The Friday Article Roundup
Dropping in with great pop culture writing from the past week.
Coming in hot, it’s:
Thumbs up on stretcher to Dave for contributing this week! Send articles to be featured throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Indiwire‘s Chris O’Falt talks about the addition of the new Academy Award for Best Stunt Design – and what’s next for the category:
In essence, this is why the stunt design category will ultimately become the award for best action design. The word โstuntโ elicits the safe execution of a dangerous feat, like a fall down the stairs, or a car jumping across a ravine. Thatโs part of what the stunt department does, but under the larger umbrella of action design. As OโHara points out, the action storytelling, or how โthe action fit[s] the story,โ will be the criteria for evaluation.
Will Sloan digs into why he wrote a new book about Ed Wood, and what there was and was not to find:
I think this is probably the case with most nonfiction books – the eccentricities in your subject that you love so much are also the things that sometimes drive you crazy. First and foremost is the issue of Wood being a โbadโ artist. Now believe me, I know that โbadโ is complex word, which is why I put it in quotes and wrote a whole book about Ed Wood. However, I think itโs unavoidable that much of the reason to discuss Jail Bait lies in its failure to rise to the level of a conventionally movie, which I believe is what Wood intended to make. Woodโs minimalist horror films like Final Curtain and Night of the Ghouls call to mind the low-budget atmospherics of Jacques Tourneur, but the comparison to such a master craftsman does them no favours. Taking Wood seriously means running up, again and again, against his limitations.
For Documentary, Vikram Murthi looks at the rights management and access to archives that increasingly plays a role in producing music docs:
Even under the ideal circumstances of Concord generating their own material, putting together a project is, practically speaking, akin to completing a jigsaw puzzle after the pieces have been flung around an enormous mansion. โItโs nice if a partner has a general appreciation for music docs being their own discipline,โ notes [Charles] Hopkins. โBecause they are, and there will be added layers you have to navigate through the process. There might be multiple music publishers or multiple record labels; in each, there might be multiple approval parties. A label, a publisher, or a private third party might be the one to sign off on licenses instead of an estate. It becomes about identifying the stakeholders and wrangling the approvals, in each case, that youโll need.
At Pajiba, Dustin Rowles writes about remembering Nicky Katt at his best:
He was so good in SubUrbia, yโall. He played a burnout, loser racist who thought he was owed something by virtue of being a white American (sound familiar?). The character had just enough vulnerability that the audience thought he might actually redeem himself and see the error of his ways. But thatโs just not how these characters really work. Eric Bogosian knew that, and Katt gave what I thought at the timeโand still doโa tremendously good performance as a shitbag. Thatโs how Iโm going to try and remember himโnot as a shitbag, but as a tremendously good actor brave enough to take on those roles that might have killed another actorโs career.
At Hearing Things, Jill Mapes talks about learning how to listen to music from her father:
At some point in my youth, I realized most kids werenโt explicitly taught to be a music fan by their parents, like they might be with a sports team. My peers didnโt sing early Who hits at the third-grade talent show, or find themselves too scared to sleep after hearing the Beatlesโย White Albumย played backwards. They werenโt being quizzed on classic song intros by age 10, and debatingย Dark Side of the Moonย vs.ย Wish You Were Hereย as the best Pink Floyd album by their preteen years. Other kids didnโt steal their dadโsย Dookieย andย Tragic Kingdomย CDs, or lose their shit over a handmade comp of โ60s one-hit-wonders like โRed Rubber Ball.โ For a long time I felt this made me special, to have this musical bond with my dad; I knew it was an extension of his love. Later, I came to view it as a passed-down survival skill. I inherited so much from him, and the way we both self-soothe anxiety and depression (mine diagnosed, his not) with pop songs is a coping mechanism for a shared genetic flaw.ย
Kลdล Simone asks: What if we made advertising illegal?
The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that. The traditional argument pro-advertisingโthat it provides consumers with necessary informationโhasn’t been valid for decades. In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don’t inform. […] โBut it’s free speech!โ Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you โGET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAYโ with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That’s not free speech, that’s harassment.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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What Did We Watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Six, “Spider In The Web”
This season has been incredibly frustrating – each season has a nickname, and this one is โSigns And Portentsโ, and itโs a bit much of me to be on the second season and still hinting at big shit coming rather than just, you know, having it come. The characters have been sketched out! I know this world at this point! Things should actually be happening by now!
