Category Archives: Marcum my Words

Sounds like I Hate This Show, but I Love It.

Posted on November 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

In the movie Barfly, Henry Chinaski (the barfly of the title) is asked “Why don’t you quit drinking? Anyone can be a drunk.” Henry replies, “Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.”

 

I am reminded of this scene every time I find myself watching 2 Broke Girls, a sitcom on Monday nights on CBS. You see, I am a Sitcom Drunk. Each season brings its new crop of shows, many of which won’t last but a handful of episodes, and by now I need only flip through the season TV Guide preview to know what will most likely be what come season’s start. With way more shows going on than back in the regular cable and pre-cable days, one can’t throw in with just any new-hatched unfledged sitcom comrades. So why this seemingly steamy pile of a show?

 

Like his alcoholic brother, the Sitcom Drunk can’t always say why he sticks with a certain show week after week, he just watches. Maybe it was the Whitney Cummings show at Zanies I had recently been to.  Maybe it was because Kat Dennings had recently been in the tabloids or some such. Maybe it was as simple as that ol’ sitcom television evergreen, the buddy-com. Like Felix and Oscar, like Laverne and Shirley, like Larry and Balki, Max and Caroline (the Girls) are just a couple of pals trying to make it in this crazy world. And when you combine the Opposites trope of Perfect Strangers with the Plucky-Gals-Making-It of Laverne & Shirley, then this Drunk is getting three sheets to the wind on shenanigans and hijinx.

 

So now think of the aforementioned series. Now think of them where one girl is a tall thin blonde whose father was a Madoff-type criminal and is now broke, and the other is the shorter wise-cracking buxom brunette who takes her in. They work together in a Williamsburg, Brooklyn diner because of course they do. Oh, and Caroline wears 5-inch Louboutin heels and Max rocks knee-high boots that look like they were just made for waiting tables in a diner. Throw in a Mel Sharples manqué named Oleg who pops out periodically through the kitchen pass window to talk (in an absurd Eastern European accent) about his penis and what he’d like to do with it, Garrett Morris doing a Garrett Morris impression, a diner owner who makes Ching Chong Ding Dong from The Colbert Report seem tame, and then Bob’s your uncle (Actually Jesse’s your uncle. Or Leo. Or Fester.). This is the show, every episode, every week. Until it wasn’t.

 

This is what has led me to this Chauncey Gardiner-like state of perpetual watching; all this talk of Sitcom Drunks and TV tropes is heading toward the realization of all that viewing labor, the fruits of Endurance. It is the episode where Something Different Happened. This is the episode that embodies the dragon the watcher keeps chasing series after series, waiting for that moment where the event occurs and the immediate resulting shock of TV junkie joy lasts even into the show’s descent back into its reconfigured sameness. But it isn’t the writing or the acting that’s different; it’s how the show itself is presented. In the case of 2 Broke Girls, it has to do with the laugh track. Now the pro/con argument re:laugh tracks is best left for another time, but the kind of show that can bring the chronically habitual viewer the satisfaction he craves requires it. What makes this moment the red-crested warbler of TV is its rarity. During the run of any sitcom this type of episode can only happen once, and you better have it on when it does (This is an important fact. DVR, DVD, VOD – this will not get you where you want to be. The anticipation and its release after waiting all week for the live airing is the third heat that allows one to wring as much pleasure as possible from an intrinsically dull form. Watching it all in one go is a rushing stream that washes the gold away before you can notice it’s there.).

 

At this point one may ask (with good reason) “So what is it? What happened that was so fucking great? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! GET TO THE DAMN POINT!” All right, endurance does have  its limits.

 

The 30th episode of the series was titled “And the Candy Manwich,” which in itself is a hint at the carpetbombing of innuendo to come (Haha, I said ‘come’). A quick bit of the comedy-porn stylings on offer in this episode goes like this:

Caroline: [after throwing up at Andy’s candy store] I finally meet an adorable, sweet guy. A guy so sweet, the word “sweet” is next to his name on actual real estate, and I completely destroy any chance I have with him.

Max: You didn’t destroy anything. And it’s good to let him know right off the bat that you have a gag reflex.

