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Quote of the Day

“Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards – the color of silver – and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head’s trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him.”

– Flannery O’Connor
“The Artificial Nigger”

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2014 TV at the Half

Wow… what a terrible year it’s been for TV so far. I’ve looked at Wikipedia and several TV websites just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.. and it would appear that I haven’t: there just hasn’t been a lot of quality new stuff on TV so far.

Here’s my mid-year list of the best new scripted shows on TV. After that, there’s a brief essay about new shows that tried and failed and some awards. So let’s do this thing:

The Best New Shows of 2014

#12 Turn (AMC) – Spies in Revolutionary War America? HELL YES! What’s not to love about a show like that? It’s like AMC made a show just for me. Except… “interestingly-interpreted” history aside, this show is slow, like many AMC shows are, and the premise of the show – spying – seems to be forgotten from time to time in favor of character development. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: character development is a crucial part of any good show. But, at times Turn seemed too much like AMC’s other spy show, Rubicon: you wonder what happened to the premise. However, I put this on the “best-of” list because of an interview I read with the show’s creators: it seems like they have heard our concerns, and season 2 should be a much improved show.

AMC's "Turn"

#11 True Detective (HBO) – Beautifully shot. Expertly acted. Carefully written. And then it all falls apart at the end. What is it with modern anthology series? ‘Cos this show TOTALLY reminds me of American Horror Story, and how AHS always starts off pretty well, but limps towards a lame finale every single time. True Detective could have been the hands-down favorite for best new show of the year… possibly even best new show of the decade. But the conventional, formulaic ending left me cold. It’s like the first 7 episodes were almost unbelievably good, but the last one… was like something out of a direct-to-DVD movie, Or like the writers quit with 10 pages left to write in the script. Or something.

HBO's "True Detective"

#10 Silicon Valley (HBO) – This new series from Mike Judge – creator of Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and Office Space – is pretty damn amusing. It’s almost like The Big Bang Theory for computer nerds like myself. While a knowledge of the IT industry and programming is helpful in understanding the laffs, it’s not required. Sadly, this is because the show, awesome though it is, seems to rely on standard stereotypes, especially the “IT nerd afraid of his own shadow”. One nerd is terrified of his possible success, Another is afraid of girls. Another – the more down to earth one – is apparently afraid of being sober. Still, this show delivers the funny more than any sitcom I’ve seen in a while. It’s definitely worth a watch!

HBO's "Silicon Valley"

#9 Mr. Sloane (Sky Atlantic) – I’ll admit it: I am a sucker for anything with Nick Frost of Spaced, Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. In this series, Frost plays accountant Jeremy Sloane (“with an ‘e’, like Sloane Square”). Jeremy is having a terrible 1969: his wife has left him, he was fired from his accounting job, and his nosy elderly neighbor lets herself in whenever she wants, which always seems to be the wrong time. Jeremy has just about had it with life all around. But then he meets Robin (Ophelia Lovibond), a free-spirited American hippie who changes his life… but just as things start to take off with Robin, Sloane’s estranged wife Janet (Olivia Colman) returns, throwing everything up in the air. Will Jeremy move on with his new American love? Will he go back to his wife? And will he finally ditch his terrible high school friends? This show didn’t get a lot of love from British TV sites, but I really liked it. It was heartfelt and bittersweet, while being funny at the same time. Sure, Sloane’s a loser… but he’s a loser anyone can identify with.

Sky Atlantic's "Mr Sloane"

#8 Happy Valley (BBC) – Sarah Lancashire stars as Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant in an idyllic town in Yorkshire. But life isn’t as pretty as the setting would seem. Drugs are flooding the town, and Cawood has her own personal tragedy: the suicide of her daughter after being “raped” by a man named Tommy Lee Royce (played by James Norton; while Cawood’s daughter and Royce did have sex, it’s not entirely clear whether he actually raped her or not). Cawood finds that Royce has been released from prison, and she makes it her duty to track his every move. Little does she know that Royce is a pawn in a much bigger game. It takes the police a while to figure it all out, but in the end, many smaller crimes are part of a much larger conspiracy. Will they be able to solve the case in time? This series got rave reviews from most critics, but for one thing: it has a couple of pretty brutal scenes of violence against women. Here’s my take: while it’s true that British TV seems to have a newfound fetish for hurting women… so what? Was it OK for cop shows to show men suffering for decades, but somehow it’s a problem NOW because it’s women? Can we have female police officers in real life, but not show actual violence they might encounter on our TVs? Also, and this is just me nitpicking, but why did they use “cannabis” as the “evil drug” in this series? They could have used crack or meth to be the “evil drug turning our fair citizens into zombies”, but no… they blamed skunk instead? Ooookkkkaaayyy.

