Category: Things I’ve Seen

I picked up a couple of Rushdie hardbacks in a sale for $5 each a bunch of years ago, and as part of my ongoing mission to read everything on my bookshelf I finally picked one of them up. I went for ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’. This is Rushdie on rock music and fame, following two characters who become huge stars through the eyes of a third who is their friend and a photographer. The narrative is constructed to echo the tale of Orpheus, but doesn’t stop there, blending in numerous mythological and magic-realist layers. There’s a huge amount of stuff to get your teeth into here.
Trouble is, it mostly doesn’t work. While I’m glad I stuck with it, I almost ejected from the book in its long first half about the youth of the main characters, in which Rushdie indulges himself in near-endless digressions about their relations and their pointed, literary foibles. It improves in the second half, as the main characters actually start doing things, and the parade of oddity kept me interested if nothing else.
It has the aura of a man trying too hard to be literary, and the subject matter is complicit in exposing this. Rock and roll (or, later, just rock) music is the opposite of the flights of fancy in this book, which are designed to be read through one’s reading glasses with a smirk on one’s face. None of it convinces, even for a moment, which is surprising as Rushdie is consort to the famous and has no doubt spent a great deal of time chatting with genuine rock gods.
The breadth of Rushdie’s vision here is unfortunately matched by a serious lack of depth. The alternate-world-of-rock Rushdie creates seems a weak attempt at Alan Moore, the weird intrusions from antoher world seem a weak attempt at David Lynch, and the supergroup he envisions seems unlikely to take the world by storm forever.
There is enjoyment to be had from this book; I was genuinely having a good time for the second half. But I don’t think I’d bother recommending it to anyone. Perhaps I need to dig out a copy of Midnight’s Children, which I remember enjoying immensely, and refresh my memory for Rushdie’s gifts.
But the question in the title does hang over me. Those Rushdie novels on my shelf have seemed less and less essential every year. Does anyone really care about his work any more? Is there any need to go beyond the Booker of Bookers and read the rest of his work? Inquiring minds want to know.

Over the past few months Cal and I have been working our way through Cracker, the UK series in which Robbie Coltrane’s Fitz is a gambling, drinking, smoking psychologist helping the messed-up police solve crimes. I haven’t watched most of it since the NZ broadcast in the early 90s. It has been fascinating, and sometimes painful, to watch as the wheels come off and the show spins out of control. In its first episodes, it was as fierce and confident as Fitz himself, spinning out complex plots with apparent ease and drawing characters with clear centres but deliberately obscuring their boundaries. Jimmy McGovern, series creator and principal writer, was rightly hailed for this work. I remember a time when every interview with a TV creator would say “I wish we could write like Jimmy McGovern on Cracker”. (Heck, I remember someone working on endlessly barmy NZ soap Shortland Street saying that.)
But it was Jimmy McGovern’s celebrated writing that ruined Cracker.
As it went on, Cracker became a show so enamoured with its own premise that it wound in on itself to breaking point. McGovern forced the characters through misery after misery, each time delivering bigger and bigger hammer blows. More shamefully, he would not release any character from a spiral of self-destruction; each of them rushed into their own failings with such heedlessness that it went beyond human frailty and poor decisionmaking, and became a ludicrous act of contortion.
Like the careful emotional weighting, the deft pacing of the early episodes also disappeared: compare the economy of storytelling in the first episodes, where major plot developments are introduced and resolved in 5-second sequences and two short lines of dialogue, with the laboured pace that had set in by the end of the second season.
The best Cracker story is also the precise moment when the wheels first slipped the tracks. The second season’s opener, To Be A Somebody, was an excellent story with Robert Carlyle’s killer drawn so very plausibly and a clear role for Fitz’s psychological expertise (which, in later episodes, acquired the aura of magic). Most shockingly, it saw the murder of one of the core cast, Chris Eccleston’s DCI Bilborough.
But McGovern couldn’t resist the temptation to pile it on. Not only did Bilborough die, his 2IC Jimmy Beck (who hero-worshipped and, it was unsubtly hinted, loved his boss) had made a crucial mistake that led to the death. McGovern steered the unlikeable and hapless Beck down into such a pit that he raped the remaining core cast member, Jane Penhaligon. Penhaligon became hardened, casually vicious and vengeful; Beck eventually committed suicide, laying guilt back on Penhaligon’s shoulders. And all of this, of course, served to make Fitz’s life miserable in countless ways.
Then McGovern left the series. There wasn’t much left for anyone else to work with by this stage.
If the decision to make Beck responsible for Bilborough’s death was where things first went wrong, it was the decision to have Beck rape Penhaligon that was the point of no return. The story was massively controversial in its day, and it still doesn’t read easily in terms of politics – the name of the serial, Men Should Weep, is a clear indicator of who McGovern is trying to indict with the story but it is hardly sympathetic to a feminist reading. McGovern himself calls Cracker the “first post-feminist drama series” and a rejection of political correctness. There is one unforgivable moment, a moment that I cannot believe any woman would have written with a straight face, where Fitz’s wife tells Penhaligon (who had been sleeping with Fitz) that “there was a poetic justice to her rape”.
So. Cracker. I loved it to bits fifteen years ago, and there’s still a lot to like now, but the problems rise up and strangle it. Fitz the character is so good at uncovering the motives of the murderers he meets; I wonder what he would have made of McGovern’s urge to so completely destroy the characters he had created.

