Our Germans are better than their Germans

All the hype around the new Audi spot got me thinking. They must really be banking on the evanescence of the average viewer’s pop-culture memory.



It strikes me as a bit of a strategic misfire to try beating up on their competitors’ brand images, especially BMW.* Especially given that Jason Statham drove a BMW 7-series in “The Transporter.” Moreover, that film, fun as it was, played like an extended version of one of the BMW “Hire” films, with Statham taking over the role of taciturn Brit from Clive Owen.



In my opinion, BMW did a much better job at establishing and maintaining its authenticity and credibility as a high-performance marque. Without a doubt, BMW was inspired by John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin,” which featured a jaw-dropping chase scene with—wait for it—an Audi A8. Indeed, Frankenheimer went on to direct the first installment of The Hire, “Ambush.”



My personal favorite of the Hire films, “Star,” was directed by Guy Ritchie, who was by then kind of a big deal for having made “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” notable for many reasons, not the least of which was introducing the world to a bald, beefy British badass named . . . Jason Statham.

Instead of trying to convince me that a new Audi is better than a 20-year-old Bimmer or a 30-year-old Benz (which only makes me wonder what’s the German word for “duh”?) Audi would be much better served by playing to its strengths: all-wheel drive innovation, racing and rallying heritage, etc. They won Le Mans a few years back—in a diesel. That might not mean much to the average Super Bowl viewer, but at least it's a story--their story--and not some lame retread of something BMW did better almost a decade ago.

*Full disclosure: I am a lifelong BMW fan, former owner of a Euro-spec 1979 323i and a 1970 2002, and future owner of a cherry Atlanikblau 1972 3.0CS, which is what I would get were I in a position to choose among the latest offerings from Munich, Ingolstadt, or Stuttgart. Plus, I’d have enough left over for a parts car, a 2002 project, an E3 sedan and an ‘80s vintage 535is--like the red one in the Audi spot--for daily flogging.

I reveal my Inmost Self

For some reason*, I've decided to allow the seal to be broken on the crypt containing artifacts of my past life.

Here's a sample:

The rest can be found via the link above or at "My TV Reel" under LINKS.

So, was I right to cut my losses and get out, or should I have stayed the course, a la Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove?

*There seems to be a fine line between self-loathing and self-aggrandizement. Either way, at least I'm getting something on the blog.

Hey, I know that dude...

So, didja hear the one about the DHS drone who thought Wikipedia was good enough for government work? Anybody who's as big an "Arrested Development" fan as I will no doubt find it strangely familiar:

Bluth family attorney Barry Zuckerkorn ("He's very good"), counseling his clients on their position in a stock buyout:

Barry: So, basically, you’re about 2,000 shares short of being the majority stock holders. Now, unfortunately, it’s a private stock so you can not just buy up the shares unless someone is willing to sell.

Michael: Are you sure?

Barry: That’s what it said on ‘Ask Jeeves.’

Funny, right? Apparently, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals didn't think so.

A mutual friend of the blog has more to say about it here.

Common Ground

In general, I sometimes fret that Sesame Street suffers from a surfeit of pop-culture savvy. It's not Choo-Choo Soul, but the hip-hop syncopation of the "updated" theme makes me pine for the innocence and simplicity of the old-school version. I'm not completely deluded--I fully expect to hear "Your music sucks, old man!" echoing across the generation gap at some point. I just didn't think it would happen before the man-cub had mastered the alphabet.


Fortunately, here's one instance where I think the furry hands at the Children's Televsion Workshop got it right. And even better, the man-cub is down with it, too.

Gaius, Zaius; Zaius, Gaius.

Was anybody else secretly hoping that net-wielding gorillas on horseback would come riding out of the rubble at the end of last Friday's BSG, or is it just me?

Couldn't you just see Adama, screaming through clenched teeth at a ruined Statue of Liberty: "Gods damn you all to hell!"

Oh, well. Season ain't over yet.

Jack of all trades; Ken Jennings of none.

UPDATED! See below.

