For the last couple episodes of True Blood, the denizens of Bon Temps have been concerned about a maenad in their midst. The maenads were the handmaidens of Dionysus or Bacchus. Dionysus is the deity in charge of boozing, ecstasy, and ritual madness. On his high holy days, his female worshipers would get wasted, engage in random carnal acts, and tear animals limb from limb with their bare hands and eat the raw flesh. Ya know, party hardy.

On season two of True Blood, the vampires and shapeshifters and telepaths and regular folk are all scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to deal with the character of Maryann Forrester wreaking havoc in their town. Maryann Forrester is apparently a maenad and she calls Dionysus or Bacchus “the god who comes” and she is hoping to sacrifice something sufficiently tasty to get the object of her worship to actually show up for the party. According to the vampire queen, maenads always expect their deity to show up and they get stood up every time. Unfortunately, the vampire queen is played by Evan Rachel Wood, who looks beautiful in her red-painted lips, but is utterly unconvincing as a ruler who has been undead since before the industrial revolution. As a disaffected teenager, Evan Rachel Wood is a believable enough actress and I think she even gets prettier as she gets older, but Bill Compton’s maker Lorena, played by Mariana Klaveno, comes across so much more elegant and queenly. And what is up with the late 40’s-ish bathing suits and Eisenhower references and the whole art deco thing from a vampire who is older than man’s mastery of the steam engine? Anyway, oddball casting and styling and not exactly this otherwise excellent show’s finest hour.

Back to the maenad Maryann Forrester. Maryann Forrester is played by Michelle Forbes, who I first came across as the morbid but fun Dr. Julianna Cox from the coroner’s office on Homicide: Life on the Street. No stranger to genre, Michelle Forbes has been in Star Trek: Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, 24, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Lost, and more. I’ve seen some people whining about a genre show like True Blood appearing on HBO, but I hardly think True Blood pushed Sopranos or Deadwood off the air and I like seeing someone actually put effort into making a serious quality genre program for adults.

At any rate, Maryann Forrester is down with whatever keeps the party going. Every time she orders in a restaurant, it makes me crack up because I looooooove ordering multiple entrees and appetizers and waiters and waitresses often ask parties I am with if we are expecting more people. So Maryann Forrester is a sensualist. She likes to eat. She likes to throw legendary parties. She doesn’t mind the rough stuff, evangelizes it even. She cooks a delicious semi-human heart. And she wants to sacrifice Sam Merlotte (the workplace sexual harassment wereguy) to her deity. I admit that I am way past the point where I find orgies tiresome, but there is no denying that Maryann knows how to throw an exciting bash. Even if she does keep getting literally left at the altar.

I admit I like a good party as much as anyone and I might have thrown a few parties which revelers still talk about. But, more and more, I feel so sorry for the beautiful life of the party who is always waiting for a man who is never going to show up and treat her right.

Would you want to party with handmaidens of Dionysus?

PS Apparently, Michelle Forbes was in a movie called Love Bites in 1993 where Adam Ant plays a vampire. I’d be grateful if anyone could point me to where to find this vamp flick.

As you all probably know, the HBO series True Blood, based on the Charlaine Harris novels, was one of my favorite new shows this past year, maybe my very favorite. The new season is kicking off with fun altmodel cam boy and local vampire blood dealer Lafayette Reynolds possibly in trouble and more murderous whodunit and more surprisingly well done and extended sex scenes. I’m not sure the first True Blood Season 2 teaser pics and True Blood Season 2 promo photos really do the show justice.

I am sure that a bunch of the product placement tie-in billboards and suchlike around Los Angeles are a bit cringe-inducing. There are billboards for motorcycles, cars, automotive insurance, and and Gillette razorblades and other not terribly vampy products. (I don’t necessarily want to give tons of bonus exposure to silly things advertised this way, but I have to give Gillette a shout-out because years ago I worked the product launch for the Gillette Sensor and it was the most awesome and creative technical theatre gig I ever saw.) Pale-skinned dark-haired vampy femme fatale Dita Von Teese says, “I don’t understand this vampire bandwagon. Just saw a billboard advertising razors that “vampires prefer”. Vampires don’t have to shave!” I could get into a dissertation about the necessary equilibrium between enjoying the success of what you love verus avoiding having what you love co-opted. But really this brings me to another much more pressing and vital concern about the new season of True Blood.

