My Harmontown Evening

So, depending on whether you know me in real life, you may or may not know that I went to Harmontown tonight.  If you don't know what Harmontown is, I'm not going to explain to you here.  Go listen to the podcast, it's amazing and engrossing and funny and weird and, like most television, best when enjoyed serially.

Afterwards, my friend Matt and I went to The Drawing Room along with some of the folks from the podcast and I expressed my love and admiration for Spencer (who looks precisely like a Dungeon Master SHOULD look, ie very wise and bearded) and talked briefly with Dan Harmon who I THOUGHT had been putting Sam Cooke songs on the jukebox which would've been awesome but instead was getting money from the ATM which was completely normal if not totally awesome.  But he was hella chill and cheersed me and I felt too weird to engage him in a conversation about his inadvertent Lindsey Weir costume which probably would've taken some explaining and man, it's like, I'd really like to just talk to these guys (Jeff Davis included, he's so adorable & I was gonna say impish but really it's Deanish) but even at a tiny bar post-Harmontown I feel like I'm imposing which is my own constructed bullshit & probably partly Matt's fault (sorry, Matt) but that doesn't mean it makes me feel magically confident (which I usually am, BTW, magically confident is kind of my middle name) or anything.

There's this weird paradox with comedians-as-celebrities where, because these days they often share a lot of their real, personal selves with the public, they seem more accessible.  And man, I can't wait until I live in LA and can go to Harmontown every week and become the token queer chick and all of that.  It'll happen.  But until then I just feel like an asshole talking to them.  They don't want to talk to me.  They want to talk to their friends!  And while *I* think I'm awesome, thinking that in public makes me an asshole.  Or maybe not, who fucking knows.  I still can't really figure out what's going on with some of the Harmontown regulars who are, as my friend Katie would say, totally Aspy.  Part of me wants to act just like them and put myself out there, and part of me hates them for being just as narcissistic as I myself definitely am.

I think that last sentence sums up a lot of aspects of LA culture.

In conclusion, Sir Dan Harmon:  I am even more awesome than everyone else (yes, I am an "awesome" girl, Dan).  I enjoyed the "Fag" anecdote as much as I enjoyed the faggot episode of South Park, which is to say A WHOLE FUCKING LOT...but wish you had called for at least one of us gays to join your multicultural coalition (I would've been much more funny and MUCH less creepy than the Puerto Rican girl).  I could sit in a tiny room and watch you all play Dungeon and Dragons FOR YEARS.  And wearing that coat with even semi-baggy jeans makes you look like you're in a half-hearted Lindsey Weir costume.  JUST FYI.  All you need is a brunette wig and to get Jeff wicked stoned so he can be Jason Segel.

Wish I could be there for Jarreth week next week.  Come on tour to San Francisco.  Next time, make the jukebox your bitch.  And I love you all forever, in the least creepy and most narcissistic way possible.

Thus ends my first LiveJournal entry in many a year.

New Drama Showdown: "Last Resort" vs "Revolution"

As we all know, the networks have been searching for the next Lost for some time.  There was The Event, Persons Unknown, V, Alcatraz, and a whole bunch of other short-lived shows I can't even remember that failed to hook and capture the public in the immediate, visceral way that Lost did.  I was reading an interview with Zeljko Ivanek where he was talking about being bummed he didn't get to work with Blair Underwood more on The Event, and while I love Zeljko and I love Blair Underwood, the sad truth is that The Event was terrible.  Just really, really bad.

My love of Lost got me into a quandary with some of my best friends when the sixth season aired.  I had been pretty obsessed with Lost since about mid-way through the second season, when I watched the first season DVDs and then went off to a new college and realized I could buy episodes on iTunes.  That shit hooked me pretty hard.  After I graduated and moved back home, I made a bunch of people start watching. I swore to them that the writers knew what they were doing and all the loose ends would be neatly tied up if they would just be patient.  Now, I still maintain that Lost was, for the most part, a great show, and after careful consideration, I even became a fan of the finale.  But fuck, the writers really dropped the ball during season six.  The episodes aren't all terrible and we do get some satisfying answers, but they spent WAY too much time introducing unnecessary new characters, faffing around with Charles Widmore, and getting to the heart of the Jacob/Smoke Monster thing and not enough time wrapping things up satisfactorily with the original cast and some of the mysteries they'd been developing for years.  Don't even get me started on the alternate reality/limbo thing - while I do like the finale, the build-up to it was frustratingly dumb.  Anyway, this is all to say that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof robbed me of some of my well-earned reviewer credentials and to this day, my friends still give me shit when I recommend a mysterious drama.

Well, I'm hoping that I can redeem myself now.  There are two new dramas this year that have already found some success with the Lost style of a large, diverse ensemble cast and gradually-revealed mysteries, and it turns out that they're both pretty good.  One is already pulling ahead of the other in my book, though.