There's no future in England's dreaming...

This caught my eye over at Nancy's place:

Just for the record, I have no particular problem with the idea of a "constitutional monarchy". It seems to me that modern Britons have no fewer "freedoms" as "subjects" than modern Americans have as "citizens" which, for those people in my social milieu and income bracket, are largely the freedom to starve and sleep under bridges once their jobs are offshored or eliminated.

No, the interesting thing to me about this is the degree to which this picture - deliberately, I'm sure - could just as easily be Fildes or Sargent or, for that matter, Gainsborough or Reynolds. Nancy observed that the benefit of Diana Spencer's death prior to the photograph is that the People's Princess lacked the goofiness to fit into this little royal family portrait.

And it is pretty goofy, but I think it's a very peculiar quality of goofy that has nothing to do with Diana's own astrologist-and-aromatherapist-and skeevy-lover sort of goofy.

The goofy here is the Classic Old School British Goofy, composed equally of exaggerated self-worth, lack of introspection, hauteur, and noblesse oblige, the Stuff of Empire Goofy that doesn’t see any humor in pretending that it’s still 1894.

Diana had her own massive Goofy but it was a thoroughly New Age Goofy incomprehensible to the stodgy House of Grammy Windsor. The Goofy on display here is a Goofy of centuries of "breeding", a sort of stud book of Goofy that values humans for their lineage rather than their accomplishments.

Sad when you consider that the clan threw out the perfectly good surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, too. Sigh.

The idea of keeping a nice old granny around out of pure nostalgia is hardly worse, say, than the idea of Donnie Trump or Ted Cruz as Chief Executive of a nuclear superpower. But as government it's a very, very peculiarly goofy idea, an idea the presumes that the worth of one person or a small group of people is higher than the worth of many.

(Mind you, our own "system" that purports to exalt the worth of the many over any individual is kind of odd, too...)

But the only real issue I have with the British system is that it really only works if you can pretend that it's still 1894 and the King or Queen actually matters. It's kind of like spending a fairly sizeable chunk of cash to keep a long-running reality show on television and then insisting that everyone pretend that that's really important.

So I used to get a chuckle out of the ridiculous royal pantomime across the Pond, thinking that We the People had, at least, nothing equally ridiculous.

Then, of course, this Republican primary came along.

And now I feel kind of like that stone parrot, the one on the bottom that's clearly getting its psittacene conge' in the form that The Donald plainly intends for his own daughter and God help me how I wish I could scrub that image out of my brain.

Deaths of strangers

I opened up my Facebook today to find out that Robin Williams has died, probably by his own hand, probably after losing a fight with his own demons of depression and addiction.

I found two things odd about this.

First, that so many people were expressing actual sorrow, saying that they wanted to cry, that they were personally grieved and felt personal loss. Only one of them - Lisa Jakub - actually met Williams personally, worked with him, and has lost someone she knew and loved. But I'm fairly sure that my friends Chris and Carrie and all the other friends posting messages of loss didn't know him other than as an image on a screen. I'm not saying that they didn't care, in the same way that I care about favorite places, or beloved stories or music, or about people in distant lands in a sort of abstract way that I don't want bad things to happen to anyone outside the Cheney family.

And, second, hard after that was that I didn't, not really, not about Robin Williams, and I immediately felt like a heel; everybody else is posting sadz about the man's death and my only thought as I read it was "Hunh. How 'bout that..?" like I was reading about a water main break on Burnside or a traffic tie-up on I-5 South.

Then I thought, y'know, I don't know the poor guy. I know him as "Mork" or his other pixel images on a screen, so essentially he's as "real" to me as Oscar the Grouch or the Wizard of Oz. I don't have any particular connection or bigger emotional investment in the man's death - or life - than I do in the water main break or the traffic tie-up. For me they're all just "news".

I think I've talked about this bizarre aspect of electronic media and celebrity culture before. We "know" all sorts of people from television and films that we don't really "know" in any sort of real sense. We may feel like Robin Williams' films, or part of his work, or just what we think of as his personality were important parts of our lives. But what did we really know of Mr. Williams? Of what he loved, of what he hated and feared, what made him happy or sad, why he did what he did and was who he was.

It may seem like we "knew" him, though, because his image was as recognizable as those of our own family.

So it still seems odd to me. Was this man a part of our lives, as much a part as any other friend? Enough so that his loss is grievous to us? Is an emotion based on a created intimacy as genuine as one from an intimacy that springs from artless Nature?

Joseph Stalin once said "One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic"?

