In Praise of the All-Star Superfan Podcast

My podcast backlog is never-ending, especially when taking into account ongoing shows like Guardian Football Weekly or WTF with Marc Maron or any of the innumerable history podcasts that I've picked up over the last couple of years. That said, I always like to keep an eye out for interesting new shows, especially if they're in an area that I haven't been following much recently. I seem to get a lot of recommendations from Twitter, and the All-Star Superfan Podcast is one of these.

Hosted by two Irish guys, Alan Burke and Rob O'Connor, the show talks about everything to do with Superman. And I do mean everything: not just comics and movies and TV shows, but also games and even the Superman radio serial from the 1940s. They also manage to talk about other stuff going on in the DC universe, from other DC-related shows to movies and so forth.

So far, so good - but the reason I first downloaded an episode, over a year ago, was that they got legendary comics writer JM DeMatteis to talk to them. I had no idea what connection he had to Superman (it turns out he wrote episodes of the Superboy show from the late 80s/early 90s, which I remember vaguely), but since I loved his work on Justice League in the 80s alongside Keith Giffen, I had to check it out. Since then, I've heard them talk to a number of other luminaries, from Mark Waid to Marv Wolfman, so they're clearly more than just a couple of dudes recording in their basement.

I'll admit I don't listen to every show, since the stuff about the Lois and Clark show isn't a huge draw (though their enthusiasm for it is making me consider revisiting, even despite Dean Cain's turn toward alt-right idiocy). It's the same with the Superman and Lois show on the CW, which I didn't really take much interest in after the pilot, but they talk in such glowing terms about it that I'm thinking of giving it another shot.

That said, it's nice to hear them talk about general developments in Superman and DC stuff from time to time, or to dig into really obscure bits of Superman mythos, like the aforementioned radio serial. Indeed, the talk with Marv Wolfman happened because he said he'd only do it if they could ask about something that he hasn't talked about already a bunch on podcasts; they brought up the 1980s Ruby-Spears cartoon, and he admitted that this was indeed a topic no one else had ever asked about.

Also, God help me, I saw an episode or two of that show when it was on, so that should give you an idea how plugged into Superman I am.

Listening to the show always makes me think about my own fandom for the character. It's way more fashionable to say you like Batman, and traditionally my favorite individual characters were always the Flash and Green Lantern. Yet I've always had an appreciation for Superman, because his stories tend to be a lot more varied than those of those other characters: a Flash story is all about Barry Allen (or Wally West) learning how to use his superspeed in a new way, while a Green Lantern story is always about using the power ring to solve a problem. Batman, similarly, is always using his vast array of skills and knowledge to solve crimes.

Superman, though, is the only character I can think of (except maybe Todd McFarlane's Spawn) who routinely has to solve his problems without his powers. Lex Luthor, particularly since the 1985 reboot, is not a character that Superman can punch out, so Lex Luthor stories always require Superman to outthink his opponent, who happens to be the smartest man on Earth. It's the same with Brainiac and various other characters, though of course every once in a while you do get villains against whom Superman can cut loose - but the most notable of those, Doomsday, actually killed Superman. So you could say the punching part of Superman is the least fascinating thing about him.

I also love the different ways to tell the same stories about him: his origin has a different resonance depending on what time period it's set (there's a great novel by Tom DeHaven, It's Superman!, that goes back to the character's 1930s roots) or where on Earth he's supposed to have landed (Mark Millar's not my favorite writer but he knocked it out of the park with Red Son, which imagined Superman landing in the USSR instead of Kansas). In some stories he's always the last Kryptonian, while in others he encounters other survivors, which lets the creators examine how his US upbringing puts him in conflict with his native planet's culture.

