August 2005 Archives

Can you hear them singing...?

1. Eschaton

Reliable even in the off-season. First recommended to me by Dan the man (at Disc Diggers).

2. TMFTML

Back and baaaaaaad...

3. ROCKS OFF

For obvious reasons, and for Ian Stewart.

4. RUDE PUNDIT

"Sweet Foucaultian nightmare..."

5. ZOILUS: CARL WILSON ON MUSIC

You second self as critic, only different.

Blog day

Singing to themselves? Or Everybody? Or nobody? Can anyone tell? Is there such a thing as TOO MUCH self-consciousness? What happens if/when a medium is BORN self-conscious? If a tree falls in a postmodern forest, can it hear itself?

REAL LIFE AD COPY

Are you still a wax virgin? (BBC 1 TV)
Beat the French on their home turf! (OTB horses)
Big flashy films for your grubby little houses. (billboard)

WILL YOU GO TO LUNCH!

Lindsay Posner on why David Mamet is great, warts and all:

Perhaps in no other writer's work can the colloquial expressions of tragic human need be transformed into such moving, glorious poetry. As the hapless Bernie says as he ogles an unsuspecting girl on a beach: 'With tits like that, who needs ... anything?'

Finally, celebrating its team's win in the Liverpool ECHO, an irresistible

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK:

"It may be pink, but it's not remotely girly..."

[...happy anniversary baby, got you on my mind...]

WKD DIVIDEND

I misread the blog date as today, when actually, it's next week, so here's a BONUS post:

Filmoculous: constantly replenished links by category...

James Wolcott: a writer finds his medium...

Pluck RSS Feed of the Day: latest and greatest...

memeorandum: news as clusterlinks...

TV Guests: patterns emerge from these posts, a meat-story: just go to the web page and search on any of the big numbers, you'll zig-zag your way down the page. The machine wreaks of overfamiliarity, another unwritten story about the gluttonous poetry of the basic media orbit...

Unofficial Apple Web Log: dirt, tools, speculation, links, consistently impressive...

NOTES ON SFU FINALE

Analogous to SEINFELD's closer, where creator Larry David reached for sentimental self-hatred and found barely pity. (CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM often pulls this off.) Alan Ball's feast of death became a weeper, true sign of a writer who's fallen too much in love with his characters and needs to churn out a few more drafts. The most obvious sign was the opening preemie childbirth of Rachel and Nate's daughter, dangled as the opening corpse with that ominous hyphen AS THOUGH THEY MIGHT ACTUALLY KILL HER OFF BY THE END OF THE SHOW. Within ten minutes this became preposterous. Killing a preemie might have fulfilled Rachel's worst fears and self-loathing, but this was a finale tailored to the M*A*S*H* crowd: if the opening stiff was a cheat, the closing visitation by Nate and his father Nathaniel was out and out clumsy. Rachel had never met Nate's father, she would never have been visited by HIS ghost. All the ghosts in this episode tormented their subjects until they turned into hollow Freudian hallucinations. David sees his red-hooded stalker until he boldly confronts him in the mortuary's basement workroom, the vivid deathspace, only to discover that his tormentor is HIMSELF. This panders to all this show's better ideas: David remains genuinely traumatized by a psychopath who poured gasoline on him and made him, one of TV's best-written homosexuals (played by a breeder) suck on a gun. Even after confronting the poor sod in prison, he's inexplicably haunted... even the best shrink would work a couple years work on this alone, not to mention David's childhood in a funeral parlor. Confronting this ghost as "himself" trivializes the whole thing... which could have been followed up on with Keith, ex-LAPDer who probably knows from PTS.

Ruth's arc was the most cliche in a pile of doozies: she camps out at her sister's, lets her hair down, and opens a dog babysitting service with Kathy Bates. On the Memorial show Ball was quoted as saying "Ruth is surprising because she's always surprising herself...," which is gobbledy-gook for not thinking her character through. So he turns her into an Earth Mother who suddenly vaults into the voice of compassionate experience for Claire. Oh please.

