I’ve had a great time writing for True/Slant under the watchful eyes of Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel, and Coates Bateman.  I can’t thank them enough for the opportunity and advice they provided along the way.  And to my loyal followers, casual readers, and unhinged trolls, I appreciate your interest in my blabberings and hope you’ll continue the conversation at my new haunts.  So long and thanks for all the fun.

WHAT TV IS DOING THAT THE MOVIES AREN’T

In the last post, I talked about the inherent difficulties in creating original art in a medium as collaborative and expensive as film. Yet television, long considered a ‘wasteland’, is enjoying a widely acknowledged creative renaissance at the same time the movies are striking out. On first glance, this is puzzling. They’re both mediums of visual narrative aimed at a mass audience with budgets sizeable enough to preclude amateur involvement.  But I think there are key differences, intrinsic and imposed, that have made it easier to achieve excellence in television than in film – at least in the last decade.

FAILURE DIVIDED BY TIME

One reason might be that TV creators simply get more chances. Movies are a one-shot deal, while television is usually serialized over a period of months or years. Spreading the narrative out over a longer period of time relieves some expositional and character building pressure from the creators. And it allows more leeway for mistakes, since viewers see the episodes, at least in part, as distinct entities, and won’t judge an entire show too harshly based on a few bum apple episodes. In fact, most great shows not only have a few crap episodes but at least one mediocre season, but fans view that as an inevitable part of the process of getting so many hours of entertainment. To use a term from finance, television has the ability to amortize its failure over time, a luxury that films, by their very nature, don’t have.

But I don’t want to let the movie industry off the hook that easily. There are stark differences in the choices that the two industries – even though they’re often owned by the same parent company – have made in distributing their product to the people. These choices have made all the difference for the end product.

SCRATCHING THE NICHE

Since the 80’s, television has benefitted creatively from the introduction of niche markets, a.k.a. the cable networks. None of us would be talking about the current “golden age” of television if our only choices were still the Big Three. Relieving the pressure to please everyone all the time, producers can work on quality shows knowing that an audience lies out there somewhere among the cable universe. Movies haven’t really figured out to do this profitably yet. All the money is gambled on the shoot-em-up spectacles and the inane star-driven romantic comedies, with a few crumbs left over for tedious and predictable prestige pictures for Oscar bait. These days, the cinematic circus is all tentpoles with nothing underneath. The medium budget studio movie is basically dead, and with the collapse of foreign pre-sales as a method of financing last year, indie film distribution is struggling more than ever. Rather than researching alternative avenues of income and distribution, the Big Six studios keep putting their bets on bigger, dumber, and younger. Meanwhile, adults looking for thoughtful movies are out of luck.

THE WRITER AS PAUPER AND PRINCE

The lowly treatment of writers in the movie industry is the stuff of on- and off-screen legend. Robert Altman’s The Player captures the feeling most vividly when it has a producer literally kill a screenwriter and get away with it. Once a screenwriter hands in a script, he/she can expect to have it rewritten twenty times by God-knows-how-many writers hired afterwards, not to mention being shut out of the set and thus, further input.

The case of Ridley Scott’s recent stinker, Robin Hood, is a good illustration. Originally entitled Nottingham, the script took a fresh spin at the myth by telling the story from the Sherriff of Nottingham’s point of view. Using forensics, he hunts down a local terrorist, aka Robin Hood. The script by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris quickly became a hot property and the subject of an intense bidding war.

Given that there have already been 111 movies about Robin Hood according to IMDB, it was essential that any new movies about this legend actually be, well, new movies. And this script, while dark and unconventional, certainly promised that. Well, till Russell Crowe, director Ridley Scott, producer Brian Glazer, and god knows how many other writers got their hands on it. First, Ridley became obsessed with archery and had the movie rewritten to be all about that. You and I might think that’s the least interesting part of the Robin Hood myth, but what do we know? We didn’t direct G.I. Jane. Oh, and then Scott thought it would be interesting to have Russell Crowe be both Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham in a Fight Club sort of twist. I almost wish they would have ran with this idiotic idea so at least the movie would’ve been spectacularly bad instead of just plain old boring bad. But cooler, more conventional, heads prevailed, and it became little more than a retread of the last big Scott/Crowe team-up.

“The script went through many, many different changes…. But to me, really, it’s more about the visuals. It’s the Gladiator version of Robin Hood.”
- Brian Grazer to Entertainment Weekly
-
Who in the hell – beside the aforementioned three – wants that movie? No one, according to Rotten Tomatoes and the box office. But it’s a familiar story in Hollywood. A studio buys a script for its unique and compelling voice, and proceeds to strangle that unique and compelling voice until it’s the same whimpering moan of mediocrity that we get every week out of these guys.

Contrast that with television, where the writer/producer supersedes the hired-hand director and has final say over what happens to their story (except for the execs, of course). I’m not saying that film needs to hand over the reigns to the writers. It is a director’s medium, after all. But somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that auteur means author. If directors aren’t going to write their own scripts, they should at least listen to the people that do, even after they write them a check. The current too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen process –a tug of war between half a dozen screenwriters, inane input from egotistical execs, clueless after-the-fact focus group suggestions – is murdering storytelling at the cineplex. Art By Committee is an oxymoron, not a business plan. I’m biased, obviously, but if you stop treating the writers like they’re disposable, you might start getting something besides throw-away movies.

IS THE CINEMATIC SITUATION HOPELESS?

So much of modern moviemaking seems to be a conspiracy against quality, where expecting a good time that doesn’t insult your intelligence is a sucker’s bet. Entertainment – to say nothing of art – rarely makes it out alive. But does it have to be this way? So many of the problems revolve around the monopoly of the Big Six studios, and their chokehold on the making and releasing of film product. Given the recent revolutions in the distribution of home entertainment like Netflix, Red Box, and on-demand, it seems odd that hasn’t had more of an effect on the production side, especially since the secondary market is where most movies make back their budget.

Perhaps this change towards digital distribution can make the digital revolution that happened in production finally bear fruit. Higher quality HD cameras such as The Red have made digital indies look less like subpar high-school productions (see The Anniversary Party, Funny Ha Ha, etc.), and more like the kind of adult art than can give the majors a run for their money. The movie industry is nothing if not unpredictable, and I wouldn’t count out quality movies as being something to compete on. Stranger things have happened.

