• The exodus of established stars from the decaying music industry continues, with Madonna signing a concert management company, not a record company, to distribute her next few CDs. Other artists, including space-heater heir Trent Reznor, are going further and selling direct to fans.
• That quintessential “legacy media” company, NBC, is buying up Oxygen (one of the last big non-conglomerate-owned cable channels) and vacating its historic studios in Beautiful Downtown Burbank. Under California laws intended to preserve media-biz jobs, the network has to offer the lot to a buyer that’ll keep it operating.The Tonight Show will move to the Universal Pictures lot, which NBC also now owns; the NBC News bureau, the KNBC-TV local news, and Access Hollywood will move to a new building nearby. The other network show still made on the Burbank lot, Days of Our Lives, is rumored to be ending in ’09.

  But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.

• Get ready for more Letterman “Network Time Killer” segments: The movie and TV industries are bracing for the first writers’ strike since 1988. The difference this time: The networks and cable channels might let a strike go on for a while, running a bunch of cheap reality shows instead of scripted fare.
• Our pal Sherman Alexie is in the running for a National Book Award. It’s for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a “young adult” novel about a Spokane Reservation teen who finds himself an outsider everywhere he goes.It’s also got fabulous illustrations by another of our ol’ pals, the one-n’-only Ellen Forney. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer folks.
• Looking for an industry even more moribund than recorded music? Try mass-market beer. Miller has already merged with South African Breweries; Coors has merged with Molson. Now both seek to merge their respective U.S. operations.The deal would turn the once competitive domestic swill market into a duopoly between “MillerCoors” and Anheuser-Busch. (The Pabst brands are now owned by a marketing company that contracts out its production to Miller.)

  I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.

  Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”

• As the world gets hotter, it also gets humid-er.
• Ann Coulter inanity of the day: Now sez she wishes all Jews to “perfect” themselves, by becoming Christians.
• Office whoopee? Go right ahead, say many companies. Just don’t try to cover up the aroma by burning microwave popcorn in the break room.
• While other commentators wax nostalgic about the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, P-I business columnist Bill Virgin gushes undeserved laurels on the semicentennial of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (that other favorite novel of male virgins everywhere).Let’s compare n’ contrast, shall we?

  Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.

  But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.

  Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.

  Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.

  Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.

  But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.

  (P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)

…just how “progressive” a left-of-center web site can be if said site is turning a profit but not paying its writers.

On one level, David Lynch’s brief memoir/manifesto Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is, like most of Lynch’s body of work, bewildering.

On another level, like most of Lynch’s body of work, it makes perfect sense by its own individualistic sense of logic.

The bewildering part is when Lynch frequently segues into endorsement spots for Transcendental Meditation. He’s practiced it for almost as long as he’s practiced filmmaking, and now has his own “David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.”

I’m sure Lynch has sincerely benefitted from his TM practice. It’s a minor shame he takes the movement’s PR lines at face value. For some reason I’d expected more healthy skepticism from him. But instead he waxes enthusiastic about the “unified field” and a thousand meditators in one town miraculously reducing the crime rate.

I’m sure Lynch’s daily meditation habit helps to ground his mind, refresh his creative juices, and enable him to withstand the massive stresses that face any Hollywood player.

I’m not convinced the TM system is, by itself, any more effective than any other meditative regime. However, any human discipline can be more effectively executed with instruction and guidance, such as that provided by the TM organization’s professional trainers.

Catching the Big Fish is beautifully designed, and beautifully written. Just as in his screenplays, which seldom let dialogue get in the way of imagery, his prose is short and sweet and directly propels the narrative line.

Lynch talks only a little about his films, explaining at one point that he doesn’t want his comments to overshadow the works themselves. (This is in a piece about why he doesn’t like DVD commentary tracks.)

When he does talk about his films, it’s in the form of little vignettes. Befitting his early training as a painter, his stories in the book are all about stringing together a succesison momentary images.

He does talk about his new digital-video feature, Inland Empire, and why he’s turned permanently to shooting on video. Previously famous for painstakingly crafting the perfect shot, now Lynch is a total convert to digital video’s flexibility, its versatility, its economy, and its capability for unlimited retakes and experimentation.

And, as you might expect, he discusses the apparent contradiction between his TM-fueled drive for “bliss” and the dark, often violent content in his works:

“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and omst films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad….It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”

And, I LOVE what Lynch says about “world peace” as something we should work for, not dismissively joke about.

On this day, which has predictably and tragically become an annual call to fear, that’s as good a message as any:

“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one.

Peace.”

So did that granddaddy of all most-frequently-shoplifted-by-stoners novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

I didn’t used to understand what all the Kerouac alterna-celebrity hype was all about. I’d read On the Road and some of his other books; but the rambling odes to young-adult wild oat sowing failed to inspire awe in me.

Sure, he’d lived an adventurous life (until he became a bloated drunken burnout). But I’ve never given a damn about a writer’s gossip life, only about his/her actual writing.

(Hence, I’m not the best person to share your worshipful odes to the lowlife legends of Kesey, Bukowski, Nin, and especially “Hunter.” Talk to me after you’ve read their works.)

Then I attended the Kerouac monologue bio-play at the old Velvet Elvis theater. Soon thereafter, I discovered Kerouac’s Playboy essay, “Origins of the Beat Generation.”

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Kerouac, I learned, was reared in Boston to Quebecois parents.

Kerouac’s beat dichotomy of hipsters vs. squares was really the great Canadian dichotomy of earthy Quebeckers vs. stuffy Ontarians!

