Newspapers, Page Views, and Guilty Pleasures

One thing I don't like about reading stuff on the internet is that someone knows what you've been reading. I don't mean I worry that someone knows what particular things I am personally reading, but rather that it is clear what is collectively being read.

Sites count page views; they count them with care and for specific things; and reasonably, they take more clicks to indicate that there is more interest out there for that sort of thing. "More of that sort of thing," they conclude.

It's a little too bad, because it means one's guilty pleasures are never innocuous.

If I buy a newspaper, I enjoy feeling like some days I can study the international news, and other days I can just wallow in the Life section, and since no one knows either way, it makes no direct difference in how my reading is interpreted. I just, you know, bought the paper.

I'm sure more people buy when there's more catering to guilty pleasures, but I'm also sure that lots of people get a special pleasure from the package: it's nice knowing there's an in-depth story on the Ukranian political situation on page 3, or whatever, even if you're not going to read it today. I want those stories to be there, even if, let's admit it, I read them less consistently than I read the comics.

The total package is what I like about the paper.

Online you can't hide. If you click, guiltily, on the Paris Hilton news, you're part of the gazillion page views that the site gets for its Paris Hilton news, and then the site figures, gotta have more Paris Hilton news.

I know these forces exist in "old media" too; I just feel like they're so accelerated and personal now. Like, every time I click, I'm making life worse in the long run. You: hastening the end of civilization as we know it.

I don't know what the answer is but whatever it is I feel it will have something to do with the structure of advertising revenue, which I'm not up to thinking about right now. Maybe later after my mental candy fix of the morning. Ugh.

For Love Or The Game

is a feature in ESPN the Magazine. In it, they take some athlete, and his wife/girlfriend (pronouns used advisedly, although maybe once a year they switch it up by having the chick be the athlete) and a teammate or competitor, and then they ask the athlete questions and have the girlfriend and teammate try to guess what the answers are.

It's a front of the book kind of thing, designed to be stupid and funny; it is not as funny, in my opinion, as the semi-regular feature "Right Name, Wrong Number" in which they call people with the same name as famous sports figures and ask them the interview questions that you would ask the actual athlete, and the person answering gives straight ahead responses. That makes me laugh a huge amount. Also the "If Larry King Wrote For Us" feature, because that is also pretty goddamn funny.

Anyway, this "For Love Or The Game" thing is supposed to be light-hearted and they always ask the question "Who wears the pants?" to which the girlfriend or wife is apparently contractually obliged to answer either "I do" or "He'll say he does."

I have been reading ESPN the Magazine for about three years now. It comes out every two weeks; I think this feature is in at least every other issue.

Never once in that time has the non-spouse or girlfriend won. Not once.

I'm starting to feel like the whole thing is rigged. I have been reading this feature and the girlfriend's missed like three pretty easy questions in a row and I think we're heading for an upset and then she pulls it out.

It's not, I suppose, totally implausible that dating someone gives you an insight into their character that nobody else can match. But I guess it strikes me as equally plausible that ESPN the Magazine operates on the reasonable assumption that we would don't want to hear that Mike Modano's wife does not actually know him as well as his teammate Darryl Sydor does.

But it's this funny ritualized enactment of what relationships are supposed to be like. The girlfriend says at least one drastically wrong thing, the buddy cracks some jokes, the girlfriend demonstrates her strength by refusing to fall in with any idea that the guy wears the pants, but accepts the concept wholesale, and at the end the power of true love as a basis for knowledge, faulty as it may be, is reaffirmed.

It's The Hollywood Santa Parade!

Yesterday I went to the Hollywood Santa Parade, which I guess is technically different than the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which died last year from hemorrhaging money.

I live about two blocks away from the parade route, and last year I came back from the grocery store and watched high school bands practicing on the little side streets of Fountain and found the whole thing pretty goddamn touching, but didn't go. Then they said that was the last year and I found myself stricken by a sense of loss and failure, which is funny. As though it wasn't worth going to in itself, but if it was my last chance to experience the parade all of a sudden it became critically important.

