Salon.com > Sarah Vowell http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Michaelllllll Jorrrrrdan! http://www.salon.com/2000/06/07/jordan_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/07/jordan_4/#comments Wed, 07 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/06/07/jordan I used to live in Chicago and I moved away not so long after Michael Jordan retired. What was the point of sticking around? Like I was going to sit there year after year, on the same couch facing away from Lake Michigan, and look at the same TV while who -- Shaq? -- won the NBA championship? No more throwing open the windows after Bulls wins to better hear my neighbors in the high-rises next to the lake banging on their balcony railings with joy, as the cars on Sheridan Road honk their horns in time to "Sweet Home Chicago" on their radios.

Have you ever been part of something like that? Sheltered beneath some grand, citywide umbrella of agreement? In arguably the most segregated metropolitan area in the nation, where even the two baseball teams splice the town in half, brother against brother, North vs. South, the fact that almost every kid in every neighborhood and 'burb owned a No. 23 Michael Jordan T-shirt was a relief. Which is why on the afternoon in 1998 that Jordan announced his retirement, after leading the Bulls to six NBA championships, you couldn't walk down the street without looking into bloodshot eyes. I admit it: I, too, cried.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/07/jordan_4/feed/ 0 The book on film http://www.salon.com/2000/05/10/film_books/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/10/film_books/#comments Wed, 10 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/05/10/film_books "I reserve the right to be expansive," Steve Earle said on Saturday. The ex-junkie, ex-con singer-songwriter was giving a presentation at the New Yorker Festival of Books at a Manhattan club called Float. As I recall, he was discussing the difference between story songs and less narrative ones. But in declaring his "right to be expansive" he hit on the pleasures of watching an artist who's been around a while move through the world. Every so often, Earle would play a song on his acoustic guitar, and his voice has never sounded as wonderfully delicate or as hard. Yet when he talked about his current life -- he's been writing poetry (a haiku a day), teaching a class at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music and running a record label (which has the terrific South Philadelphia band Marah on its roster) -- he came across as all over the place, which is to say generous and interested and up to his ears in the cause of art.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/10/film_books/feed/ 0 The Dixie Chicks, TV Guide and me http://www.salon.com/2000/04/26/tv_guide/ http://www.salon.com/2000/04/26/tv_guide/#comments Wed, 26 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/04/26/tv_guide The other day I was staying in a nice hotel. When I was poking around the room, looking at room-service menus and the little shampoo bottles and the like, I came across a small, leather-bound folder on the bedside table. And inside this sober folder was this: Under the words "dixie chicks" in orange and pink lowercase letters was a photo of the country-pop trio -- smiling bleached blonds in pink and orange, one of them contorted like a circus acrobat with her legs in the air.

They were on the cover of TV Guide, which promised "Men, Money and (Sing It) 'Goodbye Earl'! The Sassy Country Trio Gets Down to Serious Girl Talk." Looking around at the room's mahogany and marble, it made sense that such a trashy cover of such a trashy magazine had to be hidden in such an elegant setting.

Something about the room said, "I only watch PBS." The room said that; I said to myself, Haven't gotten this issue yet, and plopped down in a wing chair to read about the band I love to hate. (Well, first I looked in the movie listings, as I do every week, to see if "The Man With the Golden Arm" would be playing, but it never is. In the March 11 issue, however, it was 28-down in the magazine's crossword puzzle, "Man With the Golden ___.") As for the Dixie Chicks, what is more fun than reading a Q&A with singers you don't like talking about their early years, in which they were paid $100 to sing Bette Midler's "The Rose" at an open-casket funeral to banjo accompaniment?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/04/26/tv_guide/feed/ 0 Songs that kill http://www.salon.com/2000/04/12/psycho_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/04/12/psycho_2/#comments Wed, 12 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/04/12/psycho In Bret Easton Ellis' 1987 novel "Rules of Attraction," Paul, a college student, describes the records playing at a party. "The Pretenders turn into Simple Minds," he muses, "and I was grateful because I could not have stood there if there had been no music." The Ellis oeuvre is full of playlists, beginning with his first novel, "Less Than Zero" (named after Elvis Costello's first single). He writes very noisy books: MTV in bedrooms and living rooms; tapes and radios cranked up in cars. And Paul's words -- the idea that Ellis' mostly aimless characters' lives would be unbearable without a soundtrack -- hint at something we don't like to talk about when we talk about entertainment.

