Sunday Salon: Alert

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... is what I certainly haven't been this week.  Certainly not like this highly caffeinated stag.  (He's got his eye on you.)  This was a week of rampaging insomnia in the midnight heat.  "Tonight we should see a low - that's a low - of 85 degrees," our weatherman kept warning us.  So I tossed, turned, read a shocking amount, and saw the dawn from the wrong side several times.  And then, naturally, I fell ill.

But here's hoping that all that dull, restless discomfort is behind me now, and I can start doing things with my days besides barely making it through my obligations and then collapsing into fitful unconsciousness for much of the remaining daylight.

Friday night I went out to Old Town Alexandria for an evening of tasty sushi and rollicking political debate with my friend L, whom I have known since kindergarten. (How can you tell two people were raised in DC?  Upon first seeing each other for the first time in months, they spend hours arguing about national and local politics, all without ever actually disagreeing with each other.)  Old Town is gorgeously green and antiquated, and I renewed my dismay that this was only my second visit in a lifetime of living a half hour away. "Of course," said L, "you were raised in Washington.  Washingtonians never go to the suburbs." What suburbs I did find myself in as a child tended to be north, rather than south, because of the part of town we lived in.  So it was with no minor sense of triumph that I navigated the tangle that is the roads and bridges leading over the Potomac and into the southern part of town. This is an approach D and I used to make all the time, coming up from Chapel Hill, but the only times he ever did it uneventfully and accurately were when he didn't have me - the Washingtonian - in the car, urging pieces of truly bad advice on him.  By now I have decided that the northbound approach to the city is intentionally designed to confirm southerners' conviction that it is an opaque and labyrinthine metropolis with no urge to welcome them or explain itself.  Sigh.

On Wednesday, I head off to Los Angeles and reunion with D, although it looks like our plan to be there for the rest of the summer may meet with an unexpected disruption.  More on that soon, I hope.



Watching


This has been a week of much non-literary posting, as I watched WALL-E for a second glorious time with an audience I'm not entirely sure the makers anticipated, and dove back into Deadwood for the third and final season of lawful lawlessness.  I also sought out the sibyl and asked her to look forward in television (a variation of looking back in anger) to prophecy which series would please me the most in the coming year.   To no one's surprise, not a single network show made the list.  Unmentioned in the annals of the blog is my viewing of Leo McCarey's subtle and moving Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple who lose their employment and then their house, only to find their children can make no place for them in their new, "modern" lives.  I have a lot to say about the film, but it was devastating, so I haven't quite come to terms with it yet.



Cooking


There hasn't been a lot of cooking this week, what with the wacky sleep schedule and falling ill, but I have continued to make batches of my summer guacamole, which is so simple and adaptable that I could do it in my sleep. (This is a major claim from someone who clings to recipes for even the most familiar dishes.  What can I say?  I am a textual girl, a bookish sort.)

Here's how it goes:

  • Slice a clove of garlic in half and rub the sides of your bowl with the recently cut edges of the two halves.
  • Dice a small onion (use Vidalia for a sweeter guacamole, yellow for a spicier, or red for a more colorful), and toss in the bowl.
  • Cut four small ripe avocados (or two large ones) in half, removing the pits by whacking them sharply with a knife and then twisting the embedded knife until the pit pops out.  Use a spoon to remove the avocado halves from their peel, and plop them into the bowl.
  • Pour a generous splash of lime or lemon juice into the bowl (aim for about 1/2 to a whole lemon/lime's worth, depended on how liquid and tart you like your guacamole).
  • Add a pinch of salt (not too much, since the chips you will probably be eating this with will be VERY salty), and a generous pinch (about a half to 3/4 teaspoon, although you can adjust this to taste) of each of the following: paprika, cumin, and either cayenne or chili powder.
  • Use a fork to mash the ingredients together until the guacamole has reached a consistency you like.  I like it chunky, but if you want it super-smooth, you can use a food processor.
  • At the end, you can either serve the guacamole directly or add any of the following ingredients that you have on hand: rough chopped cilantro, finely diced pear, finely diced jalapeno with all the seeds carefully removed, a handful of pomegranate seeds. 

A few recipes have also caught my eye this week - all summery and fruit-filled - although I haven't tried preparing them yet:




Listening


I am still listening (home-longing in the heat) to Haligonian artists, between Matt Andersen's Live at Liberty House, which I just bought this week, and Meaghan Smith's The Cricket's Orchestra, another album filled to the brim with retro energy.

There is something so delightfully odd about the tone of this video by Meaghan Smith, which starts off seeming like a serious, intense-stare and elaborate-hairstyle period piece in the vein of Poirot and Mad Men.  But then the next thing you know Smith is dancing with an overeager mop (in the tradition of the Swiffer commercials), who just might also be able to play in her band.






