As I'm writing this my house is full of smoke, for the third time in as many years. A fire is raging in Sonoma, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, and the smoke is spreading throughout the Bay Area, forcing people indoors and covering everything with a fine layer of ash. The sky is hazy, darkening everything and giving the world an apocalyptic glow. Entire towns in Sonoma County have been evacuated.
Adding insult to injury, the local electric utility, PG&E, has been threatening to turn off power all over Northern California. A week or so ago, the word came down that they were looking to shut off sections of Palo Alto, among other cities, though details on when, what parts and how long these outages would last, were all impossible to get. PG&E put up a website telling users what areas would be hit, but because they mismanaged the information, the websites crashed due to traffic. In the end my town wasn't affected, but loads of other towns were - including hospitals and other medical facilities.
This is all because PG&E couldn't be bothered to maintain its network, which caused last year's fire, the Camp Fire. That fire, the deadliest in our state's history, killed 85 people in Northern California, people who in some cases barely had time to get out of their homes before the flames overtook them. Not only did shitty electricity infrastructure cause this tragedy, but the aftermath caused PG&E to go bankrupt, citing wildfire liabilities of $30 billion. But because they're the monopoly provider of large parts of the region, that doesn't leave consumers many options if the power goes out. Coincidentally, PG&E also has some of the highest electricity rates in California, because their energy generating infrastructure is old and decrepit, requiring further maintenance - maintenance they don't provide because they're too busy giving their executives inordinately large bonuses.
And yet the right-wing loves bashing California. They say we're ungovernable, that our cities are crumbling and dirty and full of homeless. They disdain our huge homeless population and high gas prices, and when idiot elected Republicans befoul the air with this litany of untruth, right-wing voters here and in the rest of the country lap it all up. All of this ignoring the fact that all these problems - massive wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, high energy prices and corporate malfeasance, among others - are all basically down to right-wing policies.
And at the root of those policies, which aim to punish the poor and middle-class for not being rich and which aim to destroy our environment, is the stripping of the public sector in favor of the private sector, all in service of the completely idiotic idea that if we give more money to rich people they'll share the wealth with everybody else. So we strip our natural resources, let our physical and energy infrastructure crumble to pieces, and build planes that are so smart that when they take off they assume the air flying past their nose means they're pointed too high and they crash straight into the ground.
We're suffering the crapification of America at the hands of unfettered capitalism, where companies focus only on maximizing profit without actually making product that customers need or want, or that work as they should. Cars that are meant to be safe navigate straight into highway dividers and burst into flame, because the manufacturer decides to call one of its functions Autopilot; bridges fall down because nobody's bothered to maintain them since they were built; and energy utilities let trees grow next to their power lines because they don't want to spend the money to hire and train engineers to make sure that these very power lines don't have combustible materials growing next to them.
And again, somehow it's my fault because I voted for Obama twice, and because I believe that the fruits of the economy should be shared more widely than just the two or three assholes who've managed to convince investors to let them undermine our democracy by taking our data and monetizing it.
It's frustrating seeing my home turn uninhabitable, first through epochal droughts and then through apocalyptic fires every autumn, and knowing that my life is being shortened by the stupidity and greed and corporate malfeasance of people hundreds or even thousands of miles away, who are pissed off that we allow gay and transgender people to live their lives here in this state.
At some point even the Republicans are going to accept that global warming is irreversible and more complex than they can imagine, and somehow it'll still be California's fault for being too liberal. Well, fuck them, and if you vote for them, fuck you too.
Sunday 27 October 2019
Sunday 20 October 2019
Thoughts on picking up the Wire again
I'm finding that one of the nice things about being in a new relationship is sharing what you're both interested in. This is kind of an outgrowth of that initial feeling out of what stuff you have in common, whether movies, music, books, or any sort of art.
So it is that I find myself rewatching the Wire with my girlfriend. We've taken on an episode at a time, here and there, when we've been spending weekends together (and when we're not off gallivanting around Chicago or Universal Studios), and the early indications are that it's a hit.
This is very important to me: I consider the Wire to be the best show ever made, bar none. Head and shoulders above intermittently brilliant but intermittently infuriating shows like the Sopranos or Breaking Bad, or over shows like Mad Men that I never managed to get into. It's also one of the most important things that opened my political consciousness, and my interest in finding out what's really going on with race in America - words that seem naive when I phrase them that way, but that are meant to express how the show gives me a glimpse of a way of life that I can't begin to comprehend based on my experiences in what amounts to a parallel universe of privilege.
And of course the Wire isn't the definitive word on race, just as it's not the definitive word on the drug war (though it's as close as anything); rather it's a perspective on both that comes through in David Simon's exploration of how we live together, how a city functions (as viewed from its constituent institutions) and how inertia in those same institutions makes it almost impossible to enact lasting improvements in citizens' lives.
