Tag: television

  • 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.

  • media: andor, season one

    Oh, just what the internet ordered: some more commentary on Star Wars.

    To be honest, my relationship with this franchise is certifiably bipolar. Up, down, deep, shallow, love it, hate it, roll my eyes at the wonderful blur of a galaxy far, far away. I mean, if there was some kind of independent adjudication of fan-ness in the Star Wars media landscape I wouldn’t be anywhere near the top, but I’d probably have a ranking.

    I am told in a tale perhaps apocryphal, that I attended a screening of the original in 1977 at a drive in movie theatre, asleep as an infant in the back of the car.

    I have watched the films, read the books, played the games, absorbed the lore, studied the history, run the themed race, ridden the rides, toured the studio, bought the merch, and drank the star wars kool-aid in big gulps.

    But ever since Disney bought the whole thing… I get it. You’ve heard this story before. Everyone complains: Disney borked it, right? Yeah… no… maybe… kinda… sorta… what does that even mean?

    I remember walking through the queue to Star Tours in Disneyland last summer and feeling this sense of vague disconcert. There was this sense that as fun as the ride was, as immersive as the queue was built, that there was a vibe that whoever had built this thing, well, they just didn’t get it.

    Here’s my point and I’ll move onto the review: you’re in the queue to Star Tours, boarding a fictional vacation trip, and one of the destinations advertised is Tatooine. This is the case because you’re supposed to be excited about visiting something from the universe of Star Wars, but if you were in the world of Star Wars, as a character with agency and thought and free will, you would avoid Tatooine at all costs. It is a truck stop in a backwater in the middle of lawless nowhere. You would never in a million years book a vacation there. That’s the whole point. It’s like seeing an advertisement for the industrial area behind the airport suggesting you could go visit the shitty bar by the gas station and bet on the dog fights in the back alley. Why the hell, in universe, would there be a tourist cruise headed there?

    Because. Simply. Tatooine is intellectual property and most people legitimately don’t look beyond the “gee whiz I saw that on thuh teevee…” so it sells just fine in Disneyland.

    And that vibe is where my frustration with modern Disney-owned Star Wars has tended to exist for the last few years: it’s all just intellectual property being shuffled into disconcerting new recipes that make no real sense and have no real sense of the stakes of this universe. It’s all pretty much been a low-thought, gee whiz theme park ride, particularly a lot of the new limited run series on Disney Plus.

    In other words, it took a great deal of contrary information suggesting that Andor was something that rose above this dreck, or at least aspired to lift itself out of the gee whiz-ness of the intellectual property churn factory built by Disney over the last decade to make me want to actually commit about ten hours to watch it.

    But we did.

    We finished watching the first season this past weekend… and I will suggest that if nothing else it has tried and almost certainly done a reasonably good job of building something fresh from the universe, adding to the story rather than blithely churning intellectual property and recycling the old pulp of the films. Sure, it leverages and contributes to the structure of the broader story, but it risked something bigger, created stakes, incited emotion and felt more real than the manufactured backstories that have populated my overpriced streaming subscription lately. It wasn’t perfect. There was some inconsistencies and a few tourist glances towards Star Wars Land TM. Yet, it was compelling and we wanted to keep watching, to see what happened, and you started to care about all the characters, even some of the terrible evil ones. No, not perfect, but pretty good.

    And if nothing else, it hardly ever felt like a sightseeing tourist vacation to a truck stop by the airport.

  • Our Well-Loved Cookbooks: Cooking with Friends

    Bear with me.

    Just as I may be accused of jumping on the pop culture bandwagon (following my twitter and news feeds being filled yesterday with the sensationalized announcements that some middle-aged actors from a television show that ended fifteen years ago are having a reunion episode) apparently authors of cookbooks do the same.

    Back in 1995, when the sitcom Friends was barely a season old, some bandwagons were jumped upon by a couple of folks who (with motivations unknown to me) published a collection of recipes co-branded with a soon-to-be generation-defining television show.

    I don’t remember exactly who or why… but someone gave me this cookbook as I shipped off and moved out of home setting out towards University.

    I’d be lying if I told you this book had been cracked open as more than a curiosity in the decade prior to this morning.

    But, for a very long time, it was one of approximately three cookbooks I owned.

    Was I a fan of the show? Well. I watched it, but mostly because in the nineties as a student without cable television, we watched whatever was broadcast over one of the four channels that reached our apartments via the little rabbit ears antenna.

    Yesterday I couldn’t help but open my twitter feed and see countless people promoting the reunion episode trailer that had been posted online. Serious news agencies devoted writers, resources, and space on their properties to dissecting the cultural impacts of a ten-year-long, millennium-spanning sitcom.

    I was reminded that I had this book on my shelf.

    Still.

    On my shelf mixed in among the other mostly-serious cookbooks.

    Latching onto popular culture to inspire recipes is not an obscure thing, tho.

    Beside the Cooking with Friends cookbook on my shelf there was also (I kid you not) a copy of The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook (which technically belongs to my daughter) and a more recent acquisition Binging with Babish: 100 Recipes Recreated from Your Favorite Movies and TV Shows, which I bought to support Youtuber Andrew Rea who runs a remarkably well-produced and genuinely brilliant cooking channel where he instructs and entertains around a very similar premise. (After I’ve cooked a few more recipes from his book I’ll post a breakdown in a future post.) I’d also be obscuring my fascination with pop-culture-inspired recipes if I didn’t mention that I own a healthy digital collection of PDF cookbooks containing such titles as The Geeky Chef Cookbook, Minecrafter’s Cookbook, The Nightmare Before Dinner and of course The Wizard’s Cookbook: Magical Recipes Inspired by Harry Potter, Merlin, The Wizard of Oz, and More.

    All that said, one season in to the show Friends there was insufficient inspirational fodder for the Cooking with Friends cookbook to be anything but a co-branded cash-grab. The recipes are broad and basic. Italian food (because one of the characters is Italian) or coffee-house treats (because they all spend a lot of time drinking coffee in a café.) Later seasons would turn one of the main characters into a working chef (which certainly would have provided some interesting recipes) and revolve entire episode plots around eating, cooking, dining, drinking, and other food-related activities. But little of these stories is to be found between the covers of this book.

    The little blue page flag visible in my photo above opens to a page with a recipe for pesto pizza a recipe that, yes, we did cook a few times, using both the pesto and the pizza dough recipe from this cookbook. I don’t recall the characters ever having much to do with pesto pizza… but the pizza was pretty delicious if I recall.

    My twitter feed has already forgotten about the Friends reunion episode trailer that was the star of the news cycle yesterday. Maybe the bandwagon has rolled on. I spent half an hour as I started my day with a cup of coffee flipping through the recipes in this old, once-treasured book. It was well-loved, and perhaps now long-forgotten, but it served us well for a time.

    Like an old friend. Friends? Friend.