Tonight, tomorrow you will see people dressed up in their Halloween finest.  For your viewing pleasure I present others who are dressed up in their, well, regular party clothes.  But it might as well be for Halloween, right?

The following content is NSFP/W (what does NSFP mean?).  Click below for more….

Eden Muse in rainbow fashions!

Allen Faulkner.  And yes, those are hooks holding that metal contraption in place.

Ms. Easy sparks it up!

Quill the Clown as a barcode

When most of us think of Halloween movies, we tend to think of horror flicks, psychological thrillers, or bizarre mind-benders. The Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, or What Lies Beneath, or 12 Monkeys. But since 1993, a stop-motion animation musical has become as much a part of American Halloween culture as any horror franchise.

Boys and girls of every age
wouldn’t you like to see something strange
Come with us and you will see,
this our town of Halloween

So begins the opening song of what is perhaps the most misunderstood Christmas movie of all time, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Yes, I’m serious. For all the references to pumpkins, death, trick-or-treating, and the Boogie Man, The Nightmare Before Christmas is actually a Christmas movie. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last 16 years and are unfamiliar with the plot, here’s the basics (spoiler warning).

• Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King and unofficial leader of Halloweentown, finds his annual Halloween hijinks unfulfulling.
• Jack discovers “Christmastown” and decides to claim Christmas as his holiday instead of/in addition to Halloween.
• Jack convinces the residents of Halloweentown to help him, but Sally thinks that something is horribly wrong.
• Sally tries to convince Jack to abandon his plans for Christmas, but after he doesn’t, she has a premonition of just how bad it’s going to go.
• Jack has Santa Claws Claus kidnapped, and he starts delivering the presents that Halloweentown made for Christmas around the world.
• Jack has an attack of conscience, rescues Santa, and restores Christmas to its rightful place.

This isn’t a plot of a horror flick, or a thriller, or even a brain-bender. It’s a plot of redemption, of discovery, of caring. The two main characters each have a conscience, even if one of them doesn’t recognize it until it’s almost too late. Halloween movies view conscience and caring as a weakness that get you killed, imprisoned, or driven insane. It’s Christmas movies that illustrate the power of caring for your fellow people (although perhaps “people” shouldn’t apply to the various residents of Halloweentown).

And there’s no such thing as redemption in a Halloween movie – you survive and drive off/kill the monster, or you die a gruesome death. Redemption and it’s related theme of renewal are cultural themes of Christmas. Christians say that Christ was born to save us, and he saved us through his sacrifice and resurrection, not with a chainsaw or by traveling through time to harvest virus samples. And the Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, presages the return of the sun and the renewal of the earth and life itself.

That’s not to say that Nightmare doesn’t have Halloween elements, of course. It does, after all, take place in Halloweentown and is largely populated with a cast of Halloween miscreants (vampires, witches, a mad scientist, scarecrows, monsters, and the aforementioned Oogie Boogie Man). And while Jack rescues Santa from Oogie’s chamber of Halloween horror, he does so by killing Oogie. And this is after Jack sings:

And for the first time since I don’t remember when
I felt just like my old bony self again.
And I, Jack, the Pumpkin King.
That’s right, I am the pumpkin King! Hah! Hah! Hah!
And I just can’t wait until next Halloween
’cause I’ve got some new ideas that will really make them scream
and, by God, I’m really gonna give it all my might!
Uh-oh, I hope there’s still time to set things right….

So Nightmare isn’t your standard Christmas movie. It’s not A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, or even The Polar Express. It’s not sickly sweet and heavy on the moralism like It’s a Wonderful Life, or brain candy like White Christmas. It’s more along the lines of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the related Scrooged, or the 1964 version of Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer – scary and disturbing on several different levels, but with a good message.

So by all means, enjoy your Nightmare at Halloween, but perhaps you should watch it yet again during the Christmas season, as it is truly intended.

And finally, everything worked out just fine.
Christmas was saved, though there wasn’t much time.
But after that night, things were never the same—
Each holiday now knew the other ones’ name.
And though that one Christmas things got out of hand,
I’m still rather fond of that skeleton man.
So many years later I thought I’d drop in,
and there was old Jack still looking quite thin,
with four or five skeleton children at hand
playing strange little tunes in their xylophone band.
And I asked old Jack, “Do you remember the night
when the sky was so dark and the moon shone so bright?
When a million small children pretending to sleep
nearly didn’t have Christmas at all, so to speak?”
And would you, if you could, turn that mighty clock back
to that long, fateful night, now think carefully, Jack.
Would you do the whole thing all over again,
knowing what you know now, knowing what you knew then?”
And he smiled, like the old Pumpkin King that I knew,
then turned and asked softly of me, “Wouldn’t you?” (closing narration from the soundtrack)

Lyrics from The Tim Burton Collective

Image Credits:
Touchstone Pictures

The two of you get nice and sauced, stagger towards the subway and eventually make it back to Sesame’s $4.5 million penthouse, where you proceed to wildly bump unprotected uglies and find out the other’s dirty secret: That you both cry during sex.

Warning for those with heart conditions, delicate eardrums towards 2:00.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’re honey child to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
Well slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

- U2

Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have been with us for a very long time. Science fiction, as well, has been with us since Mary Shelley found herself in a bet with Lord Byron about the possibility of writing a new kind of horror, one not grounded in the gothic.* So the presence in our popular culture of stories based in unreality of one form or another is certainly nothing new.

It seems to me that there’s been a lot more of it lately, though. I don’t have the means to conduct the kind of thorough study we’d need to prove the point, but a cursory examination of what’s on television demonstrates that a good bit of our attention is being occupied by various hyper-realities.

• In this TV.com list of most popular shows, at least 20 deal with the supernatural in some form.
• A quick look at the networks’ fall line-up reveals 11 non-reality-based shows. Add to this Chuck, which will be back mid-season sometime.
• That list doesn’t include cable, of course. In addition to SyFy (or whatever the heck it’s being called these days), HBO is currently burning it up with True Blood, an exceptional vampire/mystery series.

When you factor out reality and game shows, soap operas and children’s programming, the ratio of supernatural-to-natural (such as it is) is quite high. And we’re not even including ludicrously fanciful programming that’s ostensibly based in the plausible (think Desperate Housewives here).

Now let’s have a look at the top-grossing films of 2008:

• The Dark Knight
• Iron Man
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Hancock
• WALL·E
• Kung Fu Panda
• Twilight (2008/I)
• Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
• Quantum of Solace
• Horton Hears a Who!

And 2009:

• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Up
• The Hangover
• Star Trek
• Monsters vs Aliens
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine
• Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
• The Proposal

Beginning to notice a pattern?

I can’t help wondering why. Cultures behave the way they do for reasons, and studied examinations of those behaviors (and most especially, of the culture’s popular artifacts) tell us a great deal about the society. What does it love, what does it hate? What does it dream of, what does it fear? What are its dysfunctions…

In this particular case, what are we running from?

We Are the Hollow Men

I have a theory. Well, actually, it’s not well developed enough to be a theory. Or even a hypothesis, for that matter. So let’s just call it a question. I recently read Affluenza, a book that sets out to examine our culture’s pathological need for stuff. The editor’s review at Amazon sums it up this way:

The definition of affluenza, according to de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor, is something akin to “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” It’s a powerful virus running rampant in our society, infecting our souls, affecting our wallets and financial well-being, and threatening to destroy not only the environment but also our families and communities. Having begun life as two PBS programs coproduced by de Graaf, this book takes a hard look at the symptoms of affluenza, the history of its development into an epidemic, and the options for treatment. In examining this pervasive disease in an age when “the urge to splurge continues to surge,” the first section is the book’s most provocative. According to figures the authors quote and expound upon, Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000, our credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, more people are filing for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college, and we spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything. “To live, we buy,” explain the authors–everything from food and good sex to religion and recreation–all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity. They offer historical, political, and socioeconomic reasons that affluenza has taken such strong root in our society, and in the final section, offer practical ideas for change. These use the intriguing stories of those who have already opted for simpler living and who are creatively combating the disease, from making simple habit alterations to taking more in-depth environmental considerations, and from living lightly to managing wealth responsibly.

