Nice... Sorkin has a sense of humor about himself

The thing I like most about Aaron Sorkin on 30 Rock is the extra-textual nature of his appearance on the show that kicked his ass. When Tina Fey launched a show set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live (but not really) sketch comedy program, her 30 Rock was in direct competition with Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, created by an acclaimed, award-winning, television heavyweight. Aaron Sorkin's show was set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live (but not really) sketch comedy program.

Media chatter didn't indicate much hope for 30 Rock. Sorkin had done a TV behind-the-scenes series before (Sports Night was critically adored even if the ratings didn't win the show longevity), and he was at the height of his TV powers post-West Wing. The market wasn't going to bear two shows about the same thing, and there was no way some former SNL writer was going to stand up a show that opened with a dynamite, Network-style tirade that got everything right.

“You're familiar with my work. The Social Network, The West Wing, A Few Good Men.”

“Studio 60?”

“Shut up.”

And then Tina Fey kicked Aaron Sorkin's ass up and down the block. The beating was bad enough that his guest spot on 30 Rock probably couldn't have happened without 5 years distance and a Social Network Oscar salving his ego.

A lot of people saw Studio 60 was in trouble from the start with an unbelievable premise: a genius comedy team shunned from an industry run on coke and controversy due to drug addiction and scandal. I'm no industry insider, but if you ban all the comedy writers with coke problems, you're going to be scrambling hard after you fire 50% of your workforce. (Is that figure too low? 75%)

Even if our hard working, genius protagonists were in the doghouse for their failures many years back, Studio 60 also somehow thinks a comedy show's audience would care. It's a fair guess that less than 10% of Saturday Night Live's audience could name one of the show's producers or writers, much less tell you if they had a dark history. The only writers of a sketch show that people generally recognize are ones that get in front of the camera-- I found out Bob Odenkirk wrote for SNL after watching him on Mr. Show, and never would have known Tina Fey's name if she hadn't starred in 30 Rock.

Worse, Studio 60 was a workplace drama (Sorkin's stock in trade) that made the crucial mistake of showing the efforts of his characters' skills: if this was a team of comedy geniuses brought in to resurrect a failing sketch show, why are their sketches so painfully unfunny? Saturday Night Live might be floundering, but it does at least try to make jokes... I can't imagine anyone mistaking the Gilbert & Sullivan parody on Studio 60 for comedy, much less finding it funny.

Comparatively, 30 Rock is, in and of itself, very funny, and shows very little of TGS. When we do see the show Liz Lemon and company are putting on, it's lowest common denominator (“Someone put too many farts in the fart machine!” or the Robot vs Bear Sketch) and accepted that the writing and producing team are far from geniuses... but 30 Rock and its behind-the-scenes of an unfunny show is damn funny.

30 Rock got its licks in early, too; in its first season, with Studio 60 still competing with them, the list of bad sketches included a Studio 60 reference (“This is worse than that Gilbert & Sullivan parody we did”), a sly dig that TGS could have done a sketch that bad... but no one in the writing room or the audience was going to claim it was the work of geniuses. They also take a shot a Sorkin's style, albeit in the most conventional way possible (“Kenneth, can you walk and talk?” “Gee, I've never thought about it before.”)

As both programs are ostensibly about comedy writers for a comedy show, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the funny one is coming back for a 6^th season and the drama is a TV history footnote... but Aaron Sorkin's appearance of 30 Rock made me think back to the time when he was in direct competition with Tina Fey in real life, and no one thought he could lose that fight.

I'm giving away the ending for every Atom Egoyan Movie

Having just seen Chloe, I think we need to get Atom Egoyan to admit that his auteur aspirations are just an excuse to show graphic lesbian sex. I'm beginning to doubt he has any loftier ambitions than to get young actresses naked. When someone first told me to watch Exotica (which I had dismissed as part of the Basic Instinct/Joe Eszterhas sleaze pool), their reasoning was that it was actually a good, somber, psychologically dense film... in spite of the strip club setting and cover nymphet peeling off a schoolgirl outfit. I'll admit that Exotica, my first Egoyan movie, was actually better than I'd expected, but it's become apparent after several of his movies that it is just like every other Egoyan film. In his own way, Atom Egoyan is a more predictable filmmaker than M. Night Shyamalan. He's Nicholas Sparks-level predictable...

So, spoilers for all Egoyan pictures coming up in both the micro and macro levels, I'm going to give them all away.