Perhaps one death is, too.

Or perhaps it isn't.

Safe somewhere

One of the fun things about blogging is where it can take you
.

In this case, it took me into the life of someone named Dorothy MacKaill.

Dorothy is the strikingly pretty woman whose stocking-tops enliven the preceding post. I hate to admit it to her shade but all I was doing was looking for a bit of spice to illustrate the "pre-Code" era films and I Googled up her picture.

But from there I had a fun time pursuing Dorothy. Turns out that she was a damn fine actress and a sort of minor-A-lister in the Hollywood of the Twenties and Early Thirties. But she didn't quite make it over the bar. She wasn't re-signed by First National Pictures in 1931 and spent another six years knocking around Tinseltown before hanging 'em up.

But here's where the story actually gets interesting in a maddeningly opaque way.

Dorothy moved on from movies due to a mixture of failure to draw, bad luck, and bad timing. In 1931 - right after her best known flick Safe in Hell (which is where Dotty appears looking so fetching in those stockings) - she got married to a musician, a guy named Miller, and supposedly had decided to make a go of being a good little Thirties wife and live on hubby's income. This seems to have been something of a wash; they were divorced by 1934, with Dotty complaining that Miller had conned her into leaving the film biz.

She sort of drifted around after that for a while. She was back in Britain in 1937 where she made one of the long-running Bulldog Drummond flicks. I can't find where she spent the war years, but was presumably doing something like making O.D. paint for the War Effort. She is said to have spent time taking care of her mother, but there doesn't seem to be a genuinely reliable source for this.

She turns up in Honolulu in the early Fifties, living at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a setting of convivial solitude. She made a couple of appearances in the old Hawaii Five-Oh series in the Seventies, supposedly as a favor to Jack Lord.

She died in her bed at the Royal Hawaiian in 1990, at the age of 87.

What intrigues me is that Dorothy seems to have been perfectly satisfied with the quiet life she led in the islands, so it must have been perfectly satisfying for her.

But what it was like, who she was like, we do not and cannot know.

That's the fascinatingly elusive things about celebrity. Here's a woman that we can "meet" on the screen. We can see her walking, hear her speak, see how she carries herself; all the sorts of things we associate with people we actually know...and yet, we truly don't know ahything about her. If she chooses - and she did - she can disappear completely. Her life outside of her films, and three television episodes, is a complete blank to us.

She spent forty years doing...something...probably all sorts of things of which we know absolutely nothing.

We have no idea how she filled her days for forty years. Don't know what she liked, what she did, whose company she enjoyed and whose she didn't. Did she love to hike into the forests of the Koolaus? Could she tell an o'hia from a banyan? Was she a regular at the Honolulu Public Library? Did she play golf, or tennis, or rugby, for that matter?

Whatever she did, whoever she did it with, or not, Dorothy seems to have had a long and pleasant time doing it.

And that seems good enough to me.

Friday Jukebox 2: Shameless Edition

OK; another confession - I actually liked this Richard Marx song when it came out back in the Eighties, and it's still goofy pop hookiness at its tin pan alley-est-ly catchy:



Maybe because it's really an Eagles song; I didn't know until I looked it up but Joe Walsh, Randy Meisner, and Tim Schmit were all involved in one way or another.

That said, apparently Marx is kind of a thin-skinned shameless douche. Shameless douche plug; read the story at the link - Ted McClelland is damn funny, and it's a damn good story if you like stories. And if you didn't, boyfuckin'howdy are YOU at the wrong address. Because I swear, half the time all I feel like I do here is tell stories.

OK, I'm off for the long weekend.

(h/t to Nancy Nall, where I ran across the McClelland article.

So Emotional

I really try and avoid the horrible celebriphilia that runs mad through everything in American pop culture.

You know when you read something like that you're in for a post about celebrities and pop culture, right?So, okay. It's not that I don't enjoy pop culture; by and large - if you've been reading this blog for any time you know that - I am the pop culture guru in this household.

But to my mind there's a skeevy sort of obsession with famous people you can't avoid unless you work hard at dodging the electronic media and limiting your exposure to almost all the other forms of popular press and entertainment. I try, but even I couldn't miss the "news" that Ms. Whitney Elizabeth Houston departed this vale of tears the past Saturday, aged six years younger than I am.

Now in general this blog tries to live by Joe Kugelmass' "Five Rules About Celebrity Deaths", to wit;

1. A blogger is not capable of being “disrespectful” to a dead famous person. That person’s friends and family do not care.