Homicide: Life on the Street, the pre-Wire TV show of homicide cops on the job in Baltimore, has been one of my favourite creative works in any medium since I watched the first episode the night it was broadcast in NZ, back in 1994. It electrified me – a police procedural that didn’t focus on the procedure, instead using the pointedly mundane details of policework as a canvas on which to draw some multilayered and fascinating characters. There hadn’t been anything like it before.
But the later seasons of the show came through at a time when I was greatly disaffected with broadcast TV, and the series-on-DVD and download-off-the-net options were still years away. So I missed big chunks of season six of Homicide, and the entirety of season seven, which also turned out to be the final season.
A couple years ago Cal and I started watching Homicide again. It has taken us until very recently to make it right through to the end, and for me to see Season 7 for the first time. Its reputation preceded it: on the Wikipedia link above it is noted that “the seventh season is widely regarded as the weakest…” and that without Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton anchoring the cast, it had Jumped The Shark. When Cal and I reached these discs I warned her, don’t expect much from these ones. Partly I was warning myself too.
Well, turned out I shouldn’t have been so worried. Even poor Homicide is great TV, and this season well and truly exceeded my expectations. It was a particular pleasure to have no idea where the episodes were going, and to be genuinely shocked by some of the twists in the tale. The high points are presumably well-known to Homicide aficionadoes:Shades of Gray, in which a riot leaves a bus driver dead; Kellerman, PI, in which an old member of the squad stirs up some trouble; Lines of Fire, a whole episode devoted to one nailbiting hostage negotiation.
What surprised me though was how much forgiveness I felt towards the derided aspects of the show. Detective Falsone, the cheapskate Italian sleazeball; Detective Stivers, who gets nothing to do all season except sit around the squad room and make snide remarks; and especially Detective Sheppard, the tall and beautiful man-magnet. The way the show handled Sheppard particularly surprised me – first of all, she was played straight as the beautiful woman coming to work in the department and getting hounded by all the men. There was something fresh in the fact that every single guy in the show had an eye on her – normally shows settle for triangles, but this just went all out and portrayed its male characters as clueless hound dogs.
Then the show took a left turn and Sheppard was on the receiving end of a vicious beating. This cast a long shadow over the remainder of the season, as all the characters discussed the events, whether Sheppard had been at fault, and what it meant for having women on the job (but usually men only talking with men, and women only talking with women). I was also pleased to see that while they let Sheppard reclaim her job, they never let her off – at the end of the season it was still up to the viewer whether or not she’d been at fault, and whether women are a liability because they can’t physically intimidate a lot of people.
It would be overstatement to say gender was the season’s theme, but gender was definitely on the block for examination. Since season one, the female contingent in the squad had grown substantially. Behind the scenes this was due to pressure from the networks who wanted to get more women into a male-dominated show, but in s7 the producers took this enforced change and interrogated it. If there are women on the job, what does that mean for everyday life? Sheppard’s experience was one way this was explored. The otherwise pointless Ballard-Falsone romance makes sense in this light too, because if you have mixed genders on the squad then you will get romantic entanglement and all that entails. (In a weird sense, the addition of Gee’s son to the squadroom even fits in to this theme, because family politics and gender politics cross over in some ways.)
The real centrepiece of the season, of course, was the saga of Tim Bayliss, the fresh-faced newbie in season one episode one now jaded and facing the conclusion of his own existential journey. What happens to Bayliss makes sense of the loss of his old partner Frank Pembleton; without Pembleton’s anchor, he spins outwards, reinventing himself over and over and finally breaking apart into nothingness. Kyle Secor sells this beautifully, unfailingly generous with the camera and courageous in what he gives up to the performance. He’s not the star of the series, there isn’t one, but his experience is what you take away from the ending (and its coda in the Homicide: Life Everlasting TV movie).
So with all this going for it, I can easily forgive s7 its weaknesses, its too-neat revelations and occasional forays into TV-typical murder mysteries. The heart stayed strong through this season. Don’t skip it – watch Homicide right to the end. It has many rewards. I’m delighted I finally got to see it.

I blogged about this before. It’ll be gone soon, but while it remains: Big Bird singing at Jim Henson’s memorial service.

