Friday, April 05, 2024

The Month That Was - March 2024

I fear my productive, engaged life is on the wane.  I have been truly struggling in my day job like never before.  It is not entirely my fault, much of it is a change in organizational culture that is either intolerable or that I can't seem to adapt to.  Whatever the case it's dragging me down to the point where I am doing retirement calculations in my head whereas I was previously just daydreaming (admittedly with increasing frequency). If it gets to the point where I am doing them on paper, then we'll know it's over.

Some of my struggle is also the realization that I will never recapture the carefree and -- dare I say -- adventurous life I lived from roughly age 35 to age 50. It is possible that such a life is not appropriate or even possible for a man of my age (although I think it is possible and who cares what is appropriate) and that I should embrace my new parameters.  That's fair. And perhaps I should be grateful that while my life has increasingly become more constricting it has, on the whole, become more meaningful.   


It is interesting to divide my adult life into 15 year sections.  20-35 was young adulthood; a lot of lost years, struggling to find my independence, coming to terms with the realities of the world and the awakening of understanding my limitations and how my self-image was delusion.  35- 50 were the Salad Days.  Maybe 50-65(ish) are the mature phase, where I've found responsibility and dependability are the tools of meaning and that relationships (of all sorts) are the measure of meaning.  What will 65(ish)-80(ish) hold?  Acceptance and peace?  Disappointment and confusion?  Satisfaction?  Regret?  I suppose it is inevitable that I will find out.


I need to start writing again.  I was going to put it off until I retired, but that was wrong-headed.  New goal:  Kick off one, possibly two, new book projects.


[Autos] Car Concerns

[Movies] Flick Check: Bad Action 

[Books] Book Look: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

[Cars] Car Concerns

My Acura has nearly 170k miles on it.  I had a tricky start with it; it actually stranded me at one point with a known power steering issue.  Well, it wasn't known, or at least Acura didn't acknowledge knowing it at the time.  It was fixed under my extended warranty so no cost to me (would have been in excess of $2k) and at some later point, Acura acknowledged the issue and began fixing them for free.  But that aside it's been pretty good.  I truly enjoy driving it.  The engine is strong, the handling is beyond anything I could challenge, and the structure is solid.  To this day when I hear a rattle I can always trace to something loose in the cup holder or side pocket, never a fit and finish issue.

There are things I don't like.  The infotainment is useless.  It is from a time before Apple Play or Android Auto. The onboard navigation maps haven't been updated in 12 years. The sound system is weak, but I don't listen much in the car anymore, usually the radio is off (This is a weird development in my personal history and I really should explore it at some point).  The ability to seamlessly upgrade your infotainment system like you could have done for a car radio 20 years ago has been improved away.  Really, it should be easier, I mean these things are just screens with computer guts. Elon is the only one who seems to understand that these things should be able to be updated at will.


The lesser thing I don't like about it is that it requires premium fuel. It is, effectively, a more highly tuned version of the V6 you can get in a Honda Accord which uses regular.  That was not such a big deal when I bought it, but I just paid a full dollar/gallon extra over the price of regular.  It gets decent mileage.  I average about 25 overall.  But that's still putting me out an extra $600 or so per year.  Yes, I know I could just use regular and let the knock sensor do its duty, but I need to make the minor sacrifices to preserve the car because I think I'm going to try to get another 40k miles out of it, at least.


I paid 25k in 2015 for it.  The equivalent Acura today would be a 2023 TLX with around 14k miles.  Those look to be at about $34k asking price.  Makes sense because the inflation calculator seems to think that $25k in 2015 is about $33k today.  But any time you are making a major purchase, there is the question of opportunity costs.  E.g. is another Acrua the right car to spend 33k on, or given I think I can probably get another 40k-50k miles out of it, does it make sense to buy another car at all?


