Yeah, we remember $2.43 gas.
**According to Wikipedia, “Diminishing film work, marital difficulties, and a drinking problem eventually ate away at Halop's show business career.” And: “Halop married seven times.”
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Everybody’s Dancin’ Those Late John Garfield Blues (¡Leo Gorcey Es Tu Papá!)
Some genius has gone and done it: combined Americans’ two insatiable addictions---watching TV and filling their gas tanks---into one unholy consumer experience. We’re sure this isn’t a brand new phenomenon, but we first encountered it late Friday afternoon at the Hugo Chavez Fill-Er-Up around the corner from our house. We wondered why everyone was staring up toward the tops of the pumps---perhaps gas had already hit $4 a gallon and we missed it, or maybe the face of Jesus had been rendered visible behind the glass---then noticed that each and every gasoline dispenser was newly crowned by a small, two-sided flat-screen TV! We caught the eye of the Hispanic wrecker driver at the next pump, who was chuckling and shaking his head: “Man, they’re making so much money now they got their own TVs!” he observed. “Yeah,” said we, “maybe they got cable, and we can just walk over here at night and catch HBO.”
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Omar is Dead, and Life as We Know It Seems Drab and Barren
We’ve tried to devote the few spare moments the Almighty grants us to a close study of the upcoming Texas primary elections, but our mind keeps wandering far away as we zone out on the lulling cadences of the SoulMender (maybe the Empathy Deficit’s got us down), or we reflexively turn away from the occasionally braying screech of the Missus Clinton (not a particularly “male” reaction, contrary to popular but uninformed opinion). Besides, this doing of our civic duty steals invaluable moments from our obsessive watching and contemplation of the 5th and final season of HBO’s The Wire, now down to its last two episodes (or grand finale, if, like us, you catch the show early on HBO On Demand).
We believe it was Carmela Soprano, ruefully needling her splayed-before-the-tube Mafiosi-Couch Potato husband, who offered the great meta-observation on TV: “It’s so much more interesting than life, isn’t it?”
The Wire was slow getting into gear this season, driven as it was by the highly out-of-tune plot twist that saw hard-drinking Irish cop Jimmy McNulty (one of The Wire’s few prominent white characters, and one of its most uninteresting) manufacture a kinky serial killer of Baltimore’s homeless so that the funds-strapped city would grant his department the resources to take down cold-blooded drug kingpin Marlo, who is pictured as the apotheosis of predatory capitalism by Wire creator David Simon. And Simon’s highly anticipated dissection of the newspaper business (anticipated in the newspaper business at least: has there ever been a show that generated so many acres of news and magazine print as Simon and The Wire?) at first seemed flat, perhaps because the monopoly newspaper operation, unlike the monopoly street-drug trade, isn’t really that riveting a subject for drama, and the workers who populate newsrooms these days are a singularly boring lot, or so we’ve been told.
By the fourth or fifth episode, however, as these developments merged with the show’s other narrative threads, the sheer headlong drive of The Wire took over, temporarily culminating in a emotional high point last Sunday with the out-of-the-blue killing of Omar Little, America’s best-loved gay practitioner of the fine art of ripping off drug gangs (hey, according to this piece in the Houston Chronicle’s Star section---which like most anything else half-interesting in that section emanated outside of the newspaper---even the SoulMender himself has “expressed his admiration for Omar---albeit with the caveat that he didn’t endorse Omar’s behavior” (NOTE TO CLINTON CAMPAIGN: BETTER JUMP ON THIS QUICK!). We were so wrong about Omar: We figured he’d stick around to coat the streets of Baltimore with the blood of Marlo & Co. and die trying, a showdown that we thought would be surreptitiously engineered by “murder police” Bunk Moreland (who, as no less an astute critic than us previously noted, is the most sublime fictional creation in the history of TV drama; when you see New Orleanian Wendell Pierce in a non-Bunk role you realize what a hellaciously good actor he is; unfortunately, for much of this season too much of Bunk’s face time has been devoted to hand-wringing over McNulty’s ruse).
