Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

AMERICAN LOVE STORY.

I could be really crazy or really insightful (or both) but it dawned on me this morning, after catching up on three more episodes of American Horror Story last night, that FX's creepy new series about ghosts is actually about something entirely different.

(Fair warning if you haven't watched the show or if you're behind me on the episodes -- I've seen six so far -- that what follows includes spoilers, so beware.)

Some background: American Horror Story is about a family -- husband, wife and daughter -- who move to Los Angeles from out east and buy a house they find out soon enough is haunted by previous owners and 100 years of unlucky flotsam and jetsam who died in the house (often at the hands of other owner-ghosts and as-yet unexplained PVC-covered sadomasochistic demonic entities). This show, improbably created by the same minds who brought us Glee, does not let up. In fact, it's so intense and chalk full of unwholesome creepiness that I'm not quite sure I'll get through this first season, let alone the recently announced second one.

But as I alluded to earlier, at its core I don't think this show is really about ghosts at all. It's about love and relationships -- specifically people floating around like ghosts in their existing relationships without a clue that they or their partners or the relationships themselves are dead, dead, dead.

Once I had that epiphany, the entire show made a lot more sense. (Spoiler extravaganza coming.) The home's owners Ben and Vivien (Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton) love each other but their marriage is clearly over. Their neighbor Constance (fanfuckingtastically portrayed by Jessica Lange) is alive (I think) but clinging to lingering, long-gone relationships with her dead children and dead housekeeper -- who, by the way, Constance shot in the eye and killed in a fit of jealous rage when she discovered the woman schtupping her husband 30 years ago. There are the ghosts of the original owners of the house who stayed together in spite of his drinking and general creepiness and her decision to open an abortion clinic in the basement. There are the ghosts of the most recent owners of the house, a gay couple who found themselves trapped in the house and in a sexless relationship. And perhaps the most glaringly obvious example of my initial premise, Ben's and Vivien's suicide-prone daughter Violet whose boyfriend is a mass murderer who can't get an erection because he doesn't realize he's been dead for 15 years.

Deep breath.

The message here -- in spite of the complex web of relationships going on in this clearly fucked up house -- is simple. Many of us are like those ghosts or living with partners who are ghosts or clinging to long-dead relationships that are themselves ghosts. Why do so many of us stay? Because those ghosts represent people we once loved, still love or fear losing forever.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON HOW THE GOP LOST ITS GRIP WITH REALITY.

To most Americans who know David Frum, he's George W. Bush's former speechwriter. To me, he'll always be the son of one of Canada's best and most beloved journalists, the late Barbara Frum.

In this week's New York magazine he lays out quite brilliantly how the Republican Party went mad. It's an amazing and insightful read, particularly from someone who until recently was so close to power on the GOP side.

Here are two of my favorite quotes from his piece:

"In funding the tea-party movement, [conservative billionaires] are actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair."

And this:

"Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn't conservatism; it's a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation."

A must-read if you're interested in US politics.

 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: A PARABLE FOR THE US AND CHINA.

"The previous winter at Blenheim [Palace] had been harsh, and the pheasant hunters had been efficient; as a result, just a single pheasant had survived in the palace gardens. This bird had gained total control of a newly seeded field. Its intake of food, normally regulated by the environment, was now entirely unregulated: it could eat all it wanted, and it did. The pheasant grew so large that when other birds challenged it for seed, it would simply frighten them away. The fat pheasant became a tourist attraction and even acquired a name: Henry. ... It didn't take long before Henry was obese. He could still eat as much as he wanted, but he could no longer fly. Then one day he was gone: a fox ate him."

-- Michael Lewis, Boomerang

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON THE US DEBT CRISIS.

"The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. [It's not] a public-sector problem; it isn't a problem with government; it's a problem with the entire society. It's what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It's a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It's not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of indidvidual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They'd been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans and the American people expressed outrage at the Wall Street people who plaid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans."

-- Michael Lewis, Boomerang

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON RECKLESS MERITOCRATS AND FECKLESS KNOW-NOTHINGS.

"In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness... In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania... In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world...

"Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe...

"What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts. But from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain, the outsiders haven’t risen to the challenge. It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent.

"In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way."

-- Ross Douthat, The New York Times

QUOTE OF THE DAY: SCHEISSE UND DAS FUERER.

From the 'there couldn't be anything to make me more repulsed by Hitler, could there?' file:

"After the war Hitler's doctors told US intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces; and there was strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him."

-- Michael Lewis, Boomerang

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS OEDIPUS: 140 WORDS ON 'THE SKIN I LIVE IN'

Pedro Almodovar films are one of my guilty pleasures. My problem is, six months after seeing any one, it has a tendency to meld in my mind with all the others. Was that scene in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown? In Volver? In All About My Mother? No clue. It might be because most of Almodovar's films share the same melodramatic, quirky, funny, moody, confusing sensibility. Or maybe it's because they all seem to star some combination of Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz and a regular cast of talented Spanish actors.

Whatever the reason, the stylishly shot, beautifully acted The Skin I Live In promises to stand out from that muddled pack in my head. It's still melodramatic, quirky, funny, moody and confusing. And it stars a gracefully aging Banderas with stunning Elena Anaya -- who happens to look like Penelope Cruz after plastic surgery, which is ironic... but I don't want to spoil the fun.

Let's just say Almodovar's latest -- a modern take on the Frankenstein story or maybe it's Oedipus -- is fantastic. Fucked up but fantastic.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON THE BANKING SHELL GAME.

On my brother's advice, I've begun reading Michael Lewis' book Boomerang about the financial mess the world is in. I suspect I'm going to have a lot of quotes of the day before I'm through. Here's my first:

"...another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks with a billion dollars in new assets."

-- Michael Lewis, Boomerang

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON WHY YOU HAVE TO BE BETTER THAN NOTHING.

"The easiest way to describe your product (or service or candidate or cause) is to outline how it's different from the competition... We do this so often and so naturally that often, we forget to talk about why we made the thing in the first place. When selling A against B, we might do a great job of explaining why A is better than B, but it's easy to forget that the prospects you are pitching have another option: doing nothing."

-- Seth Godin