Adrienne Barbeau! This show has such great guest stars. And right when I was writing that in my notes, Jessica Walter was onscreen in a tiny role as a Senator giving Sheridan orders.
There’s one shot where it passes over “the San Diego Wastelands”, and the models they use aren’t great but also they’re physical models!
WELL ACTUALLY ALERT: I am still in Season One behind you but I had done some small poking around on Wikipedia and it is Season One that is called “Signs and Portents” (an episode has this name as well I believe). You are currently in *checks Wikipedia again* “The Coming of Shadows.” Spooooooooooky!
I got the details wrong, but my basic point stands! “Coming of Shadows” is just “Signs and Portents” but slightly spookier.
Signs and Portents: Coming Of The Shadows: The Foreboding Menace
The Pitt, “9:00 AM”
Solid episode. There’s an annoying trend here of certain characters being assigned levels of supposed likability or morality, so that Doctor A will make a mildly snarky remark and have everyone call them an asshole, but Doctor B will make an equivalent remark under equivalent circumstances and it’s fine, or Patient A (in tremendous pain) will be difficult, but everyone should understand that, but Patient B (in tremendous pain) will be difficult, and everyone should snark at them. It’s like the writers are signifying the role they’re playing in the story, but not by making them play it, just by having the other characters comment on it. I find this annoying, although at least it isn’t yet resulting in the “asshole” characters being completely flattened out.
But there’s good stuff here, especially the progress of the patient storylines and the way they occasionally set up moral dilemmas that the show isn’t labelling as obviously, like Robby wanting time and tests to cushion parents as much as possible about the brain death of their eighteen-year-old son vs. Langdon wanting to get that room freed up for a patient who has more of a chance. And sometimes the right answer is clear, but the human difficulty with it is still compelling, as with the adult siblings who are putting their elderly father with dementia through agonizing procedures to prolong his life even as it becomes, by the second, more and more distressing to him. And there’s some good camaraderie with multiple people trying different tactics to make one young doctor feel better about losing his first patient.
Gotta say, even knowing that it could well go bad for maximum drama, I think I’m actually on the side of “it is not your job, as a medical doctor, to go to the police with a secondhand account of a mother who saw that her eighteen-year-old son had written down some violent fantasies about his classmates.” If they’d been concrete plans, I might feel differently. As it is, they’re definitely disturbing and tremendously worrying, but it seems like a big leap to believe he plans on immediately acting on his resentments … and more to the point, I don’t know what the police are going to realistically do here. This is a problem without a good answer. That said, I feel like my money is on this show having him attack someone(s) and having that person/people end up in the ER later.
Tropic Thunder
Comedic masterpiece. I watched this with a friend, and we were talking about how impossible it would be to get this kind of big-budget action-comedy with actual location shooting today (not in the supposed location, but not all on green screens, either). We live in a fallen age. But this is magnificent. Can’t say anything about that people haven’t already said a thousand times, so I’ll just say that all the performances are terrific and that I love how overstuffed it is with both top-notch comedic actors–Danny McBride and Bill Hader in supporting roles!–and mostly dramatic actors killing it by playing the comedy completely straight, like Nick Nolte. Also, the final reveal on Lance is such an amazing punchline.
Aw, man, I always end up sympathising with Characters Labelled The Bad Guy, even on shows I like (like Blackadder Goes Forth, though I think the show deliberately makes Captain Darling a little sympathetic).
Favourite detail: RDJ only losing character when Stiller starts making the “dingo took my baby” joke, not just because it’s such a hack fucking joke dumbass Americans make (nothing quite so American as thinking you’re too cool to take a tragedy from another country seriously), but because it’s so great seeing an actor waver between one character and another like that.
