Your moody feminist existentialist stoner hero

Linda Dahl's fine new novel

Thanks to Google Earth and its spawn, you now have a ground-level view into practically every remote corner of the planet — and, gawking from deep in your chair, you will never feel a thing. Linda Dahl’s fine new novel, Gringa in a Strange Land (Robert D. Reed Publishers, $14.95, pbk.) provides an unblinking look at a recent university graduate out to see the world in the early 1970s, and a reader is likely to be swept up in the book’s profound depth of feeling.

Dahl, well known as the biographer of several prominent female jazz musicians, creates a fictionalized account of years living alone in isolated villages in the Mexican state of Yucatán, paying for her dope, rent, and jars of Nescafé on occasional earnings, and checks wired from home.

If basic elements of the expat’s tale will seem familiar, as will several of the stock characters that expats always seem to encounter, Dahl overcomes the usual limitations of her genre with a nervy and stark examination of her protag, a middle-western hippie chick who is herself a work in progress.

Author Dahl

This artist-as-a-young-woman prevails over every page of the novel, simultaneously craving companionship, and unable to abide the company of others. She loves Mexico because it isn’t home, and mildly resents the intrusive copy of Time magazine air-mailed each week by her parents as a link to what she’s left behind: Velveeta and Nixon and Sunday nights with Disney, the Cartwrights, and the Ed Sullivan show. At the same time, she is smack in the middle of the three-way intersection between dismissive, wistful and peevish, over being deprived of air-conditioning, a decent hi-fi, and shops catering to the middle-class.

Dahl’s creation, known as Erica Mason, paints capably and attracts the interest of a vacationing Associated Press reporter, who works her into a story about young American artists in exile. She is momentarily pleased by the acclaim, but that passes, and she resumes her regimen of self-absorbed Quaalude-popping, interspersed with creative outbursts, and ongoing schemes intended to lead toward some undetermined purpose.

Fragile and domineering, acutely self-aware and completely oblivious, Erica veers back and forth toward her obsession with an imperfect past boyfriend, and a series of attractions-repulsions involving local menfolk. She is your moody feminist existentialist stoner hero, Hemingwayesque as an estrogen version of Nick Adams.

The author is bravely unconcerned about making this fictive creation appealing to readers. Erica can be a pain, not least for what she represents. When a character upbraids her for the obvious hypocrisy of using and discarding strangers out of brief sexual need, even while she complains about the callousness of the male gender, Erica is surprised by — and then immediately accepting of — what she recognizes as her own cruelty.

With those attitudes, you expect an eventual form of comeuppance, but Dahl skillfully avoids predictive outcomes, which is part of what makes this a worthy and commendable novel. In bygone days, the Caribbean outland was filled with callow Nordamericanos spending years on end in the arduous work of getting their heads together, egged on by the lyrics of Steve Goodman’s Banana Republics, or Jimmy Buffett crooning about wasting away in Margaritaville. Dahl’s Yucatán is a lonelier place, where the music is joyless and inaccessible, the heat just wears you down, and the drug highs are actually sustained lows.

Those were the seventies, when curiosity and a paperbound copy of Carlos Castanada in your backpack could lead you anywhere. Today, Americans seem far less inclined to ever want to become hippie adventurers. They’ve been cowed and enervated by events, and, too broke to catch the view from the deck of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, now seem content to look at the world through YouTube, finding the entire idea of Strange Lands (and the passports and customs inspectors and odd practices that go with them) to be troublesome and confusing.

Tomorrow, it will be clusters of wealthy Chinese and Indian beatniks who go slumming in the smaller towns and suburbs of the USA Rust Belt, buying houses for a pittance, getting stoned on Trader Joe’s Cabernet, balling the entranced locals after an evening at Appleby’s, and grousing that they can’t find anything interesting to do in proximity to Nine Mile Road. When that occurs, as now seems inevitable, you would hope the Americans will show forbearance and outward tolerance for the strangers in their midst, as did the impoverished and powerless residents of Mérida, Yucatán, so compellingly depicted in Dahl’s fiction.

Seven tons of airborne effluence. I did that?

Motivated to monitor the outflow of pennies during this recession year, and enabled by a website called Tripit.com, I’ve been keeping tabs on my travel. Seems I’ve clocked 39,725 km thus far in 2009, not counting those short jaunts to the distant exurbs to try to wheedle money out of clients, or the occasional wild weekend at the Red Roof Inn in Findlay, Ohio, or a quick spin around middle Etobicoke on my scooter. My ‘09 travel seems to have been pretty much equivalent to the circumference of our planet, measured equatorially at 40,075.02 km. That’s less travel than when I was being regularly summoned to appear for no evident purpose in Antwerp and even worse places, but is still more travel than anyone would want to face on a Monday morning in December.

Accor Hotels outpost in the Buckeye State

For the hell of it, I ran my total through one of the carbon footprint calculators that are popping up on the Internet. Bingo. Seems I’m personally responsible for generating 14,568 pounds of CO2 in the past 12 months. That’s seven tons, if you’re scoring, or approximately 110 times my own weight in crud. I did that? It reminded me of a line attributed to good old Don Rumsfeld, supposedly in connection with Prime Minister Blair’s increasing misgivings over the Iraq invasion: “I say when the cat turds start to get bigger than the cat, it’s time to get rid of the cat.” Good homespun advice, as always, but perhaps it might change your view, Mr. Secretary, when you find you’re the diarrhetic cat.

David Suzuki, the longtime environmental nudnik, claims air travel “presently accounts for four to nine per cent of the total climate change impact of human activity.” That’s the kind of statistical rigor that would get you expelled from a first-year introduction-to-science lecture course, after you explain in your essay that you’ve determined a statistical variance of… oh, 125 per cent. Suzuki, someone I used to think of as well-intentioned, seems determined to be regarded as a crank in his declining years. He filmed a series of TV commercials for an energy conservation effort in Ontario that was at least as objectionable as Howie Long’s recent ads for Chevrolet, and that’s really saying something. Both campaigns try to win over viewers to their point of view, by depicting the man-on-the-street as a gormless mook who craves direction  from a drill-sergeant figure. That may well be the case, but there is still something off-putting about seeing it all laid bare. I’ll toss my energy-inefficient fridge, I’ll even consider leasing a domestic automobile, but for the love of god, allow me to keep my dignity.

I later caught a minute or two of Suzuki’s radio gig on the John Oakley program in Toronto, which led me to wonder if the great conservationist is, you know, losing it. He left the show in a huff, after Oakley raised a mild question about the validity of the climate change data. How, I wonder, when you’re tossing off such dubious statistics — “Could be four per cent. Could be nine per cent.” — can you expect not to entertain questions about your research methods?

Which is not to agree with the faction that sees the Kyoto Accord as an organized plot against Western economic interests. We can leave that knee-jerk contention to Rush and his Legion of Lesser Limbaughs. I’m merely proposing that if your goal is to change people’s behavior, the wrong approach to take is that of a pious, petulant, hand-wringing, finger-wagging auntie.

Speaking of whom, today marks the first occasion when a worldwide coven of pious, petulant, etceteras in the journalistic trade joins together for the purpose of boring readers (no small feat, being dull in 20 languages) with their shared view of the climate summit in Copenhagen. This project was an initiative of The Guardian, which is my newspaper of choice in the UK, in spite of their capacity to promulgate a general form of nuttiness, in the finest English traditions. Some good papers signed on to their plan to speak with one voice on this issue, including The Irish Times, Le Monde, and Amsterdam’s great daily, de Volkskrant. There were dozens of insignificant papers no one has ever heard of, as well as what is generally regarded to be the dumbest daily on the planet, my hometown rag, the vile Toronto Star. Much as I strive to keep an open mind, when the Star declares itself to be on one side of any issue, it almost always turns out to be an idea any reasonable person would reject out of hand.

There are 1,422 daily newspapers in the United States, of which exactly one, the Miami Herald, signed up to reprint the Guardian editorial. I wouldn’t read very much into this, for better or worse. Many of the progressive leaders and managers of the US newspaper industry must recognize that the role of the paper in its community is to present an enlightened local voice, in the local dialect, using local reference points. I’d argue that no cause is properly served when a case is presented in lockstep, without the unique separate perspectives of each news  organization. Were I only lucky enough to be entrusted with a fine institution such as the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, or the Pittsfield (Mass.) Berkshire Eagle, I would not be impressed in the slightest by the chance to join ranks with the Guardian gang, no matter how much I agreed with their position, or how much I respected their paper. Joining ranks is fine for some, but is just not why an independent press is supposed to be there.

In any case, there are more effective ways of communicating a message, rather than rubbing readers’ noses in it. I haven’t seen Jason Reitman’s new movie, “Up in the Air,” but I understand that it will do more to discourage unnecessary air travel than any lifetime of media appearances by the cranky, self-righteous David Suzuki, or forest-despoiling newspaper publishers. (I’ll consider taking the Star seriously only after they’ve pulled their air-poisoning delivery vans off the road and replaced them with pedal power.)

Porter Airlines: Just as polluting, but you probably won’t hate them as much as Air Canada

So, look. You’re not about to eliminate all your business travel any time soon, and neither am I. I’m truly sorry about the seven tons of carbon. If it makes you feel any better, I promise that most of my 2010 shuttling in the Toronto-Montreal-New York City triangle will be on Porter Air, the excellent short-haul carrier that operates out of Toronto’s City Centre Airport. I don’t think Porter is any more environmentally friendly than any other means of motor-propelled transport, but at least when you’re aloft and they hand you a complimentary can of Steamwhistle beer, it appears to come in a recyclable green-colored aluminum container. That may not seem like much to some, but I figure that if you want to keep an eye on your carbon, the CO2 bubbles in your beer are as good a place as any to begin.

Strangely enough, this beer is for Ted Rogers

So, I’ve been scribbling nonsense regularly in this blog for a year now, and here is the sum total of everything I’ve learned in the process: If your topic is beer, large numbers of people will be curious about what you have to say. If you write about practically anything else, no one will care.

Of the 37 encyclicals I’ve issued — this is the 38th — the two installments devoted to the subject of beer attracted exactly four times the traffic of the next most-read topic (which was about an undeservedly obscure rock singer named Lotti Golden.) The beer-related pieces delivered eyeballs, but my carefully constructed considerations of muy serio topics such as dying newspapers and beastly Dick Cheney drew flies.

I detect a winning formula here. You’ve got to give the people what they want: beer. This seems to be the case for visitors to this blog, hailing, as they do, from 30 countries, including several where they don’t encourage beer consumption, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Plato: Politics, poetics, pilsner

Plainly, this discovery calls for a beer. The challenge for the coming year will be to work some sort of beer reference into each post. Actually, it really isn’t that much of a challenge, since you can conveniently divide all the world’s experiences into two categories: those which can be better understood, or improved upon, by having a beer in your hand, and those which cannot. (Thanks to Plato for his early work in formulating this approach.)

Working down the list of my past year’s greatest hits, my fourth most-read post was an appreciation of the late Ted Rogers, a fellow I probably wouldn’t have cared to have a beer with. But, you need to give the devil his due. Yesterday, they dedicated part of a street in Toronto to Rogers, which is an extraordinary occurrence. This isn’t a town big on handing out recognition or acknowledgements, unlike Paris, Brussels, or Montreal, where you earn a street named in your honor if you happened to be a dry-cleaner who didn’t mix up the orders too often. (Toronto’s usual rules of disengagement don’t apply if you’re some sort of hack municipal politician, in which case you’re certain to be recognized with your name on a nice big expressway, or a cute neighborhood dog-run.)

Walk of fame? Sheesh...

True that there’s a so-called Walk of Fame somewhere in the west end, but that was mainly created to pay tribute to non-entities, such the cut-ups who appeared on TV game shows that no one watched. We’ve always felt safe and virtuous about elevating the mediocre in Toronto, but quickly get tetchy should someone act too big for their britches.

The songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, for example, is a giant, who deserves an outsized bronze statue on Yorkville Avenue, or perhaps outside the former site of Steele’s Tavern on Yonge Street, where he performed. He ain’t going to get one. Neither will legendary musicians such as Ian Tyson or Murray McLaughlin, or the poets Raymond Souster and Al Purdy. Toronto is a cold, cold town. The very name is derived from an Ojibwa phrase that means: Place-where-they-might-give-you-a-zoning-permit,-but-first-you-need-to-bribe-a-city-politician. (Although several scholars with a more scatological bent insist that a more accurate translation is: Place where they wouldn’t bother urinating down your tonsils even if your kidneys were on fire.)

So it is that there’s no portion of University Avenue named to honor Dr. Wilfred G. Bigelow in his hometown, but all he ever did was figure out some obscure surgical manoeuvre that led to countless lives being saved.

Ted Rogers is deemed worthy of honor, no doubt for his pioneering contributions toward “system access fees” and “negative-option billing,” two innovations that enabled him to syphon cash from sleepy-eyed cable-TV subscribers across the Dominion of Canada. That, in a nutshell, was Ted Rogers’ Way — and that is what I’ll recall, should circumstances lead me to stroll down the newly christened Ted Rogers Way.

There is a nice symbolism in a portion of Jarvis Street being named for the communications kingpin. Back around the time Ted was collecting his law degree at the University of Toronto, the thoroughfare was commonly called “Tawdry” Jarvis Street, or “Notorious” Jarvis Street, and it was widely known for its streetwalkers. The sex-trade workers long ago moved elsewhere, making the sidewalks safe for boardroom icons, such as dead Ted, to step out of their limousines without concern. Let it be known that working gals will never again be welcome on Ted Rogers Way, at least unless the Rogers organization can devise a plan to somehow incorporate the trolling bawds’ activities into their consolidated corporate earnings statements.

But, as I say, you might as well give the devil his due. Unlike various former big-wigs in the Toronto media business who are currently incarcerated here and there, Ted steered well clear of the jailhouse, and we salute him for that. You try to picture a hypothetical Garth Drabinsky Drive, or Rue de Myron Gottleib, or, I regret to add, Lord Black Boulevard, and what comes to mind is an appropriately dismal stretch of Gerrard Street East or Broadview Avenue in close proximity to the Don Jail. That ancient lockup is not what anyone with a dictionary would call salubrious, and I’m led to believe that no matter how much you scheme or wheedle, once the cell-door slams, that spells the end of Happy Hour. The readers of this blog will want it to be said of Ted that, unlike some others, right until the very end he was entirely within his legal right to tell the waitress to bring him a beer.

Pirate Radio: Not nearly enough ‘yo-ho-ho,’ or ‘gabba-gabba-hey’

At the conclusion of the new British movie, Pirate Radio, a bit of text appears on the screen that informs you of what a splendid four decades rock & roll has enjoyed, since 1966. Proof of the contention is provided in the form of quick glimpses of 40 years worth of LP and CD covers, from Sergeant Pepper to Jay-Z. The images of album-cover art keep piling up, until there are too many of them, and each becomes indistinct and cog-like: small bits of a collage, not individually discernible.

If this was the message the filmmaker was trying to impart — that the soul of rock & roll was obscured somewhere along the runaway assembly line — Pirate Radio might have been taken as a subversive commentary on a society obsessed with leisure and amusements. That’s not the message.

Once, when entertainment was something you needed to seek out, you’d pay a dime — previously a nickel, later a quarter — to listen to your favorite pop music tune through a juke box. If you got to hear your favorite song for free, on the radio, which might happen no more than five or six times each day, it was a two-minute interval of pure pleasure. Actually owning a record was a rare luxury. They were sold in limited quantities in tiny nooks of Woolworth’s, and in the back of some neighborhood drug stores, where children were discouraged from congregating.

Go, cat, go: Bill Haley's Comets rocking around the clock

That was the tail-end of the era depicted in Pirate Radio, which attempts to tell the story of the how the emergent teenage music overcame the rabid opposition of corporatist squares, an inevitable victory attained because joy is much better than gloom. Hundreds of screenplays have previously worked this theme, from “Rock Around the Clock” in 1956, past the “T.A.M.I. Show” of 1964, to the best of the genre, “American Hot Wax,” the 1978 biopic of DJ Alan Freed (which features a brief role for the unpleasant upstart comedian Jay Leno.)

It looked as though Pirate Radio had the potential to surpass the lot, with the advantages of a skilled writer-director, Richard Curtis, a decent budget, an engaging cast, and an under-worked subject in the short, happy life of unlicensed offshore broadcasters, who for a short while beamed their signals from the North Atlantic into Swinging London.

The movie works best when Curtis is left to do his miniaturist thing, and there are a couple of small, understated scenes that are at least as good as his earlier work in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the “Vicar of Dibley” TV series.

In one moment representative of the best of British cinema, a disconsolate newlywed DJ, just cuckolded on his wedding night by a colleague, takes silent solace from sitting on a coach with two chums, wordlessly dipping his bourbon-cream biscuit in a mate’s mug of tea. In another standout segment, a shy, middle-aged DJ, inarticulate and socially dysfunctional when not introducing records, can’t think of a single thing to say after meeting the son he abandoned at birth. The son becomes equally mute and panic-stricken — and an audience’s impulse is to look away from something so realistically intimate and touching.

Director Curtis: too much music, man

The film’s problem is that there aren’t enough of these inspired quiet moments of character study. Unexpectedly, in a rock & roll movie, there’s far too much rock & roll, and most of it is the wrong sort entirely. The historical pirate radio stations, such as Radio Caroline and Radio London, filled a need by broadcasting hit parade music interspersed with rapid-fire chatter from American-influenced DJs. The repertoire of Number One hits in the UK in 1966, spun from 45 RPM platters, included essential rock classics such as The Spencer Davis Group’s Keep On Running, The Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, and Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames’ Get Away — none of which is heard in the movie soundtrack. (But you lot can listen to them at Mog.com, by clicking the preceding links.)

The ‘66 British chart-toppers also included a fair bit of what we would now call unlistenable schlock: Tom Jones’ maudlin “Green Grass Of Home,” Frank Sinatra’s cloying “Strangers In The Night,” and Gentleman Jim Reeves’ just-plain-awful “Distant Drums.” Incredibly, those three chestnuts held the Number One position for a combined 15 weeks.

Recognizing that no contemporary CD soundtrack-buyer is going to pay for such schmaltz, even if it was what Pirate Radio listeners were accustomed to back in the day, the filmmakers elected to pull the old switcheroo, substituting how it should have been, for how it was. And so, director Curtis (who would have been sipping his Ribena as a seven-year-old when Radio Caroline was in its heyday) contrives to depict a Top 40 station as featuring an Album Rock format, when they are two entirely different beasts.

This blatant misrepresentation is further confounded by having his DJs play tunes that wouldn’t be recorded for another 12 months or more after ‘66, such as Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” John Fred & the Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),” and Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne.” While it’s true enough that Noel Harrison had a minor hit with Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1968, it’s absurd to think that any Top 40 radio station might ever have subjected its listeners to Lenny’s idiosyncratic moaning.

Do we split hairs? I think not. Evidently the budget of Pirate Radio exceeded $50 million, owing to the director’s penchant for recreating period details with painstaking accuracy. To spend a fortune trying to accurately depict obscure gauges, meters, and broadcasting instruments, and then take an inauthentic approach to the music selection, is to reveal the director’s priorities. No Beatles. No Lovin’ Spoonful. However, there are two tunes by the Turtles, including “Eleanor,” which the pirate DJs seem to have been prescient enough to play two years before it was even written. (Top that trick if you can, Jimmy Savile.)

Sir Jimmy: Gifted, but not clairvoyant

Not that you’d blame poor Curtis for being disinterested in the music. Who wouldn’t be? When you’ve spent your entire life submerged in the Baby Boomer rhythm, as we all have, it’s hard to imagine that it ever might have been fresh, interesting, or anything you’d ever go to effort of tuning in. Rock & roll is just too readily available a commodity to command any attention these days.

There’s a bit of dialogue in an earlier rock movie, the Monkees’ 1968 release, “Head,” where one of the bad guys taunts our heroes, regarding their obsession with the usual caprices such as sex, drugs and rock & roll: “Be careful of what you wish for, fellows. One day you just might get it.”

I would say that adage applies to a force-fed diet of endlessly recycled tunes, most particularly when they are so obviously being used to accompany someone’s desperate attempt to sell you something. The makers of Pirate Radio want to sell you a glimpse of how much fun  broadcasting used to be, but you’ll find it more satisfying to stay home and catch a re-run of WKRP in Cincinnati.

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• 11/22/09: Anyone with any degree of interest in the real pirate radio should visit http://radiolondon.co.uk/, a comprehensive, addictive site run for more than 10 years by Chris and Mary Payne.

De-bleating the weird old ‘70s America: What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?

Getting George's goat

I got a kick out of The Men Who Stare at Goats, the new film that spoofs and distorts the US Army’s real-life 1970s experiments with the paranormal. The movie follows Hollywood’s earlier goofball tradition of having civilian goldbrickers make yuks at the expense of the military, viz., “The Wackiest Ship in the Army,” “Operation Petticoat,” and other hoary artefacts, none of which could ever be called good.

Reviewers have griped that much doesn’t quite sit right with Goats, and I can vouch that viewers at my screening went away complaining, a few seeming a bit irritated and tetchy. Since Jeff Bridges has a meaty role in the movie as a hippie army officer, critics have made comparisons with his previous appearance as a pot-head in “The Big Lebowski.” That’s just wrong. His cartoonish Lebowski character, the Dudester, is unrelated to this Goats assignment, where he plays a fictionalized version of Lt. Col. James B. Channon, U.S. Army (ret.), an American original, about whom much more needs to be said.

Colonel Jim: No cartoon, he

Channon was, and remains, no cartoon. Even overlooking that fundamental mis-representation, Goats, as a movie, still gets trampled by Lebowski, cloven-hooves down.

The film can’t contain its sniggering response to the historical fact that America’s armed forces leaders were once officially intrigued by the potential of the human spirit. In mining this incongruity and extracting the cheapest kind of slapstick, Goats quickly slips out of its pen, and lopes off in no particular direction. The presence of three-and-a-half good actors — Bridges, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, and Ewan McGregor — keeps the project airy and watchable. However, the incidents on which the movie was based deserved a less-dismissive treatment.

Channon, commissioned by the Army to imagine and report on New Age approaches to the military, created a self-described concept paper, known as the First Earth Battalion Manual, which addressed this windy question: “Understanding that we must work through people, how can our Army establish and maintain control of changing, interdependent systems to maximize force readiness?” His thoughts, along with some rather good illustrations created by the Colonel himself, are on the web, here.

Channon comes across in his notes as the kind of out-of-the-box windbag you’d want to keep around your organization, as a challenge to the orthodox elements, knowing that one day he’d piss you off for good. It was his good fortune to be advancing his progressive/wingy ideas in the 1970s, when there was a receptive audience for creative approaches: new ways of seeing, in the phrase of Carlos Castaneda.

Castaneda almost certainly influenced Channon. The anthropologist and author sold eight million books, and created a large following from his early ’70s epic, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. He made it seem nearly plausible that anyone so interested might hang out with all-knowing elderly Mexican shamans who could teach you cool stunts, like projecting yourself through space, or inhabiting the body of a wolf, or, on a more accessible level, gobbling fistfuls of peyote buttons. That certainly seemed like a more interesting proposition than what we were doing at the time, which was cutting high school classes in the Toronto suburbs and making off for the Towne & Countrye Mall.

When Castaneda landed on the cover of Time magazine, it may have been the Army’s reveille call to do due diligence on this turn-into-a-wolf tactic. Sure enough that the usual bag-of-tricks wasn’t winning the day in Viet Nam, so it would have been irresponsible to leave any avenue unexamined. Jim Channon grabbed the peyote buttons and, to his credit, ran with them.

The Colonel’s currently a large part of a Hawaii based think tank, Arcturus Research, and gets paid big bucks by corporations for his “imagineering” services. Ever the stoic new age soldier, he appears to be bothered not in the slightest by being depicted on the silver screen as an acid-head laughing stock, conducting death-stare experiments aimed at a herd of de-bleated goats. It makes a kind of sense that the entertainment industry would know exactly what to do with a figure such as Jim Channon, which is to dismiss him as a fruit-bat, and add a laugh-track to his message of human potential. The cineplexes thrive by a business model of convincing people to live vicariously, while consuming giant portions of junk food. The movie studios will adapt to the times, making even Mickey Mouse an angrier, more cynical figure, if that’s what it takes to maintain their brand equity in a cruel and unpleasant age. Messages of self-actualization are strictly for Bollywood cinema-goers.

Left as big media’s last proponent for the notion of being all that you can be – a line deployed by the Goats movie to invoke knowing snickers – is Oprah Winfrey, whose promotion of the human potential movement seems just a wee bit insincere and unconvincing. (In pitching her upcoming webinar to publicize her latest crappy, middle-brow book discovery, she exclaims, “I can’t wait to tell all y’all about it!” Tell all y’all? Stow it, sister.)

