The Hyper-Entertaining of America

...Thoughtful social scientists would probably tell us that the American attention span has shortened over the past few decades, and there might be some truth to this...

...And if you feel like getting a little starstruck while you fill your tummy, there's a Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe, those quintessential mixes of entertainment, food, and T-shirts, in just about every big city in America...

...Aside from the 10 or so actual theme parks in and around Los Angeles, there is Universal Studio's City Walk, a recreated downtown Orlando in the hills of Burbank...

...America is the richest nation in the history of the world, and whatever Jonathan Kozol says, the prosperity reaches down into the lowest orders of society...

...Treasure Island has a pirate-ship war every hour...

...Push 1. Could that wholesome girl from Vermont really have done it...

...Not anymore...

...I remember in my college days washing my clothes at a dingy little coin-op place that had two TVs, one always tuned to a soap, the other to some lurid talk show...

...The trial run is going on right now on 57th Street, home to the aforementioned Bar Bat, Jekyll and Hyde, and Motown Cafe...

...And it's not just venues traditionally considered outside the purview of entertainment that are getting this treatment, but old-style entertainments as well...

...Then it hits me...

...Hyper-entertainment has also penetrated those shrines to our national pastime, America's ball parks...

...But they were hailed as the companion appliance for the new age, the era in which boredom might finally be routed and forever eradicated...

...This revelation came to me at the Virgin Mega-store, at Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles...

...Back then (no more than 10 years ago) that was all the entertainment the average clothes-washer required...

...Once described by an architecture critic as "New York's Rue de la Paix," the street has become an outdoor supermall...

...What, you ask, is the "root cause" of all this mania...

...Back then, the things were as big as shoe boxes and cost several hundred dollars...

...The science of demography allows entertainment executives to pinpoint with great accuracy not only what people want but what they're willing to shell out for...

...Downtown Orlando is itself a kind of theme park almost indistinguishable architecturally and spiritually from Main Street in Disney's Magic Kingdom...

...Disney is getting into the act by taking over whole blocks in L.A...

...Background noise . . . this seems to be a common thread running through the entertainment culture...

...And not just when they go to the movies or a concert or a ball game, or to some other such traditionally entertaining event, but when they go anywhere...

...The Disneyfication of Times Square means New Yorkers are soon going to have a big chunk of urbanized Orlando right smack in the middle of Midtown...

...Forget Disney World and the studio tours and all that stuff you have to pay to get into...

...Now people treat it like lowly radio, leaving it on for hours on end, just for the sake of the comfort or distraction of its constant hum...

...Toronto's Skydome, really more of a theme park than a ball park, was way out in front of this trend when it opened in 1990, but now is emulated by just about every new park going up and every renovation of an existing one...

...There's just too much money at stake...

...Nowadays, it's difficult to get away from costumes and songs: In New York, in a five-block stretch, there are two horror-movie-themed joints, one called Le Bar Bat and the other Jekyll and Hyde...

...It's expected...

...That's too dull...

...All this interactivity means that television, once the very essence of entertainment, is no longer entertaining enough on its own for some people, who need their interactive devices to keep gameshows and even dramas like Murder She Wrote watchable...

...Wolfe made this observation in 1964, and what was once true pretty much only of the neon-painted desert is now true of almost the entire country...

...This phenomenon- the hyper-entertaining of America-has spread with the tenacity and speed of a souped-up Ebola virus...

...It's a safe bet that few of those machines ever play Hamlet...

...It remains to be seen whether "interactivity" can save TV from becoming just another generator of background noise...

...Now you just charge right up and ask for a date...

...It was only a few short decades ago that it overwhelmed radio, relegating the once-proud medium of Glenn Miller and "The Shadow" to providing background noise for drudgery like housework and commuting...

...My parents didn't care for it much, but they were indulgent and they took me there from time to time...

...to break the ice...

...Then, another revelation: The Virgin people have canned and piped this infernal noise because they realize their customers don't just want to shop anymore...

...It was driving me crazy, but no one else in the store seemed to mind...

...We might as well get used to it...

