"New Fargo. New Kit-Kat. All Bad."

The new series of Fargo is marvelously terrible. It's mortal grievous.  It's so bad it should be proverbial. It's a simpering, dainty thing like the saccharine Garrison Keillor dreamt it up after one of his midnight snacks of whoopee pie, johnny cake and fiddle-faddle. I recently wrote to a dear old friend in the old country, who actually said that the new season of Fargo was of the same high calibre as the first. I said:

I sat watching the first two episodes with wife, exploded: "Was this written by fifteen year olds?" Every five minutes the number, the age of the showrunner, would go down –– by the end of the first episode I was attributing it to a long table of eleven-year-olds. Not even precocious ones. Vapid, unrealistic, childish stuff! I prefer to watch I Zombie. It's not Shakespere but it is a d___ sight better than the execrable Fargo (or, as it's known Farce-go, or, as it's known, True Detective Season Two in All Its Lurid Bad Awfulness Deluxe 2.0.) 

There are elements of the supremely bad Wes "Park Slope McSweeneys" Anderson in it –– I was waiting for Bill "If I Came Any More Overrated I'd Be in Sonic Youth" Murray to come limping on set and do one of his gnomic turns–– and there are bits baldly redolent of Quentin, the Mule-Faced Woman. Bad preceptors!

You shall not read ill of it, though. I have lately realised that bad reviews are now routinely buried by multinational corporations. They hire people to do it. It's an actual job people do. The other day I tried one of the new three-fingered Kit-Kats. It was bad to have. Garbage in the mouth. Like eating Fargo Season Two in fact. I couldn't believe Kit-Kat had so willingly pissed away their advantage in the game of chocolatiers! I couldn't believe they had whored out their good name and the delicate and exquisite memories we had of Kit-Kats as children. I googled "THE ALL-NEW KIT-KAT IS HORRIBLE" looking for support from the hoi polloi and amazingly nothing came up. 

It wasn't like when I was hating Matt Jackson on Jeopardy and that was (apparently) simply me being cussed and negative. (I looked on Survivor Sucks, where one finds trolls congregating to seethe, to see if anybody else hated Matt Jackson. No such dice.) I knew that other people must hate this new inferior Kit-Kat, so where were they? Answer is, the Kit-Kat people hired "Reputation.com" or some equivalent to kill or hide all the bad reviews, to throw them to p.9999 of any Google search, those back pages where my works are usually to be found (or rather are not to be found –– ever) ––  and to glut the first hunnerd fifty, two hunnerd pages with empty boring puffs.

Believe the same thing has happened with Season Two of Fargo, because it's execrable and nobody says so. I have to believe that not everybody is that critically compromised. 

We all know about the new Golden Age of Television, it is by now a critical cliche, and it doesn't mean that everything that comes out under that aegis is actually any good. 

Folks, I give you Fargo Season Two. 

This episode, the discussion about shampoo (MOTIF: GANGSTERS TALK ABOUT TRIVIA), the gangsters' niece talking all tough (MOTIF: GANGSTER WOMEN ARE WITTY) while the silent redskin gutted a rabbit (MOTIF: GANGSTERS ARE COLORFUL AND OFF-BEAT), the hackneyed 1970s clothes (MOTIF: THE SEVENTIES WERE INTRINSICALLY AMUSING). Afros, knit sweaters, Dundreary sideburns. Ugh. Tired routines were being shamelessly egested and swatted about the soundstage. Old lees and curds sold as new stock. 

"The top of the pot is popped off with the froth."

I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when that acclaimed genius the "showrunner" had pitched this one. "Gents, have I got an idea for you. Idea's this. The movie Fargo."

"You want us to make the movie Fargo."

"I want you to make it again, but with less-talented actors and without the Coen brothers."

"Kid how could it fail."

The best thing on this episode was the commercials.  They had a new Norm MacDonald KFC one. 

Maybe I ought to go over to FX and make a pitch. 

"Fellers, let's make a TV show based on Norm MacDonald pretending he is Colonel Sanders."

"A Heist Is a Prison Escape –– Sometimes."

The other day I was trying to make it through the Lee Marvin film Point Blank, but it was no use. It couldn't be done. Still, I now know that the film begins with a heist that takes place in an abandoned prison. So I thought, even as my toes were curling at the badness of the film, "Governor Cuomo was right. Sometimes a heist is a prison escape."

As Laurence Remila used to say –– on a near-daily basis –– "Mea friggin' maxima culpa."

Or was it Cicero.

