Marc Maron: Cats know more than we can understand

Marc Maron with Boomer: [Photo by Dimitri von Klein from Catster]

I kind of wished I’d blogged about Marc Maron before he suddenly became ubiquitous… I’ve been listening to his podcast WTF (I get it on iTunes) occasionally but regularly for the past year or two.  I’m not sure what his secret is, but some of these conversations have been really memorable, so much so that I can remember where I was walking the dog or walking home as I listened to some of them. David Cross, Fiona Apple, Pamela Adlon, Mike White, John Oliver, Stephen Merchant, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, Diablo Cody… I guess those are the ones I remember most vividly. Maron is an over-sharer, he’s self-laceratingly critical and confessional, smart but insecure about his knowledge & status, obviously needy and competitive, but not too aggressively so, melancholic, eager to connect… And he seems to bring out a similarly confessional, over-sharing spirit in his guests.  Part of it may simply be the podcast’s length and flexible structure — it’s an open-ended conversation (conducted in Maron’s garage studio, which is now immortalized in the opening credits of his t.v. show), and as far as I can tell, he’s not aiming for a particular length, so the exchange can go into some slow patches, and then can pick up or open out into something new. (For example, I was feeling disappointed by his Lucinda Williams podcast– he seemed nervous, and interrupted her too often — but then eventually she got into fascinating stories about life as a child with her bipolar, alcoholic mother.)  The Mike White conversation was especially great, with some pretty startling moments of self-revelation on White’s part (but I am a huge fan of his anyway- he’s the creator of Enlightened as well as movies like Chuck and Buck).

Btw, one tip — although I know this makes Maron mad: every podcast begins with about 10 minutes of him riffing and ranting and promoting Stamps.com, so if you mostly want to hear the interview, you need to fast-forward.  (There’s often good stuff in the rants, though!)

I also just read Maron’s memoir, Attempting Normal, which is good.  You have to have a certain degree of patience for incessant discussion about his grim-hotel-room (and other) masturbation habits — generally pretty amusing, though.  The book more or less tells the story of his comedy career, his two marriages, his career slide and serious depression that preceded his comeback that began with his beginning WTF.  It’s episodic, though, and many of the chapters are basically little mini-essays or fragments, some of them artfully constructed.  The chapter “the Clown and the Chair,” about the role played by a particular piece of thrift store furniture in the endgame of his second marriage, is excellent, for example.  I also really liked his discussions of the weird, exhausting, and often alienating life he led in the late 80s and 90s as a “road comic” playing casinos, restaurants, and small clubs, in his case mostly around New England. There’s an amazing story about a comedian, Frankie Bastille, who’s since died, who snorted heroin in the passenger seat as Maron drove them to a show out of town (Maron was opening); when they got to the club, Maron had to physically haul in the seemingly comatose Bastille, who then proceeded to deliver a killer show, and then nodded out again on heroin on the drive home.

One thing that struck me, and that I found refreshing, is the degree to which Maron is basically a male Crazy Cat Lady.  The chapter “Cats” explains how he acquired his collection of formerly feral pets; they come up repeatedly elsewhere, and the book ends with a moving tribute to Boomer, his favorite cat who disappeared right when Maron was beginning to tape his new IFC show, Maron. [That is Boomer in the photo above.]

Why he vanished just as my life was changing drastically demands interpretation. I am not religious or spiritual, but I am prone to connecting dots in equations so that they defy coincidence.  Someone suggested that maybe this was the end of our journey together, that he had taken me as far as he could and that it was time for him to move on. I like that angle….

If you are awake and alive, sadness is a fluctuating constant. Hope is fleeting, a decision you make out of faith, desire, or desperation. Cats know more than we can understand. I don’t care about biology or brain size.

Sniff…

So far I’ve seen two episodes of his new show, #3 and #4.  I give it a 7.5 so far… or maybe an 8… It’s good and smart in some ways, and funny, but he and his story feel a bit constrained by the scripted sitcom format, and a lot of it feels a bit like a slight variation on Curb Your Enthusiasm: needy, narcissistic comedian in L.A. playing a just slightly fictionalized version of himself.  Louie too, I guess (Maron and Louie C.K. are old friends; there’s an amazing conversation about how they had a falling out and kind of patched it up on Maron’s recent Fresh Air interview), but so far I don’t think Maron has managed to get to the kind of raw insight, formal innovations, and originality that Louie offers.

The last episode, in which Maron decides to date “an age-appropriate woman” for once (i.e. not in her early/mid 20s), was seeming not-so-great to me, and then it took a twist and actually became much better than I expected. Maybe Maron is Marc Maron’s Lucky Louie and he needs to have this one cancelled and then regroup for his next great one. Or maybe this one will get better as it goes.

