Rav Casley Gera’s Blog

In the first series of Big Brother, I remember the housemates speculating after “Nasty Nick” was thrown out about any possible press coverage. Most of them were incredulous at the idea that it would be in the newspapers at all. Of course, it was splashed all over the front pages for days.

Last week, model MaySoon left the house voluntarily, and the housemates spent an hour imagining possible headlines: “See MaySoon,” etc. Actually, though, it barely made it into the papers at all…

American cinema's creative zenith was reached in the 1970s, just as movies were being displaced by TV. Now we have a golden age of American TV drama, just as TV is under threat of being completely displaced by the internet. Was it always thus? Are we doomed to see the economic models of great art forms disrupted, just as they have reconciled their artistic and commercial imperatives?

April 20, 2008 in Asides, Culture, Rav Idly Wonders, Technology | 1 comments

worst.

brits.

ever.*

* oh, ok, for twenty years or so.

who put the dumb, pretty office poof on CNN?

So it’s mid-January! You remember 2007, right? Right? The one before this one. The one with the missing girl, yes? Yes! That’s right.

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Bob Saget?

Bob Saget?

I have literally only heard of him from an episode of The Simpsons where Chief Wiggum thinks he has tickets to see Bob Seeger and Lisa points out it’s actually Bob Saget.

That’s all. That’s the only time.

Wait. Conan didn’t have a joke if the ring didn’t spin for 56 seconds? He just had to chat with the trumpet guy? What, he was just so sure he would make it? Or does he have some leftier-than-Leno position that, if he says anything at all funny, he’s a GOP scab?

What’s with the beards? Leno, O’Brien - is this an American strikey lefty thing I don’t know about?

First sights:

* Hostel is astonishing glow-white slab of ultramodern, and shares space with the local drama school, which is both nice and bizarre.
* McDonald’s appears to have exactly the same menu as in the UK. Bit disappointing.
* Euros aren’t as cheap as I thought.
* The hostel charges an extra 4 euros a night to the over-26’s. I feel like a paedophile just being here.
* Madrid has a serious grafitti problem (see picture). I saw a maid standing in the doorway of an upmarket-looking apartment block, but she couldn’t budge the mass of spray-paint all over the door.
* Also saw a dreadlocked white guy, early twenties, presumably homeless, shaving hastily in a car wing mirror.
* I walked behind a TV interview, and will therefore be on Spanish TV.
* Sat in a cafe eating fries with garlic mayonnaise, watching Spanish TV (not looking out for my cameo), I was struck by the tacky presentation of Spanish daytime TV, with on-screen captions and idents that could have been from the early 80’s. And the program, which seemed to be enitrely celebrity gossip (Spain invented the modern celeb mag, of course, with Hola! - which begat Hello!), didn’t feature a single American or British celeb. No Winehouse, no Beckhams, no Britney. Perhaps, I thought, all this talk of globalisation is nonsense. Perhaps TV is the great local medium, maintaining individual cultures, local obsessions. Then I noticed the background music to the feature I was watching was “Matinee” by Franz Ferdinand.

PA100166, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

So let me get this straight. Letterman hosted Late Night and tried out for the Tonight Show but lost out to Jay Leno. Letterman moved to the Late Show and was replaced by Conan O’Brien. Now Leno is leaving, O’Brien is moving to to The Tonight Show, and Letterman is presumably having some sort of exoskeleton designed so he can keep doing The Late Show until the gap between his teeth grows so large it consumes the entire Earth.