Why I'm Excited About The Return Of Twin Peaks

It'll probably be well over a year until we return to Twin Peaks but we will be returning to Twin Peaks, that's what is most important. David Lynch and Mark Frost simultaneously announced on Twitter a few days ago "That gum you like is going to come back in style" which thew everyone for a loop at the possibilities and finally later confirmed that a deal had been struck with Showtime to air nine new episodes completely written and directed by Lynch and Frost. Much has been written and Tweeted about this announcement in the last few days, everyone trying to outdo each other's favorite obscure lines from the show or make jokes about what life in Twin Peaks would look like in the present day. Within 24 hours, I'd read numerous pieces about how disappointed certain bloggers and TV writers already were about something that won't happen for a year and a half still and of which they've seen no footage of nor any details about. Some concerns I heard were that the numerous second-rate canonical pieces of Twin Peaks pop culture in the last 20 plus years were going to mean nothing if this new series continues where season 2 left off. Which is ridiculous because wherever Lynch and Frost want the series to go is where it should go. There is no reason to believe that this new season, which will apparently be a present day continuation of storylines we last saw at the end of season 2, in 1991, as opposed to the dreaded "reboot" or prequel of some sort, will be shoddy or uninteresting. The first season of Twin Peaks is extraordinarily original and interesting and David Lynch was on board completely, however, season 2 was plagued by network intervention, declining ratings, and the exit of Lynch as the head creative vision for the show. The mystery of the death of Laura Palmer was the biggest thing on television for a while but when the story was forced to stretch out and expand the world, it started to fall apart a little. It's still a wonderful watch but it gets a little strange. The hint of the darkness in the woods becomes a little too visible, a lot of quirky characters go completely off the deep end and there are aliens. Lynch came back to wrap it up when it got canceled and then did the prequel film Fire Walk With Me, which chronicled the final days of Laura Palmer and was not received well, but the legacy of the show still lives on and is remembered fondly.

I'm not embarrassed to admit that my lasting memory of the show since I first saw it about 10 years ago is that of Sherilyn Fenn as the Lolita Audrey Horne. Audrey is a bored, rich, curious and lovelorn teenager who has her eye on FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. She may or may not have actually cared that Laura Palmer was murdered but becomes interested in getting to the bottom of the mystery in order to win the heart of Cooper and make him realize that she is the woman of his dreams. One night, Cooper returns to his room and is greeted by a naked Audrey in his bed, beckoning him to join her. Cooper resists but it pretty much takes a pack of wolves to drag him away. In rewatching the series this week, I became interested in the battle for my affection between Audrey and Laura's best friend Donna Hayward. Donna is the kind of girl you take home to meet your parents but Audrey is fun. The image of Audrey changing out of her saddle shoes and putting on her red heels perfectly illustrates the dual nature of much of Twin Peaks. What seems wholesome on Sunday morning is dark, sexy and seductive on Saturday night. The tutor to a mentally-challenged kid is actually a cocaine addicted escort. Still, the array of wonderfully written and acted female characters in the show holds up. While most of the men (and some of the women) are duplicitous and evil, you can't help but be charmed by Lucy in the Sheriff's office or Norma in the Double R Diner or stunned by the image of Audrey in a little black dress humming to herself and shimmying her body to the tune of a song in her head. Even the more insidious characters like Catherine Martell or the flat-out insane characters like Nadine Hurley or the Log Lady are intensely interesting. Even by the end of season 1, a mere 8 episodes, every character is so fleshed out that you seem to know everything about them. Twin Peaks is a seemingly quaint town that instantly charms the newly arrived Cooper but is very quickly turned upside down and shaken when Laura dies, the secrets, lies and misdeeds becoming very evident and changing everyone's lives. This theme, that of an idyllic small town and the darkness that lurks below the surface and in the shadows, is a favorite for Lynch, most notably in Blue Velvet, also featuring Kyle MacLachlan. In addition, the episodic, serialized single-crime plot of Twin Peaks is, to yet again use the popular phrase, coming back in style. Incredibly popular and well-made shows like True Detective and Fargo this year and lesser shows like The Killing owe a debt of gratitude to Twin Peaks. The fact that Lynch at his peak would step down a notch and helm a television show is also something that is becoming vogue, with such illustrious directors as Stephen Soderbergh, Cary Fukunaga, and Alexander Payne creating shows for pioneering networks like FX and HBO. Twin Peaks is more of a soap opera than a crime drama but it excels at the latter while poking fun at the former. Mark Frost even directed all the scenes of the fictional soap that many of the residents watch on television entitled Invitation To Love, which slightly paralleled what was happening in Twin Peaks. It was a cheeky little homage to the genre disguised as a goofy way of furthering the plot that included backstabbing, murder and too many affairs to count. The murder mystery wasn't too shabby either and there was plenty of blood and mayhem to satisfy the most hardened procedural fan.

In retrospect, I might be more interested in the renewed love for Twin Peaks and the excuse to watch again and write about it. However, the fact that there will be new episodes set in present-day Twin Peaks is wonderful news and I will be counting down the days and scouring the internet for any news about the production. I'm not looking at this as a cash-grab for Lynch and Frost or a shameless attempt by Showtime to cash in on an already established brand name, I see it as an artist going back to a world he loved as much as us and being genuinely curious himself about what has happened since we've been gone. There was so many iconic, lasting, cool pop culture items that were spawned by Twin Peaks that just to see the red room again or hear the Angelo Badalamenti music once more will make it completely worth the wait. Diane, it's been a while but we're going to taste that heavenly coffee and pie once more real soon.

