RIP the UK, Part II: Rhymes with Clucking Bell

I note that my post on Labour's broadband plans has reached a respectable 72 hits (not the largest for the year, but nor is it the smallest), so emboldened I guess I'll have a quick go at thoughts on Thursday's general election.

I may have given it away in the title of this post, but I'm not best pleased.

The Conservative party is in unassailable control of Parliament, to the point that it no longer needs its confidence and supply deal with Northern Ireland's DUP. The Liberal Democrats at their second-lowest level in their history, with their own leader, Jo Swinson, losing her seat in Scotland and being forced to resign. The Scottish National Party rules in most of Scotland, with Labour marginalized to a couple of constituencies but the Tories holding more seats in Scotland than them. And Labour is knocked out of a number of its heartlands in the industrial north and midlands by the Tories, as it looks for a new leader to replace the outgoing Jeremy Corbyn.

The SNP is talking about another independence referendum for Scotland, but in the meantime its presence in Westminster deprives Labour of a significant portion of its traditional power base - kind of like if California suddenly elected a whole bunch of third party candidates to its congressional delegation, knocking a hole in the national Democratic caucus.

For Labour the question remains of what to do next, and for starters, who to lead them in 2020. It may be reductive, but I see two major poles within the party: the Blairite wing that sees hewing rightward as the path to success, and the left Momentum wing that sprang up around Corbyn. Momentum will likely not tolerate a Blairite leader; the Blairites will be too scared of seeming leftwing to support a Momentum-approved leader. It's not unthinkable to imagine that the two split into separate parties and weaken Labour further.

(By the way, if I seem scathing of what I call the Blairite wing, it's because I am - he swept to power by being younger and hipper than John Major, admittedly not a difficult trick, but essentially moved the party rightward because he wasn't a natural Labourite, the same way JJ Abrams approached Star Trek as not a fan. He then led the country into an epochally unpopular war, did nothing to staunch the divisions between the Southeast and everywhere else, and his followers moved so far right that they let the Tories stake out ground on their own patch)

Without Scotland, though, the question of power remains academic. The SNP is a party of the left, and so, starting in 2015, they and Labour have duked it out for left voters there across three general elections and counting. But Labour comes second (presumably) because much of the Scottish electorate still hasn't forgiven them for siding with the Tories in the 2014 independence referendum.

As far as I can tell, the only way forward for the left in Britain is for the SNP to stand as a national party - but what relevance does its agenda have for voters in the Home Counties? Still, the UK could do worse than Nicola Sturgeon as PM.

I don't know if I'm qualified to talk about what went wrong with Labour's campaign, though I'll guess that it was a combination of undefined position on Brexit, personal animosity toward Corbyn (which is a shame as he always struck me as fundamentally honest and ethical - more so than Boris Johnson, though that's another quite low bar) and confusion over the party's platform. I addressed part of that in my post about the free broadband plan, but it does seem like the agenda wasn't very straightforward - you can bitch about modern elections being reduced to soundbites all you want but admittedly "Get Brexit done" is quite a bit snappier than Labour's "Time for Real Change".

Which itself isn't bad, but doesn't capture what was on basically everyone's mind.

The other question is, where does the UK go from here? If it leaves the EU as promised on 31 January, I'll need to see what happens to my relatives who live there, such as my sister and my cousin - will they be able to stay, or is the Home Office going to tell their respective employers to get all EU citizens off their books? It may seem fanciful, but this is exactly what happened to a Russian colleague in 2012-13, as companies were forced to reduce the number of non-EU workers they sponsored.

If they are allowed to stay, what services will they and my British friends have access to? Austerity seems to have lasted a lot longer in Britain than in the rest of Europe, presumably because the Tories since 2010 have been gutting public services and selling off as much as they could to business interests both inside and outside the country - this means more funding going toward London and the Southeast, and less to the rest of the country, thereby worsening the underlying condition that led to Brexit.

And as I put it back in August, kicking all the EU citizens out does nothing to lower house prices, because those (at least in the capital) are being driven up by rich Americans, Russians, Chinese, Middle Easterners and anyone else who has enough money that the government wants them. If this had been the case in 2001, when I first moved there and had maybe a couple thousand dollars to my name, they'd have shipped me back home at the first opportunity.

So I'm finding it hard to be sanguine about these results. We'll see more poverty, more homeless, more tragedies like Grenfell Tower, worse outcomes for the sick because of the dismantling of the NHS and increases in hate crimes and regular crimes. And who knows what terrorist plots will march on in the city thanks to the government's cuts in policing?

The UK will soldier on, as I've already said, but it'll be a smaller, meaner place.

RIP Rene Auberjonois

Just read that Rene Auberjonois passed away today, at the age of 79. Reading his wikipedia page now, I'm struck by the breadth and diversity of his work, in film, TV and stage, as well as voiceover work - there are a lot of roles I must have seen or heard him in, without knowing it was him, such as on the film version of MASH and on the animated Young Justice.

But of course I know him mainly for playing one of my favorite characters, Odo, on one of my favorite TV shows, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He had the most distinctive prosthetics on the show, a sort of smoothed-out, simplified version of a human face, and he was involved in some of the show's best moments, including playing a huge part in the final storyline of the show as it wrapped up the Dominion War.

On the show, Odo was the "outcast" character, in the tradition of Star Trek characters like Spock and Data, but even though the entire cast, in some form or other, consisted of outcasts, he was more noticeable. In part this was because of his portrayal as the stern security officer on the station, whose methods didn't always match up with those of Starfleet. But it was also because of the gentleness that Auberjonois brought to the character - in the season 2 episode Shadowplay, he gradually befriends the young girl on the planet he and Dax are investigating, showing how Odo wasn't as gruff and forbidding as he wanted to appear.

I lost sight of his career after DS9, but I was always excited to see his name among the credits of a show. I'm heartened to read that he was a regular in Boston Legal, a series that my girlfriend loves and that we're going to watch together at some point soon (and, let it not be forgotten, a show that also starred William Shatner). I'm also pleased to read, though I must have known this at some level, that he did the voice of the French chef in Disney's Little Mermaid - another well-known role from my childhood.

My condolences go out to his family, and I'm hoping to find someplace to watch the recent DS9 documentary, What We Left Behind, for some interviews with him (and with Aron Eisenberg, who played Nog and who also passed away suddenly, not long ago).

The Star Wars Prequels: As Bad as You Remember

Between episodes of the Mandalorian with my girlfriend, I've been taking advantage of access to Disney+ by watching stuff that I haven't seen in a long time, like the Simpsons (mostly the Treehouses of Horror), old Mickey Mouse shorts... and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

I know: why would I do this to myself? I haven't watched the prequels in their entirety in over a decade - in the case of Episode II (2002) and Episode III (2005), not since I watched them in the theater during their original run. I don't even have any memory of the circumstances in which I watched Episode III - it must have been here in the US, because I didn't leave the country, but I'm not sure if it was here in Palo Alto or in New York, nor do I remember who I saw it with.

Episode II sticks in the mind a little more, but for all the wrong reasons: poorly acted, excessive CGI and scenes that are so truncated that they feel perfunctory, as if George Lucas is using them just to remind us that a specific subplot is happening. There are things approaching interesting storytelling - like when Count Dooku claims to be fighting against the Sith Lord who's taking over the Republic - but they get lost almost immediately and walked back.

I think the thing that got me interested in re-watching these movies is this rundown and ranking of the entire series from the AV Club, written before (just before) The Force Awakens came out and kicked off this latest era for the Star Wars saga. The author is quite generous to George Lucas, while still not giving him a pass for his worst excesses, and if I don't agree with ranking Revenge of the Sith ahead of Return of the Jedi, then I can at least appreciate that there's someone else out there who thought Episode II was even worse than Episode I.

The criticisms still hold up. Episode I: The Phantom Menace is too reliant on CGI and on corny, kid-friendly gags to be actually entertaining to watch. The opening crawl is laughable in its discussion of trade disputes and blockades and the middle section on Tatooine, with the pod race, is overly long and not germane to the story.

What struck me on this re-watch was, again, how bad the performances were, or at least the line-readings, and the fact that the scenes are frustratingly truncated just like in Episode II. One feels a little bad criticizing Jake Lloyd as Anakin, given his later struggles with mental illness, but it's undeniable that he needed fewer lines, and that Lucas needed an editor on his script. And where the characters aren't obnoxious, like Anakin or Jar-Jar, they're just wooden, like... well, like everyone else. Natalie Portman, Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor - all are respected and talented actors, but you wouldn't know it watching this movie.

