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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Meghan Daum and Rob Walker

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Meghan Daum

Ally McBeal vs. Chow Yun Fat

Posted Friday, March 2, 2001, at 11:56 AM ET

Rob,

A reader e-mailed you about Titus? Can you forward it to me? I still have no idea what that show is about. Contrary to what I've displayed in this correspondence, I don't actually watch that much TV. It's just that I don't have cable, and therefore when I do turn it on, I end up watching whatever crud is on the four channels I do get. (Not even CBS comes in.) In order to get cable, I'd have to get a satellite dish, and I'm much too vain about my yard for that kind of thing.

I want to pick up on a thread from your first message yesterday and say, "a pox on Kathleen Norris for editing Leaving New York: Writer's Look Back"! That was MY idea for an anthology. Actually I've wanted to do a sort of Hello and Goodbye To All That. The first half would be essays from writers about coming to New York--the slush pile job, the five roommates, the heady nights at the White Horse--and the second half would be pieces about leaving--the overpriced studio, the cost of private school, the folding of Details. Except that my eyes are glazing over just describing it. Maybe it's better left to Kathleen Norris, who, by the way, is a wonderful writer who wrote a wonderful book called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She makes my migration to Nebraska look like a move from Manhattan to Queens. She left New York for a small town in northwestern South Dakota and has lots of interesting things to say about isolation and cloisterdom and the ways that we perceive the idea of "connectedness." I'd recommend it if you're into that kind of thing. And if you're into the opposite kind of thing (at least formally) I'd recommend My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies 1950-1998 by George Trow, which basically traces the development of the public imagination from 1950 onward. It's a history of the cultural influences that shaped the way industrialized people absorb information, a sort of flow chart of how Winston Churchill begat William Randolph Hearst, who begat the tabloid sensibility, which begat the backlash against and subsequent reformation of the tabloid sensibility, which Trow identifies as that bleak 1970s aesthetic of the loser as hero. (He cites Dog Day Afternoon; I might cite Cassavetes.) This lead to the tabloidization of the ordinary (he cites Kato Kaelin; I might cite Richard Hatch or, pardon me, Darva Conger) wherein we are relying on the anti-heroes we anointed in the post-Vietnam era to come through for us as something other than the hollow media hostages they are. The result? Utter disappointment.

I bring this up because a) it appears to be in direct keeping with the Temptation Island phenomenon, where you have people like me decrying an ordinary waitress from Atlanta because she failed to demonstrate the expected heroism of breaking up with her boyfriend and b) the kind of cultural free associating that (ideally) would gel into some sort of Larger Theme is the very thing we're supposed to be doing here at the "Breakfast Table." We're supposed to take the news or reality television or the self-exiled New Yorker theme and show how the small pieces fit together to reflect a more general cultural mood. And you know what? It's hard! I don't know if that's a testament to Trow's assertions, if our occasional exasperation with the opinion mill is literally the fallout of an overly disparate social and political context (and this is Trow's signature theory, which he laid out in his 1978 essay "Within the Context of No Context") or if, truly, it is more fun to imagine Ally McBeal having it out with Chow Yun Fat than it is to opine about deficit reduction.

Of course, it could also be the result of my not having followed the budget plan very closely.

Well, off to the gym!

Meghan

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Meghan Daum

Ally McBeal vs. Chow Yun Fat

Posted Friday, March 2, 2001, at 11:56 AM ET
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Meghan Daum's essay collection, My Misspent Youth, will be published in March. Rob Walker, a journalist living in New Orleans, writes Slate's "Moneybox" column.
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Reader Comment From The Fray:


I have a suggestion for some 'reality based' TV programs. How about Refugee Boat? We could take contestants and put them in a third world, war torn country and give them thirty days to figure out how to make a raft, find food and get set afloat before despotic soldiers order them to dig their own graves.

Or, how about Street Survival? In this one, the contestants must survive three months on the street with only the clothes on their backs and no identification. They would be required to jump trains, sleep outdoors in alleyways and in shelters, and generally try to survive their new found compatriots, welfare rolls and dumpster diving.

And, how about this beauty? Prison Guards would be a reality based show where one would become a prison guard in one of the most feared prisons in the United States. In this show contestants get thirty days training and then must work as a prison guard in the most violence-prone sectors of the prison for at least two months. Talk about ratings! I know that I would personally be glued to the screen.

Let's give vanity and greed a real price. Instead of paying people to play the mind games most of us have to wade through in our regular work week, let's up the ante a little. I can't wait until the spotlights burn and we get to see one of these numbnuts have to face a freight train's worth of trouble rushing headlong into them.

--Rogue

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