Wabbit Season 2059

FADE IN

EXT. SHATTERED CITY SKYLINE, IN RAIN – NIGHT

Its towers chipped and decaying, its grand thoroughfares now reservoirs for trash, a once-proud and glittering metropolis is a hollow, broken husk of its former self. Its self before GreatWar 2.0.

As we ZOOM IN to one particularly abandoned district, we see sporadic signs of life: fires burning in trash cans, bands of marauders roving potholed streets in search of victims: anyone on foot. Almost anyone.

MEDIUM LONG SHOT

Down a dimly-lit ALLEY off one of the serpentine streets, a figure some distance away blocks the rain-dappled light behind him. The figure, a menace of armor, moves forward. Its hulking shape announces: this is nobody’s victim. SLOWLY ZOOMING toward the figure, its details become apparent: A man, grizzled and grimy, wearing body armor head to foot, one panel bearing an identity label: “FUDD, HUNTER, CLASS 1.” He brandishes a weapon, an over-under 12-load Taser shotgun that glistens in the sparse overhead light. His eyes are fixed in a relentless focus. His mouth doesn’t move but it doesn't have to. We hear his thoughts, an incantation to himself, a mantra willing him to self-control.

FUDD (VOICE OVER)

Be vewwy … vewwy … quiet. I … am hunting wabbits.

From a working draft of “Fudd v Bugs 2059,” a post-apocalyptic live-action/animated reworking of the classic Looney Tunes cartoon tandem, now in development at Warner Brothers. In the sci-fi update, Elmer Fudd, a seasoned and ruthless casual hunter, has been biomechanically re-engineered by the government and tasked with capturing the last remaining mammal in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha — a rabbit — for breeding in an environmentally depleted world.

His prey: Bugs Bunny, the wily, elusive creature who makes use of the city’s subterranean spaces, and his own survival instincts, instincts technologically sharpened by his time as a test subject in an experimental U.S. military animal-testing program. It’s cat and mouse, hunter and hunted in the nightmare world of 2059.

Tobey Maguire is reportedly on the short list for the role of the gifted hare, as is Jim Carrey. Gerard Butler is being considered for the role of Elmer Fudd; Will Smith has also been approached.

Kathryn Bigelow will direct.

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Image credit: Beanjamish, deviantART.com

Health-care reform: Navigating the tunnel's end

The health-care debate that’s on the verge of becoming American history has hundreds of thousands of personal stories that distill the nation’s perilous situation on health care for its citizens into something accessible. The lofty, procedural, partisan rhetoric of the issue comes down to everyday scenarios. Like the one for Natoma Canfield, a small-businesswoman recently diagnosed with leukemia, a woman whose story typifies the bureaucratic farrago facing those millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.

Or Michael Brooks’ story. The 12-year-old Omaha boy, faced with a myofibroblastic tumor, a rare form of cancer that was unresponsive to chemotherapy, found that his family’s insurance wouldn’t cover an experimental procedure, according to KETV of Omaha. He faced a grim future until his community — from neighbors, friends and classmates to strangers wandering in off the street — rallied to gather the money for the experimental procedure. Health care by crowdsourcing: a sad sign of the times if there ever was.

It’s that kind of heart-wrenching financial improvisation that may be near an end in the United States. Sometime this week, maybe next at the very latest, President Obama expects to sign into law the most sweeping health-care legislation since Medicare, more than two generations ago, and the realization of an objective that has eluded this nation since Theodore Roosevelt first proposed it in 1912.

The caged death match Republicans have now with House Democrats hinges on so-called deeming resolutions, a procedure under which the yearlong saga of the health-care reform may finally be just about over. The resolution, shorthanded as “deem and pass,” was suggested by Rep. Louise Slaughter, chair of the House Rules Committee, and has been adopted and championed as a strategy by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.



It's the latest skirmish in the health-care warfare between the House and the Senate, the bruising and confusing legislative choreography that all these months has looked like gridlock to the American people.

The intricacies of this entirely parliamentary procedure will provoke a headache you don’t need, but Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post, breaks it down nicely:

The House is stuck having to basically pass the Senate health care bill, because the bill cannot be reconciled in conference committee. Why? Because it will be filibustered. However, House members are averse to doing anything that looks like they approve of the various side-deals that were made in the Senate -- like the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback." The House intends to remove those unpopular features in budget reconciliation, but if they pursue budget reconciliation on a standard legislative timeline -- where they pass the Senate bill outright first and then go back to pass a reconciliation package of fixes -- they'd still appear to be endorsing the sketchy side deals, and then the GOP would jump up and down on their heads.