And yet... I still have something of a soft spot for this one, flaws and all. It was the first new Star Wars in years, and I got to see it on opening day. Awkward as a lot of it is, it manages to instill that sense of wonder, of a wider universe, that was present in the original trilogy. It sometimes tries too hard, but it manages to look from the outset like it belongs in the same universe as the original films.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones was also much as I remembered it. Hayden Christensen wasn't much of an improvement over Jake Lloyd, and neither was the dynamic between him and Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan - master chastises student constantly, not because he's actually irresponsible but because the script demands that we show, in the most ham-handed way possible, the wedge driven between them. And the romance subplot between Christensen and Portman is still pretty unconvincing.

There are a couple of nice things to say about this one, though. Especially on the cloners' world of Camino, Lucas shows a gift for coming up with impressive settings for his alien worlds. The craggy, reddish tint to Geonosis doesn't strike me as much but I can't deny that it makes an impressive contrast.

As mentioned above, there's also the bit where Count Dooku (aka Saruman, aka Christopher Lee) captures Obi-Wan and claims that he's fighting against the Sith. It's undercut by the circumstances - Obi-Wan being held shackled by a forcefield in a prison cell - and walked back immediately, but I remember being so excited when I saw that scene, thinking that Lucas was about to throw us a curveball... but no.

But perhaps the best part of the movie is the depiction of how Palpatine maneuvers events to take power for himself. There's a vogue for seeing harbingers of Donald Trump in all media, but this sequence is genuinely impressive - and I'd actually forgotten it was here, given that Episode III is where the collapse of the Republic really takes off (and was accompanied at the time by right-wingers complaining that George Lucas was getting too political - some things never change, clearly).

Also, I can't deny that seeing Yoda leaping around and kicking ass gave me a thrill, both then and now. Maybe it's because so much of the rest of the film was lackluster, but it was great to see just how great a Jedi he was.

And then there's Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I remembered bits of the movie, from the final fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan, to the slaughter of the Jedi Order and the death of Padme, but little else. I'd forgotten that the opening harks back not to the previous movie but to a whole bunch of crap that happened between the episodes - I presume all that is in the Clone Wars movie and TV show, but I haven't seen those yet, so the transition is still jarring to me.

I haven't finished this re-watch, so I won't belabor the point too much, but it seems like the scenes breathe a little more than its two predecessors. However, the dynamic between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman remains as wooden as ever - they talk at cross-purposes, and not to reveal character but to reveal plot. There's less of the cutesy crap, because a whole bunch of good guys are going to die, badly, before the end, but it persists in the droid army and in C3PO and R2D2's time on screen.

It also looks great, the initial fight in space over Coruscant looking really impressive... but then, if anyone knows how to put together a gigantic set-piece it's George Lucas.

Now, to sum up, watching these movies again hasn't changed my mind about them. Some bits are worse than I remembered, others better, but the majority is still as I recall, for better or worse. They go way too far in forcing fan service, like showing C3PO and R2D2 or in calling forward to stuff from the original trilogy. And the storylines are just bad, or at least badly written.

Unlike the AV Club, I can't guess how these movies would have done if they'd been the first we'd ever seen of Star Wars. I take them in relation to a group of movies that I grew up loving, and they can't ever measure up to that - nor to the more recent movies, starting with Force Awakens and ending with Solo. But I can't deny that there are some pleasures to be had with them, even Episode II, my least favorite of the films (so far) and easily in my bottom 5 films ever.

So as I prepare for Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, I'm seeing where the saga "began", in the hopes of seeing if it connects to how it "ends". I might not even be too disappointed if they have Hayden Christensen as a Force ghost again, though if JJ Abrams resists that temptation I'll be quite happy.

Not Sure Disney Plus is Going to Kill Netflix

Managed to get onto Disney+ this weekend, and I've been poking around for a couple of days, looking at what they have. I may be atypical in that I'm not too bothered by what original content is on a streaming service - I want to have access to stuff that I like and stuff that I might like.

Although, that said, an interesting-looking series that isn't available anywhere else will make me take notice. The Mandalorian is this service's standout at launch, and I'm looking forward to starting on it with my girlfriend for the Thanksgiving weekend.

(As an aside, I'd like to thank any deities or higher powers out there listening for connecting me with a girlfriend who loves Star Wars - it's an especially nice thing to have in common with someone)

They've done a nice job of organizing the main channels of content that they think people will want, such as Star Wars, Marvel and so forth. And once you're in there, you can find everything organized by type of content (movies, TV, extras) and in some cases in chronological order.

What's a little annoying is looking through a channel like the main Disney one and searching for classic Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck shorts - like on Netflix you have to know what you're looking for because it's not going to serve it up for you in a logical fashion.

The other thing I like is that it really does have a lot of content, especially stuff you can't find elsewhere. I'm not 100% sure if I'm going to devote a lot of time to rewatching old shows like DuckTales, Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers or Darkwing Duck (hopefully TaleSpin is there too), but it's impressive that you can find them somewhere, given that a lot of these shows aren't available elsewhere, or even really on DVD.

On the other hand, is $6.99 per month a reasonable amount to pay for knowing that you have access to all this stuff? I suppose it is on its own, since it's a lot lower than what Netflix or any of the other streaming services charge at the moment. But not necessarily if it'll be one of several streaming services that people own.

This gets to my discomfort with the whole premise of what analysts are calling the streaming wars - Disney's jumped in, AT&T is going to bring out HBO Max next year and eventually NBC will launch Peacock. In contrast to something like CBS All Access or DC Universe, which have positioned themselves either as their own company's repositories or as niche services, these three new ones look to be aiming explicitly at stealing subscribers from Netflix, by getting big-name shows that Netflix won't have.

Should NBC, AT&T and Disney really be aiming for supremacy, or is it better to hope that they can coexist? Speaking for myself I don't see myself cancelling Netflix until it ends the physical DVD service (which I still get) and its backlog gets completely gutted with only original content left. But even then, I'd probably just jump to the service that has the most stuff I want to watch.

Another issue for me, but which is probably not coming into the calculations of AT&T or NBC, is international viewing. Those two services in particular are probably not going to target viewers in other countries, so Netflix will likely continue to have a dominant position abroad because it'll remain the primary place to watch a lot of American shows - even if local rights holders in each individual country pull their own shows and movies off the service. That presence internationally will give it a sizable war chest to commission new shows or buy rights to stuff that no one else has.

The other thing that concerns me is the maintenance of shows that are only owned by one streaming service, or that belong to services that go out of business. John August has already highlighted on his podcast Scriptnotes the fact that a lot of movies aren't available anywhere anymore, because the DVDs aren't widely available and no one has (or can get) the streaming rights.

If every service moves to hosting only its own content, something will inevitably fall through the cracks, and I'm curious what's going to happen to it. For example, a key reason I'm not signing up for DC Universe is because I'm expecting it to go out of business soon - I don't know how much content is on it beyond the (admittedly cool-looking) original shows it has, which are Titans, Doom Patrol and Swamp Thing. Should Netflix completely succumb to its new competitors, I'd hate to see all its content disappear never to be seen again.

But this is all a long way off, I think. The oft-quoted (but possibly not accurate) figure is that Disney+ had 10 million subscribers by Day 1, but this still isn't catching up to Netflix for a while. Its back catalog is good, but not particularly diverse, and given that focus on Disney-branded movies and shows, it likely won't be very attractive to viewers who want to see more edgy or grownup content. And Netflix will still have the edge in interesting foreign shows or movies, to say nothing of its finely tuned recommendation engine.

That may be enough, at least in the short term, to let it fight off its competitors, even when they're as big as Disney.

Thoughts on Labour's Broadband Plan: Still Not Sure It Adds Up

Every once in a while something comes up that riles up the telecoms-analyst fibers of my being, and the Labour Party's announcement of universal free broadband this past week is one of them.

I've been chewing at it ever since, and I might be influenced slightly by the comments of various telecoms and tech analysts I already follow on Twitter (or with whom I've previously worked at Informa/Ovum), but I find it notable that very few of my old colleagues are able to say a good thing about this proposal.

That could be because they're all right-wing Tories, of course, and I have seen a few of my more excitable former colleagues throw around words like "socialism" in regard to this deal.

