Louie (Louis C.K.'s show on FX)

The little daughter is a pretty good violinist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tci_dWusz-o

that's cool but I still am not really sure how it is anybody's idea of good parenting to mold your 6-year-old into a tiny violinist

or tiny gymnast or equestrian or whatever

or actress for that matter I guess

I'm sure they expect her to get taller, don't worry.

lol

its impossible to mold a 1 year old let alone a 6 year old. they have brains and personalities of their own that are stronger than any adult ime.

increasingly this year, Louie feels like a conversation with audiences about our assumptions and their limitations that’s among the most politically and emotionally sophisticated things I’ve ever seen. There are no victims here for our benefits, and no easy outs for us that will let us leave with our assumptions intact. Louis C.K.’s humor is operating at a level where he can redeem Dane Cook, make us appreciate abstinence experts, and where he can make us laugh at the same things as people we’re fighting a war against. Someone in Hollywood should give him a movie deal. And the State Department might want to sign him up as a cultural diplomat. What’s happening in this show isn’t just important because it’s artistically astonishing. It’s meaningful, to me at least, beyond metaphor and allusion.

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2011/08/26/304935/louie-open-thread-duck-and-emotionally-uncovered/

psyched to read that hoos
just for further background on last night's ep, he linked to his diary from doing the uso tour for reals on his twitter, & it's here, complete w/a bunch a pics he took w/a leica & some interesting thoughts on being in those places

(i only read the first line but think that the author should be more, so go watch it! rather than read me first; the show deserves it)

also ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SPOILER~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
lol at the dirty look he got from the parent coming out of his kid's class. like the first real inter-episode segue he's pulled, almost.

i read one account he gave of performing for troops that was genuinely inspiring, he said all the power went out and he was like that's fine, i'll get down off the stage and everybody just gather around me, i can do this without a microphone, and he did it, and he said it was one of the best experiences he's ever had as a comic, he had them howling (he also said it ended up being the filthiest show he's ever done)

the stuff on the blog about the shows is great; that he was warned to keep it clean but was getting such a response from just kinda freewheeling on stage that he kept trucking & it ended up being gross. there's a funny anecdote about someone telling him that he could get away with doing those shows provided he apologised before doing the next.

i read the thing hoos posted & mainly just dug that last graf excerpted above, but yeah this does feel really intelligent & interesting still; a lot of this ep was straightforward enough to be predictable or mundane in other contexts but the few angles it was coming from coalesce to make it more than the sum of its parts - as a restrained, open travelogue; as comedy; as eye into that world etc. great looking & sounding ep, too.

last week being kind of a throwaway makes sense now, sandwiched between two total emotional powerhouse episodes. it's just breathing room. with fart jokes.

you know, i don't quite know what to make of this last episode. Like it was well meaning? but felt sort of lost? The bit at the end where he's like "no man i don't need a vest, brotherhood of man" was really kinda whaaaaaaa? to me.

though now i'm reading those blog entries and it's casting this all in a different light.

i sorta feel the same - like i think saying that it comes from a few different angles is maybe a way to generously address it being lighter, in each respect, than a lot of other eps. so yeah eg the vest thing or the simplicity of the pratfall/cross-cultural-tension-breaking thing. but i feel okay about being generous!, bc in the context of the series it feels like it's adding a pretty valuable dimension to the overall picture, just this free roaming various-aspects-of-louie's-life thing. i remember finding brokeback mountain kinda problematic in some respects but understanding that it was already, probably, ambitious enough just in terms of its premise and managing to get made. and i feel like the very fact of this being out in afghanistan was pretty adventurous terrain even if some of its content was a little more pat.

I have to say for all the cute duckling stuff, I thought the highlight was the performance of "Circle on the Cross."

in what sense?

(just more remembered things: the daughters are such good actors, cf the bedtime scene)

yeah, that's all pretty well put schlump
i love the way the daughters mouth doesn't move when she says "can we keep just onnnnnnne duckling"

i also like that he called the soldier heckler dickface and then ripped into the dude from buffalo

schlump otm; i can see why people would find this episode less sharp than some of the rest of the series but it still kind of wrecked me. thank god he called that dude dickface i needed a laugh.