I have been saying my ideal car is a minivan.  I could carry all the grandkids. It could do double duty to handle the light hauling I have to do occasionally.  (With my Acura in the body shop for the deer hit damage I have a rental Toyota Tacoma pickup. There was no drama taking my bike herd into the shop for spring tune ups.  It was just a matter of tossing them in the back.  Nice -- definitely something of value.) In my 34k price range, that would mean a 2022 Toyota Sienna with over 40k miles on it.  Wow.  A Sienna with less than 15k miles would cost in excess of $45k. 


Granted, minivans are in high demand at the moment and are very much overpriced versus their SUV counterparts.  If I moved up to 37k I could get a 2023 Honda Pilot with about 15k miles.  Same with a Toyota RAV hybrid (the gas savings might make it worth it). If I was willing to step away from Honda and Toyota I could find a Chevy Traverse in the $35k/15k miles range easily.


I would very much miss the driving dynamics of my Acura, but sacrifices have to be made somewhere. Maybe the thing to do is keep the Acura and buy a cheap old small pickup for utility purposes.  Or maybe the thing to do is hang on to the Acura and rent a truck when I need it.


Maybe the thing to do is win the lottery.  


Anyway, the Acura is in the body shop for deer hit repairs.  When I get it back it gets a new set of tires and I'll try to get another 40k out of it.  That should take me well into 2025, possibly 2026.  Maybe I'll feel more comfortable splurging at that point because the car I replace it with will likely be the last car I ever buy. 


[Movies] Bad Action

Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom -- My first impression is that the writing of the script for this movie may have been crowdsourced to children ages 6-10.  I doubt that is really the case.  What I do think happened is that it came from prompting an early version of AI, something a good deal less sophisticated than Chat GPT4.  What an incomprehensible mish-mash of tone and action. It is as close to completely incoherent as a movie can be without being a series of totally randomized sequences.  I can think of no principle of good screen writing that was employed here. The description of Dumpster Fire could not be more apt. No good will come from this movie to anyone associated with it.  It should not have been released.  Wow.  Just wow.

Fast X -- In contrast Fast X is roughly on the same plane of quality, but it embraces its own absurdity in such a way that it is at least inoffensive.  Movies like this are pure background noise, only meriting partial attention.  But everyone involved seems like they are having a good time -- I wouldn't doubt this group, having done these movies for years -- is probably a fun bunch to get together. I have no idea what the plot was, or whether there was any semblance of character arcs.  Like I said, a bit of eye-candy to have on in the background and never to be thought of again.


Road House -- Another step up in the genre, mostly due to the fine performance of Jake Gyllenhall.  Given the state of reboots and sequels in Hollywood I would have expected this to be borderline offensive -- see: Justified: City Primeval, Many Saints of Newark, pretty much anything Star Wars or Star Trek -- but it was actually not bad. They kept the right amount of irreverence and absurdity of the original (although, sadly, no one is ever told to "be nice") while making you hate the villain and identify with the hero.  BTW, a key villain in this is Conor MacGregor, an MMA fighter who is making his acting debut playing a psycho. Since he is clearly half-psycho in real life, "acting" is a stretch.  Anyway, it's Gyllenhall who provides what redemption there is with a pitch perfect performance of a normal, friendly-looking dude who can just happen to beat the snot out of anyone else on the planet.  Overall "meh", but I might watch it again if I land on it when I'm channel surfing.


Note the escalation in the three action flicks discussed here: from Dumpster Fire to  Inoffensive to Not Bad.  That is where we are now.  At one point in the not too distant past I declared the action film as the predominant art form of our time, for better or (more likely) worse.  If I recall correctly, I suggested the action supremacy started with The Matrix and peaked with Infinity War.  I stand by that, but even I am stunned by how quickly has come the fall.

[Books] Book Look: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis

I picked this up because it was mentioned in a couple of forgotten online comments somewhere as an unknown classic.  I don't remember the context, I just remember the references to this.  

