Hugh Laurie's "Mystery" (Commonplace Book)

The commonplace book is supposed to be a collection of good quotes. But I can use it for cool YouTube clips as well. Here is one of doofy British comedian Hugh Laurie -- who many Americans know only as Dr. House -- performing a song of his own composition on his sketch comedy show A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The genius of the song is how the unremitting rhyme scheme generates all the best lines.

Complex Genres

Because I am interested in genre and influence people often ask me what my favorite one is, if they don’t just assume it is superhero comics. But actually my favorite stories are stories that do one of three things (1) combine genres (Firefly, Marvel Zombies, Dark City, Brick), (2) reinvent genres (Punch Drunk Love and the screwball comedy, Sopranos and the Mob Movie, Seinfeld and the sitcom, Watchmen and the superhero comic book), or (3) Transume a host of genres under a single heading (Kill Bill, Planetary 1-14, Casanova, Samurai Jack). I need more stuff in these categories for my Kill Bill Class. Give me your four best in any category (1, 2, or 3).

From Perry Meisel's The Cowboy and the Dandy (Commonplace Book)

Rock and roll is the crossing of the cowboy and the dandy. If you grew up on Westerns and Sherlock Holmes, your destiny was rock and roll. And if the outwardness and aggression of the cowboy had a historical counterpart, it was, not surprisingly in retrospect, the inwardness and languor of the dandy. Dandy foppishness relieves and controls what strength there is in cowboy panache. Each leavens the other. You can see both at play in the semiotics as well as the music of rock and roll. Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Prince -- all balance in a single style the cowboy's strength, the dandy's charm; the cowboy's rage, the dandy's melancholia. Like Elvis before him, Dylan, too, combines country with urban -- a double lineage of Woody Guthrie and white folk on the one hand and Muddy Waters and the blues on the other. With their cowboy boots and dandy scarves, how like Oscar Wilde in Colorado [where he visited once] both Dylan and Elvis are! Simply put, the blend of cowboy and dandy is suddenly unavoidable in rock and roll. Group monikers like Guns 'N Roses or the Sex Pistols [or Iron Butterfly] only formalize what is already at play in the prehistory of a discourse so overdetermined as to produce both the Beatle boot and an extended meditation on the leopard-skin pillbox hat.

Studio 60, Episode 8: No no. No. No.

The eighth episode of Studio 60 just ended ("Nevada Day part 2"). The seventh episode had some of the old Sorkin kick to it, and much of the eighth had some good stuff (Bradley Whitford, for example, was quite funny in just about every shot, even when he had nothing to say). But the whole thing resolved into a joke where the big bad boss finally locates his moral compass and rants against the big money Chinese client he is supposed to grab, defending the cast of Studio 60 as honorable even though it will cost him probably billions of dollars. The joke? It's all a misunderstanding because the Chinese guy's daughter made a gross translation error, a conclusion worthy, perhaps, of an episode of Just Shoot Me, or something equally wretched.

Ugh.

Brad Winderbaum's Satacracy 88: Episode Four

The fourth Episode of Brad Winderbaum's Satacracy 88 is out today, another five minute story that continues to open this world up. If you have not seen it, go to itsallinyouhands.com, or click on the link in the right bar, or click on the thumbnail on yesterday's post. Then vote, then come back here.

The episode begins with a still black-and-white image of Angela and Zim (we will remember his photograph from the last episode) -- it turns out they know each other, they are friends, or at least colleagues. Brad does a great job introducing a conflict at the end of last episode (bring me this guy's hand), then starting by bringing the conflict up a notch (this is a guy she knows personally). A quick flashback establishes the other side of the conflict: she told him, if she fell under Carter's control, to kill her, and now Carter has sent her after him. The decision at the end revolves around the realization that he may not do what she told him to, and that may be the best thing for her. Complicating things is Angela's double life: at the club she is aware she is a serious, tough assassin, but in the car, on the way to get Zim that personae is not visible (actress Diahnna Nicole Baxter does great job with the two roles). Zim is trying to get her more violent side to emerge, for reasons we are not aware of.

