Jan Svankmajer is an artist and/or nutcase whose films include an obvious masterpiece called “Meat Love.â€? It is the story of two chunks of meat, who fall in love and come to a bad end. It was made in 1989, and is described as having immense charm, wit and intensity….a parable on the tragic nature of love and existence, all in less than one minute.

Now this is what I want in a movie! The other day, I stupidly went to see the new movie by Mike Judge, creator of “Office Spaceâ€? and “King of the Hill,â€? both of which I really admire. “Idiocracyâ€? is a low-budget comedy about a future that has been dumbed-down to an extreme (i.e., only a little dumber than the present.) The US is overrun by morons who laugh at farts and can barely put two words together. Kind of just like it is already, only with costumes.

It was a terrible movie, no offense to Mike Judge. I also saw “Inside Man,â€? another terrible movie, this time by poor Spike Lee, who must have needed the money. I watched a new episode of “Weeds,â€? a pseudo-sophisticated Showtime series about a mom who sells pot, since her husband died and everyone knows that means you have to either become a stripper or a drug dealer. The plot involved preteen masturbation, and it was so crass and awful that I longed for Sex and the City, which I could never  watch without running out of the living room, screaming.

I know I should’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine! I know I would have felt encouraged by its intelligence level, even if everything else was wrong with it. I really fucked up. Now that Deadwood is over, there’s just nothing to live for, entertainment-wise. Everything is as bad as it could be….so bad, that Mike Judge can’t even satirize it. I might have to forgive all the artists out there, making the arty crap that always struck me as so monumentally pretentious.

I apologize, Jan Svankmajer! Whoever you are, keep up the good work. Stick to your guns, don’t sell out, aim high, right over my head if you feel like it. Just don’t leave me alone in the wilderness with mainstream pop culture.

If pretentiousness were a crime, and it is, a shop in my neighborhood called “Obsolete”? would be guilty with Special Circumstances. You really haven’t experienced the extreme limits of absurdity in art collecting until you visit Obsolete in person, but its website will illustrate what’s afoot here. I first read about Obsolete in the Los Angeles Times, in a profile of a local entrepreneur who collects crap like trays of old teeth and tin aircraft dummies from WWII. The dummy cost around $60,000, just a drop in the bucket for this particular “collector”?, who gushed about Obsolete and called its owner a “Visionary.”?

The first time I went there, I was simply overwhelmed by both its rarified atmosphere and its awful collections of useless crap. Each “piece�? was accompanied by a small white index card with a terse typed description of the item and a price, roughly a thousand times more than its value. A giant wooden pencil from some old advertising campaign was propped in a corner and priced at $5,000. A chipped painted doll head was listed as “antique German doll head with chips. $3,500.”? (Alas, the “French hand-made cheese bowl”? pictured above has been sold.)

My friend and I wandered around the shop, hissing “Look, look!” like little kids in the porn section of a video store. We were excited, disgusted, and trying hard not to laugh. Whenever the young clerk seemed to look our way, we pretended to be admiring something. I adopted my loud Foreign Lady voice, which allows me to act stupid without feeling embarrassed. We flipped through some pricey photography books, which all featured children or adolescent boys in various states of undress. We finally walked out into the fresh air, feeling a bit like Alice emerging from the rabbit hole.

I find myself telling friends about Obsolete whenever the subject of pretentiousness comes up. I always get excited, and I always propose a field trip. I will be the Foreign Lady, and maybe I will have the nerve to barter for a rickety old wooden picnic bench like the one I got at a yard sale once for fifty cents, but is priced by the Visionary at Obsolete at a dignified $6,000.