Avon Barksdale is the top authority of the Barksdale drug empire, and Stringer Bell is his best friend, main strategist, and confidant. Stringer has been trying to move out of the drug game and into legitimate business. In this scene, he lays out his plan to Avon, trying to get him onboard for the new strategy away from the petty violence of the streets. Avon considers this, and then utters the immortal line: “I’m just a gangsta, I suppose. And I want my corners.”
There is a mystical element to The Wire. Everyone who passes through our field of vision has a soul to them; a fundamental build that contains their skills, intelligence, motivations, and sense of self. This is part of its social commentary, as it observes how people can be punished or rewarded based upon how their environment interacts with who they are as people. To a large extent, this is about race, class, and social position – as Carver puts it, “They fuck up, they get beat. We fuck up, we get pensions.” Specifically, Wallace and Dookie are quiet, sensitive, intelligent boys who end up murdered and driven to heroin respectively because they simply don’t have the opportunity to capitalise on those talents and are punished beyond all reason for their weaknesses.
(It also extends outside that. Prezbo is terrible at being a cop, at least out on the street, but uniquely talented to be a great teacher.)
In this sense, The Wire is an articulation of Stephen J Gould’s quote “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”. Avon is fascinating in this context, because he’s a guy who, from the start of the series to the end, is exactly where he needs to be.
He understands not just the practicality of The Game but the emotions. Heavy is not the head that wears the crown; he’s comfortable wearing power and organising the deaths of his enemies, but he also knows and loves both his limitations and his responsibilities. He’s a king who takes care of his subjects. When you get right down to it, he is both directly – through things like supporting kids playing sport and being noticed by talent spotters – and indirectly – through financing Cutty’s gym – getting more kids out of The Game early than any of the institutions in the show.
Between him and Stringer, he’s also the one who knows that you can’t assassinate a politician and get away with it. He has that famous scene in which he shows D’Angelo a gangsta who got shot and ended up in a coma and explains that one mistake – one accident – will get you killed, and you’ll never be able to control your environment enough to be certain you can avoid that (“And how you ain’t never gonna be slow? Never be late?”). He does what he does knowing he is going to die and it’s almost certainly going to be a bullet that gets him. He accepts that.
It’s an attractive quality in a person. It doesn’t matter that he’s a murderous drug kingpin who orders the deaths of children to protect his empire – he has a regal quality to him. Wood Harris’s performance is extraordinary, a man in total control of himself with nothing to prove to the world. He is a gangsta, nothing more and nothing less. Ambition without pretence; pragmatism with the glow of divinity.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
Tristan J. Nankervis’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Tristan J. Nankervis
"Obi-Wan never told you about your father."
"I love you." / "I know."
"I'm terribly sorry - no no, please don't get up--"
Department of
Conversation
Spot-on, all of this, with special +1s to Avon’s “regal quality” and the attractiveness of him understanding exactly who and what he is, including the limits of that. I know Stringer is the more unusual character (and obviously Idris Elba turns in a world-class performance), but I’ve always felt like it was a shame that the cultural and critical spotlight on Stringer meant Avon and Wood Harris got somewhat overshadowed. This helps redress that, and beautifully so.
I’ve always loved this scene with Avon and Stringer and how it runs up against Stringer’s own less-understood limitations: Stringer, at heart, believes in the economic man, that people are rational and that being rational means wanting money, first and foremost, and doing what it takes to have more of it. He’s brilliant, but he can’t see that the trappings he wants to shed are exactly what Avon values above and beyond the money. A lesser show would play that disconnect out purely as a flaw on Avon’s part–he’s clinging to an outmoded worldview and could ruin Stringer’s innovative new approach!–but The Wire sees the pathos in it. It’s their divorce moment.
Thanks! If it helps, I’ve got one foot in part of The Wire fandom, and the collective view seems to be that Stringer is a pretentious idiot (to the point that I think said fandom forgets the level Stringer is playing on and the things he genuinely achieves).
“idiot” is too harsh, but Avon has his number when he says “not smart enough for that out there.” He’s wrong about a lot in the “legitimate” business world – getting suckered by Clay Davis, obviously, but even in some little moments – he’s dead wrong in his assessment of the cell phone market, for example.
That’s exactly it – and in my experience, most of the fandom sees Stringer this way. His personal tragedy is particularly Greek Myth in a show full of it – he’s Prometheus, punished for stealing fire from the gods. Legitimately improves the structure of his world but that ultimately gets him humiliated and killed.
Mm, what I like about Stringer as a character is his complexity– I don’t really see him as a hero of the game or a villain (though he does have his villainous qualities). He does some things well, and B&B Enterprises and buying up property is a hell of a smart way to go legit. But then he does dumb shit like not checking with his lawyer before bribing a city official, and as I said, his business instincts aren’t always good.
(Aside, I do love the scene with his logic in telecom being a bad investment. “If a no-account ***** like Poot has two cell phones, who are you even gonna sell them to? The market is saturated.” It’s not bad logic, but it shows the degree to which his perspective is too limited for the world he wants to play in. And it’s easy to miss that line or its significance while watching, too, unless you’re looking for it.)
Plus, he’s a snake. Putting the hit on D’Angelo and then sleeping with his woman. (Shit, Kendrick just had something about that: “Fucked on Wayne’s girl was he was in jail, that’s conniving.) And of course, selling out Avon for his own vision, which is half of what makes his scene Avon in “Middle Ground” so heartbreaking.
The other half, of course, is that Avon’s sold him out, too. What actually gets Stringer killed is that “not smart enough for them out there”– except, in this case, not even smart enough for this here— his attempted duplicity with Omar and Brother Mouzone that they figure out pretty easily. Ultimately, Stringer thought he was a master manipulator, and between Clay Davis’ ripoff and his actual death, discovered the hard way that he was not.
What Did We Watch?
Sits on the couch, puts my legs on the coffee table, and makes myself at home.
