Pissing in the Wind: Death of a Cliche Title

So, Arthur Miller is dead, huh? Too bad. The Crucible was good, and I thought Death of a Salesman was pretty interesting. I liked the part when Biff went postal and started shooting SCUD missiles at his office building from atop a grassy knoll, screaming "Say 'ello to my little friend" with guns ablaze, and his shirt torn open, exposing a "Thug Life" tattoo across his chiseled abs. Good times, good times.

I'm going to level with you here: I know very little about Arthur Miller and his work. To be perfectly honest, when news reports went out saying "Arthur Miller is dead," my first reaction was, "Arthur Miller was alive?" And apparently he was, and apparently now, he's not. Frankly, I was more concerned with the death of Rick James than of Arthur Miller. Not to mention ODB. At least with those you were just waiting for the autopsies of those drug-bloated corpses.

This might strike some readers of The Enfranchised as strange, since the writings and topics of choice for this blog tend to be literary, with the founders' scientific backgrounds sometimes creeping through. But since I consider myself more of a houseguest than a tenant (think the Kato Kalin of blogs), I'm sort of the odd man out. This is especially so with regards to the overall voice at The Enfranchised. As the name might suggest, the blog could be thought of as the voice of an oppressed majority. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the postings never really reflect that. And in my opinion, that's a good thing. I'd much rather read a collection of rants and articles not tied down to any ideology or common voice for that matter. And in my own, liberal-guiltish way, I find the latter preferable. Granted I'm a white male, from a middle-class suburb, educated in a New England private school, but that's about all I have in common with WASP culture. Plus I'm a gay, communist amputee. Power to the people.

But enough disclaimers. Baron von Foster touched on an interesting topic in his turn at upwind urination, namely, the role of blogs. Thanks to the internet--and kudos to Al Gore--it seems that everyone has a blog nowadays. Dan & Dan have one (of which I am a proud contributor). I have one. Even the Prime Minister of Ukraine has a freaking blog. In short, blogs are going the way of assholes--everyone has them, and mostly they smell like shit.

I could be an aspiring author and write the wittiest, most well-written (or is it best written? Obviously this is hypothetical) essays in my blog and no one could read it. I could write salacious lies about elected officials and world leaders, and I bet people would probably read it then (and believe it). For example: the Pope is actually dead. Has been for years. It's like Weekend at Bernie's in the Vatican. That, and Dick Cheney is gay.

Someone searching in google for "Dick Cheney gay" or "Pope Bernie" might come to this blog, and if I wrote an entire expose about Cheney's gayness, or the Pope's deadness, who's to stop me? My editor? My sponsors? My (laugh) sense of decency? It's sort of a double edged sword: freedom of speech, but a little too free... Or as my gay friend Dick Cheney might say when speaking Pope-like zombie-talk, "must...stifle...dissent..."

So in an internet full of blogs, how do you get your readers? Put metaphorically, if a blog falls in the forest, would anyone hear it? Put succinctly, who the fuck cares what I/we write? And should we even care if anyone does? Hence, comrade Bentley's google ad about Arthur Miller.

Maybe some people were directed to this blog and found it interesting. Perhaps more found it ungrammatical drivel and puked on their keyboards. (me no see why). Probably, a lot are wondering about the necessity for all this self-indulgent introspection. Either way, I'd hope no one would come here expecting a blog devoted entirely to Arthur Miller. What would that be like anyway? "Update: he's still dead." "Further update: Arthur Miller rocks!" "Breaking news: his fingernails have grown. Arthur Miller lives!"

So basically what I'm saying is that Arthur Miller is dead, and unless some literary psycho wants to go papal on his ass, he's going to stay that way. You should probably go read one of his plays, that way you can commiserate with the cultured community, and talk about the great scene where John Proctor throws miniature crucibles at the undead to stop them from eating all of Salem's candy. And thus, Halloween was born.

Silver

The first 1000 words of a story. Please, tell me if I should bother writing the rest:

Cindy Whittaker picked up the next DVD on the rack. Sissy Scoffield was "radiant and graceful" according to one of the reviewers. "Gives the performance of a lifetime," raved another. "Her obvious charm and endearing smile light up the screen," dared one critic (who had had one script anonymously rejected by every major studio and subsequently gave up attempting to create). Of course, Cindy knew better. Sissy was an anorexic shrew of an up-and-coming alcoholic, and not the best trailer-mate Cindy had ever had. She smiled knowingly and replaced the DVD to its--

"You're Cindy Whittaker," said a male perched on the precarious border of prepubescence and adolescence. "Oh my God, you're Cindy Whittaker."

"Hi."

"I'm your biggest fan. You are so-- I'm your biggest fan. I know everyone says that, but I've liked you since 'Heart Transplant'. Remember that? Straight-to-video, but I camped out anyway. Can I have your autograph? I have to have your autograph."

Cindy smiled. "Of course. What can I sign?"