Oh, I do the same thing. I think I have some instinctive response to the idea that the character is getting unfair treatment (to a certain extent, I also often wind up protective of characters widely despised by the audience, even if the show itself isn’t behind it), and it’s especially aggravating when it comes in the form of the show trying to get out ahead of me like this. I will say, to be fair to The Pitt, at least one of the designated assholes gets plenty of good moments, so in at least one case, it’s probably “I want to have a jerk with a heart of gold, but I don’t want to actually write a jerk, because then the audience might not like him, so instead I’ll just have other characters call him a jerk.” Downside: this just makes me feel like those other characters are being jerks.
100% on RDJ in that moment: the genuine offense breaking through is so great, especially paired with the weary I’m-so-sick-of-this-joke aggravation. “You know that’s a true story? Lady lost her kid.”
Hey, now, we were telling 9/11 jokes within six months. We don’t even take our own tragedies seriously.
Cadillac Man – Robin Williams is a car salesman coping with an ex-wife and teen daughter, two girlfriends, and a desperate need to keep up his sales. And then he’s a car salesman trying to talk down a crazed husband who takes the car dealership hostage over his wife sleeping with someone at the office. I am not sure that this would have been a good movie if it had stuck with one plot or the other, but we definitely lose something in abandoning “Robin needs to sell twelve Caddies in a day.” Williams and the movie both end up short of being good, but he has his moments in a generally non-comedic role, especially opposite Tim Robbins as the jealous gun toting husband., And there is definite tonal dissonance here that really makes his a struggle to watch at time. Nice scenery in Long Island City in Queens, an area I know well.
Kojak, “A Need to Know” – Hector Elizondo is a driver for a consulate or embassy for an unfriendly nation. He is also a child molester. He is also working for the FBI, which turned him after an earlier arrest. He is also working for his own side to set up a Fed. Kojak and team only care about making an arrest stick and at the very least getting Hector sent home before he can strike again, but working with the Feds is difficult. This is a very complex hour, with a lot of moving parts, including the implication that a kid was at least nearly molested while the FBI was playing its games, and with Kojak wanting not to punish Hector but to get him proper care, a rare attempt by a TV cop to have compassion for someone who is compelled to do horrible things. Elizondo is excellent as this fairly meek little man who not only does bad things but suffers under the thumb of his bosses and the FBI. Al Freeman Jr. is very good as a Fed who would rather the whole sting operation fail if it means letting a molester go, but that is not his call.
Frasier, “You Can Go Home Again” – On the third anniversary of his show, Frasier remembers how it started. A flashback that works to both show how much things changed between Frasier and his family since he came home, and to demonstrate that the writers know Frasier on Cheers acted differently and apparently was influenced by Niles. The season finale is satisfying and emotionally resonant if not as good as the previous two. The third season was overall more consistent than the second, with some classics, but also just a bit less funny than we might have expected.
I think I saw Cadillac Man on a date. Itโs one of the movies of the period (Iโve discussed others in this space like Down and Out in Beverly Hills) that take a comedy plot and shoot and edit it like a comedy but donโt do jokes. Not as a failure, but in an attempt to try and uncover the absurdity of life. And IIRC, this was ok even if not fully successful(same as Down and Out). But the big problem is Hollywood never figured out how to market these movies except by positioning them as comedies, so a 17 year old might take a girl to see it on a date, and then what?
Live Music – mildly shambolic powerpop punks Ex-Vรถid, third time I’ve seen them and they’re always fun but with an ever-present hint of self sabotage. Which I find quite charming tbh.
Wooooooooooo live music! And yeah, sometimes it is fun to see that edge, I remember an old Pere Ubu show wondering if David Thomas was faking being extra crochety or really was going to flip out on people.
Wooooo charming live music!!
Babylon 5 — half of the episode is time travel stuff which is pretty decent (although it involves a clearly Gurgi-inspired alien wiener and boy is he grating) although like all time travel stuff it is setting up loops for down the road. But it is a lot better than the other half, which is all about the Minari Council Of Dipshits In Grey Pajamas and boy are these fuckers stupid, just dumbass woo woo nonsense that the show seems to recognize as such (their plan is rejected) but we still have to spend a lot of time with their nonsense. And worse, hear about how humans are special and unique in their passions, ugggggggh.