What is up with vampire hair on Alexander Skarsgaard? In the season opener, big wig vampire sheriff and nightclub impressario Eric Northman, played by the always charismatic yet unsettling Alexander Skarsgård had foils in his hair. Like he was bleaching highlights in. It appears that he will be wearing shorter hair for Season 2. It is too early in this portion of the series to get into much philosophy of prejudice, or presentation of sexuality and sensuality in media, or the nature of the erotic, so I can’t help turning over and over in my head whether I feel like vampires should have to deal with hair growth. It would suck to have hair chopped off in a battle with another vampire if it could not grow back. If no regrowth were the case, then all vampire altercations would look like hair pulling catfights. It would suck to be turned on a day your hair dye was not fresh or you hadn’t shaved your shavable parts. Hair and nails do grow a bit after death, but not much. Would vampire hair just regrow to the length and/or shade it was at time of death?

Should the fictional undead require hair dye and razors? How do you want your media to handle vampire hair growth?

So I am just clocking in for a day at the orifice, watching porn movies based on World of Warcraft. There are a group of magical “whores” on a quest to battle an evil darkness spreading through the land. The fantasy quest episodes open with some appropriately mood-setting medievalist-feeling music and then get down to doing battle or doin’ it. A demon directs a threesome. An elf gives a pirate her booty in exchange for something decent to wear. Delightfully, a magic-user, played by Bianca Dagger, makes a special prismatic rock a lil bigger for a lesbian tryst. There is a recurring motif of characters, momentarily befuddled by magic and illusion, coming to their senses and being like, “OMG, what did I just do?” The best of these is when a Paladin, played by Monica Mayhem, suddenly snaps out of it and declares that she would never fuck a barbarian . . . while his splam is still on her face.

I think that these swords and sorcery sex videos would have been perfect viewing material when I was Treasurer of Science Fiction Club in college. The sort of group experience where everybody would have gone around afterward for weeks saying, “I would never fuck a barbarian.” Which would be pretty awesome.

The Whore Lore episodes are directed by Dez and the stories are mostly by Dez and Staci with a screenwriting assist from Marcus London. Marcus London also plays a well-built, tattooed, red-cloaked rough partner for some of the whores. He looked familiar and I figured out that I didn’t recognize him for his 2007 win for Best Oral Sex Scene, but I did recognize him because he played a pornstar in a scene on HBO’s extremely porn-cozy hit Entourage.

As I go through the fantasy episodes, I realize that a bit more is familiar and not just because Forrest Black and I have shot some of the armor worn in various scenes. See, there is this castle in the Hollywood Hills which regularly has pretty notorious after-parties. It is a beautiful space, lots of fun to hang out at, and, if there is a drug you’ve never seen anyone in Los Angeles do before, it is definitely the spot to go to rectify that lack of experience. It is also a very enjoyable place to get into the sorts of intellectual conversations which are not as common in Hollywood as I might prefer. The castle peeps keep telling me I should shoot naked gothic girls there and had told me a lot of porn had been shot there (also part of Spinal Tap!) and I always thought it was odd I had not recognized any. That circumstance has also now been remedied. So about a third of Whore Lore sex scenes take place at a place where I have spent some quality late night time. And actually so have quite a few of the people who appear in Blue Blood pictures and post on the boards.

Suddenly I have a whole new perspective on the Whore Lore repetition of scenarios where people are all wondering what they did and who they slept with. Which is kinda awesome. We’ve got a free Whore Lore photo gallery for your viewing pleasure and I recommend checking out the site for the naughty stuff. But I want you all to know I would never fuck a barbarian. To the best of my recollection.

