The Early Films of Jim Henson
Before the days of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson was an independent filmmaker in New York, making experimental films between commercial gigs. It was the mid-sixties. According to John Bell’s Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History, Henson was sharing a workshop space for a few months in the basement of a New York City library with a German sculptor and choreographer named Peter Schumann. Schumann specialized in avant-garde performances, entertaining crowds with masks, puppets, and postmodern dance, often employing these for political demonstrations.
In watching 1965’s “Time Piece,” seen above and recently unearthed by Metafilter, it’s difficult to consider it without Schumann in mind. The film played in New York theaters on a double bill with Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman and concerns itself with a man (played by Henson) being examined in a hospital. As the clock ticks away, a grand surrealistic array of experiential memories overtakes his existence. Gorillas bounce on pogo sticks. There is the quiet Kermit-like plea of “Help!” Chickens emerge in strip clubs. And all this is intercut with optically printed pixellated squares.
The film is set to a intermittent drum rhythm that echoes the heartbeat of time. What’s particularly intriguing is that, according to David P. Campbell’s The Complete Inklings, “Time Piece” so captured Campbell’s imagination that the film was shown at an a seminar at the Minnesota Statewide Testing Program annual conference, with Henson’s film projected on one screen and the test results of a random individual projected on another. The idea was to show Henson’s film, with Campbell announcing to the students, “We should always remember that there is a person behind each of these test scores; to make that point dramatically, here is one person’s test scores and here is a product of his considerable imagination.”
This permissive cultural climate permitted Henson to make “The Cube” in 1969, a teleplay that independent filmmaker Vincenzo Natali appears to have handily pilfered from.
A protagonist, known only as “The Man in the Cube,” is trapped inside a cube of white rectangular panels, with strange individuals who enter and exit through other doors. This premise gave Henson the opportunity to explore a wide variety of topics: racism, sexism, the realm between reality and fantasy. There is even reference to the fourth wall. At one point, a professor addresses the man, pointing out that he is in a television play.
Believe it or not, “The Cube” was commissioned for a television series called Experiment in Television, a now forgotten program that aired on NBC between 1968 and 1971. This series came about because NBC needed filler material to provide late Sunday afternoon programming when the football season had ended. And they decided, quite amazingly, to provide a venue without commercials for documentaries and experimental films.
In the end, it was public television that secured Henson’s rise to fame. But today, unless you’re as squeaky-clean as Ken Burns, your prospects for national exposure are slim. Now that the first season of Sesame Street has been issued on DVD, it’s been issued with a parental advisory reading, “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” The idea of children running around an inner city, looking to learning as a way out, is apparently too threatening a concept.
Given this drastic shift in priorities — the unusual idea of commissioning an experimental film for a testing conference, the now antediluvian notion of creating a space on national television where filmmakers can pursue alternative ideas, and the censure on anything slightly offensive to “suit the needs” of children — one is forced to contemplate the current media atmosphere. Certainly, there is YouTube and the Internet. But this online landscape increasingly values views — and thereby advertising revenue — over notions that are not popular or lucrative, and one wonders just how tomorrow’s Hensons will thrive. Of course, any artist who feels compelled to create will not let any obstacle stop him. But by hindering the spectrum of expression with our priorities (what sells, what’s safe, et al.), I’m wondering if we’re closing the floodgates to those who might have new and innovative ways to get a mass audience excited about the world around us.
Hillary’s Tears, Our Tears
Lorrie Moore’s naive essay on Hillary Clinton not only demonstrates the unspoken precept that skilled fiction writers are sometimes remarkably simplistic when they write about politics, but deploys the same scripted liberalism that every progressive is now expected to chant to peers in coffeehouses. The formula, it seems, boils down to this: Hillary Bad, Obama Good.
