TV Slut Report

[Can't decide what is worse the period before the job interview or the period after? The interview itself isn't such a big deal, but before you worry if you've prepared enough and after you worry if you screwed up. Right now, I've just about convinced myself I didn't get the job and will have to go through the whole thing again soon. As a result, I find myself feeling quite bristly and depressed this morning - much like the weather outside my window. Hoping mood clears up by 4pm - have a concert that I'm going to at Lincoln Center. It's free and I'm seeing it with the NYC Movie Critics Group I recently joined.

As an aside - you ever feel as if you have been thrown into a play, you don't know the lines, you don't know what role you are supposed to play, and feel as if you are just fumbling about making a complete and utter fool of yourself?]

Warning much snark below, because this is TV and I refuse to take it seriously. Plus TV is a safe topic to snark about, right? It's not like religion or politics? Okay, yes, I realize this is a niave and stupid statement coming from an individual who started her online writing career posting television essays to fanboards.

Well, I've watched this week's premieres more or less, only one I missed was the pilot for Friday Night Lights and well anything that is on the pay cable channels, a la Showtime and HBO - because even I can't watch everything. After awhile it all starts to become one big blur anyways. Plus I do not own a DVR or Tivo, nor can I tape anything any longer. Somewhat limited here.

What I did watch:

1. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - already discussed in a prior post. I'm worried about it.
Only three people on correspondence list besides myself are devoted. That is not good, since currently correspondence list's reactions to new series and the Neilsen's reactions to new series appear to be in synch. Frex - everyone online that watched the show the previous week, with four exceptions (myself included) was disappointed. Half did not try it a second week. (While they all came back for Heroes). Damn. Studio 60 is the only show on tv that does not have sex or violence featured as a plot point. Which begs the question: Can we watch something that is propelled purely by dialogue and not by sex and violence? (That's meant to be a rhetorical question by the way.)

2. Heroes - seen the episode twice now - at 7pm tonight, because there was zip else on. All I'll say is: It is not an series that improves on a second viewing. But don't worry about it - according to the entertainment mags - it's the next big hit - or this year's "Lost". People adore it. And Hiro? He's apparently the break-out performance this year or "pop culture" trend. The poster child for Geekdom - at least according to the mags. Heroes according to TV Guide spoilers - is supposed to get even better as we move forward. There's even a possibility that the evil super-powered serial killer is not who I think it is, which would be cool. Heck anything with Adrian Psdar in it, I'm willing to watch. And yes, I like Hiro too. Is there anyone out there who doesn't? It would be like not liking a puppy dog or something?

4. Veronica Mars - I enjoyed it. But - it had problems and I worry about its longevity. Granted, Rob Thomas is not good at introductions or summary episodes, and the man clearly hates exposition and/or wrapping up loose ends. Because, the Keith Mars subplot that hung over from last season, you know the one with Kendall Casablancas and the suitcase? I needed the internet to explain it to me or rather numerous people sharing what they picked up. Not one person - but several different posters. The fact it took ten or fifteen people exchanging information in two discussion threads on two different lj's for me to figure out what actually did happen (and I still might have a few facts off), should tell you something right there.

Here's what I managed to get from the online crowd: ( specifically coffeeandink, Masq, and herself_nyc's lj's, thanks guys, because I was as lost as you were) : ( Spoilers )

The problem with the subplot - which would have been clearer if it were the only mystery we had to figure out or was at least directly linked to whatever Veronica was doing - was this subplot was threaded or cut within the VM mystery and the Logan/Dick story. The Logan/Dick - VM stories actually coincide. Keith's seemed like we were watching another show or rather it reminded me of when I was attempting to flip between VM and Lost last year and got predictably confused. Last season Thomas struggled with the transistions between Keith and Veronica's mysteries a bit as well. It's why the pacing got so slow at times and the story got muddled. It worked fine when the two stories jivved. Not when they had zip to do with each other. The first season this was not a problem - since Keith's mystery and Veronica's were more or less one and the same.

I liked the rest of VM. ( spoilers fairly vague for S2 VM, S3 VM. )

Enjoyable, just confusing and slow in places. VM is an odd show - it tends to pick up steam for me later in the season, the first five episodes? I tend to be ambivalent about. This worries me, since VM only got 13 this year. This show needs more than 13. [Am wondering if VM may work better on DVD as a telenovela? People who've watched the DVD's seem to react differently than those of us who watch it as it is broadcast.]

4. Lost - Not sure how long I'm going to stick with Lost for numerous reasons - the main one being that most of the social groups I've joined like to do things on Wedensdays. The other - well, see behind the spoiler cut.

