In Which We Relive The Little Moments of True Blood

Golden Showers

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The most charismatic man on television has come to Bon Temps, and Alan Ball's seminal series about how much people loathe themselves, True Blood. His name is Hoyt Fortenberry, and he's a grown ass man. When times are troubled and you need a friend, Hoyt is perfectly willing to console you. If, for example, your hymen reconstitutes itself every time it's broken, Hoyt is totally cool with that. He will just shoot you one of these cold looks:

Hoyt lives in the now, he breathes for the moment. Fuck you, Mom! Fuck you, World! Fuck you, Bill Compton! Wait, Hoyt did not mean that last part about his girlfriend's maker. He's unlikely to feel the full wrath of Bill's dreadful Southern accent because, well, Bill's now a whipped piece of cornbread who can't even murder a Soldier of the Sun.

I had an English teacher who would circle "whipped" every time I used it in a paper. She told me that I knew it was sexist. I told her that the fact that I was the only kid in the class who was aware of that gave me the license. God I hated eighth grade.

Hoyt is the only real thing you can focus on when the neverending barrage of Anna Paquin's left breast is repeatedly thrust into your living room. In light of Sookie's real-life relationship with her vampire paramour, this week's dream sex sequence must have been especially painful for Stephen Moyer. I can only hope CourtTV goes 24/7 on their divorce, assuming CourtTV still exists.

Moments of action are the best drama, and True Blood is about to abandon cheesy, Hotel New Hampshire-esque brother-sister bonding for a couple of weeks that is full of them. Sookie and Bill have done Dallas, and now they're headed home to Bon Temps to wreak their vengeance on the world.

However, things are not well with Adam and Eve. Can you really be satisfying a woman if she's having an eight-minute long dream sequence about another man while in bed with you? Also, if a vamp can get power over a person just through a few drops of blood, that probably explains Kevin Federline completely.

In other news, the show's writers finally gave Lafayette something to do, although it really didn't make sense that he would ally himself with Tara's mother of all people. Given the choice between some medea who just fed me a tasty heart and my alcoholic mamma, I'm pretty sure where I'm going.

Of course, sense-making has never been Alan Ball's forte, as the physics-defying shapeshifting of Sam Merlotte proves. How exactly can you strap someone down to the stocks if they can defy the laws of conservation of matter and turn into an insect? Someone should tell them that when Gregor Samsa made his move, he didn't suddenly become a centimeter tall.

My sympathies lie elsewhere. I really feel Godric's pain though, it must be really annoying to be an immortal. If vampires really did exist, people would be jumping out of their seats to live forever, wouldn't they? I mean, it's pretty much the central focus of Mark Cuban's life; that is, if he isn't already immortal and just waiting to release this info during the Mavs first championship celebration in 2116.

To be able to choose your own death is the power of the gods, and that's really Michelle Forbes' job. We can only pray they kill her off in the season finale or I will have to singlehandedly finance a Kalifornia sequel. Get Jason Stackhouse to cut her up with a chainsaw at some point in these next three episodes, please. With that said, I have nothing but respect for her nutritious preparation of the human heart.

In the season's conclusive episodes, the vampires will get back to their murdering ways and Sookie will continue to find a way to work her Gran into every episode. I wish it were easier to write Anna Paquin off this show - if only Godric had casually tossed her off the roof of the hotel before he teleported into a bubble nude and saved John Connor.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Garbage Day" — Brendan Benson (mp3)

"Don't Wanna Talk" — Brendan Benson (mp3)

"Posied and Ready" — Brendan Benson (mp3)

In Which We Are The True Blood of Men

I Can't Love You Like That

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Bill Compton sits back in bed. His squirrelly little vampire features are happy for a time. He feels better in bed; when he's at work his boss is about two feet taller than him and his girlfriend spends most of her time squealing and complaining. Things are better in the contours of this dark Dallas hotel, better by far. "Let's go back to Bon Temps," he tells Sookie, as if she's listened to a single thing he's said since the second season of True Blood began.

Who could say no to a face like that? An old face, a face that's been through something he cannot fully understand, because he is not human enough to understand it. And also, because it takes mental strength for the actor playing him not to slip into his native British accent. Bill began his life sometime during the Civil War in the South, and it hasn't really been good until now. His face says, "I wanna be happy!!!" and who can say no?