Now I’m not exactly a Hillary lover. Clinton waffled from a 1993 universal health care plan which mandated all employers to provide health care for employees to her latest “universal” plan, which shifts the mandatory financial burden to individual citizens. But a proper universal health care program is single-payer, regulated by the government, and doesn’t abdicate the spoils to HMOs. Clinton is also the senator who received the most money from HMOs in the 2008 election cycle. (Obama was second.)
Like every good left-leaning American, I have been seduced by the seemingly limitless reserves of Obama’s charisma: his smooth handling of Bill O’Reilly’s arrogant attack dog antics, his adroit response to anti-abortion protesters, insert your magical Obama moment here.
The man is slick. Slicker than Bill Clinton. I firmly believe that he can be the next President. He looks good. Too good.
In comparing Obama with Clinton, Moore writes that “unlike her, he is original and of the moment. He embodies, at the deepest levels, the bringing together of separate worlds. The sexes have always lived together, but the races have not.”
I wonder if Moore remains aware that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, women earn 77 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make. (The disparity, incidentally, is better in Washington, DC, where women make 91 cents to the male dollar. This may explain why Capitol Hill remains somewhat out-of-touch on this issue. An Equal Rights Amendment may provide succor to these problems.) Or maybe Moore remains unaware that young women are earning degrees at a higher rate than men do.
This certainly doesn’t reflect a case where the sexes “have always lived together.” Unless, of course, we’re talking garden-variety cohabitation. And while Obama may talk the talk, I fail to see how Obama’s legislation record brings together separate worlds in any way that is substantially different from Hillary Clinton. The oft bandied boast is that Obama was not Senator in 2002 and therefore unable to vote for the congressional resolution authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq. But what’s not to suggest that within this climate of fear, Obama wouldn’t have done so? (The record demonstrates that John Edwards also voted for it. Kucinich and Paul did not.)
The distinction then is predicated on retroactive speculation. Which is a bit like seriously considering the ridiculous question Bernard Shaw asked of Michael Dukakis during the 1984 Democratic presidential debates: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Kitty Dukakis was not raped and murdered. Obama was not Senator during 2002. Nonetheless, it is an American political tradition to rate presidential candidates according to what they may have done under certain circumstances, as opposed to a more reasonable survey of what they are likely to do based on their past records.
So ultimately the difference between Obama and Clinton comes down to charisma. To watch Obama in action is to experience the most pleasant and capable of political machines. He’ll jazz up a crowd in minutes and give them the fleeting sense that they can change the world. But who is the wizard behind the curtain? Progressives — including myself — were so eager to fixate upon Karl Rove, but why do we fail to apply the same standards to those who run Obama’s campaign?
Last week, Hillary Clinton welled up on camera and was roundly ridiculed. The question arose over whether this was sincere. Cruel YouTube parodies surfaced soon after. For some, the tears confirmed the inevitable. Here are some of the YouTube comments:
I really feel that Hillary Clinton is a worhless [sic] piece of shit.
i hate this woman
This bitch won because she got on national television with her fake crocodile tears in front of million of viewers.
Yea what a fucking cow. She should be making pizza.
This is a very EVIL fricken human being…She should be ashamed of herself! If she had any heart at all she would finally tell the truth!
Go and fuck Bill.. instead of cheating people
Hillary Clinton is a worthless piece of shit.
And so on.
This was not, however, a Muskie moment, even if an op-ed columnist like Newsweek’s Karen Breslau was keen to dredge up the droplet that careened down Muskie’s cheek and sealed his political fate. Until the primary results dictate otherwise, Clinton is still very much in the game.
What was not factored in Breslau’s article was the double standard with regard to gender. I find myself being one of the few who remains suspicious about never seeing a gaffe from Obama. Real humans screw up. But presidential politics demands perfection or, as Bush’s two victories confirm, a guy you can drink a beer with.
The cult of personality remains so seductive that even adept writers like Moore offer this foolishness: “it is a little late in the day to become sentimental about a woman running for president. The political moment for feminine role models, arguably, has passed us by.”
