Of Dead Presidents, Popes, and Pop Stars

This Friday, the body of Michael Jackson will be on public display at Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. Gary, Indiana, would like the body, or would like to be next in line to receive the body. Gary Mayor Rudy Clay thinks the corpse would be a great addition to a mass public memorial to be held on July 10th at the U. S. Steel Yard that is home to the Gary Southshore Railcats.

Gary, one of the most tragically blighted urban areas in the U. S., is Jackson's hometown. Mayor Clay said that he "believed the body would lie in state here." He sounds quite optimistic about Jackson's final tour, yet one wonders if Mayor Clay realizes that Jackson cannot technically lie in state unless Barack Obama designates (strictly, a Capitol Rotunda viewing), because he is not the current President nor was he the former President. But this is a petty semantic quibble and, obviously, the term is elastic when a popular figure of Jackson's fame is the body in question.

Popes lie in state in the Vatican.

Jackson will also not lie in honor, a designation reserved for non-Presidents who are distinguished Americans, unless Congress deems it so. Lying in honor is also conducted at the Rotunda. Rosa Parks lay in honor, as did two Capitol police officers who were killed in the line of duty in 1998.

Jackson can, theoretically, lie in repose, "repose" meaning "death." Anyone dead can and does, although the term as used in the United States is often interchangeable with lying in state.

This is very confusing.

Ronald Reagan made a final lap around the U. S. upon his death, appearing both in California and in Washington. Ronald Reagan, however, wasn't drawn as a cartoon character.

There is a Disney-esque, freak-show vibe surrounding the planned viewings. Jackson in a glass coffin, the glass Prince of American Pop, broken into a million tiny pieces by opiates, an asshole of a father, allegations of molestation, and a secretive, self-protective lifestyle now said to have involved a fake relationship with a chimpanzee. His death has the feeling of a dream sequence done up in gaudy Technicolor: Here lies Tinkerbell.

If we clap long and loud enough, will he awake?

Jackson still had millions of fans, as evinced worldwide by the innumerable makeshift memorials, tear-streaked faces, and panicked "tweets." These were the people--or some of them--who would have clapped for Jackson as, at age 50, he threw himself back onto the concert stage. He would have whipped his 112 pounds around like a dervish, frantically summoning the Big Eighties all over again, that nightmare time of intensely synthesized pop and bad fashion circumstance.

We weren't ever going to get to know Michael Jackson. The man was a recluse, and, in death, has reclaimed the public stage on which he had shortly intended to perform. The fans get their closure even if the performer is inanimate; denied the right to see him sing "Beat It" live, they get to see his body dead.

This type of memorial is in a class of its own, and even more so when you consider that Mayor Clay is jockeying for the remains as if they were something that belonged, de facto, to the City of Gary. It has all the makings of a spectacle (or, more crudely, a clusterfuck) and you can bet that should the spectacle get to Gary that it will be seen as something by which the city is glorified; you can almost feel Mayor Clay at work, writing his tribute speech. Gary also wants the body under home turf and has politely argued for its local burial. There, finally, is the reinvigoration of Gary...as a tourist attraction.

Think about it: Perhaps a theme park could spring up around the gravesite. This is only fitting, since Jackson kitted out his Neverland as an eternal playground. In the center, the body molding à la Lenin. A formal, although whimsical, mausoleum to be etched with bluebirds and happy lyrics from "I Won't Grow Up." Around this edifice, a 24-hour detachment guards against grave robbers (mandatory villains). A whopping 500 acres (bigger than Disneyland!) provide the lucky visitor all manner of attractions and 60 thrill rides. All major international cuisines and crafts are represented at various colorful pavilions. There is a magnificent light show--wait for it--preceded by a montage that projects images of the American flag, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Grilled Chicken and Jackson as Cinderella, the local ragamuffin who made good, very good.

So it isn't the most innovative theme park around. It doesn't have to be. It's in Gary.

It's a sponsor's dream come true. Any suspicion that Jackson might have been guilty of pedophilia will be forgotten when there are millions to be made on branding. Who is going to opt out of that?

There is ample parking for all.

