Last night went to see All My Sons, whose all-star lineup did their valiant best to convert Arthur Miller's hot air into a mighty wind while crisscrossing and circumambulating the green patch of all-American backyard as if it were a soccer field. In the prologue a monstrous storm merging with the roar of a bombing campaign uproots a tree in the backyard planted in honor and memory of the missing pilot son, Larry. The tree's removal leaves a hole in the backyard, symbolizing the hole in the family's life left by Larry's loss. This symbolic hole was about as subtle as everything else in this huffing-puffing production, where the director Simon McBurney has neighbors and assorted Everymen and -women flanked at the side of the stage like a mute chorus, turning to face the audience like the risen dead; on the clapboard walls World War II footage of factory floors and ground combat is projected with a overlapping blur effect to conjure the Clouds of War. I can understand wanting to move away from the naturalist staging of Miller, where everyone seems to be wearing lead boots as they stand their Ibsenite ground, but I didn't anticipate anything this hokey. The cast? It was a pleasant surprise seeing how much Dianne Wiest has slimmed down since that HBO shrink show with Gabriel Byrne, where she looked beached in her own flesh; she had some inflections in act one that reminded me happily of Thelma Ritter, but by act three I was wishing it was Thelma Ritter in All About Eve I was watching. As the successful factory owner harboring a shameful secret at the core of his bluster, John Lithgow, joshing around in his bathrobe, had too much irrepressible buoyance to embody Patriarchal Enterprise. He's too vaudevillian for his character's Old Testament self-exonerating thunder. (I first saw Lithgow on stage in 1978, where he farced it up in Kaufman-Hart's Hollywood satire Once in a Lifetime. Time do fly.) Patrick Wilson seemed to be trying to psyche himself up to believe in what he was doing, though the four men sitting in front of me were most appreciative when Wilson came out shirtless in act two to perform tree-removal. Some of the actors in the smaller roles appeared encouraged to act peppy, and "pep" in an Arthur Miller play seems almost a violation against nature.

As the local bud of May loved first by Larry, then by his brother (Wilson), Katie Holmes raises the sails with her first entrance, a vision out of Irwin Shaw's classic story The Girls in their Summer Dresses. Holmes moves beautifully on stage and more than held her own with the old stage pros in the cast, her gestures and line deliveries executed with a clarity rare in Hollywood actors taking to the stage (they often sink into themselves, muffled and mumbly, letting their arms hang dead at their sides). I'd pay honest money to see Holmes essay a Broadway comedy or musical--she's got the gung-ho energy and stylized physical attack to deliver something wow from the diving board. That's the thing about TV and movies--they let you see only a small fraction of what an actor's capable of. It's only in the theater that you get the fullbodiment, though it sometimes entails having to put up with Arthur Miller's dialogue being hurled like boulders in a message drama whose hinges creak with arthritic age.

Our friend Brenda--I'm not sure if I'm permitted to disclose her last name; perhaps she wishes to maintain a secret identity so that she can slip in and out danger undetected, like The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.--has thrown caution to the wind (what's the point of throwing caution to the wind? couldn't the wind just blow it right back?) and started a blog. It's a novel move, starting a blog at a time when so many are shuttering theirs, lowering the musty curtain on their little theatrical. But Brenda's blog is infused with a plucky, can-do spirit represented by the solemn pledge she makes the reader: "every day I post, I swear I will use the word FUCK once. And only once."

I admire her discipline, her restraint, her embrace of formal constraint, without which sonnets would run more than fourteen lines, and then where would we be? Because, be honest, it's a challenge getting by on just one FUCK a day. Think of the blogs we've grown up with since children, beloved institutions such as Eschaton, TBogg, and Whiskey Fire, with its lyrical refrain "fuckity fuck fuck fuck" and its rooster cry of "fuckadoodle-doo." Sometimes the cursing flies as fast and florid as the fecking swearing in a James Kelman novel or Gordon Ramsey kitchen. So it's quite a restriction Brenda has chosen to place on herself, though I feel confident that she is up to the rigorous task, and that every individualized fuck will be a spicy treat.

A vicious rumor has reached my cauliflower ear and although my first impulse is to ignore it, let it die a natural death, I recognize that in the age of the Internet, natural death has no dominion. So let me state clearly and emphatically for the record, I did not bear Alex Kuczynski's ten-pound baby. Yes, being Vanity Fair's first male surrogate mom might have landed me on Oprah, but my ankles get swollen enough without adding pregnancy to the routine. As for the article itself, it'll doubtless incite a bat swarm of protest letters to the Times magazine over the author's air of entitlement, privilege, pride in the "track record" of her husband's sperm, etc., that will brighten the holiday season and make Alex K America's least favorite reindeer. Using the author's baby nurse as a photo prop in a plantation-like scene--I'm sure that's going to go over just dandy with readers, too. It's as if the editors got together in a meeting around the salad bowl and said, How many buttons can we push in a piece to set everybody off? But that would imply cynicism on their part and I, for one, feel certain that this awful article was published with the utmost sincerity, such is my faith in human nature.

