Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #761
Cheri Beasley and election stuff in general, more Twitter BS, a whole thing about showrunners and post-show wrapups robbing directors of the artistic ambiguity of their work.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? Week going okay? Doing all right over here, just sort of getting through the week, you know? But the good news is my four-day-weeks-for-the-rest-of-the-year routine kicks in today, wherein I use up all my vacation time taking Fridays off for the rest of the year. It really is the greatest. I strongly recommend it. So today is the last workday of the week for me. I can get behind that. Two meetings today. Not too bad, not too bad.
Yo La Tengo is playing Cat’s Cradle on its next tour, which is very exciting. Last time they came to the Triangle, they played the Durham Bulls stadium, opening for Sylvan Esso, so this is a lot more convenient and rightsized as a venue. Does it make up for Taylor skipping North Carolina and Depeche Mode well, skipping the entire East Coast? Sure! I am happy. They are great. I have seen them already since the pandemic started, but I’m happy to see them again.
I need to renew my passport and get Jane a passport. I am not looking forward to this process. I tried to do it online but my UX anxiety kicked in and I ran away. So I guess I’m going to the post office. Which really tells you something about their UX when you’re willing to go to an actual post office over dealing with their UX. But that is on tomorrow’s day-off agenda.
Along with the frame store. I bought a piece by Emily Marie Miller (small, charcoal) not too long ago and I really need to get it framed.
Yesterday Emma went to to meet North Carolina Democratic candidate for the US Senate Cheri Beasley, who did a little event at our early voting location. I had work and meetings so I could not go, alas. But she said she was much better in person, kind and warm and her TV ads don’t do her justice. It is one of the closest Senate races in the country, and could decide the fate of whether the senate is in Democratic hands or not and, you know, a single judge gets appointed for two years, who controls the impeachment trial of Biden (I know, I know), that sort of thing. Somewhat important things. Please consider donating. Her campaign manager has been hounding me this week for one last donation, and Emma’s visit put me over the top. It’s a hard time to donate, it’s hard to imagine they can make use of the money, and her polls have her consistently 1% down or so, in a political environment that, the conventional wisdom says, is unfavorable to Democrats. It can feel like throwing money into the void.
But it isn’t, and they can use it. Please consider throwing her a couple bucks. As much as you’re comfortable losing in a bet, maybe.
This political environment is an exercise in distinguishing between hope and optimism for me. All this talk of a red wave makes me crazy, this is all such bullshit, I can’t believe people are just giving a political party a pass on fascism because they’ve decided Woke is a bad word in exactly the way they decided “Liberal” was a bad word in the 80s. It really is something watching them make jokes about hammers to heads with zero political ramifications from “normal” people all around you. I do not like it one bit.
But I’m just going to keep up hope for the next week. And when the election happens, I will focus on the silver linings. Democratic wins in places where they hadn’t won before. Whatever I can find.
Because what else can we do. This is ridiculous.
Was watching Interview With the Vampire the other night. It is a good show, we enjoy it. But one thing we do not enjoy are the post-show wrap-ups with the showrunner. They really kill the magic. He’s this smug white guy who just sort of recaps the episode. These end-of-show things. Did they used to be such explicit recaps? I feel like back in the old Game of Thrones days they had a bit more nuance, a bit more insights into the minds of the creators. But I’ve noticed this with the wrap-ups on House of the Dragon too. Now they basically just tell you what you saw.
But the thing is, it’s like they… kill all nuance and ambiguity? Like you will see some amazing scene and the director filmed it with great care and there are many possible interpretations of the meaning of what happened. And you are confused and a bit curious and your mind starts going in a few directions at once about what this might mean, and sure, it’s a little messy but that’s part of the fun of the whole thing.
And then the showrunner gets on the wrap-up show and says “And then X happened.” And suddenly you realize it’s not meant to be ambiguous at all. The showrunner placed an order with a director and the director shot the episode and in doing so, put a little bit of a spin on things, because, you know, they’re a director, an artiste and not a showrunner. The showrunner will indulge, because they need to give these directors a little wiggle room so that they can keep up the caliber of director they can hire. But ultimately they needed the plot to get from Point A to Point C by way of Point B and that’s what they ordered and that’s what they are going to use even if Point B was a little murky in the deliverable, they’re gonna clear that up in the post-show wrap-up and move on as if it wasn’t.
