I’m in Seth MacFarlane’s corner, despite his smarminess. The master of ceremonies at the 85th Academy Awards managed to annoy the right people.

In “Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night,” Amy Davidson, an affirmative fem at the New Yorker, kvetched over the “hostility shown to women in the workplace.” The meandering Davidson was moaning about MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” routine (I didn’t see it), and its implication:

We saw your boobs, but that’s not even what we find attractive, so you exerted no power in doing so—all you did was humiliate yourself?

Behold the sacred boob! So now if a woman strips and a man laughs he risks accusation of impropriety. Besides, women rule the work place, toots. I know men who don’t dare greet a female for fear of an harassment suit.

Another anemic New Yorker writer whined that MacFarlane insulted those Who’re Always Ready to Receive Offense.

Snivels She Who Took Offense:

MacFarlane came off as kind of a pig, as he made fun of women for being too thin, too old, too naked. How sophisticated is it to call the pretty, popular girls sluts? I had to stand up and move away when he turned his sights on the lovely black nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated for Best Actress. I felt sick imagining where MacFarlane might go. So when he simply made a joke about George Clooney sleeping with her down the road, I felt my body relax.

I’ve now watched “We Saw Your Boobs.” If this is indeed MacFarlane singing, he has a better voice and is more musical than all the other warblers who “sang” last night, except for Dame Shirley Bassey, of course, who can do no wrong.

Here’s her stunning, sexy, original performance of Gold Finger

As I predicted in Annual Oscar Offal, Adel did deliver a monotone. She has no range. Barbra Streisand was appalling. And I owe you an apology. I promised no Jennifer Hudson. But someone did go primal on stage. I suspect it was Hudson.

Finally, the reason I’m on MacFarlane’s side is because he has set off that ersatz defender of Jewish interests, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL, “on Monday blasted an Oscars sketch in which potty-mouthed film star bear Ted joked about Jews in Hollywood.”

I recall that Foxman had more to say about Mel Gibson than he had about a Seattle based Jihadist, Naveed Afzal Haq. Haq murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building in 2006.

The ADL’s website issued only the tersest of statements. It made no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim. A glance at the League’s site and a visitor from Deep Space might get the impression Seth MacFarlane and other marauding Christian Cossacks like him posed the greatest danger to Jewish continuity.

As I said, I caught but a glimpse of Seth MacFarlane presenting the Oscars. He was not terribly funny, but then they never are. Don’t tell me you found any of the multiple appearances of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg the least bit amusing.

“Family Guy” is quite cute, but this MacFarlane creation has nothing on Mike Judge’s stuff. “Idiocracy” and Beavis & Butthead are sublimely smart.

MacFarlane is certainly not in Joan Rivers’ league when it comes to impropriety. If only she were unleashed on the Oscar crowd. Now that she’s old, she gets away with speaking her nimble mind.

I laughed so loud and hard at a comment she made on her reality show with Mellisa, the insipid but loving daughter, that I missed at least two more jokes. (I would not recommend watching “Joan Knows Best?”. Like all reality voyeurism, it’s junk—and a schlep, as Rivers would say.)

Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party Mellisa was throwing for her young son and his rowdy small friends. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out:

“I don’t know how Jerry Sandusky managed to do it.”

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The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd is too much for me to stand, not even for you the reader. There will be some unfunny shtick. A precocious crappy kid will make a debut. At least one aging actor will be honored (in 2011, the distinction was Kirk Douglas’) and retired—Hollywood performs professional geronticide on the old—and hackneyed scripts filled with loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential hedonists will abound.

The closest I’ll come to watching the 85th Academy Awards ceremony is “Fashion Police,” a sartorial send-up by Joan Rivers. She’s the only comedian and great wit who can get men to watch a program about fashion. Like me, my husband hates all “estrogen oozing” TV programing, but greatly appreciates Rivers. And rightly so. She’s lethal.

