Archives for October 17, 2007

This site is not about politics, but I was nonetheless intrigued to read in the latest Gallup Poll that 23% of Americans claim not to have heard of Fred Thompson, while one out of three Republicans and 15% of all respondents say they don’t know enough about Thompson to have an opinion of him.
May we take this as proof that, contrary to popular belief, some of us don’t watch Law & Order? Mrs. Teachout does, but I’d seen a grand total of one episode prior to meeting her two years ago, and the only one of Thompson’s films that I’d seen was In the Line of Fire, which is fourteen years old.
While all this says far more about me than it does about Fred Thompson, the fact that his name recognition falls considerably short of universal strikes me as…well, comforting. I’m no culture snob, but it’s still nice to know that I’m not the only American who keeps a relatively safe distance from the massiest of mass media.
UPDATE: A friend writes:

I had to drop you a note because I just read your blog about Fred Thompson. As I am a diehard Law & Order fan (I feel people are either CSI or L&W fans…they can like both, but they really lean towards one. It’s kinda like the Beatles-or-Elvis theory), I never knew what his name was till he announced he was running for president…and even then, it took me a few days to remember it. But no matter how much I adore L&W (or any show for that matter), I usually have no clue what the actors’ names are.

Several other readers echoed that last observation. I guess that’s the difference between a critic and a civilian!

“The number of jazz musicians in this country who piece out their lives in the shadows and shoals of show business has always been surprising. They play in roadhouses and motel lounges. They play in country inns and small hotels. They appear in seafood restaurants in ocean resorts and in steak houses in suburban shopping centers. They play in band shells on yellow summer evenings. They sit in, gloriously, with famous bands on one-night stands when the third trumpeter fails to show. They play wedding receptions and country-club dances and bar mitzvahs, and they turn up at intense Saturday night parties given by small-town businessmen who clap them on the back and request ‘Ain’t She Sweet,’ and then sing along. Occasionally, they venture into big cities and appear for a week in obscure nightclubs. But more often they take almost permanent gigs in South Orange and Rochester and Albany. There is a spate of reasons for their perennial ghostliness: The spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak; their talents, though sure, are small; they may be bound by domineering spouses or ailing mothers; they may abhor traveling; they may be among those rare performers who are sated by the enthusiasms of a small house in a Syracuse bar on a February night. Whatever the reasons, these musicians form a heroic legion. They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos. Some of them sink into sadness and bitterness and dissolution, but by and large they remain a cheerful, hardy, ingenious group who subsist by charitably keeping the music alive in Danville and Worcester and Ish Peming.”
Whitney Balliett, Alec Wilder and His Friends (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)