Girl in a Cage

We Can Rebuild Her

So I watched the new Bionic Woman with pretty low expectations. After all, I grew up on Lindsay Wagner (though, I did not, as my lovely wife asserts, have a crush on her, as my tv heart belonged to Lynda Carter. And Dana Plato. Okay, and Rebecca Shaffer. But not Lindsay Wagner), and how could a new show possibly compare?

Well, the joke's on me, because I can't wait for next week. There were some clunky moments--most notably the horribly-written exposition at the beginning: "I'm just a bartender, and you're a surgeon and a professor! Why are you going out with me?"--but, overall, I have to say it was an impressive hour of tv. I was not that terribly impressed with the star, but I was totally hooked.

Whereas Reaper, at heart, is about problems that don't interest me--slacker guys not knowing what to do with their lives--the Bionic Woman is right up my alley, idea-wise. It's about the way your life can be suddenly and irrevocably changed by events beyond your control, it's about identity, and it's about the difficulty of balancing work and family! Also it has women kicking each other's asses. What's not to love? I may catch Reaper if I've got nothing else to do, but I'll be tuning in to Bionic Woman every week.

My only complaint--could Miguel Ferrer (who's fantastic and elevates this as he does pretty much everything he's in) possibly have been called Oscar Goldman? Could we have gotten one DA-na-na-na-na-na-na bionic noise? Maybe a German Shepherd named Max? Throw a bone to the old school viewers, people!

E.T.I., or maybe The Revenge of Vera Gemini

So, okay this post is about Reaper, but I thought I'd headline with the title from another song from Blue Oyster Cult's "Agents of Fortune" album besides "Don't Fear The Reaper," which I'm sure is going to headline many many reviews of the show.

As for the show itself, I have to say it was good not great. I really liked the best friend character--his "let's go to Vegas, get some smack and kill a hooker" line was the best of the whole show--and Ray Wise was great as Satan. I also really liked the little moment with the mom where the kid forgave her. That was a genuinely sweet moment.

And of course I loved the whole bounty hunter for Satan thing, although I have to say the arsonist guy was dispatched pretty easily, maybe because they had so much else to do, plot-wise.

But my overriding impression was that I might just be too old for this show. It's funny and fun, but the big problem at the heart of it that this slacker guy doesn't know what kind of life he's going to have and is such a wuss that he can't ask out the beautiful girl who is unaccountably fond of him. I guess it's just the stage of life I'm in (I've finally entered the grumpy old man stage I've been preparing for all my life!), but these are not compelling problems to me.

So, in the end, I liked it, and if I was 22, I would have loved it, but I'm not 22, and so I don't think I'll be tuning in regularly.

Serendipitous Insomnia

Connoisseurs of insomnia know there are at least three types:

1.) Can't fall asleep for hours.
2.)Fall asleep, but wake up for hours in the middle of the night.
3.)Fall asleep, but wake up at least an hour too early and can't get back to sleep.

The first is hell on earth. The third, which I'm fortunate enough to have as my insomnia mainstay these days, is downright pleasant by comparison--you get a jump on the day, you can read the paper, maybe catch up on some reading, send insincere friend requests to people you hate on myspace, stuff like that.

Or sometimes, you go down and flop on the couch and find something on that turns out to be just incredible. Such was the case when, at about 5 in the morning, I caught New York Doll on tv. This movie, a documentary about New York Dolls bassist Arthur Kane, completely kicked my butt. I was way too young for the Dolls, and so I never got to revere them the way some people do, but even still, this is a brilliant, profoundly moving documentary about, among other things, the incredible power of music to bring people together and change lives. Now, it's not unusual that I have a tear trickle down my face when watching a movie, but I was full-on bawling at the end of this one. It's just one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And if you're into the New York Dolls beyond "Trash" and "Personality Crisis," you'll probably like it even more than I did.

Here's the trailer:

Librarians Are Sexy

Note: So the bookselling chains have declined to stock my fabulous young adult novel, How Ya Like Me Now, because they are punk-ass bitches. (Note to Borders and B&N buyers: I kid! I kid because I love!) So now I'm beginning my campaign of shameless pandering to the people who can really make a difference in my sales. Ahem.