My absolute favorite Superman story, though, is Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, in which Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, loads of other stuff) tied up all the threads from the Silver Age Superman continuity, from the 1950s to the 1980s, to finish up the Superman mythos before they got rebooted in the Crisis on Infinite Earths. It's scary, heartbreaking, but ultimately a loving goodbye to that continuity, helped by the fact that it was drawn by longtime Superman artist Curt Swan, who'd done a lot of the original stories this was based on.

The All-Star Superfan Podcast hasn't tackled that story yet, and I'd be surprised if they can ever get Alan Moore to talk about it, but I'd love to see them do a segment on it. Either way, if they can keep getting great guests, I'll be happy to keep listening.

Spoiler Filled Thoughts on The Rings of Power

For the last couple of months I've been watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and witnessing social media losing its mind over the show, mostly to dunk on it. Some of the dunking seems to be the usual bad faith, alt-right complaining that a fantasy show featuring magic and Elves shouldn't also feature people of color, but some of it comes from SFF authors I generally admire, or at least appreciate, poking justifiable holes in the teetering edifice of plot that the show runners have erected here.

So is it a good show or not? Should you watch it? I've just finished the last episode of Season One, having essentially had the big reveal spoiled for me (thanks a lot, juxtaposition of pictures with oblique headlines on episode recaps), so I'm going to wade in. Spoilers abound, as noted in the title.

Spotlight and The Thrill of Doing Journalism

So last week I talked about All the President's Men, and highlighted that plus Spotlight and The Post as some of my favorite movies about journalism. This week, lo and behold, Spotlight shows up on HBO Max, so with my endorsement from last week still fresh in mind, I decided to watch it again.

Now, whereas last week I talked about All the President's Men's distinctively 70s filmmaking, with Spotlight I'm struck by the legwork, as I put it then. The reporters on the Spotlight team are shown chasing down leads, frequently by showing up at people's homes and offices, working the phones, working the legal records. All of these are things they tried to drill into us at journalism school, though I'm not sure how well it all penetrated, at least for me, in all cases.

Certainly the stories I wrote, for the most part, weren't as important as the one in Spotlight, dealing with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the institutional coverup surrounding that abuse. I worked on one crime story, involving a robbery that turned into a deadly shooting, and made it all the way to the intensive care unit where the victim was being treated, before my and my partner's nerve failed us and we couldn't bring ourselves to hassle the victim's relative who was sitting by his bedside... certainly not for some stupid story for school that only our professor would ever see.

My other bite at the journalistic cherry was an investigative piece were another partner and I tried to establish whether the trash incinerator on the other side of the river from Manhattan was burning electronic waste. I had one good success, when I doorstepped the lawyer for the environmental group who'd turned us onto the story; he was quite impressed that after a few days of not being able to fit me in for a call, he found me at his office so he made some time. The rest of the investigation didn't go so well, which is probably one of many things that... I was going to say put me off journalism, but it's probably more accurate to say that it showed certain types of journalism don't necessarily play to my strengths.

The first instance doesn't bother me so much, for the reason I mentioned. The second one does, because when I watch movies like All the President's Men or Spotlight, it feels too bad that I didn't manage a good investigative piece. There were some factors against me, notably the impossibility of confirming something that the environmental lawyer was probably right about but also acting on his own agenda; also, my professor was pretty bad, since her way of teaching journalism was just to tell us to "write it beautifully" but not actually... teach anything. Yet at the end of the day, the failure is my own, and it certainly pushed me away from taking a class in the second semester on how to do investigative stories (I also didn't care for that class's professor, so I'm not super sorry I missed it).

Still, I fancy that I know enough about the legwork the reporters in Spotlight are doing that I can imagine what it would have been like for me to work on something like that. At the same time, I know from later experience that the pressure of getting things in quickly doesn't always work for me: I believe, or my work experience has led me to believe, that I'm better at putting together an analysis of what's going on, explaining why it's important rather than giving a running commentary on the latest developments.

