Category Archives: Television

Double Rush

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There are four bicycling movies, that I hold above other much better movies, for the simple reason that these four feature bicycles. There are many other, much better movies that I like, but these four I love. They are Breaking Away (1979), Quicksilver (1986), American Flyers (1985) and 2 Seconds (1998). To this quartet of movies, I would like to add a TV series, Double Rush (1995). I can’t believe that I only became aware of its existence this week.

All four movies plus the TV series, exercise the theme of speed on a bicycle. In the coming of age movie, Breaking Away, speed is equated with freedom, breaking out of a small town, with its narrow range of options. In Quicksilver, the Kevin Bacon bicycle messenger movie, speed was necessary to perform the job. It soon becomes necessary to stay alive. American Flyers rolls out slowly from Saint Louis and as the opening credits roll, so does the protagonist, along Leonor Sullivan, in front of the Arch. Flyers is a bicycling racing movie, so the need for speed is self-evident. 2 Seconds is another bike messenger movie, set in Montreal and uniquely about a girl, instead of one of the guys. It is my favorite of this fab four. Double Rush is another messenger based show. It is a sitcom, set in NYC and a product of its time.

I learned of Double Rush from reading Bike Snob NYC. This blog is popular and its title gives you fair warning of the New York attitude that you’ll encounter. Bike Snob’s post was in part motivated by the new reality TV show, Triple Rush. In bike messenger parlance, rush, double rush and triple rush are successively faster and more expensive grades of package delivery. I have no interest in reality TV, so Triple Rush holds no interest for me, but Bike Snob had a YouTube link to the pilot episode of Double Rush. This hooked my interest and I watched all three YouTube segments. This is the IMdB synopsis:

Johnny Verona is trying to hold together his struggling bike messenger service. Standing in the way of success are his smart-ass slacker riders, cutthroat competitors, and a whiny executive-wannabe constantly telling everyone within earshot that she shouldn’t really be doing this job because she’s a Harvard graduate.

Double Rush was both a spinoff series and a derivative TV series. The cast’s anchor, Robert Pastorelli, and head writer, Diane English were spun off from Murphy Brown. Though well written, this show is also rather derivative. Similarities to the TV series, Taxi and Cheers are self-evident. The show only lasted once season and the title of one of its later episodes says it all, “The Show We Wrote, the Day We Found Out, We Were Going on Opposite Roseanne”. Here are the YouTube links to the series pilot episode segments, one, two and three. Watch them and enjoy them, before the censors rot them.

The above photo shows the brand new drive train on Anne’s bicycle. In the picture, it glitters in the morning sun, all shiny and new. Friend and Team Kaldi’s member, Phil, overhauled it for and did an excellent job. It looks like new, rides like new and propels Anne faster than ever before. I just hope to keep her in sight, when she races ahead on it. I also hope that she will eventually wait for me. Of course, all those fixies, with their fixation with fixed gears, would abhor Anne’s shiny new cog. More is pity for them, and more the gears for Anne and I. Maybe next this Luddite subculture will give up pneumatic, for solid tires?

That Was The Week That Was!

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OK fans, Marquis is charging down the field.  He fakes left, then right and then left again.  And he Scores!  I don’t believe it!  Marquis has managed to hook-slide his way into the weekend.  Simply unbelievable! 

At times this week, work certainly seemed like an Olympic event.  There were lows, snows and highs this week, but by Friday, things had ended up on a high note, in no small part to the help from friends and co-workers, Mike and Don.  The grief that I gave you guys this week was only respect, clumsily shown.

The title for this post is an allusion to the television series, That Was The Week That Was, a satirical television comedy program shown on NBC in 1964 and 1965.  Derived from the BBC series by the same name it was a big hit with both my parents and my brothers and I.  A real family values TV show, Democratic family values that is.  The show was hosted by David Frost and featured Henry Morgan, Buck Henry, Alan Alda and Nancy Ames.  Contributors included Gloria Steinem, Tom Lehrer and Calvin Trillin.  We have Bubs and Horsey’s copy of the Tom Lehrer album from the show.  It still plays in high fidelity and we are happily enjoying it.  So to Anne’s sisters, “Come and get us, coppers!”

