do down Johannesburg way.

Hit it!

 
Download now or listen on posterous

Miriam_Makeba_01_Pata_Pata.mp3 (6166 KB)

---

Gibson on the rocks

---

I confess that, when I called this blog "FutureWorld," I did not think about it very much.  I had been participating in a focus group on media and technology for a few months, and was having a lot of fun writing up the little odds and ends of thought roaming around inside my head.  When I decided to create a proper blog, I came up with the title almost immediately.  It's tongue in cheek, I assure you.  I meant something like this:

Here we are, in this immensely rich world, surrounded by miraculous technology.  This is, in so many respects, exactly the world we were promised by novels and movies.

How come it's not Utopia?

Partner and I were comparing notes not long ago about our own childhoods, and we found that we had both looked forward in awe to the Year Two Thousand, and had calculated how old we would be when the Millennium hit.  I vividly remember it, for some reason: I was on the school bus, and I suddenly realized that I would be forty-two years old on January 1, 2000.

It seemed unimaginable to me.

It still seems unimaginable to me now.

I still think of The Future as a gleam on the horizon.  When I look at the situation with cold logic, however, I realize that I am forever stumbling over the cliff's edge from present to future, every second.  The Future isn't a distant prospect: it's now.  And now.  And now.

And yet, for some reason, although we've come so far, created so many valuable and precious things, learned so much about the world, the world is not perfect yet.

I don’t want to be a futurologist, believe me.  I don’t think there’s any percentage in it.  I was just looking at a BBC interview with the author William Gibson, who has written many hip little novels about people bopping around in cyberspace and having adventures with all kinds of bizarre technology.  I respect him, I suppose – he’s a better writer than I am – but I’m not crazy about his “insights.”

For example: in his latest novel, he hypothesizes little flying information-gathering drones.  He thinks these might become commonplace: "They are actually going to change the landscapes of cities," he said.  "People in tall buildings, particularly in cities like New York or Chicago, have been living lives of utter privacy quite unconcerned that anyone might be looking in the window.  That's just not going to be the case anymore."

So close the curtains already.

Here is another apercu, about the value of information: "One of the economic units of this society is being 'in the know' or being able to convince people that you are 'in the know'," said Mr Gibson.

Gibson is showing us a mysterious future world in which knowledge is actually valuable.

Golly!

One more: The rapid pace of change of the present day could also spell curtains for the central idea of [Gibson's] three cyberpunk books: the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace.  "Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world," he said. "I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us."

This makes me wonder idly about the “consensual hallucinations” of past eras: Jane Austen’s era, in which people somehow believed that the London Season was extremely important; medieval France, in which people somehow believed that building a cathedral would make God’s mother happy; the Classic Maya era, in which people somehow believed that the gods positively hungered for blood extracted from your tongue with a stingray spine.

Every era feels this way.  Every era looks pityingly at its forebears, who simply didn't realize the value of the London season, or cyberspace, or stingray spines.

Every era feels that it is the pinnacle of civilization to date.

That's because every era actually is the pinnacle of civilization to date.

People don't change.  Stuff changes, cultural dreck changes, but people don't change.  I know I don’t.  I’m still five years old inside, and when I look in the mirror and see a shambling wreck, I think: What happened?

We’re still a bunch of children squatting around a campfire. 

And the world, laboring under its burden of culture and history, gets slower and shabbier and fustier around us.

"The twentieth century," a character in "Angels in America" says sadly.  "Oh, dear. The world has gotten so terribly, terribly old."

---

Goodbye, VHS

---

Partner has been watching “Hoarders” a lot lately, and it is having a very salutary effect on him; he's been cleaning and throwing things away like mad.  Believe me, I'm not pointing fingers.  About a year and a half ago I watched a couple of episodes of “Clean House,” which is basically a more low-key version of the same thing (the people are just as crazy, but they don't seem quite as maniacal as the people on “Hoarders”; also Niecy Nash is very funny, and I found Matt Iseman very restful to look at), and it inspired me to clean out the entire basement storage space.

