The Idea: Go watch House MD now. Way too good to last.
The last time I recommended a television series (Karen Sisco,
and the recommendation was due to early-episode writing by creator
Elmore Leonard), it was the kiss of death. I seem to have had this
effect on the handful of good television series over the past decade: The Big Easy, Dave's World, Reasonable Doubts, Max Bickford and the best of them all, Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night. What distinguished all of these series was excellent writing: You didn't even have to watch -- you could enjoy just listening to the smart, quirky dialogue, and the rich, carefully woven story-lines.
So I'm almost afraid to go to bat for the latest well-written drama (on the Faux network yet -- sheesh), House MD.
The show features British theatrical actor (accent undetectable) Hugh
Laurie as the eponymous Dr. Gregory House MD, brilliant but bitter
medical specialist, whose team must solve the medical mysteries lesser
minds have given up on. Some of the medical cases are intriguing,
usually with wry twists, but the real magic in the program is the
dialogue, which sparkles and hasn't an ounce of fat on it. The writing
is mostly done (I think -- writing credits are hard to catch in
Hollywood productions) by Sara Cooper and Lawrence Kaplow, who were
last seen as the writers of Hack,
the short-lived and claustrophobic (but also cleverly-scripted) drama
that featured David Caruso as a disgraced cop working as a cabbie.
I've seen quite a few well-written shows destroyed by studio and
network hacks insisting on more 'human interest' (i.e. improbable
'cute' romances that are dragged out like soap opera story lines), more
'action' (i.e. simpler shorter dialogue and more implausible disasters
with ample shouting and shooting), or more 'conflict' (i.e. black-hat
stereotypes that conspire and do inconceivably mean things to
impossibly good guys, also a soap opera staple). The Pretender
actually took a soap opera actor and, thanks to good writing, made him
engaging and heroic -- but the hacks dumbed down the show and refocused
it on the conspiracy of 'the center' and the absurd Snidely
Whiplash-level nastiness of the antagonists. The (anti-)hero was
reduced to a comic book caricature and the program became unwatchable.
Same thing happened to Max Bickford,
which started brilliantly but was soon forced by the studio to
introduce more romance and bigger roles for the young actors on the
show (i.e. shed the older-demographic skew because advertisers know
older viewers buy less, and less impulsively). Richard Dreyfuss could
have been excused if he had murdered the producers, who reduced a show
of great promise to pathetic drivel and may have wrecked Dreyfuss'
career in the process. Maybe it's a good thing that some of the best
shows never lasted long enough to be polluted and dragged down by the
pathetic media-oligopoly moneygrubbers who run the studios and networks
and care only for ratings points among their most unsophisticated
viewers. The consequence is the flood of cheap 'reality' dreck that has
filled the schedules and made shows like House stand out so remarkably.
The attempt by the hacks to damage House
is clearly evident (the hospital administrators are predictably corrupt
and ludicrously manipulative and out to 'get' our hero -- they force
him in the latest episode to choose between firing one of his brilliant
interns or shilling for a new overpriced drug; and the way-too-pretty
young people on the staff are being given more close-ups and featured
in vapid, simple subplots) but what is remarkable is that the show
seems to have found a way to accommodate this interference without
losing its edge. A particularly fine episode, Fidelity,
has a convoluted, stunning plot and a merciless, horrifyingly human
ending. It would make a wonderful stage play. And House's spare and
savage come-backs and asides are still original, lovingly crafted and
totally believable. House is tailor-made to be the stereotypical rude
and short-tempered medical specialist, yet Laurie and the writers
refuse to allow him to be caricaturized -- with each episode he grows
deeper and more engaging and complex.
Catch it while you can. House
is way too smart for its own good, especially on that network. As a
real-life doctor said in his review of the show on imdb: "Somewhere
there is a team of writers who actually know their craft, and an acting
ensemble that knows how to pull it off. Now I can watch my TV one hour
a week." I'm with you, doctor.
The Idea:
As regular readers know, I have occasionally published articles on this
site from people who do not have their own weblogs. This will mark the
third time I've published the work of Glenn Parton, best
known for his wonderful eco-philosophy/ eco-psychology essays The Machine in our Heads and Humans in the Wilderness. His essay Love Politics was published here last year, and Part 1 of this three-part essay, entitled Exterminism,
was published here in January. As I mentioned in Part 1, the ideas in
the essay are Glenn's, not mine, and you can tell him what you think
through the comment facility below, or e-mail him
directly. I'll add my two cents at the end of Part 3. In this part,
Glenn moves from criticism of Western culture to mysticism in support
of a polyamory life:
Free Love, by Glenn Parton
Look up at the clear night sky!
The free play of two cosmic forces, Eros and Thanatos, Love and Hate,
Attraction and Repulsion, Intimacy and Distance, sustains harmony among
the heavenly bodies and evolves the beauty, wisdom, and goodness of the
universe. What is the message or lesson for human association or
society that is written in the cosmos? We know that human society is a
microcosm of this great celestial order, and that we have fallen out of
balance with the rest of Nature. What must we do in order to become
part of the Universal Harmony again?
Everyone recognizes that friendship cannot be mandated or legislated,
that it arises naturally, spontaneously, one person at a time, and that
it is possible and desirable to have many friends, on different levels
of communication, conversation, and commitment. The hope of peace on
earth, and peace with the earth, has a lot to do with spreading
friendship around the world, but I do not believe this ideal will ever
be realized (enough to save the world) until we acknowledge that Yin
and Yang, the feminine spirit and the masculine spirit, are also
cosmological principles and/or forces, which change the balancing point
between men and women by adding sexuality to the mix. We should not
pursue a vision of worldwide peace and friendship that ignores,
minimizes, or misunderstands the sexual-polarity of human association.
