June 4, 2008

Well, here's a fine kettle of fish . . . after all my recalcitrance about starting up a blog, I couldn't wait to get here to add my second entry in so many days. Entirely because Barack Obama became the Dem Pres nom last nght. Apparently, there is hope for this country.

When The Primary that Wouldn't Die began, it seemed like an embarrassment of riches: the first woman candidate (from a past successful administration) and the first black candidate (with a wildly inspiring message). But then a funny thing happened -- Obama started offering us things we had forgotten we could even hope for. Contrast George "Treasony" Bush's "I'm not a Washington insider" of eight years ago with Obama's much-different message of no longer playing by Washington's rules. It's approximately the difference between day and Nightmare on Rove Street. And it certainly made the lady look increasingly shady, not to mention behaving increasingly unladylike. Perhaps that sounds sexist; it wasn't a virtue of gender that turned me off to Clinton, it was a demonstration of disrespect. When she cranked up the mudslinging and the sound-byting and the snapshots of belting back shooters with the Working Man, she became just another politician -- particularly in contrast to an opponent who insisted on taking the high road whenever possible.

I'm not suggesting that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a President like Dubya. Nobody short of Howdy Doody with grandiosity issues could be a President like Dubya. But as the months have rolled on, the Hillary machine has started to remind me more and more of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a perfectly normal looking character is introduced and we like them just fine until their skin strips away and we discover it's a fang-wielding alien with an agenda to destroy us because she owes it to the lobbyists on her home planet. Um . . . I guess I just said that Hillary was better than a murderous puppet but then likened her to a murderous alien. Maybe that was put a little strongly.

The point is, Clinton's obligations to the status quo and the powers-that-have-been becaue clear as this thing trudged on. And even if she isn't a Dracula she does seem to have a hunchbacked, rat-eating minion doing her uncrupulous bidding. He happened to be the previous President of the United States, but you never know where the next Igor is coming from. A Hillary presidency may not have ended up as panderingly "insider" as the Doody Debacle -- particularly since she is beholden to a different crew -- but it would have been a package deal nonetheless. And just plain business-as-usual.

It may sound blindly idealistic to think that Barack Obama is offering (or able to provide) something different. Or it may be that this is the first time since the Kennedy administration (Bay of Pigs notwithstanding) that we have a rationale to hope. Time will tell. And I can't help but believe that time will be kind.

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June 3, 2008

I 've resisted creating a blog for quite some time. I couldn't quite see the point, since I spend so much of the rest of my time writing. So you figure there had to be some pretty strong motivation to begin this, a gnawing subject I needed to divulge here that I just couldn't seem to incorporate anyplace else. So here goes.

One Life to Live has become SUCH an awesome soap lately! I mean it. I've been more-or-less watching this thing since (gulp!) 1969, when I was just a mere whisp of a lad (though it's okay if you thought I was a newborn in that time frame). There has been an intermittent appeal to the show . . . certainly there must have been something to make the likes of David "Boom Boom" Sedaris have a post-adolescent fantasy about moving to New York and writing for it. But these days, the show has become astonishing -- certainly by soap-opera standards, but perhaps also by television-in-general standards. (That may say more about television in general, but I'm not going there right now.)

I am not used to cracker-jack dialogue, irresistible characters, and breathless pacing on daytime. But, sure enough, that's what One Life to Live has been serving up for weeks now. (Perhaps "weeks" sounds like faint praise; in the world of soaps, a single sweeps week of decent plotting is a revelation, but this show is heading for some kind of Guinness record.)

I simply don't use the forward-skip button on my DVR remote any longer. From the droll wit and pectorals of Tuc Watkins to the splendid work of everyone else, there isn't a tedious moment. (I guess I had to single out Watkins -- playing the charming roué David Vickers -- because I ran into him at the hot foods bar at Whole Foods once. He should've been one of the hot selections, and that's all I'm gonna say.) It is apparently largely attributable to Ron Carlivati, who has taken over Head Writer chores and has amped things up considerably. To be fair, things started getting superlative before the regime change, but the continued upswing is certainly happening on his watch.

It's nice when the familiar becomes the superlative. You turn around and something you tolerated out of habit has morphed into . . . well, a hot foods bar. It's about time. Because, from what I'm led to believe, we only have one life to live.