But I have also become uneasily aware that I need to do something about the huge stack of VHS tapes sitting next to the television cabinet.

I never watch them.  But never.  I put away a big box of really unwatched tapes in the basement last year, and I have resolved to give most or all of those to Partner's mother's nursing home very soon.  The tapes that I keep in the living room are (ostensibly) favorites, things I really don't want to get rid of - but they're really just taking up space.

So what's my resistance all about?  Well, I do tend to accumulate things in a “Hoarders”-like way, though maybe not to the point of pathology.  And I spent $$$ on all those tapes, and if I actually counted up all the cash I spent on videos, I would probably burst into tears; getting rid of them is an admission that I wasted my money, a little at a time, over a whole bunch of years.  And there are a few tapes that I will certainly keep no matter what (nothing but Grim Death will part me from my copy of John Waters's “Desperate Living”).

There was a halcyon period in the early 1990s when everything - everything - was suddenly appearing on VHS: old movies, new movies, old TV shows, cartoons.  It was wonderful to own them, and the prices seemed moderate.  The flaw in this reasoning became apparent to me very early on, when I joined a mail-order video club in the late 1980s and tried to pick out my introductory stack of six videos.

Naturally I included “The Sound of Music.”  Who wouldn't want to own that?

And I literally never watched it.

How often do you come home from work and say, "I really feel like watching 'The Sound of Music' right now"?

Netflix, and streaming video, have freed me.  So long as I'm reasonably certain that I can find (let's say) “The Sound of Music” somewhere out there in the cloudy firmament, my pathological need to own it is considerably diminished.

Now I just need to overcome my hoarding instinct, and get a box, and start pitching tapes into it.

And then I can start thinking about that little cupboard full of unwatched DVDs.

---

The Wizard of Oz: a slightly different interpretation

---

The Times has been running an interesting blog lately called The Stone. It's a forum for modern philosophers to take up pretty much any topic they choose – linguistics, ethics, boxing, business, the nature of philosophy itself – and run it through its paces. Some of them have been exhilarating, funny, entertaining, thought-provoking.

I found the most recent blog entry insufferable, however. In it, a professor of philosophy from the University of Chicago named Robert Pippin goes on for paragraphs about how the teaching of literature in academia has become needlessly convoluted. (I love needlessly convoluted essays about needlessly convoluted topics, don't you?) He advocates (I think) for something he calls “naive reading,” which apparently means reading for pleasure.

Man, I could have written the same thing much more briefly. Something like this: “Hey, folks! You can read a book or watch a movie purely for pleasure. You don't need to parse it or pull it apart, if you don't want to.”

But sometimes I like pulling things apart.

Here is my all-time favorite off-the-wall interpretation. I heard a version of this a long time ago. I've thought about it for many years. It's wonderful.

So anyway: “The Wizard of Oz.” The movie, not the book. Thinking about it, now? Okay.

First of all: both Kansas and Oz are run by women. Kansas is run by Aunt Em and Miss Gulch, who are at odds with each other. The Kansas men (Uncle Henry, the three hired men, and Professor Marvel) are nonentities. Oz is also run by women: the two Wicked Witches (one of whom gets killed by Dorothy as soon as she gets there) and Glinda. The Wizard doesn't count; we find out later that he's just a fake anyway.

Dorothy is growing up. She's maybe thirteen or fourteen in the movie, right on the edge of womanhood. She runs away from home in Kansas, because Aunt Em and Miss Gulch won't let her keep her dog; she rebels against the ruling matriarchy. Then the tornado happens, and she ends up in Oz. And what's the first thing she does? She kills one of the Wicked Witches. She “liberates” the Munchkins. She becomes, in Glinda's words, the “national heroine” of Munchkinland.

And what's her prize? Red shoes. Red. The color of blood.  Beginning of womanhood. Are you following me?

Dorothy's on her way to becoming a powerful woman in her own right. She shows the Wizard up to be a fake, all on her own. She kills the Wicked Witch of the West almost by accident. She's braver than any of her companions.

