Blender Magazine Picks Worst Writer; Fails to Pick Member of Staff

So, yesterday Blender Magazine (the US’s equivalent of Q) declared that Sting is the worst lyricist ever. Never mind the fact that Blender saying that someone’s writing is bad is equivalent to Courtney Love telling Steve Coogan he has a drug problem. They also put Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie further down on the list, because the band are indie but also popular and thus are seen as having no credibility. I notice, however, that Blender’s writers are too scared of seeming dumb to touch The Decemberists, a similarly emo band who are considered smarter because they weren’t beloved by Seth Cohen, don’t have hooks in their songs, and write lyrics like this:

We made our huts of avaram
We’d not betray the sole Ledum
The acres of hysterisy
To our own pangs of starvation

Rhyming “avaram” and “Ledum” is crime enough, but “hysterisy”?? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Is that one of those uterus-removing operations performed by screaming banshees? Note to music critics: a lyric is not intelligent just because it’s incomprehensible. Note from Merriam-Webster: “hysterisy” is not a word. Compare those lyrics with the opening of Death Cab’s “Marching Bands of Manhattan”:

If I could open my arms
And span the length of the isle of Manhattan,
I'd bring it to where you are
Making a lake of the East River and Hudson
If I could open my mouth
Wide enough for a marching band to march out
They would make your name sing
And bend through alleys and bounce off all the buildings.

Now that’s imaginative, and reminiscent of the imagery in one of Donald Barthelme’s stories. And no avaram huts in sight.

As for Sting, I’ll have to go ahead and admit something here: I like him. When I was a dorky, MOR-loving kid, he was one of my favorite singers. My first concert was a Sting concert, and it was transformative – I’d never imagined that music could be so vital, such a connecting force, something you could feel vibrating through you and linking a crowd of disparate people into one unified force of all that was thrilling and beautiful and uplifting about the world. Yes, “Fields of Gold” did that to me, okay? I still have an affection for adult-contemporary music – it is soothing and uncomplicated, and sometimes I feel like listening to something unchallenging and familiar – and so no, I don’t just like the Police; I own nearly all of Sting’s albums, except for the last couple of them, and enjoy all of them. They’re not the best music I own, and the lyrics aren’t always fantastic, but seriously, worst? Worst ever? I know it’s fashionable to hate Sting, but give me a break. He’s not a bad lyricist. According to Blender, his biggest crimes are pretentiousness (?!?!? Find me an unpretentious musician and I will find you a three-headed unicorn bathed in flame) and “ripping-off” Chaucer and Shakespeare in his lyrics. Again, this is apparently a crime no one except Sting has ever committed (except HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF WRITERS, including Dylan -- not to mention that Shakespeare himself ripped people off incessantly). And what, exactly, is so bad about quoting from them? Yeah, it's a bit pretentious, but it's no "I had a brain that felt like pancake batter" (we'll see how long it takes for AdmiralNeck to comment on that remark). Anyway, fuck you, Blender. Trying to fit in with the cool kids is not doing you any favors.

[ETA: How long? Try five minutes! What's Jack White ever done to you, other than try to entertain you with his colour-fascism, wiry moustache, and instinctive lizard-brain understanding of the Blues? There's just no pleasing some people. - Admiral Neck)

Not that anyone asked, but my personal favorite lyricist? Stephin Merritt -- a sometime solo artist also associated with The 6ths, Future Bible Heroes, The Gothic Archies, and, best of all, The Magnetic Fields. I often don't pay attention to lyrics until I like a song, at which point I'll find out what they are so I can invest in the song more deeply, but Merritt's lyrics demand attention all on their own. They are smart, erudite, often incredibly poignant, and best of all, funny -- something far, far too rare in songwriting. As one critic put it, anyone who can rhyme "Marguerite" and "spirochete" is okay in my book. Just compare "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" to the Decemberists' crap above:

I met Ferdinand de Saussure on a night like this
On love he said, "I'm not so sure I even know what it is
No understanding, no closure
It is a nemesis
You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids"

He said...
So we don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything about love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing
Without love

I'm just a great composer
And not a violent man
But I lost my composure
And I shot Ferdinand
Crying "It's well and kosher
to say you don't understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland"

His last words were
We don't know anything

Now that's how you write a song.

This Week in TV: Week 2

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SeatSavers (c)

There are two things I really really hate, and one of them is op-ed pieces by aggrieved journos bemoaning the cruelty and heartlessness of modern life. Every-so-often some Polly Filler or Lunchtime O'Booze gets on their high horse about people not being as civil as they would expect people to be, usually after they have had trouble flagging down a black cab, or walking into a door that someone failed to open for them. Their rage fills page after page of rag with screechings about the end of modern society. I just want to shake them into realising that people have a right to be assholes, and often people who think they act with utter ethical purity often accidentally cause the horrible things that annoy others, often without even realising it. It's just life.

Some are worse than others. Noted sanity-avoider Peter Hitchens recently delighted in the tale of a student fined something like a billion pounds for putting her feet on a train seat, saying that such actions were the only things we could do to ensure that our humanity can be saved. I wish I was joking, but I'm not. I would quote it, but I can't find it online, though I did find him saying on his blog that Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was a bad movie, so I'm even more pissed now than I was before.

The other thing I really really hate is inconsiderate assholes not getting up for pregnant women on the Tube. Why aren't people as civil as they used to be? Is this the end of modern society? I know, I'm a monstrous hypocrite and should be banned from the Blogosphere immediately, but while shoved into the corner of a crowded Jubilee line train this morning, I watched a heavily pregnant woman forced to stand for at least five stops (I got on at Finchley Road, and she was already there) while several able-bodied people hogged seats and stared into the distance or bored holes of concentration in their books. I've heard of commuters demanding that other commuters get up and give up their seat for pregnant women before, but I don't have the bottle for that. So instead I stood and fumed impotently, as is my way.

