#you know the suspended bridge effect. it's like that but for tv shows i think.

[anthonycrowley]

things Happen and my kneejerk reaction is 'i should watch supernatural about this'

#my post #you know the suspended bridge effect. it's like that but for tv shows i think.

[anightmarethisdamage]

Medusa MV Reactions Part 2

Anyway I'm not going to lie, I thought this was Sangwoo's grave... :o

Rip.

This reminds me of the Cicada ARG.

I also find it interesting that the Medusa place is a carwash - with water (duh) which could be used as a mirror to stop Medusa from turning you to stone. We could also see the TV screen earlier as a way to stop her turning you to stone - hence why the boys just got... brainwashed? De-brainwashed? Whatever it was.

Omg Medusa's drug dealing water now!

I love the travelling motifs like cars, petrol stations, hotels etc, but I just cannot suspend disbelief enough to think they got such a nice car without stealing or murder.

Why does he look so fascinated lmao?

OMG WATER!

Bain got to water his plant! Or did he....?

Yeah how about no he didn't?

Dude my jaw dropped when I saw this shot. The MV could have ended with Bain recycling his water bottle, but this one shot recontextualises the whole thing. As you may know, since I stan JUST B, I am a massive fan of time loops and nonlinear narratives. And if there is one thing to take away from this MV - it's that in Tick Tock we saw the butterfly effect happening - and now they've done something that butterfly-effected them into a timeloop dream state. I would say 'like idiots,' but this happens to a lot of people apparently, so they're just regularly stupid.

This also creates a lot of engagement in the MV because we now wonder - how do they get out? Which is the dream? Are they both the same reality or not? Is this real or not? And so on. I think I've offered good hypotheses in my analysis but the only real way to get an answer is next comeback... which... I mean, since this one took 11 months we have no clue when the next one will happen, if at all.

Sorry to be a downer.

I loved the song, anyway.

Let's look at the lyrics!

Lyric Analysis

Yep, so straight off the bat there's a lot of imagery of violence, suffering, conflict etc - talking about predators, starving, killing, etc - and also division - they are divided, either from each other or the rest of the world.

Then there's the fixing of the division - through the rain that washes the memories away - ironic, since there's no water in the MV - and then the connection - riding high beside you and throwing your old memories away, breaking your painful past to come out new.

I like how they say 'in the darkness, you're my Medusa' - in classic JUST B fashion, with insane depth. Medusa could be beautiful, she could also be ugly. But whatever she is, she is dangerous, and this is reflected in the MV - the rain is supposed to bond them to their Medusa and get rid of the division - but there is no rain - it's all in their head - they are being deceived by her and in the end end up with nothing - no water, no love no nothing.

Not going to lie, with the whole 'drop the pain on me' and 'I'll break the thorny barriers around your heart,' they sound a little masochistic. Mind you, this is something we've seen before with JUST B - probably related to the trauma of DAMAGE.

I like how JM's bridge-postchorus thing is distorted too - shows the effect that Medusa has on them. Also, how they then literally say 'I can't look away,' like, yeah, you can't, you're literally stone, my guy.

Medusa also recontextualises the 'don't break down' at the end - because they are stone, they can literally be broken and shattered.

So - conclusions about the lyrics. As always, they are amazing and have some hidden meaning. However, I think they really shine with the MV, rather than by themselves, as lyrics like DAMAGE do. Medusa is on paper, a lovesong with some potentially sinister meaning. But the MV takes that gothic, sinister nature up the the next degree. Not only is there no rain and no water, only desert and suffering, but there is also no sign of love or relief from this suffering. There are also wonderfully amazing moments like the line 'You're the medusa in my darkness,' - suggesting a saviour - while Bain is literally crying over not having water - hence, no saviour. It reveals how the boys have been blinded to the dangerous nature of their situation, and it's quite frankly amazing how the MV contradicts the lyrics of the song to tell a story. 10/10.

Conclusions

An amazingly Gothic story, as expected from JUST B. It carries on both from the 'JUST B' series and from Naneun, continuing the story while also creating it's own self-contained and intriguing story. It leaves us with many questions and a few potential answers, and uses the juxtaposition of lyrics and video to further show the themes of the story in an amazing way. Could it be better? Sure. But I'll always have my own directions I want the storyline to go and they won't be the ones BlueDot takes. It's still a very solid addition to their discography and I know I'll be playing this song on repeat for ages, singing my heart out like Geonu.

#just b #only b #medusa #just b theories #mv analysis

[jennawynn]

Chronotrek: Disco season 2 part 2 and a digression about Starfield.

Episode 6-

I think this is one of the few episodes I have actually seen. One of my housemates watches new Trek, and I either saw a bunch of it over her shoulder or watched it with her bc it is very familiar.

