I've missed the last few weeks of Saturday Night Live, but I tuned in last night simply because I happened to finish a book right around 11:30. I'm glad I saw this episode because host Joseph Gordon-Levitt kinda brought the house down. (In case the name's not familiar, or that picture's too small, he was the kid on 3rd Rock from the Sun; now he's 28 and making indie films. The Lookout was good; I hear Brick is great but it's been in my queue for about three years.)

It's a pretty regular occurrence for hosts to sing and dance in their monologue; Gordon-Levitt chose to emulate the "Make 'Em Laugh" number from Singin' in the Rain. If you have seen that movie, you know the insane physicality involved. If you watched the show, you know that he 95% pulled it off, and that's an incredible achievement.

This link to an Entertainment Weekly recap helpfully provides clips of both Gordon-Levitt's number as well as the original from Donald O'Connor. The writer of the recap, Ken Tucker, is very crotchety about the whole thing, huffing that he was not impressed because Gordon-Levitt didn't make it look as "effortless" as O'Connor did. Not to deride what O'Connor did back in 1952, but he had a cushion that Gordon-Levitt did not have: edits.

Gordon-Levitt did the whole damn thing live! He landed BOTH runs up the wall! So he was huffing and puffing a little by the end. Tucker complains that the thing "wasn't funny," but I think he's missing the point. It wasn't meant to be funny, and it wasn't meant to be better than the original; it was meant to be an incredibly bold gesture by a guy who's just been hovering on the edge of superstardom for the past fifteen or so years, and who I expect will be much-talked about for the rest of the week. It was a calculated move saying, "hey, don't underestimate me," and my prediction is that it will work.

(If you want funny, see the last skit of the night, also playable on the EW page. Gordon-Levitt played Lloyd Dobler doing the boombox serenade and Jason Sudeikis played the neighbor who just couldn't stop ruining it with questions. "Hey, whatcha doing? Is that Peter Gabriel?")

Anyway, it impressed me. Watch those clips--O'Connor's first, so you know what the standard was, and then Gordon-Levitt's--and tell me you didn't have at least a little bit of admiration for the kid. (Who is, incidentally, exactly my age but still seems like he's twenty, only because he's been on TV since he was like four.)

from Grub Street New York: Flowchart Helps You Determine What Crap to Eat

"Is your name Jared?" (if yes: Subway) if no: "Do you have more than $3?" (if no: Taco Bell) if yes: "Are you drunk?"

Thanks to the Fug Girls for the tip! (Speaking of the Fug Girls, read their take on the not-with-a-bang-but-with-a-whimper finale of Project Runway which aired last night.)

Here's the set-up: living room, wooden door, 3-4 feet of entryway, another wooden door, screen door, big bad outdoors world.

Here's the problem: there's this wind tunnel effect being created between the two wooden doors. The one on the outside closes and bolts and everything like it's supposed to, but somehow it traps a bunch of air in the entryway space. The indoors door doesn't latch very well, and as a result, the wind causes it to open in a ghostly manner. It also takes 3 to 10 slams to close in the first place.

It's not a security issue, of course--I do have a properly-locking door--but having the inside door hanging open makes the room kind of chilly, plus Skylar has taken to hanging around in the entryway so she can make sure no one with bad intentions is stepping on our porch. As far as I'm concerned, she can do that from the window.

So, my question is, how do I show this door who's boss? Physicists? Meteorologists? Just the generally handy? Advice, please!

I am one evening marathon away from finishing the fourth season of Lost—I say this as a person who just started watching it, from the first episode of the first season, in September. I’m averaging approximately two weeks per season; at this rate, I will be more than caught up when the sixth season hits broadcast television in February.

I’m not sure I will watch it, though.

Netflix Instant View has been my source for catching up the first five seasons of Lost. Any episode is viewable as quickly as I can connect to the Internet. (For those of you STILL not on board with Netflix, ABC.com has all the full episodes as well.) I can watch twelve episodes in a row while on the couch, but I can also watch one in the library between classes, and I can watch two in bed before going to sleep. In short, I have integrated Lost into just about every aspect of my daily life.

