"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.