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Six Shows I Stopped Watching, Part 1

22 Apr

For years, I had a serious sense of commitment about my TV.  If I started watching a show, I finished it down to the bitter end (and it was sometimes quite bitter).  Cast changed?  Head writer  left?  Show just started being all out terrible?  Too damn bad.  I was there until the finale.  I can’t make a commitment to anything else in life, but I made a commitment to a television program, and I was going to follow through on that at least.  I scorned friends who didn’t feel the same way.  Quitters, I’d say.  You owe it to the show, it might get better.  And then came the first show on my list, which got so bad, so quickly, that it simply broke my system in one fell swoop.  It made continuing watching it so painful and pointless that not only did I stop watching that show, but my sense of television commitment was shattered forever.  I still didn’t do it with ease, but now I was free to discard a show that cried out for discarding, a show that hadn’t plateaued or become simply mediocre but which had become bad or actively irritating and was counting only on my lifetime of viewing to keep me watching.  That show I could now simply neglect without feelings of regret, because screw it.  Sometimes it was a conscious instant decision to stop watching from one point, but more often it just came about because I noticed myself simply not catching up to a show even though the episodes were on my DV-r or on Hulu and every time I thought to myself, I really should catch up, and then thought, I don’t really want to and put it off for later. At some point later officially becomes never.

Without futher ado, here are the first of six shows I quit.

Heroes

We can be Heroes

The show that taught me how to say no.  Find a person who started watching Heroes in the fall of 2006, and you’ll find a person who stopped watching Heroes before its fourth season (!) ended; just ask them when and they’ll respond in a disgusted manner with when it was, and how it still took them too long to quit.  After utter obsession with the first half of the first season, which seemed like fascinating can’t-wait-for-the-next-episode new tv as characters with powers gathered together and found each other to take on villains Sylar and the mysterious Linderman, the foundation started to crack as quickly as the second half of the first season.  I remember reading that Heroes allegedly had a plan in place for five or six seasons, but if they did, boy, it was an awful one.  The ending of the first season was terrible, and it didn’t get any better from there.  I watched the first half of the second season, which was kind of structured into two halves, and I was officially out.  For the first couple of years afterwards I talked about the lost promise of Heroes, how a show that started out so strongly fell so fast, due to mismanagement of a brilliant premise.  Later on, I decided there was nothing brilliant about it at all; it was a good premise sure, but brilliance doesn’t become quite that bad, quite that fast, and my only regret was that I had gotten that involved to begin with.  My brother stuck around a lot longer than I did and would tell me tales of future seasons which only made me laugh and be thankful that I was no longer spending my time with them.

Lost

Lost

There’s probably no show I’ve spent more words of frustration on, orally or written, than Lost.  No show built me up and then knocked me down more fiercely.  I’ve always said about Lost that I despise Lost only in a way that you can only hate something that you once loved.  Lost is one of few shows I was truly obsessed with, if only for a short time.  I marathoned most of the first season and was obsessed in the second half of the second and early in the third, reading internet forums and trying to figure out what the hydra and the arrow and other stations might mean.  It’s hard to remember in hindsight exactly when things began to go wrong, but by the fourth season, our honeymoon was very clearly over.  The more Lost spiraled out of control, the more I felt I had lost what we had, and the magic was gone.  Ironically, this was at least partly because the magic was full on – time travel in particular may have been the switch that sent me over the edge.  Because I had been so in love with the show, I stayed on well after I seriously thought we had no chance of a future together.  Still, in the gap between seasons 5 and 6, even though I knew it would be the last season, I made the extraordinary decision to stop watching.  I had to.  I had no other choice.  I still read the wikipedia episode summaries, because yes, I had to know what was going on in Lost’s life, but I couldn’t be there with it. The more I read, the happier I was to be apart.  The flash-sideways were the single worst thing to happen to Lost, and that’s saying a lot.  Just for purposes of closure, I sat down with my friends, who hadn’t stopped watching like I had, and watched the finale, live.  I”m glad I did, because I got to know what everyone who hated it was talking about and was able to more knowingly complain about how stupid everything about the show had gotten.  To this day, I can rant about Lost for hours and days, and want to punch everyone who tells me it’s about the journey or the characters and not the plot or the questions being answered.

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Billboard Hot 100 Rant: PSY should be #1

25 Oct

As far as I can tell, the goal of the Billboard Hot 100 is to figure out what the most popular song in the country is.  However, the method to figuring out what that is is not always so clear.

Billboard has currently settled on some secret combination of radio play, digital downloads and on-demand streaming songs from a limited number of streaming services, including Spotify.  This computation is done through a compilation of a mystical quantity known as “chart points,”  which Billboard, in their articles on Wednesdays announcing the top 10, makes reference to.   Two weeks ago, Maroon 5 topped PSY by a mere 500 “chart points”!  What a close one!  Or is it?  They tell us it is, but who really knows, because it’s a completely proprietary measure, which makes it extremely frustrating to vent specific criticism for how the charts should be measured, because there’s no way to test it.

For comparison, imagine if major league baseball just released MVP standings every week, saying where the main candidates ranked in a couple of key categories (say hitting, defense, and baserunning as the digital downloads, streaming and radio respectively), but not exactly how MVP standings are calculated, so Mike Trout might lead Miguel Cabrera by 100 MVP points, and you might think that’s too many but it’d be hard to figure out exactly why, or test your assumptions and suggest ways to reweigh.  This actually even more closely resembles the BCS standings in college football, but for all the frustration with those standings, the weights assigned to each category are at least in public view.

