After 8 seasons, Monday night was the last night of the series, “24.”

Most times, no matter its popularity, a TV series is just a TV series. But in the case of this TV show, when the series’ main character, Jack Bauer, was referenced more than once on the floor of Congress, and Bauer’s actions were trotted out as an exhibit A in the middle of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, by none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and then in 2007, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with some FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, traveled to LA to ask the show’s creative team to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they were having both on troops in the field and America’s reputation abroad. ….I think we can safely say that we’re in some other kind of realm that transcends the “it’s only a TV show” trope.

The series showrunner and exec-producer, Howard Gordon, was on Fresh Air on Monday and had his own answer to the controversy:

“To say that we’ve been some … mouthpiece for some political point of view — it’s not only specious — but I promise you, it is insane. Any fly on the wall and anyone who’s been there would tell you the same. So unfortunately, look — the show is a show for one thing. It’s a thriller in the vein of Bourne Identity or Rambo or Dirty Harry. And the hero finds the bad guy and shakes out of him where the bomb is. And again, the real-time scenario lent itself really well to that. Frankly, for the first five years, I don’t think you could find a single article or op-ed piece that used the word ‘torture’ or described that this was somehow morally repugnant or corrosive or anything. I think what happened was, when Abu Ghraib happened and Guantanamo happened — the show certainly benefited from some kind of post-9/11 wish fulfillment; you had a guy who cut to the chase, who did whatever was necessary, and again there was some wish fulfillment involved — I do think the show experienced some of the blowback. We did understand that the climate had changed, because of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it had changed. … [A]nd it put us into a conundrum. Honestly, at the end of Season 6 — where Jack had been acting a certain way — we had a choice: Either we renounce the series and admit we’re a bunch of torture-mongering, morally corrosive torture pornographers or we find a way of confronting this issue and this changed world that we’re in. And, in a strange way, it gave us fodder for the seventh season.”

Yes, well…

As a die-hard “24″ fan I have long been ambivalent about some of the show’s script choices, but have hung in faithfully because the delights of the series seemed always to outweigh its unsettling downsides.

(That is with the exception of 2007’s notorious Season 6, which went completely and creepily off the rails, both in terms of its over embrace of brutality, and frankly, in terms of the quality of the writing in general. But then, as Gordon said, it recovered in Season 7 where it articulated some of the moral issues around torture, plus had some very nifty plot twists, so all was forgiven.

Or sort of forgiven. It was somewhat vexing that both Fox and Friends and Glenn Beck—whose moral compasses, such as they ever were, seem to have long ago rusted—became so ooozily enamored of the show in Season 7, that they failed to perceive its ambiguities and still managed to use it as ajustification for torture not a caution against it.)

And, nearly any pronouncement from former “24″ producer, and co-creator, Joel Surnow, was enough to make some of us wonder if we were, oh, I don’t know, risking the health of our immortal souls by watching the show at all. But Surnow is thankfully long gone.

Now the last few hours of Season 8 have taken us into what is, in many ways, the darkest place of all.

In hour 20, we had to watch as Jack coldly executed the latest CTU insider traitor, Dana Walsh. (“24″ has pioneered a whole new class of evil broads—13 female villains in total. They have ranged from the queen of them all, Nina Myers, through the very, very bad first lady, Sherry Palmer, to this season’s Dana Walsh, who managed to project a sort of sloe-eyed, sexy spawn of Satan look that became its own kind of special effect.)

In hour 21, there was the matter of Jack disemboweling the Russian sniper/assassin who killed FBI agent and Bauer paramour, Renee Walker—AKA Jack’s Last Chance for Happiness. Now most of us might honestly have wanted to disembowel the guy too, but most of us also, I trust, would have stopped short of it (even if there was the vague justification of getting the guy’s recently swallowed cell phone sim card).

Hour 22 featured Jack clad in an Imperial storm troopers-like outfit as he prepared to kidnap the divinely Nixonian ex-President Charles Logan who, after seeing the scarily helmeted Bauer approach in the distance, screams in high hysteria to his secret service agent “That’s Jack Bauer, he’s coming to get me!” (A great “24″ moment, as were nearly all of actor Gregory Itzin’s scenes this season.)

Finally, there was the very last two hours—which I am reluctant to give away here if you haven’t yet watched the finale. I can tell you that the poet Rumi was quoted well in a crucial moment of foreshadowing—and that, in the end, everything came down to Jack and Chloe O’Brien—Mary Lynn Rajskub’s sour-faced and fabulously courageous character creation.—which was exactly as it should be.

