Man, Animal

The BBC and Richard Attenborough do it again. This is not only fascinating, it's exquisitely shot and narrated. The message is rather incredible. To me, this belongs in the pantheon of heroic human deeds, next to--but perhaps somewhat less than--the battle at Thermopylae:

Where The “Black” Ends

I watched an episode [video] of the NBC program, Who Do You Think You Are, last week. As usual, it was fascinating to watch this exploration of American history as encapsulated through one man’s search for ancestry, even if that man is the famous Lionel Richie (Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah!)

I dropped in a few minutes in as Richie had identified his Great Grandfather who had married, at age 50, a 15-year-old girl only to get divorced about seven years later due to abandoning the now 22-year-old with child. This revelation didn’t sit too well with Lionel even after he’d been told this was the norm in the 1800s. Sigh. More on this …

Nevertheless, he continues the search into this particular man’s life and times. He discovers the guy, John Louis Brown, was a leader in a Tennessee fraternal organization known as the Knights of Wise Men. It seems this organization was an inchoate insurance company for black people, providing life insurance at a time when the recently-freed black people weren’t accepted in southern white society after Emancipation and the Civil War.

This part of the story seemed to sit better with Richie, especially when the consulting expert couched this organization in the magical terms of being an early Civil Rights organization. Suddenly the rake who’d married then abandoned a 15-year-old bride was recast as a leader in the black “community,” a most inauspicious role.

Sadly, Great Grandpa Brown seems to have come out a bit worse because in the end, the treasurer of the Knights of Wise Men turned out not to be so wise after all and made off with its treasury, effectively bankrupting the Knights and Brown. We find Great Grandpapa ending his life in an unidentified grave in the pauper’s section of the black cemetery he’d tended for a living toward the end.

One of the documents unearthed by the historians for the show pointed to the fact that Great Granddad may have been a slave owned by a man named Morgan Brown. In addition and rather shockingly, Great Granddads’ father is listed as Morgan W. Brown. Lionel’s happy feet stopped “dancing on the ceiling” by this bit of news, even though he “expected” something like it. Sigh.

Tracing back further, he finds that indeed Great Grandpapa Brown had started life as the slave son of a slave woman (wonderfully named Mariah) both belonging to a prominent TN doctor named Morgan Brown. In a diary entry, Dr. Brown recorded the birth to Mariah of a son named John. The historian assured us that this was highly unusual especially when it was also discovered that Dr. Brown decreed in his will, written sometime during Mariah’s pregnancy, that she and her son be freed upon his death. In addition, Dr. Brown stipulated that the baby boy be given an education, an anathema in pre-Emancipation America.

This Dr. Morgan Brown was the father of Morgan W. Brown and so either Brown (pere) was Richie’s Great Great Granddad or Brown (fils) was, and considering Brown (pere) was 80-years-old at the time, it was more likely that Brown (fils), 39 at the time, was the cock-on-the walk responsible.

So then, it turns out that Lionel Richie, mega-rich musician had slaves in his ancestry and that one of those ancestors was a white dude who’d impregnated a black slave woman. Not at all surprising of course, but here are some observations.

Lionel Richie obviously has white genes in his bloodline, looking at him. If you go back long enough in America as a black man, you will find slave ancestors. Black slave ancestors with white genes didn’t get them by laboratory experimentation as far as we know; “massa” and slave woman had some chickaboom chickaboom and out popped baby.

Further, the fact John Louis Brown’s mother was freed and that he was educated seems to point to a tender benevolence on the part of the slave holders or at least, to the absence of malevolence toward Mariah and John.

Knowing this, what surprises me is how Richie ends the ancestry search right there, where the “black” ends. It seems he’s simply not interested in knowing anything about Great Great Granddad and anyone else before in spite of the fact these men don’t fit the abusive slave owner role. “Why not,” seems a good question, one that only Richie can answer. But in my opinion, it’s rather ridiculous to stop your search for ancestors simply because the “black” ends.

The other observation I have is that of realizing just how uneducated modern (American) man is about history. It violates our modern sensibilities when we hear of men having children with 15-year-old girls and we reel from all the implications.

When the entire length of recorded human history is examined, such occurrences are indeed the norm. If an alien landed on earth to peruse and study our history as a race, he would deem our present-day society as an aberration vis-à-vis our past. We have been the way we are only for a very short time, and try as hard as we may, those drives  and attitudes don’t simply vanish from our gene pool.

Adverts

Or commercials are you provincials know them. As in: almost all US adverts suck rotten eggs. Luckily, the Brits are incredibly marvelous at producing imaginative and above all, ironic commercials.

