The Glamorous "Life" on the Discovery Channel

There was a Fergie song a few years back called "Glamorous" in which she spells the word glamorous and the refers to it as "the flossy". Perhaps this is her Gramma's friend Flossy, a hip elderly lady who wears bangles and bedazzled pants suits? Alas, no; flossy means "flashy, showy", as the Urban Dictionary will tell anyone who asks.

So Fergie tells us that her life appears flossy, but that she still eats at Taco Bell. She's a regular person with a seemingly glamorous job.

I watched two hours of the "Life" series on the Discovery Channel last night, and it made life in the wild seem extremely flossy. It was one stunning beauty shot after another of reptiles with Stretch Armstrong tongues, a female ostrich running (unsuccessfully) for her life, tiny frogs hurtling down cliffs, and fish, basilisks and Western Grebes dancing on water (not together, though they'd make a great inter-species dance company; probably get a lot of grants with that angle).

Anyone who's ever gone camping or walked within two hundred feet of a standing body of water swarming with mosquitoes can tell you that life is not flossy. "Life" is, but life isn't. It smells. It's dirty. It eats at Taco Bell. Anywhere there have been people -- and if you are there and if camera crews are there, then there have been other people there -- there are people-remnants, plastic wrappers or bits of toilet paper or initials inked on rocks or rock cairns or (and especially) footprints. To take pictures of the wild, you might have to frame out your Aunt Flossy (she booked the Alaska trip with you, of course; she collects pictures of wildlife and flirts with the young guides).

"Life" makes everything clean and precise. It's fascinating and informative and I very much enjoyed it, but it's also a Glamour Shots version of these creatures. They're wearing too much lipstick and posing with tilted heads in front of a pastel background, which is to say that the lighting is always very bright, the shots are very sharp, and the narrative is very clear. Nothing is chaotic or frightening or dull or matter-of-fact. Animals running for their lives look picturesque. You cannot feel the terror and the bursts of cortisone and smell the dust and sense the hot breath. The animals are presented in extreme closeups and in slow-mo. Slow-mo makes everyone look cool. It's the cheapest shortcut to glamour; it makes Steve Buscemi look like Steve McQueen. The whole thing is like the Wild West as interpreted by Sergio Leone: beautiful, visually and aurally precise and striking, and utterly untrue to life.

Amidst all the Oprah-narrated HD beauty, the most striking bits of the show are the few minutes at the end of the program when you see the crew on site shooting these incredible images. This is one scene: a cluster of cameramen perched for weeks next to a dusty, muddy waterhole where a poisoned water buffalo is mercilessly harassed by a pack of taunting Komodo Dragons. The cameramen stalk both the buffalo and the dragons; they stand and move the camera when the dragons run off. They watch the water buffalo get bitten by a Komodo Dragon, and they know what the buffalo does not; that he's been fatally poisoned and will linger for weeks. They settle down next to the Komodo dragons to watch him weaken and die.

I am surprised that a pimp would be manipulative

"Nightline" producers and I must read the same newspapers and magazines, because they frequently air stories about things I just read about somewhere else, like when they went to visit some of those isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle that had been pictured in Scientific American via info on Survival-International.org.

So I wasn't surprised when they did a story on how the economic crisis is affecting legal brothels in Nevada, since I had read a good article about this very thing in the LA Times at the beginning of this month.

But unlike the LA Times, "Nightline" did a crap job with the story, since it came off as more of a publicity piece for the particular brothel they profiled. The ladies are so nice! They provide a "stress relief" service! Business is fine, mostly! The Madam is a shrewd business-woman with a Suze Orman haircut and a black pantsuit who just happens to take her vicious German Shepherd with her everywhere she goes!

And Neal Karlinsky, who is usually a good correspondent, was practically giggling through the whole thing. Geez, Neal, get a room! You seemed pretty amused with the orgy room, and it is 60% off these days.

Nightline's website claims that this was a story about how "desperate woman turn to world's oldest profession during economic downturn", since job applications are up at the Mustang Ranch. But the story was really more of a PR tour of the facilities, and that's not news, that's salesmanship.