People who care about pop music, and I am one of them, like to discuss songs as liberators, as catalysts, as jokes or friends. But what of the term background music? Just as often, probably more often, listeners use music as a kind of stopgap. I like to think of fandom as a way of being in the world, but so often it's a way of avoiding the world, a barrier, a wall. Witness the witty scene in the new charmer "High Fidelity." In that film version of Nick Hornby's novel, John Cusack's Rob, a record-store owner, holes up after his girlfriend's left him and tries to put it out of his mind by reorganizing his record collection "autobiographically." He sits among his stacks of albums as if in a fort.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/04/12/psycho_2/feed/ 0 All this useful beauty http://www.salon.com/2000/03/29/whitney_3/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/29/whitney_3/#comments Wed, 29 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/03/29/whitney Seeing the new Whitney Biennial is like struggling through some interminable Jackie Chan movie -- minute after bleak minute of watching a bunch of cartoon characters dork around. If this museum show collects the best American art has to offer at this moment, then the American century really is over. Good thing the Whitney owns all those nice old existential Edward Hopper paintings it keeps trotting out every few months -- it's going to need them. I didn't learn anything, wasn't moved and only smiled once at the biennial: at Paul Pfeiffer's "The Pure Products Go Crazy," a digital video loop (alluding to William Carlos Williams' line that "the pure products of America go crazy") of young Tom Cruise humping the couch in his tighty-whities in "Risky Business."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/29/whitney_3/feed/ 0 “T for Texas/T for Tennessee” http://www.salon.com/2000/03/15/texas_6/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/15/texas_6/#comments Wed, 15 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/03/15/texas Walking home from a Super Tuesday party -- or whatever one calls a get-together with a bunch of people sitting around eating pizza and screaming at CNN -- I found myself humming Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel." Once it became official that Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee were to be their parties' candidates in the presidential election come November, "Blue Yodel" was a natural choice. (You might know it by its first line: "T for Texas/T for Tennessee.") Of course, the song is sung from the point of view of a man who's off to buy a "pistol just as long as I'm tall" to shoot his sweetheart, and then a shotgun to kill the man who stole her, so it has more to do with the governor's affinity with the National Rifle Association than with the vice president's critique of the same, but still, it's a good, handy song and quite a relief. It's not like we had an Arkansas vs. Kansas theme to whistle last time around.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/15/texas_6/feed/ 0 The ballad of Luther and Johnny http://www.salon.com/2000/03/01/htoo_twins/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/01/htoo_twins/#comments Wed, 01 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/03/01/htoo_twins The picture of Luther and Johnny Htoo, 12-year-old twin brothers who command a ragtag guerrilla army in the rain forest of Myanmar (formerly Burma), is the first classic photojournalistic image of the new millennium. In the Associated Press picture, they are side by side. Johnny's the serene one with the angel eyes. Luther, forehead shaved, is the smirking devil sucking down a cigar. By early February, I couldn't open a magazine without seeing that picture of the twins, without reading of their bizarre cult of soldiers called God's Army, of their recent attack on a Thai hospital in which they held some 500 people hostage. And every time I saw the picture the first thing that popped into my head was this: I miss my sister.

I am a twin. And to be a twin child is to always have another person in the picture. My mother made a halfhearted stab at keeping separate photo albums for each of us. But the distinctions are arbitrary -- Amys in most of the faded black-and-white snapshots in my album, and vice versa.

Once I saw Luther and Johnny sharing the same frame, it hit me how much they have in common with my sister and me. The similarities are uncanny. Luther and Johnny are illiterate, Baptist, messianic insurgents struggling against the government of Myanmar, and my sister Amy and I shared a locker all through junior high.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/01/htoo_twins/feed/ 0 Honest Abe and Earnest Al http://www.salon.com/2000/02/16/vowell_america/ http://www.salon.com/2000/02/16/vowell_america/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/02/16/vowell_america The program notes to the Feb. 7 performance of Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" at Lincoln Centers Avery Fisher Hall point out that the folk tune "Camptown Races" is quoted in the score because it was one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite songs. Coplands piece, which sets Lincoln's writings to orchestral accompaniment (played here by the American Symphony Orchestra), was narrated during the Avery Fisher performance by Al Gore, who, as you may have heard, is running for president. This makes the "Camptown" moment all the more prescient. For what song, other than "We're in the Money," could a politician love more? It's a song about a horse race, a gamble. And it never sounded more resonant than in this, the primary season. Place your bets, fellow citizens, for just as I might put my money on the bobtail nag, polls show that you have a thing for the bay.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/02/16/vowell_america/feed/ 0 Please, sir, may I have a mother? http://www.salon.com/2000/02/02/vowell_wb/ http://www.salon.com/2000/02/02/vowell_wb/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/02/02/vowell_wb If all the hot young characters on the current WB network lineup invited their mothers and fathers to some sort of parents weekend, let's just say that it would not be a boon to the innkeepers of Television City. That is because an astonishing percentage of these characters' parents are dead. If they are not dead, they are gone, having skipped town years ago leaving their deserted progeny with only a photo to emote over and enough abandonment issues to keep them in guidance counselors forever. Or they are in prison or, worse, Palo Alto. Or, as in the case of the missing parents of the trio of extraterrestrial kids stuck in "Roswell," they're literally lost in the stars, assuming that the word and concept of "parent" even means anything on their home planet.

