Unbelievably it is two weeks since I got back from holiday. But perhaps fittingly today was the first day since then that I have completely vegged out and done nothing. I slept in until midday, which was much needed and then sloped around for the rest of the day, watching telly and playing online poker and eating Tangle Twister lollies. It's the last opportunity I am going to get for inertia for a while - tomorrow I am doing another double podcast recording and then I am gigging round the country for 13 nights in a row. My brain correctly decided to shut itself down and not think about much at all and due to the late start was constantly surprised every time I looked at the clock.
I did at last manage to send out next month's
newsletter detailing the many things I have got coming up, and then remembered that the new format of How Not To Grow Up is published on Monday so
sent out this PS (if you haven't bought the book yet it is for the moment cheaper to buy this version on Amazon than it is to buy the Kindle version.
We've been watching the first series of the brilliant "Larry Sanders Show" on DVD this week. I think I mentioned we'd been watching the Garry Shandling show recently too, but this series is even better and probably my favourite sit-com of all time. It's been a while since I watched it and I am not sure that I have seen every episode (certainly not in order) but now almost 20 years after it was made it still stands up and if anything is given an extra dimension due to the passage of time. Some of the celebrities that feature are still famous, but some have slipped off the radar (I was straight on wikipedia trying to find out what had happened to
Dana Carvey) and some (alas the sublime Phil Hartman) are dead. But this just adds even more weight to the satire about the transience and self-indulgence and meaninglessness of fame. Hank Kingsley is my all-time greatest sit-com character, played to perfection by the brilliant Jeffrey Tambor (who also appears in another of my top 5 comedies of all time, Arrested Development). If you haven't seen this show then buy the box sets and watch from the beginning. It will make you laugh, it will make you cringe and somehow it will make you love the tragic and vacuous idiots who inhabit this bleak and terrible world.
I also somehow got hooked into watching "The Final Destination", the latest in the long-running "Final Destination" series. The twist with this one is, I guess, that it was in 3D and several jokes alluded to that fact, but as I was watching it on TV it was in regular 2D (though sometimes struggling to get beyond 1D in plot and characterisation). I think I have now seen all of the Final Destination films, though the same could pretty much be said of anyone who has seen any one of them. A dream or vision of impending doom whether in a plane, on a rollercoaster or as in this case during a speedcar derby, allows a select group of people to escape their fate and then death or fate, feeling cheated at not having killed the people it was meant to kill (though for some reason still allowing the vision that prevents their deaths to take place) hunts them down, one by one, in the order that they would have died. I kind of hate the whole concept of the franchise, which is made to reinforce the idea that our lives and deaths are pre-planned and there is nothing we can do to escape them. Accept your lot people because you have no control over your lives.
Of course if this happened in real life it would be pretty freaky and the police might become involved (or at least the media would follow the survivors around to watch the next one get picked off). And it makes for a pretty dull film, unless you like watching people die in gruesome ways, because you can be pretty certain that death is inescapable and everyone will just die. But of course people do like watching that and despite my reservations I am fascinated enough by the concept to watch every incarnation of the stupid, rubbish and slightly offensive concept. And even though I was bored halfway through this one, I had to watch to the end to see if everyone died (yes they did). Even at the end when some of them think they might have beaten the curse I am amazed that none of them realise that even if they have it doesn't mean anything. Life is still random and they could still die at any second. And if there is a force capable of hunting down those who have cheated death, though somehow unable to stop them cheating death in the first place, then it will probably find a way to get them. They have not become immortal.
God or death or fate. None of them will be mocked. They will all take you down eventually my friends.
But for some reason I have to watch a film that bored and angered me. Because everyone loves watching pretty vacuous Hollywood starlets get splattered. It's the only thing that could improve Larry Sanders.