1. The Big Secret-- Where Shyamalan films became predictable because you knew to expect the “what a twist!” at the end, Atom Egoyan always has a Big Secret one of the characters is keeping, and when it is revealed, it will retroactively inform all their actions. These movies are always dialogue heavy, and whichever character spends their time telling stories and providing lengthy soliloquies to the other characters... well... they're lying. If you know this, it becomes very easy to predict how the movie will end, because the entire film is built around this character's misdirection. The more time they spend trying to lead you away from the Big Secret, the more obvious the nature of the secret becomes.
2. Dour and Stultifying-- no one will ever have any fun in these movies. Egoyan makes “dark” films about “serious” issues, where “troubled” people and burdened by their dark and inescapable “drama.” There's never a laugh in these movies... not even Where the Truth Lies, which is about a Martin and Lewis-style comedy duo.
3. Kink/Perversion-- and the air of seriousness is really hard to take seriously when the stories always seem to go to the well of anything from (at least) naughty sex to (at most) child abuse and molestation.
4. Hot, Young Lesbians-- I swear, this is why Egoyan got into filmmaking. These scenes are extensive, graphic, and shot like soft-core porn. Though the Big Secret of Where the Truth Lies is that Martin had a big gay crush on Lewis (and the girl who found out is dead), Egoyan has no interest in filming Colin Firth making love to Kevin Bacon-- not when he can slip Alison Lohman a roofie and have her tumble into bed with a girl in an Alice in Wonderland costume. So it's not a gay thing; it's all hot young lesbian sex, all the time. And, yes, Chloe's Julianne Moore isn't a pretty little starlet, but her long and graphic sex scene is with Amanda Seyfried. Admittedly, it doesn't happen in every Eoyan picture, but I'm pretty sure it's a 2/3rds majority.
5. Great Tragedy-- All of the heavy breathing is apparently justified by a Great Tragedy that haunts the film (and will be related to the Big Secret). The Great Tragedy is so oppressive that it is crushing the souls of most of the characters, so much so that they didn't even have any fun while having all of that serious, somber sex.
6. Death-- There's no way around it. Either the person with the Big Secret has to die, or their Big Secret is that someone's dead because of them.

So... yes, in the first act of Chloe, as Seyfried is telling the stories of her sexual exploits and maneuvering (and we see them hazily, in her mind's eye), my Egoyan Sense started tingling and I knew: she's keeping a Big Secret, and these stories she's telling are false. The pattern has become so unmistakable that I immediately knew how the film would end. I'm pretty sure this cookie-cutter formula negates these movies' play at art, which seemed to balance out the inherent smuttiness; with all the mock-serious pretense stripped away, these movies are just... sleazy. In a Joe Eszterhas sort of way.


As a postscript-- I never saw Ararat. I know that it centers on the Armenian genocide, and so its Great Tragedy and Dour Mood must be firmly in place, but I’m not sure I want to watch an Egoyan sex scene with a holocaust as the backdrop.

Show hosting 101: Don't be an ass

I can't quite get my head around a venue (and venue's staff) that has a handful of bands show up to play and then spend the entire night treating everyone in the club as if they were a massive inconvenience. Sure, it's a sunday night, and the club is far from packed, but still... we've played empty houses on off nights before, but none of those venues greeted band members or audience members with the "I'd be having a better night if all of you decided not to show up" vibe.

The best example of this happened to Michelle-- since there was no guest list (in much the same way there were no drink tickets), she wanted to pay for someone who was coming later. The response she got was "That's a huge inconvenience."

"Can I do it, though? Can I pay for him now and you just let in when he comes?"

Keep in mind that, at the time this conversation took place, the girl at the door had... er... processed about three people. This includes taking their money, making change if necessary, and applying a stamp to their wrist. She'd had to do this three times. Being asked to take money in advance, she said, was "a huge fucking pain in the ass."

"So... you're not going to take my money?"

"I didn't say that. I just said it was a huge fucking pain in the ass."

Understandable: she was swamped. I think she had to send detailed information via text message about everyone she processed, and the workload was astonishing-- she was slaving over her cell phone for most of the night. She didn't actually have to process many people (it was a slow night), but the amount of time she spent typing into her phone was astonishing. Whatever they're paying her, it ain't enough.

Most of the people who worked for the club had similar attitudes... it makes me want to break out the word "pissy," which doesn't come up in conversation much, but is definitely applicable here. Pissy attitudes about having to deal with the inconsequential bands of the night (obviously beneath them) and the poor saps dumb enough to pay to enter their establishment.

The weirdest bit, to me, is: if you hate putting on these little, off-night shows... why do them? There are other venues that size that don't book bands on Sundays or Mondays or any night they think isn't going to bring people out... in much the same way there are plenty of other venues that are perfectly happy to put on smaller shows and slower nights, happy to see the bands come out, and treat the people who come out like worthwhile human beings. It just doesn't make sense to book the show and then treat everyone in attendance like shit.

This particular place has a reputation for being unpleasant: we have people who wanted to come out, but just didn't want to go there... I've sort of defended this place in conversation against friends who call it the worst club in Seattle (the attitudes of the security staff and the quality of sound on the main stage are the biggest complaints). My response has usually been "It's not that bad," which was all the defense I could muster.

It's not much, but I never bore this club any ill will... but after last night, who would waste their breath defending this place?