“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” – Theodore Sturgeon

The successful sci-fi author delivered that gem to Venture magazine, after being bombarded with the umpteenth question about why so much sci-fi sucks so hard so often. And so was born the oft-quoted “Sturgeon’s Law”, an assertion as bitter as it is true. He was right to suggest that sci-fi doesn’t have a monopoly on mediocrity.  Whether you collect fine art or pop records, you’re going to have to sift through a ton of trash to find even a little bit of treasure.  But while I think Sturgeon’s right that it’s harder to find quality than crap in most endeavors, I think he’s wrong to suggest that they all share the same ratio.

For example, let’s take film.  If you did an honest accounting of the popular mediums, I think it would be hard to deny that going to the movies delivers disappointment more reliably than any other diversion.  In every other field, we are living in a golden age of excellence and accessibility. There is more quality television, music, writing , and design being produced now than the average person can hope to keep up with, and it’s easier than ever to gain exposure to it. But for movie fans, you could check out all the great films of most years over a long weekend. I don’t care if you’re talking about the multiplex or the arthouse, a lightweight romantic comedy or a weighty drama tackling the social issue du jour. Excellence is an endangered species in the movie world, and I don’t see the situation getting better any time soon.

A GOOD MOVIE IS HARD TO FIND MAKE

In some ways, this is inevitable and longstanding, an inherent property of the medium itself. It is exponentially harder to achieve excellence in filmmaking than it is in other mediums. Now, that’s not to say that someone who makes a great movie is more talented than someone who paints an incredible painting, records a brilliant album, or writes a masterful novel – or even a harder worker. I’m simply saying that, for reasons I’ll go into below, there are many, many more obstacles standing between the vision in a moviemaker’s head and its real world execution than there are in other fields.

Making a movie takes a lot of people. There’s no way around this fact, even for indies. And this has considerable consequences for the creation of art. A songwriter can write a song by themselves, and either record it solo or, unless they’re the Polyphonic Spree and need 28 people, recruit three or four other musicians and form a band. A novelist needs only themselves, time, and maybe an editor, to complete their book. A painter needs a few supplies and a canvas. You see where I’m going with this.

As Edward Jay Epstein puts it:

Assembling a small army of individuals with highly specialized skills on a temporary basis is not an easy task. It requires persuading individuals to contractually commit themselves, often six months in advance, to a job that may last for only a few weeks, and to forego other opportunities. They must work long and unusual hours, often with strangers who may be unfamiliar with their methods and, in some cases, hostile to them. Then, after completing their task, they must seek other employment.

Epstein’s only covering the logistical difficulties involved, not the creative ones. Imagine trying to get 100 or more people to collaborate on any other kind of artistic endeavor, and take a guess on the odds of being anything less than a muddled mush of crossed signals and pained egos.

Now, all these people we’re talking about don’t come cheap. Sure, on some indies, you can get your friends to work for free on your first or second movies, but after a while, you realize using volunteers gets you volunteer quality product. You need professionals, and professionals cost. This is why, despite their best efforts, the arthouse and the indies haven’t really stepped up to the plate where the studios fail. A talented amateur filmmaker is still an amateur.

MAMMON AND THE MOVIES

The average daily running cost on a studio picture in 2000 was $165,000. Naturally, the incredible – some would say obscene – amount of money required to make one movie has a filtering effect on what kind of art you end up with. You either somehow pony up a few hundred thousand – at the very, very low end – to make your own movie, or you come up with a script that will make a movie that an army of marketing experts think they can design a poster around. Originality and complexity are anathema to this mindset; they’re too unpredictable at the box office. Better to stick with known formulas, well-worn tropes, familiar franchises, and lowest common denominators. It’s a truism that aiming for the widest possible audience means working in the shallowest artistic pools .

This is not another rant against the idiocy and poor taste of the major studios.  Though I’m sure most movie execs probably have both traits in spades, they start the game with their hands tied.  They’re dealing with astronomical sums of other people’s – i.e., their parent company’s – money. If they continually gamble billions of dollars on aesthetic whims with little chance of profit, they and thousands of other people are out of jobs. Resolving the tension between making something worthwhile and making a return on investments of that size has always been tricky. We shouldn’t be asking why Hollywood keeps making bad movies. We should be asking how it ever makes good ones.

As Samuel Beckett knew, the act of art is the art of failing better. And success once doesn’t guarantee your next fifty attempts won’t be failures. It’s just part of the process. Great artists need thick skins, time, and persistence. But the huge hurdles of filmmaking make it so expensive to fail, most filmmakers just don’t get that many chances. And if they do get to make their script, chances are it will tampered with at every stage of the process; its unique peaks flattened to resemble proven moneymakers, its idiosyncrasies and eccentricities shaved off so as not to offend or confuse a mass audience, and by the time it’s all over the work is so altered as to be unrecognizable to its creator and unpalatable to anyone with half a brain.

In the next installment, I’ll look at why TV is enjoying a creative renaissance while films flounder, and what the movie studios can learn from that.

But why should former supermodels get all the moviemaking fun? Here are five spouses of world leaders that would cut interesting onscreen figures, even if they’re not quite the publicity magnet that Bruni manages to be.

Sarah Brown (Wife of British PM Gordon Brown)

Given the fact that Gordon Brown could very well not be M.P. in a week, the family is probably going to want to look for hobbies and alternative income streams. And what better hobby than being a movie star? I’ve knocked around the idea a bit myself, but I can never seem to find the time.

When not running to her husband’s defense after he inadvertently insults little old ladies, Sarah Brown splits her time playing the charity-circuit wife role to the hilt and being the “high priestess of Twitter” (I guess that’s a thing?) – a far cry from her days as co-founder of high-powered P.R. firm Hobsbawm* Macaulay. So, she’s reserved to the point of being chilly, tech-savvy and super-ambitious, and attractive in an angular and slightly unnerving way. Sounds like a Tilda Swinton type if I ever saw one. Team her up with Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), make her the C.E.O. of some ethically challenged bio-tech company, and the script practically writes itself. And no bad films have ever been made after saying those last five words, right?

*Apparently an actual person’s name and not a Harry Potter character.

Princess Letizia (Wife of Felipe, Prince of Asturias)

As we all know – or discovered on Wikipedia thirty seconds ago – Prince of Asturias is the official title for the heir apparent to the Spanish throne. Not a bad snag for a commoner*. I’m not surprised given how easy she is on the eyes, if you know what I mean. (I mean she’s physically attractive.)

