Tag: Television

On Iggy, Izzie, Steve, and Nico

A few odds and sods here…

Ignatieff “coronation”

Someone asked if I was if I was OK with Michel Ignatieff being “installed” as Liberal leader. And I have to say, yes, I’m just fine with it, thanks. I don’t have that much fondness for the guy—took a real dislike to him during the last Liberal leadership convention—but whatever.

At least the Liberals did what I suggested by rapidly dismissing M. Dion and accelerating their leadership process. By contrast, the Conservatives never listen to my advice. So big props for that.

And frankly, now, or in May, what’s the difference? He was going to be the next leader anyway. I like Bob Rae better, but the man has serious baggage from leading Ontario during a recession. I can just imagine the Conservative attack ads on that theme.

With limited options and time, the Liberals took the best available course. Just hope this coronation works out better for them than the Turner / Martin ones.

Shark jumpin’

So, I’m OK with Iggy, but I’m not the least bit OK with Izzie. Stevens. Grey’s Anatomy?

Even if you don’t watch the show, you may have heard about its recent, most gallactically stupid plot line ever, wherein Izzie first has visions of (that was OK), then starts having sex with, her dead fiancee! No! Not OK! This isn’t Buffy! Dead is dead in this series.

Then I realized I never really liked Izzie anyway (apparently she was a great character in season 1, but since I’ve been watching this series, she’s been awful), so I could just fast-forward all of her scenes, then just enjoy the rest of the show.

That worked OK for one episode, but then I ran into problem 2: Melissa George. Introduced about the same time as the dead fiancee, she plays this super-annoying old friend of Meredith’s, now an intern at Seattle Grace. Fast-forwarding her as well proved a lot trickier, especially since she started flirting with Callie, whom I really like.

But wait… Why is Callie flirting with another girl? After doing a pretty good job of contrasting Hahn, who was just realizing she was a lesbian, and Callie, who wasn’t—but was just really taken with Hahn, this turn of events is nonsensical. (Melissa George, you are no Jessica Hahn.)

So Izzie, Melissa, Callie, and Alex (too many scenes with Izzie) are out, and now I’m little troubled about this strange new relationship between McSteamy and “little Grey”. Much more of this stuff, and there won’t be anything left worth fast-forwarding to.

Dance redux

As for more worthy television….

One more thing I liked more on the Canadian dance series: Each of the four finalist got a profile and moment in the spotlight before the results were announced. Despite the really excessive blah blah that resulted, it was much better than what happens to the runner-up on the US series—they are unceremoniously shunted aside while the winner is showered with confetti. Always makes me feel bad for them.

(And congratulations, Nico. A deserving winner.)

Steve and the Senate

As for our less deserving “winner”, Mr. Harper…

I can’t seem to bring myself to get that outraged about the new Conservative Senate appointments. P-M’s are allowed to appoint Senators. So he previously said he’d rather reform the House than appoint them. Small potatoes, really. I’m much more concerned about them stalling on Climate Change talks and underestimating the degree to which Canada is at risk from sub-prime mortgages.

I will say it is unfortunate the P-M is still busying himself with political games instead of dealing with real problems like those. But it’s unfortunately not surprising.

Also not surprising

D’oh Canada! Survey reveals Canadians barely understand their political system [This was a valid link at the time…]

Inspiring Canadians

I could make this one semi-political as well. Point out the comparisons… Four contenders, only one can win. Yet they realize that supporting the whole team only makes them stronger. They do not delight when a rival messes up. Despite their talent, they are humble and willing to admit they have much to learn. All under 30, yet all very mature, very charismatic, extremely talented. Deserving contenders, all.

So You Think You Can Dance Canada. Your unlikely source for inspiring voting options.

Nico Archambault.
Nico Archambault, my predicted winner of So You Think You Can Dance Canada

But I’ll drop it now. For one, I’ve made this comparison before, and for another, it’s frankly tainting the program to compare it with the mess in Ottawa. So let’s just talk about it on its terms.

There are ways in which the American original is superior to this homegrown version. The host, for one—no one can match Cat Deeley’s easygoing charisma; she may be the best of host of any reality show, period. I also miss the little video recaps the US show inserts into judge’s comments when appropriate—they describe a jeté, we see said jeté. And the Canadian show has four judges instead of three. That becomes a lot of blah blah going on.

But, in more important ways, I’ve found the Canadian show to be superior.

Multi-cultural range of dance styles

The ubiquitous hip hop and contemporary are always here too, but there have also been so many other styles. Afro-jazz. House. Brazilian something or other that the two guys did in the last show. It’s really multi-cultural. And where the US show was praising itself to the skies for including one Bollywood number, these ones are inserted quite matter of factly, and regularly.

