Visionary Madness

Somehow, a vague, momentary curiosity led to watching a complete episode of Charlie's Angels that was so perversely bad it forced a new, lower reappraisal of just how bad 70s television was, and the baldness of its attempts to buoy itself with mere titillation.

The subtext of this thing was hilarious: it took place in a toy company where the 'designer' was the first character introduced. Few minutes after meeting Kate Jackson. laughably dressed up to look Asian, he launches into a sad story about how the company's owner refuses to make his visionary new tools, that include a guillotine and then a game where kids drive cars around and get points for mowing down pedestrians. As if the sundae was not rich enough, Kate Jackson chimes in to ask him if his ideas are 'good for the children.' Predictably, in the first group scene he is proclaimed a whack job. Of course, in reality, he was a visionary, since that's exactly what has happened with toys. What's funnier, though, is that the scene is really a gross opportunist of the past confronting that of the future, cloaked in the still omnipresent teflon garb: 'for the children.'

Sex Slave Case/Kitty Genovese

When this story was run on the local news, they interviewed a neighbor who lived directly above these two sows. They asked him if he saw or heard anything. He said 'well, I saw him kissing the girl one day' and then they asked 'did you hear anything?' He says 'well, my wife and I heard a girl screaming but we didn't know where it was coming from.' Interviewer asks: 'what was she saying.' Would be hero: 'help me.' [!!] Now the amazing part: the guy's profession: Security Guard. Ok, note to this knuckle dragger's employer: you might be better off with someone who is willing to be bothered by a crime occurring outside his mr. magoo range of view.

People made such a big deal (as they should have) over the Kitty Genovese case, where she was attacked by a man with a knife and yelled for help for hours and no one called the police. This case is more like a Luis Buñuel film. It was hard to even tell if the interviewers knew how outrageous it was that this neighbor didn't call the police. Doubtful: this thing dropped like a stone, while the network went back daily for more news about Anna Nicole.

Suze Orman: The Horns Come Out

I love this woman Deborah Solomon. In the Age of Charlie Rose, where interview is vaseline-assisted vassalage, it is great to see pieces like hers, even though her standing up to people has sometimes gone sideways, in this case, the results are magical.

This interview is like socratic surgery where the patient grabs the scalpel and unintended hari kiri quickly ensues. Is it a coincidence that her surname is Or Man? Like so many before her, she presents herself as a guardian angel, but then dismisses her gender as idiots. But don't feel bad, Ladies. Apparently, the states can all go to ruin, and the market too (nevermind the ecosystem that she's jetsetting through, privately).

Seriously, if I had written her lines, I wouldn't have gotten close to this. Congratulations, Suze: you are the most despicable huckster to come to town in a long time.

NBC's Latest Delusional Stupor

Their latest hail mary is the overly hyped new show 'The Black Donnellys.' I didn't record the first episode, but found it for free on iTunes tonight and had a good laugh. Whoever said this was a successor to 'The Sopranos' should either publish the recipe for the cocktail of barbituates they are on, or get a workup on their nut. The show was beyond silly. While I like The Sopranos, there is a certain Fred and Barney quality to it that can more than border on the cartoon. One imagines that the pitch for this show was Sopranos meets Space Kids. Finally, I am so bloody tired of how NBC's formula for everything is family is more important than anything in the world (while they are running like all the other maggots after stories like Anna Nicole). The ending of this episode was a 10 on the sappy/sentimental richter scale.

Meanwhile, the framing of the whole show being that these little squirts are spawns of a failed Celtic extermination was nauseating. What a pile of crap. Family is the most important thing, but let's start by making the veritable head of the Irish table out as a Kronos-like genocidal maniac, and find nary an ounce of contradiction in that. (In Vietnam, such a concept would make less than no sense, as they have a peculiar custom of recognizing family across time, not just as a smarmy pack of buddies you grew up with.) I happend to have looked up the wikipedia entry on the black irish not long ago. Revisiting it was a good opportunity to see that facts, and real information, are just so, I dunno... boring. (Same network that 'ripped' that story of the actress who was murdered in new york recently from the headlines and changed it around so it wasn't the immigrant who killed her, but the greedy white job boss who was oppressing him. No wonder these guys dislike 'reality' TV so.) So, after draining all the reality from the concept, what is left? Black is cool, and it's badass. Well alrighty then.

