PITW: Bread and Circuses

Pardon me if I stray from my role as moderator to smack some sense into my "peers."

To Foster: It's not that I have any strong desire for the hub-bub of professional sports to overtake the college arena. Once money is explicitly on the table, any pretense of tradition or themes or association would be lost. In their quest for players, schools would have to negotiate on cold dollars instead of warm fantasies of being say "Lady Vols" or "Demon Deacons". (Why any athlete would want to be part of these to begin with is beyond me). In a land of recruiting with contracts and bonuses instead of below-table bling would we ever find a team that could, on sheer will of consistency, compete with the Filibusters' record for single season overtimes? No. No we could not. (To those of you who take my word as gospel: don't try breaking that fact out as canon. In fact, there is no team the Filibusters. But as I write this, I realize that they sound much more like an Asian Archipelago Demoltion Unit than they do an obscure procedural trick anthropomorphized).

To 'Athan: As I was at the NCAA tournament in Kansas City (which is in Missouri. WTF? That's the kind of ill logic that belongs in Canada. Then again, so does the entire Midwest), I found the girl for you. Knowing your fetish for all things absurd and blonde, I present to you the future Mrs. PoopShit. This 6-4 mountain of a matron could make a quaker out of a presbyterian. During foul shots, we chanted "Fee Fie Fo Fum" in between the sound of her mammoth feet leaving potholes in the court. As she palmed the pig skin (I'm not confusing basketball and football her, she just brought pork rinds with her), she would engage in defense by using her gravitational influence to shape the arc of an opponent's shot, removing any hope of goal-tending calls by warping time, space, and the vision of the refs as she deftly weaved her body using calves that had as much thrust as a Pratt & Whitney 350FG Turbofan.

I mean, shit.

Would you like Freedom Fries with that?

Contrary to Foster and his distaste for collegiate basketball (and penchant for JV field hockey), I'm a big fan of this topic. Unlike our recent ones, it doesn't involve eulogizing some dead white dude who used words to big for me to understand (like eulogy), or this so-called "science" or "computers" of which I've heard so much about. Finally, a topic that every freedom loving, God and immigrant-fearing American can relate to: sports. (Need I bring up the suspicious fact that when this topic was presented, Foster conveniently fled to France, possibly to molest unwitting, underage croissants...).

Anyway, Foster makes a number of points, most of them sexually perverse. We've heard them all before: athletes are stupid; they're corrupt ingrates; women have no place driving cars; and so forth. Needless to say, I disagree with most of what Foster says, particularly the part about kicking puppies for sport.

First off, are student-athletes the hyphenated beings they're made out to be? Foster thinks not, and I think so. Sure you get the occasional Jim Harrick "Coaching 101" exam that asks Varsity Basketball players on the final exam, "How many points is a 3-pointer worth?" (find the link yourself, dammit), but I'm not willing to make the blanket statement that all athletes are like that. For every Maurice Clarrett, you have a Shane Battier or Emeka Okafur, not to mention the walk-ons. I'm not naive enough to say that Allen Iverson took the most academically strenuous courseload at Georgetown, but if you change the schools from Georgetown or Stanford to Miami or Ohio St., how much more work do you think Joe Fraternity did there than The Answer at G'Town? And note, elephant-walking doesn't count as a class (if you don't know what it is, you're missing out on a good joke).

Even at the elite universities with good athletics, you'd need to extend the anti-athlete argument to all those legacy kids whose names include suffixes with numbers. I wouldn't be particularly against this extension of the argument, but you have to remember why this is done in the first place: bling.

For every generation of Winthrops or Cabots or Bush's you let into your college, you raise the chance of getting a new building erected (heh) as that trust fund amasses. Sure it runs contrary to the ideals our nation was founded upon, but colleges gotta feed their babies too. To make a rambling point short: hate the game, not the player.

Aside from the above "logical" arguments, I'd say schools gain from admitting "underqualified" athletes in non-financial ways as well. As I've theorized before, smart kids are ugly, so athletes are hot. I don't know how I could have gotten through 2 hours of psychology if not for ogling the shotputting ogre in front of me every Monday and Wed. "Damn! Look at those traps! I wonder how much she benches... I wonder how much she can drink... I wonder what her hair smells like... I wonder what her back hair smells like..." Mmmmm. Sweet memories.

Aside from the general deliciousness athletes bring to campus, I don't see how you can be against someone doing you such a big (and sweaty) favor on the curve. Lord knows I don't want to always be that lone dot all the way to the left of the peak. If letting in a few more fullbacks brings me a standard deviation closer to the mean, I say come on in.

This is all without even bringing up the school spirit argument. I've said it once and I'll say it again: you can't tailgate for a chess match. Nor can you paint your chest for a concerto, or vomit in the bleachers during Hamlet.

I really can't think of anything else to say, so let me end this with a joke:

Q: What do you call a man with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art.

(Same post, different blog)

Unbunch your panties

Normally I try to be good about responding to PITWs, but unfortunately I've spent the weekend hacking up a lung and stealing my 3-year old cousin's jelly beans at my Aunt's house. Needless to say, my mind is currently backed up with mucus and chocolate, and all I can think about is tonight's pending Desperate Housewives and going to bed soon thereafter.

So I promise to respond tomorrow. And the response will be bigger than Jesus.

March-Madness's Arch-Badness

If the play on words in the title of this piece hangs together about as well as the diorama in Dan's seventh grade science project, cut me some slack: I'm on vacation. Or practically--I'm leaving for Frohnce and, eventually, Spain, in two motherfucking hours. And as sexy as the idea of typing this post on the Chunnel Train (Ethan Hunt style) is, I can't quite bring myself to take my laptop into a country which has already displayed great gusto for bending me over and giving me the old blitzkreig right up my Maginot Line.

Frogs aside, I'm not crazy about the flavor of this week's piss. It has a decent bouquet, fine mouthfeel, but the uric acid marches all over the fruit; the subtle notes of ginger, lemongrass, and nitrogenous waste materials are lost. What I mean to say is, its a non-question for DR. F; another pseudo-problem summarily dispatched by the finest intellect of the 21st century.

The thing about Dan's question is it breaks the FIRST rule of denial: You can't have your delusion and eat it too. Viz., as soon as we start talking about college basketball players as deserving some sort of compensation (that is, as soon as we recognize that basketball players are profitable for universities) the mirage that many of them have any right to BE at a university disappears like the Leviathan's wedding band at a nursing home (think about it). Come on, the reason college athletes are unpaid is so we who sit on the Board of Trustees (and we here at the Enfranchised sit on ALL boards-of-trustees) can keep our fingers wedged firmly in our ears and tell ourselves they're students first. But the truth is most of these kids aren't even students EIGHTH. They're ball-players, and that's a fine thing. Nothing wrong with being a ball player. (Hell, if I had a jumpshot do you think I'd be writing drivel for this rag?) Still, I've got a sneaking suspicion that Allen Iverson didn't catch all the subtleties of G. John Ikenberry's seminar's on American power while he was at Georgetown. 'Na mean?