This is particularly frustrating in recent days due to the unusual situation of PSY’s Gangnam Style, a rap song from an unknown artist in Korean, hanging in at #2, knocking on the door of #1.  PSY tops two thirds of the factors which go into compiling the Hot 100, digital downloads and on-demand streaming, which leads us to talk about the far more complicated third factor, radio play.

Radio play is an indirect measure of popularity; while individuals determine on-demand streaming and digital downloads directly, they only have an indirect effect on radio playlists, which are directly determined by corporate radio overlords (I don’t mean this in a negative way as much as a descriptive way).  This doesn’t necessarily mean radio shouldn’t count at all; it is indirectly controlled by music consumers (there’s a reason that radio and download lists most of the time at least share many of the same songs, if in a slightly different order) and it certainly is many people’s primary exposure to pop music.  Because of the indirect control, however, a song’s popularity on radio tends to lag behind its popularity with downloads and streaming, as radio starts picking up on things that people have shown interest in weeks and months after the fact.  This happens particularly with songs by artists who are not already superstars.  A Rihanna song is far more likely to get immediate airplay than say, a Carly Rae Jepsen song would have been eight months ago (or a fun. song or a Gotye song); in fact, mind bogglingly, 9 week Hot 100 #1 “Call Me Maybe” never actually topped the radio charts.

Still, this over-reliance on radio is magnified even more with PSY because Gangnam Style is, as previously mentioned, #1 on digital downloads and #1 on on demand streaming, it can only muster a relatively lowly #12 on radio play.

I’m not exactly sure if a song has ever hit #1 on both of those other charts while being so low on radio play, but I highly doubt it (note: several songs have charted #1 on downloads while being much lower on radio play due to huge first week download numbers while radio play lags behind, but not both download and on-demand streaming as far as I know).  I have absolutely no way of knowing exactly what’s keeping PSY at #12 on radio songs, far below its placement on the other charts, but it makes sense to assume at least part is the fact that it’s in Korean.  Rock and country songs have difficulty breaking onto pop radio, and take far longer than pop songs by popular singers if they do break through eventually, but this language issue is something entirely different and almost definitely more intractable.  It’s frustrating that the people have spoken so clearly by having PSY dominate the downloads charts most of the past month (only topped by weekly Taylor Swift releases before her new album, which faded fast) and having three straight weeks of atop the streaming chart, but there’s basically nothing people can do anymore to push the song to #1.

There’s a second huge caveat to Billboard’s method of determining the most popular songs in the US.  Youtube isn’t counted.  Youtube is the most used on-demand streaming service, and to not count it is to leave out a huge chunk of streaming music listens, more than any of the streaming services now included.

I don’t actually and never can know how much emphasis the Hot 100 formula currently puts on radio songs so I can’t say definitively it’s too much, but I’m going to say it anyway, because the abject lack of transparency gives me freedom to rant based on assumptions and guesses.  PSY should be #1.  The people have spoken definitively.

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The Trouble With Politics on Homeland

3 Oct

Homeland’s great; the new season has just started, but based just on the first season alone, it’s one of my top four hour long programs on TV (along with Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones), a very prestigious group.  However, no show is completely perfect and it’s always fun to slightly pick at the ones we love, in good fun, of course.

There’s something that rings false about talking about politics in a serious way on a television show or movie and trying to keep everything non-partisan.  With a show like Veep, it’s mostly doable, because it’s a comedy, and because the show is short on policy and long on silliness – the whole show is based around the idea that the Vice President essentially has no real power.  It’s still not ideal, but it’s simply less important – it still feels false that party never comes up, but it’s less of a big deal that it feels false, because of the above reasons, and because the stakes are so low.

As long as politics is on the fringes, like it was in most of the first season of Homeland,  this isn’t an issue.  The Vice President was mostly important because of his being a target, and his relationship with CIA director David Estes.  In this limited role, where the Vice President was mostly acting as a particularly political figure, it didn’t feel like party was necessarily relevant.  However, once Brody’s name was brought up as a Congressional candidate, Homeland veered into the trouble area.  There is simply no way you go into a congressional campaign, and the meetings and parties which Brody attended, without party coming up.

This season, with Brody a congressman, and being talked up in the first episode as a potential vice presidential candidate, already looks to be entering the more political sphere of Washington D.C.  Party is so wrapped up in today’s political scene that it feels false to have meetings with the Vice President talking about political matters without it ever coming up, even offhand.  Homeland tries to skirt this by only dealing with the Vice President, rather than the President or other prominent political figures, but now that the Vice President is clearly revving up his Presidential campaign, honestly avoiding parties just feels forced.  It feels like the otherwise natural conversations were jury-rigged to remove any natural hints of political party.

Sure, I understand the benefits of avoiding mention of political parties – choose the wrong one, and you immediately alienate half of your audience.  That’s a problem for TV sure, and it’s a calculation weighed against the negative lack of lack of naturalism, and as for the limited relationship with the CIA, in the first season of Homeland, it’s not really important.

Several other shows have had this issue.  Boss, in which I assumed from the get go that the mayor was Democratic, because there hasn’t been a Republican mayor of Chicago since the Great Depression.  Particularly in that situation, such a one-party system, not mentioning parties at any point seems to make even less sense than it does in other instances – the benefits to be gained by keeping out partisanship are lessened when everyone will just assume it’s Democratic anyway.  24 went back and forth; initial presidential candidate (and later president) David Palmer was clearly labeled a Democrat which made sense, and even though of course 24 wasn’t really about politics, it made a lot more sense to name the party, especially in the second and third season when he dealt with his cabinet, and his reelection campaign, and had a specific opponent.  However, 24 seems to stop talking about it as the show goes on, and by the time of the final president (there’s an insane number of Presidents in 24, but that’s a story for another day) party stops being mentioned entirely and it can only really be back engineered by figuring out the timeline of 24 that Allison Taylor is a Republican (or the very nature of American two party politics have drastically changed in the fictional 24 world).

