England's Weird Problem with Ireland

One of the books I'm reading at the moment is The Song Rising, the third in Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. I met Shannon at a Super Relaxed Fantasy Club evening in London back in 2018, and ended up checking out her books after that, starting with the (then) standalone Priory of the Orange Tree, and eventually moving on to her ongoing series. I wasn't sure at first if it was the kind of thing I'd be into, but as I got further into the first book I became gradually more hooked.

It's not exactly urban fantasy, though it takes place in London and features spirits, psychics and otherworldly beings. It's also not exactly science fiction, even though it's set in a future fascist dystopia and features a certain amount of advanced technology. It's an interesting mix of those two genres, with Victorian/Edwardian trappings and a heavy debt to penny dreadfuls and the culture of London gangs.

Another thing that's struck me, several times as I've read the previous books in the series but most forcefully again as I've read this current book, is the Irish through line permeating the books. It makes sense when you consider Shannon's name, and her protagonist, Paige Mahoney, but a key theme in the series is the ongoing anti-Irish prejudice displayed by the ruling entity, Scion, as well as normal people surrounding Paige. This all made me think of the weird relationship the English have with the Irish, something I observed as a foreigner to both cultures, but which I'm sure Shannon has experienced firsthand growing up in London.

I first moved to the UK after my final year of university in Göttingen, Germany, where among other things, I got interested in Ireland. That's the year that I got into the Pogues, Brendan Behan and James Joyce, as well as general Irish history, all washed down with copious amounts of Guinness and other stouts at my local Irish pub. Part of it was my ongoing obsession with the works of Northern Irish comics writer Garth Ennis, but I think I was just fascinated by meeting actual Irish people for the first time, whether a crowd of kids from Dublin or the manager of the Irish pub, a guy named Mick. I made friends with Mick and with the Irish exchange students, took a class on the history of the Irish Free State (1916-1921) and ended up going on a trip to Dublin, Galway and Belfast, which was super fun.

All this Irish-ness gave me a certain perspective, not to say bias perhaps, when I moved to London at the end of that academic year. For a while I hung out with the brother of one of my friends from Göttingen and some of his Irish pals, and otherwise I absorbed how the English viewed their neighbors from across the Irish Sea.

This was the aftermath of the Good Friday Accords, which essentially put an end to the decades-long emergency in Northern Ireland, although in those months when I was newly in London tensions erupted again in Belfast. Luckily they didn't ruin the Accords, but it's been clear ever since that the various sides are always at least a little mistrustful of one another.

As I say, I had a certain perspective on the Troubles and the English response to them, whereas for my peers at my first job, there in Southend in Essex, I suppose various IRA atrocities were still alarmingly fresh in mind. I remember being shocked by a case where some Irish people suspected of IRA connections had just been gunned down, and being equally shocked when my flatmate at the time justified it saying that the UK had been on such a high alert because of the IRA; incidentally, this is why trash bins are so difficult to find in public places in London, especially on the Tube.

There were other examples, like when a friend rebuked me for referring to Derry instead of Londonderry. He claimed that only Irish republicans called it Derry, but my experience had been rather that only the English used the other name; in my experience in Belfast even the Protestants called it Derry. Or, most hilariously, when another friend suggested that the IRA had been engaged in a genocidal war against the English, which seems... a bit much.

And moving on from my own circle of friends into the wider culture, a travel book named McCarthy's Bar came out around then. Written by a comedian named Pete McCarthy, it was about a trip he took in Ireland, in which the hook was that he went to every pub he could find that had his name on it. Notably, it features the following line: 

"Each 17 March brings to a head the inability of the English middle classes to deal with the Irish Problem, in the sense that Ireland is a problem because it exists."

I still remember that line, despite only having read it once over two decades ago while skimming the book in the local Waterstone's on my lunch break, because it squared so totally with my own experience. That line McCarthy wrote went on to talk about how celebrations of St Patrick's Day always brought out the English patriots, or nationalists rather, who got annoyed at celebrating a patron saint of Ireland instead of their "own" Saint George (though these folks would doubtless get annoyed if you suggested that George wasn't, himself, English).