Reading


I am just finishing, after many months of neglecting it, John Burdett's Bangkok 8, in which Sonchai Jitpleecheep tries to maintain his status as the only non-bribe-taking cop in Bangkok, and his colleagues attempt to convince him that his Buddhist restraint is in fact throwing the carefully balanced moral ecosystem of the city's justice off kilter.  His beloved partner has died in a particularly unpleasant way while investigating the crime scene of a murder-by-car-full-of-venomous-snakes.  His mother (a highly skilled lady of the night) is trying to open a brothel that relies on the chemical reality of Viagra rather than the imprecisions of natural arousal, and his boss is the co-owner of the venture.  A beautiful but culturally insensitive FBI agent has been foisted upon Sonchai for the run of the investigation, which increasingly implicates a wealthy American jade merchant with (it seems) some other tastes he likes to pursue while in Thailand.

On deck:

Magic Study, the sequel to Maria V. Snyder's very enjoyable Poison Study, in which Yelena (former poison tester to the Commander of Ixia) goes to her homeland of Sitia for the first time to be trained in magic.  Sadly, this means leaving her new beloved, the second-in-command in Ixia.  Their complex friendship was a big part of what made the first book so enjoyable for me.  We'll see how it goes.

The House of the Scorpion - I've read the first, three-page chapter of Nancy Farmer's novel, and here's what I know already.  This is a society that raises cloned embryos by gestating them in mostly immobilized cows - but don't worry, because the cows' "brains were filled with quiet joy from the implants in their skulls" - "Did they dream of dandelions?... Did they feel a phantom wind blowing tall grass against their legs?"  A man fears for his job and his future if his batch of embryos doesn't produce at least one success.  When a single century-old fetus does make it all the way to birth, he sighs with relief and begins the routine task of "blunt[ing] its intelligence."  "Don't fix that one," says his colleague quickly, "It's a Matteo Alacrán.  They're always left intact."  Has any author even been as efficiently intriguing as this?  Three pages, and she presents all these oddities with perfect clarity.  I can't wait to read the rest.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - That's right, everyone else is reading it, and now I will be too. This is lemming-reading, I guess.  But I hear great things about the first volume of this bestselling series, even from those who couldn't stand the later installments.  So off I go.



That's it for this week: happy World Cup finals, all, and a joyous Bastille Day later this week.  Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

The Quick and the Deadwood: "Tell your God to Ready for Blood"

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Several years passed - I'm not quite sure how - between the day I removed the last disc of Deadwood's second season from my DVD player, and today, when I pressed play on the opener of its third and final season.  It certainly wasn't from lack of affection for the series, which, warts and all, remains one of the most inventive coherent worlds ever created for television.

Looking back over the vastness of intervening time, I thought I might need a refresher in plot, so I gamely clicked on the second season summary.  Several minutes later, utterly unenlightened and desperately seeking subtitles, I sallied forth into the muddy, piss-soaked streets of Deadwood once more. Here's what I found:

It's election season, and campaigns have made odd bedfellows.  Not least of these is Sheriff Seth Bullock, pillar of granite-browed rectitude and widow-fancying hearth-throb, who finds himself uneasily and passively allied with lord of misrule (and bar-owner by night) Al Swearengen, who had spent the previous two seasons like a canny spider at the center of the web of greater Deadwood, waiting greasily for vibrations along his sticky strands of influence.   These two are the most dynamically entwined of former-enemies-turned-allies, but it seems everyone in town is either agitating for an office personally or using threats and promises to control the outcome. "I've got an idea," a friend helpfully says to one candidate, "Instead of running for office and tending bar, why don't you just tend bar and let everybody punch you in the face?".

Although most of the characters are embroiled in plots that cycle them rapidly through rage and despair, the centre around which the gyre of Deadwood widens and widens is always Al Swearengen.  This week he is grappling with sinister mining magnate George Hearst (future Senator and father of yellow journalism prophet and Rosebud-mutterer William Randolph) to determine which of them can exert the most complicated, subtle, and devious hold over individual citizens of the town.  Hearst, as an opening gambit, has arranged for his own employee to be killed in Swearengen's bar, presumably to have an excuse to come down on the establishment, filled with the mighty rage of the wronged. But then, oddly, he chooses not to follow up on the incident, telling Bullock that it won't be necessary for the sheriff's office to look into it any deeper.  It must be hard, Swearengen insinuates oh-so-kindly to the genial Hearst, not to see events like this as part of a larger conspiracy against you personally.  Oh, I have long since giving up on seeing everything as a conspiracy against me, Hearst cannily replies, recognizing only the top layer of Swearengen's irony.
"You ain't the centre of the universe, in other words," banters back our villainous hero.
"Exactly."
"Don't that lead you to despair?"
"No, sir."
With a charm born of utter honesty, a Swearengian reply: "You're stronger minded than I."
The best lack all conviction, while the worst - the poet tells us - are full of passionate intensity.