So, she’s hot, Spanish royalty, and has a sister who resents being thrown in the tabloid spotlight just because her sibling snagged a prince? It’s probably illegal somehow for anyone but Pedro Almodóvar to tackle this kind of readymade melodrama. My Sister, My Secret or something like that.

* Maybe it’s my American lack of familiarity with vestigial figureheads, but can we come up with a less insulting term for non-royalty? Given the shoddy track record of monarchical morality, I think they should be the ones stuck with the pejorative shorthand.

Kim Ok (Alleged current wife of Kim Jong il, Batsh*t Leader of North Korea)

Don’t make the mistake I did and get her confused with Kim Ok-bin, the super-smoking South Korean actress. You will waste an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure that one out. Nope, this is just the old secretary turned consort deal. We’ve all been there.

Now, I’ll grant being married to the dictator of the most paranoid and isolated regime on Earth is a bit of stumbling block, sure. But let’s not let a little thing like life in a forced labor camp stop us from an inspired casting choice. Hear me out here: I’m thinking Oliver Stone. He’s already an old hand at brutally unsubtle propaganda and shameless hagiography. Sure, he may not see ideologically eye to eye with Dear Leader now, but give him a few months in a NK filmmaking education camp, and I’m sure he’ll come around. Kim and Kim: A Match Made in Worker Paradise, or somesuch. I’m not a marketing guy, gimme a break.

Chantal Biya (First Lady of Cameroon)

Let me just point out up front that this lady has an entire tumblr blog dedicated to her multiple mega-ridiculous hairstyles. That alone gets her at least one movie. And the flamboyance doesn’t end at the forehead. Biya is well known for her glamorous ways – glamour meaning the same thing in Cameroon as it does here: wearing shiny, comically overpriced things that a spouse was able to purchase by exploiting the less fortunate.

The Chantal Biya Story is a Baz Luhrmann biopic. That much is obvious. But twos of minutes of interweb research hasn’t told me a thing about her singing chops, so whether it can reach the full unwatchable ridiculousness of a Luhrmann musical is still unclear.  And for no good reason, here’s a random picture of Chantal Biya seemingly giving Carla Bruni the stink-eye at the UN.

Joachim Sauer (Husband of German Chancellor Angela Merkel)

The German media’s nickname for the quantum chemist is “The Phantom of the Opera”. But don’t let that fool you into false excitement. It’s only because he’s camera-shy and loathes attending public events with his wife. So, he’s boring, normal, and has a perfectly understandable distrust of the media spotlight. GUH. Well-adjusted people are so lame, drama-wise.

But we can work with this. Anybody see the critically acclaimed indie sci-fi drama Primer, directed by former engineer Shane Caruth? I didn’t think so. When even fans describe the film in terms like “hopelessly confusing” and “deliberately paced”, it’s no surprise that your little time-travel flick is relegated to cult status. But that’s exactly why they’d be perfect for each other. Caruth and Sauer could have a ball banging out another head-scratcher science-fiction flick that’s heavier on the science than it is on the fiction. And “The Phantom” could rest easy, knowing that appearing in a Shane Caruth film wouldn’t danger his beloved anonymity in the slightest. Done and done.

I can answer the last two questions definitively: Yes, it did get a release, though only in four theaters, and yep, they actually try to pass off that series of cardboard boxes covered in computer paper as an actual MRI machine. But as far as the first question, I’m a long ways from a credible explanation of how and why After Last Season came into being or what it all means – even after watching it three times on DVD. But try I must. Along the way, I’ll be interspersing my thoughts with pull quotes from this Filmmaker interview with the director from last summer.

Stop Making Sense: The Plot of After Last Season

Filmmaker: What are you trying to say or communicate with this film? Region: The film covers several subjects. Scientific innovation and how it can be used to solve a murder is one of them. Showing some facets in the lives of medical students is also one of them.

After Last Season resists synopsis like Keith Richards resists sobriety, but I can at least lay out some of the pieces and hope someone else knows how to put together the puzzle. Despite supposedly being a ‘sci-fi thriller’, ninety percent of the dialogue involves incredibly dry discussions of one of three topics:

1. MRI machines and their functions

2. Directions to nearby towns and descriptions of local businesses

3. Geometric shapes

I saw one person online try to summarize the plot as “Ghost Foils Murder”. If I had to sum it up briefly like that, I guess my take would be “Medical Interns Endure Confusing Renovations, Inept Haunting”. But, in the spirit of the film, let me test your patience with a longer synopsis:

Along with several characters whose reasons for being in the film are unclear, a couple of medical student use groundbreaking, mind-reading technology (that looks like MS Paint ) to uncover (kinda) a murder from last week, and then the murderer that they saw with their thought-reading chips (more on that later) comes to get them (how would he know?) with an already-bloodied knife (?), but then a ghost one of the main characters had seen in a dream (I think) attacks the bad man with a chair, even though shortly thereafter the ghost demonstrates how he can lift a ruler but not a backpack (seriously), and I think a chair is usually at least as heavy as a backpack, right?  I give up.

But don’t get me wrong. All that ‘drama’ with the knife-murder-guy is only about five minutes of screen time and is so confusingly staged and shot, it doesn’t come close to breaking the film’s commitment to inducing bewildering boredom in the viewer.

Region: After you’ve seen it, you know the whole plot. It’s all in there. It’s very logical. I wanted to make the movie as realistic and logical as possible, it’s just in the way it’s presented. The way it’s presented it will produce some kind of thrilling or disturbing reaction. But it’s very logical and it’s all in there.

But as much boredom as the movie generates – and it’s a lot – it’s a strangely fascinating sort of dullness. It sounds odd, but my friends and I were on the edge of seats with boredom the whole time. It’s thrillingly tedious: how will they top the last banality? I’ll collected some samples of the enigmatically generic dialogue to give you an idea. Like the movie itself, I give no context. Some of these are the scenes in their entirety:

Woman on phone: “I’m on the third floor. I live in an apartment building on the east side of the city. It’s about 15 minutes from the bridge. I have a view of downtown from my windows.

***

Stacy: Did he love the town?

Anne: Sometimes, he gave me the impression that he didn’t, but my grandfather stayed in Ringham most of his life.

Stacy : (said with an inordinate amount of interest) : What did he do in Ringham?