Episode 7-

Ah, back to Talos IV. I'm glad I watched the pilot :joy: The difference in special effects is vast. We've been spoiled by good effects that now it's harder to suspend reality to enjoy a good story with bad effects sometimes... but watching old Trek, it's almost like they lean on those effects over the storytelling frequently. Like the long sequence of going to warp with the fading in and out stars over the almost static shot of Pike on the bridge. Maybe because those effects were so cutting edge when it first aired? It's funny because this point is occupying the same space in my brain as something I'm also thinking about with regard to Starfield, but I'm not certain why.

I noticed there were mods out there that remove things like the docking and launching and landing animations to get you out of cutscenes faster and I'm sitting here intentionally 'getting up' from my seat and walking to the launch bay instead of just using the 'exit ship' button, docking and walking to the dock instead of just boarding immediately because it grounds me in the place, in the travel. I'd actually love it if you accessed the planet map from a navigation pane in your control panel rather than just using the start menu, tbh.

I don't understand why you would want to just fast travel and 'teleport' from one city on one planet to another. It would disrupt my feeling of living in the world. Now I do not want my trip from one planet to another to actually take 9 hours without the grav jump drive, but those sequences offer a transition- like the DM saying 'you travel for 3 days and arrive at your destination'.

To that point, showing Enterprise going into warp _is important_ for the same reason. It's the same reason you always get that establishing shot of the planet or the city from overhead when you watch a movie or TV show. It's to tell you, the audience, where the scene is taking place. BUT... unless you have reason to linger, all it takes is a couple seconds before you shift to the story and/or characters. That scene with the bridge of the Enterprise going through the star field is so long comparative to the snappier pacing of modern TV. Is it because they felt the need to fill space back then? Was it because doing the fade in and out of stars was Fancy Tech and they wanted to show off? Was it because shows about space were so new and they had to linger to make sure the audience understood what was happening? I don't know.

#chronotrek #and also #starfield #? #special effects #and #establishing shots #transitions in media #i never use tags like this lol

[clueingforbeggs]

OK as it looks like we may be approaching the actual death of the Queen here are a few reminders:

1: Whilst it is fine to wish the Queen would kick the bucket already, all that will happen monarchy-wise is we get a King and the national anthem gets gender-swapped.

This means:

1a: The Queen's death isn't likely to result in any changes unless you, and I'm talking to people in the UK and Commonwealth countries, start spreading awareness of why the monarchy, etc is bad. Queen Elizabeth had the advantage of being a monarch for a long time and was well-liked by the public. Charles does not have these advantages. Now (or, when she dies) would probably be a good time for people in Commonwealth countries to say 'Do we really need to be part of the Commonwealth?' and for British people to say 'Do we really need a monarch?'

1b: The only real immediate change that will happen is Operation London Bridge. The impacts of this will be:

1bi: Staff at Buckingham Palace wearing a black armband.

1bii: All major TV channels will pull programming, like when Phillip died. All newsreaders will wear black suits and ties. Blanket coverage will mark the beginning of a period of national mourning.

2: National mourning is actually not good. Aside from the fact that monarchies suck, national mourning is just... Really sucky. If you're British you'll probably remember thinking 'Oh fuck just return to normal TV coverage already!' as most major TV networks continued to constantly show stuff about Phillip. Well, get ready for that again, because it's about to get worse! (read: Longer)

2a: For twelve days, all flags will be flown at half-mast. (Cool, no effects here, really).

2b: The London Stock Exchange will be closed for at least one day, potentially more, it's estimated that the losses will be in the billions. (Fuck capitalism, but not cool. This will have a large negative impact because... Well, we live in a society)

2c: The BBC will suspend all programming. Eventually, when programming does resume during the 12 day period, comedy programming will still be suspended. (Not cool. I know we live in the age of streaming, and anyway, you can easily turn to another channel, but the BBC is still the national broadcaster, and the message of 'you can't laugh at anything, the Queen is dead so you need to mourn' is really, really, not good. Also, think about the effect that Phillip's recent death had.)

2d: Currency and stamps will need to be reissued. (not cool. It will cost money. And remember that the country has just lost a lot of money by closing the stock exchange.)

It's great that people are not supporting the monarchy, but making memes on Tumblr about the Queen's upcoming death, whilst not harmful, doesn't help. Use this as an opportunity to try and actually make a change. Help bring about a future that moves away from monarchies, colonialism, and its remnants.

(Also, if it doesn't succeed this time, we won't have to wait that long until Charles (age 73) is in the ground, annoying the country with yet another period of national mourning, which might help make more people want the monarchy gone)

[summerspn]

Batwoman

2019 series > Ep 1-3

*sigh*

Okay here goes...I’m going to break it down for you:

The trailers & ads:

I was skeptical about watching this show as all the trailers for it were terrible.

As a woman I can honestly say each and every trailer made me cringe & go ‘stop!’. They were SO bad.

But, that’s not the actors’ fault. They’re given lines they have to deliver on & Ruby Rose seemed to deliver on those decently enough I suppose.