Music by John Williams – On the one hand, an hour forty five of talking heads touching almost all the bases can be a bit wearying. And don’t expect any criticism of his occasional tendency to repeat himself, his reliance on other composers’ works, or just how twee the Harry Potter score is. OTOH, there is a lot of ground to cover for someone who started as a session musician in the 50s and has worked in TV and the movies ever since. The stuff about him prior to Star Wars is new and fascinating and humanizing, especially the tragic death of his first wife. The stuff after feels bit more self-congratulatory. And we only barely get to know Williams even though about half the movie is him talking. But the music speaks for itself, and sometimes there are glimpses at the process and the thoughts of a man who championed symphonic movie scores when they were out of vogue and who wonders what will happen to them in the digital age.
Kojak, “The Corrupter” – The title refers to Robert Webber (four time guest on The Rockford Files), who’s running a jewel theft ring and thinks he can buy Kojak. Nope. The plot is okay, the acting is solid, and we get several scenes where Kojak is reminded to get a warrant. Guests also include Scatman Crothers and Alfred Ryder.
M*A*S*H, “Mail Call” – Frank learns his stocks are up, Trapper gets a photo of his daughters, Henry gets his wife’s receipts and has to balance her checkbook, and Klinger’s father is dying and needs him to come home, for the fourth or fifth time this year alone. The first time the comedic potential of receiving mail is explored, the first episode directed by Alan Alda.
Pretty Good, “The History of People Slipping on Banana Peels” – Jon Bois has branched out from sports to esoterica, and searched the internet for every news item about people slipping on banana peels. Which is real. He unearths some fascinating stuff about fatalities, con artists, the luckless, and the steady decline of such news stories. (Apparently, public trash cans are a recent development.) As ever, Bois’s graphics and narration style make this worthwhile.
Ah haha, what a great topic for a doc, thank God for Jon Bois. “Fatalities?” What a way to go.
NOVA – Hindenburg: The New Evidence – The Ploughboy has been big into disasters lately thanks to those “I Survived” books for kids. He has drawn multiple drowning Titanics and put together a Lego diorama of the Hindenburg disaster complete with panicking mini-figs running from the flaming carnage. We expect a call from the school any day.
On the upside, he was interested in watching this doc twice, which went into a scientific investigation to explain what exactly ignites the leaking blimp in the first place. It broke down the answer, and the process of arriving at the solution, into easy steps and explained the principle behind each step. So he hopefully absorbed some science and history along with the big ol’ explosion.
This is timely, because I just saw something about those “I Survived” books yesterday. I would have been all over those as a kid, but instead I just had a lot of books about the Titanic specifically. Cool to get some science along with the epic disaster.
Haha, watch for a related What Did I Read in a couple minutes.
It’s really morbid that we are getting kids’ book like that, but not surprising given that time my nephew asked me and my wife about the Great Molasses Flood. I guess when it’s in the past, it seems academic and cool to kids.
Here are some more blimp disasters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
My daughter did a report on the Great Molasses Flood a few years ago which is the first I ever heard of it. Definitely w0rse than slipping on a banana peel when it comes to death-in-the-street-by-food options.
Also maybe when the name of the disaster sounds like a children’s book.
Pardon me, sir, but as a former blimp pilot I must note that the Hindenburg was a *zeppelin*, an entirely different craft!
Was too tired to stay up late for the Top Secret! discussion, but what makes it work for me is the more specific parody is bolstered by the specific performance of Kilmer — yes, there are a bunch of musical numbers but he is so damn charismatic and joyful in them that they’re fun on their own, before you get to the goofery on the margins (like Kilmer’s various suicide attempts). If anything hurts the movie it’s giving The Blue Lagoon the same treatment Saturday Night Fever got in Airplane!, one of those movies has lasted in the pop consciousness and the other has been rightfully memory holed.
Yet there were two Blue Lagoon defenders at the discussion! I wasn’t about to knock it too hard after having seen it only once about twenty five years ago.
It does have wonderful cinematography, the best-looking quasi-child porn you’re likely to see. Extremely astute analysis snagged via Wikipedia:
In a retrospective review for RogerEbert.com, critic Abbey Bender wrote: “When it comes to the depiction of burgeoning sexuality, ‘The Blue Lagoon’ wants to have it both ways … with puberty making itself known through rather obvious dialogue. Sexual discovery is here the natural outcome of the storybook situation. So yes, the soft-focus montages of teen flesh are gratuitous but the film presents it all as innocent—these kids don’t even know what sex is! They don’t even know how a baby is made! They learn it the hard way, obviously. By couching sexuality in primitive purity, ‘The Blue Lagoon’ gets away with perversion that would likely be even more controversial today.”
My condolences if his Hindenburg fascination leads to a watch of the 1975 George C Scott “The Hindenburg.”
Oh no, that actually is on his radar! I wasn’t familiar, looks pretty lunatic (sounds like it subscribes to the easily debunked “bomb” theory).
It’s really just boring as hell, not one of Robert Wise’s high points.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: This is colorful, funny, and appealingly furious, but it ultimately left me cold. The rage, justified though it is, overwhelms the story until we’re not watching a narrative about a respected teacher whose leaked sex tape has whipped up a prurient, self-righteous furor, we’re watching a thesis about 2020/2021. In fact, the strongest section of the film is the middle one where it drops narrative entirely and just becomes a kind of acidic dictionary to its moment, a kind of condensed audiovisual poetry. There are a couple bits in the main story that are intriguing–the way Emi shifts around the locus of responsibility on uploading the video, the way the constant buzz of advertising and movement makes it feel like she’s going through a personal crisis in the middle of a Qatsi film–but mostly, it’s just rage. The rage is justifiable, and I agree with it: fuck misogyny and double standards, fuck the decline of privacy, fuck Holocaust denial, fuck the censorship of this particular cut, etc., etc., but that’s not, like, a movie. The observations stoke my anger without leading anywhere. It winds up almost feeling like some statement about the challenges of making art in the present moment, when it seems like so many people are intent on revealing their lack of nuance and depth, when so much evil and stupidity does feel almost cartoonish in its obviousness … but Radu Jade’s own talents deserve more than that.