Maria Bamford Driven Crazy By Bullshit

[with apologies to Elayne Boosler]

I’m totally pissed I missed Maria Bamford when she performed in Bloomington a year or so ago (I didn’t know about her then).  Like Louis C.K., she offers a standup comedy of abjection & anxiety, with a quality of pleading loneliness and reaching out for connection.  Part of the tension of the routines is in the sense conveyed of someone who feels locked up into him/herself, trying to communicate, and simultaneously undercutting and commenting on those efforts.  Both Bamford and LCK have a similar kind of trademark apprehensive/amazed/horrified look, and an almost-cringing physical quality– a sense of someone used to getting beaten up by life.

Bamford’s supposed current Match.com personals ad: “I can wear the same outfit for five days straight!  Or, I can crouch in the shower and make myself real small.”

I think I first heard about her in this fascinating piece in Slate, “Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford,” in which she discusses her history of mental illness and how she incorporates it into her comedy.

Bamford: People get really irritated by mental illness. “Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!” I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, “You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.”

It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, “Oh, you’re just an attention getter.” Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice.

Slate: Or a weakness.

Bamford: Yeah. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. “Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.” Or: “I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?”

Slate: Right. And then people who suffer from mental illness feel ashamed, making it even harder for them to talk about it with other people—where if you had a “regular” illness, people would speak much more openly about it.

Bamford: Yeah, it’d be like, “Let’s pink-ribbon it up!”

Slate: By talking about these things in your act, you’re countering some of the silence that otherwise clouds them. Is that something you’re conscious of as you work on your material?

Bamford: Well, a lot of it is selfish, I think. If I talk about it, then maybe somebody will talk about it to me. I don’t know if there’s as much much nobility in it as I would hope…I feel super insecure and embarrassed and ashamed about mental health issues. That’s why I want to talk about it. There’s sort of a hostility even, where you go, “I’m just gonna say what I am and then see if you can’t handle it.”

Bamford has this brilliant new special called The Special Special Special that’s available for download or streaming for $4.99.  Here’s her website for more details.  It’s a standup routine she performs in her own home to an audience of two, her parents, sitting there on the couch.  (Plus a guy playing keyboards.)  She has to stop at one point to give her pug his eye drops, and to get some cookies from the oven for the audience. Imitations of her mother are almost as much a part of Bamford’s routines as they are in Margaret Cho’s.  So seeing Bamford imitate her mother and father, to them and only them, generates a special kind of excruciating discomfort.  Although in a way, maybe that’s not quite true, because the affection you sense between Bamford and her parents comes through clearly, and they also seem to find the stand-up pretty hilarious.  It is awkward, though.  And sometimes it gets to a place beyond mere awkwardness, such as when she discusses her suicidal episodes and desire to die.

But if you don’t know her, you might as well start by checking out some of the episodes of the 20-part 2009 web series The Maria Bamford Show.  I’m not sure to what degree this is factual (it seems obviously based on reality), but Bamford sets up the scene in the little pseudo-theme-song she sing-songs in the first episode:

I was a marginally successful comedy living in Los Angeles for fourteen years… But I never got my own sitcom and then my boyfriend turned out to bisexual… And then I forgot to pay my insurance premiums so I couldn’t afford my medication for OCD, depression, anxiety… So I started driving cross-country in a blond wig and bathing suit looking for ‘angels’ with a drug dealer named ‘Lips’…  My parents found me on a sidewalk selling clock radios in Detroit… And they said, hey why don’t you come live with us in Duluth, Minnesota so you can get your medications kind of stabilized… and they took me back to their house where I’m living in the attic with my 11-year old pug Blossom… It’s the Maria Bamford Show!

The addictive show, which consists of 20 3-6 minute episodes, chronicles the various embarrassments and humiliations of living in Duluth with her parents and encountering old friends and enemies as an apparently-failed would-be showbiz comedian.  It becomes difficult to draw the line between the necessarily or accidentally low-budget, awkward, or even bad/ low-quality, and the intentionally so.  Blossom the pug is a great presence; there’s one fantasy-horror (Holloween?) episode where Blossom kills and, if I recall correctly, eats Bamford.  A lot of formal experimentation playing around with the limitations of the cheapo DIY production and the larger conceit of Bamford licking her wounds, back in Minnesota from L.A. and finally producing the pseudo-homemade star vehicle sitcom she would never be allowed to do in reality.  (But maybe now she can??) She’s kind of the anti-, abject Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore.

