I decided to snag a random day off, and while I ended up wasting half of it at the gym and then a good quarter at the doctor's office (because things happen at random, don't they), I also found the time to go to the theater to watch the latest Captain America movie.
As I say in my headline, it's a step, but it remains to be seen if it's enough of a step. Spoilers for the whole movie after the jump:
My project to listen to (almost) all of the biggest UK rock bands from the 60s to now continues, and in recent weeks I've hit a big milestone that I was looking forward to, namely I've reached the Britpop era.
Because I listen to all of a given band's discography, I've gone through several bands and artists that were releasing material in the 90s, some of which swirled around what the Britpop bands were doing. For example, David Bowie was getting recognition again at that time, even as he experimented with other genres and styles, like electronica. Then there were the bands who came just before Britpop, like the Madchester/baggy scene (notably the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays), or the likes of the Beautiful South, Saint Etienne and the Lightning Seeds.
BTW, speaking of electronica, I've already explored the strand that was most closely associated with Britpop, the genre called big beat, which for my purposes consisted of Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy. And what's most fascinating about big beat is that my way in was through Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook, who was previously a member of the Hull indie band the Housemartins. While Cook went on to become one of the biggest names in electronic dance music, his former bandmate Paul Heaton spearheaded the Beautiful South, bringing things back to 90s guitar rock.
These bands, like the Beautiful South, were all in rotation on MTV Europe during the summers when I'd go to Italy, and they played between the videos that I was really looking forward to, those from Blur and Pulp. That's why it's kind of poignant to reach Blur and Pulp's discographies, because I'm reminded of how new and fresh they felt when I was just discovering them, and it also reminds me of how hard it used to be to find certain music.
It wouldn't be fair to say that it was impossible to hear these bands here in the US. Before the mythical summer of 1995, when I first saw the videos for Blur's Country House and Pulp's Common People, I'd already heard Girls and Boys and Underwear on my local alternative rock station, Live 105, but the visual component turned out to be so important for imprinting on my brain. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Country House (despite being reviled by a number of reviewers at the time) was bright and breezy and irreverent, in contrast to the dour fare I saw on American MTV at the same time. Common People was also a blast of fresh air, with its 70s sartorial stylings and bright colors.
When I got obsessed with Blur (moreso than with Pulp), I was fascinated by the diversity of musical styles on their albums as well as the aesthetics of their singles. To the End, from the Parklife album, features on its cover a rose lying on top of a gun with a silencer, evoking James Bond. End of a Century, also from Parklife, features a painting of a starship resembling the USS Enterprise from Star Trek.
I wasn't picking up these singles at the time, though I'd likely have seen posters for some of them when I started visiting London. But the real impact is seeing them now and imagining how it would have felt to see them back then. It's the same with Pulp's songs from 1995 or so - in addition to remembering how I felt about certain songs at the time, I also find myself thinking about they must have sounded to other people.
The aims of the British rock listening project were initially to get acquainted with the discographies of the Kinks and then of The Rolling Stones, and subsequently to work my way up to music from beyond 2006 or so, which is about when I stopped being current with new music. But one of the other benefits has been to contextualize a bunch of bands I was listening to when I was in high school, such as Peter Gabriel or the Pet Shop Boys.
Now that I'm at the Britpop years, I'm getting to do the same with an even bigger, more important chunk of my musical background, and I'll be at it for a while: after Blur there's Oasis and Elastica and Sleeper and all the other lesser-known bands that made up the scene, or at least orbited around it. Without getting too caught up in nostalgia, it'll be fun to revisit those times, and fill in any gaps in my musical knowledge of the era.
I've been looking for evening classes for a while, to get me either out of the house or to help improve some skill that's important to me. And then last summer/early fall I started seeing ads on Facebook for TV and film writing classes at UCLA.
Because I'm not quite on the verge of moving to LA, I was glad to see that these classes through the UCLA Extension are mostly offered online. I started off with an Intro to TV Writing course, which consisted of six weekly sessions on Zoom. As the name implies, it was an introduction to how TV is generally written, both 30-minute comedies and 60-minute dramas. Each week we had to watch an episode of one or more specific shows, then compare them with the scripts or write our own beat sheets summarizing the various plot lines going through each episode.
It was in this way that I got introduced to Barry, on HBO, and Severance, on Apple TV Plus. I've sort of fallen off with Barry, but I want to get back to it soon, while for Severance I'm currently taking advantage of Apple's promotion to get a month of Apple TV Plus for free, so that I can catch up on the first season and watch the second season. I'm even considering keeping the subscription for an extra month, so I can get to the end of Season 2.
