I am constantly amazed by what I choose to remember and choose to forget. The small, vital factoids that push me through a conversation drift like breath in 20-degree temperatures. The key word on the very tippity-tip of my tongue never gets out without the serious throwing of shapes and much anguish, yet I can still recall a Datsun commercial from sometime around the 1980s, featuring two Asian men calling themselves The Wong Bros. and announcing a year-end sell-a-thon. In Steve Martin-esque fashion, they shouted at the camera, shaking various degrees of late ’70s bling, “We’re the Wong Brothers! We are two party guys!” I’m dead serious about this.

Clearly this ad wouldn’t have a chance in hell if it was aired today. Even Six Flags came under fire last year for commercials with a barking Asian man rating “fun” situations – One Flag! Six Flags, more fun! This year, he was replaced by their creepy old (meaning younger person in old man prosthetics) dancing man character. If Nissan Motors resurrected those wacky Wongs, it would trigger a thermonuclear public relations implosion. This isn’t about political correctness or incorrectness, though. After several decades, the Wongs are still with me. As a piece of advertising, that means it was highly effective. As anything more than a jumping off point for this piece, though? Not so much.

I know it’s now November and Thanksgiving is just around the bend. That means a few things for a lot of people. The football season, although already plenty serious, now becomes a fight to the finish for some teams, a fight for dear life for others. That cramp in your side pocket is the pain your wallet is feeling due to impending holidays. Economists have already predicted a total outer-thigh-attack this year, but that remains to be seen. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will strut down New York City once again, although the last time I was really into it, they were walking the giant Underdog balloon down with them.  (If you’re now asking what the heck an “under-dog balloon” is, the next few paragraphs will mean the cubed sum of zero to you.)

My father was a television repairman once, before people just routinely threw out their broken TVs, but before that he was a short order chef, and Thanksgiving was his day to lord over the kitchen. Not that I or my siblings minded, as his recipe for stuffing is totally killer — in every respect, actually. Aside from the bread and the basic mirepoix, in goes raisins, bacon, bacon fat, apples, black olives — and while the details might not sound appetizing, the taste is something else. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Dad’s stuffing. It wouldn’t be Dad’s stuffing if we didn’t pack three extra pounds on our respective asses for having eaten it.

Almost as ingrained is the Danny Kaye movie Hans Christian Andersen, always played on this holiday, usually after the airing of Laurel & Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers. We’d be eating the holiday meal, smelling Mom’s homemade pumpkin and apple pies as they started to warm up and hearing Kaye sing, “Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.” Then, during the station breaks, a cartoon commercial would pop up, an animated globe with a smile on its hemispheric face bouncing across these lyrics, the jingle sung by a chorus of young-sounding voices:

“Playworld! A world of toys, great for girls and great for boys! Playworld, where prices go…”

Then an imposing baritone, possibly Thurl “Tony The Tiger” Ravenscroft, would take over, “So low, low, low, low, LOOOOOWWW…” And the kids would pop back with a last cheer of “PLAYWORLD!”

Now you tell me. Why would this ad have any reason for hanging around my brain? Is it associative — due to the fond recollections surrounding the day, even the commercials get pulled into the nostalgia? Was the commercial really that effective? I wonder about this from time to time and tend to go back to the former, primarily because Playworld folded 25 years ago. The company’s main competition, Child World, collapsed shortly thereafter, both victims of a certain giraffe named Geoffrey and another piece of marketing – the allure of becoming a Toys R Us kid.

Oh, I have that jingle in my brain too, but it appears without pies, stuffing, Underdog or wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. The funny thing is that if I utter “Playworld, a world of toys” to my older sister she, too, will repeat the commercial’s song verbatim, and the look in her eyes indicates she’s suddenly smelling pie and stuffing. Memory is an incredibly powerful thing.

Cut back to 2009. My Sundays are tied up, not with church even though I feel I ought to attend, but with seeing my grandmother at the nursing home. The reasons why she’s there are complicated, and somewhat shocking considering we were going out to lunch every Sunday last year, me picking her up from her house, she being fairly mobile on her own. Now she’s in a wheelchair, but I still take her out to lunch. The facility she’s in is not bad at all, and I’ve mentioned that in comparison to others I’ve seen it’s some kind of role model, but in order to feel alive, you need to get out. Even if it’s only a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon, those hours can be spent beyond familiar confines, beyond routines that become grooves in the brain, grooves that shove out small insignificant things like names, dates and memories.

I don’t care that she calls me every other person’s name but my own. I just go with it, as I do when she asks me how this person or that person is doing. It’s not my place to tell her that this or that person has been dead for years and she was just picking up on the crosstalk of her dreams. I do care that she at least knows that on Sunday, even if the Jersey Shore beachcombers glut the Garden State Parkway, I will be down there to see her. And if it’s raining like Noah’s worst construction day, I’ll still be down there. I also care about my own brain and sometimes wonder, when it’s my turn to be in the chair, what will I be left with? What will I get to keep? Will I only remember “Playworld, a world of toys”?

You don’t remember what I was talking about last week. I’ll just move on to — what? You say you do remember? Oh. Crap.

The crux of last week’s column was my belief that there’s no solid reason to be hard on Jay Leno, no matter how bad his show might be, because NBC wouldn’t do anything innovative with the timeslot anyhow. They’d probably fill the space with more dramas about lawyers, cops and doctors. This statement was mildly controversial, spurring a light flurry of responses along the lines of, “If it’s good television, it wouldn’t matter if it is about lawyers, cops and doctors,” and on this I will agree to disagree. With all the stories television can tell, I’m still perplexed by viewers’ seemingly insatiable desire to revolve around these three occupations. This, however, was not the problem with what I wrote.

No, that would be what I said regarding the canceled series Southland. We’ll get into the whys and wherefores in a moment, but the responses (which came fast, furious and often) tended to fit into three categories:

1. “You’re stupid & dumb & stupid.” – If you’ve posted a public column and haven’t been called this at least once, check if your PC or Mac is powered up, because you certainly haven’t been writing on the Internet. Calling someone an idiot on this thing is as common as muck.

