So it looks like I’m not the only one who has Lost interest. My friend Paul directs me to this story:

New ‘Lost’ Episode Hits a Ratings Low

By LYNN ELBER
AP Television Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Lost” crashed in the ratings this week, hitting an all-time low for a new episode. ABC’s drama about plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island drew an estimated 12.8 million viewers Wednesday, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen Media Research. That’s well off the peak of more than 20 million for the drama that became an instant sensation when it debuted in September 2004.

ABC has worked hard to try to protect a show that helped turn the network’s fortunes around, moving it to 10 p.m. EST Wednesday this year to steer clear of Fox’s blockbuster “American Idol” and CBS’s increasingly strong “Criminal Minds.”

After “Lost” fans complained about reruns interrupting the show’s serial flow last season, the network tried an experiment: It split the current season in two, airing six episodes before an extended break and then resuming with 16 additional episodes.

The story goes on; click above for the rest.

While I’m not going to lose any sleep over the show’s slow downturn, I do want to acknowledge that when it was cool it was very cool. The writing crackled. And it was refreshing to see a cast of actors who truly reflected a band of world travelers: Koreans, Aussies, Brits, Yanks, Africans, and so forth. Try finding anyone in a Woody Allen flick who isn’t upper-middle-class white or Jewish. (I guess such people don’t exist in New York.)

The guys at my local comics shop tell me that comics writer Brian K. Vaughn has been enlisted to write episodes this season. (And that the producers of the series brought him into the store for a visit.) Vaughn is a terrific writer (of comic books, at least), so perhaps there’s some new energy in the offing. I hope so. Because I’m still watching the show every week with my daughter.

Dr. Mabuse, as you may recall from this earlier post, writes a manifesto of evil that compels acolytes to bring down society through chaos and confusion. To contemporaries — including Josef Goebbels, who initially banned it — the second Mabuse film, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” presented an allegory for Hitler, who wrote “Das Kampf” and then inspired others to implement it.

In Europe, the legend of Dr. Mabuse continues to grow. And why not? They experienced his “testament” of World War II in a way we did not. Many people have taken the Mabuse mythology and twisted and interpreted it for their own reasons, and again, I say why not. If Supergirl can go through so many iterations, then Goebbels is free to shoot new framing sequences that insist that Fritz Lang’s film blames society’s ills on the Weimar Republic and that herald Hitler as the cure.

Some of this was on my mind last night in a conversation with a friend who, surprisingly to me given his proclivity for the provocative and obscure, hasn’t seen these Lang films. Today, he emailed with another coincidental and bizarre Mabuse appearance (and before I quote him I should note that during this conversation I connected Lang, and Mabuse, and World War II, with a lengthy discourse on Samuel Beckett hiding from the Nazis durings World War II):

Curiouser and curiouser. Last night after we spoke I opened a box of books I had ordered. There was a novel titled “Red” by Richard James. It involves “the curious machinations of Dr. Mabuse” and thanks Grove Press for permission to quote from Samuel Beckett’s play, “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Does any of that sound familiar??? Beyond coincidence? (Play “Twilight Zone” theme here.)
I bought it from edwardrhamilton.com. The original price was $14.95 but they have it as a remainder for $3.95. The stock number is 6050662, in case you want to check it on ERH’s search engine. It was published by gaymenspress.co.uk, if you would like to check there for more info. I imagine it will have a bunch of gay men somewhere in it.

I checked out “Red” by Richard James on Amazon.com, and yes, there seems to be a connection to my new master, who orchestrates all our doings behind the scenes. My heart goes out a bit to Richard James; not only does the novel not seem to have sold well, but it appears that he’s taken to reviewing it himself on Amazon, and under his own name, as this link reveals. If you can write a clever book involving a mastermind plotting to take down society, certainly you’re clever enough to set up a psuedonym to review your own books, no?

