It's been so long since I've posted a long newsy ramble that I may as well submit this as a quarterly report. Since my last dispatches I've been to New Orleans twice and my Best Friend's farm twice. Not bad, to escape summer in the city four weekends out of twelve (I'll try to keep improving on that, with continued heartfelt thanks to Best Friend and Dangerblond), and I'm a full month into my first "season" with no baseball in longer than I care to count. I was twenty years as a baseball parent but we didn't start playing fall ball until The Oldest was three or four years into it and I was part of the league management that started "off season" ball at our park. Back then, there just wasn't any fall ball except some highly competitive travel ball. Now, it's everywhere. I'm doing okay without baseball. I really expected to be missing it more. Maybe it'll hit me all at once, but so far I'm enjoying the additional time.
Not that I'm getting more done. I've been trying to give up HBO, my little stand in protest of the cancellation of John from Cincinnati. I am particularly stunned by its weak replacement on Sunday evenings, Tell Me You Love Me. I watched the first two episodes. It's spiced with nicely done sex, although you have to go through way too much talking about the relationship to get there and when you do it's sex piled on (I mean really loaded) with pathos. Haven't we all had enough of that in real life? I'd prefer the Yost Clan's hysterically dysfunctional quick-witted interactions, expletives and all, to the angst-laden, overly earnest, self-aggrandizing, so-called meaningful discourse of the narcissistically unlikable characters in Tell Me You Love Me. I can't help it. Gag. I've also managed to catch on DVD seasons one and two of Weeds, the smart dark comedy put together by Showtime, about a suddenly widowed suburban housewife who takes to selling marijuana for a living after the death of her husband leaves her with no way to support her family. We're missing season three as it airs, although there's something to be said for waiting for the DVD and zipping through the whole thing without the suspense of waiting a whole week for the next episode. I've also heard that Dexter, about a brilliant sociopathic forensic scientist, is one of the best and freshest new things on television, so if I don't have the gumption to cancel my HBO subscription, at least I can offer them a digital finger (is that redundant?) by subscribing to Showtime too. (Hmmmm... logic, or the lack thereof.) It does seem to me that HBO's management has completely lost its way, sort of wildly chopping at their own programming with an indiscriminant ax, losing Deadwood, Carnivale, Rome and now JfC, all of them ending prematurely or even rushed, compromising the stories, in their rampage. Tell Me You Love Me is a pathetic replacement for any of these shows, much less for The Sopranos, which they at least had the good sense to end well (although I realize I'm in the minority thinking that). When I compare HBO's recent stumbles with Showtime's innovative new programming, it seems to me that, in the language of JfC, HBO's getting dusted.
There's, of course an all you can eat buffet of online video content , something for every mood. Clay at NOLA-Dishu posted a really interesting series of videos in his post Survivorman takes his family off the grid and Ashe Dambala continues to post these really amazing and compelling videos at American Zombie of Naomi Klein talking, this time with John Cusak. I'll never forget my sudden but undeniable realization on day five or six of the Federal Flood that followed Katrina's landfall in New Orleans, that no one arriving for so long, no one besides the press and a Coast Guard that had thrown out their rule book and those heroic regular folks with their own boats, could not have happened accidentally. This being America, I could come to no other conclusion than that the calvary arrived when they chose to arrive, and it was a chilling realization. In her video, Klein talks about New Orleans and Iraq et al, the war(s) we monger (the "War on Terror" [sic]TM The Capt.), as "disaster capitalism" and she suggests that our government is "willing to spend unlimited amounts of public money to fund this new economy." Speaking of the emerging companies (Blackwater comes to mind as the most obvious but there are many), she compares them to the Dotcom boom of the nineties saying, "these are our new start-ups." It's chilling to think about, but when you look at it all that way, everything finally makes perfect sense. Go. Now. Watch the video.
I can't remember the last time I actually saw a movie in a theater but I'm planning to do everything in my power to catch Left Behind, The Story of the New Orleans Public Schools on Saturday afternoon, October 13th at the Canal Place as part of the New Orleans Film Festival. It'll be a long drive to catch a movie but it's received such high praise and among my NOLA blogger friends are some who teach there (read: any excuse to go to N.O. will do). It's gotten cooler both here and there since my last visit at the end of August and I'm lonely for Middle Son, Dangerblond and Georgina.
So, there. That wasn't so hard, was it? We're all dispatched for now. Peace, out, y'all.
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