"CSI: Miami" might be getting even sillier.

This past Monday I enjoyed the newest episode of "the worst show on network television." I was reminded of why I watch this show: Lt. Horatio Caine had a line in the first couple of minutes that was a true howler. For those of you unfamiliar with the format of the "CSI" shows, they usually open with a death. In this case, a wife (played by Leslie Bibb of "Popular" and See Spot Run) is giving a speech at a fund-raising party in the backyard of her tony Coconut Grove home. Champagne corks are popped, but the final pop sounds a bit different. It's a gunshot! Heavens! Her husband then stumbles off the balcony above her and falls onto a serendipitously placed ice sculpture, which impales him. This is all a set-up for Horatio's comment, of course. Alexx the Coroner remarks, "shooting somebody in broad daylight, at a party with all these people; that's cold-blooded." Horatio looks at the impaled corpse, puts on his glasses, and half-whispers, "It's cold as ice." (Sadly, this was followed by the usual Who theme song, rather than Foreigner, which would have been absolutely perfect.)

It seems like this season they're not even trying to maintain any sort of link with reality, however tenuous. The show is getting so absurd it's almost crossed into the realm of the surreal. On a recent episode a hunter was mauled by a grizzly. In the Everglades! This past Monday, the wife turns out to have an identical twin that her husband didn't know about. But wait, it gets even better! Halfway through the show, for no apparent dramatic reason, it turns out there's a third sister! They're identical triplets! As if this weren't ridiculous enough, it turns out the husband has hired some guy to have plastic surgery to resemble him so he can act as a double. Come on! It's hard for me to believe that the writers actually expect people to take this seriously. This level of silliness has to be intentional.

And another thing: why do people always confess immediately the instant they are confronted with the slimmest sliver of evidence? Here's how it usually transpires:

Lt. Caine: I understand you've been looking for your lucky peppermill. Well, we found it. At the dead girl's apartment.

Suspect: Yes, it's true, I killed her. Please cuff me and make me do the perp walk now.

For more information on this week's episode, you can check out the CBS page here: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/csi_miami/episodes/518/

No one's gonna save you from the beast with forty eyes.

And now, for no reason whatsoever, I give you the text of the full introduction to "Thriller," as originally read by the late Vincent Price:

Darkness creeps across the land,
the midnight hour is close at hand.
Creatures crawl in search of blood
to terrorize y'all's neighborhood.
And whomsoever shall be found,
without the soul for getting down,
must stand and face the hounds of hell
and rot inside a corpse's shell.
The foulest stench is in the air,
the funk of forty thousand years.
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
are closing in to seal your doom.
And though you fight to stay alive,
your body starts to shiver.
For no mere mortal can resist:
the evil of the Thriller.
(Cue diabolical laughter)

Book Review - "Death & The Maiden" by Ariel Dorfman

Reading plays is awesome, as is writing them. Telling a story without anything but dialogue is quite the challenge. And when one reads a play, you don’t have the actors one would normally rely upon to provide nuance. Ariel Dorfman intentionally refrains from naming the country where “Death & the Maiden” takes place, although it’s obviously Chile. This is an obvious attempt to reinforce the universality of the tale, and it succeeds. Leaving aside the deeply creepy feeling of being confronted by mankind at his worst, committing the most heinous crimes imaginable, the narrative and pacing are very strong in this play.

At this point I’ll provide a brief synopsis of the story: Gerardo Escobar and his wife Paulina are staying at their remote beach house. The unidentified country in which they live has recently reverted to democracy after an extended period of military dictatorship. Gerardo, a lawyer, has been appointed to head a truth and reconciliation committee. Years ago, shortly after the military seized power, Paulina was abducted and tortured. It is implied that the army was using her to get to Gerardo, a leftist student leader at the time. Paulina never gave him up during the torture, so Gerardo was never captured, and this unspoken fact continues to color their marriage. At the beginning of the play, Gerardo gets a flat tire and a Good Samaritan, Dr. Roberto Miranda, gives him a ride home. Paulina, who was blindfolded the entire time she was held prisoner, hears Dr. Miranda’s voice and recognizes it instantly. She is convinced that he was one of her torturers. That’s when things get crazy.

The character development is especially strong in “Death & the Maiden.” I have a theory that in most stories there is one relationship that is more important dramatically than any others. In this case, it’s the relationship between Gerardo and Paulina. Dr. Miranda is meant to be more of a puzzle, a monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of the Escobars’ marriage that forces a cathartic conversation that is long overdue. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the character development is the constant shifting of power among the three characters. Power, and its ability to brutalize the wielder, is one of the main themes.

