Ray Davies on Regis and Kelly!

…singing “Lola” in honor of Kelly’s daughter.  (I’m not sure if Kelly is in on the joke.)

Don’t you love how Disney just cuts him right off?  This great performance:  Filler till the credits.

To be fair, he got to perform the title song off his new album Working Man’s Cafe earlier in the program.  This is really wonderful:

Davies was also on David Letterman last month, giving this hard-rocking performance:

Early in my blogging career, I wrote a salute to Ray and the Kinks, who managed to produce the greatest pop music of the 1960s without ever really being part of that transcendental decade.  I was nervous about his solo career.  The last several years of the Kinks produced more embarrassment than glory.  But the album he was coming out with then, Other People’s Lives, had several great songs, and no really bad ones.  The above songs sound, if anything, stronger.   Really glad he’s back, really fun to see him try to make some sense out of Regis and Kelly, who both seem like they’ve taken Tourette’s-inducing pills.

Here’s What “John From Cincinnati” Means

I get it.  The fact that I get it doesn’t make “John From Cincinnati” a good show, but if you’re wondering what it’s all about, it’s simple.

“John From Cincinnati” tried to answer the question of what would happen if the most potent figures from the New Testament, akin to John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Joseph and Mary and of course, Jesus Christ, were to emerge in a contemporary setting.  What would the people around them do? 

The show asks:  Do you believe the New Testament?  Do you take it as a matter of not just faith but fact that Jesus performed miracles like raising the dead and walking on water?  Was the purpose of these miraculous feats to persuade the people of his times to believe he was divine, and that his words were prophecies? 

If you do believe these things, why would you find “John From Cincinnati” implausible? Isn’t there supposed to be a return?  Well, then, it could happen like it does on the show, couldn’t it?

The show was rife with Christian mystical symbolism, but I don’t think the point of the show was to bring us all to Jesus.  It was, instead, a what-if, a fantasy, a film noir Second Coming. And yet, within the universe of the show, we are to believe that this particular Second Coming is a very good thing — for the characters in the show, and for humanity in general.  The crisis precipitated by 9/11 is “huge,” as John says.  Bigger than what we believe it to be already.  An existential threat that will require divine force to save us mere, frail humans from turning it into an apocalypse.

Bring on the Clicks; I’m Blogging About “John From Cincinnati”

I wrote a nothing post about “The Sopranos” last year and forgot about it. But the word “spoilers” was in the title, and even though I made it clear I didn’t have any spoilers, and didn’t want any spoilers, it got thousands of clicks when the series ran its final nine episodes this spring. Well, I like “The Sopranos” a lot, I’m with those who think it’s the best television series in history, so I kept writing about it, and kept getting bunches of hits. Who knows how far anyone read into my musings — the mania was for spoilers. But it drew a crowd.

Will history repeat itself when I write about “John from Cincinnati,” HBO’s “Sopranos” successor?

Seemingly, no. “John From Cincinnati,” or JFC as its rabid fans would call it if the show had any rabid fans, is the weirdest, most off-putting show I’ve ever seen on television. And yet, I’ve stuck by it to the end, which comes — ah, relief — this Sunday night. I can’t imagine HBO picking up this show for another season, so if the writers have any explanation for themselves, it will probably have to come Sunday.

What do I hate about this show? Rebecca de Mornay’s character spends most of every show screaming and cursing in a voice that reminds you of worn-out brakes. “John,” the mystical idiot savant who doesn’t mind being stabbed because it heals right away, stands like he always needs to pee — which is ironic, since the first clue that John isn’t normal is that he never “dumps out” — alleged surfer talk for making #2.

The remaining characters all play like out-of-place refugees from “NYPD Blue,” show co-creator David Milch’s fondly remembered cop drama. They talk in that kind of ornate, faux-Damon Runyon style that is Milch’s trademark, but where it worked on “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” it seems completely wrong here. I haven’t read the novels of the other co-creator, Kem Nunn, but he has a lot of credibility as a chronicler of surfer culture, and the show’s surf atmospherics seem right. But there’s not enough footage in the water!

The opening credits are the best part of the show, but they are a tease.

The song is “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, from the album Global A-Go-Go. I am grateful to “John From Cincinnati” for introducing me to the song by the late co-leader of the Clash. But all those great vintage surfing shots? Why can’t we have more of those?

The show’s HBO website does have one valuable feature, the “Inside the Episode” essays by writer Steven Hawk. They’re weird, but compelling. They go so far “inside” the episode, you hardly recognize it. Regarding last week’s show, he said this:

I was enthralled during the shooting of the scene in the Snug Harbor parking lot when Ramon (Luis Guzman) shows Barry and Doctor Smith (Garret Dillahunt) the Avon catalog he received from Rosa the friendly rose-growing neighbor. Ramon, as excited as we’ve ever seen him, urges his two friends to turn to the catalog’s middle spread, which is sprinkled with the mysterious stick-man figure that’s been increasingly prominent in recent episodes. As Smith dashes off to get his own catalog, Ramon nearly pleads with Barry:

RAMON: Listen to me! Look at this!

BARRY: I am looking, I am seeing Avon in an entirely new light…

RAMON: This is big. This is huge.

BARRY: I think it very well could be.

RAMON: I want to cook something.

BARRY: I could eat.

Doctor Smith arrives, shows his catalog to Ramon and Barry.

SMITH: Look.

BARRY: Those same marvelous figures.

SMITH (to Ramon): What did she tell you about these?

RAMON: Nothing.

SMITH: This is huge.

“Big” and “huge,” of course, are words John said repeatedly during his strange, hypnotic parking lot speech at the end of Episode Six. And don’t forget that Ramon cooked for everyone during that speech. But my favorite aspect of this scene is the threesome’s inexplicable sense of joy and purpose. Here’s what Milch told the actors during rehearsal: “What’s happening is, all these subliminal cues are being activated without your knowing it. Essentially what you’re doing is activating neural connections. They know [the appearance of the stick figures in the catalog] is huge simply because they’ve trusted their intuitions. A wave of purposefulness is carrying all of you, even while you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here…’”

In other words, you need not know exactly what’s going on to be moved by the universe.

Good to know!

If the show works at all, it probably does work on the subliminal level Milch was suggesting. Why are these people happy? Why are these people mad? Why don’t these people notice how cracked everyone else around them is, and run away?

Maybe after Sunday night, the dozens of odd mysteries about which I’m not all that curious will be resolved. Or maybe they won’t, but my “neural connections” will be clicking away, causing an unaccountable improvement to my life. There must be some point to this show.

Hal Fishman, R.I.P.

Hal Fishman, the anchor for KTLA’s News at 10 for decades, died today, just a few days after a collapse sent him to the hospital, and to a diagnosis of colon and liver cancer.

With his passing, another news voice with whom Los Angeles grew up vanishes. If you’re my age, you might remember he was the “sidekick” to George Putnam–the bombastic right-wing model for Ted Baxter–during Putnam’s two stints at KTLA. Next to Putnam’s theatrics, Fishman was the sober junior professor who seemed to share Putnam’s black-and-white view of the world, but was willing to let the facts speak, dryly, for themselves.

After Putnam left KTLA for good, Fishman stayed on and honed his straightforward, no-nonsense style. Putnam had a feature called “One Reporter’s Opinion,” and Fishman continued the tradition of commentaries that were, as I recall, right-leaning but lacking in the demagoguery of his former boss.

The Channel 5 broadcast reflected Fishman’s stodgy insistence on delivering news in a plain, brown wrapper. Fishman was a record-breaking pilot, and he treated the news like a pilot treats reports to air-traffic controllers: Matter-of-fact, but life-or-death. His co-anchors — Larry McCormick, Jann Carl, Marta Waller, Ed Arnold, Stu Nahan, to name but a few — adopted the same style: Eyes riveted to the camera, no detectable facial expression or vocal inflection, no glamour, no humor, just straight news reading. It was as if KTLA and Fishman had internalized former Vice President Spiro Agnew’s criticism of media bias, and were determined, at least on this one broadcast, to eradicate any trace of it, not even a raised eyebrow. Amid all the happy-talk sangria of its rivals, Fishman and his colleagues poured it straight and knocked it back.

KTLA got good ratings but eventually Fishman’s style must have struck someone as dated. KTLA’s Morning Show was meta-happy-talk, the news with a comic beat, with the anchors’ and reporters’ charm as the point of the show. A little bit of that feeling crept into the nightly broadcast over which Fishman continued to preside. And he did fine! He loosened up, smiling frequently, enjoying the teasing from his younger co-anchors. The underlying ethic was not changed significantly; his show was still the most serious and straightforward of all LA’s local news shows. He added just enough spice.

Fishman never seemed to age. Obviously, he was very sick at the end, but apparently didn’t know it and certainly didn’t show it. So I’m shocked at losing him, even though he was 75 and has been broadcasting continually since 1960. You could say he was the last of his breed, but it’s hard to think of anyone else who was so good at being unexciting.

Did David Chase Tell Journey’s Lead Singer What the Sopranos Ending Meant?

I thought I was done writing about “The Sopranos,” but this is waaay too interesting to pass up:

Rocker STEVE PERRY refused to let THE SOPRANOS creator DAVID CHASE use his classic song DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ in the mob show’s final scene until he knew the fate of the drama’s leading characters.
The ex-Journey frontman kept Chase waiting until three days before the long-awaited finale aired in America on Sunday (10Jun07).
Perry is a huge Sopranos fan and feared his 1981 rock anthem would be remembered as the soundtrack to the death of James Gandolfini’s character Tony Soprano – until Chase assured him that wouldn’t be the case.
Perry says, “The request came in a few weeks ago and it wasn’t until Thursday that it got approval, because I was concerned.
“I was not excited about (the possibility of) the Soprano family being whacked to Don’t Stop Believin’. Unless I know what happens – and I will swear to secrecy – I can’t in good conscience feel good about its use.”

From another version of the story:

The songwriters of Journey’s power ballad “Don’t Stop Believin”‘ were “jumping up and down” when they learned a few weeks ago it had been licensed for use in the final episode of “The Sopranos.” But even they couldn’t believe how it would prove so integral to one of the most memorable final scenes in television history.

“It was better than anything I would have ever hoped for,” said Jonathan Cain, Journey keyboard player, who watched at home with his wife and family.

Tony Soprano chose the song after flipping through a jukebox at a New Jersey restaurant where he dined with his family. The song played in the background as ominous characters flitted about and, right as Steve Perry was singing “don’t stop,” the HBO series did exactly that, for good. The ending infuriated some fans, amused others and intrigued all.

Cain, who wrote the song with Perry and Neal Schon, didn’t know how it would be used when they agreed to the licensing. Cain kept the fact that it was going to be in at all a secret, then watched the episode with his family.

“I didn’t want to blow it,” he told The Associated Press on Monday. “Even my wife didn’t know. She looked at me and said, ‘You knew that and you didn’t tell me?”‘

Journey released the song in 1981, and it reached No. 9 on the singles chart. It has taken a life of its own since then, often reflecting the attitude people had toward Journey itself. “Don’t Stop Believin”‘ brings back fond memories for many but is unbearably cheesy for others.

It’s easy to imagine Tony Soprano, back in the day, taking a young Carmella to a Journey concert.

What does this do to your particular pet theory about the show’s ending?

What song do you think Chase would have used if Steve Perry said no?

Do you think Chase was so committed to using “Don’t Stop Believin’” that he changed the ending to suit Steve Perry?

*UPDATE: I’ve partially replaced the linked story with a different version. Apparently, the one I quoted, which I found here, was edited erroneously to make it seem as if Steve Perry was the one whose wife said, “You knew that and you didn’t tell me?” It was the song’s co-writer Jonathan Cain who describes the scene with his wife, as the second story I’ve linked to now has it.

