Copious Notes

If you are not a SportsCenter watcher or just missed this last night, I thought I’d share Jeremy Schaap’s great look back at the Chicago White Sox’s infamous “Disco Demolition” promotion between games of a double headder on July 12, 2009. In short, a radio station sponsored an event where they blew up disco albums on the field between White Sox-Detroit Tigers games. Game 2 never happened because things got a little out of control — just image combining alcohol, low security, and a fervent hatred for a music genre. Filling out the story are great photos, video and comments.

My Twitter home page. Look for me @copiousnotes.

The video service Hulu, we are told in its advertising campaign, is “an evil plot to destroy the world.”

That might be — he says, having been sucked into hours of watching ­reruns of Saturday Night Live and WKRP in Cincinnati.

But to listen to some people, you’d think Twitter was the one pulling the planet apart, 140 characters at a time.

David Letterman was at least ­honest in his dressing-down of ­Twitter on his April 24 show: “When you don’t ­understand anything, and you’re ­frightened by things, then you make fun of it, you ridicule it, and that’s what I’m doing. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it.”

Funny — and funnier if you saw Dave deliver it in his cranky-old-man fashion.

It’s more annoying when you hear clueless comments. For instance, on NPR’s Weekend Edition on April 26, This I Believe co-producer Jay ­Allison compared his series of essays about faith to several Internet upstarts: “I think that separates it from Twitter and blogging and Facebook. It’s not a chronicle of what’s happening in that moment. It’s something that’s gathered over the course of an entire life.”

Yes, but neither I nor ­anyone else I know of has ever equated jotting a quick note with writing a memoir.

Lumping Twitter with an essay, or even ­blogging and Facebook, shows a ­fundamental lack of ­understanding of what ­Twitter is — and of the ­curiosity to find out.

(By the way, NPR has a Twitter account, churning out headlines on a regular basis.)

It’s not that hard to learn what Twitter is. As Internet applications go, it is one of the easiest out there.

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I though I was just agreeing to be part of a tableau that looked something like this . . .

It seemed like an almost innocuous request: could I be a part of a “Living Lord’s Supper,” for the Maundy Thursday service at my church.

Sure, I could put on a robe and be part of a Da Vinci-esque tableau. Why not?

So, I volunteered, and the next thing I knew I got an e-mail with my monologue and a rehearsal schedule.

Monologue? Rehearsal? I need to more thoroughly vet these little requests.

Yes indeedy, the Living Lord’s Supper was more than looking like part of a masterpiece. It was actually a reenactment — key word, “act” — of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples in which Christ would announce he was going to be betrayed, and then each of the disciples stepped forward to tell their stories and insist they would not betray Jesus.

I was Philip, frankly a kind of boring disciple. Didn’t betray anyone, didn’t doubt anyone. Just saw Jesus and rolled with him. But the monologue, written by our pastor, Woody Berry, was a nice two to two-and-a-half minute — depending on how I paced it — journey of fascination and acceptance. Directing us through it was Martha “Mrs. Lincoln” Campbell.

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T-shirts trumpet the University of Kentucky's appearance in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, today. But without a playoff system, college football's post season is all irrelevant hype. Herald-Leader photo by Mark Cornelison.

Excuse me while I take a post to rant about one of my pet peeves in sports:

Saturday night, after driving home all day from a Christmas vacation in Georgia, I grabbed a cold beverage, flipped on the TV, and landed on a bowl game.

To get a handle on what I was watching, I hit the info button on the TiVo remote and was informed I was watching the Emerald Bowl, a college football “playoff.”

“Playoff!” I wanted to sputter incredulously, like that infamous Jim Mora press conference, “Are you kidding me?”

Playoff would have meant the winner of that game, California, would advance to a next round with a possibility of eventually winning a championship. But alas, this was simply an exhibition game, and Cal finishes its season saying it won . . . the Emerald Bowl, which is played in San Francisco, not Oz.

Maybe if that TiVo info box inserted the words, “sorely needs a,” between the words college football and playoff, you may have an accurate statement. But at this time, there are no playoffs in college football, which makes it very hard to take the sport seriously.

We are in the midst of a “Bowl Championship Series” that will be hyped beyond belief by Fox for the next week leading up to a college football fictional championship game Jan. 8 between two teams I don’t give a rip about.

I bring this up here because this is an entertainment blog and the BCS is the biggest thing we are sold as entertainment for the next week. In sports circles, the BCS has been debated over and over and over and over again, with series apologists arguing it makes the regular season matter more and that the tradition of the bowls has to be preserved.