2. In most cases, famous people who die young will still have managed to have more of “a life” than 99.99% of people who die old.

3. Many people who are publicly sad about a celebrity death had not thought about that celebrity once in the previous twelve months.

4. Some of the things that lead to celebrity deaths are, in fact, not relevant to the lives of ordinary folks (e.g. Michael Jackson’s personal drug doctor).

5. Public mourning is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors. For example, the bad economy increased mourning for Steve Jobs. People are more grieved by Whitney Houston’s death than they were by Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s death because her songs were more radio-friendly and sentimental.

In keeping with the first five of these rules I have no real insights or trenchant observations about the passing of Ms. Houston. She seems to have been a rather ordinary woman whose single outstanding qualities appear to have been her pretty face and powerful voice, without particular intellectual or emotional depth, lacking any hint of either greatness or depravity. Without her voice she would no doubt have been simply another nice semi-urban girl from New Jersey.

So it is her voice that ensures the emotional glurge regarding her death.

And for me, at least, her voice is perhaps the single thing that I truly dislike about the woman, and the only real observation of any worth that I can think to make about the woman now that she is sure to be enshrined in the pop culture pantheon.

Here's why.

First, let me qualify myself; I've sung publicly, not professionally, but in both an organized choral group and as a soloist. You wouldn't pay for my solo singing - at least, I hope you wouldn't - but I have a decent amateur bass-baritone and know my way around both classical and popular music. I've been known to rock the house with "Wild Colonial Boy" when I've had a few. So; I can sing, a bit. And as a result I have some very definite ideas about what makes a song work.

Okay. So, here's our gal the late Ms. Houston tearing into perhaps her best known pop song, "I Will Always Love You" at the 1994 Grammys.The performance is...well, it's what Houston did. The quivering vibrato, the swooping, breathy phrasing, and of course the "big moment" - it comes with the key change at 3:19 in the video - the pause, the breath, and then the soaring blare as Houston's voice rises and swells in a cresting wave of throbbing emotion. That was her style, and although she wasn't the only singer of her era who used it she might have been the best known and the most influential.

That belting style is now nearly inescapable when you hear power pop sung in public. You hear now it every time you turn on "American Idol" and any one of it's many imitators, or encounter one of the many pop-song belters trained in the post-Whitney Era. It's as if every single jazz and pop vocalist between 1950 and 1980 had been instantly turned into Barbra Streisand.

But...here's the thing. Check out the lyrics to "I Will Always Love You":

"If I should stay,
I would only be in your way.
So I'll go, but I know
I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way.
And I will always love you.
I will always love you.
You, my darling you.

Bittersweet memories that is all I'm taking with me.
So, goodbye. Please, don't cry.
We both know I'm not what you, you need.
And I will always love you.
I will always love you.

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you've dreamed of.
And I wish to you, joy and happiness.
But above all this, I wish you love.

And I will always love you..."

Got it? Is that a sad song, or what? "Bittersweeet memories"? "We both know I'm not what you need"? This sucker is about loss, my God; heartbreak, the death of a precious love, desolation, the long, slow, agonizing draught of bitter gall you know you will drink the rest of your life as the one you can never forget recedes in the rear-view mirror.

This is fucking tragedy, man.

But Houston's version - and all the other belters' that have followed her - makes a kind of joke out of that. The emotional throb and gush, the soaring finale...she's not standing there heartsick and grieving that she will always love you; she's hurling her challenge to the skies - she WILL always love you, goddammit, and she's not ashamed who knows it.

Now.

Here's the woman who wrote and first sang this song, Dolly Parton, doing the tune exactly twenty years earlier than the Grammys:Excuse me for being partial, but for my money that's how you put over a hearbreaking song; simple, clean, her voice as clear and sharp as a winter night and as crushingly empty. There's no strength in Parton's version, no power, no hope. She knows she has lost everything, and the sweet clarity in her voice makes the pain of that loss utterly unbearable.

But you hear much more of Whitney than Dolly in pop singing today. So while I am sure that there are those who were fond of Ms. Houston, or loved her, I cannot and do not pretend to share in their grief.

Since I was not a particular fan of the woman's vocal stylings what was lost to me by her death was only her voice and her vocal style, and since that part of her leaves me somewhere between indifferent and mildly irritated to mourn, or pretend to mourn, or, indeed, to do more than to note her passing with a rather irked shrug would be to violate the Five Rules.

Therefore, I will do no more.Sorry, Whitney, but...meh.