In The Wire, which features a very Boss-like situation of a one party city, there’s no shying away from mentioning party.  David Simon, whose aim is to provide as realistic portrayals as possible, clearly labels Carcetti and essentially every other important political figure in the show as Democrats; to go throughout a campaign without party mention would break that naturalism.  The single most politics based show in recent memory is of course The West Wing, and the main characters are basically all Democrats; it would be ludicrous to imagine that show without party identity.  In a recent failed show which heavily revolved around politics, Commander in Chief, which starred Joan Allen as a Vice President, who ascends to President when the President dies, the creators partially cop out by having Allen play an independent (a Republican nominating an independent as his vice presidential candidate in this decade’s political climate?  ha), but at least labels her as a former moderate Republican, and the President she was elected with as a Republican.

Simply put, the fact is that it seems ridiculous to showcase a presidential election campaign nowadays without mentioning party, far and away the most important identifier of a candidate.  I’m not sure how close Homeland is going to take us into a potential Brody run in a presidential campaign as the vice presidential nominee, but the closer it decides to take us, the more limiting it feels to not label the party.

While I find this issue minorly troubling,  clearly it doesn’t deal with the very fabric of Homeland, and thus the show can and will still be excellent without it.  Still, I’m sure they won’t deal with it unless they absolutely have to, otherwise they would have by now.  For a show in which nearly every other interaction and scene feels true (even if it isn’t, what the hell do I know about the CIA, but that’s not really the point),  the political scenes feel off with the deliberate aversion of party.

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April Ludgate is an Asshole

29 Sep

I love Parks and Recreation. It’s one of the best comedies on television, and even if dare I say it may have entered a period of slight decline (Tom and Ann dating reeks of running out of ideas) it’s still great.  So this comes from a place of love, but I have a qualm with the program (well, a couple of qualms, but others can wait for later).

April Ludgate is a complete and utter asshole.  You know, I tolerated it for some time.  I don’t mind her being lazy; I can understand that.  I don’t mind her being cynical and pessimistic and disliking people in general; all understandable.  But what just crosses over the line is she’s out and out mean, and for no reason.  Not like busting someone’s chops, or having a good laugh, but like a serious jerk who no one would want to hang around.  She’s actually nice to Andy, and I understand why Ron would like her, but that’s it.

She’s always been pretty mean to people, and particularly Ann, and I was willing to empathize with that, even though it was completely unnecessary and uncalled for, because of the Andy situation.  What crossed the line for me was when she, at a party, at her, Andy, and Ben’s place, threw Chris’s car keys in the garbage.  This is not fucking funny or okay.  This is they keys to his fucking car.  Taking someone’s car keys for any reason other than he or she drank too much is totally unacceptable, but if she took them, let him look for them for a minute, and then gave them to him, I’d grant her some leeway, as maybe a good laugh.  But, no she throws them out.  How the fuck is he going to get home?  So basically he’s stuck with no keys, can’t get into his car and home, thinks he lost them, which might be the worst part of all, and has to call a locksmith, which costs money, to get back in, all because April thought it was fucking funny.  I’m not saying she has to like Chris.  But that’s more than just a mean comment or a snide remark, that’s an asshole-ish action.

An even worse and more line-crossing action occurs in the most recent episode, the second of the fifth season (“Soda Tax”). Ben was nice enough to bring April along with him to work for him in Washington D.C.  No one made her go, she had a job in Pawnee, and she absolutely didn’t have to accompany him.  There was no pressure on her to go; it was completely her choice.  It was nothing but an extremely generous gesture from Ben who thought she might enjoy something in a busier city which could be more intellectually engaging, which again, I point out, she could have easily turned down at no cost.

Ben realizes that his college interns don’t respect him, and unfortunately, it’s largely out of his control because they’re well connected.  What prompts this realization is partly their shoddy work product, but also a caricature of Ben with a stick up his ass posted on the wall of the office.  Ben is naturally appalled by this totally uncool picture and tries to bond with the well-connected ringleader intern to curry his good favor.  Eventually he gives up trying to be liked after seeing a second caricature, even after he worked so hard to be cool.  Ben tells the intern to just do his work, and please stop making caricatures.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the intern didn’t draw the caricatures at all.  April did.  This reveal comes right after Ben explains that April is not, as is commonly believed in the office, his daughter, but rather his friend.  Some friend.

Yes, April, who Ben did a great favor to by taking along to Washington .  Now it’s bad enough that she gives absolutely no effort and is of no help at all to Ben in DC, even constantly giving him guff.  But oh no, doing nothing is not enough to fuck over Ben, who is desperate to succeed in his dream job and is working really hard.  No, she has to actively sabotage him, making his entire work environment poisonous and stabbing him directly in the back.  It’s bad enough to be unnecessarily and unprofessionally lampooned by employees, but by one you brought with you who is supposed to be your ally and who you consider your friend.  That’s pretty unforgivable.

And then at the end, she all of a sudden agrees to give 15% and is helpful, using her powers for good to try to intimidate the unruly intern and that’s supposed to fucking make up for it.  I’m sorry.  Too fucking late. Ben may forgive her just like that, but I don’t.