Six Feet Under Opts for Cremation

One of the core features of the modern echo chamber is that criticism, when it does arrive, is so paralyzing that the truly deluded narcissist responds by not only agreeing with it, but embracing it. The whole last season of Six Feet Under was an amazing exercise in self-erasure, ending with what had to be the most absurd finale in the history of TV: an extended flash forward featuring all the characters looking like frosted mini wheats, partaking of a coda that eliminated each one's life, skipping straight forward to death. While this conceit smacks of the Senator Blutarsky bit at the end of Animal House, it was also a most apropos way for this thing to go up in smoke: a distillation that focuses on the bits caught in the drain rather than the strained liquid.

There were two main elements this season that made the self-immolation really piquant: 1. the show really tried hard, for most of the season, the blaze a new trail in how much disinterest they could produce in their characters. Nate turned into a complete, exxed out idiot, finally spiraling through killing a bird, raving like a lunatic, and then Quakerism and a new no fight resolve, only to disappear in a blessed silence, but like all characters, only until the next episode where he came back preachier than ever as a ubiquitous ghost. It was very appropriate that a recent list of overrated movies included American Beauty just as this thing was sending its last cinders up the flue: Alan Ball has finally shown that just keeping some dust or garbage in suspension by dint of a cyclotron and a lucky updraft does not a career make. At least he seems to realize, Stockholm-style, that he has nothing to say and that, as Kerouac once said, all he can offer the world is his own confusion (I'll take K's though). Wait, that was the other element (#2): the void.

Ultimately, though, it's the ending: the idea of seeing each person just expire at ridiculous arbitrary dates in the future, that is so foreceful in its stupidity that it does reach back and erase in a way that is stunning, making a joke out of all that had come before. Congrats, folks, go have a drink. It's a wrap (sar(a/i)n).

Billy Bob on the Bard

Having already a very low estimation of Billy Bob, it came as something of a surprise when I happened to catch him on The Tonight Show last week and one of the talking points they had prepared was his belief that Shakespeare is overrated. His brilliant argument essentially consisted of two points: 1. the plays are really just soap operas, and 2. all the 'flowery' language is a ruse. The most hilarious part of this is that if there is one person who is not overrated, it is fucking Shakespeare. Furthermore, does this witless idiot realize that he is claiming that a worldwide conspiracy that spans centuries is his real claim? Or does he think that all those people just repeated what they were told and it took Billy Bob's bravery to break the yoke?

Now here is the kicker: he was on to pitch a new sports movie about high school football and the clip they showed had him delivering a pan-faced speech to a bunch of 15 year olds about 'being in the moment' and 'living from joy.' It's no wonder he has it out for Shakespeare when he's part of a cabal who are doing the typical Hollywood trope of taking a downhome story and recasting it with pseudo buddhist nonsense. Congratulations. When Billy Bob's career goes down the tubes, maybe he can play the fool in a rendition of one of Bill's plays, though he's more suited to a syphillitic, drooling idiot.

The Obesity Network

60 Minutes did a great piece recently about the auto industry's crack addiction to trucks. The lobotomized wonk who spoke on behalf of the car/truckmakers of course blamed the situation on the consumer, saying, in effect 'we don't want to hog up all the resources and melt the polar ice caps, our customers demand more and more power.' Well, there is an element of bread and circus I will grant them, but come on, this frothing piggery is not just the manifestation of some unencouraged human instinct.

A similar thing seems to have happend on the Food Network of late: it's become the obesity network. First, the Barefoot Contessa showed up. Whose great idea was it to bring on a mutated cross between HR Puffenstuff and Suzy Homemaker and have her make mountains of meat and sweets? The show itself is hysterical on a number of fronts. They never just shoot her standing there making food, they always have shots of her running in and out of her stores and then back to the reactor where she 'works' on her next explosion. Just saw an episode of a new 'home cooking' show with another mountain-sized sow adorning a serving for a giant with a huge additional scoop of ice cream, cooing so much it was more like auto-erotic food porn.

As forensic detectives, we are a sorry lot. We wait until things blow up and then we just prepare our defenses. The only thing that is funnier than the fact that auto executives were able to sell a truck for every car in the US, is the fact that no one riding this wave could see that there is nowhere good for it to go. We don't live in a state of the sound and reasonable on one side being led astray (as the wonk would have it), but a case of two crack addicts, unclear about their addiction, the treatment or the recovery. This is the wildcatter, the prospector: the key is to light the fire then make your killing, on the burn or the extinguishers, who cares.

Fat pigs rushing around in their trucks, emptying the oceans, filling the rivers with crap is in a way a unifying vision of America in which metaphor has reached a new level of clarity, but it is also posits a bizarre diagnosis about the forces driving this latest phase of mania. Did we give up on our narcissistic notions of holding a deed on immortality? No, we have convinced ourselves that we can be complete pigs and if something of consequence blocks our going forward, a cost-free bypass or angioplasty will be provided. A mere detour.