DISQUS

What about Stiv Bators? All the dead Ramones? All the other dead NY Dolls? And how could you possibly forget Wendy O Williams?

Sad news indeed. Luckily, there's plenty of Tommy and the boys on youtube!

That's a pretty fascinating hobby, and it does indeed lead to good questions about what constitute listener standards these days. It made me think of an email I got some months ago from a record producer friend of mine that resonated. I actually can't find the "letter" the email referred to, but I can find plenty of references to it. It's all about compression and *loudness* in production today. But more importantly, it's about how an industry is losing its grip on its most basic foundations of quality. This article we the best I could find on it, but it's worth the read:

http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/st...

My my, that puts CF in a whole new light. I'd dismissed him as little more than eye candy for MFN fans.
You can't blame him for taking bad scripts any more than you can blame Michael Cane for doing Blame It On Rio.
A paying gig is a paying gig, you make the best of it that you can, and hope you don't get Gilligan'd out of ever working again.
I sincerely hope he heeds your advisement and selects better scripts, because his agent clearly has horrible taste.

Well, at least Pam Anderson did Baywatch. Love it or hate it, it was a long running series and also starred the inestimable D. Hasselhoff.

Baywatch will live on in syndication and a whole new generation of pubescent boys will pantingly marvel at Pam's substantial assets.

I'm fairly certain ANS's memory will live on as long as the sure-to-be endless litigation surrounding everything she ever became involved in. Tom W is right though, she was not a "star".

Nah, slappy. they don't live in a vacuum and these are not stupid people. They know what they're doing, they know what they represent and they think it's all okey dokey. So they are both symptom and cause.
But I'm not mad at Anna Nicole, per se, it's society's fault that she became what she became.

The Unabomber, David Koresh, eric Rudolph - all examples of people who sacrificed themselves for what they thought was the betterment of our society. But my point was twofold, to praise molly and bury anna nicole.
Look, as you said, there are good, nice, kind people all around us. The difference between them and ANS is that she was given everything she could ever have imaginably needed, and she used it to become a dumb-blonde-joke.

It is indeed a sickness in our society that we completely ignore the things that matter (like the war) and instead endlessly consume titillating nonsense that makes no contribution to the betterment of mankind in any way, and doesn't even pretend to.

If my comments seemed mean, so be it, but she was symbolic of the *problem* our society is stuck in, as long as there are Anna Nicoles and Paris Hiltons to keep us distracted, the hole we are in just gets deeper and deeper.

Wow, that kind of review makes this a must-see. I completely agree with you on the matter of documentary film - I enjoy them but also find them lacking in substance. That's sort of necessary these days, we crave entertainment not education.
Thanks for the tip though, I think this one will be great!

Absolutely, because right or wrong it would have been in service to something other than self.

SSS - you make a really good point about the dearth of culture in our culture. I think about the commoditization of "news" and the saturation of parent-company-serving advertorials as grounded in two important events that happened in the recent past. Obviously the deregulation of the media by Reagan was important, but also the power shift in the studios was huge. When the heads went from creatives to lawyers, the quality of product out of hollywood went down the drain. There were pure business-side executives making creative decisions based on actuarial projections that I have no doubt were "points-driven". Like "A-lister MFN = 10 points" "B-lister MFN = 5" "A-lister female nudity = 10" "Mass killing = 10" "Pet rabbit in boiling water = 10" and so on. When the points were added up in a spreadsheet, the project got done or killed depending.
We're paying the price for it now with reality TV and Anna Nicole.

Tony, in case my attempt at humor wasn't funny, let me clarify: I thought the post was really excellent!

I'd like to add the youthful perspective, if I may. Being a relative tenderfoot at 41, I think my perspective is a little closer to the ground in these matters.
I believe that the overwhelming majority of kids that play these games know exactly what they're doing - gaming.
There is an almost statistically irrelevant percentage that does not. But this stems from some mental condition - sociopathology, maybe - that would almost certainly manifest itself in some other way if the games didn't exist.
Here's what I'd like to add as an important factor: drugs.
By this I mean perfectly legal, wildly overused and misunderstood drugs like antidepressant and ADHD drugs.
These "medicines" do, I believe, tip the balance in young minds, and bring the fantasy, consequence-less game violence, and the real world of school and neighborhood violence together.
Kids whose minds are altered by SSRI drugs (and those like them), do not as easily distinguish between shooting a gun in a video game and shooting on at their classmates in school.
There's a well known co-incidental component here: school shootings are carried out almost exclusively by kids on these meds. I feel certain, even though it's totally anecdotal, that violent games figure largely into the equation as well.

As for your writing abilities, Tony: I didn't understand a word you wrote, I just deduced from the crystal clear comments of the translators Blue Girl and Tom W.

I hope this doesn't discourage you from trying. Perhaps after a few more generations of foreign-talking "Alvas" have lived here in America, you'll talk like a real one too.
:)