Brick City

Brick City

There, up ahead,
a man pats an empty plastic bag, like a tambourine.
He shakes his head, side to side,
to side,
eyes glazed, marbled, cold.
Loosies, loosies, loosies,
the street sings.
Baby turtles scratch their plastic cages with tiny nails,
pawing furiously.
Loosies!
Shake your head, eyes to laces.
Add a brick.
Clickity-clack.
Clickity.
Clack.
Down the block, dark, hairy legs,
bowed out, ostrich-like.
Large calves, in a ruby-red skirt,
high-heels,
lumbering.
Loosies!
No, no, shake your head,
turn the music up.
Add a brick.
Shaggy! Shaggy!
Yeah you, you Scooby-doo,
mutha’ fucka’!
Add a brick.
Under the old RKO theater
small cherubs, open-mouthed, wide-eyed,
look down on the city.
Burned out windows,
pigeon shit,
sneaker shops,
below.
Prayer begins, the sirens shake pavement.
So many bricks,
so few buildings.

Quote of the day

I'm slowly working my way through the 2011 Booker Long List (link below), and I'm currently halfway through Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie (think Life of Pi + The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet). It's one of those books that makes your television so very easy to ignore, and that makes you wish that someone finally, finally, invented the never-ending novel. It's that good. I'll have a full review when I'm finished.

"This got us onto the subject of Jamrach's and how I worked there in the yard, and all the beasts that came and went over the years. It was the mention of the silent bird room that got him. I told him how they sat there unmoving in those tiny boxes, songbirds with locked throats, and he said that was all wrong. He said he hated to see a bird in a cage. "It's something to do with the wings," he said. "It's when they can't open them up."
We smoked silently and I thought about how that room had saddened me as a child, but I had grown used to it over the years as it became an everyday thing. It was just how the world was."

http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1514

Monster Bug Wars is one bat-shit crazy television show

Monster Bug Wars, a 60 minute television show currently airing on the Science Channel, is absolute insanity. You're probably asking yourself (a) what is Monster Bug Wars? or (b) what is the Science Channel? or more likely than not, you've never heard of either. The show and the channel bill themselves as "educational" television, but if this is what's teaching our children, God help us all.

So what, exactly, is Monster Bug Wars? Though it may sound like a SyFy channel movie of the week (e.g. Mega Python vs. Super Spider), if you DVRd the show in hope of some epic cheese you're going to be in for a bit of a letdown. The show pits a variety of bugs up against one another, and with footage captured from somewhere deep in the wilderness (probably a backyard in Echo Park), over the course of the hour, five bugs (from five 'fights') are crowned heavy weight champions of the grossest and lowest chain of the animal kingdom (the other five contestants die terrible, icky deaths). If this show doesn't sound absurd enough by this point, Monster Bug Wars launches itself into the ultimate drinking game stratosphere by adding the most ridiculous elements I've ever seen in a so-called "educational" television program.


First, before each bout, an insect "expert" from so and so university introduces each combatant. This is sort of like how HBO had Fight Camp 360: Pacquiao vs. Mosley except it's absolutely nothing like that. We hear about how ferocious each competitor is and what we can expect from their Mortal Combat finishing move ("watch out, because this ant can lift a thousand times its body weight! That's like if you could life 15,000 pounds!").

Simultaneously we're treated to some nifty CGI, because if the National Spelling Bee and the PGA get computerized intros, then there's no way we don't get to see a CGI Praying Mantis with claws that sound like Morimoto's knives getting sharpened. If you get your rocks off to quick CGI zooms of pincers, stingers, and fuzzy mandibles, then these segments will probably make your head explode.

But it's in post-production sound editing where Monster Bug Wars really shines. Take for instance the fire ant. Whenever said fire ant (CGI or actual fire ant) zoom-ins occur we get A TIGER GROWL. I shit you not. For beetles, Monster Bug Wars often employs the call of the majestic elephant. I had no idea the two were related, but now, thanks to this show, I have some amazing little informational tidbits to drop over small talk at cocktail parties. When I try to imagine how the wizards over at Monster Bug Wars managed to pull off these sound effects, I envision a tiny, one-inch man, out there in the somewhere in field, gently (yet simultaneously pissing in his miniature pants) leaning a boom mic as close as possible up to an ant's pincers.