Oprah and her doctor buddies, Phil and Oz, will encourage you to put down the crack pipe, and take off those last 50 or 60 pounds, and end that abusive relationship with the kid’s nanny, but you’ll never catch them offering astral projection lessons or encouraging alternate consciousness experimentation on the television machine. Bad for ratings when your audience is away somewhere in a spirit trance.

Armies might entertain some fresh ideas every other generation or so, but when it’s time to get cracking, the old response will do just fine: send your kid overseas as cannon fodder. So, yes, I enjoyed the Goats movie as a kind of harmless goof, but when the popcorn’s finished, you wonder what exactly is so hilarious about soldiers imagining war might one day become something else, or smart people envisioning that our poor, unhappy race could eventually become something better than what it is.

In an age of weak beer and no hair, Molson Canadian 67 embraces the New Normal

Jerry, man...

Advertising whiz Jerry Della Femina, who not only lived but epitomized the high life depicted in the TV series “Mad Men,” once tried to sell light beer and couldn’t.

He writes in his entertaining 1971 bestseller, “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor,” how his brilliant campaign for Gablinger’s Diet Beer, a product of Rheingold Breweries, failed to persuade suds-lovers to switch brands in order to cut calories.

Forced to explain how his judgment could have been so wrong, the ad maven whines that he didn’t initially understand how beer-drinkers — being some sort of primitive blue-collared species — actually took pride in their distended guts, and considered the word “Diet” as anathema.

Others would simply say that both the product and its ad support missed the mark by miles.

Gablinger’s happened along, way back in 1967. A decade would pass before Miller Lite and Natural Light from Anheuser-Busch would emerge to create a sector category. Today three of the four leading beer brands are “light,” as are six of the top 10. That would make these diluted brews the new normal. And that, in turn, would force some brewing industry executive to spur the introduction of an Extreme Light as the new, um, light.

Beer at its most ephemeral

Hence, Molson Canadian 67: a beer so light, that, as the joke might go, you hardly need bother. As much as I’d like to think that the “67″ name is there to honor the year of both the birth of Gablinger`s and the Canadian centennial, it actually refers to the number of calories in a 12-ounce bottle. That compares with an even 100 calories in conventional light beer, or 150 or so in the full-strength variety. (Here’s a private message for Stephanie DeSutter of Molson, who spun the following prevarication to Marketing Magazine: “When people automatically think there’s anywhere from 200 to 250 calories per bottle of beer, there’s definitely a great opportunity for a brand like 67 to come in and make that calorie call-out.” Which people? Badly misinformed people who can’t read the nutritional information on their beer label? That’s the market you’re targeting?)

There have been other ultra-low calorie lagers before, and they’ve all been rejected by consumers. I used to buy something called Alta, a product of the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in Portland, that also hit the scales at 67 calories. It was quite tasteless indeed, but kept a fellow hydrated, and the price was right for school-kid budgets. I can’t imagine that the new Molson product will be any better, or any good at all, but the marketers seem determined to avoid Jerry Della Femina’s last-century missteps.

The National Post newspaper reports that Molson is using a blog-trolling service called Radian 6 to scope out comments about the new brew, and an article adds that the company will “respond to those consumers in what it calls ‘Direct to Drinker’ engagement.” I guess we’ll see exactly how that works, but if you’re planning on engaging this blogger, Ms. DeSutter, please leave the stepped-on suds in your office.

The original Mad Man?

Now, if Jerry Della Femina had personally showed up on your granddad’s doorstep, and instructed him to drink Gablinger’s, well, things might have played out differently. JDF is a biggish gentleman whose shaved-head-and-beard was a trademark in the days when he, along with Shel Silverstein, Yul Brenner and the fictive pair of Mr. Clean and Lex Luther, were the only lads sporting that particular look. Then Kojak and Michael Jordan joined the gang. Now, the denuded-skull-with-goatee is the other side of the new normal, accompanied by a weak beer in front of you, to complete the image.

Last week, Mr. and Mrs. J.T. Grossmith showed up in town, following a year-long road trip hither and tither, during which time we’ve failed to keep in touch using Skype.

J.T., the male component in the couple, has affected the Full, Complete Jerry Della Femina, but, to his credit, wouldn’t accept a Molson Canadian 67 when I offered to treat him at the neighborhood pub, and agreed to a glass of white wine. Something about a shaved head seems to accentuate a man’s eyes, and I was surprised to see that I’d never really paid any attention to J.T.’s peepers during the 30 years of our friendship. His are what I would call extraordinarily cop-like, which I may elaborate upon during a future occasion: say, if I ever get around to scribbling that police-procedural novel I think I may have in me.

Perhaps, if Ms. DeSutter and her team are open to a marketing opportunity involving strategic product placement, I may call the book “Badge 67,” and it may feature a bald, cruel-eyed detective who watches his waistline by drinking watery lager — and is miserable, as a consequence. I’m keeping most of the plot under my hat, but part of the dramatic tension will come as the detective searches high and low, both in lowdown dives and swell joints, looking for the miscreant who stole two-thirds of the flavor from his bottle of beer.

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• More about struggling beer brands, in Mitch’s April 2009 post about Rolling Rock.

Jay Leno and the Golden Age of Mediocrity

Excuse me, but didn't you used to be Jay Leno?

You’d probably question the motives of an architect who forever groused about the high cost of building materials, and be suspicious of a surgeon who constantly worries out loud about the expense of all those darned gauze pads. Therefore, you need to wonder why NBC, the television network, has taken to carping about the exorbitant investment incurred in order to broadcast quality television programs.

Let me disclose, before we go any further, that I own shares in the General Electric Company, which operates NBC — although this is nothing to brag about, believe me. As a stakeholder, whose stake is currently worth quite a few drachmas less than I originally paid, I naturally support management’s efforts to improve shareholder value, if that is the appropriate phrase to use when you actually mean, “Give me back my god-damned money, you imbeciles.”

The network’s programing gurus determined that the guru-like move was to stop trying to fill the 10 p.m. slot with shows that no one wants to watch, and, by the way, cost an arm and a leg to produce. They wondered: Why not just show a test-pattern? Why not sell the hour to the Hair Club for Men?

Then some better-grounded executive ejaculated, no, no, we can’t do that, but why not move Jay Leno’s Tonight Show up to 10, and put that Conan guy in Leno’s old spot? Brilliant, the management team exclaimed.

Bud Collier: Never ashamed to pay you to watch his TV program

Apprised of these developments, and determined to keep an eye on my investment, I tuned to the Leno program during its first week in the new time, and found it encouraging in its flagrant mediocrity. It was so dreary, I deduced, that it’s going to drive viewers to other, more compelling, entertainment options: nightly re-runs of Beat the Clock shown on the Bud Collier Channel, or viewing pornography on the Internet, or staring at a dripping faucet, or perhaps reading a library book of modern poetry published in the original Italian. Well, forget the last one.

Faced with this outcome, GE would be bound to sell NBC to Rupert Murdoch, or some other pigeon, and perhaps several of the many billions that will change hands may trickle down in the form of a shareholder dividend. (Yes, I know: highly unlikely that GE’s Jeffrey Immelt would let loose of any portion of the mazuma, but a fellow can dream, right?)

Moving Leno to ten-oh is one of those classically dumb corporate decisions that will rank up there with Ford’s exploding Pinto and Schlitz’s additive-enhanced beer. I can’t remember how your charming host used to come across when he was regularly seen around midnight — but, to paraphrase the old Mickey Gilley song, he don’t get any prettier when you’re fully aware that closing time has been extended by an hour-and-a-half.

In truth, it’s just plain unsettling to watch Leno anxiously pitching his repertoire of lame topical jokes, effusively greeting the predictable queue of has-been actors promoting their tired old projects, and basking in the over-rehearsed adoration of his studio audience of casually-turned-out mongoloids. There are some zany stunts larded in, as well, but it’s best to pretend these didn’t occur.

To say something positive, however, the spectacle shows every sign of having been put together on the cheap — which, after all, was the founding premise.

Having grown up watching a fair bit of Canadian television, I’m familiar with the visual symptoms of this rigid adherence to budget, as well as the underlying logic, which is: (1) “Why use two cameras, if you can get away with one?”; and (2) “Where does it say you need three musicians for a trio? Fire that sax player.”

If you’re accustomed to the usual showbiz aggrandisement, this will seem unorthodox. We’re used to generations of promoters inflating the value of their attractions in order to impress the yokels, from Sam Phillips introducing Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny and Carl Lee as his Million Dollar Quartet, or George Hamid calling his Atlantic City amusement joint the Million Dollar Pier. But even adjusting for decades of hyper-inflation, NBC’s Leno hour seems like The Seven Hundred Dollar Talk Show, and that would probably include the budget for the store-brand cookies and fruit punch served nightly in the Green Room.

Since NBC seems determined to emulate a Canadian standard of mediocrity in its daily schedule, the broadcasting colossus may want to import another tactic from their media colleagues north of the border. Canadians, much like citizens of other nations, haven’t been spending as much time as previously watching the listless nonsense on commercial television. This resulted in lower ad revenues — an obvious problem for Canada’s TV networks — so the station owners did what they’ve always done, and went to the national capital and demanded that suckers’ money be used to support their failing for-profit ventures. The federal broadcasting regulator obligingly sent a platoon of mid-level bureaucrats outdoors to help load bags of funds into the trunks of waiting limousines.

I’m reasonably certain that the Obama administration would respond similarly, if asked politely. Think this through: When, inevitably, NBC is driven out of business through the Leno misstep, and forced to hand over the keys to the studio to Rupert Murdoch, what will follow? Roger Ailes will run the NBC News department, Glenn Beck will take over the Leno slot, and President Obama will see his war against Fox television being fought on two fronts. Who needs that? Better to simply provide a generous federal subsidy to the TV networks, same as to the banks and auto industry.

That would be my suggestion, which I offer not as a GE shareholder who may stand to turn a buck from a bail-out, but as a concerned television viewer and supporter of the President.

Oh, well. Why pretend? It’s my suggestion only because I want GE stock to remain in double digits, at least until such time as I can unload it. If you were seeking altruism, I’m afraid that you may have been inadvertently reading the wrong blog.

Starbucks and the death of hipster capitalism

Taster's choice? Hard to imagine

Howard Schultz, the visionary behind Starbucks, is worth $1.1 billion, which makes him one of the most successful businessmen of the Boomer cohort, and I’m saddened to read that he has completely lost his mind.

I began to question the lad’s commercial sense a year ago, when Schultz introduced instant oatmeal into his stores, and insisted it was a superior offering, absolutely the best oatmeal ever. I tried it. It was swill. At the time, you had to wonder the extent to which Schultz’s instincts would eventually decline, and I pondered the seemingly ludicrous notion that Starbucks might soon try to sell instant coffee to accompany the dreadful reconstituted oatmeal.

Well, as you’ve probably read, Schultz has gone and done that unlikely thing — but it’s even worse than that.

During the coming 72 hours, Starbucks will try to persuade you, by giving away samples of their new instant coffee, that the buck-a-cup synthetic is just as good as the three-dollar brewed coffee they’ve been pouring.

"You see? I told you it wasn't that bad..."

Toward what end? In the highly improbable case that the instant may not taste like something procured in bulk by the provisioning agents at the state Department of Corrections, Starbucks will have succeeded in conditioning their patrons to trade down, thus reducing their corporate revenues. Indeed, if discerning coffee-drinkers come to realize that the powdered substitute ain’t that bad, what is to prevent them from gravitating toward the neighborhood Wal-Mart, where the canny consumer can snare an entire month’s supply of the stuff, at the same price Schultz seeks for a single cup?

The question is moot, of course. Everyone knows that instant coffee is never going to be equivalent to the real stuff, in the same way that shaking a dose of generic “coffee whitener” on top of your joe is not the same as mixing in a daub of half-and-half. You can fib to yourself (or to your company’s directors), as Schultz has done, but it’s madness to think that you can pass the con along to your customers, and not suffer the consequence. There was a media buyer I used to visit, a fellow named Roy Chernoff, who used to offer up truly terrible instant coffee, out of an Old World impulse to be hospitable. I’d sip it politely and suffer silently, because Roy was a gentleman, and because I wanted very much for him to give me money. That was an altogether different set of circumstances from allowing Howard Schultz to think that I’m prepared to hand him cash to revisit my wretched-coffee-with-Roy moment. Heck with that.

What has gone wrong at Starbucks? It’s not simply that management seems anxious to diminish their brand by offering inferior new products. I’d say it’s more an issue of general entropy, the usual course of what happens when time passes by.

It isn’t Schultz’s fault that he’s become a stumble-bum overseeing an empire-in-retreat. It’s simply, sadly, that it isn’t 1984 any more, and the old acumen is likely to have suffered some wear-and-tear.

Ah, if we could all go back to the day when Howard and his buddies, all those baby boomer businessmen, used to be so adorable, as they opened their head shops and jeans stores and macrobiotic food kiosks and used record and comic book stores and leather outlets and stained-glass studios, sandblasting the walls and stripping the floors of the cheap retail space in the hip neighborhood, playing that same Moody Blues LP over and over again, filling the world’s nostrils with the stench of patchouli oil. They began as outsiders up against the forces of mainstream retailing, hipsters with a practical cut-throat streak.

Up here in Canada, once upon a time, the government even went so far as to tax funds from struggling wage-earners and redistribute them over to the little whipper-snappers who dreamed of opening up a funky candle store somewhere near the Farmer’s Market. And damned if the government didn’t want the money back — ever! It was free! Why? Just because it was so irresistable to encourage a rebellious, disaffected B.Comm.-grad who was starting a fresh new business venture in the cruel, cold world. Not very many of the hip capitalists endured for longer than a few months. As for the working-class families who financed these experiments, for their contributions they received the privilege of continuing to pay income tax until death. Hardly equitable, but that’s Canadian economics  for you.

“My dream is to bring lattes and chai tea to the masses,” is what Howard and all the other Howards might have inscribed in their high school yearbooks. (And if you’d told them then and there that they would survive only to become the kind of people who would just-add-water to packets of Nescafe and Quaker’s Oats, they probably would have threatened to idealistically pop you in the snoot.)

Things change — indeed they do — but I still can’t see this development at Starbucks as anything less than the curtain coming down on the age of the groovy entrepreneur. For Schultz won’t be content with merely trying to sell instant coffee. Watch for other, more absurd product introductions in the months to come: The world’s greatest instant chocolate pudding, accompanied with a superb spoonful of Dream Whip. The ultimate Spam sandwich on Wonder bread, topped with excellent mock-mayonnaise. A breakthrough in instant orange-y drinks, that you’ll swear is tastier than Tang, garnished with one pristine ice cube.

This isn’t what anyone would admiringly declare to be retro-chic. I fear it’s just time running out.

Never on Monday: We hang out with the meat-free crowd, for 24 hours at a stretch

And so we’ve gotten past another Meatless Monday. Our house, containing nothing but Paul McCartney fans, has been adhering to this practice since the composer of “C-Moon” and “Biker Like an Icon” and other classics, instructed us to knock off eating flesh for 24 hours at the beginning of each working week. Yes, you’re right, and I suppose if he told us to jump off the roof, we’d probably do that, too. You can meet the Beatle’s meaty theories by clicking here.

Make mine a Quarter-pounder; hold the hamburger, please

I had a drink last week — two, if you’re keeping track — with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Casually, I asked her if she was still a vegetarian. “Ppff,” she said. She gave that up years ago, after her GP finished an examination with this assessment: “That diet you’re on has worked wonders. Congratulations, you’re now officially anemic.” Beside which, her occupation frequently requires extended stays in danger zones such as France and Belgium, where someone who declines the horse-meat or blood-sausage course is forever identified as L’Étranger, and that`s never conducive to closing deals.

Nonetheless, I find I’m not at all missing the dead animals on the table on Mondays, and we’re seriously considering expanding the program to add a Weggie Wednesday, or possibly a Flesh-free Friday. Part-time vegetarianism, it can be said, has something going for it. It allows you to feel virtuous on occasion, although not to the extent that your friends can’t stand listening to you, or being around you. Though it strikes me as a good idea, I would never proselytize for Meatless Monday, the way Sir Paul has taken it upon himself. I cringe to think of his former spouse, the lamentable Heather Mills, as she applies her lunatical passion to promoting the cause of veganism. If Heather Mills is the face of the vegan movement, kindly hand me a cheeseburger — unless it’s Monday.

It happens that our having adopted these once-weekly dietary principles coincides with my recent discovery of the 1947 recording by the great Johnny Mercer, backed by no less than the King Cole Trio, of “Save the Bones for Henry Jones (‘Cause Henry Don’t Eat No Meat.)” This seems to be one of those many nonsense tunes popular with hep-cats in the ’40s, along the lines of Mercer’s “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank,” except that the lyrics could be read as an anti-vegetarian diatribe against the title’s Mr. Jones:

Our banquet was most proper
Right down to demi-tasse
From soup to lox and bagels
And pheasant under glass –- class!
We thought the chops were mellow
He said his chops were beat –- reet!
We served the bones to Henry Jones
‘Cause Henry don’t eat no meat
He’s an egg man
Henry don’t eat no meat.

These striking phrases, from tunesmiths Danny Barker and Vernon Lee, are clearly intended to depict the carrot-fancying Mr. Jones as a sorry specimen of post-War manhood. They endorse, in syncopated fashion, the skepticism of the old dialect-humorist Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote: “Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classified as cannibals.” (If that doesn’t strike you as clever, try reciting it with a comic Irish brogue and see if it makes a difference.)

McCartney has cranked out the occasional novelty ditty himself, and can more than hold his own in that genre, as he demonstrates through his verse about the sergeant-major being a lady suffragette. You’ve therefore got to wonder why Macca hasn’t applied his lyrical talents to creating an answer to the Henry Jones slur. Or perhaps he has, and it can be found on the never-played B-side of one of his countless releases.

And, since we seem to have strayed onto the subject, whatever happened to the good old Answer Record? These days, public discourse takes the form of idiots screaming polemics at each other on talk radio. Previously, when radio stations programmed empty-headed music instead of cretinous chatter, you’d have records arguing with each other: “Eve of Destruction” countered by a “Dawn of Correction,” “King of the Road” rebutted with “Queen of the House.” The notion seems beyond quaint by current entertainment industry standards, where divergent views in the hip-hop community may pass unnoticed — unless a performer is unlucky enough to be fired upon by Uzi from a passing car driven by a fellow artist.

But who are we to question the ways of Sir Paul? If he deigns to ignore the scornful provocation of Johnny Mercer, and chooses a dignified silence in reply to the mocking piano riffs of Nat Cole, that, my friend, may be the purest form of eloquence. Of course, it’s also possible that Paul is no longer capable of achieving anger, having purified his spirit and softened his mind by four decades of abstinence from the butcher’s counter at Waitrose.

In which case, I’ll answer on his behalf, in the form of the following Johnny Mercer-versus-Johnny Lennon mashup:

He’s an egg man. They are the egg men. He don’t eat no meat.

Travel notes: I go to Blackpool for my ‘oliday

Kyle be switched! Low-brow Brit TV is jolly fun

Mr. Jeremy Kyle — “Jezza” to his mates, apparently — is Britain’s current answer to the stateside TV schlock-peddler Jerry Springer. This sounds like it should constitute at least one redundancy, because Springer, London-born, is extremely popular with UK audiences, in their blind rush to embrace all things Americanisher. This Yankee-loving impulse leads to puzzling sightings, such as the ubiquitous presence of Coors Light in pubs (having appropriated the tap that once might have issued Theakson’s Old Peculier or Charrington Toby), and British Burger Kings offering “Diddy Do-nuts,” a product concept Sean Combs probably thought of and rejected years ago, at the start of his career.

Back to Jezza. I caught a bit of his act last week on the ITV network, and he was singing loudly from the Maury Povich hymnal that morning, letting us know the true DNA-confirmed identity of the baby-daddy would be revealed only after prolonged shrieking and scowling by the momma, a spotty fat girl with lank hair, who offered up a chain of memorably East-end utterances. One I cherish is: “It weren’t like he were a proper father, then, weren’t it?” (I’d attempt to provide a link to the episode, but I suspect we’d all end up transfixed for the entire working day, staring at Jezza’s human train-wreckage, stuck wondering about what it all means.)

William Hogarth may have been the original Jeremy Kyle. Little comfort in that, ducks

The unappealing girl’s Hogarth-inspired appearance and Dickensian syntax recalls the mighty old unapologetic Great Britain of yore, increasingly scarce these days. You can get an excellent cup of coffee and a nice plate of risotto anywhere in the country, and other formerly scarce commodities are plentiful, but the time-honored British shite, the tea-cozy, the Ford Cortina, and the musical recordings of George Formby, have all gone away somewhere. Where?

The brief time spent with our Jezza sent me out in search of other artifacts of bygone England, which is a way of justifying how I wound up spending part of a Saturday afternoon in Blackpool, Lancashire. What little I previously knew of Blackpool was from the great Kinks’ song, “Autumn Almanac,” where Ray Davies, in some sort of character, sings: “I like my football on a Saturday, /Roast beef on Sunday’s alright. /I go to Blackpool for my ‘olidays, /Sit in the open sunlight.” Never a more perfect description of each of the eternal English verities.

I can report that the seaside resort on the Irish Sea is likely the same in 2009 as it was previously, except that there are fewer visitors and possibly a greater proportion of female beach-sitters wearing black robes to preserve modesty — as prescribed by their religion, one presumes. It’s a traditional delight, is what it is, and they don’t even put quotation marks around traditional while they’re trying to sell you traditional Blackpool Rock, traditional three-quid fish ‘n’ chips, and a collection of some of the grubbiest-looking traditional B&Bs seen outside of the area of Paddington Station in the 1970s.

The souvenir shops sell last season’s T-shirts pledging loyalty to Everton FC (Blackpool’s local squad, the Seasiders, have struggled since the transfer of Sir Stanley Matthews, back before Hogarth’s day), and pink cowboy hats, which seem to be purchased and worn by groups of drunken young women in the Yates Wine Bar, a popular spot to drink, scream, and fall down, during the course of those pre-wedding hen parties. The fellers, off from Liverpool, Leeds and Bolton on their separate stag outings, appear in T-shirts custom-made for the occasion, affixed with suitably misogynous slogans. Plenty of affordable fun for the whole family.

This is a scene designed to make progressives queasy, and nostalgics all wistful-like. Donkey rides on the beach. A big clanking roller-coaster. Jellied eel and jars of lager. All in counterpoint to what is going on everywhere else in the land, where the old ways belong to the last millennium.

The previous evening, we’d stumbled into the Trafford Centre in Manchester, a truly grand post-modern retailing showplace that provides some unusual visual touches, including, in a food court, a convincing recreation of a pre-Katrina New Orleans street scene. Here’s your vibrant new Britain, packed with the prosperous young seeking out Gap clothing, 10-pin bowling, first-run American movies, and other modern good-life accouterments. We dined inside the mall at a chain tapas joint, taking our time with a decent bottle of Rioja. It was a nice evening, but one we might just as well have experienced in Dubai, or Duluth.

Blackpool, on the other hand, has strippers, and lewd comedians. It was pointed out to me somewhere on the promenade that, on certain street-corners, the eastern European sex-trade workers are as common as seagulls. Couldn’t tell you about that. I can attest, however, that Bass ale and Carling lager are still vended openly in pubs, and that pinot grigio and Mojitos are not the potables of choice, as is the case one hour’s drive south. I raise a glass of something to good old Blackpool, where I’d guess that any early school-leaver on the dole can still get blotto and go off onto the beach after last call, with some bloke she can barely see, and show up on telly a year or so later, appearing on the Jeremy Kyle program to await the result of a DNA paternity test — providing persuasive evidence that, in spite of appearances, maybe there will always be an England.

Books, Briefly: One too many Jerry Stahls, and Ginger Strand’s veritable Niagara of trite observation

One of the very cool new applications on LinkedIn.com is the feature that encourages users to keep track of, and comment on, books they’ve recently read. Useful for the LinkedIn community, but especially useful for the gizmo’s sponsor, Amazon.com, which must be mining the data like there’s no tomorrow — which there may not be, judging from what appears to be the typical jamoke’s usual reading habits. Not that I’m any better, as the following list reveals, all too obviously. It was pointed out to me over lunch by my friend Phil Diamond, that the downside of sharing your book list with the planet at large is that everyone now knows what you’ve been reading. ”Is that bad?,” I asked Phil. He answered, inscrutable as ever, ”It’s just not the same stuff I read.” Which, I guess, must be why he says to-may-toe, while I say to-mah-toe. The following — admittedly, a little fiction-heavy, with at least one Jerry Stahl too many — is what I’ve lately racked up, between trying to get a couple of things done. They`re listed sequentially, and linked to Amazon. Feel free to comment: except Phil, who already commented.

