In Which We Are Tortured by HBO's Bored to Death

Saving the Comedy From Itself

by JESSICA FERRI

Jason Schwartzman’s face holds so much meaning for most of us—his big beautiful mole, his undeniable Jewishiness; the soundtrack of Rushmore starts to flounce around in my head. Do you remember the first time you saw it? How moved you were by Max’s dedication to write the world’s best play? And his determination to win Rosemary’s heart? Those awkward indie days are long gone. Schwartzman has become the star of an HBO series.

The show is Bored to Death, and it was written by Jonathan Ames, who, despite his many novels and risqué one man shows, is still fairly under the radar outside of New York as far as writers go. His reputation is one of a slightly perverted funny man with great autobiographical pieces. Unsurprisingly, Schwartzman’s character on the show is lovingly named, “Jonathan Ames.” The show opens with a hang-dog looking Schwartzman, incredulous at the Israeli movers carting his beloved girlfriend’s belongings into a moving van outside their apartment. When Jonathan questions their ethnicity (Jews aren’t strong enough to be movers, right?) one responds, “What are you, another self-hating New York Jew?" And Jonathan nimbly nods his head as if to say, “duh.”

Here we’ve entered into some sort of parallel universe where jokes about self-hating Jews are awkward and unfunny. Watching Schwartzman in this strange non-Wes Anderson real world (which, thanks to a The New Yorker Talk of the Town piece we know is Fort Greene, Brooklyn) is like watching Woody Allen in a film where he plays a well-adjusted WASP. Thankfully, Zack Galifianakis, who plays Jonathan’s friend Ray, is here to save the comedy in this comedy. After Jonathan’s girlfriend takes off (with a parting kiss that’s hotter than most people get when they’re in a relationship) Ray describes his feelings after his last girlfriend dumped him."After my breakup I felt like I was wearing a falcon hood." "A what?!" Jonathan exclaims. "A falcon hood."

Like most television shows, Bored to Death is off to a shaky start. Jonathan, an aspiring writer, picks up a copy of some Raymond Chandler and decides the best way to distract himself from his post-break-up gloom is to become a private detective. The transition into the show’s premise is rushed and strange, but, okay, we shrug our shoulders and keep going. It’s ironic that Jonathan chooses the lifestyle of a private dick given the fact that his girlfriend has terminated the relationship because Jonathan apparently indulges too frequently with white wine and marijuana. Opening a bottle of white wine, Jonathan plops himself in front of his laptop and posts a Craigslist ad, saying he’s "unlicensed," but willing to help. And his rates are reasonable.

At this point, I’m not quite sure what Ames is trying to do. It feels like he’s trying to remake a less than great Woody Allen movie starring Jason Schwartzman for television. But I digress. Ted Danson, as Jonathan’s needy boss, George, the editor of some New York magazine, jumps whole-heartedly into this endeavor, greeting the audience and Jonathan with “do you have weed?” Once they’ve installed themselves in the bathroom, Jonathan wonders aloud why George is back on the pot. “Oh I’m just bored—I’m bored to death,” he whines. Danson, despite looking like a cross between Annie Lennox and Frankenstein, delivers in this scene, and in a later one where he appears in a bathrobe, desperate for marijuana and women.

Jonathan’s actual detective work in this episode, which involves locating the boyfriend of a missing girl at the request of her sister, is frankly, boring. The scene where he tries to order a whiskey in a bar instead of white wine gets more laughs. It’s obvious at this point that creator Ames has no intention of making the detective work clever or funny. The show’s potential lies in Danson and Galifianakis and their respective interactions with Schwartzman. There’s certainly something here—and Parker Posey and Kristen Wiig are scheduled as the next guest stars. While the conceit of the show is not unlike a Wes Anderson movie, if Schwartzman can keep the mugging to a minimum, we just might have something funny not starring Larry David on HBO.

Jessica Ferri is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can read her published work here, and her blog here.

"Morning Light" - Girls (mp3)

"Summertime" - Girls (mp3)

"Lauren Marie" - Girls (mp3)

In Which We Give You 10 Rules For Dating Worth A Damn

To the Gentlemen

by ALMIE ROSE

Gentlemen. I sense a dating crisis among our generation. The movies have lied to us. Nobody dates anymore. I'm not ready to give up on the movie dating montage we all want so here are some suggestions to help you along:

1. Zachary Braff, stop following me.

This is the 2nd time in 6 days that you and I have been in the same place. Oh I know: you didn't mean it, it's an accident, you don't know who I am, blah blah blah.

This one is important:

2. Gentlemen: If you are on facebook and you are in a relationship you need to put that shit on your profile. If you have a girlfriend you need to click the little button that says "In a relationship." 

It takes two seconds and saves heartache. You don't even need to put the name of the person you are in a relationship with. But you need to declare it. To not declare it is tacky. And weird. I've had guy friends who counter that with, "I don't want people to know about my personal life on facebook." Are you serious? Really? Really Charlie? Then don't get on facebook. Get on linked-in or get your own website where you can put whatever the fuck you want.

