The new season of AMC’s Mad Men starts this Sunday. I will be at Vampire-Con, so I’ll be TiVoing it, but I’m looking forward to this new season of one of my favorite shows. Pre-season rumor has it that this time out, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has in store more drinking, more gender relations of both the sexual and social issue variety, and will start off a couple more years into the 1960’s.

We’ve got a beautiful Mad Men promo photo gallery for your viewing pleasure here. The colors of past seasons were a bit different from these and I can’t say whether the new season will fully match prior seasons or evolve. I love the look here, though, and one of the most impressive things about Mad Men is the hyper real look and feel. The show’s costuming is convincingly period, but somehow makes each time it covers look more fabulous and glamorous and beautiful than it probably looked at the time. The lighting and color palette is always just gorgeous and makes this one of the few shows I always TiVo at Best Quality, so I don’t miss a bit of the look and feel.

Over on the AMC site, they also have a MadMen Yourself avatar creator. The image above is the one I did for myself. There was no option for iced latte, as it would have been an anachronism in 60’s Madison Avenue, so I opted for a hot coffee. There was no option for purple hair, but I was able to select stripes.

When I heard Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg was hosting the MTV Movie Awards, I thought for a split second about whether they would be worth seeing. Hot Rod was an unwatchable mess of a movie, but Andy Samberg brought us Dick in a Box, Natalie Portman Rap, I’m On A Boat, and more awesomeness. My brother went one year and reported it was unutterably dull, but staying home and TiVo can assist with that. But I only really thought about even TiVoing it for a split second. I suspect Eminem, who walked out of the proceedings, wishes he had not even TiVoed it as well.

I wondered what remotely cool or remotely music-related movies even came out last year, besides Twilight? From all reports, the only notable events of the MTV Movie Awards evening were the premiere screening of the Twilight New Moon Trailer (which we’ll have for you here in a moment) and that grody Sacha Baron Cohen creep being dropped on Eminem. Basically Sacha Baron Cohen put on this white outfit which riffs unoriginally on the already satirical White Gold heavy metal milk commercials and shows his ass (which ranks lower than Fred Durst’s ass on the List of Asses Nobody Wants to See) and MTV flew him over the audience on a wire and dropped him in Eminem’s lap, crotch up. If multiplatinum rapper and movie star Eminem, who has the best gothic video on MTV right now, ups the MTV Movie Awards star quotient by gracing them with his presence, how disrespectful and unappreciative is it to stick an unappealing stranger’s tiny groin in his face?

If you don’t know who Sacha Baron Cohen is, count yourself fortunate, but he is basically this disingenuous pseudo-comedian who never owns his own stupid presentation. Sacha Baron Cohen always pretends that he is just playing a character, but most of his characters are exaggerations of someone trying pathetically hard to be cool. The ego protection Sacha Baron Cohen is engaging in there is so obvious, just in case someone notices that he is not cool at all, that I find him painful to watch under the best of circumstances.

I guess one could argue that Eminem plays spoof characters in some of his videos, but I feel that is deeply different because one has a sense that sometimes Eminem is clowning around and sometimes he is being raw and real. And nobody would greenlight flying Eminem over the MTV Movie Awards audience and dropping him in Bret Michaels’ lap, crotch up.

It is now the morning after and Twilight unsurprisingly swept the MTV Movie Awards with standard award show fare like Best Movie and MTV special awards like Best Fight Scene. So Robert Pattinson who played vampire leading man Edward Cullen, Kristen Stewart who played viewpoint character Bella Swan, and Cam Gigandet who played bad boy vampire James all spent a lot of time clutching boxes of gold popcorn on stage. Apparently the other music-related movie worthy of MTV consideration was High School Musical 3: Senior Year which starred Zac Efron. Zac Efron is nice-looking enough and I saw him host SNL and so I can’t say whether High School Musical 3: Senior Year was robbed when Zac Efron lost in the Best Kiss category he was nominated in which was won by Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from Twilight. I’m not sure what Zac Efron did win, as even the clips from the MTV Movie Awards show this year are kinda unwatchable and IMDB shows no 2009 wins, but, when he was called to the stage by Sacha Baron Cohen, who was apparently a presenter, poor Zac Efron, being put on the spot, looked like he wanted no part of it and was considering following Eminem out of the building. Edit: MTV reports that, although most viewers missed it in the hubbub, Zac Efron won for Best Male Performance (as opposed to Robert Pattinson’s win for Best Breakthrough Performance Male Winner.)

