Category: Television

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Big Continent

Today’s Tour de France stage, the 11th, was a relatively flat, windy one with a sprint finish. The final kilometer included several sharp bends — especially considering the predictable fact the sprinters would be winding up for their charge to the line — and naturally there was a crash. One of those who fell after rounding a curve and veering into the left-hand crowd barrier was Freddie Rodriguez, an accomplished Colombian racer who lives right here in the East Bay rider. He might also be known as Falling Freddie, because he seems to have a penchant for hitting the pavement hard.

So there was a crash, and one of the riders swept out of contention for the stage win was Tom Boonen, the leader of the Tour’s sprint points competition. Among those still upright and rolling fast was Robbie Hunter, a South African and leader of the Team Barloworld, sponsored by a Johannesburg-based industrial conglomerate. Hunter, who just missed taking the fourth stage, launched early and captured a relatively easy win. The victory inspired Versus television’s Phil Liggett (MBE) to note the historic dimensions of the occasion:

“A South African becomes the first African from that big continent to win a stage of the Tour de France.”

Which, among other things, made me think about the continents that have not produced stage winners: Asia and Antarctica. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing an Asian rider in the race (if the Chinese get interested, watch out). And Antarctic natives such as krill and penguins have not yet been admitted to the pro cycling ranks.

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The Sprint Finish

Today’s Liggett/Sherwen call of the final 1,000 meters of today’s fourth stage in the Tour de France:

Liggett: Here comes the run by [team] Lampre now! As they try to bring Napolitano through! This is the first big sprint at the Tour and it is a free-for-all!

Sherwen: Julian Dean is there in the black and white and you can be certain that right on his wheel will be Thor Hushovd, one thousand meters to go, there is the flamme rouge, Quick Step [team] have got control now, they’re on the front but where is Tom Boonen? He’s not on the wheel of his teammates, there’s a line of [team] Milram, they’re looking after Zabel, there’s a lot of pink jerseys in there for T-Mobile, there’s a little bit of a switch, they’re going to start lining up for the finish line, they’re looking now at about 550 meters to go, Gerolsteiner [team] pulls off, still Quick Step in control. …

Liggett: Well, watch out for this little switch at 250 meters, it might disrupt the move here now, and still Robbie McEwen has not got through. I can see Robbie Hunter trying to get through, but they’re still not going to make a big sprint. And Julian Dean’s on the front now! Dean has found his man Thor Hushovd! Dean the champion of New Zealand! Hunter coming on Dean’s wheel! Hushovd opens the sprint in the center now! Förster trying to get through on the right here as now Thor Hushovd hits the line at last.

Sherwen: Thor Hushovd was perfectly set up for the win by Julian Dean, I just saw the black and white jersey, the Kiwi national champion was right in the right place, he sacrificed himself completely. You need a sprinter to lead out a sprinter. Big Thor has not been superb over the last couple of days but at the end of the day when you’re set up like that by Julian Dean you have to say thanks very much, mate, and you have to finish it off.

Comment: My reaction to these guys’ work usually ranges from mild annoyance to outright disgust — yeah, I ought to just chill; this is just a bike race on TV — but I’ll say something nice here. The end of a sprint stage is beyond hectic. The racers accelerate from 35 to 45 mph, there’s a mass of bodies flying around, and everyone’s madly jockeying for position. What impressed me here is that Sherwen picked Julian Dean out of the crowd a kilometer before the finish line; he knows the players well enough that he correctly predicted that Thor Hushovd would be on Dean’s wheel. That turned out to be the crucial moment in the sprint. To exit slack-cutting mode, though: Both Sherwen and Liggett missed the real drama of the last 100 meters, when Hunter, the South African sprinter, jumped from Dean’s wheel to Hushovd’s in a desperate attempt for the stage win. He timed his finishing charge about a half-second too late and lost by half a wheel. Hunter crossed the line shaking his head and fist in frustration.

Anyway: The point is that the Versus Boys do this part of the race pretty well. Things are moving at light speed compared to the normal baseball, football, or soccer game, and somehow they manage to keep up with it.

