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Shakespalin, Dubya, and Henry the IV Part 1.

After Sarah Palin twice used the non-word “refudiate” (presumably a mash-up of “refute” and “repudiate”), she justified her coining of new words on Twitter by saying that Shakespeare did it too.

“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!- SarahPalinUSA
This unleashed a response on Twitter of people making fun of “The Bard of Wasilla” under the topic #shakespalin, some of which were even funny.

This is an example of the “culture war” in the U.S. in action. Liberal elites who love Shakespeare find Palin’s ignorance excrutiating. For Palin supporters, it’s one more example of smarty-pants Liberal elites thinking they’re better than everyone else because they’ve read Shakespeare.

I’ll add to the pedantry by saying that Palin is unwittingly repeating the myth that Shakespeare introduced thousands of words into the English language. He didn’t.

Shakespeare may have coined some words, but he is credited with inventing far more than he deserves, simply because the people assembling dictionaries often cited him as the first source.

I get frustrated by the attitude that Shakepeare is the exclusive province of the hoi polloi, with arcane interpretations of his works making them ever more inaccessible to average joe. Shakespeare was popular entertainment: Romeo and Juliet starts off with dick jokes.

Shakespeare is a giant for many reasons: great characters, great poetry and great stories that we can still recognize and apply today.

One example is the similarity between the narrative arc of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 and George W. Bush and the Republican primary in 2000.

For a chunk of his youth, W was very much like Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1. Hal (Henry) is the Prince of Wales, next in line for the British throne. But instead of attending to court business and politics, he spends his time hanging out in bars with drinking buddies (Falstaff) and wenches.

Hal’s chief rival is Hotspur – (real name: Henry Percy), a war hero with a reputation as a great warrior.

W also spent a lot of his youth dicking around. He was a fratboy cheerleader at Yale and famously blew off his time in the air national guard when others were fighting in Vietnam. He ran a couple of oil firms badly and ran the Texas Rangers baseball club. He became Governor of Texas, in a state where most of the real power rests with the Lieutenant-Governor. He was a lightweight who was only a “somebody” because of his dad, and was a boozer whose drinking nearly cost him his marriage.

In the 2000 Republican primary Bush was the expected front-runner, only to face an unexpected challenge from John McCain, who like Hotspur is a war hero with a temper. McCain was shot down in Vietnam, held prisoner and tortured for years in the “Hanoi Hilton.” The son of an admiral, he was offered his freedom if he betrayed his fellow prisoners, but refused.

McCain’s rashness and anger was his weak spot, and in 2000, Bush’s team set out to exploit it through “push polls” – phone calls to Republican supporters in South Carolina asking if the fact that McCain had a black child would affect their support for him.

The question seemed to imply that McCain had illegitimately fathered an African-American son or daughter. In fact, he and his wife had adopted a girl from Bangladesh.

The purpose of this race-baiting poll was twofold: to drive down support for McCain, but also to get him angry during a television debate with Bush. Both strategies succeeded: when McCain got angry with Bush, Bush stayed cool. McCain looked out of control.

Just as Hal, the barfly-prince overcame Hotspur, and seemed even more remarkable for it, so Bush, the barfly-President’s son overcame McCain.

We can’t stretch this too far, of course. Hal’s actions and ambitions from the outset were calculated, while in the 90‘s Bush’s grand ambiton was to become National Baseball Commissioner.

Hal went on to become Henry V, personally led the British to victory in a foreign war (Agincourt) and, in Shakespeare’s version at least, delivered one of the greatest speeches in all of drama.

W, on the other hand, led the U.S. into two disastrous foreign wars, never having served himself, nearly bankrupted his country, and could barely deliver a speech, even one written for him.

So let’s not push it.

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SPOILER ALERT – In Limbo After Lost: Thoughts on the Series Finale

I watched the Finale of Lost a day late. I returned from a weekend in the country and watched it only after carefully avoiding Facebook, e-mail, Twitter – basically, the Internet, or anything else that might give away a clue to what was going on.

