Meet the 'California Gays'.

As far as I can tell, Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ is the jam of the summer.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying it captures the cultural zeitgeist of 2010 or anything — it’s just the song that America has collectively decided to bore into our collective skulls for the moment. And why not? It has Snoop Dog and manages to steal from both the Beach Boys and Big Star in one sugary swoop. The fact that the video features a naked Perry surrounded by orgasming streams of cotton candy might have something to do with its popularity as well.

The real sign that the song’s a huge hit is the number of parody videos that have sprung up. There’s one for Wisconsin, one for Jersey, Milwaukee gets in on the act and there’s even a parody for California. The most popular parody, (at least based on the number of times it keeps showing up in my Facebook feed) however is Ryan James’ “California Gays.”

Instead of doing something useful with my day, I chatted up GOOD’s information architect, John Durkin about the video, what it says about the gays and what this video means for the future of humanity:

John Durkin: Have you seen Ryan James’s videos? The “California Gays” video for Katy Perry’s song?

True/ Slant: I keep ignoring it on Facebook. Should I not?

JD: It’s the best. The Katy Perry video with Snoop Dog is terrible and makes no sense, but this video made me love the song.

TS: I just started watching it. I am only interested in the blond one so far.

JD: [Perry] loved it and retweeted it. The blond is totally adorable, and then there’s one boy toward the end who shows up who is super cute. But it’s the funny part in the middle that sold me.

TS: I almost lived with one of these guys! I interviewed to be his roommate. This actually is exactly the kind of gay shit I don’t like. Like, these are not my people. Fine for them, don’t get me wrong, but mostly they seem ridiculous. If I were at a party and these were the guests, I would probably feel horribly insecure and judgmental.

JD: Well – it’s just a video! I mean – of course it is! It’s a song about how hot California girls are. It would be silly to show pale hairy people primarily. Notably, there is a fat hairy guy front and center at the end.

L.A. boys spell it out for you.

TS: Guy Branum! He’s great. You know he’s on Chelsea Lately? He’s her official homosexual or something. I like that he’s the celebrity cameo.

JD: And there is some diversity. They’re not all white.

TS: I like how the cute blond is totally sunburned at the end. But that doesn’t count as ‘not white.’ I see only two non-white people.

JD: I thought it was sufficiently self-conscious and willing to be pretty silly — I mean — It’s all put together in a week by a 23 year old logger at MTV.

TS: My problem is not with this vis-a-vis it being a statement about ‘the gehs.’ My problem is that I don’t really want to hook up with any of them.

JD: Ugh. So what? It’s colorful and fun and far more appropriate a video for the song than Katy’s candyland bingo thing.

TS: I am not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it repulses me on a sexual and aesthetic level. Oh, I see now — at the end — That it is like a video blogger’s cute project–

JD: — I think “repulsed” is a bit strong–

TS: — and that sort of makes it more charming.

JD: Yes, it’s more charming when you see the ubergay guy who directed it explain this and a few other pop-videos he made with some of the same people.

TS: But yeah, the whole ‘Ohmgawd am I not fucking fabulous with my speedo and my sunglasses’ thing is usually pretty repulsive, at least for me. I am sort of happy now that I realize that I don’t like those guys and that being gay just means being attracted to other guys and not having to buy into well, the rainbow youth.

JD: I suppose – but – hello – this song is about California and therefore, the beach.

Scene from the original video.

TS: It’s just a taste thing! My California gays would be like, latinos on the eastside or silver lake dudes.

JD: Well, maybe you should do a music video with them and have the dance-off part in the middle be eastside vs. westside.

TS: I already did my gay music video! 50s sexual sublimation and science experiments! I mean, this is really cute, but you have to see it’s also very very WeHo meets Queer As Folk. And maybe only as a result of being gay for pay all these years, it’s not my thing. Put this way: Judging the video on its own merits, it’s great! It totally achieves what it sets out to do.

JD: It’s certainly over-the-top gay. It couldn’t be gayer, but that was the intention from the outset. It’s not necessarily meant to be smorgasbord of sexual delights for you. It’s just supposed to be campy and fun.

TS: I agree and then want to have a conversation about what ‘gay’ means and if the ‘gay’ presented in the video is in fact a contemporary and relevant depiction of ‘gay’, whether here in California or elsewhere. I can’t help but watch gay stuff without deconstructing it. It’s why I avoid it.

JD: It does interest me that a 23-year-old’s vision of California gays is this. It’s a very 90s gay.

TS: Totes.

JD: A very gay pride look

TS: Not even hipster gay. It’s almost Chelsea.

JD: Which – again – for the summer – for the pop song it’s a video to – that’s perfect. Yes, its Chelsea WeHo West Village gays. In fact, the NY gays in the danceoff were slightly hipsterish in comparison.

TS: Which is a sort of strange statement, don’t you think? I always found the whole Chelsea boy mentality to be very fascist. Very ‘one of us’. You’d think in doing a video about ‘California Gays’, we would see some more pride in the different kinds of gays here, or barring that, something less dated.

JD: Not to a Katy Perry song tho. I mean, what hipster listens to Katy Perry?

TS: I know I don’t.

JD: Right, I don’t either – until my head was infected with her song due to this video.

TS: It is catchy, but so is AIDS.

JD: I thought the song was stupid. Still do – but they really made it fun! That’s the thing I feel it’s not. It seems to be 90s gays style, but I don’t detect any weirdness about AIDS. There is no dark side to the video.

TS: No, there is no dark side to this video. Yeah, but it’s not my fun. It’s like the Roland Emmerich pool party fun.

JD: And that’s because it’s through a 23-year-old lens.I think they don’t see AIDS. They just see rainbow Speedos.

Jeeps are pretty Californian, right?

TS: Fun gay speedo Nazis romping on the beach!

JD: Well, I certainly don’t see them as Nazis! And it’s funny that there is a homophobic line delivered by Snoop Dogg in the song, delivered by the director confusingly in this video. “No weenies.”