These are all super heavy concepts for a show that starts out looking like a police procedural, but they begin to take shape over the following seasons, when it follows different parts of Baltimore and a shifting cast of characters.
(I have to be vague about what's coming, because my girlfriend sometimes reads this blog [hi, sweetie!] and I'm under strict orders not to spoil anything)
Most immediately, it's lovely experiencing the show again, getting to know characters like Bunk, McNulty, Bubbles and Stringer Bell as if I'm seeing them for the first time. It's also fascinating watching them again with the knowledge of what happens to them over the coming years - as well as thinking about the different fortunes of the actors who play these characters. David Simon himself has noted how most of the white actors have gone on to bigger and better things, while many (though by no means all) of the black actors remain character actors. Though I was excited to see Michael B Jordan's name in the credits, given his surge in popularity recently on the back of roles like Apollo Creed and Killmonger.
It's also interesting to watch the show without the echo chamber of all my friends in London who were watching it just before me or at the same time. I don't know what it was like here in the US, but in London it was An Event. Not only was my workplace buzzing with talk of Omar, Avon Barksdale and Clay Davis ("sheeeeeeeee-it"), but it was all over the papers and the culture generally. The phenomenon was even mentioned in NW, Zadie Smith's 2012 novel about an intertwined group of Londoners.
Now I'm watching it more than ten years since its end, and since the end of the cultural moment it lived in. Especially this first season, where interactions with federal employees are peppered with mentions of the War on Terror, but the whole show (as I remember it) refers to concerns that are so different from the world we live in now. That's partly because in the interim we elected our first black president, and right after him our first white one.
But the technology is also miles away from the smartphones and social media we use now, and the gender, sexual and racial politics are definitely seen in a different way than now, in our post-Ferguson, Me Too and post-DOMA culture.
As I said, my girlfriend seems to be enjoying it - beyond the well-drawn characters and the relevant questions of race and class, her work background is very similar to the milieu in the show, so it's full of things she recognizes. And she likes to quote some (particularly foul-mouthed) exchanges back to me when telling stories about work, which is also fun.
I'd been thinking idly of re-watching the show anyway, but now that I've gotten together with her it's made it easier to justify it to myself. I'm hoping that once we wrap up the Wire, we'll be able to take on my other Top 3, namely the West Wing and Justified.
So it is that I find myself rewatching the Wire with my girlfriend. We've taken on an episode at a time, here and there, when we've been spending weekends together (and when we're not off gallivanting around Chicago or Universal Studios), and the early indications are that it's a hit.
This is very important to me: I consider the Wire to be the best show ever made, bar none. Head and shoulders above intermittently brilliant but intermittently infuriating shows like the Sopranos or Breaking Bad, or over shows like Mad Men that I never managed to get into. It's also one of the most important things that opened my political consciousness, and my interest in finding out what's really going on with race in America - words that seem naive when I phrase them that way, but that are meant to express how the show gives me a glimpse of a way of life that I can't begin to comprehend based on my experiences in what amounts to a parallel universe of privilege.
And of course the Wire isn't the definitive word on race, just as it's not the definitive word on the drug war (though it's as close as anything); rather it's a perspective on both that comes through in David Simon's exploration of how we live together, how a city functions (as viewed from its constituent institutions) and how inertia in those same institutions makes it almost impossible to enact lasting improvements in citizens' lives.
These are all super heavy concepts for a show that starts out looking like a police procedural, but they begin to take shape over the following seasons, when it follows different parts of Baltimore and a shifting cast of characters.
(I have to be vague about what's coming, because my girlfriend sometimes reads this blog [hi, sweetie!] and I'm under strict orders not to spoil anything)
Most immediately, it's lovely experiencing the show again, getting to know characters like Bunk, McNulty, Bubbles and Stringer Bell as if I'm seeing them for the first time. It's also fascinating watching them again with the knowledge of what happens to them over the coming years - as well as thinking about the different fortunes of the actors who play these characters. David Simon himself has noted how most of the white actors have gone on to bigger and better things, while many (though by no means all) of the black actors remain character actors. Though I was excited to see Michael B Jordan's name in the credits, given his surge in popularity recently on the back of roles like Apollo Creed and Killmonger.
It's also interesting to watch the show without the echo chamber of all my friends in London who were watching it just before me or at the same time. I don't know what it was like here in the US, but in London it was An Event. Not only was my workplace buzzing with talk of Omar, Avon Barksdale and Clay Davis ("sheeeeeeeee-it"), but it was all over the papers and the culture generally. The phenomenon was even mentioned in NW, Zadie Smith's 2012 novel about an intertwined group of Londoners.