Now, as soon as we start throwing around big, Marxy sounding words like "Labor" and "Proletariot", and wondering whether these athletes--who bring in big bucks for their schools--should get paid, why then the NCAA's New Clothes start to look an awful lot like their Birthday Suit (Look people, I can't make all the connections for you, I'm on a clock here). In other words, even asking that question should make Duke and UNC blush. The short answer, then, is that if college ballers want to get paid, they shouldn't be college ballers. What about the nearly-dead white men at the universities that profit from these amateurs? Well, that ain't right either. And just because it shows no signs of changing doesn't mean we should compound it with a further slutting-up of the NCAA. As it stands, the system works a lot like Reno, lets not make it Vegas.

Let me be the 1,242,569,382nd to say that the NBA ought to consider a farm system for developing young talent to take the place of college ball. As I'm sure that my reputation for humility precedes me, I'll humbly suggest that college athletes stay paid in the same old currency they've ALWAYS been paid in: soft grades and high-quality trim. It isn't exactly a hard-knock life for your average college jock. I had the distinction of living amongst them at a dorm RESERVED for their likes at GWU last year. Most were adequately blinged and drove sports cars, and GW didn't even make it into the sweet sixteen.

Though, I can confirm that our power forward made it into some sweet sixteens on his own...and a few baht mitzvahs.

-The Natural

Not bad for 25 minutes eh?

Pissing In The Wind: March Madness

Well, my bracket's shot. The Leviathan's, imbued with the results of hours of careful study, bears about as much resemblance to reality as, well, The Leviathan. Foster replaced basketball teams with philosophers on his, and unless Sartre makes it to the Final Four, he's fucked. So, we need something else with which to amuse ourself. Hence, pissing.

So, let's keep it simple: Why should NCAA student-athletes be amateur? Is this jsut another excuse to exploit the wage-labor of a teenaged proletariat? Or is it a genuine attempt to make them love the sport and the program?

Do your worst.

Sexistentialism

This Saturday, I had occasion to sojourn (with a group of visiting Americans) to what, according to my source, was a "cocktail bar" called the Walkabout. We found it in one of the less couth corners of Leicester Square--for those unfamiliar with London's topography, Leicester (Leh-ster) Square is just northeast of Piccadilly Circus, which is about as garish and loud as London gets; think 42nd and Broadway meets Japanese gameshow. Anyhow, we came upon the place, and waited in the queue, where the shadows ran from themselves. At this point something crazy happened. I handed five quid to a bald Northman with an ill-favored look about him; and in exchange he lowered a velvet rope and urged me into what, if you pressed me to guess, was either the third or the fourth circle of hell.

It seems that--on a good day, in the smoke-wisped darkness with a few sickly-sweet, overpriced cocktails in you, hell looks an awful lot like a night club. Or, if not a "club", then a "cocktail bar" so closely resembling a club that the distinction is academic at best. Dark, dank, desperate and deafening--it sucks the English youtharazzi down into a place not so closely resembling London.

I took off my jacket, ordered a pint, took some half-measures towards dancing with my girlfriend, and settled in for some people-watching. Much to my disappointment, though, I didn't manage to spot any people. Instead, I caught a side-long, strobe-lit glimpse of what Kierkegaard mornfully labeled "the Public"...what Nietzsche contemptuously dubbed "the Herd"...what MTV CEO Judy McGrath ruefully calls "the Audience".

Somewhere between the seventh and ninth movements of 50 cent's Harlem concertos, I got to thinking about sensory deprivation torture--a little bag of tricks dabbled in by the CIA and Mossad, but raised to the level of an art form by the KGB. No, I'm not talking about the Five Techniques the marines at Git-mo have so recently been pooh-poohed for using--no black hoods or "stress positions". What I have in mind is the much softer, and more diabolical, form of deprivation first studied by D.O. Hebb at McGill University (fucking Canadians). Hebb's and others' findings described a family of techiques aimed at muting the senses, at cutting off the brain from external stimuli. One of the more complex deprivation apparatae has its subjects sealed in a soundproof, pitch-black tank, and placed supine in a solution of water and epsom salts so saturated that it makes one neutrally bouyant. This sensory desert robs from a person even her experience of gravity, and since the air and the water are kept at the same temperature, even tactile sensations are dulled. Alternative medicine freaks herald the tank as a tool for acheiving higher-consciousness and creativity through the prolonging of semi-conscious theta-states, but Hebb and his colleagues originally had quite a different use in mind: that of 'prepping' subjects for brainwashing.

Just imagine you're a Komrad Kolonel in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate. You've recently discovered that a Party boss's daughter has been passing-off state secrets to the American consulate between ballet lessons. Now, she's too high-profile to "take care" of that way, but nevertheless her behavior needs to be...corrected, and her future loyalty to Mother Russia ensured. Your solution: slip a mickie into her Stolichnaya, pump her full of muscle relaxers and Sodium Pentathol, and have her wake up to find that she's lost her body and now exists solely as a free-floating consciousness, alone in timeless, endless, blackness. Chances are she'll be open to...rehabilitation.*

So what does all this have to do with my Saturday night with the Herd at Walkabout? Only this: the Western night club is sensory deprivation in reverse. Instead of withdrawl, it gives you inundation; instead of lulling you into acceptance, it beats you into supplication. Ambient light is taken from you, compressed with a sickening crunch, and torpedoed through the darkness at a hundred miles an hour. Music is boiled; the distillate is NOISE at your eardrums and BEAT in your shoes. Sweat, booze, and ashes, all doused with cheap perfume, play a sort of olefactory zero-sum game, each fighting the others off, resulting in a kind of nasal static. And touch...Well, next time you're in da' club, you make your way through thirty yards of dance floor to the bar, and you tell me that the corridor of slippery fabric and slipperier flesh through which you burrow isn't like unto a birth canal. And like a birth canal, you come out the other side confused, disoriented, upset, and out of breath--and inexorably covered in the sticky residue of humanity.

But to what end, this sensory superfluity? To me, it's obvious. We overload our perceptual gear because we want to forget--to forget what we are: awkwardly embodied selves; weak, contingent, little epistemic beings, unsure of everything, endlessly aware of the schism between Me and You. As Trent Reznor vis-a-vis Johnny Cash sang it: "You are someone else/I am still right here".

So we swim, not in water and epsom salt, but in bodies and ethanol. We close off the dicey world of physicality and endeavor to become timeless, spaceless consciousness, or--since our end in the club isn't higher knowledge of the self but carnal knowledge of others--we aim to unleash pure consciousness of the Id, unfettered by self-consciousness (for how could we grind so arhythmically, kiss so sloppily, or grope so violently without quite literally forgetting ourselves). For a few fleeting moments, wrapped in the Walkabout's burlap bag and beaten with popular culture, we manage to transcend the insecurities, the idiosyncricies, the pockmarks and the sneaking suspicion that there's more to the opposite sex than the crude utility of their flesh.

But, lo, there is nothing sadder than when the effect has run its course: the young chap who's sobered up enough to surmise that the spasmic contortions of his extremities have failed to amount to 'dancing'; the candy-girl who realizes she's been giving our friend just enough of her lips to keep him from wondering off between songs; the older chap who hovers around the periphery, five years too-old to be here, clutching his lager and keeping the beat from the neck up. These are all freshly awakened individuals; bona fide persons--for all the lonliness and ugliness that that entails--broken off from the pack, from what Sartre would call the "Group-in-Fusion" whose neurotic mass have checked their very selves at the door with their coats. They've woken up to the absurdity of these dark, noisy rituals and realized, perhaps only temporarily, that transcendence isn't in cranking up the volume on sense-data, no more than it is in muting it.

