One-Way Street

A Shriek of Woe

I took the day off from work today, so I'm at home in the suburbs where, ironically, it's easier to get a "genuine" Chicago hot dog than it is in downtown Chicago. I walked to Irving's, a masculine space with the aura of a baseball dugout. The lunchtime crowd is mostly construction workers taking a break from building McMansions. ESPN was on the television--Irving's seems to have a cable package that includes only ESPN--and a SportsCenter-like show was concluding with an announcer giving a quick rundown of the weekend's sporting events. He worked his way down the list to until he reached the American Hockey League finals. He then drew a deep breath and added, darkly, "This is the opening weekend of the Sex and the City movie."

The movie dominates the arts pages across the United States today. Many articles center around someone trying to get their mind around the fashion displays the film promises to deliver. There's also, predictably, a counter-reaction of male writers who regard the movie as a filmic Abu Ghraib. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass recently published what he called a "shriek of woe" entitled "Because no man should feel the agony of this film," that begins, "I can still hear the terrified cries of men from across the sea, from England, men scared stiff by the new 'Sex and the City' movie premiere, and such cries are cries of warning to men in America, where this evil film will debut in a few weeks."

I haven't heard any terrified cries, although the guy making my hot dog at Irving's was so distracted by the mention of Sex and the City that he added hot peppers when I specifically asked him not to.  I've seen several episodes of the series--it's hard to avoid--and I've always been of two minds about it. It's always been my impression that the show's signature fashion ensembles weren't the real point of the series. I saw it as the story of four women from the provinces trying to make their way in the city--a distinctly nineteenth-century story. I suspect that that's level at which the series really connected with its female audience. It's also why the SportsCenter crowd's horror is so misplaced and hysterical.

Just once, though, I wish there were a character who looked the four women straight in the eyes and said, "Come the revolution, you're going to be the first to be shot." The real shriek of woe is that we've passed the historical moment when someone could say something like that.

Watching the Oscars before the Storm

To prepare for last night's Oscars telecast I read the A.O. Scott/David Carr debate about the ceremony. Scott argued that the publicity bloat of the Oscars obscures genuinely good American filmmaking. Carr championed the Oscars as one of our few remaining shared cultural experiences. Before the show, I was on Carr's side, feeling that the Oscars accurately reflected Hollywood as an industry. But after watching the show, I came to sympathize with Scott's position that, by closing the door on a very good film year while ignoring many excellent films, the Academy Awards did more harm than good.

I always forget that the ceremony doesn't start on the hour. First there's the red carpet to endure.  The doughy-faced girl who plays Hannah Montana was everywhere, acting very chipper for someone so irrelevant. The cameras were also fixated on Carrie Russell, whoever that is. A nice-looking woman, but kind of a generic starlet. The cut quickly to the dress procedure of the red carpet interview was startlingly abrupt. You get the sense that if Osama bin Laden came down the red carpet, there would be a perfunctory question or two about the whole terrorism thing before the conversation would switch to his elegant, flowing white robes.

So the actresses are led into the hall by their dresses, while the men look like they just remembered the Golden Globes is the ceremony with the drinking, not the Oscars. Then the promos kick in for ABC shows I won't watch in this lifetime, nor in my next. Finally, Jon Stewart bounds on to the stage, armed with a set of jokes that had a first draft feel about them.

The rest of the night is kind of a blur. Carrie Russell appears a couple of more times and I still can't figure out who she is. The Hannah Montana girl, the show's most prominent product placement, appears again to do something completely inconsequential, and yet she manages to use the adjective "awesome" to describe it. Jon Stewart seems to be acting out the writers' residual bitterness with his clench-jaw delivery. He looks visibly relieved to have the chance to ad lib when they let Marketa Irglova back out to give her speech.