It's just as well that the parents weekend never happens anyway, as it would probably be lorded over by the squeaky clean preacher and wife from "7th Heaven," who would ruin all the cocktail hours by saying grace over their club sodas, causing all the mothers and fathers who had managed to escape cancer and incarceration to kill themselves, slitting their wrists with swizzle sticks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/02/02/vowell_wb/feed/ 0 Risky business http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/sarah_vowell/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/sarah_vowell/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/01/19/sarah_vowell During the three-plus hours I sat in the dark watching Paul Thomas Anderson's ensemble epic "Magnolia," I found myself wanting something I'd never wanted before. More Tom Cruise. As a white, middle-class American moviegoer who went to high school during the Reagan years and subscribes to more than one cable film channel, I've seen every film Tom Cruise ever made, some many more than once, without even trying. Like a Tom Petty or a Jim Lehrer, Cruise falls into that category of competent if ubiquitous public figures who have never won my love or hate and therefore never truly caught my eye. Except for his memorably baroque turn as Lestat in "Interview with the Vampire," which I, like the rest of the country, blame mostly on his curdled blond hair. But somehow, Cruise's work in "Magnolia," as male prowess guru Frank T.J. Mackey, so seized my curiosity that I walked straight out of the theater to go rent his 1983 film "Risky Business." Has he always been that -- whatever he is?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/19/sarah_vowell/feed/ 0 My favorite things http://www.salon.com/2000/01/05/bests/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/05/bests/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/2000/01/05/bests Best Bathrobe: Tony Soprano, "The Sopranos" (HBO)

With the possible exception of Hugh Hefner (who somehow pulls off looking rather regal in PJs), there's nothing more vulnerable than a man, not to mention a mobster, in bed clothes. And Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), the New Jersey family man/wise guy, suffers not only from depression, but perpetual bed head. He's weary. He's funny and charming and deadly too, but the fact that he spends so much on-screen time bursting out of his bathrobe while his relatively rested wife and kids have already gotten cracking on the day gives him a reluctant air. Like, he's willing to kill and be killed if it comes to that, but five more minutes, Mom.

Funniest Song: Le Tigre, "What's Yr Take on Casavetes?" (Mr Lady Records)
The misspelled name is the first laugh, and after that Kathleen Hanna's latest band presents a question about how one feels about that pompous dullard of a filmmaker (that's my take by the by) as a multiple choice. Your options: "Genius! Misogynist!" and "Alcoholic! Messiah!"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/05/bests/feed/ 0 “I'm a pure insider” http://www.salon.com/1999/12/01/collings/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/01/collings/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/12/01/collings English art critic Matthew Collings' book "It Hurts: New York Art From Warhol to Now" (21 Publishing) is a gem. A smart and wickedly funny road map of everything from pop to performance, Collings hunkers down with downtown tricksters, the uptown avant-garde and all the painters, conceptualists and taste-makers in between. Collings is frighteningly well-informed, not just about the subject of art, but also about its rituals, its silliness, its gossip and, ultimately, its integrity. "It Hurts" pierces visual art's pretentious membrane because of Collings' affection for his subject. He and I recently spoke by phone.

The subtitle of your book is "From Warhol to Now." Why did you want to begin with him?

