What I'm Watching: Summer is Ending!

I need to commit to doing more writing.  As I type this I’m nearly to the end of August and most of what I’ve done this year is start writing projects I haven’t finished, with the only thing getting done are these blogs… which happen almost never.

 

Recently, I tried to work on a short story and discovered that my brain can just barely put words together.  I know what I want to accomplish but the actual act of typing has gotten hard.  This has to do with atrophy of the creative muscle, I fear.

 

I’d go into why, but, eh.  Let’s not.  Instead, let us talk about the fact that summer is almost over.  School is starting.  Fall is arriving.  And somewhere in September, all the shows that went off the air last spring are finally going to come back and, you know, entertain us.

 

Unless it’s Revolution, in which case, it’s mostly about frustration and shame.  (Oh, but I kid.  Unless it actually turns out that way.  In which case, bleah.)

 

At the start of summer I sat down and started scribbling the names of all the shows that my wife and I needed to roll through this summer, including the shows we hadn’t gotten to, shows we wanted to see but hadn’t gotten our hands on yet, and much to my surprise, we’re getting pretty close to the end of that list.

 

The only thing we haven’t gotten to yet is Lost, and we almost started it yesterday, except we didn’t because, you know, it’s Lost, and avoiding actually getting back to the show is what we do.

 

We will get there, and I suspect we’ll get through the end of season five or so before TV starts in earnest.  And we may even make it to the end, because some of our shows (Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries) won’t actually return until October, and Glee that that huge gap in the middle…

 

Anyway, we didn’t watch Lost last night.  Instead, we watched…

 

Sherlock:

 

We haven’t gotten all that far into the show, but to be honest there’s not much show to get into.  It’s run for two years so far, and up to this point there’s been a grand total of six episodes.

 

Now, granted, they’re about 90 minutes each, so they’ve basically made six TV movies.

 

I need to add here that I’ve been pushing to watch the show for a while, and the only reason we’re just getting to it now is because my wife has resisted the show.  I suspect she feared it would be gory, though she never came out and said it.  She’s also not really a huge mystery fan, but…

 

Well, okay, the show has mysteries in it, and that’s good, but what’s selling this show to people in a big way are the two leads, both presented with excellent character material who not only rise to the occasion, but surpass it.

 

I’m not going to say too much else about it until I’ve gone through the back five episodes, and realistically that shouldn’t take us more than a week or so.  Suffice to say that even though I haven’t finished series 1 and 2, I’m very happy that series three is on the way.

 

Being Human

 

Sticking with the UK theme, after a long pause I finally wrapped up the final series of the UK version of Being Human. 

 

And I hate to say it, but realistically the show might have ended at just the right time. 

 

It’s not that the show was bad, but it was clear that the BBC didn’t have much of an interest in the show anymore.  I base this on the fact that the apocalypse featured almost no people, and the cast spent much of the series sitting in the same sets week upon week.  The Beeb has always been thrifty, but this is the first time I felt it so keenly on Being Human.

 

And there were other issues as well.  After being granted a mere six episode run, the main characters weren’t even aware they were in a fight with another enemy until the last episode, which felt… underwhelming.

 

Here comes the “and yet…”

 

In the center of the last episode each character is “granted” a wish.  Now, all of these actors are pretty new to the show, all of them having arrived during the previous series for a few episodes, and now having taken over for the original cast.

 

And they were all, to a one, brilliant in these sequences.  They were funny, and heartbreaking, and despite the fact that they’ve been wholly together as a cast for less than six hours, I really FELT those moments.  These guys were given good material, yes, but they all dove deep and they brought it to another level.

 

Up to that point, I had thought I would be fine with the show coming to an end.  But I realized then that, no, I wasn’t really.

 

Because I didn’t care about the plot.  Yeah, I’d enjoyed the machinations of the earlier episodes, the way they twisted around and put the characters into real danger, but really now, I just wanted to watch a show where these three people hung out.

 

That would have been fine.

 

So my hat goes off to everyone on the show, for cruising through five series and a mere 37 episodes, and making us care about a handful of characters in ways that shows like Heroes and Revolution simply don’t.

 

And a final bit of applause for the ending, which lets you choose whether everyone had a happy end, or a sad one.

 

(Hint: It’s a sad one, but you can live in ignorance if you like.  Really.  It’s fine.)

 

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

 

You know what amazes me?  Between the various incarnations and itinerations of Whose Line, there are more than 400 episodes of show, when you slap in all the spin-offs, add-ins, and various other side projects that decided to do what this show does.

 

Heck, even if you take all the episodes under the official title, you’re looking at more than 350 episodes of STUFF that has poured out of the performers.

 

And now it’s back, and it’s on the CW and… well, it’s just as good as it ever was.  Which is to say, out of 22 minutes, you probably get ten great minutes, and twelve that won’t make you change the channel.

