is a blog by Brendan
I really liked this. Logic!
“So, is universal health care a religious issue? … I think a church that says yes to this question has two options. Either the church supports a state mandate for health insurance for all, or the church offer to provide health care for those who can’t afford it.”
Carrie Fisher blogs, apparently, and the evidence suggests that she’s been doing a bit of back-and-forth with the Internet in her own defense. Basically, people think she doesn’t look like she did in 1983. I will allow you a moment of shock.
On my west’ard migration a year and a half ago, while I was bumming around San Francisco on my own, someone–Sumana?–suggested that I take a night and go see a play. By happy coincidence, I was in town at the same time as Fisher, who was doing her show Wishful Drinking at the Berkeley Rep. So I got a ticket and went.
I learned a great deal about Fisher that evening (I hadn’t even known she was married to Paul Simon), and in the process saw probably the only good one-person show ever. I also laughed a lot. How can you avoid laughing at the image of Cary Grant calling up a teenage girl, at her parent’s slightly deranged request, to lecture her soberly about the dangers of LSD–twice? Or at a still from the bridge of the Death Star about which she noted that “I weighed about ninety pounds here, eighty of which I carried in my face?”
It’s one thing to know somebody is a writer; it’s another to see her perform in a self-written multimedia showcase that includes jokes about her own electroshock therapy. I liked Carrie Fisher before then, almost as much for her guest spot on 30 Rock as for Star Wars (and that was all before I knew she tried out for Han Solo). After that show, like became admiration, and she was elevated to the selective ranks of people who have secured my loyalty pretty much for good. Even if her blog posts are littered with unnecessary punctuation.
(In case you’ve noticed that I started dating a short girl with a screenwriting degree, a taste for wine and a sardonic sense of humor within months of moving to Portland: shhh.)
It’s not as if I think the people reading my blog are among those going “oh no how did princess lea get fat :(.” But I feel the need to state this anyway: Carrie Fisher rolls with my crew. And before you write a word against her, consider the fact that fuck you forever, and die in a hole.
Shitcock.
Ready for another screed about how a television show has failed to satisfy me? You are? You are ready for some unexpected things!
I wanted to like Cupid ’09! I did. I loved Cupid ’98 and I loved Veronica Mars, so Rob Thomas + more exposure + more money had to add up to something good, right? No! Cupid ’09 is a stupid television show that is bad. Tonight I had to turn it off halfway through. I have identified three reasons for this, listed in order of increasing subtlety.
First, the writing is bad. Advertising bad. Not freecreditreport.com commercial bad, but easily eHarmony bad. I have no way of accounting for this. Rob Thomas has demonstrated repeatedly that he can write, and indeed manage a writing team well; has he concentrated so hard on that that he has forgotten how to read?
Second, the shooting style is weird and elliptic. They seem to have fewer ad breaks than a typical show, but they try to deal with that by throwing in B-roll with lots of lens flare. It ends up looking like a documentary with pretensions instead of a comic drama. (Speaking of which, it also seems to have no dramatic or comedic elements, but that goes back to #1.)
Third–and honestly, this is the killer–Bobby Cannavale isn’t Jeremy Piven. He’s a good actor, and Jeremy Piven isn’t the only guy who would be capable of taking on the role, but to make Cupid work, Trevor has to be kind of a jackass. Cannavale’s Trevor is ripped, deep-voiced, gentle, well-dressed, polite and full of faith in human nature. Piven’s was horny, cynical, scruffy and smirking. Piven was playing Han Solo, writ short; Cannavale seems to think he’s in Touched by an Angel.
Fourth, it is impossible to stop hating Cannavale’s fauxhawk, which appears in 80% of the shots. He had a fauxhawk while in the mental hospital. No. No.
Point three there is indicative of a larger issue, which is that the cast has no chemistry. They’re all about as lively as shellshocked deer. Sarah Paulsen’s lone facial expression already helped sink Studio 60, of course, but Jeffrey D. Sams’s seething bouncer roommate created just as many sparks as Paula Marshall’s Claire; Rick Gomez’s stand-in seems to deal with Trevor by simply turning to Valium.
Absent any conflict among the regulars, the show has to lean on its match-of-the-week for interest, and nobody cares about them. Nobody did before, either. We just liked seeing how they illuminated the tension between Claire and Trevor, but this time, there’s nothing there to see.
Old media : “-gate” :: new media : “-fail.”
Also, “scandal” shorthand : reasoned discussion :: firebomb : toothpick bridge. Which is not to say reasoned discussion is always particularly warranted.
Wow. Wow. The guy who founded WebTV (you remember WebTV, right? Your grandmother failed to use the Internet on it) and the guy who got fired from Eidos (you remember Eidos from 2000-2005, right? You didn’t buy any of their Tomb Raider sequels) have decided to revolutionize the video gaming industry! They’re going to let you play hideously compressed PC games from 2007 without a keyboard or a mouse on a computer with no disc drive, hard drive or video card! Guess who sat around a lot of hotel rooms staring blankly at the N64 controller on the set-top box? (I bet you already guessed!)
To their credit, they have been able to startle some wide-eyed journalists by showing them closed tests on a cloud system with nobody on it, from which they disallowed screen caps or video. That puts them one step ahead of Infinium Labs. You remember Infinium, right? They failed to make the stupid fucking Phantom.
My alma mater is starfucking harder than ever before for its 2009 commencement speakers. At least when we randomly gave out a DHL to James Earl Jones in 2003, it was to a man who overcame a distinct handicap to become a respected actor. But Jerry Bruckheimer? Really?
I guess this is seen as a way to simultaneously give the students a treat and maybe earn a little donation kickback, in exchange for a piece of paper that nobody seriously believes is worth anything. If it were just Linda Bruckheimer, who actually has philanthropic ties to Kentucky, I’d be fine with it. But when you give someone a degree, even a worthless one, you’re endorsing their career and setting it as an example for students to follow. Spend your lives making hundreds of millions of dollars from empty spectacle without even providing any of the creative energy, kids! Bring the circus; let somebody else worry about the bread.
I still haven’t posted about this, have I?
I was supposed to be in this picture. Last September, I got my acceptance letter to Clarion South 2009, which I’d resolved to attend way back when I was still in London. I leapt about with glee, of course, and then set out saving enough money to defray the cost.
I failed, and in December I withdrew my application.
So there’s that story! Maybe in 2010 I’ll be in a position to reapply; maybe not. I am quite sure that whoever got my spot made good use of it, and I hope the short fiction economy survives long enough for me to read the results.
The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.
In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.