Maqroll is a romanticized drifter.  He wanders the world, often at sea, engaging in various escapades from the lurid to the horrific.  Also known as the Gaviero (Spanish for a Lookout), he divides his time between wandering the seas as a freighter crewman and engaging in illegal activities on land.  He is not completely immoral, nor completely amoral, but he has no problem with grift and crime, up to a point.  He will pimp and con, but take care not to cause too much damage.  He is not adverse to shady dealings and making use of others, but he is also loyal to his friends and those he loves.  Along the way he is given to ruminations -- pensive half-laments about his compulsion to lead a life of wandering and discomfort.  His scams are often undertaken seemingly out of boredom, or perhaps more accurately, anger at the world for boring him, for giving him no purpose. 


Very much in the Latin American vein of long, florid descriptions and, frankly, superfluous detail.  Mutis can easily write page-long paragraphs describing the wind through a field or the countenance of a stranger.  You would think that would be anathema to my sensibilities, and it is, but over the years I have learned how to skim in the appropriate places.  That is not technically a flaw in the book.  That is a conflict with my personal sensibility.  Mutis is a poet and has a tremendous command of language and seems to have met an equivalent talent in Edith Grossman as translator.  Near as I can tell the stories are told as individual novellas out of time sequence.  I could not construct a clear timeline in my head as I went along, but that may just be due to my skimming.


At 700 pages it can easily exhaust a reader.  Although the characterizations are strong and the stories decently plotted, there is no one here to really like or sympathize with.  There is an occasional hateful villain, but the protagonists just do not engender concern. They, and the tales about them, are interesting to a point, but not deeply affecting.  There is more curiosity than connection.


Should you read the Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll? If you are an unseasoned reader, the answer is almost certainly no.  Read Don Quixote instead.  There are certainly rewards here for a more experienced reader.  Mutis' command of words is deeply impressive.  If you like authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you will be very comfortable with Mutis and likely be one of the people who deem this a classic. And, as I said, the stories are interesting.  You kind of want to keep going to discover what happens, even if, when all is said and done, you don't really care.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

The Month That Was - February 2024

I'm afraid I have to bail on this month.  I really hate doing that.  I think I've only done it a handful of times in over 20 years, but I haven't had any time to do anything but my day job this month -- it's gotten particularly horrendous  -- and even when I have time to breathe I'm too brain dead to write anything.  Honestly, if it takes so much of my energy that I can't even update this site, something has to be done.  Can't last forever, right?  I promise to be back next month, somehow.  Deepest apologies.

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

The Month That Was - January 2024

My memory is uncertain but I think I started blogging in 1999, which means I've been at this for a quarter-century this year.  Nobody actually blogs anymore, at least not in the original sense.  Not even me.  I just do monthly postings to keep my writing muscles engaged.  At the start I didn't have my own url.  I just had some space allocated by my internet Provide.Net, so my page was something like www.provide.net/dmazz which was my personal allotted space on their servers.  There were no blogging tools so I coded HTML by hand and made adjustments to pagination manually with every post. I got quite efficient at it.  It was during that pre-Google era that my blog reached the height of its popularity when I managed to get listed in Yahoo's list of blogs.  In alphabetic order A Dam Site was at the top of the page so anyone who searched for blogs saw mine first in the list.  Had I been smarter and more foresightful I would have parlayed that into a tech empire. (Interestingly, provide.net still exists as some sort of specialty internet provider with a very reasonably priced fiber offering.  I'm guessing they are a reseller/installer, but idk.)

In any event, we once again increment the year and I have an opportunity to reconfirm my new year's resolutions, which are really just my life principles.


  1. Enhance the lives of the people I care about.

  2. Fight sloth (the Deadly Sin, not the adorable forest creature).


I see no reason to change those.