Ideally you’d watch the episodes in order, but if you want to try another one, I really like this Mother’s Day special in which Maria’s (actual) mother tries out for the role of her mother (and tries to convince Maria that she might want to become a lesbian).  It ends with this little encomium: “Mom?  Thanks for letting me do less-than-accurate and highly-embellished portrayals of you for the internet and on television and in movies, if they’d let me… Happy mother’s day!”

Check her out!  I love this woman. Shell out the $5 for her special, it’s great and she deserves it (and she definitely needs to keep those insurance premiums paid, too).

*We Killed*: Elayne Boosler driven crazy by bullshit

I read a lot of We Killed: the Rise of Women in American Comedy (by Yael Kohen) the other day; it’s an oral history and I started reading it in the 1970s or so, skipped the earlier parts of the history about Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, et al (I may go back to read that).

One figure I found fascinating in this narrative was a stand-up named Elayne Boosler, who grew up as the child of a Russian acrobat and a Rumanian ballerina in Brooklyn.  I’d never heard of her, although she was quite prominent in the 70s and into the 1980s.  She dated Andy Kaufman and achieved a fair amount of success; she even did a Dry Idea anti-perspirant commercial in what looks to me like 1982 or so:

There are three “nevers” in comedy.  Never follow a better comedian.  Never give a heckler the last word.  And no matter how badly a joke bombs — although it’s never happened to me personally — never let them see you sweat.

She is viewed as a pretty important figure by many of the commentators and she emerges as a slightly tragic or melancholy one in the sense that her career seems emblematic of female comics of this generation: she was super-talented, she did well, but she hit what seems to have been a kind of glass ceiling.  Richard Lewis comments that he always thought of her as “Jackie Robinson of stand-up in my class… There was like, a guy, a guy, a guy, a guy, and ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elayne Boosler!’ And she would come on and rip up the joint, and I just found it astounding, because she had to overcome so many obstacles.”

As the author explains, one of the most problematic blocks to the advance of female comics in this era was The Tonight Show.  Appearing on the show was one of the crucial routes towards stardom and Johnny Carson admitted outright that he found most female comics “a little aggressive for my taste”; as Kohen comments, “the women who suited Carson’s taste were, for the most part, blond, buxom, and willing to play dumb.”

Someone else (Joanne Astrow) comments, “There are always complex stories.  There’s another side to it.  Elayne Boosler has what I would honestly call anger management problems.  And Elayne has an obsessive craziness about material being stolen from her.”  Then someone (Claudia Lonow) chimes in, “Did she have a chip on her shoulder or was she a creative person who was being driven crazy by bullshit?  That’s what I think.  She was systematically being driven crazy.”

I find this convincing partly because she was obviously so good and there seems no good reason why she would not have broken out in a bigger way (as many of her male peers did) were it not for the endemic structural sexism of the comedy scene of the era.

Check out this hilarious clip about the awkwardness of one-night stands:

And this clip of Boosler appearing on some kind of strange Andy Kaufman special, in which he sits high above her at a giant desk as they bicker about their breakup, is amazing:

Boosler now seems to have become a progressive activist of sorts (writes for the Huffington Post sometimes) and an animal rescue advocate.  I’m sure she’s doing fine but my sense is that she never got her due.

Following a victory lap about Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, the book concludes somewhat depressingly with the recent emergence of a new ideal of model-level hotness for female comedians; notwithstanding occasional exceptions that prove the rule like Melissa McCarthy, it’s pretty clear that nowadays if you don’t look like Chelsea Handler, Whitney Cummings or Natasha Leggero you are likely to get shunted away from performance towards the writers’ room.

Dylan’s *Tempest*, *Where’d You Go, Bernadette*, *Homeland*

Several great things I have recently read/seen/heard:

The new Bob Dylan album Tempest (I try not to buy everything on Amazon these days but I will note that it is $5 for the Mp3s on Amazon).  I’ve only listened to it 2-3 times can say that it continues his amazing late-career run.  For a long time I took for granted that nothing Dylan had done since 1975 (Blood on the Tracks) was even remotely in the same ballpark of quality or significance of much of his music before that point.  But ever since, I guess, World Gone Wrong in 1993 it’s all been great, much of it amazing.  (I don’t know about Christmas in the Heart, I gave that to my dad for Xmas but have not really checked it out myself!)   Some of the new one sounds like, I don’t know, Western Swing, Johnnie Cash, Nashville Skyline; weird, craggy, old-timey; funny, tender, & mean.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette.  This is the funniest book (novel) I have read in quite some time– totally sharp, witty, entertaining, and moving too.  The author, Maria Semple, used to write for Arrested Development so the funny part is not surprising.   One reviewer sums it up pretty accurately as “a wry slice of a life– one that’s populated by private school helicopter parents, obsessively eco-conscious neighbors, and green-juice swilling, TED-talking husbands.”  The social satire is hilarious and spot-on even for someone who doesn’t know Seattle– Seattle stands here for a certain kind of techie contemporary bourgeois bohemian that one finds everywhere.  The private school shenanigans are priceless. What’s most immediately impressive and amusing is Semple’s facility with the different voices, jargons, and styles contained in all the documents she incorporates seamlessly into the novel — which is a dossier of texts, somewhat in the style of Clarissa or Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, I suppose, with no real central narrator but only Bernadette’s 8th-grade daughter, who (we eventually figure out) has collected the set of texts and is collating them and turning them into a narrative.  There are emails back and forth from various parties; a psychiatrist’s report; memos from the head of the not-quite-A-list Seattle private school; a cruise ship’s log; a news article or two; tributes by famous architects to the protagonist Bernadette, who designed an influential early “green”/eco house, won a MacArthur, and mysteriously retired; some IM messaging within Microsoft’s system, etc.  In this way it brings to mind A Visit From the Goon Squad a tiny bit — and there’s one riff about the pauses between songs on a CD that almost seems a homage to Egan’s novel — but the mode is more brightly comic and satirical.

Homeland, the Showtime show starring Clare Danes.  Season one is recently out on DVD and we are devouring it (waiting for the 3rd and final DVD to arrive).  Danes is fantastic and the show is addictively suspenseful– I’ve never seen 24 but I imagine it has some things in common with that?  It is, interestingly, a remake of an Israeli t.v. series.  Danes plays a somewhat unstable C.I.A. officer who has become convinced that Nicholas Brody, a war hero and former POW recently captured and brought back from Iraq, is in fact a mole or double agent who was turned by Al Quaeda.  Three episodes left and I do not know how it’s going to turn out, although I have some theories.  Season Two starts pretty soon.

“Racial Tone-Deafness” on “Girls”: Where’s the Black Best Friend?!?

[image stolen from NY Magazine's Vulture blog]

I am actually kind of pissed off at this Jon Caramanica piece that begins, “Those looking for hints of racial tone-deafness on the second episode of “Girls,” last Sunday on HBO, wouldn’t have been let down.”

The evidence for this?  “Jessa (Jemima Kirke), nervously facing down an abortion, insists, ‘I want to have children with many different men, of different races,’ as if they were trinkets to be collected, like key chains or snow globes.”  Yes, this is an instance of a character, a hilariously fatuous 23-year old, revealing (in a moment of heat and personal crisis) “racial tone-deafness” in a conversation with a close friend.   The whole point is that she is fatuous and un-selfaware.

What irritates me is the hypocrisy of the New York Times* criticizing a (IMHO) very smart and funny show for depicting the lives of (so far) four relatively privileged (though not actually remotely near member of the 1%– they all have to work day jobs) white girls living in Brooklyn.  What, this should be like the beer commercial where every white person has one reassuring best friend of color with them at the bar?  Please, just read through an issue of the Sunday Styles section in the NYT and then watch Girls and tell me which one reveals more unselfconscious, unexamined privilege.

*Yes, I do realize that the Styles section is not actually Jon Caraminica’s fault or responsibility.  But that is a weasly formulation: “those looking for hints… won’t be let down.”  Of course, this writer is just using the pseudo-controversy over the show as a hook to write a piece about the politics of representation on t.v.

In an email exchange on this topic, a friend who basically agrees with me observed, “The one thing I would say is that the portrayal of the Asian-American girl in the publishing office as ‘bitch w. computer skills’ did seem slightly jarring in the all-white context.”  That is actually a good point; I’d forgotten about that, but it’s true, that scene (and I can’t think of any others) could possibly be read as a somewhat Curb Your Enthusiasm-like wince-inducing moment.  As my friend also commented, however, this scene takes place in an utterly realist context — the rival editorial assistant with better computer skills (she just learned Photoshop) might very well be Asian-American, there is no reason why she might not be.  The bottom line for me is that unless you are shocked, shocked, that in a group of four recent liberal arts college graduate buddies in Brooklyn, all are white (where’s the black best friend?), it seems absurd to pick on Girls for television’s (very real) larger failings of diversity.  (Of course Caraminica did eventually say more or less this.)