So if there are any of you ‘Ad Men’ or women reading this (fat chance, I know), allow me to point you in the direction of the Top Gear ‘Best Car Ads’. Notice the almost effortless, simple, sometimes bizarre way these commercials transfer the need and want to buy via the TV.

Also: notice with what aplomb the accompanying descriptions simply introduce then with that light touch of Englishness, for lack of a better description, snarkily tosses it your way. Now go and do likewise.

Enough jibber jabber, go forth.

Same Old Song & Dance (With A Twist)

Ricky Gervais is not funny.

That is not to say he’s always been that way. Way back, in the original (and best) The Office era, his middle name was ‘hilarious’ then something happened. I speculate it could be when he got famous or when he sold The Office to American TV, but he became most assuredly not funny.

This diagnosis was confirmed beyond a shadow after I’d seen HBO’s Ricky Gervais: Out of England. That stumbling, diffused babbling of a show underscored it: the man’s no longer funny and I can forgive almost anything in my celebrities … but that.

And now, as if to seal himself into the unfunny tomb for eternity, Gervais puts pen to paper and writes A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist for the Wall Street Journal. Now as atheistic missives to the world go (one wonders why they’re constantly proselytizing—if nothing objectively and truly matters, why bother?) it’s a very different, i.e. smellier beast from Bertrand Russell’s. In fact, it’s terrible.

First, it’s not funny.

Second, it’s replete with threadbare atheistic tropes (“science can’t prove God’s existence therefore He doesn’t exist”, “I believe in one less god than you do,” “you don’t need God to be moral,” etc.) and that’s really tiresome. That someone who really cares intellectually—in other words, a real skeptic—won’t seek to do the basic work necessary to answer these Grand Questions smacks of intellectual laziness and worse, hubris. At the very least, a true skeptic will arrive at agnosticism rather than atheism (see Kant, Immanuel; also Pascal, Blaise).

However, the shocker of the article was a recounting by Gervais of his eight-year-old self rejecting theism and the existence of God within an hour of being asked “Why do you believe in God?” by his self-described maladjusted brother. Atheism: so easy an eight-year-old could do it in an hour.

How utterly ridiculous.

And how not funny.

Liberals Think They Know Everything

Serenity Now

The Betrayal Of Mystery

I simply have to repost this in its entirety because it exactly explains what I think about the finale:

The Betrayal of Mystery

posted at 1:04 am on May 25, 2010 by Doctor Zero

Note: the following includes spoilers about the finale of Lost.

If you enjoyed the finale of Lost, I’m not writing this to challenge your taste.  You have nothing to apologize for, or defend.  There’s nothing “wrong” with cherishing the fine acting and emotional resonance of its reunions and farewells.  For my part, I loved the early years of Lost, which I would happily have declared the greatest television drama of all time, in the moment when Jack’s season-ending “flashback” was shockingly revealed to be a flash-forward.  I absolutely hate what the show degenerated into.  I thought the plot of the finale was a stunning act of creative cowardice, which no amount of effort from the talented cast could redeem.  I offer these thoughts as a memorial to what I thought Lost was trying to be, and a critique from someone fascinated by the art of storytelling.

The most common defense of the finale, along with the formless mass of random events and dead-end plotlines the series became, is the assertion that only the characters truly mattered.  The plot was a bit of intellectual stage lighting, designed to illuminate them from various angles.  Personally, I think both plot and characters are essential components of drama.  Does anyone seriously think Lost would have been nearly as popular if it had followed the exact same characters, living humdrum lives in suburbia?

To excuse the empty “secrets” and arbitrary plot points of the show is tantamount to saying it only matters who the characters are, not what theydo. This is a profound contradiction of the philosophy expressed during the show.  Much was said about the importance of making choices.  The wizard Jacob explicitly states, in one of the last episodes, that his millennia-long existence has been shaped by his desire to give others a choice in determining their fates… but the characters, and the audience, are completely in the dark about the rules and consequences governing these choices.  Powerful forces, like the Smoke Monster, operate by utterly arbitrary rules, revealed very late in the game.  In other words, the choice being offered to our heroes is a blind choice… and how is that really a “choice” at all?

The audience was kept in the dark as much as the characters were.  This was coupled with annoying prods from living plot devices like Eloise Hawking, who were inexplicably certain about various arcane matters.  The central drama of the last season revolved around the Smoke Monster attempting to escape from the island… until he suddenly decides to destroy it instead.  What made him think he would be able to accomplish this?  What made anyone think his escape would destroy the world, beyond the assurances of completely mysterious characters who make no effort to explain what they mean?

