works of wanderlust

Category: reviews

I mostly write about things I like. If I haven’t written about it, maybe I just haven’t seen it… or maybe I didn’t like it.

  • book reviews: on down the river

    September may be the end of summer reads, but no doubt that I am still trudging through a reading list longer than I care to admit. My lack of completed tomes this last few weeks has less to do with the quantity of reading I am going and more to do with my ability to focus on just one book.  It would seem that my digital distractibility in this department is no less a problem than the analog version.

    That said, I have been reading. And reading. And reading some more. 

    And lately I’ve read…

    James by Percival Everett

    James is a horror story. Flipping the perspective on a book I literally just read, it instead retells the events of the famous Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn from the view of the runaway slave Jim.  But where Twain’s original text is merely a weighty adventure romp with a moral imperative baked into its layers, all of it nudging and imploring readers to examine their notions of the racial divide in the Americas of that time, James wraps Jim in a kind of fictionally-driven agency to offer a story that is both compelling in its context and chilling in its implications. It is made no better, of course, that the all-too-real monster chasing James as a runaway slave through the pre-civil war south is the great grand-pappy ancestor of the same monster now creeping out of the shadows and into seats of vengeful political power in the US in 2025. Being a white, middle-aged Canadian man leaves me in no good position to offer any opinion on what this book does right or what it is supposed to mean or how it should be read. All I know is that it shook me, shook me to the point that like a horror story I often had to put it down for days at a time to process the descriptions of inhuman cruelty written inside. It is a fictionalized account, of course, and rightly so told as it is as a counterpoint to a “great American novel.” My reread of Huckleberry Finn recently was still quite fresh in my head, of course, and having just revisited the raft ride down the Mississippi I was all too aware of the weight of that story in the modern context of American neo-racism and an orange menace normalizing two hundred year old ideas that should have long been sent to their grave. But naivety of reality is the greatest ally of the dark impulses of humanity and one’s greatest weapon is education of the horrors as painted in even just a fictional tale, and empathy for the fact that while James is fictional his is a story built upon more truth than many of us can stomach.

    Shit, Actually by Lindy West

    There are days when I fashion myself a humorist of a sort, attempting to write clever reflections of life, the universe and everything—but mostly books and video games if I’m being honest. But that said, even if I can’t always measure up in my own witty writing, I do have a vibe and am drawn to reading the kind of observational kinds of reviews that I wish I could churn out with my little keyboard here at a Starbucks. This book of clever film reviews of a bunch of movies, all of which I have almost certainly seen every last one (except Twilight, I’ve never seen that one!) multiple times, showed up as a recommendation in my audiobook feed—and there I was looking for a low risk, light-hearted listen with a credit burning a hole in my digital pocket. I am also, notably, a fan of the oft-chided podcast rewatch genre, which has led me into similar additional reading expeditions. In other words, this wee book checked a lot of boxes for me. I consumed the whole damn thing inside of two days, all seven hours of short essays read by the author, providing clever, witty and jabbing summaries spectacularly mediocre movies while sticking her finger into the gaping plot holes of the same. And what else is there to say. I was funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, which startled me almost as much as it did the other people in the room where I was listening with headphones.

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

    The day I finished re-reading this classic all tangled up in the history of American racism and slavery as it definitively is, the government of my (Canadian) province released a book ban list to the public, which given the company it would have been among—classics of political reaction like 1984, cautionary tales of amoral governments tangled up in religion like The Handmaid’s Tale—it was almost surprising that there was no Twain on the list. We live in dark times here in the mid-20s and while I’m not exactly sure the motivation for Twain to have written a book and a character like Huckleberry Finn, and can’t help but believe it was, too, a reaction to dark times. The book, obviously, is an indictment of American slavery told from the perspective of young adventurous Huck Finn whose adventures in a previous novel landed him a rich kid with an abusive, alcoholic father (all too normalized by the society in which Finn lives.). He escapes by faking his own murder and lands up in a classic travelling-the-river tale in the company of Jim, a slave who has also escaped. The duo’s adventures are a fictionalized glimpse at middle America of an era, one assumes, peppered with the moral maturing of Huck as he faces down the complex questions of right and wrong in a society that taught him that certain people are property and that what he is doing is abetting a crime the likes of which he figures will condemn him to hell, all the while we as the reader look at it from the modern perspective of Finn’s innate judgement being the right one. And still it is a hard book to read, not because of anything particularly narratively confusing, but if only because does at time feel as though the demon Twain was shining sunlight upon has risen up once again, never truly departed from this world.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see this wind up on the banned list of any American politician who had both read and understood its story.