So far I am loving the show.  Part of my thinking here derives from a “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” principle of popular aesthetic criticism.  A favorite moment, for example: the scene where the Lena Dunham character’s job interview is going great until she, flushed by success and unable to bite her tongue, makes a joke suggesting that her interviewer was a notorious date-rapist in college, and is told (as the interview screeches to an unsuccessful close) that this kind of humor isn’t appropriate in “an office environment.”  Cut to her maneuvering her dejected and wonderfully imperfect (just normal) body down the street…

Music Videos @ Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Another visit in Cincinnati was to the Contemporary Arts Center, which for a while was the only building in the U.S. designed by Pritzker-prize-winning, Rem Koolhaus-protege, Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.

From wiki: “A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid’s winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong (1983) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).”  It’s funny to look at a (seemingly abandoned/ not up to date — only up to 1990) accounting of her early works: over and over, “Not Realized.”  Here is a good, albeit somewhat skeptical, analysis of the Cincinnati museum.  I like the building, although it is showy and I agree with the critique that “we are often forced to acknowledge the building at times when perhaps we should be admiring the work presented inside the building instead.” Although maybe that is not such a problem really.

(I just remembered an amusing bit in Bruce Wagner’s good novel Memorial — the protagonist is a semi-successful bitter architect who is always mentally fulminating about various international art and architecture stars including, obsessively, “fucking Zaha Hadid.”)

Right now the whole experience is very 21st-century and postmodern (or late 20th-century anyway) since the building is full of a show about the history of music videos.  I actually thought it held up pretty well — although most of the videos are things you could easily pull up on Youtube, they did make sense as a curated collection, and the experience of watching them on large screens with headphones in this context was often pretty engaging.  No question of course that music videos have been a major occasion for groundbreaking aesthetic experiment over the past 30 years.  A lot of Bjork… there was one whole little room based around her amazing video for “Wanderlust” featuring these somewhat Snuffleupagus-like felt yak creatures.  Also several Kanye West videos (“Can’t Tell Me Nothing” lip-synched by Zack Galifianakis and Bonnie Prince Billy in the sidekick/Flava Flav role = great; the “Runaway” video featuring an apparent Victoria’s Secret model in painted-on feathers in the Man Who Fell to Earth angel role = crap), early David Bowie, LCD Soundsystem, several Michel Gondry videos, Missy Elliot and Hype Williams’s fantastic “The Rain,” all kinds of other stuff.

There was a huge, noisy school group there (once they left, we were almost the only ones in the whole place) and the guards kept shutting off certain screens in order to protect the sensibilities of the little brats.  There was one little room specifically dedicated to “Controversial” videos which featured little peepholes you had to peer through — quite irritating actually as, ironically, you had to kneel to see them if you were over 5′ 5″ tall.  These mostly weren’t too exciting — the one I’d never seen that made an impression was the rather creepily erotic and fascinating video for a song called “Twin Flames” by the Klaxons.

*Louie* and experimental sitcom form

I’ve become sort of obsessed with Louie, the sitcom starring comedian Louis C.K.  Someone I know who’s in the comedy biz raved about him a while ago which finally prompted me to check out the show (which is on FX — I think the second season is currently going?  I have it set to “record all” so I’ve been watching a lot of shows from earlier this year, I think.  Season one is on DVD.)

It’s pretty brilliant!  Probably the best new comedy show I’ve seen since Curb Your Enthusiasm, with which it has some things in common.  The structure is basically like Seinfeld: Louis C.K. is playing some version of himself, a (now) recently-divorced father of two girls, 5 & 9, and a somewhat successful standup comic, although the t.v. Louie is somewhat less successful than the real Louis.  Every episode includes some of the Louie’s (or is it Louis’s?) standup routine, which usually relates in some way to what it going on in the show… although it doesn’t always.  In fact part of what I find striking about the show is its embrace of discontinuity, loose ends, and incoherence.  Sometimes there’s just an element of sloppy production, but it also seems intentional, part of an purposefully loose-ended aesthetic strategy.  Louie himself is a a schlub, overweight, balding, with money issues since the divorce, lonely and depressed.  42 years old (maybe that’s one element in my bonding with the show; the show is about what it feels like to be 42 in various ways… from a certain perspective anyway).  He has an expressively dour face which often falls into a look of suppressed desperation.  Louie’s experiences as a (divorced) father play a major role, and the show is hilarious and unusually honest/realistic about parenting & kids.  (Someone told me that his kids remind her a bit of our daughters, which I can kind of see!)

So, there’s some Seinfeld, some Curb Your Enthusiasm (often wince-inducing, feels improvised), and some influence from Taxi or other 1970s shows.  Louie has a blue collar vibe, presents himself as a regular, beaten-down NYC guy (although he grew up in Boston, Newton specifically).  In the opening credits, which show Louie lumbering up the stairs from the subway, eating a slice of pizza and then heading into the basement comedy club, the lettering is very retro 1970s, a lot like Taxi specifically I think; I heard Louis C.K. on Fresh Air mention his admiration for The French Connection so perhaps there’s a more general 1970s media influence.

