Category: Entertainment

Throne Of Endless Games

game-of-thronesI don’t mind that George R.R. Martin is a dick to Starks.  But he better finish Game of Thrones before I die, or Hell won’t hold half my fury.  I will reach out from the grave and pluck your heart out, you egomaniac!  Plus, in the end, if you try pullin’ any of that Sopranos fade-to-black crap, I swear on the souls of my grandchildren, I will hunt you down and make you pay.  Here’s the deal, George: you gave all of us the disease — you did it — now it’s time to come up with a cure.  Give it some thought!

The thing is it’s been five television years and Game of Thrones is still going sideways — in all directions.  I’m not the only person on this planet who’s looking around for a hint of the storyline.  There are lots of us, and our concern is that Martin has become so bloated with nerd worship he’s going to carry on writing into nowhere indefinitely.  Look, Sword and Sorcery centre stage has got to be a total buzz — I get it.  And being compared to Tolkien at every turn must be the ultimate ego stroke.  However, Martin needs to remember that not every fan is hanging on his every word.  Sure, the Fire and Ice people who’ve been around since the 90s spend tons of time looking for clues and constructing theories and making videos and writing fan fiction etc. etc. etc. on into the wee hours.  They love that stuff.  They’re added Cersei Lannister to Luke Skywalker in the Comic Con Pantheon, and they’re happy as puppies.  However, the rest of us — Game of Thrones folks — came to Westeros by way of HBO.  We don’t care about the detailed genealogy of the Targaryen dynasty.  We see a great tale that captured us with an imaginative premise and an uber-cool beginning.  We were willing to let it wander a bit in the middle, but now that it’s started to waddle, we’re concerned that it might not ever actually have an end.

Honestly, no audience will allow itself to be cliff hanger bait forever.  For God’s sake, George! Let’s start tying up a few loose ends and get on with it!

English: A Love Affair

englishI love language, and because English is the lover I grew up with, I love her best.  She’s subtle and sensible in slingback Louboutins and knee-torn Levis.  She can dance all night, gliding like a princess or grinding the stage burlesque or rustling between the trees like a black wind witch, flowing on the moonless breeze.  But she is a witch — with conjures that — in magic — change her words to whatever she wants them to mean.  Yet she prefers straight talk — prepositions and modifiers that let you know exactly what and where and when, even if it isn’t now.

And my lover is a thief who steals without remorse.  A freebooting pirate who takes the words she needs — and more — just because she can, gloried by the theft.

She’s a glutton who dines at her sister’s banquets, selecting the most delicate morsels to claim as her own and never tiring of the feast.

But my lover works hard.  She is a mechanical engineer who fits strange words together with invisible nanoweld precision, producing new tools that exactly fit their employment.

And she is an inventor.  Seduced by necessity, she is lewd and wanton, abandoning herself to satisfy his needs.

She is beautiful as the slip mists of fog, sleeping, gauze angel white in the forest dawn; angry as cracked open thunder; sad as a lost puppy’s tears and quiet as a bead of night.

Painful, bold and strong, she hunts with the predators, howling with the chase, quivering with the kill.

And she is a flirt, tempting me, flaming my desire to touch and hold and caress the words she speaks to me.

But mostly, my lover loves me.  She laughs and sings and listens.  She speaks only truth (and the occasional lie.)  She stays with me even when foul with blank page fury, I have no words for her.  And there, at the edge of the wilderness, lost and alone, it is she who comes and finds me, takes my hand and whispers, “Let’s go home.”

The Rise Of The Media Whore

kardashianIt’s pretty obvious that there’s nothing real about Reality TV.  It’s as carefully crafted as its scripted cousin.  The only difference is the actors are playing themselves.  So be it.  In the great scheme of things, the difference between Tori Spelling and Sansa Stark is minimal. (BTW, I have no philosophical bitch with Reality TV.  I don’t necessarily watch it, but I think it’s a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment — certainly as valid as the Game Show, The Cop Show and The Sit-Com.)  Unfortunately, Reality TV has one dreadful side effect — the media whore.

You’ll probably be shocked to know that the media whore was actually born on PBS, the squeaky clean Boy Scout of American broadcasting.  (No, it wasn’t Big Bird!)  In 1973, Public TV broadcast An American Family, a point-and-shoot chronicle of the Loud family — Bill, Pat and the kids.  Highbrow television being what it is, the series was called a documentary.  A rose by any other name….  Our society still had a modicum of dignity in those days, so it took a generation and the Europeans to push us over the edge of the Reality abyss.  In the 90s, Dutch TV came up with Nummer 28 the inspiration (“plagiarism” is such a hard word) for MTV’s The Real World.  From there, it was a slippery slope through Big Brother and American Idol to Paris Hilton, Phil Robertson and the High Priestess herself, Kim Kardashian.

The apologists dress these media whores up in all kinds of reasonable clothes, from the aforementioned documentary to straight comedy, to struggles with adversity and personal pain.  Yeah, right!  The truth is they are simply not content with Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.  They don’t just like the camera, they lust after it.  And they’re willing to do anything to satisfy their narcissism.  They will sell themselves, their children, their dignity (Lance Loud invited the PBS cameras back to film his death.) and their very souls to get it.   But the scary thing is — the frightening core of this contemporary phenomenon is — if they are the whores, we are the clients.  We, the audience, are the Johns of their peek-a-boo prostitution.  In fact, we built the brothel, and every time the Internet bends, breaks or beats Obama’s record, we add on another room.

As anyone in the media will tell you — it’s all about the numbers.