On the contrary, the present political moment is very much about whether a president has the right to appear sentimental before the cameras, which in turn is very much predicated upon whether the candidate is a man or a woman. It does not matter what Hillary Clinton’s positions are. What matters most of all is whether or not the “bitch” or “the worthless piece of shit” fabricated her tears.
The question we should be asking is just why these gratuitous issues of telegenic interpretation are deflecting more pressing concerns, such as platforms and positions, and why even the best of us are happily swallowing the bait.
“Jesus Came First!”
Sherri Shepherd of The View has uttered, in all seriousness, that “Jesus came first.” Shepherd seems to believe that, in the great collective whole of human existence, there was no religion before Christianity. One must ask how such an ignorant fuckwit was picked from the available pool of candidates and hired as co-host. Granted, one does not expect penetrating insight from The View, but surely there are minimum intelligence standards. Surely, there is some producer on the show who is doing more than tearing out hair and begrudgingly accepting this dunce as a talking head for our time. Because this baffling statement truly represents the nadir of talk shows. I’d expect such a conclusion from a four-year-old who still believes in Santa Claus and doesn’t know any better, not a forty year old adult who has had decades to form her conclusions. But there it is. “Jesus came first!” A statement as foolhardy as shouting “The world is flat!” at a geography convention.
If this were a just world, Shepherd would be employed at a full service gas station somewhere, assuming of course that her diseased mind was capable of understanding that inserting the nozzle does not come first (although Jesus DOES come first and he shall save you from rising gas prices!) and that you actually unscrew the cap before putting in the nozzle. Of course, since this is a task repeated multiple times throughout the day, perhaps after the thirty-seventh time, she might catch on. Then again, maybe not. Because as seen in the clip, when presented with the facts by her peers, Shepherd is incapable of even confessing that her co-hosts may be right.
Why the hostility? Because this isn’t just about the glorification of ignorance, but the glorification of people who refuse to accept anything but their ignorance. A remotely thinking person would stop in his tracks and realize that they’ve made a mistake or consider that facts and evidence may have some bearing on maintaining a mind set. And here’s the thing. It’s not as if Shepherd is being asked to weigh in on the Jungian influence on advertising or distinguish between an AK-47 and an M16, but she’s being asked to respond to a basic fact that anyone with a basic elementary school education knows! In continually employing a numbskull as dumb and dense as Shepherd’s on the show, The View’s producers are complicit in celebrating one of the most abhorrent qualities that has pervaded this country. Maybe Mike Judge was right. If we continue to accept such rampant stupidity without protest, at this rate, we’ll be queuing up for Ass: The Movie in a lot less than 500 years.
Unintentionally Hilarious BBC Pilot
And here’s Part 2.
Mainly for Men was a disastrous 1969 pilot in which the BBC attempted to get in touch with “what men wanted” by filming this magazine show. The result involved awkward attempts at interviews, how to fill up your leisure time with shark hunting, and even a song that you could sing along to (with a blonde polishing furniture in the foreground): “Men say they don’t just want little to make up an ideal woman / They talk about hair, the clothes that you wear, as part of the ideal woman!” (At the end of this ridiculous number, the host says, “And very nice too. The only way to do the dusting, I can tell you that.”)
In Part 2, you can groove along with the guy snapping his fingers along as sitar music plays in the back as he photographs a model.
Watching this today, one wonders what people will make of Maxim in forty years.
(via MeFi)
Andy Kaufman on “The Dating Game”
Look Carefully and You Can See the Gust Blowing Through Her Head
BSG “Razor”: Discouraging Signs
Heather Havrilesky: “‘Razor’ is neither the fascinating, heart-pounding ‘Battlestar’ of our fondest memories nor the cheesy, ‘All Along the Watchtower’-lyrics-spewing ‘Battlestar’ of our worst nightmares. But those hungry for a glimpse of Starbuck and Apollo will eat it up faster than a leftover-turkey-and-stuffing sandwich.”
