Who Asked Me?

HBO’s new series “True Detective” has a dripping backwoods bayou setting, spookily appropriate opening funeral dirge by The Handsome Family, and musical selections hand-picked by T Bone Burnett including Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam and Wu-Tang Clan. Woody Harrelson, one half of a querulous detective team, brings a cocksure “No Country For Old Men” Texas mumble (despite going for Louisiana) and an age-adjusted swagger reminiscent of “White Men Can’t Jump.” Matthew McConaughey’s broody smoke suggests Matt Damon doing his McConaughey impression, talk-whispering “sure I dropped the thirty-eight pounds for ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ but I still look damn good with my shirt off.” There’s something for everyone – beautiful young women who get naked and say improper things, satanic ritual and symbolism, antler-donning murder victims, and dusty mid-afternoon roadside bars with sun peering through the cracks and Kris Kristofferson’s “Casey’s Last Ride” on the juke. They don’t miss a beat. McConaughey’s “time is a flat-circle” nihilism is paired with the two actors playing parts that cover a seventeen year span and they pull it off effectively. There’s little question that “True Detective” isn’t that bad, but is it all that good?

That may come down to taste and whether you prefer straight narratives or thematic horror mysteries requiring a bit of homework after the one hour weekly class adjourns. Topping this list of take-home work are the multiple references to a ‘yellow king’ in the series which is a nod to an 1895 book of macabre shorts by the American writer Robert W Chambers called “The King in Yellow.” The title references a fictional play used as a motif running through several of the stories and said to bring madness and despair to anyone who reads it. “Ah, well – that explains that” some will say, then busily continue their research before next Sunday night rolls around. Others – perhaps those preferring a good Hank Williams song that sums itself up nicely in the first verse – will say “fuck this.” Either way, the show serves useful purpose as a blowhard detector for anyone claiming complete understanding after the first go-round.

My one-man jury is still out and I’ll reserve final judgement for the last episode. If nothing else the show has been a reminder of the effectiveness of a well-scored soundtrack. Like “The Sopranos” which followed David Chase’s singular musical vision, “True Detective” features T Bone Burnett’s steady hand throughout. He uses Lucinda Williams “Are You Alright” beautifully in episode four and closes an epically spooky final scene with McConaughey in episode five with the intro to The Bosnian Rainbows’ “Eli” – disturbing enough to have me checking behind the couch as the titles rolled. But all of this stylized richness also runs the risk of swallowing the narrative whole. At its center “True Detective” has some compellingly solid stuff about the sometimes futile search for meaning. In the opener Woody Harrelson opines on McConaughey’s character, whose troubled past includes a collapsed marriage and stint in a psychiatric hospital after his three year-old daughter is hit and killed by a car. “Past a certain age a man without a family can be a bad thing.” The implicit irony is that Harrelson’s man with a family – a character who cheats on and neglects his wife and two daughters – is an even worse thing. But Harrelson’s cowboy philosophizing pales in comparison to McConaughey’s soliloquies on nothingness and the illusion of self, epitomized by his take on studying the faces of various female murder victims:

“You know what you see? They welcomed it .. not at first, but right there in the last instant. It’s an unmistakable relief because they were afraid and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go. They saw, in that last nanosecond, what they were. That you, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will and you could just let go. To realize that all your life –all you know, all you love, all you hate, all your memory, all your pain– it was all the same thing, all the same dream. A dream you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person..”

Heady stuff and well-delivered by an actor on a particularly strong career streak. Where all of this nothingness, intersecting timelines and obscure literary references might lend an effective metaphor for life’s milieu, it also walks a tightrope when it comes to delivering the goods in episodic television. Most of the buzz among viewers has seemed to center on what the payoff is going to be, how it will all be tied together. But how do you lend meaning and definition to a narrative that emphasizes their absence? If “True Detective” wraps up neatly it will be a disappointment to those enjoying its rich ambiguity. If it persists with obscurity there will be others asking “what the fuck?” Either way it conjures the image of McConaughey, carving up sixteen ounce Lone Star beer cans in the shape of people and cooly asserting that it don’t mean a thing.

As a Northern California sports fan living in New York, I’ve become familiar with something commonly known as the East Coast Media Bias – a tendency for major outlets like ESPN to ignore anything happening with a ball west of the Mississippi. It registered on my first day in Brooklyn, 2003, when I picked up a late edition of the New York Times to check the box scores for the Giants-Dodgers game the previous evening. “Los Angeles – San Francisco : night game.” This was all it said .. no score, no explanation, nothing. The implication was clear: those teams left in ’58 and nobody cares what they’re doing now. Sure, there was the occasional story about the hated Barry Bonds back then as he was ramping up to pass the great Babe Ruth (and eventually Henry Aaron) for the home run record. And in subsequent years some attention was thrown the Giants’ way for their two World Series victories. But as far as day to day sports coverage went (and still goes) I was out of luck unless a New York team was traveling west.

