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Category Archives: Entertainment
PROMPT: TV Shows
Andy Griffith Show, Carol Burnett Show, Dick Van Dyke Show… wow, they were not creative with names in those days.
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PROMPT: Rewatch
No TV series. Though there might be episodes of “Seinfeld” that I’ve seen that many times (but others I may have never seen at all.)
Re: Movies: “Kung Fu Hustle,” “The Matrix” (the first one,) and “Kung Fu Panda” (the first one.) Nothing else comes to mind, but there probably are some. (Back from the days when cable ran the same content over and over.)
Five times is a lot of times to watch the same thing. If it’s really good, it will be too mentally / emotionally draining to watch repeatedly. And if it’s too bad, it will be tedious to do so. It needs to be in the sweet spot of light, but incredibly entertaining.
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PROMPT: Rewatched
Movies: The Matrix (1999), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), and – possibly – The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010). [Really, I could watch any Christopher Nolan film more than once (and probably need to in order to fully get them.)]
TV Series: None. I can’t think of a series that I’ve watched more than once — except maybe in reruns as a kid, watching episodes out of sequence and on a hit or miss basis.
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BOOKS: “The Comedians” by Kliph Nesteroff
The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy by Kliph NesteroffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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This book presents a fascinating history of standup comedy and the various ancillary activities that comedians have taken on to make ends meet, to advance their careers, and – in a surprising number of cases – to pay for drugs — e.g. from writing to radio and television performances to hosting interview shows. The book’s exploration runs from the days of Vuadville to today’s world of Twitter and podcasts.
The book reveals a great deal about which readers may be unaware. If you, like me, watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and wondered whether the mob was really that involved in the entertainment industry, turns out, they were. In fact, Nesteroff addresses the violence and threats experienced by comedians in a way that is much more explicit than in that TV show. There are tales of early insult comedians running afoul of wiseguys who were in the audience unbeknownst to the comedian. There is even a chapter devoted to the building of Las Vegas to meet certain needs of organized crime, as well as discussion of the mob’s decline (or, perhaps, legitimization) in the industry.
Another discovery that was interesting to me was how wild some of the early comedians were, both in their stage and in their personal lives. There were a number of names that were familiar to me from re-runs of highly censored network television programs. I’d wrongly assumed that these individuals were as bland and wholesome as their on-air personas. Buddy Hackett is a prime example of someone who wasn’t at all what I expected.
It’s remarkable to see how many ups and down standup comedy has had in its relatively short life span — cycles of boom and bust.
If you’re interested in standup comedy and how comedy has progressed as a form of entertainment in America, I’d highly recommend this book.
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PROMPT: Cartoon
As a kid, I would definitely say I was more Looney Tunes than Hanna Barbera. I particularly liked “The Road Runner Show” and episodes with Yosemite Sam. Probably because the violence seemed more authentic and characters like Marvin the Martian and Yosemite Sam were salable as murderous psychopaths. I watched Hanna Barbera, but it always seemed like softball by comparison.
Today, I would have to say Rick and Morty.
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PROMPT: Podcasts
What podcasts are you listening to?
I don’t really, though I do catch YouTube rebroadcasts of Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and some standup comics.
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Limerick of the Racist TV Exec
A TV executive for the show, Kung Fu, was unsure of just what he should do. Carradine or Lee? Which one should it be? One knows Kung Fu, but Asian, he is too.
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PROMPT: Television
“A-Team,” “Knight Rider,” “Taxi,” “The Jeffersons,” “Three’s Company,” etc. With plenty of reruns of “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “I Love Lucy.”
Deep cuts: “The Master” and “Airwolf”
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BOOK REVIEW: The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction by Nick Groom
The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction by Nick GroomMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Gothicness is the perfect kind of subject for the VSI series because it’s one of those areas about which everybody knows something, and yet knows nothing, really. Goth is [or has been] a people (or some people’s perception of other people,) an architectural style, a literary / cinematic genre, a contemporary lifestyle, and a political motif. Because of this diversity, even people who have a degree of expertise on some aspect of gothicness may have little understanding of other aspects or how these varied forms of gothicness relate (if they do, and – if they don’t — why enough people believe they relate to have made this well-formed, consensus view of connectedness.)
The downside of this diversity is that this book will almost certainly be dry, verging on tedious, at some point in the reading, depending upon one’s interests. For example, I found the portions on Gothic literature and cinema to be fascinating, but the part that dealt with gothicness in Whig politics to be boring. [With the architecture bit somewhere in between.] That said, one needs to follow this throughline to see how so many varied domains came to be Goth. Also, the book is quite short, so one isn’t likely to be bored to death because there’s not enough space spent on any one topic for that to happen.
I learned a lot about what it means to be “Goth” [or “goth”] from reading this book. It covers the history in some detail, but also brings it around to present-day movies and art. If you seek to know more about what “Gothic” means, you should definitely look into this brief guide.
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Tiger Riding for Beginners 