|
|
|
watching teevee
Wednesday, March 22 2000
One thing I'm learning about this home loan business is that it's never really over. Once you think you have everything done, suddenly the loan broker cheerfully makes yet another set of demands and you find yourself scrambling all over again. There's never a point where you just kick back and say "ah, I've done it!" And so it goes, until the loan is paid off, some thirty years from now. That's about the time when fresh wrinkle-free (but possibly acne-prone) adolescent replacement faces will routinely be grown in petri dishes, one of the many tangential services of the local 1-Hour photo processing lab.
I finally got to see the Simpsons episode where, in a reckless moment of macho bravado, Homer coats his mouth with wax and eats a super-powerful imported hot pepper cooked up by Chief Wiggums as part of a town-wide chili cook-off. Homer then finds himself stumbling through an inadvertant hallucinogenic vision quest depicted with flawlessly rich drug-savvy texture. What with the repressive cultural climate of the War on Drugs, this particular episode must be unusually controversial; this is indicated by the relatively few times it gets aired. I've seen broadcasts of the Gay Steel Mill episode a half dozen times at least, but tonight was the first time I saw any of the hot pepper episode, and I watch the Simpsons reruns every chance I get.
In other teevee watching news, I found myself sitting through a complete episode of Law and Order, and I was amazed by how good it was. It had obvious similarities to NYPD Blue, but I almost never make it through a whole episode of that show (or the X-files, for that matter). Not only was the acting in Law and Order exceptional by the standards of the broadcast medium, but the issues presented were far more complex than I'm used to seeing in any dramatic artform. Good and evil and right and wrong all co-mingled on a wickedly clever complexity of levels. Our hero, the prosecutor1, sorted out the issues, weighed them against his conscience and the political realities, and arrived at a compromise solution that, while not perfect, was the best attainable given the situation. In tonight's show, a couple of hot-headed cops "teach a lesson" to a foul-mouthed college white boy by dropping him off in Harlem at night. The white boy is immediately murdered, and the officers are held responsible. It's in the plea-bargaining where the drama and moral ambiguities really get interesting. Of course, I was pretty stoned when I watched this, so maybe I'm completely off-base here.
[REDACTED]
Kim and Sophie out in the courtyard. Sophie is between barks directed at a Federal Express employee.
"I think this Once" as an MP3 (400K) (sorry about the low volume of the vocals). By the Gus, January 1996, performed Feb. 2000.
1 I recall this actor starring as an honest (but conflicted) lawyer in an excellent (but under-rated) teevee miniseries which I watched faithfully six or seven years ago. It was set in the racist South of the early 60s and purported to be based on the diary entries of a black nanny.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?000322 feedback
previous | next |