What a happy and unexpected ending. Northwestern Indiana has been hit hard by the economic fallout. Furnaces have been shut down at the steel mills and men who once worked as engineers are now shift janitors. The auto industry is in deep doo-dah, not zippity. All of these good, solid citizens will now have jobs and they won't have to wait for Barack Obama to get them jobs riveting bridges or fiddling about with windmills.

Welcome to Michael-Land!

God Bless the USA!

We'll Always Have Paris, Or Will We?

Yesterday's most popular (that is, most e-mailed) article in The New York Times travel section was one entitled "Frugal Paris." The City of Light and all things chicer than thou beat out articles about Puerto Rico and gangster hideouts in Wisconsin, as well it should. The "Frugal Paris" article, by Matt Gross, is lyrical in tone, speaking of a "ruffled, fractal edge of the trees in full green bloom" and "low pale buildings with their amber lights just turned on."

And this is just in the first paragraph. Paris does that to people. Writers are especially susceptible. Countless bad novels have been set there, as have unwise and sudden romances. The article goes on to explore the writer's desire to seek out nostalgie de la boue, which is described as a keen appreciation for the gutter (NB: Read The Maids, mes amis). The writer argues that Paris, with its boulevards and monoliths and haute couture, is misperceived as being too expensive. The reader with an appreciation for France's second-greatest export--fine fragrance--would disagree. I, for one, would be unable to board the plane home without having purchased a bell jar of Muscs Koublaï Khän, that infamous scent of riding hard across the Mongolian steppes on a very sweaty horse.

What makes the American lust after Paris, and what separates Paris from Grand Rapids or anywhere else in America? On our own domestic front we have cherry blossoms on the Mall, rogueish graffiti in Brooklyn, and the La Brea Tar Pits, not to mention Death Valley, the Idaho Panhandle, and Mt. Rushmore. The French have rien on the windswept desolation of Little Big Horn Battlefield, so why isn't the sad vista of Custer's Last Stand inspiring the next generation of postmodern novelists?

The answer is romance. America is not romantic (Canada is even less so). It's too practical throughout most of its mass and it is home to too many silly, albeit useful, inventions that are hawked on the Home Shopping Network. The French, on the other hand, imbue their butter keepers with elegance. They aren't concerned with popping massive numbers of corn kernels in a dry, fat-free environment. Who are we kidding? We're starving. No wonder articles like Gross's are so appealing.

There are many permutations of romance possible in Paris, outside of the sexual. Indeed, most of the romance is sensuous and may involve large numbers of pistachio macaroons or the criminal act of eating, without fear of penalty, real heavy cream without FDA intervention. Horse meat? It is better than you think, a real historical chomp, and it is low in fat.

For the creative--the painter and the poet--the opportunity to reculer pour mieux sauter must seem inescapably alluring. Not being of Paris is experiencing a setback in one's lifestyle, so what better place to learn to work harder and better?

So evocative of missed romance is Paris that the reader is tempted to breach it in August. That the whole of the city pretty much shuts down during that doggy month isn't mentioned. There could be soggy sexual skirmishes à l'apres-midi for those of us evincing a persistent American bravery. And don't forget that being drunk in Paris is far more fun than being drunk in Bayonne.

Most everything is better in Paris, and the French know it. That is why they sneer at us over our shoulders. We do not know how to live and when we do live we live in denial and self-abnegation. Big business would shudder to a stop should Americans adopt any French (or European) habit of lingering over coffee and small gossip. That this might contribute to a betterment of American health seems not to have crossed our minds as we race through our days, constipated with rising interest rates and choking on the bile of the impossible health-care system.

A short list of things that are better in Paris, or at least with a French accent:

--Pastry

--Museums

--Dirty words

--Body odor

--Wine

--Lingerie

--Pig trotters

--Absurdism

--Political wives

--Extramarital sex

Our longing for Paris is a case of melancholy for places that we have never been. In a strange psychological quirk, humans develop mysterious funks for bridges, illuminations, apartments, and trains, none of which most of us will see. This explains the sudden and deep pangs felt upon seeing a neighbor's pictures of impenetrable lines of German tourists in front of the Louvre or stumbling upon a photo of a pissoir taken by an anonymous stranger and shared with the world via Flickr. This then creates an unhappy envy, but guess what? Garlic breath really does smell better in the Bois de Boulogne.