I’m hooked. I liked the story when it was smaller—the forty-odd plane crash survivors trying to build a life on this mysterious island that is both tropical and riddled with polar bears. Then things spread out—there were bands of scientists that had died of some mysterious plague, there were murderous, mysterious “Others,” there were a whole group of people on the other half of the plane who somehow crashed on the other side of the island. This crew fought that crew, that side kidnapped this person. People were continually knocked unconscious while someone escaped. The “others” began to mix with the castaways, then a whole new crew swept in on some ship with a whole new set of loyalties.

And THEN they started mixing flash forwards in with the flashbacks, and now they're suggesting that the island which we already knew had healing powers also appears to be set in some kind of time warp. (Comparable to the one in my living room? Maybe...)

But here’s the thing—a lot of people who stuck things out from the start of the show were really tiring of this show by the third and fourth seasons. I like to read old episode recaps from Television Without Pity, and while these episodes were airing, people were really getting cranky. The show had been on for more than three years, and people were getting impatient, needing answers. Watchers were also frustrated with what was then the standard TV airing schedule: a handful of new episodes scattered across September, reruns in October, sweeps eps in November, reruns through December and January, another sweeps in February, and so on. Two weeks, six weeks between episodes and people were forgetting what was supposed to be keeping them on the edges of their seats. (It’s worth noting that now networks recognize what they didn’t know in 2006: shows like Lost and 24 are now airing mostly uninterrupted for half seasons, lengthening the time that passes between seasons but shortening the time that passes between new episodes.)

Experiencing a show when it’s new, you get to be a part of the cultural phenomenon. I can talk to people about Mad Men the next day because Joan hit her hubby over the head, or jump on the Internet and read everyone’s reactions to the guy who got his foot run over by a lawnmower. (I didn’t write about that episode, but the AV Club did!) You think there’s anyone who wants to talk to me about Lost now? It’s like I’m walking around saying to people, “Can you believe these iPhones? Fan-cy!”

But watching with the broadcast, you also have to deal with those problems. Everything that bugged people about Lost back then has not bothered me at all. I am impervious to cliffhangers—I just click “Play next episode”! I’ve not tired of the layering of the mystery yet because it’s still all new to me. This past summer, I watched season two of Mad Men in just a couple weeks. This fall, I watched season three, but it took thirteen weeks. You get less immersed in a TV show when it’s a short weekly appointment than when you spend an entire week watching it every night (especially a show like Mad Men, which builds up steam SO SLOWLY, although the last three or four episodes of the season were incredible).

I vividly remember my first experience with TV on DVD, when the Best of Friends video discs (not even DVDs yet!) came out, Christmas of 1999 or 2000. My parents bought my sister and I each our own set, because we were spoiled. I…watched all twelve episodes in one night. Really. I don't know if at that time I had seen those episodes recently—it’s possible that Friends was already in syndication, airing at 6pm on TBS or whatever—but having the ability to just pop a tape in and watch “The One Where No One’s Ready” was incredibly novel. (I also brought those videos back to college with me, where on one occasion my roommate and I watched “The One Where Everyone Finds Out” three times in a row.)

It’s fun to think about how much the experience of TV viewing has changed, even just within my lifetime. They didn’t even have VCRs when my parents were kids! TV shows aired, and then what? They dissipated into the air? The other night, I set up my DVR to record The Office while I was in class, but it didn’t pick it up for some reason or another. I shrugged it off, because, you know what? I knew I could watch it on Hulu the next day.

Talk about being spoiled!

I changed the battery in my wall clock yesterday, but since that time the clock has been wrong. Somehow, I managed to mash down the hour hand and jam it, leaving the minute hand untouched.

