In my craft or sullen art 
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed 
With all their griefs in their arms, 
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread 
Or the strut and trade of charms 
On the ivory stages 
But for the common wages 
Of their most secret heart.  

Not for the proud man apart 
From the raging moon I write 
On these spindrift pages 
Not for the towering dead 
With their nightingales and psalms 
But for the lovers, their arms 
Round the griefs of the ages, 
Who pay no praise or wages 
Nor heed my craft or art.

--Dylan Thomas

People Who Should Be Beaten With Shovels (Part Two)

1. One of my old TAs came up to me and let it be known that he was halfway through writing two novels--that is, at midpoint in both books.  He brought this up as if he was halfway through the cultural equivalents of Beowulf and Caedmon's hymn, foundation-shaking tomes of unequivocal transplendance. The subtext was, "I'd be a genius if I could just find the time." Well make time, consiglieri. Or don't. Either way, don't expect me to validate something you haven't done, or commiserate.  I despise artists who have to make it known that they're artists. Die in a fire.

2. People who do drugs while jobless or living with their parents. And people who smoke cigarettes while on the dole. 

3. People who moderate the comments section of their blogs. What, you can't stand someone expressing a divergent point of view, or poking some fun at your asinine musings? Then take the fucking comment option off your blog. But don't pretend that you want a dialogue, you rejects from the NKVD. From now on, I'm reblogging all my blocked comments here, and the gloves are off. 

4. CNN. Used to be that rap music was the black person's CNN. Now, rap music is the black person's Home Shopping Network, and CNN is the black person's CNN. I swear that "B.E.T TO HONOUR MICHAEL JACKSON" was a prominent story on Ted Turner's shitty network--and not a passing story, but the kind where they have all those liberal douchebags comment on them, as if their opinions were actual news. Bravo for us cause we loves the black man! We get it, you're white guilt liberal trash. Just hire Olbermann to cry at the end of every broadcast and be done with all pretence to news.

5. People who wish we'd pay more attention to Farrah Fawcett. Ass cancer sucks, but you didn't do anything that anyone under forty remembers, so don't be upset when the auteur of Thriller pre-empts the fraudulent televised reminiscences your fans think you deserve.

6. People who get offended over the word faggot. In a language with over a million words, including dubious coinages like"Web 2.0," can't we just agree that "faggot" has two distinct definitions, only one of which is meant to imply anything remotely sexual? As much as I dislike Perez Hilton, the guy obviously doesn't belong on the self-righteous GLAAD's shitlist. Straight people call each other faggots. So do gay people, apparently. Doesn't context mean anything anymore? Do these special interest groups just have their search engines set to RSS anything with an offensive word in it? if so, shouldn't you sue the British cigarette industry?

7. Quirky drug dealers in low-budget movies. Yes, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a good film. The book was great, too. But there's nothing worse than a bad film that owes a large debt to HST--except for a bad film that owe a large debt to Tarantino. I just watched twenty minutes of a real piece of shit called The Salton Sea, with Vincent D'Onofrio as a noseless rifle-toting cowboy meth dealer named Pooh Bear. Christ, Gomer, you're one of the most talented actors of your generation, and you have zero films to prove it. Stop romanticizing failure. 

8. Marxists with tenure. If you really believe that literature (or history, or physics, or whatever) exists only to politically mobilize the next generation of Li'l Lenin's Soldiers of Outdated Thought...why not take to the street? Why preach from your ivory tower? You're hypocrites and frauds who don't have the slightest interest in the subjects you profess to teach.

9. The president of Microsoft, who said that we weren't in a recession, that the markets for tangible commodities (ie books, dvds, etc) had resettled. What a self-serving asshat. I refuse to use any microsoft product other than Word for Mac, which sucks bad enough that I never feel nostalgic about my old PC. My XBOX has been in the shop for the last five weeks, and I'm starting to think they're waiting out my warrantee. I don't want to hear any prognostications about the future until you start fixing the broken shit you've already sold us. as far as digitized books, do you think I'm trusting my book collection to the company that brought you Vista? Microsoft is the Grady Tripp of companies, treading off the goodwill of MS Paint and Word 3.1

10. Any and all indie bands with WOLF, FOX or BEAR in your name. We get it, you're spiritual, maaan. Shove your pawn shop guitar into your ass crevice. Anyone who listens to modern rock should be ashamed of themselves. I mean, Kanye West and the American Idol crew are bad, but they don't cloak themselves in fake social ineptness and trade on retro cred they haven't earned. Rock music has become the Michael Cera of noise--bashfulness don't cut it.