[The Starship Troopers camera guy was shrunk down to the size of your pinky in hopes of obtaining the mythical roar of the fire ant.]

So, in summation, Monster Bug Wars is one of the greatest and most educational shows on television. I can also vouch for it as a fantastic drinking game. During the course of five bug battles, a litany of things can be won and lost on the outcomes a title card fights starring, for example, GIANT SCORPION vs. MAMMOTH WOOLY SPIDER. And yes, the mammoth wooly spider sounds like a bug from Starship Troopers, in case you were wondering.

So the next time your friend tells you he's watching UFC #771 for 79.99 you tell him you're watching TRAP-JAW vs. ANT LION, for FREE.

Review: Snowdrops

Snowdrops, the debut novel by A.D. Miller (current editor for The Economist) shortlisted earlier this year for the Man Booker award, is a superb character study that simultaneously paints a vibrant picture of the oil-rich and over-banked Moscow of the mid-2000’s. For someone about to embark in career of corporate law it’s also harrowing.

Snowdrops’ protagonist, Nick Platt, is a mid-30’s ex-pat corporate attorney in the “Wild West” years of Moscow. It’s the heyday of 2000 boom and money is flowing into Moscow as fast as oil wells are drilled. Nick’s law firm facilitates loans to quasi-gangster/quasi-corporate companies popping up throughout the country, and during his stint overseas, Nick becomes romantically involved with a beautiful Russian, Masha, and her sister. The sisters slowly involve Nick (or Kolya, as they call him) in a scheme which evolves as the novel pushes along, with Miller skillfully conveying the frozen Moscow wasteland, debauched nightlife, and moral ambiguity of the period throughout.

I recently read a negative review of Snowdrops which claims that the “twist” comes too soon; because the reader knows what Nick does not so early in the novel, Snowdrops, as a “thriller”, fails. Perhaps as a “thriller” Snowdrops is a failure. But the reviewer misses the point. Snowdrops is not a “thriller”, not really. The schemes involved are not particularly elaborate, and as the reviewer notes, are telegraphed early in the novel. Instead the real question the reader grapples with throughout is how an educated British corporate lawyer became so easily duped. In answering the question we circle back to why I found Snowdrops so harrowing.

Nick is not a particularly engaging character and maybe that’s why his decisions throughout the novel are so fascinating. There is no indication of much in the way of a personality; while the book reads as a manifesto of his descent in moral ambiguity (written to his current wife (finance?)) we get no sense of character behind Nick’s words. He has no true friends (sans an alcoholic reporter and a superior at his firm), and has a strange and awkward relationship with his family. Akin to his Russian surroundings he is cold and passionless. This is what I think the book is largely getting at – Nick is a man going through the motions; no purpose, and no love. There is one moment in novel when he mentions he may not make partner in his law firm, but it is a throwaway. His relationship with Masha, no matter how fabricated, gives his life a spark worth writing about; she takes him to clubs, involves him in threesomes - she makes him feel needed and loved. Far from the life of a mid-30’s corporate attorney, Masha makes Nick feel young, with a life ahead really worth living. His relationship with Masha, coupled with the allure of Moscow, are an oasis which Nick, as shell of man (no matter how educated), is willing to to keep alive, even if it means jettisoning reality and rationality.

Snowdrops left me sympathetic with Nick’s decisions, at least in some respects. That alone is troubling. You pity Nick. You wonder how many lives play out in this world along the same lines. Ninety hour weeks of diligence for a transaction that may never happen. That shot at partnership for ten years of silence. Moscow, in all its fake glitter, fake wealth, and fake smiles, gave Nick two years more truly alive then London could give him in a lifetime as a corporate attorney. Even in the face Nick’s moral’s decisions, when Masha’s ploy has long been laid out in front of him, when the time for willful blindness has ended, Nick yearns for Moscow, for Masha.

What does it say when you’d knowingly accept a forged life in place of your own? Snowdrops is no thriller. At least not for me.

In Defense of Books

I’ll start this by prefacing that I come from a literary family; my maternal grandparents founded STORY Magazine, and helped champion some of this century’s most influential American writers (the recently deceased J.D. Salinger being among them). So when my father surprised me with the three hundred dollar Amazon Kindle (I cite the price only because I find it absurd) for Christmas several months ago, I was conflicted.