Grist notes that in the wake of 9/11, affluenza seems to have evolved from social disease into official policy:

In each of the past four years, more people declared bankruptcy than graduated from college. On average, the nation’s CEOs now earn 400 times the wages of the typical worker, “a tenfold increase since 1980.” Although the United States makes up less than five percent of the world’s population, we produce 25 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions; since 1950, we “have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on earth before then.”

Many of us also know that bigger houses, bigger cars, more gadgets, and more expensive clothes do not make us more content, despite the glossy promises of advertisers. Yet consumer spending has long been used as an indicator of both the national economy and the national mood. The more we spend, the better off we are — or so we’ve been told. This mantra has been particularly insistent in the past year, as the great blooming bubble of stock market riches began to deflate and the Bush administration chose instant gratification as an economic strategy. Since Sept. 11, national leaders have been telling us with ever-increasing urgency that consumer confidence must and will rebound. While confidence — as an indicator of our faith in the future — should return, it’s equally clear that the past few decades’ rate of consumption is neither sustainable nor desirable. Moreover, we must assume — and hope — that tragedy has made us wiser, and tempered the impulse of so many Americans to affirm their existence with a pleasing new purchase.

To be honest, reading Affluenza is one of the hardest things I’ve done in some time. I not only saw the moral emptiness of my society laid bare, there were entirely too many pages that described my own life. Even in instances where I feel like I’ve won the battle against consumerist addiction, I still had to acknowledge that once upon a time I was eaten up by a craving for material things that not only couldn’t have made me whole, it would have made the hollow space even larger. I had to slog through passages that seemed specifically written about people I know, people close to me. Worst of all, the book flogged me relentlessly with details about how our obsessions with status and toys are annihilating the physical world that sustains us … for the moment.

Affluenza ripped at my guts in ways that brought me literally to the brink of illness. Or maybe past the brink – I haven’t written about it before, but I’m currently battling at least a couple of medical conditions that may ultimately be the result of affluenza. One of them – a blood sugar issue that I’m now taking medication for daily – is certainly a product of the American food complex. If you drink, on average, two liters of soda a day for the better part of 25 years, how many milligrams of high-fructose corn syrup have you strained through your body? I’m not blaming anybody for my stupidity, which was considerable, but let’s not pretend that our consumption patterns exist in a vacuum, either.

The physical impact pales next to the psychological, though. I grew up desperately seeking the sort of validation that comes with success in America, and if you aren’t careful you can fixate on all the wrong goals. Is success a certain income level? Is it a house in a certain neighborhood? Is it the security that comes from knowing that your children have newer, cooler and more expensive basketball shoes than their friends? Is it a Lexus or Beemer or Mercedes? Is it having a certain number of people reporting to you?

Is it the satisfaction that comes from working so many hours your wife doesn’t recognize you when you come home? Is it the number of ulcers you have? Is it having a physical stress level so consistently high that your body is more or less always sick in some way?

Affluenza made me think about the lies we tell ourselves about success. About the “American Dream.” We grow up enculterated into a consumerist assumption (unless our parents raise us in the woods, miles from the nearest television – and then we have a whole ‘nother set of problems). At some point we realize that we’re not happy (although “realize” may be the wrong word – one thing affluenza seems to do is systematically kill off our self-awareness – in any case, we aren’t happy). Everywhere we look, though, we see happy people (these are called advertisements), and the happiness we see emanates from a thing. A car, a haircut, a shirt, a house, an iPhone, a particular brand of computer…whatever it is, it’s something that can be purchased. So we purchase it. And after a few minutes, we’re not happy again.

I once watched a young boy on his first real Christmas morning. The monetary value of the presents he had under the tree was probably triple the value of all the presents I’d ever had under all the trees during my entire life. He ripped into the first present – it was spectacular. He looked at it, then put it aside and ripped into the second one. And the third. And the fourth, and fifth, and so on. He never paused to play with any of them. It was only about more, more, more. And when there were no more, he still didn’t play with them. The look on his face at that moment was one of profound and unmistakable disappointment. There were no more.

I had never seen anything like it, and I was as horrified as he was unfulfilled. That young boy has had several more Christmas mornings since then, and as best I can tell each one has been little more than a re-enactment of that first one, only with escalating price tags. He’s a smart kid and a very good kid in many ways, but I shudder at the hollowness that now threatens to consume his entire life.

Can I complain about the parenting decisions that have been made in this boy’s life? Well, I could, but in truth the significance of the story isn’t what happened to him, it’s that what happened to him happens millions of times a day all across our consumerist nation. The more we have, the emptier we are. We’re a nation of addicts, and all the stuff that we’re Jonesing for is a million times more addictive and destructive than crystal meth.

What Happens When We Run Out of Fantasies?

We are the age of insubstantiation,
a generation of digital bells,
loose change on the sidewalk.

Our days are loops,
our nights tight spirals,

and if the virtual is
          even better than the real thing

it’s only because the real thing is so goddamned empty.

So here’s my theory/hypothesis/question. We’re a hollow nation, a society that provides nearly all of us with rampant access to more material goods than we know what to do with. But we cannot find happiness in the material because there is not happiness in it. On the contrary – it’s a system that’s rigged to feed us a shiny, pretty lie that hollows us out some more, all the while whispering that only more of the lie will make us happy.

This is our reality. So should we be surprised that our favorite television shows and movies aren’t about “reality”? That instead, we turn toward the magical, the mystical, the alien, the supernatural and hyper-real realms that can promise us even more? Even when these narratives are dystopian, they can’t help but be more interesting than stories about this world. After all, we have everything that this world can offer and we’re still bored to tears.

These are heady days for fantasy merchants. But where will we go next, when even better than the real thing grows dull?

_________________

* Alkon, P. Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

In thinking about technological change, and our relative inability to often recognize the transformational technologies at the time they come along, consider the electric guitar. Particularly the solid-body electric guitar invented by Les Paul, who passed away Thursday at the age of 94. The NY Times story does him justice – he was just messing around and came up with this thing because he couldn’t find it anywhere. And I don’t imagine that in his wildest dreams he could have foreseen the impact it would have; certainly no one else did at the time.

But in retrospect, it’s clear that the electric guitar is one of those things that changed everything. First came rock and roll, which led to the sixties, when led to the breakdown of everything…. No, wait, first came rock and roll, which led to drugs, which led to the breakdown of everything…. No, darnit, let’s see, first came rock and roll, then came… I can’t remember.

But it’s true. The electric guitar changed everything. It made music more interesting, certainly, and the cultural landscape has never recovered. Actually, the US culture wars of much of the second half of the 20th century focus on rock and roll as much as anything else, perhaps more so. I remember my first (and only) visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We were on The Older Daughter’s college tour, which took us out to the Midwest – Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa – and it was a great holiday, one of the great family trips we took. And I remember insisting, over the bemused objections of everyone else in the family, that we should make a visit. Everyone was a pretty good sport about it, as I recall.

And it was worth the trip. For the rock and roll audience, it was interesting – most of the people we saw there would have looked completely at home in your standard Indianapolis 500 crowd. And the upstairs part, where the inductees have been enshrined, is a bit weird and over the top, actually. Of course, since so many of them are dead, maybe it’s a not inappropriate venue. (Les Paul was inducted in 1988.) But the really interesting part of the museum is the actual museum itself, which lays out, in a very serious but undeniably clever way, the history of rock and roll in America. And you realize, in a way that I’ve seen crystallized nowhere else, that the history of rock and roll in America is inextricably bound up with two other aspects of American life – race and censorship.

And both are still with us. The race thing is obvious – think of the South, changed on the surface but perhaps not underneath (given the racists they repeatedly elect to Congress and their local legislatures), and the outrage among a substantial part of the US population against Obama that is currently driving the tea party and healthcare protest lunacy. If America does permanently schism, as it shows every intention of doing, it will be over race. Which will be tragic, but perhaps nonetheless unavoidable. The censorship thing, too, is still around – fundamentalists of all stripes (who in the US are primarily, but not exclusively, Christian) will never stop trying to ban stuff, and if they can’t, they’ll burn stuff, and if they can’t do that, they’ll think of something else instead – as recently as a couple of years ago Dixie Chicks CDs were being bulldozed. The overlap between these two sets would make an interesting Venn diagram.

