The Chris Moeller Archives

The All-Star Game drought

Two weeks from today, I'll be attending the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in St. Louis. Tickets were indeed pricey, but I'm sure you have your vices, too. Besides, I expensed them to the blog.

Am I excited about seeing President Obama at the game? Of course, although security will be a nightmare, especially for those of us with radical affiliations. Am I excited that Obama's duties include throwing out the ceremonial first pitch? No, since it means Obama will be doing a job that should have been given to Cardinals great Stan Musial, who's been looking a bit frail in recent years. It remains to be seen now how Major League Baseball will instead choose to honor baseball's greatest living player, the man who played in more All-Star Games and hit more All-Star Game home runs than any other player. Maybe "Stash" could play the National Anthem on his harmonica. If the honor takes any other form, we can be sure that FOX will be in the middle of a commercial for a bankrupt car company when Stan Musial gets his long-awaited nationally-televised tribute from Major League Baseball.

It's been so long since St. Louis hosted the All-Star Game, I couldn't pass up going. The last time the city played host, in 1966, the starting pitchers were Sandy Koufax and Denny McLain. The now-89-year-old Musial had only been retired as a player for three years. Construction of the Arch had just completed less than nine months prior, and the monument would not be open to the public for still another year. If Cardinals fans have to wait the same length of time we just did for the next All-Star Game to be awarded to our team, I'll be 77 years old. And Stan the Man likely won't be there at all.

posted by CM @ 7:18 AM 2 comments

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 15-11

Five more classic American prime-time television shows are now revealed. If your favorite for the top spot is among them, keep yourself collected and contact your employers' 24-hour-a-day toll-free stress hotline. The number to call can be found in your health care information package.
NOTE: This will be the last five-at-a-time countdown post. Beginning Wednesday, July 1st, we'll commence unveiling, one-at-a-time, the final 10 shows over ten days, a new one each evening. Store that stress hotline number in your cell phones.


#50- "Just Shoot Me"
#49- "L.A. Law"
#48- "The Carol Burnett Show"
#47- "That 70s Show"
#46- "The Rockford Files"
#45- "The Big Bang Theory"
#44- "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"
#43- "Night Court"
#42- "The Dick Van Dyke Show"
#41- "NYPD Blue"
#40- "Barney Miller"
#39- "Frank's Place"
#38- "The King of Queens"
#37- "The Phil Silvers Show"
#36- "Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
#35- "Frasier"
#34- "Get a Life"
#33- "St. Elsewhere"
#32- "Everybody Loves Raymond"
#31- "Hill Street Blues"
#30- "King of the Hill"
#29- "All in the Family"
#28- "The Larry Sanders Show"
#27- "The Jack Benny Program"
#26- "The Cosby Show"
#25- "The Golden Girls"
#24- "I Love Lucy"
#23- "The Bob Newhart Show"
#22- "Roseanne"
#21- "Lost"
#20- "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"
#19- "The Wire"
#18- "Mad Men"
#17- "The Simpsons"
#16- "Newsradio"


#15- SEINFELD NBC 1989-1998
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Jerry Seinfeld was one of my favorite stand-up comics on the twice-a-year guest cycle on "Late Night with David Letterman" so I'm proud to say that my brother and I were right there with our attention and our VCR's humming when the little-watched pilot "The Seinfeld Chronicles" debuted during the summer of 1989. Who knew then what an extraordinary blockbuster series this one would become? It went on to help define an entire decade and change the way sitcom stories were told. Earlier half-hour sitcoms may have featured 6 or 7 longer-paced scenes, but "Seinfeld," by the end of its run, had cranked its total up to 20 or 30-- many scenes lasting less than a minute as it bounced back and forth between various plots. It was famously referred to as "a show about nothing," because the plots might be as spare as the group of friends waiting in line to eat at a Chinese restaurant or trying to find their car in a parking garage, but I think it can now be described as a show that was "about everything." A character with no job hired an intern to help him manage his everyday life, in effect, a caddy to his own peculiar persona. Other episodes featured a golf ball hit into the ocean plugging the blowhole of a whale, and the set of "The Merv Griffin Show" getting fished out of a dumpster and being rebuilt in a man's living room. Seinfeld himself defined it as "a show without hugging," and indeed, the banally immoral characters hardly even made physical contact except for the occasional shoving. Much of the humor evolved out of the long Jewish tradition of comic humiliation, and while the show had fun tweaking itself as one filled with trivial happenings, the quiet absurdity of the characters' lives seemed to remind almost everyone who watched it of their own absurd existence.

"Seinfeld" clips are ubiquitous so instead enjoy this impressive poster art from one of the show's fans.


#14- "ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT" FOX 2003-2006
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It takes more than a few twisted minds to tell a story that combined secret fathers with Pop Secret popcorn, two women named Lucille with an aquatic seal on the loose in the Pacific Ocean, and a British spy named Mr F with a mentally-retarded female. At various times, "Arrested Development" presented a David Blaine-wannabe riding a Segway, an aspiring actor who is also a "never-nude" (exactly what it sounds like), a one-arm amputee, the exact plot of "Mrs. Doubtfire," Judge Reinhold as a judge, Liza Minnelli suffering from vertigo, Henry Winkler as a sexual deviant, Carl Weathers as himself, an airport staircar as the family automobile ("You're going to get hop-ons"), a gin-soaked middle-aged mother who ranks her children, a "light treason" business deal between the family and Saddam Hussein (who, in the family's defense, looked a lot like the guy who played "the Soup Nazi"), the Blue Man Group, the classic Peanuts "sad walk song," and a humorless attorney who had once been voted the worst audience member Cirque Du Soleil ever had. The comedy was distinctive, innovative and tasteless. When teenager George-Michael was trying to find out whether his attractive girl cousin was adopted, he asks his uncle Gob (jobe') whether his aunt Lindsey was ever pregnant. Gob responds, "Sure, lots of times."

Here's a trailer for a documentary-in-the-making about the series. It features a number of fans who would surely put "Arrested" even higher on their all-time list than just #14.


#13- "NEWHART" CBS 1982-1990
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I can't think of another TV series besides this one in which every season produced was better than the one before. Bob Newhart's second long-running program started as a modest replicate of his first, installed with the same winning elements, the slightly-off-center characters in orbit around the solar Newhart (the Jack Benny format). It evolved into an absurdist masterpiece featuring a character that spoke increasingly in alliteration, an heiress spoiled to the point of complete disconnection from reality, an amorous librarian, and of course, those three bizarre woodsmen whose parents were so infamously economical with baby names. It's revealed along the way that Johnny Carson (as himself) paid the woodsmen's water bills, Tim Conway (also as himself) was a friend, and in the 184th and final episode of the series, that the entire series had been a dream of Dr. Bob Hartley's, the character Newhart played in his previous series, after the psychologist had consumed a late-evening Japanese meal. The pop reference to Newhart's previous show (as well as to a notorious "just-a-dream" decision made by the producers of "Dallas") helped make the "Newhart" finale one of the most famous and well-regarded of all-time. But lesser understood by both viewers and critics is that the dream development also utterly transformed every action that had become before it during the run of the series, forcing the series to be rewatched again and again. The fact that it was all a dream explained why things were getting increasingly bizarre in this little Vermont Inn. (During the REM phase of sleep, just before awakening, perception of sensory images are at their most stimulated.) The plot-twist was arrived at near the end of production, but in happy retrospect, it explains why Bob's patients and friends (the same actors, like Jack Riley and Bill Quinn) kept running through his dreams; it explained why the inn's handyman looked so much like Bob Hartley's best friend from college (Tom Poston in both roles); and it revealed the hidden fact that even though Bob was married to a gorgeous brunette, played by Suzanne Pleshette, he also had a thing for blondes in tight sweaters. Magnificent, magnificent ending.

Here, Newhart discusses that final scene with a rep from the Archive of American Television.