I've always liked It's a Wonderful Life, and I think it's a shame that it's no longer on every station every day around Christmastime. Still, there's always been one part that bothered me. It's near the end, when Clarence tells George that Mary is just closing up the library, and George goes running over and practically assaults the poor woman who has no idea who he is. Mary's becoming a librarian is supposed to be the unkindest cut of all, the thing that really convinces George that he should have been born. I've always thought this was tremendously unfair to librarians, and I'd rewrite it thusly:

CLARENCE
She's just closing up the library!
Ext. Potterville Public Library. Night. MARY, a thirtysomething caged tigress of a librarian, locks up the library and walks down the sidewalk. George and Clarence watch, and George whistles appreciatively.
GEORGE
Damn, Clarence! I'd tap that!

CLARENCE
But you can't tap that, George! I told you, you've never been born!

GEORGE
Noooooooooo! I want to live, Clarence! Please, Clarence!

Etc. etc., Hee Haw and Merry Christmas, love Sam Wainwright, here's to my brother the richest man in town, blah blah. The point is, librarians have been unfairly caricatured as pinched spinsters, and its well past time that these bespectacled beauties, these saucy succubi of the stacks were given the recognition they deserve for pursuing The World's Sexiest Profession. Why, when my friend Eric was a librarian, it was all I could do to remain heterosexual!

In short, Librarians Are Sexy.

(To any librarians who happen to be reading. If you enjoyed this blog entry, please read and recommend my YA novel, How Ya Like Me Now. Should you feel so moved, you could nominate it for the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. And not just because I've buttered you up, but because it's a damn good book. Seriously. An award would really help my sales.)

(If, on the other hand, you found this blog entry offensive and/or patronizing, I feel I should inform you that the whole thing was Louis Sachar's idea. Blame him. And, you know what? Why not give my books his shelf space, just to teach him a lesson?)

No More (Guitar) Heroes

So my friend sent me this video about Adrian Belew:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qsqDl8_nQQ . I wouldn't recommend sitting through all six minutes of it, because it's pretty pointless self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. Not that I, of all people, have a problem with self-promotion. It's just that this doesn't offer much in the way of new or interesting information.

What it does offer is a standard infuriating cranky old man complaint: "Too much of today's music is fashionable crap dressed as artistry. It's mostly about the way you look, or how you dance. I grew up in the golden age of ideas! Well, things go in cycles; maybe creativity will become fashionable again. Virtuosity is sexy."

Ugggh. Where to begin. I guess there's this--there's always been fashionable crap in music. Adrian's just put out because the kind of crap he was associated with doesn't happen to be fashionable right now. There was no golden age of ideas. And if there had been, it wouldn't have been the Jurassic period of oxymoronic "art rock". (Unless that was the golden age of, "Hey, I've got an idea! Let's put together a band that really sucks and put out a laughable concept album!") Finally, virtuosity, at least in popular music, is probably the most overrated quality of all.

Adrian Belew may be a fine guitarist, but the reason nobody cares about him now isn't because nobody cares about good guitar playing--it's because good guitar playing doesn't mean squat unless it's in the service of a good song. This is why Clapton's post-Cream output has been so lackluster, and why Van Hagar sucked despite the continuing presence of Eddie Van Halen on guitar. (and don't talk to me about record sales--so, yeah, Van Hagar picked up some casual listeners who listened to them once and threw their CDs next to the Mister Mister CDs) It's why Zappa, whatever his instrumental skills, was a sub-Weird Al humorist of a songwriter and therefore never found a mass audience. Adrian Belew played on some good Talking Heads songs. Other than that, it's the art-rock noodling of King Crimson and, um, the Bears? Bleh. It's not the fault of contemporary music, Adrian. You need to play on some decent songs, fer chrissakes!

I mean, my personal favorite guitar solo comes courtesy of Keef in "Sympathy for the Devil". It's not particularly virtuosic--seems like it consists of about 6 notes, actually, but it slices right through the song perfectly. I love that final solo in Deep Purple's "Highway Star," but who cares about Richie Blackmore's work with, say, Rainbow? Presumably he's still the same guitar hero he once was--it's just that nobody cares how well you play unless the song is good in the first place. Did anybody buy the Slash's Snakepit albums? I mean, he's the same guy who knocked out fantastic solos in "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Paradise City."

