George Carlin ~ The American Dream

"You have to be asleep to believe it."

Shake Shack $$$: Bad for City Parks? by Arun Venugopal - WNYC

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I've only recently started eating at Shake Shack, and have fallen hard for their frozen custard (the blueberry, so very creamy). And after generally avoiding beef for years, I've made return trips for their cheeseburgers, which I've concluded are superior to those of Five Guys — certainly less unwieldy.

But let us set aside such childish pursuits as all-beef patties, and consider this article by Patrick Arden in Next American City, asking "whether the city’s reliance on private-funding schemes was creating disparities between parks in wealthy and poor neighborhoods."

In 2009 Shake Shack collected revenues of $4.9 million; $220,256 of that went to the city and $348,389 to the park. Concessions in other parks pay as much as 20 percent of their take to the city, but not [owner Danny] Meyer, whose company adds to its profits by catering private parties in the park for $15,000 an hour. When Meyer opened his fast-food stand, he was the director and co-founder of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that oversees the public park.

Just to be clear, I've never eaten at the notoriously over-patronized Madison Square Park Shake Shack, only the UWS and Times Square locations — but I digress.

Arden gives numerous examples of the "big business" that public parks have become:

Few may object to the $364,000 salary paid to Central Park Conservancy president Douglas Blonsky, because his group is responsible for raising 85 percent of Central Park’s $27 million annual operating budget....

But those two parks now exemplify how lucrative the conservancy model can be. The Bryant Park Corporation took in more than $8.8 million in 2007 and its executive director, Daniel Biederman, picked up $210,000 for overseeing its 9.6 acres. Over at the Madison Square Park Conservancy, president Debbie Landau pulled in $185,000 — and her sister Maggi made $114,962.

Arden also notes that Robert Hammond, executive director of Friends of the High Line, earned $280,000 last year — "$75,000 more than the salary of [Adrian] Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner."

The problem, as Arden sees it, is not so much the fat paychecks in the private sector, it's the continuing cuts in public funding:

In 1960 parks maintenance and operations claimed 1.4 percent of city funds. Mayor Bloomberg’s new $63.6 billion budget would send parks’ percentage to a record low of 0.37 percent, or $239 million. (Chicago spent almost $150 million more last year on 21,000 fewer acres.) The mayor’s cut would drop the full-time workforce below 3,000, less than half the number employed by the Parks Department in 1970. “No other city agency has lost a greater percentage of its workforce over the last 40 years,” says [Geoffrey Croft, president of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates]. “Private money will never make that up."

Arden and parks advocates say the “Golden Age for Parks” that Adrian Benepe claims is more like a Gilded Age, "with wide — and growing — disparities between lavish, showplace parks for the haves and cast-off parcels for the have-nots. For every Madison Square, Bryant Park or High Line, there are hundreds of parks that depend solely on the city, and many suffer from scandalous neglect."

Tony Hendra: George Carlin: The Last Words You Can't Say on Television - The Huffington Post

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Just shy of three months ago (November 10th) George Carlin's "sortabiography" Last Words was published. That same week the ever-loyal I-Man (who can still kick a book's butt up the best seller list) did a nice spot with George's bro Patrick, USA Today ran a great review, NPR's Talk of the Nation enjoyed an unprecedentedly (for them) laugh-filled half hour with Rebecca Roberts (who has a magnificent laugh herself), Mr. Olberman was kind enough to announce the book's arrival, right on air, and Tony posted a Carlin-gem-packed announcement right here on HuffPost, which the powers-that-be featured and HuffPost's discerning readers shared heavily with their BFFs.

For media coverage, all in all a good first week.

Very adequate. Very understated. Very nice start.

AND THEN...(drum-roll)...

NOTHING!

Not a single national radio show, not a single morning show, not a single late night talk show, not a single cable show of any description, however lowly or loony, thumbed out a text, offering a few minutes of "their" air for George's daughter, brother or co-author, all of whom give great interview.

In one sense it didn't matter. George's loyal fans, who span three generations, bought the book anyway and bulled it within a week to #7 on the New York Times bestseller list - ahead of Ted Kennedy, Malcolm Gladwell, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson (and breathing down the neck of that argumentative idiot Glenn Beck) - all of whose books had had the benefit of being hyped to the ionosphere by national radio shows, morning shows, late night shows, cable shows, major papers, magazines, lifestyle sections, lit-blogs, you name it.

