The Internet keeps distracting me.

* This is brazenly dishonest, even by Fox standards.

* When Reagan tried to convert Gorbachev to Christianity. You mean that's not the job he was elected to do?

* Great news, or greatest news? New Line pursuing a MacGyver movie. The opening to the MacGyver This American Life (free to stream) goes a long way towards explaining his continued appeal seventeen years after the show went off the air.

* David Chase's Sopranos follow-up has been announced: it's an epic history of the movie industry beginning in 1913.

* And get your "disrepecting the office" talking points ready: Barack Obama will be the first sitting president to go on The Tonight Show. If only Conan had already taken over...

#2: culture!

* How HBO changed TV.

* Is Sarah Connor canceled?

* Europe names crew for simulated mission to Mars. Devotees may remember that this is strikingly reminiscent of the first episode of The Twilight Zone.

* Examined Life is your crash course in contemporary philosophy.

I'm not suggesting that Taylor set out to sandbag or ironize her subjects in "Examined Life." In fact, I'm quite sure she didn't. But as with Taylor's previous film, "Zizek!" (whose subject, the Slovenian madman Slavoj Zizek, appears here at a London garbage dump, claiming that mankind isn't alienated enough from the natural world), the movie has a philosophical element of its own that is not free of guile. By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O. Trying to rehabilitate the concept of revolution while rowing in the Central Park lake, post-Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt literally runs aground on a half-submerged boulder. I'm far more sympathetic to Hardt's intellectual project than I should admit, but, really, what can you say?

* The great American novel v. women. (Or maybe that's the other way around.)

* Alan Moore v. comic book films. More Moore here and here.

* How they marketed Watchmen: a look back at the original solicits from 1986.

* Gary Westfahl: Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future. Another thing Suvin makes clear in his very good book on science fiction is that if you're expecting science fiction to predict the future you're asking the wrong questions.

* The Indy just announced the winners of their 2009 poetry contest, and once again Jaimee was one of the judges.

* And Neil sends along some optical illusion fun.

True fact: if you took every swear word from The Sopranos and stacked them one top of another, it would reach the Moon.

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.

Science-religion-politics Sunday!

* The Vatican has officially forgiven the late John Lennon for a off-the-cuff joke he made forty-two years ago. Let no one doubt the magnanimity of the Catholic Church.

* The "broken windows" theory has apparently been experimentally verified. Giuliani '12? Via MeFi.

* Science confirms the Livia Soprano Theory of the Universe: it's all just a big nothing. Also via MeFi.

* Science confirms that religion strongly correlates with unhappy lives.

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

* Science confirms that America miraculously became "a center-right nation" the day after Barack Obama won the presidency.

* The Cato Institute confirms "Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival." Not because it won't work, of course, but because it'll work so well as to discredit their kneejerk anti-governmentism forever. More at DKos.

* Who will pray to Bush for clemency? And how many corrupt presidencies do we need in a row before we abolish the damn pardon power?

* Finally, prepare yourself to go deep inside the ant hivemind.

James Hibberd has the Mad Men master plan: five seasons covering a period of ten years, 1960-1969/1970. We'll clearly be working off a Sopranos model, which means we shouldn't necessarily expect each new season to pick up where the last left off. Via AICN, which summarizes thusly:

* The series is designed to run five seasons.

* The show will skip long periods of time between seasons. (Season one concluded in late 1960; season two, premiering July 27, picks up in early 1962.)

* The series will take the employees of Sterling Cooper at least to 1969. Perhaps even 1970, since I'm told Weiner said "10 years."

Design Observer pays homage to AMC's excellent Mad Men, the first season of which Jaimee and I finished up watching on DVD last night. This particular homage is all about Mad Men's depiction of the advertising business—which I suppose is something it's rather good at—but it's really the subdued dystopianism of the show's 1960 Manhattan setting that grabs me. Matthew Weiner (who as Design Observer informs us earned a job on The Sopranos on the basis of his spec script for Mad Men) has a very keen eye for cultural critique, and in accordance with something I once wrote of Terry Gilliam never allows his 1960 to become so reified that we forget the different ways in which we're also talking about the present. There's a nice cartoonishness to the satire that's fun, but also necessary: it functions as a kind of critical prophylactic so that we're never allowed to understand Mad Men as mere history.