It was Friday night of the weekend, and the parents were nestled all snug in their beds, while sinuses full of snot danced in their heads.  Mamma with her Kleenexes, and I with my night-cap, had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.  When out on the lawn there aroused such a clatter, it turns out what the boys were doing is what really mattered. 

I spoke with Dan and he said that his art show(s) went well.  “It was a night.”  In addition to the public opening on Thursday night, he also showed his art to the CalArts faculty in a series of private showings.  Annie bused in a contingent from Claremont, plus Cousin Liz and company descended from the Bay Area.  Friday night he did another showing and on Saturday he does the teardown.

Dave has been invited by Purdue to make a campus visit as part of his application process for graduate school and at their expense too.  Last year he applied to over ten different schools and Purdue is the first to bite.  He has to book his travel yet, but look forward to more news.  [Story Developing]

Home Alone 2-gether

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This week, before work, on both Monday and Tuesday morning, I have managed to crawl out of bed, go downstairs and then go biking.  I find it strange that I couldn’t mount this effort back when the weather was unseasonably warm, but waited until November’s true nature showed itself, but I guess that is just me.  I got 10 and 16 miles, respectively.  I took the picture of the Muny and Pagoda Circle in the dark.  I rested the camera on a bridge pillar and took a one-second exposure.  I think that this technique deserves more exploration.

Anne is seen modeling, in her very own independent fashion, two of her latest knitting creations.  The headband and matching fingerless mittens are for Ashlan.  We were eating dinner together while the NPR Marketplace business show blared out from the kitchen radio.  I don’t know how exactly we got on the subject of retirement and the proposed raising of the standard retirement age from 65 to 69, but we couldn’t decide when the proposed increase would occur.   Would it occur in 2018, 2048 or somewhere in-between?  But why let the facts (or the lack of them) get in the way of one of Anne’s great soliloquies:

The year is 2048, the place a classroom in Saint Louis.
 “Oh no, it’s that old bag Mrs. R.  I bet you that she is a hundred years old.”
 “Not yet honey, not for another six years.  Then I can finally retire.  I remember way back in the day when a person could retire at the age of 65.”

After dinner, I blogged for a bit and then we sat down on the couch and watched Glee together.  It was a fun episode that managed to smash together, substitute teaching, Gwyneth Paltrow and the musical, Singing in the Rain.  Paltrow may do a better musical song and dance routine than Anne, but Anne is the better substitute teacher.  Nine out of ten teachers agree.  The tenth teacher was some disgruntal gym teacher named Sue Sylvester.

Foxici-Glee

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Toxicity is the degree to which a substance can damage an organism.  Foxici-Glee is the degree to which Fox’s musical comedy TV show, Glee, can cause damage to our educational system, America’s youth and yea even the very fabric of our society.  All these are charges that have been leveled at this TV show.

Fox’s Glee first hit the airwaves about a year and a half ago with the series’ pilot show.  The pilot neatly laid out the show’s tenants, high school setting, ensemble television comedy and one very important hook, musical theater.  Talent that was only hinted at in the pilot show was confirmed when the series began a year ago.  This hapless high school glee club teetered from one episode’s crisis to the next.  The glee club and its members faced an array of enemies, from the banal, grape slushies being tossed into their faces to the truly Machiavellian Sue Sylvester, coach to the school’s cheerleaders, the Cheerios.

Last January, Jane Lynch won a Golden Globe for her role as Sue Sylvester, in an otherwise disappointing awards ceremony for the show.  Not too surprising though, what with only half a season under their belts at that time.  The second half of last year’s season was similar to the first half, but with several important differences. The originally promised number of musical numbers per episode began to grow.  Their production values also started to increase.  Significant guest stars began to populate some of the episodes.  Finally, the musical numbers that once each had stood only on their own began to coalesce.  Sometimes an episode featured a particular musical artist, sometimes, like this week they featured an actual musical.    