Alan Ball’s True Blood on HBO is moving along at a brisk clip. (If you haven’t viewed through episode 109, you may want to stop reading here.) Episodes 108 and 109 really highlighted the theme of who is really the hunted in Charlaine Harris’ world of vampires who have come out of the coffin.

We’ve learned that human beings can get high on vampire blood or V. We also learn that, while vampires can drink the synthetic blood substitute Tru Blood, nothing is enjoyable quite like the real thing. So there are plenty of small-minded folks in the True Blood world who fear vampires because they could hunt them and feed off of them, even if they are not doing so. Yet there are also reasons for humans to hunt vampires, although again most do not do so. Time to look in a mirror to figure out who is the hunted and who is the hunter.

Some vampires, such as the jaded 1,000-year-old nightclub impresario Eric, played by Alexander Skarsgard, are annoyed by the whole vampire pride and vampire rights amendment thing. They are satisfied with their position in society and are perfectly happy to exercise their power from the shadows. There is a scene where the human leading lady Sookie Stackhouse, played by Anna Paquin, is kissing vampire leading man Bill Compton, played by Stephen Moyer, and their chemistry is notable. Eric’s most trusted retainer turns to him and says that if she still had feelings, she would be moved by this public display of affection. Eric replies, in the most bored voice imaginable, that he wouldn’t.

The best culture clash in the most recent two episodes is where Sookie’s best friend Tara Thornton, played by Rutina Wesley, turns to her alcoholic and possibly formerly possessed mother and her friend, who are all decked out for church, and points out that putting on a ridiculous hat and going to church isn’t going to make them better or happier than Tara. I personally kinda like the jelly bean colored Southern church-going style of hats, but I don’t really have a hat-shaped kind of head. My skull and hair are generally wrong for most hats I’ve tried on, although I always welcome hat source suggestions.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s episode of True Blood. There is going to be a vampire tribunal, presided over by a vampire elder played by Zeljko Ivanek. Zeljko Ivanek is perhaps best known for his portrayals of Governor James Devlin on Oz and of the driven prosecuting attorney Ed Danvers in Homicide: Life on the Street. The Ed Danvers character was so popular that he was brought in as a crossover character in a number of episodes of Law & Order, even after Homicide was canceled. Zeljko Ivanek has actually done a lot of political and legal acting roles over his long career, so I think he will be very entertaining as a vampiric judge who gets to decide when it is or is not all right to kill.

Given the huge ad campaign HBO’s True Blood ran just about everywhere, including this site, you have probably heard that there is a new vampire show of some sort on cable television. I actually had planned to do a feature article about the brilliant ad campaign for the show, but it was one of those times when pesky life gets in the way of writing. True Blood had some damn sexy billboards, posters, and bus adverts and, of course, banners on targeted sites like Blue Blood, and some sort of sweepstakes. The show takes place in a world where vampires have “come out of the coffin” and are looking for equal rights, opposed by the expected fundamentalists, and assisted by a mysterious Japanese company which has produced a synthetic blood substitute called Tru Blood. We’ve actually still got some great background videos explaining the setting of True Blood which I’ll see about posting after the hectic rush of Halloween is past.

