This blog contains descriptions or reviews about current television series, as well as news about the series. Over time, the blog will tend to emphasize news items.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
The NBC Today show had a couple of interesting segments recently. One of them is really upbeat, about a teenage “Jerry Maguire” (a 1996 film with Tom Cruise), a high school senior named Alex Kline in New Jersey, who started a business (“The Recruit Scoop”) connecting basketball players to teams and runs it on Twitter. I don’t know how he can carry on his business at high school, since most schools ban cell phone use. His work reminds me of that of the baseball geek in “Moneyball”. Will Brad Pitt make a movie about him?
There was another story this morning, which I couldn’t find online yet, disturbed be. An elementary school teacher made a project of each kid’s “sacrificing” time every day to help other people. (The report used the word “sacrifice”). A nine year old girl achieved this by cooking dinner for her parents, who did not live together. Apparently she had been conceived artificially. It struck me that the nature of their relationship should not be made “her” problem (one could understand why they didn’t marry). I wonder how “conservatives” would react to this story.
Modern settings of Shakespeare plays have sometimes been tried, with some controversy. In 2010, PBS Great Performances aired (and subsequently released on DVD) a 158-minute film of “Macbeth” directed by Rupert Goold, with a self-absorbed (of Spock-like) Patrick Stewart (who could play me) as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as a rather laconic Lady Macbeth.
The play is set in a parallel universe where modern Britain (really more 90s-like) has become a fascist police state, as if the Nazis had won WWII and then replaced the monarchy with one they controlled. It doesn’t really seem like a believable model of what Britain could ever become now (even for those who saw the film “V for Vendetta”). The film is punctuated with WWII black-and-white footage of soldiers goose-stepping. Much of the film seems to be shot right off a London stage.
The ghost and apparition scenes at first seem just crazy, until you get the idea that Macbeth is living in a world of his own fantasy, where, by his own admission, his own imagination and narcissism have done him in.
In fact, the film begins slightly out of order, with the Sergeant (rather like a character out of an Alban Berg opera), a handsome and virile John Hywel, lying on a gurney, chest contaminated by electrodes. Later, his own prior-self comes back, again on the gurney, in a ghost scene that seems homoerotic, at least for Macbeth, who performs a bizarre ritual (almost like one from an alien abduction) with him. (Are we in Eli Roth’s “Hostel”?) But of course the prophesies (that Macbeth cannot be harmed by a naturally born person but can by one born of Caesarian or by someone not so human) seem rather like existential tests. In the end, it seems as though Macbeth was swindled not so much by the witches as his own delusions. In a modern setting, his pistol isn't loaded and MacDuff (Michael Feast) gets to him
The music is by Adam Cork, but in many places resembles Shostakovich, as if the police state were as much Communist as fascist, or as if the two extreme forms of authoritarian tyranny had come together. At one point, there is a Schubert song with piano, and the opening slow movement of the Mozart A Major Sonata.
It seems as if the world has rationalized its own kind of morality, where only some people have any place at all.
A stage version of Goode’s treatment can be rented from YouTube for $1.99.
"Macbeth" was taught to seniors when I went to high school (1960). Even now I don't recall the extent of Macbeth's self-serving violence. We had to read one other Shakespeare play of our choice (I chose "Hamlet").
I recall the 1996 film of "Hamlet", four hours, directed by Kenneth Branagh for Columbia, with stirring postromantic music by Patrick Doyle. I saw it at the Uptown in Washington DC. The intermission occurs late, after Hamlet’s famous “honor” speech in the middle of Act 4. The film is set in the historical period, but is directed to give the effect of a Stephen King horror movie. The “play within a play” in Act 2 makes the point that fiction (or media) can cause others to act and have consequences for the artist. In the climax, in the palace battle scene, the actors literally swing from the chandeliers.
I am not a fan of Fox’s version (1996) of “Romeo + Juliet” with Leonardo Di Caprio in modern terms; it was shown to English classes when I worked as a substitute teacher. I recall a ninth grade English teacher explaining the idea that it was acceptable in ancient societies for young women to marry and have babies much younger than it is today.
Sunday night, Jan. 29, CNN Presents aired “Big Hits, Broken Dreams” with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a 40-minute documentary exploring serious head injuries from high school sports, mostly from football hits. A few students have died, and some have been left with dementia or significant disability normally occurring much later in life, if at all. Programs are underway to make the tackles or blocks less violent, and to keep students with even mild concussions from returning before completely recovered.
Much of the documentary was shot in North Carolina.