[TV] Alas, Toob Notes

[Rant] San Francisco State of Mind

[Michigan] Michigan State of Mind


[TV] Alas, Toob Notes

If you've been following my posts for the last few years, nothing in this article in the Guardian about the decline of quality television will be new to you.  It's getting some play because the comments are coming from David Chase, creator of the Sopranos, but really it's been blindingly obvious for many, many years.  (BTW, Chase's follow up to the Sopranos, Many Saints of Newark, was an epic disaster so…)

I try really hard to avoid falling into the trap of reminiscing about times past and griping about degradation.  It's a hole virtually everyone steps in, and it's usually wrong.  I still believe the world is improving as surely as I still acknowledge that it is a ten-step-forward, nine-step-back , jagged, and uphill path.  Often things are worse before they get better.  Often things aren't really worse, just different. Often things that you think are worse are actually better. As Tyler Cowen noted, these are times of change and you will hate living through times of change.


But with respect to television, I think I can safely say that things are objectively worse.  Everything (well not everything, but almost everything) being produced now seems to come from a bottle, a formula.  One show gets some eyeballs and everyone rushes to do some variation.  Modern writers can't seem to generate consistent quality.  It's like anything they do that works must be because they lucked into it.  Cases in point:

  • True Detective:  The first season was groundbreaking, with Matthew McConaughey spouting existential pessimism while riding around with a pissed off Woody Harrelson trying to solve the case of a serial killer.  Remember the Yellow King?  Season two floundered but at least it was original.  Season three succeeded by essentially remaking the first season with enough variation that it seemed fresh.  Season four we are now in the middle of and while they've ramped up the spookiness, I haven't seen a return to quality.  It attempts to remake the season one formula yet again, with mismatched cops who hate each other and spooky quasi-mystical imagery, but it is weak on character and long on cop show banality and cultural stereotypes. I should withhold final judgment until it's over but it's looking like a degradation.

  • Fargo:  I think this is the fourth season and it's bad enough that I abandoned it. It's another attempt to leverage the original movie plot of evil cadres on the Northern Plains fighting it out over a macguffin with a cloy and clever innocent stuck in the middle. The first season was sharp but the trajectory has been downhill ever since.  Not only does it break no new ground, the writing has degraded into online political debate level inanity.


Consider:  Both of these shows can't muster a decent fourth season.  The Sopranos, Mad Men, Better Call Saul, et. al. kept quality high and content fresh through five or six seasons.  The general degradation simply cannot be denied.  Allow me to pretentiously quote John Stuart Mill:


In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.


There is one active show that I would classify as eccentric: The Bear.  Prior to that the last show I can remember that I would classify that way was Lodge 49.  Nobody watched it and it only lasted two seasons. I miss it. You might suggest Ted Lasso, but despite its delightful first season, it descended into banal sweetness and woke tropery after that. I'd be more open to Barry as an example, but as clever as it was, anything about crime or crime adjacent can't really be eccentric.  Here's a question: What shows today don't feature character journeys that have them learn societally approved lessons? What shows are about individuals confronting personal conflicts that may or may not resolve in the way the zeitgeist would guide them, or even resolve at all?  


All of this ranting has all been prompted by the fact that, for the first time ever, Northern Exposure has started streaming in its entirety.  I have fallen for this show even harder than I did in its first run.


You see, my friends, quality TV such as The Sopranos didn't emerge from nothing.  There were hints and indications that things were improving through the decade of the 90's prior to its inaugural season in 1999.  Twin Peaks was truly out of this world and remains a cult favorite to this day.  I have written before about the X-files, specifically episodes written by Darin Morgan.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer foreshadowed all the hyper-irony that has since worn thin, but it was fresh and clever at the time and, like, the X-files, the best episodes were magnificent works of drama.  But the one that stands above them all is Northern Exposure.


As I rewatch it I am reminded of the quality of the writing which reached almost poetic heights. Characters are, on occasion, given outright soliloquies. The town DJ -- Chris in the Morning -- acted as a combination spiritual guide and Greek chorus.  There are constant references to great literature and the vocabulary alone would get the show shot down in our world of sixth-grade reading level normalization.


