Vast Wasteland

see also: Piven, JeremyIt’s counter-intuitive, but having a TiVo encourages a healthier relationship with the television box. You’re always hearing from TiVotees who go on about how they watch less TV than they did before they got one, but now I’ve got proof. Over the past month I’ve been subjected to more TV at my parents’ house and on airplanes and in hotel rooms than I’ve watched in the past four years.

The first thing that becomes obvious is that so much of TV is absolute crap. There’s a whole section of my TiVo subscription list that I always thought of as guilty pleasures, but now I can watch completely guilt-free. Because now I’ve seen what’s out there, and it’s worse. And what’s worse, I’ve been having to see it Clockwork Orange-style, unable to turn the channel but still instinctively reaching for the rewind, fast-forward and skip buttons like some kind of a phantom limb.

Or worse, stuck on a plane with a huge projection of Jeremy Piven all up in my face for an hour during turbulence.

Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime
Also known as Jeremy Piven is an Enormous Douche. I’ve got no idea how something this loathsome made it to the normally-innocuous Travel Channel; I’m guessing there weren’t enough sexxxy spring break girls in it to make the cut for E! The premise is that inexplicably well-known supporting actor Piven makes a spiritual pilgrimage to India with a camera crew and a book about yoga he picked up while in LA.

One of the remarkable things about this show is that it manages to make egomaniac Anthony Bourdain seem low-key and selfless. Hell, he makes Richard Gere seem well-adjusted. We get shot after shot of Mr. Piven doing yoga here, talking to a swami there, feeling visibly moved by the plight of a child over there before being driven back to his luxury spa here. The key theme isn’t so much “India” or “East Asia” but “get this guy on-screen as much as possible.” It’s not filmed like a travel documentary but a campaign ad. Although I’m not sure what office he could be running for other than Arch-Douche of Doucheland.

And all the while he keeps bowing and saying “Namaste” in that insufferably pompous nasal whine. I like to think that the typical shooting schedule for the “documentary” consisted of 10 minutes getting footage of him shouting “look at me” during some deeply significant ceremony, followed by 20 minutes of the camera crew just beating him repeatedly.

Bones
I’m sure she’s a fine actress and all, but Emily Deschanel has that weird Cro-Magnon thing going on. I’m just sayin’. It was surprising, is all, because Zooey’s hot.

But the show is stone dumb, even for Fox. Read the character names and descriptions on that Wikipedia site, for starters: “Temperance Brennan” and “Seeley Booth” are your heroes. Take that petri dish of stupidity and add the desire to one-up CSI at every level, and you end up with forensic pathologists at the Smithsonian who have holographic technology straight out of Aeon Flux.

Plus it has a message: the one I saw was about a murdered prostitute addicted to plastic surgery and Dr. Temperance Brennan lamenting about people so convinced they’re ugly that they willingly give up their individuality. Which is a good, albeit preachy, point, although the whole time she was talking I couldn’t stop staring at her protruding brow ridge.

The Closer
This one isn’t so bad, actually; it’s your typical old-school hour-long crime show. I just wish somebody would give Emmy Award Nominee Kyra Sedgwick a dialect coach. One of the things about her character (who’s pretty much completely unlikable and annoying) is that she’s supposed to be from Atlanta. Nobody from Atlanta talks like that, not even on “Designing Women.”

Grey’s Anatomy
I only caught a few minutes of this one, and I don’t get it. I keep hearing about what a huge hit it is, and I guess I assumed it was a show about a hospital. From what I could tell it’s a show about self-obsessed average-looking women who wanted to have sex with equally average-looking guys. Maybe it’s got some subtleties I just didn’t pick up on.

Kenneth Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory
I’ve seen three sermons/infomercials by this guy, and the recurring theme of each wasn’t so much faith and belief or even Christianity, but “Praise Jesus I’ve got so much money.” He talks about his boats and his planes and his big houses and his big cars and how all of us could have as much money as he does if we just have faith. And tax-exempt status, I’m assuming.