I’m going to get on posting that Twilight New Moon trailer now, but, seriously, I think Eminem should get a Get Out of Jail Free card for pistol-whipping Sacha Baron Cohen any time he feels like it. Ideally without warning and in the (tiny) crotch area.

Some pundits are suggesting today that Eminem was not really annoyed and just acted angry as part of the gag. If Eminem was not actually disgusted, then he deserves an Oscar or at least an MTV Movie Award for his convincing performance.

Every now and then, I will use my TiVo to download a bunch of music videos. I download a bit of everything and then watch them briskly and efficiently. No reality programming in between. No commercials. If I don’t like the beginning of a music video, I fast forward to the mid-point to see if it gets better once it gets going. If not, I’m on to the next one.

I never heard of Justin Moore before, but I just got through playing his “Back That Thing Up” video about five gajillion times. “Back That Thing Up” has what Tapeheads fans would know to call serious production values. For those of you who must shamefacedly admit to never having seen Tapeheads, allow me to illustrate:

Mo Fuzz: All this video is missing is production values.
Ivan Alexeev, Josh Tager: Production values?
Mo Fuzz: Yeah. Tits and ass.

If muscles on video vixens and tight faded jeans on singer boys are coming back in style, I think I owe some deity a sacrificial goat now! Maybe two goats for the drummer still having tattoos and a mohawk. If “Back That Thing Up” is representative of Justin Moore’s body of work, he falls somewhere between Brooks & Dunn and Garth Brooks on one side and Motley Crue and AC/DC on the other. There are at least as many appalling sexual double entendres in “Back That Thing Up” as there are in “Big Balls”. I loathe puns. Unless they are sex puns. Then I love them.

Justin Moore has a mischievous smile, an easy charismatic stance and delivery style, and a smooth Southern voice both speaking and singing. Justin Moore has enormous star quality and looks really good in tight faded jeans and a cowboy hat. I usually don’t like cowboy hats (even though my foot was once photographed with one for Playboy.) He has an uncomplicated comfortable way of moving in his country duds which just works very very well. According to The Valory Music website, Justin Moore’s parents were deeded a fifteen-acre farm from his grandfather in a 272 person town called Poyen in Arkansas. His bio includes such American small town pastimes as high school baseball and gospel choir. I know country performers tend to talk about their mad farming skillz the same way rappers represent their drug-dealing resumes. Justin Moore is kind of being pitched as both flawlessly country and kind of indie, although it sort of looks like he is a Universal recording artist and he did get an awesome music video directed by Wes Edwards and produced by Brittany Hailes.

I have lived in both Georgia and North Carolina and, when I was thirteen, there were a lot of accent fetishist New Yorkers who wanted to date me for the five minutes I really had that Southern twang, until the moment passed. There is still the occasional word I say with a Southern accent, but I do not now identify as Southern nor have I ever identified as Southern. I have never thought of country as my community or culture. So I don’t care if Justin Moore’s comically country music-ready resume is over-spun or not. Apparently Country Music Television is a little wound up about the content in the video, so too racy for CMT is certainly a selling point in my book.

I know, I know, I get all excited about some media thing. I research it. Then I have to ponder whether it is real or not. In my defense, the YouTube comments on the cowboy singer’s videos tend to be mostly girls saying they are super “cuntry” and way better than those “Playboy whores” in the “Back That Thing Up” video. Except for the one gay guy who wanted Justin to back his nice thing up into some dick. This was apparently very offensive to some country fans. Some “cuntry” girls also complained that the video was degrading to women, but they were un-eloquently debated by other posters who apparently ran the lyrics through a rap filter and felt that it was good that “at least” it was not what they had come up with. Yeah, ’cause Justin Moore is more talented than they are.

