I am SO glad I don't actually watch this show

I realize that if you're going to be part of the zeitgeist in America today, you have to watch all of these competition shows. The problem is, I'm over here still listening to the Allman Bros. Band and even Green day; and I also like Railroad Earth and Leftover Salmon and the Flecktones (four of the best damn musicians you will ever hear) and Hot Tuna (who are playing at the Beacon Theatre this weekend, and if you didn't get to see any of last winter's shows with Charlie Musselwhite and G.E. Smith, and you're in the New York area, GO!). I like swing. I like bluegrass until they start singing "I'm going to heaven and you're not because I love Jesus and you don't" through their noses. I love black gospel music because it feels like praise and joy and not like smugness and elitism the way white gospel does. I love Motown. I love 1920's jazz as rendered by Bix and Tram and Satchmo and Sidney Bechet. I love acoustic blues and electric blues and the blues shouting of Wynonie Harris. I love the music from Tin Pan Alley that collectors are thankfully digitizing from old 78s and Edison cylinders. My musical taste is far and wide and eclectic. And if it doesn't include hip-hop, well, I'm 56 years old and I guess that's just going to have to be my excuse.

What I don't care for is what I think of as current pop music -- the stuff purveyed on talent shows like American Idol and Simon Cowell's Fall 2011 entry which I keep thinking of as the Rollerball of talent shows, The X Factor. I would have had ZERO interest in this show were it not for a promo that ran during The Simpsons one night in which a girl who was just a kid was belting out "Mercy", sounding like the love child of Janis Joplin and Axl Rose. And I was utterly blown away. This must be what it must have been like for the people at Island Records hearing Amy Winehouse for the first time, long before she became a hot mess.

Of course I have my pride, so it's not like I was going to sit there for two hours a week watching a parade of cookie-cutter shrei-ing pop divas trying to be the next Mariah or Whitney or Britney or Beyonce or Rihanna -- those overproduced divas who to my aged ears are completely and utterly interchangeable. But as little Rachel Crow, the chubby Betty Boop-faced kid with the infectious grin, the heartwarming backstory, and the ferocious confidence, charmed her way through this weekly mess of American decadence, growing as a singer even while we watched, it was hard not to get sucked in.

And I'm so glad I didn't (well, not too much). Because for all that Rachel Crow has the heart and soul and voice of a long-downtrodden blues singer, I'm not sure I could have watched her be eliminated this week.

The entertainment industry is littered with kids who starred early and flamed out quickly. For every Leonardo DiCaprio there are twenty River Phoenixes and Corey Haims. For every Justin Timberlake there are twenty Britney Spearses. And the trainwreck that was Michael Jackson is in a league by himself. So it's probably a blessing in disguise to not score a $5 million record constract at thirteen, I don't care how centered and sane her family seems to be. But while Rachel Crow may be able to sing like Etta James, this image:



...drives home that this is still a very little girl. The talent is there. The opportunities will come. There's too much money to be made off this kid for them not to.

Because sometimes your brain needs something to cleanse the palate

No, I don't watch "X-Factor". But based on a short promo clip before the season started, I could see that Rachel Crow has a vocal gift you can't cultivate. I've been saying all along that this kid is no pop princess, she's a born blues singer. Turns out I was right...in more ways than one:



Unfortunately, they've already started ruining her. It's clear they put her on a diet, and there's only a flash of the little-kid grin we saw earlier. But holy crap, what a voice.

We knew that Southwest Airlines had weight restrictions. Now it seems it has a dress code too

Last time Southwest Airlines hit the news, it was because their maintenance sucks. Before that it was because Kevin Smith was deemed too overweight to fly on their airplanes. But who's Kevin Smith, anyway? Outside of snarky fanboys and fangirls, do most Americans know who he is?

Now they may have messed with the wrong pop culture figure. Because Southwest perhaps might have wanted to think twice about kicking a guy who penned an album that became the anthem of a generation off their planes for ridiculous reasons:

Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong says he was asked to leave a plane he was travelling on in California for not pulling up his trousers.