(cue laugh track that is sweetened more than a bowl of Fruity Pebbles in a bowl of condensed milk with Care Bear sprinkles)

 

So this is how this show has gone every week for 30 weeks, Caroline sets it up and Max takes a giant dildo and knocks it down. Fine. As I’ve said, the difference in this episode is not the Mad-Libs inspired dialogue or the traditional sitcom-style acting – that never changes. What happens here is courtesy of sound engineers and that other favorite TV trope, the Breakout Side Character. Jennifer Coolidge plays Sophie, the girls’ upstairs neighbor with big hair and a bigger personality. She (naturally) hooks up semi-regularly with Oleg, which gives us no end of bon mots such as how crotchless panties are a great low-carb snack or what implements Sophie likes to put up Oleg’s butt. Sophie often shows up at the diner, claiming “her booth” whether it is empty or not. And this is where it happens. In the preceding 29 episodes, Sophie’s entrance is just that, an entrance. She comes in, throws down some catty shit on Max and Caroline, laughs uproariously at herself and leaves. No extra laughs, everything status-quo. But this night, when Sophie walks in the diner….TREMENDOUS APPLAUSE! Catcalls, laughs, whoops and hollers greet her as she walks in. And from that point on, every scrap of laugh track is sweetened and brightened beyond the rainbow in a box of Lucky Charms. It’s at once jarring and satisfying, thrilling almost. One starts to anticipate the punchlines (which is absurdly easy to do) even more than usual, waiting for that laughter-turned-up-to-11 track to kick in. Whether an audience was even there nearly gets lost and becomes merely the  paper-thin crust this heap of recorded laughter sits upon. Wonderfully, this continues through to the end of the episode, ushering in the next phase of this show.

 

“Really?” you may ask. “That’s it? More laugh track? You prattle on and on and that’s the payoff?” Well, yes. But consider it – every time Kramer busts into Jerry’s apartment, when Fonzie strolls into Arnold’s, when Erkel comes into the Winslow house – there is a demarcation episode where, for the first time, the audience cheers wildly when that character appears. This usually coincides with a solidification of the show’s ratings, which is the point. After this episode, the show is on its way to syndication heaven and riches for its creators (no more Zanies, eh Whitney?)

 

The joy that this brings may have been a little bit overstated. Well, not overstated, but not precisely stated. It wasn’t as though when this happened I started fist-pumping around the room like Kirk Gibson and cheering myself. It’s more of an inner feeling where there was a click (like Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) where it is as if a capsule had been broken open and the satisfaction of television viewing at its zenith courses through the veins and renders one completely pop-culturally sated.

 

The best way to describe this condition of sitcom drunkenness is in terms of a certain YouTube video. In this video a young man beats Super Mario Bros. on the original NES with his feet. Not only beat the game, but doing it for time (he finishes the game in just over 9 minutes) as well. He has played this same game, where the characters and worlds and warp levels are the same every time, so often that he has had to continually look for new ways to continue to enjoy it. He even casually drinks a soda as he does this, perhaps trying subconsciously to add an extra level of complexity to his task. That is the source of the Sitcom Drunks madness, the idea that he has watched so many episodes of so many sitcoms that each cameo is cross-indexed instantly A Brilliant Mind style, ticking off other shows the actor may have been in, or looking to see if the interiors have changed at all from season to season, and of course waiting for that rare bird which is the shift in laugh track (all of this is predicated on the multi-cam, laugh track having sitcom, which is the real bread and butter of the Sitcom Drunk).

 

Yep, watching 2 Broke Girls is the Playing-Super-Mario-With-Your-Feet of watching TV shows. And I dig it. So I won’t be available on Monday at 8, so don’t call.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Marcum my Words

Tagged , , ,

Intelligence Reporting is a Puzzle, Not a Snapshot

Posted on November 18, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Over the last several days and weeks leading up to the election, the news feed on my Facebook page had been a Santa’s Scroll of political spew, a seemingly unending roll of pictures, quotes, graphs, and jokes – from Obama the Witch Doctor to Romnazis – very little of it illuminating, nearly all of it sportive ruminating. Normally this sort of horse-race bloodlust is just my game, and I’ve linked and posted and commented and liked my fair share, but the stories and pictures from the East Coast following Hurricane Sandy made it all seem unimportant. For a little while at least, looking through the admittedly tiny lens of Facebook, it appeared that people were taking off their R and D team jerseys and instead worrying about friends and family and loved ones. Campaigns stopped their campaigning, pollsters stopped their polling, and in the face of extreme circumstance we found our better selves.

 

Too bad it didn’t last.

 

Nope, the right-wing pundit class wasted no time after the election getting back to spilling printed pus and blogged bile across the media landscape. They’re back to the issue that they thought would win the day before, and for some reason they still think will bring down the president. Libya.

 

On the Sunday before the election, Sen. John McCain called the ongoing situation “the worst cover-up I’ve ever seen” and suggested the president wasn’t qualified to be commander-in-chief. During the second presidential debate, an exchange over what event the phrase “acts of terror” referred to in a speech launched a torrent of fact-checking, fuck-that-checking and to-hell-with-you-checking. The problem is that McCain knew this was untrue, and Romney didn’t care what’s true. McCain knows – as does Sen. Lindsey Graham (another recent critic) – that intelligence reports change as the intelligence coming in describes an evolving situation. The Republicans are demanding something they know cannot be produced in the manner they claim to want. This continued charade of indignance is nothing more than the carrying through of the first commandment of Rovianity, “Thou shalt attack thy enemy’s strength.” The GOP has spied an issue that they are feverishly trying to politicize to help their man, all the while denouncing the injection of politics into the issue. They know because during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, they were defending the intelligence community in the same way that Pres. Obama is now. They know intelligence gathering and analysis is a tricky business through their experience on the Armed Services committee at the very least. I know intelligence reporting is a tricky business because it used to be my business.

