Phutsie's Pop Culture War Fantasies: Sinéad Sings "Troy," Destroys American Idol

PHUTATORIUS
Our ever-deteriorating popular culture fires aesthetically offensive mortars at us all day long. Taylor Swift. Jay Leno. The Grammy Awards. Twilight. How I Met Your Mother. Whatever the Hell Happened to MTV. It's a near constant bombardment of shallowness and crap, and occasionally I'll close my eyes and daydream scenarios wherein those of us who are most aggrieved seek out one another, form a resistance, and begin to fight back.

Now of course daydreams are by their nature exercises in self-indulgence, and so I'm not ashamed to say that a full two thirds of my pop culture war fantasies culminate in me taking the podium at the Academy Awards and raining down rhetorical hell on the VIP audience. I've written before that I'm a dork, and probably too much of my free time is given over to the composition of these lecture-rants I'll never give at the Oscars. But we have other weapons, and one of them is Sinéad O'Connor, psychotic guerrilla songstress. She's our most radicalized asset, we've been holding her in reserve for a high-stakes mission, and we've been only barely able to contain her fury. Now we're going to unleash her on American Idol.
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Picture this: a young, mangy woman with shaved head and downcast eyes steps tentatively onto the Idol set. It's a put-on, of course, because we know how fierce she is, and we know her plans. Simon, Randy, and Paula raise eyebrows in perfect synchronization, but they at least act as though they're reserving judgment. Susan Boyle, right? You never know. It's clear from his face, though, that Simon is piecing together a thousand-word rant on the "hair gimmick."

The woman looks up. Her eyes, cool and blue, betray nothing of her intentions. She stands lightly, with arms at her side and ankles crossed, and she waits.

"It'll be this 'Mandinka' song, then?" Simon snaps, squinting disdainfully at the note in front of him.

Sinéad shakes her head.

"The musicians have rehearsed 'Mandinka.'"

Sinéad speaks for the first time, says quietly, "No musicians."

Simon snorts. Paula shrugs. "Do whatcha gotta do, Sister," Randy contributes, in his signature faux-hip argot.

Sinéad tiptoes to the microphone, drops feet to flats, turns wild eyes on Camera 1. "I remember it," she begins. "Dublin in a rainstorm . . ." And she sings "Troy" straight through, a capella.

What follows is something of a cross between the final scenes of Carrie and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The sheer power of Idealized Guerrilla Siren Sinéad O'Connor shears the flesh from the judges' bodies. The audience reacts in a panic as the stage catches fire, fissures appear in the walls and widen, and a great chasm opens in the ground in front of the stage. By the time the song is finished, the American Idol studios have been obliterated, along with much of the surrounding city block. Somehow, miraculously — as if Sinéad had wanted it this way — only Ryan Seacrest survives. Now deaf and blind, he climbs out of the rubble to tell the world what he saw and heard, The Last Things He Saw and Heard.

I haven't decided whether Sinéad survives. "THE PHOENIX FROM THE FLAME! I WILL RISE!" are indeed lines that receive particular vocal emphasis in the song she sang, but it's not clear to me that they don't carry more force if she herself succumbs to her own destructive power. That is, if she doesn't rise immediately, she can be, in a way, more threatening. Does she martyr herself to destroy American Idol, or does she reveal a certain degree of invulnerability by escaping the building's collapse and the ensuing conflagration, without a mark or a scratch? Tough call. I'll have to think about it.

Rock Me, Amadeus!

MITHRIDATES
I went back to Dave's Records yesterday for the third time this month. OK, I may have a slight addiction. Fair enough. But yesterday I raided the Classical/Opera section and am now listening to an almost scratch-free seven-dollar double record of The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Tutto è gioia, no? Well, no. You see, this Eastern Despot didn't read the fine print — or actually the big, bold print right on the cover. What I'm listening to right now is a bunch of fat sopranos, accompanied by the music and singing to the tune of Die Zauberflöte — but IN ENGLISH!

With all due respect to the geniuses at The Metropolitan Opera Club, there are reasons we want to listen to this exquisite music in its original Deutsch. And it's not just snobbishness. Snobbishness is why I don't like the supertitles at the Met. I like being slightly less in the dark than the bridge-and-tunnel crowd (welcome again, Whitecollar Redneck).

And it's certainly not the inherent beauty of the German language. It's simply that we don't want the sheer stupidity of the plot and inanity of the dialogue made so plain and obvious. If it's in some foreign language we can only partially understand then we can pretend that the libretto is as sophisticated as we (think we) are. Instead we know that one of the great musical triumphs of all time is as mind-numbing as a Bollywood blockbuster and as pointless as Terrance and Phillip's Asses of Fire (and for the time, probably as tasteful).

