Smoking and the P.C. Left Coast

One thing that's come up a bit this week is the political correctness of life in the urban centers of the West Coast. I grew up "back East," as they say, not in one of the great bastions of curmudgeonly East Coast assholery, like New York or Boston, but some aspects of coarse East Coast forthrightness stuck with me. I love living in California and I especially love the Bay Area, but the culture here can be smug, self-righteous and politically correct to a gagging degree.

Smoking is just one of the ways this manifests. I am a Democrat, even a liberal, but I have some libertarian principles as well, and one thing I cannot stand is public hysteria that tries to interfere with my right to do what the fuck I want to do. I struggle with smoking; I don't really want to do it, but it has me in its grip. In the next year, I will quit smoking, as circumstances have arisen that should finally motivate that. But it's also one of those issues where I think people need to calm the fuck down and let people be. There is now, among certain crowds, an unhealthy social snobbery about smoking, the kind that says, " I am better than you because I don't smoke." Out here, people pride themselves on their open-mindedness; what that means is, rather than actually confronting opinions with which they disagree, because everyone is free to their own beliefs, they will just remain silently, smugly superior.

The refreshing thing about the attitude on the other coast is that it's both more in-your-face - well, fuck you, buddy! - and accepting - now, let's get a drink, asshole! Out here, if you don't agree with someone, you just roll your eyes and back away, and go be with the people who share your exact convictions.

The Idiot Box

I have to admit, I love television. Sure, there's lots of crap on television, but that would seem to be the nature of any medium so broadly and deeply embraced by a culture. There are something like 1 1/2 billion TVs in the world, yet one can still find plenty of people who claim to not watch television; I know people who don't even have one. I guess they spend a lot of time reading, which I also love to do.

I watch television more or less daily. I embrace it. Kim watches, but gets sick of it after a couple hours. Sure, it's a time suck. I'm just someone who is able to keep watching and watching. Not just TV shows, of course, but a lot of movies. To me, it's kinda all the same thing.

Anyway, here's a short list of what I think are the best shows I've ever seen:

Twin Peaks
Max Headroom
The Office (BBC)
The Wire
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The Singing Detective
Sesame Street
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Twin Peaks, actually, is one of my favorite - what would you call the category into which both TV and movies fall? Moving image narrative? And why isn't Max Headroom available on DVD? I'm trying to track it down. I imagine a lot of people, if they remember Max at all, think of the Coke pitchman, not the TV show. But the show was great, a cyberpunk TV show right around the time cyberpunk was actually a thing, instead of years later. Truly innovative and ahead of its time.

I truly love the American Office, too, it's like great TV comfort food, but it's nothing compared to the British version, which is sheer genius, moment-to-moment, from start to finish. Of course, it's maybe easier to do that when you have a total of 12 regular episodes and a long special episode. Still, the compromises and simplifications made for American viewers (thumb-sucking, unsophisticated Yanks that we are) keep our version from being truly great. Why is British TV often so much funnier (or more serious) and sharper than our own?

I don't think TV makes people dumb; a lot of TV, though, is made for the lowest common denominator and is obviously little more than an advertising delivery vehicle. You could say that people make TV dumb. With some shows, it's a bit difficult to articulate what makes them popular or effective, other than that people watch them, and it's easy to become cynical. But then you get a show like The Wire, which really shows what the medium can do - you know, the Dickensian aspect, the duration, the focus, the superb writing and character development, the long arcs - and one finds that we're really in a golden age of this medium: The Sopranos, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica (at least the first two seasons), Mad Men, 30 Rock and many more. American TV is so much stronger and more interesting as an art form than American film these days...

Makes me want to make television for a living which, actually, I do already. But, you know, different stuff.

Denial and DFW

I'm having a hard time accepting that David Foster Wallace is dead. By hanging, no less. WTF.

I read Infinite Jest out loud with Melissa when I was in China eleven years ago. It's such a great book, so funny and sad and perverse. I had read The Broom of the System in college. Let me just say that I am against this suicide bullshit. There's nothing romantic about suicide. I can't really believe that he would do it, in spite of being a writer. Is it really that big of a fucking deal if you can't write one now like you could when you were 30 or whatever?

That's probably not the reason. That would be too obvious and according to script. I wonder if he left a note? I wonder how long it was and if it had footnotes.

Was he working on something new? Had he finished it?

Lars and the Real Girl

Some people have recommended this movie to me, so I watched it. I cannot, myself, recommend it. It was as tonally-off a movie as I have seen. The script could have worked as a bizarre comedy, perhaps starring Crispin Glover, but in its present form it doesn't meet rudimentary suspension-of disbelief standards. It's a shame because I admire several of the actors, especially Ryan Gosling, but this one was a big misfire.

Hamlet 2

In a summer with more than the usual number of smart comedies, Hamlet 2 is the best of them. It's a clever parody of the Inspirational Teacher Movie, at it's best zany, filthy and sharp. One can complain about an underused cast - Elizabeth Shue and Catherine Keener are both great actors who barely register here, for starters - or the sheer ridiculousness of the enterprise, but why bother when you have Steve Coogan's best film performance to date, a case of a great comic actor slipping completely into the skin of his character.

Or when you have co-writer Pam Brady, who co-wrote also South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and is a producer of the TV show, most certainly putting the phrase, "Those Bible-humpers can suck a bag of dicks," in Amy Poehler's mouth, or helping to pen the glorious "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" musical number that is Coogan's apotheosis.

If it doesn't work at all times, I am inclined to forgive. Director Andrew Fleming also directed Threesome, a 1994 Harlequin Romance in which Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin and Josh Charles have a kind of drawn-out, repressed ménage à trois. I remember watching this film with two female friends of mine in, perhaps, 1995. It was a fun evening.

So, again, Fleming gives us a movie that is an enjoyably bad farce; here, there's also something brilliantly subversive about it. It celebrates free expression with a fuck you attitude, a foul mouth and its "heartsoul" in the right place.

Outside Lands, Part 2

My second day at the Outside Lands festival (a couple weeks ago now), was a better experience than the first. I was hanging out with Scott (who kindly gave me his extra ticket) and his friends, without a big agenda about what to see, and we smoked some weed and wandered around a lot. The day ended with Wilco, my Favorite Band, and it was a decent, if uninspiring, set.

But that day I also saw what must have been the best act of the festival, the Mexican duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela. I think it was the sickest guitar-playing I have ever seen. They had two giant screens so we could watch them play. Scott told me later every time he looked over my mouth was just hanging wide open. Slack-jawed, they call it. Here's one of their videos:



It was a beautiful day, the throngs were tolerable and the music was great. Also, the sound did not go out much, from what I recall.

Catching up

As it will, time has slipped by me. The last couple weeks have been busy and I have not had a chance to update this blog. I'm sure my legions of readers are furious.

So, I'm going to spend some time today catching up. Now that I've stopped doing freelance work and I don't have anyone coming to visit me for a month, I'll actually have my Fridays free. I have many plans, as always. My life is a long string of unfulfilled plans.

At certain moments, the thought does come: time is slipping away. You can almost feel it. It's like, most of the time, you're just doing your thing, passing through the world. It's not really possible to stop moving; you move in time, or with it. But, occasionally, you feel like you step outside, or above, the flow, for a moment - like swimming out of the river, clambering up on top of the bank and watching it flow past.