Happy Halloween

I like Halloween. Always have. It was an important holiday for me growing up in Carrickfergus in the 1970's. We bobbed for apples and for money, we ate chocolate and nuts and apple tarts, we wore masks and we went "Halloween Rhyming" - the Irish equivalent of trick or treat. There was always a lot of weird stuff going on up country that used to scare the bejesus out of us. October 31 is the last day of the Celtic year and the traditional fire ceremonies celebrating this event go back thousands of years. It always makes me laugh when I read some pompous idiot complaining in The Daily Telegraph about the growth of this "ghastly American holiday" in fair Albion. These people just don't know their history. They should read Frazer's Golden Bough. In fact everybody should read Frazer's Golden Bough.
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We had trick or treat in St Kilda this year and the kids loved it. Nobody got a rock.

George Costanza Wasn't Crazy: Lloyd Braun Is Responsible For Everything

No this isn't Seinfeld Season 7 Episode 10 this is Randy Quaid in Vancouver, this week, claiming asylum from a mysterious mob of "celebrity whackers".

New Zealand To Revert Back To Colonial Status For Duration Of Hobbit

In a surprising addendum to the agreement signed by Warner Brothers Pictures, Peter Jackson and the government of New Zealand, NZ is to revert back to colonial status for the period February 2011 - December 2012, when the first of the two planned Hobbit films is due to be released. NZ law is to be replaced by a jurisprudential code drawn up by the Warner Bros legal department and a system of military tribunals are to replace NZ's Crown Courts. The New Code will go into effect on February 1st 2011 and is rumored to include such controversial measures as curfews, martial law and droit de seigneur for all Warner Brothers and New Line executives. Under the regulations the NZ police force is be replaced by armed militamen supplied by veteran private guerilla firm Blackwater Security. Further reports say that a new currency featuring Tolkien characters is set to replace the NZ dollar, serfdom (not Smurfdom that's a different film) is to be brought in for all Wingnut Film employees and in perhaps the most shocking of the new developments the All Blacks rugby team will no longer chant the haka in Maori but will challenge their opposition in Quenya.
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Sir Peter Jackson will move up the order of chivalry to become Lord Peter of the Shire and the current Prime Minister will be reduced to the rank of Steward. Blackwater Security will be able to identify the employees of New Line and Wingnut Films by the special inscribed gold rings they will be enslaved with given.
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Surprisingly there has been little opposition to these measures in New Zealand. John Guinness, a teacher from Wellington said yesterday "It's a small price to pay. The Hobbit belongs in this country and if this is what it takes to keep it here then so be it." Clare Fuller from Auckland added "Peter Jackson is a god around here and if he thinks this is necessary then we have to do it." Jamie Theakston from Dunedin, although supporting the measure, did have one reservation "I'm due to get married in March and I'm a little worried about the whole droit de seigneur thing. But that'll all be water under the bridge in December 2012 when I'm lining up to see The Hobbit for the first time! It's going to be awesome!" 
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Contacted through a medium JRR Tolkien said that if The Hobbit was about any one theme it was surely about the power of massive corporations to triumphantly impose their industrial might on an awed and brow beaten populace. "Dark Lord Sauron could not have crafted a better contract," Tolkien chuckled before adding: "Elenna·nóreo alcar enyalien ar Elendil Vorondo," which apparently was not Elvish but merely the late Professor of Anglo Saxon's attempts to clear his throat.

Belfast Man (of course) Discovers Evidence of Time Travel in Charlie Chaplin Film

Watch it now before agents from the future go back in time and erase all this from ever happening.

What Gives With Peter Jackson's Anti Australian Rhetoric?

According to Radio New Zealand:

at a rally in Wellington on Monday Sir Peter Jackson delivered another strong blast against an Australian trade union that has been advising New Zealand union Actors' Equity and was behind the international boycott [threat]. He warned against turning New Zealand into another state of Australia under the sway of a "destructive" organisation.

Last week Sir Peter accused the Australians of being "bullies who want to impose their will on New Zealand," and on Wednesday he said that what made him "really angry" was the involvement of the Australian union.

