Now showing: TCM vs. corporate philistines

Posted on July 1, 2023 by oddmanout215

Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face

“Zaslav is at it again.”

I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that the same high-level hatchet man behind the mission to make CNN more rightwing recently took action to dumb down, or perhaps destroy, the only TV outlet that shows quality films on a routine basis. That’s Turner Classic Movies, of course, which dips into every movie era and genre, showing everything from classics to obscure curiosities, 24/7, with intros from knowledgeable hosts and no commercial interruptions.

“You mean David Zaslav?” Swamp Rabbit said. “The CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery who hired and fired Chris Licht? The media boss who answers only to guys like John Malone, the rightwing billionaire and leading shareholder at WB Discovery?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy,” I replied. “Zaslav the bigshot corporate cutthroat. He’s supposed to be a film nerd, but he fired all the talented staffers who molded TCM into a unique repository for movies that not only entertain but also shed light on the historic and cultural trends that shaped the world we live in today.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “TCM ain’t perfect. They have a lot of turkeys on their playlist, and they show them classics too often. At this point, I think I could recite all the lines in Casablanca from memory.”

I shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that. You should memorize Citizen Kane, too. And My Man Godfrey. Fill your head with content that makes you think instead of with reality TV and video games.”

I told him we’re all lucky that film directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson intervened, possibly before Zaslav might otherwise do irreparable harm to TCM. Lucky that those guys apparently are skilled diplomats as well as first-rate artists, able to talk Zaslav into believing it’s better to be thought of as an enlightened patron of the arts than an all-powerful philistine.

“You don’t know how their talks with Zaslav went down,” Swamp Rabbit said. “You don’t know what he’s planning to do with TCM’s humungous library. With them naughty pre-Code movies like Baby Face, and screwball comedies, and noir from the ’40s, and sci-fi from the ’50s. And so on.”

That’s true, I told him, but maybe the three of them convinced him there’s more to life than mergers and maximizing profits. That the world is more than a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

“You stole that line from Network, Odd Man. Your problem is you think movies are like real life.”

“The best movies are like real life,” I said, “except with better dialogue and storylines that are more coherent.”

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Birds of a feather fish together

Posted on June 25, 2023 by oddmanout215

Justice Samuel Alito (left) and hedge fund manager Paul Singer.
What’s that smell?

I showed Swamp Rabbit an online photo of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and hedge fund manager Paul Singer enjoying a super-expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008. Singer brought Alito along, providing him with a free ride on his private jet and other goodies.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “If you’ve seen one photo of corny old white guys holding up dead fish, you’ve seen ’em all. What’s your point, Odd Man?”

My point was that Singer, as most news junkies now know, is a billionaire Republican megadonor whose hedge fund was involved in multiple cases that came before the Supreme Court in the years after the fishing trip took place. Alito should have reported his paid-for trip and should have recused himself from cases involving Singer’s hedge fund. He took neither action and recently thumbed his nose at reporters who exposed his obvious ethical lapses.

Swamp Rabbit chuckled. “Ain’t you the polite one. What you call ethical lapses is what other peeps call bribes.”

“Don’t be crude,” I said. “You can’t use a word like bribes just because Alito took big gifts from Singer then voted in his favor when the supremes ruled on that multi-billion-dollar case involving Argentinian debt. You can’t even call it influence peddling. Show some respect. We’re talking about the highest court in the land.”

We both had a good laugh at that phrase. I noted that Alito is no more guilty of ethics violations than Justice Clarence Thomas, who accepted expensive gifts and favors from Harlan Crow, another billionaire Republican megadonor, or Justice Neil Gorsuch, who sold an expensive property to a high-powered lawyer who also brought cases before the supremes.

“I could go on,” I said after we finished laughing. “Let’s just say all the Republican-appointed supremes use the same moral compass in the performance of their duties and always claim to be beyond reproach thanks to vague passages in the Constitution regarding separation of powers.”

