melbatoast

BRIEFLY: Nog

2009-10-18T22:11:00.002-04:00

Many of my northeasterly friends posted Facebook or Twitter updates this afternoon that were variations on the following: "What? Snow! Interrobang?! Nooooo! Not yet, it's too early; I'm not prepared! Argh!" Stuff and nonsense along those lines.

I looked out my window this midmorning to see a slow descent of slush mixed in with a moderate amount of rain. It hardly had the fortitude to be called "snow". It was wet and barely corporeal whilst falling, and when it hit the ground, it quickly was indistinguishable from the liquidity of its more prevalent falling companions. The ground has absorbed it, and unless there's a truly tumultuous temperature drop tonight, I expect to see no ice nor snow nor even frost upon the morn.

But as people bundle themselves againt the oncoming onslaught of cold, I choose to warm myself with this: for the next eleven weeks, until right after New Year's Eve, there will be egg nog once again available for purchase in my local supermarket. That will warm the cockles of my heart for a while, the eventual actual accumulation of snowfall be damned.

BRIEFLY: Don't Take Maine For Granite

2009-08-24T23:25:00.005-04:00

Dear Tony Scott, and the producers, writers, and FX team for Enemy of the State:

If your second-tier bad guy is going to be a conservative Republican from New Hampshire — and why not? There's a fine pedigree of inspiration to justify the characterization — don't have a scene where your ex-NSA tech genius pulls his address off of his phone records and shows his residence as being in Maine. MAINE! That's an outrage!

Oh, and I see that the IMDB points out that the zip code for Maine on his address is for Washington, DC. And as the screencaps below show, his name changes from "Sam" to "Steven". Last I knew, Samuel wasn't a derivation or nickname of Stephen, as one is Hebrew and one is from the Greek. Well done, everyone. Well done, indeed.

Bloom County: Michael Jackson

2009-07-15T22:15:00.002-04:00

Bloom County was an extraordinary comic strip during its storied, hilarious, multi-year run. If I were to list the most important influences on my sense of humour and language, right after Walt Kelly's Pogo would come Bloom County, which had a similarly sprawling anthropomorphic cast, political bent, and a strong sense of word play — centering particularly on the way words simply sounded. Despite two revivals in the Sunday funnies, some animated specials, a couple painted gift books, a line of greeting cards, and an iced tea flavor, Bloom County has not successfully established itself as a fixed, indelible part of day-to-day pop culture. The fact that it continues to be referenced and resurrected in one minor way or another is testament to its cult belovedness, but that it's not a referential throughline, not a cultural touchstone is frankly beyond my reckoning.

A woman approximately my age just confessed on a public social networking board (gasp!) that she'd never heard about the whole Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial where his hair caught on fire. My first reaction was to be startled, until I realized that my knowledge of it came not from the event itself, not from the incident, but from the cultural commentary that followed. Specifically, I remembered the way in which it was satirized in Bloom County. A brief internet search produced similar memories on various people's blogs, but no reproductions or scans of the strips themselves.

While we still wait for the IDW collection of the entire Bloom County library, we can at least partake of Andrews McMeel's online offerings. Since this archive isn't searchable except by date and user-created keywords — and then only by members — I don't claim to present a comprehensive collection of every one of Berkeley Breathed's Michael Jackson references, here's what I've been able to piece together (Remember other Jackson/Bloom crossovers? Mention them in the comments). For those of you not inclined to wait for IDW, most of the following can be found in the classic 1985 assemblage, Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things:

+ March 18, 1984: Steve Dallas sings "Billy Jean" to an imaginary audience. (one strip)

+ March 22, 1984: In a satire of the Pepsi commercial accident, Steve Dallas burns off his chest hair while making a rock video. (three main strips, but a segment of about a 20-part ongoing story)

+ May 2, 1984: Oliver's mother gives him a Michael Jackson makeover. (two strips)

+ June 25, 1984: Oliver's mother wallpapers his entire room with Michael Jackson's face. (three strips)

+ August 17, 1984: Opus visits Neverland, and he and Michael reenact The Prince and the Pauper (15 strips)

+ September 27, 1986: Interestingly, this is reprinted in the Billy and the Boingers collection with the punchline, "..Don't you think it's high time Michael Jackson got interested in girls?" A sliiiight alteration there. (one strip)

Michael Bay Shout Out

2009-07-13T14:10:00.002-04:00

Well, after three weekends with the top box office results, Transformers 2: Racist Boogaloo has finally been knocked out of the number one spot by Br�no. I'd like to say, "by Br�no, of all things..." but I still recall the mysterious favourable fervor that surrounded the first film. I figured the gay angle would cancel out middle America's post-Jackass love of Sacha Baron Cohen's antics, but he's still riding the crest of that bizarre gestalt of reality programming, schadenfreude, and our tendency to laugh when we become uncomfortable (q.v. The Office and Fawlty Towers) for lack of any better response. Or he's got a post-Borat curiosity factor buoying him up temporarily. I mean, there's no way he'll still be there next week when ~~(500) Days of Summer~~ the newest Harry Potter comes out.

(A brief note on box office records: some nerds are understandably upset at Transformers 2: Transformener! creeping close to The Dark Knight's nigh-toppling of the classic Titanic record. I don't put much stock in box-office records — despite having once written to a newspaper to set them straight about Spider-Man's domestic gross — but it was still gratifying to read that someone had finally done an inflation adjustment for the top-selling films, to find out exactly how much blocks are really being busted by all these spidey-come-latelies. And while Titanic is still in the top ten (Star Wars is at number two, but I can't tell if that includes the 1997 special edition re-release), Spider-Man, as the Guardian puts it, is "nowhere to be seen." Makes one feel like someone suddenly turned the gravity back on, and realigned magnetic North.)

I don't particularly care what succeeds instead of Transformers, so long as something does. People talk about Michael Bay as a spirited visionary, someone with a good sense of populism and energy. I begin to grow tired of this particular paean. It seems to me that this is a kind of shorthand for "charismatic, improvisational egotist." The same sort of tribute was paid to Peter Berg's Hancock, and that was a dreadful mess. Good moments, but incoherent overall. Other films that don't stand up to any sort of logic test, but which people adore for a few catch-your-breath, coolness moments: Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, Armageddon (referred to as "Armageddoon" in my household because of the fortuitous happenstance of a mislabeled free-HBO-weekend VHS dupe; fortuitous because it more successfully creates the sound of the utter doofishness of its contents), and The Rock. You may notice a laser-like focus in this list. Yes, I do feel that Bay's films are most accurately characterized by a certain stylish lack of narrative intelligence, and his other films — The Island, Pearl Harbor — don't even have the cool moments to make us forget their mawkishness. In general, there is an exuberance in each of them that is relentlessly macho and completely slapdash, which ultimately means his films have stood or fallen on the inadvertent charisma or professionalism of his key actors.

