Leap day

Well, I gots to post on February 29. By the time the next one rolls around, we’ll probably all be brains in jars with terabit wireless implants for communication and virtual interactions in Fourteenth Life.

In contrast to the futuristic tone of that paragraph, things have been pretty retro this week. This morning I saw the video for Rick Springfield’s “I’ve Done Everything for You,” which is five minutes I’ll never get back (but I just couldn’t look away). And my bro tipped me off to the fact that if you run a little program called DOSBox, you can play Snipes on your Mac or Linux box. Oh man, did I waste a cumulative several months of my life playing that. I’m actually afraid to set it up now—you all might never hear from me again. At least, not until the whole brains-in-jars thing comes to pass.

Time killer

I blame Danielle for sending me this link. I got past level 10 once! Highest score so far: around 420K. Swami is kicking my ass up and down, of course.

Prepare to waste massive amounts of time

Pardon me, I need to go scrutinize a map of Africa.

Alma matters

As a graduate of William and Mary, I had a front-row seat to this week’s debacle of President Nichol resigning. He was the target of a lot of irrational right-wing blustering about a few topics; you can read about it all here (among other places, I’m sure).

When I was there in the early 1990s, W&M was a mix of a few goofy braniac weirdos like me and a whole lot of Young Republicans studying business and wearing blue blazers and chinos. Somehow I managed to look past the school’s associations with Margaret Thatcher, Scalia, and James Baker and focus on more progressive happenings, such as when Doug Wilder came to campaign. (Although I must admit that most of my time in college was spent shirking the assigned reading and going out for nachos.) But now, the attacks on Nichol are harder to ignore—if only because a fair amount of the conflict has been waged in my email inbox. Also, it’s been a stark change from the relentlessly sunny PR I usually receive, whose singular purpose is to induce me to donate some dough.

I have to say, anybody attacked by the likes of Michelle Malkin is pretty much all right by me. Virginia clearly is torn between its conservative past and a more liberal, hopeful future. Too bad this incident with Nichol is a clear step backward.

Speechless

Here’s what Mitt Romney said yesterday when he dropped out of the presidential race:

I disagree with Senator McCain on a number of issues, as you know. But I agree with him on doing whatever it takes to be successful in Iraq, on finding and executing Osama bin Laden, and on eliminating al-Qaeda and terror. If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

What a tool. What a huge tool. Yeah, that’s not exactly reasoned political debate on my part, but the implication that voting for a Democrat is equivalent to “surrendering to terror” is so beyond batshit crazy that it’s hard to respond in a rational manner. It’s this kind of laughable rhetoric that makes me wonder how anyone takes these people seriously. (Although not enough people considered Romney worth taking seriously, so maybe that’s something.) The fearmongering worked in 2004, but since then it has seemed as though Americans were finally getting a clue regarding the current administration’s corrupt mismanagement. I can only hope that Romney chose his words less for their general impact and more as a coded message to the conservative base that he’s still willing to drink the crazy juice. Damn, what a freak show American politics is.

P.S. I’m also irritated that text after my blockquotes is always formatted all nasty. What gives?!

Review: Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I realized that Larry Sanders was the best comedy show on television, ever. But I do know that it is true. I think I first became aware of this universal truth near the end of the show’s run, around 1996 or 1997, when I managed to watch the entire series without much trouble thanks to the relentless rerun policy of HBO.

What can I say about Larry Sanders? If you haven’t seen it, then your life is that much grayer than it could be. It had that vibe you get when you’re playing the piano and your fingers just happen to strike the best sounding chord ever. Or you’re playing tennis and you aren’t overthinking things and hit the most incredible shot you’ll ever hit. At that point you sit back and think, well, that was a moment of greatness I should savor, in case it’s the only one I ever experience. I’m not kidding, Larry Sanders was just like that.

