A few years ago Terry Gross interviewed Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, a publisher that reprints old pulp novels as some new works in the genre. The big selling point for these books is that they are all sold in paperback and many have original artwork designed in the styles from the mid last century. I started buying them up wherever I could find them (and in typical OCD fashion, trying to do so in the order in which they were published). I currently have a shelf with 14 of them on it. Fade To Blonde was the first new book Hard Case Crime released. Perhaps the best thing I could say about it is that I had no idea until I read about it after the fact. The pages drip with that great early 60s LA imagery. Hot cars, diners, night clubs, of course the blondes, the whole package. The plot is hardly a consideration: there’s a mysterious girl who may or may not be who she says she is; there’s a tough wanna-be screenwriter working construction and looking for money; crime bosses; stag films; violence, sex and nudity; and sentences like these:

A slim brunette with a neck like a gazelle appeared at my shoulder, wearing about as much cloth of gold as you’d need to keep the chill off a canary. She set a fresh gimlet in front of me as if she were kissing her baby goodnight. Burri watched me taste it and looked pleased when I nodded. It was as good as the first.

I love that shit. For the first book of my 2010 reading marathon, I think I picked a good place to start.

* * * * *

10:29 PM Adam: good evening
10:30 PM Rick: Hello sir.
Welcome to the official MMF Conan Chat
10:31 PM Did your local news affiliate run the promo clip?
Adam: it did indeed
10:32 PM I gave it the requisite chuckle
Rick: As did it I,
Wait, is that how you say that?
As did I, with it?
Adam: ummm
10:33 PM Rick: As is I?
anyway.
Adam: I enjoy “brash” Conan
10:34 PM but not as much as “angry” Conan
and “smooth” Conan
Rick: Both are enjoyable.
NEWS IS OVER
Here we go!
10:35 PM Adam: haha
10:36 PM I was hoping for some jump off the bridge style shenanigans
Rick: The Conan RUnning motif!
Adam: how far will they take this?
Rick: it’s all coming together!
Adam: hahaah
10:37 PM Rick: Are we to draw something from the use of “Cheap Trick”?
Adam: just that they are AWESOME
10:38 PM Rick: Not that this whole late-night shiftery is some massive joke.
That Jay WON’T be on at 10 in the fall
That Jimmy Fallon will have to go back to obscurity.
10:39 PM Adam: great open
Andy Richter is speaking to me!
10:40 PM Rick: I like that he’s YELLING.
I also like that he got to keep his music.
Adam: same here
Rick: WOW. That is a large studio audience.
Andy has the hair-cut of a demented doll.
10:41 PM Adam: it’s fitting
so does Conan
Rick: Lots of “blue” on the set… which is said to have subliminal effects on viewers.
10:42 PM not really sure what though.
Adam: it’s very calming
uh oh
that was a terrible laugh from Andy
very canned
Rick: Andy looks freaky.
10:43 PM Like he should be a villain on Venture Bros..
10:44 PM Punchline: “Exactly like being at a Clippers game”
Conan, i don’t know what that means!!!
Adam: Leno would not make such a joke
10:45 PM hahaha
no Desperate Housewives fans in the crowd
Rick: Conan seems thinner.
Adam: he’s so nervous
10:46 PM Rick: Andy at the lectern with the crazy hair looks like the wacky English teacher at a junior college.
10:47 PM Adam: hmmm
not too sure about the judge bit
Choco taco’s are, in fact, delicious
10:48 PM Rick: this is the truth.
Adam: ask your mom to check your local grocery store kids!
Rick: Laker games? Conan, you’re from Boston.
TURNCOAT!
10:49 PM Adam: hmmm
interesting cameo from Greg Kinnear, the man who almost took Conan’s job
Rick: Good catch.
10:50 PM Here we go… first remote comedy piece!
10:51 PM Adam: hahaha
Tokyo
10:52 PM Rick: There is your ANGRY conan.
10:53 PM Adam: the Universal Tour looks pretty crappy
Rick: Not while Conan at the wheel!
10:55 PM Adam: I could use some 99 cent toilet paper
Rick: A success?
Adam: not bad
Rick: We’ll only know if the NBC studio store is selling shirts with CIRLCE, CIRCLE! printed on them.
Adam: enjoyed the first one more
10:56 PM so far both skits have been mentioned in his NYT interview

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24Conan-t.html?pagewanted=all

