You Have Died of Dysentery Author Alterations

WHILE BURNING THROUGH SEASON ONE of HBO's mighty fine cowboys 'n' profanity epic Deadwood, I ran into a couple of sequences (mild spoilers ahead) that would bring a laugh to any editor who has had to deal with too many anxious cooks eager to season the broth—or a typesetter whose constituents have to tinker when you're straining at the bit to go to press.

Smallpox has come to the gold-rush camp of Deadwood, and the town's leading business interests —including saloon owner and whoremaster, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane); his rival in the whiskey and flesh trades, Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe); and hotel manager/Swearengen underling E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) — have pooled their funds to send out missions for vaccine and establish a quarantine tent. The next bullet point on their plan is to place a story in the camp's daily broadsheet to forestall panic by portraying them as being one step ahead of the outbreak.

This brings the three suddenly civic-minded rogues to the office of the Deadwood Pioneer, helping its reporter, editor, and publisher, A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) write the feel-good piece that will keep the booze-, tail-, and gamble-happy prospectors who line their pockets from dropping their sieves and vamoosing.

Merrick, his fingers glossy with ink, reads back the last sentence: "'Thanks also to the aforementioned merchants, the vaccine will be distributed gratis.'"

Al: "'Free gratis.'"

Merrick: "'Free gratis' is a redundancy."

[Al looks askance at Sy and E.B.]

E.B.: "Does that mean, 'repeats itself'?"

[Merrick nods.]

Al: "Then leave 'gratis' out."

Merrick [writing]: "What luck for me, Al, that you have such a keen editorial sense. 'Free.' 'Distributed free.' Period. It will take me some time to reset the type—"

Al: "Yeah, hurry up!"

You just can't move fast enough for some clients.

Later that day, as Merrick prints the first proof, Sy, Al, and E.B. are there to greet it. They look on expectantly and a bit mystified as Merrick peels a page off the type.

Merrick [inspects the first page]; "Gentlemen—"

Al: "Come on, let's see it!" [snatches it away]


Merrick: "Or should I say, my fellow authors?"

[Said authors zero in on the article as Merrick watches.]

Al: "I think maybe it should have a question mark: 'The Plague in Deadwood?'"

Merrick: "The type is set. You're reading the definitive edition."

Al [looks at other two, shrugs]: "Let's run it."


Of course, not all audiences are appreciative of the careful choices an editorial team makes in selecting the mot juste:

Al [that night, reading the paper in his saloon while his flunky, Dan Dority, looks on]: "Merrick! Merrick wanted to put here, 'Gratis.' Now is the idea to inform your readers, or to make them feel like a fucking dunce? Huh? I had to put in 'free.'"

Dan: "I don't see why the fuck he doesn't have news of the baseball."

Guys. Always with the sports pages.

All images © Home Box Office, Inc.

A Nielsen Nightmare

IT OCCURRED TO ME TODAY, while vacuuming the living room, that it's been at least 2 weeks since I last watched television in my home. Though I've watched early-morning financial news and crap on the Food Network while at the gym, and TiVo'd America's Test Kitchen eps at my parents' on Sundays, the postwork viewing habits I'd long maintained had evaporated.

For a long time, my evening ritual was to make dinner with the first Simpsons episode on Fox running in the background, then watch the second one, and then Seinfeld, while eating. After eight, I'd switch over to the computer or book and listen to WFMU until bedtime. Sometime before FOX eliminated the double dose of Springfield, I decided I had nothing more to learn from the show, and stopped watching, tuning into Jeopardy! instead as my pre-Jerry viewing. Then one of the crap VHF channels began airing reruns of Family Guy, a show I only began watching during its unlikely but successful return to air after cancellation. For a while, I would tune in at 7:30 to see some of the older episodes, ignoring the distractions of different voice-acting styles, cheaper animation, and heavy censorship to fill in my gaps.

