Good morning. Hello. How are you? #686
Kitty vet woes, Fairbanks Denny's woes, Jane bedtime woes, and twelve hundred words about a proposed Truman Show sequel that I would very much like to see.
Good morning, friend. Hello on this fine Wednesday. How are you? Hot enough for ya?, he says, smugly belittling devestating climate change killing people around the planet, instead using it for a dumb joke.
Programming note: The Denny’s in Fairbanks, AK, is, in fact definitely closing. My friends Kim and Rochelle report in from the Fairbanks foodie beat:
The rumor is true. It was in the paper. The new Northernmost Dennys will be in Anchorage which feels wrong on so many levels. I spent so many hours at that Denny’s in high school and college. It’s the end of an era.
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Yes. Denny’s is no more. They’ve had a difficult time keeping staff. They were employing people from the halfway house before pandemic hit. The last time we went there was the day Sam’s Sourdough burnt down, quite a disappointment when I expected sourdough pancakes. Fairbanks could use a breakfast restaurant honestly.
Man. I was super sad about Sam’s Sourdough Cafe burning down. Both of those gone is a real hit to Fairbanks. If any Fairbanksan wants to open a breakfast place, let me know and I will help by donating a toaster or something.
On New Year’s 1989 going into 1990 at 11:30 PM I was sitting at the Denny’s with a bunch of friends and we thought “Is that all there is? Are we just gonna sit here?” And we decided no! We drove up the University and into the fine arts building which was never locked and got on the stage at the concert hall with a boombox and had a little dance party and we were listening to “Flashback” by Ministry at Midnight which is maybe not the most wholesome song but I am glad we got up from the Denny’s. In that back room. That they would open up for us when 20 of us showed up at once so we didn’t bother the other customers.
Roy is feeling better, but it was not good yesterday, and Emma ended up taking him to the vet again, for a second round of X-Rays, in case they missed something. A small, blurry line appeared on the X-Ray and the vet thought it could be a piece of thread or something, which is conceivable because Emma has being doing some sewing and there is thread around. There wasn’t much more to do but wait and see, so they gave him some drugs and sent him home, and he does seem to be eating now. He’s been back home for around 12 hours now, no puke. He’s eaten some treats out of Emma’s hand, he’s snuggled. HOPEFULLY now he’s back on the mend, because the next step after this is a pet ER, and that is a) expensive AF and b) impossible to actually book. It’s CRAZY how hard it is to book vets and vetrinary ERs now. I know a lot of people bought pets during the pandemic but… weren’t those pets mostly already alive or going to be born? Vet services seem slammed. There’s a segment that probably had a financially lucrative pandemic. Man.
If anyone wants to start a breakfast spot in Fairbanks, Alaska, that offers vetrinary servies, let’s talk.
I re-watched The Truman Show over the last two days. My friend Nick hit the nail on the head: “That movie feels more and more dark as you get older.” It sure does! Christof is evil, man! Apparently Andrew Niccol’s original script was a lot darker, and even though they lightened it up, a lot of the darkness remains under the surface. Also, the plot is catalyzed by a series of technical fuckups that seem extraordinarily unlikely to happen in such rapid succession after years of successful production: a floodlight drops from the ceiling of the dome, a radio transmission is intercepted by Truman’s car radio, there’s that whole elevator and backstage switcheroo fuckup. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there must have been a sabateur operating within Cristof’s organization. Which, like… makes you wonder. How organized and dedicated were the free Truman crowd? I wonder if Lauren Garland, Truman’s true love, was, like, part of an organized resistance.
I would totally watch a remake of The Truman Show more in line with Andrew Niccol’s original script but not, like, set in Manhattan or anything. Just sort of… darker. More in depth. You could even do it as a sequel, actually. What happens to Truman thirty years later? Do he and Lauren get together? Stay together? And there could be ample flashbacks to his time in the bubble, and right after he got out. One thing Andrew Niccol’s script did was have Truman confront Cristof in person, I think he hit him or something. And I felt all this anxiety as he left that bubble and Lauren puts on her coat and goes down those stairs to find him: how are they going to find each other? is there going to be a crowd at the entrance of the bubble? Truman fans the world over, who recognize Lauren and shuttle her to the front of the crowd? Do the anti-Cristof activists set up a security perimeter and get a black car for them and shuttle them away to a secret house they’ve had prepped and ready for Truman for when this day inevitably comes? Like a strange religion waiting for their messiah. But Truman doesn’t want any of that he just wants to go to Fiji with Lauren and take a picture on the beach and use IMDB to look up who played Lauren’s asshole father that said “Fiji, we’re going to Fiji” and take a picture together of the two of them smiling, flipping him off, and send it to him, or at least at him on a Twitter account.