The end result? Since yesterday, the time in my apartment has continually been some time past six. 6:05, 6:20, 6:45. It flows from 6:59 right back into 6:00 again.

I'll eventually fix it, but for now I'm enjoying the oddnesses, such as taking a long nap yesterday afternoon and waking up 20 minutes before I originally fell asleep.

Famous Authors Narrate the Funny Pages

Beetle Bailey
by Ernest Hemingway
"It's a mighty sorry business, Sarge being blown up like that," Beetle said. The other soldiers in the café nodded silently. He ordered another bottle of vermouth and drank the vermouth. It was a good vermouth.

Check out the others, including Peanuts by Jane Austen and Dilbert by Charles Dickens. Garfield by James Joyce is also a highlight.

This movie was a real strut for Warren Beatty—throughout he’s the smartest, craftiest, stealthiest, studliest guy around. When his character—a journalist—literally won a barfight, I gave up expecting anything else. That made the movie sort of silly, in addition to the narrative, which was quite obscure and impenetrable for an action-thriller. Also, the last section went on for ages. There are some really great suspense movies from the 70s, but this isn’t one of them.

Alfie (1966)

I saw the remake, with Jude Law, way back when, and thought at the time that it felt old-fashioned. The refrain of, “What does it all mean?” was, I think, by 2004, a question that people born in the era of self-help were a little more used to asking themselves. I was interested, then, in seeing the original, with a youthful Michael Caine, to see if it made more sense in a historical context. The answer is, yes, it does. The incredibly shallow journey to selfhood really should belong to a guy with sideburns, who calls women “birds.” I could quibble with the sexism in the movie, but it was positively quaint, with Alfie having a moment of realization that his victimized girlfriend “has feelings! Just like me!” As a period piece, it was fun. (It seemed weird, though, to have Shelley Winters in a glamorous role—could Roseanne’s Nana Mary really ever have been a sex symbol?)

Click ahead for five more films (but only two produced in my lifetime!)

Sometimes my dog cracks me up. When she's been alone for awhile--while I'm at school or out running errands--she gets really excited to see me come home, and sometimes she channels this excitement into chewing on one of her toys. Thus, she'll often meet me at the door with a stuffed animal clutched between her teeth. (Or maybe I'm misinterpreting this; maybe it's actually an offer. "I'm so glad you came home! Here, have a frog!")

Anyway, I always let her outside to relieve herself after I've been gone for a few hours, and she usually she carries her friend outside with her. So today, I did not consider it unusual that when I got home from the grocery store, Skylar met me at the door with a little teddy bear dangling from her mouth.

Then she decided to do something new: she raced outside, trotted over to the grass, spit out the bear, turned herself around to look at me, and excitedly peed all over the bear.

If for no other reason than that they are sometimes so stupid, dogs are a joy forever.

But the real news is that "proudly average" has triumphed over Hollywood. Personal challenge-setter (and Cereal Monogamist commenter!) Tim Reid successfully trounced Ryan Reynolds' race time by 11 whole minutes, coming in at 3:38:46.

See confirmation of Reid's race time here and his site here. He deserves hearty congratulations, both for meeting his personal goal and for raising a bunch of money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation. And also because he visited my blog, and so I consider him my close friend.

Eat a pizza and put your feet up, Tim! You deserve it.

