>But there's a difference when that manipulation has a dramatic point, say in Hitchcock's thrillers, and when it's audience abuse.

The latter seems to happen with egotistical creators. The first time I really noticed it was with Twin Peaks, when David Lynch decided ... that we were all morons who deserved to be screwed over.<

TP's second season was bad, but the yet-to-be-topped award for audience abuse has to go to THE X-FILES. The last four-five seasons were as big as mess of unresolved (or badly-resolved) questions; for-the-hell-of-it plotting; awful characters and characterizations; and obvious boredom/contempt for the audience and fans as it gets. The only good thing I can say about TXF's later years is that is it gave me a thus-far infallible sense of knowing from jump when a long-arc show is going to be worth the time ("24," at least until this season; NIP/TUCK, THE WIRE), or a we-don't-know-where-this-is-going waste of time (CARNIVALE, DRIVE, INVASION)

>It was comforting that after his unfunny parody of early TV, On the Air, and the Twin Peaks movie that was a final upraised middle finger to the show's fans, Lynch has dropped below the radar horizon. Nobody seems to care very much what he's done since; check his IMDB filmography.<

Er, his MULHOLLAND DRIVE made any number of "year's best" lists and put Naomi Watts on the map. Lynch is one of those guys who would do better doing Brit. TV, where you can have series designed to run a couple of seasons and whatnot.

>My own mother found my buff body distasteful, though it would have taken Gitmo to make her admit it (my family deputized a representative to ask me if I was gay)<

For the love of God, Debs--could you _please_ either work out your self-hatred in therapy, or go home and bury the hatchet with your family? You are fooling no one with your concern-trolling about black folks and pretending to care--you hate being black and it shows in every single "helpful" piece you write. Why not duke this out with your family instead of trying to make the rest of us feel like shit? You are as bad as SALON's resident misogynists who also should take their issues up with their moms instead of trying to torture the rest of us.

...about black women or their health. This is yet another chance for her to scapegoat them for her self-hatred and family-rejection issues. I'd give a million if someone would get her family's side of the story about what Dickerson is really like. Bet it wouldn't be pretty...

>Debra (who always writes bullshit like this) isn't helping black folks. And if she truly wanted to help us, why does she chose to publish in an online magazine whose readership is probably majority white?<

It's a funny thing--there are a set of AAmerican black women journalists whose stuff regularly appears in ESSENCE, VIBE, or (occasionally) NEWSWEEK or TIME. Does Dickerson write for anywhere else but SALON? If not, why not? Is her stuff so self-hating that most black or mainstream publications pass on it?

>People aren't staying away from the theater because it isn't ambitious enough. They're staying away because it's relentlessly "ambitious," because it keeps insisting on its own unique and righteous importance,<

I love theater, and every Broadway season brings at least two or three shows I'd like to see. (And I'm the sort of "nerd" who would see the occaisional truly terrible show just as a learning experience. :)) But at $100 a ticket, I'm lucky if I can swing one. And I'd be truly out of luck if I didn't live near NYC and had to bear the major expenses of travel/hotel. Broadway is out of reach for the very people who might make it a habit, and it's a mystery to me why TPTB don't take that fact in account.

You're right--it's been a while since cable ran any Broadway shows. (The last one I can recall was DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE with David Hasselhoff, and that was a good three-or-more years ago.) Would it hurt the fairly deep-pocketed HBO to allot some of its hours to theater instead of running MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: III for the billioneth time?

The JULIUS CAESAR with Denzel Washington a few seasons back was critically disliked but was one of that season's few hits. I have always thought the reason why was because African-Americans turned out in larger-than-usual numbers to see it. The performance I attended had at least three batches of high-school students seeing it as an end-of-the-year school trip--and several out-of-state church/social groups who had arranged bus trips into NYC. I don't know whether group sales in general are a loss-leader for theaters, but there's got to be a way to open up Broadway to everyone, not just rich folks and rich tri-state-area residents.

Thanks! How are the seats--good ones, or...?