In Which We Pray For The People Of Pakistan

Shopping List

by DICK CHENEY

HBO's disastrous programming of late reminds me of the Republican presidential field, I wrote. But no, there is nothing to watch on HBO anymore. Cancel all of your subscriptions. Did you know they are jumping into bed with J.J. Abrams? Do they ever want a woman to watch one of their shows again?

HBO had success by adapting the works of a fantasy writer whose literary efforts were deemed too complex to bring to film or television. They decided to follow this up by working on Michael Crichton's back catalogue. I am sorry but this looks like a complete mess.

Do you giggle like a schoolgirl every time someone says they have the munchies? You will probably enjoy The Brink.

The other day I watched The Brink, a thinly veiled excuse for Tim Robbins to complain about Israel every week. I have to give this humorless show credit in that it actually attempts to portray a non-Western country, in this case, Pakistan. However mostly of the comedy consists of Jack Black smoking pot and Robbins having sex with Asian prostitutes, which really grates after awhile.

The Brink is going for something like Dr. Strangelove but the weird thing is that it actually takes itself seriously. Straddling the line between parody and satire is working out decently well for Donald Trump at this point, but I've never heard of it being a success in television. It is astonishing how many people take Donald Trump at face value. What he said about John McCain was hilarious, and he has singlehandedly made Jon Stewart funny again. Does The Nation also think that Big Bird is destined to become our Secretary of Defense?

Cute lampshade. I think Farrell was in a sitting position the entire episode.

After Sunday night's disasterpiece, there is only one more episode left of True Detective, which I have to give some credit to — at least it didn't try to save its mess of a season by showing off Rachel McAdams' body in an extremely unlikely sex scene with Colin Farrell. They did have intercourse, but it was very restrained and loving, and prefacing by Farrell's Ray Velcoro explaing, "I am a bad man."

The president of HBO gave a rambling and completely insincere interview about how much he loves True Detective. "The finale will really deliver," he explained, as he mimed masturbating to the reporter. Well, it has better, since David Fincher's shows (Utopia? Synchronicity? Get the fuck out of here) are D.O.A., the last season of House of Cards was about as entertaining as a White House press conference and someone (probably Michael Lombardo) got high on molly and greenlit a Lewis and Clark miniseries. This is a real thing.

"I looked in the woods for your rapist for over an hour. I think that was sufficient."

But back to True Detective. The story so far: There isn't much of one. From the attorney general to the chief of police, everyone enjoys a hot bang now and then. The protagonists of True Detective are the people excluded from these lively sex parties. Since there were not invited, they decided to steal some important business paperwork from the event. Naturally, the owners of the paperwork want it back. Instead of just making a photocopy, Taylor Kitsch refuses and is murdered.

Are you getting excited! About the paperwork! But you know what might save HBO? A miniseries about affordable housing. What even is this.

He wrote down flash grenades on a piece of paper. What even is this.

A mark of evil is how easily we are influenced by our environment. "If you had just been honest, we couldn't have got you," the people blackmailing Taylor Kitsch explained. Instead he had to pretend to be a straight man, and it is what got him killed. I believe the same thing happened to Rock Hudson.

Vince Vaughn was busy, and a lot more. He showed his wife the guy he killed and she was nonplussed. I think she has probably seen it and a lot more before when she was Nucky Thompson's wife in a past life. I am running out of steam trying to describe how lame True Detective is, but not even Vaughn blowing up his own casino for some reason was sufficient to bring excitement to events.

I guess their production budget was pretty meager by this point.

Instead of describing Rachel McAdams' sex with Colin Farrell in excruciating detail (he touched her arm with his finger) or bashing HBO for their terrible choice of programming, I need to focus on a growing trend: older woman stealing the roles of younger women. I am absolutely devastated that the careers of Jonathan Demme and Meryl Streep have come to this:

Maybe cast one person of color in your movies, just to amuse me.

I didn't feel sympathetic towards Ellen Page when she was a pregnant white girl with a cute boyfriend, and I certainly don't care about some older white woman appropriating cultures she isn't a part of and trying to restore order to her family. Jonathan Demme was a respected and admired artist at one time. Now he's probably going to executive produce a miniseries about the Wright brothers or something while Halt and Catch Fire gets canceled. There is no justice.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

I'm sensing the mayor may be a thinly veiled commentary on HBO's president.

"Break the Chain" - Ultimate Painting (mp3)

In Which The Properties Of Liquid Shrimp Are Notable At Best

Vikings of Our Day

by RACHEL SYKES

Silicon Valley
creators Mike Judge, Dave Krinsky & John Altschuler

In HBO's Silicon Valley, the tech industry is a lot like Rome before the fall. As unassuming techies gain millions by selling apps to Google, the pilot episode leads us through a world of monster parties held in cavernous mansions and filled with awkward people. In one courtyard, a baffled Kid Rock plays to largely unmoving crowd of coders whilst, in another, strangely bearded men hypothesise on whether the properties of liquid shrimp, for $200 a quart, are consistent with ejaculate.

