CRITICAL MASS: Jerome Weeks’ farewell column

LAST WEEK, Jerome Weeks accepted a buyout offer from The Dallas Morning News beginning Sept 15, rather than work in a severely reduced arts section. Staff employees were told they could write a farewell column but it would have to be OK’d by management first. At any rate, Jerome’s farewell column was refused, and thus far just one farewell column from the 111 people leaving the paper has appeared. Here is what he wrote.

It’s a little thing, but I’m looking forward to reading for idle pleasure again.

Readers have often told me that being a full-time book critic must be a dream job. And I agree. It’s practically a leisure-time activity. Let me take a moment here to put my feet up on my desk. Ahh.

Still, as Mark Twain observed, anything you’re not obliged to do is play. Anything else is work. And as a book journalist, one is obliged to race after the Media Now-Now-Now – what critic David Denby once called “information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”

What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites. But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.

That’s amazing but it means keeping up is a full-time sprint. A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days. Recall those dreaded high school assignments: A bad book can seem like a prison sentence.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much. Which just shows how little we actually value reading. Critic Walter Kirn has observed that the novelist is “culturally invisible” today because his job offers few rewards to the big-dog male ego. The same is true of reading. Nowhere in films or TV do characters read — other than the “bookish girl” or the action hero, but only when he must desperately decipher the Sacred Inca Brain Codex for clues to foil the arch-fiend’s dastardly plot — a plot the “bookish girl” could have figured out long ago.

Still, for reviewers, one of the accidental delights of the job comes precisely from reading many of those books we’d normally use for attic insulation. It’s a central pleasure of art: discovery. Finding that what we couldn’t imagine happening in a book can not only happen but succeed, endure, excite.

Then there’s the joy of relaying this to readers. To re-live the thrill. And, of course, there’s the pleasure of irking some people, notably bloggers. Mustn’t forget that.

All of which keeps the neurons firing. Helps stave off Alzheimer’s, as the doctors advise. So for all of this and a paycheck, if little else, I’m grateful. I’ve been doing it, on and off, in academia and the media, since I wrote my first published newspaper review at 20.

On the third hand, turning such pleasures into a chore can warp a person. No, not warp them into the cliche of the curmudgeon-critic but give them a pained relationship to what they love. I read books the way I breathe, but lately, when another three-pound monster has landed on my desk, I’ve flinched.

So it’ll be a relief to read for pleasure again. One reason it’s particularly appealing these days is that it’s so counter-culture — so counter to our prevailing techno-bully-rapid-response-profit-margin mindset. It’s seditious fun being idle, being un-productive.

Let’s not fool ourselves. Publishing is an industry like any other, and a book is a commodity like any other. But reading is slow, it’s private, it’s non-electronic. Reading fiction is particularly suspect in our Get Ahead Nation. Traditionally, it has been a “woman’s pastime.” It’s not necessarily self-improving. For that matter, it’s often not necessary at all.

So yes, being a book columnist is one of the last, great gigs in the grumpy, panicked world of newspaperdom. But although print journalism and books are far from gone, this little corner of them is. Just now, there was room for my big feet on my desk because it’s been cleared off. The books have been boxed up, shipped out.

I’ve left one novel unpacked, though. I plan to read it on the train home, maybe share it with my daughter, Suzanna, because it looks like one she might enjoy. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll turn off this computer now.

You will no longer be able to:
E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com

From Sept. 9, 2006 New York Times:

Shying Away From Degeneracy
By DAN MITCHELL

THE new film “Idiocracy” sounds like a sure winner. It was directed by Mike Judge, creator of the animated TV series “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” and director of the sleeper movie hit “Office Space.” It stars Luke Wilson. It has received good reviews from the few critics who, despite the efforts of 20th Century Fox, have been able to see it.

So why did Fox, after sitting on the movie for two years before releasing it Sept. 1, decide not to market the film, opting instead to open it quietly in only 130 theaters and then quickly send it to video? Judging by the online reaction, there are at least two possible reasons.

