I’ve never been impressed with Conan O’Brien — didn’t think he was clever, let alone funny — and so I haven’t watched his show in probably 10 years or more. Based on this clip, he’s gotten much better, because this bit with a sex-obsessed “professor of bread” is hilarious.
I find this video absolutely gripping. Where I grew up (out in the woods), I had numerous encounters somewhat like this one. Watch this clip all the way to the end — about 4 minutes — and then tell me two things:
1. Is this real? (Or fiction, as with, say, a guerrilla marketing campaign of some sort.)
2. How do you feel about the actions of the guy in the BMW at the end?
Last night I saw Michael Crichton on Charlie Rose’s show and was surprised to hear, for once, I talk-show guest who was careful to stick to the facts as he knows them.
I don’t share Mr. Crichton’s view on global warming (he doesn’t believe in it; this snotty speech will give you the overview), but honestly I’m not in a position to evaluate all the data and reach a scientific conclusion. What I do have is the evidence of my senses: increased storm activity, melting polar ice, and the vast expenditure of money by insurance companies in arming themselves against future financial effects. My experience of insurance companies is that they do nothing for the good of anyone but insurance companies, so if they believe in global warming, I believe in it.
What was refreshing about Mr. Crichton was his allegiance to the facts as he knows them. Unlike Jane Smiley, he didn’t purport to be able to read the mind of George W. Bush or to channel past events involving the quote unquote president. He parsed administration actions, like the partial ban on stem-cell research, for both the upside and the downside. When Charlie Rose tried to paraphrase Crichton’s words, the latter would gently but firmly correct him because the paraphrase wasn’t right. At other times, Crichton said, “I don’t know.” And why didn’t he know? Because he isn’t a mind reader, hadn’t been at the event, didn’t have empirical evidence, wasn’t presented with the data — and so, he couldn’t know.
Contrast this with the bulging-eye, popping-vein school of commentary on Fox News or MSNBC or, really, anywhere else. In media terms, Crichton was cool, and so much commentary has become hot that he almost seemed as though he didn’t belong on TV. An adherence to the facts as one knows them? Why would we expect that? And, given their personal interest, how many people in entrenched political camps want that?
Five thoughts that recur whenever I come across the latest PBS pledge drive and Dr. Wayne Dyer’s show “The Power of Intention”:
1. The Shaya thing – I’ve seen this three times now and always come in at the same point in the story. Because I never get to see it all, Dr. Dyer might tell me that Source doesn’t want me to see it all. More likely, I’m switching over from another program during a commercial break. On a similar note, I’m reminded that Jack Kirby also called God “The Source” but that was in comic books circa 1972.
2. Suspending judgment – Every time he talks about suspending judgment I’m reminded of what I’ve just read (or not read) in the newspaper. Maybe we need more judgment. And when he says that when you judge someone as stupid you are merely showing that you’re capable of judging them as stupid – why is that a bad thing?
3. He’s anti-drug, not as a moral choice but as a personal choice. That’s fine. As a reader of William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe I’m aware of the upside of drugs. And I believe many American Indians use drugs to get closer to Source. So who’s right? If he can’t handle them, that’s a separate issue.
4. This show makes a bad argument for funding PBS, because Dyer’s show is essentially an infomercial that he should be paying for on basic cable. PBS is a bonanza for him, but it’s not a free ride: We’re paying for it.
5. Why is it sophisticated for the PBS base to sneer at some religions (let’s say Pentecostals, or Southern Baptists), but heartless to attack a guy who preaches a mushy pantheism to the cultured and comforted few? Because most people choose their religions based upon class, and it’s easy to mock the lower class. And also because pantheism doesn’t require much in the way of adherence to doctrine (since it has none), just a determination to be nice.
So it looks like I’m not the only one who has Lost interest. My friend Paul directs me to this story:
New ‘Lost’ Episode Hits a Ratings Low
By LYNN ELBER
AP Television WriterLOS ANGELES (AP) — “Lost” crashed in the ratings this week, hitting an all-time low for a new episode. ABC’s drama about plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island drew an estimated 12.8 million viewers Wednesday, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen Media Research. That’s well off the peak of more than 20 million for the drama that became an instant sensation when it debuted in September 2004.
ABC has worked hard to try to protect a show that helped turn the network’s fortunes around, moving it to 10 p.m. EST Wednesday this year to steer clear of Fox’s blockbuster “American Idol” and CBS’s increasingly strong “Criminal Minds.”
After “Lost” fans complained about reruns interrupting the show’s serial flow last season, the network tried an experiment: It split the current season in two, airing six episodes before an extended break and then resuming with 16 additional episodes.
