Story Telling

When the mood strikes me to randomly watch a DVD I often turn to the first two seasons of Alias (the only seasons I own, or particularly want to). If you dig the schtick of the show, and I obviously do, it's really well made and goes down smooth. Usually, though, when I intend to watch an isolated episode I get sucked into watching an extended run of them, and that's happened this weekend. I noticed something this time, though, the first time it occurred to me consciously.

Alias tends to invert the traditional structure of a television episode. Continuing dramas have evolved through (and evolved into) a number of storytelling formats, but the main story of each episode has a similar dramatic arc which loosely or closely follows the canonical "three act" structure. "Act" doesn't mean a literal act in a play or a complete segment between commercial breaks; a TV show with four commercial breaks or a Shakespeare play has five discrete segments, and the storytelling is molded to invest each act with its own dramatic pulse. The "three act" structure is more of a storytelling principle wherein the dramatic issue is presented, escalated, and then resolved. The Star Wars movies are a good example of how this works, if you imagine each movie to represent one "act". The example has the convenience of illustrating how each "act" - in this case each movie - has its own independent dramatic structure that replicates the presentation/escalation/resolution arc on a smaller scale. This is necessary to provide some sense of resolution and closure to a particular installment; Empire ends with a lot of balls in the air (because by that point it was clear that Lucas would get to make a third film), but it's more tied up than if it was, say, the first part of a two-part television show and ended on a cliffhanger with the words "To Be Continued..."

A show on American network TV is constrained by the imposition of commercial breaks at regular intervals; each between-commercials segment is treated in TV parlance as an act, and many if not most shows attempt to mold all the acts but the last one into a modified miniature of the "three act" structure. A problem is presented and escalated, but we go to commercial before resolution as an incentive to keep you watching through the ad break; when we come back, the resolution of the previous act occurs and we start the cycle again, until the final act of the show wraps up the whole hour's worth of drama. The art of writing scripts that lend themselves to compelling "act outs" is one of the major skills required for television work.

So we've seen how drama, and especially TV shows, take the storytelling concept of the "three act" structure and continually replicate it, with necessary modifications, at every level of division. It's sort of like a fractal in that at each level of magnification it replicates the complexity and (in a Mandelbrot set, IIRC) the actual shape of the larger structure. Television shows that explicitly engage in seasonal arcs, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or most seasons of The Sopranos, also map this structure over the length of their 22 or 13 episodes. On Buffy, the first third, more or less, of episodes set up the pieces in play for a given season, the middle escalates the dramatic action, and the final third, more or less (usually a little less) drive towards resolution. One of the arts of crafting a season-long story is having all this happen at a satisfying pace; there's a balancing act between on the one hand tying off the resolution too soon or too slowly so that the last few episodes drag, and on the other hand delaying so much resolution that the final hour is overstuffed and feels like its solutions came out of nowhere, abruptly.

ANYWAY. Alias eschews the season-by-season story structure (the single biggest paradigm shift in the show happens in the middle of Season Two) but as a continuous drama it clearly draws from the tradition of similarly-minded shows which meld aspects of the soap opera format (where continuous development of relationship-driven plotlines is paramount) and the anthology show format where each episode is a closed box. The Twilight Zone is the ultimate anthology show since it had no continuing characters other than the narrator, but for these purposes procedural-type shows like Dragnet or CSI can be considered as exemplars. On CSI, with the exception of a few recurring antagonists, the "A" story of each episode is a closed-off arc with a defined resolution, but the sub-plots unfold over multi-episode, sometimes season- or series-long arcs (Grissom's deafness, his relationship with Sara Sidle, etc.) The dominance of this form of storytelling goes back at least to The X-Files and probably also draws from Twin Peaks and various 80s cop shows, neither of which I'm familiar with.

