The short road to 200.

So I suppose the mystery is not where, but what I have been doing.

Short answer, don’t know. Long answer, I am reaching a threshold, and have no idea which way the burst is going to take me.

Though I am not trying to use this space which I hold as a proving ground of my base talents of writing to document my emotional rationale or state, but since I tend to think in references and patterns instead of logic and algorithms, I might as well:

There is a line in the great, almost lost film, Wet Hot American Summer, where Molly Shannon’s character says:

“I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

I just got a break for 2 days after working 7 straight. I have worked both weekend nights 3 straight weeks. My body aches. I suppose… that’s why you all didn’t get a music video roundup.

On that note, I spent roughly 200 words trying to decipher or replicate what Justin Timberlake sounded like (actually I debated if it was even him) and when I read LA Weekly on Monday, I was kicking myself for not reaching the point of what the seminally Marixst pop rag’s music writer did. I quote: “I’d like to know the rationale of the music exec who decided that the lead single of their hottest property in 5 years features him sounding like a genderless alien.”

Genderless alien, I gotta steal that bit. I mean, Damn, I wish I wrote that. I still stand by that the “YEAH” refrain is from Super Troopers bear fucker scene, unless you’re Steve Allen, your ripping off my bit.

I don’t know where I stand on Pearl Jam on anything but a live band anymore. I don’t know where to place their albums outside of VS. Ten is filled with classics, but I can’t listen to it straight thru. Vitalogy needs a producer’s hand now more than ever, and everything else is spotty.

Maybe they are the Gen X version of Jimi Hendrix. Nothing happens in such high watermarks if not for their involvement, they had some of the biggest singles of the era, but of their major albums only one is truly great (Vs. and Axis: Bold as Love) yet the others have better songs (Ten and Are you Experienced/Electric Ladyland). While Jimi will always be written as higher because of his boomer Q level, I must note that he, like Pearl Jam was really sick of the music industry standards after his third album. While Pearl Jam took a self imposed exile from the public eye (MTV, Ticketmaster, mega tours), and their absence is notable after the Death of Cobain and grunge in the mid 90’s. While Jimi died at 27, many forget that his last years were spent with band of Gypsies, touring his worries away, and trying not to play “watchtower” and “hey joe” every show.

Sure, that’s a lot of short-takes, but I am not going to get into a thing here. Plus they were both from Seattle. That’s my closing argument.

But I do know that when it comes to live covers, I really love Pearl Jam, and have received few better gifts than the CD of their best live covers from this years West Coast tour from my friend Dani at work, who was their for all of them and even did live updates for Indie 103.1 from the road.

So what else has been going on at the Honeycomb hideout? I’ve been going thru the Wire OnDemand (maybe more on this later on) and the Simpsons season 8.

Watching season 8, I realize how many of my favorite episodes of the show are from this season. And for my money, it’s the only season that can hold a candle to Season 4. I know I wrote that Season 5 was #8 of the best seasons, but this is why I am a blogger and pencils have erasers.

The only two duds are “The Homer they Fall” Homer as a boxer, and My Sister, My Sitter, which is the one where Lisa baby-sits Bart. The only okay episodes are Mountain of Madness and Lisa’s Date with Density (when she dates Nelson, who I think the writers should get rid of in Uter like fashion, he jumped the shark in 22 short films when he was marched down the street with his pants around his ankles.)

Season 8 is one of the more self-contained (meaning few outside or dating references) and self-aware (episodes like Homer’s Enemy and the Poochy episode). It was the best combination of the shows two greatest assets, its tenderness and its irreverence.

Season 4 is the closest the Simpsons ever came to pure unbridled Monty Python style looniness. In the first moments of that season, the children are burning down the Springfield Elementary. Sure it’s only a fantasy in the episode, but when that’s the first scene after the show returns from Summer reruns, that’s a changing of the guards that wasn’t approached until David Chase decided to have Uncle Junior shoot Tony Soprano in the beginning of season 6.

I like the Sopranos tie in because season six was a long dismantling of everything that the audience had come to like about the Sopranos, and it tried as hard as it could to burn in effigy the appeal of the criminality of the mobsters.

Season 4 of the Simpsons is where the show went from great to classic. Watching suicidal workers listen to Tom Jones blast on the Power Plant PA was so dark and gleefully wrong in “Marge Gets a Job” is one of my top 20 moments in the show. In the clips core is a very sour center, somewhere between “no good deed goes unpunished” and “Trying your hardest isn’t good enough”. Some of this is parallel to Homer’s supplanting Bart as the main character, as the show shifted from the sometimes amusing joy of watching the defiant kid into watching failure of the system.

In Season 4, there is a crazy atmosphere to the show, as if the whole town is about to erupt in mass riot at any moment. The only thing that keeps the people in line is the promise of a crazy scheme, and when it inevitably fails, that’s when the show loses all care and just rockets up the insanity.

From giant mechanical ants, a possum named “Bitey,” the show openly mocking Leonard Nimoy, Homer having a heart attack, monkey’s typing “it was the best of times it was the BLURST OF TIMES!,” Future Bart as a male stripper, I can’t help but think that the whole writing staff decided to just go with their most base instincts and write as if they didn’t have anyone who could say no. It’s got a swagger unlike any other.

And I go back to the notion that for the season, the town itself was on the precipice of disaster. Until Arrested Development hit seasons two and three, I never felt this kind of energy again in a comedy. While some people will remark that the stellar moments in TV (real and fictional) were those that came as the most shocking:

The Moon Landing
Who Shot JR
Stringer Bell being shot by Omar on The Wire
The first Survivor finale and the snake and the rat speech
Al Gore making out, hardcore with his wife.
Al Gore on MTV’s Music Video Awards.
Al Gore on Futurama

Whatever.

TV has been the medium of both the worst and the best in American art this decade, and maybe for the last fifteen years.

From the Simpsons, Sopranos, Seinfeld, South Park, It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia (I’m putting it in the canon it’s that friggin good) Deadwood, Newsradio, The Wire, and Arrested Development, I can think of few matches. The towering achievement of cinema has been Lord of the Rings, which at base level, is a visual novel.

The only other medium close is videogames. That features Halo, the Zelda 64 games, The Metal Gear Solid series, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, and the baddest and best of the bunch, Grand Theft Auto 3, VC, and SA.

In the last three GTA games made the same leap that Simpsons took almost a decade earlier. It wasn’t that the bar was raised, it changed the stakes. Suddenly everything was different, because now, in their respective forms, freedom reigned supreme. Suddenly, anything was possible.


And well, why the hell not, lets get into it.

Dave’s top 25 Simpsons episodes.

1. Mother Simpson
2. Simpson Tide
3. Rosebud
4. Last Exit to Springfield
5. Cape Feare
6. Krusty Gets Kancelled
7. Marge vs. the Monorail
8. Homer vs. the 18th Amendment
9. Lisa’s First Word
10. Kamp Krusty
11. Bart Mangled Banner
12 .Homer’s Barbershop Quartet
13. Homer goes to College
14. The Way we Was
15. Homer’s Triple Bypass
16. Homie the Clown
17. Lisa on Ice
18. Homer: Bad Man
19. Guess whose coming to criticize dinner
20. Blame it on Lisa
21. $pringfield: or how I learned to Love Legalized Gambling
22. Mom and Pop Art
23. You Only Move Twice
24. Burns, Baby Burns
25. Lost our Lisa