The story goes on; click above for the rest.
While I’m not going to lose any sleep over the show’s slow downturn, I do want to acknowledge that when it was cool it was very cool. The writing crackled. And it was refreshing to see a cast of actors who truly reflected a band of world travelers: Koreans, Aussies, Brits, Yanks, Africans, and so forth. Try finding anyone in a Woody Allen flick who isn’t upper-middle-class white or Jewish. (I guess such people don’t exist in New York.)
The guys at my local comics shop tell me that comics writer Brian K. Vaughn has been enlisted to write episodes this season. (And that the producers of the series brought him into the store for a visit.) Vaughn is a terrific writer (of comic books, at least), so perhaps there’s some new energy in the offing. I hope so. Because I’m still watching the show every week with my daughter.
Dr. Mabuse, as you may recall from this earlier post, writes a manifesto of evil that compels acolytes to bring down society through chaos and confusion. To contemporaries — including Josef Goebbels, who initially banned it — the second Mabuse film, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” presented an allegory for Hitler, who wrote “Das Kampf” and then inspired others to implement it.
In Europe, the legend of Dr. Mabuse continues to grow. And why not? They experienced his “testament” of World War II in a way we did not. Many people have taken the Mabuse mythology and twisted and interpreted it for their own reasons, and again, I say why not. If Supergirl can go through so many iterations, then Goebbels is free to shoot new framing sequences that insist that Fritz Lang’s film blames society’s ills on the Weimar Republic and that herald Hitler as the cure.
Some of this was on my mind last night in a conversation with a friend who, surprisingly to me given his proclivity for the provocative and obscure, hasn’t seen these Lang films. Today, he emailed with another coincidental and bizarre Mabuse appearance (and before I quote him I should note that during this conversation I connected Lang, and Mabuse, and World War II, with a lengthy discourse on Samuel Beckett hiding from the Nazis durings World War II):
Curiouser and curiouser. Last night after we spoke I opened a box of books I had ordered. There was a novel titled “Red” by Richard James. It involves “the curious machinations of Dr. Mabuse” and thanks Grove Press for permission to quote from Samuel Beckett’s play, “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Does any of that sound familiar??? Beyond coincidence? (Play “Twilight Zone” theme here.)
I bought it from edwardrhamilton.com. The original price was $14.95 but they have it as a remainder for $3.95. The stock number is 6050662, in case you want to check it on ERH’s search engine. It was published by gaymenspress.co.uk, if you would like to check there for more info. I imagine it will have a bunch of gay men somewhere in it.
I checked out “Red” by Richard James on Amazon.com, and yes, there seems to be a connection to my new master, who orchestrates all our doings behind the scenes. My heart goes out a bit to Richard James; not only does the novel not seem to have sold well, but it appears that he’s taken to reviewing it himself on Amazon, and under his own name, as this link reveals. If you can write a clever book involving a mastermind plotting to take down society, certainly you’re clever enough to set up a psuedonym to review your own books, no?
I suppose I should be unsurprised that someone who would want to touch on Dr. Mabuse would also gravitate toward Beckett. I think the big surprise is that Grove Press permitted the quote (perhaps these things are easier now that Beckett is in the ground). One can’t tell from either site, Amazon or Hamilton, that the book is published by “Gay Men’s Press” (Hamilton says “GMP”), but when you click the latter site for “related reading,” you get titles like “Fag Hag,” “Father’s Day,” and “The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket,” so it seems a safe bet that the book relates not only to society’s “irreversible decline,” but also to the man (and men) behind it.
For several years in the early 1990’s, I was a frequent reader of tarot cards for other people. I remember my sister seeking guidance from the cards, and my wife, and assorted friends. I didn’t read them to offer divination, I read them the way Carl Jung read them: as a key to the subconscious of the seeker.
When you read the cards in this way, allowing people to make their own connections, they reach metaphorical associations and conclusions they wouldn’t have otherwise. “The dark-haired woman” becomes fixed in their mind as “Sally,” the friend they hadn’t been thinking of, but who of course will be rushing to their aid now that they’ve thought of asking her for help.
Some time last year I joined Netflix, and in an odd tarot-like way the system has brought me circling back around to earlier artistic interests and obsessions of mine, as well as new associations. Specifically: Thirty years after first being introduced to dadaism and expressionism, I’ve had a recent re-immersion in the latter thanks to the films of Fritz Lang and, especially, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.” Just as it would not occur to the questioner to think of “Sally” until the cards jog their memory, I would not have found myself brought to this film had I not begun my Netflix account with two Werner Herzog films (“Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, Wrath of God”), which led the system to suggest other arty German films. It’s wonderful at this point to discover an artist like Fritz Lang and feel as thought you’ve found something fresh that you also already knew in some way.