Palo Alto is like Rome, then, but largely without the hedonism. At the heart of Silicon Valley are four programmers, Richard (Thomas Middleditch), Big Head (Josh Brener), Bertram (Martin Starr), and Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), who are archetypal computer nerds living and working in a tech “incubator” and hoping to create the newest, weirdest app to finally make it big.

Indeed, the “incubator” is largely a frat house for nerds whose residents write apps like Nip Alert which provides the nearest location of a woman with erect nipples. Unlike fraternities, however, this bravado doesn’t quite fit – Richard and his co-workers are clearly the tiniest fish learning how to swim with the sharks. By day, they surf dating websites specialising in Asperger’s and by night, when a stripper calls round at the house, they scatter like lightening offering excuses that range from “I need to make a playlist” to “I’ve overcooked some water.”

These are awkward men, then, distinguished by their “somewhat ghostly features,” who are reluctant colleagues and only sometimes friends. Importantly, and perhaps most interestingly too, they are poised at the very beginning of something huge, living together out of necessity as technophiles flock to Palo Alto and raise rents way beyond the programmer’s living wage.

Show runner Mike Judge, best known for creating Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and the near canonical Office Space, is committed to documenting the pitfalls of the programming Gold Rush. After Judge graduated from UCSD in 1987, he moved to the area of Northern California already known as Silicon Valley and began work at a start-up video card company. Quitting after just three months, Judge is vocal about how much he hated his time there, likening the company’s culture, his colleagues, and their ethos to the Stepford Wives.

Twenty years on and in Silicon Valley the platitudes of the Steve Jobs generation have gone into overdrive. One fictional tech company, Hooli, regularly baits its employees with slogans and banners as Judge artfully shows how these institutional platitudes seep into the culture.

Early in the pilot, Richard attends a terrifyingly accurate TED talk in which a venture capitalist rails against the prescriptive learning of the education system. “The true value of a college education is intangible,” a detractor yells back. “The true value of snake oil is intangible as well,” he replies, receiving a witless and congratulatory laugh from the audience. In the new tech world order, every batshit concept has its own inspirational platform which largely goes unchecked.

It is Richard, however, who is the heart of the show as he designs a website called Pied Piper which helps artists identify copyright infringement. This idea seems laughable to many of Richard’s rivals: as one colleague mutters, nobody on the Internet cares about stealing anymore. However, whilst making fun of Pied Piper, a group of engineers realise that Richard has developed a compression algorithm that has the potential to make whoever refines it a billionaire.

The repercussions of the technology are endless, they venture, and Richard is forced to make a choice which, from the way his body reacts, could be the first of his life: should he sell his algorithm and buy a lifetime of liquid shrimp or should he accept a smaller sum from a company willing to let him be CEO of his own venture?

By the end of the pilot Richard is suddenly leading his own company. This decision sets up the rest of the series and the anticipated takedown of the Silicon Valley mentality which will presumably rob Richard and his friends of their ethics one by one. The decision to strike out alone also sets up the dilemma of aspiration that must be the show’s main focus. “For thousands of years,” the programmers mourn, “guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us. But now, for the first time, we are living in an era where we can be in charge and build empires. We could be the Vikings of our day.”

Judge knows, however, that the revenge of the skinny white man is not a concept that can run and run. Through his knowing takedown of the TED industry, his send up of the charitable projects and “spiritual” gurus guiding many of today’s CEOs, Silicon Valley represents the absurdities driving the innovations of the modern age and, in its opening episodes, shows the potential to grow into a large scale interrogation of big business, “ethical” living, and the inferiority complex driving the surprising successes of the geeky white male.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. She last wrote in these pages about Hannibal. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"In Silence" - The Folk (mp3)

"Deep Space" - The Folk (mp3)

In Which We Don't Really Like Ray Drecker Or His Penis

Big Dick Doesn't Go As Far As It Used To

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Ray Drecker's wife divorced him because he was only pulling in a gym teacher's salary. On last week's episode of the HBO series Hung, Drecker eats dinner at the home of her dermatologist Jew of a second husband. After coffee, he asks the good doctor, "How did a guy like you get the girl from a guy like me?" It's not lakeside property, because Drecker (Thomas Jane) has that in spades. He doesn't have to go on living in a tent while he repairs his dreadful cabin of a house. He just has to sell out to his neighbor, reap a tidy profit, and relocate.

But he doesn't. He won't. He's used to being there. It's his parents' house, after all. He's been living on the lake since he was a little boy. Most things in life get stale — children, marriage, work, friendships — but humans never tire of sticking their toes in the water, and sometimes swimming in it.