2. “You’re a liar.” – When I approach this column and write, I base it on information I have gathered, period. Fabrication serves absolutely no purpose. When I say I’ve received information, you can be sure I’m telling the truth. In the final analysis, though, my defensive pose is fatally compromised. Sure, I’m saying with my heart on my sleeve that I’m giving you the truth as I’ve heard and seen it, but that’s all blah-blah and rubbish when faced with…

3. “You’re ignorant.” – Ouch. So what if I said that the word-of-mouth-meisters were selling Southland on the premise that one of the policeman characters was or might be gay? So what if I’m blindly rehashing what I was myself given by other sources? The cold, blunt truth of it is that I never saw an episode (and said so in the first article, a point I’ve made several times but, in actuality, excuses nothing) and so I never took the time to back anything up. I took the crosstalk and the salespitch and never bothered to see for myself. I don’t need to have a ten-pound Webster’s Dictionary land on my foot to know that’s the definition of ignorance: not finding out for one’s self. I repeat: ouch.

At the very least, that scars my credibility. At the very worst, it’s a display of disrespect to the Popdose readership because, in this day and age of television on the Internet, on iTunes and on your neighbor’s TiVo, I was lazy. I can plead my case ’til the cows come home, but no matter how I arrived at my flawed synopsis, it would have been easily rectified had I just done the homework. This is a mistake that won’t happen again, especially because getting a huge number of responses is only cool when the respondents aren’t calling you a dumb, stupid, ignorant liar.

There is still a problem, though. All the contrition in the world isn’t going to change the fact that if I came to this flawed conclusion about the show, others did too. This was reflected in the more thoughtful responses to last week’s column. There are, I’m sure, other people out there running on assumptions about Southland and its marketing, only they don’t have a soapbox. So I asked people to write in. There were some conditions, though. The first condition: I requested two paragraphs, both concise and persuasive, about the merits of this TV show. Not to sell me on Southland; these folks already pegged me as an ignorant bonehead anyway. No, aim at all the ignorant boneheads, including me, and let us know exactly why you’re charged up about this program.

The second condition was, I believe, more important than the first. You have to use your real name, not some screen name, alias or nom de plume. I didn’t want contact information, this ain’t about setting people up for junk mail or spam, but really if you’re passionate enough to write out the check, sign it. A few people came forward. A lot didn’t. Some refused to step out from behind their anonymity. Their reasons are their own, but if, God forbid, an NBC executive read this piece, anonymous comments would have all the gravitas of the latest LOL Cats postings.  There’s a time for being KingSexyPants84 and a time to not be. My name is Dw. Dunphy, and I have no sexy pants myself.

To my word, the space was arranged for these responses with the assurance that they wouldn’t be edited. I started the clock, waiting for the RSVPs to come in; slowly, they arrived. For awhile I had to wonder where this was headed, especially when Sunday dawned with news that NBC had severed all ties with the program, allowing it to be optioned out to cable TV (probably the TNT network). It will have a shot on cable; I still believe that this is where the commitment and attention span for such shows now resides. My assumption is that, in spite of all the mishegoss, the network itself viewed it solely as another cop show. An assumption, but if they truly thought that had anything else, they might have tried to find another place for it, instead of setting it adrift. It is what it is.

So listen up, TNT, or any other network interested in Southland — the following participants would appreciate your attention. The desire to see the show return is there, and the numbers indicate an audience your advertising partners could get along with. They’ve submitted to my spare conditions, and I’ll take whatever insults they want to want to direct at me in my own column. I cede the floor to the fans of Southland.

Lori Parsons: I can’t say I have anything compelling to say about the show, really.  I’m not one of those who sees a show and immediately gets all, “Oh my God, this is the best show ever!”.  The first season had its flaws.  They tried to branch out to too many characters way too soon but they seemed to get that and had retooled the show over the hiatus and was going to come back with a narrower focus, which I was very much looking forward to.  Regina King’s ”Lydia”, Michael Cudlitz’s ”Cooper” and Ben McKenzie’s “Sherman” were the characters that immediately drew me in. I liked the partnership of ”Sammy” and “Nate” (Shawn Hatosy and Kevin Alejandro, respectively), and “Chickie” (Arija Bareikis) as well.  Some of the other characters I could have done without.  Tom Everett Scott for one.  I like the actor but just didn’t care for, or about, the character.

Alright, so this isn’t sounding much like a defense but let’s just say it had promise and I was more than willing to see the show get into its stride and figure out what worked and what didn’t.  I’ve always liked cop shows but not all catch my attention.  I’m not that into the procedurals, of which there are many these days, which is probably partly why this one caught my attention.  It was getting back to a realism that I feel is missing in other shows, the beat cops and what they encounter, the personal struggles.  Nothing they were dealing with seemed to overly dramatic.  Even the rich kid donning a uniform, as cliché as that could be, didn’t seem too over the top.  No, not anything original but sometimes it’s just the right mix of actors, writers, and cinematography.  The look, the feel….it just hit the right note for me, overreaching scope notwithstanding.

Sure, it’s another cop show among many in a long line of cop shows but such are commonly successful and are so for a reason. People like to see the good guys going out and catching bad guys and everything in between.  They like to see people in such occupations dealing with the same personal problems as “we” are.  People like to see that these “good guys” are not without flaws.  It may be a tired concept on the surface but as long as they keep them human and there are new people give it a try, there’s always a chance that it will strike a fresh feel, depending on what else is scattered across the landscape.  Other “cop shows” I watch/have watched: Adam 12, Starsky and Hutch, Streets of San Francisco, 21 Jump Street (Johnny Depp.  Need I say more?).  I loved NYPD Blue, and currently watch The Closer, The Mentalist (ok, this one’s mainly for Simon Baker… I’m still not above watching a show just for eye candy,) just caught White Collar and liked it a lot.  No rhyme or reason to what keeps my interest really, just some shows “have it” for me and some don’t, for different reasons.  Sometimes I’m in the mood for lighter fare and sometimes I want something more realistic.  Southland falls into the latter.

Maryellen Weinberg: Why is Southland different from other cop shows and why should you watch: because Southland is not just a cookie cutter of what’s already on. For starters, it’s filmed on the streets of Los Angeles, not in a studio. That brings a realism that often isn’t seen on other shows. For instance, any cops that they show in the background are real police officers, not just ‘extras’. They had a retired LAPD officer who was also an ex-SWAT member as an adviser on-set for filming. It’s as close to real as you can get without watching Cops.

