The Darkest and/or Stupidest Timeline

I won't deny that it's been very hard to be existential the last couple of weeks. The worst possible outcome of the elections came about, and now all we have to look forward to in the lead-up to January 20th is learning exactly how screwed we are. Matt Gaetz as attorney general? Sure! Some dum-dum from Fox News who doesn't believe in germs as Defense secretary? Hey, why not? The anti-vax, brain-worm guy in charge of Health and Human Services? The more the merrier.

All the good news at the moment feels transitory at best (e.g. the Onion buying Infowars), or a bit infuriating (e.g. Marine Le Pen potentially going to jail for misuse of EU funds). That last is infuriating because we could have short-circuited Trump's return, but we decided to dismantle all our guardrails for democracy and rule of law instead. So now I get to worry if the food I eat is going to kill me, and I won't be able to get vaccinated against diseases anymore. I'd inject bleach, like Trump suggested during the pandemic, but I won't even be able to tell if it's pure bleach or adulterated with some crap or something.

I did engage in one meaningless act of defiance (two, if you want to be nitpicky) and deleted both my Twitter accounts this week. There was a little hemming and hawing over conversations I've had over the years, but fuck it, I'd been inactive so long (except for posting links to this blog) that I don't even miss it.

Instead I'm now on Bluesky, which, yeah, feels a tiny bit like old Twitter, and also doesn't come with the soul-crushing negativity of the last few years. I'm following a lot of writers and interesting people there, so hopefully my timeline evolves past people comparing it to Twitter. That said, I have already had to block a fascist, just to give you a sense of how much the sewers are overflowing.

The best part is that I fired my therapist last month, because I wasn't getting much out of it and she kept minimizing my concerns, saying it was just anxiety. That may be true, but I caught myself wishing I could talk to her last week - until I realized that she'd probably just have told me I was spiraling again. If they do deport everyone in January, I might drop her a line again, assuming neither of us has been sent to Venezuela or been buried in a ditch somewhere in the Central Valley.

On the plus side, now that another pandemic and lockdown is pretty much inevitable, I don't feel like I have to defend my continued Covid-hoarding. Indeed, I may have to increase my reserves of toilet paper, paper towels and Kleenex boxes, ahead of any further catastrophes.

There's also the possibility of moving to Europe, but a good many places are already run by fascists (Italy), or are under threat of it in the near future (Germany). This might be the opportunity my dad's been waiting for, that I finally move back to Italy. Or I might try Ireland, which is apparently an expensive real estate market, so I'll feel right at home not being able to buy a house there. I also have to keep on my little sister's good side, so that if needed, she can sponsor me to move to Australia.

On the plus side, if I have to move to a place with fresh air, public transportation and single-payer healthcare, I'll probably get a million times healthier within a month. Which means more McDonald's! Also, I know where the Taco Bells in London and Sydney are, so I'll be covered from that perspective.

Hmm. Better pack the statins anyway, just in case.

This post started as an aimless brain-dump of my thoughts on the past few weeks and then turned into a standup act, so maybe it's best to end here. I'll be back in the next few weeks with various musings on TV shows, movies, comics and roundups of 2024, but I'll end with this final thought:

We haven't really had a good year since 2015 (which itself was pretty sucky for a number of people). My hope with the election was that we could move toward turning a corner, but now I see that at least the next four years are gonna suck hard too. I'm hoping to find ways to make them suck less, at least within my circle of control, but 13-plus years of suckage is a long time, there's no getting around it.

In the meantime, come find me on Bluesky!

Two Different Visions of 'Salem's Lot (And X)

I haven't read that much Stephen King, and I haven't read him in a while, but I absolutely loved 'Salem's Lot when I read it in 2003 or 2004. I read it at the right time to be primed for the updated NBC miniseries that came out in 2004, starring Robe Lowe as Ben Mears and Donald Sutherland as Straker, but it's also been so long since I watched it that I don't remember anything except the iconic scene where Barlow kills Mark Petrie's parents - instead of clonking their heads together, he spins their bodies around, breaking their necks.

These are the things that stick with you, 20 years after the fact.