There are plenty of televangelists out there a lot more toxic — as far as I’m aware, Kenneth Copeland hasn’t blamed 9/11 on the liberals or said “nyah, nyah” to a stroke victim. I was just surprised by the rhetoric of the Copelands, having grown up watching Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker (yes, really) reveling in their wealth and excess and seeing how that whole thing played out.

Decompression

The day after crunch mode ends on a project is like a bullet train hitting a concrete mammoth. “Brick wall” seemed too mundane. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, instead of finding myself sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do and too bored even to nap.

There’s still plenty to do, of course, but the key point is that I didn’t have to do anything today. I’m torn between halfway feeling guilty about goofing off today and then realizing that I don’t feel guilty about goofing off today and feeling guilty about that. Luckily things will get crazy busy again within a couple of days, and all that nonsense will stop.

I ended up going to Hollywood Boulevard to see Pirates of the Caribbean at The The El Capitan Theater. A while ago I complained about the El Capitan having too much of the Disney Regimented Whimsy vibe going on. That was a perfect example of what happens when Disney goes horribly awry; today was a great example of what happens when Disney gets it right.

The theater has piratey stuff over the sign, all through the lobby, and in the balcony. In the basement there’s a museum with props and costumes from the movie. If you pre-ordered your ticket, you got a bucket of popcorn and soda included (the tickets are ridiculously expensive, but a) that’s Disney, and 2) it was worth it). They had the organist going as usual, which is always cool; a drawing for tickets to Disneyland; and before the show started they did a flaming pirate skull/dungeon effect behind the screen, which was really well-done and great for getting geared up for the movie. It was pretty much exactly the promise of the theater — the Disney thing combined with the Great Movie House thing.

As for the movie itself: not bad. I’d been reading reviews panning it, and hearing people say they didn’t like it, but I don’t think it deserves the negativity. As far as movie-trilogy-franchise-building goes, it was suitably entertaining. And it worked all right as a movie in spite of being the Jan Brady of the trilogy — unlike The Two Towers (a better movie), Pirates had an arc to it.

What it needed was an editor. And a few more script revisions. In the first, stuff happened because it kind of made sense to happen. It was still as formulaic as a big Disney action franchise requires, but there was motivation for everything. The second just seems as if they threw everything they could think of up on the screen. I’m sure there was a thread through the whole thing that made it vaguely story-like, and I’ll bet that it was explained in one of the hundreds of lines of dialogue I couldn’t comprehend at all. Plus the thing could’ve stood to lose an hour or so.

Speaking of bad editing and meandering purposelessness, here’s a video I made from Hollywood Boulevard. I got myself a video camera for my birthday and was playing around with it and iMovie. But if you’re into that kind of thing, the internet makes it possible. Let me reiterate that this is a home movie, so don’t watch it expecting something interesting to happen.

Blur

SLEEP!Hard to believe I’ve been in LA for a week already. On one level it feels like it’s just been a day or two. On another level, it feels like I’ve been here for months. That would be a side effect of the wicked crazy crunch we’ve been in. Any notion that I’m no longer working in videogames is belied by the fact that I’m up until the oui hours (as in, “oui, je suis très fatigué”) and seeing nothing more than the office and my hotel room.

I was playing around with the MacBook’s webcam and even after four tries, I couldn’t stifle a yawn before the picture went off. I think that says it better than anything else.

Things will get back to normal at some point, I’m certain.

In other news, the pilot for the Amazing Screw-On Head TV series is watchable online at SciFi.com. I haven’t been able to watch it yet, both for lack of time and because of the hotel’s lousy internet connection. Someone watch it and tell me how it is.

Also, my favorite song at the moment is “We Run This” by Missy Elliott.

