December closed with a remarkable flurry of headline sports stories. It was not only one for the memory bank, but it may have been the most fitting way to end the decade known as the Naughty Aughties. What seemed like an awkward tag at the beginning of the new century has become a most appropriate signature phrase.

The first shock was the fall from grace of the poster boy for clean living and family values. Tiger Woods instantly went from the slickest brand in the American pantheon of commerce to the butt of jokes and ridicule.

IMG, the International Management Group, had persuaded nearly all major sport corporate sponsors that Woods was their man: the perfect golfer with the perfect image, the quintessential sportsman. Everybody loved Tiger, admired Tiger, wanted to be like Tiger.

We all got on board, even though we should have known better. America still wants its sports heroes cut from the Frank Merriwell at Yale mode, and Tiger Woods of Stanford looked like one of them.

Instead, Tiger is the perfect hollow man, lacking a center and lost without a compass — except for the one on his yacht that has become his shelter from the firestorm.

Typical in cases like this, the media that touted the Tiger Brand as the genuine article turned with fury and self-righteousness on its former model of perfection. Even more amusing is how quickly the corporate world cut its ties to the feline philanderer.

Accenture, one of the major corporations that identified its brand with his brand, quickly began removing all images of Woods from company advertisements. Tag Hauer, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, announced it would scale down its association with Woods. Procter and Gamble lowered their Tiger profile by withdrawing its Gillette ads featuring Woods. Then AT&T pulled the plug on its Woods connection.

Only Nike has remained completely faithful, with Phil Knight saying that this whole thing was but a minor blip. There have been no TV commercials featuring Woods on television since late November. Tiger Woods has vanished from public view and from the branded world in which we live. It is doubtful, however, that sex has disappeared from the PGA tour or other sporting venues.

Sex and sport are inextricably linked. Faux sex surrounds all our sporting events, where young women called “cheerleaders” and “dancers” decorate the landscape with wiggles, jiggles and giggles passing as a cross between glamorous role models and purveyors of sexual titillation. Then there’s the real sex, as women make themselves available to athletes, and star athletes take it as a perk of the position.

The Tennessee Hostess Scandal is an adjunct to the Tiger Woods affair. Sending young women from the University of Tennessee out to a high school football game on a recruiting trip is about as bad as it gets. The stories of attractive young women traveling hundreds of miles to see and be seen with naïve high school athletes who are targets on the football recruiting board point to issues of sexual access and the insane pressures surrounding intercollegiate athletics.

Such insanity was on display in Florida recently as Urban Meyer, head football coach and minor deity, announced his retirement from coaching, citing his health. An outpouring of grief and angst flowed throughout Gatorland. Then Meyer reversed his decision. He will now take a leave of absence until he gets control of his world. This is comparable to most of us giving up breathing until we could live without having to do it constantly.

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PopPolitics contributor Richard Crepeau is featured in a Dallas Morning News story about Barack Obama’s omnipresence in the media.

Karen Brooks reports:

He’s on his own channel on your satellite television. He’s in MTV videos by rap and reggae artists. His ads pop up on the Web sites you read. He’s delaying a World Series game to buy a block of national TV time. And when you’re cruising down the street in your favorite racing video game, his face whizzes by on a cyber-billboard

The only place he hasn’t appeared yet is on a box of Wheaties.

Love him or hate him, and whether it helps him or hurts him, the presidential hopeful is everywhere.

“It’s stunning, isn’t it?” said Dick Crepeau, a contributor to PopPolitics.com and a professor of American cultural history at the University of Central Florida. “It’s very, very calculatingly done, and they’ve done it very well.”

Brooks enlists Crepeau and other cultural critics to look at the benefits and possible pitfalls of being “everywhere.”  While Obama has been able to reach non-traditional voters by appearing in places like a billboard within popular video games (the image above is from Burnout Paradise on Xbox 360), the McCain campaign uses the opportunity to claim, once again, that he is more “style than substance.”

I’m the last person to celebrate the life of a celebrity — but I will make at least one exception: Paul Newman.

My fervent hope is that future generations of superstars take his cue — on two fronts.

First, he shunned the entire Hollywood machine, even while he was living off it.  He created an entirely new definition of “staying humble.”

Second, he never felt he should hide his politics for the sake of his art.

Thanks, Paul.