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The Getaway by Jim Thompson

Jimbo`s masterpiece

Recommended: I return to this book every couple of years, and grow ever more impressed with each re-reading. Thompson, the sly master of 1950s-era American pulp fiction, gets everything right in this novel. And then, just when he’s got the reader convinced of the book’s many merits as escapist fiction (in at least two senses of the term), he pulls a series of gearshifts and fast left-turns that no other writer would have imagined or attempted, and connects all the spaces between Macbeth, Freud, and Dante’s Inferno. Even after repeated readings, it’s still hard to accept the depth of Thompson’s bleak vision, and impossible to figure out how he pulled off this remarkable feat.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

Recommended: Lee’s twee, a poet and he knows it, and you suffer the first chapters until he finally gets going. When he hits his stride, describing his mother’s odd life in the Cotswolds in the earliest part of the 20th Century, you’re entitled to sit up and take notice. His often reprinted passages about his sexual initiation, the cider with Rosie referenced in the title, are funny and humane, and ring beautifully true. By the time he’s explained what the motorcar did to the 1,000-year-old ways of village-life he was born into — geography measured in terms of the speed of horse-travel, eight miles an hour — your eyes should well up.

The Hunted by Elmore Leonard

Dutch being, you know, Dutch

Formulaic mid-’70s Leonard pot-boiler, this time set in Israel, where his rough-housing buddies and their uneasy gals exchange sharp dialogue and fire big guns at each other — including an Uzi, which makes sense, given the locale. I read this one over an evening in a hotel room in Swindon, England. Could not have been more perfect.

Love Without: Stories by Jerry Stahl

An uneven collection of short stories spanning 20 years that will add nothing to Stahl’s reputation, hard-won from his outstanding novel “I, Fatty.” The first tale seems to be an earlier, undeveloped version of his novel, “Perv: A Love Story.” Others are period pieces from late-’80s Playboy Magazine, and one is a scatological rant against Vice-President Cheney. Giving the devil his due, the references to the private lives of the Three Stooges and Stevie Nicks’ post-performance pleasures are nothing short of uproarious.

Dead Liberty by David Craig

Cold War-era thriller by the great Welsh novelist James Tucker, using his ’70s pseudonym. A rewarding, convoluted tale of one journalist’s role in the attempted escape by a middle-class family from East Berlin, that holds up well nearly 40 years after publication, and may be one of Craig’s very best books.

Downtown: My Manhattan by Pete Hamill

Gotham`s all reet with Pete

Recommended: A fine writer’s valentine to the Capital of the World, which underlines the big-heartedness that made and sustains the great metropolis. In contrast, lesser places such as Toronto, with their condescending cruelty toward fellow inhabitants and disinterest in the world beyond, are revealed as simply not worth thinking about. Writes Hamill: “Where I came from, the rules were relatively simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts. Never cross a picket line. Don’t look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don’t back off either. Make certain that the old and weak are never in danger. Vote the straight ticket.” Words to live by from a book that fires the spirit.

Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand

Ms. Strand has, perhaps, 200 reasonably acceptable pages in her 300-page-plus first-person account of the history of Niagara Falls and its bi-national communities. What grates is her awful tendencies to place herself in the forefront of this narrative, whether she’s annoying the librarians at the public library on the New York side, or laughing at the attendees of a Red Hat Society gathering in Ontario. A kindly, patient editor might have reined in the author’s worst instincts, but there is no such mediator in sight. Consequently Ms. Strand’s worthwhile sections on the rise and fall of the border-hopping Niagara Falls Museum are watered down by dreary self-referential remarks about her boyfriend Bob, her circle of Manhattan friends, and her father. She possesses a certain kind of naïveté not uncommon to contemporary U.S. authors, whereby she views events as either being American or Not American, and feels a pathetic obligation to delineate and explain the distinctions to an uninterested readership. This extends to her erroneous definition of the Bloody Caesar as a “Bloody Mary with Tabasco,” and Canada’s National Drink. No need to tell her about Mott’s Clamato; the information wouldn’t conform with her cookie-cutter reasoning apparatus, or her proclivity for stringing together smug, facile paragraphs. Caution to student writers everywhere: There may be an okay book buried somewhere in this sloppy, sophomoric volume, but the author is too occupied with drawing attention to herself to let her subject matter or material take center-stage.

Rock Springs by Richard Ford

Fine fiction: See the Fords going by

Recommended: Ford’s rare gift is the ability to tell small truths using spare, unadorned language. These 10 short stories reveal the lives of ordinary residents of Montana and the Great Plains, where Calgary and Winnipeg are large, exotic centers heard on the radio but never seen. Men hunt, fish, and keep their anxieties unspoken. Women leave. Cars are stolen, guns used to threaten. Fists sometimes kill. This is an important collection that takes the Hemingway formula into a compelling, unsettling new direction.

Perv: a Love Story by Jerry Stahl

Published in 1999, this coming-of-age tale set in the earliest 1970s is a showcase for the developing talents of Stahl. The flaws in this book are considerable, and stem from the author’s determination to show off his Terry Southern-like tendencies. Other portions are satisfying and admirable, but Stahl’s need to be regarded as edgy ultimately sinks the story.

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky

Fascinating study of the 300-year decline of the role played by the oyster as an consumable, and an economic enterprise, in New Amsterdam and New York City. Filled with historic asides and detours, and leading toward an inevitable environmental nightmare, author Kurlansky has great material, and a well-honed storytelling sense, but is in the unhappy position of having to convey more than anyone would want to know about this subject.

Live, alas, and on-stage: ‘The Harder They Come’

Dem-a-loot, dem-a-shoot, dem-a-wail

When a big movie comes unexpectedly out of a little country, it’s an event to remember, and everyone will  recall the 1973 release of “The Harder They Come,” the Jamaican reggae-infused gangster film. I first watched the movie as a high-school kid during the Nixon presidency, Spiro Agnew still a contemporary political figure, and me thinking, “Whew, I need to see this again.” Which I have done, many times in various cities. Bought the soundtrack, too, along with anything I could get my hands on by Desmond Decker and the Aces, or the Maytals (later Toots and the Maytals), and then the entire Wailers catalogue. We spent years amusing ourselves by reciting the script’s best lines, waiting for the most inappropriate occasions to begin imitating the Trenchtown patois: “Gimme break, mon” and “Don’… fawk… wid me!”

Jimmy's shirt: It sure would look good on you, dad

It would seem like a wonderful idea to base a stage musical on this landmark movie. The first British version was staged in 2006, and moved to the West End last summer, to positive reviews. The original cast is now appearing in a touring edition, which I caught in Toronto last week.

It’s always a hell of a thing to see what the passage of 36 years has done to our culture. The film used a cinema-verite technique to depict reggae as, in Bob Marley’s phrase, Rebel Music, imported from the teeming Third World. Now, the music is as safe and familiar as any other packaged consumable. The Canon Theatre had a big display for Red Stripe Jamaican lager — in contrast to the obvious reality that when the Rude Boy scene was emerging, the brewers must have been terrified that their trucks would be looted by rechet-carrying yoot. More galling still: the distinctive jersey worn by Jimmy Cliff in the film version, an item I’ve searched for high and low and would have gladly paid a fortune for on E-bay, was being sold at souvenir stands at a brisk rate to ridiculous middle-aged men exactly like myself.

The performance is lively and spirited, and all the other verbs reviewers use when what they’re really trying to say is that the show isn’t all that good. The story has lost something — actually, a few things — in translation from gritty movie to slick musical. You get the feeling the producers’ first choice would have been to obtain rights to that other Jamaican-themed movie, the 1993 John Candy comedy “Cool Runnings,” but that was a Disney film and you know what those Disney people are like to deal with. Momsers.

Instead, they’ve Disneyfied all the rough edges out of a story that, to begin with, was perhaps not that much more than the sum of its rough edges. What’s left is one of those frenetic song-and-dance musicals with a few comic turns, done in tribute to the swell old music of bygone days, viz. “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” That’s well and good, except three of the show-stopping ensemble numbers in this production have been imported from somewhere that isn’t “The Harder They Come.”

You get Jimmy Cliff’s “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” always a treat to hear, but not part of the original film, perhaps for the reason that it has nothing to say about the story line. You also get “Day-O,” made famous by Harry Belafonte, as a sop for those who would leave might leave the theatre disappointed after seeing a musical that’s supposed to take place in the Carribean that doesn’t include “Day-O.” Worst of all, you get not one, but two renditions of the Jackie Wilson classic, “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher & Higher,” and that’s two more than were required. Wilson was a great artist, who experienced a severe myocardial infarction while onstage, just as began to sing the lyric of that song that begins, “My heart….” He probably deserves a West End musical of his own, but what he surely does not deserve is to have his signature song plopped mindlessly into the mandatory church-gospel scene of a mediocre stage play. Wilson wasn’t mediocre, and, for that matter, neither was he West Indian, which gives you an early sense of how quickly things veer off-course.

The cast is good, and the singing is very fine. Rolan Bell makess a plausible Jimmy Cliff stand-in, and Chris Tummings does a better-than-adequate job belting out Toots Hibbert’s “Pressure Drop.”

Unfortunately, this just serves to recall how all the uneven pleasures of the movie have been flattened into a flavorless paste in the musical. The first glimpse of Toots on screen was potent enough to raise him to top billing in his group, and then to ceaseless global acclaim. The character played by Tummings, as seen on film, was an intriguingly conflicted figure, a sympathetic authority figure who determined that it was a necessary part of keeping the peace in raucous Kingston, to turn a blind-eye to the ganga trade.

The musical encourages a re-examination of the movie — and the movie is a superior work, in every respect. Viewers who haven’t seen the film for several years will be delighted to recall such wonders as Bob Charlton’s quietly malevolent portrayal of the local music tycoon, Hilton, a pale, pipe-sucking presence who dictates what the islanders will hear on the “heet parade.” His assistant is a benign Sino-Jamaican, which draws attention to the simple reality that the former colony is and was far more complex and multi-dimensional than its image might lead you to first think. The musical discourages this kind of complicated thinking, to its detriment.

Admittedly, some especially violent sequences from the celluloid edition would be difficult to assign to live actors. Jimmy Cliff’s character, provoked, attacks his tormentor with a knife, and is sentenced to be lashed. The film vividly shows Cliff being flogged by authorities, while his bladder involuntarily empties. The voice heard over these images is that of the sentencing magistrate, as he thoughtfully delivers his verdict, offered with regret, but also calculated to encourage rehabilitiation and maintain public order.

This depiction is intended to be considered antideluvian and brutal — but today seems nearly enlightened, compared to the contemporary American practice of providing wholesale lengthy incarceration for non-violent offences.

Another striking scene from the movie that failed to make it on stage involves the Jimmy Cliff character, who while seeking work, wanders into the estate of a wealthy Upper St. Andrew housewife, played by Beverly Anderson. There is a half-moment of mutual sexual tension, as the lady of the house mildly flirts — and then the Jamaican class-structure inevitably and abruptly kicks in, as Ms. Anderson haughtily dismisses him from her grounds.

Prime Mininster and Mrs. Manley

Art meets life: That actress became the wife of Prime Minister Michael Manley, a mixed-race politician who won election after shrewdly becoming the first candidate to usurp the emerging musical movement by employing a reggae campaign theme, “Better Must Come.” The international ambassador and exemplar of reggae, and the tiny nation’s great poet, Bob Marley, was another Jamaican of mixed-race, who touched audiences on every continent.

The power of the music, and of the movie, is a slice-o’-life authenticity that still resonates through the generations. The stage play is a stylized slice-of-show business that offers an extended brand experience, some heart, but not too much mind or soul. Fifteen minutes after leaving the theatre, you’re thinking you’d like to go home and watch the movie one more time on DVD.

And, so, farewell to Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua

I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but I think I’ll miss Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, more than I’m going to miss Michael Jackson.

Gidget — who even knew she had a name? — died today, at 15. She gained favorable notice for a series of TV ads that ran from 1997 to 2000, promoting the fast-food chain, a unit of YUM Brands that offers particularly unpalatable tortilla-wrapped food items. It regularly occurs to people who have been out late drinking and forgot to eat dinner that it might not be an entirely bad idea to stop at Taco Bell and pick up a couple of bean burritos. Gidget, with her appealing manner, and her passionate cry of “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” made it possible to imagine that such thoughts could be something other than a radically self-destructive impulse. This is by no means a tiny accomplishment.

Unlike Michael Jackson, Gidget completed her assignment on behalf of Pepsi-Cola (the former owner of Taco Bell) without managing to set her head on fire, and developing addictions to prescription analgesics as a consequence.

Alas, poor Michael

We discover, after her passing, that Gidget was a female who was assumed to be male; her dubbed voice was that of Carlos Alazraqui, the dialect comedian. Jackson’s gender issues were, of course, much more complex.

Chihauhuas average a litter size of three. Jackson was one of 10 children, including Brandon, who was stillborn. Four pounds is a decent weight for a chihauhua, and Gidget seems to have maintained an acceptable body mass index, despite the documented high prevalence of obesity among Americans of Hispanic extraction, and her employment promoting the caloric, fat-laden products of the Taco Bell organization. Jackson reportedly weighed 112 pounds at his death, which indicates that his endorsement must have applied mainly to the fructose-free version of Pepsi-Cola.

A 40-ounce cup of Pepsi, which is what they’ll offer to serve you at Taco Bell,  contains 500 calories. A pair of those bean burritos is going to come in at 700 calories. The cola will perk you up, and the heavy lunch will put you to sleep, potentially creating a cycle of dependence. Watch out for that.

A coroner’s report said Jackson suffered from alopecia, and wore a wig. Chihauhuas, which typically live 10 to 17 years, are sometimes known as Mexican Hairless dogs.

As for Gidget, she seems today like a groundbreaking entertainment industry figure, who bridged previously offensive media stereotypes with today’s common depiction of Hispanic-Americans as a diverse and vital component of a multicultural society. Some have argued that Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s paved the way toward greater understanding between the races, leading to the presidency of Barack Obama. That could be, but I don’t think I want this discussion to go there. Obama is leading the world to a safer, saner place; Jackson died too young; “Beat It” is a great tune. We can agree on all that.

Sally Field was the original television Gidget. She’s still on TV, in a real stinker of a weekly drama, and promoting that osteoporosis drug in a series of commercials that is just painful to watch. Gidget the dog never stooped (pardon the disease-specific joke) to endorsing prescripton drugs. For his part, Jackson didn’t need to push pills; he allegedly had 19 doctors happily writing up enough scripts to get him through his final mid-life crisis.

The best you can say about Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, is that, though she appeared mainly in commercials, and though she was undeniably a canine, she brought two distinctive and seldom-seen  characteristics to the human-dominated modern entertainment industry.

Talent. And dignity.

The Summer the Morons Took Over Town

Toronto native Glenn Gould, who was both a grand musician and, irrefutably, an all-out whack-job, used to say that the area of his home town where he felt most at home was Don Mills, and that comment was taken by many as proof of his eccentricity. He explained that he felt completely at peace driving alone in his automobile, amid the anonymity and featurelessness, the order and hollowness of the place, which was developed at a post-war planned community. My public school geography textbooks, and possibly yours, contained lithographed photos of the Don Mills Center, an outdoor shopping mall that epitomized the Atomic Age. The soundtrack to that low-slung, artfully treed architectural vision was Gould massaging the ivories, letting loose the Goldberg Variations.

Don Mills: A mid-century urban paradise

By the time I scored a big-time publishing job and went to work in Don Mills, in the 1980s, the Center had been enclosed, like most of its counterparts among suburban retailing complexes. A couple of parts of the original plaza that had not been covered became satellites of the indoor mall, such as the government-run liquor store, and the Dominion supermarket. Further outposts had been opened, including the pizza stand where our company’s hard-charging CEO sometimes could be observed scoring his bag of cocaine after a long day of boardroom strategizing. Safe and warm inside the mall, there was a second-story bar that I happened to like. It was patterned after the standard-issue airport cocktail lounges of 15 years earlier. The fellows who brought you beer and peanuts wore old-timey cocktail-waiter jackets, and the sound system offered up Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, during this period when Cyndi Lauper reigned on the airwaves.

As will happen over time, the mall became rundown and seedy. The anchor tenant, an Eaton’s department store, famously closed and spiralled downmarket as an ever-grubbier succession of flea markets took over the space. The swank bar was replaced by an unswank fitness club. The landlord had seen these signs occurring in other retail centers, and went back to the drawing board. Boom went the wrecking balls.

The reborn Don Mills Center opened late this Spring, returned to its Modernist roots as an outdoor plaza. The new old center opened to generally good reviews, if not throngs of customers dying to spend their money on designer gee-gaws.

Post-modern Don Mills: Back to the nearly stench-free future

I wandered over yesterday, and liked what I saw. It`s little different from those new post-modern retail recreations of small-town Main Street that are popping up all over the continent. It reminded me a little of Kierland Commons, in the Phoenix suburbs — but right now that isn’t the main selling point.

First and foremost, the center is just about the only place in Toronto that doesn’t currently carry an offensive stench, or reward the sightseer with vistas of refuse, stemming from the disruption of garbage-collection services by unionized workers. The strike is now into its second month, and there is no end in sight.

The mayor of Toronto, a moron co-incidentally named Miller, but not Don Miller, went on CNN the other week to deny that his practice of dumping household waste in public parks and gardens detracts in any way from the city’s appeal as a tourist destination this summer. Reaching out to the blue-collar U.S. tourists who used to pack picnic hampers and sit in minivans for a couple of hours to enjoy Toronto’s theme parks, baseball stadium and shopping drags, he urged viewers to come see our new opera house, with its ‘world class’ acoustics — like it would occur to Mr. and Mrs. Hamtramck that it’s time to put on their Tigers caps, and visit Toronto to catch the fat broad warbling through Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Lest you think this mayoral nincompoop has lost his judgment as a stress-induced consequence of prolonged negotiations with intransigent unions, be assured that he was widely regarded as an idiot long before any of this unpleasantness started.

Looks appealing, certainly, but will it pass the smell-test?

There’s a tourist attraction not far from my house that is a popular spot for summer weddings. It faces the Humber River and adjacent parkland and jogging trails. The park, named for the explorer Etienne Brule, is a wonderful garden that has been converted into a temporary garbage dump for the duration of the strike. You should see how unhappy the wedding parties seem, when the stink begins to waft over. A couple of dozen strikers hang around all day, standing by an oil-drum fire, providing added atmosphere by haranguing area residents who wish to dump their garbage. One of the elements key to their dispute is that the workers felt entitled to bank their unused ‘sick days’ and accumulate them to apply toward early retirement. I heard a proponent of this fanciful  notion on the radio, explaining that it was only fair, because in the private sector, employees receive big bonuses just for showing up for work on time. Evidently, this demand has been dropped, but the two sides remain far apart.

God, we used to be smug in Toronto. Back when Peter Ustinov wittily described the city as ‘New York run by the Swiss,’ we bragged about our litter-free streets, our inspiring parks, our reliable public transportation, our upright coppers, our dependable civic government.

I’m no chauvinist, but I remember urging friends from New York to try out the graffiti-free subway system, as a novel experience. We were so insufferably superior, in yapping about our egalitarian streets, schools, and systems.

Now, just look at the place. Every visitor who had to listen to any Torontocentric creep condescendingly explain about how we don’t have the private gated residential communities you-all have in the states must be laughing like Ricky Ricardo. If I had out-of-towners coming in this summer, I’d be embarrassed to have them set foot in most parts of this trashy burg. Instead, I’d run them over to the Don Mills Center, for an antiseptic, hollow,  pleasant, stench-free evening of drinks, dinner, and bookstore-browsing.  ”This,” I would tell them, “this is what things used to be like here, before that half-wit Miller and those brain-damaged unions ruined the city forever.”

There’s no business like show business, except maybe the business of misery

Apparently a singer just died, there was a big memorial event in L.A., and it’s all over the news.

While we’re dispatching entertainers to play to capacity audiences in the Biggest Room of All, it behooves us to bid adieu, too, to Vancouver’s Serf-of-Pop, Terry Black.

Very Terry: The Japanese pressing

Mr. Black seemed to have the chops, but he couldn’t catch the breaks.  The parallels with this other dead entertainer, one Michael Jackson, are minimal, except that back in the 1960s, they were both tapped to become the next big thing in teenage music. One rose; one fell.

Mr. Black came out of British Columbia with a hit record, and moved to Hollywood, where there was talk of putting him in the next Elvis movie, as Presley’s brother. It never panned out. Mr. Jackson emerged from Gary, Indiana — a less-likely point of origin than B.C., if such is possible — with four of his brothers and a hit record, and moved to Hollywood, where he married Elvis’s daughter. That didn’t completely work out, either.

Mr. Black’s record revolved at 45 rpms, precisely the same rotation rate as Mr. Jackson’s hit singles, and both recording artist’s recordings had big holes in the middle, where you placed an adapter before putting the record on a spindle. Mr. Black’s “Unless You Care” was played frequently on Canadian radio stations for decades, at least in part because the law required broadcasters to play music by Canadians. He sang the peppy lead vocal on “Try a Little Harder,” a memorable 1972 track by the Toronto band Dr. Music, and warbled on the soundtrack of Ivan Reitman’s 1979 motion picture “Meatballs” (listen here.) When he died last week, he’d been working as a disc jockey in Kelowna, a small city in B.C. populated by retirees.

It has not been a good week for Canadian disc jockeys and other entertainment industry figures.

Two more sorry specimens are the theatrical impresarios, and just-convicted fraudsters, Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb.

The Livent Lads, on the move

If you followed their courtroom occurrences, the former principals of Livent could tend to get a little fuzzy regarding certain details of their business dealings. They are crystal-clear on one point, however: They don’t want to go to jail.

This is understandable. After all, Drab has at least one close friend named Black — not Terry Black — who is serving time right now in a Florida slammer, and most likely there isn’t much good to say about the experience.

Drab and his locked-up pal (you know the name; he writes books) share another friend, who is the lawyer, Eddie Greenspan. Ed defended them both — unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Having not achieved his desired outcome, which would be his clients absolved of all charges, and left to clink champagne flutes with their attorney while they all cackle like hyenas, Eddie has seized the opportunity to fabricate lemonade from lemons.

Don’t send my boy to jail for 10 years, judge, your worship, he has suggested to Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto; please, please don’t put this good man behind bars.

Ed’s offering up a whale of an alternative concept. Why not just let Drab and Myron, those luverly Livent Lads, put on a show?

Ed says the boys are prepared to set off on a cross-country lecture tour, if it means they can bypass a cell in the stony lonesome. Drab and Myron will star in “Community Service: Tonight!”, with performances at universities, community colleges, and technical institutes from coast-to-coast. Drumming up interest in the idea, Ed says Drab “would teach students the discipline of the craft, the enormous role that integrity and honesty play in the theatre, the importance of fulfilling contractual responsibilities [and] the avoidance of unethical conduct.” Throw in some recycled Gallagher-and-Sheen patter, along with a good set of PowerPoint slides, and you just might have box office magic.

The inspiration for Fast Eddie's lecture series?

The fellow who wants to put the producers behind bars, Crown Attorney Alex Hrybinsky, seems to think Ed-the-lawyer’s follies will bomb in New Haven. Yes, there are precedents for the type of staged entertainment Ed envisions, but they have never been imposed as a legal remedy in a criminal case. The lawyer seems to have been inspired by the exhibits of human curiosities and oddities described by author Gregory Gibson in his recent book “Hubert’s Freaks,” which is about the long-running Times Square peep-show of the same name. If what Ed has in mind is to place his clients into some kind of travelling carnival, where onlookers can gawk, and the attractions can make a bit of money answering yokels’ questions and selling souvenir postcards, that constitutes a macabre revenge-scenario worthy of fellow-showman Tod Browning.

On with the Drab 'n' Myron Show: A Tod Browning revenge fantasy?

Our layman’s prediction: The Drab ‘n’ Myron Road Show will never happen. Ed’s courtroom string of bad luck appears to be not yet over, and as much as the impresarios must long for the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, this final act has Bialystock & Bloom written all over it, if you happen to recall the ending of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”

Plaudits to the other legal Greenspan sibling, Brian, who is representing Myron. Brian has come up with a wonderful reason why Myron shouldn’t have to go directly to jail: It seems the former Livent CFO is really kind of reluctant to mingle, and doesn’t get all out much. According to Brian, that’s equivalent to being under house arrest, and should be calculated as time served. Madam Justice Benotto must be stroking her chin over that one, in a stagy form of contemplation, or else doing a slow-burn pantomime, as perfected by the late actor Edgar Kennedy.

++++++

What is more tragic than a pair of impresarios who may find themselves incapable of producing a theatrical extravaganza, for the next eight-to-10 years? How about a broadcaster whose mike has been abruptly shut off, following a 25-year career serving one media outlet? Martin Streek, a D.J. with radio station CFNY-FM in Toronto, reportedly parted ways with his employer in May. He committed suicide this week, reports say.

