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Pony: TV-orama
10.18.2007
Since I got this hacking cough, I have been allowing myself a convalescent's worth of tv- watching.
Last night I saw The David Bowie biography - what an amazing, constantly creative, freakishly talented person. It kind of made me feel shitty to be watching tv for 3 hours instead of whipping off on oil painting while creating dramatic personae that I will later translate into a story-based musical tour-de-force.
keeping to the British theme, I switched to this show where this bossy woman takes a disgusting, beer-swilling oaf of a man and gives him a detox diet for 8 weeks. They examine what he eats, how much he drinks (12 pints a day!) and they even look at his poo in a tupperware container. It is both gross and engrossing.
Tuesday night we had also watched The Tudors, a co-production between the Ireland and Canada, starring Jonathan Rhys-Myers as Henry VIII. I keep wanting it to be quality trash, like Rome, but it falls short.
The night before we had also watched the PBS Jonestown documentary. I have been known to use the phrase "drank the kool aid" before, but I had never actually thought of those 900 people who died in Guyana.
The documentary was extensive, tracing the back to the creation of the Church of the People, explaining the political mood of the 1970's. The subjects who spoke - the survivors - were so shockingly articulate. I guess I'd never though of them as idealists. I had always brushed them off as weak, brainwashed acolytes of someone who they should have known better than to follow. This doc showed the church members as real, complex, hopeful and confused, multi-dimensional people.
I could not sleep that night thinking of that massacre - how he first took the babies from their mothers' arms. But stories like that extra-affect me these days for obvious reasons.