It got me thinking, though. I've often been lucky enough to grab a seat on a Tube and have felt awfully protective of it, as if it is a wildebeest I have chased and killed. No suit-wearing lion is going to get my wildebeest seat, so back up! Of course, I don't have to commute very often, so it's only a slightly big deal, and I can look past it if necessary, and will get up if need be (cue round of applause for me). As for the selfish jerks on the Tube this morning, why weren't they able to see past their need for a seat? Were they all regular commuters so fried by the experience of having to stand on a train for an hour that they would now shut off their empathy circuits so that they could live with their seat-winning success while some distressed pregnant woman stands two feet away? [Yes. -- Canyon]

There's no way to change human behaviour short of going all MK Ultra on them, and that's not how I roll (plus, I can't afford the editing suite and big screen projection system required for full-on brainwashing). You can, however, charge people for being scumbags, so I came up with a new idea to make money for myself off the backs of suit-wearing pod people; SeatSavers! At the termini of the major tube lines, licensed SeatSaver employees take over every empty seat on a Tube, and for an outlay of £5-10, they will get up and give you that seat! Brilliant! Of course, they would get up for old people, the infirm, and especially pregnant women, free of charge. In the meantime, the dickhead in the pinstripe who is trying to bury his/her face and his/her guilt in a copy of The Kite Runner pays through the nose.

Unfair extortion, you say? Megalomania? Racketeering and profiting from a miserable service? Just another day on London Transport, I say.

CSI: Miami Watch - "Come As You Are"

There has been a delay in recapping the episode of CSI: Miami that aired a couple of weeks ago, but even more than usual we needed time to digest what we had seen. As we’ve said many times before, the show represents the right-wing half of CSI-niverse. The original is logical and analytical, and the Miami variant is reactionary and judgemental (the third version is soporific; I can't place it on a value-grid because I rarely make it to the end of an episode with my eyes still open). Plus, CSI: Miami has an astonishing body count, no sympathy for even the most trivial lawbreaking, a total lack of irony (which is one of the reasons why we like it, despite ourselves), and some really unpleasant political messages (my “favourite” is mentioned here; I think that that comment stopped me watching the show for about 2 years). The fact that two shows with such different messages can have come from the same cloth fascinates me, which is yet another reason why I’m drawn to both.

Come As You Are, however, is a curiosity. It lionises the US military, which is no surprise (Bruckheimer relies on military assistance to make many of his movies, and he’s not about to piss them off now), but even so seems in two minds about the Iraq war. In the middle of this disconnect, there is a lot of stupid nonsense that made us laugh. I’ll try to spend more time on the latter than the former.

The episode opens with two teenage jocks on a firing range, running around in camo and shooting targets. No sexy ladies in the opening scene! This is starting to become a trend, and after they went all out with the toolbooth attendants a few weeks back. Shame. Just as the kids are winding down their stint on the course, one of them lets off five rounds in a target, from behind which a bound corpse slumps. It’s a recruiter for the military, and his death is such an egregious tragedy that H’s entrance is more sombre than ever.


His grief is so intense that for the first scene he delivers his dialogue in a faltering croak. Conscious acting choice? Or did a glug of Fresca go down the wrong pipe? We shall never know. The two kids, Derek and Matt, deny knowledge of the guy, and the fact that he was bound and dragged into position post-mortem gives credence to their claim. Delko and Wolfe gather evidence, and I noticed that the direction was a little better than usual. The episode contains the usual splitscreen, glass-warping craziness, but some of the compositions are unusual and pretty, as is the editing later on. Kudos to director Joe Chappelle, who it seems directed the movie Phantoms, in which Affleck was the bomb, yo.

While looking for rock dust or something, Wolfe dares question the war in the most lily-livered and vague manner possible (so weak I can’t remember what he said. Probably something about it being a bit of a mess, like a kitchen gone awry) and that earns a rebuke from Delko, who pompously intones, "All I know is he's wearing a uniform, so he gets our best." Which explains why they're usually doing such a shit job investigating all of those other crimes; the victims are civilians and don’t deserve their best. Fine, go piss off and join NCIS if you've got such a hard-on for the military.

So far, so slightly exaggerated from their normal jingoistic behaviour. However, there follows a scene that spelled the beginning of the end of our love affair with Calleigh (and by love affair I mean, tolerating her more than most of the other characters). Alexx is about to examine the soldier’s body, and Calleigh comes in to watch, and the following exchange takes place.

Calleigh: ::sigh:: Men in uniform.
Alexx: And it looks like he went through a lot of them.
Calleigh: What do you mean?
Alexx: Today wasn't the first time he was shot. See these scars? They're old bullet wounds. Barely a piece of him without a scar. Tim. Hicks. Was. A. Fighter!
Calleigh: You know, I bet he got some of them saving lives. He was awarded the Bronze Star.
Alexx: Well, that makes this even harder to say. We found traces of a white powder in his nasal cavity.
Calleigh: ::with massive shock and indignation:: Oh, I do not think that he is the type.
Alexx: Well, things aren't always what they seem.
Calleigh: ::now in full absolution mode:: You know, I bet that white powder could help explain how someone could overpower a trained soldier.

Words failed us. No soldier is ever less than perfect! Ever!!! Got that, viewer??!?! Your bumper ribbon is insufficiently patriotic, you son of a bitch! Have you ever retro-actively absolved all soldiers of any crime? I’m not talking to you, Coulter, I know how you think. I’m talking about the rest of you. You probably think the waste products of a soldier stink. Don’t you! Well, they don’t! They are perfect! PERFECT!!!!!

