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Playing on the Wing – The West Wing reviewed

Thursday, February 08, 2001

Irish and British viewers seem to get more than their fair share of American TV shows. From the highs of Seinfeld and The Simpsons to the lows of Temptation Island and Jerry Springer, we know our way around US output as well as most Americans. 

Better in some cases. Over there shows such as Sex in the City and The Sopranos are only available on the premium cable channel HBO, so not everyone gets to see them. 

But surely not everything plays as well here as it does there? Take The West Wing, for example. Why would we be interested in a drama about the inner workings of the White House? There is nothing more uniquely American than its political system, and while a documentary might at least show us some facts, what benefit can there be in a fictional account of a non-existent president?

Well, good TV is good TV, and The West Wing is top drawer stuff. It’s intelligent (and assumes its audience is too), and it wears its cleverness lightly. A recent episode included a brief disquisition on the Latin phrase ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’, which was sharp, funny and relevant. You’ll watch a lot of Oprah waiting to see that. 

It’s also artfully constructed. The show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, wrote the critically acclaimed but rather neglected comedy, Sports Night, which was set in a fast-paced TV studio. He’s expert at moving quirky characters around an office environment in quick scenes that are funny but also advance the plot. 

So how much is the programme about politics? Well, on the surface, not that much. It won’t tell you much about the structures or operation of government, or lecture you on policy issues. The characters know this stuff backwards, and the show keeps up the pretence that the audience is just observing, so no-one’s going to sit down and explain everything. (Unlike in medical dramas, where there’s a lot of technical stuff happening, but from time to time this has to be explained to patients or their families, and by extension, the audience.)

But underneath the character-driven storylines and the witty arguments is a very clear political agenda. President Bartlett, played with sharp good humour by Martin Sheen, is a Democrat, and there’s a prevailing sense that everyone in the administration is honestly trying to improve the lot of the country, and act in a fair and decent way. 

Bigotry and intolerance is treated in an impressively uncompromising way, as when leaders of the religious right are summarily shown the door after making insinuations about Jewish members of the administration. 

On occasion, however, the President can be a little too good to be true. While the camera jerks around following the officials down corridors, and nobody can say more than a few words without someone else cutting across them, when we see the President on screen, the pace slows down and the approach becomes more reverential, sometimes cloyingly so. President Bartlett mouths platitudes eloquently and with conviction – he’s a pre-lapsarian Clinton. 

And now, with a famously stupid President in the real White House, the show feels like a party political broadcast. Look what you could have won, it says: a bunch of attractive likeable intelligent young people and a President who does good work. Boy George and his team of Cold War re-treads look decidedly feeble by comparison. Gore is no Martin Sheen, that’s for sure, but the message is clear. 

So we should watch The West Wing for its shining script and great performances (Rob Lowe is surprisingly good as a policy wonk so intelligent and committed as be clumsily stupid in real life). But we should also watch it to remind ourselves that more than than half of the people in America would rather have a President Bartlett than a President Bush.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • USA

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Articles Modest Proposals Television

Postcards from home – watching familiar TV abroad

Tuesday, July 18, 2000

It’s 7:30pm on a Wednesday, and on television the theme from the English soap Eastenders starts up.  Then Ballykissangel comes on, with its gentle humour and relaxed Wicklow pace. Nothing strange there, then. 

Except that I’m watching these familiar programmes in my apuartment on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, and I’m not sure it’s a very good idea.

It’s not really the characters and plots that threaten to rupture the divide between my life here and my former life in England and Ireland – although the storylines are a bit less clumsily uplifting and the actors a little less perfect-looking than their American counterparts. 

What really matters are the incidental details – the idioms, the streetscapes and even the products on display.  When Niamh goes to the (suitably small) fridge and comes back with some Avonmore milk my heart was tugged very firmly.Who knew I was so attached to dairy products? 

The narrow streets, the dirty cars, the flat grey light (even though they shoot BallyK in the summer), the way everyone looks a little ill . . . these are things I have no protection against. 

Especially when they creep up on me in the completely different surroundings I thought I was comfortable in. That’s partly physical environment – the ridiculously beautiful fog-bound San Francisco mornings, or the high blue sky and gentle 70-degree breezes of an afternoon on the Peninsula. 

But it’s also the televisual surroundings. I can now find my way around the 60 or so channels that muscle their way into my living room. On the at the same time as Eastenders was ‘How to Get What You Really Really Really Want’ – a self-actualization, self-help, self-development special on PBS (shame on them); next as I zap through is the news in Mandarin, next the US version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, then a buxom Spanish language drama and elsewhere 3 baseball games (go Giants), 2 shopping channels, the Sci-Fi Channel, Animal Planet, the Weather Channel and all the rest. 