 

But when you put that up against any other standard sitcom on the air, it probably puts it in the top 5% of shows through history.

 

The big complaint this season has been that they keep bringing in special guest stars but… eh.  I guess people have forgotten that they used to bring audience members who were just about as funny as the so-called stars.  And at least the semi-famous people seem to be having fun, and haven’t actively harmed the show.

 

All in all, I’m happy to see the show back, and I wish it a continued long life.  600 episodes or bust…

 

Under the Dome

 

And then there’s this show, which…

 

*sigh*

 

Okay, so they had three things going for them.  Four, really.  Stephen King wrote the novel, and I’ve been a fan of his for probably 25 years.  Which is freaky.

 

On top of that, the novel was really quite good, which is more than you can say for some of King’s efforts.

 

Then they got Brian K. Vaughn to adapt it for TV.  Dude is talented.  Way talented.  I’ve enjoyed a lot of his work, and even dug his episodes on Lost, regardless of the general quality of that show.

 

Finally, Steven Spielberg also has a hand in the show.

 

And?  And?

 

And man, I just so much want to like this show more than I do.

 

I’ve emailed back and forth with some friends in an effort to figure out why I just can’t love this show, and the theories have wandered from the mostly-uninspired acting to the ho-hum direction.

 

One of the bigger issues?  Much like every other sci-fi show that takes too long to find its feet, the show is all too often a monster of the week extravaganza.  There’s no water!  There’s no food!  We need insulin!

 

Eh.

 

The thing of it is, the show is doing really, really well ratings-wise, and is getting another season.  Which, you know, good for them.

 

But if they’re going to make this show work, I really think it needs to go one of two ways.

 

Probably the easiest way is to make the characters more interesting.  For the most part, it feels like they have occupations, but no real lives.  They don’t feel human, or rather they don’t feel human enough.  They spout dialogue, but it rarely illuminates character and mostly tells us stuff we already know, so we don’t forget about it.

 

Granted, a lot of shows have stock characters, but these don’t even feel stock.  They feel like a bunch of generic people telling each other what’s happening week by week.

 

The other option is, if you’re forgive the expression, to just plain up the crazy. 

 

Last week we finally got a few decent plot twists, as we found out just a little more about the dome and the mini-dome.

 

But we don’t need one plot twist.  Or two.  We need ten.  We need these people screaming through plot, chewing it up faster than the human mind can handle.  With only thirteen episodes, they should be able to create 22 episodes of story and cram it into a 13 story sack.

 

Or, you know, hire some of the staff of the Vampire Diaries…

 

I suppose the good news is that now they’ve got some time to really plan out the second season and make everything better.  But I question whether the critics have been hard enough on the show to warrant them making any improvements.

 

Here’s hoping.

 

 

 

 

Stuff I Love In 2013

Over the last few months, I’ve almost started a lot of entries, and then ended up just plain not getting around to them.

 

In some cases, the moment came and went, and in others, like with all things creative, the need to babble was met elsewhere.

 

What I’ve noticed, however, is that my last few entries were mostly about problems (with TV, and other things) and solutions thereto.

 

But I have had a few things I’ve really enjoyed lately.  And I wanted to write them all up in nice, long entries that talk about how wonderful they are, but, it didn’t happen, and now I’m not sure that long entries are needed.

 

So here, then, are a few things I’ve really enjoyed over the last couple of months.  Do yourself a favor and check them out.

 

Light: A Gone Novel

 

I’ve been a big fan of the Gone novels since I got my hands on the first one.  At the start of the story, a giant dome appears, everyone over the age of fourteen in the dome vanishes, and some of the kids start to develop superpowers.

 

Then, over the course of six books, people develop alliances.  More people develop powers.  A lot of kids die.  Strange creatures appear. 

 

And everyone fights an evil monster that can worm its way into your mind.

 

Michael Grant stated at one point that he did no planning for the series – he just gets every morning, types, and see what comes out.

 

And man, I have to say, what came out was a lot of fun.  It was entertaining, and heartfelt, and most impressively, it was brutal in ways that I wouldn’t have thought a YA series could be.  By the time this book came out to conclude the series, almost all the food is gone, much of the place has been burned to the ground, and just about everyone is dressed in rags.

 

To top it off, they’re all under a literal microscope.

 

I’ve read a few series over the last five or ten years that really failed to deliver when it came time to conclude.  The Hunger Games had a brutal but unsatisfying ending that never really pulled together for me.  Harry Potter spent too much time on an interminable camping trip.  And Twilight didn’t even bother to end with a whimper.  Instead it made a whole lot of nothing happen, and then a whole lot more nothing.

