I only mention this because I didn't mean to watch any TV tonight - for one thing I've got enough work I should be doing, and for a second I've been reading enough Csikszentmihalyi and Gitlin recently to begin seriously (honestly!) thinking I might just sell my TV/cut off my cable and have an altogether more fulfilling and cultured life. But first, I wanted to watch The Simpsons tonight. The channel guide said The Simpsons would be on - no sure thing between now and the end of the World Series. Just give me that, Rupert. I won't even ask for Arrested Development tonight. All I wanted was to watch The Simpsons, so I turned to Fox (spit) at eight and...

Fashion ROCKS! Or so went the premise of this awards show thing that's on my TV in place of The Simpsons. Only, this isn't an award show - it only acts like one. It's not a fashion show either, however many Beautiful People and The Men That Fund Them are there. I don't know what in God's name it is, to be honest, but I left it on just long enough to discover what "Fashion Rocks!" really means...and that is;

Largely bad music has a long, proud tradition of being married to truly ludicrous fashions (Andre 3000 does, of course, get the Elton John Exemption here)
AND
Fox doesn't think you've had enough of the insufferable Black Eyed F'in Peas.

A question: do you think Dennis Leary ever dreamt he would turn into the sort of reading-lame-cracks-off-the-teleprompter-at-bogus-Fox-'awards'-shows putz he used to excoriate mercilessly a decade ago? See, I don't even know what an awards show producer is thinking when he goes and gets Dennis Leary. He doesn't 'get' Dennis Leary. Hell, I don't think Dennis Leary can even 'get' Dennis Leary anymore. I realize that despite the chain-smoking, Bud-drinking, anti-authoritarian persona he came into our consciousness with, Leary has shilled his gimmick out a hell of a lot over the years. He gets a bit of a pass from me for things he does for firefighters and the like (rumor has it that Leary is just a regular Irish guy from Boston who likes to play hockey with his cop and firefighter buddies...but I dunno, you wouldn't know from watching TV over the past few years). The plain fact of the matter is that once you take away the cigarettes and the bottles of Budweiser on the stool and all the vitriol that went with it - you get...well...nothing. A somewhat pissed-off sounding guy doing an unnecessary job, who his old comedic self would have told in no uncertain terms to fuck off. One of the last people in the entertainment world I would pick to present something like this, which carried all the weight of one styrofoam packing peanut.

However, a glimpse of the crowds during Rod Stewart's performance (was he coming onto Ronnie Wood?) gave me an utterly fantastic idea. Look, today digital cable allows us all to have 500-some channels, and at the same time we're only scratching the surface - the bandwidth used by all your household cable and internet traffic is an infinitesmal fraction of the amount that could be handled by a regular fiber optic cable. Put another way - there's potential for a LOT more niche channels out there. I know the one I want to see is the Awards Show Crowd channel.
Here's what I mean: you know already that the second best part of any awards show is when they scan the crowd to show the just-defeated nominees desperately trying to hold back a cry of 'oh fuck!' or the clear mix of discomfort and annoyance exhibited by, say, Fifty Cent and his posse when, oh, Reba McEntire is performing (and vice versa). The BEST part of any awards show is when they scan the crowd and show various B-list, C-list and L-list celebrities, not to mention other besuited
Why not a channel devoted to this? Surely the technical means are there. I want a broadcast that lingers on the crowd and only the crowd, especially the swish seats; Let it float around Radio City Music Hall or the Kennedy Center or wherever. I want to see them all - every roly-poly, unfortunately-bearded Wall Street type and his call-girl-looking companion (him, swaying off-beat, her, playing the air guitar and hiking her top back up), every greasy-looking, fake-tanned internet entrepreneur/A & R 'rocking out' to some resurrected 60's rocker (or just the same, 'punk-rocking' out to Avril).
I bet you'll see this channel within 4 years, too.

Thankfully, before I had too much more time to think about this, I escaped to buy and cook dinner.
But got done in time for The Surreal Life. Which is a little something like getting done with everything in time to do a half-gainer into an enormous, soul-sucking, strangely compelling black hole.

"He had that European flavor to him, being Mexican."



Apologies to Sartre, but hell is not other people. Hell is not being able to find the remote control as "Creating The New Partridge Family", or whatever the hell it's called, comes on. This really happened to me tonight, for five minutes or so. Stuck way down in the couch cushion after all. I saw more Danny Bonaduce than I propose the introduction of something we could call The Bonaduce Factor, or perhaps The Mark Of Bonaduce. By that I mean you know that anything that Danny Bonaduce is involved with, or even makes a cameo on, sucks. And not just that it sucks, but that it's got that hanging stench of leering desperation and 'why didn't we think of this whole scam first?' inferiority. Sort of like a bad, sub-Stern shock radio act.