On a recent vacation, while sitting poolside, I pulled the sleek little device out from my bag, and a friend immediately asked my thoughts on this, the future of the publishing industry. If the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad (a feminine hygiene product?) are, as prophesied, the future of the publishing industry, it’s going to be a sad, sad future. And then I proceeded to go on a bit of a rant, which may or may not have been fueled by several bloody marys.

I read every night before I go to sleep; if I don’t, I don’t sleep. It’s as simple as that. And I don’t read from the Kindle. There’s a stack of books by my bed, and I just go with whatever I feel like at the moment. Lately, I’ve fallen for the Library of Congress collections; 1,500 pages of thin, acid-free pages, that won’t yellow with age, and have little cloth bookmarks embedded in their spines. They’re authoritative editions for the most significant American authors of the last two centuries, and they’re great. Now back to the point.

There is something inherently satisfying about a paperback or a hardcover novel that the Kindle can’t replicate. There are the little things; the crease in the binding of that book you re-read every few years, chiseled so deeply down lining that when you flip through the pages your favorite passage magically appears. There are the scribbles in the margins, the bunny-eared corners, the coffee-ringed covers, and the browning sheets in your ten-year-old copy of The Fountainhead (which you never really got at the time, but told everyone you did anyway). And then there are the more important things; the feel of the book in your hand, the matte cover, the precision of the binding, the smell of paper. Books are for collecting, for sharing, for embracing. You lend your favorite book to a friend, you read a passage during a gathering (if you’re that kind of gal or girl), and then you pass them down to your children. They might even be worth something someday. Books surrounded me, and continue to surround me. They lined shelves in my childhood, and now they line shelves in my apartment.

Now take the Kindle. Admittedly, like everything these days, it is fast, and it is for the lazy, and the jetsetter. You no longer need to browse a book store because in thirty seconds your book is beamed, via Whispernet, to your Kindle. For something along the lines of half the price of the hard-copy (which again, just strikes me as absurd), you are guaranteed instant gratification, American hyper-capitalism style. But you can’t share this PDF you just downloaded for $ 9.99, and you can’t feel it (save for the cool metal and the plastic). I guess if you’re an environmentalist you can make the argument the Kindle and its ilk save a lot of trees. But any sense of experience and shared history is gone. And so a good portion of the joy leaves as well.

When you pick up a book you’re holding on to something that traces its lineage all the way back to Ancient Egypt and beyond. To monks illuminating Bibles candle-side during the Dark Ages. To a soldier in the trenches with his one of copy of whatever you want it to be. I told my friend the Kindle is very good for vacations, and it is. It’s light, it’s easy, and to be honest, no one would really want to borrow the Stephen King book I was reading anyway. But my point is this; books are important, and if you are lucky, they helped raise you. The way we shape them, and in turn, the way they shape us, is part of our history and our collective consciousness. To condense a library into a PDA or a Kindle, or a Nook, or whatever really cool, over-publicized device comes next is fine; just don’t do away with books.

I want to hand my children my beaten old copy of Goodnight Moon, grayed, and torn, and full of life, and see the look in their eyes when they drool, with equal ferocity, on the same pages my which my brother and I drooled. I want them to trace Harold’s purple line with their little fingers all the way across one piece of paper, hit a bump at the neatly stitched trench of the binding, and keep on going. I don’t want to hand them a piece of tempered steel with a chip and Whispernet access, which thanks them, ever so politely, for their $ 9.99.

Plus tax of course.

Dear Hollywood #2

Since you listened so very intently to my first suggestion (wait, no, you didn't), I’ve thought of another, maybe even better suggestion! Foolproof even! This one goes out specifically to all you pay-cable channels that can spend upwards 20 million dollars on things like Band of Brothers and Rome (so basically just you, HBO. Or Showtime, if you’re feeling lucky).

Two words. Ex. Machina. Well, that’s actually just Ex Machina, and it’s a story by Brian K. Vaughn (currently wrapping its run over on DC’s Vertigo imprint), who has a script circling agencies right now that's got everybody in a tizzy, and before this upcoming season, was a exec-producer on LOST (and writer of some of its finest hours). If you don’t know this guy now, and you know names like Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman (should you know them?), you will definitely know him soon. I think. Maybe.

