Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

Swingin'

I've always had a theory that whenever guys and gals start swinging, they begin to lose interest in conquering the world. They just want a comfortable pad and stereo and wheels, and their thoughts turn to the good things of life -- not to war. They loosen up, they live and they're more apt to let live. Dig?
-- Frank Sinatra (The Playboy Interview, February 1962)

Dug, baby. Anybody longing for some moral clarity, or just for a time when people could reasonably be said to "start swinging," should study the text of Sinatra's Playboy interview, helpfully posted by a site called This Is Sinatra! (The exclamation point is theirs, not mine, which seems entirely appropriate.) Sinatra weighs in on the peculiar demands of performing, of course: "...an audience is like a broad -- if you're indifferent, endsville." But he also holds forth on racism (against it), disarmament (for it, with one swingin' catch), fatherly responsibility ("I didn't tell my daughter whom to marry, but I'd have broken her back if she had had big eyes for a bigot") and the chances for a Communist takeover of the US: "Khrushchev has as much chance of succeeding as he has of making 100 straight passes at the crap table." The fact that this turned out to be correct is much less interesting to me than the picture of the diminutive Soviet premier hunched over a crap table, signaling feverishly for more comped vodka and shouting "Seven come eleven, comrades! Niki needs a new pair of shoes!"

The interview is especially fascinating for the glimpse it provides into that long-gone postwar moment when liberalism had certitude and swagger, and its own boy prince on the throne. It was surely the last time in recent memory that the Left was sexy. (The college girls may have loved Gene McCarthy, but that was ideological, not vascular.) Looking back two years to the presidential candidacy of John Kerry and two years ahead to a probable run by Hillary Clinton, one has to wonder where the zazz went.  In the meantime, there's always nostalgia. "When GUM department store in Moscow starts selling bikinis, we've got a fighting chance, because that means the girls are interested in being girls and the boys are going to stop thinking about communes and begin thinking connubially," Sinatra told Playboy, showing a gift for nuanced geopolitical thinking that's sorely lacking in today's celebrities.

Endsville.

God to VMAs: Yeah, I Don't Think So

WANTED: Position for former Viacom promo staffer who had the idea to stage the Video Music Awards in Miami during hurricane season. Will work cheap.

Is there anything more loathsome -- and I include in this calculus puppy abuse and the "Deuce Bigalow" movies  -- than awards shows? Is there anything more worthless and cheap than the sight of self-satisfied millionaires giving each other standing ovations and toting home thousand-dollar goodie bags? I don't think so.  And, not for the first time, God apparently agrees with me.  Let's all just wallow in the karmic specialness of the last-minute preparations for this year's Video Music Awards, shall we?

Hurricane Katrina, which intensified throughout the day Thursday, shut down MTV's run-up to the extravaganza, forcing the cancellation of dozens of outdoor concerts, poolside cocktail parties and promo events.... Heavy rains and high winds also prompted the revocation of all location shooting permits, starting the removal of tents, elaborate outdoor sets and camera positions as the precipitation fell harder.... No sooner had the doors opened Wednesday at The Doubletree Surfcomber Hotel on South Beach -- which MTV bought out and temporarily renamed Hotel MTV for the week -- did the city of Miami Beach step in and shut down the festivities.

I don't know what's more soul-satisfying here: The thought of Sean Combs running for his life in an Armani-soaking downpour, or the delicious prospect that Kelly Clarkson might have to spend Saturday night in a Red Cross shelter, squabbling bitterly with a family of nine over the last pack of Saltines.

It isn't that I want the spoiled crybabies of the entertainment world brought low, and forced to stare dumbly into the abyss of their own curdled humanity... Oh, wait. Yes it is. That's exactly what I want. Sorry; the deck is stacked so firmly in favor of celebrity in our culture that opportunities to see it foiled don't come along that often, and we don't always recognize them at first. That's just what we're looking at here -- a beautiful deus ex machina named Katrina. Please understand: I don't want to see anyone else hurt in this thing, even if it's, let's say, Ashlee Simpson. I just want to see her privileges curtailed for about 48 hours, and a reminder issued that there are forces in the universe more powerful than fame and more awful than United Talent Agency. So let's all hope the people of south Florida, by which I mean the ones who aren't flying in right now on chartered Gulfstreams, get through the weekend okay. And then let's sit back and watch the fun.

Reality Bites

Webster's defines "synergy" as "the dumb-ass melding of two things that were too wrong and awful to stay separate for very long." Case in point: The inevitable cross-pollination between reality TV and what Reuters calls "the '80s revival." The wire service is reporting that producer Mark Burnett ("Survivor," "The Apprentice") is joining forces with INXS, the Australian band best remembered for the hits "What You Need," "Kahlua, My Kahlua" and "Down The Boozer With Stan." (I may not have these exactly right, as they come from some notes my assistant Debbie hurriedly cribbed from the Internet.) The result: "Rock Star: INXS," a new series starting tonight on CBS and continuing for 39 episodes over a grueling 13 weeks. The show is built around the band's search for a new lead singer, which they need because original frontman Michael Hutchence killed himself in 1997, despondent over the discovery that his career had been a lot more interesting thirty years earlier, when Jim Morrison had it. According to a press release, the band's surviving members decided to go ahead with the series now because they "need money really badly," and also because Burnett did that pinwheel thing with his eyes and hypnotized them into thinking it wasn't repellent. And say, did somebody say "repellent"? Because the show will be hosted by semi-pro freak show Dave Navarro, who used to be a rock star himself until he decided that working even that hard was a drag, and the bizarrely pneumatic Brooke Burke, who, whatever it is she does, she's now doing it here! Wow! Now how much would you pay? No, I mean to avoid having to watch this. Seriously, how much would you pay? Because I'm cashing in some bonds.

(Hang on, this just in from the "Rock Star: INXS" web site: Burke currently stars in EA Games' hot new video game "Need for Speed: Underground 2" where she plays Rachel Teller, a street-wise adrenaline junkie who runs an elite, underground street racing circuit. For her performance, she received a Spike TV Video Game Award for Best Performance by a Human-Female. I'm not making this up, because I'm not this funny.)

Look, Mr. Irresponsible has done some terrible things for money. I don't want to go into details, because honestly they're a little hazy, but I'm pretty sure I remember playing Russian Roulette for cash in the back room of a Cambodian gambling joint.  That's a summer session at Andover compared to "Rock Star: INXS." Can these guys really be so desperate that they actually need to do this? Don't they have families they can put the arm on?

Luckily, there's a life lesson here: There is no shame in losing one's fortune -- particularly if one has gained it in a pleasant fashion, like, say, being a rock star, and dispensed of it in the pursuit of mindless good times, like, say, a rock star. There's a reason why the phrase "Easy come, easy go" has been cited in languages dating all the way back to Aramaic. Where one loses the good will of one's community is in kvetching unattractively about the loss. And make no mistake, that's what "Rock Star: INXS" is: a 13-week, 39-episode kvetch, a whine for attention writ large, a mooching electronic panhandle. This sort of thing not only demeans the supplicant, it plants the seeds of psychic stress in the audience, reminding them as it does of good fortune's fleeting fragility. It is, as an act, anti-social. So if you find yourself fallen from the Olympus of free spending and palmy times, do your society a favor. Don't go on TV. Do the right thing: Go away someplace remote -- someplace like Australia, say -- and take to the oldies circuit. There are worse ways to scratch out a living. Although, to be candid, I can't think of them just now. Still, you see my point.