Idea for a Sitcom
Crystal Blue Perdition
Anyone getting psyched for the first of Breaking Bad‘s final eight (8) episodes could do worse than revisit this post from two years ago by a friend of Korrektiv. The commentary contained therein is still relevant, as is the link to the New York Times profile of the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan — a lapsed Catholic, in case you didn’t know (which reflects at least a few faint photons of glory on us). As an Extra Added Bonus, there’s a YouTube embed of an old (i.e., young) Bryan Cranston commercial for J.C. Penney that — at least for those of us not too familiar with the man’s pre-Walter White résumé — constitutes a real-life flashback as paradigm-shifting as anything on the show.
In case you didn’t click the first link above, here it is again.
And Hank exits the loo in 3… 2… 1…
Tamerlan(e)
I
I have sent for thee, holy friar
But ‘twas not with the drunken hope,
Which is but agony of desire
To shun the fate, with which to cope
Is more than crime may dare to dream,
That I have call’d thee at this hour:
Such father is not my theme —
Nor am I mad, to deem that power
Of earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell’d in —
I would not call thee fool, old man,
But hope is not a gift of thine;
If I can hope (O God! I can)
It falls from an eternal shrine.
– from “Tamerlane” by “A Bostonian” (Edgar Allan Poe)
The Colbert Corrective
Bad Catholic posted this to his Facebook page. My favorite comment on the post comes from Joe Gehret, who muses … “That awkward moment when a satirist in full character puts the theological smackdown on a heretic…”
P.S. BC says he’s working on an abstract to submit to the Walker Percy people. Who else is in?
If you miss Seinfeld
Or if you’re tired of watching Kramer shave with butter or Elaine selling Muffin Tops, the sitcom of all sitcoms has been resurrected as a Twitter account. All new episodes @SeinfeldToday
Shelly’s Catholic
Northern Exposure: Holling sings Ave Maria to Shelly on Christmas Eve.
Canticle: A Lamentation of Lamentations
–
for Jonathan Potter
Telling it ruins it.- Walker Percy
If time’s axes could be measured by x’s and y’s,
Weightlessness would hit the moon and comes up short
As typical astronauts would goof on graffiti
That beats them to the punch – “Clapton is God,”
The lunar lithograph exclaims. The pretensions
Are less than literary and more than time allows.
This message from the stars came back as reverb,
A name renamed, distortion, a bending of chords….
And
The same for seeing Israel dimly touching goatskin
On a TV talk show – “That’s Esau, or my name’s not Ishack!”
He touches his nose and suddenly all of Egypt knows
The shivering of naked bodies, all twisted by weird news –
Assemble on a hardwood bench before a swimming pool,
Olympic-sized, its water cold with catharsis. A sauna
Awaits an answer, scalding hot with cleansing steam.
The swimming instructor presumes to know their ἕποι
And
Let’s count them off – a madwoman who bent herself
Into a chimney and another into a ventilation shaft:
Both waited to die, discovering what we’ll never find out
Unless we interpret their deaths as more akin to life;
A man who chewed away at the face of another man,
Strong with the urge to prove that human flesh must eat,
Faceless, drug out from shadows, out into light,
Miami’s hot sun, in plain view, faceless, nothing new….
And
A boy who burnt his parish church down to see Christ
The night He was born. His innocent match lights the hay,
The statues, altar, body, blood, soul and divinity.
Still another boy who greeted mother as a corpse
Every day for seven weeks after school, alone, together,
And not knowing death, only sleep and love;
He took direction from her ghost until the matrix
Decided enough was enough; then there was the last,
And
So lost in numbers among forceps and lawful blood,
The airlock of bickering rhetoric, a silent scream,
This one, he or she, counts, observable, if only for Rachel.
Remember Rachel? “Who is Rachel? What is she?”
And
My guitar gently weeps.
House
Lord help me, I never could stand this show. But The Wife loved it. Anyway, now it’s over. Still, there will never be a finale as awful as Lost‘s. I’m looking at you, Potter.
Surfing with Mel Update
Sometimes, the lines just write themselves: “It’s been kind of weird the last couple of years. It’s like living in a bad B movie. From slipping on a banana peel in your driveway to sort of midnight phone calls – ‘We have the girl; we want $1000 in unmarked bills’ – it’s like, ‘How did I get here?’ It is bizarre.”
Today in Porn: Grandma Wants to Watch a Nice Movie from Netflix Edition
Mr Potter, take notes for your next poetry slam.
I will show you fear on a package of butter.
