HinesSight

I watched The Handmaid's Tale to learn what reelecting Trump would be like

It was a tough job, but I had to do it -- watching every second of every episode of the five seasons of The Handmaid's Tale, a show that I wasn't interested in when it aired from April 2017 to November 2022, but which grabbed my attention this year for a couple of reasons.

One was that I'd seen Elisabeth Moss in The Veil and was captivated by her acting. She's the lead character in The Handmaid's Tale.

Another was that I wanted to see what lessons The Handmaid's Tale had for our current political situation, where Donald Trump is seeking a return to the White House and the three Supreme Court justices he appointed overturned abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade in June 2022 via the Dobbs decision. 

In case you're not familiar with the basic plot of The Handmaid's Tale, which is based on a book by Margaret Atwood, Wikipedia summarizes it.

In a world where fertility rates have collapsed as a result of sexually transmitted diseases and environmental pollution, the totalitarian, theonomic government of Gilead has established its rule in the former United States in the aftermath of a civil war. Society is organized by power-hungry leaders along with a new, militarized, hierarchical régime of religious fanaticism and newly created social classes, in which women are brutally subjugated. By law, women in Gilead are forced to work in very limited roles, including some as natal slaves, and they are not allowed to own property, have careers, handle money, or read.

Sure sounds like the sort of thing rabid Trump supporters would dream about, albeit not to the degree religious authoritarians were able to pull off in The Handmaid's Tale. 

Power-hungry leaders? Check. Militarized regime? Check. Religious fanaticism? Check. Subjugation of women? Check. 

The Handmaid's Tale has many flashbacks where we get to see how the United States as we know it now became a nation, renamed Gilead, with totalitarian rule by men consumed with a lust for power and keeping women in the subservient place their interpretation of the Bible demands. 

At first it seems impossible that this could happen. But bit by bit, rights are extinguished until democracy and the Constitution are just memories. Today many Americans think that could never happen here. 

They need to think again. 

Project 2025 was embraced by Donald Trump until publicity about this scary agenda for a second Trump presidency became so strong, his campaign had to pretend to disavow it. There's a lot to dislike in the 900 page document. A BBC story describes some of what it would do, including these scary plans that relate to The Handmaid's Tale.

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control - a controversial idea known as "unitary executive theory".

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.

The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a "bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization". It calls for drastic overhauls of this and several other federal agencies, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.

...Project 2025 does not call outright for a nationwide abortion ban.

However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post.

The document suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family".

Since I watched some of The Handmaid's Tale every day until I finished the series, there were times when I thought about giving up on it. Not because it wasn't captivating. Because it was so dark and disturbing. 

The big lesson that I took away from my viewing was this: to prevent The Handmaid's Tale from being even a partial reality in our country, it's absolutely essential that Kamala Harris be elected president this November. Donald Trump has told us that he plans to be an authoritarian theocratic ruler if he wins. 

We need to believe him.

"We" being everybody in the United States who supports freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, but especially women, because they have the most to lose from a second Trump presidency, just as they had the most to lose in The Handmaid's Tale.

I loved the Olympics opening ceremony, including drag queen part

When I first heard that the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was going to be held on the Seine River, with boats carrying the parade of nations, I thought that this could be a big mistake by the organizers. Why not respect tradition and have the ceremony in a stadium, like it always has been?

Well, my thought was the mistake, not the decision to have the opening ceremony on the Seine. I recorded the lengthy ceremony. My wife and I are only partway through it, but we've loved what we've seen so far, and I know that we'll love the rest of it also.

France did itself proud. The opening ceremony was wonderfully bold, creative, innovative, breathtaking. I'll remember this one much more than all the other ceremonies I've watched, and mostly forgotten, over the years.

The boats passing by the cameras, filled with cheering, flag-waving, dancing athletes from around the world, was much more interesting than the usual march into a stadium. Being on a boat freed the athletes to express themselves more exuberantly. 

And the boats themselves were well worth watching. Each was unique. Some were large. Some were small. I expect that boat tours of the Seine are going to experience a big increase in ridership after the Olympics. 

The performance part of the opening ceremony held my attention to a greater degree than past ceremonies have. Being outdoors, with the "set" the banks of the Seine and other locations in Paris, gave the performances a vibrance that surpassed the performance part of previous ceremonies. 

As an open-minded liberal, the outrage of religious conservatives about the so-called Last Supper performance featuring drag queens made the opening ceremony even more appealing for me.

A NBC News story about the uproar showed how ridiculous religious fundamentalists can be. Aside from being bigoted, they lack both a sense of humor and appreciation of artistry.

PARIS — The extravagant opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics has caused fury among the populist and religious right in the United States and elsewhere, with critics especially unhappy about an apparent depiction of the Last Supper featuring drag performers.

A fashion show at the ceremony included a scene that resembled a modern re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, French actor and singer Philippe Katerine appeared as the Greek god Dionysus, painted blue and wearing little more than a bunch of flowers covering his modesty.

While some fans loved this unabashed display of French camp and kitsch, others — particularly those who espouse conservative or Christian beliefs — were not happy with it.

“In this scene from the Olympic opening ceremony, the famous painting of The Last Supper is recreated, but Jesus is replaced with an obese woman, while queer and trans figures (including a child!) depict her apostles,” Jenna Ellis, former 2020 campaign attorney to Donald Trump, told her 1 million followers on X.

She described the ceremony as containing “overt pagan and satanic symbolism.”

The Last Supper refers to the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his 12 apostles before he was crucified. It’s also a popular subject in Christian art, most famously depicted by da Vinci, who painted a scene that captured the apostles’ reaction to Jesus’ announcement of his betrayal.

Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening ceremony, defended the production when asked at a news conference Saturday about some of the backlash. Jolly said he was unaware of the criticism and wanted to display “inclusion.”

“When we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone, questions are raised,” he said at an International Olympic Committee media briefing.

“Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together,” he continued. “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that. In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

Right on, Mr. Jolly.

I'm sorry that you have to deal with the wounded feelings of our religious conservatives here in the United States -- who have no problem taking away the right of women to choose their own health care, and the right of LGBTQ people to express themselves as they wish, but get offended when the Olympics opening ceremony doesn't comply with their weird twisted sense of morality.

Just ignore them. And be grateful that you live in France, where you're an ocean away from the extreme religious nationalism of fundamentalist Christians in the United States, who are our homegrown American Taliban.

Five recent streaming shows that I liked a lot

These days, on broadcast television I mainly watch news and political programs. For entertainment, it's almost entirely streaming shows that appeal to me. Here's five recent offerings that I liked a lot, or at least enough close enough to a lot that I was eager to watch all of the episodes in the series.

They're ranked in the order of my liking, with (1) being my favorite.

(1) The Veil - Hulu
Amazingly, this was my first real introduction to Elisabeth Moss, who does a terrific job playing an intelligence agent tasked with finding out whether an Islamic woman in a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syria border, if I recall the countries correctly, is a relatively innocent member of a terrorist organization, or the mastermind of a plot that could kill many thousands of people.

The relationship between the women is fascinating. Each is adept at showing themselves to be someone who may or may not be who they really are. I was so taken by Moss, I finally have gotten around to watching The Handmaid's Tale, a series that I passed on because it seemed too disturbing. Yes, it is, but Moss is so good in it, I'm enjoying the first season, which I've almost finished. 

(2) Hacks (season 3) - Max/HBO
My wife and I have enjoyed the first two seasons of Hacks. Season 3 is just as good, maybe even better. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder have great chemistry together. It's a pleasure to have a series about an aging female comedian and her bisexual young writer be both so funny and so touching.

Good comedy really goes a long way toward making life seem more bearable, because it lightens and brightens my spirits. It turned out that a couple of days before I was scheduled for a colonoscopy I watched an episode where Smart joins a group of elderly men who have an annual party where they drink and have a good time, then all go together to get a colonoscopy. Not exactly realistic, but the jokes made me feel better about my own procedure.

(3) Franklin - Apple TV+
An entertaining and informative look at Benjamin Franklin's efforts to entice France to enter the Revolutionary War on America's side. Michael Douglas is totally believable as Franklin. Even though we know how history turned out -- we won the war and gained our independence -- this series shows how things could have gone quite differently.

The dialogue is crisp and well-written. Franklin's wit and personality come though loud and clear. We did some Googling of the historical accuracy, and it appears that this series is mostly based on fact, though naturally there's some fiction mixed in.

(4) Sugar -- Apple TV+
Colin Farrell plays John Sugar, a Los Angeles area private detective who drives around in a classic convertible, loves old movies, and has secrets that eventually are revealed in what for me was an unsatisfying conclusion. But I still enjoyed the intrigue as Sugar tries to find a missing woman who is a member of a famous acting and movie-making family. Lots of twists and turns, as there should be in this sort of show.

(5) The Sympathizer -- Max/HBO
This tale of a double agent who was a communist sympathizer in the South Vietnam army, serving as an intelligence agent who rooted out North Vietnamese spies, appealed to my love of spy thrillers. And it was interesting as a reminder of the Vietnam War that was so instrumental in my baby boomer generation's formative years (I escaped being drafted by a high enough number in the "birthday" lottery).

But the episodes had too many ups and downs for me to love this series. I finished it, but more because I was curious to see how it was going to end than because I adored watching the series. Robert Downey Jr. plays several roles, none of whom looked like Robert Downey Jr. to me, so kudos to the costume and makeup people. The Sympathizer is worth watching for the Asian stereotyping back in this country during the 1970s, which thankfully has improved a lot. 

Woman in wheelchair brought tears as I watched So You Think You Can Dance

There's a lot of crap on television. There's also beautiful, unforgettable, highly emotional moments. That's why I watch. A single moment of that sort makes up for all the crap.

My wife and I have watched every episode of every season of So You Think You Can Dance. The show took a hiatus during the covid years. It reappeared recently. So far this season has had a lot of memorable auditions, as the three judges select contestants for a Top Ten competition, if I recall the number correctly. (It's varied somewhat over different seasons.)

The audition that has stuck in my mind most strongly came from a 27-year old woman, Kaylee Bays, who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome at the age of 21. Watch this video of her performance, which begins and ends in a wheelchair. 

It brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. 

I can't stop thinking about what she said to the judges. That last sentence, "As I lose pieces of myself, I will dance until I am dancing with my eyes," is amazingly beautiful and inspiring.

My doctors predict that I only have about five years left of mobility at this level. I feel more connected to myself as a human than I ever have. As I lose pieces of myself, I will dance until I am dancing with my eyes.

I've had painful sciatica in my right leg, hip, and butt for more than four years. In December of last year it got quite a bit worse, though initially in 2020 the pain was so bad I frequently had tears in my eyes for that reason.

I can't walk very far now. I can't go to my Tai Chi class now. I can't exercise without enduring some intense pain. I feel sorry for myself, even though I try to be as positive as possible about the prospect of finding some relief once my appointment at Salem Pain & Spine Specialists arrives in ten days.


The example of Kaylee Bays, who is much worse off than I am, yet has a much bigger smile than I'm able to manage most days, makes me feel that no matter how bad my pain is, and no matter how little I may be able to benefit from treatment, I can still fight as hard as I can to keep on doing the things I like to do and need to do.

For Bays, that is dancing. However she fares in the So You Think You Can Dance competition, she's clearly a winner. CrippleMedia describes some reasons why in "Breaking Barriers: Kaylee Bays' Triumph for Disability Representation on So You Think You Can Dance." Excerpt:

In the realm of performing arts, individuals with disabilities often encounter barriers to showcasing their talents. Kaylee Bays, a dancer hailing from Los Angeles who performs on wheels, etched her name in history as the first wheelchair user on So You Think You Can Dance. Her poignant and deeply passionate jazz solo, set to Pink’s “Never Not Gonna Not Dance Again,” embodied Bays’ journey as a disabled dancer.

The song serves as a potential anthem for disabled dancers, Highlighting that disabled dancers can still enjoy their passion, even after diagnosis or as their disability progresses, by adapting moves to what is accessible to them. At three, Bays embarked on her dance journey and pursued a professional career until her diagnosis intervened.

At 21, she received a life-altering diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, after enduring years of unexplained pain. This syndrome causes joint dislocations, stretchy and fragile skin, and hypermobility. She was informed that she had to stop dancing, a prospect that left her heartbroken.

However, Bays was determined and taught herself to dance from her wheelchair. On the show, she candidly shared her feelings of isolation and expressed a desire for a fearless role model when she first became disabled. Now, she fulfills that role for her community.

Masters of the Air -- a moving series about the bravery of WWII aviators

Having just finished watching Apple TV's nine-part series, Masters of the Air, I can heartily recommend it to anyone who would enjoy a deeply moving portrayal of the American aviators who flew B-17 Flying Fortress bombers into Europe from bases in England during World War II.


It's based on a book with the same name about the 100th Bomb Group. At the conclusion of the final episode, some of the main characters are shown along with photos of the real-life aviators, plus a description of where life took them after the war ended. 

I found that highly emotional.

Partly because while I barely knew anything about my father, John Hines, as my mother and he divorced when I was too young to remember him, and I only was able to spend one hour with him in my entire life, a newspaper clipping my mother saved of her post-war engagement notice said that he served in the Navy for three years and "was overseas two years as instructor with the 17th Marine Regiment, engineers, attached to the First Marine Division." 

That Wikipedia link says that the First Marine Division saw heavy fighting in the Pacific. I have no idea what experiences my father had, but watching Masters of the Air, I felt that even though he was a Marine, not an aviator, and a jerk, I had to give him a mental salute for the sacrifices he and everyone else who served in the Armed Forces during World War II endured.

Over and over, while watching this series, I'd think, "No matter how badly my day is going, it's a hell of a lot better than being in a Flying Fortress flying into Germany before the allies had air superiority." Because in many respects those were suicide missions. Sometimes half or more of the planes were shot down.

Yet the crews were eager to keep flying, notwithstanding the extreme danger they faced, because it was so important for them to obey their orders and do their part in defeating Nazi Germany. 

Masters of the Air starts off sort of slowly. The first few episodes are devoted to getting to know the characters, two of whom are rather confusingly named "Buck" and "Bucky." After that, the bombing missions are realistic and tense. It takes amazing courage to keep flying through flak, antiaircraft fire, and fighter attacks in a lumbering Flying Fortress that has to be kept on a steady course during a bombing run.

Obviously it isn't giving anything away to say that Masters of the Air has a happy ending. The allies win the war! To see the B-17s used to drop food via parachutes at the very end of the war to desperately hungry people in the Netherlands echoed the air drops the United State is doing in Gaza now.

I like to watch TV with subtitles on. Half of Americans agree with me.

My wife, Laurel, and I agree about most things. That's one reason we've been married for 33 years. But we differ when it comes to watching television with subtitles (a.k.a. closed captioning) on. 

I enjoy subtitles considerably more than Laurel does. So when I'm watching on my own, I almost always turn subtitles on, especially with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. With sporting events and news programs, I usually leave subtitles off.

Though I'm 75, firmly in the Baby Boomer generation, not being able to hear dialog isn't why I like subtitles. I can hear what actors are saying just fine. It's not understanding what they're saying that drives me to tell the voice command on our Apple TV device "subtitles on."

British accents are the worst for me. For Laurel also, which is why we agreed that subtitles were a must for the Ted Lasso series, as it was set in England. 

I find that the main benefit of subtitles is being able to understand the plot much more easily. Too often actors either mumble their way through an important scene, or lower their voices almost to a whisper. I don't find subtitles to be a distraction, though my wife does.

It turns out that I have a lot of company when it comes to liking subtitles. About half of Americans say they use subtitles most of the time, according to a survey of 1,200 people. 

It's interesting that the younger you are, the more likely you use subtitles. Us baby boomers are the least likely to use them.

Here's the pros and cons of subtitles, according to survey respondents. 

Here's how our (not so) wild New Year's Eve went

If you think that your New Year's Eve was mild, not wild, in comparison to how others celebrated the last day of 2023, take heart: likely our night was just as unexciting.

We did go out. To a neighbor's house. Which took a whole three minutes of driving. (They have a really long driveway out here in rural south Salem; otherwise it would have been quicker.)

The get-together started at 6:30 pm. Most of the attendees were old, so there's no way we were going to party on until midnight. 

After snacks and conversation, Pictionary took center stage. Laurel, my wife, had played Picitionary, while I couldn't recall doing so. During the short drive I got tips from Laurel about the game. "You're given a word, then you draw a picture of it and your team tries to guess what it is."

Okay, pleasingly simple. Here's a photo of Laurel drawing her word. I'm visible over her shoulder studiously ignoring her (it was girls versus boys, so I wasn't involved in guessing her word).

When it was my turn, I uttered an expletive when I saw the word I'd gotten. "Pope." I would have been even more distressed if I hadn't had a glass of wine that relieved to some extent my first-time-player Pictionary anxiety.

Since there were red and black markers, I drew a stick figure with a red triangle meant to represent a Pope's fancy headgear. That elicited exactly zero decent guesses from my team. With my mind frantically racing, I came up with an idea: add a cross! 

Now the stick figure with a red triangle on its head had an arm with fingers holding a large cross. This elicited "Bishop," which became after some nonverbal encouragement from me, "Pope." Yes, I screamed, feeling like the King of the World. 

I blurted out, "Now I love Pictionary." But not enough to stay past 8:30, because I wanted to return home and compose a New Year's Eve post for my Church of the Churchless blog, plus save our dog from a lonely evening. 

When Laurel got home via a ride from a neighbor, we settled in for our traditional New Year's Eve watching of CNN where Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen hold forth in New York at Times Square. Thankfully, after last year's alcohol-free event, Cooper and Cohen had shots of smuggled tequila. 

Geez, CNN. Loosen up. They aren't driving. Seeing Cooper and Cohen get steadily more tipsy as the clock draws closer to midnight has always been one of the best things about watching CNN on New Year's Eve.

They were entertaining this year, as always. A memorable humorous comment came when Cohen was taking the lead in talking with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, I think it was, and the conversation turned to movies the three of them liked.

Observing the exciting talk about movies I'd never heard of either, Anderson Cooper said something like, "I'm used to being the Gay Guy in a group, but I've got to say, I have no idea what you three are talking about." Meaning, they were acting much gayer.

Paul Anka sang "Imagine" this year as the Times Square ball dropped at midnight. Laurel and I thought he did great, after we got over the shock of Paul Anka still being alive. He's 82, which isn't that much older than my 75. 

I was shocked to see on Facebook that some people trashed Anka's singing, saying it was way off-key. I'm a lousy singer, but I feel like I can tell if someone is singing well, and Anka seemed to do just that. See what you think.

Streaming shows I've liked recently

This is the third, and last, installment of my hit blog post series (in my own mind, at least) about streaming shows I've liked in 2023. First two posts are here and here.

Billions -- Various streaming services
Yeah, I know. This series, which had seven seasons, kicked off in 2016 and concluded this year. But I came late to the Billions party. I started watching it in 2023, can't remember exactly when. Once I started, I was completely and utterly hooked on Billions. I couldn't watch anything else during my Me Time for streaming. (My wife and I watch some shows separately, then together late at night.)

I loved the theme of greedy financial types jousting for power and money, with a federal attorney in the Southern District of New York battling not only his own demons but the financial guys/gals. Note: Laurel, my wife, has a strange distaste for Paul Giamatti's face. When we'd fire up Apple TV for our together TV watching time, usually an image of Giamatti would be on the screen, left over from my viewing of Billions. I had to rush to switch to a different screen before my wife had a nervous breakdown. 

A Murder at the End of the World -- Hulu
Very creative and unique take on the rather familiar plot of a brilliant "detective" straining to discover who the murderer is among a group of people in an isolated setting where all the suspects are known and can't escape the premises. Great acting with a pleasing didn't-see-that-coming ending. The stark snowy scenery is gorgeous. Show is set in Iceland, though I don't know if that's where it was filmed.

The Buccaneers -- Apple TV+
An engrossing period piece set in the 1870s. However, the music and general vibe is contemporary, at least when it comes to the five female friends who embark from the United States to find good times, and husbands, in Britain. It was easy to get hooked on this show. Lots of opportunities to think stuff like "Oh, no, he isn't right for her" and "Why can't the two of them get together?" Thankfully, there apparently will be another season -- though this seemed pretty obvious from the ending of the first season.