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The Tour: The Versus Boys Are Back

We’re having our traditional Tour de France first stage party this morning: Usually we get up when the live broadcast starts (5 a.m. here in PDT), have a few neighbors over, and watch the peloton race toward the usual sprint finish. Today we overslept, so the festivities didn’t begin until after 7.

Phil Liggett, MBE, is doing his usual charmingly hackneyed, loopy race call. Just now he said, “The peloton are being led by the boys in blue.” It’s always “the boys.” His best moments today:

“The Tour’s Yellow Peril.” Referring to prologue winner and race leader Fabian Cancellara, who of course is wearing the yellow jersey (and using yellow pedals and a yellow helmet as long as he’s Number One). Yellow Peril: I’m sure that one popped into his head without any idea of its origin.

“The sprinters have their bird teeth out.” Bird teeth? It’s a mystery what he meant, and my early online research is no help. If you come across this and know what the heck he’s talking about, please help interpret Phil for me. [Hmmm: The insightful Kate speculates that Phil meant “egg teeth,” which embryonic birds use to break through their shells.”

“The team domestiques are out of the kitchen and working hard.”

And from Phil’s “analyst” partner, Paul Sherwen, on Robbie McEwen, who rode from the back of the pack to win: “He never panicked. He kept his calm like a magical poker player.”

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On the Tube

Taking a break from the topic of dentistry for a moment — except to note a story (by way of Marie) about Southern Illinois University’s dental school suspending the grades of its entire 2010 class because students are suspected of cheating — two notes on the current state of television. Well, not the state of television — more like, here’s what I think of two new shows on HBO.

One is “The Flight of the Conchords.” Two New Zealand lads land in New York aspiring to conquer the world of rock and roll. It’s very inventive and funny. Everyone should see it. (The two guys behind it, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, have been working the Conchords act for several years; there’s a BBC radio series based on their alleged exploits in Britain, too — haven’t tracked that down yet, though).

The other is “John from Cincinnati.” The show arrived with high expectations because it’s the work of David Milch, who’s responsible for the unforgivably long-lived “NYPD Blue” and the shamefully short-lived “Deadwood.” OK, so we’re four episodes into the season. As noted last week, the highlight for me is the opening credits, featuring a lovely montage of “golden age of Southern California surface” clips displayed with the oddly moving “Johnny Appleseed” (Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros) as soundtrack. The problem with what happens after the opening sequence is nearly everything. I guess the thing is shot nicely. The cast is competent in its best moments but flat, ill at ease, off-key and wooden most of the time. You can’t blame most of the actors, though; they’re wrestling with a poorly conceived story line full of nonsensical plot twists and subplots; (an odd stranger shows up in surferville; many odd things ensue; we’re made to understand the paranormal is at work). The individual episodes dispense with character development or credibility; the dialogue is wooden or soap opera-ish or falsely mysterious.

How bad is the show? Well, the part of the waterfront it covers concerns miracles in our workaday world. But the way this show doles out supernatural events, the miracles are not nearly as thought-provoking and surprising as, say, a can of Guinness draught with its special little gas capsule. Tonight, the title character, who is a cipher and perhaps the second coming of Jesus (he’s given to saying “the end is near”) was savagely stabbed by a man trying to rob him. But after three weeks of empty hocus-pocus, it was utterly unsurprising — in a George Reeves-era “Superman” holding up his hand to stop a bullet kind of way — that the character was ultimately unharmed. Oh, wow, another miracle.

I’ll pray for another one: Someone please make this show go away.

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Johnny Appleseed, from Cincinnati

After week two, the thing I think I like best about David (“Deadwood,” “NYPD Blue”) Milch’s new “surf noir” drama on HBO (“John from Cincinnati“) is the song that plays over the opening credits. I listened the first week and couldn’t really catch any of the lyrics. The second week, I replayed the opening a couple of times, and at least got an intelligible first line: “Lord, there goes Johnny Appleseed.”

Armed with that much, the rest was easy. It’s Joe Strummer, late, and late of The Clash, and the song, “Johnny Appleseed,” was recorded with his last band, The Mescaleros. Finding out it was him, it was easy to hear a link to The Clash; one, anyway: “Lost in the Supermarket.”

Among other Google results for “Joe Strummer” and “Johnny Appleseed”: the band’s original video, shot in London, and a 2001 performance on Letterman.