In the trailers, my biggest issue was the terrible dialogue & poor makeup/wardrobe.

The campy style Batwoman costume & the sloppy bat tattoos...ugh! Why would anyone think that would be appealing?!

Now, onto the show...

There is one & ONLY one reason I watched this show...my mom! I figured I had to give it a shot. But it was not because my mom like it. She in fact, hated it!

My mom, who loves everything from medical & criminal dramas, to shows about witchcraft & medieval times. She somehow even loves campy movies like Dark Shadows. She’s a huge fan of Wonder Woman (comics, tv show & recent movie). She loved the Captain Marvel movie. She is a comic fan and loved Batman & Batwoman growing up.

Yet, she hates this show!

After seeing videos & online posts ALL saying it’s because non fans hate the show because they’re bigots, that’s not true.

The show is awful - so I suppose the trailers were accurate.

My mother could care less what people do for their own pleasure- and like she taught us, “as long as no one’s being hurt & it’s consensual, who cares?”

So right now, just to paint you a picture, neither her nor I care about the lesbian storyline in Batwoman. I don’t care if she’s gay straight, bi, attracted to pumpkins etc. Have at it.

The reason I chose to watch this show is because my mother loves fun well written entertainment & sometimes just silly fluff to get her mind off reality. And as my best friend we have that in common. Our viewing tastes are very similar. So when my mom says something was terrible, it piques my interest (much more than those awful trailers).

The actors:

Most of the actors aren’t bad. Since Dougray Scott is in this I take it as a comparison amongst the others. If you don’t know who he is ...he was in Ever After, Desperate Housewives, Fear the Walking Dead, Hemlock Grove and a thousand other projects. He’s a good actor. However, in Batwoman he has a few mistakes with his accent & delivery of a few lines (much fewer mistakes than the rest of the cast).

But all the actors have mis-steps with their lines & delivery of the lines. Whose job is it to stop them & try again until it’s good? The director

Some actors aren’t as strong as others but after watching the show, I think the strongest actors are: Dougray Scott, Nicole Kang, & Rachel Skarsten. They seem to work with what they’ve got. Trying their best. But the dialogue!

There was a line about Kate Kane having mixed feelings for her sister & didn’t want her hurt because “Duh, feelings”. .... 🙄...she’s a medical student?? The writers gave the actor THAT to work with? Okay...um, they couldn’t have done a second draft and tweaked it? You didn’t find it needed a little more work? Like wrote this instead “it’s only natural to be conflicted...” which makes her sound intelligent. Instead, “Duh, feelings”?!

Unfortunately we come down to Ruby Rose. She’s not a good actress. She seemed to be more talented in the trailers than the actual show but that was because she showed something I like to call emotion.

What happened? Every single line RR delivers has zero affect. Even when she’s literally smiling there is no emotion in her eyes....what only makes her look psychotic. And she moves her eyebrows up & down sooooo much. It’s distracting.

However, she (like the other actors) does seem to be trying. With that said, if you can’t be pulled into the character or the actors’ take on them then it suspends disbelief.

I have nothing against Ruby Rose but knowing she was a model gives context. They work with their eyebrows a lot & any acting they do is for about 20 seconds of a commercial. It’s clear that RR is tackling the tv show like she would a modeling job. Only now she has a s****y wardrobe.

However, she can’t act. She is monotonous & sounds robotic.

I do think though that’s made worse by the director probably not pushing to do enough takes. Sometimes directors instruct actors to act a certain way which makes them sound worse.

Ie) Hayden Christensen acted beautifully in an old tv show where he played a victim of molestation. In Star Wars a Phantom Menace he was apparently told to act more annoyed then angry so voila he came across as a brat...

So I do wonder what influence the director had here.

The wardrobe/makeup:

Papa Kane, Leaders of the Crows, my man Dougray...yes he still looks good in his suits but he’s always shown wearing the same suit. Wardrobe actually helps tell a story especially in a show like this. But it’s like the budget is too small or the director forgot about anyone other than Kate & Beth.

Morning scenes, have him with a little extra stubble, some make up to look like he has dark circles under his eyes. Ruffle his hair. Have him sitting in a hideous vintage t-shirt while they have breakfast. Kate could see how awful he looks and ask “did you get any sleep?” Then they could talk about how worried he is for the city, Kate, or even thinking about Beth! Kate could see the shirt & go “didn’t I get you that?” And he says “yeah for my birthday” and she says “that was ten years ago”.Boom! Shows he loves his daughter & a tiny bonding moment. ...but this never happened.

Luke Fox. Somehow they took an attractive actor and made him look about 20 years older just by wearing glasses that belong to Angela from Who’s the Boss!

