Respect Authority

I can’t believe it was only six months ago that I wrote my first post on RA about Jersey Shore, when the show was just a few episodes in and the media/pop culture firestorm surrounding it hadn’t yet reached its peak. Oh, how things have changed.

The first episode of the much-anticipated second season premiered on MTV last night, and unless you live under a rock (or are older than 35) you know that the network’s eagerness to get the now-famous cast back on air led them to shoot Season 2 in Miami when it was still snowing buckets on the East Coast.

So far, the geographic change seems at worst harmless, and at best necessary. Since JS Season 1 only ended a few months ago, it would be exceedingly hard to revive the novelty of the show’s first weeks in the same house and at the same bars. Indeed, it’s not such a bad idea to test the legs of the cast—can they be as interesting, or perhaps more interesting, when removed from the very scene that gave the show its name? Answer: yes.

Watching The Situation, Pauly D, Vinny, Ronnie, Sammi, Snooki and JWoww (more on Angelina later) reunite was like meeting up with old friends again, and even though we know many of the cast members have spent the last four months within arms’ length of one-another, it still felt like they were all excited to be re-living the very experience that got them here in the first place. Sort of like how the three months you spend planning the prom (what, you guys didn’t have overanxious female friends in high school?) didn’t manage to undermine the greatness of seeing your peers in evening wear. (Well, that, and the drinking; everyone’s looking forward to the drinking.) Read More ›

“Bruce Marr just posted a comment for First meeting!

‘Another thought about Other Voices, Other Rooms. Capote’s 
complex figurative language and religious allusions give the 
narrative a sense of cosmic, or metaphysical significance. For 
instance, near the beginning the landscape is described as 
looking if it were under the sea. Another work of literature 
which has this “metaphysical sense” is Moby Dick.’”

Enough said.

All I want to know is: How did ChickenDiapers.com remained unclaimed until 2002?

[WSJ]

So I know I’m several weeks late with the inevitable roundup of summer television, but I like to get a little settled before I pass judgment on hours of programming that I’ll probably continue watching out of sheer boredom after I’ve long since established that it’s making me progressively dumber (see: Rock of Love). I like to catch a few episodes, allow myself to get mildly invested in the characters/contestants/suitors before I decide whether a show is “worth” an hour of my Sunday afternoon, which might otherwise be spent watching foreign films, reading literature or pontificating on the meaning of life. Seriously, I’m a very busy person.

So here’s what I’m watching this summer, and what you should be too, if you know what’s good for you.

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THE BACHELORETTE: I’m a little late to this particular line of shows; all I know is both The Bachelorette and predecessor The Bachelor (shit started in 2002!) are the mainstream equivalents of VH1’s romantic contest-based programming. The only difference is there’s more mush—poetry, hand-holding, prolonged eye contact without resulting sexual contact—and fewer strippers. Bachelorette Ali, who is apparently a cast-off from a past season of The Bachelor (sort of the ABC version of Real World/Road Rules Challenge), seems sufficiently generic; she’s the kind of girl you’d pass in a J. Crew with a small dog in her purse. Her eligible men are equally nondescript, to the point that I’ve watched at least three episodes and couldn’t pair names with faces. Fortunately for ABC, the sheer voyeurism of watching people try to fall in love means it’s hard to fuck this one up.

Verdict: Watch with a hand on the remote. Some scenes—like Ali being serenaded by anyone, anywhere—are too perfectly awkward to miss. Others, like the ENDLESS rose ceremony, are easy to skip.

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TOP CHEF D.C.: Here’s the thing about Top Chef: it’s getting a little…old. The formula is the same every season and even though they switch cities, unless you’re familiar with the culinary inner-workings of Chicago versus New York versus D.C., the guest chefs and restaurant cameos aren’t going to make much of a difference. It doesn’t help that a lot of the challenges are the same (and then again repeated on Top Chef Masters which, let’s be honest, is just a space filler between TC seasons so you don’t start watching something else in that time slot). That said, this season of Top Chef seems to have the requisite cast of characters: the early front-runner, the power-hungry female, the trod-upon foreigner. Add some spices and voila! Decent television.

Verdict: If you’ve watched the last six seasons, you might as well keep on keeping on. But make sure you have food around; after one particularly tantalizing episode I found myself dipping pretzel rods in butter.

