Frankly, I'm embarrassed for adults I hear saying things like, "Ohhh, I never miss Dancing With the Stars, or American Idol, or Project Runway, or Pick a Skank (or whatever's the name of that thing with Bret Michaels). All I can think is, "Good lord, is life really that empty and desperate? Never miss? Do you have all your tax files in order? Are all the screws in the garage separated by size, labeled, and put away? Tires full? Walked the dog? Already sent a birthday card to Mom?"

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I still get woozy whenever someone refers to Ronald Reagan as "The Great Communicator." Dottering old Ronnie was less "communicator" than "The Great Pitchman," the central casting model who won the audition by standing up straight, looking the camera in its unblinking eye, and selling whatever the client needed selling. Some of it he may have even believed. But his style of "communicating" left me thinking that for the most part, he didn't really understand most of it and that it wasn't all that important that he did.

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I bet I haven't missed more than a couple Oscar shows in forty years. And yes, that is both scary and pathetic. But a long time ago, I gave up expecting them to be something they'll never be, which is uproariously funny—with some white-hot comedian laying zingers on Steven Spielberg for stinking up the place with that last Indiana Jones flick—or in anyway spontaneous with streakers and one of the losers going all Joe Pesci on a winner on their way to the stage. It's Hollywood's prom night, for God's sake. No one gets mussed when they're that made up.

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As a subscriber to the Star Tribune, as in someone who pays to have it delivered and then reads (most) of it, I've been waiting a day over two weeks now to sink my teeth into a new column by my favorite sulfurous, commie, pro-tax, anti-stadium, Pawlenty-baiter: Nick Coleman.

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I corrected yesterday's post, where I had KTLK's generic conservative talker Chris Baker physically returning to Houston. In classic mega-media fashion, Baker will instead be providing, uh, content, such as his stunningly credulous interview with Michele Bachmann, to both the Twin Cities and Houston markets (with a combined reachable audience of, um, nine million or so).

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[Correction added].

 I should start with Michele Bachmann's latest descent into feral lunacy (This would be her interview with KTLK's Chris Baker where, along with worrying that, "We're running out of rich people," she had conservatives' strangest boogeyman, the voter registration group ACORN, getting $5 billion in stimulus money and being under federal indictment. Uh, neither is evenly remotely true.). But I can't decide who is worse of a threat to intelligent life on this planet, her or Baker? But at least Baker has the good sense to go back to Texas, where they've made a grand tradition of saying whatever they pull out of their butt. [Sadly, I let wishful thinking run away with me here. Baker will be double-dipping, from KTLK to Houston. ... it's Clear Channel, Jake.]

Or I could start with some kind of a clock, waiting for the Star Tribune to mention in print and on the record that it has demoted Nick Coleman out of his columnist job and to some kind of a reporting gig--no doubt "deep reporting"—with the Variety section. It's one thing to have strained relations with a high-profile employee, but come on, are they really taking the Acme Tool HR approach and avoiding all comment on a personnel issue? Coleman is a fairly public person. But at this point, the paper's concept of logic is in heavy competition with Michele Bachmann.

FYI, a new Facebook site, "Where's Nick?" is up for those waiting to see how long it takes Strib managers to man-up and make a simple statement of fact.  

 
 
Or I could congratulate James Lileks for being named one of TIME magazine's "25 Best Blogs". This is an inspiration to me. I'm going to write a lot more about my flashlight and postcard collections from now on. Good one, James.

But instead, bear with me while I declare Facebook doomed, based not so much on this week's privacy flap but on the fact that a geezer like me signed on last Sunday and promptly fell down the rabbit hole. Not that it was my fault.

Being fundamentally anti-social, I resisted all this social networking stuff . . . until now, mainly on the rationale that since I don't care what I ate for lunch, why in hell would anyone else? And don't get me started on Twitter. The quality hours of the day are those disconnected from digital correspondence.

But Sunday, a friend sends me an e-mail saying she has posted pictures of a Christmas party on Facebook . . . and in order to see these (and concoct a plausible explanation for why I'm licking the waitress's knee), I have to open an account. (At least this was how it was explained to me.)

The first flush of anxiety—and a key motivator in all things Facebook, I'm convinced—came when, after ten minutes, I was mortified at the fact of having "0 friends." Not one. I hadn't felt such a chill of nerdy isolation since sophomore year of high school when Bonnie and Beth and Patty—the cool girls—pretended they were "saving" the three other chairs at their lunch table.

The mood deepened at the nineteen-minute mark when my oldest kid, a.k.a. The Weasel, called from Seattle. I knew it was him. I could see his name and number on the phone. But all I heard was, "No! NO! NOOOO!"