The singer, 39, tweeted to say: "Just got kicked off a Southwest flight because my pants sagged too low!"

[snip]

Cindy Qiu, a local TV producer, was on the flight and described what happened on her company's website.

She says she heard Billie Joe Armstrong ask the flight attendant who'd demanded he pull up his trousers, "Don't you have better things to do than worry about that?"

Now, it's true that when one is on a plane, one is supposed to listen to the flight attendant for safety reasons. But kicking someone off a plane for wearing low-rise pants?

The band is back in the studio. I for one can't wait to see the song about Southwest Airlines. Perhaps Kevin Smith will appear in the video.

I am not ready for my childhood to be "retro" -- but it is.

When we first bought our house, a friend came over with her mother on the day we closed, took one look around, and said "You are going to be working on this house until the day you die."



After fifteen years and about $60,000 worth of siding, windows, roofing, gutters, a refinished basement, two water heaters, a furnace, and an upgraded electrical panel, I'm still ashamed to have a party. The longer you live in a house, the more daunting it becomes to have work done in it.



My next project (and I know my limitations so I don't end up on Renovation Realities), was going to be the downstairs bathroom. It's a 1950's cape cod house, so the bathroom is one of those tiny 5 x 7 functional-only bathrooms. I had a bath designer come out, and explained to her my vision of a step into yesteryear with gleaming white subway tile, a pan shower replacing the hulking seafoam-green tub with the massive rusting chip in it and the curved bottom that plots to kill me every time I step into it, and white hex tile with black accents. I knew the minute she walked in the door that her company would not try to get this job, because she came armed with a fat stack of glossy brochures from the kind of high-end cabinetry companies to which I'm sure the Real Housewives of New Jersey refer when remodeling their bathrooms every five years, sending the old fixtures to Green Demolitions.



Then Mr. Brilliant was laid off in January, and I started looking around said bathroom, and suddenly it seemed like a waste of $10,000-$15,000 to gut a bathroom with plaster walls and replace it with sheetrock. Yes, it's one of those 1950's tile bathrooms, but while most bathrooms of that era that are seafoam-green-and-black have the black tiles as accents, mine has black wall tile with the green accents. So I started to reconsider. We're hoping not to have to age in place, because the property taxes in New Jersey will kill us, assuming we're ever able to retire. So it may not pay to do the shower conversion right now. The tile is in good shape, and while the floor is a dull green that needs replacement and a new subfloor, and the holes in the ceiling that had to be punched so that a leaking pipe from the upstairs bathroom could be replaced have to be patched, but it occurred to me that perhaps this bathroom could be saved for the cost of a new vanity or sink, a few boxes of hex tile from Home Depot, a new mirror and a couple of well-placed shallow wall cabinets, a new light bar, and the labor to deal with the difficult stuff.









So I started looking around for photos that others had taken of their sow's ear bathrooms turned into silk purses. It isn't so much that I wanted to return it to its 1950's glory, though I did recently find on Freecycle a listing for an original seafoam green sink and toilet and thought about it for about five minutes until remembering that the seafoam green is the part of this bathroom I loathe most. But in these austere times, the days of the $20,000 Zen retreat seem to be over.



While looking for others who had scaled back their plans, I stumbled on Pam Kueber's very cool Retro Renovations site. Pam isn't just about learning to live with mid-20th-century tackiness, she's about reveling in it as some kind of Golden Age of Design. For someone like me, who is old enough to remember chrome-wrapped boomerang kitchen tables and who worships regularly at the altar of Gustav Stickley, it was difficult to wrap my mind around this concept. But Pam's enthusiasm, and that of her readers, is so infectious that I almost found myself starting to appreciate the design sensibility of my childhood.



Almost.