Shadow of a Doubt: I would never have guessed that Hitchcock had made a film with such a Twin Peaks feel to it. This is so gloriously, darkly weird, peeling back the surface of the peaceful suburbs to show not only ennui but also dewy-eyed desperation, incestuous longing, off-kilter true crime games, ESP, and, of course, murder and sociopathy. Joseph Cotten is terrific here, especially when his veneer of charm drops away and he becomes not only a compelling threat but also someone who bears his loathing of humanity like an open wound; Teresa Wright makes for a fantastic opposite number, going through her own less-showy but still-impressive metamorphosis from giddy, admiring girl to steely (if crucially compromised) avenger. Special mention for Patricia Collinge, too, as sister to one Charlie and mother to another, playing a woman who seems like she’s projecting brittle normalcy over a deep, heartbreaking well of despair and unsatisfied need. All beautifully shot, too.
The Contestant: Rewatch with a friend who was seeing it for the first time. This is a great one to see people’s reactions to. Highlight: “That laugh-track is an indictment of humanity.”
Unsurprisingly, that led to follow-up viewing of The Truman Show. This may be a perfect movie, with a ridiculous amount of cleverness and care packed into every frame and every filmmaking decision. Hilarious, smart, and moving. When it comes to favorite moments, I’m torn between the sheer gutting cruelty of inter-cutting Marlon’s genuinely moving, horrifically dishonest speech to Truman (“And the last thing I would ever do is lie to you”) with Christof feeding him his lines and the sheer FUCK YEAH moment of Truman’s exit, featuring what is surely one of the best ironic call-backs to a catchphrase. A lot of movie used to get billed with “triumph of the human spirit,” but this is what it really looks like: a bow and then the determination to step out into the black, wherever it goes.
Hundreds of Beavers: This was everything I wanted it to be and more. Like Killer Klowns from Outer Space, it just has extraordinary artistic commitment to the bit, where there’s no amount of time and craftsmanship it won’t pour into selling the joke or creating further beautiful fulfillment of its premise. I haven’t laughed out loud at a movie this much in a while. A++ slapstick, tons of goofy imagination and exuberance, dogs playing poker, and a beaver saying, “J’accuse!”–I have no notes. I guess technically it shouldn’t be so long, but I wouldn’t actually cut any of it, because I was having a blast.
The Truman Show is fascinating in the overarching Man vs./in/a part of Environment career of Peter Weir, because the Environment is entirely fabricated — it is mysterious to the Man but not to us, and while other fabrications exist in Weir’s movies they are subject to the larger Environment (harmoniously, to a degree, in Master and Commander and Witness; destructively in The Mosquito Coast and The Last Wave). But our Man here transcends the limitation of the Environment (which is after all created by another man) and this “the determination to step out into the black, wherever it goes” — makes something suddenly clear: Truman does a Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Maybe this is prurient of me, but I think the thing that sticks out to me most about Bad Luck Banging is the decision to include (and kick off the movie with!) a real sex scene, and the way this is unexpected and shocking, but also demystifies the moment being discussed, especially by making it a very much less-than-picturesque encounter with interruptions and the kind of silliness that would be embarrassing to display even aside from the inherent embarrassment of the ordeal. Not sure it was necessary to show it a second time, however. In the end I agree with your assessment – not quite free enough from its narrative to be a breezy collection of scenes, too scattershot to keep momentum from story alone.
All the others though, heck of a weekend watch! I really need to catch up to The Contestant.
Yeah, the realism of the initial sex scene–even with the censoring graphic in place–is a really nice touch: it all feels very human (and specifically very married), and that helps get us invested in how it’s treated. It definitely makes it sting more when the parent-teacher conference starts with everyone crowding around the iPad to watch it.
It was a great weekend! And honestly, even with being cooler on Bad Luck Banging than I wanted to be, I’m still glad I watched it.
Fwiw, if you watch on a non-Disney owned service (or disc), there’s no censoring graphic! Quite a, uh, kick off to the movie.
Bull Durham — I think Ron Shelton is praised more as a writer and director of actors than as a visual stylist and yet he shoots a post-coital Susan Sarandon casually sitting on the kitchen counter drinking coffee and it is hotter than 99.9 percent of cinema. Obviously the movie is still great, even if Tim Robbins has the worst pitching motion ever recorded on film (sees Grady Little listed as “baseball consultant” in the credits) aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The Simpsons, “Dancing Homer” — well, obviously. Homer is telling the story, a device the show used a few times in the early years, and it has a short story feel to it, especially with the lengthy opening of Homer and Burns at the ballpark –compare to Seinfeld, which is ruthless three-act drama, or how fast-paced the Simpsons would eventually become. The melancholy feel is great, more TV needs to end with drunk people at the bar enjoying failure, but the episode’s high point remains the delightful one-off Rasta guys getting down to Homer’s reggae Baby Elephant Walk.
Ransom — speaking of The Wire, it’s Richard Price as co-screenwriter! Also, I clocked Price’s cameo as a cop, this is probably too much investment in Price on my part. But while there are shades of his writing here this movie is a mess. There are nods to how Mel Gibson got away with bribery and how the kidnapping is a moral if not vengeful response to that, but no real recognition from Gibson. And this makes the big turn of the story, how Gibson uses his wealth to fight back against the kidnappers, feel weird even as it’s a great plot move — after feinting at how buying your way out of trouble doesn’t work, the movie lets Gibson buy his way out of trouble. At least until the dumb denouement, not since Richard Lynch in Invasion USA has a villain gotten so dumb over the course of a movie than Gary Sinise here (no shade on Sinise, who is quite good). Just by virtue of being a 90s flick with money there is a “we used to make things in this country” look to the picture and there are also plenty of squibs, fuck yeah, but Howard also makes some overly frantic moves and the movie fudges a pretty important bit of info (just how the hell do the feds catch up with everyone on the first drop?). A decent tired watch but not worth reclaiming, the best bit was noticing how the purposefully abrasive but still to my ears catchy noise-metal the kidnappers play to disorient the kid was written, produced and performed by Billy Corgan. Release the soundtrack, cowards!