“Each Day is a Gift” — Advice from Tony Soprano*

That’s what Tony Soprano said after miraculously surviving a gunshot in the belly as he was leaving the hospital in the third episode of the sixth season of “The Sopranos,” which ended last night. He said that, and then went about proving over the remaining 18 shows that the gifts come with strings attached, and some of them are pretty lousy.

I’ve been leading that one-day-at-a-time lifestyle ever since my 15-month sentence was pronounced back in January — with a surrender date of March 30.

I thought it would be obvious to the judicial system that I should be able to stay out of incarceration while my appeal was being considered, so I didn’t really expect I would go away on that date. Now I know that at the federal district level, asking a judge to grant bail for appeal on a case over which he presided is tantamount to asking him to second-guess his own trial rulings. Others reviewing the record might conclude judicial errors resulted in an unfair trial, but that’s not something one’s trial judge is likely to perceive.

While he considered the bail motion, the judge moved my surrender date back to April 27th. When he turned me down, that became the date I expected to have to report unless the appellate court reversed him quickly.  I started shopping for prison clothes.  But now, while the appellate court considers my request, there is no surrender date. The process has no proscribed ending.  I could find out what’s going to happen five minutes after I post this. Or, in two weeks, maybe longer. The appellate judges who will make this decision have very full plates.

If the decision goes against me, I would head off to Taft within a few weeks after that. If not, I will wait out the appeal while conducting my life — working, supporting my family, living like everyone else. There will still be an anvil over my head, but my time horizon will be a little more expansive. I won’t be a “day-to-day” guy. Maybe a “month-to-month” guy. And, if the court agrees with me, a guy whose conviction gets reversed.

Anyway, you might ask, how does this tie into “The Sopranos?”

First of all, what happened last night was about the last thing I would have expected when this 9-episode conclusion began last April 7. No I’m not talking about the sudden blackout in the middle of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” that had much of America screaming their cable had gone out at the worst time. I actually predicted “no final resolution,” like Gilligan’s Island, two months ago.

No, what I mean is the fact that I got to see the final episode at all.

I envisioned my wife or one of my brothers coming to Taft to see me on visiting day, saying, “Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t you rather wait to watch the DVD after you get released?” “Well, yeah, but can you give me a hint?” Within the inmate population, I imagined there would be a no-spoiler omerta. But woe unto him who sang.

Considering that “each day is a gift,” I spent way too much time I’ll never get back this weekend on Television Without Pity’s Sopranos community site, offering up my pre- and post-show perceptions of last night’s episode and the series as a whole. Meanwhile, I’ve neglected this blog, even though lately most of my readers now go to one of my other Sopranos posts.

So here, for your consideration, are a few of the things I wrote last night and early this morning, most of them in response to posters who were furious about the indeterminate final scene. A number of the other posters on this site were expecting a bigger finish; Tony dead, or in the Witness Protection Program, or forced to endure the agony of seeing one of his children die, or his wife. Instead, onion rings, Journey, Meadow trying to parallel park and…over. So you’ll see a lot of back and forth here:

A half hour after the show was over:

OTHER POSTER: 9 Years invested in this? What kind of ending is that????

ME: It’s straight out of Larry David. No hugging. No learning. No getting whacked.

Fifteen minutes later, someone offers the theory that the blackout meant Tony was dead. He was shot by the guy who went into the men’s room. Like Phil Leotardo at the Oyster Bay gas station, Tony never saw it coming. Suddenly, consciousness just stopped and all went dark. But, as was the case with Phil, Tony’s family had to watch. At least according to the theory:

OTHER POSTER: I don’t think there is any ambiguity in the ending and it doesn’t leave the door open for anything further. A faithful viewer should take this to mean Tony is dead.

ME: This is tempting, but I think it’s false. Who ordered the hit and why? Phil’s dead. Butchie is a businessman and made an agreement not just with Tony, but also Lil’ Carmine. Business wins — that’s one of the messages of this ending.

The spoilers suggesting an insane personal revenge motive for Butchie are clearly wrong. He was fed up with Phil.

Carlo is in (Witness Protection.) The Russian’s grudge is with Paulie.

Tony’s only enemy at the moment is the federal government, which is going to grind him down like his mother ground down Johnny-boy, not shoot him in a diner.

Another poster objected that the ending was disappointing because Tony hadn’t been punished for his lifelong crime and murder spree, the proceeds of which sent his daughter to Columbia and decorated his wife with endless bling. I pointed out that his lawyer told him he was almost sure to be indicted.

Other poster: (I don’t) think it is clear that Tony has been punished…

Me: He’s going to prison. He’s going to grow old in prison. Or at least that’s what’s likely to occur. There were three possible endings.

• Life goes on.
• Tony gets whacked.
• Tony gets arrested.

Chase gave us a combination of 1 and 3. What’s the problem?

Then this morning, I just riffed for awhile after reading a few dozen other posts:

ME: After sleeping on it…

Going back to Greek tragedy and Aristotle’s analysis of the structure of drama, on up to the three-act structure taught in every screenwriting class at UCLA, we know how a “play” is supposed to end.

There is no similar body of knowledge about how a TV series is supposed to end. I don’t care what David Chase or Aaron Sorkin or J.J. Abrams says, when they start one of these series, they have no idea if they’re going to get to do even a second episode, and they certainly have no clue if they’re doing 22 or 122. It all depends on factors outside their control — ratings, the actors’ careers, etc. There is no science to this, no successful model of “how to end a TV series” that Chase could consult.

Lots of beloved series from the past had no ending at all. The last episode could have been the third episode. Or they tie up one arc that started in the final season. Or they just stagger to the end, the stories having been drained of any potential long before.

The two best TV endings I can think of were of MASH and Six Feet Under. But both of those series had built-in conclusions that guided their writers. For MASH, we all know the Korean war ended, so an episode about what everybody was going to do next made perfect sense. And the way Six Feet Under focused on death made its last sequence a perfect coda: “You’ve seen Nate die, now let’s see how everyone else is going to die.”

Chase didn’t have an ending like that available to him unless he wanted to kill off Tony. Apparently, he didn’t think that ending made any sense. It would have been too easy, and it wasn’t consistent with Tony’s strengths as a character. He might be a lousy boss, but he’s a survivor, he’s strong in protecting his family, and he’s a good negotiator. All that worked in his favor. Getting (Tony) killed at the end would have felt arbitrary.

(snip)

But a lot got accomplished in this final episode. The Junior v. Tony story that started with episode 1 played out to a beautiful, sad, meaningful and ironic conclusion. Meadow and AJ’s rationalizations for staying in the orbit of their corrupt parents were organic to the story, but also perfect representation’s of Chase’s cynical view of life. That the brilliant Meadow could delude herself that her father was a victim of racism? And yet, ironically, she’s right. The state does have the power to crush the individual, and the individual needs an advocate like Meadow to have any chance. If you see it up close (I have), it’s hard to root for the FBI….

(snip)

The show also closed the loop on Tony/Melfi. Her harsh treatment of him in “Blue Comet” is reflected of course in Tony’s boo-hooing to AJ’s therapist, but I think the real end to that story is near the end, when he’s raking leaves and hears the ducks flying overhead. He seems at peace, for the moment. Maybe Melfi helped him, or maybe it was just the passage of time.

The scene in Holstein’s was a denouement. There was no more story to tell. It was Chase’s opportunity to address the audience directly. Life is dangerous, life is tense, life can be snapped away in a moment, but not necessarily this moment. The onion ring is the perfect symbol — a circle, like the roulette wheel, and an onion — layers.

Someone else pointed out that the family ate the onion rings differently than most people do. They didn’t bite into them, they swallowed them whole. First AJ, then Carmela, then Tony. Putting a piping hot onion ring in your mouth all at once can be painful. But the image of AJ, Tony and Carmela swallowing circles related for me back to the scene a couple episodes ago when Tony is on drugs, watching a roulette wheel, and says to the hooker who gave him peyote: “It works on the same principle as the solar system.”

A lot of posters hated the Journey song. They turn their noses up at Journey as a band from the depths of the 1970s, a mullet-head band. But one poster made a great connection:

OTHER POSTER: “Don’t Stop Believing” was perfect. As Chase has said, and many of us have pointed out, 90 percent of what comes out of the characters’ mouths are lies. I think the song was a nod to that trait in the characters: Don’t stop believing your own lies, because you couldn’t if you tried.

ME: Thank you. I think this is the most satisfying explanation of the final song. It’s the lies we tell ourselves that keep us doing what we’re doing — that keep despair at arm’s length. Mobsters and their families are no different from the rest of us.

It also makes sense for David Chase, the music encyclopedia, that the essence of the show’s ending would be a pop tune. If he wasn’t a TV producer, he’d be a guy who makes personalized mix CDs for everybody he knows.

The only honest character at the end? Junior. Who doesn’t remember anything and thinks he’s being talked to by aliens. But at least he doesn’t lie to Tony, and that reassures Tony that the shooting wasn’t personal.

But the debate about whether Tony was dead or not raged on. I just don’t think he is.

OTHER POSTER: The bathroom guy was at the counter when Tony came in. There is no reason why bathroom guy wouldn’t already have a gun in his pocket and do the job before Tony’s entire family came in either.

ME: I don’t think hit men whack people in crowded family diners in front of Boy Scouts and other children, after they’ve spoken to waitresses who could identify them. Someone with a firmer grasp of Mob lore might correct me, but that would seem like an idiotic place and manner to do the hit, if one was ordered. Tony arrived alone, would probably leave alone, so if it was to happen that night, it could happen while he’s driving. Or any other night, somewhere else. Tony was no longer in hiding.

Because the idea of Tony getting whacked in the diner is so illogical, I disagree that the purpose of the blackout was to make everyone speculate on what happens next. Nothing happens next.

It’s the “life goes on” ending, just edited in a more arty way.

Indeed, life goes on. It feels a little different today, however. After living inside David Chase’s head for all these hours, you start to hear yourself breathe like Tony and you feel your face tighten up into that confused squint at the absurdity of everything that happens.

I envy those, like my son, who have never watched the show. They have 86 hours of the best writing about America of this decade, performed by skilled actors and captured by brilliant cinematographers, still to watch. I’m sure I’ll see them all again sometime, but to see them for the first time…

*UPDATE: One of the finest TV critics on the Sopranos, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, gets the exclusive post-show interview with David Chase:

“I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene.

“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to god,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’ People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”

(snip)

One detail about the final scene that he’ll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the song on the jukebox.

“It didn’t take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I’d never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, ‘What do you think?’ When I said, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ people went, ‘What? Oh my god!’ I said, ‘I know, I know, just give a listen,’ and little by little, people started coming around.”

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn’t know. (“I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.”) He’s relaxing in France, then he’ll try to make movies.

“It’s been the greatest career experience of my life,” he says. “There’s nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say.”

Salute to James Gandolfini

There’s a fine, and somewhat rare, profile of James Gandolfini on the AP wires.  With all the focus on “The Sopranos” auteur David Chase — “The Sopranos” is nothing if not a series that highlights great writing and character development — it shouldn’t be overlooked that Gandolfini has completed what might be regarded as the greatest performance in the history of motion pictures. 

“What???” I hear you saying.  “In your opinion,” my late grandmother would remind me.  

Well…there have been a lot of great actors in movies and TV, Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, Lawrence Olivier.   But none of them have taken a character like this, Tony Soprano, basically an evil man, and managed to make us care about him for 86 explosive hours over the course of eight years.  Maybe they could have, but Gandolfini actually did it.  And he’s doing some of his best acting right now in these dark final episodes, not coasting but stretching.

From the AP piece:

“Good writing will bring you to places you don’t even expect sometimes,” he marvels, meaning himself, and how the material could catch him off guard and take him somewhere new, even as he was performing it.

“It’s a ride that I was along on, with everybody else,” he says.

And like everybody else, he can’t help feeling appalled by Tony’s brutish misbehavior. After shooting a scene where Tony did something despicable, Gandolfini would sometimes upbraid his own character.