What gives? Well, the issue behind all this is quite simple. New Zealand does not have a collective bargaining agreement for actors. NZ Equity wants collective bargaining so its members dont get ripped off, as apparently they did with Lord of the Rings. (And although Sir Peter called LOTR a wonderful New Zealand home movie, remember that he personally made over 100 million dollars from that fun family project.) NZ Equity are being supported by Australian Equity (hence the bizarre "Australian bully boy" remarks). Sir Peter claims collective bargaining is bad because it means that actors will get paid more and the cost of making The Hobbit will go up and become uneconomic. (Anyone who has read nineteenth century labour history will recognise this doleful argument). Sir Peter insists that the actors stance has put the whole film in jeopardy and Warner Brothers might move production to Eastern Europe, the UK or Ireland. I doubt that. Ireland is out of the question because of the strong Euro, Eastern Europe is utterly impractical and the UK is also too expensive. I think Sir Peter is trying to pull the, er, wool over the eyes of the people of NZ. If you are going to start production in February 2011 you would need to have booked studio space at least a year in advance, the only studio space that has been secured has been in Wellington. Whether the actors get a few more dollars an hour or not will not determine if The Hobbit gets filmed in NZ or not. (Tax breaks and a change to the labour laws banning strikes and residuals might). You have to admire the Sir Peter's cojones, though, casting Australia as the enemy not Warner Brothers or indeed himself. The Aussie villain always plays well in chippy New Zealand which sees itself as the little brother who doesn't really get the attention it deserves from mummy and daddy. The bluff has worked. A terrified and brow beaten NZ Equity has now withdrawn all boycott threats and the Screen Actors Guild has said that its union members are free to appear in The Hobbit.
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You'd think from the news coverage that all New Zealanders are behind Sir Peter over this, but that is definitely not the case. Brian Rudman has a good piece in the NZ Herald, here.
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The clip of course is from Flight of the Conchords. Brett, incidentally, was in Lord of the Rings where he played an elf. (This is off topic and I may be wrong about this, but after watching a lot of Australian TV over the last two years it seems that New Zealanders are quite a bit funnier than Aussies whose humour seems a little broad and slapsticky for my taste.)

The Guardian's Top 25 Sci-Fi Films

"I dreamt music."
"That's funny I was dreaming about unicorns."
"Unicorns? Oh, shit."

All this week the Guardian film critics have been compiling their lists of the 25 best art house, comedy, action, sci-fi films etc. I've looked at the other lists and pretty much agree with the critics picks. The number 1 romantic comedy for example is Annie Hall and I'd be hard pressed to argue with that. I certainly haven't seen all the films on the other lists but good geek that I am I have seen everything on the Guardian's sci-fi list and there are a few things on there that bother me. First I'll give you the list and then my complaints.

1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Metropolis
3) Blade Runner
4) Alien
5) The Wizard of Oz
6) Solaris
7) ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
8) Spirited Away
9) Star Wars
10) King Kong
11) Close Encounters of the Third Kind
12) The Terminator/Terminator 2: Judgment Day
13) The Matrix
14) Alphaville
15) Back to the Future
16) Planet of the Apes
17) Brazil
18) The Lord of the Rings trilogy
19) Dark Star
20) The Day the Earth Stood Still
21) Edward Scissorhands
22) Akira
23) The Princess Bride
24) Pan's Labyrinth
25) Starship Troopers


Ok, 2) Metropolis should be number 17) or lower - it's a film for film buffs only, influential certainly but overrated as a film. 5) The Wizard of Oz should not be on the list, it's a musical or a gothic film or something not a sci-fi/fantasy film. At 6) Solaris? Are they kidding? I assume they're talking about the seven hour Russian version in which nothing happens, three or four times, in space, whereas the book is actually pretty fast paced and interesting. Read the book and tell me this film isn't a travesty. Ok, 7) E.T. - I'm sorry but I have always hated that film: is it the score, the crying, the sentiment? I don't know, I hate it. 8) Spirited Away is a cartoon. There should be a separate category for cartoons. I don't dig cartoons. Period.  14) Alphaville is not a good film. Its pretty dull and dull witted. It's only on there because they wanted something French. 21) Edward Scissorhands I've never liked either. In fact the only two Tim Burton movies I've enjoyed are Ed Wood and Mars Attacks. 23) Akira is another friggin cartoon. 24) Pan's Labyrinth is not a cartoon but the villain twiddles his moustache villainously which is pretty cartoon like. Hell Boy was better. 25) Starship Troopers? An allegory about the rise of fascism, or a fascistic film about allegories. Who knows? Who cares? Man I hated this movie. It was just so dumb and lame from start to finish. Here's a good rule of thumb - if Denise Richards is in a movie it's going to be utter rubbish unless Neve Campbell is also in that movie. Stick to that and you'll be fine my son. Ok, so here's my list of the top 10 sci-fi movies:


1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Blade Runner
3) Alien
4) Star Wars
5) Planet of the Apes

6) Terminator 2: Judgment Day

7) Back to the Future

8) Silent Running

9) The Matrix

10) Brazil

And here's sci fi lists Top 100 sci-fi movies. I completely forgot about 12 Monkeys.





