is a blog by Brendan
Almost exactly three years after I started Sad and Happy Movie Day, Jon and Amanda finally maneuvered me into actually watching Hotel Rwanda. We didn’t even have a happy movie to chase it with, but a couple episodes of Arrested Development made do.
I could have sworn that was Julia Sawalha playing the Red Cross worker, but IMDB says I am wrong. Dang. Oh, also the world is going to burn and we all deserve it.
I want to kill you.
I did that gag THREE YEARS AGO, THE ONION.
I downloaded LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 because it’s the first album I’d heard of that was specifically designed to be run to. Unfortunately it’s way too slow for that, but it’s still pretty good music. I had been rating everything on it three or four stars on iTunes, and suddenly–halfway through a song I’d already rated–I found my mouse hovering over the five-star button. Because somebody had started playing chimes.
This is a serious problem and I don’t know what to do about it. As soon as a song incorporates chimes, handbells or tone bars of any kind–especially, as they are often used, in counterpoint–I will unconsciously decide that it is the greatest song ever and listen to it ten times in a row. I can’t help it!
I would say that this is a flaw in my musical taste, but it is widely agreed that my musical taste already consists largely of flaws. This is a crack in the very foundations of my aesthetic sensibilities. It is a metaflaw. Chimes are a sloppy exploit for the kernel of my brain.
Someone recommend a song that will ruin chimes for me forever. I want to change.
He stumbles out of the house and falls to his knees, wiping his hands over and over on his bloody jeans. Smoke’s pouring out of the basement. It smells of hickory, myrrh and scorched wiring.
“Jesus, Lawrence,” says Marti, hollow around the eyes. “Tell me what happened, give me some reason I don’t have to arrest you…”
“You don’t understand!” says Lawrence. “The spell went all wrong–those aren’t them in there. Those aren’t my girls!”
“Not anymore,” says Marti sadly, and pulls out his cuffs.
From the house across the street, the doppelgang watches, hair in pigtails, eyes like wounds.
Yesterday a man was arrested for murdering his stepdaughters in some kind of ritual. It’s a horrible story. It also sounds way too much like a Clive Barker ripoff novel.
Stories I have written that revolve around invented or reinterpreted methods of divination: Stella, Jaboullei, Rob, Shekel and Jewel. I was kind of surprised it was this few–I feel like it’s one of the structures to which I keep returning. There’s another one coming Monday, if you hadn’t guessed.
I think the reason I keep coming back to this is a variation on the existential dread I feel when considering the persistence of objects (eg the lives of sapient dishes): the amount of potential information in the world, and how quickly our ability to capture and interpret it is growing, and how insignificant that capability will always be–in an obscure way, these things terrify me. They also thrill me. Look at what we can discover! If time and distance are the universe’s crypto, divination is the original side channel attack.
I also live in constant fear of side channel attacks, by the way, to the point where I have resigned myself to much-more-likely primary channel attacks. I kind of never want to be even mildly famous, as that would destroy what flimsy comfort I take in anonymity.
Anyway, you’ll know I’ve gutted the shark on this theme when I write the one about logymancy. Meanwhile I want to do more of these little collect-and-explain entries; I think they’d be a better point of entry to Anacrusis for new or hesitant readers than just the sheer blank mass of the archives. When one of my best friends refers to my writing corpus as “a stupid amount” and my own mother is too intimidated to read them, I am pretty much failing to sell my product.
So I opened Facebook and saw this much of an ad on my screen:
And I was like, “What, does she need emergency reverse liposuction? I mean, obviously she DOES, but is that going to save her–oh.” Because by this point I had copied the image out and could see the first frame of the animated gif, to which it apparently never resets:
Hi! St. Jude? Call me. We need to talk about this concept called “above the fold.”
HOORAY
I get to fuck the planet JUST LIKE YOU
Now, to get out of this state as fast as fucking possible.
I took my first road test yesterday. I managed to parallel park in a space exactly the same size as Scott’s (kindly) borrowed SUV, but on reflection, I’m kind of glad we stopped after I made the wrong turnabout.
The sitcom is killing sketch comedy.
Maria was emailing around this one Muppets bit from Seth Rogen’s stint on SNL and she apologized if anyone had already seen it, but, as she pointed out, “nobody watches SNL anymore.” This is hardly news. SNL’s function now is not so much to be watched as to give Andy Samberg Emmys for songs that have a penis joke. The only reason I’d even set it playing on the Tivo was because they had Spoon on, marking the first and only time I’ve deliberately watched the show for the music.
The rest of the show was factory standard, a very careful reenactment of the weekly SNL ritual (is it really a coincidence that part of the show actually airs on Sunday?). The freshest joke was a Macgyver reference. Macgyver ceased production before some of you were born.
I’ve mentioned here before that sketch comedy is unprofitably hard; not coincidentally, I was talking about Studio 60 at the time, like I’m about to do now.
Studio 60 had a running thing where one of the writer-performers wrote and led a commedia dell’arte sketch in several episodes, evidently so Aaron Sorkin could demonstrate that he took Intro to Theater History. The focus groups hated it but the head writer heroically kept it in until it could build an audience (“Matt, Matt! This week two guys in Dallas liked it!”). There are a few problems here.
Now, could you write a funny sketch that incorporated the stock types and exaggerated physicality of commedia dell’arte? I doubt it. What you could do is write a ten-minute play or one-act, which gives you the time to introduce the conventions to the audience, set things up going in a direction that the tropes predict, upend the whole thing and finish with a telling and funny point about the form’s influence on modern writing.
Studio 60 tried to go a lot of places, but that wasn’t one of them. Sorkin, bless him, doesn’t do reexamination; he does reverence.
This is where I get back to SNL, as revered an institution as exists in modern television, nowhere moreso than within itself. Like Studio 60, it can’t bear self-examination; the brand of comedy in which it traffics is built high and shakily on mannerisms that date back to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or even Abbott and Costello. It persists entirely due to inertia and the occasional breakout YouTube bit (ever noticed, by the way, that those look and sound like nothing else on the show?).
Now, when every network ran three or four sitcoms and they all made use of the same stylized rhythm as sketch, that was enough: they supplied each other with context. But sitcoms don’t work that way anymore. Poetically, it’s due in part to Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night that shows like Arrested Development, The Office and My Name is Earl were able to take hold and eventually shatter the studio-audience / three-camera format.
I misstated my thesis at the beginning; it’s not so much that sitcoms are killing sketch as that sitcoms have been its life support, and now they’re pulling plugs out, one by one. If the dependency holds, SNL has about as much time left as Two and a Half Men. Both of them are rigid guardians of their genre and flagship shows. Personally, as Matt Boyd once said about syndicated comics, I want to punch a hole in that boat.