I understand that the American premiere of the play had Glenn Close and Richard Dreyfus as the Escobars and Gene Hackman as Dr. Miranda. Great casting. I would highly recommend the movie version as well (here’s the IMDB entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109579/). Directed by noted ephebophile Roman Polanski, it stars Ben Kingsley as Dr. Miranda and Sigourney Weaver as Paulina. Gerardo is portrayed by the totally underrated English character actor Stuart Wilson. You may remember him from such films The Rock, Lethal Weapon 3, & The Mask of Zorro.

Fantastic Reality: Why "Entourage" isn't really the male version of "Sex & The City."

The final season of The Sopranos (or if you prefer, the last two-fifiths of the final season) will start in a mere four weeks, and I am pretty excited. What's even more exciting is a new season of Entourage is starting up the same night!

I’ve seen Entourage referred to as the “male Sex In The City” more than once, but I can’t agree with that assessment. The similarities are obvious: a group of four friends live in a glamorous locale and get into adventures, of a sort. Their adventures include activities such as hanging out, chilling, kicking it, drinking, and occasionally talking about relationships. It would be captious to point out that one show involves four men in their twenties, the other four women in their thirties; that one show takes place in Los Angeles, the other in New York.

One of the big differences, though, is in the presentation of the characters. While all four of the dudes on Entourage display behavior that reminds me of my friends, I just can’t see them as types. I can’t see guys walking around wearing T-shirts that read “I’m a Turtle,” or “I’m a Drama” (though, honestly, who would identify themselves with the biggest loser on the show?). I’ll admit that Vince does kind of remind me of my friend Tim, and sometimes E finds himself in situations that I’ve personally experienced, but I can’t pick one that I identify with more than the others. All four of them remind me of me and my friends collectively.

I don’t mean to suggest that the four women on S&TC are one-dimensional or that they aren’t as fleshed out as the four men on Entourage. I can’t make that call because I’m not familiar enough with the former show to do so. But on Entourage, the characters don’t represent “types” quite as clearly.

Here’s another difference: Entourage will not have the same pop-cultural impact because it’s not suggesting some new attitude for young urban men. It’s simply presenting a fantasy that the vast majority of them already want. Vince, Eric, Turtle and Drama live in a mansion, sleep with hot girls with ease, and have instant entree to any club, restaurant or bar they want. None of them have jobs in the traditional sense. Drama and Turtle don’t appear to really have anything remotely resembling a job at all. (Although Turtle’s burgeoning rap management career from the second season was a neat plot device. It also enabled to them to add some complexity to his character; by displaying some ambition, he doesn’t come off as such a self-aware yet unapologetic schnorer.) The only one who can’t sleep in everyday is Vince, and that’s only when he’s working on a movie, which is almost never seen on the show. In his capacity as Vince’s manager, E is the one who seems to have the most job related stress.

Sure, S&TC presented a fantasy, too: these women never worry about money; they eat at trendy restaurants, barhop to the hottest spots, and buy clothes like they’re going out of style. There is one crucial difference here. S&TC tacitly encouraged behavior that mainstream culture has traditionally depicted as exclusively male. There is one female fantasy that the show always conspicuously eschewed, or at the very least downplayed thematically: landing a husband. Whether this is an innate female fantasy or one that is constructed by popular culture is a discussion for another time. What made it unique and what accounted for its cultural impact was that it told women they didn’t have to spend all their time worrying about finding a man. It told them that it was okay for them to get in to their thirties without one, or even the prospect of one. That it was okay for them to be as promiscuous as men are allowed to be, to focus on their friendships with other women and their careers rather than on constantly obsessing about finding a husband and having babies. And that’s the show’s ultimate conceit.

Entourage's ultimate conceit is that the show is a bizarre combination of fantasy and reality. When I say bizarre, I mean it’s bizarre because it actually works. I’ve already outlined the fantasy element of the show. The four characters have, mainly through serendipity, found themselves in a situation that pretty much any dude their age would kill to be in. In order to maintain this fantastical element, I think they should be very careful about showing the crew doing anything outside of La-La-Land. I think it was a good call to have the entire shooting of Queens Boulevard take place in between the first and second seasons. And I’m not convinced that having an episode at Sundance was a great idea (but it was a great episode). I’m willing to let it slide because on one level they were in the same milieu but in a different location.

The reality of the show presents itself on three levels. Firstly, with Doug Ellin as the main creative force behind the show, and Marky Mark as an executive producer, it’s a safe bet that a LOT of the experiences the foursome go through are based on things that really happened to Doug Ellin and Mark Wahlberg when they moved out to California. Drama is a great character, though arguably his main purpose is to provide Marky Mark with an opportunity to rag on Donnie Wahlberg. (The great irony here is that Donnie Wahlberg is a much better actor than his younger brother; if you don’t believe me go watch the first five minutes of The Sixth Sense and then watch the new Planet of the Apes.) And of course, casting an actor whose older brother is a much more successful actor as the older brother of a much more successful actor was a stroke of genius. It also indicates that Kevin Dillon is probably a pretty self-aware cat.