Give Luke some 2019 glasses that sit properly on his nose! And the same for the rest of his clothes. They don’t fit right. The show is trying to nerd him up but you can make people awkward, nerdy , or quirky without downplaying their looks. Have Fox wear jeans with his vests, or a fun t-shirt with a suit jacket etc.

Kate Kane. She has the worst wardrobe in the show! Though Batwoman’s suit looks tacky & campy...

Give Kate nicer clothes! They do not need to be expensive but they do need to give her a personality.

1) Plaid...why? Lesbians wearing plaid is a stereotype so WHY would this show advertising itself as modern & breaking the barriers have their main character wearing something so cliche? Makes zero sense. However, since plaid (aka tartan) is making a comeback in fashion they could have used it (if they really had to) in another piece of clothing. A scarf, gloves, shoes? (I actually have a pair of red plaid boots which are durable and adorable). Throwing on a plaid shirt is just lazy.

2) Her hair. Okay so if they’re going for the short-during-military-training look I get it but Ruby Rose has the same hairstyle in everything. I wish she’d just either grow it out or chop it all off. They could have had a scene where she’s fiddling with it in the mirror like she’s self conscious about the new do...showing human insecurities.

3) The leather jacket. Sigh... okay this is my personal opinion but I think the black leather jacket in shows is used too much. It immediately signals strength & a tough exterior right? Well literally everyone knows this. It’s not subtle. I mean I love how it was used on Supernatural where the coat had a history but it was tied into a backstory and eventually was used less and less. But the leather coat was used more in early seasons (which was as far as 15 yrs ago). Other shows always have the ‘bad boy’ wear the jacket. It’s so boring. I’d rather if Kate strolled you wearing a fun typographic shirt or a basic t-shirt and have an expensive belt because she has a thing for belts (subtly nodding to one Batwoman has to use).

There were many choices other than a basic plaid top and black leather jacket. Wardrobe decisions that could give the character/actor subtle layers or tools to work with. But that too was done lazily.

Set design:

Dark & gloomy? ✅

Isolated & abandoned feeling? ✅

Appropriate to the corresponding event... 🙈 not so much.

Ie) the bridge where the family’s car fell off. Whether it’s done with cgi or finding the right location, the bridge in question was generic. Now if the bridge was higher up and/or there were super super wild & crazy rapids maybe, just maybe we’d believe Batman thought Beth was a goner. But it was actual fairly tame so it made Batman look like he just saw the car hanging and go “hey my shift ended an hour ago” and walk off.

And,

The “secret” entrance to the bat cave is in Wayne enterprises? Wouldn’t that be hard to get to? I can picture Bruce hanging around in the garage waiting to go in...he starts over to the door, someone comes, he stops...ya know because everyone knows him...

It’s just weird. There were so many other options.

Special effects:

Some have been pretty bad so far. This is a CW trait. I don’t know if they separate the budget for the directors or not. Is it all one lump number or are they told ‘this is for the production & this is for the special effects?’. I wonder because other CW shows seem to have tiny budgets allocated to the effects. In any case, a show about super villains & heroes needs bigger budgets so it looks more believeable.

The writing:

The writing is just bad. Writing lines like “duh sisters” for a character who is supposed to be educated & intelligent seems ridiculous.

Question - if Bruce Wayne has family why didn’t he stay with them when his parents died? Or they with him? Is this a plot hole from the comics or just this show?

Unrealistic. Yes it’s a superhero story but we care less if the person has all their skills & abilities immediately.

My bff and I love superhero shows but we both had the same problems here as with Supergirl. She just had her powers & didn’t really struggle with them. I watched 2 episodes & was bored already.

Batwoman was so boring but I wanted to see if it got better. It hasn’t.

This show needed to spend episode 1 where she’s discovering how bad Gotham was without Batman & where he went. Is he doing a really long pub crawl? Saving people in another country/city? Dead? Kate shows zero concern for her missing cousin & for some reason, hates him.

Kate immediately knowing how to use the bat equipment with zero practices...how at the beginning she’s swimming in ice water for no reason and doesn’t get hypothermia?? That’s all very unbelievable.

Kate is written as Mary Sue. She knows all & has the most skills in the world! Why??? Okay so she was in the military so yeah give her a backstory of taking taekwondo classes or something but for her to know how to do Luke Fox’s job better than he does? Or where the cameras are at Wayne Enterprises...more than the security team?? And to know what the computer password is, okay... basically she has to be great at everything & the other characters have to be written dumb in order for Kate to be appealing. Why?

Bashing Batman...in a show based in the bat-universe. Terrible move. Kate doing this repeatedly makes us think she’s a villain. Not a hero.

Bashing everyone with male genitalia...makes Kate look like a pr*ck. You can hate certain men you’ve known but to constantly reference women as being superior to men...

1) negates equal rights. You can’t be equals if you act/think/say you’re superior.

2) any boys watching this show is going to feel like something is wrong with them.

3) it’s sexist.

Just like many of us women grew up hearing repeatedly that men were better at this & that...

