television

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?

Click and see. The fact that this sort of thing is not allowed makes no sense to me. I mean, the ads for Fahrenheit 9/11 were much more disparaging to Boosh.

Can’t wait for the networks to stop mattering.

Got to the season finale for Project Runway on the re-run tonight. It’s been a household institution all summer. I like that neck-tatted Jeffery won. He wasn’t my favorite early on, but as he got to be less prickly I liked him more.

Michael was who we were all rooting for, but his stuff just wasn’t executed at the same level as everyone elses.

I also liked how they opened up everyone’s lives a bit more. That Jeffery was a junkie isn’t surprising, but it’s a real thing. Oolie is from East Germany? Cramazing! I’m sure she’ll do great in the future. You could see that everyone wanted to make money w/her.

And speaking of money, how much do you think Laura’s apartment costs? What does her strange Einstein-looking hubby do? I’m sure the answers are out there; maybe someday I’ll look.

Anyway, this show is I think one of the best-executed of all the reality programs. It seamlessly weaves trashy drama with personal career development and big-name product placement, and it’s effective because it doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not, or hide what it is.

Ok, enough talking about TV. I’ll write about Lost whever I watch that too. Flipping away from consumption to production, my todo list is ever growing:

• Post about Vagabond Opera show: gypsy good times, del-arte kids, sarah’s secret door and how it makes you feel like an arcata insider, petas and moonshine, dancing a stomp.
• Post three or four think-pieces on my work blog.
• Start creating election-time video. I want to do Ross Perot, but me; mainly talking to millenials about millenials and getting that whole revolutionary spirit going again.
• Working on my new theme for the site, documenting the Rebel Unicorn.

That’s the short list too.

And I have a company to bootstrap, and a few dim embers of a social life to fan. It’s a lot, but I’m feeling good about things generally. More and more at home in my own skin every day, and looking forward to a gangbusters 2007.