Following the Young@Heart stuff, I was reminded of something else I’d been meaning to blog for a while.
A few weeks back I stumbled across some videos on YouTube from Jim Henson’s memorial service in New York, from 1990. I watched them with my heart in my mouth – these were moments I’d heard about years ago but had never seen. Henson was an inspiration and an example to me when I was a kid, and he is even more so now, and the story of his memorial always seemed to sum up his legacy: open to the public, full of performances from friends and Muppets, equal parts laughter and tears.
So I finally got to see Big Bird doing “Being green”. I made it through the whole song without losing it, but right at the end, Big Bird looks up and says in a quiet voice, “Goodbye Kermit”. That tipped me over. So sad.
There were many other great moments – Harry Belafonte doing “Turn the World Around” was a highlight – and I was eager to share them. But I waited too long, for all of those videos are now gone from YouTube. It bothers me a little – surely Jim Henson would have wanted his memorial out in the public domain? – but it seems silly to make a cause out of this.
Simply mark this, that the internet is a big and wild place and you will certainly have the chance to see this memorial some time in the future. When the chance comes, grab it. And maybe flip me an email so I can give it some linky…
(Also disappeared from YouTube: Henson’s wonderful Time Piece short. If you get the chance, watch that.)

Watched Young@Heart the other day, the doco about the elderly choir who do rock songs. It was great. Not often you walk out of a cinema feeling more grounded than when you went in, but this does that.
Not from the movie, here’s the choir doing Nirvana’s “Come as you are”:

Also not from the movie, the choir singing with David Byrne:

And this one from the movie, the bit that turns a Coldplay song into a genuine heartbreaker.

Watch this movie.

So, does anyone out there in internet land remember this?
From 1997 to 1999, NBC broke new ground by webcasting a spin-off of the acclaimed show, Homicide: Life on the Street. It was called Homicide: Second Shift, and had its own cast of characters using Photoshop to get its characters into the same sets and locations as the TV show. Sometimes TV characters guested on the web version; occasionally web actors had cameos on the TV version. There was even a full-fledged crossover, the episode “Homicide.com” in the final season, which started on the web, had its second part on TV, then resolved itself on the web.
I was aware of Second Shift when it aired, but didn’t have the net access to engage with it at the time; and NZ’s broadcasts of Homicide were hardly in synch with the US broadcasts anyway. So it slipped by me.
I’m wondering if anyone out there remembers Second Shift, and particularly, if anyone can access copies of the material? It doesn’t seem to be included on any of the Homicide DVDs, even the big complete set. Surely it can’t be lost forever?
(I already posted this on the hive-mind of pop culture that is RPGnet’s Other Media forum, but garnered only tumbleweed. Help me, internets!)

Cal and I have recently been preferring sitting at home watching a DaViD, rather then going out to a fillum, partly because the range of fillums on offer has been uninspiring and partly because a David gives you a $2 entertainment as opposed to a $32 entertainment. Or, in the case of a borrowed David, a $0 entertainment as opposed to.
Recent Davids watched:
Into the Wild (2007)
Ravishing to look at. Dude abandons family, lives in a bus. Feels a bit too sure of itself for my taste, but chunks of this film have stayed with me.
The Notebook (2004)
Pleasant love story with some effective silly weepie moments. Works entirely due the chemistry of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, of which there is plenty. Best for when you’re in a forgiving sort of mood.
Raising Victor Vargas (2002)
Nervous, sweet little film about some teenagers learning a little bit about themselves and each other while they fall in love. More subtle in its characterization than you’d expect, so it grows in the memory.
Great Expectations (1998)
Wildly off-kilter but highly enjoyable updating of the Dickens classic, with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow being surprisingly not annoying as director Alfonso Cuaron barely holds the film together around them.
Bella (2006)
In New York, a chef and a newly-fired waitress engage in a sort-of romance as she comes to terms with the fact that she’s pregnant and he recalls a past mistake that haunts him. A great film, although a self-conscious one. [Cheers David for reminding me of the title for this one!]
In other David news, it was announced yesterday that the patron of this blog is engaged to be wed! Congratulations and felicitations to the happy couple.

And while I’m talking comics, I want to give a shout-out to these great ads: the Throaties Find Your Voice campaign. They appear mostly in bus shelters, and what I love about them is they fit this presentation better than any other ad I’ve ever seen in the space – from a distance, they’re bold and eye-catching and present a mystery that can only be solved by getting closer, i.e. while you wait for the bus. Usually the advertising on this space works only to be seen from a distance, but this actively engages you from a distance and gives you a reason to stay engaged until, and while, you’re close. What’s more, the way the image is constructed from colour dots like an old comic reinforces the message by clearly indicating the scale at which your brain should be processing things, while adding in the message that the product is reliable because its been around a very long time. Its just very, very clever stuff.
99% of advertising makes me grumpy; this series makes me happy. Nice one, Toby Talbot et al.