American Idol(review) Triumph of the Hicks

As we left for work this morning, I kissed my wife and said “Bye Dear, whooo!”

She first ignored me then shook her head at my bright purple blazer as I raised my fist and chanted “Soul Patrol, Soul Patrol.”

“Dear, What are you doing?”

“America and American pop music are forever changed because Taylor Hicks beat the Simon-declared odds and became America’s Fifth Idol. I felt it was important that we observe the moment appropriately.”

My wife, who still hasn’t forgiven the show for letting Chris Daughtry get voted off by Elvis, began to back out into the street. At that precise moment, sixteen blue-robed zombies joined me in the driveway to sing that certain- ground-breaking chart topper “Do I Make You Proud?”

At least this was better than the alternative, which would have consisted of Toni Braxton popping out of the sunroof of my Honda Civic in white lingerie, to duet with me on “In the Ghetto”. I know the concept wasn’t Taylor Hicks’s fault, but could somebody have paid attention to the words a little before unleashing Toni Braxton as fembot prancing around Idol V?

If I combine that visual with the lyrics, I get this - white southern male does the vertical limbo with hot black woman dressed as hoochie mama , she gets pregnant, he abandons her, she raises child in the ghetto, child has to attend a school that got left behind too, and grows up to run Enron unless someone can teach the angry young man to be soulful and play the harmonica like his dad.

This is Civil Rights in 2006-white boys and girls can now have sexual fantasies about Toni Braxton and Taye Diggs in public and black boys and girls get to have sexual fantasies about Taylor Hicks and Kellie Pickler. Think about another southern male, Strom Thurmond, who in 1960 would never have done this duet on tv. Of course, by the time he died Strom not only had his segregationist cause honored by Trent Lott, America found out a bit more about Strom’s private perspectives on race. I suppose too that “In the Ghetto” was better than having Ryan make bawdy innuendo about Elliott Yamin’s mother and her Idol statue, which I’m convinced never did happen.

btw Toni Braxton is a very attractive woman with a great voice, but it didn’t help that they lit her and made her sound like someone Eddie Murphy might pick up hitchhiking at three in the morning.

Okay, obviously I wasn’t one of the millions of Americans who voted in greater numbers for Taylor than for George W. Did Ryan really say that American Idol was the biggest election in the world without even a hint of irony? Unlike real elections, I know that American idol voters still often seriously believe that their own votes actually affect the outcome. Some of them buy special cell phones just so they can get in mass text messages and not have to worry about busy signals and Dial Idol making like the NSA. Maybe the key to revitalizing our democracy might be to let everyone vote as many times as he/she wants by cell phone and eliminate all campaign contributions except from Ford and Coca Cola?

One idiosyncrasy of Idol’s last week is that after a season when the Tuesday show is the interesting one, the reverse is true once it grinds to the finals. All through the season, the producers pad Wednesdays with Ford commercials, group sings, less than probing interviews by Ryan, and sadistic variations on the week’s inevitable game of un-musical chairs. The coronation show, though, is two hours of tasteless TV genius in which “Can you top this?” alternates with “What were they thinking?”

This was especially true this year. It didn’t help that both singers reprised numbers that they’d had some success with earlier in the season followed by two Idol “exclusive” songs that must have been rejects from the “Up With People” libretto. Yes, Katharine should still have done a better job staying in key and maybe enunciating better, but shouldn’t the contestants at least get to sing music? Taylor did do a better job with the coal he found in the Idol “Here’s your single….Sucker!” stocking, but that was a just a brutal way to end the competition phase.

At 9:00 pm Tuesday, I could have gotten better odds of Ryan reconciling with Terri Hatcher than Katharine McPhee winning idol especially after Daniel Powter came on stage at the end of the Tuesday show to announce that he would sing his McHit. The actual singing in the finals may have been less a factor than people think. Taylor also won because he had the better narrative. First, they cast him as the underdog while simultaneously giving him more time on screen than the promos of a new NBC Thursday night sitcom. Second, late in the game I noticed the narrative of Taylor as musical journeyman who had spent the last ten years singing in dive bars and at events like the Mullet Festival seemed to be all over the internet.

“Had my brother not talked me into going to Las Vegas to audition after I got flooded out of New Orleans, I was going to take a day job.”kept replaying.

Compare that to “My tv producer dad cries a lot”, “Mom was in "Showboat"with Donald O’connor”and even taught Marianne Willamson how to sing cabaret(perhaps someone wants to turn "A Course in Miracles" into a Broadway Musical), and I’ve spent the last year auditioning for pilots and plays where I pretend to be a whale with good cleavage. Given that America loves to come to the rescue, faced with this choice, who were millions of Americans going to rescue with their cellphones?