 

But the end of the Gone series is tough and fair.  These kids, by the time they get to the end of their tale, aren’t really kids anymore, and that’s addressed.  The big final battle puts all the major players into the mix and lets some of them go and has some of them die.

 

And perhaps most importantly, it’s not a book full of wasted words.  Look the end of most series and you’ll see the final volume is massive, bigger than all the books before it and often filled with bloat.

 

Light, by contrast, is shorter than the previous books, and the taughtness just sings. 

 

I would never argue that it’s a perfect series, grant you.  The writing is sometimes overly simplistic, and even occasionally awkward.  This is not a book that makes you marvel at its prose.

 

But it’s fun, wonderful, brutal, and full of questions and answers and philosophical musings, and most of all it plays fair. 

 

If you like Stephen King and want to see what he’d do with some young X-Men, this is your series.

 

Bunheads

 

One of the things that tough about recommending something is that after a while you start to forget why you love it.

 

My wife and I were and are huge fans of the Gilmore Girls.  But we’re not really the type to watch and rewatch a series over and over again like comfort food.  So over time, we’ve gone from remembering all the little details that made it awesome to mostly just remembering we like it a lot.

 

That said, we’ve recommended Gilmore to probably a dozen people, and we haven’t found anyone who didn’t like it yet.

 

And now, along comes Bunheads, which my own father referred to as Gilmore Girls 2.0. 

 

Is it that?  Sort of.  A middle-aged woman surrounded by a small town of quirky characters?  Sure, it’s that.

 

But while the Gilmore protagonists were smart and strong and mostly had their lives together, Michelle, the main woman of Bunheads, is pretty much a wreck in a dead-end job at the start of the show.

 

Then she gets married and moves, and she changes the people around her, and they start to change her.

 

Ultimately, it’s a show about friends and family and how they affect each other, and how our perception of other people and ourselves change.

 

Which makes it sound really boring.

 

But trust me, it isn’t.  

 

First of all, it takes up an hour, which should make it a drama.  But in reality, it’s a single camera comedy that has time to stretch out and tell a long, meandering story that often meanders more than it tells, but never lets a minute go without being hilarious.

 

Second, it’s a dancing/singing show that gets everything right that Glee gets wrong.  It chooses fun and sometimes offbeat music, the dances are choreographed instead of cut together (many of them are shot in a single take and last for two minutes or more) and perhaps most importantly, while everything is perhaps emotionally heightened, the people on the show still act like actual people, and not automatons in service of the story.

 

And the acting.. look, ABC Family blew it when they didn’t even bother to submit these people for Emmys.  Sutton Foster is here in her first lead role on television, and while it takes her a few episodes to really nail the voice of her character, once it’s there, it’s THERE.

 

The same can be said of the four teenage ballet students, all of them appearing on TV for the first time, or just about.  All of them are great, all of them dive in and swim and never look back, and the writing supports them at almost every turn.

 

The only real issue I have with the show is that it was cancelled.

 

I theorize that there’s never going to be a DVD set of the show.  That you’ll be able to get it on iTunes and Amazon, but ABC Family will never put these episodes into a box you can buy, and here’s why: Box sets lead to people loaning things out, which leads to growing fanbases, which leads to people sending irate letters about how you can cancel such a great show and never look back.

 

How good is the show?  Despite that fact that we had three other TV series that we were trying to catch up with, my wife and I put in the first episode and never even thought about going back and working our way through something else.

 

It was eighteen wonderful, heartfelt episodes, and now it’s gone.

 

Kickstarter, anyone?

 

Imagine Dragons: Night Visions

 

One of the problems with avoiding the radio is that I’m painfully behind on music trends.

 

Heck, Glee is probably the only reason I’m up on any popular music at all, and even then, I’m probably roughly three months behind.  By the time I find out what’s in, it’s usually on the way out.

 

Such is life.

 

I mention all this because Night Visions had probably been out almost a year by the time I realized that a Glee song I’d rather enjoyed way written and performed by Imagine Dragons.  And then came Radioactive, which is one of those songs that ended up everywhere.

 

Pentatonix was covering it.  American Idol was cramming it into their “here’s who’s still on the show” montages.  And it’s been used in a handful of movie trailers.

 

And so I did as I sometimes do, and I just went out and bought the CD.

 

The one thing that’s nice about being behind the times is that sometimes it can be a win for you.  The album has been put out a half a dozen ways as it turns out, with different bonus songs on each version.  I own one that has 18 songs on it, and the people who bought it 12 months ago could only get an 11 song version.

 

And you know what aggravates me?  It the UK, there’s a 21 song version, and I honestly want that one.

 

Night Visions is an odd little grower of a record, wherein no two songs sound alike.  If you enjoy Radioactive and want more songs like that, well, you’ll have to look to another band, because there’s nothing else like it on Night Visions.