But the really cool thing about True Blood is that the storylines are character-driven, the themes are righteous, the sex is in-your-face varied, and the lighting and cinematography are really beautiful. The series was developed by Alan Ball, award-winning writer of American Beauty and creator of Six Feet Under, based on the Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire Mysteries. The sort of focus character is the telepathic Sookie Stackhouse played by a perky yet strong Anna Paquin, the Oscar-winner best known to dorkdom for her recurring role as Rogue in the X-Men movies. Her character would probably come across as more feisty if not for her balls-to-the-wall best friend Tara Thornton, played by powerful newcomer Rutina Wesley. I don’t know where they found Rutina Wesley, but I love everything from the way her arms are just a little butch to the way she embodies the character cussing everyone out, both when needed and when not needed. Brother Jason Stackhouse is played by Ryan Kwanten. Sookie’s romantic leading man is played by Stephen Moyer. I normally wouldn’t mention someone’s personal life, but, whether it is out there for PR or privacy invasion, the gossip blogs are abuzz with reports that Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin are real life lovers, which may account for their incredible smoking hot on-screen chemistry for Sookie and Bill the vampire. In theory, I guess the audience is supposed to wonder whether Sookie will end up with Sam Merlotte, the owner of Merlotte’s the bar where she waitresses. Some people in the fictional Louisiana town Merlotte’s is in might find the guy suspect because he is from elsewhere and has a hint of the supernatural about him. Maybe part of the reason I personally instinctively don’t like the character is that the only other thing I ever saw the actor Sam Trammell, who plays Sam Merlotte, do on camera was get murdered by serial killer Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s Dexter. But really I’m bugged by someone’s boss at their regular all-the-time job hitting on them aggressively. I know they may not enforce anti sexual harassment laws that well in the South, but, ew, so not hot. The characters who inhabit True Blood’s Bon Temps are plentiful, deepy realized, and very interconnected, so I won’t list every single one, but there are two hot boys I can’t go without mentioning. The first is camboy/hooker/drug dealer/short order cook Lafayette Reynolds, played with gusto by Nelsan Ellis who hadn’t been in a whole lot of things before, but is jump-off-the-screen charismatic in this show. The second is Viking/nightclub impresario vampire Eric Northman, played by Alexander Skarsgård, fresh off his textured starring role on HBO’s Generation Kill.

I realize that a high percentage of the Blue Blood audience has been watching True Blood all along, what with the whole vampires, sex, kink, gothic punk, clubland and bar nightlife, and both disenfranchised and entitled weirdos thing in common. But, if you haven’t treated yourself yet, all previously-aired episodes are now available via On Demand. Incidentally, True Blood showcases a variety of different moods and types of sexuality, manages to shoot each sex scene a bit different from the last, makes the sexuality feel consistent with what each specific character would be into, and is so hot that even a professional can’t tell whether some of the actors are actually having full-on real sex or not. When the acting and styling is that good, the point of insertion is just a footnote in my opinion. So, uhm, yeah, True Blood is pretty much my favorite new show this year.

This week, True Blood kicked it up another notch with a guest starring turn from Stephen Root, of Office Space fame, playing the lonely dork vampire who lives for Monday nights when he watches Heroes and then trades his blood for hot gay hooker sex with Lafayette. Plenty more grisly human nature ensues and let’s just say we definitely can’t wait until next week to see what happens to his stapler.

I think Mad Men was probably my favorite television show last season. The show name Mad Men is derived from the ad men who worked on Madison Avenue in New York. The first season of the show revolved around the lives of people who work at a fictional ad agency called Sterling-Cooper in 1960. Despite the fictional nature of the agency depicted, the modern ad industry trade magazine Advertising Age put together a whole fictional issue with news bites, interviews, and profiles of fictional industry professionals. That is some mighty creative marketing.

Don Draper, the primary character on the show, is always quick with a clever word and a creative approach to marketing at work and coming up with the best personal presentation personally. In describing him, one of the his coworkers says, “nobody has ever turned over that rock; he could be Batman.” So his carefully-constructed persona has worked for getting his dream job and dream house and dream woman and dream family and a number of spare dream women, but the people he knows both professionally and personally sense that Don Draper is holding back to the point where he is somewhat unknowable.

Show creator Matthew Weiner also wrote a dozen episodes of The Sopranos and produced thirty-three episodes of The Sopranos, so it should come as no surprise that his baby Mad Men is about a lot of things with interlocking multiple storylines and complex and deep characterizations. It is always difficult to make a period piece come across as both convincing and relevant, but Mad Men succeeds brilliantly. In addition the the snappy dialog and strong set design, Katherine Jane Bryant’s costume design is nothing short of amazing in its variety, beauty, and attention to detail in character development. The award winning costume designer is best known for her work on another impressive period show, David Milch’s delightfully foul-mouthed HBO western Deadwood.