  • media: streams of september

    I have been dabbling in my media consumption. I have half a dozen books on the go and it’s a dead heat to see which one I’ll race ahead and finish first. I’m deep into at least four different video games right now. I’ve got a couple movie-watching missions on the go. And I’ve been tackling my episodic entertainment on the streaming platforms with a scattershot abandon.

    My lack of focus is probably linked to a couple of things happening in my professional life and my inability to sit still for longer than thirty minutes, it seems, lately. I have this overwhelming sense of something that I can’t really describe in other way than as a sort of productivity fomo, a fear of missing out on making or doing something more important than what I am ever doing at that moment, so I can’t sit still and just do much of anything.

    But my neurosis aside, I did manage to push through a couple of series.

    The last couple of weeks I watched:

    streaming: Umbrella Academy, Season 1

    I watched this whole series the first time, start to finish, pretty much as it rolled out.  Each new season release turned into a binge watch with the Kid. Binge watching is not my preference. I think it must be a generational thing. Kids these days! I prefer my suspense to hangout at arbitrary act breaks determined by the commercial nature of broadcast television that forced me once to wait an entire week between episodes. Gah! Alas, there was a part of me that felt like watching it in binge-mode the first time through had my poor old guy brain at a disadvantage and that a slower paced rewatch was in order. I spread my second go at season one out over about six months, which admittedly, might have been a lot slower than the spirit of my long lost self intended.  If you have not partaken of the Umbrella Academy quite yet think of it like a kind of off-brand Marvel superhero-type story blended with a bit of goth style, some retro-alternate-futurism and a dash of dark humour. Oh, and a lot more random death. It was the brainchild of Gerard Way founder of My Chemical Romance and cousin to conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan, which should tell you more than enough about the vibe of this thing.  I watched it first time with a fourteen year old and now she is doing an arts degree in drama and film studies. Correlation or causation, you tell me. The backstory is far too complex to explain, except maybe to say kids with mysterious powers are raised by the world worst parent without access to therapy and what could go wrong? The end of the world could go wrong, that’s what could go wrong. Worth your time, but maybe watch it over a few weeks and neither two days nor six months.

    streaming: Avenue 5, Season 2

    I have a soft spot for comedic science fiction. In fact, did I have the confidence of prose to compose comedic narrative in a science fictional setting it would almost certainly be my genre of choice. I even wrote a series of articles trying to wrap my head around the mechanics of the absurd, thinking (probably vainly) that if I could put some logic to creating the illogical I might have a thread of hope upon which to grasp and thus, perhaps foolishly, try to write some silly sci fi. The conclusion that I ultimately came to was that writing absurdist and funny spec fiction is actually hard—and so much more difficult than writing “big guns in space blow shit up” fiction or “evil robots chase frightened people” stories. The thing is, I grew up on a steady diet of Douglas Adams and Red Dwarf, and I know for my endless efforts of looking for it that good absurdist comedic science fiction pretty much remains a genre with a lot of empty shelf space. Again: because it’s hard to do well. And I mean sure, modern casual science fiction bros like Dennis Taylor or Andy Weir have written great stories that are funny-adjacent, often providing a good belly laugh, but those and other funny-adjacent authors are storytellers who are telling serious stories while acknowledging that sometimes regular people do funny things. People are not generally absurd all the time, is what I’m saying, and neither are their characters. What I’m talking about here are mostly slapstick among the stars humour, buffoonery and chaos and, yeah, absurdity. Avenue 5’s cast was stuffed full of great comedic actors but only earned itself two short and obscure seasons of what turned out to be a cliffhanger serial narrative because—I’d like to think—it was misunderstood. I finally tracked down the second season last week and watched it in the span of twenty-four hours binging, and too watched it with the eye of someone looking for absurdity in space. Anyone looking for a moral or a message would be disappointed of course, but like all great comedy it had heart and that should have earned it a couple more seasons—and not an abrupt cancellation.

  • book reviews: from the end of the world

    I realize it has been over a month since I posted a review, but it has not been for lack of reading. Oddly enough my biggest struggle has been focussing on one book for long enough to cross the last page finish line.