“The justices are our ultimate legal authorities,” I added. “They decide what women can and can’t do with their bodies. They rule on student loan relief, voting rights, the environment — all the big issues. They’re appointed for life. It’s no wonder they hang out with some of the most powerful people in the country. Birds of a feather flock together.”

“Birds of a feather fish together,” Swamp Rabbit said, chuckling again.

“Exactly,” I replied. “This seems especially true of vultures.”

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DeLillo’s ‘airborne toxic event’ is still unfolding

Posted on June 20, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit dropped by on Sunday to wish me a happy Father’s Day, but we ended up talking about that strange day earlier this month when the air smelled like burnt toast and the skyline looked like a blurry photo viewed through a sepia filter.

“I woke up with a hangover and smelled the smoke and figured the swamp was on fire, ” he said. “It wasn’t, so I went back to bed.”

I got up that day and investigated. A talking head on the Channel 6 news alerted me to the source of the smoke — wildfires in Canada — while I was ordering a slice of Sicilian at Vincenzo’s, near the swamp. A code red air quality alert has been issued for Philadelphia and the surrounding region. The pizza man sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” but he stopped joking when the talking head said there would be no Phillies game that night because of poor air quality.   

The pall lifted a few days later but not before the news media made clear that the air will only get worse as climate change caused by fossil fuel burning makes wildfires “more frequent and intense.” A Philadelphia Inquirer article offered suggestions on how to cope: Avoid driving. Stay indoors when you can. Close windows. Wear a high-quality mask.

“I’m surprised they didn’t just tell us to stop breathing,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Wildfires are only part of the pollution problem, I reminded him. In February, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and local residents flipped out after receiving conflicting “expert” opinions on how dangerous the leaked chemicals were. This real-life incident and its aftermath were strikingly similar to the “airborne toxic event” in Don DeLillo’s bleakly funny novel White Noise (1985), which touches on our refusal to directly connect such toxic events to our ongoing assault on nature.

“Bleakly funny?” Swamp Rabbit said. “What you mean by that?”

“We fret about pollution all the time,” I replied. “The more we fret, the more we pollute. You don’t think that’s funny?”

Footnote: White Noise, like many great novels, is prophetic. One of its main characters says, “It’s no wonder they call this thing the airborne toxic event. It’s an event all right. It marks the end of uneventful things. This is just the beginning. Wait and see.”

The novel was made into a Netflix movie last year.

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Energy update: Clean vs. dirty in Texas showdown

Posted on June 17, 2023 by oddmanout215

“You and them other cynics were wrong,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Texas ain’t gonna cut back on wind and solar. That creepy little gov’ner and his oil cronies can’t win on account of there’s too much money to be made in renewables.”

He was dissing me for assuming last month that Gov. Greg Abbott and his fellow yahoos would succeed in their effort to block expansion of the renewable energy industry in Texas.

In the end, Republicans in the State Legislature who were itching to strike a blow against progress suffered a setback because, as one energy consultant put it, “a remarkable coalition of environmentalists, industry organizations and business groups — including more than 50 chambers of commerce, manufacturers, generators, oil and gas advocates and others” helped shoot down most of their proposals.

“They got together and took on the anti-woke, anti-wind-and-solar gang,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That ain’t no easy task in Texas.”

Some of the details are in a New York Times column by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, who noted that “clean energy provided about 25 to 30 percent of Texas power last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2002,” and that “green-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act are poised to create more than 100,000 jobs in Texas by 2030 — which would add more than $15 billion to the state economy over that time.”

“You’re too quick to think the worst,” Swamp Rabbit said. “When all’s said and done, the polluters are gonna go with the green, ’cause that’s where the biggest profits are.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” I replied. Texas is the No. 1 wind state, but progressives will have a hard time defeating the forces that keep green energy generation sites from linking up with the sort of far-reaching grid that’s essential for distribution. Most of the grid has yet to be built. And there’s the problem of the giant energy companies that benefit from incentives but continue to stall the actual transition to renewables.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “They’re hedging their bets, but they’re gonna do the right thing when the time is right.”