Since all films are the happy accidents of their creative committees, I am perhaps unfair to lash out at Mr. Bay. But I am weary of machismo as spectacle, and his specific hair-band video aesthetic. So it was pleasing to find that in addition to confusing "You know... for kids!" with his own unconscious racism, that the man is simply inarticulate. The ever-marvelous Vulture pays people to read drek like Ain'tItCoolNews and TMZ so that I don't ever, ever, ever have to, and they gleefully cribbed a collection of typographical and grammatical inanities from Bay's irate correspondence with Paramount marketing. These help enormously in beginning to understand my reaction to his body of work, as it clearly demonstrates a passion-over-coherence dynamic that I reject personally and professionally.

Fittingly, Bay rejects me as well. In responding to the accusations regarding his potentially unintentional sambots, Mr. Bay said, "Listen, you're going to have your naysayers on anything. It's like, is everything going to be melba toast?" The Vulture assumed he meant "vanilla", while Andrew Wheeler more correctly assumed he meant "milquetoast". Me, I look forward to a day when everything is a little more melba toast, thank you very much.

N.B., the above image is from an NHPR story about a psych experiment about whether New Yorkers would help a happy, defenseless robot. Is there anything more vanilla? Sheesh.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Bert

2009-05-18T23:54:00.000-04:00

Shamelessly stolen from Paul Hornschemeier, I wish to celebrate the birthday of the great 20th century humanist philosopher, Bertrand Russell (no relation). I do this by stealing an image that I peered at and poured over whilst visiting Boston's Fine Museum of Arts, as we used to call it in high school.

It's difficult to see if this small reproduction, but as Russell lights his match in the darkness, he and the flame are both out of focus. What is in focus are his spectacles on the table in the left-hand foreground. I have no idea what this says about the photographer's take on the subject, or why he chose this image out of the undoubtedly innumerable other shots of the famed thinker, but I found it to be supremely fascinating as an aesthetic choice, and perhaps one of the more subtly profound works in the exhibit.

It can be hard to appreciate an exhibit of 20th century celebrity portraiture. It's all too easy to say, "Oh, yes, I have a postcard of that image of Audrey Hepburn" or "Huhn. So that's what Nikita Khrushchev looked like..." and to simply move on. Once one recognizes Paul Newman or Ernest Hemingway, what further is one supposed to look for in the image? Karsh tried to portray them as powerful in their own right, and in their own sphere. I liked to look for the incidental details that revealed both the passage of time and the humanity of the sitter. Thin, gold wristwatches with the unmistakable slimness that accompanies fine internal clockworks. Thick cable sweaters with worn holes and slipped stitches. A fine network of lines around the eyes and knuckles, so much easier to examine in black and white. How even the meticulous banzai topiary of a moustache or beard always has errant tendrils. How many of the subjects smoked. How many didn't. And whether the smoke was conceit of the photographer, who surely acknowledged if not encouraged the wisps and curls which do so much to both catch light and contain shadow.

But even all that observation and catalogue of detail still doesn't encompass the artistry that is portraiture. To do that, one must paradoxically see what is unseen, or perhaps only seen with the self and not the eyes. Which is part of what I love about the Russell image... a photograph that hardly shows the subject at all.

Further Reading
     + MFA exhibit page
     + Time magazine slideshow of featured images
     + Boston Phoenix article about the exhibit

A Long Day's Journey Into Silence

2009-03-09T09:17:00.004-04:00

Well, it's been forever since I've posted anything. And since I'd prefer to say something instead of just chronicling every Batman-related news story that crosses my field of vision, I find that my blog is dwindling again. Despite my previous plan to jot down some quick notes and links, and throw them — gelatinous and unformed &mdash into Blogger's gaping maw, I find myself reluctant to clack out anything that I haven't thought about, mulled like fine cider, and weighed in the palm of my hand, to get a small measure of its relevance and universality. Unfortunately, this means that I usually find it lacking, particularly as my internal Bureau of Weights and Measures is as slow and bureaucratic as its civic counterpart, which removes much chance of any relevancy right from the offset.

One might think that microblogging would be the answer, then. And, as you can see, I have incorporated a Twitter feed into the sidebar, publishing my running list of songs that have gotten stuck in my head long enough for me to do something about it. But I'm not convinced that Twitter or, say, Tumblr would provide me with the answer. It's become clear to me that blogging really is about comments, about a call and response relationship with the void. I've long held that, for me, this is supposed to be more like a column, a collection of aggregated observations that should amuse, but should stand on their own. It should not rely on knowledge of me, nor be designed to shine a light into my personal life and internal workings. However, I have largely failed in that last aspect: the column has become more of a diary, more of a LiveJournal as time has withered on. In part this is because I have lost my trust in my ability to be universal, in my ability to write openly without an intended audience. I would write with more surety, and therefore more frequently, if this had a focus, a topic, a row to hoe. But since it doesn't, since it is just a feature for my peregrinatory whims, it really has to be simply about me, and therefore simply be a journal after all.

I heard about a study recently (not sure where... I assumed in the Sci/Tech news I accumulate in my RSS subscriptions, but a series of searches reveals nothing, so now I'm guessing it was a one-line item in Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me) that indicates that blogging makes one happy. Researchers claim that individuals who blog feel

"a sense of greater social integration, which is how connected we feel to society and our own community of friends and others; an increase in social bonding (our tightly knit, intimate relationships); and social bridging ? increasing our connectedness with people who might be from outside of our typical social network."

The article I link to above claims, if I'm reading this right, that this comes about because of an internal sense of satisfaction that comes from journaling about one's internal feelings, and the increased sense of self-acceptance that comes with the external articulation of this. What is not said is whether this greater sense of self is dependent upon external reinforcement from comments, hits, or other exchanges. Is the writing sufficient unto itself, or does it really need to be "blogging", with the subsequent back-and-forth that seems to be a requisite part of the definition.

Also, does microblogging bring micro-satisfaction? How much happiness can be spun and how much self-concept can be reinforced in 140 characters? If anything, I wonder if the micro-format, being such a virtual amuse-bouche, leaves both the reader and the writer impatient for and anxious about more. For every person who wonders why someone would even join Twitter anyway, I wager, there's someone using the service in anguish over what to say say next, in order to always have one's account fresh and new and interesting. And I do not envy this hypothetical (read: straw?) person's regular bouts of status panic.

