Anthony Wieners Wiener

It isn't so much that Anthony Wiener snapped a picture of his own wiener and shot it out into cyberspace via twitter it is that the media machine between Palins Wallyword vacation takes a break and puts Wieners Wiener page one in cable and network land. The wiener in question hacked by the crazed hacker who shot it off to the unsuspecting innocent is now abroad in some cafe on the left bank with a mask on and a handheld, laughing into his latte as Wiener explains his wiener to Wolf Blitzer who looks like he never had a wiener and if he did it had a beard.

But famed nobody Andrew Brightbart could not wrestle this wiener to the ground as twitter pulled in every network and newspaper in one hundred forty character hubris or the equivalent pixilation which makes for a very grainy wiener shot indeed. Anthony Wiener on explaining his wiener told Wolf and anyone who would listen that a hacker prankster punk took a shot of his wiener unbeknowst to him and tweeted his weiner to all would follow a Wiener. But is it your wiener Wolf persisted. Lets just say I wont dignify that with an answer Mr. Wiener responded.

And even as Lawrence O'Donnell berated the Wiener followers and Weinter cabitzers for being so fascinated with Wieners wiener he led with the story also to say no one should lead with a wiener story and haven't we fallen to a new low? Indeed. Mr. Wiener held fast to his hacked punked pranked story but did not specifically deny the wiener in question was his wiener bringing more wiener speculation from the Wiener watchers and followers.

At the end of the day all we know for sure is that a mans' wiener was compromised by being tweeted by someone and we cannot be sure that the wiener was not Anthony Weiner's weiner who tweeted his own wiener but that it is someones wiener even though Anthony Wiener will not say that is it not his wiener but that he was punked hacked or pranked by somewhere out there in cyberspace by someone who possibly took Anthony Wieners weiner and tweeted it for all the world to see. The moral to the story is that no man  should ever tweet another man's wiener. Especially not Anthony Wieners wiener.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Poor Ed

Poor. Ed. Could a guy get more contrite and not melt into the floor? I don't think so. He must have said he was sorry to Laura Ingram twenty times before he was done with his sign off before his week of suspension for calling Laura a slut of the mouth. You really expected someone to come out and throw a bucket of water on Ed by the fifth I apologize to my family, my boys, to the network, to Laura, to just about everyone on the planet for what I have done. And then Ed could melt into the floor like the Wicked Witch of the West.


Yeah Ed is over the top. Yeah he is usually ranting about the same old populist stuff and he sure is no Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O'Donnell. He is the pissed off big guy who gets steamed up by his own words during his show to the point he looks like he's going to jump off the screen and tackle someone in your living room. I cannot really watch Ed too much. It is so much retread, but I did feel sorry for the guy when he groveled for ten minutes for calling whatshername a slut.

Yeah, he shouldn't of done it. Yeah he spouted off. But do you watch Fox News? I do. And when they spout off about not giving assistance to the tornado victims or is Obama really a citizen or giving Andrew Brightbart night after night to voice his racist opinions( he never apologized to anyone for trashing a woman's career) then you kind of feel Ed has a point. Riddle me this one, can anyone remember anyone from Fox News apologizing for anything? Anything at all? After years and years of racial attacks on the President and everything he stands for.

Of course not. Not going to happen. But I can name David Letterman, Keith Olbermann, Lawrence Odonnell, Ed Schultz as having apologized on the air for remarks they have made. Now why is that? Why are the liberal guys always apologizing and Rush and Becks and Sean merrily spewing their hate? Guess that is their shtick.


Anyway, old Ed is gone. And who knows if he will come back. He sure looked pained when he apologized to the world. Maybe somone should have thrown a bucket of water on him and he could have just melted into the floor into a smokey steaming mass...I'm sorry for being a liberal...I'm sorry for being a liberal...I'm sorry for being a liberal...

