Phil’s Liggett’s Quote of the Day

From the Versus Stage 1 telecast of the Tour de France:

“The beautiful scenery of Britanny now, remember we’re in Britanny now for three days, that’s what they’ve paid for and that’s what we’re gonna get and enjoy here on the Tour de France because these narrow roads constantly twist and turn, the undulations are very, very special here for all of the riders and 43 of them in their first Tour de France.”

Technorati Tags: , ,

The Tour 2008

With an exception of one day, our TV service has been off for about eight months. The one day we broke down and turned it back on was Super Bowl Sunday, and that just served as confirmation that 200 channels or whatever it is of satellite television wasn’t anything we were missing. For the most part, anyway. I will admit that it’s a little weird to hear people talking about Colbert or “The Daily Show” and think, wow, we just don’t look at that anymore.

And the other thing I’ve realized is that, the vulgar excess of the Super Bowl aside, TV is very much the way I keep up with the sports I still follow. So: no baseball this year and very little sense of how the season is unfolding beyond sporadic reports that the Cubs are doing well and that that poor, poor pitiful team in Tampa Bay is really having a year.

Tonight, though, we are linked up again to the broadcast world. The reason is the Tour de France, broadcast again on Versus. The first stage was today, and we got reconnected just in time to see the tail end of the first rebroadcast of the day. A Spaniard named Alejandro Valverde won in an oddly configured finishing section–a sharp descent followed by a short sharp climb that kept the usual contingent of crazy sprinters out of the picture. Valverde took the stage with a shocking burst of uphill acceleration in the last 250 meters that blew away a rider who looked like he had the stage in the bag. And besides the wonderful action, I knew the Tour was back when I heard Phil Liggett, back for the umpteenth year of melodrama, mispronouncing the winner’s first name. At various times it seemed to come out not only as Alejandro, but also as Alefandro, Alessandro, and, most weirdly and regularly, Alethandro. Phil, I missed you. MIthed you, I mean.

Tomorrow’s stage broadcast starts at 5:30 a.m. here, and we’re having our traditional “first Sunday of the Tour” gathering with some neighbors.

Technorati Tags: , ,

The Tour 2008

With an exception of one day, our TV service has been off for about eight months. The one day we broke down and turned it back on was Super Bowl Sunday, and that just served as confirmation that 200 channels or whatever it is of satellite television wasn’t anything we were missing. For the most part, anyway. I will admit that it’s a little weird to hear people talking about Colbert or “The Daily Show” and think, wow, we just don’t look at that anymore.

And the other thing I’ve realized is that, the vulgar excess of the Super Bowl aside, TV is very much the way I keep up with the sports I still follow. So: no baseball this year and very little sense of how the season is unfolding beyond sporadic reports that the Cubs are doing well and that that poor, poor pitiful team in Tampa Bay is really having a year.

Tonight, though, we are linked up again to the broadcast world. The reason is the Tour de France, broadcast again on Versus. The first stage was today, and we got reconnected just in time to see the tail end of the first rebroadcast of the day. A Spaniard named Alejandro Valverde won in an oddly configured finishing section–a sharp descent followed by a short sharp climb that kept the usual contingent of crazy sprinters out of the picture. Valverde took the stage with a shocking burst of uphill acceleration in the last 250 meters that blew away a rider who looked like he had the stage in the bag. And besides the wonderful action, I knew the Tour was back when I heard Phil Liggett, back for the umpteenth year of melodrama, mispronouncing the winner’s first name. At various times it seemed to come out not only as Alejandro, but also as Alefandro, Alessandro, and, most weirdly and regularly, Alethandro. Phil, I missed you. MIthed you, I mean.

Tomorrow’s stage broadcast starts at 5:30 a.m. here, and we’re having our traditional “first Sunday of the Tour” gathering with some neighbors.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Theme Music

Taxi

Now that we’ve disconnected our 2008 TV, we watch television from past decades. “Taxi” first aired in an era when I didn’t watch much ‘vision (late ’70s, early ’80s), so I became a fan in reruns. Somewhere along the way, someone in the house gave me a season of “Taxi” on DVD. We periodically watch that, as we did tonight.