I suppose I should be unsurprised that someone who would want to touch on Dr. Mabuse would also gravitate toward Beckett. I think the big surprise is that Grove Press permitted the quote (perhaps these things are easier now that Beckett is in the ground). One can’t tell from either site, Amazon or Hamilton, that the book is published by “Gay Men’s Press” (Hamilton says “GMP”), but when you click the latter site for “related reading,” you get titles like “Fag Hag,” “Father’s Day,” and “The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket,” so it seems a safe bet that the book relates not only to society’s “irreversible decline,” but also to the man (and men) behind it.

Release the white doves — Camille Paglia is back on Salon.com after a 6-year absence. Given the way the site is trumpeting it, I guess it’s important for them (and for her).

I don’t begrudge them their celebrity columnist — and here’s her first new post, if you’d like to see it (may require registration). But I couldn’t help noting the self-obsession leaching through every line of it. We shouldn’t expect more of celebrity bloggers, but if you’re going to put on airs, at least really put on airs. Don’t be so transparent about your megalomania unless you’re doing it for laughs. I was willing to let it all go as yet more postmodernism (Camille about Camille about Camille) until the following caught my eye:

A final news item: Mitchell Lichtenstein, an actor (“Lords of Discipline,” “Miami Vice,” “Law & Order”) and a student of mine from Bennington College in the 1970s, has written and directed his second film, “Teeth,” which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival last month. It was immediately bought for distribution by Weinstein/Lionsgate, and the lead actress, Jess Weixler, won a Sundance award.

Mitchell’s theme — brace yourself! — is the vagina dentata or toothed vagina, an ancient myth that he first heard about in my classes and that, he has told interviewers, he never forgot. At his request, I specially wrote some lines for the film but have yet to see it. Web reports from Sundance have raved about the film’s comic mix of retro horror with satiric sociology. This week, “Teeth” is having its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Bon appétit!

Here was my Thought #1: Hey, this is what Mitchell has been up to! (He was in a play of mine in 1990.) Thought #2: Hey, Mitchell was Camille Paglia’s student — I didn’t know that. Thought #3: I’ve been making references to the vagina dentata for years and I never studied with Camille Paglia, and Thought #4: Now when I mention the vagina dentata people who understand the reference will think I got it from Camille Paglia or Mitchell Lichtenstein. Which led to —

Thought #5. This train of thought is so self-referential and all-consuming that I could blog for Salon.

Postmodernism. Everything comes full circle.

Now that I’ve mentioned “tarot” in the headline of a post, half of the sponsored links have flipped into tarot and astrological services. (Which may be gone by the time you read this.)

I’m tempted to test the system and post a lot about Manichaeism to see what comes up.

You may have noticed my advertising content listings on the right column. So far they have generated precisely zero in income, although, as they say, hope springs eternal (except when it dies a slow death). I was intrigued to find out what listings would arrive in that column, and so far am unsurprised to learn that most of them are listings for writing-related sites. (As they should be.)

One of them, blogit.com, caught my attention. “Get paid to blog.” That sounded interesting. I wondered how much it could be, figuring that it couldn’t be much. In fact, I figured that by comparison, third-world microloans would seem like jumbo loans. Bear in mind my past experience of writing for The Comics Journal for a penny a word in the 1980’s (when they even bothered to pay and honor other commitments; they stiffed me for the Jack Davis interview they finally ran 15 years ago in #153, and couldn’t be bothered to send me a copy or even a xerox, despite my polite and then not-so-polite requests until a few years ago when I finally Gave Up).

Well, I don’t know what Blogit pays but the site’s business model leaves me thinking it would pay perhaps no more than The Comics Journal at times — zero. In fact, it’s even worse than The Journal, where at least it didn’t cost me anything other than my time and my expenses to have my invoice and my requests for copies ignored. On Blogit, one gets paid to blog by posting blogs that generate enough clickthroughs from paying subscribers to generate interest, whereupon one gets a share of that paying subscriber’s subscription fee. How to become a Blogit.com writer? By subscribing. So it’s pay to play.

I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t just set up one’s own blog and set up sponsored listings.