And the die-hards--whose stamina and denial keeps them gyrating through the fourth repetition of that Black Eyed Peas jam--call those of us who fall ass backwards into our selves squares or "wallflowers". But I'm fairly sure the Cosmic Joke is on them: we're all wallflowers, some of us just forget where to stand.



NOTES
*If this sounds like a subplot from a Tom Clancy novel, that's because it is.

Punks for Christ

Jesus on the Half-Pipe

::blink::

Apparently... There are now youth ministers... The Jesus kind... who do their evangelizing... by doing skateboard tricks.

I say this all with what must seem like a great deal of hesitation because before every phrase I double check my sources to make sure that's right. But yes, in fact, the idea seems to be to "Ollie for the Lord." Pop shove it, then pray.

Quoth one Right Reverend Skater: 'You can skate and not be a punk. You can be about respect for parents, and abstinence, and no drugs.'

'Or, as Mr. Moore put it: "I knew God had given me this gift, and I knew I wanted to glorify him with my skateboard. I wanted to stoke God out."'

To stoke God out?

What happened to the good old days? When you could have more than one characteristic. Skate on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and alternate Fridays. Be known as a Christian on the others. But in these days of specialization the only way to be understood is to have one trade, no matter how specific or unrelated the trades in which you jack.

I guess I just fear for what comes next in the realm of confusing religious/secular mergers. Fire-eating Friars? Buddhist Car Salesmen? A pope who surfs? Heck, a pope who's alive would be enough of a change. Quaker Seismologists? Jews for Jesus?

Thoughts from a Finals Week-addled Brain

There I was, minding my own business, just reading about the implementation of Relational Database Management Systems (RBDMS's). Y'know, as I am wont to do. Now, computer scientists are funny people. They live in a world of abstraction, and view as the primary skill one can learn in life the ability to forget the trees for the forest. And then have the forest need to be restarted every 10 minutes.

But this is not a lesson about computer scientist's people skills (it would already be over) nor forestry, and considering what I ended up getting on that final, certainly not one about RBDMS's. Instead, I quote a very learned source (Database Systems, The Complete Book, by Garcia-Molina, Ullman, and Widom), talking about the order in which to take computer statements and save their results. (this is on page 973, section 18.8.4) It says that in certain situations the type of software it describes must "[abort] T (if T would violate physical reality)".

::blink::

If T would violate physical reality? What? if I do this wrong, are monkeys going to begin flying out of my butt? Or stop flying out of The Leviathans? Would Foster start being funny? How could that result from the sequence of pretend actions a typewriter-on-steroids chooses?

The answer, of course, is that this is just an example of a poorly chosen metaphor. But, y'know, so is my typewriter-on-steroids one. So is, in fact, almost everything about computers: windows, mail, sites, engines, mice, the information superhighway, Al Gore. These are all like their real-life counterparts, but slightly different, off-putting and boring.

It is only when we get to IM'ing, xanga'ing, googling, dot-coms that we find a place where the computers are willing to forge truly new paths. They are not replacements for everything from the ploughshare to the stapler, they are computers. They are not HAL, they are not WOPR, they are not Microsoft Bob. They are computers.

And if you still feel the need to anthropomorphize computers (please don't: they hate that), then just think about one thing a computer can do that no human ever could:

If you tell a computer not to think about a pink elephant in a magenta tutu dancing the tango... it won't.

Dan and His Discontent

Whew-- So I don't read and/or post to my blog in a little over two weeks and just LOOK what happens: Dan goes on a tear; a tour de force; a dimestris mirabilis of consistent sexcellence. In the space of mere days he publishes the tender and pensive "Retrospective"; "Why the internet will never replace being smart" and "The Powers of Ten that Be" with their anti-platonist technological skepticism, their dystopian echoes and their underlying humanism; and, of course, the two charged, angry fragments against the cultural logic of late capitalism that together would come to be known by generations of critics as "The Douche-Bag Papers." Of course, saddled amidst these seminal works of ontoblogical exegesis are two rather unfortunate forays into fiction, which most scholars (perhaps with justice) are prepared to forgive as the overextension (or, to some, the hubris) of a great mind.

From time to time, I here at The Enfranchised like to take a few moments and reflect (aloud) on the work of my colleague. I do this in the spirit of dialectical rigor; and also because it saves me from having to think about my own thoughts (as George Bernard Shaw so famously quipped: "Those who can't do, quote George Bernard Shaw.") So, to this end, here's some comments and conjectures:

-In "My SAT score is now average", Dan makes an elliptical allusion (by means of a pun-deployed URL link) to what, I can only assume, is a letter-to-the-Editor of his once published by the New York Times. Of course, as any of you who were curious enough to follow the link in the hopes of it leading to a pictorial essay on the hernia examination can attest, the URL belongs to a section of the Times website inaccessible to non-members. Is this an oversight on Dan's part? Or has it deeper meaning as some kind of audience-participation analogue to the general elitism of the piece? Perhaps neither. My own hypothesis (sadly unconfirmable, since Dan and I haven't been on speaking terms since that May in '68, in Paris) is that it speaks to his conviction that adding the place-name "New York" to anything makes it sound posher and more worthy of our chin-stroking. Observe: "The Hackensack School of Air Conditioner Maintenance and Repair" sounds dull and provincial; but hehold "The New York Institute for the Edification of Interior Climate-Regulation Apparatae." I know what you're thinking, 'Didn't Chomsky study there?' The answer, of course, is yes, he did.

-In "The Powers of Ten that Be", Dan again reveals in print his two minds about the Enlightenment thesis that the rational sciences and their progeny hold the key to human progress. Sadly, Dan himself commits one of the all-time worst logical blunders: the Phallus Fallacy. He says:

"Allow me to quote a sage mentor: "How do you make my dick 8 inches long?" "Fold it in half." This 2/3 foot phallus is still only 4 times as long as D.R.F.'s semblance of an organ: less than an order of magnitude separates us.

Instead, it is McCormack's Reaper, Whitney's Gin (Cotton, not the Christmas Tree liquor), McCoy's Not a Bricklayer, He's a Doctor, and such contraptions of the 19th Century that introduced the idea that one man, no matter how great, even if he were John Henry, could not match up against machines measured in Hundreds of Horsepower. (I don't believe in posthumous medal ceremonies).

Can anyone make sense of this second paragraph? Neither can I. But this is to be expected: utter an absurdity (in this case, one about the righteousness of my Johnson, which in truth is as long and distinguished as the list of universities from which Dan received rather thin envelopes) and patent nonsense follows.

-Lastly, in "The only Mechanics...", Dan is a bit unfair vis-a-vis International Relations majors. Therein he says: "how many times have I seen an International Relations major (in my fraternity, we called them IR unemployed majors) try to woo a girl at a party with long, soft elucidations on the nature of the cosmos only to learn that she was herself a physics major...)". Now, I'd like to tell you what's wrong with Dan's thinking here, but unfortunately I am strictly speaking unable to mentally parse and process any string of symbols that follows directly after "in my fraternity".

-Bigus Dickus

My SAT score is now average

Andy Warhol once... well, thinking about it, I suppose there are few things he didn't do. But we all know that "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes" quote. Well, the thing about exponential population growth and the societal onset of Adult ADD/ADHD is that 15 minutes was optimistic. Instead, figure you get maybe one good mention in a semi-prestigious source. (*cough*) So, man, wouldn't it suck if you got that one fleeting shot at renown before your voice (and other parts of anatomy) lowered?