Okay, let’s come clean and get geeky. I don’t watch much television, but, in the interests of keeping reasonably au courant with contemporary culture, BSG is one of the four shows I keep up with. Last season was pretty damn dreadful — the kind of soporific writing reminiscent of people whose exposure to science fiction doesn’t extend past the purported Golden Age of Science Fiction from the 1950’s. (The “expertise” of Dave Itzkoff comes to mind in considering these flaccid plots, particularly that wretched flashback-laden boxing episode.) And the fact of the matter is that the mealy-mouthed metaphor of a leftover sandwich simply isn’t enough to exonerate the egregious missteps in last season’s finale. Sure, I’ll watch out of morbid curiosity. But someone needs to demand better standards from Ron Moore. Perhaps the WGA strike will force Moore to ruminate for a while and find his mojo again. (Or maybe he might want to try writing a few episodes instead of sitting it out as “developer” or “executive producer.” Or does he wish to become another Rick Berman?)
I cannot believe that “it’s pretty impossible to keep that level of intensity going on for too long, and there’s no way that ‘Battlestar’ could escape falling into a repetitive formula.” Does Havrilesky so easily forget that Moore once had the balls to recast the series in dramatic fashion at the end of the second season, only to allow the show to deteriorate into derivative third season episodes once the crew escaped New Caprica? He lacks the courage to lay down the one card he has to play: the discovery of Earth, which presumably will occur in the forthcoming fourth and final season. Maybe he knows that his chips are up.
Further n.b.: I am by no means watching this show that closely, but if Havrilesky cannot remember the Centurions (and that would be with an O, not an A; are the Salon copy editors asleep at the desk?) who have appeared at various points throughout the series — largely employed in planetary surface battles — then one wonders whether Havrilesky is even paying attention.
Peter and David
Nudge Nudge
A compendium of 150 Monty Python Sketches. (via Quiddity)
Did Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson Rip Off Grant Naylor?
In consideration of British comedy history, here are two video clips. The first clip is from “The End,” the first episode of Red Dwarf, written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor and produced in 1987:
The second clip is “The Exam,” written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, taken from the first episode of Mr. Bean and produced in 1989:
Both of these scenes are funny, but there are a number of striking similarities: the effort to blow into the paper, the cheater flipping over the paper and being surprised that there is information on both sides of the exam, and the cheater closing his eyes in disbelief only to open his eyes and see the exam in front of him.
The National Post reported that Mr. Bean was conceived as a test character in 1987. Sketches for Mr. Bean had apparently been performed on stage. But in this interview, Atkinson revealed, “And so we thought wouldn’t it be interesting to bring them to Montreal, which we did in 1989. We tried them out on basically a French-speaking audience. And then we did the English-speaking side.”
The big question here is what Mr. Bean sketch he’s talking about. Was “The Exam” one of the candidates? According to the Just for Laughs page:
The sketch, which was in the form of a lecture on dating techniques, was first tested out at one of the French galas. It was met with such an overwhelming positive response, that it was added to the HBO special, and was met with the same response. BBC brass watched the tape of his performance at Juste pour rire and the following year Atkinson’s “Mr. Bean” TV series aired for the first time and made Atkinson an international star.
This suggests that “The Exam” may have been written sometime in 1989 — shortly after the BBC commissioned the first thirty-minute installment of Mr. Bean. A version of this sketch was also included in a Rowan Atkinson one hour HBO special, which was performed and filmed on December 19th and 20th, 1991 in Boston’s Huntington Theater.
Still, I have to wonder whether Curtis and Atkinson were inspired, in part, by Red Dwarf. Obviously, hot off the success of Blackadder, they were very concerned about whether Mr. Bean was going to draw a major audience. But did they see Red Dwarf and abscond with a few of Grant Naylor’s ideas just after signing on with the BBC? And what do Grant and Naylor have to say about this?
