In Which We Ride On God's Great Motorcycle

Love of Leather and Country

by DICK CHENEY

Sons of Anarchy
creator Kurt Sutter

I always wondered what happened to the British kid in Undeclared. (I assumed porn.) Then I was gchatting with Grover Norquist last year, and he was telling me about his favorite show, Sons of Anarchy. On Sons Charlie Hunnam portrays Jackson Teller, the vice president of his motorcycle gang and the practitioner of the worst American accent outside of Simon Baker. Grover bought me the show's first three seasons on DVD as a thank you present for a bunch of jokes I wrote him about Ezra Klein. That gift changed my life.

where are all the girls, did they attend West Point or something?

At base, Undeclared and Sons of Anarchy showcase essentially the same concept. Both concern groups of friends a little too overeager to explain how virulently heterosexual they are, adding up to something of a these ladies protest too much, methinks type situation. Each show concerns a counterculture not commonly exposed to the mainstream light; in the case of Undeclared the fact that college is a gigantic scam perpetuated by Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler, and in the case of Sons of Anarchy the fact that a motorcycle gang is basically an enigmatic cover story for a bunch of guys to ride on big metal phalluses.

I never understood the appeal of a motorcycle before, and I still don't. For a show concerned only with people devoted to the speedy vehicles, Sons of Anarchy hardly ever shows the members of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original (SAMCRO) admiring or enjoying their motorcycles. As transport, the devices are convenient because they can be ridden fast and hidden easily, but these jockeys don't seem to care much for their steeds. They're more into quietly serving out jail time and absolute monogamy.

"Do they force you to read The Daily Beast in here?"

Hunnam's Jackson Teller had a high school relationship with Tara (Mad Men's Maggie Siff) that engendered a love that never abated. Despite the fact that he turned into a drug-running, guns-abusing freak like his father, she's still attracted to his hard pecs. Even after he cheated on her with an adult film performer, she was still fine with it and raised his children without complaint, then went to her job as a hospital surgeon. And that's not all!

Listening to the British Hunnam pridefully spout the various details of the arms trade is about as believable as imagining that a University of Chicago educated doctor would ever copulate with him, but that's part of the fun of Sons of Anarchy. As the show's current season came to a close, the union has been so insanely ludicrous that the Sons of Anarchy writing team has the couple communicate only through cliché, as with this charming exchange from the penultimate episode of the season:

TARA: Tell me you love me.

JACKSON: I love you, Tara.

(pause)

Do you love me?

TARA: If you make it stop I will.

(pause)

I love you Jackson.

Jesus, did none of these people watch Tell Me You Love Me? Clearly not, or they would have cast Adam Scott as a rogue biker named Frederick de la Santos and I wouldn't have to watch him tongue kiss Amy Poehler anymore. Why not embark on a crossover episode, like when Urkel hit that girl on Step by Step with his car?

the fact that Ed Bundy remarried is the cherry on top of this situation

Jackson's mother Gemma Teller is played by Married... with Children's Katey Sagal as an aggressive, controlling presence in the lives of her son and husband. She reminds me of my wife Lynne if every third sentence out of Lynne's mouth was, "Don't hurt my baby." Her ongoing feud with Drea de Matteo was the highlight of the show's first season, although the fact that Drea did not get naked and that they never showed her shooting up heroin or bearing Jackson's baby somewhat lessened my interest in the storyline. 

"Tell me what you really thought of the second Hellboy."

Sagal's first serious dramatic role is a mixed bag. (I'll be scrambling my metaphors a lot in this paragraph.) Her ongoing marriage to show creator Kurt Sutter has hardly engendered goodwill among the fanbase, and including her original music was another fly in the ointment. The fact that her husband (Ron Perlman) beat the shit out of her and all she did was frown a lot constituted the final straw for me, however. Sagal actually enlists her son to kill her husband, but he has to leave him alive because of the CIA. Fortunately this storyline doesn't seem likely to go all Boardwalk Empire but I still get kind of creeped out by the way she looks at Hunnam.

just tell everyone you got into INXS there for awhile juicyEven when Sons of Anarchy gets silly, like when they debuted Tom Arnold as a wacky pornographer, the show usually redeems itself. There are actually many moments when Sons of Anarchy crosses conventional lines, such as when valued club member Juice tried to hang himself from a tree with a steel chain. You don't often see a suicide attempt on cable television these days, although god knows the British host of The X Factor should give it a shot. Also, there should be a specific viewer warning for having to see Ron Perlman's exposed belly.

To join the Sons of Anarchy, a member has to get a back tattoo. If they leave the group, they have to get it inked over or removed. I believe the Church of Scientology and the Heritage Foundation have a similar policy. The most common method of leaving the SoA is by death, and this season's death march has already claimed club founder Piney (William Lucking, not that it matters now). Ron Perlman shot him in the chest with a shotgun because he had an incriminating letter, setting up the weathered veteran as the show's biggest heel.

Also on the death list was poor Herman (The Shield's Kenneth Johnson) whose main crime was being cast on the doomed NBC version of Prime Suspect. Most of The Shield, Deadwood and Oz have taken their own place in Sons of Anarchy; you'd be surprised to know how few actors there actually are in the world, maybe 600 total not including Tom Cruise or his wives. They get thawed out of cold sleep every Tuesday.

get it????

Last night the show's many concurrent storylines converged in a not-so shocking season finale. When we had last left club president Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), he was lying motionless in a hospital bed after being shot in the stomach by Piney's son Opie (Ryan Hurst). Instead of actually having the balls to kill off the most famous actor on their show, Sons of Anarchy creator/actor Kurt Sutter (below as incarcerated member Otto Delaney) chickened out and left Clay alive.

Jackson Teller had long calculated a plan to leave his club in the dust, move to Portland and start up a bed & breakfast with his wife. Instead, in the season's climactic finale scene, he ascended to the presidency of his little club. He explained the change of heart by saying that it would be one thing to simply abandon his club, but another to destroy it completely. I sympathized with him for the first time then because it's the same way I feel about having to watch the second season of Game of Thrones. Then again, how could it be as bad as A Dance With Dragons?

Jackson's tough decision is the exact same as Kurt Sutter's. When you make a beautiful piece of art, the second hardest thing to do is to leave it behind entirely like Larry David and Seinfeld, but the most painful thing to do is turn it into something unrecognizable. Sons of Anarchy lost its way a little bit this year by not changing enough in seasons past. Any character, no matter how finely drawn, becomes stale after we see them in identical situations over and over again. Consciousness change through repetition is only another myth perpetrated by the American political process.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Honey Girl" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

"Little Birds" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

"The Devil's Sake" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

In Which He Is Now The John Lennon of Domain Names

The Man Who Could Not Usually Be Silenced

by DICK CHENEY

Lost

Season Six

I heard last week's episode was focused on Kate. I was on Fox News during the original airing. I drunk gchatted some peeps later that night after a case of Buffalo Trace and a prostitute named Susquehanna. The only one up at 4 am is Charles Krauthammer, and after busting his chops for being in a wheelchair like Locke and Magic Johnson for a week in the late 1990s, I asked him if Kate ran from her problems for the entire episode. He typed "lol" and then excused himself to empty his bedpan.

Charles Krauthammer jokes aren't how I made my reputation - Lost recaps with read-between-the-lines political coverage are. Let's face it - I could write a more coherent argument than Glenn Greenwald just by using the frontal lobe of my brain.

I guess I'm just caught up in the critics of my evil deeds, like New Locke, a.k.a. the Man in the Black. The writers of Lost asked themselves, "Would it be cool if we created a NEW major antagonist of the series in the final season of its existence?" They answered yes, and recast Locke as the villain in the saint's body. At least the Borg had a shiny-looking cube.

It's difficult to enjoy the inspiring story of Locke getting fired for cause when I have nightmarish flashbacks to Sawyer showing Kate the gay wedding ring he bought for Juliet in last week's episode. This week, Sawyer pretended that never happened, while still cracking wise by drinking himself to death in his underwear.

In the meantime, New Locke found a boy in the woods who looks like young Jacob. Revolutions have been started from less, I think this is basically how the careers of Charles Manson and Bob Dole began. Everywhere I go people ask me how I got my start in politics. "I was in the jungle," I tell them. "I ran out of food and water. I saw Satan, and sold him my soul. Now I've come to take yours." And I then bring out these creepy fake teeth that I have to replace the lack of my not having real teeth anymore and scream like Chunk in The Goonies.

I really don't understand what happened to Lost. You have these iconic characters, and yet all you can find to do with them is go to some weird cave on the side of the island and look at "candidates" for the island's savior. That may be how the Democratic Party chooses gubernatorial candidates, but it's a far cry from a political process.