Richard Price + “plenty of squibs” had me very perked up, but then I got to “not worth reclaiming,” and aww, now I’m deflated again. But seriously, I miss squibs.
It’s not Dead Alive or anything but still pretty wild to think this was the blood standard for a mainstream flick — and what this is more than anything is a TNT-style watch for the hungover/not-in-the-mood-for-quality viewer, a Grand Slam Breakfast of a movie. So if you are in that zone, watch away! The cast is also stacked — Delroy Lindo, Lili Taylor, baby Liev Schriver, Donnie Wahlberg perfectly cast as a dumbass, the wonderful 1-2 of seeing Dan Hedaya’s name in the credits and then later on in the movie someone saying “let’s go visit the corrupt union official” and knowing exactly who that will be.
https://frinkiac.com/meme/S12E07/1238904.jpg?b64lines=IFNxdWlicyE=
I’d like to give this movie another shot knowing that Ron Howard went through his own kidnapping drama earlier in his life.
The kid is pretty standard 90s movie kid, acting-wise, but Howard is fairly grim about how he’s handled and is up front from the start the kidnappers plan to kill him. He’s also pretty down on the media and how they exploit this, which is par for the course for this era of filmmaking and is potentially very interesting as a theme (Gibson using TV to counter the kidnappers) but this too is half-baked.
Hahaha Grady Little! You’re not the only one who remembers him hanging Pedro Martinez out to dry in ’03. And while Bill Simmons has a lot of goofy movie takes, he stands with you on Robbins’ pitching motion, and neither of you are wrong.
No Country for Old Men – this has always been in my “admire it more than I love it” Coens category, but watching it directly after The Ladykillers definitely bumped it up to a higher tier. Not only is the filmmaking back to their best, I also found a renewed appreciation for the occasionally very funny parts – the fact that I laughed more at this than their last out-and-out comedy is kinda funny in itself. I’m not crazy about the big Tommy Lee Jones monologue scenes though, to be honest – obviously they make for great “acting showcase” kinda scenes but they just leave me a little cold. Really appreciated on this viewing how much this is effectively a stealth Terminator sequel, including multiple scenes of burly guys trying to obtain clothing and an unstoppable villain with no humanity.
Trap – good fun, even if it slightly outstays its welcome by having about seven moments where it seems to be ending and then isn’t. Really liked the premise and Josh Hartnett is great in the lead role. Listened to the Blank Check episode afterwards and thought their analysis was particularly good, but when they said “some viewers might be getting a little impatient by this point” – yep, that was me. Still, enjoyed it a lot more than Knock at the Cabin and Shyamalan continues to be a fascinating filmmaker.
Beatles ’64 – one of my weekend live music events put me in a Beatles mood so I thought I’d check out this “new” documentary, but since basically all of the good stuff in it came directly from the Maysles brothers footage that was already released as their own film I kinda wish I’d just watched that instead. Is taking another filmmakers work, adding in some mediocre contemporary stuff and calling it a new movie really even filmmaking? It made me a bit grumpy either way. But possibly worth it just for the David Lynch interview clip, even if it’s only a minute or two long.
Live Music – on Saturday night I went to see the Sheffield Beatles Project, the 30-strong ensemble that a couple of friends play in that covers a Beatles album (or two, depending on length) in full every December. This year they did the White Album, which is obviously quite an ambitious one to take on – they did a great job as usual, and made some interesting decisions to spice up some of the less beloved songs or the ones that wouldn’t seem to suit a large ensemble, like converting most of the group into a choir to back up ‘Julia’ or adding some of their own ideas into a wonderfully bizarre live take on ‘Revolution no. 9’. Then they did an emotional ‘Merry Xmas (War is Over)’ to finish and I left very satisfied.
Sunday night I was back to my comfort zone (tiny venues and sweaty punks) for Perennial, a New England dance-punk band who were great fun. They had a couple of their UK label-mates along for the ride, locals Stuart Pearce (who sound like the Fall, basically, for better or worse) and Sumos who were new to me and had a classic indie-punk sound in the kinda Superchunk vein, all really excellent and well worth a trip out on a stormy December night.
Wooooo live music!!
Woooo live music! Hell yeah Fall and Superchunk as reference points, although unfortunate you got Merry Xmas instead of Wonderful Christmastime (I am not joking).
EDIT: And I need to rewatch No Country but I think Jones’ monologues are not entirely intended to be taken as-is — he’s sort of full of it. This was prompted by realizing one of his bits is 90 percent recast for Oswald Cox in Burn After Reading.
Haha I do have a soft spot for Wonderful Christmastime.
Interesting take on the No Country monologues. This is another case where I feel like I need to read the source material to get a full grip on it, I’ve read a bit of McCarthy but not this one.
It’s not as much that Jones is wrong as it is that Barry Corbin is right. This is not new, quit whining like it is.
I was extremely suspicious Beatles 64 would reveal nothing new to me, so thanks for the heads up.
I hadn’t seen the Maysles stuff before so I guess I’m happy this gave me a good way to do so in nice restored form. But yeah calling this a “new documentary” kinda feels like somebody saying they’ve directed a new film about the holocaust and then you watch it and find out they’ve just edited Shoah down to a tight 90 minutes
Live Music
Woo live music! Went and saw three local bands at a small club on Friday, just like it was 20-25 years ago. Slow Caves was the headliner and I guess the biggest and most successful of the bands, though that’s relative. They were some pretty good rock; I went mostly for their current big single, ”Tension”, which has a real early-90s Britpop feel to me. The rest of their set didn’t feel quite that way, more standard rock, but it was good.
