Gramarye

UGP is up through T, more or less. Highlights include “The Mimosa Cafe”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/The+Mimosa+Cafe (Sturgeon, Zelazny, croissants) “The Passion”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/The+Passion (frightening images of Nichrist), “Three Brothers”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/Three+Brothers (notional, ridiculous movie created during, I believe, a very long IM with Andrew), and “TASP”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/TASP (Ah, quotes whose context I have mostly forgotten).

Well, “S” is a pretty important letter for UGP, and I’ve finished it off, more or less. I particularly enjoyed fiddling about with the “Sci Fi Porn Stars”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/SciFiPorn list. (Note: linked page is highly, highly offensive.)

Okay, so the new fall season kicked off (for me at least) with “??Prison Break??”:http://www.fox.com/prisonbreak/ — which features ??John Doe?? alum Dominic Purcell. What I didn’t realize is that it also includes “Robin Tunney”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000677/ of “??Empire Records??”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112950/ and “Peter Stormare”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001780/ — not a monstrously fat Stormare as we (reluctantly) saw in ??Constantine??, but with a compensatory mullet.

Wow.

As for the show itself, it’s not bad. It would obviously like to be many, many other shows. ??24??, as “Kevin”:http://brotherprior.blogspot.com/ pointed out to me; also, obviously, ??Oz??. And I think that all of us watching were wishing it would either do a little more to live up to, or to live down, the ??Shawshank Redemption?? connection; I was probably alone, however, in experiencing — as I do with any conspiracy show — a melancholy yearning for long-lost “??Nowhere Man??.”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112104/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnx0dD0xfGZiPXV8cG49MHxrdz0xfHE9bm93aGVyZSBtYW58ZnQ9MXxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8Y289MXxodG1sPTF8bm09MQ__;fc=2;ft=20;fm=1 God, I miss that show, and God, I’m ashamed to say that I can’t remember a single minute of it, except for the last three minutes.

But back to ??Prison Break??. It’s not a stellar show, at least not yet, but it has some things going for it. It’s a good premise — narrow enough to give the show structure, but big enough to give it room to grow and change. The best shows tend to have this kind of mid-range focus: organizational comedies and dramas like ??Sports Night?? and ??West Wing?? and community-focused shows like ??Desperate Housewives?? or ??Gilmore Girls?? all model this same unclosed smallness. It also has reasonably good acting — the two brothers (Purcell and this “Wentworth Miller”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0589505/ character, whom I can only know from “??Dinotopia??”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0233044/, since I’m sure I don’t remember him from ??Underworld??) aren’t stellar, but they move plot okay, and Tunney is in good form doing her best Maura Tierney impression; Peter Stormare is, of course, Peter Stormare.

I think the show’s major built-in problem is that it’s trying to run incompatible parallel plots: a prison break and a conspiracy. I love the partly circumscribed space of the prison, but it provides a clear, specified terrain with obvious power relationships. There may be secrets there, but they aren’t the same kind of secrets you find in a good conspiracy; conspiracies thrive in open spaces — the placelessness of an ??X-Files?? or a ??Nowhere Man?? or the wide-open spaces of a ??Push, Nevada?? or an ??Earth Two??.[1] When the walls are tight in around you, there’s nowhere for the hidden watchers to hide. This needn’t be true, obviously; the “Panopticon”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoptican being a good proof of concept in this regard. But that’s not the sort of prison we’re dealing with here.

There are also problems of pacing, some of which come out of the genre miscegenation, and some of which come from trying to give the show a running start. There was far too large a hurry to disclose (or at least hint at) plot developments; character development (like Tunney’s vacillation regarding Purcell’s innocence) that should have taken place over weeks was compressed to ten minutes; and there was absolutely no need to break out Evil Housewife at this stage.

On this point, the show should clearly look to the masterful misdirection of JJ Abrams, who has demonstrated with both ??Alias?? and ??Lost?? that using spectacular, episode-dominating throwaway storylines are the key to tricking audiences into giving you the time you need to tell the real story. The first three episodes could have been about the lead-up to the race riot; we didn’t even need to _suspect_ the machine screw was for anything other than defense until the last moment. Not to mention that we could easily have waited until the second episode to even start defining the brothers’ relationship.

Obviously I’ll watch it as long as its on the air, but I make no predictions as to how long that will be; I also won’t be horribly disappointed if they kill it.

fn1. Yes, I know how weird I am.

Slashfood

Mmm. I do love grilled cheese, and I’m working on a “Grilled Cheese Mods”:http://kukkurovaca.objectis.net:2521/ugp/show/Grilled+Cheese+Mods page for UGP, but in the meantime, this is pretty cool.

While I’ve done a lot of different things with grilled cheese over the years, here’s a basic walk-through:

Start with good bread; a rustic white or a sourdough batard are good choices; slice to around .5-1″ thick, or maybe a bit thicker, depending on texture; the goal is to give the sandwhich structure and make sure you can really taste the bread, but be careful not to cut so thick that cooking (or biting) is impeded.