Once again -- and as it should be -- the sold story structure allows all the little details to shine. Angela has flaking make-up at the club in the flashback as Zim as flaking make-up at the club in the present -- one of my favorite details from Civil War is how the costumes have wear and tear, it gives the thing a sense of lived in reality. Plus Susan, the series girly-girl, applies the make-up, which is nice. Zim's bright red shirt stands out (he is, after all, the target) and it is emphasized by the matching red drink straws and the red button that is Angela's weapon. We transition from the flashback to the present by focusing on Calloway's hooded face, watching then and now -- the lighting lets us know something has changed.

Brad also lifts from good sources. The secret club you can teleport to from an alleyway with a password is from the final two season of Buffy (though the password was not "the universe exploded from the primal atom", a surprising cosmic mouthful), and Ariel does a move right out of Nightcrawler's Oval Office battle in X2, combining fighting and teleporting in the most useful way possible. [The fact the Brad has not seen the final two seasons of Buffy is another question to address, but these ideas trickle down and I am sure Whedon was not the first person to make the hidden club door a mystical secret rather than a social one].

Only once do we see the influence of a potentially risky source, and that is with the eyeball in the hand. While the pulpy New Age book cover image is a lot of fun, it is easier to sell pulp if you have a big budget (like Lost, with all its 70s tech). A pulpy special effect with a very low budget recalls Saturday afternoon live action adventure shows like Mutant X. Again, it is a fun image (if like me you think pulp is fun), but it lacks the budget to get it across. It's a bit of a silly problem but it is a real one: do pulp on a big budget and it is an interesting stylistic choice; do pulp on a small budget and it's not a choice, it's a limitation.

For the identity of "Lois" we will have to wait until next time.

Nikki Cox

Married with Children was a hugely popular show during its ten year run (1987-1997), and spawned an unbelievably shameless rip off in 1995, Unhappily Ever After (which ended in 1999). Each character from Married With Children is copied exactly, even the dog (who appears in the latter show as deranged puppet bunny; the dog’s thoughts, often voiced on Married with Children, become Bobcat Goldthwait's talking bunny). Nikki Cox was hired to play the analogue to the Christina Applegate role, the unbelievably sexy older sister (the twist being that Nikki Cox's character was very smart where Kelly Bundy was very dumb).

Nikki Cox is now on the show Las Vegas, but between Unhappily Ever After and Las Vegas she had a short-lived sitcom called Nikki (2000-2002). It’s a predictably terrible show, at the same quality level as Christina Applegate’s post Married with Children sitcom Jesse (1998-2000). But Nikki Cox has an odd quality one imagines escaped the producers of Unhappily Ever After, and could not be properly directed on Nikki (though at least they tried). Nikki Cox a beautiful actress, but a Mary Tyler Moore quality interferes with her obvious sexuality. You can see a good mix of pictures of her here (compare the picture in the upper left to the one in the lower left of the page). Someone like Jessica Simpson is more alluring for being so wholesome, it's part of her appeal. But with Nikki Cox something has gone off the rails and you can see, in the sitcom Nikki, a battle between sexuality and the ghost of Mary Tyler Moore. Like a good Freudian slip, miscasting can reveal a lot about the inner workings of a show, its creators, and the actress in the odd position of having to navigate between two very different kinds of signals.

Honda: The Power of Dreams (Impossible Dream)

I saw the full-length version of Honda’s Power of Dreams (Impossible Dream) ad in front of a movie recently, and I was knocked out by it. You can watch it here, on youtube. I know everyone has already praised it already, but I don't mind being late to the party.

It is perfectly simple: a man lip-synchs to Dean Martin’s version of the song “Impossible Dream” (from Man of La Mancha) while riding, in a series, increasingly complex vehicles. In a nicely specific detail, he is not an everyman, but rather a concrete guy with a vaguely 70s look, and he may be a kind of daredevil stunt man. His progress, combined with the song, is a clear but not pedantic way of indicating Honda’s desire to make better and better products. More than an image, it is a plot: the vehicles are increasingly dangerous as well as complex, and the commercial plays with having him crash and burn before we realize that he is saved (by Honda’s ingenuity). What I find most striking about the commercial is the way it revitalizes the song, which has become such a cliché I don’t think I have ever really heard it before. (In the same way, it is very difficult to “hear” Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech; we have heard it so many times that, unless we work hard, it registers as no more than “hey, that’s that famous ‘to be or not to be’ speech"). The song builds in intensity as the plot of the commercial progresses, and, in part because we see him singing, we pay attention to the lyrics, we hear them freshly and feel the progression of the song in a direct way. To revitalize something great that has become dusty: Ellis’s version of the Fantastic Four in Planetary, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman, and a Honda ad. Go figure.