Now you'd think that jumping into the NYT Top Ten right from the get-go (the only other 'author' to do that that week was She Who Murdered Bullwinkle from a Helicopter) would have caught the attention of some clued-in, hands-on, 360-degree-vision media whizbang wouldn't you?

You'd be wrong. Again.

This apparent media shunning continued through November and the pre-Christmas retail frenzy when Last Words was outselling almost every other bestseller on the list - even the ones above it. Then the WaPo - one of the Only Two That Count in the book world - gave it a rave review, calling it not just funny, but a "powerful, personal, introspective story with real poignancy," adding that the account of George's service (and ultimate discharge) from the Air Force "rivals Joseph Heller's Catch-22," And this from the august WaPo mind you - not Numbnut's Reviews For A Dollar. Now, we thought for sure, our I-phones and B-berries would start vibrating with offers.

Nope. Not a single vibe.

So baffling was the silence we began to sniff around, and found out that the reasons our PR people had been giving us were (for once) absolutely true. It wasn't necessarily that the MSM - especially television - didn't want to know about George's life-story, it's just that they...

"...hardly do authors anymore," said a rep from a morning show (whose name you'd know but shall be nameless) then had three authors in a row on the next three mornings.

Or that they were "...you know, too busy with Jon and Kate and Sarah Palin," emailed another unnamed big-name morning show.

But most just said... "we can't have you on because You/We don't have an author." Well OK, but we do have the author's articulate and talented daughter, the author's beloved older brother, and the author's reasonably presentable co-author. Besides, this excuse didn't seem to apply to another well-known and equally dead Irish-American - Ted Kennedy. His posthumous musings "True Compass" didn't have an author either, but that didn't stop his widow Victoria being on so many shows she began to seem like wallpaper.

Was this massive media diss of an artist who has been called one of the greatest if not the greatest comedian of the second half of the 20th century, intentional? Possibly. But we leave media conspiracy theories to the rabid raccoons of the right (and Hillary Clinton).

Was this the snobbery of the upper-middle-class media for an outsider? Equally possibly. However incisive George's intellect, however wide-ranging his autodidact knowledge, he remained forever a 9th-grade dropout. The Harlem edge and earthiness of his work never sat that comfortably with our college-educated cultural bourgeoisie. (One worthless 20-something drone at CNN where Tony went to record a segment for a Canadian morning show, dismissed George's work as "foul-mouthed").

Was this the MSM, craven as ever, slavishly following the lead of the artistocracy - those who decide which frauds and daubs, which slabs of self-obsessed upper-middle-class logorrhea - constitute Art and Literature? Was the whole self-important, self-obsessed media establishment refusing to grant the term 'artist' to a mere stand-up comedian, however brilliant and vastly influential? Also possible.

Perhaps Rodney Dangerfield had it slightly wrong. It isn't just comedians who don't get no respect. Unless you're 300 years old and French, it's comedy itself.

Whatever the reason: ignorance, arrogance, snobbery or just media ADD, it was in the end, not tawdry so much as sad. Saddest of all was the response of the city George loved, the city he was proud to say was in every word he spoke, every step he took, the city to which he'd hoped to return before he died with a one-man Broadway show called New York Boy, an account of his wartime Manhattan boyhood based on Last Words and of which the good old WaPo said: "(After a very funny opening) something unexpected happens. He spends the first third of the book telling a beautiful, powerful story of growing up Irish in Harlem..."

Apparently it wasn't beautiful or powerful enough for the New York media. Although our own great newspaper came through with another glowing review, not a single television station, not a single cable outlet, not a single radio show or magazine or journal in his own hometown saw fit to write or speak a single word in memory of the life and genius - not to mention the last words - of an artist whom it's no stretch to call a national treasure.

For shame New York. For shame.

But even in the concrete heart of a media capital there's always a cockle of warmth. Paul Holdengraber, the dynamic and creative Director of Public Programs of the New York Public Library, has just announced that the Library will present a grand tribute to George's life and work in the place where he now belongs: the cultural epicenter of New York arts and letters.

The tribute will be hosted by another quintessential New Yorker, Whoopi Goldberg, joined by a number of comparable luminaries from across the creative spectrum - who will be announced over the coming weeks. It will take place on March 24th. Tickets are on sale. If you haven't had a chance yet, check out George's Last Words and come join us in March for an uproarious evening as we celebrate it and its incomparable author.

Joe bless you, The New York Public Library!