There is little real dramatic tension in a contest with random rules and imaginary stakes.  The early seasons of Lost were gripping because we embarked on a voyage of discovery with the characters, exploring the dangerous mystery of the island by torchlight.  By the end, everyone was plodding back and forth across the bland expanse of that island, blind pawns in an ancient contest whose rules and outcomes they couldn’t begin to understand.  It might have passed for dreary existential humor in a bull session down at the college coffee shop: our only real choice in life is deciding whether we want to be white or black tokens in a game we’ll never actually play!  It’s a poor excuse for storytelling, though, and I find it melancholy to watch good characters fumble through a bad story.

I’ve got no problem with sorcerers, demons, and magic caves as elements of a heroic fantasy.  I do have a problem with a story that pretends to be something rational, only to drop such elements on the audience at the eleventh hour, to cover the embarrassing inability of the writers to finish what they started.  Not even the most satisfied viewer of the Lost finale can pretend the show began with an honest confession that its puzzles were random and insoluble.  A commitment was made to the fans, both implicitly through the scientific trappings of early episodes… and explicitly through interviews given by the producers… that it would all make sense in the end.

The show achieved its greatest popularity during the years when eager fans flooded chat rooms with theories about The Numbers, The Hatch, the island’s fertility issues, the “sickness”, the frozen donkey wheel, the “special” children, and countless other plot twists.  If the producers had stated none of these riddles would ever be solved, most would be completely forgotten, and some would simply be dismissed as sorcery, those chat rooms would have turned into ghost towns overnight.

It’s not merely a question of riddles left unanswered.  The show lied to its viewers, repeatedly.  Remember Juliet saying “it worked” after the atomic bomb went off, followed by the last season’s opening shot of a submerged island in what appeared to be an alternate timeline?  That wasn’t some sort of clever misdirection.  It was an outright lie.  The reason everyone immediately rewinds The Sixth Sense after seeing it for the first time is that it plays fair. It shows the audience certain things, with complete honesty, and the audience misinterprets what it’s seeing.  It’s the difference between pulling a quarter out of someone’s ear with sleight of hand, versus knocking them unconscious and stuffing a coin in their earlobe.  The kind of cheating indulged by the Lostwriters will cost them their feet, if they ever run afoul of the madwoman fromMisery.

What happened at the end of Lost is the betrayal of mystery.  Storytelling requires a commitment of trust between author and audience.  Lost squandered six years of that trust.  None of the plot elements from the first two-thirds of the story had anything to do with its resolution.  The end of the story came from out of left field, as if the Harry Potter series had ended with a cop shooting Voldemort dead.  Sorry about all the fuss and bother, Harry.  Guess that whole “Chosen One” thing was just a dead end.  You were still a great character, though!  Give our best to Ron and Hermione!

That final scene in the Church of the Non-Denominational Afterlife was touching, but it was almost a separate story from the ugly mess lurching to a halt between the endless commercial breaks.  Jack’s painful walk to his final resting place gave his character the dignity of a tragic, yet uplifting end.  It matters that the reasons he died, along with everyone from unborn children to Dharma scientists and unlucky French explorers, were pulled from the creative oven half-baked.  Too much of their collective story was left to our imaginations, and we aren’t the ones getting paid millions by ABC Television to write this stuff.

The parts I don’t mind scripting for myself are the wacky adventures of Hugo the White, as he teleports around the globe and tries to… subtly manipulate people into making the fateful journey to his mystic island.  “Dude, you should totally catch that flight to Sydney.  And, um… insist on an aisle seat, okay?”

I hate Lindelof and Cuse.

The Story Of Us

I’ve been engrossed in watching the History Channel presentation of a series titled America: The Story of Us. While I generally like these kinds of programs, I’m always a bit leery because if it is possible to revise and reconstitute the lessons gleaned from history, you can bet the liberal media will do so with glee.

After watching some episodes, I was puzzled to find that the series involved the government of South Africa! In what way exactly, I don’t know but here’s the interesting thing: the portrayals of black Americans seemed a bit “off” by which I mean, I could tell the actors weren’t black Americans and it suddenly dawned on me that the “blacks” were in fact South Africans.

The ultimate irony: funded (excuse me, presented) by Bank of America with coyly inserted historical vignettes disguising crude commercials—the Great Chicago Fire was really all about Bank of America, it seems—and blacks portrayed by South Africans, America: The Story of Us seems to be anything but.

I’d give the series, superbly narrated by Liev Schrieber, by the way, a 70% grade. I really dislike the idiot celebrities they gathered to provide ridiculous commentary (Al Sharpton and Sheryl Crow, really??) on subjects of which they actually really have no knowledge.