As a second matter, I suspect Katharine McPhee shouldn’t have taken “Advanced Smoldering Look” during her short time at the Boston Conservatory in lieu of Talk Show 101. If you want to be a celebrity, you have to learn to do the five minutes on the couch next to Leno or Letterman. They ask you vapid questions, you give them enough to make you seem loveable, inoffensive, and sincere before they cut to commercial. Whenever she had to be mediated by Ryan, Katharine was mostly giggles, thank yous, and maybe a bit too much honest reaction. She came off as a late model Valley Girl with a voice, which is like, you know, totally, like who she happened to be.

As I was watching the two hour coronation show, it occurred to me that whoever put the thing together must have the blueprint of Idol’s TV genome sequence. This year’s kitsch-fest homaged all the show’s myriad influences. Obviously, the show is a direct descendant of Ted Mack and Star Search, but it tapdances on the naïvely-sentimental essence of its direct TV ancestors by dosing it with an edge of mean spiritedness. The Gong Show aspect of the show mostly comes into season during the audition episodes, but Simon is Idol’s magic ingredient, the jalapeno on the bologna-cheese sandwich, because he gives Idol to keep it from slipping into Amateur Hour blandness.

I’ve long maintained that when the music is bad, the judges deftly step up the sideshow and the center of that is inescapably Simon who is the direct tv descendant of Charles Nelson-Reilly and Paul Lynde, two individuals who extended the game show genre with sarcasm-covered honesty as subtext for the idiocy of the goings on around them.

Similarly Paula Abdul carries on the chaotic non-sequitur tradition of Charo crossed with her very weird take on the Delphic Oracle. I tend to think of Randy Jackson as an uncool version of the Fonz, but it would likely take me too much space to explain that one other than to mention the longstanding tv technique of creating “catchphrases”, Dawg.

On Wednesday night, Idol’s provocative balance between sentimental and mean took the form of Kevin Covais and Michael Sandecki aka Clay Faiken. Early this year, the show created a niche for Covais as its stud manqué. Whether he was singing "Part Time Lover", or being called “Chicken Little” by Paris, Idol only avoided looking like the high school bully because the show constantly reminded us that Kevin was in on the joke and having fun too. By the time he was soloing to "What’s New Pussycat", I was starting to wonder, “If I were mom and dad, would I want my son turned into Pee Wee Herman just for the sake of fifteen minutes?”

As one of the hundreds of Idol bloggers out there, I’m well aware of Idol’s latent tv ancestors. Reality TV’s roots are in events like Miss America and the Academy Awards . By the late sixties, much earlier if you happen to be gay, roughly half the tv audience for both events watched less because they were interested in the competition than because they loved to snark. Miss America and Oscars viewing parties became a regular social event where people would get together to see who could supply the best subtitles about the absurdity of the outfits and other goings on. This, of course, is why Miss America died with Bert Parks. Ryan's tv great-uncle. The producers never quite got the Camp-factor which in a tv version of Heisenberg only works if the makers of the show pretend to be oblivious to it.

For millions of people, the Idol technology triathlon is to Tivo the show, vote with cell phone, then post on the internet in a post Y2k Oscars’ viewing party. It’s even evolved to a point where many of the participants don’t even bother to watch the show. In any case, Idol is rooted in the great winking gay cultural tradition that runs through television that starts at least as early as Liberace, moves through Robert Reid and Felix Ungar, came out through Ellen, and culminated in Will and Grace. Of all the semi-stars who have emerged from the Idol machine, the one who couldn’t have gotten America’s attention without Idol is Clay Aiken. Aiken also happens to be the most sexually ambiguous of all Idol finalists.

I don’t think the show or Clay’s management have ever known how to deal with it. Sandecki, who was audition round fodder, just happened to be a parody of all that the producers feared most about Clay Aiken winning the show. I don’t presume to know Sandecki’s personal life, but now that he’s had his fifteen minutes, I doubt that his my space page is being mobbed with female fans wanting to date him.

In any case, the producers managed one of these perfectly constructed tv moments. Sandecki got to act out the homage to Idol’s awards show roots, we watched his Clay Faiken audition in all its bladder tightening glory, then Ryan made us wonder if the show had jumped the line to full on mean by asking Sandecki to sing again. As he screeched while scrunching up his face for a few painful bars, suddenly from behind door number three Idol 2A version of Clay Aiken popped out.

Of course, the show can’t directly reference the fact that Aiken disappeared for several months in the wake of tabloid stories about his sex life, but this version of Aiken almost seems like the brocuhre model from one of those “Help me Choose to be Straight” seminars. He’s tan, a bit more muscular, has lost the hand gestures, and has been sprayed with extra testosterone. Even more dramatic, the full on makeover was standing next to the exaggerated version of the old-model nerd Aiken. As a bonus, Aiken sounded better on Elton John (wow interesting choice there) than any of this year’s contestants ever managed. Yes, I’m looking at you, Levon lite.

