Year in Review: Stuff I Liked in 2020

One of the themes I've heard people talk about all year is how we all have more time to do stuff now because we've been locked down at home. I kind of see what they've meant, but it oddly hasn't felt like that to me because I've been working steadily all year - if you're meant to be working, that still only leaves the evening hours and weekends to catch up on TV shows and music and books.

Nevertheless, I have been watching and enjoying stuff all year long, despite my worry early in the lockdown that the isolation would get to me. Below are some of the things that have helped - in addition, of course, to my girlfriend, who I've effectively been living with since around August and without whom I'd probably have gone crazy:

Football podcasts

The thing that made the pandemic's early stages feel particularly apocalyptic was the way sports shut down completely at the same time that we all went into lockdown. And as the European soccer leagues went on hiatus from one week to the next, for the first time since World War II, the football podcasts found themselves without content - since they're obviously based on dissecting what's just happened and what's about to happen.

So I have to praise Football Weekly, from the Guardian, and Totally Football for how they dealt with the lack of games. Football Weekly spent a few weeks introducing the regular correspondents, like Spain correspondent Sid Lowe and polymath Philippe Auclair, all while trading in the usual nonsense between hosts Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning.

Totally Football, meanwhile, added two nice sections to their regular and European-focused shows. One was a football trivia tournament among the correspondents, while the other was a segment looking back at each season of the Champions League from its start in 1992. The latter was particularly fun, since some of my early football memories are of Champions League finals from the late 90s, so it was good to hear (for example) the 1998-99 season, where Manchester United won, re-evaluated with two decades' hindsight.

It's a shame that both shows stopped doing these segments when the games started up again, but a related plus was the fact that Football Weekly started doing its live shows online, which meant I was finally able to catch them. After years of hearing the hosts talking about them, I'm glad I got to log in and listen to the silliness live.

German football

When the football did finally start up again, the first league to come back was the Bundesliga, so I duly took this opportunity to catch up on the league all the hipsters love. The matches in those early days were pretty surreal, with rules against celebrating too closely and a ban on fans in the stadia. That latter meant that you could hear every kick and every swear, a state that I oddly miss. Playing without fan noise may have been odd but I appreciated the novelty.

YouTube

It feels a little weird to praise a whole big corporation, especially one that's so devoted to spreading misinformation without repercussion. But YouTube brought me a lot that I needed during the first few months of the pandemic, and so I have to thank them and their weird, weird algorithm for helping me exercise, take tours of London and solve fiendishly difficult sudoku.

The first thing I discovered, like a great many people inside and outside Britain, was Joe Wicks, the Body Coach. I started hearing about his PE with Joe sessions, but instead of doing those I started following along with his HIIT workouts, especially the low-impact, low-noise workouts he'd record in hotels (this is because I live on the top floor of my building and don't want to pound on my neighbors' ceiling; just too bad they're not as considerate and constantly make noise running around and slamming doors). Following Joe's workouts helped me stay fit when the gyms closed, and also helped add some structure to my Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The next was Joolz Guides, a series of guided walks around London that helped ease my homesickness for the city. As you can imagine I focused on the areas that I know well, like Hampstead, Shoreditch and the like - it really was the next best thing to being able to walk around (well, not quite - but I had no choice!)

The final thing I want to flag here is the Cracking the Cryptic channel, which features two British nerds doing brutally hard sudoku puzzles. The algorithm threw it up for me at random one day, so I checked it out and basically spent the next three months watching it whenever I needed to wind down. I'd even watch a short video before bed, because it was so satisfying.

Books on Kindle

Another big corporation, but I have to hand it to Amazon for making so many books so easily available. I bought about twenty books all year, most because they were heavily discounted, and read them voraciously. Many were of series I was already reading, others were new suggestions from people I follow on Twitter, but it all made me happy, especially because in the early days the bookstores and libraries were all closed.

Some notable favorites this year were The Mortal Word, book 4 of the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman; Das Reboot, a discussion of how the German national team worked to win the 2014 World Cup, as written by Totally Football correspondent Rafael Honigstein; as well as The Mixer and Zonal Marking, both by Totally Football correspondent Michael Cox on the evolution of tactics in the Premier League and in Europe. But there were a lot more good ones that I read in addition to those.

Uber Eats

Another one I feel a little uncomfortable praising, but I can't deny that it's been nice to get food delivered to me this year, particularly as cases surged and it became more risky to physically go to restaurants. My friend got me a voucher to Uber Eats for my birthday, and I took the opportunity to order in a bunch of stuff every week, whenever I got sick of the taste of my own cooking. My girlfriend also grew to appreciate it, so now we alternate between orders on different services when we feel lazy or just in the mood for some Shake Shack.

The MCU

I wrote about this earlier in the year, but I also took advantage of being on my own to watch (almost) all of the MCU movies again, in order. I appreciated some of them more on the second go, others less than before, but once again, it's hard not to appreciate how well the studio managed such a long, sustained streak of decent films over more than a decade. And it was just reassuring to come back each night to catch up on what Captain America or Iron Man or whoever was doing.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Another great discovery for the year, this time thanks to Netflix. It fit into the trend of recent years where I've found older cartoons that are layered enough for adults to enjoy, like the Bruce Timm DC shows of the 90s. And because its voice director was Andrea Romano, it became a thing for me every episode to pause and see how many big names lent their voices to the show (like, um, Serena Williams). I also recently went back to watch the emotional "Tale of Iroh" from second-season episode, Tales of Ba Sing Se, and it nearly broke me. I've moved on to Legend of Korra, which isn't quite the same, but it's nice to explore that world again.

Mario Kart Tour

Another one I've written about, but playing Mario Kart has been a nice way to spend time with my honey that wasn't just watching Netflix. It's a little later than the others, since I only started it in October, when we shifted to my place from hers, but I've had fun building up my karts and drivers, and learning the various courses. It's worth saying, as well, that my initial assessment still stands: the game personifies the dog-eat-dog nature of modern capitalism quite well...

Foothills Park

The final entry on this list is my local open air zone. It was actually closed for a while early in the pandemic, and when it did open, it did so only on weekdays, so that the first time I went was on an afternoon off in May. I've gone a few more times since it fully reopened, and it's just been so nice to walk in nature, feeling far from my house and the path I've beaten into the suburban streets around my neighborhood.

There are, of course, other places to walk, but it's the closest, so that I can take just a couple of hours to drive up and enjoy the scenery all to myself.

You'd think solitude is the last thing I'd want after this year, but more than anything I've appreciated all these items above for how well they took me away from my own four walls - even the YouTube exercise videos. I've been very lucky that I've been able to work from home and acquire everything I needed, without having to worry about finding childcare or entertainment for my kids, so my only concern (other than staying healthy) has been staying sane.

With luck, the vaccines trickling into society mean we won't have to do this much longer, but I hope you've all found things that similarly helped you through... 

Year in Review 2020: The Hits Keep Coming

In preparation for this post, I re-read two posts that I wrote back in January: one looked back at the decade just gone, and the other looked forward to the year to come. The one about the 2010s talked about how my life had changed during that time, while the other considered what was likely to happen in politics.

They both feel incredibly far away right now.

I have to say, though, despite the title of this post, I can't say the year has been an especially awful one for me personally. I'm very lucky to have a salaried position that allows me to work from home; I'm also lucky to have a place to live and a lovely girlfriend with whom I've been cohabiting for the last few months, so I don't even have to stave off loneliness the way I did in the first few months of the pandemic. I did lose two relatives to the coronavirus, so I won't claim I'm unscathed, but again - many people have had worse years than I have.

I'm also happy to report that my worries about the 2020 election, as outlined in the post about what 2020 would hold, didn't bear fruit. The US elected Joe Biden as a pretty clear repudiation of Trump and his assault on the administrative state, so while the patient is still in danger, at least the blood loss and trauma is slowed.

Though not stopped: the year began with the impeachment trial in Congress, where the House voted along party lines to impeach, and the Senate voted along party lines (except for Mitt Romney) not to remove Trump from office. If the pandemic hadn't distorted American life, it's scary to think what Trump and his coterie would have gotten up to before Election Day, emboldened by the fact that the Senate wouldn't hold them to account.

I titled this post "The Hits Keep Coming" because this is just the latest in a long string of years where things have gone so, so badly. The pandemic may have derailed Trump's shot at reelection, but don't forget that it was so bad precisely because he and those around him downplayed it, ignored it and did all they could to stop the government helping the people who needed it the most.

It was also the latest year in which California saw apocalyptic fires and smoke, which turned our air poisonous and blocked out the sun for weeks on end. It struck me at some point that these awful fire seasons started affecting the Bay Area back in 2017, so they line up nicely with Trump taking office, though even I have to admit that it's more of a coincidence - the real problem has been mismanagement by our energy providers and a loss of preventive fire maintenance in favor of just hiring more firefighters. Trump's an idiot for saying we needed to rake the forests more, but it's true that our fire preparedness in this state has gone down the toilet.

The year was also marked by political and social upheaval, in another almost unbroken streak since 2014 or so. The reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests provided white supremacists and casual racists alike cover to vent their grievances against minorities, and provided Trump more opportunities to divide the country and fire up his base of extremely shitty people.

His loss at the polls probably even galvanized this shiftiness even further - talking about how the election was "stolen" has given his supporters a legend of grievance that I'm sure will resonate like the Nazis' "stab in the back" legend after the First World War. That, coupled with the Democrats' weak showing in Congress, implies that the US will continue to be ungovernable as a result of the GOP refusing to engage with political institutions.

The hope is that Biden will be able to accomplish something before the next midterms inevitably hand Congress back to the right wing. I've read pieces that suggest he follow Trump's playbook by trying to do everything at once, and not letting the sections of the commentariat arrayed against him to focus on bitching about any single thing, and at this point I'm hoping for any strategy from him (and from the rest of the Democratic Party) that will help the country move forward and turn fairer, healthier and safer.

