Ahh, fall. The time of new beginnings. The new school year is picking up, 5770 is nearly upon us, and the new shows are coming back to TV in advance of the new TV season. So I’m going to attempt to get back into music/tv/pop culture blogging as a way of refreshing my writing chops, which have withered terribly recently. And hopefully being creatively wordier about other pop culture will get me over the writer’s block I’ve been having finishing the demos for untitled Andrew solo musical project 2008 2009.
This week, we start with some overviews of what’s in the TiVo and recent playlists. But first, here’s some of the blogging context that I’m drawing from for this revival of the site, meaning that I’ll skim through most of these feeds on most days:
A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago – A mix of pop culture, filtered through some of the smartest bloggers and commenters on the web.
What’s Alan Watching – Sepinwall is the dean of the television blogosphere, starting with his own incisive analysis and continuing with the insightful and generally exceptionally well-behaved commentariat.
Tuned In – Time’s James Poniewozik covers not only narrative television, but also news TV.
Ken Levine – TV comedy writer. A couple of the shows he worked on were little ones, like MASH and Cheers.
The AV Club – TV and music covered extensively and thoroughly.
Ear Farm – The indie music scene in NYC and beyond. Although they try not to self-promote on the site, editors Matt and Mike are in two of Brooklyn’s finest bands: Goes Cube (Matt) and Mancino (Mike). I burned out on most of the music blogs I had followed, but Ear Farm is the one indie I keep in the mix.
Well, that and all of the various blogs from NPR – All Songs Considered, Monitor Mix, A Blog Supreme and Monkey See.
You can find me short-form blogging over at Twitter and a mix of short and long at andrewraff.com.

The Twitters and the internets were all abuzz yesterday with shock and horror that Fox was going to again cut short the run of a brilliant Joss Whedon series and would be slicing away a bit of the souls of Joss’s fans. Fortunately, that’s not quite the case. Unlike with Firefly, Fox aired all of Dollhouse in the correct order. Unfortunately, part of the reason that the situations are different is that Dollhouse is not as fun or enjoyable of a series as the space-western hybrid. Dollhouse did become compelling with the recent episodes “Man on the Street” and “Needs,” but without the same immediacy and fun that kicked off Firefly.
So, what’s happening? Fox interprets the terms of the contract as their 13 episode order including the unaired pilot, while the production company made 13 episodes (exclusive of the original pilot) for the DVD distribution. See Sepinwall’s summary to understand where everything stands.
This sounds like it comes down to a contractual and bargaining issue between the network and the studio, more than a premature cancellation (ala Firefly, Pushing Daisies, etc.) If Fox does renew Dollhouse, I’m sure that “Epitaph One” will air at some point before the start of season 2. Or perhaps the brisk DVD sales of the show (for fans to watch the epitaph) will encourage the network to pick up the show for a second season.
Given that episode 12 is titled “Omega” and episode 13 “Epitaph One,” it seems that there won’t be many plot threads left dangling after episode 12, or cliffhangers that will be resolved in episode 13. The characters may be able to react to the events in the last act of episode 12.
Even if Dollhouse ends with this one 13 part story, does that make it a failure?
I think that single season 13-episode series (longer than a miniseries, shorter than a multi-season 22 episode series) can be great artistically. Lots of room for character building, but not too much time to get sidetracked and diverted from telling a single story. What if Whedon had the opportunity to tell a story every year for a few years in 13-episode chunks, with each year being a completely different story/series? I’d very excited to see what Whedon or one of the HBO Davids (Simon, Chase, Milch) could do with that type of creative concept.
To a large degree, David Simon’s HBO projects have all been in this style. The Corner and Generation Kill were mini-series. Season One of The Wire was essentially one story told from beginning to end (but did create a world that was opened up and explored in depth in the following four seasons, which were slightly less self-contained.)
Kings, which has been interesting, if not compelling viewing, will likely end up as a single 13 episode series (as NBC burns off the remaining episodes to lower ratings on Saturday night). How it stands on its own as a story remains to be seen, but this could be a model worth pursuing, at least from the creative perspective.

While the Oscars prepare to celebrate the year’s best in films, it’s a reminder of the limits of the medium.
Brian Lowry, Variety, TV has the advantage in storytelling: “There are obvious parallels between ‘Mad Men’ — the AMC series that keeps amassing accolades despite what star Jon Hamm aptly referred to during the Screen Actors Guild awards as ‘dozens’ of viewers — and ‘Revolutionary Road,’ the star-driven movie that generated mixed critical response and largely missed out on major Oscar recognition. Yet in the differences resides a clue as to episodic TV’s advantage in tackling character-driven material.”
Willing Davidson, Slate.com, Great Book, Bad Movie “Why does Hollywood take our favorite novels and turn them into crap? …Three of the films that will be feted come Oscar night are based on recognizable literature. And while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Reader are definitely terrible movies, Revolutionary Road is both the worst movie I saw this year and one of the best novels I’ve read.”
Film is an ideal medium for certain types of ideas, but not the complex storytelling with which television and novels engage their audiences. A serial television show usually has 13 or 22 hours per season to tell a story. In 13 hours, it’s much easier to engage with the characters than in the 2 to 3 hours of a film.
Fortunately, television auteurs now have the ambition to tackle visually complex and ambitious endeavors. HDTV has also helped to make the medium more engaging, dynamic and cinematic. While film may remain the more commercially successful medium, television may be joining literature as a more creatively successful medium.

Having seen this on VH1 years ago, I’ve been looking for this video on the internets ever since I’ve been able to watch video online.
Here’s the completely bad-ass 7 minute performance of “I Want to Take You Higher”

And the high-larious interview with Sly Stone:

After remembering the problems from playing in similarly cold weather during high school marching band, I wondered how the quartet featuring Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Anthony McGill and Gabriela Montero managed to play with such precise intonation during the cold weather at the inauguration. Simple– the broadcast and webcast audio was recorded in advance in a temperate recording studio.
The New York Times reports, At the Inauguration – The Famous Fingers Were Live, but Their Sound Was Recorded: “The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).”
And for other clarinet nerds, that snazzy clarinet McGill played is a LeBlanc by Backun Legacy. The Times profiled McGill, who is a principal clarinetist for the Met opera earlier in the week, Another Eloquent Chicagoan at Center Stage.

At The A.V. Club, Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom? …
It’s as if Axl is desperately trying to get some unmakeable dream song from inside his skull onto the CD, and the result is an overstuffed maelstrom that makes all the punk dolts scoff. His ambition is noble, yet wildly unrealistic. It’s like if Jeff Lynne tried to make Out Of The Blue sound more like Fun House, except with jazz drumming and a girl singer from Motown.

Continuing from yesterday, here is another annoying trend of television news reporting: attempting to sound smarter by needlessly using excessively long words.
In this clip that’s been going around the web today, Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron twice uses the word “knowledgeability” where the shorter and more direct “knowledge” would have sufficed.

Or is knowledge:knowledgeability :: truth:truthiness