The Caves of Androzani
Yes, the mercenaries clearly use Super Soakers as their weapons. Yes, Sharaz Jek is nothing more than a Phantom of the Opera ripoff. Yes, the “technology” hasn’t dated all that well. Yes, one of the bad guys speaks in Shakespearean soliloquies directed at the camera (and, really, why can’t we see more of this on television?). Yes, Peri’s “American” accent shifts into British at certain spots. Yes, the death of one of the supporting characters in Episode 3 could have easily been improved upon with Adobe After Effects. Yes, they had no budget. But, man, this is some pretty fun stuff — in large part, because the script and the acting are pretty fantastic under the circumstances.
Witness the Doctor Who episode, “The Caves of Androzani” on YouTube: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] Part 11] [Part 12]
Ellen DeGeneres, Scab
The Hollywood Reporter: “DeGeneres skipped filming on Monday in support of her writers but returned to work Tuesday despite the strike, though she said she missed and supported her scribes.”
Apparently, Ms. DeGeneres does not know the meaning of a strike, which involves not working until you come to a resolution. Showing “support” for writers one day, only to work the next, is not striking. I don’t care how many tears Ellen DeGeneres wishes to shed over this or dogs. These are the actions of a self-serving bimbo without integrity. Her pathetic statement can be found here.
DeGeneres, incidentally, is a WGA member. Whether the WGA will initiate proceedings to remove her from the guild or consider her a special case remains to be seen. But if the WGA lets this fly and opts for the latter, then I’ll have little faith in the WGA’s powers of representation.
[UPDATE: Nikki Finke has obtained two letters from AFTRA thanking DeGeneres for her support. She's also cited WGA's Minimum Basic Agreement, which excludes material written by a presenter for a comedy-variety program broadcast. Maybe so, but it's a pretty shitty thing to carry forth with "support" for writers one minute and the filming of a television program the next. You don't see Leno, Letterman, or Stewart carrying on these days.]
The Impact of the Writers Strike
Variety; “The canaries in TV’s creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Comedy Central’s latenight stalwarts ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.”
It’s 1988 all over again. And there’s a part of me quite curious about how long it will go on, how patient audiences will be for reruns, and whether the late-night television titans might at long last be revealed as mimetic melonheads desperately reliant they are upon their writers.
The difference this time is that this WGA strike is going down in the Internet age, with the largest possible depository of non-union talent showing off their wares at YouTube.
Sure, 95% of everything is crap. But what if the networks and the WGA can’t come to an agreement? Let’s say that the strike ends up going on for longer than six months, which would surely make the promised spate of sixteen uninterrupted episodes of Lost impossible and piss off the fans. That’s certainly sticking it to the man. But is it possible that a spate of enterprising nonunion talent, shut out by the WGA system, might drastically court the networks during this strike? And if they do not approach the networks or the networks do not approach them in scab-like manner, then perhaps television audiences, desperately searching for new material, might be drawn to either the Internet or reading books to find new stories.
In other word, this WGA strike couldn’t have happened at a better time. As the relationship between old media and new media remains transcendent and ever-evolving, I’m wondering if we won’t see some serious shock waves if the WGA strike isn’t resolved within two months. Unless, of course, the WGA strike proves the inevitable: that current television audiences are quite happy to get their reality TV fix. Which would be considerably ironic, given that this was precisely what the WGA has gone to the mat for.
Geek Alert! Geek Alert!
Peter Davison will reprise his role as the Fifth Doctor. And yes an “Eeeeeeeeeeeek!” is in order for this.
Babylon Fields
The pilot for Babylon Fields, the zombie crime drama that was noted on these pages a few days ago, now lives in its full 42 minute glory on Google Video. Watch this while you can. One never knows the vagaries of lawyers who will want to take this down.
I’m Too Easily Amused
Dark Shadows reenacted by dolls.
Wouldn’t She Have Learned About Joints in the Joint?
