Hokum

Another fun year:

Here are a couple of audio clips:

I Wish You Would

Chicken Shack Boogie

Previously: Omar’s Coming! | Hokum home page

…well, not Omar, but Michael Kenneth Williams, who played one of my all-time favorite television characters in HBO’s The Wire. This time, Williams will play Chalky White, described as “the de facto mayor of Atlantic City’s African-American community,” in HBO’s new series, Boardwalk Empire.

I already was sold on that series before I got this news. Steve Buscemi has the lead role, that of a political boss and rum-runner in Depression-era Atlantic City; Martin Scorcese is one of the executive producers and will direct some episodes; others in the cast include Gretchen Mol (recently in the American version of Life On Mars) and Dabney Coleman. But Buscemi and Omar? I’m there, and it’s great to see another good-looking HB0 series. This one opens Sept. 19.

Previously: The improbability of ‘I’m Not There’ | Hokum home

Sometimes, I come across a film I really enjoy and wonder how it ever got made. What was the pitch for, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? How do you explain that concept to potential financial backers? What about Moulin Rouge! or my all-time-favorite improbable movie, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Bonzai Across The 8th Dimension?

This is how I feel about I’m Not There, a fantastic film that must have been an incredible pain to get off the ground. I can’t even begin to accurately describe the plot, such as it is, but I’ll try: Six actors, including Cate Blanchett, portray what are described as “different facets of Bob Dylan’s persona.”

I also won’t attempt to explain how the film unfolds. Actually, it doesn’t unfold as much as meander in a wonderfully abstract way, and your enjoyment of the film probably will be linked to your knowledge of Dylan’s life story. If you know about Woody Guthrie, and the Village, and “Judas!” and the motorcycle crash and bein’ saved and Pat Garrett, you might love the film. Otherwise, you’re probably going to scratch your head and look at your watch.

I watched it again a couple of weeks ago and it’s one of the few films that stands up to repeat viewing for me. When Jim James (the lead singer of My Morning Jacket) sings “Goin’ To Acapulco” or the kid sings “Tombstone Blues” with Richie Havens, I’m moved every single time. And there are whole vignettes — particularly when Blanchett shows up on the screen or Richard Gere plays an older Billy the Kid — that are just miles above anything I’ve seen in a movie in recent years.

Go rent it. If you hate it, you’re only out a few bucks. If you like it, you’re probably going to want to buy it.

Soap operas ruled at my house when I was a kid. There was “Search For Tomorrow,” with the star-crossed romance between Joanne and Sam; there was “The Guiding Light,” “As The World Turns,” and, of course, “Days Of Our Lives” among many others. I was stuck with them, just like sands are stuck in the hourglass, because we had one television and two channels and a mother who ruthlessly controlled the viewing options. My mom watched the soaps while she performed the endless tasks involved in overseeing a seven-kid household, so I had to watch them too, dammit.

Now they’re nearly dead. They’ve been circling the drain, so to speak, for some time now — but Ad Age is proclaiming that The End Is (Probably) Nigh.

“Viewers these days want to dip in and out of shows, media analysts suggest, so talk shows, quiz shows, health-and-wellness programs and even infomercials might better fill the bill,” the magazine reports. It notes that the Big Three networks aired 18 soap operas in 1970-71 but are down to six now — with only one of those on NBC. Viewership of the soaps has fallen from 6.5 million during the 1991-92 season to 1.3 million in the 2009-2010 season.

Of course, there actually are lots of soaps still on TV — they’re just not called soap operas. They’re called “reality television” and they skip the writers and actors that once were used to make soaps soapy. “Big Brother,” which puts on hours and hours of programming almost nightly on Showtime, is a classic example; the ridiculousness of some shows is so rich that the inevitable parodies have arisen.

My fascination with the soaps I hate is simple: I can’t believe they’ve held on this long. Trace them back through radio (and heck, before that, through movie serials — and fakey travelogues and phony chautauquas and travelin’ shows before that) and you can see a line of soapiness that dates back for more than a century. I guess the taste for hyperinflated drama never really goes away.

Previously: Inspiration | Hokum home page

I’ve had a few of these streaks over the years I’ve been writing Hokum — weeks where nothing really leaps to mind when it comes to thinking of topics that need a few words applied against them. I’m in one of those streaks now and that’s why there haven’t been any meaningful updates for a while. This, too, shall pass.