With that revelation, I understood. Kerouac’s works were only partly romans a clef about himself and his friends. They were mostly rambling, improvised love songs to the people, places, and things he loved, to the America of hot jazz, R&B (not its teenybopper dilution as rock n’ roll), blue jeans, the long lonesome highway, drinkin’, whorin’, and all your educated-straight-white-male pleasures.

All this is a prelude to David Mills’s Guardian essay contrasting Kerouac, Wm. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.

Mills’s premise: Like certain later cultural scenes, folks who happened to be in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily make the same stuff.

The gay Ginsberg and the then-closeted gay Burroughs, Mills claims, had a lot more at stake in their personal revolts against Eisenhower/squaresville America.

Burroughs, the most formalistically-minded artiste of the three, was particularly able to hold his philosophical and aesthetic principles as the society around him churned.

But Mills believes Kerouac, the meat-and-potatoes straight guy who’d documented the adventures of his more overtly freaky friends, came to feel left behind, or even betrayed, as the Beat worldview was commercialized into hippie-dippie hedonism. All this led, at least indirectly, to his drink-sodden premature demise in 1969. Ginsberg and Burroughs, meanwhile, remained resolute and active into the 1990s.

As an old college radio new-waver, I heartily preferred Burroughs’s staccato rhythms and imaginative dystopian fantasies.

The latter-day Ginsberg? Those amateur performances of giddy song-poems lauding the allure of underage boys? Not my idea of significant art.

That leaves Kerouac. Many have superficially adored his works. I superficially dismissed it. I’ve since learned to appreciate it, and its evocation of a world that had already passed by the time On the Road came out.

Austin cartoonist Ethan Persoff is posting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s pioneering (founded 1958) magazine of committed satire and radical thought.

Krassner was one of the progenitors of hippie-era ribald masculine humor (despite having been born way back in 1932). Much of the Realist material has been anthologized in book form, but to really “get” it you need to see it in its Persoff-provided original context (32-page newsprint magazines with few pictures and no ads).

One just-posted 1961 issue contains the following unsigned one-liner within its back-page filler column: “Ever wonder if some of the pious souls who talk about exporting democracy really just want to get it the hell out of this country?”

…on writing a Kurt Vonnegut remembrance, what with all the verbal tonnage that gets generated whenever a “Sixties Generation Icon” (SGI) dies.

But note must be made of a particularly vile obit segment on the Fox Pseudo-News Channel. As you watch the linked clip, remember: This was a taped “actuality” piece, not a live rant by a commentator. This is from the part of the channel’s output that’s still billed as fair-n’-balanced.

If you can’t stomach watching it, I’ll tell you what you already suspect: James Rosen totally trashes the beloved author and everything he stood for, dismissing Vonnegut as a morose loser whose refusal to conform to right-wing ideological obedience sealed his pathetic, irrelevant fate.

Now: What I have to say about Vonnegut. His SGI status seemed odd to me. Vonnegut was well past 30 by ’68. He was an old-school Eugene Debs socialist. His novels and stories were sad/angry/brutal, not mellow or fluffy or self-aggrandizing. He never set himself up as anybody’s guru.

Like Stephen King, Vonnegut learned his craft selling short stories to mass entertainment magazines, back when fiction was still a big part of most big mags’ menus. It was there that he learned all the little details of comic timing, of repetition, of strong characterizations and brisk plots. He learned how to be both populist and popular.

The “So it goes” fatalism pinned on him by some obit writers was actually an attitude he’d been reacting against in his work. No, Mr. Rosen, Vonnegut wasn’t a defeatist cynic. He was an angry young man who stayed angry in his old age, and deservedly so.

He was also an artist who, in his wit and his inventiveness and his unbending adherence to moral principles, provided an aesthetic vision of how the world ought to be, even as his plots revealed/symbolized the sorry state of the world as it was.

…in the ol’ reality-based commuity, folks. Columnist Molly Ivins has succumbed to cancer at 62. The Texas tornado was among Bush’s earliest and strongest observers/opponents, and never veered from her well-spoken progressive populist stance. She’s already missed.

…Here’s a ’40s-era abridged and illustrated version of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The original book was an American “free market” economist’s thesis on how “centralized planning” would always lead to one or another flavor of fascism. Hayek (no relation to Salma) clearly intended an anti-liberal (specifically anti-New Deal), pro-libertarian statement. But, at least in this condensed version, it’s eerily prescient about modern pseudo-“conservative” ideology.

…points out exactly where the American left made its big wrong turn, in learning “to love ‘identity’ and ignore inequality.”

The longtime P-I consumer-action and trivia columnist really was the total embodiment of the trenchcoat-and-fedora newspaperman, and a perfect gentleman to boot.

…Jim Emerson really needs to get a better picture of himself on his site, but the content makes up for it–a veritable cornucopia of film-related fascinations. Chief among his current obsessions: the opening shots of favorite films.

…one of the most explicit yet poetic sets of reasons for “Why I love women.”

Weeks after art critic Regina Hackett quoted Dale Chihuly saying “pig shit,” theater critic Joe Adcock quotes playwright Ki Gottberg referring to two of her characters as “hairy muthafuckas.”

…the art of fiction in the U.S. is stagnating; particularly the short story, a “dead form” which has “exhausted the conditions for its existence.” Her Rx: “Write long novels, pointless novels. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things. Dear young writers, write with dignity, not in guilt.”

Remember when we told you about Adele Ferguson, the troglodyte local political columnist who returned to infamy with a little piece about the goodness of slavery? Thanks to negative national publicity spread by weblogs, her editor has announced her contract won’t be renewed.