I also knew that there was a 1979 version, but I can't recall how much of it I saw - if any. In any case, just before I left for Europe I saw that Max was getting ready to release a new version, so I put it down on my "to-watch" list, and dutifully caught it when I got home. My short review is, just watch the 1979 version instead.

This is exactly what I did, and the differences are pretty stark, even though the new movie is pretty indebted to the 1979 version, moreso, in some ways, than it is to the book.

The 2024 version suffers from two big problems. First, it is a single, two-hour movie, instead of a three-hour TV miniseries (as the previous two versions were). The pleasures of the novel come from the slow unfolding of the horror of what's going on, after we've become acquainted with the characters who live in the town and their relationships to one another. This new movie has pretty much none of that, so that the characters feel like they're on rails - they're just doing their thing as dictated by the plot, without it feeling like any of their actions are organic.

The other big problem for me is that the new movie is set in the 1970s, as the book and the first miniseries were. I love a well-done period piece, but this version suffers from the same issue that a lot of 70s-set movies made in modern times do, which is throwing in 70s signifiers to really hammer home what decade we're in. In the 1979 version, Ben Mears drives a jeep, but in the 2024 version he drives a sort of Impala that is intended to scream 1970s. The 2004 doesn't have this problem, because it sets the story in the present.

There's another issue with Ben Mears, which is his age. David Soul was 36 when he played the character in the 1979 version, while Lewis Pullman is 31 in this year's version. Five years doesn't seem like much, but it does give you a change in perspective, as you start to see middle age on the horizon - and it's particularly important here, because of Ben's backstory as (supposedly) a grieving widower. I say "supposedly", because the 2024 version doesn't give Ben any of that backstory - he's just some guy who lived in the Lot as a kid and came back. This version also takes away his interest in the Marsten House, which is the thing that brings him back to the Lot in the other versions.

I don't particularly begrudge other changes the new version makes. It may have been more true to life that the only Black character in the 1979 version was one of the gravediggers - and he has, at best, one line in a single scene. But the actor that was cast as Mark Petrie is pretty good, and I'm never going to complain about Alfre Woodard in a role (here she replaces Jimmy Cody, Ben's first ill-fated sidekick in the book).

But overall, the better technology for photography and special effects ends up detracting from the story. In the 2024 version, characters get grabbed in jump scares, but in the 1979 version, they didn't have the budget for stuff like that, so they just stand there while the vampires bite them - which is true to the book's depiction of vampiric hypnosis.

The climactic battle in the 2024 version takes place at a drive-in theater, where the vampirized townsfolk are hiding in the trunks of cars. This sequence has some good visuals, but it also relies on a vampire trope that I hate, which is of them being able to survive in shadow (in this case, the shadow of the movie screen). It's emblematic of the movie as a whole: it has some good, evocative visuals, but it lacks substance. The 1979 version is pretty cheesy, but it does the atmosphere and the characters' motivations better, and because it's set in its own concurrent era, it's not so desperate to show you how 1970s it is.

This thought was brought home to me when I watched X, the throwback slasher flick directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth. X is set in 1979, but it seems a lot less desperate to show that it's set then - the year is more to link it to old-school slasher flicks from that same era, and to comment on the way porn capitalized on new technologies even back then (there's a scene where one of the characters talks about the possibilities that home video holds out for porn). The result is a lot less self-conscious, and a lot more deft in introducing the characters and describing their relationships.

It's kind of an unfair comparison, because 'Salem's Lot has different themes on its mind than X, but as I say, the new version of 'Salem's Lot doesn't do as good a job of exploring those themes. All that leaves you with is a good-looking but ultimately empty movie - on the other hand, Lot director Gary Dauberman originally filmed a three-hour version, and I'd like to have seen that.

England Presses the Tuchel Button

Well, at least it wasn't Frank Lampard.

I was intrigued when the FA announced that Thomas Tuchel would be the next England manager. I admit I don't know a lot about him, but I also wasn't expecting them to go for a foreigner again. I don't think it's a bad appointment, but it raises a few questions, which I'll be interested to see answered as he takes the reins.