There are lots of questions that went unanswered, which is to be expected. Some of the action and images were absolutely spectacular. I loved most of it. Then, the big reveal:  the flash-sideways that had taken up half of the whole last season was all after Jack had died – or as he was dying. I felt ripped off.

Let me explain why I thought this was a mistake, by explaining what Lost did right. Lost was brilliant for a couple of reasons: first, it crammed just about every “desert island” reference you can imagine into each episode. Tons of crazy mysteries, lots of retro-Tintin tech and so on. But the real genius is that, in a show that was filled with crazy, comic-book / sci-fi / fantasy style action, it managed to make characters matter.

It’s generally understood in writing that plot and character are inversely related: whether its a book or a film, the “bigger” the events are, the less the inner lives of the characters matter and the more the players just get swept along for the ride. It’s either Transformers or My Dinner With André.

Lost’s creators got around this in an ingenious way: in the first few seasons they would flashback to a character’s past during an episode in a way that would shed light on that character’s motivations as they went through the crazy goings-on on the island – kidnappings, polar bear attacks, mysterious monsters. It grounded characters, avoided boring exposition, gave characters surprising depth, and – perhaps cleverest of all – meant the viewer knew far more about each character than the other characters on the island did.

This created a kind of intimacy – a secret knowledge – that built a rapport between viewer and the characters. What happened in the flashbacks mattered, because it shed light on the motivations and inner struggles that were playing out in new conflicts.

This could only go on so long – there was only so much past for each character to plumb – and the show switched to “flash forwards” instead, eventually shifting into a time travel plotline where jumping back and forth between points in time was a result of telling stories that had characters split into different eras.

All that was to come to an end at the end of last season, by setting off an H-Bomb at some point in the 1970’s that would somehow restore some kind of balance, and hopefully prevent the plane accident that brought them all to the island from ever occuring – like pressing a cosmic “reset” button.

This last season opened with the aftermath of the H-Bomb on the island (pretty low-key for an H-Bomb), which returned all the remaining characters to the “present” (2004), and opened up a parallel “flash sideways” storyline in L.A., where all of the characters seemed to be living lives somewhat different – and usually much happier – than they had before.

The really shocking reveal of the Series Finale was that this entire season of “flash-sideways” was not a parallel timeline, but a flash-forward to the moment of Jack’s death, turned into a kind of limbo, or purgatory – or fleeting fantasy. It was, (we were told) a kind of spiritual reality, created by the collective unconscious of the souls of the people who had been on the Island. Together, they broke away from the wounds of their lives they endured before their time on the island – that we learned about through flashbacks – and celebrated the joys of the times they had together on the island.

It felt good to seeing all these characters actually get a break – and enjoy some happiness – after enduring so misery. But the problem with the “flash sideways” is not that it was sentimental, or schmaltzy, but that it was immaterial – literally.

In all the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and time jumps that happened prior to the last season, the decisions that characters made really mattered. They risked their own lives at risk in order to save the people they loved. They often had to make painful decisions under extraordinary pressure because time was running out. This was still the case in the storyline set on the “island”.

But what was really at stake in the “flash-sideways” in the last season? The writers and producers get the character of Desmond to round up all the characters in L.A. timeline. In the island reality, he is a mysterious “failsafe” who is immune to the powers of the energy that runs the island. Will he be used somehow to tap through between the timelines and unite them again, or create a new synthesis?

No, because he is just rounding everybody up to get Jack to move on from Limbo. There is no urgency, in terms of time pressure or consequence. What will happen if Jack fails to move on? He’ll keep living in Limbo where he seems to be pretty happy – happier, in fact, than he ever was. Why does he have to move on now? What difference does it make? It’s not clear why he has to move on at all, or why he has to do it now.