I Took A Walk Today

I took a walk today. I headed up Bonar and then turned East onto Channing. I was going somewhere but it didn't really matter. I had my trusty iPod with me and was listening to the On The Go playlist I always have loaded up. As I was clicking through songs looking for a worthy song to begin my journey, I remembered reading that Apple is finally discontinuing the iPod's like mine, the ones with the wheel, non-touchscreen. I tried to remember how long I have had this iPod; before I lived in Rancho, before I lived in Huntington Beach maybe? At least 6 or 7 years I think. Centuries in digital technology time, far longer than such a product is supposed to last. I love my iPod though, it's always been there when I needed it, holding any and every song I ever needed at any particular moment. I finally decided which track would hold the honor of batting lead-off. It was a good choice. The drummer counting off 1-2-3-4 and then off they go. There seemed to be a lot of houses under construction on this street, a lot more than normal. Some small single units being re-sided or being remodeled, while a few large, stately three story homes were being gutted down to their skeletons. I briefly wondered if I would ever own a home and if so, would I be so unhappy with it that I would tear it down and build another one? I can barely afford to buy groceries so the thought of buying a home and having a mortgage was so foreign that I laughed off the thought completely. It was a quiet night, no traffic save for a few people passing by on bicycles, the ones heading West downhill enjoying their ride more than those heading uptown, the slight grade becoming more evident the further you go. The track changed and yet again, an immensely familiar and wonderful sound came out of my headphones, the voice of one of my heroes, as much as a full grown man in this day & age can have a hero, the voice of Laura Jane Grace. I instantly flashed back to three days ago when I stood in a large, ornately decorated theater and watched her onstage singing my favorite songs and having so much fun. I started to tear up slightly at the thought of it, the live performance being so enthralling and majestic, bringing a whole new sound to the same songs I've heard a thousand times before. I hate seeing pictures of myself but if someone would've taken a photo of me at that exact moment, I think the image would reveal a happiness that is very fleeting for me. I think it would be a good photo. But, of course, there was nobody there, just me on the sidewalk. It was dusk on a Tuesday, most of the homes lit up from the inside, figures passing by second floor windows, girls in tank tops sitting at computer desks in front of their windows, so when they get bored for a fleeting moment they can gaze out the window into the outside world and perhaps gain inspiration, a few people on their stoops taking phone calls. Mostly I just caught a glimpse of televisions showing something. The local Oakland A's are playing a one-game playoff tonight, maybe people are watching that. They were the best team in baseball for much of the year but they really fell off the last month or two. I could get into details but suffice it to say, they shouldn't have traded their best player Yoenis Cespedes. They haven't been the same since. There are a lot of cats on my walk, cats that are just sitting on the sidewalk in public, which slightly blows my mind. I'm a rural kid, pets either stayed in the house or at least in the yard and cats never went outside because they would get eaten by coyotes. Around here, as in many other places, I presume, they're free to roam. They seem calm and unafraid. Good for them. They have their freedom but they know their limits. A new song is playing now. It makes me think of things that are nice but that I don't necessarily want to think about right now, 'bittersweet' is the term for that, I think. I should clarify; it makes me think of someone. The thought of her makes me smile but the thought of her has, in the past, plunged me into long, deep misery. The kind of misery that isn't brought upon by work or family or friends, the special kind of misery  that envelops you and makes you feel like gravity is extra heavy at that moment and makes every other thing in your life seem so petty and trivial. Thinking of her makes things foggy, I can feel myself becoming uneasy and my mind beginning to replay the same flickering movies in my head so I do the only thing I can think of to stop it and click to the next song. After about a minute, the storm has passed and I'm listening to John Darnielle sing about what I think is Montlair, CA. Is it the same Mills Avenue? I'll say it is. It makes my connection to that song even greater. I finally reach MLK Boulevard and witness the world again; cars flying by, people running in place on the corner, waiting for the light to change, high school kids in pads on the football field across the street going through hitting drills. The next block brings me to what is technically my destination and I more or less get what I came for but not really and realize that it's suddenly dark. As I head back down Channing, I see another cat darting back and forth between the planter of an apartment building and a parked car. I wonder briefly how far he has ventured from his home; has he ever met the cat I saw further down Channing? Do they call out to each other in the night, hoping to see each other again at some point and share stories? I think even in the city, cats lead pretty solitary lives. They have their domain and keep it at that. Even though it's dark now, it's still nice out, cool but not enough to have to roll down my sleeves. The streets are dark but it's not a threatening neighborhood, people around here mostly just go about their business. Most residents are either young people going to school or families. There are always block parties and yard sales around here, lots of parks and playgrounds. For a short while, I start walking in a way which has me stepping on each square of cement with each step I take. It requires me to ever so slightly take bigger strides but I stop shortly after I begin when I reach a stretch of sidewalk that has been re-done or paved over and has no such continual pattern. The next song gives me an idea for a tattoo possibly, a line that would look good somewhere on my arm perhaps, a place where I would forget about it and then take off my shirt in front of a mirror and read it and be reminded of what it means. But tattoos are expensive, I can just remember it. Or write it down somewhere. The walk back seems quicker even though I'm not actively trying to get back home any faster. Maybe that slight grade is making me walk faster. I reach Bonar and turn back onto it and see my building. The lights are on in my neighbor's apartment. Two girls live there but I don't know much about them. They're quiet and seem to keep to themselves, certainly much less social than the other tenants in our building. I briefly think about how perhaps I'll run into them in the stairway, one of them going somewhere and me returning, and awkwardly extending the offer to come over for dinner or drinks one evening, just to be neighborly. I don't drink but I don't really have to mention that until the time comes and then I can just shrug it off and give the same explanation I've given a hundred times about not enjoying the taste of alcohol. Maybe she'd find me charming, maybe she'd regret agreeing to the offer. For now, neither of us would have to worry about it because I ascended the stairs without running into anybody. For some reason, I had forgotten to turn off the television before I left and the baseball game was still going on. Maybe someone else had walked by and had the same thought as me, 'Looks like they're watching the game up there.' The A's were winning but knowing them, they'd blow it. I sat down on the couch and was immediately beset upon my one of my feline housemates. She climbed on my lap and up my chest in order to give me a tiny, furry head-butt. I patted her on the head and looked at her and wondered if she desired freedom, desired a life outside of this apartment. The world is a scary place, if so for me then definitely for her. We were okay there on the couch. It was a nice night.

What I'm Enjoying Lately

I've been making the most of my summer in the San Francisco bay area by watching a lot of television and seeing a lot of movies. I spend my days taking people's money in exchange for books and every once in a while I even read a few of them. Some of my favorite authors released some new books this summer, including Reed Farrell Coleman, whose novel, The Hollow Girl gave us one final go'round with Moe Prager, Coleman's weary traveler whose regrets and personal tragedies are countless, who bears the weight of every lost partner, every senseless murder, every tragedy life brought to his doors on his shoulders. I kept this one for almost a month, taking it slow to savor every last page I had left with Prager. Another favorite of mine, Stephen Hunter, released Sniper's Honor, the latest in the Bob Lee Swagger series. Swagger, now a bored old man, jumps at the chance to tag along with an old reporter friend around Russia on the trail of a WWII-era sniper nicknamed the White Witch, a beautiful, crack-shot sniper on a personal mission to eradicate the Germans from her homeland. While in Russia, Sniper opens some old case files and some old wounds and is forced once again to use his skills honed in Vietnam as Bob The Nailer, one of our most decorated and feared snipers. On another end of the literary spectrum, one of my favorite reads lately was Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds. The book is great at getting at the restlessness that twenty-somethings like me live with, the feeling that whatever we have now isn't good enough and that if maybe, just maybe we try this thing instead of that thing, it'll change everything. It doesn't, not usually. It just creates the same different problems. The book is a fun little jaunt down the rabbit hole with O'Malley's heroine, an increasingly unstable restauranteur trying to grasp for a hold on her own life.

The summer TV schedule, while full of shows about vampires, plagues and rapture, has one very bright spot. Masters Of Sex is the most human, the most interesting and the best show on TV right now. The show plumbs the depths of human emotion, to get to the bottom of not just how we interact sexually with each other, but how we get through life with each other. Michael Sheen, as William Masters, is a humorless, brilliant, troubled man who is struggling to see his vision fulfilled and in the meantime, explores his relationship with his secretary/partner/lover Virginia Johnson, played by the radiant, gorgeous, amazing Lizzie Caplan, in every imaginable way, not to mention every imaginable position. The third episode of season 2, a locked room story that takes place almost in real time, lets us be a fly on the wall as the two of them discuss their relationship, break it down, examine the pieces, role play, and attempt to put them back together in any way that fits. A televised boxing match mirrors their night in the hotel room, as Bill teaches Virginia the subtleties of boxing and how maybe, just maybe, the old-timer on his last legs in the ring, might just pull off the victory in the end, against all odds. Segues be damned, over on FX, the one-two punch of You're The Worst and Married on Thursday nights is one of the most pleasant surprises of summer TV. Here are two shows who test the limits of what can be shown and talked about on television in hilarious fashion, two shows that explore relationships at two very different points in their existence. With the end of Justified and Sons Of Anarchy, it's good to know that FX has a few shows to build future schedules on, in addition to shows like The Bridge and The Strain. Two more shows I've been very excited about are The Knick, on suddenly exciting and relevant network Cinemax and Hell On Wheels, the closest thing we have to a good western on television (maybe Longmire as well). The first episode of The Knick was fantastic, and from what I've heard, it's only going to get better. Stephen Soderbergh's distinctive visual style seems so fresh compared to other period shows. The man's own camera movement, choice of music and flat-out flair gives life to all the cases of death in the Knickerbocker Hospital.

On the big screen this summer, my tastes have been varied. For all the times I went to see movies like Neighbors and 22 Jump Street, I tried to balance things by checking out things like Snowpiercer and Mood Indigo. This week, I saw the much anticipated James Gunn directed Guardians Of The Galaxy, featuring instant movie star Chris Pratt, who has toiled away on screen as goofy best friends and transformed himself from irritating hole-dweller Andy on Parks & Recreation to lovable buffoon Andy on Parks & Recreation. The film is full of all the humor, inside and nerd jokes that one would expect from Gunn, who, like Joss Whedon, understands what it takes to helm a giant comic book adaptation and make it good. Speaking of comic book adaptations, Snowpiercer, which can be described as Hunger Games On A Train, is a modern-bloody-masterpiece. In my opinion, the politics take second billing to the incredible visual style Bong Joon-Ho exhibits here, similar to what he did in his other excellent films, including Mother and The Host. The fight in the car with the butchers in masks in the dark is one of the most amazing things I've seen on screen all year. It rivals fellow Korean auteur Park Chan-Wook's single shot fight scene in Oldboy, where an army of henchmen are dispatched with a hammer. Mood Indigo is the latest from Michel Gondry, who is back in full form, after a documentary and a somewhat ill-advised foray into the world of Hollywood superhero films, with this film about a man whose life is turned around when he meets a beautiful, radiant, fun-loving woman (Audrey Tautou, *swoon*) and what happens when she is diagnosed with a mysterious, Gondry-like malady, one which sees a flower growing in her lungs, slowly killing her. The fun, goofy playfulness with visuals that he is known for gives way to some real tragedy that brings the mood down a little, but you're used to it if you've seen any of Gondry's other work. It's good to have the man back. Other highlights lately include Lucy and the previously discussed Cold In July.

