TV Tomb of Mystery (Sealed)

The original idea for the TV Tomb of Mystery was to prevent purchase of new DVDs by doing deeper dives on the ones I already had. It never really accomplished that, though, and the end result was a fair amount of random TV covered but not a tenth of what I wanted to get through.

Looking at those early posts I see a lot of over-introducing the reader to the shows I covered, or screencap-bloat. I got better at the bloat as I went along - FWIW, not much now; I’m sure these skills will come in handy in the blogging retirement home - but it makes some of those Young Indiana Jones, Friday the 13th or Avengers posts kind of messy. Ditto for the TV Proms. Ah well. 

Before I seal the TV Tomb of Mystery and leave it all to the cyber-grave-diggers of the future, let’s have one last look at some of the TV I keep around here. All descriptions from imdb.

~

(1988)

Year ago, I used to always tell people my plans for a series based on Cook's adventures, with a coda season of George Vancouver’s to the Pacific Northwest. If you had a drink with me anytime 2003-2008, you probably heard the pitch and me acting out the episode of the Endeavour crashed on the Great Coral Reef, told in Lost flashback style to Cook before he left England, all to the haunting strains of "Asturias." I mean, I've got the whole thing storyboarded out in my head, and with drone-cameras and CGI, it'd be even easier.

People tuned me out, I guess – it happens – but had anyone at that time told me “You know, boy, from the things you're saying, it sure sounds like you’d appreciate this Australian mini-series that follows the historical record closely and emphasizes each of these beats you’re talking about. No 'Asturias,' but every other scene you mention is in there." I sure would have appreciated it. I guess I can't blame my stateside friends for not knowing. But what about all those Australian bartenders I met during this time? Not a one? No one on the internet? (It was somehow never mentioned in the four years I belonged to the Captain Cook Society, as well. Who surely must have been aware of it - and both its quality and sensitivity to the folds of the story from so many sides. Bizarre.) 

Oh well. At least I got there. Here’s what I learned: (a) my original idea of three mini-series and a coda would’ve been way too much, (b) even so, this one is rather top-heavy to the first voyage, but boy do they cover everything and then some and exactly as I pictured it all in my head – so wonderful when that happens, thank you to all involved, (c) the performances are top notch, but extra props to John Gregg's Sir Joseph Banks. Truly one of the best marriages of actor-to-role I've had the pleasure to see. The miniseries structures itself wisely in his and Elizabeth Cook (played by Carol Drinkwater)'s relationship with the Captain, checking in with them at home during the later adventures, and this (ties things together well). Extra points to Xabier Eliorriaga as Lord Sandwich, as well; what screen presence this dude has.

Hard to tell if people who are not obsessed with Cook's voyages will enjoy it half as much as those who are. But if you're in the latter boat, you're in for a treat. 

~

(1985)

A three-part, six-hour adoptation of Jackie Collins' book about a group of very wealthy, attractive, snobbish women who are caught up in the low life and high society of Hollywood.

It's funny that they use an old picture of Candice Bergen up there. Mainly because the big takeaway of this mini-series for me is: how to take a group of effortlessly attractive actresses and add years and layers of distraction to their faces and figures in some kind of Liberace cosplay.

I get that it's an exaggeration of the fashions of the era - and possibly there's something meta here, as well; think of the "Hollywood Wives" trope now, wouldn't it be a group of over-stylized women with Botox leers and what not? - but it's always odd when attractive women are done up so garishly; it's like the opposite of what normally happens on the silver screen. I'm surprised their agents didn't get the production shut down. 

Normally I have great patience for things so steeped in trashy retro, but I struggled to make it through the first episode and ending up turning the second one off. Maybe someday. I will one day work my way through the novels of both Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann. Not sure why, but it's a promise I made myself long ago. 

I always love seeing Tony Hopkins in any pre-Silence of the Lambs role, though.
It's like a whole different career.

~

(1991)

An anthology series focusing on various stories from Kurt Vonnegut's acclaimed collection Welcome to the Monkey House. The stories blend elements of black humor, satire, and science fiction. 

Few series this side of Young Indiana Jones bring me back to the early 90s era of cable than this one. I've spoken often of this over the life of the blog, the time travel aspect, how certain media brings with it an eau de nostalgia. It's a phenomenon many folks have commented on over the years, of course, not just me. 

Why this is, with either YIJ or this, I don't know - this isn't a favorite show, nor were these TV viewings of yesteryear particularly memorable. I couldn't tell you the night I watched either (although I do remember a memorable morning-after-huge-party viewing of "Fortitude" which was my first experience with the "wake and bake" phenomenon; as such, that episode might be seared on the brains more than others) and yet for some reason, the 'member-berry-flypaper of these shows is stronger than most others. Go figure.