Rick: And we end act 1
Adam: (shameless plug)
10:57 PM what’s Letterman doing tonight?
10:58 PM Rick: Hmm… not sure.
In commercial break.
I suspect his show will be pretty normal.
11:00 PM Aaaaaaaaaand we’re back.
Adam: yikes
Rick: Obligatory Leno claps.
Adam: that was scary
11:01 PM I thought he was going to come out for a sec
Rick: I, however, WILL NOT CLAP
11:04 PM Adam: hahaha
Conan so potent he can impregnate with but a glance
11:05 PM Rick: I know this is the first episode and all, but I worry they’re going to set the bar too high with the number of remotes.
11:06 PM Adam: he’s just buying some time
they
Rick: Then again, when Letterman first went over to CBS he did remotes all the time.
Adam: they’ll phase them out eventually once they come up with new bits
11:07 PM your recent statement raises a question though
Rick: And I think Letterman didn’t stop doing them until the late 90s.
Adam: who will Conan be compared to?
11:08 PM or rather
compared to more?
Letterman or Leno?
Rick: Well… I think critically he’ll be compared to Letterman, but I suspect everyone else will compare him to Leno — because when push comes to shove, the ratings are all that people care about
11:09 PM — especially people in charge of programming late night.
That being said, even if he does horribly, I can’t imagine a scenario where he loses this gig.
Adam: yeah
Rick: It would have to be an absolute disaster and Jay will have to fail at 10.
11:10 PM Adam: one thing that makes late-night unique is the leash that everyone gets
except for Chevy
haha
11:11 PM Rick: And Joan Rivers.
Magic Johnson
Adam: ok ok
Rick: Spike Fereston (kinda)
Adam: so there were a ton of people
but they were not Tonight Show hosts
Rick: True.
Exactly.
11:14 PM This is the part of the show where Conan will start to lose viewers to Dave…
on those random Wednesday’s in August when he’s talking to Britney Murphy, I can see people heading back to CBS
11:15 PM Adam: hey man
Britney Murphy is a FANTASTIC guest
also the one time I saw Letterman who do you think was the guest
11:16 PM that’s right
Norm McDonald
I mean
Brittney Murphy
11:17 PM are you seeing movie trailer after movie trailer?
Rick: Right now we’re in local spots.
Though there was a Year One ad.
Adam: we had that and GI Joe
Rick: God that movie looks awful.
11:21 PM Whitney Matheson from Pop Candy said Land of the Lost was rather funny.
I don’t know if I’m to agree.
Adam: well she is a dirty dirty whore
Rick: eeeeeeee
Adam: that’s exactly the kind of thing I would expect out of her whorish mouth
11:22 PM hmmm the girl from Pushing Daisies is in it
I am now interested
Rick: Ah yes, I was wondering where I’d seen her.
THAT IS THE ANSWER>
11:24 PM Hey, did we talk about the Goodbye Saigon sketch on the Will Ferrell SNL?
and how it was FUCKING HILARIOUS.
Adam: no I never saw it
Rick: Your loss my friend.
Adam: is it onlilne?
11:25 PM Rick: I don’t think it is… because of music clearances.
Download it (illicitly!)
Adam: hee hee
no Rick, I will not
wink wink
Rick: Yes. Please keep from doing that. [cough]
11:26 PM Adam: whoa??
a conan commercial during his show?
that was the super bowl ad no?
Rick: yeah, it was.
11:27 PM kind of odd to replay it.
Adam: that is a faux paus
Rick: Woah!
Wait. Nevermind.
11:28 PM Adam: touche!
Rick: Flipped to Letterman. Though I saw Richard from LOST, turned out to be Helio Castronevas
(sp?)
11:29 PM I wonder if they’ll play Evenflow?
Nope.
Adam: this is the part when I turn the tv off
11:30 PM who does letterman have on
?
Rick: Pearl Jam never subscribed to the Jeff Tweedy theory that 2 guitars is obsolete.
They were right all along.
11:31 PM Adam: final thoughts?
will he have 2 guests in the future?
Rick: I’m sure he will.
11:32 PM I’m in an awful position, because Letterman is my horse, and yet I want to watch Conan
I also watch TV over the air and don’t have a DVR.
Perhaps Conan will be saved for “mornings at work online”
Adam: I’m sure it will be online
Rick: not sure why i quoted that.
11:33 PM OK.
Well, this was fun.
Adam: it was
Rick: A new era has begun.
Adam: not a bad first show
I thought the opening skit set the bar pretty high that the show itself did not reach
Rick: And we now live in a wonderland without a Jay Leno… for three months
I would agree with your assessment on the opening.
11:34 PM On that note. Let’s call it a night.
GOODNIGHT AMERICA.
Adam: the end.

Tonight while you’re watching the LOST season finale (or before… or after), call the above number and leave a voice-mail about your thoughts. Then sometime tomorrow I’ll string them together chronologically and release it as a podcast.

ENJOY.

UPDATE I’m going to be leaving the line up through Thursday if you want to call and give your thoughts on the finale and what your predictions are for season six, then I’ll post a second podcast before the weekend. In the meantime, enjoy the calls AK, myself, and a few others made over the course of the two hours. [Spoilers, obviously]

LISTEN HERE

(Runs about 8 minutes.)

[via TVBarn]

[NYTimes.com]

The first moment came at about the two-thirds mark when some goober asked him to name what surprised, troubled, enchanted and humbled him in his first three-months and change in the office (some would mark this period in “number of days” but those people are the type to subscribe to such a Hallmark Holiday, and I am not one). His answer was at times, funny, poignant, honest but most importantly: real (even if it wasn’t). It reminded me of a similar press conference in 2004 when Bush 2 was asked if he had any regrets (or mistakes or something, I’m not sure of the phrasing). Both men took a long pause between answering and clearly were caught off guard by the question (even if they shouldn’t have been). The difference is Bush didn’t answer the question. The thing with Obama (and here is where we tie this back to television) is that he seems to be the type of person that can go up in front of a huge group of people, under bright lights, broadcasting to millions of homes and can just stand there, think and reason on the spot. In that 2004 press conference, what you see Bush doing is thinking of a way out of the question. Watching those differences can make for great TV.