And rock and roll, for as long as it’s been around, has epitomized both of these conflicts. Early radio stations refused to play “Negro Music.” While it was on separate stations, that was fine – but as soon as white teenagers started listening in, civilization started to collapse, or something. But people really believed it then, and they still believe it now. Rock and roll in the US is inevitably political, in a way that it’s not in, say, Holland (which brought us one of the best rock guitarists, Jan Akkerman, who plays a Les Paul guitar too). Even in this day of corporate rock and roll, it’s still a principal outlet for the other, in Fanon’s framework, and always will be. Anyone can pick up an electric guitar and a bass and a drumkit and go to town. So the censorship thing will always be there. And who knows how long the race thing will still be around for – it may need for my generation to finally die out before America is mature enough to come to grips with it. Rock and roll has historically been one of the principal modes of attack on racism, ever since white boys like Carl Perkins first picked up his Les Paul Gold Top and came out with “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956. And without Les Paul, no rock and roll as we know it.

So let’s all hope that Les Paul was greeted by a heavenly choir wearing sunglasses, all strumming away on their Gibson Les Pauls to “How High the Moon.”

Wufnik is an American who lives in London, has too many advanced degrees for what he does for a living, and has strong feelings about rock and roll.

The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media

The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that encouraged fairness and “objectivity.” (Granted, these concepts, like their bastard cousin “balance,” are not wholly unproblematic. Still, they represented a far better way of conducting journalism than we had seen before.) It’s probably not idealizing too much to assert that reporting in the Cronkite Era, for instance, was characterized by a commitment to rise above partisanship and manipulation. The journalist was expected to hold him/herself to a higher standard and to serve the public interest. These professionals – and I have met a few who are more than worthy of the title – believed they had a duty to search for the facts and to present them in a fashion that was as free of bias as possible.

In other words, their careers, like that of Claude Shannon, were devoted to maximizing the signal in the system – the system here being the “marketplace of ideas.”

By now the critical reader has probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned money. Said reader might suggest that I wax a little too starry-eyed, that journalism was always about ratings, circulation and profit. The really cynical response might say – as I myself have said – that even our greatest reporters were doing nothing more than selling product. True enough.

However, the issue here is about the assumptions involved regarding the path to profit. In Cronkite World, the reporter (and editor and publisher) assumed that success had something to do with what I’m here calling signal. You attracted a larger audience and sold more soap if you did a better job investigating, digging, presenting the public with facts. When you did a better job than your competitor at providing the audience with relevant, meaningful, accurate information that helped them understand and interact with their environment, then you and your employer would be more successful.

That is, your success in the marketplace was intimately tied to your professional ability. Success was a function of signal.

Somewhere along the way that changed, though. Here’s what I think happened.

First, in Uncle Walter’s day you had three channels (networks plus local affiliates), you had a couple local newspapers and a local radio station or two. If you grew up in a place like I did (Winston-Salem, NC), you likely had no more than six sources of information available to you on a given day. If there were a major story to be discovered at the national level, the competition to break it was going to include CBS, NBC, ABC, UPI, AP, Reuters maybe, and that’s about it. If the story was local it was down to a couple local papers and the three local affiliates.

That’s a comparatively small field of competitors, and given the number of things that happen in a given week there were usually enough scoops to go around. So to a significant degree, it was possible to make a living off of signal.

What about today? How many potential sources for news are available to you? Legacy networks; national papers; cable news channels (and cable “news” channels); ubiquitous access not only to your local paper and TV affiliates, but to all local affiliates and papers; online alt.news outlets; blogs – millions and millions of blogs; advocacy group sites; and a plethora of other channels, including e-mail (and lists), newsgroups and forums, mobile (like Twitter), and on and on we go. Even if we assume that there’s 10 times as much interesting news to be scooped than their used to be, the competition for those scoops has grown at an insane pace. If you’re in the news business, you probably find that the ratio of news to competitors is dozens of times worse than it was when Cronkite sat in Katie Couric’s chair. Yes, several outlets are still trying – a couple national papers, AP, Reuters, etc. But that’s about it. Everybody else (Scholars & Rogues included) is trying to attract the attention of the public, and very few of the models in use rely on what we might see as a traditional approach to news and reporting.

So. The pursuit of signal ain’t cheap or easy. The return rate on that investment is hardly guaranteed. And even if you are doing pretty well at old-style reporting, competition for eyeballs is simply ridiculous. A news agency, therefore, that insists on the old signal-based model is fighting an uphill battle.

Welcome to the Jungle

As with the problem faced by the academy, described by Katherine Hayles in part 1, media businesses had (have, and always will have) an institutional need to make a profit. Whether there’s actually enough signal to go around is momentarily beside the point, because it’s easy to see how the perception might evolve in a corporate boardroom that the traditional approach is a losing game. (And in a market-driven society, “perception is everything” is literally true.) In this brave new world of 500 channels and seemingly infinite numbers of Internet-delivered information (and disinformation) sites, it’s harder than ever to attract necessary revenues the old-fashioned way.

The conclusion: if there’s 10,000 guys stomping all around Signal Lake, hundreds of boats jockeying for position on every square inch of surface, a million more casting off the bridge, all fighting over two or three half-assed little fish, then maybe we ought to wander over to the River of Noise. Something is always biting there.

If my theory is right, then, our media institutions are behaving the way they are out of a certain logic. Not an admirable or productive logic, but something that makes sense if you’re looking for cause and effect. To wit: at the moment, there’s a prevailing perception (likely accurate) that there’s a greater return – a massively greater return – to be had on noise generation than there is signal hunting. Putting a hard-nosed investigative reporter on the trail of an important story for a few weeks or months, that’s an iffy investment. Employing enough reporters to reliably fill up the 24/7/4ever news cycle, that’s expensive. How much easier it is to simply trot Matt Lauer and Ann Curry out there to primp and blather over the latest “development” in the Michael Jackson “story.”

The results? Well, the networks are making money, aren’t they?

So, if I can try and pull all this together:

• Once upon a time both academia and the news media were structured in a way that aligned personal and institutional success with activities that we might call signal.
• The landscape changed in ways that made it hard for the institutions (and the individuals within them) to continue succeeding using the established strategies. Specifically, these environments evolved in ways that made signal a scarce commodity at the same time the systems were expanding.
• Both environments adapted by cultivating new structures and processes that were able to survive on noise.

How Can We Return American Media to the Promised Land of Signal?

Maybe we can’t. The media genie running amok in America is a big, powerful one, and you can rest assured it ain’t going back in the bottle without the mother of all throwdowns.

Still, the damage that the Noise Media is wreaking on our society is intolerable – worse in nearly every respect than what has happened in the world of LitCrit, and I think I made clear how bad that is in part 1 – and we’d be advised to contemplate how we can at least boost our signal-to-noise ratio in the right direction. To this end, there are two things that need to happen.

First, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (because this seems to be my answer to everything), we have to dramatically increase our emphasis on education. Specifically, we need to cultivate stronger critical thinking skills. The reason is simple. An enlightened mind has a much lower tolerance for foolishness. The reason that media have been able to profit off of inane programming is because our culture has so aggressively pursued the anti-intellectual. While I’m not attempting to let the pimps who program our media outlets off the hook here, it is not untrue to suggest that their actions are a logical response to what the marketplace has become.

Second, we revive the public interest standard and make it the centerpiece for every deliberation that happens regarding media in the US. The public interest, not the corporate interest. Fowler and Brenner said, in the early ’80s, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” It was self-evidently stupid when they said it then, and the only thing that has changed in the intervening years is that now we have even more evidence to prove it. But thanks to their efforts on behalf of Reagan’s anti-public communications policy, we now live in a nation where “journalism” and “pandering to the lowest common denominator” mean fundamentally the same thing.