“I would say, God, what a -!” Whereupon he helpfully substitutes his unpublishable outburst with a family friendly version: “What a jerk!”

So what’s the truth? Does he like this jerk who was part of him for so long?

“I used to,” he says. “But it’s difficult toward the end. I think the thing with Christopher might have turned the corner.” That was a soulless display: Fed up with his nephew’s shortcomings, Tony pinched shut the nostrils of the gravely hurt Christopher, ensuring he would choke to death.

But wait! Gandolfini thinks a moment, and more of Tony’s recent misdeeds – not homicidal, but clearly depraved – come to mind: “Maybe the gambling thing with Hesh. And maybe the thing with Tony Sirico (as Paulie Walnuts) on the boat.

“It’s kind of one thing after another. Let’s just say, it was a lot easier to like him before, than in the last few years.”

If you can catch it sometime, there’s also a great interview with Gandolfini from about two years ago on “Behind the Actor’s Studio.” 
 

Two updates, or Why Bloggers are Better than Hack Journalists

1.  Could anything be more cliched than this?  Riffing off the same article about minimum-security prisons in The American that I wrote about here, a lazy-minded writer named Peter Carlson goes on autopilot and comes up with a column that soothes every liberal prejudice without engaging any of the issues honestly.  To get himself off — a vulgar way of putting it, I realize, but that’s the way the story feels — he is forced to recast Luke Mullins’ story as an apologia for rich, crooked CEOs by a magazine sponsored by a think-tank devoted to “the welfare of the rich.”

Missing the point entirely, Carlson apparently thinks the story was about this:

Now, white-collar miscreants are forced to mingle with common street-level dope dealers. And they have to work for seven hours a day — sometimes at jobs that are boring and unfulfilling and beneath them. And some of these former country clubs no longer have a tennis court — or even a bocce court! And inmates are forced to wear tacky prison garb instead of their stylish street clothes.

The horror! The horror!

Okay, Carlson, are you feeling better now?  Then why don’t you ponder for a minute or two why the “dope dealers” are in these prisons.  You have to put two and two together.  Minimum security prisons are reserved for non-violent federal felons.  Why are non-violent “dope dealers” doing federal time at all?  Obviously, you’re amused by the notion of white-collar convicts being forced to mix with them, but the “dope-dealers” are human, too — not just characters in your hack morality play.  Have you done any reading about the human consequences of the war on drugs? Didn’t think so.  

And while I’m sure you had a ball mocking the “high-class folks” now being warehoused at taxpayers’ expense, aren’t  you the least bit curious about how many of these supposed powerhouses of capitalism actually belong there — and how many of them are actually “rich?” 

Mullins didn’t interview any CEOs; my guess is because he didn’t run into any.  The way our system works now, the CEOs generally aren’t the prosecutors’ targets.  CEOs are too wealthy, too well-insulated and, if they were aware they were doing something wrong, they made sure not to get their hands dirty.  In a typical white collar case of the past five years, the ”higher-ups” work with the government to nail the “lower-downs,” which makes the government’s job so much easier. The feds get to look like they’re doing something important, while the stockholders interests are protected.

Obviously, I’m sensitive on this subject, but it burns me that a prestigious newspaper like the Washington Post publishes the writings of a pampered fool like Peter Carlson who, instead of doing any real thinking or reporting, just rolls out the creaky boxcars of received wisdom.   If it’s my fate to go to a minimum security prison in the near or distant future, it doesn’t scare me in the least; and I certainly don’t plan on going in with an attitude that I’m better than any of my fellow inmates.  But there’s a side of me — petty, to be sure — that wishes for the same fate for a Peter Carlson, a scribe who thinks he’s above everyone — CEO and “dope dealer” alike.  How long would that snarky smile last?  Measurable in seconds.

2.  It took her almost a week, but it was worth the wait:  Ann Althouse took a careful, Tivo-aided look at last Sunday’s episode of “The Sopranos,” the one in which Tony kills Christopher after a car accident.  It’s a tour de force, and I say that even though I disagree with her ultimate conclusion — that Tony is now dead.

I post these paragraphs just as a sample.  You should read all of it:

Carmela makes Tony a cup of coffee with that expensive expresso machine Paulie gave her in the April 22 episode. Tony says “It’s good.” At least something is good. They have a conversation that brings out the mother theme. (I note that Paulie’s aunt/mother Nucci also dies in this episode, and there’s a fair amount of childish whining by Paulie on the subject.) Carmela, crying over Christopher’s death, says that when Tony was in the hospital — back during that coma-dream — “It was Christopher who held me.” This mother-son image prompts Tony to bring up the baby seat in the SUV after the crash. It had a tree limb in it, so if the baby had been in the car, it would have been “mangled beyond recognition.” Carmela stomps off, and Tony is left holding out his empty arms toward her in a way that says this boy has no mother.

The following scene is Tony’s real session with Melfi, and he’s talking about mothering. He’s disgusted that Christopher’s mother is showing up now and soaking up all the sympathy, when she didn’t mother him well during his life. He says, “I hand carried him through the worse crisis he ever had.” “Hand carried” is an odd expression, but it conveys the image of a mother carrying a baby. Of course, it’s completely ridiculous for Tony to think he ought to be getting the sympathy when he’s the murderer. Tony thinks Chris was ungrateful, that his hand carrying only inspired hate. Well, yeah. It consisted of offing Adriana.

This sequence of mother-themed scenes culminates in a gathering of various mothers in the Soprano living room. Tony wanders out of his bedroom and looks down on them from the upstairs railing. Christopher’s baby is there. Christopher’s mother says: “She doesn’t know. Isn’t God wonderful that way?” Christopher’s wife pulls out her large breast and as the baby takes it, Tony snaps open the cell phone. He’s calling some guy in Las Vegas. “I need a suite.” The guy offers a plane too. Enough of the female. Bring on the phallic symbol. Escape from the family sphere into the realm of sin.

“Kennedy and Heidi,” and Chris-ta-fah, R.I.P.

Last night’s “Sopranos” episode cinches it for me.  The baby-boom generation has finally produced its Great American Novel, and this is it. 

More than any novel or movie I can think of, “The Sopranos” is an honest, faithful reflection of the heart of American culture.  It’s about everything we’ve learned and lost growing up with the H-bomb, the Cold War, the assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan, Woodstock, drugs, TV, classic rock, yuppie consumer culture, New Age, Prozac, the dot-com bubble, Bill Clinton, global trade, 9/11 — all of that and probably more. “The Sopranos” has no detectable political agenda, but it speaks eloquently to the corruption that has seeped into all our relationships, our business dealings, our culture, our consciousness. 

The brilliant irony of how Christopher Moltisanti met his maker!  Sure, Tony delivered the coup de grâce, strangling him by pinching his nose after the accident.  But the accident was caused by two seemingly nice, decent girls driving a late model car, who preferred to let the unknown victims of a horrible accident die than risk what would have been a minor sanction against their driving privileges.  We have grown to loathe and fear the moral relativism of Tony and his crew as they justify dozens of murders and ruined lives. But what Chase is saying here is that, under the right circumstances, Tony’s ethics are everyone’s, including our children’s.

Like our country’s greatest writer, William Faulkner (whose stories seldom left a small fictional region of Mississippi called Yoknapatawpha County) David Chase and his writing crew display America through the eyes of a geographic sub-culture, New Jersey Italian-American criminals. ”The Sopranos” gets a lot of its comedy from putting our culture’s evasive buzzwords in the mouths of these thugs.  Like this exchange from Season 5:

Tony Blundetto: It’s hard to believe. My cousin in the old man’s seat.
Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri: It’s like “Sun-Tuh-Zoo” says: a good leader is benevolent and unconcerned with fame.
Tony Blundetto: What?
Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri: “Sun-Tuh-Zoo”. He’s Chinese Prince Matchabelli.
Silvio Dante: “Zoo”! “Zoo”! “Sun-Zoo”, you fucking ass-kiss!

It helps if you’re old enough to remember that Prince Matchabelli was the name of a perfume company that advertised on TV a lot in the 1960s.  Paulie was not the first to mix that name up with Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”  But what really makes it funny is the idea of mobsters elevating themselves by citing Sun-Tzu, a chic cite for all enlightened corporate executives. 

Again and again, Chase has rubbed our faces in the sheer evil and vulgarity of Tony Soprano and his associates, through some of the most violent and ugly scenes ever depicted.  Then he shows just how well Tony fits into the upper-class milieu –worrying about his kids, enjoying sushi, engaging in comforting nostalgia about his ethnic roots and, of course, medicating himself under a psychiatrist’s direction.  He’s just another executive who made it to the top of his chosen profession.  He has what so many Americans have, and what most Americans want.  Was his rise to the top that much dirtier than others who are lauded by our culture? 

It’s a horrible question, an insulting question.  But that’s what Chase has been asking through 83 episodes of “The Sopranos,” never more starkly than last night.  For all our ideals and pretensions–and our hallucinations of enlightenment–are we baby boomers so sure we haven’t passed the ethics of sheer expediency onto our children?  

The Iraq War Books to Come

George Tenet, the head of the CIA from 1997-2004, has just published a book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.  He was interviewed about it on 60 Minutes last night, and will be on Larry King tonight.  I’m sure we’ll see him soon on Charlie Rose, The View, Live with Regis and Kelly, Jon Stewart’s show, and, if it was still on the air, you might see Tenet in animated form on Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

You probably know what this book’s all about, what makes it newsworthy:  Tenet’s claim to have opposed the invasion of Iraq, and his denial that when he told President Bush that evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs was a “slam dunk” that he really meant it was true.  The NY Times’ Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book:

Alternately withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous, “At the Center of the Storm” is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members. Mr. Tenet depicts an administration riven by factional fighting between the State and Defense Departments, hard-liners and more pragmatic realists, an administration given to out-of-channels policymaking, and ad hoc, improvisatory decision-making.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” he writes of a war that has already resulted in more than 3,300 American military deaths, at least 60,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and already cost more than $420 billion. Nor, he adds, was there “a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change.”

Mr. Tenet’s book also ratifies the view articulated by former military, intelligence and Coalition Provisional Authority insiders that the White House repeatedly ignored or rebuffed early warnings about the deteriorating situation in post-invasion Iraq. Mr. Tenet writes that the C.I.A.’s senior officer in Iraq was dismissed as a “defeatist” for warning in 2003 of the dangers of a growing Iraqi insurgency, though it was already clear then that United States political and economic strategies were failing. Although the trends were clear, he adds, those in charge of policy “operated within a closed loop.” In that atmosphere, he says, bad news was ignored: the agency’s subsequent reporting, which would prove “spot-on,” was dismissed.

 Tenet’s book has not gone down well with either Bush supporters or Bush foes.  Arianna Huffington is one of many to ask the sensible question, “Why Didn’t George Tenet Just Resign?”

Poor George Tenet. Flogging his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, on 60 Minutes, Tenet tells Scott Pelley about how his phrase “slam dunk” was misused by the Bush administration. Tenet, you see, didn’t mean it was a “slam dunk” that Hussein actually had WMD, he only meant it was a “slam dunk” that a public case could be made that Hussein had WMD.

I can’t really see that the distinction matters, but Tenet apparently does. “I became campaign talk,” Tenet tells Pelley, “I was a talking point. ‘Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.’ Well, let’s not be so disingenuous. Let’s stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let’s tell, let’s everybody tell the truth.”

Great — except he’s about four years too late. Tenet seems to believe there’s a major distinction between lying and standing by silently while others lie, and then proudly receiving a Medal of Freedom from the liars.

And Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his Slate review that Tenet was not just ineffectual and wrong about the invasion of Iraq; he was ineffectual and wrong about 9/11.  Hitchens recalls one of the creepiest things I remember reading about the immediate post 9/11 response. It was in Bush At War by Bob Woodward.  Hitchens uses that quote as a launching pad for an irate attack on Tenet’s credibility and character:

…(I)t was a very favorably disposed chronicler (Woodward) who wrote this, in describing Tenet’s reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet told Boren. “I’ve got to go.” He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: “I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting.” Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his “gut” but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to “HUMINT” under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It’s for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet’s book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was “not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept” this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn’t mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his “slam dunk” vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:

Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.

As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: “We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program.” It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president’s office. And it’s pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that “there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet “knew” of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.)
Despite this assault, Tenet stands to profit handsomely from this book, a fact that will not go unnoticed by others currently still serving the Administration.  If a policy goes wrong or becomes unpopular, Tenet’s success shows that no mea culpas are necessary; anyone can distance themselves from unpopular decisions they helped make, even someone as high up as the Director of the CIA.

Still to come: 

The Army I Wanted Wasn’t the Army I Had: Unknown Unknowns Known, By Donald Rumsfeld

Paul Wolfowitz: It Ain’t All About the WMDs, by Paul Wolfowitz

More Years of Magical Thinking, by Laura Bush

The Audacity of Audacity, by Dick Cheney

and…

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy President, by George W. Bush

And it turns out none of them wanted to invade Iraq.  Who knew!?

Soprano Spoiler Futility*

What’s interesting about the constant search for Sopranos spoilers — a big source of traffic for this blog recently because I wrote a post a year ago that had the words “Sopranos spoilers” in the title — is how irrelevant they turn out to be, even if they’re true.

Go onto some of the forums I’ve linked to, and you read these almost operatic endings that “my cousin who works at HBO” or “a guy who worked at an ice cream shop they’re using for a location” convey with gleeful certainty.  Most of these spoiler scenarios are frauds, I suspect. They’re written by the same people who compose the e-mails we get from deposed Nigerian royals who want to give you a $3 million reward.

Even the ones that have a possible ring of truth always omit the ironic, dream-logic context that makes these events meaningful. What actually happens on the show is usually telegraphed far in advance, or easy to predict if you follow the story. But how it is presented — that’s where the surprises are, and no spoiler can convey that.

Like when Big Pussy’s betrayal was discovered and he was murdered. In most of these spoiler discussions, it would have been described just that way: Tony finds proof that Big Pussy has been wearing a wire for the FBI, and along with Silvio and Paulie, murders him on a boat. That was not a surprising outcome. We knew Pussy was wearing a wire for months. It was grimly inevitable.  What made it interesting was Tony finally gave in to his subconscious suspicions. Remember? Tony was suffering from food poisoning, had feverish dreams in between attacks of vomiting and diarrhea. In one of those dreams, he’s in a fish market on the boardwalk. A fish starts talking to him. It’s Pussy, who says that, deep down, Tony always knew he was working for the government.

I could just see how that would’ve gone over on one of these Sopranos spoilers sites. “My cousin delivers bagels to HBO, and the climax of the episode is Tony having this weird dream.”

In last night’s episode, what really happened?

• Tony’s on a losing streak. He’s lost a lot of money gambling. His gambling debts cause conflict with his old friend Hesh and with his wife.
• Tony feels responsible for the family of the slain gay mobster Vito. He tries to figure out how to help his widow deal with her son, who is acting out in extremely peculiar ways.
• Phil (who had murdered Vito in rage over his homosexuality) refuses to assist Tony, even though Vito’s widow is his cousin, and it was in the name of “family honor” that he killed Vito.
• Tony and Carmela resolve their argument with an admission that they’re both worrying about whether Tony’s going to die or get arrested.
• Hesh’s girlfriend dies mysteriously. Tony consoles him by repaying a debt he incurred from gambling.
• A.J. proposes to his girlfriend and she accepts, but soon afterward, she breaks it off.
• A “tough-love” organization — paid for by Tony — comes to Vito’s widow’s house late at night and takes Vito Jr. to a camp somewhere out west. He’s terrified.

But if you saw the episode, was that really what you saw? Are any of those plot points so compelling? If anyone had told you in advance that these things were going to happen, would you have really “gotten” the episode without seeing it? For most TV series, like “24,” if someone tells you what’s going to happen, you don’t really need to see it. But “The Sopranos” is a violent mob story as reimagined by a hybrid of Edith Wharton and James Joyce. And, like those authors, the events they describe can be kind of ho-hum, routine, life creeping forward sorts of events where the significance is all in the subtext.

Yet last night’s episode seemed incredibly significant. Fear of death or imprisonment looms over Tony now like never before. The scene in which Vito, Jr. is taken away evokes one of Tony’s biggest fears — the late-night knock at the door.  Vito Jr.’s mother wanted to move her family to Maine to get her son away from the rumors about her dead husband’s sexual orientation — a clean getaway.  But Tony won’t let himself get away that easily, so he doesn’t let Vito’s family either.

In an earlier episode, Tony expressed knowledge that 80 percent of his peers are murdered or imprisoned — terrible odds that he’s beaten so far, but he keeps on betting, his money and his life.  In their argument, he tells Carmela that, having survived a gunshot wound that should have killed him, he’s still “up,” even though he’s lost a lot of money.  What’s he going to do with his winnings?  The awkward scene when he repays Hesh seemed like a concession — Tony clearing the ledger, resolving things while he’s still got a chance.  He had planned to pay him off with proceeds from a big gambling score; instead he uses working capital, taking chips off the table.

A.J.’s proposal scene was pathetic, and you know this sad kid’s humiliation will become Tony and Carmela’s heartbreak. Plus, there’s an ironic contrast:  Tony commands loyalty under pain of death and damnation; A.J.’s fiancee won’t even stay engaged to him for a week.

I’ve only watched this episode once. The second time is always more rewarding and revealing, which is more proof that spoilers for this particular show are meaningless. But, hey, keep looking for them — I like all the new visitors!

* Edited, 5/1/07

The Best Posts About the Sopranos

Since so many of my readers have been coming here lately in search of Sopranos spoilers, and presumably clicking away disappointed in the lack of dish, I’ll do the next best thing:  Here are some of my favorite places to read about the Sopranos, especially the most recent episodes:

• Slate’s TV Club dialogues on the Sopranos.  In the past, they’ve had organized crime experts and psychologists.  This half-season, they’re just using a couple of good writers, Timothy Noah and Jeffrey Goldberg.
• The Television Without Pity forum on the latest episode.
• A brief post by Ann Althouse, plus some good comments.
• MSNBC’s “Sopranos Body Count.”
• TV Squad has a contemplative take.

What everyone seems to be picking up is:  The overt references to The Godfather (Tony with his tomato plants, the christening scene in the previous episode, the brief reign of the New York boss ending with a bullet in the eye like Moe Green got),  the eerie resemblance of the young Asian man incarcerated with Uncle Junior to the Virginia Tech madman, and the prevailing sense that things might end “not with a bang, but a whimper.”

That line is originally from T.S. Eliot, by the way, and that’s what “The Sopranos” reminds me of:  Being an English major.   For all its violence, comedy and great characterizations, what’s most notable “The Sopranos” is the richness of its symbolism, the subconscious parallels between two things that seem unrelated, but connect in our minds and in the characters’ minds, especially Tony, Carmela and Christopher. 

We see the three of them try to make sense out of their world on this deeper level in a way that compares with how we follow another trio’s subconscious thoughts: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the main characters in Ulysses.  Part of the joke, though, is that the poet in Tony is the same psychic realm from where his murderous thoughts seem to arise.  Tony vents his rage verbally, but he is most dangerous when he is listening and watching.  Tony is a great listener and watcher

Like last night: For some reason Tony wanted to know if it was Paulie who, years earlier, told Johnny Sack about an offensive joke made at the expense of Sack’s wife, leading to all kinds of headaches for Tony.  What made him think of it?  Listening to Paulie prattle on about his mob life with some prostitutes.  Then listening to one of the prostitutes repeat some of the information back to him in bed.   Somehow, these and other observations come together in his mind; and as a result, he almost murders Paulie on the boat, because sharing the joke with Johnny Sac was a sign of Paulie’s disloyalty.  With war looming with the New York family that Johnny Sac once headed, this is a detail that suddenly alarms Tony.

Water is everywhere in “The Sopranos,” always has been, but especially in these past three episodes.  Tony and Bobby and their wives on the lake.  The FBI interested in what Tony might be learning about Muslim terrorism at the Port of Newark.  Tony and Paulie on a fishing boat.  Tony and Beansie chatting by a swimming pool. Even Junior pissing his pants.  He has to take medicine to control his bladder, but the medicine leaves him too sleepy.

Tony can only control the flow of words from Paulie’s mouth by killing him, but he doesn’t do it.  Water is where bodies are dumped, where bad memories are forgotten, only to float back up again.  Keep an eye on the way water is used in the remaining episodes if you want clues (er, I mean ”spoilers”) to how it’s all going to end.    

LA Times’ Triple-Dip of Imus

Three fascinating pieces in today’s LA Times about the demise of that tedious (and, I think, clearly racist) old fart Don Imus.

First, in the news section, a story that should get a lot more attention: Imus’ unique role as a conduit for liberal and Democratic politicians to white, male voters:

With Imus’ show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.

“This is a real bind for Democrats,” said Dan Gerstein, an advisor to one of Imus’ favorite regulars, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “Talk radio has become primarily the province of the right, and the blogosphere is largely the province of the left. If Imus loses his microphone, there aren’t many other venues like it around.”

Jim Farrell, a former aide to 2000 presidential candidate and Imus regular Bill Bradley, said the firing “creates a vacuum.”

This week, when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) was asked by CNN why he picked Imus’ show to announce his presidential candidacy, Dodd explained: “He’s got a huge audience; he gives you enough time to talk, not a 30-second sound bite, a chance to explain your views; … and a chance to reach the audience who doesn’t always watch the Sunday morning talk shows.”

This is sad on so many levels. “Come for the racism, stay for the liberal talking points?” Because, let’s face it, Imus has been doing this kind of schtick for years, as documented here, here, and here, just for starters. But I guess Imus functioned as a kind of good-old-boy cultural guide for elitist Democrats, as best illustrated by his famous “Stop it, you’re going to ruin this,” scolding to John Kerry after the disastrous speech at Pasadena City College. Imus was trying to protect the Democrats’ chances to win over white males in the 2006 election, and he saw Kerry’s insult to the troops as dangerous.

There is at least one good liberal talk show host who seems to have an affinity for white males and vice-versa: Ed Schultz. He’s not a favorite of the left blogosphere, but then, for that matter, neither was Imus.

The next LA Times Imus piece that caught my eye was from an unlikely source: The pathetic “humor” columnist on the op-ed page, Joel Stein. It’s really worth reading! Stein explains that he first discovered Imus in junior high and liked him because he called everybody a “weasel.” Then, in high school, Stein switched to the funnier Howard Stern and forgot about Imus.

I was pretty shocked when Imus reemerged as a political cognoscente. Senators and journalists happily suffered the fool. Imus asked people such as John McCain dumber questions than Stern asked strippers, and they laughed it off. But without the sexy little giggle.

That’s because society’s aspirationals use politics as a refuge for their stupidity. They sucker you into long conversations at dinner parties about how Bush is stupid and how Bush is also really stupid. They feed on political blogs and newspaper columnists that reflect their side and parrot the best one-liners they can find. These are the people who furiously scream about policy decisions mostly because they need to furiously scream about something. If they were one rung down the socioeconomic ladder, instead of yelling about Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria they’d be shouting about Kobe’s refusal to pass.

This isn’t to say that politics aren’t important or interesting. It’s to say that most people who talk about politics aren’t important or interesting. And Imus was their king. He got to pretend to be smart with actual smart people.

The arena of politics is too confined to encapsulate all the topics worthy of intellectual debate. It’s as though we all go to a college where everyone has to major in political science. Newspaper columns, talk radio and cable news channels rarely have serious debates about art, literature, technology, sex, fashion or religion. If it weren’t for Monica Lewinsky, newspapers still wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of the thong. Look at the lengths Britney Spears had to go to just to inform us of long-standing fashion changes in personal grooming.