I do not especially like this. But also it seems silly to skip them because, well, they exist, the ambiguity, it turns out, is all in your head and the director-for-hire’s artistic flourishes and you may as well fuhgeddaboutit.
In the particular case of this Interview With The Vampire showrunner, he also seems monumentally insensitive to trauma and abuse and seems to have fixed internal rules about how those are shown on screen which is unfortunate. They’re logical rules, and do not, as it turns out, make bad TV but also they’re just so… confining.
It also got me wondering, since these things do such a good job removing ambiguity, if any devious showrunner has used a post-show wrap-up to mislead the audience. Tell them one interpretation is the correct one, only to have it turn out later that this is untrue. I cannot think of this having happened, but as these wrap-ups proliferate, and the formula becomes so boring and constraining, I can’t help but wonder if someday a showrunner will pay a bit more attention to this whole pantomime and subvert the format. Mayhaps we are not there yet, but stay vigilant!
Regarding Interview with the Vampire, I’m also really into the structure of how they approached the idea of a remake or a reboot. It is completely unique and very clever. Hard to discuss without spoilers, but purely from a story architecture point of view, that was a clever conceit, I gotta say.
I’m already so tired of Elon Musk owning Twitter I just want it to go back to the way it was before. The extent to which that man can suck the life out of the room is just endless, it’s getting so all anyone talks about on Twitter is this doofus. Biden’s speech broke through last night, at least on my timeline. That is good. And people got momentarily excited about Kash Patel getting immunity OMG maybe Trump will finally get indicted, etc. etc. But mostly all anyone wants to talk about on Twitter is Elon Musk owning Twitter. Early indications are the dude is going to ruin it, but in a slow and incompetent way, so I am just trying to enjoy it while it lasts.
I’m kind of thinking that Twitter was managed just fine, that it’s an incredibly delicate product and inherently difficult to iterate upon from both a technical and political perspective. And I think moving fast is vastly overrated — Elon is living proof of that. The dude’s investment would have been much better protected and furthered in this last week if he had done absolutely nothing.
Of course in Elon’s case he has to move fast because he’s out over his skis financially and is bleeding money and can’t afford to keep paying the bills.
Firing half the staff seems ill-advised. I assume the largest parts of the staff are trust & safety and the sales/account teams, and I wouldn’t cut the former because I’m not an idiot and I wouldn’t cut the latter because I think it’s good when companies make money. Engineering presumably has a bunch of people but it seems well-established that Twitter is held together with glue and duct tape and I, personally, would tread carefully there but what do I know I guess, I don’t like shipping broken products. Also I am not a hubristic psychopath who just fired all the leadership who actually knew these people and could help me evaluate 7,000 employees in a week and I don’t think I’m smart enough to do that myself that quickly.
But I think one interesting possibility for Twitter and “big changes” is… just turning it off in the rest of the world. Completely. Just ditch the overseas market. This would probably actually be a terrible idea but imagine how much easier would things be. Of course, it’s about 15% of the revenue and Elon, that poor, poor man out of his depths financially needs every dollar he can get, but I just think if you had to cut a bunch of people, this would be a logical way to do it. Maybe I am projecting here, but global CPMs are just garbage compared to US ones, and all those intelligence headaches and nuanced moderation challenges…. fooey on all of them. Does Elon even care about being the roll king of India?
Eh, just workshopping here.
I would like to give a shout-out to King’s Road Merchandise, online merch vendor for Epitaph Records, who is shipping me a second copy of LP2 of the Tom Waits Alice reissue with absolutely no muss no fuss, no requirement to send back the original defective LP2 or even send photos. That is very nice of them.
Moody and quiet mix for you today, almost all new but threw a couple oldies on to, you know, fill it out, give it a little terroir, a little depth. Lotta ladies on this mix, I am just noticing. Shit I think Tom Waits is the onlhy male. I mean, there are men in some of these people’s bands, bt he’s the only male vocal on here. Very excited about new Black Belt Eagle Scout need to investigate further. This song is very moody and quiet I hope she still has some good distorted shoegazy guitar tracks amongst the new stuff.
Farewell, faithful readers. Thank you for your time and patience in this matter.