Which brings me to my pimp problem. It was a madam in this case, but a madam is just a lady pimp with better marketing. Madams need a more pimped out name, like bertha. Like "Mess with me and my Bertha will break your legs, sucker!" Tough, like that.

So Nightline followed pantsuit Bertha and dog to the airport, where she and a doppleganger colleague (matching pantsuit) greeted a new recruit, a lovely young lady who applied to the prostitute job over the internet and, good news! she got the job! The Berthas swooped in as she came down the elevator so common courtesy would keep her from ditching the whole thing, and the Berthas had a black limo waiting to take her to her exciting and glamorous new life of having sex with strangers for money. Limo = class.

Nightline also showed us how the Berthas were kind enough to supply her with her own antibacterial soap and monthly HIV and herpes tests. Glamour!

After I watched this story, I got really incensed with the airport pickup and the limo and the black pantsuit. "What'd I do?" asks the pantsuit, but really, Pantsuit, you are part of the shenanigans. Don't act all innocent. That whole charade is a psychological snare to gloss over the nature of the job. It's like being interviewed in a fancy conference room where the free coffee flows when in actuality you're going to be working two floors down in a cubicle in the basement for 50 cents a mug. Only worse, because you have to have sex with lonely truckers.

I was so mad at Bertha I and Bertha II until I realized that they are pimps, and I can't be mad at pimps or Berthas for being smooth-talking and emotionally manipulative because that is what they do. That's how you keep the ladies down on the farm (ranch, in this case).

My mistake, Bertha! But "Nightline", boo to you. You totally got teased and released.

Jan Brady's Hideous Deformity

Jan Brady brought the angst and self-hate like no other moppet on TV. She was the Jacques in the sunny SoCal world of the Bradys, the reminder of the real world of teenage dismay and inward rot in the midst of all the hair-flipping hijinks. We, as sitcom viewers, did not enjoy the likes of this kind of adolescent character assassination again until that fun-free dullard Vanessa Huxtable. Thanks, Brady writers!

In the classic George Glass episode, Jan loses the affection of yet another human male to her lovely and charming sister Marcia, which naturally causes Jan to analyze herself to try to answer the existential question, "Why am I, Jan Brady, so replusive?" She thinks she finds her answer in the mirror, where she finally notices the hideous deformities on her face. Freckles.

Until I saw this episode as a kid, I had no idea that freckles were supposed to be gross. It had never occurred to me that I might want to try to rub them out with lemon (as Jan tries to, because Jan is no scientist), or at least duck my head in shame and load up on the foundation. But I knew, as everyone knew, that Jan's freckles were not the problem; Jan's black hole of a personality was the problem. Even fictional George Glass probably dumped her sooner or later.

Then one day in middle school, my lab partner suddenly said, "It'd be really cute if your freckles were just on your cheeks instead of all over your face."

Oh my lord, it's true! People think freckles are ugly! Fortunately, though, I thought my lab partner was pretty damned silly, so I decided to keep my face just as it was.

Since then I have learned that black & white photography really brings out the freckle goodness in a face. Had Jan seen herself like this, she would've immediately drowned herself in the toilet.

The middle photo is b&w with a blue filter -- look, just be glad I didn't give you the old High Contrast Blue Filter, because you might've been moved to call the infectious disease department. The right photo is with the red filter -- freckles gone! Alien perfection achieved! Jan, come over here -- I've found a solution... and send over Clark Tyson!

Jan, Jan, Jan. The other Brady kids had positive identifying characteristics; look where Jan fits in:

1. Marcia - perfect
2. Greg - self-confident
3. Peter - happy-go-lucky
4. Jan - self-hating
5. Cindy - plucky
6. Bobby - Bobby

Geez, Jan, way to deliver the schadenfreude. If there was nothing in a given episode to further erode Jan's self-esteem, it was a wasted thirty minutes.