This all brings me back to what was really my only point:

There is this kinda new singer Justin Moore and his catchy and nicely performed song “Back That Thing Up” has an incredibly cool video out directed by Wes Edwards. The end.

So I was minding my own business, drinking some coffee and eating something late brunchlike, feeling a little bleary and desirous of entertainment. So I popped over to Music Choice on my TiVo. I hit download on the new Hinder video, a 50 Cent video I’ve seen nine million times, and the business advice of Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy. Feeling like I hadn’t maybe found my ideal yet, amongst newest and most demanded videos, I selected the videos by genre category section.

There is a section called “Adult Alternative” with the slogan, “Videos with an edge, but without the attitude“. Okay, the first things on there were Coldplay, John Mayer, and Amy Winehouse. I’m going to admit right now that I don’t enjoy any of those musical acts. Nope, not even Coldplay. Yes, I know how innovative their internet marketing was last album. That doesn’t make them sound any less whiny to me. And not a poetic kind of tormented artistic soul whiny, just a neighbor’s cat howling in the rain when you are trying to get something done kind of whiny.

It strikes me that I think the Adult Alternative category is what used to be called Adult Contemporary or Disturbingly Lame Pop Aimed at an Older Demographic. Did they start calling Adult Contemporary Adult Alternative because the word Contemporary was potentially ironic or because the word Alternative would make their audience feel more hip? Adult Contemporary would once have included Steely Dan, Air Supply, and maybe Journey depending on the radio station programmer. I guess maybe Adult Contemporary pre-dates the Clear Channel stranglehold on music because it varied by individual radio station and Clear Channel isn’t really into that whole individuality thing.

Then I have the horrifying realization that I enjoy more old Adult Contemporary than modern Adult Alternative. I’m not sure what this means (besides pointing out that Americans who live overseas don’t always get the most current music) other than that I think I need another coffee.

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.

Every once in a while, I like to watch old black and white movies. I’m particularly partial to ones where men speak in clipped strong rhythms and people get murdered. But I’m open-minded and my TiVo recently suggested that I try watching The Wild One.

The Wild One is the classic 50’s flick where Marlon Brando’s Johnny character, when asked what he was rebelling against, famously answered “What’ve you got?” It is difficult to watch the movie in the present day and fully grasp the impact it had at the time. Supposedly many people felt that James Dean was a Marlon Brando wannabe and Brando’s swaggering performance in The Wild One informed the later acting careers of men like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. The rival motorcycle gang, lead by Lee Marvin’s Chino in the movie, is called The Beetles and is believed by many people to have inspired the name of the band The Beatles with an a. I’ve seen mention that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a jacket based on Brando in The Wild One or possibly even the specific jacket used in the film, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation more solid than rumor on this. Regardless, even today, everyone from lesbian drag kings to Leonardo DiCaprio takes inspiration from the seminal role of troubled Johnny Strabler. Heck, I personally even commissioned a Cookie Monster Brando before I ever saw the movie in its entirety, so ingrained is this flick in the American consciousness.

Despite this, watching today, it is difficult to know what mood the movie could have evoked when it came out in the 50’s. The movie was released in America in 1953 and was banned in the UK upon its overseas release in 1954. Ben Maddow, one of the writers on the film, went uncredited at the time, probably because he was blacklisted due to McCarthy era paranoia. So the movie is about rebellion. It inspired generations of rebels. The bike Brando rides is apparently his own personal Triumph. Even one of the writers on the movie was an outlaw. So it just seems like the movie should feel truly menacing. But it honestly feels more filled with innuendo and symbolism than menace.

Rebel Johnny has a second place trophy strapped to his bike, which has given thousands of film students what to talk about for half a century. Chino keeps stressing that he really misses Johnny and really wants to “have a beer” with Johnny to the point where the viewer becomes certain there is some sort of homosexual code in the invitation. The man driving the car which injures one of Johnny’s motorcycle club followers is said to be hopped up on vitamin pills and overstimulated. Were they prescribing Dexadrine to seniors in the fifties? I have no idea, although I’m terribly curious. I think of leather jacketed bad boys as being feral and rail thin grifters, but the BRMC or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club guys all appear to be gainfully employed and capable of paying for their beer and coffee and maybe a nice sandwich.