Paul Reiser (of Mad About You fame) uses some much-needed levity to express his own frustration with the lies and innuendo that appear to be the entirety of the McCain-Palin campaign:

We’re in the 3rd grade again. The skinny, smart kid who just moved in to the neighborhood is getting roughed-up by the asshole bully. The kid who hits you in the head with your hand and says, “Why’re you hitting yourself? Why’re you hitting yourself?”

“Um, actually I’m not. You’re hitting me.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“No, I’m just pointing out that…” SMACK!

“Why’re you hitting yourself?”

And, although he no longer speaks because of his battle with cancer, Roger Ebert is still able to give a devastating “thumbs-down” to those tactics.  Along the way he explains why Sarah Palin is the “American Idol” candidate:

I think I might be able to explain some of Sarah Palin’s appeal. She’s the “American Idol” candidate. Consider. What defines an “American Idol” finalist? They’re good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented, why, they’re darned near the real thing. There’s a reason “American Idol” gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, Hey, that could be me up there on that show!

My problem is, I don’t want to be up there. I don’t want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq.

And Matt Damon thinks we’re all living a “bad Disney movie” nightmare:

Of course, why should the opinions of celebrities matter?  I mean, the only place farther away from the political realities of Washington than Hollywood is … a small town in Alaska?

Update (via DailyKos): Okay, Heart actually doesn’t appear to have legal standing, since “Barracuda” has been “licensed for public performance under a blanket fee paid by the venue to ASCAP, the firm that collects royalties on behalf of composers and copyright owners.”  But Roger Fisher, a former guitarist of the band, says he will donate his royalties to Obama: “With my contribution to Obama’s campaign, the Republicans are now supporting Obama.”

You gotta have Heart, I guess.

Yes, Heart — one of my youthful guilty musical pleasures — has sent a cease-and-desist order to the McCain-Palin campaign via their record label.  They objected to their use of “Barracuda” after the Republican convention speech of VP nominee Sarah “Barracuda” Palin (the nickname she supposedly gained on the basketball court).

Four years ago I saw John Fogerty on the “Vote for Change” tour supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket with Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M. and others.  His extra-bitter performance of “Fortunate Son” made it clear what he thought of George W. Bush.

So why isn’t he publicly objecting to the use of “Centerfield (Put Me In Coach)” — which bridged the speeches of Joe Gibbs, former coach of the Washington Redskins, and Senator Lindsey Graham at the convention?

Now, I don’t know if a cease-and-desist order would have any legal basis, but as Dave Burdick at the Huffington Post reports, many other artists and their labels have made their objections known.

Come on, John, the list even includes Van Halen.

“Once upon a time, about a month ago, Senator John McCain was mocking the celebrity of his rival, Senator Barack Obama, comparing him in a television commercial to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears,” writes Michael Cooper at The Caucus. “But on Monday Mr. McCain showed that he was not against bold-faced-types, per se, hobnobbing in company that is decidedly more Us Weekly and Billboard than Congressional Quarterly or Council on Foreign Relations in its nature.”

Daddy Yankee, John Voight and Angie Harmon are McCain fans, as is Patricia Heaton (above) — who has her own reasons for wanting to see McCain take the White House:

“I was a little disappointed in not being able to introduce Cindy, as was originally planned, as she is a beer heiress and I’m Irish Catholic,’’ she said, according to a pool report, drawing laughs from the crowd. “I have a vested interest in seeing her become first lady so I get invited to those White House keg parties.”

Fox has more of Heaton’s remarks:

“As an actor I recognize that our opponent, someone who thinks that if he puts on the right costume and stands on the right set, that we will all believe that he is presidential material but John McCain doesn’t have to pretend because he walks the walk,” Heaton said during her introduction of the presumptive GOP nominee at a McCain Sacramento fundraiser.

Heaton, an award-winning actress best known for her role as Ray Romano’s wife on the hit series “Everybody Loves Raymond,” said McCain is more in touch with the concerns of regular Americans than his rival. She specifically cited the contrasting images Obama in Berlin “giving his blessing in messianic fashion to thousands of adoring Germans” and McCain talking to voters in a supermarket aisle.

“You know what I thought when I saw that photo? I thought, ‘yeah baby, we are going to win this election.’ Because I am in the cheese aisle in the grocery store a lot more often than when I am in Berlin and so are most other Americans,” Heaton added.

But is she in the cheese aisle as much as she’s on the golf course? Or in England?