Anne: He became a carpenter.

[Lots of mutual laughter at this for some reason]

Stacy: Well, my father also grew up in a small town. He stayed in this town until he was 15. Later on, his family moved aways to the suburbs of a large city.

***

Random Lady: My uncle saw a coyote by that tree over there. It stood there for several seconds and then went away.

***

Actual last line of the movie: We have a room next to the living room.

***

But as dazzling as the dialogue is, it’s no match for the real star of the movie, the set ‘design’.

Production Values, or Lack Thereof, of After Last Season

Region: We only had enough money to shoot the film and not enough for production design in the beginning. Additional money only came several months later for the special effects and for the computer animation. We made the sets simple. I used shots of walls to show the passage of time in some scenes and to show that something is happening at a different location in other scenes. (ed. note: Huh?) For the rest we tried to keep the sets simple because of the budget.

Let’s say I decided to walk into any random room in my apartment, lay my camcorder down on the first available surface, and spin it around violently. Odds are I’d end up with a more pleasing composition than ninety percent of this movie. And the only thing more innovatively inept than the camerawork is the ‘set’ ‘design’. I’m not exaggerating to say that my friends and I missed ninety percent of the dialogue in this movie the first time we watched it because we couldn’t stop laughing at how amazingly awful the sets, special effects, and cinematography were. Every new shot triggered another round of questions, confusion, and guffaws.

But it also incited arguments.  The thing is so poorly made it’s a provocation. Viewings inevitably dissolve into debates about intent and conspiracies over whether the whole thing is a giant put-on or not. It’s a level of slapdash halfassery that would elude the amateur.  An amateur is merely inadequate, but so much of After Last Season seems to go out of its way to be wrong.

The sets are piled with seemingly random detritus and the walls are often, for some reason, half-covered with wallpaper taped on with duct tape. Text is digitally placed on a blank sheet of white paper when it could’ve easily been simply typed and printed out. The presence of a ghost is illustrated by gray Rubbermaid boxes sliding across a floor. The movie’s plot revolves around electronic chips that two people place on the side of their heads so that one can see the other’s thoughts. Yet they decided to illustrate this ultra-futuristic technology with graphics that would’ve looked low-budget on a screensaver in 1993. The combined experience of the effects team on ASL can probably be measured in minutes.

Filmmaker: Were these people from a VFX house, or were they people who simply knew how to do things on a computer?

Region: People who knew things to do things on computer. Unknown people. We put [the effects] together from scratch.

Uniquely Inept is Still Unique

But as craptastic as the film is, it’s more than mere incompetence that makes the film fascinating. Most incredibly lame works of almost-art are compelling and sadly comic because of a massive gap between highfalutin intent and piss-poor execution. But like The Room and Troll 2, it’s incredibly hard to even begin to fathom the intent behind After Last Season. In other words, it’s so weird, I don’t even what they were going for – and that’s strangely admirable. It may not be, by any measure on any Earth, well shot, written, acted or directed, but it is highly, highly, original. And, personally, I’d much rather see some loony goofball flame out like a roman candle trying some nutty stunt than watch yet another by-the-numbers piece of boring Oscar bait aimed straight at a complacent middlebrow audience. I’m looking at you, Eastwood.

Sadly, After Last Season isn’t available on Netflix yet. You can only purchase it through Amazon. And for the record, I highly recommend pooling the resources of your Bad Movie Club and doing just that.  Here’s to originality!

Filmmaker: Is there anything else you would like people to know about you and your movie?

Region: It’s a thriller. The critics would say it better than I do. One critic said it’s a film unlike anything you’ve seen before. That’s from the critic, and that’s something we tried to do.

Over time, every mass medium evolves a way of reaching the lowest common denominator, its own specially tailored and especially shameless method of squeezing the art until it screams dollar signs. We live in a capitalist world, so it’s not surprising that artists, entertainers, and journalists can’t always pick dignity over paying the rent. Let’s review:

• Television has got its missing white girls, celebrity ‘news’, and overall bleeds = leads philosophy.

• The movie industry could hardly survive without binging on mindless explosions, sequelitis, and formulaic romantic comedies.

• Radio (it’s still a thing, right?) lives and dies by voice-tracking, dayparting, speeding up songs to fit in more ads, and, of course, an unholy arsenal of screeching shock-jocks and apoplectic political gasbags.

• And even the medium associated with the highest of brows, publishing, sustains itself primarily on a program of fad-diet books, pop-science piffle, quickie cash-in bios for the dead celebs and ghost-written claptrap for the dumb and living ones.

*******

Now, the internet is still a toddler compared to the above media, but it’s already developed some tried, true, and slightly short of dignified ways of pulling in pageviews, the metric that eventually makes the money that keeps the whole thing going. Linkbait can be good or bad, and it’s obviously part of life for any company making its living with content on the web. But it’s good to know what the internet equivalent of fishnet stockings and a low-cut blouse are, so you can spot the cheap and easies like an expert.

On the technical end, there’s spamdexing – which I could explain but it would probably put us both to sleep – and on the content end, there are several tactics to lower yourself to snag more eyeballs. There’s celeb gossip (nothing new there), unverified tech rumors, fake-feuding for traffic, and throwing in names that are insanely popular but utterly irrelevant to your post like Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber, or Justin Bieber, for example. And, of course, there’s the list. I’m a big fan of lists, even if especially if they’re silly and useless.

But there’s a limit. And The Daily Beast has not only crossed that limit, they’ve set up shop on the other side and started giving the finger to everyone who ever gave a flip about standards. Their lists are kaleidoscopically stupid; every possible avenue of idiocy is explored. The premises are hopelessly flawed, the criteria are completely meaningless, and the actual content is, well, debatable is the kindest description I can muster. (Flat-out f**ing retarded is the least kind, if you were wondering.)  OK, Tina Brown, you’ve forced me to fight fire with fire, list with list.  Here goes:

THE TEN MOST USELESS DAILY BEAST LISTS OF ALL TIME, OR AT LEAST UNTIL NEXT MONTH

10. The 50 Most Stressful Colleges

Random metrics + high interest subject = shamless linkbait.  How good is the engineering program? How much crime is on campus?  What is the acceptance rate?  What do these have to do with each other and how they do prove an amorphous and probably unmeasurable quality like “stress” on campus?  Oh, nevermind all that.  Forward this to aunt Susie – she’s got a kid applying this fall.