"Oh, shoot. I don't think I have--" The youth searched his pockets, finding a pen, but no paper. He glanced at his loose shirt and, idea in mind, back up at her, a guilty look crossing his face. "Can I sign your breasts?" He was red before he finished saying. "I mean--" He stammered. "If you could, I mean, my chest. I don't have any paper, but you can write on skin. Really. Sometimes you have to shake the pen, but eventually the ink will--"

She laughed. It's not unusual for a teenage male to fumble contact with the opposite sex so disastrously. But in this case, he had good cause. Cindy started life as one of those adorable children who can light up an entire room and never grew out of it. Men who were talking to her would discreetly leave their wedding bands in their pockets while they conversed. And, what's more, she hadn't an inkling of the effect she had on people. Cindy Whittaker was born a movie star; she had no need to spend her childhood balancing books to learn posture or applying make-up to flatten out her nose. She just had to wait for someone to turn the camera on her.

"How about," she moved her hand past Sissy's tripe of a film to one she had starred in, opening its case and taking the boy's pen, "I sign this copy of 'Say It Like You Mean It.' Do you know that one?"

"Of course I do. I saw it three times in the theater with my girlfriend!" Her admirer would spend the rest of his adult life wondering why he admitted to her there was anyone else of a romantic nature in his life.

She gave him the signed disc and, knowing nothing else to say, he ran away. More men, she thought, would do well to follow his example of not overstaying one's welcome.

"I'll gladly pay for the movie, I'm sorry, I didn't even think--" she looked to the cashier, and fumbled in her purse for her wallet.

"How about," he said, a glint of a scheme in his eye, "I just let you rent it, and you forget to return it, and we forget to care."

"Thanks," she said, a bit suspicious. Living in Hollywood, she'd gotten used to seeing glints of schemes, and it had never turned out well. "I don't know what to say."

"Say you'll go out to dinner with me." Brian Seston realized (for that was the cashier's name) that sometimes clichés just are the right thing to say.

"Why?" Cindy had long ago gotten used to people wanting things from her; by now she was just curious about motivations.

"That kid won't stop smiling for weeks. When he referred to your--" Brian had lasted longer than most males, but like most males had found his train of thought derailed by--

"My breasts. You can say it."

"When he slipped up his statement, I thought he was going to end up crying into his pillow tonight. You're obviously able to think on your feet, so you get points for wit, and you're also charitable enough to put in the effort to spare him, so, points for some combination of pity and kindness."

Cindy wasn't used to so much praise that didn't mention her skills or her-- (I can say it) her assets. She knew it was an off-chance, but did he? Maybe she was being too vain, I mean, there's a decent chance, not everybody, "Do you know who I am?" Ohmygod that sounded too arrogant. She's not trying to get out of a speeding ticket--

"I work in a video store, Ms. Whittaker." He pointed upwards and at that moment, on 14 televisions throughout the store, there was Cindy sitting in a car and "having a bad feeling about this" in "Hitchhiking", a mediocre horror movie that grossed $32 million in its first weekend. "I know who you are."

It was Cindy's turn to be embarrassed. "How much did you say the video was?"

"3.25."

She blew a strand of her brown hair out of her face while fishing around for the bills. "If you know who I am, then why do you think I'm free for dinner for some video store clerk? I could have important photo shoots in Milan to get to. On a chartered jet." Off-putting was not Cindy's best or most-practiced mood, but she had seen other starlets use it to get out of situations made uncomfortable. She thrust the wadded-up dollars over the counter.

He took them gently and dropped them into the cashbox. "You may be a movie star. Everyone may know your name. And while I'd disagree with our shorter friend that 'Say It Like You Mean It' was an artistic apogee, I'll readily admit you were quite great in 'Mind Over Matter'. But, let's be honest: it's a Thursday afternoon and you're in a video store franchise paying to rent your own movie. I think you have time for a quiet meal."

Pissing Into the Wind: Pissing Into the Wind

This post is a lot like Dan's dear old mum: late, lackluster and notable mainly for its holes.

Ok, so that analogy was a bit off-sides. Truth is, I don't know how the shit to make this topic funny.

I told Dan as much when he posted it the other day.

"But, its about death!" he said. "Death is ALWAYS funny."

"No, Dan." I says to him. "Its about advertising. And advertising is the least funny thing in this and all reasonably promixate universes."

"Shit, I dunno." He scratched his head. "Imagine.....product placement on tombstones."

There is, of course, no accounting for taste.

But what's worse is that, in the absence of humor, I don't even know how to make this post interesting. It seems to me this is a non-issue. Should we be profitting from the death of a great artist and social critic, even a much-loved one? Why, no, Yoko, we shouldn't. But it doesn't seem to me that we here at The Enfranchised ARE profitting from it. We are not, for instance, selling "Death of a Playwright" t-shirts or commemorative porcelein "Cruci-bowls". Nor are we claiming to be in receipt of a homemade, super-steamy, uncensored Miller-Monroe Technicolor (R) Moving Picture, coming soon (for a fee) to your 16mm Reel-to-Reel.