Oz is a great growth experience for Dorothy, but she keeps saying that she “wants to go home.” She doesn't want to be a grown-up after all, or independent. She just wants to go home and let Aunt Em take care of her. And she uses the ruby slippers to wish for that very thing, and the wish comes true. “And I'll not going to leave here, ever ever again,” she sobs, back in black-and-white Kansas.

Not exactly a happy ending, is it? Dorothy is going to be under Aunt Em's thumb for the rest of her life. She had her chance to be an independent woman, and she lost it. She wished it away.

Let's look again at what happens in Oz. Dorothy gets lots of “good advice” from Glinda – another powerful woman – but Glinda very gently points Dorothy back in the direction to Kansas. Glinda doesn't want Dorothy in Oz longer than necessary, does she? Dorothy rubs out Glinda's competition for her, and then Glinda politely shows Dorothy to the door and tells her it's time to go home. And Dorothy meekly does as she's told.

And how about Dorothy's three “companions”? Back in Kansas, they were at least human. They weren't beautiful, but they were at least marriageable; they strutted around and showed off for Dorothy back on the farm. In Oz, however, two of them are walking talking inanimate objects, and one of them is a lion. No marriage material here.

One last thing. Everybody in Kansas turns up in Oz. Miss Gulch is the Wicked Witch of the West; the three hired men are the three “companions”; Professor Marvel is the Wizard. (Well, Uncle Henry doesn't turn up, although I always the Wicked Witch's guard who says “She's dead” was the same actor; I find on imdb.com, however, that the guard was an actor named Mitchell Lewis, may he rest in peace.)

Where's Aunt Em?

She only turns up once in Oz. Dorothy is trapped in the Witch's castle, and the hourglass is running out. Dorothy is hugging the Witch's crystal ball and crying, and suddenly she has a vision of Aunt Em back in Kansas, crying “Dorothy! Dorothy!”

And then Aunt Em turns into the Wicked Witch.

We already know that Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch are the same person. Now the Witch is equated with Aunt Em. All three (not to mention Glinda) have a vested interest in keeping Dorothy subservient – keeping Dorothy down on the farm, in a word. Preventing her from growing up. Preventing her from getting married and striking out on her own.

Because “there's no place like home.”

How do you like them apples, Professor Pippin?

---

Going to the movies

---

A. O. Scott had a nice thoughtful piece in the Times recently on the slow tragic decline of the movie business, and the upturn of TV. Now, to be fair, this article has been written and rewritten every few years since the 1930s (see Mehitabel the Cat's thoughts on the subject here). Everyone is always concerned that the older medium (insert medium here: movies, vaudeville, radio) is dying, and the newer medium (insert medium here: TV, movies, TV) is turning into a juggernaut, killing everything in its path, including Western culture.

It never quite happens the way it's supposed to. The older medium retrenches, regroups, and discovers a new life. Or, as in the case of the eight-track tape, it heads directly for the landfill.

But Scott (who's a pretty smart cookie) makes the excellent point that “going to the movies” (as opposed to just watching a movie on TV) is an experience in and of itself. It involves leaving the house, for one thing. It's immersive: you go into a big dark room, a room specially designed for movie viewing, with a special sound system. You sit, and you go limp, and you Watch The Movie.

This reminds me very much of Grand Opera. Opera isn't just about ladies with Viking helmets and fat tenors in doublets. It's immersive. It's grandiose, and meant to be so. It's sets, and color, and music, and drama (the more intense the better).
Providence, being a city with a largish Italian population, has occasional opera productions; Partner and I went to “Tosca” a few years ago. If you're only going to go to one opera every few years, you can do worse than Puccini. And “Tosca”: well, I ask you. Lots of drama, a couple of murders, and she jumps off the roof at the end. What's better than that?

It was a lot of fun. It was also sixty dollars a ticket. And there's another parallel with “going to the movies”: the movies are expensive. Fifteen bucks plus refreshments for “Dinner With Schmucks”? Oh, please. We pay around a hundred dollars a month for cable-plus-Netflix; that's $1.67 per day per person, for a ticket to whatever we want to see. We still go out to the movies, but nowhere near as much as we did even ten or fifteen years ago. There are too many choices available at home: lots and lots of movies, lots of excellent TV programs. Lots of dreck too, it goes without saying, but you can't live on filet mignon, you've gotta have potato chips and Necco Wafers once in a while too.