One last note on Twitter. A few people in conversation have sought out my editorial on the whole phenomenon, and one of the points I like to drive home about its appeal is the celebrity aspect of the whole thing — there is a potent allure in providing a service that encourages the illusory notion that one is connected with someone famous. I fully understand why creative types like singer/songwriters have been firmly embracing the web, as it allows them to use technology to regularly reinforce their audience, and in the fractured commerce that is the music business, a core of devotées is acutely necessary. I'm less sure why, say, an actress like Kat Dennings needs a homepage, a YouTube channel, and a Twitter account. That is to say, I understand why she would want or need them as a person — after all, I have all these same things — but not so much as a celebrity. If one uses the singer/songwriter lens above, to have all these one-way outlets for communication feels like brand-building, and I find it hard to believe that either Ms. Dennings or her publicity staff would feel that she needs to be a brand. Even in the mayfly world of starlets.

The flip-side of this is the fake Twitter-account, which is almost invariably associated with a celebrity. I'm not sure I understand the appeal of pretending to be a celebrity... is there really a frisson that comes from having thousands of followers when they're not really interested in you at all? How is it that the fake Zooey Deschanel has thousands of followers and no posts, while the real one has but a pittance? (EDIT, 10 Aug 2009: The follower balance seems to have been redressed, but it's difficult to tell, as both accounts seem to have been blocked or suspended at this time. So links have been changed to Google caches.) My favourite spoof, however, is the rather baffling "StephenFryJohnCleese", who apparently decided that pretending to be one famous British comedian wasn't enough, and so he'd grab more followers by being two! Or something...

BATMAN: and Friends

2008-12-22T18:30:00.008-05:00

I've played around with the new Brave and the Bold cartoon, as I'm always willing to at least try a new spin on the Batman character, but come away dissatisfied. It's not just that the character is bright and poppy and has a permanent cowl shadow more reminiscent of Adam West's mask than the effects of actual light sources — after all, I don't begrudge the Batman that smiles over in DC Kids' Super Friends. No, cuteness is not my problem, it's just not being written for me, despite the presence of Blue Beetle, Plastic Man, and a bat-utility belt that comes with a frickin' lightsaber! My friends with children seem to enjoy it, so it's clearly reaching some demographic that simply doesn't overlap with my little Venn radius.

No, my Batman-related joy has been almost entirely British in the recent past. I stumbled upon an announcement that Lily Allen was releasing a song on her new album called "Guess Who, Batman?", which had a marvelous campy Riddler quality to the whole thing. And when I heard that Allen felt that she was "becom[ing] a character in a comic" and two songs off the new album, I became quite excited about this whole thing. The first single — if pre-release internet buzz-leaks can be called "singles" — "Everyone's at it" was quite catchy, and the interesting Madonna-parody ironic self-awareness of "The Fear" definitely intrigued.

This was all well and good because after seeing Ms. Allen on both Never Mind the Buzzcocks and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, I had given her variety show Lily Allen and Friends a try and found it to be the dullest collection of pseudo-hip tripe I'd encountered in quite some time. The BBC told me it was boffo with the kidz, and I was relieved to discover that this was merely so much spin. Not that I wanted a charming young person with glasses to fail utterly, but it was so, so, so dull, that I just wanted to chalk it up to overenthusiastic marketeers and forget all about it.

It turns out that, reviewing my iTunes data, that I don't have much by Ms. Allen, and that what I do have, a) I only repeatedly listened to a very select few songs, and b) I may have confused her frequently with Kate Nash. Embarrassing and predictable, I know. Still, it does make the fact that I enjoy the first two "singles" from It's Not Me, It's You that much more of a nice surprise. Check out this post from Pretty Much Amazing for a vast sampling of tracks from the record, including the vulgarity-titled one, which is the song rumoured to be the Batman track. I don't hear it myself, which may be why the Caped Crusader's name no longer graces the track list. Which sort of makes this entire thread a bit moot.

So let me close with this, instead: if you really loved me, you'd be bidding to get the naming rights to a recently discovered species of bat. Sure, the current bidding is at five thousand dollars, but isn't it worth it to have the name rhogeessa batmanueli forever ensconced in the Museum of Natural History? What price nerd infamy?

Obligatory Birthday Post

2008-11-30T13:21:00.003-05:00

It's November 30th. Yay me, and all that.

Okay, now that's out of the way, let's talk about AT&T. Upon purchasing the iPhone this summer, I was told by a sales representative (consider the source and caveat emptor and all that) that AT&T would have extended its 3G network into southern New Hampshire by November.

I'm not saying that this was a selling point for me, as I was already going to pony up for the damn thing, but it was a nice bonus. All reports about how much using the 3G network burns up the iPhone's already limited battery, while I was looking forward to being able to do a little web-browsing whilst in remote and portable locations, I was not looking forward to loading tiny, tiny images at dial-up modem speeds. So the future existence of 3G, with all its drawbacks, was a definite hatch mark in the plus column.

Well, November is officially over, and there's not so much of a sniff of 3G in NH according to my antenna. Peter reports that if he's standing in a particular corner of one of his flatmate's bedrooms, he can sometimes get 3G... but basically the evidence is not there. So I turned to the official AT&T portion of the world-wide web to see what they had to say about their services in my little corner of the world. A billboard adjacent to I-93 outside of Boston trumpets that "New England is AT&T Country", a marvelously funny little bit of trumpeting considering that it was only recently that iPhones were officially available in Vermont considering that there was absolutely no AT&T wireless coverage available in the hidden valleys of the Green Mountain State.

Dan Frommer posted a well-Dugg map of AT&T coverage areas dated July of 2008, and XTI9.com had an additional, more popular map dated October of that same year. But AT&T has an online map of their own, that allows you to search down to street level how good the coverage is in your area.

The darker the orange, the better the reception. The blue on the right-hand map indicates 3G availability. And it's an astounding piece of fiction. There is no 3G in Concord that I can find, and certainly a big swamp of it surrounding my apartment. And I'm bloody lucky to get three bars anywhere in my building, and to see that lovely deep orange right on top of my thumbtack indicating the "best" coverage is eye-rollingly inaccurate. The previous links to the Digg maps may be out of date, but they are more consistent with my experience on the ground, holding my phone towards the sky, squinting and hoping for a signal from above. Maybe some day the reality will match AT&T's claims, maybe... ~~Perhaps by next November 30.~~

EDIT: By sometime in mid-to-late December, which is to say, within a couple of weeks of writing the above, I did indeed have 3G in most, if not all of Concord. So the map was just a little ahead of the actual schedule of implementation. Not bad, AT&T... not bad.

