The opening paragraph from John Fante’s “Ask the Dust”:

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

A good analogy for what’s going down with me lately, up to and including the solution. And so far so good, I might add.

News flash to my generation: A certain former music channel is cutting the cord:

“We’re pushing Generation X out,” [MTV Networks President Van] Toffler said. “We’re slaves to our different audiences, for MTV that’s millennials, who are vastly different than Generation X; they’re definitely less cynical — they’re more civic minded.”

News flash to Toffler: For the most part, Gen-X pushed MTV out the door years ago. Probably around the time that the “M” stopped standing for “music” (apparently, it now stands for “millennials”), and proto-reality show sludge like “The Real World” started dominating the channel’s airtime. As much as the channel was defined in its formative years by Gen-Xers — and vice-versa — times have changed for both. It’s not like anyone expected a televised shrine to youth to gracefully grow old with its founding audience.

In fact, one wonders why the official disconnect comes at this late date:

Regardless of whether the network’s programming matches its ideals, Toffler’s way of thinking is good business. There are roughly 78 million millennials. Generation X only has around 46 million members. If you couple that fact with the generalization that Gen-Xers are both less consumer-minded than their peers and much harder to fool, then it becomes downright surprising that MTV waited this long to shift their focus to greener pastures.

I suppose there are compensations. Middle-aged Xers can shift to VH1, where they can catch… well, the same reality TV crap as on the MTV mothership. Here’s to staying young forever!

From here, any building buzz for tonight’s Oscars ceremony has been pretty well displaced by the Cablevision-Disney blackout of the broadcast in the tri-state area.

But, all told, disgruntled Cablevision subscribers shouldn’t feel that bad. Because in an indirect way, the loss of some 3.1 million viewers dovetails with the overall lessening of impact that an Academy Award nomination has had on the box office this year:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doubled the number of [Best Picture] nominees this year in hopes of drawing more attention to more movies. But the revenue bump for this year’s crop is less than the one enjoyed by last year’s five best-picture hopefuls.

And of that $135 million, all but about $24 million went to the one film in least need of an Oscar bump: the record-smashing “Avatar.” The figures were generated between the nominations Feb. 2 and the last weekend before Sunday’s awards.

Last year’s best picture nominees pulled in $146 million over a comparable period, and most of that went to a film Oscar helped turn into a sensation: “Slumdog Millionaire.” Three of the five 2009 nominees at least doubled their take in that period, something no film in this year’s batch even came close to doing.

So this year, fewer people are watching the Oscars, or the theatrical releases that are up for Oscars. Nice symmetry.

I’m sure the industry reaction will be to amp up the number of nominations, rationalizing that this year’s Best Picture expansion failed because it just didn’t go far enough. How does twenty potential Best Pictures crowding the box office sound? Not that the box office is the true target:

And a nomination lasts forever, whether a movie is in theaters or being offered on Netflix, so the full story of the benefits of the expanded category hasn’t been told yet. Studios make billions of dollars on DVD and Blu-ray disc sales, not to mention what they collect from pay TV outlets at home and abroad.

At the end of the day, it’s just a marketing label. The pomp, circumstance, and statuette are entirely incidental.

I can’t decide which one of two things is more off-putting about Michael Strahan’s new TV commercial for Sports Authority:

Is it:

- Strahan’s gratingly-pitched “WOW!” exclamation after he hits that big homerun?

Or:

- That freaky/creepy-looking sales clerk that approaches him directly afterward? Seriously, that pale-white skintone and that shoe-polish black hair and eyebrows — the guy looks practically animatronic.

Also, a side note to the Sports Authority marketing team: While most people won’t give it a second look, it’s probably not a great idea to use insider-lingo like “Strahan Campaign” as the title for this promotion’s Web landing page. Details, details…

Much ado over “the most-watched hockey game in 30 years”, with an estimated 27.6 million Americans watching the U.S.-Canada gold medal game. The context:

To put the numbers in perspective, Sunday’s game drew a higher overnight rating than every World Series game since 2004 (including every game of Yankees/Phillies last year), every NBA Finals telecast since 1998, and every NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four game since at least ‘98.