Ethics as Aesthetics: Aaron Sorkin

Last Sorkin post for a while, until I am ready to write about why Studio 60 is not working.

Plato distrusted the arts, because he was concerned that its beautiful illusions would interfere with day-to-day morality. People would be under the illusion that they had access to truth, when they had only fictions. Aaron Sorkin (Sports Night, the first four seasons of West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) is Plato best enemy. On the surface, Sorkin’s characters -- almost all of them, even the bad guys -- appear to be the apotheosis of ethical models in art: loving, strong, smart, deeply principled. Just to name a single example, an entire episode of Sports Night is given over to one of the main characters struggling to choose a charity to donate money to. Sorkin is a genius, one of the greatest living writers in any medium (I would put him alongside Grant Morrison and John Ashbery, and I plan to at some point). But he uses ethics, not as a model, but as an aesthetic device, the way a painter might select a particularly picturesque tree. The only complaints I have heard against Sorkin -- at least until Studio 60 -- boil down to the same objection: he is not realistic. But complaining that Sorkin is not realistic is like complaining that ice cream has no nutritional value, it misses the point. Sorkin is the only genuine – which is to say persuasive – inheritor of the films of Frank Capra, especially Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Capra is a filmmaker who is such a part of Americana that it can be hard to see how watching his films can be anything other than a study of the nostalgias, especially as Its a Wonderful Life hits with such regularity at Christmas. But they are great films, and Sorkin keeps them alive. Ethics as Aesthetics, beautiful, moving, unrealistic objects. Screw content. Sorkin is pure style over substance. I don't care that much what writers have to say -- as someone once noted Milton could have put all his thoughts on God into four or five pages -- I care how they say it. And Sorkin is a master.

On Studio 60 the parts are there, but they are just not persuasive in the same way. But that is for later.

Studio 60 and Allusion 2

The pilot of Studio 60 also alludes to real life in order to ingratiate us to one of the main actors -- when we are introduced to Matthew Perry his character is high on pain killers from his recent back surgery, an allusion to actor Matthew Perry's long time and public addiction to pain killers. Sorkin alludes to the actor's troubled past in order to transmute his bad reputation into comedy. Matthew Perry is instantly likeable for this reason; we feel he has admitted something to us, and so we feel closer to him (as we would to a friend who had confided in us). This tactic is not new for Sorkin -- the pilot of West Wing involved Rob Lowe's character getting dangerously close to a sex scandal, something the actor was very familiar with.

My fourth, and for now final, allusion in Studio 60 is in the fourth episode, which involves everyone realizing that, in the show within the show, they just aired someone else's jokes as their own; they scramble to revise the West Coast feed by inserting live material into the copy of the show that aired live on the East Coast. In the end it turns out that the "stolen" material was itself stolen -- stolen from a writer who wrote it under contract for Studio 60. It turns out there was no plagiarism, because the network owned the original material. They were "stealing" from themselves. What is funny about this is that Sorkin has an almost shameless ability to reuse his own material. The most dramatic example is the West Wing episode "Someone's Going to Emergency, Someone's Going to Jail" in which Rob Lowe, having discovered his parents are divorcing because his father has been having an affair with a woman for more that twenty years, gets crazy over a work related thing that, unconsciously, is a metaphor for his current situation. The exact same plot is the subject of the Sports Night episode "The Sword of Orion". Dozens and dozens of situations, lines of dialogue, kinds of jokes appear in all three shows (and in Sorkin's A Few Good Men); here is a whole list of them. The point is that just as Sorkin alludes to Perry and Lowe's personal history in the shows, he alludes to his own history as well, in order to charm viewers with self-knowledge.

Studio 60 and Allusion 1

I wanted to walk through a few allusions in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, to show on how many levels Aaron Sorkin’s writing works. You don’t need to have noticed any of this to love the show; much of it works on a subliminal level anyway.