It's early retirement for Bill Compton. His sideburns have grown unnecessarily long, and his temper correspondingly short. Eric's involved in flashbacks, and Sookie is meeting new friends and listening to fangbangers' thoughts. Jessica even has a cute boy to tell her about the comic he's reading. Bill's all alone. He has no drama, or had no drama, until the vampire named Lorena came to his door.

Bill hasn't spent much time explaining anything to Sookie. To be fair, she doesn't really ask. She's never had to ask what anyone's thinking her whole life until this point, and such customs are more habit than intuition. For this reason she's not the ideal partner. She can't be with a human, and she can't be with a vampire, so that leaves shifter, whose thoughts she never could make out as well as human thoughts. Sookie and Bill have about run their course, and it's time to move on.

In the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris, Bill and Sookie spend most of the series apart, with any number of other men and strange ass human women that get in the way. Now I realize the sorrow of this sweet parting isn't a moment too soon.

Looking into that dental conundrum, I wouldn't know just what to think. Sookie and Bill have the problems of most relationships: the woman makes the man less of a man, and the man makes the woman less of a woman. To wit:

I think I'm in love with Sarah Newlin (Anna Camp) for all the right reasons. (The principle reason I'm sure of that is because she doesn't have a Maxim portfolio.) Normally the walking pheromone known as Jason Stackhouse would be all over ass like that. But when her husband has shown you his shooting star collection, you tend to get a grip on your need for a hot bang. Jason, I feel for you. The father of my first girlfriend once drunkenly chased me around a Yacht Club.

Above all else this season, you do fear for Jason, because he is on the verge of realizing something about his life: relationships usually don't work, even human ones, even all-shifter ones. They are perched on a precarious balance, and all they do is change you in a way that you wouldn't normally have been changed, and usually for the worse.

As the inspirational leader of the Fellowship of the Sun's boot camp, Jason has definitely showed all that he can be, at least until Alan Ball gets desperate and/or horny and has him pull a Ray Drecker.

Why can't life be as simple as a handjob in a bathtub?

You have no idea just how many bathtubs I have lazed around in, waiting for the lady of the house to come up with a stern upper lip and the cruel intentions of roughing up my junk. I also had exactly the expression on Jason Stackhouse's face: pleasure mixed with a distinct fear that my penis was about to be pulled off. That's why this show is pushing boundaries. In real (or real-er) life, this is actually what you come home to:

Afterwards, you have no hope. Only one person in Bon Temps is waiting at home for you, reading a topical book like Heartsick, and wearing Gran's old clothing. It smells like death, a good bracing smell. Tara, you are home, girl, but something is not right in your life. Everybody's ganging up on you, and it's not your fault. Kevin Federline was watching the scene where MaryAnn made everyone in Merlotte's yell at Tara and saying, "I knew it!!!"

Although to be fair Michelle was wearing a cute outfit, this plotline is moving at the speed of molasses. Tara never trusted anybody in her life before this, and now three vagabonds are planning to move in? Why doesn't she just tell Sam? He can reliably inform her that he owes Maryann $100,000, which is plenty for a down payment on a house, and in Bon Temps should probably be able to buy Sookie's mansion outright. How much longer will Tara be haunted by this foreboding threesome?

I thought she was going to flip her grits when she saw that dude just calmly reading in her bed, but instead she curled up around his private parts. That is not the Tara I know and love. It's fine for inaction to build to action in drama, but the Tara I know would be curled up around a .45.

It's not really fun watching all the black folks in Bon Temps be tortured right now. It doesn't seem like Tara or Lafayette will be in any position to help their girl Sookie's travails in Dallas because they're too busy. In fairness, no one can really help Lafayette. Even though it seems like his ordeal in the bowels of Fangtasia wasn't too different from his day-to-day life as internet porn star and drug dealer, he has a new perspective on the world, one that reliably informs us You can tell by the expression on my face that I rlly hate the world.

This week's True Blood was so light on meaningful dialogue that you could have watched with the mute button on, and still had to weather some classic lines from Eric Northman's life before Christ died. If I wanted to watch the third Underworld movie, I would have watched it and reviewed it under a pseudonym.

Although I didn't love how they handled this whole situation in the book, it was preferable to a boring chatfest with the two Dallas-based vampires. In Living Dead in Dallas, there's a whole harem of vampires and fangbangers feeding on each other, and Sookie and Bill feel very overwhelmed, and Eric pretends to be somewhere else. The issue with translating that to the screen is it becomes an enormous set piece for no real reason — I don't think any of these people or vamps ever made it back to Dallas.

