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.