hello typepad: On Voice and Authenticity

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Friday Night Lights Buzz Bissinger on Twitter: "The liberation of Twitter is not to dwell it — make it real and visceral and immediate." On his avatar disappearing: "Tried some new fucking program that sucks the dongasaurus." On avatars: "Why is called an Avatar when all it is a weeny little picture. Can't we just call it a picture. Aren't avatars liquid blue things?" Television: "It is really fucking hard to come up with a good story line every week." Girl with the Dragon Tatto: "Now there is one angry chick." Steroids: "Everybody in the entire fucking world cheats. Except me and Brett Favre."

His voice and pace overwhelms — is this the world's first exposure to Bissinger's native voice, bombast and cadence sans editing? He misbehaves in interviews, most famously in his blistering diatribe against Will Leitch and Deadspin on Bob Costas Now, and recently in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Was the first draft of Friday Night Lights 1500 pages long and laced with F-bombs?

Bissinger's first person opus on Twitter is a level-headed intellectual analysis of the medium. On Twitter itself, he offers "A plea to all Twitterites": "don’t confuse my rants, sometimes over the top, with my continued effort to write with meticulousness, honesty."

When you have a newborn, the whole internet is tl;dr.^** So I've been blogging a lot of stuff I haven't had time to read. Still haven't read that steroids piece! But while Lev slept in the sling this morning, I spent some time on Hulu^* & YouTube.

Hulu watchers of Friday Night Lights have hopefully had time to watch the season ending episode of season 4. I've discussed the Friday Night Lights Podcast before, but it's worth listening to after you watch the final episode (major spoiler in that link).

Blake, Russ, and Lyle break down the football and melodrama in FNL with the same tone & levity they discuss the Superbowl; "Was Tinker lined up as a tight end on that play?" "Was that the first time Coach Taylor ever enjoyed talk radio?" "What does Slammin' Sammy Mead (the talk show host) look like?" "What kind of school year do they have in Dillon?"

But the coup de grâce is the interview with Madison Burge, who plays Becky on the show. An Austin native, Madison describes her level of familiarity with FNL as "Why's that guy in a wheel chair again?" She became a convert for good during her audition with Kyle Chandler which she summed up as "I'm nervous, you're gorgeous."

Burge says exactly what she thinks (or is very deeply embedded in character), is as charming in the interviews as she is on the show, and isn't afraid to wonder out loud what's going to happen next, especially to some of the significant characters whose luck took a turn for the worse.

Are you not caught up with Friday Night Lights, or generally bored with this post? Here's a conversation between Ricky Gervais and Larry David:

Ricky says: "I'm thin in America, but I still wear Black" and they excerpt the restaurant swearing scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I consider the funniest three minutes in televsion history. They discuss profanity, brutal honesty, not liking to work, and of course they laugh a lot. Also recommended!

^* Hulu Plus! For $10 a month you get twice as many ads and access to many more back episodes of some shows. Being able to watch on the iPad is nice, but I'm not entirely sold on the value yet.

^** What else? This blog post took me around 15 hours to write.