"You Don’t Need to be a Weatherman..."

What if the reporting of weather becomes politicized? It’s not out of the realm of possibility considering our present day environmental concerns. Let’s say Glenn Beck and Karl Rove get together to form a weather station called Fox News Weather and let’s say on the other side of the fence you have MSNBC Weather. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the Fox News approach to weather would be totally supportive of the industrial growth even if it results in increasing carbon dioxide emissions and the green house effect. Sure there’s climatic change. When it rains it pours might be the mantra of the Fox News Weatherman. Too bad Tex Antoine, the Manhattan newscaster who got booted off the air for suggesting a rape victim ought to "lie back and enjoy it," is no longer around. He would have been a great anchor for Fox Weather, suggesting that we all should merely drink up every time a Sandy comes along and victimizes vulnerable areas of the country. On the other side, MSNBC Weather might find fracking to be the source of all the world’s ills. Fracking and the ingestion of animal fats.  If we didn’t eat meat, we wouldn’t release toxic gases into the atmosphere. "Beans beans the musical fruit the more you eat the more you toot" might be a homily Ed Schultz quotes when he does a guest appearance on MSNBC weather, but it’s what you toot that makes the difference. The smog will disappear from the skies of LA, Chicago and NewYork, according to your jolly MSNBC weatherman, when Americans learn to love Tofurkey.

Spider-Man: The Stage Goes Dark

Shouldn’t Icarus and Hubris find their way into the title of Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark? The history of the production is literally the Icarus myth, with injuries occurring because actors have flown too high. The show has also had its esthetic wings melted, at least by Ben Brantley of the Times, who made the unusual decision to review the play before it had officially opened (“Good vs. Evil, Hanging By a Thread,” NYT, 2/7/11). Other mainstream reviewers have chimed in with almost uniformly negative write-ups. Positive remarks about the show by conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, who undoubtedly supports the Republican initiative to cut the projected 1.6 trillion dollar deficit by refusing to renew the NEA’s 140 million dollar budget, will likely add fuel to the culture war that has been brewing between the cosmopolitan establishment and flyover country. Taymor actually occupies a unique position in this conflict in that she’s an avant-gardist whose work (especially The Lion King) has been commercially successful. Spider-Man had or has everything going for it, from a major theatrical imagination to music by one of the most charismatic rock stars of all time (Bono), who also happens to be one of the producers. So beyond the striving for greatness evidenced by the show’s record-breaking $65 million budget and constantly delayed opening, what went wrong?