Such with Alias: each episode deals with independent missions, but they weave in and out of longer story arcs - Sidney's relationship with and understanding of her father and her mother, the mysteries around Rambaldi, her relationship with Vaughn, etc. Alias was, however, a somewhat notoriously cliffhanger-driven show, which brings me to the point which instigated this post. Imagine a continuing episodic drama's "A" stories as a sine wave, with the crests as the points of heightened drama and the valleys as their resolutions. In most shows, the episode breaks are aligned with the valleys. Alias' method of generating its incessant cliffhangers (seriously, I've just watched episodes two through eleven of Season One in the last few days, and I think there've been three episodes that didn't end with some variant of "How's Sydney going to escape this dangerous situation?") shifts the episode breaks to happen over the crests of the sine wave. Another way to look at it is that the entire show is structured as though its individual episodes were acts of one episode, the week between episodes were a commercial break, and therefore dramatic resolution were disrupted and delayed until we're back from commercial/back next week. The standard Alias episode runs resolution/presentation/escalation. This works pretty well on DVD, but I can understand part of why the show struggled to establish a solid fan base and why network executives eventually mandated more isolated episodes. The cliffhangers were there on the assumption by the showrunners that they'd drive up viewership, but by continually denying a resolution coterminus with an episode's conclusion, the show frustrates (and undoubtedly alienates) the natural dramatic experience we've all been conditioned to expect and enjoy.

In other words, you've got to really enjoy the show's schtick to deal with the weird inverted way it built its episodes.

I wonder, incidentally, where the breaks were in, say, the serialized publications of Dickens' novels. Did he just write until he reached his page count for a given installation and stop wherever necessary, or did he craft each installment to have its own dramatic arc?

Why I'm Not A Believer

If you want moral castigation over the Edwards affair revelations you can find them in many many elsewheres.

One particular tack of criticism and disapproval that does catch my eye is the idea, which I endorse, that this retroactively taints the Edwards candidacy. (As someone who was a fan of said candidacy, this matters to me.) If Edwards knew the information about his affair was floating around at the same time he was gearing up for a campaign, he either had to know that it was quite likely this information would eventually come to light, or he was delusional. These things always get uncovered. If he was delusional, that's no good. If he knew there was a great likelihood of discovery, that's no good either. The revelation of an affair would have, most seem to agree, destroyed his campaign had he become the Democratic nominee. To pursue the presidency even when doing so raised the risk that his own personal foibles would submarine an otherwise extremely strong opportunity for the Democrats to regain control of the White House indicates a great deal of arrogance and selfishness. (Or, otherwise, delusions and/or naiveté.)

I'm not interested in discussing whether this apparent reality of our political culture is a good thing (I don't think it is). I'm also not interested in discussing whether this standard is fairly applied; McCain cheated on his first wife, and that doesn't seem to do any harm to his candidacy, but I do believe that he'd be seriously damaged if it was revealed that he was stepping out on his current wife. Fair or not, stupid or not (unfair and stupid), this seems to be the situation we've been dealt. (Clinton is an interesting case/exception. For one thing, he was already the president and already had the fact that a majority of the people liked him being the president in his back pocket at the time of the Lewinsky scandal. Furthermore, as others have been pointed out, Clinton had been so relentlessly attacked for less well substantiated instances of adultery and general lasciviousness, both by serious political opponents and, incessantly, by late night talk show hosts, that the power of the exposure was severely depleted. Even though in fact it was a new revelation, it felt like something we all already knew, anyway, and had learned to live with.)

What I am interested in mentioning is why, despite my disappointment with Edwards' arrogance and selfishness, I'm neither surprised nor disillusioned: I don't trust people who run for president. This is why even though I like Obama, will vote for him, think and hope he'll be more of a good president than not, and honestly think that he can do a lot to improve and advance social ... attitudes in this country, I don't think of him - can't think of him - as a revolutionary figure, as someone in whom to unreservedly believe, a Great Hope, or any of the aspirational - and, some Republicans would say, quasi-messianic - drapery with which he's been provided: he's actually running for president, and I don't believe (in) people who run for president.

It's possible that there was a point in my life when I thought it might be cool to be the president. This definitely would have been before I had any understanding of what it might be like to be the president. I have, today, less than no desire for the presidency. And, even if I had a desire to somehow magically be the president, I look at the process necessary for becoming the president and I can't begin to stomach it. And even if the campaign was no obstacle to my gastrointestinal fortitude (and how could it not be?!) the general and generic compromises and life choices and ways of presenting yourself necessary to even get to the stage of viable candidacy ... it's distasteful, all the way down. I want not part of it. It's, in my opinion, all extremely ugly and dirty and while I'm glad, I suppose that someone wants the job, I can't imagine a normal, well-adjusted person wanting the job.

