In the midst of all the coverage of the TV news helicopter crashes in AZ in which four people died, few have taken the time to ask: what were reporters doing chasing a carjacker anyway?

The question may seem too obvious to those living in the big southwest markets, like Phoenix and LA, where such chase scenes are staples of local TV. As the BBC report drily notes, “Police pursuits are fertile material for many US TV stations and have proved popular with viewers.” And decrying the give-’em-what-they-want mentality of local news may seem hopelessly naive but really: why send newsmen out to do this job? I would suggest it would be better left to sportscasters but that would be unfair, like asking them to call the action on the greyhounds chasing the mechanized rabbit. Have the scofflaws and thieves ever gotten away on chopper camera? The best you can hope for (and I’m sure many of the viewers who drop everything to watch these pursuits do) is a multiple car collision, ideally one involving at least one police car. It’s kind of like The Dukes of Hazzard except real people get killed.

Rather than decry the viewing preferences of the rubes of America (a fulltime job for some TV critics) or even heap any more scorn on the network affiliates that sent those journalists and pilots up in the air in the first place (a third chopter witnessed the crash and reported it to TV viewers in crash of the Hindenberg terms) I’d like to share some of the blame with the cable news networks that stop their increasinlgy imbecilic daily coverage of dog shows and celebriity scandals to share these “breaking stories” with their viewers.

Here’s a newsflash for CNN et al: There is no story there. Cop-chases-criminal is the man-bites-dog of daily journalism and that you would help risk the lives of reporters who could be covering — I dunno — the local effects of global warming or the plight of working Americans without health insurance by pandering to the gladiator tastes of the Idiocracy implicates you in their deaths.

For those of you watching at home, do yourself a favor: The next time you see a live car chase on TV, turn it off.

Reading Dominick Dunne is such a guilty pleasure, if pleasure be the word. The Vanity Fair columnist, social-observer and international gadfly defies parody. Better writers than I have tried and failed to capture the circular essence of his column but it is as difficult to get a hold of as the worm Ouroboros. In the beginning is his end, and vice versa.

It could be Dunne’s proximity to the world he covers that makes his prose so Escher-like. “I met Phil at a party given by Ahmet Ertegun,” is a typical pullquote in his August column covering the trial of Phil Spector, accused of murdering a Hollywood hostess named Lana Clarkson, and that is just a small sample of the name-dropping for which the author is famous. Sprinkled throughout his trial dispatch are first-hand encounters with Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Bruce Cutler and a host of lesser lights.

But it is those lesser lights who really distinguish his reporting. Take this not atypical encounter: “One night during the trial I had dinner at a popular restaurant on Sunset Strip,” he writes. “A very pretty waitress named Crystal Angel took me to my table. A few minutes later, during a lull in her duties, she came and sat down with me. She told me she had been a friend of Lana Clarkson’s…”

It is that upstairs-downstairs stuff that really sets Dunne apart. Waiters, bell hops and chauffeurs are always taking him aside to tell him the dish. This one, at least, had a name — though Crystal Angel is probably as common in West LA as Marty Kaplan is in New York, and not just among transvestites. (It is redundant to add that waitresses such as Angel are also actresses, as was Clarkson, and doubly redundant to say they changed their names.) No one doubts these encounters really happened — though I’m sure his off-the-record, gossip-laden style gives the fact-checkers at VF fits — which is a testament to the profile of the man himself.

What makes the pleasure of reading him so maddening is the absence of context, and sometimes even judgment. Dunne’s daughter was murdered by a stalker ex-boyfriend, and in writiing about his trial he found his metier. He later burnished his skills covering the endless OJ trial and even hosts a slightly lame celebrity injustice show on Court TV. He calls himself a defender of victim’s rights and comes by the stance naturally.

But by the end of the Spector column, the best he can muster is “I have never believed the defense’s story that Lana Clarkson committed suicide on the night she went to Phil’s castle.” This may have had something to do with the chauffeur in the driveway who heard the gunshot and saw Spector stagger out carrying a bloody pistol to announce, “I think I killed somebody.” Of course Dunne has to muster some objectivity and he has seen worse men than Spector walk away scot free. But in downplaying the story of the producer pulling a gun on John Lennon (Yoko tells Dunne, “Oh, that story has been exaggerated” and speaks of Phil with fondness) he neglects to mention the other people he famously frightened with firearms: Leonard Cohen, the Ramones, not to mention his much-abused ex-wife Ronnie Spector. Sometimes a little distance is needed to see things clearly, or at least tell which end is up.