Now, however, that network seems to have fallen into a rut of Family Guys already rerun a million times on Sunday nights between blocks of fresh eps. (I'd written off new eps of The Simpsons as a viewing priority even before the mediocre movie came out.) I don't have cable, and the only other air-signal channel I watch at all is 13, our local PBS station. And most of the good stuff they air is released on DVD . . . not unlike nearly all of pay-TV's nonsports content.

As I wound up the cord on the vacuum, I thought about whether I'd even take this TV with me in the next move. (Not for another year at least; the lease renewal is sitting on my desk here, and I'd like to remain within 15 minutes of my current job, and within walking distance of a transit nexus should I need to change jobs in the next 12 months.) The set itself — what I suppose in 10 years we'll call an old-style tube model — is a bit fucked. A purple tinge has been creeping from the bottom left corner for the past 2 years or so. I've had this thing since my move here in 1999, and it was a gift from my parents, so it owes me squat.

With the pointless ballyhoo of digital broadcasting edging every closer, I assume that past some point next year, my choices will be to piss away some money on a digital tuner, or to get cable. In my review of the offerings on my parents' cable lineup during my Sunday visits, I gotta say, there's not many reasons to pay Cablevision any more than I already am for the broadband account. Getting a Netflix account, tapping the DVD burner in my parents' TiVo, or using iTunes can fill in any gaps. Between that realization, and the lack of any broadcast shows in which I'm interested, why even have the TV set at all?

I'd say about half of the movies I've rented in the past few months, and all of the TiVo DVDs I've bummed off my parents, I've watched on my 17" PowerBook with studio-quality headphones for the audio. (My DVD player, about the same vintage as the TV, can't read most TiVo-burned discs.) I've already mentally committed to jumping to the big MacBook when this slab on which I'm typing eventually merges with the infinite. According to Apple.com, the maximum 17" offers 1080-resolution HD video. Not a bad reason to begin hoarding my pennies, though I am hoping this current Mac makes it to its 5-year anniversary in November at minimum before it, too, begins the death spiral my TV is cutting.

The only upcoming reasons to retain the TV are football and the political spectacle approaching in the fall. Football I can watch at the gym or over at my parents', and I usually can't stay up late enough on Mondays to watch the air signal for that anyway. (The cable-only NFL Network can go fuck itself.) As regards Decision '08, it's not as much Election Night I worry about missing — I've already deemed a combination of radio and Net coverage to be superior to a repeat of watching Dan Rather run through three lifetimes worth of folksy sayings. Any relevant bits of "wisdom," spectactles, dramatic suicides, etc., will be retained by the news sites and thus be streamable. But I did briefly think the tube might be worth retaining for the debates between Sens. McCain and Obama. (Heh.) Then I remember how much seeing McCain makes me want to throw my crockery across the room, and I figure, if he's not gonna pay my Pottery Barn bill, why should I rack one up?

As for the spot occupied by the TV? I'm thinking another couch. Make my living room into a talk show set. I get more out of talking with the people I know, and occasionally playing the odd board or card game with them, than the shit the entertainment industry shovels onto the airwaves and co-ax, and I always feel bad making my Christmas party guests sit on folding chairs. I'd probably have to get rid of one of my bookshelves and its books (I suspect some of you just shuddered at that thought). There are quite a number of tomes there that I haven't touched in years, though, and if a library, or the patron of one of its book sales, can benefit from it, why leave the knowledge frozen on the shelf? I painlessly handed off five books to the local library this morning, and in the unlikely situation that I buy a new book in the next several months (can't beat interlibrary loan and note-taking for most of the books I've impulse-wanted in the recent past), I will remove an existing book to make space.

However it goes, I don't intend to become that Onion area man who constantly mentions that he has no televison.