I always hold room for the possibility that I'm unusual or weird (shut up!) in this regard as in many others. But the idea of running for president is so uniquely foul to me that I can't fathom how it could appeal to anyone except the selfish, arrogant, and frankly the power-hungry. That's not to say that there aren't good people who are selfish, arrogant, and power-hungry, or that the selfish, arrogant, and power-hungry (whether "good people" or not) can't make good presidents. But I can't find it in my to trust in someone so patently different from myself. That Obama even wants to be the president is, in my opinion, the scariest thing about him.

On the other hand: GObama! Si, se puede.

Why I Want Silver Or Bronze

Well, for one thing, I've always preferred the appearance of silver (and white gold, and platinum) to traditional yellow gold.

But no, I'm here to briefly talk about why I want the US Men's Basketball Team to not win the gold medal they are being widely, if cautiously, favored to win. I think the so-called "Redeem Team" needs to lose, and American men's basketball needs to keep losing, for it's own good. I don't want them to win until they've gotten it right and won for the right reasons.

The original Dream Team, and the only one worthy of the name, was the team we sent to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the first time the US had sent a team of professionals to international competition. The Dream Team was, first of all, that; more than any other international team it truly had a near-lock on the consensus best American-citizen NBA players of its era; the current team doesn't compare because it doesn't have guys like Tim Duncan or Kevin Garnett on it. Not only was the Dream Team almost exclusively composed of the very best players of its era, it also happened to represent a moment of particularly rich talent from the 80s/early 90s era of American basketball which hasn't been equalled until the last few years. TEN of the guys on that team were also on the NBA's 50 Greatest Players (from the first fifty years) list compiled in, I think, 1996. So the Dream Team was Dream-y. They also didn't really give much of a damn about their competition, and frankly they didn't need to. Famously, Charles Barkley was asked what he knew about their upcoming opponents, the Angolan team, and Barkley responded something like "I don't know much about them except that they're in trouble." It's vaguely possible that the coaching staff did some scouting, but I highly doubt the players listened to it; the talent gap was so enormous that the concept of having to spend time thinking about the best way to defeat an opponent would have been received as mildly insulting by someone like Larry Bird or Michael Jordan. The opposing players, too, were star-struck. Many asked for autographs, and Toni Kukoc, soon to be of the Chicago Bulls but currently playing for the Yugoslavian team and one of the best non-American players in the world, pissed off a lot of people by claiming that if the American Dream Team played an international Dream Team assembled from the best players from every other country, the Americans would still kick ass and take names (and sign autographs). And he was almost certainly right.

That wouldn't be the case today. I'd have to think more about the composition of a global non-American All Star team, but any team with a starting lineup of, say, Yao Ming, Dirk Nowitzki, Andrei Kirilenko, Manu Ginobili, and Steve Nash, and guys like Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, and Hedo Turkoglu coming off the bench, is at least a fair matchup for the current Olympic team. Over the past ten years there's been a shift in the public attitude of American basketball players, from the continuing casual assumption that they're the best of the best and they don't need to worry about it to the current proclamation that "Hey, these other guys are really good, we believe we're going to win but we absolutely respect these players and can't take them lightly." The problem is that I don't really believe that to be true. NBA players obviously respect their All-Star fellow peers, guys like I named in the imaginary starting lineup, but nobody on the American team in 2004 gave a moment's thought to the burning question of "How are we going to stop Carlos Arroyo?" The result was that the Puerto Rican point guard carved up the Americans and absolutely humiliated them, which was doubly depressing because Arroyo was an NBA player and not an especially good one. (Arroyo continued to play in the NBA, winning bigger contracts but never quite equalling the performance he gave in that game and never cementing his status as starting-quality. He just this summer signed a contract to play in a Spanish league.) I believe that the players actually do read and think about scouting reports now, but I still think there's an attitude on their part that needs adjusting; the mealy-mouthed clichés about how "We've just go to play as well as we can and show we're the best" barely pass muster as media-comment in the NBA, where you're at least expected to drop some Basketball 101 clichés as well.