The more serious side of the LA Times emerges in the penseés of Tim Rutten, their ponderous, old-school media columnist.  In his piece, he asks the really important question:  How has Imus gotten away with making these kinds of comments for so long, while retaining the fawning support of the political and media elite?

This guy has been doing this stuff for years — insulting and disparaging not only African Americans but Jews and gays.

This week the Anti-Defamation League distributed a statement pointing out that it has been lodging protests about Imus’ anti-Semitic remarks for years and nothing has been done. There are examples it cites that, frankly, can’t be quoted in this column because they’re too purely offensive, including a characterization of Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz that’s straight out of Julius Streicher. (He habitually referred to the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. with a similarly racist epithet.)

Why did he get away with it?

IT happened because he made millions for his network and syndicators and covered himself with a very shrewd strategy. He positioned himself as the thinking person’s shock jock and, when he wasn’t dishing out racism, prejudice or misogyny, invited onto his show a virtual who’s who of the national news media and publishing elite. Those people were only too happy to ignore their responsibility to call Imus on his reprehensible behavior because they profited from the promotional opportunities his program granted them. He helped sell books and journalists’ careers.

Another devil’s bargain, in the same mold as the Democrats’.  What does this say about the cynicism of the writers, broadcasters and politicians who seek to lead and instruct us, that they would find in Imus a useful tool?   Because from what Rutten and the various Democratic spokespersons quoted above are saying, we can expect the sales of books by journalists to drop, along with the percentage of white males voting Democratic, if Imus isn’t there to shine his peculiar light on them.

The mind reels at the implications.

The Sopranos, A Look Back

You didn’t realize it, but this is the Sopranos Decade. Everybody kicks up to the big guy, but the big guy is a whack job.  That’s pretty much the ’00s in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Maybe you missed the whole thing.  Hey, you want to get in on the zeitgeist, you gotta pay!  The zeitgeist is too good for basic cable.  

Okay, here:  Get caught up in seven short minutes!  Right here.

That’s the Way It Was: CBS Evening News in 1975

Take a look at this.  It’s a CBS Evening News broadcast on January 17, 1975 — including the ads! 

If you are a new-media type, under 30, and only watch the network news during disasters or elections, watching this will give you a much better sense why these broadcasts were so important.  A few impressions:

• What’s that rattling sound at the beginning and the end of the broadcast?  Those were teletype machines.  
• The clips from the press conferences are longer, less pithy and visually empty.  This must have been before the PR people figured out that people don’t listen to the news, they watch it; and before they drilled senators, bureaucrats and other spokespersons that if the cameras are rolling, your job is to repeat, repeat, repeat, the talking points script.  People used to be interesting on TV — even boring people.  Now they’re afraid of being interesting.
• Philosophically, the differences between then and now are vast.  It’s not just a simple matter of right vs. left.  It’s as if the basic Milton Friedman precept of “no such thing as a free lunch” didn’t exist.  Energy, the topic at hand, is presumed to be a good that government can allocate, with only the means up for debate.
• Walter Cronkite, however, provides no evidence of any of the political bias the right wing imagines permeated the news back in the 70s.  His summary of the positions of Congressional Democrats, the Republican president, automakers, environmentalists, etc. strikes me as completely fair and comprehensive; delivered without rolling eyes or arched eyebrows.  As the network news audience has shrunk, the bias seems far more pronounced now.
• You could get tires for $18???
• “High nutrition” = a bowl of sweetened cereal, buttered toast, juice and milk. The cereal was called “Bucwheats,” but it isn’t clear if buckwheat is an ingredient.  However, maple syrup was, hence the commercial is set in Nevada near a bunch of maple trees.
• “Munich” was just as potent a metaphor then as now.
• The United States:  Arms merchants to the world.
• You had three choices for over-the-counter pain relief:  Aspirin, buffered aspirin and a product called Anacin, which was made out of aspirin with caffeine.  This was before Tylenol, and long before Advil.
• How quickly we forget:  The world’s primary terror target in 1975 was London. Civil liberties suffered greatly as a result.
• A story about oil tankers in Banfrey Bay, Ireland was illustrated with a ridiculous commercial by Gulf Oil — an Irish ditty, complete with pennywhistle, about “bringin’ home de i-il, me boys” — designed to argue for deep-water oil ports in the US.  The story shows that these kinds of terminals lead to big oil spills that kill fish.  What were Gulf Oil’s flacks thinking!? “Hey, we don’t care about oil spills, we’re dancing an Irish jig!”
• Whatever happened to “breeder nuclear reactors?”  In light of global climate change, will these come back?
• Want soft skin?  Vaseline Petroleum Jelly.  Want lively looking hair?  Johnson’s Baby Shampoo lets you “baby your hair.”
• If you were arrested in an anti-war demonstration on the capitol steps on May 5, 1971, the ACLU won you a $10,000-per-demonstrator settlement.  Did anyone ever get the money?
• A sad little story about Richard Nixon in San Clemente, less than a year after his resignation.  He was sick. He liked talking about sports.  He rode around in a golf cart.  Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra paid him visits, as did Bebe Rebozo.  Anyone remember Bebe Rebozo?  Pretty soon, Nixon faced the end of his free postage privileges. The roses had to be donated: No one to take care of them.
• Anyone remember Skitch Henderson?  He was the bandleader on the Tonight Show during the early Johnny Carson years. Anyone remember he went to prison? (Apparently, he got some bad tax advice…from Leonard Bernstein and Henry Mancini.)
• The insane claims of advertisers!  Ground roast and instant coffee (Taster’s Choice) taste the same?  If that was true, do you think Starbucks would go to all that trouble? 
• Nothing about celebrities. The closest was the story of George Halas’ ex-wife getting season tickets to Chicago Bears games in her divorce agreement.

And that’s the way it is, Friday, January 17, 1975!

The First Episode of Gumby from 1956–on YouTube

“He’s on the moon all right.”

 

As my son might say, computer animators can’t top this.

No, Really, I Don’t Know Anything about the Sopranos!

Should I feel guilty?  I’ve been getting a lot of traffic lately to a post I put up about a year ago about The Sopranos.  The point of the post was that there were a lot of spoilers on the Internet the weekend before the first episode of the new season, and avoiding them would take some willpower. 

The post has not a single spoiler in it.  And even if it did, it would be a year out of date.

Well, if you type Sopranos Spoilers into Google, guess whose entry shows up on the first search page?  The search page entire marketing departments and spin-off PR agencies are built around.  I am so optimized.  And I wasn’t even trying. Nobody paid me $50,000 to consult for them on how to do this.  It just happened.

This isn’t the first time.  My Elliot Mintz post from last year still gets lots of hits, and until someone basically copied my stuff into Wikipedia, I was the #1 result of any search for the Paris Hilton/John Lennon publicist.  (I’m still a healthy #3.)  But at least that post had information in it.  You go to my Mintz post, you learn something.  You can impress girls with it.  You can win bar bets.  You can feel in the know.

Not so with my Sopranos post.  It’s just a bunch of pointless drivel.  It was meant for my smaller core of regular readers who check in here occasionally for a glimpse into my mind.  A glimpse taken on a particularly sad and mediocre day, catching me obsessing about a damn TV show.  

A few days ago, I updated the post to underscore its total uselessness.  But they keep coming! So this is my last shot, my last chance to get my integrity back. 

Attention: If you’ve come to my blog for a clue as to how the Sopranos are going to end, you won’t find it here.  I don’t know.  Go here instead.  It has a bunch of credible sounding spoilers in it.  I wish I hadn’t gone there.  I really didn’t want to know what it purports to tell you. It’s probably not true anyway.  But since you’re obviously so determined…have at it.

Looking Like You’re Doing Something Important*

The successful campaign to get the Nevada Democratic Party to pull out of a debate sponsored by the most successful cable news network represents the essence of vanity politics.  I hate to break it to MoveOn.org and other Democratic activists, but, at least as of this writing, people who watch Fox News are still, surprisingly, allowed to vote.   By shunning their network of choice, aren’t you shunning them as well? 

This editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal was a bit sarcastic, but apt:

Hard-core liberals can’t stand the Fox News Channel. Passing a television that’s tuned to the conservative favorite forces many of them to close their eyes, cover their ears and scream, “La la la la la la la la la!” Then they dash to their computers and fire off 2,500 e-mails condemning the outlet, none of which are ever read.

But liberals’ aversion to Fox News has finally gone over the top. The Nevada Democratic Party had agreed to let the right-tilting network co-sponsor, of all things, an August debate in Reno between Democratic presidential candidates. Party officials were serious about drawing national attention to the state’s January presidential caucus, the country’s second in the 2008 nominating process. What better way for the party to reach conservative and “values” voters who might consider changing allegiances?

But the socialist, Web-addicted wing of the Democratic Party was apoplectic. The prospect of having to watch Fox News to see their own candidates would have been torture in itself. So they set the blogosphere aflame with efforts to kill the broadcast arrangement, or at least have all the candidates pull out of the event. Before Friday, the opportunistic John Edwards was the only candidate to jump on that bandwagon.

You’d think the deal called for having Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter mock the candidates between comments. No, even unfiltered, unedited, live debate between loyal Democrats couldn’t be entrusted to Fox News.

The approach of outfits such as MoveOn.org is so juvenile it’s laughable. Imagine if every political organization created litmus tests for news organizations before agreeing to appear on their programming. Republicans would have boycotted PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, National Public Radio and The Associated Press decades ago.

So how did the state party, which voluntarily agreed to this debate, get out of it?  By accusing Roger Ailes, Fox News President, of being insensitive to Barack Obama by making the following joke at a radio/TV correspondents’ dinner:

“It’s true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said, deliberately confusing the Illinois senator’s name with that of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. “I don’t know if it’s true President Bush called [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’ “

Say what?  This is a joke at President Bush’s expense, not Obama’s.  Get it?  See, what Ailes was trying to say was that Skippy the Bush Chimp Hitler is soooo dumb, he doesn’t know the difference between… oh, never mind.  I forgot.  You never laugh at any jokes that don’t have the words “wanker” or “fucktard” in them.

I realize it’s easy enough to write an e-mail or a blog post, so perhaps you can’t argue that this campaign to impose reverse censorship on Fox News didn’t cost the blogging left a whole lot of time.  But, isn’t there something else going on the Democrats should be focusing on? 

*Update, 3/11/07.  In a column about Gov. Bill Richardson’s Nevada strategy, the Review Journal’s Eric Neff subtly shows why this was such a self-sabotaging move by the Democrats.

Richardson, the New Mexico governor with the best resume to be president, knows the West. Democrats rightly believe the path to the White House in 2008 runs through the West, where voters like their guns and open space almost as much as they dislike taxes and government intrusion.

Nevada has done nothing politically to suggest it doesn’t fit that mold. Voters have declared the state pro-choice and approved medical marijuana at the same time they have sought to restrain taxes and have elected fiscal conservatives statewide.

But unless Democrats reach out to Republicans and independents in Elko and Esmeralda counties, you can forget about Nevada going blue. And unless Democrats reach out to all voters nationally, the White House isn’t going to change parties.

When you reach out to people who don’t know you — whether on Fox News or in Carlin — you’re more likely to open people’s minds. The true believers won’t budge, but there are plenty who will.

But MoveOn.org apparently doesn’t want Democratic candidates to get moderate or independent votes.  Instead of winning elections, they apparently would rather exhibit their disdain for Fox News.  Well, hope that works out for you guys.  

What Artists Can Do

The HBO mini-series Rome is the stuff of nightmares.  Murder was done routinely to achieve political as well as financial ends during the period depicted in the show — a period of civil war that accelerated the bloodletting, to be sure. If the historians consulted for that show are correct, Rome’s elite routinely consigned innocent people including loyal soldiers to an early death merely to acquire what they wanted, and faced no sanction.  Further down the social ladder, slaves, prostitutes, even children were frequently sacrificed for the most trivial of reasons, their murderers also seemingly unpunished.