I don’t know how the Idol version 2 Clay Aiken molded from the pale ball of Clay 1,will ultimately do now that he has K.D. Lang’s hair, but this was breathtakingly good reality TV. It played out on more levels than any Robert Altman movie. In the meantime, network tv continues our bizarre cultural dance between its attraction to American pop culture's inner-homo and its need to act terrified of openly acknowledging it. No show makes the tension of this ambivalence more palpable than Idol.

The only thing that didn’t quite go perfectly was that the seemingly shocked Sandecki kept singing after the punch line. I suspect the producers allowed this so that Meatloaf could feel better about his performance. (I did hear that he’s been sick, so in that sense he did the trooper thing) A few others have noted that Katharine McPhee seemed notably more relaxed on Wednesday and sang better. I suspect it had something to do with the format of the coronation show which is much closer to jump into production number and do your role than sing while everyone stares at just you and talks about your dress being too tight.

I’m pretty sure too that Bucky was tapping on his mike during “Raindrops” because they built experimental technology into it that allows anyone to sing without an accent. “The Raindrops on Idol fall mainly on the plain, I think he’s got it.”

He actually sounded pretty good as did Mandisa. It was also definitely heartwarming to see Chris Daughtry sing a Live duet with his hero and role model Captain Picard.

Stardate May 2006, our band has landed on the stage of an alien planet. The Enterprise is being tracked by a wannabe who appears to be a Borg clone, the chain hanging from his belt being the only clue.

We Walk a careful Line with this situation. I order evasive maneuvers and go really really high to get out of his range. It seems to work, but seconds later he's still there. We go into hyperdrive.

Whoops, something's wrong! There’s Burt Bacharach, Prince, and is that Scott Bakula from "Quantum Leap" piloting my ship? The singularity must have taken us into a time warp. It can’t be later than 1986. I’m pretty sure the one who calls himself Ryan is a poorly disguised Ferenghi.

The pilot for the Kellie Pickler sitcom worked less well. How does one say “More obvious than Hee Haw” in French? If I may be so bold Chef Puck, to get someone like Kellie to eat anything all you have to do is deep fry it. Had you done that, she might have even been willing to try your line of frozen pizzas, say the one topped with kiwi fruit and fiddlehead clams.

Speaking of stupid trends, what is this whole bit with the chefs as tv celebrities ? Except on Star Trek, you can’t taste food even through a high definition plasma screen. I know they use food shows to sell lifestyle accoutrements, but they might as well make bloggers into TV stars.

For some reason, I actually rather liked the Burt Bacharach medley. First, it made me feel like I’d stepped into the first Austin Powers movie and I’ve always liked watching Elizabeth Hurley. (Jay Roach also used live down the hall from me) Second, it came bundled with a free ad for Psychic Friends Network.

If someone could tell me they paid their 50 cents a minute back in 1984 and Dionne Warwick told them she’d be on tv singing with Kevin Covais and Melissa McGhee while promoting one more tour, I’d buy a block of a thousand psychic friends minutes right now to ask about "Peak Oil", global warming, and Karl Rove's possible indictment. In the meantime Elliott as aFurby singing “House is Not a Home” sounded very good, maybe it was the producers way of making up for letting Mary J. Blige yell him off the stage.

If only the Idol producers could have matched that great scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding, this tribute to the guy who kept pop alive during the Woodstock era would have been perfect.

After three hours of Idol this week, my mind is frazzled to the point of being reduced to random bits about other parts of the show. Carrie Underwood (I was never a fan) actually looked and sounded good. Now that she gets to sing in her zone, she struck me as a deserving winner in this sea of the season five final dozen. After a season of telling Lisa Tucker that she kept choosing material that was both too old for her and too big for her voice, what was "Alfie" all about?

I thought the musical highlight of the evening was Paris Bennett and Al Jarreau. She doesn’t have his rubbery inflections, but she matched him surprisingly well with the vocalese. Also, it was one of the few duets that night where the participants actually seemed to be listening to one another. The song from Dirty Dancing with Katharine in a bridesmaid's gown (talk about your not so subtle hints) and Taylor in a tux felt like it was lifted from a bizarro episode of Donnie and Marie .

One last comment on the Idol genome, the show has one other hidden ancestor. In a time of extraordinarily divisive politics and constant talk of bleak prospects for the environment and our children, Idol almost pointedly ignores the truly topical. Except for Josh Gracin, the war in Iraq doesn't exist in the Idol universe, Katrina never happened, and the only reference to global warming is Kermit the Frog in a hybrid Ford Focus.