Sadly for Calleigh’s theory, it turns out the white powder is ketamine, and even so Calleigh refuses to blame the guy. She goes to see Tim’s widow with Wolfe, and upon finding out she’s a vet, jumps to the conclusion that it has to be her drugging him, without even a shred of evidence, because the only alternative is that Tim took the drug himself, which is impossible, because that’s a crime, and no soldier has ever committed a crime EVER EVER EVER in the history of the world.

Of course, it turns out he is stressed because his recruits keep dying, and his guilt is so overwhelming that he needed to relax and thus took it voluntarily. So he’s a voluntary drug-abuser with a responsibility for recruiting kids into a military endeavour that has turned out to be horribly bloody and FUBARed. Does this mean Calleigh accepts that the guy is not pure? Of course not, because he is a soldier and is thus blameless, as opposed to everyone else in the show who gets arrested for farting or breathing heavily or chewing gum. His grieving wife is made to feel like shit by both Wolfe and Calleigh, who give her grief over not reporting a recent break-in to the police, and with that, we both go off Calleigh. She’d already been infected with the same judgemental attitude as everyone else on the show, but this is a step too far. Plus, was she checking out that soldier's corpse? Ew.



Wolfe goes to see Tim’s colleague, a recruiter with a pissy streak who tries to out-tough little bitty Wolfe, which is confusing. Turns out he has a history of violence, and as such is a suspect in Tim’s murder. So the show tries to have its cake and eat it. Soldiers are perfect sacrosanct individuals, but some recruiters are flawed and evil. Or are they? Am I now thinking in absolutes because everyone on the show does? Or is this their idea of moral shading? Having one guy be an asshole and the other a saint who loves horse tranqs? Does this count as balance? Is the show interested in balance? It hasn’t been before. At this point I started to wonder what they were playing at, and it got more confusing as it went along.

Tim received a hate letter prior to his death, which leads them to a soldier, Kevin, whose brother was killed during an ambush in Iraq. H goes to visit him to find some answers and to be all noble, seeing as how he coincidentally is attending his brother’s funeral. Of course, being H, he has to teleport in, as this series of photos shows.


Skeeving up to Patrick and Kevin’s bereaved mother, he is all charm. He then talks to Kevin who is horribly depressed and bereaved, though he knows to stand to attention when H shows up, him being the King of All Everything Ever. Kevin blames Tim for getting him and his brother into the war, as he told them they'd make a lot of money. That’s pretty low behaviour, and again we see criticism of the soldiers. At this point I was wondering if there would be a Damascene conversion by the CSI judgement-bots, but I can tell you now, that doesn’t happen. Anyway, during the discussion, Kevin says he killed his brother, freaking out with the grief, and for the first time ever H panics. He didn't even react this strongly when his brother died in his arms. It looks like he's thinking, "Oh God, are the terrorists winning now? I must shoot something soon!"

H vows to get to the bottom of this. Bottom of what? Is this guy now presumed innocent of Tim’s murder just because he's a grieving soldier who just confessed to a different crime? I don’t get it. Anyway, the break in at the vet's office leads the team back to the kids on the firing range, who are brought in for interrogation. While being accused of everything from robbery to murder to hiding WMDs by the obnoxiously indignant Calleigh, one of them says to the other, "Don't fold, Matt!" Er, she's right next to you, dude. Calleigh, not being a total idiot, spots the potential subterfuge, and puts on the thumbscrews. Turns out both Matt and Derek tried to join up (so they could get laid and shoot guns, natch), but Derek had second thoughts, so they tried to get the application back. Just to make sure no one finds the applications and files them, they burned all of them. Calleigh sneers at them for being evil. You can tell she’s going to get back at them for this evil evil evil…erm, bit of burglary. Is it because they’re a bit dopey? Or is it because by burning the applications they have stopped lots of kids from becoming noble and honourable soldiers who will look good in uniforms? Only the pinched face of Calleigh knows.

H asks the bereaved mom if he can do an autopsy on her dead son, Patrick, and she acquiesces to save Kevin from military jail, or a court-martial. Before we can get to that amusing scene, H brings in Kevin and during his interrogation, it cuts between them and a flying football, and for a moment I thought we were watching Friday Night Lights. It's a nice bit of editing, though. Cue flashback to Iraq, or should I say scrub brush in California doubling for Iraq. It's like that godawful episode of Boomtown with the Mykelti Williamson flashbacks to his military service during the first Gulf War. Ugh, that was the worst hour of TV I've ever seen. CSI: Miami is making me have flashbacks to that episode! It's becoming too meta!

Kevin is under the impression that he killed his brother, and the flashback shows a chaotic fight and the possible accidental homicide of Patrick. Sadly, the tragedy of the scene is undermined by the final shot of Kevin, mourning the death and chaos. While striving for overwhelming pain and sadness, he ended up reminding me of Tracy Jordan playing famed jungle-fever-haver Thomas Jefferson.


H assigns Alexx, the only coroner in Miami Dade, to do an autopsy on Patrick, even though there's already been one and CSI's involvement has made him late for his own funeral, and it's conducted with such reverence you'd think they were examining Jesus. Still, it pays off (of course; they couldn't possibly have a dead-end on this "tightly plotted" show). They find a mysterious piece of shrapnel missed in the autopsy conducted by the military, which turns out to have come from an armoured vehicle. It's a big chunk of metal, and they missed it? Contrivance, thy name is CSI: Miami.

With the plot now split into two (a now common thread in a show that once focussed on a single crime per episode), Delko is given the task of figuring out what happened during the battle. Sadly for the viewer, this doesn't mean that he's shipped off to Fallujah, not when we have the internet to do the work. Dan is asked to look for footage of that exact battle on YouTube, and finds three clips, for crying out loud. I just did a YouTube search to see how easy this is, but I don't know what search term to use. What did Dan and Delko use? "Kevin Patrick Iraq murder justice"? But that brings up no clips. I pronounce this show unrealistic.