Lessons in Chemistry -- Apple TV+
This is a show about a strong independent woman held down by the mores of 1950's America. And, of course, her own hangups. There were times when I felt like giving up on the series when her plight seemed hopeless. Of course, that was just the bottom of a narrative arc, so I was glad when I kept watching and saw her triumph over adversity. It's a love story with unpredictable twists. And quite a bit of science.

Reacher -- Amazon
I'm enjoying Season 2 of Reacher just as much as Season 1. The best thing about the show for me is that Reacher isn't played by Tom Cruise, which he was in the movie version. That was so wrong, so out of touch with the Reacher I came to know through the books featuring this character by Lee Child, I could barely watch little Tom Cruise trying to act like a 6' 2" 250 pound muscular Jack Reacher.

Who, we learn in Season 2, can set off an air bag in a car by delivering a powerful kick to the front of the vehicle. (Don't try this at home; at least, if you don't want a broken foot.) Reacher is a nice guy who, believe me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of, because then he's not nice at all.

Streaming movies and series I've enjoyed recently

Watching entertaining television is as important to my mental health as is my evening dose of relaxing marijuana in a hot bath, both of which I enjoy every day. 

Though we have ten zillion channels (more or less) on our DirecTV subscription, I rarely watch any of them other than for sports and news. Streaming services via our AppleTV device is how my wife and I entertain ourselves, sometimes together, sometimes on separate televisions.

Here's some of what I've enjoyed recently.

Rye Lane on Hulu was highly enjoyable. My wife and I watched this movie together, since we're both fans of romantic comedies. I loved the film's overall vibe. Great dialogue, engaging characters, lots of humor, happy ending (guess that's the case with all romantic comedies). And even though the movie is set in south London, I could understand most of what was said without subtitles. A feel-good film. If you want proof that opposites attract, while also repelling temporarily, Rye Lane provides the evidence.

Extraction 2 on Netflix was a movie that I watched on my own, since I have a much greater attraction to lengthy violent fight scenes and stuff being blown up that my wife does. I wisely preceded my viewing of this film by watching Extraction, since it just made sense to see the sequel after the original. Rest assured that the basic plot is much the same in both movies. Virtually unstoppable guy skilled in hand-to-hand combat and firearms of all types is paid to extract an innocent victim from a nasty situation. Non-spoiler alert: Chris Hemsworth survived Extraction to make Extraction 2, and it sure looks like Extraction 3 is in the works also.

Beef on Netflix appealed to me a lot. Well, aside from the ending of the final episode. That was a letdown, though it didn't take away from the enjoyable drama of watching two Asian-Americans go after each other in marvelously creative and increasingly dire ways after a road rage incident between them escalates into an intense feud. They have to deal with Asian-American stereotypes, such as the high achieving mother who is always in control and never loses her temper. Not happening in Beef, for sure.

Rabbit Hole on Paramount+ provided me a Kiefer Sutherland fix after enjoying him so much in 24, where he played a character vaguely similar to who he is in Rabbit Hole, though also quite different. I enjoyed the twists and turns in this thriller, where you're never quite sure what is real and what isn't, the problem faced by Sutherland and his co-stars also. My main gripe with the series was that it often seemed like it was filmed with a dark filter over the camera. I guess the difficult-to-discern scenes were intended to reflect the shadowy nature of the plot machinations, but I got tired of not being able to tell what was going on. 

Ted Lasso on AppleTV+ deserves a big shoutout since my wife and I watched the final episode of the last season with a bittersweet feeling. Bitter, because a show we liked so much was ending. Sweet, because Ted Lasso gave us so many enjoyable moments over the years. It took us a while to begin watching the series, since we couldn't believe that an American heading to England to coach a soccer team even though he knew next to nothing about soccer could be entertaining. Wow, we were so wrong. The positivity and endearing corniness of Ted Lasso, a truly unforgettable TV character, hooked us on the show instantly. You'll be missed, Ted. (We really did feel like we were losing a friend as the final credits appeared on the screen.)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has screwed up Hollywood

I'm no superhero fan when it comes to movies. I can't understand their appeal, though I readily admit that I've only seen the first Wonder Woman movie, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Black Panther movie.

When someone in my Tai Chi class asks me if I've seen the newest Guardian of the Galaxy movie, what goes through my mind is, Good god, no; if I was confined to solitary confinement and had a choice between seeing Guardian of the Galaxy or staring blankly into space, I'd choose the blank stare.

But instead I just say, "I'm not into superhero movies. Is this one any good?" That stimulates an excited description with names of characters like Thor I've vaguely heard mentioned, but couldn't care less about. 

After all, I'm 74, not seven. I grew up watching Superman on a black and white television. I enjoyed his exploits. Until I became old enough to appreciate different sorts of TV shows and movies. So it baffles me how so many adults these days are obsessed with comic book characters.

A story in the June 12 issue of The New Yorker both explained the appeal of one set of superhero movies, the Marvel variety, and the deleterious effect these movies have had on other kinds of movie-making. Here's some excerpts from Michael Schulman's How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood.

Whether you have spent the past decade and a half avoiding Marvel movies like scabies or are in so deep that you can expound on the Sokovia Accords, it is impossible to escape the films’ intergalactic reach.

Collectively, the M.C.U. [Marvel Cinematic Universe] movies—the thirty-second, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” opened in May—have grossed more than twenty-nine billion dollars, making the franchise the most successful in entertainment history. The deluge of content extends to TV series and specials, with an international fan base that scours every teaser and corporate shakeup for clues about what’s coming next.

As in the comics, the M.C.U.’s chief innovation is a shared fictional canvas, where Spider-Man can call on Doctor Strange, and Iron Man can battle Thor’s wily brother. Hollywood has always had sequels, but the M.C.U. is a web of interconnecting plots: new characters are introduced, either in their own movies or as side players in someone else’s, then collide in climactic Avengers films.

In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” gave Hollywood a new model for making money: the endlessly promoted summer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied the formula, so that each blockbuster begets another. David Crow, a senior editor for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a “roadmap for a product that never ends.”

Twenty years ago, few people would have bet that a struggling comic-book company would turn a bunch of second-string superheroes into movie icons—much less swallow the film industry whole.

Yet the Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes. The shift has come at a perilous time for moviegoing.

Audiences, especially since the pandemic, are seeing fewer films in the theatre and streaming more from home, forcing studios to lean on I.P.-driven tentpoles like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine, which studies audience behavior, pointed to Marvel’s sense of “elevated fun” to explain why it gets people to the theatre: “They’re carnival rides, and they’re hefty carnival rides.”

Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked the air out of” more human-scaled entertainments. Whole species of movies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have become endangered, since audiences are happy to wait and stream “Tár” or “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” or to get their grownup kicks from such series as “Succession” or “The White Lotus.”

Yet even prestige television has become overrun with Marvel, “Star Wars,” and “The Lord of the Rings” series, which use the small screen to map out new corners of their trademarked galaxies. Hollywood writers, who are currently striking over the constricted economics of streaming, also complain of the constricted imaginations of TV executives: instead of searching for the next “Mad Men,” they’re hunting for Batman spinoffs.

Marvel’s fanciful house style has rubbed off even on Oscar winners. This year’s Best Picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” had a Marvel-ish meld of walloping action, goofy humor, and multiverse mythology; it could have easily functioned as the origin story for a new Avenger. Marvel, meanwhile, has colonized nearly every other genre.

“WandaVision” was a pastiche of classic sitcoms; “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” was a feminist legal comedy. Detractors see the brand’s something-for-everyone approach as nefarious. An executive at a rival studio, who called the M.C.U. “the Death of All Cinema,” told me that the dominance of Marvel movies “has served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie.” His studio’s comedies had been struggling at the box office, and he groused, “If people want a comedy, they’re going to go see ‘Thor’ or ‘Ant-Man’ as their comedy now.”

This is sad for movie lovers like me who aren't into comic books adapted for the big screen. The only good news I could find in The New Yorker story came near the end of it.

All this followed Iger’s comments, at an investor conference, that Disney would reduce its content, including endless Marvel retreads. “Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance?” he said. With all the oversaturation, palace intrigue, and brand deterioration, the M.C.U. juggernaut finally appeared to be showing cracks.

The release, last month, of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”—which grossed twenty-eight million dollars less on its opening weekend than the previous installment—did little to dispel the feeling that Marvel fatigue is real, and that Feige is spread too thin for the avalanche of content.

“The one downside to Marvel is that it all bottlenecks at Kevin,” the former executive said. “I think everyone’s agreeing that this is not the optimal amount of stuff.” Scientists predict that our own universe will begin to contract in the next hundred million years; the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having reached its outer limits, may be subject to a similar law of nature.

I'll miss Succession. But not what the Roy family stood for.

The past five years and four seasons of Succession, a highly entertaining and addictive HBO series, captivated me and my wife. 

There's never been a TV show that captured so brilliantly the devious machinations of a powerful family, the Roys, as the children of billionaire mogul Logan Roy vie to succeed him as the leader of his company. 

Without exception the acting was superb. The writing, exquisite. The plot twists, tantalizing. The humor, darkly funny. 

I was sad when the closing credits appeared on last Sunday's final episode of the concluding season. While the Roy family couldn't be said to be likable -- in fact, none of the primary characters were -- I deeply liked their unlikability. 

Well, let me take that last sentence back a bit, because some memories of touching moments in Succession just occurred to me.

The Roy family often would speak of loving each other, and sometimes that seemed to be true.

But only briefly. Then they would go back to playing their vicious rich people games. Lacking nothing material, having more money than they could ever spend, their concerns centered around who their father favored as his successor and how they were faring in various financial power struggles.

In last Sunday's New York Times, there was a story by James Poniewozik that captured what was most politically disturbing about Succession. I'd had vague feelings about what was said in the story, which was titled in the print edition, "In 'Succession,' Troubles of Rich Are Ours Too." But Poniewozik crystallized for me what was most wrong about the Roy family.

As is the case with most of our nation's real-world billionaires, the selfish desires of the super-super-rich aren't just something to be viewed from afar by us ordinary citizens as tasty soap-opera morsels. No, those desires have consequences for everybody, given how powerful the Elon Musk's and Rupert Murdoch's of our culture have become.

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story.

On Nov. 21, 1980, more than 83 million people — over three-quarters of the entire American TV viewership — watched “Who Done It?,” the episode of “Dallas” that revealed who shot the love-to-hate-him oil magnate J.R. Ewing. The mystery, which CBS milked for eight solid months, was a consuming obsession, a Texas-sized example of the power of 20th-century TV to focus the world on one thing.

On Sunday, HBO’s “Succession” will answer the question (or not) of who inherits the media empire of the late tyrant Logan Roy in front of a viewership of — well, a lot less than 83 million. (The show’s final season premiere had 2.3 million same-day viewers; delayed viewing on streaming brings the total average audience to over 8 million.)

Airing its finale to a much more dispersed audience is a fitting end to the saga of a family that got rich off the modern media market, whose final episodes are set against the backdrop of a country that is coming apart.

But numbers aside, “Succession” is in many ways the premium-cable, late-capitalist heir to “Dallas,” a prime-time saga that uses delicious dialogue and sibling rivalries to explore the particular nature of wealth in its time. It’s “Dallas” after 40-plus years of wealth concentration and media fragmentation.

The “Who Shot J.R.?” sensation was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of mass media’s reach. In 1980, three networks still controlled the entire TV audience, which they would soon have to share with cable. It was also a cultural turning point; prime time was becoming fascinated with the rich just as the Reagan Revolution was beginning.

“Succession” is very different from “Dallas” in the details. There are no twangy accents, assassination attempts, cliffhangers or season-long dreams. Its plot turns are simply, devastatingly inevitable: The show sets up conditions, gives its characters motivations and lets them act in their interests. (“Yellowstone” is a closer heir to “Dallas” in both cowboy hats and murder plots.)

And if the “Succession” audience is smaller, the money is, pointedly, bigger. Rewatched in 2023, the idea of luxury in “Dallas” looks quaint, almost dowdy. The aesthetic is Texan country club; the Ewing homestead, the size of a decent suburban McMansion, is a toolshed next to the Manhattan aeries, Hamptons manors and Italian villas that the Roys flitter among.

Some of this is a matter of modern premium-cable budgets vs. the grind of old-school network-TV production, of course. But it also reflects the changed, distorting nature of modern riches. In 1980, American wealth inequality was still near its postwar lows. Since then, the wealth of the top .01 percent has grown at a rate roughly five times as much as that of the population overall. Today, the very rich are very, very, very richer.

The holdings of Waystar Royco — Hollywood studios, cruise lines, newspapers, amusement parks, a king-making right-wing news channel — make Ewing Oil look like a franchise gas station. We know only vaguely how Logan Roy built his empire, but it was enabled partly by the media-consolidation and antitrust deregulation, beginning in the “Dallas”/Reagan era, that allowed his real-life analogues like Rupert Murdoch to make their own piles.

...“Succession” has long hinted at the Roys’ willingness to play footsie with dark political forces for ratings and influence. Waystar’s right-wing news network, ATN, leaves a popular commentator on the air despite his Nazi sympathies. The family backs a far-right presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken, who voices openness to the ideas of Hitler and Franco. (Mencken fittingly shares a surname with the American writer who said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”)

Late in the final season, the close presidential election is disrupted by a fire, apparently started by Mencken supporters, that incinerates thousands of ballots for his opponent in liberal Milwaukee. In exchange for Mencken’s regulatory cooperation in a struggle over control of the company, ATN declares the handsome fascist the winner, legitimizing his claim to power amid a legal challenge. The result leads to riots. But it’s great for ratings.

As for American democracy — well, good luck! Part of the fantasy of past rich-family sagas was that none of the drama affected you, even by implication. When Ewings did each other dirty in the oil business, you were never asked to imagine yourself, somewhere offscreen, seeing your gas prices go up.

“Succession,” on the other hand, argues that the problems of today’s hyper-rich inevitably become ours because they have so much influence and so little sense of responsibility. (Its main exception is the Pierce family, the owners of a rival media empire, whose blue-blood noblesse oblige comes across as patronizing and ineffectual.) We are swamped in the wake of their yachts and chopped up by the propeller blades, even if the billionaires, sitting on the top deck, scarcely feel a bump.

And while the damaged characters are fascinating, even pitiable, there’s no one among the Roys or their enablers worth rooting for. As with “Game of Thrones,” if you think the important thing is who finally ends up in the big chair, you’re missing the point.

My memory of Tina Turner

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.)

I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.

Bill Maher wrong about transgender athletes and Trump indictment

Bill Maher is a comedian. I like his jokes. It doesn't bother me when some of his one-liners mess with facts in order to get a laugh. That's what comedians often do: exaggerate in order to make a humorous point.

What irritates me about Maher is when his playing loose with facts continues from his opening joke-filled monologue to the mostly serious discussion Maher has with his two panelists.

Last Friday's show (April 14) featured Maher engaging in extended rants about transgender people and Trump's indictment. I didn't like what he said on both subjects.

Maher claimed that transgender women (who transitioned from being a man) were harming the rights of "real" women. I've never heard that from any of the women I know. The main argument presented for this assertion was transgender women competing in women's sports.

OK, this happens. Not often, but sometimes. Maher and the panelists, Katie Porter and Piers Morgan, spent quite a bit of time talking about a transgender woman winning a NCAA championship in swimming.

That was Lia Thomas. 

University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title after finishing first in the women’s 500-yard freestyle event Thursday evening.

Thomas pulled away in the final 150 yards to win in 4:33.24.

Thomas, who previously swam for the men’s team at Penn, has come to personify the ongoing debate on trans women’s participation in sports and the balance between inclusion and fair play.

This is a worthwhile debate to have. There do need to be rules governing transgender women who want to compete in sports where they may have a competitive advantage. However, Porter made sense when she said this should be left up to the organizations that govern women's sports.

And Morgan was wrong when he said, as I recall, that Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle by 50 seconds over the next fastest woman. Actually it was 1.75 seconds, not exactly a blowout. Plus, Wikipedia says:

In March 2022, she became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport after winning the women's 500-yard freestyle event. Thomas lost muscle mass and strength through testosterone suppression and hormone replacement therapy. Her time for the 500 freestyle is over 15 seconds slower than her personal bests before medically transitioning. Thomas's winning time of 4:33.24 was 9.18 seconds short of Katie Ledecky's NCAA record of 4:24.06. In other races, Thomas has been beaten by multiple cisgender women as well as by Iszac Henig, a transgender man not on hormones.

Further, the NCAA has instituted a transgender policy that addresses the problem of assuring fair competition between transgender and cisgender women.

At its January 19, 2022 meeting, the NCAA Board of Governors updated the transgender student-athlete participation policy governing college sports. 

The new policy aligns transgender student-athlete participation with the Olympic Movement. The resulting sport-by-sport approach preserves opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all who compete.

So it isn't true that transgender women are trampling on the rights of other women. Maher should educate himself about this before contributing to the transgender hysteria that, as Porter correctly noted, is endangering transgender people, who are subject to physical attacks at a rate much higher than their proportion in the general population.

Regarding Trump's indictment, this is a simpler Maher falsehood to address. First, he wrongly claimed that Democrats were after Trump because he had sex with Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress. That's untrue.

Hardly anyone cares who Trump has sex with, possibly excepting Melania, his wife. And Trump wasn't indicted by Democrats. He was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury that heard extensive testimony about false business records filed by Trump in an attempt to cover up the payment of hush money to Daniels a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

Maher blathered on at length about how Democrats were making the same mistake with Trump as Republicans did with Bill Clinton following his affair with Monica Lewinsky. But again, the charge against Trump isn't that he had sex with a woman other than his wife.

He's been indicted because he paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair just before the election where his misogyny was a central focus, and instead of reporting this as a campaign contribution, Trump falsely termed it legal fees.

Bill Maher is a smart guy. So is his staff. So I can't believe that Maher didn't know the facts about Trump's indictment. He knew. Maher just chose to say stuff on his show that was false, in order to take a cheap shot at Democrats.

Just like he took a cheap shot at transgender people.

Oscars 2023 was great, but I disagree about Best Picture

I always enjoy watching the Oscars show, and this year was no exception.

I liked having a host back on stage. The tag-team approach I recall from last year didn't work as well as Jimmy Kimmel providing a continuous presence -- for the whole 3 1/2 hours or so of the 3-hour show. One thing I've learned is to always add an hour to our DVR recording time, which came in handy this year.

The way I see it, watching the Oscars is a lot like watching sports. If you have a favorite team, you're going to root for them to win, even as you recognize that they may not be the absolute best team in the league. 

I'd only seen three of the films nominated for Best Picture: Top Gun Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I loved the first two films. I didn't like Everything Everywhere All at Once.

So I was pleased when All Quiet on the Western Front and Top Gun Maverick won a bunch of lesser awards.

It wasn't a surprise when Everything Everywhere All at Once walked off with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and a couple of other awards. But I felt that this film was overrated and the Academy went overboard on giving it so many awards. 

That said, I enjoyed the acceptance speeches of the Everything Everywhere All at Once winners. Jamie Lee Curtis gave appealing remarks when she won Best Supporting Actress. I just don't think that this film is going to be remembered as a marvelous bit of movie-making. 

It was quirky, creative, and trendy, given how the multiverse has captured people's attention, even though obviously there's no evidence it actually exists. A few years from now, I suspect Everything Everywhere All at Once will be viewed as a production that doesn't age well.

On the plus side, I was thrilled when Navalny got Best Documentary. The acceptance speech for Navalny was the only time Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine and his authoritarian rule of Russia was mentioned at the Oscars. 

And having watched and hugely enjoyed RRR, an Indian film, I was rooting for it to win Best Original Song, which it did for the catchy “Naatu Naatu.” The dancing that accompanied the song was as infectious as it was in RRR itself.