• I love when Tim Gunn prompts all the designers to say, "Thank you, Mood!" at the fabric store. There's something so corny and good-natured about it. If he hadn't become a fashion guru, I think Tim would have made a great kindergarten teacher.
• Why are they doing so many 1-day challenges? I feel like there haven't been many really incredible designs this season, and I think that's partially because they're being given so little time to design and create. Can't Lifetime foot the bill for a few 2-days? I want to see another Chris and Christian avant-garde gown, please!
• I've been rooting for Carol Hannah. I worried that tonight she was getting what reality TV-watchers call "the edit." She's been really unsure of where to go with her design and spoke for all of us wafflers when she announced, "I'm going to commit! I think." But actually, she was getting the perseverance edit, the struggle that pays off, and got commended on the runway. Though she did not win. I don't like Althea, who was the winner, because she refuses to mar her designs with necessary support undergarments. The judges like her, though, even awarding her the win tonight. If I could trade Althea out for Gordana, I would, but the judges clearly think she's too old, so her days are numbered. I don't like Logan or his greasy hair, but he's not going to be a problem anymore.
• Meanwhile, can someone explain Christopher to me? He started out on a roll, won in the first episode, later made a dress I loved which he described as being for a Victorian-era vampire bride, and then he just fell apart. He's been in the bottom two four times in a row now, and four designers have been eliminated so that he can hang around and make the viewers at home laugh at his ridiculousness. He got lucky tonight that his bedskirt gown was only the third worst tonight. As for Irina, I've decided to like that she's such an unabashed bitch. She didn't say much at first, and suddenly a few episodes in, she swooped in to announce that nobody knew as much as she did, and everything everyone else was making sucked. I should hate her--I kind of dislike when people on competitive shows can't keep their eyes on their own paper, so to speak--but she's made some nice stuff (including tonight's dress although Nina thought it looked "cheap") and, you know what, be confident Irina.
• Hey, Uncle Nick from Season 2 is a judge! Yay for him! Heidi is awesome. She described Logan's look as something an 80s rocker would wear, "but not the main one." He eventually takes from this that he was eliminated because he was too edgy and the judges "didn't get it." Sigh. They all say that. He even used the expression "Middle America," which is pretty nervy coming from an Idahoan.
• I usually watch Models of the Runway, the after-show, but that's only because I'm in bed and I don't care that much what's on. Tonight they had like a ten-minute discussion about boob tape. ...No comment.

SPOILER ALERT for those of you not keeping up with the show (i.e., Mom) but Don Draper 'came out' to Betty about his true identity, telling more truths in a row than I believe he has ever done before. This all occurred while his most recent dish-on-the-side waited for him in the car so they could go away for the weekend. He never made it back to the car--did he forget that she was there, or, did he, cool-as-a-cucumber, just let her figure out that he wasn't coming back? Oh, Don.

But forget all that, because none of it was as awesome as the moment Joan clocked her husband over the head with a vase.

This guy's a real jerk, not in the least because when she married him, Joan quit working at Sterling Cooper and is thus in the show less than she used to be. Less Joan = bad. But also, he's a bastard who failed out of his surgery rotation (or...whatever) and can't get himself back on track. Also he's a jerk, he doesn't talk to her, he belittles what's important to her, he fails to recognize the real contributions she could make as a wife, because he thinks women are useless and just bred to sit around, when Joan's smart and super-capable. He's been nothing but trouble for her, dashing all her dreams for her marriage.

Well, in this episode, after another bad interview, which all of her helpful preparation couldn't keep him from screwing up, he snapped at her that she couldn't tell him anything, that she didn't know what it was like to want something your whole life and have it not work out. Which of course she does--it was marriage she planned for, and that he has single-handedly ruined. And then she clocked him over the head with a vase. Oh, Joan.

Note: this weekend I put together preparation for my Halloween costume. It is Mad Men-inspired (think sassy Sixties secretary!) and I am incredibly excited. I have cat's-eye glasses!

Woo. Too much excitement for a Sunday night.

Edited to add: Joan SMASH!

They're down to 8 cheftestants on Top Chef and that can only mean one thing...

Tonight is RESTAURANT WARS!

You’d think a roomful of college students, like the ones taking the film class I'm taking now--and it’s not an intro film class either, they’ve all made it through at least one full class already--would be willing explorers. I’m surprised at how often they react negatively to black and white, to subtitles, just to differentness. (The 400 Blows is not boring, twerps! You're boring.)