The Feisty Station That Defended Carlin’s ‘Seven Words’ Looks Back by Glenn Collins - NYTimes.com

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As the encomiums for George Carlin have rolled in from stand-up legends, celebrities and scholars, his death at 71 has also been noted at a diminutive, iconic and iconoclastic radio station in Manhattan, WBAI-FM.

Its broadcast of the comedian’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” became a landmark moment in the history of free speech. In a 1978 milestone in the station’s contentious and unruly history, WBAI lost a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that to this day has defined the power of the government over broadcast material it calls indecent.

“It’s a bad time here for us because George Carlin was part of the family,” said Anthony Riddle, the station’s general manager. “I think all the producers are dealing with it in their own way,” Mr. Riddle said, some doing commentary and others running archival material, including a bleeped-out version of the “Seven Words” routine.

The 1978 ruling, often termed “the Carlin case,” was actually called Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, and turned on a 12-minute Carlin monologue called “Filthy Words” that appeared on a 1973 album, “Occupation: Foole.”

After the Carlin album monologue was broadcast on WBAI in 1973 during “Lunch Pail,” an afternoon show, a listener objected that his young son had heard the words on a car radio. The corporate parent of WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation, received a letter of reprimand from the commission, which the company challenged in court.

The Supreme Court said that the broadcast was indecent, though not obscene, and gave the commission the right to determine the definition of indecency and to prohibit such material from being broadcast during hours when children were likely to be listening.

Despite this legal Dunkirk, “the fact that his seven dirty words having emanated from here is kind of a source of pride,” said Jose R. Santiago, the station’s news director.

The court decision “was about more than just radio,” Mr. Riddle added, “it was about the right to be human beings in the United States.”

“It was a gutsy thing for a radio station to do, taking that stand,” he said.

Though the station was not fined, Pacifica paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, said Larry Josephson, the WBAI station manager from 1974 to 1976.

Now, broadcasting the seven words “would cost us $360,000 per incident — so those seven words would cost us $2.5 million,” about equal to the station’s annual budget, Mr. Riddle said. “Now we’d be severely limited in taking a chance on protecting people’s free-speech rights.”

Recently Mr. Josephson had to abide by the consequences of the very commission decision he was involved in, as the independent producer of WBAI’s annual “Bloomsday” celebration on June 16, which honored James Joyce and his novel “Ulysses.”

Though the broadcast began at 7 p.m., the protagonist Molly Bloom’s famous lengthy monologue of erotic musings — which contains several forbidden words — had to be read after 10 p.m. during the “safe harbor” period when the F.C.C. allows the broadcast of what it terms “indecent” material.

The station that for generations has spoken truth to power is incongruously situated on the 10th floor of 120 Wall Street, and smack in the middle of the FM dial, at 99.5. Now in its 48th year, WBAI was both an expression, and ringleader, of the counterculture during its peak in the mid-1960s through the Vietnam War.

Observers have said that in its heyday, its on-air personalities, like Mr. Josephson, Steve Post and Bob Fass, extended the popularity of FM radio and explored the possibilities of the medium.

But its turmoil-filled subsequent history has featured a fiesta of staff clashes, board eruptions, station coups and protests. Amid accusations of every imaginable form of -ism, on-air personalities and producers have been summarily banned; on-air resignations have not been unknown.

These days WBAI, whose slogan is “Your Peace and Justice Community Radio Station,” has a paid staff of 25 and 200 independent volunteer producers, Mr. Riddle said, adding that WBAI has more than 200,000 listeners. He declined to say how many subscribers there are, but the number is believed to be fewer than 20,000; the minimum subscription rate is $25 a year.

Mr. Riddle, who joined the station in February, said that “it’s always difficult to run a democracy,” adding that “a lot of people believe in the kind of radio we provide,” since the station does not accept advertising, underwriting or grants.

If in many ways the station has changed, the legality of broadcasting the “Seven Words” has not.

“Now, 35 years later, we can’t take a chance of playing it,” Mr. Riddle said. “Discussion of the words is not acceptable, unless you cut the heart out of it.”

Photo: Playboy Mgazine

George Carlin, the Comedian, Is Dead at 71 - NY Times Breaking News

George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and groundbreaking routines like "Seven Words You Can Never Use on Television," died in Los Angeles on Sunday according to his publicist Jeff Abraham. He was 71.

George Carlin - 7 Words You Can't Say on Television

The cause of death was heart failure, according to Mr. Abraham.

Mr. Carlin began his standup comedy act in the late 1950s and made his first television solo guest appearance on “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1965. At that time, he was primarily known for his clever wordplay and reminiscences of his Irish working-class upbringing in New York.