Now I'm watching it more than ten years since its end, and since the end of the cultural moment it lived in. Especially this first season, where interactions with federal employees are peppered with mentions of the War on Terror, but the whole show (as I remember it) refers to concerns that are so different from the world we live in now. That's partly because in the interim we elected our first black president, and right after him our first white one.
But the technology is also miles away from the smartphones and social media we use now, and the gender, sexual and racial politics are definitely seen in a different way than now, in our post-Ferguson, Me Too and post-DOMA culture.
As I said, my girlfriend seems to be enjoying it - beyond the well-drawn characters and the relevant questions of race and class, her work background is very similar to the milieu in the show, so it's full of things she recognizes. And she likes to quote some (particularly foul-mouthed) exchanges back to me when telling stories about work, which is also fun.
I'd been thinking idly of re-watching the show anyway, but now that I've gotten together with her it's made it easier to justify it to myself. I'm hoping that once we wrap up the Wire, we'll be able to take on my other Top 3, namely the West Wing and Justified.
Sunday 13 October 2019
Thoughts on Joker
Well, holy crap. Just saw Joker yesterday, and it was basically all I could hope for. Spoilers below the jump, and then I'll share some thoughts.
Wednesday 9 October 2019
Cautiously Optimistic about the New Picard Show
Well, I just had a gander at the second trailer for the upcoming Picard series, and I'll be honest, I've got some thoughts. And feels!
Have a look:
So, it's still kinda light on details. Plot, and so forth. In fact, like the previous trailer it looks a lot like Logan, except with Patrick Stewart playing the roles of both Logan and Professor X, all in one. Young woman with mysterious bad guys chasing her, hero who's gone into seclusion, etc and so forth.
But I also can't deny that the glimpse of Riker and Troi, more than anything, brought a chuckle and the teensiest lump to the throat. More so than Data or Seven of Nine, or the set from the classic fourth-season episode "Family".
I was thinking a little about my reaction to the trailer, and I guess it's the fact that, while my Star Trek will always be Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation feels like home, and coming back to it feels so, so right.
One of my friends, who was into Trek in high school alongside me, is fond of arguing in favor of Discovery by pointing out that the reaction to TNG was similar (die hard Trekkies saying it wasn't real Trek, "trash and not canon", etc). It's hard to conceive of that, though, as I'd argue that most Trek fans now probably grew up alongside TNG, moreso than fans who've gravitated toward any of the other shows, even the Original Series.
And while I think that TNG was good for a lot less time than us fans would like to recall, even when it failed it was thought-provoking, in ways that Trek really hasn't managed since. Even DS9, which I think had the most sophisticated storytelling of any of the shows, didn't always hit the heights of episodes like Measure of a Man or the Drumhead.
The Mission Log Podcast used to talk about "the Kirk speech" in TOS, where the captain usually delivered that episode's theme, though frequently in ways that haven't aged so well since the 1960s. Then, when they were reviewing TNG, they would talk about the Picard speech, which also delivered that week's theme, but I'd say those have aged a lot better, given that Picard always better exemplified the humanist spirit that Gene Roddenberry aimed to convey in the show.
And Picard was always just a more interesting character, especially once the writers gave him more to do than being cranky. Over the course of the show he was revealed to be a musician, archeologist, fighter, and lover - his card on the TNG card game back in the 90s even explicitly called him a Renaissance Man. Roddenberry always argued that humanity could be great if we could just put aside our hatreds, bigotries and obsession with money - and Picard is probably the best exemplar of that argument that the show ever gave us.
So that's why I'm so looking forward to this new show featuring Patrick Stewart. But then I think of all the things that worry me. For one thing, that similarity to Logan, which also implies to me that they're going to kill Picard off at the end of the show. Not that I blame Sir Patrick for wanting a clean break, but it'd be nice to see him ride off into the sunset, happy, rather than being put into situation after situation until it makes narrative sense to bump him off.
The other thing that worries me is that this is the same studio that brought us Discovery. As I mention in that rundown of season 2, I thought the showrunners fumbled the ball badly, after a first season that was rough but promising. Part of it is the changes they made to the formula: by focusing on the journey of Michael Burnham rather than making it an ensemble show, like the previous ones, CBS painted itself into the corner of following a character who's not actually that clever or interesting, and as a result failing to develop any of the characters unless they were needed in a given episode (RIP Airiam).
Picard looks like it'll be another serialized show, rather than episodic. For the story they look like they want to tell, that's fine, though my objection to it in Discovery is that they seem to have used that narrative structure only because that's what audiences expect, rather than what makes sense for Star Trek. That structure has also led to the show missing out on the humanistic and intellectual angle that TOS, TNG and the others had, to varying degrees, and replaced it with a more cinematic feel.
The cinematic feel can be good, in the form of higher production values and more action. But it can also be bad, in the form of action for the sake of action, and way more simplistic storytelling. And that trailer, where Picard is yelling about the Federation living up to its ideals, indicates to me that we're getting the simplistic storytelling that marred Discovery.