Guess you only see that on Fox.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will blast off this summer

MSNBC Taking Water Fast Post-Olbermann

I admit it. Keith Olbermann was my man for a long time and even when I moved away from combat punditry I would always flip on Keith to see what he was up too. But now he has left MSNBC or more specifically Count Down and turned it over to Lawrence O'Donnell. The scuttle is that after two years of Keith negotiating with the network they parted ways over differences we can only guess at. Pushing the bar must have finally got to the brass, but all you have to do is watch the network post-Olbermann to see it is a ship taking water. Fast.

I like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, but they are no Olbermann. Bringing in the Ed Schultz show is just piling on left wing on liberal on left wing. He brings little but bombast and regurgitation to the lineup and I am a liberals liberal but Ed is too much for even me. But Lawrence O'Donnell while sincere and heartfelt is a man with a cross hair on his back. You can already see the brass's next move when the plummeting ratings come in. And they will plummet.

The problem is Keith wasn't just Count Down, he was the anchor of MSNBC at night. Hardball, Maddow and O'Donnell were the warm up bands for Keith, though they often followed each other with reciprocal stories. But Keith just took it up a notch and blasted a hole right through the rights latest buffoonery with scathing indictments, dripping sarcasm, and boyish glee. Many times he went right over the top and blasted out of the roof, but it was always an interesting rocket to watch. Now we are left with the smoke and blow back of his departure and there seems to be little propellant left in the MSNBC tank.There is just a gaping hole.

Lawrence will do his best to fill the big man's shoes but he is doomed. The left suffers from lack of firepower in general and they just lost one of their biggest guns. Keith had the guts and and the position to take on anyone including the President and say exactly what he thought which is probably why the higher ups at CBS and MSNBC squirmed and pulled on their collars. But of course it was that type of red hot editorializing that cranked up the ratings and made MSNBC a player.

It almost makes you wonder if the golden age of combat punditry is coming to an end. If the age of civility does indeed occur then certainly the other combat pundits will be out of a job. Maybe Keith Olbermann saw the writing on the wall and got while the going was good. But before it is over a Jay Leno type of scenario would not be that surprising with Olbermann returning to bring ratings back in line. I think a flame thrower would be the proper metaphor for the regard he would show the short sited higher ups of MSNBC and company.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in February

Good Night and Good Luck-Olbermann Leaves MSNBC

Edward R. Murrow who Keith Olbermann obviously modeled himself after said these words every time he signed off from his broadcast. Good Night and Good Luck. It is irony at it's best, but Murrow meant it. He wanted people to have the luck it would take to fight the corporate powers, government, the natural tyranny of men. His job was to poke holes in these forces and shine light into the dark corners of human chicanery. He eventually took on McCarthy in the darkest days of the House on Un-American Activities and did what no man in the news had done up to that point--he took on the underside of American democracy that destroys people while hiding under the flag.

Now Mr. Olbermann has left MSNBC for reasons unknown, but we can guess. If you watched Keith at all he was the one of the few who took on the dark side of American politics and American business. He was the underdogs dog and barked at anyone who came near. Many times he slipped into bombast and of course his show was hopelessly one sided with his triumvirate of Chris Hayes, Howard Fineman, and Eugene Reynolds to comment and mostly back up Keith's latest thesis. As time wore on Keith did become predictable, but he was always heartfelt and always unafraid.

Sometimes we cringed when he really got on a roll, but like a good novel you had to listen closely to the prose. Keith was a thinking man's  liberal cable show. He was no slouch when it came to mixing history, liberal theology, and politics, throw in the Olbermann anger and indignation and you had a cocktail of  talk show bravado that could knock your socks off and many times did. Sometimes, you just wanted to stand up and cheer when he finished his Final Comment.

But he has left the network and we don't know where he will land. Keith did what Maddow and now Lawrence O'Donnel can't. He did have an Edward R. Murrow touch that had a moral indignance and gravitas that lent credibility to his charges against the nightly villains. Keith Olbermann does care about people and he does want to be the voice of those who cannot defend themselves. And so when he signed off with his customary Good Night and Good Luck at the end of his show, he said, look I know the cards are stacked, but le'ts keep trying anyway. We can only hope he lands somewhere and continues the fight. So back at you Keith.

