television

Um yeah. Ultra-cheezy title. Ultra-questionable premise.

Ultra-awesome show.

See, you get good actors and a decent budget, and give the creative types (writers, directors, etc) enough room to be dangerous, all of a sudden something worthwhile might happen. It won’t likely be a mega hit, but it will likely be good. And that should recoup a decent budget. And then you make money and produce quality culture. Win!

(Also, wikipedia informs us that the original working title was Forever Sam Crow, further confirming that marketing douchebags are generally worthless; had they stuck with that I’d have had to come up with a different counter-positive to lead off my post.)

You know, Showtime is giving HBO a run for its money in the high-production-value TV serial department. Since I heard Duchovny won some award, and I’d already been impressed with the quality of Dexter and Weeds, I figured I’d see what Californicaion had to offer. I find that I like it.

Firstly, I do enjoy David Duchovny. As a teenage fan of The X-Files, I always thought it was kind of a bummer that his and Gillian Anderson’s careers never took off. Seemed like a lot of talent there in their brainy personai. Duchovny seems quite at home in the role of a self-destructive down and out (though still living quite well) New York City author moved to Hollywood. It’s not easy to pull off the intricate mix of sour self-loathing and towering hubris, peppered through with the occasional flashes of authentic charismatic genius that the character requires to not read as a total douchebag. Indeed the actor may be cribbing from his own life more than a little, but regardless it’s highly watchable.

Secondly, Natascha McElhone is captivating as the leading lady, which is essential for the whole formula to work. If we don’t love her, the whole thing falls apart. Thankfully, we do. Or at least I do, and so I buy the essential premise hook line and sinker. The narrative revolves around this on/off relationship, and it’s through this that we see the characters’ redeeming aspects as well as their deepest flaws. It’s from this love story that the show draws its power. There’s an awful lot of fucking, yes, but because at the center of it all is a heartbreakingly jilted romance, the whole achieves a level of emotional sincerity that saves it from the gratuitous precipice on which it sometimes teeters.

The result feels like a dirtier, brainier, more grown-up take on Entourage; SAT vocabulary words, french-cinema sex-farce, and a strong romantic through-line, but also an exploration of the American culture industry and the people caught up in its workings. Entertaining stuff.

Personal Reflections
I’m perhaps biased here, because I feel the sexual ethos of the program dovetails with my own sensibilities quite well, which isn’t something I frequently find. My particular blend of feministic chauvinism / power-tripping cunnilingus is pretty far outside the strike zone of mainstream sex-as-marketing, so seeing it mirrored back in a cultural product gets me thinking — which is all I really ever do these days anyway — but maybe, just maybe, it gets me thinking in a way that might lead to doing… something. At some point.

Sigh. It feels as though I’m retired, sexually. Like I hung up my spurs. I’ve certainly quit trying, and much as I flatter myself with the notion of being an eligible bachelor and all, fortune favors the bold and if you don’t try, well, you can’t really expect much. It’s who dares wins, and I’ve not felt daring in quite some time.

An example. Just this past weekend I rolled out on a sly invite to a wedding after-party. Aside from being not as drunk as everyone else, it was as ideal an environment as Humboldt has to offer for meeting women. There were even some pretty ones there, and people I didn’t even already know. Heady dready rasta mamas and cute be-booted cowgirls abounded. I even had my inviter offer to introduce me to whoever I wanted. But of course I didn’t make anything of it.

And so I wonder, why is this? Some part of it must be fear, and some part of it is certainly a lack of energy/focus, and some just plain old being rusty and out of practice, but these answers seem pathetically vague, especially since I’d actually like to see a change.

I’m reminded of one of my sister’s great writerly maxims, a gripping command for the aspiring creative soul: own your shit.

Confronted with that kind of mandate, I have a few responses.

• Josh Koenig has some issues with self-esteem, in particular with his potential value as a partner, even in the most limited of contexts. Without an internal sense of self-worth, it’s hard to get very attracted or to be very attractive to anyone else.
• Josh Koenig is also, at some level, sexually repressed. As are most of us, but it’s certainly not helping the cause here.

• Josh Koenig worries about the intimacy and vulnerability that truly excellent sexual chemistry facilitates, worries about hurting and being hurt.

That all reads like fear, actually. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Huh. The more you know. Josh Koenig needs to get back in the game.

Well, I’m not sure when or how this will all change, though I’m sure it will eventually. For my own sake I hope things limber-up soon, but it’s a challenge alright. Until I discover, embrace and embody my sexuality as an adult — as opposed to playing the erotically-inspired Peter Pan act that did so well in my early 20s — there won’t be much joy in mudville. On the other hand it sounds like a fun thing to experiment with, the discovery of a new sexual persona. The notion of experimentation itself has a kind of naughty resonance, the freedom to make mistakes, and it seems to me that unburdening myself of some super-egotistical baggage is probably a good thing here.

But it’s late and I’m still a bit under the weather. Given that I’ve thoroughly disgusted my mother and probably 33% of my other readers, and yet honestly feel no guilt, I believe I’ll call it a night and retire in meta-victory.

So I mentioned this bit in the show Mad Men in a post below. It's really really good, and so naturally some smart kid put it on YouTube. Here's the beef:

Good. Shit.

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.

They canceled the show, choked it out early really, which is why the last few felt kind of rushed. Cocksuckers. It wasn’t the ratings monster that was The Sopranos, but it was doing about as well as Deadwood according to the stats, so I don’t see what the problem was. It certainly didn’t seem anywhere near as expensive as Rome to produce…

More stuff to plead with the suits, if you want. I honestly think given that they cut the 12-episode run to 10 that it’s not coming back. Fools! Think of the cult DVD sales!

On the plus side, I was able to use it as a frame for a blog post about Ari Fleischer’s return to politics (“Ari Fleischer should get back in the game”), so that’s nice.

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.

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.

GD it, these bastards sure know how to leave an unresolved ending. I just caught up on the last few episodes, and the next isn't for a month with a pretty solid "to be continued" close.

Overall I dig the mystical developments more than the romantic. Not that there's anything wrong with romance, but they way they're playing this just sheds negative light on all parties. It's not very much fun, and it makes me not like some of my favorite characters as much.

Also, I finished up season four of The Wire, which is really just an incredible piece of artwork. If you have not checked it out, do yourself a favor and Netflix, on-demand, bittorrent or blockbuster that shit. They ended that one without much conclusion too, and apparently will wrap it all up in one last season next year. Sigh.

I believe I'm mostly caught up on the two network shows I follow: BattleStar Galactica and Lost. The former is having a gangbusters third season, the latter losing its edge.

It's not an easy thing to make a good network serial drama. The form demands you have 25 episodes or so, each 45 minutes long and broken up by commercials. That's a lot of chapters to fill. Network executives mess with the work in progress trying to tease out better ratings, and they're usually not looking at making a great piece of culture, just how to get more eyeballs next sweeps.

The people who work for HBO have a much easier time of it: 12 one-hour episodes with no commercials and you pretty much get to make the whole thing. Input from the parent company comes in the off-season and you've got an entity that sees the long-game of DVD sales as a big part of their margin, so they want a quality product.

That being said, it's instructive to watch what happens as one show ripens and another deteriorates.

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?