On a personal level, I'm hoping to move forward with the writing, the fitness, my relationship and financially, as always. A lot of this forward movement I'm hoping for will depend on the course of the pandemic, especially since I'm pretty far down the priority list for getting vaccinated. I'll be surprised if I see the inside of my office again before June or so, let alone being able to get on a plane and leave the country (or even the state).

But luckily, my writing and fitness are things I can work on here at home. Something that living with the pandemic has confirmed for me is my need for structure to be able to accomplish the things I want to do - I may not have done all the writing I wanted to do, but the writing I did accomplish came about because I held to a strict schedule of writing most nights.

It's the same with fitness - despite not being able to go to the gym since March, I've seen my tummy slim down to levels I haven't experienced since I lived in London. This is an effect both of my religious adherence to runs and HIIT workouts on YouTube (thanks to the Body Coach, Joe Wicks!), but also the fact that my opportunities to snack between meals fell sharply once I couldn't walk to the Specialty's near my office and get my twice-a-week iced tea drink and turkey-swiss croissant.

It's a cliche to say that no one can tell what the future holds, but this year has shown us how true it is, and I think the chaos will continue to a certain extent. But hopefully everything can settle down for a bit soon - I'm tired of living in interesting times.

RIP John le Carré

Just saw the news yesterday that John le Carré passed away, and wanted to write a quick tribute to an author who was probably my favorite outside the SFF genre.

Because of my dad's interest in mysteries and thrillers, le Carré was one of the names I remember seeing on the bookshelves from my earliest childhood, along with Agatha Christie. I never picked up anything of his, however, until my early 20s, when I discovered copies of his two earliest books, hidden away on a bookshelf at our house in Italy.

I read A Murder of Quality and Call for the Dead, le Carré's second and first novels, in that order, and then went on searching for more of these books featuring George Smiley. Soon after I moved to London and found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, followed by The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, as well as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I didn't love all of these - Schoolboy I found a particular slog, and I also don't remember being so dazzled by Spy Who Came in from the Cold - but the ones I did like I liked enough to keep looking.

Part of it, of course, was my personal circumstances. When I found Tinker Tailor I'd just moved to London and was experiencing firsthand much of what le Carré was writing about. It's hard to really appreciate the London of the 70s when you're sitting in sunny California, but if you're actually surrounded by the flock wallpaper and hissing radiators it's easier to imagine the milieu that Smiley's traveling in.

Over the years I read a few more of his novels, but none grabbed me quite like those first two, or Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People. Still, there were also the adaptations - Tailor of Panama, The Constant Gardener and so on. I remember, after the latter movie, being struck that le Carré had done well to identify unscrupulous corporations as the real villains of the 21st century after the end of the Cold War. Indeed the reviews of his books from the 90s to now have focused on his anger at the more venal aspects of the establishment - whether it's illicit arms sales, pharmaceutical malfeasance or the War on Terror. 

A recent pleasure was reading The Night Manager, and contrasting it with the TV version that came out a few years ago. I'd say le Carré was rather well-served by adaptations, as the TV version of the Night Manager updated and streamlined the novel quite well, and Tailor of Panama boasted a wonderful cast in Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush. But the two best have to be the BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People.

Featuring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, these two miniseries from the early 80s are probably the most faithful adaptations of his work that I've seen - and when I saw faithful I mean to the spirit of the books, rather than slavishly following exactly what happens in the pages. The film version from 2011 is decent enough, if slow and a bit hard to follow, but doesn't quite get across the time period as well as the earlier versions.

Citing an author as an influence is always tricky, because we cite authors and books that we think make us look more clever than we really are. However, it's fair to say that le Carré and George Smiley are all over my current work in progress, a melding of spy thrillers and fantasy novels. My main character is clearly based on Smiley, though I hope it's not arrogant to say that I'm trying to say something very different with my own character than le Carré was with his.

Regardless, I'm sad that another author I admire has gone. He himself may have despaired of how the public assumed everything he wrote was how the spy business is in real life, but his gift was that his world felt true. Moreover, as I wrote in my blog about the Night Manager, he had a gift for setting his scene, and for bringing to life the worlds his characters inhabited. There won't be any more from him, but I'm reassured that I don't have to venture much farther than my dad's bookshelf to find more books by le Carré that I have yet to read.

RIP Maradona

Like the rest of the football-fan world I was stunned this week to see that Diego Maradona had died. I saw it on the BBC's website on Wednesday morning, so early, in fact, that when I googled it the snippet from his Wikipedia page that shows up on the first page of results still showed him as being alive. Since then I've been listening to football podcasts talking about his legacy, and reading whatever I could find about him.

I have to say, though, that his death doesn't hit me as strongly as perhaps it does other football fans of my generation, simply because I got into football after his heyday. In fact, I started watching with the 1994 World Cup, but only started paying attention after he'd been sent home for failing a drug test. So my knowledge of him comes filtered through secondary sources, of which the majority are English, so a little biased.

But I do also remember summer trips to Italy as a child in the 80s, and hearing his name mentioned almost breathlessly by various cousins. This would have been the period in which he was playing at Napoli, though I had no understanding of it until years later. And effectively, you can't deny that he did something impressive by joining a team that hadn't been that good and taking them to the Scudetto... twice. As someone said on either Football Weekly or Totally Football, it's hard to imagine the world's most exciting player of today going to some unknown team and dragging it to the league title almost single-handedly.

As for his presence at World Cups, what I know of him there comes almost exclusively from British reporting on the 1986 World Cup, which is hailed as both his showcase tournament and the best World Cup of recent times. Inevitably I heard about the Hand of God goal first, but to their credit the British media are just as likely to tell you about his second in that game against England, where he ran past five England players to score the winner.

That game took place in a time when it was harder to find out about footballers outside the country you lived in, so someone could pop up in an international tournament like that and blow everyone away. It was also a time when leagues in Europe weren't yet hoovering up talent from abroad as soon as it showed the least amount of potential, so a player like Maradona could develop his talent at home in Argentina before making the transition to Europe.

On the other hand, it was also a time when clubs just brought in players from abroad and left them to sort themselves out in a new country, which may have contributed to Maradona's downfall. He arrived in Barcelona at the age of 22 or so, which meant he wasn't particularly worldly yet, and his career after that was marked by chaos and misbehavior - one story I saw this week involved him partying with Colombian narco Pablo Escobar, at the latter's own prison.

Maradona's legacy may have also screwed up Argentina's national team for a long time to come. Ever since his retirement, any promising new Argentine player has been held up (somewhat desperately) as the new Maradona. Most haven't lived up to this potential, but the one who did, Lionel Messi, may be the unluckiest of all in this respect. He moved to Barcelona from Argentina as a child, with his whole family, which limited his ability to get into trouble (other than tax stuff), but that meant he hasn't been steeped in Argentine culture the way Maradona was.

Moreover, because of the world's search for the next Maradona, Messi and other Argentine players tend to be selected on the basis of their attacking prowess, which has left the national team pretty unbalanced with regard to midfield and defense. So while Messi is just as able to drag his compatriots to a final as Maradona was, he's surrounded by less accomplished players, and that may have made all the difference.

The other interesting point, made on Football Weekly, was in contrasting Messi and Maradona directly. The guest, Jonathan Wilson, called Messi's talent difficult to love, because it's so otherworldly, whereas Maradona was a completely fallible human whose talent was divine. I don't entirely agree, since Messi has always struck me as a player who makes you happy to watch, but there's something to the point that Maradona's volatility was part and parcel of his talent.

He was a good story because he was so chaotic and unpredictable - in the same match cheating egregiously and then scoring one of the finest goals ever. It's a shame, but also probably for the best, that we won't see a talent like his again soon, even if Messi surpasses him technically.

Covid hits home

A short one today, as my family has experienced two close Covid-19-related deaths in the past week.

One was on my mom's side of the family, in Rome, an old friend of my grandmother's from when they lived in Romania in the 1930s. They were so close in those days, and in the days after the war, that their children effectively grew up together with my mom and considered each other cousins. They're still friends to this day, which is what makes the loss more painful for her.

The other death is my dad's older sister, who was also my godmother. She had a difficult time of it from an early age, with her interest in painting curtailed by mental illness that plagued her through her life. Between that, and illness caused by decades of smoking, she had to go live in an assisted living facility several years ago, which is where our current plague found her, after several months cut off from her family.

Both deaths were in Italy, which has little directly to do with our current surge in cases here in the US. But for those gearing up to get on a plane to visit relatives, please think of who you're going to encounter while you travel. The people in the airport, or train station, or gas station might not believe in wearing masks, or might know people who think the virus is a hoax. You might not feel bad when you meet your parents, or cross paths with an assisted-living nurse - you might not feel bad at all throughout the time you have the virus.

But the virus doesn't care - it's opportunistic and fast. My aunt was diagnosed last week and was asymptomatic until this morning, at which point they rushed her to the hospital. She died seven hours later.

So please stay home. Take care of yourselves, and take care of others, by limiting your travels and visits to bars and other public places. The most vulnerable people in society - the old, the ill and the poor - are being decimated by this thing and so it's up to us to help keep them safe.

Messi vs Ronaldo - the other one

My walks, when not accompanied by podcasts, tend to be fertile times for interesting thoughts, and this past week I found myself wondering if Lionel Messi, despite being the GOAT, hasn't failed to live up to potential. Or if not failed to live up to his potential, then whether his achievements with the Argentine national team haven't lived up to his achievements with Barcelona.

This thought reminded me of another player I (unaccountably) think hasn't necessarily lived up to his potential, which is to say Ronaldo. But not Cristiano Ronaldo, rather the Brazilian player dubbed O Fenômeno.