Idol’s popularity owes much to the fact that it’s the equivalent of cultural comfort food. Does anyone remember that the most popular show on television at the height of the sixties revolution was Laugh In , an electrified version of Vaudeville with little touches like paisley, stickers of flowers, and Goldie Hawn in a bikini. Idol, ostensibly the revival of Amateur Hour, is this generation’s Laugh In

I remember thinking that none of the jokes on Laugh In were actually funny maybe especially “Sock it to Me” and “Here Comes the Judge”, but I laughed and kept watching, maybe because I needed to laugh in those times. Some of the music on Idol is genuinely wonderful, but mostly it’s not. I suspect I watch the show because I want to believe in music, any shared music, in a time where discord or even apocalypse is always just below the surface in America.I know that no second coming of Paul Robeson will ever sing “We Shall Overcome” on the show. I even know that I’ll probably never hear a voice as good as Johnny Hartman’s or Sarah Vaughan’s on AI. Still, I keep watching because in all its tastelessness, manipulation, and silliness, Idol seems to catch some warming echo of tv culture that resonates for me.

In 1987, I was on a bike trip with a group and we were camping in the Mojave desert after being told that the area was filled with roving bands of death worshipping Satanists. For some reason, in the spirit of scary campfire stories it got us just scared enough. By one in the morning a couple riders were crying that they weren’t ready to have their hearts ripped from their bodies for some sick ceremony as if they really believed it, a fellow biker whipped out a guitar and started playing and singing "American Pie" (a song that was a hit when most of the group was in pre-school). Here inthe hottest, most bug infested, waterless spot in California, suddenly everyone started singing along with him and the whole group was feeling safe again just because of the shared comfort of pop music.

Idol is a British show that’s been made deeply American. This year’s finale caught all that’s weird and yet endearing about our own popular culture in its marriage of convenience between the rhetoric of cell phone driven democracy and amateur singers with backstories. Somehow too, it reminds me of that night with Don Mclean after midnight in the Mojave.

What can I say, but “Soul Patrol, Soul Patrol.”

Other Chancelucky Idol Reviews

Sir Linksalot American Idol articles

chancelucky

Interview with Bella Rossa

Interviews With Bloggers Part 20: Chancelucky

Chancelucky
The Bella Rossa Interview With Chancelucky.


Chancelucky is a California blogger who first caught my eye with his "The Book of Judas, as Told By Karl Rove" post over a year ago, and uses his blog to share efforts at fiction as well as reflections on how weird it was to find a 43-year old picture of himself in an elementary school band online. He's versatile enough to write straight political stuff followed by silly celebrity blurbs like this comparison and contrast of Woody Allen and Steve Martin. He's ready to lay out his opinions on American Idol silliness right beside posts about Condoleezza Rice, which just goes to prove that what makes a blog fun enough to go back to again and again is good writing, no matter the topics covered. Oh, and random fun trivia, he once rode his bike from Los Angeles to New York.


Film_reelBELLA: What current books, music, tv, movies, hobbies, sports, etc., are currently holding your interest?



CHANCELUCKY: Because I now spend so much time in front of the computer counting
my hits, I had to think a bit. Ron Suskind's One Percent Solution. I
also recently read a history of the Opium Wars by Travis Hanes and
Frank Sanello which is kind of the British version of our war in Iraq
in that going to war to force another country to buy narcotics was
controversial back then. The British invaded anyway and got Hong Kong
out of the deal along with the right to sell drugs to China.


Library_of_babel
The writer I've been meaning to get back to is Jorge Luis Borges, one of my posts "The Ancestor Room" was inspired in a very obscure way by Borges's "The Library of Babel".
The connection would be much less obscure if I actually understood
Borges.


I'm a big Harry Potter fan as well. My younger daughter and I have read all 6 books aloud together.


Music: I only listen to music that Randy Jackson has either
produced, played on, or had some other direct connection to.
Fortunately that's about everything that can be put on Mp3. I sometimes
make exceptions for Bud Powell, Shirley Horn, and anything on Blue Note Records up through 1965. Every once in a while, Steely Dan, Rickie Lee
Jones, and Cheryl Wheeler. In other words, I have a geezer's taste in
music and sort of a snobby one at that.


The_ringer
Movies: I really like Bollywood. Also my wife can't understand why I
watch teen movies. She has never forgiven me for making her go see
American Pie 2, because I insisted that the first one was funny. I'm
also the only person I know who found any parts of Johnny Knoxville's The Ringer funny. I have a weak spot for Farrelly Brothers' movies.
In
a galaxy far far away, I did work for a movie producer for about a year
in a very peripheral capacity where the high point was getting to see
first hand that Tom Cruise was much shorter than Nicole Kidman. Being
around the people who made the movies totally warped my taste. For
instance, the people on my softball team there thought Mars Attacks was
the funniest movie ever.


Television: I watch reality tv. I watched American Idol for 3
seasons so I could talk to my kids about it. I suspect they've never
read my reviews though or at least would never admit to it. I suspect
I'm the only person in America who watched both weeks of ABC's "The One�." Now that it's cancelled, I'm sure I am the only one.


I
also have always been drawn to the dating/mating shows, because I was a
nerdy asocial teenager. My wife grew up cute and popular and still is
both of those things. I may be the only person in America who saw all
episodes of Average Joe and actually have watched whole episodes of
Parent Control, Elimidate, Fifth Wheel, and Next (I wouldn't have
been allowed to get out of the bus). I even still follow the Bachelor.