As for the show itself, it's good, not great. The lack of digital remastering really hurts. Vonnegut was once my favorite writer until I woke up one day and discovered I couldn't read it anymore. I'm afraid to revisit Slaughterhouse Five or Timequake lest I discover I don't like those, and they were huge and influential books for me and I don't want to discover that. I like "Fortitude" with Frank Langella and "The Foster Portfolio" the best - great performances by Jon Cryer and Katie Wolfe. 

 

Goes for everyone, actually. Great episode - I just watched it again.

~

(1958-1960)

Former combat cameraman Mike Kovac is now a freelance photographer in New York City, specializing in difficult and dangerous assignments where he can get the kinds of pictures that other photographers can't, or won't take.

Here's one I took a chance on because the whole series was like $9. What a bargain! I'll buy almost any TV on DVD at that price, if it came out before, say, 1990, and isn't M*A*S*H. Old TV has a whole different rhythm, whole different feel. Great for background, or great to watch and pick out actors and actresses you've seen elsewhere. Combat and M Squad are like that, too. I enjoy the mild disorientation of it all more than any of the actual stories, usually. But that's okay. 

Great idea for a retro show, if someone wants to reboot it. That is: a show done now but set in the 1950s. You could teach new generations about the mechanics of photography * , great period costumes, flashbacks to WW2, the whole nine yards. Epic. The material is perhaps under-exploited here in the original version, as is the star power of Charles Bronson. (He takes his shirt off a lot, though, if that's your thing.) 

* I have a book on the shelf about studio photography from the 50s that could pass for one of those appendices giving technical specs for steampunk maguffinery in a fantasy novel, so obsolete are its references and opaque its descriptive processes. 

~

(1998)

Another one I had no idea existed until this year when flipping around in Marvel Legacy Animation in Disney Plus What a find. My kids are all fascinated by it, even if they don’t know what to make of it. Understandably - this is not an entry-level, it's for people steeped in Marvel lore. I think that basically has become everyone by default, thanks to the MCU, so no issues now. Different story back in the 90s, maybe? I don't know. Anyway: what a cool show. Larry Brody (author of "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" while we're here) gets the DSO Sorry-I-Missed-It-Award of 2021.

The animation is a cross between a sort of Johnny Quest style and that not-quite-fully-developed CGI look of the 90s. Beyond the Mind's Eye meets Starlin/ Kirby. Quite memorable.

~

(1989 - )

It may seem a little odd to include this one, but my kids have had Simpsons-mania lately so I’ve been revisiting it all and even seeing some of the ones I never saw.  

Like most people, I think the series' glory days were when Clinton was in office, but some of the later stuff is indeed fun (particularly their opening couch gags, such as the Bansky one which made the rounds a few years ago, and this one.) But nothing beats the classics. Seasons two through eight are the Carpenter Run of The Simpsons. 

You ever play around with Frinkiac? It’s fun. I showed it to my kids and they can't believe it. I told them they could even make their own. Here's the first one they did and made me upload to the screensaver on the tv. 

~

(2017 - God Help Us)

This show could be the reigning champ of nonsense-TV, a genre that has blossomed alongside prestige-TV in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. Or perhaps not alongside and perhaps not blossomed. More like sprouted like poisonous toadstools in the shadows and basements between and underneath the skyscrapers. 

The connecting thread is, ostensibly, Harry (Bill Pullman at his squintiest and shaggiest) a detective who at one point had amazingly ridiculous personal problems that mirrored aspects of the crimes he was investigating (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) before they stopped any pretense of that and then the ridiculousness of the crimes being investigated shoved everything else aside. Nothing about the show - from the relationships to the crimes to the investigations to the anything - is even within shouting distance of realism, but it's a fascinating glimpse into the biases and projections of the people making it. It's one of those "emotionally true" deals, if you identify as porcelain. Each episode rewrites the details on which the previous episode hinged and kind of looks at you, confused, if you bother to bring it up. It's a fascinating way to make TV. 

Each season is a textbook example of wild disconnect and escalation, of understanding the grammar of visual storytelling but not the actual meaning. It soaks the grammar with a superficial grasp of trauma, void, like I say, of verisimilitude of any kind, and this makes some of seasons one and two great fun to watch. Season three, however, is about as pointless and un-fun a season of television as has ever been filmed. My wife and I watched it to the bitter end under the mistaken conclusion our fellow trash-TV friends, with whom we long-distance-consumed together seasons one or two, were watching, too. They sensibly gave up after the first or second episode. It's almost like someone from the show peeked out and saw no one was taking it seriously and wanted to make absolutely sure no one had any ironic fun at the show's expense. Mission accomplished, I guess. 

~

Star Trek: Lower Decks
(2020 - )

The support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos, have to keep up with their duties, often while the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies.