That all took place in the years 2002-2004, when we were still less than a decade off from the Good Friday Accords. But there were more recent indications of the weird attitude of the English (though I think at least the Scots, if not also the Welsh, are guilty of some of this too) during the whole Brexit tomfoolery. Because of the unique and weird status of Northern Ireland, Brexit threatened to either re-erect a physical barrier between the Republic of Ireland and the North, which would have been a violation of the Good Friday Accords; or it would have put up a hard border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the island of Britain, which was seen as effectively ceding the North to the Republic.

Neither option was palatable, so the ruling Tories went for a third option. Some suggested that the Republic of Ireland should also leave the EU, while others, most notably former Home Secretary Priti Patel, rather astonishingly suggested using food shortages to pressure the Republic to accede to British demands over the movement of goods between the south and the north. The point about the food shortages is particularly galling in light of the history of the Irish famine of the 1850s, in which about half the population emigrated or died, all because the English not only refused to provide aid but also continued exporting food from Ireland.

While it may be unfair to tar all the English by association with their absolute stupidest person (Priti Patel, to be clear, though she has a lot of competition these days from the likes of Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch and Boris Johnson, among far too many others), it's notable that someone felt able to say the not-very-quiet part out loud like that. As the commentary I linked to suggests, the British and the Irish worked well together and learned more about one another while they were together in the EU, but it's depressing that this kind of boorishness was so ready to come back to the surface once the Brexit negotiations got serious.

All of this is to say that I appreciate that touch in Samantha Shannon's Bone Season novels, in which the English nationalist overlords are particularly anti-Irish. It's not something you're as likely to see in an English writer's dystopian vision, but I find it notable that Shannon has made it such a key part of her story. It's a shame that these prejudices persist, even among people that you'd normally consider reasonably progressive or enlightened, and it seems a shame that these attitudes will only harden the longer the UK is estranged from the EU.

Year in Review: Things Are Gonna Get Worse After 2024

There were a couple of angles to take with this, including thinking of just doing a RIP post on Jimmy Carter, who passed away today. But I don't know that I had much to say about Carter, since his presidency only overlapped with my life by about sixteen months. And there's only so many times you can trot out the Simpsons joke about him being "History's Greatest Monster".

Carter's passing, just a few weeks before Trump takes over again, does feel like a symbolic moment. It's hard to imagine two more diametrically opposed people. Everything I've read about Carter, even before he died, has indicated that he was deeply moral, even if not always very politically savvy; only the most QAnon-addled MAGA folks could ever suggest Trump is in any way a moral person. On the other hand, Trump has been a lot more successful politically, effectively becoming the face of the GOP for the last decade and reshaping American life even out of office. 

Though I was also pleased to see that Carter was more influential, on a policy level, than most commentators give him credit for. According to a write-up in the Guardian, he started the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and FEMA, as well as providing inspectors-general for federal agencies and protections for whistleblowers. It also says he signed more domestic legislation into law than any president since WWII, other than Lyndon Johnson.

So he's earned his plaudits, and his exit from the scene just as America's worst president comes back to fuck things up again. It's notable that Trump's looking at undoing a number of signature Carter achievements, like the Department of Education. I think if I were 100 and facing that sort of attack on my legacy, I'd have had enough too.

It's funny, though, that Carter's passing isn't part of a big celebrity migration into the beyond, like 2016 was. That sense of all the celebrities dying at once felt epochal, especially when Brexit and Trump arrived - kind of like they sensed what was coming and decided to get while the getting was good.

2024 hasn't had a similar level of celebrities dying, though of course there have been many, some noted here on this blog. But it's definitely felt like a year of dysfunction just like 2016, and of economic dislocation that's bitten the Democrats on the ass.

The main difference is that, unlike 2016, we have a template for the coming four years: it'll be chaotic and ugly and stupid, and probably a lot of people are going to die that didn't need to. The question will be whether we get another pandemic, complete with botched response, or if we get to graduate to foreign policy crises, such as shooting wars in the Middle East or Asia.