The program underscores the danger our culture has, at least in the past, expected young men to endure to prove themselves competitive and “protective” of others. It reminds me of the days we had a draft.
I remember, at around age 8, being taken to a session where I was supposed to play football, and refusing. I was the "sissy". In gym class, we just had touch football.
There has been some concern over the possibility of concussions from the practice of "heading" in soccer. I'm not sure that affects professional soccer, as in Europe (Saturday, before going to the West End Theater, I saw part of a soccer match in Barcelona, Spain at a sports bar near GWU in DC; it was vigorous. I remember a stay in Bilbao, Spain in 2001 when sports bars airing soccer were absolutely packed on a Sunday night.)
CNN and MSNBC have both reported investigations by Erin Brokovich (Julia Roberts played in the 2000 film about her) into a mysterious neurological illness in young women in an areas in western New York State, near the site of a 1970 railroad accident that spilled cyanide and trichloroethene, never properly cleaned up or even reported. MSNBC link is here.
Tonight “CNN Presents” aired its hour-long “Narco Wars”, about what is happening in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The cartels are powerful international businesses.
This is all scary because at least church groups that I know of have gone down to Central America for missions. One in Guatemala (water engineering), one in Nicaragua (Nacascolo), one in Belize.
The film said that American demand for illegal drugs leads to crime in poor countries, a murder rate 16 times ours. But one can make the argument that it’s the illegality of drugs that drives the profits.
Tonight, Piers Morgan interviewed “Marky Mark” Wahlberg, who said that kids should not depend on “making it” the way he did without completing their education.
And Don Lemon reported on Aaron Jackson, the CNN Hero who continues to raise money to free kids in Africa of intestinal parasites.
This refers to the “Planting Peace” initiative, shown on this website with an older interview between Jackson and Larry King, link.
So a late-night comedy host can get sued over a joke? That’s what happened to Jay Leno for his “joke” about the Sikh’s, on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” (link).
The San Jose Mercury News weighs in on this here (Tony Hicks). Tip the waiter, watch your table manners.
TMZ has a story, link, “Is this some kind of sikh joke?”
The “joke” was that Mitt Romney keeps the Golden Temple in Armritsar as a summer home, as if the New Hampshire White Mount lakes weren’t good enough for him. Could Romney handle the Tuckkerman Ravine trail up Mt. Washington?
NewsXLive from India has many youtube videos on this:
Mr. Leno’s comments are protected by the First Amendment in the US and were intended as “satire” against the GOP presidential candidates.
I usually catch some of the night shows just before bed. They seem to reduce all seriousness to absurdity. I can remember one in 1978, just after a personal breakup, and being taken by a comment that everything in the world reduces to money.
Monday, the “Days of our Lives” episode ended with a disturbing image of Will (Chandler Massey) spitting at his own reflection in the mirror, just after a discussion in a pub where Sonny discussed being out and open and even starting a gay bar in Salem, and Will as asked obliquely about the reaction of his own family.
Earlier, Chad and Gabi had played games with Kate about the modeling job, and Gabi complained that Will wasn’t very interested in her, totally oblivious to the apparent ambiguity of Will’s sexual orientation, which the soap is using to tease viewers these days.
But Will’s self-disgust may not be about sexuality so much as his realizing he has allowed EJ to corrupt him completely. He’s supposed to become a doppleganger for EJ and give up his own identity, at least until EJ wins the election.
On Tuesday, it seems like EJ and Abe are setting up a "cheating scandal" about seeing the debate questions in advance. Like knowing the debate questions in advance would really affect your "performance". It sounds like the "Recall" crisis on the qualification exams for radiologists. In the meantime, Nicole tries to further corrupt Will.
“Days” and “General Hospital” are still standing, even though DOOL has gotten pretty silly. “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” are gone. “Passions” disappeared a while back. This is a genre the networks are having difficulty sustaining.
Sunday night, CBS “60 Minutes Presents” gave us “Into the Wild”, a three-part short short documentary about wildlife. Remember, Paramount had given us a film by the same name where a young man runs into tragedy and starves while roughing it in Alaska.'
The first part of the CBS film showed a mass wildlife migration around Lake Tanganika, showing mostly grazing animals chased by a few big cats. Because of habitat encroachment by man, CBS predicts that many of these animals could be gone by 2050.
Next the documentary showed the “language” of elephants, which is quite specific as to relationships among the elephants, but doesn’t have grammar per se.
Finally, it went on a journey looking for chimpanzees – but the ordinaries, not the bonobos. As people have learned from tragedies, chimps in the home do not substitute for “children”.
Wikipedia attribution link for map of lake Tanganyika.