A second viewing of Rob Morrow's performance in the lead role makes me think it's an all time great. It's no wonder the show promptly died when he left.  But the whole ensemble is tight and well cast.


The thing that stands out most to me is the humanity of it.  Look, there is no doubt where the writers stood on social issues, but rarely was anything purely motivated by social issues, and when it was, it was usually a smoke screen for something personal. Let's take the treatment of race.  There is one character who is portrayed as an outright, unrepentant racist and homophobe.  But he is never treated as a person with anything less than sympathy and understanding.  He is treated both by the other characters and by the writers as a human being.  He is not detested, not portrayed as evil, not given poetic beatdowns;  He is given a character arc that allows him to be human and in fact have aspects to his personality that are quite positive. All the characters are like that.  They all have terrible flaws that, in the current year, would require them to go through symbolic or actual punishment and suffering and either be removed or appropriately re-educated.  The contrast with today is truly stunning.


But in the end, it's the writing that does it.  I have discovered three TV shows in my life that use the written word in something other than an utilitarian manner, for exposition or to move the plot along.  Writing that aspires to artistic merit.  Deadwood, Justified, and now Northern Exposure.  Even though I have seen them all before many years ago, I find myself looking forward to the end of the day when I can sit back and enjoy a couple of episodes.  I doubt this will be the last time I rewatch the series.  It belongs in the Pantheon.


How far we have fallen.


[Rant] San Francisco State of Mind

Triggered by both the Lions playoff game against the 49ers (the chosen team of my SO) and this posting of photos by Scott Alexander, which needs to be looked at, I have been  thinking of San Francisco a bit. Those photos remind me of Ann Arbor in the 70s.  Is that good? In any event, Keep Austin Weird can't hold a candle.

SF is so well documented as a disaster of filth, crime, and chaos, that it almost certainly has to be not as bad as it's portrayed.  Still, the exodus of businesses continues.  The toy store that was the inspiration for Toy Story is closing out of safety concerns.  


Paul Graham (of y-combinator) is of the belief that it's a matter of replacing just a small number of council members and things will turn around right quickly:  "There is hope for San Francisco. Most people don't realize the extent to which the city's problems stem from just a handful of incompetent supervisors." Perhaps, but as someone born in Detroit and having been close to its history my whole life, I can say cities "recovering" or "turning around" is the exception not the rule.  Detroit was the wealthiest metro area in the U.S. 1949, it took about 15-20 years to destroy it and despite all the effort and good faith and noble words, it's still a disaster and that's not going to change.  There are overwhelmingly more examples like that than there are of big cities turning around.  To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the end comes very slowly, then all at once.


I was in SF only once, a couple of decades ago when it was still a top tourist destination in the U.S. and I was at an early stage in my traveling phase.  I was thoroughly unimpressed.  It was cold and inconvenient and overpriced.  I saw none of the great beauty that other folks seemed to see. During that time, the big three cities for me were Vegas for the Strip, New York for Manhattan, and New Orleans for the French Quarter.  SF was a nothing-burger by comparison.  I saw no reason to ever go back and haven't.  (The closest I've come since was Carmel-by-the-Sea which is worth a visit.)


And in truth, I think the rest of us will be just fine without a functional SF.  Michigander: "So there is the Golden Gate Bridge, which is 1.7 miles long.  You call that a bridge?  Oh, and there is an island near it?  Alcatraz.  I'm sure that's lovely.  Have fun on your wee little bridge and dire, abandoned prison island."

[Michigan] Michigan State of Mind

Despite living my entire life in Michigan, I hit a deer with my car for the first time. It wasn't a hard hit.  The only thing on my car that was smashed was the grill (made of plastic) and the deer ran off into the woods, with probably little more than a bruise. This has been one of the warmest winters on record (thankfully) and the deer seem particularly active and I find myself driving to work before sunrise, so probability finally caught up with me.  Sixty-three plus years without a deer hit is a pretty good record for anyone in the Great Lakes region. I am blessed.

