2007 September | Declan Cashin

Archive for September, 2007

Smoker’s Breath

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

So I was a bit behind but I finally caught up with the rest of season 3 of Battlestar Galactica this week after several ‘stay up until 3am watching it’ nights. How is this show not the biggest thing on television? For the past three seasons, it has continually raised the bar for both science fiction and episodic television itself (its series 2 finale has only been matched by the recent conclusion of series 3 of Lost for narrative daring).

No other television show has engaged so much with our troubled, fucked-up (or should I say “fracked up” to use BSG terminology) modern world as BSG. In telling the story of how a scattering of human survivors must battle with a robotic enemy – of their own creation – that’s out to annhilate them and their way of life, BSG takes the post 9/11 world and refracts it through its own ingenious sci-fi prism.

The War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel and Palestine all cast an oblique shadow over BSG, as does America itself. In fact, when TV historians come to analyse this golden age of television, they will pick BSG as the definitive television show of George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s America. Just look at some of the major themes and topics that are recurrent in the show: terrorism, torture, invasion and occupation, insurgency, state security, religious fundamentalism, revolutions, coup d’etats, witch hunts, paranoia, imperialism and imperial presidencies, assasinations, political corruption, suicide bombings, mutiny, military dictatorships, civil war, love, marriage, infidelity, sex and sexuality, gender politics, abortion, racism, xenophobia, existentialism, political philosophy and what it means – literally – to be human.

A brilliant ensemble cast, led by Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell (all hail President Roslin!), Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer, and Grace Park, only add to the quality of the show. And while BSG remains a cult hit, slavishly, devotedly obsessed over by people like me, critics have been falling over themselves to praise the show (don’t get me started on how the Emmys have blanked it every year). BSG won a highly prestigious Peabody award last year, MSNBC and Entertainment Weekly named it as the Best TV Show of 2006 and the New Yorker, New York Times and Rolling Stone all carried rhapsodic cover feature reviews of the show throughout last year.

As for the series 3 finale – I was left stunned. I’m still processing the shattering twists and revelations so if any fans out there want to help me out, it’d be much appreciated. As for the rest of you, please get watching. As another BSG-loving friend of mine says: if you’re not watching Battlestar Galactica, you don’t deserve a television. In fact, if you don’t love BSG, you just don’t love television.

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Brian O’ Who?!

Friday, September 28th, 2007

Donncha O’Callaghan. Now THAT’S a “bod”

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Isn’t it Bionic?

Friday, September 28th, 2007

Former EastEnders star Michelle Ryan (Zoe Slater) looks like she has a hit on her hands with the new version of Bionic Woman, which premiered on US TV this week, and beat Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Private Practice in its audience share. Read about it here.

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All the Pretty Things

Friday, September 28th, 2007

This Life column from Day and Night magazine in today’s Irish Independent

There’s nothing like a good old fashioned, politically incorrect, dubiously-sourced survey reducing men and women to crude, basic stereotypes to get the mind ticking over on matters of love and lust. German researchers recently published the results of a study they conducted on the sexes that essentially says men are shallow, looks-obsessed Neanderthals and women are more ruthlessly shallow gold-diggers.

The “boffins” (it’s never “scientists” when it comes to these types of surveys) based their findings on an examination of a group of speed daters, and by analysing their behaviour, concluded that men pick their mates based on physical attractiveness, while women are more selective, and can “adjust their desire for a ‘high-quality’ mate”. And lest there be any confusion, “high quality” is taken to mean “he’s loaded”.

This is all Darwinian stuff, the boffins tell us, and it would certainly give credence to those moments when you pass a couple in the street and find yourself silently asking, ‘What is she doing with him?’ Oh come now, you know you’ve done it.

And who are we to question all of this if it is indeed encoded in our natures? But speaking as a man (be nice), I feel moderately qualified to comment on the laws of attraction that are wired into our XY chromosomes. It is indeed like survival of the fittest out there – and by ‘fittest’, I mean, of course, the hotties (if you listen really carefully right now, I think you might just hear Charles Darwin spinning in his grave).

Yes, I, like many other men, am drawn to the Pretty People™ and I’m not ashamed of it. After all, they’re here on earth for our entertainment and edification. Acting in a manner truly befitting our simian ancestors, we gather around them, knuckles dragging along the floor, making noises and suppressing our innate urges to reach out and groom them by picking flies off their exquisite forms. If it were a movie, it’d be called Gorillas in Their Midst.

And in keeping with the evolutionary process, you find that you must learn a whole new language to even talk to a lot of the Pretty People™. In my specific, man-centric case, it’s Hunkish, which I speak poorly in a broken, pigeon dialect that all too often fails to be understood by the intended pretty target. Regular English deserts us when we try to chat up the Pretty People™, leaving us floundering with the few words our primate minds can cobble together, causing us to come out with masterful seduction lines such as, ‘Socks are great aren’t they?’

However, not for the first time, I think the girls might be right. Looks, shockingly, are not everything, and I can say that having done a few intensive crash courses in the “all that glitters is not gold” school of dating. Based on my own experience and that of my consiglieri, I can confidently say that a lot of the Pretty People™ – and I mean the ones who know they’re hot – are just dull. There’s no endearing flaw, no little insecurity to arc the attraction and make you want to furrow deeper to find out more.

So what’s one to do? Obviously, the solution is to find a way to get through to a Pretty Person™ who has the personality and the goods to back those looks up, and then follow the example of that great, misunderstood romantic heroine, Kathy Bates in Misery, and force them to love you in an environment of torture and intimidation. Alternatively, you can go for the more “traditional” route of being open-minded, shamelessly flirty and, most of all, persistent. And if that person happens to be loaded, all the better. Whatever about looks, we all know money is the sure-fire way to happiness.

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I Need a Hero

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Milo Ventimiglio. Gratuituous torso shots. Even more reasons to be excited about Heroes Season 2

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Roth. God.

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

For those of you who missed it, the Sunday Times had a great refreshers course in the work of the peerless, magisterial American novelist Philip Roth in the Culture mag last week. It can be viewed here. Roth publishes his latest novel Exit Ghost this autumn, but for those who haven’t had the pleasure yet, I’d recommend tackling his astonishing ‘America’ trilogy from the late 1990s – I Married A Communist, American Pastoral and The Human Stain, three novels that are breathtaking in their intellectual, linguistic, social and historical sweep. This guy is just awesome. Nobel Prize in Literature NOW! Don’t make me come out there to Stockholm.