Less homophobia

I’m not just imagining that, am I? Certainly Nico gets praised for his masculine style of dance, but there just seemed to be less “You have to be man!” lecturing going on. And Tre advising that one dancer imagine his partner as a man, if that’s what it took? Cool.

Audition episodes

Unlike the US shows, which featured a bunch of “heart-warming” profiles of individuals (many of whom never made it very far), the Canadian shows featured primarily dancing. So much better! There is a lot of dance talent in this country. Which brings me to….

Better dancers

When American judge Dan Karaty commented that he worked with So You Think Can Dance all around the world, and that the Canadian program was “second to none”, I could believe it. Because really, it’s an amazing group of dancers.

Take the solos. On the US show, last season’s solos, by pretty much all contenders, were largely boring. They seemed short and pointless. The Canadians have no more time, but do so much more with it. Natalie picks a completely different style every time. Allie sticks with ballet, but does it to a wide variety of music. Early contender Dario did some of the most amazing, original dances I’ve ever seen.

And look at Miles, the “B-boy” who’s managed to make it to the top four. Probably, on technical skill, Sebastien should be the one there… But this guy has acquitted himself extremely well. To my mind, much better than Twitch, whose presence in the US top four kind of made me twitch, and Dominic the year before, much as I was pulling for him. Miles deserves his spot.

(And on a completely shallow note, holy jeez, what a good-looking bunch.)

So there you have it. If you haven’t watched yet, it’s not too late to start. Finale is tonight at 9:00, and they will be redoing all the best of the season. And if that whets your appetite, on New Year’s Day, be a couch potato and watch the So You Think You Can Dance Canada marathon. All on CTV.

Dolls, Mad Men, and the US election

So I just finished Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. It’s a novel about three beautiful women who all become rich and famous—but not without being victimized, betrayed by love, and addicted to valium (sedatives, the “dolls” of the title). It’s an addictive read, and while certainly not literary, I was left pondering just what the message was supposed to be here.

The novel is set between 1945 and 1965, or so, and the portrayal of women is something to behold. Like the assumption, throughout the novel, that a woman should quit her job—no matter how fabulous—the minute marriage or even just engagement is on the horizon. Pile on the more dramatic horrors of involuntary incarceration in a mental institution and choosing suicide over the potential loss of fabulous breasts to cancer, and you’re left feeling rather glad to be living in these times.

One gets a similar sense from the much-hyped TV series Mad Men, set in 1960. One character, Peggy, becomes the first “since the War” to do any copy-writing for the Stirling-Cooper ad agency feature. “It’s like watching a dog play piano” says one of the men, of Peggy’s writing abilities.

The most recent episode I watched focused on the Nixon-Kennedy election. The firm—which the creator notes is a “dinosaur”, destined to be rocked by the changes of the times, not participating in them—is backing Nixon. And having to accept that their man has been bested by the young, charismatic Senator from Massachusetts.

And here we are, with the year’s US election, and the old man of the Republican Party figures his best chance of defeating the young, charismatic Senator for Illinois is to put a young, dynamic woman on his ticket.

Good thing she didn’t quit her job when she got married.

The best sport there is!

… Ice skating

That’s the name of Salon posting post board thread dedicated to the sport (some would say “sport”) of figure skating. A sentiment I confess to sharing.

Before leaving for New York, I set the PVR to tape every bit of figure skating I could find on CBC. (And finding that was a bit of chore, given the off-prime time hours given over to it—midnight, Saturday afternoon…) When back from New York and waiting at the luggage carousel, I saw Jeff Buttle’s smiling face up on the TV screen showing the news. While I couldn’t catch the details, I knew that meant he had to have done well. They weren’t going include a sixth-place finish in a five-minute news summary.

Back home, the stack of newspaper that weren’t supposed to be there (my registered vacation stop was ignored) gave the pre-story: 3 pairs teams in the top 8, including a bronze medal; the strong fifth place in women’s; the silver in dance. But it may have been only the next morning that I heard Buttle had actually won gold.

Why I like watching this sport so much, I’m not really sure. I’ve certainly never done it myself, my own ice skating skills never having progressed much beyond the rudimentary. I like dance, too, but I don’t make a point of watching ballroom dance competitions on TV. But—and especially when Canada does have a reasonably strong team—I can’t help watching the figure skating.

This is a challenge, because I have hours of the stuff on PVR now, and DH does not share my enthusiasm. So I try to cram in the viewing when he’s not around, fast-forwarding the duller commentary and interviews, not to mention some of the duller skaters (that pairs silver team? My God, could they be any slower? As Kurt Browning said, maybe if they did nothing but jumps, I wouldn’t have to fast-forward out of boredom) and those just having a really bad day (one grows weary of wincing at all the falls).

So at this point, I’ve seen most of it. I think I just have the Dance Originals and the full women’s Long Program left.