Claudine — humans are special and unique in their passions! In particular James Earl Jones is one suave dude here, such a boss as he makes some moves (although not without sensitivity) on Diahann Carroll’s title character, a single mom of 6 in 70s NYC. Jones is also the man in how he knows himself and acts with confidence, it is not his game but his casual and straightforward shutting down of Claudine’s boss that convinces her to go out with him — his unapologetic masculine energy, in other words, and this gets a very serious blow later in the movie that made me think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu, of all things. Because Jones does not handle this well and Claudine the movie is about how Claudine the character doesn’t really have an option to not handle things well, she just shoulders the burden and pushes forward. Carroll is great here, one brief moment where she gives her angry teen son a Look had me laughing, but there are a lot of serious moments here too (especially a grim and desperate reaction when her teen daughter gets knocked up, just as she did) and comedy that may not be fully bitter but is definitely biting. A lot of this comes through the film’s look at the welfare state, in the person of the social worker bothering Claudine (her vibe is “what if Mary Tyler Moore were Dolores Umbridge”) and the system behind her that says Claudine can’t work but also can’t accept gifts and can’t get married without losing benefits/putting Jones in the system. This is also the subject of “Mr. Welfare Man,” one of the insanely catchy and awesome songs performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips and produced by Curtis Mayfield on the soundtrack, pop that contains despair and resilience and that sets the tone for the movie — if things are resolved a little too neatly emotionally at the end, the actual final action rules, a small victory of fuck-you solidarity and that’s what to hold onto going forward. Great stuff.
Cabaret – I havenโt seen the stage show and I suspect seeing a good performance would both enhance and mute my appreciation for what this does. Without a stage version for reference, Iโm skeptical of keeping the Emcee portions somewhat sealed off from the outside story. I can imagine having it more integrated – even just having it in the same space without needing a cut to transport you there – would enhance both sides of the equation. Hopefully get the chance to see someday, probably right after I get โTwo Ladiesโ finally unstuck from my head.
For some reason, lately, Iโve been watching compilation videos of people falling down. I know youโre not supposed to laugh at someone when they fall down, but I canโt help it. I canโt explain it, itโs just funny. I guess thatโs why the pratfall has endured through out time.
My husband just sent me an instagram video compilation of cats falling down, off things, etc and there were tears streaming from my eyes.
I used to watch these during the COVID lockdown, because the people falling were always at a barbecue or on a boat or just walking along with friends and it reminded me of the possibility that other people existed.
Yes, people exist and theyโre very very clumsy.
Trap (2024). A very fun movie that does fall apart a bit if you look too hard at the details (why would you let a man this capable anywhere near a bicycle, of all things).
Agreed with what others here have said – the first half in the concert is the far stronger part. Once they leave it almost transitions to a completely different kind of movie. But even in the weaker back half, I did like that the perspective of โtrapped person has to improvise a way outโ flipped to another character, who, like The Butcher, drew on her own very specific knowledge, resources and public persona to solve the problems. I laughed out loud when the two exchanged looks in the back of the limo.
What Did We Read?
I’ve put all other reading on hold to blast through Atlas Shrugged to write an essay on it. My original plan was to blast through it in one day so I wouldn’t have to have it in my life too long, but not only did this prove overly ambitious, I’m not even halfway through it at the end of the week. It has a compelling set of plot hooks – what really gets me is that when you strip out the pseudo-philosophy and whining, this actually has a pretty great plot buried at its core – and a, uh, strong (yet extremely confused) point of view that makes it compelling in a trainwreck kind of way, while the prose alternates between taciturn pulp-like writing and delirious anti-realistic bullshit that makes it a chore to read.
I’ve not given up on the book – I have to win now – but I’ve decided to make my read it of a bit less ambitious, so you’ll probably get my essay on it in a fortnight.
I really enjoy how, like, everybody told you this was a bad idea from the start, and you pressed on anyway, and now you are running into even more reasons than we suggested on why it’s a bad idea… and yet… you press on.
Hopefully this doesn’t break you in some way!
