"I feel like a jerk suspecting that they were all actors."

I said, and Will Cate said:

I think they were all actors, and I don't at all feel like a jerk for thinking it. It's television. That means it's almost certainly 100% fake. Look at all the different camera-shots, the lighting. I call bullshit on the whole thing.

It was incredibly didactic and it played straight into the audience's desire to believe that good people are out there with the skill and the energy to lead us forward into racial harmony. Ah, well! It was a nice Sunday-school lesson in how to step up and speak out for what's right... if you believe.

In real life, most people, even good people, think it's best to deploy cold silence as the social pressure against strangers who say things that aren't very nice. But you can't make a TV show out of assorted dirty looks, however sharp and well-aimed.

"Anna Gunn, my wife on 'Breaking Bad,' gave me a beautiful hardcover of 'The Dangerous Book for Boys.'"

"A perfect book to flip through to get back in touch with the little boy within. It inspired me to create a concept for a TV show. . . . Stay tuned," says Bryan Cranston, answering questions about books in the NYT Sunday Book Review.

As Meade and I approach the last few episodes of the series — which we've been catching up on at a rate of about 1 episode a day — I'm glad to see Bryan Cranston has a new show in the works. Here's the whole series on Blu-Ray and here's "The Dangerous Book for Boys." I wonder how the "Dangerous Book for Boys" idea became a new TV show. Is it a show for boys (and girls) or is it for adults finding their inner little boy?

I take it Anna Gunn must have thought that Cranston's "Breaking Bad" character was getting back in touch with the little boy within, that it was an actor giving another actor a resource for understanding the character. How does a woman feel when she finds her husband getting back in touch with the little boy within? It may have been Gunn's way of saying: This is how my character sees you, in pursuit of a boyish need for danger. Perhaps Cranston's new-show idea has something to do with the way this need can be repurposed in a positive and productive way in adult manhood. The Walter White character hurls himself out into a quest for manhood that is horrifically destructive. As Cranston puts it in the interview at the top link: "The depth of this tragic story made it feel like the character reached Shakespearean level."

What if it were not a tragedy but a comedy? That's my guess at what the new TV idea is. By the way, I just discovered yesterday, that Cranston was Tim Whatley, the dentist character on "Seinfeld."

"The Highs and Lows of The Sound of Music Live."

Including: "HIGH: The many, many instances of Rolfe's shorts."

"Since 1965, women with children have logged increasingly more time watching television and driving..."

"... and increasingly less time playing with children, doing chores, and exercising, according to a new report published this week in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings."

In 1965, mothers of children aged 5 to 18 spent 14.2 more hours a week being physically active than being sedentary. In 2010, they spent 3.8 more hours a week being sedentary than they did on physical activity.

Interesting, but why did they put driving in the same category with watching TV? Because one sits to do it? Chauffeuring the kids around used to count as one of the child-rearing tasks. I suspect the reclassification has to do with the focus on the woman getting enough exercise. We're so much less concerned with what's good for children that helping them get to their various events and social occasions is equated with lolling about in a recliner.

And why was "playing with children" seen as physically active? Much playing with children involves sitting around while they do things with toys and games. Building blocks, dressing dollies, playing Candyland and Old Maid, operating the electric train — these were all done sitting down. Yeah, there are those running and jumping around kids' games that we played in the 60s — tag, hopscotch, monkey-in-the-middle — but Mommy didn't play those games. It would have been bizarre for Mom to join in on, say, jump rope.

Much of the work of raising children has to do with simply being present and watchful over long periods of time. It's not an exercise routine. If Mother is concerned about burning calories she's probably less vigilant. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and my mother didn't play with me. But she was around, relatively nearby when I played. Kids played with kids. Go out and play. Find something to do. And we did. Whether she sat down and whether that sitting involved a TV doesn't matter. It so happens that my mother stood, read the newspaper, and listened to the radio. But you see my point: Child-rearing is not an exercise routine, and our present-day focus on adults getting exercise should be kept separate.

People today are really confused, it seems to me in my old age.

"Lazy Men Are Responsible for the Great Orgasm Deficit."

A headline at Cosmopolitan. Excerpt:

These days, it feels like men are letting themselves off the hook for one-sided orgasms a little too easily.... "I know some women don't have orgasms every time. Don't worry about it." Now that he's framed it like you're the one who's being forgiven for your tricky, finicky genitals...

Framing. It's not just for politics.

And since the new study on the low rate of female orgasm has emerged, so have myriad response pieces (by women) about how sex feels good even without an orgasm, and how orgasms are almost besides the point.