I feel absurdly proud of the Canadian skaters, as if I had anything to do with it whatsoever. But those who doubt the toughness of people in this sport, think that fifth-place pairs winner Craig Buntin had to move immediately from lifting his partner over his head with one hand to shoulder surgery to repair the damage; that bronze-medal pairs Jessica Dube’s face was slashed by her partner’s skate last year; that gold medalist Buttle could barely walk a year ago, so bad was his back injury.

Also nice to see American Johnny Weir, always an interesting skater, finally win a world medal (a bronze), and that Japanese woman’s skater come back from a terrible fall in the opening moments of her program to be dynamic and perfect enough in the rest to win the gold.

But Jeff Buttle, I have to say, comes across as one of the sweetest human beings on the planet. So it’s really great to see that he won, and won decisively, by doing his quad-free program perfectly. Every big win this guy has had—the Silver at a previous World’s, the Bronze at the Olympics, and this Gold—always seems to be a big shocker. Maybe that’s finally over now.

Watching the new Battlestar Galactica

As mentioned previously, during the TV writers’ strike, we stared renting DVDs of the remade Battlestar Galactica series, which I’d read was really good, but felt I was too far behind on to watch on “live” TV. (One friend was amazed I’d never seen this series; another equally amazed that I had any interest in seeing it. In the immortal words of Dr. Temperance Brennan, I don’t know what that means.)

I’ll start by saying that I don’t remember the old series at all, though I imagine that I watched some of it at the time. So until watching the extras, I had no idea that Boomer and Starbuck were men in the original, or that one of the recurring guest stars was played by Richard Hatch, the original Apollo. So I judged this one on its own merits. And found it to be good.

It is, indeed, a drama in space, and not so much a space drama. Character is paramount, and each episode continues from the last—two features I always prefer in my television. So I’m drawn in by the story, and I care what happens to these people—even the ones who aren’t really people. The underlying mythology retains its interest. We’re halfway through season 2 now, and the full motives of the cylons remain mysterious.

The series is dark. There are moments of joy and triumph, but mostly the characters are struggling, running, and fighting. It can be kind of haunting. So though we’re getting through the disks pretty quickly—an average of an episode a day, I suppose—it’s also good to have a break from that world, to watch something else. To enjoy an escape that the characters themselves rarely experience.

“Surviving” the TV writer’s strike

It’s been somewhat amusing reading some TV columnists on the strike, using adjectives like “dire” and “desperate”, that seem just a wee bit strong to describe a temporary weakness in entertainment options. Truthfully, it’s taken me a while to really notice. After all, shows didn’t run out of scripts immediately. But an awful lot of them have reached that point now. So what am I doing?

Well, probably watching a little less TV, for one! I’m doing more workouts to fitness videos instead of to prerecorded DVR programming (on the treadmill). Maybe I’m reading a little more. But of course, I haven’t given up TV entirely. I’m still watching:

  • CBC stuff. They have four new dramas. I’ve checked them all out, and have stuck with two (the low-rated ones): Jpod, which is weird, but I read the book; and MVP, which has its moments of awkwardness, but is mostly soapy fun. Then there’s the stalwart Marketplace, which I really think more people would benefit from watching.
  • Jon Stewart. It’s not quite the same—he’s calling it A Daily Show instead of The Daily Show—but it remains worth watching in this time of particularly interesting US races for the White House.
  • Documentaries. On PBS, CBC, CTV, and even the Documentary Channel. Often somewhat depressing programming, is the thing, but this week’s DocZone documentary is about Happiness, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
  • Reruns that are new to me. Only this year have I regularly been watching Bones. Lately they’ve been rerunning episodes from past seasons. They’re all new to me, and it’s fun to catch up. (They should start doing that with How I Met Your Mother.)
  • DVDs. Done rewatching My So-Called Life, working on WKRP, with more on standby. And just rented Battlestar Galactica; let’s see how I’ll like that.

I hope the strike doesn’t end until the writers get what they want. Their demands seem perfectly reasonable, the networks very greedy. Be great to have some new episodes back, but in the meantime, I’m “coping” just fine.

Breaking out of the iPod bubble

“Love of iPod” is not exactly an original sentiment. I’m coming up on two years of ownership of my 30 GB “video” iPod, which holds no video and, despite the presence of some audiobooks, I mostly see as a music machine. The house and car are finally arranged such that I can listen to it anywhere, sans earphones (which hurt my ears, and make me sound particularly insane when I sing along). I love the playlists—the ability to combine a subset of my 3500 songs according to genre, mood, theme, composer, quality, date…

But the downside, of course, is that you really limit your exposure to new artists and songs—ones you might well come to love and appreciate, if only you ever had a chance to listen to them.