Perhaps the system has evolved in precisely the way we should have expected. But it has evolved into something that does not serve our society or its future best interest. The sooner we understand why it has spun out of control, the sooner we can begin taking action to transform it once again, this time into something worthy of a culture that regards itself as the most advanced on Earth.

Unfortunately, some movies get it so bad that you just can’t take them seriously. The husband of a friend of mine noticed a serious oversight during the freeway scene in Matrix: Reloaded that destroyed his suspension of disbelief: at least one of the computer generated cars was missing the drivetrain entirely. I didn’t notice, so I found the movie fine. He did notice, and from that point on wasn’t able to take Reloaded seriously.

I just finished a movie that I couldn’t take seriously, even as mindless entertainment, because the director got the science so wrong it was laughable. I just watched The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich.

Let’s pretend for a moment that it’s possible for a super storm like that described in the storm to form. And let’s pretend that the storm could somehow suck air down from the upper atmosphere. And let’s pretend that a “critical salinity threshold” could shut down the North Atlantic Current. And let’s pretend that the shutdown would happen over the course of days. And let’s pretend that the Gulf Stream up along the coast of Africa…. Ok, let’s not, because that last point came within the first 15 minutes of a 124 minute-long movie.

Seriously, if you’ve seen the movie, go to the part where Dennis Quaid’s paleoclimatologist character is giving a talk in New Delhi. Watch the screens behind him that are supposedly showing the thermohaline circulation (see image at right). Not only does the circulation on the screen behind Quaid not have anywhere near the number of branches the real thermohaline circulation, but what should be the Gulf Stream is going up along the western coast of Africa, not along the eastern coast of North America.

After that, everything else became just more and more absurd. The “storm surge” that hit New York? Visually impressive, but it was essentially a tsunami. And it just sort of flowed around the Statue of Liberty, instead of knocking it over. And it flowed between the buildings in New York instead of blasting at least the first few blocks of buildings apart like matchsticks.

That cargo ship that conveniently navigated itself up tight city boulevards and grounded out right next to the library? Deus ex Machina to the max. And last I checked, there’s not a climate model out there that can give you good results within 48 hours – most take months of dedicated time on the most powerful computers yet devised.

And that’s without the cancerous child melodrama, the divorced parents melodrama, the “best friend falls through the ice” melodrama, the President apologizes to the world melodrama, and so on. And the last line of the movie (”Wow – have you ever seen the air so clear?”) nearly made me want to vomit.

About the only thing I really thought was totally and completely accurate about the movie was how stupid politicians are (the movie’s Vice President is a blatent Cheney dig, and it came out in 2004).

I tend to enjoy end-of-the-world fiction and have ever since reading “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in junior high. I’ve enjoyed Emmerich’s work in the past as well, and from the previews for 2012, it’s going to be another good “kill off the human race” flic. But I recommend that Emmerich stay away from science-based work in the future. Special effects and bad melodrama can’t save a move that is both fundamentally and deeply wrong.

NOTE: I’m sure that, given the movie came out in 2004, much of what I said above has been said before, repeatedly, and probably better too. But I had to say something.

Image Credits
AFP: Antara News Agency

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

This past weekend saw the online release of the first non-spoof, fan-created film set in the Lord of the Rings universe. That by itself is fairly unremarkable, but a number of things set The Hunt for Gollum apart from your standard fan created fare. It’s long (about 40 minutes), it has better than average acting and writing (think direct-to-DVD caliber), it features incredibly high production values despite a meager £3,000 budget, and it is based on canon. That last bit especially, had some wondering if Gollum would run afoul of rights holders at Tolkien Enterprises.

Where most fan art uses original characters and story lines, The Hunt for Gollum’s writer and director Chris Bouchard based the script on appendices to Tolkien’s original work. That the film uses Tolkien’s actual story could have spelled trouble for the entire production. There are two understood rules in the world of fan art: don’t use official material (like logos, music, and to a lesser extent known characters), and don’t try to make money off your creations.

Bouchard smartly cleared his film with Tolkien’s estate before releasing it. “We got in touch with Tolkien Enterprises and reached an understanding with them that as long as we are completely non-profit then we’re okay. We have to be careful not to disrespect their ownership of the intellectual property,” he told the BBC. And there are undoubtedly a plethora of fans happy he did.

The Hunt for Gollum has been a huge success, amassing over 600,000 views on Daily Motion since it was released on May 3rd, and garnering mainstream press attention from the BBC, WIRED, NPR, and Entertainment Weekly. It’s hard to imagine that all that attention is doing anything but increasing the value of Tolkien’s intellectual property. That’s why Chris Albrecht over at NewTeeVee thinks studios should encourage fan films.

Fan films are nothing new — Wikipedia pegs 1926 as the birth of the genre — but the proliferation of cheap, high quality production tools and the emergence of the Internet as a mass distribution platform has some rights holders waking up to the potential for fan art to keep a brand alive. Last year, for example, DC Comics reversed a long standing policy of aggressively protecting its copyrights and trademarks, including going after fan flicks, and officially okayed fan art that was done on a not-for-profit basis.

But what if fans did sell their art? Would that be so bad? Most fan art is a labor of love, but some fans sink serious time and money into their homemade projects. James Cawley reportedly put more than $100,000 into recreating the original Star Trek set for his well-received fan-made Star Trek web series, and donated crew time likely would have cost more than $1 million at market value.

According to TheForce.net, a fan site for the Star Wars universe, which enjoys a rich community of fan created art with the blessing of George Lucas, the sale of fan films is a “sensitive issue.” Fan filmmakers worry that one project trying to make a buck selling unauthorized fan art could cause rights holders to pull the plug on the entire community.

But Mike Masnick at TechDirt wonders if maybe fans should have more leeway in their ability to sell artwork based on someone else’s IP. Speaking of Bouchard’s agreement with Tolkien Enterprises to keep things non-commercial he wrote, “what if people made such a creative film without reaching such an agreement — or without promising to be totally non-commercial? Would that be so wrong? It wouldn’t take away from or harm Tolkien or Jackson’s work. It would only enhance it. So why should these fans even need to gain permission to create such a movie?”

I spoke to Matt Maggiacomo, who makes a modest living performing as “The Whomping Willows,” a band that sings songs set in the Harry Potter universe, about his thoughts on fan art. The Harry Potter rock community – or wizard rock, as it is known – enjoys one of the most liberal agreements with a copyright holder of any fan art community. Representatives of the wizard rock scene came to an agreement early on with lawyers for J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers allowing them to continue to create their music and even sell CDs, merchandise, and charge for shows (with a few restrictions, like not being able to sell merchandise online and not being able to use official logos and images on album art, t-shirts, etc.).

“I am lucky to be a fan of a series whose author is so generous with her creation,” said Maggiacomo, who thinks it is a testament to Rowling’s character that she is so open to fan art. “[But] it’s really up to the author/creator of the series. If Jo Rowling came out and said that she objected to wizard rock’s existence, I would quit. No questions asked. Ultimately we all began as fans of a series, and we have to keep that in mind. It takes a lot of work to create a universe; Tolkien and Rowling have each created one of the most complex fictional universes in the history of literature. We have to understand that these universes are the authors’ babies, and they have every right to limit and restrict use of their creations.”

Maggiacomo thinks that one of the reasons that Rowling, Warner Brothers, and Scholastic have been so open to wizard rock and have even allowed its participants to profit from their creations, is that the community as a rule donates a lot of time and money to charity. “I think this sets wizard rock and the larger Harry Potter fandom apart from other fan communities,” he told me.

In 2000, Henry Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, predicted that fan involvement would only become increasingly more important to the success of commercial media. “Soon, [copyright holders] are going to need those active fans more than ever before,” he told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “In a world with multiple media options, video on demand and micropayments, fans may become the new gatekeepers who help direct consumers toward interesting and engaging media content. The smart media executive should figure out which direction the media-consuming public is moving, run around in front and shout, ‘Follow me.’”

