Wasting Away Again in Blogaritaville

I’ve hit a good few of the standard highlights of the Art of Blog, including the death of the pet and the lengthy hiatus. This is another one, the noisy exit. Activities suspended until further notice. Not open for business. I quit.

It’s very easy to be taken in by the allure of instant, “free” pseudopublication, and ignore for a long time the nature of the beast, which is you contributing to an amorphous mass of text and someone else profiting by it. Of course, creative types getting the short end from business is hardly a new and interesting theme, but there is something a little bit special about the number of people who have now been convinced to do it for nothing while remaining convinced that they are getting something for free.

Well, here is a small insight from a tired and cynical little drone buzzing around in a very large and chaotic machine: Google is not running Blogger out of charity or some affection for the creative spirit of the masses. Google is running Blogger because the massive popularity of Moveable Type, LiveJournal, etc. convinced them that it would be profitable to acquire a major position in this market. A quick review of your AdSense account and Google’s stock price should clarify the nature of this relationship.

And that’s fine: my intent is really not to shake my puny fists at the bastions of Evil Corporatism. People like blogging, adding their stellar insights to the somewhere between 4 and 10 million similar examples out there gives them a warm fuzzy, and that is fine by me. My bottom line, this side of Black Friday, 2005, is that it isn’t doing anything more for me than when I used to keep a handwritten journal in a series of blank books, a process which was considerably less expensive since I didn’t have to maintain an internet connection or a relatively modern computer. And I didn’t feel guilty if I didn’t write for a week, like I was letting down one of my 6 regular readers.

So to hell with it. I just don’t have enough time to flog this horse’s corpse any more.

If you are one of those 6 people, my apologies if this comes as a disappointment. You know how it is. If you are one of the dozen people who actually went so far as to give me some money, you can expect to continue to receive little oddments, scraps of text, and music in the mail throughout the coming year, as some small thanks. I hope these modest entertainments have amused. If you were invested in the pentagon/files story line, well, its fate remains to be seen. There is about one and a half again as much of that as has already been put online already written, but the story is not yet completed and I’m not sure how invested I am in wrapping it up. It may find its way out into the world yet, and if you were a patron you can rest assured to get it for free if it does so.

I’m not sure what’s next. I have some things in progress and I’m feeling ambivalent about them. If anything happens with any of it I feel comfortable saying that anyone who is reading this and actually cares will hear about it from me directly. I am an exceptionally easy person to find online, my email is in the profile, so I’m not going to fret about losing touch.

I had a conversation a while ago in which I opined that for the vast and overwhelming majority of aspiring writers, the internet was currently a dead end: that even the most modest hopes of viability remained firmly entrenched in conventional publishing. My own investigation convinces me that this is an accurate assessment. I’m certainly open to the possibility that this might change, but if so I doubt very much that access to whatever fantabulous new markets emerge will come through remaining on this particular bandwagon. If I do put text online again, one thing I am certain of is that it will be under a domain I own and administer, supported by bandwidth I arrange and properly pay for, and thereby control. For quite a while I set aside my misgivings about the fact that, in publishing through a medium like Blogger, I was effectively giving control of a creative enterprise over to a corporation. Like so many others, I justified this because blogging through the Google machine was so “easy.” Considering two thousand years’ worth of warning about the relative merits and pitfalls of the broad versus the narrow path, its a bit shameful that I was still so susceptible to this argument. In the end I had to ask: if I insist it be easy, just how invested am I in it anyway?

And this is the answer.

In the meantime: there is no need to come back here. Nothing new will appear in these pages, or on any of the other five blogspot addresses I have been maintaining. If I create something new I will promulgate it by other methods.

In the upper right hand corner of this page, you will find a little button, labeled “NEXT BLOG.” Clicking it will carry you to some random example of the medium: it is a process that can be repeated indefinitely. I recommend it if you are looking for something to read.