Lost is trying to move back towards the simple pleasures of its first season. Although this current one has suddenly vaunted itself into the competition of suck, the first season was actually incredibly slow and deliberate about what it hoped to accomplish. The larger vision of the island that was developed in the ensuing seasons is totally obliterated by the character-based stories the show wants to return to.

Now that we've found out Hurley is Rose's boss, I have come up with some other ways the cast can be suprisingly connected with each other in parallel Los Angeles:

- Claire makes a young mother faux pas and asks Walt to babysit for Aaron

- Sun gives Charlie a massage complete with happy ending

- Boone appears in a not-very-well-received adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction

how was there no 'bueller' joke associated with this flashforward?- Kate sells her revolutionary book concept, Eat Pray Run

- Shannon explains the concept of thetans to Sayid before he joins Scientology

- Juliet commits the classic screwup by transferring Miles' domain name to a big corporation without notifying him and then lying about it

Seeing John Locke teach his fiancee about how there are no miracles recalled the brilliant lessons of George Bluth. Every time Katey Segal's face gets in my face, I can't get what she did to John Ritter out of my mind. Who knew that Married with Children would spawn three successful careers, one major eating disorder, and one complete failure? Speaking of weird casting, putting regulars from Lost on every other failure of an ABC show is wrong in so many ways. If they try to recast Michael Emerson as one of the guys with the girl in the pizza place, I'm going to have to commit an unrelated murder on whoever thinks Better Off Ted is funny.

harold and richard, get off this show and head to white castle guysThe only show I can really watch and enjoy besides Lost is of course Archer, where H. Jon Benjamin is doing a virtual clinic in how awesome he is at voice acting.

So far Aisha Tyler and Jessica Walter are underwritten and annoying, but it's comforting to find a show that's honest about its objectification of women instead of just putting Evangeline Lilly in a wife-beater for the better part of five seasons.

"wait a second - does the doc have a higher number because he's kewter than me?"The parallel universe Los Angeles is likely to ensure what we should already know by now - even in this wonky version of the future, the names written on the wall of the Man-in-Black's masturbation cave were headed for the island even if Oceanic Flight 815 never crashed at all.

You're probably wondering why I've been in the news lately. It's partly because I saw Sarah Palin reading off her hand and wanted to make the save, and partly because if k.d. lang is confident enough to look like that in public, so am I.

A young tumblr's story has recently inspired me to speak out. The man who created pitchfork.tumblr.com had it stolen away from him. Tumbledore's fight to become the Yoko Ono of domain names has already embarrassed one really insecure tumblr "director of outreach." Her outreach is about as effective as Ari Fleischer was at hiding my more profanity-laced e-mails, and her memoirs about this incident on a rival website leave something to be desired. A lot of hurt feelings hopefully won't mar the fact that my favorite blog in the world is located on tumblr, and also my second favorite. Never hire an oversharer to do what an undersharer can do just as well.

you hurt the feelings of a beautiful young tumblr in the prime of his tumbling. all he wanted was to post pics and songs for uWe now all tenderly await meaghano's memoir about her customer experience with tumbledore, replete with a raunchy sex scene where she dry humps a printed out e-mail. With a little luck this can turn into something Don King can really get behind.  Hopefully I will read about meaghano and tumbledore's 2012 nuptials in an elaborate NYT wedding profile where instead of them posing together, their websites pose for a series of photos. The initial enmity between the two melted over a series of e-mails and meet-ups at Pinkberry. The two quickly found they shared a grudging respect for Choire Sicha, and neither knew how to pronounce his first name.

tumbledore claims nothing! it is you who have to answer for your sins!!!Young tumbledore demonstrates a devil-may-care attitude that Sawyer would do well to follow. At the very least he won't have to do awkward rope ladder stunts with a former paraplegic and he can focus on having heart-to-hearts with Richard about how new Locke wants to kill his friends. The island's jungle has turned into more of a sausagefest than Gawker.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. He is marketing a line of "Free Tumbledore" tee-shirts that you will be excited to hear about in the coming daze. You can read his review of the Lost premiere here.

"Killing the Ghost" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

"Jane I Still Feel The Same" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

"They Were Wrong" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

Ryan's incredible new album, Dear Lover, comes out this week.