Nine years later, that prediction is likely more true than ever. Albrecht is almost certainly correct that rights holders would do well to encourage fan involvement and be more lenient with fan created art. And if allowing fans to sell their work could translate into a more vibrant and longer-lasting fan community, then Masnick might be right as well. It’s hard to argue against the wisdom of letting fans make money from their creations when looking at the wizard rock movement, which has been able to sustain itself for at least 5 years and has grown to support over 500 bands, while raising thousands of dollars for charity.

Either way, the future looks bright for fan art. More receptive rights holders combined with low cost pro-level tools means better fan art regardless of whether it is made for a profit.

Our ears may hear bleep, but our eyes see lips moving that say shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker. Sometimes our ears will gather additional evidence. They will hear mother followed by bleep instead of fucker. Sometimes the ears will detect ass followed by bleep or bleep followed by hole but never the compete asshole. But the ears never hear cock followed by bleep or bleep followed by sucker because, it seems, Almighty Television Execs think cocksucker is so reviled a concept as to ever be partially bleeped.

I rarely view pricey premium channels such as HBO or Showtime. But my friends who can afford such luxuries assure me that there’s rarely if ever a bleep to be heard. It’s shit and fuck and motherfucker and cocksucker, etc., as far as the eye can see (or, rather, the ear can hear).

The broadcast networks, of course, don’t even offer any profanity to bleep. (Well, maybe the occasional nipple, but that’s not the issue here.) Apparently, the Federal Communications Commission fines them (in the public interest, of course) for transgressing against something called “public decency.” (We all know, of course, that offending the public with profanity isn’t the real reason — the networks just don’t want to piss off the advertisers.)

Basic cable is my only hope for a little guilty pleasure. Wouldn’t comedian and social critic Lewis Black’s unbleeped HBO “Red, White & Screwed” special be much more delicious if Comedy Central’s reprises of it didn’t bleep every instance of Mr. Black’s fuck and shit and the occasional dickhead? Comedy Central doesn’t demand that Jon Stewart clean up his language during live taping of The Daily Show — yet bleeps his utterances of asshole and fuck when the show airs.

And then there’s the lovely, demure Kathy Griffin on Bravo (winner of two Emmys, as she likes to point out). She’s a true potty mouth. We all know what she’s saying. She drops the offending profanities with aplomb. She’ll even use hand motions to emphasize the language. Yet Bravo bleeps them all.

That’s hardly brave of Bravo, the basic cable channel that says it “delivers the best in food, fashion, beauty, design and pop culture to the most engaged, upscale and educated audience in cable.” Surely such an audience can deal with the occasional shit, fuck, motherfucker, and cocksucker uttered by some of its performers. Surely such an audience does not need the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” that bleeping represents.

Hell, even basic cable channel AMC bleeps the use of shit in “Blazing Saddles.” Why is AMC so wimpy about such a low-level profanity in that Mel Brooks classic movie ?

I like the occasional, well-timed profanity. I’ve even used it in my classroom. (Committing such rhetorical sins, however, as a professor at a Catholic university probably means I’ll be plenty warm during my afterlife.)

I should confess, though, that I prefer limits to my liking or use of profanity. Like any rhetorical device, if overused, profanity loses its capacity to convey shock, emphasis, and powerful emotion. We all know, of course, people who drop fuck, shit, asshole, and motherfucker into every possible utterance. From the lips of those people, profanity is merely noise shrouding a lack of signal. Lewis Black, Jon Stewart, Kathy Griffin, Mel Brooks and other comedic social commentators are not such people: They are desperately needed signal trying to break through overwhelming noise.

I wish basic cable would just let me hear what my eyes can see. It’s particularly egregious when Comedy Central, of all basic cable channels, bleeps profanity. After all, this is the network that put a counter on screen to record the 162 utterances of shit in a South Park episode. Comedy Central broke linguistic ground with that show — then promptly threw the dirt back into the hole it dug in social norms.

To those TV chieftains who serve as basic cable’s Highest Authorities on What May Be Heard, who deny my ears the profane audio of these social critics to accompany the video my eyes can see, I say fuck ‘em. If viewers of these comedians object to not bleeping shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker, I ask: Why the fuck are you watching those shows in the first place?

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It wasn’t until then that I realized just how much I liked the song, that it was Aerosmith who was singing it, and that I did not, in fact, actually like the Run DMC cover all that much.

But at the tender age of 13, that video whisked me off to Oz and paved my yellow brick road with albums ranging from Def Leppard to Pearl Jam, from Midnight Oil to Suzanne Vega, from Jethro Tull to Depeche Mode.

And partly because of Run DMC’s cover, Aerosmith’s career has been long and varied and fun, if not necessarily sublime.

That said, however, Aerosmith has done at least one truly sublime song and performance. The first time I watched the video on MTV, it pinned me to my chair. I remember, when it was over, not feeling like I’d even taken a breath through the whole thing. Even now it still pins me to my chair when I hear it. Enjoy.

As an aside, Run DMC is being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tomorrow. I don’t know or really care whether a rap group really belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but if they hadn’t been featured on NPR this morning I probably wouldn’t have remembered this.

It’s  been suggested before that Jon Stewart is perhaps America’s most trustworthy journalist. Which is nice for him, but not so good for the rest of us, because he’s not a journalist. He’s a comedian. He’s David Letterman. He’s Larry the Cable Guy. He’s Phyllis Diller. He makes his living by making people laugh.

But here he is, once again stepping up and telling truth to power in ways that seem spectacular to us. (And make no mistake – money is power in America, and media conglomerates are among power’s most critical brokers. So stomping the balls off of Jim Cramer does, in fact, constitute speaking truth to power.)

The relevant part of that last paragraph occurs toward the end of the first sentence. What Stewart did has been the talk of the entire fucking world in the last 48 hours. He, a guy with a TV show, hauled a man out into the town square who has done, by omission or commission – your choice – grave damage to countless Americans. Whether Cramer contributed to the insanity that has led us to our current economic apocalypse directly or whether his worst sin is that he did not use his platform to call out the guilty in advance, he and his employers played a noteworthy role in facilitating our financial crash. And we, the citizenry of the information-logged society in the history of the solar system, stand agog: motherfucking WOW! Did you SEE that?!

This is the tragedy. We’re as staggered at the occurrence of actual journalism as we would be by the sight of Rosie O’Donnell clubbing Donald Trump to death with her boobs. The fact that the only journalism in recent memory has emanated from Comedy Central is … well, it’s like shooting novocaine into the leg of a quadriplegic, really.

Cap and Bells

It’s never been easy – or profitable, or even safe – to speak truth to power. America circa 2009 isn’t the first place when the ordained channels have failed to convey to the people an accurate accounting of the events shaping their lives. In fact, what we’re dealing with now is more reflective of the historical rule than it is the exception.

Throughout most of history you’ve had to search for the truth about power in indirect commentaries: literature, and especially speculative genre fiction, for instance. Comedy. Art. The forms allow a person with a point of view to express it while maintaining a sheen of plausible deniability. “Oh, no, your majesty, I wasn’t writing about your munificent presence! The malevolent criminal monarch in my story is something I imagined might exist in a less just society on a planet in another galaxy.” It’s good to remember that science fiction and fantasy are never about the future or other worlds – they’re always about here and now.

And there’s the very old tradition of the fool. The jester, in his classical incarnation, was the only one in the court who could get away with telling the truth. The fact that he was a certified nutball removed enough credibility from his words that he could say serious things without being taken seriously. He was fine so long as he didn’t slip into lucidity.

Put another way, the truth has always been there if you knew where to look and understood the code. 2009 isn’t a lot different from 1009 in that respect, I imagine. There can be a price to be paid if the wrong person says the wrong thing in the wrong way. Once upon a time the price might be that your loved ones would get to watch your head being paraded around on a pike. Now the price might be something as pedestrian as losing a job opportunity or having your reputation perma-slandered by a vicious partisan noise machine. But there’s always risk, so the citizen bent on telling the truth needs to understand the context.

Clowning America

Throughout the Bush years any journalist with the temerity to act like an actual reporter paid a price. The default was loss of “access,” and that was pretty terrifying to most on the best because your ability to survive was going to be hindered if you couldn’t get anywhere near the newsmakers. This wasn’t the worst that could happen, of course. Ask Joe Wilson or that mealy-mouthed cocksucker Scott McClellan (not a journalist by any means, but a good illustration of the point) what happened when you hit the Bush/Cheney mob a little too close to home. At best, it took courage and hopefully enough cash-on-hand to sustain you through some hard times.

