i dream in super eight

The “30 Rock” episode guest-starring Carrie Fisher as Rosemary Howard, Liz Lemon’s idol, may have this season’s highest laughs-to-minutes ratio. Starting with Liz receiving the “GE Followship Award” for her mastery of “product integration, cross-promotion and adverlingus” — which sets up the conflict between what she does (produce a network TV show) and what she thought she wanted to do (what Rosemary did, write comedy that makes people “think.”) Great lines ensue:

Liz to Rosemary: You are my heroine. And by heroine I mean Lady Hero. I don’t want to inject you and listen to jazz.

Jack to Liz (about Rosemary): Don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again.

Liz to Jack: This is my show.
Jack to Liz: No, this is my show. And once a week I rent it out to the good people at the erectile dysfunction companies.

Jack to Liz: Push the envelope. You know who uses that phrase? People who don’t have the guts or the brains to work inside the system.

Liz to Jack: Rosemary says that women become obsolete in this business when there’s no one left that wants to see them naked.
Jack to Liz: You make enough money, you can pay people to look at you naked. To the future, Lemon!

Meanwhile, Jack helps Tracy sort through some issues with roleplaying and we get Alec Baldwin’s astounding and manic 4-in-1 impersonation of Tracy’s father, mother, the white man Tracy’s mom took up with, and their neighbor Mrs. Rodriguez.

And some of the best throw-aways ever!

Jack to Tracy: What’s the one thing I asked you not to do?
Tracy: That 227 movie. New Jackée City?

But as much as I loved this episode, it kind of left me feeling like my soul had been stepped on just a little bit. Rosemary, it turns out — with all her high-minded ideals — has become a crazy, desperate drunk lady who lives in a rat-infested apartment that may have no toilet in a neighborhood called “Little Chechnya.” Also, she thinks it’s the 90s. “Yikes,” says Liz as she flees in horror to beg Jack for her job back (after having left in protest, under the influence of Rosemary). Obviously, jobs are good things to have, if you enjoy food and shelter, not to mention discretionary income. But it’s the way Liz chooses between Rosemary’s world and Jack’s. Of course, Rosemary and Jack are two comic extremes. But I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say they fit into the facile narrative in which all of the excesses, wrongs, and failures of a ridiculous, naive 60s radicalism get righted by free-market capitalism/business culture/the Republican Party/trickle-down economics.

Somehow, the episode doesn’t quite satirize this narrative so much as uphold it — which is disappointing. It’s like riding a big wave of irony that breaks in the shallows and just leaves you there as it washes back out.

And, um, right, it’s a sitcom on NBC. What do you expect? Why are you even giving this much thought to it? But I guess that’s where the let-down comes in – because this episode does make you think. And then a promo for “Deal or No Deal” flashes at you, followed by some ads and then you’re like, Oh, hey, it’s that one for a sleeping pill with Abe Lincoln and the guy in the diving bell and the talking beaver. Talking beavers are funny. Wait, there’s a Law and Order: SVU rerun on at 9? Have I seen this one before? That developmentally-disabled little girl looks familiar. Whatever. It’s on and I’m not moving. God, I love my couch.

I feel dumb for not knowing about Jack Delano’s photographs before. The whole Shorpy site is amazing.

Several years ago, I got laid off, and what I most wanted to do at the time was listen to Big Star. The emotion and attitude, the chords and rhythm of the music seemed to constitute an ethos opposed to that of corporate achievement and though I wasn’t even laid off by a corporation – just loosed from the 9-5 structure of an office environment – I wanted to live in a Big Star world. Burn the business-casual skirt and pull on a pair of Levi’s (a disingenuous metaphor because I often wore jeans and never wore biz-cas clothes to that former job, but still). Big Star’s lyrics said: I’m going to this party, I’m meeting this girl, I’m sitting in the backseat of this car, talking to you. Teenage concerns, but ones that stay with any feeling person way beyond adolescence. And the music said: I’m full of longing, I’m a little slack, I’ve got time to think about things or just hang out. Druggy, I guess, but that wasn’t the appeal. The appeal was that these were songs from the 70s, from Memphis, and it was the spring of 2001 and I was on unemployment in New York.

I saw Control the other night. Three things:

1) I love that shutting yourself up in your room to listen to David Bowie and Roxy Music records and put on eyeliner seems to have been a rite of passage for a certain vintage of sixteen-year-old British boys.
2) I think I went to the cinema expecting an elaboration on 24 Hour Party People. But Anton Corbijn has different aims than Michael Winterbottom. Party People was kinetic, fun. Control feels like more of an elaboration on the iconic old photographs of the band. Stark, moving pictures.
3) Ian Curtis’s belted, pleated pants and collar shirt! So uncool they’re cool. Even if it may have been as conscious a look as any. Get on it, Urban Outfitters!

I was negative months old when punk broke, so I don’t know what anything was “really” like back then but I don’t think coming to something at a remove (10, 20, 30 years after the fact) necessarily makes the personal experience of it less valid. Which isn’t to say that nothing has been diluted or diminished by the complete and total commodification of dissent and all that. It’s just to say that it made my day, on the subway this morning, to see a sullen girl dressed in a gray school-uniform skirt, black tights, black legwarmers, black hoodie and Doc Martens. Her denim jacket had a Sex Pistols badge sewn to a front pocket. She’d pinned the big Ramones patch on the back.

We’re, like, real people now. We have spices! We have blogs!