But who knew that there is, in this country, an entire subculture of people who, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to make their midcentury houses look like McMansions, have chosen instead to restore them to their original hideous glory, with pink bathrooms and ugly Don Draper sofas and pink kitchen appliances and tulip chairs.



If you watch This Old House, or read the magazine, there's always a bit of self-importance about restoring an old Queen Anne, or a Victorian, or especially a Craftsman house (which is my own particular favorite design aesthetic). Perhaps it's because these eras all pre-date anyone who's still alive today, which gives them a hushed museum quality to which that kind of reverence fits. But the mid-20th-century aesthetic, with its absurd turquoise kitchens and seafoam green bathrooms and bright orange sofas and kidney-shaped coffee tables, has a kind of gleeful tastelessness that after you read Pam Kueber's blog, makes you kind of understand it, even if you aren't quite ready to contact that guy getting rid of the seafoam green bathroom sink.



Today Pam Kueber has attained that revered condition of Blog Nirvana -- a LONG profile in the New York Times. Go check it out, and then check out Retro Renovations.



As for me, next time I go to get my hair done, I'm going to check out World of Tile on Route 22 in Springfield. Who knows, they might have the same seafoam green and black floor tile that I have now, and perhaps when it hasn't been trod on for fifty years it looks awesome.

Saturday Morning Snark

Somewhere in California, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are howling with laughter:

And that differs from these.....how?

Hilarious.

Because anything that can make me laugh at a time when the idea of a sudden fatal heart attack is an appealing thought, deserves to be posted.

Show Tune Hipsters

The Future of Broadway

There's a very strange thing happening in pop culture these days, and it has to do with show tunes.

Show Tunes. The very phrase has been associated with, variously, little old ladies with blue hair, tourists from Kansas, and Teh Gay. And yet, we're now finding that there is a Vast Show Tune Underground, a club that surely meets in dark basements in bad parts of town, serving up bad liquor and requiring a password for enter. Its members are neither little old ladies with blue hair, nor tourists from Kansas, nor gay men. In fact, they are some of the most unlikely people you'd ever think would be aficionados of the Songbook of the American Theatre. For one thing, they're straight guys. For another, they're "guy-guys", with sophomoric, Apatowan senses of humor which lean towards jokes about getting high and jerking off, about farts and anal probes and the reality that "clitoris" is a funny-sounding word. And yeah, there's a fair amount of undercurrent of homophobia to what they do, which is why they are as rich as Croesus and is no doubt their way of overcompensating for the fact that these guys really, really love show tunes.

Seth MacFarlane, who created Family Guy, a show that uses any excuse to include a musical number (preferably a big production number), has often revealed in interviews his love of show tunes and the American songbook. The CD Family Guy Live in Vegas, a collaboration with composer Walter Murphy, gave a taste of what MacFarlane's amazing pipes can do. But MacFarlane takes his American songbook as seriously as Michael Feinstein does, and in September will release Music Is Better Than Words, a compilation of "hidden gems" from musicals of the 1940's and 1950's. But because Mac Farlane's Broadway sensiblity is so tied up in his own voice, and because he's busy producing three hit TV shows and doing live performances, a move to Broadway is unlikely. Still, given the demographic of his audience, a guy with the snark cred of Seth MacFarlane can do a great deal to open the eyes of the youth demographic to the emerging Broadway that is not just for bluehairs anymore.

The bluehairs are the reason for the hue and cry over the years about the impending Death of Broadway, about where the next generation of audiences is going to come from when everyone who could possibly stand to sit through Andrew Lloyd Webber bombasts has already seen them and started to die off. All the hoopla about Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, at least before it became a national joke, was about keeping the same young audiences in the theatre that made Avenue Q a hit and a Tony Award winner in 2003-2004 -- one with staying power that is still playing off-Broadway.