#12- "The Andy Griffith Show" CBS 1960-1968
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Once upon a time on television, long, long ago, there was a show that didn't play down to rural people, and viewers rewarded it. "The Griffith Show," as its now-elderly star always refers to it in interviews, never finished below 7th place in the Nielsons, and it left the air when it was #1, evidently having lost only the young urban viewers advertisers most desire. My not "playing down" comment is not to imply that many of the characters portrayed as living in tiny, fictional Mayberry, North Carolina were not stereotypical "rubes" or "hicks," in the same way that Jack Benny had been willing to trade on some old Jewish stereotypes on his show, but in Mayberry, there was a nobility that went along with living in this unassuming, genial community. Unpretentious and fair-minded sheriff Andy Taylor, a widower, watched out over not only his son and his live-in aunt, but his self-important and inept deputy, misinformed and slow-to-wit townsfolk, a rock-throwing hillbilly, and even the town drunk, who was allowed access to the prison to lock himself up safe and sound every Saturday night after one of his benders. The show was achingly-funny, and Don Knotts, who played Deputy Barney Fife, made off with four consecutive Emmys for his efforts. It was replaced on CBS (while on top) because the programs being developed behind it were deemed more "relevant" during a time of great change in American culture, but one would have to look long and hard to find, in retrospect, another show ever aired on television that did more to promote peace and tolerance. As one of my former co-worker's bumper sticker stated, "Everything I need to know about life, I learned from watching 'The Andy Griffith Show.'"

Here's a clip of a parrot whistling the show's theme song.


#11- "CHEERS" NBC 1982-1993
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The first 5 seasons of "Cheers," in particular, are right up there with the best any series has ever offered, and to say I grew up with this show would be an understatement. It was like the third Moeller twin. The second twin's favorite show in those days, "Cheers" began when we were seven years old and it left the air the spring we graduated from high school. When the Moeller TV Festival debuted in 2002, "What is... Cliff Clavin?" the one in which Cliff appears on "Jeopardy," was chosen as the first-ever episode screened. During the 11 years the bar stayed open, the show received 26 Emmys and a record 111 nominations, and its leading man became TV's highest-paid star. It was a throwback in a sense to series like "Andy Griffith" that was less ideological and more community-based. The mostly-disfunctional regulars at the fictional bar had families, but we rarely saw them. They liked being at the bar instead. "Cheers" could be likened to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in that it was a workplace comedy in which co-workers acted as the family. It was, likewise, a show aimed at adults, but the characters on "Cheers" didn't "grow" as human beings, and they were less heroic. In year 11, Sam was still a shallow womanizer unsuccessful in finding love, Carla, angry and resentful, Rebecca, Sam's equal or more in shallowness, Frasier abandoned and alone, Cliff still delusional, and the implication was that Norm, at the end of the bar, had never even ventured out from the comfort of domestic beer. There were 275 "Cheers" episodes produced, and none of them, marvelously, were "very special episodes" dealing with dour subjects such as drug abuse or death. Norm's obvious alcoholism was more in step again with Otis the Town Drunk than any self-improving character model that would have followed in the 1970s. Rare for any show that ran 11 seasons, its format and rhythm became so polished and comfortable, you got the impression that if its stars had wanted it to, "Cheers" would still be producing new episodes today.

I can't tease Cliff on "Jeopardy" and then not show it to you.

posted by CM @ 12:13 PM 1 comments

The boy in the mirror

In the spring of 1983, I was in 3rd grade in a rural two classroom school in Iowa that educated fewer than 40 children. My musical background was three years of piano lessons, and the only black people I knew were the ones on television-- a fictional radio DJ, Arnold and Willis Jackson, and the shortstop and several outfielders for the St. Louis Cardinals. Sinatra had long ago stormed the Paramount, Elvis and The Beatles had both played Ed Sullivan, but the world had never seen anything like the force of nature that was becoming Michael Jackson-- that is, until Monday night, May 16th of 1983, when "the gloved one" walked away with the show during the Motown 25th Anniversary TV Special. By the morning of May 17th, all 40-some kids in my school were "moonwalking" their way to recess.

Is it too audacious to suggest that Jackson's musical and social impact has surpassed that of "early Elvis" or the British Invasion that came before him? Not if we consider that 47 million TV sets were tuned in to watch the new King of Pop that night-- not just the white kids, but the black ones too. Not if we consider that Michael's album released that year, "Thriller," has since gone on to sell what might be as many as 109 million copies, more than any other album in global history. "At one point," one biographer wrote, "Thriller stopped selling like a leisure item-- like a magazine, a toy, tickets to a hit movie-- and started selling like a household staple."

Elvis and the Beatles may have hoisted rock-n-roll music onto the world stage (and they had the entire consumer power of the Baby Boom to help them along), but it's the soulful, funky, dance-pop tunes that Michael inspired-- those of Madonna, Prince, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Boys II Men, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Usher, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, R. Kelly, Kanye West, John Legend, Alicia Keys, and Janet Jackson-- that have run roughshod over the Billboard music charts for the last quarter century.

His music stayed on top, but, of course, his personal life didn't. Reaching the highest peak of American celebrity made Michael an attractive target for tabloid media. A highly-injurious lawsuit marked by bizarre claims and the strange court outbursts by his accusers forced Michael off the public stage during the last years of his life. Despite the fact that the legal suit was sweepingly rejected by a California jury, the lies became the truth. He lost much of his marketability, and his overspending caused creditors to vulture on high as if his was the estate of Sammy Davis Jr.

Michael Jackson was a genius of music and dance, and of that mysterious art of connecting with people. Upon his death, the controversies that seemed to swallow him whole near the end distract from his extraordinary cultural legacy, but it's a rich irony that it was this unparalleled fame and cultural impact, and his struggling to cope with it, that ultimately caused so many people to lose their human connection to him. Nothing changes the fact, though, that Michael Jackson is the artist who lit the brightest flame in music today. A blowtorch, really. And I'm proud to call myself, now fully-grown, a member of the Michael Jackson generation.

Now I'm off to enjoy a nice long cry over a lovely childhood memory from 26 years ago and for one of the world's gifted, gentle, and beautiful souls lost today. Rest in tranquility and peace, Michael.


---
Michael on the Motown TV special.

posted by CM @ 8:29 PM 1 comments

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 20-16

Sorry for the delay in the publishing of this latest installment. I was hospitalized with a severe case of "acute countdown fever."

Now, where was I?

#50- "Just Shoot Me"
#49- "L.A. Law"
#48- "The Carol Burnett Show"
#47- "That 70s Show"
#46- "The Rockford Files"
#45- "The Big Bang Theory"
#44- "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"
#43- "Night Court"
#42- "The Dick Van Dyke Show"
#41- "NYPD Blue"
#40- "Barney Miller"
#39- "Frank's Place"
#38- "The King of Queens"
#37- "The Phil Silvers Show"
#36- "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
#35- "Frasier"
#34- "Get a Life"
#33- "St. Elsewhere"
#32- "Everybody Loves Raymond"
#31- "Hill Street Blues"
#30- "King of the Hill"
#29- "All in the Family"
#28- "The Larry Sanders Show"
#27- "The Jack Benny Program"
#26- "The Cosby Show"
#25- "The Golden Girls"
#24- "I Love Lucy"
#23- "The Bob Newhart Show"
#22- "Roseanne"
#21- "Lost"


#20- "THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW" CBS 1970-1977
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Everywhere you look these days, there's "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." No, I'm not talking about Cloris Leachman on "Dancing With the Stars," "The Office," and Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," coming in August. I'm not talking about Betty White on "My Name is Earl" and the #1 movie in the country last weekend, "The Proposal," with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. And I'm not talking about Ed Asner, the lead voice on Pixar's blockbuster film "Up." I'm talking about all of the office-centered sitcoms that are still television's standard form and all ripoffs of a sort of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." On Mary's revolutionary program, characters were not static. They grew as people. Her boss, Lou Grant, got divorced. Not only was Mary Richards the first single female character on television who didn't define herself by her current relationship, but it's time we acknowledge that she was really the first single person of any gender on television to assert herself as single and well-adjusted. The series anchored one of the great lineups of television of all-time-- CBS Saturday nights during the 1970s, and it was the anchor as well for perhaps the greatest television production company of all-time, owned by and named for its star-- "MTM." That's reason enough right there to throw your hat up in the air.