(Incidentally, living here in the US makes me bristle when right-wingers refer to things as socialism, but in this case I do have to concede that nationalizing the broadband industry is, in fact, socialism. But I digress)

I suppose my main objection to this idea is that it feels (not for the first time) like Jeremy Corbyn promising unicorns and free ice cream to everybody, when there are more important issues to slay in this election cycle. I'm obviously not voting in this election, but I want to read a coherent position from Labour on whether we need a new referendum on Brexit, what an actual Labour Brexit would look like, and what kind of immigration regime they'd institute on leaving the EU (they have talked about these things, but I'm kind of used to vagueness from Corbyn on this topic).

I'd also like to hear what Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell aim to do about kickstarting the workforces in areas, particularly in the north, that still haven't quite recovered from the Thatcher years. The problem, as I see it, is that the UK's government, finance and media are so centralized on London that there aren't any opportunities elsewhere in the country, which is also leading to the demand on housing in the capital. Most importantly, I'd like to hear how Labour intends to shore up the NHS, after decades of under-investment.

This is not to minimize the importance of bridging the digital divide between urban and rural residents, a problem that plagues basically every country. From the point of view of ensuring equal opportunities for everyone, making sure every community has access to the same quality and speed of broadband is a noble ideal. The argument Labour is making is that a single, centralized provider, run by the UK government, is better able to plan and implement the work to ensure that universal access, while also cross-investing from more profitable areas to enable spending in less profitable areas (i.e. everywhere outside the cities).

That post by Assembly Research misses the point that the cut-throat competition to offer faster speeds at lower prices hasn't resulted in access for those who live outside of those areas. I'm more persuaded by Dean Bubley's take that the costing is suspect - especially once all the companies affected by the decision (from the wholesalers piggybacking off BT's fiber network to the mobile operators that rely on it for their own backhaul) take the government to court.

The best takes, in my opinion, are these two articles from Wired, which present McDonnell's proposal, the implications thereof, and the feasibility based on research the current UK government has already undertaken, which also examined the possibility of a single monopoly provider.

The latter, in particular, ends with the best quote I've seen:

The true danger is that this new plan will put a spanner in the works of current fibre broadband plans, and make any future progress more sluggish, rather than speeding it up. It is private investment from the likes of BT, Virgin and Cityfibre that has driven connectivity across the UK, and they could give up or wind down their activity if they believe the government will dominate the space.

This scenario was also outlined in the advice to the government, which would be a “significant departure” from the current approach. The report claims it will “reduce network competition, both now and in the future which is likely to have a negative impact on quality, choice and innovation.” 

“They have a strong vision. But the idea of going back to a monopoly would require redesigning the institutional framework of the market, which won’t help if the goal is to get fast broadband for all in a short period of time,” says Paolo Gerli of Northumbria University. “It might be good to leverage what is in the market rather than try to implement a completely new system.” 

As the final quote says, there's a discussion to be had about the trade-off between speed and completion. If Labour does proceed with the plan, it'd do better incentivizing existing ISPs to cover more of the UK's landmass, rather than population, as a way to achieve its goal quickly.

The other option might be to break OpenReach up completely, and allow cities, counties and local councils to design their broadband provision plans according to their own needs, with perhaps a minimum reach and speed goal that the UK government could impose.

Although that idea suffers from two flaws. For one, it feels a little too close to what we did in the US when breaking up the telecoms monopolies; for another, it feels a little too free market for Corbyn's comfort, as well as decentralizing power. Who knows?

All I know is that a nationalized, free broadband service sounds great but feels a little too pie in the sky. If they want to sell it, Labour needs to provide more actual information on how much it will cost, and guarantee that it won't become a political appointment.

Or they can forget about it and fix the railways, the NHS, joblessness outside the capital, income inequality...

Hollywood Might Kill Comics After All

Amid all the critical buzz about Joker, I caught this piece on The Verge the other week, and it crystallized some of my thinking about the differences between Marvel and DC, and about the effects on the source material of all this success for comic book movies just at the moment.

Between the furore about whether or not to make a movie about Miles Morales, whether or not to have Peter Parker be black, and so on, it occurred to me at some point that the people pushing for those more inclusive types of casting are fighting an uphill battle. Because the wider movie-going public (as distinct from the comic-buying public) knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman, Clark Kent is Superman and Peter Parker is Spider-Man, you'll have trouble attracting them to a movie featuring someone else in one of those roles, at least at first.

Even Into the Spider-Verse, which as I've said before was a damn delight, had to spend a lot of its running time explaining why Miles became Spider-Man, and even then it required a big starring role from Peter Parker (plus a minor role from another Peter Parker). On the other hand, witness the Spider-Man origin fatigue that greeted Andrew Garfield's Amazing Spider-Man movies, and the fact that Marvel/Sony felt that the Tom Holland entries could dispense with the origin story totally - not only do we all know the characters, we all know their origins too.

The Verge article suggests that this is a peculiar drawback of Marvel, as its characters and stories have essentially been designed to run forever with relatively little change in the status quo. And indeed, other than Peter Parker graduating from high school and then getting married (something that was eventually walked back in Marvel's first big, egregious retcon), Spider-Man remains the same character as he was back in 1962.

It's the same for Captain America, Iron Man and to perhaps a lesser extent the X-Men. I say a lesser extent for the X-Men, because the general idea of mutants fighting against bigotry is the same as when they launched in 1963, but being a team book has meant they could change the cast of characters around a whole lot more, including on more than one occasion jettisoning every character and just building a completely new team.

Even there, though, Marvel hasn't really ever experimented with its books as much as DC. Sure, the Punisher may have been rebooted as an occult demon-hunter at one point, which is generally remembered (if at all) as an embarrassment, but DC used to reboot its characters every few years, as the continuity grew too complex or as new creators decided they wanted to look at the books from different angles.

One good case in point is the Flash. The protagonist of the current CW show is, of course, Barry Allen, who's been "the" Flash for the longest time (1956-1985, and again more recently). When I first encountered the character, he was Barry Allen, and it was only years later that I learned that there'd been Jay Garrick before him, and that he'd died and been replaced by Wally West after the Crisis on Infinite Earths.

By the time I started reading Flash comics, Wally West was the guy in the suit, and so technically I consider him "my" Flash, even more than Barry (few of whose adventures I ever read). But ironically Wally was the star of the comics when the original Flash TV show came out in 1990, which had Barry Allen as the character. This meant that TV viewers who wanted to check out the comics were stuck with some other guy who was always feeling inadequate compared to Barry Allen.

That show disappeared fairly quickly, without troubling the ratings overly much, so the comic was able to continue on its own path unmolested by TV or movie considerations for a couple of decades. Indeed, the Flash was a prominent character in the Bruce Timm Justice League cartoon, and while he physically resembled Wally West, they never delved very far into his backstory or the relationship to Barry.

But of course now that there's a TV show on the CW and a movie in the works (bizarrely not connected to the show), Barry Allen appears to be the main character once again, and Wally's been consigned to some sort of limbo.

The Verge piece also mentions the reboots and retcons that authors like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman made to characters like Swamp Thing and Sandman, and how they related (or didn't) to previous versions of the characters. One of my favorite runs of any comic ever is Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, where he retconned the main character's origin, then turned him into an environmental crusader and ended his run with a long metafictional storyline that culminated in Animal Man meeting Grant Morrison.

Of course, the reason that DC could do this stuff with its characters, or turn its flagship super-team, the Justice League, into a slapstick comedy, is because nobody was really reading the books at the time. If you can rely on your readership not changing, then you can reward them by letting the characters progress - much like Keith Giffen did when he rebooted the Legion of Superheroes in 1989.

But now that the comics are hot property, you have to keep them in a sort of stasis, so that you can then also sell the comics to the potential fans who've been attracted by the movie or TV show. The Verge article suggests that there's wiggle room there, as you can make a movie like Joker as a standalone, without worrying about continuity; I'd argue that's mostly true, but only because Warner/DC needed a Hail Mary pass after Zach Snyder's Superman and Justice League movies sucked so badly.

On the other hand, being able to reinvent the characters and approach them from different angles might be the best option for the movies, just as it was for the comics 20-30 years ago. Fun as the MCU movies have been, you're now basically working with 22 movies' worth of continuity, and at some point it might become too confusing for folks who just want to watch a movie with explosions and other fun stuff.