I tossed one of his empty beer cans at him. “Sorry to bust your bubble, friend-o, but time is not on our side.”

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Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Donnie boy?

Posted on June 12, 2023 by oddmanout215

Donald Trump is much taller than Edward G. Robinson was and not as convincingly tough, but how could any movie fan not think of Robinson last week when the Department of Justice indicted Trump on 37 criminal counts?

I’m talking about Little Caesar (1931). In particular, the scene where mob boss Rico Bandello, played by Robinson, voices his last words: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

As if it were hard for him to believe he could no longer add to his tally of gruesome crimes.

“Trump ain’t Rico,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Rico was an old-fashioned gangster. He didn’t get elected president. He didn’t have an army of fans wearin’ silly red caps. And the cops caught up with him at the end of the movie.”

I noted that Trump’s movie won’t end well either, but he has clung to the top of the dung heap for a long time, thanks in part to early help from the New York and Philly crime families. When “Sammy the Bull” Gravano said “The country doesn’t need a bookworm as president, it needs a mob boss,” he was talking about Trump.

“Rico came from nothing and fought his way up during the Great Depression,” I said. “Trump was born rich and groomed for success in the real estate business, working with mobbed-up construction companies and crooked politicians. His mob connections helped him get into the casino industry. He was just as rotten as Rico but he remained a media darling, even when reporters like David Cay Johnston and Wayne Barrett were exposing him in print.”

Swamp Rabbit sipped a beer and shook his head. “I still say this Trump-Rico connection is a stretch. Trump is a sleazebag but he didn’t shoot nobody, not even on Fifth Avenue.”

“That would have been the least of his crimes,” I said. “Instead he stuck with white-collar crime and helped destroy democracy in America.”

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Centrism (mainstream media’s favorite myth)

Posted on June 11, 2023 by oddmanout215

“What you mean their ain’t no center?” Swamp Rabbit said. “There’s the left wing and the right wing and the center. You can’t have the one without the others.”

I was telling him that CNN chief Chris Licht had been fired by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav for doing a clumsy job of transforming CNN into the “centrist” news vehicle envisioned by John Malone, the Trump-friendly billionaire behind the merger of CNN and Discovery. I reminded him that Licht’s job had been in jeopardy at least since CNN, invoking centrism, aired Donald Trump’s May 10 town hall.

“Enough about them corporate sleazeballs at CNN,” Swamp Rabbit said after downing a double shot of Wild Turkey. “They propped up an election-denyin’ crook.”

“Malone said he wants CNN to be ‘more centrist,'” I replied.

“What does centrist mean?”

I told him that, in theory, centrism involves giving equal weight to both sides of a story, even if one side might be distorting the facts or lying outright. In practice, the notion of centrism — bothsidesism is a more accurate term — often provides a platform for outlandish liars like Donald Trump and the people who endorse his lies.

“I’m not just talking about rightwing greed hounds like Malone,” I added. “I think guys like A.G. Sulzberger at New York Times and Martin Baron, late of Washington Post, are afraid they’ll lose too many readers/viewers and advertisers if they state the truth too plainly. Their newspapers propped up Trump for years before they tore him down. Centrism is about the bottom line.”

Swamp Rabbit opened a can of beer. “But we’d be in bad shape if there wasn’t no center, don’t you think?”

“We’re in even worse shape if there’s a center with room for Trump and mini-Trumps,” I replied. “Don’t you think?”

Footnote: “There can be no center to American politics as long as most Republican voters support Trump and most Republican lawmakers follow Trump’s lead. There’s no “center” between democracy and authoritarianism.” — Robert Reich

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Supreme Court sullies Clean Water Act

Posted on June 2, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was lecturing Prayers, my favorite feral cat. The news is hardly ever new, I told him. At best, it’s a reminder that the people who run this country now might be even less enlightened than the idiots who, generations ago, fought efforts to clean up our ongoing environmental mess.