In America today, and in the countries that also built their governments and judicial systems on Enlightenment principles, the life of every individual is seen as deserving of full protection by the state.  Even if a murder victim is a criminal in the act of committing a crime, our system is supposed to work to redeem that lost life.  In war, the common understanding now is that a soldier’s death is an unusual event, a breakdown in the system, to be avoided whenever possible. 

The jihadists’ willingness to sacrifice themselves as well as the lives of innocents is what avowedly gives them whatever advantage they’ve got.  That we cherish the lives of individuals is interpreted as a sign of our weakness and decadance, says Osama Bin Laden.  The jihadists know they can use our belief that every person has a fundamental right to life against us.  They draw on a more ancient understanding of justice, one that relatively devalues individual life, remorselessly sacrificing thousands of people in the name of crusades for God and power.

How did we get from there to here?  From Rome to the U.S. Constitution?  From the Dark Ages to today?  From nightmares to dreams? 

According to this review on WSJ.com, author Lynn Hunt suggests (in “Inventing Human Rights”) literature made a crucial contribution:

The definition of human rights, she argues, “indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason.” Accordingly, rights continue to evolve “because their emotional basis continues to shift.” Jefferson’s assertions resonated, she says, thanks to “brain changes” that had occurred in the 18th century. “Ordinary people had . . . new understandings that came from new kinds of feelings.”

But where did these new feelings come from? Ms. Hunt offers two answers. First, new forms of art, especially the epistolary novel, focused on the lives of ordinary people and thus encouraged a broadening and deepening of empathy. “Can it be coincidental,” she asks, “that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century–Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761)–were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of ‘the rights of man’?” Second, the public felt a growing revulsion toward judicial torture, a practice she describes in grisly detail. This revulsion, in turn, stemmed from a new respect for the human body, in particular its individuality.

The reviewer, Joshua Muravchik, finds her theory “not entirely convincing,” by the way. It feels right to me, however.  Who better than an artist, a writer, to go outside the hierarchy of power to show in memorable ways what “the little people” normally trampled by history think and feel; to educate our imaginations to see souls, not masses?

The jihadis need a good novelist.  Or a mini-series.   

“I Think I Swallowed a Shotglass.”

For Thanksgiving weekend, here’s a 60s-era CBS documentary clip of a Frank Sinatra recording session — a clinic in the art of singing.  Look at the delight on his face.  No, not in this photo — on the video below.

The song is “It Was a Very Good Year.”  Because every year we get to be on this planet and in the company of the people we love is a very good one.  By definition.

On Fox, O.J. Simpson, and Mike Piazza

I gather that if you spend enough time in the highly rarified strata where the biggest media executives dwell, you just lose all your wits. 

It’s a voluntary form of sensory deprivation; to have enough money and enough people demanding your time that you decide you must completely detach yourself from ordinary people.  A form of character mutation must take place, per the theories of Charles Darwin. Certain powers of intuition grow weaker, starved for energy by the parts of your brain that must expand to encompass the business dealings of a global media empire entrusted with billions of investor dollars. 

To be an “A-list” publisher, editor, literary agent or broadcasting executive today bears no resemblance to how such people lived their lives in the past; when they drove their own cars, took taxis, rode subways, frequented local pubs and sat with everybody else at pro football games.  The income and experience gap between the executive and the audience was much narrower decades ago than it is now.  

All of this must explain the O.J. Simpson debacle.  Judith Regan and Rupert Murdoch, and the anonymous but nearly as powerful suits who directly report to them, must just be unable to look normal people in the eye and understand what they are seeing there.  I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t have immediately recognized the stupidity of giving Simpson a massive public platform, and paying him a fortune to spin gruesome fantasies, masked confessions and bullshit rationalizations about the crimed he committed but absurdly denies:  Decapitating his ex-wife and an acquaintance.  How could they not have expected the victims’ survivors to object publically?  How could they have convinced themselves that this mercenary exercise would provide the victims with “closure?”

In this morning’s New York Times coverage of Murdoch’s decision to drop the show and the book, a familiar name popped up, one I hadn’t heard in awhile:  Peter A. Chernin, president and COO of the Fox Entertainment Group, which was responsible for the now-scuttled TV broadcast. 

Los Angeles Dodger fans recall Chernin all too well — for an almost equally clueless move.  From the archives of DodgerBlues:

May 15, 1998… a day that will live in infamy. After rejecting the Dodgers’ $84 million contract offer, (Mike) Piazza was traded to the Marlins along with Todd Zeile for Gary Sheffield, Charles Johnson, Bobby Bonilla, and Tourettes-inflicted Jim Eisenreich. While Sheffield has certainly paid dividends for the Dodgers, putting up solid numbers for three straight years, the Piazza trade marked the beginning of the end of Dodger tradition. It was Fox’s first major move, and it showed how much they knew about baseball: nothing. The move was engineered by two TV guys, Peter Chernin and Chase Carey. Fred Claire, as lousy as he was, would never have made such a move–trading a certain Hall of Famer in his prime, the cornerstone of the organization, a guy loved by fans. It still makes us sick to think about it.

Well, I guess Chernin’s not that great of a “TV guy,” either.

By the way, in case you were wondering what happens when a big TV spectacular is cancelled, and a mega-big book is withdrawn, here’s a primer from the same NY Times’ article:

In an interview last week, Judith Regan, the publisher, said ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, had signed a contract with “a manager who represents a third party” who owned the rights to Mr. Simpson’s account.

Because the News Corporation and ReganBooks decided on their own to cancel the book and the television special, that money is likely to still have to be paid.

A spokesman said Ms. Regan declined to comment yesterday on the book’s withdrawal.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said some books had already been shipped to stores. Those books will be recalled and destroyed, Ms. Crum said.

Last Friday, Borders announced that it would donate the net proceeds from sales of Mr. Simpson’s book to a nonprofit organization for victims of domestic violence.

Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Borders, said she received a call from HarperCollins yesterday afternoon notifying her that the book would be recalled. No explanation was offered for the decision.

“I think everybody knows why,” Ms. Binkley said.

The rights to the book could still be sold to another publisher, said the News Corporation executive involved in the negotiations.

There is precedent for a recalled book to be sold to another publisher and then to the public. In 1990, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, bought the rights to “American Psycho,” a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after the original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew from publishing it because of the novel’s graphically violent content.

As for the television interview, it could also be offered to other outlets, although at least two other networks, ABC and NBC, have reported that they turned it down before it was accepted by Fox. Ms. Regan, who conducted the on-camera interview with Mr. Simpson and is presumed to own the rights to it, could still seek a sale to either a cable channel or even a pay-per-view company.

The fact that the interview already exists on tape, executives at Fox and News Corporation said, means it is likely to turn up somewhere, perhaps on the Internet.

See, nobody ever pays for blunders like this.  By the time you’ve reached the level where you have the power to f— up to this degree, it’s too late — you can’t go back to where the normal people live.   You’d die, and your colleagues know it.  In the real world, the Piazza error would have cost Chernin his job.   But at his level, you’re kept around — and history can repeat. 

If you’re looking for a Christmas present for anyone at Fox involved with this fiasco, well, I don’t think they could ever have enough of these:

A Toast to Bob Barker

Did I forget to send my good wishes to Bob Barker, who announced his June 2007 retirement last week? The link is to a piece in Slate, extolling him as the “last gentleman” of daytime TV.

Bob Barker, a host who projects cool control and avuncular warmth at once, is now in his 83^rd year on Earth, and his 35^th presiding over this twinkling heaven. An unfailingly graceful screen presence, Barker announced this week that he would hang up his microphone—a natty corded model with a distinctively slender, and mildly kinky, silhouette—next June. A notable chunk of his core audience has retirement on the mind, too, if the commercials are any guide: “Life begins at 65…” “Free mobility consultation…” “What’s the Beano doing out?” But the show, now as ever, is fun for all ages—snowbound tweens, stoned collegians, hausfraus in want of tender stimulation.

Yesterday, in a gray one-button suit and a royal-blue French-cuffed shirt, Barker looked like James A. Baker III at an Ocean’s Eleven tryout. Barker’s Beauties were dreamy in knee-length button-front dresses of a red somewhere between cardinal and Chianti; a video artist could do worse than to create a loop endlessly extending the moment in which two of them, coiffed like Douglas Sirk heroines, demo’d a pingpong table (actual retail price: $578).

I, too, have fond memories of Barker, going back to my 60s childhood, and I wrote about them here. From that post, I’ll repeat one my favorite bits of found video on YouTube — Bob Barker almost losing his cool at a desperately dense contestant. En-joy! Joy! Joy? Joy???

Democrats as Censors?

I get a lot of e-mails from the Democratic party. Howard Dean, Rahm Emmanuel and a guy named Tom McMahon are frequent visitors to my in-box.  This one was from McMahon and it was called “RE: A Despicable, Irresponsible Fraud.” Here’s how it started:

Dear John,

This is it: crunch time for getting the slanderous ABC television docudrama “The Path to 9/11″ yanked off the air. The network schedule has this slanderous attack on Democrats slated to start on Sunday night, September 10, at 8 o’clock — and as long as it stays on the schedule, we have work to do. Take a minute right now and tell Disney president Robert Iger to keep this right-wing propaganda off our airwaves:

http://www.democrats.org/pathto911

Here’s the good news: the suits at ABC and the Walt Disney Company have started panicking under pressure, thanks to your ferocious response to the outrageous decision to put this irresponsible miniseries on the air. But until Disney quits defending its plan to broadcast conservative propaganda — fraudulently presented to Americans as “based on the 9/11 Commission Report” — the company should plan to keep taking every bit of heat we dish out.

I really don’t get the party’s strategy — at all. Here are the problems with it that I see:

1) They’re calling attention to something that they don’t want people to see. Which means curious people are more likely to want to see it. Human nature.

2) They’re associating the Democratic Party with censorship, e.g. boycotts and pressure to push for prior restraint of a program. Why aren’t they mindful of the precedent they’re setting? “If we don’t like it, take it off the air,” is now an official party position. I have a feeling that’s going to come back to haunt them when the right wing objects to a pending TV program that offends them. Dems are supposed to be for free speech.

3) A related point: Will the entertainment leaders so critical to the party’s fund-raising agree that such pressure tactics are appropriate? Has anyone asked Rob Reiner, or David Geffen, or Larry David how they feel about this?

4) The position they’re defending isn’t credible. Clinton turned over the White House keys to Bush in January 2001. The attack was in September 2001. It’s pretty apparent the plannng for the attack started before 2001, and was preceded by a number of Al Queda-sponsored attacks on American assets that all took place during Clinton’s tenure. So why is it out of bounds to criticize the Clinton Administration’s record on this issue? How could you review the “path to 9/11″ and avoid doing so? I don’t hear Bush people complaining about what is supposed to be some very harsh criticism aimed their way in this show. Which leads to…

5) The program is going to air. People will watch it, more than would have because of curiousity. Many will be expecting it to live up to the description: “Right-wing propaganda.” But I bet it won’t strike most viewers that way. “What are they fussing about?” will be the response, I bet. Or worse: “What were they trying to hide?”  The net effect will be to give the show more credibility than perhaps it deserves. If “The Path to 9/11″ isn’t a drooling right-wing fantasy, it will be regarded as fair, and its critics will be taken as over-sensitive.

Could be that the party is once again trying to catch up with the left-wing blogosphere, which has been hysterical on this topic, and probably has been pressuring the party to “stand tough.”  It’s fine for grassroots, independent people to be upset. But the party itself should be above this sort of thing. It should have adopted a more sober “wait and see” approach, keeping powder dry until after the show aired rather than demanding that the show be censored. Really, the Democratic Party, as an institution, should have done nothing whatsoever to call attention to it.

