332: Consumer ennui

I don't know about you, Internet, but I just cannot get into the whole Black Friday-Small Business Saturday-Cyber Monday thing this year.  I mean, yes, I did buy the Law & Order: Los Angeles box set for 67% off this afternoon, and a snow shovel for half off at the local hardware store on Saturday, but everything else I bought this weekend was just stuff I would have gotten anyway -- like food.

Maybe it's because I've been waiting for three weeks for a paycheck.  Maybe it's because I want everything to cost less than $30 (and therefore irrationally hold out for a better sale, when I can almost guarantee there won't be deeper price cuts any time soon).  Maybe it's because almost nothing I had my eye on went on sale this weekend.  All of the above, probably.

In any case, I hope everyone else had a better thrifty money-spending weekend than I did.

298: Tourism flashback

Flatiron Building, New York, 2010.

This was taken the day I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge up to Midtown Manhattan.  It was also the day I discovered I had the wrong lens on my camera, which is why this one turned out looking...odd.  I think I was standing a block and a half away and could still only get this much of the building.  Ah, well.  These things happen.

279: Interest-ing

Let's talk about a new fall TV series.  Of the shows I've checked out (New Girl, Pan Am, Person of Interest, part of Suburgatory) Pan Am is the winner in terms of quality (after two episodes), and I still have hope for New Girl, in spite of literally cringing at some of Jess (Zooey Deschanel)'s antics.  But I'm most interested in the world and mythology of Person of Interest.  A show about preventing violent crime in post-9/11 America using stolen information from a government threat-assessment computer?  A J.J. Abrams project with Lost veteran Michael Emerson as one of the stars?  I was all in from the get-go.  The fact that Jonathan "Brother of Christopher" Nolan, co-writer of The Dark Knight, is the creator is just icing on the cake.

Person of Interest's Reese (Jim Caviezel) and Finch (Michael Emerson)
via TV Fanatic

Here's the short version of the premise: in the wake of 9/11, a rich genius computer programmer (Michael Emerson) built the U.S. government a Big Brother machine to identify potential terrorist threats.  The machine, however, identified all potential violent crime, so the "irrelevant," small-scale crimes are disregarded -- and sent to the programmer, Finch.  He gets a list of Social Security numbers of people who will be involved in crimes, either as a victim or perpetrator.  Finch recruits an ex-CIA agent, John Reese (Jim Caviezel), to do the boots-on-the-ground work of preventing these crimes using a combination of technical savvy and old-fashioned brute force.

Much more under the jump. (I started rambling. Whoops.)

270: Empire

via We Heart It

Boardwalk Empire is back, and along with it one of the creepiest, most unnerving characters out there -- not to mention interesting -- Richard Harrow, played by Jack Huston.  On a show like this one, where the plot crawls along at a snail's pace and I tend to zone out and just marvel at the sheer amount of atmosphere, I always have to pick a character whose scenes I watch attentively, so I know what's going on with at least one person.  It looks like Harrow's the one this season: between his sweet/creepy scrapbook of happy family pictures and his connection to the small faction trying to undercut Nucky Thompson's bootlegging business, it promises to be an interesting season for ol' Tin Man here.

263: This is a Zooey Deschanel appreciation post

via We Heart It

Having just watched The New Girl and appreciated its Lord of the Rings references, its quirky humor, and, perhaps most of all, its hilariously abbreviated theme song, I'd like to take a moment to say -- haters to the left -- that I really like Zooey Deschanel, and I hope this show works out.

262: The vast wasteland

Missed another blog yesterday, because I watched the Emmys and got all excited about Downton Abbey taking home four trophies.  It was an okay show, with several horrible choices (the Emmytones) and a few good moments (Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage's cameo in the opening number; The Office's Creed buying meth from Aaron Paul).  But the best and funniest bit was (at least partially) unscripted: the lead comedy actress nominees lining up on stage like pageant contestants waiting for Rob Lowe and Sofia Vergara to announce the winner:

And then Melissa McCarthy (who I love) was crowned Miss Emmy.  I suspect Amy Poehler's hand in this, since she also arranged the eyewear bit from the 2009 Emmys:

That second clip proves the importance of having presenters who 1) can read off a prompter without sounding like they're reading off a prompter, and 2) have enough chemistry to make you believe they like each other.  Tina Fey and Jon Hamm: good.  Most other presenter pairings: not so much.

But anyway.

260: Accessories

2011.

Several consecutive days of dry, cool weather?  Must be time to break out the leather.

(Fossil bag, vintage boots. FYI.)