Cf. this review of the new SAT. Specifically,
"Jacob Chase, 16, a junior at Roslyn High School, gathered with parents and test-takers around a group of cars. He said he had scored 'extremely high' last year on his PSAT, and on yesterday's SAT, the essay played right into one of his academic strengths: writing.

'One of my stronger points is writing, because in the future - in college or anything you do - it's a skill you're going to need,' said Jacob, adding that he had studied 15 hours a week for the test. He said that a good score would complement his résumé - he plays basketball and runs cross-country - and might help him get into colleges like Cornell."

This guy obviously deserves to be stuffed in a garbage can. And then rolled down a hill. After being set on fire. I like his commentary on the correct pedagogy, informed by his considered opinion on the progression of American industry. Let's be honest, "Jake": are you really going to find those writing skills in demand during the 7-10 years you spend as Bubba's Butt Bitch after your inept attempt at white collar crime is exposed? At least, (for Bubba's sake) you've spent all your time A) preparing for sports that create the lankiest of inmates (a good 2-mile time and the ability to drain 3's does little good in the shower) and B) memorizing the difference between a homonym and a homophone. Oh, and don't kid yourself: you're going to end up in the "prestigious" Honors Program at a mid-tier state school for exactly a semester and a half before your low-level meth addiction distracts your studies and you end up eking out after 5 years with a 2.3 GPA in Criminology.

-D"Go big or go home. I'm not attending any interventions until my friend has shown me he at least has the commitment to OD"an

Silver, Part 2

(continued from part 1)

And so he cooked her dinner. She came over to his place, expecting a wooing: posters of her (all taken *after* she turned 18, of course) decorating the place, newly-bought décor to evince a certain level of glamour. What she got was a typical twenty-something apartment, any and all style courtesy of Ikea's budget racks, with most of the t-shirts consolidated into one pile. The tablecloth was the only visible attempt to clean the place up, and it was the sort of thin plastic that one buys last-minute in the grocery store. For someone so used to the red carpet, it was new to walk into a space whose philosophy of interior decoration was afterthought.

Brian poured both of them a glass of wine. She took it and, as was polite, offered him the opportunity to show off his purchasing power and prowess. "What kind of red is this?" She settled in for a discourse on varietals and their respective bouquets--

"Umm, red?" And he went back to chopping the tomatoes. In the background he was playing a new pop tune. The band wasn't that great, and certainly weren't famous, but the song was catchy, reminded everyone who heard it of some tune they liked, and they were willing to do a cross-promotional music video. Of course, quickly, the table was set and light conversation was had. Comfortable and invigorating without being intellectually exhausting. The sun set and then the light was by candle. Of course, other dates happened later. They went ice skating (both of them were awful and said yes in the hope the other would be able to coach them as cute couples did, but instead just stumbled around the rink for an hour before succumbing to their mutual coldness). She convinced him to go jogging with her, and he survived only because she stopped to sign an autograph at the same intervals as he stopped to check if he was, in fact, as he believed having a heart attack.

As a romantic comedy fixture, Cindy had filmed many a montage and came closer than the next guy to understanding their purpose. Most people think a montage is used to show passage of time. How else would the audience understand that it was now a month later and a relationship was cemented? And this is wrong because the average audience member is not willing to accept the simple fact that audiences, of any medium are, by and large, stupid. They are willing to accept development wildly disproportionate to elapsed time.

No, the montage is the only way movies can hope to turn reality into real life. Real life is where we live. In real life, your girlfriend is the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. Your in-jokes are the funniest, your love life the greatest. There is a spark between you. Tangible. No one in your presence could deny it. Reality, however, is that you are two clothed primates drawn together by one of yours deep-seated feelings of insufficiency and the other's ticking biological clock.

Writers cannot craft a universally compelling narrative of love because no love is universally compelling. No compliment, no matter how loaded with adoration and praise means half as much as "nice sweater" coming from a beloved. No insult, no matter how laden with profanity and tales of sexual obscenity, hurts one-thousandth as much as a lover's uncertain glance. The reason for the montage is because it is impossible to write down, in all its particulars, a relationship. No imagination, even one infinitely better than reality, can match real life.

And so, we settle for a montage of scenes of pretty people doing activities we almost believe could lead to emotion. Only teenage girls and virgins could ever truly fall in love based on what they see on the screen. The rest of us leave the theater confident in our superior capability to engage in emotion. All because of the magic of cutting from scene to scene without allowing us to see what is actually going on.

Back at dinner (for despite talking about the running and the subsequent dates, dinner hadn't really ended), dessert, a nice crème brulee that was perfect to both of them despite its objectively obvious technical shortcomings, was finished they slowly drew together, a single whisper's distance from the other's cheek--

They kissed. They smooched. They necked. And soon (by now the pop song previously alluded to had hit its romantic climax) there was nudity. And there was sex. Not the kind of gratuitous nudity so popular in today's romantic comedies where all we get is a hint of buttocks or perhaps a passing frame of nipple. Honestly, whose first post-coital instinct is to (as Meg Ryan's characters invariably do) pull the sheet up to cover precisely enough of their breasts to attain a PG-13 rating while still leaving the promise of cleavage? No, they left the sheets scattered on the floor and basked in their mutual warmth. Their relationship was not built exclusively on the sex, but it was certainly a part of it.

Of course, the montage has to have distinct start and end points, or else the audience will perpetually fear their vantage point might jump out from under them. The best technique for signaling the end is a quick and drastic change in tone, to make it clear that the emotion (i.e., the beginning of a relationship) has crescendoed and should now move on. The more abrupt and surprising the zig and/or zag, the better--

"You're Cindy Whittaker!" came a voice out of the fog of disturbed sleep.

"What? Huh?" She rolled over and quite quickly refound her bra and indignation. "Who are you?"

"That's Tony, my roommate," said Brian. "Back from Philadelphia early? Right, no matter." Brian reached for his boxers, more calmly than Cindy's frantic grabbing at items of clothing. "Do you think maybe you could give us some, y'know, privacy?"

"You're Cindy Whittaker!"

"Out!"

Tony compromised on turning around and continuing with his droning. "I'm your biggest fan, I know everyone says that, but I really am. I even saw--"

"I have to go," said Cindy, to Brian. She turned to Tony, "I'm sorry, I appreciate your fan--"

"--you in that sleeper film noir feature you did: 'Café on the Brink of Sorrow'--"

"Don't mind him," Brian said. "He won't even notice you're gone for half an hour. He does this sometimes."

"You sure, cause, I don't want this to get weird?"

"Just go." They were both clothed, and Tony had turned back around to regale her with his Cindy Whittaker fan club bona fides. "I'll see you later?"

"Umm, yeah." Then came the moment of maximum awkwardness in any social interaction: the good-bye physical contact. The essential question of which is: What is appropriate given your history and current surroundings? Though it sounds trivial and unimportant, many men have gone crazy trying to learn its calculus and reasoning.

She extended her hand right as he went to kiss her. He backed off and took her hand, right as she leaned in towards him. The two seemed doomed to a vaudevillian back and forth (over the soundtrack of Tony's recounting of her filmography) before he pulled her in to him and kissed her. Really kissed her. A kiss that was hello, goodbye, and how you doing all in one. What more was there to do? She left.

