Wax Banks

Another try, with InvisiClues.

Is America better off with 10M people watching Fox, 5M watching MSNBC, and 5M watching CNN? Or with everyone watching Cronkite?

Hint 1: Which came first, the emancipatory revolutions of the Sixties or cable television?

Hint 2: Which had a bigger impact on the Arab Spring: the invasion of Iraq or Twitter?

Hint 3: Would you rather have an RL friend or a Facebook friend? Which do you accumulate faster?

Hint 4: Occupy Wall St went from posing for the cameras to purchasing homeowner debt and delivering emergency relief. Which strategy has accomplished more?

Muskrat Jamboree 2013.

A whole bunch of women in pink hair dye and rainbow clothes and pins featuring the guy who plays Moriarty on Sherlock came in to Luna a moment ago and I thought, 'Oh, a nerd convention of some kind. No guys. Fandom, then.' A quick bit of googling about tells me it's Muskrat Jamboree, a 'multi-fandom slash convention' right here in Cambridge. Reading about the community inevitably leads to reading about Due South, 'the show about the Mountie with the guy from Slings and Arrows,' and digging into any one show's online fandom is a time suck and a mind killer. Just don't.

I hope they're having a nice weekend.

'The royal "your mama."'

I've been very sick for a couple of days, and taking care of my very sick son for a couple days before that. It's been podcast time. Dan Harmon (creator of Community) and Jeff Davis ('suit-clad gadabout,' formerly of Whose Line Is It Anyway?) do a show called Harmontown -- it's a chance for the compulsive, depressive, 'self-destructive' Harmon to get some performative therapy, in the form of long unhinged rants and the occasional piece of surprisingly deft two-handed improv. Sometimes Harmon's girlfriend and comedienne/improvisor Erin McGathy joins in.

Every week they play Dungeons & Dragons with a DM named Spencer, whom they plucked from the crowd at the Nerdmelt Theater in LA. He is their Karl Pilkington.

They are on tour right now (yes, even Spencer), releasing each of twenty mostly-nightly shows as a free podcast the very next day. I've been listening to Harmontown for a while. At times it's brilliant, transcendent, heartrending not-quite-comedy of the kind Community fans know well, as when Harmon read a loooooong excerpt of his teenage journal onstage; I actually cried during that bit. At times it's two drunks fucking around onstage. The tour is going very, very well so far; they are nervous and feeling their way through things.

Please give them a listen.

Please vote this Tuesday!!

Just a reminder (if one is needed) that you should vote next week if you can. We've actually got a crucial statewide election going on here in Massachusetts -- Warren/Brown for the Senate seat that Martha Coakley pissed away a couple of years ago -- and we're lucky to have two reasonable candidates running. Brown has proven himself a principled man, or else an extraordinarily effective panderer to MA liberals (and business shill, duh), and Warren is a genuine firebreathing liberal crusader (and warmonger, but who's counting?). But I can't even consider voting for Brown (again? I know I didn't vote for goddamn Coakley) because control of the Senate is up for grabs. The stats boys say the Democrats have it locked up, but there's no taking chances.

SO!! American readers, please go vote on Tuesday. Don't let The Thick of It and In the Loop dissuade you.

Buffy entire, $66, you either have this or don't realize you need it, go get it.

Joss-whedonery cheap, right here.

I've been watching LOST Season Six special features (I know, I know) and getting nauseated by both the self-congratulatory awfulness and the just...plain...awfulness. Lost wasn't about anything at all, in the end; it was a roller coaster that disappeared when you got off it, along with your memories of it. Its ending was contemptible trash. This sale is a nice opportunity to step back and remember how deep Whedon's first TV show was -- deeply felt and brutally honest about actual human beings. For all its failings (e.g. the rickety 7th season, or Whedon's tendency to moralize about drugs, which he got over with Dollhouse if memory serves) Buffy was totally devoted to the shared/inner lives of its characters. It was about people, just people, and Whedon succeeded in making a show with an honest-to-god message that stayed true to its stated ideals all the way through.

Lindelof and Cuse dropped the ball early (then split their pants scrambling to pick it up). Joss Whedon's TV career has gone from strength to strength, even in the deeply problematic Dollhouse. If you haven't seen this show, please do. Without Buffy (plus Twin Peaks and The X-Files and The Simpsons and Seinfeld) there is no Lost -- nice thought -- but there's also no Most_of_Geeky_TV either. So much TV storytelling takes Whedon's work as a template, but few shows can touch his best work. For Christ's sake just watch the show already.

Who 'won' last night's presidential debate?

It's a stupid question, of course. Romney came off better than Obama unless you know how much outright lying he did, but this only matters to those willing to change their voting status at this point. Those folks are few in number. Obama's had nearly six years of high visibility; Romney gets to play the energetic outsider -- the moderate for Christ's sake! -- because no one cares to read up on his long long history of corporate thievery and run-of-the-mill right wing nastiness.

But he's not a moderate, and he won't be able to play make-believe on that score for very long. His liabilities are as they always were: Paul Ryan is a brittle ideologue (his role in the debt-ceiling fiasco will do Biden some favours), Romney himself is pure corporate kleptocrat spiced plus a few insane social views and plenty of blandly conservative ones; Obama's ability to drive xenophobes insane doesn't extend to most Americans; the economy is changing and Obama's handling those changes decently; and as the ACA kicks in more and more over years, one of the great injustices in our country's modern history will be rolled back bit by bit (which, yes, voters actually do notice).

There are a lot of factors working in Obama's favour as there always have been, Romney's actual beliefs (and total lack of policy plans) not least among them.

Did this debate change the minds of actual voters? Not really, no.

So it doesn't matter what the idiots on CNN and Fox News think (it never has). Obama performed poorly, Romney did superbly, but facts are facts and Obama's still going to win by 4% just like I've predicted for literally years.

Yawn.

For obvious reasons -- mostly to do with having completely forgotten how important He-Man was to me as a kid -- this image nearly made me cry just now.

Brief Buffy-nerd note about 'Seeing Red,' specifically that awful scene.

Attention conservation notice: [Don't read if you don't care about Buffy. Don't read if you really care about Buffy but haven't seen Season Six. Read if you are, like me, a big-ass Buffy nerd.]

From a Whedonesque discussion:

I actually also did get the powerless bit out of Spike's scene, though I think a lot of people probably didn't. But as a man, it immediatly comes across as very violent, which makes it a lot more shocking than if it had been a woman trying to get with a man. That's why I hated that scene so much.

Semi-relatedly:

One interesting thing about the Spike-Buffy relationship is the way the two characters move between seeing each other as categories (monster, Slayer) and treating one another as people ('...you treat me like a man, and that's...'). The attempted rape in 'Seeing Red' is awful on its own (human) terms, but as the characters are also larger-than-life figures, that symbolic dimension stays present: in that scene, Spike is misapprehending his own nature and the nature of their relationship, and -- maddeningly -- backsliding in the way he sees Buffy. He loses his sense of her as a young woman in pain (which he achieves in e.g. the final scene of 'Fool for Love,' and the Glory-tortures-Spike episode 'Intervention').

That's one thing that makes the end of 'Intervention' so interesting: Buffy's heartfelt kiss and thanks feel like she's seeing Spike both as a man who was turned into a monster, and a monster rising to the moral status of a man. Like everything else about that final act of Season Five, it's shot through with all this ambivalence and not-quite-rightness -- after all, there's no way they can actually win against Glory, that's always pretty clear, and earlier in the episode Buffy's gotten the 'death is your gift' speech, which has just accelerated her ongoing collapse.

All of Season Six is as exhausted-feeling as that last movement of Season Five, 'Seeing Red' not least. That feeling that all the characters -- and the show itself -- are running on fumes. (I suppose that's why you need yet more Sarah McLachlan.) The bathroom scene in 'Seeing Red' is just one more example, in a season full of them, of a character mistaking life's tendency to continue for a need for more drama. (That's one thing I hate about the 'Andrew and Jonathan like big gestures and big stories' explanation of those characters: it's not that they like dramatic gestures as such, it's that they're shit scared of just being who they are, because they hate their 'selves.' For sad, obvious reasons, I guess.)

Anyhow my contribution to the actual discussion under...discussion...is that when, in 'Touched' (7x20), Spike tells Buffy 'You're the one,' he doesn't just mean the Slayer, and he doesn't just mean the love of his (after)life. He means both: a whole person. Just Buffy, Buffy as she complicatedly is. Y'know, cookie dough and all that.

Throughout Season Six, though, Spike swings from one understanding of her to another, and Buffy in her desperate depression does the same. They see each other wrong. Everyone does, in Season Six. But at that point there've been moments -- in 'The Gift,' 'Intervention,' 'Fool for Love,' etc. -- where it could've gone another way. Season Six is about backsliding and evasion and shortcuts and falling-into-mere-category, which is (if anything is) a sin.

Horrible as the attempted rape is in itself, it's part of a less shocking but maybe more deeply unsettling season-long pattern.

Anyhow, I never thought the scene in question lacked for compelling subtext, but I hadn't tried to word it together until just now.

A note about Gervais and Merchant's Life's Too Short.

Warwick Davis -- who's really good looking in addition to having sharp comic timing -- decides to resuscitate his career by leeching off his friends Gervais and Merchant...and essentially doing David Brent on camera. The extraordinary thing is that G&M cast Davis to play a version of their old character(s), an unfunny schmuck in fact, in order to show his (Davis's) actual existing comic talent. Certainly the most humane depiction of showbiz dwarves I know of. Gervais in particular gets dinged for meanness and arrogance all the time, but Life's Too Short (Davis's title, by the way) is a fine showcase for a man who's never been allowed to play comedy in his own face.

In other words, what looks like exploitation is -- as usual for Merchant and Gervais -- actually a generous celebration of a talented, funny friend who'd otherwise never have been given a chance to show off. (If you realize Karl Pilkington is a genius, you'll see where this is going.) Note, by the way, that Davis's character is a mix of Merchant's agent, Gervais's Andy Millman, and of course David Brent himself: literally a warm beating heart hidden underneath the wacky goings-on.

(More introspection: the scene in episode 3 with the boy in the wheelchair is a punch in the gut, and Davis helps bring out its painful humanity.)

I could do without the 'Yay! Cameos!' aspect, though the actual cameos are mostly quite funny, Liam Neeson's in particular. 'I don't take notes.' Heh.

An essential misunderstanding about story, Buffy edition.

The editor of the Buffy comics at Dark Horse, Scott Allie, recently did an interview about Angel+Faith #5. It included this exchange:

AndrewCrossett: I have a question about the "zompires" and the mechanics by which they are created. In Buffy #3, Willow says "When someone becomes a vampire, a demon possesses their dead body. But without the Seed, demons can't pass into this world. The demon has to possess the vampire's body from another dimension." I took the last sentence to be Willow clarifying that [...]

So, could you clarify the real explanation behind the zompires (at least insofar as the characters understand it at this point)?

Scott: [...] This season has also led to a lot of conversation about the metaphysics of the demon/vampire/human connection, and we have some varying theories. Joss doesn't want it nailed down in a scientific kind of way, so we try to make sure that what we do loosely works within a few differing ideas for the metaphysics of it. We think that giving the readers something to ponder in terms of the nature of these characters is more interesting than explaining it. [my emphasis --wa.]

I once referred to Allie as a 'glorified project manager' rubber-stamping Whedon's scripts and getting a shitload of free publicity for what seemed to be other people's work, and that was unfair and small-minded of me. He did write the second most incoherent arc of Buffy Season 8, so he has more to apologize for than enjoying secondhand Whedon publicity; but it was still a totally inappropriate comment which embarrasses me greatly.

But this answer is straight amateur-hour bullshit -- a writerly failing rather than a publicity-tour faux pas -- and he's made this mistake often enough that I'm starting to get embarrassed for him too.

Ambiguity is not ambivalence. (Cognate: complication is not complexity.) How many times must I and everyone else with half a brain say it? Incoherent plots are not the same as complex thematics; multiple explanations for a plot device are not the same as multiple moral frames for a story. JESUS CHRIST!

If you can't make 'there's a demon inside you and it wars with your human self for control over your actions' resonant without making a half-assed mystery out of the logistics because you can't be bothered to finish building the world your employers licensed, you're in the wrong business. Whedon handwaves his metaphysics all the time; he's infamous for it, in fact. But he never handwaves the meanings of his stories; he never misunderstands 'open to interpretation' as 'we don't have to work out super basic plot details.' Simple plots, complex stories. That's Joss's strong suit.