The tenor of the reports I read today talked about his clashes with upper management at his previous clubs. This was confirmed by a perusal of his Wikipedia page, which cites acrimonious departures at almost every club he managed (a notable exception being Mainz). That doesn't seem too big a problem at clubs like Paris St. Germain or Chelsea, which have reputations for sacking managers, or at Bayern Munich, since he was the first coach in 11 seasons not to win the Bundesliga (though he won it in the first of his two seasons in Munich). On the other hand, the fact that he left so many clubs in the same circumstances should give the FA pause - particularly since the manner of his departure is a reason why Manchester United decided not to hire him during the summer.

Then there's the fact that Tuchel also rubs players the wrong way. He had issues with certain players at Chelsea and Bayern, and had a bit of a reputation for being an authoritarian at other clubs too. Speaking as absolutely not an expert, the England job seems like it depends more on man-management than tactical nous, so this is really the aspect that concerns me about Tuchel's appointment.

Fabio Capello was brought in partly to impose some discipline on the England squad after the antics at the 2006 World Cup, in which the WAGs' sideshow contributed to this feeling of the players being more concerned with celebrity and endorsements than playing for their country. Early reports spoke glowingly of Capello's rule that players had to wear suits to team dinners. On the other hand, the football at the 2010 World Cup was disappointing, and Capello left two years later amid a dispute with the FA over John Terry losing the captaincy because of his alleged racist abuse of Anton Ferdinand.

My other question about this appointment isn't about Tuchel's ability, but rather about the FA finding the courage to appoint a foreigner for the first time in 12 years. That phrasing should indicate how I feel about them appointing a non-English coach - both Capello and Sven-Göran Eriksson had excellent records, even if they never won trophies or got as far in tournaments as Gareth Southgate did. I expect that Tuchel should do well, if he doesn't set everything on fire before the next international break - he is, after all, a league winner in both Germany and France, and a Champions League winner with Chelsea.

However, the fact that the FA opted for a foreign coach this time shows how few decent English coaches are left. I've banged on about this a few times over the years, so I'll just rehash my points quickly by noting how odd it is that an Englishman hasn't won the top flight in England since 1991, and that a British manager hasn't done so since 2013. The best jobs seem to go to buzzy, fashionable foreigners while English managers get stuck on the carousel of diminishing returns that starts with the clubs outside the notional top six (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Spurs) and ends with Everton or West Brom or something.

The last English manager to get a top 6 club on merit was Graham Potter at Chelsea, and he didn't have a good time of it. He was then replaced by Frank Lampard, who isn't considered a very good manager but still walks into these roles because he was a famous player. Either would have been a bit underwhelming if they'd gotten the job instead of Tuchel. Not that Southgate inspired dancing in the streets when the FA appointed him in 2016.

The way I see it, Thomas Tuchel will either be a masterstroke, bringing home a World Cup or Euro... or he'll be a disaster. He won't bed in long enough to get boring, a point that the Guardian's Football Weekly made today, but it'll be one of those other two extremes. Indeed, given his track record of making friends and influencing people, I feel there's even an outside chance that Tuchel breaks all the china before the 2026 World Cup. At any rate, if he doesn't win that, I don't expect him to still be there for Euro 2028.

Either way, I appreciate the FA's willingness to look beyond the tired carousel of English underachievers for an actually decent tactician. I'm looking forward to seeing how Tuchel does, and maybe, hopefully, this appointment gives English managers a kick up the arse and we'll see more of them gaining experience abroad.

RIP John Cassaday

As if the passing of James Earl Jones wasn't bad enough for the nerdosphere, I learned today that comics artist John Cassaday also passed away yesterday. He wasn't as much of a household name, even among comics fans (I believe), and I don't even know the full range of his work, but I did know his work on Planetary, and honestly, the craft on that is enough to cement his place as one of the greats.

I first encountered his work back in 2000 or 2001, when Planetary was a going concern and Warren Ellis was revitalizing the hell out of the Wildstorm line. And while Bryan Hitch was giving the Authority the widescreen comics treatment, Cassaday's ultra-detailed style was doing something equally interesting on Planetary, which was Ellis's sort of meta-commentary on how superhero comics (and especially Marvel) erased the pulp characters who'd come before.

