In Which We Can't Avenge Them If We're Dead

Bannermen

by DICK CHENEY

The time between when you make your wish and when it is granted comprises everything. As a mere hooligan who only cared about the marginal income tax rate, I did not understand this, so I would keep on wanting the thing. To stop needing to do whatever it is — sleep, eat, summon a dark spirit — is incredibly difficult, but if you do not stop, then afterwards you end up discarding your heart's desire. If you really wish something, you must have it then and now or not at all.

My wish was for Westeros to become alive. Sadly, I wished this in 2007.

What do you do with a show after you kill off its best characters? Without the considerable presence of myself and the last president in the public discourse, The Nation has resorted to slandering black people and mocking Mormons. ("Why Can't We Make Fun Of Mormons?" If you have to ask, you're probably not a liberal magazine.) Sure, my jabs about Katrina vanden Heuvel having two silver spoons embedded in her sizable cheeks are all in good fun, but when you look to who benefits, you can see that Victor Navasky's secret plan is for Romney to be elected. It means his entire bottom line.

The deaths of Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon were also bad business. Not quite Scarlett Johanssen when she's Lorraine Bracco-ing a Norse God bad, but horrible nonetheless. Unlike in The Avengers, where they kill off even incidental characters with gaudy, funereal music, the HBO series felt the need to stay faithful to the novels on which they were based. And everyone dies. Hopefully they haven't read A Dance of Dragons, because there is still a chance to get this right.

She's going through a thing right now

Try watching Game of Thrones with someone who isn't emotionally invested in whether Arya Stark lives or dies on her journey up the King's Road. It's just a series of increasingly disturbing scenes; actually the show is a deep departure from the novels where a twenty page chapter was spent leading up to said scene. Here we just get: rats crawling into men's bodies, the theft of teenage dragons in onesies, the slaughter of babies, the rape of Khaleesis, the austere birth of a shadow. Everyone in the Seven Kingdoms possesses a mid-sized or larger tongue.

The real problem is the focus on the two most boring families of the Seven Kingdoms, the Baratheons and the Greyjoys. The Baratheon's squabble/Clash concerns two feuding brothers, one gay and one impotent, who seek to inherit their oldest brother's birthrights. The words of House Baratheon are "Ned Stark died for this?"

tyrion is peeking during at lease 18 percent of all his screentime

The Greyjoys are somehow worse, if this is even possible. I hate you Theon Grejoy. You look like a jack-in-the-box, you can't act worth a shit, and you didn't even say goodbye to Robb Stark.

The words of the Greyjoys are "incest boating." The ancestral home bases of the Greyjoys are the Iron Islands, and if it did not look so glorious, the scenes set in these environs would be even more execrable than they already are. The set design in Game of Thrones borders on magnificent. The show must cost twelve fortunes. You can easily watch the show without the volume on and get the basic point.

"I came from nothing." "That's the sixth time you've said that."

Game of Thrones uses the word 'only' a lot. At some point, you begin to doubt the singularity of the subject. The dialogue mostly concerns the following:

"Remember our words."

"It was only a dream."

"I am only a maid."

"It is my duty."

Ser Loras, I'm coming!!!

"I cannot, my lord!" (He can.)

"He has to pay the iron price."

"It is only my duty."

"I am your king!"

During a recent episode the takeaway point from seven straight scenes was, "You can't avenge him from the grave." Because most of Game of Thrones' compelling characters have already died off or are about to, much time has been dedicated to establishing new villains. The process is long, and there are a lot of them. Littlefinger actually seems like a super guy compared to most, and young creature playing Sir Loras is a star in the making.

But that's the only thing marking time between when a twee Tyrion is twinkling like Santa's elf about some decision he's going to make that will turn the tide of war. How lovely to imagine how many bannerman will be consumed by the wildfire. In the North, Jon Snow is contemplating throwing a bone to one of the maids from Downton Abbey. It's hard to know who exactly to get behind.