But thank goodness for her and for the lovely Eve Plumb. Jan brought the real human doubt and the insecurity that balanced the show's cheeriness. Jan made regular kids feel better about not being Bradys. Jan made the ordinary superior.

But, seriously -- what was the shit on her face?

"Deadwood" (2004-2006)

I heard the charmingly no-nonsense David Milch interviewed on The Treatment; at Elvis's prodding, he did talk a bit about his father's rough-and-tumble and not entirely legal background, but he never did explain what gave him the balls to pitch a show about the Wild West in which the chief scumbags talk like Shakespearian seconds and the entire cast revolves around a 60-year-old English actor who isn't exactly known for his good looks.

Sounds great, Milch. We'll clear a place in the schedule for it right now!

My friend Killian insisted that "Deadwood" was a great show long before I got around to watching it. She forced me to watch part of an episode with her once, and of course it happened to be the most fellatio-heavy show in the entire history of the series. Good one, Killian. No thanks.

But fortunately I gave it another go and rented the DVDs, and I cannot believe how attached I've become to the rogues and murderers and Indian heads in boxes and corpse-eating pigs and delicate ladies stranded in the sea of filth that is the town of Deadwood. That 60-year-old Englishman turned out to be my most deepest love on the show, a character who as vile and noble and sexy and repulsive, lovable and cruel as... let's say Regan and Goneril as played by Lear. A bossman's gotta do what a bossman's gotta do.

This show is a miracle of casting and of stellar writing and plotting. And don't miss the gorgeous opening credits and theme song; the love and care that made this show extends to all corners of the production.

"Deadwood", huh? Sure, Milch. Sounds great. We've also got a pilot ready for a Custer-meets-Chekov show in which Custer tries to sell his house to Indians. And we've got a great Watergate-meets-Jane Austen show in which G. Gordon Liddy is played by Hugh Grant, and Nixon can't choose between his love of hotel theft and his devotion to his shit list.

(Bonus post convergence: 20 years after his turn in this dopey and appalling "Red Dawn", Powers Boothe shows his real stuff by swaggering around Deadwood as Cy Tolliver, who is, let's say, the Regan and Goneril as played by Gollum.)

Ed Begley Jr. Spans Time

If you watch Battlestar Galactica Classic on Hulu right this minute, you will see Ed Begley Jr. flying a raptor or some such, and then you will see him thirty years later during the commercial breaks, starring in a DirecTv commercial.

That's a pretty neat FTL jump of your own there, Ed!

I am mortified by Dancing With the Stars

I was flipping channels a few days ago and landed on Dancing With the Stars.

Why? Why this show be like this? I no speak good after see show.

I understand the premise of this show to be that we want to watch professional dancers yell at non-professional celebrity dancers, who then dance in front of a trio of loud-talkers who give them points, and also take them points away as punishment for bad rumbas. I don't know who these judges are, but they are very animated people who seem to care deeply about dance. They are frightening.

I think watching celebrities fail at something difficult in an artistic field that is not their own is supposed to make me feel good, or vindicate my non-celebrity status, or maybe, to be more charitable and glass-slipper-half-full, make me identify with the participants, who it seems are just regl'r folk like me who take adult education classes. Except that their adult education class is televised, and they are forced to sit next to Marie Osmond. (I know that was a previous season, but I saw clips of her fainting and her hair and her big face and her chipmunk cheeked demon dolls on the news at the time and I won't forget it any time soon.)

Whatever this show is supposed to make me feel, it primarily makes me feel like hiding my face under a blanket. If I can still hear the show from under the blanket, it makes me want to press my face into the blanket until I suffocate and no longer have to hear the stress and the mugging and the pleading for votes and the clinging -- god, the clinging! -- in my dreams.

And the outfits.

I am so deeply mortified by the skits that the couples do before and after and, god knows, during their dances that I can't believe the producers manage to get people -- people who have accomplished some something in life! breathing people, with souls! -- to make those faces and paw each other and act like the least talented middle school drama troupe ever formed via a sign-up sheet in the cafeteria.