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WORK OF ART: In its never-ending quest to find the “top” everything—chef, fashion designer, hair stylist, hair stylist for poodles—Bravo has moved on to perhaps the most subjective of all topics: art. Work of Art throws a bunch of weirdos with artistic inclinations in one room, where they tackle assigned inspirations that run the gamut from portraiture to book covers. To be honest, I had limited hope for this show. I get the Bravo thing, I buy into it, but as someone who’s spent life wishing her technical ability matched her drive to create art, I wasn’t keen on watching people have their work slammed. So far, Bravo has proved me wrong: the ‘assignments’ are broad enough that it’s hard to argue people are being pigeon-holed and the variety in skills is huge; the show includes everything from painters to performance artists. The only weak point: the judges. But to be fair, Tim Gunn set the bar pretty high.

Verdict: If you like Bravo’s other fare, this one is well worth the time. And if you don’t like Bravo’s other fare, why the fuck are you reading my blog?

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YOU’RE CUT OFF: VH1 never ceases to amaze. Just when I think they’ve exhausted the possibilities for trashy spin-off shows, they come up with something totally original (and by original I mean “original”) to hold the line until Ray J and another gaggle of hookers can be rounded up. You’re Cut Off follows a dozen spoiled princesses (think My Super Sweet 16, plus ten years) as they’re thrown in a house together with a life coach who teaches them lessons like “Toilets don’t clean themselves” and “Shoes don’t HAVE to cost $4,000.” It’s predictably entertaining to watch women who count tiaras among their casual-wear try to figure out how to grocery shop, or sweep a floor. Unfortunately the life coach/host isn’t harsh enough to make me feel like the ladies are learning anything so much as biding time until they can return home to their pampered lives, a few thousand dollars richer (what does VH1 pay its minions these days?) and decidedly more famous. I would venture to say that a re-casting of Sharon Osbourne, who whipped even sluttier and trashier girls into shape on Charm School, would have made for a much better show. Assuming Monique is booked.

Verdict: When it comes to the on-camera demonization of 20-somethings who have never had to work or think for themselves, I am decidedly in favor.

Now that it’s become abundantly clear neither man nor machine can solve what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico, I think it’s high time we start looking for alternatives. And no, I don’t mean collecting pounds of hair from the floors of high school gym showers worldwide and shoving them in the still-spewing rig. Rather, we need to think outside of the box, and in this case the box is reality.

It’s pretty obvious the oil spill is a job for a superhero. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of pseudo-natural disaster for which superheroes are uniquely prepared. Can’t get into space on a whim? Call Superman. Need to ascend that skyscraper in 30 seconds flat? Text Spiderman. And if you just need a quick fix of a woman in latex, I’m pretty sure Catwoman hasn’t done much of anything since the early 90s.

So who in our long parade of superheroes and villains is best suited to handle what’s arguably the biggest environmental disaster in our country’s history? Well we at RA thought of some ideas that, frankly, don’t sound all that batshit next to “throw tires in there.” (Note: Aaron thought of most of this. His knowledge of superheroes is unparalleled and, were it not so helpful to this post, I would be mocking him).

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BATMAN: BP may have a lock on the advanced technology surrounding offshore drilling, but I’m pretty sure Batman was behind everything from the Hummer to the Internet. Dude has mad gadgets. And the fact that the government (and therefore the massive companies to which the government pays endless lip service) is heavily involved in the industry suggests Wayne Enterprises probably has something up its sleeves for this. Some CIA oil-containing secret weapon that was in development in the 80s and then got scrapped because, well, not containing oil is certainly more profitable. Morgan Freeman would be all over this.

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CYCLOPS: All things considered, an optic beam is a good thing to have laying around. After all, the rig is made of metal, and a good blast from old One Eye could probably seal the thing in a few seconds flat. Whether Cyclops can swim that far underwater is another question. I imagine this is where Storm would come in handy; she could probably part the seas for Cyclops and then, to quote Aaron, “make like a waterspout that sucks up all the oil and have like Professor X levitate that shit into space.”

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MAGNETO: It’s ill-advised to rely on Magneto for much of anything that involves “saving humanity,” but even mutants can’t live on Sludge Planet. Seems it’d be fairly easy for him to pile a bunch of metal shit on that open pipe (think the electromagnetic/nuclear explosion that killed Juliet in LOST).