The first is that the film is simply too stark a critique of American culture, or even that it is a cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics (essentially, overbreeding among the stupid). The movie depicts a future in which everyone has become so dense and culturally lowbrow that Mr. Wilson’s character — an average guy from the present day who travels by accident hundreds of years forward in time — is a relative genius. Why, asks David Weigel on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run blog (reason.com), do “movies that exploit dumbed-down American culture get wide releases while a comedy making light of that, by the creator of ‘Beavis and Butt-head,’ is getting canned?”

He points to another blogger, Ilkka Kokkarinen, who writes that the implications of the movie’s theme — flatulence jokes aside — “are so immensely serious that it is simply unimaginable that any studio boss would take the slightest chance of becoming the next Mel Gibson over the idea that society of stupid people is worse than a society of smart people.” (sixteenvolts.blogspot.com) Populists — defenders of the little guy — would not stand for it, Mr. Kokkarinen says.

Others theorize that Fox disowned the film because it makes fun not only of Fox News — the studio’s sister division — but also of Starbucks, Fuddruckers and other companies that may advertise with one or more media outlets of Fox’s owner, the News Corporation.

The blog FishBowlLA quotes Luke Thompson, a movie reviewer for E! Online, as saying, “some of the sponsors may well have been unhappy with the way their products are placed, and made some phone calls to higher-ups” (mediabistro.com).

from FishBowlLA:

Luke Thompson wrote:

It was obvious the studio killed it — usually, movies that don’t screen for the press are promoted up the wazoo with misleading trailers, posters, etc., but this wasn’t promoted at all.

It’s possible Mike Judge or somebody else pissed somebody important off.

Having seen the movie, though, the best theory I have is that some of the sponsors may well have been unhappy with the way their products are placed, and made some phone calls to higher-ups. Carls Jr. is prominently mentioned, featuring their new slogan “Fuck you! I’m eating!”, their “super big-ass fries,” and when one woman is unable to pay for her fries, the Carls Jr. automatic dispenser calls the cops and tells her her children are now the property of Carl’s Jr.

Perhaps closer to home, Fox News features nearly nude anchors and is affiliated with “The Violence Channel.” Though this seems fairly mild compared with the usual critiques of Fox News, sexual content does seem to be considered more of a stigma nowadays.

It may have been a simpler decision than that, like someone just figured they wouldn’t make money from it theatrically — but tonally and in content it’s absolutely in keeping with everything Judge has ever done, most of which has made the money men very happy in the long run.

Friday, September 15, 2006 7:30 PM at Skylight Books

Arthur Magazine and the Nightjar Review Present…

“They’re Coming To Take You Away: The Poetry of of Alex Mitchell, John Tottenham, and Peter Relic”

Three Los Angeles poets bring their work to Skylight for a evening of laughter, languor, and imagistic transgressions.

Alex Mitchell has been called both “a rock’n’roll addicted sweetly emotional fellow traveler” and “a bruiser with a bruised heart” in the pages of Arthur Magazine. Mitchell is the author of Life Is A Phantom K-Mart Horse Starting Up In The Middle Of The Night (Yahara Design Press), a book of prose-poems about both his misspent Florida boyhood and his hard-knock years in Hollywood. He is not afraid to show off his Miami Dolphins tattoo.

John Tottenham is the author of The Inertia Variations (Kerosene Bomb Publishing), a masterful poetic tome on the art of getting nothing done. In his eight-line poems, Tottenham succeeds in “discharging himself of will, while subtly sublimating his own state of stagnation” (Arthur Magazine). The Inertia Variations are currently being adapted into song form by Matt Johnson of The The.

Peter Relic is the recipient of the 2006 Da Capo Best American Music Writing Award. He he has written for publications including Rolling Stone, MOJO, and the Los Angeles Times. His poems (as published in the Nightjar Review) prompted betablog to write: “Utilizing the Malaysian stanza form known as the pantoum (Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and John Ashberry all used it), Relic toggles between being trenchant and ludicrous, all rendered with a definite sense of craft.”