Schizohedron Bullet Points! for 9/6/06

• BUGGED WHILE AT WORK: Now I know my peripheral vision is working well. While typing away at the thinkbox, I noticed a stirring out of the corner of my right eye. A full-on look confirmed the dreadful, initial assessment: A roach was walking across my desk. I bisected it with the edge of a pint Chinese-food container — the first item at hand I could afford to discard — and, dying bug twitching its last between the plastic rim and the September 3rd box on my desk calendar, I called HR to inform them of the infestation. Their speculation: Recent construction on the floors above and below us stirred up vermin. I'd prefer the mice we had in the office during the first few weeks of occupancy. Four legs good; six legs bad.
  

• THEY'RE CUBES, NOT CELLS: Anyone see the Family Guy movie? I believe it was rerun Sunday night. The depiction of pathetic future-Stewie as a dead-end employee of some Best Buy/Staples amalgam called to mind how much I despise Dilbert. The interaction between older Stewie and his female coworker had the same rhetoric of job-as-prison and boss-as-evil-overlord as the crew in Dilbert does. What always goes unsaid in Dilbert, as a friend of mine once pointed out, is that all of these workers could quit, flee this job that is damaging their spirits, and find fulfillment in another position. Are they really all so incompetent that the anonymous company in the strip is the only organization clueless enough to employ them? More important, is this an example a real-life worker should follow? As office rebellion goes, Dilbert is about as subversive as the Elks. My first boss at my current company had walls festooned with Dilbert comics and gear. Had my current department not poached me, I would have quit within a year. Should you walk into an interview with that sort of cube art, just consider it practice, leave a fake phone number, and run.
  

• EIGHTEEN IS TOO OLD: The season premiere of The Simpsons is coming up this weekend, surprisingly avoiding its usual fate of relegation to November by Major League Baseball. If only I cared. The past three seasons of the show have been lackluster. Both Family Guy and the dearly departed Arrested Development routinely trounced the episodes of The Simpsons that preceded them. This season opener is playing the guest-star card, snaring the voice talents of Michael Imperioli and Joe Pantoliano for an ep in which Homer joins the Mafia. Good to see they're getting on the Sopranos bandwagon so promptly. I'm sure we'll see an ep in which Lisa becomes a pro at no-limit Texas hold'em real soon. At this rate, I don't know what original killer material they would consider holding out for the upcoming Simpsons movie. Time for FOX to tell this 18-year-old to move out of the house. I'll instead spend the evening preparing to watch the Duel of the Mannings in the Giants–Colts game, quite possibly with barbecue at my parents' house once they decamp to the shore. And on that point . . .
  

• EAST-COAST CASINO BINGE: The current plan is to go with, at minimum, Steve and Felix to Foxwoods this coming Saturday, then on Tuesday, to visit my parents in Wildwood Crest, stopping at some unsuspecting Atlantic City venue on one leg of the journey, So I'll have the chance to play poker twice in five days, in casinos no less. Were I not on a better-sleep kick, I would have taken the host of the Maywood venue up on his offer to host the game tomorrow. As of this evening, he reported to me that he is light on players, so maybe I'll end up going down there and hitting a poker trifecta over the next several days. On the other hand, I can't win a couple of extra hours of sleep in any of these games, and if the sleeper sofa down the shore is anything like the one I dropped my bones onto last time, I'll spend the night flipping around like a salmon in a bear's mouth and arise with a mighty hump.

So Much for That Theory (Sopranos Spoilers)

I TRIED. I STILL claim a partial victory, though, in that the writers and producers of The Sopranos are banking on the audience following the plot through an unconvential detour. Some folks have expressed anything from mild discontent to outright loathing for the dream sequences in the show, but these donks also tend to whine when any show has a body count of less than three, so fuck 'em.

I noticed that in the dream, Gandolfini used his "real" voice. If you have access to the Season 1 episodes, play the pilot, then any of the later ones. His accent is distinctly different. He doesn't do a lot of interviews and almost no talk shows, so you don't hear Gandolfini speaking as himself as often as you hear the gruffer, filthier, Jersey-ized Tony Soprano voice.