Let's hope Godric sticks around for awhile: it would be nice for Eric to have somebody to kowtow to. This episode was all set-up and set-up and set-up, but it will be fun when the show gets all the powerful elephants in a room together and watches them to try to relate non-violently.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Under the Paving Stones" — The Like (mp3)

"Too Late" — The Like (mp3)

"Bridge To Nowhere" — The Like (mp3)

In Which True Blood Rolls On Through Its Second Season

The Secret History of Blood

by ALEX CARNEVALE

True Blood

creator Alan Ball

Yes, the vagaries of the underworld, once they come to your doorstep, can be exciting. But pretty soon that party's getting out of hand. And there's one thing that Tara's cousin Lafayette can tell you after being unbearably tortured at the hands of the Sheriff of Louisiana Eric Northman.

Calling your cousin 'hooker' is common parlance in the salty town of Bon Temps where a half-bull, half-human claws people half to death, more spiritual creatures egg on the party spirit with three-clawed hoofs, and a young vampire can just order a tasty human treat to her door. Most likely, though, you'll end up like Tara:

For awhile, it's good. It's great. The appearance of normalcy can give purpose to any situation. Best friends shack up with each other and life seems on the upswing. A vampire 'maker' calls his ward his 'progeny.' If you have the right word for something, you could potentially turn things around. Even for a moody, tortured vamp life's not all bad.

Molly gets her kicks from comparing True Blood to Buffy. While I grant you that Buffy was tremendous for its time, it was for kids. This is serious business, so serious that Anna Paquin can't be bothered to act beyond filling out her latest outfit. As one qualified ONTD critic put it, "The fact that Anna Paquin won a Golden Globe for acting proves that anything is possible." It's now an axiomatic proof, True Blood doesn't care about the finer points.

In fact, as shit collapses around her ("I almost died...again!"), Sookie's remarkably calm...for some reason. "I know Bill wouldn't want me to do this," she says before she does something she knows will earn his disapproval. My golden retriever Rosie learns quicker. "God dang it if I didn't love the taste of your blood so much Sookie!" Bill will likely respond to another Sookie mishap in a future episode. These two are either on their honeymoon or they're Honeymooners.

I'd rather be a fly on the wall for the cutest couple in six counties — the 1,000 year old vampire known as Eric Northman and his favorite homosexual pet. I can't wait for this parasitic pair to go to their house in the country. For christ's sake, Hollywood has been begging for an interracial Withnail & I for longer than I care to remember.

did she happen to see Jack or Hurley on that flight?Eric and Lafayette are now bound to each other by virtue of sharing blood. Remember how Bill was so able to come to Sookie's scream in the airplane hanger? It's because he tasted her sweet necktar before. Now Lafayette has a dangerous monster at his beck and call. Oh right, he's not in a partying mood.

working theory is that she is what has been powering al gore

Michelle Forbes' one-note performance as the party animal is starting to grate on me, though. Each episode will she reveal some new superpower? Not even Al Pacino in Scarface was this distracted from the business at hand. I don't want to see her literal claws, I'd prefer her metaphorical ones and maybe an upskirt for shits and giggles. Every creature of power has a plan, or else how did they get their power?

Perhaps it came to them when they were young, before they were truly ready for it. The Center for Disease Control reports that one-third of all young vampires are staked before getting to sample hotel-provided B-positive ass. In the books Sookie and Bill visited a human hotel modified to cope with vampires; here vampires are afforded separate but far better treatment. Bill, Sookie and their ginger ward have come to Dallas to find the vampire Godric, fearing he may be imprisoned by the Fellowship of the Light.

The sexy group of vampire haters has employed Jason Stackhouse in their quest to rid the world of everything disgusting and alien, preserving the all-American sexuality we have come to expect from God-fearing sprites of the world. Jason has become the unwitting protagonist of this series. Sometimes you plan for someone to be the main character of your show and it turns out to be another person's story. In this case, the afflicted is the sibling of the main characters, and with a full 55 minutes to fill every week, they need all the backstory they can get. A slow burn heats best.

you don't really eat sarah's ribs, it's more like you take a bath in themWould I disavow all my previous beliefs and the welfare of my sister's bf to get with a Southern woman who was once a vegetarian and knows how to cook ribs? The answer is yes.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here. You can find his review of the first few episodes of Season Two here.

"No Fun" - Vitalic (mp3)

"My Friend Dario" - Vitalic (mp3)

"The Past" - Vitalic (mp3)