And what is “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” about? A svengali of evil, evidently dead but somehow still operating, sets in motion a chain of events that are seemingly unrelated but deeply connected in ways that the film’s lead, Inspector Lohmann (played with riveting naturalism by Otto Wernicke), cannot ever fully puzzle out. “Mabuse” is a puzzle box where all the pieces don’t fit, or perhaps more appropriately, where they fit in more ways than seem possible. The film includes a chase scene that goes nowhere except right back to where it began, a locked-room escape that turns the villain’s weapon into a mechanism of egress, and any number of appearances by characters who aren’t really there, either in the form of silhouettes, recording devices, spectral images, voices from the grave, or imputations from an evil manifesto.
After watching it no fewer than three times, the second time with the excellent commentary track by “Mabuse” scholar David Kalat, I still haven’t fully solved the film and never expect to. Rather than having gained an explanation from it, I’ve gained an enlightenment. That’s what tarot does for you, and that’s what art does, too.
A few years ago I borrowed a video tape from good friend and actor Mark Chaet. The first thing on the tape was the premiere of “Lost,” and I wound up watching it — and these years later I’m still watching the show. The difference is that I used to enjoy it.
Where the show used to be about event — a plane has crashed, and how will we survive, especially when there’s an invisible monster in the woods? — it’s now about effect: “Here’s how we’ll double back in the writing again, here’s how we’ll string the audience along, here’s the shocking surprise” and so forth. Of course the show always had these effects, but they weren’t the point of the endeavor before.
I’m still watching the show because it’s become a ritual for my eight-year-old daughter and me to watch it together and I can’t bring myself to tell her that much as I like her, I don’t like the show any more. (As with Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest, I too am trapped on “Lost” island.) This week’s episode — the return from a three-month hiatus — clarified my disenchantment. We get a lot of back story on Jack’s blonde captor, Juliet, which is absolutely uninteresting because I don’t care about Juliet. Indeed, the show has trained me not to care about recently introduced characters. Just as soon as Michelle Rodriguez’s character of Ana Lucia, a gun-toting, smart-mouthed, emotionally battered former member of the LAPD, had breathed gasoline into the show’s carburetor, she was shot to death. Another character torn between the good and bad, Mr. Eko, was similarly dispatched. At one time, the love story of Rose and Bernard was seemingly so important that an entire episode had to be devoted to it, but I haven’t seen or heard from them in months and months. So why care about Elizabeth? Because the unshocking revelation is that she too is a prisoner on this island and has been for three and a half years? You could say the same thing about driving to Burbank from Santa Monica. No, the most interesting aspects of Juliet’s flashbacks was seeing “Deadwood” actress Robin Weigert sans her Calamity Jane accent.
Just as I no longer care about the back stories of the show’s new characters, I find that its metafictional tricks have grown dull. It was fun at one point to see Walt reading a comic book featuring a giant polar bear and then to see just such a bear menace the islanders. It was also amusing to have the leader of the Others named, at least temporarily, after the fictional Henry Gale, whose niece was blown by a tornado into a mythic otherworld named Oz. But now the references seem more copied than creative. Sawyer and Kate break into one of the hatches to rescue Alex’s boyfriend from Room 23, number 23 being both one of Hurley’s numbers and also the title and subject of a forthcoming Jim Carrey movie in which everything apocalyptic is associated with the number 23. Those two references seem in keeping with the show’s history of reference and self-reference. But what is inside Room 23? A scene we’ve already seen — an iconic scene — depicted no fewer than 35 years ago in the film of “A Clockwork Orange.” In “Lost” it seems less an homage than a swipe.
A prime metafictional misfire would be the demise of Juliet’s husband. Surely no one was surprised when Juliet said she could join up with what turns out to be Dr. Moreau’s island only if her ex-husband is hit by a bus — and then it happens. Was the effect comic? No. Because it was foreshadowed so strongly that only the blind deaf and dumb could have not foreseen it, it missed being comic, or even jokey, and instead seemed a pathetic gasp from an etherized patient who was not going to make it.
When did the show slip? At the time, it felt like the end came with the valentine to Rose and Bernard. But in a larger context, I think provisioning the castaways was a mistake. Shadowy commercial enterprises, such as the one evidently behind the Others’ research, are worrisome in a general aspect (witness Halliburton) or, sometimes, in a practical aspect (as when they show up with guns and animal cages on “Lost.”). But in the day-to-day, nothing is more fearsome than hunger and privation. Once food and supplies began materializing, either in underground vacation villas like the Hatch, or in drop-shipments around the island, the exigencies of day-to-day survival took a back seat to philosophy, much to the show’s loss.