All of which is a long way of getting around to how shell-shocked Richard Sherman must have felt when he woke up Monday morning. Sherman is the talented and talkative cornerback who plays for the Seahawks, an equally talented but decidedly small-market football team in Seattle. If west coast teams already have a chip on their shoulder because of the New York media bias it has to be doubly bad for Seattle and their fans, playing in the same division as the storied San Francisco 49ers. The teams have been neck and neck for the past few seasons mirroring each other with strong, hard-hitting defenses. Seattle has been nearly unstoppable at home. But let’s face it – Tony Bennett never left his heart there and outside of rain, coffee, and a high suicide rate, the town isn’t exactly on most must-see lists. So there was plenty of build-up to the NFC championship game on Sunday featuring the Seahawks and 49ers despite the fact that a lot of people still didn’t know who Richard Sherman was. Being a Niner fan I was already more than familiar with the guy and his mouth, but it was quite the phenomenon as about fifty million other television viewers received a crash course in his special brand of id-venting.

The game was a good one but something changed for me early in the fourth quarter when the 49ers’ linebacker NaVorro Bowman suffered a sickening knee injury, replayed endlessly on FOX for good measure. The Niners were still in it but I didn’t care anymore. Things got sloppy after that; chances for a controlled scoring drive were squandered by quarterback Colin Kaepernick and he threw a key interception. It ended with a final surge downfield and a somewhat forced attempt at a touchdown pass with thirty seconds left, perhaps against better judgement and to Richard Sherman’s corner of the end zone. Sherman made a great leaping play on the ball tipping it into his teammate’s hands for the interception and win. It was an opportunity for the guy to do one of two things: celebrate with his fellow players and allow the multiple slow-motion angles to speak for his greatness, or go with his M.O. of running his mouth. To both his credit and demise, Sherman stuck with the latter. He immediately got in the face of the intended receiver Michael Crabtree, slapping his behind and offering a taunting handshake. He made a choking gesture, putting his hands around his throat. But he saved the pure gold for his post-game interview a few minutes later where the intensity of his anger (despite the win) was palpable. He proclaimed himself the greatest in the game without mention of his team and went after Crabtree as a “sorry” receiver. This wasn’t Terrell Owens in tears and overcome with emotion after making a game-winning catch against the Packers. And it wasn’t Peyton Manning shattering the single season passing yards record and deflecting all credit to his team, either. It was a guy going nuts and proclaiming his singular greatness to fifty million people while making sure to get in how much the opposing player sucked.

There were excuses for Sherman’s behavior. Crabtree had supposedly dissed him at an Arizona charity event in the off-season when Sherman attempted to shake his hand. But this wasn’t an isolated post-game outburst for Sherman and his on-camera record is notable, whether taunting Tom Brady, accusing haplessly pompous ESPN commentator Skip Bayless of sucking at life, or provoking the Redskins’ Trent Williams to make good on his promise – “I’ma gonna punch you in the face” – after their game last year. Some, including Sherman himself, noted that Sunday’s incident was in the heat of an adrenaline-fueled moment minutes after he’d made the play of the game. Yet he still had the tact and good sense to reiterate Crabtree’s mediocrity and his own greatness an hour later in a calmer, sit-down session with the media. Things went viral by the following morning with most Internet outlets seeming to defend Sherman’s outburst(s) as ‘good television’ and many implying that the backlash had much to do with race. (Sherman, Crabtree, and the majority of both the Niners’ and Seahawks’ rosters are black.) But the reader response to these posts went in the other direction ranging from those proclaiming that Sherman qualified as a jerk regardless of his skin color to out and out racist vitriol. It’s an unfortunate fact that stirring a national hornets’ nest typically includes letting some sub-human hornets out, too. An article on the sports website Deadspin asserted that a public personality (in America) can be black, arrogant or talented, but never any more than two of these traits at the same time. I don’t know if this is true, but as a 49er fan I’d still like to reserve the right to dislike Richard Sherman. If he was on my team I’m sure I’d be glad he made that play, but a part of me would probably wish he’d learn to shut up on occasion, too. Perhaps that makes me racist, but like Richard Sherman I believe it’s healthier to put it out there for discussion.

If I had to put all of this under one encompassing canopy it wouldn’t be about Sherman’s race, talent, outspokenness, Compton upbringing, feud with Crabtree, Stanford education or impressive dreadlocks. It would be about the guy’s age .. twenty-five years old. Jerk or saint, supremely talented or B-squad backup, not many people get to be the center of a national maelstrom simply by running their mouth as they’ve always done throughout a short if eventful career. Putting this in proper context would be an impossible task for anyone, never mind a twenty-five year old man. It will be interesting to catch up with the guy in a few years to get his perspective. Chances are he’ll still have a lot to say.

“If it looks like an antenna and acts like an antenna, then it is an antenna.” This according to affably urbane Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, angered at the ‘official’ proclamation that New York’s new World Trade Center is the tallest building in the country. The needle on top was declared something other than an antenna, thereby allowing the structure to surpass the Windy City’s Willis (formerly Sears) Tower. This is one dogfight that you might have figured the famously profane politician would have let go, but at five foot seven he perhaps has a more personal investment in the matter. Outgoing New York mayor Mike Bloomberg is only an inch taller than Emanuel but the new guy, Bill de Blasio, is a soaring six foot five. It isn’t too much of a stretch (insert winky emoticon) to imagine Rahm pacing his bedroom at three in the morning, fuming over that “m**herf**cking thing” on top of that “c*cks*cking building.” New York seems mostly oblivious to the matter, or perhaps slightly amused – like Dominique Wilkins watching Spud Webb steal his title at the NBA slam dunk competition. If I were Emanuel’s shrink I’d skip the Freudian bullshit and advise him to turn his ambition toward becoming the next mayor of New York. Perhaps it’s because I’m of average height, but diminutive stature isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Bloomberg or LaGuardia.

It made me happy, for lack of a less appropriate word, up at four a.m. on a recent, chilly morning and watching the glowing, blue signal light atop that spire, or needle, or whatever the heck it is. The upper portion of the World Trade building is visible from my living room window and I caught the view almost by accident, noting profoundly “wow .. that thing is way up there.” The building’s erection (again with the winky emoticon) has mirrored my own stay in New York and progressed at a slow and steady pace. In rare moments of kinder self-evaluation I might say the same about myself. That night I’d returned from a Van Morrison show at the Garden where the 68 year old Irish fireplug had again done well by music critic Greil Marcus’s famous quote (“no white man sings like Van Morrison.”) After the show I grabbed a late night snack at a midtown bar and caught the second half of the 49er game on Monday Night Football. Cold night, Van Morrison, 49ers, quesadillas and a shot of Jameson, Midtown New York City. They say it’s the little things and, Rahm Emanuel not withstanding, they’re probably right. Though I might amend it to “the little things in a big city” for added sublimity .. sometimes that really hits the mark.

I was watching an episode of Stephen Merchant’s new tolerably decent HBO show “Hello Ladies” the other night, standard fare cringe-comedy of the sort he’s been doing with Ricky Gervais for the last decade. Merchant has yet to reach Gervais’s saturation level and as such hasn’t veered off into ‘Derek’ territory – the latter’s latest TV comedy-drama about a ‘special’ volunteer member of a nursing home staff who enlightens all via uncalculated displays of ‘kindness.’ Ugh.  But more on that another time. There was a transitional scene in the ‘Ladies’ episode where Merchant exits a pool party he’s planned because the invited Hollywood models and actresses have failed to show. They then, of course, all arrive on cue shortly after his departure. In order to explain why nobody phones or texts to alert him to the change of events they had to insert a scene where a neighbor woman throws his cell phone in the swimming pool. It’s only later, once he’s home on his laptop computer, that someone breaks through via a pop-up message to let him know what’s going on.

Louis CK had a brilliant bit on a recent Conan show that starts with him explaining why he won’t get his kid a cell phone and develops into a dissertation on the absence of healthy despair and sadness in modern culture. “You need to build an ability,” he reasons “to just be yourself and not be doing something .. and this is what the phones are taking away.” He goes on to explain that “underneath everything in your life there’s that thing .. that empty .. forever-empty ..” Cut to CK driving in his car as Springsteen’s ‘Jungleland’ comes on and his instant urge to join the murderous legions texting while driving in order to not feel lonely. He describes the powerful instinct to get the phone and “write ‘hi’ to, like, fifty people” sifting through the uncool ones until he finds the appropriate response to alleviate his crushing sadness. Instead he pulls safely over to the side of the road and cries hard. While I’m not sure I agree with his alternative method — I once had the “getting it out of you” analogy for intensely indulged grief explained as the psychological equivalent to running on a broken leg — I do think he’s on to something. Perhaps the more reasonable alternative is to just keep driving while letting yourself listen to the end of the song and shedding a few unmanly tears for no one to see.