But then I discovered that there were two openers, and one of them was Big Dopes, another local band with a fun current single, with a fun video to boot– ”Moon Car”. I enjoyed their set even more than Slow Caves, honestly. Their rock has a real mid-90s alternative/indie feel. They also played a cover of “Age of Consent,” and I was chatting with the lead singer at the merch table afterward and he recognized my Squeeze shirt, so he’s got good taste.
The other opener I had not heard of, and actually got in late to their set, and then wished I hadn’t– Circling Girl, named after a Cocteau Twins song, so you know they have good taste, and you have some idea of what they sound like. (Nobody sounds like Elisabeth Fraser, but they do some pretty good “dream pop.”) Also one of the singer/guitarists helped me find my glasses after I left them on the merch table. All in all a pretty good night for a guy in his 40s going solo to a local show.
The Shield, first five episodes of season 5
With “Extraction,” the season premiere, I love how everything just starts off like another case of the week (with a few introductions to our new season– Tina is here, Billings is captain, Danny is pregnant)– and Kavanaugh doesn’t show up until the 14-minute mark.
“He had a chance, he just never took it.” – There’s a moment in “Trophy” that makes me think this was absolutely true, and they weren’t even interacting, not really– it’s when Dutch looks back at the interrogation room camera after they break Peaches’ roommate with a grin, and Tina gives this genuine smile like we haven’t seen from her yet even once.
“Trophy” felt like it played unfair to me at first– hiding what the Team knows from us in a way it’s never done before– but after remembering that we actually saw Ronnie sweeping for bugs in “The Enemy of Good,” I think it’s fair enough. (And even if we didn’t know that, it would certainly be implausible for Vic to be acting this stupid when he knows he’s under investigation.)
Anthony Jeselnik: Bones and All
Pretty good. The jokes are still good, although some of them are longer in the setup then I’ve come to expect, and there’s more of Jeselnik telling stories (in his own way, of course) and talking about himself, and carrying it through sheer force of personality and stage presence. I dunno that this is his best collection of jokes, but I had quite a good time.
Football
Sports sports sports! A really good day of college games, a pretty good day of NFL games. I still like the NFL game better overall, but I think the 12-team playoff has really injected some new life and interest into college ball for me. A largely uncontroversial and unsurprising day– I can’t even call Georgia winning an upset– except for, of course, SMU’s loss to Clemson and the decision that put the committee to. I think they made the right decision putting SMU in anyway; 9-3 Alabama being ranked higher than 10-2 Miami is one thing, but an 11-2 ACC team is another. Especially because if the committee didn’t take SMU, they would’ve then created a perverse incentive for teams in SMU’s position going forward to not play in their conference championship game. (I would’ve been fine with SMU getting the boot if they’d gotten their asses kicked, but they lost by 3 on a really unbelievable last-second field-goal drive.)
Hmm looks like external links from comments aren’t working properly, but I looked up ‘Tension’ and yeah definitely full of early Britpop vibes. Not a sound I’ve been keen to revisit but they’re doing some fun things with it.
Huh, weird. Someone should look into that.
Whatever magic you did seems to have worked, they’re working for me now.
Oh, neat! Note to self, do not put quotation marks around URLs here.
Woooooo live music! And hell yeah local bands! “I left my glasses at the merch table” is some supreme Old Man At The Show behavior.
And in terms of Old Man at the Show, I left off that said singer / guitarist was extremely cute, because I did not forget that I am A)married and B)probably 20 years older than her.
I love that whole two or three episode section where Vic is solving cases, not knowing Kavanaugh is coming down on him (Ronnie: “We just sent [Whatsisface] over the border yesterday!“).
Doomsday!
I was thinking “Apocalypse”, and I knew that was wrong but it was in that ballpark.
Apocalypto! Ragnarok! No, wait, it’s one that isn’t a movie…
Woooo live music!!
Spider-man 2.
Just a perfect super hero movie. The subway sequence is a 10/10 action scene. I’d put it with jackie chan fighting the guy in the factory in drunken master and terminator 2 in the factory. The emotional arc here—peter gets his powers back when he accepts his responsibility, the flip side to uncle ben’s quote—is great. There’s just perfect little directorial touches throughout. When doc ock approaches pete and MJ at the coffee shop, before he gets there, the ground keeps thudding and the camera does a little jump zoom as he approaches. Super basic camera trick, costs nothing, and does more to communicate the threat than a million dollar fx shot would (not that there’s any shortage of those). My most old man opinion is that Raimi had more sauce than directors these days.
Abbott elementary. They let melissa steal the show. I’m going to start talking in philadelphia sicilian dialect. As another philly sitcom icon said: I want to be the type of guy that says jabroni.
I still haven’t seen last week’s Abbott episodes, because Mrs. The Captain My Wife (boy, “Mrs. C” was a lot easier to type) hasn’t wanted to watch anything but The Shield in our free time. Which I can’t really say I have a problem with.
Bohemian Rhapsody
I missed the first twenty minutes or so of this – I assume, because I came in when Freddy joins the band – but I can confirm what everyone said before me; this is basically Walk Hard: The Legend Of Freddy Mercury, it’s bizarrely homophobic, and it’s wildly overedited. The funny thing about the movie being executive-noted into hell by the surviving band members is that the mixture of the nature of the story and the way they forced their ‘observations’ into every scene means that the non-Mercury members of Queen end up in an almost amorphous mass. All of them were as necessary to the success of the band as Mercury, but let’s face it, none of them were half as interesting.
Transporter 3
Again, missed the first twenty minutes. This is amusing mainly as a very-slightly-more-creative-than-usual European action schlock where only two characters are American. Again, overedited, though that’s typical of a 2008 action movie.
I was talking about Bohemian Rhapsody on Bluesky a few days ago, and while I’ve never seen it, I’ve seen a two-minute clip (if even that long) of some scene of them having lunch, and after hearing the rumor that the band demanded equal screen time for all members, I can’t unsee that in how it’s edited.