My disgust for the Onion Knight knows no bounds. He can't even read. It's laughable.

you kowtowing little maggot

Someone needs to do a theatrical release of all the Arya scenes. See you later.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to this Recording. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Magic City.

jon snow is the only one permitted a pet for some reason

"The Lost Buoys" - Clock Opera (mp3)

"Move to the Mountains" - Clock Opera (mp3)

Ways to Forget was released on April 23rd.

inside The Nation's editorial offices

In Which The Past Is Dead To Us

Wishcasting

by DICK CHENEY

Magic City
Starz
creator Mitch Glazer

The pilot of Magic City ends with a corpse floating through the ocean, perhaps the dumbest cliché in crime fiction. That the offending dead body is the head of a powerful labor union is no panacea on this insult to my intelligence. I lived through the sixties twice, well, three times if you count the four hour brunch I had with George Lucas where he said "In those days" over 450 times.

Nostalgia for the past permeates almost every aspect of society. It is the defining characteristic of a declining civilization, and it is all the more pervasive in the midst of technological or industrial revolution. I hate this attitude, that things were better before x, unless the x you're referring to is the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones. Thankfully, Starz's new series Magic City is so completely overwhelmed with ridiculous cliches that it's difficult to imagine anyone wishing to return to the Miami of 1959.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan's ever-expanding neck (on loan from Tom Hanks, who presumably no longer requires the device) portrays Isaac Evans, the manager of Miami's Miramar Hotel. His backer Ben Diamond (Danny Huston) is a member of organized crime, and the remaining details are copied verbatim from Martin Scorses Casino.

Isaac has two sons and a daughter by his first wife Molly, and he remarried a Gentile woman his daughter disapproves of and his son creepily observes sunbathing in the nude. Since there is no XBox, his eldest son spends the vast majority of his time having unprotected sex, In the pilot alone there are three blowjobs received, all by men. Actually, it is grammatically correct to refer to a blowjob as a "bowjob" if the sexual act in question has occurred thirty years or more in the past. Once in Magic City a woman tries to give another woman a bowjob, but it all goes so predictably wrong.

the ice queen

It gets to the point where you're actively praying for a powerful female character to enter the mix, with the brains and bravado of my wife Lynne and the prominent forehead of an Angelina Jolie. It happens near the end of the second episode, and when you find out she's a tall, icy blonde you just sigh. After striking union members toss Isaac's wife's poodle off a hotel balcony, he doesn't even even respect her enough to tell her the dog died. He just replaces it with a new snarling poodle. This is what amounts to comedy in Magic City.

the abused mob wife

I made a list of the show's clichés so they can fix them:

- Cranky old man with a secret heart of gold

- Bowjob while driving a convertible and the car crashes

- Purportedly religious politician is actually a corrupt buffoon

- Witness has to be intimidated but ends up killing himself anyway

- Young girl has a bat mitzvah and chooses a Judy Garland theme

- Insensitive rich woman can't hold onto a man to save her life, they don't "deserve her"

- Vicious and heartless mob boss uses elaborate metaphors copied from episodes of Bones to suggest depth of field (watching him relate the story of the Frog and the Scorpion with a straight face was more painful than getting a new heart)

- Peggy comes up with a campaign and Don takes credit for it

- Girl tells boy not to call her by pet name, later reveals she prefers the nickname

- LeBron James is afraid of commitment

Don Draper was able to ever so briefly be interesting because of how ridiculous every single word out of his mouth and woman he slept with was. The writers of Magic City have tragically misunderstood the fact that he is meant to be ironic. The officious Isaac is never funny, he does not joke, he simply ribs, like the backup quarterback on a football team. He has no friends, not even his boss or his wife. He gets along with his father, but only because he needs help disappointing the labor unions of the world.

Don's shame at his mysterious origins was obviously a light parable of the Jewish self-hatred of Matthew Weiner, and of course Don really had nothing to fear. Isaac, who is an agnostic Jew, endures slurs and various difficulties related to his ethnicity, but he himself and his family make Ace Rothstein look like David Ben-Gurion. There should an inset displayed during the show of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's circumcised penis as verifiable proof he is what it seems he isn't.

the maid

Isaac's younger son, law student Danny, is infatuated with one of the hotel's maids. As Frank Sinatra prepares for his New Year's Eve concert, Danny sends his intended the gift of a lavish red dress. (Her massive eyebrows are nicely set off by the gown's elaborate fringe.) Women are either servants or whores, and there are about 20-25 prostitutes in the pilot alone. It's a woman in 1959, what else could she be?