You could get with the idea of showing how all the major characters die if only Hollywood weren't in one of its WORST OLD-AGE makeup phases these days. HUGE clunker having Keith killed by thieves as a security guard, one of the show's most noble characters reduced to a racist cliche.

CONNECTION PROBS PLAGUE BLOGGER OVERSEAS

Blog Friday moves to Glob Saturday, with extras.

HALE AND FAREWELL

Dr. Conrad Milton Riley 1913-2005

Even for a family hotel, $13.95 is an obscene amount to pay for MR AND MRS SMITH, but it has its money shots, especially Jolie's wicked smirk. As producer I would have trimmed it down about twenty minutes, but hey. The meta story makes it all but irresistible: that Vaughn and Aniston hooked up after this is an offstage punch line that ranks with the best of them.

Coming soon: notes on SFU finale, blog Friday, and Binky leaves the room in tatters...

In honor of Oprah, I've been listening to Mark Hammer read GO DOWN, MOSES aloud in the car during commutes, a rendition of the novel that catches every nuance, every tingle, every shiver of recognition, especially in the freighted silences that explode inside the dialogue like landmines. Check WF's definition of rock'n'roll, circa 1940:

"Yet it was not that Lucas made capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood, but the contrary. It was as if he were not only impervious to that blood, he was indifferent to it. He didn't even need to strive with it. He didn't even have to bother to defy it. He resisted it simply by being the composite of the two races which made him, simply by possessing it. Instead of being at once the battleground and victim of the two strains, he was a vessel, durable, ancestryless, nonconductive, in which the toxing and its anti stalemated one another, seetheless, unrumored in the outside air..." Faulkner describing Lucas Beauchamp in "The Fire and the Hearth," page 104.

[SNARKY POST-MODERNIST REJOINDER]

[Witty, irreverent yet immodest declamation of how busy blogger has been working on innumerable book projects and accepting awards, barely time to think nevermind blog, but here they are, cranking it out...]

[EXASPERATED threat to quit blogging alltogether...]

[Slap-dash list of quirky links reflecting online panache...]

[Gratuitous non-sequitur to leave newbies in the fog...props to Pootie Tang...]

[Semi-gratuitous joke about agent and/or publishing industry...]

[Name-drop big party for wkd, promise to report dirt, complain about lack of party clothes, brag about capacity to party hard...]

This date (August 9) carries a special meaning for us geezers who remember George Bush Sr., then heading up the RNC, as one of Tricky Dick's more ornate apologists. We like to read old copies of STONE, turn up some Bad Company and hit the Nixon Monument (#15 of 16, description only, of B. Kliban's cartoon: SEND IT ON). Who knew Reagan, and now Bush's brat, would make "We Won't Get Fooled Again" sound even more naive. (Further reading: NIXON AGONISTES, by Gary Wills.)

A QUAKER "THING"

Just caught up with "All Alone," the latest episode of SIX FEET UNDER, emotional kryptonite for anyone suffering a recent death in the family. Nate's "too pure for this world" Cobain quote just about summed up his character. Like, idealists always DIE on us.

GOD IS AN ASSHOLE

Sounds like a Stephen Colbert line...

FILE UNDER: STAR TREK, THE ASHTRAY

Michelle Phillips bookmarks, in the press kit to her VICTIM OF ROMANCE AND RARITIES (Hip-O Select).

SELECT PODCASTS:

I'm disappointed in the iTunes podcast feature, especially the auto update to iPod which takes forever. I do it manually and it's far more efficient, and I've grown attached to these shows, which help me through the drudgery of mowing the lawn...

MEDIA MATTERS with Bob McChesney

Download page here; podcast rss feed here.

KCRW (various: Podcast page)

Le Show, Left, Right & Center

WNYC (various: Podcast page)

On the Media

CINECAST

Idea-driven Chicago movie exchange replete with music and listener feedback.