Bombshell

Although I am the Designated Knower of all things pop-cultural in the Fire Direction Center, I do try and avoid the seamier and sleazier aspects of our celebritized and overexposed culture. This is not easy, since it seems that the entire point of the "news" media is to inform the innocent bystander of every conceivable detail of the doings social, emotional and venereal, of the Rich and the Famous.

And, although I truly enjoy the movies, I usually don't feel any kinship with or prurient interest in the lives of the pretty people who act in them. For all that the glossy magazines try to convince me that I really know these people they are truly strangers; what I "know" of them is largely the fictions that they, their publicists, the tabloid press and their more obsessive followers create for the rest of us groundlings. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the Cult of Celebrity is this faux intimacy with people we do not and never really will know anything about.

That said, I do come across various bits of "celebrity gossip" in my peregrinations through the newswires, and I ran across this nasty bit of work today on msn.com; "Jesse James Apologizes To Sandra Bullock, Hopes For Forgiveness".

It caught my eye for two reasons; one, that a notorious 19th century outlaw thought to have been shot dead by that "rotten little coward" Robert Ford in 1882 was sorry for anything other than not being dead and, two, that Sandy Bullock was involved somehow.

As much as I can be said to be "interested" in celebrities, Bullock is one of the few who interests me. She seems - for that is all I can judge her by, her public persona - to be a vivacious, emotionally alert, quick and animated person. She is, of course, physically attractive, that being a requirement for her employment. She has made some enjoyable films but for the most part she's gone from playing in one awful dog to another. She's been in some truly terrible movies and done poorly playing in them, and that's not even counting "Speed 2: Floaty Boaty" or whatever the hell they called the stinker.

And now the poor woman is tied to the public pillory of "betrayed wife".

I had some notion that she had formed an alliance with some sort of tattooed lad, one of these (to me) inexplicably inescapable "bad boy" type guys, who turns out to be the not-dead, not-outlaw Mr. James. Said bad boy is being accused of doing what bad boys often do, namely sinking passing tuna boats with his little pink torpedo.

At which point, the unmarried-to-Sandra-Bullock male just has to ask:

"Dude! Are you fucking NUTS!? Are you smoking crack? Are you taking the spike straight in the jugular vein?"

You're married to this woman who is so physically beautiful that she makes her living being physically beautiful. She is capable of being so lovable and charming that she has charmed and become beloved of millions of other poor schlobs, many of them more attractive and wealthier than you. You are legally entitled, indeed, both legally and socially enjoined, to enjoy physical and emotional intimacy with this beautiful, vivacious, charming woman.

The fuck..?

Which serves to point up several home truths about people in general, men in particular and "Jesse James" as an individual.

1. We know less than we ever thought we did or think we do about anyone.

If a homely schlub like James can throw away any hopes of remaining intimate with a woman that - at least from the outside - seems as ideal as Bullock, then there is no hope for understanding what brings and holds men and women together.

Or, possibly, it is a judgment (again) on celebrities and the place they hold in our culture. Because the only reason I can see doing this other than pure stupid horniness is if Sandra Bullock is a really wretched person emotionally; violent, angry, dismissive, ignorant, boring, unstable...whose initial attraction was her looks and the fake intimacy that this guy James thought he had with her. And, on closer acquaintance, who turned out to be quite another, much nastier, less lovable person.

Is the story true? Is it made up by an attention-seeking woman who doesn't care who she hurts in her quest for fame?

Who knows? I certainly don't. But the thing is...neither do you or the butcher the baker and the candlestick maker...and yet "Entertainment Tonight" tells you all that you do.

So what looks obvious - tattooed lad cheats on adorable wife with tattooed skank-ho - may be anything but.

2. If this idiot did manage to poke a hole in his marriage with his johnson he won't be the last, and he wasn't the first, to throw away something worthwhile - assuming it was, and if not, why marry the woman when the old prohibitions against intimacy have fallen? You want sex, you want to "be with" Sandra Bullock, gorgeous movie star? Why not? But why promise her your truth, and your singularity, and then follow your ignorant tumescence into a cheap and nasty affair with some drive-by harlot?

(Or, hell, a scented sorority sister, for that matter? Our girl "Bombshell" makes things looks nastier than they are by looking like a skank. But, really, does it and should it matter who was playing hide-the-chopper with ol' Jess? The point here isn't about the sex - it's about making a promise and then breaking it with malice aforethought. You're not getting done for adultery, James, but for being a lying, cheating skeeve.

You want to screw around? Fine - go to the old lady, 'fess up, let her enjoy kicking your ass out and following it with all your stuff before you go looking for trim.)

