Art is dead.

At least, if I'm to take seriously 80% of what I've been seeing lately, it sure is. I blame the internet for most of it, myself.....everyone and her grandmother and her dog has a blog or twelve and has designated herself a 'journalist' or an 'essayist'. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry (particularly the Dicks) has a digital camera, webcam, and/or cellphone camera and a flickr, MySpace, and/or Youtube page and has designated himself a 'photographer' and 'filmmaker'. It's fucking ridiculous, completely maddening. Bad 'art' is everywhere on the 'net, but that's not even the worst part.

Don't get me wrong, talentless gits have ALWAYS tried to pass themselves off as artists. There have always been street poets, Central Park sketch artists, and a gazillion guitar-torturing, self-torturing, and audience-torturing singer/songwriter wannabes making the rounds of the cafes in the West Village, not to mention all the schmucks wandering around in black (who WEREN'T wearing it strictly for its slimming properties) with pained expressions on their faces and nothing between their ears, hoping to be labelled as intellectuals by OTHERS, but with noplace to flat-out label THEMSELVES. These people have always existed, but their delusion was limited to themselves and perhaps a few of their equally dimwitted friends and families, if ONLY because their 'work' was stopped for quality's sake before they could commit it to a public forum.

But not anymore. Bad writers have Blogger and Wordpress and god-only-knows what the fuck else to 'publish' their blather, and scads of promotion websites to get the word out (just take a look at the side of this page, for pete's sake...heh). Bad photographers have Flickr and MySpace, bad filmmakers have MySpace and Youtube, and everyone's got virtually unlimited domain names to scoop up and web services to subscribe to, so they can build their very own, personalized, craptastic pile o' pseudoartistic manure, and when all that's done.....well, damn, skippy. If I've got a REAL LIVE WEBSITE, then I've GOT to be an Artist....right?

Wrong, fool. I'll admit, the net allows for real artists to get their shit seen more widely and a whole lot cheaper than anything that came before it. But the downfall of all this is that people like me and a lot of my friends, who appreciate good art and do seek it out, are getting so fucking sick and tired of reading page after page of unemployed junkies waxing poetic about their cats, their exes, their drug problems, and all the talent they think they have, as they spin around their living rooms till they get dizzy and puke, snapping pictures the whole time with their circa-2002 .5 megapixel digital cameras....that we've all but given up looking. And worse still, a lot of the people who might actually have made MONEY off their writing or visual art a few years ago are limiting themselves to blogging and Flickr-ing, honestly believing they're going to be 'discovered'. I was discussing the latter with a friend the other night over drinks when I realised something else horrifying...I AM a published writer, one who has been getting work published for real CASH since I was a teenager, and who HASN'T been published since Istarted BLOGGING....not because I honestly think I'm remarkable enough or promoted enough to be discovered via the net, but rather, because this has made me lazy. Shit, even my writing STYLE has become lazy. I look at what I've written here so far and can't help but wonder....what the hell is up with all those ellipses?

But I digress. Or rather, I rant. After all, isn't what the internet's for? (Well....that, and porn....)"

But I'm A Republican!

You know, I spent an hour and change Tuesday writing a big old reactive post about the whole Don Imus affair, and I’m actually kind of glad the computer ate it, because this whole thing is getting way the fuck out of hand, and I’m nauseated at the way the media keeps humping this story like the proverbial dog at the fire hydrant, and if we’re going to hinge a discussion about racism on this asshole’s remarks, well, I may just have to rip my eyeballs out with a coat hanger and/or move to a bunker in Nevada and broadcast extraterrestrial conspiracy theories on AM radio a la Art Bell. So I will say this: Imus is a dick who made a stupid, crass, bigoted remark, and while I certainly think he deserves to take some well-deserved shit for it, there is a difference between a true racist and a person who makes racially charged remarks yet does not, prima facie, support the institution of racism. Imus, I suspect, is the latter. Rush Limbaugh, whom you may recall made the remark, “Who cares about black people? They’re like 12% of the population,” is the former. And while millions of dumbasses depend on Limbaugh for moral and political guidance, no one depends on Imus for anything (including, I suspect, entertainment. But I’m an overeducated, undertrained Lefty slacker who doesn’t get up before ten if she can help it, so what do I know?). But no one sees fit to call Limbaugh on his OxyContin-laced shit because, as the blogosphere describes it, IOKIYAR (it’s OK if you’re a Republican), and Imus is not, to the best of my knowledge, affiliated with any political stripe. Hmmm. Maybe I should change my voter registration for the sole purpose of being able to spew all sorts of racist, sexist bilge and not get called on it! [/sarcasm]

Seriously, though, I was psyched on Wednesday night when it looked like my beau Keith Olbermann was going to address the question that’s been driving me stark raving batshit all week, namely, why just Imus? Why not Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, who claimed a female black senator dresses “like a ghetto chick,” or Michael “Wiener” Savage, or, hell, any of the knuckle-dragging yahoos over at Fox Noise (KO’s term, not mine, as is the aforementioned phallic moniker)? Hello, Ann “Invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” Coulter? Well, he addressed it, all right, for about ten seconds during an interview with Jesse Jackson. Hey, Keith! Come on, man! Don’t work it into the promo and turn it into a big ol’ production number if it’s just gonna turn out to be a one-act in a black box theatre in Brooklyn! (Yes, I realize that’s what promos are for, and I actually prefer black box theatre in Brooklyn to big production numbers. I’m just saying, tell it like it is.)

So CBS and NBC have fired Don Imus. Which is fine, really; it was a prickish thing to have said, and as persons-on-the-street and columnists alike have raised this week, if an ordinary person in a run-of-the-mill job ran his or her mouth off like that, said person would have been canned. That still doesn’t answer the question why Imus was singled out above all else. Hopefully someone at The Nation can, or already has, come up with an answer I can live with. However, the mail has not yet arrived, so I’ll just have to subject y’all to my half-assed theories, which are:
#1. This is yet another symptom of the Theme Parking of America, in which we’re tolerant of bigotry and outright racism as long as it’s shoved under the umbrella of right-wing nutbaggery (under which Imus, I must point out again, is not, strictly speaking). Hey, we were all right with “Hee Haw” back in the day, ‘cause that was on TV, and they were singin’ and twangin’ and chewin’ their corncobs and they just made it all look so dang-tootin’ nice! Who needs The Grapes of Wrath? And Limbaugh and Hannity and Beck, well, watching them is kind of like going to Disneyland as envisioned by David Duke, so what’s the big deal? Spit, hiss, growl.

#2. This is like when you were in junior high homeroom and there’d be like ten of you horsing around, and just at the moment everyone got quiet you’d manage to blurt out, “Eat my shorts, asshole!” and the teacher would send you to the principal because “You were the one I heard!” True, but I wasn’t the one talking about how we should put a stink bomb in your car and write “Mr. Cooper is a dick” on your windows with soap. Maybe you should send those people, too. Again, spit, hiss, growl.

Too many John Hughes movies? Sure. But Mainstream Media? Let he among you without sin and all that jazz. Since you won’t cover real news anymore, I propose we go after Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and company. Guess who else was the one the teacher always heard?