I can also tell you that, for me anyway, the finale was a worthy two hours with which to cap the best of the eight seasons—complicated, multi-shaded, possessed of the courage of its convictions, and fraught with the knowledge that cleaving to what is just and right and true is the only worthwhile path, no matter the cost (and that there will be a cost), but when the cleaving grows too single-minded and brittle, it has its own soul corroding moral dangers.

So what, in the end did it all mean? Was it only a TV show as its producers say? Was it a pop cultural reflection of our desire for good and evil to be clearly demarcated with bright, shining lines in a manner that real life rarely provides? Or did it start to actually affect in troubling ways the culture it purported to merely reflect in fantastical broad strokes (with no meal times or bathroom breaks)?

Or was it all of the above—and, on occasions, like Monday night, satisfyingly more.

I’ll go with the latter.

What do you think?

Michael Jackson – Black Or White (Official Music Video) – Watch more funny videos here

I realize I haven’t said anything about the death of Michal Jackson. For one thing, I have been traveling the past few days, but mostly I have been silent because I found it more than a bit vexing that the news of Jackson’s early and saddening death drove ALL OTHER NEWS OFF THE NETWORKS.

Iran suddenly didn’t exist.

(Hey, I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate that Meet the Press didn’t devote it’s entire newscast to the demise of the Gloved One.)

All that said, this morning after I finally managed to get enough sleep to be a bit more reflective, I rewatched a few of Jackson’s most famous videos and was reminded of his entirely unique talent—and, well, beauty. (Even after he made his face into a science project, he couldn’t erase his innate grace.)

Beat It alone is stupendous. It is, at once, extremely theatrical, and yet grounded in an artistic and emotional authenticity that, 27 years after the fact, is still spectacular to behold.

He was a very troubled man. We know that. And the repetitive necrophilia that our sheep-like national media descends to in instances such as Jackson’s death is predictably wearisome.

Nevertheless, Michael Jackson left a musical legacy that is drenched in beauty and wonder. The discomfiting peculiarities of his personal life, and the media’s over-the-top postmortem fawning can’t take that away.

No, I’m not kidding. The neighbors’ tree took out the power line. Ah, Topanga!

There is much to tell….Nuggets of juicy news from the LA Times Book Fest….A new story or two of former gangmembers redeemed (with video)…and more.

Expecting power–and—resumed blogging Monday mid-morning.

I’m a bit slow on the uptake this morning so didn’t check my email until just now….or I’d have had this up earlier. Courtesty of Mr. Sam Izdat over at TellZell.

LOS ANGELES, Calif—Merry pranksters scaled a Los Angeles Times building Thursday to unfurl a three-story high banner protesting news cuts by the paper’s owner, real estate billionaire Sam Zell.

The banner was hanging from the historic Times building in downtown Los Angeles. It read: “Zell Hell: Take back the Los Angeles Times.” A website address on the bottom directed the curious to the mysterious protest site by an anonymous Times employee: www.tellzell.com

“Like many of us, he got in over his head in the mortgage crisis,” said one Times employee who participated in the banner drop. “He can’t afford what he bought. But instead of selling his house, he’s chopping it into pieces.”

The banner was taken down rather quickly after its unfurling. “The security guards were smiling, though,” reports TellZell.

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has some speculation as to the identity of Sam Izdat aka the Instained Retch who is the now nationally read blogger behind TellZell. The Retch answers here and says he’s definitely not a union guy, but an LA imes journalist.

Here’s a video of the last moments of the banner drop.

With the scheduled July 27 demise of the Sunday LA Times Book Review looming ever closer, this past Monday morning former LA Times Book Review editor, Steve Wasserman, and three other former editors of the Book Review section—Sonja Bolle, Jack Miles, and Digby Diehl—wrote an open letter protesting the loss and urging people to join in the protest. They sent the thing to a list of publications ranging from our local blogs to the New York Times. LA Observed printed it first, followed by a short piece in Editor & Publisher. There was a mention in Publisher’s Weekly. This morning, Inside Higher Ed ran an impassioned column sparked by the letter. And when I last checked, the cultural reporter at the Lehr News Hour expressed an interest in running a small story on the issue.

You can find a copy of the letter here.

