The holiday season is closing upon us, and you are probably stumped on what to give me this year. The answer is: whiskey. A lot of it. Under the tree, in the stocking, on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth magical night, you get the picture. I want whiskey now.

Likewise, you probably want to be able to do most of your shopping in one place, so head out to the local packie/bottle/liquor store, and pick up some of these bottles for the whiskey lovers and assorted drunkards on your list. And get something nice for me yourself while you’re at it.
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It’s no secret that the dry and boring like to give and receive books. What else is so easy to shop for, easy to wrap, and easy to return than a book? Given that there are thousands upon thousands of books in seemingly every area of human interest, one is bound to find something for your most least interesting relative.

For your dry and boring sports fan, I highly recommend a book about that most boring of sports, baseball. Will Leitch, best known for creating the sports blog Deadspin and then destroying it by daring to leave it in the hands of another, wrote an excellent book on baseball entitled Are We Winning? a book about the drinking habits of Midwesterners. It’s also about Will and his father and how they love to watch baseball while drinking. This is book for the drunk sportsfan who knows more about sports than Peter King, i.e., every single one.

The best books I read this year were for young adults, Scott Westerfeld’s series. Everyone knows that Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination sparked the Great War; what Westerfeld’s books presuppose is … maybe the Duke’s son secretly inherited his father’s titles and lands and worked to stop the great powers from falling into war. Leviathan and its successor, Behemoth, combine elements of historical fiction with speculative fiction and steampunk; they are fun, fast-paced, and have lovely illustrations. While aimed at young people, these are books for all ages, but especially aimed at future SCA members, cosplay fanatics, LARPers, and furries.

While it was short-listed for the Booker and failed to win, I really like the cover for Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey. Isn’t it lovely? Actually, it is a really good book. Fans of historical fiction, Alexis de Tocqueville, and viewing America through the lens of snobby Europeans.

Carey has won the Booker twice before, and this novel is a strong social critique of current European and American culture. Well worth a purchase for the liberals in your family who keep threatening to move to la France but who won’t actually go, or for the conservatives in your family who need another reason to hate it.

Finally, Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and other writers and sword-fighting enthusiasts have created a serial novel that is being delivered online only (for now). Entitled The Mongoliad, the work is set in 1241, a time when Ghengis Khan’s son Ögedei Khan and his hordes threaten to overrun Europe. Subscriptions are available at the six and twelve month and lifetime levels; a free iPad and iPhone application is available through iTunes. The work has multiple viewpoints including, thus far, knights, priests, assassins, peasants, Ögedei himself. It promises to be not simply an exercise in historical fiction, but an experiment in publishing. Stephenson and Bear has said that they will publish the completed novel on paper whenever it is that they complete it, but if the novel succeeds without being printed, it will certainly show that good work will find a large and sustaining audience in the electronic medium.

First, know that I am firmly in the tank for “Homicide;” I firmly believe it is the GOAT, though the show suffered a drop-off in quality in the last two seasons. I will accept that for most people, “The Wire” is the superior show. However, I give maximum points for “Homicide” being a) based upon David Simon’s incredible book the show, and her spirit was seen in the closing of the finale. The show rarely used such cop show clichés as car chases or shootouts, and instead focused on dialogue. Visually, “Homicide” broke the rules of television, using cinematic techniques from the French New Wave among other movements. Further, the centerpieces of the show, The Board and Lt. Al “Gee” Giardello, were innovations for storytelling and racial politics on television.

The Board in both Simon’s book and the television series is the center of the squad’s activities. The names of all murder victims are entered on the Board, open cases in red ink, closed cases in black. The detectives’ careers are therefore on display for all to see and judge, but the Board is also a way for the victims to be spoken for, a key element in Simon’s book and the series for showing the motivation of the men and women who are drawn to working Homicide.

Giardello’s character, adapted from the real Baltimore Homicide Department’s Gary D’Addario, remained Italian and was played by Jewish-Cameroonian-American actor Yaphet Kotto. Giardello’s pride in being both black and Sicilian was a recurring element of the show, as the character speaks fluent Italian but often senses that systemic racism keeps him from being promoted to Captain. Gee’s internal and external conflicts of race and identity paralleled the struggles over racial and personal issues throughout “Homicide’s” run and is a theme that Simon would expand upon greatly in “The Wire.”

In the series finale, “Gee” runs for Mayor of Baltimore but is assassinated, bringing all the former detectives back to the squad to put the case down, to move the name Giardello from red ink to black on the Board. “Homicide” was powerful television that never found a large audience, partially because it had to pull punches with language and depictions of the results of violence and because NBC kept moving its time slot.

On the other hand, HBO gave Simon the creative freedom to expose the underside of Baltimore’s streets in “The Wire.” If you don’t like—nay love—“The Wire,” you need to close this window now. Go away, nobody likes you.

Bringing on such creative talents as “Homicide’s” Clark Johnson to direct the pilot (“Homicide’s” Det. Meldrick Lewis) and Peter Gerety (Det. Stua Gharty) in a recurring role as “Judge Phelan” as well as cast and crew members from Simon’s HBO Miniseries “The Corner.” The cast of characters expanded with each season but the depth of characterization in such characters as Stringer Bell, Omar Little , Jimmy McNulty, among many others is rarely seen outside of literary novels.