There were a few other moments of actual feeling, when someone gets caught up in their passion for making movies, or the enormity of their good fortune finally hits them. One such moment was Diablo Cody, in her Betty Rubble dress and stevedore tattoo, accepting her award for her fellow writers. But overall the ceremony had a perfunctory and joyless air about it. I don't know if it was the snowstorm that's about to hit Chicago—our fourth or fifth major storm of this interminable and dreary winter—or just the tail end of a long weekend with a variety of job crises facing me on Monday morning. Maybe you saw something else. I haven't had the chance to read anyone else's reaction. Even the Coen Brothers' studied New York cool struck a discordant note. Ordinarily I like them, although I'm still mildly surprised that No Country for Old Men won the Best Picture Oscar. I haven't seen the film yet, primarily because I read the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-Western grotesquery I wasn't eager to re-experience in CinemaScope. The story just seemed too remorselessly bloody, too emotionally hollowed out to serve as the standard-barer for the American film industry.

I thought the key moment in the broadcast was Jon Stewart's iPhone joke. There was some big-screen montage and when it was over, Stewart was watching it on an iPhone. The joke was a sly reminder that the Academy Awards are always two to five years behind the cultural zeitgeist. All that screen-chewing acting and those luscious long takes are lost in the microscreens of the digitized cinema. Finally, the iPhone joke was the writers' way of reminding the actors that they're up next in the bitter war over the three-inch screen.

Nimrod Nation

I can think of few places more unprepossessing than Watersmeet, MI. And yet, the town has already experienced fifteen minutes of unlikely fame thanks to some ESPN ads, which led to a brief vogue for Nimrods tee shirts and sweat shirts--the Nimrods being the nickname of the local school's sports teams.  Starting tonight Watersmeet gets another shot at fame with Brett Morgen's Nimrod Nation, a week-long documentary series on the Sundance Channel. The series' website promises "a unique experience of a very different America." Clips from the series show lots of snow, determined basketball players, and picturesque rustics opining on matters ranging from the trivial to the insignificant. Watersmeet is Lake Woebegone with low production values, its one-liner fame extrapolated into a metaphor for small town America.

As it happens, my family has a summer cottage in Watersmeet Township, albeit just barely: the access road runs from Land O' Lakes, WI, but the state line runs along our property line. Watersmeet is where we go to dump our garbage. We've been to its Indian casino once, and I won forty bucks, which I blew on ice cream--in Land 'O Lakes. We used to go to a Watersmeet truck stop that served an excellent breakfast until, like a lot of Northwoods businesses with too much overhead, it burned to the ground shortly after the summer season concluded. The documentary's website claims Watersmeet is an "outdoorsman's dream" with 302 lakes (this number includes Lac Vieux Desert, which is actually miles away in Wisconsin), 241 miles of trout streams (mostly dried up because of an extended drought), and 1,478 citizens, mostly Finns and Indians with no use for summer residents from Illinois.

Throughout film history, filmmakers have been depicted small towns as repositories of traditional values that the urban and suburban bourgeoisie have forgotten. The structural opposition is simple: Small towns never change, while big cities are in constant flux. Morgen's images of portly men in flannel, pale cheerleaders, and snow-bound basketball courts are straight out of 1950's America. It will be interesting to see if Morgen also captures the sense of permanent economic peril in which the town lives.  Businesses change hands or shut their doors seemingly overnight. Or they simply go up in flames. (The local firemen know the drill; they rarely bother trying to extinguish the fires). The only enterprise of any scale and sense of long-term investment is the Indian casino. Even the gas stations have a high turnover, and with pumps scarce in the area and lots of gas-guzzling trucks around, you'd think that would be the one sure bet in the region. The fishing guide and resort business disappeared a long time ago. The lakes are all fished out. Poor snowfalls over the last few winters have nearly wiped out the snowmobiling economy. Logging still exists, but it's not very profitable. The locals hunt deer less for sport than for sustenance; a bad hunt can mean a family really struggles to make it through the winter. Watersmeet Township is mostly low-end service industries now: hair salons and small motor repair, with the occasional antique shop popping up for a brief existence. In an attempt to cash in on the recent real estate boom, two real estate agencies set up shop in town to sell second home property to weekenders from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Low lake levels, meager snowfalls, high fuel costs, and tight mortgage lending will probably doom that effort.

Brett Morgen, the director of the lively documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, has stated that he tried to let the locals tell their own stories in Nimrod Nation. He wanted to avoid the melodramatic turns that documentaries tend to take in favor of something "a bit more lyrical and poetic." Watch tonight to see if he avoids another filmic cliché: the small town as a bastion of enduring moral values, just waiting for the troubled suburban bourgeoisie to pack up the SUV and head for the woods. But they better hurry before the woods go up in flames, too.