Why the mugging? I've sat and watched ballroom competitions on PBS, so I know from the tyranny of dance, and I'm familiar with the kabuki theatre of the lipstick and false eyelashes and the Vegas theatre of the showgirl outfits, but I swear I've never seen those people mug. They are all business off of the dance floor. Mugging would muss their makeup. Mugging would take muscle energy away from their lines.

Yet it is required on this show, even from perfectly dignified athletes who are game enough to give it a go with the mock-sexy faces and the exaggerated pouts, but god, I wish they wouldn't. Does being a celebrity willing to go on this show mean that you are not permitted to retain any dignity at all?

The outfits. Professional dance ladies, why butt cleavage? Why cutouts to expose hip bones? Why spangles and ribbons on bathing suits? Why the entire spinal column? The men cannot button their shirts because they must let their shaven, spray-tanned chests say Hello! to the world, I understand, but why no buttons at all, ladies?

I am mortified. No wonder I can't dance.

Lisa Ling Has Balls of Steel

Let's say you're visiting the inmates at animal prison, otherwise known as the zoo. The animals stare dolefully back at you: "We're innocent!" they say, but you know better. "Sure," you say, "everyone here says that. Tell it to the flamingos."

You enter the monkey house and cover your ears. The monkeys are the angriest inmates in there, and they are angry at you because they think like you do. They know that a mere branch or two of the evolutionary tree stands between your side of the glass and theirs. They are PISSED. They scream and bounce off the walls and set up a racket that strikes deep in our homo sapien souls, rattling us to our vertebrate bones with reminders of our African origins and the sounds of the jungle or opposite riverbank or savanna all around us and no walls to keep us in.

That's also the sound of the television show "The View", and the talking head news shows, and "20/20" and so much more. It's the sound of much of television these days, where everyone has both an asshole and a plethora of opinions, and it's hard to tell the difference. The loudest opinion wins. No one feels the need to back their opinions with facts or experience, because it's what they think and they aren't afraid to say it because they are honest. "Honest" is the new "Ignorant".

You can't run a nation on opinions, or it leads you to start disastrous wars and ignore people baking in the Superdome and act with impunity in regards to the Constitution. When citizens learn to value their opinions over their learned judgment, they forget how to vote with their heads. They vote, instead, with their assholes.

Lisa Ling is a young journalist who started as a teenager, reporting for Channel One. That led to her gig on "The View", a show that hoped to give women at home during the day intelligent voices to listen to. It was a show that wouldn't talk down to them. Somehow it instead became a show about screaming over each other and talking about being rich and famous, which represents none of the people watching but provides them with WWE-style entertainment.

Ling was the twentysomething champ-een back when "The View" hoped to represent different generations of women. She was, and is, smart and articulate and funny. She's comfortable in her own skin. She notices the world and its problems and thinks she can do something about them, be actively engaged. She didn't belong on that show.

She left and returned to journalism. I've set up a TIVO wishlist for her name and have thus caught her National Geographic specials on a maximum security prison and another on North Korea, and her Oxygen special on "Who Cares About Girls: Sex Slaves in India".

Watch her work. Seek it out and watch it. I don't tend to eagerly sit down to watch something called "Sex Slaves in India" because of the crushing reality of how fucked up the world is, and for girls and women in particular. But Ling's approach makes it not on bearable but edifying. She's fearless. She stop on a prison yard full of warring gangs and interviewed the gang members. She asked North Korean families about the Glorious Leader. She followed along on raids that rescue girls impressed into sex work from their brothels. She's a young Asian American women who fits in everywhere she goes and can talk to anyone about anything. It works because she's smart, unselfconscious, and genuinely curious. She listens. She probes. She challenges. And she doesn't just seek problems, she seeks solutions. Her reports show us the people who are fighting back, like the Nepalese doctor who performs cataract surgery on North Korean citizens with the permission of the Premier (thus showing the Premier's generosity, of course).

