Monday, August 2, 2010

TV commentary: Entourage on its last legs


Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard

I noticed a little attention paid to a previous posting on my miracle at housing court. I suspect it was the word entourage that, at least in part, pulled in a few more readers.

My
entourage consisted of two subtle-thinking and gorgeous attorneys (see My 3,000 Loving Arms: Spinoza in Housing Court). The other entourage, these days, is on HBO. I've checked out several years of the series from the library. At first I enjoyed watching, despite its being based on the Hollywood entourage of former rocker Mark Walberg, a.k.a. Markie Mark, who was publicly and privately racist. He claims to have recanted.

Rex Lee as Lloyd the assistant and Jeremy Piven as Ari the agent boss are so much fun to watch with their outsized and dead on characterizations. The boys themselves, the four guys who came up in Queens and now live the Hollywood life are cute.

However the day-to-days of this entourage include nothing to indicate any contact with brain stimulation. As hall-monitory as this may sound, not one of the entourage ever does anything to choose to use the mind, and it seems a fair representation of the rocker, rapper, movie star life.

Hey. I smoked marijuana through the seventies. I also read. This group, especially in the most recent season, simply smokes dope, prowls somewhat inefficiently for babes and watches t.v. That's it. They are so boring to watch.

Soooooooo boring.

Am I judgmental? I'm okay with that. TV is often mindless and that's good. Married with Children (for example) was a silly series but I loved it and never felt the characters' boredom. They were too busy being frustrated, opinionated and scheming.

I have lifetimes of bad karma to work off. Even this one life of mine has revealed me as rich with bad attitude. The point is to keep trying for something better. Hall monitory plus sinful Christian-y? Could be.


Still, HBO's Entourage has devolved into a spineless lowest common, and it didn't start out with high marks in attention to women, something I avoided mentioning up front (although when one of the few women in the series is a smart professional, like Debbie Mazur as publicist, she's allowed to be that--allowed by audience and entourage).

In the name of being entertained, I am willing to overlook many a questionable attitude. Ya gotta. Comedy's rarely about the pure (well, except Keaton and Gleason fighting with themselves). Huh. Maybe it's always about the pure in an impure world. I gotta think about that. I do know this: The impurities of boredom are too much for me.

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