Jimmy Kimmel had some good jokes. Naturally I can't remember most of them. One that sticks in my mind came near the end of the show when he observed that whoever edited the voluminous footage of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol into a "film" that made the riot look like a tourist visit deserved an Oscar.

(It was Tucker Carlson of Fox News who fashioned that lie, of course.)

Lastly, my wife and I kept feeling sorry for whoever had to sit behind the woman wearing a large floppy white hat, or head covering. It seemed to us that this was a selfish thing to do, especially since no other people in the Oscars audience had anything comparable on their heads from what we could see.

I didn't like "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie.

Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime.

After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little.

Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters and interested in the plot, I felt like turning off the TV numerous times while suffering through what I"m pretty sure was the least enjoyable Best Picture nominee I've ever seen.

A review in The New Yorker describes how I felt about the movie, albeit in much clearer and more sophisticated language. (Its subtitle is "There's no there there."

The movie world is awash in fantasy, and that’s a problem, because fantasy is the riskiest genre. There’s no middle ground with fantasy because there’s no ground at all. Even a middling work of realism inevitably rests on experience, observation, and knowledge, but a mediocre fantasy is a transparent emptiness, a contrivance of parts that aren’t held together by the atmosphere of social life.

It’s the triple axel of cinema: when successful, fantasies are glorious, seemingly expanding the very nature of experience by way of speculative imagination. Some of the best movies of recent years—“The Future,” “Us,” and “The French Dispatch”—are fantasies, and their artistic success is doubled by their very resistance to the corporatization of fantasy in the overproduction and overmanagement of superhero franchises.

But a failed fantasy is a wipeout, and that’s the simplest and clearest way to describe “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a new film (opening Friday) by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a duo called Daniels). Were it not for the appealing and charismatic presence of its cast, it would leave nothing but a vapor puff that disperses when the lights go on.

Couldn't agree more.

For most of the film, there's a lot of cheesy Kung Fu'ish fighting scenes, interspersed with shots of people screaming loudly. The multiverse plot, such as it is, was confusing to follow, in part because I like to use subtitles, but when I asked Siri to turn on subtitles, the response was that they're already on.

Which was true as regards the subtitles shown when  Chinese was being spoken. But my problem was understanding the main characters when they spoke in English about what was going on in the fantasy world of the multiverse.

Of course, since it didn't take me long to realize that I really didn't care what the movie was all about, after a while the fact that the "failed fantasy" of Everywhere failed to interest me fit with the fact that I never got all that interested in the movie's realistic scenes either.

That said, I started off enjoying the portrait of a Chinese-American family trying to manage a laundromat while dealing with their intergenerational problems. But once the movie veered off into multiverse fantasies that seemed way too confusing to me, I realized how Everywhere could have been a better film with just a bit of fantasy and a much larger dose of realism.

A review in The Guardian says it well. (It also has a good subtitle: nothing nowhere over a long period of time. 

This hipster hypefest is an adventure in alternative existences and multiverse realities from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the “Daniels” – who in 2016 gave us the Jonzeian comedy Swiss Army Man.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcerting to find it frantically hyperactive and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdetermined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.

There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe.

But this mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there.


I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions.

I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity.

Last Friday's Real Time show was a good example of this.

His guests were Bari Weiss and Tim Ryan. I guess you could call them centrists. Ryan, a Democrat, ran for Ohio Senator against JD Vance in the 2022 midterm election. Weiss was recruited by Elon Musk to make a big ado about not much in the recent Twitter Files saga.

A central theme of Friday's show was how the American people are fed up with the woke positions of Democrats. (This has been a theme of previous shows also.) 

So there was a lot of tut-tutting about how in many parts of Ohio, and rural areas generally, having a "D" after your name can be a death knell for your election chances. OK, an obvious point, but fair enough. But I keep waiting for Maher, Ryan, or Weiss to bring up an equally valid point.

In virtually every large big city in the United States, having a "R" after your name pretty much dooms your election chances.

So why doesn't Maher spend as much time asking what Republicans need to do to win back urban voters as he does asking what Democrats need to do to win back rural voters? I also couldn't understand why Maher and his guests didn't bring up the 2022 midterm results.

There sure wasn't much of a sign that voters were fed up with Democrats because of their excessive wokeness. The Dems picked up a seat in the Senate, maintaining control of that chamber. And the Dem losses in House races was hugely below expectations. They took control of some Governorships and state legislatures.

Rather than House Republicans having a 30-40 seat majority as many pundits predicted, the GOP just has a narrow four seat majority.

Thus it seems clear that the Democratic Party is alive and well in the United States, contrary to all the doom and gloom about Dem popularity expressed by Maher and his guests.

Another thing that irritates me whenever Maher brings it up is the notion that all across the country, young children are being indoctrinated by teachers in the supposed Liberal Commandment of gender fluidity.

Maher keeps claiming that rather than teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and other core competencies, liberal elementary school teachers are spending much of their classroom time talking about how wonderful it is that some children have two mommy's or two daddy's.

Bill Maher loves to cite individual anecdotes as if this proves anything. Actually, it doesn't. If Maher presented solid data on how frequently teachers of young children are bringing up gender issues, and used an anecdote to back up those data, that'd be fine.

Instead, Maher likes to talk about a single anecdote that he or his staff dredged up, then uses that anecdote to draw broad-brush conclusions about how wokeness is destroying our educational system. 

That's a lousy way to make an argument. Maher should know better, but he appears to have entered a largely fact-free zone on his show. 

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

When Maher and his guests talked about the horrible food in the school meal program, they didn't mention that during the Trump years, it was Republicans who stood in the way of making school breakfasts and lunches more nutritious. 

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did.

Here they are.

Slow Horses - Apple TV+
This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in a dingy backwater building. 

Gary Oldman is terrific as the cynical leader of the group. He casts off humorous insults to his team in a marvelous fashion, though deep down (very deep down), his character loves them. Or at least likes them. Season 2 was better than Season 1, which was very good itself.

The Recruit - Netflix
Another fresh look at the world of spying, this time from the American side of the Atlantic. We follow the ups and downs of a young 20-something lawyer newly hired by the CIA. He quickly learns that in an organization dedicated to scheming, the people he works with can't be trusted because they're schemers.

Just as he is. Like Slow Horses, The Recruit is a pleasing blend of action, humor, and personal relationships. I don't know if it's a realistic reflection of what it's like to work at the CIA, but it rings true to me. I look forward to a Season 2, though I found the final episode of Season 1 to be unsatisfying.

Fleishman is in Trouble - Hulu
A doctor with marriage problems who lives in New York City. Seems like a familiar premise for a show. That's why my expectations for it weren't very high. But Fleishman is in Trouble was enjoyable viewing. Mostly.

I found the darker episodes of the series to be kind of difficult to watch, since they were such a contrast with the lighter, humorous episodes. Clair Danes plays Dr. Toby Fleishman's wife. I'm a big fan of Danes, having loved her in Homeland. Here she's another mentally disturbed character who's fascinating to watch as she emotes her struggles.

What I liked the most about this show was how skillfully it portrayed all the characters as both flawed and virtuous. Just when I thought I knew who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were, I was surprised to learn that the good were also bad, and the bad were also good.

My liberal defense of Yellowstone, the Paramount show

When it comes to my TV watching, I care a lot more about entertainment than political correctness.

This explains why liberal me, who was unalterably opposed to the Bush administration's use of torture during the so-called War on Terror, could cheer on Jack Bauer in the 24 series when he'd use the cord of a table lamp to shock a suspected terrorist into divulging details of a dirty bomb threat.

It also explains why I'm a huge fan of Yellowstone, the Paramount series now in Season 5, even though a TIME magazine story asked a pertinent question in its title: "Is Yellowstone a Red-State Show? According to Fans, the Answer Is Complicated."
Download Is Yellowstone a Red-State Show? It's Complicated | Time

Well, not to me, for the same reason 24 wasn't a right-wing torture-loving show.

Yellowstone is a gripping tale of a ruthless ranching family who use means both fair and foul to protect their property from developers who want to make Montana into a playground for wealthy people with few ties to the state.

It's a lot like Succession. But Succession is about well-off urban people engaging in devious behavior and family disputes, while Yellowstone is about well-off rural people engaging in devious behavior and family disputes.

That one word difference, urban vs. rural, seems to be a factor in the reaction to the two shows by media elites. The TIME story says:

Since 2018, Yellowstone has become one of the most-watched scripted dramas on cable, often out-drawing shows on major networks. January’s fourth-season finale had over 9 million viewers the night it aired (excluding those who streamed it later), nearly double the number that watched the Season 3 finale.

By comparison, the Emmy-winning, critically acclaimed HBO drama Succession,which tells a similar story about a wealthy family fighting to hold on to its place in the modern world, drew 1.7 million on all platforms (including some 600,000 watching on cable) for its third-season finale a few weeks earlier.

But who is watching Yellowstone? That’s a question that tends to perplex people who write about TV for a living.

When the show’s fifth season debuts on Nov. 13, it will likely dominate the ratings yet again, all while drawing little attention from major media outlets or the people who hand out awards (it has been nominated for one Emmy.) Rotten Tomatoes links to 10 critic reviews for its fourth season, versus 141 for Succession’s third.

Recently I saw a post in my Facebook feed from someone who said that they'd watched the first episode or two of Yellowstone Season 1, but didn't like how violent it was and what a jerk Rip, the ranch foreman, is.

I left a comment on the person's post saying that I've watched every episode of the first four seasons and love Yellowstone, noting that I hope they'll give it more of a try, because the characters are complex. How they appear in the initial episodes isn't how they look as we learn more about them.

This excerpt from the TIME story resonates with me.

While it’s true that a lot of big hit shows have only a minimal presence in the larger popular culture—no one’s handing out Emmys or writing weekly think-pieces about NCIS: Hawaii, after all—it sure feels like Yellowstone should be discussed more.

Its star, Kevin Costner, is an Oscar winner. Co-creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan wrote the critically acclaimed movies Sicario and Hell or High Water. His stories tackle corporate greed, class conflict, racial identity—all topics that usually get cultural commentators excited.

Republicans who support candidates vowing to protect faith, family, and the Second Amendment could certianly be drawn to Costner’s John Dutton, a rugged Montana ranching magnate who pines for the good old days and uses brute force against his political enemies. But the show does not seem to be trying to actively court that crowd.

Yellowstone’s premise is in line with classic nighttime soaps like Dallas, in which nearly every character has a little bit of angel and a little bit of devil in them, and where the stories sometimes dispense with logic to get to the next cliffhanger.

The issues Yellowstone raises about land stewardship and big business are relevant, but the plots are more about romance, violence and feuds—all played out against a gorgeous Montana backdrop.

One reason I find Yellowstone so refreshingly different is its seemingly mostly accurate portrait of life on a giant ranch. My wife largely likes Yellowstone for the horses. There's an amazing scene of the cowboys rounding up hundreds of horses, galloping full speed with the herd down a steep slope.

Directing Yellowstone requires a different set of skills than directing Succession, for sure. Ditto for the actors. The men and women who display some astounding riding skill, not to mention the skill of the horses they ride, aren't going to be found in a typical Hollywood casting call.

I also admire how multi-talented the ranch hands are. They can hunt, fish, train horses, mend fences, drive huge horse trailers, rope, fight, cheat, lie, play poker, murder, and a heck of a lot more besides. Those men, along with a few tough women, are the sort you'd want to have on your side.

Sure, they do a lot of nasty stuff. But that's a positive feature of Yellowstone, not a reason to dislike it. I enjoy shows where every character is a mixture of good and bad, light and dark, morality and immorality. 

Because that's human nature. It's just a matter of degree. We're all the conniving yet admirable characters of Yellowstone, even if we aren't starring in our own TV series.

Taylor Tomlinson's stand-up comedy heals my frazzled psyche

My big problem with life is... (drumroll please)... LIFE. 

Meaning, insofar as I know what I mean, but now that I just wrote this blog's topic sentence, I'm stuck with explaining it, no matter how many problems get fixed in my life, new ones pop up like a perpetual motion machine designed by a sadist.

I suspect most people feel this way. So what are we to do? 

Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll only can take us so far, especially if we're (OK, me) so old, sex is starting to  look like the car that zipped by in the other lane and now is so small in the rearview mirror it's barely discernible; drugs are limited to marijuana because dealers of harder stuff are find to find when you're 73; and the last rock band truly worth listening to in your entirely personal opinion was Cream over fifty years ago.

Meditation? Yeah, I've been there and done that for a really long time.

The fact that I'm still as messed up in 2022 as I was in 1969 when I started to meditate every day tells me that based on that extensive flat trend line, the chance of me taking a sudden quantum leap to a blissful state of enlightenment is vanishingly small.

So I'm becoming increasingly convinced that television is the solution to my problems.

After all, when I'm engrossed in a good show, I forget about what was bothering me before I turned the TV on. Sure, those bothers are still going to be there when I turn the TV off, but at least I've had a break from worrying about my medical ailments, my psychological defects, global warming, why our dog won't come when I call her, Trump becoming president again, and a host of other anxieties.

In the realm of television, I'm enamored with certain types of stand-up comedy. The qualities I enjoy are honesty, observational humor as opposed to jokes, self-awareness, and, naturally, a comic's ability to laugh at themselves.

When I find a stand-up comic like that, my problems feel less important not so much because I've hidden them under a Bed of Distraction, but because the comic has laid out their own problems on the bedspread for me and anybody else watching for them to see -- which makes my own vicissitudes seem less serious, since if the comic can laugh at their problems, I can do the same with mine.

Or at least try to do the same with mine. Not surprisingly, I tend to find other people's problems more humorous than my own, though I'm working on looking on my own life as if it was material for a Netflix special.

Like "Look at You" featuring the hugely talented comic Taylor Tomlinson. I learned about her from a newspaper story about leading comedians with televised shows. The description of Tomlinson's act appealed to me the most, so my wife and I watched "Look at You" last week.

We loved it. 

Tomlinson starts off by talking about her mental problems and psychotherapy experiences. I figured that would be worth about five minutes, then she'd be on to other subjects. But no, Tomlinson stuck with that highly personal theme for, I don't know, around 20 minutes of the one hour stand-up show, maybe even longer.

For someone so young, about 25, she's remarkably self-aware. And more importantly, really funny. Tomlinson has an appealing manner about her that makes her easy to watch.

Here's some You Tube videos with material from "Look at You."

RRR is a terrific action movie about India under British domination

I just finished watching RRR -- "Rise Roar Revolt" -- a movie from India on Netflix that's a mind-blowing three-hour combination of action, thriller, romance, dance, superhero, and probably other genres that I could recall if my mind wasn't in such a blown state.

(It's got English captioning, and quite a bit of the dialogue is in English.)

I loved RRR. India fascinates me. I've visited the country twice and was a devotee of an Indian guru for 35 years, which led to me spending a lot of time around people from India. So when I read about the movie in a Rolling Stone review, I knew I had to see this highly popular film.

A subversive, supersized screed set in 1920’s Delhi, the latest film from the Telugu writer-director S.S. Rajamouli — its title RRR means different things depending on what translated version you see, but the Hindi cut opts for “Rise, Roar, Revolt” —  has already broken box office records in India and earned a rapidly growing cult following everywhere else, notably the States.

The first two paragraphs of the Rolling Stone review provide a good feel for this high-energy movie.

It’s tough to pinpoint the exact moment that the movie hooks you; mileage will vary per viewer. For some, it might be right from the get go, during a Melodrama 101 preamble involving a kidnapped child and casual colonial cruelty that leaves corpses in its wake. Others may find themselves leaning forward when a supercop, sporting the world’s most luxurious old-timey mustache, single-handedly beats back a crowd of thousands to catch a rock-throwing culprit. Or maybe the sight of a ripped, shirtless man sprinting through a forest and narrowly avoiding a midair collision between an angry wolf and an even angrier tiger is your investment tipping point.

Don’t worry: Should you somehow not find yourself entertained or exhilarated within the first 20 minutes or so of RRR, a.k.a. one-ninth of this film’s running time, stick around. There’s more. A lot more. Like an emergency rescue mission involving a sinking raft, a flaming train, a horse, a motorcycle, some rope and the flag of India. And a siege on a diplomat’s mansion punctuated by a CGI menagerie tearing into the British Raj’s troops. And the most frenetic, kinetic, class-conscious dance-off to ever double as a cultural fuck-you. And bromantic montages, slo-mo brooding, flashbacks that constitute their own short films, a man kicking an arrow through a tree trunk into another man’s head, and an acrobatic sequence involving a hero leaping, fighting and shooting legions of enemy soldiers while perched on his best friend’s shoulders that would make Butch and Sundance slow-clap.

A laudatory review in The New Yorker also is worth reading. It notes that while RRR is wildly nationalistic (I don't like Prime Minister Modi's Hindu nationalism, but I'm sure we both loved RRR), it does so in an appealing fashion that transcends modern politics.

When it comes to cinematic propaganda, blatant is better than insidious. Overt advocacy has the virtue of candor and the vigor of fervent emotion. A movie such as “Top Gun: Maverick” hides its messages under the guise of unexceptionable realities, whereas another new, high-energy, political action spectacle, the Indian film “RRR” (which was released theatrically in March and is now streaming on Netflix, where it’s in the top five), makes its statements explicit. It thrusts its imaginative artistry thrillingly and gleefully to the fore.

Here's the official trailer in Hindi.

And here's a great bollywood style dance-off. Be aware that there's quite a bit of gore and violence in RRR, but it goes along with the story line.

The shows I love to stream tell a lot about me

After writing the title to this blog post, I had a strong feeling of obviousness wash over me. OK, so be it. I plead guilty to stating the obvious.

What people like to watch on TV says a lot about them. So does the music they like to listen to. So do the books and magazines they like to read. 

Still, I find it fascinating how our personality gets projected into those sorts of activities. It's almost as if we don't need to meditate, engage in psychotherapy, or stare into the darkness of a coffee house expresso to know our self.

Maybe I just need the notebook in which I write down shows my wife and I might enjoy on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, Apple TV+ and whatever other streaming services we have that I can't remember.

Plus my memory of which shows captivated me so much, I could barely wait to see the next episode. Which include, roughly in the order of my passion for them:

(1) Tehran. I'm watching this Israeli show on Apple TV+, which requires closed captioning. A spy thriller, the plotting and character development is much beyond 24 or Homeland, in my utterly personal opinion. I'll be sad when I finish Tehran, I love it so much.

(2) Yellowstone. The scheming, killings, and yes, morality (by their standard) of the Dutton family as they try to save their giant Montana ranch from greedy developers kept me glued to the screen from the first episode. Family dysfunction, mixed with family love, was never so interesting.

(3) Succession. Well, except for Succession. The Roy family members are more polished than the blunt cowboy style of Yellowstone, but they're equally vicious in their privileged rich fashion. None of the Roy's can trust each other, yet they all do their best to pretend that they can. Great entertainment. 

(4) Lupin. Nothing like a good heist story to get my juices flowing, especially when it is set in Paris and features a memorable character who seeks to avenge his father by taking on the persona of a fictional thief with a social conscience. 

(5) Anatomy of a Scandal. Did a Member of Parliament rape his assistant with whom he was having an affair, or was it just a plain old affair, as his wife hopes? Can he be trusted? Seems like a nice guy when he's home with the kids; not so much when he's acting like a jerk. Engrossing drama.

So is there any common denominator to these shows that might reveal some deep dark secret about myself? Sadly, not really, since it isn't a secret that I like spy novels, being especially enamored of Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series.

I enjoy the TV shows listed above because they feature people who are a complex mixture of good and bad, positive and negative, moral and immoral. Just like everybody, really, simply taken to an extreme. I love it when I both admire a character and detest a character.

Doesn't really matter if they're a saint or a sinner at any particular moment, so long as they're interesting.

Oscars blow it by a pitifully minor mention of Ukraine

Tonight's Oscars show was viewed around the world. It used to get hundreds of millions of watchers. Maybe that's less now.

Regardless, both those who put on the Oscars and those who won awards blew it by failing to take a much stronger stand in support of Ukraine against Russia's unprovoked invasion.

I watched every minute of the show.

