Month: July 2007

Today’s feature on the MeeVee blog is my bit on the new shows BET is launching this month, including the scandalously tacky Hot Ghetto Mess, based on the website of the same name. It’s sort of like “What Not To Wear,” only it’s “What Not To Be,” and without any redeeming makeover. Or empathy. Sounds great, huh?

A local legend holds that the tower will crumble if a virgin ever graduates from nearby Eastern Michigan University; as of 2007, the tower still stands and operates.

Wednesday morning I am going to Bolivia. What’s the weather like? Do I need a jacket? Do I Need A Jacket Dot Com says “Yes. It’s Cold.”

Yeah, winter in the mountains will do that.

I apologize for the degree of pretentious self-examination in the previous post. If that’s not your thing, please look at this video of un-pretentious self-examination. By which I mean the monkey pees on itself.

Seven years ago I moved to Boston to write instruction manuals for a startup that was going to change the world. Overnight, I became a technical writer. “Yeah, it’s a hit at parties,” I’d say at parties. That usually got a polite chuckle.

Several years, a buyout, and a layoff later, I’d been a marketing programs manager, a product marketing manager, an author, an editor, a blogger, a yuppie, a thirtysomething. Then, just this year, I somehow turned into something I’d never expected: a television critic.

When I moved to Boston, my roommate had a TV but I didn’t watch it that much. And when I lived alone, I didn’t get one. Sure, I watched some stuff at the gym or whatever, but not much. I didn’t trust television. I didn’t respect television. Yes, I was a pretentious twit (still am!), but also I just didn’t like what was on, and didn’t have time for it. The peak of that anti-TV sentiment was in college.

Except for junior year, I barely even knew anyone with a TV (possibly because I barely knew anyone at all, but that’s another matter). It simply didn’t occur to me that anyone paying $100,000 for a college education would spend time watching television. TV was for idiots, stoners, children, people in nursing homes. Not for me, not for my peers, not for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.

As a senior TA, I was confused when nobody signed up for my Tuesday 8PM study session. “Dawson’s,” the class explained. Dawson’s? Was this some other TA group, or a different class they all took? The Spanish department didn’t have a Professor Dawson. Maybe it was Freshman English? They had to explain to me that “Dawson’s Creek” was a popular teen drama. By that point, there was little point in going on to drill them on the difference between camarones and gambas. They were never going to take anything I said seriously.

These days, I have cable TV and TiVo and Joost and Netflix. Shows like “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” showed me how teen-oriented programming can break out of its genre pigeonhole and really say something about the turmoil of adolescence. The HBO originals lineup for the past few years — The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, even Sex and the City — slowly convinced me that TV is not a vast wasteland but an art form of astonishing diversity.

It’s got conceptual pieces that were interesting the first time but have lost all their charm through endless repetition (“Big Brother) and self-obsessed auteurs who think their petty struggles and drug problems constitute interesting pieces (Hey Paula). And it’s got… well, all kinds of stuff. Some good, plenty of bad, and a hell of a lot of stunningly mediocre.

And it’s now my job to write about the most popular American art form. How the hell did that happen?

Lisa Simpson in 2008.

Yeah, yeah, gallery of famous people with facial tattoos over at ABC News. Maybe I’m jaded, but the only shocking bit in the whole story is this crime against grammar: “Allgier, 27, was taken away in the back of a police car from a fast food restaurant after he shot and killed a corrections officer to death.”

A cabinet of natural curiosities was basically a renaissance man’s collection of weird and unexplained goodies from around the world: taxidermied exotic (or fictional) animals, religious relics, that sort of thing. My friend Jasmine started a band called the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities in the same vein: a collection of strange and interesting sounds turned into songs.

She’s based in Missoula, MT right now but had a gig in San Francisco at the House of Shields last weekend, and because I happened to be out there for work I got to see her play. Good show. Instruments included wind chimes, an alarm clock, guitars with a lot of different effects pedals, a child’s electronic keyboard, and some Christmas lights.

I don’t see her much: we had lunch a few years ago, and before that it had been at least a decade, probably more. She told me I ought to be writing poetry. I laughed.

Bush just let Libby out of jail. It’s not, technically, a pardon, but it’s enough to make me want to throw things. Can you say conflict of interest?

“Hey, Scooter! Thanks for obstructing justice when they were investigating my cronies and me– I can’t pardon you but I should be able to get rid of everything involving some kind of actual punishment for you.”

You want to talk about the obstruction of justice? I want Scooter to face justice, and by justice I mean I want him to join Paris Hilton and nonviolent drug offenders in making the US the country with the largest prison population in the world!

WSJ blog and Businessweek say that the French system, while not perfect, has a lot of advantages over the US, such as the fact that patients rarely die because they are too poor to pay for medicine.