I went to the parade once before, when I was maybe seven or eight, with my family and my best friend's family. I don't really remember what I thought about it; I remember people shoving and a struggle to see and some confusion.

Anyway, I saw the signs this year and I meant to go and then I forgot, and then I remembered. The parade started at five; I worried about whether to show up early to get a seat and all that. I went to get a late lunch at RoRo's Chicken and I saw people already staking out seats.

So I drifted over there around 4:30; the parade was due to start at 5. There was a lot of space left, and I sat down on the street, and watched the 15 year olds next to me flirt and giggle. But then at 4:45 one of their parents showed up with a whole host of other adult/teenager/family friend types, and the thermos of hot chocolate came out and a six year old was sitting at the very end of their row of chairs, looking, mostly, extremely anxious about the whole thing.

Bob Avakian's Revolutionary party came along, handing out newspapers and selling t-shirts about how the Bush Administration was a terrorist organization and then there were the Jews For Jesus and then people selling candy canes and light up toys.

The Eckankar center was advertising clean bathrooms, and lending out chairs.


People kept running across the street, aka the parade route, and I found myself vaguely anxious about that. The six year old's mother brought him a piece of pizza; she was blowing on it to cool it down for him.

Things started happening. A whole troupe of fire department guys on motorcycles tricked out with lights and tinsel and with lovely ladies on the back came wheeling down the street. Then there was a procession of emergency vehicles, lights and sirens on. The Robocop car was one of them!

The families on either side of me were waving; I felt weird waving. In fact, I felt a little weird being there on my own, plunked down on the asphalt without so much as a blanket or a thermos. I guess maybe I should have bought a light up toy.

One of the six year old's relatives who was maybe 13 himself (although I am now too old to accurately measure age in young people) came over and told the six year old to stand up, that he wanted to see how tall he was. The six year old was reluctantly hauled up. Then the 13 year old took his seat. The six year old looked upset and said, "Give me back my seat." The 13 year old said, "What do you say?" The six year old added please, and was given back his seat.

There was Bob Barker! There were high school bands! There was the mayor, who may have been greeted by cheering up on Hollywood Blvd., which was the pulsating heart of the parade route, but not down on Sunset, almost at the end. I mean, there were a couple of cheers, but nothing so much. He was working the crowd; he shouted "Hollywood in the house!" and asked the cops what district they were from and mentioned the tragic recent death of a cop and then later he asked a family where they were from and shouted "Covina in the house!" There was Rocky Delgadillo. There was Fred Willard, which I was very excited about because I had him confused with David Leisure, who was Joe Isuzu. It is only just now that I learned my mistake, and I feel a little cheated.

Endless amounts of time passed between bands and celebrities. I got antsy. The Marine Corps band from Twentynine Palms played a medley of Christmas carols, including that one that goes peace on earth and mercy mild, and I got all choked up, and then I myself ran across the parade route and went home.

Marc Jacobs' Mid-Life Crisis Is An Inspiration

As I seem to mention all the time these days, I am 40 years old. This seems to me just about the paradigm age for being "middle-aged."

In way, you could say I'm having a bit of a mid-life crisis, in the classic sense: I fret about my age; I feel bad that I've accomplished so little; I'm seized by stupid fantasies of life improvement. I know, I'll buy a Corvette! I'll adopt a greyhound! I'll get liposuction!

Last week Jezebel had a story about fashion designer/icon/guru Marc Jacobs and his midlife crisis. The basic elements: Marc Jacbobs has gotten into weird jewelry; Marc Jacobs has one tattoo of an M+M on his arm and another of the girl from "Poltergeist" on his back; Marc Jacobs has been to the gym and wants to pose for you, topless, ballarina-style, showing off his sexy physique. Marc Jacobs wants to say goofy things like "The new concept is to have no concept. Ha!"

Now, this is a midlife crisis. The Jezebel comments were sort of along the lines of "Ugh. What happened to him?" but I think it's way cool. The man is showing us how it's done. I, for one, am paying attention.

One of the things often said about midlife is that it's the time in life when one's thoughts start to turn toward death. This doesn't apply to me, though, because, as I mentioned before, I have always been a freak about death.