11. Boneless fish. There's something disgusting about opening up a can of salmon and seeing that white circle of bone in the middle. But goddamnit, at least it's real. Prosessed food stinks. If I want the bone out, I can do it myself. Better than having some dirty nose-picker's hand groping through my food. 

12. Literary psychoanalysts. Since taking this class on Freud, Lacan and Zizek, I've been grappling with the definition of psychoanalysis. It's not critical theory, because it's not critical and it's not a theory. At the same time, it's not quite a philosophy, because philosophies are usually more codified. The closest definition I can come to is that psychoanalysis is a religion, with Freud as God and Lacan as Saint Peter. My prof loves Lacan, but not in the same way I love Harold Bloom or James Wood, as a fallible critic I disagree with. No, he loves Lacan the way Tom Cruise loves L. Ron Hubbard. Psychoanalysis is his Dianetics. Nothing wrong with that, but let's call it what it is. Freud's pseudo-scientific writings have been highjacked and turned into a cult, which isn't nefarious so long as it's out of my motherfucking English department.

Actual Guardian UK blog feed, this morning

For those of us who secretly believe that gangster movies are the only ones worth making - despite our obsequious lip service to Truffaut and Antonioni - the timing could not be better. Aficionados of gangster movies view reality as a daisy chain connecting one gangland saga to the next, with ordinary life - family, children, career, lunch - occurring in between. We do not need an uninterrupted stream of gangster movies to survive, and we certainly do not need half-hearted twaddle like Knockaround Guys to function properly - but we cannot tolerate long gaps between high-quality releases.

Joe Queenan, The Hollywood Mob

And yeah, I pretty much do believe that. I love Bergman, etc, but give me L.A. Confidential, The Departed, or even, dare I say it, Street Kings. Queenan just put me in the mood to see Public Enemies, the trailer of which disappointed me. But, and here's an even better quote:

...in a summer when filmgoers must rely upon Jack Black, Will Ferrell and Christian Bale for thrills, even the most dismal gangster movie is a more appealing option. After taking in a few of these films, it will immediately become apparent to even the most prissy, lily-livered moviegoer why gangster films have retained their wide appeal since their inception. They never have people like Kate Hudson or Emma Thompson in them. And so far they have steered clear of Orlando Bloom.

Michael, we're not gonna fight about this.

Paul, I think I told you, I'm a lover not a fighter.

I've heard it all before Michael. She told me I'm her forever lover. don't you remember?

Well after loving me she said she'd never love another.

That what she said? 

Yeah she said it. You keep dreaming.

 I don't believe it...

Christ this is funny. Patrice Oneal, Opie & Anthony on Perez Hilton...just wait for the Pulp Fiction spoof at 7:30.

Richard Rorty on Fundamentalism

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students readDer Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”

– ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2

Ebert Gone Wild

Roger Ebert is, as Herzog calls him, a "soldier of cinema," someone who loves nothing more than watching a film of ANY quality and commentating on it. As his health has failed, his reviews have generally become nicer, perhaps buoyed on by his sheer thankfulness at being alive. Ebert is an insightful critic, skilled at distinguishing great films from good, but never particularly skilled at distinguishing good from bad. 

Ebert 's review of Transformers 2 marks a shift. Any lenience or willing suspension of disbelief has been tossed aside in favour of righteous vitriol. Ebert fucking HATED the film, and he procedes to unload a double barreled shotgun of nerd rage into Michael Bay's face.

Here's what I mean. I was going to truncate the review and just keep the negative stuff...but it's all negative stuff. 

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

The movie has been signed byMichael Bay. This is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996. Now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Faust made a better deal. This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies, and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines. The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.

The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples. They have tiny little heads, except for Starscream®, who is so ancient he has an aluminum beard.

Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian); "Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail); "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror). The first American review, however, reported that it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time" (Todd Gilchrist, Cinematical). It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.

This review reminds me of why I like Ebert. Unlike the two hipster simians that took over his show, Ebert has the balls to write scathing reviews of pop-culture-phenomena like Transformers, knowing full well that nothing he writes will affect the movie's success in any way, and will only make him seem outdated and uncool. But damnit, that's what a film critic is supposed to be. Whatever your standards, a piece of shit is a piece of shit, and Roger Ebert  calls 'em like he sees 'em. 

Sam's Movie Round-Up

None of these films are all that new, but who has money for new movies? 

THE WRESTLER - Witness the resurrection of Mickey Rourke...who in point of fact has been doing great and critically-unregarded work for the last fifteen years, though a lot of it has been in substandard films (THE RAINMAKER, SIN CITY, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, to name three). It's a great star vehicle, though not a great film. 

THE BOXER - Daniel Day-Lewis as an ex-IRA trying to reunite Ireland through the healing power of beating the shit of people. Great cast, swell cinematography, a film surprisingly free of the overused images and  cliches that make movies about Ireland so unwatchable. Unfortunately, Day-Lewis doesn't have a funny mustache or a kooky top hat, but still worth checking out.

BLADES OF GLORY - I laughed, but I can't remember at what. 

STEPBROTHERS - John C Reilly has always annoyed me, but he's terrific here, playing WIll Farrell. 

SPIDERMAN 3 - So, Sam Raimi, basically what you're saying is that the black costume is analogous to the Mask from that awful Jim Carrey movie. Tobey McGuire lives out his dark fantasies, does a dance number in front of his girlfriend (who sings as badly as Cameron Diaz did in THE MASK), struts down the street, gets back at the people who wronged him yet brings misery to the people he cares about, then finally learns that he doesn't need the mask (I mean costume). SSSSSmokin'!

[It says so much about the two great comic companies' approaches to character that DC's The Sandman is a multi-layered exploration of the mythopoeics surrounding death, sleep, the unconscious and the imagination, while Marvel's the Sandman is a guy made out of sand.]

RIGHTEOUS KILL - Hoo-hah.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan

Master of the sarod, Ali Akbar Khan, one of the most influential Indian classical musicians,  died on the 19th. 

Grad School Woes, Part 2

Here's what grad school is like, for those of you who have considered going:

Imagine a small room populated by five of the most meek, inoffensive, softspoken young men, and five brassy-'n-beautiful women determined to subvert the power structures keepin' em down (even though they outnumber the guys and their quackery is more prevalent than any illusory "conventional" teachings on power structures). Add one forty year old high school teacher and a militant lesbian. All of them prefer literary theory to literature, and their theories all run together into that post-Hegelian, Marxist, quasi-feminist-deconstructionist-post-postmodernist nonsense. 

We don't even speak the same language. To them, "I had so much to drink last night" means "Gee, I should've gone easy on those splendid wine coolers." To my family, "I had so much to drink last night" means "I just threw up under the Christmas tree, my cats have all been stapled together, and why's there a box set of Korean Ingmar Bergman movies in my mailbox?" 

Now add the professor, a dandified fifty-year-old who sees every movie The Youth might be into, Twitters and Facebooks like a mafucker, and refers to his significant other as "my partner" so's not to hint at the fact that he's...straight. What a fucking rebel. Your desperate attempt at fashionable alterity fools no one, pal.

We're studying Lacan, which means the teacher's going to prove that the unconscious mind is structured like a language. By 'prove' I don't mean using logic or persuasive argument.  I mean prove mathematically. Yes, this is what Lacanians actually believe. 

I've never been surrounded by so many people so willing to pour out the Kool-Aid. A PhD student who I really respect told me this about Lacan:

"It didn't make much sense at the beginning, but the more I read, it really helped me understand the way the world works...and to understand myself."

THAT'S WHAT FUCKING CULTISTS SAY!  "Before Dianetics I was lost, man." 

Lacan and his Sicilian messenger boy Slavoj Zizek are the hip, fashionable theorists of the day, because they rehash decades-old Marxist theory but apply it to, like, pop culture, y'know, like comic books and shit. Way deep, maaaaan. Like combining the high and the low, like a gun and a rose. Doesn't that say something abut the world, maaan?