Goodbye, All-American Girl

Two months after America celebrated its bicentennial, a new television show debuted on ABC. America would soon celebrate this show as "Jiggle TV," a form of entertainment not marked by its theatrical assets. The show was Charlie's Angels, a female detective series that made actress Farrah Fawcett into a seventies supernova.

Fawcett wasn't unknown to America when Charlie's Angels debuted. By the time the first episode aired, Fawcett-Majors' (still married to the actor Lee Majors) iconic poster, showing off her teeth, hair, and erect nipple had become one of the 1970s bestselling pop culture items.

Some say the 1980s marked the end of America as we knew it, but the truth is that the end of the 1970s--the Super Seventies--was the real terminus. The 1970s were a silly era, full of junk food and just plain junk and the last of the great Detroit muscle cars. It was an era of cheap and cheerful invention, not just limited to the hairstyle that Fawcett popularized and which was erroneously adopted by thousands, including some men in rock bands best forgotten. The 1970s gave us Pop (and Pet) Rocks and The Midnight Special, Ron Popeil and Deney Terio. Worse yet, we lived happily with a narrow worldview in the age that was the beginning of our international undoing.

Television was responsible for a lot of the tossaway inanity, and yet opposites existed peaceably: For every clever Carol Burnett Show there was a brainless Dukes of Hazzard. In hindsight, a viewer's options were severely limited. You had your three majors, PBS, and a couple fuzzy UHFs that refused to be tuned by the rabbit ears. Despite this lack of 24-hour, complex programming (and porn), people watched TV more then than they do today. The reason for this, of course, is the personal computer, which at the end of the 20th century turned into a warm and welcoming personal burrow. In the 1970s, you either watched TV with the family or you shut yourself in your room with Led Zeppelin III and a Thai stick.

Those of us with less sappy mindsets will recall the 1970s as a time of embarrassment and polyester.

Fawcett was the ultimate All-American blonde and she began her career advertising those products so iconic they were almost patriotic: Ultra-Brite, Wella Balsam, and Noxzema. Take a look at Fawcett lathering up Joe Namath's face in the shaving-cream commercial. Broadway Joe's shit-eating grin and sloping, dopey eyes make him look as if he'd have been right at home as a Sweathog in Welcome Back, Kotter, giving Vinnie Barbarino a run for his money in the doofus department. Fawcett had that effect on men general; it's a safe bet that most of those 12 million posters were sold to satisfy the urgent libidos and prurient minds of young male America.

Females were not immune either, hair type be damned. Within weeks of the poster's appearance, hairstylists had learned not to attempt to dissuade those patrons who were either too old or whose hair was too straight for Fawcett's leonine style. Open any yearbook of the Class of '76 and you will see the Farrah Do, as it was known, on most of the student council, with the exception of the sour-looking girl whose favorite pastime was breeding beef cattle. That girl had a sensible Dorothy Hamill haircut, the Dorothy Hamill being the decade's second most popular coiffure. The Hamill was functional, though, and there may have been grounds to claim that the Hamill was born of a fervent need to unsex. Hamill you could take home to meet Mother, yet the similarly sporty Fawcett was priapic fantasy.

Guided by super-manager Jay Bernstein and superstar husband Lee Majors, Fawcett filmed one year of Charlie's Angels and then quit. Angels had no redemptive qualities or serious ethical questions to tackle (at the time, this was strictly the purview of dull old PBS) and Fawcett romped through it unruffled. She then lagged as a movie star and had a small and surprising success in the off-Broadway play Extremities. She appeared with her hair straightened, which in Fawcett's case looked like the mark of an emerging serious actress. Fawcett was a slight woman who, though at least partially responsible for the "Jiggle TV" term, was seriously out-jiggled by another Bernstein client, Suzanne Somers. Nothing again would resonate with the public the way the poster and the series had; had Fawcett replaced Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer we'd never have forgiven her for betraying her earlier, sexier self, born of Texas but decisively a product of California.

