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Laugh-In With Yelling: Pardon The Interruption

As is the case with so many of  the things I like the most, I haven’t ever been able to say why I like the sports talk show Pardon The Interruption so much.

But I had an insight when I accidentally juxtaposed mentions of Laugh In and PTI last week: PTI is an opinion show that subverts opinion shows.

I can’t stand most staged pontificating, political and sports talk radio and partisan blogging.  To call this culture partisan is too timid. It is a culture that enjoys hatred; it is a culture where hatred delivers the pleasures of a sport and the comfort of a family. In the case of political opinion, it is a culture that actively stunts intellectual growth and disdains common decency, all in the name of its nasty little principles. 

And along comes PTI, where Kornheiser and Wilbon yell at each other all the time but also constantly mock, subvert, tweak, and goose their righteousness. Like Laugh In, they have running gags.

This, from the hilariously detailed wikipedia entry about the show:  “Kornheiser spent an entire week mocking the pronunciation of the planet Uranus.” 

We are flawed, grasping, goofy creatures. Sometimes, we transcend our limitations and arrive at something like truth. But it’s nice to be reminded that we’re usually just talking crap.   

Donkey Wrong

It may be impossible to parody donkey basketball because donkey basketball is one of the weirdest ideas ever implemented.

Added Thursday:  I post these things because I am somehow drawn to them and I just sorted out what I only sensed last night:  the pathos of the horse who had to be put down at the Derby flowed under this otherwise wacky segment. On the (to me) almost unmissable Pardon The Interruption on ESPN, the guys were talking about whether Congress should investigate horse racing and Tony Kornheiser who is against Congressional investigation into other sports, who enjoys horse racing, and who "is not a PETA guy," summed up the pathos in three words: horses can't speak.

2-Year-Old Donkey Called Up To Pro Donkey Basketball League

R.I.P Dick Martin

Rowan and Martin's Laugh In created unreasonably high expectations of adult parties.  The jokes were lame at the time, and age horribly, but the delivery was so much fun it didn't matter.  Dick Martin was one of those guys you just look at and start laughing. There was something giddy, and perhaps zen, about  him.  Humor surged inside him, and the jokes just surfed on top.   

Look what the A.V. Club has called it a cult classic

I was on record more than a year ago as saying that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang rocked.  Along with E's favorite, The Lion In Winter, it is a part of our very misanthropic Christmas.   (It should also be noted  that, like Chandler Bing, I do mist up over the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, which I own.)

Read the  AV club article.

Don't Trust Anyone Over 300: Rewatching "Miri" from the original Star Trek

I don’t think I’ve watched a full episode of the original Star Trek since the 1970s.  So when I downloaded some early Friday evening–E was visiting some friends–I was actually able to see them with something like fresh eyes. 

The oddest of them was “Miri.”

1.    Strange new worlds, my ass.

The crew happen upon an exact replica of earth.  Not “earth-type” planet.  Earth. As in “hey, look there’s Winona.”  Star Trek loved alternative history, the most narcissistic of fantasies. But also my favorite. The only question more interesting than “What’s next?” may be “What if?”

2. And the moral of the story.

It turns out that this version of earth was stripped of all post-pubescent life by a man-made plague, which resulted from an attempt to extend life.  Kirk is attacked by Grandma Addams. For guys in a spaceship, the Enterprise crew is strangely anti-hubris.

3. Selective linguistics.

Just as our language has evolved from Chaucer’s English so has “Grup” evolved from “Grown Up.”  All other words have remained stable for three centuries.

4    Kirk’s charms are even creepier than usual.

See absence of grown ups. The planet is inhabited by children who you would think would be even more feral than they are, given that their parents died horribly three centuries ago.  The eldest of these children is a girl named Miri. Since she is “becoming a young woman,” Kirk flirts with her to get information. Given the crisis everyone is facing, this is understandable. But then he has her clean tables and sharpen pencils.  Adding to the off-the-charts cringe factor are also some scenes with Yeoman Rand, designed by the script-writers to induce jealousy.  Yeoman Rand complains, “On the ship, I always was trying to get you to notice my legs.” Really? That was a problem?  To call the female crew members’ skirts short is to acknowledge that the top/loincloth combo was, in fact, a skirt.

