Hurley has a band

Office blues

Oh, how easy it is to forget about offices. How easy to forget the constant desk-based negotiations between web-surfing and writing, or rather, obviously doing something other than work, or subtlely doing something other than work. But, of course, in both cases not having any actual work to do. If you’re typing, in an innocuous word document say, it must be work, even when it’s categorically not. But reading The New Yorker online, which is probably more work-related (because it makes me smartah) than what I’m doing now, is somehow illicit. This is especially true when computer screens are visible to all passersby. This is surely a time-saving technique, but it is also a soul sucking one. There’s nothing worse than feeling as though you have to hunch your shoulders to obscure the screen, or to be constantly flexing your mouse finger, in case you have to minimize in a hurry. It’s just a picture of Brad and Angelina anyway, not a crime!
Maybe I’m talking about a particular kind of office to begin with—one where people have to do some actual work because, if nothing else, there’s this nominal paper coming out sometime in the immediate future. So procrastinating is somehow frowned upon, even though we all do it. But at Wernham and Hogg, or Dundler Mifflin (that’d be a fun game, coming up with potential Office companies), or what have you, do they have to do any work? Or do they just have to sit there and waste time? Which would be really hard work, but of a different, spirit crushing, kind. That’s something the British version did a lot better than the American, suggesting that people actually did work and it hurt them, with all the wordless shots of people at their desks and the occasional sales call, which no one on the American Office ever makes.
I enjoy the American version’s Jim and Pam more than Tim and Dawn, largely because J&P seem a better fit, as people, than T&D, and then also because Jim and Pam are both really awesome and funny (especially Jim) and I want to be friends with them. And though I like, and even more importantly hurt for, Tim and Dawn, I think we would only be friends if we were forced to work together in an office, in which case I’d be obsessed with them. But Jim and Pam, especially Jim, are so great that it makes absolutely no sense that they would be working at a place like Dundler Mifflin [Two people in this office, in discussion of the illuminating covers of today’s Post and News, are currently screeching, “That Britney Spears is such trash.” “Such Trash.” “Trailer trash.” End scene]. He’s cute and funny and wicked smart. And the whole transferring plot suggests that he can be motivated (even though his motivation that time was obviously Pam). This is a totally tired point, that the British Office is way more realistic than the American version, but it’s still true. Jim really doesn’t belong at a place like Dundler Mifflin. How did he end up there? Tim could have worked there because he wasn’t that cute and he wasn’t that smooth, because he couldn’t sack up and tell Dawn he loved her and smooch her, and because he had this obvious streak of bitter and a real, painful insecurity about him, that Jim just doesn’t have. Jim’s doesn’t believe he’s a loser. He doesn’t carry himself like a loser and he doesn’t really carry himself like a slacker. I love watching him, so I’m only complaining a little, but it doesn’t make sense that he’s there, or not the emotionally real kind of sense that the British Office always made.

Meese

There’s a mouse in my house. It was spotted yesterday evening three times, which means, on the plus side, it’s probably the first one that’s decided to hang out, or we would have seen it before. On the minus side, it also means it was probably stuck and didn’t know how to leave. I’ve had lots of run-ins with mice in my day, and they don’t overly upset me (I don’t get on a chair and holler when I see one for example), but they are mighty unsettling for such wee creatures. I really hate knowing they’re around, but not knowing exactly where. Sitting right above my shoulder? Under my chair? I ended up wandering around my apartment last night with a broom handle, banging on the floor to scare it off, and perhaps to accost the mouse with if it made an appearance. It reminded me of that scene in The Parent Trap where they convince evil step-mom to be that she has to bang sticks together to scare off the mountain lions.
In addition to random mouse sightings in every apartment I’ve ever lived in, except for my parents, my two, previous, intense mouse experiences are: 1) mouse crawled down my back. 2) Mouse crawled across my bed. The first was at summer camp in the “library,” which was just a place where we had sleep outs and watched videos on rainy days, and that had a serious infestation problem. Like when your bunk had to clean it for community chore there would inevitably be a sighting, a.k.a. an entire litter of mouselets whimpering in a garbage can. My bunk slept out there one night, and we were up to the regular 14-year old sleepover hijinks, running around, screeching, and a mouse ran down my back while I was sitting on the floor. An event that wasn’t as terrifying as it might sound, because it was dark and I didn’t know what was happening until it was over, at which point, it seemed kind of funny. Incident number two came in college, when I snuggled down in bed only to see a shadow dart across my pillow. I started screaming and all my roommates came into my room, and doubted me (!), until the mouse ran out from behind my radiator.
The moral of the story is that mice are not really scared of humans. But they are kind of cute, so it could be worse.