One thing that hooked me about “Taxi”–beyond the delight in watching the occasionally brilliant ensemble work of Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Andy Kaufman, Marilu Henner, Judd Hirsch, et al.–was the theme. I love what I’ll call it’s winsome (if not melancholy) quality at the opening and what I’ve always heard as the lonely sound of the little reprise at the end. What other sitcom theme has such a sad tug to it?

For the record, the theme was the work of “smooth jazz” master Bob James, who assembled a pretty amazing crew to record the “Taxi” music during the show’s five-year run. The theme itself is called “Angela,” and I’m guessing it refers to a series of episodes involving the Judd Hirsch character, Alex Rieger, and a bitter and unattractive blind date. (The MP3 is for sale at Amazon.)

Technorati Tags:

Anchor Magnetism

Dennis Richmond is retiring after more than three decades on KTVU. Which makes me ponder the longevity of anchors, at least in the big markets. I haven’t lived in Chicago for more than 30 years, and I still seem to recognize some of the people reading the news. Same here in the Bay Area. The mystery is, the one thing about local news shows everywhere is the low esteem in which they’re held–at least among the cognoscenti in other media. So what accounts for the staying power of the same faces year after year after year?

The obvious part of the answer is that despite how shallow, superficial, hollow or misinformed a particular show or anchor is, the programs and personnel obviously develop a loyal following in all those anonymous TV-watching households. With my occasional serious journalistic pretensions and the occasional serious pretensions of my blog, I’ve been bemused to discover that the one subject over the past couple of years that draws readers day in and day out have been items dealing with Leslie Griffith, the former KTVU late-night co-anchor. I’ve noticed that plenty of visitors also arrive on my site after Googling Julie Haener and Sara Sidner and Gasia Mikaelian, Griffith’s successors. Part of the audience is obviously guys who really like hearing about traffic accidents and shootings and the Bush White House from good-looking gals. Period.

There’s got to be more to it than that, though. I think it comes down to the phenomenon of consumer habit. People like what they like, and just as most of us prefer a certain kind of car, a certain kind of breakfast cereal and a certain kind of toothpaste, most tend to stick with a favorite newscast. I think that group is the biggest group, and is very durable (even now, I can tell you which newscasts we watched when I was growing up in Chicago and why). But stations don’t go on hunches; they pay big money to figure out what the audience is doing and why; they pay top dollar to keep their brands intact by keeping a likeable lineup on the air.

The question I have is whether the phenomenon of the anchor who serves for generations, the way Dennis Richmond has, is passing or past already. We have different and many would insist better ways of getting the news now than watching someone in a studio someplace read a sliver of a complex story told better elsewhere. I guess it comes back to the habit: How much longer will we need that comforting daily presence coming to us over the air. When you look at it that way, the answer is maybe forever.

Technorati Tags: ,

No Tele, Plenty of Vision

I’ve mentioned several times that we’ve become TV-less here at the HQ. That’s true, and a truly wrenching experience that I’m backing into; but it’s also not like the old days — pre-DVD, pre-VCR –when turning off your TV was the media survival equivalent of pouring a drum of ice water on the fire you were counting on to keep you alive through the winter. In other words, our little electronic fireplace can still keep us warm. The “tele-” part of the TV might be switched off for now, but there’s plenty of “vision” left in the box if you have the requisite hardware hooked up.

We have some DVDs of old TV shows: “SCTV” and “Saturday Night Live,” “NewsRadio” and “Mad About You” and “Taxi,” too. “NewsRadio” is the only one we’ve been watching; Phil Hartmann’s show all the way, and I’m simultaneously surprised by how good he could be and shocked, still, that he’s dead.

But you could say TV on DVD — even inspired TV, which I admit exists — is nothing but the vast wasteland without the commercials. True, but that’s a great improvement. The last week or so, we’ve gone on to the part of the vast wasteland that comes out first-run in theaters and then comes home on DVD: movies.

