Rich Mintz  

My latest TV find is The Supersizers Go… on the Cooking Channel, a three-year-old series in which a British pair (food critic and comedienne) spend a week at a time living the lives of different periods and gorging themselves on the contemporary dishes. It’s a fairly light conceit, and I don’t quite understand what “supersizing” has to do with it (unless you postulate, counterfactually, that in every period other than ours, people ate more than we do). But it’s entertaining, and mildly informative.

This week Giles and Sue went Victorian, and it does seem that people in Victorian days ate a lot more heavily than we do — their experience reminded me of when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, and had to adjust to a lot more fried food and meat and sweet tea than I was used to. My favorite moment was when they were served (by their cook, as a side dish, at an ordinary dinner on an ordinary evening) a plate of calf’s-ear fritters, which looked as though they’d be delicious if they had zucchini inside, but alas they didn’t. The rest of the boiled calf’s head was sitting nearby on a plate, dressed with about a pound of parsley; you can see it here.

It’s not Downton Abbey, but given the choice between this and watching Bobby Flay yelling, or Nadia G wielding her assets, I’d pick this. More on this episode here.

Severe Australian hair salon interventionist Tabatha Coffey is back for another season on Bravo, and this year Tabatha Takes Over isn’t just turning around hair salons, she’s taking on a range of retail businesses. And in episode two, she took on the turnaround of a business that meant a lot to me twenty years ago: Club Ripples, the gay club on the shore in Long Beach, California.

In 1993, I probably spent eight or ten Sunday afternoons at Ripples, driving down from LA with my boyfriend and meeting up with my Orange County friends. It was a convenient halfway point between us — in those days, I was living in West Hollywood and working in Costa Mesa, driving 50 miles each way in the carpool lane, passing Long Beach about midway — and it was nice to get out of the gay ghetto I lived in and experience another gay-friendly but not-quite-ghettoized community. And there were new people to look at and talk to, and Long Beach (population “only” 400,000) had a friendlier vibe than LA, and it was sunny and quiet and you could hear the seagulls. For a short time, we even considered buying a house in Belmont Shore, a gay-friendly neighborhood even then and much more affordable than LA, and moving.

Back then, Ripples on a Sunday was packed — it was a local hangout for gay people from Long Beach, a fun day trip from LA, and a magnet for gay people from Orange County. I was never really a bar person, and whenever I went to a gay club I felt like everyone else was prettier and more vivacious than me, not to mention in on something that nobody had bothered to let me in on. But Ripples felt incrementally warmer and more welcoming. People talked to you, and being by the beach made people a little less uptight. From LA it was a schlep, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Now it’s 20 years later, and Ripples has been suffering. It’s obvious from Tabatha’s show that some of its wounds were self-inflicted, and she did what she could to help with that (and through the happily-ever-after lens of a reality show, she appears to have succeeded). But it’s also true that the club scene has changed. One of the Ripples owners said this to Tabatha and she waved it away, but I think it’s true.

Even in 1993, which isn’t that long ago, there were many fewer ways to meet people than there are today. The modern coffeehouse scene was very new (no Starbucks, or almost none). There was no Internet as we know it now; nobody had a cellphone, let alone a smartphone; AOL charged by the minute. If you wanted to have a social experience with other gay people, you pretty much had to go to a bar and stand around until you saw someone you wanted to talk to. And so that’s what we did, even those of us who didn’t really like to drink and didn’t feel comfortable in those surroundings.

“Kids today” still go out and stand around, of course they do. The difference is that they don’t have to in order to be sociable; they have other choices. And so businesses have to be competitive, which is where I think Tabatha is right on. I hope her changes to Ripples stick, because the place meant a lot to me once — and it was open and serving gay people with a smile when I was six years old, which is a long history indeed.

I already apologized more than once to David Cross, but after watching 3 episodes in a row of “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret” on IFC (the last 3, not the first 3 — not that they came to any sort of conclusion), I feel I owe him another one. The guy’s a genius, at least at playing a particular type of well-meaning, socially awkward, self-unaware sad sack. I was going to say “at playing himself,” but I’ve seen Cross live and out of character (on video) and he definitely isn’t like that in person.

The rest of the cast are terrific, too (Will Arnett plays a character that’s kind of like Gob from “Arrested Development” on cocaine), but this isn’t really an ensemble show; it’s a vehicle for Cross, whose character is set off against the other, thinner characters.

I’m reading this profile of Carrie Brownstein, one of the two people (with Fred Armisen) behind “Portlandia,” and I find this passage about Brownstein’s earlier life is needling me:

Thinking that an office job might be a good thing to try, she did a six-month stint at Weiden+Kennedy — the modish Portland ad agency responsible for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. (The agency’s playcentric workplace has been spoofed on “Portlandia.”) But working at an ad agency proved alienating, she said, because of the way “the work mimics art.” She added, “Music, to me, is an earnest populist endeavor and this was a cynical populist one.”