I guess Joe Strummer said it best, calling out, "you're my guitar hero!" to Mick Jones as he wails out a rudimentary solo in "Complete Control." You're a guitar hero if your playing makes a good song better.

I Dreamed I was Madeline L'Engle But I Woke Up Joe Bouchard

So I learned of Madeline L'Engle's death from one of my myspace friends. I do not know her real name, but I know she has a killer tattoo on her back. Such is the bizarre world of myspace. And it occurred to me to write something about how much I had appreciated Madeline L'Engle's work as a kid, how the whole search for the absent father thing really resonated with me when I was a kid whose dad had recently died, how her books showed enormous respect for children, blah blah. And then I thought, well, it's unlikely that she has internet access wherever she is now, and it's probably more important to pay tribute to artists whose work meant a lot to me at one point who are still alive.

Most of the authors who really moved me as a kid are dead, with the exception of Judy Blume, but I'm saving her for later.

For today, I'd like to give a shout out all the way from my ninth grade self to Blue Oyster Cult. When I was a young adolescent, the baby boom was in its third decade of an especially prolonged adolescence, and their music dominated the only rock and roll station in town. So it was classic rock or nothing. And Southern Rock in particular got a lot of play, so you could have Skynyrd, or you could have Little Feat, a southern Grateful Dead manque, or Bad Company, a British southern rock manque, or Shooting Star, an American Bad Company manque.

Bleh, and may I add, bleh. So, at fourteen, I was still a little bit too young and sheltered for most punk rock, and besides, you had to listen to some kind of classic rock to fit in, and I was still sort of interested in fitting in, not having yet developed my taste for pissing people off just for the hell of it.

But most of the classic rock bands were singing about sex and drinking, two things that were still pretty far over the horizon for me at that age. But then there was BOC--conventional enough, musically speaking, that I could like them without being labeled a freak, but weird enough that I could actually relate to it. I mean, I knew in theory what was going on when Robert Plant was threatening to "give ya every inch-a my lo-wuvv!", but I couldn't really relate. But here was a band singing about subway trains to hell, Godzilla, aliens, and Joan Crawford rising from the grave. Now here was something I could sink my teeth into! Because if the experience of sex was still far off, I was already well-versed in horror and science fiction, and BOC's obvious interest in both subjects made me feel less alone and dorkified, because obviously you could be into Godzilla and still rock out and have groupies and stuff, so maybe it wasn't hopeless for me.

My obsession with BOC came and went very quickly--I guess it lasted for most of ninth grade, but my affection for the Ramones was about to grow into an obsession that continues to this day, and I also discovered X in the tenth grade, so that was about it for classic rock and fitting in as far as I was concerned. And of course as I grew to hate my ninth grade self, I had to despise his music for a while.
But now, so far from the whole thing, I have some affection for that little guy and the music he loved, and so I thank Blue Oyster Cult for having a cool symbol I could doodle on my notebooks, for their sense of humor, and for helping me get through the ninth grade.

They Giveth and Taketh Away Again

And Lo, in the shadow of the success of the X-Files, another supernatural show rose up. And it was known as Brimstone. And it did star Some Guy From Thirtysomething, or possibly Wings. (For the male stars of those shows did all look the same, but for Timothy Busfield who hath hair of red.) And yea, the show did concern a cop who had gone to hell after killing the man who raped his wife. And Lo, there was a jailbreak in hell, and all of the most evil people in human history did walk the earth wreaking havoc. And Satan said unto the guy from Thirtysomething or else Wings, thou art a cop. Thou shalt hunt down those who have escaped my domain, and shoot them in the eyes to return them to hell, and thou shalt thereby redeem thyself and earn thy release from hell.

And it was good.

And yea, only one man did watch the show, and he was a short, grumpy man in Massachusetts, and yea, the network execs were full of folly and did not cater unto his personal tastes, and lo, the show was canceled. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, at least in the Halpin household.

Many years passed, and the glory of Brimstone was forgotten. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer did come and go. And lo, the networks did decree that another tongue slightly in cheek supernatural show might be pleasing unto the viewership, and thus did the CW offer up Reaper. And the creators of this show did gloriously rip off Brimstone, for yea, their show concerned a man who had to return souls to Satan after a jailbreak in hell.