Anyways. Ex Machina. Right. Ex Machina is a story of a civil engineer (Mitchell Hundred) working for NYC who stumbles upon an artifact attached to the Brooklyn Bridge. It blows up, scars his face with some nifty green looking circuitry, and he finds he can control machines. Talks to them even. At this point you’re thinking – dude, I know this script. It’s Jake 2.0 but not in Vancouver (well, it probably will be in Vancouver anyways, but we’ll get to that later). If I wanted to buy a shitty show off SyFy or UPN (like 10 years ago) I could (this is still an HBO exec thinking here)! But wait! So for a few years he [Hundred] tries to be a superhero. He translates well to screen because he’s one of a kind. His powers are somewhat believable (if fantastical), and budget-wise, for a non-procedural, they make sense. You can just green his eyes and those circuits (mostly hidden from plastic surgery), and change his voice when he’s talking to machines. Anyways, it would work.

But now comes the good stuff. So he ends up saving one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Genius! So BAM, already we’re in an alternate universe. Then he quits the superhero gig, which he was pretty crappy at. And runs for mayor. And wins! So now you’ve got an ex-superhero dealing with topical subjects (think The West Wing, but in Gracie Manor), with somewhat realistic super-human aspects (think Batman), PLUS, you get fanboys who try and connect the dots, and feed web-based meta-games and whatever time-consuming thing advertisers can think of (a-la LOST). And how do you get said fanboys? Well, and here’s where the show is elevated; there’s an arc. A BIG arc. Where did he get his powers? Turns out they’re from an alternate earth, and his powers we’re meant to be the first step in a war. And it all gets very creepy from there on out, but those can be the bread-crumbs. That’s the hook. BUT, the topicality of being the NYC mayor is what brings you back every week. And BAM! Get a good show-runner, cast Ron Livingston as Hundred (don’t worry, Defying Gravity lasted two weeks - if he'll do that, he'll do anything), cast Donald Sutherland as his mentor, somehow get Brian Cox and Ian McShane in the cast (because really, what don’t they elevate), and VIOLA! Insta’ Hit! And then make me show-runner.

P.S. Please film it IN NYC. Fringe moved this season to Vancouver along with everyone else, and it's really obvious. Like Colin Farrel in Phone Booth, everyone knows New York City streets aren't five cars wide, our pedestrian walkways aren't that clean, that's NOT what newstands look anymore (it's not 1985), we have hybrid cabs now, and the Crown Vic NYPD rides were sooooo early 90's.

Love, PSVIII

one more for the road

The McSweeney's slash fiction collection got me to pick up Sarah Manguso's memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (Picador, 2008), documenting her battle (beginning as a junior in college) with a wildly unpredictable and incapacitating autoimmune disease. It's an unforgettable read.

"The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of spacetime, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening."

A few more quotes

I've been so, so, busy. So busy, in fact, that I've only been able to read snap and flash fiction (woe is me).

Which is where I found these:

"POSTMODERN
You are reading
SATIRE
You are reading in a clown suit
SCI-FI
You are reading in a spaceship
SPECULATIVE
You do not exist in a spaceship
REVISION
We've been through this before"
--Deb Ulin Unferth

And from David Eggers:

"Well then, they ask again, what does air feel like? And we have to think about this. Air feels like air, we say, and the fishes laugh mirthlessly. Think! they say. Think, they say, now gentler. And we think and we guess that it feels like hair, thousands of hairs, swaying ever so slightly in breezes microscopic. The fishes laugh again. Do better, think harder, they say. It feels like language, we say, and they are impressed...The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older they say, and they touch our arms gently."

From How the Water Feels to the Fishes

I'm also a big fan of this one (Eggers again):

"In a moment of clarity you finally understand why boxers, who want so badly to hurt each other, can rest their hands on the shoulders of their opponent, can lean against one another like tired lovers, so thankful for a moment of rest."

and

"81

When the cannibal zombies come, the weakest die first. I turn off the film and think about my life. It is made of fear now. I begin running long distances, lifting weights, and training my mind to calm me in times of great stress. I work harder at my job, clear my apartment of clutter, and organize my finances. My friends have not watched the film. They praise my newfound strength and health."