The plethora of jukebox musicals that dot the theatre district like Starbucks these days aren't going to do it. The songs in these shows, such as Jersey Boys, Million Dollar Quartet, and Baby It's You, have no resonance for younger audiences. They're for the neo-bluehairs that constitute the first wave of baby boomers. Perhaps this group has enough disposable income to keep Broadway going all by themselves, because there's yet another one coming: Natural Woman, based on the life and music of Carole King. It's all enough to make me rue the fact that Leader Of The Pack opened in 1984, before the jukebox musical became a cheap way to make money. Frank Rich hated it, but I actually SAW Leader Of The Pack and was rewarded by some great belting by Annie Golden and a rendition of "River Deep Mountain High" by the great Darlene Love that turned the Ambassador Theatre into the First Church of Awesome Gospel. "Leader" ran for only 120 performances, which should give the producers of Natural Woman pause, Jersey Boys notwithstanding. The jukebox musical set is starting to retire, and doesn't have a whole lot of money for Broadway. There's only so many ways you can slice that bologna before it starts to go bad. At some point you have to bring in new audiences.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that snark sells. Yes, musicals like South Pacific are classics, but among the high school drama club set from whence new audiences come, the standard bearer is the ubiquitous Guys and Dolls -- to this day the gold standard of marriage of wit and music. The wit is out there; the question was from whence the music would come.

And it's coming from some highly unlikely places.

Anyone who's followed Green Day over the years knows that even back in the Dookie days, it was clear that while Billie Joe Armstrong may have been a snotty punk pothead, he had a gift for ditties -- 3 minute pop songs filled with angst, rage, and yes, snark. We knew that Billie Joe was prolific, and we knew that his brand of 3-chord punk had those damnedly catchy pop hooks that left "Walking Contradiction" playing over and over in your head for three days. What we didn't know, is for all these years, what Billie Joe was writing was show tunes. What we learned when American Idiot hit Broadway was just how glorious some of those songs are when performed by people who can actually sing.

For example, here's "Whatshername" performed by Green Day:

...and by the original Broadway cast:

American Idiot on Broadway was a vibrant, exciting show with a great cast, hampered by a weak book, but it still played a respectable 422 performances, closing this year on April 24. And now we know that while Billie Joe Armstrong became a rock star writing songs about getting teenaged rage, there's something else brewing there -- a knowledge and feel for the conventions of theatre that in the aftermath of American Idiot have no doubt had him thinking he might at some point write something specifically for Broadway.

Sort of like what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done with The Book of Mormon. Back in February, I started receiving postcards for bargain preview seats for this show. I knew that these two guys combined with Bobby Lopez, who along with Jeff Marx wrote the hilarious, yet still tinkly songs for Avenue Q, would produce a winner. But Mr. Brilliant had been jettisoned from his employer a month before, and I couldn't justify spending even $49 a head for a show.

Of course now I'm kicking myself, now that Book has become a monster hit, and is expected to pick up a wheelbarrow of Tony Awards this weekend. Who would have thought that the same people who fifteen years ago created a cartoon that started with a foul-mouthed character getting anally probed by space aliens via an expanding satellite dish would become the Toast of Broadway? But even if you can't get tickets until sometime in 2016 (which is what seems to be the case; just try looking for tickets during the time period that Telecharge allow you to enter and if you want to really get sick, try looking for tickets at StubHub), you should run out and buy the original cats recording.

Here's composer Bobby Lopez on this week's Studio 360 on NPR (full interview link) playing the opening to "I Believe", which I've read will be the song performed on the awards show tonight. It wouldn't have been my choice, but this song is a small miracle -- it demonstrates the full goofiness of some of the Mormon precepts, and yet for one brief moment, it makes you believe them too.

Parker and Stone may be getting all the press, but for my money, it's Bobby Lopez, likely to be two-for-two by the end of this weekend, who is the unsung hero of this production -- a Frank Loesser for a new generation.

Anything interesting happen today?

I heard a couple of nice British kids got married.

OK, you've seen the dress. Now go about your business.