    When I first bought my new ebook reader I had downloaded a trio of books from the library and so I had no issues grinding through the limited selection. But over the last month or two a number of holds have reached the top of my library queue, I discovered an ebook repository for free classics, and my occasional browsing of the deals section on the kobo website has resulted in me accumulating titles faster than I can read them. Here I am with a different big stack of books, it seems.

    In other words, I’ve been dabbling and I now have something like a dozen books on the go.

    So while lately I have been reading a lot of things, I actually finished reading…

    Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

    There was a time not so long ago when it seemed like a sure bet that biotechnology was merely lagging behind advancements in digital computer tech and that eventually and inevitably it would catch up. That one day humanity would program critters and people and viruses in the same way that we now write apps and databases and AIs was taken as a given. Still quasi-working in a healthcare-adjacent role and daily-ish using my university degree in genetics when this book came out, I seem to remember reading it the first time and feeling as if I was just looking down a futurists timeline of potential society-killing options. Farfetched, maybe, but manipulation of genomes and biohacking as a corpo-dark-era tactic at the hands of lunatic geniuses was not off the table. I think twenty years of uninspired progress towards much of anything in this realm has not taken off the table the doom of society via bioterror, but it has thrown a bit of cold water on the idea that a lone genius prodding DNA in his private lab will unravel the fabric of life and twist it to his own evil designs. Atwood, as usual, paints a stark vision in this the first of the MaddAddam trilogy which I decided to re-read before I plunged into books two and three soon. In a world of AI erosions of our own real society from the bottom up, breaking the world through exponentially accelerating evasion of laws and decency and good taste, it was an interesting voyage back into the simpler times of dystopian fictions that just wanted to kill us outright rather than simply making us obsolete and angry. 

    Stupid TV, Be More Funny by Alan Siegel

    I will admit: my guilty pleasure these last few years has been rewatching old episodes of The Simpsons along with a fan-tastic weekly show called the Talking Simpsons podcast. The now thirty-six year old cartoon show has been a running theme in my life these past decades, and revisiting the classic eps has been a breath of nostalgia for me in these weird times. And as pedantic as it can sometimes get, diving down the rabbit hole of production minutia and listening to random commentary about the history of television from decades past definitely beats the modern news. The author of this book was a guest on the aforementioned podcast, hawking his book obviously as he chatted along with the retro-nostalgia conversation, and I just happened to be pondering books for my reading list. Of course, with so much scope to cover even a book a hundred times as long could likely still not do the subject matter justice and Siegel chooses to focus on a collection of early production obstacles and paint a story of the little-show-that-could breaking through the norms of a media landscape that was stagnating with wholesome sitcom predictability. As a devotee of the television nostalgia podcast genre I can’t say there were more than a few nuggets of knowledge that I had not stumbled across before, but the book does frame them up and contextualize the story against the backdrop of cultural and political shifts going on at the time. It would definitely make a great entry point into a vast field of knowledge, and a worthwhile read even for us crusty old nerds who are already neck deep in the lore of an aging media form.

    Endymion by Dan Simmons

    It would be fair for anyone to assume that the third book of a four book saga could be the weakest of the bunch, but somehow that is not the case with this one, the third volume of Simmons Hyperion Cantos. We pick up into the story over two hundred years after the end of the last book which left in a bit of a hanging what-happens-next scenario us as the civilization humanity had built across the stars on the shaky foundations of their AI creations was entering a collapse and fizzling into a new dark age. And once again the style does an about face and we are granted a new (doomed) narrator and new narrative style. Two hundred years is a lot of catching up to do for any story, particularly when the seeds were planted for a daunting religious oligarchy to grab power in the void of the civil collapse, and our narrator strings us through a story of a lone child, the descendent of two of the characters we met in the previous two books, who is facing down insurmountable odds to, we presume, take on the empire. The story is a river tale. That’s trope, I think. The main cast finds itself moving down a river on a raft towards a vague destination and the challenges they face are those of not just the humans chasing them but the natural obstacles they encounter along the way. I can’t think of more than a couple of stories that use this structure, but it definitely feels like a trope… and that’s okay because the science fiction setting and the juxtaposition of natural obstacles and the seeming unlimited power of a fully armed and super-powered military apparatus chasing our protagonists while they float down an interstellar river on a flimsy wooden raft is a kind of magic that keeps one turning pages. 