Isaac's eldest son Stevie Evans starts an illicit affair with Ben Diamond's tragically abused wife Lily Diamond. At first the sex is completely unprotected and fun, but after the fifth time, she says, "Can you please just hold me Stevie?" To kill time takes a bunch of indecent photos of them having sex. Over seven times she asks, "Did you burn the photos?" If I have to tell you the answer, you don't yet understand the familiar appeal of Magic City. It's like slipping into the second asshole where David Chase forced Terence Winter to put all his bad ideas.

Alex asked me to review the second season of Game of Thrones ("You won't believe what happens to Tyrion!" Fuck you.) I said no. He asked me to review The Hunger Games. I said no. He asked me to review Magic City, and I said, "Only if I can use the word shiksa over twelve times." I must simply be getting old. The past and the future both seem equally boring. All around me in the real world I see things that have never existed before, that are never described in our art or media. I turned this disaffected feeling into a screenplay titled Vaginal Space Program. It has a huge part for Holly Hunter and it was purchased by a savvy executive at Paramount. Look forward to that. What else is there to look forward to?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and the former vice president of the United States. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

a prostitute

"Four Hours Away" - Young Prisms (mp3)

"Runner" - Young Prisms (mp3)

"Outside" - Young Prisms (mp3)

In Which Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall

The Dying Mirth

by DICK CHENEY

Who has it better, gays in New York or television critics? I spent the last three hours digesting the second season of Showtime's The Real L Word. I now know more about an arbitrary set of lesbians in Los Angeles than even my proudly out daughter. Here are some conclusions I have come to about lesbians:

- there's a lot less talk about Celine Dion than I had been led to believe

- by and large they work at Marc Jacobs or in advertising

- they're just like us

"i just decided i want to start a lifestyle magazine called Dirty Boudoir"

- Turquoise is a frequent motif in their swimwear

- Lafayette's last name is Reynolds and his boyfriend is straighter than Sam Merlotte

I connected more with a bunch of lesbians way outside my age and price range than I did with the entire cast of True Blood. Try achieving empathy for a newly-turned lesbian who stages MMA fights in New Orleans for some reason and tongue kisses her "opponent" afterwards. Try feeling sad for a bunch of people who turn into horses.

not so subtle allusion to the four horsemen of the apocalypse

Most shows end with a deux ex machina, they don't begin with one. The first eight minutes of True Blood were about as intelligent as all the horrible things Mother Jones has been writing about Michele Bachmann. Your magazine was named after a female politican, maybe you shouldn't spend your entire website criticizing one. After you spend 80,000 words picking on one woman, she starts to sound pretty good simply for defying you. The only magazine more unfaithful to its mission than Mother Jones is Cat Fancy.

Am I going too fast for you? Are you the kind of person who needs 8,000 well-crafted words in order to understand that True Blood is simply a propaganda vehicle for the Democratic Party? (Don't worry, David Frum is working on a column about this.) Harry Reid sketches out True Blood storyboards on bar napkins in between bong rips. The entire Sookie-is-a-fairy storyline came about when he used a derogatory word to describe Barney Frank.

[stage whisper] sookey?

The only good part of True Blood was Bill Compton's office as the King of Louisiana. A Bill Compton as Patrick Bateman-montage might be the only thing that would ensure Alan Ball spends enternity in heaven. But you didn't come here for mediocre jokes about True Blood and cutting edge observations about Mother Jones. You came for the throne, and also for my summer reading pix.

Last Sunday's season finale of Game of Thrones featured no horse being cut in half, no raunchy sex scenes between inappropriate partners. There were some heads on pikes, but thankfully no one was decapitated. Someone did get suffocated with a pillow, but there was a very strong feeling the individual in question was already dead. There was only one prostitute and she was bored.

Boring a prostitute is no easy feat. Even when Karl Rove is tired of "consulting", he goes for the reach around to make sure you're receiving something tangible in return for $1500 an hour. After he's finished serving you, he gets roughly the same expression on his face as Khal Drogo did after his vaginal rejuvenation.

he's still most likely going to be voting in the Democratic Dothraki primaries

After the black magician restored her husband to some semblance of life, Daenerys did what any one of us would do - she got really high and set herself on fire. Sir Jorah Mormont's facial expressions during this scene were so cartoonish it's truly a wonder he didn't scream, "No, you'll burn on the pyre, Khaleesi!!!" Try shrieking "Khaleesi!" wildly during oral sex and when you're at the ATM. The rewards are great.