It's because - and I know I've said this here before; we are goddam idiots where sex is concerned. And I think it has a LOT to do with the whole way we wrap sex up in secrets, hide it and make it undiscussable and untouchable, instead of a part of what we want and, especially, hopefully, what we want to do with someone we carfe about.

I think if we were a little less goofy about it we might have less trouble with it.

Or maybe not - powerful thing, lust. One of the Seven Deadly Sins, y'know. Who knows what happened in the James/Bullock house that brought these two people here.

And - beyond the sadness that we are invited in to peep at their unhappiness - what's sad is that, regardless of what happened, one of the two, the one with the busy little penis, may have responded by going out and thrashing the mattress with a woman whose idea of post-coital melancholy is to go flog the story of their illicit friction to the nearest tabloid half a year after is supposedly ended? Who claims to be too dumb to know her supposed lover is still married?

Only the couple and the other woman - if that is what she is - know the truth, and all of them may not know all the truth. But the way things seem, either Bombshell is a galactic-class liar, Sandra must have been a pretty unlikeable - or even un-lust-able - person, or ol' Jesse James is perhaps the dumbest goddam not-dead, not-outlaw to ever drew breath.

And I feel dirty just knowing it.

Alcibiades on a bike?

I didn't blog about this year's Tour de France at all.

Writing that surprises me. I've blogged the Tour every year I've been doing this, from the tainted 2006 Tour of Floyd Landis to the 2007 Tour with all the drama of the expulsion of Rasmussen, the heroism and then the shame of Vinokourov, and the arrival of Alberto Contador and the departure of Team Discovery to 2008 and the Year of Little Carlos.

I enjoy pro cycling the way other men enjoy porn; seeing the flaws and the fakery and the seamy byplay of it all but enjoying the resultant pleasures - and mortification - of the flesh, nevertheless. In this case, the flesh, bone and muscle it takes to get on a bicycle and ride over a thousand kilometers in three weeks. Through little towns and great cities, fields of flowers and industrial wastelands. Up to the summits of the great mountains of history, through the passes where Charles Martel and Napoleon's soldiers marched. It's just a great sport.

But not this year. I'm not sure why. Caution, perhaps. So many of the riders have been caught doping, it's always a chancy thing now to predict or celebrate a great ride.But the other reason was, I think, that I sensed the possibility of a really ugly Tour with the return of Lance Armstrong. I've discussed before why I think LA's return to the sport isn't an unalloyed benefice. And, sure enough, the Armstrong Show had an immense impact on, and I think a very mixed impact on, this year's Tour.

The is no question that the presence of Armstrong raises the awareness of the Tour in this country. When LA is not riding the conversation I hear about the race is pretty much confined to the real hard-cores, the genuine cycling fanatics (of which we have more than a few here in Portland...)

Once you get away from the Bike Gallery or the Portland Wheelmen the level of interest drops to...well, pretty much zero. I doubt that 90% of the Portlanders you see sporting a Livestrong yellow bracelet could pick Frank Schleck or Mark Cavendish out of a crowd if you put a gun to their heads. But add our Texas boy back in, and...well, you know the answer.

In fact, the Versus people counted on the Armstrong Effect this year. In a small but telling gesture they added a tiny Astana jersey to the usual lineup of category leaders' jerseys at the bottom of the screen that tells you where the leaders are at any point in the day's stage.

So you knew not only where the GC, points, mountains and young rider leaders were...but where the uncrowned King of Cycling was. I know this seems trivial, but did they do this for Sastre, the defending champion? Had they done this for ANYone before Armstrong? I mean, great champion or not, this is a 38-year-old coming off four years of retirement and a broken collarbone. Why should we have any expectations of him other than that he would try and do his best to win, as he always does?

Oh, yeah, right. He's LANCE ARMSTRONG!

So. The Tour was it's usual wonderful mix of vicious politics, brute force, gasp-inducing skill and grinding endurance. Those of us who watched got to enjoy the usual sights of the color and power of the peleton, great breakaways, monster climbs and frightening descents (including Jen's Voigt's horrific crash descending the Col de Petit San Bernard shown here - warning, not for the faint of heart). The story, as always, was who would cross the finish line in Paris in yellow, and Alberto Contador was that man.But I have to think that winning his second Tour was extraordinarily difficult for Alberto, and not because of the heat, the wind, the climbs - and the Spaniard climbs like a goddamn elevator - or the crashes. It was because of all the attention paid to his teammate Armstrong.