Johnny Strabler and the guys just don’t seem that dangerous by today’s standards. It is hard to tell how much of that is attributable to the times or the intentions of the moviemakers. Sunset Blvd. for example is a far darker movie and it predates The Wild One by only three years. Perhaps McCarthyism lead to a lamer approach to cultural danger in movies. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to create something camp, although this seems unlikely for a director like Laslo Benedek who first became known in America for doing the first movie version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, also a darker movie now that I think about it.

But maybe in 1953, a large group of guys dressed all freaky in leather and what my grandmother used to call “dungerees” were just terrifying. I certainly know some people in the here and now whose posturing for what they perceive as the normal folk makes me roll my eyes. And would probably come across campy in a movie. Yet a group of thirty or forty of them dressed to kill would probably frighten most small town dwellers. Marlon Brando’s Johnny Strabler is easily grabbed and beaten by the proper men of the town. This would probably be the same fate that would befall a lot of people whose eyeliner and hair frighten and horrify even now. You really can’t judge who will be dangerous by what they wear. A leather jacket or colored contact lenses might make a person doable, but it doesn’t make him dangerous. The same can be said for a suit. You just can’t tell what a cornered person will do by the cut of his gib. Actually, liking the cut of someone’s gib is a nautical reference, but doesn’t it seem like it should refer to haberdashery?

I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.

He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.

A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”

The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.

I used to watch music videos and just feel the mood they were trying to evoke. I’d believe that the peformers really were that cool. It was all so sexy and exciting. I just wanted to pass through that TV screen into a cooler and more passionate world.

Given that I kind of did manage to live my life so that I got to pass through the screen to the other side, I actually only got cable television because I was offered a really good deal on getting it with a cable modem. Time Warner Cable recently bought out Comcast, who I think bought out RoadRunner, and maybe AT&T was in there somewhere. I didn’t totally follow all the transfers and my cable bills literally did not have a return address on the envelope for a while because the changeovers were so hasty.

The upshot of all of this is that I recently had a channel line-up re-shuffle and it is easier for me to TiVo lots of music video shows, fast forward through stuff I don’t like, and still get to enjoy lots of videos I do like and might not have come across otherwise. Music videos used to be one of my favorite forms of entertainment and one of the only types of television I would watch. My college had a room in the student center with a gigantic projection TV and a friend of mine (who had a first and last name which were surreally both slang for penis – he was even more surreally named after his father) and I used to sit there and watch MTV on it, missing stuff we were supposed to do because we were just going to stay until the good video came on. When I finally had access to a television with cable and a closed door, I wasted no time finding which shows had the highest preponderance of rock videos I found worthy of self-pleasure.

My new Time Warner Cable line-up includes a couple of MTVs and VH1s and CMTs, and the delightful relative newcomer FUSE. I should be in heaven, but I have trouble stopping the negative ideation those video channels evoke in me today. The problem is that I have too much of a sense of how the sausage is made and I’m discomfitted by a lot of their cooking methods. I see a video with some teenage boy singing about how wrong it is to beat your girlfriend and the song is catchy enough and the boy is okay-looking and has a nice enough voice which works for the material. But I can’t stand the pretense that some teenager wrote the song.

Cablevision Systems Corporation, the corporate parent of FUSE, has sports holdings which account for nearly 20% of their revenues. I wish music understood teamwork like the world of sports does. Sports fans know and understand that, while some people are really standout stars, there are a number of positions which need to be played and the coaches get airtime too. If someone gets too flamboyant in drawing attention to themselves, they can get penalized for showboating. In the world of music, there is this desperation to pretend that the lead singer just came up with everything. Unfortunately, the product is so manufactured that a lead singer who really can come up with his or her own songs, style, and message is likely to be buried and ripped-off and asked to change, but never played by the music video stations. A headstrong artist is a pain in the ass and nowhere near as desirable as a compliant and good-looking youth who can sing and dance and sign contracts which offer a low percentage.