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THE FLASH: This is a little grim, but so is watching herons and gulls wash up on the shores of Loiusiana looking more tarred than feathered. In one comic, The Flash ran around the world so fast that he went back in time, which would be useful for turning back the clock a month, killing everyone on the rig (whatever, they were going to die anyway) and preventing this from ever happening. As a side benefit, I’m not opposed to canceling out that intoxicated night of karaoke I had last week.

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AQUAMAN: It stands to reason that the dude has some expertise when it comes to water-related disasters. That said, he uses creatures of the ocean to help him, which might be a lost cause right now. There’d have to be some sort of global outreach on the part of sea creatures to solicit help from those in far-flung places. Sort of like when Scuttle and Flounder got all the sea animals to ruin Prince Eric’s wedding to Ursula in The Little Mermaid.

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SPIDERMAN: Not sure how useful Spiderman would be for the actual sealing of the rig, but assuming he was down for a collaborative effort, the cleanup work here would be massive. Some uniquely manufactured spider webs, designed to pick up oil and filter water, would come in mighty handy over the next, I don’t know, three decades.

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SUPERMAN: It’s fair to say getting Superman involved is a surefire way to get this shit taken care of, and in time for him to go home and bang Lois. The options are limitless: traveling back in time, sealing the pipe with heat vision, freezing the whole area and throwing it into space, plugging it with Lex Luther. When you can pull off underwear outside the pants, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want.

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Now I know what you’re thinking—what about Captain Planet? It’s true that the captain, whose job as a superhero is pretty much to prevent or stop this exact kind of disaster, should be on the task force. But to be honest, I haven’t seen him deliver on that whole “bring pollution down to zero” promise, so I’m willing to give everyone else a try first.

Got your own ideas? Let us know. But let’s be honest, they won’t be nearly as awesome.

You can now embed tweets! Expect to be inundated with other people’s humor, for those moments (which come so often) when my own has run out.

Anyone who’s been in a corporate meeting …or at least seen an episode of 30 Rock, knows the importance of synergy. After all, what’s better than a great product if not finding a way to integrate it with other great products in the most prevalent business example of killing two birds with one money-scented stone? This sort of big-business sell-outitude is obvious in things like Taco Bell/Pizza Hut combo restaurants and ABC’s prolonged dispute with Cablevision eliminating my access to Disney for an entire day. But in the TV world, synergy has been woefully underutilized. In other words, the day there’s more than one competition show about hair styling is the day we should start trimming the fat—and what better way than by combining some of our favorite programs? Here are RA’s top ideas for the TV equivalent of Taco Bell/Pizza Hut …minus the gas.

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1. REAL WORLD/JACKASS

Both of these stalwart MTV franchises have been lagging in recent years—on the Real World, MTV vacillates between self-involved intellectual types and balls-to-the-wall party kids, with little gray area. Meanwhile Jackass, once the symbol of our viral video times, has since the beginning of the decade fallen into a murky audience zone. The 20-somethings who followed the show during its heyday are too old to appreciate it anymore, and there’s something inherently creepy about 13-year-olds watching men their father’s age attach things to their balls.

Combo show: Eight strangers picked to live in a house and have their various attempts to injure themselves or one-another taped.

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2. SURVIVOR/LOST

The “plot” of Survivor is ungodly easy to follow—drop desperate losers off on an island and let them duke it out; each week, someone is given the boot. Lost, by contrast, has long since stopped making sense for even its most devoted followers. Throwing these two together would make Survivor fans moderately smarter (as Lost is prone to obscure literary and philosophical references), and Lost fans slightly less confused. After all, what is an island full of fame-seeking morons if not some sort of televised purgatory?

Combo show: Send a few dozen idiots to an obscure island with limited supplies and plentiful mysteries. Stage random assaults via wild animals and smoke monsters. Each week, someone gets kicked off (and put on a plane that will subsequently crash).

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3. REAL HOUSEWIVES/CELEBRITY APPRENTICE

Anyone who’s seen even one episode in the Real Housewives franchise knows housewife in this case is synonymous with “marrying rich so you can start your own line of face cream/cocktails/jewelry/insert other pointless product here.” But what would happen if you actually put the self-absorbed and mildly insane women of RHNY to work for someone like The Donald? Though Sinbad and Bret Michaels have provided no shortage of hilarity so far on this season of Celebrity Apprentice (to say nothing of perennial politician Rod Blagojevich), the two-hour show is quickly wearing thin (at Episode 2, mind you). Some good old-fashioned cat fights would definitely do the trick.