The stories aren’t predictable. Unlike other police shows where you can often guess who the killer or perp is by the first commercial break, that’s not the case on Southland. It keeps you hanging until the end. They have some cases that are wrapped up by the end of episode and others that continue from one episode to another, which is also unique. But the thing is, because of how real the show feels, you want to know what’s happening with the characters when they’re off-duty as well and how it affects their on-duty work, and you get some of that as well. You learn they’re people with flaws and baggage just like the rest of us.

Give Southland a chance when it comes back on (and it will!) I think you’ll be glad you did.

Barbara Riecker: First and foremost, it has a pedigree to die for, from the creator, to the writers, directors and an ensemble cast that knows how to take direction and delivers.  Each episode is fairly self-contained.  Locations are real, giving each scene credibility. It is L.A. specific, and totally shows us the underbelly of the city, regardless of the socio-economics of the victims and perps being portrayed.

As to the show’s premise, it promised not to be a procedural and it isn’t. It promised to go into the personal lives of the officers and detectives and it did.  It may have spread itself too thin in Season One, but it’s understandable given they only had seven episodes in which to lay their whole foundation. It also promised to focus on fewer story lines in Season Two, and to maintain its gritty nature.  We were deprived of seeing this for ourselves by NBC, who got the show it commissioned, but couldn’t keep their own promises to Wells et. al.

Michelle Stolowicki: Why are the Southland fans enraged over the show being canceled since there are so many cop shows available? It’s because Southland is not just another cop show. Truth be said, I was initially so turned off by the way NBC promoted Southland that I did not watch the premiere. I caught the end of the second episode and was surprisingly delighted which left me eager for more. Southland has this air of realism to it and at times the viewer feels like he/she is watching a fictionalized version of the show Cops.

The producers achieved this realism by filming the majority of the show on the streets of LA with some shots captured by hand-held cameras, using actual cops and gang members where applicable, having a twenty-six year veteran of the LAPD as a technical adviser, and using real street language which included foul language.  In addition, the actors underwent “cop” training by going to a shooting range, participating in ride-alongs with real LAPD cops, and driving training. Combine this with excellent writing, awesome actors, and a great crew, the viewer gets a real glimpse into the lives of the LAPD. Nothing is sugar-coated, the viewer sees all – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Southland isn’t just another cop show, it is the cop show to watch.

And now, a tangent: For a moment, I think it’s a good idea to reflect on what’s coming down the pike. The battle rages on about net neutrality, which is basically a way of maintaining the open channels of the Internet as we know it, maintaining it as a space for creative minds and technologies to keep expanding what’s there — but it’s only a matter of time before some kind of radical alteration happens. Several telecom companies would rather that open field not be there, in order to make sure toll gates are created on the Internet, to make sure companies and providers get paid first and any big ideas go through a gateway (in loose translation, own the Google minds so they don’t become the Google competition.)  From there, it’s a slow trickle-down, from the creators to the users, the goal being locking down the technology and locking in the user, and that means positively identifying said user. Think about it. The Internet is probably the only venue left that legally allows anonymity and alternate identities. It’s, for best or worst, a golden age of communication, but one that has not truly been monetized yet — not on its face, anyway. It won’t change because of fair or unfair use, or of some high school Twitter junta that goes after a classmate with virtual impunity. It won’t be because someone commits a crime but leaves no digital DNA behind. It will just be because companies market to people, not aliases, and the more these companies can identify them, the greater the chances of selling to them. Remember driver’s licenses before photographs and barcodes?

In short, the faceless sea of Internet communication can’t survive forever because it goes against some of the most cherished tenets of capitalism, and in this cash-strapped age, the prospect of licensing for individual ‘Net users, like the licensing of individual car drivers, becomes both tantalizing and not out of the realm of possibility. You’ll be told it’s for the societal good, or more likely for your own good, but it isn’t, really. It’s just a way of making sure you’re paying in. This is also why it means something to attach your actual name to your sentiments. Like I said earlier, if you’re passionate enough to write out that check, sign it, especially now when it’s your free choice to rise above the masked subset. It’s not in the interests of Corporate America for you to have that option forever, and while that sounds awfully paranoid, it’s also feasible.

Preach, preach, blah-blah. What have I learned from all this? If I’m going to exercise my free choice to rise above that “faceless subset,” I better make sure I have my stuff solidly backed up, checked and double-checked and footnoted if necessary. If column A does not match column B, something has to give. Something has to go. My goodness, my task was merely to sit on the couch and watch the show. Surely a couple jugs of coffee and a bag of chips could have gotten me a passing grade. And when I attach my name to my work, I want it to entertain, to attempt to inform, to give the reader something to think about — whether it’s a serious topic or a trivial one. Mostly, I want to be proud to have my name down there like a badge, and because I opted to tread the easy course, rather than making sure my facts were dead solid perfect, I can’t say I’m all that proud of last week’s entry. There was never any malice meant, but what you feel and what you know can be very, very different. Double check, triple check, know it for certain. This was a particularly hot fire I needed to pass through, if only to burn off the dross so that what emerges on the other side is better for it. And do you know why that matters?

Because my name is Dw. Dunphy. I will be here next week. (Get a nosh of that veal, it’s to die for.)

I have not come to refute the claims of editor-in-chief Jeff Giles, because it would be pointless. NBC is slowly finding out just how pointless, in fact, as they proceed to take a pounding from their advertisers and affiliates for their penny wisdom. “Jay Leno is beloved,” they said. “Jay’s fans are loyal, ” they said. What NBC brass feared was losing Leno to ABC, who probably would have snapped him up right quick, dumping Jimmy Kimmel like, well, like Sarah Silverman dumped Jimmy Kimmel (What, too soon?) With the costs rising by the year for scripted programs, the nighttime dramas leading the charge with more explosions, dead body mannequins and pricier locations, the Peacock network sought to kill two birds with one formerly skunk-haired stone. Talk shows are cheap. Run one five times a week and tell David E. Kelley to take his tired crap elsewhere. And with Jay, you get an instant audience! Win-win!