Ling had a chance to have her head turned by the easy money, easy fame, and easy work of "The View", but she wanted to talk about other people instead of herself. How terribly old-fashioned of her! How Bill Moyers! Why don't she and Anderson Cooper has a little "look at us being journalists and going to war zones and not just reporting spin" party in Baghdad or the Gaza strip! And then they could play a round of "The Mole" like the little smartypants they are!

Lisa Ling gives me hope that we aren't really a nation of people with our collective head stuck up our collective asshole, and I can't think of any higher praise in 2007.

Robert Sean Leonard on "House"

I made the mistake of seeing "Dead Poets Society" twice; the first time you notice its earnest sincerity, the second time you notice its exasperating sentimentality. The worst part was watching Robert Sean Leonard mope around with his big cow eyes, dripping his sensitivity all over the place. I swore off the RSL right then and there.

This particular boycott was very easy to keep up because he never seemed to be in anything I wanted to watch. Since 1989, RSL has apparently been winning Tonys or some "I'm so special and New Yorkie!" crap like that, so, fine, I was happily RSL-free.

Then "House" came on the T.V. and I had many layers of prejudice against it: 1) Hugh Laurie is funny and British, not dour and American; 2) I was worn out by medical shows -- I did a long, dedicated residency with "ER" that ended when the show got too soapy, I'd had plenty of "Trapper John, MD" growing up, along with vague memories of "Quincy", and nothing could ever match the genuis of "St. Elsewhere" anyway, so why bother?; 3) the character was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, so he's called House, GET IT?; 4) he's a cranky, non-PC, man-you-love-to-hate, Becker of a guy, and I didn't watch "Becker" for good reason; and 5) RSL. Case closed. I'm not watching "House".

But it kept sticking around, and one day I was so bored I decided to increase my knowledge of current shows by watching a season three episode and getting it over with. Well, sew my buttons, this show is fantastic! I instantly became addicted.

It gives you to mystery of the diagnosis without fetishizing it like procedurals do with crime, and it gives you the character's personalities without lapsing into distracting melodrama. The best of both worlds, and perfectly cast to boot.

And wouldn't you know, my old nemesis Leonard is stellar in the part of Wilson, House's best (and only) friend. He's witty and noble, kind and depressed and sarcastic. He's got that look in his eyes, that awful vulnerability and hurt that even the best actor can't fake. It's the same look that Ed Flanders had as kind, tough but tortured Dr. Westphall on"St. Elsewhere". It's the look that brought that tremendous dark depth to Montgomery Clift's characters. (Incidentally, neither of those actors had happy personal stories, so here's hoping that RSL really is a great enough actor to fake it.)

Curses, RSL! You've defeated me by being a great actor and stealing my TV heart!

Greatest Story Description EVER

There was a movie on cable yesterday called "Mother Knows Best" (1997), starring Joanna Kerns, Christine Elise, Grant Show, and Jessica Walter.

First of all, that's a great TV movie cast, because it's made up entirely of TV people we all know and probably like. Even if the movie sounds unappealing, you may say "But I'd like to see Joanna Kerns again, so I'll tune in." TV actors get to be our TV friends, and there is real pleasure in catching up with them again, even in a goofy TV movie.

Secondly, this is what the movie is about, according to the TIVO description:
A woman finds a husband for her daughter, then decides he's not good enough and must be killed.

I'm not being snide when I say that that makes me want to see the movie. The wonderful thing about this description is that you could give it to five different writers and get five wildly different movies, any of which could be good: Thriller, Black Comedy (starring Bette Midler, in 1988), Murder Mystery, Psychological Drama, Horror (if the husband lived on as a zombie, preferably played by present day Patrick Swayze).

I couldn't watch the actual movie, unfortunately, so I can't tell you whether it's good or not.

"Roseanne" (1988-1997)

Television executives seem to think women only want to see the airbrushed version of themselves, the petite, pretty, inoffensive, wry-but-sweet ladies with "the Rachel" or "the That Girl" do being the only thing that sets them apart. Even Mary Tyler Moore starved herself to be our ideal girl-woman.