Yours very sincerely,

Scrivener

In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do - namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street, Herman Melville

Sarah Silverman: Controversy is Easy on the Eyes

What's the deal with Sarah Silverman? What's the deal with comedy, for that matter? For a while I thought that Comedy Central (Comedy Partners, MTV Networks, Viacom) was exercising some sort of internal editorial protest against the MTV model by actually playing a fair bit of stand-up comedy in the programming line-up of the comedy television channel. No, it appears that comedy performance is still very much in the social currency.

Sarah Silverman is a comedian, anyway, and she is formerly recognized as "hot," you know, physically, and she is "controversial," in that she treats topics that are taboo in her routines.

It appears that this culture takes some sort of particular and unseemly pleasure in watching a conventionally pretty girl tell filthier than average jokes. On further consideration, this is probably not much more of a revelation than observing that the public mind is enticed by the idea of professional cheerleaders having intoxicated sex in a public restroom.

So as usual, Ms. Silverman as a phenomenon is easy enough to understand with the bare minimum of facts. It still irritates me that my fellow journalists (just kidding) can't get over the fact that she's pretty, like it's so amazing and sort of laudable that a pretty girl would do anything other than just hang around looking good. The other thing that irritates me is the comparison being made to Lenny Bruce. The difference, and I acknowledge that it's a subtle one, is the part where Bruce gets arrested for obscenity.

So anyway, I decide to go to the source, or at least a source, and find out about Silverman's new movie, Jesus Is Magic. Before I lose patience completely with its glacial, laboring flash interface I manage to extract this:

Despite the current political climate, in JESUS IS MAGIC she takes on such pitch-black topics as September 11th, unwanted body hair, and the Holocaust, and spins them into decidedly un-politically correct comedic gold.

Does that list of example topics seem weird to anyone else? Sort of a kink somewhere in the middle, something doesn't quite fit? What's up with that?

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14:59

A confession: I don't really follow popular culture. Like most people who own a television and don't live in a cave I can't avoid the highest profile events that ensnare he mass mind, but I'm nowhere near the cutting edge nor the inside track. I fake it instead, by basing almost everything I write about on Google Zeitgeist, which aggregates information on search activity on the search engine and provides a handy top fifteen for the previous week, and thus a reasonable approximation of the public eyeball of a given moment.

The downside of this is being unable, from time to time, to avoid some particularly noisome bit of public offal that I have been studiously ignoring, sometimes for weeks.

Case in point, it was not immediately obvious to me what the connection was between several components of the November 7 Zeitgeist report, namely number 2, "cardinal panthers cheerleaders," number 10, "renee thomas," and number 12, "angela keathley." It didn't take too long to connect the dots. That first one is not a typo, at least not my typo. Carolina Panther Cheerleaders would seem more appropriate. There's no mistaking the intent: I have been sucked into the vortex of the Carolina Panther Cheerleaders bathroom sex story.

This is one of those stories, that what strikes me is how utterly dull and mundane the true meat of the story is, which is some drunk beating some other drunk over some perfectly idiotic conflict in a bar. If I had to report every time that happened my work would never be done. No, of course the twist that has its pincers lodged firmly in the collective psyche is that the fight in question apparently started over allegations that the dispute arose over two cheerleaders having sex in a bathroom. Now again, if I had to write every time someone had sex in a bathroom... well, it wouldn't keep me as busy as covering the bar fight scene, but it would make for a lot more disgusting reading, I'm sure. There is evidently some issue of the alleged assaulter (that would be, uhhh, Renee Thomas) also presented a different cheerleader's ID to the police after she was taken into custody. Thomas and Kethley deny the sex part.

That is absolutely as far as I'm willing to go into the story, except to note that its tenacious hold on the public imagination is just so tediously predictable. It does present the opportunity for headlines that appeal to my sense of the surreal, such as "Panthers Cheerleaders Deny Lesbian Sex, Loud Moans Only Crying" (National Ledger, November 12 2005), and demonstrates that level of prurient controversy at which the truth or falsity of a given story becomes utterly irrelevant, and also provides the valuable lesson that using a fake ID on the police is a good way to turn a misdemeanor charge into a felony.