Tony slapped his roommate on the back. "Pretty fucking incredible. You're sleeping with Cindy Goddamn Whittaker. My roommate is balling Cindy Whittaker. I mean, you have to wonder what she's thinking, right?"

"What? No."

"I mean, no offense. I think you're great. But you must know what I mean. She's--" he accented each syllable as if talking to a foreigner who had a solid grasp on English only when spoken slowly and loudly "Cin-dy Whit-a-ker."

"And I'm Brian Seston."

"Are you just messing with me? She's a movie star. She could have any guy she wants." He paused. Tony had a habit of pausing right before he said the wrong thing. In many people, this would be when they reevaluate whether it was actually worth saying, but somehow Tony still always said what was on his mind. "You-- you gotta figure she's just slumming it, right?"

"Is it really so foreign a concept that she might actually like me for me."

"No, I mean, you're a cool guy. I hang out with you. I live with you, it's great, really. But, you're a video store clerk. You have been for 5 years. You're not even a manager. I know, I know, you don't have ambitions to the bourgeois. But she's famous. She's on the internet."

"Yes, she's on the internet. And that palace of urban legends, inane email forwards and videos of white guys dancing is never incorrect in deciding societal importance."

"OK, ok. I see your point. Sure, she's no different than the rest of us." Tony paused. Again. "So, her breasts-- they real?"

The Powers of Ten that Be

In the beginning, it was simple. I'm better than you. But then, we got numbers. So the question became, how much better am I? Those Greeks with their love of division but ignorance of zero and decimal points could say, quite simply, I'm half again as good as you. There, you were ahead of someone else by an almost insurmountable margin. But then you start learning about incrementing. The simple act of adding one to one. And then you need to be twice as good as someone.

This of course becomes an arms race of integers. My love for the woman whose hand I'm seeking can not shine merely twice as bright as the sun (for then I might leave her in the event our Sun becomes a Red Giant and consequently that much brighter), but thrice will secure our position in the eternal book of couples. And then, not thrice but quat... tetr.... four times better. Four leads to five, and six is afraid because seven ate nine.

Soon, we're in double digits. And you're slapping zeroes on willy nilly. Ten times better. 100 times stronger. Samson slayed One Thousand men! (With the jaw of an ass, no less. Keep that in mind, all those who tell me to shear myself in real life. If I ever find a jaw of an ass, I will be your worst nightmare.)

We all know what madness lies down this path. Millions. Billions. English Billions. Trillion. Googols. Googolpleces. Plaid. Ludicrous.

The real culprit, of course, is the machines. Men do not work in terms of thousands. Allow me to quote a sage mentor: "How do you make my dick 8 inches long?" "Fold it in half." This 2/3 foot phallus is still only 4 times as long as D.R.F.'s semblance of an organ: less than an order of magnitude separates us.

Instead, it is McCormack's Reaper, Whitney's Gin (Cotton, not the Christmas Tree liquor), McCoy's Not a Bricklayer, He's a Doctor, and such contraptions of the 19th Century that introduced the idea that one man, no matter how great, even if he were John Henry, could not match up against machines measured in Hundreds of Horsepower. (I don't believe in posthumous medal ceremonies).

And it was their 20th Century progeny, the computer, that delivered the final blow. That chip in your current computer can add billions of numbers every second. You could add, in that same span, what? 2 single digits and a Roman Numeral?

But towards what end? That chip could challenge a grandmaster at chess, but only if it has a friend to move the pieces. It cannot fell trees, it cannot heave coal. It cannot even solve tic-tac-toe until the climax. It may be a trillion times superior to you... at what you don't care about.

So, say it with me and say it simply: I'm better than you.

The only mechanics they're used to deal with their Bimmers

It ain't easy being a pseudointellectual. It's of course de rigeur to subscribe to the New Yorker and at least one of the Atlantic or Harper's. But once you factor in perusal of McSweeney's, consumption of a drink at least as pretentious as a free trade shade grown mochaccino latte, you start to see why it's tasking. But at some point, every up-and-coming would-be Stoppard-quoter finds him/her/itself at a critical juncture: needing more science.

Somewhere on the scale of knowledge after learning the difference between Hindenburg and Heisenberg and before "learning" about string theory (yeah, metaphor's great, but how many times have I seen an International Relations major (in my fraternity, we called them IR unemployed majors) try to woo a girl at a party with long, soft elucidations on the nature of the cosmos only to learn that she was herself a physics major and he was laying Lipton instead of lepton?), there's early-20th Century quantum theory to be tackled.

The problem is that it makes no sense. I mean, it does if you have a Ph.D. in physics. Or the ability to think. But quantum theory does not jive in any way shape or form with the world we experience. Its most famous analogy, involving the possible attempted murder (or is it attempted possible murder?) of a feline was originally proposed to show how ludicrous the whole get up was. This failed attempt at satire (and I know how that feels) was followed up by a play written by Michael Frayn, a playwright principally known for choreographing an amalgamation of staging gone wrong. The best analogy he presents is a skier going both to the left and the right of a tree simultaneously, which is obviously false because it doesn't account for the more compromising routes of Michael Kennedy or Sonny Bono.

Mythology, having the benefit of being crazy and hence accounting for any possible though, affords us several examples. Orpheus and Lot's Wife both looked back at the lost of, respectively, their beloved and their not-being-a-pillar-of-salt. But, this hardly counts, for the true pseudointellectual must have progressed with 2000 years of thought, instead of finding inspiration in the same fire and brimstone that Calvinists have been spewing for centuries.

But, finally, I have found an example of Heisenberg's principle in a way that even the most blatant of tidbits-of-knowledge seekers can understand. ApplyYourself is a way that people apply to Business School. Well, entities like people but without souls apply to Business School. But ApplyYourself was Holier than the bastard lovechild of John Paul II and a Sieve, so applicants could look at their status before it was reported to them. Several hundred people did so. Several hundred people are now not going to Business School.

That's right, most of the schools affected (Harvard first among them) decided to reject anyone who looked at their status, even if their status was admitted. Why! Perfect! Observing the value of a variable affects it! Just what Heisenberg was talking about. So take some solace, Mr. Looky McGlancerson, in the fact that your downfall will help is the comprehension of others' physical goals.

(Seriously, though, this is an important lesson in ethics for would-be businessmen: If you can do something unethical in a forum as anonymous as the internet, do it to your competitor. If only Enron had forged ExxonMobil's books instead of their own, they never would have lost their futon in the Lincoln Bedroom.)

Why the Internet will never replace being smart

We've all heard "The More The Merrier." You hear it when your friends are going somewhere and you want to tag along, or when your friends are organizing an orgy and you want to tag along, or... You get the idea. What a great saying...

Except that's not the whole story. The saying actually goes "The more, the merrier/the fewer, the better fare." Amusement comes with a price, and it is this trade-off that gets to the heart of inclusion/exclusion. Sure, wikipedia may be an excellent reference for all things computer or math-related. It may devote pages of idolatry to the comedy of Idle. It may even have decent reporting on nerds' favorite history event. But look at their description of characterization, see that half of it discusses the use of characterization in fan fiction, and realize that their world view is and always will be skewed.

Why, even just a search for [ the fewer the better fare ] brings up mainly airplane ticket options (better fare) and health care studies (fare better). Computers will never be able to edit, and the people who use computers will never see the need.

