Thoughts on Pluribus

It's been a while since I finished Pluribus, about a week or so, but I wanted to set down some thoughts on it while the show was still relatively fresh in mind. The TLDR is that I really liked it, more than Breaking Bad and more than what I've seen so far of Better Call Saul, although I've still only seen one season of Saul. I'm looking forward to seeing where Pluribus goes next, but to discuss that, I'll have to engage in some SPOILERS, so proceed with caution after the jump.

Oslo 2025

With the loss of my job came a lot of time to think about next steps and so forth, and not long after I had the idea to go traveling. My initial thought was a little out there: months and months away, in which I'd be soliciting freelance work and stuff. In consultation with my family and my bank account, I cut that down to two months, in which I'd spend some time in my usual spots of London and Turin. But I also wanted to take advantage of the free time that I had to do something that I don't get to do that often. 

When looking at Europe, the problem is whittling down the enormous array of stuff to see. I knew I wanted to go somewhere I hadn't been before, but the glamor of a long train trip down through France was also attractive. In the end, I decided that as much as I love the Eurostar and Paris, and that a few days in Lyon would have been nice, I'd rather go to a completely new country. Eliminating anywhere too far out of my way (like Iceland), or too small (like Luxembourg or Malta), left me with the Nordics, and so I decided on Oslo.

I'm really glad I did that.

The Radhuss, from the National Museum

I found a decently priced hotel, which turned out to be right in the center of town. The hotel itself was nothing special: the room was so tiny that in the evenings I had to move my suitcase against the front door, so that I wouldn't trip over it if I got up to pee in the middle of the night. The bathroom sink was so tiny that shaving or washing my face meant getting water everywhere. And worst of all, this being a, normally, particularly cold part of Northern Europe, there was no air conditioning - which is forgivable except that the window barely let in any air from outside, even at night.

Did I mention that this was in the middle of an epochal heatwave? I based my activities in the three full days I had in Oslo around where I could find air conditioning.

Luckily, that wasn't too difficult - major sights like the National Museum and the Munch Museum were air-conditioned (and required me to put my bag in a locker, so I got to dry out even further), and the day I went up to the ski jump at Holmenkollen it was high enough in the hills that there was some breeze, especially in among the trees. Also, walking along the harbor was a delight, because any wind coming off the water did a nice job of cooling me down.

The harbor, from the National Museum

The location of the hotel, despite my objections above, was perfect: the only time I needed public transportation was to get to Holmenkollen, but everything else was within a 20-30 minute walk. I had the royal palace just five minutes away, which I didn't catch because I was busy with other sights, and the National Museum was about ten minutes away. There was also food and drink aplenty, about which I'll speak in a moment.

The National Museum was a particular highlight for me. The first floor had a lot of Nordic design and some plaster copies of classical statuary, but the best was on the second floor, where it offered a survey of painting from the 1500s through to now, with a special focus on Norwegian painters. Among those there were a lot of good landscape paintings by Johan Christian Dahl, as well as a room devoted to Edvard Munch. In fact, the National Museum is a better place to see Munch's most famous painting, the Scream, than the Munch Museum itself (both have copies, but the one in the National isn't mobbed and is visible at all times).

The Munch Museum was also pretty great, even if I wasn't initially sure I wanted to spend a morning just with Munch's paintings. The building itself is beautiful, a 13-story tower overlooking the harbor and with views of the whole city. I could even see the Holmenkollen ski jump from the Munch's upper floors. The assortment of Munch's works was also great, though I feel like I might have appreciated a more biographical approach, seeing how his work evolved as he battled depression and drink over the course of his life.

The Munch Museum seen from the Opera House

The very first day, I went up to Holmenkollen, which was a trek because the T-Bane up there was out of service, so I got to enjoy a sweaty, crowded replacement bus service for half an hour; as an aside, I find it notable that rail replacement buses, the bane of my existence when I lived in Britain, are just as grim in Norway. As you can imagine, I took an Uber back into town at the end of the day.

The ski jump at Holmenkollen

Holmenkollen itself was nice, though - I got to walk around the hill where it's located, exploring some of the wooded trails surrounding it, and got to explore a classic Norwegian stave church. Under the ski jump was a little museum dedicated to skiing, which was nice for me to see as a northern Italian who learned cross country skiing at the same time I learned to walk.

