Vancouver's Concession to Brooklyn's Gentrification

"Otho's head is quite tiny, and it's owner's legs loutishly unclean," Catullus, pig of pidgin Latin

Stephen J Cannell reigned supreme over the television airways longer than JJ Abrams due to the fact that the studio system, during Cannell's prime, was in its turn of the century generic mode, not yet imploded in the Reagan era by digital technology turning us all into libertarian rebels; thus Wiseguy was Francis Ford Coppolla and Martin Scorsese on the cheap. By the time Abrams made good on the mystery island island motif to make Lost a sensation, the end of Clintonion global hegemony was already at hand. Abrams may have hit a vein of gold with his spectacular drama, but the expectations created by his plane crash could not possibly be fulfilled, certainly not by ABC, and Abrams managed to dissolve himself, through the radical assertion that none of us are accountable to either circumstance or environment. Cannell's disillusionment with the American empire, however, cannot be dismissed, however made for television his underlying cynicism was, it manifested itself as the gateway to the post-9/11 world we currently inhabit. Neither is Ken Wahl as gut wrenching as Donnie Brasco,. Pretty boy in North Hollywood may leave lonely women slavering for a high quality, more masculine definition of John Travolta, but Terranova's collusion, ethical erosion, is a sequential novella, to Depp's comparative existential insight, and Jim Bynes' "Lifeguard" was already a cliche by the time the character aired and formed, the primitive cyborg, empowered by early metadata and telecommunication advances, even if the perfect starlet fantasy hearkens back to every Southern European girl's brass ring. Ken Wahl was the epitome of working class transcendence for many, especially in the world of Kevin Spacey's Mel Profitt. Cannell might have had the courage to let Spacey's genius go where Spacey's genius took us with the later Usual Suspects, instead of Tucci as Pizzolo, but this might have been too radical for viewers: the self-hating, magnetic, corrupting influence of real power, of which money is merely an instrument, so Profitt was given a fatal flaw, not entirely without insidious capacity, however, in after-effect. It is the men like Spacey's villains who actually run the world, and we know it, even without a Carter administration white paper on sibling jackasses who create international scandals. Chelsea is a more adept Machiavelli, but look at the kind of parents she had to fuck her up.