TS: Oh, I saw that. They could have made that a moment. But it just sort of flops out.

JD: Ahem. Yeah, I think their enthusiasm primarily, and then the skillful choreography, editing, etc… are commendable. They made a much more fun video for that song – that at least makes sense – and I dunno -I like the sort of thoughtless happy gayness they show.

TS: It’s well made.

JD: I am tired of seriousness and complexity and extended metaphors and meta this and that.

TS: Well, it’s July. No one can blame you.

JD: Yes. That’s why I felt it was timely.

TS: Also, the world is falling apart, so maybe there are more important things than pouring over the hidden meanings of a gay music video parody?

JD: No, no there are not.

Miles of Bravo's "Work of Art: The Search for the Next Great Artist"

When I first heard about Bravo’s latest reality offering, Work of Art: The Search for the Next Great Artist, in which a bunch of hipster artistes compete against each other for big big prizes, I died a little inside. The fact Sarah Jessica Parker was producing didn’t help much.

However, I gave the show a shot because a.) I am attracted to damaged artsy people and b.) I like to think of myself as damaged and artsy as well. In other words, I’m a hipster and I’m glad I did, because last night, the show offered up the most fascinating and interesting episode of reality TV I’ve ever seen.

To explain the utter awesomeness of this episode requires a quick bit of background. Anyone who’s ever seen Top Chef or Project Runway knows the basics of Work of Art: Semi-pro wannabees in a creative field are challenged each week to produce an artwork after having ridiculous constraints placed against them. The artists are meant to be a cross section, if not of the artistic community, then America at large, which is why the show counts a line cook among the contestants.

Unlike chefs or fashion designers, however, art is purely subjective. Food can clearly taste bad. A dress can tear on the runway, but to declare that ‘your piece of art isn’t working for us’ as the judges of Work of Art do each week, is mostly a matter of taste and, as we’re learning, popularity.

None of this is terribly surprising, but what has come as a shock is how willingly the chosen artists have been to play into the usual reality TV conceits.

Art School: Not So Confidential

If there’s a group you’d expect to subvert and rebel against being showcased on reality TV, it’d be visual artists. Instead, almost the entire cast has merrily bought into all the reality bullshit. You can see it on their faces when they win and in their tears when they lose.

In fact, only two cast members seem aware of their ironic situation: Miles Mendenhall, the twinkie obsessive-compulsive Minnesottan who manufactures ‘quiet spaces’ out of concrete anuses and Erik Johnson, a moody, bearded loner whose life was literally saved by art, having used it as therapy to help repair his mind after a major brain injury.

It’s no surprise that not only do they make for the most interesting watching of all the people on the show, but also that they hate each others guts.

For weeks now, Erik has been insisting, while chain smoking to the camera, that Miles is a huge fake, that he plays a tortured artist for the camera, but offscreen is a different guy altogether. Erik seems to be on to something. Just after the show premiered, a report on a local Minnesota arts blog detailed how Miles had worked with his art professor to craft a persona he would play on the show (presumably as a sort of critical commentary art school joke), but the post was quickly taken down, and Miles (and Bravo’s lawyers) have denied any sort of extended performance art on his part.

Which of course, is total bullshit. The Miles we see on TV is an impossible character. He falls asleep during challenges, he speaks in the sort of emo art-school dialogue that only shows up in parodies of artists. The horrific part, however, is that his Lost Boy Artist schtick has made him wildly successful. The judges instantly were moved by Miles’ “sensitivity”, one of the girls on the show throws herself at him with every opportunity (as does New York Magazine critic and judge Jerry Saltz, who mused on his blog today that Erik’s art career may be ruined forever because he publiclly called Miles an ‘art pussy’) and he keeps winning challenge after challenge.

No wonder Erik is ticked off.

This week’s challenge put the contestants into two teams, each tasked with designing a piece of public art for a Manhattan park. Erik gets stuck working with Miles, as well as a mousey girl who wears funny hats and another girl whose pissed at him because she took credit for an idea that was his on a previous artwork and he called her on it. It’s that kind of show.

Naturally, the team decides on Miles’ idea: A treehouse that forces viewers to stare at a particular patch of sky. And naturally, every single idea proposed by Erik is shot down. In fact, the only thing they can think of using Erik for is manual labor, which to his credit, he begrudgingly does.

To anyone who has ever been in high school, this is excruciating to watch. Miles and his ladies adroitly shut Erik out using the sort of Orwellian teamspeak that we train our children these days to use as a lame attempt to make them ‘civilized.’ At one point, when Erik raises his marginalization as well as his resignation to being the team’s grease monkey to to Simone Simon de Pury, famous art gallery owner, who serves as this show’s Tim Gunn, Miles pounces. It’s not enough for Erik to just work on the art, he must love the art, feel passionate and most importantly, be part of the communal joy that is Team Miles.

In short, it’s not enough to just eat Miles’ shit, you have to like it, as well.

This is a bridge too far for Erik, who lets out an invective against Miles. “Look, I get what your doing, the whole tortured artist thing. I get the whole ‘We’re in this giant corporate showroom and it’s so overwhelming that I have to go to sleep’ thing as a statement. But I’m not going to play along. You’re a fake.”

Erik on the outs.

Which is how Erik became my personal hero. He’s a modern day Antonio Salieri to Mile’s Mozart, only Miles is no genius. Erik, for whom artmaking is a literally life-sustaining activity is unable to sit by while Miles reaps acclaim and adoration for basically being a pretentious asshole. So, he calls Miles on his shit, winning the instant admiration of the other team, who have been merrily watching this debacle, as well as the instant enmity of Team Miles.

The denouement is as heartbreaking as it predictable. The sculpture, once finished is atrocious. It’s a jungle gym designed for murdering children and the idiots who designed it are unaware that they situated it so that the patch of sky viewers are forced to watch is where the Twin Towers stood.

At the judge’s table, Erik stands his ground that he tried to be a part of the team, but wasn’t allowed to sit at the cool kids table and while the design was Miles’, it’s Erik who is sent home.

