SQUIRREL RAPE:

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)