( Spoilers for Lost )

5. The Nine - not bad. But not something that's going to keep me home or awake on Wed nights either. And next week - watching the Project Runway finale. I skipped the reunion. I don't need to watch tv to see people cut each other into ribbons. But am very curious to see who wins out of the finale four, especially now that I've seen everyone's runway shows. Personally? I'd pick either Laura or Uli, but I'm betting the judges pick Jeffrey - who of the four seems to have the most versatile look. Sorry, I should be talking about the Nine not PR here. Which may tell you something. The Nine was interesting. It reminded me a great deal of Spike Lee's The Inside Man. Except I liked the Inside Man a bit more.

( spoilers )

6. Grey's Anatomy - remains my comfort show. Watching Grey's feels a bit like drinking a glass of ice cold water on a hot sweaty day or just snuggling up with coco in front of fire while it is snowing outside. It's refreshingly simple and comforting. And one of the few shows in which I like most if not all of the characters. Okay, I do like Derek, just not when he's being McDreamy or Meredith's love interest. ( spoilers for S2 and vaguely S3 Greys )

I'm love Grey's for Christina (who makes me laugh), Alex, Izzy, George, Callie, the Chief, Dr. Sloan, Burke, Bailey, and Addison. That's why I watch it. And this episode was more enjoyable the last two partly because it focused more on these characters and less on Meredith.

7. BattleStar Galatica - still packs a punch. And watching the websoides did help.
I liked aspects of it. The Starbuck(kara Thrace)/Leoben storyline is going to get on my nerves soon.
( spoilers for BSG )

[Updated: For a truly excellent analysis of this episode go here: http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/636582.html?style=mine#cutid1.
Coffeeandink really points out how the episode works and why the writers chose to do what they did. Reading it changed my mind.]

8. I also watched Nip/Tuck - ( spoilers )

Proust, What Makes a Novelist, and A Spainish Guitar Festival (not necessarily in that order)

I've linked the two because I read an essay regarding Proust and the novel by Milan Kundera on the way to the Spainish Guitar Festival and then portions of Swann's Way on the subway ride home. By the by - it is not easy to read Proust when two people are having a heated debate about the ethical conduct of their mathematics teacher right next to you.

The Guitare Festival was basically two hours of classical guitare music performed for free at Julliard to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of its Pre-College Guitare Department. ( Listening to Spainish Guitare )

On the subway ride to and from the concert - I finished an article in this week's New Yorker entitled What is a Novelist? or How Great Writers Are Made. by Milan Kundera Milan Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. He's a Czech novelist.

( About Albertine, who apparently appears in the second volumn of In Search of Lost Time and the divine alchemy of the novel )

In case that makes no sense, which it doesn't unless you know who Albertine is - he revists Proust in the next passage of his essay, entitled "Marcel Proust's Verdict" - which he states and I'll transcribe it in full for those on my flist reading Proust at the moment and those who are or attempting to become novelists:

In In Search of Lost Time, Proust is absolutely clear:'In this novel...there is not one incident that is not fictional...not one character a clef.' However tightly bound to the life of its author, Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autiobiography; there is in it no autobiographical intention; he wrote it not in order to talk about his life but to show his readers their own lives. "Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." Those lines of Proust's define not only the meaing of the Proustian novel; they define the meaning of the very art of the novel."

I think this is true of most art, great art, in that what we see in it is often what it tells us about ourselves. How it reflects much like a magic mirror might an unseen truth. People have told me that reading Proust changed their lives - I think what Kundera states above explains to a degree what they mean by that - how a novel or work of art can in fact change, save, or even affect us on a spiritual level.

There's a passage from Proust's By Way of Swann's or Swann's Way that I'd like to share with you, which in some ways encapsulates this:

[The narrator is describing the experience of reading a book he's recently picked up. It's on page 86 and the narrator has just told us how he's acquired a book recommended by a friend.]

" After this central belief, which moved incessantly during my reading from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part for those afternoons contained more dramatic events than does often, an entire lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not "real", as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot life. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as migh a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain nautral phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change.) "

In short a novel or piece of art can affect us more than a real experience, for it is an experience lived in the mind, the imagination. It can change you. You can experience a piece of artwork and leave it, different. Because you have spent a moment inside a point of view you may or may not have imagined or looked in the mirror and saw something reflected back that you did not know existed. According to Kundera, that is what a novelist does - creates a work that provides the reader with a window into the reader's own soul.

There's other passages I'd love to share from both the article and Swann's Way - I've only made it to page 140, partly because I feel this overwhelming need to inhale the words on the page and discuss every ten pages in my lj. That would slow anyone down. By the way - pages 137-140 explain the titles of the volumes. He goes into detail about what by way of Swann's is and by way of Germantes. If you skimmed them, go back and re-read. Quite important thematically speaking.
( Description of Way by Swann's literally. )