Knights of Sidonia game?

Recently I watched the new Netflix Distributed Anime Knights of Sidonia, and let me tell you: it is incredible. From the first episode there is a sense of utter mortality that permeates the entire series. What I enjoy the most about the series is that it is clearly cut from one continuous story and is not in a picaresque/episodic format that so many shows fall into. Instead this series is one giant story with increasing stakes from show to show it was great. Yes it's based on a manga, but there are a lot of shows like that and they just ramble.

What is game-able about the show is that their spaceship's energy (Heigus particles) is used for everything they need to do. Fly out to that alien? Use some Heigus particles. Want to shoot a giant laser beam at that monstrosity tearing your friend apart? Use some Heigus particles. What's that? You're out of Heigus particles? Sorry, bro you're fucked.

I think it would be fun in a tabletop game set in space with giant robots to use just this one resource for everything. Tabletop RPGs like D&D are all about managing the consumption of resources, and this is where a lot of tension comes from. This would make for prime game moments of a player deciding whether to take one last shot at the enemy and risk being stranded in space or fly back to base and maybe have to deal with that enemy again later on.


Obviously this needs more work, but I'm not hosting any space games anytime soon so it can definitely wait.

What I'm Enjoying Right Now

HALT AND CATCH FIRE - To fill the void left by Mad Men on Sunday nights, AMC slotted in the new '80s computer programming drama Halt And Catch Fire which revolves around an enigmatic and brash tech entrepreneur Joe McMillan (Lee Pace, from The Hobbit, Pushing Daisies, The Fall) whose desire to build a computer to rival IBM sees him recruiting a punk rock klepto tech genius college student who dislikes wearing bras and a sad sack drunk married father of two whose flash of genius years before went unnoticed by everyone except Joe. The show is built around the two men whose life goals are diametrically opposite, yet the venn-diagram of their desires slightly overlaps when it comes to building the machine that they believe the world is waiting for. Scoot McNairy plays Gordon, the programmer who is struggling with a teetering marriage (Fun Fact: his wife is played by Kerry Bishe, who also played his wife in the Ben Affleck film Argo) and alcoholism while wasting away in a cubicle in the office of a tech firm. Joe belittles Gordon but quickly lets his intentions be known and recruits Gordon and Cameron, the rebellious young woman who struggles to trust the suits who want her skills. Joe is a mix of someone somewhere between Don Draper and The Wolf Of Wall Street. He can whip up a room into a froth with an improvised speech of stolen catchphrases and cliche sentiments but has the confidence and determination to walk away from any confrontation the winner. It's a nice little period piece to be a placeholder for a few months before Mad Men comes back.

COLD IN JULY - This film is a cold, black, dirty little piece noir. Joe R. Lansdale wrote the book about a man who shoots an unarmed burglar in his home one night in small-town Texas and struggles to cope with the aftermath. Soon, the dead mans father (Sam Shepard) shows up in town, fresh out of prison, looking for vengeance. Halfway through the film, the plot takes a turn and becomes something altogether different but tests Richard (Michael C. Hall) in unimaginable ways. Don Johnson shows up in the larger than life role of Jim Bob, a PI with a personality the size of Texas and Hall surprisingly keeps up with Johnson and Sam Shepard. His role as Dexter Morgan for almost a decade prepared him to play Richard, a man hiding secrets from his family and more capable of violence and vengeance than anyone would assume. All three men are forced to confront the darkness they know exists in the world and which resides within them and see if they make it out of the darkness alive.

WORLD CUP SOCCER - The World Cup, held every 4 years, is perhaps the most beloved sporting event in the world, even more than the Olympics. Soccer, still struggling to gain footing as a serious sport here in the United States, is the sport of choice for almost every other nation on Earth. The US Men's National Team, USMNT, is always a dark horse to make the tournament, let alone be considered a real threat to compete but this year, thanks to the presence of coach Jurgen Klinsman, a German who has both coached in and played & won a World Cup, the US have a decent chance of advancing into the later stages. The traditional powerhouse nations Spain, England, Italy and Portugal are all out or will be finished by week's end and heavy favorites Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands and Argentina are all awaiting opponents in the Round of 16. Worldwide soccer superstars (most players are members of multiple national, club and professional teams all around the world) like Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Robin Van Persie, Wayne Rooney, Mario Balotelli and our own Clint Dempsey all had a major impact on their teams performance, making this one of the most entertaining and exciting Cups ever. In addition to the action on the pitch, the brutal Brazilian heat and humidity has been a major topic as it wreaked havoc on many of the players, including just about everyone who has had to play in Manaus, in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, where the US had a heartbreaking draw with Portugal on Sunday after giving up a goal on the final touch of the game, where for the first time in history, the match was paused for a water break. There were allegations of match fixing, favoritism among the referees, flopping (all standard for the sport of soccer) and even an incident involving Luis Suarez of Uruguay, who bit an Italian player on the shoulder today (the third time he's bit an opponent during a match). All this and we're not even through the opening round of the tournament. The NBA and NHL Finals were just a few weeks ago but those games pale in comparison to even the most middling matches of this tournament. The levels of athleticism and the sheer explosiveness and excitement that some of these players can display at any given moment is unmatched by almost anything else out there and anyone who isn't watching out of some misplaced desire to be opposed to what everyone else is watching and talking about is really missing out on some world class entertainment and drama. If anyone is reading this before Thursday the 26th, do yourself a favor, go to a sports bar on Thursday morning, or somewhere public with people watching the US versus Germany game to determine first place in their group and let yourself get washed away in the enthusiasm and excitement that comes with watching this sport on the biggest stage the world has to offer.

Lets Go To Fargo

After the conclusion of yet another once-in-a-generation show, it's time to debate with myself about where it belongs in the pantheon of great contemporary shows. Fargo, in all its snowy, bloody glory, just finished its first season (or first incarnation, depending on whether it holds with the anthology format that seems to be the new TV model) and with it, the inevitable comparisons to True Detective, the most recent Is It Great? show.

First off, we have to discuss this new model of the limited series, miniseries, anthology series (whatever you like to call it) that has started to show up on television. American Horror Story, a show I dislike for too many reasons to discuss here, has, admittedly, been doing that model very well the last three years, bringing back some of the same actors each year but in a new locale and with a new theme, while keeping with the general tone of something creepy and unsettling. AHS was definitely a model for what FX and Noah Hawley want to do with Fargo. This season was different than the movie and the (possible) next season will be different yet again, presumably while keeping the main ingredients of snow, murder and dark comedy. But the most important thing that an 8 or 10 (or even 3, 4 or 6 as per usual in the UK) episode season brings with it is the ability for the show to attract big names. AHS annually gets a large, talented cast and Fargo has the deepest bench in television right now, including Billy Bob Thornton who will surely be a contender come awards season. True Detective became the behemoth it was because of the above-the-title names of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. People who may not have normally watched a gritty detective drama tuned in to bear witness to the McConaissance and expectations perhaps became too high, even if people's expectations of what the show was going to be was never what Nic Pizzolatto was going to do with it. This format can really only work with the type of show that has a central mystery to solve; a workplace comedy wouldn't be able to muster up enough intrigue after 8 episodes to warrant the closed ending, never to be explored again. Sitcoms need time to flesh out their characters & relationships and procedurals live and die on their formula, episode after episode, year after year.