No, sir. If we living white men are guilty of any crime against that dead one, it's that we deign think we've got something meaningful to add to the discourse on his demise. We've perhaps gotten it into our heads that the world, or at least the digital world, gives half-a-kilobyte about what we have to say. So we use our meagre pull with the Oracle at Google to siphon away a few well-intentioned furrowed-brow intellectual types from the standard fare at salon-dot-com and The Times, to our little den of triumphant WASPism, where we offer up only the best in self-congratulatory, obscure references (Jude the Obscure-obscure, not The Mayor of Casterbridge-obscure; after-all, we want to make you feel as snarky and clever as us). But if class-solidarity through the public-exhibition of exclusivist, jargon-filled rhetoric is a crime, then surely Michael Moore, my "Postcolonial Studies" professor, and the editorial staff at The New Yorker should all be in jail.

Unfortunately, I'm not nearly so good a writer as Dan would like to think that I like to think I am. In fact, I'm fairly sure I misused "gotten" in the previous paragraph, but I don't really know because I'm just THAT mediocre. So, I'm not too worried about the repercussions of our nontroversial choice to market to the "reader-of-armchair-punditry-about-recently-deceased-playwrights" crowd. Fact is, even with the extra Google hits, we're just a blog in a sea of blogs, no different from this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one. And what's more, we don't even have an interesting "underrepresented" or "repressed" or "marginalized" take on things. As the name of the blog suggests, the only thing marginal about us is our talent.

Therefore I say fret not, Fearless Moderator. I doubt you'll have to wring your hands or consult your scriptures too much over this one. I think its cute and endearing that you see our convoluted method for getting the little boxes of numbers at the bottom of our page to change more frequently as presenting an ethical dilemma about the price of exposure. But if you're really convinced that our b-musings here are going to make any of us famous, well, I've got a real estate investment I'd like to talk to you about.

You're right about one thing, though. And that's that, once we've hooked the reader, once she's come this far, she can't stop. That's right, I'm talking to you. Don't even THINK about not reading the rest of this post.

Every. Last. Word. Of it.

Now they've gone and done it...

Everytime the little man has an idea, the "Man" steals it from him. Now, you'd think we'd appreciate this: being The Enfranchised, we're normally on the stealing end of that equation. We've been talking about Arthur Miller these past few days (in fact, odds are, you were directed here in search of information. Scroll down to see me follow the sordid chain of events.) But just when we're examining (in Pissing in the Wind, our crossfire-like panel discussion when my two co-bloggers try to out-ad hominem cable pundits) the ethics of getting attention from someone(else)'s death, I see this article in the Times.

A contestant in NBC's The Contender (a reference to On The Waterfront, an early version of which was scripted by none other than corpse of the hour Mr. Miller) committed suicide. NBC denies it's related to the events of the show, but you can't expect Joe Schmo to really believe that. I mean, he's dead now, by his own hand. Don't you think people would be watching his hurt feelings a little... closer. And imagine the grief of his family, forced to revisit... (If you haven't cried about it today, It's New To You! (Director's Cut joke for this parenthetical: something involving Must See. Do I really have to connect all the dots for you?))

NBC, of course, is not canceling the show. They're not even shelving it for a period of grieving. According to executives, nothing is changing.

Ha! Nothing is changing? Like this won't end up as a "Very Special Contender" or a lead-in of a Barbara Walters interview with the tear-stricken survivors (not Survivors -- that's a different network).

I guess the challenge, then, is not whether we should profit, in readership or ratings, over someone's death. But how to do it more efficiently than a unit of GE.

Pissing In The Wind: Autopsy of a Post-Mortem of an Obituary inside an Enigma

If you were reading this website 4 days ago, odds are I knew you. Today, however, odds are you clicked on an ad from google.com. You're looking for information about Arthur Miller. I followed reports of his death here. But we here at the Enfranchised have a broader vision. Part of that vision is, once a week, to argue.

And so, the question before us today is, should another part of that vision be opportunistic advertising? Bidding on keywords we tangentially discuss at best to lure readers into our spider's web of a site? Is it all right to commemorate one of our fallen comrades by using his demise as our foot in the door?

Of course, we're not alone. David Mamet banged out a tribute, just in case you forgot that he had not disappeared after Glengarry Glen Ross. (obligatory one-liner: I watched the network TV version of GGGR last night. It ran 15 minutes) Our ad was placed on google.com within 50 minutes of the news breaking, but since then such reputable establishments as NPR and the New York Times have outbid us for the traffic of mourners. So, we're at least in good company in our blatant grab at readership through morbidity.

So, commentators, tell me, is this how we want to become famous? Grabbing the eyeballs of innocent travelers wishing to console their grief over tragedy with information? Or are we, in
fact, just that desperate?

Also, in a well-structured 5-paragraph essay, choose any character from The Crucible and discuss what, if any, mistakes they make in the context of honesty, history, and the Protestant Work Ethic.