What I just wrote may be true, or it may be the reason I give for why I didn't do so well in rapid-fire journalism. The job I had after J-school was probably not unreasonable in asking for 2-3 short pieces per day, but I couldn't seem to get them right, even though there were some interviews or discussions that I remember being proud of. On the other hand, a big problem was also trying to avoid rewriting all the press releases that came across my desk.

Something else that Spotlight emphasizes is the changing nature of journalism, into which I found myself ejected from J-school upon graduation. It takes place in 2001, and starts with a new editor taking over at The Boston Globe amid the declining circulation and revenues that came with the rise of the internet. The movie itself came out in 2015, so there was more than a decade's worth of further destruction of the newspaper industry, but the issues raised in the film are still valid now: advertising on the internet killed classifieds in papers, which was the real lifeblood of the industry. This led to the need to attract more eyeballs, which meant dumbing down headlines and subject matter.

To the film's credit, the new editor isn't portrayed as a marketer who's only interested in the bottom line, and he's shown pushing the Spotlight team to give the abuse story more prominence. But it's striking to see the seeds of all the things that have hurt journalism up to now, including a shot of an AOL billboard right outside the Globe's offices. The movie doesn't mention social media or fake news or polarization, but it came out late enough that you can fill in those blanks yourself.

Unlike All the President's Men, they do make movies like Spotlight now, which is a good thing, because it's important to show journalists as more than the amoral sleaze bags that some (predominantly rightwing) filmmakers like to portray. It's also good that the movie shows the legwork, the long hours and the long calls, that should characterize good reporting.

And who knows - maybe one day I'll manage to do something along those lines myself.

All the President's Men: They Don't Make Them Like That Anymore

Since this month is pretty light on things leaving HBO Max, my viewing has been a little more scattershot of late. Instead of worrying about what's about to leave, I've checked out movies on other services, or just about anything that caught my eye. Last weekend it was Everything Everywhere All At Once (which was pretty ace) and this weekend I'm rewatching All the President's Men.

The only other time I watched it was back in 2005, on one of the first weekends I was at journalism school. They wanted to show us an idealized version of one of American journalism's greatest hits, presumably to inspire us to reach the same kinds of heights as Woodward and Bernstein. I don't know if it necessarily worked at that goal, but it did inculcate a love in me for movies about journalism.

For one thing, I like the procedural aspect of it. You've got Woodward and Bernstein chasing down leads bit by bit, sometimes doorstepping a contact, other times working the phones. You see them taking calls at all hours of the day, grabbing food in between meetings, and getting yelled at by their editor for not having enough to go on. So from that perspective, it really does do what my J-school was hoping to communicate, which is the detail work and the tenacity needed to land an investigation.

The other journalism movie I can think of that showed the legwork to the same degree is Spotlight, which I think I'm due for a rewatch as well. That said, I also have a big soft spot for the Post, which is less about the procedural, nitty gritty of journalism and more a high-minded discussion of what the press is for. Probably have to rewatch that one as well.

Now, the main thing that those two more recent movies are missing is the weird naturalism of 70s movies that pervades All the President's Men. Part of it is technological, like when Woodward and Bernstein are driving in a car at night, and they drive through a deep enough shadow that the screen goes completely black, though you still hear their voices. Even into the 80s and 90s, filmmaking technology couldn't cope with dim lighting the way it can now, although clearly the director of this film probably wanted that shot to look natural, to the point of sacrificing the visuals. I don't think a modern film would get away with that.

Then there's the sound production. You have a lot of background hum, whether from whatever's happening in the shot or just the noise the microphones picked up back in the 70s. My favorite moment, though, is when Bernstein's talking to a source outside and a jet flies past, making the two characters have to shout. I can only assume that's on purpose, possibly even to evoke what happened when the real Carl Bernstein was having that actual conversation, but once again, you can't imagine a heavily curated and managed film in 2022 having that same feeling of artful sloppiness.