Good Night, and Good Luck.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will Blast off in April.

Movies are Struggling

Apparently movies are struggling. Television is taking some of the high road with better fare headlined by Mad Men. The studios have gone LCD in hard times and putting on more Dumb and Dumber fare figuring the safe bet is the play when people are tightening their belts. It worked in the last Great Depression with Fred and Ginger doing the tux and tails among the champagne glasses. So why not again? Escapist fare should be the ticket for a middle class being driven into the ditch.

But they are rebelling and staying home. Three D gimmickry aside which gave them a momentary boost, people are even turning away from DVDS and looking for television drama that tells a story. Wow. A story! Reality television bet that story was dead and you could put truckers, rockers, movie stars on with a camera and tell their life of weight loss, drugs, family and that would be enough. Seems people want some story to go with their warmed over re-runs.

So they are looking to HBO and the streaming channels that might actually give them some substance. You may not go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but there are some thinking people out there and a lot of  those boomers had college educations. So maybe we are moving, or creeping back to a point where people prefer not to sit in the darkness of CG madness, but would rather sit in their living room and watch a story tangling it up with the human condition. Maybe even read a book.

Sigh. Where is Fred and Ginger when you need them most?

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in September.
...funniest book since Russo's Straight Man..."
                                                                 Chicago Sun Times

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Not Everyone Can be a journalist--Sanjay Gupta hits the wall

We are used to just about everyone being a journalist now. Television journalism has become something of a who's on first comedy routine. The stand ins for television journalists bitterly prove the point. We get the wonks who stand in for Rachel Maddow and we get the sleepy Lawrence O'Donnell for Keith Oberbmann. You get just about anybody for Larry King and for Anderson Cooper we get Sanjay Gupta. It would seem this replacement was a bridge too far.

Sanjay did an interview with Ron Paul about the mosque in New York. He pressed Ron Paul on his position on the mosque and Paul effectively laughed at him and lectured him on the connection between what the right is doing with this issue and our presence in the Mid East. Sanjay adopted a  smile that said he had no idea what had just happened  and then tried to rescue himself with a comparison between Obama and Paul's positions.

Again RonPaul effectively laughed at his obvious ploy to stir up controversy. Gupta sat there and tried a few Anderson Cooper attempts to interrupt but Paul just batted him down. Sanjay then quickly ended the interview with egg on his face his neck his arms just about everywhere egg can land. He bitterly proved the point that there is a thing still called journalism and not everyone can do it. Sanjay Gupta is a physician who snuck on CNN during the Haiti crisis. Maybe he should go back to being a doctor. People don't often laugh at them.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man who loses his mind in the suburbs.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Our cultural heritage--cable television

Vapidity aside...is it just me or has cable become the dumping ground of all that is cheap, shallow, worthless, produced in a nanosecond on a shoestring with a gnats intelligence? Certainly the pay channels are the only refuge now. I was just reading David Foster Wallaces's essay on television written in 1990 and not much has changed. Or has it?

Wallace did not see the advent of reality television. When he wrote his essay there was just a few nascent starts of Married with Children or Cops. A sort of precursor warm up to Survivor and American Idol or Dog the Bounty Hunter. Reality television tells us about ourselves as it reflects back everyday life. No thought. No work for the viewer. The couch potato has become the comatose patient in the mental ward staring blindly at nothing. One thing about reality television is there is no plot and certainly no meaning so we recall it the way you might talk about an accident--did you see that dude forget his song on American Idol?

Forget about the cries of cultural demise--there is no culture here and whats more in cable land no one cares. The real shows have been relegated to pay or the networks that still care about trying to get some ratings through drama--but cable simply shrugs and puts out more American gladiator type of fare or more cooking shows or more fallen stars followed around with camera crews. Ratings are ratings and the good news is that Americans will watch just about anything with sensational lore.