But if you simply must pay attention to those two nice kids in England, there's no better way to do it than with Sarah's liveblogging over at Balloon Juice. Just be careful, though: coffee and keyboard simply do not mix, dahling.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Is there ANY good news ANYWHERE?

Sorry about no good pearls of widsom from me this week, just crazy busy with work and too dispirited to come up with anything readable. So you might as well catch up on those who have been able to at least catch their breath. I have a day off tomorrow, only part of which will be spent working, so I'll try to catch up then.

Meanwhile, not all of this is from bloggers, but worth reading just the same.

Gaius Publius on the wholesale turning over of entire towns to corporations.

Gail Collins on Texas: Ground Zero for the Work Force of Tomorrow. (God help us. And by the way, why is Texas Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to secede, now looking for FEMA help when they hate the federal government? Fucking parasite.)

Mike Stark on Alaska Sen. Don Young actively participating in a rally supporting right wing militia leader Schaeffer Cox, who was arrested on March 10, 2011 for plotting to kill state police and a federal judge, and for possession of illegal weapons.

Rick Ungar is keeping an eye on Scott Walker, who hasn't actually DENIED that he's planning the kind of "financial martial law" that's taking place in Michigan.

I knew what I was doing when I added Tom Degan to the blogroll. Enjoy his look at the late, great Ernie Kovacs.

And finally....Roger Ebert reviews At Last, Drugged, a.k.a. P0rn for Paul Ryan.

I'm going to try to pull some thoughts together about the senseless and pointless death of Restrepo director Tim Hetherington.

Pap Smears at Applebee's

It isn't so much that I want to write about the fact that the biggest pair of doofuses ever to appear on a cable TV show (and I'm including Snooki and JWoWW in that consideration too) think that you can get pap smears at Walgreen's. It's just that I can't pass up the opportunity to point out the latest example of right-wing idiocy when it also provides the opportunity to once again flog David Brooks for his "salad bar at Applebee's" observation about how Barack Obama can't relate to "the common man" as well as a pundit who deludes himself that he has a brain in his head.

And I think "Pap Smears at Applebee's" would be the greatest name for a rock band since the Fountains of Wayne were left orphaned by the closing of, well, The Fountains of Wayne.

If YOU decide to name your band "Pap Smears at Applebee's", please e-mail me a link to your YouTube video and I'll post it. But until then, here are the Fountains of Wayne:

This kid is nobody's fool.

Anyone else get the sense that Justin Bieber has a pretty good sense of irony about his own preposterous level of fame? How many sixteen-year-old boys do YOU know who would be cool with a web site consisting of photos of women who look like them?

It's the Testosterone Oscars®, or What Am I Going To Do With Five Pounds of Chicken Wings?

I'm so tired of hearing the Academy Awards show referred to as the "Gay Superbowl" or the "Chick Superbowl." Why should a mediocre football game played by two teams I don't care about (though Green Bay is my pick solely by virtue of being the only nonprofit, community-owned team in the NFL) get to be the point of reference? From now on, Superbowl Sunday is the Testosterone Oscar®s.

The best satire that I've seen on the Hype Machine that is Super Bowl Sunday comes from Wiley Miller of Non Sequitur fame. You'll have to click over to see it so that GoComics doesn't send its lawyers after me, but it's worth the click.

Now everyone knows that if you really don't have a team to root for in this game, there are only two reasons to watch: The commercials, and chicken wings.

Cookie Jill has a nice compendium of memorable Super Bowl ads, but you kind of have to wonder about a country in which millions of people who record programs on their DVRs so they don't have to watch commercials, tune in on this one day a year primarily to watch the commercials. This year, as in most years, car ads dominate, because despite $100 oil, Americans will still go broke to drive a cool car. And I'm sure we can expect the usual odious T&A ads from GoDaddy. And that annoying E-Trade baby, who if he were mine I would suffocate with a pillow to save the world from his future as a hedge fund manager, will also make an appearance.