This is a thing that's always fascinated me about movies from the 70s. You start to see it in the late 60s, not only when New Hollywood directors were coming up but even in something like Bullitt, where shots were deliberately staged differently than they might have been just a decade earlier. The framing of shots and the way sound is recorded are deliberately done poorly (like lens flares), to make things seem more natural. There's also an odd quality to the way lines are delivered, which you wouldn't hear in movies now, again probably to sound more like how people were thought to speak.

It's gone by the 80s, where shots are framed in more traditional ways, although the first Superman film with Christopher Reeves, from 1978, is also shot in that more straightforward style, so it might be a question of what fits the content, too. I have to say, though, as odd as the framing and sound mixing are in movies from that era, I never quite get tired of it, even if the special effects aren't as good as now.

The other striking thing about watching All the President's Men in 2022 is how little has changed, and how much. We've just spent the summer watching hearings about a president's criminal misdeeds (the January 6 insurrection), and read about an entirely different set of misdeeds (the improper handling of classified material at Mar-A-Lago), so that's how little has changed - dishonest president doing dishonest things.

What's different, of course, is the willingness of said dishonest president's own party to condemn him. All the President's Men makes a point of having various Republican characters denounce what the Committee to Re-Elect the President was doing with regard to the Watergate break-in. I can't imagine future movies made about the current era being able to find quite as many Republicans willing to criticize Donald Trump, witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson notwithstanding. Especially when you consider that a lot of these supposed Republican critics of Trump are on record as saying they'd vote for him again.

I don't want to say that the events depicted in All the President's Men seem quaint in comparison to thousands of yahoos storming the Capitol, because going by the portrayal onscreen in that movie, the burglars hired by Nixon's people were just as incompetent as Trump's coterie. And one has to remember, the first time Trump was impeached was for doing stuff to undermine his rival, just like Nixon was doing. Still, it's not quite the same as whipping up a mob to kill your own vice-president and disrupt the electoral process.

Though if that security guard Frank Wills hadn't discovered the break-in, who knows what Nixon might have unleashed later on in his second term?

Separating Art from the Artist (Part N of X)

I don't really have guilty pleasures. If I like something, I like it, and I don't really feel embarrassed to like it, because I don't read books or watch movies to impress other people. That means my reading sometimes extends to genres or series that aren't high on the lists of the top SFF books of the year, for example, much of urban fantasy. I got into the genre through Daniel Abraham's Black Sun's Daughter series (which he wrote as MLN Hanover), and from there I moved to Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson books.

The books are silly, and perhaps a bit repetitive, but they're a fun, breezy read and a good way to get stuck into some female-written SFF, without also being bound to the Ann Leckies or Arkady Martines of the moment (much as I've enjoyed their books). Every once in a while, though, I stumble on some comment that Briggs puts in her protagonist's mouth. It's become a ritual over the ten years that I've been reading the Mercy Thompson books to note some passing comment and wonder what Briggs's politics are. Sometimes it's spurred by the comment that Mercy has a concealed carry license, or it might be anything else.

In the most recent book, it was when one of the werewolf characters talked about how high gas prices were. So I checked Briggs's Wikipedia page, as I always do, and found that there's no mention either way of outre political beliefs. This time, though, I persisted and found some reactions in the previous book where readers were disappointed that another character had voted for Donald Trump. I also found the interview below:

There are a couple of things to talk about here. First is the standard, and kinda disappointing, refrain that she hates both parties equally, which I've found is usually code for "I vote republican". It's tempered, though, by the very correct point that both the Democrats and the Republicans are completely beholden to dark-money - I may agree more with the Democrats' goals, but I'm just as uneasy with how much of the party is beholden to corporate interests and PACs as I am with the Republicans.

Briggs also makes the accurate point that the character in question, Mercy's husband Adam, is a white man from the South who was born in the 1950s, so what political affiliation do they expect him to have? The other source I found, criticizing Adam's voting, mentioned that he voted for Trump grudgingly, which is also an interesting characterization: in real life, plenty of conservatives have voiced displeasure with Trump but have continued to vote for him because they still can't bring themselves to vote for Democrats. Briggs doesn't mention that, but she could very well have been thinking about it.