Unlikely as it sounds, maybe in a few years Marvel will be revisiting its characters in quirkier, more standalone settings too.

Sick of all this California abuse

As I'm writing this my house is full of smoke, for the third time in as many years. A fire is raging in Sonoma, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, and the smoke is spreading throughout the Bay Area, forcing people indoors and covering everything with a fine layer of ash. The sky is hazy, darkening everything and giving the world an apocalyptic glow. Entire towns in Sonoma County have been evacuated.

Adding insult to injury, the local electric utility, PG&E, has been threatening to turn off power all over Northern California. A week or so ago, the word came down that they were looking to shut off sections of Palo Alto, among other cities, though details on when, what parts and how long these outages would last, were all impossible to get. PG&E put up a website telling users what areas would be hit, but because they mismanaged the information, the websites crashed due to traffic. In the end my town wasn't affected, but loads of other towns were - including hospitals and other medical facilities.

This is all because PG&E couldn't be bothered to maintain its network, which caused last year's fire, the Camp Fire. That fire, the deadliest in our state's history, killed 85 people in Northern California, people who in some cases barely had time to get out of their homes before the flames overtook them. Not only did shitty electricity infrastructure cause this tragedy, but the aftermath caused PG&E to go bankrupt, citing wildfire liabilities of $30 billion. But because they're the monopoly provider of large parts of the region, that doesn't leave consumers many options if the power goes out. Coincidentally, PG&E also has some of the highest electricity rates in California, because their energy generating infrastructure is old and decrepit, requiring further maintenance - maintenance they don't provide because they're too busy giving their executives inordinately large bonuses.

And yet the right-wing loves bashing California. They say we're ungovernable, that our cities are crumbling and dirty and full of homeless. They disdain our huge homeless population and high gas prices, and when idiot elected Republicans befoul the air with this litany of untruth, right-wing voters here and in the rest of the country lap it all up. All of this ignoring the fact that all these problems - massive wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, high energy prices and corporate malfeasance, among others - are all basically down to right-wing policies.

And at the root of those policies, which aim to punish the poor and middle-class for not being rich and which aim to destroy our environment, is the stripping of the public sector in favor of the private sector, all in service of the completely idiotic idea that if we give more money to rich people they'll share the wealth with everybody else. So we strip our natural resources, let our physical and energy infrastructure crumble to pieces, and build planes that are so smart that when they take off they assume the air flying past their nose means they're pointed too high and they crash straight into the ground.

We're suffering the crapification of America at the hands of unfettered capitalism, where companies focus only on maximizing profit without actually making product that customers need or want, or that work as they should. Cars that are meant to be safe navigate straight into highway dividers and burst into flame, because the manufacturer decides to call one of its functions Autopilot; bridges fall down because nobody's bothered to maintain them since they were built; and energy utilities let trees grow next to their power lines because they don't want to spend the money to hire and train engineers to make sure that these very power lines don't have combustible materials growing next to them.

And again, somehow it's my fault because I voted for Obama twice, and because I believe that the fruits of the economy should be shared more widely than just the two or three assholes who've managed to convince investors to let them undermine our democracy by taking our data and monetizing it.

It's frustrating seeing my home turn uninhabitable, first through epochal droughts and then through apocalyptic fires every autumn, and knowing that my life is being shortened by the stupidity and greed and corporate malfeasance of people hundreds or even thousands of miles away, who are pissed off that we allow gay and transgender people to live their lives here in this state.

At some point even the Republicans are going to accept that global warming is irreversible and more complex than they can imagine, and somehow it'll still be California's fault for being too liberal. Well, fuck them, and if you vote for them, fuck you too.

Thoughts on picking up the Wire again

I'm finding that one of the nice things about being in a new relationship is sharing what you're both interested in. This is kind of an outgrowth of that initial feeling out of what stuff you have in common, whether movies, music, books, or any sort of art.

So it is that I find myself rewatching the Wire with my girlfriend. We've taken on an episode at a time, here and there, when we've been spending weekends together (and when we're not off gallivanting around Chicago or Universal Studios), and the early indications are that it's a hit.

This is very important to me: I consider the Wire to be the best show ever made, bar none. Head and shoulders above intermittently brilliant but intermittently infuriating shows like the Sopranos or Breaking Bad, or over shows like Mad Men that I never managed to get into. It's also one of the most important things that opened my political consciousness, and my interest in finding out what's really going on with race in America - words that seem naive when I phrase them that way, but that are meant to express how the show gives me a glimpse of a way of life that I can't begin to comprehend based on my experiences in what amounts to a parallel universe of privilege.

And of course the Wire isn't the definitive word on race, just as it's not the definitive word on the drug war (though it's as close as anything); rather it's a perspective on both that comes through in David Simon's exploration of how we live together, how a city functions (as viewed from its constituent institutions) and how inertia in those same institutions makes it almost impossible to enact lasting improvements in citizens' lives.

These are all super heavy concepts for a show that starts out looking like a police procedural, but they begin to take shape over the following seasons, when it follows different parts of Baltimore and a shifting cast of characters.

(I have to be vague about what's coming, because my girlfriend sometimes reads this blog [hi, sweetie!] and I'm under strict orders not to spoil anything)

Most immediately, it's lovely experiencing the show again, getting to know characters like Bunk, McNulty, Bubbles and Stringer Bell as if I'm seeing them for the first time. It's also fascinating watching them again with the knowledge of what happens to them over the coming years - as well as thinking about the different fortunes of the actors who play these characters. David Simon himself has noted how most of the white actors have gone on to bigger and better things, while many (though by no means all) of the black actors remain character actors. Though I was excited to see Michael B Jordan's name in the credits, given his surge in popularity recently on the back of roles like Apollo Creed and Killmonger.

It's also interesting to watch the show without the echo chamber of all my friends in London who were watching it just before me or at the same time. I don't know what it was like here in the US, but in London it was An Event. Not only was my workplace buzzing with talk of Omar, Avon Barksdale and Clay Davis ("sheeeeeeeee-it"), but it was all over the papers and the culture generally. The phenomenon was even mentioned in NW, Zadie Smith's 2012 novel about an intertwined group of Londoners.

Now I'm watching it more than ten years since its end, and since the end of the cultural moment it lived in. Especially this first season, where interactions with federal employees are peppered with mentions of the War on Terror, but the whole show (as I remember it) refers to concerns that are so different from the world we live in now. That's partly because in the interim we elected our first black president, and right after him our first white one.

But the technology is also miles away from the smartphones and social media we use now, and the gender, sexual and racial politics are definitely seen in a different way than now, in our post-Ferguson, Me Too and post-DOMA culture.

As I said, my girlfriend seems to be enjoying it - beyond the well-drawn characters and the relevant questions of race and class, her work background is very similar to the milieu in the show, so it's full of things she recognizes. And she likes to quote some (particularly foul-mouthed) exchanges back to me when telling stories about work, which is also fun.

I'd been thinking idly of re-watching the show anyway, but now that I've gotten together with her it's made it easier to justify it to myself. I'm hoping that once we wrap up the Wire, we'll be able to take on my other Top 3, namely the West Wing and Justified.

Thoughts on Joker

Well, holy crap. Just saw Joker yesterday, and it was basically all I could hope for. Spoilers below the jump, and then I'll share some thoughts.

Cautiously Optimistic about the New Picard Show

Well, I just had a gander at the second trailer for the upcoming Picard series, and I'll be honest, I've got some thoughts. And feels!

Have a look:


So, it's still kinda light on details. Plot, and so forth. In fact, like the previous trailer it looks a lot like Logan, except with Patrick Stewart playing the roles of both Logan and Professor X, all in one. Young woman with mysterious bad guys chasing her, hero who's gone into seclusion, etc and so forth.

But I also can't deny that the glimpse of Riker and Troi, more than anything, brought a chuckle and the teensiest lump to the throat. More so than Data or Seven of Nine, or the set from the classic fourth-season episode "Family".

I was thinking a little about my reaction to the trailer, and I guess it's the fact that, while my Star Trek will always be Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation feels like home, and coming back to it feels so, so right.

One of my friends, who was into Trek in high school alongside me, is fond of arguing in favor of Discovery by pointing out that the reaction to TNG was similar (die hard Trekkies saying it wasn't real Trek, "trash and not canon", etc). It's hard to conceive of that, though, as I'd argue that most Trek fans now probably grew up alongside TNG, moreso than fans who've gravitated toward any of the other shows, even the Original Series.