But really, truly, I think the organization of USA Basketball needs an overhaul. It was apparently getting one four years ago when Jerry Colangelo, a figure of aging respect league-wide, the former owner (and current executive) of the Phoenix Suns, was made basically the American Basketball Godfather. However, all the talk about how they were going to implement a new approach, weren't necessarily going to recruit star player but were instead shooting for the best possible team, how you had to demonstrate a multi-year commitment to USA Basketball not only as a show of good faith and dedication but as a necessary attempt to replicate the chemistry the international teams have built up over years of playing with each other...all this has been overtly upheld but subtly undermined. I could say a bunch more, but I'll confine myself to note that some of the final player selections should be eyebrow-raising in light of the criteria I laid out above, and suggest playing favorites both with Colangelo and the team's coach, Mike Krzyzweski, but also on the part of the team's sponsor. Eleven of the twelve players have Nike contracts, and the sole non-Nike player, Dwight Howard, is marginalized in the semi-official video documentation of this team, and photographed in such a way that he can hide the offending logos on his shoes and, as a concession to his own shoe company, hide the Nike logo on his uniform. Supposedly the shoe companies are leaking some of their juice, but never ever ever underestimate how powerful they are in the world of basketball.

I Can't Even Begin

I don't even have anything to add to this, but ... wow ... I'm ... what is there to say? This is where I'd normally come up with some sort of clever outlandish comparison, but there isn't one that can compare while staying remotely plausible. We've got the inappropriate appropriation of an exploited and (depending on how you want to look at it, previously) oppressed culture by an element of the culture which did the exploiting: that's pretty run of the mill. Neither is the fact that the appropriations are, apparently, not very good or accurate (I really wouldn't know, personally), but what I can't really begin to wrap my head around is that DeBeers isn't merely an element of the culture which exploited the "African" culture whose art is now being haphazardly and inexpertly appropriated; it was a major agent of the exploitation! In its corner of Africa, DeBeers was THE agent of exploitation! And this isn't past exploitation - I mean, whatever you want to say about the way European-Americans interacted with the Native Americans, and whatever you want to say about the current state of Native American societies as a result, we're not still going around violating treaties and destroying villages and giving them smallpox.

The capstone, of course, is that the medium in which this appropriation is being effected is the very fucking material for which much if not all of the horrific exploitation was done. Okay, I've got an analogy. DeBeers "celebrating" the spirit of Africa by producing these diamond-studded replica-mask jewelry pieces is like if:

We imagine that Hanes was founded by a conglomerate of powerful American slave owners (in actuality, it was founded in 1901 in North Carolina, so Hanes undoubtedly did benefit from share-cropping, so this part at least doesn't have to be totally fictitious). Now imagine that Hanes decided it was going to celebrate the spirit of African Americans' considerable cultural influence on the USA by producing a commemorative line of T-shirts with images of generic and stereotyped African Americans doing things like playing a saxophone or catching a football or dicking around with some peanuts. And these T-shirts were going to be made from ACTUAL COTTON which was hand-picked by ACTUAL SHARECROPPERS who are ACTUALLY SHARECROPPING TODAY. How fucking unbelievable and, frankly, unacceptable would that be? That's what this is.

Wow.

Geese, Shirts

On Friday night my father and I ate dinner at Café des Architectes. The meal, overall, was fine; the entrees were adequate, the desserts somewhat disappointing. I'm sure there are better things on the menu than what we ate. But. BUT:

The foie gras (which is not on the copy of their menu available online). The foie gras was, simply, the best I have ever had. It was astonishing, life-alteringly good. I was a little shaken. I realized that if this had been the first foie gras I ever tried, then I would have soon after stopped eating it because I wouldn't be able to find anything to compare to this and would have been frustrated into disinterest by what my mother used to call "the strawberry of your mind". I believe the menu described it as "seared" - I could be wrong - but if it was indeed "seared" then that was only insofar as someone had taken the foie gras and waved it in the general direction of a fire several feet away. This was basically paté de foie gras, and from my first bite I was transported. My father, by the way, concurred with my superlatives, down to the "best I've ever had, by far." There are other ways to make foie gras and other directions to go with a paté, most if not all of which I greatly appreciate, but this...

It was so delicate and so creamy. My father suggested that it evolved in your mouth the way a sip of wine would if you delayed the swallow. For literally the first time in my life I offered my compliments to the chef. I stressed to the waiter that I was the sort of person who never expressed praise higher than "very good" in a restaurant, and then told him that this was "amazing". The rest of the meal after that was an inevitable letdown.

.....