And I can’t stop myself from thinking about how the singer doesn’t understand the words he is singing. I can’t stop myself from thinking about contract law. I can’t stop thinking about how roughly seven companies own most media in America. I can’t stop thinking about how the music industry’s response to YouTube was not to offer kids in Peoria the video-directing opportunity of a lifetime, but to offer those talented kids in the boonies the opportunity to line the industry’s pockets for nothing. I can’t stop myself from thinking about how many talented musicians I know, who will never get a real chance, precisely because they are the whole package, in an industry which has come to prefer people who can fit snugly into small roles.

And then I find myself wondering about a band like Evanescence. The band has sold more than fourteen million albums worldwide and they tend to be marketed somewhat as a Gothic band. I’ve had some interaction or other with someone from most bands which are marketed as Gothic or industrial or deathrock or anything along those lines. If I haven’t, then someone I know has. Either I or someone I know will have interviewed someone from the band, partied with someone from the band, had sex with someone from the band, or at least shown up at a nightclub and had a conversation in line for the bathroom with someone from the band. But nobody I know has ever mentioned having anything to do with anyone in Evanescence.

Dictionary.com defines the band’s name as “to dissipate or disappear like vapor” and the Gurl.com top interview in a Google search for amy+lee+evanescence+interview explains the band’s name as “The word Evanescence means to dissipate like vapor, it puts an image in your head of like a ghost/specter that isn’t really there.” The Gurl.com interview has no interviewer credit. So I watch videos late at night and I finally start wondering if Evanescence really exists in any man-in-the-street sense of what a band is or if some enterprising producer for the surreally-named Wind Up Records just made up the whole thing to, you know, wind up the public. And sell fourteen million records. Which is a lot.

The question is, if Amy Lee and Terry Balsamo don’t really write Evanescence songs, don’t pick out their own clothes, don’t have the personal lives claimed for them, or maybe don’t even speak English, does that make their performances less enjoyable for their audience? If it does reduce the pleasure, does that mean it is good and reasonable to hide the origins of the music and the performers? Is it okay to lie, if it makes listeners happier? Is it still okay to lie, if it makes listeners happier, but the lies mean a genuine struggling band, who tells the truth, can not compete?

Someone, please tell me you have met Amy Lee from Evanescence and she speaks English like a goth girl from Arkansas. Someone, please tell me how to block the part of my brain which wonders if Evanescence is a hoax, when all I really want to do is watch some cool videos.

If you go to NBC.com right now, it looks like you can watch a full replay of last Sunday’s episode of The Apprentice: Los Angeles. Only the link on the front page of the site 404’s. I don’t blame them one bit. If my name were on that pale imitation of their earlier success, I wouldn’t want to extend the viewership of that show either.

Full disclosure: I have watched every single episode of The Apprentice. I watched all of the Donald Trump Coke Classic shows. And I watched all of the Martha Stewart New Coke shows, even with the lackluster candidates provided to Martha, and even though I have never seen anything else of Martha Stewart. Unless you count SNL sketches. Realistically, I think my viewing habits re: The Apprentice make it more meaningful when I say that I expect to permanently remove it from my TiVo queue later today. I’m writing this at 2am Saturday night/Sunday morning, January 14, and the show airs Sunday nights. At the end of this article, I’m going to tell you a spoiler for tonight’s episode. I know this secret info either because (a) I went to college with some big muckymucks at NBC or because (b) I have committed my valuable time and sharp business acumen to the lame task of figuring this out.

There was a lot I really loved about the first season of The Apprentice. I loved the whole businessman-as-rockstar vibe of the show. Before I lived in Los Angeles myself, I used to constantly get asked if I was in a band. There is no reason why living your life passionately and flamboyantly and taking the road less traveled should equate to being good at singing or playing popular music. Of course, living in Los Angeles has sapped some of my desire to put on some over-the-top outfit and traipse around town. Sure, I’m a writer and a photographer and those might sound like creative pursuits to someone who hadn’t been overexposed to La-La-Land. Truly, people in my town tend to view anyone dressed very creatively as either (a) a stylist or (b) a tourist or (c) talent. And, when LA people say “talent,” they do not mean it as in “good at something,” but rather as the raw meat of the Hollywood machine, the stuff they grind up every day. Coming out of a punk rock DIY background, I find the idea of “talent” as another species anathema. I started off publishing pictures of my friends and peers. When I picked up a camera, I wasn’t documenting something I felt separate from. But I found that dressing the way I did was a drag.

