Television-related Parries
March 2009
Namaste, Dharma Workmen
What do the Lost characters mostly want these days? It’s not to get off the island. Increasingly, the island is just where they live and love. If anything, they’ve found home — or, rather, their home found them.
February 2009
24, Lost Get Soft
When life gets fast, unlike how it’s lived by most of us out here in the dark, loyalties are quickly superceded by new circumstances. This is not despite values but because of them. Such Darwinian churn is a theme shared by the very different Lost and 24 and so might just be a defining one for our times.
April 2007
Previously On
It’s a golden new age of submersive television drama. But which show is better, 24 or Lost?
February 2007
Recently with Charlie Rose
Peter O’ Toole is as charming offscreen as he is on — ah, his diction, his pacing, his unaffected yet perfect English and obvious delight in using the language with precision, music, beauty. And Michael Crichton: What a fabulous man, not just great in accomplishments but so personable and easygoing.
This One’s a Ten
I found Kiefer’s heavy breathing an increasingly unconvincing substitute for real tension, Tom Lennox and his poor proposals dull and dry, and the presidential assassination plot thread to be a grinding up an alley we’ve been up before in 24. But Day 6 Hour 10 has somehow turned it all around.
Style in Person
Is Neil Strauss’s The Game our generation’s On the Road or Electric Kool Aid Acid Test? Certainly it’s about extreme personalities on the edge of self-destruction yet leading a social revolution that may change modern society. And the characters travel around America somewhat frantically, with returns to their families from the foment of the group’s experiment.
December 2003
Bob Monkhouse Dies
Bob Monkhouse wasn’t ever really very funny, and if you tried to find him funny you ended up finding him sickening, but there was something completely captivating as well.
Television-related Photos
No Latmag on Television
And on the Trail
Mon 7 May ’12
“He was no longer so worried about becoming a man; he felt that to an extent he had become one. But in his heart he wondered if he would ever learn the language of men.” A study of Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell character, interspersed with quotes from Norman Mailer’s immortal short story, “The Language of Men”.
Mon 12 Dec ’11
Irit and I were discussing this regarding ET, which still feels contemporary: in arts, entertainment and style, it’s been Groundhog Day for 20 years. “Now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.”
Fri 15 Apr ’11
Behold, “The Book of Highdef” as told by Eric D. Snider.
Sat 7 Aug ’10
Saxondale tells The Sun how it is — an in-character interview.
Sat 29 May ’10
24 and Lost are dead. Long live 24 and Lost! From The New York Times and the Huffington Post.
Sat 17 Apr ’10
On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot, said Captain Kirk. It is a silly place.
Thu 11 Mar ’10
As I suspected, it looks like it’s all going to be previously on 24.
Sat 12 Dec ’09
The internet is... any number of silly things.
Fri 9 Oct ’09
The authoritative Mad Men blog, Basket of Kisses, interviews Elisabeth Moss, AKA Peggy Olsen.
Lileks riffs on Mad Men. “If you don’t watch Mad Men, and you think it’s some Austin-Powers view of the sixties full of madcap over-the-top cultural schtick – they’re smoking, indoors! They’re drinking, at noon! No.”
Thu 4 Jun ’09
Thu 16 Apr ’09
Dharma Initiative magazine ads circa 1977.
Thu 5 Mar ’09
Jason Hunter’s mad convoluted theory of the mad convoluted events of Lost.