I think about the finitude of life all the time, and it never seems to me anything less than a shocking, unbelievable tragedy. I mean unbelievable in the literal sense: I almost cannot believe that this is part of the organization scheme we've got going on here. It's just too shocking.

As far as I'm ccncerned, death is the perfect dilemma for not enjoying life. When you're unhappy, it seems outrageous that, you know, life's a bitch and then you die. No second chance to work it out right the next time. When you're happy, it seems equally outrageous in a different way: what, you mean I'm just getting this all figured out and then it's going to end?? You can't be serious.

In my previous post I mentioned my apprehensiveness about reading The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, since it's a story about a man who can barely move. As I explained, there, though, I needn't have worried: the book is about a strange sort of life, not about death.

No, the book I should have been frightened to read is Philip Roth's Everyman. I just read it this week. Not only is it about death, and about dying, but it's about death and dying in a way that make them seem completely unbearable. Having come to think of Roth as one who makes the unbearable bearable, I felt the absurd emotion of betrayal on top of my ordinary unhappiness.

The "theme" of the book seems to be something like, "Everyone is going to get old and die, and it sucks so so bad. When you start getting older and closer to death it sucks even more. Way more than you expected."

Do I need this? The narrator of the book experiences a certain surprise at finding it so awful to be sick and alone at the end of his life, but is there anyone who isn't aware of the awfulness of geting older, and sicker, and finally dying?

As far as I'm can see, there is only one rational way to deal with the fact that one is going to die, and that is total denial. At least, it's the only way for me. If I think about it, I am paralyzed. If I don't, I am OK. My life is organized around finding ways to not think about it for extended periods of time.

That's why I like Marc Jacobs' mid-life crisis. This guy is having a good time, and he is obviously not thinking about death. He is doing it at no one's expense, really: there's no violence, no belittling of other people, no crabbiness.

He's just having a good time. He's an inspiration to us all. Just as a fashion guru should be. Thanks Marc!

Now if you'll excuse me I gotta go work on my abs.

Marilyn Manson Lives In My Neighborhood

I don't actually know where Marilyn Manson lives.

But I was at Borders the other night buying The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss. I was buying it not because of any profound love for the music of Marilyn Manson, but because I've been going through a mini-phase of reading rock bios. I like rock bios like I like riding the bus. You learn that people out there are leading these lives that are unimaginably different from yours and it expands your sense of possibility which is nice when the world starts to get a little claustrophobic.

Anyway, I'm buying this book, along with some other books, and the Borders clerk said, "One of my customers was just talking about him." I said "Oh, really?" He said yeah, that this customer claimed to have seen Marilyn Manson at the Arclight Cinema (where, according to the website, movie lovers belong). And I laugh, because although US magazine tells me every week that Stars Are Just Like Us, I still find it funny to imagine Marilyn Manson at the Arclight Cinemas, buying his $8 coffee and maybe some of that tasty caramel corn.

And then the clerk says that the guy was a tourist and maybe just confused one of the standard issue Hollywood types for Marilyn Manson. I said maybe.

Gorbachev is appearing in Louis Vuitton ads these days. The new Tom Ford perfume ads are, at least to my eye, genuinely shocking. (It is a measure of my shock that the previous link was not to the pictures. Link via Jezebel .)

All of this has a strange apocalyptic feel to it. Marilyn Manson hangs out at the movie theater near my house. Or maybe the people who hang out at the movie theater near my house are identical to Marilyn Manson when seen by the naked eye. Former Communist leaders advertise luxury luggage by adopting fake spy poses. And people are using sex to sell things.

My Favorite Williams Sister

Is Venus.

I don't follow tennis. But every now and then tennis gets plastered all over everything and the whole Williams sister phenomenon was hard to miss, although I'd like to remind you that before there were Williams sisters there was just Venus.

I liked both Williams sisters, but I liked Venus more. Part of it's just as an aesthetic object -- she's so great looking in that terrifyingly predatory way. She makes you (made me?) reconsider how women can and should look.