CK’s humor follows the trail blazed by George Carlin and borders on straight-up pathos, save the appropriate comic observations. The laughs often come defensively; his observations are so uncomfortably accurate that responding any other way would involve pulling the car over. Where Carlin evolved into a loquaciously dark, almost confrontational persona, CK sticks with an edgy sort of hopelessness with homicidal id on full display. He can reference topics like filicide and necrophilia with the same ease Jerry Seinfeld talks about Superman. He loses me at times when he indulges in the morbidly unattractive elements to middle aged physicality and decline, but always seems to right the ship with some insightfully funny and brutally honest shit. He had another bit recently about parents at their children’s school dance recital, none of whom are viewing the event straight-on but rather on the screens of their iPhones and iPads held in front of their faces and causing all to look like a group-shot from the witness protection program. “In a million years you’re not going to watch videos of your kid doing shit you missed the first time it happened.” It’s in these unscripted moments that he’s most eloquent. He goes on to say that the parents just post this stuff to Facebook, where it goes unwatched by legions of others who see only the first frame and occasionally comment. You can prove this to yourself, he concludes, by splicing in an extended video of your asshole shortly after the dance intro and noting how nobody notices. Personally, I don’t think he needs to wrap up what’s already a brilliantly funny bit by going for the huge laughs with broad humor .. but it works.

Got called “faggot” by an urban street-tough on the subway the other day. His foot was in the middle of the aisle and I stepped on it getting up to offer my seat to an older woman. “Excuse me, faggot” he said, all bad-ass and hard-boiled. I had earphones in and I don’t think he figured I’d heard him. I gave him zero consideration until I sat down again in the middle of the car and started thinking on it. Then I got an inexplicable urge to see his face; to find out what he looked like. I’d only been mildly aware of him previously, listening to him spit out threatening expletives at his video game. I got up and walked over to where he’d been but he was gone .. the entire incident filed away in the drawers of civic minutia.

Not sure what I might have done. Nothing about it felt particularly threatening but I likely underestimate my age and inability to take care of myself. New York isn’t the city it once was but it isn’t Mayberry either. Mostly I was curious about his choice of epithet. ‘Faggot’ seemed particularly weak in light of other potential slurs. ‘Grandpa’, ‘Slacker’, ‘Yankee Fan’ and ‘Facebook Over-Poster’ all would’ve done the trick. Later, near Union Square, I stopped to sign a petition for gay rights. I support the cause but am typically too up in my head to address someone with a clipboard. Not that it was a noble gesture and means of evening the score with my subway friend. “Zing – take that young urban street tough!” But I allowed myself to feel that way momentarily while ignoring my Bernie Goetz scene revisitation. These days I’ll accept false credit for things even if constructed entirely within the parameters of my own head. It’s a small perk in exchange for the endless shit I beat myself up over.

***

Been watching “Boardwalk Empire”, catching up with past seasons. It’s above average but falls back on stylistic devices, graphic violence, and attractive, naked women with Zelda Fitzgerald hairstyles. Granted, this has kept me watching. Steve Buscemi is a good leading man; believable both as a Sad Sack loner and powerful gangster kingpin. He’s proof that one needn’t be physically imposing nor handsome to possess commanding screen presence. ‘Handsome’ occasionally seems something of a handicap in terms of sustaining superior episodic drama. It worked for Jon Hamm in the early seasons of “Mad Men” but now, as we delve deeper into Don Draper’s psyche via innumerable flashback sequences, it’s become more difficult to remember why we care. Sure, this guy looks great in a suit and he gets laid a lot. But now we’re expected to have empathy because this doesn’t provide him with the answers to life’s mysteries? Have another Canadian Club and watch January Jones take her clothes off. I prefer to watch Buscemi, alone in his study with an uncomfortable collar, wool suit, and that Bugs Bunny mug reflecting the pain of a thousand disappointments. Both shows romanticize eras when smoking and drinking were acceptable day-long indulgences. There’s the occasional nod to high blood pressure and cirrhosis of the liver, but it’s really about how cool everyone looks in tailored vests with Lucky Strikes and whiskey tumblers.

***

I’ve been looking at Oregon real estate, albeit from a great distance and via the Internet. It’s a long-shot but so are most things at one time, including those that come to fruition. I wanted to see what one gets for the price he pays for a six hundred square foot, junior one bedroom apartment in New York. The results were eye opening: 2000 square feet, ocean-front property, multiple bedrooms, separate studio and guest house, etc. But the town I was scoping has a population of six thousand, many of them retirees. It isn’t the kind of place where you can walk down the block and grab a calzone. On the other hand, there’s no subway and more distance between you and the guy calling you ‘faggot.’ I figure they just burn it on your lawn or carve it in to a tree. And you can have a dog and a bar b cue. It’s a nice thought anyway, and something on which to conclude this exercise in three-dot meandering.