Stuart_little
Hobbies: I collect stuffed images of Stuart Little and other stuffed
members of the rodent family through E-Bay including a Hamster that
sings Kung-Fu Fighting. I believe that Stuart Little is the most serene
member of the animated cartoon character pantheon and E.B. White's
book traces an American version of the story of the Buddha. Sadly, the
rest of my family does not share my beliefs and my Stuart icons often
get thrown around the house by them.


I also like to bicycle, but
always stop riding whenever I get more than three flats in a month.
Since we have no money to maintain roads in California, I haven't
ridden as much as I used to. I rode from Los Angeles to New York once.


Sports: I've played pickup basketball since I was 13. It's gotten
harder to do as I've gotten older because I don't own a pickup truck. I
would watch world cup soccer, but it's too "pitchy".




BELLA: How would you describe your blog?


CHANCELUCKY: It's green. It has pictures on it. I check it constantly for signs that
anyone else in the world has looked at it. I'd worry about what a
psychologist might think of me if he or she read it.

Writing_journal_3BELLA: Why
do you blog? What was your original goal or intention when you started,
and has that changed with time? Is your blog a means to an end (finding
work, developing creative ideas, making money, meeting people), or does
it exist for its own sake?




CHANCELUCKY: I've written most of my adult life with very limited commercial
success. I used to get very excited about writing something I was proud
of, but then obsess over trying to get it published which kept me from
writing until it did (which almost never happened) and gave me writer's
block whenever it got rejected or just ignored (which almost always
happened).



I figured if I had a blog, I could pretend that people were reading
it or at least could and I could then move on to writing the next post.


My understanding of my own blogging changes constantly. I think of
Chancelucky as an extension of myself that really doesn't exist
offline. In regular life, I'm the sort who goes to parties and
dinners, leaves early, and comes home without actually talking to
anyone including whoever I went there with. I also tend to ask more
questions about others than I answer about myself. Blogging seems to
let some other side of me out. It's sort of like "Chucky", the
psychotic doll who is more or less inanimate when people see him but
who wanders around in the middle of the night when no one notices and
lives his other life. It happens that "Chucky"� is an abbreviated
version of "Chancelucky." I think that was just a coincidence, but
I'm not sure. Wanna play?

BELLA: Is there one particular post that you think exemplifies your work, or represents your best writing?


CHANCELUCKY: I think of myself as a fiction writer, so the fiction posts are
actually the most important to me. I currently like My Father's Paradox, which
sat in my head for almost twenty years after I met and talked to Daniel
Ellsberg's first wife. Hardly anyone reads the short stories on my site
though, which probably should be telling me something, but "Chucky"
won't let it go.

Technorati_buttonBELLA:
How often do you Google yourself, check yourself on Technorati, see how
many people link to or bookmark you, and/or pore over your referral
logs and visitor statistics?


CHANCELUCKY: This is like asking alcoholics how often they drink.


BELLA:
Is there one particular post that garnered you an atypically large
reader response or number of referrals from search engines? If so, why
do you think that is?



CHANCELUCKY: My American Idol reviews have been really popular because I think
there are a lot of people out there who realize that the show really
shouldn't be taken all that seriously. Of course, the irony is that I
spent all those hours writing posts that joked about people taking the
show too seriously.



90210
Blogcritics.org brought me a bunch of readers for those posts as did Sirlinksalot.
I
should mention that I was heavily influenced by Daniel Drennan's
reviews some 10 years ago of Beverly Hills 90210, a show I also watched
with my daughters. He eventually got a book contract out of it, but
he's one of these individuals who probably influenced how a lot of
people blog about tv more than he gets credit for. (Damn, I keep ending
sentences with prepositions.)



I've also noticed a similarity between my American Idol Reviews and
Dave White's reviews on the Advocate's webpage. Since Drennan and Dave
White are both gay, I'm a little scared that the Conservatives will
find my blog and annul my marriage.






The single most poplular post on my blog is the Book of Judas, which was one of my early entries in what became my Karl Rove
series. The weird thing is that no one read it for several months until
it turned out that there was a "real" Gospel of Judas that wound up
being about exactly what I suggested Karl Rove's Book of Judas would
read like.




I'm not sure what Fundamentalist types think when they find it, but
God hasn't revealed anything to me since. My script for Rambo Four also
gets a lot of hits, but there's no sign that anyone's actually read
it and Sly has not sent me any early rushes of the real Rambo Four.

BELLA: What are some of your favorite, "must-read" blogs? What keeps you going back again and again?


CHANCELUCKY: I like blogs that are personal and individual, but by people who can
write reasonably well and have things to say. Funny helps a whole lot
as well.