David Simon’s series took the best parts of “Homicide”: great characters drawn from the real world of Baltimore, but expanded its vision from the Board to focus whole seasons on the war between the police and the drug dealers, then to the world of the dockworkers, then the political system at large, the school system, and finally the newspapers. “The Wire’s” startling ability to show the deeply entwined structures of power in each of these institutions is unmatched in American television historya. Louis Althusser would have loved this show.

Simon also used continued “Homicide’s” system of developing plot structures over multiple seasons and from multiple points of view but took it to a new level in “The Wire”—not simply focusing on the police, but on how a city’s fractured institutions are symptoms of the depths of the modern city’s overall disease.

“The Wire” is the best dramatic series HBO has ever produced. Better than “The Sopranos.” Yeah, I said it. Now go—the whole series is on sale.

Amazon is now offering a tremendous deal: The complete DVD collections of: “Homicide: Life on the Streets” (35 DVDs) for $114.49 and “The Wire” (23 DVDs) for $155.49. To buy these series at these prices is to steal. To not own these is simply foolish. You can also package these two series with the nearly as good “The Shield” (another 29 DVDs) for a total of $378.47. This does not suck.

The 1970s, 80s, and 90s had some epic, and truly craptacular, miniseries. There was the transcendent: Alex Haley’s “Roots” and Ken Burns’ “The Civil War;” the good: “North and South” and “The Stand,” the mixed-bag: “It” is often terrifying and well-acted and constructed, but then it turns out that instead of the terrifying clown, It turns out to be less scary than ridiculous because It turns out to look like a giant rubber spider some PA bought at a drug store. Horrendous. Bigger let down than Rosebud being a stupid sled.

And then there was the just plain god-awful: “The Thorn Birds.” Mix all the melodrama of “The Waltons,” adding in multiple bastard births in the Australian outback, hidden fortunes and wills, a lustful priest, and a complete lack of shrimp on barbies? I’m pulling my eyes out already.

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Facebook exists for one purpose only and it’s not to re-connect high school friends to annoy people with update about non-existent farms, though it does these things very well. Like any other commercial site, Facebook exists to make money. That’s fine, but a bit boring. I’m more interested in our culture’s new sideshow barker: Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

CBS has announced they have canceled “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” Yes, I can hardly believe the news either—“The New Adventure of Old Christine” was still on the air this season? It’s fifth? Really? So it will probably go into syndication and make Julia Louis-Dreyfuss even more money? And she won an Emmy? Huh. I might need to watch more television not aimed at my gender, age, tastes, or sense of humor.

While the continued existence of this show was perhaps not exactly well publicized by CBS, what is no secret is the “Seinfeld Curse.” “Watching Ellie,” “Bob Patterson,” and “Listen Up!,” and “The Michael Richards Show” were all supposed to be break-out hits based upon America’s love affair with the cast of “Seinfeld.” But each of these shows, one worse than the other, failed because of the ridiculous expectations placed upon their stars. And honestly, a sitcom based on a daily, timely talk-show and airing on a different network?

You might be tempted to say that nobody from “Seinfeld” sits prettier today or offers more evidence that there is no “Seinfeld Curse” than Larry David. There he is, sitting on top of the world with his hit HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and starring in Woody Allen movies. Wait, Whatever Works? Even Leitch was disappointed; politely, of course. At least Larry left “Seinfeld” before gimmicks like “The Apology” “The Betrayal” and the inevitable let-down of the show’s finale. Wait, he wrote that? Yikes. Moving on.

Let me revise: nobody from “Seinfeld” is sitting prettier than Bob Balaban. Not only did he speak French with François Truffaut while wearing an epic beard before “Seinfeld” in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but he joined up with Christopher Guest’s comedy troupe and has been part of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. You sir, you Mr. Bob Balaban, you have shown the world that there is no “Seinfeld Curse.”

I don’t really have to talk about “The Marriage Ref” do I?

“Grey’s Anatomy” will burn down a house and shoot down characters tomorrow during the season finale. If only this were an episode of “Justified” or a newly discovered Johnny Cash song, then I might be excited. Hey Shonda Rhimes: if I can’t get wound up about fire and gunplay, you’ve got a problem.

Here’s what will happen: some character who stammers ‘seriously’ sixteen or seventeen times a show will be “devastated” by a fire in her house. WHO? Who could this be?

Then, two characters from the hospital will be shot. Will they be major characters? Unlikely. More likely, they will kill off two of the newer characters like Reed or April because fleshing them out would be too darn difficult.

The show’s website hosts something called ‘Mer-Der’ movements. Good lord. How about some MUR-DER moments tomorrow? Start by offing Meredith and Derek. Then Alex, Miranda, and all of the ‘Invaders.’ Invaders? It might have been funny if they called them ‘the Others’ but with all that drinking and screwing to get done, clearly no one at Seattle Grace watches “Lost.”

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