MarkKawakami.com

Blog Guilt: Post worthy things that deserve (but won't get) elaboration.

The new job is going well, but it doesn't leave me as much free time as I used to have. Which means posting has fallen wayyyyy off. So I've got a bunch of posts running around my head. So rather than actually do the full-drawn-out super verbose post thing, I thought I'd just summarize. Though, don't get used to this brevity thing, it's really not my style (as evidenced by an overly-long introductory paragraph that really doesn't need to be there in the first place (and an even more unnecessary parenthetical (and so on))). Verbosity will resume next time.

A webpage I worked on was on TV! Specifically, this one. It's a promo for VH1 and IFILM's "Show Us Your Junk" contest for their Webjunk 20 show. It was only on screen for about half a second, and I didn't technically design the page. Or write the copy. I did however choose yellow for the heading colors. I mean, the shade of yellow was already chosen, but you know... we could have used white. OK, technically I didn't do that much for the page besides making sure it exists but hey, how many of your web pages have been on TV, huh? Huh? That's what I thought!

Stuff I've re-read: I recently re-read "Set This House in Order" by Matt Ruff. It's about a guy with Multiple Personality Disorder (technically, Dissociative Identity Disorder) who meets another person with the same condition. It's an astonishingly good book, one of my favorites and I recommend it to pretty much anyone who asks for a recommendation. I decided to re-read it after reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time, which is about a kid with Autism, and one good brain thingy deserves another.

Surprisingly, I'm not ashamed to admit also re-reading Jaws: The Revenge, the novelization of the movie by Hank Searls. It's not surprising that it's better than the movie, you'd have to have some sort of active hostility to qualities like character, plot, believability and not sucking to be worse. But it is surprising that it's actually pretty good. I mean, it ain't Walter Mosley, it ain't James Ellroy, but it's definitely much better than it has any right to be.

Deadwood, Entourage, etc. HBO is now airing the third seasons of both "Deadwood" and "Entourage" and they're really good. Season two of Deadwood wasn't as good as the first and season two of Entourage kicked season one's ass. But that's almost totally irrelevant: Both shows are at the top of their game right now.

In other HBO show critiques: "Lucky Louie" can be funny, but way too much schlong. "Tourgasm" sucks, comedians not on stage are boring as hell.

ABC rips off Telemundo: OK, everyone, my favorite reality show is not "Survivor". It ain't "The Amazing Race". It ain't... uh... those are the only two I actively watch anymore; It's a show I don't even understand. In 2001, flipping past Telemundo, I discovered the greatest show ever: "Protagonistas de Novela". It was like a cross between "Big Brother" and "American Idol", only "American Idol" didn't exist yet. Basically, they had a bunch of contestants in a house, a la "Big Brother", but they were competing for a spot on one of Telemundo's telenovelas, which for those of you not versed in Spanish-language television, are the night-time soap operas that are surprisingly watchable even if you don't speak Spanish, which I don't. Now, that should make watching Spanish-language reality television difficult, but Protgagonistas did two things that helped tremendously in that regard: First off, the contestants frequently wore t-shirts with their names written on them. Wow, that makes things easier! Every reality show should do that. The second thing was that the show was also really well edited, a fact you can only appreciate when you don't speak the language. It was far better edited that Univision's rip-off "La Academia" (or whatever it was called). And the show was extremely entertaining because of the HUGE arguments the contestants would get in, as well as the elimination process which involved the (patent pending) "Cara a Cara", literally "Face to Face", where the contestants would call each other out and say to their faces why they were voting for the other person. Doesn't matter that I couldn't understand a word, pissed off is pissed off in any language.

The next year, they had the possibly more interesting "Protagonistas de la Musica", which was even more like "American Idol", in that the contestants were competing for a recording contract. This is, as far as I can tell, going to be what ABC will be ripping off with "The One", their mix of "Big Brother" and "American Idol". It can't possibly be as entertaining: First of all, Network reality show contestants appear to be much more skittish about having sex with each other (oh, did I mention that? Plenty of bumping on "Protagonistas"), plus they won't have the impossibly hot Rebecca Montoya (or for the ladies, Facundo). And the impossibly hot Rebecca Montoya was reason enough to watch.

posted by Mark Kawakami at June 26, 2006, 12:06 AM // permalink // (2569) Comments

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