A Face to the World, by Laura Cumming
Really interesting, illuminating book on the art and history of self-portraits. Each chapter feels more like a standalone essay than a building block in a single text, so I may have done this a disservice by reading it so quickly, but it’s a thoughtful book that introduced me to a lot of new-to-me artists, so I don’t have too many regrets. I particularly loved the discussion of artists who incorporated themselves into works that weren’t exclusively self-portraits, like Michelangelo portraying himself as the flayed St. Bartholomew’s clutched skin in The Last Judgement. Also a lot of intriguing examination of how self-portraits have variously seemed egotistical (Courbert’s The Meeting becoming a famous joke in its time for Courbert seeming full of himself) or ego-free, how they were used as early branding, how some artists gravitated to them and others were repulsed by them, etc. Makes me wish I’d taken an actual art history course at some point, but this is at least a good start.
What’s So Funny?, by Donald E. Westlake
The second-to-last Dortmunder novel. This has a little too much going on–Stan’s short-lived idea about stealing the gold dome from a planned mosque could have been cut without any problems, since it goes nowhere and doesn’t even work its way up to a good punchline–and generally feels a little too diffuse. But even weaker Dortmunders are still entertaining and still come with good sequences and jokes. And here, we get a PI gleefully organizing a heist (with a little blackmail to smooth things over), the OJ’s reaction to a potential cop hanging around, boyfriend theft, Dortmunder’s NYC apartment building exodus + surprisingly effective casing of a joint (Kelp only gets a couple de Koonings!), the fate of the stolen chess set, etc.
Particularly great line:
โSo you found this thing,โ Dortmunder began. โThis chess set.โ
She laughed. โOh, Mr. Dortmunder, this is too good a story to just jump in and tell the end.โ
Dortmunder hated stories that were that good, but okay, once again no choice in the matter, so he said, โSure. Go ahead.โ
Elevation, by Stephen King
A very slight standalone novella. This has a silly and somewhat clunky premise–a man keeps his same apparent body shape while gradually slipping into weightlessness and/or out of the effects of gravity, and as he slides towards the inevitable, he also mends fences with his lesbian neighbors and helps them better integrate into the “well, by being married, you’re just rubbing it in our faces” conservative Castle Rock community and make a success out of their restaurant. These two ideas do not feel like they need to go together, and, with the best will in the world, I don’t entirely buy that the healing resolution to the restaurant plot would come that easily. But somehow I enjoyed reading this anyway. King is just one of those authors who is, 95% of the time, congenial to me, to the point where I like spending time in his prose. Don’t get me wrong, I have tiers of great King vs. good King vs. only okay King vs. bad King, etc., and this is probably somewhere between the last two categories. But he has a kind of literary homeyness for me, and I can’t pretend that doesn’t make a difference when it comes to enjoying the weaker stuff.
The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
Excellent, quotable, and highly useful for everyday life. Lewis has a gift for punchy, vivid distillations of moral scenarios people don’t even usually think of. I talked a little about one of the best of these–a kind of poisonous, negative “unselfishness,” as opposed to a positive sense of charity and kindness–but there’s also the bit where Screwtape advises Wormwood to make sure his “patient” only prays for his mother in an abstract way that has nothing to do with the real woman, so that the abstraction becomes steadily more ethereal and further from the real, flawed woman he lives with, that way none of his expressed goodwill towards her soul will ever spill over into his actual treatment of her, or the bit where he talks about how deadly it would be if the patient were to conceive of his present fear as the suffering he has to bear–much better to keep him focusing on all the indefinite, unrealized, mutually contradictory possibilities of the future as things he may have to bear. And so on and so on. Intelligent and sharply written.
Very much with you on King and his tiers and familiarity (although I confess I have zero interest in his swerve into detective/cop crime stuff), the best way to describe it is I read “he also mends fences with his lesbian neighbors” and automatically assumed you were being literal about the fence-mending because of King, and being ruefully accepting of that anyway. What seems really interesting about this is its total inversion of Bachman’s Thinner, a guy getting lighter instead of heavier but becoming more involved in his community instead of becoming isolated (and in his isolation even more destructive), quite the split personality here.
And What’s So Funny is part of the later decent-but-not-great Dortmunders (I do like the chess set ending too though), but Get Real is a very strong conclusion.
Some of the crime stuff is worth it, but a lot of it doesn’t quite click for me. The most aggravating on that front was The Outsider, because it starts like a thriller that, while potentially needing to go to some absurd lengths to justify its seemingly impossible scenario, is going to play by real world rules … and then it takes a sharp turn to the supernatural that feels less like “I wanted to explore this supernatural idea” and more like “I didn’t know how else to resolve this plot.”