Returning to the waiting room, the mousey girl from Team Miles tries to say she’d like to see Erik again, but Erik, who isn’t going to fake niceties tells her he hopes never to see her again.

By himself, he holds the first painting he made in the show, a portrait of another contestant. He says his only regret was that he wish that if he went, it would have been in the first episode for “painting some dumb surfer boy trying to be a zombie.”

He shows us the painting. It’s Miles.

I don’t know if I’m doing the episode justice. What’s so fascinating is Miles transformation from adorable hipster to something just this shy of Nazi. From his oversized glasses to perpetual bedhead, Miles is the very modern model of a postmodern metrosexual.

But let’s face it: there are hipsters and there’s frathouse guys who dress as hipsters. If we’re honest, the whole hipster thing is based on us trying to recreate our childhood. We think we’re more clever because the things we love about our childhood we love ironically, but the stuff we love ironically is pretty fucking dumb. Transformers? Saved By the Bell? These are adult conversations?

Erik, who seems unable, by virtue of life-experience to fake it, seems hopelessly uncool. His biggest sin, in the eyes of Team Miles, is that he won’t go along with the elaborate fiction they’re deluding themselves with. Erik is vilified for trying to introduce ‘reality’ into a reality TV show and since following that road would eventually reveal that Miles and his flock are little more than a bunch of delusional art-poseurs grandstanding for thirty seconds of fame, he must be stopped.

In our increasingly trivialized society, where, thanks to technology and urbanization, we’re able to filter out any news or people that go against our carefully constructed identities and world views, people like Erik, who seek to pop our groupthink balloons are either dangerous, or vital, depending on your point of view.

The hipster movement, with nostalgic irony calculated to strip history of any real meaning and smug self-satisfaction tamping out skeptical self-criticism, is our generation’s definition of cool and Miles is its poster boy. But I’ll take the honest asshole over the surfer boy zombie every time.

While politicos, media pundits and economists debate the number of angels standing on a pin, most Americans are wondering about the fundamentals of our democracy and our capitalist society.

In short, we’re in the midst of a great national freak out, a collective anxiety attack that threatens to shake our collective faith in the ability of this country to confront and solve the problems it’s facing.

What we need to do is to take a deep breath. We’re not in the midst of collapse; we’re in the midst of reinvention.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the spy scandal, if it can even be called that, is how blase the whole affair has been treated. The administration’s primary concern was not that Russians were spying (albeit, by all accounts ineptly) on U.S. interests, but that the affair could damage relations with Russia.

This is remarkable progress and the Obama administration deserves credit for handling the situation so adroitly that most of us responded with a sense of Cold War nostalgia, not fear.

It also highlights how much the world has changed in the twenty plus years since the end of the Cold War. 1990-2010 may very well be viewed as an interregnum between two eras, the later of which we are just now entering.

What was once called ‘national defense’ is now referred to as ’security’. The United States, having failed in its attempts to force democracy on the Middle East is beginning to move away from its Cold War mission of spreading U.S. style democracy across the globe and is now beginning to engage global partners like China and the E.U. as equals.

If you believe in American supremacy, this is cause to throw up your arms in disgust, but as we’ve learned from our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to remake the world in our image requires abandoning the very values we hope to promote. China is a better model. By tying our economy with theirs, we’ve brought a nation famous for isolationism into the global sphere.

Yes, this means more competition, but it also means we’ve created a far more stable world than what preceded it.

In our fight against terrorism, we’ve also been wildly successful, incapacitating Al Qaeda and thwarting dozens of attacks. While terrorism, nine short years ago seemed to be the defining threat of the 21st century, it has now become a manageable, if ever present threat.

After a decade of myopic focus on international threats, it’s now our domestic problems which seem intractable, but even here, progress is happening at a rapid pace. Considering the fundamental ways that the globe has changed; geopolitically, environmentally and economically, it would be naive to think that the country could continue without a major realignment.

Take the Tea Party, for example. It’s neither as seditious as those on the far left make it out to be nor is it as revolutionary as its proponents claim.

As Judge Joseph L. Tauro’s decision in favor of gay marriage based on the 10th Amendment (a favorite of the Tea Partiers which requires that anything not explicitly stated in the Constitution is the domain of individual states) shows, this is a discussion which transcends the left-right divide.

Admittedly, Tauro was most likely trying to spank Tea Partiers and illustrate their hypocrisy, but he also, perhaps inadvertently, legitimized the Tea Party’s states rights platform. Should the Tea Party create a cohesive, philosophically consistent platform (which would mean ditching the nativist, racist and homophobic strains it now embraces) it could become a legitimate and powerful successor to the Republican party.

Liberals deride the Tea Party as a bunch of lunatics, but they do it at their own peril. Should the Tea Party get its act together and make the new political dividing line states rights vs. the federal government, they could very well find themselves painting themselves in a corner. Nobody like the federal government and for good reason. It’s ineffective, even when run by Nobel peace prize winners.

But the Left also needs to get over its self-defeating accommodation. On most issues, it’s liberal politicians who have the forward thinking solutions that will make America prosper in this new era. Of course, we need to move to alternative energy. Of course, the next great economic engine will be creating sustainable and environmentally friendly products and systems. Of course, we need to invest in healthcare and education and improving the lives of the poor if we are hope to be successful.

And of course, the Right’s suicidal embrace of irresponsible big business and social conservatism is what’s holding this country back.

We must keep following the path we’ve set and move forward, but we must accept the consequences for those actions and account for what we have done. It’s these two alternating principles that are the new demarcation between Left and Right.

Far more than gay marriage or fiscal economics, it’s the Left’s desire to push forward with progress and the Right’s desire to preserve and protect what we have that animate our public discourse.

For better or worse, we’re a binary country, forever arguing for two competing visions of the future. What we have yet to realize, but are at last become aware, is that the terrain has changed. Abraham Lincoln’s charge that “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew” is as true today as it was 1862.