James Ellroy

from Saturday's Melbourne Age
The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, by James Ellroy

During a 2006 book reading at the famous Skylight bookstore in East Hollywood, James Ellroy scanned the crowd of about two hundred fans and noted with satisfaction that about a third of them were women. After being introduced, he walked up to the lectern and addressed his audience: “Stop me now! It’s going to my head. I need a strong woman to tame me with her love and walk all over me in high, black boots.” After the reading seven women slipped him their phone numbers and he took three of them out to dinner.
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The Hilliker Curse is full of stuff like this. It’s a funny and self depreciating memoir that uses the framing device of James Ellroy’s relationships women as a way of filling in his post teen life story. His previous memoir, My Dark Places, unpacked the horrific events surrounding his mother’s unsolved murder and his years as an adolescent neo Nazi and borderline sex pervert who got his kicks from stalking girls, breaking into their houses and sniffing their soiled underwear.
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Well into his thirties he was haunted by the image of his sexually adventurous mother, Jean Hilliker, who he both loved and hated. (Shortly before she was murdered he told her that he wanted to live with his father and for that she slapped him so hard that it was still stinging fifty years later when he came to write about it.) Ellroy went to live with his wastrel father and became a junkie, alcoholic and ne’er do well who somehow felt that if only he could get his act together he would become a great artist like his idol, Beethoven. Beethoven, of course, was a product of the German Romantic movement and much of The Hilliker Curse feels like a Bildungsroman: the poverty stricken orphan struggles to make his way in the world and after many setbacks is triumphantly redeemed by the power of his pen.
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In another writer this could get pretty precious but Ellroy is an autodidact who dodged Freud and is thus able to tell his story in a straightforward manner without a lot of psychobabble. For the uninitiated, however, he has made few compromises in his prose style: verbs are dispensed with, sentences clipped and he often writes in the breathless tones of a 1950's scandal sheet. Ellroy doesn’t “look” he “peeps” or “scopes.” He doesn’t “remember things” he “time travels”. This can get a little bit exhausting and it is perhaps symptomatic of a larger problem with The Hilliker Curse. Ellroy’s view of women is old fashioned and all together too reverential. He puts women on a pedestal and worships them and then condemns them for not living up to this image of perfection. I was reminded of a scene from Mad Men when Peggy upbraids her mentor Freddy Rumson for his talk of “broads” and “dames” and explains to him that women and times have changed. Ellroy’s Rat Pack language and attitudes were already becoming out of date in 1965. Not that Ellroy was ever too concerned about the counter culture. He hated hippies, kept his hair short, didn’t like girls who wore too much make up or nail polish. In his twenties and early thirties his main encounters with women seem to have been with prostitutes that he initially only wanted to “speak to” before succumbing to their other attractions. After producing such modern classics as LA Confidential and American Tabloid Ellroy appears to have hung out with an awful lot of adoring fans and you have to wonder whether hookers and groupies are the best pool from which to build a theory of the female gender or to find that elusive mother/lover for whom he was searching.
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Interestingly I think Ellroy’s attitude towards women infects his fictional female characters too. I have never been completely convinced by any of them and they do not talk or act like any women I know, although, in his defense, no women I know are mixed up in plots to assassinate the President. Ellroy calls himself the “Tolstoy of crime fiction,” but you never really see him producing a character like Anna Karenina or Natalia Rostova. Then again, perhaps he was only kidding when he said that; he is one of America’s wittiest writers and The Hilliker Curse is full of hilarious scenes, many at his own expense. It is also scathingly honest and although it is not quite up there with My Dark Places it is certainly a worthy edition to the Ellroy canon and is recommended to both die hard fans and newbies alike.