I kept waiting for someone -- a presenter, an award winner, anyone -- to make some impassioned remarks about the bravery of the Ukrainian people and the need for freedom lovers everywhere to support their battle against Russia.

Instead, all we got was the bare minimum: a screen with a bunch of words that called for a moment of silence for Ukraine, along with a request to donate to Ukrainian relief.

Better than nothing. But just barely. 

I heard a lot of talk in support of deaf people, of LGBTQ people, of Black people. But there were only two verbal references to Ukraine.

After a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Godfather movies, if I recall the number of years correctly, one of the honorees said as he was leaving the stage, "Viva Ukraine." 

Wow. The Oscars ran about 40 minutes over the scheduled three hours.

So there wasn't time for a couple of minutes to honor the freedom fighters in Ukraine, who, while the Hollywood elite were congratulating themselves for being able to make movies, were risking their lives to combat the biggest invasion of a European country since World War II?

I guess not. Looks like the Oscars had decided that what the world needs now is 3 hours and 40 minutes of an award show devoted to wealthy people involved with movie-making patting themselves on the back.

The other verbal reference to Ukraine came from Amy Schumer, one of the three hosts, who said after making a humorous remark, "There's a genocide going on in Ukraine and women are losing all their rights."

Huh? Thousands of Ukrainians are indeed being killed. That arguably is a form of genocide, but it also is simply Russia bombing civilian areas rather than military targets. And I have no idea what Schumer meant by women losing all their rights.

Maybe she got Ukraine mixed up with Afghanistan, where the Taliban are indeed taking away women's rights.

Actually, many women and children in Ukraine are losing their lives, not their rights. Russia is forcing lots of Ukrainians to flee to Russia from cities being bombed by Russian forces, so I guess that could be considered a loss of rights.

I found this year's Oscars entertaining, but also deeply irritating. It astounded me that no presenter or award winner, neither of whom is at a loss for words, didn't use the world stage they found themselves on to draw attention to the horrors being inflicted on Ukraine by Russia.

Instead, I watched Will Smith rush up on stage and punch Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about Smith's wife. OK, she has hair loss, and Rock joked about that.

Chris made a comment about Jada's shaved head ... saying he couldn't wait to see 'G.I. Jane 2' -- which got some groans from the crowd, to which he just sorta shrugged off.

Chris didn't think he'd crossed a line, but Will clearly did ... because he stormed the stage and literally socked the dude in the face. A stunned Rock exclaimed, "Wow. Will Smith just smacked the s*** outta me."

The American broadcast on ABC muted, and even froze, but in other countries it continued ... and Will shouted "Keep my wife's name out your f****** mouth" twice to Chris.

Will Smith later made one of the most annoying acceptance speeches I've ever seen when he won Best Actor for his role in "King Richard." Smith kept saying that God had chosen him to do some amazing things, which apparently included punching Chris Rock and swearing at him.

Religious hypocrisy is the worst kind. Will Smith showed that tonight.

I liked Dave Chappelle's Netflix show, transgender jokes and all

Usually a joke is just a joke. Let's not over-think it, folks. Standup comedians are supposed to push the boundaries of what's socially acceptable.

And, naturally, be funny doing so.

Dave Chappelle's new Netflix show, "The Closer," succeeds on both counts in my obviously personal opinion. 


Others disagree. That's fine. If they feel that Chappelle was unduly nasty toward the LGBTQ community, with his special focus on transgender people, they're entitled to their own obviously personal opinion.

Me, I don't expect comedians to be paragons of virtue. I want them to make me laugh, cause me to look at life in an off-beat fashion, lead me to see familiar things through the lens of a comedic mind.

Tonight I finished watching The Closer. I enjoyed all 72 minutes of it. Having heard about the controversy over Chappelle's treatment of gays and transgender individuals, I was prepared to not like the show.

Instead, I didn't hear any jokes that made me think, Chappelle went too far. 

I must have a lot of company, since The Closer has a 96% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, I suspect many, if not most, of those who decry Chappelle's insufficient wokeness haven't seen The Closer.

They just know it's bad, because others who lack a sense of humor and want everybody to conform to their rigid view of What Can Be Spoken In Public told them to be outraged by what Chappelle says.

He ends with a moving story of a transgender woman who comes to his smaller shows in the Bay Area and laughs uproariously at his LGBTQ jokes. Having learned that she has attempted standup comedy, he invites her to open for him in a larger venue.

She bombs for 45 minutes. But she finds a seat in the front row and watches Chappelle's routine, rather than slinking into a dark corner as most comedians would.

Chappelle's telling of this story was both funny and moving.

He says that she'd been drinking quite a bit. Throughout his routine the woman and he engaged in banter about transgender issues. She turned out to be really funny. Just not during her 45 minutes on stage.

The audience was laughing. Chappelle says it was a great experience for him to have the back and forth with his transgender friend during his routine. 

When Chappelle started getting criticized on Twitter by LGBTQ activists, the transgender woman stood up for him. That caused the activists to go off on her. 

Six days later she killed herself. 

Her supposed tribe, the LGBTQ community, had turned on her because she wasn't sufficiently fanatical in her devotion to their ideological purity. Instead, Chappelle said that she was a member of his tribe, the tribe of standup comedians who honor unfettered speech rather than political correctness.

Chappelle says that the transgender woman told him that she didn't want to be understood by him. She wanted him to respect her struggle as a human being:“I don’t need you to understand me, I just need you to believe… I’m having a human experience.” Beautiful. 

Everybody struggles in one way or another. Everybody faces challenges.

Blacks. Whites. Everybody. Men. Women. Everybody. Straight people. LGBTQ people. Everybody. Religious people. Atheists. Everybody. Democrats. Republicans. Everybody. Old. Young. Everybody. 

I loved watching the faces of Chappelle's audience smile and laugh during his show. Sure, there were a few serious-looking faces. But clearly his diverse audience was enjoying Chappelle's skillful comedy.

We've got to be able to laugh at each other and with each other. No exceptions.

Blacks can make fun of whites. Whites can make fun of blacks. Straight people can make fun of LGBTQ people. LGBTQ people can make fun of straight people. Men can make fun of women. Women can make fun of men.

Nothing and no one should be off limits when it comes to comedy. If you're easily offended, don't watch edgy standup comedy.

And don't expect that those of us who enjoy a good laugh are going to take your outrage at a comedian who pushes the limits as anything other than an absurdity that deserves ridicule.

Comedians are equal opportunity slaughterers of sacred cows.

And I say this as a vegetarian. If you're a Hindu who doesn't like references to sacred cows, lighten up. If not in this life, hopefully you'll be reincarnated as a standup comedian.

Might as well end by plugging my 2017 idea for a Salem "Mingling of the Tribes" roast/fundraiser that has so far garnered precisely zero enthusiasm from anyone but me. Oh, well. These blog posts bombed, and likely so would my own standup routine were I ever to attempt one.

Salem should have an annual political roast: "A Mingling of the Tribes"
"Mingling of the Tribes" effort could help to heal divisiveness in Salem

UPDATE: The morning after I wrote this, I came across a couple of stories about Chappelle and humor. The Economist has a good piece, "Dave Chappelle for gender realism." Excerpt: 
Download Dave-chappelle-for-gender-realism

Mr Chappelle is of course foul-mouthed and shocking. He delivers an anti-Semitic one-liner in his show, chuckles as his audience gasps, then repeats it slowly, three times. Transgressing public mores, to deliver laughs, or social insight, or just to make people squirm and wonder why, has been the dominant tradition in stand-up ever since Pryor put a match to institutional racism, too. This reflects a singularly American set of conditions: high levels of social tension, a dominant place in popular culture for the most persecuted group and strongly protected free speech. Mr Chappelle, who, like Pryor and Mr Murphy is African-American and a master of many forms of comedy, calls stand-up his favourite form and an “American phenomenon”.

Because of its connection with social justice, most standup comedians, especially black ones, are of the left. But, again, the phenomenon must be edgy to be funny. So no whites are excluded from Pryor’s or Mr Chappelle’s racially loaded critiques, including the sympathetic left-wingers laughing wanly in their audiences. And that dramatic tension, between performer and fans, has increased in recent years as the activist left has increasingly presumed to police speech. A declaration in 2014 by Chris Rock, another top black comedian, that he could no longer perform for college crowds because they had become “way too conservative…[in] their willingness not to offend anybody,” was a signal cultural moment. For Mr Chappelle, who was in the process of relaunching his career around that time, it was also inspiring.

He does not seem transphobic, in fact. If his comedy has a moral theme it is that everyone is flawed and everyone should be accepted. Its force lies in showing how quickly that truth is lost when group politics takes hold. Mr Chappelle has spent much of his career railing against racial injustice. Pointing out the equally manifest reality that women lose out when sex is redefined as a state of mind is consistent with that record.

Even when justice is served—as in the advance of gay rights—his subversive mind ponders why such progress is not general. “Why is it easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it is for Cassius Clay to change his name?” he asks. “Empathy is not gay. Empathy is not black. Empathy is bisexual. It must go both ways.”

And an interview of David Sedaris in the New York Times Magazine, "David Sedaris Knows What We'll Laugh at When No One is Judging," is pertinent to the controversy over Chappelle. Humor isn't something we can choose. We find something funny, or we don't. But as Sedaris says, societal restrictions can cause us to stifle our mirth for fear of seeming politically incorrect. Excerpt:

Do you think much about what you can and can’t get away with? People say, “I can’t believe what you say onstage,” because you can’t say anything anymore. I mean, I love an old-fashioned vulgar joke. There is a joke that I’ve been reading onstage: A woman wakes up on her 40th birthday, and she goes to the drugstore and says: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The druggist says, “36?” She says, “I’m 40.” Next she goes to the butcher shop and goes: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The butcher says, “32.” She goes, “No, I’m 40.” She goes up and down Main Street. Nobody comes close to guessing her age. She gets in her car and goes to the gas station. Says to the guy, “Can you guess how old I am?” He says, “I can guess your age and your birthday. But first you have to let me fondle your breasts for a while.” She says, “OK.” Then after about five minutes, he says, “You are 40 years old, and your birthday’s today.” “How did you do that?” He goes, “I was in line behind you at the butcher shop.” The audience gives the biggest laugh from that line. But first the audience makes a noise when the gas station attendant says, “You have to allow me to fondle your breasts for a while,” and she says, “OK.” Whereas 20 years ago, her agreeing to it would have just been accepted as part of the joke.

Are you finding that the gap between what people will laugh at and what they would admit to finding funny is getting more pronounced? You know what was interesting? I did a bookstore event the other day, and I read the funniest bits from the diary.

I got nothing. Nothing. Then people said afterward, “My face hurt from laughing.” I said: “You weren’t laughing. I was here, you know.” But you turn the lights off? In a theater, the lights are all the way down, and people will laugh.

Because people behave differently when they’re not worried about any social consequences or judgments? Yeah. Especially if you’re in America and race comes up in any way, the audience freaks out. So Andrea, the woman who assaulted me, was Black. When I shape that into an essay, I think it’s important. I was let into the foyer of a building I don’t live in; that had everything to do with me being white. If you have a character who’s Black and is not a virtuous character, the audience freaks out, because they think: If I laugh, does that make me a racist? If I don’t like this person, does that make me a racist? It’s something I’ve noticed for years. The audience freaks out, and it’s by and large a white audience freaking out, and it gets worse with every passing day.

"The Chair" is a great look at college free speech

I know some retired Willamette University professors who would love "The Chair" on Netflix. This is a short (three hour) series that covers a lot of ground: college politics, free speech/cancel culture, how minorities are treated in academia.

My wife and I liked it a lot.

Sandra Oh, who I came to know and love in "Killing Eve," has a very different role here as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English Department at a smallish university. She's terrific, as are all the other actors, notably including Everly Carganilla, who plays Kim's adopted daughter. 

Though by far the youngest member of the cast, Carganilla steals every scene she is in, displaying an astonishing talent. 

Check out reviews of "The Chair" if you have any doubt about watching it. The Atlantic review is titled, "The Chair is Netflix's Best Drama in Years."

Perhaps, like me, you inwardly sigh with the breath of a thousand winds whenever you hear the words cancel culture, as mangled and distorted as the expression has become. If so, know that the people behind Netflix’s The Chair are likely sighing too. And yet here they are, presenting a unicorn: a near-perfect television show that clocks in at just three hours, and a comedy-drama that skewers the subject of free speech in academia without taking a side, demonizing a particular group, or descending into tweed-clutching.

That last observation is correct. It's refreshing to see a drama where there aren't clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys." Since I'm a big proponent of free speech, having had some recent run-ins with excessively woke people on Facebook, I was sympathetic to Bill, a professor who gets skewered by students after making an unfortunate Nazi salute in class. The Atlantic says:

During one packed lecture, Bill satirically performs a Hitler salute while considering absurdism’s power against fascism, sparking a viral meme and a furious debate about free speech on campus.

The main gripe I had with "The Chair," a minor one, is that for some reason Bill never offers up a coherent explanation for why he did the Nazi salute, which was captured on video. That makes the angry students seem more justified in their demand that Bill be fired, whereas if he'd defended his action as satire, that should have reduced the cancel culture demands.

Hopefully there will be a Season 2.

The final episode of Season 1 ended with enough ambiguity to justify a second season, which I guess is one reason why it ended the way it did. Regardless, "The Chair" is well worth watching in its current incarnation. If it gets reborn, so much the better.

Summer of Soul -- great movie about 1969's Black Woodstock

Last night, via Hulu, my wife and I finished watching Summer of Soul, a hugely entertaining movie about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that featured outdoor concerts with musicians such as...

Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and The Fifth Dimension.

It's been called the Black Woodstock.

However, a big difference is that Woodstock, which also happened in 1969, became a cultural phenomenon, with a movie about the festival coming out just a year later in 1970. By contrast, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival sat untouched for fifty years.

Thankfully, we're now able to see many of the acts that thrilled a mostly Black crowd of 35,000 or so who crowded into Mount Morris Park for six concerts in the summer of 1969. 

I found the movie deeply moving for several reasons. 

The emotions conveyed by the musicians gripped me. The movie flips back and forth between video of the performances and footage of what was going on in the country around that time. 

Murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam War. Hippies. Drugs. Hair, the musical. Black Panthers. It was a tumultuous time. 

I was attending San Jose State College in 1969. Me and my hippie friends would go to San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, tripping on marijuana, psychedelics, or both. 

Once we saw Ike and Tina Turner, but I don't recall seeing any other Black musical groups in person. So it was a delight to watch them perform in Summer of Soul, since their TV appearances back then were a lot less soulful than the Harlem performances.

The movie talks about how music was used to both express the Black experience and to help Blacks deal with the many challenges they faced back then. Also today, of course.

Seeing the faces of the crowd as they watched the Harlem Cultural Festival performances made me realize much more deeply how soul, blues, and gospel music touched the Black community. This was a special event for Harlem. Attendees speaking today in the film would say that they'd never been with 30,000 fellow Blacks in one place before.

The highlight of Summer of Soul for me was Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples singing Take My Hand Precious Lord. A short clip someone put on You Tube doesn't do justice to their performance, but it gives a hint of the strong feelings expressed by Jackson and Staples.

What kept going through my mind as I watched Summer of Soul is that expressing how we really feel may not make a crappy situation better, or make a pleasant situation even more enjoyable, but it connects us more deeply to reality -- whatever that reality may consist of.

I saw hundreds of years of Black oppression and Black culture being expressed on the stage of the Harlem Cultural Festival. And I know that the people who attended the festival viewed those performances with much clearer inner eyes, since they were living the realities being sung about.

I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that when The Fifth Dimension came on stage and sang songs from Hair, I thought, "Well, damn, they're Black." I didn't know that.

A member of The Fifth Dimension said in a present-day interview that they were criticized for being Black and sounding white. Yet she noted that they couldn't help sounding however they did, correctly saying that it was ridiculous to expect them to sound Black -- as if that's an actual sound. 

Here's a 1970 video of them performing The Age of Aquarius.

Sly and the Family Stone brought back memories, though I can't be sure if I ever saw this band in person. (OK, there's lots I can't remember from that psychedelic era; as the saying goes, if you can remember the 1960s, you weren't there.)

Sly singing Wanna Take You Higher to the Harlem audience had mixed messages. Sure, that what's marijuana and other drugs do. Sly also seemed to be speaking to the heights Blacks could reach if the forces keeping them down were lessened.

I think this video is from the Woodstock performance by Sly and the Family Stone. 

"In the Heights" shows joy of belonging to a community

Today I praised the In the Heights movie to someone who hadn't heard of it.

They pulled out their phone and told me the film's Rotten Tomatoes ratings: 96% positive for critics, 95% positive for viewers.

I said, "I'm surprised it wasn't 100%." 

In the Heights is that good.

My wife and I watched it at home via our HBO Max subscription. It's showing at Regal Willamette Town Center and Regal Santiam here in Salem, plus the Independence Theater.

It looked and sounded fine on our TV. I'm sure it would look and sound even better on a really big screen.

But be warned.

It's a musical. Some people, mostly men I suspect, have an aversion to musicals. However, In the Heights isn't a traditional musical, assuming that word -- traditional -- has any meaning these days.

It's a musical in the style of Hamilton. Which isn't surprising, since Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the music and lyrics for a Broadway production of In the Heights before he created Hamilton.

So the basic rhythms are rap, hip-hop, and Latin. The movie is set in the largely Dominican community of Washington Heights in New York City. 

I loved the sense of community that permeates the entire movie.

Which, by the way, doesn't have any bad guys/gals. No evil-doers. Nobody to boo.

It's that rare movie where 100% of the characters are positive people, all trying to do their best in a world that puts up barriers to them because of their heritage and circumstances.

Since I'm so used to movies that feature the main characters overcoming the malevolent actions of others, it took a while for me to settle in to watching In the Heights without the expectation of "something bad is about to happen."

Nothing does. 

Sure, there are problems people face. That comes with being human. The only tension in the movie arises from wondering how the main characters will deal with their problems.

Since it's a musical, problem-solving involves a lot of singing and dancing. And since it's a Latino-themed movie, often the singing and dancing has a salsa-like flavor.

I live on ten acres in rural south Salem. I grew up in a very small California town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I've never lived anywhere that bears a resemblance to the highly urban Washington Heights. 

But In the Heights made me wish I could experience the warmth, neighborliness, energy, joy, and passion of the diverse community that's the centerpiece of the movie. 

Yes, it's an idealized picture of a few blocks in Washington Heights. Everybody gets along. No gangs. No trash. No violence. No police. No traffic jams. 

A summer power outage during a really hot spell is the worst thing that besets the community. And it doesn't take long before people are back to dancing and singing their way through this challenge. 

What kept going through my mind as I watched In the Heights is what a city like Salem (Oregon), where I live, misses by having a semi-small-town feel throughout most of the urban area. We do have a downtown.

However, there's no singing and dancing in the streets, aside from a few special occasions each year. Mostly our sidewalks are nearly empty. If someone started playing salsa music and invited passers-by to dance along, there'd be few takers almost everywhere in Salem.

Again, I realize that In the Heights isn't a depiction of real life. Still, the sense of community among the mostly Latino population felt decidedly genuine. This isn't something that can be packaged, sadly. 

It's a natural result of people living in close proximity to each other who share a cultural heritage that encourages openness, communal eating and drinking, celebrating joys and supporting each other in sorrows.

An NPR interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda and screenwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes ends this way:

I want to finally ask about the timing of this movie because it's going to be among the first wave of summer films to open in theaters as the pandemic is slowly winding down. How do you think that timing might shape how people take in this story?

Miranda: I think it's enormously poignant. We filmed this in the summer of 2019 before the pandemic hit. And I know when I see a picture of two people standing close together, I've been marked by this — "Are they OK? Are they vaxxed? Is this all right?"

And this movie is such a love letter to the power of being in community with each other, of being out on the curb, of hugging, of dancing together. It is such a reminder of the power of that. I'm really hopeful that it's giving folks a reminder of how we used to be and how we can hopefully one day be again.

How to get voice recognition working on LG TV

I'm enjoying our new LG television, which we got about two weeks ago. So far there's only been one glitch, and one annoyance.