Y'know where the Dark Horse Buffy comics went badly off the rails last year? When the story called for one of Whedon's patented 'here's the big unbelievably-thematically-freighted plot cliché which we'll spend the rest of the story complicating' moments (Glory is a god, Buffy curses Angel, Buffy 'came back wrong,' Faith 'turns evil'), and the best the writing staff could do -- unbelievably -- was 'the universe did it; it's fate.' (I can't even bear to explain what this means; just typing out that offensive shit will lower my IQ by a good 30 points.) It felt like Whedon simply let the story get away from him for the rest of Season 8 -- indeed, in interviews he's given the impression that the offending plot-shit wasn't actually his idea, though he's justly taken the blame for the comic's incoherence.

That was an example of complication, rather than complexity, of storytelling weighing down the tale. Instead of making a clear, strong plot choice for the audience to interpret however it liked, Whedon/Allie/Meltzer made a half-assed plot choice without really committing to it, which robbed the rest of the season of almost every drop of its moral weight. As a result, what should've been one of the most tragic events in the 14-year(!) Buffy story made absolutely no sense -- and was robbed of so much of its impact -- in Allie's telling of it.

Too much plot 'cleverness,' too much business, not enough story. That ended up being the unexpected problem with Season 8. And this 'zompires' silliness sure seems to be more of the same. Joss is partly to blame, yes. But the TV series sure didn't have this problem...

* * *

As much as anything, my frustration here comes from the knowledge that -- perhaps, perhaps -- the Buffyverse is running out of steam again, because it's once again lost its prime mover. Season 4 of the original show was an enjoyable mess, a recovery period during which the writers searched for a way to write the Scooby Gang, who had been clearly written as unjustly burdened adolescents through the show's first three years, as adults. Whedon had planned to tell 'high school is hell' stories on Buffy, and the show had to shift gears, somewhat uncomfortably, before it could become a story about accepting the selflessness and entry into real community that so much constitute adulthood. (Marti Noxon's knack for depicting burgeoning eroticism and heartbreak helped the show move into its triumphant second season, and she was instrumental in guiding the series through seasons 5-7.)

The last three seasons of the show were explicitly about the deepest nature of the Slayer (mythos and character), but they were even more about the expansion and overflow of personal and group identity: Buffy joins the world, main characters drift apart and reconstitute themselves, families grow and are reimagined (remember the episode 'Family'!), destinies are grappled with and ultimately rejected, and private moralities are explored in a grey zone way way way beyond the simple 'Slayer good, demons bad' rules of the early episodes and seasons. The finale of the TV series showed Buffy simply blowing up the entire premise of the show -- the Slayer mythology itself -- and in the process giving away her birthright...so as to become a whole person, without it. ('Cookies,' in the parlance of the series finale.) The story had come to a natural ending and exhausted itself.

Then the comic began. And suddenly Buffy was...a supporting character in her own book. The mythos came back in the clumsiest way imaginable: a plot as old as the universe, by which a Slayer/supervillain teamup was preordained so as to bring into existence a magicless world and...oh fuck it, it's still too stupid; the point is, the nature of the Slayer was trivialized instead of deepened by the 'Twilight' plot. The comic was burdened, in the end, by a lot of conspiratorial gobbledygook, which wasn't enough to hide the fact that the story -- the characters, their development, the play of actual human desire -- had been lost.

I have no idea whether 'Season 9' will be any good. But it's clear from the first couple of issues that one of Whedon's key storytelling ingredients -- a dead-simple premise which ramifies and signifies in an ever-expanding assortment of (usually painful) ways -- is still missing, or deeply buried in plot mess. 'Magic has left the world' just doesn't feel personal; the 'Twilight' thing still doesn't make sense to me; Spike flying around with a spaceship full of bugs feels like a bad joke; the Xander/Dawn pairing isn't desperately necessary (it's just...limp). It's all business.

That's a sign of a faltering story: business. (For a show consisting entirely, solely of business, see Lost or the laster seasons of Galactica -- two promising shows that crawled right up their own respective assholes double quick.)

* * *

Or maybe the problem is I just don't care about comics anymore. 20 pages a month? Are you kidding me? Give me Dave Sim or BKV or even 100 Bullets, but it's just not working for Buffy. Or rather, for me. I'm the problem.

Social media and the danger of dramatic adequacy.

The trouble with social media - or rather, one key trouble among many - is that they encourage us to think about the lives of our ‘friends’ (online connections) as elements in our own private info-experience, our ‘stream’; and because we are steeped in the norms of melodrama and other entertainments, we therefore tend (naturally) to think of online lives as ‘dramatic.’ Indeed, we may even perceive them as dramatically adequate, i.e. a digital acquaintance’s troubles will filter through to us not as the emotionally overdetermined mundane that is mere physical life, but as a structured consciousness-manipulation like, say, a TV show.

It makes sense that we would misunderstand our social connections this way. We already apply the logic of dramatic viewership to politics, criminal justice, sports, war, mourning, aging, all of human history…

The difference between, say, the real world and MTV’s The Real World (and its descendants, from Jersey Shore to Nancy Grace) always was and is simply this: life is always continuation, disappointment, deferral, mere action. Life is not significant - drama is a redaction and manipulation of life in which events are depicted precisely and solely because of their meaning, the lessons they impart. (All drama is at some level didactic, necessarily and neutrally so.) What happens in our world just…happens. We interpret it, to be sure, we narrativize and dramatize it for ourselves and for one another, but most of us aren’t stupid or deluded enough to think that day-to-day life is staged for the purpose of revealing significance.

Except that I’m wrong - most human beings are just that deluded. (The delusion is called ‘religion.’)

Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk are dangerous to the social fabric in the same way so-called ‘reality television’ is - indeed, the same way horserace news coverage of (partisan) politics is dangerous to the body politic. These forms encourage us, in subtle ways and otherwise, to imagine our lives as fitting a dramatic structure. It’s obvious how, say, FOX/MSNBC politicking does so, but Facebook is just as much a theatre, a representational matrix, a set of sharp constraints on its hundreds of millions of users’ communicative input and output.

If you’ve ever seen an online argument (in a blog comments thread, say) blow up quickly and suddenly into a ‘flame war,’ you can understand the dangers of anonymity and the nonexistence of ‘empathy at a distance.’ But the problem extends to ‘social media’ networks as well. When interpersonal interactions occur in a form/forum that blocks empathy - when the events of a ‘friend’s’ life come to you in the form of a typo-ridden public news ticker rather than as a social occasion, simply cutting off the biological feedback loop by which humans regulate one another’s emotions[1] and integrate unspeakable or unimaginable experience - we are denied the chance to utilize our incredibly rich emotional sensorium and processing power, our unique mammalian ability to take part in the mechanism of regulation and communication called love.

Social networks don’t transmit love - only infatuation. We relate to our online ‘friends’ the way we relate TV characters, via dramatic mediation.

If you’ve ever talked about ‘other people’s dramas,’ you’ve done what almost every human being does without even thinking about it: you’ve reduced another person’s complex lived experience to the status of narrative for your benefit. Social networks contribute to the misconception that the important thing about the events of our lives is what they mean (to us), rather than the mere fact that they have occurred.

This misconception, this lie, is one of the root causes of human unhappiness. So what.

---

1. 
   See the extraordinary book A General Theory of Love for a moving and accessible treatment of the ‘limbic system’ and the neurobiology of love.  ↩
   

Liz Lemon is a frumpy character played by an attractive (to you?) actress. There! How hard was that?

Because Sady Doyle's essay about class and the 'We Are the 99%' movement her anxieties about her upbringing has been making the rounds, I was thinking about (and then reread) her '13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon' piece, which in addition to having a title that signifies to the Educated Reader exactly what intellectual circle the Educated R. is about to enter, is a decent bit of media/cultural criticism wrapped around a gigantic, embarrassing-if-the-universe-were-actually-just, Media Studies 101-level misunderstanding.

The title of this post should clear everything up for the interested reader. Just as Dustin Hoffman is neither autistic nor a cross-dresser nor a dental torture victim, just as Sarah Michelle Gellar has slain precious few vampires in her life, just as Geoffrey Rush is not a classical pianist (nor a pirate!), just as Brad Pitt is not a daft environmental terrorist, Tina Fey is not a frumpy comedy writer! LIZ LEMON IS NOT TINA FEY, she is a fictional character, and TINA FEY PLAYS HER ON TELEVISION.

Which is to say, Doyle's anxiety about Tina Fey's character/creation, Liz Lemon, wouldn't just disappear if she stopped eliding this difference, but then at least she (Doyle) would be able to other, perhaps more abstract but at least less dodgy matters, like this:

WHEN a comedic type (e.g. the Liz Lemon type) evolves at a different rate or in a different direction from the prevailing cultural winds, the audience's relationships to that type will undergo transformation under tension; afterward the type can still serve its purpose, illuminating relationships and releasing anxiety, but maybe our responsibilities change too. THEREFORE it's reasonable - important - to ask what work the Liz Lemon character, with her roots in 1960s stories about women entering the workforce (e.g. The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and earlier status/degradation texts like I Love Lucy, is doing in our culture right now, and MOST IMPORTANTLY I THINK find ways to revel in the great pleasures of these women's comedic work while keeping a sharp eye out, not for transgression and that-over-which-we-are-obligated-politically-to-become-persnickety, but for the next incredible thing. WHICH IS PERHAPS the long way 'round to saying, Pissing on your competitor for cultural oxygen doesn't further your cause. The culture wars aren't actually wars; you don't win by shooting the other guy.

Key difference between Deadwood and McCabe and Mrs Miller; i.e. between real liberalism and (ironic-)conservatism.

In McCabe, the building and growth of the town serves as counterpoint to the main action, which is the private struggle of the title characters. The two stories parallel and illuminate one another, but the town - the church - is always a symbol in the background of the film. The story comes down to two characters, and the town is an element in that story.

On Deadwood, the characters start out trying to escape this or that, as McCabe does in the film, but their story is the story of the town itself, and vice versa; the social fabric is foregrounded at all times. Swearengen, the most complex character on the show, is also the central element of the town of Deadwood itself, the greater community body - yet he willfully subsumes himself in that body in the second and third seasons. Every character who thrives on Deadwood does so by entering into the fellowship that is the town. Writer David Milch makes no distinction between the stories of the characters and the story of Deadwood itself.

In this regard, Deadwood is the more radical political/moral text: where McCabe ironizes and subverts the tropes of the film western (disreputable outsider comes to frontier town to seek fortune, battles Big Money Back East), Deadwood rejects the film western's premises outright; this rejection is symbolically enacted with the murder of Wild Bill Hickock in the show's fourth episode. He isn't the West, he's the 'western,' the media fantasy of the lone gunslinger, and he dies alone as he must.

Or more neatly: Swearengen on Deadwood also faces mercenaries from Back East, like McCabe himself does; but on Deadwood they're just a subplot, a minor thread in a narrative building not to his own transcendence or apotheosis but to the town's legal incorporation. He submits to a greater will; the town enters into a greater, more robust (but much less comfortable) order; the buildings going up all around him aren't symbols. They're buildings.

This difference stems from the TV/film difference in no small part. But it's also a matter of political focus. Deadwood both valorizes entrepreneurs and demonizes Big Business, yet its social ethos is all about the collective, the self-organizing workers, the orderly transition to civilization. Not only does Milch dismiss the libertarian fantasy of the West and its affiliated political pseudophilosophy, he rejects the fundamental premise underlying it (the sublime value and meaning of the Individual).

Or more briefly: Altman offers a melancholy vision of the Little Guy trying to get by and dying at the hands of Big Business, but Milch gives us a continuum between the two, and locates his key moral conflict elsewhere (the illusion of separateness versus holy union in the community body).

Or even more briefly: McCabe is a movie about a pimp and a whore, set in a lifelike western town. Deadwood is a show about God a town.

Fox News watching. Ugh.

