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Category: Culture

Burn it all down

I now believe that Hollywood is in imminent danger of being destroyed by an angry God. It’s an unavoidable side-effect of reading the fall 2004 TV pilot roundup.

It’s nice to know that Seth MacFarlane (“Family Guy”) is working on another animated show. I did not particularly want to know that Rob Lowe is in a pilot in which he plays the in-house doctor at a Vegas casino. Nor do I have much hope for the premise “Animated show about Siegfried & Roy’s Vegas act, told through the eyes of the animals.” Or “Suburban mom uses psychic powers to solve crime.”

Probably my fault somehow for watching every episode of Mr. Sterling.

Sorkin alert

From AICN:

Aaron Sorkin, giant-brained creator of “Sports Night” and “The West Wing,” has now gotten the greenlight from New Line to produce his spec screenplay for “The Farnsworth Invention,” which depicts a 22-year-old genius from Utah who invented television in the 1920s, according to Friday morning’s Variety. This project has long been a part of Sorkin’s agenda, so one assumes Sorkin will still return to TV at some point to oversee his long-gestating proposed series — a backstage show-within-a-show kind of thing depicting the the creators of a fictional late-night comedy show that bears more than a passing resemblance to “Saturday Night Live.”

Josh: “You’re telling me you invented television.”

Toby: “Yes.”

Josh: “Moving pictures, except in your house?”

Toby: “Yes.”

Josh: “Well, there’s no market for that. Donna, do you know where the market for that is?”

Toby: “Look, it’s a perfectly reasonable —”

Donna: “I think it’s in Poughkeepsie.”

Toby: “It’s not in Poughkeepsie.”

Josh: “Then it’s not likely to be in anywhere else, either.”

Probably it won’t be much like that, though.

Listen

Being a music lover, I was quite pleased to accidentally stumble into the useful world of MP3 blogs. It’s a blog, see, but instead of ranting about politics, these people are posting MP3s and talking about music. The MP3s usually don’t stay up for more than about a week, which is enough time to give them a listen but apparently not enough time to get on the RIAA’s radar. It’s like a very very slow radio station. “This week, we’re going to play the new Prince single.”

I stumbled onto the concept via The Tofu Hut, which has a superb blogroll organized by genre. Also, the man I know only as forksclovetofu is insane as hell. Others that I’m currently loving: Copy, Right?, Fluxblog, said the gramophone, Moistworks, and music for robots. Then follow links. I might start buying a lot of music again if this keeps up.

Twice the Hanzo

Belatedly: yes, Kill Bill: Volume 2 is a big fat pile of talkative fun. It is not as violence-packed as Volume 1, but it is certainly a tale of bloody revenge and the fight scenes are top-notch. Tarantino’s obsessed with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling, right? So Volume 1 is the action, and Volume 2 is a kind of weird metaflashback that goes back over all the violent impulses and actions of the first volume and explains the motivations behind them.

Maybe not. But it’s still tres cool. Not super-deep, but super-cool.

Hard blend

The Atrocity Archives is pretty enjoyable if you’re part of the vanishingly small target audience. I like espionage novels, and I’m a computer geek who knows a fair bit about the history of the field, and I like H.P. Lovecraft, so the book worked for me. But man, it’s dense-pack fiction. You need to know who Turing was and it helps to understand what a device driver is and you ought to be steeped in sysadmin/programmer culture and the espionage bits build on the work of Le Carre and Len Deighton.

Possibly Atrocity Archives should come with annotations, like “The Waste Land.”

I should note that I don’t see anything wrong with any of this; in fact, I rather like it. It’s OK for novels to be difficult. I’m certainly not going to castigate Charlie Stross for writing difficult novels that happen to fall within my area of expertise. Nobody complains that James Joyce was pandering to linguists, after all.

So, yeah: in the afterword, Stross explains that the conceit of the novel is that the horror of Lovecraft and the Cold War espionage of Len Deighton have a lot in common. The big difference, in his mind, is that the espionage hero has hope and the Lovecraftian hero doesn’t. (Or if he does, he shouldn’t.) But he draws pretty convincing links between the amorphous horror of the Lovecraft mythos and the inhuman horror of pending nuclear war.

Certainly the fusion works in the writing itself. You replace the threat of weapons of mass destruction with the threat of invading entities from another dimension, and everything kind of falls into place. The structure is, alas, weakened by the interjection of Dilbert-esque corporate satire; it’s hard for me to believe that a top-secret occult espionage organization runs on a matrix management style. I don’t mind that the hero is a Neal Stephenson hacker — the fish out of water stuff works well — but I do mind that he seems to have somehow convinced his agency to turn into a 90s dot-com.

Apart from that, though, it was a good read with fairly interesting characters. Nobody makes any permanent sacrifices, but the threats are convincing and Stross can write horrific passages when he’s not being overly clever; the descriptions of the relics in Amsterdam are very chilling.

Five minus one

I didn’t like Five Deadly Venoms as much as I thought I would. The kung fu was awesome, particularly the final battle, which provided a suitable climax to the movie. The DVD transfer was, again, superb. The story didn’t really grab me, though.

I think in retrospect I was expecting big kung fu action with all five Venoms from the first minute, which is not what I got. Instead, I got a somewhat complex mystery, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for that. It was a pretty good mystery, and I only figured out who was who five minutes before the revelation. Also, I’ve realized that I like the big sweeping epics like Water Margin better than the close-focus kung fu flicks, on average.

Worth watching, and I have another Venoms movie to watch (same actors, not a related plot), and I’m looking forward to that one. Just not as much fun as the other Shaws I’ve seen so far.

Raoul uneaten

Poppy Z. Brite’s new book, Liquor, is a pretty huge change of direction from her early work. It’s not horror, it’s not gory, and it’s not the work of a writer fascinated by young gay men in New Orleans…

Strike that last; maybe it’s not such a huge change. Still, no vampires or other creepy-crawlies. It’s a foodie novel set in New Orleans, and it’s well-written, so it’s pretty much perfect for people who love cooking. I wouldn’t call it terribly deep but I enjoyed it. Her husband is a cook, and she’s got the feel of the restaurant world down pat as far as I can tell based on the summers I spent running dishwashers on Nantucket.

As a novel, it’s got a fairly loose plot and a paucity of tension. As a slice of life piece, it’s a lot of fun.

Final battle

Sadly, Kwame lost, but it won’t hurt his career. Which is good — I think he’d have been a better hire than Bill, although I’m sure Bill will do a good job for The Donald. On the other hand, Bill certainly did a better job on the final task than Kwame. Kwame was stuck with Omarosa no matter what, but he should have at least tried to sideline her.

Even given that he’d kept Omarosa, he might have had a chance to win if he’d defended himself in the boardroom. I’d have used the situation as an excuse to trot out the “I always hire people who are smarter than me” line, which has the advantage of being true. I’m pretty sure Kwame’s management style works better when he’s had the chance to build and/or mold his own team rather than inheriting a bunch of subpar workers.

I’m already looking forward to Apprentice 2, in large part because competitors can think about strategy now. This season, since nobody knew how the final few shows would work, strategic planning was a shot in the dark. Now, I think it’s clear that you want to ally with another strong competitor; the goal is to get to the final four and then out-interview your ally. That way you get him or her back on your team for the last task; it’s immensely important to have a strong employee there.

Mind you, that’s not exactly what Bill did (unless Bill and Amy had a stronger alliance than we saw) and it’s more or less what Kwame did. So it’s not a guaranteed win. Still, I think that if Kwame had dealt with Omarosa better he’d have won because of Troy’s strong support, and it’s certainly the strategy that got Kwame and Troy into the final five.