Alphabet Meme: Film Titles

2008-11-16T12:03:00.004-05:00

Glenn Kenny compells me to do a lot of things. I miss Premiere magazine, a periodical with which he was involved that first introduced me to the idea of Film as compared to Movies, the writing of David Foster Wallace, auteur theory, the realization that entertainment was a business, and that hype was as well. His memories of The Feelies got me to finally watch McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in a charmingly banal coincidence. I don't know the man, but he's a writer, and I do like the way he strings words together.

So, when he blogs about being tagged to participate in an internet meme (after having started his own), I'm inclined for reasons passing understanding to jump on board.

The rules are as follows: 1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

And that's basically it. There are actually more rules than that, but they're about propagating the meme, and how to do with spelling and title conventions, and blah blah blah. The meme is, Pick 26 movies, one for each letter, put them in order, you have no additional guidelines as to what you should pick. So my limiter, self-imposed, is going to be my DVD collection. Anything in grey is something I don't actually own. Here we go.

The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder
Broadcast News (1987), James L. Brooks
Charade (1963), Stanley Donen
Dangerous Liaisons (1989), Stephen Frears
Edward Scissorhands (1990), Tim Burton
The Fisher King (1991), Terry Gilliam
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), George Armitage
Heist (2001), David Mamet
The Incredibles (2003), Brad Bird
The January Man (1989), Pat O'Connor
Kicking & Screaming (1995), Noah Baumbach
Little Man Tate (1991), Jodie Foster
M*A*S*H (1969), Robert Altman
North By Northwest (1959), Alfred Hitchcock
Out of Sight (1998), Steven Soderbergh
The Philadelphia Story (1940), George Cukor
Quiz Show (1994), Robert Redford
Rushmore (1999), Wes Anderson
Strange Brew (1984), Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Norman Jewison
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Philip Kaufman
A Very Long Engagement (2004), Jean-Pierre Jeunet
What's Up, Doc? (1972), Peter Bogdanovich
The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), Rob Bowman
Young Frankenstein (1974), Mel Brooks
Zodiac (2007), David Fincher

Going through my DVDs for this, I could have easily constructed two more lists, one just for classic films, and one for commercial pleasures. There were more than twce as many films as I listed that I regretted having to leave out. I don't remember having this much trouble selecting my top twenty films over at YMDB. But the list that remains is still a valid reflection of my tastes over time and my history as an audience... there's nothing here that I don't have vivid memories of or a particular connection with. And while I refuse to tag five people to spread this meme, particularly when I know full well there aren't that many people who read this, I hope someone feels the urge to at least mentally run down one's own list of twenty-six, with whichever selection criterion feels appropriate...

For Candidate For President For America

2008-11-02T06:30:00.001-05:00

BATMAN: Apologia

2008-10-31T21:13:00.005-04:00

Well, I did not dress up for Hallowe'en this year. The intent was dress up as Trapper John from Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, complete with Hawaiian shirt and golf umbrella, but I had the devil's own time finding a red and white tropical shirt in later October. Not entirely sure why — it strikes me as just the time of year that one might need a primary-coloured equatorial pick-me-up in one's wardrobe, but apparently both department stores and secondhand shops disagreed with me.

This isn't the first time I haven't dressed up on Hallowe'en, but it's the first time in a long time. And this is the result of a rather slippery slope... a few years ago, I decided that it wasn't worth it to pay upwards of a hundred dollars on pieces and components to make a Hallowe'en costume just perfect, and since then I've even stopped planning my costumes months in advance. So this costumeless year is the clear result of eroding standards, and for that I apologize.

By means of recompense, I offer you the following pictures of people dressed up as Batman. The first is my niece, Gabriele, Jokerized through the Dark Knight: Ha Ha Ha application for the iPhone. You know and I know that she's been Jokerized, but when she sees the picture, she claims that she's Batman in it. And who's going to argue that point with a four year-old. The next was just blogged by Kiel Phegley and reblogged by the Comics Reporter, and the third and fourth are something I found and saved back in April: Andy Warhol dressed as Robin, the Boy Wonder. Enjoy.

EDIT: This seemed thematically appropriate, so I'm adding it on: the last image is Ms. Macdonald of Stately Beat Manor dressed up in the clan emblem.

Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Choose

2008-09-18T08:01:00.003-04:00

At work this year, I have been making a point of rotating through a number of pins worn on my lapel. Most have been those small three-quarter inch badges that hipsters use to adorn the flaps on their messenger bags, and which are just the right size to cover the boutoniere hole of my suit jackets. Because I have a limited number of these, I was pleased to find that due to my habit of dutifully filling out surveys for National Public Radio about my listening habits and my lack of donor generosity, they are kindly sending me three pins in gratitude for my efforts.

The e-mail that thanks me also invites me to e-mail my friends, and encourage them to send their mailing address to NPR to possibly receive three random buttons as well (supplies, naturally, are limited). I don't have any friends, so I hope that NPR won't begrudge me posting this out in the wild, instead.

My suspicion is that this, like Obama's offer to send a text-message to his supporters in advance of the national announcement, is actually a moderately clever way of gathering more addresses of likely donors, despite the fact that the NPR Listens website says that it will not share your name with the fundraising arm of their organization. So, be advised of my unfounded suspicion that you may be trading a cool Carl Kasell badge for future mailings asking for your financial support. Personally, I think it's worth it. If you agree, send your name and address to the e-mail link above, and you to can wear your liberal media bias on your sleeve, lapel, or messenger bag.

Teeny Tiny Letters

2008-09-01T07:36:00.004-04:00

This Week's Small-Print Round-Up:

As a direct result of all the terror and bad things post 9/11 and as a mark of respect, it has been decided NOT to release this cd in Dolby 5.1 surround.

—Trellis, Green Wing original television soundtrack, 2007

SHIRT CLUB IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HOW SEXY, HANDSOME, DEBONAIR, FETCHING, LOVELY, SPORTY, BECOMING, SUAVE, CAREFREE, BREEZY, GLAMOROUS, PRETTY, ENTICING, ENCHANTING, BEWITCHING, ENGAGING, GORGEOUS, RAVISHING, STUNNING, BONNY, BEAUTEOUS, HOMELY, COMELY, FAIR, AFFECTED, PRECOCIOUS, LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE, OLD-SCHOOL, OR NEW-SCHOOL YOU MAY OR MAY NOT APPEAR. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOUR SHIRT CLUB T-SHIRT SHOULD BE WASHED PRIOR TO ITS 11TH WEARING.