Mr. Streek entered the radio business out of high school, right around the time stations were switching to an automated voice-tracked format. All the talk, in the 1980s, was that the day of the disc jockey was through. Indeed, when the early-’90s recession hit, the entire medium of commercial radio was considered to be in jeopardy, with some licensees walking away from their equity, unable to pay their whopping power bills through advertising revenues. In other words, it was very much like the situation that daily newspapers find themselves in today.

The role of the disc jockey endured, nonetheless, and it’s said Mr. Streek was crackerjack at his work, and a decent bloke, to boot. Especially disturbing is the news that he left a suicide note on his Facebook page. There are already web sites that make light of celebrity deaths, and the popularity of so-called social networking sites can’t be disputed. I fear that the posting of suicide notes to the Internet may already be a trend, and that some web entrepreneur not unlike Rupert Murdoch will quickly move in to exploit this as a niche opportunity. The round-the-clock coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death leaves little room for doubt that there is any human misery either too large or too small for someone to avoid capitalizing upon.

Dylan v. Elvis? Stop the fight, referee. It’s no contest

Theatre of the imagination. That phrase sums up the reason why Bob Dylan’s weekly show works so well on radio, and why Elvis Costello’s new program is such a dreary flop on TV. (Those unfamiliar with the Dylan audio extravaganza can check out a pirated MP3 version here, providing they have no scruples concerning intellectual property protection.)

Without pictures, the listener is left to imagine Dyl, sitting in a darkened broadcasting studio, illuminated only by a scattering of red and green LEDs, wearing Ray-Bans, in front of a pair of well-used turntables, puffing Old Golds and chuckling to himself while he spins 45s and 78s from his own collection.

A bad habit, and not to mention, one that could stunt your growth

We know that’s not at all how his Theme Time Radio Hour comes together on XM Radio, and that it’s more a matter of ISDN lines and digitized voice-tracks. Well, of course we know that. But the point is that we can’t actually see old Bob in reality, being handed his script by a flunky and then straightening his reading specs and patting down his toupee, and muffing one line after another, sputtering while he tries to pronounce Hawkshaw Hawkins. So we visualize him the way he should be: as a reincarnated Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins, sharing intimate knowledge and magical tunes with a secret fraternity of those wide-awake at four in the morning in the Bay Area and beyond. Or as a latter-day Herb Jepko, a bemused, calming presence in the middle of the Salt Lake City night, as in the days when Herb would offer solace to brother and sister Nightcaps in 38 states and Canada. Dyl deserves to be mentioned in the same paragraph as those radio legends. He’s that fine a disc jockey, no less impressive for having all the while maintained and sharpened his songwriting and performing talents. And, yes, you’re listening to a fan talking.

Herb, now as always, on the night shift

I’m also an admirer of Mr. Costello’s music and lyrics, but his new chat-show offering on the cable network Bravo is — let me put this delicately — not good. Part of the problem is that Elvis has placed himself on visual display, and you kind of wish he hadn’t. A decade younger than Dylan, Elvis is missing the ironic fashion sense of the man from Hibbing, but, sadly, that doesn’t stop him from experimenting. He covers his bloat and pudge with an Edwardian frock coat and tablecloth-sized cravat, and tilts his trademark porkpie hat at a rakish angle over his unshaved, swollen punim. The effect is more than a bit tragic. You have yesterday’s angry young man coming across like J. Wellington Wimpy, about to cadge a hamburger today, promising re-payment tomorrow. As the familiar saying goes, his is a face designed for radio.

The Elvis show, called “Spectacle,” is a reminder of those small-market syndicated gabfests of two generations back, hosted by third-tier TV curios such as Al Capp, and sceened on the uppermost part of the UHF dial. These programs, seen by the few in the small hours, attracted oddball guests who started out removed from the mainstream, and mostly stayed that way. On the other hand, here were venues where performers of the level of Sir Monti Rock III could show up and let their hair down.

Mr. Costello, sans spectacles

Mr. Costello’s stilted formality provides no such promise, in Norm Crosby’s words, that Everything Goes. He comes across like a man channelling David Frost, and not the acceptable version you saw in the Frost/Nixon movie. He’s the creepy Frost you remember the Westinghouse network distributing from the Little Theatre Off Times Square: an insecure, distracted Englishman in New York, fervently wishing he had somewhere else to be, and someone more interesting to talk to. (In Elvis’s case, he at least appears grateful that he has a studio to hang around, and that he doesn’t have to spend any additional time listening to his wife, Canada’s own Diana “Makes Your Skin” Krall, punish their children by murmuring show tunes to them.)

Elvis’s guests are either big-shot megastars who leave the impression that they’re humoring the host by appearing on his wee program, or non-entities who get the full-out Costello fawn. One such talent-free visitor recently was Bob Dylan’s kid, who made fifteen minutes seem like an all-day telethon. Jakob Dylan has supported himself in the business-of-show for a decade now, and seems to think of himself as a revered fixture on the entertainment scene. He told Elvis a pointless and petulant story about how his mother once threw out one of his articles of clothing without his permission. Okay, the vest was a gift from Joe Strummer of the Clash, but that still doesn’t elevate this thin gripe to a story worth re-telling. Yet, the interviewer, Mr. C., seemed captivated by Jakob’s yarn, in the fashion of Art Linkletter marvelling over how kids say the darnest things.

It must be pointed out to Elvis and his producer that, for certain, Bob Dylan wouldn’t dream of having his son as a guest on his own radio show. So, what is this? A feeble effort to butter up Papa, hoping Dyl will reciprocate by playing one of Ms. Krall’s cornball sides on Theme Time Radio Hour? Won’t happen, Jackson.

The promise of “Spectacle” is that it has nowhere to go from here, except further down — and that’s when things might get interesting. Elvis presiding over an old-timey Al Capp-style TV freak show sounds like a more promising concept than whatever it was they originally had in mind. When Sting and James Taylor refuse the invitation to drop back for second appearances, Elvis will turn to the C-list of bygone days. I, for one, would love to see, and not just hear, Elvis interview Sir Monti Rock III, and the Capp parade of put-on artists, along with the genuinely deranged, damaged, and deluded. Now, that would be something worth imagining.

_________________________________

• Now meet one of the New Dylans who might be ready to stage a comeback, 40 years after her not-so-smash debut

Another newspaper bites the dust, and the autopsy once again says ‘death by stupidity’

Cuter than heck, but not worth a buck-fifty for a poorly printed picture

It has been more than a decade since the metropolitan daily in your community ended the pretense that they were fighting for you against the forces of inept government, indifferent big business, and other institutions that require a watchdog. The day of muckraking, crusading journalism ended when publishers determined that it took less effort and expense to simply provide biscuit recipes, reviews of rock-and-roll concerts, and wire-service photos of newborn baby puppies. This menu of lame trivia failed to win over audiences, but investors liked it just fine when profits improved.

Now, dumbed down well past the point of no return and abandoned by advertisers and audiences, these same newspapers are too disengaged and besotted to fight for their own survival. Small wonder that readers aren’t even bothering to say, “The hell with them.” They’ve simply walked away.

I was visiting the San Francisco area a couple of months ago, around the time Hearst was threatening to close The Chronicle, and now I’ve just returned from Boston, where the owners may be determined to shut down The Globe, and, as a trained reporter, I can offer this dispatch: No one in either community cares in the slightest about the threat of their newspaper disappearing.

The Tucson Citizen died a few weekends past. My bet is that no one cares, in Tucson, or Pima County, or anywhere else. Wherever you may be, around your office water-cooler this morning, everyone probably knows what happened to poor Susan Boyle, and how much the Star Trek movie earned at the box office, and what the overnight ratings were for the concluding episode of some lame TV drama, but no one will have ever heard of the Tucson Citizen. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s print version croaked recently I had intended to scribble down some thoughts — worthwhile and revealing thoughts, I might stress — about an internship I once had there, back in grad school. Never quite got around to it. Had a lot more important things to attend to, potatoes requiring mashing, several bicycle tires to inflate, and all.

I’ve spent my entire life reading, employed by, studying and caring about newspapers (in which case, you’re probably right to make that sarcastic aside about it not being much of a life) and I still can’t manage to get worked up about the industry’s decline.

I’ve been corresponding recently via e-mail with a fellow who used to own some big newspapers, and a much larger number of small ones, and he tells me that there are great challenges in the business, such as distribution logistics, and high fixed labor costs. I wanted to keep the conversation pleasant, but, come on now. Talk about missing the point. The biggest problem newspapers face is plainly that they are just plain irrelevant to anyone without a financial stake in their well-being.

There just isn’t much left to newspapers for anyone to care about. All the sensory aspects that used to be an integral part of the experience of reading a newspaper have been stripped out, such as the foul-smelling ink that would leave stains on your fingers and clothing, and the paper residue that would cling to your lap. If you happened to be walking past a newspaper printing plant late at night, say the old Globe and Mail offices in downtown Toronto, when the presses were running, you’d feel the rumble of the machinery, and when, at 9 p.m., you paid the vendor for the next morning’s paper, it could still be warm to the touch: literally, hot off the press.

Disappearing before your eyes

It didn’t matter that the paper you’d just bought wasn’t worthy of any prize from the New York Art Directors’ Club. It wasn’t meant to appear sleek, functional and friendly, like an I-phone. You were supposed to adjust to it, folding the broadsheet pages in halves or quarters to accommodate the output of the printing apparatus, or else lying on the floor on your stomach to scan the pages. Who does that now? The pages have been trimmed to manageable size, the typefaces plumped up with collagen, the designs cleansed and sanitized.

As noted a few blog posts back, the Marriott hotel chain plans to discontinue dropping newspapers in front of guestrooms this season. This decision has not caused Marriott stock to plummet, and I doubt that Bill Marriott’s days have been taken up with fending off complaints from deprived hotel guests. It’s not as if he was out removing TV sets from the fiberboard armoires in each of his properties, or emptying the vending machines of Pringles or OnYums. I’d like to see him dare to try that stunt.

Whoa, Nellie. Where have the reporters gone?

No, Bill Marriott’s safe to kick newspapers while they’re down, because newspaper publishers are far too stupid to fight back. In the heyday of the press, promotion managers would try to boost circulation by creating appealing gimmicks, such as cash giveaways, and bingo games, and other tactics to appeal to casual readers. Editors would send reporters out to create news, a la Nellie Bly. Editors, again — because you didn’t really have art directors until fairly recently — would concoct eye-grabbing headlines, or select striking photographs, or determine a way to stand out from other publications: hence, the salmon-colored Financial Times, or the late “Pink” Toronto Telegram.

That was then. Now, the publishers are too whipped to fight, and too weak to even recycle the old bad ideas. Readers have understandably deduced that if all dailies are offering is an ever-decreasing portion of ever-more uninteresting content, it’s time to try something else for your information fix: a commuter rag, an entertainment-listings tabloid, YouTube, or a blog. It’s not that any of those things are inherently less boring than your morning paper, or, lord knows, that they have a better-executed business plan. As regards the newspaper, it’s simply that, as someone once observed of the rule of the modern Iranian monarchy, in the end, they just didn’t matter any more.

The Taliban, Cheney, and humankind’s frenzied race to the bottom

Yesterday, a man named Nigel Wrench, who is the BBC’s evening newsreader, said this, following a reporter’s item about the Pakistani Taliban’s habit of kidnapping children for deployment as suicide-bombers: “Children as lethal weapons. Humanity reaches a new low.”

Is he live, or merely a creation of Chester Gould?

Impossible to argue. That’s why we in the western world don’t think twice about assigning people the task of keeping us safe from those who would turn children into exploding devices and send them out into crowds, to be detonated.

What we could not have imagined, and never factored in, as part of this bargain, was Dick Cheney. And yet, here he is, insistently making his case that because our enemies are monstrous, it behooves us to engage them on their terms, matching tit for tat.

 

Chester, the occasional molestor of rationality

When I say that ”we” couldn’t imagine the Cheney chain of logic, I must exclude Chester Gould. The creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, who late in his life became something of a rabid right-wing lunatic, sketched out an invented character, Diet Smith, who was an unapologetic weapons merchant and a special pal of police departments everywhere. Mr. Smith created a death-ray that instantly vaporized miscreants, and he demonstrated its effective use to his cop buddies. “Where’d the bad guys go?” Detective Tracy asked the arms salesman, who replied, “You’re breathing them.” The cartoonist, Mr. Gould, specialized in drawings of middle-aged white men with heads tilted back and teeth exposed, roaring with laughter, and here he employed just such a panel, framed with the credo, “Violence is golden… when it’s used to put down evil.”

 

Capitalist Smith (with moustache) and his tool, Det. Tracy

 

 

I recall this comic strip appeared in the early 1970s. As a kid reading this stuff, it struck me as more than a little silly, kind of gross, and out of step with the times. Regardless, it was something out of the funny papers, and not to be taken seriously.

 

Gould's gang: Paving the way for a character named 'Chainy'

Flash forward 35 years, and you have a serious-looking fellow who looks like he was rendered in the stylized manner of artist Gould, drawn as a balding lard-tub with curled lip, connoting malevolence, and this cartoonish fellow is out there reviving the Diet Smith dialogs. Mr. Gould, who never failed to find a way to clamber over the top, would have insisted on making his fictive character, his own private take on Dick Cheney, into something more memorable than merely another sadistic nut. (That would be in keeping with his inventions of characters with eccentric personas such as ‘Half and Half,’ ‘Mumbles,’ and ‘Pruneface.’) So, continuing this string of uncanny depictions, Mr. Gould likely would have made his imaginary Mr. Cheney as ‘Chainy,’ a former high-ranking elected official, — say, a retired vice-president of the United States — turned invalid, who bitterly criss-crosses the planet in a personal rocket-propelled wheelchair, flailing out with a rusty motorcycle chain while mumbling his tough-guy philosophy. Mr. Gould might have been wrong about the rocket-chair, possibly, but, otherwise he’s mapped out this comic-strip Chainy right down to the 1930s-vintage baggy serge suiting. “Violence is golden… when it’s used to put down evil.”

 

Today’s paper contains the stunning claim that US soldiers raped suspected enemy combatants during interrogations. That’s the allegation, and as much as you don’t want to believe it, you wait for Dick Cheney to fly overhead in his rocket-chair and shriek, “So what? Look what they did during 9/11!” He, and the proponents of what they call “enhanced interrogation methods,” because people seem to get squeamish around words such as “torture,” will deny that rape occurred, and are bound to describe it instead as “assault with a friendly weapon,” appropriating Lee Marvin’s line from “Cat Ballou.”

However, even in the sometimes morally ambiguous world of Chester Gould (which, it occurs to me, really should be the name of a theme park, somewhere), it should be hard to put a virtuous spin on the practice of raping prisoners. The stark realities of current politics require us to take sides, and we’re with the side whose aim is to prevent occurrences such as innocent children being strapped to incendiary devices. That doesn’t mean we’d ever wish to hear some angry old jackass encouraging the institutionalized policy of abusing prisoners, either theirs or ours. That’s the kind of argument that was born of the comics page, and, for the well-being of our race, for the good of humankind, it really does need to stay there.

Cryin’ Brian, quit your sobbing. It’s Canada, and no one cares what you’ve done

Ask any university historian (except the one living in my house; she’s busy with other things) and they’ll tell you that Canada was created in the mid-1800s as an institutionalized kleptocracy, with the aim of enabling a handful of privileged property owners, known as the Family Compact, to steal openly without having to fret about competition from the speedier, more clever, more ambitious upper-crust thieves who plied their trade in the United States. The Brits and some Irish were regularly allowed to come and run their small scams in parts of Canada, because they had such nice manners and lovely accents, and, besides, they could be related to cousin Wilfrid from Cirencester. On the other hand, the Americans, self-made banking and utilities robber barons from Troy, N.Y., and cellulose shirt-collar oligarchs from Schaumberg, Ill., were unacceptably flashy and vulgar, as well as being far more adept gonifs, to boot. The Family Compact saw to it that the sharp-eyed Americans were slowed down, and preferably turned back at the border. After all, that’s why there is a border.

That’s our homeland, and the name of the place is we like it like that. Many nations have been born of grander visions than the pursuit of untrammeled thievery, but have amounted to far less. Canada, except for a few brilliant hours during some 20th century wars, and an artist or two I could mention, has been entirely about a vague form of social tolerance, a toque-wearing egalitarianism for the rest of us, and shared dedication to the high purpose of letting the corporations and the governing classes get on with what they are compelled to do; i.e., steal.

Here is how the system is structured: Politicians appoint their law school chums, and some compliant newcomers, to the judiciary. When, as will happen, the politician’s manicure is discovered deep in the cash-register till, or photographed massaging the backside of the babysitter, who happens to be the industrialist’s underage daughter, it’s expected that the magistrate will deliver a stern rebuke to the offender, for letting down the side, and the miscreant’s punishment is that he has been admonished by Mister Justice Schoolpal. No further purpose would be served by meting out additional disgrace upon someone of the politician’s probity and high public regard; having his reputation questioned is already excessive recompense.

In Canada, there are precise criteria that serve as sentencing guidelines, when a member of the governing class, or one of their retainers, should somehow be found guilty of having committed a crime. If the wife should be zotzed by a hired hit-man, she has to die at the scene before it is considered a jailable offense. If the wife is simply maimed, or confined to a wheelchair, or if she expires in an ambulance, the husband gets off. That is the legal precedent.

Lesser infractions are routinely ignored. These include matters involving narcotics on a small scale, or misunderstandings over land dealings, or the petty theft of a few million from the treasury, or six-figure bribes secretly made to and accepted by public officials.

This leads us, not necessarily directly, to the Rt. Hon. Martin Brian Mulroney, the 18th Prime Minister of Canada, known popularly during his term of office as Lyin’ Brian, and henceforth, following his tearful appearance before an investigation yesterday, known as Cryin’ Brian. (Even the Toronto Sun, which buried the news of the Mulroney testimony on page 26 of today’s edition, picked up the rhyming sobriquet. Mr. Mulroney currently serves as chairman of Quebecor World, a company affiliated with the Sun’s parent organization.) 

Mr. Mulroney seems to have been caught up in an unseemly business involving an ex-friend representing some offshore business interests, who, in friendly fashion, apparently handed over to the Prime Minister an envelope stuffed with a large sum of money. Mr. Mulroney has been scrutinized regarding this matter previously, and those who previously accused him of wrongdoing failed to make their case. His defence at the time was, “What envelope? What money?” He was later presented by the government of the day with an apology and a packet of travelers’ cheques amounting to $2.1 million, as a token of compensation for having endured some discomfort.

 

BM the ex-PM: Smoke gets in his eyes

Now he’s back before another panel, the Oliphant Commission, and his version of events has been revised. Blow me down, but it now appears there was some cash that changed hands — $225,000 — reportedly received right around the time he was leaving the Prime Minister’s office. He placed it in a safe, and didn’t report it to the taxman for six years. That looks pretty bad, as Mr. M. admits. He told the commission: “What transpired represented a significant error of judgment — on that I deeply regret and one for which I have paid dearly.”

 

Except that he hasn’t paid at all; in fact, he was the one who got paid, two-point-one million smackers, and by taxpayers, no less.

And now the blubbering, which he explained was caused by seeing several of his tormentors from the media sitting in the gallery at the hearing, allegedly enjoying the spectacle of B.M. twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. I’m sympathetic to the plight of the bluff, big-hearted Irishman, quick to tears and laughter. Drop the needle on Van Morrison and Paddy Moloney singing “Marie’s Wedding,” and I’ll bellow right along. I quite enjoyed Mr. Mulroney’s salty, saucy observations, as quoted in Peter C. Newman’s “Secret Mulroney Tapes.” He was an average Prime Minister, at best, but he remains a colorful scamp, and an amusing memento of bygone days, like the retired professional hockey players who still hang around the Chick-n-Deli in Toronto, still trying to score with secretaries, except the secretaries are actually marketing vice-presidents earning far more than the old guys ever did in their prime.

Regardless, this damp-eyed Brian crying in the chapel is much too much. As he famously once told a political opponent, he had a choice. Handed a windfall of mazuma by his wacky successor, he might have taken the dough and endowed an institution of some sort, to benefit the public. He might have been the benefactor of the hypothetical Ben Mulroney Foundation, named to honor his father, and aimed, let’s say, at discovering efficient ways to provide healthcare to the blue-collar populations of outlying communities, such as his native Baie Comeau, Que. That would have honored the ”good name his father gave him,” which B.M. yipped and yapped was sullied during the prior investigations. That tactic might have gained him some sympathy, and some admiration from the little people, whose opinions about him may possibly matter, as well they might, in that strange and needy Irish heart.

But he didn’t do that. He kept the money: locked it away in a safety deposit box, he now says. In Canada, that’s what they do. That’s what they’ve always done.

We understand that. What we don’t understand is the waterworks. It’s not as if he’s bound for the lockup, like a common t’ief or tinker. It’s Canada. There’s no crusading district attorney such as Peter Fitzpatrick to stir up a Cook County jury, and Mrs. Mulroney, Mila, is neither dead, nor even maimed. Sure and it isn’t possible that Himself is sobbing because he thinks someone’s going to feel sorry for him and give him some more money, the way they did last time around. Tell me it couldn’t be that the man’s hopin’ for, could it?

Shock discovery: My Saab plays for the other team; Starbucks’ appalling oatmeal

My car is finally back on the road, after being in the shop twice in the past few months, following not one, but two, rear-end collisions.

 

"Dude, your car is so gay..."

I took note (see previous post) that when the insurance company temporarily provided me with a Hummer as a replacement vehicle, other motorists kept well away. My poor Saab, on the other hand, seems to be a proven magnet for the driver approaching in my rear-view mirror. Not knowing how to account for that, I drove my colleague Markowitz (pictured at right) a short distance in the car, and described the situation.

 

He went away and thought about it. Later that same day, he outed my vehicle, breaking it to me without fanfare.

Here’s the e-mail he sent:

• According to Gaywheels.com – a US website that bills itself as “sole source of information specifically targeted to and about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender car-shoppers”  – the Saab 9-3 is on their Top 10 list of vehicle favorites (Volkswagen rabbit was number one.)

As a non-member of the LGBT demographic, once I’d processed the information (Gaywheels.com?), I quickly came to terms with the fact of my car’s possible inclinations. Didn’t bother me in the slightest. Actually, it gave me hope that perhaps there’s a future for the Saab marque, now that General Motors intends to abandon the line, and gays may be potentially prepared to adopt it. Straights are said to follow the gay lead in trends, so perhaps by the time my lease expires, the car may have retained some small trade-in value.

I mentioned this in an e-mail to Linda Dahl, who replied that her daughter “told me that my Subaru Outback is a ‘lesbian’ car. That must be why I am getting so many flirtatious glances from women in supermarket parking lots.”

Must be.

 

Fred: Not suitable for the UK

I momentarily thought of the recent news that the UK has banned Rev. Fred Phelps, the nutbar US Baptist cleric, from entering Britain. Pastor Phelps is the disagreeable lout who makes a pest of himself protesting gays during occasions such as funerals. I had a vision of Minister Phelps, on his way to a protest demonstration, being struck at a Topeka crosswalk by a succession of Volkswagen Golfs, Saab 9-3s, Subaru Outbacks, and whatever else may be on that Top 10 list Markowitz was talking about.

 

I agree with the decision by the UK’s Labour government to keep this ecclesiastical loon out of the country. Please don’t take that to infer, however, that in the future I won’t be keeping a significant distance between my rear bumper and yours.

* * *

 

Sofitel Montreal: Petit Dejeuner servi en Chambre (courtesy tripadvisor.com)

Just back from Montreal, where I had a productive meeting with an unreconstituted British Columbian, who, exercising a habit he’s maintained since the Roaring 1920s, called for his breakfast oatmeal — alas, in the dining room of the French-owned Hotel Sofitel. He reports that the waiter, possibly recently exiled over from the 5th Arrondissement where he couldn`t get the full hang of being rude, did not endorse his choice, and declined, when asked, to bring over the usual accompaniment of brown sugar.

 

I sympathized. Marlene eats the stuff every morning. I can take it or leave it. Last time we ate oatmeal together was at a Starbucks location somewhere, where the signage proclaimed it as the best danged oatmeal in the world. It was not, not by a long-shot. The Starbucks barista prepared a paper bowl of convenience-store grade instant oatmeal, and was insufficiently trained to determine the proper amount of hot water to apply. You’ve heard the joke about the newleywed bride who couldn’t boil water to prepare instant this-or-that? That was this hopeless shlemozzle of a barista.

 

 

Keep that @#%# Schultz away from me

We pitched the slop in the dustbin, and I later sent a note off to Howard Schultz of Starbucks, taking the time to explain why his stock price has tanked. In return for my sound business advice (“Please don’t sell obviously inferior products and lie to your customers that they’re great“), I got an automatically generated response urging me to get lost.

