EPISODE 437: PLANET B
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
So this week NBC announced it is launching its own streaming service, Peacock, and this tweet from screenwriter Eric Heisserer pretty much summarized everything.
You can’t fault networks for trying to get their Great Big Streaming dollars. But to take the admittedly and deservedly still popular The Office off Netflix, where people come for many things, onto a separate service and expect millions of people to come watching is like Hot Topic deciding to move out of the mall and expect people to keep showing up.
No one thinks about you, Hot Topic. You are where we go when we get lost headed to some place elsewhere and realize we have five minutes so why not.
Meanwhile Greta Thunberg came to Congress via the Atlantic –
*desperately hopes she shot her own version of Lonely Island’s I’m on a Boat video and sent it to her haters, and that in private she refers to them all as Shorty*
--and had this to say: “Please save your praise. We don’t want it. Don’t invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it because it doesn’t lead to anything.”
Thunberg’s appearance in the U.S. led to some great headlines this week about our super fun, everything’s going to be fine, we just need to focus on all the streaming services and keep rolling back all the environmental protections Global Warming Climate Crisis.
That second one is Scientific American negging Very Important Writer Jonathan Franzen, who has recently come to the realization that we’re doomed and as you know he writes Important Novels so Listen up Sheeple!
Actually, in all seriousness the SciAm piece has a great ending:
…Doom is a possibility; it may that we have already awakened a sleeping monster that will in the end devour the world. It may be that the very fact of human nature, whatever that is, forecloses any possibility of concerted action.
But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the Universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens. A flower in a garden is an exquisite thing, rooted in soil formed from old rocks broken by weather. It breathes in sunlight and carbon dioxide and conjures its food as if by magic. For the flower to exist, a confluence of extraordinary things must happen. It needs land and air and light and water, all in the right proportion, and all at the right time. Pick it, isolate it, and watch it wither. Flowers, like people, cannot grow alone.
You know what can apparently grow alone, though? Streaming services. Like HBO Max, which is like HBO insofar as it is owned by Time Warner, and not in that “Max” is short for “filled with shows that are have nothing to do with HBO, like Friends and The Big Bang Theory”.
My pitch for the tag line: “It’s not HBO, It’s Time Warner Diluting the HBO Brand.”
(I once won $50 for suggesting the Catholic teen youth group that I was forced to be a part of have as its tag line, “I’m rooted to Branches.” Which yes, makes no sense. But neither does the fact that HBO Max is going to be streaming BBC show Doctor Who when the show is going to air on BBC America.
And wouldn’t you love it if Time Warner just admitted that it’s way less interested in HBO’s decades of quality television than cannibalizing that pedigree to make it rain?)
To summarize:
Greta Thunberg’s challenge to humanity is as much about believing that we have some influence over the direction of our reality as it is about global warming.
A couple weeks ago in a conversation with composer Holly Herndon, technology writer James Bridle offered a thought that resonates: “Tools guide evolution on a deep level,” he said. From axe heads to Facebook, the tools we choose to use form who we are.
If tools shape our evolutionary direction, then we should take more conscious decisions over what tools do and actually decide that direction for ourselves. We can pick which way we want to go. Because our tools have been developed deliberately to grab our attention, to steal our time, to make us work harder, all of these things. Those are evolutionary redirecting steps. If we want them to go in another direction, we have to make very serious choices around which tools we use and how we design them.
In other words, Sir, step away from the Facebook. Put your phone down and raise your eyes slowly. SLOWLY. See the world around you.
Now make better decisions.
(There was also a great piece in the New York Times recently suggesting the best way to teach students who live in an environment of constant stimulation is to force them to take more time to think and look around.
Which is cool, cool cool cool, but if I could just ask, is this going to be on the exam?)
In between finishing one assignment and starting another, Thursday night I wandered to the Culver Hotel to hear some live music. The hotel is both oddity and icon, a mini-Flatiron-style time capsule of old L.A. abandoned in the middle of a street amidst the upscale shops and restaurants of downtown Culver City. The Munchkin actors and actresses stayed here while shooting The Wizard of Oz at the nearby M.G.M. studios, and apparently held blowout parties. The ghost of developer Harry Culver has also been seen walking its hallways.
As I sat listening at the bar I kept noticing this middle aged couple across the room. They reclined on a fancy looking sofa, and the man’s arms were sort of spread wide behind him while the woman with him leaned against him. He had this look of great bliss, the kind of expression you feel slowly expand across your face after a few days of vacation as you begin to realize you’ve been holding your breath all these months and finally you can breathe again.
I tried not to stare, but it was hard not to. Their happiness was like a helium balloon gently tugging us away from our worries up to a place where they were all just pretty blinking lights in the darkness.
Lots of media consumption this week. Between Two Ferns: The Movie is everything you would want in Between Two Ferns. Come for the Matthew McConaghey opening, stay for the Letterman jam.
I also started Netflix’s Criminal, four unrelated three part mini-series set in police interrogation rooms in the U.K., Germany, Spain and France. Think of it is as a European iteration of a Rod Sterling-type anthology series, great actors getting to do little televised plays, with a gentle frosting of serialization.
50 minutes set mostly in a small room where a couple cops try to get people to confess to stuff is not the easiest story to tell, though. The David Tennant episode is fabulous once David Tennant is allowed to be David Tennant, but that doesn’t happen fast. The first German episode also has fantastic performances, but again, a lot of time to burn.
And I checked out Ad Astra, aka Brad Pitt is Sad in Space. I found it a nice surprise. Much more adventure than I expected from the trailer, with substantive beats of Terrence Malick in between. For those for whom medieval literature is their disco, I’d say it’s an outer space Pilgrim’s Progress, Brad Pitt wandering through a landscape of conflict and uncertainty in search of his father-but really-spiritual-freedom. I really liked Pitt’s quest, and how it resolves.
(It also has an unusual-for-Hollywood dark take on life in the universe, the future and the existence of God, all of which it’s somehow able to turn into a positive, which was interesting.)
(Also, if you are ever going into space and have any doubts about your safety, TAKE BRAD PITT WITH YOU.)
Question a propos of nothing except also life: Is the genre of cosmic terror actually never about the abyss around us, the horror of the emptiness of the universe or the amorality of humanity, and always about the emptiness, the fear, the aloneness we see within?
Or put another way, is it weird that we seem to have this whole subgenre of Sad in Space movies, or are they the only kind that actually make any sense in the first place?
++ LINKS ++
I’m finding I have a lot of things to suggest of late. Rather than bombard you here, I’m going to post some stuff over the next week at my Tumblr page. Come for the links, stay for thoughts about Shazam and my obsessive-but-not-quite finished ramblings about fantastic comic book series The Wicked + The Divine.
For now, two tweets and a song.
Today in Animals Are Just Like Us (I swear I’m not looking for these, they’re just right there in my feed):
When your grandchildren ask you what did people ever get out of the internet, tell them about this:
And Song of the Week: Salted Caramel Ice Cream by Metronomy. I don’t know if it’s the music video of druid hipster gelato baristas versus a semi-hippy Snuffleupagus-hallucinating ice cream guy or the overall poppy sound, but I love this. Perfect for a Monday morning, or a world that seems kind of nuts.
Sometimes the most subversive response to despair and cynicism is to take a solar powered boat across the Atlantic. And sometimes it’s a public expression of joy. You bring the tunes; I’ll make some snacks. In the words of Kristen Bell, let’s dance this forker out.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.