The glitch was the voice recognition button on the remote for our OLED55C1PUB model stopping working, after it functioned fine initially. 

I kept getting the error message, "A temporary issue has occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Please try again later. (200)" But after later arrived, the voice recognition button still didn't work. 

A phone call to LG customer support led to a solution, though it took quite a while (three transfers) before I finally was able to talk to someone who deals with LG televisions. Not exactly the greatest support phone system.

After initially being told that it might be necessary to reset the remote, something I didn't want to do because it was difficult to pair the remote with our DirecTV system, I was given an easier procedure.

(1) Unplug the TV.
(2) Press the power button on the lower front center of the TV for 5 seconds.
(3) Plug in the TV.

Gee, I wonder why I couldn't think of that. So obvious... (not!)

That did the trick. Since, voice recognition has worked fine. 

By the way, it helps the customer support person if you have the correct model number for your TV The receipt we got from Video Only made a "1" look a lot like an "I," so I kept saying OLED55CI (as in eye) instead of OLED55C1 (as in one).

Unable to find our model, the support person eventually told me to press the mute button three times, which brings up a screen that has the model number and other useful info about the TV. Again, who knew?

The annoyance is how ads periodically appear on our LG TV. Not ads from a sponsor of a television program. Ads coming from businesses that must pay LG for the right to annoy people who just paid $1,500 for a new TV and now are forced to endure ads.

I poked around in Settings for a while tonight and may have found a way to turn off ads. I'll update this post if that approach worked. If it doesn't, I'll phone LG support and complain about ads appearing on our TV.

Our new LG TV has artificial intelligence. But I hold the remote.

Jim Ramsey, a long-time friend, deserves a commission from Salem's Video Only store. 

When I told Jim that I'd just bought the newly released Apple TV device that streams Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a whole lot more in 4K, he said, "But now you need a 4K television."

Well, damn. I hadn't thought of that. 

We had a Samsung television that was working fine, though it had started to seem a bit dated. But until we ditched our crappy CenturyLink DSL, the only so-called "broadband" option out here in rural south Salem, for the hugely faster Starlink satellite internet (thank you, Elon Musk!), we didn't have the internet speed to make 4K streaming an option for us.

So with a Memorial Day sale in progress at Video Only, off my wife and I went yesterday to check out what TVs can do in 2021.

I was clutching a printout from Consumer Reports of the top-rated 55 inch televisions that had an LG model rated #2, just one point behind a more expensive Sony model. 

Pleasingly, the guy we talked to at Video Only -- Lucas Weimer, the Sales Manager -- told us he owned that LG television and liked it a lot.

Even better, he said that the Consumer Reports ratings were from 2020 and the 2021 LG televisions are even better. Plus, if we weren't going to mount it on a wall, we could save several hundred dollars by getting the tabletop model.

It didn't take much for Weimer to sell us on the LG OLED55CIP. It was $1,500, three hundred less than the LG list price and the Amazon price. I liked Weimer's casual, competent, low-key approach to making the sale. 

Of course, we basically were sold on this television once we saw the excellent OLED picture and heard its impressive sound. 

It fit nicely into my Subaru Crosstrek. Once the LG was set up at our home, it was time to put it through its paces. At my age (72), I remember well how simple televisions were for most of my TV-watching life. Which, basically, is my entire life.

You turned it on. You turned it off. You changed the channel. You changed the sound. That was about it.

Oh, except when I was young, growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where the only channels came over the air from Fresno or Bakersfield, fuzzily, to change the channel I'd have to climb a ladder and get on our roof to turn the antenna this way and that while my mother yelled through an open window, "looking better, no; go back, that's worse; OK, guess that's the best picture."

So back then my mother served as the human intelligence which led to our black and white TV being (barely) watchable.

Now, our new LG is brimming with artificial intelligence, based on a description of our model on the LG web site and my initial forays into the guide to features that I've been making my way through using the remote control.

For example:

Ooh! Deep-learning algorithms. Now we're talking! 

But I want more than just an artificial intelligence (AI) that automatically adjusts the picture and sound. How about a television that knows me so well, it automatically presents me with what I'll enjoy watching most when I turn it on. 

Such a TV is coming. I just probably won't live to see it. 

Though I've only had a day so far to learn what our new LG television is capable of, it seems clear that increasingly, the line between smart phones, computers, and televisions is blurring. 

Eventually the only difference between them may be the size of the screen. Otherwise, televisions will be as connected to the internet as smart phones and computers, while those devices will have the same entertainment capabilities as televisions.

Regarding the OLED thing, I didn't really know what it was yesterday when we bought the television. I just knew that Consumer Reports had said it was a desirable improvement over LED technology, so I wanted it.

Turns out, from an informative CNET article, that back in late 2019 at least, LG was the only television manufacturer making OLED screens, which stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. 

The LG web site talks trash about those archaic LEDs.

The CNET article says that "infinite contrast" may seem like an overstatement, but actually it isn't.

OLED TV marketing often claims "infinite" contrast ratios, and while that might sound like typical hyperbole, it's one of the extremely rare instances where such claims are actually true. Since OLED can produce a perfect black, emitting no light whatsoever, its contrast ratio (expressed as the brightest white divided by the darkest black) is technically infinite. And contrast ratio is arguably the most important aspect of picture quality.

 

Worst Academy Awards show ever

Every year I look forward to the Academy Awards show. I should have reversed direction this year and looked backward to previous shows that were actually entertaining. 

This was the first time I fast-forwarded through much of the interminable three-plus hours, because I wanted the damn thing to end so I could do something enjoyable.

Whoever came up with the atrociously bad concept for the 2021 Academy Awards should be drummed out of Hollywood forever. 

It wouldn't take me long to Google who that person (or people) was. But I found the show so uninteresting, I can't summon up the energy to learn who produced this yawner.

It's difficult for me to decide what was the worst thing about the show, so I'll just list some of the things that turned me off in no particular order. 

-- No production numbers. The nominated songs just got a few seconds of play rather than a full production featuring the singer of them. 

-- Few clips from the films. It was incredibly stupid to not show, say, the costumes that led to a Costume Design nomination, instead having the camera linger on the nominee while the presenter talked about them. Hey, how about showing clips from the movies?

-- More ranting about no clips. Ditto with makeup. Ditto with sound editing. Ditto with almost every award aside from Best Picture, Best Animated Feature, and maybe a few others. Again, it was crazy to have the presenter talk about the sound nominees rather than letting us hear what the movie sounded like.

-- Lack of humor. With no host possessing comedic talent, there were no moments that even elicited a smile from me, much less a laugh.

-- Unlimited acceptance speech time. In the past, the best part about most acceptance speeches was hearing the music start playing that signaled "stop talking." This year, there seemed to be no limit to the speeches, so the boredom went on... and on... and on.

-- People of color got bad deal. Lots of BIPOC nominees won awards. Unfortunately, they won them on the absolutely worst Academy Award show ever, during which I'm confident many viewers turned the boring show off, or skipped through the uninteresting parts (most of the three hours).

-- Best actress got little time. Frances McDormand, the most quirkily interesting person in the show, only spoke briefly after she won Best Actress and the show was past its three hour scheduled length. Meanwhile, script writers and other lesser award winners blabbed on forever at the beginning of the show. 

-- Dumb attendee game. I would have much preferred listening to Frances McDormand instead of suffering through the "name that song" game where nominees in attendance were asked to say whether a song had been nominated for an award or something else. I've forgotten the something else because I fast-forwarded through most of this part of the show once I saw how bad it was.

-- Audience came last. The whole show reeked of a Hollywood insider focus rather than entertaining the viewing audience. Way too much self-congratulating and way too little concern with the public who pay the bill for movies through ticket buying and streaming purchasing.

-- Humanitarian award recipient missed out. In the past I've watched every minute of the Academy Awards show because most of it was interesting. This year, the show was so boring, I fast-forwarded through the humanitarian award to get to the end of this nightmare more quickly. 

-- Setting was completely forgettable. I'd heard the show was going to be in Union Station and somewhere else. Wherever it was, that place was so bland, it added nothing to the already blah production.

(For a real review of the Academy Award show, which echoes some of my points, check out the New York Times story, "The Covid-19 Oscars: Not Masked but Still Muffled.")

"The Great" is, well, great! Here's why I liked it.

My wife and I came late to The Great, an engrossing ten-episode series on Hulu that is (very) roughly based on the story of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. 

It was released on May 15, 2020. We discovered it last month after looking for something else on Hulu, noticing The Great, and having my wife say, "I've heard it's pretty good."

From that moment we watched The Great almost every night until we finished the last episode yesterday. Thankfully, Season 2 is in the works, because we loved the show.

It's like nothing else I've ever seen -- not on television, not on the big screen. 

There's so much to admire about The Great. Here's some of what kept me firing up Apple TV and clicking on Hulu night after night.

History, what history? Yes, there are aspects of The Great that are historically correct. However, the overall tone is wildly 21st century, not 18th century. The characters speak like people today, albeit with an even greater use of "fuck." 

At the start of every episode there's an asterisk next to the title that says, "An occasionally true story." That's accurate.

The Great doesn't look like I'd expect Russia in 1761 to appear, assuming I knew anything about Russia at that time. 

The accents are British English, by and large. The clothes worn by those hanging around the court of Emperor Peter often look quite modern. The sun always appears to be shining and it's warm enough to lounge around outside.

All of that contributes to the story of Catherine and Peter, who she has been betrothed to in an arranged marriage of sorts, rather than detracting from it. 

The craziness of The Great, the contradictions, the jarring confluence of olden times and modern attitudes and ways of speaking -- all that drew me in like a cinematic magnet. Endless surprises kept my attention glued to the TV screen for all 10 episodes.

Strong woman plus jerk of an emperor equals fascination. All of the actors in The Great are terrific. But Elle Fanning as Catherine and Nicholas Hoult as Peter are the most watchable.

They take different trajectories as Season 1 progresses.

Catherine starts off as a nice woman thrown into a marriage with an asshole of an emperor. Bit by bit she finds her inner empress, taking on some of the ruthlessness of Peter.

Meanwhile, Peter becomes increasingly likable, though by no means a nice guy. He finds his softer side, while Catherine hardens up. She isn't Russian, but realizes that if she wants to change Russia into a more refined and democratic nation, she has to become as tough as Russians are.

Catherine is a character that bears some resemblance to what I've seen before in movies. Peter, though, is unique, thanks to the astounding talent of Hoult.

Peter is Trumpian, though without Trump's most irritating qualities.

Yes, Peter is narcissistic, controlling, authoritarian, cruel, uncaring. Yet he also has a sense of humor, can laugh at himself, is open to suggestions, and appealingly transparent.

Like Trump, Peter is unashamedly himself at all times. But I liked Peter hugely more than Trump.

I think it's because you can see the humanity in Peter lurking below the surface, which isn't the case with Trump, who is a jerk all the way down.

Peter is somewhat conflicted about being Emperor of Russia, while I have no doubt that Trump would have zero doubts about being Emperor of the United States. At any rate, Peter commands the viewer's attention whenever he is on screen, as is the case with Catherine.

It's a wild and crazy court. I'm not saying that I'd like to be part of the emperor's court as shown in The Great, since in the long run it would be stressful and exhausting. However, they sure do have a lot of fun.

Assuming your definition of "fun" includes shooting inside the palace, having sex whenever, wherever, and with whoever strikes your fancy, prodigious drinking and eating, making the heads of your enemies a table decoration, and so on.

The excesses washed over me in a pleasing waterfall of decadence. There's never a dull moment in Peter's court, that's for sure.

I really liked the frequent exclamations of "Huzzah!," a catch-all outcry that has no real equivalent in English, with "Yay," "Hooray," "Right-on," coming closest I guess, along with the Marine Corps' "Oorah."

"Huzzah" became so appealing to me, I'd like to make it part of our language.

Peter and the rest of his court said it before smashing their glasses on the floor, as a gesture of solidarity, as indicating approval of something someone did or said, and in other intriguing ways. 

As I suspected, that term isn't part of Russian culture, according to the Russia Beyond web site.

“If you had a drink every time someone in The Great said ‘Huzzah’, you’d be drunk before the end of the first episode,” is a joke currently doing the rounds among Russian Twitter users.

And that’s not surprising - in the new (not so) historical comedy series about the Russian Empress, with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult in the lead roles, this exclamation of delight comes at the end of pretty much every piece of dialogue.

In fact, “Huzzah!” is essentially the equivalent of the traditional Russian exclamation “Ura!” (the Russian for “Hooray!”), which usually denotes excitement, joy after achieving a set goal or defeating someone, or a war-cry. 

Here's the trailer for The Great.

The Prom is a great feel-good movie (ignore The New Yorker)

Hah! A seventy-two year old father, me, showed in one instance he's more culturally with it than his forty-eight year old daughter, Celeste. 

Usually Celeste has seen, or at least heard of, cinematic offerings before me. After all, she lives in Orange County, which is a lot closer to Hollywood than I am here in Oregon.

But in a post-Christmas FaceTime call this afternoon, I asked Celeste if she had seen The Prom yet. No, she hadn't. And it appears she wasn't even aware of this Netflix production.

I highly enjoyed The Prom. So did my wife. I don't get why Rotten Tomatoes has it with a 58% positive review from critics and 68% from viewers. 

In my utterly personal opinion, this story of two girls who aren't allowed to attend their Indiana high school prom as a couple was well-acted, entertaining, and moving.

It's full of song and dance numbers involving the four lead actors: Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Ranells. I thought the last two sentences of The New Yorker review by an overly snooty Anthony Lane missed the mark.

It's possible both to agree entirely with the movie's politics and, at the same time, to feel that you're being strangled by a rainbow, and we should thank the Lord that "The Prom" wasn't released before the election. I can think of some states, not just Indiana, where wavering voters, disgruntled rather than wowed by the film's remorseless plea for tolerance, might have swung in the opposite direction.

Well, maybe those of us old enough to distinctly remember when lesbians and gays were really discriminated against in high school, way beyond what The Prom shows, find the aforementioned "remorseless plea for tolerance" more appealing than younger viewers like, perhaps, Lane.

Having spent 1962-66 at a small (400 students or so) central California high school in Woodlake, I watched the inspiring end of The Prom with tears beginning to form in my eyes.

Partly because I admired the courage of the student, Emma (played by Jo Ellen Pellman), who wants to take her girlfriend to the prom and meets resistance from a behind-the-times parent organization. 

And partly because I was inwardly cringing at the memories of how the guys in my high school referred to homosexuals. We'd throw around insults like "You homo!" and "Faggot!" with gleeful abandon. 

Naturally there weren't any known lesbians or gays in my high school. Yet probably they were there, just underground. In fact, they might have been using those epithets I just shared themselves. If you're afraid to be outed, you have to show that you're part of the heterosexual in-club.

I wish I could apologize in person to anyone harmed by how we spoke about homosexuals back then. My only excuse is that we didn't know any better. There was zero mention of homosexuality in any class I took in high school, so far as I can remember.

Plus, there definitely was no attempt by the teachers to encourage respect for diversity, including different ways of expressing one's sexuality than the societal norm. Back then homosexuality was viewed as an aberration, a moral failing, something to be mocked and condemned.

I can understand why young people today who live in liberal areas might look upon The Prom as making a big deal out of something that is taken for granted by most high schoolers today: being attracted to the same sex not only is no big deal, it isn't any sort of deal, just the way things are.

That's wonderful. But The Prom still has a message that needs to be heard, because not everyone agrees with what I just said. Are you listening, Indiana? 

Here's the trailer.

 

Here's why I loved The Queen's Gambit on Netflix

At first I doubted Jim Ramsey, a friend who I have coffee with most Sundays, when he said I should watch The Queen's Gambit -- a seven-episode Netflix mini-series about, yawn, a girl who plays chess. 

That unduly confident "yawn" was the reason it took me a week or two to say to my wife one evening, let's take a look at The Queen's Gambit to see if we might like it.

Well, we sure did. 

Every night after that we watched another hour-long episode. Yesterday we reached the end of our immersion into the ever-so-fascinating story of Beth Harmon, a woman in the man's world of competitive chess back in the 1960's.

So thanks, Jim, for the recommendation. 

If The Queen's Gambit were a movie, it would deserve consideration for the Best Picture award. Regardless, I consider it to be one of the best 3 1/2 hour productions I've ever seen.

It's rare to have a movie, which is what I'm going to call it, be both highly suspenseful and deeply emotional. Yet Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Beth masterfully, and the other fine actors grabbed the attention of my wife and me from the first minute and didn't let go until the closing credits. 

And damn, the movie is about chess. I couldn't believe that I could get so nervous watching chess matches, agonizing over moves by Beth and her opponents that I couldn't comprehend. 

Well, let's make that, barely comprehend, with the emphasis on barely. 

I learned to play chess in high school, when a math teacher made us play the game in 1965 or 1966, which happens to be about the time Beth is entering the world of competitive chess. 

And that's the only resemblance between Beth and me, chess-wise. I got serious about chess only to the point of checking out some books about it from the library. I'd play games and learn openings by copying moves from the books on an actual chessboard. 

Beth, on the other hand, was capable of playing entire chess matches inside her head, basically. There's a scene where she and another chess expert are driving along, calling out moves in their mental chess match. Wow. 

The movie shows the fine line between genius and madness. 

Beth develops a drinking problem after her tranquilizer problem. Some of those scenes were painful for me to watch, since my mother was an alcoholic. A divorcee, it was just her and me in the house during her heaviest drinking period when I was in high school.

Let's just say that things got really weird, really disturbing, really painful. Naturally I realized that I was just watching a movie, not real life, but The Queen's Gambit is so gripping, I found myself feeling at times like I was watching my (much older) mother as Beth hit the bottle.

Us baby boomers grew up in an era when women/wives often were driven to alcohol and tranquilizers by being second-class citizens who couldn't use their talents and intelligence as men/husbands could. The Queen's Gambit shows this convincingly. Younger viewers might wonder, were things really that bad for women in the 50s and 60s?

Answer: yes. 

Anyway, there's plenty of reasons to watch The Queen's Gambit: psychological, sociological, chessological. But the main reason is that it's a hugely entertaining movie. Here's the trailer.

DIRECTV back to its irritating channel-losing ways

I'd say that I have a love-hate relationship with DIRECTV, but that wouldn't be honest. My DIRECTV relationship is almost entirely based on hate.

I hate how much our monthly subscription costs. I hate how shows we've recorded mysteriously disappear from our DVR (digital video recorder). I hate that the Pac-12 Networks aren't carried. 

And I hate it when DIRECTV engages in a corporate pissing match with the owner of one of the channels that we've paid to get, yet is at risk of being taken off the DIRECTV lineup for reasons that are never specifically disclosed but which obviously involve corporate greed.

The current channel-losing irritation is the prospect of losing KGW, the Portland NBC affiliate, at 5 pm next Monday, November 30. 

KGW is owned by Tegna. DIRECTV and Tegna can't agree on how much the former should be paid by the latter for being able to offer the local station to subscribers.

I couldn't care less who is at fault here. Both corporations are money-grubbing assholes who don't care about ordinary people, just how much money they're making. 

DIRECTV says Tegna is doing them wrong. Tegna says DIRECTV is doing them wrong, 

My attitude is that both DIRECV and Tegna are wrong to threaten the removal of programming that us DIRECTV subscribers have paid for, yet won't be getting if KGW is taken off our channel lineup on Monday.

DIRECTV is losing customers at a rapid rate. So the non-geniuses at AT&T, which owns DIRECTV, are figuring that taking away channels from their diminishing number of subscribers is the way to increase profitability? 

Not going to happen. 

Sure, currently my wife and I are stuck with DIRECTV (or Dish, which is just as bad as DIRECTV) because we live in a rural area where cable TV doesn't exist and cell service is slow, leaving us with no TV alternatives other than satellite.

But I'm looking forward to the rollout of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service, which promises to give people like us a hugely faster Internet speed than the crappy 6-7 Mbps we get from CenturyLink now. 

This will open up streaming possibilities that are closed to us at the moment. So the more DIRECTV offers up horrible customer service, the more likely it is people like us will bail on DIRECTV when we have the chance.