When seen through the lens of a 24-hour news cycle, it’s just crisis after crisis, but if we step back and look at how far we’ve come in twenty years, the same spirit of adaptation, improvisation and ingenuity that has made this country so wildly successful in its brief history is as alive as it’s ever been.

We’re at the start of a new era and so long as we have the strength to realize it, the future is on our hands.

Barack Obama on Tuesday.

There’s a giant glob of oil in my Kool-Aid.

Like many of the young voters who helped catapult Barack Obama to the White House, I have a growing sense that the President (my President) is hopelessly out of touch, no matter how many twitters, Facebook posts and email newsletters he sends my way.  Minutes after the President’s first Oval Office address, like clockwork, I got my pep talk email from Mitch Stewart, Director of Organizing for America, subject line:  ”Japhy, will you stand with the President?”

Mitch and I are great friends, even if the relationship is a bit one-sided. Mitch emails me every time the President has a major policy address or is about to pass some major legislation and he reminds me of how awesome Barack Obama is (“The President presented a vision of a future where we as a nation are not held hostage by our dependence on fossil fuels”) and then Mitch asks me if I’ll sign a petition saying, ‘Yes, I think Barack Obama is awesome.’ If I do sign the petition, I’m asked nicely if I’d like to donate to the DNC, which I never do because I’m poor and hate political parties.

But I like Barack Obama. Or, at least I used to.

We Obama supporters get a bad rap from well, most everyone. While it was fashionable for about thirty seconds back in 2008 to be all into ‘hope’ and ‘change’, most folks jumped ship as soon as it became apparent that Obama was not capable of magically transforming the world overnight. Whether it’s the gays (“Taking a reasoned consensus building approach to repealing DADT is homophobia!”), the progressives (“Where’s my reeducation camp for Dubya?”) or independents (“Surprise! We changed our mind!”), the Obama coalition of voters have been surprisingly quick to abandon the President, as he leads the nation through crisis after crisis.

A brown pelican is mired in heavy oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island.

Then there’s the one group that has been with him from the start and which, for the most part, is still with him: Young voters. No president in recent history has enjoyed such popularity with the 18-29 set and they’ve continued to support the President, even as older Americans have abandoned him.

You could chalk youth support of Obama up to naive delusion, but if you do, you’re probably an old person. Despite the evidence of Justin Bieber and the popularity of the Twilight series, most young Americans are not idiots. We know that changing the course of the country requires sustained attention and effort. It’s young college graduates who are facing the brunt of a failing job market. It’s young men and women who are the ones sent off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We’re all too aware that we’re the ones who are inheriting a nation whose economic, environmental and energy policies have led to a situation where up to 60,000 barrels of oil are spilling into the Gulf of Mexico everyday.

So naturally, for those who have stuck by him, Obama’s speech on the BP disaster, his first address from the Oval Office, would be a big fucking deal. Here’s a crisis that seems as tailor-made to Obama’s policies as 9/11 was to the hawks that circled above the Bush White House.

The spill, the result of deregulation and our country’s unsustainable addiction to oil, ought to crystallize to the American people what Obama has been saying all along, which is that the role of good government is to assert authority over private enterprise when their actions are so great that they affect the public at large. When your oil or your mortgage-backed security come lapping up at the American people’s front door and threatens to endanger all of us, then we, the people, become shareholders, too.

Here was Obama’s big chance to lay it all out to the American people. Here was the moment for our community-leader-in-chief to roll up his sleeves and tell America, how, we, the people, would get ourselves out of not only this immediate crisis, but lay out a vision for how we could pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and move into a greener, cleaner tomorrow.

Instead, we got an 18-minute litany of toothless platitudes delivered with all the obligatory cheer of a 5th grade book report. If judged by the standard of ‘I have to make a Really Big Speech now because there’s a Really Big Crisis happening’, then I guess Obama’s address was somewhat okay. If you’re judging the President on his command and knowledge of the situations well as his ability to provide a specific course of action as well as the motivation to make it happen, however, then last night’s speech was an absolute failure.

It’s not that we expect Obama to go stand on a pile of oil-soaked dead birds and shout at us via megaphone. Though if there’s one thing the current President might learn from his predecessor, it’s that imagery matters; the most outstanding image of Obama in this crisis has been him eating shrimp on a Alabama dock with advisors.

Still, watching Obama down po-boys is a lot less discomfiting than listening to him say “I want to know why” the Deepwater rig failed and The Mineral Management Service (MMS) was asleep at the wheel in regulating the rig. It’s as outrageous and disingenuous as listening to the oil execs tell Congress that there’s someone else to blame. This President needs to realize that his job is not to observe and consult, but to lead.

At the end of the day, the boss of the MMS is Barack Obama. At the end of the day, the person charged with the safety of America’s people and land is Barack Obama. That role cannot be fulfilled with a panel of experts, nor Nobel prize winners, nor commissions. Put another way, you do not change the world by saying, “I urge the Commission to complete its work as quickly as possible.”

Thick oil in the northern regions of Barataria Bay in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana

The President’s defenders will argue, as they always do, that criticism of their efforts is so much media bloviating. They’ll argue that in the pursuit of good copy, their critics ignore the reality that the reality of the spill is too complicated for a sound bite. Fine, but the administration has had 58 days and counting to get it right and they still haven’t come close.

At some point, hopefully soon, the President needs to take responsibility for the disaster. Last night was his chance to do that, but instead he only distanced himself further, putting the disaster in the hands of BP, government bureaucracies and blue-ribbon panels. Most bizarrely, he asked nothing of us, the American people; even George W. Bush asked us to go shopping after 9-11.

In effect, the President has told those who voted for him, “Thanks for electing me, but from here on in, I’m going to rely on experts.” It’s a puzzling approach for a man who ran on bringing people into the governing process. Obama intoned the dark days of World War II in his speech, but somehow he, like most of D.C., seem oblivious to the fact that despite all the partisanship and bickering, if you call on the American people in a time of crisis, they will respond.

If only someone — anyone — would make the call. We’re waiting.