I spoke to Wasserman a few hours after it first appeared to find out what effect, if any, he hoped the letter would have. “Frankly, I’m not all that hopeful,” he said. “We released it because we felt that, either singly or collectively, that it would be a mistake to let the moment pass. But they’ve cut more than a third of the Book Review staff already,” he added. “Only three people are left.”

So is there nothing that can be done to save the Sunday Book Review (and Opinion)? It’s true, Sam Zell sure isn’t much of a listener, so maybe it is hopeless.

Then again, maybe not. Can’t hurt to try.

But first a few facts:

In its 33-year history, the LA Times Sunday Book Review has admittedly never turned a profit. But neither does the business section or sports section (as Wasserman reminded me). The idea has always been that the high interest sections of the paper such as sports, business, books and opinion are part of the package that draws readers.

And although the ad department can’t sell directly against those pages, the paper’s big advertisers are counting on the fact that, when we get our papers on Sunday, after we pull out our favorite sections, we will likely wander through the Macy’s and the Best Buy ads. Then we’ll look at that nice glossy insert hawking the latest Target specials.

Curious as to where Los Angeles stands as a book buying market, yesterday I called the people at Nielson Bookscan, which is the primary collector of book sales data in the US. They told me that, in 2007, Los Angeles was second only to New York (with which it often trades places). Last year, New York had 8.5 percent of national book sales. Los Angeles followed with 5.5 percent. San Francisco was third with 3.7, followed by Chicago, 3.5, and Washington D.C. had 3.4.

Also, just to remind you, the LA Times Festival of Books, which draws 140,000 people to the UCLA campus each year, is the largest book fair in the nation.

So, yeah, LA residents are interested in books, a fact we demonstrate with our feet and with our wallets. So why doesn’t ZellCo understand that? Forget the cultural damage to Los Angeles that cutting the Book Review both signals and actually accomplishes, it’s a bad business decision. A pullout Books and Opinion section gives many of us an excuse to subscribe to the paper. Without it, our reasons for that expenditure are rapidly vanishing.

“This is very, very painful,” said Wasserman. “My real fear is that this isn’t about news papers at all, it’s about real estate,” he added morosely. “This is about Sam Zell waiting until it’s the right time to sell the property at 1st and Spring street, and making a killing.”

Probably so. Yet in the short term, it can’t hurt to write letters. We have nothing to lose. (At this point, we’ve pretty much already lost it.)

But it’s worth trying to get back. So write Editor-in-Chief Russ Stanton at the LA Times. (Russ.Stanton@LATimes.com) And firmly ask him to reinstate the Book Review and Opinion.

It’s good business, and it’s good for Los Angeles.

But, tell Stanton, hey, don’t believe us. Call the folks who make the advertising decisions at Target and Macy’s and ask them what sections they’d like to see stay in the LA Times in order to make their ad dollars worth spending over at Spring Street.

The late, great Molly Ivins expressed the whole thing rather succinctly two years ago: “I don’t so much mind that newspapers are dying — it’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.”

HAPPY 4th!!!!

PS: So what songs do you think we should be playing today? Lists! We need lists! (Yes, I too had some others—Tom Morello doing This Land Is Your Land, among them. But at the last minute, I settled on the classics. )

Nothing stops a bullet like a cello?

Sunday’s 60 Minutes featured a profile of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s next music director, the astonishingly young (26-years-old), astonishingly curly-headed, and just plain astonishing Gustavo Dudamel, who is slated to take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009.

The video of the segment, which can be found on the 60 Minutes website, is worth watching to get a preview of the wunderkind’s wondrous style, but also because of what it has to say about the unusual program that led Dudamel to music:

He was in a music program, which is a Venezuelan innovation. It is called El Sistema, the system, and it takes children – a quarter of a million children – almost all from poor neighborhoods, and teaches them how to play instruments.

This has led to hundreds of youth orchestras sprouting up all over the country.

But El Sistema is less a music program than a profound social movement that takes kids off the streets, takes them away from crime and drugs and despair.

“The music saved me. I’m sure of this. With all these bad things around you, you are exposed to these things, very close. The music give me a way to be far of these things,” Dudamel says

Dudamel says that when he takes over in 2009, he hopes to do for many of LA’s inner city kids what was done for him.

“Now we will start a project with the young people from the poor communities here in LA, like in Venezuela,” he says.

May it be so, Gustavo, may it be so.

.

“How come there’s cuts in the newsroom when the company’s still profitable,” says an unhappy editor when a new round of staff buyouts are announced.