If someone had directly yelled at me and overtly told me I had to change, I would have spit on them. They could not have forced me. But the Los Angeles pressure was more subtle than that. I found that, if I looked hot on a shoot day, the photos often didn’t work out as well, as models were likely to get either competitive or amorous or both. It is easier to not bother blow-drying my hair when I got out of the tub, so I wasn’t going to bother, if it made my day harder. And I found it difficult to do business. I would meet with people where I thought we could make win/win deals and they would try to take advantage of me and be shocked when I noticed. My kinky and freaky clothing and my multi-colored hair seemed to make the businesspeople assume I was wet behind the ears. It made it a lot more likely that there were going to be sharks circling me. Sharks who were sure my looks meant blood in the water. Sharks who were going to be really really pissed when they didn’t get a meal. And I definitely bear more than a few scars from sharks I didn’t manage to get away from in time.

So, I know I’m not as obviously flamboyant as I once was, but Donald Trump became a bit of a personal hero to me, when he displayed a combination of business wisdom and charismatic garishness. Most CEOs do not get in front of the camera and I appreciated that he did. In his famous boardroom scenes, where contestants on the show were eliminated, Trump had two very businesslike lieutenants in Carolyn Kepcher and George Ross. That first season of the show, Trump also had an amazingly impressive assortment of candidates. The structure of the show was to split the candidates into two teams and have them compete against one another in business tasks. The first season candidates seemed like truly exceptionally capable and innovative businesspeople. They impressed and intrigued even with the ways they addressed a task as simple as running a lemonade stand. At the part of each episode where Trump would tell the viewers some nugget of Trumpian wisdom, I used to hang on his every word.

This makes my disappointment in The Apprentice: Los Angeles much worse. The NBC web site has nicknames for all of this season’s candidates. They are pretty uniformly stupid and include such winning phrases as The Webhead and The Believer and The Blonde. The candidates from the first season of The Apprentice appeared to be, perhaps lower on the totem pole of life than Donald Trump, at least as presented. But they were still presented as all being winners. Many had achieved greatness before the show and many went on to still greater achievements after it and perhaps partly because of it. The name of the game this season, however, appears to be to degrade the candidates as much as possible. Why Trump would want to work with someone he has already humiliated is anyone’s guess.

The first twist on the show this season is that the losing team has to sleep outside. Essentially the two teams compete against one another on various basic business tasks and whichever team loses, not only has a member fired, but they have to sleep in tents in the backyard of a house. They refer to the house where the winning team sleeps as “The Mansion,” but the view from their backyard doesn’t look to me like Mark Burnett and Donald Trump sprang for the best Los Angeles real estate. Actually, it looks like “The Mansion” is in Southern California, but not technically in Los Angeles at all. Additionally, the entire winning team sleeps in the same room on beds which look like they were purchased last minute at Ikea. “The Mansion” looks like a decent enough house and placing a whole television show in a house or two is difficult, but glorifying that pedestrian abode just gives the lie to everything Trump has ever praised or bragged about in the past. Trump Tower, where the New York-based seasons were shot, looked nice. Candidates had roommates, but at least it was not a summer camp style dormitory. I cringe in embarrassment for this season’s crop as they go on for the cameras about the haves and the have nots and how sleeping outside makes people hungrier to win and being indoors makes victory so much sweeter. Keep in mind that we don’t really have weather in Los Angeles, so it is not like the people in the backyard are getting snowed on. Has Trump actually fallen so far that the best thing he could offer winners was the opportunity to sleep indoors? Has he actually managed to find people he thinks are good at business who are dazzled merely by having a roof over their heads? Mind you, a central plot point of the season opener for The Apprentice: Los Angeles was refusing to let businesspeople go to the bathroom. I’m not making that up. I wish I were. Each season of The Apprentice has shown less of the interesting business aspects than the last. I thought the shift in focus towards personality conflicts between contestants was bad, but telling professionals they can’t use the toilet and filming how they react is just pathetic.

