Short Stories, Long Odds

Whenever I have the tv on for background noise – Mike Doughty calls it his electric fireplace – if I look up and discover that entertainment news has come on while I was doing something else, I feel guilty and a little dirty and then I turn it off, quick as I can.

This doesn’t make explicit sense – it is a stupid thing to feel guilty about, for one, and for another, who cares? and thirdly, so what if someone wants to watch that even if I don’t – but it happens every time. I think it is because I am so anti-celebrity-worship.

I feel weirdly conflicted about it because I am a fan of television, and I think that people who take pride in not owning a TV or not watching a TV are brain racists. There’s some very good stuff happening on TV. There’s plenty of bad stuff, admittedly, but the television series has been elevated in the last ten years to a level that matches or exceeds most films.

Being sick over the last few days means I’ve consumed a bunch of television, and I think there are some shows that you should start watching if you aren’t already.

Mad Men: I’m halfway through the first season, and it makes me wish I had skipped politics for advertising. And been my age in 1961. The writing is pretty good and the characters are great. It earns plenty of cool factor for the period setting, and the production quality puts you right into the story.

I don’t know why people say that this show is killing the pocket square. The theme music and opening sequence is boss.

24: I have, in the past, been accosted by liberals for wearing a shirt Diana got me a few years ago that says “JACK BAUER FOR PRESIDENT.” This was at the height of the torture news breaking during the Bush administration and I was called, in not so many words, a tool for Republican propaganda.

Yes, I know 24 is on Fox and yes, I know Jack Bauer shreds the Geneva conventions and federal and international law in his efforts to save the country and beat the bad guys. And I don’t care. Jack Bauer isn’t real and his decisions always advance the story towards saving the world, so I don’t face any moral conflict in cheering him on as he strips wires and breaks fingers. If it were a documentary I’d be horrified, but since it is not I root for Jack and against Red Foreman’s stupid Senate subcommittee.

Because watching 24 can essentially occur in a moral vacuum, I also don’t mind recommending it as a fun and exciting show to watch with great characters and great research. I hate legal and cop dramas but give me an intelligence community turf war and clutch counterterrorism field work and I can watch for hours. I read an academic article the other day about how RoboCop is ‘fascism for liberals’ or at least fascism that liberals can enjoy in entertainment, and I think 24 works the same way on a certain level.

Flight of the Conchords: Flight of the Conchords is some of the best comedy on TV right now. It is a show about Bret and Jemaine, formerly New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a capella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo. They are trying to make it in New York. The following is a song about a recent night at the club:

Heroes: If ever there was a show that works as an example of how firing all the writers when things go wrong can save the day, it is Heroes, and the new season is proving it every week.

How I Met Your Mother: Barney. Barney. Forever Barney.

I mean, a show that can make this kind of a self-referential joke about a character?

So awesome. Diana thinks we like this show because it is basically about us, and that is probably true. The characters graduated in 1996 – I graduated in 1997 – and I most resemble Marshall. But sometimes I wish I was Barney and could be awesome all the time, so much so that I engage in impromptu suiting up from to time. Totally worth it.

House: I usually don’t like medical dramas but I liked E.R. before it got dumb. House is not dumb, even if it is more or less the same story every episode. This is another one of those shows that are character-driven rather than plot-driven. It could be totally non-linear and it wouldn’t matter because the character dynamics are so good. It isn’t lupus, and it isn’t myelitis.

So there it is – good shows that are well-written and well-made and that you shouldn’t feel guilty about watching.

Conversely:

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job is not funny.

1. I was born in Michigan. My family moved to Texas when I was 4. I have lived in Michigan, Texas, and Massachusetts. I have never lived alone. I still consider Boston to be my home because it is the place I felt and feel the most comfortable.
2. My life is divided into two distinct phases – my music / drumming phase and my writing / politics phase. People that know me in politics often have little or no idea how wholly consumed I once was by music, how good I used to be at it, or what happened that resulted in me getting out of it and into other things.  Once while having drinks with politipals, someone started saying that drummers now are “funkier” than they ever were. I piped up and said that that was nonsense, and that you’d be hard pressed to find someone “funkier” than Clyde Stubblefield, who played for James Brown (and was the Funky Drummer), or any number of drummers from the 60’s and 70’s and someone said “Whatever, Josh, what do you know about music?” It does not happen very often, but I was honestly speechless. They had no idea that I at least had some claim to making an argument, and there was no way for me to explain it without a story that might as well have started with the line, “Since the dawn of time…”

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(Originally published in Boston’s Weekly Dig. This is a revised version.)

Recently, I learned a hard lesson. A lesson about boundaries. A lesson, even, about interpersonal communications. A lesson about the dick you can’t take back.

I’m an academic – a political scientist – so I spend a lot of time hanging around with professor types. These are guys who nail editorial cartoons to their office doors that show a guy looking forlorn at a bar, saying “I miss the commies”. They talk politics, they pay attention to the British elections. They teach classes about torture and build software that predicts violent conflict. Almost as a rule, they use the Queen’s English.