Oh, you might be wondering: where did *I* learn the complete turn of this phrase? From an old media type of edited information source. (It was on Jeopardy! when I was a kid)

Retrospective

When I was a kid, I always confused Dan Rather and Ronald Reagan. Since then, my white male discernment sense has evolved, and I am no longer confused by why a president would be reporting about himself. (Though, with the FCC's stance on television ownership, it won't be long until Big Brother Murdoch decides and announces everything himself). Well, Reagan is dead, Rather is retiring tonight, and Zombie Reagan isn't even a shoo-in for the VP nomination in 2008. What has happened to the world?
My summary of the last 20 years, and how they are reflected in the coming about of these events:

1. Stem Cells. Look, I'm no biologist, but the fact of the matter is that these are as close to ambrosia as we can ever come. Ambrosia made from fetuses. Distasteful (and bad-tasting), I know. But these contain the secrets to eternal youth, curing cancer, and the Colonel's secret recipe. As long as they don't team up with nanotechnology and fusion, we will continue to be the dominant species of the planet.
   
2. Someone, I forgot whom, managed to convince Americans that your choice of anchor was like inviting this person into your home. Of course Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings are more personable and more likeable and handsomer and probably better-smelling. But you shouldn't look for a father figure in a nightly news anchor. You should look for the same sort of enjoyment you get from Crazy Uncle Fred. Except that Rather can't mess up your carpet by spilling his drink during Thanksgiving and then vomiting on the spot to try to clean it up. Cause he's in your TV. Also, that's not the side of the garage he's rattling incoherent analogies at, it's Madeline Albright.
   
3. The stagnation of Constitutional Law. With the current Supreme Court more full of near-deads than a Sunday Matinee of Maltock Made-For-TV Movies, no one can ever be sure how they will decide. Will Rehnquist see the logic of your arguments, or be too embarrassed to ask you to pause for a second so he can replace the battery in his hearing aid? But the fact of the matter is, any decent reading of the 22nd and 25th amendments make it quite clear that Zombie Reagan could move from the Naval Observatory to the White House. The only ticket from the Left that could beat him would be Vampire Howard Dean / Werewolf Hillary Clinton. (I almost made it Werewolf Howard Dean / Vampire Hillary Clinton, but then I realized that was too close to the truth.)
   

New Tricks

Here's the thing about growing older: You have more laurels to rest on. In today's installment of The Enfranchised, I'm posting the beginning of a short story I originally wrote more than a year ago and recently revised (special extended director's cut). Things I'm proud of in this story: the different impression the reader gets of the narrator than he has of himself, and some of the ideas. Things that need to work on: well, this is where you come in.

(the first page is here, and I've provided a link to the full text)

"Gerald, did you hear me? You've, uhh, gone somewhat catatonic." As my boss blathered on I prepared the cogent response that I knew would save my skin and impress my peers.

"No. No I'm not." Damn. It had sounded better in my head.

"Yes you are." He sighed. "No one wants to fire you, Fred. It's just something that happens. Now and then. In these hard economic times."

"If no one wants to fire me, then how is it happening?"

He was silent for a moment before saying, "Fine. Very few people wanted to fire you." He shuffled papers and looked at his watch. "Look, Fred, we both know this isn't the end of the world for you."

"Damn right it isn't." This wasn't the end of the world for me. "What do you mean?"

"You're a respected, preeminent researcher in your field. Everyone in the Labs has a copy of your book on their shelf." It's true: my book was a veritable litmus test for economists the world over. Any schmuck can name-drop Einstein or Hawking (that publicity slut of an author. You think he really needs the wheelchair? I've seen him get drunk at conferences and do karaoke). Only the truly initiated, those who've dug deeper, know my name.

"Great, you're right. Thank you Ari. So, I'll just submit my resume, excuse me, my CV, to a few search committees. I'll start my new appointment next fall, and formally retire in, say, October." From January 2nd, that was 9 months to start a new life: swift, but doable.

"Well, Gerald, you do have six months vacation saved up. We were thinking maybe you could take it starting now." That sounded fine. "Oh, and if you could have your office cleared out, we have an intern starting tomorrow."



(the rest)

It had to happen, sooner or later

They say bad things come in threes. Of course, there were 7 Police Academy movies (plus one, I shit you not, in production), so maybe they're wrong. But assuming they're not: We sold our soul to commemorate Arthur Miller's passing. We did a stuntman (tequila shooter where you snort the salt and squeeze the lime into your eye) to mourn Hunter S. Thompson's on-the-phone suicide. So we were just waiting for the next death of an old beast the ASPCA just wouldn't let us have for dinner.


Enter Bubba. A 22-pound lobster invariably referred to as Leviathan (pushing our co-blogger from being the 372nd most popular entity called "Levi" back down to 373rd), Bubba warmed hearts and gave pots everywhere size anxiety. CNN says he was 80-100 years old, while biologists pegged at closer to 50. Of course, CNN probably thinks the way to tell a lobster's age is to count his rings, so let's say it's 50. Of course Bubba would be awful to eat: tough, aged, and, well, by this point he had a face.

So the fish merchant "graciously" release him into the wild by selling him to Kipley's Believe It Or Not. Oh, a feel good story. What a great thing for me to have told you and you to have heard he's free as my prose in this sentence and certainly nothing could--

Oh, except he died. (Chicago Sun-Times obit headline: "It was shell of a life for 23-pound lobster." I'm sure if Bubba's family members were alive, sentient, and close to an internet connection or Sun-Times distribution venue they'd be offended at your finding levity in his death. Also at your making him 1 pd. fatter in death than in life). This tragedy, however, is an English Major/Joseph Campbell's wet dream. A hero struck down right as he's gaining prominence. He bowed at what we all realized was the peak of his career, without even inflicting upon us a tragedy of a 1-hour finale.

Now, though, I wonder about his new job being a shell at an aquarium. I'm not saying he's not up to it, I just have... reservations. First off, won't this give the millions of children who pass by his edutainment grave every year some skewed ideas about the immensity of your typical crustacean? To say nothing of nightmares? (I'm still unable to get a decent night's rest after I heard about using miniature horses as seeing eye dogs! Though that might be more from perpetual laughing than true fear.) But, really, I guess the biggest tragedy in all of this is that every epic hero (and I think it's obvious Bubba falls into this category) deserves a funeral pyre.


With maybe a nice Hollandaise?

Pissing In The Wind: What America's next sport will not be.

Pardon me for the tardiness: My back is currently burdened by monsters of network protocols. That being said, Foster and the Leviathan urinated amply. I guess what I have to add is largely a prediction of what will not become popular. Ever. And that's webcomics. No, I mean, they might have their appeal in reading them. Occassionally. when you want to feel superior. But I mean watching them being written. And yet, this seems to be the newest league (cf. here). To add to the Leviathan's point: something is definitely not a sport if your jersey is ironic merchandise.

That is all,
DaBentley

Pissing in the Wind: Oh, Canada

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

H - E - Double-Hockey-Stick (and a Handbasket)

Hockey, much like MxPx, is slowly going the way of the buffalo. I for one don't weep. As a portly young lad, I learned quickly that ice is a fickle mistress and something to be avoided at all costs. Though I did, for a time, feel a certain affinity toward Zambonis, as I thought they were a kind of Italian pastry.