But that's at the macro level - how was my year?

Eh.

In some ways it was pretty good. I felt more comfortable with the work I was doing at my job, especially after a grim 2023 in which I was overwhelmed by a new topic. I finally made a decent fist of submitting a novel to agents, even though I didn't get any interest (or not yet, anyway). And I had a couple of good trips to Australia, Italy and London, which pretty much completed my migration out of pandemic life (it took me a while to get comfortable with certain aspects of travel). I even got to upgrade to business class again, for the flight to Sydney, which I can say is the absolute best way to fly there.

On the other hand, I had trouble getting new story ideas off the ground, and the dating scene was a bit disappointing, especially compared to last year, which was one of my best years for dating. I spent a lot of time struggling with my weight, and while it seems to be going in the right direction, I've still got a ways to go.

Overall, it's also been hard to shake a fog of... something. I wasn't sure if it was depression, while a therapist I had for a while assumed it was anxiety. To which I say, por que no los dos? Of course, it wasn't major clinical depression - I was able to work and cook and get out to the gym. Actual clinical depression is no joke, and I'm glad not to have to deal with that. But it's true that a lot of things I normally like felt less compelling this year, as I hinted at in my review of all the media I consumed.

One example is the final book in Tad Williams's Last King of Osten Ard series, which I've been trying to read but haven't been gripped by the way I was with earlier books. I don't think the problem is the book, I think it's my own lack of focus and tiredness at the end of the day, when I should be happily plowing through dozens of pages per night.

Now, as I suggested earlier, it hasn't all been bad, and there are signs of promise for the early part of the year, at least. I took an online TV writing class in October and November through UCLA's continuing education program, and I'm taking the followup, 60 Minute TV Drama I, to strike while the iron is hot. If nothing else, I'm hoping to get some new insights into how to tell stories, which will improve my writing in other ways.

Beyond that, I'm looking forward to more exercise, more travel, and a clearer view on where I want to be going. I've always felt pulled in opposite directions by the big life goals (get published, get laid, get fit, get rich and get out of the house more), but I think the important thing will be to keep them all moving, at least a bit.

I did manage to get some stuff done during the first Trump presidency, after all, notably going to Japan for the first time, getting a girlfriend and pulling down a big pay bump when I switched jobs. Thinking about it, the feeling of unease has been there all year, but has felt a lot more intense since the election, so I think it's also a matter of time, and of getting over that huge disappointment.

Anyway, this is probably my last post of the year, so I'll see you all on the other side. It'll be a tough four years (and probably longer, even if Trump is term-limited), but what's keeping me going is the knowledge that things are cyclical. And while things can always get worse - truly, always - they can also get better. That progress will be measured in millimeters and fractions of an inch in 2025, but the potential is there.

Or in the words of my favorite movie this year: "Let's fucking go" and "Maximum effort"

2024 In Review: Media Consumed

One of the things that struck me this year was just how much media I consume at the moment. At any given time I'm watching a few TV shows and movies (based on interest and on feeling like I'm getting my money's worth from the various streaming services I pay for), reading a number of books and comics, listening to music and podcasts, and maybe playing video games. Which all makes it odd when I consider that it doesn't feel like it's been that good of a year for it all, somehow?

In fairness, I have kept up with a number of shows, particularly from Disney Plus. Of those, X-Men 97 was the clear standout, both because it was a good treatment of the characters and because it dovetailed well with the comics I was reading this year. Echo was decent, though maybe not as memorable as Hawkeye, where Maya Lopez originated, and the Acolyte had some promise but didn't necessarily live up to it. Its cancellation feels like capitulation to the toxic review bombers, but I also don't feel like I'll wither and die not knowing what happens next. 

Agatha All Along was another promising one, which did a very nice job of playing a long con on its viewers, at the same time that it was pulling the con on its characters. Its seventh episode, "Death's Hand in Mine", was the standout, but somehow I felt like it whiffed at the end - not in undoing Agatha's death, but rather in failing to really explain her motivations. I liked the fact that the Witches' Road never really existed, though.