Then the "friending" kicked in. People I barely remember. People I don't think I've ever met. People I didn't much like when I did meet them, and people I wouldn't want to spend an hour with if they paid me in Kruggerands. Sure, there were a few I actually enjoy. But high school classmates of my kids? Come on! Why? When it comes to informal fraternizing, I believe in strict segregation of the generations. I like my crass, vulgar jokes, marinaded in sixties music, seventies movies, and eighties, uh, lifestyle choices, and I don't want to clean all that up because of some metastasizing intergenerational gossip mill.

Sarah Janecek and I filled in on 'CCO yesterday and today. 'CCO runs a daily poll on some topic or another. Yesterday we asked, "Who Should Have Control Over Your Facebook Information? A: Facebook? B: You? C: Don't know, don't care?" Why the crowd that "doesn't know and doesn't care" would even bother to vote baffles me, but 11 percent actually said that Facebook could have permanent control over every stupid picture some alleged friend posted of them passed out drunk and buried in sand on Isla Mujeres with a gigantic mud and seaweed penis.

I don't know how much longer I can take this. The upside is that one kinda/sorta casual acquaintance kicked over this link to a very cool BBC site stocked with intelligent interviews with filmmakers. It almost makes the pages and pages of "I'm grooming my dog Cartier and thinking about spring" seem worthwhile.

But mainly I'm waiting until 'CCO TV's Pat Kessler joins up. Word on 'book says he thinks he's too cool.

When Kessler opens an account, I'm closing mine.

Sorry, the hed was too easy.

(Oh, and before I bury the lead, yours truly and Sarah Janecek will be filling in/auditioning Wednesday and Thursday on WCCO-AM from noon to 3 p.m. Think of it as Modulated Shades of KTLK. We are committed to something less fraught with risk of bodily harm and scarring than we did in '06 . . . but just as compelling. Feel free to offer abundant criticism.) 

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For a guy who still couldn't tell you how to rollover a 401k, I've become a junkie for anything with a scent of the inside action on how this, uh, "deep recession" went down, from the first wave of deregulation to Lehman Brothers boss Dick Fuld getting slugged at his gym.

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I'm trying to stay on a diet. No more than one "The World is Ending," death of newspaper/print column a week.But damn, there is a lot of fodder out there for response and deep thinking.

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My complaint du jour this past weekend was the major television networks' woefully deficient analysis of the competing stimulus proposals. (As I also said, this was basically a face-off between "plan" and "anti-plan" since the "loyal opposition" brought literally nothing to the table other than tax cut rhetoric.) Reporting from NBC, CBS, etc. was—as usual—almost entirely centered around horserace coverage—"Obama's down," "The GOP is up." I don't know about you, but I was looking for a little thicker soup from the big kids. You know, like maybe the thinking of credible economists breaking out the likely effect of the various plans.

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Somebody will spit out a log by tomorrow and find the last time FoxNews, NPR, The Huffington Post, and Helen Thomas all asked questions in a presidential press conference. I'm guessing never.

As someone who actually remembers watching JFK's press conferences—I took a break from chiseling wheels out of stone and hunting sabre tooth tigers—Barack Obama has a ways to go to project that Vegas lounge vibe that old Jack had down cold from the get-go.

Of course, in early '61, at the time of JFK's first "presser," the biggest boogeymen were still the Russians (who released a couple American fliers in time for Kennedy's first show), not conservative religious zealots running around in the mountains Waziristan (which no one had ever heard of, believe me), and the Republican party was led by avuncular-to-grandfatherly characters such as Everett Dirksen and Charles Halleck, not radio jocks, who'd never dare a public debate, and first-term governors who think Waziristan is is a kind of shag carpeting.

Things have changed.

I watched with interest to see how Obama has processed this week's exercise in "bi-partisanship" and as much trouble as he took to say that he'll keep doing what he's doing and this is a long-term game, it was pretty obvious he's about run-the-tank dry talking to the crowd that "thinks we can do nothing." His predecessor was pretty much a dilettante about all things government, other than flying back to the ranch for some downtime. Obama sees a lot of work to get done . . .  fast . . . and, as he said, "in sequence."

As I said a couple days ago, he'll continue to go through the motions of fraternal civility, but after watching so much abject knuckleheadedness out of people—in a national crisis unlike anything in seventy years—he's got to be thinking Nancy Pelosi has it more right than him. He won. He has the votes. If "they" want history to record they opposed everything he threw at the wall, so be it. Let the fools hang themselves.