Butter the bread with soft butter, and sprinkle the butter with spices: cayenne, garlic powder (or actual garlic, if you have it), pepper (my favorite use of pepper involves taking whole pepper corns and, rather than grinding the, crushing them with the flat of a heavy knife, or working them mover lightly in a mortar and pestle, the idea being to retain substantial chunks), or Montreal Steak Seasoning.

Make sure your pan, press, or other heating implement is hot.

Cheese is an arena where I’m not inclined to dictate, not because it’s not vital, but because there are so many good choices; much is up to whim, or depends on the other elements of the sandwich. I mean, I like swiss, but practically no one else in the world does. But yes, better cheese produces better results, and softer cheese melts faster, so if you do use a hard cheese, take that into account.

Not every grilled cheese requires a filling, but the canonical sandwich in my kitchen is filled with a mayo-and-chopped-olive paste, ideally also containing some horseradish, and possibly some slices pepperoncini.

Other options include sauteed mushrooms (always a good choice), or, once, sour cream and cranberry sauce. (Seriously, it was great.)

Well, sort of. I saw someone at the counter today carrying a “moleskine”:http://www.moleskineus.com/, a Pentel “Sharp”, and a rather ungainly Jansport shoulder bag, all products I own and, until relatively recently, carried on a regular basis, and only one of which has any kind of popularity.

I’ve fiddled with the Gramarye theme a bit, tweaked the feeds (added last.fm, uncrossed the streams) and removed that ugly, ugly header from the “UGP”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/ sidebar.

_Update_: Freshened up my FOAF file (kind of) and popped it “here.”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/NickFoaf.rdf Also set up autodiscovery on Gramarye (if you have the “Foaf Explorer”:http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/ bookmarklet, or something like it, you can test this out).

It is a well-known fact that I am all about television. I love it, absolutely. Or, rather, I am passionate about it, which sometimes means love and sometimes means hate. And I definitely believe that, one way or another, “TV is the future.”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/kukkurovaca/108521.html

So, the beginning of a new fall season is always a time of high drama for me — hope, disappointment, anxiety, joy. And, of course, the stakes are raised by the ongoing problem of Nick’s Law. Nick’s Law stipulates that if (a) I like a show, and (b) I watch it from the beginning of its run, it will be cancelled and/or tragically retooled within two seasons.

If you’d like to review some of the evidence yourself, I have a “UGP Page”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/Nick’s+Law on it. Victims include ??Clone High??, ??Sports Night??, ??Push, Nevada??, ??Miracles??, ??Karen Sisco,??, and even seemingly ready-made crowd-pleasers like ??FastLane?? and ??She Spies?? (if you haven’t watched the first season of this formerly hilarious show, you aren’t allowed to snicker). Shows whose survival is attributable entirely to my ignoring them until they were a good two or three seasons in include ??Alias?? and ??West Wing??.

Now, there have been some close calls for the Law. ??Everwood?? is a borderline case; it would be possible to argue that it did not undergo a retooling as such. However, the show changed radically in the quality and above all the weirdness of its writing after the first season was over. But we have yet to see a show that clearly and definitively disproved the rule.

The only serious candidate from last year is ??Lost??, which I watched with great determination, based on my loyalty to ??Alias??, and which, in addition to impressing me, seems to have actually caught public attention as well. The question is, can it hold that attention even as it proceeds to break down (presumably) some of the mysteries which hooked us in? And I believe it can, because with ??Alias?? Abrams continually demonstrated great skill in keeping audiences on board through just the sort of transitions that normally threaten a “What the hell is happening now?” show like ??Lost??. (??Push, Nevada??, for example, was not so skillfully managed.) So, my hope with regard to ??Lost?? is strong.

But even if tragedy strikes everyone’s favorite castaways, hope will still remain. ??Threshold?? and ??Invasion?? are bringing out two of my favorite underemployed actors, Carla Gugino and William Fichtner (amazingly, no one seems to think it’s funny when I explain him by saying he “Fichtns”), and, apparently, pitting them against creepy alien forces.

Another not-unfamiliar face is ??Prison Break??’s Dominic Purcell an alum of the horrible, horrible, but eerily fascinating ??John Doe?? (conspiracy of evil mutes versus time traveler? Not quite, but something like that); it also features a plot that remind me of a Delany short story, which has to be either a very, very good sign or a very, very bad one. I like the premise (architect with the blueprints breaks into prison to help his brother) and the storytelling potential of confined spaces.

I don’t know anything about ??Surface??, except that my kneejerk response to the premise is, “We’ve been needing something to take the place of ??Seaquest??; and while I’m similarly agnostic about the value of ??Commander in Chief??, there’s something to be said about the idea that we need to be able to envision, things before we can do them, so I’m all for more representation of female presidents in the media. And while I’m really not at all optimistic about ??Supernatural?? or ??The Night Stalker??, they’re bound to be good for a few laughs, if nothing else. Obviously not ??Veritas: The Quest??-style laughs, but still.

In short, even if the curse isn’t broken, there should still be some amusement to be had. One can hope.

“A rough chart of the fall lineup”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/2005+Lineup