 

Likewise, if you enjoy the soaring melody and echoing guitar of America, a bonus track found only on the Target edition of the record, you’re better off checking out old U2 albums.

 

As for the seemingly Ethiopian-flavored inflections of Underdog?  Yeah, don’t go poking around the record looking for more songs like that.

 

I’m a big fan of the eclectic in general, but this is the first album in a while where it’s really felt like I can just keep listening to an album and discovering hidden gems in it.  Even after two months of driving around with it in my car, I would grow tired of one song, only to find another one that hits me a new way on the tenth listen.

 

My only disappointment, really, has been just how hard it is to track down all their songs.  They have two EPs from their indie days that are hard to locate, and they’ve released several EPs and singles with one or two bonus songs. 

 

And then there are the soundtracks.

 

The Dragons are on the road now, and it will probably be another year before they get a new record out.  I’ve gotta say, I’d just about kill for them to put all the hard-to-find stuff on one disc so that I don’t have to find it track-by-track.

 

Honestly, even if it’s a little random, I can’t help but think it will be just as interesting as their first full-length record is.

 

(How much did I love it?  After two months of listening to it, I stopped for about two months just to give it a break.  And now it’s back in my car, on repeat.  It never even made it onto a shelf in my home.)

 

A Really Awesome Mess

 

I long ago outed myself as a Brendan Halpin Superfan.  I really love a handful of his books, and like the rest of them to varying degrees.

 

A few years ago Brendan starting writing a series of collaborative novels, wherein he takes the boy narration and she (in this case, Trish Cook) takes the girl narration, and together they tell a story of love, loss, and zany adventures.

 

(That sentence started as a joke, but it’s pretty accurate.)

 

And in this case, it’s about two kids, a boy and a girl, who have been sent to a mental health facility/school to sort out their mental health and other issues. 

 

We’re a little over halfway through the year now, and I’ll go ahead and say it – I’m not sure there’s going to be a book I like better this year.

 

It’s probably that this has a lot to do with where I’m at this year.  The book deals extremely explicitly with mental health struggles and adoption issues, both of which are very close to my heart right now.  More to the point, it contains one of the best descriptions of depression I’ve ever read in a novel.

 

The story could be dark and hard to swallow, but it isn’t.  It’s kept about as light as something like this can be, and yeah, by the end it stretches credulity just a little bit, allowing the characters a bit of a magical ending.

 

But you know what?  Sometimes, I think, readers need to know that things CAN turn out okay, even if it takes a little more luck than seems possible.

 

I want to share more of the plot, but to do so would wreck a twist or two, and at least one moment that, as they say, got me right in the feels.  (It has to do with an elephant.)

 

I will say this, however. (Settle in for a story, kids.)  Due to the various stresses of life, reading an entire book has, just in this last year, gone from something I did every week to something I manage maybe once or twice a month.  In years past, we’ve both gotten into the adult reading program at our local library and stuffed the box of read books with slips.

 

This year, I managed to put in five in the course of three months.  One was a gift book that took twenty minutes to read.  Two of the books I started before the summer even began, and it took me ages to finish them.

 

I sailed through A Really Awesome Mess in two days.  What’s more, my wife did the same in three, which is the fastest she’s read a book in just about forever.

 

I guess this is where I enter my plea, as Brendan has struggled to keep books coming out these last few years, as his publishers have stopped supporting him and he’s had more and more difficulty selling his work.

 

Last year, he put out one novel direct to the Kindle.  This year, he decided to Kickstarter his latest book, which I gladly put money into.  (The ebook arrived yesterday.  I’m waiting for the physical one.  Maybe.  Waiting is HARD, yo.)

 

Please, please, please, people.  I’m not asking for a bestseller here.  I’m just asking that this sells enough copies that Brendan can keep writing and remain financially solvent.  I’m begging you.  Give it a try.

 

And I’m out.

 

What I'm Watching: Finales

As I’ve stated before, one of the great joys of summer is getting caught up on things.  This last week, for example, I finally managed to get through three different season finales, the final word on the current season of each of the shows.

 

Revolution:

 

I’m talking about this one first because I had the farthest to go on this show. When the finale actually aired, I had eight episodes left to watch, out of the back ten.  If it were a great show, I probably could have gotten through it in a week.  And yet, it took me until July to get to the end.

 

Yeah, that says something.

 

I’ve been kicking the show back and forth with a buddy of mine.  He finally gave up and deleted all the episodes he hadn’t seen off of his DVR.  He may try to watch the show again next season, when the dust has settled and a few new writers (in particular, Ben Edlund of Angel and Supernatural fame) are in place.

 

Mostly what I’ve been trying to figure out is what makes the show so very broken.  It has a good budget, and surprising amount of action, and most of the actors are good and a couple are great.