Ronaldo, who was initially known as Ronaldinho (Little Ronaldo) and whom I now sometimes uncharitably call Ronaldão (Big Ronaldo), isn't necessarily someone you'd consider a failure, since he led his team to two consecutive World Cup finals (1998 and 2002) and won the latter, almost single-handed, as well as the 1994 medal, though he wasn't as involved in that tournament. He also picked up three titles playing across seven clubs in four countries, netted 352 goals and won the Ballon d'Or twice.

When you compare Big Ron to Messi, though, he looks a poor second in terms of sheer numbers: Messi has won 10 league titles and four Champions Leagues, all with Barcelona, netting 640 goals across 741 games and winning the Ballon d'Or 6 times. Though when you look at their respective international careers, Ronaldo comes out clearly on top, since he won those aforementioned World Cups as well as two editions of the Copa America.

Turning to personal perceptions of these players, it also comes down to my earliest experiences watching them. I still kinda see Big Ron as someone who didn't live up to potential because of how he completely went missing in the 1998 World Cup final against France. His poor performance in that match was a result of a convulsive fit the night before the match, but given my distaste for the Brazilian national team after they beat Italy on penalties in 1994, it was satisfying to see the juggernaut stopped. That made it easy to discount his role pulling Brazil to the final four years later, in Japan and South Korea (his silly haircut also caused me to discount his footballing prowess).

Messi, on the other hand, first came on my radar as a rumor from my friends who were more plugged into Spanish football, and then as a series of highlight reels spotted on YouTube. Probably the first time I watched a full match in which he played was the 2009 Champions League final, in which he and Barcelona dismantled Manchester United. And again, personal preferences colored my perception of that game, since I was annoyed at Man United's strong record against Italian teams (especially Juventus). The fact that he did it again two years later just cemented him in my mind as one of the greatest I've ever seen.

Personal biases and raw scoring numbers are poor substitutes for really gauging how great a player is, of course, though for most of us they're all we have to go on. The accepted idea is that Messi is the most natural footballer of his generation, while Cristiano Ronaldo (hereafter dubbed CR7) is the embodiment of drive to become one of the best ever. This implies that quality is effortless for Messi, and that Cristiano Ronaldo is less gifted; but of course Messi's perfection is honed by relentless practice, while CR7's drive to win and be the best wouldn't be possible without his ferocious natural talent.

So where does this leave Big Ron? The consensus, at least per his wikipedia page, is that he embodied the greatest talent, especially in his early years, of the last few decades, more so than either Messi or CR7, despite their longer careers and longer time at the top of the game. If nothing else, he boasted a 63.3% goalscoring record for Brazil, which put him ahead of CR7 (60.4%) and Messi (50.4%), despite them having both played more games and scored more goals overall.

The other reason it's easy to forget about him is that he shared the Ballon d'Or and other European accolades with other great players of his era, whereas Messi and CR7 have locked those trophies up between them for over a decade.

In the end it comes down to whether you think a player's club career or international career is more prestigious. Messi's titles with Barcelona blow out of the water not only O Fenômeno but also his traditional rival CR7. The areas where CR7 beats Messi are in Champions Leagues won, games played and goals scored for his clubs. Fairly or not, it also apparently looks better that Messi did it all with just one club, whereas CR7 did it with four.

But the lack of World Cups or Copas America will surely rankle with Messi, especially since he pretty much single-handedly dragged Argentina to the finals in Brazil 2014. Even CR7 won a European Championship with Portugal in 2016. But Ronaldo, O Fenômeno, beats them both.

Don't Be Fooled as 2020 Threatens to Come Good at the End

It felt like it'd never happen, but the 2020 election has come and gone, and it went to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There were a few nail-biting moments there, when certain states showed up with early Republican leads, and despite the calls from the likes of Nate Silver's 538, it was hard to feel confident about a blue shift from the postal ballots being counted after the same-day ballots.

The Election Day violence and intimidation seems not to have materialized, though that could be because no one reported on it (the intimidation, at least) or because the majority of Democrats voted by mail, meaning there were fewer people for white supremacists to intimidate at the polling stations. The attempts to steal the election do seem to have materialized, but luckily the Republicans (or more specifically the Trump administration) have been so ham-handed about it that even Fox News hasn't propagated their false claims.

My worry is that the relatively orderly election leads to a feeling of returning to normalcy for the incoming administration. The fact that the Electoral College didn't contradict the popular vote this time around, and the fact that the vote-counting infrastructure at state level were actually honest and not bought off by Trump supporters seem reassuring, but could just end up masking our system's in-built flaws until someone comes along who really knows how to take advantage of them.

This isn't an idle worry, since the "blue wave" we were promised didn't really materialize down the ballot. It looks like the Republicans cut in the Democrats' lead in the House (though without taking back control), and it looks like they're maintaining their lead in the Senate. With Mitch McConnell still leading the Senate GOP, we can expect four more years of obstructionism and zero-sum-game politics, where the Republicans will be playing to stop the Democrats from winning, rather than proposing their own agenda (and to be fair, this isn't surprising, since the GOP didn't even offer a platform for the election this year).

The other problem to think about is what all those Trump voters are going to do for the next four years. There are 71 million of them out there, and while they surely aren't all Proud Boys or whatever unpresentable group you want to name, the madness that the Trump presidency unleashed is going to poison our politics for a long time to come. If nothing else, that madness will come back in four years, when Trump presumably attempts to run again (or his daughter does, or Tom Cotton, or some other monstrosity), but the real worry is that they'll come back in just two years to grab the House in the midterms.

After all, the effect may be less pronounced than in the Senate, but the House is also prey to the demographic advantage the Republicans have by controlling the non-urban districts. And the fact that Representatives serve two-year terms means that the fundraising for 2022 starts now, with all the dark money presumably going to races that could prove decisive in two years.

In the meantime, the Republican stranglehold on the judiciary continues. It's not just the Supreme Court, which is bad enough, but they've filled more lower-level judgeships in the past four years than Obama did, so the pool for Biden and presumably Harris to appoint from will be very heavily Republican to start with. The big challenges to a progressive agenda are going to come from that quarter, so I hope the Democrats are taking it seriously.

On the plus side, Biden's win seems to have the Brits scared now that they won't have the US backing them up on Brexit. Jokes about him being Irish aside, I'd like to see Biden be constructive and steer the UK back from the brink of a hard Brexit, especially one that endangers the Good Friday Agreement - and hopefully it will also provide an opportunity for the political climate in the UK to calm down again after the last four years post-Brexit referendum.

My other foreign policy wish, though this is much more remote, is that Biden reverses the policy of the past two decades in the South China Sea, of pulling back its forces and allowing China into the vacuum. This policy has allowed China to bully the smaller countries and influence them unduly - an reinvigorated American show of soft power (backed by good-faith attempts to create trading and cultural links) will help show the benefits of good governance and provide an alternative to the Chinese Communist Party's way of doing things abroad.

And of course, the big thing on my mind is the coronavirus. Biden has already named a task force to tackle the pandemic, but it's clear that it'll be with us for a while even in the best-case scenario. As my girlfriend pointed out today, quoting from a tweet she saw, it wouldn't do to get the virus now, before we start to make actual progress against it. We'll have to maintain vigilance and avoid ending the shutdowns and mask mandates until any successful vaccines have been rolled out to enough people.

But with all those caveats out of the way, it's nice to see that things have a chance of righting themselves. I don't want to say "go back to normal", because the "normal" of the past two decades wasn't that great. But good governance will make for a nice start.

Mario Kart Tour: The Perfect Game for Late Stage Capitalism

I've recently joined my girlfriend in downloading Mario Kart Tour on my iPhone. While the game itself is fun, a nice recreation of certain classic Mario Kart courses and drivers going back to the original Super Nintendo version, it's also a cutthroat world where entrenched privilege allows you to skate over your competitors who have less means with which to compete, hence the title.

It should be noted, by the way, that the competitor with less means in this case is me, because I haven't shelled out the $4.99 per month for the Gold Pass.

Mainly what I mean with that tongue-in-cheek title up there is that, quite apart from the cultural divide between Gold Pass holders and others, the way races play out is a perfect encapsulation of how The Man keeps us all down:

If you draw in front, especially in the lower-speed 50cc and 100cc races, you can actually race fairly undisturbed. Racing at those speeds early on, I got a good sense of how most tracks are laid out and how to maneuver across the track to get coins or bonus points. I was able to do that because I was far enough in front that even if someone hit me with a red shell or a blooper, or even the dreaded spiny shell, I could still limp across the finish line well ahead of my competitors, who in the meantime are locked in a life and death struggle with one another for points.

Naturally, I see this as a metaphor for how in real life the upper classes play on a completely different level economically, while the rest of us fight one another for the scraps they leave. And they can afford to be generous, because we're more likely to tear one another apart than we are them. At least that's how it feels when I'm stuck somewhere around fourth or fifth place and trying to grab as many green tokens for the current Halloween tour as I can.

Then, when you do buy the Gold Pass, you get twice as many goodies from daily rewards as the plebs who just play for free. This entrenches your position even further, because it gives you more coins to buy stuff, more rubies to pay for Pipe Pulls, which give you even more good stuff (unless your pipe is crap) to help you get even further ahead.

Of course it's only five bucks a month (as my girlfriend reminded me literally a moment ago when I told her what I'm writing), and of course the developers deserve to be paid for the work they've put into creating this app. As I mentioned, it's a fun game, and the courses look great, even though I'm heartily sick of Maple Treeway by now (there's a blind curve that I always get wrong).

I'm not saying people shouldn't play it or anything like that. But I do find it notable that the real competition isn't among the top two or three spots in a race, but between second place and eighth, and everyone in between, and they're slowing each other down while the jerk up in first place is sailing blissfully on, not even worried about getting hit by a Bullet Bill (because of course those don't last long enough for the person in eighth place to get farther than fourth).