The stave church at Holmenkollen

The food was uniformly good, whether I went to restaurants or ate a quick sandwich or focaccia at the museums. I've previously had bad experiences with food in Denmark and Sweden (or at least so unmemorable as to be etched in memory), so it's probably not too surprising that I ended up eating a lot of Asian food while I was in Oslo. But it's a good sign when a city has decent foreign food - it shows that there's a lot of openness to new stuff, which is good to see. And the city itself was pretty diverse: a glance at Oslo's demographics on Wikipedia suggests that immigrants or children of immigrants account for about 30% of the population, compared to 14% nationally.

In terms of other tourists, I was surprised to hear German as the most spoken language at all the tourist sights. There were Italians, Spanish, French and Brits, as well as a healthy smattering of Swedes and probably Danes, but it felt like wherever I went was a German, or at least a German-speaker (there were some Swiss around). The people of Oslo were themselves fairly unobjectionable, apart from their tendency to run red lights on those little electric scooters that were the plague of other big cities a few years ago. There was also the extremely drunk guy who wandered into the place I was having dinner on the second night, whereupon he announced he wanted to have sex with the waitress (I think that's what he said anyway; he was speaking English but slurring heavily).

Overall, I can't recommend the city highly enough. It might be different in other seasons, or even when the summers aren't as blazing hot as July 2025 was, but everybody seemed to be having a great time, whether tourist or local. There were people swimming at the beaches by the Opera House and the Astrup Fearnley Museum (and er, this is a good time to note how good-looking a lot of Norwegians seem to be), and the vibe felt to me like Sydney. If I was going to splurge irresponsibly on travel during this period of funemployment, then I'm glad I did it in Oslo. I can't wait to check it out again.

This good boi travelled with Amundsen, 13/10

Paul McCartney's Photography at the DeYoung Museum

I spent yesterday afternoon up at Golden Gate Park with my dad, since we had the day free and wanted to get out of the house. The plan had originally been just to drive up, walk around the park and have a snack at the museum cafe. But since my dad has a membership to the DeYoung Museum (as well as its sister museum, the Legion of Honor), we decided to have a look around the galleries a bit.

The main exhibit we checked out was the collection of Paul McCartney's photos from the Beatles' early tours, including their visits to Paris, New York City and Miami. McCartney had been experimenting with photography for a while and had brought his camera along to take some candid backstage photos as well as some artsy compositions of the Beatles and their friends and well-wishers. Along the way, the pictures also depict the preparations for the band's arrival in America, press events, the famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the band in relaxation mode in various places.

The backstage snaps are all pretty interesting: there are shots of band members goofing around their dressing rooms, along with shots of other performers who were touring with the Beatles, such as Cilla Black. In the sequence showing the band's visit to Paris, there are studio snaps of them hanging out with local musicians who were recording work for other bands or for the re-recordings in other languages of the Beatles' own songs. You also get glimpses of various band members' partners at the time, like Cynthia Lennon and Jane Asher, whom Paul was dating at the time.

Most of the photography is in black and white, but it bursts into brilliant color for the section showing the Beatles in Miami. That section is pretty much all vacation snaps, depicting the band swimming, lounging by the pool or fishing on boats. Everyone looks impossibly young and the Fab Four in particular seem delighted to be trading the environs of rainy northern England for the swanky parts of Miami in the summer.

One of the things that was fascinating about the exhibition was seeing my dad's reaction to it. He was initially skeptical about it, thinking it wouldn't be that interesting, but he ended up enjoying it a lot, especially seeing again the decor and names of that period, when he himself had been a teenager. At the end, when we ventured into the gift shop, he was moved to buy a double CD compilation of Beatles songs from the period (for my part, I bought Help!).

The other thing that struck me was how of their time the shots of the Ed Sullivan performance were. John, Paul and George are standing in a line, dressed in suits, each carrying their guitars and bouncing up and down slightly as they play. It's the iconic shot of them, and the pose that countless bands imitated in those initial years as other artists and impresarios aimed to capitalize on the Beatles' success. But it's also very, very different from how artists present themselves these days.