The second realistic aspect of the show is one that I can’t comment on too deeply because I haven’t experienced it myself. But when I’ve spoken about the show to people who have worked in the Hollywood machine, they’ve told me it’s freakishly accurate.

The third aspect, which I will comment on more thoroughly, is the writing. Obviously, I have a bias towards writers, but I think what’s wrong with most movies and TV shows is the script. If the characters don’t talk like real people, then how believable can the rest of it possibly be? The brilliance of the writing on Entourage is that it seems extremely familiar to dudes who watch the show, particularly cats in their twenties. (Swingers was also really good that way.) The manner in which Vince, E, Turtle and Drama talk to and interact with each other is totally accurate. It’s very similar to the way I interact with my friends. And that makes the show compelling. There was a particularly good moment in the penultimate episode of the second season. Turtle and Drama are watching the climax of Brian’s Song, “the ultimate guy cry movie,” and both of them are obviously trying really hard not to cry. When Vince comes in and asks them to turn it off, Turtle initially objects, but when he turns around and takes a look at Vince, he complies instantly. Before Vince actually says a word, his friends can tell something bad has happened. That verisimilitude distinguishes it from your average TV show.

The similarities between S&TC and Entourage have been remarked upon, and they are shown on the same channel, a channel which has distinctive shows anyway. And while there are some similarities, ultimately it’s just not accurate to call Entourage the “male Sex & The City.” Great as it is, Entourage is most likely not going to have the same cultural impact as the earlier program. S&TC was really groundbreaking underneath its patina of superficiality. It suggested that women could place their priorities on things other than the quest to catch a man and get a rock on one's finger. And whether you argue that that idea is something innate, or something women are programmed to think through pop culture, the bridal-industrial complex, or whatever, you must admit that it’s pretty outré to encourage such a mind set. Entourage doesn’t really do that. Rather than devising a new mode for young urban men, it presents a fantasy that the vast majority of them already want. Entourage makes its mark by combining fantasy and reality so deftly that it actually works. And that’s no mean feat.

I Dig Multiethnic Places

I was thinking about Brazil. In a lot of ways, Brazil reminds me of the United States. Both are large countries, in two senses. They are physically big, and encompass a wide range of geographic features and climates, with distinct regional cultures. Both countries have big populations, made up of black, white, Asian, and indigenous peoples and any combination of those you can imagine. And that is a beautiful thing.

I'm reading a really interesting book right now called "World on Fire." It's by Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law school. So she has cred. The book is about the "volatile" combination of market orientated economies and instant democracy in countries with "market dominant minorities." That is the important phrase to remember. Globalization frequently makes the market dominant minorities even richer. They have the capital and the international connections. An already extant wealth disparity between the majority and the MDMs increases. There are so many examples: ethnic Indians in West Africa, Tutsis in Rwanda, white people in Southern Africa and Latin America, Croats in Yugoslavia, ethnic Chinese all over Southeast Asia. An already extant resentment and envy among the majority towards the MDMs also increases. Thus proceeds the introduction of market economics urged on by western governments and institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and others. Simultaneously, free and fair monitored elections start to take place, and now those majorities have free speech, freedom of assembly and meaningful votes. Then they can be taken advantage of by demagogues and opportunistic politicians more than willing to exploit ethnic tension to get votes. (While it's not really fair to include all of these people in the same sentence, this category could include Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez, Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, Gennady Zyuganov, the Ollanta brothers, Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe. Some of these men have much better intentions than others, though.) And sometimes it gets really ugly. Riots, looting, rapes, lynchings. That kind of ugly. Then things get worse. Misguided attempts to redistribute wealth result in nationalizations of companies and the resultant decrease in efficiency and quality, the foreign investors go away, the MDMs move their money (this can be in the billions) to banks in other countries, and the economy goes straight down the toilet. Next on the menu, how about a backlash against democracy, or perhaps an extended period of crony capitalism? The worst kind of crony capitalism, wherein a tiny group of businessmen and corrupt politicians (think Suharto, the Somozas, Ferdinand Marcos, the Yeltsin family, Daniel Arap Moi, the Burmese junta) hoard massive amounts of money whilst most of the country lives in poverty. This not a recipe for peaceful coexistence. Towards the end of the book, she goes for a bit of stretch. She suggests that Israelis are a regional MDM and that Americans (or estadounidenses, si prefieres) are a global MDM. In the context of her argument, these assertions are not as convincing as the rest of the book.