And while I think that TNG was good for a lot less time than us fans would like to recall, even when it failed it was thought-provoking, in ways that Trek really hasn't managed since. Even DS9, which I think had the most sophisticated storytelling of any of the shows, didn't always hit the heights of episodes like Measure of a Man or the Drumhead.

The Mission Log Podcast used to talk about "the Kirk speech" in TOS, where the captain usually delivered that episode's theme, though frequently in ways that haven't aged so well since the 1960s. Then, when they were reviewing TNG, they would talk about the Picard speech, which also delivered that week's theme, but I'd say those have aged a lot better, given that Picard always better exemplified the humanist spirit that Gene Roddenberry aimed to convey in the show.

And Picard was always just a more interesting character, especially once the writers gave him more to do than being cranky. Over the course of the show he was revealed to be a musician, archeologist, fighter, and lover - his card on the TNG card game back in the 90s even explicitly called him a Renaissance Man. Roddenberry always argued that humanity could be great if we could just put aside our hatreds, bigotries and obsession with money - and Picard is probably the best exemplar of that argument that the show ever gave us.

So that's why I'm so looking forward to this new show featuring Patrick Stewart. But then I think of all the things that worry me. For one thing, that similarity to Logan, which also implies to me that they're going to kill Picard off at the end of the show. Not that I blame Sir Patrick for wanting a clean break, but it'd be nice to see him ride off into the sunset, happy, rather than being put into situation after situation until it makes narrative sense to bump him off.

The other thing that worries me is that this is the same studio that brought us Discovery. As I mention in that rundown of season 2, I thought the showrunners fumbled the ball badly, after a first season that was rough but promising. Part of it is the changes they made to the formula: by focusing on the journey of Michael Burnham rather than making it an ensemble show, like the previous ones, CBS painted itself into the corner of following a character who's not actually that clever or interesting, and as a result failing to develop any of the characters unless they were needed in a given episode (RIP Airiam).

Picard looks like it'll be another serialized show, rather than episodic. For the story they look like they want to tell, that's fine, though my objection to it in Discovery is that they seem to have used that narrative structure only because that's what audiences expect, rather than what makes sense for Star Trek. That structure has also led to the show missing out on the humanistic and intellectual angle that TOS, TNG and the others had, to varying degrees, and replaced it with a more cinematic feel.

The cinematic feel can be good, in the form of higher production values and more action. But it can also be bad, in the form of action for the sake of action, and way more simplistic storytelling. And that trailer, where Picard is yelling about the Federation living up to its ideals, indicates to me that we're getting the simplistic storytelling that marred Discovery.

To put it another way: questioning whether the Federation was right was daring and fun when Deep Space 9 did it, but given that it's now the default mode of latter-day TNG movies and Discovery alike, it'd be nice to once again get stories that don't test whether Roddenberry's vision could work, but rather stretch out in it, take it for granted, and see what stories we can tell from within a Federation that isn't venal and corrupt.

And yet...

Much more than Discovery did, Picard is making me consider paying for CBS All Access, rather than waiting for my next trip abroad to watch it. Because even if it's bad, it'll feel like coming home.

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Just finished Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, and I'm filled with joy thinking about that novel.

I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, because my sister left a copy here when she went back to Europe, and because I needed to read a couple more books from top-flight authors for the year. It turns out I knew about the book, slightly, because Craig Mazin had read out an excerpt from it last year in the Scriptnotes podcast, and as a further bit of synchronicity, a local bookstore has a poster for one of Greer's previous books, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, up on the wall of their bathroom.

The premise is lovely - to avoid having to attend an ex-boyfriend's wedding, which also takes place on his fiftieth birthday, middling novelist Arthur Less starts accepting invitations from all kinds of half-baked literary events across the world. As he has indignity after indignity heaped upon him from New York to Mexico City to Turin, Berlin to Paris, Marrakech, India and Tokyo, he also remembers his own life as the companion to a much more celebrated poet, and comes to terms with his circle of friends aging - something that wasn't promised, given they came up and came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

Even more lovely is the language. In Berlin Less is enlisted to teach a brief course at a university, which he calls "Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein". The narrator describes Less having the students assemble words from favorite novels, translate a novel's opening from English to German and back until it's unrecognizable, and at the end says they may not have learned about literature, but have been given back the love of language that made them literature students in the first place.

This love of language shines through the whole book, from the description of Arthur Less's kissing ("like a man who knows only the present tense of a new language - only you, only now" [sic]) to the aforementioned passage read out on Scriptnotes, which deals with the difficulty of being the non-famous partner of a writer considered a genius.

But what makes it such a wonderful book is that the language, while erudite, flows effortlessly, making it a quick read, an enjoyable one and also an intelligent one. And a funny one - I don't know the rest of Greer's oeuvre, but here he draws on the likes of PG Wodehouse in using an impressive command of the language to make you laugh. Certain lines ("Let us never find out") made me laugh out loud, which other funny novels don't always manage.

One other thing that may make the book resonate for me is the theme on aging. Less spends the book ruminating on what it means to have gotten to fifty without the desired success in matters professional, financial or romantic, and when the date comes finds it an anti-climax. I'm not gay, a novelist (yet) or fifty (yet), but I did hit forty this year, and at the time found myself thinking back over the previous 20 years or so, trying to make sense of the tapestry of experiences I'd had up until then. It was hard to pinpoint any really major successes, but had to acknowledge a certain satisfaction with my travels, my years living abroad, and various other achievements.

Less has a similar trajectory, as he's faced with the prospect of being interviewed onstage by the ex-wife of his famous, genius lover, or of the possibility that he's killing the literati of Berlin with boredom, or even the dissolution of a friend's marriage that he'd previously thought rock-solid. He's looking back on all those experiences and trying to pull them into a coherent narrative of what his life has meant, a task made more urgent by the approach of the milestone that says you're old, and the need to adjust to the reality that there is actually life after fifty (or, in my case, forty).

But perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay the book is that it reminded me of how much I love writing, and got me back on track with my own work. There's something wonderful about reading a narrative by someone who knows the language as intimately as Andrew Sean Greer, and having it remind you how much you love the language too. I wish I could read it again for the first time.

When Chicago Was More Than the Second City

I've long wanted to visit more of America, and the last few years living in the US have given me the chance to see parts that I wouldn't get to when I was flying over from London. Some of it, like Portland or the more mountainy bits of California, have been for pleasure, but work trips have let me get acquainted with the likes of Las Vegas (where I went for CES for four years), Fort Worth and now Chicago.

My company is based in Bloomington, Illinois, and I got the word two weeks ago that they wanted me out there for a meeting. I weighed up my options and quickly decided that I wanted to add a couple of days in Chicago, which is about 140 miles away. I got a rental car, and the company was happy that it would cost them less to send me home on Sunday (i.e. yesterday) rather than the Thursday after the meeting ended, so I was set.

And things improved when my girlfriend agreed to fly out to meet me the day I drove up from Bloomington, marking our first long weekend away together (cue "Awwwws"). She managed to get on the same flight as me, and even booked herself into the seat beside mine, which made the whole trip even nicer.

As for the city itself: I planned on one major sight per day, and while we missed the Field Museum, Wrigley Field and Shedd Aquarium, we did get to tour the river on a cruise that focused specifically on the architecture, plus we hit the American Writers' Museum and the Art Institute, so I think it's fair to say we caught a bunch of things that are relevant to my interests. We even went to the viewing deck at Hancock Tower, overlooking Lake Michigan and downtown, where we spent a romantic evening watching the sun go down and the city lights come on.

Top of the World, Ma

My girlfriend laughed at me the first morning on the bus up to the Architecture Center, when I said I was already feeling good about the place, and could kind of see myself living there. I've since moderated that since a friend who lives there explained how brutal the winters have been, but even she agrees that it's a great city, if only they would put it somewhere more temperate.

Mostly I was just excited to be in a big city again, especially one with so much history. Between paintings, music and architecture, as well as politics and business, so much of what we associate with the idea of America comes from Chicago, more so than from New York or Los Angeles. I've heard more than one person (on and off TV) poke fun at the regard Chicagoans have for their city, and the self-regard on the gift shop shelves can be a little overblown, but it is nice to think of a third pole to the US, separate from the two giant cities on either coast.