After that, I decided to keep on doing it, so I found an Intro to 60 Minute Drama class, as that's more in line with the kind of TV I'm interested in. That's a ten-week class, so I'm still in the middle of it, but so far it's pretty interesting. Where the previous class talked a lot about theory and the business, this class drops us straight into the plotting aspect - early on we had to choose a show for which to write a spec script, and every week we've been refining the idea for our spec. Because I don't watch loads of network TV, and most of the stuff I've watched lately is more of a limited series than an ongoing (stuff like Agatha All Along and the Penguin), I opted for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
It helps that SNW is episodic rather than serialized, so I don't have to worry about fitting into something so tightly plotted - although a couple of classmates are tackling shows like House of the Dragon, which I found too intimidating (apart from the fact that I'm not watching it).
At any rate, I've enjoyed coming up with a story for my own episode of SNW, and at the same time figuring out the B and C stories, and determining how they fit into the overall whole. Because SNW's episodes are mostly self-contained, it's easier to watch them to piece together how that interplay works, and then try to replicate that in my own story.
We also have to give feedback on classmates' work, so I get to examine storytelling from that angle, too - looking at what works and what takes me out of the story. A couple of other people are doing SNW stories too, so I've mostly commented on theirs, but I've also given comments on a few other shows, though some of the ones that I don't watch are tough to find comments for.
With regard to the teaching, I think it's pretty good so far. For this week's assignment I had some questions for the instructor, and she got back to me with some helpful comments quite quickly. That meant I ended up submitting my assignment a few days early (we have a deadline every Friday), and so I can do other stuff, like this here blog.
Another thing that's been helpful about this class is that, while it seems focused on network dramas with ad breaks, the format that it teaches is still relevant for shows on streaming services, which typically don't have ads. It's one of those things that feels very "duh" when you see it, but it's been a revelation to see how act breaks work, especially with the need for a good cliffhanger to keep that audience there from act to act. This is a relic of network TV, when viewers might use act breaks as an excuse to flip to other channels, but it's still relevant when you're competing against whatever they're looking at on their phones.
I don't know if it'll lead to a TV writing job, since I don't know what the prospects are for a 45-year-old with no experience, but I'm also looking at it as an opportunity to improve my storytelling in other media. The main thing I'm taking from it is plotting out my main plot and subplots, from start to finish, and then plotting the story by putting them together. I figure that any skills that improve my writing should be transferable to whatever form I'm writing in, whether it's TV, movies, prose or comics. It's also given me a taste for deconstructing books and shows that I like, to see how they're telling their stories.
And yeah, if it does end up leading to a Hollywood writing career... that's not such a bad outcome, is it?
One of the books I'm reading at the moment is The Song Rising, the third in Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. I met Shannon at a Super Relaxed Fantasy Club evening in London back in 2018, and ended up checking out her books after that, starting with the (then) standalone Priory of the Orange Tree, and eventually moving on to her ongoing series. I wasn't sure at first if it was the kind of thing I'd be into, but as I got further into the first book I became gradually more hooked.
It's not exactly urban fantasy, though it takes place in London and features spirits, psychics and otherworldly beings. It's also not exactly science fiction, even though it's set in a future fascist dystopia and features a certain amount of advanced technology. It's an interesting mix of those two genres, with Victorian/Edwardian trappings and a heavy debt to penny dreadfuls and the culture of London gangs.
Another thing that's struck me, several times as I've read the previous books in the series but most forcefully again as I've read this current book, is the Irish through line permeating the books. It makes sense when you consider Shannon's name, and her protagonist, Paige Mahoney, but a key theme in the series is the ongoing anti-Irish prejudice displayed by the ruling entity, Scion, as well as normal people surrounding Paige. This all made me think of the weird relationship the English have with the Irish, something I observed as a foreigner to both cultures, but which I'm sure Shannon has experienced firsthand growing up in London.
I first moved to the UK after my final year of university in Göttingen, Germany, where among other things, I got interested in Ireland. That's the year that I got into the Pogues, Brendan Behan and James Joyce, as well as general Irish history, all washed down with copious amounts of Guinness and other stouts at my local Irish pub. Part of it was my ongoing obsession with the works of Northern Irish comics writer Garth Ennis, but I think I was just fascinated by meeting actual Irish people for the first time, whether a crowd of kids from Dublin or the manager of the Irish pub, a guy named Mick. I made friends with Mick and with the Irish exchange students, took a class on the history of the Irish Free State (1916-1921) and ended up going on a trip to Dublin, Galway and Belfast, which was super fun.