Then again, even before iPod, I’d already mostly given up on radio stations that played new music, whose between-song patter and ads were clearly aimed a couple decades younger than me, and the music television stations, which seemed to be largely taken over with rap music. At least, with the iPod/iTunes store, I cheaply sample a song or two from a new (or new to me) artist, if it happens to reach my consciousness.

I haven’t deleted the “Purchased” playlist that the iPod software automatically places all your bought songs into. It becomes kind of a map into the music that has managed to break through the barriers of “the music I already own”. So what does manage to burst through?

Music from TV. (Just not from music TV.)

Most influential has to be the addictive reality shows Rock Star: INXS and Rock Star: Supernova, from which I have not only have I bought performances from the show itself, but also originals of what was covered, and songs by the performers on it. But there’s also a smattering of Canadian / American Idol, and even some influenced by dramatic series.

  • “Single” by Kalan Porter. The winner of the first season of Canadian Idol I watched most of, the judges kept commenting on his rich, mature voice. Though recognizing he was a good singer, I didn’t really grasp that quality of his voice until this song, which really plays that up from its opening notes. Hard to believe he’s only 17.
  • Nevermind by Nirvana. I had the Unplugged album already; Rock Star: INXS convinced me I need this one too.
  • “Wish You Were Here” by Marty Casey. A breakthrough moment in Rock Star: INXS, as Marty Casey sang this more melodically than anything he’d done previously, which helped carry him through to the final. Also a bit of a breakthrough for me, as I finally started to understand the mania for Pink Floyd, a band I’d previously dismissed as too dark. “Wish You Were Here” is beautiful, and some of their other stuff doesn’t suck, either.
  • “How to Save a Life” by the Fray. This song became so associated with Grey’s Anatomy that I actually thought it was the official theme song, and wondered why it didn’t play at the start of the show. Then it stuck in my head and I had to get it.
  • “Anything, Anything” by Dramarama. The wonderful Storm Large won her first encore on Rock Star: Supernova with her performance of this song, that I’d never heard of before. It’s a barn burner. (I also bought Storm’s own “Ladylike” single, a true feminist anthem.)
  • “California Dreamin'” by JD Fortune; “Baby One More Time” by Marty Casey. Two radical reinterpretations of these well-known songs reveal the creativity on display in Rock Star: INXS. In both cases, I think I like these better than the originals.
  • “Save the Last Dance for Me” by Ben E. King. I bought this because it was the soundtrack for Brian and Justin’s season 1 prom dance on Queer as Folk, and have developed an appreciation for just how sexy this song is, in its own right.

Others in this category: “Pretty Vegas” by INXS (their first single with winner J.D. Fortune), “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Suzy McNeil (a tour de force from the show), “Man Who Sold the World” by Jordis Unga (beautiful song, beautiful performance), “We Used to Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols (Veronica Mars theme song), “Over My Head” by The Fray (since I liked their other song), Suzie McNeil’s Broken and Beautiful album (girl has pipes), and “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers (whom I suspect I should get more of).

On the dance floor

I don’t have a whole lot of pure dance albums, but I do love me a really good dance tune. Sometimes I first read about these; sometimes I caught a minute on MuchMusic after all; sometimes I heard it when out dancing at parties or weddings! “Mambo No. 5”, “Livin’ La Vida Loca”, “Hips Don’t Lie”, “Maneater”, “Can’t Get You out of My Head”…

But the ultimate has to be Great West’s “Home for a Rest”. Because that’s just what you need to do after dancing along to this infectious tune.

From when I used to listen to radio

“Laid” by James. I loved this song when I used to hear it on 102.1 (back when I still listened to that), but had a heck of time figuring out what the song and artist name were. When I finally found it, this became, like, the fourth song I bought for the iPod.

The only other one in this category, I think, is “Closing Time” by Supersonic.

The Grammy’s / The Junos

TV again, but in the specific genre of music awards.  These would have some influence over my owning some Shakira and Nelly Furtado (as previously mentioned), and definitely affected these purchases:

  • “Hey Ya!” by OutKast. He was really criticized for his “native American” theme here, but it kind of blew me away.
  •  “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. I don’t think he performed at the Oscars, did he? But he still won, and I love this song, and I don’t even know why, because it’s definitely rap.
  • “Hallelujah” by KD Lang. Gorgeous, gorgeous; I have two versions of this, live and studio. The lyrics just get me; I don’t understand them literally but they seem to reach right past the logic into the emotion. (I also bought a few more of her covers from Songs of the 49th Parallel.)
  • “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera. This was not a beautiful look period for her, but she really killed this song.
  • Green Day’s American Idiot album. It’s sort of punk/pop and kind of great.
  • “Not Ready to Make Nice” by the Dixie Chicks. Although, it was more the documentary than all the Grammies that had me buy this song.