When I call him the Lord of Misrule, I don't mean to conjure up jolly images of surrealist jokers and Mardi Gras kings.  Swearengen is famously, hilariously, generatively profane  - at one point he demands the truth from the craven toady of a mayor E.B. Farnum with these words:
"I will profane your fucking remains, E.B."
"Not my remains, Al!"
"Gabriel's trumpet  will produce you from the ass of a pig."
But rather than being a fully Falstaffian figure of plump, rapscalliony good humor, his is a darker kind of chaos.  He holds Deadwood together in more or less sinister ways (his efforts at town improvement have led to more than a few corpses being subtly fed to the pigs in the dead of night), but his is not a leadership of coherence and calm.  Rather it is a dynamism that courts collapse, that never rests content with what is.  He is the centre that cannot hold.  The power that finds itself only by reacting to its own potential overthrow.

In talking to Hearst, Swearengen walks a thin line between asserting this centrality, this control, and convincing the more powerful man that he can be harmless and even supportive given the right incentives.  In the conversation, he draws a distinction between being "dangerous" - a short-term, destablizing threat - and being "powerful" - the long-view steadfastness of balanced control.  And of course, he claims to be the first (dangerous when riled by bodies on the floor of his bar, but easily appeased) without being the second.  This naturally leads us to wonder whether he is as powerful as he is dangerous.  Or is danger the trademark of the chaotician, the radical, the experimentalist, while power is only ever within the reach of the stable, the conservative?

It is one of the great truths of this show that its central concern is the Law - How is it built up at the frontiers of both nation and imagination?  How does lawlessness like Swearengen's drift inevitably towards political structure, and then subsume the Law into its own processes of misrule?  Now that Swearengen and Bullock have joined forces, the nature of power and moral structure is in the town is a muddier issue than ever.  Bullock finds himself asking whether his explosive temper (think what a rage you would have built up if you had been glaring repressively at people for two solid years) should disqualify him from running as incumbent sheriff. He is particularly unsettled by an episode in which he beats the slimy but sadly innocent Farnum within an inch of his life, thinking that the notorious gossip has told Hearst about Bullock's sexual entanglement with a now-pregnant widow.

As he is being pummeled by the sheriff himself, E.B. cries out for the law, and his wizened cook goes running across town without a second thought to fetch Al Swearengen.  This is his instinct for the political structure of the town and its system of justice.  Looking in on this tawdry scene, we have to wonder - what has the law come to in Deadwood?

Tivoracle: Most Anticipated TV

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Television is more interesting than people.  If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms.
                                                                                            - Alan Coren


Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
                                                                                            - Ann Landers


So... is television inherently misanthropic as a cultural invention?  Is it, as Debord argues in his Society of the Spectacle, the symbol of our increasing isolation - our atomization - in units of one that interact only with the media(ted) spectacle before us, rather than each other?  Is our best and longest relationship now with the television and computer screen?


I can't believe it.  Not least because TV still provides us with the sort of serial narrative that encourages the confluence of social debate - the sort of interaction that led to Dickens' novels being discussed avidly by all of London as each new segment was published, or to Tocqueville's assertion that theatre was an art form tailor-made for American society, because the intermissions threw spectators together in a democratic discussion of the play's ideas and merits.  Thus I have felt for a long time that the internet might actually provide my "Intro to Literature" students with a crash course in argument, close analysis, and the use of textual proof.  Send them off to any discussion board that deals with a show like Lost or The Sopranos, and they will find a Darwinian frenzy of analyses being proposed and tested against whether the details of the show itself support the theories.


Of course, Debord might say that this is proof of the triumph of the Spectacle - we think we are connected to others, but instead we are just addressing the Spectacle itself (talking about the show, through the internet), never escaping mediation for a sort of pre-capitalist direct social contact. ("The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images," says Debord, echoing the philosophical models set out by Alan Coren and Ann Landers, of course. Wall-E, as it turns out, is a portrait of a Debordian society.)  


But I say "Bah!" to you, Debord, if I am even recalling your densely aphoristic book correctly.  Don't be such a grinch. For you it is all authentic social interaction at one end of the spectrum, representation at the other.  And, to me, this has the ring of anti-theatricalism (and art-antagonism) about it.  Not all seeming is sinister.  And let's not invest too much confidence in the existence of some prelapsarian authenticity.