Which hopefully will be soon. 

Ricky Gervais' Humanity show is wonderful dark humor

If you're looking for something to take your mind off of the West Coast wildfires, COVID-19 crisis, systemic racism, global warming, Trump vs. Biden, and other serious things that leave you less than smiley-faced, my wife and I have a suggestion.

Fire up Netflix and watch Ricky Gervais' Humanity show, a 78-minute stand-up routine that dates from 2017.

Now, if you watch it and blame us for recommending this piece of tasteless trash, keep in mind that Laurel and I enjoy dark humor. And Gervais is so dark in Humanity he easily beats out a black cat in a completely lightless room.

He starts off by spending considerable time telling transgender jokes at the expense of Caitlyn Jenner, daring to speak the name that mustn't be spoken, according to transgender purists -- Jenner's original name, Bruce.

After that the show descends (or ascends, in my opinion) into taking jabs at other sensitive topics, like children with cancer. Moments of more traditional levity are interspersed here and there, such as how dogs got their special gifts.

The breed that hunts lions wasn't wild about their gift. 

We watched Humanity a few days ago. Rather bizarrely, now and then I've found myself thinking, What would Ricky Gervais do in this situation?

That's the power of comedy, and of dark comedy in particular. Gervais finds humor in subjects that are thoroughly unfunny to most people. Yet from a certain perspective, such as the twisted mind of Gervais, they are funny. 

And Gervais makes fun of himself also. Just not as often as he takes digs at others.

He demonstrates the virtue of not caring overly much about what other people think, so long as what you think rings true to you. At one point he recites the cardinal rule followed by his family, or maybe just his brother and him, I can't remember exactly.

"If you think of something funny, you must say it." Maybe somebody will laugh. Maybe they won't. No matter. What matters if that you expressed your creativity. There's a lot of power in that comedic philosophy.

Here's some You Tube videos of clips from Humanity, including the dog bit. It's the first one. Also, the least offensive one.

In one day, I've become a 71 year-old TikTok addict

This isn't a cry for help, even though I'm addicted.

To TikTok, the video-sharing service that has aroused Trump's ire -- which led me to download the iPhone app this morning, in part because my default position is that whatever our Idiot-in-Chief is against, I'm for, since Trump is almost always wrong.

Last Thursday Trump signed an executive order aimed at TikTok. 

In the order, which takes effect in 45 days, any transactions between TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, and U.S. citizens will be outlawed for national security reasons.

In practice, experts told NPR the order likely will mean the viral video service could no longer receive advertising from American companies and the app could be removed from Apple and Google's app stores.

For the more than 100 million Americans who have downloaded TikTok, experts say the app may no longer be sent software updates, rendering TikTok unmanageable, and eventually nonfunctional, with time.

Sure seems like a dumb political move to threaten to take away an app that 100 million Americans have downloaded about three months before the November election. So I'm happy that unless Trump reverses course, the TikTok faithful, which now includes me, will unleash their righteous rage on an already unpopular president.

Reportedly TikTok collects the same sort of data Facebook and Google do, including location data and Internet search history. So what's the big deal?

There's no evidence TikTok is sharing that data with the Chinese government.

And even if it was, after spending a lot of time with TikTok today as my addiction quickly took hold, my attitude is that if the price I have to pay for seeing amazingly creative, funny, and entertaining short videos is having the Chinese government know that I'm a guy in Oregon who is a news junkie, I'll pay that price!

I heartily recommend downloading the TikTok app and giving it a try. I knew that my 13-year-old granddaughter liked TikTok, so I had the erroneous impression that it was geared toward young people. 

Which, I guess, it is.

But the never-ending stream of videos that you get after indicating what sort of things you're interested in is absolutely ageless. I kept showing my wife the newest must-see video that caught my eye, mostly of animals and their humans doing humorous stuff.

I haven't made a TikTok video yet, though likely this is just a matter of time.

It's clear that to really wow people with your video it helps to understand the editing options available via TikTok. But some videos are as simple as someone pointing their smartphone at something interesting and pressing record.

If you don't want to download an iPhone or Android app, TikTok has a web site. But I found that the videos are more appealing on my iPhone, maybe because it is so easy to just swipe up and see the next TikTok offering.

The sensation I got from watching TikTok videos was pleasant in a variety of ways. It felt good to get glimpses of so many lives, both human and animal. Most videos possess a simple joy that lifted my spirit in these COVID times. And the creativity/talent of TikTok users made me feel positive about our country's future, in a rather strange way.

So much more brings us together than drives us apart.

Like laughing at a video of a dog wanting to walk up the last few steps of a staircase to join its owner, but temporarily paralyzed by the sight of Cat of the House lying on the landing. Cajoled by the owner, the dog finally backed its way up those final steps, until it could sit side-by-side with the cat. 

Then it quickly turned toward the owner, which made the cat instantly reach out with its paw and take a swipe at the dog. This must be a recurring drama between the cat and dog, but it made a dramatic mini-video.

Anyway, it's good to see that TikTok plans to sue the Trump administration over the ban, perhaps as soon as next Tuesday. Like most things Trump does, likely the ban has little or no basis in facts and the law. Hopefully TikTok will prevail, so my addiction can blossom more fully.

What two old people say while watching Hamilton on Disney+

It took my wife, Laurel, and I three nights to finish watching Hamilton on Disney+. One reason is that the show is long. Another is that when two 71-year-old people watch Hamilton at home, there's a lot of pressing the stop/start button.

Thankfully, we weren't watching on Broadway. If we talked through a live performance like we did through the streaming version, we would have been thrown out of the theatre pretty damn quickly. 

Here's some of what you would have heard if you could have been a fly on the wall of our TV watching area.

Laurel: Stop the recording.

Me: Why? 

Laurel: Don't ask why, just do it!

Me: OK, OK. There, now what?

Laurel: Can you understand what they're saying? 

Me: Once in a while. How about you?

Laurel: I have no idea what's going on. They talk so fast.

Me: Yeah, it's a rap cadence. Our ears aren't adjusted to it.

Laurel: For sure. OK, let's keep watching. Press play.

Ten minutes later...

Laurel: I've got a question.

Me: You're not supposed to talk during a movie. Oh, wait, we're at home. All right, what is it?

Laurel: Did Aaron Burr want to be in the room where the affair happened?

Me: Jeez, no! Are we watching the same Hamilton?

Laurel: Don't be sarcastic. Just answer the question.

Me: OK, do you remember how Hamilton was working away at his desk, and his wife wanted him to do something with her, but he said he'd got to finish a bill about something to do with the national treasury that Jefferson and Madison said didn't have a chance to pass in Congress because he doesn't have the votes, and then later Hamilton goes off and talks with Jefferson and Madison, during which Hamilton agrees to have the capitol on the Potomac, and also gives the south some other stuff that I couldn't quite understand, then we learn that the bill passed with Hamilton getting what he wanted and Jefferson and Madison getting what they wanted, because they'd worked out a backroom deal, and so Burr was wishing he could have been in the room where all that conniving happened, though I admit that Burr may have wanted to be in other rooms also, which helps explain why he ended up running for Congress so he wouldn't always be on the outside looking in, anyway, that's what I think is going on but I can't be completely sure since I'm only understanding about 20% of the words.

Laurel: Well, you're understanding more than I am.

Me: (wordlessly presses "Play" with an inner smile on my face, because now I'm contemplating a career as a 71 year old white guy rapper, since I can understand more of Hamilton than my wife)

Seriously, though, or even more seriously, since the dialogue above is close to what actually happened with us, Laurel and I enjoyed Hamilton a lot. 

We grasped more of the second act than the first act. Maybe our ears had started to get used to the rapid fire speaking and singing, or maybe the second act has more actual talking. Regardless, Hamilton was highly entertaining and inspiring in equal measure. 

It was quaint to be brought back to a time when having an affair could disqualify a man from becoming president. (At least, that's what I think happened with Hamilton; can't be sure, given how much of the lyrics I failed to grasp.)

After we finished watching, I fired up Google to see whether other people had the same problem with understanding the words of Hamilton that we did. The first and only link that I looked at was customer reviews of Hamilton from the Detroit Theatre. Apparently these were touring shows, with a different cast from the Broadway production.

But some of the reviews echoed our Disney+ experience, word-comprehension-wise.

I'm 39 and definitely not losing my hearing; however, I was in the upper deck and could understand about 25% of what was said. The song tempos are relatively fast and I'm sure the actors were enunciating their lines, however, it didn't definitely sound that way. Much of it sounded like gibberish. My father (71 years old) understood about 5%. It became a material part of our experience - too bad! I encourage a headphone option.

Lots of hype around the show maybe raised expectations too high. The show was good, but not spectacular. Hard to follow the rap pace, plus the phrasing used in rap, so the story gets lost.

My husband and I were excited to see Hamilton in Milwaukee. Our seats were excellent, but when a play’s story is dependent on the audience understanding what the actors are singing, it fell short. My husband understood nothing and I struggled to pick out words. Very disappointing.

The main complaint is that I concentrated very hard to hear what was being sung and still could only understand about half so I barely followed.

While the show was unique and dancing exceptional, the audio was not. I was sitting in orchestra section and could not understand the dialogue being sung. It was loud enough, but spoken so rapidly, it was like listening to another language. I actually dozed off a few times during the show from boredom. Certainly not your typical musical, but not for audiences over 35 unless you are really into rap music and can understand the almost incoherent verbiage.

Sexy Super Bowl halftime show by J. Lo and Shakira offends some, but not me

Call me courageous -- Brian, you're so brave! -- but I've got to take an outspoken stand on yesterday's Super Bowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez, a.k.a. J. Lo, and Shakira.

I am unabashedly in favor of beautiful women wearing as little as possible during a musical performance, and dancing in a sexually provocative manner.

There. I said it.

Let the .000001% of men who disagree with me take me to task, along with the almost equally small percentage of women who believe that female performers should cover themselves demurely on stage, and dance as if a Puritan God was watching.

If you didn't see the halftime show, you're in luck. Here's a video of the whole performance, which my wife and I thought was fantastic. 

However, this morning someone on my Twitter feed shared a tweet by conservative religious nut-job Franklin Graham, with this right-on comment: 

Imagine if your church were less worried about women displaying their sexuality and more worried about your president trying to rape them.

In a similar vein, the conservative Washington Examiner also found a lot not to like in the halftime show.

During this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez took the stage for a performance that was supposed to be about celebrating their Latino heritage and empowering women. That's all fine, but the show was still completely inappropriate for children and the Super Bowl.

When J-Lo shimmies down a stripper pole in Hustlers, she’s doing so in an R-rated film. In theory, no one under age 17 sees it. That isn't so when she does it at the Super Bowl.

Worse than Shakira's and J-Lo’s oversexualized performance, however, was the message it sent to young viewers. Millions of families watch the Super Bowl each year, and for the finale, J-Lo even brought her 11-year-old daughter on stage with her for a performance of Let’s Get Loud. By that point, a convenient outfit change had made her look a bit more appropriate for sharing the stage with children.

Yeah — but what about everyone else's children?

Answer: it was fine for them to watch also.

Outrage over what's viewable at the Super Bowl should be focused on the spectacle of grown men running around doing their best to give the other team brain damage, knee damage, and damage to other important bodily parts. 

Fortunately, wiser minds than Franklin Graham and the Washington Examiner had positive things to say about the performance by J. Lo and Shakira. 

Washington Post: The Super Bowl poses the question: What's more obscene, sex or sexism?

Given this thicket of seemingly incompatible truths, the easy way out is to complain that the halftime show was obscene, the opposite of family-friendly, proof of the corruption of American mass culture. If you can condemn the entire enterprise, you’re not obligated to work your way through the mess at the heart of it, much less to accept that you’re going to have to live with certain hypocrisies.

But sometimes the only way — and the more fun way — out of a mess is through it. If you’re inevitably going to be valued based on your body, might as well make a whole lot of money off the one you’ve got. If you’re inevitably going to be characterized as a whore or a Madonna, why not insist on the best of both, as J-Lo did when she alternated between working a stripper pole and delivering a moving duet with her daughter? If beauty standards aren’t going to be dismantled in a day, might as well enjoy the women whose discipline at maintaining their physiques ­­­makes the men look like slackers by comparison.

New York Times: J. Lo and the Power of 50

Fifty won the Super Bowl.

Fifty years between wins for the Kansas City Chiefs, and 50-year-old Jennifer Lopez, whose halftime performance in a series of barely-there Versace bodysuits sent social media into something of a meltdown.

More than four decades ago, Gloria Steinem crafted an aphorism that went down in history when, on her 40th birthday, a reporter told her she did not look her age — and she responded: “This is what 40 looks like.”

Well, on Sunday Ms. Lopez showed the world what 50 looks like — at least her version of it.

...Yes, the outfits were a little silly. Yes, they were racy (though they did show less skin than Adam Levine revealed last year when he went topless during his halftime Super Bowl show). Yes, Shakira, the other halftime star, also wore a teeny tiny micro skirt with lots of sparkling fringe by Peter Dundas — and yes, she’s 43.

But the total J. Lo effect was kind of mesmerizing: an in-your-face demonstration of a woman glorying in her own physicality, and a dare to anyone who might render judgment based on a number.

Why my wife and I are hooked on The Morning Show

Since my male ego is so small, a fact I'm tremendously proud about, I readily admit that my wife was right. Laurel kept saying, we should start watching The Morning Show, and I kept responding, but the reviews I've read haven't been very positive.

Well, we've been firing up Apple TV+ almost every night since taking our first plunge into The Morning Show, and now we're both enthralled by this compelling drama. 

Rotten Tomatoes has it right. Critics aren't wild about the series. But viewers love it.

Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon are indeed great in their roles. So are the supporting actors. Plus, the writing is excellent, with compelling scenes that are truly can't-look-away television.

What I like most about The Morning Show is the moral ambiguity. 

Just as in the larger real life drama featuring each of us, there's no clear-cut heroes and villains. At first it seems like there could be, since the co-host of The Morning Show is guilty of sexual misconduct that causes him to be fired, leaving Aniston to deal with a replacement played by Witherspoon.

However, as later episodes demonstrate, every main character, and some of the minor ones, are a blend of positive and negative qualities.

Or perhaps better put, their good and bad qualities shade into each other in such a complex fashion, it's impossible to see these people as anything other than decidedly human beings who are doing their best, even though sometimes they're accused of being the worst.

Watching The Morning Show thus has been therapeutic for me. I've become a bit less critical of my own shortcomings, and hopefully this will transfer over to how I see other people who fail to live up to my expectations. 

Life is tough.

It's tough for the high-paid, good-looking, well-known people who put on The Morning Show, a mix of news and entertainment, and it's tough for almost everybody else also. I love how Aniston and Witherspoon peel away the facade of their TV personas, revealing the realities that lie beneath their on-camera selves.

Jumping into the world of present-day politics, this goes a long way toward explaining why I dislike Donald Trump so much. He rarely, if ever, displays vulnerability, admits he was wrong, or acknowledges uncertainty about what to do. So when Aniston's character does all of those things, it's marvelously refreshing.

Yes, we had to fork out $5 a month to upgrade from Apple TV to Apple TV+. But that money has bought us a lot of viewing pleasure. Here's the official trailer, though it doesn't capture how good The Morning Show really is.

 

I hate DirecTV even more than I hate Trump

Let me explain the title of this blog post. Trump isn't sitting under our television, controlling what my wife and I are able to watch in our rural south Salem (Oregon) home where the only TV choices are crappy DirecTV and crappy Dish Network.

So DirecTV has a much larger direct impact on my life than Donald Trump does. That's why I'm complaining about DirecTV rather than Trump, even though both are hugely irritating.

There's always something to hate about DirecTV. Let me count three of the ways, starting with the most recent -- which is the biggest current reason I detest DirecTV.

(1) We've lost our local CBS affiliate, KOIN in Portland, because DirecTV is engaged in a corporate pissing match with Nexstar that has caused DirecTV subscribers to lose access to 120 CBS stations. 

Naturally DirecTV is claiming it's all Nexstar's fault. I can't bear to read the B.S. on the DirecTV web site about the dispute with Nexstar. It's like trying to decide whether a rattlesnake or a tarantula is more lovable. I freaking hate both of them!

DirecTV won't say how much money is at stake here for its customers.

But let me make a guess that is almost certain to be correct: it's much less than the $10 a month my wife and I are paying to get the CBS All Access app on Apple TV, which allows us to see Late Night With Stephen Colbert, albeit a day after each show airs.

I couldn't care less about who is more in the right in the DirecTV vs. Nexstar fight. All I know is that we aren't getting one of the local stations that DirecTV promised us when we switched from Dish a number of years ago.

Yes, I'm sure somewhere in the fine print of the contract we signed it says something along the lines of "If DirecTV isn't able to provide all the stations you're supposed to get, suck it up and stop complaining."

This Washington Post story says it more delicately, in regards a separate contract dispute between DirecTV and CBS-owned stations in some large cities.

Customers sure are tired of this old song and dance. They don’t want to hear “CBS has put you into the middle of its negotiations,” which DirecTV tweeted to an angry customer on Saturday, or that “loyal viewers are now bearing the burden for AT&T’s unwillingness” to bend, as CBS put it in its own press release.

It doesn’t matter whether AT&T “dropped” the network or CBS “pulled its signal” from AT&T. Subscribers just want consistent service at a fair price, and that seems like it will be harder and harder to get, thanks to an industry that’s turning more anti-competitive to protect its profit margins in the wake of cord-cutting and consolidation.

(2) The DirecTV user interface was horrible for a long time, and is merely terrible now. After DirecTV made an "upgrade" to its interface, for months shows that we'd recorded would disappear, seemingly randomly. I kept complaining to customer service, to no avail. 

Often I could search for them, and find them after considerable trouble. Things are better now, but I still want the old interface back, which worked fine. 

(3) I've stopped counting how many years I've been unable to watch sports on the Pac 12 Networks, because DirecTV can't work out a deal with them. I've started subscribing to Sling TV during football season so I can watch the Oregon and Oregon State games that are only on the Pac 12 Networks. 

Again, I suspect the cost per subscriber for DirecTV to offer the Pac 12 Networks is way less than the $20-30 dollars a month I have to pay Sling TV. 

Yet we're trapped.

Dish is engaged in a contract dispute with HBO that has been going on since November of last year. There's several HBO shows we watch regularly, so jumping from crappy DirecTV to crappy Dish Network makes no sense. We're screwed either way we'd go with the only two satellite TV providers.

So I'm left with...

Beyonce's Coachella show was mind-blowingly beautiful

Thank you, Netflix. There's no way my wife and I would have seen Beyonce's astounding  2018 "Homecoming" show at Coachella without streaming it the past two nights, courtesy of our Netflix subscription.

For one thing, the many shots of the crowd showed that if anyone our 70'ish age saw the two live performances (over two weekends), they sure weren't in the front rows. For another, our willingness to travel long distances and put up with large crowds to see a concert are long behind us.

So it was a gift to be able to sit at home and stare with rapt attention at our big screen TV displaying one of the most amazing performances we'd ever seen.

If  you haven't watched the Netflix film, Homecoming, make this a top priority.  

Most of the two hours and seventeen minutes is a masterfully edited view of the two live shows. Yes, two. It took our senior citizen minds a while to figure out that the seemingly miraculous instant costume changes actually were the result of virtually seamless editing of footage from the two Coachella performances of Homecoming.

The scenes of how the performance came to be also were fascinating. I was especially impressed by how Beyonce was able to handle the rehearsals and other preparations for Coachella so soon after giving birth to twins.

There's a reason evolution has females reproducing us humans: men wouldn't be capable of doing this.

I found Homecoming to be an amazing piece of performance art. Anyone who doubts that a lavish outdoor music show doesn't deserve to be in the same artistic category as a symphony, opera, or whatever needs to fire up their Netflix subscription and watch Homecoming start to finish.

Rarely do I stare at the screen of our TV all the way through the closing credits. I did with this film, though, because I wanted it to never end.