...There, the enterprising shopper will experience not just the usual mall entertainment fare of movie theaters, arcades, and playgrounds for the kids, but a fullblown indoor amusement park to ensure that a good time is had by all, even the poor folks tired of shopping...

...Push 2.) Poor television...

...I keep listening for some clue to its origin-who's putting it out, who's paying for it, anything...

...In the 1930s, the likes of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner forced their fascination with manor-house dinner parties and mahogany speedboats on a public that, as it turns out, is really more interested in man-eating dinosaurs and car chases...

...The ultrachic, ultraex-pensive shops are mostly gone, replaced by the likes of Niketown-where footwear and entertainment collide-and the Warner Brothers Store...

...In the February Commentary, Amity Shlaes points out that 60 percent of America's poor own VCRs...

...This was not always the case...

...No need for the pretense of collecting the contents of a dryer you want to use, sidling up to some pretty lass and asking, "Are these yours...

...They want, need, demand to be entertained away from home, too...

...His last contribution to The Weekly Standard, "When Lefty Met Righty . . . , or, Sleepless in Hollywood," appeared in our March 11 issue...

...And this in the city whose first manifestation led some phrase-maker in the Chamber of Commerce tourism office to dub the place the "Entertainment Capital of the World...

...For one thing, it fails to account for the success of impresarios like P. T. Barnum, the hyper-entertainer of the 19th century, or the huge popularity of prehistoric theme parks like Coney Island, which is today a mere shadow of its former gaudy greatness, way back in the days when according to these experts the national attention span had yet to shrivel to the size of a kidney bean...

...The theme park ethos- squeaky clean spaces, densely packed attractions, audiovisual extravaganzas at every turn-has spread beyond the theme park gates...

...in Century City, an eatery that looks conspicuously like the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, replete with portholes, bubble noises, and steel gratings for floors...

...That's wrong...

...Ball parks are no longer places to watch games-who can take the tedium...

...and N.Y-sinking, seedy, crime-addled Hollywood Boulevard and 42nd Street-and transforming them both into milieus of good, clean, family fun...

...Now they are entertainment complexes with bars, pool halls, and booths hawking "interactive" devices that allow the spectator to play along with the action on the field...

...And the monster is the MGM Grand, the largest hotel in the world, where the magical land of Oz, Emerald City and all, awaits after you walk through Leo the Lion's open mouth to get inside...

...Opera, haute cuisine, the National Gallery- that stuff's for eggheads, and the hell with it...

...We're talking with Natalie Merchant, whose new solo album Tigerlily is topping the charts and wowing the critics...

...it is so entertaining in and of itself that prospective browsers often have to wait in line, winding their way through the same kind of nylon maze used at airport ticket counters, just to get inside...

...So many of the original, postwar casinos have fallen victim to the hyper-entertainment culture that the town Tom Wolfe described in the early 60s is hardly standing anymore...

...The purpose of the modern mall is no longer just to gather retailers together in a convenient place with a big parking lot, but to entertain the consumers while they're buying...

...Not so very long ago, some clever major league baseball executive came up with the idea of keeping restless fans busy between innings with "dot races," electronic horse races splayed up on the scoreboard in which three variously-colored dots race around an electronically generated "track...

...the Luxor has a full-size replica of King Tut's tomb and a 10-story duplicate of the Sphinx (with a nose job...

...Now there are singles laundromats, designed as pickup joints for the Maytag-less unattached...

...Michael Anton studies political philosophy at the Claremont Graduate School...

...The Mirage has an indoor jungle and a phony exploding volcano...

...Back then it was unusual if not unique, this cavalcade of characters serving truck-stop food in pirate outfits and singing songs to all the diners...

...And for those places where Godawful, stony silence reigns, there is the Walkman...

...The fans just went wild for it, in some cases cheering louder for their favorite dot to cross the finish line than for their favorite player to belt one out...

...Orlando, Florida, is a prime example...

...And so a new era in sporting-event entertainment was born...

...But no, the voice just keeps droning on, punctuated by rock singer Natalie Merchant's recollections of growing up in Syracuse, dancing and singing barefoot in dank nightclubs when she was 17, making it big with 10,000 Maniacs (a rock band), leaving 10,000 Maniacs, her hopes, her dreams, her philosophies...