"Fire, Please Don't Walk With Me." Or, "Ewoks Are More Subtle."

For your intellectual edification, the film Fire Walk With Me, reevaluated with some reluctance and surprize, from a desk in the very same city where David Lynch lives they do say. I wrote it in late August. 

(Incidentally, after writing it I was in New York, sitting on one of the plush loveseats in the new Cos on Fifth Avenue,  waiting for my wife to finish clothes shopping. I'd foolishly begun flicking through a copy of Kinfolk, so my blood pressure was very high. In despair I groped for another magazine, amazingly located another $20+ rag, this one with Kyle Maclachlan on the cover. He was talking about the new Twin Peaks TV series ostensibly coming in the next year or two. I was quite impressed by the sheer anality of the interviewer, considering this was of the same class of hipster snotty-superficiality as Kinfolk. The guy was asking Lynch all about "BOB" the demonic spirit who possesses Cooper at the end of the series. Very specific questions. It was like the usually empty superficial style journalist had guiltily let his inner nerd run amok. 

That previous paragraph merely exists as a sort of prose poem, describing a Fifth Avenue vignette otherwise lost forever. It might equally have been a tanka equally but it is not.)

Now follows my revised impressionistic rundown on the Twin Peaks film:

1. I went to Los Feliz library.
2. I was looking for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
3. I saw they had Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me to rent.
4. Not many books in that library branch.
5. Nothing doing, apparently unconnectedly I took out a scholarly study of David Lynch.
6. Skim-read the chapters on Twin Peaks.
7. Got out Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.
8. Put it in the player.
9. I put it on.
10. I said in the first ten minutes that it’s one of my favourite films.
11. I thought, almost immediately, “No it isn’t. I’m doing a disservice to many, many films by saying that. I am betraying my better judgment. I’m being nostalgic and it’s been too long since I watched any good films.”
12. Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me is like Return of the Jedi. The first half hour is great. The Chris Isaak segment is like the scene in Jabba’s court, on the sailbarge. I am even going to put in my search terms, "Chris Isaak Jabba the Hutt" and see how many readers that draws in.  
13. Continuing the comparison, the scenes with Laura Palmer are like the scenes with the Ewoks.
14. The Ewoks are however more subtle in their acting. 
15. Laura Palmer was channeling Chewbacca.
16. My wife laughed at the badness of the acting in every scene featuring poor Laura Palmer.
17. I felt defensive and indicted.
18. I ended up agreeing with her, pummeled by Laura Palmer’s constant shrill shrieking and over-emoting.
19. Half the mystery is pissed away by prosaic exposition.
20. I remembered how we lads went into London expressly to see the film.
21. We saw it again at the University in Canterbury.
22. I remembered how I bought the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer the morning of the day it came out, in Henley-on-Thames. I read it in a morning.
23. Wall-ter the American mail artist sent me a mail art piece & told me who killed Laura. 
24. We rewatched this film in New York in about 2007 and I don't recollect thinking it was bad then.
25. The question naturally follows, how have I changed between 2007 and 2015––
26. Were those hard years, or years of good growth?
27. I met David Lynch twice in New York. He is canny to a fault. He gives nothing away. He cannot be accused of bad manners or ill will to a living soul. But he can cut a man dead with a well-chosen vapidity. 
28. Laura Palmer reminded me of ––

I have finished with my list.

"Matt Jackson, Jeopardy Jerk."

Sometimes the more you will somebody to disappear, to make like a leaf and dry up and blow away,  the more tenaciously they stick around. The green team on Amazing Race is one –– infallible because they are loathsome. Then take for instance I've been wanting this unpleasant character Matt Jackson to lose on Jeopardy all week, and the rascal keeps going from strength to strength. He shan't put a foot wrong. He shines. He garners all the Daily Doubles. And they keep putting in punch-drunk burnt-out three-time-losing welterweight bums against him.

I disliked him seconds into laying eyes on him. As he was introduced he had won three days already, and so he triumphantly raised his hand with three fingers sticking up. That's unnecessary gloating. All good-minded people, I would think, hated him for his preening self-vanity and wanted him to go.

He didn't. Instead he did the exact opposite. He coasted to triumph against the addled potterers they set against him. When Matt Jackson wins a point he ungraciously punches the air. He always does the thing with his fingers at the start of the game. Alex said, "I wonder what MATT will do when he hasn't got enough fingers to show how many times he has won." A small intimation that Alex too hates the move. Matt Jackson also cuts Alex off and snaps his answers in confident clarion-like schoolmarm tones. He boasts loudly about the jejune critical theory he likes to read. He has a bad-tempered pout on all the time until the end when suddenly he leers horribly. It comes across as supreme sarcasm –– the diva who cannot smile with any sincerity because he is so frustrated by the mortals around him. Yet his autobiographical bit on Friday was strictly banal –– he said he collects Playbills from shows he's been to.