On a macro level, Mad Men is about a moment in time when America, as a nation, felt optimistic and almighty but was about to feel less so. Mad Men is about a place in American history where the role of women in society was in dramatic flux and the general population’s views on bigotry over race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation were all changing or about to be challenged. Many historians view the early 1960’s as when the country collectively held its breath before the tumultuous late 60’s clashed with the previously ordered world of the man in the gray flannel suit. Sort of a time when everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On a micro level, Mad Men is about the ways in which human relationships make us vulnerable, force us to expose ourselves, and create strife when we want a little extra privacy. On the surface, a number of the characters look like they have perfect lives, but they all struggle to keep what they have built together. Whenever the characters in Mad Men feel envy of one another, the viewer cringes, knowing what discomfort is behind those facades. This will resonate if you have ever gone to a corporate office job and done your best to make the right impression, all the while worried that somehow people can tell that you have to make the effort to come across like they do naturally.

While pitching Kodak at Sterling-Cooper, Don Draper explains that, in Greek, nostalgia means the pain from an old wound. According to the Advertising Age, err, articles, Sterling-Cooper got the account for the Kodak slide carousel after Don Draper said, “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels around and around, and back home again. To a place where we know are loved.” This pitch is from a man who has erased his early personal history and has no one left to share most memories with.

The two most common responses Mad Men evokes are laughter and a certain deep ache sort of pain. It is not entirely a feelgood series, but it is aesthetically lovely, verbally witty, and emotionally moving. New season starts tonight with a dateline of 1962, two years after season one ended. I hope season two can live up to the high expectations set by season one.

The conventional wisdom is that more people were forced to present a false front to the world in the early 1960’s than now. I’m not sure whether that is reality or wishful thinking, but I’m looking forward to season two of a show which makes me think about important questions like that.

In the early days of American history, the founding fathers were a little fuzzy about which day of the first week in July they wanted to celebrate American independence. In 1778, General George Washington, who became the first president of the United States in 1789, saw to it that his soldiers got double rations of rum for the event. In 1776, John Adams, who became the second president of the United States in 1797, and was recently commemorated in a decent HBO miniseries, said the occasion “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations.” Over time, the holiday has been more or less formalized and somewhat regional. Parts of the American South refused to celebrate July 4th for some time because they were pissy about losing the Civil War. Well, in a way, everyone loses a civil war, but, in this instance, I mean lost in the battle-followed-by-formally-admitting-defeat way and not in the personal and societal loss way. It was actually not until 1941 that Independence Day was formalized as a paid federal holiday on the 4th of July and celebrated all through these 50 states.

Even when I worked on government gigs, back when I lived in the Washington, DC area, I was always a contractor and I don’t think I have ever gotten a paid holiday from any job I have ever held. Apparently, being my own boss is no improvement, as I’m making myself work today. At some point this evening, I’m going to go up on my roof with some family and friends though. During the day, I can see the Hollywood sign from my roof, but, on fireworks-oriented occasions, my roof is one of the best views in town. Los Angeles is very spread out, so there tends to be no one single awesome fireworks display. So I enjoy my 360 degree view of many smaller displays.

I think maybe next July I will try to be in Washington, DC for the occasion because I’ve never seen an Independence Day fireworks display which rivals what the nation’s capitol does on the Mall in the District of Columbia. Although I was impressed when Vegas did New Years up over-the-top one year by demolishing a hotel as part of the fireworks, I think we’d all prefer it if no buildings were blown up as part of the DC fireworks today, however. So we’ll just leave that sort of celebration for the New Year in Las Vegas.

For now, could someone please pass me some charred food, give me the opportunity to say ooh and ah, and assure me a double ration of rum. Strictly for patriotic reasons, you understand. George Washington would have wanted it that way.

So I was chatting with my pal Anders from the band Anders Manga yesterday. I had just been looking at some snapshots of us partying together at a Hollywood hotspot just off Hollywood Blvd. When I say Hollywood hotspot, in this instance, I mean a place variously called White Lotus, The Ritual Supper Club, the local bus station, etc. where A-listers like Mark Wahlberg can go to bang porn stars cast for the next season of Entourage on HBO. At any rate, I’ll post the pics shortly and add a link, but Anders and I were just talking about this and that and he asked if I had heard from Jennifer of The Nuns recently.