It’s just so crazily mean spirited.  Chris, at least, and I’m not defending the stealing of keys, but he can be annoying.  Ben has never been anything but kind and helpful.  You cross Adam Scott, you cross me.  That’s just the way it is.

Again, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt – her laziness and bad attitude, and her general dislike of people, I’m plenty willing to tolerate.  She still has lots of funny moments.  But it’s gone too far and there’s basically only one inescapable conclusion, when you try to actively sabotage someone who has been nothing but generous towards you.  April Ludgate is an asshole.

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Why the Emmys are Stupid: The Wire and other reasons, but mostly The Wire

26 Sep

Okay, I hate to spend any time on the Emmys, because they’re at the least silly and kind of stupid, and at the most pretty terrible and detrimental to television, but they’re still regarded as at least something of a big deal, and I should at least explain my thinking.

Well, here’s the argument in short, and while this is the opposite of exhaustive, once you have this piece of information, any additional evidence should just be duplicative:

The Wire, one of, if not the best hour long television programs ever created, got all of two nominations during its entire run, both of them for Best Writing.

That’s it.  Not wins.  Nominations.  There have been lots of theories on why this is, but those are almost beside the point; almost as if to provide excuses.  The show was on a major network, HBO, that had been winning tons of Emmy love for The Sopranos (well earned, I might add), and the show was received with mass critical acclaim.  Perhaps it took a couple of seasons somehow for people to notice it, but the fourth season, for example, earned a 98 on metacritic, the second highest score ever, with reviews in from 21 critics.  To not even generate a Best Drama nomination after that season, let alone a single nomination in any other category?  That’s a complete and utter joke.  A farce.

Here’s the broader view.  The Emmy are an outdated way to determine what the best shows on television are.  You’d be better off going over to metacritic and seeing their list highest rated shows, composed of a formula which combines critics’ reviews.

Emmy voters are like MVP voters in baseball (and other sports). They’re a mix of people, with many still stuck in an outdated way of looking at things who are afraid to make interesting and unconventional choices.  Of course, unlike in baseball, you can’t really make statistically based arguments as to which show or actor is the best but I do think similar to sports,  prevalent ways of evaluating shows or players have changed over time, and the Emmys lag way behind.  I don’t mean the Emmys should even be on any real cutting edge here;  simply a poll of any sampling of 50 critics of newspapers and web sites would lead to an Emmy awards that, even if I wouldn’t agree entirely, I’d think was more credible.  In this way, in addition to the MVP, I think the Emmys can be similar to (new sports analogy!) the Coaches Poll in college football, in which people who don’t actually watch most of the games vote anyway.  Emmy voters who are relying on merely single episodes submitted by Emmy contenders are hardly qualified to judge.

An example of Emmy’s modern irrelevance, Modern Family has won the Emmy for Best Comedy three years in a row.  Unlike Jon Cryer winning for Best Actor in a comedy, which is simply asinine, Modern Family is not a bad show.  Even though it’s personally not my favorite, I understand why people enjoy it; it’s solid.  However, it’s not credibly the best comedy on television.  And even though Emmy says otherwise, most critics and ardent television fans know this to be so, so I’m not exactly sure what the point of the Emmy is.  If the point is to see all of our favorite television stars hobnob and commingle at one ceremony with a chance to poke fun at themselves and each other, well, I understand that in theory, though the ceremonies could be a lot funnier and more entertaining than they are.  But the idea of connoting certain shows and people as some sort of at least vaguely definitive award winners doesn’t make a ton of sense to begin with, and loses whatever sense it makes when it takes serious cognitive dissonance to accept the Emmy award winners nowadays as factually best.  If the Emmys are supposed to be some sort of consensus of what television critics as a group believe is the best, this doesn’t accomplish that.  I’d much rather a fivethirtyeight-like model where qualified critics who actually watch many of the shows regularly have their votes mathematically tallied using some sort of formula if we have to have something.

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Rant: Roger Federer is a big, fat poopyhead (more or less)

10 Jul

(Warning:  The following is a long hateful rant.  If you don’t understand sports, and will think that I’m some sort of ill-spirited right-wing hatemonger because I go off the rails about something in sports, please don’t read.  If you understand that sports makes you do crazy things, and feel irrationally angry at people you’ve never met, and you hate that one guy who robbed your favorite team in their only playoff appearance in a decade from moving forward more than you love your parents, then hopefully you’ll understand)

This isn’t strictly about TV as this blog normally is; but hear me out.  It’s something I simply needed to get off my chest.  My friend wrote a long screed about his absolute and undying hatred of Lebron James after the Miami Heat won the NBA Finals, and I enjoyed his rantings and completely agreed.  However, while I am no fan of Lebron, I did not feel my friend’s inspiration until I realized that I had my own athlete who personally motivated me to rant and rave without reason or logic, while watching yesterday’s men’s Wimbledon final.

I fucking despise Roger Federer.  (note: I’m sure deep down he’s a very nice and good person and if I ever had to shake his hand and went to dinner with him I’d realize this, he’s an ambassador for the game, blah, blah, no I don’t actually think he killed babies or raped anyone.  This is my last consolation in this article to sense or reason.  Now, I can proceed with the unadulterated hate).  No one engenders as much pure bile deep within my soul.  Yes, part of my hatred is due to my complete and total love for Federer’s primary rival Rafael Nadal, and one day, hopefully after Nadal wins another major, I’ll write a more positive ode to him.  But that rivalry just the start of hate; it’s become, overt time so much more – I’ll root against Roger Federer against anybody anytime and any place.