That said, there was one other big standout, and that was Shogun. I already wrote about it, so I won't go on at length here, but it was probably the most compelling show I watched all year. Honorable mention also goes to Slow Horses, Fargo and Fallout, while Bel Air remained the most fun cheesiness. I'm expecting Slow Horses and Fallout to get more seasons, but I'm also hoping for more from Fargo and Bel Air.

In terms of movies, I feel like the one standout was Deadpool and Wolverine, which is the only film I watched twice. It held up just as well on the second viewing, on Disney Plus, but I'd have even been happy to catch it in theaters a second time. Dune Part Two was pretty good, though maybe not the visual feast that the first part represented, while the Maxine Minx/Pearl trilogy of horror movies from Ti West was good, trashy fun - particularly the first two movies. The Zone of Interest was so different from the book that it might as well have had a different title, but it was a fascinating, harrowing watch. And for ongoing comfort watching, I started the year with Fox's X-Men series and continued with a new MCU rewatch, which let me re-evaluate a couple of films and confirmed my opinions of the others.

Turning to books, the one that was most influential was Douglas Wolk's All the Marvels, which has brought me into the world of critical analysis of American superhero comics. It led me to The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz's review of how postwar comics informed progressive activism and imagery, and vice versa, as well as Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History, which I picked up because of its references to music but was pleased to see that it talked about other cultural aspects of Englishness.

I also read a lot of Richard Osman and Mick Herron, and I'm debating picking up Osman's latest, even though it's not in the Thursday Murder Club series. Other than that, history was a big part of my reading, particularly the Shortest History series, as I took in the volumes on Italy, Japan and India.

For comics, I mostly read X-Men related books, though Wolk's book convinced me to try The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which turned out to be a great read. A friend lent me Image's W0rldtr33, and that was a nice change from the superhero stuff. I'm still debating whether or not to get the DC Universe Infinite app, but somehow the pile of physical comics beside my bed isn't diminishing fast enough for me to go ahead with that one.

For podcasts, I finally finished Revolutions, which I started in 2022, just as it was ending. Ironically, just as I was finishing its final series on the Russian Revolution, Mike Duncan started it up again, but this time with a speculative story about a possible Martian Revolution. I don't know if I'll check it out, but it might have to wait until it's done - somehow I found it harder to retain information from the Revolutions format than I did from Duncan's History of Rome.

Keeping the X-Men theme going, however, the standout podcast for me this year was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. I've mostly been listening in order from when they started, so I'm only up to the episodes from 2016, when they were covering Inferno, though I made sure to listen to their more recent review of X-Men 97 and their interview with Lenore Zann, who played Rogue. Their show's given me a taste for more comics-related podcasts, so I've started exploring Wolk's Voice of Latveria, and at some point soon I'll be checking out the Cerebrocast for more X-related goodies.

And finally, my video gaming has been limited primarily to various Kingdom Rush tower defense games on my iPad. I've been playing them off and on for about a decade, but my interest really took off when the Youtuber Voduke published his magisterial ranking of all the heroes in the series. That led me to buy a few heroes and towers across the various games of the series, including the DLC levels for the fourth installment, Vengeance. 

The big news for this year was the launch of Kingdom Rush Alliance, the fifth tower defense game in the series; for the first time I was there from the start, though on some level I found it a little underwhelming - I still haven't been able to figure out if that's because it only offered the main campaign at launch, whereas I discovered all the other games after they'd been out for a while and had released a lot of elite levels. Alliance has its charms, though, so I won't say it's terrible or on the wrong path, but it does feel a little lacking in replayability. I'll have to see how I feel when the next elite levels and its first DLC drop.

Looking ahead to next year, I'm hoping for big things from Marvel's new offerings, particularly the fourth Captain America movie, Brave New World. Having watched the MCU's Infinity Saga again, it's clear that Marvel dropped the ball a bit in the Multiverse Saga by not giving us more glimpses of the core characters - if you think about it, this is the first time we're seeing the new Cap since 2021's Falcon and Winter Soldier, and we're not getting a new Avengers movie until 2026, so it'll be a gap of seven years since Endgame. That means Brave New World will have a lot riding on it, particularly since Marvel had to pivot away from the Kang storyline they were doing.