4) male bashing IS spreading hate. STOP.

That is actually why (more than anything) I didn’t want to watch in the first place because of how the trailers made it sound like they were bashing a whole gender.

Too much too soon. Revealing Alice is Beth in the first episode? Why? Drag it out an episode or 2. Each episode is both boring and yet they try to cram everything into a single episode it’s bizarre.

Ridiculous scenarios. Like Batman would leave a child to drown. And why didn’t Beth/Alice just go home or contact the police...or anyone...when she got out of the water all those years ago? Why does Kate keep letting her sister go when the woman is a multi-murderer?!

Yes, Kate is still hung up on her ex but it was years ago & she was the one dumped. And Sophie is married so Kate is coming off like a stalker 👀

All of it makes Kate look unsympathetic & unlikeable. The show isn’t funny except when we hear bad dialogue. It’s trying to be overly dramatic like a soap opera but it still doesn’t work. I think that’s due to the writing & the directing.

Now don’t get me wrong, even with RR’s lack of acting skills there are ways of making it work...that weren’t done.

Keanu’s Reeves isn’t the most skillful actor but he tries. He’s good at certain things & sticks to it. He knows where his skills are. Yes he’s improved but he’ll never be able to pull off an intense dramatic role. So he sticks to what he’s good at. He’s also a good person & tries to talk openly & intelligently about things so he has people’s respect IRL.

Ruby Rose has been touchy & volatile about people criticizing Batwoman. That made me lose what little respect I had for her.

Awhile back I had tried watching this design show (yes I like those too) Love it Or List It Vancouver. The show was fine but the designer Jillian was being critiqued left right & Center on social media after the pilot episode for sounding like a child. She used phrases such as; “totally”,”for sure” , and used the word ‘like’ a thousand times... she really did sound like a valley girl. However, about 5 episodes later that was gone. She was speaking more eloquently and more grown up - which in turn made people like her more. She & the show worked to help improve her speech patterns so it wouldn’t be distracting. And the show has been around for years now.

My point? RR could have taken the criticism & worked with it. I get she’s probably upset as she worked hard but we all go through it. We all have a project of some kind at work that falls flat. We take the criticism & try to improve. RR could take acting lessons or at the very least, practice in the mirror.

Most of the other issues I’ve mentioned are a result of the awful writing, poor direction & likely some interference from the network.

What this show should never have done was act superior. That’s being a douche. Anytime I see or hear someone being arrogant like that I just roll my eyes and walk away (or in this case, turn the channel).

If anyone working for the CW and/or Batwoman reads this I hope you’ll take some pointers.

I like myself too much though to subject myself to anymore episodes though. I’m done. ✌️

#batwoman #tv serials #tv #tv shows #cw #ruby rose #dougray scott #elizabeth anweis #rachel skarsten #nicole kang #camrus johnson #gabriel mann #giles panton #meaghan tandy #kate kane #batman #batman bashing #woke #woman

[theconservativebrief]

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for September 30 through October 6 is “Back to School” the fourth season premiere of NBC’s Superstore.

What is “The Great American Sitcom”?

Never mind that it’s not really an established construct; indeed, I just made it up. But it’s an interesting question to think about in the vein of the Great American Novel — a book so understanding of America’s soul that it bypasses the intellect and burrows straight into the heart of the country. Just about any popular, acclaimed book written by an American author has been called the Great American Novel at one time or another, but popular candidates include Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Ellison’s Invisible Man.

And yet the idea of the Great American Novel is also that there can never be a Great American Novel, because every book eventually becomes limited by the understanding of its author. Sooner or later, you bump up against something they just don’t understand about the country, and you have to go looking for thoughts on that topic or theme in another book.

The Great Gatsby is my favorite book ever written, for instance, but good luck finding any thoughtful dissection of America’s fraught relationship with race and racism, an enormously important part of the country’s history. It’s just not in there.

Anyway, if we apply this rubric to sitcoms — an American artform that we sometimes try to pretend isn’t an artform — it’s a lot harder to find shows that fit, because sitcoms are so dedicated to assuring us that everything will be just fine. Still, some solid candidates exist. All in the Family, certainly, for its understanding of American political conflict. Cheers, I think, for how deeply it grasps the country’s uneasy relationship with failure. The Simpsons, surely.

And now, though it’s still early in its run, I would think about adding Superstore to the list.

Just a few members of the massive cast of Superstore. Eddy Chen/NBC

What gives me pause about declaring Superstore a potential Great American Sitcom is how badly it clearly wants to be one. In nearly every episode, it tackles some important issue or idea of the day, in a way that makes it feel vital in its best episodes and grasping beyond its reach in its worst.

But beyond occasional clunkiness, tying a show’s storyline to whatever’s in the news at the moment can end up hopelessly dating the series. All in the Family, for instance, mostly survives on the strength of its character relationships, not because the Bunker family’s battles with inflation still feel relevant 40 years later.