The show’s theme song, playing as Louie eats his pizza etc., is a new version of that early 1970s song (about an inter-racial relationship, interestingly) “Brother Louie:” “Louie Louie Louie Loo-ee, Louie Louie Louie Loo-ayy, Louie Louie Louie Loo-ee, Louie you’re going to cry,” although cry is changed to “die” in this version.  Super grim.  Gee, you can really see why the producers would think that would be an irresistibly catchy theme.

The show has occasionally made me laugh until I had tears in my eyes… Although lately I’ve been laughing out loud less often, more often admiring it and sometimes being rather amazed at the very dark, sad, or ambiguous places it goes.

The best example of that (the dark places) might be an episode I just saw.  The show begins with Louie’s routine; as he heads backstage he finds what appears to be an old friend he has not seen for years.  This guy is also a comic, someone who started out with Louie when they were in their early 20s.  It becomes clear the guy is pretty depressed and not doing that well.  He explains that he’s on the way to Maine for a gig in Bangor and just stopped to try to say hello to Louie, whom he convinces to drive around with him.  First they go to a liquor store, where the friend buys a big bottle of vodka which he starts drinking in the store.  When the guy at the counter tells him not to do that, the friend rails against him with racist insults (“curry jockey” or something — the guy’s South Indian).  Louie is disturbed, but gets back in the car.

They end up hanging out in a parking lot in Brooklyn drinking vodka.  The guy is bitter, sarcastic and obviously jealous of Louie’s success.  Louie obtusely does not get it for a while, but finally the penny drops that when his friend talks about “stopping,” “ending it,” he is not talking about his career in standup, but his life: the plan is to do the final show in Bangor and then take some deadly pills a doctor prescribed to him for some reason.

Louie is stunned, but tries to argue with him; his friend cuts him off, mocking him for his big life-affirming speech.  Then he relents and says more kindly, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”  Finally Louie says something like, “OK.  I guess there’s not much I can tell you.  I found reasons to keep living, I can’t find those for you.  I really hope you don’t kill yourself.  I need to go, I have to take my kids to school tomorrow morning.”  They embrace, and Louie heads towards the subway.

End of episode!!!!!   This one did not really have a single laugh in it (well, maybe a few very uncomfortable ones).  Pretty radical.  Oh, I forgot one key element: a few times the show cuts to a black-and-white flashback featuring two actors portraying Louie and the guy twenty years ago.  It’s very stylized, almost in a 1940s movie mode or something — like we’re seeing the gangster and the priest when they were kids, before their lives diverged, or something — and these younger actors don’t look much at all like the two guys.  As far as I could tell, there is no subsequent reference to the suicidal buddy (although I may be watching all out of order so maybe I did miss something).

Ever since Seinfeld it’s been axiomatic that a smart sitcom must at all costs avoid the “very special episode” trap: the occasional “serious” episode that aims to tug the heartstrings.  This has been a good discipline for many shows, but I think Louie shows how much is left out if a comedy can’t also try to tackle more emotionally powerful material as we’d expect a novel or movie to do.

Another strange episode, this one also very funny.  In the hall at the elementary school, another parent, a mother, asks Louie if he would be willing to sign on to a petition to protest a new flat-screen t.v. that’s going to replace the message board at the school entrance.  This woman thinks it sounds “propagandistic” in aim.  Louie admits he has not thought about it and does not really have an opinion, which the woman characterizes as a sellout position.  She starts to leave, but then returns and asks if Louie might be interested in going out some time.  Before he can say much, she cuts him off and explains that she has no interest whatsoever in a relationship, she just hasn’t had sex for a very long time, “and you seem safe and discreet.”  He agrees to come over that night.

Once he arrives (and finds her in a dowdy nightgown), she asks if he brought condoms.  When he shows them to her, she makes a face and instructs him to go to the deli downstairs to different non-Latex ones, along with some Monistat (or something for some vaginal ailment) and blueberries.  She hands him a twenty dollar bill and when he says he can cover it, she says “oh no, I’m not going down that road!” and forces the twenty into his hands. (The actress is hilarious.)  He buys the condoms and the medicine and has to go to another store for the blueberries.

Once in bed, all she wants to do is to have him spank her; he hesitantly does so, which prompts her to start crying and calling out, “daddy, daddy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ve been so bad.”  The episode ends at the kitchen table where the woman repeatedly takes a little mouthful of whipped cream from the canister and then a small spoonful of blueberries, while Louie looks on in stunned silence.  She says to him, “so, have you begun thinking about middle schools yet?”