So it’s long been a source of deep suffering that only the first season has been released on DVD. (And frankly, the character of Larry’s wife is so uninspiringly obnoxious that there’s some definite suffering involved in watching that season anyway.) There’s been a lot of speculation about why there haven’t been any other releases, among them the idea that all the musical guests are complicating the licensing process, or the ridiculously acrimonious lawsuit that was pending between Garry Shandling and Brad Grey. (Can I just say for the record: Brad Grey is a hangnail on Satan’s littlest toe.) But regardless of the reasons, the world has remained cruelly deprived of a DVD compilation of the entire series. And for chrissakes, you can buy the full run of freaking MacGyver, how is it possible that Larry Sanders remains incomplete?

But at last, last year I found out (thanks to Lifton over at WFW) that Shandling had finally crossed some kind of Rubicon and was putting out another DVD. I finally got it for Swami for Xmas, and now that we’ve watched the whole thing I can give it a proper review. Not to be deliberately turbid, but here are all the adjectives I could use to describe it: good, bad, great, transcendent, disturbing, depressing, essential, heart-wrenching, and completely awesome. I could come up with a few more if I thought about it a little longer, I’m sure, but I doubt the exercise is helping any of you understand what I mean.

What’s the big deal? Well, this is by all accounts the last DVD we’re ever going to get, so that automatically casts a poignant light over everything. It’s bad enough when great things come to an end, but far worse when someone tells you that you’re not even going to be able to experience the whole of the greatness again. (And here I must mention the travesty that it’s not for lack of technology, or some kind of tragic force majeure, that’s keeping us from seeing this stuff—after all, the laws of physics have permitted us to view any episode of MacGyver we might desire.) True, with this four-disc set you get over thirty of the episodes, many of them with deleted scenes and some with commentaries, but dammit I want them all.

Nevertheless, this is one fine set. Of course some fantastic episodes are left out, but a damn lot of great ones are included. You also get several audio commentaries, individual interviews with just about all of the cast, lots of deleted scenes, and a few incredibly weird interviews that Shandling did recently with some of the people who guested on the show. (These are weird mostly because Shandling appears to be the single most neurotic and uncomfortable person on earth, although he’s also one of the funniest goddamn people I’ve ever seen in an off-script situation.) And the fourth disc is a huge amount of material just about the final episode, which is all well worth it. The only disappointing thing I found, besides the fact that some of the cast come across in their interviews as not very bright, or self-absorbed, or sometimes both at once, was that the reunion with Shandling, Jeffrey Tambor, and Rip Torn was a heavily edited letdown—after watching the three of them kick ass all over the place in the show itself, I was hoping for something more there. (Geeky sidenote: Before I ever saw Larry Sanders I already knew of Tambor from Max Headroom, man did I love that show.) If it’s possible, this DVD set has actually caused me to become an even bigger fan of Larry Sanders now than I was before.

But I hope I don’t come across as insane when I argue that there’s something far more important to be gained from this DVD than just having a bunch of the episodes handy at last. There’s a larger message to be grasped that addresses my earlier metaphor of that perfect piano chord or tennis shot. As you learn about the process of making the show through the audio commentaries and the interviews with cast, and as you learn a little more about Shandling through the interviews he did with various friends, you are invited to face an essential fact about human achievement: It’s never easy. Even that piano chord wasn’t actually easy, considering the hours of playing, listening to music, training of muscle memory, and all of the other factors both mundane and important that made it possible for your fingers to hit those keys at that precise moment. It wasn’t easy to make that show, to write jokes that are still funny today, to create and inhabit characters that seem so perfectly real, to stick cameramen in closets and on rollerblades to get shots that make it feel like you’re in the room when it’s all happening. It wasn’t easy for Tambor to be Hank Kingsley, or Torn to be Artie. (Well, it was probably easier for Rip, but still not all the way to truly easy.) I admit I’ve never watched recent shows like the Office, which also purport to be showing you real or realistic people and situations, but I doubt they would be possible without the groundbreaking work of Larry Sanders to build on. And it was work, definitely work.

What a great series, truly. I sincerely hope “never” doesn’t really mean never, and we get the full run someday. In the meantime, go get this set (or at least borrow mine) and as Hank says, get ready to have a good time.