This week’s episode, the Halloween show, featured The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  A backroom cabal and Sue Sylvester conspire to sabotage this glee club production.  At the end of this episode the show does not go on.  It is self-censored.  Disgression becomes the better part of valor, but not before we, the audience, get to watch all of their numbers performed.  This plotline would be consigned to the dustbin as most musicals plots should be.  After all, a musical plot’s prime function is to string together the musical’s numbers.  But, this episode’s plot is even now being played out in the news media.

Three of Glee’s cast members appear in this month’s issue of GQ magazine.  The two actresses are photographed scantily clad in a high school setting.  I listened to as much as I could stand of a late night radio show (on NPR even) that extolled all the evils of this spread, soft core porn, pedophilia, etc. etc. etc. 

First off, actresses are not role models.  I think that you have a problem if you believe so.  I offer two cases in point, Brittany Spears, with her recent problems and Marilyn Monroe, who is pictured in these City Diner paintings, she became just a candle in the wind, blown out before her time.

I’m not one to partake in conspiracy theories, but the juxtaposition of this week’s episode with the ongoing GQ controversy seems too coincidental.  I doubt that the episode could have been programmed in response to the controversy.  There was not enough time.  I doubt that Fox would be so cavalier with their hottest property, without some forethought.  A hack once said that there is no such thing as bad press, it is all just press.  An old newshound like Rupert Murdoch would know this.  I bet that he is just gleeful with all of this controversy.  I bet he is just giggling all of the way to the bank.

The Game’s Afoot

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On Sunday night, the PBS show Masterpiece Theater debuted in America the first episode of the 2010 BBC One series, Sherlock.  This modern-day adaptation of the classic Sherlock Holmes genre brings Mr. Holmes presumably kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Did you know that according to the International Motion Picture Database (IMDb) that the character of Sherlock Holmes has appeared in more movie productions than any other fictional character, beating out even Santa Claus?  Anne and I learned this, to our chagrin, last Friday night, at the charity trivia night contest that we attended.

Sherlock’s Dr. Watson is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s one was (the 1878-1880 one).  Like the original version of this character this one is troubled by his war experience.  Can you say post-traumatic stress syndrome?  This one can.  He is a wounded British Army doctor, discharged and left to wrestle with his own personal demons.  It is through Watson that we first meet Holmes.

Sherlock’s Holmes is a self prescribed sociopath and not a psychopath as one of his many enemies on the London police force claims.  He has no friends, is not interested in sex, is a drug addict and really only lives for the hunt, “Four serial suicides and now a note, it’s Christmas!”  Any Sherlock Holmes production will always rise or fall upon the quality of their detective.  Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch is a worthy contender.  American audiences might remember Mr. Cumberbatch, or might choose not to, for his role in Atonement, as that most unwelcomed of all house guests.  His shock black hair, pale complexion and watery eyes combine to create a Holmes that the entire London police force aptly refers to as “The Alien”.

21st century London not only penetrates this Conan Doyle ethos, it permeates it.  Sherlock is alternatively, texting, losing, borrowing or finding a cell phone.  Our century’s manners have also overtaken this incarnation of Mr. Holmes, mores the pity for that.  One of the worst concession to our modern times though is the rewriting of that famous line, “Come on Watson, the game’s afoot” to “Come on Watson, the game is on”.  Even with its flaws, it is television worth watching.  At least, it is television that I’ll still be watching.

Graphics with this post come from the exhibit, Home Lands: How Women Made the West, which Anne and I saw on Sunday.  Include are works from Georgia O’Keeffe, Eve Drewelowe and Aki Sogabe.  Aki Sogabe’s work is one of a set of five in the exhibit that she used to design a mural for Seattle’s Pike Place Market.  These three work’s protective glass coverings have caught reflections in my photographs that only somewhat detracts from their beauty.

Jump the Shark

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The forecasted rain held off on Saturday, so Anne and I set off on our bike ride, but Anne’s knee forced her to turn around.  I pressed on and got some me time and 16 miles. I also got to see the stretchered body of a motorcyclist in front of the History Museum.  I could go on about the new bike path segments that I rode, but this post is more retrospective.  I am coming up on my 1000th post on this blog.  The title of this post is an allusion to when a TV series crosses over from subsistent media to ridiculousness.  Here is a link.  I hope that this blog has not yet crossed over yet.