Moreover, here’s a sample of a blog I found on Blogit. Please read this and tell me that somewhere out there someone exists who will pay for this sort of writing:

Here we go….

Here we go. I was planning to write a daily opinions page on all things creative, but I have a history of great plans laid to waste when real life gets in the way. It may be weekly, or monthly or…. well you know how it goes. Watch this space…. While you’re waiting for my creative genious to be…

Why does it trail off in the end (and just when I’m so thoroughly captivated by her quest for something to say)? Because you have to click for the rest, and to click you have to be a paying subscriber. I wasn’t quite so enrapt that I fished out my credit card. The above post has one comment, by the way, and it reads thusly: “Welcome to Blogit!”

So who, evidently, pays for the blogs on Blogit? The people who have signed up to create them with the hopes that they can generate income. And who reads them? Probably no one.

For several years in the early 1990’s, I was a frequent reader of tarot cards for other people. I remember my sister seeking guidance from the cards, and my wife, and assorted friends. I didn’t read them to offer divination, I read them the way Carl Jung read them: as a key to the subconscious of the seeker.

When you read the cards in this way, allowing people to make their own connections, they reach metaphorical associations and conclusions they wouldn’t have otherwise. “The dark-haired woman” becomes fixed in their mind as “Sally,” the friend they hadn’t been thinking of, but who of course will be rushing to their aid now that they’ve thought of asking her for help.

Some time last year I joined Netflix, and in an odd tarot-like way the system has brought me circling back around to earlier artistic interests and obsessions of mine, as well as new associations. Specifically: Thirty years after first being introduced to dadaism and expressionism, I’ve had a recent re-immersion in the latter thanks to the films of Fritz Lang and, especially, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.” Just as it would not occur to the questioner to think of “Sally” until the cards jog their memory, I would not have found myself brought to this film had I not begun my Netflix account with two Werner Herzog films (“Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, Wrath of God”), which led the system to suggest other arty German films. It’s wonderful at this point to discover an artist like Fritz Lang and feel as thought you’ve found something fresh that you also already knew in some way.

And what is “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” about? A svengali of evil, evidently dead but somehow still operating, sets in motion a chain of events that are seemingly unrelated but deeply connected in ways that the film’s lead, Inspector Lohmann (played with riveting naturalism by Otto Wernicke), cannot ever fully puzzle out. “Mabuse” is a puzzle box where all the pieces don’t fit, or perhaps more appropriately, where they fit in more ways than seem possible. The film includes a chase scene that goes nowhere except right back to where it began, a locked-room escape that turns the villain’s weapon into a mechanism of egress, and any number of appearances by characters who aren’t really there, either in the form of silhouettes, recording devices, spectral images, voices from the grave, or imputations from an evil manifesto.

After watching it no fewer than three times, the second time with the excellent commentary track by “Mabuse” scholar David Kalat, I still haven’t fully solved the film and never expect to. Rather than having gained an explanation from it, I’ve gained an enlightenment. That’s what tarot does for you, and that’s what art does, too.

To put in further bas relief how good the “reign of terrier” headline is, here’s a headline from today’s — you saw it coming — Press of Atlantic City:

“Computer techs on the clock to prevent glitches from early daylight-saving shift”

Why is this not a good headline? First of all it takes no fewer than four lines on the Press home page. That’s a lot. Secondly, it tells you precisely what the story is about in an unclever way.

Here’s the lede and first few grafs of the story by Tom Barlas (who was there when I was there!):

It’s easy to set the time on the bedroom alarm clock. Just push a few buttons.

But for the past several weeks, businesses and organizations have been tinkering with their computer systems to make more major adjustments linked to an earlier-than-usual start of daylight-saving time.

With the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 setting daylight-saving time to begin March 11, technicians are installing new programs and computer patches so the switchover won’t create problems with electronically monitored things such as rail schedules, bank transactions and automatic stock trades.

Even something as simple as computer-logged appointments must be checked.