Descended from Welsh royalty and initially known as Jennifer Miro in the earliest 1970’s incarnation of The Nuns as a seminal punk band in San Francisco, Jennifer steered the band in a more gothic direction over time and was variously known as Jennifer Anderson or Tiffany Tarantula or Maitresse Jennifer. The Nuns were huge in San Francisco and opened for bands like The Ramones and The Damned and were even on the bill for the very last Sex Pistols show. Jennifer also had a role in Dr. Caligari, the seminal cinema of transgression film from Stephen Sayadian and Jerry Stahl, who were also responsible for Cafe Flesh. However, Maitresse Jennifer or Mistress Jennifer is probably best known to members of the Blue Blood boards as the Blue Blood hottie who asked all the most interesting questions about love in the kinky tumultuous world of fame, wealth, and rock and roll.

[13:10] Anders Manga: hey have you heard from Jennifer? from nuns?
[13:10] Anders Manga: she vanished?
[13:11] AmeliaG: not in ages. I was in pretty regular contact with her, so I wonder if she got married or sex murdered
[13:11] Anders Manga: i heard her friend in the band was murdered in nyc
[13:11] AmeliaG: eep, forget I just said that particular conjecture
[13:11] AmeliaG: that’s creepy

I was just thinking that Jennifer, like a lot of superstar hotties, will disappear when she gets into a new Relationship and reappear when it ends or has trouble. I wish people would not exit their normal day-to-day lives and relationships when they are in love, but it is pretty common. That is what I had assumed had happened. Now that I’ve read a bit more about what was going on at the time, I’m kind of worried.

Apparently, in the fall, Mistress Kris who performed with The Nuns and appeared in many photo shoots with Jennifer was murdered at a hotel in Times Square. Times Square in New York City is supposedly gentrified to the point of Disneyfication. I think a Disney corporation even covered the financing on a bunch of the un-sleazing of Times Square. Nonetheless, the Hotel Carter still stands and is still open for business from vagrants and creeps. At least as recently as 1999, Hotel Carter was the sort of establishment where the front desk personnel might be killing one another with a knife or hammer, and housed the sort of nightclub that Sean Puffy Combs and Jennifer Lopez would have to flee after a shooting incident. In the 80’s, Hotel Carter was the place to throw a half-dressed bound woman out the window. I’ve always liked the word defenestration but not approved of the practice.

At any rate, a housekeeper found poor Kris’ nude corpse wrapped in plastic under the bed, after a guest named Clarence Dean checked out. Clarence Dean was already wanted in the State of Alabama for (a) failure to appear for a property theft trial and (b) a rape charge and (c) not keeping the folks who track convicted sex offenders aware of his whereabouts. Apparently the vile Clarence Dean had been found guilty of attempting to do horrible things to a nine-year-old girl in Florida, but he had not maintained his sex offender registration. He was also accused of meeting college girls via online dating sites and then raping them. According to the New York Times, Clarence Dean also had prior convictions in Texas and Tennessee for sex-related offenses. Apparently, Clarence Dean got to New York by stealing the car and credit cards belonging to the Tennessee woman he was supposed to be helping care for as a home health aide. (The only other person I’ve ever heard of stealing from the person he is supposed to care for, in this sort of situation, is one of the very worst people I have ever had the misfortune to meet.) Clarence Dean’s ill-gotten gains could only take him so far because he was forced to stay at the Hotel Carter because it was bargain-priced at only $99.23 a night before tax. Consider how expensive Manhattan is if $99 a night gets you a place described by the AP as “a threadbare accommodation that stands as a throwback to Times Square’s seedy past . . . for budget travelers who don’t mind insects, grimy bathrooms, stained furniture and broken telephones.”