Are they? Sure, it's true, to a point. But is this just a rationalization to continue letting men off the hook and Criss Angel Mindfreak women into thinking that their own orgasms aren't as important as the man's?

I had to look up Criss Angel Mindfreak. I thought it referred to some character who puts her all into pleasing men, but apparently it's the name of a reality TV show about a magician named Criss Angel. Mindfreak isn't part of the performer's name I was disappointed to learn.

That short Cosmo article used the phrase "off the hook" twice, and the about the new study — which went to another Cosmo article — is about the orgasm deficit in during "hookup" sex. Too many hooks!

And Cosmo math is terrible. The headline at that linked article says "Only Half of All Women Orgasm During Casual Sex," and the text says:

Today in ~*~*Duh, Science~*~*, research presented at the International Academy of Sex Research’s annual meeting reflects that women are half as likely to orgasm during oral or penetrative sex as a casual hookup versus either of those sex acts in a relationship.

~*~*Duh, Math~*~*

"You will spend the next hour watching this new video for Bob Dylan’s 'Like a Rolling Stone'..."

"...  Good luck not spending the rest of your day watching this."

I linked to that yesterday, and I'm only bringing it up again to observe that I — a big Dylan fan for 5 decades — spent only about a minute looking at it, which is much less than the length of the song itself. So what's the deal with all these journalists claiming that we're going to become obsessed with watching it for hours or all day?

The quote I've chosen for this post seems about typical to me. It comes from David Malitz at The Washington Post, and Malitz appears to be a fairly young person, at least not an old boomer Dylan fan like me.

My reaction to the video was: 1. Here's the Dylan song that's used to represent all Dylan songs when you want to reach the largest possible audience with the message that you are playing a Dylan song, 2. I'm hearing the Dylan recording but I'm seeing some TV person mouthing the words, a type of performance that is annoying even when your dearest loved one does it; it's not cute. 3. So there are a bunch of TV people who were willing to go on camera mouthing the words of the entire 6+ minute song. 4. Either show me Bob Dylan with the voice of Bob Dylan or cover the song with your own voice and do it well (not cutesy) or leave me alone.

People like Malitz aren't so much interested in the Dylan song as in the various TV personalities who signed on the project and did the full 6+ minutes of mouthing and the technological achievement of making an interactive video that allows you to drop in on the various celebrities at any point in the song. Isn't it charming how they're all there on different channels, all synched to the same place in the song? It's not so much about Dylan as it is about hey, it's Steve Levy, hey, it's The Property Brothers. This is what could occupy a lot of time: checking out who all the TV people are and being charmed by how they look keeping up with the song. You've got to find that cute.

But Dylan is not about cute. Sample Dylan uses of "cute":

"And she buttoned her boot/And straightened her suit/Then she said, 'Don’t get cute'..."

"Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit/He spoke to me, I took his flute/No, I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?"

It was all about not getting cute... back in the 60s. But now maybe, with these kids today, cuteness is what it takes. You're supposed to get cute.

"We could tell you that the interactive video consists of 16 separate videos starring familiar actors and TV personalities lip-synching the lyrics to Dylan's 1965 karaoke classic 'Like A Rolling Stone'..."

"... and that viewers can use their keyboards to flip between these videos seamlessly throughout the duration of the song, so that the opening lines are performed by the guys from Pawn Stars and the song wraps up in the middle of a History Channel special about the Great Depression."

Or wherever you direct it... with no direction home.

But why not just watch it?

Like a complete unknown celebrity.

Björk explains television from the poetic perspective but warns you not to let poets lie to you.

All those dots that make up the picture are "millions and millions of little screens," and so "you are watching very many things when you are watching TV."

Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging it's right or not.  You just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me....

Full text at the link, but it's better in video form (if you can handle all those tiny little dots):

"But as you sit there sipping wine and eating pork belly, watching a marathon of The Sopranos — which sounds like a very nice evening..."

"... keep in mind that the distance between you and some imagined figure pounding Mountain Dew and Quarter Pounders while watching hours of Pawn Stars is not so vast."

Willa Paskin, tweaking the snobbish consciences of Slate readers who may have lost touch with old-fashioned it-will-rot-your-brain snobbery about watching too much television.

"Breaking Bad – Lingering Questions."

I'm linking to this because after writing that last post, I want to follow Boring as Heck. There, I added it to my blogroll. I don't know if I've ever done that based on reading only one post, but I can't read this "Breaking Bad" post. Not just yet. After bitching about and resisting nudging to watch the show, especially in the week leading up to the finale, I started watching one episode at a time.