#19- "THE WIRE" HBO 2002-2008
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This HBO drama series addressed nearly all aspects of American life-- social, political, and economic. The police procedural elements were largely familiar, but what wasn't was the investigation of inner-city public schools, the portrayal of the day-to-day realities of the urban underclass, and the exploration of the kind of government bureacracy that crushes souls. A whole city has been created on premium cable television (where only it could) that mirrors the real Baltimore, Maryland, where the series is filmed. The canvas included what must have been one hundred recurring characters, and it attempted to show us at least a little of how each of them lives, while being unconcerned with distracting us with "edgy" violence. Never before has there been a TV show, or even a movie that I can think of, that is principally about a city. "The Wire" creator David Simon likes to say of his hometown that "it falls down beautifully." "The Wire" is not a morality tale, but it has an expressed morality. It indicts the war on drugs, our political hypocrisies, and our broken economic system. It takes sides, which lends it its power. Sheeeeeeeet, it's got it all.

Sample this offering.


#18- "MAD MEN" AMC 2007-PRESENT
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"Mad Men" is about a time and place in which social mores and attitudes are about to radically change. The pending revolution is palpable, although perhaps only to the viewer, not the characters. The series is about a Manhattan advertising firm beginning in 1960. The "Mad" in "Mad Men" refers to Madison Avenue, and the nickname is one they gave themselves. According to Entertainment Weekly, the series opens when "play is part of work, sexual banter isn't yet harassment, and America is free of self-doubt, guilt, and countercultural confusion." The country is prosperous and bubbling with optimism, but the storm is brewing. There are more than a dozen fully-formed, intoxicating characters on "Mad Men," but the North and South Poles of the series are surely creative director Don Draper and his secretary-then-copy girl Peggy Olson, who seem to stand in respectively for the self-made man, who may or may not be mythical, and the determined new guard, sharply aware of the culture's double-standards. "Mad Men" is really a revisionist history-- many confident-seeming executives (perhaps our fathers or grandfathers) were really unfulfilled, sometimes frighteningly so, and not all was well behind the picket fence at home. The show's logo features the Draper character in silhouette and repose, with his arm over a couch, clearly watching and evaluating. "Mad Men" is a show about watching people play roles.

Here's the program's cinematic and compelling opening title sequence.


#17- "THE SIMPSONS" FOX 1989-PRESENT
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I think the most-lasting legacy of "The Simpsons" is that it changed the pace of television. The shows on this countdown that preceeded it now seem much more deliberate and casual than we remember them from their time. The rate of jokes on "The Simpsons" was sped up. It may be that there are double the amount of gags in a half-hour "Simpsons" episode than there were in another James L. Brooks' offering, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" described above. Nothing on "The Simpsons," not characterization, not plot, not a semblance of reality, takes priority over the joke, and so it's a hell of good thing that the animated classic is hilarious. On the flip side, "The Simpsons" has a gentleness, a heart beat, which to me separates it from the even more extreme examples of joke-driven animated shows that are the most popular today, even as "The Simpsons" continues to churn out new episodes two decades after its start. There are plenty of one-note peripheral characters to be employed in the arsenal of a "Simpsons" writer, from personal favorites Gill Gunderson, a befuddled and unsuccessful salesman, to unfit attorney-at-law Lionel Hutz, but in the main valve-- and here my heart and brain metaphors clumsily mix-- Bart is the Id, Homer is the Ego, and Lisa is the Superego. The show has a center provided by the Simpson family itself, feeding both the heart and the mind.

Here's "The Simpsons"' take on "Mad Men's" cinematic and compelling opening title sequence.


#16- "NEWSRADIO" NBC 1995-1999
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Already two years before it ended production, "Newsradio" was the lowest-rated sitcom on its network. It was becoming symbolic of one of television programmers most common faults in logic. Though the show had a great cast and great writers, it had no stars, so the network lost faith and changed its time slot seven times in five years. But "Newsradio" also avoided popularity by refusing to cater to popular tastes. Jokes seemed to have been aimed only at viewers who would get the joke. Writer Adrian Foo has called the series "the only morally-expressive screwball comedy with a physical-verbal comedy style in television history." The richness of the comedy and the comic characterizations require watching more than one episode to fully appreciate. It gathers strength. This is why the show is much more popular in syndication, where it can be seen day after day, than it ever was in prime-time. It's hard to imagine a comedy show that combined more styles-- slapstick physical humor, sophisticated wordplay, absurdist storylines (episodes set in space and on the Titanic), and social satire. Effusive funnyman Phil Hartman had a field day as self-absorbed radio newsman Bill McNeal, who I really shouldn't attempt to summarize simply with the phrase "self-absorbed," for he was simultaneously manipulative, vulnerable, belligerent, theatrical, cowardly, and competent. A real piece of work.

Now, the man in action.

posted by CM @ 7:21 PM 2 comments

He may have already been a winner

I want to say something about Ed MacMahon. It's rare to find anyone in any field that's willing to be thought of and become known as a second banana. It's easy to say that Johnny Carson's sidekick rode the gravy train of Carson's great talent, but don't doubt for a moment how hard that still is to stand just slightly outside of the entertainment spotlight. Take it from Conan O'Brien's "Late Night" sidekick, Andy Richter, who feared being known as only a second banana and departed for other Hollywood opportunities before settling back in as Conan's #2 this spring.

Ed MacMahon definitely seemed to enjoy every bit of his 30-year stint on Johnny's "Tonight Show," and his warm, amiable presence enlivens many of the clips we still see floating around of the show. Laughing at all of Johnny's jokes made Ed the butt of a few more, but having watched hundreds of episodes or pieces of episodes, I've never doubted for a second that Ed really thought his boss was funny. We should all be as fortunate as to have somebody that genuine there to laugh at our jokes.

---

In Kansas City on Sunday, I watched the Cardinals beat the Royals 12-5, and earn, for their manager, his 2,500th career win as skipper. Tony LaRussa is third all-time in managerial wins, behind only Connie Mack (3,731) and John McGraw (within LaRussa's aim at 2,763). In fourth place on the all-time list is Bobby Cox, who's still managing in Atlanta, and has recorded 2,360 victories through Monday night, and moving into fifth place last week with his 2,195th career win was Joe Torre, who's still managing in Los Angeles, and apparently doing it better than ever at 68 years old, as his Dodgers have started the season 46 and 24. Three of the top 5 in history are still active.

Damn these managers and their steroids!

posted by CM @ 9:48 PM 1 comments

Thank you Donald Fehr

During my lunch break yesterday, I finished reading Marvin Miller's autobiography "A Whole Different Ballgame." I then arrived back at my desk to find that Miller's long-serving successor as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Donald Fehr, was resigning his office at the age of 61.

Like his predecessor, Fehr deserves credit for so admirably running one of America's strongest unions, and doing so in the face of such unjustified and unhinged public and media opposition. In Major League Baseball, it makes little sense why fans so frequently and vehemently side with billionaire owners against millionaire players in labor disputes, especially when we consider that it's also the players that the fans prefer watching in action. (Although I hear Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy makes an exciting flourish at the end of his signature when he signs team contracts.) This bizarre fan behavior starts to make more sense when we consider that the owners can boast the support of the propaganda machine-- that is, most of the game's beat writers-- and that they actually pay the salaries of many of the broadcasters. (There's no advantage quite like being on the side that pays the bills and controls the access to information.)