More than that, being in Chicago reminds you of a time, not even that long ago, when the US considered a lot of cities important: Detroit, St. Louis and so forth. And of a time when New York was just this scruffy, dirty, dangerous city over on the East Coast, rather than the gilded playland that shows like Sex and the City are at pains to present.

View from the start of the river tour

On the drive back to O'Hare yesterday I kept thinking about Sufjan Stevens's Illinois album, which at its best talks about the human stories dotted around the entire state, referencing cultural signifiers like Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln and even Superman and John Wayne Gacy. It's not the best album, because it was his attempt to keep up with his (quickly abandoned) idea of doing an album for all 50 states, but in its best moments I do recognize what I've seen of the city.

I guess I'm affected by the city because it hearkens back to times when America was still confident and good at making things, and when you could make it big in pretty much any big city. This is a feeling I also get when I read Bill Bryson's books about America, for instance his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which talks about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Now Iowa is kind of the butt of jokes, but here on the coasts we forget at our peril that people do live there - maybe if we hadn't bypassed the middle of America by flying over it and shifting our manufacturing out of cities like Detroit, we wouldn't be in the mess we're currently in.

The Seer's Tower and modernist architecture in front

I think the city's tallest tower is a good example. When it was the Sears Tower, and the world's tallest office building, it represented a strain of American business that employed a good chunk of the workforce. Now it's the Willis Tower, and Sears-Roebuck has pretty much torn itself apart through dire mismanagement. But the tower itself is still the daily destination for around 12,000 workers every day - representing how just because a place is no longer the center of the business world people still live and work there.

Illinois is obviously not as down-at-heel as cities like Ohio and Michigan (or at least parts thereof), which were more reliant on heavy industry. It's been helped along by its more service-oriented economy, I suppose, and its continuing cultural capital comes from being the first stepping stone for a lot of Saturday Night Live comedians... as well as housing works like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

In any case, I'd like to go back and see more of it - potentially arriving on Amtrak, the way people used to get there before flying was commonplace, and you had to stop there on trips between the coasts. My friend who lives there talked about how it's a city of neighborhoods, and I think it'd be fun to find out more about those places, too.

And maybe spend another romantic evening with my honey up at the top of the city? That sounds pretty good, too.

RIP the UK

The title might be a little dramatic, but this week's news that the supposed Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided to send Parliament home for five weeks in a bid to stop them from stopping his no-deal Brexit agenda is also quite dramatic. It's also probably overkill, since Parliament had trouble agreeing on anything before he took power.

Because I read the Guardian, it's hard to escape the impression that things are going to hell in a hand basket, and that we'll be back to death by stoning by dinner-time (I never get tired of that Blackadder quote, in part because it remains so apposite with each new development in the Brexit saga). But in fairness, if I read the Times, the Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) or the Sun or the Daily Mail, I'd be just as het up but in the other direction: worried that my Brexit and taking-back of control could be stolen out from under my nose at any time by shifty foreigners and disloyal leftists.

Which is part of the problem: in normal circumstances it's a good thing that the papers in Britain have a viewpoint, but here it just means that people are unable to find any common ground, because they're being whipped into a frenzy by their respective sides.

My problem with the whole business is that I actually guess the UK's going to be okay. Not great, not as well off as it would be if they'd just voted in Ed Milliband in 2015, or more likely, had returned a majority or coalition for Gordon Brown's Labour in 2010. But the UK's economy is probably big and robust enough that it could do okay on its own - potentially even with a no-deal, though because it's so unprecedented it's impossible to tell.

But what's frustrating is the eternal deadlock that's been unleashed by 2016's Brexit vote. Labour and the Tories respectively are in disarray because being pro-Leave or pro-Remain doesn't cut neatly across party lines - Theresa May had a fifth column in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg's cronies in the European Research Group blocking everything she proposed, just because it suited them to do so, while Jeremy Corbyn's personal distaste for the EU is balanced by the strong Remain contingent in his party and counter-balanced by the knowledge that a great number of Labour strongholds voted heavily to leave.

And while it's comforting (and probably accurate) to point to the massive irregularities in the vote caused by dodgy funding and social media interference, the fact remains that the country voted and people have picked their sides. I won't claim I could foresee the result, but conversations I had as early as 2004 made me wary that a vote to leave would always be possible - for as long as I've lived in the UK there's been a steady drumbeat of negativity about the EU (in no small part because of Boris Johnson's agitating in his newspaper columns).

Add to that the fact that even then the north, or really anyplace that wasn't London, was being left behind. For all the vibrancy of Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh, the place to really do most anything is London, whether you want to get into politics, finance or the media - or simply find a job, given that so many former industrial communities in the North and Midlands still haven't recovered from the double blow of their massive inefficiencies and the Thatcher years.

I don't like to subscribe to notions that it's grim up north, especially because the farthest north I've ever been in England is Nottingham (I'm hedging a bit, because I have been to Edinburgh), but I knew enough people from those areas to know that coming down to London was their best bet to getting started in their early twenties.

The problem with Brexit generally, and my suspicion that Britain will be okay (though as stated, not great), is that it'll do nothing to address those structural issues. Power will still be concentrated in the southeast, and with it all the funding and attention; housing will remain impossible to find, at least at decent prices and at a sufficient level of quality that you'd like to see your children live there. And given that Brexit was revealed as a massive racist attempt to stop immigration, it's ironic that the folks driving up property prices in London - rich Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners, among others - won't be affected by the end of EU freedom of movement.

Moreover, Scotland's going to make more noises about seceding from the UK, hoping in part to get back into the EU, while Northern Ireland could turn back into a powder keg - or at least a giant headache for Westminster, since it had already gotten so fractious that it wasn't being ruled from Belfast anymore.

But I think the best summation of the issue is my friend's comment that the instant rage directed at the idea of revisiting the vote is ridiculous. As he points out, if the arch-Brexiteers have their way, we'll never be able to vote on it again. It's like if we were to stop having elections in the US after we voted in Donald Trump, because we can't go back on that ever (though watch this space - in the unlikely event that he loses the 2020 election, who's to say he leaves the White House...?).

Still - there's probably enough there for the UK to muddle along once it crashes out of the EU without any trade deals. There probably won't be riots or fighting in the streets, and the march of business will set things back on course at some point. But it'll be a smaller, crappier and less pleasant place, losing many of the things that made it a nice place to live or visit. And that's the tragedy of this whole farce.

Big Cold War Love

Every once in a while you step back and notice a pattern in what you're watching, reading, listening, or whatever. I've recently noticed how many movies and TV shows I'm watching that are about the last few years of the Cold War.

The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.

It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.

It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.

On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.

What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.

I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).

Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.

In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.

I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.

Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.

Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now That's What I Call All of British Music

My research through the twisting and turning corridors of British music continues. As promised when I wrote about listening to all of the Kinks' albums a few months ago, I went on to listen to the Rolling Stones' discography, then The Who, and on and on. I've explored how the blues and R&B fascination of the 60s turned into the hard rock of the 70s, and from there into the stadium rock of the 80s, a trajectory that encompassed all three bands, and might have included the Beatles, if they'd lasted that long.

I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.

My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?

The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.

The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.

The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).

There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.

Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.

It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.

There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.

Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...

Wondering About Amazon Prime's The Boys

I've been seeing ads for Amazon's new show The Boys, based on the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic from Dynamite Studios (and previously Wildstorm, which I just learned about reading the Wikipedia page a moment ago). It looks fairly well done, but I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, especially given this review on the AV Club, which I also read just a few minutes ago.

I guess the issue I have is the source material - Garth Ennis has long reveled in nihilism, and while it was entertaining when I was reading Preacher or Hitman, I wonder if it's not gotten out of hand, even for him?

He's one of that cohort of British comics writers who came up in the 80s and 90s on stuff like 2000AD, and then made their way to the US via Vertigo, and from there ended up in superhero comics. But whereas someone like Grant Morrison loves superhero comics and has continued working in the genre, Ennis went on a similar route to Warren Ellis and turned his back on superheroes as soon as he could.

I don't entirely blame him, since I think that most superhero books are basically the same now as they were 20-30 years ago, if a little more gross and intense. But what I've seen of his work since Preacher has lacked heart, for lack of a better term.

