Which Easy, Again?

There are many reasons to be outraged, dismayed, and bewildered by the anniversary of Katrina, but what I’m still puzzled by is: how did "NOLA" become a (helpful) abbreviation for "New Orleans"?  Is there another New Orleans I should be careful not to mistake for the Crescent City?  To conserve precious characters, should we start referring to "NYNY", "SFCA", or "LVNV"?  Just askin’.

1,006 Words

Shoulder Your Burdens

The second season of Battlestar Galactica concluded last Friday, and now we have seven months to speculate on where the series is going.

The Alliance Wore Gray, Joss Wore Brown

I probably became disenchanted with scifi(/fantasy/horror) TV in 1997, when Chris Carter began his serious neglect of The X-Files with a very unsatisfying cop-out resolution of the 4th-season cliffhanger.  I have long been dissatisfied with the episodic, itinerant nature of TV writing that results in discontinuities and inconsistent quality.  I am not insensitive to the pleasures of following beloved characters through the misadventure of the week; indeed, this has been my only reason for keeping up my investment in the various Star Trek series.  I guess I just want TV to be smarter, and it appears that the only way to ensure that is to concentrate creative control, i.e., get an auteur.

1997 also marked the debut of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, notably created, coddled, and championed by Joss Whedon.  I didn’t know who Whedon was at the time, so I couldn’t appreciate that he had written the Buffy film and was trying to achieve with the series what he could not with the film (the idea that a TV show could be cooler than a movie was unknown in the 20th century).  I don’t apologize for taking one look at Whedon’s series, carried by UPN (of camp-fantasy Hercules and Xena fame) and populated with beautiful twenty-nothings posing as high schoolers, and dismissing it as probably funny but not worth my time.

Later, as the series stretched its legs and Whedon subjected his characters to ever sharper twists, I became aware of critical praise for Buffy, both from the media and personal acquaintances.  Of course, if Buffy were in fact a series of such dramatic integrity as to reward an investment of my time, I should like to have viewed it whole, from start to finish, and boxed DVD sets of complete series were (and remain) financially intimidating to the casual viewer.  When the series finally concluded in 2003, a more avid advocate obtained the DVDs and extracted a vague pledge from me to watch them, but by then I had become a parent, reducing my leisure time by a factor of twenty.

Since then, my leisure time has become more flexible, and NetFlix and BitTorrent have combined to make catching up on TV and movies much more quick, convenient, and cheap.  I still haven’t taken the plunge on Buffy, but I have been prodded by influences even more convenient and cheap to invest my time in Whedon’s most recent series Firefly, as well as the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica series.  The writing on both shows is impeccably consistent, and the "off-key" character moments are tolerably low.  The actors are still dishy, but at my age that’s no longer an obstacle.

What I find fascinating is the evolution of the relationship between television creators, distributors, and consumers.  Ten years ago, when the bulk of online fandom was restricted to Usenet, I remember the fans of Northern Exposure (another series marred by the creators’ refusal to honor the integrity of their vision and wrap the series up when Fleishmann departed Cicely) struggling to convince CBS to renew the show with a "grass-roots" letter-writing campaign.  I was struck by the organizers’ then-novel suggestion that fans volunteer consumer-demographic information along with their pleas to support the artistic merit of the show.

But even as television has gotten inarguably smarter and creators have achieved greater autonomy, competition has become even fiercer.  Whereas Buffy suffered a cancellation by one network only to be picked up by another, it had a multi-season run before the suits got cold feet.  Firefly, launched just five years later, was broadcast on differing nights and out of sequence, resulting in a disappointing 13-episode run before being cancelled.  In both cases, disciplined fan response to cancellation has met with success—Buffy was picked up by another network, and Whedon was allowed to resolve some open questions from Firefly when he made Serenity.  It no longer suffices to write letters; the Firefly producers cited cash offers towards hypothetical "futures" in DVD releases as evidence of the fan support necessary to solicit the studio backing for Serenity.

I was still plowing through the first season and a half of Battlestar Galactica when Serenity hit the theaters, and I (correctly, it turns out) resolved to watch all of Firefly first, and so it was that I had to see Serenity at the last theater in the county still showing it on the same day that everyone (who doesn’t work for Microsoft) was queueing for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  My spoiler-ridden comments on can be found here.

There Are Many Copies

I guess this explains my fondness for full-length mirrors:

You scored as Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer). You forget things. Are they important? You think you might be a Cylon, but does that make you a machine? Who are you? Who am I? Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer) 63% Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck) 63% CPO Galen Tyrol 56% President Laura Roslin 50% Dr Gaius Baltar 44% Number 6 38% Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo) 38% Col. Saul Tigh 25% Tom Zarek 25% Commander William Adama 19%

What New Battlestar Galactica character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Of course, Baltar is my hero; he’s the perfect narcissist.  He and Six hit the post-feminist Sadean dynamic spot-on.

President Hastert

My son Oscar turns four tomorrow, and I’m up to my chin in preparations for Saturday’s party.  In all seriousness, however, I cannot imagine a more joyous birthday present for anyone of Oscar’s generation than this.

Smiley Of The B.D.A.

Probably only readers of John le Carré will appreciate the odd juxtaposition that bit me in a comment thread over at Henley’s and prevented me from working on anything else until I had purged it.  Updates, if any, will be posted to the Archival entry.

If You Can Keep It

Mark Schmitt brilliantly captures the unique threat that the Bushies pose to our democracy.  All Americans would do well to remember that while there is much to admire in our Constitution, laws, and democratic traditions, they alone are insufficient to guarantee incorrupt government.