I'd captured the first 20 or so episodes when AMC was running the whole series, in order, and I have a slight tendency to sit down at a certain point in the evening with the feeling that it's time to consume about an hour of television. I used to watch "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," but the political topics of the day — insurance and budgets — have a dreariness that is not puffed into an amusing form by derision and head-slapping. I know comedy should hurt. I like edge.

But it's such a dull edge, and perhaps some fictional explosions and existential ennui would better enliven my hour in the comfy chair. So I've been dipping into the accumulated episodes of "Breaking Bad." I've gotten far enough that I wish I hadn't switched off its recording after 22. There's not endless space in that DVR box, and we had about 100 post-season baseball games to keep track of before the World Series even begins, and then there are all those football games. Meade would watch these things live, and I wouldn't watch them at all, but put us together and the DVR is needed to control the flow of commercials, which I can't face with passivity. Some of them — I'm talking to you, "Jeremy" — bother me even in fast-forward.

So, with the nudging to watch it gone, I'm quietly, slowly consuming "Breaking Bad." I'll eventually reach then end, where "Lingering Questions" will be relevant to my slowly-catching-up experience. But I wanted to pin down that Boring as Heck post and thought it might matter to those of you who are beyond spoiler alerts.

Soshoku danshi — "grass-eating men" — "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant."

"The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ('Girly Men') was a tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he loved baking cakes, collecting 'pink sparkly things' and knitting clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan's corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation they spawned."

This comes from the article "Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?," which I linked to earlier today for some different purposes. I wanted to break this out separately. I may not be understanding the Japanese phenomenon accurately, but I'm interested in the way a television show can begin with a character who is supposed to be laughed at but who ends up inspiring some viewers, who legitimates and activates feelings that they have about themselves, and shows them new ways to behave, openly and without shame.

The example that occurs to me in American culture is Maynard G. Krebs, the best friend of the main character on the old Dobie Gillis show (which was on from 1959 to 1963). It was assumed that viewers would identify with Dobie. That's why he was the main character. He dressed and acted like a conventional teenaged boy of that time. He wanted girlfriends, and he had struggles with his parents and teachers, but he mostly tried to satisfy them even as he pursued his overarching goal: relationships with females.

The Maynard character wasn't supposed to call American teenagers into another way of living. Maynard (played by Bob Denver) was less good-looking, dressed grubbily, wore a goatee, was dumb about or uninterested in a lot of typical teenager things. He wasn't interested in girls. He rejected work and other conventions of middle class American life. His only interest was jazz, and he was — we were expected to understand — a beatnik. But we didn't fulfill the expectation that we would read this character as a clown. We got the idea: We could live in a new way.

Blah blah blah... we became hippies.

What does Ronan Farrow think is: 1. "an annoyance," and 2. "empowering"?

1. Your interest in whether his father is Frank Sinatra or Woody Allen.

2. His new MSNBC TV show.

(Need more details? Here's the whole article.)

ADDED: Here, you can judge his speaking style and small-screen appeal:



"I did a lot of stuff in my Hammer Pants."

AND: Watching that clip, I could only think of one word: jejune.

2 things about "Project Runway" that were changed to suit Tim Gunn.

"First, he insisted that the designers make their own clothes (the original plan had been for a roomful of seamstresses to sew the competitors’ patterns), and second, he argued that the workroom should close every night so as not to become a competition of endurance rather than talent. (It was planned as a 24-hour work space.) 'Some people can survive on four hours of sleep like Martha Stewart, and others are frail flowers who need nine,' he argued. (The change also gave the added tension of a clock ticking away, as the hour that the workroom had to close increasingly neared each night.)"

Link.

So I tried to watch the pilot episode of "Breaking Bad."

There's much talk about the final episode of "Breaking Bad," and I've got a houseguest arriving on Sunday who importuned me to set the DVR to record that episode but told me I can't just watch the final episode with him. I've got to watch the whole series from the beginning, which is to say I've got to watch 61 hours of the thing before I can hang out with my newly arrived houseguest watching the show he's so excited about and (not that I care much) everyone in the media seems unable to shut up about.

Attending to the assigned recording task, I see that the network (AMC) is running a marathon of all the old episodes leading up to the big finale, so I set the DVR to lay in the requisite 61 hours. Last night, settling in to watch the new episode of "Project Runway," I see that I accidentally bumped it, what with all the incoming "Breaking Bad" and baseball games. (The DVR can record 3 things at once, but not more.) So I call up the "Pilot" episode of "Breaking Bad."