But part of The Wire’s genius is its unpredictability, so of course Omar is done in as he’s buying a pack of Kools by a psychotic 9 year old (the screams of the Korean lady behind the Plexiglass still echo in our brain) who appears to have been pissed because Omar interrupted the boy and his confreres in the street-corner act of setting a cat afire.
Even the newsroom angle has grown on us, despite the leaden presence of city editor Gus, who as these jokers at Slate note appears to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ (one of the only characters on the show who, at least so far, seems too good---too good to be true). Our favorite is Klebanow, the supercilious, thin-lipped managing editor with the perm’ed locks (we surmise that he gets his blue jeans dry-cleaned for the weekend), who’s just a notch less smarmier than the sweaty-palmed Jayson Blair-like fabulist Scott Templeton, a careerist and favorite of Klebanow who’s almost too bad to be true (Simon & Co. take pains to show that Templeton, in addition to being a monumental liar, is a physical coward). If you’ve spent anytime around a newsroom, you know these guys. (Check the scene where Templeton, sitting in a bar with McNulty and another reporter, unwittingly goes about helping the detective, a fellow sociopath, construct the phony serial-killer narrative so it can land on the front page of the fictional Baltimore Sun. Neither is aware of the other's lies. That was sharp.)
As good as the death-of-Omar episode was, the penultimate installment, scripted by the great George Pelecanos (The Wire is surely “Pelecanosian,” as opposed to “Dickensian,” the favorite adjective of the doofus executive editor on the show) has to be one of the most affecting dramatic works we’ve witnessed, dating back several past lives to when we used to rattle our chains at the special “Slaves Only Matinee” of Euripides’ works. We won’t give way any of the story, in case our mama’s read this far, but we most certainly did not fall asleep 45 minutes into it, as we did Tuesday night during that 90-minute drowser on MSNBC.
So much more interesting than life.
We believe it was Carmela Soprano, ruefully needling her splayed-before-the-tube Mafiosi-Couch Potato husband, who offered the great meta-observation on TV: “It’s so much more interesting than life, isn’t it?”
The Wire was slow getting into gear this season, driven as it was by the highly out-of-tune plot twist that saw hard-drinking Irish cop Jimmy McNulty (one of The Wire’s few prominent white characters, and one of its most uninteresting) manufacture a kinky serial killer of Baltimore’s homeless so that the funds-strapped city would grant his department the resources to take down cold-blooded drug kingpin Marlo, who is pictured as the apotheosis of predatory capitalism by Wire creator David Simon. And Simon’s highly anticipated dissection of the newspaper business (anticipated in the newspaper business at least: has there ever been a show that generated so many acres of news and magazine print as Simon and The Wire?) at first seemed flat, perhaps because the monopoly newspaper operation, unlike the monopoly street-drug trade, isn’t really that riveting a subject for drama, and the workers who populate newsrooms these days are a singularly boring lot, or so we’ve been told.
By the fourth or fifth episode, however, as these developments merged with the show’s other narrative threads, the sheer headlong drive of The Wire took over, temporarily culminating in a emotional high point last Sunday with the out-of-the-blue killing of Omar Little, America’s best-loved gay practitioner of the fine art of ripping off drug gangs (hey, according to this piece in the Houston Chronicle’s Star section---which like most anything else half-interesting in that section emanated outside of the newspaper---even the SoulMender himself has “expressed his admiration for Omar---albeit with the caveat that he didn’t endorse Omar’s behavior” (NOTE TO CLINTON CAMPAIGN: BETTER JUMP ON THIS QUICK!). We were so wrong about Omar: We figured he’d stick around to coat the streets of Baltimore with the blood of Marlo & Co. and die trying, a showdown that we thought would be surreptitiously engineered by “murder police” Bunk Moreland (who, as no less an astute critic than us previously noted, is the most sublime fictional creation in the history of TV drama; when you see New Orleanian Wendell Pierce in a non-Bunk role you realize what a hellaciously good actor he is; unfortunately, for much of this season too much of Bunk’s face time has been devoted to hand-wringing over McNulty’s ruse).