As I write this blog, I'm listening to an album by Beady Eye, the band that Liam Gallagher formed after the breakup of Oasis. Liam was particularly drawn to Beatles iconography, but it's hard to imagine a more different image from the clean-cut and purposely non-threatening Beatles than Liam Gallagher, who once stalked up and down the stage at the BRIT Awards in big puffer jacket, inviting people to fight while his brother Noel gave the thank-you speech for their award win.

That's not to say that Liam's bad and the Beatles were good. I just find it funny to see the original pose from their performance that gave rise to, as I said, so many imitators but also to so many reactions against that image. The Rolling Stones started out looking similar to the Beatles, but soon leaned into Mick Jagger's physicality, while The Who also initially ran around in blazers and ties but would end their sets by destroying their instruments.

In a world of Mick Jagger or Morrissey slinking around the stage and flaunting their sexuality, and Beyonce or Lady Gaga putting on elaborate choreography and costuming, it's quaint and kind of sweet to see those four young guys from working-class Liverpool, looking so self-conscious in their suits as they bounce around on TV. Just like the playbills depicting Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Halliday, or the interior decor of Pan-Am airplanes circa 1964, they're images from a bygone world, and it's great that this exhibition captured them so well.

The exhibition is on at the DeYoung until July of this year, so if you're in the Bay Area and have a free afternoon, it's worth checking out. And if you're not in the Bay Area, I'm sure it'll come to your city sometime soon, if it hasn't already. It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a big Beatles fan like me.

UK Election 2024: Labour's Coming Home

Amid all the Euro 2024 fueled jubilation, I haven't had a chance to comment on last week's election in the UK (or on yesterday's election in France). But ever since the results came in, I've been thinking about the return of the Labour Party to 10 Downing Street, and the parallels with New Labour in 1997. What crystallized it for me was rewatching the Britpop documentary, Live Forever, which is overall a pretty good encapsulation of what was going on back then.

Comparing the results of 1997 with those of 2024, they look pretty similar. Labour had 418 seats then and has 411 now. In both elections the Conservatives are in second and the Liberal Democrats are third, though now the Tories have way fewer seats than in 1997 (121 vs 165) and the Lib Dems have more (72 vs 46). One of the big changes is that there are more parties represented in Westminster now, with the notable ones being Reform and the Greens, neither of which picked up seats in 1997 (Reform didn't exist, but UKIP, its predecessor, was one of a couple of Eurosceptic parties that put candidates forward). The Scottish National Party has a similar number of MPs as it did then, in part because it suffered an electoral wipeout, while Sinn Fein has grown to be the largest Northern Irish party, which would have been unheard of then.

Keir Starmer is from the same wing of Labour as Blair was, specifically the more centrist wing. Like Blair, he came in after a stinging defeat for Labour under a more leftwing leader; though apparently Jeremy Corbyn is a bit further left than Neil Kinnock was. Starmer's also relatively young, though he doesn't give off the same cool-guy vibes Blair did. Not that I've had an opportunity to see lots of Starmer interviews, but it's hard to see him noodling on a guitar or playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan. On the other hand, he did chat to Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning of the Guardian Football Weekly, so there may be a cool bone in his body somewhere.

The cultural moment is very different from 1997, though there are some interesting similarities. The big difference is the sense of exhaustion that's permeated Britain in the last couple of years. The country was hit hard by the pandemic and by Brexit, and by the mess the Tories left. Britain under Margaret Thatcher and John Major was a two-speed economy, with all the growth concentrated in the Southeast and the more industrial regions left behind. Britain under this vintage of Tories has that dynamic, though the hollowing out of anywhere outside London and the Home Counties has just accelerated in the past 30 years, plus it's suffered from austerity since 2010.

To put it another way, Britain before 1997 was just stultifying, where many young people had no option but to go on the dole. Britain up until 2024 hasn't even let them do that, because of the cuts to benefits implemented by the Tories (and to an extent by New Labour before them). Instead, young people have had to leave university in debt because of higher tuition fees, find worse and more cramped flats to live in (all in London, because that's where the jobs all seem to be), and pay for all this with increasingly precarious zero-hours contract jobs that offer no security or chance for advancement. The celebrations feel more muted now, probably because no one has any energy for a proper knees-up.