I turn it off after 22 minutes. Interestingly, 22 minutes is the classic length of a sitcom. Have I got Sitcom Mind? Reading the summary of the "Pilot" episode, I see that some exciting stuff was about to happen. When I turned off the show at 22 minutes, Meade and I had a conversation of untimed length about how perhaps there's a Hollywood plot to disparage ordinary American life through the depiction of the bored, boring, declining, dying white man. It started long ago with "The Honeymooners" — notice the shift to sitcoms — but the man we're invited to look down on has become more and more dull and meaningless until he's fully dehumanized and about to fall off the face of the earth anyway. (The "Breaking Bad" guy learns he's dying of lung cancer.)

If we'd hung on past the sitcom length of time, we'd have seen the police bust a meth lab, and other scenes of cooking up drugs, accidental fires, deadly fumes, sirens, a misfired gun, and a reactivated cock. I'm reading the plot summary out loud to Meade as I try to write this. We get into another conversation about television over the years and what it's done to our notions of masculinity. We're talking about Ralph Kramden and Ricky Ricardo as I dump sesame seeds into the stove-top seed roaster. (I like darkly toasted sesame seeds on cottage cheese for lunch, and Meade has been chiding me about over-toasting them, like sesame seeds are going to cause cancer.) The conversation continues as I follow Meade out to the front door, and it's on and on about "Bewitched" and "Leave It to Beaver" and Red Skelton.

"Remember how Red Skelton used to say 'Thank you for inviting me into your living room'?" I ask, and Meade — picking up the dog leash — remembers and entertains my elaborate theory about TV needing to be different from theater and movies because it comes into your home and how in sitcoms you're mostly sitting in your living room looking into some fictional family's living room, and there's this interchange between the sitcom family and the viewers' family. I bring up the transfusion metaphor from "Atlas Shrugged" that we were talking about a couple days ago. How has the poison — is it poison? — been administered all these years? Why have we kept the channel open? Because it only takes 22 minutes? What subversion of our values has taken place? I go on about Archie Bunker in his chair, which faces the TV....



... and we are on the other side of the TV, in our chairs, looking through at them, as if we are on their TV. What are we doing? Are the women nudged to look over at their men and see them as Edith, above, sees Archie? What has been happening in these 22-minute treatments we've volunteered for all these years?

Meade inquires about the 22 minutes — the time for the show in a 30-minute slot with commercial — and he seems to notice for the first time that the premium cable channels don't have commercials, and I tease him that he's like these sitcom husbands who are never fully clued in. He's off to get Zeus (the dog) to take him for a walk, and I make some wisecrack — like I think I'm in a sitcom — about how he should do well with the dog, since dogs don't even know the difference between the show and the commercial.

Ha ha. Back in the kitchen of my sitcom life, I see — through billows of smoke — that the sesame seeds are on fire.

Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies.

Jack Hamilton has a piece in Slate subtitled "Forget Walter White. Eastbound & Down is the most original, disturbing, wrenching show on television. (And it’s hilarious, too.)"

If we live in a golden age of great television shows, the vast majority of these shows have featured angst-ridden white male protagonists. This shift from heroes to anti-heroes has been frequently and rightly characterized as a broader interrogation of masculinity itself, one occasioned by crises of its creators, crises of culture, or both. But while current prestige-magnets like Mad Men and Breaking Bad might offer revisionist takes on white maleness, they also offer their audiences renewed fantasies of the same. Young men buy suits cut to look like Don Draper’s; aggrieved Internet communities close ranks in protection of Walter White’s right to be the One Who Knocks.

So what's great about Eastbound & Down is that it deprives the beleaguered white male of hope.

Eastbound & Down isn’t so much a show about white masculinity in transition or decline as it is a biting send-up of male fantasy itself. Powers fancies himself an alpha dog, gunslinging, rock ’n’ roll outlaw, a fiction he believes to be reality, and to which he believes himself to be entitled. Kenny Powers’ problem, in a sense, is that he’s watched too much TV. If Mad Men is a drama about the encroaching demise of a certain white male dominance, Eastbound & Down is a satire of its vacancy, and its bankruptcy. The latter is a whole lot funnier, and often more daring.

Because hopeless, pathetic decline is hilarious. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when a woman or person of color feels disrespected or bullied. Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies. (Here's the disemparaphrased Mel Brooks quote.)