10 Things I Hate About Georgia

I always remember myself as having had Scout Finch’s childhood. Even though the reality was mostly me indoors watching cartoons or playing with my Star Wars men, the parts that stand out were wandering around creeks and catching lightning bugs and riding my bike down Main Street to the old red-brick buildings of downtown to get ice cream at the family-owned drugstore and finding Boo Radley lurking in my brother’s bedroom.

So I’m sure my unrealistic nostalgia is coloring my impressions of my home state, and I’m not giving it a fair shake. All’s I know is that what I’m remembering now is why I wanted to leave in the first place.

1. Racism
Whenever I mention I’m from Georgia, it’s not long before people start talking about racism. (Or sodomy, but whatever). And I always point out that racism is a problem everywhere; non-Southerners just like to convince themselves it’s all safely concentrated in the South. And I still say that. And I still say that people in Georgia are hella racist.

Every time I come back, it’s usually just about a half hour before I hear something so racist it makes my teeth hurt. But this trip, probably because it’s the first time I’ve spent any time in an area where I’m not in the majority, is the first time it’s struck me how it’s not just stupid white people complaining about blacks. It goes both ways. I’ve gotten the “what the hell do you want, white boy” attitude so many times now I’ve stopped counting.

Still, it’s gradually improving, just not as quickly as I would’ve hoped. And it seems more of a class thing than a race thing at this point; give people enough money & education and they turn colorblind. And at least there’s still remnants of this layer of enforced politeness in the south, so that everybody stays pretty civil.

2. Heat
Almost as surprising as saying that there’s racism in the South: it’s also quite hot. The difference between southern heat and west coast heat is that here, if it’s hot during the day, it’s almost as hot that night. Fortunately, also unlike the west coast, people in the south have mastered the idea of air conditioning.

3. Traffic
This was the biggest surprise; driving around Atlanta is way worse than driving around LA, which up until now was my vote for city with the worst traffic in America. Here, the thing to do is ride up on somebody’s ass and do a two- or three-lane swerving lane change coming a few microns away from your back bumper. Part of the reason my daddy’s illness has been hard on my family is because my mama can’t drive to the hospital — and I don’t blame her at all. Navigating I-20 and 285 has been driving me nuts.

4. Smog
Because of the traffic and the heat, Georgia’s got daily smog warnings now. I don’t remember there ever being a pollution problem here when I was growing up, on account of all the trees. Now it’s even more like LA.

5. Soulless Suburban Sprawl
There’s not a patch of land anywhere they won’t build a strip mall on. The same mid-90s Bed, Bath, and Beyond architecture in every damn one.

6. The ATL
Nothing sadder than seeing a local news anchor in his 60s going on about “the ATL” on what used to be a semi-respectable news show.

7. Trinity Broadcasting Network
I still say religion is a very personal thing; any attempt to explain it or evangelize it trivializes it, and it’s way too easy to turn it from a personal expression of faith into a power struggle. That disclaimer aside, people here are a lot more expressive of their religion than I’m used to. And I’m happy to see it; I think it’s a good thing.

What pains me is to see Christianity being twisted to preach everything that’s the exact opposite of what it should be about. It’s now all about intolerance and fear and superiority and worst, politics. There’s a ton of religious broadcasting, but the worst is the Trinity Broadcasting Network. It’s got as much political propaganda as anything else; they’re not going to be happy until the United States is a theocracy and all people are controlled by fear and willful ignorance. I actually heard one “preacher” comparing those promoting religious tolerance to worship of Baal.

8. Red State
This is the part that really makes me sad. Georgia’s always been conservative, but as I was growing up, it seemed a lot more progressive. Fiercely Democratic, trying to make some sense of religious conservatism combined with the civil rights movement and the bare remnants of Confederate rebellious libertarianism, all mixing together to make a delicious moderate gravy.

Now, it’s been twisted just like every other generic bright red state, a bunch of Fox News-watchin’, Anne Coulter-readin’ yahoos who are uncomfortable with the brown people taking over and are playing right into the party line ‘cuz the president seems like a good ole boy who’d be fun to have a beer with.

