If You Stay With Me

Why You Should Never Read a Blog

I'm watching Lost on Netflix streaming at the moment, and I've come to the conclusion that I hate television.

I really do, but not in the way you are thinking. Rotting my brain with all the crappy people doing crappy things thrills me, so that's not the issue. What bothers me about normal t.v. shows is that they go on and on and on and on and on, for season after season after season.

Now it's not so irritating after the show is over, and I have a definite timeline for how many hours of my life a specific show is going to devour. In this case, Lost has six seasons, so I realized when I started that I needed to set aside a certain number of brain cells to kill. (Twenty seven neurons burn out every time Jack talks, just like Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn in LotR when he exclaims, "You cannot wield it! Weenie man, away!")

The same thing applies to a blog. They have indefinite endings. Whoever you are following is just going to keep blathering on about crap, and never really get to a conclusion. At least until they are dead, which is the one crucial advantage that books and movies have over television and blogs.

So I beseech you. Please, do not read blogs, at least until they have an exact stopping point. That way you are truly certain that once you start, you can see the end in sight.

Caffeine Rush

The Early Beatles

Just watched this, which is a documentary about the first U.S. visit The Beatles made. There is no commentary, no plot, just footage of The Beatles being themselves.

What interests me about this film are the contradictions: their prim and proper image onstage clashes with the behind the scenes footage of them smoking and drinking and fooling around. You can already feel the tension, as John is often absent, and Paul at one time quips, "No, that's the married man," referring to John.

You can start to feel their social commentaries take root, in stark contrast to the stodgy and slick Ed Sullivan (who doesn't let them talk on his show.)

If you like The Beatles, I would highly suggest renting this movie. It was $2 at Blockbuster, and is infinitely more entertaining than something trivial and lame you could rent for $6 that happens to be a new release.

Genre Combinations

First of all, watch this:



Now, I realize the above clip is meant to be humorous, and it is, though I also got a separate and equally valid lesson in it, which is that certain genres do not do well when combined together. I can only name a few instances where combining aspects of fantasy, science fiction, cowboys, horror, you name it, has turned out well.

Whenever a Star Trek episode veers into a holodeck, the story rapidly declines into Suckville. Cowboy vampires, robots with swords, dragons in the present, these all sound neat in theory, but when put onto a screen or in a novel, you end up with campy crap.

I don't know why that is. Maybe the dissonance between discordant images shatters any suspension of disbelief the audience has built up over the years. Perhaps we can take bloodsucking fiends in one movie, and guys with lasers in another, but when you combine the two into vampire cyborgs, we step back and think, "Hey, that's lame," which is shorthand for when we deny the piece any plausibility.

So it works in the video above, but if anyone is thinking it would be great to make a science fiction musical theatre review with knights and dragons, please reconsider. The world will be a better place if you don't.

Various Distractions

You must watch this:

http://www.comedycentral.com/tosh.0/

Or this:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/time-warp/time-warp.html

Or lastly, this:

http://www.history.com/content/pawn-stars