tv rant, part the second

maura @ 10:14 pm

Well, now Dollhouse is canceled, so I guess I won’t get to complain about it anymore. Stupid Fox, have they done anything right since the X-Files?

Last night I forgot to complain about House. Strong start this season with House in the institution (yay for creepy gothic buildings) and we loved his awesome spazzy rapping bipolar roommate. Who apparently rapped the life story of Alexander Hamilton at a White House shindig recently (see video at Tenured Radical, one of my favorite faculty blogs).

But then, just like everything, apparently, the season’s gone downhill. Why were 13 and Taub taken off, exactly? And the whole Chase/Cameron tension is Not Very Tense At All, since we all know that Jennifer Morrison’s leaving the show. Meh. There have been some good scenes with Wilson this season, so that’s a plus. Maybe I am still mad at them for not taking the fullest advantage of Kal Penn leaving last year. The suicide was a great plot point, but they totally dropped the ball afterwards.

Is there anything good on TV these days? 30 Rock is still awesome, thankfully. Get Tina Fey on the horn — maybe it should be on every night.

in which i rant about telemavision

maura @ 8:32 pm

I’m really disappointed with TV this fall. We don’t even watch that many shows these days (since BSG ended, and I’ve lost all patience with Lost [though Jonathan still sometimes watches it]), and it’s a total drag when they’re not so good. Esp. on long teaching days when all I really want to do at night is watch TV and drink a beer.

So, what do we watch? You may remember that over the summer we watched all of last season (the first) of Fringe, that JJ Abrams X-Files kind of show. It ended up being pretty good, and I was really excited for the new season.

This season has been really eh. Too many monster-of-the-week eps, not enough story arc. And what happened to Dunham’s sister (played by the drunk friend from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist)? Just whisked right off the show without so much as a how do you do. But what really got to me was when they killed off Charlie, the average-guy FBI partner. I don’t know, I really liked him — he was a nice balance to all the pretty folk on the show. And it was totally implausible the way they made him get taken over by that weird future guy and his partner didn’t even notice (?!). Lame.

Next up: Dollhouse. Okay, I had a bit of doubt when we watched last season over the summer, but I persevered and it got much, much better. So much better, in fact, that this season has paled in comparison. Part of it is over-reliance on Echo, I think. Some actors are strong enough to be a show’s lead and some aren’t. This show would really benefit from becoming more of an ensemble piece, like the last ep with Sierra’s breakdown.

The other issue is that the show kind of wrapped itself up last season, at least if you watched the extra, unaired episode “Epitaph One” (which we had to watch because Felicia Day is in it and we <3 her). I mean, okay, it’s set in the future, but it pretty much ties all of the loose ends of the plot up in a neat little bow. And even though I try to convince myself that there’s more good stuff in between the time of this season and Epitaph One, I’m having trouble believing it.

I will give it this: great guest stars this season from the Buffyverse and BSG. But I miss Amy Acker.

I could say more about TV but now it’s time to watch House from the other night, so you’ll have to wait til tomorrow.

make a cup of tea, put a record on

maura @ 10:12 pm

We are having a weird home-screen-viewing summer. Should have been catching up on movies, but instead we watched the whole season of Fringe. Which ended up being pretty good. I mean, it’s an unabashed X-Files wannabe, but it’s always nice to see Pacey getting work, and the plots are interesting and full of weird stuff that is sometimes gross but not too much. Also the location titles floating in the sky are pretty nice (though a friend finds them ominous).

Continuing the catching-up-on-TV-we-missed-last-season trend,* this week we started watching Dollhouse. Finally! Yes, I know, what took us so long? Partly it was self-preservation: it’s so hard to get really into a show only to have it canceled. But now it’s been renewed so I feel like we should watch it before the new season starts.