Works in progress

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Destined to confound future generations of archeologists

coke_blak1, originally uploaded by willabeast.

Does this seem like an ideal product for the French to you? It was released there in January, now in America.
It skeeves me out. I'm sure this name has been market tested many, many times but I think they did it wrong.
What do you think the difference between a "coffee-like froth" and the standard soda-like froth is?

And if was the last episode ever? Wtf

What do we think about smoking while half submerged in a manhole? It’s a bad idea right? Especially if you work for Con-Ed and there’s the truck sitting right next to you and a bunch of wires are running from it down into the hole. Definitively, wires and manholes and cigarettes are a bad combo, but smoking while half submerged in a manhole full of wires is exactly what one mustachioed Con-Ed dude was doing this morning.
This made me think about Gilmore Girls (after I’d gone through the whole safety spaz I just elaborated in the previous paragraph) because a guy smoking in a manhole is exactly the kind of thing that might appear on that show, for absolutely no good reason. You can just imagine Lorelei walking by such a scene while on her phone and breaking into some fast-jive patter about common sense, exploding streets, taking cigarette breaks in appropriate locations and getting totally frothed up about this Man lighting a Fire around Electrical equipment, and then making some reference to either Michael Jackson or James Hetfield getting burned up by onstage fireworks that only kind of makes sense, but she says so fast you laugh anyway. And it’s would all be so totally irrelevant and totally charming and totally annoying because she so hasn’t talked to Luke yet in this episode and she probably won’t and, frankly, you don’t watch Gilmore Girls only to hear Lorelei’s rants, so could the Palladinos throw you a freaking bone already?
Or maybe I’d already been thinking about Gilmore Girls this morning because I watched the season finale the other night and it focused on exactly such an irrelevant happening, and for a really, really long time. It was the last episode with the show’s creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who didn’t resign her contract. The show will air next year without her (if it gets picked up) and that… should be interesting. It seems a given that next year’s show runners will take an LBJ approach to the Palladino agenda, but that should be an exceedingly difficult thing to do. Gilmore Girls has been great (and obvs, I watch it religiously. Though that in and of itself certainly doesn’t mean it’s high quality), but under Palladino’s six seasons of direction it has also been incredibly frustrating and flat-out weird, not in an X-Files way, but in a, “seriously, you’ve decided to spend 20 minutes on this utterly irrelevant, usually annoying, side plot?” way.
A good third of the finale was taken up by my least favorite townie, Taylor, the persnickety top politico of Star’s Hollow (the Gilmores' home town), a minor character who appears every few weeks and then monopolizes excruciating amounts of screen time. Basically, after Stars Hollow’s resident “troubadour” was plucked off the street to open for Neil Young (the troubadour is this guy who sings songs between scenes while standing on the street corner) dozens of musicians (including Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub) descended on the town, hoping for their big break. This segment consisted of performances by said acts, stitched together by outbursts from Taylor to the effect that they all needed to leave, because it was bad for business and sleeping. Apologies to Kim Gordon and all, but the fast forward button got a good work out this episode.
The show’s consistent dedication to the unnecessary is part of the reason people love it with the passion that they do-- it’s unique and not driven by schlocky soap opera hijinks, but the bizarre antics of the Gilmores’ neighbors and friends. But ultimately the town weirdos are not why we tune in week after week. We watch for Lorelei and Rory. In a season finale, when we’re about to go cold turkey on the girls for the next four months, I know I’d much rather see them then the cloying antics of Taylor and the troubadours, no matter how famous or cool they really are.