- Sarah Manguso

They're all available in the McSweeney's box of short-short stories. (go check out their killer garage sale, going on now...if you haven't already)

a garden grows in Brooklyn (albeit in a truck)

Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, two brooklyn-based documentary filmmakers, previously raised 10,000 pounds of corn for their 2007 award-winning documentary King Corn.

This time around, frustrated with Brooklyn's lack of farmable land, the two took matters into their own hands and decided to fill their truck-bed with everything from arugula to tomatoes. They filmed the entire experience (including segments filmed via timelapse via solar-powered camera) and the final product should be released sometime this winter.

For now, Ellis and Cheney have a few preview snippets up and running, showing what a few dudes from Red Hook and bunch of smart friends can do with some extra time on their hands.



You can find out more about the project at http://www.wickedelicate.com/.

Or just walk around Red Hook. The truck should be pretty easy to spot.

Frank Bruni, food critic, comedian

( Frank Bruni, circa a 1984 STYX concert)

Next month, Frank Bruni, the celebrated Chief restaurant critic for the New York Times will be exiting his post for greener pastures (he's just moving over to the Times Magazine so I'm guessing he keeps his old office). This very fat, very gay foodie, whose ten-year-old picture is seared into the retinas of petrified waiters city-wide, also tends to be hilarious when doling out his famed "goose-eggs" (that damning zero stars).

(If your restaurant includes Ninja waiters, do not expect high grades from Frank Bruni)

Here's an excerpt from his review of Ninja, which recieved a 'Poor':

"On my first visit, when I tried a $150 tasting menu with a dearth of culinary highlights but a surfeit of ninja pageantry, they reliably garnished this gesture with loud expectorations of a putative courtesy that sounded more like a rebuke, the phonetic rendering of which would be something along the lines of "Go-mayn!""

It only gets better, I promise:

http://events.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/dining/26rest.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I'm also partial to this little zinger from Bruni's takedown of Kobe Club, which also seems to be inspired, at least in some degree, by Ninjas (2,000 samurai swords dangle upside down from the ceiling):

"If Akira Kurosawa hired the Marquis de Sade as an interior decorator, he might end up with a gloomy rec room like this. Will the last samurai to leave please turn on the lights?"

Eater.com has a complete rundown of Bruni's 21 goose-eggs lain over his four years and I'm planning on reading, and savoring, them all.

http://eater.com/archives/2009/07/countdown_bruni_goose_eggs.php#more

Quote of the Day

From James M. Cain (1892-1977), author of the hard-boiled novels The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Double Indemnity.

"I never feel that a city is really in the Big Time unless it has soap boxers damning the government in the parks, and parades that occasionally result in cracked heads. Why I regard such things as cosmopolitan I don't know, but I do."

From Paradise, 1933

"All grown-ups were children first. (But few remember it)."

There are certain books that you wander back to as an adult. Gravity pulls you to their dusty bindings, stuck deep somewhere in a bedroom closet. It can be years or even decades later, but when you finally open the pages they seem to be speaking a completely new language. It's as if the entire book changed along with you.

So you analyze the prose, picking the books apart word by word. How did I read this as child? I never remember it being so short! you think to yourself. Or maybe you just never had the need to read it so quickly. That feeling you had as a child, the one where you knew the book was telling you something, but you weren't really sure what it was, is long gone. Of course now you know what the author is saying. How could you not! The illustrations, which before had helped explain the book as much as the words are now nothing more than footnotes.

The Little Prince , by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, is one of these books. Exupéry seems to say there's no going back; no way to see the world as you once did. We grown-ups, blinded by things, our own self-importance, and as Exupéry writes, “numbers”, just don't have same good sense as children.

""If you tell grown-ups, "I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof...," they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, "I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs." Then they exclaim, "What a pretty house!""

As I was trying to recall my first time reading The Little Prince I felt as if Exupéry was telling me over and over gain to just give up. There’s no hope for us grown-ups, just as there's no hope for the narrator, living out his final days awaiting the Little Prince's return.

But maybe, years ago, I would have seen the Prince’s return as inevitable. And just like that, The Little Prince I had read so many years ago became a jumble of foreign words; a sealed tome, forever untranslatable.



From Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince:

""Nothing's perfect," sighed the fox. "My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens; people hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. So I'm rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...""

weekend kickoff

Just to kick-start the weekend (a day early, but whatever), the Toronto-based duo MSTRKRFT, featuring John Legend. Pretty sure this video isn't official, but that doesn't make it any less terrific.