Watching Fox News - Chris Wallace's Sunday roundtable with Brit Hume, Bill Kristol, Juan something, and someone I don't know - and the weirdest thing about it is the absolute disjunction between, on one hand, actual analysis (Boehner and Obama both need to satisfy several constituencies with disparate aims, most Americans want the debt ceiling raised now, the GOP caucus is sharply divided over tax cuts in particular, etc.), and on the other hand pure partisan talking-points nonsense ('the Democrats haven't put forth a plan,' etc.). Everyone who's appeared on Fox News this weekend has mouthed lines about how Obama has put nothing at all forward - the only person to use the word 'intransigent' actually applied it to SEIU, AFL-CIO, and AARP! It's like being in a screwed up alternate universe where no one actually knows anything about the underlying economic questions. Or, no...it's like a televised segment in our universe, in which that actually happens to be true. Damn. The only breath of fresh air today was Tim Geithner's hard-nosed performance on Wallace's show, in which he maintained exactly the right tone of professionalism - spiked with richly-deserved contempt for Wallace's ignorant parroting of talking points. Stark contrast with the babble from the other talking heads. Though you have to respect the nepotism-hire Bill Kristol, in a way, for his absolute cynicism: he really did have the audacity to describe the negotiations as 'laying the groundwork for electing [a Republican] president in 2012...' What a pathetic wretch that man is.

Norm MacDonald kills on Conan with a story about a moth.

Battlestar Galactica remake on DVD, $77 today only.

Get it if you like. I can't recommend it.

Galactica devolved over the course of four seasons from tightly wound, conceptually freighted, socially-minded military SF to half-baked religious fantasy; as the writers' conceptions of the characters grew more involuted and eventually self-devouring, the actors were given 'more to do' but found less and less humanity in the process. Moreover, the writers' ability to make the show up as they went along wasn't consistently maintained for the full series run; showrunner Ron Moore's episode commentaries can't quite cover up the desperation of the show's later plot gestures. The early part of Season Three, a feverish Iraq-plus-some-other-stuff allegory, was Galactica's peak; after that the descent into half-baked pseudotheology was too rapid even for me.

The best of Galactica was good indeed, and as 'pure TV' - audiovisual spectacle and melodrama - it's some of the best in the medium's recent history. Certainly it set a highwater mark for the production of spacegoing SF on TV. But the show's imaginative poverty is maddening in retrospect; it's no longer easy to overlook the self-referentiality that so often substitutes for TV psychology, the lurid pseudocharacterization, the plot 'twists' plucked out of absolutely nowhere.

Galactica's main problem is the incoherent 'mytharc' and Cylon religion, which Ron Moore chose to make the sole focus of the series in its late run; its strength as a combat-heavy tale of fleeing an implacable robot enemy was entirely dissipated by the domestication (and schizophrenic treatment) of the Cylons. As on Carnivale and like Lindelof/Cuse on Lost, Moore evidently became convinced that enigma was a dramatic end unto itself, which would be forgivable if he hadn't doggedly insisted from the show's first moments that 'the Cylons...have a plan.'

They didn't have a plan - they had an attitude. Unfortunately the same is true of the writers.

The final episode of Galactica is one of the most contemptuous and solipsistic pieces of 'science fiction' I've ever seen or read. After the operatic ridiculousness of the Season Three finale I had high hopes for Season Four, but after just a handful of episodes it seemed that the inertial illogic of moneymaking serial TV had overpowered critical thought or insight; the last episode makes it clear that the buffoonish religious/historical allegory couldn't be blamed on anyone but Moore himself. The series began near-perfectly in one of TV's first believable spacegoing worlds; it ends somewhere up Ron Moore's ass. What a disappointment.

Actually it has a lot in common with the finale of Lost. (That's a bidirectional insult, in case you're wondering.)

Well, it's there if you want it. I could almost be convinced to watch the show again, even knowing what a pathetic (handsomely-produced, intensely-acted) shambles it eventually became; that's how much fun the good parts were. But there's too much good stuff out there. To hell with it. Buy The Wire instead.

Christianity is not a mythology of Christ.

[I seem to have written this poorly. The point of the following is just that the details of God's 'character', His true 'nature,' are not important; what's important are the lives that people lead in His service. That's what I mean by a 'human mythology.' Christianity is a mythology for human beings to live inside, not a set of stories about superheroes. This is not an attack on the myth of a deity - there are plenty of those already.]

The 'character' of Yahweh is theologically and practically irrelevant. It's an interesting literary question (He is, after all, a literary creation!) but to occupy yourself with the 'true nature' of the Biblical God is to misunderstand its purpose. 'God' is to Christianity as vampires are to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: an inconsistently articulated metaphysical/metaphorical premise for a human mythology. The details can vary from week to week so long as emotional continuity and integrity are preserved. (Hence the meaninglessness of Biblical dietary prescriptions and sodomy laws.)

The story of Christ isn't a biography, it's an allegory - after all he didn't 'raise the dead,' nor did he 'turn water into wine.' As Jesus and early Christians reread Jewish myth/history as allegory, so the various Christian cults/churches reread Jesus as allegory.

One of the main characters on Buffy was given multiple birthdates; they don't conflict in any dramatically meaningful sense, so what difference does it make?

The only people who care about that stuff are fans; they are a blight on the body which would give itself over otherwise to ecstasy.

Rolling Stone's brilliant, authoritative look at Fox News's daily 'news' schtick.

For everyone but the delusional and the cynical, the debate over whether Fox News provides 'news' (never mind 'unbiased' news) ended years ago. Here's why. Brilliant presentation here.

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009): First response.

I shall refer to the titular fellow as ARRR here, to avoid the Roberts/Adam question. Alternate, much better title for this post, which almost renders the following exercise pointless (not that the following exercise needs the help):

Adam Roberts's From Outer Space!

Rich Puchalsky sez of ARRR's work:

His novels seem to me to be characterized by a high degree of formal structure coupled with underdetermination of what that structure means.

Paul Kincaid sez, in the post that inspired Rich's post:

A novel can turn entirely inward into the world of its story, but satire must look outwards, must relate to something beyond the fiction. This need not be satire in our modern sense of biting attack, nevertheless, we do need to consider what is being satirized [in New Model Army]. I realized that it was the same thing that is being satirized in Swiftly and Yellow Blue Tibia, though it is more overt in those books: Roberts is satirizing science fiction.

I don't hold any particular brief for experimental/formalist fiction, and am not a 'science-fiction fan' by any stretch. Hmm. What's more, Yellow Blue Tibia is at one level a sly consideration of bisociation, about which subject I have highly informal but overdetermined opinions. ARRRRR's particular brand of bone-dry conceptualism makes me uneasy 'on the page' as it were (I'm a 'rapturous overflow' kinda guy in my literary preferences). And unfortunately someone told me YBT was...a love story, grrr...which led me to pay close attention to one of its least compelling components (from my perspective).

In other words, while I wasn't prepared to dislike this book, I was unprepared to like it, if that makes sense.

But!

I did like it - quite a lot. Well, that's the easy part. I can even give a first-order approximation of Why: it's funny (uproariously so in places); its good-humoured absurdism has a darkling tinge; its intertextuality serves a purpose beyond authorial dickwavery; ARRRR's alleged total disregard for worldbuilding niceties is rendered more or less irrelevant by the book's heady abstraction, unless you're well-versed in Russian/Soviet culture, in which case I imagine he's sorry, or not sorry, or some third thing; and for 95% of its running time, Yellow Blue Tibia possesses the rare and wonderful quality of rigorous, playful ambivalence - not just ambiguity but actual multiplicity of meaning, huzzah.

Must we quibble about the other 5%, known as 'the final chapter of the book?' Let's quibble about that 5% later then.

In any case, I can sorta say why I liked it. There you go. I can even articulate some complaints about it - over ARRR's characterization of Dora the Love Interest, the somewhat hyperextended Aspergers/OCD material, or the resolution/revelation, which seems somewhat epistemologically or in any case affectively out of tune with the rest of the book-as-I-read-it (i.e. the explanation opens up quantum-as-basically-magic timestreams within the novel even while closing down, with a resounding *thump* at the reader/novel interface, all the explanation-streams woven about the novel itself, i.e. after 300+ pages of marvelous funny/weird epistemology games, ARRRRRR has to declare the Fun Over, i.e. this is one place where I kinda wish I hadn't watched 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space' before writing this review on account of that show's extraordinary interpretive catholicism). That, too, seems important: to bitch about things. That's one of the things I do.

But I'm nervous about taking a swing at the book's 'meaning,' though I've got some notions, because (1) I'm out of practice at literary-A-means-B and (2) half my brain is anyway telling the other half: 'Hey, that ambivalence you're feeling might actually be the point, or the pleasure, or perhaps the locus of your pleasure, so calm down for Christ's sake.' But maybe that hemibrain is just covering for its embarrassment over (let's number things again, why not) (1) picking up right away on an 'A or B, no third thing' resonance with the book's (after all) USSR/dialectic subject matter, yet (2) feeling uncertain as to the didactic/argumentative point of such a resonance, or whether there even is one, or (one abstraction layer higher) whether there even should be. When the feeling of LOLing/head scratching partly at self/some other third cognitive thing was - after all - quite nice.

(to be continued)

Bossypants (Tina Fey, 2011).

Everyone like me seems to have a crush on Tina Fey, but I don't. I get why they do, she's swell, but I don't share the feeling. I think reading Bossypants has helped me figure out why:

1) I never saw her on Weekend Update, which was apparently a Thing for male writer-nerds.

2) Her style of comedy mixes this slight didacticism that's so constant, and pitched just above comfortable frequency levels, that you want to say it's semi- or unconscious...but how could anything about this serious craftsman's craft be semi- or un- at this point? Her ironies are just a little more defensive and uncomfortable-with-self than I'm used to. That makes for nervy comedy (though 30 Rock is hit-and-miss, at best, in its topical seriousness) but over a couple hundred print pages it starts to sit badly. With me, I mean. Probably lots of people will eat this book up. I liked it. I liked reading it. I like Tina Fey well enough. I like her the way I liked the girls with good grades when I was in sixth grade and had the best grades, or thought I deserved to have the best grades because I was smartest (I'd heard) but I didn't work as hard as the girls, so they'd get 98's and I'd either get 100's or (when I didn't care) 88's. I like Tina Fey in a resentful way, or resent her affectionately; she makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. Either way I don't have a crush. I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

Oh look at me I had an idea:

Some people break rules because they want you to notice the rules. Some people do it because they want you to notice them. I think maybe I'm not sure what kind of person Tina Fey is, but the idea I have is that I want to think she's the same as me, and she's the kind of person I think I am, but I'm not actually that guy, I'm the other guy, and my jittery handwavy self-consciousness is that other kind, the kind that if I ever admit to myself that's my thing I'll look in the mirror and just be like, 'You asshole!'

On the other hand maybe you do the right thing thinking you've got the right reason but you've got the 'wrong' one, but by acknowledging it it becomes right, in a way? See? And this sanitizes you and makes you OK for the world, and you go about your day making the world a touch more OK. On the other other hand, Tina Fey says that Lorne Michaels says that The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30. So then would I ever have had the whole self-accusatory moment in the mirror if I hadn't been checking to see whether I was Ready for My Closeup or whatever?

* * *

It's a library checkout, not a buy. So there you go.

Does making a fool of yourself count as making something of yourself? Hi?

I was gonna make fun of Adam Kotsko but...

...no one cares, so.

(The Office UK is about generational disconnection and missing out on cultural liberalization; the American Office is about dealing with a (surrogate) parent's arrested emotional development; Curb Your Enthusiasm is about a nouveau riche with Asperger's. Let's not get carried away here!)

One of the proudest moments of my young, nonnegligibly proud life...

...is recognizing the name of the author of Passport to Magonia among the characters in the X-Files(!) episode 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space,' which - believe me this is not an easy confession to make - is one of the most interesting episodes of TV I've ever laid eyes on. Yes! PROUD! Do you know what that book is about? I bet the Internet can tell you. MY HEAD IS A JUNIOR BRAIN INTERNET STORAGE CAPSULE HEAD!

I thought I didn't like this show.

The 'American dream.'

In answer to the Good Doc's comment:

* * *

If the question is, "Can't this country be better than it is?" I think the answer is yes; but when I compare this nation to what I have seen in Asia, the subcontinent, India, Africa, and throughout Europe, including what was "behind the iron Curtain" when I travelled those countries, then I think what we have had in the United States ... I think you and I are sitting in the most free nation on this Earth. [If we are not, why do all those immigrants from so many nations, and those who are illegal border jumpers keep wanting to come here?]

