Dispiriting.

Is there anything more dispiriting than returning to New York from a distant city, to hail a yellow cab from JFK or Penn Station, and the first sight that greets you in the back of the seat is a loop of clips on the cab-seat TV, including inevitably one of Jimmy Fallon.

What in this world is more dispiriting than Jimmy Fallon?

I never understand the anointing that goes on at 30 Rock. Notwithstanding his track record and his exaggerated reputation, Lorne Michaels sure does pick 'em. Jimmy Fallon, Andy Samberg, and the fat fucker from SNL. You never hear the end of his

"Raylan County, K.Y."

People act like the latest season of Justified was the vindicating flaming sword of justice in the hands of the returning Christ-Child mounted on a mutant elephant, come for your sinful enemies, but I swear it ain't quite so.

It was barely even good.

I kept watching it to see if anything would turn up, as usually it does, but this time it really didn't.

Of course New York magazine elected to declare it this week's "heir to the Sopranos" at this point - after three great seasons, they declared their hand in the lull. Typical of New York magazine. Need it be pointed out that on reflection the Sopranos wasn't even that great? I preferred Big Love -- Homicide -- Deadwood -- The Wire of course -- even Hell on Wheels. What'd the Sopranos ever get us after all? What televisual revolution did it realize? It got us Boardwalk Empire. Or, as it's known, The Implausible in Pursuit of the Unintelligible. Who among ye buys Steve Buscemi as a mob boss?

Last season of Justified was a Dick Tracy arc of excesses and grotesques. It was Justified over-heating, over-reaching itself and turning into a cartoon, but it was a total swell to behold. Even when they stole the shock of the arm-chopping motif from Big Love (more recently employed in Game of Thrones, still to magnificent effect) it was fine. The season before that, the old Harlan County, Which Side Are You On? bit, I thought at first was hard-going down a terminal mine-shaft but when I watched it again on DVD it was full of subtle delights. Principally, the Bennetts. They blew it twice as I see it, once when they killed off Dickie Bennett (in Season 3) and second time when they killed off the best character in the whole show, Arlo Givens (this season).

Let me here recommend in creepy earnest the film Interview With the Assassin.
You know who else is great in that line? The guy who plays the corrupt beat cop in Person of Interest.

The first season of Justified, meanwhile, as I believe I noted elsewhere, is a protracted version of a Road Runner cartoon, or Sylvester & Tweetie Pie, or Tom & Jerry. Punisher versus Wolverine. You get the idea. They managed to sustain that somehow but I think the ghost got coughed up this season. What's left to say between Raylan and Boyd? They need to shit or get off the pot.

This season blew partially from bad "American Southron Gothic" mis-writing and terminally purple over-writing. They cranked up the good-old-boy trash-talking into turbo overdrive but that didn't work it just choked the viewer with exhaust fumes. Wise-cracking, Raylan sounded like a badly-written Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man and if I didn't know better I'd suspect that some of those bad bad writers from the comic books who keep popping up now in Hollywood had infiltrated the writer's high table at Justified and were ruining perfectly good characters with their dreamy out-of-character bon mots and weird inconsistencies. These fucking frustrating paeans to David fucking Mamet.

Would that this man Mamet had never been born for what has been wrought in his image.

Raylan Givens was so full of liquid smarm and drawling (illogical) olde county saws that he was rendered nonsensical and vapid. It was like he stepped out of a Foxfire book and was going to show us how to whittle a banjo from a gourd but that was about all he'd contribute. He'd smirk and squint for money. Conversely, Boyd Crowder worked like a dray horse, I'll give him that, but as a result he degenerated into Shane from The Shield, scrabbling to maintain an even keel in the face of impending disgrace. I expected Vic Mackey to show up and make him scramble, do fifty squat thrusts for auld lang syne. That boy was all over the shop, both figuratively and literally. That poor old boy don't know if he's coming or going, whether he's a prophet or a small-time oxycontin dealer. I missed the days when he was the snake-handling born-again blood-drinking Great Awakening come-outer. Them was good times. Now it's all just ambling around the bar and the trailer park looking for his script and his teeth-whitener.

After the grotesques of last season the "bad guy" this season was a nebulous identikit bald guy. A poor man's Vic Mackey. That pepped-up archetypal screen hood Wynn Duffy was better than this. I was actually relieved when Wynn Duffy sauntered into a scene this season. For this Dickie Bennett had to die? Raylan dispatched this same nameless, nebulous "bad guy" with scarcely a damn. As an afterthought. Why he did it with a phone call. He really did phone it in. You got the sense that his nonchalance was mirrored by the comics geek assholes at the writers' long table too. Phoned-in. They're just so happy they're in Hollywood in the sunshine and they're getting laid and they can live out their Turtle-from-Entourage fantasies.