So it was a surprise when, several months ago, a faculty member I had befriended referred to a group of people as “a bunch of shitheads.”

My eyes lit up. I think of myself as an intellectual, a cultured young man that is as worldly as he is compassionate and forthright. That being said, I also recognize that in speech I am often a crude, crass bastard when among friends. I’m not sure why, but when I am around my best pals or people I profoundly respect, the conversation is usually peppered with profanity. I find myself speaking the best English when I’m around people I don’t particularly care about one way or another.

This could be a fundamental flaw, built into my personality at a formative time. It is my sincere hope that if I ever work in the White House, I will be able to discuss foreign relations without referring to a country collectively as “a pack of assholes.” The days of Nixon, after all, are over.

So when Dr. Politics broke the swear barrier, I was relieved. Here was someone I could not only talk to about heady things like the Congo’s GNP, but I could also discuss them with the usual peppering of fucks that enrich my most comfortable mode of communication.

Base language and lowbrow references continued for several weeks. I managed to tell a joke about economists eating piles of shit that killed. When I mentioned, during the Schiavo debacle, that it was my sincere opinion that House Republicans could “huff a bag of dongs,” my neology was met with the kind of appreciative chuckle it deserved, even though Dr. Politics is a classic-conservative Republican.

It was not to last. Like all great linguistic movements, my attempt to infuse political discourse with salt-of-the-earth American vulgarity would eventually run into an insurmountable, culturally codified roadblock.

Last week, I was talking to Dr. Politics about an exam I had coming up. We were engaged in the usual good-natured ribbing, so I thought nothing of the following exchange:

Dr. Politics: “Well, I guess you’ll just have to study, won’t you?”

Me: “I know I’ll have to study, dick.”

His face scrunched up and the air between us became thick with partisan discomfort.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “I thought we had a special relationship!”

“Not special enough for you to call me a dick,” he replied.

I had crossed a line and I knew it. I don’t regret saying it, because in my circles, ‘dick’ is a sign of respect, a term of endearment. It also acknowledges a particularly decent burn. Early in my internship at the Dig, Editor Joe Keohane sounded surprised in asking “Wow, you’re from Texas and you know who your father is?”

My reply? “Thanks, dick.” Our professional relationship was immediately cemented, committed to journalistic excellence and forged in a mutual appreciation of ribaldry.

I’m not sure how this could have been avoided. It was a situation we’ve all been in – you reach a level of comfort with someone and then you unwittingly cross some invisible line they have drawn for themselves and never revealed to you.

What then to do? The next time I feel chummy with someone, should I give them a list of words I regularly employ and ask them to underline the ones they find offensive? Would it be more or less comfortable for me to say “Hey, in the future, I plan on calling you a dick in a jocular way. This signifies that I have accepted you as an intellectual equal. Is that okay, or should I call you something else?”

He asked me if I call my wife a bitch, and I said “No, but she calls me a bitch quite often.” He rolled his eyes. What a dick.

Last weekend, Diana and the dogs and I went to my mother’s house to make Christmas cookies. This is a tradition that’s been in my family for as long as I’ve been alive: one day in December we gather an industrious team and start cutting cookies out and baking them and then decorating them with icing my mother mixes up in bowls and then tints with food coloring. The cast changes from year to year based on who of the family is in town and which friends dear to us that we’ve gathered near to us, but it is a family ritual that marks the apex of the holiday season and the steep decline towards New Years.

Tonight we went to my friend Betsy’s Christmas / Birthday party. It is both kinds of party because she is one of those people with a latter December birthday that seems like a curse when you are a kid. Her parties are always fun because she has surrounded herself with a great variety of friends that love her. It is obvious that we are all crazy about Betsy and that she represents something special in all of our lives. We all think she deserves every happiness because she is wonderful. That sounds like hyperbole but it is not. If I could draw a direct analogy between Betsy and mythology to describe what kind of person she is, I would say without hesitation that she is the human version of a unicorn.

Over the years, the running joke about me driving anywhere has been that I was born without a sense of direction. I get lost very easily and, as a potential remedy to that shortcoming, Diana’s big Christmas present to me last year was a GPS navigator. It made driving a joy as I could finally focus on driving rather than wondering where the hell I was.  Tonight we loaded into the car and Diana punched in Betsy’s new address and we took off for a simple and pleasant drive.

However, just as we were zeroing in on the house in The Colony, the Tom Tom turned on me. Without any notice, the suction cup gave way and the whole apparatus crashed directly from the windshield into my lap. When I pulled over to collect my thoughts and stop crying after the direct hit on my business, I put on the hazards. It is, after all, the season to think of other people.

iTunes purchase I am most ashamed of: ‘Temperature’ by Seal Paul.