—Astro-Base Go, The Amazing Shirt of the Week Club, 2008

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, swapped for food, placed in a canoe, flown in the manner of a kite, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent...

—Julian Gough, Jude: Level 1, 2007

This was all prompted due to the four — four! — hidden jokes in the indicia of Julian Gough's Jude. The indicia is all I've read so far, as I have such high expectations for this book, I'm reading all sorts of other things first to try and slake my anticipation, which would otherwise be bound to ruin a perfectly good read. I'll write more about Jude later, perhaps in a time-shifted incomplete blog entry from earlier that I really need to finish up so I can write that follow-up e-mail to McLaren. Let me merely finish by saying that while David Mamet shamefully didn't put his wife's one-word review of his novel on the dust jacket (as mentioned earlier), I am inutterably pleased that Jude contains the following enigmatic pull-quote: "Julian Gough is not a novelist" —New York Times.

Brilliant! And, oddly, not in their comprehensive internet search archive...

Pop Consciousness

2008-08-21T11:48:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago I read an article on the BBC entertaiment feed that The Banana Splits show was being reinvigorated for a contemporary audience. I don't have much of a particular connection with the Splits, and can't really distinguish them in my memory from The Great Space Coaster, as they were all very occasional Saturday morning re-runs to me, despite being a decade apart in production. The only thing that really interested me was that the BBC website has undergone a streamline change of appearance recently (that I hadn't previously registered), and had a nice embedded Flash player version of the "classic" Tra La La song which was their theme.

And this is where my memory grabs hold of the whole retro shtick. Y'see, there's a great scene in Noah Baumbach's Kicking & Screaming (no, not that K&S) where Grover (no, not that Grover) is lounging awkwardly in a dorm room party, whilst in the background the Liz Phair cover of the Splits theme from the alternative band Saturday Morning compilation plays. Or so I thought, when I first watched the film. It turns out that they were actually listening to Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier", something I would have caught, were I just a little more hip.

But that was okay. I still liked the subtext of the scene. It's one of those odd pop culture connections that take place in one's head out of almost sheer desperation when one is wallflowering at a party. "Buffalo Soldier" reminds Grover of the Banana Splits which in turn makes him wonder about the Josie and the Pussycats episode that he calls up Max about. It's not delineated, step-by-step, but it makes sense. An audience member can fill in the blanks.

Or so I thought. Yesterday Mr. Wheeler linked to the Beeb's follow-up article that analyzes the similarities between "Buffalo Soldier" and "The Tra La La song" and finds them lacking in key essential similarity. I think this is like the case of the Nokia ringtone and it's origin from "Gran Vals", by Francisco Tarrega... there is a key tonal difference between the two (fast forward two minutes in), but one would never dispute the obvious commonalities.

Related Links:
+ Kicking and Screaming: DVD by the Criterion Collection
+ Kicking and Screaming: Analysis by Chronological Snobbery
+ Liz Phair, "The Tra La La song", Saturday Morning

Funny Face, Funny Books

2008-07-15T02:11:00.004-04:00

I'm not going to work more often than I can help it, so my exposure to my traditional Audrey Hepburn calendar is considerably less than daily. I've purchased a number of these calendars over the years — although this is the first year I've noticed that the name Audrey Hepburn is followed by a ™ symbol... has the estate of the late Ms. Hepburn really trademarked her likeness in this age of mass copyright infringement? — and enjoy the mild cheesiness of the almost total absence of cheesecake in the images.

I watch for repetition of images over the years, and notice that certain promotional headshots tend to make frequent reappearances. This is a pity. With appearances in twenty-nine films, surely Audrey Hepburn™ LLC must be able to license stills from her films or photos from her magazine appearances. I mean, it's probably not possible to reproduce stuff by, say, Philippe Halsman, but there's only some many years that I can stare for a month at that particular black and white coquette by Bud Fraker from 1953. The recent "Remembering Audrey" by Bob Willoughby for Life magazine had a number of photos that were new to me, so we shouldn't be hitting the end of variety just yet.

So I am particularly pleased to submit the following for consideration: Audrey reading a reprint album of Captain America with her son. Audrey and Comics: two great ~~obsessions~~interests in my life, together in one grainy image. Now that's something I'd like to see for a month in some future wall-hanging. May I suggest November 2009?

SKETCH: An Explanation

2008-07-02T10:39:00.003-04:00

I now have over a year of draft posts saved on various places around my computer. Folders of browser tabs and bookmarks, evocative images on my desktop, and anecdotes from events now well past their shelf date of relevance.

I wasn't entirely certain what to do with this digital scrapbook, and considered a simple purge, a mass deletion. Because if I looked upon these stray thoughts and thought, "Was this really worth sharing?" then what would other people think? But I was inspired by the twin sources of Nalyn and OAA, the former who encouraged me to embrace my quikjot origins of electronic communication, without needing to expound at length or significance; and the latter of whom has seriously updated her blogging by at least 600% since she threw her lot in with the shortform communication style of Tumblr.

I don't like the lack of comment ability on Tumblr, or else I'd just divest myself of these stray scrips and scraps there, but that's the model I'll be working with. So if you see a post — particularly a post that suddenly appears with an old date on it — tagged or prefixed with "Sketch", then you know it's part of my clearinghouse, and it may just sit there, context- and commentary-free. Tell me if you like them, and I may also find myself updating this blog more than my typical twice a month.

Dedicated to Rahul Kolhatkar

2008-04-27T22:46:00.003-04:00

I don't have a particular thing for George Clooney. I like him, but I would like any person who is cast in the role as this generation's Cary Grant, because I adore Cary Grant. More people should be trying and vying and jockeying for the position of this generation's Cary Grant, as far as I'm concerned, but if we're only going to have one, then, by god, I'm going to have some low level adulation for him.

But I respect any man who is successful and who is able to balance glamour and self-depreciation. It's a winning strategy, as it leads me to infer humanism and frailty upon a person who has clearly had to, at some point, step over the bodies of others in order to reach the vaunted levels of success that make anyone a household name. And it's hard not to like anyone who had something to do with Out of Sight, a masterful piece of charm.

But yeah, it's not as as George is the final part of my Five and Switch. But because he prefigures prominently in other people's estimation, I was interested in his profile in the New Yorker. And I was glad I read all ten pages of it, because I now feel closer to George Clooney than I have any other celebrity in my life:

"He hit his head on a concrete floor; not long afterward, cerebrospinal fluid began to leak out of his nose."

Anyone who's heard me tell "the cranial fluid story" will understand.