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Cultural History of The Loner

Partyofone

Once upon a time, the idea of “the loner” extended beyond the way the term is nearly universally used in media today: for destructive psychopaths, after they’ve unleashed some horror or other. I carried on a little bit earlier about the Virginia Tech official who first uttered the term in connection to Cho Seung-Hui. It was true as far as it went — and that wasn’t far at all, as Cho demonstrated both in action and in his special delivery to NBC the other day.

Anyway. Didn’t the idea of the loner once carry an aura of austere self-sufficiency, hardy individuality or at least admirable anti-heroism? In recent decades in pop culture, Clint Eastwood’s the type, especially in the Sergio Leone remakes of the Kurosawa epics. Further back, Humphrey Bogart owned the image in his Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade roles. Film noir is the loner’s genre. I could take a leap backward from there to the James Fenimore Cooper novels and his Hawkeye character. Same thing, though incredibly trying in book form. [Belatedly, I note that all the example characters above carry guns.]

But those are sort of limited, shot-in-the-dark examples and ones that rely on the distortion and romance of fiction. I went looking for a little more evidence and context, and came upon the noble example of “The Loner,” a one-season, mid-’60s western series starring Lloyd Bridges (and created by Rod Serling). Then there’s Neil Young’s “The Loner,” which focuses on the menacing stranger. Still a long way off from real life.

Finally, I hit on this, through Google Books: “Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.” It’s by Anneli S. Rufus, a Berkeley writer Kate and I know from our time, during the relatively enlightened and carefree days of the Reagan era, at The Daily Californian. It’s a serious consideration of the idea of the loner in history, in culture, in society. An excerpt from the introduction:

“Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave — like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions. A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine but not required.”

The Anneli lives less than two miles from us as the crow flies. I haven’t seen her in 25 years, since before she was Anneli. Now I know one reason why. But just one.

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Smarter Than an Oxford Man

In a dark armpit of TV Land–13 minutes or so when we were done watching something we’d recorded and were waiting for our “news” fix–Kate and I happened upon “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?” Kate then went back and recorded a full show, which we just watched. Wow.

Not that the show is unsophisticated. The kids who serve as the “classroom” for the dim-bulb adult contestants are quick, winning and photogenic as heck. The host, Jeff Foxworthy, probably doesn’t grow tiresome until the third or fourth viewing. And the contestants–the grown-ups who struggle with questions like “Which state is farthest west: Alaska, California, or Nevada?”–are clearly carefully chosen: they’re attractive, witty, emotive, willing to play along and show no shame that they can’t name the ocean that covers the North Pole and have to lean on their 11-year-old playing partners to keep going in the game. Also, we saw a total of three contestants, and they’re all Gen Xers or later. The show’s looking for a young audience, and it’s drawing players from the target age group; a balding slack-gutted Boomer know-it-all would be the last thing that would fly on this show, not that I’m thinking of trying to get on.

But even allowing for the careful sifting of players to find the perfect combination of empty-headedness, glibness and charming good looks, it’s still surprising to me how little the people we saw knew or were confident of knowing. The one who made the strongest impression not only blew the questions above, he was stumped by the true/false proposition, “The Earth is more than 50 million miles from the sun” and flummoxed when asked to take a 12-inch-by-12-inch square and come up with half its area in square inches (his answer: 24; he’s supposedly a building contractor). But since the fifth-graders helping the guy were actually pretty bright, he still walked away with $50,000.

You wonder whether something going on here–the comic spectacle of the good-natured dunce guffawing at his mistakes without embarrassment, the portrayal of ignorance as harmless and fun–explains something bigger happening in the country. Watch Letterman every night, and you get to see Bush mocked for his latest idiotic utterance. Bush and his guys have watched that mockery for years and cried their way all the way to the Oval Office. They figured out ages ago that most people will laugh along with you if you don’t pretend you’re a smart guy with all the answers; they’ll keep laughing long after the joke’s not funny anymore; they’ll give you a break when you screw up because after all, who could’ve known?