253: Local color

I spent the afternoon today on a 12-mile bike tour led by the local police department, advertised as a tour of notable areas in the city.  In actuality "notable" areas?  Crime scenes.  And the unoffical nude beach.  Don't get me wrong, it was a great ride and an interesting look into violent crime in the area.  We stopped by the sites of several murders (or body-dumps) and hiked down to what is colloquially known as Bare-Ass Beach (no bare asses today, just some law-abiding teenagers and swimmers).  We also rode past scads of trees that were snapped by the tornado earlier this summer, which also tore up the paved trail to the point where we were essentially riding on uneven chunks of asphalt at some points.

And then the cops gave us sandwiches and cans of pop.  It was pretty cool.

via Flickr

Semi-coherent rambling, aaaaaaaand scene.

250: Firenze

I've been doing research today, looking at Italy in the early-20th-century Edwardian era.  Happily, the Oregon State University Archives have a whole host of early photographs, circa 1915, on The Commons on Flickr.  When I'm looking for old photographs for writerly reference, I usually swing by The Commons early in my search, just for instant gratification.  Sometimes you stumble across truly cool photos. So: fun place to hang out, electronically, and nice source for people who need quick reference photos.

Enjoy some Edwardian Florence, Italy (all photos via Flickr):

247: Downton Pretty

So, as my friends know, I have serious Downton Abbey problem.  It is going to be difficult to stop tracking the "Downton Abbey" tag on Tumblr when the second season starts airing in the UK, but I'm trying not to get spoiled before it airs in the U.S. next January, ARGH.  Sure, new episodes of Downton will be a nice birthday present for me, but it's going to be torturous, waiting to find out what happens when Britain already knows.  For a series that spends its first season essentially dealing with British inheritance law and the family politics surrounding an entail, it's incredibly absorbing and fascinating, and the upstairs/downstairs soap operas are to die for.  Gay footmen, the secret pasts of the butler and valet, the romances (including the still-developing one between the chauffeur and the Earl of Grantham's youngest daughter) -- Julian Fellowes does it all so, so well.  It's like a longer, more involved Gosford Park, with less murder and more alarming medical procedures.  Also, there are the gorgeous costumes and the wonderful acting and Dame Maggie Smith, who gets all the best lines.

In any case, my point is that you should watch it, if you don't already.  My secondary point is that British press is starting to run promotional interviews and some gorgeous photoshoots, like these of Dan Stevens and Michelle Dockery that ran in the Daily Mail's Sunday magazines today:

I love you.

If nothing else, just watch for the shallow reasons: everyone on the show is this pretty.

244: Changing seasons

2010.

It's September, and the unofficial start of autumn.  Sure, it hit 90 degrees in the Twin Cities today and it felt a lot more like July than September, but still!  It's back-to-school season, fall TV starts soon, and the neighbor's maple trees are already starting to turn red.  Pretty soon we'll all be layering and raking leaves and watching new episodes of Castle and all those good things.  It's weird to think that we're closer to Christmas than we are to the beginning of 2011.  Time flies when you're not in school!

230: True Blah

via True Blood GIFs

Okay.  I finally saw Sunday's True Blood yesterday and it's official: I've completely reversed my previous position on this fourth season.  Amnesia-Eric was fun for a while, but now he's just bland and lame.  The whole Sookie/Eric relationship has gone from bizarre and amusing to saccharine and nauseating.  I spent most of the last episode making the same face as Alcide in that animation up top.  Pam, normally one of my favorite characters, has become juvenile and unlikable; neither Tommy Mickens nor his storyline has any redeeming value.  I want to punch Tara Thornton in the face whenever she opens her mouth, and I don't really care about Arlene and Terry's creepy baby.  Andy Bellefleur could be cut out of the show completely and I wouldn't notice.

There are a few improvements this season -- Sookie seems to have grown a backbone, for one thing -- and the Hoyt-Jessica-Jason storyline has some potential.  Bill's new role as a vampire king suits him very well, and his improved relationship with Jessica is nice to see.  But all told, I'm not fond of the witch plotline (though Fiona Shaw is as fantastic as ever), and I would rather they had skipped straight to jealous-werewolf-Debbie and the inevitable intrigue with Sookie, Alcide, and the wolf pack.  I do like that Alan Ball & Co. make changes as they adapt the Charlaine Harris novels into twelve-episode seasons, but I think they might be trying to shoehorn too many TV-plots into the book-plot that fans are expecting.

This season so far?  C-level work.  Try harder, guys.

209: I'll take One Year Ago Today for $600, Alex.

Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City, CA, 2010.

This picture was taken 365 days ago.  It seems like much longer, and at the same time, like much less time has passed.  I've had two jobs and lots of unemployed downtime in that year, gotten one haircut, read seventy-eight books, and lost ten pounds.