Only now, NBC has to wonder if the sponsors clamoring to back out of the 10 PM timeslot, and the money they represent, is more or less than the expenditure they would have otherwise incurred. Jay Leno, it seems, has become an albatross around the network’s neck, and if you think the added pressure would have caused him to step up his game and liven up the show, you probably were thinking this was originally a pretty good idea. No, the show still sucks.

But give Jay the teeny-tiniest break here. What would they have run in that slot if they hadn’t taken the big gamble? As I’ve said many times before: lawyers, cops and doctors. If for no better reason, give the big man a pat on the back for at least momentarily derailing the same old hackneyed, worn out and blood-drained train of thought that has plagued these “wonderful” nighttime dramas lo these many, many moons. It has been a long time since St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues and, unlike the diehard loyalists, I don’t think the last couple seasons of ER were anywhere near the level of the first three. But there’s no doubt in my mind that without Leno shoving his chin into that ten o’clock dike, the dam would burst forth with edgy cops with hearts of gold, horny doctors still adherent to the Hippocratic Oath and lawyers who’ll do anything to win, but they won’t do that (No, no, they won’t do that.)

I never saw an episode of Southland, the most recent NBC cop show to bite the dust. I suspect I wouldn’t have bothered to, either, as the promotions department kept throwing out the tidbit that the show featured “the first primetime gay policeman!” like the whole show would rest on that plot point as some sort of radical departure for broadcast TV. NBC has Must See TV and gay cops! This, friends, is what is known as a stunt. What would have been revolutionary would have been to have that same character in the program and not made such a stink about it. It just is; no need to shout from the 30 Rock rooftops, “It’s here, he’s queer, watch NBC!”

Television critics have taken to calling the past decade a new golden age of TV, and they may be right. Among all the half-wits clamoring to be famous for fifteen reality-filled minutes, and all the other half-wits who were formally famous and now trying to reclaim notoriety by putting on tights and shaking their groove things, we’ve also had shows about Mob families and their regular families, siblings who run a mortuary, an advertising agency, vampires, and foul-mouthed, crudely animated children who usually find something potent to say about current events, all the while marveling at the massive girth of feces. We’ve had shows about police as well, but The Wire was also about politics, journalism and the lives of the criminals and seldom-seen that tie the three institutions together. Cable TV has succeeded in mining new veins for drama by looking into entirely different caves. The only standard broadcast program to come close to this nirvana of creativity is the long-running Lost, a show indebted to the viewer’s desire to engage in mindgames and, not so subtly, to the British drama from the late 1960s, The Prisoner.

An Americanized redux of The Prisoner is underway as well, and while the notion first causes me to wince, I have to remind myself that the most insightful program about politics, religion and the human condition in I don’t know how long was based on the bones of an often campy Star Wars clone from the 1970s. Who thought the Battlestar Galactica reboot could have been as well executed as it was? Who thought, initially, it should have been rebooted at all? That it took the framework of something that was better left to memory, turned it inside out, then retrofitted it into a modern allegory once again indicates where the best minds have been hanging out, and it’s not over at the Big Four. Sure, House isn’t bad, but there isn’t much else over at Fox that screams “revolutionary.” “Exploitative,” maybe. And over at CBS, they have two NCIS shows now, three C.S.I.’s with the threat of a fourth looming on the horizon, and a wide swath of C.S.I.-like shows littering their schedules with mutilated corpses. They learned their lessons well, yes they did. They learned from NBC, which found that cloned Law & Order shows practically sell themselves until, apparently, they don’t.

That’s why you get Leno five times a week. See, without him, you would get policemen five times a week, or lawyers five times a week, or surgeons five times a week, not a new wrinkle to be had in the lot. Don’t mourn the loss of these dramas because you’re not really losing all that much, simply a carbon copy after a Xerox of a mimeograph. But I’m fairly confident you knew this already, which is why cable viewership has, in aggregate, managed to eat away at its freebie cousins. There is a simple honesty to Mr. Jay’s show, and that in and of itself should be considered a breath of fresh air. They’re feeding you the same old story Monday through Friday, but they always have.  At least they’re not trying to convince you that “it’s new to you” now.

I’ll cut to the chase. It’s Hitler. Adolf Hitler.

Yeah, I’m rather shocked myself, but it seems like Herr Fuhrer is YouTube’s latest viral go-to guy. The new black is “reich,” as it were.

If you have no clue, or you’re still digesting the last of Tay Zonday mania (remember him?), then you’ve been away from the Web for a long time. On the sliding scale of the Internet time-space continuum, a long time is equal to the distance between last Wednesday and the Wednesday previous to that multiplied by the rate of your Twitter tweeting frequency, wOOt, and ROFLMFAO, and cubed at the rate of EPIC FAIL.

The specific scene used in these YouTube videos comes from a 2004 German film called Der Untergang, or Downfall, as it’s known in English-speaking countries. Hitler is portrayed by Bruno Ganz in a bit of foam-frothing scenery munching, and in the specifically co-opted scene, he’s being debriefed by his staff. Much to his chagrin, bad news has been delivered. He summons all but his inner circle to leave the war room and, upon their exit, goes absolutely apeshit.

I attempted to find a word that’s more becoming of a respected writer. Something less crude. Something with more imagination and depth. But it can’t be done. Hitler goes apeshit, and that’s all there is to it. And therein lies the fun — I couldn’t find a better word, but because everyone in the film is speaking German, anyone with a video graphics program can find their own words, plop them on-screen as subtitles, and make Adolf into whatever they please.

For example, he can be a Taylor Swift supporter …

Or a man without a car …

A Sarah Palin devotee …

Or a Michael Jackson fan …

And ultimately, the meta version:

As you can imagine, some of these are funny, a few are just excuses to have Hitler “saying” very un-Hitler-like things, and a high percentage aren’t very good at all. Yet there’s an underlying vibe within these videos that hasn’t been addressed yet.

In a way, Quentin Tarantino already addressed it with his late-summer hit Inglourious Basterds. In the film a small cadre of Nazi hunters infiltrate the halls of the third reich to exact bloody revenge. After all this time, and considering how much the world has changed, including the once united, then divided, then reunited Germany, people are still haunted by Hitler.