MSTRKRFT – Featuring John Legend from vincent haycock on Vimeo.

dash snow, 1981-2009

( Dash tagging the Brooklyn Bridge, in 2007)

New York City and the art world lost one their brightest young stars Monday night, yet again to a drug overdose. I caught a few of Dash Snow's photos at the Whitney Biennial, and knew his family (to whom he was estranged) and younger brother when I was in grade school. It got me thinking about how many artists we've lost senselessly young and well before their prime (Elliot Smith and Jeremy Blake immediately spring to mind).

I'm often asked whose artwork plasters the background of this blog and I guess now would be as good a time as any to discuss it. The digital painting is by Jeremy Blake (another New York City-based artist), whose work was often described as "Color Field set in motion" (NYT, Jeremy Blake, 35, Artist Who Used Lush-Toned Video, Dies, Randy Kennedy, August 1, 2007). I first saw an installation of his exhibited at a Biennial (not the same year as Dash's - 2004, I think), but started seriously following him after Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Punch Drunk Love', where he contributed to the various abstract hallucination sequences.

In 2007, after the apparent suicide of his long-time girlfriend, Blake walked naked into the Rockaways' surf. A fisherman found his body five days later, his clothes and wallet left behind on the beach. Frustratingly, there wasn't much left by Blake - the only book I could find, and I think perhaps the only one that exists, is for Winchester, a video series he completed in 2005, which shifted into a more narrative-based realm and focused on San Jose's famed Winchester Mystery House.

(a still from Blake's Winchester series)

You can read about Blake's unfinished work, 'Glitterbeast', in the New York Times article linked below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/arts/design/29blak.html

an album for the summer

Discovery, the side band of Wes Miles (Ra Ra Riot) and Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), released their self-titled LP last week and it's definitely the catchiest thing I've heard all summer. I particularly love the looping work and build on So Insane.

Quote of the Day

After a long weekend on the west coast I picked up Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, edited by David L. Ulin. Los Angeles is a funny "city" (if you can even call it that); disjointed, surreal, and not particularly attractive (save for the beaches), I find myself liking it nonetheless.

I’ve pulled the below passage from Stewart Edward White’s (1873-1946) The Rules of the Game (included in the anthology). It conveys, spot on, my reaction to Los Angeles - the fact that it was written a hundred years ago and remains relevant, speaks more I think to the enduring character of metropolitan areas than to anything else.

““Well, what do you think of our fair young city?” he grinned.
“It’s got me going,” admitted Bob.
“Took me some time to find out where to get off at,” said Baker.
“When I found it out, I didn’t dare tell anybody. They mob you here and string you up by your pigtail, if you try to hint that this isn’t the one best bet on terrestrial habitations. They like their little place and they believe it in a whole lot, and they’re dead right about it! They’d stand right up on their hind legs and paw the atmosphere if anybody were to tell them what they really are, but it’s a fact. Same joyous slambang, same line of sharps hanging on the outskirts, same row, racket, and joy in life, same struggle: yes, and by golly! the same big hopes and same big enterprises and big optimism and big energies! Wouldn’t you like to be helping them do it?”
“What’s the answer?” asked Bob, amused.
“Well, for all its big buildings and its electric lights, and trolleys, and police and size, it’s nothing more nor less than a frontier town.”
“A frontier town!” echoed Bob.
“You think it over,” said Baker.”

Finally, a summer show actually worth watching

Summer, known for its long weekends, mindless blockbusters, and lazy strolls in the park, has always been viewed as something completely different for network television executives: a fertile dumping ground for shows that didn’t (NBC’s Kings and ABC’s Eli Stone are good examples), or wouldn’t (I’m a Faux Celebrity, Shoot Me in the Head with a Nail Gun springs to mind) make it during the other nine months of year. This three month period of television purgatory, akin to your fridge the day after Thanksgiving, is of the take it or leave it variety; you’re either eating leftovers, or you’re going hungry.