Palladino is like one of those parents who confiscates all of your Halloween candy and then doles out three pieces, night by night. But one of those is always a box of raisins. You’re never going to get all the candy you want--you’re going to have just enough to keep you from getting mad and just enough to remind you that you like candy—-and you’re always going to get a piece that, like, you’ll eat, but not ecstatically. Gilmore viewers are never going to get as much conversation between Lorelei and her boyfriend, Luke, or Lorelei and her mother as they want. They’ll get just enough to hope for more and just enough to remember that they’re invested in these relationships. And for the rest of the time they’ll have to watch raisins.
Of course, the benefit of this piece-by-piece approach is that when you get a good bit, it’s all the more precious. When Palladino finally gets around to tackling the major story lines, Gilmore gives you the most gratification per second of any show on the air. The finale contained a brief, but intense fight between Luke and Lorelei, the culmination of months of tension. It wasn’t long, it wasn’t thorough, but it was great—after all the months of inaction, of nothing happening, this three -minute fight carried the emotional weight of an entire episode. I’ll watch next September to see what happened to them, even though I’m really aggravated that almost every other minute of the show was dedicated to less pressing plot points.
Doling out the exact right amount of information to keep viewers watching, despite mounting frustration, is a complex balancing act. It’s possible that all the writers working on the next season of the show, who’ve been working on it for years, will be able to achieve this balance without Palladino. Some shows can survive losing their major creative voice-- The West Wing managed to surmount Aaron Sorkin’s departure (though it took a few years for West Wing to get good again and The Gilmore Girls, probably entering its last season, may not have that kind of time.)
I imagine the writers will probably be able to keep up Palladino’s fast paced, pop culture laced dialogue, though perhaps the references will be a little less random, but what they’ll do about the townies is another matter. Palladino has demonstrated a dedication to those characters that, basically, keeps her show from being as entertaining as it could be. This makes her different than Sorkin-- West Wing writers literally just had to learn how to crib from his playbook, they didn't have to evaluate whether or not everything on the show had been working under his direction, because it had been. There are a lot of things that don’t work about Gilmore and that seem to be there only by force of Palladino’s will. Avoiding Lorelei and Rory for a third of your finale is a ballsy thing to do, but on paper it doesn’t seem like something your audience would want. In fact, it’s not something that your audience wants. But it was there anyway, because, well, Palladino really wanted to meet Thurston Moore. Or, in past episodes, has really wanted to meet Norman Mailer. And, in a less fan girl way, seems to truly believe that the antics of the townies are integral to the show. This isn't really debateable, but the amount of time that must be dedicated to these antics is. Palladino has allotted tons of time to these characters, whether the writers next year will too remains to be seen. Without her around maybe those side characters will score far less screen time. If that’s the case Gilmore Girls will become a more typical television show. It will be less frustrating for sure, but also less interesting--lacking the idiosyncratic, at times insufferable tics that have made it so unique. Beyond all the fast-talking, those quirky weirdos and unnecessary asides are what have made Gilmore Girls the Gilmore Girls.

toenail teeth

At dinner tonight I realized I was only wearing one earring and got bummed that I’d lost the other somewhere on Houston Street. I just got home and found it on my desk. Which means I’d only put one on before walking out of the house this afternoon. I also forgot my cell phone and had to come back upstairs to get it. All this because I had just woken up from a highly unnecessary nap, motivated about 85% by boredom and 15% by not wanting to read anymore about the terrible white men who fucked everything up in the Congo. King Leopold’s Ghost has been pretty good thus far (100 plus pages in) even while entirely burying the lede, which in this case is the horror, oh the horror, of what happened there. He’s basically banking on Heart of Darkness to carry the atrocities across. Also, let’s think about how Ivory is kind of like elephants’ toenails—a solid substance secreted by their body. Funny what humans can convince themselves they want and need.