Embedded in the questions were a couple fascinating issues. Chuck Todd of NBC asked about the role of personal consumption in creating our economic mess. Obama's first impulse was to assert that this crisis erupted out of the banking system "betting $30 on $1 worth of collateral" . . . but after giving his speechette (there were a lot of them . . . less is often more, my man), he acknowledged that Todd is on to something about Americans living beyond their means and how that is "not sustainable."

The idea that what has passed for "normal" American levels of consumption and growth are not sustainable is hardly new. But this was the first time I remember the President of the United States acknowledging it and suggesting that after we get things stabilized, we're going to have to "look at the way we do things."

Bloomberg News's Julianna Goldman reminded Obama that he has promised to level with the public and give it to us straight (you know, like adults), good news and bad. He may have to tuck away a note to himself to schedule a "straight talk" sometime maybe later this year about how unlikely it is that we're going to get back to our lifestyles, circa even 2007, anytime soon and how it really may be better all the way around that we don't, considering well-established "metrics" on resource sustainability and all that heretofore crazy hippie stuff.

The other tantalizing moment, of course, came in response to a question from The Huffington Post's Sam Stein—a damned pissant website!, and the Times didn't get a question!—who wanted to know where Obama stands on Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy's vow to press ahead with a "truth and reconciliation commission" (shades of South Africa) and prosecute any Bush administration official for whatever "misdeeds" might rise to the level of crimes.

Here's one list, just to get him started.

Obama didn't exactly blanche, but this is going to be tricky for him. Although he's absolutely right to keep his focus on cleaning up the God-awful financial and foreign policy messes he's been handed, he cannot impede or discourage the proper function of law. Moreover, he can't just not be seen impeding, he can't, pure and simple. He has promised unprecedented transparency. The first hint that he is stifling a lawful investigation or prosecution into what are likely very serious crimes and his aura is cinders.

Obama did say, "Nobody is above the law," and I take that to mean we're in for some really interesting hearings and lawyering.

Transparency is a significant part of his agreement with the voters, many of whom know damned well that the Justice Department itself stank of criminal corruption, not to mention Gitmo and all those wiretaps.

As for Helen Thomas . . . well, Helen, I could have told you a couple people who have nukes in the Middle East.

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  8 p.m. TPT

Promoting his film Lewis & Clark a few years ago required Ken Burns to endure four hours in a car with yours truly. Thankfully, Burns brings something better to a road trip than the libretto for Oklahoma!.

Considering the sweep and adventure and upbeat ending of Lewis and Clark's adventure west, I was curious if he had ever proposed a feature film, a full-scale Hollywood number, you know, with big-name stars, trailers, and catering? Done well, a Burns-style production of just about anything, from a bio of Mark Twain or Frank Lloyd Wright to a mega-Western such as Lewis and Clark would have Oscar pedigree all over it.

Burns said he'd given it thought over the years but that his contract with General Motors had him locked up for a while. There was, however, the story of Sam Houston that he thought had every facet of a Hollywood blockbuster.

As we rolled along the arid prairies, Burns unspooled the story of Houston's incredible life from memory. (How is that possible? I can't remember the lyrics to "In A Gadda Da Vida"?)

Along with a lot of Burns-like documentary touches, I was reminded of that trip while watching a screener of tonight's American Experience film, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story so saturated with theatrical implausibility, mass psychosis, suspense, and classical religious tragedy, it begs for something on the order of what HBO did with John Adams.

Although most American school children are probably still taught that Lincoln was murdered by lone assassin John Wilkes Booth,(a conclusion Vincent Bugliosi would likely conclude at the end of 1,600 pages given the chance), Booth was, of course, the leader/catalyst for a collection of oddballs, n'er do wells, and hangers-on. And the twelve-day hunt for him was, as told in this film (drawn heavily from James L. Swanson's book, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer), an all-consuming dragnet for Booth and his co-conspirators, one of whom had attempted to murder Secretary of State William Seward that same night while another lost his courage stalking Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Even if Lincoln, five days after achieving the victory that held the country together and brought (the beginning of) assurance of full citizenship for former slaves, had not been killed on Good Friday, the overtones of a deity's passing would be palpable.

The film offers a recap of Lincoln's presidency, which was almost entirely consumed by the Civil War, including the weakening of popular support for him in North until Sherman's victory in Atlanta. Simultaneously, it builds a portrait of Booth who came to his anti-abolitionist sentiments for reasons that seem to have as much to do with separating himself from his much more famous father and older brother than any deep ideological conviction.

It was a time when, despite the proximity of the war, the president could walk the streets of Washington alone. It was a small enough town that Booth, who just happened to drop by Ford's Theatre that morning, had been tipped that Lincoln would be attending the theater that night. The story is a constant collision of melodramatic twists. (My wife is a big fan of Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, which expresses even more amazement at the pirouettes of fate.)

