Take one Xanex and see me in the morning

I was looking up the theme tune to the show "Weeds" when I stumbled across an article in The New Republic by their TV critic Lee Siegel. It's general thrust was that Weeds was derivative and unfunny. Fair enough. I would personally disagree but everyone is entitled to their opinion. It was the first half of the diatribe that struck me as worthy of comment. It was basically an attack on the whole idea of the suburbs as a hidden roiling sea of depravity and immorality. Clearly a suburbanite who resents the stereotyping in the 'liberal media'. Lee gives Desperate Housewives as pass because it is so campy that no-one would mistake it for the reality of his/her nice suburban dream. Time to get out of the bubble. The suburbs are just as boring, depraved, tedious and normal as the city. That a comedy should focus on the seedy underbelly of the 'burbs is neither new nor unfair to the ticky tacky houses. Where does Mr/Ms Siegel think that the majority of the clientele of strip clubs, hookers, massage parlour come from? You guessed it - the 'burbs. And where are the majority of drugs bought and sold for final use. No shit Sherlock - the 'Burbs. Society has a seedy undebelly and it is not restricted to demography or geography.
Oh yeah - and lighten up on Mary Louise Parker. You don't like, her - we get it. Just stop dipping into the thesaurus and a psych minor to rail against a critically well-liked actress. I saw her in Proof as well, and I thought that she did a fine job crafting her character. We'll see how Gwyneth does - though I imagine Seigel will like her - very nice suburban girl, even if she does call her child Apple.
As for the theme song, a 1962 ditty called "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds. Yes, it is a little condescending, though with no little insight for the early 60's. Siegel dexcribes it as "subtly anihilating"? What flavor of anti-skank do you have to smoke to take such offence to an amusing little folk song. I suppose The New Republic needs to increase readership to a more conservative suburban audience as the its core urban subcribers look to 'precycle' their magazines by reading Slate and 20 blogs online.

You can dooo it...

Big day in the C2C world. Blake and I finally got a long trail under our belt - 16+ miles with over 4000ft of elevation change. Took 9 hours though - not a great pace but it was equivalent to the toughest day of the C2C. Boy, did we underestimate the amount of water to bring... 2 Double Camelbaks, stat! Clearly we need to slog out more of these. For the moment, I cannot imagine doing those kinds of days back to back and we have 3 days that look like they might be dealbreakers. My preference is to train hard enough to take those days in our stride but I have always been an inveterate dreamer. The logistical implications of rescheduling our accomodation are not pretty (are you listening mum?) 2 months to go - how hard can it be?

Aching all over, I settled down to watch SNL for the first time in months. It didn't take long to remember why I neither watch nor TiVo it these days. It just isn't funny. No franchise characters (seriously, is there any Nielsen evidence to perpetuate "The Falconer"), loads of corpsing - which would be OK if there was anything to laugh at, and generally lacklustre performances... and who told Tom Brady that he could act? Or did he ask to... after all, there must be life after football. Even Beck, former avant garde rocker, was derivative and mediocre. The new songs were nothing special and he even stole the Bez role from the Happy Mondays for that muppet in the flight suit. No-one will ever out-dance and out-irrelevant-percussion Bez - don't even try. The only less dark spots were Jiminy Glick and Amy Poehler's Caitlin character. Thank God for She Spies!

Kickoff

So, here I am in Cape Cod, maintaining a west coast sleep pattern on the east coast. Or at least that is my excuse for being up so late... This is the first real entry in my blog and my first attempt to use Blogger to put it there. There is that cursory message on my .mac blog page but that hardly counts. The description of this blog says it all... [comments within these brackets are secret sub-conscious outpourings] ...a journal of nothing in particular with a proclivity towards anything that will take time away from my avowed ambition of actually getting a frakkin script out of the door or whatever metaphorical orrifice such a product should be excreted from. [Of course the secret purpose of this blog is to keep the authorial fraction of my brain actually ticking over in the face of such conscious obstruction]. Anyway, [I will use that word a lot!] since there is no content driven theme to this blog, we'll never know what is over the horizon. However, I can predict certain categories of content appearing on a semi-regular basis: TV, writing, films/movies, technology and gadgets, Apple computers, the USA from the perspective of an expat, and the geopolitically trivial yet terribly important events of my life [if I can be bothered]. Don't say I didn't warn you... [like you care]