Worst Blog Ever Nominee

Like all good crappy blogs this one is updated only intermittently (like once a year), is filled with inane writing, has a title that conveys something completely different than what the blogger intended and has an aggressively ugly layout.

Stuart Granger

TCM is doing a Stuart Granger film festival today (God knows why). Talk about a closeted gay and a treetrunk of an actor (stealing from Roger Ebert's description of Roger Moore) who starred in an endless series of mediocre flicks. Strangely enough I think everyone at that time probably also sensed that he was gay but didn't really care. I think society has never had a problem with gays as long as it wasn't in their face and there was some distance of plausible deniability -- then they'd get murderous. Most of the time you could fob it off on "sophistication", and since you thought of yourself as sophisticated too, you went along with it.

Really Stupid Shit

As stupid and monkey-headed a tech article as you're likely to read this year. Slate's Farhad Manjoo claims "The Google OS Is Doomed".

From Firedog Lake. Not sure if this is the smoking gun we've been waiting for vis-a-vis Cheney.

The Fake Counter-Culture of "Valley of the Dolls"

"Valley of the Dreck" is what star Patty Duke called the film version of the biggest selling novel of all time, Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of Dolls". The film's guilty-pleasure kitsch factor has been written about many times before and won't be repeated here. What is worth pointing out is the unreal, never-neverland setting of the film, unrecognizable as history.

Though the film is purportedly about the underbelly of the entertainment industry in the mid-to-late 60's, the film makes no acknowlegement of the turmoil and cultural tectonics of its era. In this universe, Broadway theatre is still the dominant media (with only a passing reference to movies) and no attention is paid to the ever-increasing influence of rock and roll on entertainment and mores. Ludicrously, the dominant industry figure that every up-and-comer is gunning for is Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) an aging star of stage and screen patterned after Judy Garland (originally cast in the role until she was fired for locking herself in her dressing room for two days). The only stylistic concession to the 60's is a scene where Lawson belts out a show tune while hilariously enveloped in a mass of spinning psychedelic mobiles -- an effect comparable to watching Buddy Ebsen shoot heroin.

Instead, the film inserts its own counter-culture. Though the movie is ultimately about drug abuse, you won't see any LSD, speed or marijuana here. Instead the illegal substances depicted here are "Dolls", a slang term for secanols and nembutols that has never been referenced by any other source and is most likely a made-up term. While the "hip" young people in the 60's were going to rock clubs or discotheques (rock festivals and stadium concerts still being a few years away), the with-it young people of "Valley of the Dolls" hang out in Copa Cabanna-type lounges, dining in formal dress while eagerly awaiting performances by "the latest sensation!". It is at one of these anachronistic nightspots where the Sharon Tate character meets her lounge singer boyfriend, Tony Polar, croaking out "Come Live with Me".

This is your father's edgy movie, but its lack of coolness was hardly unusual for the period. Though it is hard to believe today -- with the exception of the recording industry -- youth culture was hermetically sealed off from mainstream culture, impenetrable to anyone over age 35.* In an era where the youth demographic is chased with monomaniacal fervor and the most soul-deadening corporations try to appear rebellious, the squareness of this period is not only quaint but charming.

*This explains the phenomenon of Fake Rock Music seen in many films between 1964 and 1970. Usually heard during swingin' party or nightclub sequences, this inauthentic music was distinguished by Doc Severson-like band arrangements featuring anemic high-pitched electric guitars that conveyed to rube audiences everywhere that seriously hip-happenings were going-on.

Money Shot -- Why the Porn Industry is Still a Niche Player

As popular culture continues with its campaign of porn-norming, with adult film stars appearing on talk shows and pornography supposedly influencing fashion, one figure continually gets trotted out in an attempt to convince us skeptics that pornography has finally gone mainstream, and why only Mormons and cultural retrogrades should bother fighting it -- $10 billion. That represents the figure the pornography industry takes in each year with its videos, live appearances and websites, a figure they breathlessly tell us exceeds that of the legitimate film industry. Before Mormons and cultural retrogrades cave and buy their mothers Jenna Jamison's biography for Christmas, let's look at this number.