Back from my whirlwind inspection of Maryland, which I've become convinced no longer exists except as a simulacrum of itself, as Jean Baudrillard might observe, were he ever to spend Thankgiving in Maryland, watching the shopping malls roll by through the passenger window. The mood was modestly upbeat among the kinfolk and the kind strangers who roped me into conversation, betraying little distress over the prospect that next Thanksgiving many of us may be living in rusty sheds and hunting squirrel for food, depending on how all those stimulus packages go. This morning, as I packed, I had the TV on the local stations and CNBC, where it was one fluffy report after another about Black Friday, an annual event I have come to loathe to the very marrow. I had the TV on mute and noticed that one of the female anchors was pulling a long face, unusual given the iron-baton upbeat tone that prevails on this most hallowed of shopping days. I unmuted, and heard the report about the temporary store employee trampled to death at a Wal-Mart in Long Island by a frenzied mob unable to contain themselves by the mad scent of deep discounts. "Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains." Jdimytai Damour was the victim's name.

Whether or not this particular store was negligent in providing security and crowd control will be determined following an investigation, but it seems to be that local and cable news also bear partial responsibility for this man's death, for helping incite such trampling. For days preceding Black Friday the local and cable news outfits run item after item about "doorbuster sales," stoking the sense of anticipation and making it seem like family fun, reminiscent of that old game show where contestants raced through a store stocking their cart with anything they could pull from the shelves. Local news stations position reporters--usually bright, chipper young women who joke with the anchordesk about how cold it is or how late they often wait until the last minute to do their own shopping, har har--to interview the idiots in line. The next morning more reporters are stationed out in front of individual malls, with cameras positioned inside the show to capture the store opening from the store's perspective. One network had the camera sitting at a low angle for that thundering-hooves effect, and when the doors opened and the bodies piled through it did look like something out of Red River. The reporters later interview shoppers after they've snared their booty and it's all done with this air of frolic, even this year, when the anchors made so many nodding allusions to the "bad economy" you would have thought it was a meteorological condition, an oppressive damp fog that had blanketed the nation's midsection, impeding visibility.

What you don't see in these Black Friday updates are interviews with the people who work in these mall chains, who have to show up at even more ungodly hours than do the shoppers in order to stock the shelves and prepare for the store openings. Openings that get nearer to the Thanksgiving meal each year, with some stores opening at midnight on Thanksgiving day and others at 4 AM on Black Friday, forcing workers to cut short their own holiday plans and put in exhausting zombie hours. It's become an arms race between the major chains, and putting a stop to these excesses and exploitations is a stellar case for unionization. I see countless inane interviews with shoppers carrying bags full of booty, interviewer and interviewee competing to see who can be more effing cutesy, but nothing with the cashiers or shelvers after they've put in a long shift. How much does a security guard or greeter make at one of these malls? It never occurs to any reporter (or assignment editor) to ask; it would be a breach of journalistic etiquette to try anything that Studs Terkel. If nothing else, it would be nice if CNBC and the other cable networks would at least stop hyping Black Friday as if it were the Super Bowl, grinning and ruminating about it as if it were some durable and endearing national tradition. Quit treating shoppers loaded with merchandise dragging their fat butts across the parking lot as if they were some hardy breed of buffalo hunter heeding the call of the wild. For an ironic postscript, you can hardly do better than this:

About the time that Mr. Damour was killed, a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Farmingdale, 15 miles east of Valley Stream, said she was trampled by a crowd of overeager customers, the Suffolk County police reported. The woman sustained a cut on her leg, but finished her shopping before filing the police report, an officer said.

Sometimes I think they come up with these lunacies just to give TBogg material.* Because nothing evokes the glamorous sheen of old Hollywood than like a bunch of right wing hackettes in loaned mink. If George Cukor were alive to see this, he'd wish he weren't.

*Regarding the conservative diva calendar, a little shaver in TBogg's rollicking comments thread asks the medical question, "[W]hat is the opposite of priapism?"

I can answer that. It's what Kingsley Amis called "a cock-crinkler." And as the author of Jake's Thing, Amis had impressive layman's credentials in the field.