The truth about Fawcett was that she and the Super Seventies had a happy and serendipitous alliance. Had she been born a quarter-century earlier and hit Hollywood during the era of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, we might never have made her acquaintance. Fawcett looked like the Seventies, perhaps more so than the Seventies looked like Fawcett; she had that slim body type and that breezy, unfettered optimism that went along with the feeling that we were in our greatest era of achievement yet. We had, after all, the Chop-O-Matic. How wrong that was. Our corn-fed youth became sick and fat on sugar and grew bigger, taller, and indolent; we hurried to buy the first of the Japanese cars and crowed about their superior mileage, snickering at our Ford LTD-driving neighbor. Technology changed things, and suddenly we became sluggish and stupid, the international laggarts. Our entertainments changed and we popularized plastic breasts to the point that someone like Fawcett, who relied upon God-given sex appeal alone, would have been shown the gate (or at least the door of the top plastic surgeon in town).

We owe Fawcett a debt of thanks for her beautiful impact on that last naive and foolish era. We'd grow hipper and we'd mature out of that goofy phase where Fawcett's blonde waves were like that native waving wheat, golden in the sunset, on our domestically televised plains. We made Friends, and even in their own hysteria these friends were not like Fawcett at all. Somehow, we'd lost what made stars special in the first place, that remove between them out there in the Hollywood galaxy and us here at home in our suburban Barcaloungers. We had become one and from there on in only our salaries were different. We sucked on the same straws, ate the same French fries. This was the new nation, the one in which the pauper dines with the king and goes home ruing the hell out of genetics. In 1976, we thanked our lucky stars that strokes of good genetic fortune created Fawcett and led her onto the intimacies of our small screens. Wasn't it a great time to be an American television viewer? Wasn't it a great and mindless time overall? Have a nice day, have a Billy beer, tie a yellow ribbon, goodbye American woman, goodbye All-American girl.

Phil Spector: Da Doo Gun Gun

Chances are that Phil Spector will die in prison. Last week, a judge sentenced Spector to life imprisonment for the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson; Spector will not be eligible for parole until 2028, the year he turns 88.

Spector wore a sober shag wig to his sentencing. The hairpiece made Spector look like a fossilized Mod from Swinging London '67 and not as if a lofty intolerance for style caused him to exert undue influence over electromagnetic currents.

As a record producer, Spector shone early and then faded into the 1980s. His major achievement in the past decade was in being dumped by England's Starsailor. Back in the mid-nineties, something went awry with Celine Dion. Those fruitless projects spanned seven years of his career. Then, a jury says he put a gun into Lana Clarkson's mouth, pulled the trigger, and wrote the coda for his both his career and for his life as he knew it. It's hard to say what life Spector knew; he holed up in his Pyrenees Castle and, by a good number of accounts, menaced people.

The circumstances of Clarkson's death are odd; she was found slumped in a chair in the foyer of Spector's home, spine either fully or partially severed, with a purse hanging from her shoulder. Spector claimed this was an "accidental suicide," shortly after he said that he thought he shot her. Oops! Another mysterious accident for the tabloids, kiddies, right up there with the death of Paul Bern, the suicide of Thelma Todd, and other sordid Hollywood classics. The Black Dahlia. Of most recent vintage, Bonnie Lee Bakeley springs to mind.

Spector had an assortment of guns worthy of the Forge of Vulcan. He was a recluse who raved about his home in a Batman costume. During his trial, a few women swore under oath that he had terrorized them with his weapons; one, who had been assaulted after a party, went back the following week for another party before deciding never to be alone with Phil Spector again. A stripper testified she'd been forced to fellate him at gunpoint and Spector's third defense attorney strongly suggested that Lana Clarkson had been going down on the gun when she accidentally pulled the trigger.

What a wild night! You hear kinky stories from Hollywood, but this one has the added thrill of lethality. In this scenario, the dame misjudges what will turn Phil on and blows herself into oblivion instead. Indignant, Phil calls her a "piece of shit" on an audiotape that later becomes part of the defense.

It's one hell of a story.