Pogblog.blogharbor.com is an old real life friend of mine who loves
to play with words in bogglingly inventive ways and writes about
politics from a Mayan-futurist perspective.


GSMSO is the mother of a soldier who died in friendly
fire in Iraq who wants to keep other parents from having to go through
what she has. She's very raw and seems to keep picking up power in her
blogging voice with each post.


Coffee_and_varnish
Pissed off Patricia and Coffee and Varnish also came to my attention
fairly recently and share a quality of silly, serious, and sarcastic at
any given moment that I like to think happens in my own blog. I also
like your blog.




Hand_writingBELLA: What kind of person is the likeliest reader of your blog? What would you hope they get out of reading you?


CHANCELUCKY: I fully expect that a description of anyone who reads all of my blog
would be in the DSM IV somewhere. I have 4 different audiences with
Chancelucky. 1) volleyball folk 2) progressive political folk 3) people
who read pop culture reviews 4) the two people who read my fiction.


It does all link together in a weird way. The volleyball got tied to
a "parents' rights" movement in junior volleyball. Teen girls are a big
part of the Idol audience. A lot of my fiction is about cultural
artifacts that get stuck together unexpectedly like say volleyball,
reality tv, and Karl Rove in bicycle shorts.


If I have a common message for those audiences, it's speak up for yourself, but read the original sources first.


BELLA:
Are there people in your life who don't "get the whole blog thing?" How
do you explain it to them without feeling as nerdy and defensive as I
usually do?


CHANCELUCKY: Most don't, particularly my immediate family. They think I'm nerdy and
defensive anyway, so there's not a lot to explain. As my older
daughter told me, "Wow, I have to tell you it's weird that you
write about American Idol."

BELLA: What's your relationship with your readers? How much interaction do you encourage?


CHANCELUCKY: I've become online friends with a couple of the people I've
crosslinked. Most started as commenters on my blog or with my
commenting on theirs. I like to socialize online. I guess because in
person and on the phone, I'm not very interesting. I'm happy to
exchange e-mail, talk on the phone, etc. I do draw the line at phone or
cyber sex with any of my blog readers. It's not like there's
anything wrong with that, but I'd go broke really fast having to pay
them for the service and have a hard time explaining it to my family.

BELLA: How much do you self-censor, knowing that your friends and family might be reading?


CHANCELUCKY: Enough to keep some plausible deniability in my offline life.

Turkey_drumstick_7BELLA:
Have you ever heard yourself say something like "If you really cared
about me/were really interested in me, you'd look at my blog"? Is this
a fair thing to throw at, say, your sister, during an argument over who
gets the nicest drumstick at Thanksgiving?


CHANCELUCKY: Not many people I know in the offline world know that I blog. I've
noticed that when I do tell someone, I have this very unrealistic
expectation that that person will suddenly become a regular reader.
Do
they have turkeys with three or more legs in the Midwest? The turkeys
who wander my neighborhood in California only have two drumsticks so we
only argue about who gets the "nicer" drumstick while hitting one
another over the head with the Chicago Manual of Style.

BELLA: Do you video blog? Would or will you? Are there any video blogs that you look at? What would you video blog about, if you did?


CHANCELUCKY: I would if I knew how and had a better video camera. I actually got inspired to look into it by some of your video posts.

Delete_key
BELLA: Have you ever blogged something that later you regretted and/or deleted from your blog?


CHANCELUCKY: Well, one time I misread a pentagon casualty report and thought I had a
major story about the misreporting of fatalities in Iraq and as soon as
I picked up the mistake had to take it offline right away. Fortunately,
no one actually saw the thing before I caught the mistake. It was an
interesting experience in learning to read governments and how it's
easy to get excited and post something before you've double-checked
everything.


I have a loved one who has a traumatic brain injury, so I suspect I'm
more sensitive to the "wounded" totals than many folk and maybe
that's why I rushed the post.


BELLA:
What are your thoughts on the phenomenon of "doocing," wherein someone
loses their job because of things they posted on a personal blog? Are
you careful to maintain a clear line between your online self and your
real world self?


Snow_crash
CHANCELUCKY: It makes me think of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" for some reason. I think of
my blog as an extension of me but not necessarily me. I keep them
separate for that reason, but am increasingly aware that they share a
psyche. When I start e-mailing or IM'ing with myself, I'll really start to worry. Personally,
though I believe work requires you to do certain tasks but no one owns
your mind. I see blogging as an extension of one's mind, or self. It's
like speaking through a keyboard. Unless you work in a Cistercian
monastery, the question should be are you getting your duties done?

BELLA: Are you conscious of creating an online persona? How is that persona different from the real world you?


CHANCELUCKY: My blog self is taller, better looking, has fresher breath, and is way
more attractive to women. Blog self also never throws cross court no
look passes on the fast break. Blog self is also much more assertive
and riskier than my offline self. I suspect that's why my wife doesn't
like my hanging out with my online self. We did fool her once, that was
the night she started calling out Chris Daughtry's name. I probably
shouldn't have revealed that, but my online self took control there for
a moment. Stuart Little didn't approve and refused to speak to either
my online self or me for almost a week after that. I had to get his red
convertible washed and promise him that I would use Strunk and White as
my style reference from now on.

