As IF Times

link Hawaii Five-O remake returns to TV with big budget pilot | Mail Online.

It was exciting at first, the idea of reviving a classic TV show from the 60’s.  Hawaii Five O was the longest running detective series of all time and most of us grew up with images of the island paradise based on scenes from this show.  The classic theme song and vibrant images at the opening credits drew audiences into what was usually a riveting story.  In addition, Jack Lord played Steve McGarrett with a detached coolness that was believable.  As well, one of the actors was a guy whose real name was Zulu who played Kono. What are the odds and how cool is that?

Of course in those days, fighting crime was a bit different.  As depicted by the series, the police looked like police officers, appearing  fairly nondescript.  Criminals looked pretty much like they do today, scraggly, unwashed and possessed of bad manners.  In modern times, the police have newer standards to live up to.

Apparently, they must be young, fit and obliged to display their chiseled bodies during the course of investigations.  Their stylishness is more Lululemon than U.S. Marines. I don’t recall ever seeing Steve McGarrett of old in anything less than an unbuttoned shirt collar.  In the old days, it was a possibility that there would be some kind of physical altercation with the criminals, but mainly they were short lived tussles with grappling and the odd punch thrown.  Nowadays, the cops have to be kung fu action stars along with the criminals, though it’s not clear why that would be necessary in a world of  guns and tasers.  Speaking of guns, in the old days, cops and crooks usually made do with simple .38 caliber revolvers.  Now of course, everyone carries automatic Sigs or Glocks with endless supplies of ammunition clips.  For the most part, the bad guys are armed with fully automatic machine guns as well, but this doesn’t make them more effective.  Even when a hail of bullets is fired at the cops, only superficial arm grazings occur. 

In the old days, women were never to be seen on the front lines during the investigation, but today, not only are they fighting alongside the men, they are also young and physical specimens as well.  Despite weighing only as much as Joy Behar’s right leg, they are also somehow able to dispatch ruthless thugs who outweigh them by at least double with amazing skill.  In real life, most police women look like Ernest Borgnine.  I guess it all makes for splashy TV but unless the plots are compelling enough from week to week, it’ll be hard for this remake to come close to the longevity of the original.  You can only watch variations of a video game so many times.

link Lady Gaga and the death of sex | The Sunday Times.

Most people would profess not to care for the shtick and move on.  Not Camille Paglia, a person you do not want writing critiques of you.  Ms. Paglia, for those not familiar with her writings,  is a teacher, author and social critic who is quite influential among intellectuals and liberals.  However, despite writing articles that appear in Salon Magazine, one could hardly describe her as a liberal.   She can write opinions that are divergent from the typical liberal mindset and has been known to voice opinions quite in contrast to them.  Though many conservatives may not agree with many of her views, they are insightful, original and thought provoking.  It would be unfair to categorize her as a liberal, she is independent and iconoclastic in her views. 

So when she decides to take the scalpel to the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon, it’s not as a music critic but as a culture critic.  At last someone more qualified than yours truly, has dared to come out and declare what I’m sure has been on the minds of many.  Lady Gaga?  We don’t get it. Banal music aside, the most interesting thing she had to say was not about Lady Gaga per se, it was this comment:

“…despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…”

I have a simpler, less intellectually embossed version of this.  It’s been done.  The originality and honesty of musical artists appears now to have been replaced by images and personas that are packaged and marketed according to successful formulas created on an excel spreadsheet.  Fame and exposure has taken precedence over talent as a measure of success in western society. When William Hung famously mangled a Ricky Martin song on American Idol years ago, he achieved not boos and the hook, but instant fame, fortune and a record deal!  When you consider almost any ‘rock’ or pop band over the past 20 years, they could be interchangeable versions of each other.  The long hair, dirty jeans and  unkempt look is essentially a uniform for musicians.  It’s as if band publicists all shopped at one rock star store like some LL Bean outlet to outfit their people.  “Hey Irv, if you’re going to the Rock Store, could you pick up a few things for me from the new Keith  Richard collection?”.

It’s almost impossible to think of any successful young female artist today that isn’t obliged to flout her sexuality and comeliness in the most overt ways in order to achieve popular success.  If it’s not outrageous, it doesn’t capture media attention, if it doesn’t capture media attention, it’s not going to sell.  The phenomenon of Lady Gaga is reminiscent of cars you’d see in Tijuana or Manila, garishly overdecorated vehicles which only happen to be cars.  A lot of today’s acts are far from being edgy and original, in fact they are stereotypical and cliche.  Any argument as to good or bad is doomed to endless inconclusive debate, but the biggest danger to ‘outrageous’ acts is not that they are bad, it’s that they are boring.

And don’t even start me on that hugely oxymoronic genre of rap music.  Rap music has as much to do with Black sensibilities as Chop Suey does to Chinese food.  We’ll visit this later.