* When we really should be watching The Class, which Netflix sent us ages ago and which I really really want to see. But sometimes it’s hard to commit to 2 hrs of watching, esp. when we can’t guarantee that our wee sleephater will be asleep before 9:30 these days. Maybe after school starts. Say it with me: 8 more days!

Okay, Jonathan warned me that the first 6 eps. have been widely acknowledged as Not That Great, and that it gets better. Thanks to Twitter I know that Felicia Day is in ep. 13, too, yay! But we’ve watched 2 episodes so far and I have to say that I am wavering on whether to continue. It’s just so mysoginistic. Of course Buffy was hilarious and moving and sad and bleak, and the main character was female and bad things happened to her. Some of those bad things happened because she’s a girl. But bad things happened to other people on the show, male people. And, you know, Buffy kicked ass, so that was cool.

Echo gets to do some strong stuff too, some fighting, etc. But overall she is just being used, man. The violence in ep. 2 really threw me; it was so hopeless and bleak. And mean. It’s so confusing — Joss, what are you doing?

Of course I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s great to see so many of the Joss regulars and the BSG refugees too (Tahmoh Penikett kind of looks like my brother, so I like him). I’m sure I’ll become a convert in the end: Jonathan referred me to the blogosphere which is full of commentary on feminism + Dollhouse + Joss (and which I’m not reading yet for fear of spoilers). But geez, til we get there, it’s hard to watch. We’re cuing up ep. 3, which I hope helps me shake off ep. 2.

how’d you get on the ceiling?

maura @ 8:41 am

I’ve had a hard time keeping up with leisure reading this semester. I think it’s partly because I’ve been reading lots for a research project I’m starting soon, and also trying to keep up w/general library + higher ed news. Or maybe it’s TV — there seems to have been much more good stuff on lately (and we haven’t even started watching Dollhouse yet).

Another reason for the leisure reading drought is probably because the last piece of fiction I read was Neil Stephenson’s latest 900 page bruiser “Anathem.” It was intense + awesome: compelling and academic scifi with lots of good plot twists in all the right places. I haven’t been so sad about finishing a book since “Time Traveler’s Wife” (which still hurts to think about, actually).

A couple of weeks ago I finished 2 disappointing nonfiction books. And afterwards I experienced an incredibly intense need for fiction, it was really weird. Now I’m reading “Never Let Me Go,” courtesy of our building’s ad hoc basement lending library. It’s pretty good so far, creepy + atmospheric + engaging.

Next up I think I’ll read an old collection of Kelly Link stories, “Stranger Things Happen.” Jonathan recently reminded me that it’s available for free for Stanza, the awesome iPhone ebook reader. And I have a bunch of meetings in Manhattan coming up this week so it’ll be convenient not to have to carry an extra book with me.

One of our recent TV diversions was this 6 hr miniseries that ran on the Scifi Channel a few yrs ago called The Lost Room. The intriguing premise is that there’s a hotel room that disappeared 50 yrs ago, no one knows why. The objects that were in the room have weird powers, and the key makes any door open into the room (and when you leave you can come out of any door that you can envision). It was a good ride for the first 5 episodes — the plot moved fast + hung together well — but the last ep was kind of weak, as if the miniseries had been a pilot for a show that wasn’t picked up.

When we finished watching the show Jonathan proposed that it was kind of like reading Borges or Donald Barthelme or Steven Millhauser or Kelly Link: “They’re all working on the same project. I don’t know what that project is, but clearly they’re all involved.” Which is what made me remember that Kelly Link book in the first place.

cause the days change at night

maura @ 10:38 pm

Woah, has it really been 2 weeks since my last post? Time flies when there’s teaching teaching teaching and then bam, Spring Break. Now the teaching is over (though Spring Break isn’t quite yet) and I’m a little sad, just like last semester. Curious, it is (see Yoda reference below).

Thanks to the spring non-secular holidays, Gus’s Spring Break was extra-long this year, so we hightailed it to Our Nation’s Capital for a few days to reprise our vacation 2 yrs ago. We even stayed at the same hotel! It was nice to be sort of familiar with everything. And we finally figured out the metro. Such a weird system, with the whole pay when you exit thing and how 2 people can’t use the same card and the fares are different between locations. Duh!

The trip was pretty fun. We did a few new things: Lincoln Memorial, which I found so moving (realized I had never been there), Vietnam War Memorial (ditto), pedal boats in the Tidal Basin to ogle the Jefferson Memorial (tho someone w/short legs was a pedal slacker), and the Museum of American History (which had been closed 2 yrs ago). Gus was tired + crabby for the latter so we let him play his DS while Jonathan ogled Julia Child’s kitchen and I grooved on Within These Walls, a reconstructed historic house with info about 6 families that lived there from the late 18th-mid-20th c. Go, historic house nerds!

We also hit a few of our old faves from last time. The cafeteria of the National Museum of the American Indian has dee-licious food (mmm, fry bread. and fiddlehead ferns!). Maybe one of these days we will have time to visit the rest of the museum, too. And it’s right next door to the Air + Space Museum, which you may have heard is the most visited museum IN THE WORLD, a fact which I could not help myself from mentioning about a jillion times as we slowly swam through the ridiculous crowds of people inside.

Gus reeeeeeally wanted to see the planetarium movie about black holes, so we did. It was narrated by Liam Neeson and I spent the first part of the show feeling really bad for him. But then his voice got all spooky and he told us that many galaxies have black holes at their centers and Gus said “does our galaxy have a black hole?” and I said “uhhhmmm…” and Liam said “there is even a black hole at the center of our own galaxy!” and Gus grabbed my arm so tight it hurt. So Liam Neeson, I am sorry for your loss, but thank you very much for freaking out my child. Stupid black holes.

After that we had to get ice cream, even though it was 50 degrees and raining, because we wanted to drag Gus to the Hirshhorn to see some modern art, which we <3 and he despises (“I hate art!”). The pin book wasn’t on display, but we stumbled (literally, as we had to piggyback Mr. Crabby + Scared of Black Holes throughout the museum) upon a great exhibit of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois’s work. My most favorite of her pieces were the little rooms made up of wire cages or spirals formed by wooden doors joined together with cool furniture and other weird stuff inside, sometimes only visible through a window or via a mirror. Red room (child) was the neatest, with spools of thread and wax hands. Creepy.

Gus was mostly happy just to swim in the hotel pool, eat Frosted Flakes at the free hotel breakfast and watch cable (he discovered Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network — see, there’s the Yoda reference!). It was kind of weird to see real TV (esp. Fox News at breakfast, ugh), but it’s good to experience it every so often if only so we have the chance to engage in what passes for media literacy education in our house. When loud obnoxious kid commercials come on (like a horrible one for a card game called, appropriately enough, Chaotic), Jonathan and I mock it loudly and whine to Gus to buy it for us. He’s also started reading advertising claims to us (from all media): “Mom, is this really the best yogurt you’ve ever tasted?” which is hilarious.

Also one night in a totally hilarious, Bart Simpson moment, Gus called Jonathan “farty fart mcweiner butt.” And we completely blew it by laughing until we cried. Oh well.

a shiny object caught my eye of course

maura @ 9:33 pm

This past week was a pretty intense TV week for us. So intense that I need to blag about it!

Last weekend was the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. Overall it was a great show though of course there were weak points — last season, for example, and nearly every scene with Apollo (and his hair). But I was quite sad, somewhat unexpectedly so, after watching the last episode. When it was good, it was the best show on TV. Not a space show, not really, but a show about big meaty ethical issues that just happened to be set in space. And Starbuck was awesome.

The “angels” in the last ep were kind of weak, but I was glad that Helo didn’t die from that awful leg wound (I have a soft spot for Helo because he kind of looks like my brother). And the mitochondrial DNA bit at the end made my old archaeology self smile.