Fun stuff. I don’t have much to say, really – I’ve got a bit more to say on Enterprise, and that’ll appear in these pages sometime soon, but I think I’ve said just about everything I can possibly say about Star Trek in life. I will begin disproving that about five seconds after hitting publish on this blog, I'm sure, the way I “quit collecting comics” in 1991. But that’s how it feels anyway (for both).

The voice performances from everyone here are great, especially in episodes like "Crisis Point." Tawny Newsome deserves an award for that one. Maybe she got one, I have no idea. I bought the first season and will likely watch it another time or two, but like all new Trek, I just can't see myself keeping up with it. This one is better than all the rest of it (Picard, Discovery) that I've seen, though. The wokeisms are all there but they don't (at least in s1) overpower. A good bridge between the eras. 

 ~

(2006 - 2013)

Liz Lemon, head writer of the sketch comedy show TGS with Tracy Jordan, must deal with an arrogant new boss and a crazy new star, all while trying to run a successful television show without losing her mind.

Man, that description, while technically correct, is terrible. Is "arrogance" Donaghy's defining trait, particularly vis-a-vis Liz Lemon? Is "Liz tries to keep from going crazy?" really what the show's about? Maybe, I don't know. The show's a lot more interesting than that description. 

This was on the air when Dawn and I started dating, so we saw plenty of it back in the day. We both figured it'd be a fun one to binge-watch, but we petered out around the end of season one and then watched some random episodes and never got to the finale or live-filmed episode as we planned. Not sure why. We both enjoyed everything we saw. 

Come to think of it, Thirty Rock hasn't done so well in syndication; it seems like it'd be a binge-watch show, though, doesn't it? Or something that you'd watch reruns of a lot, like The Office? Why isn't it? Trying to figure out why is one of those ‘Which notes, your Majesty?’ sort of situation. Everything you identify as perhaps being too much seems essential when you look at it.

Season 5’s Reagan-ing episode is start to finish gold. I wish I could get the clip I wanted to for the link but no luck. It's great, though - a standout for a show where every episode is, in some fashion, a standout. 

If you told me Thirty Rock was the best comedy of the twenty-first century, I wouldn't argue. I don't know if it is, but it's got everything going for it. I love The Office, Arrested Development, Community, and Parks and Rec, all shows you could nominate for such an accolade, but each of those shows has at least a season (sometimes more than one) or a character (ditto) that feels unessential or throws things off. Not the case with Thirty Rock. 

~

Seasons Two and Three
(1988 - 1990)

Well, I meant to give each season the same treatment I gave season one, but no luck there. Ironic, since season one is my least favorite of the show's three seasons.

I took a bunch of screencaps when I watched the show earlier this year - only a few of which ended up below - but practically none from my favorite three episodes of the series: the last two ("The Raid" and "Payback") and "And Make Death Proud To Take Us." Or "Road To Long Binh," or so many others. This is the sort of glaring omission which makes me want to do the whole thing over from scratch. And I would, if my blogging DEROS was not coming up too fast to make such a thing impractical. I included a few of the guest or recurring stars below (Penny Johnson, Angela Bassett) but not all of them (Michael Madsen, Carl Weathers, so many others).

Both season two and season three added new characters and twists, and production moved from Hawaii to Los Angeles. It all worked fine for me, especially the new cast members. Season three based a lot of material on John Plaster's S.O.G. which is an essential - if confusing - Vietnam read.

The show seems to be finding a new audience these days, which makes me happy. 

~

(1978 - 1982)

The misadventures of the staff of a struggling Top 40 rock radio station in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Somewhere along the way I started throwing this one at night as my before-bed show. I watched a few seasons closely – or more closely than just-for-background, but lately it’s been more background. It has a cadence and familiarity that is perfect for that 11:15 hour, if I’m somehow not already asleep in my chair.

My nocturnal habits aside, what a perfect show. It belongs in the same conversation as any sitcom of its era and surrounding ones, from Cheers back through the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It seems dated – and it is dated – but the writing and situations are all still sharp, and it’s just a fun show. Plus with each year that passes it's more and more of a perfect museum piece on a fascinating era. Not just for radio but for all of it.

The chatter in the WKRP facebook group I belong to is evenly divided between
Bailey-vs.-Jennifer and Herb's suits. 

Although the show was on the dim edges of my perceptions before we moved to Germany, it was not shown on AFN, at least that I remember, so I don't remember it from when it was on the air. I associate it more with the shows in syndication on UHF of the late 80s. I only ever watched a full episode a few years ago - lo and behold, hey, this is great stuff. I intend to take as deep a dive, someday, into the behind the scenes production details as time allows. 

Like Tour of Duty, it's a show with some fake-out DVD releases with alternate soundtracks, so look before you leap, potential buyers. 

