Gilmore Girls: Life On The Streets

I have been entertaining myself by watching DVDs, alternating between the last season of Gilmore Girls -- which, honestly, now that it has been separated from the acrimony of Amy Sherman-Palladino's split from the show, is honestly not as bad as all that -- and the first season of The Wire.

I am not a fan of much of the original content HBO is known for: I thought The Sopranos was dull and heavy-handed (never been a fan of Mafia-tainment -- I haven't even seen The Godfather movies yet.), although it did inspire my idea for a show about the Gay Mafia: THE FALSETTOS! It was funny in 2002, believe me. I thought Six Feet Under was pretentious claptrap that thought it was much more fascinating than it ever was. Seriously, if I want to see miserable white people doing stupid things, I could just go visit my parents. ZING! And I think Sex & The City is well nigh unwatchable. (Flight of the Conchords is good, but that is the exception that proves the rule. Wait, what does that even mean? How does an exception prove the rule? Somebody please explain that to me!)

But The Wire is very good, with a distinct lack of bad acting, and with good scripts and all that. Naturally, I'm many years behind the curve on this one, but that means no waiting for new seasons. And it is nice to have Lorelai Gilmore back in my life.

Beware the Savage Jaw of 1984

I've finally been reading 1984. I know, I know, this should have been happening ages ago, preferably when I was in high school. In the back of my mind, I always thought that it was, well, longer than it actually turns out to be. Not only that, but I made the mistake of seeing the movie first; it was so dark and brutal (visually speaking), that I had no desire to actually read the book. Now that I'm reading it, I'm wondering how the movie dealt with all the bits about language, and everything that is unspoken; I don't recall anything in the movie particularly about Newspeak, which left me somewhat confused. To be honest, I remember virtually nothing about it, aside from the fact that it was just ugly. Oh, and rats; I remember that part. And a sub-par soundtrack album by the Eurythmics. "Sex Crime" at least has a good beat. Overall, the movie was something I felt I should watch, while not being something that I would ever care to see again. U-G-L-Y, it don't need no alibi: it's ugly! (I do realize the ugliness is straight from the book, but it is unleavened by the interesting language and ruminations on language that the book has so far done really well.)

Anyways, what actually got me to read the book was, of all things, an episode of SCTV; 1984-Big Brother, which is included in the collection The Best of the Early Years. This is the one episode in the collection that really meets the standard of excellence that the show eventually became known for. When the Big Brother stuff interrupts SCTV's regular broadcast day, it honestly is mildly creepy, with a female voice dispassionately intoning, "This is Telescreen. Do not adjust. It is a crime to adjust Telescreen." Orson Welles' face flashes on the screen as Big Brother. The details they include in the sketches are straight out of the book: Comrade Kangaroo shows children how to make an ear horn out of construction paper to listen at keyholes, advising children to report their parents for enjoying sex too much. There is an advertisement for a public hanging at 22:00. The Doublethink Game Show, where contestants vie for razor blades and shoe laces trying to guess whether the chocolate ration went up or down -- it always goes down, but you can't admit that it has gone down. In my estimation, it did a much better job of adapting the book than that movie did, and managed to undo my aversion to reading the book instilled in me all those years ago. Shouldn't a great adaptation of a piece of literature make you want to read it for yourself?

Things That Make Me Happy

Kylie Minogue, X : Yeah, what of it? Kylie has grown into a pretty good album artist; she seems to approach albums as a collection of singles, which can occasionally backfire, but which also means hooky and well-written tracks. Which, you know, is nothing a fan can complain about: Light Years is one of my all time favorite albums -- even the slow song I don't like serves a purpose -- and Fever was also really strong as well. (Body Language, which was released after Fever, is not among my favorites: it isn't particularly dance-oriented, and seems chilly. I associate it with German's trying to replicate early 2000's R&B. Perhaps I should revisit it.) All of which is a long-winded way of explaining that when I see she has released an album, I buy it. On CD. So when I saw it on sale at Barnes & Noble one evening, well, you can guess the rest.