Clarkson had the better narrative, though, because of its dull arc of endeavor. She lived the fundamental lie about Hollywood: If anyone "makes it," so can you. Why can't that anyone be you? Can anyone truly say what separates diamonds from roughage? Whereas Bonnie Lee Bakeley was a grifter looking to fleece entertainment has-beens, Clarkson simply wanted to be a star in the land of black holes. Friends testified that she had been very recently depressed; she saw herself as a Monroe Moderne and then had failed to achieve much more along those lines than sharing a hair color and dying a puzzling death. Clarkson knew she had washed up and struggled against it. Someone said Clarkson was "humiliated" by taking the hostessing job at the House of Blues. Meantime, all around are greater successes; they peer down from billboards and win awards and buy big houses that are threatened by fires in Malibu Canyon.

It was a titanic struggle. A career that consisted mostly of fitful casting in B-grade sci-fi movies was set against a desire to perform exquisitely broad comedy, as shown in her latest project Lana Unleashed, a reel she hoped would break the restraint that was keeping her from reaching stardom. What else could it be but lack of notice, of apathy? Lana Unleashed sounded more like a porno flick than it did a serious marketing tool, but perhaps in the twisted provocation of the title lay reason to at least take a peek.

With a voiceover looming, Clarkson hadn't quite disappeared into the hole, but she had begun to hang above it by a thread. The gravitational pull was strong, hence the hostessing job. She was making a major effort to keep up without understanding the basic Hollywood rule of thumb, which more or less requires applying a multiplier of 1.5 to any age over 30. By that measure, Clarkson was 60 years old and soon to approach the employability of Nick Nolte. Still, Clarkson had more success in Hollywood than most, even if by Hollywood standards she was no sensation and would, outside of death, never be. She fell early and hard into Amazon roles, a special typecasting reserved for tall women who look as if they could kick the shit out both men and scary alien monsters. Another highlight of her career was a sequel to 9 1/2 Weeks cleverly titled Another Nine & a Half Weeks (in France, the rather more romantic Love in Paris). In this, she was billed as "Woman at Fashion Show." Clarkson's type of actress is generally offered Bitchslappin' Babes II before The English Patient winds up on her doorstep.

This is where Spector came in. The culimination of their meeting resulted in a lot of speculation: Just what was Clarkson doing going over to Spector's home in the middle of the night? She hadn't any idea who he was when she barred him from entering the VIP party at the House of Blues and then there she was in his limo, heading out to Alhambra. Hollywood is nothing but a web of chance associations, old-boy networks, and inflicted karma. Spector/Clarkson fell into the first category, that of the random run-in with the famous. It happens all the time and most people live to tell about it and to post documentary evidence of it all over cyberspace, sometimes unflatteringly. Maybe Clarkson thought Spector was a lucky break, or maybe Spector was so physically exciting that Clarkson couldn't resist his overtures. Marilyn Monroe had her own diminutive champion in Johnny Hyde. Hollywood places such merit on the physically beautiful that it is sometimes hard to see value in difference; Spector may have been a champion Lothario with alluring and chivalrous entreaties, or he may just have been Hollywood lumpen with a deadly misogynistic streak. It doesn't really matter. Whatever happened, Spector looked attractive enough that Clarkson went home with him.

He had on one of his better wigs.

These tales are rarely uplifting. The horror isn't blunted because it happened in the Hollywood you aren't supposed to see. Hang on a minute. We will see it on cable television. Somewhere, someone is optioning a script. HBO will make a movie out of this. It's better than the Bonnie Lee Bakeley story, because the victim was sexy, attractive, and the only bang in the house that night was the gunshot.

Sex and Susan Boyle

Remember "Sex"? "Sex" (David Soller) turned up in Manhattan for two consecutive So You Think You Can Dance? auditions. He couldn't dance. He couldn't comprehend why no one thought he couldn't dance. Looking as if he failed PE at PS 101, "Sex" jerked through a second audition that he claimed represented "the male sex image." What he really represented was hubris, that overarching human tendency to believe so strongly in one's abilities that one is not able to see the truth about oneself. In Soller's case, this translated into complicity with the show's producers, who gleefully featured him as a "very special treat." Soller got his airtime and the producers got their jape.