Get lost, LOST

And you too, you fucking dicks: Lindelof and Cuse.

LOST by The Lost

Hilarious take on LOST by someone who’s never seen LOST (except this, the last season) at this blog.

Laugh-out-loud line of the day:

Toothy Mobster finishes tying up Jin. After getting tied up Jin says thank you.  He must be part Canadian.

Hahahaha!!

Heh

The Goode Things

Mike Judge’s new cartoon series The Goode Family is a remarkable thing considering its very existence in our political climate. Judge does it again and I can only hope for its continued success in skewering those ninnies on the eco-Left.

As George Will states,

"The Goode Family" does not threaten Jonathan Swift's standing as the premier English-language satirist. But when a Goode child apologizes to his parent for driving too much, and the parent responds, "It's okay . . . what's important is that you feel guilty about it," the program touches upon an important phenomenon: ecology as psychology.

The fact this series even exists points, I hope, to the impending (and welcome!) death to the hyper-surreal Green Movement which has no stake in reality.

ON a completely unrelated note, in clearing out unused files from my computer I found this in a PDF.

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
iv.Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

This is of course George Orwell’s famous six elementary rules from his worthwhile and enduring essay, Politics and the English Language, 1946.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Smooth Operator

Tonight, watching a Frontline show about over-medicated children (a topic for another post, needless to say I am strongly against it), I was captivated—captivated, I tell you—by the narrator's voice.

It suddenly hit me. This guy has narrated a billion and one documentaries on a billion different TV channels and movies, and he does it so well, you don't know if you're captivated by the story he's narrating or the story itself. In fact, to show you his pervasiveness, this man's voice over was featured in The Kingdom's opening sequence (which was one of only two cool things in that movie, by the way).

I need to find out who this guy is so I can have him record my voice mail message! The guy (maybe the same one) who narrates HBO's Inside The NFL is also cool.

Update: Found him.

Mayweather

Man, no one can stop this guy!

If you're a boxing fan like me, you will no doubt know that Floyd Mayweather, who touts himself as the “best pound-for-pound fighter” in the world, took one more step to prove his boast by knocking out Ricky “Hitman” Hatton in the 10th round on Saturyday.

HBO, in an effort to play up the fight, had been showing a series of programs (Mayweather Hatton 24/7) showing Floyd and Ricky training for the upcoming match. Floyd was his usual ‘flamboyant,’ flashy self, throwing cash around like confetti. Ricky was much more subdued, though laughing at Floyd's antics.

I was caught in a true dilemma: whether to support Mayweather as the American or to support Hatton because (let's face it) Mayweather's an asshole. They were both unbeaten before the match which guaranteed a good fight. The added enmity of sorts also guaranteed a brawl and so it was!

Some years back, I bought a Pay-Per-View boxing event between Mike Tyson and someone. The someone won, in two or three rounds! What a let-down! From then on, I decided no more PPV boxing matches. I should have bought this one.

Hatton talked tough, but in the video snippets I saw, Mayweather skillfully slapped him around with some good jabs (goddamn, that guy's got fast hands!) then finished him off with some tremendous left hooks. Well, as they say, it ain't bragging if you can do it.

Here's to you, Floyd, you magnificent bastard.

A round-by-round precis of the match can be found here.

Chase And Sexes

David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, should be drawn and quartered. Over the weekend, I saw the last episode of the series in which nothing happens. After that many years of being invested, the asshole leaves the faithful audience with a black screen. What a gyp!

Anything produced, written, or directed by David Chase is anathema from now on.

Battle of the Sexes

Found this article about men and women arguing and why they do so differently. Near the end, one of the researchers calls it all stuff and nonsense:

“You can’t generalise about men and women. Cultural differences are much bigger than gender differences. You need to specify what culture and what community within that culture.” She is scathing of John Gray’s work, which she says “ignores the difference that context and subject matter make, and is massively generalised and exaggerated”.

She says that “it is intriguing to people that there are differences, but people use it as a prop”.

Agreed, to a point. Read the whole thing, it's quite interesting and may help you when your time to argue comes. If you're a guy, you know you'll always lose though, don't you?

Dexter's Race

Simply have to stop watching as much television as I do. There are some gems though: The Amazing Race is wonderful, although I can't understand where they dig up some of these contestants (one of whom's named Vyxsin, I shit you not) and Showtime's Dexter is wickedly funny, to use a TV Guide cliché. It's based on Darkly Dreaming Dexter,a book by Jeff Lindsay.