No.

So far, grad school is three hundred pages of incomprehensible texts followed by four hours of "Dude, I saw Pelham 123 last night, and John Travolta said he was gonna like make Denzel Washington his bitch, and that, like, totally made me think of how the Lacanian unconscious posits desire in the objet petit a which for Travolta is, like, Denzel's ass, and, dude, I know the bass player from Black Mountain, and, like, dude. Y'know?

So no, it's not a lot of fun.

Grad School Woes

Here are my choices for September courses:

ENGLISH 805

Pearls and Pagans, Princes and Plowmen: Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Instructor: D. Coley

 

ENGLISH 810: Studies in Theory I

Theory and the University

Instructor: C. Lesjak

 

ENGLISH 832

Transnational Articulations: Print Culture and the Imagining of Global Communities in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Instructor: L. Davis

Print-Culture Designated

 

ENGLISH 835: Studies in Contemporary Literature

State Capitalism and Print, Visual, and Sonic Cultures in the Fiction of Elfriede Jelinek

Instructor: P. St. Pierre

 

ENGLISH 843

Diaspora and Nation in Métis Writing

Instructor: S. McCall

 

ENGLISH 860

Discourse Analysis

Instructor: P. Cramer

Aw, sheee-it, man. Where's the Shakespeare? Where's the Hemingway? Where's the literature?

Good news, though, I'm now in two courses: Psychoanalysis and Literature, and Shakespeare. So I'll be half or a third of the way through my program before I start in September.

 

All right, maybe it's not the most cerebral of jokes, but a Jews-only search engine is just asking for it. 

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema

"LESSONS OF DARKNESS"  1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.  2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.  3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.  4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.  5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.  6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.  7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.  8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."  9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.  10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.  11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.  12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.  Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999 Werner Herzog

The nice thing about Canada is that, unless your teacher's a dick or you're writing for a specific market, you can choose between British and Amerikan spellings. I like some of each. I think 'tyre' is much cooler than 'tire,' yet 'curb' is much better than 'kerb.' Some words, like 'gray' and 'grey,' look equally cool. 

If I could bring back one archaic spelling, it would be 'connexion.' Doesn't that just radiate badassitude? It looks modern, but it doesn't have the 'ugh' factor that makes me gag every time I see 'NITE-time' or 'drive-THRU.' I'm not sure yet if I like 'clew' better than 'clue,' but it's certainly more arresting.

Also, I've made this point before, but single quotes look way better than double quotes. I couldn't picture any Victorian era masterpiece with double quotes. 

From the Guardian:

Schwarzenegger, trying to plug a budget hole of $24.3bn (£15bn), thinks he can make savings by getting rid of what he decries as expensive textbooks. "It's nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form," Schwarzenegger wrote. "Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators' hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources."

Arnold, I think you're a hell of an actor. Between Twins, Kindergarten Cop, True Lies and Total Recall, you've proven that you don't need even a rudimentary command of the English language to be a great movie star.  I'm not being insincere when I say that I really like some of your films--especially the scene in Commando where you shop for weapons, that shit was awesome. No one can launch a steam pipe into the gut of a guy named Bennett like you can.

But for the sake of argument let's say that bodybuilding, driving Hummers, Nazism and saving John Connor don't qualify you as an expert on education, literacy or science. (Or math, since ebooks will cost much more than regular ones.)

Your decision is best likened to a deadbeat dad who forgot his daughter's birthday present: "This year I got you an imaginary present."

"What's that, daddy?"

"Close your eyes and think of something, and we'll both pretend it's yours."

"Daddy I don't like this game."

"Quit you're crying or I'll make you sit in the car while I go into Baskin Robbins."

You're 25 billion in the hole and textbooks cost 350 million. Ebooks will be more expensive. MORE expensive. If I had a math textbook handy, I could point out that the sign for that would be >. That's the kind of boneheadedness I'd expect from a T600.

People before you have counted on technology to save them. And you know what happened? A little thing called SKYNET. Look it up.

 Of course, you could tax people who have that kind of money hanging around--uh, like yourself--or you could sell off some personal assets. A fleet of Hummers buys a lot of science primers.