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to eke out another couple of stars from Maple Treeway.

Trying to Make Sense of Terrace House

Since my girlfriend and I joined one another's bubbles, we've been bingeing a number of TV shows together, especially since I went to stay with her for a few weeks. The big revelation for her was the richness available on Netflix, which she doesn't subscribe to (reasoning that Xfinity is expensive enough without adding streaming). Blog posts are surely coming on the likes of Aggretsuko, Narcos: Mexico and Schitt's Creek, but the first one we got into is Terrace House.

We're both Japanophiles, which is why she was interested in it, and so we started with the latest season. This is, of course, the season with the most controversy, since a contestant committed suicide after receiving torrents of online abuse. We both had an inkling of that when we started, but decided to forge on, since it's set in Tokyo.

Our first impression was some world-weary laughter, when the panel announced in the first episode that they intended for the season to end with the start of the Tokyo Olympics - the same Olympics that have now been postponed/canceled because the coronavirus. The next thing, for me at least, was the curiously low stakes of the show.

I'm not a big connoisseur of reality TV, apart from a season of UK Big Brother back in 2004, as well as Lost (not the JJ Abrams show) and Average Joe around the same time. But it struck me how Terrace House is literally just about hanging around the house and watching the housemates get to know each other. There are no prizes or competitions, and I'm guessing people don't become big stars off it the way they do after getting on UK Big Brother or something.

That's one thing that made it good shelter-in-place watching - since we ourselves have been stuck at home just hanging out.

Of course, it's also torturous because we get to see the housemates hanging out in this lovely big house in the middle of a city we both adore, and going to restaurants with amazing-looking food. We even got inspired by one episode, where illustrator Kaori and gadabout Ruka go on an ill-fated date to this place that does Tamago Kake Rice - seeing how easy it was (just make a bowl of rice and mix an uncooked egg into it, then season), we made it ourselves.

One impression that got dispelled early on was how well-behaved the housemates were. Because western reality shows tend to choose people for how they spark (negatively) off each other, we were initially surprised at how easygoing everyone on Terrace House was, but this impression wore off as housemates started having disagreements. The best one of the newest season was between Haruka and Risako, when the latter revealed the former's crush to the guy in question. Up until then the biggest drama had been between one character who seemed not to have any goals and another who kept calling him on not specializing in either his acting or his writing or his music or his carpentry.

Since finishing that series, or at least the very abbreviated run that's available internationally after Hana Kimura killed herself, we've gone back to the season just before it, set in the woods around Nagano, and we're pleased to see that the disagreements and drama have started already.

Another interesting thing to discover was that a few non-Japanese people get on the show. When the first two people left, they were replaced by another guy and girl, and in the episode introducing them, the guy is heard speaking in a different language than Japanese. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking in... Italian?!

That guy, Peppe, became one of our favorites on the show, since he brought a lot more suaveness to the house than any of the other guys on the show, and because his story is so ridiculous. A lifelong manga lover, he decided to study it in Japan, and learned perfect Japanese to do so. Asked how he was supporting himself he said he was modeling part-time to pay the bills while he got his career as a cartoonist off the ground.

I think we can all agree this isn't the natural order of things.

Anyway, if you don't mind reading subtitles and you don't mind watching people sit around and chat for an hour or so, Terrace House is a nice chill watch. It's just too bad that it ended the way it did, and in some ways the abruptness of how its run on Netflix ends makes it a little worse - we don't see Hana appear at all, just get a card at the end of the last episode expressing condolences to her family. Though maybe seeing her last appearances wouldn't have been better?

The Stakes of an Election

It's become a cliche to say that this is the most important election of our lives, because of the likelihood of electoral shenanigans and creeping authoritarianism that a Republican win will signify. This importance can also be a source of exhaustion, both from the relentless onslaught of media and social media that comes from it, as well as it being only the latest election that's being portrayed as a life or death struggle between light and darkness.

I find it interesting, and probably a feature of crisis capitalism, that Trump in 2016, Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008 all represented off-ramps into America turning shittier and more self-destructive, at least if you got all the same petitions by email that I did. I'm struck by how naive it feels to worry about John McCain or Mitt Romney dismantling democracy had they won, but of course that's how we saw it then - especially given that a win for McCain in 2008 would have represented a continuation of the GOP's policies under George W Bush.

It's also probably why so many people in 2016 thought that not voting for Hillary Clinton would be okay this one time. Donald Trump was so cartoonishly bad a candidate (pace Matt Yglesia's argument on Vox that he ran as a moderate; this may even be true, on economics, but not on anything else) that they probably figured no one in their right mind would elect him and that they could vote Jill Stein or Gary Johnson to their hearts' content - after all, we'd been told how destructive a Romney or McCain presidency would be for the dream of universal healthcare and environmental protections.

But every election I find myself thinking about a conversation that I heard back in 2006 in London, when I'd just started my job at Informa. This would have been before the Democrats captured the House and Senate amid the ongoing chaos of the Iraq War, and over a year since the 2005 general election that returned Labour's third term in office.

The conversation was between two of my coworkers, both gay men, who were talking about the prospects of David Cameron becoming prime minister at some point in the future. The UK press was awash in talk of how he represented a different kind of Tory leader - young, down to earth (insofar as an Oxford-educated aristocrat could be) and in tune with the concerns of the British middle class. He'd successfully replicated Tony Blair's trick of staking out the sensible center, though coming in from the right rather than the left, and indeed in his time as PM he didn't suddenly veer hard right: he maintained his own social liberalism and appreciation for Europe in the face of Euroskepticism within his own party.

The social liberalism is important in this context, because it struck me at the time how both of my coworkers were able to view the prospect of a Tory government without existential dread. There was no talk at that moment of the Tories coming in to take away their rights, the way there always is in America when the Republicans come to power. They were able to evaluate a Tory premiership on its own merits, rather than a threat to their actual lives, which struck me as so alien for a second.

I'd say the effect on my own politics of listening to that was hoping not only for a succession of left-leaning, social democratic governments here in the US, but also for an end to the constant back-and-forth of certain groups' rights being at risk every four years. My social media is full of people talking about how exhausting the past four years have been - a sentiment I agree with - but only a few of them acknowledge how people who are non-white, queer or simply just not male must be exhausted in this way as a matter of course, regardless of who the GOP candidate is.

It seems difficult to envision now, when we're probably headed for a civil war or a Hungarian-style illiberal fake-democracy, but it's worth dreaming of a time when both sides can agree on the basic humanity of the entire electorate. It'll take a consensus to not demonize the other side's views as unpatriotic and leading to the downfall of America, and that consensus isn't going to come as long as Twitter and Facebook are directing the public discourse.

But it's worth remembering that there's another world out there, a different way of doing things than the four-yearly crisis we have here (which is how both the Democrats and Republicans mobilize their respective bases). I hope that world comes here someday.

Freedom Comes With Trade Offs

This week the options to write about came down to two: either a review of Bio-Dome, our latest entry in the ongoing Pauly Shore movie season I'm watching with my girlfriend, or a dissection of Boris Johnson's comment that the UK is suffering more of a Covid-19 resurgence than Italy or Germany because British people love freedom more.

At 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, Bio-Dome is possibly the worst-reviewed movie I've ever seen, but it's still better than Mission Impossible 2. It also features a young Kylie Minogue, post-Neighbours but pre-music career, and I'm presuming her casting there led to a wholesale firing of her representation team, so it's an intriguing artifact from that point of view too. But I don't know if there's much more of a blog post to it, so on, with a heavy heart, to BoJo's comments.

I'm always aware of this fact when I'm watching, say, John Oliver, but taking on these sorts of statements is always a fool's errand. Doubly so for me, since at least John Oliver is on TV, whereas I'm just some jerk with a blog that few people read (Hi sweetie! Hi Dan!).

But the whole "freedom" thing is an interesting topic, since I don't think Anglo-Saxon people ever really think about the implications of it - though it's relevant in the context of Brexit, since Brexit is just a project where fat white people bellow "freedom" at each other without considering that not all freedom is created equal.

Or to be really cynical, we can take the talking point that conservatives in this country usually say about minorities (they only talk about their rights and not their responsibilities), and turn it back on them.

The main thing is that the Brits have done a terrible job of masking up, and they're now heading for a second lockdown, or rather a bunch of individual lockdowns, because they can't really do a national one again. The implications are that university lecturers, like my sister, are being forced to teach in person, with no real guidance as to how to do so safely (fuck you, London School of Economics).

So Boris claims that Brits are bad at surviving Covid, and at wearing masks, because they love freedom more than (benighted) countries like Germany and Italy, which had fascism during the War of course. It's a cynical comment, because of course he doesn't actually believe it himself, he just knows that it plays well in rags like the Daily Mail.

Of course, the Mail and other right-wing people seem to forget that society is a series of trade-offs that limit the freedom of individuals and groups, by design. In a society of perfect freedom, for example the Purge movies, you can go around killing and stealing and doing whatever you want, as long as you can hold onto what you have. Societies are an attempt to maximize the level of freedom for everyone by limiting the killing and stealing, but strangely even libertarians aren't complaining about the infringement of their right to murder people in the street (yet).

It follows, therefore, that other curbs on freedom have benefits for society more widely. We don't, or shouldn't, have the freedom to pollute, slander people or misrepresent ourselves to employers or others with whom we enter in contracts. Some of us still do, of course. We also don't have perfect freedom of speech, in which certain utterances are deemed not protected by free speech laws in various countries. The US remains more permissive than others, but even here, the celebrated "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" is expressly forbidden in the opinions of several Supreme Court cases on the limits of speech.