To put it another way: questioning whether the Federation was right was daring and fun when Deep Space 9 did it, but given that it's now the default mode of latter-day TNG movies and Discovery alike, it'd be nice to once again get stories that don't test whether Roddenberry's vision could work, but rather stretch out in it, take it for granted, and see what stories we can tell from within a Federation that isn't venal and corrupt.
And yet...
Much more than Discovery did, Picard is making me consider paying for CBS All Access, rather than waiting for my next trip abroad to watch it. Because even if it's bad, it'll feel like coming home.
Have a look:
So, it's still kinda light on details. Plot, and so forth. In fact, like the previous trailer it looks a lot like Logan, except with Patrick Stewart playing the roles of both Logan and Professor X, all in one. Young woman with mysterious bad guys chasing her, hero who's gone into seclusion, etc and so forth.
But I also can't deny that the glimpse of Riker and Troi, more than anything, brought a chuckle and the teensiest lump to the throat. More so than Data or Seven of Nine, or the set from the classic fourth-season episode "Family".
I was thinking a little about my reaction to the trailer, and I guess it's the fact that, while my Star Trek will always be Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation feels like home, and coming back to it feels so, so right.
One of my friends, who was into Trek in high school alongside me, is fond of arguing in favor of Discovery by pointing out that the reaction to TNG was similar (die hard Trekkies saying it wasn't real Trek, "trash and not canon", etc). It's hard to conceive of that, though, as I'd argue that most Trek fans now probably grew up alongside TNG, moreso than fans who've gravitated toward any of the other shows, even the Original Series.
And while I think that TNG was good for a lot less time than us fans would like to recall, even when it failed it was thought-provoking, in ways that Trek really hasn't managed since. Even DS9, which I think had the most sophisticated storytelling of any of the shows, didn't always hit the heights of episodes like Measure of a Man or the Drumhead.
The Mission Log Podcast used to talk about "the Kirk speech" in TOS, where the captain usually delivered that episode's theme, though frequently in ways that haven't aged so well since the 1960s. Then, when they were reviewing TNG, they would talk about the Picard speech, which also delivered that week's theme, but I'd say those have aged a lot better, given that Picard always better exemplified the humanist spirit that Gene Roddenberry aimed to convey in the show.
And Picard was always just a more interesting character, especially once the writers gave him more to do than being cranky. Over the course of the show he was revealed to be a musician, archeologist, fighter, and lover - his card on the TNG card game back in the 90s even explicitly called him a Renaissance Man. Roddenberry always argued that humanity could be great if we could just put aside our hatreds, bigotries and obsession with money - and Picard is probably the best exemplar of that argument that the show ever gave us.
So that's why I'm so looking forward to this new show featuring Patrick Stewart. But then I think of all the things that worry me. For one thing, that similarity to Logan, which also implies to me that they're going to kill Picard off at the end of the show. Not that I blame Sir Patrick for wanting a clean break, but it'd be nice to see him ride off into the sunset, happy, rather than being put into situation after situation until it makes narrative sense to bump him off.
The other thing that worries me is that this is the same studio that brought us Discovery. As I mention in that rundown of season 2, I thought the showrunners fumbled the ball badly, after a first season that was rough but promising. Part of it is the changes they made to the formula: by focusing on the journey of Michael Burnham rather than making it an ensemble show, like the previous ones, CBS painted itself into the corner of following a character who's not actually that clever or interesting, and as a result failing to develop any of the characters unless they were needed in a given episode (RIP Airiam).
Picard looks like it'll be another serialized show, rather than episodic. For the story they look like they want to tell, that's fine, though my objection to it in Discovery is that they seem to have used that narrative structure only because that's what audiences expect, rather than what makes sense for Star Trek. That structure has also led to the show missing out on the humanistic and intellectual angle that TOS, TNG and the others had, to varying degrees, and replaced it with a more cinematic feel.
The cinematic feel can be good, in the form of higher production values and more action. But it can also be bad, in the form of action for the sake of action, and way more simplistic storytelling. And that trailer, where Picard is yelling about the Federation living up to its ideals, indicates to me that we're getting the simplistic storytelling that marred Discovery.
To put it another way: questioning whether the Federation was right was daring and fun when Deep Space 9 did it, but given that it's now the default mode of latter-day TNG movies and Discovery alike, it'd be nice to once again get stories that don't test whether Roddenberry's vision could work, but rather stretch out in it, take it for granted, and see what stories we can tell from within a Federation that isn't venal and corrupt.
And yet...
Much more than Discovery did, Picard is making me consider paying for CBS All Access, rather than waiting for my next trip abroad to watch it. Because even if it's bad, it'll feel like coming home.
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