The reference to selling patio furniture was interesting. He made some sort of dig at himself in the first or second season, how he might've turned out differently if he hadn't been born to a Mafioso and perhaps would have had a job selling patio furniture. It also resembled the life-not-taken glimpse we had in the second season when Livia Soprano browbeats Johnny Boy into not moving the family to Reno to start a business with his friend, who — as Tony observes to Livia in the retirement home — has become a huge and legit success.

For the Babylon 5 veterans out there: Anyone else reminded of the episode "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari?"

Dramas set in hospitals bug me, as I've mentioned in the past. I really am never up for extended visits, even televisually, to the ICU. To change the subject on this point, it seems as though I will visit a hospital soon. The vascular surgeon has convinced my mother to go ahead with the carotid artery surgery we thought was deferred or unnecessary. He said he had consulted with department heads at his hospital, and implored her to reconsider, because he feels that blockage or not, the tortuous structure of the vessel is more of a hazard than we thought and might contribute to another plaque. More than anything, this indecision gave her a major anxiety attack, and I could hear her discord when she called me about this late last week.

This means more tests, more doctor visits, and more mornings where my mother is feeling too afraid to go to either and has to cancel and double up on the Xanax. Here I was, relaxing in the thought that we might have dodged a bullet on this one and posting about it here, and now she has resigned herself to going in for the work some time in April. In an ideal world, the doctor is only calling her back because he is interested in saving a life. I would hope he isn't putting her through this sort of back-and-forth turmoil for a fast buck.

So hopefully, we will see fewer and fewer scenes in The Sopranos featuring family members standing at Tony's bedside while devices carry on their grim work of breathing and filtering and draining for the dreaming patriarch. Otherwise they can stay on my parents' TiVo until late summer.

David Chase Channeling Quentin Tarantino (Sopranos Spoilers)

I AM POSTING THE above warning for those folks who have the season opener of The Sopranos taped, reserved for future HBO grazing, or the like. Granted it's been a week, and most of the folks who read this blog live in and around the environs where the film (the mighty Felix and I lived within a long walk's distance to the real Bada Bing, in fact). I ruined a plot point when, after sliding through last Monday free and clear of spoilers in anticipation of yoinking the ep off of my parents' TiVo, I opened the New York Daily News to have it staring up at me from page 3. So consider yourself warned.

It has been observed on the newsgroup alt.tv.sopranos, and possibly elsewhere, that the debut episode of Season 6 might not be the first chronological chapter. This may in fact have been an ep from the middle or near the end of the season, and the remainder of 6, and the stunted mini-season now planned as the end of the series, might see the resolution of the shooting. What we see from now until the "catch-up" episode may be retrospective fill-in.

Evidence to support this:

• Characters mention it having been at least a year since the events of last season
• Janice's baby is said to be more than a year old
• Considering the use of The Godfather as an ongoing master text, Tony's being shot mid-plot reminds me of Vito Corleone's bullet-induced incapacitation, and the use of an extended flashback (or even an interlaced past–present scene technique) calls to mind the way the second film was arranged.
• Although other characters have gotten less screen time due to shootings (Christopher) or real-life needs of the actor (when Tony Sirico had minor surgery, his scenes as Paulie were quickies shot from simple sets — this was the stretch when he was in jail), they know Tony Soprano is too much of a draw to keep him off camera or in a coma. He is, to echo the words of a newsgroup denizen, "too good an earner."
  

Above and beyond this speculation, I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was to hear the words of my favorite Beat, William S. Burroughs, used as a voiceover in the ep. I owe that beautiful junky a full post on his own, but to hear his familiar croak over the opening montage gave me hope that David Chase and Co. won't dumb the series down to the lowest common denominator. This series has seen Tony gain wisdom from dreams and fever-hallucinations . . . not something I'd expect from the shit they shovel over the traditional networks. Maybe the brains behind The Sopranos will be bold enough to try something like a chronological cut-up in the Tarantino mode, and remind me why this is one of the very few TV series I bother to follow anymore.

We shall be smarter tonight, I suppose.