Culturally, Britain doesn't really feel like it's on the ascendant now, either. Part of that is the nature of the culture industry, and specifically the music industry - there's a reason why the Live Forever documentary is about music rather than sport or art or cinema. 

One side effect of all those young people on the dole was that they had time to make music, so we saw a great flowering of unique artists like Morrissey and the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Erasure, the Cure, New Order and loads more. These artists, who sang in their native accents and didn't try to emulate American mannerisms like some of the more popular singers and bands, so we got the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and these gave way to Suede, the Auteurs, and eventually to Blur, Pulp and Oasis. 

Now it seems a lot harder to find the new Morrissey or David Bowie or Robert Smith or Noel Gallagher. I'm sure there are great bands all over Britain, but none of them seems to have broken through to the mainstream or to the US. My suspicion is that Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in Britain right now, even though she's not British herself. 

This isn't to disparage any of the great grime or UK garage bands out there, by the way - Britpop was a lot of things, but it wasn't diverse, and there were precious few non-white faces among all the bands I loved as a teenager. Whereas now you can have someone like Stormzy headlining a stage at Glastonbury. It's just a sign that the culture industry is more fragmented than it was back then.

Of course, the 90s were a strange moment for Britain overall. It wasn't just music, as Live Forever points out, and as John Harris's book The Last Party also stresses (though Harris's book is more focused on music). British cinema was getting exciting, though the only names I can really point to are Danny Boyle and Ewan MacGregor. In art, Damien Hirst was probably the most visible face of an art movement that includes Tracey Emin and was doing all sorts of innovative stuff in the 80s and 90s. Live Forever even goes beyond its musical remit to talk to designer Ozwald Boateng, who was also held to embody the virtues of the UK back then.

Just about the only thing that seems to have the same hold on the British imagination now as it did in 1997 is football. The England team of the 90s benefited from an explosion of funding following the creation of the Premier League, and from a lot of goodwill as the game cleared out the violent hooligans and became something that everyone, notionally, could enjoy. Just as importantly, black players were starting to come through and play regularly for England, better reflecting the cultural and ethnic mix of the country.

The English game of the last few years may not have suffered from violent fans or a European ban like it had in the 80s, but since Gareth Southgate was hired as head coach of the men's national team, results have been a lot better, with England reaching the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup (the first time in any tournament since 1996), then the final of Euro 2020 (the first since 1966), and after a disappointing, but actually on-par quarterfinal exit from the 2022 World Cup, England is currently one of four teams remaining in Euro 2024.

Incidentally, I'm going into this level of detail to record the ongoing savage culture war that's raging over whether Gareth Southgate is a good manager or not. I'll probably go into that in detail in another post, but here it's worth pointing out that Southgate makes for a nice callback to the 90s, because he was in that Euro 96 team that reached the semifinals before losing to Germany (indeed, it was his missed penalty that sank England). You kind of wonder how much that sense of the country being behind the team has permeated how he approaches the job now - certainly London didn't feel as bound by love for the England team during the years that Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello or Roy Hodgson managed them.

I suppose, coming back to the Starmer vs Blair theme, that Starmer appealed to football via the Football Weekly podcast because that's the one thing that still ties together a majority of people in Britain, or at least England. Blair could invite Blur and Oasis to policy confabs and No 10 cocktail parties, because they were the biggest bands in Britain and most people knew about them. He could champion British filmmakers and artists because all of them were firing on all cylinders, whereas now Starmer really can only use football to connect with people.

There's also a cynical comment to be made here: with culture so fragmented along lines of ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc, football is the only thing that won't subject Starmer to accusations of favoring one group over another. It sounds a little stupid to say it, until you remember how apoplectic certain subsets of England fans got when the team would take the knee for racial justice in 2021.

In 1996, about a year before Labour won the election, Britain was enthralled by the first tournament on home soil in a generation (remember, the Scots also qualified). The song of the moment was Three Lions, by the Lightning Seeds along with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, characterized by its chant that "football's coming home". Blair used that slogan on the campaign trail, tying himself into all the cultural strands that the electorate loved.