Cynical Rich loves this website my sister introduced me to, Despair.com. It sells “demotivational” posters, like the one for “Adversity” with a tree blown in hurricane winds and the slogan, “That which does not kill us only postpones the inevitable.” Like I said, my cynical side. Anyway, my favorite Despair poster is “Tradition” with a picture of the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and the slogan, “Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly stupid.”

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Of all the harebrained schemes I’ve seen to promote an entertainment venue, this is the shaggiest.

Augusta promoters are banking on the legacy of James Brown to attract concerts to its arena. 1994 file photo.

In Augusta, Ga., a member of the board that oversees the James Brown Arena has proposed using $39,000 of public funds to buy advertising to attract acts to the approximately 8,500-seat venue. Now, if this was to buy ads in trade publications such as Billboard or Pollstar, it might make some sense. But it isn’t.

What Johnny Hensley, a member of the Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum Authority, wants to do is place full-page ads in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Nashville Tennessean featuring a photo of a youthful James Brown and the word “Wanted” above the names of acts from those cities that Augusta wants to attract, including Elton John and Tim McGraw.

“With this, it’s an old Ronald Reagan concept – go directly to the people,” Hensley said in a story in the Augusta Chronicle.

You probably already see the fatal flaw in this: a presumption that the people of Atlanta or Nashville care who plays at the arena in Augusta.

Hensley seems to think people are going to bump into Ludacris on the streets of Atlanta or Faith Hill in Music City and say, “Hey, why aren’t you playing Augusta?!”

But people in those cities care no more about who’s playing Augusta than we in Lexington care who’s playing in St. Louis, unless we’re going to St. Louis. We care who’s playing Rupp Arena – Nickleback next month, for instance; eat your heart out, Augusta.

Hensley seems to think the name James Brown on Augusta’s arena should be enough to draw pop music royalty to pay homage to the Godfather of Soul. And yes, Augusta-area native Brown, who lived in the area much of his life, did play the Arena on numerous occasions before his death in 2006. I saw a couple of his performances there when I covered entertainment in Augusta in the mid-1990s. As I remember it, the arena, then the Augusta-Richmond County Civic Center, was fine as small-to-midsized venues go.

But if you want to go step in the Godfather’s history, you probably want to play the Apollo Theatre in New York.

If you want to attract people to your facility, you don’t just lean on the name on the sign out front – a name whose 21^st Century cachet is routinely overestimated by Augustans. You attract acts by having a first class facility, treating people well when they come to town, getting audiences to turn out for those shows, and generally building a strong reputation. We have several venues in the area that have done this, including Rupp, the Lexington Opera House and the Norton Center for the Arts.

Why does the Norton Center, a small venue in a small town nearly an hour away from any sizable city, attract acts such Yo Yo Ma and Lyle Lovett? A major reason, and acts and agents have told me this, is it has a reputation for being a great place to play, even if it’s off the beaten path.

Now, I haven’t been to James Brown Arena in well over a decade and have no first-hand knowledge of how it’s managed. But if Augusta wants to build its clientele for its arena, the coliseum authority needs to concentrate on building its reputation in the concert industry. And you don’t build your rep by putting ads in major dailies that make you look pathetic.

Note: I covered entertainment for the Augusta Chronicle from 1993 to 1996.

I am taking a few days off this holiday season, and hope you are getting a chance to spend time with family and friends too. If, however, you did wind up here with, say, 24 minutes to kill, click play and enjoy the greatest Thanksgiving episode of a sitcom ever thanks to Hulu and Allan Courtney who alerted us to this.

George Carlin performs in 2007 at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. Copyrighted Associated Press photo by E. Pablo Kosmicki.

George Carlin's legacy will be as a counter-culture figure who pushed boundaries along with folks like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, ushering in an era of topical humor that now finds a home in living rooms across the country with works like The Daily Show.

His essence though, was in tamer skits such as the comparison of football and baseball (the following from Baseball Almanac):

In football the
object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general,
to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense
by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the
blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes
and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing
this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches
holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

In baseball the
object is to go home!

Or, my personal favorites was A Place for My Stuff, where he observed that your stuff is stuff and other people's stuff is crap (sometimes, he used a different word).

