Conspiracies, Fiction, and New TV

Time out for a bit of pop culture. Indulge me, this is only marginally serious. I just finished watching the new show on SyFy called Warehouse 13. I enjoyed it, it was a good ride, even though they clearly went after the X-Files crowd with this one. It could be worth a few hours to see where they go with it. They took the endless warehouse from Indiana Jones, added some National Treasure grace notes, stirred in a dollop of Muldur and Scully, and introduced a bit of humor. That last is very important, because when you have a premise that is this borderline, taking it too seriously is risking alienating a lot of audience. The main reason the X-Files worked was the mood, the color, the textures that Chris Carter wove into it, and he played the conspiracy theory game like a master. But for me, it got very old very fast. The problems with the X-Files were manifold and manifest. The biggest one was Scully. She was the dumbest "scientist" I'd ever seen on television or read in fiction. To remain so obdurately unseeing through all that she was put through required zero imagination in the character, zero sense of humor, and probably some sort of serial fixation or related pathology. If they'd played that up it might have worked, but for pity's sake she was just dense. And therefore unbelievable. Not to mention, of course, that much of the "science" in X-Files was atrocious. But that's a charge that can be leveled as many shows on television, many movies, and quite a few novels. (It would seem to me, though, that when a show is based supposedly on science, even fringe science, an attempt would be made to Get It Right. It wouldn't take much in most instances, just someone on staff who could say "That won't work" and then offer a way that it would. I understand some shows have such a person, but he or she is more often ignored than heeded, probably because the recommendations wouldn't be dramatic. But I often wonder if the real reason they're ignored is because the assumption is made that putting in valid science would make the audience feel stupid---since clearly it makes the producers of the shows feel stupid!) The other problem with it was the profundity of the secrets ultimately being kept. It worked well when Muldur was just going through a bunch of old case files no one wanted to tackle because they led to bizarre places. Kept modest like that would have allowed the concept to work on the fringe, where it started out, and could have been very entertaining. But when it became this all-encompassing, "the aliens have been here and we are in league with them" kind of schtick, it became ridiculous. Because they were trying to keep it consistent with mimetic fiction.

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Our incredibly fickle media turns all of its spotlights on Michael Jackson

Check out the home page of MSNBC tonight (click on the thumbnail below). Do you see ANYTHING about the crisis in Iran? Instead we are presented with endless drivel about Michael Jackson, who was an extremely talented entertainer many years ago. But I suppose that there is nothing interesting going on in Iran. And nothing much else going on anywhere else either, apparently. For all you can tell by looking at the MSNBC homepage, the problems in Iran have been entirely resolved. Or maybe the problem is that MSNBC doesn't have anybody on the ground in Iran, and when a tree falls in the forest where there aren't any mainstream media reporters, the tree didn't really fall at all. Even though sustained coverage of Iran is potentially a lifeline for the brave Iranian men and women who are standing up to their government, which apparently stole their national election. And BTW, had we elected John McCain and had he gotten his way to bomb Iran, would our media have tried to present an accurate viewpoint of these young heroes? Or would we have merely seen a reply of the Iraq invasion, lots of videos of bombs being dropped and missiles being launched? msnbc-no-iran MSNBC is merely doing what the rest of the commercial news sites are doing. ALL of the commercial news sites have decided that Michael Jackson is far more important than . . . well . . . everything else combined. See the thumbnails below to see the home pages of CNN and ABC. What do these news priorities say about our commercial news businesses, and what do they say about us as commercial news consumers? I'd suggest that this fickle coverage suggests that the commercial media doesn't take its job seriously. Not at all. cnn-not-much-iran abc-barely-mentions-iran Absolute insanity.

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What it’s like to not shop for a year.

Judith Levine and her significant other decided to not shop for a year.   She wrote about her trials and tribulations in her book, Not buying It: My Year Without Shopping. She also wrote about it in Washington Post in an article titled, "Don't Buy It." Here's an excerpt: People can…

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What is music worth?

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album "In Rainbows" as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all. As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical…

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Sin, Sex, Secret Societies

Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.  I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven't picked it up since.  Years before, I'd read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book…

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