Hi kids! Ed Barbara, Furniture USA! We wanna get you started in the credit world!(Anybody remember this relic from the Guido museum in 1970s late night TV?)
Yeah, it's time for me to pontificate on the year known as Two Thousand Seven or as some tools might say Twenty Oh Seven. I used to have a boss that called 2001: A Space Odyssey
"Twenty Oh One". It really irritated the shit out of me. (Honestly. I had the cleanest colon in town back then.)
Personally, 2007 represented a time to move on (and I don't mean dot-org). Much of what occurred last year pushed, coerced and even encouraged me to wake the hell up and get on with my goddamn life. My own mortality seems to have awakened from a restless sleep and hasn't been in a very good mood since. It's kicking my ass to cut off a lot of dead weight that has been distracting me and holding me back. But it's also allowed me the freedom to embrace what is good and important from my past, present and what I still maintain will be my future if I don't fuck it all up. The clock is ticking...and it doesn't give a shit.
The biggest personal events of the year revolved around the loss of two great loves of my life-Pollardville and its Queen Mother, my beloved Goldie Pollard, one of the best friends I ever had. I was blessed with opportunity to say goodbye to both before the end came, but I can't help but want more. Still I am grateful for what I was able to accomplish in my trip to the Pollardville reunion, especially for the chance to see the best people I've ever known-the Palace Showboat Players. The Ville saga continues, not only in this blog, but also in the website, http://www.showboatreunion.com/ which includes a lot of new material about that wondrous place. Confronting the demise of that wonderful institution has caused me to love that much more and cherish its memory forever, just as I will Goldie and all my Pollardville family.
The celebrity gravy train finally derailed, making casualties of us all. Anna-Nicole, Britney, Paris, Lindsay...my, what a wonderful world we live in. Once upon a time, the downtrodden masses could look to the stars and dream to live their lifestyles of the rich and famous. Now we can't wait to see how they'll fuck up next and hope to God it's worse than one of our own. And, golly, it wasn't gender-specific either. On the female side, we had Ann Nicole, Britney and Paris. For the guys, here's Michael Vick, Don Imus and the grand return of one Orenthal James Simpson. (Side note for Rosie O'Donnell: If Britney is this country's Princess Di, they you must Idi Amin.) For me it didn't get any worse than receiving US Weekly as a substitute subscription when Premiere Magazine went out of business. Each week was worse than the next, shaking my head until it almost fall off as I scanned each issue, nearly at the exploits of what passes as a star in Hollywood these days and as a media outlet "reporting" it all. But they're complient. CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX each and every one of them no better and often worse than The Star, National Enquirer or the new pretender to the throne of shit, TMZ. As far as I'm concerned, the whole kit 'n kaboodle began once the National Enquirer was considered a "legitimate" news source before the eyes of the American public. We've never been able to wash the smell out of the media since then. And those of you-including myself-who have wallowed at this pig trough of humanity: Shame on you too as well. What the hell have we become-or even worse-what are we becoming? To borrow a quote from David Simon, co-creator of THE WIRE, "While the American empire slipped off its pedestal, what the fuck were we paying attention to?" (For an even better rant on this sad state of affairs, watch Ricky Gervais' EXTRAS finale on HBO. )
Has the writer's strike changed how you watched television? Not me. I haven't watched a network work in the traditional sense in over a year. Maybe they've been forever altered by cable TV to begin with. But the networks had totally screwed themselves by their arrogance a long time ago. They have no respect for the audience, playing havoc with their schedules, doubling up on popular shows until they burn out and cancelling others prematurely before they've even had a chance and depending almost solely on "sweeps" periods during November and February. You know the ol' sweeps, don't you? That's when the networks drag out the "BIG GUNS"-the uber-specials, the extravaganzas or more often than not these days, four new episodes in a row. Then come December or March 1, it's back to reruns again, usually in the middle of a continuing storyline as is the norm with nighttime dramas. Maybe this why CSI and LAW AND ORDER survive while almost everything else struggles. Continuity occurs when the powers that be allow it. The networks are dinosaurs and deserve all the harm they are getting now.
So enough of this mishigoss for now. Stay tuned for what I considered to be the best of 2007.
Bye kids!
