Lowkey Brilliance and the Intimate Epic in Vice Prinipals

It's easy to use a T.V. show's host network's own confidence in that show as a marker to decide how seriously to take that show.  Television monoliths like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or Westworld get every last frame scrutinized and analyzed as they are held on pedestals like the finest works of classic literature.

And in our ever more frenetic world each of us must decide which art we want to indulge in, since there's certainly more television produced than is worth our time to view.  It's easy to overlook a show like Vice Principals, which compared to HBO's heavy hitters has a minuscule advertising campaign and could probably have the production of half its season paid for by one Thrones episode.

That would be to overlook one of the most subtly well-constructed programmes on the network, and a masterful new entry in that holy grail category I call the Intimate Epic.

These are pieces of literature (any medium) that tell grand stories of consequence (power exchange, life & death, sex) through only a tight lens on just a few characters.  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly might be the ultimate in intimate epics: the story spans vast physical expanses, but more than that it's the impact of the characters' actions with one another that are immensely heightened, not necessarily because of what they are but because of how they're presented in the film.

What these guys are doing isn't all that important to anyone other than them, yet the way director Leone uses every cinematic tool available to display these events in the movie makes the audience feel like the consequences of the titular characters' actions shall be of universe-altering magnitude.

Kill Bill is another peak intimate epic, with the film bending us to believe that all of reality hinges on nothing but one person's hunt for five others.  What happens at the end of the film is no surprise - it is given right in the title - but knowing that makes no difference.  What makes Kill Bill riveting and immensely rewatchable is how it gets there.  We get to see and hear moments of intense drama unfold between all these key players, events that reach across years and continents.

When our hero does finally kill Bill, a simple and low-key death becomes as climactic as the explosion of the Death Star because of everything we know about what led to it, and because we know how important it is to the main character.  The world will still turn, wars will still be fought, and billion-dollar deals will still be struck tomorrow, but in Kill Bill that all completely ceases to matter as the film manages to shrink our perceptive scale of drama down to the intercourse of just a few people, and that is the essence of the Intimate Epic.

Vice Principals has tread some important new territory in this vein, and I hope this article can help establish it in the annals of great television-making that is worth your time in today's oversaturated tele-visual market.  Principals brings several novel characters to the screen, such as the flirtatious but not-stellar-looking writer Brian Biehn and the batshit sociopath who's managed to remain functional thus far Lee Russell.  About them and others an entire article could be written, but what I want to focus on here is the use of an ordinary, relatable, and - for those reasons - totally mundane setting in which the show occurs.

Previously I'd assumed part of what imbued an Intimate Epic with its epicness was certain qualities of the setting.  It had to involve locations that commanded attention one way or another, perhaps being exotic (the Far East, jungles of South America, islands in the Caribbean), or exclusive and rarefied (Swiss chateaus, modernist houses overlooking sprawling cities, penthouses and boardrooms amid metropolises, government agencies or top-secret facilities), or simply unique in their extremity & beauty (vast deserts of the spaghetti Westerns, curving roadways along the Mediterranean, hostile mountains).  Settings that were unusual immediately capture the viewer, saying "hey, this is not a regular place, the people that are here are doing special not-regular things."

Vice Principals dispenses all of that for a setting with none of those features.  Instead the heightened importance of everything comes from the way it's shot, the way it's edited, the usage of music, and of course the writing itself.  This is one of creator Jody Hill's calling cards, as evidenced from a similar style in Eastbound & Down.  The cinematography, often coupled with slow motion, transforms high school hallways into backdrops for deceit, love, scorn, alliance, and betrayal.  These two men are mid-grade losers working at an obscure suburban high school, yet as Vice Principals progresses they carry on as though the rise or fall of nations is at stake.  Make no mistake: there are full-bore personalities at war here, and the show expands their conflict to fill our brains' scale of what a conflict, at its greatest, can be.