And that is why the “you’re all dead” ending feels like a rip-off, all the more galling because many of the moments that were part of that story thread were great, especially characters suddenly recalling their memories of times together. It was great to see characters whose deaths you’d mourned get the chance to reunite and be happy.

The letdown comes with the revelation that storyline, as “limbo” is meaningless as a result: because what is happening to them has no bearing on the outcome of events or even contributes to the conflict in the story, or its resolution – Jack vs not-Locke, the battle over the island, or saving the light. When your choices don’t make a difference, neither the character nor the story are going anywhere.

Which, I guess if you’re dying is kind of the point.

All that being said… I can see some of the rationale for telling the “flash-sideways” story – in part because it did provide an opportunity for happiness and light in a season that saw so many major characters die. Without that balance, it would have been awfully bleak.

It’s clear, too, that the writers were finding a way to send a message to fans – and possibly themselves – that all good things come to an end, and that they need to accept that it is over and let go.

It is strange and sad, after getting to know these characters, for it to end. Still, it’s hard not to feel disappointed. The genius of Lost was in finding ways to tell an over-the-top story with ordinary people, demi-gods and magic in a way that you bought it, and that you cared about the characters. In making the “flash-sideways” a kind of dream limbo, they undercut themselves by getting viewers to invest in a story line that didn’t really matter at all.

PS> I made a similar argument about the failures in plot and character of Star Wars Episode I here:

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Flight of the Conchords: On Air

Flight of the Conchords are one of the greatest comedy acts since SCTV was on the air. Understated, ridiculous, but with music and lyrics that are as instantly appealing and memorable as a Python sketch.

Like SCTV, the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement worked themselves past the point of exhaustion for the  brilliant first season of their HBO series: 12 30-minute episodes that they co-wrote and produced, and for which they wrote and recorded all the songs.

It’s an astonishing creative feat, one that is underestimated for two reasons. Many people are only familiar with their work only in Youtube extracts of the songs, not realizing that songs like Hiphopapotamus and the Rhymenoceros or Business Time actually come from a TV show. People also think that Bret and Jemaine the writers and performers ARE the dim characters they play, not realizing that they are the creators and writers of their personas, as well as an actual, touring comedy act.

The characters of Bret and Jemaine have an amazing, childlike quality -  a kind of sweetness and innocence along with being dim and introverted – that makes them appealing and fresh, even while the story lines involve drug trips and threesomes gone wrong. They’re different from the SNL idiot man-child, like those played by Will Ferrell or Chris Farley, who are stupid screaming oafs.

There won’t be any more TV shows.Two seasons was enough but the Conchords are currently launching a European tour.

Here is a New Zealand documentary, On Air, that covers the time they were making the show. It appears on the DVD’s of the shows’ second season.

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Rick Moranis: Genius

Moranis is the T in 5 Neat Guys.

Looking back at SCTV’s Network 90 shows, it’s amazing how much of it holds up. In part, its because the people they picked as targets lasted too: Henry Kissinger, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, the Godfather.

There’s also a lot of SCTV that, in retrospect, is prescient.Sometimes it’s their influence – like on every quiz show sketch on SNL in the the last 25 years – but a lot of what they started off as jokes (like the reality / prank show Revenge) have ended up being real shows.

Rick Moranis’ Jerry Todd sketches often ended up at the end of the show. Moranis had been a DJ, so he transferred the cheeseball Todd character from an AM Top 40 station to a guy obsessed with technology. The result was the world’s first VJ.

There’s a great interview with Moranis here. http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/650/an-hour-with-sctvs-rick-moranis.html

Here’s the first Episode of the Gerry Todd show on SCTV. It includes covers of both “De Doo Doo Doo De Da Da Da” and “Turning Japanese” by Tom Monroe, from Monroe’s fabled album of lounge versions of New Wave covers, “On a New Wavelength.”

Here’s Moranis / Monroe’s cover of “Downtown” by Petula Clark.

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Ok Go Top Themselves

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