Luckily, hairs are found in Patrick's boot, belonging to a guy called Brad Hoffman, and H brings him in for questioning. The guy has a rock solid alibi, saying he's never been to Iraq but knew the victim and attended the pre-funeral (or whatever it's called), and his hair fell into his boot. We even see a flashback. Even with this mountain of evidence, H still suspects him, for no reason other than ESP. Teleportation? Mind-reading? Is H a one man X-Man? Will he develop a healing factor? Are his shades used to stop beams shooting out of his eyes? I can't wait for further developments, especially growing blue fur and hanging from the ceiling.

Meanwhile, Natalia isn't doing her job because her evil ex-husband is chatting Valera up.


This comes right out of nowhere, and it's only because I know what happens two episodes later that this makes any sense (it's establishing an insane motive for murder, basically). Otherwise, it just comes right out of the blue. Valera appears thrilled to be chatted up, finally. Even priapic Delko hasn't said as much as boo to her since the show started, which might be a lucky escape but would also damage your self-esteem like crazy. Natalia says she's not pissed at Valera, but she looks pissed enough to, gee, I don't know, KILL???!?!?!


YouTube brings up a ton of weirdly Hi Def videos of the exact firefight where Patrick was killed, and after watching them Delko and Dan just arbitrarily decide there is no way Kevin could have killed his brother as he was knocked unconscious at some point, so why does he think he did? Guh, whatever. Oh look, a licence plate on a truck that appears in one of the clips! It's turns out that Brad Hoffman lied about being not going to Iraq, and is actually a contractor! A liar who was at the crime scene and isn't an entirely blameless soldier with the automatic purity of soul that that implies? He must be guilty! Of course, the evidence of his hair in the boot really was explained, and had nothing to do with the murder that he actually committed. They only have that scene so that they can introduce him earlier in the episode, and then reintroduce him later, caught with different evidence, and then catch him heading back to Iraq. Brilliant. Oh, sorry, I meant terrible. Still, they will now get their man, after the b-plot is resolved.

Ryan finds copies of the destroyed army applications, and one of them is flagged as a security risk. Calleigh checks out a terrorist watchlist and find Matt's parents on it. They are Middle-Eastern, and even though they are respectable doctors with no criminal background whatsoever, they're assumed to be a risk. This is the most blatantly anti-establishment moment in the history of the show (I'm not counting the evil judge that H took down earlier in the season for being a corrupt landowner). Daring to shake a disapproving finger at the Patriot Act? I am amazed.

So, it turns out Matt had been told by Tim he couldn't join the army for different reasons, but upon finding out about the security risk, Matt got pissed at the subterfuge. Seriously, that's the reason you're mad? If you remember, he'd changed his mind about being in the army by that point, but he's still mad because the nasty soldier told a fib? Lame! He's so angry he goes after Tim and sees him snorting ketamine in his car. He pulls him, and he stumbles to the ground, where he smacks his head and dies. We see this in a flashback. It's an accident, and the flashback is presented as a fact, but Calleigh's judgement-o-meter is so far out of whack now that she treats him like a flat-out Dahmeresque murderer, having him arrested immediately, with massive sneerage. Man, we really turned against her ass in this episode.

Time for H to arrest his own perp, the evil bastard who killed a soldier. He calls in JAG, gets their help to go after Brad, and arrests him in hilarious fashion on a runway as Brad attempts to go to Iraq for work purposes. Delko hides in a doorway, and when Brad passes him he pops out. Panicking, Brad runs to his plane to get away, but H is already there, waiting for him!

What, did H and Delko do, plan a little prank on the bad guy? Superb. Anyway, it's another accidental murder, with Brad panicking during the firefight, pulling out a gun, and firing it through the door of his truck (hence the shrapnel in Patrick's chest), but no matter. H is furious, I tell you. Furious! Brad is going down, no matter what his defence is.

The episode ends with a montage of whathappenednext, with Johnny Cash singing Like A Soldier in the background. Matt is arrested, and Derek ends up going to Iraq even though he changed his mind, and the shots of him looking terrified in the back of a helicopter are horrible. Hasn't anyone seen Hair? That poor bastard isn't going to make it. That's his punishment for breaking into a vet's office and burning some application forms? Harsh. The recruiter is shown on a campus, haranguing random students with fliers promising free booze and sex and ketamine, probably. Patrick finally gets his funeral, and during the gun salute that we honestly thought H would join in, pulling out his Glock and doing the crouchy thing while he plugs the sky.


I guess I'm stupid for expecting anything deep from CSI: Miami, but anyone who spends time absorbing large amounts of corporate-approved pop culture (as we do) knows that there are ways to get messages across through the nervous barrier put up by those awful men in suits. You know, the ones who are worried about the bottom line being damaged by offending a small group of Episcopalians somewhere in the Midwest, and thus firebombs their product so that no content or thought remains. Not that we thought CSI: Miami would do that; it's a hard-right show, which should make it anathema to proud liberals/progressives like ourselves, but doesn't because it's endlessly entertaining and fascinating as a barometer of US politics and as a work of "art". To a certain extent, the episode did the thing we thought it would, and then some, i.e. lionising the troops to such an extent that they no longer resemble the human beings they actually are, instead becoming paragons of virtue and patriotism that are so beyond criticism that to treat them as complex humans with both good and bad attributes is to hand victory over to the enemy.