Nothing new under the sun. We have never held high art in high regard. America was formed as a reaction against a wealthy ruling class in Britain. We surfs were being exploited and so we demanded the right to bear arms and to rebel and overthrow the government if need be. A highly educated sliver of an entitled class may appreciate fine art or high literature, but there is nothing in the Declaration of Independence that says we must have culture. We embrace a populist culture that held up the frontiersman and the cowboy and now the bounty hunter and the cop and the fireman and the all American family falling apart on national television. What is more commonplace or populist than watching ourselves?

Bring on YouTube. We did. We do watch ourselves and we enjoy it immensely. If democracy's final evolution is bringing about celebradom for the masses then we are certainly on our way. A movie star or a singing sensation is hatched overnight thanks to the American Idol motif of talent shows with big payoffs. Do we now have ballads sung by young females that sound like every other young female? You betcha. The point is you don't need originality, you merely now have to morph into what was popular and worked before. If everyone could be a Beatle then everyone would--some things are just trickier to pull off.

So when we flip through the diorama of American cable television and find low budget infomercials and televangelist and wrestlers and bounty hunters and talent shows and fallen rock stars playing dad at home then we really have no one to blame but ourselves. We have deemed art to be accessible and reflective only to the point it reflects us back at us while we sit in front of the tube--or there's me! Or that could be me! In that way television has fulfilled it's promise that everyone can be famous if only for a little while. In a little way.
www.billhazelgrove.com

Dog the Bounty Hunter--Our New Fiction

An exhausted populace has little appetite for a book and we are an exhausted populace. As E.M Forester observed long ago--art is for a man with a full belly. In our time people come home to spent usually to do much more than flop on the couch for a little R and R before snooze land. Such is the life of the modern middle class coal miner. We are all paying for our sins now and work has become once again work and not much beyond subsistence.

So what is the fare dished up by cable networks for the masses? One show is Dog the Bounty Hunter. Beautiful concept. Cost is very low...camera crew and that is about it. Throw in some computer graphics at the beginning and end and you are done. Since we are a people largely without fiction it is understandable we take our characters from television. Reality television occasionally can dish up a character with all the characteristics of good fiction. In the case of Dog: A reformed convict who goes to the other side and becomes a bounty hunter bringing other malcontents to the Terra firma of the law if not the Lord.

In fact Dog the character prays before his busts. Joined by his moll wife (Beth) with the battleship body not unlike the fleshy barmaid of old with a heart of gold, these people of the earth go out to do good in the evangelical sense of the word. Dog is a man on a mission and with his sons and daughters and wife in tow he goes to spread the word of the reformed sinner who has seen the light and will shine it into the darkness of the drug dealer, convict, burglar who he tracks down using good old fashioned gumshoe tactics and without guns. He is truly Robin Hood of the Hawaiian order.

Once the perpetrator is captured in some made for television drama then the moral lesson is imparted and we see Dog the man who clearly has a higher purpose than just catching bad guys. Don't all good fictional characters have a higher purpose? He may have a superhero suit...body armor and tattoos and head dress and dangling ear rings--eternally tan and rather swashbuckling in his boots--dropping out from his monster SUV in pursuit of another randy criminal--but he is just a man purporting to right a little wrong in our fallen world.

This then is our fiction. It is low budget, yes, but it borrows from it's more highbrow brother the novel. It is supremely accessible requiring little effort on the part of the viewer and winds up in thirty minutes with a moral epigram at the end. We could ask little more from such entertainment and it doesn't matter if Dog is truly who he says he is--he is flawed and has had his scrapes where racial slurs and dubious tactics have almost ended the reign of Dog. But he has rebounded and even hit Larry King when someone took an errant shot at the Dog and his wife.

So we do care about our character and when the television goes to black and Dog retires on his earnings we will probably not remember him. Like any good pulp fiction the character ceases to live once the book is finished or the Dog is finally bumped off. But for now I say with little derision--GO DOG GO!


http://www.billhazelgrove.com/