I don’t know what’s funnier: the mad genius who teamed up Amy Sedaris with Martha Stewart in the kitchen or the fact that Stewart doesn’t know what bongwater is. (via Quiddity)
For Tyra Banks, “Experts” Are Plastic, Unreal & Non-Threatening People
Violet Blue: “As I told the producer (who I saw quite quickly), I will not lie about my appearance or who I am, for anyone or anything. It does my readers, my listeners, my viewers, my friends and the sex-positive, non-judgmental message I bring and represent a disservice to lie. And, I told her, I have to look at myself in the mirror when I wake up the next day and look at myself. Would she have me change my appearance to look ‘less Asian’ to seem more of an expert?”
Thirty Years of Jumping the Shark
And Speaking of Red Dwarf…
…apparently, you can watch every episode online. (via Quiddity)
Lionel Shriver Attacks British Television
Scotsman: “And Shriver, 50, condemned game shows that ‘create cruelty and humiliation,’ endless reruns of Friends, weight-loss programmes, a ‘lunatic profusion of British property shows’ and ‘the worst of American exports.’”
“Hey” is for Horses
I’ve noticed a troubling trend in television dialogue for two characters to begin their conversation like this:
CHARACTER A: Hey.
CHARACTER B: Hey.
Now “Hey” is a perfectly reasonable word. I use it myself. But what bothers me so much about this recurrent exchange is that the actors always deliver their “Hey” like some languorous hipster, generally when in the middle of working on a farm or meditating on a porch or doing some kind of “thinking” in relation to an emotional exercise. Never mind the age or the character relationship. The double “Hey” is used among couples who have been together for multiple years, siblings, between shopkeepers and customers — in short, it now serves in lieu of a name. It is also used when one character has returned from some pressing errand and has just finished talking with the other character only an hour before! Instead of even a rudimentary exchange like:
CHARACTER A: Everything okay?
CHARACTER B: (silence, as CHARACTER B ponders death of a loved one)
CHARACTER A: Is there anything I can do?
CHARACTER B: Leave me alone.
we get
CHARACTER A: Hey.
CHARACTER B: Hey.
No sense of empathy. No sense of giving someone space. At the end of the day, there’s the lazy television writer’s trusted “Hey,” which signals to the audience that the show will go on and we will be right back for a message from our sponsors. And the characters don’t even bother to refer to each other by their first names!
Well, I’m sorry, but this is lazy writing. “Hey” has become the detached crutch that has now replaced beats and silent emotional reaction. Apparently, television space must be filled up with dialogue or an action scene at every moment, even if it’s a monosyllabic word. And instead of conveying excitement, the “Hey” is drawn out, as if Southern Californian vernacular could be found in every scenario.
Perhaps the solution to all this is for fans of television to count the number of “Heys” in any given episode and to publicly shame these writers into writing more convincing dialogue.
Russell T. Davies
I have seen the last episode of the third season of Doctor Who and I am close to vomiting. I didn’t know how much I cared about the series until now and I sincerely hope that the rumors are true — that Davies has decided to leave Doctor Who and will never return again. I’ve had enough. For all that any long-time Who fan complained about John Nathan-Turner, the cheesy crap under Nathan-Turner was fucking Masterpiece Theatre compared to this flamboyant tripe. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see this clip, in which Doctor Who has been cheapened beyond any rudimentary level of dramatic redemption. It’s a pity, because John Simm is a promising Master. Russell T. Davies appears to have sabotaged a science fiction staple. This is, in many ways, worse than the Six Feet Under episode, “That’s My Dog,” in which another great series was hijacked. To dwell on the subject further is to unleash a mad torrent of violence upon an inanimate object that I will only call “Russell,” only to injure my hand and pay an expensive hospital bill.
Russell T. Davies, you fucking wanker. How could you do this? How could you destroy a sizable chunk of the human population in the present day? How could you write scenes in which characters effortlessly infiltrate major executive scenarios? How could you write something so adverse to the show’s quirkiness, wit, intelligence, and charm?