The other important thing to keep in mind is that for all the conservative viewpoints espoused, there are also some pretty liberal ones. One good example is that werewolf who complains about high gas prices: he's gay, which she's used as a subplot in several novels to show how traditional werewolf society is still patriarchal and homophobic, but also an opportunity for the pack to evolve, by growing to accept him and his fairly elevated place in their hierarchy. The character's mate has also, over the course of the series, become a key ally to the werewolves, despite their long-ingrained homophobia. So there's some social consciousness to the series.

The final thing to unpack, for myself and those other readers, is our own reactions. Honestly, there's nothing that says complaining about high gas prices has to mean you're suddenly a member of the Proud Boys or whatever. It's true that in our rather febrile political climate, the ones most likely to complain about pain at the pump, or at the grocery store, seem to be more right-leaning (at least on social media), but high prices and inflation affect us all, and I've seen plenty of left-leaning friends express dismay at the price of gas. I'm not generally the kind of person who stops reading an author because I disagree with one or two things they or their characters say, and it's important to keep that in mind when reading these stories that might reference current events.

So the upshot is that I'm planning on continuing with the Mercy Thompson books, until I decide that the quality's gone downhill or Patricia Briggs starts having her characters give long explanations about how great Trump is. But given the tenor of the video I've shared here, I think the latter is a remote possibility.

There are definitely some Republican or Trumpist issues that we shouldn't abide in decent society, but let's also keep some perspective: characters can complain about gas prices, believe in concealed-carry or vote for Trump, but we don't have to immediately disqualify the author for those things.

Queen Elizabeth II

Just a quick set of thoughts on the passing today of the Queen of England, and the outpouring of solemnity and scorn that I've seen on social media, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last year, I wrote a similar post after the death of Prince Philip, which I used to talk about Elizabeth's legacy and what she meant to me and basically everyone else in the West. What I wrote then is still broadly how I feel, though I should add that quite a lot of comments have talked about how her death seems like losing your grandmother. These comments have revolved around a picture taken recently (maybe in the past couple of weeks?) of her standing in a living room in her palace, looking like a kind old lady, and I can't deny, there's a grandma vibe there.

Really, how could it be otherwise? For people of my generation, Queen Elizabeth was this presence who had been there for all our parents' lives, just like a grandparent. The fact that she kept out of the spotlight helped too: she didn't make pronouncements that pissed people off, she didn't throw her weight around. I don't think I ever even heard her voice until I was in my 30s.

As far as the mourners and the detractors, as always I fall somewhere in between. I can't relate to the more fulsome expressions of grief, especially here in the US. Nor can I relate to those who are celebrating, though I can understand why some people are calling out the colonialism that the Queen represented. The British like to pretend that they "stumbled into an empire", and that they were on the whole good colonial masters; they also like to pretend that they let go of the empire with equally good grace and little bloodshed.

What I do think is too bad is how Elizabeth's death is overshadowing the various crises engulfing the UK at the moment, from runaway inflation to widespread industrial action to an energy crisis that will ruin thousands of families this winter. These crises are all pretty much self-inflicted, when seen against the backdrop of Brexit; the only thing that isn't the fault of the ruling Conservatives is the war in Ukraine, but that's just shown up how unprepared and chaotic the country was.

The new prime minister, Liz Truss, has announced an energy price cap of £2,500 per year, but if you think about it, that's already a ridiculous amount of money to pay for keeping the lights on and heating a home. Beyond that, Britain is poised to renege on its own treaty by eliminating the Northern Ireland protocol, thereby also jeopardizing peace in the region, all because the Tories can't be bothered to maintain the agreement they made or to find a long term solution that works.