(It's been an interesting 52 weeks.)

194: Earworm

Oh, Anderson Cooper.  I can't wait for his daytime show in the fall.  He was always an absolute delight when he sat in for Regis Philbin with Kelly Ripa, and if we get more backstage video gems like this, it looks like Anderson will be similarly delightful.

189: Cheese

Why can't we still have those old-timey photobooths around?

all photos via We Heart It

If we had them in all subway stations in this country, then Amelie could, possibly, happen in real life.  Maybe?

157: Un beau chapeau

Now is about the time of year I start wishing I could wear hats well.

But the fact of the matter is that the combined circumference of my skull and hair is bigger than most hats sold for women.

I'm almost always disappointed when I pick up a nice hat and try to plop it on my head, but it fails to even hit my ears.

And the hats that do fit are the ones that are kind of impractical for everyday wear.  I mean, when was the last time you tried to wear a bowler hat to the office full of casually-dressed middle-aged coworkers?

These are what we call First World Problems.

(Photos via We Heart It.  Click for individual pages.)

155: Favorites XIX

Favorite TV one-season wonders, or "oh, look, she's getting verbose about Law & Order: LA again":

Firefly

I wonder if Fox ever rues the day it canceled Joss Whedon's sci-fi/western dramedy starring a whole host of actors now on other successful shows (e.g. Nathan Fillion, Morena Baccarin, and Adam Baldwin) and featuring a couple of memorable guest appearances by Christina Hendricks (Mad Men's Joan Holloway/Harris).  I -- like most of America, apparently -- didn't watch the series when it was originally on the air, but discovered it through IMDB's streaming video and Netflix.  And thank goodness I did, because it's the perfect blend of two niche genres, offers a bit of steampunk appeal, and created a cast of likable, flawed characters.  Firefly painted a picture of a future that is both amusing and dangerous -- Star Trek it is not.  And, naturally, everyone curses in Mandarin.  It's really a shame the network couldn't see fit to give the show a second chance (and chose to air some of the episodes out of order), but they did make Serenity, the feature-film sequel to the series that helped cap off the story...though how satisfying an end it was is debatable.

Freaks & Geeks

Judd Apatow's high school comedy was set in 1980, featured some true-to-life awkward-looking teens, cameos from Jason Schwartzman and a couple Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni, and a cast that has been ridiculously successful in the years since the show's premature cancellation.  Sure, some of the gags were so painfully awkward that I couldn't actually watch them (but I have a low threshold for secondhand embarrassment) and the period setting turned some people off (who really wants to relive the early '80s?), but taken as a whole, it was a fantastic show.  These are characters you can relate to, or who remind you just how happy you are to be out of high school (or both).  And Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" was its theme song!  Maybe network TV wasn't the right home for the series; Apatow's college-set follow-up, Undeclared, aired on MTV...and was also canceled after one season.  So I'm not sure where either of these shows belonged.  At least we'll always have DVD.

Kings

This show was great...in theory.  An allegory for the Biblical David and Goliath story, set in a 21st-century kingdom that resembled a slick, modern political machine more than anything else, it was supposed to blend the stories of a soldier-turned-war-hero thrust into the lion's den of the royal machine.  Unfortunately, the show was nowhere near allusive enough -- the protagonist's name was David, and he became a national hero for blowing up the enemy's "Goliath" armored tank.  The names of characters and settings were lifted directly from the Bible with only minimal changes made (e.g. King Saul becomes King Silas).  The series should have worked.  It had IAN MCSHANE, for cryin' out loud.  IAN MCSHANE, gnawing the scenery at every turn!  Of course, I thought the character of David was too much of a goody-two-shoes to be truly likable, but I enjoyed almost everyone else, and I kept coming back because I was interested in the universe the show created.  I would have been interested to see what they would have done with a second season, but it wasn't meant to be.

Law & Order: Los Angeles

I've talked about LOLA on this blog before, and I'm still disappointed that it's been canceled after a single tumultuous season.  Sure, Terrence Howard can be about as engaging as a sheet of plywood, and the long hiatus during which the show was tweaked to the very edge of believability hurt the ratings, but with the addition of Alana de la Garza and (what seemed like) more screen time for Alfred Molina, I think the show still had a lot of life left in it.  But, like the two previous series on this list, LOLA was a victim of the NBC hatchet.  The writing was often hit-or-miss, and viewers may have found it difficult to connect with some of the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous crimes, but I always found the first half of the show entertaining.  When the case was handed over to the prosecutors was usually when the show lost momentum, in my opinion.  If one good thing came from this series, it was the introduction of Corey Stoll to a primetime audience.  Stoll is a fantastic actor who made his character (Det. TJ Jaruszalski, or just Baldy, if you're my mother) likable, believable, and reliably entertaining from the first episode to the last.  Even the dubious subplot in which TJ goes to Mexico to hunt down the drug lord who killed his partner was tolerable, just because I'm so deeply fond of Corey Stoll.  And here's where I heave a big sigh and say RIP, LOLA.  I'm sure there are literally dozens of us who will miss you.