~

The TV Tomb of Mystery is now sealed, notwithstanding a couple of one-offs for Enterprise and Coupling. (Put that in hieroglyphs.)

From Novel to Film, pt. 37: Starship Troopers

THE FILM

In 1997, my buddy AJ and I drove down from Dayton to Cincinnati for a sneak preview of Starship Troopers. We were both huge Verhoeven fans. Neither of us had read any Heinlein. We borrowed his Dad's Vanagon for the journey - I love those things - and it was my first time seeing Cincy.  

It's achieved a bit of a cult status now, but it was a big flop on release - both with audiences and critics. I was baffled. I thought its blend of fantastic computer animation (the best I'd seen up until that time) and ironic send-up of, well, everything (but definitely democracy, propaganda, youth TV, and media) was Verhoeven's masterstroke after years of improving his approach. Some people "got" it, which is to say some people appreciated its caustic eye for all the above, but most didn't. 

Its sequels shed the sarcasm and pumped up the sci-fi bug action. That franchise seems to have done/ is doing okay with itself. I've never checked out any of it. For me, the sarcasm was the whole point of it. I was an ironic fan of things like Beverly Hills 90210 and Saved by the Bell (and later Dawson's Creek) and that part of it landed like gangbusters with me. I was also a big Marxist - the best kind, illiterate and over-trusting - so its "reductio ad absurdum of militaristic culture" was just fine with me. The film seemed to nail a certain approach and a certain shade/ tone of bullshit and definitely had all the angles, lighting, music cues, and soap opera tropes to deliver it.

I've watched the film many times in the years since and still find its cynicism and sarcasm refreshing. These are my people, my snarky, cross-media-steeped, Fruitopia, Doogie-Howser-as-SS, Donna Martin Graduates people. 

A few years back Aasif Mandvi wrote in Salon (of course) about the monochromatic "whitewashing" of the cast, given that they all have Spanish names. It takes a special kind of density to not understand the deliberate nature of this "whitewashing." i.e. this is a critical trajectory both filmmakers and critic have in common, only the latter is too tunnel-visioned to see it. It's almost like one can plot these things out - the inevitability of them, and the exponential nature of the tunnel vision on a graph. I used the phrase reductio ad absurdum up there. Few things illustrate the reductio ad absurdum of now than that. It's like condemning Jonathan Swift for promoting cannibalism. 

Anyway, of course Mandvi was corrected and he apologized, tearfully vowing to reflect on the hurt his words caused and to redouble his efforts to understand and compensate for the warping effect of such endlessly circulated narrativemongering, never projecting, always twirling twirling twirling towards freedom, and we've all lived happily ever after ever since. 

THE NOVEL

I'd never understood the intense, special kind of hate fans of the book had for the movie. I assumed it was just a generational thing. Heinlein has never really landed with me. I've made multiple attempts in multiple places and have never understood the fanatical appeal his work has for some people. So, that was my bias going into this: let me try and see what "these people" are seeing here.

Well, what do you know - it's great reading. I had zero problem getting into it and at no point felt swept up into any kind of personality cult of the author. (And the writerly tics that prevented me from "grokking" other Heinlein works are absent here.) It's well-written and engages with its philosophies (essentially Athens vs. Sparta, hardly "fringe" stuff) intelligently and accessibly. You'd have to basically hate western civilization (in the very specific way Marxists do) to see in it a glorification of fascism, which is the criticism most often echoed about it. Ezra Pound this is not.  

As such, I completely understand why fans of the book (as separate from fans of Heinlein, who seem to respond more to the personality cult of the author) hate the movie. The movie seems like it was made by people who actually hate the book. Which, actually, is likely the case. So, there's an antagonistic relationship engineered into the very making of the film that I could not see before. 

I still love the movie, though, not having had that relationship with it. So let's just focus on the book. I concede that the aggrieved fans of the book have a point, and it's the sort of point (hey, the adaptation hates the source material - and us) that supersedes most others. 

The book references some manner of military disaster in the past (Chinese hegemony, eastern bloc vs. west) that proceeded a domestic collapse. When crime and corruption proved incurable, the vets took control. 

"At first, this is unmistakably nothing more than vigilante justice. But through sheer force, they are capable of maintaining a rudimentary peace. The order of martial law is a low form of order; no great civilization can flourish with a boot on its neck. But eventually, not through any formal grant of legitimacy via democratic processes but a gradual acceptance of the new ad hoc regime, regularity returns to the social world. On-the-spot justice gives way to regular procedures for ascertaining guilt and assigning punishment to perceived criminals. As these practices become institutions, civilization shifts from one sociopolitical equilibrium to another. With regularity comes justified expectations of future behavior by the new government, and along with it the rule of law, and the return of some semblance of democratic and parliamentary governance. The chief difference is that society is now quasi-Spartan: only those with a military background can participate in the governance of the polity; key civilian positions are reserved by law for veterans; and those who do not perform at least two years of federal service cannot exercise “sovereign franchise.” That is, they cannot vote.