“I hope you ain’t talkin’ about me,” Swamp Rabbit said as he approached from Tinicum swamp. “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with that mess.”

Prayers bolted into the swamp. I told Swamp Rabbit that the U.S. Supreme Court recently dealt a blow to public health concerns by ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency can no longer regulate — i.e., guard against — pollution of wetlands unless the wetlands in question have “a continuous surface connection” with oceans, rivers, or other bodies of water.

“As if everything on the planet isn’t connected,” I said. ” As if pollutants everywhere don’t eventually empty into the same stream we all draw from.”

Most of the Supremes believe — or pretend to believe — that the Clean Water Act isn’t clear enough in its language to justify blanket federal protection of wetlands. The mainstream media isn’t really challenging their arguments. It’s up to Congress to better clarify the law, the Supremes said, but this isn’t likely to happen given the current makeup of the House and Senate.

The court ruling is, in the words of a National Wildlife Federation official, “the latest sign that many decision makers in Washington have lost touch with the increasingly fragile state of the natural systems that provide drinking water, flood protection and critical habitat for people and wildlife in every state.”

“The war is never over,” I said. “There are always new yahoos to replace the yahoos who were cool with pollution levels back in the ’60s, when rivers were catching fire.”

“What you talkin’ about now?” said Swamp Rabbit, who is much younger than I. “Ain’t no river ever caught fire.”

I told him about the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, one of the events that alerted environmentally conscious people to the fact that pollution caused by unregulated industries was poisoning the natural world. The fire was the subject of Randy Newman’s “Burn On,” a satiric song released in 1972.

“I ain’t never heard that song,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t heard of Randy Newman neither.”

“Here, I’ll play it for you,” I said after calling up the song on my phone. “And I’ll send it to Ed Sheeran. Maybe he’ll steal it and turn it into a big hit.”

Footnote: In case you’ve been in a long-term coma, here’s a recent piece about corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Somebody give me a ($700) cheeseburger!

Posted on May 28, 2023 by oddmanout215

“My birthday’s comin’ up,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Maybe I’ll go uptown and treat myself to one of them $700 burgers.”

He was referring to the beer garden in Philly whose menu reportedly includes “the most expensive burger in America.” Presumably, the owners hoped to create a buzz with the story, which appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Post and other venues.

“It was a good way to get publicity without having to run expensive ads,” I said. “They should win the award for Cleverest Food & Drink Gimmick.”

Swamp Rabbit narrowed his eyes. “What you mean by gimmick? You think there ain’t really no $700 cheeseburger topped with caviar, truffles, lobster flambeed with Louis XIII cognac, and a gold leaf on top? That there’s no shot of Louis XIII on the side?”

“Sure there is,” I replied. “But they’re not expecting you to actually buy that stuff. It’s just to draw you to the beer garden. Once you’re there, you’ll buy their regular-priced burgers and drinks. That’s the plan.”

“I don’t want them regular burgers,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I deserve the best.”

I told him he was crazy. He’s so poor, he has to shoplift hamburger patties at the Acme to get by some nights. Why obsess about a $700 burger?

He shook his head. “I ain’t no second-class citizen. If them bougies can buy a $700 burger, so can I.”

I told him he sounded like “Living in the U.S.A.,” the Steve Miller Band’s hippy-era critique/celebration of American culture. The lyrics are dumb but funny. Miller shouts “Somebody give me a cheeseburger!”

“There you go,” Swamp Rabbit said.”Ain’t nothin’ more American than a cheeseburger.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Prices change, but people don’t.”

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Martin Amis (1949-2023) braved the moronic inferno

Posted on May 24, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was drinking beer on his porch when I told him that British author Martin Amis died last weekend.  

“Okay, but what’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” he said, referring to the fact that a dozen eggs at the Acme can still cost more than four dollars.