 
I note that Schultz’s competitor, Jamba Juice, is now proclaiming that they offer cooked oatmeal in the morning, unlike the instant swill Starbucks spoons out. Alas, I’m unaware of any Jamba Juice locations in Montreal to recommend to Mr. British Columbia, but that chain could have a brilliant future, whereas Schultz, the vendor of demonstrably inferior fare, seems destined to decline: any instant now.

For this no-hit musical wonder, the Golden age may be just beginning

Whole Lotti sound

The award-winning actor insisted on my listening to his copy of an obscure record called “Motorcycle Michael” by someone named Lotti Golden, because he loved the album, and because we were in his living room talking about motorcycles, and perhaps, too, because, in his self-absorption, he must have thought my name is Michael.

This kind of thing used to happen frequently enough, when someone was paying me to do that kind of work. Wealthy, famous, ego-driven specimens were keen to show you they were just like all the other bike-riding proletariat, except they could afford to indulge in their tastes for the esoteric and the elaborate: hence the garages filled with vintage two- and four-wheeled vehicles, right down to the fine old Rolls-Royce with its Saskatchewan plates. Hence, too, the basement that had been converted in its entirety, zoning bylaws be damned, to the neighborhood’s largest bird-cage, rafters filled with rare songbirds and homemade guano.

Spun once, the title track of the record, running at eight minutes and 14 seconds, never entirely worked its way out of my mind. Lotti Golden had some set of pipes, and someone at the record company, maybe Ahmet Ertegun hisself, had plainly told her to get out there and sing like Janis Joplin. That was a trick for which Lotti was suited, since she could match Janis squeal for squeal, growl for growl, and 20 million Big Brother fans will tell you that ain’t exactly nothing.

Let Lotti go loose on a scat-line, and you’d swear she had a big future in the music bid’ned. Yes, the song was no “Piece of My Heart,” and not much like Lorenz Hart, either, essentially conveying the repeated message that Michael “let me ride his motorcycle.” Nothing more to add to that, no word on whether it was red or black, street- or dirt-bike, a Royal Enfield Bullet or your Uncle Cyril’s Whizzer, no descriptives beyond another minute or two of Lotti’s high-quality grunting and yelping.

But this quizzical song has a way of making itself at home under your skin, in spite of, or because of, the producer having thrown everything listed in the Record Producer’s Sourcebook into this track. Mussel Shoals horns; Ninth Ward hand-claps; Motown choirs; Memphis chords; bass lines from Cosmo’s Garage: you got ’em all, starting, stopping, repeatedly banging into each other, and then struggling to separate and do it again. The only reason a Moog synthesizer had been left out was probably because Mr. Moog was tied up in the lab, still trying to bolt his contraption together.

Crewe you: Fifties guys lost in the sixties, Bob Crewe produced Bobby Darin, who would have bopped him on the nose for trying the production tricks he pulled on Lotti

That’s what they used to call acid-soul, or even East Coast psychedelic. If you say this is the most over-produced record in rock-n-roll annals, kitchen sinks being hurled back and forth to no apparent purpose, that might sum it up. The genius behind the mixing board was Bob Crewe, who produced “Walk Like a Man” for Frankie and the Four Seasons, and recorded, under his own name,  the Herb Alpert-like “Music to Watch Girls By.” To contextualize, it was a time when young Republicans were scoring acid in the country club parking lot, Frank Zappa was mentor to the Monkees, and even Pat Boone had signed up for a community college course in how to get hep. Crewe was an old pro in his thirties, and desperately trying to prove something to the Love Generation.

The very same forces at Atlantic Records who ruined the Lotti Golden sessions by trotting in another dozen horn players, and another, and tambourine-shakers by the bus-load, pretty much did the same thing to Laura Nyro, and others. I guess it was the fashion of the day, in art and letters, and pop music.

But the thing about rock-n-roll is that the most disposable tune will resonate on and on, on and on. Lotti Golden, letting it rip, hollers and hoots that Michael’s her daddy, Michael’s her baby, and you know without being told that this little lady’s got more than just misspent ants-in-her-pants, but possesses the goods, the rare commodity that we astute critics call “talent.”

Actor-fella wondered what I thought of the selection. I told him I liked it a bunch, and, parading my astuteness, observed that the chick sounded pretty wild. I asked him what else she had recorded, and he said nothing of which he was aware. He added that, owing to her patently unbridled intensity, it would not surprise him to learn that Lotti had done checked out. I tsked, and headed off for my IBM Executive typewriting machine, where I wrote a profile for the motorcycle magazine, leaving out any mention of the subject’s musical tastes. Our readers were more the Aerosmith type. The LG LP was 15 years old when I first heard it, and long out of print. I spent some time looking for a copy here and there, and gave it up as a wasted effort. I did eventually locate and purchase a copy of Lotti’s follow-up album, released on GRT Records, a label that had quickly gone out of business. Second time around, her music was more conventional and approachable, but lacked that initial compelling insistence of the previous release, an allure one might interpret as, “Hey, buy me a coffee; I just signed myself out of the nuthouse.” Robert Christgau, the Village Voice reviewer, thought the sophomore record was a big improvement. He wrote: “Golden’s egregious overstatement registers as a strength – her passion, even if affected, is intense enough to embarrass you.” If you know about Christgau, you’ll take that as an honest complement.

I was recently looking for some basketball scores on the Internet, and blundered across a reference to the actor’s daughter, who is now old enough to be working on her second or maybe third career, and is still regarded as an up-and-comer. She told an interviewer that when she was growing up deprived, her family possessed only two records: one by Frank Zappa (well, of course), and, she said with a flourish, “Motorcycle Michael by Lotti Golden.” Poor kid. I heard the tune only once, and it flash-fried my brain. It never occurred to me that the actor might be forcing his family to listen to the record again and again. Grown-up children, freeing their repressed memories, have tried to send their parents to jail – and for lesser misdeeds.

Because one thing always leads to another on the web, I followed a couple of links, and it emerges that there now exists an entire cargo cult formed around Lotti Golden.

From Chuck Shepherd, the syndicated newspaper columnist, we learn that Lotti was written up in a September 1969 issue of Look magazine, where she declared she wanted to be just like Bob Dylan. Shepherd disproves the actor’s earlier guess that Lotti had split the scene, at least in 1982, when she was busy producing an electro-funk band called Warp 9, which released two singles. She has knob-twiddled for others – hopefully having learned restraint from the negative example provided by Bob Crewe – and written new songs, none of which I’ve heard.

Others have taken the Lotti Revival movement further. One enthusiast, taking the bull by the horns, has converted her original vinyl release to MP3s, and posted them for downloading. We’re in a murky area here, if you care about intellectual property protection, and I hope you do. Is this copyright infringement? Is it ethical for the fan to have done this, or for me to identify the download site? Perhaps we can pursue that avenue at a more appropriate time, when we discuss Kensington Market’s out-of-print recording, “Avenue Road.”

And while traces of Lotti herself are scarce on the web, as you’d expect, there are strong hints that she is around, and may be planning a re-emergence. A web domain has been registered in her name, apparently by her sister, who lives in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and seems to run a modelling agency. A radio station in Rhode Island has been playing Motorcycle Michael, and has tried to persuade her to appear on the air – without success to date. There is an e-mail address where messages may be sent.  A Google search also turns up the sad news that her father, “Sy” Golden, died on a New York City tennis court two years ago, at the age of 82. It sounds like he was a hell of a guy, and I offer my condolences.

So, yes, I downloaded the record, burned it on a disc, played it through the Bose speakers in my car this weekend. It sounded no less strange, and every bit as captivating, as when the actor was spinning the platter, and making the chatter, way back when. Atlantic Records never bothered to re-issue the album in CD release, which is astonishing when you consider all the dreck they’ve unloaded from the back catalog. Likewise, an official version on I-Tunes is a complete unknown, as Dyl would say. All the same, I’d like to think Lotti’s on her way to becoming an overnight success, 40 years in the making, thanks to the unusual persistence of her art, and the power of listeners’ preferences, unleashed by the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll ever need to hear her opus a third time, but I’d like to think she’ll turn up playing Hugh’s Room in Toronto, where I’d have the waitress send her over a pinot gris between sets, to keep the vocal folds lubricated. It’s all still a long way from happening, but don’t try to tell me this isn’t the age of miracles and wonders.

_____________________________

• While some of the New Dylans struggle in the new century, the Old Dylan seems comfortable as Herb Jepko behind the golden microphone. See Mitch’s comments…

Achoo? The very word sounds foreign and sinister

This business with mysterious infections, folks getting sick and dying, is old-hat up here in our neck of the woods. Seems like just yesterday that SARS — or “Deadly SARS,” as you prefer — was being passed around town in Toronto, and you’d see pedestrians ambling along furtively down busy Dundas Street in their facemasks. Sold a lot of hand-sanitizer, too. Co-incidentally, my buddy Bob owns a company that had just introduced some new topical anti-infective agent, and there was a big meeting of dermatologists from the northeastern US and Canada set for the weekend when the SARS outbreak first occurred. This should have guaranteed that his product would fly off the shelves, but most of the doctors were no-shows, and the sanitizer went nowhere. He’s probably still got a warehouse filled with the stuff.

 

 

Someone probably thinks they saved their own life by skipping that Toronto concert

All this took place six years ago. I should remember it clearly because I paid a preposterous sum to take two out-of-town friends to the Air Canada Centre see Elton John and Billy Joel, and the performers were too cowardly to show up and breathe the same air as the rest of us. Wayne and Bev couldn’t cancel their flights, so we had a leisurely dinner in the Annex, and caught a local band playing on Markham Street, and went for a walk, and it was a nice night out, for all that. Eventually, I got a refund on the ducats, but I’ve never again felt any warmth toward Elt and Bill — and I was basically indifferent toward most of their music to begin with.

 

That weekend in 2003, the hotels were offering SARS Specials, so the missus and me stayed in a fancy room in the Hilton and hung around downtown. It was really quite pleasant, unless you happened to be pacing, hopeless and panic-stricken, in a waiting room nearby a hospital isolation unit while your parents or children were dying.  A guy I’ve known for years, and never really gotten along with, lost his in-laws to that SARS outbreak. I sent a short note of sympathy, not expecting an acknowledgement under the circumstances, and not getting one. I’ve run into the guy since then, and we’ve chatted, but never discussed the SARS matter. What would you say about it?

 

A delightful fellow, and certainly not sick, but we wish he`d stop coughing

Now we’ve got that swine-chicken ailment, coming up from Mexico. Our community news media are taking it more or less in stride, although some locals have already been infected. The fellow in the next office was vacationing in Mexico a few weeks back, and I hear him coughing away, but he’s an ex-smoker who works with the COPD patients’ group, so I’m thinking there isn’t necessarily anything with which to be unduly concerned.

 

I note, however, that the US news outlets are growing ever-more hysterical over this latest crisis. Vice-president Biden evidently just advised citizens not to take public transit anywhere. If he really said that, it sounds like another incident of Mr. Biden’s Ralph Kramden-like tendencies to speak lunacy and then issue an ‘‘I’ve got a big mouth’’ recantation. Another explanation is that the Democrats want to own the panic surrounding disease, the way the Republicans earlier laid claim to terrorism, and use this fear to manipulate the poor, foolish public.

 

This morning I witnessed two of American broadcasting’s leading proponents of idiocy, MSNBC’s team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, weighing in on this issue. Commenting on the decision by the German airline Lufthansa to place physicians on each of its flights to and from Mexico, Ms. Brzezinski wondered what good that could possibly do to stop the germs from entering the United States. Ms. Brzezinski bears a slight physical resemblance to Madge, the manicurist in a series of early-1980s TV ads for Palmolive detergent, who would tell her unsuspecting salon customers, ‘‘You’re soaking in it now.’’ Shocked at her question, I spoke those words aloud to the television. The saddest thing I’ve heard in years, and there have been a good many sad things in the new century, is this madcap insistence on assigning a nationality to potentially fatal microbes. As if viewers of cable news would all feel a lot more safe, if only the germs had originated in Boise, and could be given All-American names such as Todd and Trish.

Nothing to joke about, except...

Yo, newspapers: Don’t disrespect us by talking about Baby Boomer stuff

I was doing a small bit of public speaking a couple of weeks ago, which is not my usual thing, and, needing to quicken the pace, I found myself blurting out a reference to “talking like the K-Tel Guy,” which earned some blank stares. The K-Tel Guy, as everyone must know, was Phil Kives, the Winnipeg entrepreneur who gained enduring fame by speed-yapping his way through TV pitches for wacky products.

Okay, the commercials haven’t aired for, let’s see, must be about three decades, if you’re counting, but Hair Wiz and Kitchen Magician — “It slices; it dices!” — must live on in our collective memory, right? 

The expressionless faces in my audience answered the question. I made a note to myself, to examine my aging stockpile of cultural references, which are likely to be increasingly obscure to the current demographic. 

Confirming my decision this morning is Ralph Keyes, who writes for the newspaper industry’s trade publication, Editor & Publisher. Mr. Keyes cautions journalists against their predilection for what he calls ‘retrotalk‘: phrases and references that are unlikely to be understood by those not of the Baby Boom generation.  

Many of the examples Mr. Keyes provides refer to TV programs of the 1960s, such as “Leave it to Beaver” and “The Andy Griffith Show.” He cites numerous instances where discussions of current public affairs lead serious commentators to invoke mentions of Eddie Haskell or Mayberry. He also explains what is meant by dropping those two names (Haskell, a synonym for insincerity; Mayberry, a locus of rubes), which probably shouldn’t be necessary when dealing with a halfway-informed reader of any age or origin. 

The problem, it strikes me, may not be as Mr. Keyes suggests, that this habit of mentioning antique texts poses too much of a challenge or an irritation to some nitwits. I was born well after the Golden Age of Radio, but understand exactly what is meant by Fibber McGee’s closet, and find Mel Blanc’s 60-year-old transcribed invocations of Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga to be unfailingly side-splitting. The erudite newspapermen of the past, say, Mencken or Liebling, were no less a delight because you couldn’t directly relate to their evocation of names and events of their childhoods. 

If Mr. Keyes is proposing that yuppie reporters and commentators are lazy and rely overly on the convenience of using TV imagery to make their points, I won’t argue. If his point is that newspapers have thinned the ranks of the kind of experienced desk staff who once might have noticed and corrected the overuse of cheap metaphors (such as “thinned the ranks”), he’s smack on.   

You're looking lovely this morning, Mrs. Cleaver

If, however, he’s proposing that today’s young ‘uns aren’t reading newspapers because they don’t know who Eddie Haskell is, I’d respond, in the style of Old-Time Radio, “Puh-leeze, Mr. Keyes.”

Newspaper readership is sinking for a bunch of reasons, some relating to a generational change, but that trend won’t be reversed by requiring reporters to quit talking about Bob Dylan and begin to cite the wisdom of P. Diddy and cohort. I’d say the problem comes down to contemporary newspapers containing little but crap, and readers who have moved on to rituals other than reading newspapers. 

Marshall McLuhan — and I’m sorry about referring to another Ancien Régime figure — said newspapers would endure because they’re like a warm bath. What he meant by that, I think, was that print is meant to be tactile, reassuring and comforting, something into which you’d always wish to immerse yourself. 

He was wrong. Stayed in a post-modern Hotel Indigo, or one of those funky new Hilton properties? No bathtubs; just showers. And to drive the message home, yesterday the Marriott chain, the lodging industry leader, announced they plan to stop the practice of plopping newspapers in front of the doorway of every guestroom. Somehow I don’t think they’ll revisit their decision if Rupert Murdoch promises to start wearing hip-hop gear and drinking smoothies.

Newspapers are your grandfather’s Oldsmobile, or perhaps Hupmobile. 

Mr. Keyes is certain not to like this, but I’ll offer one concluding bit of retrotalk in response to the plaintive question asked hourly by newspaper publishers of ex-readers, “What do you want us to do?” At the risk of alienating some, let’s quote Goldfinger, a character in a 1960s movie, the name of which you probably won`t remember: “I want you to die, Mr. Bond!”

A hard-knock future for Rolling Rock beer

I’m trying my best this morning not to see parallels between the fate of our lives as misfits in the 21st Century, and the disturbing news about Rolling Rock beer.

Giddyap, sucker

But, just like unlucky Moe Greene and that other sorry goombah in The Godfather, you have to conclude that someone who goes to the trouble of placing a horse`s head on your mattress is trying to tell you something.

(c) 1939, Latrobe Brewing Company

Allow me that filmic comparison, for a green bottle depicting a horse`s head was the precise trademark imagery that built Rolling Rock into a semi-great brand, back when suds were sold regionally and promoted sparingly. Rolling Rock, made by the Latrobe Brewing Company in Pennsylvannia, could afford only cardboard signs for point-of-sale, which declared their brew to be the Coors of the East. Coors used to be unavailable on the right-hand side of the Rockies, where it had established word-of-mouth demand through scarcity. Liquor store owners in the suburbs of Washington, DC would pay truckers to sneak a few dozen cases back from Colorado, and would mark them up accordingly for those willing to pay.

Rolling Rock, also a pale, understated lager, and also the sole brand of its manufacturer, attempted to horn in on the Coors cachet, which was silly, because Coors was already planning its assault on the east coast. Beside which, Rolling Rock had so much more to offer, in the form of its distinctive containers.

All you can really add is `33`

Latrobe never modernized its package design, sticking with a funky 1930s look painted directly on green glass. Enhancing the oddball allure, each bottle was inscribed with the following pledge: “From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.” Those heartfelt remarks, stiff as an unrehearsed Knights of Columbus toast, concluded with the number “33,” a throwaway reference that could only be meant to puzzle central Pennsylvannia retirees, student journalists, and others with plenty of time on their hands.

Rolling Rock was destined to become an early accoutrement of geek-chic. Just after the local Latrobe owners were ready to sell, it fell to the new bosses, the Labatt folks out of London, Ont., to pair the unchanging Rock label with David Byrne’s affecting lyric, “Same as it ever was.” Presto. Out of all the dozens of tiny independent Quaker State beer brands that were still hanging in at the tail end of the 1980s (Bartels! Gibbons! Stegmeier!), only Rolling Rock was acknowledged to be cool. Some college kids, last night`s puke still stuck to their Converse All-Stars, affectionately called it Green Death, confusing Rolling Rock with Mickey`s Big Mouth, an overproof midwestern malt liquor.

Edgy coolness, of course, is always the first signal of the coming death-rattle. Labatt was bought by Belgians, who saw to it that Rolling Rock was available in places it never belonged, such as smart pubs in the West End of London, where it was served alongside Stella Artois and other things consumed by poseurs in PriMark lesiureware. The Brits, a thirsty race, never swallowed the “33″ mystique, and didn’t know Latrobe from Le Freak. Meanwhile, the Belgians were occupied trying to control the planet’s beer consumption, and slowly nurturing quirky little brands is not part of their business plan. They ditched Rolling Rock in 2006, pocketing $82 million from Anheuser-Busch.

The A-B management team wasted no time in determining exactly what made Rolling Rock special, and then they blew it all up. Glass-lined tanks? Get rid of them. Old Latrobe? Screw that. Production was moved to a New Jersey factory, and the brand image was further destroyed by introducing a range of indifferent new products. The Belgians, fortified with a new brain trust of cut-throat Brazilian executives, which sounds like some kind of joke but isn`t, turned their sights to Busch family themselves, those fat `n` happy St. Louis mouth-breathers who tended Bud and Michelob, and were barely aware that they`d acquired Rolling Rock. Fifty-two billion bucks convinced the Busch bunch to part with their family legacy. By that point Rock sales had already fallen by a third within five years, and A-B was promoting the stuff with a sad slogan, “Born Small Town,” which underlined how the once-proud suds were pumped out alongside Bud ’n' whatnot next to a Hess refinery just off the New Jersey Turnpike.

Picturesque setting in which to imagine your beer being made

A more honest slogan would have been, ’We just don’t care.’

Well, then, here’s a surprise. The Wall Street Journal today reports that the Belgians, now calling themselves Anheuser-Busch InBev, are looking to unload Rolling Rock for a second time. They engaged Lazard Freres to go find a buyer, but were disappointed when the merchant bankers came back and said, ”No one’s willing to pay any serious money now that you idiots have destroyed the brand.” (It emerges that the Latrobe brewery, and with it any claim to continuity or legitimacy, was earlier parceled off separately to a group from Wisconsin.)

That leaves a couple of schleppers who may still be interested in picking up Rolling Rock, if the price is right. The most logical fit would be with KPS Capital Partners, which recently bought the old Genessee plant in Rochester, N.Y., and also purchased the rights to distribute Labatt stateside, which for practical purposes means metropolitan Detroit, western New York, and a couple of counties in Connecticut. Restoring the Genesee brand has proven to be a mug’s game, and my guess is that Rolling Rock isn’t about to start rolling uphill, either. With retail and tavern space tightly controlled by a couple of dominant suppliers, and with thousands of new products emerging annually from the beverage industry, it’s hard to picture the precise niche for a flattened brewski with a 1930s pedigree.

It’s just as easy these days to pay a qualified Mumbai graphic designer $75 to design a brand new logo and fresh product identity. Of course, what you can’t buy — or buy back — for $75 is your soul, and you’d be setting the stage for tragedy if you thought you could try. Rolling Rock had one: a distinctly American, pre-War soul that would have much to say to us right now in our current circumstances, except that it`s silent, quiet as the late thoroughbred sleeping next to the guy who crossed the Corleones. So, here’s our Belgian-inspired ”tribute to your good taste.” Drink up your Bud, asshole, and be like everyone else.

____________________________________________

• Mitch doesn’t quite get around to sampling Molson Canadian 67 in this November 2009 post

Death comes to Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey and wife Angel, astride Paul Harvey: Good day!

On the very day Rush Limbaugh was waddling to the podium to incite all those angry folks attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (Rush: “Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to fail!” Crowd: “Yes!” Rush: “They certainly did.”), death came to Paul Harvey. That’s the kind of cheap juxtaposed symbolism that Harvey, the perennial radio gasbag, turned into cash each day in his three-quarters-of-a-century on the airwaves. In his heyday, which was the Nixon era, Harvey was quite the noisy right-wing crank, verbally beating up on hippies, and Ruskies, and what-not, on hundreds of ABC radio affiliates. Later he relocated his golden microphone from the Windy City to Phoenix, and learned to relax a little. By the time Harvey reached the ripe old age of four-score-and-ten, he had mellowed into a beloved antiquity of the wireless, celebrated as a great enduring American showman, like Bob Barker or the Rev. B. Graham. Closer to the rev.

Displaying fashion creds, CCR and Fogerty (bottom right)

Harvey came to Toronto one year during the Nixon era, and threw a sermon out at the People’s Church, an evangelical palace on Sheppard Avenue, not that far from my childhood neighborhood. He was a pal of the local pastor, Oswald J. Smith, who was an acclaimed radio preacher and, like Harvey, not one to make excuses for the godless. I called Wex, and he agreed that we simply couldn’t afford to miss this extraordinary moment in theological history. We found our way to the house of worship, dressed in the manner of the day, the way John Fogerty dressed. We must have been 16 years old.

Every pew in the church was occupied, but the helpful parishioners fought all over each other to clear space for us. Kindly hands reached out, extending hymnals.

Harvey strode to the dais. He boomed a variation of his traditional greeting: “Hello, Toronto-Canadians!” He was a captivating speaker. His cadence and enunciation were broadcast-quality. He’d toned down his use of the pregnant pause, along with exultant sentence ending… which was known far and wide… as his trade-mark! The congregation was in thrall, even the swinger with the rock-star hair and white suit seated a few sections away, who kept turning from facing the speaker to shoot stares at me and Wex. I guessed he was some kind of churchly special ambassador to disaffected youth. We kept our distance.

The performance was not what we’d hoped for. We’d come to mock Harvey, assuredly not to praise anyone. He was a meaningful figure to us high-school wiseguys, right up there with a galaxy of adults we found wondrous/ridiculous. Ward Cornell and Ron Martinez from the world of sport, Spiro J. Agnew and Everett Dirksen from the political sphere, Stan and Jan Berenstain from the world of beaux arts, everyone who ever appeared on the Al Capp TV talk show, and local broadcasting legend Gordon Sinclair, although Sinclair wouldn’t scale the heights of true absurdity until much later, when he recorded his smash-hit prose-poem, “The Americans.” There were only a couple of individuals we considered too hep not to ridicule: the Firesign Theater comedy act, Captain Beefheart, the writer-bookstore clerk Juan Butler, and some guy whose music criticism in Rolling Stone never deigned to describe the contents of the record and conveyed nothing of the subject of his review, but who told evocative short stories featuring fictional characters of his invention. The name used by this reviewer was J.R. Young. I wonder now who he really was, and whatever became of him.