9. The Left’s Top 25 Journalists

OK, I won’t bring up that they lump bloggers, journalists, newspaper columnists, and radio talk show hosts all together.  I realize I’m one of the few holdouts who distinguish between commenting on the news and breaking it.  But still, Fred Hiatt is on a list of lefties.  Fred Hiatt, for crisssakes.  At #5.  Worthless.

8. The Endangered Sandwiches List

It’s really just a list of great delis across the U.S., but that wasn’t eye-grabbing enough, so TDB had to come up with a confusing/dopey title and work in some story about how delis are dying because of low margins on brisket,  their association with Jack Abramoff (huh?), and the low-carb craze (four years after Atkins went bankrupt).

7. America’s 25 Craziest Cities

Any commentary on this one would be secondary to just listing their lame criteria: psychiatrists per capita, stress, eccentricity and drinking levels.  What?  But at this point, whatever, fine.  Do your dumb meaningless list, Daily Beast. But c’mon!  You should’ve had a clue something was wrong when Cincinnati, of all places, was number one.  Cincinnati has never been number one in anything, ever, good or bad.  It wouldn’t even crack the top three in a “Lamest Cities in Ohio” list, an admittedly tough contest.

6. A-List Buddhists

Aside from putting Tiger at #1, the list isn’t that bad by Daily Beast standards.  But the tagline, “Hollywood’s Buddha-ful People” is enough to land it in the middle of the Hall of Shame.

5. The Right’s Top 25 Journalists

Again, apart from a laughably broad definition of journalist (Rush Limbaugh?) , it’s a shame to throw respectable people like Caitlin Flanagan and Nick Gillespie in with the likes of Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck. Also, I have to quote the blurb about Bill O’Reilly:

“O’Reilly, an anchor who has turned blowing hard into an art form (ed. note: no argument here), is reliably—and relentlessly—omniscient (Omniscient?  That’s the word you wanted?)  His paint-by-numbers conservatism can be off-putting even to those who share many of his beliefs, but every now and then he has his finger perfectly on the pulse of the nation. And then he’s unstoppable.”

So, Bill is reliably and relentlessly omniscient, which is good.  It sucks when someone’s erratically all-knowing.  But even with consistently godlike powers, he’s only unstoppable every now and then.  That’s why he’s only at number five on their list.

4. The Elite’s Top 50 Baby Names

The co-founder of something called nameberry.com, “which we like to think of as the high-quality, intelligent source for stylish names”, lays out the Chets,  Tiffanys, and Taylors of tomorrow so that we can preemptively hate their idiot parents.  When Seraphin, Imogen, Phineas, Atticus, and Kai become as common as Brad and Kelly, we’ll know who to kill thank.

3. The Top 25 Centrist Columnists and Commentators

Any list where Joe Scarborough follows Jon Stewart is clearly meaningless.  Evidently, Stewart is on this because made fun of Keith Olbermann one time.  I think they’re confused.  Criticizing people on your own side occasionally doesn’t make you centrist.  It makes you honest.

2. The A-List B-Cups

Somehow dumber than it sounds, it’s an inventory of celebs who’ve gotten breast reductions.  Thank God someone is recording this information for posterity.  It should also be noted that  the definition of A-List is stretched so far that it includes the likes of Soleil Moon Frye and Loni Anderson.  The slideshow contains gems like this from Kelly Osborne: “Perfect boobs is what I want.”  Enlightening.

1. The Top 20 Dog Names of the Future

With the amount of brain cells I lost just reading the title, I can’t possibly risk reading the article.  We have a winner.

All of this is well documented and widely deplored. We know the offenders: TMZ, US Weekly, Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, etc. But as much scorn as they deserve – and sure, they deserve a truckload – I’m not interested in their particular crimes. I’m interested in exploring a more collective guilt, a guilt borne even by those who are simply spectators or who spend their time actively tearing apart the star system.

Some of the bloggers and critics I’m talking about are people whose work I’ve long admired and probably at one time or another poorly imitated. But my point still stands: Anyone who consumes this material or who makes a living commenting on stars and their behavior is automatically part of the celebrity machine and is at least partly responsible for the end result. It doesn’t matter whether you’re laughing at the whole enterprise while you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter whether you see your warts and all only coverage as a much-needed corrective to the blemish-free bullshit of the star-making machinery. And it doesn’t matter whether you see yourself as better because you reference Sylvia Plath in your posts instead of just drawing semen on celebrities’ faces. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because, in the end, you’re not a better person than Perez Hilton or someone that works at TMZ or Star magazine. You’re just a smarter one. The person who helps produce US Weekly and the person who buys it to laugh at it and the person from Gawker who makes a living mocking it all contribute to its bottom line.

This is because the celebrity industry isn’t like other industries. The cliché is true: In 99 percent of cases, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. All the blistering takedowns and all the withering quips serve the exact same function that a puff-piece People spread does. It feeds the beast. And the last thing any of us should want to do is feed the beast, because it feeds the worst in us. It’s an awful industry driven by our basest instincts – envy, superficiality, greed and spite – and, perversely, any engagement functions as a sort of endorsement. The only way to win is by ignoring them. Like the classic Simpson’s song goes, “Just Don’t Look”.

Apart from supplying fuel to a machine they claim to hate, there’s also an inherent amount of arrogance and superiority involved in the enterprise of celeb-mocking. Like most sane people, I’m frequently appalled by the behaviors of the rich + famous, but I think it’s helpful to have some perspective. The sudden introduction of immense fame and incredible fortune present the kind of character test I don’t think most people would pass, much as they’d like to think otherwise. The amount of sinless, stone-throwing spectators regarding this or that gaffe, infidelity, or chemically-induced celebrity mishap is far greater than the number of people that wouldn’t fall victim to the same self-inflicted misfortune if they were in the same place. Besides, you get no points for resisting temptations that you aren’t offered.

The giddy thrills of the celebrity merry-go-round may seem like candy, but they’re poison, more or less. They either make us feel bad about ourselves for the wrong reasons – by presenting a fake world free of problems that makes our own lives pale in comparison – or they make us feel good, also for the wrong reasons – because we’re smugly judging public figures that are under pressures that we can’t possibly imagine. And in case you were mistaken, you don’t have a ‘right to know’ the details of a public figure’s life. Presuming you do cheapens the meaning of both ‘right’ and ‘knowledge’. I don’t care if they are a golfer, a singer, or a senator (unless they’re misusing public funds). It’s none of your business.

