I’m finally getting around to watching the first episode of Rubicon. From what I can understand, super duper secret agency analyst Will Travers is a dedicated but conflicted widower who lost his wife and daughter during the 9/11 attacks. His boss–also his father-in-law–David, urges Will to leave the agency just before being killed in a train crash. And also, some billionaire kills himself, and it might have something to do with a crossword that shows up in several newspapers…

…That’s a lot of plot for a pilot. And it might work if the first ten minutes didn’t move so slowly. We’re introduced to the characters–but instead of neat exposition, we get long scenes of Will, thinking hard and being forlorn. Once the pace finally does pick up, the clues tangle with each other instead of weaving a story. I’ll watch the next episodes on DVR–but only to see if those tangles smooth out or turn into impossible knots.

For a show with such an ambitious scope, timing will be everything. Rubicon needs some adjustments if it’s going to attract and keep viewers.

I just started reading the mystery novel The Inheritance by Simon Tolkien. Yes, Tolkien, as in J.R.R. This is a grandson, and his second middle name is Reuel too. He’s the son of Christopher, who edited the original Tolkien’s posthumous work, and is reportedly estranged from his father because of his (Simon’s) support for the Lord of the Rings films. And now he’s writing novels.

Publishing under the same name as a famous parent or grandparent may be easier in some ways – having a name like Tolkien can presumably open some doors – but also takes a certain amount of courage, as literary talent is not necessarily inherited, but the pressure and expectations are there regardless. Stephen King’s son Joe publishes as Joe Hill, which takes some of the pressure off, but his son Owen wrote a book under Owen King. Both of mystery writer Jesse Kellerman’s parents (Faye and Jonathan) write in his genre, but that hasn’t seemed to faze him. And then there’s Mary Higgins Clark: her daughter Carol Higgins Clark is a successful mystery novelist, and so is her former daughter-in-law Mary Jane Clark, whose books are often designed to look eerily like Higgins Clark’s own. (Gossip in the bookselling world says that this is not a coincidence.)

I’m not far enough into The Inheritance yet to know what the title means in the context of the plot, but I can’t imagine that Tolkien and his publishers didn’t realize that the title could also be read as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the author’s ambiguous literary inheritance of name and reputation. And I must admit that I picked the book up at the library partially to find out if he was related to the Tolkien. Fair enough. If you’re going to be held up to the standards set by your famous grandfather, you might as well use his name to get me to read your book.

So remember when I wrote a long defense of Work of Art? Heh, yeah, sorry about that. It turns out that the finale last night wasn’t very good. (Spoiler on who won here.) The producers, in a departure from the previous episodes, seemed to want us to take the contestants very seriously as artists. As I said before, what worked for me about Work of Art had more to do with the fact that it was great television than it did with the quality of the art produced on the show. Since I took it that way, I found the finale disappointing. Also is it just me or was that painting of the taxidermied dead twin deer fetuses creepy or what?

I was listening to The Avalanches’ Since I Left You last night, and was struck by just how far all-sample music has deviated stylistically from them in 2000 to, say, The Hood Internet, Super Mash Bros., or even Girl Talk now. Obviously, current mashup artists don’t have much to do with the first fully sample-based album, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., but then again they probably shouldn’t. Endtroducing….. isn’t a dance album; apart from “The Number Song” and “Organ Donor”, it’s all brooding atmospherics, so it should bear little relation to mashups meant for dancefloors. But Since I Left You, while ending up as so much more, is meant first and foremost as party music. Yet the way it approaches song structure is far more traditional than current mashups. Check out the title track (whose video, incidentally, is probably my favorite for any song):

Compare that to Super Mash Bros.’ “Meet Me at Fantasy Island”:

The Avalanches’ style isn’t exactly verse-chorus-verse, especially not on more four-to-the-floor stuff like “A Different Feeling”, but there is definitely a structure; there’s even, arguably, a bridge in “Since I Left You”. Super Mash Bros., of course, just take their favorite parts from the songs being sampled and throw them together.

That works to a certain extent, and when a mashup artist is really good at selecting killer snippets, the results can be devastating. This is why Feed the Animals hit so hard when it came out — Girl Talk knew exactly what to pull out and exactly where to place it. But there’s a reason I listen to Since I Left You straight through more than I do Feed the Animals. Layering one catchy bit after another forces you to keep up, which takes the fun out of successive listens. Listening to Girl Talk, after a while, is exhausting; you get hit by one hook after another without being able to breath. The Avalanches welcome you to paradise, but they also let you relax once you get there.