End of episode.  Really more like a Mary Gaitskill story than a sitcom.

Although Louis’s standup mode is on the crude and direct side, there’s something very artful and even experimental about the show, which seems interested in playing with the (under-explored) possibilities for innovation within the rigid sitcom form [as our friend Josh observed, I should have credited him].

Red-State shows: Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights

We’ve been watching two Red-State t.v. shows, Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights. In the recent NYT Magazine piece about Breaking Bad and its show-runner Vince Gilligan, the author pointed out that although BB has an audience as big at Mad Men‘s, it’s less visible than that show in the media, perhaps because whereas it’s a #1 show in Santa Fe/Albuquerque (where it takes place), Memphis, and Kansas City, it’s not even top ten in NYC and L.A. E.g., it’s a red-state show. I had not thought of it quite that way, but the contrast with Man Men especially brings out the contrast: Mad Men is about sophisticated NYC ad agency execs, BB is about Walt, a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, dying of cancer and selling meth, ostensibly to leave his family a financial cushion (since of course his paltry teacher salary would not provide that). Other main characters include Walt’s brother-in-law, a D.E.A. agent, and their two suburban wives (Walt’s wife goes back to work as an accountant for a small company in season three). No cultural elites to be found, with the exception that proves the rule of Walt’s old college buddy and his wife who are now wealthy and culturally sophisticated scientists and seem to exist in a different world. Their brief appearance in the show only underlines that otherwise, BB takes place in a world of middle-class (or below) economics and aesthetics. I doubt there will ever be “Breaking Bad yourself” Facebook apps to make yourself look like a ravaged Bryan Cranston (as there is for Mad Men).

We’re in the third season now (on DVD; season 4 just started), and I think the show has improved. The first season’s pilot began by throwing you into a shocking and surreal scene (of Walt and his meth-cooking partner, his former high school student, fleeing the cops in their RV on the highway), but that season settles into an in-some-ways predictable rhythm, exploring the ironies as Walt maintains his suburban life and job while also secretly cooking and dealing meth. It kind of seemed like a masculine version of Weeds with some of the same themes of bland suburbia and an illicit underworld beneath it, and an emphasis on life in recessionary times, a head of the household doing what she or he needs to do to maintain the home. But as the show has gone on, it’s become increasingly unpredictable, suspenseful, and sometimes almost David Lynchian in its everyday surrealism. In season three the Twins, two murderous Mexican assassins, are maybe a bit much… (they reminded me a little of the Russian giant impervious to pain in the Stieg Larsson novels). But in this season the show has reminded me more of the Sopranos, with more of a feeling that you don’t know where the show is going; and Bryan Cranston has definitely developed some Tony Soprano-like gravitas and moral ambiguity.

Then we also started watching Friday Night Lights (first season!). A few friends (and many critics) have been recommending it for years. This one is totally Red-State. Small West Texas town obsessed with high-school football; many characters devoutly Christian; big emphasis on the positive values of teamwork and belief in oneself and one’s teammates; as Sarah commented, a high school that seems almost entirely dedicated to producing male jocks and sexy women (so far there is next to no reference to classes or academic work). But, it’s really good… very gripping, and one of us went into this with zero interest in football, the other (me) quite little. Maybe part of what’s so good about it is what made ER so gripping, a fictional immersion in a very challenging and difficult job that brings a diverse group of characters together in a common obsession. Of course it’s disturbing (to me) that high-school football bears that weight, but once you accept the given that these students and the coaches are engaged in an activity of immense public significance with a lot at stake, with possibilities for heroism, triumph, utter failure, shame, life-transforming injury, it creates a world of vividly meaningful drama which you don’t get in your typical show. There are, as with ER, soap-opera elements too, but the center of gravity is the team, the games and the season. There’s also a pathos in the viewer’s potential realization that the games are not in fact of such true significance… who really cares in the end if the Panthers win the season? (Well, it definitely matters for the coach, one of the main characters, who will lose his job if they don’t win.)  But that pathos becomes part of the meaning — the sense that they’re all pouring their hearts and lives into this game, a questionable fiction into which so much is invested.

I’m curious to see how it develops and to what degree, for example, the show expects a viewer who “agrees” with the importance of high school football, as opposed to one (like me) who wonders whether it’s a great idea for the entire town to focus obsessively on the job performance of 16 year old kids.

One minor note — the show has some basic continuity problems so far.  The fill-in quarterback Matt Saracen gets beaten up badly enough to go to the hospital, then two days or so later has no marks on his face; the player with a spinal injury cannot yet even more his fingers; he has a breakthrough where he moves his hands for the first time, then a day or two later is wheeling himself around in a chair.  (I assume this is unrealistic.)