Tea Party Approved: Steve Poizner

With its status as entertainment capital of the world, California has had a good run of making its elections as entertaining as say, a CW teen drama or maybe a late-night FX comedy.

Most everywhere else, voting is a series of bond measures and series of unimportant offices vied for by diligent public sector employees and the occasional local businessperson.

California however,  knows how to put on a show. Porn stars, actors, politicians who operate under the delusion that they are Bruce Wayne (Sorry, Gavin!) and a cast of every crank this side of Fresno enliven our political debate.

Demon sheep and anti-immigrant rhetoric fill the airwaves and thanks to a government-crippling ballot initiative system, we get to weigh in on everything from marijuana legalization and gay marriage to which energy conglomerate gets to rape us first.

But even the most vote-happy of us can get bored at times (especially when you know that no matter who wins, the state is going nowhere fast), which is why as I headed to the polls today, I decided to vote as if I were a Tea Partier. And let me tell you, it felt great.

Now, let’s get a couple things clear: For the most part, I consider the Tea Party movement to be little more than a half-way home for unreconstructed racists, spoiled libertarians who want all the personal freedoms without any of the corresponding responsibilities and the sort of fat and lazy people who only deserve a place in the public discourse because every village needs an idiot.

And I understand that for some of you, choosing to vote for oh say, Steve Poizner for Governor, simply because I think he doesn’t stand a icicle’s chance in Mexico of surviving in the general election is somehow dishonest or even unpatriotic. Of course, this is an incredibly silly argument, but since we live in a hyper-partisan age, let me explain why.

Dem's offer of Former Linda Rondstadt Groupie

In California, voters can affiliate with any political party, or if they choose to, they can vote independently, becoming a ‘decline to state voter’. Thanks to a ballot initiative, DTS voters can, should political parties allow them to, vote in party primaries, which is how I came to be a Republican for a day on Tuesday.

In the past, political parties were loathe to allow outsiders into their private party primaries for fear that jackasses like myself would hijack the vote, but with DTS and independent voters the most rapidly growing ‘demographic’ in the America electorate, both Republicans and Democrats have come to accept independent voters as a fact of life.

They may come to regret that decision. Of all the initiatives on the ballot, none scares political parties more than California’s Prop. 14, which seeks to et rid of party primaries altogether, essentially creating two elections— a primary mash-up of every candidate, followed by a general election of the two highest vote getters. This means, in theory, two Republicans or two Dems could be on the ticket come November. While just about every mainstream politician is against it (save Arnold Schwarzenegger), voters love the idea— the measure got 50% in the latest poll.

Which brings me back to my Tea Party roleplaying.  While I loathe the Tea Party, I absolutely feel just as enraged as they do.  The California state government is ungovernable thanks to ballot initiatives, our chronic refusal to raise property taxes and idiotic term limits that strip the legislature of the institutional memory needed to effect change.

No matter who wins the Governor’s race (Spolier Alert: It’s Jerry Brown, the one-time ‘Governor Moonbeam’ turned Attorney General), there’s no chance that the real problems facing California will be adressed, simply because there’s no mechanism for effecting those changes.

Add to that my general loathing of political parties in general.  Republican’s love to quote from Washington’s Farewell Address when it comes to its defense of religion in public life, but it’s main point — that political parties lead to a factionalism that makes beating the other guy more important than creating responsive public policy and that this trend ultimately leads to tyranny — is resolutely ignored.

"Down with this sort of thing!"

I take great pride in being an independent voter.  You might call me fickle or unwilling to be a team player, but the evidence shows that the voter trend is away from political parties and towards a political free-for-all. Nobody’s thinking the GOP and the DNC are going anywhere, but if you really listen to the Tea Partiers and the Progressive Left, they are saying the same thing. They are tired of a politics dominated by two parties which seem more interested in protecting corporate interest over individual liberty and freedom.

The mainstream media (or in Palinese, ‘the lamestream media’) find this increasing radicalism worrisome, as if the nation will be ripped asunder by a country of old men who would like to literally whitewash the national mural of diversity, but while it’s not pretty, the fracturing of left and right seems to me an ultimately healthy thing for the country.

Whether you’re a religious fundamentalist or eco-loving green, you’re probably fed up with a government that promises you change, but fails to deliver. We’re a nation tired of being asked to compromise for a middle ground that seems to only exist in the boardroom’s of Wall Street and as the song says, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’

For most of America history, our nation’s political discourse has been fractious. De Tocqueville marveled at how our civics showed as much innovation and experimentation as our industry and while most of the Tea Party and Progressive experiments ought to wind up in the dust bin, they’re existence is preferable to complacency.

Unfortunately, it’s complacency which rules Sacramento and Washington, despite the economy, the environment, our infrastructure and our standing in the global economy. Is it any wonder the angriest man in the room holds our attention? Did my ‘tea party vote’ make a difference? Probably not, but it sure felt good — especially the part where I had the opportunity to vote for Orly Taitz for State Secretary.  What? I think she’s just what the G.O.P needs.

Image by Coyote2024 via Flickr

I’m taking a break from my usual California-centric column to talk about an Island.  But before I do, I’m going to talk about LOST. Last night’s finale was in many ways, like every episode, leaving its audience filled with questions, yet this time the questions weren’t about polar bears or smoke monsters, but with questions about ourselves.

The following is filled with many spoilers for the series finale of LOST.

Now, I fully expect folks to pile on the LOST ending.  After years of speculation that the Island (or at least, the Season 6 flashsideways world) was Limbo, it turned out to be just that. Or maybe it was two halves looking to be made whole. Whatever it was, the reunion of all the Losties in a big church of feel good karma all but invites a cynical response from the critical eye.

But eyes are all about what LOST is about, from the first frame to the last, and how we choose to view the world and how that view shapes our lives is a central question of the show.

Come On Everybody! It's about the people.

To those who view the hippy-dippy faith trip that the final episode winds up being as cheesy or ludicrous, I ask, what show have you been watching for the last six years?