Surfboard_in_water
BELLA: How long have you been online, and what kinds of things have you done online (chat rooms, message boards, games, aimless surfing, etc.)? How has this changed your life, for the better or worse?




CHANCELUCKY: I started online in 1991 though I had e-mailed some in 1987. I surf
aimlessly constantly in hopes that I’ll find some metaphysical truth
hidden in the web. I think of it as a modern version of the Oracle of
Delphi.


The online obsession has impacted me in some weird ways. I
start sweating and hyperventilating if I can't get on the web for more
than a few hours. I now hear news and think about ways to blog about
it. A friend was having a baby and was asking me about names and all my
suggestions started with "http://www." He got really mad when I told
him that his surname wasn't a valid domain.


I was filling out my driver's license renewal the other day and put my ISP in as my home address.


Fortunately, I'm not addicted or anything. That would be really bad.


Dell_laptop_7

BELLA: How long do you think you will continue to blog? What are the circumstances under which you can imagine yourself quitting?






CHANCELUCKY: They'll have to take the keyboard out of my cold dead hands. I'd say
I'd quit once I'm brain dead, but right wing bloggers keep going
anyway, so....I mean how many oxycontin do you have to have your maid
buy for you before you actually fry your brain?


I wonder if they'll have little blue pills for guys who can't get their post or hit counts up anymore?

BELLA: What's the coolest thing that's come out of your blogging experience?


CHANCELUCKY: I'm writing much more than I ever have and reaching more readers than I
ever did before thanks to a technology that didn't exist when I started
writing. I also value many of the friendships I've made through my blog
even when the friendship is nothing more than a kind word in a comment
or someone linking me.

Thanks ( 2 years of blogging)

Like most folk, I’ve had my share of things that I’ve done and a certain number of disappointments. As a writer, I’ve had a lot more of the latter than the former. For many years, I’ve probably gotten along on the too common fantasy that someday someone in a position to help would “find my writing”. I’d then be rescued from the embarrassment of telling people that I write then having to explain that I’ve never been published by any publication that any normal person would recognize. Even worse, it turns out that everyone writes or thinks they can write and basically I’ve never had anything that separates what I do from what they do.

Over time, I’ve told fewer people in my regular life that I write creatively. Also, most of the people in my life who know that I do write ask less and less about it these days nor do they show any interest whatsoever if the topic does happen to come up. It’s been one of those things in my life that most people around me treat as a “tacit” failure. I’m pretty sure they think they’re being polite by not asking me about it. In the meantime, we talk about their kids, jobs, vacations, home woes, etc. and sad to say I have no idea what they may be dreaming about or yearning for either. Perhaps that’s the nature of middle-aged friendship or now that I’m well into middle-age I’m just a crummy friend.

Anyway, I had planned to post about the fact that this blog is now two years old, but I didn’t get the chance because I had too many other things to write about. For someone who battled “writer’s block” for many years, that’s an accomplishment. I also set a goal early this year of getting to a hundred thousand visitors by the end of 2007. I crossed that in Mid-May and am currently closing in on a hundred and twenty thousand.

Of course, this has come at a price. My family thinks I’m nuts and my wife has probably rightly not been happy with the way I obsessively check my hit counts. She’s repeatedly counseled me that it’s more important to write something that I’m proud of and have absolutely no readers than it is to spending so much of my time counting and analyzing my hits. There’s a logic to what she says. Most everything my wife does tell me makes sense. It’s just that I’ve internalized this belief that if no one reads what I write, it’s not real. Anyway, crossing a hundred thousand visitors is a big deal to me.

I know that doesn’t make my blog commercial. In fact, my dreams of any editors, publishers, agents, better known writers finding me here have never materialized. Well, one writer did find me here, but none of her e-mail addresses worked or she never responded to the e-mails that I sent to the three different addresses I found for her. Otherwise, I might as well just be sitting here on my URL and talking to a volleyball.

There are a lot of blogs that get a hundred thousand hits in a day. I also suspect that several thousand of my hits are me looking at or revising my site. Still, beyond the fact that I’m sort of obsessive-compulsive about numbers of any kind, I feel good to have gotten to my goal. Now I can say, “Yes, I write and my blog has had a hundred thousand visitors.”

Most people don’t know that this is very different from having a hundred thousand actual readers. It sounds like a big number though. I also don’t tell them that if I posted winning Lotto numbers or were offering pictures of Julianne Hough, I’d get that many hits in a couple days.