The final nail in the coffin is always the closing music and cut to the credits.  Viewers are left, episode after episode, with the notion that something big has changed, something bigger is afoot, and whatever goes down not everyone will come out of it well.  In short, the musical selections and perfect cutting at the show's conclusions haunt, and that is just about the finest thing that can be said for any piece of art.

This latest episode - the penultimate in the show's punchy run - leaves us with Neal Gamby and Amanda Snodgrass together again, as Miss Abbott looks onward, crushed, while the dreamy, spacey tunes of Roost's Big Black Delta play over everything.  That final shot of her lingers just a little longer than you expect, and combined with a little hint they dropped a few episodes ago when she was shopping with Gamby, my money's on her as the shooter.

Half-Literate

Mar 15 2015

 Knowing how to read it but not how to speak it
sometimes feels worse than not knowing how to read it at all.

YOU SUCK

APR 8 2015 2

If you think I laugh too much, it's not true.  It IS true that I laugh at all jokes.  That's because there is something funny to be found in all jokes.  Perhaps you actually told a good joke.  Then I laughed spontaneously.  That's best; good job!

Maybe your joke wasn't good, but seeing as it was a joke, it should've been.  Therefore, I laugh at you for thinking that a shitty joke would work.

Be Being Been

JUL 27 2017

I'm SLOW and INEFFECTIVE at generating things because I believe that "I can't BE there unless I've already BEEN"

In other words, it's my mantra - "it can only be found by those who already know where it is" - being applied onto myself, destructively!

Of course I KNOW the whole being-->doing-->having method of things.  Yet I constantly believe that I must have ALREADY BEEN somewhere to be valid in pursuing being there (what moronism)!

How did I get into motorcycles?  I just joined the class and I bought one.  Boom! Now I'm a biker, because I ride a bike.
How did I get into swinging?  I just attended events.  I mentioned that it was an interest to girls I was into, I got onto SLS, I said yes to the opportunities that existed.  How did I get to make furniture?  I just made it.  How did I get to be an acid head?  I just took acid.  The doors were all open.  It was merely my prerogative to walk through them, but for some weird reason that's the part we humans find difficult.

So how do I get to be an artist?  Just make art.
How do I get to be a lover?  Just love.
How do I get to be a fit muscle man?  I just exercise regularly and eat well.
How do I get to be sexy?  I just be sexy.
How do I get to be rich?  I just make money.  I find things others value but  aren't doing, and I do them.
How do I get to be a leader?  I just lead.
How do I get to have fun?  I just enjoy doing stuff, and pick fun things to do.

Note the shift from 'be' to 'have' on the last question there, is there anything worth exploring in that?

How do I get to have my dream house?  Just build it, get the people needed to do so.
How do I get to have the life I want?  Just be the person who'd have that kind of life.

What's bigger than pornstar, or The Pleasure Man, since those haven't been drawing me forward.  The Maestro's part of it, so is the Powerful Man, but they're not there just yet...what's the magical thing that'll go DING and make EVERY LAST THING from the past disappear, leaving ONLY the beingness of this supermaster present.

What do I REALLY want?  Who do I REALLY want to be?  That would have the self-respect to pull off anything and everything I desire, no stoppages or excuses or shortcomings or justifications for why I don't have it.  I'm talking that Mad Max, Don Draper, Baron Flambeaux, Cary Grant, hard-rocking, brilliant, sexy, art-shitting, OUT THERE rockstar who just burns the world to the ground with his very gaze?!  The kind of guy who'd set sights on a girl and ultimately get her to a choice about him, and satisfied with her choice, but nonetheless having made it....rather than quiet in the corner, HOPEFUL (god what a vile word!).
The guy who's got a big, shit-eating grin on, whose Miami-neon swim shorts ripple in the wind while he holds open the throttle on a cigarette boat loaded with acid and amplifiers bound for some atoll off the coast with guys & girls of highest caliber.  He doesn't need to be the best..because they're all the best.  He's a god, yet he's among gods.  And he pulls others toward godliness.  He understands other perspectives but does not adopt them.  He is the Lizard King, and his presence throbs with a gentle, torquey unshakability.  Others may lob what they have at him...their cheers or their jeers, their tomatoes, their empty bottles at the back of his head, their roses & soaked lace knickers, their condescending tones & disapproving looks, their mind tricks, their delusions, their awe-struck compliments, every mechanism they have, and he shall not be deterred from his course.  For he knows it, and it is true, and true to it he stays with an authenticity purer than hydrogen.  There is only one sin: doubt.