But part of The Wire’s genius is its unpredictability, so of course Omar is done in as he’s buying a pack of Kools by a psychotic 9 year old (the screams of the Korean lady behind the Plexiglass still echo in our brain) who appears to have been pissed because Omar interrupted the boy and his confreres in the street-corner act of setting a cat afire.
Even the newsroom angle has grown on us, despite the leaden presence of city editor Gus, who as these jokers at Slate note appears to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ (one of the only characters on the show who, at least so far, seems too good---too good to be true). Our favorite is Klebanow, the supercilious, thin-lipped managing editor with the perm’ed locks (we surmise that he gets his blue jeans dry-cleaned for the weekend), who’s just a notch less smarmier than the sweaty-palmed Jayson Blair-like fabulist Scott Templeton, a careerist and favorite of Klebanow who’s almost too bad to be true (Simon & Co. take pains to show that Templeton, in addition to being a monumental liar, is a physical coward). If you’ve spent anytime around a newsroom, you know these guys. (Check the scene where Templeton, sitting in a bar with McNulty and another reporter, unwittingly goes about helping the detective, a fellow sociopath, construct the phony serial-killer narrative so it can land on the front page of the fictional Baltimore Sun. Neither is aware of the other's lies. That was sharp.)
As good as the death-of-Omar episode was, the penultimate installment, scripted by the great George Pelecanos (The Wire is surely “Pelecanosian,” as opposed to “Dickensian,” the favorite adjective of the doofus executive editor on the show) has to be one of the most affecting dramatic works we’ve witnessed, dating back several past lives to when we used to rattle our chains at the special “Slaves Only Matinee” of Euripides’ works. We won’t give way any of the story, in case our mama’s read this far, but we most certainly did not fall asleep 45 minutes into it, as we did Tuesday night during that 90-minute drowser on MSNBC.
So much more interesting than life.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The Absolutely Bestest Show on TV (As of This Fleeting Moment in Time)
A few weeks ago, while hurriedly passing through on our way to some larger point, we made the not-so-novel observation that HBO’s The Wire was the best show on television. We’re afraid, however, that this grand pronouncement proved to be just another of our transitory enthusiasms, because at the time we had not seen Last Dance, which we stumbled across on one of those cable stations that’s way, way up there on the digital dial.
You’ve seen Last Dance, haven’t you? The show about the geriatric dance troupe that travels from town to town, chasing the Terpsichorean muse and searching for late-life adventure? And by “dance” we don’t mean Arthur Murray or Lawrence Welk-style hoofery or even square-dancing or boot-scootin’. Nope, Last Dance shows America’s elders in all their butt-twitchin’, arm-thrusting, synchronized hip-hopping glory. It’s a brilliant idea (apparently no one has taken credit for Last Dance’s creation, although we detect the subtle hands of both The Sopranos’ David Chase and Deadwood’s David Milch, as well as some other guy named “David”), because if there’s one thing that Americans love even more than Joel Osteen, Internet porn and salty snacks, it’s watching old people dance like teenagers. And with the first of the nation’s Baby Boomers now eligible to draw Social Security, Last Dance is demographically right on time.
