The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized."

The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized."

Monday, December 21, 2015

"I Am Sidon Ithano." Or, "Sarco Plank, C'est Moi."

[Portions of this post originally appeared in an email to M.K. Price of Northamptonshire, England. Reprinted by kind permission.]

We saw The Force Awakens on Friday in Glendale. Grown woman dressed up as a Jawa. Check. Putzes that spend their whole lives in pajama bottoms . Check. He was there at the cinema in his pajama bottoms and Yoda t-shirt. Whose favorite character is Yoda? While there is the life in me give me Hammerhead, Bossk and Greedo. 

I avoided all spoilers so was happily shocked and saddened by the "aha moment" (Oprah), the "pinch me moment" (my wife) when "Rilo Kiley"  ––


–– drove a light saber through Han Solo's lower intestine, shook him off his sword into a bottomless pit, and then the planet blew up. Wife goes, "Do you think he's alive?" 

I especially recommend the scenes on Jakku, the "Niima Outpost" there, and in the orange dwarf woman (okay I'll bite, Maz Kanata)'s rebel compound –– albeit it was rather a nebulous place designed expressly for Mos Eisley / Jabba's sail barge junkies like me. (It's a castle, it's a dive bar.) We got to shamelessly relive our cantina highs and they got to showcase the Henson monsters and assorted bounty scum. 

As I said to Pete Kline on speakerphone in the car heading over there, "There is a rarefied breed that eschews the spaceship chases and aerial sharp-shooting showmanship as routine and dreary. There is a refined element, an elevated subset, a high cultus, which drifts deliberately to the lower psychosociogeographic strata of the galaxy spaceways; what Jesse Lemisch would call Star Wars from the bottom up." I rather rasped this –– leered it, with my lips recoiling from my teeth, over-enunciating it, in a Massachusetts mid-Atlantic accent, and Pete hung up.

The final reveal, Mark Hammil, was somewhat bathetic after all that came before it, further fumbled because of the wretched poor man's Joker impersonation, the bum hash bad ham fist of a performance he gave a week earlier as The Trickster on The Flash. I cannot take Luke so seriously after that disgrace. I bet J.J. Abrams was livid when he saw that on his TV screen.

Boring. I'm being boring. Okay, that's me. Boring work to do.

"Getting Out of Boring Time Biting Into Boring Pie," as God Is My Co-Pilot useda say.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

"Top Chef, Low Man on a Totem Pole."

Kwame on Top Chef said a funny thing yesterday. I happened to hear him saying it because I was watching him on that same TV program Top Chef at the time. 

Talking about his meteoric rise to "James Beard nominee status" he said, "I was literally the lowest man on  the totem pole." 

He went on to explain that he was not strictly somehow mystically embedded within a totem pole, where he was the bottom face, but he was actually (or, to use another synonym of actually, "literally") a "line cook in a kitchen."

People never tire of misusing the word "literally" and I never tire of pointing it out when they do.


Wonder which of us is the more boring.


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Related: I was walking around in Iliad Books today, saw a woman with blue hair. I thought, "She looks like a Top Chef character."


Has it come to this?