Three Lions fell out of fashion for a while, but made its comeback in 2018, and has been trotted out at every tournament since then. Just our luck, then, that it's being sung on the terraces in Germany just as, back home in the UK, Labour's coming, at long last, home.

Bullitt, Dirty Harry and Old San Francisco

For the last couple of months, I've been scanning the "Last Chance" section that HBO Max helpfully adds, so that you can see which movies and TV shows are about to disappear from the service and plan your watching accordingly. It's a nice feature, which I wish more streaming services offered, though I also wish HBO Max were a little less glitchy as an app.

This month there were relatively few things I wanted to watch in Last Chance, so after I finished Bullitt, I moved on to the Dirty Harry movies, all of which are available on HBO. While Harry Callahan and Frank Bullitt are very different characters, they fit together nicely as Neo-noir cop films, and it helps that they all have soundtracks by Lalo Schifrin and are set in San Francisco. In fact, seeing the city as it was back in the late 60s and early 70s (I haven't yet watched the last two Dirty Harry films) is amazing, because SF is pretty different from back then.

As some background, I'd previously seen the first Dirty Harry film, but not since college, and I've caught bits of The Enforcer (the third movie) on TV over the years, but never watched it start to finish. Bullitt, meanwhile, is familiar to me more as a reference (the car chase, Steve McQueen on the movie cover), but I also hadn't seen the full movie before.

In both cases, it's been fun looking at where individual scenes take place and seeing how different they look now. The biggest thing has been the bits that take place on the Embarcadero, which is now an open thoroughfare with great views of the bay but then was dominated by an elevated freeway. That freeway, which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, was by its demise generally considered to be an eyesore, so the city took the opportunity to remove it and opened the area up.

That said, when Bullitt and his partners are guarding their witness, they put him in a hotel just by the Embarcadero, in a room at the same height as the freeway's top level. The views you get of the area there and in the Dirty Harry films are much grubbier than the neighborhood is now.

It's fair to say that much of SF is grubbier in those movies than it is now, even despite the big homeless problem that the city currently has. Though it's also a lot more working class than we imagine the place to be now, since the tech industry hadn't quite taken over yet. As a result you get scenes and references that hark back to the working class Irish and Italian communities, not to mention the Black community (The Enforcer has a subplot around some black nationalists), which have maybe been forgotten in the last few decades.

The other fun thing about the early Dirty Harry movies (moreso than Bullitt) is the little slices of big-city weirdness you get in between the large plot points. There's the foot chase in the Enforcer, where Harry and the criminal he's chasing accidentally crash a porno shoot, but there's also the jumper in one random scene in Dirty Harry and the brief flashes of nudity that we see when Harry's staking out a building or chasing the Scorpio killer.

Stuff like seeing a woman receiving her guests for the evening completely nude, or glimpses of a gay interracial date through Scorpio's gunsights, is intended to show the weirdness of a big city in the wake of the hippy era, the weirdness of a big liberal city, and the general chaos that Harry Callahan lives in daily. It's a little dismissive (the second movie, Magnum Force, is co-written by the rather conservative John Milius) but also charming in its depictions of this bygone world.

It's also funny seeing Harry shaking his head at "wokeness" fifty years or so before the current culture war we find ourselves in. Now, of course, conservatives are mostly railing against LGBTQ people and especially trans people, while then they'd had it with women's lib, but it's clear that the arguments then were the same as what we're hearing now.

As a final point, the other thing I find interesting about that era of film-making is that they even set the movies in SF at all. Mute Witness, the book that Bullitt is based on, is apparently set in New York, but became SF when being translated for the screen: I feel like nowadays you're more likely to see the opposite case, where the source material is in San Francisco but for the screen becomes New York. Dirty Harry's another movie series that doesn't really have to be set in SF, and I can also think of films like The Towering Inferno that I guess were set in San Francisco for cultural reasons that are lost now.

It seems too bad that you don't get many movies just randomly set here anymore. Now it seems that every film that wants to depict life in a big city just automatically opts for New York or Los Angeles, unless the story has to be set somewhere else. One example is (500) Days of Summer, which was apparently set in SF in the screenplay but switched to LA.

