Sooo interesting to hear your take on Poker Face! Oddly I thought it was the other way around, in terms of the only friends with guys things, I thought her female friendships were wonderful especially with the female trucker. I totally agree about the whisky/beer drinking thing although I thought it legitimately worked here - it often feels very forced when it’s a male cop for example. The bit that annoyed me the most was the way that the whole chasing-a-fugitive narrative just totally disappeared for whole episodes at a time. I get the “vignette” nature or “anthology” thing that they were going for but I thought the original hook of the first 2 episodes was so strong, I didn’t understand why they let it slide. Also some episodes totally disappeared up their own ass for long stretches. But overall I thought it was incredible. And HER HAIR! Me and my husband were trying to come up with theories of how they managed to get it to look like that! Just amazing.
¨I’d finally passed the Presidential Physical Fitness test. Tom Cruise is the President Physical Fitness test.¨
Good God, I´d forgotten about that thing. (At some point I checked myself out on it, did fine, and then blew it off. Yay.)
At any rate, I never saw the first Top Gun... no point in seeing the second. I have failed America in that way and I am totally at peace with it.
¨That’s the problem with television, and with the way in which everything is television now, the monkey’s-paw bargain of the stupid little golden age of television we got fifteen years ago, which, on balance, probably wasn’t worth it.¨
We live in the land of commercial now, so all the commercials are out here trying to do Awkward Dada and Mugging for Surrealism. I can´t say this has been an improvement.
¨I’d never liked that Haley song, and I still don’t; l’d never really gotten Elvis, and I still don’t, not really.¨
Same. Or rather, I get it enough to not care. It´s Black Music for White People - given that it originates smack dab in the middle of the spasmodic end of Jim Crow. It made a certain kind of white person very angry and that worked well enough that the Wonder Bread substitute for biscuits (no chitlins, beans or collard greens, please, we´re white) sold like, uh, hotcakes.
The young white ladies could lust after Elvis, natch. Not my thing, never understood it myself. BB King and that guitar, that I understand.
¨My point here is that my parents never really cared about the Oscars, but I didn’t know that until well into adulthood.¨
My mother, also a boomer, grew up right there in the middle 1950´s living across the street from a drive-in movie theater. So she got to listen to endless reruns of every crappy black & white monster movie they made in the 1950´s. As far a I can tell the result was she has ability to discern the differences between things. Black and white Japanese Samurai movies or the sountrack of the King & I, or Charles Aznavoir records, or early 00´s superhero movies, or an anime series about people growing wheat in Kansas (don´t ask, I don´t know), gay romance manga featuring guys so thin they might as well be made of Popsicle sticks, or the Oscars every year (and the Golden Globes too) even though she hasn´t watched a new movie in a decade, and a movie that didn´t involve superheroes in even longer, and *I* can´t make any sense out of it. Boomers, man, idk.
¨I got to pretend, for a few long hours of a deeply boring television broadcast, that I was a real person, that I’d managed to do it, that I had built myself a home in the world, just like everybody else.¨
Where´s the essay on you being a character in a Edvard Munch painting?
Sooo interesting to hear your take on Poker Face! Oddly I thought it was the other way around, in terms of the only friends with guys things, I thought her female friendships were wonderful especially with the female trucker. I totally agree about the whisky/beer drinking thing although I thought it legitimately worked here - it often feels very forced when it’s a male cop for example. The bit that annoyed me the most was the way that the whole chasing-a-fugitive narrative just totally disappeared for whole episodes at a time. I get the “vignette” nature or “anthology” thing that they were going for but I thought the original hook of the first 2 episodes was so strong, I didn’t understand why they let it slide. Also some episodes totally disappeared up their own ass for long stretches. But overall I thought it was incredible. And HER HAIR! Me and my husband were trying to come up with theories of how they managed to get it to look like that! Just amazing.
¨I’d finally passed the Presidential Physical Fitness test. Tom Cruise is the President Physical Fitness test.¨
Good God, I´d forgotten about that thing. (At some point I checked myself out on it, did fine, and then blew it off. Yay.)
At any rate, I never saw the first Top Gun... no point in seeing the second. I have failed America in that way and I am totally at peace with it.
¨That’s the problem with television, and with the way in which everything is television now, the monkey’s-paw bargain of the stupid little golden age of television we got fifteen years ago, which, on balance, probably wasn’t worth it.¨
We live in the land of commercial now, so all the commercials are out here trying to do Awkward Dada and Mugging for Surrealism. I can´t say this has been an improvement.
¨I’d never liked that Haley song, and I still don’t; l’d never really gotten Elvis, and I still don’t, not really.¨
Same. Or rather, I get it enough to not care. It´s Black Music for White People - given that it originates smack dab in the middle of the spasmodic end of Jim Crow. It made a certain kind of white person very angry and that worked well enough that the Wonder Bread substitute for biscuits (no chitlins, beans or collard greens, please, we´re white) sold like, uh, hotcakes.
[Seriously: BB King, 1951: https://youtu.be/uUWLXeGIDSo - blues/R&B - basically proto-Zeppelin or proto-Cream
Fats Domino 1955: https://youtu.be/uLvXVnpnR84 - practically big band for the blues with stop time!
And Chuck Berry, also 1955: https://youtu.be/npkoS9Q3QYk - a quickie ]
The young white ladies could lust after Elvis, natch. Not my thing, never understood it myself. BB King and that guitar, that I understand.
¨My point here is that my parents never really cared about the Oscars, but I didn’t know that until well into adulthood.¨
My mother, also a boomer, grew up right there in the middle 1950´s living across the street from a drive-in movie theater. So she got to listen to endless reruns of every crappy black & white monster movie they made in the 1950´s. As far a I can tell the result was she has ability to discern the differences between things. Black and white Japanese Samurai movies or the sountrack of the King & I, or Charles Aznavoir records, or early 00´s superhero movies, or an anime series about people growing wheat in Kansas (don´t ask, I don´t know), gay romance manga featuring guys so thin they might as well be made of Popsicle sticks, or the Oscars every year (and the Golden Globes too) even though she hasn´t watched a new movie in a decade, and a movie that didn´t involve superheroes in even longer, and *I* can´t make any sense out of it. Boomers, man, idk.
¨I got to pretend, for a few long hours of a deeply boring television broadcast, that I was a real person, that I’d managed to do it, that I had built myself a home in the world, just like everybody else.¨
Where´s the essay on you being a character in a Edvard Munch painting?
elm
i´m curious
YES WIDOWS. I have been evangelizing for this movie for years. One of the most underrated (and underseen) movies of at least the last ten years.
Hmm yes to WIDOWS in all caps! Have you seen the original TV show? If not, I would highly recommend it.