So anyway, the whole thing is totally appalling. It appears that the perpetrator of this awful deed is probably standing trial round about now and may get the death penalty. Certainly, given his long rap sheet, Clarence Dean does not sound like a candidate for rehabilitation and no amount of remorse on his part, if he had it, would bring Kris back. To be 100% even-handed, I’ll mention that Clarence Dean’s brother apparently claims the guy is a simpleton who is being framed, but I can’t think what the motive would be for the New York City police to frame a fugitive serial sex offender for murdering a hot girl from a goth band.

At any rate, I hope Jennifer is okay. Does anyone know how she is doing?

I did not have a television for many years. Then, when I had one, it was only used to play videotapes; I didn’t even know for sure whether it failed to get reception or I’d never tried to get any on there. In the process of getting myself the Hell out of Georgia, I hocked the aforementioned television and used the proceeds for moving expenses (paying off a truck tow driver not to tow away the moving truck cab with almost everything I was moving inside.) I did not miss my hocked television.

But then they invented TiVo, On Demand, UnBox, instant download, renting DVDs by mail, and high quality TV shows with long, complex, and well-written story arcs. My two biggest objections to television in the past were always that (1) I couldn’t see planning my schedule around when a television show was on and (2) I’m not exactly the average person, so I was pretty sure that no show aimed at the lowest common denominator was likely to appeal to me.

The Sopranos sucked me in on DVD and I watched the first few years in an absolute orgy of television consumption. Even though The Sopranos often dropped whatever storyline had made me push play on the next episode, the show was still a whole lot of cuts above what I thought of television as capable of being. Prior to The Sopranos, my mobster fetish had only been satisfied by movies and real life.

Since then, I’ve come to strongly prefer the format of the long cable drama over all other video media. It’s funny that I don’t even really know what the name for it ought to be, but it is definitely a new structure for story-telling, one which allows for the communication of much more complex and interesting stories. Some of my favorite shows in this emergent form are the Weeds tales of a suburban widow-cum-drug-dealer who maintains her style of life and Dexter’s introspective serial killer and The Tudors with the sexiest retelling ever of the monarchy of King Henry VIII, all on Showtime. On AMC, I’m currently watching Breaking Bad which is about a middle-aged chemistry teacher who learns he has terminal cancer and starts cooking meth and I’m looking forward to the return of Mad Men about a poor Jewish orphan who reinvents himself as a WASPy philandering Madison Avenue executive. Don’t get me wrong; the complex cable drama has some wretched shows in that format too. The politico and mobster show Brotherhood on Showtime is so over-acted with such heavy-handed writing that it is painful to watch. HBO’s bigamist Mormons with sinister associations show Big Love is unwatchable unless you are far far more titillated by unconventional sexual relationships than I am. But, on the overall, this is a pretty awesome format.

And then there is The Wire. The Wire is pretty much the absolute perfection of the form. The first season was all about a successful street drug distribution organization. It was gripping and both police and gangsters were written, acted, and directed so well that the viewer truly felt like they were real people. Then they switched to the potentially less glamourous dockworkers the second season and they made it work, made that gripping too. Today is the last episode of The Wire. Creator David Simon, frequent collaborator Ed Burns, and the rest of the impressive Wire team have done such a good job up until now that I accept that the series was ready to come to a close. They told the story. It took five seasons to tell it, but, unlike a sitcom where nothing changes, the various characters have had their story arcs at this point. They’ve told us what they came to tell.

I’ve seen a number of bloggers jumping up and down about how The Wire deserves an Emmy and how everyone should tune in for the final episode. I have a couple thoughts on that. Firstly, HBO broadcast two half hour specials comprised of clips from the show and interviews with the cast and crew who were clearly supposed to be pushing the agenda of getting The Wire an Emmy. The show is brilliantly written and a cynical Angeleno might speculate that maybe their Baltimore shooting location has contributed to them not winning so far. Personally, I couldn’t tell you when the Emmies are or name three shows which have won one for writing. I bet the bloggers demanding an Emmy for The Wire couldn’t either. But it is good to know that HBO is taking care of their people after five seasons of excellence.