Cool story Matt.

Alex should have said that.
Alex should start saying that generally in that segment. "Cool story bro."
He would say it three times a day every day if he started it.

Purely as an experimental inquiry I typed a few unkind epithets alongside MATT's name and fed them into the search engine to see what other thinking people made of this brazen prannet. Amazingly nothing came up. I sought reassurance that other sensitive people disliked this man MATT JACKSON like I did, but the internet –– which seems to have an echo of every idiotic thought we can possibly summon –– had no comment to make on it.

I thought, "Am I really alone in resenting this guy? Does the problem lie with me?"

Then I thought, "Maybe this is a yawning opportunity –– the first man to capitalize on the nationwide hatred people feel for MATT JACKSON."

Maybe I am grasping for company in this void of human decency, this bad epoch fallen low, this Kali Yuga, this Iron Age, old buddy old pal, but it sounded to me as though Alex said something else on Friday suggesting he didn't like Matt much either. He said, "If you're one of those viewers who likes to root for a player in the competition, this week has probably been a disappointment for you. This guy MATT has won every day and we keep sending in amateurish bumbling clown school sophomores!" He couldn't come out and say it outright, but he implied a growing weariness.

Who shall rid me of this troublesome prat?

"Timothy Carey Was On Gunsmoke."

                            

Timothy Carey was on Gunsmoke.

The episode is called "The Gentleman."

I recommend you watch it if you are at all what you claim to be, id est, a discerning follower of culture.

Marshal Matt Dillon peremptorily kicked Carey out of Dodge, but not before Carey voiced the wildcat vow to come back. He was like Ezra Pound, who used to say, "I cease not to yowl."

Next scene, in walked Jack Cassidy.

Amazing cast this episode has!

Jack Cassidy was instantly spoiling for a fight with Timothy Carey. He happened to see the first scene in which Carey menaced the "working girl" with a heart of gold (VIRGINIA BAKER). Cassidy's character, a raffish gambler with a lopsided smile not to say a slantacular take on life, had a fatal heart condition, went to see the Doc, but he must revenge himself on the man who mistreated his lady love, the homely hooker (VIRGINIA BAKER), before he up and expires.

She was not exactly a pretty woman but Jack Cassidy was just moonstruck like a teenage polecat and declared her the best-looking women he ever seed.

"You can't have been looking very hard," I said to the TV at that point.

                           

The whole episode was a build-up to a showdown between these two classic character actors. These two Dick Tracy, spaghetti western grotesques.

Lovers of thespianism and cinema everywhere and for all eternity were robbed of any joy by Marshal Matt Dillon, who coolly subverted the destined meeting between the two. He punched Jack Cassidy out, rendered him unconscious with a single blow, slung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and threw him into a post-chaise leaving Dodge post-haste.

Off it went stage right and then in came Timothy Carey, stage left, running after the departing stage. Matt Dillon punched him unconscious too. That was that. Deprived of the scene all refined lovers of the craft desired by that lowbrow (but brilliant) two-fisted lawman MATT DILLON!

(It is to be noted that both Timothy Carey and Jack Cassidy would later show up on multiple episodes of Columbo, but never together.  Carey never played the killer, he used to be a character who slung hash in a greasy spoon and made a bowl of chili that Columbo particularly liked. I think he was meant to be a recurring character and then he drifted away. He never did get to have that scene with Jack Cassidy.)

"Vladimir Putin Was On Charlie Rose."

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More Tips For Junior Murderers.

1. If you're going to commit murder in Los Angeles, don't do it on Columbo's watch. Don't do it when an episode of Columbo is being filmed, or rather when the action of an episode is taking place in the fictional world.

2. If you're going to be on an episode of Columbo, don't kill anyone. Be a bit role. Be a waiter or a barman or a secretary or a construction site stalwart. Live out your life peaceably.

3. If you absolutely must commit the terrible sin of murder, kill somebody poor or irrelevant. Middle class even. Columbo don't care one damned hoot about blue collar stiffs.

4. It should be noted that Columbo is a fictional character. But perhaps the illusion of Columbo reduces homicides in LA among the fratres ignorantes, the sorts of people – and surprising their number – who believe Sherlock Holmes was an actual historical figure too.