Are we getting a new article and discussion today?
There seems to have been a wire crossed somewhere today. Checking on tomorrow to avoid the same situation.
What Have We Been Reading?
Finished An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson by Andro Linklater. As previously noted, Wilkinson was for a time the highest ranking general in the nascent US Army, on the payroll of the Spanish Empire, and a co-conspirator with Aaron Burr till he changed his mind about that. And despite many knowing he was a traitor and despite being of limited competence, he never faced any consequences for his treason and was only finally kicked aside after the War of 1812. It’s a fascinating look at how someone sufficiently good at being a charming con artist can get away with just about anything, and also how even Founding Fathers are easy to con. But this is also about the formation of the Army, and the first steps away from no standing army to what was assembled bit by bit over the past 230 years, and about how the US overcame its initial wobbliness to embrace Manifest Destiny instead of forming several smaller nations.
Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon – Gee, can’t understand where my son would get his morbid fascinations. This souvenir from our family trip to that really big canyon, updated for its third edition, details all 750 documented deaths in the canyon itself (it only count deaths that occur within the walls of the canyon – even if the event started, say, on the edge of the canyon – not traffic accidents/medical emergencies in the town or park, and of course it doesn’t know much about the no doubt thousands of indigenous peoples who bought the farm over the centuries in the canyon before Europeans encountered it). Lest we accuse the author of excessive morbidity (ignoring our own for purchasing it), there’s an introduction where the authors bring up the sensitive touch needed for writing on the topic, followed by a strong argument for the safety benefit of writing such a book, followed by a strident declaration that it would be irresponsible not to write this book, so back off.
Then it’s off to the races, the races that end in 120-950 foot drops onto the desert floor. The chapters are divided according to cause of death with the first being falls from the rim. Fortunately they include a few successful rescues to keep it from being unendingly bleak (and to acknowledge the more often than not successful efforts of the park’s rangers). It’s a white-knuckle read of these daring rescue attempts and then paragraph after paragraph of the more horrifying falls imaginable, it eventually feels like watching a supercut of just the end of Wile E. Coyote’s antics. Very glad I’m reading this after a safe 400 miles from the edge.
I’m just picturing the recent Simpsons “series finale” over and over again.
I would hope it’s a lot of people just going one mile straight down. I don’t think you’d even be alive by the time you hit. It’s probably a lot less of that and lot more of that guy from midsommar.
The accounts of last sounds (some form of “Ahhhh!” with a Doppler effect) are terrifying enough, worse are the ones that bounce off ledges and slide for a time before the next drop.
Bad News, by Donald Westlake. My wife had a minor surgery last week (all’s well, no worries), and this was the perfect distraction while I was sitting around in the waiting room. This isn’t the best Dortmunder novel overall, but you cannot improve upon the opening chapter where poor Dortmunder’s robbery of a Wal-Mart-alike gets interrupted and he has to fling himself into the optician’s office and pretend he was locked in there overnight. It’s just an incredible comedic sequence, with tons of great improvisation and cleverness. The main plot here–Dortmunder and Kelp and Co. getting in on an Anastasia-like con involving part-ownership of an Indian casino–is also lively, engaging, and full of good twists, but I have a hunch that it’s the opening that will really stick with me.
Glad your wife is doing OK, and yeah you can’t beat Westlake for comic distraction. I think the post-What’s The Worst That Could Happen? Dortmunders are generally a step down but still very fun and they all have great setpieces like that opening (the bust-out subplot of Watch Your Back! is one of my favorites). The last one, Get Real, is very good though, more cynical than the Dortmunders usually get without violating the comic tone.
The Hardy Boys: The Shadow Killers, by Franklin W. Dixon of course. The nephews will be 9 soon and I have a big box of Hardy Boys books that I might start passing down to them, I read this one (part of the 80s reboot, as opposed to the 30s originals or the 90s terrorist-fighting re-reboot or the 10s WOKE NONSENSE) to see if there was anything offensive in this story of Frank and Joe fighting Yakuza ninjas in good old Bayport. And there wasn’t! It’s pitched at roughly a better 80s movie level of cultural integration, the head ninja is a Japanese guy but he gets his ass kicked by another Japanese guy instead of the boys and there is a lot of talk of honor and whatnot, it could be much, much worse. But as crime it is hilarious, here is the plot:
1. There is a Yakuza gang war in Japan with repercussions in America, namely
2. The head of Bayport’s largest import-export business, a Yakuza kingpin, needs to maintain his smuggling empire, so he
3. sends ninjas to rob the apparently vast network of Army Reserve bases near Bayport, all of which are full of machine guns and hand grenades, while simultaneously
4. promoting a teen karate tournament in the surrounding towns with each contest winner getting a free trip to Japan, BUT
5. injuring all the top karate kids before said contests in order for the various Legally Not Billy Zabkas the karate kids would be fighting to win by default, in order to *checks notes*
6. give the Legally Not Billy Zabkas, who again are teenagers, a non-suspicious reason to go to Japan where they will then get Special Yakuza Training in order to further his empire.
Just mind-boggling shit that my dumb kid ass certainly did not pick up on at the time. But even in nonsense there is wisdom! When our boys first meet the Yakuza chief he appears to be a nice guy and he explains why he is holding his tournament:
“My company is in the business of importing and exporting goods. There are many things to buy with a dollar — or a yen. But there are two things that cannot be bought — understanding and good will. The karate tour — like many other activities that my company has sponsored in the past — will promote those things. I call them INTANGIBLES. They cannot be seen or touched, counted or somputed as profit. But they are crucial to my way of doing business.”
Sportswashing described in 1988! Maybe the Hardy Boys can look into the Saudis next.