Red said it best after Andy got sent to the hole for blaring Mozart over the Shawshank loudspeakers:

I have no idea to this day what them two Italian ladies were singin' about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singin' about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it.

But it's over and done with sooner than I could finish this post. And so blaring over the speakers in my living room — much to the dismay perhaps of my rock 'n' roll neighbors — is the overture to Le Nozze di Figaro. And for those of you who might not be classical music fans, anything that opened up Trading Places can't be all bad, right?

Some of us do love classical music, though. Do you remember intermission at the Chicago Symphony on our second date, a mere 48 hours after we first met, and you said, "I am perfectly happy right now"?

But let's not get carried away with ourselves here. This is a rock 'n' roll country and this is a rock 'n' roll blog. And so I contend that it really doesn't get much better than this . . .

Yes, But Do We WANT Personalized Web Search?

PHUTATORIUS
Google Inc.'s VP of Search Marissa Meyer is touting "personalized search" as the wave of the future. Sounds good, but what's it all mean? Google's celebrated web search algorithm orders search results based on the cumulative wisdom — well, preference, anyway — of the masses who have already entered the search string, reviewed the results and clicked through to what looks good. Imagine the Internet as a vast woods, with the world's Net users wandering around, breaking the ground cover with their feet. Google's current search model channels people down the well-worn trails: this is most likely the site you're after, because other folks with the same interest went here.

Of course, what I want and what some cobbled-together notion of the Typical Websurfer wants aren't always going to be the same. So Google proposes a further step: tailor Web Search to custom-order search results based on what I, and not the Google Golem, want to see.

As one incremental step toward that Shangri-La of Search, Google has launched "SearchWiki," a product that allows a user to adjust the order of search results per his or her own specifications. Those preferences will be recorded in the user's personal account with Google, for regurgitation at a later date, if the user should re-enter the same search string. Users can also tag their own Wiki-style comments to search results.

Personalized search sounds pretty terrific. It sounds like Google getting even better at what they do than they already are. So hooray. But here's my beef. I think there's something to the notion that we'll be worse off — both individually and as a community — if the 'Net gets so smart that it gives each of us exactly what he/she wants, nothing more or less, all of the time. Distractions and diversions are abundant in this world, and they surely dissipate our energies and make our days less efficient. Take, for example, the television that sits just over my right shoulder as I type right now. It's showing news footage of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at the President of the United States, and it's completely shattered my concentration. This is a bad thing.

On the other hand, there's news footage on the television, right now, of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. Are you kidding me? As distracted as I find myself right now, this television is enriching my life. And I believe there's something to be said for not having complete sovereign control over the information one receives. We hear quite a lot these days about the political polarization of our news sources, and how we all choose to live among and spend time with like-minded people who don't challenge our worldviews. It's socially and intellectually calcifying. Now imagine an Internet that anticipates your needs and meets them completely. I mean, ick, right?

I like the idea that I might be allowed to stumble across something I didn't ask to see, that I might be surprised, that I might see/learn/find something I've never experienced before — and that it might cause me to see the world a bit differently, to grow as a person, to find a capacity for empathy that I didn't know I had. In fact, I think it's important. It's the diversions, the digressions — dare I say it? — the hijackings that enrich our lives. They lure us out of our carved-out personal spaces into the broader community. Take, for example, Gmail, which serves up ads based on keywords I type into emails. This was supposedly creepy — Google's machines reading my emails. But human eyes aren't processing the content of my message: this much is clear from the fact that sponsored links to Human Events and WorldNetDaily often appear after I've sent off a blistering screed to M'dates and V'torix about politics. Anyone who read the message would know Human Events and WorldNetDaily aren't at all up my alley. Clearly the Gmail ad server isn't "smart" enough. But if it were, I wouldn't have the benefit of knowing that these publications exist, that they say such ludicrous and laughable things, and that there are people out there who swear by them. Knowing all this is good for me. It's important.

Do I think SearchWiki is going to destroy communities? Hardly. Google proposes to publish the Wiki commentaries — users can rate, describe, and review sites to one another. This functionality arguably enhances community. And technology that has the simple effect of saving prior search strings seems harmless enough. What I don't like is the down-the-road ideal of search personalization. I don't want a search engine to anticipate my needs perfectly. I want a rough idea of what I am after, delivered alongside other, miles-afield links that carry the potential for great distraction and enlightenment. So much of the joy in life comes in the searching, after all. Just don't make it too easy, Google.