I say this not as a blameless scold, but as someone who’s been a producer and a consumer of celebrity news product at various times in my life. The former I did as a paycheck and the latter I did out of boredom, but, either way, I regret it – and I don’t think I’m the only that does. It’s unfashionable these days to talk about something being “beneath” us, but if we can’t say this kind of thing is below what we’d like to be, then what are we saving our standards for? And, again, it’s not any better to be a mocker than it is to be a booster. You’re boosting sales, pageviews, and ratings either way. Being draped in irony doesn’t keep you from getting dirty.

The bottom line is we’re better than this, and we have better things to do with our time and talents.  Let’s start acting like it.

Whenever I go against my better judgment and watch a clip from Glenn Beck’s show, the end result is usually not much more than a severe headache and a wrist sore from constant fist shaking. But his recent unintentionally hilarious hour-long interview with nonconsensual fondler Eric Massa actually provoked some thought from me, though not the kind Beck was intending. The lachrymose host was chomping at the bit to crown Massa a new conservative hero of the first order – the liberal apostate, eager to dish dirt on the perfidy of his previous ideological allies. But sadly, Beck ended up with little more than an hour of lame backpedaling and tickle-fight tales that made him the butt of more jokes than usual. Where did America’s favorite crazy crybaby go wrong?

Now, at least some of the blame for the primetime train wreck can be attributed to Beck’s habit of uncritically embracing every half-baked conspiracy theory that comes down the pike. But the bigger part of it has to do with the host exhibiting a trait common to nearly every conservative on the spectrum these days, whether they’re a fundamentalist railing against the evils of gay marriage or a Cato fellow ranting about the evils of the estate tax. It’s a bug that’s turned into a feature over the years: the kneejerk impulse of conservatives to choose their policy preferences, their rhetoric, and their heroes based on what most pisses off liberals.

Smells Like Teen Spite

It’s a tendency familiar to anyone who remembers being a teenager. When Mom and Dad zig, Junior’s gotta zag. Most of us grow up and grow out of this annoying trait, and at least try to pick our tastes and actions on the merits. The conservative movement’s ‘innovation’ is to take this contrarian stubbornness out of adolescence and build a thriving industry around selling it to adults. But how are right-wing leaders able to trigger such instantaneous obstinacy? They do it by manipulating a long-standing inferiority complex among the faithful.

Since Nixon, right-wingers have harbored – or perhaps manufactured? – feelings of victimhood to achieve their ends. No matter if they’re in power or out, they see themselves as the perennially beleaguered, the permanently embattled, the eternally put-upon. If the title “The Wretched of the Earth” wasn’t already taken by a post-colonialist author, I’d wager Regnery Publishing would have offer something along those lines. But, of course, the disenfranchised-in-name-only don’t lie down and take their phony powerlessness without a fight. That’s when the auto-intransigence kicks in.

Is this just a case of differing viewpoints? If they agreed with everything, they’d be liberals, after all, right? But I’m not talking about simple disagreement. I’m talking about the above-and-beyond-ness of it all, the need to rub their difference of opinion in the opponent’s nose constantly even when it would seem to go against core principles or even self-interest. But enough flat assertions – let me give some examples of what I’m talking about.

Any Friend of the Earth is an Enemy of Mine

Environmentalism was always going to be an ill fit for the big-business wing of the party. But it’s amazing to watch just how enthusiastic the ordinary conservative has become about thumbing their nose at even the most banal of conservation measures. Drive on any red-state highway, and you’ll be treated to a parade of bumper sticker belligerence about ‘tree-huggers’ and boasts about how much carbon the driver is wasting. Go on any right-wing forum on Earth Day, and read some of the ridiculous bragging about how they’re going to leave all the lights on and spray their aerosol cans in their air for no reason. Even if you don’t fully buy into the claims of environmentalists, I can’t even begin to understand the mentality of a full-grown adult who would intentionally and happily throw trash on the ground just to ‘spite’ Al Gore. This is beyond traditional liberal and conservative values. It’s the difference between a jerk and a decent human being.

Torture Porn

One of the most shameful and depressing polls in recent years was the one showing white evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supporting torture against suspected terrorists. What  Would Jesus Do?  It involves ripping out people’s fingernails and pretending to drown them, apparently.  But even seeing surveys like that, I was still under the naive belief that torture supporters only took that position with somber reluctance, a last resort for national security adopted with the utmost gravity.

Nope! Liberals hate it, so not only do they have to support it, they have to support it in the only way they know how – obnoxiously as possible, at maximum volume. From Rush Limbaugh joking about Abu Gharib being little more than hazing to Giuliani cracking sleep-deprivation quips to ‘humorous’ waterboard shirts jumping off the shelves, the torture of fellow human beings is little more than punchline fodder for the average conservative these days.  Again, I can’t grasp the mentality of someone that both supports and jokes about torturing another person.

Hero With a Thousand Angry Faces

I could point out many more examples of this nihilistic exercise in picking one’s policy positions by what happens to be the most pointlessly antagonistic to the other side. Heck, you could write a whole psychology paper on the mentality involved in the right-wing cheering against the U.S. hosting the 2016 Olympics. But even more than this or that stance taken out of spite, I think we can judge the movement by its heroes and why exactly it puts them on a pedestal in the first place.

Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Michele Bachmann: is there any chance in hell that these empty-headed empty suits would be right-of-center superstars if their main shtick wasn’t tweaking liberals? They can barely string a sentence together without sounding either stupid or crazy. They have ethics issues out the wazoo. They’re ambitious incompetents whose sole value to the conservative cause is causing steam to shoot out of liberal ears. But lucky for them, that seems to be the sole criterion for right-wing pedestal placement.

A One Way Street

We have our own ways of being obnoxious, but liberals just don’t do this sort of thing. We didn’t elevate Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, or Ward Churchill to heroes just because conservatives hated them. And the fact that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are viciously hated by the right doesn’t make them any more popular on the left. In fact, liberals are quick to abandon and denounce their polarizing elements. Ask Michael Moore how many calls he gets returned from Dem reps. And while we have our share of partisan apparel and car accessories, they’re not nearly as gleefully combative as those on the right. “Coexist”and “Visualize World Peace” don’t exactly get the blood boiling. Sure, we had stuff like “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot”, but that’s a far cry from a “Liberal Hunting License”. Mostly, liberal gear is light propaganda, not taunting through text. One side is trying to persuade, the other is trying to provoke.