Johan Bruyneel is a very bright man and a great maker of cycling teams. If this Tour is any indication of his personality, however, he is also a poor man-manager and something of a jerk. Signing Armstrong to a team that already had a GC monster as leader showed that he either 1) had lost confidence in his man Contador, 2) was so in love with Armstrong that he was willing to risk an all-out fight between him and the Spaniard rather than see LA sign with another team, or 3) thought so much of himself that he thought he could ride both these tigers to a podium sweep in Paris.

Well, the expected occurred. Contador and Armstrong are predators, egotistic men who live to win. The veneer of politeness wore thinner and thinner as the tour went on, until finally Contador attacked on the slopes of the Col de Verbier, taking the yellow jersey.

He did the same again three days later, to the public ire of his team director and his teammate Armstrong (who, by then, was by tradition and financial caution rendered unable to attack a yellow jersey held his own team) for dropping his teammate Andreas Kloden out of contention for a GC podium. With his immense climbing strength and the dramatic mountaintop finish on Mont Ventoux the penultimate stage the outcome was pretty much decided. Only the ill feelings persisted.Of course, there were other stories - there always are, that's the glory of the Tour - such as the Schleck brothers riding for the glory of Luxembourg (has Luxembourg EVER had any glory?), or the incredible speed of Mark Cavendish who yet managed to get schooled by the flying fox, Thor Hushovd, in how to win a points jersey without blinding speed.The race ran its three-week course of victory and defeat, of pain, hard work, desire, the thrones and dominations and all the splendor thereof. Not to mention the silliness, indignity and fatuousness, which is pretty much what you'd expect for any great human endeavour...So as much as I enjoyed this year's Tour, I came away feeling a little sadness for Contador, the young man whose second victory will always be tainted by the anger and frustration he must feel at his own team, its manager and his "teammate" Armstrong. And that brought me back to the man from Plano and what our obsession with him says about him, and about us.

I don't know anything about Armstrong the man. The notion that we can "know" people we have never met is a curious development of the electronic media and its saturation with the lives of the famous (although these are often known only for a sort of circular fame that rests on their simply being well known; modern celebrity seems to require neither exceptional wisdom nor particular skills but merely a complete lack of privacy). I can only guess by what is reported of his actions.

He is, obviously, a very driven man, personally and professionally. A man of great ego, and self-absorption; one has to be, to be a great athlete. Of his continuing battle after his cancer we are told of his indomitable will and his zeal for life. Of his personal tastes, he seems to be a bit...simple. We've learned so much else about him, but not that he writes poetry, plays the koto, knows how to swing dance or enjoys the films of Harold Ramis. He seems, well, a bit of an athlete: uncomplicated (a synonym for "kinda crude") and direct. Hard to say...

His politics appear to be a bit of a mystery; he is a personal friend of perhaps the worst U.S. President since James Buchanan, George W. Bush, but is quoted as saying that he "disagrees" with the idiot son of George and Barbara.

I respect the man's strength and courage. But it's telling how small things affect how we feel about other people we don't really know; Armstrong lost the ability to touch me more deeply with his cutting treatment of his former fiancee'.

To publicly claim that he broke off the engagement because he "didn't want more children" only months ahead of his impregnation of his new squeeze?

Cruel, Lance. Very cruel.

Here's the thing, though.

Armstrong was publicly discussed as a political candidate back in 2005/2006. He himself talked about a possible run for governor of Texas (but scrapped these plans when - I suspect - it became obvious to LA that as GOP governor of Texas he would have to make decisions to please his party that would cut off a lot of his Livestrong donations). But he was considered by some, and still is in some places, as a viable political candidate.

On earth - why?

We don't really KNOW the man. What we do know - especially in light of his treatment of Sheryl Crow - suggests that he is, for all his virtues, also a ruthless egotist with a side of cruel.

(For those of you who don't recognize her, this is the FIRST Mrs. Armstrong, Kristin, whom he dumped for Sheryl Crow. Who may have been the first to get the real feeling for how ruthless the man can be when he wants something.)

But he's famous! How can he be ruthless, callous or mean? Don't we know him? Don't we LIKE him?

People have always been entertained, or even obsessed, by the rich and "well-born". The extravagance and public display of royalty and nobility constituted perhaps the only public benefit of monarchy prior to the electronic age. But it is since the arrival of the mass print media, newspapers, television and movies that real Celebrity Culture has launched. We are bombarded, saturated, with the doings of the rich, the highly places, or the merely "famous". In the Seventies Rula Lenska

was a sensation because she became well known for...being well known. She was a novelty, a curiousity, a freak. Today she would barely qualify as a footnote. Our public fascination for celebrities like Rula and Lance Armstrong has become almost inescapable.