The joke is, of course, that humans can be unfortunate creatures who crave recognition and admiration far beyond their limited capabilities. This tendency is best exploited if the human in question has an appearance to match the lack of aptitude. Such was the case with Soller, who stuffed his sweatshirt into baggy shorts and who, to use cruel modern parlance, looked as if he might have come to the audition on the short bus.

Something similar was slated for Susan Boyle, the dowdy Britain's Got Talent contestant who shocked both Britain and an international cyber-audience with her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream." The confluence of frumpish appearance, doleful back story, and emotive lyrics moved grown men to tears and advanced Boyle into the semi-final rounds.

Last evening, Boyle won her semi-final round and will move to next week's finals.

Boyle can sing, despite what sounded like a momentarily wobbly start to "Memories" from Cats. Her performance was not quite so stunning as her first, because the element of surprise had been removed. The world had already responded to Susan Boyle, and despite another evocative song choice, Internet opinion was divided. Why was this? "Memories" may be barely more mawkish than "I Dreamed a Dream" and more illuminating of Boyle's less remarkable lower register, but has the singer crested because worldwide adulation can only be a brief and fleeting affair regardless of original merit? Or because we now can no longer steal humor from pathos?

The shock of the initial audition turned into allure because of Boyle's image; in her sashed lace dress she appeared as if she had just come from church and was nervously preparing to slice an Easter ham. Predisposed to this type of contestant on talent shows and understanding that early rounds are mostly peopled by the earnestly misguided, viewers were instead moved, as if inside each and every one of us resided an ugly and untalented duckling. Boyle touched our hopes, but she also touched our fears. Her triumph was a dream or her dream was triumph, and within a week it didn't matter which came first.

Still, her triumph had a hollow ring.

There have been many beloved singers whose appearances did not fall within a pre-set definition of beauty. Kate Smith, Janis Joplin, Placido Domingo, and Maria Callas are but a few. All of these perfomers achieved iconic status without their looks playing a role. No one was stunned that Smith could sing, and although Joplin was known to be insecure about her own looks, she staggered the Monterey Pop audience not because she was unattractive and could sing, but because she sounded like no one else out there, not at that festival and not anywhere else either. Time has remembered these singers as the sensations that they were. It has not remembered them as genetic flaws with good voices.

Reality shows have turned people like Susan Boyle into curiosities. They exist both to give people who might otherwise have gone unnoticed a chance, but they also exist to dramatize the assumed "sad" qualities of an individual. A presumed unattractive appearance has become a talent, alongside whatever other talent someone might possess, even when that talent comes with quotation marks and with an extreme lack of self-awareness.

The public isn't suddenly drinking of the milk of human kindness. It seemed as if they were; it seemed as if Boyle were to be generously forgiven for a lack of standard beauty by hearts that might otherwise be dour. Her impact was that of pleasure and satisfaction, not of mockery, but this is not what Britain's Got Talent so brilliantly exploits. It isn't Susan Boyle who is being exploited, it is us. It is our need to have the unglamorous drained of any feeling of compassion (or pity) and then a scheduled approval when the opposite occurs. Susan Boyle isn't even about Susan Boyle. She's about the thrall of malice towards others and how arousing it is to mock things in others that are outside of their personal control. When the cheap excitement of ridiculing the ridiculous was tired, we were firmly put in our places by the English with a slick gotcha! moment that was easily predictable yet not lessened in impact by the obviousness of its premise. That there is an individual at the center of this doesn't matter. We have been played for the fools we are and then told that we weren't really fools at all, just a world of hard-hearted disbelievers and aren't we really sort of terrible for always seeing the bad side of things?

How you interpret Susan Boyle depends on how you interpret the human race. It can be a complicated matrix that says quite a bit about the human condition. There are those who feel passionately about the redemptive qualities of the story and there are those who feel yanked about by Simon Cowell. Somewhere in the middle are those who judge on merit alone. Disturbingly, Boyle feels plotted as a character in someone's narrative, with a predestined conclusion that would not have happened outside of the reality platform. Since the story began with this premise and is continuing along a calculated arc, what ending would ultimately be the most rewarding? What would be the most profitable in terms of epilogue?