3. If you have my number and are texting/calling me for the first time to see me, please suggest dinner.

I am worthy of dinner. Drinks = please take off my skinny pants and do things to my genitals on my couch while "Who's The Boss?" plays in the background. I don't want to speak for all women, I really don't, but I know that most of us appreciate being asked on a real date. And look, there are times when all I really want to do is get into your skinny pants with the TV on for background noise. But if you don't invite me out to dinner then you will never find out. Now if you're taking me out for drinks at a jazz club or something, that's different. But if you ask me to meet you at the bar where they serve free hot dogs, then have fun with yourself and Tony Danza. Even Patrick Bateman took his women on dates.

4. I always say that with a great number comes great responsibility.

I'm not joking. I mean, I am kind of joking when I say it because to say that with a serious tone of voice would make me sound like a tool, but the sentiment behind it is real.

5. If you ask me to dinner, don't try to sneak past the dinner hour and then text me.

Do you think I'm not going to realize that you're texting me at 11 instead of 7? Do you think I just don't get hungry? I love to eat. I'm like a little kid, I love going to restaurants. They're magical. Take me to In-N-Out, just own up to the dinner date.

This one is for the ladies:

6. Ladies, if you are in a relationship, you need to put that on your profile too.

And if you're going to name names, under "in a relationship with..." then you need to put the name of your real boyfriend. Not the name of your best friend, not Christopher Walken, not "art and beauty", but your boyfriend's name. I have a friend who thinks it's hilarious to put her best friend's name...even after she got into a serious relationship. Her best friend is a guy, so that made the whole situation confusing for everyone. Let's all just make facebook easier on each other.

7. No one has an answering machine any more.

If you really wanted to reach me, you had several ways of doing so: cell, text, email, facebook message, twitter, robots or some shit, etc. So if you didn't contact me I know it's because you really didn't want to. It's not like you left me a really lovely long message on my answering machine about how you can't wait to take me out for dinner at Dorsia but I didn't hear it because I was in the shower. No. This is not a Meg Ryan movie. Welcome to 2009.

8. Don't ask me out if you have a girlfriend.

Honestly, I'm surprised that this even needs to be said. But if this happens, if you do ask me out and I find out that you have a girlfriend, then I have every right to be steamed like Seymour Skinner's steamed hams. Once a guy asked me out and then wouldn't add me on facebook (which is suspicious, it really is) because I later found out he didn't want me to see all of the lovely photos of he and his girlfriend on it. I don't blame him, if I were him I wouldn't want me to see that either. But if I were him I wouldn't ask me out in the first place.

9. If you're throwing a party and you invite me, that can count as a date.

Just don't invite me if you're already bringing a date. If you do invite me to your party, please introduce me to your guests; it's rude not to. But if you do introduce me to your guests and then take their camera, take a picture of me, give them their camera back, and say, "This is for you to masturbate to later", that's worse. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

10. Be a gentleman.

I'm going to stop here because if I go any further then my head may explode. This is why my relationship with Sven is so good. Imaginary boyfriends are the best kind of boyfriend.

Almie Rose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is the creator of Apocalypstick. She last wrote in these pages on the AMC drama Mad Men.

"Quicksand" - Tim Buckley (mp3)

"Martha (Tom Waits cover)" - Tim Buckley (mp3)

"Peanut Man" - Tim Buckley (mp3)

In Which We Learn What Bright Collision In The Zodiac Brews

Born To Die

by R. A. VILLANUEVA

…Law will not sanction such abuse
Forever; when the mischief's done,
Planets, rejoice, on which at night
Rains but the twelve-ton meteorite.
 
 — from "Three Sonnets in Tetrameter"
  Edna St. Vincent Millay

1.  
 
In the images and video released by the Sliding Spring Observatory hours after the passing of Asteroid 2009 DD45, the evening sky over Canberra seems thrummed with static. And in these grainy sequences, that rock, bathed in friction and gas, is either a bright speck shivering at the frame’s center or a glimmering mote, arcing gently upwards from the right-hand corner of the film.  
 
Discovered less than a week before footage was shot, 2009 DD45 appeared like a thief in the night, stalking the outer orbits of our geostationary satellites, its perigee 1/5th the distance between the Earth and moon. Which is to say, had our gravity been any more seductive, the asteroid would have breached our atmosphere’s upper heights with a certain and all-consuming fire.


2.
 
By most measures, 2009 DD45 echoes the size, velocity, and attendant heat of a cosmic body—or, as a competing theory goes, an aggregate mass of cometary debris—which broke through morning and exploded over the hinterlands of Siberia in June, 1908. The shock wave of its entry and the subsequent matter-bursts above the Stony Tunguska River released enough thermal and kinetic energy to fell tens of millions of trees and incinerate a range of nearly a thousand square miles.  
 