Masks are another curb on personal freedom that's beneficial to the society at large. I have the freedom to walk around outside without a mask, but I don't have the freedom to enter a shop without it (at least here in California). People agreeing with Johnson's verbal excrescences would argue that their own freedom is more important than that of some shop assistant or burger-slinger, such people being poor and/or immigrants, but a sane society judges that the freedom of the majority of people is more important than the temporary inconvenience of one person who claims they can't breathe in a mask made of <checks notes> old t-shirts.

Put another way, if you don't respect anybody but yourself, you have a lot of freedom. You can lie, cheat, steal and generally be Donald Trump or Boris Johnson as much as you want. But if you respect people, you willingly give up some freedoms - the freedom to cough on lower-paid people of color, for instance, or the freedom to help the shop assistant infect their elderly relatives with a disease that feasts on co-morbidities.

On the other hand, if you have respect for people, they'll have respect for you, and for your rights. So we come together as a society and willingly curtail our own rights, so that we can all get on with whatever we're doing that doesn't hurt others. So maybe it's not that Germans or Italians love freedom less than Brits - it might just be that we love our neighbors more.

Those who don't like that, are welcome to follow the lead of Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome and lock themselves in a hermetically sealed biosphere for a given period of time. We'll be interested to see how you get on infecting each other.

Openings: The King of Staten Island

One of the nice things about sheltering here with my girlfriend for the past month or so has been our movie nights on weekends. Between streaming services, her DVR and things we're generally interested in, we've managed to find some good stuff - for example, we're alternating between the films of Chadwick Boseman (RIP) and those of Pauly Shore. But one of the first we watched was Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow's King of Staten Island.

I think we were both intrigued by the trailer, and the movie itself is pretty good - it takes most of the good stuff about Pete Davidson and very little of the stuff that annoys me, and places it in a believable context of showing his character coming to terms with his firefighter father's death ten years earlier, and his growth from fuck-up wannabe tattoo artist to a (potential) adult. There are probably spoilers for the movie after the jump, so be forewarned.

Key Years

I've mentioned how I'm frequently rereading books and comics, or rewatching shows, that I've liked in the past, but I've been thinking lately about which media I'm consuming and what times these things are from. I've narrowed it down to three main periods that I keep revisiting, in some way or other. They are, plus or minus a couple of years, 1995 and 2002 and 2013.

The stuff from 1995 seems to be mostly music, comics and TV shows. From 2002 it's mainly books, and extending to around 2004-05 it's music. And finally, 2013 is associated mostly with books.

When I noticed this pattern I started thinking about why I kept coming back to these years, and the best I can come up with is that they were particularly key years, though usually for very different reasons.

1995 is associated with the best time in Britpop, which isn't just when I was experiencing exciting new music but also forming my self-image as a "European". I was getting more interested in European history (especially World War II) and languages, and starting to imagine what my life would be like when I could live on my own.

That interest in Europe and Britain in particular took in Premier League football, and the British comics I was discovering at the time. Of course, by 1995 Neil Gaiman's run on the Sandman was ending and Garth Ennis had finished his run on Hellblazer, but because I discovered those books around that time (actually even a tiny bit earlier) I associate them with the period. By the same token, I didn't read Grant Morrison's Invisibles until a few years later, but rereading the collections now I see how much that book was a product of its time: 1995.

The other thing I was into at around that time was Star Trek, so I can't help but associate that year with Deep Space Nine, in particular. In fact, I've already noted how my most recent rewatch had me remembering the first time I saw those episodes, i.e. 1995-97, rather than the second time in 2006 or so. About which more anon.

2002 is another key year because I'd just started my first job and was reveling in the actual circumstances of being a young adult on my own for the first time. I'd also gotten into travel, which meant I was fixated on travel writing in a big way. In a way every time I reread my beloved Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux books, I'm revisiting that period, when the world was opening itself up to me in a way that hadn't been possible when I was a kid and when I didn't have a monthly paycheck to finance such gallivantings.

In terms of music, 2002 itself was a little barren but by the end of that year I'd discovered the resurgence of guitar bands that had begun with the Strokes and the White Stripes. I was discovering new bands, both from the UK (like British Sea Power) and, in a first for me, from the US (like Interpol). At the same time, I was also discovering a lot of the older music that was influencing what I was discovering then, so I picked up Morrissey's post-Smiths back catalog, for instance, or Joy Division and New Order.

The next one is 2013, which isn't so much a year of a big transition as it was of a new feeling: actually being good at shit. In 2011 and to a greater extent in 2012 I'd found my feet at work much more than I ever had previously, and this trend carried on in 2013. I don't remember the football so much, and I'd kind of lost the thread of newer music by then, but what sticks with me most from that time is travel and history books. I've already written about it, but there was a whole sub-genre of books mostly by white male British writers extolling the wonders of one specific Northern European country, be it Germany, Switzerland or Denmark, and I was having it all.

The ones about Germany all seem to have hit around the same time, though I didn't read them all when they came out. However, I reread Germania by Simon Winder last year (preparatory to reading Lotharingia, his latest, this year), and I've reread Keeping Up with the Germans, by Philip Oltermann, several times since I bought it in 2014. Honestly, I'm kind of twitching with the junkie-like need to read it right now, although that might also be related to my Europe withdrawal, a result of not being able to get on a plane and go to London and Italy because of this stupid pandemic.

My 2013 nostalgia, by the way, is also manifesting in a desire to finish series I began or was in the middle of during that year. Last year I caught up with Ian Tregillis's alternate WWII trilogy, The Coldest War, and with Jasper Kent's Danilov Quintet, for example, and I'm still working on James SA Corey's The Expanse, though there wasn't a gap with those books as big as with the Tregillis or Kent books.

Now, it's also interesting to think about why certain years don't loom as large. 1997-98 is one, given that I'd just started college and was getting into a bunch of new music (namely all the gloomy Manchester bands from the 80s). 2006 is the other, since I'd just graduated from graduate school and returned to London to start Phase 2 of my working life.

For the former, the music just became part of my mental furniture and I've rarely been away from the Cure, the Smiths and whatever else I was listening to then. For the latter, all the bands that had become exciting in 2002-04 suddenly started releasing boring second albums. I watched a bunch of TV that was perhaps more admirable than lovable (e.g. Battlestar Galactica); or I started the big Star Trek rewatch that essentially continues now. And in terms of books, I have vague memories of a bunch of disappointing British SF novels and waiting for the next George RR Martin book to come out (which didn't happen until 2010).

Memory is a funny thing, of course. We all remember where we were when we heard about momentous events, but we also reconstruct otherwise meaningful times in our lives. By focusing in on those three periods, I can draw some conclusions about what was going on that perhaps resonates now, though it's best not to read too much into it - I could easily point to nostalgia for other books and series I was reading at the time, for instance.

Though I wonder if other people are so fixated on books, music and other media from similar significant periods in their lives, or if it's just because as an SFF writer I'm always chasing the high I got from reading favorite classics of the genre?

Writing Characters in the Chronicles of Prydain

I mentioned in my post about rereading Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago that I was eyeing up my old copies of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, and at this point I'm about a third of the way into book 5, the High King. I hadn't read these books since I was about ten, so apart from the odd scene from bits here and there I remembered nothing about them.

A couple of things jumped out at me from the start. One is that the books move fast - the longest of them, the High King, comes in at 286 pages, so there's not a lot of time lost charting the intricate political alliances of Prydain before Taran, in book 1, goes chasing after the oracular pig Hen Wen. Think of it this way: these five novels altogether are probably shorter than George RR Martin's first Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones, likely because younger readers are a lot less interested in the buildup to people hacking each other to bits with swords.

The other thing that I noticed straight away is the verbal tics of most of the supporting characters. The bard, Fflewddur Fflam, is constantly aggrandizing himself ("a Fflam is valiant!"), correcting ("if you take my meaning") and telling lies that make his harp strings snap. The Princess Eilonwy likens things to other things all the time, and Gurgi speaks in the third person about himself and others, and worries about his "poor tender head".

There are others, both for these characters and for others, but it strikes me as a quick way of letting the reader know who's talking - there are a lot of characters to keep track of so it becomes important that Fflewddur have a different voice than Eilonwy or the others. It also reminds me of a point the critic James Woods made in his book, How Fiction Works, where he described such motifs as a way of making a one-dimensional character work - by insisting repeatedly that she'll never desert Mr Micawber, Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield is giving a glimpse into her thoughts, which have probably involved deserting Mr Micawber.

The thing she - and the supporting characters in the Prydain books - repeats, becomes the defining feature, and while it's a single one that doesn't show her or them as fully realized human beings, it also allows them to come alive in a way that wouldn't be possible if the author were trying to give them that rich inner life.

Thinking about my own stories, the ones where I've differentiated the characters from one another more successfully are the ones where I've located an accent or a voice for them. That comes about from reading their dialogue out loud, so I suspect that my shorter stories are more successful in this regard than my longer novellas.

It's also worth noting that this is another example of YA literature doing something more economically (and perhaps effectively) than "serious" or "grownup" literature. Making a supporting character say the same things, or the same types of things, over and over isn't necessarily the best option for a character who'll be, for example, the point-of-view character for entire chapters, but without talking down or pandering to kids, it helps them get a quick sense of the character.

To take Fflewddur Fflam again: when he's introduced he's described as spiky-haired and spindly, a king who's so bored with ruling his kingdom that he went and learned to be a wandering bard. The lies he tells, which make his magic harp's strings break, reflect both his inclinations as a bard to make things more interesting, and hint at the idea that he's not so proficient either at music or at ruling.

Coming back to George RR Martin, he does something similar with the internal monologues of many of his characters, such as Ned Stark remembering the words "Promise me, Ned," which his sister Lyanna said on her deathbed. I've read some reviews that compared that to a musical motif, like in opera, though in contrast to Lloyd Alexander's characters it's hinting much more obliquely at the character qualities than having them repeat certain phrases or tics.