It’s never been the plot conceits or mystery that have made the show; it’s the human connections these strangers find that have brought us back season after season. Why are you judging the show on the mechanics of the metaphysical.

The metaphysical is the true heart of The Island.  It’s mysteries are those of the human condition. How do we forgive? How do we fall in love? What can we do to not feel so damn alone?  In this respect, LOST’s final moments deliver in every way. For it offers up a clear, definitive answer:

We find meaning in our lives by living our lives like they have meaning.

With a Smoke Monster pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, with our future bleak and unknown, with our lives already ridden with mistake and sin, we can survive and yes, I’m going to say it– “We can either live together or die alone.”

Whether we’re a leader questioning our purpose, a couple who no longer love each other, a heroin addict or a former torturer, we are capable of our destinies, not because of any all powerful force, but because how we live our life is our destiny. In fact, despite the clear afterlife shown at the end, the show still tells us, “Dead is dead.” It’s life that matters.

Yeah, but what happened to Vincent?

We can spend our lives chasing after Dharma stations or contacting freighters or following some neurotic blond dude who thinks he’s God, but our lives are not about that, just as the show has never been about that. It’s about who touches our lives and who we touch.

And in the end, LOST shows us the possibility of a world in which we are fully aware of our lives and how short they are. Call it Heaven or Nirvana or Enlightenment, but it doesn’t take magic to get there–it’s available to us right now.

That this message was transmitted by a network television show originally inspired by Survivor is a stunning achievement incomparable to any drama before it.  It stands among The Illiad and Shakespeare in terms of telling the story of who we are as a species. But more than beautiful drama, LOST is a call to action to our own lost world.

It sends massive warning to obsessive fanboys, be the object of their obsession comics or nuclear bombs or the minutiae of a television show, that they are chasing the wrong things. That in the end, what matters is each other.

It’s a show that has always provoked discussion, but now it asks us to ask questions about ourselves and our world, which can be seen either as a horrible place of isolation and destruction or as a miraculous place in which we are all capable of redemption.

To All Survivors: So let’s all of ask the question LOST started on our Island? “Why are we here dude?”

L.A's Lights vs. Arizona's "Rights"

If pressed, your average Californian would admit they never really liked Arizona all that much to begin with. Phoenix has all the smog of Los Angeles without any of the charm and if you want to see the Grand Canyon, Disneyland’s got a diorama of it.  Yet, for the most part, the two states have mostly managed to ignore each other, comfortably separated by desert, irrigation canals and the occasional accidental manmade inland sea-cum-cesspool.

All that changed last week as the Los Angeles City Council voted to initiate a boycott of Arizona businesses and services in the wake of Arizona’s new anti-immigration ‘target the Mexicans’ law.  Pasadena, San Diego and now (not surprisingly), Berkley have passed similar measures.

Yesterday, Arizona Corporation Commissioner Gary Pierce (who’s running for reelection) wrote Los Angeles Mayor Antonia Villaraigosa that he’d “be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation”, adding, “I am confident that Arizona’s utilities would be happy to take those electrons off your hand.”

L.A. gets 25% of its power from Arizona. Can Pierce, an electric-utility regulator, really shut out L.A’s lights?

Basically, no. The plants in Arizona that supply L.A.’s electricity are owned or have ownership stakes by Souther California Con-Ed or the Department of Power and Water and Pierce has spent the majority of the day walking back from his letter, saying that he thinks that California and Arizona are “are awful close and interrelate so much, I just think [L.A's boycott is] an impractical solution and not very well thought out.” In other words, much like the immigration bill, Pierce’s bluster amounts mostly to political grandstanding. If the details of electricity management get you excited, The Arizona Republic has a pretty good explanation of why Pierce’s plan could never work.

But could Arizona and California go to war? Actually, they already have. In 1934, Arizona Governor Benjamin Mouer called in the National Guard and the “Arizona Navy” (really a ferry boat called the Nellie Jo) to stop the construction of Parker Dam, which would divert more ‘Arizona water’ to California. As the old western saying goes, ‘Whiskey’s for drinking, water is for fighting over’.

Lake Mead has seen better days

Arizona lost the Battle of Parker Dam and today most of the resources shared by the western states of California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada are managed on the federal level through a byzantine series of treaties and agreements that regulate who gets how much water and power and when.

As ludicrous as Arizona’s threats are today, they do represent a real threat to the West’s future. Climatologists and geologists have pretty convincing evidence that for the last 100 years the American West has been wetter than average and that it is now returning to its more normal arid environment.

Despite more snow and rain this year than usual, California still remains in the grip of a nearly decade-long drought. In a 2007 New York Times article titled “Is the Future Drying Up?” on water official saw the a future of limited water and resources in the West and predicted “Armegeddon.”

None of these problems are new, but as the region careens towards economic and environmental disaster, politicians from both states prefer to engage in the political equivalent of mooning each other across the border. Boycott Arizona? Turn off L.A.’s lights? Serious times call for serious solutions. We have plenty of the former– but none of the latter.

Not quite a 20-mule-train.

It happens to everyone now and then. Last week, I boiled over. A combination of seemingly intractable problems, both personal and professional, the relentless noise of Facebook and Twitter, combined with a steady flow of stupider-than-usual news (turns out our economy has a delete key and our best answer to an environmental crisis is to follow the plot of The Simpsons Movie and put a big dome over the whole thing) twisted around me into a knot that wouldn’t untie.

So I did what any sensible Angelino does when the world gets to crazy and headed out to the desert for some alone time.

If this sounds like one of those stories where I go out in search of my spirit animal, it is. Only, my spirit animal turns out to be a Mustang convertible and along the way, I discovered that the sky has fallen– and none of us seem to have noticed.

Everyone has their own way of blowing off steam. I’ve tried my share of poisons, though last time I managed to get really drunk it only led to me emailing and overly effusive letter to my congressman, Henry Waxman, thanking him for his work on the health care bill. Needing silence and solitude, I rented a red 2010 Mustang convertible and took off for Death Valley, which is not only the largest national park outside Alaska, but also, come night time famed for being the darkest spot on Earth.