Fehr has been at the receiving end of quite a few columnists' barbs this week about his delay in agreeing to steroid testing early in this decade, but his biggest mistake was ever agreeing to testing in the first place, as it's a massive violation of worker' rights to have privacy invaded without a court's burden of having to show cause. He hesitated on confidential testing because he didn't trust the owners, and sure enough, as Ray Rotto wrote on Monday, confidentiality turned out to be "handled by the Easter Bunny Department, over in the Tooth Fairy wing of the Santa Claus annex."

Tracking through the litany of labor disputes over the years requires more space than Marvin Miller could cover in even 424 pages of his book, but sufficed to say that baseball players and their union leadership have had to battle over the years for rights and freedoms that other American workers take for granted.

As examples,

- In your job outside of Major League Baseball, it's inconceivable that your employer would hold the rights to your employment services in the industry for the course of your entire life. (Pitcher Jim Bouton once jokingly asked an attorney for the National League if club owners would consider lifting the Reserve Clause for a player once he reached the age of 65. "No," the lawyer said with a straight face, "because the next time you'll want it reduced to fifty-five.")

- Your employment services cannot be sold or traded to a different company located in a different city.

- Your employer has probably not been granted a special exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 under a bizarre determination that the company (which I'm presuming here to be for-profit) is not engaged in interstate commerce.

- Your boss has likely never hired a so-called "commissioner" to oversee the office, a man permitted to make unilateral decisions "in the best interest" of the company, even outside the Constitutional rights of due process and privacy, and limited only in his ability to act against the majority will of the cartel of owners who keep him employed.

- He or she has likely never tried to cap employee salaries during a period of unprecedented company growth.

- Your boss has more than likely never acted in concert with other employers to hold down wages, being found guilty of such a crime over three consecutive years in a court of law.



- And I sincerely doubt also that your employer has enjoyed the added benefit of over 100 years of great consumer appeal for his/her product, as well as year after year of record-high profits.

- Chances are that he or she has not had the luxury of doing business with negligible material costs in production or service, or that he or she has enjoyed 500 percent and more market value increase for the company or franchise in less than 10 years' time.

- I'm guessing that the physical plant that houses the business likely isn't leased on extremely favorable terms by municipalities eager to serve your boss' needs and serve him or her with tax-free interest on bond issues on plant improvements and/or replacements.

- The person in the corner office where you work doesn't necessarily enjoy access to an ample supply of skilled employees and cut-throat competition to gain employment.

- And it's additionally unlikely that your boss has the right to blackball or conspire, as part of a cartel boycott, against the skilled employees of his or her choosing.


After 26 years of fighting to help get players their fair share of baseball's exorbitant profits, yet having to deal publicly with being the villain, Donald Fehr deserves combat pay from the players as part of his retirement package. He should get several hundred "thank you" cards if nothing else.

To Mr. Fehr, upon the announcement of your retirement yesterday, sir, I say thank you for all you've done for so many of the men (and their families) that have been my heroes on the diamond, and for the blows you've struck for all of us who work every day ourselves and call ourselves fans of the game. Because of increased competitive balance among the franchises and an end to the culture of game-fixing caused by player slavery (that plagued the game during the first half of the 20th century), we've all shared, as fans, in some of the gains won by players. I count you too, Mr. Fehr, among the heroes.

posted by CM @ 11:24 AM 13 comments

Polly Jean - A-Train Concert Series 6/13/2009 - by Aaron Moeller

Last week, less than a thousand of us lucked into an ideally cool, early summer evening to have made a trip to the ampitheatre of the Minnesota Zoo to hear the stunning sounds of long-time underground rock artist PJ Harvey. After trekking a few hundred yards through a densely-wooded path, we came upon a theatre stage with a lake and descending sun beyond it, a lovely and serene backdrop for summer music. Ampitheatres are definitely great - out-of-doors but no need to carry a lawn chair or a blanket. The strains from the music system as we entered were exclusively those of Howlin' Wolf, another blues original from decades ago.

A few months shy of her fortieth birthday, PJ Harvey has had one of the most enviable careers of any female rock artist. Well-known and respected (read:beloved) in alternative music circles, the British chanteuse spent a number of uncompromising years on the fringe of mainstream success, before everyone realized she was most comfortable remaining in the margins. Recording since the early '90's, she's been a regular on the cover of British-based music magazines and been an occasional cover girl on Spin and other American publications. Rolling Stone's Artist of the Year in 1995 and, more recently, #1 in Q magazine's 100 Greatest Women in Rock, she had a high profile slot opening for U2 on their All You Can't Leave Behind tour and is a legend of the Glastonberry Music Festival across the big pond, among other highlights. And her backstory's a good one- raised by hippie parents on a British sheep farm, she heard almost nothing but pre-WWII blues as young girl.

Sprung from the punk poetess and priestess tradition of Patti Smith and the experimental blues forms tradition of Captain Beefheart, Harvey also has more than a little in common with the dark, Euro-gothic sounds of Nick Cave or Marianne Faithfull, and the howling, avant-garde primalism of Yoko Ono. Take that stew, then add versatile musicianship and a near-operatic singing range and you have PJ Harvey. To half-remember a quote from the competitive Courtney Love, another punk priestess who rarely displays an inferiority complex: "PJ Harvey is the only rocker chick who makes me feel like total shit."

British singer-songwriter Pop Parker was the evening's opening act. His songs were urbane, funny and shockingly risque, a trait that was even more pronounced as it was accompanied by a straightforward acoustic guitar. Early in the set, I spotted PJ Harvey enter from the side of the stage and take a seat in the front row, a move of support for Parker's set that I nonetheless found incredibly distracting.

Dressed in a simple black dress and wearing subtle but obvious stage makeup and bright red lipstick, Harvey was recognized by a few down front and demurely sat and politely applauded throughout Parker's set. It must be said that PJ Harvey, while something of an unconventional beauty, is irregardless, a strikingly attractive woman. Our seats to the right of the stage weren't great for the seeing the whole stage but they were perfect for observing Harvey. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, Parker's music played as I enjoyed the vision of PJ, with an easy air of British regality, sipping tea and dangling a flip flop from the end of her foot. She took the stage shortly afterwards in her bare feet to begin a jarringly haunting and beautiful set with numerous musical highlights, some of which will live in my memory 'til death - right up there with the moment during Parker's set when PJ (no doubt sensing a chill in the air) wrapped a black scarf around her neck and ever-so-slightly hiked up her skirt to pull on knee-high stockings.

OK, I know what you're thinking. This review could easily turn into one of those Esquire Most Beautiful Woman in the World articles, where a hipster writer follows around Halle Berry or Scarlett Johannson for a couple days, taking note of her daily life, trying to find her essence, while hunting for details, the truth of her reality, her vulnerabilities and insecurities, but then gives himself away, revealing that he can never quite define the mystery. He simply can't explain why he doesn't get turned on when other girls sip their tea.

But I defend myself. Sex appeal deserves a mention here as everywhere. PJ Harvey's art is unmistakably and unapologetically sexual. Just as sex is natural, important and ubiquitous in life, so it is in PJ Harvey's music. Particularly in a live context, the way she looks can't be separated from the way she sounds. Known for wearing (or almost wearing) psycho-sexual outfits - she's posed nude for an album cover, for God's sake - with lyrics that would make Prince blush, riot grrrls take notice that this trim and petite singer was never a willowing, virginal wallflower, whether she's howling gutteral 21st century blues or transcendent, orgasmic yelps that reach the top of the scale.

On the bill with multi-instumentalist and sometime collaborator, John Parish, this show was almost exclusively music from their new album, A Man a Woman Walked By, and another shared album, Dance Hall at Louise Point, from 1996. This is music of eerie brilliance but challenging and certainly inaccessible to pop music radio, even by her daring standards. This is dark stuff - lyrically and musically. This is haunted-mother-who-drowns-her-newborn-baby-in-the-river stuff. It's a pre-industrial, backwoods gothic world that the original bluesmen knew, and maybe only Bob Dylan and Tom Waits can also pull off today. Too creepy for your radios.