And the pilot was directed by Kevin Smith, who hath much talent and who doth offer up far too much information in his myspace blog, unless thou art interested in the analingus habits of portly celebrities.

And the lone Brimstone fan lived on, and he was much pleased.

Who Can Turn The World On With Her Smile

Well, the television gods giveth, and, lo, they taketh away.

Season 3 of the Closer
wrapped up on Monday, and I have to say I was a little bereft. Even though it's about murders, it's just so cozy! I read somewhere that it's basically Mary Tyler Moore with murders, and I think that's pretty apt. Brenda came close to calling the squad her family on Monday, and co-workers as surrogate family is pretty much the whole conceit of the MTM television archetype. I was also glad they finally gave Fritz something more interesting to do besides be exasperated.

Another one of my favorite shows, Kappa Mikey,
on Nicktoons Network, is another MTM knockoff, only this time the naif at the center of the surrogate family is a bumbling American who co-stars in a Japanese action show with two young women, a guy with big blue hair, and a little purple creature named Guano. And yes, there's a gruff, but mostly kind-hearted boss too. It's fast-paced, funny, and completely absurd and made with respect for the audience that is so lacking in most kids' programming. I think I may actually like it more than the kids do.

And another of my favorite shows, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (not true! I used to live there!) returns tonight.
While three of the five main characters are part of the same family (sort of--you may recall that the kids were actually the result of Anne Archer's adultery and not Danny DeVito's biological kids at all, which explains how Danny DeVito got two tall kids, one of whom is blond.), it's, again, a Mary Tyler Moore-based workplace comedy with a bar instead of a newsroom and a band of gleeful sociopaths in place of the crew of eccentrics that surrounded Mary Richards.

It's really starting to seem that in TV, less is more. All of my favorite shows above, plus Halfway Home and The Sarah Silverman Program, run these short, 6-10-episode seasons, and I'm totally okay with that because it keeps the quality high. I just think it's a lot easier to do ten great episodes than 22. (Or, you know, 24, which I stopped watching even before it became The Official Show Of Republican Torture Advocates).

It's also starting to seem like everyone in television should just bow down before the Mary Tyler Moore show
, since it seems to be keeping shows in all kinds of genres running. Plus, what other show has had its theme song covered by the likes of Husker Du and Joan Jett? I guess the Ramones covered the Spiderman theme, and Scooby Doo was covered by Matthew Sweet and, uh, Billy Ray Cyrus, but I still think the MTM theme is out front for coolest covers.

Team Vanessa

As the father of two tween girls who, as I may have mentioned, are kind of obsessed with High School Musicals 1 and 2,m I feel like I should mix my metaphors and add some fuel to the fire of the ridiculous tempest in a teapot of the Vanessa Hudgens nude photos.
(No, I'm not linking to them. If you are reading this blog and you do not know how to find pictures of naked women on the internet on your own, all I can say is, ask your husband.)

Now, my parents were theater people, and I spent a lot of time as a young child around actors and performed in many plays through the end of high school, and all I can say is looking to professional actors as role models is only slightly smarter than looking to professional athletes as role models. So is it okay for us to say that kids can enjoy the performances of these people without having to emulate them? I can say in my house, nobody has ever expressed particular admiration for any of the actors involved in these movies--they like the characters, and they are actually old enough to know the difference. I don't think that actors need to be held to some puritanical code of conduct in order to perform for children.

I mean, what the hell is the big deal here? I think the problem is that we in the United States have our collective heads up our collective asses when it comes to sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular. So, if you've missed the "scandal", Vanessa Hudgens, star of HSM one and two, apparently took some pictures of herself in her underwear, and one in the nude, and they've now made their way to the internet, and apparently some people feel that this makes her ineligible to perform for Disney. Because...why, exactly? Because she trusted someone with something intimate and they betrayed her? Shit, that just makes her eighteen. (And it's not a bad lesson I think for the kids who are asking questions about this thing that you have to be very careful about whom you trust. I mean, what teenager hasn't trusted somebody else with their secret, their heart, their virginity, whatever, and been betrayed?)