BBC's "Happy Valley"

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The Atlanta Pen

I used to drive past the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta – known as “USP, Atlanta”, ‘the Federal Pen” or just “the Pen” – on a fairly regular basis. But I never gave it much thought. Oh sure… I’d sometimes wonder what the prisoners were doing at that exact moment and sometimes I’d think about how nasty the 1987 riots were.

USP, Atlanta
(photo via Atlanta Time Machine)

I was surfing around a few nights ago and found some interesting stuff about USP, Atlanta.

The prison was authorized by the “Three Prisons Act” of 1891, which also created prisons in McNeil Island, Washington and a rather famous one in Leavenworth, Kansas. Construction was approved by President William McKinley in 1899, and the facility was completed in 1902. At the time, it was the largest federal prison in the United States, with a capacity for 3,000 prisoners.

And what prisoners they were!

*     *     *

Ignazio Lupo was an organized crime figure who ran Manhattan’s Little Italy in the early 1900s. In 1903, Lupo married Giuseppe Morello’s half-sister (Morello ran similar gangs in East Harlem and the South Bronx). The gangs merged to form the “Morello family”, which became the basis of the Genovese family, considered by many to be the “gold standard of American crime families”. Although suspected of killing no less than 60 people, Lupo was actually convicted of running a counterfeiting ring, and spent a decade in USP, Atlanta from 1910 to 1920. Once freed, he petitioned the US government to travel to Italy, something prohibited by the terms of his parole. President Warren G. Harding approved Lupo’s request, with one amazing clause: Harding, and Harding alone, would judge whether Lupo was “law-abiding” and “not connected with any unlawful undertaking during the period of the sentence”.

Ignazio Lupo
Ignazio Lupo. Photo from lacndb.com

By the 1930s, the National Crime Syndicate (a loose coalition of organized crime families created by Johnny “The Fox” Torrio) decided that Lupo was too wild and attracting too much law-enforcement attention. So Lupo was stripped of all of his criminal enterprises. Lupo then started a protection racket amongst Italian bakers in NYC, and by 1936 he’d grown so violent and over the top that the governor of New York asked FDR to put Lupo back in prison for the remainder of his original term. So Lupo served an additional 10 years in Atlanta, from 1936 to 1946. He died, almost forgotten, in Brooklyn in 1947.

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USP, Atlanta’s most famous resident was Al Capone.

As a young man, Johnny Torrio – the same Johnny Torrio who later created the National Crime Syndicate – worked legitimate jobs as a bouncer and porter in Manhattan. He joined a street gang, became their leader, and managed their money so well that he was soon able to buy them a pool hall as a hang out. It didn’t take long for the hall to become a hotbed of gambling and loan sharking, all of which Torrio managed well. This attracted the attention of Paolo Vaccarelli (a.k.a. Paul Kelly), founder of the Five Points Gang. Kelly invited Torrio to join. Torrio quickly drew the attention (and admiration) of several younger members, including Capone. In time, Torrio would hire Capone to tend bar at The Harvard Inn, a Coney Island dive owned by Francesco Ioele (a.k.a. Frankie Yale).

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Advice for Bloggers

For some reason, I enjoy reading food blogs. It’s kind of inexplicable, because food blogs are the most likely to drive me insane. If you’re thinking about starting a blog – especially a food blog – please read this before you start:

HIRE A PROOFREADER – If you want to get payed for riting on you’re blog, yoo shuld hire to proofreeder, or at least have sumone reed you’re stuff before yoo post it up their. I mean, come on, folks… I’m the King of the Rambling Sentence, but I *do* have a firm grasp of grammar basics like “there\their\they’re” and “your\you’re”. It’s amazing to me that some people want to write, but can’t even get past minor stuff like this. There’s a snack blog out there where the author constantly uses the word “yea” (as in, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”) instead of “yeah” (as in, “yeah, these are good.”). I want to stab that guy in the eyeballs… repeatedly. To cope, I have to read all his posts in a mock English bishop voice: “Yea, though Frito Lay hath given unto man these Cheesy Garlic Bread chips, I enjoy them not, for thy flavors offend every living thing that creepeth.”

GET TO THE POINT – I’ll admit that I like writing stories where the first couple of paragraphs seem to have nothing to do with the title. I haven’t actually checked, but I’m certain that every History Blog article starts that way. But the other day I was at a site that reviews Trader Joe’s products. The average review seemed to be around 1,000 words, and 100 to 500 of those words often had nothing to do with the product. If the review was about a frozen food item, then half the review might be about being stuck in traffic, and how traffic has gotten much worse since Barry Schoch took over as state DOT secretary, and why can’t our state have FastPass lanes on toll roads like other states, how SiriusXM has gone to hell since the merger, and why Subaru can’t build a reliable transmission, and.. oh yeah, getting home late was why they were reviewing the frozen item… which was “just OK”, by the way.

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