I also have my shelf of opera recordings. I can hear Callas singing Norma anytime I want, and Jan Peerce as a goofily earnest Florestan in “Fidelio,” and I even have a Wagner set with an aging Kirsten Flagstad as Brunhilde.

But it ain't the same as being there, seeing them in person.

Listening to a recording, even an excellent recording, is not the same as Going To The Opera.

And watching a movie on TV, even an excellent movie, on a really good TV, is not the same as Going To The Movies.

---

I'll take the low art, and you'll take the high art

 

---

 

The Bravo Network had a new show this season called “Work of Art.” Its format is the same as that of “Top Chef,” and “Project Runway,” and “RuPaul's Drag Race,” for that matter: get a bunch of aspiring cooks / designers / drag queens / artists, throw them in a room, give them a box of crayons and a Taiwanese newspaper, tell them to create something interesting, and then allow a group of “experts” to evaluate the results. (Don't worry if you haven't heard of these “experts” before; you're just asked to assume that they're well-known in their fields. I grew up in the era when Marcus Welby was thought to be a real doctor, so I can go along with the gag.)

 

Jerry Saltz, one of the “Work of Art” judges, recently wrote an interesting piece in New York about his participation in the show. This evoked a blizzard of commentary from the readership – much of it revolving around two issues:

 

• Art is much too important to be the subject of a competition.

• Anything created in the context of a reality TV show can't be good art anyway.

 

(Some readers also thought that, as an art critic, Saltz was also somehow subverting the creative process. Well, subversion of the creative process is just what critics do. I should know.)

 

Let's take those two big points one at a time.

 

Competition. This is sort of a condition of life, I think. Artists, like the rest of us, compete all the time – for attention, for an audience, for money. Most artists make little secret of it. Beethoven wrote amazingly awful dreck because he needed money. Philip Dick wrote novel after novel at top speed, also for cash. Andy Warhol did magazine illustrations. The Italian Renaissance painters were intensely aware (and envious) of one another's work and success. Bach and his contemporaries challenged one another to, ahem, organ competitions, and fought and begged for patronage. Picasso said smugly to Gertrude Stein: “I will paint you one apple and it will be as fine as all of Cezanne's apples.”

 

Sounds like competition to me.

 

So much for that.

 

“Low art” isn't “art” at all. This is the root of pretty much every bit of snobbery in the Art World, even back when I was a schoolchild back in Ur of the Chaldees. In “The Red Shoes,” the dictatorial impresario Lermontov famously declares of ballet that “For me, it is a religion.”

 

Hats off to Monsieur Lermontov, but not everyone subscribes to his religion. Sometimes, dancing is just dancing.

 

This “low art = no art” fallacy takes many forms. When the Harry Potter books were coming out, people were alternately praising J. K. Rowling for getting kids to read, and worrying loudly that kids weren't reading “the right thing.” What is the right thing to read? “The Joy of Cooking”? “Crime and Punishment”? “Guns & Ammo”?

 

Another fallacy, more central to this discussion: you can't really produce anything memorable using a “low” medium like comic books, or TV, or graffiti, or reality TV. This is the main point of many of the critics of “Work of Art.” It's a reality show, and nothing good - nothing worthwhile - can come from a reality show.

 

Nonsense, nonsense. There's beauty and meaning to be found everywhere, loads and loads of it. And artists and cooks and drag queens and designers are working like gangbusters to create something new and worthwhile and unique.

 

And if it makes money and makes some poor zhlub on a cable show successful for a few minutes: fab-u-lous.

 

Those who disagree can go read “Crime and Punishment” or “Guns & Ammo,” or build a plinth in the backyard, or do a watercolor of the First Cuckoo of Spring, or whatever it is they consider to be a serious use of their valuable time.

 

I, in the meantime, will be watching RuPaul.

 

Because, as Ru says so pithily: Girlfriend, if you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?

 

---