Clearly that wasn’t the only place where the institutions of the Fourth Estate lacked, and continue to lack, courage. As Stewart makes brutally clear in his 20 minute-plus dismemberment of Jim Cramer – a man not heretofore known for being short on words or self-confidence – finding malpractice in the field of financial journalism (my new favorite oxymoron, by the way) is about as tough as finding loose morals in a whorehouse. Think about it. You have CNBC, FOX’s biz news, the Wall Street Journal, the financial sections of hundreds of newspapers, and how many more business “news” outlets. How many of them were warning you of the things that we’re now told were more or less inevitable? (Told by some, I should say – others are still trying to say there was no way we could have predicted this. Which is bullshit – I know some very sharp people who predicted it, but they don’t have TV shows, in large part because they’re the sorts willing to tell the truth about rigged games. Maybe they should have put together an irreverent ventriloquist act or written a fantasy novel.

Media as far as they eye can see, so much media, so much “analysis,” and not a drop of journalism in sight.

It’s true that Jon Stewart isn’t the first funny guy in history to be the best available source of reliable reporting on the social, political and economic condition. But most of those places didn’t have democracies. Most didn’t have a free press. And none of them had more access to information or channels of distribution than we do.

“Journalism is no worse off now than it was during the reign of Caligula” is a true statement, but it’s not the sort of thing an advanced society should have to settle for, either.

Let’s get Jon Stewart the Peabody. Then a Pulitzer for The Onion. And why not a Nobel for the karma-obsessed lead in My Name is Earl?

If that’s the world we’re willing to accept, it’s the best we deserve.

Back to Meryl, though. Is it just me, or does she get nominated at least once a year? I hadn’t realized how close that is to being literally true until Best Actress winner Kate Winslet pointed out that this was nom #15 for Streep. 15. Damn. The miracle, of course, is that she’s only won twice, because she’s certainly the greatest actress of her generation, and may well be the finest who ever lived.

Streep’s second win was in 1983 for Sophie’s Choice, which I have always regarded as the single greatest performance I’ve ever seen in any film, ever, anywhere, period. I remember seeing it in the theater and when the movie was over having to just sit there a couple minutes and breathe. The film, and her performance especially, had drained me, not only emotionally but physically.

Which has me thinking about something that might be fun here. What are your all-time Oscar faves? For that matter, let’s feel free to include things that didn’t win (or even get nominated), but now, with the perspective afforded by time, perhaps should have.

So, open thread. Your greatest film, director, actor, actress, and supporting actor and actress? In addition to Streep, let me toss the Blade Runner Final Cut into the discussion for Best Film, as well.

Dr. Slammy was kind enough to put up a post earlier today that shows just how un-Christian people who call themselves Christians can actually be. And then I happened to be listening to my favorite Goth crooner, Voltaire, when one of my favorite songs came on: “God Thinks”, from Voltaire’s Almost Human album. Enjoy.

God thinks all blacks are obsolete farm eqipment
God thinks the Jews killed his son and must be punished
God thinks the white man is Satan
God, they know what God thinks

God thinks we should all convert to Judaism
God thinks we must all be Christians and
God thinks we should all embrace Islam
God thinks the only true religion is Hinduism

And I
I know what God thinks
God thinks you’re a waste of flesh
God prefers an Atheist

God thinks all people like you are evil
God thinks all people like you are an embarrassment to creation
self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and use His name for your own protection

God thinks the sun revolves around the Earth
God thinks there was something very wrong with Copernicus
God thinks abortion is murder and
God thinks everything that science gave us is wrong
God thinks women deserve it
God thinks AIDS is a form of punishment

I hate people who blame the Devil for their own shortcomings and
I hate people who thank God when things go right

And I
I know what God thinks
God thinks you’re an idiot
God prefers a heretic

God God
God thinks all people like you are evil
God thinks all people like you are an embarrassment to creation
self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and use His name for your own agenda

God is a liberal
God is a democrat
God wants you to vote republican
never trust a man who puts his words in the mouth of god
and says that it’s absolute truth
its lies and it smells like death
its all in a day’s work taking money from the poor
Why do you think that God would need your dirty money
if he wanted to start a holy war?

self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and use His name for your own protection

God thinks puppies need to die and
God thinks babies need to drown
’cause God is neither good nor bad
God is you and me
God is Everything

(Lyrics from LyricsTime.com)

At the time, the story of the party’s demise made headlines larger than those for the sinking of the Titanic, because the elements of the story, interpreted in an ever-so-slightly-post-Edwardian way, made for a tragic tale in the heroic literary tradition.  In many ways, those elements still do, but with a twist that is both modern and at least as ancient as Sophocles.

Terra Nova is an utterly marvelous but rarely performed play about the Scott Expedition written by Ted Tally, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Silence of the Lambs.  Tally wrote Terra Nova as a graduate project at Yale, and it went on to win the Obie Award for best Off-Broadway play — a nearly unheard of accomplishment for a first-time effort.  The play is currently being produced in Longmont, Colorado through January 24, and this trailer provides some insights into the history, production, and script.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tally’s approach to Scott’s story would hardly be embraced by pre-Great-War English.  The newspaper articles from the day focus on self-sacrifice, courage, and refusal to do things the “wrong way.”  Tally turns that into a tale of hubris:  the mistaken ideal that Nature plays by rules recognized by humans, and that sheer force of will can overcome physical realities.  In the heroic, tragic tradition, he raises the question of the hero’s fatal flaw and the role played by fate, or mere chance, in the hero’s demise.

As the story goes, Scott decided that his party would walk to the South Pole and back, eschewing the use of dogs, covering roughly 1,600 miles over ice, rock, crevasses, and deep snow, while rising over 9,000 feet in elevation on the southbound leg, wearing clothing that was mostly wool covered by wind breaking canvas.  His party hauled sledges, sometimes weighing as much as 1,000 pounds, loaded with paraffin oil (for heat in the tent and for melting ice for drinking water), tins of food, shelter, extra clothing, scientific and navigational instruments, and the like.  According to Susan Solomon, author of The Coldest March, Scott and his party ran into the worst weather imaginable.  It was substantially colder than normal, and the following wind Scott expected to help move the sled by sail on the return march never materialized, as the best weather research of the day suggested it would.

Scott’s party endured day after day of temperatures in the -30F to -40F range on its return home, which turned what should have been an easy surface for the sled into a rough, unyielding, high-friction drag on the men.  Snow so cold that the men felt it had the properties of sand slowed them, as did ridges of ice formed by wind that ran perpendicular to their path.  An injury to Edgar Evans, the largest and strongest man in the party, also retarded their progress, as did the later deteriorating condition of cavalryman Titus Oates.  Both died on the march, Oates in spectacular fashion as he ran out of the party’s tent into a blizzard, sacrificing his life to avoid continuing to slow his companions.

Tally does an admirable job of balancing the realities of modern cynicism with the essential nobility of what Scott and his companions attempted to do.  The Great War (WWI) changed Europe in a very fundamental way.  To a large degree, post-war Europe (and Great Britain in particular) traded its unbridled optimism for persistent skepticism about behaviors it once would have lauded as being driven by the most admirable of human traits.  Scott’s reputation, once sterling, has been eroded by modern weighting that tends to value ends over means.

And it is means and ends that are at the center of Tally’s play, as they are the center of so many others.  Tally’s Scott is a classically heroic figure, endowed with both larger-than-life qualities and with a fatal flaw.  Unlike most other heroes, though, Scott’s primary flaw is an insistence on doing things the right way and, secondarily, the hubris that the right way will lead to the right outcome.  Lear’s flaw is foolish vanity, Macbeth’s unbridled ambition, Hamlet’s intellectual paralysis, and Oedipus’ willful ignorance about killing his own father in the face of a prophesy saying he will do just that.  None of those flaws are qualities we tend to admire the way we can admire Scott’s, and like Macbeth, Scott is beset by outside forces beyond his control — the weather and a fatal injury that party member Evans covered up — that beg the question of just how responsible Scott is for his and his party’s demise.  Should he have abandoned the sick and injured members of his party that slowed the others down and, ultimately, cost all of them their lives?  Should he have had dogs haul him to the South Pole, eating the dogs as the sled load lightened, the way his antagonist, Amundsen did?  For that matter, should our soldiers abandon their wounded?  Should we fire the disabled in our businesses, so that the rest of us can prosper?