And I've met the owner of the place: good guy, nice to talk to, always treated me well. He was not at this show. His employees are the kinds of people that give this venue its reputation... the kind of place that, even if you like the bands playing, you just don't want to be there.

"I'm never going back to Guitar Center"

I say it every time I walk out of that place... and I consistently walk out empty handed. It's always a frustrating experience, and every time I walk in I think "I know I said never again after the last time, but today I just need one simple thing, and there's no way this trip will be a waste of my time." It's always the same self-rationalization as a slink into the K-Mart of music stores against my better judgment, trying to pretend I'm not in a crappy mood just because I crossed their threshold.

Most recently, I just needed a phaser-- specifically, an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone. I walked in, walked up to the counter, and asked for a Small Stone. The clerk looks at me blankly. "Who makes it?"

I answer "Electro-Harmonix."

"You mean a Small Clone?" He responds, naming that company's chorus pedal.

I try not to rankle at his correcting me: "No, I mean the Small Stone." Anyone who doesn't play, and play through pedals, might not get why this annoys me: the EH Small Stone is probably the second most popular phaser pedal in the world, not quite as ubiquitous as the MXR Phase 90, but it's been in production non-stop since the mid 1970s. Someone working behind the effects pedals counter at a music store should at least have heard of it.

He looks up this strange and unfamiliar pedal in his computer. "Hmm... I don't have one in stock. I could order it from a warehouse and give you a call when it comes in." And this is the primary problem with Guitar Center-- if I wanted to order one, I would have done so online, without dealing with the fluorescent lights and the ambiance of someone practicing Metallica riffs on an out of tune guitar: that's what I use the internet for. I walked into the mega-chain-store because I wanted to exit the store with an extremely common pedal in hand.

I've made this mistake more than once-- I have often gone to Guitar Center because they're a big chain, and I expect them to be well stocked. I don't enjoy being in the store, I don't like shopping there, but their size always makes me assume that if I want to find something that everyone uses, something mass produced, this will be the obvious place to go... and I am always wrong: I leave empty handed, wondering why I had to describe a Big Mac to a McDonald's counter jockey (you mean Quarter Pounder? No? Maybe I can order you one from the store across town)

It's got to work on all systems

I don't know who's going to follow me through this metaphor, but...

When you're working out a mix of a song, you have to check it on different systems. This lets you make certain that the song doesn't just sound good in a studio, on nice monitors. You want to make sure it sounds good on bass boosted DJ headphones, on laptops' built in speakers, on a boom box, and on a pumping home stereo system. It's even important to check the mix in mono (there's a number of reasons to do this... but for right now let's just focus on "if you can make the mix sound good without a stereo image, the thing is pretty solid"). If it only works on one system and fails elsewhere, you've got more work to do.

And so we get to the point:

If you want to argue the quality of Avatar as a film around the argument that it can't be appreciated without 3D special effects and an IMAX screen... you may be right. It may very well be designed to show of an amazing system, but if the thing doesn't hold up in mono (so to speak), it's not really that good.

Tone

"What the hell was wrong with your guitar sounds tonight?"

A lot of people don't know this, but different rooms have different sounds... with everything set exactly the same on my bass, amp, and pedals, I can have completely different sound in one room than another. I was struggling with that at the last show: I didn't sound quite right to myself.

What's even worse: how you sound to yourself is never how you sound to an audience: the sound is different in different parts of a room. For example, on the same night, Lea from Noise-a-Tron felt that she sounded a little quiet on stage; I was in the audience, and her bass was huge (they sounded great). When we got up there, I thought I sounded really thin and anemic... but people in the audience say we sounded great that night.

It's tricky.



... and as an aside, when you do a search for "Skwisgaar and Toki" images these days, you find a lot of slashfiction images. I had to go three pages before I could just find a normal shot of the two of them.

a little past the peak

Being a pedalgeek with some small awareness of what's going on in the pedal geeky world, I was impressed when VisualSound announced their new pedal, the Vans Warped Distortion. Cash-in and fad pedals aren't new, but it takes some real balls to try and sell the sound of Warped Tour punk rock in a pedal... especially since the festival is 15 years old now. At least DOD launched the Grunge distortion in 1993, and Ibanez's Phat Hed distortion and chorus with the wack'd setting launched in 1999: sure, these companies were digging in for kids' Seattle and nu-metal obsessions, respectively. The pedals didn't sound anything like the uber-popular music they referenced... it was just a calculated cash grab, aimed at teenagers who just got their first guitar. Seriously, people: Kim Thayil doesn't play through a pedal labeled "grunge" and Munky doesn't have a pedal that says "wack'd."

But that doesn't stop the corporations. Visual Sound used to be a nifty little pedal maker that got bought out by Dunlop (who has been gobbling up pedalmakers like a comic book villain). Vans was sold in 1988 and is owned by the same corporation that does Lee and Wangler jeans. They have teamed up in the name of a massive festival to create a cheap pedal to sell in 2010... you know, for "punk." Which I think lives mostly at malls.