Dennis Perrin presents a comedy tutorial by way of a review/appreciation/critique/bittersweet meditation of/on the Smothers Brothers DVD box set. I remember watching the Smothers Brothers show Sunday nights with my parents in the Sixties. Except I don't exactly remember my parents watching it with me, so they must have gone Out. Well, it was the Sixties, after all, and a lot of people were going Out, then returning at an irregular hour in altered condition. Perrin:

There are so many other features to enjoy: the music (Ray Charles, Ike and Tina Turner, The Doors, Donovan, Joan Baez dedicating a song to her husband who was convicted for draft resistance, her remarks about militarism CBS naturally edited out); the comedy (George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Jackie Mason, Jonathan Winters, David Frye, who in one sketch plays Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon, David Steinberg, whose comedy sermonette enraged so many viewers that his second appearance never aired, The Committee, the seminal San Francisco improv group who perform on several shows). Of course there's plenty of political material about war, racism, and censorship, the Brothers portraying CBS executives as frightened old men. And there's one remarkable segment where the Brothers interview Dr. Benjamin Spock, who at the time was on trial for assisting draft resisters. The candor expressed about the Vietnam war was something you just didn't see in prime time, much less on a comedy-variety show. And viewers didn't see it, as CBS cut the Spock interview as well.

Well, there are fewer (if any) frightened old men running the media now, their suites occupied mostly by savvy, Blackberrying young men and women who are probably just as craven as the druids of yore but with a much slicker line of rationalization. It's not as if Leno or Letterman are any more hospitable to causing discomfort. Also check out the clip of Parker Posey performing "No Penis Intended," which suggests an update of SCTV's proto-feminist musical "I'm Getting My Head and Screwing It on Right, and Nobody Better Tell Me It Ain't," directed by Seth Dick III. ("Nice name, Seth," sneered Dave Thomas's Bill Needle in his caustic review.)

And be sure not to miss Self-Styled Siren's top ten list of the things she loves most about old movies.

Two items that would make my list: 1) white satin and 2) the way women in thirties films stood with their hands provocatively on their hips, their arms forming pitcher handles--a pose both beckoning and self-contained. Oh, and 3) the telephones. The ones in the phone booths, the newsroom ones that accordioned in and out on extended arms, the elegant ones that they brought to the nightclub tables. Not like today, where everyone's walking around in action films with these electronic playing cards pressed to their ears as they call in coordinates for an airstrike as Jon Voight sits in an office three thousand miles away, crinkling his eyes to convey mirthless, amused contempt for the laws that bind lesser men.

Picture my blushing joy when I opened the entertainment pages of the Times and saw myself blurbed in the ad for Twilight.* This will put me in solid with the "kids," though it might dilute my status within the intellectual establishment. Oh, who am I kidding? What "status," what "intellectual establishment"? The levees have broken and houses are being carried rapidly downstream as we cling to the roofs as best we can.

I also take a quantum of solace in the findings of Gender Analyzer, which purports to linguistically decode the sexual identity of a blogger, piercing the veil of a clever pseudonym or well-crafted persona. "Markos Moulitsas and James Wolcott will be relieved to learn that they're as masculine as masculine gets." Damn solid we're as masculine as masculine gets. We didn't need no Gender Analyzer to render that righteous verdict, bucky. Markos and I are like Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven, barely breaking a bead of sweat as we ignore Horst Bucholz's horrid overacting. It's only some of my "critics" in the right blogosphere who are unable to discern the high-tensile steel resolve and cat-like reflexes concealed by my gentle circumference and tender facade, mistaking the fine Risko illustration (in which I resemble a cross between an Aubrey Beardsley absinthe drinker and Percy Dovetonsils) for what I like to call the "real me."

Even a mach three macho machine such as myself can get a bit ennui'd. Politically, my passion is spent. It's hard to get excited about the lineup card being filled out for the incoming administration. "[T]he cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring," Alex Cockburn writes at Counterpunch. "They're dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who had hands-on time grappling with health insurance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice." But if I can't get excited about the choices so far, neither am I able to work myself up into a state of irate betrayal, as I'm seeing on some of the lefty blogs. I have a larger sense of disquietude about what's looming ahead culturally, the oncoming economic disaster that will wipe out a lot of dance and theater companies, cripple museums, and kill off print publications. A hunkered-down, bunkered-in period of cautious retrenchment smothers creative energies, and art is in what infuses life with meaning and pleasure, takes our minds off of death and paperwork. The recent passings of John Leonard and Clive Barnes underscore this uneasy sense that we are in a season of endings and closings, at the last stop before the train's taken out of service for good. The one songbird note of cheer I've received lately is the news that Keigwin + Company will be restaging Bolero NYC next summer at the Joyce Theater. If only I could hibernate until then, but such a toll that would exact on my muscle tone...

*The quote extracted from my theta brainwave Twilight meditation.

Barry Crimmins contends with an influx of armed intruders skulking the periphery of his property, dressed in camouflage gear and blessed with the brains and manners of convicted idiots. Yes, it's hunting season, where no being is safe from these strip-mall Hemingways and beer-belly Daniel Boones.