In a post from a couple weeks back, I wrote about enjoying Keith Olbermann’s castigation of President Bush over his “giving up golf” comments. I even appreciated the freshness of finally having an unabashed liberal beating the O’Reillys and Limbaughs at their own sensationalistic game. But I did express a bit of a hesistancy over the way Olbermann’s style risks losing the message within the machinations of the messenger/entertainer.

Well, I think Olbermann’s latest “special comment” concerning Hillary Clinton’s reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy just confirms my worries. And I’m not alone. James Poniewozik, TIME’s TV critic, writes:

The substance (or lack thereof) of the controversy notwithstanding … Olbermann is edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability. (As soon as the Clinton gaffe broke, blog commenters were wondering how ballistic he would go, and he obliged, and how.) Even if we concede his argument — that Clinton was at best callously and at worst intentionally suggesting she should stay in the race because Obama might be killed — every time he turns up the volume to 11 like this lately, he sounds like just another of the cable gasbags he used to be a corrective to.

While years of frustration might have — might have — justified Olbermann’s outburst over Bush’s disregard for soldier’s lives, Clinton’s comments don’t rise to that level.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I see Clinton as the consummate Machiavellian — and I’m sure, apologies notwithstanding, that she really was saying that an assassination might just happen this year and that is a reason to stick in the race (although I can’t imagine she wanted to say it publicly). I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt.

But all she did was make herself slightly more irrelevant than the day before. And that’s not worth the anger.

If you didn’t catch Keith Olbermann’s screed last night — inspired partially by President Bush’s commitment (which he didn’t really keep, apparently) to give up golf in honor of those servicemen killed in the Iraq War — it’s worth watching. Oh, and buckle yourself in — it’s a pretty wild ride:

As genuine as Olbermann intends it to be — and as right-on as he is about it all — his tone and self-righteousness bother me.  Olbermann condemns Bush at the end of the piece for thinking that the Iraq War is all about Bush himself.  Well, I’d like to say to Olbermann that criticism of the Bush administration and the war machine it perpetuates is not all about Olbermann.

And that’s the larger problem with a personality-driven pseudo news show.  It’s never really about the news.  Olbermann, even at his most poignant, feels more like an entertainer than a social critic — and I’m not sure that inspires much action or even critical thinking in his audience.

I could be wrong …. What’s your reaction?

Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times wonders at — rather than analyzes — the sea change that has made “Pop TV” the new favorite venue for politicians. With all the recent appearances by the President, candidates and their spouses on everything from “Deal or No Deal” to the “Colbert Report,” Stanley notes, “It’s hard to recall how unusual it was to see Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas playing the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992.”

Her pop explanation: “Elitism is to the 2008 campaign as communism was to 1950s politics: a career-breaker. And pop TV is the antidote, a free platform to rub shoulders with viewers who only glancingly pay attention to the news.”

It’s not every day that a small, important book ends up in the hands of a big, well-known star, sunning, in a bikini, in Malibu.

This week the stars aligned, as Pamela Anderson was spotted reading “Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity,” a book Kirkus called “a work of honesty and, yes, integrity.”

Close-up:

Let others give advice or offer critical analysis. We tracked down the book’s author, Anne Elizabeth Moore, who these days can be found in the the busy halls of the Anti-Advertising Agency, among other places, for a response:

Of all of the images I never ever thought I would come across in my life, Pamela Anderson reading my little treatise on the rampant corporatization of culture and dwindling of democracy in a bikini is, well, the entirety of the list. Seriously. W. T. F., IMHO.

And if I weren’t able to look at it as radical leftist politics preaching outside the choir — far, far, outside — I’d be really weirded out. By the pictures of Pamela Anderson reading my little treatise on the rampant corporatization of culture and dwindling of democracy in a bikini.

Want to learn more about the book that made Anderson hit up two Gatorade bottles? Read this most excellent Q&A at Murketing.

My partner and I have been known to explore or dismiss a restaurant purely based on the font of the signage. And most of the time it works. Really. If it weren’t for this technique, we might never have discovered the Wicked Oyster in Wellfleet, Mass., or Moon and River Cafe in Schenectady, N.Y., or …

Well, might a font be the way to choose a presidential candidate as well? Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith, who work at The Font Bureau Inc. of Boston, believe you are what your typeface is. And if you follow their logic, we’re looking at an Obama-McCain match-up:

Obama’s type is contemporary, fresh, very polished and professional. The serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit. The ever-present rising sun logo has the feeling of a hot new Internet company. His sans serifs conjure up the clean look of Nike or Sony. This typography is young and cool. Clearly not the old standards of years past ….