Maybe we should give up having to have tragic losers in our lives. That would solve the whole thing and maybe we'd be a whole lot happier. We could just walk off into the sunset feeling good about other people, instead of feeling that we have superior skill in determining which deserve our endorsement. But then reality TV would cease to exist and we might have to do something else with our time. This might be the end. We might not recognize ourselves.

Brad Pitt Is Happy, Are You?

In response to a flood of rumors about the state of his marriage, Brad Pitt has announced that he is happy. Happy. He is hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival. He has a beautiful family. He might make more family. He is not banging the nanny or trying to look up nuns' habits or whatever else he might do out of desperation to telegraph to the world that he is miserable.

This is wonderful news from Brad Pitt, who has begun to look as if he is suffering the disturbances of suburbia. It's a very curious state of affairs. The more beautiful his wife becomes, the more Pitt appears as if he is covered in atomic ash. He has become the banker on the 5:15, the guy with the broken rake, the swimmer with the college medals who now blows up the kiddie pool and finds himself short of breath.

As a result of the innumerable inquiries into the Pitt-Jolie marriage, one cannot avoid Brad Pitt even if one wants to avoid Brad Pitt. Recently, one magazine called out another for manufacturing Pitt-Jolie drama solely for the sake of selling magazines. The horror of this is unfathomable. Since 2005, the offending magazine has run 21 cliffhanger covers, each of which claimed the couple was done, or almost done, or done as soon as it was revealed that Angelina Jolie was really a man. Or that Brad Pitt was made to wear a French maid's uniform (with frilly pink panties) while bending over and serving Angelina Jolie escargots en croûte and other homely French comestibles.

From a cheap physical standpoint, the best of Brad Pitt came early in his career, when he became the subject of the national swooning experience. This type of attention becomes a physical challenge for the subject, but not fot Pitt, who now enjoys the experience of middle age yet who no longer causes fans to go into a dead faint.

This is really rather unfair. Pitt has failed to live up to expectations. He has jowls, dull hair, and there probably won't be any post-mortem revelation that he was a belligerent drunk with a bad case of cystic acne on his ass. His last movie was sketchily based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short and Pitt cocooned himself nicely in its special effects; he has made moves since he was moved on by Jolie in the useless Mr. & Mrs. Smith. There were tenderer questions and a willingness to be shown in the process of balding. There is always the gleeful implication that he has betrayed himself as amuse-gueule of the vagina dentata, but keep in mind to whom that vagina belongs. If Jolie seemed more exciting during her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton, you remember Thornton's fear of antique furniture and wonder if this and perhaps other idiosyncrasies led to her healing rush towards maternal nature.

Pitt has not seemed to be the propulsive force in his marriage; the tabloids would have you believe that he lives in a constant state of romantic Sturm und Drang, with hurled knives and mental imbalances and the looming threat of potential lesbian alliances. He is Euro-pastel in his Cannes ensemble, but he was never a sartorial lion in the first place. He has too many influences at hand: David Niven, Noel Coward, Sonny Crockett. What if he wanted to play nude hacky-sack on the beach at Juan-les-Pins instead of sitting through a screening of Inglourious Basterds? He keeps busy; he has 12 films in development.

He looks as if he might be at home behind a lawnmower. This is the great secret of his happiness. He might one day rebel and burgle a neighbor's home to steal the neighbor's wallet, but not today. He is a lucky man. Sometimes, you barely notice him. Go to his house, he might break out the bridge mix.

You could probably borrow his tools. He is happy. Are you?

Adam Lambert, the Drive-Through Idol

As fast-food is to the national diet, so Adam Lambert is to American Idol. The likely winner of Season Eight is a prime piece of fast-food entertainment. Both show and singer would have us believe that Lambert is new heir to a long line of peacockish androgyne rock stars. The feminized sexual plumage of English glam-rock, Hollywood hair-metal, and the New York Dolls has been sanitized for safety by either the singer or the franchise or both, leaving Lambert neutered. Despite vocal flexibility reminiscent of, but not nearly so wrenching as that of Freddie Mercury, Lambert's packaging puts him closest to camp costume, to Elton John or to Liberace. His digestibility as a rock star puts him closest to a Big Mac.