Excluding the NFL, the 17.6 overnight for the game is the second-highest of the year for any sporting event, behind only the Texas/Alabama BCS National Championship Game in January (18.2).

That kind of televised turnout sparks discussion on how, or if, it’ll transfer over to the National Hockey League.

The short answer: It won’t.

Certainly, hockey proved itself worthy of the showcase-event placement it garnered as the closing act of the Games (especially impressive considering that standard Olympics presentations tend to emphasize individual athletic personalities). And certainly, the fervor created by Vancouver will net the NHL a few extra followers for the stretch run of the 2009-10 season. But let’s face it: People tuned in because this was a once-every-four-years happening, and the grand finale happened to feature a storybook North American rivalry. The echoes of 1980 (strained as they were) helped build the momentum for the U.S., as well (the Canadians, of course, didn’t need any such priming of the pump).

But, for all the enthusiasm that was generated, I don’t see it carrying past the extinguished Olympic torches. It was indeed a self-contained moment, part of what made it special. There’s no sense of re-living that experience by catching the next NHL game on Versus or NBC, let alone on a regional sports network.

It is amusing to think how the league could attempt to capitalize on the concept, though. Maybe continue to ride Ryan Miller as Team USA’s golden boy, and make the Buffalo Sabres “America’s team” for the NHL playoffs? They could do worse.

The appeal of disaster movies has ebbed and flowed for decades. A recent spate of theatrical releases indicates that, currently, the flow is go: The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Book of Eli, The Road, The Happening, and Legion all attest to our public preoccupation with endtimes.

Whatever the sociological underpinnings for this fascination, better that we play them out on the big screen:

Crave danger but lack a death wish? Not to worry, I’ve got you covered. You and I can get hopped up on disaster porn. We can dream of swamps of fire, we can contemplate the sunspots on the sun. We can surrender to wind and water and meet an angel on the run. We can watch a faster ocean sweep a vaster Himalayan sky. We can get our kicks on the apocalypse. Every time a volcano pops, I get a little closer to Zen. Every time the ice cap crumbles, I feel a little cleansed. Let’s purge our souls as godheads roll and score it all to some slinky 70s soul. With 2012 around the corner, Hollywood’s throwing an eschatological feast.

Who knew the end of the world could give you such a tingly feeling?

Last week, on the eve of the Winter Games commencement, I was asked on two separate occasions whether or not anyone really, actually watched the Olympics.

Being the sports snob that I am, I scoffed back that no, no one watches the Olympics — other than the 100 million or so who tune in every couple of years. I thought that was an effective comeback, which underlined how a person projects his/her own perceptions and preferences onto the wider popular consciousness. (And we all do that, including me, who unfailingly muses on if anyone cares about things like awards shows or reality TV, despite being fully away of the millions of devoted fans for each.)

As it turns out, my off-the-cuff citation of that 100 million viewership for the five-ring circus was only half the story:

“I’m very confident we’ll do well from a ratings standpoint,” NBC research guru Alan Wurtzel told reporters Thursday. He said he expects 200 million people to watch at least parts of the Vancouver Games over the 17-day telecast. That number would be fewer than the 215 million who tuned in for the Beijing Olympics, but more than the 184 million from the prior winter Olympics in Torino, Italy.

So it’s more like a couple hundred million viewers who “don’t count” when it comes to the Olympics. All depending on your perspective, of course.

In the wake of yet another high-profile plagiarism incident in the publishing world, we come upon the modern media proliferation justification for cribbing others’ work:

Although [16-year-old novelist Helene] Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

So according to this mindset, Hegemann’s lifting of an entire page from an obscure novel called “Strobo” for use in her book, “Axolotl Roadkill”, is fair game. Because “Strobo” came to Hegemann in a flood of content, it was essentially anonymous raw material, free for repurposing.

Which is all nonsense, of course. What strikes me about these supposed new-media rationalizations is that they are never disclosed ahead of time — only after the theft is discovered. If copycats like Hegemann truly believe that what they’re doing is acceptable, why don’t they reveal what they’re doing upfront, when their book/movie/music first comes out? Obviously, if they can’t admit to this content theft (or “mixing”, or “curation”, or whatever semantics sound best), then they know that they’re in the wrong. At best, they’re just too lazy to engage the original creators’ permission. Ethical quicksand, all around.