Other things which suck about The Apprentice: Los Angeles include Trump having fired one of his lieutenants, Carolyn Kepcher, for enjoying the limelight too much. This suggests that the mere act of pointing a camera at someone makes people think they are a greater person at the very same moment it turns them into a lesser person. Maybe true and maybe a justified rightsizing, but it makes it look like working for Trump is not quite the “job of a lifetime” that the commercials for his show suggest. George Ross, with his brilliant insight and professional gravitas, apparently still works for the Trump organization, but he doesn’t really care for LA and has work to do in New York. So this past week’s boardroom, Trump had his daughter Ivanka Trump on one side and the leader of the winning team on the other. Of course, the leader of the winning team had to act like a jerk and rub her victory in the face of the losers (even thought they lost by a very very slim margin.) Here is the big twist coming up tonight: The candidates already know that the winning team’s leader (The Hottie) will remain the leader as long as she is winning, but what they do not know is that she is going to have to switch teams and try to lead the people she just lorded it over in the boardroom. Hardy-har-har.

I thought Ivanka Trump came across great on the most recent season of the show, when she guested. Her image then was tough, beautiful, flawless, brutal but fair. Unfortunately, she apparently went to image coaches over the summer and she just comes across as a mean person with bad manners now. Her taking Carolyn’s place on Donald’s left also gives one the sense that nepotism is going to be the way in the Trump organization and it may make no difference how hard someone works. Which makes viewers ask why anyone would compete hard to get a job working for the Trump family, especially when they never let anyone else finish a sentence.

Speaking of Ivanka, most internet users will have been unable to escape the recent feud between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ll give the Cliff’s notes, so anyone who missed it previously will now have this data filling up their gray matter. Trump owns a pageant or two. A couple of pageant girls were seen out on the town, behaving in a supposedly unseemly manner i.e. allegedly drinking, doing lines, possibly having sex partners back to her place, and maybe kissing girls. The implication was that the two pageant babes were lovers. There was a big public brouhaha where stripping one girl of her crown was discussed but she was given a second chance and the whole thing was unseemly for all involved. So Rosie stated publicly that she felt Donald did not have the moral high ground or compass to judge a twenty-year-old girl. So Trump called Rosie fat and is suing her and Ivanka told the press she felt Rosie was a bully. I’d feel more sympathy there, if Ivanka and her father were not both coming across as such bullies on The Apprentice: Los Angeles.

Full disclosure: Although I understand that Rosie appears on the show and has said inflammatory things on it before, I have never watched The View. Unless you count SNL sketches. It is my understanding that Rosie O’Donnell is a famous lesbian and my opinion that she may have felt a responsibility to speak out about the pageant nonsense. Or she could be a jerk. I have no idea.

Now, maybe I’m just letting my own sexual fantasies intrude here, but I get the impression Ivanka Trump knows how to please a woman. On the list of things this former Trump fan is horrified by is his apparent homophobia. Is it really that awful if some pageant winners make out? Is it really that awful if Rosie O’Donnell is not physically attractive to Donald Trump? Is Ivanka Trump not on the cover of The Advocate because Trump would consider it unseemly? And, most importantly, by being on the show The Apprentice, does Trump have the right to go after Rosie in court? Does The Advocate have the right to put Ivanka on their cover whether or not she wants to be there? Are they public figures who are subject to public comment? What makes someone a public figure? Does becoming a public figure make someone a worse person? I don’t know all the answers, but watching the tragic devolution of this brilliant TV show, I am definitely thinking about the questions. I hope I am not causing any damage by pointing my own cameras at people I think are cool.

At any rate, I think I won’t be buying any more Trump books or watching any more Apprentice shows after tonight. I do intend to continue to watch Saturday Night Live. But I won’t be watching Donald Trump any more. Unless you count SNL sketches.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.