The other TV we’ve been obsessed with around here lately is Avatar: The Last Airbender, a cartoon/anime series that ran on Nickelodeon from 2005-2008 (I think). We started getting the disks from Netflix for Gus but by the end Jonathan and I were equally hooked. It’s just really frakking good.

It’s a fantasy martial artsy kind of premise: the world has 4 nations (earth, air, water and fire) and certain people called benders can control these elements. The Avatar can bend all elements and has traditionally kept balance in the world, but the old Avatar disappeared and the Fire Nation has been at war with everyone else since then. A bunch of kids (early teens) find the new Avatar, also a kid, and set out to defeat the Fire Lord and make things right. There’s action, adventure, friendship and well-drawn, beautiful animation (for a TV show, at least). Plus the girls kick at least as much ass as the boys (tho the Avatar is a boy).

And big meaty ethical issues are front + center. In one of my favorite episodes the kids go to a library (yay!) in which a spirit has amassed knowledge from all over the world. The spirit makes them promise that they won’t use the knowledge they gain to do harm to anyone, and they lie because they need to find the Fire Nation’s weakness. When the spirit finds out about the lie he’s furious and destroys the library, and the kids narrowly escape. Gus and I had a long conversation about the morality of war after that one.

A live-action Avatar movie is planned for sometime in the near future, though we may have to boycott it because all of the main characters have been cast with white actors. The cartoon is entirely made up of kids/adults of color. Hello, Hollywood, it’s 200-frakking-9, what is your damage?

but the very next day you gave it away

maura @ 8:14 pm

Why is the lame Wham Christmas song in my head? A friend asked for fave xmas songs on facebook, and I said “Christmas in Hollis” and the entire Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. But someone else said Wham. I mentioned this to Jonathan yesterday and he claims to have no recollection of the Wham song at all, even after I made him watch the video on YouTube. Which I guess makes sense, because he was never a 15 yr old girl.

I was telling my sister about this yesterday and she brought up Music and Lyrics, the movie I’ve been trying to forget for ages. And now the songs are right back in my head again, dammit.

Have I said this before? Since we don’t have cable (and don’t watch live TV because the rabbit ears aren’t very good), we don’t really get to see commercials much. And apparently I’ve completely lost the ability to tune them out. Seriously, it took me like 10 minutes to write this blag, because my brother in law is channel surfing on the sofa next to me.

brandy on the carpet and chartreuse on the armchair

maura @ 9:29 pm

Can someone please tell me why we have not managed to make it to the Red Hook Pool until today? Seriously, we are dumb! Because a fantastic time was had by all three Smillers today. First stop: the pool, which is just enormous: a 4′ pool the size of Rhode Island with a 1′ kiddie pool + sprinklers right next to it (with easy parking right out front!). The sun was punishing, but there was a little shade on the edges and the pool was so nice and cool, it didn’t even matter that it was 90 zillion degrees out.

Next stop, the soccer field catty-corner to the pool, around which vendors sell incredible, amazing, freshly cooked Latin American food. J + I split a meltingly delicious chicken tamale and an enormous chorizo taco (with a handmade tortilla!). Gus, Senor Picky Eater, shocked us by wolfing down a pupusa con queso, which was even more surprising as he’d spent the walk from the pool to the vendors whining that he wanted a hot dog, just a hot dog, a hooooooooot dooooooooooog. And we washed it all down with a limeade. Yum!

As if that could even be topped, we decided to pull out all the calorie stops and head over to Baked (best. bakery. name. ever.) for a sugar fix (a.k.a. desperate attempt to keep Gus from falling asleep in the car on the way home*). We split a yummy lemon cake (with lemon curd between the layers and lemon buttercream frosting) and brought home a lemon lime bar and this crazy peanut butter + chocolate cake. Yum YUM!