But that, I suppose, is besides the point.

For those of you who worry about this kind of thing, and I have serious doubts that our readership includes many of you, I'll offer a suggestion or two about the prospects for filling those modestly-sized skates.

If our aim is to stick as closely to the spirit of hockey as possible, then it seems to me we ought to replace it with a sport I've tentatively called "kicking-the-shit-out-of-mulleted-Canadians". Its rules, I take it, are self-explanatory. Its potential, enormous. It'd no doubt be the biggest thing in Yank-on-Canuck action since the Aroostock War.

Alas, our legal department tells us that's not the way to go. So what else? Well, I care a great deal for backgammon. Unfortunately the WBA would murder us on the television-rights. But speaking of games which don't require a speck of athletic ability, what about poker? Seems nowadays every teenaged prick with a piggy bank and the rough capacity for abstract thought fancies himself a cardshark (here's where I tell you I was so ahead of the curve on this whole poker thing: I was so ahead of the curve on this whole poker thing).

Now, I happen to get a kick out of watching the ESPN coverage of the World Series, and apparently, so does every asshole with a remote control and optical nerves. The good news is these same kids pay me off when I'm at the casino, cuz they get it into their heads that they ought to try everything they see on TV (these are the same fuck-o's who shave each others asses and skateboard of their roofs; think "Jackass" without the production values). Now I'm not saying I'm a great player, but I respect the game enough to know my role, unlike every assclown with a dollar and a modicum of hand-eye coordination. I was at a low-limit hold-em table the other day and I'll be a tipsy-showgirl if there wasn't some little shit with a "NO LIMIT TEXAS HOLD-EM" t-shirt on. Now, I've seen a lot of great ball players at Yankee Stadium, and wouldn't you know it that not a ONE of them wore a shirt that said "PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL" on it. Anyway, bottom line is that the bubble has got to burst on the poker fad. Its only a matter of time before every fuckface with a pair of 3s and an opposable thumb gets tired of subsidizing the careers of middle-of-the-road players like myself. And once they realize they can't DO it, I'm thinking their interest in WATCHING it will wane.

Here in the Her Majesty's United Kingdom, they've got cricket. But let's get back to our discussion of sports. We've got to keep our audience in mind: what would satiate the hockey fan's puck-cravings in the absence of his fix? What's essential to hockey's hockeyness? Is it the rule structure? Dubious. Nary a Bruins fan will make the trek to his local middle school field hockey match to watch the girls duke it out in plaid, and any one who DOES is probably required by state law to inform you of certain things. Is it the ice, then? Unlikely. Few Philiadelphia Flyers fanatics shed a tear when Michelle Kwan took her last figure eight around the rink. But, come to think of it, they all probably got their rocks off watching the Tanya Harding take a lead pipe to the Kerigan's kneecap. Which brings me back to my original point: Hockey is about hurting people, preferably uneducated foreigners.

And thanks to Adam Smith and the Amazing Technicolor (R) Free Market, we've already got a substitute good which offers just as much xenophobic sadism, one that's waiting to sweep in and pick up the hockey fans once the NHL finally folds:

War.

That's right, I'm talking America's passtime. No, no. Not the Bud Selig one, the Donny Rumsfeld one. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, peace is what made sport necessary. Don't try to deny it--you know the pessimistic anthropologist in you agrees with me. But there's certainly no shortage of the stuff these days, so who needs hockey? I challenge the NHL to produce something as awe-inspiring and entertaining as the M1A2 Abrams tank, with its smoothbore kinetic shitstorm of a main gun. Step right up and get your tickets, war's got everything you could possibly ask for in a sport: high stakes, favorites and underdogs, zealous fans, controversey, live broadcasts, no slaughter rule.

Pfft. And you voted for Kerry?

Pissing In The Wind: What kinds of sticks, what kinds of balls?

So, hockey's over. I mean, yes, for the season. But, let's face it, hockey was barely holding on as the "fourth sport" anyway. If they do come back, it's not going to be because of puck-handling, it's going to be because they amend the rules so every goalie is now a gorilla without further equipment and you're allowed to engage in fights on the ice. With katanas. Katanae?

So, commentators, I put it to you: what sport will emerge from the icy ashes of the NHL's corpse to grab mindshare among American audiences? Ice skating? Tonsil Hockey? Steroid-testing? Inform us, O Enfranchised.

Haute Cuisine

Well, there I was, in a restaurant. A fancy French Restaurant. db Bistro Moderne. And after five years of New Providence High School French... I was able to pronounce the ingredients I didn't know about.

No, really, my meal felt like a game show: Merv Griffin presents "Garnish or Ingredient": swallow this or leave it on the plate? But, I never would have made it to Final Jeopardy, as after two courses I was definitely in the hole money-wise. Oh being fashionable, why must you be expensive?

-Dan "why did I think artichoke ravioli sounded like a good idea?" Bentley

...This is Bat Country...

The States are in danger of losing every last voice of dissent to the Great Beyond; and this blog is in danger of disintegrating into an a meta-obituary for recently deceased American literary figures. But, alas, Hunter S. Thompson (better known to some of the younger generation by his pseudonym Johnny Depp) has taken his own life with a gun that---perhaps ironically considering his long-standing NRA membership---was torn from his cold, dead hands.

Miller wrote with insight, dignity and meloncholy, and we here at The Enfranchised did our all to incorporate the same into our collective drop-in-the-bucket of a tribute. Unfortunately, to attempt to incorporate the elements of Thompson's literary genius into a blog obit presents a seemingly insurmountable logistical problem: Even if we could give you the address of a place to get the Benzedrine, Marlboro Reds, Wild Turkey, and .357 magnum (which, for legal reasons, we can't), it'd be near impossible to arrange the licentious polar bear, the seventeen year-old whacked-out blonde or the psychopathic attorney-accomplice.

My favorite piece out there so far is Tom Wolfe's. No doubt other worthwhile tributes will follow.

Pissing Into The Wind

Pardon my tardiness: I decided to take a last-minute jaunt to New York City. My hotel and office are both in Times Square. I mention this neither to brag nor to elicit your pity. Instead, it has informed my opinion: we ain't done nothin' yet.

New York is the kind of city that hands immigrants a dream, an Anglicized last name, and then starts selling you things.

Every side of any building is covered in billboards. You only know you've truly entered Times Square when the neon goes from bright to blinding. The strippers here wear pasties and g-strings not because of any sense of decency but because those particular pieces of fabric have the most impressions (read: eyeballs) to offer.

No, so long as we're merely exhuming corpses and not spray-painting them with our messages, I think we'll be all right.

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.

Cain was Abel and Biff was Happy

Complete non-sequitor headlines aside, we here at The Enfranchised were, like many others, saddened by the news of the passing of one of the great American writers.

Dan is joking, of course, when he suggests that Miller is to be admired most for wooing Norma Jean away from The Yankee Clipper. Though, it is perhaps sad in its own right that maybe the last man ever to have loved Monroe is gone from the earth. And sad, too, that we'll probably never see an American couple like that again---something tells me that Britney Spears and Thomas Pynchon won't marry, and that it wouldn't be quite the same even if they did.