About two years ago, right in the middle of Ken Jennings' record-setting know-it-all juggernaut, I tried out for Jeopardy! Getting on the show had been and remains a lifelong dream of mine--okay, maybe not a dream exactly, but definitely on the list of things to do just once before I die. Like publishing a short story in The New Yorker or finishing the NYT Sunday crossword. (Will Shortz, if you're reading this, you are the devil incarnate.) What can I say? I have an unhealthy relationship with minutiae and, as anyone who's ever played Trivial Pursuit or Cranium with me will attest, an even less healthy need to show off how much of it I can access.

Believe me, though, when I say that I have never confused recall with intelligence. A lot of people seem to think that, since most Jeopardy! champs exhibit the kind of facial ticks, sartorial retardation and grotesquely underdeveloped social skills we usually associate with geniuses, that they're wicked smaht. Most of them probably are genuinely bright and intellectually acute; hell, most of them are lawyers. But that's not why they excel on Jeopardy!. I don't consider myself smarter than the average bear, just preternaturally good at random recall of cultural ephemera. A zeitgeist sponge. A trivial savant, if you like. And, if I may say, a pretty snappy dresser (thanks entirely to my wife).

Long story short, I didn't get on. I didn't even get past the first test. Two and a half hours standing in line at the Biltmore Square Mall (which is about 135 minutes more than I had spent there up to that point), 3 minutes to come up with responses (phrased in the form of a question, natch) to 10 pretty hard but not mind-bending "answers." And 20 seconds for some pretty-boy proctor to glance over my sheet, purse his lips and say, "Sorry."

Me: So I didn't pass?
PBP: Nope.
Me: Can you tell me what I missed?
PBP: Nope. We don't really do that.
Me: Can you at least tell me how many I missed?
PBP: Nope. Sorry.
Me: Can you tell me where you bought that sweater so that I can have the place fire bombed and spare humanity any more pain? (Actually, that last bit was only in my head.)

Anyway, that was that.

Like I said, the questions were hard--mostly all Double Jeopardy!, lower-half of the board stuff. That I was expecting. The snooty, callous, goatherd (Next!) mentality of the dude behind the table is what really threw me. Remember the maitre d' at the restaurant in Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Like that, only without the 'stache. But there was no convincing him that I was Abe Frohman, the sausage king of Chicago, never mind the guy from whom Ken Jennings was going to get his ass handed to him.

So you'd think I learned my lesson. You'd be wrong.


Tonight is the online test to qualify for the VH1/Entertainment Weekly World Series of Pop Culture. The fact that it's all pop culture--no opera, no European royal family trees, no American Vice Presidential arcana--just fun facts and quotes from TV, movies and pop music is just enough to delude me into believing that I won't fall prey to any blind spots. That, and the sample questions were crazy easy.

Trouble is, my sobriquet notwithstanding, I probably have equally large weaknesses, to which I'm all but oblivious, when it comes to certain corners of the pop-culture landscape. They go too deep into The Simpsons, for example, and I'm screwed.

Am I a pop-culture genius? (Isn't that an oxymoron?) I don't know. Maybe. I'll let you know after the test.

UPDATE
So I took the 10 p.m. test. Overall, I don't think I did especially well; almost certainly not within the top 5% needed to qualify for the 'wild card' team.

The hardest part was the analogies. This is the category that separated the players (or playas) from the posers. One question in particular (that I can recall) compared character relationships on The Simpsons with those on Dallas. To succeed in this category, you basically have to have not gotten off your couch since the beginning of the Reagan administration.

I also had a lot of trouble, as expected, with song lyrics. Well, at least lyrics from the likes of Kelli Clarkson and R. Kelly. Or R. Kelly Clarkson.

My biggest disappointment was in movie quotes. I really thought I'd ace that one. But boy did they go wading in the bog of ultimate obscurity for some of those. One Crazy Summer, anyone?

I think I acquitted myself fairly well in the Body of Work category. If I came anywhere near 10/10, it was in knowing who was who and who was in what. Unfortunately, I don't think they're looking for category specialists.

So, alas, I don't expect my phone or my inbox to be lighting up any time soon with word from a VH1 production associate.

C'est la vie. C'est la guerre. C'est la pomme du terre.