It might have been the switch to Marvel in the early 2000s that precipitated it. Preacher was graphic, extreme and sometimes all you could do was laugh in horror (cf. the Meat Woman), but you could see he held affection for characters like Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy, or even Arseface. It was so thematically rich that it actually got me into Western movies, especially John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Even now I don't think I can name a more perfect comics series, other than Ennis's run on Hellblazer or Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

And it seemed like he was onto something similar with War Stories, the one-shots he did for Vertigo after Preacher, about wars (mainly World War 2, one of his favorite themes). But then he went for Marvel's MAX line, and I think his worst instincts got the better of him. Mainly in the final issue of his Fury mini-series, where Nick Fury (pre Samuel L Jackson) strangles the main villain with his own intestines. Apparently George Clooney had been attached to play Fury, but was put off by that book.

From there Ennis went on to the Punisher, first under Marvel Knights and then MAX. His first storyline was fun, in a back-to-basics way, but the impression I get of some of the MAX issues is that he was just there to rack up as much of a body count as possible. This is notwithstanding my pleasure at seeing his fingerprints all over Punisher War Zone, of course, but I can't deny that those stories aren't really his absolute best.

Another one that I dip into from time to time is Crossed, which he did for Avatar. Crossed is basically just gross and disturbing, a version of zombies where instead of the mindless walking dead, the zombies are maniacal rapists and murderers acting out their civilized selves' worst impulses. There's room for thematically rich stuff there, which is why I have a look every once in a while, but for the most part it's unrelentingly brutal.

The Boys is kind of in this vein, from what I've seen. The first image of the series, essentially, is the crushed, armless corpse of the main character's girlfriend, a hapless victim of collateral damage during a superhero fight. I do think the story plays well with one of Ennis's best-loved themes, which is the ease with which the people in charge of society get subverted into immorality, but I guess my experience has been that he's more concerned with grossing out the reader than giving us characters to care about.

Maybe that's unfair - Wee Hughie is a pretty good character, but somehow I've never connected enough with the book to buy the trade paperbacks, even having skipped ahead a few collections to the end, where things go pretty crazy.

It might just be that, overall, I'm tired with all the relentless negativity and nihilism of media at the moment. I've talked about it on Star Trek Discovery (though my complaint there is more the writing than the tone), and it's present in a number of other shows and comics at the moment. The problem is that nihilism is also present in the real world, much more so than in 2006 when Ennis and Robertson started The Boys, and it gets a little tiring to see that kind of thing even in the places I go to escape from the real world.

Now, I should point out one other, slightly contradictory thing, which is that I'm pleased for him and Darick Robertson that they've had the show optioned, and are getting paid well for it (I presume). I think he's one of those writers whose work deserves more recognition - I just wish it was for some of his better work. I know Preacher's on AMC, but I also don't get the sense it's taken off the way other AMC shows have... and that's a real shame.

At Last

Just felt like an appropriate thing to post, given how stuff at home is going:

Thoughts on the Women's World Cup

So another Women's World Cup ends with the US taking the trophy home. With my limited knowledge of the women's game, I guess I'm not surprised, since all I really knew about women's football before this tournament started was the 1999 tournament, with the now-iconic team that won their second trophy on penalties and, properly, for the first time, put soccer front and center here in the US in ways that the men's team hasn't been able to.

It may sound bad but I wasn't really planning on paying much attention when it all started last month. It was a little more top of mind for me than it might have been if I didn't religiously read the Guardian's football coverage every day, and their Football Weekly podcast has done a decent job in the regular season of mentioning the doings in women's football. I'd been sort of looking forward to a break, but then it all started and I found myself swept along in the excitement.

I remember listening to the Football Weekly that went out the day before it started, and getting a sense of excitement from the correspondents, and I think that's what made me want to keep up. But the thing that really got my attention was seeing Italy unexpectedly beat Australia.

As an Italy fan, I think it's fair to call myself "long-suffering". I still have fond memories of Italy's 2006 triumph (in the men's tournament), but since then the World Cup has been one disaster after another, and the European Championships have been only a bit better. To be honest I didn't even know the women hadn't qualified for the last couple of tournaments, so seeing this unfancied team come out of the blocks was impressive. Even more impressive was the 5-0 against Jamaica that essentially guaranteed progression to the round of 16. And if Italy went out in the quarterfinal to eventual finalists the Netherlands, well, it was at least a good run, which was needed after so many years of the men doing so badly.

The other thing I enjoyed about the tournament was the mirror-universe quality to it all. Some teams that are nowhere in the men's game qualified for this tournament (like Thailand), or were even considered strong contenders (like Canada). Even China and Japan got to the knockout rounds, which is a big feat for Asian teams on the men's side.

Probably the biggest example of this quality, though, is the position of the US. By winning today the US takes home its fourth trophy, making it the most successful women's team on this stage, whereas the men didn't qualify for Russia 2018 either. I was struck by the narrative surrounding their progress as the team everybody loved to hate, especially given how they kicked off their tournament with that 13-0 demolition of Thailand.

But I also got into the narratives around Megan Rapinoe and her ongoing spat with both Donald Trump and with the US Soccer Federation, as well as how the women's team overall has taken the federation to court to achieve parity with the men in terms of pay. Given their success internationally, it's hard to argue, especially when you read the analysis of how little they earn compared to the men.

All of a sudden, not only could I not avoid profiles of Rapinoe or Everybody's Favorite, Alex Morgan, but I couldn't get enough of them myself, especially given how outspoken Morgan is on this pay gap question. The profiles on her talk about how marketable she is (which I take as a euphemism for "attractive"), so it's more notable how willing she is to speak bluntly about pay, her goal celebrations or even backing up Rapinoe on not visiting the White House.

I also can't help contrasting Morgan with Neymar Jr. on the subject of diving and drawing fouls. Both are key players who score a lot of goals and therefore get the stuffing knocked out of them regularly. And if Morgan has started to incorporate diving into her own repertoire, it's still a far cry from the theatrics that Neymar engages in when he gets fouled - to the point that he's probably damaged his own reputation every time he pounds the turf while rolling about.

Morgan gets bowled over, makes maybe some kind of meal of it, but then she's back on her feet and drawing more fouls, with a lot less complaining than him.

Or another example that I loved: in the Sweden-Netherlands semi-final Kosovare Asllani took a ball to the face that left her getting stretchered off at the end of the match, and going to the hospital for scans. Yet she recovered fast enough to play again in the third-place playoff a few days later, and even scored the first goal. 

I'd say it's those kinds of stories that made me glad I've watched a fair chunk of this tournament. I just hope I'll be able to keep up with this side of the game as it develops, though with luck a true female equivalent to Neymar's playacting is still a few years off.

Radical Kindness or Just Plain Being Nice?

We were having a conversation in the office the other day about the recent Mr. Rogers documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor, and it got me thinking about the buzz that surrounded the movie when it was out. I seem to remember posts here and there on Facebook where people were raving about it, and elsewhere on the internet people were talking about how much it made them cry.

At the same time I thought I saw an increase in memes relating to Mr. Rogers, and the various kindnesses and wise sayings he doled out in his years on TV. The main one is about seeing people at disasters who are helping, and to always look for the helpers - which I think is very good advice at any time.

I'm old enough to remember watching Mr. Rogers on TV, though I think as a whippersnapper I preferred Sesame Street, which was funnier and fairly anarchic for TV aimed at kids aged three and up. I thought I remembered when he went off the air, though that and his passing (in 2001 and 2003, respectively) turn out to have happened later than I had imagined.

But what got me thinking after the movie came out, and after that conversation in the office, was how the niceness of Fred Rogers seems to have taken on a political undertone.

This shouldn't be surprising, in these weirdly polarized times, when certain (*cough* rightwing *cough*) groups find depictions of the Statue of Liberty to be provocatively liberal. But when I say "political" I don't mean that the Mr. Rogers ethos has been adopted by the left - more that the need for being nice and tolerant in a quiet and low-key way seems to have become a reaction against the prevailing current of American society, which just feels more polarized along any metric or ideal you could care to mention.

So I call it radical kindness - I don't think I came up with the term, but whoever it belongs to, I take it to mean a clear attempt to be kind and friendly in situations where it would otherwise be easy to just be unpleasant. Like any such impulse, it can also sometimes go a little overboard - I remember being at a concert at Stern Grove in San Francisco last year, where a woman sitting in front of me was not only helping people climb up along her little stretch of ground where she was sitting with her friends, but was also insisting (repeatedly) slogans like how we're all in this together, or wanting to help out, or some such.