That’s good writing. It merits a better headline. How about:

“Shift in time takes sine.”

No, that isn’t Mr. Malaprop (the quote unquote president) wondering about the latest actions of “Islamofascists” (a word no doubt coined for him by others). That is my favorite headline of the day, and it accompanies coverage on MSNBC.com about the Westminster Dog Show.

In the days before the World Wide Web, I was a copy editor at The Atlantic City Press. (Excuse me — “The Press of Atlantic City.” Clearly the name change, made in the early 80’s I believe, fixed a grievous misconception that this daily newspaper was in some way aligned with Atlantic City.) The duties of a copy editor include, yes, editing copy, as well as rewriting, and supplying headlines. At times the headline assignment — always on the fly, with a deadline looming — was a real head-scratcher. It wasn’t uncommon to be assigned a “242” (a headline to fill two columns in a 42 point-typefont) or even a “142” (ONE column, 42 points) with seemingly mere minutes to go and on a subject best summed up by a 90-minute lecture with Q & A to follow. At some point our beloved managing editor Bob Ebener (well, I loved him; he was my Lou Grant) sweetened the pot with a weekly contest — $25 for the best headline and $25 for the best caption. I won each of these several times in my 6-month stint on the copy rim, winning best caption once for a photo of a billboard painter doing the art for a gigantic sign of a human (lending me the inspiration for a caption that played off Lilliputians), and best headline once for anchoring a lengthy piece on local welfare fraud with the headline “Brother, can you spare too much?” This latter achievement was especially noteworthy among copy editors because the reporter actually sought out the editor responsible (me) and thanked him profusely. I would say that was better than the extra 25 bucks, but I really needed the 25 bucks.

While I haven’t been a copy editor for 20 years, I haven’t lost one bit of my appreciation for the oft-neglected art of headline writing. (An art I still employ, of sorts, with corporate clients.) The “Reign of terrier” headline works in all aspects: It fits the small space assigned, it grabs the eye (because, indeed, I thought at a glance there was a story about a “reign of terror” alongside a photo of a dog), and it delights the reader.

I don’t know who wrote this, but somebody oughtta send him 25 bucks.

Since he announced — seemingly yet again — today that he’s running for president, here’s the obligatory Barack Obama post. (I don’t want to be the only blogger in the U.S. to miss out on this. Too much like being the only Nader in ’08 supporter.)

I don’t have any further thoughts about his candidacy except this one: All the pundits who are saying “it’s too soon” for Obama to run because he’s inexperienced would be running themselves if they suddenly found themselves in his position — at the height of buzz-fame. Obama has nowhere to go but down from here (and I predict that is coming soon); the question is whether or not he’ll go back up.

Aside from that, as Mark Evanier points out, it’s way too early to predict who will emerge from an ever-widening pack on both sides of the aisle — although that isn’t keeping plenty of people from making predictions. My only prediction this early is this one: that the group with the most to gain from a two-year campaign cycle of 24/7 political news (i.e., the media and the consultants who feed them and are fed by them) will build up and tear down each of these candidates one by one. That makes most of the process of picking a president an entertainment, which is also known by another word: spectacle.

They aren’t dying wishes, because they’re still alive. So here are a few selections, with commentary, from the “living wishes” of what some prominent baby boomer celebrities would like to do before they die, as posted on MSNBC.com:

STEPHEN KING, Author, 59 (Above)
One of the world’s best-selling novelists, with more than 25 top sellers under his belt, King has built a loyal fan base of millions by consistently scaring them. His latest, “Lisey’s Story,” came out in October last year.

“I’d like to outlast George W. Bush’s second term of office.”

TO-DO LIST

1. To live to see George W. Bush tried for crimes against humanity.
2. To fly in space—orbital would be fine—and to write about it.
3. To see “American Idol” canceled.

I don’t care about #3, but I’ll join him in the other two.

JOAN JETT, Rocker, 48
A member of the Runaways when she was only 15 and lead singer of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Jett is one of the original bad girls of rock and roll—who doesn’t drink or smoke, is a vegetarian and reads ancient Hindu philosophy in her downtime. Her record “Sinner” came out in June.