Part of it is the way her personality got presented to us by the media. Serena was the bubbly sister; Venus aloof, serious.

From the New York Times article on Venus's match against Jelena Jankovic: "Williams, locked in a business meeting with herself all night, was having none of it."

I like that in a sports phenom. (See also Abdul Jabbar, Kareem and Bryant, Kobe.)

I also feel like she's one of those athletes who get covered grudgingly. This is the ESPN.com article about her upcoming match-up with Justine Henin. The author, having dedicated most of his column inches to why Henin would be the obvious player of the year if she wins the U.S. Open, devotes two sentences to the fact that Williams still has to be beaten, including their record against each other, and segues gracefully to why Williams won't win. "And yet, they haven't met since Henin won the first of her six Grand Slams in 2003."

There's something more than a little lunatic in insisting that the sports media show your preferred player the same respect and admiration that you do. It suggests the same inability to separate inner and outer worlds that leads to face painting. So we'll leave that aside.

I think that what really cemented my devotion to Venus Williams, though, was the spectacle of her losing ground to her younger sister. I don't know why -- I'm an only child and not a tennis pro so I will never face my younger sibling across the net in a Grand Slam setting. But it's got this universal appeal to it, this ashes to ashes, dust to dust quality to it. It's the circle of life, where we rise and then, slowly, inexorably, fall.

It's the way it is for us all, eventually. That doesn't mean I have to like it. I suspect I'm rooting for Venus Williams because I like rooting against the probabilities.

I hope she wins.

Controversial Sports Figures: The Tiki Barber Edition

Noko Marie asked me if I was going to post on Michael Vick. I was thinking about it, and never got back to her.

I don't actually have that much to say about Michael Vick. I don't think the country's outrage over the case squares with its general position on animal rights. I think the case demonstrates a revolting publicity-seeking on the part of some federal prosecutors. I think it illustrates our over-criminalization of the world in general. I think Michael Vick's friends are not very loyal. And I think it's pretty goddamn amazing (and, all right, funny) that the biggest scandal to erupt in the NFL, a league where a player was sentenced to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, has to do with dog-fighting.

Not that I'm pro the electrocution of dogs, okay?



But I didn't have a lot of outrage one way or another until my Aug. 13 copy of ESPN The Magazine showed up containing an article by David Fleming titled "Arthur & Mike: A Love Story Gone Bad." I wasn't able to find a link to it online, so I'll summarize. It features lots and lots of pictures of the Falcons owner, Arthur Blank, hugging Michael Vick, pushing his wheel chair, high-fiving him.

The thesis of the article seems to come at the end of the third paragraph. Fleming has described the scene as Blank pushed Vick onto the field in his wheelchair for opening weekend 2003. You can tell, kind of, where Fleming is going pretty quickly. He describes both Blank and Vick as looking "inappropriately giddy." He suggests that Vick could have walked onto the field -- he had a set of crutches and a walking cast for god's sake. He says "[S]omewhere on the sideline that day in Dallas, they rolled over a line, blurring the boundary between owner and player. Blank and Vick looked far more like business partners and close friends."

Ok, here's David Fleming's point: "In retrospect, Vick's precipitous fall from national icon status to federal indictment may have begun with that little push from his boss."

Michael Vick went bad because Arthur Blank treated him like an equal.

It made me think about last year's Tiki Barber controversy. No dogs tortured there. Basically, Tiki Barber, a suave and handsome man who health-wise, still probably had a season or two in him, decided he wanted to step down and pursue his interests in broadcasting. Given that my recollection had him already at the age in which players in his position are usually too fucked up to play anymore, it seemed reasonable enough to me. But according to an article in ESPN The Magazine (I threw away that issue, so no citation -- I really need to start saving them. Probably in plastic covers) this decision by Tiki Barber illustrated a critical lack of heart. And we wouldn't remember him as one of the all-time greats. Instead, we would sneer at his memory.