One thing I could never possibly believe is that J.R. Young was actually a teen-aged Rush Limbaugh writing under an early pseudonym, although it is a possibility not ruled out by chronology, but by common sense. As I said, these Rolling Stone pieces were pretty good, and Limbaugh’s published writing is uniformly not-good, although it would be wrong to regard him as an entirely talentless repository of illegally obtained prescription painkillers and last month’s rancid suet. Yes, he has been a malignant force on society, and, yes, for the past 15 years or so, listening to him has been an impossibility for anyone with a bare trace-amount of self-respect. However, the Limbaugh of yesterday was not always what you currently see and hear — and hear, again and again.

Before he surrendered his independent spirit for a gazillion-dollar payoff, Limbaugh was a polished radio yapper who took unexpected positions just to confound his audience, as the great broadcasters have always done. Greatness, however, was something for which Limbaugh just wasn’t cut out. I recall during the late ’80s listening to a few weeks of programs where the host refused to come out as strongly anti-abortion. Caller after caller screamed abuse and threats at their guy. He stood his ground, maintaining that he hadn’t fully formed an opinion consistent with the orthodoxy of the right, and that he was mindful of the opinions of the women in his family, whose judgment he prized. He maintained this position for several days, as the listeners cajoled and pleaded with him to proclaim his rejection of the pro-choice argument. And then he abruptly backed down, and became an anti-abortion zealot like all the rest. He never again looked forward or sideways, for even a second.

He had another great stunt around this time, doing a spoof show where he claimed he’d just started dating a liberal woman and was falling in love, and beginning to reassess his hard-line right-wing positions. Again, his audience turned on him, and became an angry mob set to first denounce their leader and then string him up in the public square. All a big joke, he predictably explained at the end of the program; no libs, no lady, and no love for Limbaugh. In fairness, it was a pretty good joke, albeit a bleakly revealing joke, and one he would never repeat. What I gathered from this was that Limbaugh wasn’t necessarily born to pander to the lowest common denominator, a status that makes him no different from his media enemies at MSNBC, the New York Times or Air America radio. They’re all slobs waiting for a paycheck and a pat on the head from the boss. It’s just that he’s a better panderer than most, and more commercially potent when propped upright in his studio.

 

Follow that robusto: Limbaugh, fearless champion of the nickel cigar

He was still sentient enough earlier in this decade to suffer revulsion at what he’d become, requiring round-the-clock self-administered anesthesia and pastries. That possibly speaks to both his latent humanity, as well as his disfigured character and damaged judgment. Think of Rush as Hunter S. Thompson’s rusticated, half-bright, more insecure baby brother, and recall Thompson’s fondness for quoting Dr. Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

 

Seeing him on television this weekend, egging on the rabid right, turning away from the possible consequences of inflaming his followers during a precarious time in the nation’s history, you’d be wasting your time trying to imagine what it is Limbaugh thinks he’s become. Whatever that may be, it’s clear that he’s more to be pitied than mocked. In that regard, and others, Limbaugh is no Paul Harvey.

You are now entering/You are now leaving Canada. Welcome/Come back soon, Mr. President

Like so many others, I was impressed-as-heck with the U.S. President’s visit this week to the Canadian capital. It was a far less uncomfortable spectacle than when their predecessors last convened in Ottawa, where it was discovered that neither the U.S. leader, Mr. Bush, nor the Canadian leader, M. Chretien, spoke a solitary word of English between them. On that previous occasion, their exchanged grunting and gibbering at a televised state dinner seemed intensified after local organizers arranged for someone’s brother-in-law to look after the AV arrangements, in a contract valued at nearly twelve dollars. The ornate scene was outfitted with a single 40-watt overhead light and a lone microphone declared surplus by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, back around the age of Norman DePoe. The impression I had, watching on television as Bush and Chretien slurped soup, was that the world was scheduled to end in around 10 minutes, and these esteemed leaders were being televised from their refuge in an undersea cavern off the New Zealand coast.

If we had our Strothers, we`d be getting along better with Mr. Martin

Failure to communicate, Strother Martin-style, is far from the problem concerning the facile Mr. Obama, and the earnestly articulate Mr. Harper. Both could talk the scales and bones right off the Arctic Char, as they might say up north. Where the previous two North American leaders were, let’s say, somewhat provincial and cloistered in their outlook and bearing, the current pair seemed perfectly at ease with their respective roles, and with each other. Mr. Obama seems not to be the sort of American visitor to Canada who grows tetchy the first time he notices gasoline being dispensed by the litre, and later becomes unhinged upon determining the scarcity of Pabst Blue Ribbon or that local brand of pork rinds they sell in Tulsa. Similarly, because Mr. Obama was spared the horror of having to converse with minor Canadian political figures such as Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, he was presumably able to skip the lecture concerning the superiority of Canadian healthcare and the unfair level of transfer payments to Quebec. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who was reminded, as Mr. Obama boarded his plane back to civilization, of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines at the conclusion of Casablanca, chirping about how this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Or not. As effusive as Mr. Obama was in his praise of the neighbor-nation, there are many of his countrymen who still struggle with the difficult concept of a land that looks, sounds and smells like the United States — but isn’t. It’s comparable to the disorientation our English cousins seem to experience after they’ve inadvertently stumbled over the footbridge into Chepstow, Wales, except that the English know instinctively how to handle such a situation, which is to shrug and continue their binge-drinking. An American, separated from his or her homeland, seems to lack that sort of easy adaptability, and feels compelled to begin explaining things, first to themselves and to then anyone unfortunate enough to be in proximity.

Chepstow, a town in Wales, which is another country that isn`t the USA

So it was in Ottawa with the saddest Americans of all, those representing the national media.

Noting the presense at Mr. Obama’s arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, replete with ceremonial scarlet tunics, CNN newscaster Fredrika Whitfield, normally no imbicile, was flummoxed. She admitted her confusion to the viewing public: ”They appear to be some sort of troops.” Other stateside journos, made knowledgable of RCMP protocol by watching Dudley Doright cartoons in childhood, wondered aloud how the Mounties had arrived at the airport without their horses. One bears this foolishness with neighborly good humor; you should hear the nutty things they say about their own country.

Of course, there’s never any shortage of stupidity in the Canadian media, either. The gold standard of local idiocy, the Toronto Star, continues to stick to the plot of its serially published fantasy, which involves an imaginary Canadian political leader named Iggy, who is standing by and about to grab the tiller that steers the federal government. The Star was offering its readers an alternate-reality account of the presidential visit, wherein the American president acknowledged and took a real liking to this fictitious Iggy character, and has him sized up as a better candidate for the role of sidekick than the elected leader of Canada, Mr. Harper.

Indeed, when Mr. Obama finally quits screwing around with the economy and short-hop foreign visits, and gets around to the serious business of buying a dog for his daughters, he could surely find a worse name for the pooch than Iggy. Other than which, it’s fair to assume that the Star’s Iggy must have struck Mr. Obama as a certain type of figure he’d seen in his prior career in Chicago politics, the grinning one-name supplicant — Ziggy the ethnic fellow, or Wiggy the high-strung man, or Piggy the overweight boy with the snout-like nose — who presents himself as qualified for employment as a city library worker, or night custodian at Midway airport, or as a toll-taker on one of Chicagoland’s many fine bridges and thoroughfares.

That is, if he made any impression at all.

Theatrical criticism, and a very brief stab at onomastics

1. Theatrical criticism

“A toe-tapping vaguely good time” is exactly how I would describe “Happy Days: The Musical,” now playing for a brief run at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, before moving on to wow audiences in Schenectady and Ashtabula. You’re likely to enjoy the show, providing you can avoid asking the following question: “What has happened to this planet, that someone thinks they can squeeze another buck out of television’s most mediocre sitcom ever, by putting it on stage and charging serious money for tickets?”

The exercise of revivifying a disposed-with TV franchise as a live theatrical event is now an established off-Broadway genre, and a proven means of peddling ducats to audiences who turn nostalgic over the mention of cult classics such as The Brady Bunch or Saturday Night Live. (Although, the concept likely wasn’t that different when George Reeves and Noell Neill first took their Superman act out on the country fair circuit.)

Then, again: You can’t call the viewers of the “Happy Days” TV series a cult, and it may not be entirely correct to label them viewers, either. Consumers, more like it. There once was a Happy Days industry in North America, the same way there were once other industries, i.e., automotive, fruit canning, shoemaking, etc. Time was when you could buy Happy Days pyjamas, license-plate frames, lunchpails, or other ephemera — or simply amuse yourself by reciting the clever lines spoken by the series’ actors, such as: “Aayyeee,” “I still got it,” and two dozen similarly witty selections.

The tale of how this series entered our consciousness is well known: pilot episode set in Eisenhower Era is shot during the earliest ’70s, unimpressed network execs scream ixnay, portions are aired as a segment of “Love American Style,” director George Lucas (pre-Star Wars) views the discarded bits and casts unemployed Happy Days actor Ron Howard in a similar role in his about-to-be-lensed teen pic, “American Graffiti.” Lucasfilm does boffo box office, network says, let’s give that ’50s comedy a shot, public eats it up, show has seven-year run and endless reruns, series creator Garry Marshall becomes filthy-stinking-rich spinning off media consumables such as “Joanie Loves Chachi.”

If the “Happy Days” TV program seemed to last your entire life, perhaps it did; perhaps it has. On the other hand, the musical version’s two hours pass quickly and something close to enjoyably. The book and story come courtesy of Mr. Marshall, and are what you will expect from the fellow who drew laughs from the catchphrase “Sit on it.” By which I mean, the intent is not ambitious. The music, appropriately by ’70s-relic Paul “We’ve Only Just Begun” Williams, is okay, and incorporates familiar snatches of the original sitcom theme, penned by Tin Pan Alley denizen Norman Gimbel.

 

Composer Paul "I'm Not John" Williams

We know far too much about Paul Williams — his life, his career, his game-show appearances, his round glasses and shag-haircut — but what do we really know about Mr. Gimbel? To begin with, we know that he kept busy creating ditties for ’70s sitcoms, including Mr. Marshall’s stablemate “Laverne & Shirley.” This was by no means his claim to fame. He was a formidable hombre who wrote the English language lyrics to Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema,” and partnered with Michel Legrand on “I Will Wait For You.” With collaborator Charles Fox, he wrote “Killing Me Softly with His Song” for Roberta Flack, and Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name.” It’s assumed by many that Flack and Croce, both highly regarded songwriters, penned those respective hits — but, not so; it was the team of Gimbel and Fox. Sort of makes you wonder why some imaginative impresario didn’t stage a work around the memorable songs of that under-recognized pair, rather than taking the easy route to repackaging schlock entertainment. That in mind, you picture Mr. Marshall late at night, refilling Heinz bottles in Arnold’s drive-in, using some cheap generic catsup bought in bulk, thinking he’s getting away with something. Even imagining him in this task, he is unlikely to be humming anything from his new musical, but it’s safe to think he’d be whistling while he works, keeping tune to “I Got a Name,” coming over the Wurlitzer wall-boxes.

 

2. Onomastics

I Got a Name. That track could sum up the entire decade of the ’70s. All the themes connect: featured song in a 1973 movie starring Jeff Bridges, which was inspired by a Tom Wolfe essay about stock-car driver Junior Johnson, the tune shot to the top of the charts after Mr. Croce’s death in a plane crash. Over-orchestrated instrumental versions are still found playing in bank lobbies and on the Music of Your Life AM radio stations — but the assertive, self-declarative title forms the crux of every hip-hop and rap song that followed. Got me a name, sucka.

Thing is, we’ve all got names, do we not? Only since the advent of the Internet, however, have we been able to locate and identify others who share our individual names: Googlegängers, in the web vernacular. A new web site, http://howmanyofme.com, offers assistance in this regard. Since I believe Norman Gimbel is now enjoying his golden years, I used this site to determine how many other Normal Gimbels I’d need to sort through, in the event I wish to contact him about this Music-of-Gimbel-and-Fox Broadway musical concept that occurred to me two paragraphs back. The site tells me there are currently two Norman Gimbels in America, information which I’ve filed away. The same source tells me there is but one Jim Croce extant. He’s not the celebrated JC, who for all I know may off playing gigs with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. Still, it’s all kind of interesting. There are 37 Garry Marshalls and four Richie Cunninghams.

As for your correspondent, we now know that there are 111,607 people in the U.S. with the first name Mitchell, which is statistically the 491st most popular first name. Noting that`s the precise equivalent of the entire population of the Federated States of Micronesia, I cry out to the proud 111,607: “Dudes! We cracked the Top 500! Let’s all fill the University of Michigan Stadium to capacity, and celebrate.” We also learn that there are 51,981 people in the U.S. with the last name Shannon, enough to qualify as the 675th most popular surname, and equal to the entire population of Elkhart, Indiana. With all the credibility provided by a reference I’d never even heard of until 10 minutes ago, the web site informs me with oracular certainty: “There are 19 people in the U.S. named Mitchell Shannon.”

I’m aware that there are, additionally, at least two of us up here in Canada. There’s the fellow who is now tapping his keyboard, and there is or was some chap with the same name out in British Columbia, who once sent me a nice letter and recalled our meeting at a motorcycle rally sometime somewhere. I swear until I’m blue-faced that I’ve never been near the guy, and you’d figure I might remember if I had. Well, one of us must be wrong about the other one; that’s all.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken the earliest steps in learning what I can about the other dozen-and-a-half-plus-one individuals who share my name. I’d previously come across a web link to one, a substance-abuse counselor around my age who lived in Ogdensburg, N.Y. That town is just over the river from Belleville, Ont., and twice this past summer I found myself out driving around in his vicinity. It didn’t occur to me for a second to contact my closest Googlegänger, although we’re nearby enough to practically be homies. Must be my Canadian reticence, or else I had other things on my mind.

I saw something once about a Mitchell Shannon who is an attorney in Alabama. Imagine that. Barely seems possible.

I’m also aware of a Mitch Shannon in the Denver suburbs, who is a realtor who owns the www.mitchshannon.com domain. I wonder if he knows about Mitch Shannon, another real estate guy in Lodi, Calif. California Realtor Mitch has a sideline of blending garlic powder, paprika, salt, onion powder, red pepper, black pepper, basil and other stuff, into a bottled concoction he calls Mitch’s Oh Yeah! Original Spice Blend. A local Lodi newspaper offers the following quote from some friend of the entrepreneur, who is a winery-owner: “I love it. Ol’ Mitch got me hooked.” Oh, yeah? Actually, I’ve always wanted to own a winery. Failing which, I’d settle for having a friend who owns a winery, who refers to me as Ol’ Mitch, or occasionally Good Ol’ Mitch, and doesn’t get angry when I hang around his tasting room, offering the opinion that last year’s cabernet was far superior to this year’s batch.

Ol’ Mitch’s condiment blend sounds familiar, as though it could be very close to Tony Cachere’s New Orleanian product, but I suppose I should send him an order and put it to the test. What’s holding me back is that I’m not sure I want to provide Mitch Shannon with Mitch Shannon’s credit card information. This has security risk written all over it. But I can’t help but think he needs a Canadian distributor for his spice line. Perhaps an exchange would work well. I may need to buy some property around Lodi, which would provide a fitting base from which to practice the chords of the John Fogerty song, “Oh, lord, stuck in Lodi again.”

I disqualify as potential Googlegängers, or as anyone I might ever contact for any purpose, the married twosome in London, England who occupy the http://www.mitchandshannon.com domain. They’re probably harmless enough, but their web site features a blog purported to be written by the couple’s sock-puppets, named BH and the Binkys, who explain: “This blog is about our lives and what we do when Mitch and Shannon aren’t around.” I couldn’t endure much more, having no tolerance whatsoever for cuteness, but I imagine BH and the Binkys must have seemed like a very good idea one Sunday morning over a platter of breakfast mimosas.

Perhaps, if all 19, or 20, or 21 of us who share my first and last names, in the correct order, were to gather in one location, it would be for the solemn purpose of spending a weekend mocking those two lame-o Brits and their dreadful sock-puppets. If we do convene, I’d want to kick off the convention by recognizing the learned and honorable delegate from Alabama, who would address the delegation as follows: “Mah name is Maytch Shannon. And who maht you-all be?”

Looking down on other motorists

If you’ve ever wondered who all those half-wit groseros are, the galoots you see obliviously driving their Hummers past the Greenpeace protest demonstration on Earth Day, let me just raise my hand and say: c’est moi.

Just like the governor of California, and the trophy-wives of investment bankers, and a pack of other environmentally insensitive louts, there’s a mud-streaked Hummer parked in my driveway — or there would be if the thing would fit in the shared driveway of my inner-city shack. As it is, I leave it parked overnight on the street, and when I squeezed defiantly past a schoolteacher in a Smart car this morning I’d swear that she glowered at me. Probably a vegetarian, I’m guessing, skedaddling to work, where she’ll force her joyless students to watch that Al Gore movie one more time.

Listen to me, will you? Forty-eight hours driving a Hummer, and I’ve turned into Rush freaking Limbaugh.

You may ask, as my sainted mother did yesterday, what a fine and sensitive young fellow such as myself is doing behind the wheel of a totemic affront to all forms of decency. As I have remarked repeatedly since Saturday, “It’s an insurance rental. It’s mine for a week.”

Somewhere a dozen blog-posts back, I described for the amusement of those who seek skillful and inspiring tale-telling on the Internets, a yarn involving my discomfort at being driven around New Jersey by an infirm 83-year-old woman. As is the case with so many web-related developments, it took some time for the implications of this post to be felt.

Felt they were. Last week I was stopped in my Saab at an intersection a couple of blocks from my office, where I was rear-ended by an 81-year-old woman who was returning home from a doctor’s appointment. A different octogenarian, I hasten to add. This one drove (note use of past tense) a rather cherry ‘99 Mustang, which looked mighty sportin’ until the moment of impact, at which point the entire front end sang its closing roulade. Quite a wallop, as the body-shop dude described the collision, using a technical term. The other driver was shaken, but not hurt. I, however, was plenty freaked out, wondering if the occurrence was karmic payback for having so callously used a senior-citizen as a prop in my despicable act of electronic raconteurship.

But you get past these introspective moments. The insurance company claims-adjuster graciously waived my deductible, absolving me of blame or shame. The kid at the car rental place drove right to my door and delivered a Dodge Magnum, the worst vehicle I’ve ever encountered, and I’m someone who drove a lopsided Hillman Avenger from Dorking to Bognor Regis and back, in the ’80s. After one evening of spinning the Dodge’s tires through the deep snow on my neighborhood streets, I contacted the car-rental lad the moment he opened his shop.

Chrysler engineers the "numb" into every Dodge Magnum

“This Magnum,” I began.

“Yes?,” he said.

“I hate it.”

He likely figured, well, if Mr. Discerning Motorist can’t stand one ungainly North American slab o’ crud, perhaps he’d care for another. Out came the Hummer H3.

I began to protest, but quickly dropped my objections. Hummer? Hmm.

Here is my rationale for undertaking a week-long relationship with this petro-swilling memento of the Age of Dick Cheney: Who’s gonna stop me? You? How about you? Or maybe that pencil-neck over there?

Didn’t think so.

Georgie-boy, patron saint of Humvee owners

I’d vouch that either as a sophisticated driving experience, or as an automotive engineering marvel, the Hummer is neither, but it’s highly efficacious as a testosterone supplement. Other than which, it won’t fit down the ramp into the parking garage of my office building, and it requires some careful advance planning to maneuver through the Tim Horton’s drive-through. I can also report that decent people avoid me now, probably sensing that the Hummer is an accoutrement to some unexpected lifestyle-change that they’ll want no part of. They’re guessing that the severe new hair-do will follow, and then the new wardrobe designed around those khaki pants with the pockets on the sides. Cargo pants, I believe they’re called. The ensemble may be referred to as the Full George Peppard.

Right now I’d swear several oaths that these things will never happen. I’m still a Saab kind of guy trapped in the pressed-tin body of a Hummer H3. But we’ve seen how the unexpected can pop out of nowhere, and suddenly everything is different. That’s how the fist of fate seems to move, and it packs — what did the body-shop guy call it? — quite a wallop.

That’s enough talk. Now you can all get the hell out of my way.

Puppies who paint: Roll over, Picasso, and tell Mark Rothko the news

The talented Ms. Chanda-Leah

I’ll admit to being fascinated by the art of Miss Chanda-Leah, a Canadian expressionist working in watercolors. While her execution and technique may seem unexceptional — if I may be allowed my keen critical judgment — allowances can and must be made, since the artist is a dog. This is not intended as a slight on the individual’s deportment or appearance. She really is a dog.

“Chanda Loves to Paint!,” it says on the web site devoted to her work. When applied to four-legged artistes, who would quibble that use of the exclamation point is ever unwarranted?

Her biographer elaborates: “By holding a brush in her mouth, Chanda is able to paint some very unusual abstracts. She uses different size brushes to achieve these ‘creative’ pictures.”

The site includes a portrait of the artist as a rather stout toy poodle. She’s photographed with a brush clamped within her jaws, poised before an easel; Georgia O’Keeffe, eat your heart out. Here’s Chanda pursuing her muse, rather than the usual things her species might chase, such as a cat, a mailman, or a speeding Buick.

Opus 64 demonstrates the evolution of Chanda's style

The Chanda collection numbers some 64 works, executed in 2005 and 2006. That may not be so impressive, adjusted for the usual measure of one dog year equaling seven human years. But, even so, go ahead and call that a prolific output. Most dogs never get around to painting a single opus, much as they might hang around outside Starbucks, trying to impress the opposite sex by yapping about their creative intentions. Let these art-school poseurs talk; Chandra’s a doer.

Audacious and vivid are two fitting adjectives for Miss Chandra’s canvases, which demonstrate a capricious abandon in the use of shape and color. That’s a puzzle, since dogs reportedly don’t see colors, or at least not the same colors as us humans. However, when the subject is canine art projects, mysteries abound. That’s something to remember while struggling to understand Chanda’s ability to sign her name to her works, both in a big looping human-like script, and with a tiny black paw-print. We may assume that Chanda’s owner, trainer, and intellectual-property manager, Mrs. Sharon Robinson of Hamilton, Ont., may have assisted in this regard.

Handy though she appears with a set of brushes, I couldn’t help but observe that Chadra’s thick, lustrous coat of fur might have offered an alternative means of applying paint to canvas. Given this advantage, along with the unrestrained enthusiasm typical to the poodle breed, we might ask what impulse held the artist back from using her very body to passionately slam pigment to board, a la Jackson Pollock. I’ve witnessed my own toy poodle engrossed in using her flipside to grind a potato into the carpet of my parents’ living room, and regarded it as an inspired form of performance art. Alas, Chanda is no longer in a position to offer career guidance to up-and-coming dog aesthetes.

The Canadian art scene was dealt a staggering loss on June 20, 2006, when Chanda-Leah died at age 12, “due to complications that led to heart failure.” Her unnamed 64th and final artistic creation was completed only four days before her death, imbuing that work, and her entire gallery, with a special poignancy.

It’s a sad occasion when any dog has her day — or any artist. There’s a scene in a novel I just finished reading wherein a dog is struck by a car and killed on a rain-slicked street-corner, and the guilt-stricken driver hands the dog’s owner a large stack of cash before driving off. The inconsolable owner sits on the curb, beside the lifeless form of his pet, and in his despair arranges the bills on the wet sidewalk to trace the outline of a dog’s body. This vignette, which occurs in a not-especially-good piece of fiction by a man named Connolly, seemed to me astonishingly moving and poetic. Likely Chanda has never attempted the art-form of creative writing, but I have, with unsatisfactory results, and I’ll tell you that one eye-popping passage surrounded by three hundred pages of forgettable prose is always going to be something to strive for.

When swingers swung: painter Bill 'n' politico Pierre

As much as I’m fond of dogs, I can’t manage the conclusion that it’s easier to lose an artist than a pet. For example, I was unexpectedly saddened to hear of the death of the Canadian painter William Ronald a decade back, although I never met the fellow, was put off by his television program, and didn’t think his art was up to much. I don’t know why I cared about the end of Bill Ronald. Life short; art long — something like that? Could be.

Upping the ante by a pawful of kibble: a famous vision by Cassius Coolidge (1844-1934)

If you love dogs, and art, and art that depicts dogs, and if you can put up with the company of human artists who will paint portraits of dogs playing poker, you still may not know what to make of art ostensibly created by a dog. I’m reminded of a stunt undertaken by another toy poodle once housed by my in-laws. A crafts-minded member of the household was hooking a rug, and the dog took the occasion of being left alone to deconstruct the effort, somehow undoing each stitch. Then the dog arranged each strand of wool into a separate pile, accurately sorted according to color. When the rug-hooker returned home, the dog could not have been more proud, glancing at the ruined handiwork, catching the eye of the artisan, and grinning the way nihilist poodles do. This strikes me as a more natural undertaking for the canine bent on creative expression. Anti-art is fringe, but art nonetheless, and in the right hands, or paws, it can be pure, strong and beautiful.