Iain Banks's Ontological Difficulties

Like most of his previous sci-fi novels the new Iain M Banks book Surface Detail deals with the liberal galaxy wide civilization "The Culture" and its attempts to improve human rights throughout the universe. This time The Culture is determined to wipe out the various Hells which lesser cultures propagate in virtual reality to punish their citizens after death. The Hells are awful places where Sim creatures can feel actual pain for all eternity. The way this works is that at the moment of death a copy of a sentient creature's brain pattern is taken and then transmitted into the Sim world and there they are tortured for their crimes in the Real. The Culture - who are opposed to all forms of torture - don't like this and the book follows the Culture agents who have been sent out to stop it.

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Banks's problem is that he is not a philosopher and hasn't thought through the ontological consequences of "taking a copy of someone's brain state" at the moment of death. He seems to think (and crucially for the book everyone in the galaxy seems to think this also) that this cloned virtual entity is still somehow the actual person who passed on. It isn't. It's just a copy. When the real person dies, his consciousness becomes extinguished. A clone of that person will not be that person. There is a well known philosophical conundrum called Searle's Chinese Room which partially deals with this idea and the whole concept of an artificial consciousness in general. People like Searle and Roger Penrose wonder if an artificial consciousness is even possible but let's say for the sake of argument that a machine could replicate consciousness, I still find it hard to believe that civilizations who had acquired this extraordinary technology would have fallen for so obvious a philosophical blunder as to punish a person's clone for something they themselves did not do. You might as well punish a cat in China for something a teenager did in Des Moines.

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Banks generally avoids hard sci-fi and high ideas preferring action scenes but it's a shame he doesn't push himself more and at least have his characters discuss some of these metaphysical concerns. It would force him to try that little bit harder. Banks himself seems wearied by churning out the same old fight scenes page after page to such an extent that at the very end of Surface Detail he seems to have lost interest in the novel completely, wrapping up all the story lines in a final two page character summary. Even the appearance of an old fan favourite seems tacked on and perfunctory. Maybe - like one of the virtual people in the Surface Detail - Banks needs to take a break from writing for a year or two and spend his time in a retreat reading, meditating and thinking instead.

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This blog post also gives me the opportunity to link (again) to Professor Nick Bostrom's page where he quite convincingly argues that all of us are living in a Sim right now and that our consciousnesses are indeed simulated. Of course if this is true then atheism is false and ghosts, gods and afterlifes are all probably real which is not a pleasant prospect.

Sherlock Holmes

The much hyped new BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes finally hit Channel 9 tonight. It's a modern spin on the classic story starring Benedict Cumberbatch (who played the pederast in Atonement) as Holmes and Martin Freeman (from The Office (and if the rumors are true the upcoming Hobbit)) playing Watson. Watson is an Afghan war veteran (like the original) who needs a place to crash in London and by dint of some strained plotting ends up in a flatshare with a chap called Sherlock Holmes who claims to be "the world's only consulting detective" - an amateur who helps the police (I guess he doesn't watch Monk). Anglophile cat owners of a certain age will love this show with its Byronic hero, its English accents, its occasional wit and its supposedly London locations. (Like Dr Who its all mostly filmed in Cardiff, and a Cardiff shout out can be the only explanation for one of Holmes's more tortured deductions early on). I enjoyed the genuine chemistry from the cast in episode 1 and the acting which was uniformly excellent. The script could have been tighter especially the third act which lifted a famous scene from The Princess Bride, as the key plot point. Inconceivable! as Wallace Shawn might have said.
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There were a few interesting action scenes and like Guy Ritchie's movie of last year we got to see how Holmes's mind worked, although I found many of his deductions pretty dodgy (this too, however, reminded me of the original stories).
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On the whole the new Sherlock Holmes isn't terrible which, paradoxically, is not a good thing. It will encourage the BBC to continue digging in the nostalgia mine and we can expect yet more verions of Robin Hood or Pride and Prejudice or another Dickens adaptation and lots more Dr Who. They will all star terribly nice young actors and be well made and done tastefully with just a smidgen of the gothic to thrill you as you watch in your favourite cardigan and slippers. Perfect fodder for everyone who wants to forget for an hour or two that death is coming and it'll be here soon and it will last forever and ever.

Helvetica

Helevtica is a film directed by Gary Hustwit that was released in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the typeface's introduction. Its basically a history of Helvetica and an insight into how this one particular typeface came to take over large portions of the font world in the 1960's. It explains the backlash against Helvetica and the rifts between 1950's modernists who admired Helvetica's clean lines (these guys all inhabit Sterling Cooper style offices) and the scruffy postmodernists who hate Helvetica for all the same reasons that the modernists love it. This is the kind of film that the late Stanley Kubrick (a font fanatic) would have gone nuts for and I have to admit I really enjoyed for reasons that I don't quite understand - I suppose because it appeals to my inner geek or maybe its just interesting to watch passionate people get all worked up something - anything - in this age of apathy. (This blog post of course was written in Helvetica)

So What National Anthem Do They Play When Northern Ireland Gets a Gold Medal At The Commonwealth Games?

The surprising answer is the lovely "Londonderry Air," which is seen as a neutral anthem by both traditions in Northern Ireland. Of course its usually a moot question because N.I. doesnt often get gold medals (last time at the Melbourne Games they got zero) but this year they won three golds, all at the boxing. I wish they would play The Derry Air (nice pun for our Francophone readers) at N.I. football matches too, instead of the doleful God Save The Queen, but football is more politically charged than the Commonwealth Games so I wont hold my breath.
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For those of us engaged in the war against stereotype and cliche it is somewhat disheartening to learn that half of Northern Ireland's entire medal total came in either boxing or shooting.

Stieg Larsson = Tupac

When I heard the news that there was a second unpublished Stieg Larsson novel lurking on his long time girlfriend's laptop I wasn't surprised. Like Michael Jackson and Tupac, the late Mr Larsson is destined to become more prolific in death than the poor chap was in life. This is an exciting development for Larsson fans and bad news, obviously, for misogynistic Russian pigdog incestuous rapists.
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Any spoilers? Well, I've heard that in books 4 and 5 Lisbeth Salander gets even bigger breast implants than the ones she got in book 2 and Cally Blomkvist turns over more filthy stones in that hypocritical, poisonous, cess filled, putrid, neo Nazi, kakistocracy that we foolish bourgeois dupes in the West call, er, Sweden.  

Banksy Goes To Springfield

When I found out that English graffiti artist Banksy was doing the pre title sequence to Sunday's Simpsons episode I thought it was going to be a typically lame celebrity cameo or something. It wasn't.

Hmmm I thought this vid would be safe because I cut and paste it from Banksy's youtube channel. However after I went to bed Fox initiated a breach of copyright claim. The best I can do for now is a kid who taped it off his TV here.

Wednesday update - the YouTube seems to be working again. Does that mean Fox's copyright claim failed?

The Key To Understanding Tony Blair

I have finally finished the Tony Blair memoir A Journey (The Journey if you bought the British version.) Many passages of A Journey have been analysed and unpacked by the world's media, but this little quote seems to have gone unnoticed from the beginning of Chapter 18 'Triumph And Tragedy' that perhaps best explains Blair's  British views on the world:  

"Travel does play havoc with the digestive system. You need to eat healthily and with discipline. I am very typically British. I like to have time and comfort in the loo. The bathroom is an important room and I couldn't live in a culture that doesn't respect it."

The clip is from Carry On At Your Convenience and should be borne in mind whenever you come across former Prime Minister (and Blair role model) Harold Macmillan's quote that "Britain will play Greece to America's Rome." Er...yes.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize For Literature. The Lit prizes have become a bit of a joke over the last decade or so as a series of countries, continents and languages get ticked off the list by the Swedish Academy. The Swedes are worried about American domination of world culture so there's hasn't been an American winner for some time and they also don't give the prize to anyone who is politically right of centre which means that Les Murray or David Mamet shouldn't hold their breaths. Saying all that though, Vargas Llosa is a terrific choice. I've read a half a dozen of his books and several of his essays. He writes with an urbane, detached, often very funny voice and he's very readable. It was Vargas Llosa that made me want to go to Peru, not the gloomy heights of Macchu Piccu. I liked this little nugget from the BBC news story:

The author once had a great friendship with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, about whom he wrote his doctoral thesis in 1971. But their relationship turned into one of literature's greatest feuds after Vargas Llosa punched Garcia Marquez at a theatre in Mexico City in 1976, leaving him with a black eye. The pair have never disclosed the reason for their dispute, although witnesses have suggested they fell out over a conversation between Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa's wife. In the intervening years, the authors fell out politically, too, with the Peruvian publicly criticising Garcia Marquez's friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Relations appeared to thaw in 2007, however, when Vargas Llosa provided the foreword to the 40th anniversary edition of Garcia Marquez's classic work, A Hundred Years of Solitude. After the Nobel announcement on Thursday, Garcia Marquez - himself a Nobel laureate - tweeted: "Cuentas iguales" ("Now we're even").