“Accept what is going on and grow with it and adjust to it.”

TO-DO LIST:

1. I’d like to go to India and Africa, do some serious traveling.
2. To somehow combine my love for animals, nature and children.
3. To learn a language. I took French in school, but I didn’t like the teacher so I learned nothing.

Nothing stopping her from doing #1 — just book a show or two in those regions and more than pay for it. No problem with #3; she already knows a language: English. (Unless she means learn another language.) As for #2, perhaps she could combine these things by taking my kids and dog to the park on Sunday. That would “somehow” combine her interests. In fact, if Joan is going, not only will I go as well, I’ll even drive and pack lunches. Joan: Email me. I speak your language.

ERIC BOGOSIAN, Playwright, 53
This monologist and playwright became a household name in the late ’80s with the movie version of his play “Talk Radio,” then buffed up his Angry Young Man status with stinging monologues like “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.” Fast-forward 20 years. Eric Bogosian still writes plays and dabbles in Hollywood movies, off-Broadway productions and TV, lately as Capt. Danny Ross on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” His work is speaking to a new generation: “SubUrbia” got revived last fall and “Talk Radio” starring Liev Schreiber opens on Broadway next month.

TO-DO LIST:

1. Learn to speak Armenian.
2. Master the yoga posture Eka Pada Koundinyasana.
3. Read The New York Times headline US FORCES LEAVE IRAQ TODAY.

While I’m thrilled to see a playwright on this list, I’m unconvinced that Eric Bogosian is — or ever was — a “household name.” Perhaps in his own household. The households of others? Not so much. What I like about his list is its specificity (plus, I like saying “specificity” in my head while writing): unlike Joan, he doesn’t want to learn “a” language; realizing that he already knows at least one language, he wants to learn Armenian. He doesn’t just want to take up yoga; he wants to master a certain position. He isn’t waiting for nebulously defined charges against the quote unquote president, he wants a definite action with legitimate reporting of it. Given his mindset (concrete actions and goals), Bogosian should be in business. Or running the government.

Speaking of someone who once ran the government, or at least part of it, here’s the list of doctor-by-telepathy Bill Frist, who once inaccurately diagnosed Terri Schiavo over a video feed so that he could wring political capital from it:

BILL FRIST, Former Senator, 54
Frist served two terms as Senate majority leader before relinquishing his seat in November. A physician for 20 years, the Tennessee native has traveled to Afri-can nations to set up a hospital and provide medical care since 1997. He plans to leave for his next trip—to Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Sudan—on Jan. 30.

“Medicine as a currency for peace—it’s not just a mantra, it’s something I live.”

TO-DO LIST:

1. Continue yearly trip to African regions without health care to perform needed surgery.
2. Fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and work to provide clean drinking water to poor areas.
3. Treat heart problems in gorillas at D.C.’s National Zoo.

Bill, I am with you on #2. If you can find some way to do that in what we euphemistically call “developing” countries without 90% or more of the aid going to strongarm thugs with submachine guns who hide under the rubric of “government,” all the better. Because sadly, I think that’s job number one in most of these areas. With regard to #3, I share your concern about these gorillas as well as their gorilla kin and indeed the entire ecosystem that supports them, in the wild or not. But I don’t remember you as much of an environmentalist. Have you had a change of heart (no pun intended), now that you’re so far removed from the levers of power? Wish you’d had it sooner.

With regard to #1 on your list, though, there is simply nothing anyone can do about it. You say you’d like to “continue yearly trip to African regions without health care to perform needed surgery.” Sadly, as a former Senator it doesn’t matter where you go, you’ll have health care. I wish we could make this dream come true for you by taking it away, but you’ve got it for life (just as the benefits and entitlements due convicted felons who happened at one time to be in Congress continue to roll on). If it’s any comfort, there are 45.8 million Americans without health care; I only wish you were one of them.