You can tell that Last Dance is something different from the opening credits, when a phalanx of Harley-riding geezers comes roaring out of the darkness, into the sunshine and toward the camera, their turkey wattles flappin’ in the breeze while Psychotic Reaction rises on the soundtrack (not the Count Five original, either---the Brenton Wood cover, which as scholars long ago confirmed is simply the backing track of the Count Five version with the Oogum Boogum Man’s vocal dubbed on top; Last Dance is too hip for the room---any room!). We can’t get enough of the dance routines, especially the weekly show-closing to Super Freak, but it’s the finely drawn characters and their stories that have kept us coming back week after week. The conceit, of course, is that all the dancers are over 70 and thus when off-stage susceptible to the insults of old age---tight bowels, loose dentures, dowager’s hump, debilitating arthritis, permanent erectile dysfunction, unexplained grumpiness, etc. When the lights go up they come alive as “one organism,” as the troupe’s director, a finicky 73-year-old gay man with a heart of gold, always says, but during their off-hours the characters fuss and fight, pair up for furtive sex (this is cable, so if you’d be offended by the sight of two fully unclothed 80 year olds going wham-jam on the queen-size of $79-a-night hotel room you’d best steer clear of Last Dance), commit gross infidelities, become addicted to gambling (slots, mostly) and various drugs (prescription and non-prescription), and are occasionally stalked by homicidal maniacs. It’s just like ER or Grey’s Anatomy (neither of which we’ve ever watched, so we’re just guessing here), except with an older cast and a grouchy female lead whose signature expression is “Suck my c—k, c---sucker.” (Again, the subtle hand of Milch?)
In an early episode that has “Emmy” written all over it, one of the troupe’s two black males decides he’s gay and “comes out” at age 83. His fellow dancers are accepting, except for one---the remaining straight black male of the troupe, who derides his former friend as a “butt-wheedlin’ sissy” (again, it’s cable). Of course, the bigot sees the error of his way after the newly gay character rescues him while the troupe is out ice fishing between Wisconsin engagements. The episode ended with a massive group hug, and if it doesn’t bring tears to your tired eyes have someone call the coroner, ’cause you ain’t got a pulse, Chester.
There’s a little somebody for everybody on Last Dance---a WASPy incontinent former corporate lawyer whose last divorce, from a 17-year-old Guatemalan mail-order bride, left him bankrupt and in need of work (“All my life, I’ve wanted to dance---to just get down,” he confides to another character). There’s a remarkably well-preserved Indo-American female named “Shiva,” as well as real-live American Indian (played by a real-live Indian) who often sits out the dance routines because they “shame” his ancestors. Our favorite, though, is the crotchety old Jewish guy, who is casually revealed in an early episode to be Israeli, which explains why he’s rude to everyone, including his 101-year-old mother, who travels with the troupe doing their laundry and whose frequent lapses into “dementia” provide some of the series’ more poignant plot twists. There’s even an elderly Italian-American, an ex-Mafioso with no 401(k) who looks suspiciously like the guy who played “Paulie Walnuts” on The Sopranos (it couldn’t be him, could it?).
Well, anyway, check it out: Last Dance is much, much better than John from Cincinnati.
Wait, scratch this posting: We just saw Drinking with the Stars.
You’ve seen Last Dance, haven’t you? The show about the geriatric dance troupe that travels from town to town, chasing the Terpsichorean muse and searching for late-life adventure? And by “dance” we don’t mean Arthur Murray or Lawrence Welk-style hoofery or even square-dancing or boot-scootin’. Nope, Last Dance shows America’s elders in all their butt-twitchin’, arm-thrusting, synchronized hip-hopping glory. It’s a brilliant idea (apparently no one has taken credit for Last Dance’s creation, although we detect the subtle hands of both The Sopranos’ David Chase and Deadwood’s David Milch, as well as some other guy named “David”), because if there’s one thing that Americans love even more than Joel Osteen, Internet porn and salty snacks, it’s watching old people dance like teenagers. And with the first of the nation’s Baby Boomers now eligible to draw Social Security, Last Dance is demographically right on time.