My heavenly vision, and long-range political solution, is Free Love
between man and woman. By free love I mean sexual love that does not
restrict itself to one person at a time. It means holding oneself open
to the possibility of sexually loving more than one, and taking that
voyage when the opportunity arrives; it means taking each man/woman
relationship on its own terms, as far as it will go, as far as it wants
to go, including sexuality, until it finds its own point of equilibrium
between Love and Hate, Intimacy and Distance. That is the Way to reach
the proper balance between men and women. The message of evolution is
that each being finds its balancing point with all other beings,
according to the laws of nature, including Yin-Yang, creating a
self-balancing dynamic whole in which each being is what it is in terms
of the totality of its relationships.
Human beings must freely associate, form, and bond, including Yin-Yang
sexual energies, or we disturb the natural order of human society, our
alignment or agreement with the logic and love of the cosmos. Human
society, with its sexual-polarity, must freely arrange itself, or we
will not achieve a harmonious community, and without a harmonious
community we will not reach consensus on the political level because
sexual frustrations, conflicts and hostilities spill over into the
major areas of life, work and government. In other words, the ideal of
friendship will remain an empty ideal if we do not understand that free
love is part of the original architecture of human togetherness, and
that we must allow sexuality between men and women to work itself out,
according to inherent interests and desires, or we will never build
good government, real democracy, or a true Republic because if we do
not first put our sexual lives in proper order, then politics will
collapse on a faulty foundation. Out of the fundamental harmony of a
sexually balanced civil society will come political intelligence and
wisdom.
Respond, as much as you can, to all heavenly bodies orbiting around
you. That’s how the suns and moons and planets behave toward one
another, pushing and pulling everything into a vibrating, pulsating,
interconnected totality. Of course it is not possible to love everyone
with the same intensity and completeness (with some people a simple nod
or smile, or even silent toleration, is enough), but each man/woman
relationship has its natural sexual closeness and distance, and we must
have the courage to seek it, and go there, without interference from
custom, convention, or imposed morality. Friendship is always, at
bottom, a relationship between two people, but everyone knows that it
is not socially desirable, not community-building, for each person to
have only one friend. Rather, each person is permitted and encouraged
to have a diversity of friends, each one created on its own unique
terms, as deeply as possible, with no outside direction or definition.
If sexual love was free to follow this path, like friendship, then we
would have discovered the secret ingredient in a self-balancing social
constellation (of friends and lovers), and secured the social
foundation for rational discourse and action.
If there was only Love, then the Big Bang would not have occurred, and
the world would collapse (into undifferentiated Oneness), and evolution
would have to begin again; if there was only Hate, then the world would
fragment, scatter, and fly apart. The Great Harmony is a balance
between the forces of Attraction and Repulsion, Contraction and
Expansion, Integration and Disintegration. Free Love is the mystery of
the universe, and if human beings would learn to sexually love who we
want, when we want, in the way that we want, as much as we want,
instead of imposing artificial constraints, or false morality, on love,
then the gravity of love would create a tight and intricate web of
human connections in which we would not have to struggle for political
consensus because we would already basically have it.
The first and foremost criticism that is raised against free love is
that it harms children, but actually it is best for children because
the nuclear family is too small a world for the development of the vast
potential of children. The nuclear family limits childhood reality to
the overbearing influence of two adult perspectives, making it nearly
impossible for the child to escape from prejudice, ignorance,
narrowness, and parental unconsciousness. The wounds of the parents are
visited on the children, and the cycle of the neurotic family is
perpetuated from one generation to the next, which slows down the
evolution of the human species tremendously. Free love makes intimate
communities (like tribes), rather than isolated families, the center of
childhood upbringing, exposing the child to many viewpoints, expanding
his/her consciousness, increasing the opportunities for sanity and
self-realization.
A second objection that is raised against free love is that it will not
work because human beings are competitive, jealous and possessive
creatures, but actually it is monogamy that causes these problems
because it makes us fearful that if s/he loves someone other than me,
then s/he cannot also love me. If your concept of love is limited, then
that creates jealousy and possessiveness because you are afraid of
loss, abandonment and loneliness, but if you “see” that it is possible
to love more than one, then you will not fear abandonment and
loneliness when love overflows to include others. Free love makes
intimate networks (like tribes), rather than fragmented couples, the
center of personal life and love, exposing the adult to a diversity of
potential lovers, broadening the horizon of intimate contact,
communication, and knowledge, increasing the opportunities for security
and happiness.
Another criticism leveled against free love is that there is not enough
time to love more than one, but of course love concerns quality, not
quantity. Eliminating the boredom of monogamy alone would provide more
than enough time for at least a few additional lovers, and then there
are those habits, routines, hobbies, and fantasies that could be
replaced, for almost no money, with deep and thrilling real sexual love
adventures. There will never be enough time for co-dependent
individuals because every gesture or sign of independence is seen as a
minimization or devaluation of their relationship, and there will never
be enough time for someone who is waiting for the one and only perfect
lover. Such people cannot get enough love no matter how much they get
because they misunderstand free love. To these people I say:
contemplate the heavens and let your personal life become a feeling and
thoughtful expression of the Will, intention, and intelligence of the
Universe!
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