I'm also hoping for a good new season from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which will hopefully make up for the end of Lower Decks next week. I'm sure other, unheralded shows will come up, and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised by them as they launch.

Overall, though, I'm hoping to spend a little less time consuming media and more time... I dunno, doing stuff? I wouldn't say my media diet made me stay home more, but now that I'm not really sequestering myself like I did during Covid, I think I can go out and explore the world more again.

Or maybe we'll be stuck inside again thanks to the new administration? I'll explore some of those concerns in my next blog, which will be a rundown of my 2024. Though I'll spoil the main theme for you here: 2024 sucked, just like the eight years before it, and like the four years that are coming now. But next time I'll explain just how 2024 sucked. Lucky you!

Quick One on the Hunter Biden Pardon

Whenever I'm with my mom, she'll usually ask me what I think about some cultural or political thing that's going on, and generally speaking, I refuse to venture an opinion. There are lots of reasons for this, whether some deep-seated thing about being criticized later for my answer, or because I honestly don't care - when she asked me over Thanksgiving about the prospect of President Biden pardoning his son Hunter, it was primarily the second one.

I haven't followed that case a ton, beyond reading a couple of articles here and there, as well as listening to Hunter's interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast a few years ago. So I don't know the ins and outs, beyond whatever's filtered out through osmosis into the wider culture. Based on that, my read is that Hunter probably is a bit dodgy, but that his dad probably isn't... or isn't dodgy for the same reasons.

When President Biden announced this week that he'd be pardoning his son for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, I thought about that conversation with my mom, and then decided that I was okay with it. Part of it is probably that phenomenon where a party's voters agree with an action when their party's leaders do it, and disagree with it when the other party's leaders do it. But part of it is also a slightly nihilistic satisfaction at seeing the Democrats doing something that the Republicans have been happy to do forever (and make no mistake, Bill Clinton made dodgy pardons too).

Trump's been talking about pardoning the January 6th rioters forever. Some news headlines have suggested that Biden's pardon of Hunter gives Trump the "excuse", but it was always going to happen. And Trump's going to pardon himself for the January 6th thing and the missing documents case. That was going to happen regardless of what Biden did.

So the reason I'm broadly in favor is that, if Biden hadn't pardoned his son, Hunter would be at the mercy of Trump's Justice Department as of January 20th. Make no mistake, they'd have thrown the book at him, and they wouldn't have minded any of the bleating about political witch-hunts that would have ensued. At least this way, Biden's earning some of the criticism he's getting from the right, and his son is off the hook.

For the moment, anyway. When I brought it up with my mom today at dinner, she was a little less pleased with it than I was, but she also pointed out that Trump's people are going to... ahem... find some trumped-up charges to get Hunter on. Realistically speaking, laws are only effective insofar as they're enforced, so there's probably very little stopping Trump from ordering his attorney general to have Hunter thrown in jail on general principle. Especially given that the Supreme Court ruled this year that the president can commit crimes while in office.

But this pardon is a last middle finger to Trump and the whole ecosystem around him, which depends on sycophants to enthusiastically do whatever he says, as well as moderates to criticize the Democrats more severely for doing the same things that the Republicans do. The whole "when they go low, we go high" thing has been totally invalidated - and if it's bad for democracy and the rule of law that certain pardons are skirting dangerously close to dodgy territory, then too bad. I'm sick of Democrats getting steamrolled by Republican gamesmanship (cf. Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court in 2016).

Anyway, what's bad for democracy and the rule of law isn't so much a father pardoning his wayward son, shady as he may or may not be, as a convicted felon and known insurrectionist getting voted into office on promises of being a dictator on day one and of prosecuting his political rivals. I wish the pearl-clutching brigade had spent more time criticizing that for the past eight years, rather than enabling Trump's worst instincts.

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.