Cheney's Law

Last night's Frontline documentary "Cheney's Law" was a chronicle of horrors, to be sure, but there were no new revelations about the Vice President's implacable assault on the Constitution. The dramatic tension of the documentary was provided by Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor from the University of Chicago who served, briefly, as the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel before he ran into the David Addington buzz saw. It was Goldsmith's legal analysis that set off the near-palace coup surrounding the renewal of the warrantless wiretapping program. By demonstrating how Cheney's legal team had stepped well beyond conservative legal principles--well beyond any recognizable legal principles--Goldsmith revealed how monadic, not to mention fanatic, Cheney's claims for executive privilege have become.

Cheney's version of events was provided by a series of black and white photographs of the vice president in which he displays his entire emotional range, conveyed in exactly two expressions: the beady-eyed stare of the monomaniac, and the cagey smile of a man who has the entire nation bugged. David Addington, Cheney's Cardinal Richelieu, looks as innocuous as a stamp collector. Strung together in a narrative, Cheney's machinations enhancing presidential power are mortifying, but the documentary didn't do much to solve the essential mystery of the man. "Cheney's Law" doesn't convey the grandeur of his secrecy and fanaticism, or why the issue of executive power, which he can never enjoy directly, became his reason for being. While there are plenty of logical explanations for the policies of the Bush Administration, none to them, to my mind, satisfactorily explain the vehemence of Bush and Cheney's beliefs or the magnitude of their failures. It seems that the more we know about what goes on inside the Administration, the more baffling it appears.

Theater of Punishment

Now that the flayed bodies of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have faded from view, we're now turning our attention to the invisible masses of incarcerated bodies in American prisons--2.2 million of them now. The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea writes about how the broken American penal system is gaining an increasingly larger share of public policy debates, spurred by the bad conscience that comes from the sheer scale of the problem: currently there are seven times the number of inmates in prison than in the early 1970's, when American cities were thought to be in an irreversible slide into decrepitude and criminality.

Shea begins his article with a Foucaldian analogy: "What if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream?" He points out that the prison system is contiguous with society as a whole, although he limits his discussion to the problem of recidivism. Society's disciplinary function, in effect, has become inefficient. The arbitrariness of power has become too transparent, separating out poor minorities from society for as long as possible while reintegrating the more economically successful back into society. The crack gap is the most infamous example of this imbalance: a white guy snorting cocaine habit is far less likely to be locked up for long periods of time than a black guy with a crack pipe. Also, America is dumping 700,000 prisoners a year back into society with few resources devoted to making sure they're functioning, productive members of society.

Shea argues that prison reform will become a major topic in the public sphere very soon as a series of new books are released documenting the inadequacy of our penal system. However, with a new spate of vengeance films in current release and unresolved debates about how the US should protect itself from terrorist attacks--not to mention a crime rate creeping back up--indicate that Americans still aren't in a mood to grant much clemency.  After all, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are still in operation.

The incipient prison reform movement may have less to do with genuine concern for the unfortunate than a consequence of a long economic expansion finally running out of gas. Citing Foucault's Discipline and Punish is irresistible in this context, and Foucault points out that prison reform is most likely to occur in affluent times, when criminality tends to turn toward crimes against property, causing in turn a broad harshening of penalties. Rather than just simply throwing every crack head burglar in jail for the rest of his life, as we're essentially doing now, reformers wanted not to soften the law but to lessen (or sometimes merely to hide) the arbitrariness of justice. Foucault himself was a member of the Groupe d'information sur les Prisons (GIP), a prison reform group, but that didn't prevent him from being suspicious of prison reform movements in general, which he regarded as agents in the redistribution of power.

The whole idea of prison reform appeared when Europe replaced its theaters of punishment (burning witches at the stake, for instance) with the penal system, with its combination of optimistic rhetoric and panoptic technologies of surveillance. But in the last few years it seems like we've reverted back to a theater of punishment. What were Abu Ghraib and the Fox series 24 about other than the flaying of bodies in the name of American power? Maybe we're ready for something a little more decorous, something more consistent with our ideas of liberty. Or maybe power has become so diffuse, so disconnected from democratic practices, that when the time comes for us to decide what to do about our dysfunctional and unfair prison system we'll find ourselves as helpless and powerless as the people in jail.

