Los Angeles is a driving city. Here, everything, everything, is at least twenty minutes from anything else. Except during rush hour, when everything is, at very least, an hour’s drive.

Of course, as a subway-riding New Yorker, I’ve actually rather enjoyed the countless car hours. If nothing else, they’re prime listening time, and throughout LA’s highways, byways, surface streets and back alleyways, I’ve been burning the grooves off the trusty CDs I brought with me.

By now, however, after nearly two months of heavy listening, those CDs are beginning to bore me to tears. Which is why, earlier today, I swung by the exceedingly impressive Amoeba Music (on Sunset) and picked up a couple of new CDs.

Feeling the need to bolster my alt-country holdings, I bought:

• Son Volt – Trace
• Uncle Tupleo – 89/93: An Anthology
• Whiskeytown – Stranger’s Almanac
• Wilco – Being There

All of which thoroughly impressed me on first listening and further bolstered my growing appreciation for the genre. A few weeks of this and I might could almost be a Southerner.

For the past several years, I have been, like many other effete snotty sorts affecting high-brow quasi-intellectual postures, a TV-non-watcher.

Which isn’t to say that I’ve strictly not watched TV. I have. But only those shows so clearly a head and shoulders above standard programming fare that I could continue to disdain the television industry as a whole. (Specifically, my watching was largely constrained to the West Wing, several of the HBO series, and old episodes of the Simpsons – ideally from the 1992-1997 seasons.)

Since arriving in Los Angeles, however, I have found myself watching ungodly amounts of TV. Arguably, that isn’t entirely my own fault; Yoav Fisher, one of my Cyan colleagues and my housemate in Los Angeles in the temporary corporate housing we’ve been sharing, is a heavy watcher. As a result, the TV in our apartment often plays for hours a day. Yet Yoav, a dyed-in-the-wool multitasker, utilizes this extensive TV time by simultaneously reading scripts and fielding phone calls. I admire his ability to do so, but I must admit that is a talent I do not share – if I’m in the living room trying to read and the TV goes on, my attention is immediately diverted to the tube.

As a result, in the past five weeks, I’ve absorbed everything from Elimidate, Boy Meets World and The Cosby Show to The Real World, Joe Millionaire, and Ricki Lake. And through it all, I have felt my brain cells dying off, perhaps committing some sort of ritual seppuku to escape the sheer agony of such crappy, mindless programming. With each passing day, I have felt my IQ (arguably limited as it already is) whittled away by the glowing box.

So I am particularly pleased to say that salvation is finally in sight. Yoav ships off to San Francisco this Saturday morning – as soon as he’s out the door, I’ll be unplugging the box. I can only hope that a steady diet of quality literature can reverse any damage sustained thus far.

Today, the Wall St. Journal ran a Leisure & Arts editorial discussing pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly’s $100 million gift to Poetry Magazine. The article not only cites the same essay on poetry I discussed two days back, but comes largely to the same conclusion that I did: that the creation of poetry is in less need of help than the appreciation of poetry, and that money and effort should be directed accordingly.

I’m so many steps ahead, it’s almost eerie.

The myriad flaws of consumer culture notwithstanding, I cannot help but be impressed whenever I see a really good commercial. Therefore, I extend my congratulations to Volkswagen for their new Beetle Convertible spot (click “see the commercial”), which has been screening before films in New York theaters for the past month or so.

The commercial is particularly impressive for the “indie” cool it affects, perfectly suited both to the car’s 20-something target demographic, and to the spot’s pre-film screening approach. What gives the commercial indie cred? At least four factors:

1. Quasi-retro styling. Check out the lead actor’s clothing, the very Thomas Crown Affair (original version – not Brosnan remake) use of split screen, the slightly de-saturated color timing, and, of course, the music (see no. 2).

2. The music. As in prior commercials, VW has built the whole thing around a reasonably obscure but remarkably catchy musical blast from the past. (Consider previous commercials featuring such songs as Styx’ “Mr. Roboto”, Mingus’ “II BS”, Trio’s “Da Da Da” or Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”, the last of which single-handedly launched the current Nick Drake revival.) This spot features the much-overlooked Electric Light Orchestra, with the perfectly chosen and bizarrely addictive “Mr. Blue Sky” (though in what sounds like a more recent recording than the song’s original release).

3. The lead. The poor guy is so blatantly a Jake Gyllenhaal rip-off (see Moonlight Mile) that it’s almost painful. Lest you doubt VW’s leveraging Gyllenhaal’s indie cred in particular rather than that of shaggy-haired actors in general, check the spot’s title: “Bubble Boy”, a sideways homage to a really poor film in which Gyllenhaal recently starred.

4. The concept. Standard affluent twenty-something experience: A few years out of school and things are going as well as you possibly could have hoped – you’ve got the job, you’re climbing the corporate ladder. And yet your life is mindlessly repetitive unbearable drivel. If a Porsche can pull you out of a mid-life crisis, what can pull you out of a quarter-life crisis?

Taken together, those four factors make the commercial remarkably hip. So I say, excellent work VW. If only the car was half as cool as the commercial.