You can tell that Last Dance is something different from the opening credits, when a phalanx of Harley-riding geezers comes roaring out of the darkness, into the sunshine and toward the camera, their turkey wattles flappin’ in the breeze while Psychotic Reaction rises on the soundtrack (not the Count Five original, either---the Brenton Wood cover, which as scholars long ago confirmed is simply the backing track of the Count Five version with the Oogum Boogum Man’s vocal dubbed on top; Last Dance is too hip for the room---any room!). We can’t get enough of the dance routines, especially the weekly show-closing to Super Freak, but it’s the finely drawn characters and their stories that have kept us coming back week after week. The conceit, of course, is that all the dancers are over 70 and thus when off-stage susceptible to the insults of old age---tight bowels, loose dentures, dowager’s hump, debilitating arthritis, permanent erectile dysfunction, unexplained grumpiness, etc. When the lights go up they come alive as “one organism,” as the troupe’s director, a finicky 73-year-old gay man with a heart of gold, always says, but during their off-hours the characters fuss and fight, pair up for furtive sex (this is cable, so if you’d be offended by the sight of two fully unclothed 80 year olds going wham-jam on the queen-size of $79-a-night hotel room you’d best steer clear of Last Dance), commit gross infidelities, become addicted to gambling (slots, mostly) and various drugs (prescription and non-prescription), and are occasionally stalked by homicidal maniacs. It’s just like ER or Grey’s Anatomy (neither of which we’ve ever watched, so we’re just guessing here), except with an older cast and a grouchy female lead whose signature expression is “Suck my c—k, c---sucker.” (Again, the subtle hand of Milch?)
In an early episode that has “Emmy” written all over it, one of the troupe’s two black males decides he’s gay and “comes out” at age 83. His fellow dancers are accepting, except for one---the remaining straight black male of the troupe, who derides his former friend as a “butt-wheedlin’ sissy” (again, it’s cable). Of course, the bigot sees the error of his way after the newly gay character rescues him while the troupe is out ice fishing between Wisconsin engagements. The episode ended with a massive group hug, and if it doesn’t bring tears to your tired eyes have someone call the coroner, ’cause you ain’t got a pulse, Chester.
There’s a little somebody for everybody on Last Dance---a WASPy incontinent former corporate lawyer whose last divorce, from a 17-year-old Guatemalan mail-order bride, left him bankrupt and in need of work (“All my life, I’ve wanted to dance---to just get down,” he confides to another character). There’s a remarkably well-preserved Indo-American female named “Shiva,” as well as real-live American Indian (played by a real-live Indian) who often sits out the dance routines because they “shame” his ancestors. Our favorite, though, is the crotchety old Jewish guy, who is casually revealed in an early episode to be Israeli, which explains why he’s rude to everyone, including his 101-year-old mother, who travels with the troupe doing their laundry and whose frequent lapses into “dementia” provide some of the series’ more poignant plot twists. There’s even an elderly Italian-American, an ex-Mafioso with no 401(k) who looks suspiciously like the guy who played “Paulie Walnuts” on The Sopranos (it couldn’t be him, could it?).
Well, anyway, check it out: Last Dance is much, much better than John from Cincinnati.
Wait, scratch this posting: We just saw Drinking with the Stars.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Down in the Hole: The Newspaper Business is Just like Any Other Business, Only More So
If you were one of the unfortunates at the Houston Chronicle whacked by the wide-swinging scythe of publisher Smilin’ Jack Sweeney’s “position elimination program,” take heart: You can set aside some of that buyout money (if you got bought out---hey, the Hearst Corp.’s hurtin’) to get hooked up to the cable and order HBO (which, we must sadly report, has risen by $10 a month under Comcast's ownership of the city's cable monopoly). Then you’ll be ready to pull up a chair come January for the fifth and final season of the network’s The Wire---now the best show on television after the exit of The Sopranos*---whose main story line will be devoted to downsizing at a big-city monopoly newspaper. It will be worth forgoing a few meals.
We can’t wait for the new season: It’s probably the first time we’ve actually looked forward to something on television since we heard The Beatles were going on Ed Sullivan. Given The Wire’s grand theme---the relentless commodification of the human, on all fronts---and its past treatment of the drug war, urban politics, the declining white working-class and shot-to-hell public schools, we suspect its approach to the faltering newspaper business will strike a chord for anyone involved with, or concerned about, the faltering newspaper business.