MTV’s Poet Laureate

mtvU may have an irritating acronym and a dubious business plan, but at least it showed some imagination in selecting John Ashbery as its first poet laureate. mtvU will broadcast snippets of his poems  to 750 colleges across the US as part of an effort to expose students to poetry and provide some cultural cover for Viacom's expansion plans in the 18-24 demographic.

Ashbery has taken a what-the-hell approach to the project. He doesn't get paid, but one or two students somewhere may be paying enough attention to read some more poetry. For the students who already read poetry--and there are more than one would expect--the project will be yet another well-meaning but somewhat puzzling publicity campaign, much like the 1990's vogue for poems in subways.

The mtvU presentations are slick and minimalist, and, I suppose, it's beside the point to object that they're not accurate representations of the experience of reading a full Ashbery poem. The short mtvU films lend the poems a formal closure the full poems lack. For instance, "Soonest Mended" becomes aphoristic, and Ashbery is anything but an aphoristic writer. On the other hand, Ashbery's aesthetic has been likened to music, or, perhaps more accurately given the current context, a music video: scraps of discourse and images float by, each arresting in its own way but not adding up to anything coherently meaningful. It's also worth noting that Ashbery is the only major literary figure associated with the Abstract Impressionist movement in the 1950's. Ashbery is too reserved and cerebral to be a prosody version of Willem de Kooning, but Ashbery did pick up on the Abstract Expressionists' explorations of form and emotion--at the same time early rockers were forging the same connections. Maybe someday soon mtvU will designate Barnett Newman as its first court artist.

Interview with Saul Austerlitz

Now that the music video is packing up and moving from television to the Internet, it's time to take a look at how the form started and how it developed.  Saul Austerlitz traces the history of the music video in Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. Born of the World War II-era Soundies, the music video first took its modern form in Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964). Austerlitz details the development of the form through its MTV heyday to its current incarnation on You Tube and other online outlets.  I asked Saul about his book and his thoughts on the future of the music video.

What interested you in this project?

I grew up with MTV, in what turned out to be the last moments of its unquestioned primacy as musical tastemaker.  I used to watch “120 Minutes,” on Sunday nights, religiously, and take notes on what videos were shown, who the directors were, etc.  Being mad for music as I was, music videos seemed miraculous to me, as cultural products invested with wit and vigor and a sense of cool, and yet flew almost entirely under the cultural radar.  This only became more true when music videos were bounced, for the most part, from TV.  I became fascinated by the idea of the music video as a shadow cultural history that had been neglected, caught between music and film, and wanted to write a readable, hopefully enjoyable history of a form that possessed a remarkable array of performers, styles, and traditions.  When I started, it was also intended as something of a summation of a closed genre- one that had nearly ended its run.  It ended up becoming something else because of the Internet-fueled revitalization of the music video, and became an assessment of a form in the midst of major change.

I was struck by the Foo Fighters' video for "Everlong," which you rank as the second best music video of all time. It's an amazing video directed by Michel Gondry, who you regard as a major video director. Yet, as brilliant as the video is, the song is kind of boring--to my mind, anyway. Do you think there are acts that wouldn't have been nearly so popular or highly regard without the music video?

I happen to like “Everlong” as a song quite a bit, but I fully understand your question, and think you’ve hit on something.  I think that in the early years of MTV, especially, it was possible to see sonically unexciting bands flourish by virtue of the skill shown by their videos.  I happen to like the British New Romantic groups, like Duran Duran or Adam and the Ants, but it’s clear to me that neither of them would ever have achieved the success they did in the U.S. without their videos.  It’s even more true for later artists who sell sex in their videos; does anyone think that Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” or Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” would have been hits of the same magnitude without Tawny Kitaen and Bobbi Brown, respectively?  Examples like these are only further proof of the power of the music video, which is capable of resuscitating otherwise uninteresting songs, and making classics of mediocre work.  Who actually loves “Thriller” as a song?