And it does, finally, lead me to the announcement that the future is already here and thus the time has come to canonize Warhol's comment on the future of fame as a Law. As in:

Warhol's Law: Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

Scrivener's First Corollary: 99.9% of the time it will be for being a complete jackass.

I should have just gone with puggles.

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Remember the Reason for the Season: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot

New Rome, of course, was substantially founded by the United Kingdom, that fine example of what happens when several savage packs of pale barbarians get half civilized by Italians and start Running the World.

In the spirit of acknowledging our forbearers, a brief review of the salient details of Bonfire Night, November 5, when history-minded Britons celebrate the life and brutal death of ambiguous terrorist Guy Fawkes. Fawkes had the misfortune of being on the scene, specifically a cellar under the House of Lords that had 36 kegs of gunpowder in it, when said cellar was stormed by Crown authorities the evening of November 4. The gunpowder was allegedly placed by Fawkes and 12 associates, led by Oxford dropout Robert Catesby. While the likely efficacy of igniting the powder as a means to eliminating the civic persecution of Catholics is debatable, there is still an unquestionable novelty to the notion of a political attack that specifically targets the wealthy and powerful.

The Crown did not see the humor in the situation and had Fawkes hung, drawn and quartered.

The Brits turned the occasion into a tradition of (generally) controlled fires and explosions.

I suggest giving the BBC's Guy Fawkes Game a spin. The sumptuous Flash interface does not long disguise the fact that you are being administered a history quiz with a time limit, almost none of the answers to which are found in the entirely inadequate summary above. With a small amount of study, however, you should win through to enjoy the most unchallenging final contest ever. Thank you, Brittania, for laying the colorful (sorry, colourful) foundations of our nation which we have carried on, full circle back to Rome.

Nihil Sub Sole Novum

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Life Imitates Art Imitating Life? Theron, Berry, and the Alleged Bouquet

In case you lost track of the dullest Hollywood cat fight of the 21st Century, Halle Berry is now stating that she never received a bouquet of flowers allegedly sent by Charlize Theron.

(Theron's Oscar-magnet North Country (Warner Brothers, AOL Time Warner) is in theaters now. She stars in the film adaptation of the popular dystopian cartoon Aeon Flux (one of the flagships of MTV's short-lived Liquid Television franchise) due in December (Viacom by way of MTV films and Paramount Pictures). But that's neither here nor there).

It's been reported that Theron stated she sent the flowers to Berry as an apology for a statement by a reporter claiming Theron stated words to the effect of "note to self: don't become Halle Berry." What might be meant by this is uncertain. One might speculate that Theron is reminding herself not to follow up her big Oscar power drives by starring in an adaptation of a comic/animation vehicle dominated by a hypersexualized heroine.

But that's neither here nor there either, because Theron denies ever saying it in the first place. She denies saying it, Berry denies reaction to the alleged statement, Theron has neither confirmed nor denied reported statements that she sent Berry flowers, but regardless Berry denies receiving them.

There is a theme here, you may have noticed, of the subtle interplay of cause and effect between things that may or may not have happened.

What does this mean? It means my job just got a lot easier. The deluxe heart-shaped box of chocolate truffles never, in fact, showed up at the O'Reilly Factors studios: in light of this what are we to make of Tom Cruise's failure to state that he ever sent them? In fact Cruise offered no apology for statements on Oprah that O'Reilly was leaving harassing messages on his answering inviting a threesome: Cruise has never confirmed making any such statements. O'Reilly himself has made no comment at all... but then, after his last telephone harassment debacle he did firmly state that he would "never speak of this again." One reporter dares to ask: how far does this conspiracy of silence go?

Ashlee Simpson is not "picking up options" on Nick Lachey's union contract with an eye towards a "sister-pick-up rebound relationship, skanky/doomed summer affair reality series." Snape does not say "bollocks" in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Robert Bork never sent Harriet Miers an e-card featuring an adorable kitten and a note pleading "please forgive me for the terrible things I said. I knew that we could never be together unless we could meet on the same level: that of failed Supreme Court appointees."

Reporting things that never happened, in a world that never was, as if they were of great importance. Even though even if they ever had they wouldn't be.

That's genius.

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