I quoted the subtitle of the article above — because it made the content of the article clearer— but now I see enough additional meaning to make me want to quote the title. It's "Breaking Ball." That's not just a play on "Breaking Bad" and a reference to crushing testicles, it's an allusion to the show's milieu, baseball. Eastbound & Down shows baseball as "gross and debauched, a morass of juiced-up players, abusive fans, godforsaken locales, bored and boring spectacle."

Many of the actors on-screen... boast hilariously unathletic physiques, and seem to have last donned a glove back in the days when home plate came with a tee. It’s the ugliest depiction of the game in recent memory, a hilarious and welcome desecration of one of the old white America’s favorite civic religions.

Take that, white America.

CORRECTION: This post originally ended with this parenthetical:

(And can golf ever catch a break? It's the most coolness-resistant activity on earth. It's the sport most associated with Obama, and the man most associated with the sport is Tiger Woods, and yet it's still the domain of the old white guys — fat old white guys.)

Meade proofreads and corrects my inference that "tee" was a joke about golf. I guess that says something about the connections in my brain. Running down the out-of-shape, declining white males led me to thinking about golf. The reference is to the children's game of tee ball. I don't think children playing tee ball wear a batting glove. That's what threw me off. But obviously, they do wear a glove to play defense in tee ball.

ADDED: Meade reads my correction and informs me that children playing tee ball do wear batting gloves. I'm surprised. There's so much more gear these days, what with helmets to tricycle and knee pads to roller skate. And then as I'm writing this, Meade interrupts to inform me that the author of the article meant a fielder's glove, which I know, but my point is, when I'm reading and words are used to call up an image in the mind, and I see "tee" and "glove," I picture a person at a tee wearing a glove, and that takes me to golf, not tee ball. Or is that how the female brain works?

"The Academy was simply asking for trouble by giving extra attention to [Cory] Monteith and not Larry Hagman and Jack Klugman."

"Yes, you could argue that it’s not clear where you draw the line. Do you stop after Klugman while eschewing names like Charles Durning, Annette Funicello or Bonnie Franklin? Maybe, maybe not."

What is clear is where you don’t draw the line. You don’t draw it where it leaves out two actors who were major TV stars across the decades. Frankly, though Monteith became a target, I’m not sure you include [Jonathan] Winters in a special Emmy memory before Hagman and Klugman, and I say that as a big fan of Winters and someone who didn’t watch “Dallas.”...

In particular, based on how important Hagman was to CBS, thanks to “Dallas,” his exclusion really is inexplicable. More than one person has wondered whether Winters’ link to Robin Williams, whose new CBS series debuts this week, was the reason that Winters got the nod.

Man, this is just an ugly conversation.

Death and commerce... is it really that ugly?

"Kuwaiti preacher Mubarak al-Bathali ruled recently that marriage depicted on television is considered valid and real."

"His ruling was based on a Muslim hadith, a saying by the Prophet Muhammad."

In this hadith, Muhammad defined three issues as pivotal and serious even if used jokingly: Marriage, divorce, and freeing a slave. "This hadith shows intent has no central part in these three matters," said the preacher, who also ruled that a woman who is married cannot depict a character getting married on television.

"Reality TV constructs its quite openly fake reality in order to elicit emotional responses in the audience..."

"... so what’s the point of watching crazy people melt down and then get shown the door? Especially when no one will have the nerve to say to him, 'I’m glad you’re leaving. You shouldn’t be here and you made things hell for the rest of us,' instead of the half-assed and completely unbelievable nicey-nice being made at the end?"

"Prepare your Emmys haterade now, because nothing can kill an awards show's buzz faster than..."

"... a Don Cheadle self-congratulatory tribute to how well television covered the Kennedy assassination, followed by a Carrie Underwood tribute to the Beatles' performance on the Ed Sullivan Show having been fifty years ago (next year)."

"I mean really, besides my grandparents, who are both dead, who is watching the nightly news?"

Said Glenn Beck, when challenged about his boast that The Blaze would put traditional news out of business.

I've given some thought over the years — it's one of my long-time thought experiments — to the idea of an afterlife that consisted only of being able to watch the TV news, showing what was going on back in the world of the living.

***

And here's an article about Glenn Beck's "Man in the Moon" show:

Part Tea Party rally, part Cirque du Soleil (my characterization, which Beck objected to), the show is a window into Beck’s mind — which he admits is riddled with attention-deficit disorder and a busy, buzzing energy — that is possibly more revealing than his famous chalkboard rants.

Strange!

Conservatives usually like to present themselves as appealing to the rational mind. This is not that.