And, for whatever it's worth, I think I'm actually better at Jeopardy! than at the more mainstream pop-culture stuff. Now, I'm just trying to take some solace in the idea that being a voracious consumer of popular and middlebrow culture is about enjoying the things I enjoy. There's plenty of odd detail that I sort of absorb from the ether, but I'd hate to feel like I have to actively remember every arcane detail of things in which I have absolutely no interest, simply for the sake of a trivia contest. That would just be sad. (Yes, I might be denigrating those who did better than I, just ever so slightly. I'm only the tiniest bit bitter, honest.)

Excelling at trivia is supposed to be the icing on the cultural cake, right? Well, that's my story, anyway. And, like Colin Quinn, I'm sticking to it.

Getting my geek on

So I've been watching the new Battlestar Galactica. (Yes, I am a bit late to the party; nice of you to notice, Captain Obvious. Such is the life of a new parent who, even as a childless guy with a brand-new multi-timezone watch, was late to pretty much everything anyway. So let's just celebrate the fact that I'm here at all and drive on, shall we?)

Oh, and yes, it's the same Battlestar Galactica that Michael gave Dwight grief about on that one episode of The Office where Michael was all desperate to hang with somebody on a Friday night, but stopped just short of being hang-with-Dwight-and-watch-BSG desperate. Don't think I haven't considered the mind-bending meta-implications of fretting over what a fictional character on a TV show would think of my interest in another TV show. I have, and it made my head hurt. But whatever.

Anyway, I read some write-ups about it in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly, the yin and yang of my middlebrow sensibility, and they signed off on it, both basically saying that it's worthwhile TV, and not just for a sci-fi show. So it's all good. And with the recent and impending demises, respectively, of Arrested Development and The West Wing, turns out there's a little room opening up in the viewing schedule. So I figured, What the hey. And, as luck would have it, the Sci-Fi channel aired a mini-marathon (sponsored by Heinz ketchup--no, not really) of 8 season-two shows a few weeks ago.

About the geekiest thing I ever did, vis-a-vis sci-fi fandom, was skip school and line up early for the premiere of Return of the Jedi, in 1983, with my pal Fredd. What I learned observing the assembled horde, especially the hardcores ahead of me in line--the guys showing off their schematics of the Millennium Falcon and comparing favorite Dr. Who episodes--was that I was a stranger in a strange land. I had a great time at the movie, and remain a fan of the original trilogy, as well as sundry dabblings in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the like. But there's just no way I could keep up with guys like that. I mean, my favorite Trek movie was IV (the one with the whales and the self-deprecating humor; every proper sci-fi geek knows if your fave isn't Wrath of Khan, you're blackballed. "Please turn in your pointy-ear extensions on your way out. And don't let the shh-shh-ing doors pinch you on the ass." I don't know any Klingon words. I've never shown up for anything in costume. I've never been to a "con"; hell, I only learned with a a "con" is about three years ago. Truth is, for better or worse, I have never been much more than a dilettante science-fiction fan.

Which is why this show is right in my wheelhouse.

See, it's only nominally a sci-fi show. It's actually a pretty straight-up political/military drama in very slightly otherworldly garb.

The first thing you notice is how far out of their way the producers go to not fetishize the "futuristic" artifacts and gee-wiz gadgetry. In fact, they go so much in the opposite direction that everything is almost self-consciously anachronistic. Which, if nothing else, means they sidestep the "why are the women in the future wearing mini-skirts and go-go boots?" problem pretty adroitly.

The explanation for this 15-minutes-into-the-future-look, apparently, is covered in the miniseries. Something to do with older technology not being vulnerable to Cylon Machinations v2.1. As someone who's struggled to keep a 35-year-old car on the road since it was a 20-year-old car, for reasons having as much to do with aesthetics as economics, I can totally relate.

This approach turns out to be the key to its success. Because, like the best sci-fi (at least the sci-fi I think is the best--Ray Bradbury's short stories and The Martian Chronicles, and Ridley Scott's Alien), it's a study first and foremost in the vagaries of human nature and how people respond to things. Or, in the case of Alien, how people respond to things bursting through their sternums.

There are no blue-skinned aliens sporting latex forehead appliances or other protruberances. No six-breasted women. No tentacles for a tongue. As far as I know, there are no "aliens" of any kind. I guess all the planets they colonized were just edens, free for the homsteading or terra-forming or whatever. Even the Cylons (the race of arch-enemy robot nemeses) have "evolved" into people who look more human than Pamela Anderson. Which I guess isn't saying much, but still.