Matthew Lickona, Swimming with Scapulars:
‘I cannot bear to think of the vastness of space. If humanity is a singular creation, so beloved by God that He redeemed it by the death of His Son, what is all that vastness doing there? I am shaken by images from the Hubble telescope; there are times when simply gazing into the night sky frightens me.’ (‘The World, …’, p. 203)
‘I feared eternity, even in heaven. “I think there should be a time when my spirit dies out,” I once told my father as he tucked me into bed. “Mom says that when my spirit leaves my body, it will still feel like me, but I don’t think it will.”‘ (‘The Janitor Prophet’, p. 6)
Cf. Andre Jacquemetton & Maria Jacquemetton, Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 12 (‘Blowing Smoke’):
SALLY DRAPER
This [dream] felt like I was going to heaven. Except that I don’t believe in it.
GLEN BISHOP
You don’t? Then what happens when you die? Nothing?
SALLY DRAPER
It doesn’t really bother me except that it’s forever. When I think about forever, I get upset. Like the Land O’ Lakes butter has that Indian girl sitting, holding a box, and it has a picture of her on it holding a box, with a picture of her on it holding a box. Have you ever noticed that?
GLEN BISHOP
I wish you wouldn’t have said that.
From Love in the Ruins
Angelico’s recollection of Rosebud’s convoluted anus in the combox for JOB’s convoluted post below brought to mind other great ani loci in Percy’s oeuvre, including this passage from Love in the Ruins:
Like saints of old, Dusty spends himself tirelessly for other men, not for love, he would surely say, or even for money, for he has no use for it, but because people need him and call him and what else would he do with himself? His waking hours are spent in a dream of work, nodding, smiling, groping for you, not really listening. Instead, his big freckled hands feel you like a blind man’s. He’s conservative and patriotic too, but in the same buzzing, tune-humming way. His office is stacked with pamphlets of the Liberty Lobby. In you come with a large bowel complaint, over you go upside down on the rack, in goes the scope, ech! and Dusty humming away somewhere above. “Hm, a diverticulum opening here. The real enemy is within, don’t you think?” Within me or the U.S.A., you are wondering, gazing at the floor three inches from your nose, and in goes the long scope. “You know as well as I do who’s causing the real trouble, don’t you?” “Do you mean—” “I mean the Lefts and Commonists, right?” “Yes, but on the other hand—” In goes the scope the full twenty-six inches up to your spleen. “Oof, yessir!”
And of course, having first read Love in the Ruins in the 80s, I couldn’t read this without conjuring up this guy … for all I know, his son:
“It’s gone be shameful!”
“the wrong aesthetic”?
RIP, Andrew Breitbart.
So where does the late AB’s aesthetic fit into Mr. Wolfe’s schema? No, he wasn’t Christian but he didn’t approach politics in the usual way, either.
For all that though did he resist the “preaching and speeching,” or did he play into it?
This line seems deserving of some attention:
Today in Relatives who Made Something of Themselves Instead of Blogging
My dear Aunt Cheryl just passed along this image from the credits for last night’s Grammy Awards. Congratulations, Uncle Terry!
Today in Porn: Girls Edition
So Terry Gross interviewed Lena Dunham, the youthful creator/writer/star of the girls-in-the-city HBO show Girls. Most of the attention has been on her response to questions about the show’s lack of diversity. But whaddya know, they also chatted about boys who get their sexual education from pornography.
GROSS: So do you get a sense that a lot of guys your age have learned about sex through porn sites and have these unrealistic and sometimes ludicrous ideas of what sex is like or what a girl would like?
DUNHAM: I do get that sense. I get the sense that there’s a new kind of learned behavior. I had a conversation with Frank Bruni about this for The New York Times where he was asking me yeah, about the porn question it and I told that there’s certain things that you’ll experience when, you know, not like I want to make it sound like I’m all over town, you know, testing different guys’ sexual prowesses. But in my own personal limited sexual experience I’ve found that there are guys doing things where you go there’s no way that that is your own personal instinct. You learned that from somewhere and it wasn’t, you know, a birds and bees conversation with your mom and it also wasn’t taught to you by a high school girl you met in Michigan. Like that you’re your – that is something that you have, you know, learned through osmosis culturally and now A, want to try yourself, or even more insidiously, think that I will like. And I think that young people are really scared to tell each other what they actually want.
It’s funny. I mean not to get too personal but I just found a diary that I kept in college. I’ve been an intermittent diary keeper always, never a faithful one. And there’s some guy had done something. It wasn’t anything, you know, to dramatic, like he’d just been I think sort of we kissed in college and he’d been sort of rough with me and I asked him if he always acted that way. And he said no, I don’t. But with you I do because it’s clearly what you want.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
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