One of the things I like about this book is that it's not just anti-globalization dreck by some pinko like Noam Chomsky. Amy Chua is not arguing that globalization should all of a sudden be ended and perhaps reversed (were such a thing even remotely possible). She doesn't think globalization is a bad thing, necessarily. She does think it's not being implemented the right way. Market economies and democracy are great things. It's fantastic that Peru and Bolivia elected presidents who were indigenous cats. The problem is that developing and post-socialist countries are being asked to integrate total laissez-faire economics, with minimal regulation (much like the parking lot of a Phish show) and hard-core democracy, with universal suffrage, at the same time. None of the western nations that are today so prosperous ever tried to do both of those things at the same time. That's not fair. (Actually, the author points out, there is one example of a Western nation trying to implement universal suffrage and total economic deregulation at the same time. That would be Weimar Germany, and we all know how that turned out.)

And the biggest shame about all this is the ugly ethnic violence. Because multiethnic places are usually really cool places to be. The collision and combination of cultures creates all sorts of neat fusions. The United States, Brazil and Cuba all have great music, due to the combination of European and African musical traditions. Those cultural combinations produce stuff from the delightful to the sublime, including jazz, samba, mambo, pinoy rap, spam musubi, peranakan cuisine, Kill Bill 1 & 2, Chicago hot dogs and California Pizza Kitchen. (I realize that's mostly food and music, but those are two of my favorite things.)

(Here's a link to the wikipedia page for the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_Fire. This covers some of the criticism of the book.)

Northern European Cheese House

One thing that’s fun about electronic music is the wide variety of sub-genres that people come up with to describe it. There’s tribal house, tech-house, disco house, microhouse, deep trance, progressive trance, UK garage, two-step, ambient techno, dark ambient, freestyle, neo-electro, big beat, broken beat, gabba, and many others. You get the idea. Some people only listen to one of these. I once met a cat at a party who told me he was a DJ. “Oh, yeah? What do you spin?” I asked. “Progressive trance,” came the reply. “And what else?” I countered. “Just progressive trance,” he said. “Hmmm. Sounds rather . . . limiting,” was my response.

There’s a sub-genre whose name I made up myself, but I think it defines a cohesive sound, and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the music I’m referring to. That sub-genre is “Northern European Cheese House.” This style is marked by basic four-to-the floor house beats, with sing-along choruses and simple chords that can be played with one hand on a keyboard. It goes without saying that these songs are always in major keys. There is a large overlap between N.E.C.H. and what is commonly called “Eurodance” or “Eurobeat.” But what I’m referring to is a particular sound that is, by design, incredibly poppy, totally mainstream, terribly catchy, and really, well, cheesy. And for some reason Germans and Scandinavians seem to be the premier purveyors of this musical guilty pleasure.

The Crazy Frog cover of “We Are The Champions,” or any Crazy Frog song for that matter, is an excellent example. (You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCj-RyKCmHQ) I understand it was a massive hit across Europe last summer, but it’s not too well known on this side of the pond. The frog was originally created by a Swede named Daniel Malmedahl, and the production of the songs is done by the unimaginatively named German production duo Bass Bumpers.

Another N.E.C.H. classic (and by classic, I mean it’s from the nineties) is “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex. AllMusicGuide reviewer and friend-of-a-friend Johnny Loftus once referred to their album Sex and Violins as “inane, even for the cartoon land of Eurodance.” Precisely.

The most widely heard example would be the Vengaboys, particularly “We Like To Party.” Americans who live near a Six Flags theme park will recognize this as the song the creepy old guy in the mask dances to in the adverts. The Vengaboys went on to produce other N.E.C.H. hallmarks like “Boom Boom Boom Boom,” and “We’re Going To Ibiza.” Despite the name, the Vengaboys was mainly composed of two Dutch DJs/producers, Wessel van Diepen and Dennis van den Driesschen. While they are not German or Scandinavian, for my purposes we’ll count the Netherlands as Northern Europe. 2 Unlimited were pioneers of Northern European cheese house, and they were composed of two Belgian producers, a Dutch rapper and a Dutch singer. Remember “Twilight Zone” and “Get Ready For This?”

Oddly, one of the songs most representative of N.E.C.H. was not composed by Northern Europeans. That would be “The Hampsterdance.” It was one of the first examples of a popular internet meme, and it was created by a Canadian art student named Deirdre LaCarte. Heather Phares, another AllMusicGuide reviewer, writes that the Hampsterdance song has a “Chipmunks meets Rednex” vibe. If you’ve seen See Spot Run (and who hasn’t), you will remember this music from the scene where David Arquette gets locked out of his apartment. (As an aside, here’s some career advice for Mr. Arquette: everyone knows your career is not doing great if you’re making a movie with an animal, i.e., Chuck Norris in Top Dog, or a little kid, i.e., Burt Reynolds in Cop & A Half, but if someone hands you a script with an animal and a little kid, you should run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible.)