With that said, “Back to School” illustrates how Superstore avoids overloading on the sorts of “timely” elements that might otherwise hurt its legacy. It is, very loosely, an episode about coworkers navigating workplace relationships and flirting in a world where the #MeToo movement has exposed a lot of the dark power imbalances that exist across nearly all industries, especially (but not limited to) those between men and women.

What keeps the episode from feeling didactic, however, is the way Superstore’s characters genuinely don’t know how to apply the #MeToo movement to what happened at the end of season three, when the series’ main will-they/won’t-they couple, Amy (America Ferrera) and Jonah (Ben Feldman), hooked up — but in front of a camera they didn’t realize was streaming their hookup to the entire workforce of Cloud 9 department stores worldwide.

The sex was consensual; nobody doubts that, because they, uh, saw how consensual it was. But Amy is Jonah’s superior, and there’s an inherent power imbalance there that no one is sure how to navigate. What’s more, Amy is pregnant with her ex-husband’s child, Jonah used to date a coworker, and their fellow Cloud 9 employees treat the two of them very differently when they come back to work post-hookup. There are all sorts of minefields to tiptoe through — personally, professionally, and ethically. But Jonah and Amy insist their tryst was a one-time thing, a stupid mistake they won’t repeat for fear of losing their jobs.

One of the smartest choices Superstore makes here is to have Jonah and Amy return to Cloud 9 after several months away, because they were both suspended for their behavior (their punishment lasted roughly the entire summer — funny how that works out). Thus, their hookup has become a piece of store gossip and rumor that has only festered in their absence.

When Jonah comes back, the guys in the store joke about what happened. But Amy can’t seem to find a way to joke about it with the store’s women, to let the water slip under the bridge. The disparity, she concludes, is a sign of how women and men are socialized to process things differently when it comes to sex — women to be ashamed and men to be at least a little proud.

This double standard is another subtle way Superstore removes itself from the present and makes itself more timeless. The differences in socialization between men and women run far deeper than even the patriarchal structure of America (though the two are, of course, interlinked), and they’ll probably remain long after anybody involved in the show is gone. By nodding toward them, Superstore casts a line out to the future — to anybody who might be listening 40 or 50 years from now, and who might find themselves nodding at how an old sitcom managed to understand their situation so many years in the future.

That’s what makes Superstore such an effective Great American Sitcom candidate. Though it tackles timely issues, it always uses them to dig deeper into the interpersonal dynamics of the characters in the store (especially as they apply to Jonah and/or Amy) and into what those issues say about the broken systems that human beings have constructed to live within.

Lest Superstore sound too much like homework, let me assure you that every episode is also damned funny, especially when all of the characters gather in the backrooms of the store to discuss whatever is happening that week. It’s in those moments — when their various personalities bounce off of each other at length — really shine.

And on top of that, Superstore is just a beautifully plotted show. When the end of “Back to School” arrives — and with it the revelation that Amy and Jonah have been dating in secret all this time and intend to keep doing so — it serves as a reminder that this comedy can play a long game as well as any other show on TV.

What Superstore does isn’t particularly flashy, but maybe it doesn’t need to be. Maybe the Great American Sitcom is just a show that’s incredibly well put together.

Superstore airs Thursdays at 8 pm Eastern on NBC. Previous episodes are available on Hulu.

Original Source -> Superstore is the next Great American Sitcom

via The Conservative Brief

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[topmixtrends]

A. G. LOMBARDO’S searing novel Graffiti Palace revels in an abundance of language. I take pleasure in that approach, and so welcomed the play of sounds and images. Consider this description of shipping containers at the Los Angeles Harbor: “A city of iron cubicles latticed along the harbor, piled like a giant’s stairway in gravity-suspended steps rising toward the burnished sunset, or skewed in angles and intersecting layers; some pitched, half-toppled by long-ago extracted cranes and ship’s booms.” It resembles the scene it describes, dense with shapes, colors, and history; there’s rhythm to it, restlessness, and it modifies and complicates itself as it goes. It builds from concrete imagery, rises into abstraction, then topples back down into the real. Like Icarus, we might say — but here, the fall is intentional.

Graffiti Palace is set during the Watts riots, and concerns, mostly, a journey across Los Angeles by Americo Monk, an “urban graphologist and graffiti semiotician” who records the city’s illicit signs in a notebook he carries everywhere. As the novel opens, he’s at 112th and San Pedro studying a traffic signal. His pregnant girlfriend, Karmann Ghia (yes, like the car), is hosting a rent party at the Los Angeles Harbor, where the two of them live in a maze-like assemblage of shipping containers. In Watts, police use unnecessary force during a traffic stop, sparking civil unrest and sending the city into a spiral of destruction fueled by long-simmering racial tension. Buildings burn, news crews report on the “senseless violence that rules the night,” and the police respond with brutality, roadblocks, and curfews. Monk, trying to get home, makes his way south through a landscape of fire, ash, and smoke. But the riots — of which Monk is, mainly, a neutral though sympathetic observer — make progress difficult.