However, on top of that, there was some tentative acknowledgement that the war isn't going too well: that the need for new soldiers is creating a cognitive dissonance in the recruiters that can only lead to unpleasant outcomes, be it taking horse drugs, or becoming a block-headed, hostile asshole; that lives are being destroyed and the Patriot Act is unfairly targeting whole swathes of the US population, dragging innocent, law-abiding taxpayer into the mix. The show seems to be unsure of how to dramatise these pressing contemporary issues, and as such muddles it all, and ends up being an uncertain mix of pro- and anti-war sentiments, coated in obnoxious symbolism. I wonder what Bruckheimer thought when he watched this episode, if indeed he did. Perhaps he wore this exact same expression.


Because if a picture paints a thousand words, that face portrays a billion.

"Come As You Are" Stats:

Horatio's (croaky) Send-Off Into Credits:
Frank: Somebody wanted us to think our vic died here in this playground war.
Horatio: Frank, the war may be staged, but the murder is real.
Roger Daltrey: YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Ripped-Off Plot of the Week: Boomtown? Boomtown? Really? I'm glad they didn't wreck my memories of good movies, but even so, I'm also a bit disappointed. Why didn't they rip off Three Kings? H trying to solve the theft of Saddam's gold? That would have been magical.

Natalia's Awful Blouse of the Week: : Seriously, is the wardrobe department playing some kind of game here? This one looks like a Magic Eye painting. Or something William Morris designed in the depths of absinthe fever.


Number of Caruso Two-Steps: Five.

Snottiest Behaviour From Wolfe: Besides intimidating a grieving widow with accusations of drug-dealing and faking a crime scene, he also talks down to the dodgy recruiter at length. The man would be able to fit Wolfe in his pocket, so I guess +10 points for bravado, but -100 points for being such an obnoxious little creep.

Creepiest line from Wolfe: Asking Calleigh how she got her hot little hands on a terrorist watchlist. Wolfe, just leave the women alone. They don't need your kind of "attention".

Five Random Things That Make Me Very Very Happy

1. Great Moments in Presidential Speeches:

The same joke every time, and it never fails to make me laugh.



2: Supergirl as written by Mark Waid.

Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, was recently reintroduced into DC continuity, and her history is so complicated as to be impossible to recap here without breaking this keyboard, so forgive me for not going into it. Short version; there are about 5-8 different versions of her, and this one was evil. Or not, depending on who is writing her. Her reappearance was handled by comics legend and sometime Lost/Smallville/Heroes writer Jeph Loeb, who has as many detractors as fans. His work on her title was just appalling, typified by this fight scene with a demented Lex Luthor. The second panel wins my vote for nastiest dialogue in a mainstream comic for 2005.:






And this just looks frigging stupid.


Thankfully, after months of misogynistic horror perpetrated by Loeb and replacement writer Joe Kelly (who portrayed her as a superpowered semi-villainous teen skank with a tendency for jumping on any man in her vicinity), Supergirl appeared in Legion of Superheroes and Brave and the Bold, both written by Mark Waid, and he made her honourable and decent and heroic and even a little tragic. He also addressed her man-chasing and the low self-esteem that seemed to have caused it, and had arch-womaniser Hal Jordan (of all people) explain how she should slow down, advice she instantly took on board. BTW, this is not me saying "man-chasing is inherently bad! Lock up the womenfolk!" I just liked it because the character's reintroduction had gone horribly awry, and Waid elegantly addressed the screw-up in a meta way and then retconned it post-haste. Kudos!

These moments from Brave and the Bold #6 show her capacity for empathy and self-reflection.



That's the Supergirl I want to read. Thank you for giving her back to us, Mark Waid, and also thanks to Tony Bedard for keeping the momentum going. Now, if Gail Simone can fix Wonder Woman, we're laughing.

3: This poster:



4. Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson arrive in "London" in Shanghai Knights.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; I flove this movie. Jackie's done many better fight scenes, but this is the best American one he's done, because director David Dobkin didn't just hire him and say, "leap under this table and then kick the guy in the shins and then we'll wrap and go home." He's willing to go through the grueling experience of planning the whole thing meticulously and rehearsing it a million times, something which is common practice in Hong Kong but seems to be an alien concept to many Western directors, who often hand the laborious task over to their second unit. I also love Owen Wilson's hilariously shallow over-reaction to the flower girl, and his last minute intervention.



How was this film not an enormous hit, instead of the lazy-ass bullshit Rush Hour movies? Is this Bizarroworld? Is there a wrongness virus going around? Why? WHY??!!?!

5: Fireworks by Animal Collective.

The best song from Strawberry Jam, the best album of 2007 (so far). Okay, the video ain't all that, but feel the abstract quality of the songwriting:


They fill the hole in my heart left by the dissolution of Pavement and David Baker's departure from Mercury Rev. In fact, they go further than that. With every new song I hear by them or their side projects, I love them a little more.

This Week in TV: Week 1 (Pt. 2)

As Canyon said, we watched a potentially synapse-damaging amount of TV, with only a bit of it actually amounting to anything. Old reliables House and CSI provided the highlights, along with The Office and Ugly Betty. The latter was in a particularly strong position after a storming season finale which packed in more plot than the entire season of Tell Me You Tolerate Me, Preferably In A Passive-Aggressive Stylee. The season 2 premiere opened with a telenovela parody that shouldn’t have worked but did, and then some. I do hate parodies like this, especially lazy-ass martial arts spoofs, with the heeeelarryus dubbing and crash zooms (exempt from this criticism is the Fistful of Yen spoof in Kentucky Fried Movie, which cracks me up). Spoofing telenovelas is even easier, but as it’s a nod to the origins of the show, and featured Christopher Gorham, Jayma Mays and America Ferrera being so silly, I was won over.


The rest of the episode played out as the traditional season premiere exposition-a-thon, with the only real surprise being my reaction to Hilda’s heartbreak (i.e. I cried). Not that this is a criticism; it was pacy and funny as always, so it gets a thumbs-up, even though Becki Newton’s fat suit was terrible. Doesn’t matter. She was great, as was Judith Light, who is practically a series regular now. Here’s hoping, as she is Queen Snarky.