Wait a minute, Mr. Postman: Our long waddle into Wall-e World

Neil Postman mailed it in, and the creators of Wall-e got the message

There were many wonderful moments in the recent animated movie Wall-e, but the most resonant and unexpected scene was the first appearance by humans of the future. In Wall-e World, our race has evolved over centuries to resemble a gathering of vacant-eyed, super-sized manatees, or maybe sea lions, floating on reduced-gravity chaise-lounges, gabbing mindlessly into mobile phones, and continually supine unless sucking up giant beakers of Slurpee or receiving spa treatments from robots. These accepting, obtuse jello-molds are, in other words, an only slightly distorted depiction of our current selves.

The film offers a plausible version of how this metamorphosis might occur, but Neil Postman provided all the documentation anyone might need in his reissued study, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin, Cdn$20/US$14.) Back in 1985, Postman expounded on how the emerging flood of video “info-tainment” would re-contour the minds of viewers, training the public to become ongoing consumers of random images of war, famine and other human calamities — and to view these events passively as amusements, while regarding staged entertainment as reality.

He put forth the notion, succinctly conveyed in the book’s title, that the consequence of this non-stop diet of image-consumption would be nothing less than to diminish the capacity for rational thought among viewers, resulting in the death of our culture. Postman predicted the blurring of lines between reality and imagery, and suggested that the outcome would be not the Global Village presaged by McLuhan, but rather a Global Insane Asylum, where inmates are trained to value the valueless, and to discard that which is enduring. His observation: “Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

Postman offered his views in advance of the “reality” TV programing and “audience-participation” vehicles — as well as technologies such as the Internet, HDTV, Slingbox, Blackberry, TiVO, YouTube, Xbox, video-on-demand, Sirius-XM satellite radio and others that, you’ll forgive me, I may have forgotten. (I blame these memory lapses on too much television, because it’s, ah, convenient.)

His book was published prior to many familiar occurrences, among them the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (with TV reporters embedded among soldiers), and the recent emergence of a self-described Alaskan hockey-mom as an internationally known political leader. (We needn’t take note of this politician’s TV comedic doppelgänger on Saturday Night Live, or the strange case of the Montreal disc jockey who punk’d the politico by impersonating the Prime Minister of France, for the amusement of his audience.) Reading Postman’s arguments, it seems inevitable that these events would happen — just as the TV appearances of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as an reporter embedded during the Iraq war made it certain that he would soon be selected to fill a high political office, say maybe Surgeon-General.

Two decades after his book was released, apparently Postman has rung twice. Everything he expressed 24 years ago in the form of his fears for the future has come to pass — and, yet, many of us, in our soulless, bedazzled state, preoccupied with the plots of “23-and-a-Half” and “CSI: Mimico,” will not have noticed that anything in our lives has changed, let alone changed for the worse. That, too, was his prediction. “When a people become an audience,” he wrote, “and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.”

Postman would not have been surprised that newspapers would remove their serious content in an effort to better compete with the electronic media, or that the levels of newspaper readership would plummet. He foresaw the emerging format of talk radio as two camps of ideologue perpetually chanting vitriolic slogans at each other. And he would not have been taken aback to know that it would take a cartoon such as Wall-e to offer enlightened discourse on the most meaningful subject of our age, which is the psychological, physical and environmental cost of unbridled hedonism.

Why we can’t talk any more

There's a better class of neighbor in Pima County

I received a call the other day from a chum who was formerly a distinguished newspaper publisher, who now lives in a Tucson trailer park, and is trying to save some money in order to pay for the necessities of life, namely his two-dollar quart of pinot grigio and greens fees for the nearby public golf course. Someday soon the trailer parks will be overrun with ex-publishers, given the state of the newspaper industry, but never mind that for the moment.

I could immediately tell he was economizing by using the Skype phone service, because every third word was unintelligible. Normally, when you talk to him face-to-face it’s only every eighth word that doesn’t make any sense, so Skype was considerably upping the ante of conversational difficulty. The price of being incomprehensible is a bargain: he pays just $29.95 for an entire year’s worth of exceptionally poor-quality calling.

“How’s your Jeep running?” I asked. Oh, he said, she’s fine and sends her regards, and I realized that he thought I was asking about his wife, whose name is Jean. Since there was no way to gracefully correct the error, and because I don’t happen to care all that deeply about his Jeep in the first place, I didn’t bother to rephrase the question.

Hello, Central? Get me a better phone, willya?

Skype is a glorious throwback to the days when nothing worked properly, or else it’s a preview of a future when we’ll all be fumbling with our hearing-aids.

Coincidentally, only a few hours before I received the call, my wife asked me what I knew about this thing called Skype. I wondered why she was curious. It seems she had just received a piece of correspondence from someone who works for a public agency where my wife is a board member. The employee had been asked to describe his job duties, and provided a long — if not especially cogent — list, wherein he claimed to be engaged in “regularly skyping stakeholders.”

I explained that the fellow was referring to a particularly ineffective voice-over-IP product that you would only think of using if your goal was to annoy the person you’ve contacted. I further offered that anyone who would use Skype as a workplace tool is either trying to conceal something from the people he’s calling, or else believes you can impress your board by tossing around phrases they may not be entirely familiar with. Example of the second possibility: Sorry, I’m far too busy to respond to your request right now, because I’m skypilly skypifiying Skype-Skype-Skype!

The only person I know who can use VOIP without spreading this type of extreme chaos is George-the-Dentist, who is seldom home, and usually on the phone, and would consequently be diverting his entire income to AT&T’s long distance division if not for Skype. You don’t require caller ID when he phones. You’re greeted with a distinctive burst of static, followed by some line noise, and then you hear something that sounds just the slightest bit like the voice of George-the-Dentist. “George,” I say, “where are you calling from?”, and he mentions some place such as Istanbul, or Islington,

Islington is one of our dozen or so favorite London boroughs

or the Isle of Arran — or perhaps he’s actually addressing the ghost of Isadora Duncan, for all the sense you can make of things.

The only way you can carry on any actual dialog using Skype is to ask the other party to repeat his last comment over and over again. Eventually some semblance of a discussion may emerge, but the overall effect sounds vaguely biblical, or else derived from Samuel Beckett:

– “For I said, and when will you be returning home?”
– “And it was that I answered, within a fortnight.”
– “Then you will be returning home within the fortnight?”
– “Yea, as I said, within the fortnight I’ll be returning home.”

Throw in “verily” a couple of times, and these chats can become positively creepy, but nonetheless it’s always a kick to get a call originating from the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel Luxembourg, and a treat to yap with George-the-Dentist, even if Skype does make it sound like his mouth is completely stuffed with samples of surgical gauze. (Odds of that actually being the case are no better than average, I would guess.)

Because I’m reading a slim book on a related subject, it occurred to me that the new popularity of the low-fidelity telephone conversation will rate a footnote in the study of current epistemology.

You say goodbye, I say hello

Someone will argue that when you become accustomed to comprehending only two out of three words spoken, your brain will make adjustments and begin to fill in the blanks. This will mean, in effect, that on one-third of the occasions when you think you’re conversing with other people, you’re actually only talking to yourself.

In which case, you may be better off blogging.

Season’s Greetings from Toronto

 

Expensive, but worth it, they say

Paid a thousand bucks for a set of winter tires this afternoon, top-of-the-line Michelins, and drove straight off into the afternoon blizzard, tuned to the all-Abba station on satellite radio, lumbering along in my Saab. Under typical circumstances, your Michelin salesman would be getting good and desperate around Christmas time, ready to deal on wheels. And thanks to the recession, every other consumer item is currently marked down to the BOGO category, where you buy one and get one free. Not happening this year: the Quebec government made mandatory the use of snow tires beginning December 15th, and consequently they’re in short supply throughout the neighboring cantons.

 

So, I trudge a block or two further, stuck in traffic long enough to sit through two separate playings of “Two For the Price of One,” surely the oddest Abba tune in the entire Abba catalog of polar weirdness. At first I think Abba is mocking me for having overpaid on the tires, but the tune reaches me on second listen. They simply do not write songs like that anymore, period.  This track begins with a strained vocal by Bjorn or maybe Benny, voice strangled by repressed Lutheran passion. His accent cranked up to comic levels, sounding like a one-joke dialect vaudevillian, Bjorn or Benny takes on the character of a lonely perv reading the personal ads in the Stockholm Daily Meatball , whose eyeballs go all ker-schrproing when he spots a listing that seems to promise a menage-a-trois. He responds: “I read your ad, it sounded rather thrilling; I think a meeting could be mutually fulfilling; Why don’t we meet for a chat, the three of us in my flat?”

It follows that this poor sick twist is sweating in the throes of the imagined sexual encounter of his miserable lifetime. He’s probably already planning the adverbs he’s going to use when he writes the event up for the Svenske edition of Penthouse, but it emerges abruptly that he simply misread the ad. “She said, I’m sure we must be perfect for each other; And if you doubt it you’ll be certain when you meet my mother.”

So, yes, Two for the Price of One: a Vladimir Nabokov short story, and a bouncy pop tune, all wrapped up in one strange three-minute package. Brought to you through the courtesy of XM 31, All-Abba Radio.

I am looking forward to decyphering this astonishing tune a third time, when XM Channel 31 goes silent. Seems, unlike the full-time Sinatra, Jimmy Buffett and Springsteen stations on XM satellite radio, Abba Radio is a temporary thing, intended to promote the release of the “Mamma Mia” DVD and then fade away. Indeed, where Bjorn and Benny stood only minutes earlier, the frequency is now occupied by Chanukah Radio, with a properly guttural pronunciation of the “Ch.” I express my disappointment through a loud string of angry shouted oaths, none of which involve dreidels or latkes. It took me 30 years to jump on the Abba bandwagon, and here these satellite jockeys are set to yank the buckboard out from under me, without so much as a Yumpin’ Yimminy of warning.

I feel abandoned in my Swedish near-luxury car, unable to share the Michelin-cushioned journey with the penultimate Swedish band. Don’t get me wrong; there are many fine Hebraic troubadours — at least one in my own family, the redoubtable Martin Shaw — and others with familiar names such as Leonard Cohen and Mickey Katz, all capable of conveying the Chanukah experience to a listening audience. But none of them are Abba.

 

The Mick in his prime: Nothing too mousy about this Katz

(I might even eventually come to terms with the advent of an all-Mickey Katz radio channel, though it would likely need to be padded out with performances by Katz’s untalented child, Joel Grey, and his even-less-palatable granddaughter, Jennifer Grey, and that would certainly pose a problem.)

 

So occurs the winter solstice here in the north country. The security department of Mastercard has an urgent message waiting for me on the voicemail by the time I arrive home through the storm. The grand I’d plunked down for the new tires was flagged as being outside my usual purchasing patterns. I assure the investigator the charge is legit. “What did you do,” the fellow asks, “put a down payment on a car?” No, I reply, I bought four 17-inch Michelin X-Ice beauties, and, daddio, I’m lovin’ them. I see, says the Mastercard cop, and he thanks me for my cooperation. The days will begin to grow longer now, a few less  moments of darkness  each evening, and I now fear no patch of black ice, no accumulated snow drifts on the Gardiner Expressway. The Saab is what you might call sure-footed, and you can clearly hear the snow crunching beneath the wheels, because of the silence left now that Bjorn and Benny have taken their peculiar, creepy, and irresistable music, and vanished somewhere over the Arctic Circle.

Miseducation of a Medical Publisher (Part 34)

The Garden State

At this time of year, two winters past, I found myself sitting in the passenger’s seat of a Toyota Prius, being driven around the northern-most edge of New Jersey, the part close to the Delaware Water Gap, by an infirm 83-year-old woman who liked to talk to herself while she drove, using incomprehensible sentence fragments, among them, “drat,” “umpf,” and something that sounded close to “Barney.” Here’s a situation that just cries out for sang-froid, I told myself, wracking my brain for a mild conversation-starter, just something to get her focused, I hoped. “Well,” I began, “how do you like the Prius?”

She turned her head slowly and faced me square on, casting her glance away from Route-wherever-it-was-she-was-supposed-to-be-looking. “I hate it,” she barked. Then she arthritically turned back to face the oncoming traffic.

Yes, I said, agreeably. Why’s that?

She turned again. “Because I keep driving it into trees,” she said, her voice restraining real anger. “Last time it cost the insurance company $12,000 in body work.” I decided it might be best to clam up and keep the seat-belt fastened.

“This isn’t a good car for me,” she said. “I can’t see through the back window. The roof pillars are too wide. Why would they design a car like that? When you’re old, things hurt. You can’t turn your head so easily. You don’t see very well. Things hurt.” With that, she cast her vision back toward the windshield. I quietly hoped her peepers were up to the task. Normally, I like to reassure people who complain about aging, using some quip I’ve picked up, such as “80 is the new 60!”, or something even more dismissive and non-empathic. But I had no idea where we were heading, other than off toward lunch somewhere, and I determined that a minimalist approach to conversation would be best.

“I just hope I can find the restaurant,” she said, as we passed through another north Jersey village with one more perfectly wonderful-looking diner, all baked goods made on premises. I asked if she ever sought directions from her car’s GPS, which was built into the Prius dashboard. The question revived her anger. “They’ve got that there to spy on me,” she snapped. “They always know where I am whenever I turn that thing on. Everyone always knows where everyone else is all the time. Tell me something…”

Now she was turning toward me again, while over the rolling hills another town approached dead ahead. Could have been Mahwah, I think. We must have been somewhere near the Tappan Zee bridge.

“How do people still have affairs, these days?”

David Ogden Stiers, a native of Eugene, Ore.

I summoned up a slight smile, and tried to make it wry. I was trying to commune with my inner Charles Emerson Winchester, and ignore my inner Hawkeye Pierce. Hawkeye Pierce, with his repertoire of sharp one-liners, would not have helped. (In a tiny voice, Hawkeye whispered, “Why ask me, lady? Do I look like Dr. Kinsey?”)

We arrived at our destination, and my guide wondered if I could park the Prius, to cut down on the risk of potential tree-related mishaps. Which I did. We both ordered the Spaghetti Putanesca, and I had a glass of Valpolicella. We talked about the New York newspaper scene of the 1950s, when she was a staffer on the Journal-American, and I hadn’t been born. I asked if she ever met Westbrook Pegler, the Hearst paper’s star columnist and an infamous red-baiting lunatic. She told me you didn’t meet Pegler, he was too big a big-shot. You knew that he was around the building sometimes, but you never met him. And just how the hell did I know who Pegler was?

“Newspaper junkie,” I said. This is going pretty well, I thought to myself. I’d caught the Continental flight from Toronto to Newark to try to salvage a business deal that I’d signed with the woman’s son, who purportedly represented the privately held publishing company his family owned. Because business deals are never, ever what they’re supposed to be, it emerged that I had to reassure the CEO’s mother that she was dealing with substantial people from up in Canada. I’d persuaded our lawyer that this face-to-face palaver was preferable to seeking a legal remedy to the unexpected development of a signed contract being unilaterally voided by the CEO’s ancient mother. Our lawyer had no qualms about his ability to tackle the matter in a foreign jurisdiction, Bergen County or wherever, but I was certain of three things: that the costs would be unimaginable; that we would find ourselves in front of a judge named Honorable Sudsy Nussbaum or Justice R. Barton Caputo; and that we would lose.

So, we worked out an understanding of agreement, the CEO’s mamma and me. The deal was resuscitated across a maroon tablecloth during the espresso and biscotti course, and we made our way back toward the airport without encountering a tree-related mishap. By the time I was back behind my desk again the next morning Mamma had a few hours to re-think things and changed her mind, or else something brand new had come up, and the accord was fated to expire. The lawyers were set loose to duke it out, and it all ended in a draw, which meant the threats of litigation, ours and theirs, were revealed as so much trash talk. I never spoke to Junior again, and he had actually been a pretty good friend.

Sadly, the estrangement left me with no one left to discuss matters relating to the New York City press scene in the post-war years, which shouldn’t have been a tremendous personal loss to anyone, but was to me. Henceforth, whenever I’d blurt out, “I’ll see your Westbrook Pegler and raise you a Joe Liebling,” it would be to an empty room. Mamma was headstrong, obsessive, money-loving, capricious, childish, a woman after my own heart. I had been looking forward to years of challenging her with questions such as, “Young Ideas by Dick Young. Column ran in the Daily Mirror, or the Daily News? Walt Kelly. Cartoonist for PM, or the New York Star?” Knowing the answers, but looking forward to the walk down memory lane, or, more precisely, down 32nd Street.

But the smashed remnants of the business deal precluded any future contact, and you play by the rules of the game. Missus, if you’re reading this, and I would never say that’s an impossibility, please know that I haven’t the foggiest idea how people have affairs in the age of the GPS, or exactly how a GPS might intervene, but it should be a happy enough thought for anyone, on the cusp of a dark and creepy season in Ramapo, Nutley and Piscataway, simply to guess that they do.

Edward S. Rogers, Jr. (1933-2008)

Play pool, Fast Eddie

When Ted Rogers was born in Toronto in 1933, entertainment was a scarce commodity. The movie theaters were darkened and locked each Sunday. Public playgrounds were closed on the Lord’s Day; the child’s place was presumed to be fidgeting in church. Daily newspapers came out either five or six days a week, never on Sunday. Rogers grew up during the Great Depression, a bleak time in a dour age in a cold city. Ted Rogers’ father invented an improved type of radio, which refined the possibilities for commercial broadcasters to offer up a dollop of programming to ease your mind from its many cares for a few hours each day. The airwaves delivered music, news and commentary (which were occasionally two different things back then), baseball games, merry comedies, dramas starring Lorne Greene, and long sermons from spirit-filled preachers, along with jauntily sung commercials for Presswood bacon and Presswood ham, Langley’s dry cleaners and the friendly man who delivered Milne’s heating oil. You could depend on the friendly man from Milne.

Ted Rogers’ father didn’t make much money from his invention. He wound up bamboozled by fourflushers. Papa died at an early age, just 38.

Today, 12/02/08, was Ted Rogers’ appointed time to croak, and the world he left was a very different place. Entertainment oozes from every crack in the landscape, falls from above, soaks through the skin. You could fulfill Marshall McLuhan’s prediction and offer to pay for a little silence, but it wouldn’t do you any good.

Theaters closed on the sabbath?

At Yonge & Dundas, stimulation abounds

Today there’s a dozen Jumbotrons set up at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas, blaring video nonsense all day and all night. They’ll never leave you alone for a second now, these entertainment purveyors. I’d bet that Rogers died with the cable TV on. So will we all.

I was driving past a Rogers video-rental store this morning when the news came over the Rogers radio station that Rogers, “a pioneer, a visionary, a humanitarian,” has left this vale of tears, less than five days before his career-capping achievement was to have taken place: the first regular-season NFL game to be played outside the US, in Toronto at the Rogers Center. I might have called someone on my Rogers Wireless phone to pass the news along, but the laws governing such behavior on the highways have been changed recently in Ontario, and, besides, the Rogers-branded town formerly known as Toronto is constantly awash in information, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the late, great Ted and his flunkies. Rogers’ media consumers most likely heard about the great man’s demise a few precious moments before the memo was handed upstairs to the Great Scorer.

Conrad Black’s occupied whittling a gun from a soap-bar in his Florida jail cell, and now Ted Rogers is uncharacteristically quiet in the back of the limo, destined for his one last appearance before the investment analysts. You might conclude that they’re screening the final reel for the generation of Toronto’s media moguls that attended Upper Canada College.

As a fellow media baron, I offer the highest praise to Ted’s mogul-ness, which is that he never once forgot to ask for the money.

My friend Mary Layton recalls that when Rogers was beginning to build his media empire with his startup radio stations, CHFI-AM and FM, it was Ted hisself who’d call on the media buyers, sit in the cubicle with his alpine hat in his lap, and plead for some business. Later, when his larger dreams of creating a cable and wireless empire were realized, and he was in a position to scoop up the nickels and dimes, along with the quarters, he instituted some innovative business tactics, such as dropping the commercials the US networks sent out with their broadcasts and replacing them with ads he’d sell locally. The American broadcasters howled in outrage, but Ted kept the dough. He introduced so-called negative option billing for his cable TV customers, as a further means of not giving a sucker an even break. Similarly, when the use of wireless telephones expanded, he began charging something called “system access fees.” The amount of these fees began to escalate, which led to the reasonable assumption that it had to be the conniving federal government that was pocketing the $7-a-month charge. Nah. It was Ted.

During the last several years, you could always tell when you were watching a commercial for one of the dozens of services offered by Ted’s various companies. There was a striking meanness of spirit in each of the ads, a signature tone of snideness that left you wondering just exactly how the man whose name was on the firm’s door wanted to be seen by the world.

He was quite a card, they say. Just last year he was yukking it up at a press conference with Ralph Wilson, the nanogenerian owner of the Buffalo Bills, crowing over how he’d snapped up the Toronto football stadium, financed by taxpayers at around a half-billion bucks, for the paltry sum of $25 million. A rich guy I once knew told me about the time Ted ran into the moneybags’ mom at a party, just after Ted had come into a big pile of cash by finalizing one or other of his schemes. “So,” he greeted the rich guy’s ma, “Tell me something. How does it feel to be really wealthy?” Mm, I said to the guy telling the story, what did your mother say? He started to laugh. “Well,” he began, but then he cracked up and couldn’t continue. He laughed a little more, and then he was able to compose himself. “She said, ‘I wouldn’t know, Ted. I’ve never been poor.’” I felt, for the first and only time in my life, the slightest twinge of sympathy for Ted Rogers, the man who’d been skimming small amounts from my cable bill all those years. Imagine Ted forced to get through an entire evening surrounded by that particular class of Upper Canadian pinhead.

He’ll likely have more suitable company in the Afterlife, although other people’s idea of paradise might well be intolerable to Rogers, especially if it involves peace and quiet. I picture him shifting to-and-fro in a celestial wing chair, nervously thumbing through a tattered old copy of Maclean’s or Canadian Business, biding his time until Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone show up for lunch. When they finally wander in, blinking and disoriented, Rogers will tell them, “Boys, you know what this place could really use? Something to liven things up. I was thinking about a theme park, and a pay-per-view specialty channel, and a roller-derby league, and…”

Wonderful news: Canada’s mayors love the cities they run

Living in Toronto, where it’s not uncommon to hear hard-pressed ratepayers and greasy chamber-of-commerce types alike describe the city as “world class,” it often comes as a bolt from the blue to learn that in fact there are several other cities in Canada. An article I’ve just finished perusing this morning while aboard the Via Rail train bound for Montreal refers to a total of nine, including the locale I’ve just left, and the one where the locomotive is bound.

Nine cities: who knew?

The piece — which promises, “Nine Canadian mayors tell us what makes them love the cities they run. And no others!” — is contained in the Via passengers’ magazine, which is an oddball two-language publishing effort, rife with gratuitous exclamation points and Franglish goofiness. You’ll see what I mean in a few minutes.

The chief magistrates, eight middle-aged white men and the Sino-Canadian chap who evidently runs Victoria (there’s a city named Victoria?) fail to make a very convincing case for any of their burgs, but manage to keep their remarks noticeably brief, for a bunch of local politcos.

Sullivan, not Katz

Mayor Sam Sullivan of Vancouver offers: “We are a compassionate city where people reach out to their neighbours.” Having strolled along the main drag of the city’s notorious Downtown East sector last summer, I’d have to say hizzonor is right on the money. I witnessed beer-soaked johns reaching out to child hookers, junkies and alms-beggars reaching out for bits of sandwiches discarded on the sidewalk, and at least one anxious fellow, well turned out in the latest women’s fashions and high-end cosmetics, reaching between the broken paving stones on Broadway, trying to retrieve an object I couldn’t quite discern. So brief were Mayor Sullivan’s remarks that he declined to comment on the thousands of terminal cases who teem about the Terminal City, in scenes you might recall from documentaries about the scuttling underclasses of Calcutta or Caracas.

Katz, not Sullivan

I much preferred the comments of Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz. (Seems like every Podunk elects a guy named Sam.) Says His Worship: “I’ve always said that the greatest aspect of Winnipeg is our extraordinarily friendly people.” Winnipeggers do tend to be noticeably sweet-tempered and accommodating, it’s true, but regardless of Mayor Katz’s consistent and unyielding position on the issue, his observation might seem less like pandering if it came from someone other than a party due to face the local electorate. Nonetheless, you’ve got to love the ingratiating and vibrant Manitoba capital, just as you have to admire a civic leader who can keep his remarks down to a total of five sentences. I speculate that his brevity was learned from the more clever idlers at the intersection of Portage and Main, where they often choose to keep their lips clamped, owing to those chilly Prairie winds.

