Good evening. Today is Wednesday, September the 24th, and this is my last broadcast. Yesterday I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decay, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God bullshit. And then, there's the noble man bullshit; that man is a noble creature that can order his own world; who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for thirty-three years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see...

What I found especially interesting about the film, which was visually as bland as its color scheme suggests, was how dated it felt in some ways, and then suddenly how fresh. The scenes with the network execs negotiating a contract for the Mao Tse-Tung Hour with Laureen Hobbs and the Ecumenical liberation Army led by the Great Ahmed Kahn are pure gold, but the comedy is of a kind that no longer exists in the movies.

There are elements of the plot—the triangle of Diane Christensen, William Holden's Max Schumacher, and Schumacher's wife, played by Beatrice Straight (who won the Oscar for her five minutes on screen here)—that are not only played straight, but are to be taken very seriously. The scene for which Straight won her Oscar is not comedy, but high drama. The characters are complex. The intergenerational relationship between Diane and Max forms the moral core of the film, and it isn't funny at all.

That's what's jarring in the end. The marriage of this clearly absurd scenario and how it plays out, with serious explorations of character, realistically portrayed. I have to say I found the scenes with Dunaway and Holden a little hard to take, myself, and I think the film may have done without the subplot altogether, and may have benefited from the more consistent tone it would have had without it. This combination is so difficult to finesse, I can hardly remember other films that have self-consciously attempted it. There are two films here, essentially, and when they come together in the end, it's not seamless, by any means.

But these are minor points in a film with a number of outrageous, brilliant insights into the place of media in American life.

There was actually a feature in the Globe this weekend about how "new research concludes that the sensationalism sweeping local news is bad for ratings."

[A] study published earlier this year - the most exhaustive ever conducted of local television news - suggests that the industry has severely underestimated its audience. In an unprecedented survey, a team of researchers under the auspices of the Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the minute-by-minute Nielsen ratings for newscasts from 154 local television stations over five years, more than 33,000 news stories in all.

What they found is that quality sells. The sensationalism of late-1990s WHDH, the study suggests, does bring good ratings. But well-done, substantive TV news proves just as popular - and often earns even better ratings.

Imagine that. We're not actually the morons we all think we are because we believe everything we see on TV.

PBS is no better, by the way, as far as I'm concerned. They've seriously dumbed-down over the last decade. I mean, how many hours of freakin Antiques Road Show can you watch? And why do they call it the MacNeil News Hour when it's hardly fifty minutes long, with seven minutes of commercials on either end.

And that's another thing. Some time in the nineties they started running commercials on public TV. flat-out, full-on commercials. And yet they keep calling it commercial-free. And the commercials are from the most noxious, evil, cheatingest, polutingest corporations on the planet. AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron.

It's almost like they're mocking public TV viewers, who still refuse to admit that PBS is commercial TV, funded in part by the multinationals we're supposed to oppose.

Granted, PBS bunches their ads all up in the beginning and the end of programming, and have left the middle for their nattering, never-ending fundraisers.

Radio's not much better. I do some part-time bookkeeping for a small business, and I was there yesterday afternoon, and we had Terry Gross on, and she was interviewing the supremely annoying, supremely boring Peter Sagal, host of Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! and author of a new book called Vice, a tribute to either his appalling naiveté or appalling intellectual dishonesty—I can't tell for sure which—and, if the interview is any indication, full of condescending observations about "those people"—"those people" being people who have sex.

Fear not, Sagal manages to escape the "orgy room" uncontaminated!

Newsflash: "Neurotic, Balding, Middle Aged Jew Discovers Sex is Endlessly Fascinating and Endlessly Boring!" Gosh. How orginal.

Sagal's trips through uncharted waters to the undiscovered countries of strip bars and swingers' clubs is not voyeurism, Terry's quick to reassure us, because it was all "research for his book"! Well, that's a relief. We would hate to think he had been morally or intellectually corrupted by actual participation in life. (Terry tells us: "he did briefly become an active participant in the gluttony," tee hee.)

NPR needs a shot of testosterone. Click and Clack's about as ballsy as they get, God love 'em. There could be nothing worse for the mummies of the CPB, PBS, and NPR than getting down and dirty and living lustfully. Their sense of decorum rivals the Puritanism of the religious right, but without quite as much passion.  I can't listen to NPR for more than ten or fifteen minutes—I can feel my testicles retracting.

During this dreadful interview I kept asking myself, what's the niche audience here? Time-warped neutered neurotics with verbal tics (he must say "so to speak," and "shall we say" about a hundred times over the course of the piece)? Mummies. Dust in their veins.

After I was finished with work, I dropped into Dudley Square, where Tuesdays and Thursdays The Food Project has a farm stand with fresh produce...


Now these people aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. The produce is beautiful. It's cheap (my friend and I got two big bags of fruits and vegetables for fifteen bucks total). And there's such a feeling of goodwill among the volunteers and participants in the program. The kids are lovely. Glowing with pride. (I know it’s not radiation, because the Food Project is organic.)

I had visited their roof garden at BMC, which I can actually see from my primary care physician's waiting room, earlier. Looks great:


Aside from the Food Project's little farm stand, there's actually a lot going on in Dudley Square these days. Construction everywhere. It's all part of a revitalization plan that has been somewhat needlessly controversial. Last year the Globe reported on fears amongst some long-time residents that "revitalization equals gentrification," but it doesn't.

See, gentrification is when gay men come to your neighborhood en masse, buy all of your old houses, fix them up, open a couple of overpriced restaurants, reroute the Pride Parade down your old street, and then sell everything a few years later to straight white people at a huge profit, and move to the suburbs, grumbling all the while that the "breeders" are taking over everything.

Revitalization, on the other hand, is when the government comes in, builds new housing, and leaves. No gay men. No parades. No "breeders." There's really no way to get the two processes confused. What's happening in Dudley Square is genuine revitalization, not anything even remotely akin to gentrification. The fact that Dudley Squarians are calling threats of a Walgreens and Expressions (whatever in the world that is) moving in "gentrification"—well, it borders on a slur, is all I can say.

I noticed yesterday that the William E. Carter School, which borders the T tracks at Mass Ave., has finished construction of its lovely "Sensory Garden Outdoor Classroom"...


William E. Carter is a public school serving profoundly developmentally delayed multi-handicapped kids. This outdoor classroom has facilities for learning and play, including music-making, gardening, and a swing set built to accommodate children with handicaps. And as you can see from the picture, it's a beautiful facility in what was not too long ago a nondescript parcel (to put it nicely).

Had a big, fat steak and a couple of beers with a buddy in the evening, to celebrate that I was infectious-disease-free, and round off the near-perfect, beautiful autumn day that was. So much going on out there in the world. And it's good to know that sometimes—albeit on rare occasions—you don't have to be mad as hell to not take it anymore. You just have to be willing to get your hands a little dirty.