And it was captivating. "Black Hearted Love" was raw and sensual. Her space age vocal over 19th century banjo counted down the beauty of "Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen". The entire audience certainly felt a little awkward at one point as they slowly figured out that she kept making direct and unwavering eye contact with only me. Don't hate me, guys. Eerie, high-pitched vocals made "Leaving California" stand out, as well as a run through of "Rope Bridge Crossing" and the title track from Dance Hall at Louise Point. At one point, PJ bounded down off the stage during a run of guitar solos and danced (still in her barefeet) with the high school kids mashing on the sidewalk that fronted the stage. During "The Soldier" - a simple, plaintive tune, boasting only crying voice, strumming guitar and plinking piano - a large, white, Great North fowl of some kind whipped across the lake flapping her wings on the surface of the water. A beautiful moment that left us moonshot.

The finest performance was of Dance Hall's "Taut". She began by kneeling, wrapping her simple black dress (surely the classic black mini is the Uniform of the Angels) tight around her knees as the music began its rumble. She then ranted the rapid fire lines of the opening verses as the guitars ignited their respective motors. The song's story is a midnight-black remembrance of Billy, a high school lover, and his car ("the first thing he ever owned except me"), the runaway verses careening toward the dangerous chorus of "Jeee..sus! Save! Me!"

Then "Pig Will Not", a junkyard blues bounding clear down a gravel road. Harsh, random, punk, and positively tuneless. At one point, she literally yelped like a barking dog. She finished with the shouting, nearly-hoarse declaration, "I will not! I will not!" "April" and the Parish-penned "False Fire", introduced as having been a song written for a Hamlet soundtrack, were the encores.

It was a show free of nostalgia, but I was taken back a few times in instances of sober clarity. Back to my earliest days of PJ awareness. At a campus record shop, in front of the storefront windows. With a pixie-ish girl looking out from the promo posters and flats. Of course I was drawn to that image immediately, as I was those sweet, vampishly made-up college girls standing in line for the new album. I suppose in those years as I picked my way through the CD racks for imported Dylan bootlegs that were already 30 years old, I saw myself as a misfit too. Too misfit to smile at the college girls who'd been Chicago suburb, high school cheerleaders. But not misfit enough to say hello to the tattooed and heavily pierced girls who smiled at me in line for the latest PJ Harvey release. But in the world of art - art that challenges the mind, heart and hormones - there is only the present day. I'll have to hit the next tour to maybe hear those PJ Harvey solo album classics, hopefully anything from To Bring You My Love, or from Uh Huh Her (greatest album title ever?), or "A Perfect Day Elise", maybe the finest recording from the post-punk-era rock canon. And they'll no doubt be in reworked and interesting new settings and contexts. When I invite you along next time, be sure to take me up on it, but don't be put off when she sings only for me.

posted by Anonymous @ 1:58 PM 1 comments

Oh, you Cubs

The headline reads: "Giants Series Hero Rhodes dies at 82."

Dusty Rhodes came up big for the then-New York Giants in the World Series of 1954. As a pinch-hitter, he walloped a 10th inning, tie-breaking three-run homer in Game 1, tied Game 2 with a 5th inning pinch-hit single, capped that second game with another home run in the 7th, and in the pinch again, hit a 2-run single in Game 3. The Giants, now in San Francisco of course, have not won a championship since.

Rhodes' obituary set me to thinking about the status of the rest of baseball clubs' LAST World Series heroes. Cincinnati's last World Series hero would be 1990 MVP Jose Rijo. The former pitcher, who won 2 games for the Reds in the Fall Classic that year, just turned 44 years old. He has a supporting role in the recently-released film "Sugar." The Cardinals' last World Series hero, pitcher Adam Wainwright, who closed out all three post-season series for his club that year, turns 28 in August. He pitches for the Cardinals Sunday in Kansas City.

Only two teams have longer championship droughts than the Giants.

The Cleveland Indians haven't won the World Series since 1948. Their hero that year was pitcher Bob Lemon, who won two games and allowed only three earned runs in 16 1/3 innings. Lemon died at the age of 79 in 2000 in California.

Then there's the Cubs. Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown won Games 1 & 4 in the 1908 World Series that stretched five games. Brown dropped dead at the age of 71 in February of '48, eight months before the Indians took their last championship. In fact, the entire 1908 Cubs team has been dead for almost 40 years. Pitcher Bill Mack who pitched in 2 games for the team that year at the age of 23 was the last to go in 1971.

posted by CM @ 7:15 AM 0 comments

Blind items

I'm a fan of the new tabloid craze-- blind items. I don't know how long they've been appearing online or in periodicals such as the New York Post and the Daily News, but they work like this-- a juicy tidbit of celebrity gossip is published, but without the name of the celebrity. Then the great unwashed, people like you and me, are invited to guess in the comment threads who the mystery celebrity is. It's great fun to play, but be forewarned, it can be very frustrating. (Here's a collection of "blind items" from Defamer.com, where a new batch appear each day.) Sometimes the celebrity description will contain specific clues. For example, "This Oscar winner was not behaving very "kingly" when he was caught groping a waitress at a N.Y.C. nightclub recently." It could be Ben KINGsley. It could be Forrest Whitaker, who starred in "The Last King of Scotland." It could be... oh, who are we kidding? It's one of those two guys.

I want to start my own "Blind Items" feature on this blog, but such an initiative requires spies. So keep your eyes open when you're out exploring the social scene in your local communities, and get back to me.

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Editors at the satirical website The Onion-- which was just awarded a Peabody last month-- aren't letting up on the Palin children these days.

The site also drew attention from The Des Moines Register this week for a video piece about Olympic gymnast, dancing star, and West Des Moinesian Shawn Johnson, another underage girl who has sought the public limelight. My guess is that Johnson has a good sense of humor about it.

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It turns out there are a lot of courageous freedom-seekers in Iran. Maybe it's a good thing we didn't bombed them.

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Tony LaRussa and Joe Torre have both been selected now as National League coaches for next month's All-Star Game, hosted by the Cardinals in St. Louis. Now if they can find a way to add Whitey Herzog and Red Schoendienst, Cards managers will basically be covered back to 1965.

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Quote of the day: Slogan written on a sign at the sizable counter-protest outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York Tuesday, "Sarah needs a life/Bristol needs a spouse/I can see idiots from my house."

posted by CM @ 12:20 PM 0 comments

The second apology

David Letterman is apologizing on his show tonight in a more formal fashion to Willow and Bristol Palin and their parents for the jokes he told a week ago that were interpreted to be attack on Willow, the underage daughter of the Alaska governor. (The text of tonight's comments are here.)

I'm a Dave fan and I have little doubt that his decision tonight to add further clarification and go further in his apology is his decision alone. To deliver one is his prerogative. Fourteen-year-old Willow is even owed an apology-- by her mother, that is, for being dragged into all of this. But I want to reiterate the fact that I don't think that either Bristol or Sarah Palin is owed an apology by Letterman here, and not just because the governor has implied that he's a pedophile.

Eighteen-year-old Bristol is an adult who chose to enter the public fray-- a teenage mother promoting abstinence-only education after she got knocked up having unprotected sex with her boyfriend under her parents' roof. This makes her a perfectly acceptable target for satire, tasteless or otherwise. I would contend in fact that our social contract with such demagogues actually demands that they be confronted with the challenge of public ridicule. Answers.com describes a demagogue as "a leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace." That description definitely fits the Palin daughter I saw chatting it up on Larry King last month.