Most of the time I pick my way between these in the same way I do my food choices here – choosing each one on its merits, and embracing the local options. I don’t pine for Marmite, Barry’s Green Label or batch loaves over here (nor will you often find me in Irish bars in the city) – I’m too busy eating veggie burritos, sushi and knocking back double lattes and Anchor Steam. 

I’ve gone native – the only way to go. Similarly, most often my tv diet is made up of local good stuff too – Will and Grace, the late lamented Sports Night, baseball, the guilty pleasure of Survivor, good documentaries (although I did get a shock the other day when my lake monster-hunting housemate from Dublin was beamed into my living room in a Discovery Channel show). 

So when I stumble across shows that so abruptly drag me back into my older life, I feel at once happy and regretful. They remind me that however comfortable I am here, there’s a home that has a claim on me I can’t shake. 

It’s much easier to live a new life here without being nudged into thinking about what you’ve left behind, especially when you least expect it. A little like coming across photographs of old girlfriends – you get some pleasure from recalling a your past, but when you return to the present you’re not quite as confident of your place in it any more. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, July 2000)

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Articles Life Modest Proposals USA

Under Construction – raising a tipi

Sunday, March 19, 2000

Last weekend I helped raise a tipi with some friends near Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

On a flat step above a bend in a river we camped out the previous night, sitting round the campfire making s’mores and drinking wine from mugs.  The stars were out above us, and as the moon set behind the hill opposite we picked our way down the steep path to the river.

Lying on our backs on the flat-topped boulder on the bank, a shooting star traced a stitch of light above, and we heard the freezing water slide by beside us. If you really listened, you could almost catch a tiny whisper of the world’s quiet roar. A place for everything, and everything in its place. 

The next day, with snow nestling amongst the cacti on the north-facing slope across the river, we set to work on the tipi. None of us quite knew what we were doing, but with instructions printed from a Welsh tipi website, we lashed the first three poles together, and raised the tripod against the azure sky. 

I sat whittling sticks for the pegs (which don’t work well in sandy soil, it turned out – metal pegs are a much better if less romantic choice), and as my friends placed the other poles in place it seemed as if the frame had somehow always been there, on that step above the river. 

There were certain customs to be observed in the building. The opening faced eastwards – away from the prevailing winds, and towards the morning sun – and when all the poles were in place, they were secured with rope that was walked clockwise four times around the frame – one revolution for each of the seasons. 

We threaded the lifting pole into the canvas cover on the ground, and then lifted it into place at the back of the tipi and unfolded the cloth, wrapping it round the poles like putting a coat on an impatient five year-old. 

OK, so the cover didn’t quite match up at the front at first – there’s lots of room for misadjustment in an 18’ tipi – but after moving some poles forward and some back, we were done. 

The smoke flaps, the oval opening, the tops of the poles criss-crossing, the soft light inside as we all stepped in and stood there, splintered, scratched and happy – marvelling at what we’d made. 

Made? Or revealed? It was as if the tipi knew how and where it should be built, and we’d simply helped it along. More like archaeology than construction. From a pile of sun-bleached wood and a mildewed bundle of cloth we’d uncovered something noble and determinedly right. A place for everything, and everything in its place. 

And my modest point? My extrapolation from the specific to the general?  My thought to leave you with? None, really. I just wanted to tell you. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, March 2000)

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • Life • USA

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Articles Life Modest Proposals USA

Cabin Fever

Saturday, June 19, 1999

In the last 15 months I’ve been on over 70 aeroplanes. Since this January, from my base in Kansas, the list of cities I’ve been in seems ridiculous – Atlanta, DC, Chicago, Dallas, Tucson, San Francisco (twice), Dublin (twice), Galway, Cincinnati, Denver, Santa Fe (three times). 

You can spin this unlikely itinerary in a number of ways. Either it’s a fact of modern day business life, and something that an increasing number of people do all the time.

The dystopian version of this points to the grind of long distances, the soullessness of airport hotels, the grim-faced grey acceptance of the folks at the gates in business attire carrying bulging laptop bags. 

Or it’s a glamorous jet-set lifestyle of expense account living, a new shiny city every week and a year-round tan. 

My truth lies somewhere in the middle. I have little enough luxury on the business trips – I fly coach and eat as many Burger Kings as lobster bisques on the road – but I get treated pretty well (big hand for the deeply stylish W Hotel in San Francisco) and I appreciate the opportunities it gives me to see all kinds of stuff I wouldn’t otherwise know about. 