This is Your Life, Genocide Edition

I take This American Life for granted and often it can seem too familiar and predictable. Some of the more famous voices on the show grate on me, and the giggles, awkwardness and teenager-y cuteness can feel contrived; sometimes I just want them to sound like grownups.  Yet, not so rarely they come through with something pretty great that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere.  Jogging the other day I listened to this pretty amazing piece about a few episodes of This Is Your Life from the 1950s that brought the show’s usual approach to the challenging realm of atrocity survivors.  TIYL was of course a hugely popular show with an audience of many millions; it was hosted by Ralph Edwards, who also taught Sunday School and was one of those 1950s reassuring voices of a benevolent status quo.

The This American Life piece (btw, it occurs to me that the show’s name must be indebted to This is Your Life — duh, I guess) is about a couple of jaw-dropping episodes in which Edwards brought (under false pretenses — guests were almost always surprised) on the show, to be confronted by friends and associates from their past, first, a Holocaust survivor (according to This American Life host Allison Silverman, the first person to discuss her experiences in the camps on American television), second, a Hiroshima survivor.  The first one:

“This is your life, Hanna Bloch Kohner.”

“Oh no!”

Oh, disturbingly, yes.  In May 1953 Edwards surprised Hanna Bloch Kohner, whose apparent dismay at having her life story told could have had something to do with the fact that a lot of her life was a staggering nightmare.

“Can I say, Ms Kohner, that looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during 7 short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror and tragedy.  You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.”

Hanna Bloch Kohner is a Holocaust survivor, although the word Holocaust wouldn’t commonly be used for another eight years.

As Silverman goes on to explain, Kohler goes through the usual This is Your Life series of surprises, although the people she’s confronted with are not grade-school buddies or teachers but, for example, the friend with whom she went through Auschwitz.  The combination of Edwards’ patriarchally plummy tones, the 50s Hollywood game-show setting, and Kohner’s descriptions of her experiences in the camps (narrated in her pronounced Czech-Jewish accent) is just surreal and incredibly bizarre, like a George Saunders story, really.  Silverman’s best line is in regards to a promotional piece of jewelry presented to Kohner for appearing on the show; as Silverman quips, “it must be hard to design a Holocaust charm bracelet.”

The piece then discusses another TIYL episode, this one featuring Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto.  As part of his big surprise, he gets to meet… Robert Lewis, one of the co-captains of the Enola Gay, who dropped the bomb that killed on the order of 100,000+ of Tanimoto’s friends and family.  Awkward, to say the least.  Lewis seems like a wreck.  Apparently he and Tanimoto kept in touch after the episode.

The episodes can certainly seem from our perspective to be in unbelievably poor taste, but as Silverman suggests, they were important in bringing this material to a U.S. mass audience in a sympathetic and basically respectful manner.  And both Kohner and Tanimoto seemed to have been very pleased with their episodes, regularly showing visitors the 16 mm. video they were given as a memento (I believe Kohner actually toured with the film to raise awareness).

A clip from the Kohner episode of This Is Your Life is on Youtube, I’ve just realized, check it out.  Also here’s a Der Speigel article about Kohner.

America’s Got Aerial Dancing

Somehow it seems that whenever I turn on the t.v. I’m assaulted by Howie Mandel’s irritating goatee on America’s Got Talent.  I usually turn the channel ASAP, but the other day I got sucked into the Michael Lipari/ Ashleigh Dejon “aerial dancing” performance.  This completely cracked me up and I had to catch up a bit on their previous history.  A few weeks ago they delivered this performance.  (There’s a minute or two of introductory blather; the key part of the performance lasts from about 2:30 to 3:00.)

Sharon Osbourne’s little clutch at Howie’s arm, and then his painfully fake/ stilted performance of confused concern just before Lipari & Dejon Rise from the Flames, are priceless.  The whole thing is so… old-school.  The athleticism is admittedly impressive.

Here’s their most recent performance.  This one brings the aesthetics of the Victoria’s Secret “Angels” line/ an over-the-top bachelorette party to the kind of bad acting you rarely get to see on national t.v.  The effect makes me think of the figures on top of a wedding cake come alive and swinging around maniacally on ropes and ribbons, pausing every few seconds to emote in operatic fashion.

“We decided to go the direction of being a little bit more heartfelt.  Last time we shocked the judges, and America.  And this time… we want to touch their heart.”

“People often think we’re a couple, but actually we’re just friends and partners.”  Wait, is it possible that Michael Lipari is not straight?