I told him that Amis at full throttle is reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson in his glory days. Some of his protagonists have the same manic energy, the same flair for brutally honest, comical self-criticism. I mentioned John Self, the first-person narrator of Amis’s novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), whose self-destructive sorties in New York City recall those of Thompson’s alter-ego in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafim. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk. In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first.

I noted that Self, a director of TV commercials, uses his confessions to exalt his many addictions. He’s a media whore, an amusing monster, a device created by Amis to lampoon the excesses of our sick, money-driven culture, which is even sicker now than it was in the pre-Internet ’80s.

“Blah blah,” my mangy friend said. “I live in a shotgun shack with a leaky roof. So do you. Why should I care what that bad boy wrote?”

I tried again: In some of his best fiction, Amis captured the giddy hedonism of the 1980s and early ’90s as the world was slipping into a downward spiral triggered by climate change, wealth inequality and pervasive cynicism. Writ large, the story of John Self’s ongoing self-abuse – I was lying face down under some hedge or bush or some blighted shrub in a soaked allotment full of nettles, crushed cigarette packs, used condoms and empty beer cans – is the story of humankind’s ongoing abuse of the planet.

Amis keeps us laughing – Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door – as Self, seeking more money, more everything, staggers toward his inevitable crash. His ignoble odyssey begs the big question:  Do we still have time to clean up our act, or is the crash a foregone conclusion?

“The crash is already here,” Swamp Rabbit said as he flung an empty can into the weeds in front of his shack. “It’s breakfast time but I can’t even afford to have eggs with my beer.”

Footnote: Amis wrote a lot of first-rate fiction and nonfiction. Arguably, the novels Money, London Fields and The Information, all written prior to the millennium, are his best works.

Another: The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America is the title of Amis’s 1986 book of essays. He borrowed the phrase from Saul Bellow, who took it from the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis.

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Walking blues (my search for dress shoes)

Posted on May 20, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was checking my email and noticed that images of shoes were appearing every time I opened a new file. Dress shoes, so-called. Tassel loafers, oxford bluchers, brogues. Shiny and super-square. The sort of shoes I stopped wearing around the same time I quit working at cube farms.

“Where they all comin’ from? ” Swamp Rabbit said, looking over my shoulder at the shoe advertisements on my laptop screen.

“I did this to myself,” I replied. “I did an online search for local shoe stores this week and now every company in the world that makes shoes has my address and wants me for a customer.”

I explained that my search was in preparation for a formal occasion where my running shoes wouldn’t be appropriate. And that an online search for any commodity creates a plague of related ads that infects the sites you subscribe to. (Algorithms in action.) The capitalist monster finds out where you are, then it eats you.

Why’d you do an online search?” he said. “There must be shoe stores all over Philly.”

“You’re thinking of sneaker stores, rabbit. Running shoes, if you will. The neighborhood stores that sold dress shoes are mostly out of business now. The only places that come up when you do a search are those high-end shoe stores in Center City. There are a half-dozen of them, tops.”

“What you mean by high-end?”

“Shoes that are wildly overpriced because of their brand names. Wolf & Shepherd, Allen Edmonds and so on. Some poor-schmuck salesman at some high-end store on Sansom Street showed me a pair of loafers with a $395 price tag. That’s probably close to his take-home pay for a 40-hour week.”

“Why don’t you shop at a department store, or one of them consumer dumps like Walmart or Target?” Swamp Rabbit said.

“The shoes at those places cost less, but they’re much more cheaply made, so they wear out fast. Relatively speaking, they’re overpriced, too. Inflation is a bitch. The media isn’t telling half the story.”

He scowled. “Dress shoes are a lot cheaper at Target. You just don’t want to spend any money, Odd Man.”

“You’ve got no room to talk,” I said, looking down at his shoes. “You’ve been wearing those Chuck Taylor All Star high-tops since Obama was president.”

He asked me what I would wear to the formal occasion if I couldn’t find any dress shoes that suited me. I told him I’d dug up a pair of old black running shoes to wear with my suit.

“Great plan,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t forget to polish ’em.”

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