Where, exactly, does the “entire thing become worthless,” as Tally’s Scott asks of himself?

Terra Nova is an ambitious play for an ambitious ambiguity.  It is not produced often.  Plays that have little name recognition rarely are, regardless of their merit.  If you live in Colorado, or will be visiting before the play closes on January 24, you might be well advised not to miss it.  You can buy tickets by visiting this site or by calling 303-772-5200.  A review of the show is available from the Denver Post.

Speaking of Fiction 8, let’s get this out of the way first

Fiction 8 – Project Phoenix
I have a rule – I never include in my official ratings CDs that I had something to do with, no matter how great I think they are. And since I co-wrote “Hegemony,” the track that closes this disc, that means that Fiction 8 is officially disqualified. This doesn’t mean I can’t tell you what I think I’d think about the record if I weren’t laboring with a conflict of interest, though.

Project Phoenix represents a significant step forward for the band. Most notably, bassist Mardi Salazar has assumed a much greater role in the creative process, writing and singing about half the tracks on the album. Her contributions afford the CD a richer balance, both tonally and lyrically, than we’ve seen in previous F8 efforts. Mike’s angst and cynicism are still front and center, but are tempered by Mardi’s softer, helplessly romantic contributions.

Or maybe “softer” isn’t quite the right word here. F8’s music is unambiguously darkpop – industrial with goth overtones, but essentially pop in structure. Smith’s songs have always hit like a boot to the gut. Sometimes the rage is palpable, other times muted beneath layers of self-doubt, but even his most thoughtful moments – and perhaps especially his most thoughtful moments – leave some part of you hurting.

Mardi’s voice is more conversational, however. It packs plenty of punch – it’s just that the fist is enveloped in a silk glove.

The result is a real yin/yang interplay between despair and hope, and this interplay makes Project Phoenix the most nuanced Fiction 8 record to date.

And now, the Platinum LPs

The BellRays – Hard, Sweet and Sticky
Easily one of my favorite discs to listen to of the year. What Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings have done for ‘60s soul, Lisa Kekaula and Co. are doing for driving ‘70s rock. As you work your way through HS&S you can hear all manner of echoes and influences, from Detroit proto-punk (Iggy & the Stooges, MC5) to Brit Blues Rock (The Faces, for instance) and beyond. Rather than try to weave a rich narrative tapestry, let me offer, in bullet points, some of the things I’ve thought while listening.

• There are a couple moments where I almost think they’re channeling Deep Purple (“Psychotic Hate Man” pounds along like “Highway Star” on steroids).
• She’s almost like a female Chris Robinson.
• If AC/DC ever needs a new singer and they’re willing to consider a woman, they should call Kekaula. Of course, as great as this record is, she should politely decline.
• In their bluesier moments she reminds me a little of Maria McKee.
• Mother’s Finest. Enough said.

Kekaula exhibits a lot of range vocally, managing the softer R&B stuff with the same kind of passion she dumps into the rockers, although I think she’s probably at her best when the songs are in overdrive. The band also packs those songs with substance – Bob Vennum seems to be the principal songwriter, and he’s responsible for cracking this off:

The homeless and the poor
are glad to go to war
for the right to be
put down even more.

More than anything, this band reminds us that once upon a time it wasn’t so hard to find take-no-prisoners rock and roll. If you’re at all like me, Hard Sweet and Sticky will make you acutely aware of how much you’ve missed something that you never really realized was gone…

The Dandy Warhols – Earth to the Dandy Warhols
I’ve been hearing about this band for some time, but am just now getting around to actually checking them out. Apparently I’ve been missing out.

One of the things that stands out the most – aside from some really clever songwriting – is the production. The sound manages trippy and psychedelic, textured and layered, nuanced and even swirly, all without sacrificing clarity – which is pretty neat, since the whole effect comes off as very natural sounding. So credit the disc with some of the best production of the year, as well.

In the end, Earth to the Dandy Warhols samples from and updates a host of retro moments (including “Welcome to the Third World,” a funny riff on The Stones’ “Some Girls”).

Death Cab for Cutie – Narrow Stairs
Ben Gibbard is as indie-critical-darling as they come, and if it wasn’t clear why before Narrow Stairs, it should be now. A good friend once said that writers are cursed to observe life without ever getting to live it for themselves. That’s too absolutist, of course, but it reminds me of Gibbard’s enigmatic lyricism. His observations on the lives of those around him are acute and thoughtful, but there’s a disconnectedness about it all – he somehow seems more involved with his observations that he is with the actual characters.

I don’t mean to suggest that he’s unconcerned or callous at all – the voice is one that cares, but that perhaps is wise enough to understand which lines not to cross?

There’s a very small number of artists who never seem to strike a foul note. Everything they do, even their least impressive work, still manages to be better than everybody else’s best. These are people you don’t really need to sample. They have a new CD, you buy it without worrying if it’s worth the cash. Karl Wallinger, eels, Peter Gabriel, Graham Parker, these are the kinds of names that come to mind, and Death Cab is pretty darned close to being on that list, if they aren’t already. I mean, I bought this one after hearing just one song, didn’t I?

Don Dixon & the Jump Rabbits – The Nu-Look
If you know Don’s music, here’s all the review you’ll need: The Nu-Look is good even by Dixon standards. If not, click the link and sample for yourself.

His latest is a departure in one respect. Don has been playing live with Jamie Hoover and Jim Brock for years, but this is the first time they’ve gone into the studio as a recording power trio. As Don explained in an S&R interview back in May:

I discovered Hendrix and Cream about the same time. Disraeli Gears and Are You Experienced? were both on the turntable a lot. I felt like what I wanted to do with The Nu-Look was more like the Cream side of things than Hendrix We’re a more balanced ensemble. So when asked for comparisons early on, I blurted out Disreali Gears as an example of a power trio that I had admired in my youth and it stuck.
…
Hoover and Brock have both been working with me in various combinations for a long time. We all have many projects going on and they know they can count on me. They know it’s a collaborative effort when we play and they also know that I will help them with their projects, usually behind the scenes – or at least I’ll stay out of the way. We play together because we like what happens on stage…it’s really that simple. I’m very lucky and I know it…

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (as it were), I’ll reiterate something I’ve said many times before: Don Dixon is an American musical legend, and the fact that he remains unknown to so many people who would love his music is a goddamned crime. The list I’m talking about above in the Death Cab item, Dixon is on it and has been since the ‘80s. I suppose it’s possible he might one day record something that isn’t worth listening to, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Duffy – Rockferry
I’ve been loving the recent surge of neo-soul and girl group acts in the last couple of years – Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Nicole Atkins, Lucky Soul, etc. So I was anxious to get my ears on this one when I started hearing all the hype. Initially I was having a little trouble getting into it, though. I think I expected something more along the lines of Lucky Soul’s pure pop approach, but what’s going on with Duffy is actually a lot smokier and more soulful than that.

After about ten spins I finally started to get it, and at this stage I think what Duffy has done here is richer and more substantive than Winehouse’s last effort (I should say previous, I guess, although I’m afraid it might turn out to be her last, after all). The made-for-Bandstand “Mercy,” which has been played pretty widely, is a lot of fun, but she’s actually at her best in the CD’s more somber moments, like “Hanging On Too Long” and “Stepping Stone.”

I’ve probably listened to Rockferry 30 times or so, and it just won’t stop getting better with each play. I can’t wait to hear what she does next.

The Killers – Day & Age
I stepped out on a limb the day this disc was released and speculated that we may be about to hear a defining moment for one of the best bands alive today. As it turned out, we got something of a split decision. On the one hand, this isn’t the epic, career-defining third record I was hoping for. On the other, it is a damned good CD and yes, The Killers are one of the best bands alive.