I'm not sure what the obsession is with the Super Bowl. It can't just be football withdrawal, because fans of non-playoff teams gave up on football weeks ago, and even those of us whose teams fell just a wee bit short are now looking forward to spring and baseball.

Or maybe not.

Perhaps it's just an excuse to have what is essentially a national holiday smack dab in the dead of winter, and who could blame us, the way this winter has been. It's gotten so bad that yesterday we were cheering a cold, raw, rain that all froze up last night -- just because it wasn't snow. They're predicting a bit of snow and rain Monday night, and potentially another big one towards the end of next week. It's enough to make you want them to put Christmas back into March where it belongs, except for those pesky years when Easter is in March, which would just move the Holiday Chocolate Overload three months forward. Of course in March the weather is getting better and you can go outside and walk it off, but it doesn't change the fact that we have at least another month of this. So why not make today a holiday, especially when the Academy Awards are likely to be a snoozefest after the Weinstein Borg's frontal assault of the last few weeks. I enjoyed The King's Speech as much as the next girl, but Best Picture? Really? Doesn't that seem like a lot of trouble to go to in order to give Colin Firth the award he should have gotten last year for A Single Man? I mean, that would be like giving Shakespeare In Love Best Picture to justify giving Dame Judi Dench an award for a few minutes of screen time because you jobbed her on Mrs. Brown the year before.

Oh. Right.

But I digress.

So, since Super Bowl Sunday has become a national holiday to the point that not even the hungriest realtors dare to put on an open house today, it might as well have its own "official" food, and that food seems to be chicken wings.

There's something satisfying about chicken wings out of all proportion to what they are. Part of it is the primal thing about meat on the bone, though one would think that something as small and relatively dainty as chicken wings are hardly the stuff of which macho men are made. If it was only about primal carnivorousness, we would see a rush on turkey legs at the supermarkets this weekend, and you'd see on the news guys with foam rubber cheeses on their heads brandishing turkey legs like jousters and maidens at your local Renaissance Faire. But instead it's chicken wings.

Now, if you don't hold a Super Bowl party, but you feel obligated to participate in the bacchanalia of grease and bone and sauce that is any permutation of chicken wing you like, there is the question of where to find them. This year we haven't had a repeat of the Great Chicken Wing Shortage of 2009, but unless you are having 27 people over, you are stuck with mammoth ten-dollar packages of wings. And so it is here at Casa la Brilliant, where I'm planning to cook up some fake Buffalo wings (which are just going to be baked wings with some Frank's Hot Sauce slathered on at the end) and some teriyaki wings (because I don't much care for hot wings). And then I have to find room in the freezer for the rest.

So what kind of saturated fat-laden treats do YOU make for this dead-of-winter holiday?

Caturday: Why the Justin Bieber hate?

One thing that I've become aware of as I get older is how difficult, often impossible, it is to catch up with whatever pop zeitgeist is going on at any given time. Most of the people I work with are a lot younger than I am, and listen to music that is very different from what I listen to. Green Day is about as "today" as I get, and even that band is now a bunch of guys in their late thirties. An article about Gregg Allman is more likely to catch my eye than one about the return of Lauryn Hill, whose voice I wouldn't recognize if I heard it.

But all this is about real musicians, not about "pop stars." And that brings us to Justin Bieber. Aside from the fact that I am almost old enough to have grandchildren who would listen to Justin Bieber, I really didn't know much about him, other than that he's some cute-boy singer who got his start on YouTube, and is now the biggest thing among tween girls since Leonardo DiCaprio drowned to save Kate Winslet. This month's Vanity Fair has him as its cover boy, which used to spell Career Doom (see also: Gretchen Mol, who has turned out to be a damn fine actress, even if it took longer than Vanity Fair promised), which is perhaps why more established people like Cher and Johnny Depp have graced the cover recently. But since I am an occasional commentator on the pop culture zeitgeist, I felt obligated to read it. Bieber seems like a pretty nice kid for a pop juggernaut, aside from the religious stuff. But if religion is what this kid needs to keep him from becoming yet another teen star burnout, who could object?