Even better was The Office, with two episodes screened back to back. The big event was the Jim/Pam reveal, which John Krasinski spoiled a while back by saying the producers were hoping to explore their relationship. Whatever. I like the characters but I’m much less invested in that arc than I am in everything else, especially Michael and Jan’s dysfunctional couple, and the possible breakdown of Dwight/Angela. Regarding the original series, Tim/Dawn was the thing I liked most about it, but then as fantastic as that show was, it didn’t have the rich cast of characters that The US Office now has (and no Creed-analogue, which automatically makes it inferior), so now I’m kind of spoiled for choice. Jam/Pim/PB&J just don't matter as much any more.

It wasn’t all good, though. One of the dismaying trends of the new season is the lack of originality in the new shows. There’s nothing as odd as Lost, as potentially controversial as Dexter, or even as promising as Studio 60 (hate it though I do, it seemed to be the show to beat this time last year). What we do have is Moonlight (Angel meets Forever Knight), Reaper (Ghost Rider/Brimstone meets Clerks), Chuck (Alias meets Clerks), Bionic Woman (a reimagining of a spin-off), Journeyman (Quantum Leap meets Early Edition), and Dirty Stupid Monkey (Arrested Development with a lot less laughs). Even much-touted Pushing Daisies is possibly extracted from Tru Calling and a Torchwood plot device, horribly enough. Even so, it still sounds like the most interesting of the pilots.

Speaking of those shows, we also saw Journeyman, and it seems like the showrunners took the bits of Quantum Leap that worked (honourable man travels through time to save people), added the stuff that the format wouldn’t allow (a personal life for the protagonist plus a history of substance abuse, an arc involving his former lover), and then took away the quirky stuff that made the previous show so watchable (Al, Ziggy, the odd bit of cross-dressing). It’s pretty bland stuff, though kudos for hiring Kevin McKidd, who looks like the freak-birthed lovechild of Daniel Craig and Paul Bettany.

He’s a more interesting actor than your usual episodic low-brow sci-fi show would get. The first episode hinted that there would be some explanation of what is happening to our hero (Quantum Leap’s explanation was, famously, “It wuz God wot done it.”), and it seems the paradoxically chronoriffic effects of his travels will affect things around him, but we’ll see how bold the writers are. In a few weeks he could just be pootling around teaching John Lennon the lyrics to Imagine, at which point we will stop watching. With extreme prejudice!

Which might happen sooner rather than later with Bionical Woman, which was aaaaaawful. Perhaps it will get better; NBC are changing the showrunners like Magic – The Gathering cards, desperate to keep the momentum of the show going, but it needs to make a lot more changes before becoming a watchable show. Though I hate to kick a Brit when she’s down, Michelle Ryan is insufficiently bionic as Jaime Summers, though she’s not helped by the ridonkulous running effects and horrifically bad wirework. Even worse, her character is whininess incarnate. Her nanotech pioneer boyfriend saves her life by pumping her full of nanodoohickeys he calls Anthrocites, which rebuild her limbs. Does she thank him? No, she does not! She goes off on him about it and accuses him of ruining her life. At least you have a life to have ruined, you ingrate! Later on it turns out they also put warriortech chips in her superbrain (she has an enormous IQ, and thus works in a bar, making rocket fuel out of Triple Sec, obviously). At that point, her anger is justified. Before that? Get over yourself, girl. You ain't all that and a bag of nanobots.

The rest of the cast made very little impression. Miguel Ferrer growls menacingly (poor bastard), Jamie's sister is a little punk Gupta-in-waiting, numerous other actors point their faces at the camera or each other and look concerned, and the excellent Mark “Badger from Firefly” Sheppard wears some dreadful old age makeup and plays the big bad, as far as we can tell. As for Katee Sackhoff, who is getting the only good reviews in the show, she drools over Ryan in a viewer-panderingly bi-tri way, and wears the worst lipstick ever. I wish I had a screencap right now. This comparison pic will show an approximation of the horror.

Of these new shows, only one made a real impression. Dirty Stupid Monkey might have been tonally confused (was it equal to Ugly Betty in terms of camp absurdity? Was it actually a drama about corruption and murder? Would Peter Krause get to do anything funny?), but I can imagine that will settle down once the showrunners have a better idea of how their cast gels. The bigger problems with it lie in the sheer mechanicality of it.

Everything in it is designed by committee to put bums on seats, with nothing organic or real in it (It's the anti-Tell Me You Love Me, FOR REALSIES!). Principled lawyer working for sprawling, wacky, corrupt family he has a history with, all of whom are cliches (Paris Hilton-a-like, slacker son, evil priest, lonely sex-driven old flame, corrupt politician with a taste for transsexuals), tempted by the success and glamour of their lives while coming into conflict with his wife. It works (it's built like a machine by an army of writers and looks like a billion dollars was spent on it, so it kind of has to), but it might not hold our attention in the long run, despite the presence of Krause, Billy Baldwin in full-on puffy mode, and Donald Sutherland with his Amazing Eccentric Pimp-Coat.

The parallels with Arrested Development are obvious, and the AV Club has been comparing the characters to the Bluths. They’re right on a lot of them: Samaire Armstrong = Maebe; Evil Priest = GOB; Jill Clayburgh = Lucille Bluth, though as Canyon said while we watched it, how wonderful it would have been to cast Jessica Walters. Many are saying that Peter Krause is playing Michael Bluth, but Michael was part of the family, and Krause is playing their lawyer. Surely that would make him Barry Zuckerkorn.

And really, who wants that?

ETA: I got screen captures of the lipstick incident!

Is Michelle Ryan going to look like this when she inevitably starts to turn evil? That ain't good.