The thought of him winning more major titles makes me physically ill.  I hate every thing about him.  I hate the uber-preppy way he dresses.  I hate his fucking headband.  I hate his false humility; the way he pretends to be humble and every journalist and commentator has to talk about how humble he is even though he’s not humble at all.  In fact, his fucking false humility is far more infuriating than if he’d at least be honest and just talk about how great he thinks he is; at least honest arrogance Chad Ochocinco or Kanye style can be compelling.  He’s so smug.  It comes out in his smile, and his little chuckle, which just scream how pleased he is with himself.

I hate that while Rafa Nadal, my favorite, looks like he’s working up a sweat and burning through hundreds of calories in a single point, it looks like Fed’s not even trying.  I hate that while Nadal has to contend with constant knee injuries, Federer never even gets a scratch, and then journalists have the audacity to add extra credit to Fed’s record because he had the good fortune of having a healthy body.  I hate that the one time Fed was under the weather it was of all things fucking mono, and of course, he didn’t use it as an excuse, but the blathering press corp was there to use it as an excuse for him, even while still crediting him for not getting hurt the rest of the time.  In fact, even more so, Fed took credit for having made it so far in the Australian Open with mono, talking about doctors wouldn’t have let him play; another wonderful example of his world-famous false humility.

You know what I hate?  I hate his fucking hat.  There is no way someone wearing this hat can not be a douchebag.  If someone was in a soup kitchen handing out soup to needy families while innoculating impoverished kids from infectious diseases while wearing this hat, that person would still be a fucking douchebag.  If I saw someone wearing this hat, I would rip it off  his or her head, and then hit him or her with it, and then burn it with matches I carry for that single purpose alone.  I hate that every fucking celebrity comes to sit in Roger’s box.  I hate that he’s home in every fucking tennis arena in every fucking country, that fans root for him no matter what, even though I don’t understand what he did to be the hometown hero from China to France to California.  Anna Wintour roots for him and throws him parties.  Tiger Woods, of course, roots for Federer.  They chat. Gavin Rosdale and Gwen Stefani are friends.  Will Ferrell’s another buddy.  Will Smith roots for Federer.  Smith gave Federer a Men in Black suit for some reason.  Why?  Who the fuck knows?  I hate that no one in his box seems to show any emotion, like they’re all cool and collected because that’s Roger’s rules; winning is merely so expected that there’s nothing to get excited about.

I hate how Roger opposes instant replay.  I hate how he keeps telling Novak Djokovic’s box full of his family members to shut up because he can’t deal with a little noise.  I hate how he opposes a shortening of the ATP schedule which might help a lot of players because he never gets hurt and goes and attacks Nadal and others for complaining about it, because he has the brilliant aptitude to never get injured.  While Nadal and others talk about starting a union, Federer toes the company line.  He’s anti-fucking union.  There are even political reasons to hate R-Fed.  Who sides with the fucking tournaments over the players?


I hate the Gillette commercials that he does.  He does them with other hated athletes of mine, such as Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter (Thierry Henry is a Red Bull, so I don’t him, but still).  In the last scene of this particular commercial the three athletes pelt a poor dude who is shaving with a series of balls from their respective sports, and then laugh about it.  FUCKING HILARIOUS.  He could have cut himself!  He’s using a fucking razor!  I’m not the only one who hated the ad; industry mag Campaign named it the worst ad of the year.

He owns a place in DUBAI, ground zero for hyper-rich assholes.  He doesn’t just own it, it’s his second home.  Who wants to live in Dubai?  Sure, it may be progressive by the standards of some of the regimes in the region, but homosexuality is illegal there, and people actually get jail time for it.  Extramarital sex is illegal and punishable with jail time!  Federer lives and spends months of his year there.

You know what I hate?  When he plays the U.S. Open he has his own fucking special Roger Federer suite at The Carlyle.  The FUCKING CARLYLE.  He stays there once a year, when he plays the U.S. Open but he still has his own suite named after him.  You know what that suite has besides every luxury you could possibly think of and then some?  MONOGRAMMED PILLOWS.  Roger Federer can not sleep on pillows WITHOUT HIS INITIALS ON THEM for TWO WEEKS.  You know – I don’t even think they’re pillowcases.  I think they probably throw out the fucking pillows every day and give him new ones with his initials.  I hate that there’s a plaque on the door to his suite that says how many grand slams he’s won, as if he needs to be reminded of this every time he walks in, or any visitor would be remiss if he or she didn’t know.  Real classy, Roger.  The Observer article with pictures of the suite says he prefers the second bedroom to the master bedroom.  WHY DOES HE HAVE THE MASTER BEDROOM THEN.  Remind by the way, before we forget, that they keep MONOGRAMMED PILLOWS all year long for him so only he can use them during two weeks of the US Open.

Just to go full circle here, nothing shows Federer’s false humility better than this tone-deaf Netjets commercial showing how rough Roger has it as a poor do-it-yourself kind of guy, declining help while he tugs a wagon filled with all his trophies to his private jet.  What would be more humble and relatable?  Nothing has given me more pleasure in recent years than watching this commercial air after Federer is out of a tournament.  If you come away with nothing else, this of this commercial as an example of exactly the type of person Roger Federer is.

I was hoping this would help me excise the demons so I can at least avoid tennis until the US Open and stop thinking about my hatred, but it turns out after writing this, I just feel even stronger.  A sign of true hate, I suppose.

The Top Ten Strangest Saturday Night Live Musical Guests, Part 2

18 Jan

Time for part 2 of our countdown of the ten, but really eleven, strangest Saturday Night Live musical guests.  You can find part 1 here which contains the first five and the criteria for appearing on the list.