But as the major networks lick their collective wounds, trying to figure out a way to staunch their slow audience bleed, cable has quietly moved in on their territory. TNT and USA have thrown the harmless Burn Notice, HawthoRNe (“she’s a RN, who’s the SOUL of the ER”), and Royal Pains into the ring, and they’re uniformly forgettable. Maybe summer just wasn’t made for watching TV. But three weeks ago, HBO, in all its infinite wisdom, premiered the second season of its wonderfully addictive True Blood. The show, run by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, shares absolutely none of its predecessor’s pathos, which for a show about transsexuals, shape shifters, and vampires, is a good thing. Based on the ‘Southern Vampire Mysteries’, a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, Blood follows Sookie Stackhouse (played by Anna Paquin), a mind-reading, Bon Temps (a fictional Louisiana town) waitress, who falls in love with a two-hundred year old vampire. True Blood is steeped with allegory, and Ball (who is out), clearly wasn’t playing for subtlety. When a synthetic blood is discovered, successfully mimicking human blood types, vampires finally “come out of their coffins” (a line pulled directly from the show) and during the opening credits, “God Hates Fangs” is posted prominantly on a church billboard (pretty much summing up Bon Temp's opinion of vampires).

One would imagine that Blood was originally envisioned as HBO’s response to the mega-popular Twilight, but Blood shares none of the tween staple’s forced seriousness. Instead, True Blood flourishes in its own brand of absurdity. Sookie’s brother Jason (played by Ryan Kwaten), is a dumb as dumb gets, and by Season 2 Kwaten has nailed the furrowed brow of idiocy. As Jason’s roped into a retreat for the vampire-hating Church of the Sun, you’re just waiting for him to sleep with the minister’s wife - and promptly get caught (cue said furrowed brow of idiocy).

The beauty of Blood is that it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. While there are a few season-long mysteries, and horror scenes that aren’t actually scary (they’re usually just gag inducing), Ball’s smartly kept the show light and airy, with fleshed-out characters, high production values, and some much needed nudity. If True Blood were a junk food, it would be one of those chips with a big ‘No Trans Fats’ plastered on the front of the bag: you know it’s bad for you, but at least it could be worse.

True Blood airs Sunday at 9PM on HBO.

A few of my favorites clips:





The opening credits:

Quotes of the Day

I found today's quotes buried in a wicked Salon.com article (http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2009/06/18/impact/ ) for the new ABC summer mini-series Impact, starring James Cromwell, and airing this Sunday at 9. The two-parter was originally set for broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel (should give you a good gauge of quality right there), and was produced by a German production company (ok, now you should be running).

A few of the gems are below.

"We have no other choice, sir. You can't hide from gravity!"

"Look, I can't even answer the questions on 'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader,' but even I know the moon is not capable of manipulating gravity at this level." (This zinger is straight from the Chief of Staff)

and finally:

"Science has very much come under question these last few days. But, it's all I have."

Now lets pause for a moment and remember that someone was actually paid to write this. The lucky sap is Michael Vickerman, and yes, he went to film school. Some of the other writing credits under his belt include The Haunting of Sorority Row (winner of four Acadamy Awards) and Superfire - Inferno in Oregon (a paltry two Acadamy Awards). Sadly, I now feel I owe it to myself to watch his latest masterpiece.

"We are a part of something here that's going to be written about in the same context as Newton and Einstein. I know you don't want to miss out on that!" utters Natasha Henstridge towards the climax of the mini-series.

You're damn right I don't.

re-mixed movie trailers, YouTube style

I recently stumbled upon an entire sub-genre of YouTube clips where people take a considerable amount of time and effort to re-cut movies into trailers, completely changing the tone of the films. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are pretty amazing.

I've linked a few of my favorites below.


Shining

The Shining as a family rom-com, appropriately re-named Shining.

"Meet Jack Torrance. He's a writer looking for inspiration." Classic. Love the use of Solsbury Hill.




David Lynch's A Goofy Movie

Had this actually been made, God save the children. [there's also a great David Lynch's Dirty Dancing clip, if you've got the time]




Glen & Gary & Glen & Ross

And finally, my personal favorite, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross as a film dealing with tourettes syndrome (not much of a stretch there).

finally that Pixies/Godard mash-up everyone was clamoring for

Ok, so maybe there wasn't much demand for a Godard/Pixies mash-up, but there sure as hell should be now. I'm pretty sure the UK Surf remix is off of the B-sides album if anyone's interested (personally, I like it better than the original).