After largely abandoning their neo-‘80s influenced sound for something that was aggressively Springsteenesque on their second release, Sam’s Town, the nu wave is back on Day & Age – a development that’s a little puzzling.

Bands this ambitious don’t move backward, and to be fair, while the musical vibe retreats a little, there may be a perfectly valid artistic justification for it. Brandon Flowers wasn’t born to the stage, and when you watch him live you can feel the effort it takes for him to connect with the audience. I note this because these songs are dominated by themes of alienation – a failure to connect, a struggle to relate to convention, a bafflement regarding the unwritten rules that bind society together. Given the quirkiness of some ’80s synth-pop – think Gary Numan here – maybe these are the sounds that fit this exploration best. Of course, I’m just guessing here….

I won’t be surprised to revisit what I’m writing here in a couple years and conclude that I missed something important, and even at this stage I have to acknowledge that the main hurdle The Killers don’t clear on Day & Age is the unreasonably high one I set before them myself.

In sum, a great CD that may age well. We’ll see.

thenewno2 – You Are Here
What if an insanely famous member of the greatest band in the history of the world had a son who looked exactly like him, sounded exactly like him, and listened to a whole lot of Tricky and Massive Attack?

Meet Dhani Harrison, whose brand of “electro-blues” (his first full-length effort) weighs in as the best trip/electronic disc of the year. I will warn you, though – don’t buy it because you liked his father, because thenewno2 (pronounced “the new number two”) sounds nothing like a Beatles record. Or a George Harrison solo record. It’s dark, downbeat, brooding, occasionally ponderous, and as thoroughly modern in 2009 as dad’s act was 45 years ago.

You Are Here is deft and clever and an altogether exceptional debut. Sadly, I can’t imagine that he’s going to enjoy the level of popular success that attended his famous father. Very sad, because at this stage of the game I’d say he’s every bit as accomplished as George was at the same age.

The Raveonettes – Lust Lust Lust
Few bands in the rock history have exerted the sort of influence we now associate with The Jesus & Mary Chain, who along with Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine paved the way for some of the most interesting music of the past two decades. The debt Denmark’s Raveonettes owe J&MC is more obvious here than on their last outing, where they got a little too infatuated with studio slickness and lost touch with the rough edges that define their lineage.

Here the noise is back in all its distortion and reverb-soaked majesty. Not that this hurts the innate accessibility of the record in the least – in fact, the rawness of the mix accentuates the melodicism and of the songs and the purity of Sharin Foo’s vocals in a way that’s perhaps initially counter-intuitive to listeners who are new to dreampop, shoegazer and their related genres.

The band also released a couple of nice digital EPs on eMusic in 2008 – give them a listen, as well.

Rick Springfield – Venus in Overdive
Springfield has been cranking out vastly underrated Power Pop since back in the days of Dr. Noah Drake, and it’s a shame that he’s gotten so little critical acclaim. The truth is that his music, while never deep on what we might call a Proustian level, has always been thoughtful and meticulously crafted. He’s also one of the three or four most instinctively brilliant performing front men I’ve ever seen (a short list that includes Freddy Mercury and “She Called Me Bruce” Springsteen).

Rick is in the midst of a superb artistic rebirth these days. After 1988’s underwhelming Rock of Life he disappeared for a decade, but 1999’s Karma kicked off a run of studio releases that range from very good to fantastic. Put his latest in the latter column. Some guitar pop aficionados I know are calling this perhaps h is best CD ever, and while I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far quite yet, I’ll allow that it’s awfully close.

His trademark knack for cracking off an irresistible hook is present in spades – as always – but what really sets ViO apart is the sensitivity with which Rick confronts … women. Guys who have spent as much time on stage ducking panties as he has are bound to have done things. Questionable things. Things that are especially questionable in the eyes of the women that they were, you know, married to at the time. In a recent interview Springfield danced carefully around the subject, but the implication was more than clear, and he has finally arrived at a place where he’s worried about how men connect with women as people instead of flesh. This isn’t a new theme for him, by any stretch, but there’s a refinement in how he approaches the topic, and even the subject of “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” is interesting not because of her body but because of what she really represents beneath the surface.

If you like smart guitar pop that works as hard to hook the mind as it does the feet, this is your kind of record.

The Best CDs of 2008

• CD of the Year
  
• Pt. 1: the Gold LPs

George Denis Patrick Carlin was a goddamned hypocrite, and I loved him for it.

In the latter part of his long and storied life and career, the late standup comedy legend came off as a crusty, irate, disappointed, extremely cynical bastard who freely admitted he’d given up on the hopeless human race and reveled in its plentiful fuckups and contradictions.

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. This country is finished.” – GC

Offstage though, Carlin was a kind-hearted, selfless, encouraging friend to myriad pluggers on the comedy circuit. His daughter and colleagues say he was nothing like the persona he developed in the face of advancing age and frustration with the agonizing lack of progress in the nation he loved as much as he lampooned.

“Some people see a glass that’s half full. Some see a glass that’s half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” – GC

Though he insisted that he didn’t give a shit about America anymore, he sure kept up with it. In his last HBO show, It’s Bad for Ya, he opened with an astounding rapid-fire monologue loaded with all the latest buzzwords to show how tuned in and mentally shipshape he still was, despite having endured heart surgery and hitting the big 7-0.

Plus, he read more blogs than you do.

“The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.” – GC

I saw Carlin perform three times, the last here in Denver a few years ago in which he scoffed at the obsessively precautionary society America had become. He bragged about having swum in New York City’s filthy rivers as a kid.

“I was tempered in shit!” – GC

But he could never shake that bad ticker…

“As it stands right now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks, two to one. However, Richard still leads me, one to nothing, in burning yourself up.” – GC, 1982

George was honored in November with the Mark Twain Prize, apparently the only award he saw as “legitimate.” I wish he’d a made it to the ceremony, but he was undoubtedly there in spirit. Ah, who’m I kidding…

“What’s this favoritism toward the dead? FUCK the dead!” – GC

Two doctor/brothers, Joel and Ian Gold, have identified symptoms of a mental illness unique to our times: the Truman Show delusion, named for the 1998 movie that starred Jim Carrey as a suburbanite whose movements were filmed 24/7 and broadcast to the world. The two say a handful of individuals are convinced they are stars of an imaginary reality show.

Though limited, their findings are creating a buzz in the media and the psychiatric community: Is it possible that reality TV is shaping delusions?

In an interview with WebMD, Joel Gold says, “The Truman Show delusion encompasses a patient’s entire life. They believe their family, friends, and co-workers are all reading from scripts and their home, workplace, and hospital are all sets. They believe they are being filmed for the whole world to see.”

Just … wow.

As the article says, this is a variation on other types of “persecutory and grandiose delusions.” I’ve had some brief experience with people on the fringe of that category, and can tell you that it’s no picnic. In fact, it can be scary as hell.

It goes without saying that mental illness is never funny. As these maladies go, though, this strikes me as one of the more bizarre ones. I’m not sure it’s really possible for those of us who don’t suffer from something like this to imagine what it’s like. How could you possibly think that you were living in a reality show, that you best friend was an actor paid to hang out with you, that there were hidden cameras chronicling your every move? Isn’t it curious that you can’t find the show anywhere on your television? How could you imagine that somebody out there would be interested in watching it? How is it that the evidence of the physical world never intrudes on the fantasy? (This, of course, is why it’s a mental illness – I realize that.)

Okay, okay – I can give you the one about people’s willingness to watch, maybe. If people will glue themselves to the latest goings-on with Hulk Hogan’s family, the really sad housewives of Atlanta and Jessica Simpson trying to figure out whether tuna is chicken or fish, then maybe there is an audience for you making yourself a sandwich. I don’t know. I’m not 100% sure that this phenomenon itself isn’t a mild form of masochistic disorder.

In any case, just a word of advice: if you’re all teed up to watch the Dr. Slammy Show marathon on Network 23 this weekend, please pick up the phone.

You need help.