Each issue dealt with a different aspect of either 20th-century adventure fiction (like the Shadow, Doc Savage, Victorian horror literature) or 60s comics (the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Superman and Wonder Woman), and Cassaday's style accommodated all of them. He could do beautifully craggy faces, which was notable after the 90s, when certain artists couldn't seem to depict different ages to save their lives. But he could also imply action without undue bombast - this is a talent that Hitch has, and Frank Quitely also does it quite well.

I also liked that if Hitch's Authority looked like Alan Davis, Cassaday's work on Planetary reminded me of a slightly less cartoony Kevin Maguire. Incidentally, the reason Hitch's work looked like Davis's is that he was being inked by Paul Neary, who inked some of Davis's most famous work (and who, sadly, also passed away earlier this year, a fact I only learned today when looking for reputable sources about Cassaday's passing).

I did experience a little of Cassaday's non-Planetary work, in the form of one issue of Astonishing X-Men, which he did with Joss Whedon. I didn't stick with the book, because I couldn't see how anyone could follow up Grant Morrison's New X-Men, but I've since heard that Astonishing was almost as good, so I have that to look forward to. And I've been seeing some panels from Cassaday's Captain America work, so that's another body of work to get stuck into.

But I'm sad that, having passed away at 52, Cassaday leaves behind much less than if he'd had his allotted threescore and ten. Ellis may have conceived of the strangeness of the world in Planetary, but Cassaday brought it to life, and he'll be missed.

RIP James Earl Jones

Like everyone, I was sad to see the news that James Earl Jones died today. I confess I didn't know much of his work beyond the obvious ones, like voicing Darth Vader and Mufasa, as well as in the early Tom Clancy films. But of course I knew his voice, and I knew his presence whenever he showed up on screen.

Reading his Wikipedia page, it's exciting to see that he had the same type of experience on stage as some of the great British actors, having played roles in Shakespeare as well as contemporary American theater. I've long thought that America should have an equivalent to the Royal Shakespeare Company, i.e. a group that turns out the most talented actors, like Ian McKellen, Michael Gambon, Patrick Stewart, Lawrence Olivier... I'm aware I've listed a bunch who did SFF movies or shows, but bear with me, will you?

Anyway, Jones would belong in that company, and now that I've read of his background in Shakespeare and in theater more generally, I'm sad I never got to see it. He was a great actor, and he'll be missed.

Rethinking Profit

It's not all comics and football around here - sometimes I turn my incoherent ramblings on economics. And the thing I've been wondering about lately is profit.

I know that the business of business is profit. According to Milton Friedman, that's all a business should be thinking about - any other social benefits of profits generated are out of the business's sphere of responsibility, and shareholders can use the profit for whatever social purposes they want. This then leads to the idea that a publicly held business's fiduciary responsibility is to maximize those profits, and if its management fails to do so, then the shareholders have the right to exchange the board for one that will bring the most profits possible.

The problem I have with this is, a business has to have something in mind beyond just making profit, if it isn't actually in finance. Strictly speaking, Pfizer (a stock that I own) isn't necessarily delivering the greatest profit to shareholders, because it continues to develop drugs rather than fire all its scientists, hire investment bankers, and compete with Goldman Sachs. 

That may seem like a stupid analogy, but it isn't - drug discovery is extremely expensive, even if you discount Pharma companies' own claim that it takes a billion dollars to bring a drug to market. There are a lot of dead ends, where a molecule that seemed promising at the start turns out to make people's skin fall off or just drop dead; a Pfizer or a Merck or whoever can outsource the discovery process by buying promising companies, but that's expensive too. It'd be easier if they just turned into a bank, wouldn't it?

Same with, say, Ford. You don't have to reinvent cars every year or so, but you do have to keep building them, adding features that either customers want or that will keep them alive (funnily enough, these aren't always the same thing), and you have to pay people to build the cars for you. Those people have their own demands for profit, and the longer they stay, the more they cost you.

Perhaps I'm being willfully naive - I understand that Ford and Pfizer and every other publicly held corporation can't just pivot to finance, because then we'd have the ultimate externality, in which food, clothing, medicine and basically everything else isn't being produced. But profit doesn't really seem to serve any societal function of its own - whatever industry you're in, profit may be the ultimate goal but it doesn't get shared with the people who build it. Employee pay is an expense, which is why companies sometimes make layoffs in the midst of record profits: the market is stupid and it thinks that the company is making its operations leaner.

