Cold Comforts

TODAY THE WEATHER turned on us, yet again, and the two days of glorious sunshine turned into a grim, gray, dour, rainy winter day. The ground is swollen shut, still cold from the deep freeze of the last two months, so the rain is coursing off it in streams. The kind of slow, soaking rain that always seems on the verge of ending, yet seems as if it will never end. So the lunch of the day is soup and sandwich. The soup is Campbell's Soups Natural Selections Tuscan Chicken, and the sandwich is ham on rye, grilled. The face on the television screen is Thandie Newton in the fine film Run, Fat Boy, Run, which is not a bad film because David Schwimmer directed it, but rather because of the huge holes in the plot at the 1, 3 and 5 marks. Which is to say it's a fine enough thing to watch, so long as you are distracted by the bad weather, the good food, and the lovely Red Hook Winter Ale. (Which I also had with Ghiardelli's Christmas special peppermint bark, which was both a one-hundred-and-eighty degree skid around and dead solid perfect.)


The film of the day is not Requiem. One of the crew at the Onion AV club recently added it to their thier new cult canon series, which I can appreciate on several levels, but, I, just . . . Nope. No can do. The barrel is way too full of fish. And one of the plot threads is yanked straight out of a Rolling Stones song. It's that school of film that's supposed to reward us all for appreciating how rotten the human spirit is, malfunctioning aspiration machines strapped to dying animals. Oh, and by the way, fuck yer mom, too. (Love the soundtrack, though.)



The film of the day is the fifth season of News Radio. Actually, it started earlier in the week. No, it started last week. Or was it the week before? Whatever. I grabbed a link to Hulu, which I had never bothered with before, and ended up watching the entirety of Season 4, which was the season before Phil Hartman's wife went insane and killed him before turning the gun on herself. It was also the season wherein the writing went from very good sitcom to straight out, up-and-up abstract comedy, culminating in an episode wherein they reinacted the movie Titanic, to great and magnificent effect. In point of fact, I started with the Titanic episode, and then went back to the beginning of the season, the first episode of which featured Jon Lovitz as a man perched on a ledge, preparing to commit suicide.

There's what you know, and then there's what you can prove. For instance, it's well documented that the fifth season was pulled together in spite of the fact of Hartman's absence, in fact because it was felt that Hartman would have wanted the show to go on. Lovitz joined up in his friend's absence, but knew he wasn't taking his place, because no one could take Phil Hartman's place. The fifth season has a kind of rhythm to it, one, two, one, two, with a fairly conventional plot followed by a more surreal and absurd episode. (More or less; this is a matter of appreciating intentions as much as anything else.) It's also indisputable that every single member of the cast found themselves channelling Lovits at one time or another. But I know . . .

Lemme back this up a step. I am on record as having a very vague and thoroughly unexplainable understanding of some kind of afterlife. No idea why, not attached to any kind of belief system or religious upbringing, just some vague notion that there is something left over, some other kind of existence out there somewhere. And somehow I know, I just know, that from somewhere, out there, Hartman was looking out at the show as they filmed it, thinking that there's no way the season would have played out that way if he had still been in it.

And he smiled.