I have to say for all the cute duckling stuff, I thought the highlight was the performance of "Circle on the Cross."

― Simon H., Friday, August 26, 2011 1:58 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah that was amazing, also the point in the episode where i could tell it was going to mess with me

no comment on the buffalo stuff >:[

except to say that no buffalonian would respond affirmatively to "anyone here from new york?"

read the blog!, based on a for-real incident that i won't ruin, buffalo was representin

all right maybe if you've been in afghanistan for a year you'd start to hear "new york" as "new york state" because you missed home that much

okay i feel like an idiot but which blog are we talking about?

linked upthreax

Man, that was somethin else.

Where can I buy a duck.

yea that was awesome. whole segment @ camp timothy was so fuckin great, theres no drama or story arc 2 it but it was incredibly intimate & real. its the goddamn tree of life of sitcoms

Wait so the duckling was his fear I get it.

They're all good, ffs

― the tuomas clown affair (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, 20 August 2011 03:15 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^^

its the goddamn tree of life of sitcoms

lol

ok i just caught up and yes, they are all brilliant

Wait so the duckling was his fear I get it.
http://28.media.tumblr.com/Ii3YbXKTvkssk8umVGwknZy2o1_500.jpg

i love this guy a lot
http://feeds.feedburner.com/louisckvideopodcast

Why isn't this a world where I can watch pootie tang before the storm comes to eat me?
http://www.avclub.com/articles/pootie-tang,30745/

how is this shit not on netflix i ask you

always thought chris rock had the best moments in pooty tang

the duck episode was really haunting. can't stop thinking about it.

it was really good!

s2 enters all-time tv list for me, like w Simpsons and Roseanne in realness

p much

This is always the show we put on last because it's so reliably excellent that we know we will never be let down.

i just rewatched the last ep of season one, not having watched the rest, i think keenly because i remembered the last scene well. it's so great, and kinda an exemplar for what's great about the show - the real variety in scenes, & the interesting things that happen in them (there's this great silent-comedy scene, but set against the overloading music of the club he's taken to, in which he creeps up on a girl trying to cop a guy's moves); the dynamics between him & a few of the other characters, like the hysterical babysitter, the guys he goes out with, his dirtbag friends, etc; and the emotional reach in the last part. it's so good.

re: the criticism upthread that there's a part of this that's trying to project too hard that he's a great guy: i don't disagree with this, necessarily, but don't find it such a troublesome premise. i think it's accepted with the same sort of reflection as that he's a frequent masturbator or that he's pretty solitary. & i don't so much think it's that he's 'a great guy', always doing the best thing & stepping back to allow others to go forward, so much as that he's trying & has a certain set of priorities, like his kids, etc. there's some seinfeld thing that they realised some way through that it wasn't problematic for jerry to be successful - like they didn't have to revert to the traditional klutzy thing of everything blowing up in the lead's face for comic sake. & that there's a basic mode for louie in which he's doing okay & is pretty moral (though obviously with weird behavioural extensions to that - he's not excising the 'sure i would date a 19 year old' bits, etc) seems like a v reasonable starting place for him to be at in the show.

like, not having rewatched the rest, rather

yeah i don't mind his "i'm a pretty decent guy" schtick at all. and, as you say, it's not like he isn't aware of the fact that he might think too highly of himself. cf the standup bit in the ep a couple weeks ago where he talks about how ppl like him think they're so great for not staring at ppl with disabilities (or something to that effect).

kinda wondering when the louis ck backlash begins. i love the dude but he's getting so much hype right now, so many people saying "OMG BEST COMEDIAN/SHOW EVER."

still feel like i don't really get the show but i'm glad he's doing it and people like it a lot

like bill simmons is praising him on grantland for no reason

don't know why i started posting again, sorry

basically, dude got the "funniest guy in america" mantle for a little while; I agree that he's bound to slip at some point but I'm really just enjoying him being at the top right now.