Monk’s travels are picaresque, zig-zagging through southern Los Angeles and throwing him into the company of gang members and cops, musicians and exterminators, seers and novitiates, artists and radicals. He traces a tricky line: he’s neither wholly black nor wholly white, and can appear, depending on the light and time of day, Mediterranean or African, Caucasian or Arabian — “a walking Rorschach mirror that perhaps reflects more of the beholder than the subject,” as Lombardo puts it. Monk’s notebook of graffiti makes him of interest to gangs and police alike. At various points, he is held hostage, given food and drink, interrogated, and offered various drugs, though he mostly refuses to partake. Meanwhile, Karmann grows increasingly worried. The party rages around her. Night passes into day, day back into night. She chases people away from her phone, hoping to hear from Monk, and fends off the approaches of multiple suitors.

Karmann is a latter-day Penelope, a baby Telemachus in her belly, and Monk is Odysseus, making his way back to the harbor while Los Angeles writhes in agony. Buttoning the story to the spine of the Odyssey serves the novel well. Without that structure, the story might collapse under its own weight, too many characters, too many details, too many vectors of movement. Instead, it is improbably resilient, deriving narrative energy from the series of trials Monk undergoes, many of which have clear links to Homer’s epic: lotus-eaters in Chinatown, a cyclops in the tunnels under Los Angeles, a fortune teller near the Harbor Freeway. These connections work best when they’re dense and layered, operating as conversations and arguments with the source; when they’re on the surface, or treated as jokes, they’re less effective, pinging the reader with the thrill of noticing them without doing the harder work of expanding the range of Homeric tropes. At one point, Monk is in the back of a Corvair when he hears angelic singing coming from a nightclub, “a soul aria that seems out of this world.” He tries to get out, but he’s strapped down by the unfamiliar mechanism of a seat belt, still somewhat new in 1965 — Odysseus lashed to the mast as his ships sails past the island of Sirens. “Honey, you don’t want to go in there,” the driver says to him. “Them girls are so hot you’ll never leave.” It’s funny, but feels a little gratuitous. Then again, the episode of the Sirens is among the most recognizable moments in the Odyssey, and treating it in an offhand manner is perhaps the best way of paying homage.

The interpretative framework of the book coalesces in Monk. He’s a guide to the city as much as he is a traveler of its streets, and his explications of graffiti illuminate the meanings hidden in the gang signs, murals, stencils, and culture-jamming stickers stuck over advertisements. But Monk is also aware that this world is unstable, precarious: “He knows that sometimes signs are like the new physics, that the rules break down; the semiotician struggles in the twilight of uncertainty: message, sender, receiver, meaning can shift, change in time and space.” Communication is always contextual, always contingent, and the discrete order of the system that makes interpretation possible can disintegrate at any moment. Recording the signs and stories is, therefore, also an attempt at preservation:

This city is always changing, shedding its skin of underground signs and languages in paroxysms of destruction and rebirth, seething in a secret war between the dispossessed, who write its street histories, and the cops and power structures, who destroy unsanctioned communication through anti-graffiti paint crews and incarceration and intimidation: he will be their historian.

Along with his catalog of graffiti, Monk collects stories, preserving the city’s counter-narratives. In Chinatown, Monk hears the story of the invention of the fortune cookie from a man named Shen Shen. On 127th Street, Monk runs into Miss Iva Toguri, who, once upon a time, was accused of being a “Tokyo Rose,” the name given by GIs to the English-speaking women who broadcasted propaganda over Japanese airwaves in World War II. In an alley off Athens Way, he stumbles into the home of a woman who calls herself Queen Mab (“I’m not Mercutio, am I?” Monk jokes). She spins a story of slavery and emancipation laced with magic, runes, and secret societies. These stories, as related in Graffiti Palace, cannot be taken at face value. It’s true the fortune cookie was invented in San Francisco; it’s true a woman named Iva Toguri was put on trial for treason, though her trial was a travesty of justice and she was later pardoned; Queen Mab, for her part, is Circe (maybe) by way of Shakespeare. But Lombardo’s versions of these stories are, like graffiti, exaggerated and colorful. His rendition of the history of fortune cookies mixes in haiku and the dozens. Miss Toguri’s story is supplemented by invented details. As for Queen Mab’s version of history, who knows? Even Monk is skeptical.