And then there is a scism in the anti-Crisof zealots, half of which still follow Truman and are happy to see him living, but the other half wanted something from a post-Cristof Truman that they are not getting now, so, you know, wacky schism hijinks ensue, there’s a scuffle at the Truman safehouse, some of them view it as an innately “holy” place (their exact religion level is TBD, it is unclear if this holy business is a metaphor or they actually diefy him) because he did actually stay there for a few days, and others view it is evidence of Truman’s failure and false prophetness and burn it down.
Meanwhile Cristof has to, like, find the sabatuer in his ranks and it turns out it’s that quiet hot Asian woman who’s always behind him, Chloe, who was inspired by Philip Glass, who returns for a cameo at the age of 85. Chloe is actually the leader of the resistance, but she’s also the daughter Cristof never had, etc. etc. It’ll hit him hard when he learns it was her, who he ignored and belittled for decades but also secretly loved like a daughter. The network executives try and take Cristof down, but he survives it, he was right, the ratings were too good.
He then is taken out for a few episodes by a legal assault on the bill that let his company adopt Truman. Here season sort of shifts, part 1 is all about Truman and Lauren but eventually the action sort of moves back to Cristof’s production company (which really needs a name) while Truman stays in Fiji and grows a beard and catches up on modernity like Captain America in Winter Soldier.
So Cristof is dealing with the trial, and trying to sniff out the spy, who’s not been caught yet. A lot of cat and mouse with Chloe and Cristof’s goons. She consults the sage wisdom of 85 year-old Philip Glass in one scene. Paul Giometti’s character has gotten out but he is scarred and sad and a drunk now and trying to avoid the whole thing but both sides are hounding him to testify in the trial and it is fucking him up because he knows where the bodies are buried. Literally.
Then there’s an amazing episode where, after a year, maybe two in hiding, Truman shows up to testify at the trial about Truman’s law. It’s his big reveal. All those people who used to wear “how’s it going to end” buttons now where “Where’s Truman” buttons. Trial has been going on in the background, no one knows where Truman has been this last year, but he makes a surprise appearance looking all buff and bearded to testify at the trial and gives a super intense monologue just ejecting all his PTSD for the world and everyone is horrified. Public sentiment shifts solidly against Cristof.
But Cristof is undaunted. He has a new vision for the next “season” of the show. It will not be on broadcast TV, it’ll be on a streamer, where you have to pay. He pitches Facebook and Google. The real ad revenue this time comes not from product placement but from the panopticon dystopia I once laid out in an article describing the perfect world of ad metrics, where it’s not product placement, but complete omnipresent media and ad tracking enabled through everyone’s phones. There will be a Big-Short-style rapid explainer of single-storce ad metrics studies and the work of John Phillips Jones. Hopefully we can get Natasha Lyonne and Anna Kendrick to narrate it I feel like they’d be a good team.
Also it turnes out that the loss of Truman’s law is actually moot, because he’s just going to get a baby and their parents, the company doesn’t need to adopt the kid. The parents are just all too willing to participate, literally tens of thousands of couples-with-pregnant-moms are applying, because America is a fascist hellscape and he wasn’t actually wrong that a lot of people would find living in Seahaven infinitely preferable to the real world.
Truman and Laura have an intense debate about whether to go live their lives together or fight this horror, though I don’t know which of them is on which side of the debate. I have basicaly mined a zillion TV tropes for this plot but it is a TV trope too far to have them break up over this. They’ll stick through it, work it out. Theirs is a difficult relationship but a rewarding one. It will be, god help us, a positive and real portrayal of marriage in the modern era, which means it’ll be the first things the real-world network execs kill off in this show. Eventually, of course, they’ll “fight” but what can they even do any more than what can we do about the proto fascist republican party in our country. Truman’s Truman so people will want to use him as a symbol, a spokesperson, but he wants to do the dirty work, the real work.
Took thirty pounds or so of cucumbers to the food bank yesterday and wow that was infinitely satisfying. If I can win the battle against these squirrels I will have a massive amount of tomatoes to send along as well. I already give them money every month but giving them food feels so much better. My dad ran a Food Bank for most of his retired life so all this Food Bank stuff is really making me miss my dad and feel closer to him, so that is nice.
Jane was a pill last night and yelled at me for two hours while Emma was at the vet and then she made me sit by her bed for ages while she was supposed to be going to sleep. I had gotten bedtime pretty routinized, so I am not in general one of those parents who has to spend hours on bedtime so this was uncommon territory for me. Hopefully she feels better today. We even resorted to a pacifier. At age four. Forgive me. I was desperate.
All right justa mix for you today, mostly old, kinda all over the place but I think it works well, aside from the low mastering volume on Hüsker Dü and Bright Eyes. Doug reminded me of Edie Brickell the other day so I gave that a re-listen for the first time in decades it was very good. New Mogwai soundtrack, very long but has a few gems on it. That Lou Reed song came on the other day and reminded me of my year-long obsession with it in 2018 or so what a great song. And of course we gotta do The Truman Show theme.