  • media: nostalgia summer mode

    Two weeks of blur, waiting for professional stuff to happen while July slips away into the heat. We went on a road trip to BC and I loaded up my device with a bunch of movies and books and it turns out I barely had time to read the news, let alone finish a novel. But I squeezed in some down time and stared at a screen when I got tired of the beautiful mountain views.

    The last couple of weeks I watched:

    films: all the matricies

    I was there in 1999. And again a few years later when the sequels hit theatres. Films were still events back then, and trilogies building on universes were rare and precious gems worth queuing up for at the local megaplex. And it’s not like I haven’t gone back and watched any of the Matrix movies in the intervening twenty-five plus years… but it has been a while, and never have I ever sat down and over the course of three days watched all four (yeah, even the 2022 Resurrections instalment.) Until recently. Summer. Vacation mode. Heat wave. Laziness on the couch. Call it whatever, I unplugged from life for the duration of four movies and plugged into the oh-gee mind-bender of philosophical cinema. This isn’t a review, of course. You can read opinions of any or all of them online, and like all online opinions many are shrouded in rage and bias and unrealistic expectations, particularly following the unlikely masterstroke of storytelling-meets-special-effects-meets-brain-melting-concepts that was the original The Matrix. Spoiler alert: what if we were living in a computer simulation? What would that tell us about free will and emotions and personal agency and choosing blissful ignorance over gritty realities? The Wachowskis were telling a story that was as open to interpretation as any piece of art, and I ate it up along with half the modern world fitting a skewered worldview though the lens of a reality that I would now forever question, even just a little bit. I recently heard someone suggest that the reason everyone hated the ending of Lost so much, remember that show?, was that the build up and hype did not align with the final result. I think the same could be said about other shows like Battlestar Galactica, another long run show that was dissected on the fly online and could never have filled the spaces of anticipation and imagination of eager viewers waiting to see the ending. The Matrix fell into the same trap, and even when the four-quel arrived in 2022ish it was met with a kind of collective what-was-that-groan. But The Matrix extended universe had already been scoped by the unbound imaginations of millions of critical viewers and fans leaving a space of expectation so big that no story could ever hope to rival the vague perception of what it should be. That same Lost theorist suggested that a modern “binge watch” of the show held up so much better because there was no anticipatory collapse: that it was just a good story with a reasonably solid (if weird) ending. And having just binge watched the four Matrix movies I think I would suggest the same for those films. Watching them all in a row with no expectations beyond it as a piece of interesting film and art, they are far from perfect, but they are interesting and entertaining and hold up.

    film: cast away

    I saw this flick for the first time in the theatre a few weeks before I moved to Vancouver. (That should put some dates onto my timeline for those of you doing research on the matter.) It is one of those sort of core memories stuck in my head because I had been hanging out with a small group of friends from my summer job of the year before and a few of us met at the theatre and went to see Tom Hanks yelling at a volleyball and a couple of the people were trying to simultaneously wish me well while selfishly suggesting that Vancouver was going to “eat me alive” and that I should just stay here and look for a job locally. I wont say that it made me upset, but those words always kind of haunted me, particularly three years later when (without much regret) we bailed on Vancouver and moved back and I always sort of wonder if those friends were astutely correct about my fortitude or just generally cynics about moving abroad. I can’t help but flashback to that conversation whenever I watch Cast Away so entangled are those two things, which is strange because the movie is a story of resiliency and personal fortitude in the face of overwhelming powerlessness and even creeping hopelessness. Hanks loses everything but anchors himself in the tatters of that hope and survives being stranded on a deserted island for four years only to return hope to learn that most everyone else lost hope about him long before he escaped and was rescued.  There is something parallel there to the journey I have been on personally lately wherein I ejected from the flight of my career and dropped into the wilderness of wherever I’ve been wandering for the last two years. I often feel like despite the seeming agency I imparted myself in pulling the ripcord and jumping that to do so from a burning plane is not so much agency as it is playing a forced move and convincing yourself it was a good choice. Hank’s character made choices to survive and fight against the powerlessness but those things were less choices as they were playing well the poor hand he was dealt and trying not to crack under the pressure when it seemed that all was lost, that he was lost, and when everyone back from where he came had assumed he was gone forever and so they had moved on. Nearly every time you take a run at the wave it is gonna toss you into the reef and mess you up, but you only need to break over that barrier once to get back to civilization.