Five years ago, I did a little top-of-my-head analysis of the stark expansion in media/entertainment expenses for the average American household since the ’70s. The topline results:

In 1975:
- Telephone (single line, long distance, no frills): About $15
- Daily Newspaper: About $4
- Magazine Subscriptions: About $4
(That’s just about it, unless I’m missing something big. Cable TV was around in the mid-’70s, but didn’t really start catching on until the early ’80s; the average person still went with over-the-air fare.)
TOTAL: $23

In 2005:
- Telephones (landline with long distance, call waiting, etc.; second line, cellphones, Blackberry pagers, etc.): About $200
- Internet (broadband): About $40
- Cable/satellite TV: About $80
- Magazine Subscriptions: About $10
- Daily Newspaper: About $10
- DVD/Video Rentals: About $25
(We can probably add satellite radio subscriptions to this lineup in the next five years; and I realize that the newspaper subscription is probably getting dropped in most households these days.)
TOTAL: $365

Turns out that my guesstimation is more or less accurate. Entering the century’s second decade, we are spending more, and on more options, to keep ourselves occupied:

It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.

And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.

And that all lump-sums into about 400 bucks per month per household. Amusement-slash-edification certainly ain’t cheap.

In a fairly staid commercial lineup for Super Bowl XLIV, the clear winner for me was this utterly improbable pairing of David Letterman and Jay Leno (with Oprah in the moderating middle):

Maybe even funnier than the ad itself is the lengths taken to keep its inception secret:

The spot was shot last Tuesday afternoon, under the strictest of secrecy which involved both Mr. Leno and Ms. Winfrey flying in surreptitiously to New York, and arriving incognito at the [Ed Sullivan Theater], while Mr. Letterman was in the midst of taping his show for that night. It also involved Jay wearing a disguise: hooded sweatshirt, glasses and faux mustache. If you happened to be on Broadway between 53rd and 54th street last Tuesday about 4:15, you might have seen a man fitting that description slip into the theater by a small entrance under the marquee.

All that for a “Late Show with David Letterman” promo. And it basically topped every other $3-million, 30-second spot of the night. Dave might have been complaining about his “worst Super Bowl party ever”, but it produced the best commercial break during the whole game.

I don’t chew gum.

So why is there a picture of Dentyne gum in this post? Simple: Dentyne’s marketers reached out to me for some blog-vertising action (just one of a recent spate of requests to come this way). They sent on two “bottles” worth of the gum, so I guess I’m obliged.

That’s one thing: “Bottles”. Dentyne refers to these plastic containers as bottles, even in ads. And yet, with their wide-mouth lids, they’re clearly more like jars. Maybe “jar of gum” sounds like an odd packaging description, but “bottle of gum” doesn’t sound much better.

Such packaging isn’t new in the gum/candy game. It’s been around for years now, obviously geared toward car-cupholder placement. But once again, I’m not a good fit: I don’t own a car. And even if I liked gum, I don’t know about having a jar (yeah, I said it) taking up valuable space inside my everyday man-bag.

So is there anything I like about this freebie? Just one thing: That wild artwork on the container’s outer wrapping. It’s a commissioned design by Anthony Yankovic, part of a series of color-themed designs for Dentyne’s flavors. Those intricate line-drawings are mesmerizing. I particularly dig that psychedelic triple-eyed owl, the centerpiece of this mini-mural.

As it happens, Yankovic and I share a bit of a connection: He currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida — the same town I made my home in for 15 years. In fact, as near as I can figure, Yankovic moved to the ‘Burgh just about the same time I moved out, some four years ago. Small world.

In any case, after this review, I’m left with a couple of 60-piece counts of sugarless peppermint gum in a cool-looking container. Nice to look at, but ultimately, I’ll have to give them away, fanciful art and all.