I wish that I could be as confident as others to think that our First Amendment right to such expressions of political dissent (yes, that's what it is) are safe in modern America. Lest we forget that little more than 20 years ago, a satirist was still subject by law to civil and financial penalties for presenting this type of satire into the marketplace of ideas. It took a unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case of Hustler Magazine v. Jerry Falwell to guarantee that public figures could not be compensated for emotional distress incurred even if it were intentionally inflicted. (Chief Justice Rehnquist, hardly a liberal, wrote the majority opinion of the court.) One of the principals upheld in the verdict was that there needs to be sufficient "breathing space" in the freedom of expression, even to the point of making a false statement (and this was clearly a joke), that a chilling effect not do damage to speech that does have constitutional value.

It's a typically classy move by Letterman to go further than he should have to in issuing now a second apology. It's not a sign of weakness, but the host is going to have serious problems with me and his other viewers if we start to get a whiff of that chilling effect creeping into his comedy.

posted by CM @ 7:05 PM 0 comments

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 25-21

Some big TV shows are starting to topple now in our countdown to #1. Watch the sky for falling classics...


#50- "Just Shoot Me"
#49- "L.A. Law"
#48- "The Carol Burnett Show"
#47- "That 70s Show"
#46- "The Rockford Files"
#45- "The Big Bang Theory"
#44- "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"
#43- "Night Court"
#42- "The Dick Van Dyke Show"
#41- "NYPD Blue"
#40- "Barney Miller"
#39- "Frank's Place"
#38- "The King of Queens"
#37- "The Phil Silvers Show"
#36- "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
#35- "Frasier"
#34- "Get a Life"
#33- "St. Elsewhere"
#32- "Everybody Loves Raymond"
#31- "Hill Street Blues"
#30- "King of the Hill"
#29- "All in the Family"
#28- "The Larry Sanders Show"
#27- "The Jack Benny Program"
#26- "The Cosby Show"


#25- "THE GOLDEN GIRLS" NBC 1985-1992
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Forty years before "The Golden Girls" and now almost 20 after, there's still no other television show that has focused its attention on the exploits of senior women. HBO's bawdy "Sex and the City" is held up as an innovative depiction of female sexual empowerment, even into middle age, and as I write this summary on Friday, I'm watching the hosts of the daytime talk program "The View" discuss the concept and TV portrayal of "cougars," along with popular daytime actress Susan Lucci. But Susan Harris' sexually-vibrant girls of gold were already buying condoms on network television back during the Reagan administration. When the program debuted, in-depth depictions of female friendship and social groups of any age were rare on television. Episodes of the new series typically featured both tenderhearted moments and laugh-out-loud comedy. All four of the principal actors in the series-- Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty won Emmys for their work, something only two other shows in history ("All in the Family" and "Will & Grace") can claim. White, as the dimwitted Rose, and McClanahan, as the amorous Blanche, switched roles just prior to the series' debut to avoid playing too close to their previous well-known TV roles. "The Golden Girls" is one of 9 shows that appears on the countdown that aired on NBC at least in part during the decade of the '80s, and as part of executive Brandon Tartikoff's famed "Must See TV" campaign that revitalized the network.


#24- "I LOVE LUCY" CBS 1951-1960
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"I Love Lucy" is one of television's iconic series. In fact, a description of Lucille Ball's title character also sounds not unlike that of the medium itself when it's at its best-- what the Museum of Television calls "a tornado in a bottle." Lucy was a blast of energy rebelling against a backdrop of confinement and domestication. It's difficult to comprehend the extraordinary popularity of this series in its time. Nothing today could compare. When Ball's character gave birth on the show in 1953 (in the days before it was even permissable to say the word "pregnant" on television), 72% of all U.S. homes with TVs were tuned in to the episode. That percentage translated to 44 million people. To compare, the top rated show on television last week (Game 2 of the NBA Finals) drew 14 million viewers, this, in an era when having a television in the home is nearly universal, and the country's population has almost doubled (160 million to 305 million) what it was in 1953. Thanks to its star, "I Love Lucy" also helped to establish television, in a sense, as a sort of women's medium, at least relative to film. Lucille Ball remains the television comedy star to whom all others are compared, and as the owner of her own production studio at the time, the show stands testament to her artistic vision as well.

No obscure clips for Lucy. You'll recognize this one from the episode "Job Switching."


#23- "THE BOB NEWHART SHOW" CBS 1972-1978
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"The Bob Newhart Show" was a comedy about adults for adults, with sophisticated comedy favored over broad slapstick. Characters learned from their mistakes and grew as people. Neither husband nor wife was portrayed as baffoonish. Both Newhart, as Bob Hartley, and Suzanne Pleshette, as his wife Emily, were educated, career-oriented, and untraditionally (for television) worthy of each other-- best friends as well as spouses. Almost every one of the series' 142 episodes featured a comedy bit involving Bob in a phone conversation with an unheard voice on the other end, consistent with the signature phone-centered routines of his popular nightclub act. Despite never registering an Emmy win in any category, "The Bob Newhart Show" has shown up, since it wrapped in '78, on nearly all of the lists ever published of the great TV shows in history. That Newhart and his supporting players never garnered industry honors during their time is confirmation of the effortlessness that emanated from nearly every facet of production, from direction to writing to acting. "The Bob Newhart Show" was high-brow and low-key.

The series took place in Chicago and Newhart was a native of nearby Oak Park, Illinois. His likeness as Doctor of Psychology Robert Hartley is memorialized today with a statue in Chicago's Grant Park.


#22- "ROSEANNE" ABC 1988-1997
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In the "Roseanne" universe, love for family was best expressed in the form of sarcastic verbal assault by both parents and children, which made this popular sitcom to appear, on its surface, to be more mean-spirited than most. But over the course of nearly a decade, the series came to reveal perhaps more emotional depth than any other half-hour comedy before or since. Like "All the Family" before it, "Roseanne" demonstrated that a family could be hardened without being disfunctional. The fictional Conner family of fictional Lanford, Illinois was one of TV's first to be clearly matriarchal. As star Roseanne (nee Barr and Arnold) told a collection of former TV mothers during a dream sequence in one episode, her household could have been called "Father Knows Squat." Yet Roseanne's husband Dan (John Goodman) was as fully drawn as any other character and their marriage was depicted as a stable one. In the days before all television characters, employed or otherwise, could afford to hang out all day in shops drinking $5 coffees, the Conners lived in a world in which it was tough to make financial ends meet. Roseanne was forced to leave her job at a plastics factory after standing up to a foreman. The family struggled to make a go of a pair of small businesses, first, a motorcycle repair shop, and later, a diner. Through the entire course of the series' run, the talented Roseanne, as creator, stuck to a singular, uncompromised vision of the show that beared her name, and a parade of writers and producers sent to the unemployment line provided evidence of her drive.

This "Roseanne" clip shows off both the caustic nature of the show's comedy and, I think, the series' emotional resonance as well.


#21- "LOST" ABC 2004-PRESENT
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Science fiction and adventure series are not my preferred genre. To me, the lack of boundaries to realism takes a lot of the fun out of the fiction. But today's blockbuster hit "Lost" blows me away with the complexity of its storytelling. The show would also not be ranked so high if I had not finally come to connect this spring (thanks to the latest string of episodes) with a sort of guarded assurance that all of the puzzle pieces will eventually be set into place. Bill Carter, critic with the New York Times says the series possesses "perhaps the most compelling continuing storyline in television history." The plane crash survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 had lives before they boarded that fateful aircraft in Sydney, Australia, as we learned in a series of flashbacks, and many have lives long after, as we learned through a series of innovative flash-forwards. A new layer of mythology relating to the characters' fates is peeled away nearly every week. From an artistic standpoint, the show deserves immense praise not just for manufacturing such sustained suspense, but for its ambition as the elaborate story structure could be defined as nothing less than "anti-commercial." By this I mean that its impossible for a viewer to start following the plot in mid-series. This is probably the reason that original audience numbers of 16 million per episode on ABC have dwindled down to about 11 million with one season still to be produced. But how can you not respect that?