$10 billion does indeed represent the approximate domestic theatrical take for films shown in the U.S. and Canada -- it does not, however, represent international grosses which can double that of domestic grosses. This number also does not include DVD sales which are once again double that of domestic box office. Even with these larger revenue roll-ups, these film studios, in turn, are often the smallest divisions of the multinationals they are a part of (Universal is a tiny part of GE, Columbia is dwarfed by its parent Sony). The point here is that comparing yourself to the film industry in order tout your economic clout and cultural significance is a little like bragging that you're the tallest building in Tulsa. To put it in perspective -- $10 billion is about what Wal-mart generates in revenue every two weeks.

The World's Tallest Building -- finally

If the news stories are to be believed, the world's tallest building will start construction shortly in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The significance of the building is two-fold: one, in this era of frustratingly incremental height increases, this structure beats all comers with a thorough finality. With skyscrapers like the Petronis Towers (1469 feet tall) and Taiwan's 101 Building (1651 feet tall) claiming top honors by dint of tactics like counting a building's spire (as opposed to the highest occupied floor) to beat the Sears Tower (1450 feet tall) as the world's tallest building , there is something satisfying about a skyscraper that quashes all the hairsplitting equivication to reach a height of 2312 feet. The rules that the Council for Tall Buildings uses to determine the tallest buildings, Highest Occupied Floor, Top of the Roof, and Top of Pinnacle or Antenna -- the engineering equivalent of everyone being special -- are all rendered irrelevant by this monster. At 2312 feet, this structure is almost 1000' taller than the late World Trade Center and represents the first clear advance in building height since the construction of the Empire State Building and Chrysler Buildings in the early 1930s.

Secondly, the location of the tower in the center of the Arab Middle East cannot be ignored. The United Arab Emirates is one of the few progressive and tolerant Arab counties in the region, a model of where the Arab world could move should it decide to chuck its backward and revanchist behavior. The destruction of the World Trade Towers represented Western Enlightenment ideas under attack by the forces of religious intolerance. It is marvelously symbolic that this tower, a product of Western rationalism, will be built in the heart of a malignant, death-centered, anti-intellectual Muslim culture. Building such a structure in the U.A.E cannot help but be a provocative challenge to the rest of the Arab World.

The Other Stolen Election
Why a Nixon's presidency should have started in 1960 instead of 1968.

In American history it's hard to think of eight years as epic as the span between 1960 and 1968. During that brief, convulsive period we managed to kill a president, finally eliminate the Jim Crow laws, and spawn a war that created a political and societal chasm that pushed the U.S. closer to revolution then at anytime since the Civil War. The easiest benchmark for this eight year gulf is a pop culture reference. Watch any movie, listen to any pop music from either side 1960-68, and marvel in the sheer compression of change. With the bruises of the 2000 election still smarting it seems appropriate to go back four decades and look at the 1960 presidentital election; a contest, that had it gone the other way, would have resulted in a very different history than the one we study today.

Speculation on alternative histories is an old and whorey endeavor that is of more interest to adherents of the Great Man theory of history than to those who believe that the currents of history can only be shaped by its participants, not changed. For years many have speculated on what would have happened if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, if Bobby had survived and won the Democratic nomination in 1968, and if LBJ had retired as Senate majority leader. But the true watershed moment occurred years earlier in 1960. It was in that election year that John Kennedy beat vice president Richard Nixon by a plurality of 118,000 votes out of a total of 68 million votes. Though it is well-known that Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, had substantial mob and union connections in the key state of Illinois, Seymour Hersh admits in his book, "Dark Camelot", that mob boss Sam Giancana's help was of an unknown nature -- however, Hersh asserts, Chicago Mayor Richard Daly's assistance wasn't. Kennedy himself related Daly's comments to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee the following evening, "Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and help of a few close friends, you're going to carry Illinois."

Hersh goes on to say:

"Without the state's 27 electoral votes, Kennedy would have had a plurality of only 7 votes over Nixon in the electoral college, with 26 unpledged Democratic electors in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama threatening to bolt unless they received significant concessions on federal civil rights policy from the Democratic Party. They had the power, if Kennedy lost Illinois, to throw the election into the House of Representatives for the first time in the twentieth century."