It is funny how much Elevation is in conversation with Thinner while going in a completely different direction both narratively and tonally. I guess that’s the King-Bachman distinction for you.
Currently trying to decide whether to read the book of Dortmunder short stories before Get Real or save that for afterwards.
The shorts are fine although not memorable – Westlake’s best short story is probably the weird and creepy Nackles.
Yeah, probably the best thing that can be said about Elevation is that itโs slight, and dissipates quickly afterward. Waitโฆ maybe the form is following the characterโs problem? Manโs a genius.
Lewis really would have some things to say about Effective Altruism, wouldnโt he!
Iโve almost finished The Great Divorce, which is similarly concerned with the question of salvation but in fable form. โGhostsโ in Purgatory/Hell take a bus excursion to Heaven, where they are met by โReal peopleโ who they knew in life who have made it in permanently and want to help them make the (at first) painful journey towards staying. We then get lots of Screwtape style dialogues as the Ghosts mostly refuse to give up some deeply held feeling or viewpoint and choose to go back to the bus.
Some beautiful lines in this one, as was the case in Screwtape. Of the souls on the bus at the start, he describes them as โfilled not of possibilities but of impossibilitiesโ. In another passage during a debate between a Ghost and a Real person, the Real person says: โOnce you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them.โ
Reading this made me want to check out The Great Divorce, which I’d also heard good things about, and this + that last quote really sells me on it. That also reminds me of the bit in Screwtape Letters where Screwtape talks about people being so exhaustively careful to situate older books in their historical context that they completely deaden themselves to the idea that they might find something true and revelatory in them.
These mid-life converts to Christianity do have a certain something in their writing, donโt they!
I have a bunch of other CS Lewis and GK Chesterton books (essays and fiction) sitting on my shelves, and I think Iโll continue working through them.
Finished The Ratline: Love, Lies, and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive by Phillippe Sands. This is three different works. The first is a bio of Otto Wachter, a high ranking SS officer who oversaw mass murder in Krakow and present-day Lviv. It’s well researched but there is little here that stands out from other bios of Nazis. The second is an attempt to discover if Wachter’s son is right that someone poisoned his father when he was a fugitive in Rome in 1949. Sands, a top tier international lawyer, assembles and sorts through medical evidence and data about US intelligence operations after the war, and provides a very good picture of how the US went from arresting Nazis as war criminals to recruiting them to help fight the Soviets and helping them flee via the titular “ratline” to Argentina. This has very little to do with Wachter directly, but it does explain why he was never arrested. (He was not, in fact, murdered.) And the third story, the one that makes this worth reading, is about Wachter’s son, who constantly insisted his father wasn’t that bad but was also far more willing to talk about Wachter than his siblings. Sands, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and an expert on war crimes, at once gives the son a lot of space to make his case and never really accepts it. But I think Sands’s goal is to explore the legacies left by the war and the Holocaust, and that really resonates.
More Parkers! Inspired by Lauren I revisited The Man With The Getaway Face and it still rules, even more so than other books Stark gets into the nitty gritty of getaway routes here and is basically in Dad Mode of getting from point A to point B in the right way (the right way is faster than the people who are trying to betray you so you can betray them first). And as I recollected, this is fully immersed in the world of crime, the secret gun dealers and crooked mechanics and bent doctors that is what makes a Parker book a Parker book. I also burned through Ask The Parrot and Dirty Money, the last two books in the series, and Dirty Money in particular is fascinating in how that world has changed — there is a real sense of Stark building to a conclusion that I think would have been in one final book, because so many people who Parker deals with here are from previous books in the reboot, because there are not a lot of other people in this world anymore. And in particular he cuts a deal with mob (if not Outfit) people because he needs their connections to the straight world for ID, it is a huge need but this seems like a big compromise that would lead to Thief-ish problems down the line. But he still takes care of business.
That sequence where Parker is timing the route and dealing with all the lights is fantastic, pure process. And I love that it’s his real work for the day, and then he’s so irritated by having to play along by talking about fake routes he knows he’s not going to take because of the double-crosses boiling up right under the surface of this particular job.