Lastly, if you have not been watching The Wire so far, do not start now. Or at least do not start with the finale. The thing about a complex story is that it can’t be told or comprehended in one hour. The last 59 episodes are not available for instant download or On Demand customers, but the first four seasons can be rented or purchased on DVD. I recommend starting at the beginning and getting the whole story. By the time you finish watching through the fourth season, with its focus on education, maybe the current season, examining the role of media, will be out on DVD.

I don’t usually like to schedule around television. Ever really. But I’m pretty sure we are now about a quarter of an hour into the East Coast showing of The Wire finale and my TiVo has been picking it up for me. And I want to watch it before the entire internet starts posting spoilers.

I have a new guru. I just watched the Katt Williams Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1 on HBO. Well, specifically on my TiVo of an earlier HBO broadcast. Anyway, I have this impediment to increasing my personal success as briskly as my work ethic should guarantee. Specifically, every time my accomplishments start coming really fast and furious, in a way which is visible to others, the haters come out. I would like to claim I am immune to haters and their low end bottom-feeder tactics, but I’m not.

I do what I do from a place of love. It sounds corny, I know. But, as I’ve said many times in the past, the initial print issues of Blue Blood were in many ways a love letter to the scene I had become a part of. The DC scene of the early 90’s was this vibrant nexus of punk, fandom, and cyber cultures. In that part of the world, we were less concerned with the genre-quibbling of bigger entertainment business cities. Goth-industrial music was identified as sort of a subset of punk there. Knowing who both Gary Gygax and Wendy O. Williams were was a plus.

The city produced both Chemlab and Fifth Column, and Fugazi and Dischord, and Henry Rollins and 21361 Publishing. Although I was born in London and have lived on three continents, in half a dozen countries, and a whole bunch of states, in many ways DC is the city which most created me as an artist and, as an extension of that, created Blue Blood. I knew all these incredible, artistic, fabulously creative people who just needed a venue to showcase their brilliance. And I was determined to give them that platform. When I first arrived in the DC scene, I had the most intense sense of having come home to where I had always truly belonged. From my heart, Blue Blood was a sort of love letter to a world which had welcomed me and made me feel whole and right at a time when my education and expectations had left me feeling adrift.

Well, it turns out that being able to decorate one leather jacket with paint and rivets and being able to tell one great fantasy of an alternate life to a fuckable chick does not equal wanting an actual platform for success or recognition of any kind. I found that quite a number of my amazing and talented compatriots wanted to be able to fantasize about how cool it would be if they started a band, wrote a novel, opened a dungeon, ran a nightclub, got a short story published, deejayed a big party, designed clothing, became an international sex symbol, etc. Although I will engage in conversations about wouldn’t it be cool if, I have a tendency to then go forth into the world to make it so. I think I’m wired that way naturally and my upbringing only hammered that into me more. I was both shocked and deeply hurt when I found that a lot of the DC scenesters I counted as friends were angry at someone giving them a chance. They wanted to be able to get credit for their brilliance without having to actually come through with, ya know, work. It had never occurred to me that there were people who did not want opportunity to come knocking.

So I ended up in this odd circumstance where I was getting kind words for my work on Blue Blood from people who were huge heroes of mine. Only parts of my primary support structure were just really kind of pissy. HBO would come to my house to do a special, but I couldn’t get some of my supposed closest friends to stop by. William Gibson would tell me I was “courageous” and John Shirley would buy me coffee and DC scenesters who had built whole events based on Gibson and Shirley’s writing would make my participation a pain for me. I didn’t know the word “hater” then, but it sure would have helped if I had.

Even today, I find I have to remind myself really strenuously to keep moving forward when the haters come out. I now plan to watch Katt Williams, my new guru, whenever I start feeling like maybe I should slow down a bit because everybody loves people who do less. So, if you are a hater, I am going to try to let you do your job (hating) and I’m going to do mine. You are now cordially invited to sit there and say my hair ain’t luxurious, when you know that it is, bitch.