As someone who enjoys dressing "nicely" when an appropriate opportunity presents itself, I've been for the most part happy with the expectation that I should wear suit (or jacket) and tie to my job. The only major issue I've had with that notion is that I don't have enough money to instantly buy myself into a respectably sized wardrobe for this purpose, which keeps me rotating the same three suits and one or two jackets over and over. I hope to pick up another suit or two in the near future, both for my satisfaction as well as the lifespan of my clothes.

There has been one other problem, though: the tie. The tie has historically been my least favorite element of the "dressed up" look. (Well, until you get into tuxedos, of which I'm not a particular fan, but I'm restricting myself here to the traditional business suit ensemble - what used to be semi-formal daywear for a professional man, but has become formalwear over the past fifty years or so.) I don't like ties not because of appearance or principle but because of physical discomfort. I don't like having things against my neck. From time to time I've worn a turtleneck, but I can only wear one for a few hours before the constant presence of something in constant contact with the entirety of my neck becomes oppressive. Similarly with the tie. Except in those circumstances where I feel the occasion really demands it (or, now, to please my boss), I enjoy wearing a suit with a shirt open at the collar, sans tie. The problem is exascerbated by the physical coordination of the tie and the shirt. To wit:

With a standard collar on a dress shirt, be it a point or a spread or a button-down*, the tie knot should properly be such that no part of the shirt is visible behind the knot. Otherwise, it seems as though the knot has been either sloppily tied or else loosened, whether or not this is the case. Ensuring that the knot entirely obscures the portion of the shirt over which it is situated provides a sharp, clean look. However, in practice, over the course of the day the tie will inevitably loosen slightly, providing a sliver of shirt over the knot. Thus we tighten the tie. Problem: tightening the tie to this extent tends to require tightening the knot back into the shirt, and hence into the neck, prepetuating and intensifying the discomforting sensation that something is pressing against a delicate and vital segment of my person. My father, who has less throat-discomfort issues than I do, is aware of this problem and suggested a logical technique whereby the shirt-front is pulled away from the body with the same hand which braces the tie while the other tightens the knot. This works, but only so far. Enter a solution, below the "not quite a" footnote.

*(NB: this is a major and unimportant pet peeve of mine - the "button-down" properly refers not to a dress shirt but to a particular sort of collar which you might find on a dress shirt; as a matter of fact, I prefer not to wear a button-down with a tie, it being a less formal collar to begin with. The button-down with tie is a particularly Brooks Brothers-y look - in fact, the button-down as a collar for dress shirts was, I believe, introduced by Brooks Brothers - and kind of Bostonian in a way that I'm not fond of, though otherwise I have nothing against Boston [except the Irish from Southie].)

I recently noted my father wearing dress shirts with a particularly attractive collar. It is basically a spread collar (though the same principle could work in a point) and I can neither find an illustrative picture on the internet nor determine a specific name. I believe that Ike Behar calls it a "Jerry," (if memory serves) but that's just the name for a line of their shirts. (My father will inquire of his favored clothier, from whom he has purchased a number of shirts with this collar, whether it has a specific designation.) The collar is such that rather than the collar-button passing through its hole in a vertical plane - one piece of fabric aligned flush with the neck imposed over another piece of fabric aligned flush over the neck - the two sides of the shirt cross over each other as though one is a hood over the other. It's a subtle effect but, as I said, quite attractive. Noting my appreciation of this design, my father recently gifted me with two shirts which share this attribute. (Both Ike Behar, which aside from the relative prominence of this collar in their line is one of my favorite, if not the absolute favorite, designer of men's shirts, although the much more budget conscious Jos. A. Bank wrinkle-resistant dress shirts have become appreciated workhorses of my job-specfic wardrobe.) And not only does it look fantastic, but I discover an unanticipated benefit:

The design of the collar obviates the need to hide the shirt behind the tie knot, because its very appearance indicates that you're not supposed to do that. The knot should be snug against the shirt, of course, but the collar is clearly intended to be visible above the tie knot due to the specifics of its design. And further, because of the curved, "hooded" effect, tightening the tie into the shirt means tightening it parallel to the body (i.e., moving it further up), and not into it. The added comfort was considerable. It generally takes only a few hours for me to want to remove a tie, but on the first day I wore this shirt it was after 5 PM before the vague discomfort set in.

Now if only I had the funds to purchase a great many of these marvelous shirts.