That was Carlin's gift. He was an observer. Jerry Seinfeld was as much a inheritor of of his mantle as Jon Stewart or Bill Maher. Observation is one of the most basic elements of comedy. Carlin observed his life. He observed the world. He observed a lot of crap. And he spun all of that observation into routines that were side-splittingly funny, and he didn't worry a whole lot about who he offended along the way.

Carlin crossed the line on purpose.

Maybe most to his credit, he never stopped doing that. Yes, he mellowed with age. His Thomas the Tank Engine character was his loveliest creation. I remember watching it with one of my children and thinking, as many parents probably did, "I'm watching the guy who did the seven words you can't say on television on a kids show."

But he never took his eye off our world, and boiled it down into routines that would crack you up, make you think, maybe even offend you.

Carlin not only made us laugh, he made us observers, and he changed his art form. That's a legacy few people who pick up a microphone to tell jokes can claim.

Read: The New York Times thorough obituary of George Carlin.

Sometimes commercial campaigns puzzle me. Like, why would cell phone or computer companies think I'd want to buy their brand because their pitchman in a condescending jerk? Why would a soup company think I would be seduced by the idea that their product could turn me into a gurgling zombie?

The current Hotels.com campaign really bugs me.

Now, I like Hotels.com. I have used it to research and to book lodgings on trips and think it's a good service. I've even liked some of their previous commercial campaigns, but the current one . . .

It is probably the first commercial campaign I've seen that highlights the user-reviewer, the citizen critic that is now weighing in on the virtues and pitfalls of virtually every product out there, from hotels to movies to nose-hair removers. Once again, nothing against user reviews. They can be informative for people buying products or services, particularly sight unseen off the Internet. I'll often use them, though in the case of hotels, I usually also check in with professional critics at, say, Frommer's or Fodor's.

The problem with the Hotels.com commercials is the implication that their reviewers are being bought.

In one, a family is checking into a room, and the mom tells the bellman that they picked the hotel based on reviews at hotels.com, and maybe they'd be writing a review. The bellman opens a suitcase full of cash and jewels and says, "I bet you will."

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Hotels want a good review so bad, they'll try to buy you off if you use Hotels.com. Ha, ha.

That was cute, and to any of us who write reviews for a living, it probably reminded us of a time when someone sort of blatantly tried to curry our favor, knowing we were writing reviews — not that I or anyone I know has been offered a briefcase full of cash and jewels.

But there are a few spots that bug me, because the traveler accepts and encourages the gifts. In one, a man finds a fur bathrobe in his room, and when the bellhop fesses up that it was a bribe and gets ready to take it back, the guest strokes the robe, says he'll let it slide, but don't do it again, especially when he comes back on a specific set of dates. In another one, a man finds two tubes of shampoo, and when his wife says maybe they were trying to butter him up for the review, he shouts, "It's working."

Yes, these are jokes. And maybe I am a little hypersensitive because I am a critic and I don't like to see things that impugn the integrity of that craft.

But the message of these commercials is that the reviewers take and are being influenced by the bribes. Is that really the message Hotels.com wants to send?

Amber Rhodes works with Tiffany Duquette, an intern at Music City News Media and Marketing in Nashville, to resolve issues with her myspace page. Photo by Rich Copley/LexGo. For more photos of Amber, click here.

A few weeks ago, I went on a slightly offbeat assignment, heading down to Nashville to hang out with Lexington’s own Amber Rhodes, an aspiring country music artist, for a day. It was a fun and illuminating assignment where I learned about things such "song-plugging" agencies and other mechanics of the country music world I was previously unaware of. You can read the story by clicking here. I also threw together an Amber photo album of pics that ran in the paper and some that didn’t, and invite you to check that out, too.

First up, I have to say thanks to everyone who expressed condolences over the "death" of my mp3 player, which I wrote about Thursday. I think a lot of people identified with that piece because so many of us have
inadvertently destroyed a small electronic device somewhere in this gadgety age we live in — I’ve heard about a number of cell phones in toilets and other mishaps the past few days.

But all that support and sympathy is what prompts me to write this follow up: IT’S ALIVE!

Thursday, it appeared to be gone daddy gone. For half a day, the computer wouldn’t even read its contents when I docked it. It wouldn’t even play Taps.

But midday Friday, it started working again, playing complete albums and playlists, letting me surf around and downloading music. For three days, it has worked flawlessly. I even reported the Leeland album review in the post above using it.

So, while I would in no way recommend washing your mp3, cell phone, etc., to see if it survives, if you have accidentally done that, don’t give up. There could be hope.