The second item is less profound and probably a bit more calculating. The last question of the night was something about how since the US is a major share holder in all of these companies what kind of a shareholder were we going to be? Now, this is happening at five til, when most Americans that decided to skip the event but wanted to watch network television were likely tuning back in. His reply was along the lines of “You don’t think I have enough stuff on my plate, bro?” and was one of the best and most straightforward explanations as to why we needed government intervention I’d heard. He probably wasn’t thinking about this specifically, but the idea that such an explanation was given so close to my beloved LOST starting up almost seemed too perfect. What can I say, the man’s got skillz.

OK. Enough political yackery. LOST stuff after the jump.

What’s that old dramatic rule? You introduce the hydrogen bomb in act one and someone is going to have to detonate it in act three?

Yet another gem from the team over at camp LOST, and while I for whatever reason find crying Faraday to be moderately unbearable this episode delivered so much plot (and so succinctly) it’s kind of remarkable that we were all complaining two years ago about how nothing made any god damn sense. “The Variable” filled in so many gaps I feel like I can actually sit here and say with a fairly decent level of authority, “Yeah, I kinda know exactly what is happening.” Just that thirty second bit of dialogue toward the end where Dan says to Jack and Kate, “Here is how it is all going to go down” as we, the audience, say, “Yes. This makes sense to me and those around me.”

Of course, now he’s dead, seemingly killed by both his mother and… his mother, and nearly all of our heroes are in some sort of peril, but at least that’s just drama. The mysteries seem almost wholly wrapped up (granted, there are still enough unknowns out there to fill an algebra book (or quantum science or whathaveyou) but at this stage, knowing what we know, that stuff mostly falls into the “oh, that” category. Sure we’d like to know, but it isn’t going to keep me up at night.

What’s interesting about reveals is how they’re done. For the first 40 minutes we were treated to revelation after revelation, as Dan told the frumpy doctor that he was from the future and Miles was his son, that Eloise and Whidmore were Dan’s parents, and this that and the other — all things we knew, but which are satisfying to hear. This paired against the ending, where we learn something we didn’t know (and the inevitable cliffhanger) really packs a punch. The writing has always been good, but it is these last two seasons (specifically since Brian K. Vaughn has come on board) where they’ve really found a way how pace these things perfectly — I’m curious if that is an influence derived from comic-book storytelling?

What is so amazing is how this season has somehow managed to deliver one fantastic episode after another with a lot of our characters separated by space and time. Season two tried to do this with space and failed — perhaps the lesson is you need those first few seasons under your belt to establish the characters before you can successfully break them apart. I mean, Locke is a freaking dead man walking and arguably the single most important character in the show and yet it feels like he’s been totally sidelined this season. What’s odd is everything has been so great, I haven’t even minded.

Ah, but poor Dan Faraday. He was just trying to fix a problem he didn’t start, and yet he was killed by the very person who put him up to it. If that isn’t a political metaphor, I don’t know what is.

Arrested Development was endlessly self-referential. This show is more broad in its focus. The target is clearly Family Guy and its joke-o-matic approach to humor. The problem is in doing so Sit Down, Shut Up very much turns into the program it’s attempting to cut down. The problem lies in the lack of dimensions. There is nothing remotely relatable to any of these characters outside of the voice talent (Jason Bateman, Will Arnet, Henry Winkler, etc), and half of them aren’t even particularly funny. Arrested Development worked so well because all of the actors were right there in the same room playing off one another. Here, it’s just a series of detached voices edited together.

I suppose this makes it sound like I hated the program. I did not. It’s funny, a few scenes quite funny. Tonally, it reminded me a lot of Clone High (maybe because the character design is similar and Will Arnet is in both), but when the half hour was over I wasn’t exactly dying to see another episode. What’s interesting is that the writing is quite brilliant. Unlike Family Guy, this show never felt like the gags were a result of pulling pieces of paper from a hat. It’s clearly a parody, but of the type where you write it and then pass it around to your friends saying, “Hey, check out my take on animation!” Everyone has a big laugh, comments on the cleverness of having the unseen principal suffer an “accident” while air-quoting, only to put it in a drawer and go back to working on that thing that you actually intended on making.

Look, all signs point to an Arrested Development movie to be in the works, so how angry am I really supposed to be. Maybe it’s all for the best. At least this way I won’t have my heart broken when FOX inevitably pulls the plug.

Hit up the comments if you’d like to discuss.

For the record, I enjoyed Parks and Recreation and think it has a lot of potential, but the idea of sandwiching it between episodes of The Office made me realize that I can only watch about 47 minutes of that style of comedy before I start to glaze over. What they really needed to do was throw 30 Rock somewhere in the middle just to give us a little “zany” to mix it up a bit.

Update: After further review, I’ve decided that the highlight of the night was, in fact, this clip. Sorry for the error.