I don't believe in reincarnation. However, if there's a Rebirth God out there, here's a request: next time around fashion me into a black person who can sing, dance, and have a rollicking good time like the performers in Homecoming.

By and large, I don't believe there are big differences between blacks and whites. Still, this thought kept going through my head as I watched Homecoming: Maybe it would have been possible for Beyonce to populate the stage with equally talented white performers, but this would have been really tough.

This show, and the film, was a tribute to black culture -- especially the amazing marching bands at black universities. The energy, enthusiasm, and joy of the performers, led by Beyonce herself, was beyond belief. I wanted to bottle the good feelings I had while watching Homecoming so I could take sips when I felt down and uninspired.

I got exhausted just watching the Coachella performances. How Beyonce was able to do all that singing and dancing without seeming to break a sweat astounded me.

(Well, she did appear to have a wind machine follow her on stage to blow her hair, so maybe that helped.)

From my male perspective, I found it fascinating, but really not all that surprising, that Beyonce and her crew of female dancers, singers, and musicians could be both sexually sensual and womanly empowered. Somehow Beyonce and the other artistic directors were able to make shaking one's booty into a feminist statement (much to my delight).

It also was great to see the two French dancers, Larry and Laurent Nicolas Bourgeois, a.k.a. Les Twins, prominently featured in Homecoming. They competed on World of Dance and blew me away with their unique appealing dance style.

Here's the official trailer for Homecoming. There are homemade videos on You Tube showing the performances,  but they're nowhere near as good as the Netflix film.

 

Netflix, like life, works in mysterious ways

I've used psychedelics, meditation, and philosophy to understand the mystery of the cosmos -- with decidedly mixed success. But now that I've reached what feels like the astoundingly old age of 70, I'm pleased to find wisdom any way it appears to me.

Such as, through the unexpected workings of Netflix. Which led me yesterday to a better appreciation of what is really important in life.

My mini-enlightenment began when I noticed that "A Star is Born" was available in our Netflix DVD queue as of February 20. So I elevated it to next in line and mailed back the movie we'd just watched, "The Wife."

However, I didn't realize that Netflix would send us our next request on February 19, when "A Star is Born" wasn't available. So I got an email saying "Dan in Real Life" was on its way to us. 

Damn, I thought. That's probably a loser of a movie, since it was released in 2007 and we've had no interest in seeing it over the past dozen or so years even though it was near the top of our Netflix queue.

So my plan was to return it as soon as it arrived, to hasten the arrival of what we really wanted, "A Star is Born."

Things turned out differently, though. Which, interestingly, is the central theme of "Dan in Real Life," as the Rotten Tomatoes synopsis describes: 

Widowed father and family-advice columnist Dan Burns, who is reeling from the heartache of loss, takes refuge by trying to maintain order with his three rebellious young girls, while dodging anything unexpected or outside the box.

But when Dan heads to Rhode Island, his miffed daughters in tow, for the annual fall weekend thrown by the large and boisterous Burns family, everything changes. Soon after his arrival, he runs into an alluring woman named Marie in a bookshop.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Dan experiences real, live sparks--only to have to douse them liberally when he discovers Marie is, in fact, the brand-new girlfriend that his brother Mitch is about to proudly introduce to the family.

As the weekend gets underway in the close quarters of a crowded house filled with quirky, prying relatives, Dan and Marie try to squelch and cover up their growing mutual attraction at every turn, leading to one comical situation after another. Yet, no matter how hard they try to do the very opposite, Dan and Marie can't help but fall in love.

Now, Dan is about to realize that no matter how wise safety might seem, when it comes to real life, he's going to have to break all the rules.

Good advice. 

Last night I told my wife, Laurel, that "Dan in Real Life" got pretty good critic and viewer reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, so we should give it a look-see rather than returning it without watching the movie. After all, if it sucked, we could stop watching it after half an hour or so.

But both of us loved the movie. Steve Carell was great in it, as was Juliette Binoche. This romantic comedy even made us laugh out loud several times, and we usually keep our amusement silently inside our heads.

The movie was short enough (98 minutes) for us to see it in one Wednesday night sitting.

However, it was long enough that we didn't have time to see any of our usual politically-oriented TV shows that pile up in our DVR for eventual watching. Like, Late Night With Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Real Time With Bill Maher. 

(Why is it all of these have "with" in the show names? Another mystery of the cosmos.)

What struck me as I headed off to bed after watching the local -- OK, Portland, since Salem doesn't have a TV station -- 11 pm news was how much calmer I felt, compared to our usual television-watching routine. Almost always my wife and I feast, maybe even overdose, on a diet of the above-mentioned politically heavy shows.

Given that the Mueller report appears to be coming out next week, part of me was wondering what Colbert, et. al., had to say about this important development. However, a larger part of me was feeling good about the, well, feel-good message of "Dan in Real Life."

Love is what counts most in life.

Not politics. Not the Mueller report. Not the 2020 election. Or any election. And love, no matter who is fallen in love with, can't be controlled, predicted, anticipated, or even understood. It is simply there, a mystery in plain sight.

If you haven't seen "Dan in Real Life" and want to get a feel for the movie, here's four clips from the last part of it.

Here Dan and his brother Mitch, whose girlfriend is the woman Dan is falling in love with, Marie, both sing to her in their separate ways. Marie likes what Dan did, yet also is confused by it.

I loved the bowling scene. Dan (Steve Carell) and Marie (Juliette Binoche) meet up after Marie realizes that she really isn't attracted to Dan's brother and leaves the family reunion. But she calls Dan and says, "I had to leave. But I didn't get very far." What they didn't know is that the whole family also has decided to go bowling.

Dan feels bad that he's been letting down his three daughters. They get him back on track with Marie, though.

And naturally there's a happy ending in the closing credits. Geez, I really like romantic comedies.

Photos of 2018 Salem Art Fair & Festival

I hugely enjoyed today's Salem Art Fair visit. 

Here's photos, and commentary, of what caught my eye (and also my stomach) this afternoon. I share photos of my Art Fair purchase, a coffee mug with an unusual bumpy glaze.

The Art Fair is a great $5 bargain, especially since this also pays for entry to evening entertainment. I'm probably returning tomorrow.

U of O softball way more entertaining today than OSU baseball

I'm an end of season softball and baseball fan, because we have DirecTV and they still don't carry the Pac 12 Network after so many years, I've stopped counting. 

But today ESPN showed important games for both the University of Oregon softball team, which needed a win over Kentucky to advance to the Women's College World Series, and the Oregon State baseball team, which needed a win over UCLA to have a chance of winning the Pac 12 championship, plus get a better seeding in the NCAA playoffs.

My conclusion: women's softball is way more entertaining than men's baseball.

Now, this is something I've been aware of ever since I started watching softball games. The Ducks' exciting comeback win in the final inning over Kentucky last year convinced me of that.  

But today's viewing added more fuel to that conclusion.

And it wasn't just because the U of O Ducks won, while the OSU Beavers lost. It was how the games were played that made watching softball so much more enjoyable. 

Let me count the ways...

(1) Softball moves along much more quickly than baseball. The between-inning commercial breaks seem considerably shorter, probably because baseball pitchers throw warm-up pitches and I don't believe softball pitchers do.

(2) In softball, a runner doesn't get to take a lead from the base they're on. Thank you, softball!

Today I watched a UCLA pitcher throw to first base about a zillion (or so) times in a row for some reason or another. The announcers thought it was because the pitcher wasn't comfortable with making a throw to the hitter, so he kept throwing to first base to buy more time.

Whatever the reason, it was super-boring. Softball runners still steal bases, by the way. There just isn't the not-fun-to-watch drama between a pitcher and a runner on first base created by the ability to take a lead in baseball.

(3) The women who play softball appear to be having more fun than the men who play baseball. Their celebrations appear more genuinely happy. Their cheers are more creative, with better choreography.

And I've never seen a softball player, or a softball coach, spit. Which makes me wonder why men need to. Don't both sexes have the same amount of saliva?

(4) I don't think this is due to a difference in athleticism, but softball is more unpredictable.

Today I saw two U of O runners try to occupy third base at the same time. And in the end, both were safe, owing to the Kentucky third basewoman's inability to make a throw to second when one of the runners had to retrace her steps.

Again, the unpredictability of softball seems to have more to do with the ball (larger) and how the game is played, rather than the ability of the players. Errors do seem to be more common in softball, but I consider this a good thing, as it makes a game more interesting. 

(5) Softball games last for seven innings, not nine. That's plenty.

And softball has an eight-run rule. Meaning, if a team has had five at-bats, and they're behind by eight runs or more, the game is over. I'm not sure what the reason is for this, especially given my impression that softball is more unpredictable, but it does speed the game along, as happened today.

(6) Softball pitchers actually spend most of their time pitching, not shaking off signs, throwing to first, pondering the nature of the cosmos, or whatever baseball pitchers do when they're not throwing a ball to the plate. 

I always record college baseball games, because I don't have the patience to watch them live. But I watched today's softball game live, and I didn't feel bored at all. 

I've got a 30 second advance on my DirecTV remote. With baseball games, often I'll press it several times and the pitch count hasn't even changed. (That feature also is a must when I watch professional golf, where a putt can take an eternity, more or less, to occur.)

Anyway, I look forward to watching the Oregon Ducks softball team in the Women's College World Series. They've been in the Series six times, but have never won it. I'll also be rooting for the OSU baseball team to make it to the Men's College World Series. 

But for sure I'll need to record the baseball games so I can fast forward until something interesting happens.

Shout! is a hugely enjoyable Enlightened Theatrics musical

Whether or not you were there in the 60's and early 70's (I was) to groove to tunes such as "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" and "Son of a Preacher Man," you'll love Enlightened Theatrics' Shout! The Mod Musical at the Grand Theatre in downtown Salem. 

I saw Shout! last night at a preview performance where the five women who sing, dance, and act with marvelous professionalism came back on stage after the show in street clothes to respond to questions from the audience, along with other members of the production.

What blew my mind further, which was already pleasantly blown by the musical, was how fortunate we in Salem are to have cast members and supporting staff with such amazing credentials.

For example, several of the women in the cast said they have a background in opera, so they observed that it was a bit of a stretch for them to get used to dancing while singing (well, not much of a stretch, given how at ease they looked on stage). 

I got to ask a question of the costume and wig designer, Shelbi Wilkin, regarding how she was able to come up with the outfits worn by the "Mod 5," who are known as Blue Girl, Green Girl, Orange Girl, Red Girl, and Yellow Girl. Wilkin said that it took a lot of research, mentioning as an aside that she is finishing up a MFA in Costume Design. 

I was impressed. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Master's Degree in Costume Design.

But now that I know, that explains why the women's clothes looked so spot-on for the times -- the first act is set in 1966, my high school graduation year, and the second act took place in 1968 and 1970, as I recall.

Since I was coming of age in the Shout! era, I can testify that the musical is an accurate reflection of the cultural changes that took place in the few years between 1966 and 1970. 

The first act is frothy and fun. 

I and other gray-haired members of the audience were treated to a time-machine ride back to Beatlemania, epitomized by Yellow Girl's ecstatic acquisition of Paul McCartney's comb after his trash was ransacked by smitten girls (even some dandruff on it was cause for joy).

And when the theme song from Goldfinger was performed, I recollected that I saw that 1964 James Bond movie four freaking times, I loved it so much as a geeky teenager. 

Somewhat disturbing to me, though, and this feeling foreshadowed the second act, was how sexist some of the lyrics to 60's songs performed in Shout! sounded to my 69-year-old ears. Naturally I didn't think that at the time, because it was taken for granted back then that, for example... (from "Wishin' and Hopin')

All you gotta do is hold him and kiss him and squeeze him and love him
Yeah, just do it
And after you do, you will be his
You gotta show him that you care just for him
Do the things he likes to do
Wear your hair just for him, 'cause
You won't get him
Thinkin' and a-prayin', wishin' and a-hopin'

Indeed, in the first act the five women are inundated with admonitions from an advice columnist in issues of Shout! magazine that basically reduce every problem a Mod Girl might have to a bad hair style, lack of a moisturizer, and such. These are light-hearted moments in the musical, yet point to the fact that though the sixties were swinging, feminism wasn't much on display.  

This began to change in 1970, as do the women in the second act. The musical's mood becomes a bit more somber, though by no means serious. Talk of domestic violence makes an appearance. The carefree girls in the first act have learned some life lessons, which mirrors my memory of the times.

I went to college in the San Francisco Bay area. It was the Summer of Love in 1967. Just two years later, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert was a mayhem-filled nightmare (I was there; not part of the violence, thankfully).

So Shout! shows both how wonderful the 60's were, along with some of the dark side of those sunny times. Go see the show! You'll love it.

Enlightened Theatrics continues to knock productions out of the Acting Park

In case you aren't a baseball fan, the title of this blog post is a big thumbs-up to the quality of the plays and musicals the Enlightened Theatrics folks have been gifting Salem through their Grand Theatre productions.

I feel bad that my wife and I went to see their most recent play, The Foreigner, only last night -- which was the next to last performance, the last being a matinee this afternoon. So my praise of the cast is intended to help spur people to go see the next Enlightened Theatrics productions, as shown above. 

The highest praise I can give the cast is that my wife, Laurel, and to a somewhat lesser extent, me, usually aren't big fans of farcical plays. By farcical I mean over-the-top acting, lots of physical humor, and a decidedly unbelievable plot.

Yet even though The Foreigner has all of those characteristics, we left the play saying to each other, "Wow, that was really enjoyable." In lesser directorial and acting hands, seeing The Foreigner could have been a painful experience for us. But the Enlightened Theatrics production was a delight.

The reason: great acting, great set design, great attention to detail.

Regarding the acting, the words that went through my head after seeing The Foreigner were "inhabit the role."

Now, since I know next to nothing about acting, which includes what inhabit the role actually means, all I can say is what those three words meant to me as I watched The Foreigner from a front row seat.

I'm sure I've noted this before about other Enlightened Theatrics productions, but what continues to impress me is that I never feel that members of a cast actually are acting. Which may sound weird, because what else would actors do but act?

OK, I know they're acting, but each and every cast member of The Foreigner struck me as inhabiting their role so completely, it seemed like their performance flowed naturally from their understanding of their character -- as opposed to a conscious decision to act in a certain way.

Yes, I'm sure what I'm talking about is akin to Acting 101, something so basic to acting it's sort of ridiculous to mention it. But even if that's true, the cast of The Foreigner were like doctoral students showing the nuances of Acting 101 at a very high level.

This was really important in a play that stretches credulity in so many ways.

Like, people believing that a foreigner (who actually was someone feigning an inability to speak English beyond a stilted "thank you" to protect his privacy at a Georgia lodge) could learn English quite fluently in just a few days of tutoring. Or, being able to hit someone over the head with a croquet mallet that conveniently knocks them out, yet leaves them otherwise none the worse for wear.

Farcical plays require great acting, or the inherent absurdity of plot lines becomes exacerbated by the audience feeling "Even the actors aren't buying this stuff."

But the cast of The Foreigner managed to make the twists and turns of the play seem believable through their whole-hearted embrace of their characters. Sitting as we were in the front row, I really enjoyed the subtle changes of expression by the various cast members as their lines were spoken and heard.

I was reminded of the cast of "Get Out," the movie that got several well-deserved Oscar nominations. In that movie there were close-ups that showed waves of subtly varying emotions pass over the face of an actor, as if we were seeing the external signs of an internal attempt to come to grips with the situation their character had been presented with.

So instead of bursting full-on in some display of outrage, irritation, joy, curiosity, or whatever, watching The Foreigner I had the feeling of being privy to the mental precursors that led up to the eventual display of emotion. And that made all the difference between feeling "This person is acting like _____" and the much more pleasing "This person is actually _____."

Bottom line: with The Foreigner, Enlightened Theatrics put on another wonderful production. I'm happy that we decided to see the play near the end of its run. Next time we'll get tickets earlier, so I can praise the production sooner and hopefully spur some people in Salem to enjoy high quality live theatre.

Five observations about Ed Asner's show, "A Man and His Prostate"

Last night my wife and I saw Ed Asner perform "A Man and His Prostate" at the Elsinore Theatre here in Salem, Oregon.  

It's an entertaining reading by Asner of what a different Ed, Ed Weinberger, wrote concerning what he went through after he collapsed while on a vacation in Italy. Since I'm not going to describe the show in much detail, you can read a review to learn about it. 

What I want to do is share five observations of A Man and His Prostate based on my personal experience of being also a man, with a prostate, who has had prostate problems of his own.

(1) Funny to hear about, not so amusing to experience. Weinberger's writing and Asner's performance are wonderfully light-hearted.

It was great to view the humorous side of a prostate problem. But I can pretty much guarantee that when Weinberger was experiencing his prostate travails ("two hours from kidney failure" due to urinary retention, we learn) there wasn't nearly as much amusement in them.

This isn't a criticism of the show, nor of the copious laughter that accompanied Asner's reading. It's just an observation that if someone with a serious prostate problem is overly sensitive, they might find that parts of the show hit an emotional tender spot.

(2) Flomax isn't as scary as Asner's side effects bit proclaims. Asner said Flomax, a commonly prescribed drug that makes it easier to urinate, "has more side effects than a divorce." 

That's certainly true. As regards potential side effects, at least.

But virtually every prescription drug comes with a disturbingly long list of possible side effects. Asner correctly said that dizziness is one of them, and I did indeed experience some dizziness after I took my first Flomax and got out of bed that night to, naturally, pee. 

But my bout of dizziness lasted only one day. Since, I haven't noticed any Flomax side effects. Your results may vary, of course. And I have to admit that this statement about Flomax on the Drugs.com site is worthy of making a joke about. 

Flomax may impair your thinking or reactions. Be careful if you drive or do anything that requires you to be alert.

(3) My doctors always have done a digital prostate exam at my annual physical. Ever since I turned forty or thereabouts, I'm pretty sure I've always gotten the not-so-fun digital, as in finger, prostate exam that plays a pretty prominent role in A Man and His Prostate.

By its absence. Weinberger, as read by Asner, complains to his doctor (during a phone call after he was admitted to a Florence hospital) that he'd never gotten a finger up the ass in the many years they've had a doctor-patient relationship. 

This surprised me. I've always figured that men of a certain age get their prostate felt by their doctor through the rectum wall as a matter of course. I wrote about my experience of this after switching to a woman physician in "Female doctors do it better."

Naturally I was curious as to how the most intimate and least favorite part of a middle-aged male annual physical exam would go. I’m pleased to report, just fine. This was the first time that my prostate had been examined by a female doctor and I can confidently say that, based on this sample of one, women do it better.

More gentle, for sure. Smaller fingers are nice. More communicative too. This was my first prostate exam where I got a running verbal commentary from the doctor: “Hmmmm. Feels pretty normal. Regularly shaped. Just about normal size. Well, let’s make that a normal size for men your age who have a somewhat enlarged prostate.”

Great. A prostate exam is the only time you don’t want to hear from a female who is inspecting your genital area that you’re larger than average. Maybe Flomax will get me nearer to normal.

(4) There's good reasons to either get, or decline, a PSA test for prostate cancer. Actually the mention of a PSA test only came up after Asner's reading when a Salem Health (sponsor of the local show) physician talked about the importance of screening for prostate cancer, which is a major killer of men. 

I've gone back and forth on getting a PSA test after the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended in 2011 against getting the test in most cases. I talked about this in "Why I still decided to get a PSA test" and "My prostate is featured in the AARP Bulletin!"

My basic feeling, which is still my current feeling, is that the results of a PSA test provide information that either can be accepted or ignored depending on a man's personal circumstances. The test isn't very accurate, but a positive result should lead to consideration of other sorts of tests than point to whether a prostate is cancerous. 

(5) Asner's worries about impotence after prostate surgery were amusing. My favorite part of the show was near the end, when Asner relates Weinberger's anxiety about not being able to get an erection following surgery (even after viewing Italian porn on his hotel room TV), with his wife arriving the next day. 

He has the bright idea that a massage with a "happy ending" is called for. And it would be for his wife -- an oft-repeated statement that always got laughs from the audience. 