6.  Ray LaMontagne – Super hot critically acclaimed but not singles charting indie rock bands have become a bit of a minor mainstay on SNL.  TV on the Radio and the Fleet Foxes have appeared, and Bon Iver is slated to shortly. Even though Ray LaMontagne actually charted, albeit barely with a #90 hit on the Hot 100 and a #34 Rock hit, his appearance seems much stranger to me due to the type of music he plays.  At least TV on the Radio and Fleet Foxes are probably big hits with the type of audience which Saturday Night Live is most likely to draw.  LaMontagne is certainly more popular than a couple of the artists on this list overall in the US, but just seems like an odd fit for the program.  This is especially true considering that I would wager that LaMontagne’s music is  best known for his song “Trouble” being used in a Traveler’s Insurance commercial with a cute dog.

5. Johnny Clegg and Savuka – Clegg and his backing band Savuka are apparently important pop music artists in South African music history.  In 1988, when Clegg and Savuka performed, I suppose America was only two years removed from Graceland making all things South African music hip and with apartheid still in place, political music with songs on such topics as advocating the release of Nelson Mandela was very relevant.  The most prominent song by Clegg may have been “Scatterlings of Africa” which appeared on the Rain Man soundtrack.  Still, this is a stretch, even in a year when SNL was clearly into world music; the Gipsy Kings appeared later in the season.

4.Lana del Rey – in a year or two, or even a month or two, this choice of musical guest might seem rote and hip, but this is Saturday Night Live taking its role as cultural curator more seriously than it ever has.  Usually an artist appearing on Saturday Night Live has some semblance of mainstream popularity (exactly what mainstream is of course needs to be defined) but also more than two songs.  The bands mentioned in the Ray LaMontagne section were certainly independent but had all released super critically acclaimed albums, and all of them sold enough albums to chart fairly high on the Billboard 200 (all relative of course since no one buys albums anymore).  Lana del Rey’s album doesn’t even come out until after her SNL appearance, and her appearance is basically coming on the heels of the success of her song “Video Games,” which has made critical waves (she was one of the most polarizing figures in the indie community in 2011) but not broken through to the mainstream.

3.  The Tragically Hip – if this was Canadian Saturday Night Live, I’d expect them to have appeared a dozen times.  I started counting how many top forty hits they had in Canada and then lost count and stopped.  It’s not Canadian though, and the closest to chart success The Tragically Hip have had in the US is three appearance on the mainstream rock chart, the highest of which was #16.  The highest album chart appearance was #134 for 1996’s Trouble At The Henhouse.  Haven’t heard of it?  Not surprising.  I can’t imagine that most people south of Buffalo, New York had heard a Tragically Hip song in 1995 when they were the musical guest.  Allegedly fellow Canuck Dan Aykroyd played in influential role in getting them onto the show.

2.  Ms. Dynamite – maybe there’s a parallel universe in which this appearance looks prescient instead of strange, and heralds the coming of a new star female British rapper, like, well, there haven’t really been any in the US, but Lady Sovereign at least kind of had a hit.  It’s true that Dynamite was having a huge rookie year in the UK, with two top 10 singles and a third in the top 20 from her debut album A Little Deeper, but she hadn’t even scratched or sniffed or anything else the slightest bit in the Western Hemisphere.  Sure, the album hit the Billboard 200, at the ripe spot of 179.  Basically nobody in America knows who she is now, and nobody ever knew who she was.

1.Fear – The early years of Saturday Night Live are strange, as the institution has changed over the years, and the rules about what kind of musical acts came on probably hadn’t hardened completely even by the 7th season in 1981, the year Fear appeared on Halloween.  Still even by the more lax early season standards, Fear was unique.  A strong statement is to be made when the most famous thing about a band is their appearance on Saturday Night Live, which is pretty much the case for Fear.  They appeared as a personal favor for fan and former cast member John Belushi, who got them the gig in exchange for breaking his arrangement to have them soundtrack his movie Neighbors, after the producers of the movie did not agree to use Fear.  They brought moshers, and caused 20 thousand dollars in damage to the studio.  They didn’t even release an album until half a year after their appearance on the show, though they had been together for five years.  I almost put them lower on the list, but the more I looked, the more I felt I’m not even sure there is a close second to Fear.  There’s no other band like them that’s ever played on SNL.  SNL was extremely eclectic in those early years, and had many acts which were not pop or rock, but nothing else even resembling the hardcore punk of Fear.

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The Top Ten Strangest Saturday Night Live Musical Guests, Part 1

17 Jan

Inspired by the awkward performance of Lana del Rey, and the strange decision to put her on the show in the first place, I’ve decided to try my hand at a list of the strangest Saturday Night Live musical guests.

Note on what I mean by strangest:  First, this has absolutely nothing to do with their actual performance on the show.  This is based entirely on the strangeness of the choice of guest.  Second, this has nothing to do with the particular sound of the artists.  This is based on how odd it feels for the particular guest to have been chosen to appear, in terms of general popularity in the US, popularity with SNL’s audience, popularity in terms of the type of music, and a couple of general oddities.  There’s a lot of arbitrariness as there has to be in any list like this.

One more caveat:  This started out as a top ten, but I can’t count.  When I realized I had an eleventh artist I wanted to include, I didn’t feel like eliminating any of the artists I had already written about.  Consider it a bonus artist..  Enjoy.

First a couple that didn’t quite crack the list, a few of which didn’t because they were from the early seasons of SNL and everything was kind of wacky back then so their lack of inclusion says more about the show at the time than how odd the artists were.  Maybe I’ll do an add on for these artists at a later date.