Beyond the characterizations, the stories are complex and sometimes quite dark, and discuss themes that fantasy authors these days are quite proud of themselves for addressing. In Book 4, Taran Wanderer, the reader is confronted with the human cost of all the wars and battles that populate fantasy fiction, and is also shown the pride and self-respect that non-nobles and non-combatants have for their trades, like smithing, weaving and pottery.

Apart from the lack of things for female characters like Eilonwy to do (and apart from the overall lack of female characters), such themes wouldn't be out of place in fantasy literature now, so imagine my surprise to learn (or re-learn) that the Prydain books came out in the mid-1960s. It also has very little echo of Lord of the Rings in it, which is another nice thing to notice, although surely Lloyd Alexander must have been familiar with JRR Tolkien's work when he was writing his own.

The books are simple, but they breeze along quite well and aren't (to me) embarrassingly childish. It's also nice to re-read one of the first series I was really into as a kid, talking about it with friends and my dad (who also spoiled the ending of Taran Wanderer for me). One of the nicest things as a reader of any age is getting stuck into a new series where all the books are readily available, so it's enjoyable to experience those feelings again.

Der Ball Bleibt Rund

It took a while to get here, but we knocked out yet another Champions League final today. The game itself, between Paris St-Germain and Bayern Munich, wasn't exactly a classic, but the tournament's format felt remarkably zippy, though it should be noted I didn't watch any matches until the final, because most of it was on CBS All Access (dammit!).

In fact, I quite liked how the last-eight matches took the shape of an American-style post-season, and I feel like UEFA could do worse than using the format again. The main thing I appreciate is how the regular seasons for the leagues had ended before the Champions League games started up again - in future it would be nice for the Champions League to start in the summer after the leagues end, with the league winners going into the knockout round, rather than the European tournaments taking place in parallel with the season and stretching teams that are participating in both.

Obviously UEFA won't go for that part, as the clubs themselves will also hate the idea. Currently fully half of the teams who qualify for the main tournament come from the top four countries, with another few countries sending multiple clubs to Europe as well. The richest clubs are already restive enough, threatening to pull out of their leagues entirely and just play one another - stopping them from spending their summers on promotional tours of the Far East and other markets probably wouldn't fly. But it'd be a fun idea.

Though it's worth noting how this was the first time in 16 years that a team from outside the top four countries made it to the final. Even more impressively, a full two teams from outside the top four (in this case France) made it to the semi-finals, which is uncommon enough. Though of course Bayern won, so the long winning streak of the top four continues unabated.

As far as the game itself, as I say, it was hardly a classic on the pitch. There were some good chances on goal, which both teams created, and I think it's fair to say that if Neymar and Kylian Mbappe didn't have excellent games, they also didn't embarrass themselves. I mean, I only saw one bit where Neymar rolled around as if he'd been poleaxed, so he's clearly feeling the gravity of the situation.

Also notable was the presence of two German coaches on the touchline. It's hard to draw a line from Ralf Rangnick to Hansi Flick (I tried) but while PSG's Thomas Tuchel is a Rangnick acolyte, Flick has played his own part in the reinvigoration of German football by having been Joachim Löw's assistant at the national team. If you count the last two finals, German tactics have been represented at the highest levels of European football for a while.

I've mispredicted this stuff before, but it's clear that the non-Rangnick coaches are in a bit of disarray at the moment, and it'll be interesting to see how they come back next season. But until then, football remains a game where 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and then the Germans win at the end.

Revisiting the Lord of the Rings

On a whim last month I decided it was time to reread my old copy of the Lord of the Rings. It's one of the earliest editions that collects all three major parts together - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King - and floating on its cover painting by Alan Lee of Minas Tirith is a shield reminding us that this was an upcoming major motion picture from New Line Cinema.

To give an idea, I bought it in college, and it traveled to Germany with me for my exchange year, where it subsequently went on a series of travels without me, as I lent it to a couple of friends who took it separately to Barcelona and Poland with them. It's probably the best traveled of my books, and it's certainly visited a number of places I've never been to.

It's also fairly dogeared at this point, both because of those travels and the fact that I reread it three times before and during the release of the above-mentioned movies, once for each film. When I started that project, back in late 2001, it was to look for the bits that I expected Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens to change when they translated it to film. The easiest to deduce was Fellowship, since it has that long section early on where Frodo and co escape the Black Riders across the Old Forest and then meet Tom Bombadil - a section that while charming enough in spots, even then didn't feel essential.

The point of all this is to say that I know the book fairly well, so like all books that one rereads multiple times, it was comforting and reassuring to slip back into its pages and paragraphs, like putting on an old sweater that you weren't expecting to fit.

I've talked elsewhere about the oddness of rereading books with a few years' distance, how I'm a different person now than when I first read the book, but because I've read Lord of the Rings so many times that doesn't really apply here. Though it was interesting where I found myself most interested in the narrative and prose, and where I found myself switching off a bit.

As I recalled, my favorite bits have always been the ones most concerned with the Hobbits and the Shire (although Part 2 of Towers, which follows Frodo, Sam and Gollum sneaking into Mordor, is one of the bits that drags for me). The Scouring of the Shire, for instance, is one of my very favorite parts and I always thought it too bad that the movies couldn't include it, though Return's ending is long enough in movie form without adding a further hour of the Hobbits' return to find their homeland changed for the worse.

The other parts that I thought dragged a bit were the battles in Return, on the Pelennor and the Ride of the Rohirrim. Tolkien's register changes from the simple, charming and almost folksy language of the sections focused on the Hobbits into what generations of less talented fantasy writers have tried to recapture - though it's worth noting that as a professor of Old English at least Tolkien, unlike David Eddings, gets his "thees" and "thous" right.

But the parts with the Rohirrim riding to war feel overwrought now, as if he's trying to recapture some of the flavor of the Old Testament, which would be okay except it gets tiring after a while.

More interesting though is the question of what place LoTR has, or should have, in the fantasy "canon". I'm putting that in quotation marks because I've been seeing some debates on Twitter about how important the canon is to new fans and writers of science fiction. For some the question of canon raises the uncomfortable specter of gatekeeping, where not having read a certain "foundational" text means you can't be a "true" fan; for others the canon as constituted contains too many authors of one type (white, male, heterosexual, etc) and not enough other demographics.

For myself I lean toward not really caring if something is a foundational text of the genre or not - I've read Dune and a fair amount of Asimov and Philip K Dick, but very little Heinlein or Clarke (other than the 2001 books and Childhood's End), but no Moorcock - so does that mean my education is lacking? I have read a couple of Octavia Butler's novels, though, so maybe it isn't? I find this discussion boring and would rather share the good stuff about it rather than engaging in ever more bad-tempered culture wars over it.

So if you ask me whether LoTR should be part of the fantasy "canon", I'd tell you to un-ask the question. Reading the story itself, and especially the 100+ pages of linguistics, legends and so forth that comprise its appendices, it becomes clear that Lord of the Rings only spawned the epic fantasy genre by accident, and that you could just as profitably shelve it alongside mythology-derived books like Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (in the case of the latter English rather than epic fantasy).

Of course I'm guilty of perpetuating the second-artist syndrome with my own fantasy stories, which clearly owe a lot to Tolkien. Like Terry Brooks or Tad Williams or Guy Gavriel Kay, I'm engaging in a conversation with the earlier work and seeing for myself what makes it tick, but it's so easy for that engagement to fall into mimicry. That, of course, is the fatal flaw of the whole genre - and if you don't believe me, just read Joe Abercrombie's Third Law trilogy, which can't get away from LoTR even as it skewers and questions everything about it.

I also can't help thinking of China Miéville's dueling viewpoints on the book. On the one hand he calls it a wen on the arse of fantasy literature, needing to be lanced; on the other he grudgingly admires how it brings to life the Nordic mythology that inspired Tolkien, contrasting it with the Victorianized Greco-Roman pantheon that he calls sterile. Both can be true, and when you read some of the worst excesses of the genre (not naming names) it's hard not to agree with Miéville.

Taken on its own, of course it's old-fashioned (though not always cliche, in contrast with certain of the choices that the movies make). And not only old-fashioned, but quite uncomfortably racist, when he talks about the "evil" Southrons and Easterlings, the mingling of the Dúnedain with "lesser" men and the "foul" Orcs. There's loads more, and it's always made me uncomfortable, though I also appreciate that there was a different cultural context for talking about "evil" races that way.

At the same time, Tolkien still manages to partly humanize even a couple of Orcs, when they're talking about how the ongoing war affects them personally. It doesn't make up for the weird racism or the outright erasure almost all women from any pivotal role in the story (yes, spare me your Eowyns), but it's clear there's more to it than the detractors would like you to think.

So I'd argue that any newcomers to the book approach it from the viewpoint of English fantasy - go read some Norse mythology (or even Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology), Susanna Clarke and a translation of the Edda or the Kalevala, rather than lumping it with the Sword of Shannara, the Wheel of Time or Prince of Thorns or something. All of those newer books have their good points, but Tolkien's most famous work probably deserves to be read in a different, more scholarly context.

Message to Joe Biden: Pick Bailey Warren as VP

The topic came up in conversation with my girlfriend this weekend, but I wanted to throw out a suggestion for Joe Biden's vice-presidential pick. I know he's said he wants to pick a female running mate, but I think Elizabeth Warren's dog Bailey should be on the ticket.

Canvassing for Warren in Iowa. Source: Getty Images

I have clearly taken leave of my senses, but if you'll humor me for a second, until the orderlies drag me away, Bailey is a good dog. He marches for progressive causes, and he's in favor of redistribution of wealth, as evidenced by that time he stole a burrito from Senator Warren's staffer. The fact that he has no legislative or governing experience is a bit of a knock, but that means there are also no prior votes that would be difficult to defend.