We’ve been watching a mixture of old favorites and some stuff we’ve been curious about. To wit, the past five days have featured “Young Frankenstein,” “A Night at the Opera,” “Mr. Brooks,” “The Flying Scotsman,” and “Zodiac.” The capsule reactions and reviews:

“Young Frankenstein”: First viewed decades ago. Not as sharp or funny as I remembered it. Teri Garr and Marty Feldman — not as funny. Neither was Madeline Kahn. Cloris Leachman: inspired. Gene Wilder — nah. Peter Boyle and Kenneth Mars: very good. But the main thing: The first time through this and other Mel Brooks films, you don’t really mind his penchant for trying to pound you into submission, for the constant reminders that what you’re watching is funny. Coming back to it, some of the bits are inspired, but more are painful. I’ll come back to this in 2020 or so.

“A Night at the Opera”: Wanted to see this after watching the last third, close-captioned, on a TV at the bar where we occasionally go for pizza and beer on Friday nights. It’s as good as I’ve always though it was — which is very, very good.

“Mr. Brooks”: You sit down and willingly watch Kevin Costner and Demi Moore, you’ve got no right to complain about it. And for the first half of the movie, in which Costner plays a company CEO who’s also a kinky serial killer and Moore is the multimillionaire homicide detective fumbling to find him, I wasn’t inclined to gripe. Much. But after Costner’s daughter turned out to be a killer, too; and after daddy had to go down to Stanford and commit a copycat murder to get his girl off the hook; and after daddy set up a dazzling plot to get rid of the annoying Moore and some idiot who accidentally figured out daddy was a killer; and after daddy has a nightmare lifted right out of “Carrie” — after all that, the movie went from interestingly implausible to absurd. William Hurt was given the scary job of being Costner’s alter ego and did more than OK, as usual.

“The Flying Scotsman”: True story of a Scots cyclist who sets out to break one of the legendary marks in cycling — the one-hour record — and does it on a home-built bike. Find it and rent it if you’re remotely interested in the world of bicycle racing or in the world of depressed Scotsmen. So: kudos for the story. But the movie shares the usual modern flaw of minimizing characterization in favor of plot. Yes, movies have always had to find dramatic shortcuts to inform you why George “It’s a Wonderful Life” Bailey is the way he is and why he was a big enough sap to stay in Hooterville and try to run his family’s stupid bank. But compare the time and detail Frank Capra devotes to explaining George to the stick figures thrown at you in “Mr. Brooks.” Capra, in the midst of a light entertainment, practically gives us “War and Peace”; in the midst of what someone must fancy to be a psychological thriller, “Mr. Brooks” barely matches “Ren and Stimpy” in terms of character development.

“Zodiac”: Continues a trend that began several weeks ago when watching, “The Hoax,” an adaptation of Clifford Irving’s account of inventing Howard Hughes’s autobiography. The trend is that people I’ve worked with — Frank McCulloch in “The Hoax,” Paul Avery in “Zodiac” — are showing up as characters in movies (if you’ve seen these and your curious about where I am, I’m the guy berating some poor obit writer in the background). But on to the movie: I though it was good, almost great; I think that’s because the movie actually spends time with the characters — though here again, would it be too much to ask the writer and director to give us a little on why Avery was such a wildman and why Robert Graysmith, the editorial cartoonist who is the movie’s main character, became so obsessed with the case? Maybe not, though; maybe both characters, the overwhelming dimension of their dysfunction and obsession, is enough. That perhaps involuntary spurt of bile aside, “Zodiac” was worth the now-extraordinary two hours and thirty-eight minutes running time.

U.S. Americans, Helping the Iraq

So by now everyone has seen or at least heard about our national dunce of the week: Lauren Caitlin Upton, the South Carolina beauty queen whose brain shut down when she was asked to weigh in on why so many Americans can’t find the United States on a map.

The transcript: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because … ah some … people out there in our nation don’t have maps and … ah … I believe that e-education such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should … our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or, or should help south Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future. … ” (YouTube video here.)

Sure, it’s kind of a funny moment, though less so when you realize that Upton nearly won anyway (she still looked great in her bathing suit) and that when she was brought on NBC’s “Today” show — NBC’s parent company also owns the Miss Teen USA pageant — to talk about the faux pas, she was smothered with treacly understanding for her moment of difficulty. With three or four days to think about it, Upton came up with this answer: “”Well personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t. And if the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography.”

