Posts

Posted on

Late Night Labor Wars

Thank goodness for the Hollywood unions for providing a little basic trade union education for the American public. It’s been so rare to see aggressive, proactive union activity that most people clearly don’t understand how this stuff is supposed to work. The fact that most late-night talk show hosts are crossing picket lines to return to the air without their writers, while David Letterman gets to go back with his writers and their union’s blessing is inexplicably confusing to some. Apparently even some producers don’t understand. One anonymous weasel (presumably from NBC) whined, “Regardless of who technically owns what, they are now intentionally putting us at a competitive disadvantage.” That’s how this works, sweetheart. If the striking Writers Guild was affecting everyone’s business equally, how would that compel the producers to settle?

I’ve written about “me-too” agreements before. These are contracts wherein an employer agrees in advance to the terms of an industrywide agreement and buys its way out of a labor dispute. Whatever the other guys agree to, we’ll do the same. Just please don’t strike us. That is precisely the kind of contract that Letterman’s Worldwide Pants company, independently of the major networks, has signed with the Writers Guild. The other late night guys whine that Letterman’s getting off on a technicality (Letterman negotiated to own his own show when he moved to CBS, while Leno pushed Letterman out of the way to take over Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” on NBC’s penurious terms). Do not let them obscure the fact that they planned to put Letterman at a competitive disadvantage by crossing the picket lines to return to the air, while Letterman held out for his writers.

And why? Jay Leno is retiring in a few years, and could have stood his ground, except I suspect that he secretly hates unions. Carson Daly, who enthusiastically went back on the air first, is the kind of unprincipled, talentless careerist who cynically calculated that by being the only host presenting new programs that people might finally watch his dreck. And Conan O’Brien, I can only assume, was worried that NBC might take the promised “Tonight Show” away from him if he stayed out with his writers.

If all of the late night programs had stayed in reruns, they would have maintained their audience share. Yes, I’m sure there are less viewers overall for reruns, but the proportion of viewers would remain the same, so that all of the shows would lose revenue equally, and thus, in a way, not really lose out at all. But now David Letterman gets to go back with fresh, scripted material and access to all of Hollywood’s stars, while Leno, who is painfully unfunny even with his team of writers, has to vamp and ad-lib for an hour each night with only the help of his own wit and whatever college professor or book author he can scrounge up. If it does place not only Leno and Conan, but all of NBC at a competitive disadvantage, then it places pressure on the NBC-Universal corporate ownership structure to settle the damn contract. Which is exactly the trade union purpose of a “me too” agreement.

Posted on

Wonderful Absinthe

All in all, absinthe’s a bit of a disappointment. In case it escaped your attention, the green fairy, which has been illegal in the United States for most of the 20th century for its supposed hallucinogenic and psychopathic effects, is now legal. It turns out, in fact, that it’s been legal since Prohibition’s repeal but nobody noticed. Since that time, absinthe has been banned from the U.S. for containing a chemical compound that determined European importers have recently proven never existed in the wormwood-derived liqueur. So what of absinthe’s reputation for murder, mayhem and gothic artistic inspiration? Guilt by association, it turns out. It’s kinda like blaming bourbon for country music or Colt 45 for drive-by shootings.

That sober analysis takes much of the fun out of drinking absinthe, which can now be found in select liquor stores and bars in one of three brands, with more (supposedly) on the way. I’ve been sampling a bottle of the French Lucid today, which tastes like a mix of sambuca and liquid Tylenol. Forget Victorian romance, or Vincent Van Gogh’s missing ear, my favorite absinthe story can be found in Dave Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street.” In the collection of anecdotes from NYC’s late-fifties folk scene, Van Ronk tells of some sailor friends who smuggled several dozen cases of absinthe out of Japan on the even of its prohibition there, hoping to make an underground score back home. When the mob wouldn’t touch it, the sailors were reduced to bartering their illicit booze for places to sleep. I’ll let comrade Van Ronk pick up the story:

As a general rule, I tried to avoid getting mixed up in this kind of convoluted skullduggery, but ever since I was a teenager, I had been reading about Lautrec and absinthe, Modigliani and absinthe, Swinburne and absinthe – naturally I was dying to find out about Van Ronk and absinthe. Also, there was the sheer joy of conspiracy for its own sake. What can I say? I have always been a hopeless romantic…

The next day my two smugglers dropped by Judy’s place, and over glasses of guess what, I got the discouraging word: my guy had bought a few cases for himself and his friends, but basically his position was, “Look – you know what it is and I know what it is, but nobody else ever heard of the stuff. Who are we going to sell it to?”

“Gee,” I said, “the Mafia sure is hard on honest crooks.”