This post is, I think, a good example of the intellectual back-patting that Ping33 and Salon.com have complained about. While I still think Studio 60 is one of the best shows on television, I will admit that some of the old Sorkin magic is missing. Until I am ready to articulate exactly what has gone wrong, however, I want to concentrate on what I do like, even if it is exactly what others hate; the show has problems, but I don't think the smart stuff I am going to discuss in this post and at least two others is among them.

Sorkin alludes to his two other television shows in the teaser to the pilot of Studio 60. Long before Desperate Housewives and Transamerica Felicity Huffman was one of the main stars of Sorkin’s Sports Night, like Studio 60, a television show about putting on a television show. She is here to remind viewers of the continuity between Sports Night and Studio 60. When Judd Hirsch interrupts the fictional Studio 60’s live broadcast, he interrupts a sketch about George Bush in the Oval Office; Tommy Schlamme – Sorkin’s main director on both Sports Night and the West Wing – alludes to their second earlier show as he copies his famous camera push through the Oval Office Window – though here he breaks into a sketch comedy recreation of the Oval Office of George Bush rather than President Bartlett’s Oval Office. The set of the West Wing was the most expensive set ever built for a television pilot; here we see it for what it always was – a set.

At the end of the second episode of Studio 60 Steven Webber says to Amanda Peete “You’ve got spunk, kid,” and she replies, and he says it with her, “I hate spunk.” It works even if you don’t know where it is coming from, but it works better if you know that the line is from the pilot of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Like Amanda Peete’s character Mary, on the show, is a single woman trying to make a career behind the scenes of a television show. And of course, the line quoted in the show is delivered by Ed Asner, who had a cameo in the pilot of Studio 60, and appears in episode five.

Essays on Firefly and House

BenBella is putting out two more Smart Pop books, one on Firefly/Serenity (a sequel to their Finding Serenity, edited by Jane Espenson) and one on House; I have been asked to contribute to each (I already have an essay in the Veronica Mars book due out soon). For House I will write on Hugh Laurie's career as it leads up to the character of Doctor Gregory House, and for Firefly, on the complex and interesting story structure of the episode "Out of Gas." I will keep everyone updated on these projects.

On Blogging (for Reconstruction.ws)

A few years ago I edited an issue of the online journal Reconstruction (the issue in which my essay on the X-Men and Gnosticism appeared). This week they have an issue on the theories and practice of blogging. They asked a host of people to blog about blogging so that that the journal can link to each one, creating a kind of hypertext collection of thoughts on the subject. This is my entry.

I like comics and movies and TV and poetry and music. Because I have all kinds of advanced training in English literature, when I read a book or watch a movie, I notice stuff. My superhero book attempted to collect all the things I noticed about comics into a single book-length argument. But truth be told, the thesis of the book came very late; it was not until I was nearly done that I realized that the connecting thread could be the argument about how the new comics I wanted to talk about constituted the successor to the industry’s Golden and Silver ages. It is the little observations about each comic book, rather than the big argument, that I think is the real value of the study. And when I read books it is the moment to moment observations that stay with me, rather than the big argument or story.

Blogging allows each little observation worthy of a bigger argument to be published, and available, before the book they belong in has been written, or even imagined.

Everyone needs to have a large discussion about the future of the University and the internet. If primary texts can be available on the web, for free, and academic essays and even books can be available in the form of blogs, for free, and if lectures by any professor can be recorded with a cell phone and thrown up on youtube, for free, then a very large part of an Oxbridge or Ivy League education can be had for free, at home, right now, by anyone with a decent computer connection.

The consequences of this fact – for established professors, and for future students and teachers – have not been thought through. But every time an academic pushes the “publish” button on blogger (or what have you) we get a little bit closer to the answer, good or bad. I, for one, cannot stop pushing that button.

Lost and "Make Your Own Kind Of Music"

Brad tells me that in LA, once something hits DVD, all bets are off, spoiler-wise, and everyone can speak freely about the secret twist ending or whatever. (I think discussions of comics, after the first week, should never need spoiler space, since comics are read only by die-hards, but that is a subject for another day). With the second season of Lost on DVD, I am going to talk about its first episode. If you have not seen it, and you are sure you are going to, stop reading now. You also might want to go download the song from somewhere, if you have not heard it.