The second point I want to discuss is the current state of quality television, which is in a very good place. Breaking Bad finished recently and Mad Men is technically halfway through its final season, and as previously noted, True Detective has a brief, successful run a few months ago and the ever present Game Of Thrones just finished its fourth season this week. Then, there are the shows like Sherlock and Orphan Black and The Americans which are critical darlings and extremely well-made but still manage to stay under the general public's radar. Game Of Thrones is the only show that has one foot firmly in the high concept genre camp and one in the quality, Sunday night must watch, Monday morning must discuss camp. The Walking Dead is a show that mostly applies to the former while Mad Men is firmly in the latter. Ratings usually come from the former while accolades come from the latter. Breaking Bad was the program that transcended both labels and became a must-watch for the way it satisfied the gangster bloodlust of its casual fans and the attention to detail in the writing, directing and acting that had critics salivating every Sunday night on Twitter. The reasons I don't like Game Of Thrones are mostly the same reasons I don't like The Walking Dead, although Walking Dead is more frequently enjoyable than GoT, which is a slog through middle earth following the attempted power grabs of loathsome, incestuous, stubbornly prideful characters. Game Of Thrones is like all the most boring parts of the Tolkein universe made into a television show that looks really beautiful. The problem with both shows is that there's nobody to root for, the threat of your favorite character being killed off at any time doesn't create enjoyable suspense, it creates a sense of time wasted investing time and emotion in their journey. Perhaps people like the escapism and exoticism that comes with shows like these, watching people in foreign situations so far from their own lives. A man shooting a crossbow into a zombie or a knight raging in medieval battle is interesting because it's not something they have to compare to their own life, it has a certain "epic" or "badass" quality to it. The most talked about, highest rated episodes of these shows are the ones with the biggest shootouts or the most brutal battle scenes. In contrast, Mad Men and Matthew Weiner are able to convey a lifetime's worth of emotion and pain in a scene with no dialogue in an episode that has fewer viewers than the evening news. If Mad Men were on any other network, it's ratings alone would've been the nail in the coffin years ago, but it's hard for AMC to deny the armload of Emmy's it wins every year. Don't get me wrong, I love genre fiction, television and movies, but I'm just tired of the best shows on television getting canceled because they don't have a high enough shock value. I have faith that the powers that be will see that smaller scale shows like Masters Of Sex and The Americans can be big on substance and draw a crowd with discerning tastes for quality television.

So the point of this piece was to discuss Fargo, a show that is severely underrated, underappreciated and underwatched. I can't find a single person discuss the show with because nobody has seen it in it's entirety, if at all. Fargo is a show that shouldn't really be as good as it is. On paper, an adaptation of one of the most beloved & successful Coen Brothers films into a 10 episode series by the guy who created My Generation does not look promising. However, Hawley dispensed with the flesh & blood characters of the film and instead, decided to explore perhaps the most important character; the snowy landscape of the upper Midwest. The dark humor, the unforgiving weather and the brutality the region's unimposing people are capable of are all present in the show, as they were in the Coen's version, but the most striking creation of Hawley and the writers of the show is the creation of the character Lorne Malvo. Billy Bob Thornton has not been this lively and entertaining on screen in years as Malvo, who is the very definition of evil, the wolf at the door of the good, humble folks of Bemidji. Malvo, at one point, decides to enact the biblical plagues on, of all people, the man he is working for, just for the pleasure of it, just to see what happens. Watching the series as it goes on, one can't help but wonder if Malvo is something beyond human, pure evil come to earth in the form of a man, sent here to wreak havoc and corrupt good people and spoil the pristine snowy landscape. He makes the sniveling, petty, cowardly King Joffrey look like an innocent little blonde kitten on the throne of swords. Malvo would have a field day with Joffrey, he'd bring him to his knees and make him beg for his life and then slit his throat with a smirk on his face. Malvo's body count in these ten episodes is astounding. The cast is full of fantastic characters whose humble civility is tested by the changing norms of society. The police captain at one point laments the disappearance of the time when folks used to shovel each others drives instead of having to watch over their shoulders. It's a similar sentiment that lingers in, among other places, the Coen's No Country For Old Men, with Tommy Lee Jones as the sheriff who is struggling to keep order in his Texas border town as the presence of the drug wars start to creep in. Malvo is definitely a chip of the same block as Anton Chigurh, a man who lives to inflict chaos and pain and lose no sleep over it.

Another notable thing about the show is the presence of a second villain, who, played by Martin Freeman, is remarkably receptive to Malvo's influence. His Lester Nygaard is a man with a thin layer of civility that is quickly broken through at the arrival of Malvo and goes forward with no worry as to what kind of man he has become. The final sequence at the end of the penultimate episode is so absolutely tragic, so pitch black evil and devastating as we watch one of the most innocent characters in the show fall prey to the two headed wolf, that it's almost impossible to watch. It's more shocking than the scene where we find out Walter White poisoned Jesse's girlfriend's son. These shows of late have been great at providing conflicted antiheroes somewhere in the gray area between good and bad, and at a certain point, it seems that Lester will redeem himself but that notion is quickly and utterly extinguished. Through it all, Fargo was able to balance the brutality and bloodshed with the humor that you would expect from a Coen Brothers property and with a cast of comedic veterans like Freeman, Key & Peele, Bob Odenkirk, Oliver Platt and even Thornton whose desire to inflict a trail of chaos wherever he goes is frequently quite humorous. His deadpan delivery and insistence on talking his way out of every imaginable situation provides a lot of unexpected humor. It's a show that was made with the intention of being different and working outside the norms of cable television. Ratings weren't off the charts but it is definitely a success for the network and Hawley can write his own ticket for whatever he wishes to do in the future, whether it be Fargo-adjacent or not. There are a few characters begging for an extended backstory to be explored, most notably Keith Carradine as an ex-State Policeman whose own history with a wolf at his door would make for fantastic television, however, it doesn't sound like Hawley wants to go back to Fargo, at least not right away, since he just finished post-production on the series two weeks before the final episode aired. I'm sure he's on vacation, perhaps somewhere warm & sunny, plotting his next project that FX will undoubtedly write him a blank check for the privelege to air.

The Mysterious Matter Of Finding A Murderer

I started reading the book to the left THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL: SEARCHING FOR MY FATHER...AND FINDING THE ZODIAC KILLER. Now, the fact that this man, Gary Stewart, thinks his father was the Zodiac Killer, the infamous murderer of anywhere from 5 to 37 people in California in the sixties & seventies, is nothing new. In fact, he's not the only guy to write a book claiming to have irrefutable proof that his father is the Zodiac Killer. Steve Hodel, in his book MOST EVIL: AVENGER, ZODIAC AND THE FURTHER SERIAL MURDERS OF DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL claims that his father is not only the Zodiac Killer, but also the Black Dahlia Avenger, the murderer of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947 as well as the Lipstick Killer, who was responsible for three deaths in 1946 in Chicago,* among others. Jeff Mudgett, a descendant of Herman Webster Mudgett, wrote a biography of Herman Mudgett, better known as H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer, who possibly killed upwards of 200 people in the early 1890's in Chicago, in which he claims that Holmes was also Jack The Ripper, the infamous unidentified murderer of prostitutes in London in 1888**. This phenomenon is nothing new, and whenever a tabloid murder makes news, it brings the crazies out of the woodwork. There's a scene in the David Fincher film of Robert Graysmith's book ZODIAC where the police are inundated with calls where people are willing to confess to any and every unsolved crime in history. A woman named Deborah Perez also claimed that her father was Zodiac but a former claim on her part that she was the illegitimate daughter of JFK made her Zodiac claim null & void. A quick Wikipedia search will show a whole host of individuals who believe that they have the one and only answer to the question of Zodiac's identity. Authorities are always reluctant to set up hotlines for the public to call in and report tips because there are so many bogus and ridiculous claims that get called in when they're really hoping for something useful. Sometimes, those people actually get books published detailing those theories.

Gary Stewart was abandoned by his biological father as a baby and lived his entire life not knowing his biological parents. As an adult, his birth mother got in touch with his adoptive parents and told them she'd like to meet him. His mother caught him up on all the family history and in his quest to learn more about his father, he begins to realize that the man may have been a murderer. He also discusses how the San Francisco Chronicle writer Paul Avery^ seemed to have a vendetta against him, which would explain why Zodiac eventually sent threatening letters & cards to Avery. Stewart describes a man who was handsome and charming, capable of seducing women and adept at hiding his shady past and problems with women that may have caused him to seek out young happy couples to kill as Zodiac. He bears a passing resemblance to a vague description of Zodiac that one of his only survivors was able to relay to the police. A description that would probably fit a thousand men in any given city at any given time.

  

Hodel provided a photo of his father that bears resemblance to yet another Zodiac wanted poster.

Still other descriptions of Zodiac supplied by survivors are of a slightly larger man, a description that fits Arthur Leigh Allen, while still keeping with the theme of a man in dark framed glasses and a crew cut.