One also presumes that, as the dog of a noted policy wonk like Warren, he'd have a better grasp of both the issues and their underlying causes than about 90% of other potential candidates.

He's also likely to have appeal across the aisle. He's a big, fuzzy, rambunctious dog, with a friendly smile and a nice golden coat. Golden retrievers originally came from Scotland, sure, but it's hard to imagine a more all-American breed, well-suited to the outdoors and to hunting. There may be some type of person who'd look at the face of a golden retriever and think, "No, I'd rather vote for the guy who doesn't even have a pet", but to be honest, I don't think the Democrats are going to get that person anyway.

The only problem I can really see is that Biden then loses the nationwide cat vote, but - without meaning to generalize here - cats aren't known for their reliable voting habits. I mean, when was the last time you saw a cat at a polling station?

Naturally, this is just a suggestion. I'm sure the Biden campaign has all kinds of lists drawn up of potential running mates. But I wanted to flag up one that they may have overlooked, who not only sat in for Warren during the impeachment trial and who the Des Moines Register called "a natural closer".

The Many Faces of John Constantine

My long-term reread of my comics collection has long since arrived at Vertigo, and I'm coming to the end of Hellblazer, which was one of my favorite comics back around 1999-2002 or so (though based primarily on storylines from years earlier). It seemed the obvious choice after reading Animal Man, Doom Patrol and (especially) Swamp Thing, where Constantine first appeared during Alan Moore's run on that series.

I've always found it interesting how Vertigo arose out of those comics that were doing interesting things with established DC characters. The first, who predated Vertigo by years, was Swamp Thing, when Alan Moore turned the character into a parable on environmentalism and on how screwed up America is (oh, if only the Alan Moore of 1982 could see us now). But then Grant Morrison went and did crazy things with both Animal Man and Doom Patrol, while Neil Gaiman grew the 1940s obscurity of the Sandman into one of the best comics ever created.

Hellblazer always had a weird position in that family of titles, since John Constantine showed up in all the magic-related books at some point, but wasn't himself a long-standing character who'd been forgotten for decades. It was also the title's bad fortune to be published alongside the books that were getting all the buzz (from the Sandman to Preacher to Transmetropolitan and beyond), and to be a sort of springboard for lesser-known British writers to make their mark in American comics.

The first case in point is Jamie Delano, who wrote most of the first 40 issues. He's a fine writer, and his first nine issues in particular are brilliantly atmospheric. He set the tone of commenting on the moral decay of Britain that he was observing, and started fleshing out the character from the occult wideboy that Moore envisaged.

But Delano is one of the great unsung writers of Vertigo - his name appeared on a multitude of ads for new Vertigo series, but none of them really ever made that much of a mark. So there may have been some disappointment from the fans that it wasn't Moore writing the book. Couple that with some of the very "deep England" storylines that Delano was writing, like the Fear Machine, which depicted modern-day pagans and hippies and Ley lines, and it was probably a very hard sell for American readers (though the atmosphere of the Fear Machine storyline stuck with me so much that, years after reading it, I was reminded of it very forcefully when I passed some sort of commune in Camberwell in 2018).

Garth Ennis was the next writer on the book, and my suspicion is that his is the defining run for most fans, at least given how many of his storylines were collected in trade paperback form at the time he was writing it. Revisiting those issues, it's interesting to see how many of Ennis's themes are already present, including his rage against self-serving people in power, as well as how much backstory he creates for Constantine separate from the backstory Delano created.

It's also funny how, despite being such a writer-driven book, it really took off when the late, lamented Steve Dillon took over as artist from Will Simpson. Ennis is a writer who demands a certain intestinal fortitude from his artists, but when he links up with one who fits him well, they hit the stratosphere together. Put plainly, Dillon drew the blood and guts so well that it spurred Ennis on to make things even more gross and horrifying - a sort of competition that led to them working together on Preacher, which became one of Vertigo's best books as it moved further away from the main DC universe.

(Even to this day, it feels weird to read a Garth Ennis book that isn't drawn by Steve Dillon - which makes the latter's death in 2016 even sadder for me)

Ennis's run did have something in common with Delano's, beyond the character, and that's the contemporary politics. One of the main subplots was around racist groups, which underlay a lot of Ennis's issues and played out in his final storyline, Rake at the Gates of Hell. What's also notable about that, and the look at far-right politics in Paul Jenkins's subsequent run, is how little has changed with regard to racism and the BNP and English Defence League et al, in today's Britain.

As mentioned, Paul Jenkins took over after Ennis, and went in a more consciously English-mysticism direction, more in common with Delano's run. He also created a new history and supporting cast for Constantine, though I suspect he referred to more of Ennis's plot lines than Ennis did to Delano's. There's a lot to like about the Jenkins run on Hellblazer, but it's sadly overlooked, possibly because he wasn't as bloodthirsty as Ennis or Warren Ellis, who followed him. I also suspect that Jenkins was too English for the American readers, like Delano.

Warren Ellis is another writer whose tics and preoccupations are all over his run of the book. Rereading his only major story arc, Haunted, it's long on atmosphere and gore, but not necessarily on plot. He tries to turn "London" into a character, but with my jaded 41-year-old eyes it feels a bit cliche, especially because he was writing during those sunlit uplands between the Labour general election victory of 1997 and the Iraq War - London was cleaning up and becoming more the stomping grounds of Baddiel and Skinner's Three Lions than Derek Raymond's I Was Dora Suarez.

(BTW I only know about Raymond because Ellis name-checked him in a blog post)

Ellis also creates his own backstory for Constantine over his ten issues, of which I have eight, but he does a good job, despite my criticism of the noir above, of balancing the magic with Constantine's innate scheming nature. Other writers portray him as less powerful than Ellis does, but Ellis shows him using overt magic in a way that adds to the mystique of the character.

Brian Azzarello, the next writer after Ellis, went way in the other direction in his run. He also took Constantine more fully into the US, because Azzarello's American and wasn't as steeped in London as his predecessors. This may have something to do with why that's my least favorite run (of the ones I know), and why I stopped reading the book during that time. This isn't to say that Azzarello wrote the character badly, apart from not nailing John's accent - but he's a crime writer more than a horror writer, and so it never really gels for me.

I lost sight of the book after that, though I remember hearing when Mike Carey took over, and then subsequently when Peter Milligan did. I've seen recently that the book has been revived, and Si Spurrier is the new writer, taking in themes like Brexit Britain, the way Boris Johnson is literally fucking the country over, and so on. I no longer have a local comic shop, and due to the coronavirus, it's possible local comic shops won't exist anymore - but I'm intrigued enough that I might look to pick up a few new issues or collections when I can.

Constantine is a good lens through which to talk about what's happening in Britain now, and while that may have stopped the book from ever taking off the way Sandman or Preacher did, I love that it's the one remaining link to the late 1980s, before Vertigo even existed, and now after the Vertigo line has been discontinued. At any rate, I'm glad there's still a book for interested viewers of his short-lived NBC show and of Legends of Tomorrow to explore (btw, Matt Ryan is a great Constantine).

10 Things I'm Looking Forward To

I don't think it's radical to say that I'm missing certain things I used to do before the pandemic. Nor are any of the below peculiar to me - indeed, I think a lot of people are already enjoying many of these things, whether because they live in places that have opened up, or because they live in places that never properly closed down.

Now, the one thing missing from this list is seeing my girlfriend, and that's because she's been spending weekends here with me lately. Having her here is the most important thing of all, and it means waiting for these other things is more bearable.

Getting a drink at the pub: I'm not the biggest drinker, and it's been a while since I've been able to do this, but what I'd really like is one of those lazy Sunday afternoons like I used to get in London, where I'd meet a friend or two, get a nice pub lunch and settle in to watch one or two Premier League matches. The pub lunches would be traditional Sunday roast dinners - roast beef, vegetables, mash and gravy, and my personal favorite part, Yorkshire puddings. I'd wash the food down with a glass or two of Coke, then with belly comfortably lined, I'd switch to a couple of beers. And at the end, not too badly off after the beers and food, I'd ramble home on the train or the tube, full and happy.

Seeing my friends in person: this is kind of allied to the one above, but it's a little more general - I'd love to be able to get together with a group of friends, in a pub or a restaurant or someone's house, and not have to worry about where they've been, whether they'll infect me (or I'll infect them), etc. I've seen my sweetie a few times in the last month, and I've seen my mom and stepdad once, but it'd be great to have dinner, a game night, anything like that.

Getting on a plane: It's funny, given how obnoxious the process of flying anywhere has become since 2001, with every year a new indignity or fee to pay, but what's undimmed is my excitement at being in an airport, getting on a plane and getting to land somewhere new. Or if not somewhere new, then getting back to someplace that I know - it could be Orange County, London, Turin or a new spot like Singapore, Buenos Aires or Tokyo. And while it's being somewhere new that I really miss, settling in for my flight ritual (getting headphones, iPad and book out for easy access, shedding layers I won't need, etc) always means I'm going somewhere new.

Going to a football match: I mentioned watching games on TV earlier, but I also can't wait for the day when I can go to a match in person. And if I say football match, take it as read that I'd like to be able to go to a baseball game or an NFL game or a hockey game too. I wasn't a great one for going to matches when I lived in London, but on the occasions I did go it was a nice way to spend an afternoon - especially when I took friends to see Fulham play at Craven Cottage in West London. They happened to be the cheapest tickets available in the Premiership at the time, and if you went at the start of the season, the location along the river and the family atmosphere was extraordinarily agreeable. And if the quality of MLS isn't quite as high, I'm equally looking forward to catching an Earthquakes game at Avaya Stadium here in Santa Clara.