The Great Confluence

2008-03-15T13:23:00.003-04:00

Is it wrong to be interested in a musician just because of the way s/he looks? I have frequently been flipping through the used/cheapo section of my local CD store and happened upon an album that looks interesting because the photography, design, and — above all — the singer look interesting. I have yet to actually buy an album just because I like the looks of the chanteuse, but I have certainly contemplated doing so.

But now with the internet, it's a wonderously no-harm, no-foul situation: a songstress catches my eye, and all I have to do is look her up on Last.fm or do a Bloglines search to see if anyone has posted some of her songs for sampling and consideration. So I was pleased to trip across the above illustration of Emmy the Great in the New Yorker and then have the Vulture point me in the direction of some of her songs a mere two days later. This is confluence of pleasing proportions. I am older than the protagonist in the mellifluously charming song "24", but it is the one of the three that most struck me personally, and not just because of the references to the Jack Bauer Hour of Power Hour.

As EtG is the band, and more than simply the as-depicted Emma Moss, I shall now resist saying "she" when I refer to them. Give them a spin.

Additional Resources:
     + Official Website
     + MTV.uk video sessions
     + MySpace page, with one streaming song at present
     + Buy their 7" vinyl single

Academia

2008-02-24T18:35:00.004-05:00

So the 80th annual Oscar award ceremony &mdash excuse me, "Oscar®" award &mdash starts in about a half hour, and many weeks ago I planned on writing about my experiences watching the five contenders for the Best Picture nominee, and I suppose if I'm going to write something, I better do it quick.

In addition to watching all the Best Picture nominees and writing about them, I had this whole plan about creating an image for the piece that was a collage of all the ticket stubs from the films. I saw the five nominees at four different cinemas, and I always save my ticket stubs, so I thought it might look kinda neat, plus adding a sense of verisimilitude to my "expertise" on the matter. I couldn't find but two of the tickets, though, looking around the apartment for the last fifteen minutes. Found the stub from National Treasure: Book of Secrets, though! That's a keepsake and no mistake! Sigh... Anyway, so in lieu of my original plan, I have simply stolen the above image from New York Magazine's entertainment column, "The Vulture", who provide me with daily snark and excellent coverage of all things spangly.

I don't watch the Oscars® anymore. I can't recall when I stopped, precisely, I remember being outraged at an interview that Danny Elfman gave wherein he stated that he'd never win an Academy Award, because the snobs on the original soundtrack section of the Academy looked down upon his rock 'n' roll background and would never see him so nominated. (Although, now that his compositions no longer fill me with joy, I note that he's listed as a member of the Academy on the official press release.) I remember watching the Oscars in early 1995 and loving Dave Letterman's schtick, and bemoaning the fact that I didn't record the "Do you want to buy a monkey?" montage. So I was confused when he recieved such bad press and aghast that Forrest Gump won some many accolades. Somewhere between the 1994 and 1998 Oscars, I gave up on the whole shebang, and instead started stumping for a system that ignored the word "best", and instead concentrated upon a merit-based system of awards. If there was a good enough film to be worthy of recognition, it would be celebrated, but one wouldn't choose between five just because millions and millions of dollars had been spent on three hundred-odd movies over the course of a calendar year, and they needed some spectacle to make it seem justifiable.

It's 7:03pm EST now, so I've run over my allotted time in which to generate some comment before the program starts. Suffice it to say that this is the first year in a considerable amount of time where I've felt like the nominations left me spoiled for choice, and all five films were of distinct voice and a high caliber of storytelling. Not all five deserve "Best" picture status, but I would be glad if any of them one. Yes, even if Jason Reitman, Skidmore College's hottest dropout, vaults still further into a realm of success I couldn't hope to grasp or even glimpse. Juno is too slight, and too immature in its storytelling to really stand next to the complexities of the other four, but I like the fact that it's there.

Anyway, it has been my assessment for some time that movies tend to win, not on their actual content, but on the psychic bulk of baggage that comes along with the film. Philadelphia wins for making people feel guilty, and Gump wins for making people feel good. Martin Scorcese wins because he's been snubbed in the past, and actors win for previous parts that were amazing, but not sufficiently showy. On these criteria, therefore, I predict that the Coen Brothers will win for their unrecognized body of work, which shadows and hovers around Old Country with palpable force. None of the other films has sufficient behind-the-scenes personality to win for the best film, as Daniel Day Lewis is the only comparable presence in the running. But Daniel Day Lewis is no Paul Thomas Anderson, and while the producers may collect the Best Picture award, it always seems like they are a second — but more important — Best Director award.

In closing, here's a picture of Ellen Page not smoking a pipe. Let's see that hit count shoot up now!

Ledger

2008-01-24T08:17:00.001-05:00

I dreamt I woke up this morning to find the strings from my venetian blinds wrapped around my neck and a thug from the Joker's clown gang crouched by my bed. "They can't all look like suicides," he said. "Some have to look like accidental death or home invasions." Then I woke up, and resisted the urge to clasp at my neck to see if the cords were really tangled around my throat.

Like Bryan, I don't know why I have been pursuing the new reports of Heath Ledger's death with such relentless fervor. I'd only even seen him in 10 Things I Hate About You and The Brothers Grimm, and he was not a ping on my Hollywood radar. I think the reason it — "resonate" is the wrong word, but I'm going to use it anyway — has resonated with me is because I read an Associated Press story after Brad Refro's death about whether certain young celebrities and their trepidatious lifestyles necessitated the preparation of early obituaries. I don't think that Ledger would have merited such preparation, nor do I hold much truck with the Rule of Three with celebrity deaths (inspired, I assume, by the Valens/Bopper/Holly crash), but thinking about the potential need for young obituaries and then reading one has left me with a need for details, as if specifics would provide me with a perspective that would allow me to not think about it again. And certainly to stop dreaming about it.

One last thing: for those who haven't see it, this is a flier from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, calling for a picketing of Ledger's funeral in order to gleefully send him off to Hell for participating in Brokeback Mountain, claiming his death as a victory for God, and saying that this performance, this sin, is the only thing "relevant or consequential" he ever did. My first instinct was to picket the picketing with a simple Let He Who Is Without Sin... placard, but I prefer Jon Sung's idea: "a bunch of people dressed as Batman and the Joker beat the living shit out of [the WBC] in full view of news cameras."

Unreadable

2008-01-22T22:59:00.002-05:00

I was going to do a little collection of some of the best nasty reviews I'd even encountered, but the internet is not being cooperative. Which is a good lesson for me... I tend to forget that while almost everything has existed in both print and digital form for the past ten years and that lots of antiquities are being added as digital archives, that there is a plentiful amount of stuff that exists only in the temporal print form in which is originated.

