[no subject]

In the basement office -- a.k.a. Download Central --
between plays of usual faves CKY and Jimmy Eat World
-- I'm hearing Baba O'Riley off the Who's Next album
rattling through the floor. This is the album to which
I first played air guitar at 13 . (Do kids play air
guitar anymore?). 

Michael gets most of his gossip/news from his pals and
classmates on an online chatroom. And while it may be
news that Who guitarist Pete Townshend -- he of the
trademark windmill -- was arrested for possession of
child pornography, that news hasn't cracked their
lineup in the wake of more pressing issues like "What
sucks?" and "What's lame?" 

Like many fans of a certain age, I'm struck dumb by
the charges against Townshend and hope he's somehow
proven innocent. Child sex abuse is unquestionably a
low-water mark of human behaviour, and about all I can
say about the worldwide police action against it is I
wish it was expanded to include child labour, and
they'd start arresting Nike wearers. 

My opinion is that the shoddy way children are treated
is part of the larger sickness of our species, that
moves us to cheer the powerful and disdain the
powerless. 

But in a society where the marketplace dictates
morality, guilt and innocence is fairly fluid. R.
Kelly is arrested for taking part in a sex video with
an underaged girl, and his latest album is topping the
R&B charts. Michael Jackson -- who, it should be said,
has never been convicted of anything except being
very, very strange -- has, according to Sony, seen a
fivefold increase in sales since having his worst face
put forward in the lurid Brit doc Living With Michael
Jackson. Roman Polanski is up for an Oscar a
quarter-century after fleeing a conviction of
statutory rape and his erstwhile victim has written an
article on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times
saying his work should be judged on its own merits. 

And maybe it should. These are either very forgiving
or very apathetic times, judging by the lack of
outrage over just about anything. 

We tell ourselves it used to be different, but of
course we rarely exercised our outrage en masse,
because the details of people's personal lives were
practically quarantined from their accomplishments.
Tacit codes of omerta by the press kept Ty Cobb from
being revealed as an ugly human being in too many ways
to count. JFK's womanizing would have killed him
politically had everyone not been "onside," and Bing
Crosby and Joan Crawford have only posthumously become
symbols of the hell some children experience behind
silent celebrity walls. 

So is Mildred Pierce a worse film for it? Or Going My
Way? Because Einstein psychologically terrorized his
wife, does the Theory of Relativity suddenly not add
up? Does Cobb's erstwhile hit record deserve an
asterisk in the same way Pete Rose's does? Is gambling
worse than brutality and racism? 

There are people who do hold celebrities up to high
standards. My friend Liz Braun will deny this, but my
observation is it doesn't exactly help in her books if
a celebrity is recently divorced or been caught
fooling around (Hellooo, Harrison Ford!). Worse if
he's divorced, leaving children behind. 

I suppose that would be most people's immediate
reaction. But unlike kiddie porn, homes broken by
divorce are out in the open and sadly ordinary. And
after 20 years of covering entertainment, I've come to
believe there really is something about sudden fame
that kills relationships. I've personally known three
different people who've gone to L.A. with Toronto
wives and kids, attained some measure of fame and
gotten divorced. One is such a straight arrow, I still
can't believe it. 

But again, it doesn't matter. In this day and age, is
there anybody whose career has been hurt by a divorce?


Next week, Chicago will be taking a run at the Oscar
podium with a record 13 nominations as a launching
pad. To recap, this is a musical about two women who
coolly ride their notoriety as murderesses to showbiz
fame. And could there be any time in history when this
scenario seemed less unlikely? 

In the case of Townshend, the real jury vote may come
with that next Who album (might I suggest as a title
"Who's Left?"). And in the case of my son, ignorance
is still bliss.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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