Sitting at a cafe with a book: this one isn't something I do much here, but it's something I love doing when I'm out of town. I remember some good stops at cafes in Buenos Aires and in Paris, especially after some epic walks through the towns. The one in Buenos Aires was notable for a weird reason (someone had slipped me a fake banknote, though I had a real one to give the waitress when I paid) and for a lovely reason, which is that the hot chocolate and croissant I had were so tasty.

Going to the movies: again, I'm not the only person who misses going to the movies. But it's worth saying - watching a movie in a darkened room on a huge screen, among loads of people who are just as excited about it as me, is something else I'm looking forward to. And making plans with friends or with my honey to go see something is great, but I also miss the times I've dropped in alone at the cinema on a whim and caught something fun, like Drive or Teen Titans Go to the Movies.

Walking down Piccadilly to the Big Waterstones: this one takes in a few different things. First is browsing bookshops for fun - I've mentioned the Big Waterstones, which is my favorite bookstore in the world, but I equally miss stopping in at Kepler's here in Menlo Park, or Books Inc in Palo Alto and Mountain View, or even the two afternoons I spent at Powell's in Portland. But the Big Waterstone's has its own ritual, which involves me taking in all five floors of books, including sometimes the cafe. Of course, there's a ritual involved before I get to the store - which is walking down to Piccadilly from Leicester Square or Tottenham Court Road. It usually involves a stop at the Forbidden Planet and Foyle's on Charing Cross Road, and it also frequently involves a stop for lunch along the way, and sometimes a stop at the British Museum (if the line isn't too long). Because I'm usually in London on vacation, I don't have loads of space for all the books I'd like to buy, but seeing the travel section, the fiction (and science fiction) section, and the history section always makes me feel good.

Taking a long train ride: here's another one that's mostly for Europe, though I'd love to do it here too. I have some great memories of taking the Eurostar between London and Paris, especially when I discovered that business class includes a pretty great meal (with wine!), as well as the route between London and Edinburgh or the time I took the high-speed train from Turin to Rome with my dad. But the highlight of recent years remains 2014, when I treated myself to the Eurostar and TGV from London to Turin, stopping in Paris to change trains, and stations. I'd sprung for business on the Eurostar, so I got a lovely breakfast on the first leg, and for first class on the TGV for the second leg. In changing from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, I saw the French newspapers commemorating the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings. And on the second leg I was treated to a crossing of the Alps in grand style, soundtracked by the epic number of podcasts I'd downloaded to my phone.

Taking a road trip: here's one for the US. A tradition from the past few years has been to take a trip to the mountains during the summer with my dad - usually somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, otherwise heading up to Northern California and southern Oregon. We spent the end of the 2018 World Cup on the road, watching the final in our hotel room in Crescent City. But it also reminds me of the time I drove down to Joshua Tree for a camping trip with friends (later that same year, as it happens), and the time I drove up to the Avenue of the Giants for a half-marathon... races, incidentally, being another thing I'm looking forward to being able to do again someday soon. There's something so great about hopping in the car for a long drive, podcasts and music at the ready, and knowing that you're on your own schedule. And of course, having somewhere to be at the end of that drive.

Stopping randomly at the store for something: This is the final one, and while it's not the most important, it's also not the least important. Going to the store involves such a production now, between wearing a mask and standing in line to get in, that there's no sense in doing a small expedition - to say nothing of the fact that being among so many other people is still a risk. More than anything, the normality of being able to just run a couple of errands in the course of the day is sorely missed. While I won't be trying to force it, I can't wait for the day when I can stop in at the store for a bottle of Coke or iced tea, without a mask and without standing in line outside.

And as I say, I'm not the only one.

Immaturity and Self-Conscious Masculinity

Something struck me the other day as I was watching Ford v Ferrari on HBO the other night. I'd been trying to put my finger on it for a while, but it occurred to me that there was a quality to the performances by Christian Bale and Matt Damon in particular, something that felt very of-our-current-time. And about 90 minutes into the movie (side note: movies are too fucking long), the best I could come up with was a certain self-conscious quality to their masculinity.

It's a reasonable movie, by the way. I knew when I first saw the trailers the kind of portrayal they'd give the Italian characters, and indeed, there's a bit of skullduggery and cheating, and people saying things sneeringly in languages that our plucky American heroes (like, er, Lee Iacocca) don't understand. And of course, Henry Ford II gets away with calling Enzo Ferrari a "greasy whop", which, um, yay for casual racism - imagine a "good guy" figure in a movie saying the equivalent slur about a Black character...

Still, it's a fun movie, the racing scenes look gorgeous and the performances are entertaining. I joke about Lee Iacocca, but he's played by the ever-reliable Jon Bernthal, an actor I really appreciate. Matt Damon and Christian Bale are good too, though as I say, there's some tic to their performances that I'm trying to figure out.

The best I can put it is, as I say, self-consciousness. Possibly because being a man, in a world of men such as racing, is freighted with a bunch of associations that are a little outdated now. In the 1960s an actor like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen could stride across the screen knowing his place in the world, and the audience knew what kind of guy he was. Two-fisted, quick-drawing, irresistible to the ladies, etc etc.

John Wayne was expected to be the stoic rock upon which the world broke, and to protect the women around him, though "around" was a relative term because they were frequently not around (with the exception of something like True Grit or Stagecoach). He could play his roles that way because women weren't expected to be public, weren't expected to be doing stuff. Women in the 1960s were more likely to be homemakers (white women, at any rate), so movies tended to be made for the people with the buying power in the household, aka the men.

Ford v Ferrari has exactly one female character with a name: Mollie Miles (played by Caitriona Balfe), who is the wife of Christian Bale's character, Ken Miles. I'm not saying this to criticize the movie - after all, in that decade there likely weren't that many women in the actual racing scene, so you want to keep things close to accurate.

Nor am I saying it's a great thing, as the lack of women in spheres like that came from decades and centuries of diminishing the capabilities of women and actively keeping them away from such activities. It's simply the fact that because there likely weren't that many women working at Shelby American in 1966, there won't be many roles for them in this movie.

But it's hard to escape the feeling that Damon and Bale's performances are acknowledging these cultural aspects from the perspective of our supposedly more enlightened times. They don't go as far as Mad Men in depicting just how different those times were from now, nor are they as blatant (which is fine with me, because I've never been able to get past the third episode of that infernal show).

What stands out for me is the scene where Shelby and Miles fight each other on the corner in front of Ken Miles's house, and Mollie sets her lawn chair out to make sure they don't get up to too much mischief. At the end she brings them each a Coke, and they clink bottles and make up.

It's hard to imagine a scene like that in a movie from even 30 years ago. There were probably fistfights, but Mollie bringing them bottles of Coke afterwards is meant to underline that they're being childish, which is the default assumption of male characters in media nowadays.

As another example, there's Chris Pratt's character in... I was going to say Jurassic World but that's the same character as Star-Lord in the Marvel movies. He alternates between super-competent (bragging to the nerdy kid that he's the "alpha" for the velociraptors) and childishly stupid, especially in his interactions with Bryce Dallas Howard.

Again, it's hard to imagine a female character in a John Wayne movie dismissing him as being childish - at the very least I haven't seen it in any of his films I've watched. If anything, he's usually portrayed as the mature one, compared to his female costar in something like The Quiet Man.

Probably the other reason I'm thinking about male maturity and immaturity is a podcast I listened to recently. Because I've gone through most of my backlogs, I decided to check out The Art of Manliness, in the hopes of hearing people talking about interesting or useful subjects. One episode, from about 2012 I assume, featured an interview with a researcher who talked about a trend of immaturity among men in recent years.

He seemed to boil it down to them playing video games or reading comics, in lieu of setting up meaningful relationships with women or getting high-powered jobs or whatever. The discussion was fairly interesting, if a bit limited - he declined to talk about what female immaturity looks like, for example (his research is exclusively on men), and didn't really examine the role that our consumeristic and media-driven culture has had on infantilizing everyone.

And I think because of that he missed a key point about immaturity. Or rather, because he actually researched it and I'm some dummy writing about it on his blog, he failed to give the fully nuanced picture it deserves. Strictly speaking, video games and comics and sports aren't enough to drive a man (or any gender, frankly) to be immature - it's the role these things play in a person's life. I'm a grown man with a full-time job and a long-term relationship, for example, neither of which is affected by the fact that I read comics or sometimes play video games.

To put it another way, if I'm immature, it's because of certain things I haven't had to worry about in my life - raising kids, for instance, or illness or grappling with real poverty. And I don't deny a certain amount of immaturity - I'm sure I've said to my girlfriend that if I'd met her six years ago, when I moved back from London, I wouldn't have been quite as mature as I am now, or generally ready for the relationship, however we want to define readiness. At the very least I was a different person from now.

I don't doubt that a large number of people really are immature - unable to make sensible decisions about their money, their relationships or their jobs (and this is, again, separate from people who've had properly hard lives, and who haven't had the luxury of deferring these decisions). But I also suspect that now men are expected to be immature in certain things - to balance being competent in one aspect of their lives with being completely helpless in others.

This is, of course, kind of regressive against women in itself. To assume that women are the only ones who can properly take care of the home or the kids is both a weird backsliding to so-called traditional gender roles and ammunition in the Mommy Wars, where people shame women for not doing everything effortlessly.

To return to the original point about portrayals in Ford v Ferrari... I called the performances self-conscious, but it also feels like a trend you see in a lot of actors. It's cliche to say that men have "lost their confidence", and I think that some of that confidence deserved to be lost, but more than any value judgement, the reason I note this style of performance is that in future it'll be a clear indicator of the time period, just as surely as Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue is an indicator of the time period he worked in. I'll leave it to the sociologists to draw the real meaning from Matt Damon and Christian Bale's performances.

And hopefully by then it won't be okay to say "greasy whop" onscreen anymore...