Still, there seems to be the kind of hate surrounding this kid that tends to always go along with being this kind of pretty-boy teen dreamboat. Who can forget the infamous "Leo Is Gay And Kate Is Fat" wars of 1998? The only thing keeping David Cassidy from the same onslaught during the 1970's was the lack of participatory media, and even from that decade, yesterday's teen dreamboat is all too often today's addict/jailbird (see also: Leif Garrett). So if Bieber rakes in tons of cash while teen girls scream, who cares, as long as the kid has his feet firmly planted on the ground? I may shake my head, but especially with no tween girls in the house, I don't have to listen to it.

Well, here's a cat in Poland who really, really, REALLY hates Justin Bieber:

Seriously, puss....some perspective please.

God, he was funny

R.I.P. Leslie Nielsen

I really can't add anything to this:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thanks for the laughs.

Rachel Maddow is a Trash Culture Mutant

Yes! She IS "one of us"! Puzzling evidence proving this was broadcast on October 28 and can be seen at 2:08:

Actually, it was the 1980's, and I have three copies of the ORIGINAL printing of the Book of the Subgenius to prove it.

By the way, any resemblance between "Bob" Dobbs and Stephen Colbert is, well, I don't know if it's intentional or not, but it's there.

(via)

This is just 1000 kinds of awesome

Daniel Radcliffe sings Tom Lehrer's The Elements:

Now if he can sing Allan Sherman's The Painless Dentist and recite all of the ORIGINAL version of this:

...his Trash Culture Mutant cred will be complete.

(h/t)

Another recruit into the Cult of Betty White

That was so cute my head exploded. And I don't even LIKE children. But I have to wonder: Why Betty White? I know she has fantastic comic timing, and she's replaced Ruth Gordon as my Who I Want To Be When I Grow Up role model, but I wonder what is so enchanting about Betty White to a baby?

Kid, welcome to your fifteen minutes

I predict he'll be on the Today show by midweek:

OK, not all of his accents are spot on. His German seems a bit off, his Japanese is too fast, his "southern redneck" is TOO broad, and Johnny Weir does a far better Russian accent. But that he can do all these even halfway credibly is pretty impressive.

Joans, Peggys, and Christine O'Donnell: Is this what feminism has come to?

I'd never been able to much get into Mad Men, but this season I started watching and found myself getting sucked into it. Part of it is that we're in familiar territory this season, since I was about the same age in 1964-65, when the season takes place, as Don's daughter Sally. But I think much of it is that this season is more about the women than about a bunch of Guys Behaving Badly.

Part of what's fascinating this season is watching the interplay between the women and the men, as the early glimmerings of change start to take hold. Joan, the whispery-voiced somewhat aging sexpot who's the office manager, seems stuck in the previous decade, while Peggy, the secretary-turned-copywriter, sees a glimpse of a new way of being at a boho party, starts to find her own voice and begins to assert herself. I'm not sure that Peggy actually existed in 1965; her rise seems somewhat unlikely until a couple of decades later. But in this week's episode, when Peggy fires a freelance copywriter whose filthy drawing about Joan truly IS beyond the pale, Girl Solidarity backfires right in Peggy's face:

Note: video may expire

Peggy and Joan are in their own ways trying to find a way in a world that's still very much controlled by men and the rules (or lack of same) that men make.

The feminism for which Joan and Peggy are just a few years too early gave a lot of lop service to being about toughness. It had to. Look at the world that women who were trying to fight their way out of being baby-making appendages lived in. It's no wonder that the Rogers and the Dons and the Joeys of the world laughed at the women who dared to challenge the established order and called them ugly...and they still do.