(...) In the real world, we tend to view sovereignty in ethical terms. We answer “Who rules?” by asking, “Who ought to rule?” This is how we continue to affirm democratic legitimacy even though it is obvious that the will of the people has little to do with how modern Western polities are actually governed. The characters in Starship Troopers have no truck with romantic theories of governance that have no basis in reality. At its root, sovereignty is power, which means force. The quasi-military government of Starship Troopers exists because the founders of the Terran Federation, back when they were little more than a vigilante mob, were willing to impose themselves on others. As it became clear that nobody could oppose them, they became the new de facto government, and eventually the new de jure government. The essential truth of sovereignty, in terms of who actually rules, is that sovereignty is inevitable and, in a higher sense, arbitrary. Why do veterans govern the Terran Federation? The only possible answer is because they can. To be clear: This is not a claim that social order requires violence. It is the claim, as historically robust a truth as can be found, is that someone, somewhere, will wield the sword. To the extent that our political constitutions can be founded on “reflection and choice,” our choice is not power versus self-governance, but responsible versus irresponsible power.

Heinlein had the audacity to explore a world where Sparta works, and is durable. Understandably, this puts our Athenian sensibilities on Red Alert. The novel’s justifications for franchise restrictions, perhaps the ultimate blasphemy in our egalitarian-democratic age, highlight a second sociopolitical truth: Any society that decouples rights and responsibilities thereby enables irresponsible power."

That review of the book is good stuff. I wish the site would rethink its name, so I could post it to social media. But who needs the aggravation. Anyway, we hear this debate raging in 2021 re: any society that decouples rights and responsibilities enabling irresponsible power. The book directly addresses this:

"To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster: to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies (of the twentieth century) were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."

While imperfect, military service was better than having no stake/ skin in the game. 

It's easy to see how a generation (or mix of generations) having just lived through appeasement, the Depression, World War 2, the advance of communism on all fronts under guise of others, and Korea could have these thoughts, or find resonance in works like Starship Troopers. It was the force of Allied guns - the efforts and "fascism" of millions of Allies - not its rhetoric that silenced what the political machinations of those who appeased from drawing rooms wrought. Broadly speaking. 

Broadly speaking, too, the bugs were a great metaphor for the new threat of assembly line communist automatons, etc. 

"Those bugs lay eggs. They not only lay them, they hold them in reserve, hatch them as needed. If we killed a warrior – or a thousand, or ten thousand – his or their replacements were hatched and on duty almost before we could get back to base. It takes a minimum of one year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting with his mates. A bug is hatched able to do that. Every time we killed a thousand bugs at the cost of one GI it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient pure communism could be when used by a people adapted to it by evolution."

Dehumanizing the enemy, of course.

~

VERDICT: Both novel and film are As, probably A+s. As an adaptation, probably a hate crime. Not an art crime, though. 

King's Highway: Garage Sale

Well, well, look what I found at the back of the garage: two unfinished posts meant for the King's Highway. One of them is for Roadwork, the other is for Just After Sunset. Neither is finished, just notes and quotes, but I'm looking at these last few blogging months as not just finishing up certain projects but emptying the tanks / chambers before heading back to base for good.

I wanted to do proper reviews of the below - and finish all of King's short fiction re-read - but looks like the work will have to be done by others. But perhaps they'll be of some interest just the same. 

Either way! Bombs away.

Taxi Driver / in the air at the time. American New Wave fiction.

"He was hypnotized by the coming explosion, almost lusted for it. His belly groaned in its own juices."

Sally One-Eye Magliore. (King's gangsters. An interesting group. How much of Magliore is in the Thinner guy whomever? He has his go-to "voices.") "When Gabriel trumpeted in the Apocalypse, Sally One-Eye would still be patiently explaining the invulnerability of all systems everywhere and urging the old whore on him."

On TV Merv Griffin was chatting with celebrities. (The refrain. Again: like Taxi Driver with the crap daytime TV he's always watching.) 

Positioned as it is, with mega-corporations buying everything (and the fate of Vinnie), the energy crisis, mindless expansion and credit, etc. American life was fundamentally changed in ways few realized at the time, focused as they were on rude animal pursuits like bellbottoms, bussing, and heroin. 

"That would be the end of the whole, self-pitying mess." (Wants to commit suicide-by-energy-wasting.) Alcoholism. He thinks about things "until the alcohol blotted out the ability to think." A reaction against all the above and his Mom dying, R.I.P.