The high-adventure phase of this particular story begins with Booth breaking his ankle in the leap from Lincoln's theater box and escaping for nearly two weeks into the swamps of southern Maryland . . . where he and his crony huddle in cold rain, eagerly reads "the reviews" of his act in local papers, and rationalizes himself in his diary.       

There are a lot of reasons why Barack Obama is better suited to being president than me. For one thing, he's smarter. For another, he's WAAAY more patient than I'd be with his, uh, "principled opposition" and the lowing bovines that pass for major TV media. I also think he's probably a much quicker study. Obama doesn't strike me as a guy who has made the same mistake twice very often in his life and builds up--pronto--from what doesn't work. So I'm guessing he has logged the lessons of the past couple weeks in his diary and underlined them four or five times.

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[UPDATED AGAIN] Frequent commenter, Jimmy, digs out this quote from Village Voice Media executive David Schneiderman on maintaining integrity while maximizing the Internet:

Jimmy writes:  "For what it's worth, here's what could be a deliciously ironic quote from Voice CEO David Schneiderman, after he agreed in 2005 to step down to President of the Internet Division (I say could be because I still don't quite get all this alleged Digg skullduggery) when The Voice was swallowed up by New Media to become what many regard as the Clear Channel of so called 'alt weeklies.'":

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The media story of the day, as far as I'm concerned, is the stunning testimony of Harry Markopolos, a.k.a. "the whistleblower" in the Bernie Madoff scandal. This morning, before a House panel looking into the epic $50 billion fraud, Markopolos revealed that not only did the (Bush-era) SEC ignored his repeated attempts to get them to pursue leads and investigate Madoff, but The Wall Street Journal blew him off as well.

In prepared testimony Markopolos says he was put, "in contact with John Wilke, senior investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. Mr. Wilke and I would become friends over the next three years. Unfortunately, as eager as Mr. Wilke was to investigate the Madoff story, it appears that the Wall Street Journal's editors never gave him approval to start investigating. As you will see from my extensive e-mail correspondence with him over the next several months, there were several points in time in which he was getting ready to book air travel to start the story and then would get called off at the last minute. I never determined if the senior editors at the Wall Street Journal failed to authorize this investigation."

I will bet that if this onion is sufficiently peeled, we will have a highly illuminating view of the institutional obstacles to reporting on a wide-range of executive scandals.

But, "local,  local" that I am, the institutional issues that caught my interest were raised yesterday by Melodie Bahan (that's "bay-han" she tells me), Director of Communications at the Guthrie Theater in a provocative posting on the local theater website, Minnesota Playlist.

Bahan makes the case that if no local critic can ever match up to the quality of The New York Times' legendary Frank Rich, at least they might consider foregoing the stale cycle of preview-review and practice journalism on the local theater community. As I say, it's a purposefully provocative argument she makes. The sort of thing that deserves a good dissection, probably in a trendy arugula-based eatery over several glasses of over-priced Pinot Noir.

On  my Keystone Light budget what follows is the best I can do.

Here are two of the "money graphs" from Bahan's complaint:

"Reviews in the Twin Cities newspapers don’t accomplish what critics and editors insist they do, which is provide a service to their readers. I would argue that the readers of the two major daily newspapers in this town would be better served by forgoing hastily-written, ill-considered snapshots of an opening night performance and focusing instead on actual journalistic coverage of the arts. I’m not against theater reviews; I’m against theater reviews that are poorly written, thumbs-up-or-down laundry lists of actors and designers that don’t do anything to illuminate the production or give readers a real sense of the experience. Maybe it’s not fair to compare our local critics to Frank Rich, but I think there’s a solution: Stop writing reviews and start writing news.

"Local theater critics are journalists first. Journalists are storytellers, and there are thousands of stories in this large and active theater community that just aren’t being written. Features about theater are often glossy, shallow puff pieces that are indistinguishable from reviews."

Oh ... baby. She argues that there is no end of stories about the characters and forces creating, sustaining and presumably ruining local theater.

Having spent a bit of time up close to local media and arts organizations, my first reaction is to warn Bahan of that for which she wishes.

Full-spectrum coverage of local theater (and any organization) would require "journalism", i.e. public tale-telling of the firings, petty squabbles, diva-like tantrums, nut job board members, incompetent "artistes", and so on and so on, in additional to thoughtful, laudatory reporting on true vision and genius. The fact is most small-ish arts organizations regard daily newspapers as publicity vehicles, there to assist them by running listings, positive previews and glowing reviews. But when/if the reviews turn "journalistic", which is to say negative, or even scathing (a la Frank Rich at his best), the cries you hear are those of the "unjustly" wounded.