American men and women of a certain age are used to a particular idea of their country. As it must, it bears no resemblance, none at all, to the country their children grow up in. There is no way to stop the advancement of technology, and even if there were, do you think people were happier before Prodigy and AOL? It seems like they weren't, in all the ways that count.

Ray's nostalgia for the past is immature; as Tony Soprano once put it, "Remember when is the lowest form of conversation." Like Ray Drecker, he's no smarter than he looks. Nobody feels sorry for a guy with a monster dick who owns lakefront property. They hate that guy. Sometimes the person you're making the show about turns out to be the least interesting person in it. This is certainly true of Hung, where two women outshine every single appearance of Thomas Jane's baby's arm holding an apple.

Uma Thurman once asked John Travolta, Betty or Veronica? The hypothetical positions two creatures who could not be more different; the poor, effacing blonde whose industriousness is the key to her reward, and the spoiled, impotent daddy's girl whose rogueish father follows her around. Hung cleverly swaps the hair color of the two, and twists once more for good measure.

The two major women in Drecker's life are his ex-wife Jessica and his business partner Tanya Skagle.

The first is portrayed by Anne Heche in a masterful performance that Elizabeth Perkins should take notes on. We never see her and Ray as they were as a couple (except once in flashback during the show's hour-long pilot) but it's not hard to imagine her girlish side giving in to Drecker's length and girth. That she rejected that for a l'chaim (Eddie Jemison) with smaller package just shows what a special woman she is.

The second woman in Ray's life is Ray's pimp Tanya (Jane Adams). The scenes belonging to her  are among the most disturbing in all of television. She's such a pathetic person that her identity folds in on herself. Despite being startlingly tough to like, Tanya has somehow turned that all the way around and being sympathetic. It's like watching a crowd of people cheering loudly while someone's greatest faults are exposed.

The show had her romancing another Writer (in the Wonder Boys "I am A Writer" sense), who she confesses to, informing him that she's blocked creatively. He turns down sex the next time they see each other, pitching some bullshit excuse, causing her to wonder later, "Why do men only want to fuck me when they're drunk?"

In comparing Tanya to her male business partner, we can marvel at their mutual lack of taste. Both accost a client at her workplace; a client who pays well and on time and demands nothing more than her fantasy fulfilled.

Although we feel bad for what they require from their johns, it's like Hung is bringing the literary concept of the unreliable narrator to the screen. Both Tanya and Ray drink too much, both require too much from other people, so much so that it's difficult to watch. A woman who has reached the depth of her self-loathing and turned back is like a man with a big penis, is the only probable conclusion that can be reached from their union.

The problems that Ray Drecker has with the women in his life are relatively simple. Since his female client's dream was to drag him into couples therapy, he should have used the time to ponder his own relationships with the fairer sex. As in Hung co-creaters Dmitry Lipkin and Collette Burson's last series The Riches, there are only two options for how Drecker, or any man, can relate to a woman. He can worship her, or he can step on her. The first is no more fulfilling than the second, and claims as many victims.

A boy in a home in Detroit on the water is taught to love his mother. He would as soon give his property up to the Jew next door as he would piss on his mother's grave. (It's amazing Drucker doesn't channel his rage at the world into his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.)

For this reason, Ray is a natural prostitute. He worships a woman for a brief time, maybe an hour for the most vivacious of those seeking happiness consultants. Then he is free to step on her. I point this out because Hung keeps wanting to turn selling your body into something it isn't. Whoring is a business. It doesn't lead to marriage or happiness, it will lead most certainly to money. All whores understand that, the richest ones best of all.

Watching a woman pimp a man and take her cut makes the audience feel a certain way. I suppose uncomfortable, and perhaps fascinated, too. But at its heart we recognize that this kind of work isn't healing. Most kinds of work aren't. One generation had its industriousness to depend on. Ours probably won't, so what will everything hinge on? Some will turn to law, or medicine. I salute their choices, or at least the ones that are freely made. But I won't serve my government, and I won't bill by the hour. What's left of honest work? Not much. Then again, there's nothing wrong with being a whore, except that it isn't good for you.

Natural selection was invented by Darwin to describe how humans improved over time. What traits are being selected fpr now? What skill except dumb luck carries on the maudlin genetic pattern of humanity? The weak live, even thrive. The strong, the hung do as well — despite what Lipkin and Burson want us to believe, it's not an inverse relationship. Even in this darkest of economic climates, every teenager has a cell phone and a credit card.

The gap between us and the world that worships us like Ray Drecker's phallus ever widens, until it will be people of the same age across continents who find themselves as unrecognizable as I do the customs of my grandparents. Either they'll go on worshipping, or they will step on us.

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

"Day to Day" — Amy Millan (mp3)

"Bury This" — Amy Millan (mp3)

"Towers" — Amy Millan (mp3)