<3
I’ll make this brief. Let’s not pretend that there aren’t already 62,000 people talking about Lena Dunham on the internet.
I watched Tiny Furniture last night, and I watched all of Girls season 1 a couple of weeks ago, and I love her.
LOVE HER.
It’s like someone has come along and told me it’s okay that I was perpetually stoned between 2000 and 2008.
She’s made me feel better about my body than Christina Hendricks ever did.
I’ve suddenly stopped feeling guilty about ‘wasting’ my early 20s. In 15 months I’m going to be 30 and that is A GOOD THING.
I’m sorry if you think this is uncool or whatever but I love Lena Dunham.
I fucking love telly innit
Do you remember back in February when I quit my job “to focus on university”? Turns out I’ve replaced it with telly box sets, and I’m back to doing uni assignments in between juggling Twin Peaks and Treme and the new series of Mad Men. Mad Men is stunning, as usual, but I can’t really talk about that here because the Spoiler Police will abseil through my windows in balaclavas.
The first series of Treme, on the other hand, was shown, like, a billion years ago in telly terms. Also, I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that in 2005 there was this fuck-off great big hurricane called Katrina that decimated possibly the world’s most culturally important city. Watching Treme is hard work. It’s miserable. Everything in New Orleans is broken and fucked-up and nobody can get back on their feet because the police and government are corrupt and ineffectual, and the local economy is failing because nobody can come home from wherever they went when the storm hit. And the music is so beautiful and heartbreaking. I can do a maximum of two episodes at a time before it gets me so down that I have to do some melancholic staring out of the window or go downstairs to start a fight about the washing up.
Basically, you have to watch it because it’s important telly.
Have I mentioned I’ve got a telly now? I moved into a house with one. It’s ace. I watched the Channel 4 thing about the space shuttle a few days ago and got MEGA-EMOTIONAL and then on twitter someone said I should watch the BBC2 documentary about the space shuttle’s last mission, which aired last night. The telly doesn’t get BBC2 though, because life is just fucking like that sometimes.
I just iplayered it though (yes that is a verb), and it was WONDERFUL. The presenter used to work at NASA so they’d granted him access to loads of people and places that you don’t normally get to see. He interviewed the catering ladies who take sandwich orders from the astronauts on launch day, and the guy who sits on a massive camera a mile away from the launch site to make sure any damage can be assessed properly, and another guy with an AMAZING moustache, and the big boss dude who cried because Atlantis was the first shuttle he was ever on. But best of all was the footage of the astronauts in some café talking about the way they breathe a sigh of relief every time they survive the moments when malfunctions caused the loss of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. It felt a bit like that Werner Herzog film about Antarctica where he spoke to the guy who always went everywhere with a packed survival kit because he’d once escaped from a prisoner of war camp.
People are amazing all the time and we just kinda get used to the general overarching amazingness of life without remembering the individual amazingnesses.
NEW RULE: Remember individual amazingnesses more often.
Why season four of The Wire is the best one:
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been watching The Wire again from the beginning, and I’m nearly at the end of season four now. When I first watched them all, season four was my favourite, but time has eroded my memory so that all I could pin that on was Prez and Bunny Colvin taking it in turns to be Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. When I finished off season three the other day, with the Brother Mouzone scenes and Stringer’s death and all that brother-against-brother shit in the Barksdale crew, I thought to myself ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. This is way better than I remember. It might even be better than season four in the middle school!’
No.
Season four of The Wire is the best one for the same reason that season four of Mad Men is turning into the best so far. They started again. McNulty’s barely in it. Prez starts afresh as a teacher. The Major Crimes Unit is non-operational. The streets are different because Marlo doesn’t abide by the rules. The only Barksdale people left are Bodie and Slim Charles and they’re absorbed pretty quickly. The mayoral race starts to link the drug traffic to the bigger picture of a city in crisis, and what David Simon has been wanting to say about society starts to get said.
Those scenes in season three with Omar, Avon and Stringer, Brother Mouzone; they were all so amazing that it was actually difficult to breathe during some of them, but there was a story arc that was pure television. There are so many arcs through season four that the apparent disorganisation of the whole thing removes our expectations of the televisual and lets us become completely involved.
It’ll probably be a good thing when I’m back at uni and thinking about something other than box sets.
Just because.
I got the first series of The Sopranos from my auntie and uncle. I’m three episodes in.
Wasn’t James Gandolfini so much thinner to begin with?
HERE BE SHITLOADS OF SPOILERS
I seriously fucking love Mad Men. I’ve just finished watching series three and have realised that it has only been in this series that I really started to care about Don Draper. I loved it in series one and two of course, but that was mainly because I loved the office politics and was a little bit gay for Joan Holloway. Now that Don’s wife has actually left him (for a slimy little toad, more’s the indignity), those poor-little-country-boy flashbacks rip my heart in two. It’s not exactly like he’s an angel or anything; he just needs to be loved.
And it is good to see Joan and her hips back in the action too.
MASSIVE COINCIDENCE ALERT!! HRRRRNK!!!!
When I was little my favourite TV programme was Sesame Street (although I called it “Sessy Street” at the time) and now my favourite TV programme is Mad Men (I can pronounce that perfectly well).
He can’t work. The doctors have said he’ll never golf again.
I love Mad Men.
It appears that my Mad Men binge is coinciding with the publication of a book called Yes Logo, which is a retrospective of the work of Michael Peters, a juggernaut of advertising design.
The Yorkshire Tea logo doesn’t look ‘designed’ at all, does it? So he must’ve been good.