 

The truth is, you can find problems with just about any show if you look long and hard enough.  But I think the problem with this show was less obvious than critics made it out to be.

 

Namely: There was a lot of story, but no strategy.

 

What I mean:

 

A good piece of entertainment has characters with a plan.  They are going to go here and do this thing, and then there are complications.

 

The problem is, the people on this show never seemed to have any plans.  At least, not ones that we were privy to.  When they had plans, they were kind of dopey, and when someone tried to beat someone else at their own game, there was never any strategy – they just barged in and had a fist/gun/knife fight.

 

An example:

 

Supreme Bad Guy decides he wants to stop Miles, who sort of became the protagonist of the show when they realized that Fake Katniss couldn’t act.  (More on that in a moment.)

 

So what does he do?  He goes to the city they grew up in, rounds up all the people that live there, and says he’s going to kill them all if Miles doesn’t show up.

 

So Miles shows up, and much gunplay ensues.

 

Somewhere in there, they introduce a female character who was in a relationship of sorts with both men.  When Bad Guy has a gun to her head, she confesses that Bad Guy has a son (with her).  Then she gets shot and dies.

 

Miles saves the town (somehow, sort of) and the episode ends. 

 

All of this sounds semi-exciting, I guess, but everyone on the show demonstrates a curious case of the stupids.

 

I think that, right there, is the big issue.  Sci-fi shows, at least ones that last, are smart.  Star Trek put forth moral dilemmas between the fistfights, and generally (generally!) smart answers to questions posed and dangers faced.

 

Ditto Firefly.  

 

There are twists and turns on Revolution, and some of them are pretty great.  But in cases like this, they’re revealed in the worst possible way.  And then, largely dropped.  After this episode, the “son” was only mentioned in one other episode that I can recall, and even then it mostly felt like a writer holding up his hand, and going, “See!?  We remembered!”

 

All of it could have been handled better.  Miles could have put together a special strike team, and gone in with an actual plan.  He could have run off by himself to save his town.  He could have mentioned some hidden component of the city the Bad Guy didn’t know about.  Only, SURPRISE, he did know.  Okay, then you have a gunfight, but at least someone did something smart first.

 

Even the son thing could have worked.  She could have used it as a negotiating tactic to get the rest of the town free.  Instead, a game-changing revelation was turned into pointless factoid doled out for some cheap “drama” that didn’t work.

 

The point is, the bits and pieces that could make the show work are there, but they’re being mixed wrong.  It’s like making a cake and frosting and baking the frosting but not the cake.  All the parts are there for it to work, but the proper directions weren’t followed.

 

There are other issues.

 

The show is pretty humorless, which makes the characters less than fun to hang around.  This is sad, because when the show IS funny, it’s impressively funny.  Miles firing a very loud gun, giving away their position, and saying, “Maybe no one heard that” isn’t high humor, maybe, but it at least indicated that something had gone very wrong in a fun way.

 

And then the acting.  Oh, the acting.  Mostly it’s Fake Katniss who, unfortunately, brings almost nothing to the table at this point.  Once upon a time, my wife and I watched a Cleopatra movie where the title character was neither super attractive (which is what Cleopatra was known for) and also lacked any acting chops.  I noted at the time that she could be one or the other, but she couldn’t be both because it just plain sank the production.

 

They’ve slowly moved Charlie from the center of the show to the far edges, trying to shrink her importance, but this means every scene with her has to land emotionally, and they don’t.  They’ve also taken to dressing her in shirts that show off an inch of tummy, which is strange because everyone is in jackets and appears to be at least a little cold, so whatever eye candy they’re trying to create becomes, “Don’t you need a sweater?”

 

The Big Bad has also become a problem as well, having mostly been forced to appear a) crazy, b) paranoid, or c) both at the same time no matter what he’s saying.  They’ve tried to give him an emotional core, but the dialogue and story just isn’t up to it, so he mostly looks confused, with large glassy eyes.

 

Could all this be fixed?

 

I question that.  They’ve put themselves in an interesting position where they turned the power back on, but the show didn’t really talk about what that MEANS.  There are rockets headed for major cities, but we don’t really know what that MEANS.

 

Some people are dead, but we don’t really know what that MEANS.

 

Revolution has been moved to a new, unprotected time slot next year, which means it’s going to need to a) get critics behind it fast and b) get people to watch fast.  This can be done, I’m sure, if they start right off the bat to make the show smarter and more logical, and start working on getting us to actually enjoy hanging out with the characters.

 

But they’ve got to do it in one episode.  Two, tops.

 

Otherwise, I suspect the show will run for a half-season next year, and then vanish without a trace.

 

Best of luck, Kripke.  If things don’t work out, maybe you can go run reason 10 of Supernatural?

 

The Walking Dead:

 

Meanwhile, Dead is filming their fourth season, and with their fourth new showrunner.