I don't think the malign inhumanity of our ruling class (and the corporate infrastructure that serves them, e.g. by our news media's near-exclusive support for monied interests) is incompatible with a benignly neglectful 'American goodness.' Indeed, I'd say the 'greatest country on earth' nonsense is just one angle on a kind of A>B>C>A cycle of preference: the U.S. is healthier than Britain, which is healthier than Denmark, which is healthier than the U.S. (Fill in whatever countries you like, there.) The point of the post is that some things are better here than elsewhere, after all, despite the manifest injustice of our arrayed social forces.

Among 'first world' countries we (uniquely, embarrassingly) have: an unbelievably high incarceration rate, a 'free' press that produces totally ignorant citizens, a lamentable public education system, an insane health care system/philosophy (holistic/preventive health is a dirty word in this poisonous country), and an addiction to 'sanitized' violence that manifests everywhere from the TV to our military sojourns in the Middle East.

Many Americans could not care less about these things, because they have 'other things to worry about.'

At the same time, there's a chaotic instability to month-to-month American life that many people find refreshing. In the right light it resembles opportunity. Day to day, things are complicated. On one hand, you're not likely to be locked up for having the wrong political opinions in this country; on the other hand, you have absolutely no say in the decision - on the part of the Congress, the Courts, and the Executive - to, say, erect a completely lunatic health care edifice, or commit to a decade of war in some distant sandstruck hell (or lush jungle). The U.S. government won't lock up 10,000 pro-democracy protesters like the Syrian bastards have lately done, but that's because the U.S. government simply ignores pro-democracy protesters entirely.

* * *

Have you seen The Wire? You simply must; it's better than all but, say, three or four dramas in the history of American television. One of its grand tacit arguments is that the 'American system' is essentially disconnected from American community - not just in a 'go federalism' anti-statist way, but even down to the mayoralty-hates-the-local-poor level. The opening scene of the show has a cop talking to a kid about his friend Snot Boogie, who's lying dead on the street, a casualty of the drug war. Snot Boogie used to come and steal the pot at the local craps game. Every damn time. The kids knew he'd do it, but they always let him sit in. The cop asks why the kids kept letting Snot Boogie run roughshod over them like this.

'Got to, man,' the kid says to the cop. 'This is America.'

The dead boy grows colder.

It's a nice allegory, I think, of the contradictions and ironies that crosshatch the 'American Dream.' The 'freedom' that the boys enjoy is all their own; the cop and the kid can chat amiably, if warily, on a stoop at night; various underground economies (drugs, gambling, street-level influence) operate unsupervised; the boy knows that Snot Boogie's fate will probably be his own, someday, and that the cop will be a part of that fate. The dead boy was permitted, welcomed, and his thievery was simply part of the fabric of their daily life; the kid has an idea about what 'America' is, what it represents, but as a poor black teenager in the inner city he knows - and the cop knows he knows - that he will never, ever, ever be welcomed into the corridors of power. The police are all over the scene, of course, working hard, doing their damnedest; they won't find the killer and they'll never stop fighting the murderous 'drug war' that did him in.

Everyone is welcome to play the game and everyone loses in the end. The ones who win, who take, don't have to play at all: they're the ones running the game. They're the 'sheltering hand.'

We're kept in the dark, and say thank you for the chance to rest in the shade.

I don't feel cynicism about this country. I feel anger.

Russell Brand.

There's never anything like this on American television. Enjoy.

One of our greatest fantasists and one of OUR WORST EVERYTHINGS.

John Crowley, grandmaster.
Wolf Blitzer, useful idiot.

WHICH, BY GOD, IS WHICH?!

Is Arrested Development actually funny? If so, what's funny about it?

[Spoilers follow.]

From the Wikipedia entry for 'Afternoon Delight' (2x06):

Buster sees a plush seal in the skill crane, wearing a shirt that says "Good Luck". Buster then points to the seal and says, "That could be good for Army," implying that a seal with clothing will help him get out of the army, something that later happens in "Hand to God". The Narrator later says that Buster had "gotten hooked playing the skill crane," placing particular emphasis on the word "hooked", all the while the camera is zoomed in on Buster's hand that is operating the claw. The hand he's using is his left hand, which is the one he loses and for which he gets a prosthetic hook.

'Out on a Limb' (2x11):

Buster is on his way to the Army when he decides to finally go swimming in the ocean, where a loose seal bites off his hand, after he misinterprets a warning from a coastguard about a "loose seal" with a response about his not caring about Lucille.

'Hand to God' (2x12):

The next day, Buster returns from the hospital, fitted with a metal hook prosthetic, to find the family gathered in Lucille's penthouse under a banner which reads "Welcome Home, Buster!" (the "You're killing me, Buster" banner strategically covered up). Buster says, "Let's give me a big hand!" and everyone forces awkward laughter. Gob arrives at the party ignorant of Buster's accident, and is scared by Buster's hook. When Buster says his hand was bitten off by a seal wearing a yellow bow-tie, Tobias attributes that statement to the "playful mutterings of the shock victim" because a seal would never attack a human. "Unless, of course, it had acquired a taste for mammal blood." Flashback to Gob performing a magic show with a seal wearing a yellow bow-tie, when a cat jumps into the chest where the seal is hidden. Cut to another flashback in which Gob releases the seal into the ocean saying, "You're not going to be hand-fed anymore.

Of course, how in the world would you catch the foreshadowing on TV? You gotta ask: why are they dropping cryptic references to the 'loose seal' accident five episodes in advance?

Well. Because they can.

None of this loose seal/Lucille/claw/limb/hand stuff is actually funny the way, say, Tobias's analyst/therapist business card is. But it's a big part of the attraction of Arrested Development. The casting of Scott Baio as Henry Winkler's replacement (on a show produced by Ron Howard) has the same sort of intellectual appeal: there's a nerdy audacity to the writers building these levels of metatextual and self-referential humour into the show, and catching references is one of TV fans' main pastimes in this data-driven (rather than knowledge-driven) consumption age.

What made Arrested Development a great show, rather than an 'interesting' one, is that for all its allusiveness and dense self-reference (some might say self-regard?), it was a strong example of a classically-structured sitcom as well. The characters were set up as sitcom types, and the elders' performances - in the roles of George, Oscar, Lucille, Lucille II, Stan Sitwell, Barry Zuckerkorn, etc. - were in a familiar sitcom style, however beautifully performed. (Jeffrey Tambor, in particular, brought a startling humanity and pathos to his work as George/Oscar, quickly outgrowing the broad material he was given in the early series.)

The point here is only that Arrested Development, like Seinfeld and The Simpsons, was a well-executed example of a familiar comedy type as well as a formal advance for the sitcom. Seinfeld's circular plotting and moral chilliness, The Simpsons's visual density and deep self-referentiality, and Arrested Development's pomo involution and formal ingenuity would all be forgotten were it not for their familiar comic modes - Lampoon-style WASP magazine-minicomedy in the cartoon's case, Borscht Belt stage theatrics for the thoroughly Jewish live-action shows. Arrested Development is the end of a developmental line that includes both the two earlier sitcoms and (crucially) The X-Files (which was both a self-referential funhouse and a bit of a genre catalogue) - but also a healthy dose of The Golden Girls.

In other words, your grandparents couldn't have loved Arrested Development the way you do, ya hip 21st-century white kid - too much rides on form and style - but the jokes themselves are old, old, old.

Buffy sale; four common criticisms addressed.

The full seven-season run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on DVD for $69.99 today at Amazon; if you haven't already seen the show, you should not hesitate to buy it. Usually when I mention these things I carry on about how great the show is, why it was important, that kind of thing. Well, those things apply here; it really is one of the great TV shows. But there's a whole shelf of books (not to mention a crazed fan community and large pack of TV-critic boosters) that'll tell you all about it.

I'll just address four common criticisms of the show and be done with it.

Monsters are stupid. You might say, no one knows this better than Joss Whedon. Or you might say: monster movies and TV might be stupid, but monsters - which is to say anxieties - definitely are not.

BtVS started out as a show about a demon-hunting teenager, but that subject was always meant primarily as an allegory - (initially) for kids 'wrestling with their demons' and so forth. My college mentor asked, annoyed, why the show wasn't satisfied being a sharply-observed domestic drama; I'd now answer that BtVS's emotional spectrum wouldn't be as vast and various, its intensities so unpredictable and complex, without some kind of genre-based magnification going on in any case.

BtVS is a horror-comedy that always chooses emotional seriousness over thrills'n'chills, though it does provide those in mixed measure. The show get darker as it went along, but it stayed funny - hysterically funny much of the time. (For a while it might've been the best comedy on network TV.) But Whedon and his writers usually found a way to treat their onscreen horrors both ironically, knowingly - as their audience no doubt would - and empathetically, by taking the characters' fears totally seriously. The show is all about (overcoming) private terrors: possession by hyena spirits models an obsession with 'fitting in'; Jekyll/Hyde's girlfriend ('I bring it out of him') metaphorizes a kind of battered-wife syndrome; 'He's changed. He's not the same guy you fell for' is made hauntingly literal; mom's waaaaay too-perfect boyfriend wants something from her that maybe it isn't the daughter's place to comment on; the girl who's tired of being 'Old Reliable' ('Old Faithful'? 'Old Yeller'?) accidentally warps her vampire self in from an alternate dimension and everyone gets to see what things are like with the new unreliable girl around; etc., etc., etc.

The demons/vampires/ghosts metaphors grant the writers an evocative, familiar shorthand with which to explore the emotional crises of high school. They're good fun in their own right, usually, but they're often hoary or played ironically. Here's the promise: if you give yourself to the characters, the show will always, without exception, play straight with you.

Few shows have had Buffy's emotional integrity.

It's a kids' show. This is simply incorrect - or rather incomplete. First, subject matter: It's not actually about kids, not even kids-in-adult-bodies. Season One is about high school sophomores, and really does feel like a very chaste teen horror-comedy. S2 explores the erotic side of its central metaphors; it's a gothic romance and very much set the template for several successor shows. S3 takes the admirable, unusual step of working its way back from the apocalyptic climax of S2, and its tone of weary resignation is in some ways its most 'grownup' feature. S4, set at U.C. Sunnydale, explicitly recalls the show's opening - the gang are freshmen now! - but the unmistakeable message is that you can't go back. One suspects that Joss Whedon had to learn that lesson himself, to an extent.

Seasons 5-7 are explicitly adult in tone and content, with the main characters moving to caretaker roles in a much-expanded narrative universe.

As for its treatment of its material:

In the second half of the series premiere, Buffy gets grounded - she's forbidden from going out and partying (she'd actually planned on fighting vampires and such). Her mom ignores her complaints: 'I know. You have to go out or it'll be the end of the world. Everything is life or death when you're a sixteen year old girl.' From the script:

Joyce leaves, closing the door quietly but firmly behind her. After a moment, Buffy reaches into the truck.

ANGLE: IN THE TRUNK

Girl stuff, memorabilia, Teen Beat magazines.

Buffy reaches in and lifts out the inside -- the trunk has a false bottom. Below it stakes, crosses, host, garlic, and a widemouthed jar of holy water.

Buffy takes out a particularly deadly looking stake. It fits in her hand like it's part of it. She stuffs it into a bag, along with a few other items.

She stands, goes to the door. Listens by it.

She gets to the window, opens it. Starts crawling out.

Joyce's line seems like a knowing wink at the audience, and the image of the trunk's hidden contents as as on-the-nose as metaphors get. But this is the key to understanding Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon: both moments are meant both ironically and in total seriousness. You're supposed to laugh and die of a broken heart. In other words, even though we recognize that it's ridiculous that being a teenager feels this way...being a teenager does feel this way. And Whedon never, ever laughs at his characters' pain, only through it.

It's cheesy. Really? Does that sound cheesy to you?

It's a low-budget horror-comedy TV show on a fledgling network. There's plenty of hammy acting and tacky monster makeup, and the vampire-fang prosthetics make the actors lisp, and it's hard to play vampires straight these days.

But while the show makes light of its own cheesiness all the time, this winking and nudging never comes at the expense of the characters' inner continuity. Do you realize how goddamn rare that is? (I'm not only looking at you, Lost fans, but I am indeed looking at you...)