"A lie would end the discussion so much more quickly and neatly. She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people who thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer."

Fred and George (and Charlie and trauma.) "Deep in Charlie's brain was a collection of bad cells roughly the size of a walnut. If you had that collection of bad cells in front of you on the table, you could squad them with one hard hit. But they weren't on the table. They were growing deep in the meat of Charlie's mind, still smugly growing, filling him up with random strangeness."

(Don't like "random strangeness" - too vague, though the paragraphs that follow provide more examples.)

Rolling Stones - Paint It Black.

The woman who dies at the Shop'n'Save, and the doctor who looked scared "as if he had just realized that his profession would dog him to the grave like some vengeful horror monster."

A mystery: Albert says "Do I know you from somewhere? Why do I keep feeling I know you?" I missed the reason for this. Anyone?

The Guardian re-read (and mock them for their pace - note: this is a reference to their re-read of King taking FOREVER. I was lapping them constantly when I was doing the King's Highway. And they were getting paid to do it! Pathetic.)

"In it he says that Roadwork is "(his) favourite of the early Bachman books". I don't know what changed his mind, but perhaps it was the peace afforded by time; of being able to stand back and see what he (or, rather, Richard Bachman) had done. In the novel, that's the problem: Barton can't. He's always there, with the house and the laundry and his wife, everything reminding him of the way that things were. I'm pleased that King is at peace with Roadwork, because it sits comfortably alongside some of his best non-genre novels: a story about a real person who has been ruined by the true horrors of real life."  

In 2021, it seems the pendulum has followed a more banal-woke take on everything Roadwork. I hope it comes back around to re-appreciation if we ever survive this neo-Maoist struggle session being inflicted on us by a few and enabled by far too many.

From the outro: "There is no rational response to miracles. And no way to understand the will of God - who, if He is there at al, may have no more interest in us than I do in the microbes now living on my skin. But miracles do happen, it seems to me each breath is another one. Reality is thin but not always dark. I didn't want to write about answers. I wanted to write about questions. And suggest that miracles may be a burden as well as a blessing. And maybe it's all bullshit. I Like the story, though."

Lovely description of "Ayana." But that's not one of my favorites.



A Very Tight Place - Dolan's Cadillac. Graduation Afternoon, all "B"s.

Cat from Hell. "B" or B -"

NYT at Special Bargain prices feels like it'd make a good beginning to something. B-



Gingerbread Girl  B+  (Perfectly fine, perfectly well-done and all, could be a great movie, but not much to it. Run, (name) Run was already kinda taken as a title, I guess. This genre of women running away/ escaping rich abusers really consumes some people. 



Mute  B+  (I remember when I read this in Playboy it was the first King I'd read in years. I enjoyed revisiting it. I often speak of this genre of King's stories as something unrealistic, the one-character-telling-another. It's almost like he heard me, or some similar criticism, and came back with this story. "You can't fault the set-up here, jackhole!" )



N  A-  (This is a fun one.)

Things Left Behind  A-

Stationary Bike  A-  (I love this one, kind of, but it doesn't really go anywhere. ha - see title. Anyway the idea of people in my stomach pissed at me for trying to give up cheeseburgers is probably genius.) 

Willa  A

"Sometimes they were in the mirror and when they slipped from view there was only a country song playing in an empty room lit by a neon mountain range."

Love this one. Not a tremendous fan of the name/ title, though I love all the "King loves his wife" stories.

~

Oregon Emporium (Dayton 1998 Mix)

I still have (not counting Boat Chips) ten or eleven cassettes. Most of these, sadly, are Nitpickers Guide to Star Trek: TNG audiocassettes. One is the Fletch soundtrack; another is the License to Kill soundtrack. A couple of others. And then there’s this one.

I moved to Dayton to study film at Wright State. My buddy AJ (RIP, seven years ago today) was already there, so I moved into his place on E. 5th St, the Oregon District. Got a job in the district at the coffee shop at the end of the street (which also sold fancy beers and pastries and eventually sandwiches) for rent and spending money. Eventually I stopped going to school altogether and just worked full time at the Emporium, officially "the Oregon Emporium," aka the coffee shop. 

E. 5th St. was full of bars and restaurants with lofts and apartments above most of them. We were the only coffee shop, though, so I soon got to know everyone on the block and their routines. It was a great place to live and work, early twenties, and I'm happy to have preserved some of it in musical amber with this mix tape. Anyone who listens to the same ten or eleven CDs over a thousand shifts knows how they can expand to explain or imbue every corner of your life whether you want them to or not.

I wrote a little bit about leaving Dayton the second time (1999) at the end of my DS9 post. This was the mix I made when I left the first time, mid-summer 1998. This was just before the iPhone / Instagram era, and I don't have as many pictures from Dayton and my time there as I wish I did. 