 

And I pity that guy, because he’s going to follow the best year the show is going to have, at least as far as the fans are concerned.

 

I don’t think season 3 was perfect, mind you.  I have issues, minor and major, with the show in general.  It’s still a show with no real logical endpoint outside of “everyone dies.”  The characters aren’t all that fun to hang out with.  And the lack of humor is, quite often, grating.  Grim is cool and all, but a little levity never killed anyone.

 

The issue we’re facing now is that any new protagonists will, essentially, just get compared to the Governor.  So that’s kind of out.

 

Alternately, the show becomes “Argument Prison,” a sequel to the Argument Farm of season two.

 

No one wants that.  At all.

 

Unfortunately, I think the show only has one major card to play, and if the showrunner is smart, he’ll play it.

 

It comes in two parts.

 

First, the rule of the comic is, Rick always lives.  So I’d kill the dude off.

 

This creates ACTUAL tension, as opposed to fake tension.  Rick is the hero – he isn’t supposed to die.

 

(Frankly, the real hero, the only character EVERYONE likes is Daryl.  But you can’t kill him.  It’d be like killing The Fonz.  Or Urkel.  It’s a gutsy move, yes, but no one will ever do it because that’s killing the golden goose.)

 

So take out Rick.  Boom.  Massive power vacuum, everyone is trying to figure out who should lead.

 

Next, have the zombies pile up outside the prison, which means they need a new home.  They can’t drag everyone (too many elderly and infirm now). So they send out scouts:

 

Boom Part 2: Daryl on a Motorcycle.  Put him in combination with any other character, and give him a third of every show. 

 

Gold.

 

Granted, that makes season five a train wreck waiting to happen, but most shows start to go off the rails by season five. 

 

(Of course, they’re already SHOOTING season four, so no one is going to listen to this… even if I wrote it months ago.  But them’s my thoughts.)

 

A last amusing note.  I had two episodes of the show on the DVR, and put them off for months, and then I watched the first episode… and it was the finale.  The “second” episode was a randomly recorded repeat.

 

Given the semi-cliffhanger status of the last episode, it was a pretty wobbly season closer. 

 

Still, best season of the show to date.  Things are going to be interesting, come fall.

 

Warehouse 13:

 

This one stings.

 

So it’s been announced that the next season of Warehouse 13 will be a scant six episodes, and that it will also be the last season of Warehouse 13.

 

But all accounts this was/is the highest rated show on the SciFi (because I hate that other spelling) channel, and this is how they treat it?

 

No.  I kid.  The fact is, shows end for a lot of reasons, most of them fiscal.  Given the number of ways they’re desperately trying to horn advertising onto the show (most with cars, oy, the cars and their features) it’s possible they just can’t justify spending the money on the show.

 

That’s a shame, really, because while I thought there was no way they could pull off a solid end to this season after the steady ramping of the first half of the season, well… Okay, I was mostly right.

 

But forget being right, in this instance. 

 

The writers took a few episodes off to save a little money and try to dip into the emotional scope of what’s happened over the course of the season, and they did a nice job of it.  Perhaps with a bit more of a budget they could have rollicked and frolicked more, but I don’t blame them for that.

 

Then they did a pretty cool buildup over the last two or three episodes, preparing to fling themselves into another massive storyline next season.  They were prepped and ready to do twenty hours of TV.

 

And now they have… six.

 

Talk about anticlimactic.

 

Ultimately, I guess I should be glad we’re getting those six.  A lot of great shows have ended on a question mark, and Warehouse, thankfully, doesn’t have to be one of them.  They’ll cram a lot of story into a little timeline next year, and after six episodes, the show will vanish with a soft poof, and fans like myself will mourn it.

 

That’ll do, Warehouse.  That’ll do.

Iffy People, Great Art

 

 

(Note: I wrote this, and then I kind of hated it, so I didn’t post it for a while.  I still think it makes a few interesting points, but… well, if you want to read it, here it is.)

 

Lately I’ve been struggling with the idea of bad people making good art.

 

Why write about it?  I dunno.  I’ve learned over the years that it’s often easier for me to set my thoughts down so I can look at them on paper (or, yeah, on the screen) and then go back over them, tweaking them, checking my arguments, and trying to parse out what I really feel about them as ideas, separate from the space in my head.

 

What I guess I mean is, it’s easier to examine some things as AN idea, as opposed to MY idea.

 

I imagine there are some who will assume this has to do with the whole Paula Deen scandal, or whatever it is.  But no.  I’ve been watching people on my Facebook page take sides for or against her, but I don’t really know anything about her, don’t use her recipes, and don’t really care all that much one way or another if she loses her cooking show.

 

Nothing against her, I just don’t care.