Let me describe an old movie experience: several years ago, when I still worked an office job, I saw a portion of a movie. I used to watch TV while I got ready for work, from about 7am to about 7:35, and what I watched varied, but if there was an interesting movie on at the time it usually won. So, this particular morning, I saw a bit of this movie in which a bunch of characters were trapped on a raft after a shipwreck. Tyrone Power was among them, and in the bit that I saw, the characters were discussing whether or not the sick and doomed among them should be thrown overboard, because they were running out of food, water and supplies. The concept of sacrificing a few people to save a few people was, I thought, an intriguing one for a movie. I love when movies address hard questions, when there’s a little ambiguity about the proceedings, so this was right up my alley. I didn’t get to see the end, because I had to go to work, but the first thing I did when I got there was put Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which is what I assumed I had watched, into my Netflix queue.

Some time later, Lifeboat appeared in my mailbox and I sat down to watch it. Imagine my surprise when Tyrone Power wasn’t in it. And it was about Nazis. And they were in a lifeboat, but it was a different boat and different people. It was a damn different movie. We live in the age of Google, so I found the movie I’d seen relatively quickly. In fact, it didn’t take me longer than the time it took to hit Tyrone Power’s IMDB page. I realized I had watched what was probably a B-movie from the 50s, released under both the title Seven Waves Away, and the far greater title, Abandon Ship! Yes, the exclamation point is theirs.

Well, Abandon Ship! is out of print, never been transferred to DVD, so I had no way to view it again until it played last week, incredibly, on Turner Classic Movies at like four in the morning. I DVR’d it and watched it today.

Abandon Ship!, especially compared to Lifeboat, is pleasantly sensational. Tyrone Power is strutting around (you know, on the raft) from the beginning, salvaging clothes off dead bodies and rolling them into the sea. People are all, “No! We need to give that man a funeral when we get to shore!” They’re menaced by sharks, they have no hope of rescue. Eventually they get to the point where they decide to control their rations by throwing the sick overboard.

From the film class I’m taking right now, I know that the 1950s were a turning point in the movie business; it was when “art movies” and “popular movies” began to take really different paths and the gap between culture and entertainment got wider. Old movies, especially from the 30s and 40s (probably my favorite old-movie era) are wonderful, but watching them is like visiting foreign countries. They just have moments that feel strange, and you take that into consideration as you watch and evaluate. Abandon Ship! (I can’t stop putting in that title, it cracks me up) was obviously popcorn fare, slick and cheesy and dark and fun, and for that reason, it felt really quite close to the movies we have in the theater today. The rhythms we’re familiar with now—like “We’re out of water,” DUN DUN DUN—were beginning to be developed. It's not exactly the same, of course--there's a little more melodrama in older movies--but the gap is just not as wide as people think.

For my part, I’m glad I learned to trek around in that foreign territory, and to feel comfortable doing so, because it’s brought me endless enjoyment.

Still, this season has been getting on my damn nerves.

There is one guy on the show this season who is such an obnoxious ass that I’m not going to print his name. I don’t want to increase his Google hits, a number I’m sure he keeps track of in some kind of retro little black book that also has the phone numbers of his favorite escort services and the female cousin he took to his prom. Anyway, this guy should know that I’m on to him. The rude and sexist things that come out of his damn mouth are so clearly designed to rile people up and grab him attention, and I am pissed that this show is giving it to him.

Even though the need has been more than met, other guys are continuing to step up and be bastards, including one in tonight’s episode who blathered on and on about how his dish was more refined and creative and special than anyone else’s and who didn’t even crack the top four. The only two guys who haven’t given me any trouble so far are Kevin (AKA Beardo, AKA Young Santa Claus) and Ash, the quippy gay guy who seemed like a nice guy but not a very good chef, and whose past-due elimination came tonight.

There are four front-runners right now (in addition to the bastards, who seem to consider themselves front-runners without tons of evidence of this): the Voltaggio brothers, and who seem too intent on beating each other to worry about the presence of women in the kitchen, nice guy Beardo, and Jennifer, who is my girl crush. The first couple episodes seemed to be trying to position her as ‘the bitch,’ overplaying footage of her talking about how competitive she is, and how she’s not there to make friends or whatever reality show cliché the producers coaxed her into saying.