Yeah, finding your native country on a map — that’s a real geographical triumph. And on top of that, she’s heard of Iraq and South Africa and wants to help them. She’s practically ready for a cabinet position. Or a network news anchor’s job.

That thought occurs after witnessing Katie Couric’s performance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” this morning. Couric, who has piloted the “The CBS Evening News” into a death spiral, is in Iraq to a) cover the big story — the upcoming report on the effectiveness of the troop buildup and b) to prove she and her show are heavyweights.

Tragically, serious news consumers no longer expect the the major TV networks or their cable counterparts to be sources for more than the quickest, sloppiest (and in the case of Fox News, grotesquely spun) sketches of a story. On Sunday, Couric demonstrated the state of the art: With the obligatory Baghdad skyline shot in the background, she began with an overly general background statement about the state of affairs in Iraq, including a badly flawed summary of the history of the conflict in Fallujuah (she skipped over entirely the battle for the city in November 2004, probably the bloodiest single engagement of the war so far).

Then, she got to the meat of her report: She essentially parroted everything our commanding general and his briefers told her and showed her during her “reporting.” The lack of skepticism — not the political kind, but the natural journalistic kind that would demand to know what one isn’t being shown, what facts the general and his staff don’t want us to see — was breathtaking. To her minor credit, Couric allowed that she was seeing “what the U.S. military wants her to see.” But that didn’t stop her from concluding that “there are definitely areas where the situation is improving.” (ThinkProgress.org has a post on Couric’s performance, complete with video clip).

Me, I’ll take the South Carolina Fumbler over the make-believe newswoman. The Fumbler will do no damage in the end, unlike the faux journalist who drops in to tell us that things are looking up in Iraq without even the pretense of some independent fact-finding.

Technorati Tags: ,

Tour Arborists

[Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett on Sunday morning as they narrated an aerial view of a French chateau southwest of Paris:]

Paul (informatively): You might not know this but in a very secluded part of the garden there’s a very old tree, a sequoia which was planted around about 1860.

Phil (surprised): The sequoia is not , not a tree of, indigenous to France, it’s Africa, isn’t it, the sequoia tree?

Paul (reassuringly): I believe it is.

Me: Sequoia. Sequoiadendron. Metasequoia.

Technorati Tags: , ,

The Running of the Bikes

No big crashes in the Tour’s twelfth stage today, which, if you’re keeping score at home, ended with a sprint finish taken by the points leader, Tom Boonen of Belgium.

No wipeouts: apparently that’s exactly the opposite of what Versus, the network televising the Tour in the United States, wants to see. That’s because Versus, in an effort to position itself as the premier purveyor of knucklehead blood sports, is promoting bicycle racing as part of its package of violent, dangerous, jackass programming. The Versus ad campaign is “Red White Black and Blue Summer” (trailer here), and lumps in bicycling along with cage fighting (scary tattooed guys beating the tar out of each other) and bull riding (nothing crushes your spleen like a half-ton of angry beef on the hoof). Oddly, some versions of the Versus promotion also include yacht racing as one of its “pain is good” offerings. Just to make it clear that Versus is advertising cycling as a NASCAR-like crash fest, its daily Tour coverage now offers a daily recap of the top five crashes in this year’s race.

On a couple levels, “Red White Black and Blue” is dumb and disturbing. Dumb because no matter how you dress it up, and now matter how many big bike pileups you get on camera, you’re not going to suck in the same audience that’s turned on by the intimate orgy of violence exhibited in cage fighting or the stomping mayhem seen in the bull-riding arena. Just not going to do it. There’s no doubt that a crash in a bicycle race can be electrifying; but to really be excited and alarmed by it, you have to be one of the bike geeks who finds it fascinating to watch Men in Lycra for hours and hours on end. Most bike crashes happen fast and with little drama and the cameras are hardly ever in the right place to get a close-up view of the action unfolding. The crashes that are replayed and replayed again and again are the exceptions.

So that’s the dumb part. The disturbing part: What’s going on with us that so much entertainment, especially for younger guys, centers on such stupid and unrestrained violence; that so much of this entertainment tries to find an audience by selling the promise of seeing someone carted off to the intensive care unit?

Technorati Tags: , , ,