I think that there's a great difference in art generally before him, and certainly in American art before him. He's a kind of watershed. I think he's a figure. He's a character. Within that character are a lot of tumultuous changes in art. And he sort of sums them up. In Warhol, it's this mixture of utter realism about our actual world that we actually live in. But also a sort of romanticism about what it is to be an artist, that it takes a leap of the imagination to be an artist. I don't think at all that his cynicism or his irony is all that he is. I think his irony and cynicism are connected to a sincerity about who we are. We give culture a kind of job, which is to tell us who we are, and he's a very good oracle of who we are.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/01/collings/feed/ 0 Moving pictures http://www.salon.com/1999/11/17/moviesrock/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/17/moviesrock/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/11/17/moviesrock My mother telephoned the other day and asked me how I was and without even thinking I exclaimed, "Great! Movies are so good right now!" She gingerly hinted at wanting more personal details regarding my (contented, thank you very much) daily grind. But at the risk of sounding too society-of-the-spectacle, nothing in real life has thrilled me in the last few weeks quite like the moment in "Three Kings" when a jeep darts across the desert to the Beach Boys' "I Get Around"; or grabbed me like the landscape of Richard Farnsworth's face in David Lynch's "The Straight Story"; or captivated me like that floating bag sequence in "American Beauty"; or cracked me up like Terence Stamp's Joe Strummer snarl in "The Limey"; or made my stomach hurt as much as "The Insider's" ulcer-in-residence Russell Crowe; or -- despite recent river cruises and coast-to-coast flights -- taken me on a ride as scenic as "Being John Malkovich."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/17/moviesrock/feed/ 0 NYTV blues http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/nytv/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/nytv/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/11/03/nytv Martin Scorsese has said that when he was a kid in New York, he watched a lot of westerns.
When I was a kid in the West, I saw every Scorsese picture I could. I have
no idea if seeing "Rio Bravo" made the young Scorsese want to call a travel
agent and book the next flight to Tucson. I do know that when I saw "Taxi
Driver" as a teenager (screened in the agriculture department at Montana
State in the same room where the range management lectures took place), it
made me want to stay the hell away from New York.

When Robert De Niro as Travis
Bickle said, "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the
streets," he didn't sound like a crackpot en route to an assassination. He
sounded like he could have been any old reasonable American living
west of the Hudson. I remember stumbling out of the ag building when it was over, grateful to walk home in the pure driven snow.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/nytv/feed/ 0 The drapes of wrath http://www.salon.com/1999/10/20/ikea/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/20/ikea/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/10/20/ikea The first half of "Fight Club" feels like a remake of Woody Allen's 1978 film "Interiors" with the genders reversed. Where Allen's vanilla ice cream-looking study of Geraldine Page's cold beige rooms contrasted her womanhood (or lack thereof) to that of joke-cracking, red dress-wearing life-force Maureen Stapleton, "Fight Club" throws a squeaky clean corporate mouse played by Edward Norton into the grimy macho world of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). You know Pitt plays a real man because his hair's messed up and he lives in what Norton's character calls "a dilapidated house in a toxic waste part of town."

Norton is psychologically castrated because of his office job, condo ownership and addiction to catalog shopping. Fincher's hilarious tour of the condo pans the living room and floats the Ikea catalog description of tables and chairs above the pieces, so that the catalog copy becomes the air Norton breathes. Similarly, Geraldine Page in "Interiors" arranged perfect white flowers in perfect white vases because she was a repressed aesthete, and Maureen Stapleton knew how to have a good time since she knocks over one of said vases -- drunk and dancing. If both maddening films are partly about gender, they are also partly about housewares. Namely, the neuroses not just of ownership and consumer goods, but the supposed spiritual void symbolized by a nice-looking room.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/20/ikea/feed/ 0 The magical mystery tour http://www.salon.com/1999/10/06/onesong/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/06/onesong/#comments Wed, 06 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/10/06/onesong I once made a pact with myself that I wasn't going to buy any new records until I figured out the ones I had. That was until I realized the thing I liked about Charlie Parker or Laurie Anderson was that at some pure deep level, their music couldn't be figured out. There
isn't some all-purpose passkey that unlocks their meaning.

The song around which I formed my eternal-mystery theory was not
some illegible bebop map or a question mark from "Big Science."
The song that hammered home the notion that listening to good
music was like watching a quiz show without cue cards was from a
genre not known for its elliptical subtleties -- Dixieland. Specifically,
it was Louis Armstrong doing that old dirge, "St. James Infirmary."
When I was 14, I listened to the one Armstrong record I had every night
before I went to sleep -- theoretically to
help my own trumpet playing (which is what I told my sister
across the hall when she'd had quite enough), but
really because I was hooked on getting spooked. "St. James
Infirmary" never stopped scaring me, never opened up -- and
thus never closed down.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/06/onesong/feed/ 0 Who needs the NEA, anyway? http://www.salon.com/1999/09/22/subscriber/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/22/subscriber/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/09/22/subscriber Sept. 22, 1999

Dear Subscriber:

Art, as you know, is about the search for truth. And in that spirit, we at Your Town Here Arts and Lectures send you this brochure about our upcoming season.