I made my way up Antelope Valley, past Owens Lake, the source of much of L.A.’s water and as a result of that city’s thrist, now little more than a dry salt pan covered with sprinklers to keep the dust down.

I shot the car over the Panamint Mountains, dropping 6000 feet in little less than an hour. The temperature rose from the mid 60s to 102 as Mustang and me sailed to Death Valley’s floor, which at its lowest point in Badwater Basin, is the lowest point in North America. It’s only 76 miles away from Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48. Despite its terrifying name, Death Valley is nothing if not a place of superlatives.

Of all those superlatives, the one I wanted to experience was Death Valley’s legendary night sky. It’s widely regarded as the darkest place on Earth.

Badwater Basin- the lowest point in North America.

You see, I wanted to see the stars. I remember as a kid, hiking at Philmont Ranch in northern New Mexico and marveling at the night sky while laying on dry chalky rock breathing in air perfumed with mesquite.

I figured if I could get a taste of that feeling again, of looking up and seeing the Milky Way as a tangible band across the sky, then things would be all right.

I pulled the car into an empty campground, cracked opened a can of Bud Lite already warm only an after hour after buying it from the nearby general store and looked up.

It’s hard to describe the heavens to someone who hasn’t seen it and unfortunately, chances are you haven’t. Up until the last century, when the electric light lit up the planet like a epileptic glowworm, the night sky looked much like it does in Death Valley everywhere.

I remember learning about constellations when I was young and joking with my pals about how bored the ancients must have been to see scorpions and bulls and twins in the sky. I see now how wrong I was and I see why I was so wrong. The sky that I grew up with, that we live with now is a paint-by-numbers version of the Mona Lisa that is the real sky.

Looking up at the real sky, your imagination can’t help from firing. I easily see giant turtles festooned with blinking jewels and scarabs and great arms cradling them. Another thing I notice is that the sky doesn’t look like a perfect dome. Ribbons of gas, nebulae and clusters give dimensionality to the heavens.

At one point, it appears as if I am looking up at the inside of a giant pagoda; tiers of light receding upward into infinity. Nothing man has created compares, not even Avatar.

Death Valley Night Sky Halo

As my eyes adjust to the dark, something else becomes apparent: a hazy glow rising up from behind the mountains to the east. It’s Las Vegas. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “light pollution from Las Vegas increased 61 percent between 2001 and 2007″, threatening this last remaining bastion of darkness. As the National Park guide to Death Valley glumly puts is, “there’s little we can do to impact the light from Las Vegas.”

Now, I know concern over light pollution may seem like tilting at windmills with all the problems we face, but there’s something terrifying in our indifference, something that bodes ill for our future. What chance do polar bears, frogs or the ice caps have when we so readily accept the loss of the entire night sky?

It would not be an unreasonable hypothesis to suggest that it was the combination of man’s primitive brain, gifted with the ability to make connections and the night sky, fretted not just with golden fire, but with the promise of endless possibility and wonder, that made our species so successful.

The night sky dazzles, but it also invites curiosity, a sense of humility and if not a perception of the divine, then at the very least, a stunning argument that compared to the infinite vastness of its reaches, we are still so very small.

Without making the mistake of assuming that connection indicates causality, it does seem that we live in an age devoid of wonder, which we have replaced with fear. We are beset by challenges, as every generation has been, but we seem to have lost our faith in possibility, whether it’s in our politics or in our arts. It says something that we’ve elected a President of hope and change, but whose great dream is to usher in an age of pragmatism.

A great many evils have been committed in the name of fanciful dreams, to be sure. The last century provides ample evidence of this, however it’s also true that our greatest achievements, not just as a country, but as a species, all began with dreams which exceeded our horizons. What happens then, when we dim our view, not just of the sky above, but of our own future?

And if we are willing to sacrifice the sky, what else are we willing to sacrifice as we press on into the unknown?

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

As you know, because everybody (read: the MSM) has told you so, the Republicans are back, baby! And they’re going to like, totally kick Democrat heiney come November.

In journalism, this is what we call, “the narrative.” Actually, that’s what screenwriters call it, but ever since ‘the news’ became a twenty-four hour show, journalists have embraced “the narrative” as a way to keep eyeballs interested in between the ads for boner pills and diet programs.

“The narrative” has become so powerful that politicians both fear and try to manufacture it, albeit clumsily. Republicans all say the same thing over and over again in hopes that it will become true and Democrats natter on about details while dropping jokes that only they think are clever. Washington no longer sells policy based on facts, but rather on how gripping a tale it can weave.

Of course, this has always been the case in politics; it’s just now we’ve made it the main event.

No narrative has more weight right now than the impending return of the Republican party and no narrative is more wrong. The GOP is more doomed now than ever. Here’s why.

Let’s take the California gubernatorial debate that occurred earlier this week. Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO whose campaign has been psychotically pro-business, now has her own get-rich-off-the-housing-collapse business deals with Goldman Sachs welded to her like a lead parachute.

I didn’t get Meg’s ‘Hurray for big business’ strategy back in March and now it’s sunk her chances. At least, that’s what her conservative opponent Steve Poizner thinks. He’s having a press conference today to point out a new poll that has him within single digits of Whitman.

Is it any wonder that Democrat AG (and presumptive nominee) Jerry Brown is offering to debate them both now?

Marco Rubio, Charlie Crist

Doesn’t this all sound familiar? Charlie Crist’s own defection from the Republican party was the direct result of a conservative challenger Marco Rubio– and the Republican establishment has suicidally embraced the Tea Party approved candidate. Suicidal? Well, free of the GOP albatross, Crist’s already beating Rubio in the polls.

Republican leaders will tell you that these races don’t matter– it’s the ones in Indiana and Arizona that are important. Which is what I would say too if the Republican National Committee was taking me out to nice dinner’s at lesbian bondage clubs, but it doesn’t change the fact that in the country’s two most populous states, the Republican party is foundering.