So while I would like to link to some of these marvelous, cutting dismissals, I cannot. Instead, I link to their placeholders for the digital future, or the place where they would be if you were a paid subscriber.

Review of: Wilson, by David Mamet
Reviewer: Rebecca Pidgeon, aka "Mrs. Mamet"
Substance of review: "Impenetrable."
Review of review: Why wasn't this pithy quote plastered all over the book jacket? If I had read that even the wife of the celebrated author found the book to be almost unreadable, I would have been perversely moved to take a crack at it! Much more so than whatever standard one-word superlatives normally grace a given dust cover. What a missed opportunity!

Review of: "The Fugitive" soundtrack by James Newton Howard
Reviewer: Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker
Substance of review: "The only thing that [Howard] seems to think is more suspenseful than banging a drum is banging a drum more loudly."
Review of review: The above is a paraphrase of a dearly cherished memory of the moment that I realized I wanted to be a film reviewer. That is fantastically mean. I want more! I want in! But, there is the possibility that I have remembered the line wrong, as the article doesn't exist online yet. However, I feel it must be close, because in his one-paragraph summary, he still takes the time to typify Howard's score as a "rude horror". Ouch.

Phenomena (Doot Doo Do Doo Doo!)

2008-01-12T16:39:00.001-05:00

It's 4:30pm, and the sun ain't set yet. You winter people can complain about the rain and the fog and the fifty degree days and the other things that are melting and destroying your precious, precious snow. I got news for you: the days are getting noticeably longer again. The end is near.

Sure, not near enough that we won't have to suffer through a frigid couple of weeks after this annual January thaw (read: "tease") and the bleakness of February, the longest month of the year... but it's acomin'. Be sure of that.

In other news, the ever popular Mahna Mahna phenomena is actually from the soundtrack to an Italian sex travelogue of Sweden. God love the Muppets. And god love the Onion, who provided me with this particular fact.

LIVEBLOG: Primary or Primate?

2008-01-08T07:40:00.001-05:00

10:52pm: with 73% of districts reporting, NPR has called it for Hillary. Over an hour ago, they had called the Republican side for McCain, with something between 50% and 60% reporting (my notes are unclear).

Of course, in 2004, the Associated Press called it for Kerry with only 19% of districts reporting, so I'm slightly more pleased with the press this time out.

I'm off to bed. I'll listen to the speeches and the pontification about what this all means tomorrow on my way to work. I'll only say, 1) that the New Hampshire primary is lousy at predicting actual victorious presidents. 2) That said, I did hear an article telling me that in the last twenty or so years — perhaps more, I can't put my fingers on the article — the person eventually elected president has never finished lower than second in the New Hampshire primary. So, statistically, we're down to four possible people who could be sworn in on January 20, 2009. Woo.

9:21pm: Dave Barry sums everything up:

The voters of New Hampshire have made their decision, and the big winner is: Change. Here's the final vote tally:
Change -- 43 percent
Hope -- 28 percent
Hope For Change -- 17 percent
Hair -- 9 percent
Experience -- 2 percent
Dennis Kucinich -- 1 percent:
Now it's time for the politicians and the press to drop New Hampshire like an ant-covered corn dog and sprint for the airport, leaving the residents of The Granite State to spend the rest of the winter plucking 239 billion candidate signs out of their snowbanks, all the while wondering if there ever really was a candidate named "Mike Gravel," or if that was just teenagers playing a sign-planting prank.

In actuality, though, the final tally is far from in at this point. National Public Radio has the reporting districts at only 44%, and New Hampshire Public Radio doesn't yet have the all-important Epping and Newmarket results in their town-by-town results.

Mr. Barry's other columns on the primary are worth reading, if only for his keen observation on New Hampshire's state-run liquor stores — "One of them is located -- I am not making this up -- in a turnpike service plaza, apparently for the benefit of motorists who are, for whatever reason, running low on gin." — and to familiarize yourself with the name "Dick Harpootlian".

3:26pm: The recorded voice of Ron Paul's wife greets me from my answering machine. I don't know how I get calls from a Republican candidate. If I were registered as an independent, I would have expected barrages of calls from candidates of both parties, but it's only in the past week that I've been getting autocalls from the Paul campaign. Maybe it's because he's only pretending to be a Republican, and so he's either bought both the Democratic and Republican registers. Or maybe he's cold-calling the whole state.

Or perhaps Anthony and Christine Fay, for whom I still get phone messages, yea these eighteen months after I procured this phone number, gave out their number to the Paul campaign. They give out their number to Realtors, car salesmen... the sort of people who plead for a number and who you'd rather not have actually call you. Instead of giving out a fake number, the Fays have been known to give out their old number... their old number which has been reassigned to me. Oy! Tony! Stop giving out my phone number! Oh, and your grandmother wishes you a happy Christmas.

3:11pm: My Nixon/Agnew button gets the approval of the guy manning the ballot box, though he informs me that he saw a button fort Adlai Stevenson the previous day at a rally, so I'm not quite wearing the coolest button so far. I could quibble with him that, I'm certainly wearing the coolest button so far on election day, but it doesn't seem worthwhile. He at least didn't seem to care that I was far too young to wear a Nixon button, whereas two or three people holding candidate placards outside the City Auditorium were taken back. But even they weren't as flummoxed as the woman who confirmed my registration. She seemed momentarily at sea due to the fact that I was registered as a Democrat and wearing the badge of a former Republican president.

2:19pm: Rhu, my assistant, brings over the Concord Monitor's Primary Election Guide for my perusal, specifically because there is a candidate in both the Republican and Democratic columns of whom she's never heard: on the former side, is the traditional Silly Party candidate Vermin Supreme, but on the other side of the aisle was the putative Democratic candidate O. Savior. In the Monitor's helpful guide, all the candidates had website addresses to head to in order to find out additional information, except for O. Savior. Perhaps we'll just have to try the Bible?

10:45am: These are not, I repeat, not the results of the official town polling station located in the gymnasium of Belmont High School. This is an informal poll of voting-age and non-voting-age Belmont and Canterbury students.

Belmont High School Mock Primary:
School Population: 480
Total votes: 305 (63%)
Results compiled by Dane Loomer
Democrat
Barack Obama: 145
Hillary Clinton: 33
John Edwards: 18
Bill Richardson: 8
Dennis Kucinich: 4
Total votes: 208 (68%) Republican
Mike Huckabee: 34
Mitt Romney: 22
John McCain: 21
Rudy Guliani: 15
Ron Paul: 5
Total votes: 97 (31%)

This looks like a standard case of votes equating to a certain media popularity, more than any issues-based alliance on the part of the voters. Of course, if Huckabee and Obama carry their respective nominations, that will be the national story anyway: the new breed of populaism.