5. The revenge of the set decorators.

On DVD, you can see–and confirm–some details that are positively Lynchian. At 23:38 note the window tableau:  a glazed, red-smeared harlequin bust impaled on a trombone; a strangely hoisted doll with mussed hair.

6. And yet. 

The characters are chuckle-headed but sympathetic; while the science tends to be a little elided, the plots follow an engaging pattern of problem, complication, resolution that reminded me of the Horatio Hornblower I read last year.    

Noble Savages

E pointed out that if we had watched The Savages before The Darjeeling Limited we could not have enjoyed The Darjeeling Limited. 

She’s right. Compared to the Savages, which tells the story of two adult children putting their father in a nursing home, the Darjeeling Limited feels just feckless.  People talk about a death, but no one grieves. People claim to be on a journey, but it feels like a prank.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes the Savages so good, but it’s easy to see when you compare it to other movies.

Compare the Phillip Seymour Hoffman professorial character to the Dennis Quaid professorial character in Smart People. The Quaid character, though no fault of his own, fits Pauline Kael’s definition of a caricature: a character with the responses built in.  Oh, I bet that curmudgeon isn’t such a curmudgeon by the end of the movie, dontcha know.

Watch the scene where Phillip Seymour Hoffman has his chin in a sling, And here you see what separates the Savages from a kind of adolescent, video game inspired moviemaking in which ratcheting up conflict seems to be the point.   

Watch the scene in the “nicer” nursing home parking lot where the Laura Linney character explains why she wants their father to be admitted, then Hoffman explains why she’s full of shit, and then reality chastens Hoffman.

I want to call The Savages grown up, but that’s like saying it has plenty of riboflavin.  It's better than that. It's funnier than that.

God, I hope I haven't overpraised it.   

And isn't Laura Linney the most underracted actress in America?

My Limited Understanding: The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited reminded me of someone I used to work with who would show me her ideas and when I said I liked one, she would say, “Really?” I was afraid to like the movie, because the filmmaker didn’t seem to like it. There was something half confused, half contemptuous, half-committed about it. Was this dark comedy or just mean? If you don’t quite believe in what you’re doing, is that satire? But then you get into the Beatles’ movie meets the Addams Family charm of the thing and you walk away thinking, that was an enjoyable movie.

Chip Kidd's The Learners: I Know, It's Just A Damn Cover, But What A Cover

I keep looking at the cover of Chip Kidd's The Learners: appreciating the thwock! of the Chris Ware line art; the nostalgic frisson of the image printed right on the cover; the cleverness of the angled, partial book jacket which obscures the character’s expression (and which thus gives the cover a punchline); the way the angled jacket invokes x-acto blades and, I just realized, Batman hideouts; the way the type on the jacket suggests the image it hides. This is the joy of seeing an object which has been completely thought through by a gifted practitioner. There are no inefficiencies here, no sputter of compromise, no smear of laziness. Maybe I just know too much about the design process to know how exceptional this is. 

Mets Commit Error

In Design Observer,  Michael Beirut starts an entry by broadly lambasting the templated nostalgia of current baseball park design. I was all set to argue with him: what’s wrong with nostalgia in a ballpark? where does nostalgia end and resonance begin? blah blah blah? (Yes, "blah blah blah "can be a question.)

But I realized that be was making a more subtle and interesting argument. (He realized the same thing and retracted his broader arguments in a comment.)  Beirut believes the designers of the Mets' new stadium got the particular nostalgia wrong. Instead of referencing someone else’s past—the facade quotes Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played until 1957–the design should celebrate the Mets’ own history. This team was born in the early sixties and triumphant in the late sixties,  so why not look for inspiration to the World’s Fair of 1964 and JFK airport, which were both in the neighborhood? I would go further: why not grab all the stylish optimism of their founding?   

Stan Getz It

Friends of mine such as Mo and Neal can do a better job of placing Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s Getz Au Go Go in its musical context than I can. I may like trash.

But I know what I hear and why I like what I hear and want to share my enthusiasm: I hear great, often playful delicacy and invention.  I hear music that embodies the same qualities I love in the graphic design of the time (the early 60s): a sort of effervescent restraint in the fizzing of a cymbal, a joy capable of irony in a saxphone doodle or a vocal line.