Need more proof? Republican enthusiasm for voting in November is dropping like a rock. Gallup shows the ‘enthusiasm gap’ between Dems and Republicans dropping by 19 points in the last month.

And then there’s that Washington Post poll that shows that the Tea Party, which has taken the Republican party hostage, is only 2% of the population. Furthermore, the poll shows Democrats are pretty satisfied with their party.

None of this fits in with ‘the narrative’, so you don’t hear it, but with the GOP splitting itself in two and supporting candidates who please the base but don’t have a chance in hell of winning a general, with the party basically devoid of any policy platform that isn’t ‘Obama is a socialist’ and with the demographics of the country shifting rapidly away from the groups that the party panders to, it’s hard to see how, in Reality Land, the Republicans are anything other than dead white men walking.

Tea Party tax day protest

The whole tea party phenomena reminds me exactly of McCain’s decision to nominate Sarah Palin for veep. At the time, all my liberal friends shrieked that Obama was doomed, that McCain had fired up the race and got everyone excited. At the time I said, ‘Well, McCain could also have nominated an organ-grinder monkey for Vice President and had the same effect. Give it a few weeks.”

People forget that “the narrative” is biased towards the new, the exciting and the visual; all elements at the heart of the Tea Party/ GOP/ Conservative bacchanalia currently underway. Don’t mistake light for heat, though. The problem is that while Americans enjoy a good sideshow, they don’t elect it to office.

Say what you will about the Obama presidency and the Democrats, compared to the right, they look like the very models of sobriety and moderation, all the while achieving their policy agenda step by fractious step.

The chapter on the ‘Republican resurgence’ may be real, but it’s being written in the Democrat’s playbook.

Placido Domingo in 'The Ring'

It’s a breezy evening Wednesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) new open air entrance pavilion and L.A. Opera President Carol Henry is standing in line waiting for a glass of wine. She turns to a fellow imbiber and says, “This is stupid, making us stand here like this. There should be waiters with trays. Really, ludicrous.”

As president of the Los Angeles Opera, Ms. Henry knows a thing or two about throwing a party– the night’s event is a kick-off to a citywide celebration of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’, which is getting its first production in L.A.’s history.  In addition to the operas, the city is putting on the largest arts festival since the ‘84 Olympics, encompassing art museums, colleges, libraries and theaters, (there’s even an iPhone app) all showcasing some aspect of ‘The Ring.’

In a city whose most notable civic space is a mall designed to look like a real city street, this sort of urban cross-pollination is unprecedented.

The real question is, why all the love for a twelve-hour long, 141 year-old German nationalist opera written by an anti-Semite whose works inspired Hitler?

At first blush, Los Angeles and Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen couldn’t make stranger bedfellows.

Besides the aforementioned Nazi appropriation of the Ring Cycle, Los Angeles doesn’t have the reputation as the sort of place that dwells much on history, even when it comes to high art.

A scene from 'Die Walkure'

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is headed by 29-year-old conductor Gustavo Dudamel and is best known for eschewing endless Brahms and Mozart festivals in lieu of challenging programs celebrating 20th century minimalism, John Adams and world music. LACMA is run by Michael Govan, who wants to install a life-size steam engine suspended by a crane created by Jeff Koons.

Even the stuffy Getty Museum has made recent efforts to introduce contemporary works among its collections of priceless (and sometimes stolen) antiquities.

This focus on the modern and the new is partly a reflection of the city and partly a practical consideration; after all, most of the really good old stuff is already spoken for. Still, a citywide focus on ‘The Ring’ seems positively retrograde. Perhaps it’s just Wagner envy. Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and key figure in bringing ‘The Ring’ to L.A. says, “Every great city has its Ring Cycle. Now, it’s Los Angeles’ time.”

What makes The Ring Festival so exciting and ambitious, however, isn’t that it aims to bring a cultural chestnut to America’s last great cowboy town, but that it aims to demonstrate that ‘The Ring’, with all its cultural significance, is at home in sunny Southern California as it is in dreary Bayreuth, the tiny German hamlet that performs ‘The Ring’ each year in a sort of annual reenactment of the 19th Century of Woodstock.

What more, there’s ample evidence L.A. has as much a claim to Wagner as anyone.

Wagner, Wagner, everywhere

Contemporary audiences watching ‘The Ring’ will feel right at home. Hollywood’s penchant for the epic is mirrored in the opera, which aims to explain the rise and fall of the gods and man as something inescapable and eternal.

Admittedly, it’s a little more ambitious than your usual box office fare, but don’t tell James Cameron that.

Explaining just what happens in the three operas that comprise the ring would take far too long to explain, (though if you’re really interested and want a good laugh,the late British comedian Anna Russel explains it as good as anyone), but it’s no less obtuse than the Transformers movies.

The early 21st Century blockbuster is essentially a Wagnerian exercise: National myth-making serving as an excuse for outlandish pyrotechnics. In Wagner’s case, the fireworks were auditory, in Hollywood’s, it’s visual effects, but otherwise, the two are identical.

Both Wagner and Hollywood offer up undefined angst, epic struggles and the imagery of a fallen world (see: Terminator Salvation, anything by J.J. Abrams or the upcoming The Last Airbender, if you don’t believe me) and it’s easy to draw comparisons between Wagner’s age and our own. They are both times in which the world is profoundly shifting, but with the old order yet to be toppled.

A deep sense of dread pervaded Germany in the 1860s, just as it does in America today and Wagner, breaking free of the fanciful ornate music of the late-Romantic era, sought to capture that feeling just as Hollywood does today. After all, harnessing the zeitgeist equals big bucks.

This is the enduring power of ‘The Ring.’ Like all great art, it tells us more about ourselves than it says about itself.

And of course, Hollywood’s no stranger to Wagner. Consider the Looney Tunes classic, ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’, which parodies ‘The Ring’ with Elmer Fudd as the heroic Siegfried.

The Ring Festival occurs at venues throughout Los Angeles now through the beginning of June.
For more information on the L.A. Opera’s production of Der Ring Des Niebelungen, go here.