So what?

Well, the "what" is that we have begun to - in the words of P.J. O'Rourke - "impute unlikely virtues to the cute." The damn cult of celebrity has left the entertainment page and the moviehouse to wander over into politics and the public square. Where once we elected generals (as if U.S. Grant hadn't warned us about the foolishness of THAT form of hero-worship...) we now elect actors. Ronald Reagan. Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Sonny Fucking Bono.

It seems like any idiot with an Equity card can get elected, at least as a Republican (tho with Al Franken we may have the Democratic equivalent). So why not Lance Armstrong? Despite the evidence of the man's professional sporting life as well as hints from his personal life that many of the attributes valuable in a public figure: thoughtfulness, self-criticism, empathy, humility (to go with the more common decisiveness, confidence and intelligence) are lacking or severely stunted in him, he certainly wouldn't be the worst well-known person we've ever elected to power here in the United States.

A democracy's deepest vulnerability is to demagoguery. Would be autocrats may attempt to conquer it, wealthy malefactors to purchase it, bureaucratic moguls to subvert it. But nothing can destroy a democracy so thoroughly and so permanently as the foolishness and greed of its people. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury." (interestingly, I have always thought that this quote is from de Toqueville - I see that it is not. Regardless, it is well put, and the longer version of the famous Dick Cheney statement: "Deficits don't matter".)

Add to foolishness and greed the public's willingness to promote to public office someone whose primary quality is that people have seen them on television in a uniform, or in costume. For any polity to choose its leaders based on how they look or what they do is often a mistake. For a democracy, where trust between leaders and led is so crucial, electing incompetent boobs because of their scripted sound bites sound good coming out of a familiar and pretty talking head...well...

In the early 400s BC Athens, then the leader of one faction fighting the Peloponnesian War, debated the next campaign against Sparta. One of the Athenian politicians was a very handsome and gifted young orator named Alcibiades.Of this man, Thucydides says: "Alcibiades, son of Clinias, who wished to thwart Nicias both as his political opponent and also because of the attack he had made upon him in his speech, and who was, besides, exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage, and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by means of his successes."

Alcibiades helped talk the Athenians into one of the most disastrous campaigns in military history - the Sicilian Expedition. His oratory, and the citizen's greed for power and loot, combined to begin the end of the great Greek democracy.I don't know if Lance the politician has the potential to be our Alcibiades. None of us does - in fact, we don't really know the man at all. The problem is that our celebrity-infatuation makes us feel like we do. So we keep electing our Lances. And Reagans. And Schwartzeneggers. And Sonny Fucking Bonos.

After all, they're celebrities. We hear about them and see them and know all about their lives. They're so strong, and so pretty, and it's like they're our friends because we know them so well.How could they possibly ever betray us..?

Bad News Bettie

Fifties pin-up Bettie Page is very, very ill.

Despite what you hear, I was about...ummm...one year old during BP's original popularity. My only interest in her would have been for, shall we say, nourishment potential...although Bettie is quite, and delightfully, "average" in that respect, without the inhuman mammillary opulence that a certain playboy in a bathrobe and pipe would soon make de rigeur for ecdysiasts.

No, I came across the infamous Bettie in the 1980's, when Dave Stevens (who drew the lovely Bettie at left) let his inner fanboy out and splashed her across the pages of several of his graphic works including the "Rocketeer". Perhaps it's just a wierd concidence that Stevens died this spring; it seems more like kismet. I'm not sure he would have wanted to live in a Pageless world.

Her story is fascinating and awful in the way that carnival sideshows are awful and yet fascinating.

It goes the whole magilla: fame, beauty, youth, exuberance, conversion, flight, despair, even madness...Bettie was hard done by, but she could be any of the young girls in the harsh spotlight of the skin trade. She made next to nothing from the men who wanted to imprison her on cellulose or slick paper. She spent years in obscurity and poverty, again getting nothing from the men she married in search of security, comfort, love, maybe even something she herself didn't understand.

And all the time, rising serenely over the real woman's hardscrabble life, are the images stolen from her youth; lovely, vital, lush...an impossible rival for women, a teasing fantasy for men. I can't help but think that part of her vanishing was the impossibility of living as "Bettie Page", of having that inhumanly glossy siren's empty paper eyes on her every minute. Hard to take for anyone, let alone a smalltown Depression kid from Tennessee...