Eventually we learn that there was indeed a happy ending to this tale, though not the one initially envisioned. 

Now, I'm no expert on impotence following prostate surgery. However, I do know that low dose daily Cialis has been approved by the FDA as a treatment for men who have both an enlarged prostate and erectile dysfunction at the same time. 

Just an observation, along with the four others that I've listed.

Bottom line: if you have the chance, go see A Man and His Prostate. Ed Asner is going to be 88 in a few days. It was inspiring to me, a comparatively young 69 year old, to see Asner perform the show so competently and vigorously. 

Next Fall is a great Enlightened Theatrics play. Go see it!

Main point of this review: There's five days left to see Enlightened Theatrics' current production, the play Next Fall. Get your tickets. Now. The last shows are Wednesday-Sunday, November 8-12. My wife and I loved Next Fall -- one of the most enjoyable plays we've ever seen.

There's even a two-for-one ticket offer that likely still holds:

Next Fall is about a gay couple who bicker, argue, make up, break apart, drive each other crazy, help each other be sane, cry, laugh, and otherwise display all the strengths and weaknesses of every other long-term committed couple, homosexual, heterosexual, whateversexual.

Having seen other Enlightened Theatrics shows, we expected the acting to be superb. Indeed, it was. 

But what blew me away was how natural the six actors were.

Never, not once, did I think "That line sounded like self-conscious acting" (a thought I often have even with famous actors in big-budget films). The dialogue seemed 100% real. And we had great front row seats, so even a whisper of inauthenticity wouldn't have escaped us.

This speaks volumes about both the quality of the actors being showcased in Salem by Enlightened Theatrics and the directing ability of home town director Vincenzo Meduri. 

We Salemians are super-fortunate to be able to see a play like Next Fall for a reasonable price, not to mention being able to buy popcorn that doesn't cost more than the ticket, and be able to eat it in my seat (before the play started, not during, I hasten to add). 

Wikipedia tells me Next Fall first opened off-Broadway in 2009. So it must have been written by Geoffrey Nauffts sometime sooner.

Now, I'm not gay, and my understanding of what it means to be gay today is almost entirely based on hearsay, not direct conversations with gay people. So maybe my feeling while watching Next Fall -- things must be better now, aren't they? -- is wrong.

Like I said, the acting was entirely natural and believable.

I just couldn't help but wonder whether two forty-something gay guys would have so much trouble today coming out to their parents. (Well, actually only one of the guys in the play has this problem; the other has his own problems, some Woody Allen'ish as regards his obsessive health anxieties.)

One thunderous compliment I can extend to the cast and crew of Next Fall is that I heard my wife laugh out loud at least once. This is almost unheard of for Laurel at a play, as she, like me, is almost entirely prone to inaudible inward amusement. 

So congrats to Nauffts and Paul Bright (Adam) for the line that got Laurel laughing -- as I recall, Adam's mention that someone's guilt over gay sex struck him as akin to the guy dressing in leather and flagellating himself with a whip, which Adam notes is "something that I'd like to see."

Sin-related guilt has a big role in the play.

Adam is an atheist. Luke, his live-in lover, is a Christian. Their discussions about religion aren't so much theological as relational, which makes them way more interesting. In fact, my main after-play question concerned whether Adam viewed Jesus or another gay guy as the central intruder into his loving relationship with Luke.

Which was fitting, for the play is so subtly written, there's little room for rooting for one character over another. Sure, since my wife and I are atheists we felt that Adam mostly got the better of Luke when they argued over religion.

But the Director's Note in the program is spot on.

At this very moment in our country and in our world, we are continually being forced to pick a side. We are pressured to divide ourselves based on differing opinions and beliefs... This way of thinking has permeated so deeply within ourselves that we as a civilized community have forgotten what it is to empathize with anyone or anything that is different from ourselves.

...I hope this production gives our audience a chance to really examine what it means to choose a "side." I hope this production creates a dialogue about empathy and how we communicate with each other. I hope audiences gain courage to continue to live in truth and peace, and I look forward to our audiences leaving with a greater appreciation for their own loved ones.

Life is short and precious and love is the greatest gift we can give.

Nicely said, Vincenzo Meduri. 

Today at least 26 people were killed in a Texas church shooting. Listening to news of this tragedy on my car radio, I heard these sorts of sentiments from people in the small town where the murders occurred.

"Trust in faith." "Know that they're with God." "So many prayers are going out to the community." "May God comfort them all."

Ordinarily I'm annoyed by religious proclamations like these. My atheist mind, which works quite a bit like Adam's, will think such things as If God has the power to comfort the living, why didn't he use his power to prevent the 26 deaths?

But having seen Next Fall the night before, and being moved by how religious faith -- even if misguided -- supports believers in dealing with tragedies that otherwise would make no sense to them, I was more understanding of those who looked to God in a time of horrible hurt.

This isn't my way. However, there are lots of ways.

In Next Fall Adam and Luke managed to find common ground that transcended their Christianity and atheism. As Meduri said above, love was the key. 

(A New York Times review of the off-Broadway production, "Love With a Proper Atheist and Other Leaps of Faith,"  is well worth reading.)

"La La Land" -- inspiration for rebels and fools who dream

My wife and I saw "La La Land" on Christmas Eve. Great movie. I'm a sucker for films about people chasing their impossible dreams, facing down their fears and insecurities, being kicked in the butt by life then turning around to ask for more. 

Watching the climactic scenes of La La Land, I was moved by how dedicated jazz musician Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) pursued their passions in the face of daunting obstacles. 

At one point I remember thinking to myself in the darkened movie theatre, "I want to be like them!" 

Then a second thought arose: "But they're a musician and an actress. They sing, dance, play the piano, audition in Hollywood, have cool conversations in jazz bars. I'm just a blogger and citizen activist."

Later, that just bothered me.

Because the core message that has stuck with me after seeing La La Land applies to everyone, not just the "cool kids." And since I'm obviously included in the Class of Everyone, that message is for me as well.

Also, of course, you. 

A key scene is when Mia is auditioning for a part in a movie that doesn't have a script yet. Expecting to read for the part, she's surprised when asked to tell a story, any story she wants, as the script is going to be written around the personality and character of whoever is chosen to be the lead actress.

After a pause, Mia begins to sing. A review of La La Land said that the song comes from a one-woman play Mia wrote and acted in, a play whose debut didn't go very well, yet which led to her audition. 

Here's a clip featuring some of the lyrics from the song, "The Fools Who Dream."

At the time, I grasped the basic message of the song, but I couldn't understand all of the lyrics. Which are:

My aunt used to live in Paris
I remember, she used to come home and tell us
stories about being abroad and

I remember that she told us she jumped in the river once,
Barefoot

She smiled, Leapt, without looking
And She tumbled into the Seine!
The water was freezing
she spent a month sneezing
but said she would do it, again

Here's to the ones who dream
Foolish, as they may seem
Here's to the hearts
that ache
Here's to the mess
we make

She captured a feeling
Sky with no ceiling
Sunset inside a frame
She lives in her liquor
and died with a flicker
I'll always remember the flame

Here's to the ones
who dream
Foolish, as they may seem
Here's to the hearts
that ache
Here's to the mess
we make

She told me:
A bit of madness is key
to give us to color to see
Who knows where it will lead us?

And that's why they need us,
So bring on the rebels
The ripples from pebbles
The painters, and poets, and plays

And here's to the fools who dream
Crazy, as they may seem
Here's to the hearts that break
Here's to the mess we make

I trace it all back, to that
Her, and the snow, and the sand
Smiling through it
She said
She'd do it, Again

I grew up in a family that most would call dysfunctional. As a child, I heard stories about relatives that were filled with foolish actions, alcoholism, divorces, infidelities, eccentricities. My divorced mother, who raised me, drank too much and smoked too much.

She also was an intellectual who read books obsessively, played tournament-level bridge passionately, expounded her conservatism proudly, and wrote a humorous Halloween play each year for me and my elementary school classmates that we performed happily.

In my teenage years, my mother, Carolyn Hines, drove me crazy as her alcoholism deepened. She also helped make as crazily sane as I am now. As the song says, she broke hearts. She made messes. Like mother, like son.

Unlike Mia, I never explicitly heard the words, "A bit of madness is key." However, I embraced that sentiment by experiencing it, both in my childhood and afterwards. Members of my family have done some crazy things. So have I. 

The beautiful thing is, as Mia sings...

And here's to the fools who dream
Crazy, as they may seem
Here's to the hearts that break
Here's to the mess we make

I trace it all back, to that
Her, and the snow, and the sand
Smiling through it
She said
She'd do it, Again

Fools, rebels, dreamers, misfits.

The world would be so lacking without them. 

But what I really mean to say is, without us. Because wherever I look, I see the sorts of people Mia sang about. We just usually aren't doing the sort of dramatic stuff movies like La La Land are made of.

No matter.  We're all fools who dream, breaking hearts and making messes. 

"Plaid Tidings" at Grand Theatre: meaningful fun escapism

Ever ready to accept free tickets, I jumped at the offer by Enlightened Theatics' Carlos Barata to see their current Plaid Tidings production gratis in exchange for a blog post review. 

In case you're wondering whether what I'll say here is colored by the hue of those two $25 tickets, I reply:

"Of course it is! I will add in one extra laudatory adjective beyond what I would have written otherwise, because I want to assure other entertainment enterprises in Salem that, yes, my blogging can be bought in exchange for free tickets. However, you won't get much in return, since the First Rule for Bloggers is be true to yourself and speak from the heart."

If that platitude sounds corny, such is fitting, because Plaid Tidings arguably is a corny show.

Four guy singers dressed in plaid sport coats return from the dead, having met their demise in 1964 after crashing into a bus filled with teenagers on their way to a Beatles concert (the teenagers survived; they didn't).

The first person I asked to accompany me to last night's show at the Grand Theatre demurred, using the corny excuse. Well, that person's loss turned into another person's gain, since the friend who went with me loved Plaid Tidings, just as I did. 

As was the case with every Enlightened Theatrics production I've seen, Plaid Tidings honors their tagline, "Broadway to Salem." The four New York performers are professionals in every way: singing, acting, dancing. The onstage bass player and pianist played marvelously; the lighting and set design was top notch; the theatre's sound system is a delight.

So it's easy for me to say, nearly completely truthfully, get tickets to Plaid Tidings pronto, because the last show is December 11, and you don't want to miss this fun, humorous, uplifting, entertaining, delightful show.

(One of those adjectives was bought and paid for by my free tickets, so now we're into totally truthful blog post territory.)

I want to address the misapprehension that other people similar to me -- atheist, progressive, lover of edgy raunchy humor à la Amy Schumer -- may have about seeing a Christmas show with seemingly zero political, cultural, or philosophical significance.

Plus, Plaid Tidings is filled with renditions of songs that, in other circumstances, curdle my Traditional Holidays-phobic mind. Such as, "It's Beginning to Look Like Christmas," Jingle Bells," "Joy to the World," "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."

So I readily admit that before Carlos' free ticket offer entered my inbox, seeing Plaid Tidings was way down on my list of must-do's. I wasn't as fearful of corniness as the person who declined to accompany me, but my dislike of how Americans usually celebrate Christmas caused me to be wary of Plaid Tidings.

Had the oh-so-cool Enlightened Theatrics folks sold out to mass-market tastes? Was this a production aimed at the people who enjoy hearing Christmas songs in stores the day after Thanksgiving, and even smilingly hum along with them?

After seeing Plaid Tidings, and having pondered its philosophical significance during a lengthy dog walk this afternoon, I want to assure fellow Christmas-skeptics that despite any misgivings you may have about this production, it is well worth your while to go see it.

Here's why.

(1) Meaninglessness is meaningful. Especially post-presidential election. The Director's Note by Charlie Johnson in the Plaid Tidings program captured this point well.

As I understand it, there are two types of theatre. One that asks the big questions and challenges your world view and another that provides escape and light-hearted fun. Prior to this experience, I had always believed the former to be a loftier and nobler pursuit. I didn't find as much value in a show written solely to entertain and distract.

But I've got to tell you -- after working on PLAID TIDINGS (a show written solely to entertain and distract) I have changed my mind. 

Over the course of rehearsals, I have realized just how necessary shows like PLAID TIDINGS are. We live in a complicated, trying world. Now, more than ever perhaps, we need a dose of escape -- a dose of fun. Lucky for you, that's exactly what you'll get tonight. Prepare yourself for tight harmonies, corny jokes, and a bit of nostalgia.

So while you most likely won't leave the theatre contemplating the meaning of life, you'll hopefully walk out of here a bit more joyful... recharged to be a citizen of the world. Turns out this silly little show is more important than I thought.

Nicely said, Charlie. I was glad to see you embrace "corny" as a descriptor of your show, to own it, to raise it to the top of your flagpole and wave it proudly. (more about this in #2 below)

Also, philosophical types like me have no problem contemplating the meaning of life after seeing Plaid Tidings. The way I see it, spending a fun, light-hearted evening in the Grand Theatre hearing old tunes sung in a fresh fashion reminds us that sometimes the most meaningful thing we can say about life is that searching for profound meanings leads us astray.

It was great to sit in my row F, seat 11 chair last night and just let the sights and sounds of Plaid Tidings wash over me in a refreshing cascade of meaningful meaninglessness.

With all the imagined worries about what might come to be in this age of Donald Trump'ism, I deeply enjoyed immersing myself in the actual what is of the show's songs, dancing, and jokes. Plaid Tidings reminded me that as seriously as we need to take the world at times, it is equally important to balance that heaviness with a lightness of being. 

(2) Corny is a relative concept, not absolute. Having grown up in the 1950's and 1960's, I experienced the pre-death years of the Plaid Tidings Four (as noted above, they died in 1964). Along with everybody else at the time, I watched Perry Como and the Ed Sullivan Show; I listened to Peggy Lee, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole; I heard the jokes of Steve Allen and other comedians. 

A bit later, we had the early Steve Martin, Laugh-In, Sonny and Cher. What we found funny back then, many would dismiss as "corny" now.

But if this is true, won't the same apply to our modern culture a few decades hence? Won't young people in 2050 look at clips of Amy Schumer, Lady Gaga, Jay Z, Beyonce, and other entertainers of our day and think, Geez, they're so unbelievably corny!

Lastly, watching Plaid Tidings made me recall how the late 1950's and the beginning of the 1960's was just as light-heartedly frothy as the show reflects, yet also as seriously scarily substantial as the times are today. 

I was one of the editors of my central California 8th grade "newspaper," published via mimeograph. My best friend and I queried our classmates in a Hines/Hart poll about whether they thought there would be a nuclear war soon. Most of us said, "Yes."

We'd spent years ducking and covering under our desks. We'd lived through aboveground nuclear tests in neighboring Nevada that caused periodic milk alerts when radiation levels got too high in cow pastures. We'd experienced the extreme Cold War tensions between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. with countless warheads pointed at each other. We'd heard about the need for every home to have some sort of bomb shelter with enough supplies to wait out the first weeks of a nuclear conflict.

I thought about all this, not during last night's Plaid Tidings performance of happy tunes I remembered from the 50's and 60's, but later -- when I began thinking about the cultural anxiety and fear that co-existed with the jokes and songs. 

Just like today.

We still live in a yin and yang world. Good and bad, happiness and sadness, joy and suffering, relaxation and worrying, meaning and meaninglessness -- all this continues to co-exist in 2016 just as it did in 1962 (all of us who lived through the scariness of the Cuban missile crisis will remember it both as the year of the Beatles' first single, and the year when we really thought we might die).

So, yeah, let's enjoy the here-and-now fun of Plaid Tidings while also facing the reality that we still live in a dangerous world filled with injustice, inequity, discrimination, greed, and willful ignorance. If we wait to be happy until the world is perfect, we'll wait forever. 

At the beginning of Plaid Tidings, one of the four singers who have returned to Earth says something like, "Our purpose is to figure out our purpose; we've got to put on the show that we didn't prepare."

Words as true today as they were back in the day -- no matter when that day was. 

Pac-12 Networks now on Sling TV. Because of me! (I like to think)

I DID IT! (in my magical thinking brain, at least)

Just five days after my annual blog post rant about DirecTV not carrying the Pac-12 Networks -- and the Pac-12 Networks not being offered on any streaming service -- today a deal has been announced between Sling TV and the Pac-12 Networks. 

SAN FRANCISCO– Pac-12 Networks announced today a new agreement with Sling TV to make all six Pac-12 Networks regional feeds, which collectively offer live coverage of more than 800 sporting events, available to Sling Orange and Sling Blue customers who subscribe to the “Sports Extra” add-on pack as six separate channels. Sling TV is Pac-12 Networks’ first over-the-top provider to offer the network’s content, enabling Sling TV customers to watch Pac-12 games, regardless of their location.

“This is a great way for Pac-12 Networks to kick off the 2016 football season,” said Pac-12 Networks’ president, Lydia Murphy-Stephans. “Our six regional networks, featuring 800 live sporting events and all-access original programming, will now be available over-the-top on Sling TV for Pac-12 fans across the country. Sling’s innovative delivery model and great interface makes it incredibly easy for our fans to stay connected with their favorite Pac-12 school, team and sports.” 

“Students, alumni and Pac-12 fans can now enjoy conference games without regional restrictions,” said Roger Lynch, CEO of Sling TV. “With Sling TV, Pac-12 Networks games have never been more affordable and accessible. As a Pac-12 fan, I can’t wait to watch the ‘Conference of Champions,’ on Sling TV – the premier destination for college sports fans.”

Naturally I had to jump on this.

I'd rather have the Pac-12 Networks be part of my DirecTV package, but I'm so damn irritated at DirecTV for not being able to work out a deal with the Pac-12 Networks for five freaking years, I'm pleased to pay $25 a month to get Sling Orange ($20/mo) with the Sports Extra add-on ($5/mo) just to figuratively poke DirecTV in its corporate eye with a silent scream of Take this, you jerks -- Sling TV is getting my Pac-12 Networks money rather than you!

It was a breeze to sign up for a 7-day trial with Sling TV. (Which is owned by Dish Networks, so that's an extra poke in the eye of DirecTV.)

After signing up, I fired up my Apple TV, downloaded the Sling TV app, put in my Sling TV password, and voila!, I was watching an OSU/Oregon volleyball game on the Pac-12 Networks -- which conveniently had a scroll at the bottom of the screen announcing the deal with "its newest TV provider, Sling TV."

I can't tell you how satisfying it was to take the photo above of the volleyball game on our big screen TV.

I've been watching Pac-12 Networks games for so long on my 13" MacBook Pro laptop via technically illegal streaming sites, the pleasure of finally getting the Pac-12 Networks on our television was well worth the $25 a month that I'll have to fork out to Sling TV if I keep subscribing after the 7-day trial ends.

Which I almost certainly will. 

Anyway, I'm glad to take credit (again, in my own mind) for writing the blog post that provided the karmic impetus for getting the Sling TV deal done with the Pac-12 Networks. I'll quote myself from my September 3 blog post: 

This is the freaking fifth year I've complained about DirecTV not carrying the Pac-12 Networks. Count 'em: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. 

...I hope both DirecTV and the Pac-12 Networks realize they're acting like idiots. Their five year pissing match over broadcast rights/fees has passed the point of ridiculousness into Asinine Abject Absurdity. 

...here we are, a year later, with me and many other unhappy DirecTV customers ferreting out unauthorized streams of Pac-12 Network games, because there is no legal way to watch them without subscribing to a cable or satellite service that offers the Pac-12 Network. Which is stupid, since other leagues offer stand-alone streaming.

...Depressing.

But ever the optimist, this story gives me some reason to hope: "Pac-12 Networks hires cable executive to solve distribution problems."

...Well, Ms. Budill looks like an attractive, charming, competent woman. If she is able to break the corporate logjam that is preventing DirecTV and the Pac-12 Networks from working out a deal, I'll nominate Budill for a Satellite TV Peace Prize.

The Sling TV deal is a good start, Ms. Budill. Now, work out a deal with DirecTV to carry the Pac-12 Networks so I can stop paying $25 a month to Sling TV. Then you'll really be entitled to your Satellite TV Peace Prize.