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My, how time flies. It was seven months ago that Don Imus made his remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team and found himself on the receiving end of a considerable amount of heat from a wide range of critics. Now Don Imus is returning to the airwaves in New York City, and he is in negotiation with RFD-TV.

So after being away for eight months, being the subject of considerable criticism, and collecting $20 million for his troubles, the I-Man will return. I am already feeling the Christmas spirit.

As someone who believes in freedom of speech, I can’t object to Imus’ return to radio. No one has to listen to him; radios have a tuner and an off-switch.

I do have one suggestion for the I-Man: Make your first guest interview Isiah Thomas. Imus and Thomas could engage in an interesting discussion of “bitch” and “ho” and the race-appropriate use of such words. And Imus might want to invite Madison Square Garden Chairman James P. Dolan to come along. It would be interesting to hear Imus apply his skilled interviewing techniques to the likes of these men.

Thomas and his employer, Madison Square Garden, recently lost a major lawsuit for sexual harassment. The suit was brought by Anucha Browne Sanders, a former executive at MSG. She was awarded $11.6 million, to be paid by MSG. Thomas, Dolan and All-Star player Stephon Marbury were all named in the suit.

In the course of the trial, Isiah Thomas admitted that he called Ms. Browne Sanders a bitch, and said that it was more acceptable for a black man to call a black woman a bitch than it would be for a white man to do so. For his part, Marbury testified that he had sex with a team intern in a truck following a group outing to a strip club. It is, of course, a well-known principle of management that there is nothing else quite like a visit to a strip club to build organizational unity.

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We’ve posted a new article in the PopPolitics magazine: “Fall Out Boy’s Biggest Faggot Fan” by Sam J. Miller, who has previously written about the political and economic subtext of haunted house films.

In his latest piece, Miller writes:

Fall Out Boy just wants to be your boy. Everybody’s boy. While most of the band’s career has focused on infiltrating the bedrooms of every young woman in the world, their new album, “Infinity on High,” makes a bid for broadening their boyfriend base into an entirely new realm: the gay market.

Bassist/songwriter/propaganda mastermind Pete Wentz gives interviews to The Advocate, makes out with boys, and picks fights with homophobic moms at concerts. There’s an overall absence of personal pronouns on the new record — a big shift from their bloody-brilliant last album, “From Under the Cork Tree” — and I’m sure that this savvy business boy left things intentionally gender-neutral so that gay guys can come on board.

But as Miller’s discusses, it’s a calculated, commercial come-on. “Who are these boys,” he asks, “and what do they want from us?”

Read the full article here.

We’ve got a couple of new articles up today. The first is a new poetry review, “The Whitman (Walt not Slim) of Popular Culture” by Richard C. Crepeau, who is also a regular blog contributor.

Poetry and pop culture often seem diametrically opposed in modern American culture. Crepeau’s review, however, reveals a potentially much more intimate relationship:

Poetry is not generally thought of as a vehicle for posing the eternal question, ?Ginger or Maryann?? or to contemplate the centrality of “Hawaii Five-O” within the cultural milieu of our postmodern existence.

For David McGimpsey, however, these are just the sort of subjects that are most suitable to poetry.

Read the full article here.

“The Kite Runner” is easy to love.

It’s a story written in elegantly simple prose that simultaneously humanizes and complicates a people and a region that, amazingly, Americans never — since their attention got quickly diverted to another place, another set of conflicts — had a chance to get to know, even if only in that shallow love-the-people-you-invade/hate-their-leaders kind of way that the American media likes to play it.

But the English teacher in me always thought it would make even a better movie than a book. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that there are story arcs aplenty — and there’s even an American angle to the whole thing.

When I saw the trailer in the theater recently, I was impressed. And from all accounts, the filmmakers have seen this as a labor of love, rather than a commercial bonanza — going so far as to make the film in Dari, an Afghan language.

So it’s incredibly sad to see those same filmmakers be forced to delay the release of the film because of fears that it could endanger the lives of Afghan child actors.

David Halbfinger of the New York Times has the amazing story — that still has a chance for a happy ending. In the meantime, as Halbfinger writer, the situation raises excellent questions concerning “the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity.”