Enter deem and pass. Under this process, the House will simply skip to approving the reconciliation fixes, and "deem" the Senate bill to be passed. By doing it this way, the Democrats get the Senate bill passed while simultaneously coming out against the unpopular features of the same.

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The conservatives won’t roll over. In recent days, the National Republican Congressional Committee took out a new sky-is-falling ad, a countdown clock in ominous blacks, whites and red counting down the time before the expected vote.

And the conservative press is up in arms. The Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece of media buccaneer Rupert Murdoch, condemned “deem and pass” as an “amazing procedural ruse,” a “two-votes-in-one gambit” and “a brazen affront” to the Constitution. The Journal mentions in passing that the procedure has been used in the past, only going back to 1998 to put it in a shallow historical context.

Review: The Word according to George (PopMatters)

Writing the book that caps your 50 years in the entertainment business, a book you know will probably serve as your valedictory address, can be a very liberating experience. You get to settle old scores, to set the record straight. You get to define the universe, or at least your universe, on your own terms. ...

George Carlin, a stand-up comedian with a refreshingly singular view of words and the modern world, was a relentless diarist, writing notes constantly in his years on the road. Over the years, he recorded conversations with Tony Hendra, author (Father Joe), satirist and early voice of the National Lampoon. Last Words, the now-published product of that 15-year oral history/literary conspiracy, is Carlin’s “sortabiography”, a spirited mashup of recollections, self-analysis and rant, both a parting gift and a parting shot. ...

Carlin’s previous books — Brain Droppings, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? and Napalm and Silly Putty — are celebrations of Carlin’s embrace of the language and his kaleidoscopic views of various aspects of the human condition.

Part raucous credo, part comic pilgrim’s progress, Last Words is Carlin’s celebration of his own human condition: its madcap cast of characters, its personal and professional resilience. It’s maybe the best evidence of how he transcended the stand-up comedy he revolutionized, ultimately becoming not so much a comedian as a conscience. ...

Read the full review at PopMatters

Michael Jack$on lives

While it’s true that, according to the old adage, “you can’t take it with you,” there’s nothing that says you can’t leave more of it behind after you’re gone.

Michael Jackson — or more accurately his estate — will soon be the beneficiary of the ways in which death can be an astute career move, almost nine months after the singer pharmaceutically shuffled off this mortal coil. News reports surfaced today that the beleaguered Jackson estate is finalizing a deal with Sony Music that guarantees the estate $200 million for 10 Jackson projects, including an album of unreleased material, to be released over the next seven years.

The deal makes it the most lucrative contract in recording history. With various sweeteners, merchandising deals and incentives related to sales, the final amount could be as much as $250 million.

“During his life, Michael's contracts set the standard for the industry,” said John Branca, the co-executor of Michael's estate, in a statement. “By all objective criteria, this agreement with Sony Music demonstrates the lasting power of Michael's music by exceeding all previous industry benchmarks."

This goes a long way to retiring the Everest of obligations, unpaid bills and lawsuits that Jackson faced before he died in June 2009, debts that some have estimated at as high as $400 million.

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One of the reasons this could pave the way for ultimately retiring those bills entirely has to do with a simple fact: a much slower burn rate. Without MJ around to spend money as fast or faster than he made it, those obligations are now pretty much a stationary target.

But for the public, it’s not about the money anyway. What piques the interest of fans, and will until sometime around 2017, is the prospect of fresh music from the pre-eminent entertainer of our time. In life and death, Michael has cast a long shadow; it’s estimated that 31 million copies of his back catalog have been sold since his passing. Like Elvis, Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix (whose latest album, “Valleys of Neptune,” was just released almost 40 years after his death), Michael enjoys a popularity that doesn’t respect the finality of the grave.

Writing in The Daily Mail Online (UK) a few days after Michael died, journalist Ian Halperin quoted a source “in Jackson’s camp” who had previously said the singer “has as many as 200 unpublished songs that he is planning to leave behind for his children when he dies.” If that’s true, there may be even more MJ projects than those under the scope of this new deal.