“The head of Bayport’s largest import-export business, a Yakuza kingpin” Ahaha, did my father ghostwrite this in the 80s? Although he was just one of millions of dads suspicious that Japan was taking over the United States because their economy was finally recovering. This is also about four steps longer than any plot he described though (Step 1: Japan invests in education and technology … Step 3: United States is handed over.)
Ha, I was very skeptical of the Rising Sun-ness potential here but I think Dixon is largely ignoring it! It’s much more import-export = CRIME, which is frankly not an inaccurate stance, any larger threats to the U.S. economy are not explored. Although wasn’t the bad guy in 3 Ninjas an importer-exporter as well? Perhaps the ninja foundation for this industry is underreported…
Silence. Over on twitter, some rando professor said they no longer teach “the ones who walk away from omelas” in class because all their students are vulgar utilitarians who just say “yes. we should do that” instead of reflecting on the ambivalence the through experiment disguised as a short story is meant to trigger. This is related to how people talk about the trolley problem as if it’s soluble (rip—too soon); the trolley problem thought experiment should make you uncomfortable with any answer. Endo’s Silence is ultimately a trolley problem, at least for the protagonist and for Catholic readers.
The book and movie both follow Rodrigues, a portuguese jesuit sent to Japan during the persecution of Christians around 1620. He’s ultimately captured and faced with a dilemma: the magistrate is not threatening him with his martyrdom, which rodrigues was prepared for, but rather, the torture and martyrdom of the Japanese christians he came to minister to. At the climax of the book (spoilers) the facr of christ appears and [ ] In the book, Rodrigues meditates on it constantly; this creates ambiguity—was he deceiving himself? It’s a foundational belief to Rodrigues that martyrdom is better than apostasy; the ambiguity for rodrigues is whether to let others be martyred because he won’t trample. It would be easy to let rodrigues off the hook by just saying “obviously there’s no heaven, etc.” but within the moral framework of the story you have to treat rodrigues based on his beliefs.
I’ve had a lot of arguments with other catholic friends over the movie. I will concede that the book is clearer about the lack of clarity as to whether Rodrigues was right. But what this does, and it’s a lot like Omelas or the Trolley Problem, is place the reader in a place where you have competing moral, spiritual principles and there doesn’t appear to really be a right answer. Endo doesn’t disapprove garrpe’s futile heroism, but he also doesn’t judge ferreira harshly either. Or even kichijiro.
and I want to shout out kichijiro again, who gets a lot more time in the book. Just an all-time great literary rat. In the book the friars meet him and immediately realize he’s their judas but they ignore that realization, and he just keeps popping up. We even get a little buddy comedy road trip chapter with him and rodrigues.
the repeat room speaking of ambiguity and thought experiments, wow. I saw described as yorgos lanthimos meets kafka, and that’s pretty accurate. I don’t want to give too much anyway. In a near future dystopia, they have a new system of justice—the repeat room. It allows a juror to experience the life of the accused and decide whether to let him live or not. The prose is mostly sparse, but more evocative for it. Like how animators know the trick to making you empathize with a face is to give it less detail, here, you’re also asked to fill in the gaps. The way one fills in the gaps ends up becoming a plot point later, and the whole final third of the book takes a left turn into looking at what it means to fill in the gaps from archetypes. I highly recommend it. It’s pretty short.
Flowers From The Void, Gianni Washington
This is a collection of short stories firmly in the Weird mode, though a few did hit some horror. Washington’s voice is still a little overjoyed at what one can do by slamming words together, but each story has a great concept driving it and a strong emotional grounding. This one extract really gets across that – the highlighted lines are a bit wanky but the bit in the middle is great:
He almost floated over each stair and its carpet of dead deaves to the sidewalk below. The autumn air was crisp enough to suck the moisture from his lips and force his mouth into a trumpeting pucker. Philip loved being affected by nature. Unlike in his interactions with other people, his passivity outdoors seemed only right. The natural world had existed longer than any person, and would continue long after. The wind pushed him along in a parody of his own mother’s impatience with him.
The main emotion and theme of the stories is loneliness in many variations; people who desperately want to be seen and understood by others but are trapped in small rooms and small tasks. Sometimes this interacts with motherhood; there are women overjoyed to be mothers but also crushed under loneliness in some way, usually by being single mothers. The horrors often target them specifically because of their loneliness, because nobody will miss them.
The weirdness itself is great, often very X-Files – my favourite is a big imaginary monstrous cat-person, the closest the stories get to true horror, but all of them are great weird ideas.
Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, JRR Tolkien
I officially crossed from exasperation to at least being able to empathise people who are into this stuff. I was actually kind of annoyed when I got to the end and realised how little actually happens in this trilogy, at least on-screen; even the huge battles, when they do come, are described vaguely and with a real sense of this happening in the past rather than the present. On the other hand, I suppose that must be what the people want; the vague idea of heroism and sacrifice as opposed to much of the practicals (Moorcock wasn’t wrong in his “Epic Pooh” essay, right down the the appropriate title).
What Did We Play?
After a long gap, we got back to Strahd and the party that never ends. We perplexed our DM by talking to the beast in the center of the hedge maze instead of running, and I got to have a really nice scene where my character checked on the well being of the NPC who is at the center of Strahd’s obsessions.
Sagrada – My wife, daughter and I played a quick game where you assemble a stained glass window out of colored dice, attempting to fulfill patterns. Ended up being the closest game we’d ever played, with each of us being separated by a single point.
Powerwash Simulator – finished! The end of the career mode storyline was weirdly brilliant, and also pandered to me specifically by featuring cats. There’s an absolute ton of additional levels but unless I specifically want to sit down and do something else while listening to music or whatever I think I’ve spent exactly the right amount of time with this and can move on.
Sable – still finding the performance issues on this slightly annoying but trying to push through them because the game is so good. Just a bunch of exploration and quests in a beautifully realised post-apocalyptic (?) world, with gorgeous music and smart writing. I wish it wasn’t also kinda glitchy even beyond the performance stuff but you can’t have it all.