The other Michigan story is football.  My alma mater, the University of Michigan Wolverines took the National title.  The Wolverines are traditionally in the conversation of the top teams.  Usually what happens is that we beat Ohio State and win the Big Ten, but don't get invited to the championship bracket, instead going to one of the top level bowl games and generally losing. If we lose to Ohio State we don't win the Big Ten and so get invited to a second tier bowl game and generally lose. Not this time, this was a charmed year -- undefeated all the way to the National Championship.  Winning National Championships in college is doubly great because it positions you to get the best recruits in the upcoming years.  Of course, in Michigan's case, as soon as we won the championship, the coach defected to the NFL thereby significantly reducing our recruiting power. Sigh. I hate to say it, but my prediction is that Michigan drifts back into the position it was before, rather than kicking off a dynasty.  I hope I'm wrong.


Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Detroit Lions hosted a home playoff game for the first time in 30 years, won a playoff game for the first time in 32 years, and made it to the Conference Championship for the first time. It was a great run for the Lions who were a perpetual punching bag and optimism reigns because the team is young and their very popular coach is coming back.


So yes, it's been a memorable fall and winter in The Glove, but spring can't come soon enough for me.


Friday, January 05, 2024

The Month That Was - December 2023

Nostalgia: remember when the changing of the year meant you would mis-date the checks you wrote for a couple of weeks?  Now our electronic payments, and even our clocks, know what the day and time is with us telling them, like we're billionaires or something.  

I still wear a lovely mechanical watch that requires winding and resetting the date for months that are shorter than 30 days and it loses about 30 seconds a day so I have to adjust the time every couple of days.  I know it's off because of all those fancy-schmancy electronics.  A TAG Heuer Carrera if you must know. It was a very expensive gift from a very dear friend.  I have been tempted to get a Google watch for activity tracking and such but I would only wear it on my right wrist, the TAG will always retain its place of honor.


Years increment, time passes, memories recede.  Some things should endure.


[Rant] Holiday Ruminations 

[TV] Toob Notes: The Smart and The Stupid

[Good Links] Year-End List


[Rant] Holiday Ruminations

Like many, I struggle with the holidays.  Not with getting depressed, as many do.  It's that my feelings and approach to them just don't seem to mesh with most other people's. I suspect a great deal of this has to do with not having a family in any conventional sense of the word.  Oh, yes, I was in a family growing up and I still have a brother today, but my family was not a family in the sense of deeply shared familial bonds.  For the most part, my family members didn't really want much to do with each other.

Every holiday has a larger, more noble purpose, typically remembrance of some event or some virtue.  We are supposed to pause and pay respect to something we presumably neglect and leave unappreciated the rest of the year.  Now, for those of you who read regularly, I hope you've picked up on my dedication to gratitude.  That makes me think of the holidays as superfluous.  We should, and I try to, appreciate these things throughout the year.  


But that's me being smug, isn't it?  Or perhaps it's just me being a loner.  Maybe for most people the days off or work and/or school are just the thing they need to re-ignite their gratitude.  Or maybe the key thing is that time off is synchronized with their friends and family, although as we know extended time with family is not necessarily healthy.


Whatever the case, I remain a bit of a fish out of water during the holidays.  For a few decades I spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas alone. Many people react to that with pity, but I was completely fine with it, and even preferred it in a certain sense.  There were ten years or so where I happily spent every Thanksgiving in Las Vegas gambling on football games and hiking in the nearby National Parks.  (In this I was ahead of the fashion.  Vegas used to be empty on Thanksgiving, now it's packed.)  Christmas was a point of calmness -- I was not running around buying last minute gifts, or putting on the mask of familial bliss or answering intrusive questions about my life.  Honestly, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.


