"The traveling, the air conditioning is so weird. You become like a lizard."

From Howard Stern's big book of interviews, a little insight into the travails of travel:

Howard: Then when this song becomes a hit, they send you out on tour, and that’s where you freak. You hated it.

Sia: Well, there were parts that I loved.

Howard: What’s the worst part of it? Is it just being in a hotel? Not being around your stuff?

Sia: It’s lonely. You have this family with you, this traveling family of wolverines that you create, and that’s not lonely. But if you’ve developed relationships outside of that, when you leave them it’s really hard to nourish them. I couldn’t ever maintain a love relationship. I don’t know. The traveling, the air conditioning is so weird. You become like a lizard.

The song mentioned above is "Breathe Me," which became a hit after it was used in the brilliant ending to the great finale episode of the TV show "Six Feet Under." Here's the official video for the song:



And here's that fantastic final sequence for "Six Feet Under":



When you travel, you're not 6 feet under, but the air conditioning is so weird and you do become like a lizard.

The new TV season — do you care?

Throwing Things lists some things they care about. Here you can see which new shows Television Without Pity is going to recap.

And, hey, the recap from the final "Six Feet Under" is up already. The recapper, M. Giant, reveals on the last page that he's moving on to recap that big new HBO series, "Rome," which starts tonight. Are you going to watch? Can we transfer our "SFU" habit onto "Rome"? Are we going to try?

MORE: I cared deeply about the new TV season when I was a teenager — and so did all my friends. We eagerly awaited the TV Guide issue that described all the new shows and talked a lot about which ones we thought we're going to be good. We made a point of trying nearly every one. That was back in the days when shows like "Bewitched" and "That Girl" were coming out. We were so into TV. Half of us started affecting the vocal mannerisms of Elizabeth Montgomery and Marlo Thomas!

UPDATE: I watched "Rome" for about 20 minutes. It was the sort of roiling, writhing ancientness I expected. I found I just didn't care.

The TV houses of your mind.

With the five-year series nearly over, someone at Television Without Pity came up with an idea for a new forum thread about "Six Feet Under." The subject: the house. Why is it so depressing? One topic being discussed is something that just began to puzzle me as I watched the newest episode: Are the kitchen and sunroom upstairs? Another puzzle: Why is Ruth's place so much shabbier than Nate and Brenda's and David and Keith's? Is the business supposed to be doing well or not? Or have they just decided to make the living quarters of the funeral home depressingly dowdy as an expression of Ruth's character?

It's interesting to try to understand the layout of the house of a familiar show and to question whether the house fits the economic situation of the characters. Do we really understand where those doors lead? Do the exterior shots match the interiors? Does the second floor really fit on the first floor?

I remember a book from a few years back that had diagrams for the houses of 60s sitcoms like "Bewitched" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Someone had really tried to figure out where all the closets and bathrooms and so on would need to be – a strange little obsession that produced a pretty cool book. I also remember reading an article about how the characters on various TV shows set in NYC did not have jobs that would pay them enough to afford living in the nice places they had. (Jerry Seinfeld was the exception.)

Then there's the whole subject of TV houses that have been important to you. I think there are a lot of people who deeply bonded with the house on "The Brady Bunch." I'm not one of them. That was never one of my shows. But wasn't there some house you really wanted to live in? Can't you still picture it and take a mental walk through those rooms today? Is there some particular thing in that house that appeals to you: Laura Petrie's kitchen island? The louvered shutters that opened Lucy Ricardo's kitchen to the living area? The spiral stairway in Mork and Mindy's apartment? Samantha Stephens' retro wallpaper?

How many details from old shows are still part of the furniture of your mind?

"I don't want to take the edge off."

Brenda said on last night's "Six Feet Under." She was refusing the vodka her mother offered. She also rejected the funeral poetry as "maudlin." Virginia Heffernan has an interesting (spoiler filled) piece assessing the series, which showed its third-to-last episode Sunday night. Heffernan contrasts "sincerity" and "authenticity":

[T]he ideal of sincerity has long ago been devalued, rendered commercial or quaint. Today, for example, it is associated with Coldplay, mewling God-and-country Republicans and weepie cable-television dramas like "Six Feet Under" that appeal mostly to women and gay men.

Authenticity, on the other hand, is regarded as rougher stuff, a man's job. Authenticity is gin to sincerity's chardonnay. (Look for it on "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood.") It suggests, as Trilling puts it, "a more strenuous moral experience" than does sincerity, as well as "a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life." Authenticity, in other words, is a confrontation not with the self, which its practitioners regard as elusive and false, but with death, horror, being, nothingness.

But "Six Feet Under," it is a woman, Brenda, who contrasts with all the mewlers on the show. I don't want to do spoilers, so read Heffernan's article if you want the details. She's got some good ones!

How "Six Feet Under" is "American Beauty 2."