I respect Brownstein, love her work, and know what she’s getting at, of course — anyone who’s ever been asked by a client, “Can’t you just make us one of them ‘viral videos’ and be done with it?” knows the difference between genuine art (or even honest craftsmanship) and a pig with pretty lipstick on it. But I’ve spent much of the past twenty years finding a way to be professionally successful in an agency career, while still feeling that my genuine creativity is one of the things the market is rewarding. And many of the people I work with daily, at Blue State Digital and elsewhere would say the same. And that list of people includes some of those I most admire for their genuine creative energy.

On this blog you’ve seen me struggle with formal and informal creative exercises (like The Artist’s Way program). Arguably one point of this blog is to give me a creative outlet that’s “untainted” by the market, although much of what I write about is connected to my professional life; it’s hard to separate the strands. But the richest creative encounters I’ve had in my adult life have come through my work. I’ve met people who are generative, uncompromising, and blessed with the power of vision, and not just a handful, but many of them. I’ve taken lessons from each of those traits, from each of those people, and those lessons have helped me not just in my work, but in my life.

The creativity I’ve experienced in agency people isn’t second-class. It’s real. There are people in the advertising business who are “real” creatives and yet who thrive on the pragmatism of the work, the fact that it can’t all be vision but must be vision with purpose. Just as the constraints of the sonnet form liberated Shakespeare to write some of the finest poetry in English, and the laws of physics liberated Thomas Edison to envision new devices that actually worked, in the very same way the need to sell more sneakers or generate more museum memberships or influence more voters liberates these people to build castles in the air that people want to own and live in.

It’s an eternal tension in art and indeed in craft, that between faithfulness to vision and practicality of product. But it is a tension, and even in art, being able to produce something that people want to experience matters. Otherwise, what’s the point? Some artists are happy creating for themselves; others are more motivated by the sense of fulfillment they feel when the audience loves their work, embraces it, does with it what they envisioned would be done. The first type of creativity isn’t more genuine than the second. We all have all these impulses woven together into our creative selves.

I don’t have much hope for Marcel Vigneron’s new cooking reality show, but it’s worth a try, so I just set my DVR. Bonus: I set it using the Time Warner web-based DVR management app, which is more usable than I expected. More to come.

New IFC series starring David Cross and Will Arnett coming this month? Why wasn’t I notified?

I have the Rockford Files (as often happens) on in the background tonight, and at the beginning of this episode, Angel (Jim’s troublesome ex-cellmate, played by perennial character actor Stuart Margolin) is walking into the fleabag SRO where he lives, and over the mailboxes is a sign with the quote “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.” I had to look it up; it’s from Daniel Webster, the last person I expected to see associated with a cheesy ’70s TV series. But the quote is actually not a terrible thing to see up on the wall of an apartment building full of hopeless people trying to turn their lives around in a bad neighborhood, at least viewed through a generous paternalistic lens. And certainly in context it’s humanizing. Some propmaster or Minister of Scenery or whatever, back in 1977, decided to put that up (or leave it up); nice touch.

I have to confess that in the past I’ve only been able to take the comedian/actor/artiste David Cross in small doses, and have once or twice given voice to the thought. (The Boon Companion can confirm.) I think it may have been after seeing him on Bill Maher’s show, which tends to encourage the kind of pontificating I find hard to take, so I’m not sure Cross is entirely to blame.

But after watching most of Season 2 and part of Season 3 of “Arrested Development” in less than a week, I have to apologize — David Cross’s portrayal of Tobias Fünke is one of the consistently funniest, most creative, most boundary-pushing comedic characterizations I can remember seeing anywhere. And it just goes on and on, episode after episode, and somehow he plays these unlikely situations, delivers these absolutely impossible lines, without busting up laughing.

Here’s a little snippet of Cross on politics:

And here’s an itty bitty snippet of insight into Tobias Fünke:

The NYT informs us that prolific TV writer Jackson Gillis died this month. No, I didn’t know him either, but IMDB informs us that he wrote 24 episodes of “Columbo” (including several memorable classic episodes from the first two seasons), 99 (!) episodes of “Perry Mason,” and scattered episodes of over two dozen more formula TV dramas from the 1960s and 70s.

One of Gillis’s “Columbo” episodes was “Short Fuse,” shot in Palm Springs — including a memorable hand-to-hand fight on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (pictured here).

Actual real-life Hoarders contrast photo, taken 4 minutes ago: