There's a Mitch Hedberg joke I'm going to butcher that goes something like: I'm a comedian, my job is to come up with jokes and write them down. Unless the paper and pencil are across the room, in which case, I have to convince myself that what I thought of just ain't funny. I sometimes feel like I have the opposite problem. I come up with things I want to write about and I have to write down at least the topic immediately or I will forget it forever. Sometimes that's not even fast enough as my brain is so distractible that I lose the idea in the gap between thinking of something and opening the notes app on my phone. It's the digital equivalent of walking into a room and immediately forgetting what I came in here for. Anyway here's some of the things I remembered long enough to write down this week.
A Thing in My Possession: A Pencil Object permanence is the mental process by which our brain remembers that things exist once we cannot see them anymore. It's a skill developed in the early stages of life for us humans. And people with ADHD will sometimes joke that we have no obje4ct permanence. (Side note: My spell check recommended I change ADHD to ADD. ADD is considered a depreciated term, get it together spell check!)
People with ADHD don't actually have object permanence issues, because we know things exist outside our perception, but we do have a very similar Out of Sight, Out of Mind issue. Once something is out of our immediate perception range it gets de-prioritized to the point of non-existence. I dropped the pen I use for writing in my journal a couple days ago and I cannot find it. It has to be in my office, because I know that's where I was when I dropped it. But It's gone forever now. Instead I picked up a nearby pencil and started using it instead. I don't like it as much, but since it's the thing in view when In need to write something down, it's the thing I use. I'm kinda hoping that by writing this down I'll put in the effort to find the pen later. Who knows.
Poorly Organized Thoughts About: Awards The emmys happened last week. I do keep up with the winners, not so much because I put any stock in the awards themselves (after all, most major awards are bought) but because I think it is an interesting reflection of where a giooven industry is at the moment. CODA won Best picture not because it was the best picture (necessarily) but because Apple really wanted to legitimize its streaming platform and so spent the most campaigning for what, by all accounts, was a pretty good but not overwhelming family drama.
With the emmys what I was really looking at was how one of my absolute favorites shows of the recent past did. The Bear. The Bear is an occasionally 30 minute long tvs how about a group of people running a small restaurant in Chicago. But to limit the show to that description is like saying ted Lasso is about a guy who coaches football in England. The Bear is an amazing show that is not like much else on TV. I don't want to say too much about it other than to make clear that it is not a comedy in any real tradition of the term. Some bits are funny, but mostly it's a dramatic exploration of grief and stress.
The comedy/drama divide in various awards never really made much sense. The place where it made the most sense, however was TV. Because TV shows used to fit into neat little buckets based on how long they were. At some point all 30 minute long shows were comedies and all 60 minute long shows were dramas. But handing out awards based on how long your TV show is seems silly. So instead we used a proxy for that, by calling them comedies and dramas. Forr time 30 minute shows were (almost) exclusively multi-camera sitcoms, which have different production and acting requirements than something like a police procedural would. But that distinction has blurred and diminished over the years to the point of being meaningless. I could hold up an episode of The Bear (this year's best comedy) next to an episode of Succession (this year's winner for best drama) and you would see more stylistic similarities than differences. Both seasons this year even featured extended single-take, continuously filmed scenes at different points in the season.
I know the shows often submit themselves in their chosen categories, and that a show will select the category they think they have the better chance of winning. But there are eligibility requirements too. Survivor can't submit for best musical at the Golden Globes (probably.) Except genre isn't a criteria any more. They changed that a couple years ago, so The Bear is a comedy because they say it is.
In the end it doesn't really matter, and I think you should watch The Bear (and Succession) and it's nice that it gives me something to write about every year around this time.
Stuff I'm Watching I've started watching Out 1, a 1971 French film directed by Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman. Out 1 is especially notable for its extensive runtime. At nearly 13 hours long, it's a big boy of a movie. I've ranted here a few times when talking about television shows that call themselves 10-hour movies. And I often follow this up with the complaint that most people don't want to watch a 10-hour movie. That mostly holds true here too. The directors even went so far as to divide the movie into 8 parts that are closer to normal movie length (1.5-2 hours.) I'm treating the whole thing like a TV season, watching each part like an episode. So far I've only watched the first part, which mostly consists of footage of two different theatre troupes rehearsing for productions of a pair of ancient greek plays. But it's not just the actors reading their lines, instead they're doing the sort of weird theater exercises that you would expect to see in a french theater in the 70s. I know there's probaly more plot coming in future parts, but that's not here yet. But for watching people writhe and make non-word sounfs for an unbroken 45 minutes, it's not bad. I'll probably circle back when I've got a couple more under my belt.
I'm also almost completely finished with watching Titans, a show set in the DC universe following Robin, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy and other members of the superhero team known in the comics as the Teen Titans. The show started on the streaming service called DC Universe before that shut down and it moved to what was then called HBO Max. It's an uneven show at best, where the first season was ok, the second was not bad at all, the third was a slog and the fourth is just ugh. Why am I still watching it? I don't know, but I've only got two episodes left, so I'm gunna power through. I don't really recommend it.
This week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is I don't care about Award Shows (Not technically from CXG, but by the same creative team, and about the show)