THE EVENT IS FREE AND ALL AGES ARE WELCOME.

Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Tel: (323) 660-1175
Click here for more info.

Stupid Fox

John Patterson
Friday September 8, 2006
The Guardian

It looks as though Mike Judge, the satiric mastermind behind Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and Office Space, just got punked again. By his own studio. For the third time.

Seven years ago, 20th Century Fox dumped Judge’s anti-corporate cri de coeur Office Space, but it became a bona fide smash on DVD, one of the studio’s biggest sellers that year. Last year Fox unceremoniously cancelled Judge’s animated hit King of the Hill, perhaps the most socially precise comedy on American television, before giving it a last-minute reprieve.

Now it’s the turn of Judge’s second feature, the splenetic, pitch-black satire Idiocracy, which wrapped nearly two years ago. Fox didn’t screen it for critics, ran no print ads or trailers, and dumped it on 130 screens nationwide. Apparently the lesson of Office Space’s success went entirely unlearned.

Knowing Judge’s sterling track record as an American satirist, I had to find out what went wrong. Usually a film eliciting such utter contempt from its own backers is a disaster. Far less often, it’s a masterpiece.

The plot: in the future, the educated and intelligent will be massively out-bred by moronic A-type prison-fodder and Nascar idiots, to the point that all knowledge of engineering, agriculture, medicine and literature will be lost to misty memory. Luke Wilson plays ordinary Joe Bowers, chosen to be frozen by the military in 2005, who accidentally wakes up in 2505 to find a broken-down, thuggish America where language has become a patois of football chants, hip-hop slang and grunts denoting rage, pleasure and priapic longing, where citizens are obese, violent, ever-horny and narcotised by consumerism, TV and fast food. Everything’s branded, and people have names such as BMW, Mountain Dew and Frito. TV features the Violence Channel (its signature show: “Ow, My Balls!”) and the Masturbation Channel (“Keepin’ America ‘batin’ for 300 years!”). The President’s a Smackdown champ and porno superstar, and there’s a mulleted wrestler on the billion-dollar bill. And everyone in the future thinks that Joe Bowers, suddenly the smartest man on earth, “talks like a fag”.

There is venomous anti-corporate satire throughout the movie, remarkable mainly because Judge names real corporations. I was astounded – and invigorated – by the sheer vitriol Judge directs at these companies, who surely now regret permitting the use of their licensed trademarks. Like fast-food giant Carl’s Jr, which in 2006 sells 6,000-calorie burgers the size of dictionaries under the slogan, “Don’t Bother Me, I’m Eating”. In Idiocracy, this has devolved into “Fuck You! I’m Eating!” And every commercial transaction has been sexualised: at Starbucks you can get coffee plus a handjob (or a “full body” latte).

Idiocracy isn’t a masterpiece – Fox seems to have stiffed Judge on money at every stage – but it’s endlessly funny, and my friends and I will be repeating certain lines for months (especially while eating), a sure sign of a cult hit. And word got out fast: I saw it last Saturday in a half-empty house. Two days later, same place, same show – packed-out. There’s an audience for this movie, but its natural demographic barely knows it’s out there.

Behind the movie’s satire lie long-term social changes like the stupidisation of the American electorate over 30 years through deliberate underfunding of public education, the corporate takeover of every area of public and private life, and the tendency of the media – particularly Fox News – to substitute anti-intellectual rage and partisan division for reasoned public debate.

Some will argue that Fox has also given us some of the best television of the last 15 years – true – and that if quality sells as well as garbage, then the bottom line is served either way.

So why was Idiocracy dumped? Perhaps because it taps a growing anti-corporate mood in the nation; perhaps because it expertly satirises the jingoistic self-absorption that now passes for public culture. Or perhaps because more people are sick of the modern America that Fox energetically helped to build than the Fox corporation itself is ready to admit.

<a href="“>

Courtesy Joshua B.!