I recently stuck my head into the big tent of the internet business world to find that the fever is back, baby. As fans of this space know, I worked for a number of net ventures in the mid-nineties in what was euphemistically called Silicon Alley — New York’s content answer to the west coast’s claim to be creating pretty much everything else in Silicon Valley. At the waning days of a recession that had seen the print business falter, sites such as iGuide and Total New York represented not just the future but the only game in town.

Of course that game didn’t seem to have any rules, or at best they were being made up as we went. Riding on a rising tide of bogus valuations and overnight success stories, venture capitalists reacted angrily to anyone questioning their business model. The money would come from somewhere and people pointed to the proprietary AOL model (once they’ve come to your crummy site, never let them go) for guidance. Hence all that talk about stickiness.

AOL is something of a dinosaur now, and Google, the success story du jour, has nothing to do with being proprietary. (Their guiding principle is not so much “Don’t be evil” as it is “If you love someone, let them go.”) And since they cracked the code of advertising online, giving people exactly what they were searching for because they asked for it, the company invokes both respect and fear in a way that makes the old AOL hatred seem tepid.

What’s changed now is that VC types want a better idea of how you intend on making money with your site before they’ll invest while the people doing the site building are still trying to find cheap ways to get their content. You know: the stuff that people look at and interact with. The stuff that makes them want to come back. The buzz phrase these days is “user generated content” with YouTube (owned by Google) being the most obvious example. Why create video when your users can do it for you? And with blogs and such, you can let them write most of content on the site, too.

At the then ballyhooed launch of Slate, then editor Michael Kinsley alienated a lot of netizens by saying that when he went into a restaurant, he wanted a trained chef, not an amateur, to make his meal. It was a battle cry for writers and editors who were sick of seeing their skills undervalued. Ten years later, Slate is still around (though Kinsley is gone) while all those little dot coms that mocked him have vanished. Their big idea — that they didn’t need no stinking word people — has been weighed and found wanting, sort of. Perhaps this new phase is just round two with UGC representing just the latest iteration (another nineties word!) of the hope that sites will somehow create themselves and wise web heads can just reap the profits.

The young people who worked for me in the nineties were all listening to Oasis, whose song “Champagne Supernova,” I was told, was as good as anything by the Beatles. Seems silly now though the most song’s memorable line — “Where were you when we were getting high?” — still seems relevant. If you’re not inside the teepee, inhaling the smoke, you won’t see the same visions the rest of the tribe does. And if everyone doesn’t believe, won’t the vision disappear?

I’m sorry if you came to my site by Googling the above phrase but shouldn’t you be ashamed of yourself? The MPAA certainly thinks so, as evidenced by the investigation into its rating system that can be found in the amusing indie documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated which I just watched on DVD. Most of the press I saw had to do with director Kirby Dick’s attempts to learn the names of the anonymous judges who decide what rating movies will get, with NC-17 (no one under 17 allowed into the theater no matter how liberal your parents are) being the proverbial kiss of box office death.

But where he really makes his case is in the taboo arena of female pleasure. Bolstered by interviews with directors who grappled with the MPAA over an NC-17 rating (including Kevin Smith, Alison Anders and John Waters), This Film makes good use of the compare-and-contrast technique by alternating censored scenes of women (Chloe Sevigne in Boys Don’t Cry, Maria Bello in The Cooler) enjoying their orgasms — a lot — with any number of scenes from R and even PG-13 rated films in which sex is used to degrade and objectify women.

(My daughter, who will be 14 in a few weeks, tuned in at this point. She has probably seen more R-rated movies than I have in the last year, thanks to the lax monitoring done at the local cineplex, including the girl-hosing films of the American Pie stripe. It was, as they say, a teachable moment. Just the other day she told me, appropos of some song on the radio, that she liked a lot of rap but didn’t appreciate the fact that the guys rapping just wanted to use girls. Feminism lives.)