7:03am: The city polls have officially opened, and the race is on. Carl Kasell has just told me that Dixville Notch and Hart's Location have had their traditional midnight ballot, and successfully polled each of their fewer-than-100 eligible residents. Both towns ended their vote with John McCain and Barack Obama in the majority position.

Despite the midnight cache that each of these towns enjoys, New Hampshire Public Radio informs me that the two towns considered to be bellwethers for the state are Epping and Newmarket.

I'll be voting in Ward 5, Concord, later today. Belmont High School is hosting polling in the gymnasium right now (the school is doing some self hype/entertainment for people waiting in the lobby by doing a clipshow of BHS News segments, including my promo spot for 24 Hour Comic Day). We did an informal poll of the students yesterday, and for what is generally considered to be a socially conservative town, the results were fairly interesting. More on that when I can sit down with the hard numbers.

Ring-A-Ding-Ding-Along With Me

2008-01-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

Bits and bobs to begin being the beguine, if you take my meaning...

+ I've closed down The Brothel, an internet forum I've hosted since March of 2003. It was good fun, and good conversation. If you participated in it in any way, thanks for hanging out. I find that I miss it, and still have regular instances where I find I'm itching to go there and type out something. My hope is to start writing this stuff in letters again, like I used to. If I used to e-mail you a lot and don't any longer, now would be a good time to hit me up again for my patented brand of twitchy correspondence.

+ Aileen regularly gives her fellow statemates a bit of a going over for complaining about the weather. And she's got a point. Complaining about the weather is a particularly ineffectual use of one's vitriol, whether one is bitching about the unpredictability of the daily expression of the climate, or whether one is moaning about the totally predictable display of living someplace where there are seasons. And even if one had gotten used to the past three years of warmer winters, brown Christmases, and less frequent shoveling, one really can't find much in the way of forensic ground to complain about a return to normalcy.

That said, the guy who who plows my driveway got stuck in the snow and ice that had accumulated there over the past few days. It's a hoary old joke, but yeah. The plow. Got stuck. In the snow. I think it's time to call a moratorium on precipitation for a little while, okay, Old Man Weather?

+ My mother has just called me to recommend that I go see Lars and the Real Girl, the heartfelt tale of one man's relationship with his Real Doll. I can't tell if this is because she thought it was weird and funny, or is that she's given up on my ever getting married and has switched to a twisted new tactic.

+ There are a couple of films that I watch annually. While Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo recently debated the best Christmas movie of all time (Die Hard all the way, baby!), I find myself deviating from their list and regularly rewatching Billy Wilder's The Apartment as my sole piece of personal seasonal entertainment. Bridging the gap between Christmas and New Year's Eve, it's my touchstone of a certain kind of solitary melancholy.

This year, upon rewatching, I was suddenly struck by the presence of a Chagall painting in the background in one scene.

How odd, I thought, that this Chagall would be used as a print in both The Apartment and years later in Notting Hill. It was an odd sort of subtle tribute. Or maybe it was because the rights to displaying the image were held by the studio. Or something else. In any case, it was an interesting coincidence, and the sort of blog post that Glen Kenny would have been proud of. I scampered off to grab a screencap from both films, only to find out that it wasn't the same painting at all.

I haven't the faintest idea where else I've seen the painting in The Apartment, then. I had a suspicion that it was in the Chagall exhibit at the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, but a review of the programme indicates otherwise.

So I got nothin'. Instead, I'll merely quote the endearing Richard Curtis dialogue from Notting Hill:

ANNA: I can't believe you have that picture on your wall. WILLIAM: You like Chagall? ANNA: I do. It feels like how being in love should be. Floating through a dark blue sky. WILLIAM: With a goat playing the violin. ANNA: Yes... happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat.

New England Intellectual

2007-12-27T11:21:00.000-05:00

While we're playing cameo-watch, let me chronicle one more in a admittedly discursive manner:

I love acting companies. I love stables. There's a gleefulness about watching actors work with each other in a variety of manners. It's one of the things that makes watching television so fun in that, if the writing holds up and is sufficiently varied, one gets to see that all-important group chemistry in a series of situations, and the actors get to play off each other in ways that are both familiar and new. It's why reviewers look for the naturalness of the ensemble cast, because there's an extra degree of trust that allows for a greater risk-taking and spontaneity in the communal and individual acting.

I am at least always partially conscious of the unreality of film- and stagecraft, and an ensemble cast helps me quiet my qualms that Hollywood is so cutthroat, so mercenary. So many comments about how "we're all a family here" often rings like hollow EPK hype, and the appearance or sense that actors have formed a band or de facto company that actually feel loyalty and camaraderie that is personal as well as professional allows me to better appreciate a work as a work and simultaneously as a piece of entertainment. I like hearing stories about directors who always include their friends in their projects in some manner. I like directors, writers, and producers who will — in a small way, not in a nepotistic, I'm Gonna Get My Nephew Screenwriter Credit On This sort of way — include their "family" and friends in their work.

Aaron Sorkin is pretty-well recognized for reusing people in his various projects. There are a number of people who crossed over between SportsNight and The West Wing as well as The West Wing and Studio 60. So it was fun to notice in the midst of watching Charlie Wilson's War that one of the SportsNight tech trio had a one-line moment for those paying particular, if not obsessive attention. Yes, yes, everyone loved the on-again, off-again relationship between Casey and Dana and the slashtastic friendship between Casey and Dan, but one of the best reasons to watch SportsNight were the frequent deadpan moments shared by the supporting ensemble. Watch the writer's block sequence from the "Dear Louise" episode, but watch the rest of the room. Watch the actors. This is almost an outtakes reel. SportsNight, particularly during their famous Christmas episode where they thanked, on-air, the actual production crew for all their hard and largely unsung work, often had this palpable sense of production verité. And that sense made the moments with the actors playing the production staff all the more interesting. And while I couldn't really tell you which of the tech guys was Chris, Will, or Dave, it still gives me a thrill when I see them turn up on other Sorkin projects.

If you find yourself similarly inclined — I prefer "inclined" to "obsessed" — then when Tom Hanks is cutting through the House of Representatives, calling in IOUs to support his budget increases for Afghani weapons, and he is talking to a group of "Northeast intellectuals", then prepare yourself for 3.7 seconds of a cameo by Ron Ostrow. It made me very happy, anyway.