I know some aren’t. We hear about them from time to time, we know they exist, and we sometimes have to confront the ugliness of a swastika splattered across our supposedly learned culture. But for the majority of people around the world, the specter of this man with the chop-shop mustache ascending the steps of Albert Speer’s architecture still sends chills down spines. He’s our real-life Darth Vader, our Freddy Krueger, our boogeyman who once walked the earth. His suicide pact with his mistress, Eva Braun, robbed the world of the main thing it craved throughout the final days of Nazi Germany: closure. That even the gunshot-and-cyanide scenario can’t be fully determined or verified leaves us adrift.

You could argue that by taking his own life, or by dying in a bunker explosion, or even choking on a chicken bone while hiding in Stuttgart, Hitler was elevated to this scary, mythic place because he never was forced to stand before a tribunal to espouse his opinions and rhetoric, never had to look his judges in the eyes.

We can be fairly sure he wouldn’t have offered up any words of repentance. Instead he would’ve used his perch on the stands, like Saddam Hussein, to proudly, blindly, and flaccidly “rip us a new one.” Meanwhile, the world had a chance to reconcile their fears of the Butcher of Baghdad in 2004 upon seeing the captured dictator’s disheveled beard, his scattershot bark of a voice, and, without a gun in his hand, no power to wield over fearful masses.

We remember Hussein that way now. I’ve written far too many words about how I disapproved of the Iraq war and the contrivances that got us in, but the one good thing that came of it all is that we got to see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain — and he turned out to be no big deal.

Hussein’s ghost has been expunged from our collective psyche, but Hitler never allowed us even that, so in a way he’s as present in our minds as he ever was. And with each new YouTube “remix” of Downfall, we laugh at the incongruities and anachronisms, and how this ravaging, raging, small person is crippled by the stupidest nonsense of our modern culture, reduced in his chair to a defeated hunch. Somewhere inside we feel a “win” against him, if only subconsciously, because we’re not really looking for it. But it is there.

Probably not for long, though. If I’ve learned anything about ‘Net culture, it’s that the next viral trend is just around the corner.

The outburst heard ’round the nation, at least until Kanye West co-opted the mike: South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson’s interjection during President Obama’s health care pitch to Congress. A million would-be pundits and chat show hosts have ruminated on it, the masses have reviled him as well as lauded him, backing their positions up with donations to electoral funds, and even former President Jimmy Carter has weighed in. Carter’s belief that “You lie!” was racially motivated seems genuine but, at the same time, heavily influenced by Maureen Dowd’s column on the subject, titled “Boy Oh Boy.”

I’m split down the middle on the racism of the comment. Standing alone, it bears zero indication of racial prejudice. It can be interpreted in a thousand ways, and has, but itself is not inflammatory. It’s all in how the listener interprets it that gives it the bulk of the controversy, and so there’s no way of crying racism beyond a shadow of doubt. As two words stitched together, intention is loaded with nothing but doubt. At the same time, though, the fact that the very white Congressman Wilson felt he could just blurt this out while the very black President was giving a speech, a disrespect he might not have shown were it a good-ol’-boy fellow in Obama’s stead, is one that would cause people to see prejudice.

I could go on for several more paragraphs about how George W. Bush was soundly boo’ed at the last few congressional speeches he made, but then I would have to weigh the emotional impact of the sound ‘boo’ versus implying the President is a liar. For some, they’re equally insulting; for others, the two hardly compare. I speculate that your take on it will depend on what side of the aisle you choose to sit on (and perhaps your willingness to reach across said aisle would play into the equation as well.)

But what exactly did Joe Wilson allege Barack Obama was lying about? It was the insinuation that under President Obama’s idealized health care plan, illegal immigrants would also get free health care and, in the twisted roadmap of who actually pays for all this free care for the undocumented, the American taxpayer would foot the bill. The President says it isn’t true. Well, knowing that I’m taking off my codpiece and inviting a solid kick in the groin, I have to say that we damned well better be making sure the illegal immigrants in this country are getting health care, for our own health depends on it.

Another subject that would invite a few hundred extra words is good old-fashioned American entitlement, even in the face of staggering unemployment. Don’t get me wrong — there are people who are ready, willing and more than able right now to get down to work, no matter how dirty it might be. This is to be commended, yet there is still a large contingent of unemployed folks out there who graduated college, worked up that ladder rung by rung, and they aren’t about to scrub a toilet, bus a table or flip those burgers. Never mind that they still have college loans to pay. Those menial jobs are still, in the face of it all, beneath them. This is why the illegal immigrant problem is so pervasive, so tangled and almost impossible to weave our way out of. If we’re not prepared to work hard for the money, and scrape a few turd skids off the head in the process, someone will have to.

It is no surprise, then, that the gears of our day-to-day lives are turned by folks from other countries. They clean up after us, they chop up food for us and they check out our groceries at our local stores. Their existences outside of work depend on the generosity of friends, often also illegals, as well as the blind eyes of landlords who simply want to make sure they get theirs at the first of the month. On the generosity side, you find families crammed into close quarters. On the other side, you find those families living in less than stellar conditions, but it’s affordable and nobody’s going to blow the whistle on them. In both examples, the breeding and spreading of germs such as our latest worry, the H1N1 or Swine Flu, is easily facilitated.

For those who can’t see where I’m going with this, and shame on you if you’re not two steps ahead of me, your response might be the knee-jerk, “Well, that’s one way of thinning the illegals population – they’ll get each other sick, won’t be able to afford health care, and they’ll just die off.” It’s a callous viewpoint, utterly flawed and downright ignorant. Sure they won’t go to doctors they can’t afford. That just means they’ll work extra hours to get the money to go to the doctors, if they choose to go at all versus toughing it out, cleaning your houses, preparing your sandwiches and bagging your groceries. If you feel your tower is so tall that the swine flu can’t reach you, you need to think again.