Media buzz about the show typically leaks over into programming in other TV dayparts. Here, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel tries to unravel one of the show's many mysteries.

posted by CM @ 3:24 PM 1 comments

Letterman vs. Palin

New competition is bringing out the best in the Late Night King, David Letterman. After back-to-back home runs Monday and Tuesday with Howard Stern and Julia Roberts, the highlight of Wednesday's show was Letterman answering the attacks on his character by Sarah and Todd Palin in an extended 8 minute segment.

Watch and enjoy.

People misunderstand what makes a great late night talk show host. We hear statements like (This guy's) the best comedian or (This guy's) the best standup or (The other guy) has the best monologue, but Dave is the best "broadcaster" of his group. Unfortunately, that word is so broad and in many ways so ambiguous that most viewers and even critics leave it alone. The great broadcaster though is the one that simply communicates his message the best on television and/or radio. Howard Stern, for example, hosts a comedy show. He's not a studied standup comedian (like Leno) or a pedigreed comedy writer (like Conan or Colbert), yet he's a phenomenal broadcaster. He talks on the air and you can't stop listening to him. Tom Snyder was a great broadcaster. Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa are both great broadcasters. Oprah, too. They're just as entertaining to watch when they're telling you what they did over the weekend as when they're reciting jokes.

This is the element that lifts David Letterman above his television peers. Monologue jokes and comedy segments hit or miss, but when a pair of planes plow into the World Trade Center in New York City, Dave sets the tone for the way his competitors will handle the tragedy, and they wait for him to lead the way. And he was at his best again last night.

The Palins have taken on the wrong guy here in their attempt to keep themselves in the middle of the national spotlight. I fear they've already begun making things worse for themselves. The political grandstanding is more disgusting than ever. At every stop of the family's public courtship with the American people, it has been the family, and not the media, that first raised the issue of the Palin children. Daughter Bristol, then-17-years-old, was thrust by her mother into the glare because of the girl's "decision" not to abort her out-of-wedlock child. Bristol has appeared on every news show imaginable since, promoting first-- through an apparent slip of the tongue-- her belief in the reality of teens having sex, and then, with better coaching, her belief in abstinence-only sex education.

Her mother helped transform Bristol into the face of the pro-life movement in the United States. The Palin brood probably owe half of their fame to the issue of premarital sex. The governor and her doofus husband immediately used the occasion of this recent alleged assault on their children's honor to raise money at their "Team Sarah" campaign website. Indeed, their public reaction to Letterman's off-color gags is just the couple's latest orchestrated attempt to cash in on their children.

Much of the public record already demonstrates adequately and in grand detail that Governor Palin is an imbecile, but I think she'll become even less popular thanks to her ridiculous remarks this week. Aside from even the tone-deaf strategic reaction to Letterman's jokes, didn't she learn from her running mate already last year that the "Road to the White House" really does go through that guest chair resting next to Dave's desk, just as the television legend so frequently proclaimed?

The whole issue is so fabricated, the implication of Letterman's pedophilia so bizarre, Palin's sense of humor so feeble, and her political opportunism so shameless, that it's hardly even worth blogging about. But you know how I get.

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Speaking of tone-deaf, the National Organization for Women (yes, it still exists) has completely fallen for Palin's professionally-coordinated effort to poll better with women, adding Letterman's name Wednesday to its online "Media Hall of Shame." The political group was miffed over the joke in the Top 10 List about the governor's "slutty flight attendant" sense of fashion. It's a characteristic move by the shrill and humorless bunch that has labeled Maureen Dowd and Keith Olbermann misogynist, but stuck by Bill Clinton and his trousers through the thick and thick of numerous sexual harassment accusations and a rape charge.

Message to NOW: Jokes objectifying a female politician who was a beauty pageant contestant and who poses for pictures like this are fair game. Women should not be treated as super-men in the same way that blacks should not be treated like super-whites. Nobody in the public arena is immune from satire. Sarah Palin can be the butt of a joke based on her appearance because she's unqualified to serve in the public offices she seeks and because she was chosen as a finalist for one position exactly because of her appearance. Bristol Palin can be the butt of a joke about promiscuity because her mother made her a public figure and she got knocked up.

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Down the road a piece in Kansas City, newspaper sports columnist Jason Whitlock, an African-American, reports being hassled during a night on the town in KC's trendy Power & Light District. His troubles beg the question of why public dress codes even exist. When they're written so loosely as to differentiate between "baggy" clothes and "excessively baggy," what could be the possible motivation other than to exclude black and brown people? A better policy would be to impose limits on people's actual behavior, and come to grips with the fact that clothes are inanimate objects, incapable of causing problems in a eating and/or drinking establishment unless one's baggy shirtsleeve catches fire brushing past a candle, and even in that situation, it's not really fair to blame the shirt.

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Here's more proof that baseball fans don't care about steroids: the Alex Rodriguez book is now ranked 2,904 in sales on Amazon.com. Only 16,000 of 150,000 printed have sold thus far (after about a month), 11,000 of those in the first week.

posted by CM @ 8:59 PM 6 comments

Polk County police use new toy to murder man

As if increasingly-unaccountable law enforcement officers don't already have enough license to shoot and club with prejudice, they seem to also be prone to developing unhealthy attachments to their newest toys and gadgets. In March, police in Hawthorne, California, used a 50,000-watt stun gun to subdue a 130-pound, 12-year-old autistic boy at an area middle school. Despite claims by police departments everywhere that the use of tasers helps to prevent more serious injuries, Amnesty International estimates that 334 people have died in the United States since June of 2001 from being tasered.

The conventional wisdom promoted by police and accepted in nearly all corners is that "tasing" someone is not harmful, the only effect on the victim being temporary physical paralysis-- emphasis on the 'temporary.' A news item out of Des Moines today tells a different story. (What a banner year for police in Polk County.)

Early Monday, Polk County Sheriff's officers answered the call of a man on a cell phone who was threatening suicide-- 21-year-old Justin Schleuning of Urbandale. Sheriff's deputies wound up shooting Schleuning with what one of the officers called a "less-than-lethal" round of so-called 'bean bag' projectiles-- ammunition supposedly meant to stun, but not to kill. Schleuning died at Mercy Medical Center this morning, some 30 hours after the assault.

We have a law enforcement problem in this country. Cops have been empowered to thuggery during the last decade by a Bush/Obama Justice Department that commits torture behind deceit and moral depravity, and spies without having to show cause.

Two hours east of here, in Cedar Rapids, the police department has been cracking down of late on every perceived social threat in the city from broken glass to jaywalking (but only in certain neighborhoods, of course). Civilian indifference to their aggressive, often instigating tactics is so widespread, they openly promote them in the local newspaper. Several years ago, the city spent scarce budget dollars on the purchase of a helicopter that flies over depressed neighborhoods during the middle of the fucking night, waking the locals and expecting to see God-knows-what in the dark.

On "Hill Street Blues," the Lieutenant Howard Hunter character, played by James B. Sikking, was always lobbying his commander for more weaponry and more firepower for the street. His character was drawn to be a punchline, not a business model. Everyone is considered suspect now. Every conflict is being escalated. Many incidents of police violence come with provocation, of course, but where's the perspective and who's being paid to be the adults here?

posted by CM @ 4:33 PM 5 comments

The Green Wave

posted by CM @ 7:28 PM 0 comments

The Top 50 TV Shows of All-Time: #s 30-26

We continue our countdown of the 50 greatest American prime-time television shows ever created. Confusion surrounded the previous posting. I received many of your calls and letters congratulating me on the completion of a successful countdown. Evidently, shows 35 through 31 were so outstanding, many of you read past the numbers and assumed they were numbers 5 through 1. Not true. There are actually thirty shows better than those, if you can even believe it.

Today, I dare to reveal five more...

