Podcast 9-5-07

See more at World of Wonder.

Fenton is back in the pod squad, Steven is on board as usual, and James, inexplicably dressed like a gay Lawrence of Arabia (that's redundant, sorry), complete with turban ("we're all one world," he will say later), begins talk about his Freak Show reading in Phoenix, where the temperature was 110 degrees and everyone was "naked" and without an inch of body fat, and he'd willingly go to prison with any one of them. This talk continues for a moment or two. Steven interrupts with mention of the VMAs, which leads to Steven and James simultaneously realizing that they'd both recognized only half the people pictured in a recent Us Weekly. "Who are these celebrities?" says James. Then James, struggling with a theory he wants to put forth, is interrupted again by Steven, who says simply, "We can get YouTube on our iPhones, but everyone's watching cats flushing toilets." "Exactly!" exclaims James. "The smarter we get, the dumber we become." "...The dumber I are," amends Fenton, pointing out that Trio, Bravo, and A&E all started out as arts networks but can't move fast enough into the realm of "immersive narrative" – or celebreality. Is Disney the breeding ground for the Lindsay Lohans and Britney Spearses? Are people brought up in show business inherently flawed? Fenton wonders if, instead of an age of consent, there should be an age below which you cannot be a star. Suddenly, James is up commandeering Randy and Lydia into the conference room and the talk turns to "dazzling technology" and an imagined future world divided into two separate societies: dumber and dumber Lindsays and Parises and smarter and smarter geeks. Steven says the word "cewebrities" and gets praised; Lydia brings up Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and, er, not so much. A lot of etc ensues: the new fall season, Chuck, Kid Nation, Britney's comeback, and a particularly prophetic sketch on an old Mad TV.

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