Christ, it’s only a television show, I know. I have only late-night Dirty Harry impulses to go on. But this two-part finale is the work of a talentless megalomaniac and I wish that justice of some sort could be effected. But it can’t.
Guess it’s time to read James Joyce instead.
The End of Raucous Late Night Television
And here’s Part 2 of the John Lydon vs. Tom Snyder exchange.
RELATED: Wendy O. Williams smashing a television set and Snyder interview. More on Williams’s Milwaukee charges here. Also, Williams vs. Mrs. Fields.
TANGENTIALLY RELATED: Weird Al Yankovic’s first national television appearance — on The Tomorrow Show — performing “Another One Rides the Bus.”
It’s also worth noting that Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show originally had the 12:30 AM time slot that NBC than gave to a rising standup comedian named David Letterman, who replaced Snyder’s thoughtful and often explosive interviews with “Stupid Pet Tricks” and interviews that involved Letterman more or less slipping into whatever celebrity junket was handed to him. Snyder would return to television thirteen years later — albeit in a more subdued form — to The Late, Late Show for a four year run. He eventually left, and he would once again see his show tailored for mass consumption — with the host replaced with Craig Kilborn and later Craig Ferguson. One might convincingly argue that Ferguson brings at least some smarts to the populist late night talk show. But when one considers the above explosive exchange with John Lydon and Wendy O. Williams’s smashing of television sets, it becomes clear that the days of late night television which attempted to grab viewers by the lapels or seriously challenge conventions are over.
Today, the only real intimate talk show interview — without a studio audience — is Charlie Rose. But compare Rose’s interviews, which involve Rose sucking up to his guests, with those of Dick Cavett’s, who regularly challenged his guests. Or Tom Snyder. Or even Mike Douglas. (Or even the early days of Bob Costas.) Television, which once specialized from time to time in provocative conversation, is now more content to waffle in conversational and intellectual mediocrity. And today’s 18-34 demographic, growing up without Snyder or Cavett, have no idea what they’re missing. (Terry Gross pretends to be a follower of this tradition, but as Curtis White has convincingly argued, she is not a true representative of public opinion.)
The interviews that I conduct for The Bat Segundo Show are an attempt to return to this abandoned long-form approach. I don’t claim to be as good as Cavett or Snyder. But I do hope that one day, radio and television will return to the conversation as a journalistic form, unsullied by avarice and the quids pro quo of publicists. Fortunately, the Internet presents an opportunity for today’s journalists to correct this considerable imbalance.
The Future of Television
Listen for the scream near the end when she gets the network wrong.
What the Dickens?
Once again, John Freeman offers a preposterous essay. In bemoaning the ostensible popularity of The Sopranos, Freeman writes, “[C]ritics were calling Chase the Dickens of our times.” And from there, Freeman’s article can be summarized as followed (and it’s best if you read the next four sentences in a high-pitched voice to get the hysterical timbe right): Oh noes! The novel is dead! The sky is falling! The literary landscape is in trouble because of uncited empirical evidence!
Again, Freeman refuses or is simply incapable of citing specific examples to prove his thesis. Maybe it’s because calling out Michael M. Thomas or Alessandra Stanley — writers who both offered this not so unreasonable comparison — involves taking a stand against fellow New York journalists, something that runs counter to Freeman’s notorious streak of passive-aggression.
But no matter. If we examine the Dickens comparison to David Chase closely, it’s not as unsound as it seems. After all, Dickens’s work arrived in installments, much like television episodes, with Dickens often corralling mammoth plot threads as he wrote (ergo, his much cited tendency for coincidental run-ins) and tailoring his novels in accordance with reader reaction. Consider the case of The Old Curiosity Shop, surely the most reviled of Dickens’s works. (As Oscar Wilde once famously noted, “One would have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) While Dickens’s close friend John Forster kept his editorial contributions fairly low-key in his Life of Dickens, it was Forster who read all of Dickens’s proofs and who gave Dickens considerable advice. Observing the close audience reaction to Little Nell, he pointed out to Dickens that he would have to kill her off.