Season One is rubbish. It's inconsistent and has the show's only terrible episodes, but the material is stronger than detractors claim. Strong episodes: 1-2, 6 ('The Pack')(!!!!), 9-12. 'Nightmares' and 'Prophecy Girl,' in particular, suggest the operatic intensity and thematic complexity of later seasons, and the way Season Two leaps off from 'Prophecy Girl' is a clear indication of how much Whedon's understanding of the show had deepened over time. Season Two moves the show decisively forward toward late-adolescence and adulthood.

Plus Season One is short.

* * *

Go buy it. I'm serious. In a world containing The Wire and Deadwood it's weird to say that Buffy is one of the best TV shows yet made, but it is. At worst it was diverting, unusually honest teen-horror-dramedy. At its best, nobody could touch it.

Buy my Angel DVDs! Please!

We're selling (on eBay) our complete set of Angel DVDs - 30 discs, Region 1, spread over five boxes. Want them? Please go buy! You'll have a hard time matching that price, trust me.

[Update: SOLD! My heavens, the always-on Internet does make some things easier, dunnit?]

Kramerica.

Who suffers? The survivors. Well: and the rape and murder victims too, I suppose.

[Spoilers follow. If you haven't read Meltzer's Identity Crisis, you may as well just do that instead. That said, after the asterisks you'll find a paragraph or two on Theory of Fictional Chracterization (and Deadwood) which might - might!! - be interesting.]

I just reread Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer's controversial DC comics miniseries from a few years back. Y'know, the one with the ringing endorsement from Joss Whedon(!), who I guess was able to look past the unbearably tawdry solution to the central mystery to see the beauty of the overall design. The structure of Identity Crisis really is a thing of wonder: the sentimental family-of-superheroes material prompts a vastly more interesting examination of the working relationships between the heroes themselves. It's easy to see why it's so highly-regarded.

Easy, too, to see what some folks despise the series.

It's the women, of course. The series's treatment of women and sex is bothersome, but (for better or worse) it's just too tiring, at this point, to care about the childish sexuality of superhero comics. Still, I can't shake the sense that a cold misogynist streak runs through the whole series. The final issue's Big Reveal is an affront to the audience's intelligence and maturity, and Meltzer completely botches the characterization of the key antagonist. (Must Jean be a robotically self-assured lawyer who goes completely to pieces when she gets a shot at sleeping with her ex-husband? Why not make her a castrating dyke and round out the whole Tour de Cliché?) Moreover, the story's hidden turning point is the 'onscreen' rape of Sue Dibny, which contains the most dialogue Sue has in the whole story. For a series ostensibly about the lives of heroes' families, 'those left behind' and all that, it's shocking how shallowly those folks are characterized here.

Yet Meltzer does spend some time on the inner lives of two supporting characters - saccharine depictions of middle-aged fathers yearning for emotional intimacy with their young sons. Bad as the castrating-lawyer-who-craves-cock cliché is, at least Jean gets to show off a little bit of spine; these dads are around to make adolescent male comic book readers mushy about their own freighted paternal relationships. Period.

And of course the real betrayal in the series - the knife in the comics reader's heart - isn't Jean's killing spree. She's just the silly bitch who won't move on, and her fate is 'appropriately' cruel. Nah. The kicker is: in a story that masquerades (ahem) as a cost-of-secret-identities tale and hinges on a rape and the rapist's awful and arguably out-of-measure punishment, the only living rape victim at story's end is Batman himself, whose memories have been tampered with by the other JLA members. Ultimately it's the 'heroes' who go on bearing the cost of all those dead supporting characters (enumerated in a couple of unironic montages, where you can practically hear the violin music in the background). The deep-down limitation of nearly every superhero comic - the escapist fantasy of invincibility, of power and license and (often literal) weightlessness - can't actually be permanently undermined, not even in a much-hyped marquee miniseries.

* * *

It seems to me that one difference between complex and complicated characterization is this: complexity is all about AND, complication never goes beyond BUT. Complex characters are fully human even in their seeming contradictions, while simpler characters appear - at certain angles - to be nothing more than symbol-sets, machines for bringing contradictory features into collision. Superman is an alien god BUT he's also a patriotic American man; Night Owl is an impotent nebbish AND he's most truly alive (sexually and otherwise) when he's beating up crooks.

See the difference? If you're interested in the mere idea that contradictory impulses can exist in one human, you're hunting small game, morally/narratively speaking. The real stuff happens when you accept that of course all our impulses come from the same shared set of experiences/predilections/behaviour patterns, and then start testing not the individual traits but the whole organic mixture against circumstances. Superman is a bit of a boring character because his 'multidimensionality' manifests as unexpected shadings of a basic idea (the Man of Steel, a force of pure good from outta the prairie). Batman is more interesting but not substantially more complex - just darker. He's built on one idea (principled vengeance in a bat suit), then his audience is treated to unexpected variations on that idea. (He's sentimental about his orphaned ward! He's in love with a cat burglar!) Superhero comics have a hard time escaping that mode of characterization.

Compare those four-colour icons to, say, Al Swearengen - a character who brings his whole expansive personality to bear on everything he does. It's not that he possesses some number of discrete 'character features,' some of them flaws and some virtues; that's comic book thinking. Rather, Swearengen acts at all times out of a set of impulses that have over time unified into something like a coherent whole. When he leaps to assist Alma, we're not meant to focus on the surprising gesture itself, but rather to understand that Swearengen's hatred of Hearst and his protective (possessive) attitude toward the town all spring from a violent personal model of what family can be. His actions in that episode are touching, but he's clearly ambivalent about his role, and Milch doesn't need to give us any heroic 'resolution' of that ambivalence. The demands of dramatic storytelling (particularly the need for a big punchy ending) are kept from intruding too much on the mere humanity of the man.

He slits Jen's throat, after all, and feels bad - but feeling bad isn't enough to stop it happening. And while his actions reveal a weird possessive love for Trixie, that love isn't the 'solution' to the lingering question of whether Trixie and Sol Star would be allowed to keep on with their own weird (and cynically inaugurated) love affair.

Complex stories don't 'resolve' just to satisfy the audience. They end, because that's what 'stories' do, but they always leave us with a greater, more expansive sense of our world - they raise questions and reveal larger-than-expected structures or deeper-than-imagined relationships. That's what they're for. Identity Crisis leaves the reader with a lingering question: What will Batman do? But it's only a plot question. What remains is ambiguity rather than ambivalence. That's true of the series as a whole. Its central moral conundrum, the bit about the brain-wiping, is compelling without being particularly weighty; Meltzer's choice is to show us tough-minded superheroes who, y'know, Just Carry Around Their Angst Because They're Superheroes. The JLA erased Batman's memories? Well, we should brood about it, because - unlike Al Swearengen - the characters in the JLA aren't expansive enough to incorporate that knowledge into more complex personalities.

That's as much a limitation of mainstream comics as anything else; you can't upset the apple cart and hope to keep sales numbers up. But it's still a shame. And it's a damn shame, too, to see that lamentable situation shackling a writer who can do what Meltzer's capable of. The best moments in Identity Crisis are stunning. They serve a story that ends up a lot like every other comic book superhero story these days: 'gritty,' melodramatic, shocking without being existentially threatening. Oh, and there's some 'post-9/11 morality' in there, whatever that means.

Well then. This is what happens when I wake up at 4:30 or so and spend all morning reading comics and writing nonsense. 'Yay,' I guess?

Junod whiffs one.

Tom Junod's new profile of Roger Ailes is utterly facile and embarrassing; by Junod's own admission it really does come down to 'He's a hemophiliac and That Why He Is The Way He Is.' I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's astonishing Harper's article, 'Host,' about a right-wing radio host - and the comparison is hugely unflattering to Junod. Wallace didn't simplify or dumb-down any of the material in that piece, which remains a definitive article-length treatment of talk radio. Junod goes for his usual bag of tricks (overblown stylistic flourishes, faux naivete, almost jokey framing language, endless repetition of less-than-interesting phrases, etc.) and comes up short; I'm reminded too that (like, say, American Beauty) his much better Mr Rogers profile rereads poorly despite destroying me the first time around. The flashy opening and provocative title promise at least some basic political discussion, but the article contains absolutely none at all; our ostensible compensation for that failing, Junod's 'psychology,' is Lost-level trauma-as-destiny bullshit. What a disappointment.

* * *

[Second thought: Tom Junod is the kind of man who does not use contractions. He does not do so because to do so would rob him of his authoritative seriousness. Tom Junod is fond of his authoritative seriousness. That his contractionless sentences contain little of meaning or substance is not relevant, because Tom Junod is not fond of meaning or substance. Y'know what I'm fucking talking about? That kind of stuff fills his articles. The weirdly stilted cadences of Serious Magazine Writers from Serious Magazines who, before they can just get on with telling the story, must first project Serious Magazine-ness. Compare to, say, Marc Singer over at the New Yorker, whose Ricky Jay and David Milch pieces show equal attention to voice/formal matters, but which are dense with implication, connection, context. Junod's Ailes piece contains absolutely no context. The DFW piece, 'Host,' is encyclopedic by comparison, despite moving (by comparison) like a rocketship.]

Cottage cheese again, Mr Assange?

I just realized where I'd recently seen the pathetic news-media-wide denigration and dismissal of Julian Assange: in the sudden backlash against David Simon during Season Five of The Wire, which 'notoriously' attacked the Baltimore Sun and similar newspapers for catastrophically failing refusing to cover the persecution of B'more's minority communities in the guise of the federal drug war.

Simon sensibly said, at the time, that we'd surely have heard the same carping from cops and teachers had they had access to 'ink by the barrelful,' but that he took the criticism in stride; after all, old-media journalism is the world he knows best. The Wire was the critics' darling until it savaged the critics, at which point it 'strained credulity' and 'descended into comedy' and the like.

Just thought of this while reading the nauseatingly condescending Vanity Fair piece on Assange and the Guardian:

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks disdain the notion that anything should come between the public and the vast universe of ostensible information you can evaluate for yourself, if only someone will let you. The ideal role of a journalistic outlet, in Assange’s view, is to be a passive conduit for reality, or at least for slivers of reality, with as little intervention as possible—no editing, no contextualizing, no explanations, no thinking, no weighing of one person’s claims against another’s, no regard for consequences. [...] The conflict is as old as civilization itself—between those who cherish what institutions provide and those who distrust everything that institutions stand for.

Only an idiot could read Assange's essays and think he 'distrust[s] everything that institutions stand for'; I bet you a hundred bucks Sarah Ellison hasn't read his essays. Hooray for old media.

Day begins: WikiLeaks, Assange, Aeon Flux, 'affective' this-and-that, naive cognitivism, consistently thuggish inconsistency, a brief mention of the New York Yankees (those bums).

Starting the day. 10:30 already. Well you don't get to tell your brain what to do. Funny notion, actually: the idea of 'you' floating around somewhere, monitoring the activity of your brain, the way 'America' observes 'its' citizens. Or 'the Yankees organization' looks at its employees. We imbue distributed networks with unitary identities in order to provide affective hooks for ourselves. It's so easy to get wrapped up in a meaning, an identity. The emptiness of 'meaning' is itself the reason for our preoccupation. There's just so much nothing to go around. We can all get into it and have the same good time.

It's wrong to say we're wired to build civilizations - that's like saying 'evolution tends to produce human beings.' Rather, we're wired to move and think in certain low-level ways, to process and store and eventually forget data or data-relations by certain methods; given the crosshatched high-level network effects known as 'human society,' within which we're bound to think, our own merely human (i.e. banally/miraculously biological) predispositions tend to interact creatively or destructively with our 'civilization.' At this point the human world is robust and complicated enough that uncivilized people can interact creatively with it; civilization needs uncivilized people. They function like inactivated viruses, strengthening the Weave without recognizing (accepting) their place in it.

Maybe co-optation is the paradigmatic civilized act.

Julian Assange can be both a rapist and a public servant. Responsible journalism would admit both possibilities - would not mix up the charges he faces in Sweden with the morality or legality of WikiLeaks's actions. It seems to me that responsible journalism is transparently principled observation and reportage. The responsible thing is to state the facts and let the chips fall: WikiLeaks's actions are ethical; their costs are difficult to determine; their legality is difficult to determine; in any case it will be difficult or impossible to bring WikiLeaks to trial; Assange and WikiLeaks have taken steps to ensure the safety of the government employees mentioned in the recent 'Cablegate' leak; nations and corporations are applying wholly inconsistent standards to WikiLeaks and the journalistic outlets it works with (e.g. treating WikiLeaks as a gov't 'leaker' rather than a journalistic organization, not pursuing the NYTimes for its role in publicizing the leaked material, etc.); the concerted actions by Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, et al. indicate that government pressure is being applied to private organizations without clear legal justification or transparency; this pressure should also be responsibly reported.