Good luck to 'em. I like Hollywood. I especially like walking in the hills and going to the Laurel Canyon store to buy a packet of the red Monster Munch for a dollar -- which is actually cheaper than they cost at heathrow Airport or even (depending on the exchange rate) in a Waitrose.

It's cheaper to buy the six pack than a single packet.

Crazy.

At Heathrow, they were selling three packets of crisps for £3, and they called that a "sale."

Well it's a pity but FX still has The Americans which dipped but is getting good again.
Plus we have Person of Interest, in which the Chinese virus has finally struck and the downfall of civilization is upon us.

Pray for me.

"Miller Gaffney Ain't Well." Or, "She Moves Through the Fair (In An Invalid Car)."

"Let's do it to it." KEVIN BRUNEAU

On the recent show in Liberty, North Carolina, Miller Gaffney was at her most un-Millerish. In fact she said outright, "I'm going to throw up." She drifted away, dazed, hand poised daintily over her mouth. Five minutes later she came positively bouncing back on to the show, jaunty as you like. Soon enough she was saying to somebody at a stall, "Is that a funnel cake? Yum." I turned to my wife and said, "That must have been a really good puke."

It's a regrettable shame that the success of the show isn't equal to the success of that puke, because word is out that the show is to be cancelled. Let me here register my hearty, lousy fucking regret. I love this show. We lost Dog the Bounty Hunter and now this, while the Housewives franchise blossoms and that scoundrel Cohen rakes it all into that grinning hell-maw of his? Truly there ain't no justice. I don't know how much more I can take quite honestly.

People online are cruel and vindictive and routinely impotent and inert and dishonest and they have poor hygiene and bad acne also. They say especially unpleasant things about the cast of this show. If I ever made mock of the "mad professor" John Bruno, please note that it was only with great tenderness and fondness.

Despite her seeming recovery, Miller blundered around for the rest of the show on John Bruno's scooter. On another episode, this same scooter that I have mentioned in a separate "post" came a cropper in the mud & this fuck-up made John late to get to the table.

Contestants have a set time to scout about the fairs and markets looking for superior items per the week's instructions. They are timed each week by an antique clock  (-- easily the least-interesting convention of the show, by the way -- the Antiques Roadshow bit when they go into tedious detail about the clock -- ) and if they turn up back at the long table outside the time limit they are fined $50 by each successful contestant.

The other contestants are never more bloodthirsty than when they are scrabbling meanly for their meagre $50 bonus from a latecomer. John Bruno was late because his scooter was bogged in the mud, which is to say on account of his personal infirmity, but the others still leapt on him for $50 each. It was like a scene from a Jack London novel for sheer natural barbarism.

The wolves leaping on the ancient native in the snow.

The cannibalism of the Donner Party.

The leader in such bloodthirstiness is Bene.

She smiles an awful lot but she is a skinflint and a cut-throat and she has blood on her hands.

I nearly accused her of actual murder but I stopped myself short.

Mark Walberg has really been throwing around the idea that he is the "host" of this show lately. How is he exactly a "host"? More like a "ghost"!!! He is a disembodied voice that never interacts directly with the cast but makes cruel and snide comments about them from as it seems the heavens. He is like Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, hiding up in a tree.  Nobody is savaged by his caustic wit more than John Bruno, the wretched insane Professor,  who comes in for a merciless drubbing from the Voice of the Walberg every week. Usually, it must be conceded, wholly deserved.

As I said, there's lots of bitching online about this show where formerly there was no word about it at all. (In fact, I must credit the nominal "success" of my weblog to my first article on this show, "Righteous Chagrin of the Market Warriors," which received far more "hits" than anything else I ever wrote, especially those feuilletons that in their scope pertained to real life or what we might call the more literary or intellectual end of the cultural speculum.) [Sic.]

The level of this dastardly skirmishing isn't high. But now when was the repartee online ever thrusting, indeed? This is not exactly the righteous wrath of a Mencken. One sour character remarks several times that Miller isn't a natural blonde. Another kvetches that they never make any money at auction. Disregarding the fact that Kevin does handsomely most weeks, and Bruno patently don't give a fuck about the spiritual-materialist side of things,  I don't think that's really their fault. The hayseeds that show up to these auctions are unwilling to go above $100 for anything. Their attitude is buy low, sell high, and they control the market it seems. If you had the actual Sistine Chapel ceiling up for auction in Old Viriginny, they'd bid maybe $20 if they felt flush.

There was all this sort of toxic fantard rumbling about Storage Wars, which I have to concede I eventually came to feel was a fix. Mostly Barry's "finds." I liked Barry but he was just a committed piss-taker and a joker and a charlatan and a disgrace to the profession. (What profession exactly, I do not know.) That was really a gang of crooks, wasn't it? Dave fucking Hester. I know I have nearly accused Bene of actual murder, but I think that the crowd on Storage Wars really have killed people before. It's just a sort of suspicion I have. I can't prove it of course.