9. Emory University Hospital

10. Pernicious Blandness
It’s manifested in the turn to Republicanism, and in the soulless suburban sprawl, but it’s all a sign that southerners are killing the south. I sure as hell am not a secessionist, and the only people I’ve got less patience for than Republicans are libertarians.

Still, I like the idea that the south is different and that that difference is worth preserving. Old town areas are getting harder and harder to find, getting replaced by Wal-Marts. Historic churches are turned into civic buildings as the congregations build newer and more modern, featureless buildings all over the place, each with a big retail sign out front advertising the week’s sermon as if it were a going-out-of-business sale. I definitely don’t have a problem with things getting more modern, since I depend heavily on having a reliable wireless connection. I just don’t want to see Atlanta turn into Orlando. In their attempts to modernize, Georgians are destroying everything that makes the south cool, and keeping everything (racism, ignorance, intolerant theocracy) that makes it the punchline to a joke.

And six things I still like about Georgia:

1. Lightning Bugs
They’re still here, and they’re still pretty cool.

2. Trees
A documentary with Joanne Woodward told me that Atlanta has more trees per square mile than any other metropolitan area. It’s easy to see that, too; they’re all over, in a constant battle between woods vs. freeways and Borders bookstores.

3. The street names
North Druid Hills, Snapfinger Road, Wesley Chapel, Five Points Trickum. Those are street names I can get behind, not mispronounced mundane Spanish words and names of saints and presidents.

4. Chick-fil-a
They’re ubiquitous now, but still they’re consistently as good as I remember. And I think it’s really cool that they’ve stuck to the policy of staying closed on Sundays.

5. Everything’s cheaper
It’s cute to hear people complaining about how ridiculously expensive gas has gotten, when it’s about $2.50 a gallon.

6. Gravy

Thirty-Five

My birthday was today, and I got exactly what I asked for two weeks ago: a birthday card from and signed by my daddy. He wrote my name on the front and my age and year on the inside. And it looks like his normal handwriting (which, he’d have to admit, was kind of scratchy to begin with).

He didn’t put any money in it, though, the cheapskate.

Cursed

Somehow I’ve pissed off the travel gods. Today they decided to delay my connecting flight back to Atlanta for two hours before cancelling it. So I’m stranded in Dulles, Virginia.

I could put a bit in here about how Dulles airport is the most hateful place on the planet Earth, and how the mouthbreathing pederasts who work for United at the airport are a scourge that must be stricken from the world, but it’s already very late and I want to go to bed.

It should suffice to say that I landed around 3:30pm, and it’s 2am now and I just got to the hotel. (Which, it’s worth pointing out, I have to pay for. Thanks, United!) I thought for a while about how I could get manage to get some work done around airport times and hotel check-out times and such, and then I thought, “screw it.” If I’m stuck here anyway I might as well make the best of it. I’m going to make an attempt to travel to DC and see the Mall and memorials and George’s house. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been to DC, and seeing as how I’m never ever going to travel to Dulles again, this may be my last chance.

Of course, the weather that supposedly cancelled my flight will probably ruin any attempts at sightseeing. And according to the internets I’m at least an hour away, so it may be completely impractical. And my camera is in my checked luggage, which is currently at some unspecified location in the southeast, so I’d be getting nothing but memories. Still, reading Sarah Vowell and a biography of Robert E. Lee got me hankering to see the capitol again, so I figure it’s worth a shot.

(Of course I wouldn’t even be considering it if my daddy’s condition weren’t relatively stable. But since I’m going to be stuck here anyway, it’ll be better than sitting here in a hotel room feeling depressed and worthless for not being down there already).

