Dispatches from Oblivion, September 2023
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public." - Paulo Coelho
Hello from South Central KY. September’s almost over, Summer is over and Autumn is here…and in my part of KY at least it means warm days and cool nights, and you can feel even cooler days coming in the air. The grass has all but stopped growing, so it’s looking like the next couple of times I mow it will be to chop up leaves.
No luck in the ongoing search for a part time job. The days get incredibly dull, even though you’d think I’d be able to keep myself occupied with TV, the Internet, and music. Not so much, as it turns out. I guess I’m too accustomed to working, to being a part of something. Having a point. I seem rather pointless these days. But moving right along…
WATCHED/WATCHING:
Joy Ride: silly, episodic but entertaining road movie that careens between vulgar/funny and serious. Great cast, I thought it was a blast really. Would make a good double feature with Bullet Train.
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Star Trek: Brave New Worlds
Star Trek: Picard
Been going down the Paramount + rabbit hole (or should that be black hole?) lately; while I have always preferred the structured universe of Trek to the more random and less coherent Star Wars, but I haven’t really paid attention to either franchise in recent years until I got curious about the animated Lower Decks and finally gave it a shot. I’m glad I did- it’s a blast, poking holes in the really hidebound mythology that ST and its spinoffs had accumulated over the decades. I also wanna be Ensign Mariner’s sugar daddy. Brave New Worlds is outstanding too, with a great cast led by Anson Mount as a dry-witted, reserved Captain Christopher Pike- you may recall him, the Captain in a flashing light box in the original series pilot- yep, this is a prequel. Picard gives us venerable Patrick Stewart in his most famous role, catching up with him as he’s now retired (unwillingly, I should add) and overseeing the family vineyard on Earth. Of course, they can’t leave it at that, so he gets involved with callback shenanigans that bring back plot threads from years gone by as well as many of the Next Generation cast as well. I’m only about halfway through season two, so I’ll withhold judgment until I’m done but I will say that while it’s not quite as much fun as the other two P+ Treks I’ve sampled, probably by design. No, I haven’t tried Discovery yet, guess that’s next.
Reservation Dogs/Dark Winds, AMC and FX’s Native American-emphasis dramady and drama, respectively, were both uniformly excellent. The former just wrapped its final season, I’ll miss those kids and their world and look forward to seeing what the cast does next. One actor the two series share is Zarn McClarnon, and the roles he plays couldn’t be more different- in Dogs he’s a res cop played more or less for laughs, though he manages to be cool just the same; in Winds (based on some books in a series called Leaphorn and Chee, if I’m not mistaken) he’s Leaphorn, another res policeman but this time his character is haunted by his son’s death under sketchy circumstances, an often troubling home life, and many other issues that a late 70s policeman would deal with in his situation. If he doesn’t get at least some kind of award nomination, well, it will be a shame. Both series should, really, but I won’t hold my breath.
Billions is back for its 7th and final season, and it’s as sharply written as it’s ever been, despite all the pop culture references they keep inserting in the dialogue, so much so that the characters have begun making meta jokes about it.
Finally, I’ve watched the first season of AMC’s rethink/update of Anne Rice’s vampire series, beginning with Interview with a Vampire, which is best approached by forgetting Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. This one picks up 20 years after the events of the original novel; Eric Bogosian plays older Daniel Molloy; nobody does weary cynicism any better than he does. I’m not familiar with the actors cast to play Louis and Lestat, but they’re both quite magnetic, especially Sam Reed as the complicated M’sieu de Lionheart. It started slow but soon sucked me in, no pun intended, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with season two.
LISTENING: John B. Sebastian, the first solo record by the Lovin’ Spoonful guy; it’s tuneful blues rock, released not long after his Woodstock appearance (there are several pics of him there in the gatefold jacket). A pleasant listen, and I’m beginning to think I’ll try to get some of his other subsequent Reprise releases. I’m a little annoyed though- I ordered my copy from a dealer on Discogs; I should have read the fine print closer or at least paid more attention- this record originally came with a lyric sheet, and the record was in the Warner/Reprise standard inner sleeve… but my copy doesn’t have those things. I didn’t spend a fortune for it, but I’d really like to have what seems to me to be a “complete” package, so I’m contemplating ordering another copy from someone else, who says in the fine print that “lyric sheet and inner sleeve included”. Things like this bother me, and I’m sure not many others.
Listen to John B. Sebastian on the streaming service of your choice.
Randy Newman Live, Mr. Newman’s 1971 3rd album release, is one I’ve been looking for for a long time. I love the cover, as well as Newman’s version here of his song “Last Night I Had a Dream”, which I first heard many years ago on a WB/R Loss Leader. This one didn’t come with any special foofoo so I am pleased with my copy, which plays well although the cover is a little dirty and scuffed. Can’t have everything.
Listen to Randy Newman Live on the streaming service of your choice.
Chicago X - I’m gonna come right out and say it, I rather liked Chicago’s early albums, with that blend of brass and rock they employed. I have most of those late 60s-early 70s albums, but I never really went into the teens with them, partially because I didn’t realize guitarist Terry Kath was on board for the first dozen or so. This, the “chocolate bar” album (that’s what the cover has on it, the band’s logo done like a Hershey bar), has some nice Kath work and some of the usual ballads (they didn’t get obnoxious with this, really, till Kath was dead and David Foster took over as producer), and is an overall breezy listen. Even the hit “If You Leave Me Now”, when heard on something besides a radio speaker in a ceiling somewhere, has nice instrumentation and a rich sound. I still have a couple of others I want to get, mostly because I have ignored them most of my life…but this is my latest.
Listen to Chicago X on the streaming service of your choice.
The Replacements - Tim (Let It Bleed edition): This brand new release of my favorite (and many others’) Mats album has been sparking online conversations for weeks now. The conventional wisdom about this one was “great songs, lousy production”, something that never really bothered non-audiophile me, who values overall sound and songs more than the nuts and bolts… but it was an issue with many, not that it affected the exalted status of this album with Replacements fans all that much. This release, though, features a brand new remix by veteran producer Ed Stasium, and it really does sound different, more “there”, bigger, more expanded, with more depth and less of the murk of the original. Vocal and instrumental things stick out where you couldn’t hear them before, and Stasium did do a little tinkering to bring this sort of thing out. There’s also a cleaned-up original mix disc as well as a live disc too, and it’s all of great interest and quality. Not being one who can drop great sums on these things, I’ll probably content myself to listen on Spotify once in a while and if I’m really being honest here, I’ll probably just go back to the original when I want to give Tim a good listen. I’m glad this exists though.
Listen to Tim (Let it Bleed Edition) on the streaming service of your choice.
I was gonna go into READING now but I’m trying to do one a month of these now, and it’s the evening of September 30th as I’m trying to wind it up, so I’ll try to get that next time. I’m reading a couple of books but haven’t gotten very far on any of them, so there’s not much to report anyway. No newish comics to go into either, really.
Fingers crossed, I’ll do this sooner next month. So until then, be good, and be good to each other.
I really like Strange New Worlds, though I still have 2 episodes left in the first season. I've gotten distracted with other shows for the moment, but will get back to it. I even bought a tie-in novel that came out earlier this year and plan to read it after S1.
As for Picard, the 3rd season is the really good stuff. Will be interested what you think when you get to it.
I was skeptical of the Stasium mix at first, in part because Tim has always sounded like it did, but it great on me with my second listen. I still think it neutered the beginning of "Left of the Dial," though.