I haven’t polled any women about their reactions to the censored scenes mentioned above (both of which involved energetic displays of cunnilingus, performed by Hilary Swank and William H. Macy respectively) but I don’t actually know too many women who claim to be looking for good sex scenes in movies. And only a precious few that I have known will even admit to enjoying porn. I was reminded of all the derisive comments I have heard over the years about traditional porn from women: that the girls are just tools for fantasy, no different than an inflatable doll, that their characters are two-dimensional, even if their bodies are 3D. (“The acting is terrible and the plot is ridiculous,” as Julianne Moore says of “Logjammin’,” a porn video briefly glimpsed in The Big Lebowski.) Women don’t want cardboard cutouts in their fantasies; women want…Jude Law.

At least this is what I concluded watching another DVD of a film I had missed in theaters, Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday. Meyers’ movies often look like soft porn to me — the clean anonymous houses in which her characters are supposed to live, the fairy tale lighting, the lame music — but in Holiday she doubles her pleasure with the story of two women (played by Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) who have suffered at the hands of caddish boyfriends and who swap houses over Christmas to discover, yes, true love.

Winslet’s character, an unhappy British newspaper scribe in the Bridget Jones’s tradition, gets the consolation prize in the form of a defanged Jack Black (you wait for his manic side to emerge in vain), while Diaz, coasting on her Goldie Hawn-like career of playing accomplished blonde ditzes, hits the jackpot when a drunken Jude Law arrives unannounced at her hobbit-like cottage. At first he seems to be playing to his nanny-shagging reputation (they fuck that first night hardly knowing each other’s names). But then he turns out to be a widower who is single-handedly raising two adorable girls who cries at the drop of a handkerchief. The perfect man: safe (widowed), nurturing (single dad), vulnerable (weepy) and virile though all the sex scenes between them are pre and post-coital. Their second encounter finds Diaz lying in bed sated — and still wearing her bra. I guess Meyers really wanted that PG-13 rating.

As Julianne Moore said of “Logjammin’,” “You can imagine where it goes from here.”

Seeing Richard Thompson at the advent of summer has become a rite of passage in New York (I wrote about one of his summer concerts in my very first blog). His arrival seems to herald the summer concert season, at least for Celtschmerz types like myself, and last night’s concert at the Prospect Park bandshell was a fitting opener, timed nicely as it was with the solstice. (Did yesterday seem really long to anybody else?)

Though the skies were clear when I left on foot from Ft. Greene, ominous clouds had gathered by the time I arrived at the park — twenty minutes later. The Sybil-like weather of summer serves to remind us how little we are in charge of, so it was fitting that we ended up sitting beside a row of guys from a local AA group. (My friend Ellen Oler deduced this by asking the aging punk rocker in the seat beside her about the A-in-a-triangle tattoo on his arm.) As the umbrellas came up two songs into Thompson’s set — and he and his band were forced to flee the stage probably out of fear of electrocution — the Bill W gang sat there getting drenched and singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and laughing at the rain. (“It could be worse — we could be crucified!”)

Backed by a versatile three piece band, the Mock Tudor man drew from his ridiculously deep catalogue of songs (including such Richard and Linda standards as “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” and “The Wrong Heartbeat”) while bypassing his more recent output. Pride of place was given to songs from his latest CD, Sweet Warrior, which sounds like it could be his best since, uh, Mock Tudor. While some detractors (and fans) say he is stuck in the 16th century or so, there are some topical numbers here, most notably the Iraq war song, “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me.” The title, he said, was inspired by hearing soldiers in Baghdad refer to the city as “‘dad” as in “Dad’s got the blues tonight.”

The theme of mortality recurred like the rain, most notably in oldies like “Wall of Death” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (the theme of suffering soldiers — these from WWI — got a reprise too with “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven,” in which Thompson took a solo that sounded like he was channeling Django Reinhardt) but when the dark clouds parted, and we were all cold and wet, he blessed us with the middle-eastern sounding “One Door Opens,” reminding the faithful that each end marks a beginning as seasons roll over each other. By the time his son Teddy joined him on an encore of “Persuasion” (which dad cowrote with Crowded House’s Tim Finn), the crowd didn’t need that much persuading. The mostly older (and white) Brooklynites who had gathered for the occasion were no strangers to thoughts of mortality, I suspect. But rather than lie down and wait for their dirt bath, most of them came to play, to stand and shout back on the chorus of “Tear Stained Letter” as the dark clouds were carried away toward the sea.