The teaser -- the pre-credits sequence -- for the first episode of the second season of Lost is, outside of The West Wing, the most riveting television I have ever seen. One of the things that makes the sequence great it is that it revolves around the Mama Cass song "Make Your Own Kind of Music." In the the first season finale, our heroes blow open the island's mysterious hatch. The second season opens with a guy whose face we don't see in a white shirt and shorts leaping out of bed to answer some kind of alarm. He types at an old fashioned computer. Then he puts a record on -- Mama Cass's "Make Your Own Kind of Music" -- and we see his morning montage -- food in a blender, wash the single bowl in a nice sink, sit-ups on a piece of equipment, jogging on a treadmill, then off to a room full of weapons to inject something into his arm with one of those futuristic injection guns. As he goes to inject himself a dull explosion from far away rattles the place, causing dust to fall from the ceiling and knocking the needle off of the record just as the song hit the second chorus. The figure, tense, makes preparations, and a tracking shot reveals that this is no kind of flashback -- this is what is in the hatch.

Pop songs are about building tension through the verses and then exploding into the big satisfying chorus everyone is waiting for. Lost, of course, has built a lot of tension about what is in the hatch and is about to reveal the answer. Much like many ABBA songs, however, "Make Your Own Kind of Music" seems in a rush to get to the big chorus. The first verse seems to have barely begun when she bursts into "MAAAAKE YOUR OWN KIND OF MUSIC! SIIIIING YOUR OWN SPECIAL SONG!" It is a typical product of feel good 70s pop. The song is maniacally optimistic. Its nearly hysterical assertions are the opposite of Hamlet's oft quoted "thou dos't protest too much." The song asserts too much, as it were, especially as it breaks its own rhythm on "even if nobody else sings along". The fact that it has this double edged sense today -- the way it almost seems ironic now -- is why it is such a good choice for Lost.

As we get into the larger story about the hatch, we learn about the Dharma corporation. The fact that they selected such a song to put in the hatch speaks directly to the kind of "can-do" science that seems to drive them. In the case of our lone figure Desmond, the song -- an anthem about being an individual even when there is pressure to conform -- has a double meaning. On the one hand his individuality has been replaced by the will of the Dharma corporation; he mindlessly follows their orders. On the other hand he has been on his own in the hatch for a long time and so the "make your own way" theme is personal and direct and a reason to get up in the morning; the second verse begins, "You're gonna be lonely. The loneliest kind of lonely. It may be rough going. Just to do your own thing is the hardest thing to do" before it again hits the big chorus.

One of the big accomplishments of the scene is that we don't feel the influence of Tarantino, but we should -- an upbeat seventies song is being used out of context in a weird and pulpy story. The best example of this is in Kill Bill, when Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman fight in the snow to Santa Esmeralda's nearly eleven minute "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." Unlike "Make Your Own Kind of Music" "Don't Let me Be Misunderstood" builds a lot of tension, refusing to get to the big explosion for quite some time. But just as in Lost's "Make Your Own Music," Kill Bill's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" is violently interrupted when it hits its big moment; just as we are getting into listening to it, it suddenly stops to bring home on-screen violence. But I will save that song, and that scene, for another discussion. For now, "Make Your Own Kind of Music" stands out as one of Lost's best thought through details.

Brad Winderbaum's Satacracy 88: Episode Three

The third episode of Satacracy 88 is up at itsallinyourhands.com, and in it we begin to get a much larger sense of the world in which Angela (Diahnna Nicole Baxter) lives. If you have not seen it or voted, see it, vote, then come back here for the commentary.

The episode begins with one of Soderbergh's best devices: a visual on which the sound from the next scene intrudes. As Angela runs, bloody from committing murder, we hear Martin's gurgles before we cut to him. The death of Martin, Angela's boyfriend we hardly knew, is violent, stylish (that perfect drop of blood), surprisingly technically proficient (Nikki Koumas, in charge of special effects and make-up, is, after all, on a shoestring budget), and not entirely without humor. The alarm clock goes off only moments after Angela has stabbed him in the neck, and he ironically dies to an upbeat song by Khalil Anthony (one that finds it proper relevance as it joins the image of Angela running). To make matters worse, his cell phone is also going off with a call from "S. Carter." As we will learn in the course of the episode Sandy Carter has every reason to think Martin is dying at just that moment; the bastard is calling just to be mean.