All this Irish-ness gave me a certain perspective, not to say bias perhaps, when I moved to London at the end of that academic year. For a while I hung out with the brother of one of my friends from Göttingen and some of his Irish pals, and otherwise I absorbed how the English viewed their neighbors from across the Irish Sea.
This was the aftermath of the Good Friday Accords, which essentially put an end to the decades-long emergency in Northern Ireland, although in those months when I was newly in London tensions erupted again in Belfast. Luckily they didn't ruin the Accords, but it's been clear ever since that the various sides are always at least a little mistrustful of one another.
As I say, I had a certain perspective on the Troubles and the English response to them, whereas for my peers at my first job, there in Southend in Essex, I suppose various IRA atrocities were still alarmingly fresh in mind. I remember being shocked by a case where some Irish people suspected of IRA connections had just been gunned down, and being equally shocked when my flatmate at the time justified it saying that the UK had been on such a high alert because of the IRA; incidentally, this is why trash bins are so difficult to find in public places in London, especially on the Tube.
There were other examples, like when a friend rebuked me for referring to Derry instead of Londonderry. He claimed that only Irish republicans called it Derry, but my experience had been rather that only the English used the other name; in my experience in Belfast even the Protestants called it Derry. Or, most hilariously, when another friend suggested that the IRA had been engaged in a genocidal war against the English, which seems... a bit much.
And moving on from my own circle of friends into the wider culture, a travel book named McCarthy's Bar came out around then. Written by a comedian named Pete McCarthy, it was about a trip he took in Ireland, in which the hook was that he went to every pub he could find that had his name on it. Notably, it features the following line:
"Each 17 March brings to a head the inability of the English middle classes to deal with the Irish Problem, in the sense that Ireland is a problem because it exists."
I still remember that line, despite only having read it once over two decades ago while skimming the book in the local Waterstone's on my lunch break, because it squared so totally with my own experience. That line McCarthy wrote went on to talk about how celebrations of St Patrick's Day always brought out the English patriots, or nationalists rather, who got annoyed at celebrating a patron saint of Ireland instead of their "own" Saint George (though these folks would doubtless get annoyed if you suggested that George wasn't, himself, English).
That all took place in the years 2002-2004, when we were still less than a decade off from the Good Friday Accords. But there were more recent indications of the weird attitude of the English (though I think at least the Scots, if not also the Welsh, are guilty of some of this too) during the whole Brexit tomfoolery. Because of the unique and weird status of Northern Ireland, Brexit threatened to either re-erect a physical barrier between the Republic of Ireland and the North, which would have been a violation of the Good Friday Accords; or it would have put up a hard border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the island of Britain, which was seen as effectively ceding the North to the Republic.
Neither option was palatable, so the ruling Tories went for a third option. Some suggested that the Republic of Ireland should also leave the EU, while others, most notably former Home Secretary Priti Patel, rather astonishingly suggested using food shortages to pressure the Republic to accede to British demands over the movement of goods between the south and the north. The point about the food shortages is particularly galling in light of the history of the Irish famine of the 1850s, in which about half the population emigrated or died, all because the English not only refused to provide aid but also continued exporting food from Ireland.
While it may be unfair to tar all the English by association with their absolute stupidest person (Priti Patel, to be clear, though she has a lot of competition these days from the likes of Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch and Boris Johnson, among far too many others), it's notable that someone felt able to say the not-very-quiet part out loud like that. As the commentary I linked to suggests, the British and the Irish worked well together and learned more about one another while they were together in the EU, but it's depressing that this kind of boorishness was so ready to come back to the surface once the Brexit negotiations got serious.
All of this is to say that I appreciate that touch in Samantha Shannon's Bone Season novels, in which the English nationalist overlords are particularly anti-Irish. It's not something you're as likely to see in an English writer's dystopian vision, but I find it notable that Shannon has made it such a key part of her story. It's a shame that these prejudices persist, even among people that you'd normally consider reasonably progressive or enlightened, and it seems a shame that these attitudes will only harden the longer the UK is estranged from the EU.
There were a couple of angles to take with this, including thinking of just doing a RIP post on Jimmy Carter, who passed away today. But I don't know that I had much to say about Carter, since his presidency only overlapped with my life by about sixteen months. And there's only so many times you can trot out the Simpsons joke about him being "History's Greatest Monster".