Ever since Lambert snaked into Michael Jackson's "Black or White" in Week One, he has been careful to keep his sexuality netted away while trolling for rock credibility. When asked for his sexual orientation, he has been coy. His non-answer has further stoked the fire for truth so that finding that truth has become something of a national pastime. With hundreds of thousands of searches for "Is Adam Lambert gay?" being performed hourly, the public must be convinced that somewhere in the bowels of cyberspace, someone has the answer. That the public is seeking confirmation to such a wide-scale degree sounds ridiculous, but then again, this is the same public that kept after Clay Aiken well beyond any semblance of sanity. It's hardly damnable behavior, but it makes one wonder about the richness of intellectual life beyond such queries. If there is to be an answer (and you can be fairly sure there will not be), will it strike us like lightning and catapult us out of our beds?

Absolutely.

Like a boy with a Mr. Microphone and a mirror, Lambert has styled himself into a specious authenticity. He seems vivid against the likes of Jordin Sparks, and yet dismissed contestant Allison Iraheta was the more credible rock performer. There is something about his studied wardrobe and precision haircut that rings false, and yet it is that falseness that makes him perfect fodder for Idol. He is the ideal Idol because he is so ideally constructed, without a shred of creative anarchy. Lacking in artistic desperation, he becomes merely the carrier of sound rather than the sound itself.

This is a win-win for Idol. Lambert is unlike any other contestant in the show's history, and the show has carefully trained its camera not on his dramatic persona but on his theatrical singing, thereby denying what Hollywood calls "the whole package." By abjuring the native eroticism so evident in casual snapshots of the singer, Idol gets half the goods and yet understands that this is more than good enough for the music-buying public.

Lambert's many weeks on Idol show him to be devoid of cockiness, rage, or rebellion, all qualities that have heavily colored the rock genre. His showmanship is so calibrated as to seem the result of hours of practice; by Idol's lights he is the tidy antithesis of rock's bad boys and whatever inner demons or proclivities led them to Wagnerian levels of destruction.

All of this aside, Lambert is a technically proficient singer and supple performer whom one can imagine waltzing into other genres with as much ease, if not as much discussion, as he has into rock. The elastic eerieness of "Ring of Fire" could just as easily be applied to a jazz standard, and the swagger would not be lost on any Tom Jones standard. This is a compliment; it is this quality that separates him from the pack, even if we were not treated to it during the show's run. Doing away with the Broadway night was an error, as was eliminating Big Band night, both of which presumably held little interest and less awareness for the television public. By last week, Lambert was caterwauling, pushing his abilities into sonic scratching on U2's "One." Early hints of subtlety disappeared, and had Danny Gokey not scraped the last note of Aerosmith's "Dream On" as so many sharp fingernails on chalkboard, Lambert's weakness would have been that much more apparent: He nearly veered out of control while digging for gut emotion.

Lambert has knocked back Season Eight as speedily as you can knock back an Extra-Value Meal. You don't parse the meal in terms of gustatory integrity and you don't parse the singer in terms of indie cred. This is true of all Idol winners and runners-up; if one breaks from form it comes as a pleasant surprise (see: Iraheta). Lambert's lack of rock verisimilitude and his fitting, Johnny Bravo-like, into what Idol sees is the rock costume, makes him nearly analogous to Jordin Sparks, winner of Season Six. Although Sparks was a Cheez-Whiz low point for the franchise, Lambert is also identically processed. Both singers learned how to execute a formula and to do it exceptionally well, most of the time.

Idol is a highly commercial show in search of a highly sellable singer. These it has produced, in Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, and Chris Daughtry. It's cunning in its design. By convincing us that someone like Lambert is "different" and worthy of legendary rock iconography, Idol is proclaiming its hipness, vitality, and relevancy. It's a good move, but don't be fooled: Before they'd have let us dine out on the likes of Freddie Mercury, they'd have served up Davy Jones of the Monkees, with an apple pie for dessert.