 

No, I think the first time I ever got at least mildly interested in The Art vs. The Man situation is when a bunch of sci-fi aficionados decided to get all in a tizzy over the fact that Orson Scott Card wasn’t quite as progressive as they wanted him to be.

I refuse to rehash that whole thing because, much like Paula Deen, Orson isn’t someone I’m all that much of a fan of.  I read Ender’s Game, and I thought it was a lot of somewhat-interesting philosophy with some cool battle school scenes tucked into it.

 

Then I read Speaker for the Dead, the followup, and found it to be a painful philosophical slog. It was a long book wherein so little happens I can barely recall the plot.

 

But other people cared deeply about these stories, and they were let down by Orson’s stance, and many of them swore they’d never read any of his books again, but clearly it’s not hurting the guy because Ender is about to become a major motion picture and the Ender books continue to sell pretty much without ceasing.  He continues to write sequels and prequels and side-quels and all of them sell.

 

So in the end, I let my brain cycles to other things that weren’t worry about Orson.

 

Should I be more bothered about it?  That’s another valid question, but let me come back to it.

 

The first time I encountered true ugliness with an artist I actually cared about, it was Lindsey Buckingham.

 

That much I’ve written about before, though it was a few years ago.  An ex-girlfriend of his wrote a book that said he was on a lot of drugs, verbally abusive, and even physical with her at times.

 

The thing about Lindsey is, for better or worse, he’s an icon of rock.  Fleetwood Mac sold millions of records with him in the group, and they continue to rake in money whenever he heads back into the group.

 

Oddly, this is after Mick Fleetwood threw him under a bus post Tango in the Night.  He said things happened that Lindsey claimed didn’t, and the thing of it is, everything could sort of be argued to a draw.  Two angry men saying, “You don’t remember, you were on drugs!”  “No, you don’t remember, YOU were on drugs!”

 

But the ex-girlfriend book seemed to be carefully researched, and more interestingly, Lindsey didn’t pop up to deny it.

 

Though maybe he just never heard of it.  Or, like most people have to, he just let his ex say whatever she had to say, and didn’t bother to correct her because it was almost thirty years in the past.

 

That one bothered me for a while, and still bothers me now.  I can barely tolerate Orson’s work, but Lindsey was, if not an influence on my own music, a guy whose albums I used to listen to over and over again.  That the book “Storms” claimed that many of the lyrics of Go Insane, one of my favorite albums, were stolen from the author of the book, really bugged me.

 

And yet, new Linsdey music came out after I read the book, and I bought it, and I enjoyed it.  I didn’t get rid of my old Fleetwood Mac albums, and I didn’t stop listening to him or the band.

 

And even now, I’m not totally sure how to justify that.

 

I can come up with one argument, which is that the story is being told by one person.  It’s not a trial with a bunch of witnesses, it’s one woman so jilted by one man that she felt compelled to drag up the dirt between them three decades later.

 

Is everything she said true?  Perhaps.  But even if it is, these aren’t things that happened a month or a week or a year ago.  These are things that happened 30 years ago.  It’s very possible that, away from the drugs, away from the tours, Lindsey became a better man.  Perhaps he long ago tried to make restitution.

 

I have no idea.

 

Most recently, I’ve had two other artists with questionable choices brought up.

 

The first is Frank Zappa, and musician I’d argue is somewhere in my top three when it comes to my music collection.  I own a lot of his stuff, and enjoy a lot of his stuff, and…

 

And boy, is some of it dating poorly on the good taste front.

 

The thing of it is, in college, I liked the guy because he was funny and thoughtful.  And in college I really learned to respect the musicianship, the sheer breadth of his composition.  I was equally fascinated by his philosophy, which mostly seemed to be, “People are stupid.”

 

But man, some of the things he said in song…

 

Straight up, some of it is really, really sexist.  And a surprisingly large chunk of it also reads as homophobic. And yet, his take was always, “Well, I’m not singing this stuff, it’s these characters I’ve created…”

 

But man.  I dunno.

 

The thing of it is, I have a kid now.  And it’s a she.  And when I pick up Zappa’s records, I sometimes question if he had the best interests of the female population at heart.

 

Urgh.

 

Zappa argued that kids should be able to listen to anything, and to some extent I get that.  Kids live in the same world they live in, and they’re going to be exposed to bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions.  They need to learn to understand what’s appropriate.

 

And yet?  And yet.

 

And yet.

 

Ultimately, I just don’t listen to Zappa very much anymore.  I put music on in my car for the most part, and Zappa just isn’t something I want to stick in my kid’s head.  Assuming Zappa was really being satirical, well, most kids don’t get satire.

 

Perhaps when she’s older she’ll find some of it funny.  But more likely, I’ll have to shrug and give the, “It was a different time” speech.

 

Except, of course, that for some people it’s not a different time.