That might come off as snobbish, but I appreciated the impulse, even though I could see her patience wearing thin with all the people trying to climb past throughout the afternoon (we were listening to an orchestra play a bunch of pieces by Sibelius, so it was a fairly long concert).

And at the risk of sounding even more snobby, on the internet there seems to be a performative aspect to it, where people compete to show how much some simple (or elaborate) act of kindness that they've read about hits them in the feels.

If I'm criticizing anything about this radical kindness thing, it's that - but at the same time I don't want to criticize too hard because it just seems churlish to get annoyed at people going out of their way to be nice to others.

I guess what trips me up about this impulse, and the buzz surrounding the Mr. Rogers documentary, is how it really is a reaction - it could be the media inflating bad news to generate more clicks, or maybe things really are so bad, but it does feel like our leaders are particularly venal at the moment, and business is more cutthroat than ever, all against a backdrop of casual cruelty and environmental collapse. With that in mind, why shouldn't people - especially younger people - decide to take a stand by loudly proclaiming they're for everything Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the government seem to be ignoring?

Overall, the real negative that I can see here is that things have gotten so bad that such stances really are necessary. Lest we forget, there are concentration camps for refugee children on our southern border, and administration officials are arguing that these kids don't need soap, toothpaste or blankets.

That said, it's not just here. In Japan there's a growing group of people called hikikomori, who are effectively modern-day hermits - effectively people who have opted out of the rat race of Japanese society and refuse to leave their homes or see their families. There are also "herbivores" or "grass-eating men", who have opted out of looking for romantic partners entirely - or at least out of traditional expectations of masculinity in Japan.

But it's notable that this reaction in Japan is against a specific cultural expectation (get your salaryman job, marry someone, and do just as all other men have been doing since the end of the Second World War), whereas in the US it's against a feeling of rampant unpleasantness. Or to put it another way, hikikomori are looking for a different way of life, whereas in America we're just getting sick of people being shitty - which has never really been an expected "way of life".

So that's why I believe Won't You Be My Neighbor got so much attention when it came out, despite - or because of - the fact that Fred Rogers was an ordained minister and probably quite conservative in many ways. Though his conservatism probably manifested in quieter ways than that of today's Republicans. Much like I said last year or so, that the MeToo movement might not have gained so much traction if a person with accusations of sexual assault and harassment hadn't gained the White House, the Mr. Rogers documentary might not have gained so much traction if there weren't this sense of cruelty pervading American life right now.

Or maybe it would have been a big (ish) movie no matter who's president? Nostalgia was probably a big part of its appeal, too. Still, I think there are grounds for my argument, and I'd be interested in seeing if there really has been more thought for radical kindness since 2016.

We could use it, to be honest.

So Many Endings, Even More Spoilers

I've been tempted to do a rundown of all the endings I've watched lately: Game of Thrones, Avengers: Endgame, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, even Chernobyl. Some have been well done, others... well, not bad exactly, but maybe not the most satisfying conclusions to their respective sagas. I don't know if I have a grand unifying theory of endings to give here, but I suppose I can tease out some commonality if I go through them all, so...

I'm not one of those who were offended by the denouement of GoT. I covered my thoughts about the thought of it ending back in April, when the first episode had just aired and the dust hadn't yet settled.  I then spent three weeks in Europe unable to watch the final half of the season (or rather, focused more on wrapping up Star Trek: Discovery). Because I was still perusing sites like the AV Club, I got the sense that crazy things were happening, and I was right.

If I have one complaint about the end of GoT, it's the rushed nature of certain things. Specifically, the bit where Daenerys torches King's Landing, and Jon Snow then has to kill her and the (surviving) nobles give the throne to Bran, the one person least likely to fuck everything up. All of these things, taken singly and indeed altogether, work, more or less. I just feel like it was all a bit rushed, which is odd considering that the season consisted of six 90-minute movies, effectively. But on the other hand, they could have cut them down to 60 minutes, developed the story a bit more, and given us ten episodes to digest the Siege of Winterfell, the sack of King's Landing, and all the fallout.

The other question is how much of this will be in the books, if they ever come out. The AV Club's "Experts" review touches on this, suggesting that the ending GRRM comes up with may not be this exact set of events, though it'll likely be the same emotional resonances, i.e. the main characters turning their backs on the past and finally forging their own futures, though with great regrets behind them. And the review notes, which I didn't notice at the time, how little Jon Snow had to do with anything apart from stabbing Dany. Hopefully in the books he's a bit more instrumental.

Contrast that with Endgame. I won't deny that Infinity War left me a little cold at the end. I knew the Snap was going to happen, because it's the starting point of the Infinity Gauntlet crossover from the 90s, so paradoxically the fact that they ended it there wasn't as much of a shock for me as it was for probably 99% of people watching.

On the other hand, I don't know how they fixed things in the comics, other than Adam Warlock ended up splitting the Infinity Stones among a bunch of weirdoes and having some sort of adventures that didn't last long. This means that Endgame had the capacity to surprise me, which probably helped me enjoy it so much.

Endgame also did a good job of calling back to previous movies in the series, bringing a number of ideas and characters back to tie them into the present - it even made me appreciate Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, which I'd thought was so much gibberish at the start. And while looking back it also did a good job of pointing us toward the future, by inserting a new dynamic into Starlord and Gamora's romance, passing the shield and armor to successors of Captain America and Iron Man, and basically bringing back most of the box office draws like Black Panther.

Though I'm not ashamed to say that, as Ant-Man became the catalyst for solving the Snap, possibly the thing I'm looking to most is another film for him.

Then there's Dark Phoenix. Unlike the others, it's not exactly meant to be an ending, but the fact that Disney now owns the characters' film rights means this series is likely done. I remain a little ambivalent about that, because while the quality hasn't been as great as the MCU films, it has been fun to see some of the storylines and deep-bench characters show up, especially in the sub-series that started with First Class.

But if anything, the real ending for the X-Men movie series was Logan, given how it put a capstone on that character's journey and on mutants overall. If Dark Phoenix sits in that timeline, then it's even more of a downer because what we can expect is a sad, sad end for all these characters.

Though I still appreciate cool-dean Professor X, as played by James McAvoy, and his dynamic with Michael Fassbender's Magneto. Seeing Patrick Stewart opposite Ian McKellen in those roles was, of course, brilliant, but this set of movies did a good job of showing their frenemy-ship as it developed over the decades. Even if their ridiculous longevity was starting to wear a little thin.

I'm also ambivalent about the X-Men going forward, because I always thought they sat a little awkwardly in the wider Marvel universe, and each subsequent X-Men movie is going to either have to incorporate the Avengers or neutralize them in some way. Though I'm curious how the roles will be recast, if at all - they might use the multiverse teased in Into the Spider-Verse and the upcoming Spider-Man: Far From Home, to show the mutants occupying a separate Earth that they only visit when there's some planet-shattering... well, crisis, I guess you'd call it.

Which actually brings me to Arrow! I'd almost forgotten about it, since Chernobyl's the thing I've finished most recently (that might needs its own post). I just wrapped up watching season 7 of Arrow, and I have to appreciate the way they approached it - I read early in the season that the showrunners decided to treat it as a final season, which meant they could go a little crazy and kill or otherwise remove a bunch of characters (or bring them back; hi, Roy!).

It wasn't the most satisfying season of TV, especially because the previous season of Arrow had been a sort of return to form, but I appreciated the high drama of it all, as Oliver discovered a long-lost sister who turned out to be evil. It'll be interesting to see how the next season, which really will be the last and will run for only ten episodes, wraps up Oliver Queen's story.

It's interesting, looking back at all these, how much superhero stuff I watch, and how much it's come to dominate the landscape. Back in 2008, you'd have guessed Batman would be the thing to dominate, with the Dark Knight, but Marvel arguably did a better job by focusing on a second-string character like Iron Man - the very fact he's considered one of the big guys of Marvel is pretty much due to that movie.

And it's interesting to think that GoT, the one thing here not based on a comic, became as big a cultural phenomenon, given its origins as a niche fantasy novel. The way for Game of Thrones may have been opened by the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but even that couldn't compete as a cultural touchstone, given how many references to Khaleesi and Jon Snow I encounter in non-nerd settings. It's also opened the way for other adaptations, albeit of works that aren't always as accomplished as GRRM's work.

The 2010s, at any rate, have been dominated by these two colossi, and it'll be interesting to see in the decade to come what takes their place.