"Roseanne" blew that theory out of the water, thank goodness, and proved that men, too, will watch a sitcom that is more funny than pretty. No matter how many behind-the-scenes hurricanes Rosanne blew into existence, she had the sense to get an extremely strong cast of actors around her from the very beginning, and she allowed the show to be an ensemble instead of showing a world that resolved only around her. Everyone Loved Roseanne, but they had lives of their own, too.

The star and guiding force also had the balls to hire interesting, unconventional kid actors. They didn't play precocious or cutesy or perfect or Duff; they played young people struggling to grow up. They made mistakes, and parental talks at the twenty-second minute didn't fix those mistakes, but did let the kids know they were loved. Just like real life.

This show was gutsy and realistic and had a long memory for the lives and loves and grudges of its characters. It also brought Shelley Winters back into the limelight in all her not-giving-a-damn glory, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

Of course, Miss Roseanne herself underwent your typical Hollywood/New Money metamorphosis, but the essential Roseanne remained. Despite her plastic surgery, she still looks like a human being and not like a grotesque doll factory experiment. And despite her many tabloid-worthy adventures in marriage and therapy, she's still smart and funny and cool, just like when she started.

She's also an artist; a difficult one, to be sure, but a vital one. In the last couple of years of her show, she accepted the fact that she could no longer pretend to be the Domestic Goddess of the beginning. She'd become an obscenely wealthy celebrity as well known for her tragedies as for her comedy, and she insisted that the show deal, however obliquely, with that new Roseanne. Her formerly brilliant sitcom became unwatchable, of course, but I admire her for knowing that she could no longer pretend to be a blue-collar working stiff and trying to apply her reality to her show. Artists need to fail to succeed again.

Here's hoping Roseanne someday finds the right venue for who she is now. She's bold and challenging and unapologetic, and we need women like that to be heard in these cloyingly girlish times.

Luke & Laura

I remember the media frenzy over these two "General Hospital" characters, these two crazy kids in love, and their oh-so-romantic wedding in 1981. The image of their wedding photo is one of those vague childhood memory pictures that floats around the koi pond of my mind, along with the hourglass at the beginning of "Days of Our Lives", every episode of "The Monkees", and a giant painting of colored circles (balloons?) that hung over our sofa.

Imagine my surprise when I recently read that Luke and Laura first consummated their relationship when Luke raped her on the floor of a disco.

That's so romantic! Ladies, don't you hate when you fall in love with your rapist? Pick out china patterns or press charges: who can decide? Why not do both!

I hear that that attractive violent sexual offender/emotionally disturbed victim duo is currently on the outs -- I hope they get back together! If a girl and her rapist can't make it work, who can?

"Tom Goes to the Mayor"

Ok, haters, hate all you want, but you're missing out on the best show on television.

Ever since "The Simpsons" proved that you can put anything on TV and avoid the FCC and the morality police as long as the show is animated (prudes and censors are confused by repeating backgrounds, I guess), we've known to look to Adult Swim for the most interesting social commentary on television. (Come to think of it, Anderson Cooper should be animated -- that's how good he is.)

TGTTM is not only freaky-looking, with the stop-motion green screen photo-animation thingy that I don't even have words to describe, it's also subversive + ridiculous which = brilliant. It's great satire -- mall-culture America, get-rich-quick bad business schemes, a bored City Council, a self-absorbed yet super-friendly Mayor who loves every bad idea, then distances himself from it as soon as it tanks, and the worst wife the world has ever seen. Once you watch this show, you see bits of it everywhere in and around your life, which is both horrifying and hilarious. This is what America feels like sometimes.

And it's exec produced by Bob Odenkirk! If you can't trust Odenkirk to point you in the direction of the smartest, most daring comedy out there, who can you trust? Larry King?...you can't beat Norm Crosby for a night full of chuckles...And skirt steak! I love it. No!

Nothing dooms a show faster than the words "it's satire", so let me mitigate the damage by pointing out that Dustin Diamond (aka "Screech") was highlighted in a very strange and funny way on the recent season three opener. And Sir Mix-A-Lot sang a song about big cups. Come ON, people!

I'm so glad this show is back.