The Obama administration is acting thuggishly and inconsistently, and politicians like the contemptible Joe Lieberman are embarrassing their constituents (i.e. us). I'm ashamed of the U.S.'s role in the pursuit of Assange and WikiLeaks.

It seems to me the WikiLeaks case highlights a worrisome brittleness in the international political order. A robust community of nations would be able to incorporate - to co-opt - an organization like WikiLeaks in the role of watchdog (not necessarily of diplomatic cables, of course). It's clear that Assange and his colleagues have done something intolerable; perhaps that's as simple as being a small, independent organization with no clear national sympathies. No unitary identity. WikiLeaks isn't a company with a boardroom, it's a pirate Internet. Our governments can't recognize or understand the ethics or motivations of such an organization, because to do so would admit the possibility that an order beyond the neoliberal 'consensual hallucination' is possible - and might even work. But we don't know how to process such an organization. We only know how to destroy it.

Only we don't, do we.

Not really.

If you've never seen Aeon Flux, the pretentious and intermittently brilliant early-90's MTV cartoon consisting of a series of two-minute shorts and ten inscrutable half-hour episodes, this is the time. Julian Assange is reencountering its central questions, after all: How many links do you have to cut before the Conspiracy (State, Company, Family, Graph, Cabal, etc.) recognizes you as fully human? Why is it so hard for us to understand that civilization and barbarism are tautologically defined, indeed constitute one another? Why do citizens consent, without even a moment's reflection or resistance, to all-pervasive surveillance and government intrusion, but object strenuously to any attempt to surveil governments themselves?

The answer to this last question has something to do with identification, of course, and - hey look, a consistent theme - affective hooks. Minds built to process faces and naively correlate symbols respond incoherently, chaotically, to encounters with truly distributed/decentered/faceless networks. So the state is Dad - the President, the Cleric, the Soldier - and WikiLeaks is just Julian Assange, the dissipated 'alien-looking'(!) foreigner who's a bad bad man, probably a rapist, and so let's shut the bastards down, go! go! go!!

[This began as my informal get-myself-working freewrite for the day, but I only got two sentences deep before I started capitalizing words and picturing you, Reader(s), rather than hiding in the whistle of warm air between my ears. Funny thing: I adored Aeon Flux when I watched it in 1995, and loathed it when I grabbed the DVDs earlier this year. I've convinced myself to try again, somehow. That's one definition of madness, yep, but there are others.]

Mad Men Seasons 1-3, $30 total, today only. Go buy these DVDs immediately. Here's why.

The first three seasons of the best show on American television are on sale for $10 apiece on DVD and Blu-Ray. You should not hesitate to buy them.

Mad Men belongs in the same dramatic tier as The Wire, Deadwood, and The Sopranos - the three Big HBO Shows, which aired simultaneously in the first part of our terrible decade. Mad Men is run by Sopranos alum Matthew Weiner; indeed the spec pilot to the series apparently helped win him the Sopranos job. Unusually, Weiner oversees a writing staff consisting almost entirely of women (including former Buffy showrunner Marti Noxon).

The XX-heavy writing room is a huge part of Mad Men's success; indeed, one of the two major distinguishing characteristics of the show (beyond its pornographically slick design/aesthetic and obsessive period detail) is its complex treatment of the inner and outer lives of women. The show's main character is semi-principled adman Don Draper - a once-in-a-lifetime role for the versatile Jon Hamm - but Draper rarely gets the last word; we know that his generation's fate is to be left behind by the youth revolt of the mid- and late-60's, embodied on the show by Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss, turning into a star before our eyes) and Pete Campbell (Vince! Kartheiser! of! Angel!). Mad Men expertly balances a decade-long generational narrative about the traumatic journey from Eisenhower to Nixon with a closely-observed character study of Olson, Draper, and Campbell - each transforming into something unexpected, none of them following a straight characterological line. There are very few arguments masquerading as characters on Mad Men.

That's its other key distinguishing feature, its great triumph: the world of Mad Men's fourth season only faintly resembles its initial (Season One) conditions. Unlike The Sopranos, a study in selfish resistance to change, and The Wire, which focused on institutional inflexibility and incompetence, Mad Men gives us characters, organizations, and moral codes that change little by little, week by week. The story of Don and Betty Draper differs from the operatic (though no less believable) saga of Tony and Carmela Soprano in that Don and Betty actually transform in the ways Tony and Carmela only dream of. (SPOILER: Just as The Sopranos included TV's most detailed and complex marriage, Weiner's show centers on the most nuanced, sustained examination of marital collapse and divorce in the history of the medium.)

Weiner's ability to let the nature of his story change with its setting (Season One begins in March 1960; Season Four ends in October 1965) is testament to his writerly seriousness - but it also speaks to his writing staff's concern with the lurching progress (regress? collapse?) of the American social contract in those times. Mad Men deals only elliptically with the Civil Rights struggle, but the women's movement is front and center at all times - even in the lives of women who resist or are not yet transformed by the social struggles of The Sixties. That variety of depiction is almost unheard of on TV. For all The Sopranos' almost prurient interest in the archaic social structure of the Mob, there weren't many female characters with real freedom of movement (Charmaine Bucco, Angie Bompansiero, and Rosalie Aprile spring to mind, not without caveats) to provide contrast, so the proceedings had a certain airlessness at times. There were no winners on that show, only illustrations.

Mad Men, meanwhile, follows women as fantastically varied as 'dowdy' ingenue copywriter Peggy, icy Betty, young Sally Draper(!), empress Joan with her hidden talents, Dr Miller with her lack of child-empathy, the tentatively professional Rachel Menken, Peggy's boho lesbian friend Joyce, the saintly beatnik Anna Draper, and Anna's college-age niece Stephanie: some of them are gonna be just fine in the show's future, and Weiner and his writers expertly avoid didacticism and moralizing. They just keep on living. Mad Men doesn't exist to make a point - or rather, it makes so many (sometimes mutually contradictory) points, on such a wide range of social topics, that it feels more like mere life than its father-series.

In that regard, Mad Men most closely resembles not The Sopranos but Deadwood, the most interesting, eccentric, and (ultimately, for business/logistical reasons) unsatisfying of the great HBO shows. David Milch's transcendent 19th-century soap opera made institutional and social points by depicting characters in their full humanity; it was never didactic (except arguably in its Season Three theatre plot), and always made room for individuals' complex relations to their social roles. 'There's no such thing as an unmixed motive,' Milch is fond of saying. The Wire was all about unintended consequences, but its mode of characterization was classical rather than Shakespearean; The Sopranos started with two of TV's greatest characters but abstracted many of its characters for the sake of night-black comedy. Mad Men, on the other hand, makes room for characters like Pete Campbell, whose transformation from clownish villain to weird tragicomic antihero (and halfway-decent husband!) is one of the show's small narrative miracles. Unlike most of the Soprano family and anyone in the Baltimore of The Wire, Pete Campbell would fit nicely in Deadwood. I mean that as a high compliment.

I haven't even mentioned the show's wit, its sexiness, its one-liners, its detailed and unsentimental treatment of creative/artistic work, its handling of children, its vivid direction and photography, or (c'mon) the great John Slattery as Roger Sterling, as good a comic role as a middle-aged man will ever find in this shabby ruin of a television industry. Well, pretend I mentioned those things.

OK look, enough of this. Just go buy the DVDs for god's sake. This is the best value you're gonna get for the best show on TV. (And when Season Four comes out, get that too - it was the best year of the show so far.)

Lately.

In Treatment, Season 2: We're only a couple of weeks in (thanks, infant son, for your thoughtful stance against excessive TV-watching), but it's both better-integrated and less startling than the first season. Part of the problem is that the discursive/investigative structure of the episodes is a little more predictable the second time around, particularly in the Mia and Walter episodes. The raw energy of the April and Oliver hours keeps them from that trap - and then there's Gina. Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest must have loved working together; Byrne gets to stretch his legs a little and Wiest gives him unbelievable stuff to work with. What a well-designed relationship, and how well played! (Plus it's the show's cleverest dramatic/structural conceit: we spend the week with Super Therapist Paul, then see him spun around on Fridays by a therapist whose style is completely different from his own, but who knows all his tricks.)

I love this show, even if its occasional schematicism keeps it from joining Mad Men and the Big HBO Shows at the top of the TV heap.

Monster Manual 3, 4th edition: If WotC put out a one-volume compendium of the 4e Manuals with updated statblocks and MM3-style background/narrative info, it'd compete with the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual (1989/1993) for 'Best D&D Monster Book Ever' honours. They will not do so; the days of encyclopedic D&D texts are long gone. Something to think about.

Little, Big (John Crowley): Still haven't figured out what I want to say about this book, other than that reviewers invariably describe the last 50 pages as 'heartbreaking,' but I found them joyous, ecstatic; the one ostensible 'sad ending' struck me as the truest and happiest of them all.

Well OK, here's something: like Pynchon, Crowley simply obliterates the boundary between genre elements (Barbarossa legendry, Faerie, the orrery, the cards) and painfully real depictions of mere life; unlike Pynchon, though, Crowley writes with absolute authority on the subjects of lifelong love and sex. Clute describes him as 'conspicuously and fruitfully knowledgeable about the bullseyes and aporias of heterosexuality.' Indeed! Or as normal folk might say: the Tale of Alice and Smoky is one of the best love stories I've ever read, seen, or heard. It is utterly, joyfully True. And the Tale of Sylvie and Auberon (Lilac reminds you to mind your pronunciation) is just as good.

(Pynchon did write the perfect 'They are in love. Fuck the war,' but he's generally more interested in sex-as-transgression, or anyway sex-as-metaphor, than plain ol' sex, never mind plain ol' love.)

Little, Big is a wonderfully dangerous book - because it does not lie.

The Grey Album (Jay-Z + Beatles mashup by Danger Mouse): Danger Mouse is from White Plains, not NYC, and the ostentatious hipster cleverness of this album wears thin after a while. What you're left with is Jay-Z, who remains a narcissistic, hypocritical buffoon whose talent for rhymes is dwarfed by his self-promoting instinct. The lyrics to 'December 4th' used to move me, but they're embarrassing:

And this was the stress I lived with til I decided / To try this rap shit for a livin / I Pray I'm forgiven / For every bad decision I made / Every sister I played / Cause I'm still paranoid to this day / And it's nobody fault I made the decisions I made / This is the life I chose or rather the life that chose me / If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black

Bless him for working so hard, but those lyrics are nonsensical where they aren't merely offensively stupid. After moralizing a little bit about his 'bad decision[s],' he sideswipes 'every sister [he] played' on his way to excusing his paranoia, insists that his career as a crack dealer was 'nobody's fault,' disingenuously takes blame for choosing that career, then backtracks into platitudes about 'the life that chose [him].' Oh, and a petulant whine to close, which literally means nothing at all. Not a thing.

And how did he end up in the 'life that chose [him]?' Take it away, Mr Carter:

Now all the teachers couldn't reach me / And my momma couldn't beat me / Hard enough to match the pain of my pop not seeing me, so / With that disdain in my membrane / Got on my pimp game / Fuck the world

Aaaaand...that's it. He's Patrick Bateman: his explanation for his vampirism is 'Hey, I'm a child of divorce.' Wanker.

The Grey Album: lipstick on a pig.

Moss (Mike Gordon): 'Cactus' Gordon is a fascinating musician. He's a skilled rock bassist, perfectly capable of doing the standard root-downbeat thing, but his work in Phish has gotten a lot more Lesh-like over the years - fluid rhythms, unexpected rests and syncopations, odd inversions, genuine use of the bass as a lead voice. Unlike Lesh, though, Gordon has access to a full complement of bass-comping skills (e.g. slap technique); when paired with a lead guitarist as versatile as Trey Anastasio, who's essentially his own rhythm guitarist, Gordon is a deadly improvisor and in-the-moment designer of ad hoc song structures, essential to Phish's unparalleled sonic richness in concert.