And it was totally worth it. One of my favorite songs on the disc is the very first song, "2 Hearts": it has a jazzy sloppiness (a very deliberate sloppiness, I admit) that I find extraordinarily appealing. That same sort of deliberate looseness is evident throughout the album. Beats aren't totally precise, and synthesizers always have the sort of clumsy chunkiness I associate with new wave. This coupled with the funkiness that underscores most of the songs makes the album very appealing to me.

Kylie Minogue: "2 Hearts".mp3

And the video for another winning song, "Wow":

The Poe Museum, Richmond, VA : Well, it is right across the street from me, but an exhibition of Poe in comics opened up at the end of April, so with the extra day off this weekend, I went to see it. It was cool -- I sort of wish they had been able to find more original art to include in the exhibition, since it's hard to really get a good idea of the art when it's in the printed comic book, and under a plastic case. And the lighting in the exhibition area made it difficult to see some of the exhibits, but it was a fun exhibit, nonetheless, with work by Rick Geary, Richard Corben, and Gahan Wilson.

Original art by Rick Geary: "The Tell-Tale Heart", from Graphic Classics:
Edgar Allan Poe (which I coincidentally bought at the gift shop).

On top of this, though, the Poe Museum itself is very pretty. Especially the so-called Enchanted Garden, a courtyard in the middle of the complex. To wit:

Yeah, so I took the opportunity to play around with my new cameraphone. And, sure, that third picture even hurts my corneas. You got a problem with that?

In the gift shop, I asked about volunteering. So I may be doing that. We'll see.

How I Met Your Mother : As Heroes has become increasingly disappointed, and as I've lost interest in Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives as they both seem increasingly desperate to attract viewers, even as the quality of the shows have waned, I've found that the network television series that I watch regularly have decreased a great deal. Basically, it's Lost (which has enjoyed something of a resurgence this year, as it seems the writers may, in fact, know where they are heading towards) and perrenial favorite 30 Rock. And that's a shame: there's something that episodic television can do that you don't get from many other forms of entertainment. But, owing in part to the reviews of the show on the A.V. Club TV blog, I decided to give this a try. Sure, it seems sort of Friends-esque, but fans of the show point to the superior writing and interesting chronological tricks to demonstrate what makes the show different -- after all, virtually all of the show is a flashback told from 2030. That's interesting, right?

Well, yeah it is, but what completely got me was how funny it is. I started watching it, and it was amiable enough. But by the end of the first disk of the first season DVD set, there's an episode that features a cockamouse -- half cockroach, half mouse -- that invades the apartment of the main characters. There is some discussion whether it is, in fact, one or the other -- maybe it's a cockroach wearing the skin of a mouse? -- but it is never resolved. They finally get the nerve to throw it outside, at which point it starts flying, and as the characters watch, it tries to fly back into the apartment. The unique narrative structure, at least as far as TV is concerned, means that everything we learn in the episodes depends on what the narrator tells us; if the narrator decides to exagerate a story for narrative effect, this is what we see. It allows the writers to indulge in minor bits of surreality without straining credibility. It's a show that is definitely concerned with story: with how they are told, and how we see our lives as a story, and how we try to impose narrative on our lives. And, as funny as the show is, it also has moments of heartbreaking sensitivity, which, on the whole, never descend into melodrama. It's just a really good show. Plus, it had the good taste to feature Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl" in a romantic montage, which immediately makes it a cut above just about anything else.

Plus: ROBIN SPARKLES!!

This could almost get me to watch The Simpsons*

Alan Moore is going to be a guest star on "The Simpsons". I'm waiting for the inevitable cameo by Grant Morrison!

My favorite guest star probably was Jasper Johns, playing himself as a kleptomaniac. It just seemed so random. Although I also liked that Stephen Hawking got voice credits on both that show and "Futurama". I mean, wouldn't that be a pretty easy voice to fake?

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*(I quit watching Fox after realizing that every show that I liked on that channel [Firefly, Wonderfalls, Arrested Development] was doomed to cancellation, only to be replaced by crappy reality shows [THE SWAN???] or Family Guy repeats...)