Midway through my frenzied packing, I came across an essay I had printed out some time back but never read: “Can Poetry Matter?” by contemporary poet Dana Gioia (Bush’s surprisingly good choice for a new head of the NEA). Taking a moment to read it now, I was struck by the truth of the essay’s main thrust: that poetry has lost its audience. Poetry has disappeared from the broader public imagination, Gioia argues, having retreated to the outskirts of ivory-towered academia. Poetry, in short, is now heard only by poets, rather than by a “cultural intelligentsia,” “limited [only] by intelligence and curiosity, [a] heterogeneous group that cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation.” And, I am afraid, I am a case in point; though I would probably self-identify as a snotty intellectual, I cannot remember the last time I purchased a volume of poetry.

Gioia further paints the decline of poetry as symptomatic of a more general concern. Echoing Whitman’s lament, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” Gioia points out that a disappearance of great audiences is slowly killing not only poetry, but other art forms as well, from jazz and serious theater, to classical music and dance. All are increasingly followed only by “subcultures of specialists,” rather than by even a small percentage of the broader population. While I’m too far outside of the would of poetry to comment intelligently on that front, from my position as both a classical and jazz musician (and avid fan of both), it is clear that the disappearance of a broad audience has indeed taken a serious toll on both of those arts over the past decades.

Yet Gioia’s essay is still a largely optimistic one. When, towards the end, he tells us that “if I could have my wish… I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture,” he adds that he doesn’t think such a wish is impossible. “All it would require,” he explains, “is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.” Gioia lays out a handful of proposals for how poets might do this, from using radio as a medium (“a little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners”) to writing critical prose about poetry that is both free of jargon and more brutally honest in its assessment of quality (“Poets must regain the readers’ trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism”).

Such an approach is heartening, and, I suspect, remarkably effective, due to the sheer number of poets, jazz musicians or dancers who would willingly rally behind the idea. If each were to dedicate only a small percentage of their time, say 5%, to effective outreach programs, the fine arts could easily have a remarkable public interest renaissance. Yet while most artists would be happy to donate their time to such an endeavor, few have the initiative to create such outreach programs from scratch. The arts are therefore in desperate need of an organization that can help develop innovative approaches to outreach and rally artists to those programs. In short, what’s needed is not the standard arts non-profit, which focuses on cultivating the arts, but a rather unusual one, focused on cultivating audiences.

I have a bad, bad feeling there may be another 501c3 in my future.

Like much of the country, I recently watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. And, like much of the country, I found it, like it’s predecessor, sort of blandly enjoyable.

While watching the film, however, I frequently found myself speculating as to the real-life fates of the three young protagonists. Which is to say, will any of the little Brits ever find acting work once their Potter runs end?

After much contemplation, I was left to conclude that poor Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) is more or less doomed to immediate disappearance from the world of film, largely due to his inability to actually act (oddly constipated facial gesturing notwithstanding). Further, that Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), who I suspect will look surprisingly incomplete without a jagged scar on his forehead, is likely to slowly fade into Mark Hamill-esque oblivion. But that Emma Watson (Hermione Grainger) might very well turn out to be the next big thing.

Throughout the film, I found Watson so much more believable, so much more subtly emotive, so much more interesting to watch than the other two that it made me almost embarrassed for them. By all indications, she’s similarly shamed the boys on the talk show circuit; while they’ve been rather inarticulate, Watson has produced gems like: “It was unbelievable seeing me as an action figure; in a few months, toddlers around the country will be biting my head off!”

All of which leads me to believe that Watson will follow in the footsteps of actresses like Ricci and Portman, leveraging a fascinatingly precocious maturity and an apparently innate ability to create subtly nuanced performances to make the rather difficult jump from child-star to more adult roles.

[And I say this all now so that when I cast her in a film ten years down the road, I can legitimately say I’ve been a long-time fan.]

I hit the local bookstore this afternoon, returning with four new reads: Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Amir Aczel’s The Mystery of the Aleph, John Barth’s Coming Soon!!!, and Gretchen Rubin’s Power Money Fame Sex.

From what I’ve observed, most people, given such a pile of new books, would finish the first before heading on to the second, the second before heading on to the third, and so on. Which, to me, is nearly inconceivable. Perhaps it’s just a severe undiagnosed case of ADHD, but I find that I can read several books at the same time faster than I can finish just one alone.

Actually, my entire life runs along those lines. People often express surprise at the number of interests I pursue simultaneously, but I’m fairly certain that, were I to focus all my time into one endeavor, I’d actually accomplish less in it than I would while balancing it with several others. I wouldn’t really recommend the approach; it doesn’t logically make much sense and it’s probably the quickest route to stress and ulcers. But I just can’t seem to make myself do things any other way.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I got hooked on Ally McBeal. And while I hate to admit it, for the past several seasons I’ve watched the show religiously, enjoying it through its prime and suffering with it through its decline. By this evenings episode, truly the nadir of five long seasons, I was more than ready to see the series end; it was less a finale than a mercy killing.

Still, I felt oddly sad to see the show go. And I suspect, come next Monday, I’ll be left with an Ally-shaped gap in my evening. So, bygones, Mrs. McBeal. Bygones. We’ll miss you.