A dreadful scene between Varys and Littlefinger proved that nothing of any interest was happening in King's Landing except for King Joffrey's awesome tyranny. In the books, Joffrey is about as likeable as Joe Biden, but in the show he has a striking charisma. When he ordered his guard to slap Sansa in the face my cheeks immediately grew rosy at the thought of the ensuing gifs.

With a big lack of protagonists in King's Landing, Tywin Lannister had a fatherly moment with Tyrion and sent him off to be his grandson's Hand of the King. He'll have to sit on a high seat, but he won't be any more out of place than Arya Stark is "disguised" as a boy. If you want to make someone seem like a boy, shave their head, or draw a picture of a dick on a piece of paper and put it inside their pantaloons.

sansa stark after hearing dance with dragons will be delayed again

While you're waiting for season two of Game of Thrones, it is best to educate yourself in the interim. My summer reading picks are thematically oriented around "If You Like Game of Thrones," because let's face it, who doesn't? The rest of George R.R. Martin's oeuvre is a little hit-or-miss, never read his music novel The Armageddon Rag unless you want to fall asleep and never talk to George about it unless you want to hear him bitch about his publisher for six hours.

Here are all GRRM's hits:

A Song for Lya

Sometimes I'm at a loss for what made this novella one of George's most popular stories. On the surface, A Song for Lya is a familiar tale about two psychics falling out of love. There's nothing new in the light satire of an alien religiosity. Instead it's the little details that make Lya distinctive - all of its relationships, especially the main love relationship, seem completely alive and real in a setting where such emotions are often overlooked and cast aside in favor of the weirdness that surrounds them. Lya makes us seem like the real aliens. The novella, available in GRRM's story collection Dreamsongs, is most memorable for its stunning ending, which never ceases to create a warm feeling in my bowels.

Windhaven

Martin's collaboration with Lisa Tuttle serves as the template for his strong-minded heroine whose society just doesn't understand her. He also experimented here with an island setting for the first time, foreshadowing the inimitable Iron Islands and Dragonstone, the place Littlefinger eventually takes Sansa.

In Windhaven this oldest of science fiction conceits concerns a generation of fliers, ending with a broken-down old woman who can't get in the air anymore. Whether the idea was Martin's or Tuttles doesn't matter, it's George's usual tact of following its story past where most authors would cease entertaining themselves.

 

Sandkings

Saying Sandkings was the best thing George R.R. Martin ever worked on is not that difficult a summation of this novella. Sandkings is the one of the greatest pieces of horror fiction ever composed, concerning a man who walks into a pet store looking for the next big thing and getting more than he bargained for. It was also later adapted into a fabulous graphic novel/one-shot, pre-figuring the Targaryen-era Westeros stories GRRM would later release, including The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword, both of which are well worth seeking out.

Tuf Voyaging

Martin was only honing his chops as a stylist when he created this series of popular stories about a cat-owning space detective. Modeled after his idol Jack Vance, the tales take on a strange environmental cast that makes them a little wooden at times, but given a chance to follow in Vance's humorous footsteps, Martin does as least as well as Vance's other imitators.

Fevre Dream

Martin's attempt at the vampire motif came about two decades too early. Set in a slave-owning American south where a riverboat is a marked sign of status, Fevre Dream contains a scene where an African-American baby is eaten by savage vampires, and is not for the faint of heart.

What made Fevre Dream such a distinctive horror novel at the time was its gluttonous, unconventional protagonist, who makes a rather dire setting romantic in its finer moments. The twist ending is enough to make it an ideal present for your mother; mine preferred Clive Barker.

Songs of the Dying Earth

Martin co-edited this tribute to Jack Vance, and his contribution to the volume, "A Night at the Tarn House," ranks with the now-deceased Kage Baker's awesome story in the style of her hero. Martin's magnetic introduction details his gesture towards Vance in Tuf Voyaging and where he believes he diverges from his progenitor.

You can read GRRM's recollection of writing "A Night at the Tarn House" here. His own personal blog is awesome - every month, he posts high definition images of the lice living in his hair.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and the CIA's foremost analyst on George R.R. Martin. You can find his Game of Thrones recaps here.

"Stargazer" - Thievery Corporation (mp3)

"Where It All Starts" - Thievery Corporation (mp3)

"Light Flares" - Thievery Corporation (mp3)

The new album from Thievery Corporation, Culture of Fear, was released on June 28th.