Michael Jaynes controls the episode, both on the narrative level (he is clearly the top dog) and as an actor. A subtle riff on Gary Oldman's car-dealer-as-super villain character in The Fifth Element, Sandy Carter immediately gives the impression of a old-school shit-kicking southerner who has risen the ranks; he has gotten rid of a lot of the accent, and now wears a suit, but he still sports that Colonel Sanders goatee and at heart he is still the jackass old-boy Confederate flag waving bouncer he was in his youth. Here the race theme I spoke of last time reasserts itself without going to far, but remember that Susan (Cassie Pappas), the epitome of the beautiful white blonde, calls Angela "sister" when they meet in this episode.

The details are again lovely. Brad focuses in on Angela's painted toes more than once (it is the opening shot), recalling Tarantino's fascination with the feet of his leading female assassin in Kill Bill. (Cassie Pappas carefully doing her nails in the background emphasizes this by reversal: we are supposed to notice a woman doing her nails -- it is THE sign of indifference -- but toenail polish usually goes unremarked). "The Left Hand of Ariel Zim", an inspired title, has the same pulpy feel of Kill Bill's "The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz."

The giant chip the workers take out of the neck of Martin, like the electric disappearing knife, is quite nice -- the only reason it is so big is that Brad, like J.J. Abrams on Lost, wants his sci-fi to be the sci-fi of the 1970s; it is only a matter of time before we get those fun old computers with the reels of tape. Brad uses blurs to great effect in this episode, to communicate disorientation, and he gets a great shot of Angela at the end, held by the throat and doing something to the electric lights as Carter glowers above her in top-notch B-villain form.

And my favorite bit: when Susan goes for the knife that disappears, she bites her pinkie fingernail. It is a gesture that is halfway between the frustration of a little girl and that "I wasn't doing that I was doing this the whole time" act (like people who suddenly decide they are going to not try and make the light at the crosswalk and attempt to make their return to the sidewalk look like something other than indecision).

In a month, the story continues.

Dexter

Dexter is Showtime's new TV series about a cop who is also a serial killer. After years of movies and television shows playing though the theme of the link between the cop and the killer, this kind of a show is somewhat inevitable, and its high concept a little exhausting. If you don't like plots about serial killers Dexter will get on your nerves, as it is such a desperate attempt to keep a tired genre alive; if you do like serial killer plots -- or if, like me, you don't care that much one way or the other -- its hard not to admit that, in spite of the transparent premise, the first episode of Dexter is a pretty good piece of craftsmanship: the acting, the structure, the tone, the characters and their conflicts are surprisingly well thought out and engaging. Though nowhere near the brilliance of Joss Whedon, it has this in common with his shows -- a dumb idea executed well enough to rise above the dumbness (Whedon soars above the dumbness).

Dexter, played by Michael C. Hall (from Six Feet Under), is a CSI style blood spatter forensic expert by day. By night he hunts the rapists and child molesters that escape the system by getting off on technicalities or what not. What separates him from the more violent superhero vigilantes is the imagery and tone of his killings; Dexter conceives of himself as a serial killer. His foster father, Harry, was a cop; when Dexter began showing signs of having been born a serial killer at a young age Harry helped him channel his darkness in the service of something good, killing monsters. Now his city, Miami, has a new genius serial killer in town, one that is clearly challenging Dexter both as cop (catch him) and fellow killer (Dexter is amazed at this new guy's skills).

What really saves the show is the tone, which, while dark, is pulpy, fun, and a little bit silly at times (not unlike CSI). Dexter has a dumb, insecure but very cute sister on the force trying to make it as a homicide cop, even though no one will take her seriously; he does his best to help her by giving her access to his insights about the new killer. Like Patrick Bateman, from American Psycho, Dexter is completely empty inside and has to mimic, as best he can, normal social and emotional interactions. Rather than play up the horror of this isolation, Dexter uses it to earn our sympathy for this character who cannot understand simple things like sex, but kind of wants to. His girlfriend, Julie Benz from Buffy, never has sex with him because of past trauma in her life; when she tries, he tries with her, but is clearly relieved when they are interrupted. It's kind of sweet actually. I can only hope it holds its own for a while until the penultimate episode's inevitable reveal that the new serial killer in town is Dexter's biological father.