It would be satire — the exaggerated characters, the wild stories — if it were not so clear that the book’s empathy is with the disaffected. During the riots, Monk is accosted by a white newscaster, Brey King (the pun in her name — “breaking news” — is characteristic of the writing), who wants to know why people are rioting. Monk’s response:

“Ah, social inequalities, I guess,” softly. “The inherent racism of a police force that’s trapped in a Jim Crow past.” Monk, realizing that being interviewed about the cops on TV is probably light-years from cool, slinks away. He scowls back at the white woman: What’s the use talking to white people? He knows he shouldn’t think like that, boxing her into some kind of simple racial equation, but she and her kind, aren’t they doing the same thing to him? Most of the time the only communication between whites and blacks seems to be self-conscious, patronizing chatter about race … spoken words are signs too, and these feeble attempts at communication from the White Power Structure — the WhiPS graffiti copied in his notebook — are really miscommunication, static that walls in ignorance instead of tearing it down. Monk frowns: perhaps there is a limit to empathy, a gulf that can never truly be bridged between others.

The satirical impulse, however, sometimes wins out, and takes the writing too far in the direction of caricature, like when a Chinese character’s speech is rendered with l’s replacing r’s. This feature of speech is so charged, so coded, that presenting it in this manner seems unnecessarily provocative. Many other characters in the novel, who are of a vast rainbow of ethnicities and backgrounds, also have their speech rendered phonetically (and use slang and nonstandard diction to boot), and other Chinese characters in the novel do not have their speech written in the same way — so the impulse is both universal to all and particular to each, and, it would seem, not derisive or scornful. But this, in particular, could have been handled better.

Lombardo’s style is a heightened one: it’s noticeable, draws attention to itself, revels in synonyms, metaphors, and exaggeration. The idea is, I think, not to show off the writer’s skill, any more than other artists who work in styles that are insistently present. Instead, it’s staking an aesthetic and philosophical claim that fiction can represent the lushness, diversity, and overflowing-ness of life — the abundance of both good and bad, large and small. In this, of course, Graffiti Palace is not alone. It’s in a tradition that includes Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick (the Melville of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” less so), writers who otherwise have very different concerns and approaches. And that is only to name a few writers, and only American ones. But this aesthetic of linguistic plenitude runs counter to a significant strain of American thinking about fiction, which emphasizes clarity, compactness, and terseness, the Protestant ethic made manifest not just in stories but in the very way they are told. It is therefore refreshing to encounter a writer going against that minimalist grain, making an argument for an aesthetic based in something other than cold hard gems of closely observed fact, written sparingly — which is not to dismiss that style of writing, but to say fiction is large, it can (and should) contain multitudes.

This style is not a simple celebration of life’s variety and richness. It’s the plenitude of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: there’s a lot going on, often teetering on the edge of cacophony, threatening to plunge headlong into the abyss, with only a few stray lines of melody as a guide through the chaos. Lombardo’s most obvious literary forebear in this regard is Pynchon, and his text bears traces of Pynchon’s influence. Characters sport absurd, quasi-synedochical names; ellipses dot the text like pepper; and there are insinuations of unseen and unknowable forces at work. And, like Pynchon, Lombardo often elides dialogue attribution or replaces it with a participle: “‘Look, Officer Trench, you know me,’ Monk trying to control the fear in his voice, ‘it’s just graffiti, art stuff, a hobby.’”

The attention to the surface of the text echoes the book’s use of graffiti, which here becomes a multi-headed metaphor, a palace of possible meaning, and a method of subverting overarching narratives. Around halfway into Graffiti Palace, Monk comes across Jax GK — short for “Giant Killer” — and his partner, Sofia. Under cover of night, they attack billboards with spray cans, stencils, and stickers, transforming messages of domestic bliss and unthinking consumerism into indictments of the same. Out on a run with them, listening to the radio, Monk is perplexed by a white talk-show host’s anger: “What the fuck do they have to be angry at? People driving in their cars, isolated, through all these streets and freeways, listening to these fools … no wonder everyone’s pissed off and insane, afraid of everyone else.” Sofia’s response: “They clog all our senses with their propaganda. […] Eyes, ears … they’d inject their lies or wire our brains if they could figure out how, but we’ll take it back, one street at a time.”

Ultimately, Graffiti Palace itself is a performative resistance to authority, channeling the multiple contrasting voices and stories of Los Angeles into a mural exploding with color and contradictions. Or, perhaps, a building covered in illicit signs and arcane symbols:

Too many dots to connect … it’s vertigo, any patterns that seem to coalesce only fade like shadows: sometimes he’s sure the city is one giant graffito, a sprawling, urban uber-text that one day, with enough notebooks, he might unlock to reveal all its hidden codes. Sometimes the graffiti in his thoughts and notebook blur into the city’s spray-painted icons, until his mind and the streets seem like one vast network of rainbow messages, the convolutions of his brain and the corridors of the city fused into one myriad, fantastic structure, like a palace of graffiti.

¤

John Flynn-York writes fiction, essays, and book reviews. He is a co-founder and editor of Automata Review, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside–Palm Desert.

The post Subversive Surfaces: “Graffiti Palace” by A. G. Lombardo appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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