Honorable mentions:  Leon Redbone, Preservation Hill Jazz Band, Leon and Mary Russell, The Notting Hillbillies, Queen Ida & the Bon Temps Zydeco Band, Mink DeVille

Now to the actual list:

11.  Pervis Hawkins – Lily Tomlin hosted a season 8 episode in 1983.  She also appeared as the musical guest in the guise of her character Pervis Hawkins, an African American male R&B singer.  Yes, this sounds as ridiculous to me as it should to you, unless you’re already familiar.  I found out more by digging up a New York Times article from 1982 in which Tomlin spoke of the character.  “Purvis is expansive, elevated, easy, real smooth in a wholesome way. I don’t feel as if I portray characters, though. They have a life of their own. It’s more like I imitate an essence.,” Tomlin commented.  I suppose die-hard Tomlin fans are familiar with the character, but I doubt most SNL viewers were then or now.

10.  Chris Gaines – This isn’t here for how unlikely it was to have the person on SNL; it was after all an alter ego of Garth Brooks, one of the most popular artists of the decade.  It’s here rather for what a bizarre circumstance it was for said popular artist to be portraying an entirely different persona as the musical guest, while hosting the show as himself.  If Garth Brooks was the Michael Jordan of country in the 1990s, Chris Gaines was his retirement to play baseball.   It’s kind of mind blowing and it never really took off the way he wanted it to, but he did come out with one legitimate hit single, Lost In You, which was his only Hot 100 top 40 single of his career.  Other popular artists have halfheartedly taken on personas, but none as fully as Brooks with Gaines since.

9.The Roches – Who are the Roches?  I’m glad you asked, because I had no clue.  Three Irish-American sisters  who record folk music and appeared on SNL in 1979.  Their most well-reviewed album was 1979’s The Roches, which was #11 on the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll.  How do these people get on Saturday Night Live?  Well apparently Paul Simon had a lot of say on Saturday Night Live around that time, and he asked for them to be on and got his way.  Two of the sisters had backed him on his There Goes Rhymin’ Simon album.  Apparently being on Paul Simon’s good side has historically been a good way to get on SNL.  Edie Brickell has been on three times essentially off of one song, on the basis of her marriage to Simon.  I’ve kept this as the only entrant from the first five years of SNL, as there’s enough in those seasons to make a whole other list, and they were probably still figuring out what exactly the criteria was to be a musical guest on SNL.

8. The Busboys – A bar band that was known (and I am using known in the most liberal sense, in that if you did know them, this is why) for two things when they were put on Saturday Night Live in Season 8, in 1982.  First, for having two songs on the soundtrack of Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte film 48 hrs., including their most “famous” song, “The Boys Are Back in Town,” which I falsely thought was a Thin Lizzy cover.  Second, for opening for Eddie Murphy on his comedy tour and appearing and being referenced to by Murphy in the subsequent HBO special made of the tour, Delirious.  Afterwards, they had their only Billboard Hot 100 hit with “Cleanin Up The Town” off the Ghostbusters soundtrack, which hit #68.  More likely though, you’ve never head of them, and you wouldn’t have in 1982 either.

7.  Ellie Goulding – If the US were the UK, Goulding’s appearance would more than make sense, it would be expected.  Goulding is very popular there and has released several successful singles from her debut album.  Here, she’s had one charting song, which didn’t pick up steam until after her SNL appearance, and although anyone with an ear to the UK music scene would have heard of it, it’s not as if she’s buzzing on top of pitchfork or other music media lists. Honestly, though it could be a coincidence, after some quick investigation my guess is that what her got this plum spot was her appearance in the much-watched wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.  Hopefully though, SNL is just importing female singers from Britain.  Maybe Kate Nash or Katy B are next.

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Quick Golden Globes Report

15 Jan

I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the Golden Globes as arbiters of quality.  If I had had any respect for the Globes before (which I probably didn’t), I didn’t after the Golden Globes were guilty, just like the Emmys, of failing to even NOMINATE The Wire, probably the greatest hour long show of all time, and in the top five at the absolute least.  This was a complete and utter lapse that would be a travesty if it wasn’t so obviously absurd as to render the award shows as jokes.  The Golden Globes even did the Emmys one worse, as the Emmys acknowledged the show existed in passing with two writing nominations.

I’m glad I got that scathing rant out of the way, but it seems some people still care about the Globes, and their shady Hollywood Foreign Press Association benefactors, so I’ll share a couple of thoughts I had on the awards.  Notice how Golden Globe award titles are needlessly cumbersome (Best Performance by an Actor instead of simply Best Actor, for example).

Pleasant surprises (and non-surprises):

Homeland, Best Television Series – Drama – Well, let’s get it out of the way first.  An award ceremony that does not nominate Breaking Bad in this category does not deserve to be able to give out awards, or certainly to be able to give out awards and have people care about them.  With that caveat, I’m very happy with the choice of Homeland, as it’s in that top tier with Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones and does richly deserve the award, as does Claire Danes.  I was strangely touched by Danes’ chance to thank her parents after she forgot when she won over a decade ago for My So-Called Life (only strange in that I’m not usually touched by anything).

Idris Elba, Best Performance in a Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television, Actor – I’ve never seen Luther, the British detective show for which Elba won.  Still, it was both disturbing and great at the same time to hear The Wire’s Stringer Bell talk with a British accent, and to see McNulty hug him as he went up the aisle to accept the award.