I'm still making my way through the book but was compelled to stop and put some thoughts down here. What I'm wondering is if doing this research and bending your findings to fit into a narrative that you want, or need to come out of it is cathartic. I didn't have a troubled childhood and I have no issues with my father or his character so I guess I wouldn't know what it's like to have to piece together my family's potentially nefarious history 40 years after the fact. Steve Hodel was an LAPD detective so tracking down murderers and criminals and piecing together facts, evidence and supposition to solve crimes is in his blood. It's not so far fetched that he would look at his father for crimes that were so close to him, both physically as a California resident and as a detective. I think when someone goes to write a story about something, they find facts to prop-up their theory and conveniently dismiss others so as to not muddy the waters. A quick look at the index of Stewart's book makes no mention of Arthur Leigh Allen, who, in my opinion,^^ is the Zodiac Killer. I believe Graysmith, in his two books, puts forth the most compelling argument for any individual to be Zodiac. Since the crimes were so famous and captured the public's imagination so intensely, coupled with the fact that they were never solved makes them particularly ripe for the picking for people to write about and espouse theories upon. I'm by no means an expert but I am fascinated with the crimes and particularly more-so as a Bay Area resident now. There have been dozens of books and films that have attempted to solve the crime and perhaps link it to other notorious crimes of the era like Hodel has done. It's big business because it's such a recognizable name, even if most of the work is reheated junk. I haven't read them all and I don't need to but I'll probably keep checking up on them every once in a while, even though I believe nobody will ever officially be named the Zodiac Killer. Arthur Leigh Allen died many years ago but has been the most closely linked suspect, thanks to the advancement of crime scene technology, to the crimes^^^. So if Stewart believes his father was Zodiac, it stands to reason that he would not acknowledge Allen as a reasonable suspect, or anyone else for that matter. I think Graysmith, because other than being in the building that some of the Zodiac letters arrived at, he has no connection to the crimes and is therefore in the best position to make a thorough and compelling investigation into the case. He didn't have the public pressure that the police department had and he doesn't have the personal connection that Stewart and Hodel believe they have to the case and can therefore objectively look at all the facts and come up with a reasonable narrative. Graysmith was a cartoonist but made a nice career for himself as a true crime writer and perhaps used some of what he learned from working with Avery and the SFPD detective Dave Toschi in the early days of the killings to become a legitimate writer and detective in his own right.

The crimes themselves hold much more interest for me than belittling these people for whom Zodiac is much closer to than myself. I admire their detective spirit and determination to take a stab (no pun intended) at finding out who Zodiac is. But it doesn't mean they're right, it just means that they were able to get a book deal.

--------------------------------

*William George Heirens was convicted of the Lipstick Killer murders and spent 65 years in prison. While everyone and his brother has their own theories, both the Zodiac killings and the Elizabeth Short murder have yet to be officially solved.
**He wasn't.
^Paul Avery was a troubled writer who was played by Robert Downey, Jr. in the Fincher film.
^^And the opinion of Graysmith and perhaps Fincher and James Vanderbilt, the writers of the 2007 film.
^^^There are many more reasons to believe that Allen is Zodiac, mostly involving the series of letters purportedly written by Zodiac. DNA, handwriting analysis, and study of the content and language in the letters points to Allen more than anyone else. The timeline of the crimes match up very well with Allen's life and behavior, including the fact that he lived very close to one of the victims and the span of time that Zodiac letters ceased to show up coincided exactly with the time Allen spent in prison. Circumstantial, sure, but hard to ignore.

"Can I Bless the Yeast?"

So Lee,

Here's what you've been missing D&D wise.

After you left Jordan came back and has been playing Vogen, the Elf Librarian (Magic-User) and also Libby, the chick that gave you the crud. Vogen is in love with Libby. It's complicated.

So the group has been travelling around the same countryside near where you as Ranger the Ranger got into a fight with your future-son and time travelled mid-wrestle. After checking in on Timmy's grandmother, the crippled bus boy at the Crooked House tavern, and burning down her house after picking up a demonic spell book and magic rapier that hits anything on a 14, but NOT the target on a 16 or 17; fighting off hellhounds while one dragged Arthur's soul into the inferno; losing said demonic to spellbook to a mysterious figure that's definitely Timmy; sneaking into a giant ant hill and stealing an ant egg for a wizard-scholar who most likely is trying to create an ant-monster army; breaking the neck of a Giant Roc that had 36 HD (!) and meeting Arthur's many new characters they decided to get the hell out of Dodge.

This entailed looking for a job in the capital and hitching a ride as... security? aboard House Cannith's new airship that uses a new engine to power it made from the schematics you guys spent so long collecting. Remember all that fighting Warforged terrorists and going into the jungle with Miss Patsy and Zinzelpants and braving the zombies and weirdo skeletons in the Desolation? Yeah that all turned into this giant airship that was being used as a peace ship to make treaties with the newly discovered southern continent and their Empire. Emphasis on the past tense in that sentence.

While you were doing all those dangerous as fuck fetch quests remember your patron, Elayne? Yeah she's here too running around telling people what to do and helping to look for the vampire which is good because she totally did all the work when you guys killed the Lord of Blades. Well, her and Matt's shotgun.

Oh I forgot to mention the maybe genocide that's happening, but whatever that's not important right now.

So the party, newly named Random Task Force, is on board the ship not five minutes when Warforged terrorists, shouting something about the Lord of Blades, attempt to take control! (Imagine in the 5th element when Bruce Willis walks onto the bridge and just one-shots that guy completely winning in one quick motion). After a pretty terrible rescue attempt of the engineers being held hostage in the engine room, the party had won! Except all the engineers died and Libby fell on a smoke bomb after being sent in (naked) as a distraction.

So she's rushed to the infirmary and the rest of the group splits into 2 (!) to search the rest of the decks for any trouble telling the ship's Captain to have everyone on board go to the top deck. LOL. Naturally the emissaries/ambassadors all decide to help cause they think they're tough shit, but they all end up dead. Right at the moment the party gets there to see them murdered by a mysterious black cloud of course. Please keep in mind these guys are all badasses. And they're dead.

The final confrontation happens in the hold of the ship fighting on and around crates.

Them:  "What's in these crates?"
Me: "/shrug"
Them: "How do you not know what's in the crates?"

How I should've responded was having bad guys burst out at that moment and then looked them dead in the eyes and said "Happy?"

Just as the guy I was trying to frame (successfully?) as the vampire is murdered by said mysterious black cloud in front of their eyes the cloud takes humanoid form and slowly dissolves away into...

Everyone: "Is it Elayne? It's Elayne isn't it?"
Me: "...Yeah, totally. It is definitely Elayne. Was gonna be the whole time..." [deletes notes]

Turns out you can't hit a vampire unless using a holy weapon, or silver which the corpses around them have. Damian's golden, holy mace does a shitload of damage to her and Jordan's magic rapier keeps accidentally hitting Amanda. Things aren't looking good. Mostly because vampires feed on people's life force, and in D&D what is the most precious form of life force?

Levels. Yep she was eating their levels! Just by touching them! Bummer!
Also she raised zombies and at one point mind controlled Jordan into attacking everybody while she hid in the rafters and regenerated life.

Yeah turns out vampires are bad news.
This is how we left it last week.

THIS WEEK SHIT GOT REAL.

The Mage Ambassador from Aundair and her cronies came down and cast a battlefield spell that imbued everyone with fighting prowess. It was pretty awesome. Golden light enveloping their muscles and shit, I was proud of myself.

Jordan couldn't come and he let the others play as him (smh), but Arthur rolled two crits as Vogen and did decent damage to the vampire and her zombie minions. Damian did some crazy holy mace damage again and things were looking good. The tide had turned!

So Vamp-Elayne decides to bail. Blasts a hole in the side of the ship and grows wings. Arthur intercepts her with his two characters Vogen and Peaches while Damian casts Yeast on the ship hole and Amanda blesses it.

So now there's a living patch of holy yeast on the escape route. Was it going to do anything? Maybe burn a little? Cause a holy-unholy infection? Who knows, because while standing in front of the hole they kept shooting arrows at Vamp-Elayne who proceeded to pick up Vogen and use him as an Elf shield.

You see where this is going? Yeah she threw Vogen's corpse at the three of them in front of the hole and they all dangled "thousands of miles" in the air.

Except Vogen. Vogen tumbled like a rag doll towards the ground. But he wasn't completely useless yet.

JaNice, Amanda's character was on the bottom of this barrel of monkeys strand and she failed miserably to try and climb up, slipping and falling after Vogen. But this is where things get fucking awesome.

Have you seen that movie with Wesley Snipes and the parachuters? Drop Zone? Fuck it, any movie where someone falls out of a plane and speeds up to catch up to somebody? JaNice does that and grabs onto Vogen's body and uses him to cushion her fall.