And no, we didn’t go to Fairway (ample parking be damned, how could we ever cheat on the Food Coop?). Red Hook is so pretty, so urban yet so quiet, like a small town in the city. I think we shall go every weekend!

* which didn’t work: he was out by the time we crossed the Gowanus. We parked the car on our street and then everyone napped for 45 minutes.

In other news, that cute blond monkey named Veronica Mars is finally off our back. We watched the finale of season 2 last night. Two whole seasons in 24 days, is that some sort of record? Some sort of dorks-with-no-life record, maybe. ANYway the finale was satisfying in some ways (Veronica + Logan TLA! Bye-bye Harry Hamlin! And of course we knew the Mayor would turn into a demon!) but not in others: hello, BEAVER is the evil mastermind??? That just seems kind of contrived. And the Jackie with a kid thing is kind of lame, too. But we will be front and center for season three, on that new weird country + western network. Yee-hah!

if you want your record back

maura @ 8:42 pm

So Jonathan is freelancing for an old boss of his right now, and she’s one of those enviable (to me at least) people who only needs to sleep about 5 hrs a night. Five hours! I’m a true 8 hr kinda gal, and though I can survive on 7 I usually will be tired + cranky by nighttime (like now!) and every few weeks will have to crash with Gus at 9pm and sleep straight through til morning. But if I could only sleep 5 hrs, or even 6, how cool would that be? Very cool, is how.

I could use the found time to do things I don’t have time to do now, not just boring cleaning or chores, but stuff I’d love to do more of like writing, making stuff, etc. I mean, it’s been a long time since I was spraypaint-stenciling tshirts with a weird logo I created called anal babies (high school), or making mixtapes for anyone and everyone (college + beyond), but lately I’ve been having a creative itch and it would be nice to get scratching. Writing in my journal just isn’t doing it (or here, apparently, since I can’t ever seem to get around to it).

And speaking of being late to the party, on heavy rotation at maurawebFM these days are: Pipas, Aislers Set, Sleater-Kinney (yeah, better late than never), and the wonderful Wednesdays at WFMU. AND my birthday’s coming up, which means that the new Ivy record will soon be mine, bwahahahaha. Almost makes up for the fact that, once again I realized too late that a band I like is playing in town (in this case, Pipas + the Lucksmiths at the beginning of the month). Sigh. Live music is just too hard when you need 8 hrs of sleep a night (and don’t have a babysitter).

Here’s a complete non-sequitur: I have only just recently realized that I am actually pretty obsessive-compulsive. Not medicatably (is that a word?) OCD, but definitely it’s a syndrome or something. I’ll pause now so that the people who know me (and esp., god forbid, any ex-roommates) can laugh long and hard.

Why has it taken me so long to realize this about myself? I don’t know, except that my mom is pretty compulsive too (I mean, it had to come from somewhere, right?) so I maybe always just thought that clean + tidy was the way things were supposed to be? Anyway now that I’ve finally acknowledged it I’ve started to notice my other weird compulsions. How I can’t leave the house without making the bed. Or how agitated I am when the garbage or recycling needs to be taken out. And of course cleaning has always been an enjoyable pastime for me. I could never work (school work) with a dirty house, and it’s such a great way to procrastinate.

Anyway, I guess this is all part of the larger need for control, another facet of the Bossy McBessy that’s me. I’ve been trying to get a handle on the control stuff recently with Gus, who’s in major-rebellion mode lately and has been running away from me down the sidewalk, which is a bit scary to say the least. The theory is that if I try to control less of his life then he’ll balk less at the things that must be controlled. Or something. And surely he’ll grow out of it someday, right? I don’t know, he’s stubborn as a mule (and twice as ugly), just like his mama.

Only 2 more episodes of Lost, what will we do all summer? Cry over the giant disappontment that was Alias this season? Why no! Silly readers, we here in mauraweb will be catching up on Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, and Desperate Housewives, of course. All this TV, we might just have to get cable again.