But I kind of like Bahan for wading into this. There are some very stale conventions to arts coverage that relevant newspapers could lose today and no one would miss. These cities are hip enough for a Gawker/Defamer-style website on the arts. (Bahan tells me Minnesota Playlist has been up only since November and may evolve into some sort of wider, deeper coverage of the local scene.) But a compulsively readable, snarky blog on who's schtupping who in local theater isn't exactly what Bahan has in mind. What she wants, she says, is ... more and better.

She concedes she's aware how bad off the two local newspapers are. "You remember that scene in "Sunset Boulevard" where [William Holden] says, 'You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.' And she responds, 'I am big, it's the pictures that got small'. Well it's like that, I realize with newspapers. They got small. They don't have the resources to cover everything they should cover. I understand that. But I'm just trying to start a discussion."

(It appears she may have succeeded, since her boss, Trish Santini, tells me that she will soon be having "coffee" with representatives of both papers to discuss ... "Well, I'm not exactly sure what they want to discuss. But I'm happy to meet with them.")

Strib theater critic, Graydon Royce, takes the attitude that Bahan is provoking a worthwhile conversation. He defends his and the paper's coverage, pointing out trend and analysis pieces he's done recently and insisting that, "over the past six months, I'd say, we've really tried to look at ways to do things other than the usual preview piece."

I sympathize with Royce when he mentions how "previews can really eat you up." These are the usually upbeat, as PR-as-you-can-get-without-paying-for-it 23" "feature advances" that papers run just prior to the next big opening. Traditional newspaper thinking says these are indispensable. The irony is that actual "journalism" -- with, you know, candid assessments of the script, cast and actual reporting on the good, the bad and the godawful ugly -- often gets left on the cutting room floor in the paper's implicit commitment to "partnering" with local arts organizations.

Bahan concedes it is unusual in the new "small" newspaper world to still have two papers in a city this size, both with full-time theater critics. (Considering the demonstrably small fraction of readers avidly interested in theater, I find it astonishing. But hey, full employment for working schlubs!)

Royce also has no disagreement with Bahan's admonition to produce thoroughly "sourced" stories. But he quickly notes the near impossibility of getting arts people to put their name on anything remotely unflattering about a local troupe or personality. "Arts organizations are not exactly eager to confide in a reporter about why an actor was fired, or why their fund-raising is going south. If you ask, invariably what you get is, 'Everything's great. No problems. Fund-raising might be slow, but you know everything is slow right now'."

Bahan uses the example of the fearsome debt piled up by the Theater de la Jeune Leune as the sort of story that a "big" newspaper should have sniffed out and covered. ("They all file 990s," she says.) Royce points out that even the board at Jeune Leune was largely in the dark about how bad things were and says, "Oh God, no" when asked if anyone at the theater was forthcoming about their problems. 

A gossipy (most likely unattributed)  blog is obviously well outside the realm of what newspapers are in business to do. Maybe that changes in The Big Evolution of papers to the web, but snarky dishing won't be happening anytime soon at the Strib.

Moreover, Royce makes the point that, "There is a certain level of advocacy inherent in covering local theater. The fact you write anything about them suggests they have value."

I told Royce I was often amused to hear third or fourth hand that so and so was mightly pissed at something I had written, but never called to tell me so directly. Maybe that's the prudent approach to someone who buys ink by the railroad car, but as a critic I always assumed I was in the game too, and therefore had no choice but to be available to anyone who wanted to tell me what a pathetic dimwit I was ... and not get defensive about it.

"It doesn't happen too often," said Royce, on taking an irate call. "But when it does I find it useful. For example, Wendy Knox over at the Frank Theater called to complain about something I had written. We got together and talked for maybe two hours. I found that very useful."

Bahan, who seems to pride herself on a certain level of literate feistiness, says, "I have no problem arguing with anyone. I think I've called everyone in town at sometime or another. But I don't think I've ever yelled at Graydon or Rohan [Preston, the Strib's other critic.]

"But the point of my rant here was just to start a conversation."
 

    

The "deck chairs on the Titanic" factor withstanding, the Strib did make a significant decision today, announcing that editor-turned-relationships-reporter Gail Rosenblum and long-form features writer Jon Tevlin will be its new metro columnists, formally replacing Katherine Kersten and Nick Coleman sometime around mid-month.

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For years, the standard post-Super Bowl cliche was, "Great commercials, boring game." As football fans though, we've had a run of good luck over the last half decade, capped with last night's classic. (It helped if you were rooting for the Cardinals.)

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