Adel’s monotone will be G-d awful, and while we will be spared Jennifer Hudson’s primal screams, Barbra Streisand will more than make up for the reprieve.

Other than lessons lost, “Les Misérables” represents great literature reduced to schmaltzy jingles, belted out by Hollywood starlets. The lesson lost: The “Les Misérables” I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations. A similar power (Uncle Sam) and its enforcers recently hounded Aaron Swartz to death.

For those who care, here are the predictions. I’ve watched none of them. I’m most likely to watch “Flight” with Denzel Washington. The film got bad reviews, but I like the “disaster film genre,” although nothing will ever come close to Airport (1970) and its sequels.

Restless—I caught it on the Sundance Channel—is a BBC One production directed by Edward Hall of “MI-5” fame. With all its faults, Restless makes you realize that any British film, even a mediocre mini-series, is better than the American equivalent, big-screen productions included. (Britain retains the edge in this department.)

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Below is an excerpt from the current weekly column, Pimping The Culture, now on WND.

“The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture—it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.

Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products. …

… By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page—most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.

‘Grammy and Academy Award winner’ Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of ‘vocal wobble’ a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, ‘Why be a musician, when you can be a success?’ Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves. …

… More sounds that curdled the air were those of Alicia Keys pounding on the piano keys. …

… I’d rather listen to the dodecaphony of twelve-tone music than sit through the guttural battle cries emitted by today’s entertainers. …”

The complete column is Pimping The Culture, now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE (Jan. 24): No fan of mine (or my column), the writer below, says the in-house studio musician, is “Obviously a nirvana fan…”

From: Daniel G
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 9:59 AM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: anywho

“Typical prog fan, putting other people down because their favorite musicians don’t use 20 sided dice to choose their time signatures.”

HERE’S the good (non-nirvana) stuff:

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At Beliefnet.com, Jack Kerwick rips into a certain elephantiasis to have plagued Ronald Reagan—the Gipper’s penchant for “gargantuan government.” So far, I have only 4 comments, all of them positive, on “The ‘Reagan Revolution’: A Myth Exploded” by Jack Kerwick:

With rare exception, virtually every “star” in the movement is a neoconservative. From the personalities on Fox News to the shining lights of “conservative” talk radio, from “conservative” politicians to the most well known “conservative” writers, there is scarcely an intellect to be found that isn’t indebted to the neoconservative worldview.

[Jack Kerwick, Dec. 26, 2012]

1) Technically, Jack may be right to invoke the word “intellect” with respect to the perpetual parade of mega mouths seen on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, etc. But there must be a better way (a word combination that triggered my musical memory: Watch what passes for pop music in Israel. It’s v e r y g o o d. More solid stuff from “Noa” here. And more about Mira Awad here).

How about “intellectuals who are not intelligent”?

2) Republican Ann Coulter has fleetingly voiced this “Reagan Epiphany,” saying that “Ronald Reagan should not be held up as ‘the touchstone for every [other Republican] candidate.’” But that’s as far as Ms. Coulter’s philosophical integrity went.

3) In fairness, and unlike almost all other Republican candidates, Reagan had the ability to brilliantly enunciate the principles of liberty. Judging from his soaring rhetoric about our (small “r”) republican liberties, Reagan understood these freedoms both viscerally and intellectually. This goes to the Gipper’s innate intelligence, which is forever disputed by the pinko pukes on the left. Intelligence why? Because the argument from liberty is a rational argument; the argument for collectivism an emotional one.

4) In some measure, Ronald Reagan’s affinity for freedom in words but not deeds bolsters another of Jack Kerwick’s brutally honest observations. This one pertains to the “inexcusable” nature of any “ignorance of the immensity of our national government, say, and ignorance of the sheer powerlessness of any one person or even group of persons to scale it back to so much as a shadow of its counterpart from the eighteenth century. …”

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The cultural gulf that separated the 2012 Republican National Convention from the Democratic equivalent, now underway, is glaring.