Ultimately, though, school is one of those things you should budget for, and a recession is no excuse to skimp. Buy your kids some fucking textbooks.

God this is sad. 

Memo to CBS Re: Frankenstein, ME

The High-Concept Slugline:

It's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein meets Quincy ME!

The pitch: 

Kenneth Branagh, Helena Bonham Carter and Tom Hulce reprise their roles from the neglected film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. With the family fortune in ruins, Victor is forced to flee to America, where he takes a job as Chief Medical Examiner for a Boston hospital. Always on the lookout for you-know-who, Victor and Elizabeth cope with the trials all newlyweds face, while trying to keep their wacky friend out of trouble. Husband, friend, creator of unholy life...Victor must balance all these roles while devising clever scientific solutions to a series of case-of -the- week illnesses. 

Supporting cast: David Morse as the iron-fisted hospital head who wants Victor to stay within the rules even if it means endangering the patients.  Andre Braugher as an African dignitary who comes to learn medicine from Victor but finds himself confronted with American slavery. Adam Baldwin as a crazed confederate soldier with a heart of gold. Powers Boothe as a railroad tycoon who must confront his disdain for medicine when his son contracts a rare disease only Victor can cure. Ned Beatty as a rival surgeon who doesn't trust Victor, even though Victor is the only one who can save his life. Glenn Close as a hot-tempered governess, and of course Robert DeNiro (CGI edited to look like he still has talent and some degree of youthful vigour).

Why it will be a success: A) The star power of Tom Hulce. B) Even though the show is technically set in the Victorian era, the show will still deal with important issues facing us today eg the war on terror, drug abuse, sexual liberation, and racism, in a heavy-handed but earnest way. C) To capitalize on the success of Deadwood, every other word Victor utters will be "cocksucker." D) To capitalize on the success of The L Word, Bonham Carter and Close will feel a strong attraction that tests the boundaries of Victorian society. E) To capitalize on the Wire and Arrested Development, the main character will actually be the hospital, which will be voiced (uncredited) by Ron Howard.

...perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

Waiting For Godot was once described as "a play where nothing happens, twice," and to be honest I wasn't enraptured by it. Yet Beckett's prose has a compelling quality. I dig it.

...the fact that we live in a world where John Lennon was murdered but Barry Manilow continues to put out albums...

The Wire has been off the air for months now, and I went over to HBO's web page to see what they've got coming down the pipe. I mean, you cancel a show like The Wire, that means you must have some REALLY good shit lined up, right? So what kind of cop/mystery show do they have for replacement, at least until David Milch's Last of the Ninth gets a shot?

The NO.1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY

 tells the uplifting fictional story of a Botswana woman who fulfills a longtime dream – and bucks daunting odds – by opening her country’s first and only female-owned detective agency. Like the novels, the series chronicles the adventures of Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott), the cheerful, eminently sensible proprietor of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, located in the rural Botswanan village of Gaborone.  

Dear. God.

And while we're on the subject of awful, everyone in ENTOURAGE needs to die. That show is being syndicated on MuchMoreMusic now, which means it's on six times a day.   The last show I remember MuchMoreMusic overplaying like that was the Chris Issak Show, which is pretty much Entourage with Chris Isaak. Same "bro" humour, same tedious scenes of dudes hangin' and chillin' (and playin' vids and smokin' weed and hittin' on da ladiez and droppin' the g from every word). How about a crossover between Entourage and Dexter?

Think about it, HBO. How many shows are on tv right now where the premise is basically "retards with money"? Lots. How many other shows took you into the mean streets of "Bodymore, Murderland"? Zip. 

All I ask from tv is that it be mildly entertaining and not treat me as if my parents fed me asbestos as a child. Not every show has to be The Wire or Deadwood or Mr Show or something groundbreaking. But come on? Marky Mark's brother and his posse-o-bros? Madam Cleo solving mysteries? Isn't this the network that brought us The Sopranos?

The Zeitgeist needs a shovel handle to the face.

As my brother Dan found out, if you lock two kittens in your room to prove how much more they love you than everyone else, don't be surprised when they pee on your bed.