David Mamet wrote what I think is one of the ballsier obits. In praising Miller's drama as appealing "not to the fashion of the moment, but to the problems both universal and eternal, as they are insoluble," Mamet also manages a bit of a fuck-you to the going fetishization of the "fetishization of the other" that garners MacArthur Genius Grants these days (do any of your readers doubt that when Mamet disses the "enthusiastic" "bad drama" of today he has Suzan Lori-Parks and Tony Kushner in mind?)

Truth is, I'd like to believe that Miller will be remembered as the last American playwright with any sense of subtlety. The Crucible is an ideological exorcism of America that is as scathing as it is discrete; Death of a Salesman annihilates our most deeply held illusions with such quietude that it almost feels nice.

When Simon and Garfunkel sang, famously, in The Graduate: "Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?/ A Nation turns its lonely eyes to you..." Jumpin Joe's somewhat bewildered response was reported to be: "What do they mean? I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial."

If we can say anything for Marilyn's second husband, its that he won't be going anywhere, for a long, long time.

Post-mortem of an Obituary

Arthur Miller was as unto God to us of the Enfranchised. He made being white and male and comfortably middle-class but still ambitious something worth talking about and, more important, worth listening to. He combined rage and comedy, emotion and story. But the feat he achieved that makes him most worthy of our admiration is this: he won a girl (*the* girl, Marilyn Monroe) from a jock (*the* jock, Joe DiMaggio).

He died this morning. It will never be an event like JFK's assassination or 9/11. Instead, it's something we learn over coffee and/or donuts and then forget or remember. Well, for all of us except Arthur himself.

But how do we learn? How does news spread of this medium-sized-event? I took notes beginning with my discovery:

7:30: The NYTimes.com website has a news alert saying Arthur Miller is dead.
7:32: The Times proves itself to be twice the newspaper most others are by posting another, nearly-identical news alert. 2 minutes later, the first is gone.
7:35: ABCnews.com breaks a banner. Foxnews.com is still leading with the headline "Inside the Twisted Teacher-Student Sex Trend" (kids nowadays have no idea how good they ahve it) and the sidebar that sounds like a verse of that-song-where-you-repeat-it-each-time-using-only-one-vowel "Abbas vs. Hamas" (bonus points if you piece together how it would eventually tell of a conflict between musical-theater instruments and musical-theater lovers)
7:39: Foxnews.com updates it homepage. The banner at the top is a terse statement to the effect that Arthur Miller is dead. The image below is a burning police car in Iraq. My interpretation: if we stop "exposing the flaws in the fabric of the American Dream", the Terrorists Have Already Won(TM).
7:40: Cnn.com has the now-standard banner. A minute later, news.yahoo.com becomes the first news source I checked that acknowledged the issue, but only as the 5th article linked to, in small text. Apparently the computer that aggregates the feeds disliked The Crucible in 9th Grade Honors English.
7:42: The NYTimes.com replaces the banner with a prominently placed picture and a link to a canned obituary with date/cause of death scratched in.
7:45: CNN has paid its due fully. The banner is removed, and the demise of Arthur Miller is now the first link under "More News", playing second fiddle to an attack on a Bakery half-way around the world in an already war-torn region.
7:46: If you search on Google News, you finally get a link to an article from the Kansas City Star (ed. note: as near as I am aware, Arthur Miller never pronouned "Kansas City", let alone being a cultural institution on its Great White Way). In this article, Miller's caretaker declined to give a cause of death, compared to the New York Times, which had already reported it as "congestive heart failure" 4 minutes ago. How you gonna get a Pulitzer like that, huh, Kansas City Star?
7:49: CBSnews.com skips the banner, and links to its obituary with the heading "Death of a Playwright." I hope that if I ever die, you have the decency to honor me with a death of puns in the announcement of my demise. Thank you.

This story, I am sure, will continue to develop. But I am glad to have followed its workings thus far. I expect other news sites to give him the due he has earned in their estimation. IMDB will have a link on the right side, Amazon.com will offer you a good price on a 3-pack of his scripts (unless you're logging in on his account, in which case you're "The Page You Made" will be a great price on a coffin.

Join us next week when the New Yorker heaps praise upon Arthur Miller for precisely two paragraphs, reminiscing on his contributions to the magazine and its namesake, before explaining why he would have hated some facet of the current political administration.

I'm sorry if my analysis seems cynical, but it seems like every news source is predictable in their handling of his death: thoroughly opportunistic.

Present company included.

-Dan Bentley

The Enfranchised's first step

Foster makes many points and several good ones in his analysis of the album as an art form. But he misses the larger picture: the singles of yesteryear are different entirely in purpose and spirit than the singles we have thrust upon us today. So if Foster's was a scientific post, allow mine to be a whimsical historical journey. As with all looks backwards, there may be some anachronisms and mistakes, the erroneousness of which are now lost to the sands of time.

In the 50's, socks hopped, drives threw, and boobs were so pointy that second base required goggles. An album was released on a vinyl record disc. As I understand it, these were manufactured by artisan dinosaurs and this is why we no longer listen to them. Instead of bittorrenting an mp3 or iTunes Music Storing a single, less-catchily-abbreviated AAC, you committed to the entire concept. Let's say you started listening to this 12-inch monstrosity of information: in those days you'd be stuck listening to the entire thing. This means that if something came up in the middle (traditionally, this involved peasant rebellions, discovering a northwest passage, or something people used to do.), you couldn't just fast forward to the next track. So, to offer an alternative to support the Tower of Babble of such artists as Elvis and the Chimpanzys without fully buying in, the single was created. Take this token of musicality, it has pictures of the dreamboats, which is, we both know, the only reason you want to buy it, you horribly non-art-oriented "fan". And, while we're at it, on the B-side, we have to put *something*, so... here's some junk.

Nowadays, however, we can pick and choose. Pluck an apple of an AM/DC song or a cherry of a Green Dan tune. Album art has gone the way of Ascii art (that is to say, best taken in small, infrequent doses). The single, as it was originally conceived, is now the center. Why do they still bother, record companies? Fans have already bought the album, passers-by the tracks that were the hook.

The answer is that fans are stupid. They have no shame, wallets infinitely deep, and a thirst unquenchable. As an example, allow me to say, I like the Postal Service. I like the Postal Service the way that most people like Oxygen. If a woman, in an attempt to seduce me, were to play any track of theirs, I don't know how my pants could stay buttoned. (this is unfortunate because, to be honest, it wouldn’t have to be a woman doing the seduction, and, well, I'll continue to say that's the way the pig got into my bedroom until the day I die).

12:21 AM Tuesday, I check out iTMS's front page to find, lo and behold, a new album by them. But wait, it's a single I already own multiple times over ("We Will Become Silhouettes", a sickly-sweet rendition of our own mortality as reminded by, y'know, nukes). But wait, it has b-sides. One of these is "Be Still My Heart", a catchy jingle in its own right that's, in their vein, a sickly-sweet telling of some love story (this is one of their tracks that falls into the "with hope" category). The other two tracks are remixes that derive most of their goodness from the original.

And as I was downloading the tracks and my credit card was being charged, I realize, I would buy anything they put their name on, so long as I could get immediate gratification. No Postal Service lunchboxes until we perfect the lunchbox modem. But, sure, I'd join their fanclub to see more photos. Or, yeah, why not pay extra to hear the songs that people more versed in music than I decided were crap. I would expend capital on a (More Cowbell) remix.

And that's when I realized: I have a problem.


My name is Dan Bentley, I'm a Postal Service-holic, and B-sides are enablers.