But from the outset their were indications of an anti-establishment edge to his comedy. Initially, it surfaced in the witty patter of a host of offbeat characters like the wacky sportscaster Biff Barf and the hippy-dippy weatherman Al Sleet. “The weather was dominated by a large Canadian low, which is not to be confused with a Mexican high. Tonight’s forecast . . . dark, continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning.”

Mr. Carlin released his first comedy album, “Take-Offs and Put-Ons,” to rave reviews in 1967. He also dabbled in acting, winning a recurring part as Marlo Thomas’ theatrical agent in the sitcom “That Girl” (1966-67) and a supporting role in the movie “With Six You Get Egg-Roll,” released in 1968.

By the end of the decade, he was one of America’s best known comedians. He made more than 80 major TV appearances during that time, including the Ed Sullivan Show and Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show; he was also regularly featured at major nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas.

That early success and celebrity, however, was as dinky and hollow as a gratuitous pratfall to Mr. Carlin. “I was entertaining the fathers and the mothers of the people I sympathized with, and in some cases associated with, and whose point of view I shared,” he recalled later, as quoted in the book “Going Too Far” by Tony Hendra, which was published in 1987. “I was a traitor, in so many words. I was living a lie.”

In 1970, Mr. Carlin discarded his suit, tie, and clean-cut image as well as the relatively conventional material that had catapulted him to the top. Mr. Carlin reinvented himself, emerging with a beard, long hair, jeans and a routine that, according to one critic, was steeped in “drugs and bawdy language.” There was an immediate backlash. The Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas terminated his three-year contract, and, months later, he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club. Afterward, he temporarily abandoned the nightclub circuit and began appearing at coffee houses, folk clubs and colleges where he found a younger, hipper audience that was more attuned to both his new image and his material.

By 1972, when he released his second album, ”FM & AM,” his star was again on the rise. The album, which won a Grammy Award as best comedy recording, combined older material on the “AM” side with bolder, more acerbic routines on the “FM” side. Among the more controversial cuts was a routine euphemistically entitled “Shoot,” in which Mr. Carlin explored the etymology and common usage of the popular idiom for excrement. The bit was part of the comic’s longer routine “Seven Words That Can Never Be Said on Television,” which appeared on his third album “Class Clown,” also released in 1972.

“There are some words you can say part of the time. Most of the time ‘ass’ is all right on television,” Mr. Carlin noted in his introduction to the then controversial monologue. “You can say, well, ‘You’ve made a perfect ass of yourself tonight.’ You can use ass in a religious sense, if you happen to be the redeemer riding into town on one — perfectly all right.”

The material seems innocuous by today’s standards, but it caused an uproar when broadcast on the New York radio station WBAI in the early seventies. The station was censured and fined by the FCC. And in 1978, their ruling was supported by the Supreme Court, which Time magazine reported, “upheld an FCC ban on ’offensive material’ during hours when children are in the audience.” Mr. Carlin, refused to drop the bit and was arrested several times after reciting it on stage.

Mr. Carlin released a half dozen comedy albums during the ’70s, including the million-record sellers “Class Clown,” “Occupation: Foole” (1973) and “An Evening With Wally Lando” (1975). He was chosen to host the first episode of the late-night comedy show “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. And two years later, he found the perfect platform for his brand of acerbic, cerebral, sometimes off-color standup humor in the fledgling, less restricted world of cable television. By 1977, when his first HBO comedy special, “George Carlin at USC” was aired, he was recognized as one of the era’s most influential comedians. In the years following his 1977 cable debut, Mr. Carlin was nominated for a half dozen Grammy awards and received CableAces awards for best stand-up comedy special for “George Carlin: Doin’ It Again (1990) and “George Carlin: Jammin’” (1992). He also won his second Grammy for the album ”Jammin’” in 1994.

During the course of his career, Mr. Carlin overcame numerous personal trials. His early arrests for obscenity (all of which were dismissed) and struggle to overcome his self-described “heavy drug use” were the most publicized. But in the ’80s he also weathered serious tax problems, a heart attack and two open heart surgeries. His greatest setback was the loss of his wife, Brenda Hosbrook, who died in 1997. They had been married for 36 years. Mr. Carlin is survived by wife, Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law, Bob McCall; older brother, Patrick Carlin; sister-in-law, Marlene Carlin and long time manager, business partner and best friend Jerold Hamza.

YouTube - George Carlin: education and the owners of America

YouTube - George Carlin: education and the owners of America