Am I wrong?  If you understand the point of the party’s strategy, please, enlighten me in the comment section below.

Update on Swag Bags and the IRS

Randi Schmelzer’s piece in PR Week (link for subscribers) on the IRS’ position that “swag bags” are taxable straightens out some of my own confusion in the previous post on this topic. The IRS has determined that the swag baskets are not gifts, and that is why they will be taxed from now on. From Schmelzer’s story:

If any organization is truly benefiting from this news, however, it’s the IRS. Focusing on both recipient reporting and the filing of Form 1099 by merchandise providers, the IRS’ outreach program includes letters to entertainment industry groups and tax professionals, an online FAQ, and plenty of media relations, according to Nancy Mathis, a DC-based public affairs specialist at the IRS.

“Any individual’s requirement is to pay tax on income,” she said. “You are not required to pay taxes on gifts, [but] our position is that these… are items given with the expectation of something in return, that use by a celebrity will enhance sales, and the products themselves serve as compensation.”

Okay, I’m a celebrity, and I get a gift basket that has some items in it I wouldn’t be caught dead using. Can I return them so I won’t have to pay taxes on them? And, if am given an item I don’t want, can I avoid taxes by declaring that I un-endorse it? “Hi, I’m a celebrity, and for the record, I never wear Axe body spray. The gallon of Axe body spray I was given in a swag bag went straight down the kitchen sink.”

Schmelzer’s piece includes quotes from PR firms whose business is focused heavily on filling these bags with swag:

Everyone is talking about it,” said Kari Feinstein, whose eponymous PR firm organizes brand, charity, and Young Hollywood-melding “style lounges.” “Even the guy at the car wash asked me about it.”

General consensus among celebrity gift-oriented firms is that while there is reason to proceed with caution, the demise of swag may be greatly exaggerated.

Feinstein said brands want to be in touch with stars, and vice versa. “That [won't] stop,” she added. “It’s too beneficial.”

“The whole intersection between Hollywood Boulevard and Madison Avenue isn’t going away,” added Lash Fary, founder of LA-based entertainment marketing firm Distinctive Assets. “It’s too important to the brands I work with.”

It might be important to the brands, but the key question is: Is it important enough to the celebrities to go through the hassle and expense of taking these products home? Celebrities are smart enough to understand that they help sell the products, but if you make it hard for them, why would they bother?

The art of real-life product placement is that you slip these products into celebrity hands stealthily, and then make sure someone else sees it, hears about it and photographs it. The celeb is working for you, and it’s only costing you the wholesale price of the item you gave them. If it’s costing the celebrity? Seems like that changes the dynamic, and puts us back in the world of paid endorsement contracts. But maybe the PR pros who specialize in this business are more creative than me.

The PR Tax (UPDATED)

Swag bags are part of popular culture now. Both “Entourage” and “The Sopranos” built episodes this season around the lavish gift-giving to celebrities at awards shows and film festivals. So it stands to reason that the IRS, which sometimes functions as a Ministry of Envy, would decide to start taxing these gifts that can be worth as much as $100,000, and would probably have continued to escalate if the government hadn’t stepped in. From the LA Times’ coverage:

“There was an awful lot of publicity about the ever-increasing value of these baskets,” IRS Commissioner Mark V. Everson said. “And somebody said, ‘Why don’t we do something about this?’ It was just so clearly taxable we felt we had to step in.”

The IRS reminded Oscar presenters before this year’s ceremony that noncash compensation was just as taxable as a paycheck. Everson said the effort was linked to his drive to bring “a sense of fairness that resonates throughout the system. You can’t let the rich get away with something.”

Legally, these baskets might be deemed gifts, but in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and the thought behind swag bags is purely mercenary — product-placement PR. The thought being that if Will Ferrell wears the sunglasses or wristwatch, while enjoying the comp week at a pricey resort, someone might see it — in People magazine, or the National Enquirer. That’s a huge bang for the buck, worth more than advertising at a fraction of the cost. Guests visiting his home might enjoy his new plasma TV and want one like it. Friends might smell his new cologne and ask him for its name. That’s “WOM,” word-of-mouth publicity. All to give brands the right kind of visibility, and associate it with the coolest of the cool.

The product-placement concept is growing in many directions; I wonder if the IRS’ decision will have an impact.

For example: If you read the PR blogs about PR blogging, you frequently see giveaways mentioned as a key strategy to get bloggers on your side. The suave PR person is supposed to note that a trusted someone is blogging about electronic games, say; or maybe writes a lot about wine. An e-mail is sent: “I’m enjoying your blog tremendously. You’ve got a lot of cred. Hey, would you like to try …” and offer (never unsolicited!) a free sample, a beta test, whatever. If the blogger likes it, the suave PR person will encourage them to write about it.

Will these giveaways also be taxed? I detected a note of panic in these comments:

“Wow — this is insane,” J. Dubb, the marketing director for Five Four Clothing, the maker of high-end urban apparel, said when informed of the IRS announcement. (At this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Five Four was handing out cartloads of clothing in its crowded freebie suite.)

“It’s hard to say what the impact will be, but it will definitely be a hit,” Dubb said. “But we think [celebrities] like our stuff enough that they’d be willing to pay tax.”

Britt Johnson, whose Los Angeles events company Mediaplacement organized a freebie suite at last year’s Golden Globe Awards, said past recipients of swag may soon hesitate when offered ostensibly free products. “You are going to see a lot of people turning things down,” Johnson said, “and a lot more people donating to charity.”

I agree with Johnson, not Dubb. The prospect of paying a tax will be a massive disincentive. For the marketers, the idea that their gift baskets would be auctioned off for charity is also somewhat of a disincentive, because the point was to adorn celebrities with these items, not a bunch of nobodies who win silent auctions.

The solution is obvious. Every item in every gift basket should come accompanied by an endorsement contract. Be a little more business-like, folks. I’m not a tax accountant, but it seems to me that if you get the celebrities to sign something that says “I will wear your high-end urban apparel to assist in your promotional efforts,” then it’s no longer a gift. Perhaps there is another tax consequence, but since it’s an upfront exchange of value, I would guess it’s more favorable.

UPDATE:  Randi Schmelzer’s piece in PR Week (link for subscribers) straightens out some of my own confusion, as well as the Times’.  The IRS has determined that the swag baskets are not gifts, and that is why they will be taxed from now on.

If any organization is truly benefiting from this news, however, it’s the IRS. Focusing on both recipient reporting and the filing of Form 1099 by merchandise providers, the IRS’ outreach program includes letters to entertainment industry groups and tax professionals, an online FAQ, and plenty of media relations, according to Nancy Mathis, a DC-based public affairs specialist at the IRS.

“Any individual’s requirement is to pay tax on income,” she said. “You are not required to pay taxes on gifts, [but] our position is that these… are items given with the expectation of something in return, that use by a celebrity will enhance sales, and the products themselves serve as compensation.”

Okay, I’m a celebrity, and I get a gift basket that has some items in it I wouldn’t be caught dead using.  Can I return them so I won’t have to pay taxes on them?   And, if I return an item I don’t want, am I required to publicize that fact?  “Hi, I’m a celebrity, and for the record, I never wear Axe body spray.  The gallon of Axe body spray I was given in a swag bag went straight down the kitchen sink.” 

—————

On the same subject, I enjoyed PR Week’s Julia Hood’s humorous editorial on product placement in “Entourage.” You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

As soon as a program becomes popular, it is apparently doomed to become little more than a platform for a parade of brands. Entourage in particular has transformed from a sly comment on the peculiar balance of power and egos in Hollywood into a fantasy camp for young guys who suddenly have unlimited sums of money to spend in the shopping mecca of the planet. Motorcycles, video games, flat-screen televisions, and Las Vegas have all been promoted through the adventures of our winsome foursome, and the producers are secure in the knowledge that their marketing partners are gleefully reaping the benefits of reaching their target demographic.

In truth, it probably doesn’t matter that someone like me is put off by the preponderance of stuff that Entourage, and many other programs, is awash with. I’m not in the elite group of 18- to 25-year-old boys these marketers covet. But this is an example of a program that is buckling under the weight of its own success, forgetting that consumers are savvier today than they used to be and will see right through those curiously blank beer bottles the boys of Entourage seem partial to, as opposed to the lovingly displayed wine label of choice.

I’m speculating that the “curiously blank bottles” are to be filled in later (perhaps for syndiction) with digitally-added brand names, as described here, and that I mentioned here.

Bob Barker’s Weird Place in the Pantheon

The other day, I wrote what some readers must have thought was a very strange post comparing two famous octogenarians, Tony Bennett and Fidel Castro. The point was entirely personal. Here are two famous men who were part of my earliest memories, who still share this planet with me, and still do what they’ve been doing since I started paying attention to the world outside my sandbox.

If I’d thought of him, I might have added another: Bob Barker.

Bob Barker was my companion through the days and weeks of my youth in Illinois and Connecticut whenever I was too sick to go to school. I was healthy most of the time, but when I got sick, I got really sick. The way I remember it, both strep throat and pneumonia seemed to hit me at least once each winter, and put me in bed for a week or two. Actually in my parents’ bed, where it was easier for my mother to bring me juice and crackers, to make sure I took my medicine; and where I could watch TV.

Cartoons ended each day by 9. The Three Stooges and Soupy Sales wouldn’t come on until about 3. Soap operas, with their crescendoing organ accompaniment and long, meaningful looks, were a joke to me.

That left game shows: Allen Ludden hosting “Password.” Hugh Downs hosting “Concentration.” Art Fleming hosting “Jeopardy!” with Don Pardo as the off-screen announcer. Bill Cullen hosting “The Price is Right.” Gene Rayburn hosting “The Match Game,” in the innocent years before every question became a sexual double-entendre. Monty Hall hosting “Let’s Make a Deal,” with Carol Merrill massaging the air around the bedroom sets and convertible sofas they gave away as prizes.

Bob Barker hosted the strangest game show of the era, “Truth or Consequences.” Suave, Brylcreemed Bob would ask contestants an impossible question, and give them virtually no time to answer it. Then he would order them to participate in a humiliating stunt — cross-dressing was a typical theme, in an era when a man never wanted to be seen wearing an apron. But debonair Bob, he made it all seem okay. As a kid, I yearned to be that smooth.

Later, after I pretty much stopped watching game shows, Bob switched to “The Price is Right,” which is still on the air. (The only broadcaster to be on the air continually longer than Barker is the Dodgers’ Vin Scully.) Under Barker’s reign, “The Price is Right” became yet another show where Bob could be cool while the contestants embarassed themselves. A smart movie producer should have cast Bob Barker as the Marquis de Sade or Torquemada. Apparently, his act wasn’t universally admired, as he spent much of the 1990s battling lawsuits for sexual harassment and discrimination. However the litigation turned out, he is still on the air.

Barker turns 80 later this year. What prompted me to think about him was seeing the following video on YouTube; a clip from a recent episode of “The Price is Right” that, if you stay with it, will make you laugh. The title of the clip is “One of the Worst ‘The Price is Right’ Players in History.” So bad, that even the unflappable Barker has to take a seat.

The Last Words

Looking at the list of Emmy nominations as posted by the LA Times’ “The Envelope” site, one thing stuck out. TV is supposed to be the writers’ medium. But the highest-profile writing nomination are at the very bottom of the list, long past the time when most browsers will quit scrolling.

Strangely, the first writing nominations to appear on the list are those for “nonfiction programming.” The “fiction” awards follow (among other things) Children’s Programs, two subcategories of Reality programs, all the sound-mixing awards, prosthetic makeup, and stunt coordination.