But I am running rather far afield from my purpose, and perhaps being a little unfair to Debord, whom I haven't read in several years, poor fellow.



I cannot tell a lie: I am something of a television junkie.  I watch a fairly wide spectrum of shows, although I recommend very few of them to friends.  And I have been known to abandon a show abruptly on more (giving up on Desperate Housewives when they implied - wrongly and irresponsibly - that teenaged girls couldn't get a prescription for birth control without parental consent) or less legitimate grounds (ending my devotion to the X Files on the very day I learned of David Duchovny's marriage to Tea Leoni).  Ever since D started to work in television, I have also paid particular attention to new programming, trying to watch a wide array of potentially gripping new shows, and bearing with the inevitable heartbreak of strong programming cut down before its time.


So what am I most looking forward to in the months to come? (Note that none of these come from broadcast networks.  Shame, networks, shame.)


A Washingtonian drama (gotta love the hometown intrigue) about a young analyst for an unnamed and amorphous government agency who discovers identical clues in the crossword puzzles of every newspaper, all pointing towards ... four-leaf clovers.  He's a code breaker, so naturally he thinks that this signifies our system of government - but if the leaves symbolize the judiciary, the executive, and Congress, then what is the fourth branch?  (And here I thought clovers always cryptically signified the Holy Trinity.  Clearly I am Dan Browned out, and need to update my conspiracy theorizing.)  And then, of course, the mysterious deaths start. The pre-pilot for this August drama is available on Hulu, and I found it more promising than polished - it feels like it wants to be an HBO drama, but doesn't have the balls for HBO's subtlety of narrative.  But I will be tuning in to see where it goes.
I'm normally no slavish devotee of Martin Scorsese, but I defy anyone to be indifferent to this Prohibition-era mobster drama that the director is launching on HBO. It's Steve Buscemi, it's a key writer from The Sopranos, it's speakeasies and rum-running in Atlantic City, for crying out loud.  And best of all in this best of all possible, possible worlds, it's Michael Kenneth Williams, who was Omar on The Wire. Resistance is futile.
I know that the foundation upon which this pilot was pitched was the success of The Tudors, but I have to admit that I never cared for that show.  My reasons are twofold.  First, it seemed to try unnecessarily hard to make the reign of Henry VIII trashy and melodramatic.  It is naturally both of those things, so why not be more historically nuanced and detailed in creating your world?  Don't strain at drama - build it.  Second, I can't stand Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Irish stunner though he is.  He is all regal petulance without any of the king's famous charm and intellectual heft, and I have always found him quite limited as an actor.  But I am very much looking forward to The Borgias, and here's why: 1) I'm not sure it is possible to melodramatize the history beyond its evident histrionics (so I hope the writers and directors won't strain themselves to try), and 2) in Jonathan Rhys Meyer's place I (blessedly) have Jeremy Irons. Not to mention Neil Jordan is helming the project....
I have just this to say to you:  Sean Bean.  Fantasy epic.  HBO production values.  And Sean Bean.  For me, the true title of The Fellowship of the Ring was The Heroic Struggle and Lamentable Downfall of Boromir, with Hobbitty Interludes and Wizards You Shall Not Pass.
 A boxing drama from the Executive Producer of In Treatment.  If that doesn't baffle you (or if it delights you) with its paradox, this might be a show for you.
All right, so this looks a bit cheesier in its characterization and production values than what we might dub the "HBO standard" for epic television, but I am finding it hard to defy the siren song of the spectacular cast - Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Matthew MacFayden, and Donald Sutherland - all of whom do cheesy shouting to the heavens so very, very well.  And who am I to cast the first stone?  I watch Legend of the Seeker.  (Don't tell anyone.)
The new show by the creator of The Shield takes as its subject a pair of unlicensed PIs.  And, in contrast to HBO's Bored to Death, these unlicensed PIs won't look exactly, uncomfortably like my partner D.  (Really.  It's unsettling.)
Zombies.  On the network that brought us the addictively churning, brain-gnawing conformity of Mad Men.  Need I say more?




And, in brief, lest I lose control utterly of the length of this post:




 Things I missed and need to catch up on
  1. Justified
  2. Breaking Bad
  3. Avatar: The Last Airbender


Returning and earning my devotion
  1. 30 Rock
  2. Friday Night Lights
  3. The Good Wife
  4. Glee
  5. Dancing with the Stars
  6. The Office
  7. So You Think You Can Dance
  8. Mad Men
  9. Treme
  10. True Blood