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Monday, August 29, 2005

Just walked across The Plaza to Collected Works to pick up this book they were holding for me. On the way I noted what seemed to be an inordinate number of people sitting in parked cars. Like a lot of them. In some cases, entire groups. No real new news on Hurricane Katrina; I am probably just not looking in the right place. Noam Chomsky would probably not approve of my obsessive fascination with this storm (when I interviewed him it was right after the tsunami and we talked about how the media gets all hyped up on these disasters while ignoring the everyday disasters and suffering that's less sexy). I am definitely prone to obsessive hypedupedness (can't possibly be real word) when BIG things are going on. (Hence, la profession). Actually, I worked at Collected Works during the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill stuff and used to pretend to be rearranging the books on the shelf where the speakers were so I could listen to the coverage. (I have no idea why I am mentioning this except that I was thinking about it when I went to pick up my book.) Anyway, back to people sitting in parked cars…I guess there's no reason to assume there is anything nefarious about this (aside from a tendency to assume things are nefarious).
Speaking of nefarious, last night's MTV Awards were really awful and despite my LOVE of popculture, no matter how awful, I was pretty grossed out by the excessiveness in combination with lack of inspiration (one or the other, I'm thinking. Either bring the bling but make it a showstopper, or keep it simple and short). This was just embarassing and I kept imagining people in other countries that don't have food or water watching the awards (a ridiculous image, obviously, since I doubt they'd have cable TV if they didn't have food or water, but you know what I mean) watching this just bombast and it made me feel sort of ashamed of everything. Also, the RKelly segment, if you haven't already read about it, was unequivocally insane. And, you know, not only do I like pop culture, but I really like hip hop, but there was very little that was likeable going on here. Of course, my expectations were probably too high (even though they were fairly low).