I'll link to things individually, but here's a mix of the whole thing, in order, if you prefer it that way. Without further ado, here's at least one of the soundtracks for twenty-one months of my early twenties.

SIDE ONE

1.  You and I – David Byrne

"You and I - may kill ourselves

You and I - go straight to hell

Where they have barbeque and beer

Better than they do up here

And you know all the words to the songs

Yeah - we smoke cigarettes

We dance with the dead

They're soft to the touch

We drink way too much

And darling, I think you'll like it here."

2. What’s the Use in Getting Sober – Joe Jackson

I've been fortunate to have had some good bosses over the years. One of them was Joe Miller, at the Emporium. He paid more attention to real-life stuff in my life than I did. I mean I was mostly focused on beer and my long distance girlfriend and hanging out with my friends. You know how it goes. You've seen these movies. Anyway, this was one of his CDs. I used to needle him by referring to "Got the Time" as either "that Anthrax song" or "isn't this just 'Walk Like an Egyptian' by the Bangles?"

Despite such things - and an erratic work ethic - I think Joe liked me. Before he employed me he made me read a book on the history of coffee, which I always thought was cool. I'd love to thank him for the thousand kindessness shown to me 1997-1999. You try tracking down someone named Joe Miller sometime, even in our exciting modern age. 

3. Rudies Don’t Care – Hepcat
4. No Worries - Hepcat

Here's a CD I only ever saw at the coffee shop. Some googling tells me Hepcat never really broke the big time. There was a lot of this sort of thing in the air at the time, at least in Dayton in 1997 and 1998: zydeco, swing band stuff. 

We've gotten used to the internet collecting things from all walks of life - and of lives before we were born - hell, that's what this post is, even. The past has an immediacy/ portability that it didn't used to have. I bring this up here because the "Underneath the Mango Tree" part of "Rudies Don't Care" was a throwback to my VHS childhood watching Dr. No over and over, and in 1997-1998, I loved that little connection.

Now it seems like, hey, what's the big deal? There was more segregation between past and present experiences back then. This is a bigger topic, perhaps, than how it relates to these specific remarks, but ah, the velocity of time. 

5. Mean Eyed Cat – Johnny Cash

Another of Joe's CDs. I found it so fascinating that guys my age (Joe was six or seven years older but still) were listening to Elvis and Johnny Cash. I was green enough to assume this was something unique to Dayton/ Ohio, thinking hey, they didn't do this back in Rhode Island. But they did do this back in Rhode Island, it just took me moving to Ohio to realize it.

I remember these liner notes pretty well. The coffee shop was sometimes very, very dead and I think I read the liner notes to everything, as well as the ingredients to everything in every cupboard. Anyway this was a song Johnny wrote in the 60s but never finished, so he added the last stanza for the Unchained CD. "She bought a ticket with her tips, and now we're curled up on the sofa / me and her and that mean-eyed cat."

And speaking of country:

6.  Private Conversation – Lyle Lovett. 

7. I Can’t Love You Any More - Lyle Lovett

I made many attempts with other Lyle Lovett based only on my love of these two songs, but nothing ever clicked the same way. 

Years later, my wife (back when we were just long distance love banditos) and I were driving back from New Hampshire and this tape was in the deck and she remarked on how sweet the lyrics were. (Was there more? See title.) I had literally just been thinking that the sweetness of the lyrics was not something everyone appreciates when she said that. We got married a few years later; I won't lie - those two or three seconds in the car after she said that and realizing hey, she gets it - probably had a lot to do with it. 

So hey, thanks, Lyle.  

8.  Buck Naked - David Byrne

9.  Angels –  David Byrne

“I am just an advertisement /
for a version of myself” 

Not much to say here. Two great tunes. "I'm ready now / but where are you?"

10.  Make a Change - Buckwheat Zydeco

More zydeco. The summer of 1997 in the District was big with this kind of stuff, like I said up there. It's in the background of all my memories, just as DS9 was the spring and summer after. A weird match but such things happen, in life, mix tapes, and up there in the scrambled McBrains. 

11.  Tommy's Song - Hepcat

12.  Country Boy – Johnny Cash. 

Listening to this again reminded me of something I'd almost forgotten: this CD eventually got taken out of rotation because someone in the District complained about the "Jesus, Jesus" refrain of one of the songs.

My country appreciation more or less stopped with Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, and Elvis, not counting some other stuff my friend Mike had back in the day. I later worked at a bar that had a lot of country in the jukebox - new country, old country, classic country, alt-country, you name it. Heard most of the big ones and more than a few of the older ones. More power to them all, but most of it's just not for me. 

Hip hop and country, pretty much: two genres that never hooked me then or now outside of a few outliers. Who knows what the future holds?