  • reviews: wet hot summer

    Maybe I’m solar powered. I certainly feel like I have a lot more energy these last couple of months with the sun out and my motivation levels surging. I’ve been reading a lot and listening a lot and enjoying interesting shows on the teevee. I can’t be bothered to write a review of every bit of media I touch, but I have had some thoughts about a couple of things.

    Recently I’ve been enjoying and thinking about:

    audiobook: anathem

    Neal Stephenson’s 2008 reality-bending science fiction novel Anathem is, I will admit, an acquired taste. The phone-book thick tome is filled with huge ideas wrapped in multi-dimensional physics shaped by a parallel (and some—not me—would argue needlessly strange) vocabulary that darn-near requires a glossary to translate. I love it. I might even call it my favourite book. It would make a terrible movie because the best thing about the story is the internal monologue of the narrator and main character expositioning the world as he sheds a veil of naivity on his quest to participate in a dimension-spanning quest to save the world. I have listened to this book—yes, listened—no fewer than fifteen times. And I have done so because almost as great as the story and the concept and the implementation by Stephenson is the narration in the audiobook by William Dufris, who—I was yesterday years old when I learned from a social media post—apparently passed away in early 2020. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I just learned this fact, that a man who’s voice has been in my ears for likely over five hundred hours of audiobook enjoyment spanning nearly two decades of repeated listening, has been gone for over five years. Dufris had a unique voice, and maybe it struck me as so profoundly personal because at the same time I was discovering the joys of repeated listening to the Anathem audiobook around about 2010, the Kid was three years old and mainlining that goofy kid’s show Bob the Builder, whose title character was voiced by—you guessed it—William Dufris. We live in an oddly complex time, when some of the people we come to feel a kind of respect and affection for are people who are neither the people we know in real life or can likely be known with any greater depth than by the simple contributions they make in their arts. I didn’t know Mr. Dufris, but as I wrote above, I have been settling into my quiet moments of headphones-in personal entertainment with his voice in my head for a third of my life. I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me, and he was just doing his job, which was to entertain and bring words on the page to life as characters with voices and vibes—and he seemingly did this so well that he is probably one of three voice actors I could name without the aid of a search engine. If you never listened to any of this work, do yourself a favour and look up the Anathem audiobook—or if you’re not into crazy complex sci-fi, just go download some Bob the Builder. It’s all great.

    film: deep cover

    It may have preluded much of my recent writing here, but the Kid spent a good chunk of her high school career in the improv theatre club. To be honest, I was never much of a fan. I’m a deep narrative guy. I like complex plots and clever stories and big ideas brought to life in meaningful ways that make you think, and my handful of experiences being dragged to improv nights for work events or hitting up shows at the local Fringe festival were always a middling, yeah—ok—sure.  But then, of course, it becomes the passion of your only child and next thing you know you are going to home shows and watching live streams of the high school improv games and buying tickets to local shows because “I’ll never turn down an improv ticket” she tells you when you offer.  On of Karin’s coworkers knew of our family’s recent dabblings in the improv theatre world and recommended we check out Deep Cover.  You can look up more elaborate details about the cast and plot elsewhere, but here is the gist: a trio of stuggling improv comedy actors (played by Howard, Bloom, and Mohammed) are recurited by an undercover police detective (played by Sean Bean) into a some light police sting work, and fumble, bumble, and over-act their way into deep inflitration of a major underworld drug smuggling ring. Hijinks ensue. British humour abounds. Of course, the Kid watched the whole thing with us (which if you are responsible for a teenager these days you know that getting one to focus on a single screen for the duration of a movie is a feat in an of itself) and routinely quipped about how “this is going to be my life in three years, just watch!” The story is funny enough to grip but the bigger message hidden in the comedy may be simply a commentary on how we undervalue certain skills. I mean, I don’t want to overthink it here: the story is a romp and a laugh, but at the heart of it is a tale of three people who were able to make it big and get criminally rich using their skills for a kind of misguided accidental evil, while at the same time those skills were viewed with a kind of societal pity when they tried to use them for good things, like to enterain others. Or, maybe its just a cautionary tale for improv actors everywhere: that the whole world is a stage after all.