My wife and I threw a President’s Day costume party in San Francisco, many years ago, and many of the costumes were quite inventive. There were several assassinated Lincolns, as I recall, and at least one Castro; Susan West came as Nixon’s dog Checkers and the most inventive was Mark Schapiro, now of the Center for Investigative Reporting, who came as a The Grassy Knoll: a skull-cap of Astroturf, a small soldier or two shooting from the top.

There was one fellow who had made no attempt, but just stood in the hallway in his street clothes drinking my beer. “I’m Voter Apathy,” he said.

That character always shows up (or not, as it were) and pundits and pollsters say VA will have a big effect in this week’s elections too. In the wake of Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert’s dueling rallies in DC this weekend, I heard at least one news commentator ask if those parody lovers (six billion by Colbert’s count) were the kind of folks who voted. You could ask the same of Onion readers, who skewered the Dems this week with the headline ,”If we’re gonna lose, let’s go down running away from every legislative accomplishment we’ve made.”

Of course! you’re saying. I like Comedy Central and the Onion and I voted in the last election, and probably for Obama. But have you given in this election cycle, money or time? Have you bought the line that Team Obama has made such a hash of defining its agenda, and yes trumpeting its accomplishments, that they don’t deserve to win? Or are you convinced that a little more radicalized GOP rivalry will energize the Obama administration and the Dems in general for the next two years, really help them get things done?

I’ve heard that argument from a few quasi Obama supporters, that more friction will help him focus his agenda or something. But an agenda is not legislation, and if you are of the camp that says his health care bill should have been more European, it’s worth remembering that the one that was passed — that will ultimately make it impossible for insurance companies to deny coverage to people who have been sick before — is the one that we could get passed in Congress. And that the Tea Party demagogues who are seen as  tipping this week’s race want to repeal the whole damn thing.

So if that’s you standing in the hallway, drinking free beer, and laughing at Jon Stewart’s jokes, how ’bout you put down your cold one long enough to pull a lever, fill in a fosdic or do whatever it takes this Tuesday to make sure the Republicans don’t drag this nation down any further than they have? Apathy is still for losers.

Anyone else getting addicted to HBO’s Boardwalk Empire? My original fear was that it would become too static, sort of like a TV version of a Kurt Andersen novel, but it has a slightly random and even dangerous feeling now that I kind of like (surprise).

Last night’s episode brought the Catholic themes to the surface, so to speak, starting with Nucky’s voluptuous mistress Lucy scratching his chest after sex. By the end of the show the repressed prohibition agent played by Michael Shannon (who was scary as the outsized schizophrenic son in the film of Revolutionary Road) is doing his own flesh-mortifaction, paying penance for his obsession with Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), who may or not be Nucky’s true love.

Some of the dissension over the show has to do with Steve Buscemi’s bonafides as a leading man. Having seen him mostly play creeps in Coen Bros movies a lot of people seem to be having a hard time imagining him as a macher in 1920’s Atlantic City. Slightly rubber-lipped and bug-eyed, Buscemi can play psychos and losers with equal aplomb. But add a few million to his bank account, and the police and politicians at his beck and call, and it’s funny how irresistible he suddenly is to the women.

The mother/whore stuff familiar to anyone raised Catholic was on full display last night, too (along with quite a bit of frontal nudity, male and female) but we all know someone is going to pay for their  pleasure. The question with any good gangster story is who will pay last? And does hell really last an eternity?

“What was she thinking?”

That’s the question being asked around some water coolers this morning, or would be if people had jobs to go to or companies that weren’t too cheap to have water coolers, or water in them when employees gathered ’round. The she in question,of course, is Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who left a message for Anita Hill on her office voice mail, suggesting she apologize for all those nasty things she said about Clarence at his confirmation hearings.

You know, that stuff about the justice hassling Hill when they worked together at the Department of Education. Like the time he said he in her presence, “Who put this pubic hair on my can of Coke?” (an image that sent Coke sales into the toilet, so to speak, for years) It was big news at the time — much of the US stopped what it was doing to watch those hearings, and it arguably changed our understanding of sexual harassment in the workplace forever.

But Thomas was confirmed and has been just the sort of rubber stamp for Scalia people feared he would, so you would think he won, right? But we know from reports that he still broods about his “electronic lynching” and so, it seems, does Mrs. Thomas. She asked an apology of Anita Hill before, it seems, who said she has nothing to apologize for — just Speaking Truth to Power, as the title of her book put it. “Virginia Hill and I have never met,” she wrote. “And one can imagine that she is guided by her own romantic interest in her husband when she assumes that other women find him attractive as well.”