Near the hypocenter, descriptions of the event sound like incantations. A trader working the riverbank recalls how the “heavens moved apart a great distance” and the “whole northern part of the sky was covered with fire” so that

I got so hot I couldn’t endure it, as if my shirt had burst into flame while still on me, and from out of the north, from where the fire was, there came an intense heat. I wanted to rip off my shirt and throw it away, but at that moment the sky slammed shut, and a mighty crash resounded and I was thrown about [twelve feet] to the ground. For a moment I lost consciousness, but my wife, running out, brought me back into the hut.

In a letter about a week afterwards, the head of a local meteorological outpost boils down eyewitness testimony into a singular account, a fusion of hibakusha narrative, an interchapter from In Our Time, and the Apocalypse of John:

At 7:15 a.m. there appeared in the northwest a fiery column with a diameter of about [twenty-eight feet] in the form of a spear. When the column disappeared, there were heard five strong, abrupt bangs, like from a cannon, following quickly and  distinctly one after another; then there appeared in that place a dense cloud. After about 15 minutes the same sort of bangs were heard again, and after another 15  minutes it repeated as well. The ferryman, a former soldier and in general an experienced and knowledgeable person, counted 14 bangs...The fiery column was  visible to many, but the  bangs were heard by an even larger number of  people…[Peasants from neighboring villages] pass on that there had been a strong  shaking of the ground, such that the [window] glass was broken in the houses.

Among the native Evenks, the roar and bellow inspired fierce cautionary tales: of shamans allied with the god of storms, of thunder-birds with eyes of lightning and bones of molten iron. 

3.  

It is easy to imagine the speaker of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Three Sonnets in Tetrameter” enraptured by the sound and fury at the locus of an asteroid impact. Easier still to imagine the speaker of another constellation of her sonnets, “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” somehow disheartened at 2009 DD 45’s threat and dart, flash and juke—how such celestial near-misses remind us of the inevitable but signify nothing beyond a harmless uptick in the Torino Scale and a soundless ricochet into the dark.
 

Both clusters of verse are relentless in their characterizations of a flailing, clamorous humanity “out of ooze  / But lately crawled.” One opening grieves and proselytizes from afar, throwing out an exasperated “God!—” at the sight of how we “masses mill and swarm / And troop and muster and assail.” Another poem warmly meditates on an Earth divorced from all our march and stammer, imagining an expanse of quiet, a skull tumbling in the Doomsday surf. And though these voices concede that “Man…when his destiny was high / Strode like the sun into the middle sky,” with “his conscience and his art,” the truth and durability of our renascence was quick to pass: at best, we only “shone an hour” before crashing “down into the sea, / Leaving no spark to be remembered by.” When the hit comes, these poems seem to hiss, rest assured that we deserve it, and that the planet will thank the universe for the favor. 

R. A. Villanueva is a writer living in Brooklyn. His digital home is here. He also curates Experiments & Disorders, a reading and performance series dedicated to undefining the boundaries between poetry, fiction, and drama. You are encouraged to attend the first Experiments and Disorders of the fall season tomorrow night, October 1, at 7:30pm. More info here.

Three Sonnets in Tetrameter

by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

I .
See how these masses mill and swarm
And troop and muster and assail:
God! --- We could keep this planet warm
By friction, if the sun should fail.
Mercury, Saturn, Venus, Mars:
If no prow cuts your arid seas,
Then in your weightless air no wars
Explode with such catastrophes
As rock our planet all but loose
From its frayed mooring to the sun.
Law will not sanction such abuse
Forever; when the mischief's done,
Planets, rejoice, on which at night
Rains but the twelve-ton meteorite.  
 
II.
His stalk the dark delphinium
Unthorned into the tending hand
Releases . . . yet that hour will come . . .
And must, in such a spiny land.
The sikly, powdery mignonette
Before these gathering dews are gone
May pierce me --- does the rose regret
The day she did her armour on?
In that the foul supplants the fair,
The coarse defeats the twice-refined,
Is food for thought, but not despair:
All will be easier when the mind
To meet the brutal age has grown
An iron cortex of its own.  
 
III.
No further from me than my hand
Is China that I loved so well;
Love does not help to understand
The logic of the bursting shell.
Perfect in dream above me yet
Shines the white cone of Fuji-San;
I wake in fear, and weep and sweat. . .
Weep for Yoshida, for Japan.
Logic alone, all love laid by,
Must calm this crazed and plunging star:
Sorrowful news for such as I,
Who hoped—with men just as they are,
Sinful and loving—to secure
A human peace that might endure.

Daft Punk - Tron Legacy Theme (mp3)

Grizzly Bear - While You Wait For The Others ft. Michael McDonald (mp3)

M. Ward - Let's Dance (mp3)

Bat For Lashes - Use Somebody Lo Fi (mp3)

Julian Casablancas - 11th Dimension (mp3)