There's also a refreshing verisimilitude to the operational aspects--the way the chain of command is set up, how the ship actually works. It feels very current and, consequently, relevant.

On the other hand, it's not without a few minor irks that pull me out of the moment from time to time. One is that the humans/colonials are polytheists. They're all, Godsdammit! and Oh my gods, Becky! And the Cylons are--wait for it--monotheists. I appreciate the intent to pay homage to that great 20th-century philosopher and sage, George Costanza, and do the opposite here, but they didn't really think it through. It just doesn't seem likely that humans would, as they're developing the technology to travel faster than light, revert back to a pagan belief system.

Then there's the frakking. Some of the actors do a decent job selling it; others not so much. Most of the time, it sounds too much like something Yosemite Sam would have said to Bugs Bunny. Any moment now, I expect to hear Starbuck call Apollo a long-eared galoot.

Apparently "frak" is one of the (blessedly) few carryovers from the original series. Another is the casting of Richard Hatch (no, not the naked queer dude from the first Survivor, which was my first thought, too), who played Apollo back in the day. Which is fine. Give the old show a shout-out. But here's the truly mystifying thing: there's actually been grumbling from fans of the original about changes and updates.

The hell? Wasn't the first BSG a baldy opportunistic, quick and dirty attempt to cash in on the Star Wars thing on TV? Did anyone actually take that show seriously as anything more than a informercial for action figures and blow dryers? Maybe I'm conflating all earnest attempts at episodic drama from the time into this one show. Was anything in the late '70s so serious that it couldn't be updated and improved upon? I don't remember much uproar over the Starsky and Hutch movie. I just can't even begin to imagine the kind of person would be such an ardent devotee to bad '70s TV (is that redundant?) that they'd quibble over it being "reimagined." We're not exactly talking Dickens here, folks. These are same people who perpetrated such crimes against humanity as BJ and the Bear and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that they also did The Six Million Dollar Man, one of my all-time favorite TV shows. But I'd also mention that, if someone decided to give it a 21st-century upgrade, I'd be all for it. I sure as hell wouldn't grouse about how they're betraying the spirit of the original by dressing Col. Austin in something a bit less embarrassing than a corduroy leisure suit.)

Not that I should throw stones, anyway. I spent many an hour of company time fanwanking on the TWoP forums. If I learned anything from my days as an occasional denizen of The West Wing boards, it's that some people are just a little too into their "stories"; sci-fi fans aren't the only ones who can get freaky-geeky. People, it's a TV show. A bit of diversionary entertainment, the primary function of which is to lull you into a stupor sufficient to leave you vulnerable to 15 minutes of advertising messages.

That said, BSG seems to be a pretty solid and compelling show with only the occasional spike in the dork meter or lapse into space-operatic melodrama. I'm not sure it rises to the level of The West Wing at its best (seasons 1-4), although it's easily comparable to the current, post-Sorkin iteration of the show. It's actually got a lot of the structural hallmarks that Sorkin used on Sports Night and TWW: flashbacks, flashforwards, crazy-long walking-and-talking Steadi-cam shots; frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see an epistolary narration thrown in at some point. In any case, it's far superior to all other sci-fi TV programs, past and present (only ST:TNG could rival it; each subsequent Trek got more goofy and less relevant). Battlestar Galactica is every bit as worthwhile and generally more engaging than the legions of process dramas on network and basic cable. And it doesn't demand any more suspension of disbelief than, say, Lost, which I also never miss.

It helps, too, that they've cast the show with actual actors. In much the same way Patrick Stewart was enlisted to bring some of thespian cred to the bridge of the Enterprise, Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnel and James Callis get BSG on the radar (or dradis?) of people who would otherwise write the show off. The rest of the acting is a bit uneven, but not distracting. The writing is, from what I've seen, inventive, and not content to be merely good enough for sci-fi.

If nothing else, the producers of the new show have given the concept behind the original a level of legitimacy it never had or--frankly--deserved. If you don't agree with me, you can go frak yourself, you raza-frakkin' flea-bitten varmit.