Speaking of slow-moving air-masses, make way for the non-Sam in the mayoral crowd, David Miller of Toronto, who commandeers occupancy of at least double the column-inches claimed by his companionable counterpart from Friendly Manitoba.

Where Mayors Sullivan and Katz are pleased enough to talk about their cities, Mr. Miller prefers a more important subject: himself. He describes his typical daily agenda as the leader of a great city, outlining how he “like[s] to have a bite to eat at the Sunnyside Cafe” and “always stop[s] for a classic peameal bacon sandwich at the Carousel Bakery” and “then I might head up to the Danforth for dinner at the excellent Allen’s Restaurant.” You work up quite an appetite being mayor, in which capacity your duties include speaking nonsense, eating, raising taxes, eating, self-aggrandizing, eating, mismanaging the treasury and resources, eating some more, being driven to the haberdasher’s to have your pants let out, and, if luck prevails, perhaps there might be time at the end of a long working day for a late-night snack. Good thing the mayor’s civic expense account contains a dining allowance commensurate with his belt-size.

On the town: Toronto's gourmand-prince sizing up potential dining companions

For those disinclined to follow Mr. Miller’s chow-bound route toward self-induced Type II diabetes, he recommends a brisk stroll “on the trails alongside the Red, Don, and Humber rivers…” Now, this is truly peculiar. The Don and Humber are, of course, world-class waterways snaking through the east and west ends of People City. But the Red River belongs to Mayor Katz’s town, as does the Assiniboine, as every country music fan will tell you. A recommendation of that Big River in the ‘Peg would seem unusually generous coming from any Torontonian, let alone the town’s political kingpin. Figures there’d be a catch.

Reading the accompanying text in French, we discover a reference to “des rivieres Rouge, Don et Humber.” Mais certainment! Big Boy wasn’t talking about the Red River; he was plugging the Rouge River in Scarborough — only the Via magazine’s translation department got things all turned around, like.

Seeing this geographic/linguistic anomaly exposed, it may occur to the reader: Didn’t we hear something once about Canadian cities with names like “Calgary,” “Regina,” and “Quebec?” And wasn’t there another city reputed to be kitty-corner to Mayor Sullivan’s turf, and it was called something like “Saint John,” or possibly “St. John’s?” Perhaps we were misinformed, since each of those places obviously failed to make the Via list, if indeed they ever existed. Or it could be that those municipalities are administered by diffident mayors who are choosy about the kind of company they keep.

On the other hand, there may be another possibility.

The missing communities? Perhaps the Mayor of Toronto just got hungry and, you know, ate them.

Don’t Saab for me, Generalissimo Motors

With all the problems of General Motors under daily scrutiny, there is consensus on how the company’s troubles stem from having too many marginal marques, among them, Hummer, Buick, Saab.

I used to drive a Saab 9-3, and I wondered what the ‘9-3′ meant. I thought it must be a reference to a Scandanavian dice game. I played craps a bit in high school, and knew that rolling two sixes was good and two ones was bad. Nine and three meant nothing to me, but possibly it was lucky for the Swedes who built the car.

A bird wearing a crown, sticking its tongue out. How quaint is that?

It wasn’t all that lucky for me, though. Picked it up at the dealer in Mississaugua and after 30 kilometers on the highway heading home I noticed that the engine was overheating. Seriously overheating. There was a good reason for that, which turned out to be that the dealer hadn’t checked to see if there was a plug in the radiator, and there wasn’t, so all the coolant was spread across a good section of the Queen Elizabeth Way. Saabs were sold through Saturn dealers in Canada in those days, in an effort to find some synergy in their common ownership by General Motors, although there was nothing else to link the brands. Saturn buyers were chipper suburban folks, quick to exchange happy memories of their vacations in Tennessee, picnicking on the grounds of the factory where their car was assembled. Saab people were basically sour misfits. So when you bought a Saab you’d get all the Saturn touches that you didn’t want, such as the team of Saturn salesmen in their golf shirts gathering in the showroom to snap your picture and cheer you on as you drove away in your brand new car. Somewhere I have the photo of a frowning male in early middle-age standing next to a blue Saab, wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. That would be me.

There, in a nutshell, is the General Motors ownership experience of the past generation. They’d send you on your way confused and not a little out-of-sorts, laying the fanfare on thick but not deigning to bother with the nuts and bolts.

I used to work for a guy who cut quite a figure when he pulled his black Saab 9000 into his executive parking space at the company his family owned, a big famous conglomerate. He gave every impression of being a fellow used to being in command of things, and after that evening when he hanged himself I was surprised to learn that another member of the management team promptly took over the lease on his Saab, and was driving it work every day. We sure didn`t understand that part, when a bunch of us sat around the cafeteria trying to make sense of it all. “Drive a dead man’s Swedish car, maybe it’s like a Viking ritual,” someone suggested, kidding to mask the grief, I guess. `You know what S-A-A-B stand for?` someone else asked. We waited for the answer. `Something An Asshole Buys.`

Later, when I got my Saab, I found its orthopedically designed seats were plenty comfortable, and the hatchback seemed ideally designed for hauling knock-down household furnishings back from Ikea. One day the ergonomically engineered driver’s seat came loose from its moorings, and that was worth a week’s stay in the Saab-Saturn sick bay. But, my, how the dog loved the car, and that counted for almost everything. She’d stick her nose against the dashboard air-nozzles, or stand proudly rigid on the arm-rests between the front seats, treating the item as a kind of olympic podium. She loved the tone of the radio when it played gospel music from the Buffalo FM station. She especially loved the tweeting noise the remote door-lock device instigated. It made her grin, and turn her head to make direct eye contact with me. “Don’t we have the greatest car in the world?,” she seemed to ask. I was not quite as certain, but whenever she nudged the stick-shift with her forehead, to make the Saab go faster, I found it impossible to argue.

The old-timers hanging around the Saab-Saturn service area told me the late-’90s Saab wasn’t really a Saab at all, just a General Motors-built genetically modified poseur. I was pretty sure they must be right, despite the odd Scandinavian quirks which survived, such as the floor-mounted ignition key and the goofy hatchback and the standard weather-band radio. One weekend in the early spring I took off with my business partners through central Pennsylvannia, bound for a medical conference in Washington, DC. We returned a couple of days later, tuned to the weather-band radio. The weather office said something about highly dangerous driving conditions, and a man’s voice pleaded with us not to strike out into the mountains in the middle of the blizzard, with zero visibility. They made it sound pretty bad, but it looked even worse. We prepared for a rough ride by buying twenty dollars worth of snack foods, intended as emergency rations, which the fellow in the back seat polished off quickly, between apnea-convulsed naps and petulant exhortations to keep driving. Our progress slowed to a stately five miles per hour, behind a line of 18-wheelers, some of which excused themselves by sliding off the road. The gas gauge was nearing empty. North of Dansville, NY, at a truck stop blessed with a Day’s Inn of some moldy sort, we pulled off and got the second-last available room, outfitted with two beds and a rollaway.

Daystop, Dansville, NY: It'll do in a pinch

Not quite sated with bags of pretzels and a dozen candy-bars, the fellow in the back seat squeezed out of the Saab and into the cafe, protesting that he’d expected to be home before midnight. A mile up the highway the New York State Troopers had closed Route 17 to traffic. Within half-an-hour the truck stop filled up with refugee truckers, the sound of their airbrakes echoing between the mountains, the snow falling more heavily. A half-pint trucker-girl in a quilted vest lept out of her cab, shaking her head. “Excuse me,” she said, addressing me. “Do you have any idea where I am?” Dansville, New York, I said, north of Corning, south of Rochester. She did something with her mouth, a tired grimace-smile, and headed for the cafe, chit-chat concluded.

Note new wallpaper. The place has been gussied up recently

The room was exposed cinder-block with a paper band around the toilet seat, old-school, but HBO had an original episode of The Sopranos that evening, and you could look out the window and watch the snow fall. One of my business partners sat pretty much all night in the coffee shop eating pie. The other walked in circles smoking a cigar, leaving patterns in the snow-filled parking lot. By morning the roads had been mostly plowed, and we began the five-hour drive home, which took eight or nine hours. The weather-band radio insisted it was still not safe to travel. The back seat was littered with beef-jerky wrappers and empty two-litre containers of Pepsi. The partnership was pretty much over by this point, and I was sick of the Saab, as well. Neither would be around by the end of the year.

Now ten years have passed, and I suddenly find I’m back driving another Saab 9-3 again. Couldn’t even tell you how all this happened. Elton John might call it the circle of life, but he probably has someone to drive him around. Evidently this latest iteration of Saab is actually an Opel Vectra badged with the Swedish griffin logo, missing the distinctive hatchback-and-weather-radio. The ignition is still on the floor, and the engine still has a turbocharger, which only kicks in when it`s good and ready, and never mind what you might have been expecting. The dog seems less delighted with this Saab, compared to the previous one, but I`m considerably happier with it, so that makes it nearly a draw. What’s mostly changed between Saabs is the status of the car’s manufacturer. Ten years ago, General Motors was busy sewing the seeds of its own collapse, cranking out models that didn`t seem to be adequately engineered, assembled, serviced or able to be explained.

Since then, the General seems to have straightend out some previous issues, but he`s like a man accustomed to heavy drinking in private, whose years of midnight debauchery were a secret from no one who witnessed him stumbling out of the Officer`s Club gulping breath mints at closing time. He could keep his bad behavior out of view, and continue to function at a reasonable level — until the day he couldn`t, and that`s when he learned how exactly many people he`d been pissing off. Now the General has been busted down to Sergeant, as I think I previously said, and he`s entirely without friends. Even the people who have made their careers apologizing for him — congressmen, local dealers, auto magazine editors, other toadies — can`t entirely believe he`s let it all slip away this quickly. That’s life in this free market economy, me hearties. Someone will straighten out this mess in the auto industry, and we`ll soon have forgotten all about brands such as Buick and Pontiac as quickly as we`ve forgotten about Durant and LaSalle. Shanghai Automotive can take over Chevrolet the same way they snared MG Rover; now that you mention it, the names even sound a bit similar: Shanghai, Chevy. Tata can have Hummer, and I’d encourage them to bring out a new vehicle called the Tummeler. The US Army can buy their mission-critical military vehicles from Frank Stronach and a couple of Russian oligarchs. Displaced UAW workers can earn a bare-sustenance wage by joining the New Cilivian Conservation Corps, and clean up the national parks so the Chinese and Indian tourists will have somewhere nice to stay on their camping vacations, seeing the USA in their overseas-built Chevrolets. None of this will matter all that much. It just won`t.

By now, it`s clear even to me that the designation `9-3` refers to the number of Saabs General Motors actually manages to sell each year: nine to guys named Olav who just retired from the herring import-export business, and three to people like me, who would probably rather be driving an Isetta, except that they don`t make them no mo’. That’s what they call a niche market, which is a ludicrous enough conclusion to a brand that once stood for something, and a corporation that was once strong enough to dictate to resentful consumers across the western world.

The dog-decider

The U.S. President-elect will need to take instant decisive action in many critical areas, yet he dithers in selecting a dog for his children. This is not a good sign. Bush was mocked for terming himself a “decider,” but regardless of whether you despise the 43rd President or merely loathe him, it’s clear that he had a strong capacity for drawing conclusions. Sure, they were always disastrous conclusions, but that’s not the point.

Betsy

I have consulted with my usual expert on canine matters, and Betsy, my in-laws’ toy poodle, agrees that the only breed to pick from among the available non-allergenic choices would be a poodle. In the likely words of the President-elect’s brother-in-law, who coaches the Oregon State University Beavers basketball team: This one is your textbook slam-dunk.

Past being prologue, you want to know who else owned poodles? How about Elvis Presley (doting, if doped, master to “Stuff” the Poodle) and Winston Churchill (cigar-chomping companion of “Duchess” the Poodle.) These two worthies exemplify the kind of men who own such animals, and it may be said that if the American public comes to see the President-elect as combining the best elements of the Rock ‘n’ Roll King and the resolute wartime Prime Minister, Mr. Obama will be home-free. (Of course, it will have to be explained to a large section of America exactly who Mr. Churchill was, but that’s no biggie. Dude had an American mother and was America’s best friend, kind of like Barney Rubble, back when the Greatest Generation was fighting America’s enemies, the dreaded Hamburglars. Then, again, there’s the old uncertainty over which traits may emerge. You wouldn’t want a president with Elvis’s oratorical skills and Churchill’s raw sexuality. That path leads you straight back to W.)

For the President-elect, there are only benefits to welcoming a poodle into the White House, and there are no repercussions. His critics will be instantly disarmed, their accusations that he is a a socialist made immediately ridiculous. What kind of socialist would own so elegant a dog? Obviously, the Republicans meant to call him a Socialite — similar to the high-falutin‘ Mrs. Milburn Drysdale, the banker’s wife on television’s Beverly Hillbillies, who entered every scene carrying Claude the Poodle. As oil billionaire Jed Clampett observed, using his inimitable diction, “She does set a great store about that poodle, though.”

Concluding the case, a poodle-owning first family would draw a direct connection to the Age of Camelot.

The year was 1963, the Kennedeys occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Jacqueline’s toy poodle, Josephine, became the toast of the nation. I’m being a little coy, here. The Jackie I refer to was Jacqueline Susann, and her bestselling biography of her charming dog, Every Night, Josephine!, was a surprise bestseller which paved the way for her later series of dirty books, which captivated our parents and may well have precipitated the Generation Gap. But, look, you can’t blame Josephine for that.

Still, the President-elect insists on complicating his choice of dog, claiming he would prefer to adopt “a mutt — like me.” Sure, sure. Great line, but this shouldn’t become a bone of contention: Let’s agree that diversity is great, and so are hybrids. But it’s time to quit ditzing around over the easy decisions, and move along to face the challenging ones, i.e., General Motors being busted down to Sergeant, angry mobs chasing Citibank across the county line, Putin rearing his head, and all.

Send the girls down to the pet shop in the mall with your MasterCard and get this thing done already. Little girls love poodles. Name the dog “Pootin” and buy him a red-state collar from Target. House-train him to crap on both Pravda and the Washington Times, in rotation. A poodle sniffing around the periphery of the Rose Garden will defy expectations, keep Rush Limbaugh’s saliva bubble sputtering, make the Republican base seem even more base. That’s the power of the poodle. Yes, by Josephine; yes, you can.

Canada-style Smackdown: Burton Cummings vs. Peter Mansbridge

The former Guess Who frontman, Burton Cummings, has failed to hit above his weight, as the saying goes, during his long career performing solo. This is no less the case today, now that the once-trim singer appears to be tipping the scales somewhere north of the big three-oh-oh. Never mind the avoirdupois: look what it did for Antoine Domino, not to mention Leslie West, and those three big rapping pimps whose name momentarily escapes me. *

Cummings’ last recording of original material was released 19 years ago, and contained some superb tracks, including the memorable Permissible to Cry. The record rocketed straight to Nowheresville, setting Burt’s career into the downdraft. At bottom, in the early ’90s, he was heard warbelling at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in the company of a couple of second-tier comedians. Someone who reviewed the performance observed, “The music business seems to be through with Cummings.”

They were wrong. He eventually worked out a new act, was rediscovered by big audiences, and then reformed the Guess Who, with songwriting podner Randy Bachman, for a successful North American tour. His new CD, Above the Ground, is an unexpected treat, although it will not elevate Cummings’ reputation. He should be regarded as the musical equal of Elton John and Billy Joel, and isn’t. As is the case with various other Canadian singer-songwriters, he has been marginalized by the limited ambitions of his managers, and his own overweening diffidence. That puts him in the same category as, say, the CBC newsreader Peter Mansbridge, who is comfortable to remain a large toad in a tiny enclosure, rather than hopping off and taking any big chances anywhere. The difference being that Cummings has the goods, while Mansbridge only has the camel’s-hair sportscoat.

Devotees of Burton will wish to purchase my excellent new book, which contains a brief anecdote about our hero, the jist of which I recall reading about in the Winnipeg Sun, when business travel took me to the Manitoba capital. Buy this outstanding new work here.

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* Small wonder I momentarily couldn’t recall the names of rap trio the Fat Boys, whose acting assignments dried up after lensing “Orderlies” with Don Ameche. How many other careers has that Ameche guy killed along the way?

All the news that’s not fit to eat

So, suddenly, for one day at least, the huge declines in North American newspaper readership are reversed, as the public demands a 75-cent keepsake memento of the Obama election: an heirloom either to put away for the generations, or else to hustle for 12 bucks on E-bay for a couple of months.

But inquiring minds might wonder: Could those sold-out newspaper boxes provide a lesson to the publishing industry?  Namely: If you happen to have actual news to report once in a while, you might stand a chance of engaging a potential reader.

There are as of this morning six daily newspapers serving my local market, including a pair of free-distribution sheets, but not counting NYT, WSJ, USA-T and the Racing Form. The content of the Toronto press regularly ranges from the simply dreary to the flamboyantly idiotic. Firmly in the second category is the column written by Mr. Shinan Govani for the National Post.

I’ve only recently — in fact, just today — taken an interest in his work, despite the striking similarity of our names, his first and my last.

By dint of a shared penchant for bold-facing the identities of people you’ve never heard of, Mr. Govani may be compared to antiquities such as Leonard Lyons, author of the Lyons Den column, which once giddily covered the Broadway beat. However, unlike Mr. Lyons, Mr. Govani’s job is made difficult by two factors. Toronto has no equivalent of the Broadway scene of the 1940s. And Mr. Govani apparently has no ability to turn out anything as demanding as a full sentence.

Lacking this skill, he is compelled to fill his small bit of Post space with a featurette entitled “What Shinan Has Been Eating,” wherein he proudly records how he scarfed down a chicken pot pie: “Grub that fills, and is ambiently attuned to the recession!” Mmm, of course: It sticks to the old ribs, and, you see, it’s ambiently… attuned.

Since the main body of his column provides further inventory of his recent intake (“There was mac ‘n’ cheese, and there were make-your-own-roast-beef-sandwiches. There was coconut cream-pie. Naturally.”), I must gather that Mr. Govani is cataloguing his food consumption for a specific purpose which may advance scientific understanding of how nutrition co-relates to bad writing.

This sort of documentation of sustenance intake is more usually handed over to one’s caregiver, and not to a general-interest readership. Matters correspondingly attendant to output, such as descriptions by Mr. Govani of his stools, urine and spit-ups, would not normally fall under the category of anyone’s favorite reading matter, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I suppose he would affirm.

Ten years ago, when the Post launched, its yuppie British editors took delight in spreading whimsical post-modern touches throughout their rag. Anticipating that the day would quickly arrive when no one could be bothered to read a newspaper, and firmly clutching their return tickets to Heathrow, these nihilists offered up a menu of whimsy, frivolity and head-scratching weirdness to counter-balance the grey columns of news. The recipe has since been adjusted, so that the news component has largely been removed, but you still get a heavy offering of oddities such as Mr. Govani’s ledger of consumables. The Post is far from the only North American daily to steer in this unwelcome direction, but it is the one they toss on my lawn each morning.

I tend to forgive The Post its eccentricities, since it costs nothing, and gives me something to cushion the goods I carry in my laptop bag. It’s certainly a well-designed and well-printed effort, and occasionally a repository of the prison diaries of its founder, Conrad Black, thus providing the honest world with a means of keeping an eye on him from a safe distance. This arrangement with Mr. Black’s jailers may be in lieu of forcing him to maintain another form of monitoring device, such as an ankle-bracelet. If the intent of providing him with these writing exercises is to keep him out of further mischief, such as insulting the screws in his Florida facility, or turning fink, or becoming a punk, then I say let him keep writing.

The other Post screwballs should really just hang it up, while there are still opportunities for advancement in, say, the direct-channel retailing game. I refer specifically to frightened, confused David Frum and his unfussy spouse — who is, of course, daughter of the venerable Peter Worthington. The lady, whose name escapes me right now, carries on many of the same literary traditions established by her dear old dad, including the generous application of non-sequiters, and dismissive one-word commentaries: balderdash! These techniques always made Worthington seem like a crank in his Toronto Sun column, but for some reason they are especially unappealing in a more current life-form, especially one who is a wife and mother.

But, listen to me complain, will you? It’s plain that no one is supposed to actually read anything in The Post, or any other 21st century newspaper. It’s equally plain that newspapers aren’t intended as information sources any more; they’re merely cheap curios for collectors with an eye on long-term appreciation.

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What Shannon Has Been Eating

• $1.94 all-beef hot dog and Nabob coffee combination platter at Sam’s Club snack bar (insist on getting diced onions in a little cup — marvelous!);
• half of a chocolate chip cookie provided by girl handing out samples at Sam’s Club;
• 8-10 Blue Diamond Smokehouse Almonds from other sampling girl at Sam’s Club (exquisite!);
• passed on the cheese spread/cracker thing the third girl offered me at Sam’s Club;
• passed on the little sausage on a toothpick.

What Shannon’s In-laws’ Poodle, Betsy, Has Been Eating

 

• big plate of freshly-cooked chicken, leg-quarter, with some kibble moistened in an au jus;
• bowl of water accompaniment;
• likely a bug, or maybe some plant growing in the yard (was pretty sick for a few days.)

 

 

 

Election Night in America 2008

Having grown up in Toronto, Canada when I did, back in the days when there were only a handful of television channels, most of which made their way feebly across Lake Ontario from Buffalo, I will always feel at least in part like a native son of Erie County and the Empire State — and by extention, the entire USA.

America was for us the neighbor’s backyard, and, as would be true in the case with the good-hearted next door neighbor you always wished you had, we Canadians have been accustomed to playing next door our entire lives. It has always been, if not technically home, then a comfortable part of the neighborhood where you feel welcome and come to believe that it’s also a place where you very much belong. It’s the house next door.

It has been my experience that the neighbors keep their doors unlocked, and are quick to provide a cheese sandwich after school, or an invitation to spend the night in the guest room during the holidays, or even offer you some kind caution when you play too rough with an unfamiliar terrier. They’re good people, they’re fun to be around, and you love them for their virtues and overlook their foibles — just as you’d want your own household’s lesser moments ignored.

In short, the USA has never been foreign to me and my cohort, and I’ve never once felt like a foreigner on the occasions when study or work led me to take up residence in New York and Oregon.

I’ve set foot in 46 states over the years, and, as the Bob Dylan song goes, the only thing I did wrong was stay in Mississippi a day too long.

Actually, that’s a lie. I even like Mississippi. It’s just the takeout chicken from that Popeye’s in Meridian that I object to.

In any case, watching the election process unfold during the last two years has been a strange experience for many of us non-American nordamericanos. In fact, elements of the campaign have seemed unsettlingly foreign, and at times distinctly not-quite-American. Watching the candidates, that broad-mouthed woman with her rusticated vocabulary, in her store-bought duds with the Nordstrom price tags still hanging from the sleeves, and observing the funny old dude with his comic facial expressions, there’s something oddly out of place here, and yet also oddly familiar. You wait for the woman to shout “How-deee!” and for the old man to chuckle his way through a homespun yarn told from a rocking chair. You’ve seen this before: It’s Minnie Pearl and Grandpa Jones, and you’re watching the race to see who becomes the President of a parallel-universe America: the United States of Hee-Haw.

Hee-Haw, of course, was the RFD alternative version of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, staffed with a cast of Grand Ole Opry favorites, including Junior Samples, the toothless, overalled man-hawg who’d draw guffaws just from eating a tomato. (An inspiration behind the creation of the current “Joe The Plumber” everyman?) The Buffalo network affiliate dropped the program at the earliest available opportunity, as did most of the stations in the sophisticated urban north. But audiences throughout the south continued to howl at Hee-Haw in syndication for many a decade — and surely still do in this age of non-stop lowbrow entertainment. Things being what they are, likely they’re howling at Hee-Haw in Beijing and Bangalore at this very moment.

In many respects, of course, Hee-Haw was never what it seemed. The show’s producers were as canny a group of executives as you’d find anywhere, and much of the program’s on-air and behind-the-scenes talent — including Burlington, Ont.’s very own Gordie Tapp — were Canadian, with experience working on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s antecedent, the long-running cornpone-palooza known as “Country Hoedown.”

My point would be there is always more to these salt-of-the-earth vaudeville romps than you see on the telebishion machine. Gaylord Entertainment was able to parlay the Grand Ole Opry franchise, personified by Minnie and Grandpa into a multi-faceted hillbilly amusement empire, with the cornerstone being the Opryland theme park. The post-Rove architects of the Mac and Sarah show seem to be aiming this proven material at the same audience.  

I’ll watch the election returns tonight to see how it all plays out. But I’ve tapped my toe to these tinny banjo tunes a couple of times too often, and laughed too many times at the same bad jokes. Put me down as one more member of the viewing audience hoping to see some newer old material.