Things are different now, and I am working to adapt.  I have been adopted by the S.O.'s family which includes a pile of children and grandchildren and a number of Christmas traditions. The first change was in gift giving.  My broad plan when needed has been to give one gift of either known usefulness or a gift certificate.  The new family takes the opposite tack of many small gifts; enough to fill up the space under a tree and a stocking hung on the wall.  This along with a full-on, multi-course, homemade Thanksgiving dinner and a traditional go out for a movie on Christmas afternoon, takes me well outside the realm of familiarity for me.


But there are benefits of being with loved ones, essentially having more opportunities to do the most important thing there is, which is enhancing the lives of the people you care about.  And the grandkids are a blast -- they basically use me as a combination jungle jim and punching bag. So I will take it, and adapt, and improve at doing the Holidays in a new way.


I don't want to give the impression that I miss my old Holiday freedom or that I have suddenly come to Jesus on the meaning of the Holidays.  It's just different.  There will be plenty of times in the future when I am frustrated with obligations and long for my former freedom.  There will also be plenty of times where I will be delighted to be watching some inane Christmas movie for the fifteenth time because it is the first for one of the grandkids.


In the larger picture, perhaps the real blessing is that I am still changing and learning and appreciative of what I have.  And, so, still living a rich life.


Related: Tanner Greer makes the compelling case for the greatness of Christmas.

[TV] Toob Notes: The Smart and The Stupid

I've been keeping up with two shows that have some similarities, and similar problems. 

  • Fargo is a new season of the highly stylized series that grew out of the successful movie of some years ago.  As typical, it is set in the frozen north of Minnesota and North Dakota.  Conflicting groups of evil people, motivated by either greed or pride or some other deadly sin, mesh into a web of destructive behavior with a clever protagonist just trying to survive having been fated into the shenanigans.

  • Fall of the House of Usher is loosely (very, very loosely) based on Edgar Allen Poe writings.  The Usher's in this case are a family whose success came about from the discovery and sale of an opioid that has caused a horrible epidemic, a rather blatant ripped-from-the-headlines effort.  And now the family is apparently suffering for it in truly gruesome ways.


Both of these shows are very skillfully done. They maintain a tricky tonal balance which says a lot, tone being a key dark art in film and video.  The cinematography is compelling.  Pacing is solid.  The acting is excellent.  Plots are coherent.  Just overall great quality productions.  


The problem is both these shows indulge in episodes of infantile moralizing.  In …Usher there is constant scolding about how if instead of profiting from the opioid, they just spend money on charitable causes they could solve the world's problems, and the only survivor of the horrors ends up doing good by starting a charity.  These are the beliefs of a child.


In Fargo, we are presented with a hyperbolic strawman of a libertarian as one of the bad guys.  Then, in the middle of this sharp and entertaining show, he gets into an extended exchange with another antagonist and takes a righteous beatdown from arguments worthy of a Reddit comments section warrior.  Honestly, it's adolescent level snark.


It's jarring, in both these cases. You are cruising along in these series, enjoying the quality and appreciating the thoughtfulness and obvious talent behind them, then suddenly you are hit with a dose of inanity.  It really just makes you second guess your affinity for the show. I guess it just goes to verify the well-known notion that politics makes you stupid.


In contrast, the other show I've been binging accepts its own stupidity.  That's harsh.  I should say, it has no ambitions other than to entertain its target audience.   Season two of Reacher is what it is and that's all that it is. 


Reacher is pure formula. A stoic, loner hero connects with some companions from his past the exact revenge for the murder of their friends.  Two seconds thought will rip any plot developments to shreds.  So you don't give it any thought.  It's fantasy.  It's a superhero film without the cape.  You enjoy the action and camaraderie and knowing that the good guys will win in the end.  Same reason millions have read the Reacher books.


I couldn't take a steady diet of this, but it's nice to have a simple and purely unpretentious show like this now and then.


[Good Links] Year-End Lists

Nothing too important but if you're passing the time scrolling, you'll find some interesting stuff here.