Dexter premiered Sunday night, but the first episode will be replayed many times; if you don't have Showtime it will play during the free Showtime preview later this week (October 6 - 13).

Thomas Pynchon and Porn

Since Blogger is being wonkey this week, I thought I would just post a single fun fact I discovered today (in a free copy of the New York Post), a connection between two writers I read on a regular basis. Thomas Pynchon -- author of Gravity's Rainbow (my favorite novel), V, Mason and Dixon, and The Crying of Lot 49 (the last two quoted in my upcoming book) -- has a niece: porn star, porn director and sex columnist for the Village Voice Tristan Taormino. Taormino, for the record, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University and has written and edited several books herself. You can visit her website here. Pynchon is her mother's brother.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for Tomorrow We Die

The message “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” is a cliché, and as such it has lost all of its imaginative persuasive force. We hear it, and write it off instantly because it is stale. In order to take it seriously, we need to hear it restated. It originally comes from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 8: 15: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun,” and has often be restated since. I wanted to collect a few versions of Ecclesiastes that I think are really powerful.

In Works and Days Ralph Waldo Emerson writes “Just to fill the hour – that is happiness. Fill my hour, ye gods, so that I shall not say whilst I have done this ‘behold an hour of my life is gone,’ but rather ‘I have lived one hour.’”

Walter Pater’s conclusion to the Renaissance is not to be missed; Pater’s five paragraphs will change your life. For Pater there are moments of exquisite pleasure, secular epiphanies: not to be alive to these moments “is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. … We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.” He advises us to devote our lives to art: “for art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” John Ashbery rephrases Pater directly in his major poem A Wave, in which he writes

Because
We all have to walk back this way
A second time, and not to know it then, not
To number each straggling piece of sagebrush
Is to sleep before evening, and well into the night
That always coaxes us out, smoothes out our troubles and puts us back to bed again.

Italo Calvino, at the end of Invisible Cities, writes

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

My favourite, however, is from the title track of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The album is a weirdly, endlessly stunning, absurdly accomplished tribute to Anne Frank; the song begins

What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all round the sun. What a beautiful dream that could flash on the screen in the blink of an eye and be gone from me. Soft and sweet let me hold it close and keep it here with me. And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young let us play in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

The archaic three syllable “aeroplane” is matched by the way singer Jeff Magnum gives us a three syllable “every”: just as we are to count every thing, we get an extended word “every,” allowing us to count it as three things, to be alive to every detail.

The Mountain Goats' Fault Lines 3 (of 3)

Fault Lines also has a good example of Darnielle’s technique of a specific detail (often from the landscape) placed parallel to some romantic cliché: “Down here where the watermelon grows so sweet,” is also “where I worship the ground underneath of your feet.” P.T. Anderson uses a similar device in Punch Drunk Love: the film so powerfully subverts the rules of the romantic comedy genre that it manages (shocking, because so rare) to earn a hackneyed line like “I have a love in my life and that makes me stronger than you can possibly imagine.” Darnielle similarly works to earn the right to cliches.

Many of Darnielle’s songs are effective because some simple worn notion – such as the fact that possessions “don’t make us feel better about who we are” – is surrounded by a population of specific and intriguing details – Vegas, Russia, Belgium, England, vodka, chocolate, strawberries, watermelon, pudding, a cracked engine block, termites, jewels, an Italian race car. And as this list shows the details have subterranean links: we don’t immediately associate the watermelon that grows on the ground with the foods from the other countries, but the fact that we are prepared for it by the other foods mentioned is precisely what makes its position in the song effective; to compare a backbone to pudding would hardly be notable were it not for the fact that it culminates a series of food references that go from references to far away, to local produce, to internal organs.