 

I became a fan of Mike Doughty more or less by accident.  The way you hear a word for the first time, and then hear that word five or six more times over the next two days?  It was like that.

 

I got one of his songs on the Veronica Mars soundtrack, and I dug it.  And I happened to read about his records on Wil Wheaton’s blog.  And my curiosity grew, and I got his first three albums for Christmas.

 

And it was good, y’know?  I liked the songs, liked the style, and found myself singing along and having a good time.

 

And then I learned there was more, if you went backwards.  He had a band, Soul Coughing, and those guys?  Man, it was a weird little thing he called Deep Slacker Jazz, with a bass, drums, and sampler, and off kilter beat poetry.

 

It was so cool. 

 

More records came out but I ultimately never picked them up.  By all accounts, his albums after that kind of went off the rails.  And I was a little broke.  But I’d do things like check in on his blog.

 

And?

 

And where am I going with this?

 

In one of my check-ins, I discovered he had written an autobiography: The Book of Drugs.  And I was curious.

 

As autobiographies go, it takes you to a weird place.  There are no chapters, no breakdowns of theme, it’s just Mike writing about things in a rough order as they occur to him.

 

But man, it’s an ugly picture of a human being.

 

What’s interesting is that Mike pulls no punches, and even throws a few that aren’t necessary.  He never actually tells you the name of anyone in the band.  The bass player is just that: The Bass Player.  Never mind that this was a fairly popular band, and that guy’s name is easy to find.

 

Once he quits the band, he goes on a few benders and, among other things, goes to Ethiopia.  I mentioned this to my wife, who asked if she should read the book.  “Not if you want to like the guy,” I said.

 

What’s odd is that after reading the book, even though I couldn’t say I really liked the guy, did make me want to pull out his recordings again.  I spent a week rocking out to Mike and, more interestingly, the band he hated so much.

 

I Googled Mike and read a half-dozen interviews and articles about him, many of which included interviews with his band-mates that went, basically, “All the stuff he said we did were actually things HE did.”

 

And then Mike did something odd.  Despite the fact that he says he hates all the old songs, and the memories they bring back… he’s decided to re-record some of them.

 

He crowdfunded the endeavor, and now he’s recording, and the record is getting pretty close to done.

 

And by cracky, I chipped in.

 

I’m still not totally sure why I did this.  Curiosity, I suppose.  Mike says multiple times in the book that the songs came out “wrong,” and that he had/has a very clear idea how they were supposed to go.  And I gotta admit, I really want to hear those versions.

 

And so I question myself.  Because I didn’t even really try to justify it.  I just really wanted to hear it.

 

When it comes down to it, the more I type the more I feel like maybe I don’t need to justify it.

 

The thing of it is, the world is filled with people whose life choices I just don’t agree with.

 

These are not dictators, or people who endangered children or tortured pets.  Ultimately, they said some things and did some things in the past that I don’t agree with.

 

I mean, a lot of composers of the last 1000 years have probably done things I just didn’t dig on.  And yet, I don’t listen to Beethoven and question my moral judgment.

 

In the case of Zappa, he was 53 when he died, and he’d be 73 today.  If the Beastie Boys can come around and determine that some of their lyrical choices were questionable, perhaps Zappa would have revised his feelings on some of his work.

 

(For that matter, Stephen King finally took one of his own books out of print due to some of the content.  I don’t know if that’s a win, either.)

 

Ultimately, my knowledge of the various composers and performers I enjoy is for the most part extremely limited.  I own work by hundreds of musical artists, and listen to hundreds more, and most of them don’t have a definitive biography and/or autobiography I can examine for things that make their soul ugly.

 

The artist makes the art, it’s true.  But then the art becomes a separate thing. 

 

Sometimes the art is kind of gross, and you have to decide if the art around it is worth your time.  (Joe’s Garage is pretty skeevy in places, but the instrumental Watermelon in Easter Hay is gorgeous). 

 

Sometimes the person around the art did some things you just can’t get behind.  But if Lindsey Buckingham spent all those years stoned, he might not even know what he did, or what he was doing.  And while that’s on him, one thing I didn’t find much of in the book were people trying to STOP him from doing it.

 

Ultimately, maybe William Shatner got it right.  In one of his multiple memoirs he says the chances that he’ll remember everything correctly is impossible, because he didn’t have four video cameras running every second to capture each moment in the book.

 

For that matter, Harlan Ellison (a noted crank) said that Shatner told a story that was essentially a flat-out lie.

 

People do things wrong.  People are sometimes wrong.

 

And yet, the art is the art. Ultimately, I chose to read and investigate personal information that told me things I didn’t want to hear.

 

And when the people who made the art are dust, the art will remain.

 

And who they were won’t matter.

 

And perhaps that’s just how it is.