Update: What gets me is that no matter how pessimistic I think I’m being, it’s not pessimistic enough. Getting from the airport to anything sightseeing-worthy in DC would take a couple hours on a good day, and this weather has apparently paralyzed the entire Washington area. I didn’t feel like risking an attempt out there, so I just get to wait at the airport again for five hours (at least; this flight is going to be delayed as well, I’ll bet a million bucks). What’s really a drag is that this would’ve been a perfect opportunity to see my friend Alfredo for the first time in I don’t know how many years, but no dice. Maybe when I make my big tour of the eastern seaboard again, hitting Boston, New York, DC, and everywhere except #@$%&! Dulles, VA.

I Have Opinions About Things

I don't know why you got to be so judgement just cuz I believe in science.One of the advantages to spending so much time in waiting rooms and on planes (all right, the only advantage) is that it gives me a chance to get caught up on my readin’ and watchin’. And now, bloggin’.

Nacho Libre
I’m baffled as to why this one is getting walloped in the reviews. It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it does deliver exactly what it advertises: Jack Black doing his usual schtick, with a cheesy Mexican accent in a movie about luchadores by the guy who made Napoleon Dynamite. I thought the movie was fine — not brilliant, but pretty funny throughout — and I don’t even like Jack Black. It’s got his prancing around, and his poop jokes (but the fart jokes, I like), and it’s got Jared Hess’ poor-man’s-Wes-Anderson thing going on, but as far as lightweight forgettable comedies go, I don’t see what’s not to like about it.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
I’ve had this one for a year but was scared to read it what with its being so long and all. I ended up flying right through it; it’s a great book. I’ve seen reviews that describe it as “Harry Potter for adults,” but I suspect that insults both the authors as well as their audiences. They’re only comparable in that they’re British and they’re about magicians.

Jonathan Strange perfectly conveys the feel of a novel written in England at the beginning of the 1800s, without resorting to too many obvious cliches like mimicking Charles Dickens’ or Jane Austen’s style, or an overabundance of “M_____” names. All the characters are believable (if somewhat anachronistic), and even the villains are sympathetic. And as one of the back-cover reviews says, it really does leave you convinced that there’s a real history of magic in England that none of us knew about.

Even when I wasn’t reading the book, I was eager to get back to it and frequently dreamt about the characters. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how to adapt it into a screenplay. So it was definitely compelling. The book does peter out a little bit towards the end, but it is a satisfying ending even if it’s more anti-climactic than I would’ve liked.

Hogfather
I started reading this book and then stopped and then picked it up again and I finished it. I suspect I’m getting burnt out on Discworld, because this one didn’t do a whole lot for me. I didn’t dislike it, but it was kind of the paperback fantasy book equivalent of celery. I feel completely unchanged as a person after having read it.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
This one is frustrating. It’s very well written — the language is clear throughout, it flows naturally from one topic to the next, and you’re never feeling left behind. But it always stops frustratingly short of what you really want to know. In the introduction to the book, Bryson explains that he wrote the book because of two major failings of science textbooks: they’re cold, dry, and impersonal; and they never explain how scientists arrived at the discoveries they made. Bryson nails the first part; he goes into the scientists’ personal histories and puts a human face on every discovery. But he fails completely at the second; I still have no better idea how these ideas and principles work than I did when I started reading.

For example, he describes how Ernest Rutherford used the half-life of radioactive materials to calculate the age of a sample and from that, estimate the age of the earth: “By calculating backwards from how much radiation a material had now and how swiftly it was decaying, you could work out its age. He tested a piece of pitchblende and found it to be 700 million years old — very much older than the age most people were prepared to grant the Earth.” Okay, Bill, but how? How did he know the size of the original sample? I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some obvious insight I’m missing, which is definitely not how the reader should be left feeling from a lightweight, accessible overview-of-science book.

And he keeps doing that. We hear about Max Planck’s career and how he developed quantum mechanics, but we never learn what quantum mechanics is. We hear about Albert Einstein and get a little bit of an explanation of the theory of relativity (space is like a rubber mattress with balls on it) but then we’re told that nobody really understands it, so we’re left to assume there’s no point in trying to explain it.