I guess the whole idea that an adult being sexual somehow disqualifies them to be in programs aimed at tweens is just so back asswards as to be offensive. My big concern about how this whole scandal is unfolding right now is that my girls are going to get the idea (not from me, but filtering through their friends and the ether and what not) that Vanessa Hudgens posing naked for an intimate acquaintance makes her bad. It's not bad for adults to be sexual--it's normal. What's abnormal and bad is repressing your sexuality--it makes you troll for sex in bathrooms. (The obvious exception--if your sexual programming makes you want to have sex with children, repress the hell out of it, or else kill yourself.)

Sexuality is one of the great perks of adulthood, and it's my hope that my kids will, in time, enjoy it safely and responsibly and without shame. I guess Vanessa Hudgens is probably pretty embarrassed to have these photos circulating, but she shouldn't be ashamed.

Hopefully most of America will see that an adult engaging in consensual sexual behavior is nothing to be ashamed of and should have no bearing on Vanessa Hudgens' continued employment with the Mouse.

A few weeks ago I wrote that the book Coffee Tea or Me was ridiculously tame because its big revelation was that women get pleasure from sex. Apparently that idea is actually more scandalous in 2007 than I thought. Cripes.

Myspace Vs. Facebook

So as part of my attempt to expand my worldwide writing empire, I'm now on both major social networking sites. Right now I'm kind of obsessed with facebook because it's new. Well, and for other reasons too, which I'll enumerate below.

Both services are essentially about people under 25 getting laid. Facebook puts a much more polite face on this, except when you get a request for details on a friend request, and one checkbox says, "we hooked up once." Ick! Whether you prefer your sleaze up front or just below the surface will probably determine which site you prefer. I'm still on the fence about this. I do like the fact that on Facebook I don't get all kinds of fake friend requests from people promoting porn sites. But for my own ulterior motives--which, let's be clear, involve promoting my books, I'm a happily married man thank you very much--Myspace does work a little better. It's easy for me to search myspace for people who've mentioned my books and add them as friends. Most people are used to this kind of treatment, and of all the blind friend requests I've sent on myspace, I've only gotten two hostile responses. One guy yelled at me in all caps, and I sent back something about how he clearly had a defective keyboard. And one woman sent this message: "Looooooser!" Somehow I fought back the urge to send back, "biiiiiitch!". Anyway, it seems pretty accepted that lots of people are using myspace for self-promotional reasons, so it's an acceptable part of the culture of that site. Whereas on facebook, there seems to be an expectation that you're only befriending people you've actuallly met. Or, you know, "hooked up with". Ecch. For some reason that just skeezes me out every time I see it there. Which I guess means I prefer my sleaze out in the open instead of in a pop-up box on an otherwise polite site.

Having said that, if I'm looking for a specific person, like, say, a former student (most of my friends on both sites are former students), I like the fact that facebook allows me to actually see their real name, instead of looking at some grainy cell phone picture of someone calling themselves "Numba One Playa 07" or something and trying to figure out if that's someone I actually knew 10 years ago.

Facebook doesn't allow the kind of profile customization that myspace allows. My take on this is that most people on myspace think that other people's customization is tacky and their own is cool. As for me, I don't know squat about what looks good, and I customized my myspace profile so I could fit in with the cool kids. I do like the music part, though. Right now anybody clicking on my myspace profile gets to hear the Carrie Nations' "Find It." (Used so effectively in the movie "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" to represent their lost innocence...ah, will they ever be able to "find it" again? Not if two-thirds of the band gets murdered, they won't!). Ahem. How will I educate people about the genius of the Carrie Nations on facebook?

Right now there are fewer TMI surveys coming through on my facebook profile. People do all these surveys on myspace and send them to all their friends, and I usually don't read them, but sometimes I do, and I usually end up finding things out about them that I really didn't want to know. (Call me old-fashioned, but I just think there are certain things a teacher, even a former teacher, shouldn't know about a student, even a former student who's well into legal adulthood.)

Facebook consolidates information about what all your friends are doing, so you can waste time on facebook much more effectively than myspace.

Here, though, is what I really like about facebook: since it's newer, and not as big, I get to be one of the people that ruins it! Probably people are already bitching about how facebook used to be cool until certain people discovered it--and I'm one of those certain people! I get to be the uncool old person that ruins facebook for the cool kids! How cool is that?