Let me suggest, as Tina Fey did in a really funny rant on Hillary Clinton, that YEAH. SHE IS A BITCH. BITCHES GET STUFF DONE.

Jen gets stuff done

She really came alive in the third episode of the season, a challenge in which the entire crew had to fix a big buffet-style meal for an entire airport hangar full of military people and their families. She had won the Quickfire, the mini-challenge that takes up the first ten minutes of every episode, and her reward was immunity—the “you can’t get eliminated tonight” prize. On account of that, the rest of the group nominated her as the head of the kitchen (there’s some fancy name for it, I forget what it was), who would not make a dish of her own but would supervise and manage and just in general keep everything hot, refilled, on plates, on time. She stalked around the kitchen like General Patton, negotiating arguments over the use of equipment, asking people things like, “Can you cook and have this conversation at the same time?” She was alarmingly impressive.

I wouldn’t be so aggressively girl-power if this particular season hadn’t made it necessary. Women have been getting eliminated twice as fast as men have been—and I’m not saying the judging is crooked or anything, but that the contestant pool was thick with mediocre ladies. If you don’t put good female chefs on the show, good female chefs can’t win, and that bugs me.

The second episode of the season pitted “boys” against “girls” (and yes, that’s what they continually called it even though these are all men and women legally able to purchase alcohol and rent cars) and featured tons of trash talk from the “boys” about how they didn’t feel threatened by any of the women. Several episodes in, the designated punching bag has become older woman Robin, who regardless of how annoying she is does not deserve the vitriol that gets hurled at her, especially when she’s not in the room.

Even super-capable Jennifer is not immune. In the very first episode, when the chefs were milling around getting to know each other, she named the restaurant that she works at, and was immediately asked, without a hint of irony, “Oh, are you the pastry chef?” Without a hint of surprise—or bother, for that matter—she replied, “No, head chef.” No offense to pastry chefs, but yeah, that’s a slight. She’s become the Peggy Olson of this show—I am invested now, and if she loses, FEMINISM LOSES. Even if she loses to the talented and utterly inoffensive Beardo.

(Tonight judge-in-love-with-his-own-one-liners Toby Young compared Jennifer’s dish to a hairy armpit. Strangely, this was a compliment, meant to be on par with a more conventional adjective like “earthy.” She just smiled with amusement and said thank you.)

GO TEAM JEN.

That person who thinks that, on a campus of 8000 students, 3000 faculty members, and God only knows how much non-academic staff, he is the only one who will be going to get a flu shot today. He walks up and down the line, stunned and insulted, seeming to think that if he says dubiously, "The line is all the way out the door?" enough times someone will let him step in. Clearly he is more important than the rest of us.

DUH there's a line. I got here half an hour early, man. How many years have you been on this planet? You wait for these things. You plan for it. You bring a book. I got through an entire chapter of Storytelling in Film and Television.

Also, my arm hurts. But I will probably not get the flu this winter.

Things That Amuse Me

At my writing center hours today, I saw (among others) a young woman from the school of management who wanted some help with an application to a graduate program. She is originally from China, and she wanted to make sure she wasn't missing anything in this essay prompt which asked if she was prepared to be integrated into the "exceptionally diverse" environment of the school. I gave her the secret handshake, which is to say that I told her that "diverse" is a signal word, meaning that the school is committed to having a varied racial profile and that she should expect a lot of minorities. She was like, great, I'm all set!

On Monday, I had a long conversation with a Korean student about the thematic implications of the expression, "Follow your heart." It's always fun to get the shot to kind of explain these things. Suddenly just being born an American makes me a genius.

Things That Improve My Outlook

Life has been exponentially sunnier since I turned in my Toni Morrison paper yesterday. I thought that thing was never getting written.