Dale Peck explains how Alan Ball continued the characters from his "American Beauty" screenplay to his "Six Feet Under" series:

[T]he project that followed American Beauty, the HBO series Six Feet Under, is essentially a character-by-character recreation of the movie’s key players. Its family is composed of figures culled from the three households in American Beauty: Allison Janney’s automaton housewife reappears in Frances Conroy’s Ruth Fisher; Kevin Spacey’s selfishly distant father shows up in Richard Jenkin’s Nathaniel Fisher; Wes Bentley’s drifter ’n’ dreamer has grown up to become Peter Krause’s Nate Fisher Jr.; Thora Birch’s ironic-but-wants-to-be-earnest teenager is the mirror image of Lauren Ambrose’s Claire Fisher; and the two Jims have moved into the main house in the form of Michael C. Hall’s David Fisher. Mr. Ball’s beloved plastic bag is back, too, this time filled by an endless series of corpses (there’s more than a little poignancy to this, since the bag that was Ball’s inspiration for his movie was blowing next to the World Trade Center).

Brilliant observation! Now this raises the question of what Ball is really saying about homosexuality in "Six Feet Under," considering the role it played in "American Beauty" (read the article for a reminder of the way homosexuality was treated in AB). Peck analyzes the kidnapping episode of "Six Feet Under" (which many fans of the show hated--and I discussed here). Here's just a part of Peck's great analysis:

Throughout this needless exercise in sadism, the cast and crew of Six Feet Under do their job well. ... But not even Michael C. Hall’s bravura performance—certainly the best of his four years on the show—can distract us from the inexplicable cruelty of what is actually happening. Desire is punished, and the punishment is eroticized, and the erotic, as it always does, seeks its final release in death. This is where gay desire seems always to lead in Alan Ball’s stories: to the innocuous invisibility of "partners" and the two Jims, or to the invisibility of annihilation; somewhere you get the feeling that the two states are indistinguishable.

So what have you been watching on TV lately?

You may have noticed I haven't been saying much about television lately. American Idol ended, and Joe Schmo was too tedious to watch. (After they decided to tone things down to cool the suspicions of one of their dupes, what was the point? The dupes believe they are on a reality show, so what's funny if the actors are acting like regular contestants on a reality show--other than that, because it's on Spike TV, the games are more sexual?) I've even stopped watching The Daily Show, and I'd been a devotée ever since Jon Stewart took over, before the 2000 election. (I just got tired of him laughing at everything that seemed to be going badly in Iraq, acting like Bush is inherently a joke, and not bothering to disguise his hostility toward guests that attempt to take the other side--especially, recently, Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard). And Dennis Miller is irking me from the other direction. (Cheering over the video of L.A. police beating a man who had obviously surrendered was just disgusting.)

So what am I watching? I'm keeping up with the new season of "Six Feet Under." I think George is sending the boxes of excrement to himself. It's clearly not Arthur, who, as Television Without Pity notes, was off buying a suit when the new package of poo arrived. I think it's George because he has had the motive and opportunity. Also, he completely underreacts when a package of crap is opened a couple feet away from him. "Six Feet Under" has its longueurs. I don't find anything interesting in the relationship between David and Keith. Both characters are incredibly bland. I can't help liking Lauren Ambrose: did you see her when she was on the Isaac Mizrahi Show and sang "God Bless the Child"? It was unbelievably good. I like the Arthur character. And I like Rachel Griffiths. The Ruth character--I don't know, how many times can an older woman break out of her repression? After the second or third time, it ought to be ridiculous. But Frances Conroy is so good, the plot line can survive a few extra recyclings.

For some reason, I've been soaking up an excess of dead body material. In addition to "Six Feet Under," I've been watching the HBO "Autopsy" series (on HBO on demand). And the other day, we needed to agree on a movie, and we decided on the old 80s movie "River's Edge," which has a lot to do with a dead body lying on a river bank. "River's Edge" was a big deal in its time: it showed how American society was on the verge of collapse because all humanity had drained out of everyone (except perhaps one drop remaining in Keanu Reeves). But here it is 16 years later, so its predictive value is gone. (Yay! We didn't go straight to hell!) We were saying things like "This movie hates poor people" and "This movie hates young people" and "When are they going to stop just driving around?" and "Where the hell are they supposed to be going now?" and "Is this thing ever going to end?" But you should see the unique performance of Crispin Glover in his prime. And it's the perfect choice if you want to wallow in 80s-style sordidness. The sets are perfect expressions of woeful misery. And there are some memorable lines, like: "I quit being a mother. It's just not worth it!"

Last night I watched the movie I couldn't get agreement on the other night, "Russian Ark." Here the question becomes not "When are they going to stop just driving around?" but "When are they going to stop just floating around?" The film is largely a technical stunt, a single shot 90 minutes long, floating through the rooms and halls of The Hermitage in St. Petersburg. We see a lot of art and costumery and try to absorb various references to Russian history. Is it arty enough? Could it be more arty? The word arty was invented for this sort of thing. My favorite movie is "My Dinner With André," which is testament to the fact that I don't need a story or any action, but I found it impossible to stave off boredom. Yes, there are some beautiful images, and the technical achievement can be marvelled at (how all the thousands of actors hit their marks and two orchestras played their pieces flawlessley--or at least appeared to), but my advice is to save this for a time when you want a purely dreamy experience. The term "moving picture" is unusually apt.