Fox TV—House, M.D.

"House," despite being relentlessly formulaic, has become a staple of my limited TV watching. For one thing, the formula is new, or at least a new variation: the police procedural transplanted into a hospital. Various diseases come under suspicion, and then are cleared, as House and his team relentlessly track down the true culprit. Unfortunately, there's not much variation within this process. Action is mostly confined to the hopsital corridors, there are limited subplots, and like the old Perry Mason episodes, you can virtually set your watch by the steps in the action.
What distinguishes the show is the character of Dr. House—a brilliant but surly misanthrope who works as a diagnostician not because he cares in the least about his patients (indeed, he has contempt for them), but because he's intellectually fascinated by the diagnostic process. At its best, the show raises an interesting ethical question about the relation between intention and action. Would you rather be treated by the acid-tongued, but accurate, House, or his far more benevolent but less clever colleagues?
This plays out perfectly in an episode where House spots and stops an incipient epidemic among the hopital's newborns. The end of the episode finds him sitting alone in the infant ward, trying to puzzle out the source of the infection. In the foreground, a sweet-faced grandmotherly volunteer strolls by with a baby carriage, alternately wiping her runny nose and stroking the infant's cheek with the same hand. As we see House again, a gloriously bitter and satisfied smile crosses his face—once again, the ineptitude of the well-meaning has raised its ugly head.

Rosanne Cash—Black Cadillac

I've been thinking a lot about tradition as I listen to this CD—not surprising, since Cash has tradition running through her veins and this music's precipitating cause is the death of those who passed it on to her: father, stepmother, and mother, all within the space of a little more than a year. Cash isn't the radical her father was, but she's smart and knows how to make the music her own. "House on the Lake," for example, is a lovely, mournful evocation of the Cash homestead outside Nashville. It's filled with private references, and yet towards the end of it she tosses in a chestnut so overworn with use that one almost winces to hear it:

"I'm going down to New Orleans..."

How many hundreds, if not thousands, of mediocre songwriters have reached for that phrase to cast a mythic hue over their otherwise forgettable creations? As Orwell wrote about dead metaphors, the line is beyond cliché; it exists simply as a place-holder, a way to kill time without thinking about how you are saying what you are saying. And yet, abruptly, Cash redeems it with the very next line:

" 'Cause we both are sinking fast."

Suddenly what was vague snaps into focus. This isn't the city of a thousand bad folksongs, but a very specific New Orleans, the 2006 version staggering under the losses of Hurricane Katrina just as Cash was staggering under the losses of those she loved. The couplet, starting in generality, becomes just as intimate as the rest of the song, for it reminds us of how public tragedies always weave their way into our private losses, how they, like parabolic mirrors, reflect and intensify our sorrow. At the same time, there's a moment of hope there, too—aesthetically, at least—since the lines suggest that all these grand tropes of American songwriting, all these shopworn clichés, might still be able to help heal us, if we could only lay our hands directly the tradition itself, rather than the encrustations that have grown over it over the years.