I learned very early in this process that blogging is a kind of virtual community in which people who may never meet in person or even directly e-mail one another find ways to support one another. Often that takes the form of an occasional comment on one another’s blogs, something that assures me and I assume them that someone else actually reads the posts. Other times, it goes well beyond that. The life of a blog can be spectacularly short. I’ve added then removed a lot more people on my blog roll in two years than I ever expected. Still, it seems like every couple weeks I have a new person to thank for supporting this blog and by extension my writing. The great thing is that these are friends who read what one writes almost by definition.

I want to acknowledge and thank the following people,

We don’t have a lot of contact, but Bella Rossa, a rising Chicago comedy writer, helped bring me one of the things I craved, regular commenters. Many months ago, Bella asked me to be one of her subjects for her Interviews with Bloggers project. While hardly anyone has ever read that interview, Dale and Atul (two of Bella’s other interviewees) began commenting on my blog.

Even though he’s Canadian, Dale’s one of the funnier people in blogland. Okay, that may be like being the tallest person in a six foot and under basketball league, but it’s still something. He mixes off-center observations from his daily life, odd often touching stories from his past , with occasional entertainment reviews. In addition, a couple of Dale’s regulars have wandered over here. These include Tanya Espanya, an endearingly goofy very-pregnant Canadian woman , Beckeye a very funny music writer from Brooklyn, and Pink Fluffy Slippers a woman who alternates between talking about her attempts to master the cello and discussions of her dietary habits.

A lot of my writing is about being Chinese-American and Atul’s perspective is especially interesting to me because he’s Indian-American, into cars, aphorisms, and, for lack of a better phrase, the ironies of daily life.

Benny is apparently actually a cat, but I met his alter-ego when I was blogging about the emergence of Cindy Sheehan. Ironically Cindy Sheehan has “retired” from public activism. Benny and Iddybud have slowly been converting me to supporting John Edwards candidacy for the presidency. Among other things, Edwards may be the most consistently pro-peace in all its senses of the major candidates.

Charles Lambert is a very fine fiction writer who lives in Italy but who happens to be British. While his fiction career looks like it’s beginning to get the attention it deserves (he won an O’henry this year and his first novel will be in print soon), his blog is very funny and far too often reminds me that America is not the only crazy place in the world. and that the Vatican has plenty of closet space.

Teriyaki Donuts/All the Wrong Faces keeps one blog about odd examples of cross-cultural bedfellows in California, e.g. the many Asian-owned doughnut shops that often also sell items like kung pao chicken or teriyaki beef sticks. All the Wrong Faces is a frank reprise of the big frustrations and little joys of being a single man navigating a major course correction in the middle of his life. I just wish he had the time to post a little more often.

Parklife found my blog through a post I made about the return of Don Nelson to the Golden State Warriors. Interestingly, we've hardly ever exchanged comments about sports since. He covers political-cultural matters with a very sharp eye. That same eye has especially interesting taste in photography. As someone who knows very little about photographers or art-photography, I find that Parklife constantly expands my cultural-political horizons.

Sunny was perhpas America's biggest supporter of Sanjaya Malakar, she had the patience to follow both my seasons of blogging about American Idol.

Lastly, I want to mention Mr. Pogblog whose blog is also two years old. Pogblog is both a real life friend and has been probably the most stalwart supporter of my writing I’ve known over the last twenty five years. Pogblog, the site, is a gem of the internet and likely the only Druidic site I’ll ever recommend here. The writing there is intricate, hilarious, exasperating, and fully original. It jumps from being a series of metaphysical puzzles about the seeming paradox of full consciousness or awareness to a somewhat disturbing obsession both with cats and Clive Owen. It’s often not easy reading, but I find that it’s always worth the effort.

One of the pleasures of keeping a blog has been having surprise guests drop in like the Grameen Foundation, the composer David Hykes, Polly Whitney the novelist, Ron Franscell, true crime writer (Fall), editor, and NPR contributor, and rather surprisingly I was even linked to the American Idol wing of Freepublic. I also want to mention that the single biggest source of readers has come from my reality tv reviews and I owe much of that to the very kind folk at Sirlinksalot, the leading link aggregator of reality tv articles on the web. I also want to thank my many volleyball readers.

In any case, support and encouragement are rare gifts in this life. Any time someone takes the time to read posts here or comment,it’s added to my reserve of both. My next goal is to get published conventionally. All those visits have helped me to think that next goal might be possible after all.

chancelucky

Bellarossa Interviews Me

Bellarossa was kind enough to include me for her most fascinating “Interview With Bloggers” project. (if there’s a theme, we seem to all be nerds or at least a bit off center. What a shock :}) Bella’s own page is in turns funny, thoughtful, personal and is always well-produced. She also keeps a Chicago comedy updates page at the Bastion.(the graphic at the top here)

by the way, the bike trip was from Los Angeles to New York. Also the most gratifying experience I may have had as a blogger may have been getting a note from a woman whose daughter had passed away who asked to link one of my posts on her daughter's tribute page.

chancelucky