So I thought I wasn't going to be able to connect the dots between Michael Vick and Tiki Barber. Fortunately, controversy erupted again when Tiki Barber made the mistake of criticizing Eli Manning. This article breaks it all down for you -- for our purposes all that's really important is this quote from Manning: "I guess I could have questioned his leadership skills last year with calling out the coach and having articles about him retiring in the middle of the season, and he's lost the heart." Eli, nicely summarizing the press coverage.

Regrettably, googling for blogging purposes, I am forced to acknowledge that not all the press coverage was as one-sided as that (see, for example, this). And I know Chuck Klosterman once wrote a column where he pointed out that most of us are a lot more like Ricky Williams than Michael Jordan.

Whatever. I'll jump on the goddamn bandwagon. I would like my boss to treat me like an equal. I would damn well expect my boss to treat me like an equal if I was a superstar and the face of the franchise and the person who kept ticket sales up. None of this would make me more or less likely to buy property on which to host dogfighting.

And if and when I want to retire from what I do I expect people not to make a goddamn federal case about my lack of heart (and we're not talking my current joblessness here; we're talking a future joblessness where I have some kind of financial security).

It's a little strange that we don't apply the kind of analysis to athletes that we apply to ourselves. I'm not just saying that we expect more from them, or less from them. We don't think about them as human in the same way. (I 'm not really prepared to be thoughtful about the race issue right now, although I have, in my knee-jerk liberal way, no doubt that it plays a huge role. Fortunately we have the refereeing studies to keep us busy on that front.) Which makes me feel a little sick to my stomach, frankly.

I was having real trouble ending this post. I couldn't figure out why. And then I realized it was all that sports journalism. I was convinced that I needed a punchy ending.

Has Britney Spears Lost It?

That's what MSN was asking me this morning as I signed out of my hotmail account.

I think I've already mentioned that it would give me great great joy to see Britney
Spears turn it around.

Not that I want to see Britney Spears buy a lovely Los Feliz estate and marry some non-trashy guy and put the excesses of her youth behind her while not eating white flour. Screw that.

Also, I'm not, like, in love with Britney, although "Toxic" is one of the all-time great pop songs.

I just happen to have gotten tired of this division of our celebrities (and by extension ourselves) into the saved and the damned. And, just like in Calvinism, the one sure way to distinguish the saved from the damned is to see how it ends. Angelina Jolie might have seemed like a troubled youth, but now she's got a family and a beautiful husband, and all that goddamn modern architecture, so we know she was always all right. She was fundamentally sound.

Not that I have anything against Angelina Jolie.

Look. Some of my favorite books fall into a category I think of as chick-lit-but-for-real. I am talking about Heartburn by Nora Ephron, who has made vast sums of money off of movies that invariably end happily. Or Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. Also, The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy.

Now, since Heartburn came out in 1983, and Fear of Flying in 1973, and The Company She Keeps in 1942 (this much I have garnered off the internet), and since I don't have any other examples ready to mind, I have just created a (historically speaking) pseudo-category of book. Also The Company She Keeps is much much better than the other two books, and would do just fine in a more heavyweight literary category. But I think about these books together because they manage to remain light, remain bearable, while depicting a world in which being adult means both betraying and being betrayed, behaving badly and behaving very well, and surviving it all.

A middle ground, you might say, between the Mill on the Floss (where every misdeed is paid for in blood and Pride and Prejudice (where all is forgiven, and wasn't that bad to begin with). Things happen, people behave badly, people behave well, people are funny and adult about it and people are heartbroken and childish about it, and then other things happen.

Other cultural artifacts that give me that feeling: the movie Manhattan, the books of Richard Russo, the essays of Gore Vidal. But I can't help feeling that there's not enough of it going around, not enough light-hearted realism, not enough grace seen in real behavior, to counteract the tidal wave of self-help telling us that perfection is obtainable, and that falling short of it can only mean disaster and the grave.

Britney Spears has obviously fallen short of perfection. I think we can agree on that. And her public behavior at the moment seems designed to give the impression that disaster and the grave await her. So, you know, I'd like to see her turn it around. Not apologize, not dress better. Just not give way to melodrama. Keep going, in whatever teetery fashion. Turn it down a notch. Raise her kids, eat her Cheetos, whatever.