Here’s one man’s reaction to a sneak peek of a CGI-rendered Smurf, from the upcoming animated feature film:

AAAAAAAA KILL IT WITH FIRE

A little extreme; I’d say the false sense of scale is making Prototype Smurf look abnormally large, and thus faux-monstrous. But anything that elicits such mock-horror doesn’t deserve any screentime around this blog, so I won’t inflict it on my audience. Let’s just hope the character designs are de-creepified by the time they hit the silver screen in 2011.

True story, via my tweetstream today:

I’m dealing with someone who’s dyslexic when it comes to Roman numerals. Yeah, really.

The catalyst for this backward-Latin enumeration: Saw VI, which my collaborator keeps mis-communicating to me as “Saw IV“. Luckily, we’re really only dealing with the later sequel, so no permanent confusion; but still.

I haven’t had a chance to ask her why she keeps flubbing that VI as IV. I wonder how common this malady was in ancient times — did Romans routinely mix up their numbering system, leading to massive daily miscalculations? Maybe that’s what led to the Empire’s ultimate decline and fall.

By the way, this post’s title is probably not proper Latin (this Latin translator was of little help). But it sounds good, so I’ll swap linguistic accuracy for artistic license. And it’s better than the inevitable alternative.

This past weekend’s tussle between Amazon and Macmillan over the right to set pricing on ebooks included some curious phraseology by Amazon:

We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles…

A “monopoly over their own titles”? In other words, Macmillan does, indeed, control the wares that it provides for sale — just like any other company that puts together products for mass consumption. And somehow, Amazon in implying that this is wrong. The term “monopoly” here is intentionally loaded: It makes the publisher seem exclusionary and greedy — again, for simply asserting the right to set its own prices. In other words, just like any other wholesaler or manufacturer (i.e., the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” that’s an accepted part of retail).

Sour grapes, basically. It also reflects Amazon’s roots as a Web company, and the general ethos that intellectual property should be free for the taking, business be damned. It’s hard to see how you can sympathize with Amazon at all, given this attitude.

Above is a typically clutter-ful Web ad, featuring Brett Favre holding a magic 8-ball — er, make that a 4-ball.

Er, make that, not really holding that ball. Because it couldn’t be more obvious that the hand in the foreground is utterly out of anatomical sync with Favre’s body in the background. Unless he’s just been mangled by a sack, there’s no way Favre’s arm is contorting in such a way to hold up that ball that way. Truly a poor example of Photoshop hackery.

And yet… This is far from a rare instance of the disembodied-hand look in visual advertising. I see it all the time. And so do others: Witness this fan-forum critique of Sophia Bush’s fake hand in a Flip video billboard. It’s rampant.

It’s easy to figure out how such a travesty happens: The directive is to highlight the primary visual element — the product, the celebrity, the gimmick — above all else. So the image gets subdivided against itself, with everything other than the focal point being relegated to mere background. Realism is sacrificed to the sell-job.

Still, I can’t figure out how this became such a widespread aesthetic. Is it assumed that the viewers “get” that this is supposed to be an unrealistic, collage-like presentation? Is there an attempt at subtle comedy in not finessing the off-position hand? Or are legions of art designers simply not up on human-body depictions? Whatever it is, it’s not a good trend.

While it’s terribly predictable of PETA to capitalize on this upcoming Groundhog Day, it’s surprising that the organization proposed a constructive way to preserve the holiday:

Gemma Vaughan, Animals in Entertainment specialist for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said in a letter to organizers of the annual spectacle in Punxsutawney, PA, that groundhogs, which are normally shy and spend much of their time in burrows, “become stressed when they are exposed to large, screaming crowds; flashing lights from perhaps hundreds of cameras; and human handling.”

Vaughan suggests using “animatronic animals” instead.

A robotic critter to handle the hoopla of the February 2nd shadowcasting? A daft idea on the face of it. And yet, I have the perfect candidate, pictured here: The gopher from Caddyshack!

Hey, a ground-burrowing rodent is a ground-burrowing rodent. No need to quibble on specific species. It’s not like there’s an imminent sequel in the works that would occupy Mr. Gopher. A steady annual gig would probably be most welcome. He can throw in his gopher-dancing moves to really jazz up an otherwise staid event.