That’s a major reason why, politically, we’re at where we’re at – which is basically, nowhere. When one side of the spectrum performs their political calculus based on being the exact opposite of the other, who would expect anything to get done? In their eyes, compromise is basically surrender, or to quote Grover Norquist, “bipartisanship is just another name for date rape.” Besides, if you think government is useless, what does it matter if it fails to function?

HFA is a feature where I look on my bookshelf, take down one of my excessively highlighted books, and share some passages to see if anyone else thinks it was worth all the yellow/pink/orange/green ink involved.

Episode Three : Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor (2007)

Pop music has always been closely linked with issues of identity and authenticity.  Since it’s most often produced and consumed by the young, this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, growing up is a process of figuring out how you aren’t as much as who you are.  Culture is one way to do that.  And as Pierre Bourdieu spent his life illustrating, culture is much more than a pastime.  It’s a weapon and a uniform as well.  “Taste is first and foremost distaste”, he famously said, and it’s hard to think of a more efficient machine for drawing those early boundaries between oneself and others than music preferences.

Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker bring an expansive historical knowledge to the issue of “the real” in popular music, and it’s this experience that feeds their intense skepticism about current claims of authenticity.  They trace the obsession with such notions to the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.  In order to distinguish between mass-produced knock-offs, companies began to make assertions of this or that product being “the real deal” or “not a substitute”.  This hunger for validation naturally extended to music, since it was just as much a business as anything else.

A couple things become clear early in their overview.  First, the guidelines for what signifies authenticity were established early on in recorded music and haven’t changed all that much.  Secondly, these signifiers didn’t arise organically.  Rather, they were the result of specific calculations and instructions by savvy producers who ignored the actual conditions and preferences of the artists they worked with in order to paint a faux-naive, nostalgic sheen over what was in reality a very modern and sophisticated operation.

They begin the book with a terrific example that links the near with the distant past: Nirvana doing a cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” from MTV’s Unplugged.  This is a perfect starting point, given the history of each of the elements involved and what they have to say about authenticity.  Unplugged was a TV show built on the dubious assertion that acoustic instrumentation and smaller crowds meant more honesty.  Besides the questionable logic behind its premise, its existence was also suspect – or at least highly ironic – given that the movement MTV was capitalizing on was in large part a reaction to the over-emphasis on image and surface that MTV itself had fostered for over a decade.  Not to mention that the performance in question, like a lot of Unplugged’s, wasn’t even, you know, unplugged.  It was simply stripped-down, in an admittedly effective way.  And the singer was someone who later literally killed himself because he thought he wasn’t being true to his 14 year-old self’s ideas about authenticity.  But for now, he was doing a cover of an artist who represented to him the highest ideals of purity and raw honesty in music: Leadbelly.

Leadbelly, born Huddie Ledbetter, was a black blues musician in the 1920’s as famous for his biography as for his immense talent.  Convicted of murder in 1918 and attempted murder in 1930, he had learned an impressive repertoire of songs from his association from fellow prisoners, both white and black, while serving time in prison. He was helped after release by the legendary white folklorist John Lomax.  Lomax is a giant in music history, and his tireless curatorial efforts leave music fans forever in his debt.  At the same time, his questionable racial perspectives and the pitiful compensation he provided the artists took on tour take some of the shine off his halo.  He doesn’t seem like such a saint when you realize he took two-thirds of Leadbelly’s income and had him work as his servant when he wasn’t performing.

In addition, he relished in spinning tales of his charge’s savagery and brutality, and forced him to dress in prison garb instead of the tailored suits that he preferred and were the standard of other, “more sophisticated” black performers of the time.  He also prevented him from performing more popular and more musically sophisticated jazz and pop tunes.   Lomax felt keeping him to the older, less-known, songs was a more honest expression of the “primitive negro’s” real essence, a sentiment that wasn’t shared by most black performers or audiences, who ignored what they saw as a step back.  But white audiences lapped up this portrayal of the “noble savage”.   Lomax could’ve very well been speaking for them when he professed:

“Leadbelly is a nigger to the core of his being.  In addition, he is a killer.  He tells the truth only accidentally…he is as sensual as a goat, and when he sings to me, my spine tingles and tears come.  Penitentiary wardens all tell me that I set no value on my life in using him as a traveling companion.”  And when he arrived in New York, he introduced Leadbelly to reporters by telling them he “was a ‘natural’ who had no idea of money, law or ethics and who was possessed of virtually no restraint.” Needless to say, there was little truth to these remarks – Leadbelly was usually a soft-spoken, gentle man who was well aware that his drunken, frenzied murder attempts had been wrong; his understanding of money, law and ethics was strong.

Lomax’s opinions on music and authenticity were obviously shaped by his distorted views on race.  This in turn warped his archival efforts, and since he was one of the most intrepid collectors of American folk music, it’s forever effected our notions of what “genuine” music in this country is about.  As the authors state:

Much of Leadbelly’s appeal, not to mention his fortune and fame, both when he was alive and after his death, derived from a racist view that the most authentic black culture is also the most primitive.  Over time, this view lost much of its racial tinge: now it is commonly accepted among rock fans the world over that the most authentic music is the most savage and raw. Of the many varieties of self-expression, it is the most primitive that rock fans associate with the greatest emotional honesty…So for Cobain, as for most rock stars and fans today, real rock’n’roll must be shackled to the idealization of “savage” simplicity.  If Cobain had broadcast the facts of his own painful life in the worldly, sophisticated tradition of Loudon Wainwright III rather than the bare bones tradition of Leadbelly, he would have been a role model for next to nobody.

