The Blog as Masturbation

What do people want?

That's a question I've been thinking about lately, for a variety of reasons. Partially because I'm not gainfully employed in a full-time career, partially because I've always felt myself to be capable of creating praise-worthy content, and partially because I watched The Social Network again.

But no, this won't turn into another piece on that movie.

Hit the jump for more.

Instant Reaction: Chuck vs the Push Mix

Tweet: #SarahConnorBitches #Chuck413

Addendum: You know who Linda Hamilton was all of Season 4? Sarah Connor. That's it. She wasn't Chuck's mom. She wasn't Ellie's mom. She wasn't Stephen Bartowski's wife. She was Linda Hamilton. That led to some certainly badass moments. But it also meant that she felt ultimately disconnected from everything else happening during the season. And, ultimately, I think that was the biggest failing of the first part of Season 4: We never felt as though Mary Bartowski not coming back to the rest of the Bartowski clan was a horrible thing.


Tweet: Morgan inspires Casey's grunts like no other. #Chuck413

Addendum: What an epic bromance, you guys. Seriously. Morgan brought Casey back from the BRINK OF DEATH.


More after the jump.

Instant Reaction: Chuck vs the Gobbler

Tweet: Live tweeting of #Chuck412 starts now.

Addendum: I feel like I need my own theme music. Can I get my own theme music for Instant Reactions? I'd like something epic, that makes you think that another Rocky movie is going through a badass training montage, but with enough maudlin backing strings to make people realize that I also look adorable in turtlenecks.


Tweet: #DOUBLEAGENTWALKER #Chuck412

Addendum: Didja see her guys? Didja? Didja?

Check more after the jump.

The Art of Limitations, the Limitations of Art

Bill Simmons is hands down my favorite sports writer. He's funny, he's irreverent, he's topical, and maybe most importantly, he speaks the vernacular of the fan. The "eye test" is a big one when you read Simmons' writing or listen to his podcasts. That is to say, if a sportsman looks like he sucks, he probably sucks, no matter what the media or basic statistics claim. At the same time, he's a big proponent of advanced metrics, which are statistics that take a lot of context into consideration, creating statistics that are often more in line with those "eye tests."

Last week, Simmons held a podcast with Patton Oswalt, who is easily one of my favorite comedians. Oswalt was on to hype his book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. One of the topics the book covered, and that Simmons and Oswalt went on about at length, were the struggles of the comedian in the 80s and 90s, and how niche comedy has found a place thanks to the Internet and Twitter. The pair agreed, the open nature of consumption of art is a capital letter Good Thing.

To an extent, I agree.

We'll come back to this after the jump.

Instant Reaction: Chuck vs the Balcony

I've been live-tweeting Chuck all through Season 4, and posting it over at another blog. Since I'm moving to daily content here, I figured it would make a good addition to the Racecar Brown collection. Check it out.

Tweet: Not gonna front; super excited for #Chuck411

Addendum: I still feel excited about Chuck being back, though I will say up front that the episode was meandering and slow and kind of disappointing and didn't really go anywhere until the end. These are still some of my favorite characters, so much so that I'll forgive what was essentially a prologue masquerading as a full episode.


Tweet: France? Romantic. #Chuck411

Addendum: Vineyards? Also romantic. Wine cellars? Romantic again. Fancy wine? Still romantic. Being shot in the back? Okay you got me there.


More funnie after the jump. Yes I intentionally spelled "funny" with an ie.

Growing With Art

Monday is my TV day, for whatever reason.

There's only one show I watch every week, NBC's Chuck. Occasionally, I'll follow that up with some CW action in the form of Gossip Girl.

Now, neither of these are astounding shows. The former is a somewhat convoluted, somewhat aimless mish mash of genres that relies on the immeasurable charisma of its actors. The latter is complete early-20s melodrama that people watch because it's a new-school soap opera, with prettier people and somewhat better actors.

So, I know these shows aren't the best, so why do I watch them?

Find out after the jump.

Chuck and Balancing Acts on Television

I've talked about television before on this blog, but a recent foray into semi-obsessive (okay, genuinely obsessive) fandom for the show Chuck has got me thinking about it again. Specifically, about how major network television as an art form is so uniquely tied to its fans in a way no other art form really is.

Sonny Tzu's The Art of Television

Television is the basest form of entertainment. At its most crude, it satisfies our most instinctual urges - for sex and violence - in increasingly banal ways. The most perfectly distilled form of this sort of television is easily The Real World. Every subsequent season, the producers at MTV come up with more and more ways to convince people, in situations that are almost bizarrely mundane, to hate, love, fight, fuck and betray each other. Usually between the same two people.