I just completed The Secret Man, Bob Woodward’s memoir of his relationship with W. Mark Felt, the granddaddy of all anonymous sources, Deep Throat.  The book provides the final refutation of the myth of the investigative reporter as guardian of democracy; Felt was just another Washington player (with anti-Constitutional hobbies of his own) who used Woodward to damage a White House that Felt regarded as a rival and usurper of the prerogatives of Hoover’s FBI.  Following the Watergate resignations, convictions and pardons, Woodward never again exposed a source to as much peril as he did Felt, nor did he write anything that would have jeopardized the access to power that flowed from his newfound celebrity.

The domination of the American political scene by two large parties is an artifact of our first-past-the-post electoral system.  Ostensibly, the intent of this system is to encourage candidates and parties to moderated their positions to appeal to as large a majority as possible.  Two "big-tent" parties also permit crossover votes in Congress, including the ballyhooed "collegiality" of the Senate, where the longer election cycle results in greater bipartisan cooperation.

The Rove Republicans, however, are no longer playing by these unwritten rules, and they have changed many of the written rules.  By scorning and, indeed, actively suppressing the swing vote while relying on a perpetually outraged and energized base, the Bushies are rejecting decades- if not centuries-old American democratic tradition.  In fact, they are behaving precisely like a party in a democracy governed by proportional representation.

If we cannot rely on either an independent press or the (small-r) republican spirit of our representatives to preserve our pluralistic democracy, perhaps we should change the rules to accommodate the Bushies’ monolithic partisanship.  Let’s toss out the Electoral Collage, as well as the 435 congressional districts.  The president/vice-president shall be elected by a straight plurality of all national votes, and the seats in the House of Representatives shall be apportioned by proportional representation (the states can keep the Senate as is).  Then let the Bushies try to build a coalition without an over-represented FatherHomeland or their beloved Southern strategy.

Are You Ready For The Summer (To End)?

Our retrospective on the career of Bill Murray continues with a look at Meatballs.  With Oscar heading off to school and our camping gear slowly disappearing into the attic, I was easy prey when I spotted the DVD for $10.

Meatballs was the second entry in a series of Ivan Reitman-Harold Ramis collaborations, including Animal House, Stripes, and Ghostbusters.  It was also the first Bill Murray vehicle, yet it transcends the type-casting that dogged Murray over his first decade in filmmaking.  Murray’s early characters were typically slackers/scoundrels that hammed it up and then redeemed themselves in the final act.  While Murray’s Tripper in Meatballs has many clownish moments, he is in no need of redemption; for everyone around him, he is the source of wisdom (although he needs to humbly and happily earn the favors of the formidable Roxanne).  The film focuses on Tripper’s patronage of Wudy the Wabbit*, but in fact Tripper is responsible for the welfare of everyone at Camp NorthStar; he is the most grown-up person in the film.

In hindsight, it is clear that Murray had always been instinctively aware of the delicate balance between comedy and gravity, and that his more recent triumphs are best understood as the fruition of his talents.  But it neither Murray’s performance nor his transcendence of the limitations of the (pre-)teen comedy genre that endears Meatballs to me.  Proximally, while I never saw it in the theaters (my family moved from Tucson to Seattle in the summer of 1979, a rather traumatic displacement for me), I must have seen it a couple dozen times on Showtime, surpassed perhaps only by my uncounted viewings of Star Trek II: The Wrath of (Sili)Khan.

Despite not having seen the film in Tucson, for me Meatballs very specifically evokes what it was like to be ten years old and alone, whether away at camp, attending a new school, or moving to a new city.  Ten is an age when one learns that there are different kinds of friends, and that it pays to be selective.  For many kids, it is also when they are first exposed to older teenagers who are not simply surrogate parents but confidants who will give them the inside skinny on growing up.  For all their foibles, heedless hair, and unfortunate clothing, the counselors-in-training at Camp NorthStar look exactly like the teenagers I looked up to in 1978-9.  The film is also severely dated by the wretched montage-ballads, but I must confess that these days, when confronted by images of plastic aviator glasses and Castro-district-shorts set to swoony lyrics, there is no other word to describe my reaction than nostalgia.

Of course, I never attended anything like Camp NorthStar; who sends their kids away for the entire summer?  These are supposed to be the poor kids?  I went to camp a week at a time, both in the Chiricahua Mountains and on the shores of Puget Sound, at most twice but usually once in a single summer.  It was church camp, but that didn’t seem to make a large difference to either the campers or the counselors appointed to watch over us.  Even after such a short duration, there were always tears on the last day (which returned unbidden last month when we picked Oscar up from his day care for the last time).

I suppose I’m obliged to make the Old Fart™ observation that they don’t make movies like Meatballs anymore.  A year after it was released, Jason Vorhees hit the theaters and forever changed the way cinema regards summer camp.  More significantly, teen comedies are now either too ironic or too gross to pause to celebrate the fleeting fellowship between 17-year-olds who give up part of their precious summer to adjudicate pillow fights between 8-year-olds.  "If you make one good friend a summer, you’re doing pretty well."  How’d you make out this summer?

*  Meatballs also inaugurated my ill-starred identification with Chris Makepeace, as I can trace my habit of early rising to Rudy’s magical discovery of Tripper’s jogging regimen.  This fascination would result in a latent anti-urbanism after My Bodyguard, and end in temple-pounding tears with Mazes and Monsters.