This Week in TV: Week 1

Here in the UK, not much is going on in tv -- except for the debut of The Peter Serafinowicz Show later this week, of course. You're welcome, by the way, Serafinowicz. You better do your Terry Wogan impression in return. But in the US, this week marked the beginning of the new tv season -- and with it, the end of our free time, as we are going to be watching something like 20 shows this year. Thank god for you, bittorrent -- you help us feel as lazy and slackjawed as we would if we lived in America.

First up should've been K-Ville and America's Next Top Model (if we are not deep, at least we are eclectic), but we never bothered to download K-Ville after middling reviews, and Living tv just started showing ANTM's eighth "cycle" (did you really need to further emphasize that the show is full of bitchy women, Tyra?), which we haven't seen yet. The one showing in the States now is the ninth, so I expect that we'll be plowing through that after the current Living cycle is done. I'm proud to say that I got AdmiralNeck hooked on this show, first as it subliminally crept up on his subconscious as I watched it while he was doing other stuff, next as he'd occasionally look up and say, "Why is that unattractive woman dressed as an exotic bird being forced to climb 50 flights of stairs and then have a photo shoot while barfing and pronouncing medical jargon?", and finally as the show wrapped its glittery, bitchy tentacles around his brain and he grew to love it in all its camp ridiculousness as much as I did. Somewhere Tyra Banks is cackling as she guzzles from a vat of barbecue sauce.

Next up was CSI: Miami, another show that's airing a season behind on UK tv. Notice a trend here? We'll also be waiting till the "current" season finishes on Five and then will do our best to catch up with the actual current season so that we can experience H and Co.'s ridiculousness in real time. The first show we actually watched was Chuck, the new Josh Schwartz series that doesn't have a voiceover by Kristen Bell (though it could probably do with one). It was slickly directed (by McG) and professionally made, featured a fairly charming nerd and his wacky best friend (both of whom work at meaningless service jobs in a large retail outlet), introduced an interesting comic premise and a love interest to boot...and yet there was something a bit off about it. The dialogue had the appearance of being funny without actually eliciting any laughs. Each line that was meant to be a joke had the right tone and delivery, and yet they all seemed like placeholders for writers who had meant to go back and put funnier lines in but never got the chance to.

[In this picture, Chuck, played by Some Guy, is joined by Adam Baldwin, modelling Patrick McGoohan's hair from The Prisoner. Chuck is saving the day here, defusing a bomb using DOS. How this is possible is not explained. - AdmiralNeck] It's a likable enough show, and I'm certainly willing to stick with it -- especially as The O.C. was so often hilarious (with the exception of the execrable third season), and there are erstwhile Veronica Mars writers on staff. Plus, pilots are never the best episodes; even great shows usually need some time to find their footing.

However...we watched Reaper a few days later, and everything that Chuck did wrong, Reaper did right. Like Chuck, it's about a fairly charming nerd and his wacky best friend, both of whom work at meaningless service jobs in a large retail outlet, but while Chuck accidentally learns government secrets, Reaper's main character, Sam, learns that his parents sold his soul to the devil. And gay dudes still can't adopt? They don't even sell it for anything cool, like a giant chicken that lays sacks of money, or a flying donkey, or the ability to multiply themselves. No, instead they use it to save Sam's dad from a terminal illness. BORING. Plus, hello, Ghost Rider? Total rip-off. Nevertheless, the writers explain that as well as they can, plus it turns out that the devil is Ray Wise, which is absolutely perfect casting.

He's exactly the right combination of charming, confident, witty, and lovable (just check out his line reading on, "I'm the devil!"), as well as terrifying when he needs to be. I only found out who Ray Wise was a few months ago when I watched Twin Peaks for the first time, but I thought he was fantastic in that, and also as a reporter in Good Night, and Good Luck; it's criminal that he's not more famous. I want to hug whoever cast him in this, because it's brilliant. But though he's easily the best thing about the show, the pilot had a lot of promise -- it's got a great light comic tone, the jokes are quite funny, the actors seem capable, and the premise allows for both interesting monsters of the week and the darker undertone of Sam's parents' misery at having not gotten a talking monkey out of the deal. While Chuck faltered in tone and didn't immediately have any really likable characters or real wit, Reaper got everything right. I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out. [The pilot was directed by Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith, doing a much better job than McG on Chuck. A commenter on the AV Club pointed out that this was probably the best-looking project of Smith's career, and he/she has a point. I loved everything about it, pretty much - AdmiralNeck]

Also on Monday we got the return of Heroes -- a lackluster season opener after an even more disappointing finale. The problem with Heroes seems to be that there are a lot of placeholder episodes where not much happens, and then certain standout episodes that completely justify all the rest of the mediocre stuff. The plotting has been fairly good up till now -- except, of course, for the ridiculous cop-outs of the finale -- but the dialogue is still largely flat and I still find myself struggling to care about some of the characters (one of those characters' names rhymes with Glurmesh, and another rhymes with Bricky and Shmeshica). The opener gave us an idea of what's happened to (almost) everyone after the events of the finale, but it didn't do much to advance the plot or further our emotional investment with anyone. Sometimes Tim Kring's Crossing Jordan-heavy resume really shows, and I feel bad for fanboys who have certain expectations about superhero stories but are instead treated to schmaltz about brotherly love above any worries about plausibility or things that make sense. Oh wait, I feel bad for me too.

On Tuesday we got House back, and I can't believe how much I love this show without the Cottages. Funny janitor! (Dr. Buffer!) More Cuddy! Funny, non-suicidal, non-miserably-addicted House! No whining Cameron! No giant-prick Chase! And best of all: more Wilson! Why can't Wilson have this big a role in every episode, I ask you, and also, why can't he move in with House again so they can play more funny homoerotic pranks on each other?