...the hunters were drenched to the bone yesterday before the weather changed last night and the temperatures fell to freezing. I was happy about this until about 9 pm Saturday when I drove down to town to pick up some supplies to see us through the siege. About halfway down the hill my headlights illuminated what looked to be a large dog. I slowed down and crept forward until I identified a fawn, and a pretty young one at that. It stood and looked back at me, lost and scared. This fresh orphan, facing hills full of coyotes and a first-ever long, cold night without a mother's warmth, would have been better off had I just sped up and ended its misery. I couldn't do that any more than I could shoot the poor thing or eat the flesh of an animal. I haven't the heart. (And I do understand that he herd needs to be culled but do you understand that the deer herd is enlarged by state wildlife agencies that do everything possible to make the countryside ideal for the animals that generate the most income from hunting licenses and for private, very influential businesses? They promote deer overpopulation to justify an annual onslaught of armed, beer-swilling mutants in my neighborhood. And it sucks.)

As I looked at the helpless babe at woods' edge, I felt as if the universe collapsed on my soul. It could only understand it felt confusion, grief and fear. I, on the other hand, knew exactly how awful things were for this little one. I was again left to the remedy of the sorely beset. This time I chose my deity more carefully since the prayer about to be offered was serious and for another. So I asked the great pacifist and lover of animals, St. Francis of Assisi, for mercy for the foundling fawn, who scooted away after looking me in the eye with eyes that sought explanations for the inexplicable.

Hunting season not only endangers deer but everything else in the wayward field of fire, even a 16-month-old child.

Incidentally, tomorrow is National Ammo Day, an annual buying spree guaranteed to excite an orgasm-a-thon across the conservative gun blog sites. I could link to a few of them so that you could check out the gruff manly fancy bluster for yourself, but why give them the satisfaction of aggravation? Let them enjoy their long winter holed up with their ammo, cans of Pringles, and Obama apprehensions as they cope with the retirement loss of Kim du Toit, the elder statesman of Elmer Fudds.

In a master stroke of counter-programming for the holiday season, Philoctetes gets the jump on the Thanksgiving feast this Saturday at 1pm by examining the famine bones and buzzard stare of Samuel Beckett in an afternoon seance devoted to his priestcraft of playwriting. (Beckett put the rigor into rigor mortis.) Among those taking part are playwright Edward Albee, actor John Turturro, and Tom Bishop, a professor and author of numerous books on French culture. I trust the panelists will not be buried up to their necks in cinders wheelbarrowed in for the occasion; that would be taking a conceptual conceit too far. Those unable to attend the event because they're preoccupied wandering the streets wondering where their economic future went will be able to view the discussion again later through Philoctetes' video library, while stay-at-homes can viewed it streamed live from the site. Upcoming in December is a roundtable on biography and autobiography featuring Nicholson Baker, Judith Thurman, Simon Winchester, and other worthies. That I may attend, depending on the refreshments.

I've been making a valiant effort to avoid Sarah Palin's nickel-coated charm offensive on cable news, subjecting myself all day on TCM to some of the most cardboard anti-Nazi Hollywood films ever perpetrated, drawing the line at a Kay Kyser comedy that cast the word "comedy" itself into disrepute. It isn't that I loathe or fear Sarah Palin. It's that she grates. If she were any more grating, she could cut cheddar. Palin as an entertainment phenomenon might be tolerable and even amusing if this were 1936 and she were a rising star in the M.G.M. stable; what delight we could take each month in our screen magazines keeping up on her romances and exploits--how she cut in front of Joan Crawford in the commissary line, initiating a sassy feud, the romantic sparks that fly whenever she and Clark Gable pass each other on the lot, the nose-wrinkling advice Myrna Loy offered her when she was a new kid just off the bus and still in her parka, and how excited she is over her upcoming role as a dance instructor in Andy Hardy Peels a Banana. But this is not 1936, the M.G.M. galaxy of stars has twinkled its last (apart from Mickey Rooney, miraculously still with us), and Sarah Palin isn't pursuing mere transient fame but actual power, a pursuit driven by a brassy assurance shielding an apparent lack of knowledge about nearly everything and a breathtaking complacency about that voluminous lack. She doesn't seem to care about what she doesn't know, it doesn't seem to register that what she doesn't know might matter and might be worth knowing even if it didn't. Her sentences seem to be missing vital ligaments when she speaks, yielding a concrete poetry similar to Rumsfeld's musings but with nil intellectual content (Rumsfeld's known unknowns and unknown unknowns at least had an ontological coherence). Now we're stuck with her twangy shtick and her family soap opera, which makes the former Clinton saga look like Les Sylphides. Just as Al Gore must live with the shame of elevating Joe Lieberman to the national stage, no act of contrition John McCain can perform will be penance enough for foisting Sarah Palin on us, subjecting us to her supreme sense of entitlement.