This morning before leaving for my acupuncture appointment I had time to read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times: “No stopping climate shift, U.N. study says.” (As is typical for the Lost Angeles Times, the story isn’t findable on their website, so here’s a link to the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage.) A quick scan leaves one with this impression: No matter what we do, the glaciers will keep melting, oceans will rise, and everyone — everyone — will pay the price.
The information wasn’t news, but to me the tone was. Just again last week, Al Gore had assured me via DVD that things were fixable. Now all the scientists he is always quoting were making Al seem… naive.
This topic was much on my mind as I left a meeting later that day in Santa Monica that was 22 miles from my office. I left the meeting at 3:20 and 70 minutes later had made only 3.7 miles of headway. (Mind you, I was driving — not walking. Walking would have been faster. Clearly.) Finally, having exhausted phone calls to friends, relatives, and strangers, and having triple-checked my email on my Treo, and having no further interest in being boxed in on all sides by other frustrated people, I pulled into the Westfield Century City mall to go see a movie. And of course the movie that was starting immediately was:
“Children of Men.”
In “Children of Men,” everything I’ve been seeing in the breakdown of our planet and our manmade infrastructure is evidenced in a dystopian future only 20 years from now. The scenes of urban combat look awfully familiar to anyone with a television set, as do the shots of “detainees” and rampaging young adults with guns, and the overall ick of sky and water. In “Children of Men,” pollution has choked the planet, and human infertility has become total. Where watching, say, “The Omega Man” could be entertaining because we had little sense that its future was around the corner waiting for us, “Children Of Men” is a bracing confrontation with a future that seems all too plausible.
I left the light entertainment of “Children of Men” glad for having seen it — glad in the way one is “glad” for having seen Picasso’s “Guernica” (which of course is visually referenced in the film, as is the cover of the Pink Floyd album “Animals,” for reasons that elude me). It was disturbing, surprising and gut-wrenching — precisely like sitting boxed in in L.A. traffic, but less so. I was happy to have made better use of my time. I rode the escalator down, got into my car, exited onto Santa Monica Boulevard —
— and found that traffic had not cleared one bit in the two hours I had been in the movie theatre. No matter which direction or what roadway, traffic was moving with all the speed of a snail on warm tar paper. At one point I called home and left a message saying that if I came across a motel with a lit vacancy sign, I was pulling over and checking in. Eighty minutes later, I finally got to my office. Total travel time: 2 hours 30 minutes to go 22 miles.
I’m not exaggerating.
I know the region had a major traffic and construction accident on the 405, but this is indicative of a pattern that is only going to get worse. Greater Los Angeles is on its way to becoming a city of isolated city-states (if it isn’t already) much like Italy through most of its history. Downtown will have nothing to do with Santa Monica.
But then, I’m not sure what Santa Monica, which is on the coast, will be like. Gore predicts that over the next 44 years the oceans will rise 10 feet, which will turn our Burbank home into very valuable beachfront property. The U.N. report says 7 to 23 inches within 93 years.
Whatever happens, it’s clear that we’re entering a period where great fissures are forming in our civilization. Robert Kaplan wrote about this in 2000 in his book The Coming Anarchy, and I remember thinking when I read it that it seemed the most prescient book I’d read since Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. Toffler wrote about our shift out of the industrial revolution and how painful that was going to be; I wonder if he knew how quickly that shift would happen? Now every day I see signs of a fourth wave, a wave of collapse or retreat. If new technology is riding to the rescue, as the quote unquote president and some others believe, I hope it arrives quickly. Because in the meantime, there is often simply no way to get anywhere, and that seemingly little problem is indicative of many many larger problems.
Daniel Radcliffe is going nude and Harry Potter fans are alarmed. Mothers are threatening boycotts of the next Potter film!
Is the actor doing this for purposes of exploitation? No, to play the troubled young man in Equus, a wonderful play that has been with us for 35 years. (And which I saw two years ago in a stunning production at East West Players, brilliantly directed by Tim Dang and starring George Takei. Please note: In general I use the word “brilliantly” only sparingly. It’s a remarkable play, and this was a remarkable production.)
I have no idea if Radcliffe can pull off what is a very challenging role — and do it eight times a week. I don’t believe he’s ever had a stage role before, let alone one that plumbs these emotional depths. But the idea that he is “betraying Harry Potter fans,” which seems to be a recurrent theme in the media coverage, is ludicrous. Perhaps he might like to do other things in his life — like act.