The rise of Victim Feminists like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell is perhaps a natural consequence of the fatal mistake that the 1960's feminists made -- of not realizing that "the system" that they felt enslaved them in the 1950's also enslaved men. As massive jerks as Don Draper and Roger Sterling and Henry Francis are on Mad Men, it's hard to argue that they're kings of the world. Roger and Henry have young pretty trophy wives, but they're still unhappy. Roger and Don are clearly alcoholics (though Don, being the show's protagonist, is starting to show signs of getting his shit together). These guys, like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Revolutionary Road, have lives of mind-numbing sameness that were only marginally better than the stifling lives of 1950's housewives in the suburbs. EVERYONE was oppressed by the budding culture of consumerism that was given life after World War II. But the minute early feminism claimed the mantle of oppression, it lost any semblance to an empowerment movement and paved the way for Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell. That's why I was so disturbed last night to hear Howard Fineman opine that part of the reason for O'Donnell's victory last night was that Mike Castle, known in Delaware as a Really Nice Guy, hammered at O'Donnell too hard and that made women voters upset.

Of course Joan and Peggy don't know about feminism yet, but in the exchange in the elevator, Joan seems to be aware that in firing Joey, Peggy has succumbed to this kind of victimology. I don't know if pornographic drawings of the office manager were a commonplace pastime among the creative department in 1960's ad agencies, but I do know that when I was a secretary in an ad agency as late as 1980, I arrived every morning to find one of the bosses standing by the coffeemaker, mug in hand, waiting for me to make the coffee, and then expecting me to break into meetings any time his girlfriend was on the phone for him (but not if it was his wife). Peggy may think she's sending a message that this sort of behavior will no longer be tolerated as of today, but I suspect that the remaining assholes in SCDP's creative department are going to be testing their limits, asserting their dominance over Joan (who rightly knows that they see her as a "meaningless secretary" and treating Peggy like a "humorless bitch."

Fast-forward forty years and you have Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell, two mind-bogglingly stupid and unqualified women, wrapping themselves in the mantle of poor, put-upon fragile flowers being picked on by mean old men like Mike Castle and others who dare mention the obvious -- that if one is to participate in government, one is at least supposed to be coherent and not sound like the early boot on Survivor, kicked off for being useless in challenges AND around camp. Because for all that Sarah Palin talks about Mama Grizzlies, what stares us in the face is the smoking ruin of feminism -- and it looks a lot like corseted Victorians fanning themselves on fainting couches.

Sarah Palin came into the public eye with her guns and her talk about field dressing a moose and shooting wolves out of a helicopter and her aura of dominatrix. But it quickly became about the imagery of the soccer mom tied to her minivan, the Downs Syndrome mom, the poor widdew goilie being bullied by the "lamestream media." Any scrutiny of Sarah Palin was just mean old media men being mean to a girl. Palin appropriated the mantle of feminism as her own, but she's twisted it into a gargoyle of victimology. Palin feminism isn't about toughing it out in a man's world, and it isn't even about changing that man's world. It's about playing the victim card every time someone dares ask you to play on the same field as the guys. Christine O'Donnell has clearly studied her Sarah Palin very carefully. She looks like Palin (only without the psychopathic eyes), she dresses like Palin, and she won just like Palin -- by playing to victimhood. This is a woman who thinks masturbation is adultery, who checks the bushes outside her house for her political enemies, hasn't held a real job in years, pays her living expenses off her campaign donations, rails against people sucking at the government teat, but is running to collect a taxpayer-funded paycheck herself.

This is what feminism has come to? Last night in her victory speech, O'Donnell threw down the gauntlet when she talked about ordinary people being able to run for office without fear of "character assassination." This is a worthy goal regardless of party, but somehow I get the feeling that this goal is not going to apply to her Democratic opponent, who is a man and is no doubt already wondering how he's going to run against her when any criticism, no matter how minor, is going to be be met with cries of "character assassination." Because in the feminism of conservatism, women are just little fragile flowers, wilting under the slightest breeze.