I’m reminded of the line from the White Stripes song “Icky Thump” where Jack sings (paraphrasing here,) “I went home and learned to clean up after myself.” Our illegal immigration issues have roots in the fact that for many years, Americans chose to have someone else clean up after them because doing it ourselves was just so gauche. It wasn’t a proper job for us. It didn’t appeal to our sense of civility. Let someone else do that. Now, having sown those seeds, we find that we might have to actually pay them what they’re worth, not a pittance under the table but enough to keep them and their families healthy through the same standards of health care we would reserve for ourselves. The price of not doing so is either having this secret workforce spreading pandemic via all those necessary tasks we no longer attend to, or…

…Learning to view all work as worthy, not just the work where we get to wear ties all day. We’d better get friendly with the concept of paying for health insurance for all, including illegals, because the price of not doing so may be far too dear. I know a family who are not here legally. Their apartment is immaculate, their work habits are fastidious without a hint of ego, and to almost everyone who knows them they’re ideal neighbors. They’ve been trying to get their citizenship for well over a decade but after a couple thousand dollars paid to fly-by-night immigration lawyers and agencies, as many promises from employers who say they will be above-board but end up shoving them below-deck, and the sudden chill that 9-11-01 put on the entire process, they’re still in a state of flux. They want to do right, but the system has said no. And if one comes down with illness, they must go to work anyway because their lives are funded on a day-to-day basis; a situation we have, in our one-dimensional way of thinking, created. And if that one happens to be stacking the meat in your Subway sandwich, or winds up going to daycare with your child, well, that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there, isn’t it?

Joe Wilson says to Barack Obama, “you lie!” I’m telling you the plain truth, however. We’re all crossing this bridge, together, whether we like it or not, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I think you’ve gotten us all wrong, and it’s time to set the record straight.

I’m not going to say there isn’t a contingent of malcontents in the field of criticism, because that would be a lie. There are plenty of people who got into the game because of a grudge against that which they’ve chosen to review. I once knew a movie critic, a local guy for a local newspaper, who frequently and regularly savaged the films he saw. It didn’t matter what it was — comedy, drama, animation, universally lauded, universally panned, the danger money was on him trashing the subject. In the meantime, he shopped spec scripts to agents and sent off treatments to studios. The more he sent, the more he was rejected. The more he was rejected, the nastier his criticism became. His reportage was venomous, like hate notes from a spurned lover.

That, right there, is the underlying truth. Even though that writer was an exception to the rule, approaching everything with aforethought disappointment, most of us critics don’t and it is because we’re still in love, if not with the media of our choosing then with the promise that’s always there. Somewhere in our adolescent lives, we stumbled into a movie theater and saw something that set our eyes on fire, made the blood flow a little faster, gave us something we hadn’t experienced up to that point. For me, it was music and I can’t very well say when it first caught on. Was it my mother’s records of The Coasters Greatest Hits, or The Fifth Dimension or even “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers? Was it Dad crooning along to Sinatra and Perry Como on those long, languid summer drives? Was it when we lived in that rental house and I played the 45 RPM record of E.L.O.’s “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” until the sunset, and I stared at that beige United Artists record label spin ’round and ’round? Was it that weird, unsteady feeling I got when the right chords were strung along, exploding into a surprising and pleasant direction? There is a love there that is almost impossible to adequately describe, but is there in most critics.

So why do we give negative reviews when something doesn’t quite measure up in our opinion? Why is it that we reserve our most evil side for our heroes when they don’t blow us away or, God forbid, outright disappoint us? Well, to be this entrenched in something is to admit a form of addiction. I’m sure that if you had me strapped down for an MRI test and played a song that really gets to me, my brain would go biofluorescent. I feel something unique and very physical when I hear new music that presses the right buttons. On the other hand, when the promise isn’t delivered, or a musician I count upon to spark that thrill fails to do so, the reaction is more than just intellectual.

Is it any wonder that I would express my dissatisfaction when my euphoria was denied? Is it at all a shock when a movie critic comes back from a brand new Martin Scorsese movie feeling like the director withheld the best reel of the show, then says so in their respective columns? Like I said before — it’s a love affair, and sometimes, love hurts. What also hurts is the realization that, over time, your reaction will not be as fresh, exciting or as revelatory as it once was. Plot lines become tired. Chord progressions become dangerously similar. Fire comes with desire, hearts get torn apart and seemingly every world is promised to every girl. I can still experience that joy, that high, when I hear a new tune that demands to be played again and again, but it will never be “Along Came Jones,” or “Cathy’s Clown,” “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head,” or even “One For My Baby, And One More For The Road” — and I have to accept that.

And I do.

So I come to you, our readership, with a challenge. When you’re reading the latest piece from your favorite journalist, know that none of us are objective in the slightest. We didn’t get into this to walk that path of blankness, ready to be shifted to one side or the other. We’ve already chosen our sides, we’re just hoping there’s something for us upon arrival. You don’t buy music with the intention of hating it, or set out to the theater to waste one and a half to two hours. You want to be thrilled, overjoyed, you want to see something that sets your eyes on fire, makes the blood flow a little faster, gives you something you hadn’t experienced up to that point. So in a way, we’re all critics.

I can’t wait for the show to start.

This week, I’m taking a cue from Popdose’s own Uncle Donnie (and not from my cousin Donnie, thank you very much) to offer up a little pre-emptive career advice. It was made known recently that Kiss would be releasing a three-disc, brand new album soon, it would be an exclusive to WalMart, and it should have the Lazarus-like qualities found in Journey’s last album, Revelations. Oh, I had something to say about it, but only after its release, as one of the curious benefits of being a WalMart exclusive is that you don’t have to market your band to the critics – meaning you critics are probably not getting promotional copies with which to skewer the provider. You’ll buy your review copy like everybody else.

What does all this have to do with Mick Jones? Well, aside from the fact that the Clash’s Mick Jones gets all the love while Foreigner’s Mick Jones has to keep reminding folks he’s not the Clash’s Mick Jones, Kiss just pooped on his band’s parade ground, for only a week or so prior to Kiss’ announcement for the upcoming Sonic Boom, Jones was lightly basking in the pale, lukewarm glow of his band’s own impending WalMart release, Can’t Slow Down. He has a few handicaps already doing the exact opposite of his CD’s title. First of all, Lou Gramm is not the vocalist on the album. Since his conversion to Christianity, his bouts with cancer and the plain old truth that he doesn’t sound much like Lou Gramm anymore, Foreigner has necessarily had to employ the services of former Hurricane vocalist Kelly Hansen. I refuse to take shots at this situation because, for all I know, Hansen might be a great addition. I’ve never heard him sing, so he’s getting a pass. However, he’s not the only addition to the group. Mick Jones is the sole original member of Foreigner now. But these things happen to bands after 30 or so years. At any rate, this new album was getting a fair amount of write-up on the rock blogs and such until, whap, Gene Simmons went and barfed Karo syrup and red dye #5 all over Can’t Slow Down. Those same blogs are now inundated with Kiss blurbs on a daily basis.