WHERE I DRAW THE LINE AT TIMMY WONKA'S TASTELESSNESS

SIX FEET UNDER: #60 Ecotone

Well it was a doozy, and the more it seems like a soap and the more I get ready to dismiss it, the more I find it's turned some cliché into something original and weird.

I didn't think they would off Nate, and I'm still sort of in shock. His dream sequences were very good, especially his last stoner beach party sendoff with a side of David we've never seen before. Totally a side of David through Nate's eyes.

Claire sits down to TALK to this new guy for the first time and realizes HE'S A REPUBLICAN, and right in the middle of their dispute her cell goes off signaling the loss of the brother she's closest to. And just when you want to hate this guy for his politics he turns in a grueling night in a hospital with a family from hell. Favorite line: Claire says she's fine has family for support, he says "really?" Claire's goodbye to Nate very affecting.... and great line: "She could at least show up for her son's coma!"

Brenda has become so unsympathetic that you're almost rooting for Nate when he... wakes up from his coma to his wife's offer of reconciliation after his dalliance to ANNOUNCE HE'S LEAVING HER AND THE BABY HE's IMPREGNANTED HER WITH. Loved the joke about "Where's Maya?" "She's with MOM!" (Joanna Cassidy... a favorite actress in the role of her life...so sexy, so disagreeable.. she's California itself wrapped in the body of a blissed-out shrink.. line of the season: "Do you REALLY think I didn't want to abort you and Billy?").

FOR ONCE A "PEACENIK" QUAKER, MAGGIE, IS PLAYED FOR A HYPOCRITE AND A FRAUD! AND YET ODDLY SYMPATHETIC!

Ruth's sequences were, as usual, weak. Poorly written. Who would WANT to sleep with this woman? Who would PERSIST? And yet I really love the idea of the overbearing neurotic mother who has a rebounder camping fling during her last chance to say goodbye to her son. MY GAWD in the bus on the way home she's pouring her "boy troubles" out to a Chinese interpreter: men are pigs in all languages and cultures. She has no clue, no idea how to get a clue, no clue what a clue might look or smell like, has cluelessness nullifying her very soul. She's without a clue about her cluelessness, and still quite unsympathetic.

Do Nate and David share a dream at the end? How very Jungian with the ocean and all that.

HARPER's

If you don't have time to read Mark Crispin Miller's "None Dare Call It Stolen" from the current issue, listen to the (poorly recorded) podcast of the July 21st forum with Miller, John Conyers, Jr., Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Sherrod Brown, and Eleanor Clift. History will not look kindly on any of this, but oh yeah I forgot "who cares we'll all be dead." At least the podcast jumps off with this surreal intro: "I'm Rick MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's, filling in as moderator for editor Lewis Laphalm, who had to be in London to testify at the Roman Polanski libel trial..."

Conyer Report [PDF]
FOOLED AGAIN by Mark Crispin Miller
Miller's News From Underground blog (RSS)

The liberal hand-wringing over Justice O'Connor has been pathetic: her two most important decisions? Bush vs. Gore, followed swiftly by her stepping down, giving Bush a big wet sloppy one. Rumor has it her husband is ill; nobody bothered to track this down, or figure out her true motive, which makes it even more obvious: she's a yahoo dressed up as a centrist. John Roberts is a stealth nominee who will conveniently distract most from Bolton's recess app't.

RENTAFLICK
LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU
Few reviewers nailed this charmingly postmodernist homage to boyhood, which contains one of the great climactic post-terrorist attack retorts (inexplicably missing from this page): "I've never seen a bank stooge stand up for ANYBODY..."

WEDDING CRASHERS
I thought Rachel McAdams an inspired piece of casting in this lumpen rental, which Vaughn steals from Wilson. But all the way through, I thought she was Ashley Williams, who deserves a break.