bittorrent

One of the shows I’ve been enjoying over the past couple months (thanks eztv!) is AMC’s Mad Men, a stylish serial drama full of moral ambiguity set in the NYC advertising industry (Madison Avenue, hence the title) circa 1960. Aside from just generally being smart and well-executed, I’m occasionally actually inspired by the marketing presentations that the protagonist Don Draper gives.

They remind me of the best of Larry Lessig’s powerpoints, but because the whole point is that Draper is being brutally emotionally manipulative — both in the context of presenting a modern marketing strategy, and also in the sense that he’s closing the deal with a client — they resonate with my artistic side even more. Truly the greatest performance work I’ve done has been essentially along the same lines: stacking up rhetoric with music and stage-imagery to seduce the audience in one way or another.

There’s something you can definitely feel as a performer when this is working, when the crowd is in your pocket. I’ve felt the same thing in business meetings and selling vacuum cleaners door to door, the energy of control when another human will folds itself into your own. It’s probably the rawest power I’ve ever experienced, and mostly since I’ve used it for good, it’s been a good thing. Lot of responsibility though.

Anyway, the season finale of the show had a particularly great sequence like this, and it’s got me mentally cutting up the music I listen to, looking for theme-clips, thinking of images, ways of explaining. Explaining what exactly is an open question. Hopefully we’ll find out.

This show is getting predictably mixed reviews, but I am loving it. I’m not yr typical viewer: comfortable with ambiguity and mystery, and thirsty drama that rewards close attention. This definitely fits that description. The most recent episode (number six) reminds me of David Lynch at his best, but maybe better.

I’ll admit I’m partial to David Milch’s use of language, which is significantly more obtuse — my housemates call it Shakespearian — than anything you’d get on The Sopranos, so I can see why people are scratching their head about this. It’s somewhat weirder and more jarring placed in a contemporary setting without the period drama of Deadwood. This show is a lot less realistic, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re interested, don’t buy the negative reviews without watching the first two episodes for yourself.

It’s fun seeing actors from Deadwood turn up again, especially Dayton Callie (aka Charlie Utter), who plays Steady Freddie, the Hawaiian Drug kingpin. “I took more acid… than you ate fruit loops for breakfast… in… inside a volcano!“ Oh man. There are a bunch of others too.

It’s kind of cool how HBO has a little talent pool rolling. You get to see range. For instance, Paul Ben-Victor who plays Palaka, Steady Freddie’s stooge, has also been on The Wire and Entourage. Palaka is a real character, a shuffling simpleton thug, and a real contrast to the big studio exec Ben-Victor played on Entourage, and with the Greek gangster he did on The Wire.

And the acting is key. Anything as strange as this, with language this artistic, is going to rise or fall on the basis of the performances and direction. Luckily, the cast seems up to the job, and the direction and use of music are strong.

The times when the show starts to lose me I get the feeling it’s because the script itself goes too far. For instance, in the previous episode, I thought the extent of Rebecca De Mornay/Sissy’s anger became monotonous, but I still dig her performance, and in-context with the big turnaround for her character in this episode, it could also have been a choice to make the audience feel pushed away by her behavior.

It’s risky for TV to leave dramatic tension unresolved without a kind of “to be continued…” hook, and I think it’s one of the pluses of the emerging format — and the creative freedom HBO is showing — that Milch and his producers can do this. I have no doubt this show will be less popular than the one it replaced, but I actually like it a lot better. Hopefully they’ll keep it on.

So, you know, you can get this off the internet the same way I get most of my video entertainment (savvy?), and I just watched it and it was really good. I don’t go for Moore’s coy, “gee mister, don’t people in Cuba have to pay for healthcare” character, but his films can be quite thoughtful, and this is some of his best work. The assembled stores really speak for themselves.

One thing that stuck out for me was this bit from France, where they make sure that if you’re poor and you need to take a cab home you can walk out with some cash. There’s a line where the French doctor says, when asked about paying bills, something along the lines of, “the only qualification for walking out is that you’re healthy enough and are going someplace safe.”

That hit home for me, reminded me of the bike crash that got me wearing a helmet:

Actually, the stitches are not that much of a pain. There were a few woozy moments in the ER, but the real damage is muscular. I righteously pulled out my groin and jammed by elbow, both on the left side. Heading in I could walk and move pretty well. Walking out of the hospital took me a full five minutes gimping along, coming close to out and out crying on the ramp leading to the street. It’s a hell of a thing to be totally incapacitated.