The music video was originally developed as a promotional vehicle.  But you mentioned that certain videos seem to instruct the viewer in how to listen to a song. How did this instruction work?

One doesn’t discount the other.  The instruction doesn’t take away from the promotion, or vice versa.  What I meant by the notion of instruction was that certain videos tell their viewers how to hear the music- in short, what to look out for sonically, or how to picture the music visually.  One of the examples that springs to mind is Dave Meyers’ videos for Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It,” which serve as visual analogs to the processes at work in the song itself.  Just like the songs, Meyers’ videos are shattered- split into a thousand pieces, and then haphazardly reconstructed.  Seeing Meyers’ choppy, splintered imagery, we grasp the nature of Elliott and producer Timbaland’s enterprise better than we would have been capable of without the video.

There seems to have been an implicit dialog between male and female artists over gender definitions.  Who do you think is key in this debate?

You can’t talk about gender and video without talking about Madonna, and David Bowie.  Bowie predates the MTV era, but in many ways he is the figure that represents its promise, and its excitement.  Bowie goes from video to video without ever keeping to the same look, the same style, or the same aura.  Is he straight, or gay?  Comic, or tragic?  Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke?  Bowie is all these things, and his videos understand implicitly the fluidity of persona that music video would come to embrace.  Part and parcel of this is a willingness to expand the borders of masculinity to include his 1970’s brand of fey theatricality, bordering on outright homosexuality in videos like “Heroes” and “D.J.”  Madonna picks up where Bowie leaves off, messing around with notions of femininity from video to video so that she becomes a larger-than-life Everywoman.  In one video, she’s an innocent young girl from around the way (“Borderline”); in the next, she’s a scheming modern version of Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (“Material Girl”); and soon after that, she’s Mary Magdalene for the 1980’s (“Like a Prayer”).  With Bowie and Madonna, it’s less a debate than a meeting of like minds.  It’s not women vs. men; it’s the video-savvy going up against the unsavvy, and it’s no contest. 

Michael Nesmith seems to be kind of a hero in the rise of the video in the 1960's. What impact did he have?

Nesmith was one of the first musicians to appreciate the capabilities of music video.  He not only made videos for his 1970’s solo work, he sought to get in on the ground floor of music video in the U.S..  Nesmith was originally involved in the discussions for what would later become MTV, although he was quickly given the boot.  Nesmith was never commercial enough to take the music video to a mass audience, but he was one of the first to imagine it being possible.  Nesmith was willing to experiment; he was even one of the first to make a long-form video for an entire album.  In many ways, Nesmith is the Moses of the music video; he’s the first to imagine the promised land, even if he didn’t quite make it there himself.

Country music was slow to embrace the music video, but eventually the form flourished there. Why didn't the form catch on with other kinds of music such as jazz or classical?

I suspect it’s due to the fact that jazz and classical are less abundantly commercial forms.  Music videos are salesmen- they look to close the deal.  They want to sell a performer, a song, a lifestyle, or more prosaically, an album.  Jazz and classical, being products of high culture (at least relatively speaking), are too high-minded to sully themselves like that, and therefore the music video has never particularly worked for them.  It’s also a youth-culture form; music videos are the fruit of adolescence and post-adolescence, and have never translated particularly well to more adult musical genres. 

What, if anything, has rock and rap lost with the decline of the music video on cable television?

They’ve lost the ability to talk directly to a mass audience through the medium of video, the way they once did.  For mainstream rock and hip-hop, there isn’t much to replace what they once had- although hip-hop still has BET, and rock, to a lesser extent, has Fuse.  However, the rise of the Internet as a repository for the music video has greatly changed the equation.  While YouTube is not going to cut it for the mega-bands of the world, it has been an enormous boon for smaller artists.  YouTube and other streaming-video sites have become places for bands to be discovered, and videos themselves another way of attracting an audience for up-and-coming acts.  The Internet has replaced cable as the locus of the music video, and what it loses in unity (everyone watching the same clip) is made up for by its capabilities as a virtual library of music-video history.  Go to YouTube, check out Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” and tell me that the Internet isn’t working miracles in preserving the forgotten detritus of music-video history.