Nixon was encouraged to appeal the election by Republican leaders but chose not to because of fears that being labeled a "sore loser" would dog him his whole career and jeopardize "any possibility of a further political career".

If Nixon had been elected president in 1960, instead of 1968, the mind reels. Obviously, the decade's central event, the Kennedy assassination, would not have occurred. U.S. involvement in Viet Nam is a little less sure since Nixon was as much a cold warrior as Kennedy and no doubt would have been lured by the same fears of a communist takeover of South Vietnam as had Kennedy. But if an early-60's Nixon administration had become involved in Viet Nam it would not have been run by Robert MacNamara and the Best and Brightest cadre. The strategy of determining victory by body count, and of fighting only in certain corridors for fear of inviting intervention of the Soviet Union and China, would most certainly not have occurred. How effective the strategy that would have replaced it is unknown.

With his challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, Kennedy is given credit for launching the space race. Since the drivers for the endeavor were cold war politics, not science or exploration, it is entirely possible that an early Nixon administration also might have also heeded the call for a moon landing -- but on what scale and on what timeframe?

It is not clear how much progress Civil Rights legislation would have made under an early 60's Nixon administration, but considering that such legislation as the 1964 Voting Rights act was pushed through congress by an arm-twisting LBJ (playing to a congress's loyalty to a fallen president by finally passing Kennedy sponsored legislation that had been held-up for years) it is likely that it wouldn't have approached the scope of what ultimately was passed. This isn't to say that Nixon's progressive tendencies would not have made themselves known during a '60-'68 term. It was during the real Nixon presidency of '68 to '74 that the EPA was enacted and welfare was expanded.

A Richard Nixon presidency that started long before the beginning of any student demonstrations and ending eight months before Woodstock (had it still occurred) would have muted Nixon's paranoid impulses set off by the war. Indeed, they may have remained dormant and prevented the very scandals that ended his career. Alas, timing would not have allowed for Nixon's greatest triumph, his opening to China. Nixon's '60-'68 term would have run simultaneously with Mao's calamitous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. It is inconceivable in such an ideological hot-house atmosphere that Mao would have been open to any rapprochement with the U.S.

SETI, Fear and Trembling

Though the recent discovery of what is purported to be an extraterrestrial signal is deemed by SETI (the privately funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) as being highly exaggerated, it does raise the question of what happens when -- years, decades, centuries from now -- we eventually determine that humankind has received a signal from an alien intelligence. With 200 million stars in this galaxy alone and (based on initial surveys) most having planets – odds would have it that somewhere in the universe several worlds might produce life technologically advanced enough to announce their presence at great distances.

Throughout the years conventional wisdom has proposed several scenarios that would result from such a find: a) Upon discovering another intelligence not of this world, all religions will be rendered trivial, the sectarian violence that has plagued mankind for two millennia will end and we’ll all become tasteful secular humanists; b) Mankind, forced to view itself as one species instead of a group of divisive, carping nationalities, will band together and realize how silly it is to fight over trivial things like genocide and slavery; c) Mankind, upon finding evidence of another intelligence, will no longer feel alone in the universe.

It is the last of these scenarios that seems the most reasonable and grounded. But for those who have the privilege of pondering such things, I am not convinced that such a discovery would make them feel any better about their place in the universe, and they may feel a whole lot worse. Any signal will most likely not be found in our galactic neighborhood, some five, ten, or one hundred light years away, but will most likely be found many orders of magnitude more distant, perhaps even outside our galaxy. Even at the speed of light, this distance would make practical communication with a civilization impossible, assuming a signal that had traveled some 100,000 light years would still have someone around to hear its reply some two hundred thousand years later.

Arthur Clarke once wrote that space is small; it is planets that are big – you can conceptually put your arms around a planet’s dimensions, but space doesn’t offer that kind of grappling hook. A distant signal would provide scale and heartbreaking perspective to the immensity of the universe, driving home our isolation, putting into sharp relief a question that was previously academic.