Michael Moore has a joke in Downsize This, where Wall Street goes through the roof because one day, every company decides to lay off every employee. I read that almost 30 years ago, but it's stuck with me ever since, as did an Economist article I read about 15 years ago or so that suggested that American companies were too profitable.

Now, it's one thing when Michael Moore criticizes corporations, but when the Economist thinks that corporations are sitting on too much cash, that bears paying attention to. Their argument was that this profit wasn't filtering out into the rest of the economy, it was just going to shareholders; indeed, a piece in Forbes this past year notes that nearly half of before-tax profits of non-financial corporations went to dividends, and that capital expenditures are at their lowest level in years. Companies aren't investing in R&D or strengthening their processes, because they're trying to funnel all that cash back to investors.

Now, this might seem odd for me, as a person who owns stocks in individual companies (as well as retirement vehicles like a 401k, an HSA and a Roth IRA) to suggest that there's too much focus on profits. I might have a different idea if my holdings were a few orders of magnitude larger.

I guess I see it through the lens of enshittification, the term Cory Doctorow coined to describe when online platforms decline in quality once they've captured their audience. He sees it in terms of Google destroying the market for online search by being better than all the other search engines, and then, when network effects and habit mean that people refuse to use Bing or whatever, Google fills its results with a tidal wave of shit, like sponsored links, adds, and now AI-generated garbage. 

But it's applicable in the analog world too, as we've seen with Boeing's ongoing quality-related struggles. When a business focuses on maximizing profit over everything else, then improving the physical products it sells is contrary to the desires of the shareholders. Performing quality control takes money and slows down launch of new products, so you get a lot of products rushed out before they're ready or you get a lot of incremental improvements being touted as new products, with a price premium to match.

This is where people normally protest that no, of course they're not advocating for socialism, they're totally in favor of capitalism, yada yada yada. It's true that I'm not arguing for a command economy, because I do believe that some amount of capitalism is needed for markets to efficiently find the best solution to a problem - after all, Google may be crap now, but before it destroyed all the competition, it simply did provide a better service. But I think that, as in all things, the incentives are misaligned.

At the very least, there needs to be some way for shareholders to reward profitability over a long period, rather than every three months. And maybe the shareholders should include the employees as a matter of course, since they're the ones who've made the profit possible? Tim Cook may be great at logistics and at understanding the big picture of getting his phones to my avaricious grasp, but he's not the one assembling the damn things, putting them in boxes to the store, or taking my order when I pop into the Apple Store to pay the Cupertino Idiot Tax.

If nothing else, sharing the profits more widely with those who actually do the work might help reduce income inequality, no?

RIP Sven Göran Eriksson

My post about the Beckham doc on Netflix talked about a weird time, so it's fitting that I run this post, about the recently passed former England manager, Sven Göran Eriksson, since he was a big part of why that was such a weird time.

I was listening to the Guardian's Football Weekly today, which led off with some tributes to Sven, as he was known during his time here. Some of it was fair, talking about his rise from obscurity in Sweden to managing in Portugal and Italy, and then getting hired for the England job on the strength of his time at Benfica and Lazio. They also talked about his record as England manager (three quarterfinal exits in a row, in 2002, 2004 and 2006), and on the tabloid obsession with Sven's personal life.

I thought some of their comments missed the point, btw. Max Rushden and co were right to point out that the Sun and other tabloids' relentless reporting on Sven's affairs was a bit much, but they also didn't mention that Eriksson was in a relationship with Nancy Dell'Olio while the tabloids were reporting on his various affairs. Indeed, one of the guys on the podcast said Eriksson wasn't hurting anyone with his affairs, but surely he was hurting Dell'Olio?

Sven's time as England manager is also a little confusing in hindsight. It's held up as a period of drift, because the expectations at those three tournaments were high, especially in 2006, when a lot of England fans expected to win. Mars bars were even briefly rebranded "Believe" bars, because presumably that would fire up the fans. 