You talk a lot about how the production values of music videos improved in the 1990's, making me wonder if the improvement in television technology during this period had something to do with the creation of ever more elaborate visual effects in video. You see the future of the music video in small-screen outlets like YouTube and MySpace. Given the technological limitations of online viewing, in your view how will the music video develop in the next three to five years?

Well, you’re right, inasmuch as watching a music video online remains less vivid an experience than watching it on TV, because of the low quality of Internet video.  Computer technology improves so fast, though, that what was once impossible becomes de rigueur in no time at all.  Streaming video itself is a fairly recent development, and as computers, and Internet connections, grow more sophisticated, the gap between Internet and TV will shrink accordingly.  I think the music video will grow in the same direction it has been heading over the next few years, becoming one of the essential enticements of the Internet.  Whether the mainstream will find a place in this sphere, or if music videos will remain primarily under the purview of up-and-coming artists, remains to be seen.

The City of the Future

The Chicago architecture film UrbanLab has won the History Channel's City of the Future contest. UrbanLab's plan calls for transforming Chicago into a green city that recirculates all of its water into a "closed loop," pun not intended. By 2106 the city will be a sort of high-tech swamp, which is pretty much how the city began. The main elements of the plan are "Eco-Boulevards," which are not really boulevards--how city planners love boulevards!--but rather canals full of snails and eco-friendly fish in place of those noxious carp-like creatures that currently live in the Chicago River. The Eco-Boulevards will connect Lake Michigan to an "Emerald Necklace," which sounds much lovelier than what we have there now: the Tri-State Tollway. There's also a plan to re-reverse the flow of the Chicago River so that it flows back into Lake Michigan, as the river originally did, so that the Lake Michigan's water will be replenished. (I haven't noticed any drop in the lake's water level recently, but I guess it's a good idea just in case.) Trains will be rerouted to the bowels of the earth, i.e., the Deep Tunnel, a system of tunnels deep beneath the city serving some obscure but no doubt crucial purpose. And where will the cars go? This is 2106, so don't even ask about cars.

Overall, this sounds like a great plan. Ecologically-responsible urban planning has been a tenet of the field for a hundred years, and will become even more important over the next one hundred years. UrbanLab's plan will ensure the metropolitan area has plenty of fresh water in the coming global water shortage, but I don't see any provisions for doing something about the mosquitoes that are sure to thrive in the Eco-Boulevards. Maybe by 2106 mosquitoes will be banished from the earth along with cars.

No Go for OJ

Looks like even Fox can be embarrassed: The big man himself, Rupert Murdoch, has just announced that the OJ Simpson mocu-fession book and TV appearance have been canceled. Murdoch said, in the understatement of the year, "I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project."  Oh well. Maybe OJ can go on Rush Limbaugh's show and Rush can help him act out the murders.

ABC's Path to 9/11 and the Tragedy to Come

Maybe there's a great 9/11 artwork already out there, and it won't be discovered until years later, when the shock wears off, like the Kennedy assassination eventually did. One thing seems certain: no one will look back at ABC's agitprop Path to 9/11 and call it a great work. It's possible that the public won't ever get to see it.

With this series ABC appears to be repaying an obscure favor to the Republican Party. From the descriptions I've read, the story goes something like: Bill Clinton was whiling away one of his boring second-term afternoons getting a blowjob, al Qaeda saw their chance and began plotting to blow up the biggest phallic symbols in the US. Then George Bush comes along to smite the evildoers. Wild cheering and cut to commercial. The series leaves out certain details like the "Wag the Dog" taunts by Congressional Republicans after Clinton tried to whack bin Laden, or Bush ignoring the report warning that al Qaeda wanted to attack the US with airplanes.

For some reason, the fifth anniversary of 9/11 seems to be the most dispiriting. Maybe it's the blatant exploitation for political and commercial ends coming this fall. I hope there's an alternative tragic narrative at work and we get some sort of perepeteia this November, followed by a tragic fall of our hero, the president.  Then we'll have a 9/11 mini-series worth watching.

The Internet Olympics

More evidence that TV is the new radio: the Turin Olympics are the lowest rated ever on TV, but a runaway hit on the Internet. Never mind about American Idol. Arguably, the Olympics are more popular than ever; it's television that has lost audience share.