Reading the local papers and watching the local news wherever I am is crucial – to read the unctious USA Today (the calling card of the travelling salesperson) placed outside your hotel room door is to participate in the pretence that where you are is exactly the same as where you’ve been. 

This is so bad because the one thing that can never be forgotten is how completely unnatural this all is. No matter how many times you get in a metal tube in one city and get out of it 400 miles away, or ring your kids on your calling card from an airport telephone, you should never once think that this is what you’re meant to be doing. 

Your body knows how weird it is. You can rationally understand jumping continents at your employer’s bidding, can justify your astronomical travel expenditure with a convincing business argument and can even develop tips and techniques to make it all seem a bit more normal, but all the stress of this time travel is building up in you somewhere or other. 

People aren’t designed to do such bizarre things as fly across the Atlantic, go to work the day they arrive, go out drinking that night, put in another couple of days’ work, then fly back home like it was an hour’s drive up the motorway. 

Human’s flexibility is at once our great strength and our fatal weakness. We can adapt to all kinds of things we didn’t ought to get used to, and can overcome by force of will the nagging reminders that we’re not designed to do this. 

This is not to say that I’m not enjoying myself – I’ve been able to do some amazing things through all this travel, and have learned a great deal along the way. But I can only see myself doing this for a limited time – it’s an adventure, not a way of life. It doesn’t take too long doing this before the losses more than outweigh the gains. 

This is last time I’ll write from Manhattan, Kansas, which between my travels has been my home for the last 15 months. I’m going to rest up back in Ireland and England for a couple of months, before moving to San Francisco. A pause before the adventure begins again. 

But the brightest moments of the last few months have all involved doing very grounded things – riding horses on the prairies, or mountain bikes in the Rockies, walking the hills of San Francisco or the beaches of County Clare, going for brunch in Santa Fe or pints in Dublin. And of course, in all of these activities, it’s been the friends and family that I’ve been with that have made the most sense in this unlikely life. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, June 1999)

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • USA • Life

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Articles Modest Proposals Television USA

Going deep – why Sports Night is so good

Tuesday, May 18, 1999

How much do you really know about Joey from Friends? Over countless episodes, all that’s been revealed is that he’s not very bright, he’s a short-term hit with women, and he’s not a very good actor. 

In all the years we’ve spent with him, we’ve rarely glimpsed a deeper side. Likeable but stupid. The same superficiality is true of the other characters – Monica (fat in high-school, control freak), Phoebe (ditsy but caring), Ross (something with dinosaurs – yeah, right), Rachel (um . . .).

Chandler has a bit more going on, but in a curious way the lack of any real depth to the characters doesn’t matter at all. If we knew more about them, it might just get in the way of the jokes. We’re given enough information to set up the gags and make them consistent, but no more. 

However likeable these and other sit-com characters are, I can never imagine them walking down the street in my town (although quite often I can’t imagine myself walking down the street in my town).

You might think this reliance on sketchy characters is limited to half-hour comedies, but consider Ally McBeal. The first season was great – fast moving and quirky with a lightness of touch that sterner dramas lack.

But currently the fantasy moments grate, and the parallels between the cases they try and the private lives of the lawyers is becoming a little too cute. At the heart of this is that beyond their catchphrases and signature weirdnesses, the characters are pretty thin. Anyway, bygones.

Compared to the shallowness of these characters, and the increasingly overblown earnestness of ER (who knew I’d miss George Clooney so much?), one show really stands out – Sports Night, a half-hour comedy that’s just finished its first season on ABC.

Prospects of it making it across the Atlantic might not be good, since it’s set in the studio of a US sports TV show (ESPN in all but name), but the show is funny, clever and rewarding.

It accurately describes the appeal and wonder of sport (we have to see why all these clever people are devoting their lives to it), but it’s not really about sport.

In the same way as Seinfeld, it’s not really about anything at all – but whereas Seinfeld worked with ridiculous plot twists, astute observations and a healthy streak of cruelty (’no hugging, no learning’), Sports Night is more understated and has a lot more heart.

It’s so subtle that the laugh track the network apparently insisted on including sounds out of place, as the show’s drama meets Ally McBeal as that so-called drama heads the other way into farce.

Sports Night works because of the clever, witty, slightly spiky characters brought to life by great ensemble playing. Anchors Casey and Dan are not just likeable, they’re believable, as are Dana, Jeremy and the others.