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As Seen on TV

First: Tyra Banks. Kate had put on her show because she said some of the teachers she works with are always talking about have mentioned her. Kate didn’t know from Tyra Banks. All I thought I knew was that she was a model (sorry–supermodel) who might have done some acting. I didn’t know she had a show, but there it was, an Oprah/Montel-esque self-help fest on the subject of anorexia and bulimia. We tuned in long enough, about 45 seconds, to hear Ms. Banks cry out to her audience, “You don’t have to be consumed by an eating disorder!” There–that’s Tyra Banks.

Next.

KTVU’s 10’Clock News. One of the stories teased on the show open was about the “Nobel Peace Prize” that had gone missing at the University of California at Berkeley. The story: Police had located the medallion and a suspect. I puzzled over what Nobel Peace Prize might be on the Cal campus; though the university is given to tiresome boasting about the number of Nobel laureates among its faculty, I don’t recall ever hearing of anyone who got the peace prize.

But before I could think more about that, the anchors launched into tonight’s top story: A burglary rampage in a rich little town, Orinda, on the other side of the hills. Then the details emerged: Over the last two weeks, police say, five burglaries have been reported in the town. The M.O.? Scary: Someone’s entering residences during the day through unlocked doors. The loot? Oh, big-ticket stuff: iPods, laptop computers, “even jewelry.” In other words, the kind of garden-variety rip-offs that urban dwellers are all too familiar with. It wasn’t even clear from the cop who appeared on camera that the police think it’s an unusual occurrence. The KTVU reporter did locate a woman who had a harrowing story about a confrontation with a burglar last summer; the intruder beat her and threatened her before getting away with $13,000 in jewelry. But as the on-camera cop said, that incident apparently has nothing to do with the current spate of thefts.

You could make a case for having the story somewhere on the show: “Genteel folk fret over predators in sylvan paradise.” But why was it the lead story? Probably because someone at KTVU lives in Orinda and either had their home broken into or knows a neighbor or two who have.

On to the Nobel Peace Prize story: Well, it turns out that someone tipped off UC police that a student had stolen the solid gold medal from Lawrence Hall of Science the other day. The cops went out and picked up the kid, who said he took the medallion from a display case “on a whim.” But it was the physics prize awarded to Ernest O. Lawrence in 1939, not the peace prize. If you care, and news people are paid to and should be doing something else if they don’t, there’s a big difference between the two medals.

Eventually, way down in the show, KTVU got around to the less important stories like Iraq and the Scooter Libby fallout and what have you. Overall, 60 minutes that barely moves the needle from “bad” to “mediocre.”

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TV Tour de Crud

I bray every July about Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen, our English-language TV announcers-for-life of the Tour de France. It’s not just the cliched, empty language they use–granted, it was charming once upon a time–it’s their tendency to miss big moments in the race and to make assertions that are simply wrong.

To really appreciate how terrible these guys are, though, it’s necessary to tune in to the Tour of California coverage that their network, Versus, is airing each night. The main problem I have is that Paul and Phil have no concept of the race geography or terrain. Thus on last night’s Stage Two show, Sherwen spouted off about “the long straight roads of the Napa Valley” as the leading racers were shown speeding down the long, straight roads of the Central Valley, on the outskirts of Sacramento. Cycling fans hear constantly about how the racers themselves ride the course to get to know it. You’d think that the guys broadcasting this stuff could at least drive the course so they might get a feel for what’s going on; but there’s no evidence they or the producers take such a rudimentary step. Instead, they just talk over the edited video of the race and spout off. In yesterday’s stage, much of which I’ve ridden many times myself, it was obvious they had no idea where the action was taking place or what was to come. It’s just lazy, lazy, lazy crap.

That’s not the only problem with the Versus coverage, though. The stages have been edited down to a point that it’s hard to get a sense of the action unfolding. Key moments, such as a crash that put local rider Dave Zabriskie out of the race, are missed or ignored (despite the fact the show hasn’t been airing until a good four hours after the finish). And Bob Roll, the one on-camera guy I’d assume (since he has lived here) has a sense of the region. is reserved to his usual role of clown savant.

The best alternative, if you’ve got a high-speed Net connection: the live video/audiocast on the Tour of California’s own site. The video is choppy, but the audio commentary is vastly superior to what the Versus boys deliver,.

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