But the football turned out to be slow and ponderous, and not at all the kind of play you'd expect to win a tournament with. I even remember sitting through the first half of England's opening match against Paraguay, which was settled by a Paraguayan own goal in the fourth minute, and when the half ended and they returned to Gary Lineker and the Match of the Day team in the studio, they all looked embarrassed at having to talk up such a performance. As I recall, England's tournament didn't really improve, and my abiding memory of their exit against Portugal, even more so than Cristiano Ronaldo winding up Wayne Rooney, is both Rooney and Beckham throwing tear-filled tantrums as the game slipped out of their control.

(I also remember having to be careful about the big grin on my face as I took the train home from my friend Ian's house. Not, I should add, because of England's elimination, but because Brazil had been eliminated by France in the earlier match, which made me quite happy back then. But that's by the by)

The 2006 World Cup is remembered more for the Wags (wives and girlfriends) and their antics in Baden-Baden, where the England team was based, than for anything the men did on the pitch. It was held up as a symbol of moral decline, in which the players (chiefly Beckham) were more interested in celebrity and partying, and of Eriksson's dangerous indulgence. Indeed, the 2010 World Cup, where England were coached by Fabio Capello, was promised to be a much more buttoned-up England camp, though they actually went out earlier than they had in 2006.

I was among many who tut-tutted at the Wags' antics in 2006 (although now my writing playlist features a song by Girls Aloud, a member of whom is Cheryl, one of the chief Wags, so I've clearly changed in the intervening 18 years). Though if you consider it, Sven's England achieved an impressive level of consistency, certainly more so than the three tournaments before or after.

England had three different managers at Euro 96 (Terry Venables), World Cup 98 (Glenn Hoddle) and Euro 2000 (Kevin Keegan). The exits were at, respectively, the semi-finals, round of 16, and group stage. If we go back to World Cup 94, England didn't even qualify.

After Sven's departure in 2006, the roll call is even bleaker: failed to qualify for Euro 2008 (Steve McClaren), round of 16 in World Cup 2010 (Capello), and quarterfinals in Euro 2012 (Roy Hodgson). We can also take Hodgson on his own, since he was the first England manager after Sven to hold the post for three tournaments, and he didn't exactly cover himself in glory either, with a group stage exit at the 2014 World Cup and then the humiliating defeat to Iceland in 2016.

You can look at this from several angles. One is that England didn't know how good they had it when Sven was their manager. Certainly he and Capello are among England's most successful managers, in terms of win percentages, even if both served up some pretty dour performances on the pitch.

But that's what's frustrating about Sven's time as England manager: he had an arguably more talented group than Gareth Southgate had for his four tournaments, and got less out of them. The Football Weekly guys said something about good man-management by Sven, which is attested by the players, who all seemed to deliver stirring eulogies this week; but I also remember that the England team was riven by cliques, with the Manchester United and Liverpool, and later Chelsea, contingents not talking to one another. I'd say that Gareth Southgate was better at getting the whole squad to play for each other.

Still, I have some mixed feelings about Sven, because I appreciated that his bookish demeanor riled up the tabloids, who'd probably rather have lost gloriously with Dave Bassett at the helm. And another thing the Football Weekly gang said was, Sven, for all his faults, lived life. Those affairs were a bit distasteful (especially the one with the FA secretary who'd also had an affair with the FA chief executive), but apart from that, he seems to have been a bon vivant.

What's sad is that, overall, Sven's career didn't really hit the heights again after 2006. He managed Manchester City before Abu Dhabi bought it, then a variety of middling to low-level national teams, the lowest of which were China and the Philippines. He also managed Leicester City a couple of seasons before they were promoted back to the Premier League, so, much like his time at Man City, he missed out on the Foxes' big success in 2016.

I've done a bit of criticizing in this post, but overall, I'd say that Sven deserves to be regarded as more than a footnote in the history of England's men's national team. His time in charge coincided with my first stint living in the UK, so the England matches were a big part of my life in those years. Indeed, my favorite Sven game is the 5-1 defeat of Germany in World Cup qualifying in 2001. His tournament teams may not have hit those heights, but he deserves the credit for that result, and for giving England a confidence they hadn't had before.