This isn’t even why I’ve devoted this column to warn Mick Jones of impending disaster. Do you really want the reason, the real reason, why he needs to do an about-face and fast? Feast your eyes on this.

Woof.

I realize we’re in the post-design world of digital music. Lavish art production is only interesting to music geeks like me, not some kid with an iPod who needs only a teeny-tiny picture to put across artist from artist. And let’s be brutally honest: kids with iPods probably aren’t going to be interested in Can’t Slow Down. But there is nothing about this cover that says, “Buy me, I’m a winner.” What I’m getting from this is, alternately, “Stage two of Asteroids! All right!” or “Matthew Broderick was awesome in WarGames!” I reiterate. Woof.

I’m also calling B.S. on the notion that packaging is entirely past-tense. We’ve moved from physical product to digital product, but that doesn’t solely mean digital music – video, pictures and on-line ephemera all interlock to make a music personality a celebrity. It has reached new heights with our latest batch, as their mugs are plastered in sidebar ads, pop-up pics and their lives are splattered all over the gossip portals like TMZ. Do not for a minute think that the thirty or so stories about Lady Gaga that show up this coming week are happenstance. Many times, these are as PR coordinated as an album cover’s photo shoot. And speaking of photo shoots, how a performer looks today is so much more important to the breadth of their career’s reach. To wit:

So that even though the necessity of a CD package is moot to all but a small sector of the buying public, it no less diminishes the importance of the packaging, and Mick, Michael, Mr. Jones… your future release’s unspoken statement doesn’t say, “Pretend it’s like the 1980s again when you loved Foreigner.” It says, “Eh. Whatever.”

So what are my suggestions to you, since I’m so smart and know what it takes to shift numbers in this modern age? Clearly, I don’t have the right answers, otherwise I’d be writing this piece on my solid gold, diamond encrusted keyboard and, at the last appraisal, they could only identify cubic zirconium. Fools! making a living at giving advice. We all have to call it as we see it and this release is trading on the well-wishes of the pre-existing fanbase. That’s the unspoken function of the WalMart release – to contain the product to one market. That all-in-one approach appeals to people with busy lives, families and no time to windowshop around Bumpkinville. You’re talking about the same demographic that probably grew up with the music of Journey, Kiss, The Eagles and Foreigner. Harmonic convergence is achieved. So, why not a simple photograph of Foreigner circa 2009 standing at the train station, the train is speeding away behind them and the blur of people racing in front of them all help make sense of the album’s title. It also recalls the cover of the band’s debut featuring a painting of Foreigner circa 1977 standing by tracks as a train pulls away.

But hey, what do I know? I just pulled that one out of my rear on the fly. You guys had fourteen years to arrive at the notion that the Atari 2600 is rad. Nonetheless, I wish Foreigner the band, in whatever configuration it may be, the best. It was probably sometime around 1979 when my mom drove me to K-Mart, the mega-store back then, and said I could get myself a cassette. I must not have been a total pain in the ass that week, and mom always encouraged my love of music. I could have had any title I wanted, but got that debut from 1977. Aside from a couple tunes that don’t hold up particularly well, Foreigner is still a fine example of the pop-rock sound, so my criticism is borne out of a degree of sentimentality that, while not entirely objective, still puts me in a time where I could like what I liked and that was my only concern.

Even so… WOOF.

Next week: “Dear Kiss – saw the cover for the upcoming Sonic Boom. Time for you all to step up to trifocals.”

One of the nicest things about writing for Popdose is that I’m surrounded by people that do stuff. Among our ranks are actual musicians, actors, dancers, screenwriters, and filmmakers, as well as accomplished writers. It’s not like some sites (that taste precludes me from mentioning) where the staff is filled by people whose dreams and talents crashed and burned, so they spend their digital days ragging on those who have succeeded.

Shortly after our very own Arend Anton previewed a trailer he made for a project he was working on, Red Gold, I sent him some audio files. I started in earnest on a new instrumental recording, going a little more ambient and a lot more ‘filmic’ and thought, just maybe, Arend could create a video for these two tracks. I wasn’t going to hold my breath, though. After all, creative types are known for a perpetual lack of fundage, he might be needing a few bucks for his efforts and, not coincidentally, I had none to offer.

He was only too willing to take a new project on and, with my complete blessing to go nuts and do whatever he felt like with my music, the wheels were set in motion. By the time he was done, he had presented a visual tone-poem touching on everything from the dread of the day-to-day, the complete freedom of innocence and, framed as a home-movie/memory, a bittersweet vignette. He named the film (Outlive).

Dw. Dunphy – The Darkness

Dw. Dunphy – The Dawn

I was over a friend’s house recently when his son burst into the living room proclaiming he was going to start a rock band with his friends. It was a scene I participated in many times during my youth, the thrill of the larger-than-life expectations undiminished yet by that dreaded “real world.” Being a supportive “uncle” I offered to show him some guitar chords and a few tricks he could probably get by with. Lord knows how some of these golden fakes served me.

The young boy looked at me with the most quizzical eyes, as if I had just recited The Iliad in Esperanto while standing on my head. “What are chords?” he asked.

“He’s talking about forming a ‘Rock Band’ band, not a real band,” his father confided to me. The boy gnashed his teeth and spun out of the room, infuriated by his father’s distinction. Yes, this kid was talking about forming a digital equivalent of a band with his friends through his X-Box, not the actual process of writing and performing songs but, in his mind, the two were one and the same. “Don’t be offended. He gets like that lately.”

I found the whole concept depressing. A few generations ago, the story went that The Velvet Underground weren’t huge but everyone who saw them play formed their own band. Although Nirvana was a lot more successful, they too spawned a legion of guitar slingers with this notion that it could be done. The thought that those days were past us and now the act of creativity was relegated to just as much vector spaceships spinning to blast ‘asteroids’ weighed heavily on me for a good long while. I’m not alone in this either. By doing a little reaseach – well, okay, more like a little web-surfing – I’ve found an undercurrent voicing this same opinion, that creative, artistic expression is slowly being co-opted by facsimile. Some go as far as dubbing it “art porn” though that may be too harsh.

