Wednesdays are the worst, and yesterday was no exception. The simple fact is that 8 hours of class in a day is no fun, especially when one class is really 5 hours long, but split by a 3-hour “break” during which one has to frantically compose a prospectus, finish off a dossier write-up, do research on one’s papers, polish off a few more work-study hours, or meet with professors.
Still, yesterday was interesting because several people from the UCLA Archive came to listen to us present our film dossiers in Restoration class. They had a lot of great feedback, and I wish we had more sessions like that, from people who actually, like, do the work we spend so much time discussing. We’ve been getting more visits from such people, which is nice, but really, they should’ve been doing so all year long.
Also, we watched TV in TV class (surprise) – yesterday’s shows were “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Maude,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and “The Richard Pryor Show,” each of which was awesome in its own special way (the third one especially). All are 70s shows: Norman Lear, “relevance,” and “quality” with the MTM kitten. It’s so great to finally watch these shows instead of just reading about them (though we have plenty of that, too – yesterday the prof told us we “only” have to do two of the 3 readings she originally assigned for next week, but what do you know, the second of the two is almost half of a book).
Then today I watched some more TV for my paper – “Cooking with Corris,” an old local TV cooking show that was fracking boring, and then “Saucepans for the Single Girl,” which is pretty fun. It’s about a girl who pretends she doesn’t know how to cook but has to learn, one recipe at a time (out of her mother’s index card catalog), so that she can snag a man. I’d watched the two episodes the archive owns before, but wanted to re-watch because I hadn’t known who Tommy Smothers was the first time around. This time, it was a bit funnier because I knew the context. He “teaches” her how to make a PB&J sandwich. The second episode had a female guest star who was supposed to teach the single girl how to make seafood curry, but almost from the beginning it becomes pretty clear that the guest star has barely ever even seen a kitchen before, and knows even less about how to make a curry.
Finally, I watched “Color Adjustment” by Marlon Riggs, which was a small experience in itself. Like, watching it made me come a bit closer to understanding what it must’ve been like for African American people to watch television the way they did, yet at the same time I felt almost complicit, or guilty in some way. And I’m not even white! =P
I think tomorrow I will go back to the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills to watch some more Julia Child shows. Last time I went I found a seminar on the Food Network. Now I know the truth about Alton Brown.