The critique of American consumerism is as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it's solid, and I can't think of any other show that's ever been more focused or forceful on the realities of misogyny. This is very good stuff.

This Battlestar Galactica/Office mashup pushes all my buttons on this insomniatastic Friday night. Via MeFi, which also has shocking video of Rainn Wilson as MacGyver, Paulie Walnuts, Captain Picard, and Xena the Warrior Princess.

* Cracked has 7 insane conspiracies that actually happened.

* MetaFilter has a fun post on irrationalities in the stock market like the January effect, the weekend effect, and the Halloween indicator.

* Via Boing Boing, Scientific American tackles the science of orgasm.

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

We here at Gerry Canavan Industries are watching this research with great interest, as our G Spotter™ and CliMax 3000™ products have not yet caught on in the way we might have hoped.

* I forgot to link to Waxy's great compilation of obsessive fanboy supercuts, including such gems as every "What?" ever uttered on Lost, every "Dude" and F-bomb in The Big Lebowski, and every murder from the Sopranos. Below: Sen. Clay Davis.

I don't like showing up this late on the blog, but due to factors including

* class;
* getting what must be my fourth cold in two months;
* what can only be described as the Unfortunate Incident of the Apple Juice in the Nighttime, which has rendered my space bar completely inoperable;

I'm only getting around to blogging now.

Sorry.

Here's some stuff to look at it:

* Lord of the Rings as Property Law.

* Alternate universe baseball.

* Alan Kirby on the death of postmodernism and the birth of pseudomodernism.

Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

* The Valve, re: Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos: What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about?

* Infinite Thought announces a new competition: "Down with Existing Society!" These are the terms:

Each and every one should express in a succinct manner his or her rationally hostile feeling about the current state of affairs.

I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to put together an entry right now, but if I did I'm certain it would probably have a lot to do with our sympathy for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law.

Or else, you know, this:

There's a long and necessary roundtable at The House Next Door on what I have long said is the most pressing cultural question of our age: Which is the greatest TV show of all time, The Sopranos, The Wire, or Deadwood? Still coming down from the last, fantastic season of The Wire, I'm inclined at the moment to give it the nod, on the following grounds:

* The Sopranos went on too long.
* Deadwood was too short.

A Deadwood that received its fourth, apocalyptic season—culminating in the devastating fire that destroys the town in 1879—might have eclipsed The Wire. But until we get it, we're still missing the last act.

And I'm pretty sure The Sopranos, distilled of all the filler, red herrings, and plot diversions—distilled, I'm saying, into essence du Sopranos—pretty easily beats all comers. Take out nearly all of season 4, half of season 5, and the second half of season 6a, and you've got a show that can easily go head-to-head against The Wire. In this sense, for my money The Sopranos is the better show—its valleys may be lower, but its artistic peaks are higher.

But like it or not, we have those superfluous seasons, and we have to take them into account.

With its huge cast of fully fleshed-out characters and total inhabitance of the city of Baltimore, The Wire has no fluff and wastes none of your time. Episode to episode, it's nearly flawless and always utterly pitch-perfect. From a political standpoint, too, if that's your thing, we must concede that its critique of late capitalism is far more devastating than either Deadwood's or The Sopranos's precisely because there is so little fantasy content to distract us from the brutal reality of what we're seeing. The Wire is the thing itself—there's nowhere to run.

But it's a close, close race, and it'll be a long time before anything cracks this top three.

Salon tackles what could well be the ultimate question: Which is the greatest TV show of all time, The Sopranos or The Wire? Somewhere, Deadwood weeps, unmourned and unremembered.

And we're back. A number of people asked me if my bosses at TIP made me take the blog down for the month I was teaching, and the answer is no—it was my own call, based upon the near-certainty of my teenage students reading my blog and bad things happening as a result. (Discretion is the better part of valor, etc. etc.)

In any event, we're back, and I have nearly a month's worth of backed-up links to upload in a single hugely massive and largely incoherent posting. So here goes nothing:

* Jaimee's teacher and friend (and former BCR contributor) Isaac Cates has a new blog, Satisfactory Comics, as do my good friends Eric the Red and Jason Haserodt, currently about a third of the way through their 3000-mile bike trip across America.

* While I was gone Tim had a thought-provoking post up about the 9/11 generation that I wanted to gesture towards as well.

* I don't care what sort of reviews it gets, I'm going to see The Darjeeling Limited as soon as I possibly can. The first trailer's out.

* On the subject of Harry Potter, I feel like I regrettably missed the moment to comment on it, so I'll just point to a slightly spoilery sentence from the Salon review that basically says it all:

As for the ending, and the strange, widespread and literarily autistic obsession with who does and doesn't die in it, suffice to say that some sympathetic characters are killed and that everything -- the configuration of the horcruxes, the true colors of Severus Snape, the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort -- turns out in the only way it possibly could if you thought about it for more than two seconds.

If you're feeling especially literarily autistic, however, J.K. has even more unnecessary epilogue for you to chew on.

* There's also something to Megan McArdle's take on the economics of Harry Potter, in which she argues that it's J.K. Rowling's failure to ever really think through the world she's created that keeps the franchise from ever reaching the heights achieved by J.R.R. Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis.

* The State is finally coming to DVD. Toothbrush! You came back to me! And you've started a family.

* Joyce Carol Oates reviews Austerlitz, among other things, in the New York Review of Books, while Geoffrey O'Brien takes on the conclusion to The Sopranos.

* Here's the full text of Alan Moore's awesome proposal for the ultimate D.C. Comics miniseries, Twilight of the Superheroes.

* Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks.

* The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Vol. II.

* They solved checkers.

* Douglas Adams, "Is There An Artifical God?"

* The Murakami Dictionary.

* Post-mortem photography, the absolute creepiest thing the Victorians were up to.

* Awesome maps (as always) from Strange Maps: China's alleged 1418 world map and Inverted World.

* A Brief History of the Lobotomy.

* Say a prayer for Bat Boy, wherever he is: The Weekly World News has shut down.

* Carl "Tinker" West: the most influential New Jerseyan you never heard of.

* Conventional wisdom has it that people who commit suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge travel from around the globe to end their lives in San Francisco Bay, but a new study of death leaps shows that the average jumper is a 41-year-old white man from the Bay Area.

* And, last but not least, some games to waste time by, especially now that you can't play checkers anymore: The Four Color Problem and Gravity Pods.

If you've actually read this far, the only suitable reward is this photo of my Phantom Fiction class, the TIPiest bunch of TIPsters who ever TIPed. You'll note the devil horns; I taught them that.

(Accidentally.)

Did Tony Soprano kill the novel? Of course not, but there's something to this, all the same:

And so we return to the central question: why is this television show referred to by so many literate viewers as a novel? The answer lies inside the twisted dynamic of the form's readership. The American novel - unlike its French, German, or even British counterparts - was not designed to run on small drip fuel. It begs for big shelf space, bulging reading groups, room to be talked about. Look back at the past 70 years of American fiction. All of the major novels - Richard Wright's Black Boy, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jack Kerouac's On the Road - were big bestsellers upon publication; today, all of them have sold well over a million copies, without a turbo boost from Oprah. In real numbers, their readership is still dwarfed by the number of Americans who regularly watched The Sopranos or even Seinfeld, but factor in the far smaller number of people who read fiction and you can see that these authors have achieved market penetration.

In so doing, these novels became part of our reality. "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes," wrote William S Burroughs in a poem memorialising his friend. It might take 30 years, as it did with Cormac McCarthy's work, to get recognised; or it might happen instantaneously, the way Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance flew off the shelves. But no novel will ever be read simultaneously, with the exception of Harry Potter's final lap, which comes soon, the way people watch movies or television.

This doesn't mean the novel is dead, however, as so many literary Kevorkians, fingers on the pulse of a wax corpse, like to claim. In the ranks of American novelists today, there are writers with plenty of lively ideas, from Denis Johnson to Ha Jin, all of whom have major autumn publications on the way. The problem is that the audience just might not be there.

San Francisco is a city without graves. In 1900, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance prohibiting burials within the city limits. In 1912, the board announced its further intention to eliminate the city’s previously existing cemeteries, and in 1914 removal notices were sent to all burial sites, declaring them “a public nuisance and a menace and detriment to the health and welfare of city dwellers.”

...Still, even the most ardent modernist might feel some misgivings about a rejection of the dead as complete as San Francisco’s. And such misgivings reflect, however dimly, a deep political insight—for a city without cemeteries has failed at one of the first reasons for having cities at all. Somewhere in those banished graveyards was a metaphysical ground for politics, and buried in them was a truth that too much of modern political theory seems to have forgotten: The living give us crowds. The dead give us communities.

Interesting essay on death, community, and everything at First Things. There's some good stuff here, even if I don't quite agree with all of it. For instance, this:

Heidegger is surely right that death belongs at the center of philosophy, but he has always seemed to me fundamentally wrong that the death involved is the death of ourselves. We need a new phenomenological description of the human condition that asserts exactly the opposite: Anxiety about one’s own death is less fundamental than grief at the death of others—-just as every parent knows that fear for our own lives can be less compelling than fear for the lives of others.

is wrong only insofar as grief at the death of others and anxiety about one's own death are so inextricably bound that it's impossible to tell them apart. Parenting (especially in societies where infant mortality has been largely checked) can be seen as a kind of double denial of death, both your own ("Even if I die, a piece of me will live on in my child") and the child's (who, no matter what you do, will still die eventually anyway). Hence our horror (for instance) at Tony Soprano's mother, a nihilist with no such illusions—proclaiming "It's all one big nothing," she actively seeks to have her own child murdered because she is angry that she has grown old—or at a woman who admits she loves her spouse more than her children. Being a parent hasn't sublimated their sense of self-interest, as we've all agreed it should.

Still more scene-by-scene analyses of the last scene from The Sopranos at BobHarris.com and A Lesson A Day, both focused on the more pessimistic interpretation that I've come to favor. Via MetaFilter and The House Next Door, the latter of which also has the first in its new weekly series recapping John from Cincinnati. Having seen the first two episodes of John, I'm intrigued enough to keep watching, though I'm not sure I quite know where it's going. When I do, I imagine I'll have more to say about it.

New York Magazine takes a look back on eight years of The Sopranos, particularly Tony's failed relationship with therapy and the way this dovetails with the show's general themes of pessimism and bleak despair. The money quote has a brief reference to the final episode and in particular the final scene, so if by some miracle you've managed to go this long unspoiled, be warned:

It’s understandable many viewers wish they could go back in time, back to the first season, which ended on a comparably heartwarming note, when the show seemed like it might be just a metaphor about the value of family. A thunderstorm was drenching New Jersey, the electricity was out; Tony and Carmela picked up the kids in their car, and they were wheeling around town, looking for a place to land. They wound up at Artie Bucco’s new restaurant, where Artie, after a moment of hesitation, invited them in. By candlelight, they shared some pasta made on the gas stove in the back.

Tony was surrounded by members of both of his families. At one table, Silvio and Paulie hashed out the revelation that Tony was in therapy, preparing for the new régime now that Junior was in prison. Chris and Adriana canoodled at the bar. And Tony raised his glass: “I’d like to propose a toast, to my family. Someday soon, you’re gonna have families of your own. And if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this. That were good. Cheers!”

This was the scene that Chase repurposed for the finale. With the family gathered once again for a meal, A.J. harks back to what used to be, saying “You once told us to try to focus on the things that are good.” But this final scene has none of the earlier’s warmth, no sense of shelter. Instead, we see a family of bad guys—dim, dwindled, corrupted, contentedly sharing a plate of onion rings. And then the door slams shut.

(Via Shankar)

Heather Havrilesky talks The Sopranos finale at Salon—in the process debunking some of the more popular urban legends that have already sprung up around it—while Terry Eagleton's new book helpfully explains the meaning of life.

NJ.com prepares for its highest-traffic day ever with Alan Sepinwall's exclusive post-finale interview with David Chase.

"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

I have to agree; there's no narrative space left for a movie, which would only serve to ruin what was best about the finale. I hope he's being on the level here, though "I never say never" really does scan as almost offensively coy.

As promised, my "Best of The Sopranos" soundtrack. Once again, as a courtesy to those who (despite belief) didn't watch the show, I'll hide the track listing behind a [+/-].