AND IT FUCKING WORKS.

It was amazing man, I wish everyone in the world could've seen it.

Meanwhile, Peaches and Ganthet are still fucked, hanging from the ship, but they miraculously manage to climb up just as the Aundair Ambassador launches a fireball and incinerates the Vampire. Promptly, Libby finally shows up with a "life boat" and they get the fuck off the ship just in time to see it ripped to shreds in a massive explosion and crash into Sharn (where this all started) levelling a third of the city.

They find JaNice a few days later in an emergency shelter set up for the victims of the crash and she is surrounded by a group of mid-tier aristocrats who worship her as their new queen. And a puppy.

Epic success! ... ?

With love,
Christopher.

Vigilantes on the Fringe

So Nate and Dave (noisms from one of my favorite blogs, monsters and manuals) started a podcast called "A Gaming Podcast About Nothing" which is pretty good if you like listening to a couple of British dudes speak about games they've played and people they've played it with in the many years they've known each other. Which I do. During the second (first?) episode they were talking about setting Dogs in the Vineyard out in the Oort Cloud which blew my mind because I've wanted to play a space cowboy/bounty hunter game forever and the Oort Cloud is a much more interesting frontier space than the typical Mars. The whole Mars setting was the reason I never got anywhere with it because it reminded me a little too much of Cowboy Bebop and as a superfan of something you have to be aware of when it is over-influencing your creativity.

The second reason this is a revelation to me is that Dogs in the Vineyard is set up to kind of deal with the murder hobo-ness of D&D that all groups sort of devolve into without removing anything that makes that fun. DitV characters are lawkeepers/problem solvers created by the Mormon higher ups to travel from town to town fixing things that need to be fixed. Each town I've seen is set up with multiple things in separate categories that are off and basically fodder for a group to latch onto and set about fucking with in their own special way. Your existence is purposeful and cataclysmic and above all known to everyone. How the NPCs react differs of course, but still I'm kind of #intoit. I don't know anything about the mechanics, but the set up is enough to set my brain on fire!

What I'm Enjoying Right Now: Lightning Round

UNDER THE SKIN - The best way to experience Under The Skin, if you haven't experienced it yet, is to know absolutely nothing about it. Nothing at all. Don't Google the plot, however miniscule it may be, don't watch the trailer, don't read the book, don't let anyone tell you about it. Just watch it while it's still on the big screen, in a big, quiet, dark auditorium because it's a big, quiet, dark film and your experience will be heightened for doing so. Some people in the group I saw it with walked out, another said it made her nauseous and gave her nightmares, another just simply stated he didn't know what he just watched. It's a really interesting film that challenges a lot of preconceived notions about filmmaking and the human condition, just to name a few.

ATMOSPHERE "Southsiders" - I'm not generally a fan of hip-hop and it's been a long time since I've listened to Slug & the gang but I really like this album. It's pretty mellow, it's not quite as angry as some of the earlier stuff, the backing tracks are more chill and free-flowing, layering well behind Slug as he tells stories about life and growing up in the titular southside of Minneapolis. Perhaps being a family man has sanded down the rough edges but he's still got some stuff he needs to get off his chest.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE - Jim Jarmusch is the epitome of cool, eclipsing even Nick Cave and David Lynch, I think. Leave it up to him to take a tired genre and make it look effortlessly cool while paying homage to its roots in literature and pop culture without any of the worn out tropes that have plagued the vampire story in the last decade. Hiddleston and Swinton are perfect as ancient vampires pondering their existence and struggling to coexist in a world that the main species is destroying. Detroit is a stand-in for the wasteland that humans have made of the world and the lovers pass their days sneaking into hospitals to steal blood and listening to rock music and wondering when humans will taint their surroundings and their bodies to the point when they become toxic.

KCRW's PRESS PLAY - Press Play is a daily news podcast on KCRW hosted by Madeleine Brand and it provides me with a small link to my Southern California roots. Brand and guests discuss events happening in LA and issues that are impacting Angelinos and Californians as a whole, from the drought to the Clippers fiasco to the exodus of auto manufacturers to the week's films. I feel smarter just for listening and it's my way of keeping up on some of the important news of the day because I'm admittedly not really a news junkie and wouldn't know what's going on unless it jumped up and bit me. I've also been listening to The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell (the recent Dan Harmon episode is really good) and The Business on KCRW.

RICHARD STARK'S PARKER by Darwyn Cooke - I've praised the Parker novels before and I absolutely love these adaptations of the Parker series by Darwyn Cooke who captures the brutality and coldness of the '60s criminal underworld that Parker exists in. Start with The Hunter, the first Parker book but check out The Score where Parker leads a team of thieves who are planning to rob an entire town in a single night.

Murder, Death And General Mayhem

I'm a big fan of crime, murder and all around mayhem as long as it's relegated to the pages of my novels and the DVDs on my shelves. Those elements have never really been a part of my life growing up in the quiet small town of Pinon Hills in the Mojave Desert. I think it's that boring small town upbringing that led me to seek out stories of outlaws and gunslingers and urban warriors like Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey. Superheroes in latex underwear and capes never quite appealed to me, flying around in the air between skyscrapers on the trail of a deformed psychopath, they seemed too fantastic, too reliant on gadgets or powers which without, they'd be powerless. If Spider-Man didn't have those webs in his wrist, he'd just be a kid in a weird suit running around. If John McClane loses his gun, he kills a guy with something else and takes his gun, he's good to go. It's the one-man-army that I love. I also liked movies like Blue Velvet that dealt with the creepiness and darkness that lies just beneath the surface and behind the white picket fences. Some of my favorite authors write the kind of rural noir that I have always believed was going on in my own backyard, men and women doing dark deeds under the cloak of rural darkness and the cover of a trailer down a long dirt road. Meth, speed and guns are the major extra-curricular activities of the high desert. But, the type of brutality and mayhem and violence that litters the pages of the crime novels I love and the action movies I worship is something I hope I never have to experience in real life, however bland and boring my life is. I've been lucky to have been raised in an area without violence (for the most part) and now as an adult, I surround myself with people who don't invite that into their lives. I currently live in Berkeley, right next door to Oakland, which is infamous for having some harsh streets and areas where you wouldn't want to make a wrong turn into. For as much gentrification and hipster-izing the city has gone through, I'm still reluctant to go through certain parts. Growing up, I had similar feelings as I would be criss-crossing the dirt roads and motorcycle trails in the desert, where I would frequently come across a trailer or a home that stood out like a sore thumb, porches full of scruffy men in wifebeaters, arms littered with swastika tattoos, shotgun at the ready resting against the wall. You just turn around, don't make eye contact and hope they're too high or too wasted or don't care enough to follow.

Still, however, violence, death & mayhem, or at least the threat of it, still creeps in. My roommates and I had trouble with some youths who sit in our stairwell and smoke weed and our landlord mentioned that people have smelled marijuana and asked if it was us. We politely asked the kids to not smoke there and received no real promise of them not doing it in the future. The last time it happened, my roommate and I asked him to leave and we mentioned that if our landlord thinks we're smoking weed in our apartment, we'll get kicked out. He said if we call the police, we'd better not get caught outside on the street because he'd make a few calls himself and make us pay for doing him like that. Who knows if he was just talking big or if he would really shoot us just for asking him not to smoke weed on our property, but it's an unsettling thought, nonetheless. In another more tragic case of death sneaking up on those around me, a manager at the theater I worked at in my first month up here had a conversation with one of my coworkers (a conversation I found out about after the fact) about the best way to kill oneself. He brought up sleeping pills and she, in the moment, in a conversation with an odd, stoic, sometimes morbid man, replied with the thought that sleeping pills wouldn't be a cool enough way to go out. That was the last conversation she had with Scott because a few days later, he killed himself by ingesting a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of bourbon. He had worked that morning to prepare for that weeks Friday openings and was due in again that evening to work a closing shift but he decided he didn't want to work or do anything else ever again. In another case of the weird ways that the threat of violence can pop up unexpectedly, today at work, in the midst of a transaction with his wife, a man handed me a notepad and told me to look at the note on the first page. The note read, "I'm going to murder someone shhhhhhh." I, like my former coworker, am okay with having a dry, morbidly humorous conversation with someone and I didn't think much of it, but it was seen as a real threat by my current coworkers and they contacted the police about it. I sincerely hope the man was just trying to be funny and expressing his distaste over having to wait in line so long in a darkly comic, hyperbolic manner. I hope nobody shows up dead somewhere in the East Bay tonight at the hands of someone unknown. In addition to all this, there was a drive-by shooting on my block a couple weeks ago that was apparently not a big deal because it happens so often on this block. A Google search of my street + shooting came up with a number of incidents in recent years.