Meow. What is even weirder about Ginni Thomas’s action though is the attention it calls to her at the very moment when people are starting to question the propriety of a Supreme Court justice’s wife making a nice salary from undisclosed donors for calling the sitting president a tyrant and spouting other Tea Party nonsense. At 7:30 AM no less! Sounds like someone needs to switch to decaf. Or Coke zero.

Okay, don’t read this if you haven’t seen the Mad Men finale (this means you, Carole).

From the reaction of the TV blogs I’ve seen today (and who the hell are these people?) the season closer either makes no sense because we don’t know Megan (the secretary Don up and proposed to, after a trip with his kids to California) is or it’s lyrical and romantic (seriously, someone wrote that) because that’s a new, open Don who pops the question. Leave it  to Roger Sterling to speak for the viewer: “Who the hell is Megan?” (He is often called upon to sound the much needed note of bitter reality in the show, as when he asks Don fresh from his meeting with the American Cancer Society, “Did you get cancer?”)

Faye, the good, loyal, mature Joyce Brothers type doctor who looked like she was cleared for take-off sealed her fate in the first scene when she suggest that Don deal with his dual identity problem and overcome his anxiety by grappling with the past. Uh-huh. Not only might that crimp DD’s style as TV’s ultimate (and literal) swinging dick (or Don), it would stop the show cold. Who the hell wants to see an individuated Don Draper?

Personally I think it’s all about impulsiveness. Betty fires her kids’ nanny without consulting anyone, or thinking of the consequences of her actions. (Consequences that include Don taking Megan on the trip to LA when he doesn’t have a babysitter.) Don proposes to Megan in the wee small hours of the morning because… well, she’s good with spills (as my friend Paulette said)! She wipes up Sally’s spilt milkshake in no time and doesn’t lose her cool — and that might just have been the moment when he decided he couldn’t live without her. So unlike his last wife, and his crazy abusive parents. Having been raised the unwanted orphan of his father’s whore mistress seems to make Don want some stability, strangely.

Or does he? I find all the California stuff fascinating. At the end of season two I thought Don might just go native; there he was hanging out with local hot-rodders, sort of a Tom Wolfe without the white suit. Any minute I thought he might drop acid. Instead he went back to NY but the Golden State still seems to represent the promise of change for him (as it did for the rest of the country), to be anyone he wants. Whoever that might be.

I believe series creator (and director of last night’s episode) Matthew Weiner has mentioned Seconds before, the 1966 John Frankenheimer flick that starred Rock Hudson as man in a gray flannel suit who trades in his old life (and face) to be reborn in Malibu as a barefoot swinger. Things don’t work out so well. It seems that second chances are as chancy as hell.

“It’s been a little while since I hit you with free-style,” as Poter Wagoner once sang. Okay, it wasn’t PW, it was Ice T but who’s counting? I’ve been busy since my last post but wanted to say something about the late C&W singer, just ’cause his legacy is so damn strange, and has so little to do with the mush that comes out of Nashville today.

I was driving back and forth between Connecticut and Brooklyn last month and picked up some new CD’s for the radio-less portions of the trip: the new Superchunk, the new Robert Plant, the Dum-Dum Girls, all of which I liked and which have stayed in rotation (especially the latter). But the most compelling of the bunch might be a CD from Wagoner’s 1970s’s oeuvre entitled What Ain’t To Be, Just Might Happen.

You’re to be forgiven if you don’t remember Porter Wagoner. You would have to be pretty hardcore country to care; if you set your wayback machines to the 1960’s you’ll hear he had a couple big hits, most notably “Green, Green Grass of Home” and “A Satisfied Mind.” If his work had a theme it might have been man’s unregenerate nature, as seen in the reflection of his Nudie suit from the bottom of a shot glass.

By the time of the recordings on What Ain’t to Be, Porter was a king in Nashville. He was known as Mr. Grand Ole Opry and introduced the world, and his TV audience, to Dolly Parton. But he was recording songs like “The Rubber Room” and “If I Lose My Mind,” all in a private studio and seemingly pulled from more than just his imagination. It’s commonplace now to see stars go crazy in public, but it still takes cojones, and maybe a big blond pompadour, to write songs about it.

For despite its anti-drug stance at the time, a lot of country music of the seventies was beginning to acknowledge that too much booze and pills will make you act batshit. Don Carpenter, who wrote the screenplay for the great unsung country music meltdown movie of the seventies, Payday, said that he was inspired by stories he heard about Wagoner from Shel Silverstein. (Whether they were true or not is another story.) In a performance that makes Jeff Bridges’s foray into the same territory in Crazy Heart look rather safe and studied, Rip Torn played a country music legend careening toward the grave, one hand on his prescription pills and the other on some girl he just met.

Torn seemed to be reprising that role last year when he tried to rob a bank in Salisbury, CT — the town he calls home. As the title of one of Porter’s songs would have it, “I Haven’t Learned a Thing.”