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.