Anyway, what the hell, all things must pass & ubi sunt. Cheers to the passing spring. I hope Miller and John and Kevin get some other show because I like them. You know what I think about Bene.

It's a regrettable disgusting shame but on the other hand I watch too much TV as it is.

Now if they'd just cancel every comic that is being written today, now and forever after, if they would just abolish superhero comics completely, in fact, I could get some proper work done around here.

"John Bruno Again."

The finest, funniest, highest times of our lives spent alongside the Market Warriors, we realised with some shock, were those spent cruising about on the back of the buggy with JOHN BRUNO.

How often does COUSIN JOHN say of an old dilapidated toy car or airship or G.I. Joe or wind-up deep-sea diver that he "had that exact one when he was a kid"?  You start to wonder if, within his dirt-poor Brooklyn tenement community, JOHN was that kid who had every toy that ever came onto the market.

Sometimes watching the show you have to ask why they gave JOHN the epithet "The Professor." The question is irresistible and must be asked aloud, "Professor of what?"

Professor of fucking up?
Professor at losing the game every week?

These titles are almost as useless as a Doctorate in American Studies!

__________________________________________________________

"Literally."

NPR on Bloomberg funding projects in other cities. "He is literally getting down into their garbage cans."

"Going Loco Down in Adam Lanza."

Frontline recently ran a series of documentaries each as depressing as the next about the actively gun-having portion of these United States.

One of the documentaries was called "Raising Adam Lanza." It was about the titular character, America's latest nascent lunatic gunman, this time from Newtown, Connecticut.

I say nothing of the matter contained therein. I want to speak here only about the title.

Is "Raising Adam Lanza" a pun on Raising Arizona, the title of a Coen brothers film starring a young Nicholas Cage?

I can't see how it was not a pun on that film's title.

It could be it was an unconscious pun, since punning on such a serious subject seems rather risqué  for PBS.

My wife naturally took issue with my remarks along this line. She said, "It's about how Adam Lanza was brought up. How he was raised."

"Yeah," I said. "I see that. But the title is still a reference to the Coen brothers' film. The whole point of it is to recall the title of Raising Arizona, the movie starring Nicholas Cage. The rich pleasure and cranial amusement, that rare treat of recognition."

In the documentary they described how troubles developed between Adam Lanza's mother Nancy and her husband. In emails she recounted how he would work "sixteen-hour days." Listening to it, I thought they were going to say she was complaining about his "sixteen-hour weeks."

The format of the documentary was to follow around these two workmanlike journalists on the Hartford Courant who were never exactly blindingly dynamic in their work. They would show bull sessions where the office would have group conversations, bullpen hashing out, where they would try to bungle randomly towards a solution or an explanation for this remarkable evil. Unfortunately it most keenly recalled to the viewer nothing so much as those circle jerks on TMZ where they all lounge about the office  around "Harvey" with his XXL coffee and crow about the bathetic antics of the Hollywood C-List.

"Steve Harvey Piñata."

It's not Steve Harvey's innate fault that people, complete strangers to him, want to smash his teeth in with a baseball bat as soon as he swaggers into view. If it's anyone's fault it's his teeth's fault! He can't help having them in his face. He can't help the way they grow -- inordinately -- exponentially. They just did.

It is his fault on inasmuch as he hasn't had them removed by an orthodontist, or paid for painful surgery to plane them to a more manageable size that won't enrage strangers and inspire them to madness.

Even in this "blame game" society, who among us can say what actual energies govern such grotesque feats of mammoth growth?

That said, many people enjoy, on "Cinqo de Maio," to craft a papier-mache head to the distinct likeness of STEVE HARVEY and to secrete candy and small gifts inside it and then hang it up and smash the fucking shit out of it.

They make a piñata in the shape of STEVE HARVEY's head. 

They stove in his big teeth and take childlike delight in the collapse of those teeth and the commensurate outpouring of lovely sweetmeats and tinkertoys!

I'm not just talking about children, I'm also speaking about adults.

Childhood, boyhood, youth, right up to old age.

It's rather like the Sphinx's riddle to Oedipus.



The only shame is that such an obvious pleasure should be confined to only one occurrence per "calendar year."

Of course there is no law on earth that says you can't do it all the year round.

Every day if you like.

"Female Suffrage in France."

Watching the Antiques Roadshow, they had a piece of "tramp art" which was a keenly-whittled frame made to encase an old scarf from Belgium that depicted Liberty or some such allegorical figure, and had the legend "suffrage universel" on it. The antiques expert remarked, in the course of dating the scarf, that while the scarf was from the 1870s, French women hadn't got the vote until 1944.

I burst out laughing at this.

I realised that I was laughing at the tardiness in the women of France getting the vote. I wasn't certain why I found this funny, but I did.

France.

The French.

How they love to go on!