So I was sorry to hear that it looks like the time is drawing short for Bettie. Her lights are dimming, and life hard or smooth isn't going to be a problem for her soon.

But it does make me hope that today's twenty-something Betties of 2008 are learning from Bettie herself; being smart and getting lots of lovely money for showing us their boo-tay, converting it into Krugerrands or something and building themselves a safe place out of that sleek skin and glossy hair, so they can live doucely into their "sunset years", serene white-haired old ladies smelling of vanilla, smiling sweetly and horrifying their granddaughters with raunchy tales of their spicy youth.

Wood eye! Wood eye!

I actually hadn't planned to post anything else tonight - it's late, it's been a long week and I'm tired.

But I just had a brief e-conversation with a friend of mine (well, a sort of cyber-pal: I'm never actually met her - I should be so lucky!). I can't link to her - tho she writes well and her blog is fun - because she enjoys her password-protected privacy, but she knows who she is and IMO she's a hell of a great woman. And it was because said e-miga is, aside from a totally kickass person, mom-to-be, desert savant and mamma-jammer (literally) someone I think of as a sorta-kinda minor-celebrity-I-know, like being pals with Bernardo Brito, that I thought of this story.

This is NOT her, BTW. She's the hottie in red at the top. This is Anne Baxter doing 40's cheesecake.I've actually met a couple of other people I think of like this: my aunt and uncle lived for years next to Anne Baxter who was quietly retired in Easton, Connecticut just a couple of years before her death; very good lady and a smart person. And I actually got to shake hands and exchange hi's with Michelle Akers while she toured Portland with the U.S. WNT back in 1999 before the WWC. So I'm usually not a total dope around someone I've seen in the paper or on the screen.

Back in the day I was something of a fan of the thea-tah, and was used to going to New York every year to take in a show or three with my college buddies. To this day I cannot remember the show - probably something pretty rotten - that I was tolerating with my friend Sally when she suddenly started poking and jiggling me and bouncing in her seat like a mad woman.

"Jaysus, wench," I hissed, "can't you cross your legs and wait until intermission? I'm soaking in some utterly forgettable dialogue here..."

"No, no!" she whispered frantically, "I just saw Sandy Duncan sitting three rows back! Sandy Duncan!!

I'm not exactly a stalker but I thought that was pretty cool. But Sally was in an complete and utter swivet. I thought she was gonna hyperventilate and pass out and I was going to be stuck there in the eighth row of "The Fucking Guys in the Truck" or whatever in hell the show was with her dead body between me and the exit doors forever. Finally she made it clear that 1) she wanted to go over and say something to Sandy at the interval,and 2) my job was to be the person that came with her.

"No fucking way!" I snarled, "I'm not going to interrupt poor Sandy Duncan's entertainment like some star-struck trailer trash wannabe."

"You ARE a trailer trash wannabe," she replied, "just get over it, off your ass and stand next to me and say hi to Sandy Duncan, you goop."After begging and pleading and a few threats the lights came up to breathlessly perfunctory applause and Sally grabbed my arm and bolted up the aisle. She came to rest standing in front of a neat, blonde-headed woman of late middle age, jittering in one place as noisily as an idling Harley Davidson.

"Oh, Miss Duncan," she gushed, "I just wanted to thank you for all your great performances. You're really a great actress."

I have to say that Sandy was really quite gracious, thanking my friend and wishing her a nice time at the show. She looked at me, not pointedly, but a trifle quizzically and I noticed that Sally was too. They both waited a beat, as if to hear me say something, but I just smiled brightly, nodded like an idiot and began dragging Sally away up the aisle.
We got out to the lobby and Sally was as excited as I've ever seen anyone not actually getting paid.

"Wow wow wow wow!!!" she multiwowed, "That was soooooo cool! Sandy is totally cool! I'm SO glad I got to talk to her! Wasn't she cool!?" Suddenly she stopped and looked at me with a skeptical squint.

"What the heck's wrong with you today?" she said, "You're usually little mister chatterbox...I thought for sure you'd have some smart remark to make to Sandy Duncan!"

I stared at her as I had stared at Sandy.

"Yeah, that was the problem."

"What problem?" Sally asked, making those air quotes around "problem" with her fingers.

I looked at her and shook my head. "The problem was...I swear to God, Sal, I'm dead flat serious; I stood there staring at Sandy Duncan's face and the only single fucking thing I could think of to say was "Which one of your eyes is real?"