By way of consolation, I took five more bottles off their hands. Hell, they were selling it cheaper than Irish Whiskey. For the next few weeks, the nabe was awash in absinthe. Everybody I knew must have picked up a few jugs. Then it was gone…

It must have been about ten years down the line that I happened to be doing a gig in Provincetown, and a publican in Wellfleet invited Paul Geremia (the world’s best blues guitarist and singer) and me to a high-class bash at his Victorian Gothic “cottage.” Paul and I were sitting there jamming, when our host approached us with two glasses of a familiar-looking opalescent fluid…

“I’ll bet you guys’ll never guess what this is,” our host said, as he handed me a glass.

I took a sip, ostentatiously rolled it around my tongue and replied, “It tastes very much like Japanese absinthe.”

“Jesus, how could you tell?”

I arched my eyebrows in my very best William F. Buckley imitation. “To the truly sophisticated palate,” I intoned, “there are no mysteries.”

Now, that is exactly the kind of absinthe experience I was hoping for! Not necessarily a hallucination, but at least some good old-fashioned conspiracy. But now that everything is twice as legal and half as fun, I can only hope that the humorless American commissars, who are supposedly seething at this subversion of their authority, will find a way to make absinthe illegal once again. Then my bottle of French absinthe would take on some illicit quality, and comrades could gather around my liquor cabinet for some rarified naughtiness. In the meantime, if you’re curious what all the fuss is about, but don’t want to shell out the big bucks for your own bottle, you’re welcome over to the Kew, comrade, to sample some of mine.

Posted on

This Is a Shamelessly Factional Button

Shannon Hammock just mailed me a parcel of the past: silly factional buttons from the Socialist Party’s 2001 national convention. It was the first time in many years that an organized caucus was formed to compete for seats on the party’s national committee. Although they called themselves “the Issues Caucus,” their focus seemed to be on personalities. They lumped a bunch of comrades with wildly different politics that didn’t necessarily even like each other into a cabal, the “us vs. them” that they had to “get.” And so I was opposed for re-election as the party’s Vice Chairman, and Shannon and I printed up a bunch of buttons that mocked the whole situation.

“This is a shamelessly factional button” was a properly irreverent sentiment, and I think we got comrades on all sides to wear those little yellow buttons. “No Factions” and the Rodney King button further got the point across. “I’m okay. You have ‘Issues'” was cute, I thought. The cowboy button was inspired by a bizarre, rambling attack e-mail by one young comrade from Chicago that ended with the hysterical exhortation, “Circle the wagons, boys!!!”

In another e-mail, David McReynolds had accused me of being “against Chicago.” My flippant response was that I had nothing against the city of Chicago, except that I hate the way they cut pizzas into squares. I’m really very right-wing on this issue. As my response successfully diverted attention from whatever-the-hell supposed “issue” we were debating to a free-for-all over what constitutes good pizza (I’m not actually making this up), we thought “No Square Pizzas” would make a good button. Bill Stodden later formed a “No Square Pizza” Caucus to keep up the shenanigans, but, being anti-organized factions myself, I did not join.

Much of the personality focus was on lumping myself and Greg Pason together as some kind of gruesome twosome of party bureaucrats. It was so bad that one could be forgiven for thinking that Greg’s last name is “and Shaun.” The picture of the two of us, with the word “Evil?” was a fitting rejoinder. (What’s particularly funny about that button is that there was a third man standing between us in the original photograph, but, like a good apparatchik, I airbrushed the comrade out of the photo!) The idea of floating Greg’s name as a possible Presidential candidate (even on the preposterous ticket of Greg Pason-Angela Davis) was, perversely meant to provoke a little more hostility from the anti-Greg and Shaun crowd. The supreme irony, of course, is that Greg and I, despite being good friends, could never agree on anything politically.

Finally, my sole campaign button read, “Shaun indulges my vices, so I’ll indulge him as Vice Chair.” The only campaign caucusing I did that weekend in Boulder consisted of booze and sex and lots of it (well, mostly booze). I lost, of course.

Posted on

The Great Blog Circle Jerk, part IV

I’m pleased as punch to finally be able to acknowledge someone who has been instrumental in keeping me on the dubya dubya dubya dot org all these years. I’ve worked with Josh Handle (Handle is a “handle,” dig?) on a number of socialist websites (including Ypsl’s and others) over the years, most of which he designed as I barked orders for how it should look. For my own dot org, he’s been an indispensable resource for coaching me through Blosxom, WordPress, PhP and other techno-gibberish that I would not otherwise understand.

Josh shares that democratizing impulse for the internet on his own blog, Open Source Society. It’s a good resource, and probably about as readable as this geek talk can be. If you need more hand holding, he’s offering his services for a fee for web design. His web design work, and, more importantly, his availability and cooperativeness, get the strongest endorsement from me. Plus, it’s for a good cause. Comrade’s got a lot of babies to feed.

Proudly powered by WordPress