Fuck the casual viewer. Seriously, who wants a casual viewer? If you’re a writer, do you want a casual reader? I don’t want those people. Don’t want ‘em. I’m throwing them back, like little fish on a hook. I want the guy who wants to be told a story.
David Simon, creator of The Wire
Don’t Think Twice, It’s all so unfair and all men are chauvinist bastards
So, how does this new grey and red affair look then? I did have all the posts scrunched up on the right hand side, and then I decided I wanted to put a picture where the Hallowed Lords Of HTML decreed there shalt be no picture, and then I found a site that said it matched colours for you and I turned the whole thing dog-sick yellow. So now its grey. For the time being at least.
I wanted to post a little something about Mad Men before bed, but every time I think about it I just imagine slinking around in hourglass dresses like Joan Holloway and my fantasies turn to dust when I consider the sheer quantities of hairspray that woman must go through. I simply could not afford the styling products on my current budget, let alone the body contouring surgery.
Anyways, I’ve just watched the final three episodes of series one and have been left with a gaping hole in my heart, yearning for cars with chrome trim and gender equality in the workplace. The last episode played out with Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, and everyone ended up just sooooo utterly lonely it was heartbreaking.
This week’s illegal downloading session begins and ends with series two, guvnor, I promise.
Every time I pass a shop window, I am stunned that this is not my reflection.
Thinly veiled
There was an awesome documentary about Rough Trade Records on BBC4 tonight. I tried not to look during the bits with Morrissey because that man brings me out in hives, but Robert Wyatt was on it and Jarvis Cocker too, who managed to slip something into the conversation about a spray that maintains a man’s erection. Hats off. The main Rough Trade dude, Geoff Travis, also proved a genuine style arbiter with mad scientist hair and even larger Trevor Horn glasses.
The best bit of all arrived at the very end though (after they’d got Duffy out of the way). These guys are called The Veils, and they’re about to release a record on Rough Trade. They are brilliant and I’m a little ashamed to say I’d never heard of them before tonight. Perhaps my period in music hermitage is behind me.
This tune makes me want to play air piano almost as much as Cold War Kids do, so I’m going to go and see them at The Ruby Lounge in April to get it out of my system.
Adventures in Telly (like spoilers, except you won’t have a clue what I’m going on about)
Mad Men, series one, episode eight:
00.01 - The James Bond people should really sue them for these opening titles.
01.53 - Pete Campbell looks like Leonardo DiCaprio’s uglier brother.
06.56 - In another life, I am Joan Holloway.
11.48 - Look at that hat.
21.07 - Why can’t I have a shabby but massive Greenwich Village apartment to listen to Miles Davis in? Life is so unfair.
24.17 - Here comes a white trash flashback.
28.01 - GAYDAR!! GAYDAR!!
36.50 - Has the tramp got a tampon?
36.57 - Nope, just some chalk. This is why I need Hi-def.
37.46 - £100 says his wife finds that picture.
39.33 - “You make the lie, you invent want”. That’s deep man.
43.48 - Don Draper is just like a gangsta rapper really, isn’t he?
45.19 - Most inappropriate use of bluegrass music since the Rednex charted in 1994.
Lost, series five, episode eight:
01.22 - If the true rules of time travel were adhered to, that rope would totally have disappeared.
02.05 - Crazy prehistoric statue is wearing surprisingly ‘on trend’ jumper dress.
04.58 - Polar bears! Finally!
06.08 - It’s like those 118 runners have actually got parts in the show for real.
06.46 - OMG. Sawyer is like, Captain Boss-Man now.
07.25 - Where are they getting their petrol from, exactly?
09.40 - Juliet has lips like Marge Simpson.
15.05 - “We’re sweaty, gun-toting hillbillies from the future, pleased to meet y’all!”
19.44 - This is what it would be like if Kid Rock had the keys to the Manson family’s commune.
26.54 - It’s the eyeliner robot guy who looks like Rob Lowe!
34.22 - I would totally love to take a submarine to 1974.
39.07 - Blah blah soppy shit blah.
Timewatch - The Real Bonnie and Clyde:
00.36 - Faye Dunaway was so much hotter than the ‘real’ Bonnie.
01.48 - A small part of me hopes this new Depression will increase the number of bank robberies.
06.35 - I swear that’s the same hat Angelina Jolie wore in Changeling.
08.07 - Clyde’s middle name was Champion.
09.45 - “Cop killa! Better you than me! Cop killa! Fuck police brutality!”
11.59 - I hate documentary reconstructions.
17.00 - Clyde Barrow’s choice of a faster car than the police is deemed “acute tactical determination”. Yeah, and looking both ways before you cross the road “demonstrates a calculating drive for vitality”.
20.40 - Shot of moody Midwest pylons.
21.07 - Some moody slide guitar.
21.27 - Shot of prison reflected in murky puddles = generally moody.
23.35 - Inmates dressed like Westlife.
27.28 - I would not want to meet a Browning Automatic Rifle down a dark alley.
28.13 - Shot of overweight Texan shooting at breezeblocks.
29.45 - This Jeff Guinn guy is like the human version of Brian Griffin from Family Guy, except with Owen Wilson’s voice.
40.22 - Schmoot Schmidt? Really? That’s your name?
43.18 - Slide guitar moves from moody to melancholy.
51.20 - Fuck me that’s a shitload of bullet holes.
57.04 - Second inappropriate use of a bluegrass soundtrack in one night.
-END-