In his solo work, Gordon's essentially a pop-rock experimentalist. His early tunes like 'Mound' and 'Weigh' reveal him to be a natural melodist whose oddball ensemble arrangements encode lovely, singable lines within devious instrumental passages. But that was Phish stuff, written to fit the band's nerd-prog sensibility. Since Phish's first hiatus, Cactus has become the band's most productive - and arguably most interesting - songwriter. His work with Leo Kottke is rustic without falling into folksy cliché, complex without ever seeming fussy, while his solo albums have moved between wild sonic experiments (Inside In, with its trombone/steeldrum weirdness) and easygoing funk-rock driven by precise, intricate guitars.

Meanwhile he's been quietly exploring the potential of the electric bass guitar as a lead instrument. (Working with Kottke seems to have emboldened Gordon to step out more than ever.) But if you're thinking 'Primus' at this point, then (a) kill yourself and (b) this is not that. With Moss, Gordon has found a fine balance between the bass-driven strangeness of Inside In (and the more organically-structured The Green Sparrow) and Phish's ensemble sound. It's a decent record! Almost kinda...indie. Songs like 'Horizon Line' and 'Flashback' still feature bossy basslines, but the opener 'Can't Stand Still' and album highlight 'What Things Seem' are fine pop tunes in which the bass serves a supporting ensemble role without sacrificing presence or authority.

Plus, Cactus's thin nasal vocals sound better than ever this time around. That lets the songs be just songs, instead of 'experiments' or 'Mike songs.' It's just an album of idiosyncratic tunes perched comfortably between Phish's jammy prolixity, the cannonball articulation of bluegrass (one of Gordon's musical loves), and Cactus's own carnivalesque compositional sense. There's a straight line from 'Sugar Shack' (Mike's superb contribution to Phish's last album, Joy) to the tunes on Moss. I dig this album. You might too - and for the first time, it sounds like Mike Gordon really cares about getting you there. Paradoxically, his most pop-accessible album seems also to have been his most effortless. But then: the further in you go, the weirder it gets.

We3 (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely): My favourite of Morrison's comics. Quietly devastating - and FQ's art is peerless. Reading this has finally convinced me to go back and try The Invisibles, which I couldn't be bothered with after being so disappointed by The Filth.

Fiasco (Jason Morningstar): Do you play roleplaying games? Do you like telling stories? Did you enjoy Fargo or A Simple Plan? Get this game.

Another moment for The Sopranos and sitcom form.

Seinfeld is the story (or rather a still life) of two sociopaths, a depressive, and an innocent; because it is a 'situation comedy,' the characters never change except temporarily, for comic effect. The purpose of the characters is to make a key point about late-20C American culture - specifically its decadence and terminal triviality. Some of the show's depth of meaning comes from its cultural specificity, its focus on a particular tribe of rich Jewish Manhattanites.

The Sopranos uneasily blended the generic demands of the mob drama with the basic form of sitcoms like Seinfeld. The shows shared DNA: The Sopranos made Big Cultural Arguments through narrow focus on one (comically exaggerated) ethnic group, too, and its main topic was the creeping pointlessness, triviality, and resulting bestial inhumanity of turn-of-the-century American culture. I don't want to overstate the links, but understanding one can illuminate the other.

Tony Soprano - who is a sociopath, a depressive, and an innocent - certainly grows over the course of the series, but one of the show's main (thematic) concerns is Tony's discomfort at being caught between oppressive, obsessively-referenced but only dimly-remembered traditions (omerta, distant Italy, blue-collar cred) and the workin' American's need to push relentlessly forward toward...something.

Drama is change, comedy is variation (stasis). The American Dream of change resonates destructively with the ritual repetition and variation that held together the culture(s) of Tony's ancestors, familial and professional. 'Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?' is one of the show's central questions; the sobering answer, 'the Soprano family happened,' was one of David Chase's oft-repeated refrains. Indeed, in service of his generational argument, Chase was often happy to let that symbolic drama supersede the personal dramas of his characters. (Hence the simplicity of characters like Paulie and Silvio when compared to analogues like, say, the simpering Farnum on Deadwood.)

The Sopranos was more like a sitcom than any of its peers among American TV drama. Its approach to its Clintonesque protagonists, Tony and Carmela - maybe the most complex pair ever depicted on TV - relied more on iterative elaboration than revolutionary change; its supporting characters were largely types, there to illuminate (or shadow) Tony's concerns; its exploration of generational transition and transformation gained much of its power from its choking claustrophobia rather than its historical sweep or daring (compare Mad Men, with its candid insight into divorce and other major midlife transformations - or even Buffy, with its yearly narrative apocalypses and constant characterological churn).

It was every bit as good as they say - a major work of art. But we should be clear about what kind of art it was. The characters who escape the sitcom of 'The Sopranos' (e.g. Melfi) find their way into the long second act of the inadequate drama that is life. One of the most amazing things about The Sopranos, to me, is that it managed to tell an episodic story (Ralph Kramden/Archie Bunker, Mob boss!) in serial form...allow its characters to recognize this weird genre trap...and in doing so illuminate the weird state of the American middle class at the turn of a weird century. Formal shenanigans of that sort rarely add up to anything. Kudos to David Chase for being, quite unexpectedly, an avant-garde comedy writer.

Let's bring up (and briefly address) a common misconception about Dexter.

Dexter is very definitely not 'about' repressed violent urges. Its main character is a serial killer who feels a strong urge to commit violent acts, but those urges aren't meant to map onto (e.g.) suburban male angst or modern ennui or any of that Fight-Club-did-it-better stuff. The show presents Dexter's ritualized, even stagey killings as satisfying releases of psychic tension; if Dexter's 'dark passenger' were just a slick allegory for how Joe the Volvo Owner can't help wanting to hit his neighbour, then the moments of unexpected violence (that late-Season One confrontation with Doakes, the terrifying trip to the bar in Season Two, the initiating event of Season Three, etc.) wouldn't be as dangerous or meaningful. The times when Dexter gets pulled into unexpected violence are different in every way from his intimate nightly ritual...

...which is one of the least violent things on the show. In the world of the show, Dexter's murders aren't violent acts. In the killing room he looks as much like a man building a tiny ship in a bottle as a serial killer. When reviewers make claims like 'Dexter’s criminal “hobby” is a potent metaphor for those aspects of manhood suppressed by domestication,' I suspect they're grasping for an easy line rather than paying attention to the show itself. The arc of the show - a person with no access to 'normal' human feelings learns to be human despite himself, and joins the wide world - would still work if Dexter did something other than murder folks (it'd just be less spectacular TV).

Dexter isn't just 'repressed.' He's fully conscious of his cognitive shortcomings and miswirings and (during the run of the series) works to correct them, with mixed and intermittent success. In that regard he's more in touch with his feelings ('as a man' and otherwise) than pretty much anyone else on the show. It's a beautiful story, if you ask me, and not a bitter one.

[Hi Reddit types. Just so's we're clear: obviously Dexter is shown doing (what we know to be) violent things. But the meaning of those acts, in the show, in the story, isn't the knife-through-heart bit, it's the desire for ritual action - pure and simple - and how that desire gets complicated by Dexter's increasingly chaotic interactions with humans. He's learning to be a person rather than a machine for producing human-looking actions. The same show could be made with a rogue toaster over that goes around toasting household things, then finds out some foods would rather remain raw, and struggles to reconcile urge and event.]

Roberts's rules of ordure.

Adam Roberts reviews Lost for Strange Horizons. Maybe the best, most levelheaded review of the show I've read. The highest praise I can give the piece is just to point out that Adam's affection for the show doesn't keep him from offering a devastating, honest critique of (some of) the show's debilitating weaknesses:

Any potted account of Lost's main storylines, such as the above, must tend to make one thing clear: that it was at root a ludicrous show. Daft, implausible, hyperactive, given to lurching shifts of focus and scale of positively Van Vogtian proportions. To say so is not to dismiss it, of course. Ludicrous is not the same thing as risible. The show's genius was in the way it fully inhabited its ludicrousness, the way it turned the clunky paraphernalia of TV melodrama into a near-perfect simulacrum-fable of profundity. It did this by playing with the grain of its daftness; always ingenuously in tune with its own absurdity, neither too archly knowing nor embarrassed by it. Narrative contrivances a first-year screenwriting student would dismiss as too hokey were deployed not once but many times - the literal ticking bomb, for instance; the Mexican standoff; the run-and-chase. The scriptwriters enjoyed the metaphorical narrative sugar-rush of killing off major characters (or in one variant of this: of introducing a new character in such a way as to make it plain s/he will be a new major player, only to kill him/her before they even get going). In small doses this can be joltingly effective, textually speaking; but it became so totally a feature of the Lost universe that it ended up creating a weirdly parodic version of humanity. Everybody on the island, it seemed - no matter what other traits their characters displayed - everybody was only ever a moment away from punching somebody, torturing somebody for information, or shooting somebody else dead. I think only Hurley and Charlie, amongst the major characters, abstained from the social performance of murderous violence. For everybody else it was a mundane business; the pistol whipping, the rifle shot to the chest, the thrown knife into somebody's back. Cumulatively this created the vibe that pretty much all the people on the island were terrible terrible people. Picture a world as a tropical island paradise wholly populated by conscience-free, violently disposed supermodels. Et - violà.

[...]

Putting all these beautiful people (Ben, Charlie, and Hurley excepted) through the over-caffeinated bounceabout contortions of plot also meant that the show as a whole kept losing its focus. It toyed with Robinson Crusoe, or Tempest, allusions, but they sputtered into nothing. It picked up the notion that everything might be an SFnal material novum, and then entirely Lost interest in that. It seemed to be saying something obliquely about 9-11 - from the world being changed by a catastrophic plane-crash at the start of season 1, to the sight in season 6 of Iraqi Sayyid's death by suicide-bombing (he grabs an about-to-explode bomb and runs off down a corridor, blowing himself up for the greater good of his friends). But no ideological coherence emerges from that sort of reading. Characters are named after famous philosophers (Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, Hume) but without any actual philosophical content behind the gesture.

A fan who even dipped a toe into the para-material generated by fans could see that part of the appeal of the show was in its tantalising detail, any one of which could be the key that explained everything. In an important sense, the point of the show was the elevation of this kind of detail to a new aesthetic prominence. When its big reveal finally came, as it must, part of it would be to dissolve much of this beautiful tracery. And so it was. Bye-bye mystic numbers, Dharma Initiative, polar bears, big-wheel-for-moving-the-island and wholly-unresolved-why-can't-people-give-birth-on-the-island storyline. Hello Jacob, smoke monster, and mystical fable of faith and atonement. Boo.

Of course then he has to go off and ruin my fun by claiming the series was 'about' something other than its own aroma. Well, no one's perfect. (Were I an emoticon man, I'd do that thing right about here.)

As they say, read the whole thing. If you're bored to the point of self-harm, my response to Adam's review sits in his comments section.

Drew Greenberg on the 'Dead Lesbian Cliche' about which so many Buffy fans had an embarrassing fit, once upon a time (in 2002).

Boom.

I was seriously appalled by the so-called dust-up after Tara's death. I still am, actually. A lot of people tossed around this phrase you're using -- "Dead Lesbian Cliche." But this confuses me. Historically, the media presented same-sex attraction as something shameful -- it was evil or pathetic or sick. And that shame was a burden borne not just by the characters experiencing the same-sex attraction, but also those in their lives -- associates, loved ones and the objects of their attraction. The best solution for all concerned was to eradicate the shame, and this usually meant killing the lesbian or having her commit suicide. Either way, she died so everyone else in the story could get back to their normal lives without the burden of her inconvenient sexuality infringing any more on them. Tara was the exact opposite of those hateful characterizations. She wasn't a problem to be solved, and neither was her sexual orientation, which was always a part of her character. Willow's friends accepted and respected Tara for all that she was, practically from jump: she was the moral center of this group of friends. She was light, she was kindness. We didn't want you to be made uncomfortable by Tara and wish her to go away -- we wanted you to love Tara and want her around more. Which many of you did. And then we pulled her away -- not so you could breathe a sigh of relief that she was gone, as has been the custom with the dead lesbians, but so you would feel the ache of her absence. We wanted you to miss her, to wish she would come back. This is not how the dead lesbian cliche works -- it is the direct opposite of it. Joss bravely inverted the traditional story arc for a lesbian death, and people criticized him for it. To be perfectly candid, I resent that. The knee-jerk reaction -- ACK! DEAD LESBIAN MUST EQUAL DEAD LESBIAN CLICHE!!! -- trades in oversimplification, and, respectfully, I think we can do better than that.