In my more cynical moments today, I couldn't help thinking that Elizabeth saw her moment to shuffle off, given the chaos facing the country in the near future. Certainly the political and social climate won't do any favors to her heirs, and in decades to come we'll probably look back on the Elizabethan era with a fondness that probably won't be entirely warranted.

Still, it's the close of an incredible era, with way too many cultural moments to count. It'll be interesting to see how King Charles III navigates the next few years, and how he'll diverge from his mother's way of doing things.

Quick Thoughts on Judas and the Black Messiah

Just finished watching Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to check it out earlier. As with so many movies and books in my various queues, there was always something more urgent to watch, but the spur for me to watch it now was the fact that it's set to disappear from HBO Max at the end of September.

The first thing to say is that the movie is stuffed with magnetic performances. Daniel Kaluuya is the most obvious one, playing Chairman Fred Hampton, but LaKeith Stanfield does a great job as Bill O'Neal and so does Jesse Plemons as FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Kaluuya and Stanfield have rightly been recognized for their performances, but I was struck by Plemons in this, how he's clearly evil but also, to an extent, conflicted by what he's meant to be doing. 

What I liked about his performance was contrasting it with his roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, which are clear opposites to one another, while in this film he's somewhere between the boy in Friday Night Lights and the sociopath in Breaking Bad - he has things he cares about, and isn't even completely unsympathetic to what he's asking of Bill O'Neal, but he's quick to harden his heart and do what his superiors order (with Martin Sheen playing a gross and sinister J. Edgar Hoover, making a nice change from Jed Bartlet).

Of course, it's perverse to write about Judas and the Black Messiah and only single out the white dude for praise, so let's be clear that Daniel Kaluuya is amazing. His speeches suck you in from the first scene, and the speech he gives when he gets out of jail was especially electrifying. Beyond that, I loved his relationships with Deborah, Bill, even the other gangs that he enlists into the Rainbow Coalition.

As far as the history, it's an era that I know so little about, even though the Black Panthers were founded just across the Bay in Oakland. That said, it's not surprising that a group that couched the racial liberation struggle in Marxist/Maoist terms would be hard for American culture to understand. But it was fascinating to see the organizing that they did, in addition to their more proactive methods of countering police brutality. It makes me want to find out more about them, because a cursory search on their Wikipedia page just now shows that there was a lot to the original organization, good and bad.

One thing that the movie elided but that I thought would have been interesting to raise was that Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton put together. He's depicted pulling together other Black gangs in Chicago, as well as Puerto Ricans and the Young Patriots, which look like a white supremacist movement, mostly because they're all shown to be southern whites and they're standing in front of a Confederate flag. It turns out that they were a far-left movement that also advocated class struggle, but aimed at poor whites from the South.

Knowing that, it makes more sense that Fred Hampton would have been able to bring them into his movement, but it would have been nice to see it spelled out better. The fact that there was a revolutionary group aimed at poor whites is a pretty eye-opening idea, since the portrayal of them on film usually seems to lean on the racism.

Of course, part of my problem is that my understanding of the 60s is mediated almost exclusively through Star Trek, Spiderman, music (Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel especially) and repeated viewings of Forrest Gump when I was in school. The latter, in particular, does a nice job of transmitting the atmosphere of the 60s, but doesn't go very deep, and none of those sources can encompass the wide sweep of everything that was happening then. So we end up with cartoonish portrayals of the Black Panthers or other movements of the era, without understanding what they were actually about.

That's why I liked this movie so much: it goes into a topic that I feel I ought to know more about, anchoring it around a fascinating personality in the form of Fred Hampton. And by showing us what was happening in the 60s, it lets us draw a comparison with how race relations are going now, showing how despite certain markers of progress, there are still the same power structures in place that led to Hampton's assassination.

As I mentioned, Judas and the Black Messiah is streaming on HBO Max through the end of September. I'd have liked to watch it earlier, but I'm glad I caught it now.