The reason this bothers me is that, despite all the undeniable problems (the heartbreaking homeless encampments, the soulless co-optation of the city by the rich, and the ridiculous levels of income inequality), the city is dramatically sited and carries more stories than just tech people. I still haven't seen The Last Black Man in San Francisco, but it sounds like it makes great use of the location, though I wonder how much SF is a character in the film the way it is in the Dirty Harry movies.

That's probably to do with the fact that big cities in America now all want to be New York, but fail. And if every city's just a cut-rate NYC, why not just film in the real one and take advantage of that? I just question why we've decided (or why Hollywood has decided) that everything in New York is automatically more relevant to everybody than the rest of the country. One of the great things about the Wire was how it dug into Baltimore, rather than just being another crime show in New York; we have this cultural understanding of New York that makes, perhaps, for easier storytelling, but I think we're missing out on the opportunity to get under the skin of other cities, and show that worthwhile stories take place everywhere else, too.

An Afternoon of Warhol at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center

As I usually do when I have a free Sunday afternoon, I headed out to the Cantor Gallery on Stanford campus today. Not because there was anything I particularly wanted to see, but because it's free and offers nice opportunities to get some walking done, and enjoy the fresh air. It also has a new central exhibition every few months, and I discovered today that they were hosting an exhibition of photography by Andy Warhol.

I don't feel I know that much about Warhol, despite a profile about him in Paradox Press's Big Book of Weirdoes from the 90s, so I gamely went to check it out. It's a review of the different themes and subject matter he took photos of throughout the last decade of his life, from the celebrity work he's known for to people in the gay community and the Studio 54 crowd, among others.

The Cantor Gallery actually acquired the contact sheets and negatives from the Warhol Foundation, so this is the first time a lot of these pictures are being displayed, which made it more interesting.

In any case, I was struck by a thought as I looked at the celebrity photos he took and that were in his interview magazine. Among the shots of Liza Minnelli, Nancy Reagan and Grace Jones, there was a photo of Michael Jackson as a rather young man, on which Warhol had traced lines following the contours of his face.

Looking at it, and the pictures around it, it struck me that it was similar to the famous Campbell's Soup painting, in that these celebrities are also brands and iconography that the public recognizes and responds to in specific ways. The silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong or Marilyn Monroe, or indeed this traced-on photo of Michael Jackson, seemed to me a way to try and distill that essence of who these people are, which made it even more interesting to try and locate the same meaning in the other pictures.

I don't know if these thoughts are ground-breaking (probably not) or so basic as to elicit snorts of derision (probably more likely), but if accurate, gives me a new way to appreciate his work and that of others in the Pop Art movement. It also gives me an insight into what he was interested in, which helps explain why he made the art that he made. Every artist has their preoccupations and pet themes, which show up again and again in their work, and for me, being able to identify these themes makes me like the work more.

It's on my mind quite a bit also because I recently spent a few idle minutes reading up on some of Neil Gaiman's work on Wikipedia, which listed certain themes he's played with since his early comics work. It also made me think of what the themes are that I'm most interested in for my own stories - future generations of literary critics will have to parse this out themselves, I suppose, but based on some of the stories I've been writing lately consciousness and artificial intelligence are fairly big, at least in some of my stuff.

On the other hand, a writer (or any other artist) probably shouldn't spend too much time teasing the themes out of his own work, right? Maybe it's all Freudian and I'm trying to express something related to shagging. Who knows?

That notwithstanding, if you're in the Bay Area, you should have a look at the exhibition. The page warns, somewhat euphemistically, that some images "may not be appropriate for young viewers", so I'll spell it out: there are some female and male nudes, which are generally quite tasteful and artistic, and then there are some photos of gay sex, including ejaculation. The more explicit contacts remain fairly small, but it's pretty clear what's going on, so if that sort of thing bothers you, feel free to skim that corner of the gallery and focus on the others.

And please do check it out! As I say, there are a lot of interesting themes covered, and if nothing else the pictures of celebrities, storefronts and Warhol's acquaintances in the drag community are fascinating artifacts of 1970s and 1980s New York, subject matter that I've always liked.