Carter's passing, just a few weeks before Trump takes over again, does feel like a symbolic moment. It's hard to imagine two more diametrically opposed people. Everything I've read about Carter, even before he died, has indicated that he was deeply moral, even if not always very politically savvy; only the most QAnon-addled MAGA folks could ever suggest Trump is in any way a moral person. On the other hand, Trump has been a lot more successful politically, effectively becoming the face of the GOP for the last decade and reshaping American life even out of office.
Though I was also pleased to see that Carter was more influential, on a policy level, than most commentators give him credit for. According to a write-up in the Guardian, he started the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and FEMA, as well as providing inspectors-general for federal agencies and protections for whistleblowers. It also says he signed more domestic legislation into law than any president since WWII, other than Lyndon Johnson.
So he's earned his plaudits, and his exit from the scene just as America's worst president comes back to fuck things up again. It's notable that Trump's looking at undoing a number of signature Carter achievements, like the Department of Education. I think if I were 100 and facing that sort of attack on my legacy, I'd have had enough too.
It's funny, though, that Carter's passing isn't part of a big celebrity migration into the beyond, like 2016 was. That sense of all the celebrities dying at once felt epochal, especially when Brexit and Trump arrived - kind of like they sensed what was coming and decided to get while the getting was good.
2024 hasn't had a similar level of celebrities dying, though of course there have been many, some noted here on this blog. But it's definitely felt like a year of dysfunction just like 2016, and of economic dislocation that's bitten the Democrats on the ass.
The main difference is that, unlike 2016, we have a template for the coming four years: it'll be chaotic and ugly and stupid, and probably a lot of people are going to die that didn't need to. The question will be whether we get another pandemic, complete with botched response, or if we get to graduate to foreign policy crises, such as shooting wars in the Middle East or Asia.
But that's at the macro level - how was my year?
Eh.
In some ways it was pretty good. I felt more comfortable with the work I was doing at my job, especially after a grim 2023 in which I was overwhelmed by a new topic. I finally made a decent fist of submitting a novel to agents, even though I didn't get any interest (or not yet, anyway). And I had a couple of good trips to Australia, Italy and London, which pretty much completed my migration out of pandemic life (it took me a while to get comfortable with certain aspects of travel). I even got to upgrade to business class again, for the flight to Sydney, which I can say is the absolute best way to fly there.
On the other hand, I had trouble getting new story ideas off the ground, and the dating scene was a bit disappointing, especially compared to last year, which was one of my best years for dating. I spent a lot of time struggling with my weight, and while it seems to be going in the right direction, I've still got a ways to go.
Overall, it's also been hard to shake a fog of... something. I wasn't sure if it was depression, while a therapist I had for a while assumed it was anxiety. To which I say, por que no los dos? Of course, it wasn't major clinical depression - I was able to work and cook and get out to the gym. Actual clinical depression is no joke, and I'm glad not to have to deal with that. But it's true that a lot of things I normally like felt less compelling this year, as I hinted at in my review of all the media I consumed.
One example is the final book in Tad Williams's Last King of Osten Ard series, which I've been trying to read but haven't been gripped by the way I was with earlier books. I don't think the problem is the book, I think it's my own lack of focus and tiredness at the end of the day, when I should be happily plowing through dozens of pages per night.
Now, as I suggested earlier, it hasn't all been bad, and there are signs of promise for the early part of the year, at least. I took an online TV writing class in October and November through UCLA's continuing education program, and I'm taking the followup, 60 Minute TV Drama I, to strike while the iron is hot. If nothing else, I'm hoping to get some new insights into how to tell stories, which will improve my writing in other ways.
Beyond that, I'm looking forward to more exercise, more travel, and a clearer view on where I want to be going. I've always felt pulled in opposite directions by the big life goals (get published, get laid, get fit, get rich and get out of the house more), but I think the important thing will be to keep them all moving, at least a bit.
I did manage to get some stuff done during the first Trump presidency, after all, notably going to Japan for the first time, getting a girlfriend and pulling down a big pay bump when I switched jobs. Thinking about it, the feeling of unease has been there all year, but has felt a lot more intense since the election, so I think it's also a matter of time, and of getting over that huge disappointment.
Anyway, this is probably my last post of the year, so I'll see you all on the other side. It'll be a tough four years (and probably longer, even if Trump is term-limited), but what's keeping me going is the knowledge that things are cyclical. And while things can always get worse - truly, always - they can also get better. That progress will be measured in millimeters and fractions of an inch in 2025, but the potential is there.
Or in the words of my favorite movie this year: "Let's fucking go" and "Maximum effort"