The setting calls for competitiveness and long hours, and so we see characters that are very good at what they do, but are concomitantly missing parts of themselves.

Dana can produce a bang-up show every night under ridiculous amounts of pressure, but she can’t see her boyfriend’s a jerk, while Casey is smart and charming, he’s also hugely stupid pretty often.

We laugh at the characters’ weaknesses while still respecting them, because we see that at heart they’re good people trying to do the best they can. Dan’s handling of his relationship with a woman who decided to go back to her husband was exemplary, but we got to see how hard it was for him to do the right thing.

So as well as the sharp dialogue and perfect pacing, we watch because of the warmth we feel for the characters. Not since Northern Exposure have we seen such a rewarding and smart show masquerading as a light comedy.

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, May 1999)

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Articles Life Modest Proposals

Natural Technology

Friday, March 19, 1999

Over the weekend, while snow fell outside, I made a unilatleral decision that it was spring, and went shopping online for outdoors stuff. 

The technology was a great help. I trawled through reviews from people who already had the gear I was looking at, and discussion board questions from people going through the same process as me (incidentally, if anyone here has anything good or bad to say about the Specialized Stumpjumper or the Gary Fisher Ziggurat, drop me a line).

In retrospect, using the Internet to research this stuff says a good deal about our attitude to what used to be termed Nature. At least from the Romantic period (although Irish language scholars would point to much earlier nature poetry in medieval manuscripts), the great outdoors was seen as a place of simple beauty, away from the strictures and straight lines of cities and industry. 

Time spent among the woods and mountains allowed us to feel part of Creation again, soothing our furrowed brows after our toil in the dark satannic mills. 

If forced to explain what they get out of a weekend in the sticks, most people would probably end up with some version of that argument today. 

Which is fine, but let’s look at what they do when they get to lands of natural wonder. The idea used to be to live simply, in harmony with nature, to strip away the artifice and excess of urban living; now people drive to the Grand Canyon in their RVs, shut the door and watch Melrose Place on the TV. 

Younger people might scoff at this approach, before communing with nature in their 3-layer Gore-Tex jackets, or zooming down mountain singletracks on their $1500 bikes that look like pieces of alien technology. 

Instead of sitting under a tree and watching the daffodils, we use nature as a testing ground (and excuse) for all our cool gear. Forget William Wordsworth – this is more like James Bond: ‘Ah, Q, I see you’ve improved the metal matrix composite aluminium oxide ceramic particulate in my bike frame so it now weighs only 3 pounds’. 

We still dream of a remote log cabin beside a lake, but an increasing number of us would picture it complete with leased line Internet access so we could mail our friends the pictures from the day’s excitement, and keep up with the NASDAQ. 

In some ways this is very positive. If people are getting out there and enjoying what nature has to offer, then maybe they’ll be more environmentally aware when they’re back at home. But as I order another piece of hi-tech kit, I do wonder sometimes if we’re missing the point. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, March 1999)

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • Life

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Essential Ephemera – should you keep old emails?

Sunday, November 08, 1998

As I write, John Glenn and his fellow astronauts are getting used to gravity again with the completion of their Shuttle mission. 

Amidst the discussion of Glenn’s return to space – take your pick:  heroic adventure, science experiment or publicity stunt – a small detail caught my eye.

It seems that Glenn was keeping in touch with his wife by email. On the one hand this shows how pervasive a form of communication email has become (forget ‘Houston, we have a problem,’ now it’s ‘Fwd: Top Ten things we want Samuel Jackson to say as a Jedi Knight’).

But it also raises a question about the lifespan of an email message.  What’s Mrs Glenn going to do with her extraterrestrial missives? They’ll likely sit in her inbox for ages, and then she’ll either delete them with a whole pile of junk when her mail program slows to a crawl, or she’ll put them in their own special folder, and lose them when she gets a new machine. 

We use email to keep in touch with old and distant friends, to flirt with people we hardly know, to send notes to our beloved to brighten their day at work . . .  to carry on any number of relationships that make us who we are. 

But when it comes to keeping the messages, we’re in a bind. Physical letters somehow demand preservation, and even if we don’t read them for years, we’re glad we’ve still got them. 

The same should be the case with emails. When I left my previous job, and again when I gave an old computer to my sister, I was faced with the task of removing any signs of my existence from the machines. The work-related stuff was easily deleted (who keeps memos from a former boss?), but the hundreds of useless jokes, website references and bits of trivia I’d collected seemed at once hugely useless and very important. 