...Tom Wolfe once said of the omnipresence of Muzak in Las Vegas that it was "as if there were a communal fear that someone, somewhere was going to be left with a totally vacant minute on his hands...

...Much of the old Strip has been razed to make way for the new type of casino, the "theme" casino...

...But 57th Street, being merely an outdoor mall, cannot compete with its indoor rivals...

...And all the while no break, no pause, no ads, nothing but this suave Englishman and Natalie Merchant, chatting away...

...From laundromats to food: When I was about 10 I loved a chain called Bobby McGee's, where all the waiters dressed in different costumes and the food and drinks were served in imaginative but barely functional vessels...

...These used to be places, like theme parks, where people went on special occasions once every five years or so-packing up the family and taking them to Disneyland or Six Flags for a bit of wholesome escape from grim reality...

...But now the experience is available every weekend, and there is no longer any need to go to an actual theme park...

...The supreme example of the form, the Mecca, the eidos, is the Mall of America outside Minneapolis...

...This is a mistake that the moguls no longer make...

...The heartland is affected no less than the coasts, little hamlets no less than the great metropolises...

...Radio and television provide it at home...

...Like popular culture in every time, our entertainment culture is loud, high-spirited, ignorant, exuberant, and annoying...

...a few hundred yards from the latter is the Motown Cafe, where singing groups come out every 15 minutes to offer simulacra of the Four Tops and the Supremes...

...And since it's possible to cram a great many more attractions under the enormous roofs of today's malls than on some city street, these behemoths blow most downtown shopping districts right out of the water...

...Well, to stay on top, you've got to stay ahead of the game, and Vegas has managed to remain the capital by recreating itself almost from the ground up...

...Is Mrs...

...People don't much care for quiet anymore, if they ever really did...

...The Warner Brothers Store doesn't just sell entertainment...

...They want to be entertained, by a never-ending stream of music, commentary, images, whatever, while they search the shelves for a little piece of entertainment to take home and play on their home entertainment system...

...For instance, Las Vegas...

...It sounds like an MTV interview, or maybe a radio clip, but there is no commercial, no station ID, nothing to indicate the source of the broadcast...

...I look around for TV monitors, but there aren't any...

...This isn't a broadcast-it's a pre-recorded set piece, canned and piped over a bunch of speakers like the "channels" airlines offer to crabby passengers through those miserably uncomfortable plastic headphones...

...The Virgin execs know-and the rest of the commercial world either knows too or is being forced by the market to learn-that home entertainment is no longer enough for most Americans...

...But the theory somehow implies that all these people who so dig the hyper-entertainment culture would be at home reading Shakespeare if only these damnable vulgar distractions weren't out there tempting them out of their library chairs and into the wide, wild world...

...What better way to keep the mind occupied during a mundane chore than an array of members of the opposite sex, all available and all scouring around for . . . someone...

...And just try escaping decor: In L.A., if you want a submarine sandwich and you're worried about getting bored while you eat it, just go to Steven Spielberg's Dive...

...Both predictions proved true, and now a sizable chunk of the citizenry is plugged into a portable sound machine, grooving away on streets, in the subway, at the grocery store...

...They need some kind of sonic stimulation to keep them from falling asleep or else from becoming so hopelessly bored that they might as well be asleep...

...We were told that they would shrink and that their cost would come down...

...More enlightened public venues, like the Virgin Megastore, provide it away from home...

...Fletcher on the right track...

...In this multimedia retail palace where the concept of the assault on the senses has been refined to the point of ritual, I was shopping for a CD or two as the horribly loud "interview" kept going on and on, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out the point...

...Go anywhere and expect to be entertained: at the store, at a restaurant, at the laundromat...

...The truer explanation, I think, is that people really just like never-ending audio-visual stimulation, and why not...

...And now ordinary people have the money to indulge their tastes...

...Combine all this new money with demography and market research, and the result is the first truly popular culture in human history...

...The small portable radio/cassette player was considered quite revolutionary when it first appeared in the early 1980s...