Not Far Inferior to Don Rickles
Thursday, February 28, 2008


In 1997 I traveled by train from Chicago to New York with a friend of mine (we thought that, since riding the train was the more miserable experience, it would necessarily be cheaper than flying. It wasn't). We stayed with my friend Erin. She worked at a place called Catch A Rising Star, which was the place, we were impressed to learn, where some twenty years before Robin Williams got his start. When I caught one of the shows--Erin got us in for free--I was no longer quite as impressed. Catch a Rising Star was falling, leaving in its trail a lot of guys with shiny dress shirts and Kentucky waterfalls doing standup on the theme of, jer wife ever say this? and, d'ja ever notice? It was then that I formulated my opinion about comedy, which was that it wasn't funny. My love of folks like Richard Pryor, Don Rickles and Andy Kaufman only emphasized the fact that stuff like this was far inferior.

Well, Invite Them Up, which just had its last show around the corner from the Bookshop, is not far inferior to Don Rickles. It was a big show, and everyone seemed "on" (is that right? Do comedians say "on," anymore?) except for one comedianne, who got stuck on a plane somewhere and seemed not to have made it "on" at all. There was lots of the great, Kaufman-like "boring" comedy (a slow reveal, during tag-team stand up routine, that the comedians were in fact shilling for Mike Hukabee, etc.) which boredom, I suppose, is now schtick but perfectable schtick, so still interesting. Besides seeing Eugene Mirman and Bobby Tisdale every Wednesday night, I'll mostly miss all the comedian shop-talk in the bar.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:46 PM, ,


Last week...
Monday, February 18, 2008

Last week, and for weeks before that, I was staying up late nights observing the switchboard of minor pains afflicting my stomach and chest. It's a recorded fact I'm prone to ulcers, and something my doctor tells me is called Barrett's esophagus, which may or may not be related to the ulcers, I can't remember, and which has, what? (sometimes I feel as if I'm making these things up) near a 5 per cent chance of giving me cancer. This explains the rodent-like gnawing that crawls between my gut and my sternum. But what else is going on here? Is that swollen basketball behind my ribcage my liver? Are those rheumy, congested things my lungs? Flash of pain beneath the armpit: my heart? Or in back of my jaw: more cancer? I've been doing this pretty much throughout 2008, waiting, holding off seeing the doctor. I've done this before, with the same symptoms, had X-Rays done to my chest, more sonograms than an expectant mother, had them roll all that cold jelly over my stomach and push their weird bat-machine into my ribs. Nothing came up. "Watch it with that coffee, lose a little weight, no smoking," that's what they say. And now that I've finally, in a sort of slow-burning panic, called all of my doctors to get the necessary tests, my symptoms have subsided to a light simmer, and some--the liver, the stomach pains--have gone away almost completely. Am I that kind of person?

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:05 PM, ,


I've got your "Dickensian Angle" right here...
Monday, February 11, 2008

The Wire, in its fifth season, seems to be losing its most vociferous supporters. Not realistic enough, they seem to be saying. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the first and fourth seasons, because those are the seasons in which The Wire adheres most closely to the tried-and-true cops-and-robbers formula (and on the audience's collective memory of that formula) and so demonstrates how deviations from that formula equal realism. This is not a difficult rule. It goes: however true, a cliche is not realism. So, too, with its flipside: entirely unprocessed information is not realism. Realism resides in the wedding of formula and novelty*. So that's America, that's seasons one and four, and that's what makes realism fun. It's only when all the barriers of the thing break down and the show becomes pure drama, or commentary, or dramentary, blech, that the thing falls apart.

This happens far too often, especially in this season, where everybody's just bouncing off the walls and talking over each other and demonstrating one or another point. I do like that David Simon called this last episode "The Dickensian Angle"--echoing the sort of primo doofuses, like Baltimore Sun Executive Editor James Whitling, who tend to think of any thing sprawling or serial in nature as "Dickensian." It's called a soap opera, folks. HBO didn't make this up. They've been going at this every single afternoon for fifty years and the tune goes: this happens, that happens, wham, something novel happens, tune in next week. In spite of the occasional psychic evil twin sister (McNulty's role this year) or superhuman cat burglar (Omar) or case of total amnesia (poor, evil Clay Davis) the soap opera is the closest thing television has ever come to realism, and it reaches its apotheosis when no one bothers to figure out how it's going to end, because it never will. It's not a wonder to me why the networks have not let the David Simons of this world make angry little soap operas in prime time before. I mean, they wouldn't, naturally, for reasons of tordinary cowardice. Yet the really smart ones must also see that the opportunity for really "edgy" boredom and stupidity, as opposed to the other, better kinds of boredom and stupidity, given so much unadulterated "realism," is enormous. Which is to say that David Simon deserves a medal, really, for those two great seasons he had. Given the huge scope of material he's been allowed to work with (too much--a tragedy, really, because television is the last art form left that has a structure that can be meaningfully broken, and that isn't just nebulous blobs of drama and meaning as fiction, poetry, gallery arts have become) the fact that he made at least some of it into an excellent crime story shows a herculean forbearance.

Anyway, the point is, The Wire is disqualified from being the best show ever aired on television. That distinction belongs to the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone, the perfect crystallization of everything that is not realism, which can be dashed off and filed away in a half an hour, and so does not pretend to last forever, or index precisely the entire city of, say, Baltimore.

*When I think about it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was actually the TV show that most skillfully utilized the formula for realism. In fact, until some ambitious Pierre Menard comes along and creates a one-to-one index between television and the world, Buffy gets my vote for most realistic (and second best) television show ever made.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:49 PM, ,


"Best Reaction Shot Ever"
Friday, February 01, 2008

"Top hats...were by 1863 a distinctly modern costume. The top hat had been invented in 1797 by the London haberdasher John Heatherington, who caused a riot when he stepped outside with one perched on his head: children screamed, women fainted, the arm of an errand boy was broken, and Heatherington was hauled before the courts to explain the meaning of his alarming new invention sixty years on, these fears had been conquered and the top hat was omnipresent on the heads of both the bourgeois and the aristocrat...worn for both business and pleasure."
--Ross King, The Judgment of Paris

posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:06 PM, ,