randulo’s unblog

Gotcha, didn't I?
 
Listen to the song Girls, Please, Girls while you read this note.
 
It features some very classy playing by Freddy Roulette on lap steel guitar, Victor (Balco) Conte on bass and Nat Ginsberg on piano, both of whom played in the Herbie Hancock Monster Band, Victor played with Tower of Power as well, along with drummer Ronnie Beck.
 
Because of the (innocent to me) title of the song, the server it was on was brought to its knees by horny guys - ew the image- trying to see women get together and please each other. The title actually refers, in fact, to my plea as a band member to the wives and girlfriends sitting at the front tables night after night in bar we played in. That was in my single days of course. Anyone I wanted to be with had to pass the test with the other women at those tables. No wonder I like Sons of Anarchy so much! Bands are like motorcycle clubs without the chains.

There was a period for several years where I didn't have a TV at all, preferring radio and then the Internet. Early Internet video was downloading a postage stamp-sized trailer of a a movie in about an hour and watching 60 seconds of staggering, stuttering advertisement for the novelty of it.
 
For the last couple of years I have been watching TV again but on the Internet, often using iTunes. (Quick comment, you do NOT need an iPod or any Apple product to watch TV with no ads on iTunes.) We have also bought several series on DVD. Mostly what brought me back was HBO, which we can't get here in Europe. One French premium cable station showed a lot of HBO stuff in English and that was an awakening for me.
 
HBO has pushed the bar up there so that there are now really two poles of American TV: the no-brains reality or singing contest poll, characterized by the lack of any mental effort of the viewer and the HBO emotional rainbow the likes of Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and so many others.
 
HBO spurred many production companies to do better work and a great example of this is "Sons of Anarchy" (FX). Possibly because of the decades I spent in California, I crossed paths with may kinds of people including a few biker club types, and as I've described elsewhere in these "half-vast" memoirs, dopers and hookers as well. I've joked about SoA being "the Sopranos on motorcycles" but not for the obvious violence or frank language. The parallel I see is that they are both literature in my definition. What I see is a universality that allows those of us who would never do anything like what the protagonists do in these series to feel what they feel, and to see what they see.
 
The Internet is our best hope for quality TV. The Internet is not naturally divided in time slots or even episode length. Delivery cost is small. Many series die in mid season for lack of audience and often these are the most imaginative, like "New Amsterdam" or "Raines". Unlike TV in the old days when there was The Munsters and the the Adams Family, all the boundaries have been broken, TV can talk about anything and I say, let them play!
 
We're already able to enjoy on demand video on many sites, so fortunately you can still watch some of the ones I mention above on the likes of Hulu.com, but don't wait too long as even there, content appears and disappears as the owners try to outFox the market (get it?). Watch for the return of "Damages" on Hulu soon, too. Evil has never been so much fun.