There are similarities though. Our standard concept of pornography is that it is a depiction of sexuality that is used to substitute the real thing. Along those lines, then fine, a ‘rock band’ that supplants a rock band is creepily similar to the sexual counterpart, being all bang and no real relationship, not even involving real people, just images on a screen that reward you for touching at the right time and penalizing when you’ve pushed the button at the wrong time. For me, the incongruity lies in that exposure to a music role-playing game isn’t liable to screw up your ideas about what performers really want from their fake guitar players.

No, for myself I think about what these youth, who have somehow fallen into the notion that they’re making something, are missing. Currently hanging on the wall of the room where I’m writing this is an acoustic guitar. It’s made by Hondo and probably could use a dust rag dragged underneath the string array. The frets are a little nubbed and could definitely stand some repair work, but when I pick it up and strum across that sound-hole, I get a decent, pleasing tone. I’ll never be Mark Knopfler and don’t think that doesn’t tick me off as well, but I can rustle up a tune when called upon.

This is not my guitar, although I own it. If I live to be a hundred and still have the thing, it will never be my guitar. It was given to me by my grandfather John. He had a workshop in the backyard of his house, once a garage but converted into a sort of a club house. This is where he went to have the occasional beer, smoke the occasional cigar and pop in a VHS tape to watch Chuck Norris kick the occasional ass. In this box of stick-em tiles, exposed ceiling beams and wood paneled walls, he showed me, or atttempted to show me, the proper finger placement on the fretboard. He showed me how to get a sustained note, how to graze a string to produce a harmonic and how to focus so that it all came together in the form of a real, flesh and blood song.

On one of these impromptu lessons, I hit record on my portable boom-box. This way I could take the tape, and that Hondo guitar, home with me to practice. Poppy, as we called him, picked up his guitar, found his finger placement, started strumming and sang, “Your cheatin’ heart will make you weep – You’re moving from this chord to that chord on the word ‘weep‘ – You’ll cry and cry and try to sleep – Now you’re taking it back to that first chord – But sleep won’t come the whole night through – And follow it up – Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you…”

There was a good block of time when I had forsaken that guitar, any guitar for that matter. Still, I had that cassette. I stored it away in my closet. Those lessons, but that one in particular, meant so much to me. I wished to keep it so that I could hear it on those days when I needed to feel connected. One such day was a dreary spring. I got the call at work from my sister. Poppy was at the hospital, the COPD that was knocking him around during those last few years was finally taking its toll. I needed to get down to the hospital as soon as I could. After some cajoling of the boss, which in hindsight probably sounded more like angry whining, I was off to make the twenty minute trek. I arrived before some of my other relatives, but we assembled eventually. When the last cousin finally arrived, Poppy breathed a sigh of relief, having seen his family all in one place one more time, and was gone.

There was a lot of crying, as could naturally be expected, and the loss that seized everyone was more than palpable. Poppy was just that kind of outsized personality, whether it was cheering his beloved Giants on to the touchdown, tossing the baseball at the park, or showing his grandson how to knock out a tune. Some people who leave are a loss, and others make you yourself feel lost, but I had my ace. I was determined to get home and dig that tape out of the closet, hear him once again trying to out-Hank Hank Williams and get some comfort in his instructions. “You’re moving from this chord to that chord on the word ‘weep’” After some frantic digging, I did find the tape. It was shoved in a box that stored my old Burger King Empire Strikes Back glasses (it has a couple Muppets Take Manhattan glasses in there too.) I rushed the tape to the deck, popped it in and hit play. The inner spools had seized over time into a sticky, black oval, unmovable. Unplayable. I stared at the deck, then zeroed in on the cassette in all it’s uselessness. The rain was still falling outside and the day had that strange cast to it, like it might never be sunny again, the kind of gray that infects the most porous parts of your bones. I must have sat staring at that thing for hours. That is when I truly felt my grandfather die.

That is, until I take that Hondo guitar down from the wall and give it a strum. It doesn’t matter what I’m playing either, be it “Blister In The Sun” or “Heart Of Gold” or dear old Hank. When that tone drifts out, my grandfather is there somewhere, and that is why even if I have that instrument until my dying day, it will never truly be mine. Sure, you can feel like you’re a rock and roll celebrity when you’re twiddling those buttons on your Strat-shaped controller, and sure you can punch along with Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain or, very soon, John Lennon, but video-game musicians will never conjure up the dead like I can, with only a couple chords and the right tempo.

I’m not telling you to not enjoy playing games, but when the game is done, get into the real thing. The easy way out may give you pleasure for a moment or two, but you have no idea of what you’re missing in that substitution.

May is the unofficial start of the summer concert season, so to unofficially celebrate the shows of 2009, Popdose.com and internet radio station The Penguin have teamed up for Penguimania 2009. Tune in each Wednesday at 9:00 EST for Radioshow With Dw. Dunphy to hear the live performance megamix in full. Then each week we’ll present a downloadable MP3 of a set from the “concert.”

Set Four

Starting off this, the final set of Penguimania 2009, is King’s X with a breakout track from the Ear Candy album. “Mississippi Moon” features guitarist Ty Tabor on vocals.

From their eponymous “Island Album,” known as such as it was their sole release on the Island label, The 77’s tear through their original “Pearls Before Swine.” The live version was the first recording of the tune, and subsequent studio recordings were put to tape with the command, “Play it like you did live.”

Technically the last Pink Floyd song being it was the final track of The Division Bell, the last studio Floyd album (we can dispense with the Roger Waters/not Roger Waters argument on another day,) “High Hopes” represents the band at its most ornate and orchestral.

Recorded during the tour of his hugely popular album The Stranger, Billy Joel closes it all out with “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” in part a tribute to the Phil Spector/Ronettes pop sound.

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That’s it! Thanks for enjoying Penguimania 2009 and don’t forget: you can enjoy the entire mix over at The Penguin, Wednesday nights starting at 9:00 PM EST: find it at www.thepenguinrocks.com. Popdose and The Penguin wish you your best concert experiences this summer. I’ll be back next week when we return to Dw. Dunphy On…