So in tribute to the writers of the writers’ medium, here are their nominations only:

Writing for a Comedy Series
“Arrested Development: Development Arrested,” Fox
“Entourage: Exodus,” HBO
“Extras: Kate Winslet,” HBO
“My Name Is Earl: Pilot,” NBC
“The Office: Christmas Party,” NBC

Writing for a Drama Series
“Grey’s Anatomy: It’s the End of the World, as We Know It (Part 1 & Part 2),” ABC
“Grey’s Anatomy: Into You Like a Train,” ABC
“Lost: The 23rd Psalm,” ABC
“Six Feet Under: Everyone’s Waiting,” HBO
“The Sopranos: Members Only,” HBO

Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program
“The Colbert Report,” Comedy Central
“The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” Comedy Central
“Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” NBC
“Late Show With David Letterman,” CBS
“Real Time With Bill Maher,” HBO

Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries
Movie or a Dramatic Special: “Bleak House (Masterpiece Theatre),” PBS
“Elizabeth I,” HBO
“Flight 93,” A&E
“The Girl in the Cafe,” HBO
“Mrs. Harris,” HBO.

Writing for Nonfiction Programming
“American Masters: Ernest Hemingway
Rivers to the Sea,” PBS
“American Masters: John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend,” PBS
“How William Shatner Changed the World,” The History Channel
“Penn & Teller: Bull–: Prostitution,” Showtime
“Stardust: The Bette Davis Story,” TCM

Who will win? I don’t know. The point is advertising and PR. If you get a nomination, there is some tangible benefit to the show’s ability to increase its ratings. If you win — even better. You can go into the fall season saying “Watch the Emmy-winning comedy, ‘Arrested Development!’” Except “Arrested Development” is cancelled. Maybe that was a bad example.

Is there a lot of wagering on the Emmys? Many words will be expended trying to predict the winners. I don’t know why. Does anyone remember the winners two days later?

If I watch the Emmys, I will root for the writers of “Six Feet Under.” That last episode, the one that got nominated, was magical. The rest of my viewing was too spotty for me to have an opinion. The shows I watched this year were “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “24,” “The Office,” “House” and “Entourage.”

And, oh yeah, “Law and Order,” although a 10-year-old rerun is just as good as a new episode, and I often can’t tell the difference. My favorite “Law and Order” flavor is the one with the great Vincent D’Onofrio as a genius cop who spits in people’s faces like a rabid parrot. That program wisely stays out of the courtroom. The courtroom scenes in the original recipe are pathetic. I just spent a month in a courtroom. “Law and Order’s” writers might want to try the same thing.

Speaking of legal shows, “Boston Legal” was often good for an absurd laugh, although I notice the show’s nominations are all in drama categories. Do people really get caught up in the drama of “Boston Legal?” Maybe they put it in the drama category because at least one storyline per show has a politically correct angle that allows the actors to make speeches about public policy. Those speeches would not last two seconds in the courtroom I was in. Anyway, the point of “Boston Legal” is the clownish William Shatner waving guns around, puffing cigars, working around his approaching dementia, and pulling his pants down in court. You’d think he was auditioning to play Jack D. Ripper in a “Dr. Strangelove” remake.
My wife and I also liked “The Comeback,” but HBO told everyone who would listen that the network considered the show a failure. Well, we didn’t, and we’re glad Lisa Kudrow got nominated. Hers was the most cringe-making performance of the year, topping even Larry David.

I also hope the Emmy voters don’t give the comedy writing award to David Letterman’s show. I’ve been a fan of Letterman since the 70s, but his show lately has been bland and predictable. They always seem to get nominated for an Emmy and frequently win. Stop encouraging them, I say. Make them work harder to entertain us.

Borrowed Time in San Francisco

Matt Stone and Trey Parker are the greatest satirists of our era, and like the true satirists of centuries past, they are essentially conservative, in the classic sense of the word. Whatever is new, trendy, popular, wherever they find complacency or conventional wisdom — that's where they attack.

Some non-classic conservatives have embraced them (there is actually a book entitled "South Park Conservatives") as allies, but the Stone/Parker version of conservatism has no more respect for the religious right or neocon policies than it does for liberal pieties.

It was two liberal sacred cows that got savaged in this week's South Park: Hybrid vehicles — or to be specific, the pompous vanity of some hybrid owners — and the city of San Francisco.

As Kyle discovers, not only does everyone in San Francisco drive a hybrid; every time a San Franciscan passes gas, they bend over and take a big whiff of it. In one scene, Kyle's father offers a party guest a choice of wines, but the guest only wants a empty glass, which he proceeds to position behind him. He lets one rip, brings the glass up to his nose and inhales deeply. The children of San Franciscans are so repelled by their extremely self-satisfied parents, they have no choice but to take drugs in massive quantities.

As ridiculous as some San Franciscans might be, in the next few weeks there will be many opportunities to worry about their fate. April 18th is the 100th anniversary of the great 1906 quake and fire. A nearly 300-mile rip along the San Andreas Fault that, in a matter of seconds, shifted one part of California up to 24 feet, the quake has had no parallel in California since then. The only U.S. comparison in immediate memory would be Hurricane Katrina's massive devastation of New Orleans. In terms of loss of life, it was about the same as 9/11.

Since 1906, the Bay Area has been relatively fortunate. The 1989 Loma Prieta quake was a major, catastrophic event, but nowhere near as powerful or widespread as '06. But Loma Prieta was the first major quake to hit S.F. since 1911. By comparison, as this USGS chart shows, there was a relative flurry of large and damaging smaller quakes in the area. From 1836-1911, there were eight quakes of magnitude 6.5 or higher.

This month's American Heritage magazine has an essay written by former U.S. Geological Survey official John Dvorak. He takes us on a walking tour of San Francisco and looks for traces of the pre-1906 city, the quake's damage and, chillingly, the areas most likely to suffer massive damage in the next big one.

The whole essay's worth reading, but I found this passage especially haunting:

I hurry west along Washington Street three more blocks, passing the dazzling white Transamerica Pyramid, the most distinctive building in San Francisco’s skyline, and reach Montgomery Street. At last I am standing on firm ground. Montgomery Street, often called the financial center of the West, roughly follows the original shoreline of San Francisco Bay, which ran close to the base of Nob Hill. The six blocks from here to the current waterfront are all “made” ground, land literally manufactured by filling the bay with sand, garbage, rotting trees, and other detritus. Scores of abandoned wooden ships were scuttled and lie beneath this section of San Francisco. Made ground is loose and unstable. It takes on the character of a liquid when shaken, such as during an earthquake. Imagine standing on a pile of loose sand. Shuffle your feet back and forth quickly. They sink into the sand. The same thing happens when the ground shakes around a building that is not set on firm ground.

Most of the destruction and the five deaths in San Francisco caused by an 1868 earthquake, which originated across the bay in Hayward, happened here. Extensive damage also occurred here in 1906, as well as in other areas of the city built over made ground. The City Hall, then at the corner of McAllister and Larkin Streets, had been built on shaky underpinnings—the site of the city’s first cemetery. The 1906 City Hall was the grandest and largest municipal building on the West Coast. It took more than 20 years to build and only two minutes to collapse. Today the main branch of San Francisco’s library occupies the site, housed in a six-story building that looks more like a bunker than a municipal ornament. Its inside is braced with steel rods and girders, some set at inconvenient angles. At the main entrance, inside a glass case, are artifacts, including bottles, broken chinaware, and a wedding ring.

For 30 years I have walked the streets of San Francisco, taking photographs. My goal is to document the city before the next major earthquake. I have often wondered how San Francisco will look after that. Which buildings will fall and which will still be standing?

The South Park parody of San Francisco is dead-on, but the other side of all that city's silliness is that its people know, at least subconsciously, that their idyllic home is in the path of nature, and that they could someday be required to act as heroes to save their neighbors and their beloved, smug, self-satisfied metropolis. And we know that's what they'll do. San Franciscans are tenacious and loyal to San Francisco above all.

It's interesting to note that America's two most beautiful cities (New Orleans being the other) are also its two most perilous. Is it beautiful in those places because they are so close to nature's unfathomable power? Or does their beauty assure they will survive even the deadliest blows?

Still Speaking Up for John Lennon

Publicist and former local radio personality Elliot Mintz was moved to speak on behalf of his friend and former client John Lennon today, attacking two productions that seem to wallow in the same kinds of morbid fantasies about the singer that motivated his killer to murder him in the first place.

The pay-per-view outfit IN DEMAND has announced plans for a pay-per-view seance to contact Lennon, which will "show psychics travelling to sites of significance to the former Beatle, including the Dakota apartment building and a town in India where he went on a spiritual retreat. The show will culminate as psychics, colleagues and confidantes sit at a seance table for 30 minutes surrounded by infra-red cameras that can capture any 'presence' or spirit that enters the room."

Meanwhile, Peace Arch Entertainment Group is in production on a film called "Chapter 27," which is based on the life of Lennon's deranged murderer, Mark David Chapman, who is to be portrayed by Jared Leto. The film is due to be released next year.

Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, has issued no comment on the seance, so Mintz spoke for himself. From the BBC website:

"John Lennon was an amazing communicator of heart, mind and spirit," Mr Mintz said. "He still speaks to those who choose to listen to his recordings. That was the medium he chose to speak with us."

The programme was "another example of the misuse of John's affirmation of life as opposed to the preoccupation of his death", he said. "The proposed show strikes me as being tasteless, tacky and exploitative."

And from Reuters, this reaction to the Leto film:

"The producers of the film will be granting an assassin's dream. It will also send out a message to other disturbed people that there is a fast track to international fame," said Mintz….

Paul Sharrat, producer of the pay-per-view seance thinks what he's doing is okay because "Lennon was very interested in the spiritual world." The producer of such probing documentaries as "Unlocking Da Vinci's Code," and "The Secret KGB UFO Files," Sharrat had previously produced a lucrative pay-per-view seance to contact Princess Diana — which, alas, failed to find the doomed lady in the ether. But, Sharratt apparently figures, since he can get millions to pay for it, why not try again with John? He said he is "making a serious attempt to do something that many millions of people around the world think is possible."

Students, that last sentence is a good example of bad spin. How hard was it to notice that Sharrat didn't specifically include himself among the "millions?" So if you are a believer in talking to the dead, what Sharrat really did was insult all of you while plotting to take your money.

Must… Avoid… Sopranos… Spoilers…*UPDATED for 2007

*Update, 3/7/07.  I’ve noticed this year-old post is getting a lot of traffic lately.  I’m sorry. This was about the first half of the new season.  I still won’t spoil it in case you are waiting to watch it on DVD, but for the rest of you…hey, how about that, whoo, imagine that, mm-mm-mm.

The thing I can’t figure out about The Sopranos is, how much of what happens is foreshadowing of the ultimate end of the story, and how much of it is just stuff that happens in episodic TV?  I think of the Sopranos as like a novel, unfolding chapter by chapter until a climatic end.  But what if it isn’t?  What if it’s just a show, like “Bewitched,” where, other than the characters getting older and paunchier, there is no final resolution. 

Those castaways never got rescued from “Gilligan’s Island,” after all. (At least not during the series’ run.) There’s no guarantee Tony will end up in witness protection, dead or in prison.  It might just … end.  How would you feel if that happened?

Here is the original post:  

This is probably a good weekend to avoid too much random Internet surfing if you’re a Sopranos fan. Hundreds of TV critics got copies of a DVD with the new season’s first four episodes and, as a result, hints are being left all over the place about some big thing that’s supposed to happen during Sunday night’s premiere.

I don’t know what’s odder; someone who would post the secret and then label it “spoiler alert,” or someone who can’t resist the temptation to find out. I’m certainly not in the first category, and for the next 48 hours I must try to avoid fitting into the second.

Because so many people use TiVo, even if you’re not a TV critic, you should be careful not to disclose twists. My brother Seth and I are both fans of “24,” where, on Monday, a beloved character met a horrific fate. I wanted to get Seth’s reaction, but luckily I didn’t assume he’d seen it and wrote him a somewhat vague e-mail.

He probably still hasn’t seen it, so for his sake anyway, I will say no more.