(click photos for sources.)

146: McGregor

from The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
here

I never sympathized with Mr. McGregor in Peter Rabbit until the fattest, dumbest rabbit you ever did see decided our backyard was his own personal salad bar.  It ate all the tulips that came up, and keeps hanging around to chow down on the new grass.  I'm seriously considering investing in some kind of Nerf gun for long-range vermin control so I don't have to keep going out and chasing it off to protect the Easter lilies that are growing now.  How many times do you have to scare the damn thing off before it stops coming back?

Frakking rabbits.

145: School pride, or whatever

New Jersey Nets forward Kris Humphries is in the news today for getting engaged to Kim Kardashian with a 20.5-carat ring.  I find this endlessly amusing because I used to see Humphries in the hall in high school, back when he was a senior and the star of our apparently very good basketball team, and I was a sophomore who didn't care.  I'm reasonably certain I never spoke to the guy, nor did I go to more than one basketball game or have any impression of him except for "is that the guy on the basketball team who's some kind of big deal?"  Well, whatever, congratulations and good for them, I guess.  I hope they're very happy, etc.

But with Humphries in the news, I have to admit that, as little as I liked my high school, it's got a pretty good record for turning out a public figures.  Oprah's favorite interior designer, Nate Berkus, entertainment reporter Samantha Harris, and rapper P.O.S are all ex-Royals.  There's also Wide Angle host Aaron Brown, a former president of the ACLU, several Olympians, a guy arrested by the FBI, and Blake Hoffarber, who made the ESPY-winning shot seen 'round the world (fun fact: I was in the stands about 20 feet away with the pep band):

So, all things considered, I am grudgingly impressed with old Hopkins.  Also, I can't complain too much, since the majority of the teachers I had were very, very good, and genuinely cared about their students.  There's also the fact that they taught me enough to help land me on the brainiest of all brainy game shows at twenty-three years old.  That's pretty good, I suppose.

In any case, I'll ask that you excuse me while I go off and continue to be amused by this Humphries/Kardashian thing.

141: Favorites XVII

There's booming, bass-heavy music coming from the park across the way, so: five favorite soundtracks in my iTunes library this week.

Pirates of the Caribbean
Sure, it gets overused during TV golf coverage (why? I don't know) but don't try to tell me you didn't walk out of the theater humming the now-familiar "He's a Pirate."  There's something very sweeping and adventurous about Hans Zimmer's score for the first Pirates film.  The music in the sequels wasn't quite as good, perhaps because it was very reminiscent of what we heard in the first, but there were some really good pieces to come out of the whole series -- I particularly enjoyed "The Kraken" from Dead Man's Chest.

Beauty & the Beast
Angela Lansbury singing that title song is intrinsic to my childhood.  Also, "Gaston" came on my iPod while I was in the car the other day, and I had forgotten how utterly ridiculous the lyrics are.  Best of all is "Be Our Guest," sung by the late, great Jerry Orbach.

Amélie
The music, like the film, is delicate and pretty and just a little bit odd.  For fans of the piano, it's happy listening.  It was my daydreamy summer driving music for a while, and it's basically the perfect background study/work music. 

North & South
I don't think the BBC ever released the soundtrack for its TV miniseries adaptation of the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, but that's okay.  I don't mind having to watch Richard Armitage mope around every time I want to listen to the music.

Star Trek, or anything else by Michael Giacchino
Nothing makes you feel like you're in an iconic film quite like "Enterprising Young Men" from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (enjoy the song and long, slow pans across the Enterprise in the video below).  Michael Giacchino is my favorite film and television composer in recent years, having scored Lost for the full run of the series, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up (and won an Academy Award for the latter) for Disney/Pixar, and almost everything J.J. Abrams has done since Alias.  There's a fun quality to his compositions, most of which are beautiful, and some utterly inspired (e.g. using bits of plane wreckage as percussion instruments for Lost), and I enjoy his often tongue-in-cheek song titles.  Best of all, it's not music that takes me out of the scene when I'm watching (like, say, some of the more bombastic music from Doctor Who), but something I enjoy going back and paying attention to when I realize I'm humming it hours later.