In a long story on The Wire in a recent New Yorker, bombastic creator David Simon offered some lacerating insights on the state of newspapers. We knew that Simon was a long-time cop shop reporter for the Baltimore Sun before his book Homicide was turned into a television series in the early ’90s, but we were surprised to learn that he had worked at the Sun as late as 1995 and left only after “bitterly” accepting a buyout offer, believing the newspaper “was squandering talent under new management.” (“Tone-deaf and prize-hungry and more interested in self-aggrandizement than in building lasting quality at the paper,” is the way Simon describes his superiors; the last season of The Wire will be partly set at a newspaper called the Baltimore Sun.) He’s a newspaper guy but clearly sees the medium’s major (and self-imposed) limitation:
*Meaning it’s the second-best show of all time, behind The Sopranos and just ahead of The Beverly Hillbillies.
We can’t wait for the new season: It’s probably the first time we’ve actually looked forward to something on television since we heard The Beatles were going on Ed Sullivan. Given The Wire’s grand theme---the relentless commodification of the human, on all fronts---and its past treatment of the drug war, urban politics, the declining white working-class and shot-to-hell public schools, we suspect its approach to the faltering newspaper business will strike a chord for anyone involved with, or concerned about, the faltering newspaper business.
In a long story on The Wire in a recent New Yorker, bombastic creator David Simon offered some lacerating insights on the state of newspapers. We knew that Simon was a long-time cop shop reporter for the Baltimore Sun before his book Homicide was turned into a television series in the early ’90s, but we were surprised to learn that he had worked at the Sun as late as 1995 and left only after “bitterly” accepting a buyout offer, believing the newspaper “was squandering talent under new management.” (“Tone-deaf and prize-hungry and more interested in self-aggrandizement than in building lasting quality at the paper,” is the way Simon describes his superiors; the last season of The Wire will be partly set at a newspaper called the Baltimore Sun.) He’s a newspaper guy but clearly sees the medium’s major (and self-imposed) limitation:
This final season of the show, Simon [said], will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”Yes, there’s little that comes neatly packaged in black-and-white on The Wire, but it’s a more accurate depiction of the master narratives of urban life circa 2007 than you’ll ever get from reading a daily newspaper, including the two or three left in the country that are worth a shit.
*Meaning it’s the second-best show of all time, behind The Sopranos and just ahead of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Why Are There No Grandmasters Seeking the Highest Office of Our Land (Or Even an At-Large Seat on City Council)?
We occasionally devote this space to our tiresome grousing about the ongoing and apparently inexorable dumbing-down of our native land. It’s one of our “themes,” so to speak, yet every once in a while we are reminded, with a piledriver-to-the-forehead vengeance, that it’s actually much worse than we let on.
Such was the case last weekend when we happened upon Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO, which we lay prone to watch after Maher announced that one of his guest panelists would be Sheila Jackson Lee (although we believe Maher mangled SJL’s name on first pronunciation). To our mild surprise, The Ubiquitous Congresswoman from Texas’s 18th Congressional District, as she’s formally known, came off well, within the narrow confines of her reflexive partisan predictability (the heathen Maher managed to elicit a grudging admission from the voluble congress gal that she “believes” in evolution, a view we suspect is not shared by many pastors in the 18th District). She did, however, manage to hog most of the dialogue---no mean feat, considering one of the other two panelists was Chris Matthews---and her appearance moved us to wonder what it must be like to be married to SJL, or to be one of her offspring, or to be even a four-legged pet in the SJL household, when no occasion is undeserving of a Major SJL Pronouncement: “Well, Bill, let me say this about [that] …” (which is how she actually seemed to preface every answer she gave Maher).