SIDE TWO

1.  Love Is Strange – Everything But the Girl 

I don't remember much about this one except it probably made me miss my girlfriend or something ridiculous. This is that part of the movie, I guess. (The hero descends to the underworld...) 

2.  Gimme Me Some Truth – Sam Philips 

Here's an album and artist I unfairly forget about in between spins of this mix tape. (I think I've rectified this, though, by discovering several subsequent albums on Amazon Music, the kind I already have, so I bookmarked a few. Looking forward to it.)

T Bone Burnett, her ex, produced this one. He and Butch Vig and a few others really authored the 90s sound for me in my head. I keep forgetting I have Stephen King's and John Mellencamp's Ghost Brothers of Darkland County waiting to be listened to, and that's produced by T Bone Burnett. I need to better organize my queues. That's, ironically, in the queue - better time management - for the post-blog life. 

3.  Sad Song  – David Byrne 
4.  Rowboat – Johnny Cash
5.  Sea of Heartbreak - Johnny Cash
6.  Rusty Cage - Johnny Cash

These lyrics are so funny, but it cracks me up how every song is about being sad. I have these routines I do with my wife, now, about songs from the 80s or 90s, and one of them is just how Chris Cornell was always talking about hanging himself. This was, you know, before. Ouch. Retired that one from "the set." 

When I hear these songs now I a) love them b) think of how my life in most of the nineties was defined by dehydration, overtiredness, and various things I don't feel like mentioning to the court. Most of my opinions, feelings, and moods I see through a lava lamp of such. I wonder how the 90s would have I seemed had I ate oatmeal and drank enough water every day? 

"Sea of Heartbreak" is so great. That's Tom Petty on there - I mentioned the liner notes. At one time I had all these guest parts memorized. He and Johnny Cash were both alive back then, too, with good albums and big hits still to come. Cornell, Cash, and Tom Petty - looking at the future from the past from beyond the grave. 

"The lights in the harbor / don't shine for me..."

7.  So Long Baby Goodbye– the Blasters

Joe had a bunch of CDs there that I'd describe as dorm room music from the mid-80s. I don't know if this fits that bill, or if my memory is even accurate, but I can picture this one playing over a crane shot of a mid-80s campus party, for sure. 

This and the Blasters' "Dark Night" were in a few things. Two great tunes for sure. 

8.   Baby I Can’t Please You – Sam Philips. 

9.   Black Sky - Sam Phillips

10.   Wheel of the Broken Voice - Sam Phillips 

I never saw this video at the time. The only over-the-air TV I watched at that time was Sunday nights for the line-up. ("The Simpons" through "The X-Files" with the middle spot being whatever Fox was hawking). The rest was all laser disc, or VHS. 

At the tail end of my time in Dayton we were getting really crappy TV reception in one room in one of those furniture-TVs AJ inherited from when his Dad moved to San Francisco. We watched some 90210 over that, and I definitely (memorably) watched He Touched Me on that thing, as it put the bow on my going to Dayton to become an Elvis fan. There's a tie-in with the name homonym of the artist, here - I digress. There’s no Elvis on this mix and there probably should be. Luscious Jackson, too, and plenty more. 

“Wheel of the Broken Voice” – those lyrics, oh the 90s-ness! But in the best way. Not a Rusted Root way. Both could be used to the same effect in Dawson’s Creek, though, and few would know the difference. Don’t shoot the messenger. Incidentally, Sam Phillips went on to be the soundtrack of quite a few Gilmore Girls episodes. 

11.  Throwing Stones - Bob Weir

This (the linked-to) is not the same version on my tape. It doesn't sound all that different, except Wasserman is turned up in the mix on that version and not on mine. This was from a CD bootleg of some kind, back when such things weren't exactly uncommon but not something I can look up. Or, I could, if I had more info to track it down, but all I have is "that solo version of "Throwing Stones" on that one bootleg, recorded sometime between 1987 and 1998.

It's pretty great, though. 

12. I’ve Been Everywhere – Johnny Cash. 

The tape ends with this one, which became a commercial and lost a bit of its luster as a result, but for a few years there it was cool insider baseball. I mean, in my circles. Not for cosmopolitan fancy folks, or country folks. 

Oh for when such things mattered even while pretending they didn’t.

But this mix extends a bit beyond the tape, to a long shot of me closing up the shop across the street, finishing up, with a couple of ghosts, living and dead, smiling back at me, to “Last Dance.” Call it a special feature or a post-credits sequence. 

Fini

~

"I'm the ice cubes in your glass
A busted Cadillac
A garden of delight
A joker in your deck

Well it ain't in what I feel
No, it ain't in what I say
In the pleasure of a kiss
It never fades away."

- David Byrne