Abusing close reading skills

So last night on The OC the writers deployed their, at this point, very old meta-joke about The Valley. In the world of The OC, The Valley is the OC, the TV show all the kids on The OC watch that’s freakishly similar to The OC. So last night a random character was on the phone with her dad, allegedly a writer for The Valley, and she was all, “Well dad what did you expect to happen to the ratings when you’ve been milking the same old love triangle for three seasons?” (Those aren’t the words she used, but the meaning she achieved). The OC writers are attempting to poke some fun at themselves here, by making a meta-analogous joke about their own show, which is sliding in the ratings. The problem with this joke is that the show has not lost viewers because of triangles. The OC doesn’t even have triangles. It has lost viewers because it sucks.
The OC’s problem is with pairs, torturously boring, prolonged, badly acted pairs. Leave triangles alone. They are a pretty shape. Since jettisoning the Anna component of the Summer-Seth relationship back in season one, the writers have never managed anything resembling a love triangle. They have pairs, and then some poorly written interloper we know is only there for a couple of episodes, mostly just to keep said pairs apart, enters and leaves. See Oliver, Teresa, Lindsay, DJ, Volchok, Sadie. None of these people contributed to a triangle in the proper sense of the word—a romantic configuration ripe with tension for which it’s possible to imagine multiple outcomes. Rather The OC has moments where Ryan and Marissa are with other people, we all realize how much better that would be, but then, Ryan and Marissa just end up back together, for no clear emotional reasons. Ryan and Marissa are the most boring couple on TV. An actual triangle would help them enormously, but that’s not what’s been written.
The Valley exists on The OC, and has since the first season, so the writers can pen pomo, meta commentary about their own show without actually breaking the fourth wall. The Valley is The OC. A joke about The Valley that does not have meaning for The OC is a bad joke, since the real viewing audience only knows about The Valley vis a vis The OC. Dig? If the writers wrote some joke that was like, “Dad, what did you expect to happen to the ratings for The Valley when you decided to make it about a terrorist conspiracy?” that doesn’t scan. Or actually, that joke does scan, but only because the idea of The OC sinking to such tactics is kind of hilarious. And would maybe help it… So a better example would be, “Dad, what did you expect to happen to the ratings for the Valley when you decided to make it all about a happily married couple?” In a weird way, this scans too, as some kind of meta commentary on why The OC scribes have chosen not to make Sandy and Kirstin happy. This though, “Dad, what did you expect to happen to the ratings for The Valley when you decided to make it all about old ladies?” doesn’t make very much sense—it’d be weird and you’d spend a bunch of time wondering how this is actually a joke about The Golden Girls, but you wouldn’t figure it out because it’s not a joke about The Golden Girls, it’s just a bad joke. Point is, jokes about The Valley have to be jokes about The OC (and they are really easy to make).
The joke that actually was on The OC last night suggests that the problem with the show, or one of the problems with the show, is that they have had the same love triangle for three years. But as discussed, that’s not the case. So either the writers are so unaware of what they’ve put on screen that they think they’ve written proper triangles or the writers are so arrogant that they think the same thing.
To their credit--pretending it doesn’t matter if you call them triangles or pairs-- the triangles actually are what’s wrong with The OC. So boring. This brings us to the other, more major problem with this joke. It’s great the writers on The OC are self-effacing, but they have trouble with personal responsibility. Making jokes about milking the same triangle for the past three years does not excuse you for actually milking the same triangle for the past three years. If that sucks, and it does, it’s the writers’ fault. Instead of making jokes, why don’t you try writing something original? In this episode, after breaking up a couple weeks ago, Ryan and Marissa are back on track for a reunion. Ryan’s beating people up for her again, they’re eating breakfast together, she’s protecting him and vice-a-versa. Snoooooze. Now it’s possible, if the spoilers are true, that Marissa is gonna bite it at the end of next week. In which case the writers are actually doing something different and this was a kind of pre-joke. But I don’t have a lot of faith, at this point, that they’d do any better without Marissa (though, granted, axing the worst actress on prime time TV from your show has gotta help).