You can read the rest of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's tweets here: http://twitter.com/elgabo.

And no, I don't know what Vargas Llosa is wearing in the photograph. I think maybe he's just returned from a visit to the future.

Red Sox Buy Reds

According to the BBC, the Boston Red Sox are buying Liverpool FC. John Henry, the Sox's principal owner, is buying out the Hicks family if one or two financial niggles can be sorted out. As much as the Hicks clan is despised in Liverpool this isn't great news for Scousers. Henry has shown little previous interest in association football. Its pretty much all been baseball until now. He grew up a fan of the St Louis Cardinals, then purchased a stake in the New York Yankees before helping launch the Colorado Rockies. He bought the Red Sox from The New York Times in 2002 with the express purpose of "reversing the curse" of Babe Ruth and winning the World Series. That he did just two years later in 2004, with - according to the completely unbiased Mitchell Report - a team that was utterly free of steroids. Cough, cough.

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I grew up a fan of Liverpool FC back in the glory days of the 70's and after living in Harlem for 7 years in the 1990's I naturally became a New York Yankees fan and thus a mortal enemy of the Red Sox. I have worn a Yankees cap at Fenway Park and endured the abuse. There is however one thing I like about the Red Sox and that is Theo Epstein, the Sox's wunderkind General Manager who is generally acknowledged to be the smartest man in baseball. It was he, not Henry, who put together the team that reversed the curse of the Bambino and most of his moves since have proved to be winners. Smarts runs in Epstein's family. His father is head of the creative writing programme at Boston University and his grandfather wrote a little movie you might have heard of called Casablanca. The Red Sox's season ended last week and Epstein is going to have nothing to do for a couple of months until the winter meetings, so I'm thinking that maybe John Henry could send him over to Liverpool to sort out the Reds. We need a new manager and a new attitude. Last Saturday discontented Liverpool fans were calling out the name of Kenny Dalglish who was a star player and manager of Liverpool and has expressed interest in managing again. Before coming to Liverpool, Dalglish got his start at Celtic FC. According to the bookies the favourite to take over Liverpool is in fact Northern Irish World Cup legend Martin O'Neill who replaced Dalglish as manager of Celtic and complied an impressive record there of 219:29:40. Purely coincidentally, I'm sure, a few months ago Celtic FC played Sporting Portugal in a friendly at none other than Fenway Park, Boston.

Charlie and Lola

Lauren Child is a force for good in the universe. Her books for children and especially her Charlie and Lola series are humane, intelligent and very, very funny. Charlie is the patient older brother of an imaginative and slightly naughty younger sister, Lola, who goes to school, has adventures and plays with her best friend Lotta and her imaginary friend Soren Lorenson. I'm thinking about Child because my kids love her stuff and there's a nice interview with her in today's Guardian. There's also a brand new Charlie and Lola story from Ms Child, about Lola going slightly invisible in The Guardian, here.

The BBC series Charlie and Lola (above, right) captures much of the books' magic and has the added benefit of excellent voice work from young actors who are so good it takes me back to the amazing stuff those kids used to do on the Charlie Brown specials. (The boy (boys?) who played Linus always used to crack me up.) I'm glad the girl who plays Lola on the BBC series is not my daughter, because really there's only so much adorableness that a man can take.

American Chopper: Senior Versus Junior

People are cynical about reality TV shows and believe that much of it is faked, rehearsed and acted. I really hope that is the case with American Chopper: Senior Versus Junior. I'd like to believe that the Teutel family is hamming it up and when the cameras go away they have a laugh over a big barbecue or something. I suspect, however, that this is not the case. Who are the Teutels? I hear you ask. Even if you know anything about the motorcycle custom business you'll probably have heard of Jesse James, who famously duped Sandra Bullock (but no one else) for five years into thinking that he wasn't a Wehrmacht obssessed, narcissistic, nut job. Surprisingly Jesse James isn't the most awful man in the custom chopper biz, no, that would be Paul Teutel Senior, who is such a loud mouthed, rage filled, Freudian villain that at times I can't believe that the whole show isn't a giant put on. No one could be so transparently unpleasant and filled with such obvious self loathing. The jealousy and hatred Senior has for his own children reminds me of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Lee J Cobb in Twelve Angry Men. For everyone's sake let's pray that Paul Senior is also an excellent actor.

Falling Glass Cover