It’s a prospect that’s bittersweet: Michael Jackson may approach his previous sales and popularity when he’s no longer around to enjoy it. But for his legions of fans, and for those people who’ve never heard a note of his music, Michael Jackson may soon regain his status of long ago: the producer of a sound and vision as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

“Everything old is new again, “ Peter Allen once observed. Yo, Death, where is thy goodbye?

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Image credits: Michael Jackson: Associated Press.

The ‘black agenda’ and its discontents

Rev. Jeremiah Wright resurfaced last week in the pages of The Washington Post. In an interview with the controversial minister published Thursday, Wright spoke of how his life had changed since the 2008 presidential campaign, when the fire of his homiletic past and his proximity to President Obama before he became president was an issue — a kind of “what did he preach and when did he preach it” style of character assassination by association that went on far too long.

“It is unrealistic to think that one person can change the mess that this country has gotten into, but to pick on him is like picking on one of my kids,” Wright told The Post. “I have been knowing him for 20 years. I have not stopped loving him because of what the press did, and to see him beat up on because of things he is not responsible for is painful.”

This statement from the 2010 model Jeremiah Wright, defending Obama, seeks to calm some of the troubled racial waters of the campaign — waters stirred up as much by intragenerational black American politics in general as by any specific utterance by Rev. Wright from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Wright’s statement was his Kum Ba Yah coda on his part in the intraracial conflict between Obama, vanguard of a new style of black leadership at the levers of power, and those of Wright’s generation for whom the old identity-dependent tools and strategies for fighting America’s racial ills have been mostly working just fine.

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Others from that generation have been heard from again.

In recent weeks, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have stepped up challenges to President Obama’s domestic agenda, exasperated at what they see as a lack of attention paid to issues specifically related to African Americans navigating the shoals of a ruinous recession.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan told Politico that the White House is “not listening” to black lawmakers.

“I don’t think we expected anything to change overnight because we had an African-American in the White House, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a constituency that is suffering,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, told The New York Times. “I think he could do more, and he will do more.”

And off Capitol Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, author, lecturer, Georgetown University sociologist and an Obama supporter, is feeling let down: “All these teachable moments, but the professor refuses to come to the class,” he told The New York Times on Feb. 8.

It all came to a head, in a way, on the Feb. 23 edition of Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio call-in show, where Sharpton and guest co-host Charles Ogletree, author and Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, spoke with a caller: Tavis Smiley, author, lecturer and presumptive general of the new-media-literate black empowerment movement. Their contentious exchange hinged to a large degree of how much responsibility Obama has for advancing what they characterized as a “black agenda.” Smiley, a longtime critic of Obama as a candidate and as president, wants that attention paid.



On a recent broadcast of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, seeking to justify such special treatment for black people, Smiley threw out one of those questions that was meant to stifle all debate coming afterwards: “Isn’t the African American agenda the human agenda?”

Kris Broughton, writing at Politic365, wasn’t having any:

“Tavis Smiley’s rhetorical question during his monologue last week on [Tom Joyner] is a sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Smiley would do well to heed his own advice, and learn to recognize that the White House efforts to back initiatives aimed at African Americans won’t always come with peel-and-stick “black agenda” labels.”

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The debate over the president’s fidelity to the black cause is the latest proof of a split in black American politics, a politics of two minds and approaches right now: One side calls for allegiance to the textbook civil-rights agenda, and to the strategy of identity-focused solutions to national problems. The other side seeks to incorporate the so-called black agenda into the wider necessaries of the nation’s business.

The old guard’s thinking necessarily provokes the question of what challenges now confronting black and minority Americans don’t confront everyone in the country. Among the most oppressing of them — jobs, home foreclosures, health-care reform — it’s not a matter of these issues hitting blacks separate from everyone else; it’s a matter of degree.

But the idea that a black agenda exists and should exist feeds into a hierarchical consideration, the idea of who should best define and articulate that agenda. That’s led to a kind of loyalty-oath reasoning that’s gone on for generations in black America, an us-versus-them attitude that’s troubling.

Redhead rising: Conan O'Brien on tour

While Jay Leno takes up his old perch on NBC's “Tonight” show, Conan O’Brien, the show's former host, is picking up his act and taking it on the road. Literally. The result — a multicity comedy tour that’s likely to sell out before it even begins — is a new visibility for a late-night TV talk show host who’s about to slip the surly bonds of his time-slot, his medium and the restrictions of his noncompete contract in ways that should be unsettling to Team Leno.