Downton Abbey, Best Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television – Let’s get this out of the way.  It’s not a miniseries, it’s a series.  There were 12 episodes of Homeland, and that’s a series.  There were 7 of Downton Abbey.  Where is the line?  (Is there an official line?)  That said, it’s good; I got on the bandwagon relatively late, and I’m encouraging others to jump aboard.  To 1910s Northern England!

Peter Dinklage, Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television, Actor – Not a surprise, as he won the Emmy.  Still, I’m always glad when Game of Thrones gets some recognition.  Tyrion is probably my favorite character in the books, and it doesn’t hurt that my first impression of him was as played by Dinklage.

Unpleasant surprises (or at least not quite pleasant enough to make it to pleasant surprises)

Michelle Williams, Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Actress – This has nothing to do with her performance.  Williams is nominated in the Best Actress, Musical or Comedy.  In what world is My Week With Marilyn a musical or comedy?

Modern Family, Best Series – Musical or Comedy – just kidding.  What’s the opposite of a surprise, doubled, and then cubed?  This is it.

Matt LeBlanc, Best Performance in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy, Actor – I don’t feel strongly about this category, but I thought this was a little surprising.  That said, the more I look over the nominees the more I realize there’s no obvious choice.  If it was three years ago, Alec Baldwin probably would have been.  If only Ty Burrell from Modern Family submitted into this category instead of Supporting Actor. Most of the best comedies on TV either don’t have definitive male leads (Parks and Recreation) or simply aren’t recognized by award shows.

Kelsey Grammer, Best Performance in a Television Series – Drama, Actor – I care less about Grammer than the fact that this should clearly go to Bryan Cranston.  Considering Breaking Bad couldn’t even get a show nomination though, it’s not particularly surprising.

Laura Dern, Best Performance in a Television Series – Comedy, Actress – I’m going to try to watch a midseason episode of Enlightened, and I hope I will personally be enlightened about the quality of the show.  From just the pilot though, I’m not getting the hype.

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Hurricane Bonus Edition: Hurricane Neddy

27 Aug

Everyone has their own reactions to this Hurric-apocalypse we seem to be facing in the New York City environs, but for my part, I can’t help but think of the “Hurricane Neddy” episode of The Simpsons, in which a hurricane hits Springfield. (there’s plenty of other hurricane TV episodes of different shows as well)  The only damage is the Flanders’ house, which is destroyed, and even though the whole town tries to help by rebuilding it, Flanders goes a little bit insane and has to be put in an asylum.  It’s an absolutely classic episode, and like all absolute classic Simpsons episodes, it’s incredibly quotable.  Thus, these are my top ten quotes from the episode, with a little bit of context (I was going to just list five before, but while thinking about them, I realized that doesn’t even start to be enough – these episodes are so good):

1o.  “Now I’m prunetracy” – in a flashback, child Ned says it as he beats up the other kids, taking their identities for himself.

When to use it:  To someone who really knows Simpsons well – it’s just an incredibly silly quote and makes absolutely no sense out of context

9.  “Past instances in which I professed to like you were fraudulent” – it’s a shame I have to break this scene up into separate quotes, as a couple will probably make the list.  Homer, recruited by the doctors to force Flanders out of repression of his mean side, is given a list of quotes to try to antagonize him.  This is the second.

When to use it:  You don’t really like somebody, and you want to express that, but you want them to kind of think you’re joking

8.  “And if you really tick me off, I’m gonna run you down with my car” – Ned, at the end of the episode, going to far to express how much he’s changed and learned now to repress his anger and rage.  The quote is greeted by uncomfortable silence.

When to use it:  You want to let somebody know that if they tick you off, you’ll run them down with your car, but you want them to kind of think you’re joking

7.  “Ah, I wouldn’t take it down if I were you. It’s a load-bearing poster.” – Bart, letting Rod know that he shouldn’t take down the Krusty the Clown poster in the new Flanders home even though Rob doesn’t like Krusty.

When to use it: Anytime someone wants to move something around in the room, ie. Move your papers off a chair, or pull up blinds on a window

6.  “Somehow, the animals are always the first to know” – Homer says it, after Santa’s Little Helper is blown away by the hurricane force winds, pointing out that animals are first to notice bad weather coming.

When to use it:  Perfect for both any bad weather situation, animal present or not (animal presence is a bonus though)

5. “Not me, friends. He’s talking about himself. But thanks for looking!” – random character, whom we learn is the actual “happiest man in town”, to whom everyone looks when Ned tellsSpringfield, that if anyone needs a favor, they should look to the happiest man in town.

When to use it: In a situation, where everyone present thinks somebody is talking about you, but they’re really not

4.”I mock your value system. You also appear foolish to the eyes of others.” – the first quote of Homer’s attempted antagonizing of Flanders

When to use it: When someone provides an awful opinion or showcases horrible taste

3. “Spin the middle side topwise. Topwise!” – Bart, trying to help the family solve the Rubik’s cube they find in the basement.

When to use it: When everybody in the room is frustarted over a task, like fixing the X-box, or opening a window

2. “I may be ugly and hate-filled, but I…um, what was the third thing you said?” – Moe reacting to Flanders, who, in blind rage has started calling out everyone in his path for how horrible they really are, and calls Moe ugly and hate-filled.

When to use it: When somebody insults you, and you want to make light of it rather than insult them back

1. “Uh, just remember, one of our patients is a cannibal. Try to guess which one! I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”- mental hospital Dr. Foster explaining to the Simpson family when they come to the mental hospital so Homer can attempt to antagonize Ned.

When to use it: In literally any situation. That’s why it’s #1.


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