With Forster’s hand in the Dickens editing process, what makes him any different from a script editor or a more benign version of an HBO studio executive? And with the great controversy over whether the Sopranos finale was any good, what makes the Sopranos finale any less different from the way people reacted to Little Nell’s death?
Further, if an acclaimed television series can’t be compared with a Victorian serial, then what the Dickens is David Simon doing recruiting crime novelists like George Pelacanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane to write episodes for The Wire? Surely, there is some convergence afoot. People like Simon wish to inject television with a more ambitious quality: the contained serial with deaths and developments that television has sometimes failed to live up to.
Unable to discover an explicit connection between the apparent fall of books and the rise of television, Freeman quotes the oft-cited NEA “Reading at Risk” study — an examination which collected its data in 2002. But what business does Freeman have drawing upon data from five years ago to contextualize a series of unsubstantiated delusions he views as a present-day problem? After all, it’s the “white-wine sipping yuppies” who are “talking.” Pretty soon, it will be the rabbits in Freeman’s walls confessing their unanimous preference for Edie Falco over Edward Falco.
And there is this preposterous leap: “To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people’s outlook on the world, and so far only George Saunders and David Foster Wallace have adequately described the way this framework is murdering our language.” What of Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, with its hip-hop neologisms and affluent fat man protagonist? What of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which used a bitter divorce to comment upon said language? What of Mathew Sharpe’s Jamestown, in which an apocalyptic scenario is predicated entirely upon trade and communication? I could be here all day rattling off titles. Is Freeman simply not paying attention to the current literary environment?
There is no need to plunge further. Freeman’s piece is uninformed and hysterical poppycock of the first order — the kind of nonsense I’d expect to be published in a college newspaper, not The Guardian.
“predators”
This might seem an incongruous thing for me to say, having written a book in which a predatory high school teacher plays a prominent role, but I feel quite bad for the guys who get trapped on To Catch a Predator (which I’ve been watching online for the last fifteen minutes, prompting this post). As Judith Levine wrote in Harmful to Minors, the notion that all sex between someone above the age of 16 (or 17, or 18, depending on state law) and someone below that age is criminal, abusive, exploitative, or traumatic is totally irrational. Some of the guys on the MSNBC show clearly are predators, but others are probably just sad, lonely people. They are lonely and online and someone pretending to be interested in them sends a message (it is legal for the decoys to approach the “predators” rather than wait for an approach, I believe; if I am wrong about this, someone correct me). Also, the notion that they are all pedophiles seems wrong to me. A pedophile is someone who is aroused by preadolescents. At 13, 14, 15, and up, most people are biologically mature. It is certainly socially and cultural innapropriate to feel sexual desire for them, but not biologically “unnatural.” Was Edgar Allan Poe a pedophile? I feel like there are many other examples–extraordinary people in history whose carnal lives I could have used in that sentence rather than Edgar Allan Poe. I think the show ruins lives unnecessarily, although I don’t deny that it may have prevented some future crimes as well.
Cribbing for Couric
Editor and Publisher: “A CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal.”
The Current State of Televised American Discourse
C-C-Catch the Wave
So let me get this straight. Max Headroom, a major cyberpunk cultural item that aired for two seasons on ABC in the mid-1980s, is unavailable on DVD. Yet a handful of episodes are available for free on AOL? I don’t understand the logic behind this, but I know what I’ll be downloading very soon. There is also the V television series (as opposed to the more interesting miniseries), a smattering of Wonder Woman episodes, and even Freddy’s Nightmares, which I’m confident is an unintentional laugh riot. (via Fimoculous)
[UPDATE: Actually, it's too good to be true: "Your PC is not running a supported Windows OS (Windows XP Professional x64 and Vista x64 are not currently supported). You can not buy and download videos." To hell with AOL.]