That was a real fucked-up five minute walk down a 40-foot hallway. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to make it, moving literally one foot in front of the other out to the street to get a car to take me back to Brooklyn. The way the hospital staff would look away as they passed by, or give this kind of sheepish “good luck” grin, still sticks with me. I believe the system we have is evil on a kind of spiritual level for creating moments like that.

Another thing that stuck with me was the first thing Dr. Miller (he was good; I remember his name) asked when he saw my head was whether or not to send me up to a plastic surgeon. I did a double-take and told him I didn’t have any coverage and he paused a beat and then said “I’ll do the absolute best I can.”

As like I said, he did good. Those stitches healed up straight and true and unless I’ve gotten a lot of sun you can barely tell they were there. And anyway, chicks dig scars, right?

I’ve lived largely without insurance since graduating from college, all except for the year I worked for MFA, and for the most part it’s been ok. I’m lucky to be strong and healthy in spite of my breakneck lifestyle and questionable diet. One time I got a bad flu and went to the San Francisco Free Clinic, which is a leftover from the 60s, but where I got penicillin for $3. The first time I really wrecked in NYC it was late and there was no traffic cop to see me go down and hustle me into an ambulance, and I didn’t need stitches or anything, so I biked home and just gutted it out.

I’ve done allright. I’ve been lucky. As I get a little older I get to feeling a bit more risk-averse. Soon we’ll have insurance through work, and that’ll be nice; but the truth is, as this film makes abundantly clear, an insurance-based, profit-driven health care system will always be extremely problematic, as it’s paradigmatically oriented away from providing treatment. Even for those with coverage.

I’ve said before that I want my first new car to be an alternative fuel or electric vehicle. Similarly, I’d really like it if by the time I have kids we’ve gotten our shit together to where health care isn’t such a humongous clusterfuck. Here’s hoping.

Two years ago, the saintly leaders at DownHillBattle did a nice little bit of copyright and general activism by organizing screenings of the seminal Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, which has not been available for sale for some time because of all the clearances necessary for the archival footage.

Their action was called Eyes on the Screen, and it used BittTorrent to distribute the first two episodes of the video series. I participated in SF, torrenting the first two episodes and setting up a showing at this anarchist loft I had a couple of connections with.

It was probably one of the single most rewarding pieces of activism I’ve participated in, as it drew a very diverse crowd both young and old, and people were very moved by both the documentary (which is GD amazing) and the circumstances (internet wizardry) by which it was presented.

That event was one of the rare moments in my time as a velvet revolutionary where I really felt like my work was building on, rather than digging itself out from under, the legacy of the 1960s. It was fucking inspiring.

Holmes and Nick and Tiffany got some serious pushback from the original producers who claimed they were really working hard on getting everything together for a DVD re-issue, and that this “stunt” was putting it all at risk. In response, they took down the torrent link and instead encouraged people instead to get the video from a library for screening.

Today, the documentary remains unavailable on DVD, with used copies of this “collectible” series going for upwards of $1000. This is a piece of history that every man, woman and child should experience, and it’s getting traded around like a baseball card.

Here’s a torrent file for the whole thing.

Seed it, bitches.

Apple TV looks interesting and surprisingly affordable. I’d like to see what success early adopters have in hacking it up, because if I can SSH into this thing and trick it out I’ll probably buy one. If it can be a media center and a solid network hub/firewall, I’ll drop $300 to have a purpose-built device as that’s a good pricepoint vs me building my own.

Well, I lost a post I wrote about Lost somewhere in the last couple of days. Bummer.

Anyway, I caught up on the first three episodes, and I like it so far. It’s unrealistic, but that’s sort of the point; the show is interesting to me because it’s about allegory and psychology and mystery. There’s danger in that kind of narrative unraveling as things get “explained,” but so far so good (e.g. w/the bear cages).

Also, loved the (highly unrealistic) shout out to the HC in Locke’s dope-plantation flashback. Also also liking the new strong female leads among the others (including Trixie from Deadwood!).

Yeah, my other post was a little more substantive. What are ya gonna do?

So the conventional TV season is starting up (I watched Lost and BattleStar Galactica last time around) which means I’m firing up my bittorrent. I’m curious how early I’ll be able to get stuff here on the west coast. Depending on torrent speed, maybe close to real-time!

So, to that end, I’ll be firing back up my torrentfeed (which will also pick up torrents for new episodes of The Wire and other HBO shows I dig, plus the odd film). I’ll also be posting some sort of essay defending the morality of this behavior, since a buch of squares and duped-teenagers seem to thing that this is somehow theft.

Anyway, that and a new site design, and hopefully some Rebel Unicorn info this weekend.