No, this quote didn’t come from someone on the LA Times editorial staff (pointing out that the LA Times has a very healthy 20 percent profit margin) after the news broke yesterday about the firing of Jim O’Shea for refusing to again slash the Times editorial staff. It was said by a fictional Metro editor working for the (fictionalized version) of the Baltimore Sun on last night’s episode of the brilliant HBO series The Wire.

In the scene in question, the Sun’s editor-in-chief has to make drastic cuts in the newsroom as demanded by management in Chicago, namely the Tribune company.

As with last year’s season of The Wire— which illuminated problems in public education (including the grindingly counterproductive teach-to-the-test downside of No Child Left Behind) with more precision and intelligence than any news or magazine story—this season’s focus on the news media is already stunningly insightful….and depressingly accurate.

The only character missing was Sam Zell.

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AN IRONIC SIDE NOTE: As most hard core fans of the series know, The Wire’s creator David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun until 1995, when he took a buyout during one of that paper’s cost cutting frenzies. According to Simon, his bete noir in the Sun’s cost-cutting battles was the paper’s then editor-in-chief John Carroll who, a decade later, became the first of three editors-in-chief at the LA Times to take a figurative bullet for his opposition to demanded newsroom cuts. (Next would come Dean Baquet and now Jim O’Shea.) UPDATE: Carroll, who led the Times to five Pulitzers, is quoted in today’s Editor and Publisher.

The real John Carroll during the first round of the ongoing cost cut battles that have now cost three top editors their jobs.

The fictional but remarkably Carrollesque-looking editor explaining the “need” for draconian cost cuts at the fictional paper on The Wire.

UPDATE: Again LA Observed is the place to go to monitor unfolding gossip and news about the latest LA Times plot twists. This morning, among other pieces of news, he quotes USC Annenberg professor Marty Kaplin:

“Haven’t I seen that movie before?” Kaplan said. “It certainly makes the replacement want ad very peculiar. ‘Wanted: Great journalist with superb firing skills.’ “

If you didn’t see Bruce Springsteen on Sunday’s 60 Minutes…..Well, I’m just sad for you.

But, not to worry. Fortunately, I’m able to provide you with the last few paragraphs of the segment. (Regrettably, for the musical parts of the segment, you’re on your own.)

“I guess I would say that what I do is I try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality. That’s how my music is laid out. It’s like we’ve reached a point where it seems that we’re so intent on protecting ourselves that we’re willing to destroy the best parts of ourselves to do so,” Springsteen says.

Asked what he means, Springsteen tells Pelley, “Well, I think that we’ve seen things happen over the past six years that I don’t think anybody ever thought they’d ever see in the United States. When people think of the American identity, they don’t think of torture. They don’t think of illegal wiretapping. They don’t think of voter suppression. They don’t think of no habeas corpus. No right to a lawyer … you know. Those are things that are anti-American.”

[snip]

Springsteen says, “It’s unpatriotic at any given moment to sit back and let things pass that are damaging to some place that you love so dearly. And that has given me so much. And that I believe in, I still feel and see us as a beacon of hope and possibility.”

Springsteen sees himself following a long American tradition reaching back through Vietnam and on to the Great Depression.

“There’s a part of the singer going way back in American history that is of course the canary in the coal mine. When it gets dark, you’re supposed to be singing. It’s dark right now,” Springsteen says. “And so I went back to Woody Guthrie and Dylan and the people who said, say take Pete Seeger, who wants to know, doesn’t want to know how this song sounds, he wants to know what’s it for.”

“What needs to be said, in this country at this moment, in your opinion, what needs to be said?” Pelley asks.

“I think we live in a time when what is true can be made to seem a lie,” Springsteen says. “And what is lie can be made to seem true. And I think that the successful manipulation of those things have characterized several of our past elections. That level of hubris and arrogance has got us in the mess that we’re in right now. And we’re in a mess. But if we subvert, the best things that we’re about in the name of protecting our freedoms, if we remove them, then who are we becoming, you know? Who are we, you know? The American idea is a beautiful idea. It needs to be preserved, served, protected and sung out. Sung out.”

BRU-U-UUU-U-U-UUUCE! ….Ahem….. Alright, now back to our regularly scheduled programing.

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UPDATE: I wrote this in a light tone, as I happen to be an unrepentant Springsteen fan, and was poking fun at myself. But the points he makes are not trivial at all, they are essential.