After the opening chapter about Cobain, Lomax, and Leadbelly, the book takes a zigzag tour through 19th century musical history, showing just how there’s hardly a genre out there that isn’t touched by this issue. Faking It is an enlightening and entertaining read, and it’s forever changed not only how I view music, but the notion of authenticity in any art form.  After reading it, I’d have a hard time saying one musician or genre was more “real” than the other with a straight face.  So much about the punk movement as documented here seems phony and contrived, despite its nagging insistence on unfiltered honesty.  At the same time, disco – long thought of as the height of artifice – emerges from their study seemingly surprisingly down-to-earth, maybe because the people involved are simply trying to make music for dancing and not worry about projecting a persona of Real Artistes.  In general, it’s helped me remember that conflating aesthetic values with moral ones often causes me to miss out on things I would’ve otherwise enjoyed.  As they say near the end:

We’re not trying to say that it’s always wrong to like music on the basis of how authentic it seems.  Often in talking about authenticity we are also talking about other attributes that can be important to us.  Music can be great to listen to exactly because it is heartfelt, emotional, honest, personally or culturally revealing, and so on.  It’s just that when we aggregate all these into an ideal of authenticity we can lose sight of the fact that some of the things that make us judge music as inauthentic – such as theatricality, glamour, absurdity, pointlessness, and cultural cross-pollination – can also enrich our musical experience considerably.

Comedian Bill Hicks died 16 years ago today at the age of 32. This is my attempt at a tribute.

HICKS AND I

It’s fitting that my introduction to Bill Hicks came in the form of an angry 300 pound ignorant redneck, the kind of unthinking pitchfork-wielder that was the frequent butt of his jokes. I was working at the [now defunct] Best Buy clone Media Play in the music department, trying to restock the shelves, when a very unhappy housewife finally found an employee to vent her anger on. Her anger was inordinate, her obesity was morbid, and her target – none other than Bill Hick’s final CD Rant in E-Minor and its alleged crimes against all things Christian and decent. We weren’t supposed to give refunds on opened items, but I was willing to risk a write-up rather than face the sick-breathed wrath of this beastly customer for one more millisecond.

Like most people in their teens and twenties, I was in the habit then of defining my tastes against the taste of others as much as on the merits of the work. So, of course, as soon as this argument-against-evolution walked out with money in hand, I snagged the CD for a discount and took it home. It was love at first listen. Bill Hicks once described himself as “Chomsky with dick jokes”, and being a big fan of both, I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I instantly became a mixture of fanboy, evangelist, and quote thief, testing the limits of my friends’ patience with poor-man’s versions of his best bits.

And Bill Hicks was a model in ways that went beyond just incompetently copying him in the break room. He showed me you could be Southern and liberal, compassionate and cynical, ironic and sincere. Hick was the walking contradiction that Kris Kristofferson sang of, part pusher, part prophet with a message that alternated between hopeless misanthropy and a fanatic hope for a better world. He drew no sharp lines between philosophy, politics, pop culture, sex, and work because he saw none. They all intersected and they all deserved withering scrutiny. I haven’t always (or even usually) been able to live up to the uncompromising and radically honest way he lived his life, but you could certainly find worse role models in popular culture to fail at emulating.

CHECK THE TECHNIQUE

Bill Hicks worked in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s, an era that was a mixed bag for comedy. It was the best of times for a comedian to achieve fame and fortune, the worst of times to try anything remotely new or groundbreaking. The lure of sitcom money encouraged comics to shave away all nuance  and originality off their act and shove down any instincts that would offend a mass audience. Stand-up comedy had never been more popular and it had never been more mediocre. Hicks resisted and reacted against this siren call, making his act as brutally uncompromising as possible. Not only did he shun a mass audience, he often cruelly lashed out at the audience right in front of him for what he perceived as idiotic complacency. When he wasn’t screaming at hecklers, he was just as likely to be preaching about the continuing evolution of man and how our turmoil and conflict were just growing pains out of our outdated human institutions.

If his act was all preaching and haranguing, he would be little more than a footnote today. But Bill Hicks was, first and foremost, a brilliant technician. The phrase “comedian’s comedian” is often used to describe him, because his peers approach embarrassing hyperbole describing his talents.

“Hicks was one of the guys fighting the good fight,” says [Jon] Stewart, who considered Hicks a legendary figure and who worked with him a couple of times on the road. “He was the guy you looked to. He wasn’t trying to be mediocre; he wasn’t trying to satisfy some need for fame; he wasn’t trying to get a sitcom; he was trying to be expert. Hicks was an adult among children.” – The Guardian, Feb. 4, 2004

This expertise is what’s lost in most of the tributes that focus on his ideas and politics. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that could construct a bit with more layers and nuances than Hicks. He always knew the perfect way to turn a phrase, where to put the pause and where to put the emphasis, every single syllable in its right place. He was a master of defamiliarization, of shifting our perspective until we too wondered why we put up with this or that bit of ridiculous bullshit. And fans who only know him from his CDs miss out on the adept physicality he brought to his act. He cared just as much about the craft as he did about his beliefs, and it showed.

DOES BILL HICKS MATTER ANYMORE?

Bill wanted to be Christ at his angriest.
- Brett Butler

Hicks was an angry comic, and we live in an era when angry comedy is extremely unfashionable. It’s probably not surprising, given the amount of vitriol and bile pumped out of the cable networks, that people would want some relief from their entertainment. The cutting edge of comedy these days is dominated by twee formalists (Demetri Martin) and light-hearted parodists (Flight of the Conchords), while satirical subversion and political commentary is mass-produced and profitable (South Park, The Daily Show). Bill Hick’s infamous censored Letterman bit seems positively quaint compared to what makes it on the air now, and it seems insane now that he was the first act since Elvis Presley to be banned from CBS. Without the aura of saintly martyrdom around him, would Hicks just be another comic cashing in on the commodification of dissent?

Maybe. Given how apoplectic the elder Bush and the first Gulf War made him, who knows what he would’ve done with Junior, or for that matter, Fox News. His anger might have reached a pitch that even Comedy Central couldn’t tilt to a commercially viable angle. Nor would he have jumped on the Hope and Change Train, considering he much of a puppet he thought Clinton was. And don’t, don’t, don’t get him started on Leno. Like his hero John Lennon, Hicks was a hopeless idealist, with all the self-righteousness, naivete, and overall jerkiness that implies. But as pushy and off-putting as self-sacrificing purists can be, it’s hard to argue they have no place. In an era when a Democratic president seems as apathetic about Wall Street corruption as his Republican predecessor and already-rich bands and actors think nothing of doing commercials, bromides about “politics is the art of the possible” and “get it while you can” seem like little more than synonyms for selling out. And selling out is something I could never see Hicks doing or condoning.  Those who can’t be bought will always be priceless.

Now I’m going to go and try to forget that Ron Howard is trying to script a movie about him with Russell Crowe in the lead.