Combo show: Pit two teams of Real Housewives ladies (personally, I vote for New York vs. New Jersey) against one-another in a series of challenges aimed at “raising money for charity” (by which I mean degrading people who think they’re above menial labor).

In honor of today, March 3, 2010, otherwise known as the day Nip/Tuck died, I’ve pasted below, in its (almost) entirety, the whole of N/T character Matt McNamara’s Wikipedia page. I’ll be the first to admit that the last two seasons of the show have been rather lackluster, though I feel this was to be expected from a program that in Season 1 brought up drug cartels and self-circumcision, obese people stuck to their couches and wanton disregard for safe sex. Either way, it’s recaps like this that remind us why we all started watching, and just couldn’t bring ourselves to stop.

Farewell Nip/Tuck; I’ll miss you.

Matt McNamara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matthew McNamara

First appearance: Pilot (episode 1.01)
Created by: Ryan Murphy
Portrayed by: John Hensley
INFORMATION:

Aliases: Matt, Matty
Gender: Male
Age: approx. 22
Occupation: Student, Mime, Armed Robber
Family: Unnamed rapist (biological paternal grandfather)
Spouse(s): Kimber Henry (ex-wife)
Children: Jenna McNamara (daughter, with Kimber)
Relatives:

Christian Troy (biological father)
Julia McNamara (mother)
Sean McNamara (legal father)
Emme Lowell (paternal half-sister)
Annie McNamara (maternal half-sister)
Conor McNamara (maternal half-brother)
Gail Pollack (biological paternal grandmother)
Erica Noughton(maternal grandmother)
Thomas McNamara (paternal grandfather)
Colleen McNamara (paternal grandmother)
Max Pollack (biological paternal half-uncle; same age as Matt)
Sarah Pollack (biological paternal half-aunt)
Kimber Henry Troy (step-mother)
Matthew “Matt” McNamara is a fictional character on the American television series Nip/Tuck, portrayed by John Hensley.

Matthew “Matt” McNamara, was raised as the son of Julia and Sean McNamara, although his biological father is Christian Troy, a man he regards as an uncle. Matt has two half-sisters, Annie (whose father is Sean and mother is Julia) and Emme Lowell (daughter of Christian with a woman named Darlene Lowell) and a younger half-brother, Conor (son of Sean and Julia). He is approximately 16 years of age at the beginning of the show’s first season. Although he isn’t as much as a ruffian in the beginning, it is implied that he was a delinquent in his early years, as Sean says to Christian, “I spent 17 years trying to corral your bad genetics”. Read More ›

Alright I know this isn’t meant to be a silo for all manner of viral videos and, to be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of viral videos to begin with—the hit-or-miss aspect offends me. (There’s a reason I watch so much television, where discerning viewers are free to pass judgment on an entire series after just a single episode). That said, I was more than a little excited for the premiere of Funny or Die Presents on HBO, not only because it gives me a little tickle in my tummy to know TV still has some measure of power (FOD is otherwise a fairly popular video Web site, so it says something that they bothered with television at all), but also because I hate watching shit on my laptop.

FOD is unquestionably sophomoric, so there were times I felt disadvantaged by my lack of a 14 to 25-year-old penis, but overall the show had enough gems to make it more than worth it. This is one of them:

This stuff never really gets old. Also, he’s French!

In the opening of “Hailey’s Song,” Eminem, who had already broken down barriers in the rap world by virtue of being white (and lyrically innovative), says “I can’t sing/I feel like singing/I wanna fuckin’ sing.” And at the end, after what is a vocally atrocious but still very endearing song, he says “I told you I couldn’t sing/Oh well, I tried.”

Were “Hailey’s Song,” in all its experimental glory, an entire album – it would be Lil Wayne’s Rebirth: daring, bold, endearing, and not entirely …good.

As a preface, I should say I’ve been listening to an illegally downloaded ultimate version of Rebirth, which includes all of the tracks officially released this week, as well as a few that had been leaked months ago and were later pulled from the CD. In all, after more than few delayed releases, Weezy popped out nearly two-dozen songs for Rebirth, which was marketed as (and is) the rapper’s attempt to merge his own hip-hop style with rock influences. I don’t have the energy to figure out which songs were part of the final release and which weren’t—moreover, all of the songs were arguably intended for inclusion on a professional album—but I figure having a few extra ones to go off of just means Wayne gets a more comprehensive chance at impressing me. Read More ›