Usually, at this point in the brochure, we'd say something like, "Consider us your ticket to fun!" But not this year. This year, we're feeling honest. Honest and low-key. I mean, if you consider us your ticket to fun, great, but we don't want to be pushy. We've been up really late typing this brochure and to be perfectly frank, we're questioning the whole enterprise -- but, hey, don't let that stop you. It goes without saying that some of the following performances were scheduled simply because we're halfway between the ocean and Minneapolis. We're just gas money to the artists and they're just calendar filler to us.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/22/subscriber/feed/ 0 “Colony Girl” http://www.salon.com/1999/09/16/rayfiel/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/16/rayfiel/#comments Thu, 16 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/09/16/rayfiel The protagonist of Thomas Rayfiel's "Colony Girl," a novel about a Midwestern religious cult, is named Eve. But does she have to be? Couldn't someone named, say, Jennifer question theological authority? Eve ("Just Eve. No last names in the Bible") is a fatherless teenager who moved with her mother to "the Colony" as a small child. She takes bites out of several varieties of forbidden apples -- sex, power, employment. Like her biblical namesake, she gains knowledge but little peace.

A charismatic leader named Gordon presides at the Colony. Gordon, Eve's mother's ex-boyfriend in their former life, exerts a power and fascination over his congregation, Eve included. "We all feared and craved him," she recalls. Gordon has escaped the black-and-white stereotypes usually assigned to communal religious extremists: He is affable, hilarious and smart, loosening the restrictions on his adolescent followers right about the time they would be tempted to rebel. His personality makes for a story that's complex and at times contradictory; just as Gordon allows Eve the unheard-of freedom of taking a summer job on a highway construction crew, he becomes engaged to one of her 16-year-old friends, prompting Eve to grumble, "There should be a Newer Testament ... One where you don't get married just because you start getting your period."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/16/rayfiel/feed/ 0 Sidekick no more http://www.salon.com/1999/09/08/sidekicks/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/08/sidekicks/#comments Wed, 08 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/09/08/sidekicks What could be more curious than being Conan O'Brien's sidekick? Conan O'Brien himself seems like he should be somebody else's sidekick. O'Brien -- and this is his charm -- isn't really leading man material. He's too humble, too self-deprecating, too kind. Unlike Jay Leno, who is unwaveringly weird, or David Letterman, whose brilliance is proportional to his own self-loathing, or the old-fashioned Tom Snyder, or his smarmy frat boy replacement, Craig Kilborn, or even no-nonsense smooth Ted Koppel, Conan O'Brien walks this earth with the rest of us. And the best part of his show is always the bit between the monologue and the first guest when he shoots the breeze with sidekick Andy Richter.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/08/sidekicks/feed/ 0 Let us now give “Thanks” some praise http://www.salon.com/1999/08/25/thanks/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/25/thanks/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/vowe/1999/08/25/thanks "It is sinful to seek any form of pleasure. Overt joy is to be avoided," begins a current magazine ad for a Saab convertible, pictured parked next to a pristine white clapboard church. Headlined "Saab vs. the Puritans," the spiel ends, "Be careful, modern-day Puritans. Who knows what this car could lead to?" Probably cocaine and the theory of evolution, if recent news is any indication. And the modern-day Puritans are out in force.

Not that they ever went away. They're angel-dusting George W. Bush's presidential campaign with allegations of youthful drug abuse. The Kansas Board of Education has evolution in its science testing standards. And why? To stare down the libertines and smite the wicked. To take this country back to its roots -- when there was one all-powerful creator but 80 million rules.

Could nostalgia for the straight and narrow of this country's original Puritan mandate explain the arrival of the weirdest sitcom in recent history? As we stand on the verge of a fall television lineup crammed with yet more slick and sexy teenage dramedies, here comes a situation comedy set in Plymouth, Mass., in 1621. "Thanks" (as in Thanksgiving) is meant to hilariously chronicle the Puritans' first year in the New World. Because nothing is funnier than Puritanism, right?

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