Animal Well – I decided to jump in knowing as little as possible, which is how I’d seen it suggested should be played. And I still don’t know much! I’ve only played a little while, though, and solved a few puzzles on my own (I just did the fish tubes). It’s been neat enough so far, and apparently some kind of programming marvel for how little space it takes up. People have raved about it, and while I’m not at a point where I’m raving about it, I’m curious enough to keep going and see if I do.
Oh, I just snagged this one. I don’t know much more than “acclaimed” and “art looks cool,” so it looks like I’m going in with the right level of knowledge.
I’d been hearing the hype for months, but only picked it up relatively recently when it went on sale on Steam.
Apparently I’m less than an hour in, so if you pick it up soon, we can kinda-sorta play through it together! (I say “kinda-sorta” because I’m definitely not scheduling any play sessions and I assume you probably don’t want to schedule free time and fun activities either.)
Pokemon Red/Blue
This is an idea of a work so blazingly original and so powerful in vision that it doesn’t really matter that it doesn’t really work in practice. The majority of the game is repetitive grinding, some moves are irreparably busted, and the balance is totally off. But even today, there’s something magical about these games to me that keeps me coming back even though I don’t really have to. Fan consensus is that Gen II is superior, and I can’t fully argue with it, but these are still my favourites of the franchise that have something I don’t think any game since captures, and indeed it’s been moving further and further away as time passes.
What fundamentally draws me to this game is its low stakes; every fucking smartass since 1996 has made the same four jokes, one of which is how weird it is to send a ten year old child out in the world to engage in professional cockfighting, when I think anyone within spitting distance of reason will recognise it’s a basic “kid goes out into the world on a Quest” fantasy that children have engaged in since time immemorial mixed with the pleasures of gladiator combat.
The basic objective of the game isn’t to save the world or to defeat an evil organisation (though you do end up doing that, more later). The objective is to go around winning fights at Gyms in order to collect all eight and enter a tournament to beat the best trainers in the world and become Champion (you also have the side mission of collecting all 150 Pokemon, although this doesn’t drive the story forward and is totally optional).
This gives the game a totally relaxed atmosphere; you’re not doing anything urgent, you’re not in a panicked rush to stop the villain destroying the world or aliens invading or whatever, you’re just methodically exploring and completing a task well simply for the pleasure of doing a task well. The game is fairly ‘on rails’ – there’s a section around the middle where you can do a few gyms in any order, but for the most part you’re moving in a very clear set path around the world.
Nevertheless, it’s a fun feeling of exploring the world; the game is almost divided up into ‘situations’ like a sitcom cycling through premises; you start off moving through small towns and forests, and then move through things like caves of a mountain, bike tracks, big cities, and other areas. One of my favourites is a late-game island built on a volcano, in which you move through an abandoned laboratory reading about an experiment in mutating a new kind of Pokemon that went horribly awry, and I’m also a fan of cruise
Each area is rich in personality; admittedly, it’s all very simplistic “power of friendship, love one another, be yourself” crap you get in all kid’s programming, but there’s a genuine attempt to invest each area in its own personality and history; on a basic level, each Gym Leader has their own aesthetic and goals that drives the construction and population of their gym. There’s some fun worldbuilding too; I love Mt Moon, where you have the story of Clefairies apparently dropping from space.
One of the biggest conflicts is against Team Rocket, a criminal organisation you take down; one twist is that the leader of the final Gym is also the leader of Team Rocket, and you end up convincing him to pack up the organisation and go straight. Again, this is a kid’s story – I don’t want to sell it as fucking Hamlet – but because it’s only a minor part of the story, it ends up playing melancholically.
And it’s actually second to your conflict against the smug, arrogant grandson of your Pokemon professor mentor; if the game has an arc, it’s of him gradually softening as he becomes attached to his Pokemon; the game strongly implies that one of his Pokemon actually dies in the story, after which he becomes more serious. You share an arc of incremental achievement through gradual hard work, and I find it deeply satisfying.
In fact, I’ve always been disappointed that future games – both within and without the franchise – don’t pick up on the notes of this. Future games would develop more story around your protagonist and around saving the world, much to my disappointment, and I always felt this game provided a model for more sophisticated and mature storytelling – and I specifically don’t mean blood, violence, or war, but rather games that are based around lower plot stakes, using NPC dialogue as a vehicle for more interesting philosophy than “be nice to your Pokemon and they’ll love you back”.
Dammit, now I have to go play Pokemon again. This is the generation of my heart, too–I’ve also got Silver on my DS, but I haven’t played it nearly as much.
If I ever stumble across a used copy of the guidebook I had as a kid, complete with great color illustrations of the first 150 Pokemon, I’m going to buy it in a heartbeat out of sheer nostalgia.
Super Mario Bros. 3 – Nintendo Entertainment System on Nintendo Switch Online
Finished worlds 6 and 7. I realized that World 7 is part of the reason I’ve always preferred Super Mario World to Super Mario Bros. 3. Made it to World 8, which is far more interesting, but I’m saving it to show it to my wife when we both have time.
Donkey Kong Land
Nearly done with the first world. Fascinated by the technical compromises and design shortcuts they used to put this on Game Boy, though it’s still not very playable. Might skip to the sequel to see if that’s better.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds online for the first time in a while, very fun. Finally maxed out Mona, one of the latest DLC characters; nearly done with the other one.
I remember world 7 being a beast. But once I discovered the double-whistle trick, I can’t remember the last time I actually played it instead of going directly from 2 to 8. (That said, I can’t remember the last time I played Super Mario Bros. 3, period.)
Actually, I think you can go from 1 to 8 with the double-whistle trick– it’s been that long that I forgot how it works and where the whistles are.
Forgot to mention (and I can’t edit it in now) that I played Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy on Nintendo Switch Online.
For those coming by here on Tuesday morning – I’m told we do have a New on DVD/Blu-Ray on the way in a bit! In the meantime, Movie Gifts participants make sure to check out the list and do your gifting.