There's YouTube links for nearly all of the songs inside, but watch out for (relatively minor) spoilers: management will not be held responsible.

1. "Woke Up This Morning (HBO Mix)" (A3) The version that opens the show is almost impossible to find, and all the other versions stink. Ultimately I had to gank a proper version of the song off YouTube using Firefox's Get Video extension and SUPER. But it's mine now.

2. "American Girl" (Tom Petty). This, from "Join the Club", plays in the background as Carmela talks to Tony in his coma (in one of Edie Falco's best scenes).

Here it is live from 1979.

3. "Take Me for a Little While" (Dave Edmunds). Credits song for "Everybody Hurts" from season four (the one where Artie Bucco attempts suicide).

4. "Coffee & TV" (Blur). One of two songs from "Pine Barrens." It's not especially pivotal—I think it's shown on the TV AJ's watching—but it's a good song. YouTube's got the video.

5. "Living on a Thin Line" (The Kinks). Credits song from "University," in which Ralphie kills his stripper goomah. YouTube.

6. "If I Were a Carpenter" (Bobby Darin). Credits song from "Unidentified Black Males" from season 5 (an episode where not much happens; the major event is Finn spotting Vito in the parking lot of the construction site). Jaimee and I have been joking about this song for years, so of course it had to go on.

Behold Bobby Darin live.

7. "Love Hurts" (Nazareth). Carmela sings this during the karaoke sequence in "Sopranos Home Moves." YouTube.

8. "Oh Girl" (The Chi-Lites). This is the song that Tony, melancholy over Irina's moving on, sings along with in the car in a classic sequence from season 4, before he ultimately forces his way into Zellman's apartment and attacks him with a belt. I was hoping the clip from the Sopranos would be on YouTube, but no dice; here's a video anyway.

9. "Don't Bring Me Down." (Eric Burdon & The Animals). This is from "Down Neck" in season one, though sadly I don't remember what's happening on the screen at the time. YouTube.

10. "Gotta Serve Somebody" (Bob Dylan). From "House Arrest" in Season 2 (the episode in which Junior gets his finger stuck in the garbage disposal, one of the series's all-time top-ten most tense moments). Here's Dylan live in 1980.

11. "State Trooper" (Bruce Springsteen). I think this is the only Bruce song they ever used, though I may be wrong about that (and Chris makes a pretty blatant reference to "Born to Run" in "Long Term Parking"). This is the song that closes out season one. YouTube has only covers.

12. "Comfortably Numb" (Pink Floyd). Referenced twice in the last five episodes; it's the song Tony is singing as he walks down the stairs at the beginning of "Walk Like a Man" and the song Chris puts on the radio right before the car accident in "Kennedy and Heidi." YouTube clip from The Wall.

13. "More Than a Feeling" (Boston). Apparently this song is playing while Tony has a panic attack in "House Arrest." YouTube.

14. "All Right Now" (Free). This is one of the songs that plays while Tony and Chris reconnect in season 6a's "The Ride." YouTube.

15. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" (The Kinks). The credits song for "Cold Cuts" from season 5, as a triumphant Tony leaves Janice's house after causing her to explode with anger. Great song. Here's just a taste from YouTube.

16. "I Saved the World Today" (The Eurythmics). Credits song from "Knight in White Satin Armor," the second-to-last episode of season two. Hey, hey, I saved the world today...

17. "Gloria" (Van Morrison). The other song from "Pine Barrens," playing over an image of (who else?) Gloria Trillo. Apropos of nothing, I should mention that I saw Tom Petty in concert when he was using this song to close his live shows in the late 1990s, and it was one of the most fun versions of any song I've ever heard. G-L-O-R-I-A...

18. "High Fidelity" (Elvis Costello & The Attractions). Credits song from the first episode of season three, "Mr. Ruggerio's Neighborhood," over the image of the lamp the FBI has bugged (ultimately futilely) in Tony's basement. YouTube.

19. "Glad Tidings" (Van Morrison). In one of my favorite montages in the show's history, this song plays at the end of season five, as a bear-like Tony emerges from the woods. YouTube has completely failed me here.

20. "Don't Stop Believin'" (Journey). Obviously. Here's Family Guy to take us home.