#50- "Just Shoot Me"
#49- "L.A. Law"
#48- "The Carol Burnett Show"
#47- "That 70s Show"
#46- "The Rockford Files"
#45- "The Big Bang Theory"
#44- "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"
#43- "Night Court"
#42- "The Dick Van Dyke Show"
#41- "NYPD Blue"
#40- "Barney Miller"
#39- "Frank's Place"
#38- "The King of Queens"
#37- "The Phil Silvers Show"
#36- "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
#35- "Frasier"
#34- "Get a Life"
#33- "St. Elsewhere"
#32- "Everybody Loves Raymond"
#31- "Hill Street Blues"


#30- "KING OF THE HILL" FOX 1997-2009
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One could make a strong case that "King of the Hill" has been television's most underrated show. Unlike the animated Simpsons, Flintstones, and Jetsons families that preceeded them, and the Griffins that followed, the Hills resided in a "slice-of-life" style sitcom, heavy on character development and regional (Texas) ethos, I tell you what. (Their son Bobby even aged.) It never broke the lines of space and time. In fact, it's probably closer in scope and structure to many live-action sitcoms. One of the pleasures of the series is watching the cross-generational but respectful conflict between father and adolescent son, Hank and Bobby. Hank is a conventional, emotionally-constipated son of the Lone Star State, while his son, an aspiring "prop comic," listens to his heart and shuns gender stereotypes, whether he's enrolling in a home economics class or trying out for team mascot instead of the football team. "Why do you hate everything you don't understand?" Bobby asks his father. Hank's reply, "I don't hate you, Bobby."

This is a trailer done in crude pencil sketch for the promotion and selling of the series in 1996.


#29- "ALL IN THE FAMILY" CBS 1971-1979
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"The program you are about to see is 'All in the Family.' It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are." Thus began a decade of television anchored by Norman Lear's classic, which led the Nielson Ratings for five consecutive seasons beginning in 1971. Archie Bunker was the angry white man living in the working class burough of Queens. He thought that the "spics," "spades," and "hebes" had all come to claim his fairly-gotten gains. Bunker clashed loudly with his liberal and equally-outspoken live-in son-in-law Mike Stivic, who Bunker referred to alternately as "Meathead" or "that dumb Polack." The depiction of hostile family life on "All in the Family" was so penetrating and resonant that it fostered critics at all points of the political spectrum, either for its crassness and its blunt treatment of traditionally-taboo subjects or because the fullness of its form caused many to believe that the bigot Archie was too lovingly presented. "All in the Family" was responsible for nothing less than introducing social themes and plotlines to television sitcoms and it demonstrated that prejudice was the dirtiest joke of all.

In the new millennium, Archie and Edith Bunker's house in New York looks like this. Like most of today's television programming, it now sports a thin, plastic layer of siding.


#28- "THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW" HBO 1992-1998
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Gary Shandling was one of the comics considered to take over "The Tonight Show" from Johnny Carson in 1992, but Gary had another idea in mind-- to create a fiction series about a "Tonight Show"-style program aping the real thing, with a satiric glimpse behind-the-scenes and celebrities playing parody versions of themselves. Thanks to this decision, Shandling had the luxury of commenting on all the action when the so-called Late Night Wars commenced for real upon Carson's retirement. When David Letterman chose Tom Snyder to host the late night show that followed his, the ficitonal Larry Sanders also chose Tom Snyder. When Sanders' show started slipping in the ratings, his network chose a "permanent guest host" for the show in Jon Stewart, much as NBC had tabbed Jay Leno to be Carson's "permanent guest host." Shandling's Sanders was simultaneously self-satisfied and self-loathing, and Hollywood pettiness and insecurity was sent up in a way not done so expertly since "Sunset Boulevard." Time Magazine reported that "Shandling revealed Hollywood's blemishes like the world's funniest jar of makeup remover."

This video clip of the episode "Hank's Sex Tape" is representative of the tone of series.


#27- "THE JACK BENNY PROGRAM" CBS 1950-1965
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"The Jack Benny Program" had already aired for 18 years on radio when it debuted on CBS in October of 1950, and the format did not change in transition, making this truly television's first sitcom, and also incidentally, one of its funniest. Jack played himself, a successful American comic, not unlike the Jerry Seinfelds and Larry Davids that would eventually follow him on the small screen, and like those of his successors, much of the Benny on-air persona was only that. In real life, he was not pompous or miserly with his money as the show depicted. What he was was someone who was very comfortable being the butt of the joke. His real-life wife, Mary Livingstone, played herself, albeit as a friend to Benny and sometimes-love interest only; announcer Don Wilson read the commercials and also played himself, a frequent visitor to Benny's home in Beverly Hills; Eddie Anderson was Rochester, Benny's African-American driver, who was written in a way that transcended racial stereotypes of the period; and Mel Blanc, the voice of Warner Brothers' Bugs Bunny, portrayed a different character (or inanimate object, such as Benny's old-fashioned car) in each episode, allowing the actor to show off his vocal gifts. Here's Blanc with his boss on Johnny Carson in 1974.


#26- "THE COSBY SHOW" NBC 1984-1992
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The story structure of a "Cosby Show" episode was unlike that of other situation comedies. There were few jokes in the script. Instead, it was a loose outline of interactions between the comedian Cosby and, principally, members of his large, fictional family. It's impossible to talk about "The Cosby Show" without reference to race. Producers employed a black psychiatrist from Harvard as consultant in an effort to "recode blackness" in the series, purposely avoiding what Cosby felt had been the most damaging stereotypes of African-Americans depicted on television. The result was something television had never experienced-- an upper-middle-class, functional black family commanding a large audience of white viewers. The show has often been criticized for not dealing with the issue of class in Black America, or America as a whole, but adversely, it's staggering to consider what was expected, even demanded, of this program, which filled a Grand Canyon-sized void on television for eight years. What the show inarguably did was present a loving, well-educated, and egalitarian African-American family of tremendous dignity in which the family members celebrated the inspiring legacy and contribution of black people to American life. "The Cosby Show" showed that black families could be just as "fictionally" cute, funny, and perfect as white families.

This sequence is from the pilot episode.

posted by CM @ 8:58 PM 1 comments

Back from the ballyard

Sorry for my absence. I've been in St. Louis watching baseball this week, and I feel bad for having left the blog for so many days. Don't get me wrong-- I have the right to come and go as I please. I'm not living in China or North Korea. Or married. But I should have said something first.

Traveling always seems to pull me out of the news loop, especially when I go somewhere with my brother, who gets all of his headlines from the Howard 100 news team on the Howard Stern XM/Sirius satellite radio show. Their top story this week was producer Gary Dell'Abate's surgery to remove kidney stones.

The city of St. Louis was abuzz with baseball, as usual, despite all the fans dressed as empty seats at Tuesday and Wednesday nights' ballgames. The Major League Baseball All-Star Game, of which the Gateway City will play host, is now less than six weeks away. Major League Baseball and/or the Cardinals have opened up a souvenir shop that sells All-Star Game-only merchandise. It's inside the building that, until recently, housed the National Bowling Hall of Fame. Can't say it's an improvement, but at least it's not sitting empty. I'm still weighing a trip to the Midsummer Classic next month. I think Grandpa and Grandma would have approved of me spending my inheritance on an exhibition baseball game.

While in St. Louis, word hit that Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa is suing Twitter after a prankster set up a fake account in his name. The action, according to the future Hall of Fame skipper, resulted in "significant emotional distress" and "damage to his reputation." The legal action threatens to confound critics who claim the manager has no sense of humor.

Personally, I don't find jokes about dead pitchers to be particularly funny, but LaRussa, who holds a law degree, evidently needs to add "The People vs. Larry Flynt" to his Netflix queue.

An anonymous smart aleck online says he suspects LaRussa will change his lawyer seven times during each hour of deposition.

posted by CM @ 8:03 PM 0 comments