I hope to stick with violence on the page and on the screen, let Frank Bill and Joe Lansdale write fiction that brings those worlds to life between the covers of a book. Let Jason Statham take on an army of gunman onscreen, not outside of my apartment on the street. And as callous as it sounds, I hope the true crime stories I read happen far away from me, never to break my bubble of middle-class existence here in Berkeley.

I Saw Some Movies

THE RAID 2 - It's rare that a film can be released, let alone a sequel, that outdoes Quentin Tarantino at his own game. The Raid 2 not only outdoes its own 1st installment, it seamlessly blends what was so amazing about the first film with a sprawling story and an additional hour that the first film didn't have while losing absolutely none of the originality and vision that director Gareth Evans brings to his work. The aforementioned QT always brings story, humor and style to his displays of outrageous and extremely violent fight & shootout choreography in a way that has scores of directors, from green film students to seasoned vets, lining up to make an homage to him in the way that his films are homages to the masters of the past. Depending on who you talk to or how deep of a Google hole you go down, it seems as if The Raid, merely a couple years old, has already inspired a handful of copycats, from the gleefully bloody Dredd to the Paul Walker/RZA/Luc Besson film Brick Mansions this month. The conceit itself comes from just about every video game ever made, a one-man-army ascending from level to level, dispatching henchmen until the final battle with the big boss. Evans, this time around, kept in all the jaw-dropping hand-to-hand (or in some cases bat-to-skull or hammer-to-spine) combat scenes but added almost an hour and incorporated the entirety of the Jakarta criminal underworld for Rama, the hero of the first film, to infiltrate and dismantle from the inside. We also get a whole handful of nameless assassins (Hammer Girl, her brother Baseball Bat Man, an assassin known simply as The Assassin, among others) and mob bosses to color the landscape and add B and C plots. Evans has very clearly become a master at his craft in a very short amount of time and after this installment, he should have the ability to write his own ticket from here on out.Baseball Bat Man (who in one scene, calls his shot, a-la Babe Ruth, before drilling a baseball into the temple of a man 100 feet away) and even more-so Hammer Girl will surely become iconic in the way that Hit-Girl and Go-Go Yubari did after their respective characters hit the big screen. I can't recommend The Raid 2 enough and I don't know if there will be a third installment but if there is, Evans's groupies, me and QT, I'm sure, among them, will be there opening day.

THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN - The Galapagos Affair is an interesting true crime/nature documentary about early settlers to the small island Floreana, among the Galapagos Islands, and the strange occurrences that happened between 1929 and 1934. Friedrich Ritter, a physician hoping to flee civilization and any of his duties as a doctor, brought his mistress from Berlin, Dore Strauch, to Floreana in hopes of becoming a modern-day Adam & Eve and living off the land to create an isolated paradise for themselves. After word got out about the mad doctor and his wife, the so-called modern-day Adam & Eve, another German couple, Heinz and Margaret Wittmer, arrived on Floreana, much to the dismay of Strauch & Ritter. Margaret Wittmer was pregnant and hoped to have Ritter help deliver her baby on the island and live out some kind of Swiss Family Robinson scenario. The already tense & odd scenario was made even stranger when the self-proclaimed Baroness Von Wagner (pictured) arrives on the island and claimes it and everything on it for herself. She had two husbands in tow whom she used as enforcers to take over the lives of the two couples on the island as well as the residents of the neighboring islands as well as visitors. She had hopes of building a tourist resort on the island and at one point, had the crew of a visiting scientific expedition make a movie based on her life, shot there on the island. What follows is a strange and tense struggle between the doctor who wishes to be left alone, the couple who wants to raise a family there and the power hungry woman with delusions of grandeur that ends in murder and affected the residents of the Galapagos to this day. The film is just as much the story of the people as it is a documentary showcasing the beautiful vistas and the endemic flora & fauna of the famous islands. The film also features a voice-over cast, including Cate Blanchett, Josh Radnor and Diane Kruger, as the voices of the principal figures through their letters and journal entries detailing their time on the islands.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER - It could still just be the residual effect of having just seen it, but I feel comfortable saying that this is my favorite of the Marvel movies, dating back to Iron Man. The Winter Soldier sets itself apart by giving itself the distinction of being an old-school style spy film that happens to be set inside a big budget superhero film. Captain America is the willing but reluctant weapon the USA and S.H.I.E.L.D. uses against all manner of threats but now, when he starts to question what his and his agency's role is in the world, things start to go south. As a fugitive, Steve Rogers struggles to trust anyone in his life and when he learns more about his life pre-thaw and finds out that his former best friend has been turned into a super-soldier by Hydra, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s enemy, he sets out to foil their plot. That's all well and great, pretty basic boilerplate stuff, but what makes this film so watchable is the chemistry between Evans and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff who flirt by trying to find Steve a date with a number of women in the S.H.I.E.L.D. office. Romanoff, like Rogers, struggles to come to grips with the fact that perhaps she is just a cog in the machine and that she is just being played by whoever is in power at any given moment. The poster above helps evoke the feeling of one of those '70's spy films that Robert Redford might have starred in that the directors were going for (I think). This film seems more grounded than some of the other Marvel projects, the action sequences and shootouts & car chases seem like something out of any old action movie, not the endlessly greenscreened CGI heavy films of recent years, including, of course, all the Marvel movies. The final battle is similar to some of The Winter Soldier's predecessors, which was slightly disappointing, but what's great about all these Marvel films is that each one is a set-up for the next and the next Cap movie and the next Avengers movie should be pretty great. This film gave non comic readers like myself a lot of history on the character and the agency as well as a lot of little easter eggs teasing future Marvel projects and other nerdy aspects for eagle-eyed viewers to relish in. In addition, Marvel's foray into the world of television, ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., has seen its world directly affected by the events of The Winter Soldier, which is pretty interesting. The world-building that Marvel is doing is pretty spectacular, at least for someone like me who knows nothing of the decades of history in the comics.

Things I Want To Ask My Dog Who Just Got Neutered

Hey man, I'm sorry they did this to you. I blame Bob Barker, but you know it is supposed to be for your own good. Well, more like for the good of the puppies you no longer are able to have. If I had my way I'd let you sow those wild oats, but we can't risk you impregnating a stranger's dog when we take you for walks. Remind me to start taking you on walks. Anyways I was hoping you could answer some questions for me with the fresh stitches and all.

1. Does it hurt when you pee?
2. Hell, does it hurt when you walk?
3. How are you coping existentially with the fact that you can no longer have progeny?
4. Did you have plans for starting a family?
5. If you answered yes to number 4, how did you plan on supporting this family?
6. Okay I'm not saying there isn't a puppy night school, but what type of classes would they even offer?
7. If you answered no to number 4, what happened in your life that makes you feel that not having kids is the way to go?
8. How big of an influence was your abandonment in my neighbor's backyard where I found you on this decision?
9. Does it hurt when you scratch?
10. Do you feel, as they claim, that you are less aggressive now?
11. What impact do you think this surgery will have on your lizard/snail hunting skills?
12. Does this mean Boo Boo wears the metaphorical puppy pants in your relationship?
13. Will you be able to bark in a higher octave?
14. First the groomers butchered your beautiful fur coat and now this, will you ever trust Mom again?
15. What is your take on the Israel-Palestine situation? You strike me as a two state solution kind of dude.
16. Why do you bark so much at people moving their trash cans around?
17. Where do you think we go when we die?
18. How'd you like your experience with anaesthesia? That time is completely lost man, you'll never know what happened! I bet you've figured some of it out by now.
19. Why didn't they send you home in a cone? Television has made me believe this is a necessary accoutrement for freshly surgered dogs.
20. We're still cool though right?

Some of those got a little off topic, but I believe they're pertinent to the over-arching context of our relationship.