This is not to suggest that the song is without powerful formulations of its own: “experts in the art of frivolous spending” is acute and forceful, as is the notion of a love that is neither merely an abstract concept, nor merely sexual, but something fragile that is kept safe by sex: the love “we swore to protect with our bodies.” But the real strong point of the song is the transition of this fragile love’s transformation into something “deathless” (a perversion of “eternal love” into something monstrous), a deathless creature, “stumbling” across a landscape (a West Texas landscape perhaps) so empty it is abstract – the hell-bound, deathless love is stumbling across a place that is merely “its beak ending,” a phrase that exists in exactly the place we would expect a specific place detail (especially from Darnielle, who is mad about places). The characterization of West Texas as a “bleak ending” is the song’s central contribution to the album’s ostensible subject: West Texas is a place where love goes to die; Darnielle's hateful stumbling love (going almost literally nowhere), unlike Yeats’ beast slouching toward Bethlehem, will not be reborn.

Veronica Mars essay update; other updates

Weeks ago I mentioned that I was invited to write an essay on the show Veronica Mars for an essay collection from BenBella Books. My contribution is about story structure and the season one finale. Now it turns out that the show's creator Rob Thomas is going to be the guest editor of the volume, writing an introduction to the book, and introductory paragraphs to each essay. Very exciting for everyone involved. The stamp of approval from the man himself.

Also a few more updates: Ping33 has his own blog (link on the right) on comics which is quite fun, Sara Reiss is doing great work talking about design and fantastically designed objects on her blog (just go to her website, link on the right, and hit the button for blog in the lower right hand corner), and guttergeek.com has asked me to write a review of Casanova for their site in the next few weeks (when I do I will link to it as my blog for the week). Go check all these pages out; they are all quite good.

The Mountain Goats' Fault Lines 2 (of 3)

There are four matching refrains in The Mountain Goats' Fault Lines in which he describes first himself, then his lover. In the first and the third of these each is compared to a damaged car. In the second, each is a damaged house. In the fourth, each has no spine. The damage in the relationship, their isolation from each other, is well communicated by locating the problem in each of them, separately.

There are two sentences in which prolonged length reflects subject matter. “Down here where the heat’s so fine, I’ll drink to your health and you drink to mine,” could be a complete sentence, a toast (this kind of thing is presumably why they are “drunk all the time”); Darnielle’s voice extends the line with four additions separated by pauses: “as we try,” “to make the money,” “we scored out in Vegas,” “hold out for a while.” These pauses and the multiple phrases, as well as the repetition of the same note on so many of the words in the sentence, emphasize the fact that he is trying to make the line, like the money, “hold out for a while.” Until this final phrase, each fragment fails to complete the “as” clause, and begs more information: “as we try” (as you try to do what?) “to make the money” (slight pause; what money? as you try to earn money?) “we scored out in Vegas” (where is the verb?) “hold out for a while.”

The second long sentence follows this same pattern: “It’s gone on like this for three years I guess,” which could be a complete sentence, is followed by “and we’re drunk all the time" -- the sentence could also end here -- "and our lives are a mess,” giving us a conjunction, and a longer complete sentence. This, however, is a song that is about a love that should die but will not; like the love, the sentence will continue long after it should have ended, as that initial conjunction is followed by two more to form a run-on sentence twice over: “and the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies is stumbling across its bleak ending,” is certainly long enough on its own, lengthened in the same style as the earlier long sentence. Rather than stopping there, however, it is followed, without a pause, by “but none of the rage in our eyes seems to finish it off where it lies.” Like the money, like the relationship, these sentences are designed to “hold out for a while.”

The references to Vegas, Russia, Belgium, and England -- even the “Italian race car” -- are a Mountain Goats' trademark, examples of Darnielle’s peculiar fascination with far away places, exotic but abstract locations that are anywhere but here. He has a whole series of songs, a few on every album, whose titles begin “Going to...”: Going to Bangor, Bogota, Bolivia, Bristol, Cleveland, Georgia (his most famous song), Hungary, Jamaica, Kansas, Kirby Sigston, Lebanon, Maine, Malibu, Maryland, Monaco, Port Washington, Queens, Reykjavik, Santiago, Scotland, Tennessee, Utrecht. Wallace Stevens writes "The motive for metaphor shrinking from / The weight of primary noon ... // The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X." Darnielle's motive for metaphor, for songwriting, is to be elsewhere, away from the fatal, dominant X of wherever he is -- the Texas of All Hail West Texas, or the Tallahassee of Tallahassee (like All Hail West Texas, one of his best).