Seems to me that successful television drama creators/show runners have some traits in common. They’re not-quite-alpha males, a bit neurotic, definitely obsessive, can be quirky and difficult, and often have an vexed relationship with fans where they deliberately obfuscate the creative process of creating the tv show in question, purposefully sending the most devoted of fans into a tizzy. As Buster Bluth would say, “It’s like you get off on withholding.” Show runners I can think of who fit this description, or close to it, include David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire), Chris Carter (The X Files) and perhaps David Lynch (Twin Peaks).
So thank goodness for Matt Weiner, creator of Mad Men. Weiner has a lot of the same characteristics of those other guys, except that he’s crazy in love with his characters and isn’t afraid to show it. He dishes like he’s talking about his ex-girlfriends in a two-part interview with the Daily Beast that was published after the third season ended. Here’s part one and part two. Don’t click if you haven’t already watched the third season finale. It’s not Spoiler City, it’s like freaking Spoiler Major Metropolitan Statistical Area up in there. Juicy stuff.
Maybe a snapshot of artfully painted woman isn’t the same thing as the Huffington Post’s publishing linkbait pics of nekkid ladies, but Jezebel might do well to avoid putting it next to a critique of HuffPo for that very action.
I stopped regularly watching the Daily Show not long after the Colbert Report debuted in 2005. I’d been feeling bored by the Daily Show for a while, and Stephen Colbert brought a much-needed sense of absurdity to his spin-off. As a Daily Show loyalist for many years (since Kilborn!), I was surprised that I gave the show up so easily. But I did. Jon Stewart’s increasingly smug takedowns of cable-tv lowlifes like Jim Cramer in recent years sealed the deal for me. I didn’t watch Comedy Central for sanctimony, no matter how deserving the target. By joining in the mudslinging, the Daily Show became part of the same machine that created and fed the likes of Jim Cramer and Bill O’Reilly.
One risk of having two daily news satires that pull material from the zeitgeist is that they’ll repeat bits. Last week was a good example. So riddle me this, who did the bit on the boy who wouldn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance better? You know my vote – the more concise one.
Twilight heart-throb and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford loved his Argentine Firecracker soul-mate so much that he abandoned his wife, kids and that annoying job (Republican leader of a slave state) just to pile up frequent-flier miles and bang his mistress with romance. But now the mean twerps at the state’s “ethics panel” have examined Sanford’s behavior and charged him with 37 crimes, hooray! But the state attorney general won’t necessarily pursue this, because come on, does he look black? (link)
Wonkette never suffers for material, but the last few months have been lacking as editor Ken Layne took off to work on a book project. No one has really mastered Wonkette’s peculiar form the way he has. His writing has a special virulence that always stuns. Ken delivered this soupçon of lunacy earlier today. Thanks Ken – and welcome back.
It’s too bad that we don’t take photos at funerals. This weekend in Keswick, distant cousins all came to Cloverfields for their grandmother/great aunt’s funeral. The church was so full some of us stood outside and listened via a loudspeaker. At the farm after the service, we sat in the back yard of the big house and ate food brought by neighbors as red leaves dropped on tablecloths. After the sun set, those of us who were left sat around a bonfire as the stars emerged.
The family graveyard contains ancesters going back a couple hundred years, and now it has Doris, too. I stood on the back porch and took a few pictures of the 300+ crowd and the mountain with my iphone. But Doris was such a modest woman I doubt she would have wanted me to share any photos of such a to-do. Instead, here’s a photo of the view from beyond the yard, the garden and the graveyard. I saw it a thousand times when I was in college, but it’s one you can never get tired of seeing.
Famous people I have seen in their natural habitats include: Debbie Harry on Broadway near Houston, noted fashion photographer Nigel Barker in a Greenwich playground, Josh Hartnett in a bar making out with an anonymous model type, the guy who played Artie on the Sopranos in an Italian restaurant (!) in Brooklyn the day before the Sopranos finale (!!), the guy from Quantum Leap on an airplane to LA, and Colin Quinn outside a comedy club having a smoke break – not sure if that one counts. In D.C. I have seen New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and disgraced former New York Times reporter Judy Miller as well as the cast of the Real World, and I know none of those count.
But probably my favorite celebrity sighting was in Griffith Park in LA a couple of years ago, and I didn’t even recognize the guy. Remember the nurse from Arrested Development, the Australian one who urged Buster to wake up from his coma, which he was faking in order to avoid testifying against his father? And when Buster responded to her cajoling, she shrieked, “FAKER!” and slapped him? She had done it several times before, as shown in flashbacks, urging various other patients to overcome their illnesses, only to scream FAKER and slap them and run away when they responded to her coaching.
One of the flashback showed a man trying to take a step in physical therapy while holding onto handrails. “I know you can do it,” the nurse said. “Just one step, if you really love me.” The man took one step, and whammo, “FAKER!”, slap, scream, run. The camera lingers on the man, who is crestfallen. “But he wasn’t faking,” intones the narrator. “It was love that made him take that step.”
Anyway, I saw that guy walking in the park. My friend recognized him because he’s a regular in the LA comedy scene, as is she. I don’t know his name, though.
Looks like I already missed a day, since it’s past midnight (and my bedtime). I can’t think of anything clever, so read this how-to on making pie crusts. It spurred me to conceptualize a thermal cooling glove that you’d put in your fridge and then wear to knead dough or, alternately, hold beer bottles. Smart right? I can see it in Sky Mall already. $49.95 or something.
After I carefully unchecked the songs I didn’t want uploaded to my iPhone, the computer did it anyway and I ended up with every song in my library on my cell phone. For some unparallel reason I decided to listen to all of them in alphabetical order, an undertaking that will probably take months to complete on my afternoon metro rides. (In the morning I read the paper. Old-timey!)
With apologies to Paul Ford, here are five-word reviews of all the songs I’ve listened to so far. (He does six-word reviews so it’s like taking it up a notch, yanno? No?) You will sense an immediate pattern in my listening habits. I’ll tell you now it’s a direct result of complacency. Keep reading →
Two years after it went off the air, the Wire is still one of those series that you compel people to see. I understand the reluctance to start. As a five-season ode to life in the streets of Baltimore featuring an ensemble cast of mostly nobodies with no discernible romantic lead, plus a lot of violence, the Wire is a hard sell. Still: I compel you! I have never seen another television show – the Sopranos included – that as deftly married characters with place. After experiencing the fiction, obsessives like myself get the blessed reward of learning the reality of the production and storytelling and casting, which adds a whole new dimension to this already expansive tapestry. Watch the Wire, really.
If you haven’t watched it, then definitely don’t watch this video collection of the Wire’s 100 greatest quotes – but not because it’ll spoil anything for you; the quotes are too disparate to tell you anything important. No, without context, the quotes don’t really have much meaning. This kind of collection is for nostalgia only, not introduction.
So thanks to my friend Tatiana, I just realized that it’s NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. NaBloPoMo is like the awkward, less talented cousin of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Last year I thought I’d write a novel about Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin’s high school. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t do NaBloPoMo either. And hey, it’s halfway through November and I haven’t done either of them again! Tradition.
But even things you don’t do must change, and so this year I am committing myself to participating in at least half of NaBloPoMo, starting ahora. I’m in more of a writerly mood these days as I just completed a Q&A interview for my grad school magazine, and it turned out pretty decently, reminding me that I once had interview/writing skills. And who knows, maybe I’ll do a full month, ending in mid-December.