"The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour," billed on the Team Coco Web site as “a night of music, comedy, hugging and the occasional awkward silence,” opens April 12 in Eugene, Ore., and meanders all over on its 30 dates, stopping in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Chicago, Boston and New York City, as well as other cities (and a stop at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn., on June 11). The tour ends in Atlanta in June, but new dates may be added. American Express is offering its cachet as a tour sponsor.

It’s not a matter of straight numbers of people, of course; in any apples-to-apples comparison, the audiences attending Coco’s shows will be dwarfed by the millions who watch Leno on television. But that’s the small-ball math. Sure as night follows day, the O’Brien shows performed live from April until June will contain the kernel of what shows up when he’s no longer legally prohibited from being funny on television, on O’Brien’s next late-night venture — almost certain to be on Fox, sometime this fall.

(And don’t forget the secondary revenue stream that’s probably right around the corner: the opportunity to buy the Conan tour performances on DVD, or the audio tracks from those dates as iTunes downloads — just in time for the holidays.)

O’Brien is field-testing new comedic material not in a nightclub setting but at the wider, panoramic scale of the stadium. Conan occupies a curious piece of the cultural real estate: part folk hero, part rock star, part walking cartoon, part savvy advertiser of himself. This concert-tour runup to a fresh late-night presence on TV on a new network raises the bar on everyone’s late-night act, especially Leno’s.

The old new “Tonight” show host has been game for the game: new set (heavy on the wood), new theme, new titles. But if the show’s physical look is updated, more or less, the semiotics of “Tonight” under Leno practically scream yesterday. He needs to counter that, somehow. Count on it: Sprinkled among the concertgoers at any of Conan’s 30 dates (including Universal City, Calif.) will be Leno scouts, reporting back to the boss with all the intel they can get.

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The prices for regular seats on the Conan tour aren’t cheap, about what you’d expect for a better rock concert. For the April 18 show at McCaw Hall in Seattle, prices range from $37.50 (second-tier box) to $77.50 (orchestra). For the June 1 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, tickets sell for from $44 to $84 apiece.

But that’s for “regular seats.” Some folks at digg and elsewhere in the vast, interwoven and multivaried blogosphere are a bit upset at the tiered pricing for some of the other perks available. For $250, you get the “Hot Seat” package. The “amenities” for this deal include one premium seat in the first 12 rows, exclusive tchotchkes and a “collectible laminate.”

For $500 a head you get the “Hot Sound” package: all of the above plus access to the sound check and a premium center orchestra seat in the first five rows.


And for $695 a pop, “you get it all!” : All of the above plus a front-row center orchestra seat and a meet & greet with Coco himself (photo op included).

And TMZ.com reports that O’Brien won’t earn a dime from the tour. TMZ says O’Brien “is doing the whole thing so he can employ his former ‘Tonight Show’ staff.

“We're told roughly 40 people have been hired to work on the production -- many of whom are ‘Tonight Show’ alums,” the Web site reported.

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On the one hand it’s easy to applaud Conan for doing the right thing by his staff, doing his best to keep them employed in the middle of a very sour economy.

But looking at it another way, it’s hard to square such efforts for his production staff when the prices for regular seats and the perk-laden special packages seek to pull so much money out of consumers working like hell to stay afloat in the middle of a very sour economy.

And nobody on Coco’s production staff drove off the NBC lot for the last time as a pauper, anyway; Conan’s full crew of about 200 people were reportedly paid $12 million in severance by NBC — averaging, a tidy $60,000 each. Some of that crew are no doubt about to work for him on the tour as well.

But for Conan loyalists, it’s no big deal. They’re already out in force ready to help O’Brien further his hold on the popular imagination. They sense what may be coming:

Someone commented at TMZ: “He's smart enough to capitalize on the goodwill that came from being a folk hero. If he had been given half the chances Leno was given when he started, he'd have done fine. I've got my tickets, and I've little doubt it will be a fun, spontaneous show that captures a great moment. Haters can stay home and watch Leno recycle material for free.”

More than Letterman would, more then Leno could, Conan O’Brien is effectively repackaging the late-night comedian as a prime-time concert attraction. In one swift move, he may be about to break more of the rules he started violating when he started out years ago.

A late-night television talk-show host building his audience, and his reputation, without actually being on late-night television. Imagine that.

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Image credits: Conan poster, Coco T-shirt: sirmikeofmitchell.com. O'Brien: NBC.