These messages were snapshots of my life at various times (both the mails I’d received and the ones I’d sent), and I couldn’t throw them away. I toyed with the idea of printing them all out and storing them that way – somehow they seemed more permanent when given physical form even on fragile paper. 

But in the end I saved them onto a Zip disk, and have them still. Except I don’t feel sure that they’re really there. Not because I fear the data will be corrupted (although that’s a possibility), or that the format in which they’re saved will be unreadable to later programs (just as likely), but because it’s hard to feel nostalgic about the contents of Zip disk, however valuable its content. 

A friend of mine recently left his job, and another friend designed a spoof movie poster for his departure. The electronic version of this poster was soon bouncing round the planet as it was forwarded to people, and put up on the Web. But it was a framed printout of the file that somehow turned all the work into a real gift. 

It’s a similar problen with other images. I bought a digital camera on my arrival in America, thinking it would be a very practical way of showing people what I was up to. And so it’s proved, with rough and ready Web pages allowing me to share my experiences with my friends and family back home. But I still find it easier to think in terms of a shoebox stuffed full of photographic memories than a portion of my current hard disk (or a bit of space on a server somewhere). 

Maybe it’s just a question of adaptation, and we’ll soon come to treasure hi-tech storage media in the way we do family photo albums and collections of old letters tied with ribbons. But I’m certainly not there yet, and I doubt Mrs Glenn is either. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, November 8th, 1998)

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Articles Ireland Salon Sport

Le Tour en Irlande

Friday, July 17, 1998

The preparations begin early, crowds gather and the excitement mounts. Suddenly there’s a flash of color, a burst of noise, and then it’s gone again, leaving people slightly unsure of what they’ve just seen. So it is that cyclists fly by as you watch from the side of the road, and so it is that the Tour de France leaves Ireland after three memorable days.

Continue reading the article on the Salon site

Posted by David in • Salon • Sport • Ireland

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Articles Books Life Modest Proposals

To David, with fear and loathing

Thursday, May 28, 1998

Not so long ago, I went to a public reading given by Hunter Thompson and Johnny Depp, promoting the new film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

The whole thing was a surreal experience – a hero of the counter-culture appearing at a media event in the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, New York – but one of the strangest parts about it was the realisation that the audience weren’t really there to see either Hunter or Johnny. They were there to get their books signed.

They were only politely interested during the readings, but as soon as someone mentioned forming a queue for the signing session, everyone was suddenly awake and rushing to take their places. 

Of course, the process of having your book signed gets you close to your hero, and allows you engange in some personal communication (always assuming you can think of something more original to say than, ‘Could you make it out to Biff, please?’). 

But I’m not sure that was what got people excited. As far as I could tell, their main concern was just getting that name in the book. (Or, in this case, those names, since Johnny Depp signed them as well, which struck me as a bit of a cheek.)

What makes us want to own signed copies of books? If we’re personally known to the author, and the book is a gift from them, there’s an obvious and special attraction – a friend of mine recently did the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney some small service, and received a couple of signed hardcover first editions, inscribed with thanks.  Brilliant. But if you’ve merely waited in line after a reading, then what real value has been added? 

In the same was as records, books are measures of your life, your changing situations and your developing interests. There’s a great moment in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, where the narrator arranges his record collection in chronological order of purchase. It’s a chart of his own history, and only he can tell you how he went from Deep Purple to Sam Cooke (or some such) in seven records. 

So in the same way, inscriptions in books help to fix a moment in time, and it’s certainly worth remembering that you met the author, however briefly. 

But what to do if the author is nowhere to be found, or the book’s not a gift inscribed by a friend? I’d argue for putting your own name and a date at the front. And add the place too; even if it’s not special to you now, you future self might be very grateful of the reminder that you spent some time in Shrewsbury. 

While writing this, I pulled out my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (purchased primarily to gain admittance to the reading), and scribbled my own inscription on the first page. Would I have been better to wait in line for Hunter Thompson? I don’t think so – I’m still making memories without his John Hancock. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, May 28th, 1998)

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • Life • Books

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Articles Ireland Salon Travel

The New Dublin

Wednesday, March 18, 1998

Early morning in the Phoenix Park, and the mist sits on the tops of the trees, swirling around the stark white papal cross. From the ruined magazine fort you can see Dublin rising through the haze—the red neon of the sign on the Guinness brewery, the green dome of Rathmines church and the distant slim striped chimneys of the power station in Ringsend. Off to the south, the gray curves of the mountains watch over the city.

Continue reading the article on the Salon site

Posted by David in • Salon • Ireland • Travel

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