At any rate, it was great to see the show back in its usual form -- when they make House too dark a character, the show loses its charm and becomes a miserable repetitive procedural. It's a repetitive procedural no matter what, but at least when House is cracking racist jokes and Wilson is stealing his cane, we get a lot of entertainment. When House is slipping deeper into the miserable throes of an addiction that we know he's never going to cure, or being relentlessly pursued by a cop with gay panic (he really, really doesn't like having thermometers in his ass, something I think Arthur Conan Doyle never mentioned in the books), the show is too dark to be fun and too shallow to properly explore those issues with any real seriousness. As far as I'm concerned, leave the Cottages out of it and bring on the new interns. (As an aside, I've read several articles now about how miserable Hugh Laurie is living in America without his wife and children, and now I actually kind of have a hard time watching the show knowing that it's making him so unhappy. Move your family to the States, you stupid man! It's not like the show's getting cancelled anytime soon.)

CSI: Original Flava came back on Thursday, and what a relief it was to return to its quiet thoughtfulness after the disgusting bombast of CSI: Miami (not that I don't love the disgusting bombast, of course). CSI is consistently one of the best, and one of the most underrated, shows on tv. I'm not quite sure why it's so ignored critically -- maybe because it's so popular, and critics assume that anything popular (especially anything popular produced by Jerry Bruckheimer) must be shit, or because it gets lumped in with all the other police procedurals on tv (I often see this happen, and know that they couldn't possibly be watching the show to make such a comment). It's always been an intelligent, riveting show, filled with great characters (I don't think there's one character on the show that either of us dislike, which I don't think I can say of any other show on tv) and twisty cases that often manage to keep you guessing until the end. In the past two seasons CSI has upped the game even more and begun playing with the procedural form, experimenting with telling its stories in unusual ways and creating arcs that have reverberations for both the characters and for later storylines.

William Petersen's Gil Grissom is one of the most unusual leading characters on tv -- he is odd and obsessive, a scientist and a man who studies entomology as a hobby, often preferring the company of insects to the company of humans. He is also the best boss ever, fair and kind to a fault, as well as unfailingly thoughtful, about both the people around him and the cases he takes on. He lets the science lead his investigations, never making assumptions -- something the CSI: Miami judgement-bots should take a course in. And he is entirely accepting of oddness in others -- I have never seen him judge even the strangest perps who come through the door. This is perhaps his most unique, and lovable, characteristic -- he even had a charming and utterly believable, though ultimately heartbreaking, romance with a professional madam/dominatrix.

Anyway, CSI returned from a cliffhanger involving one of our beloved CSIs -- Sara, who Grissom is having a relationship with. Last season's Miniature Killer captured her in the finale, and this season's opener concentrates on the team's efforts to find her before she dies out in the desert. For all the drama, it's a profoundly quiet episode, completely different in tone from Quentin Tarantino's fantastic two-parter in which Nick was in peril, but managing to echo some of those episodes' themes. Grisson's profound distress is poignantly shown but never belabored, and Sara's struggle to keep her wits about her (she manages to do several very clever things even while she's hugely disoriented by sunstroke and dehydration) keeps her fate in doubt until the very end. It was a marvelous episode in a show that just keeps getting better and better.

This week we also caught up with HBO's new relationship drama, Tell Me You Love Me (or, as it should be renamed, Tell Me At Length How Much You Resent Me, Then Have Graphic Prosthetic-Based Sex With Me). This show seems to be garnering a generally favorable critical response, and it's tough to see why -- because it's on HBO? Because it's serious and therefore worthy? Because it explores "real" issues that "real" people face? It seems now to merely be a collection of the worst kind of indie movie cliches. There's virtually no music (that's real!), the couples in the show are miserable (also so real!) and only seem to stay together because there wouldn't be a show otherwise, hardly anything ever happens to advance what plots there are (you can't ask for realer than that! People's lives are horrendously boring and miserable!), the characters are all in therapy (just like all white upper-middle-class couples!), and no one ever resolves an argument through communication when it could be dragged out indefinitely through misunderstandings (so real that soap operas abide by it!). Almost every single character in the show is a Gupta -- the only ones who aren't are not so much likable as not hatable enough to want to kill them. The plots revolve around the couples' various problems with each other, and by the third episode in hardly anything has happened, and what has happened has happened badly. [Plus, all the characters spend their time either whining, moaning, or gurning. It's very unpleasant to watch. See below for proof. - AdmiralNeck]



I'm all for quiet movies and tv shows that focus on character rather than a fast-moving plot, but they have to know how to do it right, or the result ends up as bad as any crappy sitcom or Heroes-rehash on network tv. The show is not automatically better because it deals with "real" issues, and I hate that these kinds of shows are given more leeway because they're "serious." Just because you're supposedly talking about issues that matter to most ordinary people, that doesn't give you license to not care about good storytelling. You'd think there would be an extra emphasis on good dialogue and insightful characterization, but instead we get the young couple who have sex a lot and break up over worries about monogamy, the youngish couple who are baby-crazed and only have sex when they're trying to conceive, and the middle-aged couple who have kids and haven't had sex in a year. Seriously? This is the best they could come up with? There's a difference between "classic" conflicts and stereotypical ones. And by the way, Cynthia Mort, real life is often quite funny. If people were really as miserable and humorless as they are on this show, we wouldn't have such an overpopulation problem. And when couples are as miserable in real life as they are here, they usually go ahead and break up. I'm willing to give the show more of a chance -- mostly because AdmiralNeck and I have fun mocking it -- but it better shape up soon.

We also watched the pilots for Bionic Woman, Journeyman, and Dirty Sexy Money (known in our house as Dirty Stupid Monkey), as well as the season premieres of Ugly Betty and The Office, but I'm gonna let AdmiralNeck handle those, as I am reviewed out.