He is.

I am.

"I am," he declared, and thus it was law in the universe.

Tales from the Intersection

     I sat there, at the helm of the machine, rumbling & grumbling in the misty night, waiting for my turn at the intersection, as the motor throbbed in anticipation.  I strained and in the distance I could hear the echoes of Spitfire pilots over the Channel.  A pink cigarette died in the ashtray.
     The red light disappeared and with nothing more than the slight twist of a small metal plate the beast came alive, all sound and fury and chrome and hot leather.
     The smell of female had suffused the cabin, born of the soaked upholstery, but presently it fought off the invading scent of premium gasoline.
     I howled down the boulevard, a blue streak, fully possessed of the moment.  It was all rich, clean energy, and it reeked of a man dealing with reality on its truest terms, namely: no terms at all.

The Heart of Elegance

            Complex solutions were not necessarily arrived at by complex means and only from the minds of geniuses.  They are typically derived with unwavering attention at the exact point that needs it, and a solution is ventured upon that point that may or may not work.  It probably won’t.  But there’s a possibility it does, and one can get good at guessing which solutions shall work and which shan’t.  All it takes is observation.  Reperepetitio est mater studiorum…

            And after that there’s a second pattern to notice: sometimes, one solution solves not only the problem being focused on but in its same course solves a second, yet unresolved problem.  It’s here that one can become even better at predicting the solutions, striving not only for merely a solution that works rather than one that won’t but instead for solutions that solve two problems rather than one.  It is just as the separation between an average golfer and a good golfer: playing from the same distance, the former aims for the green while the latter aims for a particular spot on the green.

            That is the heart of elegance: single solutions that simultaneously, intrinsically, solve several problems.  It leads to the association of complex solutions with brilliance, for there is the true heart of genius: not just to pull something off, but to pull it off so elegantly that it appears effortless.

Imagine A Penny

MAR 26 2016

Imagine a penny.  If you're like most people, you know just enough about a penny to distinguish it from all the other coins.  "Ah yes, the red one!"  If you know any of the following, consider yourself part of a rare breed:

• Which direction Lincoln is facing
• Where the year is stamped
• Where the minting facility is stamped
• How many times total (both faces of the coin) the words are "One Cent" stamped

These are stimuli that occur to us but which we filter out because they are unnecessary information: while your perceive everything, you only regard the minimum necessary to satisfy a situation.  Because you never need to know these details of the penny, you find yourself unable to remember them right now, even though you see pennies all the time.  Or if you don't, imagine something else that you do see all the time.  Money & credit cards, plant life around your home, or the architecture of buildings along your commute but which aren't ever your destination are all common examples.  It is this ability to filter that allows us to navigate complicated city routes without knowing the street names: we don't know what the front of every building on every street in the city looks like, but we know just enough to navigate using a few landmarks.  Our brain has boiled down the entire town to just a small handful of landmarks for a given trip and in the process saved much time, certainly an evolutionary advantage.

The marvelous perception-altering nature of LSD is such that you perceive the wonderful patterns, textures, and details of all sorts that're all around us - in nature, in machines, in people's faces, everywhere - which we normally ignore as extraneous stimuli and simply discard any notice of, let alone appreciation.  It is a way of seeing (and hearing, and tasting, and generally experiencing sensations of all types and origin) that we have not experienced for a very long time, perhaps not since before we can remember.  But to experience the goliath, unyielding continuity of reality with an adult brain and understanding is nothing short of breathtaking.