And the other crucial part of this is Handy McKay, who is also doing the real work to the point of that just being referred to — the reader can assume it’s getting done in a professional way the way Parker knows Handy is a fellow professional. I think a lot of other crime of this era will eventually pull its criminals apart and Parker having other pros to work with (if not friends) is a crucial innovation, it places Parker on a continuum instead of being an unstoppable robot. It’s fascinating in retrospect to see Stark figuring all this out as he goes, because bringing in Handy for the second book is such an important move but in the very next book Parker and more clearly Stark is already pushing back on the developing camaraderie and in the fourth book Handy takes a largely permanent powder — Westlake develops Dortmunder’s friends but Stark is wary of taking things too far. And then in the fifth book he brings in Grofield and starts it up again! But in a more clearly calibrated way.
There is a line in one of the Cooke adaptations that is, I think, not from any Westlake book about “the people Parker works with are the people Parker works with,” not friends. It’s maybe more on the nose than Westlake likes to get, but it sums things up.
Of course, by the time we get to Butcher’s Moon, Parker is acting out of character to rescue Grofield. And knows it! Though I sort of think that by this point Westlake just likes Alan too much to leave him for dead, to the degree than in a sense he’s transferred to the Dortmunder books.
Cooke actually softens the line a bit! The full sequence is one of my favorite bits of Stark: “It was a bad sign when a man like Handy started owning things and started thinking he could afford friendships. Possessions tie a man down and friendships blind him. Parker owned nothing, the men he knew were just that, the men he knew, not his friends and they owned nothing.” But like you say, Parker has a weird affinity for Grofield, although in Butcher’s Moon he is more pissed off than anything, he would be fine moving on from a dead Grofield. And Stark very much moves on from Grofield — for all the work done to keep him alive in Butcher’s Moon, he doesn’t rate even a mention in the reboot.
I am in general glad that we didn’t get, mixed in with all the unpublished Westlake books from the 60s and 70s that came out after his death, notes for a final Parker novel to be written by someone else. I might even go so far as to hope any notes were destroyed the way that most of Pratchett’s unfinished ideas were burnt up. But I do wish we had some idea what Westlake had in mind for a final scene.
Though I am the sort who maintains that Parker got a final scene at the end of Butcher’s Moon, and the later books are really some sort of Earth-Two Parker, the same character but not from the same time.
Very much with you on not wanting any Parker notes or god forbid someone else picking them up, ugh. I think the final page we have works — and it echoes Dortmunder’s final scene, which surely can’t be unintentional — but so much is introduced here and left up in the air. And there is a very interesting note of Parker needing a new fake ID, finally burning “Charles Willis,” and he and Claire selecting a name but that being pointedly not mentioned in the text. Something that would’ve played a role in one more book, or a little meta-joke by Stark, keeping Parker’s new identity from the reader?
And later Parker is definitely sassier, I think because in this time he has to interact with people more.
If I died, what I’d prefer is people take my unfinished notes, and rather than collate ideas into a finished story, just publish the raw notes in a small collection as a final goodbye. Be left with the idea of me.
Very amused by the idea of 1. you saying this because you can see the potential fatality looming from the Atlas Shrugged read and 2. us turning your increasingly horrified notes on Atlas Shrugged into a Lovecraftian nightmare of a man succumbing to madness.
Hey Friends, Whatโs Up?
Weird week, getting used to new responsibilities at work (I am not hugely surprised to find that they’re very loosely defined), feeling down about the latest fucking stupid political developments here, and had a terrible near-sleepless night on Monday that kinda fucked up the rest of the week. Still, it’s Easter now and four days of rest, time for a reset.
Nothing more fun than getting a 5:30 call from a committee chair to ask that a meeting scheduled for next Wednesday – and on the schedule for months – be moved because he’s triple booked. I am now scrambling to move this meeting, a meeting that MUST take place next week for legal reasons. I think I have found a time, but I hate making these super last minute changes. The chair, BTW, is 95 years old. He is, for 95, pretty with it on big picture items – he chairs a major audit committee for a much bigger organization with a much bigger budget, and seems to do okay with it – but he maintains his own calendar despite having an assistant, and I suspect he really should not be doing this. My organization has been trying to find a way to phase him out, or at least have a succession plan, but he won’t let.