 

My last two years in the Air Force as a cryptologic linguist were spent attached to the 22nd Intelligence Squadron at Ft. Meade, Maryland. I was assigned to a duty section within the National Security Agency and spent those years collecting signals intelligence and writing reports based on that intelligence. When I first started working within NSA, what struck me most was the sheer volume of raw material that we would collect. The unofficial motto in the intel field was “In God we trust, all others we monitor.” This is apt, and the amount of information, while certainly a valuable thing, required time and manpower to go through and look for specific events or people or anything of value to US interests. We would have certain targets and things that we were specifically looking for, but also had to be ready to collect new information. My target wasn’t “sexy,” which was a term used to describe the kind of stuff you see talked about in movies and such, but it still followed the same general pattern. A report is written based on present information, and as new information comes in from whatever source, that report may need to be revisited and reassessed. This reassessment and reissuing of reports based on changing conditions was the norm, not the exception. While there is cooperation and communication between reporting offices, the intelligence community is fairly closed, meaning you don’t always know what happens to the reports that you send out. Everything is based on the two concepts that give some access to classified information: the security clearance and a “need to know.” Nearly everyone had the same clearance, but the “need to know” part kept everything in its small place, I often had no idea what someone working on a different target a few cubicles over was doing.

 

This is an important point in regard to the current controversy. Senators, Congressmen, and the wingnut on the street is clamoring for more information, more facts, more more more. Much of what is being used to discover for certain what happened when is deeply sensitive, involving overlapping missions and targets, and to just hand it over in public or broadcast it would be unthinkable in terms of the damage it could do to ongoing missions that, in some cases, could have been years in the making. It also could impede efforts to gather new information that could help fill out the picture of what happened in Benghazi on 9/11/2012. That’s the real point here, is that when attempting to fill out the full story, the full truth of what happened when for absolute certain, you’re talking about what was happening inside, outside, among the groups, the entire narrative from all viewpoints and all sides. The picture is a puzzle, not a snapshot, no matter how much people shout and demand a Polaroid-type report that comes out as it happens in true focus. It will take until long after the election to learn all of the, as Donald Rumsfeld would say, “unknown unknowns” regarding this incident. The Right knows this as well, but would rather have you believe that either the President himself or someone speaking for him is blatantly lying to us. Why do they insist on it being a lie? Because of the reporting they have received so far, but that reporting is still in flux and also one must understand that what the press and the public is being told has been through several sets of eyes and hands.

 

Intel reports are interesting to read, because often they are trying to say things while retaining some amount of wiggle room at the same time. Everyone knows that the situation is fluid, and no one wants to be pinned down later (Cheney’s aluminum tubes anyone?) so you end up with reports full of qualifiers such as “apparently,” “it seems that,” “conditions imply,” that sort of thing. Whatever the CIA (or NSA) reports to the President has been filtered before it gets to him through several other people – he rarely sees the raw reports, the raw intel, nor should he have to sift through it all. So what the President says to the press or to us is his version of someone else’s version of some raw intelligence that came out a few days after the event when someone else picked up, heard, intercepted, read, saw the event in question. I for one would always, regardless of party, bet against the President of the United States blatantly lying.

 

The problem with the public accounting of what happens in regards to intelligence reports is when spokespeople go out and talk about them – the vagueness in the original report is often dropped, so something akin to “conditions imply that it may possibly have been something that could be seen as a protest leading to the attack” becomes “a protest led to the attack.” This is unfortunate, but they on one hand are trying to get out as much as possible as succinctly as possible, and they also understand that if pressed they can go back and put the qualifiers back in and c their a. This is more about media manipulation and message driving than lying for some mal intent, but in a 24-hour news cycle that is on its way to 12 this is how things go amongst the tweets, blogs, sites, papers, and channels that are all trying to have the goods first.

 

The knee-jerk reactions and pundit prognosticators will always be a thorn in the side of methodical, measured, and prudent intelligence gathering. There will be those who want to know NOW and will make up what they are not given. But we must always remember the past, for it’s there we often see the present in its starkest relief, and the lead-up to and launch of the war in Iraq should tell us all we need to know in terms of being very careful that we have the right information before we set events in motion that could ripple their effects for years to come. The Bush administration was right in that we don’t want to find a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud. But as long as the greatest intelligence gathering apparatus in the world is allowed to do its important business in a way that puts our interests and our security ahead of our impatience, hopefully we will never have to.

 

 

 

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Marcum my Words

Tagged , , ,