Boom!!! Best takedown of stupid fan faux-criticism I've read in a long time.

The Wire, complete series, $90. Today only (again).

Go buy this set right now. As I said before: If you watch TV and don't watch this series, you're dicking around.

Lost fans can't say they weren't warned.

Remember J.J. Abrams's unbelievably (and characteristically) pretentious 'mystery box' talk from a few years ago? Sure you do: the one where he talked about how the most interesting thing about his precious mystery box wasn't what was in it, but the very act of wondering what was in it.

Lost is, and has always been, the box (plus a healthy dollop of Lindelof/Cuse's cheerily fallible sentimentality). That was fine in Season One; a year of open-ended questions was appropriate, even if the show's staunch refusal to deal with the actual logistics of island life was an embarrassing cop-out. But the show's disinterest in anything other than the act of watching Lost isn't a cop-out...it's contempt. Critics insisted on its allegorical value, but the show was content to allegorize itself, over and over and over, culminating in Christian's arrogant and myopic declaration in the finale ('The time you spent with these people was the most important time of your life' or something to that effect). The line is neither correct in the storyworld (Sayid goes to heaven to be happy forever with...Shannon? Seriously?!) nor true for the viewer, though I imagine it's true for Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who just won the middlebrow writing sweepstakes of all time.

Otherwise sensible people are falling over themselves to praise the overwrought finale, but let's be honest: the best episode of Lost has less to say about the lives of actual human beings than the worst episode of Deadwood.

(The best episode of Lost, if you didn't know, was 'The Constant,' a grand love story that (let's be frank) was less about lovers than about the familiar tropes of cinematic love stories, with a bit of sci-fi syrup spread across the top.)

Ugh.

Recently 'on telly.'

On the one hand, Jekyll: Extraordinarily well thought-out BBC miniseries from Steven Moffat (now running Doctor Who). It doesn't have a 'central metaphor,' it has a dozen of them, each more fruitful and unsettling than the last. The one-liners are too glib at times, the acting sometimes a bit off-key, the weird American accents jarring - but that's a small price to pay for a world containing a Scottish Joss Whedon. Gleefully recommended.

On the other hand, the final episode of Lost, 'The End': Deathly Hallows + Last Battle + Family Guy + high fructose corn syrup. When I can suppress my contempt long enough to talk about it, we can talk about it. For now, let's leave it here: the two big scenes with Juliet were nice, but the rest of the 150-minute finale fell short of my expectations. Trust me: that's saying something.

Since I wrote this post to help me stop crying, and I've stopped crying, it's time to go to bed.

Couple things.

1) Played Dominion. Gorgeous game. Can't wait to try it again.

2) Sound familiar?

3) God help me, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof sound like buffoons sometimes:

DAMON LINDELOF: If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into “live together, die alone,” which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let’s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed. When the show is firing on all pistons, that’s the kind of storytelling that we’re doing.

I think we’ve always said that the characters of “Lost” are deeply flawed, but when you look at their flashback stories, they’re all victims. Kate was a victim before she killed her stepfather. Sawyer’s parents killed themselves as he was hiding under the bed. Jack’s dad was a drunk who berated him as a child. Sayid was manipulated by the American government into torturing somebody else. John Locke had his kidney stolen. This idea of saying this bad thing happened to me and I’m a victim and it created some bad behavior and now I’m going to take responsibility for that and allow myself to be redeemed by community with other people, that seems to be the theme that we keep coming back to.

Someone needs to lock Lindelof in a room with four mirrored walls and a TV playing the entirety of Deadwood over and over until he overcomes this laughable notion that Lost has ever dealt with any moral/philosophical/psychological matter in a serious way. This would have to occur in a place other than Hollywood, of course. Or Hawaii.

Questions regarding the last NBC Thursday of the season.

Why can't the 30 Rock writers tell stories? Why even try going beyond their comfort zone (SNL-style sketches and setpieces)? And - it pains me to ask - how come the writing slid catastrophically downhill over the last six weeks of the season, even as most of the performances deepened in surprising ways?

How did The Office lose its zany/melancholy balance this year? Was it the focus on the goddamn wedding? When did its current tonal weirdening begin - after Season Four? Season Three? Is the formula sustainable for one more year?

Why was Parks & Recreation the best show of NBC's Thursday? Was ending on the off-beat like that really the best the writers could come up with? Am I correct in thinking that the early episodes were a good deal smarter about politics, among other things, than they're given credit for?

...

Bonus: Do people like Community? Why, exactly? Help me out.

Early adopter of Lost hate?

Stumbled across an old post of mine, today, on Damon Lindelof and Lost. Wrote it just after Season Three ended, when people were 'sad' that Charlie had died. The nut:

Lindelof's words here are revealing: over the course of Season Three, the writers were 'starting to think about' the fallout from the Season Two finale. He loves to talk about the show having a grand design, obviously loves being seen as the keeper of these Great Secrets, but it's been apparent for literally years that Lindelof tends to blow smoke up whatever asses are convenient when it comes to this show. He has to; its appeal is eventual rather than empathetic or interpretive, i.e. the thrill is purely in what happens rather than what it means or who it happens to. (cf. 'paper-thin characters,' kidz.) OK but that's fine; there's a place for pulp, even pulp with pretensions. But remember: the meaning of the Season Two finale, even its full mere-plot-mechanism ramificiations, apparently weren't decided until after the fact. Remember too: no one knows what the failsafe key really did (except the writers, one hopes), and no one has ever wondered at any point in the story. Apparently it just Had An Effect On People, and the overheated, muddy early Season Three (oy vey that Eko-bites-it episode!) served largely to work the show back from that point. Is the failsafe the reason the island was discovered? Honestly, will the meaning of the show change either way? It's only more scaffolding. The long buildup of Season Two was almost entirely forgotten in Season Three. Are things better now? It would seem so. But the writers are still in the awkward position of having to kill off characters because they've got nothing to write for them.

I know, I know: horn-tootin'. But I stand by the post. Lindelof and company have faced a pretty consistent set of problems over the last six years. Worth a look if you have, y'know, nothing else to do in your entire life.

The Tennant/Stewart BBC Hamlet.

Superb acting as you'd expect - Christ the two 'marquee' players are good - but the stagey direction is a problem, static and ploddingly invested in the hoariest imaginable framing/intercutting techniques. Zowie, they're using surveillance footage! Wowsers, a whole scene is shot from a 'helicopter,' forcing the actors to perform in totally unsustainable physical postures! It's 'screen direction is not stage direction' 101 and it mars some astonishing scenes, particularly the finale, which should be deadly chaos but comes off as limp stage comedy, goddamnit.

But then Tennant delivers the prince's dying words as well as I've ever seen or heard them. No surprise there: TV actors learn to act on a specific physical scale that suits the camera (and the intelligence of his performance bespeaks a theatre actor's studied familiarity with the textual universe). Of all things, Star Trek and Dr Who end up contributing something extraordinary to Shakespeare. What a world.

It's here, by the way.

(And if you wanna see TV/stage direction and acting beautifully balanced, try The Singing Detective, in which lead performer Michael Gambon and director Jon Amiel prove that God exists, and She's from the fucking UK.)

Milch, Luck, John from Cincinnati, there you go.

A recent MetaFilter comment of mine, reproduced for fanciful/archival reasons:

Milch has been working on Luck in one form or another for a long time, and I'm so glad to see he's found a way to work it final form. I read the pilot script a while back (thanks T. --wa.) and it's both (1) very Milch and (2) not Deadwood, so the usual complaints will apply from the usual folks.

John from Cincinnati was an astonishing piece of work but hard to categorize, predict, or map onto other contemporary TV shows. For one thing, it's an extremely optimistic show; its plot is 'God figures 9/11 is just the beginning of these idiots destroying themselves, so he sends an autistic Jesus to visit some junkies and washouts in a surfing town to give them helpful don't-destroy-yourself advice.' Its story, meanwhile, involves said washouts and junkies accommodating divine experience and discovering their own interdependence and inseparability. It's a generational story, closely observed in interpersonal terms, yet (this is the hardest part) its strategies of representation are in no small part iconic and evocative.

Which is to say the entire show has the hallucinatory intensity and spiritual focus of the Season One Deadwood finale - in which Cochran prays for God's pity and forgiveness and (for reasons both biographical and metaphorical) Swearengen bestows it - but without the generic reassurances and archaism-tolerance settings of that earlier show. It helps to see JfromC as a companion piece to Deadwood, clarifying and expanding on its 'metaphysical' themes. It's a Gospel, more John(!) than Mark, but it's also a Revelation story - and (here's the tough bit) the symbolic and (let's say) 'characterological' or realistic dimensions of the show exist in unfamiliar proportions. Without the assortment of conditioning signals and prefatory gestures that Westerns and cop shows provide, you've gotta take everything about the show on faith.

Which is (surprise!) one of the main points of the show itself anyhow.

If you're interested in Milch, you should unquestionably listen to his Writers Guild lectures from a couple of years back - during the writers' strike - found here. Scroll down to the PODCAST entries and the videos below them. After a couple of listens you start to get a sense for how comprehensive and serious the man's thought is - in six hours of lectures he doesn't say anything, not a word, by accident. They're fucking great.

Is Lost an even tackier adaptation of the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson?

Just wondering.

Slow news day: MIT student hygiene concerns prompt dimwitted pseudojournalism from CNN, no one is even the slightest bit surprised.

This.

Yes, MIT students let hygiene lapse during finals week, just like all other college students. (It isn't finals week right now, of course, but don't let niggling details bog you down when there are geeky little immigrants to make fun of.) The baseline hygiene level isn't ideal either, so things get nasty in clusters and student lounges. And since the school is in Cambridge, classrooms are exposed to outside air for, like, three weeks out of every academic year.

But that doesn't excuse this dead-stupid news report. The 'reporter' obviously asked the students to provide the little bits of 'local colour.' The 'student senate' providing toothpaste is no different from MIT Medical dispensing disinfectant in every Athena cluster. And the bit about biology students (the last student comment) is actually funny - in a 'laughing with' way, not so much CNN's default 'laughing at' fashion.

Good on the UA for providing toiletries to students who do, after all, work pretty fucking hard each semester to provide the lackwits at CNN without something to talk about. After all, what else could they possibly be sending their reporters to cover right now? Surely there's nothing interesting or world-historical happening today.

Stupid craven fucking bastards.

A note about Buffy Season 8, issue #34 (35? whatever).

[SPOILERS!@#$!@#$ AGI THAT MEANS YOU.]

I read the Whedonesque thread on this issue and thought:

'Huh. Long thread.'

That's a whole heck of a lot of comments without (near as I can tell) anyone mentioning how goddamn stupid all the 'nature doesn't put anything here it doesn't need' stuff was. 1) That's not true. 2) 'Equilibrium' and 'local minima/maxima' and 'nonlinear dynamics' are a leetle more complicated than they're being made out to be, and the man who made Dollhouse Season One, of all people, knows the value of sticking with moral complexity even when it doesn't lead to a Big Splashy Comic Book Moment. 3) Yes to balance, yes to biological continuity and interdependence, yes to literalized forces of nature in a fantasy story - I've suspended my goddamn disbelief so hard it will NEVER AGAIN RETURN TO EARTH!!#$!@$# - but for god's sake can someone in the editorial chain please at least pretend to take their adult readers seriously for, um, a page or two? At least invent an actual fucking phlebotinum instead of treating this universe-altering event totally abstractly. Can our explanations please involve actual explaining sometimes? What is this, LOST?!

Oh, and:

4) Two pages of mythologydump stretched over 20 pages of comic is awesome if you're Alan Moore or Brian K. Vaughn and evidently not that awesome if you're Brad Meltzer. (And let it be said, I know the man can write his ass off. Just not, y'know, this.)

I don't much care about the Angel-is-Buffy's-true-love bit - she's cookie dough, she's cookies, whatever, as long as we can connect the emotional dots the story works - but this fictional world means more to me than I can possibly explain, and I don't like the idea that the 'FX budget' of comics is going to send it right off the rails. In narrative terms, never mind conceptual ones.

Sigh.