Plus, I’m only just over 100 pages into the book, and he’s already described about a dozen people as the greatest genius who ever lived. I’m starting to get the impression that Bryson doesn’t understand the stuff himself, and he’s trying to cover everything up. It’s possible that I’m just not the target audience for the book, and it’s meant for more general audiences who just want an overview instead of a more detailed summation. But it just leaves me with the same feelings of frustration that Bryson describes in his introduction. I really wanted somebody to explain quantum mechanics and relativity and carbon dating and how they know the age of the earth to me so I could understand it, for once.

The Odyssey
I admit I just started to read this one because of the references in “Lost.” I’m starting to remember that we had to read it in high school, and I couldn’t follow it then, either.

Go Team Venture!

Dr. Girlfriend“The Venture Brothers” is definitely the best show on [adult swim], and if it weren’t for “Lost,” it’d be the best show on TV right now. I got the Season One DVDs when I was down in Georgia, and I’ve finally gotten around to watching the extra features.

The extra features aren’t enough to buy the DVD on their own, but it’s a great touch they went out of their way to include them. (Besides, the episodes are so good I’d’ve bought the set without any extras). There are interviews with the cast of the “live action movie,” and a special making-of segment. I haven’t listened to the commentary tracks yet. The best special feature is the totally bad-ass slipcase art by Bill Sienkiewicz.

The new season starts Sunday, June 25th, and adultswim.com has been running teasers for a sneak preview available online tomorrow (Friday). If you want to get as excited as I am, you can check out Jackson Publick’s blog and this fansite for the show.

It was from one of those blogs I heard about J.G. Thirlwell, who does the music for the show and records under the name “Foetus.” His album Ectopia (recorded as “Steroid Maximus”) is pretty damn cool. A few years ago I got Music for Imaginary Films by Arling & Cameron, and while I liked the concept, the music itself was predictable and dull. Ectopia delivers on the concept and is better in every conceivable way.

Top 10 Signs That Superman in “Superman Returns” Might Be Gay

Super Pals
BBC News: Superman ‘not gay’ says director

Defamer.com’s painful beating-the-joke-into-the-ground

10. Wears blue tights, red cape, boots, and codpiece.

9. Flies around Earth at super-speed, turns back time long enough to deliver snappier comeback to Lex Luthor than earlier “Oh no you didn’t, bitch!”

8. Starts a weblog.

7. Outfits Fortress of Solitude with hot tub, private gym, and ironic 50s and 60s ephemera.

6. Dresses dog in matching costume.

5. Giggles uncontrollably at sexual innuendo.

4. Won’t stop quoting Bring it On.

3. Clark Kent requests transfer from news desk to gossip column.

2. Admits true weakness is not Kryptonite, but the Bravo channel.

1. Reveals that time away from Earth was spent writing a poignant, wry, and bittersweet memoir of his experiences coming to terms with a world that doesn’t understand him.

One week

Thanks to everybody who sent e-mails with sympathy and offers to help; it was appreciated. My daddy’s condition is improving very slowly, but he and the rest of the family are going to be pretty miserable until he gets out of the hospital.

As for me, I’m 3000 miles away, unable to do anything except sit here and worry about it. I’ve got one week back here in San Francisco to get everything in order best as I can. Then it’s back down to Georgia for at least two months, maybe longer. I’d been stressing out enough at the prospect of spending an entire month down in Florida for work, and that was on the assumption I’d be home right up until the last minute to get everything done. Now, my living-out-of-a-suitcase time has been doubled, and I’m convinced that I’m going to forget something.

On the bright side, though: well, I’m sure there’s a bright side in there somewhere.

Update: It’s not fun to think about, I realize, but everyone should take a minute to get familiar with the ASA’s signs to recognize a stroke. They’re not that many to memorize. And it can make a huge difference in the event somebody you love starts showing the signs and you’re wondering whether to call 911 or not.