The disparate artistic sensibility is expressed in the rendition of the national anthem, the words to which were written, as few Americans probably know, in the aftermath of the Battle against the British, at Fort McHenry. “The Defence of Fort McHenry” ended in American victory on September 14, 1814.

The opera group “Seven” sang the National Anthem during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Aug. 30, 2012.

Appreciation of musicianship being what it is, these days, I could not locate online a rendition by “Seven” sans the ceremonial clap trap. So, to listen to their glorious sound, please fast froward 2:00 minutes into the proceedings:

Contrast Seven’s harmonization and controlled use of the human voice (only 778 YouTube views, so far) with the popular, brutal-sounding primal screams of one Jessica Sanchez, who is scheduled to ululate at the Democratic National Convention, tonight.

So discordant and jarring are the Sanchez yelps. How has such crass screaming come to be considered musical?

UPDATE: From Facebook thread. This post was meant as cultural critique. Tough concept, I know, as some insist on reducing all commentary on things cultural to the libertarian law. So sooner does this paleo-libertarian address the matter of cultural standards—in this case, what goes for singing these days—and another will step in Soviet style and command her to stick to her mandate: whittling it all down to the non-aggression axiom. Don’t you find that boring? A tad lazy?

The same transpired when I commented on the “Bump ‘N Grind Britannia” of the Olympics. Such cultural commentary was, apparently, verboten, because the Olympics were a display of statism. illogical. Lazy. Bad reasoning, as the one does not flow from the other.

Over the years, I’ve commented a great deal on cultural standards, or lack thereof. If you can’t address the topic, don’t prevent me from so doing; don’t limit the discussion.

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Those of us who’re familiar with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” in the original, were galled, if not surprised, by the distortions a warbler called Ed Sheeran introduced to the number, during the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. (The Idiocracy was charmed, naturally.)

How do you suck the essence out of a piece of music?

Easily, if to judge by the vulgar performances that followed, most of them punctuated by the primal screams of one Jessie J, who also destroyed “We Will Rock You” (admittedly one of Queen’s worst numbers), and drowned out Brian May. Thankfully, Jessie J did not tamper with “We Are the Champions.”

A complex chord progression is the hallmark of many a Queen’s song. Today’s T & A lineup (Brit and Yankee alike) can belt out loud guttural screams. But you need a finely tuned instrument and musicality to sing well.

(An example of such an instrument is Carly Simon’s voice in this live performance of “That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be – 1972.” Hers is an evocative and nuanced voice. As to lyrics; you have to be a literate and complex individual to write as evocatively.)

Jessie J, aka The Crotch, does a poor man’s version of the Beyonce God-awful bump and grind.

There was a choir of kids (they get to them young) who mimed and gesticulated to the hackneyed sounds of “Imagine.” Their affectatious performance was reminiscent of the performance “art” of the 1960s and 1970s. So passe.

There was nothing “Winston Churchill” about the bloke that recited Shakespeare. It shows you how far removed Brits are from their own history. For a better Churchill I recommend the … historians of … Iron Maiden.

Yes, where were Iron Maiden, or real virtuosos like Ian Anderson (also a bit of a history buff, in as much as he knew a thing or two about … Jethro Tull).

The above Brit superstars were overwhelmingly … male. A man who can wield an axe would intimidate a chorus-line of prancing nuns and “men” stomping about with garbage cans.

The closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics would have been far improved had the hip organizers left Freddie Mercury up on the screen and played “Queen.” Come to think of it, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” replayed over and over again would have been preferable to the camp celebration of kitsch that unfolded.

UPDATE (Aug. 14): In reply to a Facebook reader: You said what I did not. The Chinese did do a better job of the Olympic ceremonies. Theirs were artful, if rigid, displays of skill, and, while the Chinese ceremonies had a cultural flavor—they were without political overtones.

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