On The Conclusion Of Things

After 17 days, we finally learned what the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was. That the plane crashed and all 239 people on board perished in the Indian Ocean somewhere is what most (rational) people suspected, however, it didn't stop us from speculating about all manner of conspiracy theories, from hijacking and pilot suicide to black holes and the possibility of the very real MH370 being doomed to the same fate as the fictional Oceanic Flight 815. The idea that the passengers and crew of the Malaysian Airlines flight had landed on a mysterious island just like Jack Shepard, Kate Austen and James Ford had was a preposterous idea, but it didn't stop the internet from speculating if it had happened. I have a few theories as to why we do this:

-Our desire for instant gratification; everyone has iPhones in their pocket which have the entirety of the internet and all it's accumulated information available at the touch of a button. Since we can look up anything and everything in 10 seconds, we start to get restless when we don't know the answers to mysteries like this.

-Social media gives crazy people a place to voice their theories where other potentially crazy people might see them and believe them even more; since it's so quick and easy to post a theory or make a meme on Twitter comparing this plane crash to the one on Lost, people start to come up with other comparisons, make a GIF or a meme, throw it up on Facebook, and a bunch of idiots start talking conspiracy theories and making jokes.

-Our desire to be a part of something monumental in our generation, for better or worse; I think we like wondering if events like this will turn out to be something where we'll remember where we were when it happened. My father remembers exactly where he was when he heard about the assassination of JFK. I remember the exact circumstances of where I was when I heard about the events of 9/11 but I suppose now whenever something like this happens, we'll just read a tweet about it on our phone.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to current events, of course, it happens all the time with television shows, which is ruining people's expectations of television shows. A show like True Detective comes along and becomes a monumental success and the source of thousands of water cooler and Twitter conversations every week. True Detective is a good show, but it's not a game-changer, as far as television dramas go. It's a great show in terms of the way television shows are made and will perhaps influence the way they're made in the future, ie. limited series runs, a single writer/director team, A-list stars, but this is perhaps a subject for another blog post on another day. But because Matthew McConaughey is in the middle of the McConnaisance and we all love Woody Harrelson as much as we all like having a marquee show to talk about, True Detective became a cultural touchstone...for a few weeks until everyone was disappointed at how it ended. Everyone was expecting something epic from it; the theories ran the gamut from some kind of supernatural H.P Lovecraft inspired climax to Rust Cohle being some kind of criminally insane genius. Every Sunday night, the internet became a sounding board for talking about what just happened and speculating about what would happen next week. We do the same thing with Mad Men and we did it with Breaking Bad and we'll all decide some other show in a couple months is worthy of the conversation and we'll do it with that one too. When Breaking Bad was coming to a close, we were pretty much going crazy trying to figure out how Walt would go out and as it turned out...he went out in pretty much the most logical way. All the theories amounted to nothing the second the episode ended and we moved on. True Detective, like Breaking Bad, is about criminals and like all shows about criminals, the bad guy dies or gets caught in the end. True Detective was a pretty conventional show that looked exceptionally good. At it's core, it was a murder mystery and since we knew it was going to end after 8 episodes, it was a pretty good bet the cops (the good guys) were going to capture the killer (the bad guy). That's the formula and that's how TV shows get made, for better or worse. I'm not a big fan of shows that go for shock value over plot, but shows that routinely have that soap opera-ish, What The Fuck! moment are the ones people keep coming back to and they bring that expectation to shows like True Detective that were never going to have that. But maybe I'm just boring and I like things that are conventional, as long as they're made well.

If an airplane doesn't make it's scheduled landing, the most obvious explanation is that it probably crashed and since the earth is mostly ocean, it probably crashed in the ocean. It didn't secretly land on an island, it didn't follow a different plane so closely that the two aircraft would look like only one on a radar screen, it wasn't a conspiracy on the part of the pilots to crash the plane, nobody stole the airplane. Maybe when someone eventually finds the (red cylindrical) black boxes, we'll find out what caused this tragedy and maybe it will be something odd and extraordinary, but it will probably just be chalked up to something as routine and common as mechanical failure. I don't suppose the families are interested in conspiracy theories, they just want the facts right now, they want someone to explain exactly how this happened and why their loved ones are dead. Speculating that the plane flew into a black hole doesn't help anyone. I guess we get bored and want to believe something extraordinary is happening when in reality, it's the most plausible & realistic explanation that usually ends up being the truth, even if the conspiracy theories are more sexy or fun or interesting to talk about. Us realists don't usually get upset when something extraordinary doesn't happen because we usually knew we were right all along.

Three Movies In Three Days

NYMPHOMANIAC - The third in Lars Von Trier's "Depression Trilogy" is decent, if you know what you're getting into. Antichrist was an exercise is grief management that ended up with images of genital mutilation and talking foxes but was ultimately weird and interesting enough to be somewhat enjoyable. Melancholia was the more humorous of the two, which is strange considering it was about the end of everything on earth. But something about Kirsten Dunst moping around naked in the forest in the face of such certain tragedy makes you keep watching even though you know the ending. Nymphomaniac, the four hour opus, split into two parts released separately, is the most watchable. The sex is graphic, awkward, and abundant, the penis's (penii?) are ever-present and show up in every size, color and shape including Shia LaBeouf's, if you're into that. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Von Trier's go-to-gal for this type of thing, is great, as always, as Joe, who is found beaten in an alley and recounts her life story to the man who finds her and lets her recover in his flat. As a self-professed nymphomaniac, what Joe knows is sex and she details the major events of her life surrounding her many conquests. At one point, as a teenager, Joe and her best friend compete to see who can fuck the most amount of men on a train. Her friend is in double digits while Joe merely has had 6 men, although she wins the contest by giving fellatio to a married man in first class who paid for their tickets when they were being harassed by a ticket agent. Her prize is a bag of chocolate sweets. The film is ambitious but it's hard to get past the shock value of it all and try to get behind Joe (no pun intended) as a protagonist. I suppose it's a satire of how we view sex today, showing how soulless and empty and ugly it is, even though it's an act so coveted and desired by almost everyone. If the exploration of sex broken down in a clinical, mathematical way by a weirdo art-house director is your thing, than Nymphomaniac is the film for you.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL - A new Wes Anderson film is always cause for celebration and his newest didn't disappoint. Grand Budapest Hotel seems the most caricature-ish, the most constructed of the Wes Anderson films. The film, like the hotel itself, takes after the sweet confections made by a girl with a birthmark of Mexico on her cheek; layers upon layers of sweet, colorful substance, constructed with care and meant to be consumed similarly. It seemed to me to be the most cynical of Anderson's films lately, although I'm sure if I thought about it, there could be similar instances found in the others. In GBH, relationships don't last, beauty fades, death comes easily and often, and there is actually pure evil lurking around the corner. M. Gustave, played with the perfect amount of upper class grace and self-loathing by Ralph Fiennes, enlists the help of his lobby boy, named Zero, in clearing his name after the death of a woman who enjoyed Gustave's company and whose family blames him for her death. Anderson's films always seem to be the perfect antidote to the melodrama that always exists on movie screens. GBH in particular feels like the dessert to the heavy main course that was the 4 month Oscar season. What I always loved about Anderson was his attention to detail in creating these worlds on screen for us to escape into. It's not tacky, it's not twee, it's simply original and awe-inspiring and I can't wait to see this again and whatever world Anderson takes us into next.

NON-STOP - This is, admittedly, a weird time to be watching a feature film about a potential airline disaster, with the mystery of the missing MH370 flight still on everybody's minds the last couple weeks. Non-Stop doesn't really evoke any direct correlation between that potential tragedy and the one unfolding on screen, but it would be impossible to avoid thinking about it. Non-Stop more evokes 9-11, as if another 9-11 type event were happening in the age of social media, smart phones and instant news. Liam Neeson plays a troubled air marshal who begins receiving cryptic messages warning him that unless he complies with certain demands, someone onboard will die every 20 minutes. From there, the film turns into a whodunit where a whole host of characters, including Julianne Moore and Scoot McNairy, all look like viable suspects at certain points. I even briefly considered the 8 year old girl flying alone to London could be in on it. As with most big budget, mainstream films like this, if you wanted to take time to sit down and poke holes in the plot and the sequence of events, you probably could, but what fun would that be? Neeson is a law enforcement officer in the vein of Martin Riggs and John McClain, the shoot first, ask questions and get reprimanded for it later types. As social commentary, it's somewhat relevant and the conclusion and reasoning for the attack comes about kind of suddenly but it fits nicely with how these kind of movies usually treat their baddies. I have really been enjoying Neeson's late career resurgence as a complete badass action hero and Non-Stop fits into that category, again, if you're into that sort of thing. A fitting end to a few days at the movies.