Meanwhile, as you might have heard, the Trumpoids are planning to claw back money already allocated to public media. No one is even a little surprised by this, though I suppose it is surprising that they are trying to do this through Congress. I have no idea how government actually claws back money. Maybe if we refuse to cooperate, they can’t actually do it? Well, we’ll see. I wonder if any of the GOP members of Congress who in the past indicated tepid support of public broadcasting will dare defend it. Probably not. My bosses in theory have a plan for life after government funding, but I am not convinced we do.
Had friends over for Passover seders. Most are people we socialize with, and having them at the table was a delight. One is a friend we have fallen out of touch with, and his behavior reminded us why. He was moody, a bit sullen, very quiet. His tendency to chew my ear off is gone, and all that is there is a somewhat sad 40-plus man who, having failed to find anyone despite being handsome, intelligent, and empathetic, seems not to be interested in people anymore.
The old joke was that teachers went to the Teachers Lounge to smoke, which prior maybe to the late 90s wasnโt a joke, I think, just the truth. Nowadays itโs where teachers go to use their phone. Trading one addiction for another, another poison that makes life worse for everybody even if they donโt partake themselves. Smoking was better because secondhand smoke doesnโt reach the entire globe.
Anyway, Iโve only got a few minutes left for hypocrisy, so Iโll report it was a busy week. Paid a visit to my father whoโs recovering from hernia surgery. My brother-in-law and I did a couple days of Spring chores around the house since he canโt lift anything over ten pounds (and I would be reluctant to ask him to do that much). It went surprisingly smooth, with few hiccups along the way as we fixed a fan blade, did some lawn care, hung some lights and other fixtures. Wish I could be that efficient around my own home. I even fixed an icemaker in the freezer when they were ready to give Amazon fifty bucks for a new unit, a double-win in my book.
Last night was Fine Arts Night at The Ploughboyโs schools, which is a great idea to have all the music concerts on the same night and also display the art class projects. My son had a whole bulletin board exhibition dedicated to a series of illustrations of lava lamps with various backgrounds. He has a lava lamp in his room, a nifty set of oil pastels, and a fondness for historical disasters. So you have lava lamps foregrounded before volcanos, shark attacks, the last moments of the Titanic, etc. His artistโs statement – โI was bored and didnโt know what to draw and have a lava lampโ – is a not-unprofound observation of the human imagination. And it wasnโt some Disney copyrighted stuff, so bonus points for that.
Enormous hell yeah to the Ploughboy and his art and his artist’s statement! That rules.
I hope that one day weโll all get to visit our local galleries for an exhibition of the grown Ploughboyโs lava lamp obsession.
I once had to deliver a message to someone in the teacherโs lounge and when they opened the door for me a giant cloud of smoke billowed out. It was like something from a Marx Brothers movie.
Wrist is healing fine. Scar is kinda gnarly but that’s why I generally keep it bandaged still.
Seems like the job my wife has been interviewing for is basically hers if she wants it, though we’re still waiting on a formal offer. It would still be retail, but seems like a much better and less chaotic environment– both in terms of being a smaller store and of not having her hours yanked around so much. Seems like it could be good.
I need to get back to playing poker for real. I think I’ve finally stopped drinking for long enough to be levelheaded at the table even when I haven’t worked out in the last 24 hours.
Looks like Iโll be back in the workforce within the fortnight. Have been in discussions with a former client for a little while about coming on board at his organisation, and as of this week itโs all basically approved – just final paperwork to be sorted out. Iโm excited to start, but also a bit apprehensive about the change after having so enjoyed the relaxed pace of not-work for the past six months.
I am not really enjoying the relaxed pace of not working because Iโm too horrified, but that also paralyzes me and makes it impossible to get anything done. Oh well.
It is shocking how stressful not having work can be after a while. I’m much happier when I have a task to focus on.
Year of the Month update!
May’s year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
And there’s still time to sign up for any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 1999!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 18th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Hand Behind the Mouse
Apr. 21st: Bridgett Taylor: Fight Club
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: The Matrix
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999