And to add another pop-cultural layer to all this, consider: Bill Murray, who shared screen time with the gopher on Caddyshack, also made his mark as the star in Groundhog Day. Given that connection, I’d say subbing in a gopher for a groundhog would fly.

In the (regrettably) long history of book-banning, it’s a wonder why more literary crusaders haven’t bypassed the piecemeal approach of targeting single titles in favor of taking down the ultimate source of all those evil words:

The Menifee [California] Union School District is forming a committee to review whether dictionaries containing the definitions for sexual terms should be permanently banned from the district’s classrooms, a district official said Friday.

The 9,000-student K-8 district this week pulled all copies of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary after an Oak Meadows Elementary School parent complained about a child stumbling across definitions for “oral sex.”

I’m guessing this same parent will have a downright conniption the day Junior’s classroom learns about oral tradition…

As original as you’d think it is to ban the language’s entire lexicon, in fact, it’s been done:

Joan Bertin, executive director of the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship, whose members include the American Library Association, said dictionary bans have happened in the past, although none has been reported since the mid-1990s.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were efforts to ban the American Heritage dictionary at schools in Alaska, Indiana, Missouri and California, she said. The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary came under scrutiny in New Mexico in the mid-1990s.

“It’s rare but not unheard of,” Bertin said.

I guess the kids will have to pick up those sanctioned definitions of sexual acts on the streets now. Which, actually, seems more normal than looking them up in alphabetical order.

As far as I know, the Canadian beaver is not an endangered species. Its print counterpart, on the other hand, is a goner, done in by a 1-2 punch of the schoolyard and the Internet:

To be more precise, the title ["The Beaver: Canada's History Magazine"] was doomed by a vulgar alternative meaning that causes Web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name… The trouble went beyond Web pages. The magazine found that its attempts to e-mail classroom aids to teachers were thwarted by its name, as were attempts to contact many readers.

It’s a sincere shame that a venerable journal like this has to succumb to such crude slang. And how primitive is Canada’s IT infrastructure that it employs such hamhanded filtering technology? In the face of these challenges, I guess it’s right to be worried about The Beaver.

Although the Canucks aren’t helping matters any with events like The Great Canadian Beaver Eating Contest…

I was quite amused today to see a copy of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life” sitting on dashboard of my morning bus, obviously in possession of the bus driver.

Because it was all too obvious that he was practically brandishing the hardcover, making sure that every rider that got onboard had a good view of it. Between that, and the staredowns he was administering, I’m pretty sure the driver was daring someone, anyone, to challenge him on it. Given the well-known proclivities of a good cross-section of New Yorkers, I’d imagine the odds are good that he got into more than one verbal joust with various passengers during his shift.

All I can say is that, during my half-hour trip, no one took the bait. Not that you could tell the difference by the driver’s customarily crabby demeanor.

Maybe I’m not the one to criticize Demond Wilson when it comes to promoting “Second Banana”, his memoirs from his “Sanford and Son” years.

But if Wilson actually wanted this book to catch on, I think he should have gone with the far more obvious choice of title: “You Big Dummy!”. Having Redd Foxx’s signature catchphrase from the show front-and-center on the cover would bring the book instant pop-cultural recognition. Plus, the novelty factor alone would have ensured a few extra sold copies.

Alas, this lost opportunity seems like something that Lamont Sanford himself would have flubbed. Eliciting yet another “you big dummy!” from his Pop, Fred G. — perhaps followed by yet another in a series of “big one” heart attacks.

Not to be outshined by the newly “Jersey Shore”-burnished guidos, New Englanders are coalescing into their own obnoxious subculture:

They’re called Massholes. Though there is some disagreement about what, exactly, constitutes a Masshole, there are several characteristics present in all definitions. A Masshole is a resident of Massachusetts — though sometimes Rhode Island, New Hampshire, or Maine — who possesses a nearly carnal love for the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins; operates motor vehicles in an aggressive fashion; drinks Sam Adams; and overuses the adjective “wicked.”

Coming soon to a reality show near you, presumably. The days of regionally-confined objectionableness are long behind us, it seems. I only hope that New York, being caught in the resulting geographic nexus, comes out intact.