But we did not come here this evening to take a cheap and easy shot at Shelia Jackson Lee, which would be just too cheap (and easy). What really grabbed our attention on Maher’s show was the pot-puffing host’s interview with Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion and candidate for the Russian presidency next year (he also has new book to sell). Kasparov was trenchant and funny (as in funny-dead serious) and demonstrated a notable ability to think on his feet while directly answering a question---notable, at least, when compared to the 18 or 20 or however many supplicants are still seeking the presidency of the United States, where SOP for candidates is to open the can and pour out the market-tested horseshit.* We especially enjoyed his cogent explanation of rival Vladimir Putin’s cozying up to Ahmadinejad (had something to do with the price of oil---can ya believe it?)
Kasparov wowed his audience: “He’s something, huh?” enthused Maher after the by-satellite interview ended. “Why can’t run in the Iowa caucus?” A lathered-up Matthews declared himself especially impressed by Kasparov’s ESL ability: “Do you ever get the feeling we’re playing checkers and they’re playing chess? That was sophisticated …our guys never get to that level of sophistication! They talk down to us … And he’s thinking in Russian!”
It was indeed quite a performance, as it apparently stunned Shelia Jackson Lee into an unprecedented silence.
This is the Kasparov-Maher interview.
*For the time being we must exempt the callow Obama from this gross generalization, because like our podnah Peggy Noonan we’ve begun to notice that the Illinois senator actually seems to consider questions and think before he speaks. Sometimes he even appears to be talking with people, rather than at them, and mildly embarrassed when he has to resort to pre-packaged blather. There’s no way in hell he could be president!
Such was the case last weekend when we happened upon Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO, which we lay prone to watch after Maher announced that one of his guest panelists would be Sheila Jackson Lee (although we believe Maher mangled SJL’s name on first pronunciation). To our mild surprise, The Ubiquitous Congresswoman from Texas’s 18th Congressional District, as she’s formally known, came off well, within the narrow confines of her reflexive partisan predictability (the heathen Maher managed to elicit a grudging admission from the voluble congress gal that she “believes” in evolution, a view we suspect is not shared by many pastors in the 18th District). She did, however, manage to hog most of the dialogue---no mean feat, considering one of the other two panelists was Chris Matthews---and her appearance moved us to wonder what it must be like to be married to SJL, or to be one of her offspring, or to be even a four-legged pet in the SJL household, when no occasion is undeserving of a Major SJL Pronouncement: “Well, Bill, let me say this about [that] …” (which is how she actually seemed to preface every answer she gave Maher).
But we did not come here this evening to take a cheap and easy shot at Shelia Jackson Lee, which would be just too cheap (and easy). What really grabbed our attention on Maher’s show was the pot-puffing host’s interview with Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion and candidate for the Russian presidency next year (he also has new book to sell). Kasparov was trenchant and funny (as in funny-dead serious) and demonstrated a notable ability to think on his feet while directly answering a question---notable, at least, when compared to the 18 or 20 or however many supplicants are still seeking the presidency of the United States, where SOP for candidates is to open the can and pour out the market-tested horseshit.* We especially enjoyed his cogent explanation of rival Vladimir Putin’s cozying up to Ahmadinejad (had something to do with the price of oil---can ya believe it?)
Kasparov wowed his audience: “He’s something, huh?” enthused Maher after the by-satellite interview ended. “Why can’t run in the Iowa caucus?” A lathered-up Matthews declared himself especially impressed by Kasparov’s ESL ability: “Do you ever get the feeling we’re playing checkers and they’re playing chess? That was sophisticated …our guys never get to that level of sophistication! They talk down to us … And he’s thinking in Russian!”
It was indeed quite a performance, as it apparently stunned Shelia Jackson Lee into an unprecedented silence.
This is the Kasparov-Maher interview.
*For the time being we must exempt the callow Obama from this gross generalization, because like our podnah Peggy Noonan we’ve begun to notice that the Illinois senator actually seems to consider questions and think before he speaks. Sometimes he even appears to be talking with people, rather than at them, and mildly embarrassed when he has to resort to pre-packaged blather. There’s no way in hell he could be president!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
