I know it's unfashionable in today's socialist dystopia, but I still regard unemployment as a badge of failure

Watching: Deep Space Nine, after realising that I hadn't seen the original first season since the early 2000s. The pilot episode was a fantastic bit of set-up that defined the Roddenberry mantra of hope for the future a lot better than TNG did, as it has a main character who's essentially without hope after losing his soulmate and moves on from this partially by realising he has a series to run, but mainly because his son figures so prominently in his space-trip with Aliens From Outside Time that it sinks in that your life is not always just about you. There's some teething trouble in episodes like Storyteller which is a bit poop, but otherwise, there's some attempt to do something with the typical Trek monoculture* by making Bajor's surplus of religious fanatics with access to space-fertiliser and lasers a problem in the long run for Commander Sisko's plans to drag the fuckers into civilised society again whether they want it or not, and I like that he's essentially a guy who doesn't want to be where he is and it occasionally gets to him to the point he becomes a bully.
Apart from the pilot, though, there's about two actually decent episodes in this first season and they're both right at the end, which is a bit of a poor average for anything but still better than TNG managed.
Also watched some Castle episodes... not sure about this show. Kind of liked it before, but not so much now, though Nathan Fillion has begun to fill out a bit and I think it really suits him as a guy who's supposed to be a cool dad and a writerly type rather than just an identikit scrawny get.




*Trek and TNG usually had monocultures as a weekly feature of stories because Enterprise or Voyager or whatever are basically America and the monocultures represent various countries in Space Age form, the tales each week being about the clash of modern American sensibilities and values with older cultures, though I just liked that Captain Kirk shot anything he couldn't fuck and things worked out okay - that's my America. Not this TNG shit where psychiatrists in boiler suits travel the galaxy espousing socialism. In my day we called that Communism. And we knew it was bad.

We grew up together: swimming pools, locker rooms, penis fights - it just happens.

Watching: Hawaii Five 0, which featured a nice moment for uber-butch Dano - a character whose whole deal is that he's a guy who came to a city he hates and doesn't understand because he misses the daughter he views as the only good thing he's done with his life - when he pretty much cries in front of his equally butch partner while they watch the birth scene in Enemy Mine, and later when he mentions in passing the reason for his hating Hawaii is because the elderly dog he lost to his wife during their divorce died during the quarantine process. I wonder if there's a long game character arc in play right up until two cast members of Heroes act like they should know each other and then the cops hop on MX bikes to scramble into the jungle "looking for clues" because it's not like jungles are big places or anything. Anyway, they find a parachute and some motorbike tracks nearby and conclude that someone parachuted to the exact spot in a jungle where they'd stashed a bike earlier, and you know what? That's cool, Hawaii Five 0 - this is why I come here, and not to be ambushed by genuinely charming character moments.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 - so that was a Harry Potter film, was it? I sat through the other six thanks to having enough younger relatives to not have much choice in the matter, but this was a joyless film. Made a billion bucks, all the same, so I don't much suppose my thoughts about it matter much, but I thought it was very slow and wondered why the Harry/Hermione naked make-out scene was in there. Seemed a bit... pointless, narratively, and that whole "we need to find the seven Dragonballs" thing from the last film runs into this one, but then gets sidelined in favor of "we need to find these other three Dragonballs as well, and also the Dragonball sword of +15 armor negation" But there's a billion reasons why I am wrong about this film, so let's just move on.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: part 2 - in which my maths might be a bit rusty, because Harry destroys four of the seven previously-mentioned magic McGuffins and then announces "we have to kill the snake - it's the last McGuffin!" But hey, whatever. It was all a bit alienating, to be honest, and no-one and nothing ever really clicked as human and relatable on its own terms but then this is the eighth film in the series so I don't suppose it had to be accessible, or so runs the logic even though Son Of Godzilla was the eighth in that series and still managed to be accessible to noobs and yes, I do hold the Godzilla franchise as a yardstick for quality in this instance, the only question is why I don't do so more often. Godzilla would totally save this film from being boring, but as it is, it's basically a tv show's season finale with deaths of no-marks all over the shop and the sets getting a bit singed to show that The Game Has Changed, and as usual Hollywood types have to go messing with the original plot from the book by changing characters around and even tacking-on a terrible ending set in the future. Awful, but I suppose the kids that grew up with the films/books liked it for the sense of closure it brought to... something or other. It kind of just finishes, to be honest. Eh.

I bet you think that shirt's about paleontology, but I'm pretty sure it's about enjoying boners

Watching: Grimm - I'm all for simplicity in laying out your premise from the off, being personally of the mind that what scuppered Paul Tobin's Spider-Girl comic book series was the inherently complex backstory of the character who it was introducing in issue one: a teenager who got a magic tattoo that gave her armor and spider-themed powers that she initially used to carve out a career as a superhero called Arana, then she became a Spider-themed superhero called Spider-Girl even though she'd lost her spider-themed powers by this stage yet was still a member of a team of young superheroes, one of whom - a girl who was Captain America's sidekick on a duplicate Earth created by the son of two of the members of the Fantastic Four when he had God-like powers which he used to create a world in which to hide his parents and their superhero friends from a huge Forbidden Planet monster made by the leader of the X-Men - was her best friend. This had to be explained to the reader in issue one, and there was another Spider-Girl series written by Tom DeFalco which featured a main character whose origin reads "she is Peter Parker's daughter" - can you guess which of these two characters had a book that ran for over a hundred issues?
Sometimes simplicity is your friend when it comes to setting out your stock, but sometimes you get shows like V, where someone was told "it's a show about aliens called V" and somewhere along the line somebody on staff decided "that must mean the aliens are called the Vs" and despite watching sci-fi for pretty much all my life and loving a show where a dwarf plays a silver dildo that follows Gil Gerard around a galaxy composed of polystyrene corridors, my reaction to this is "that is just fucking stupid."
I had a similar response to Grimm, where someone was told "that Fables thing sure does sell a lot of books, so go make us a series where fairy tales are real - you could maybe call it Grimm, after the Brothers Grimm" and somebody decided "there are these people called the Grimms and they hunt monsters derived from fairytales" and again I'm left thinking "seriously, he hangs around with nobody but women and he's never tapped Wilma? I mean, look how she dresses, and he even has a little rainbow armband, for God's sake. How am I the only one thinking this?" Oh, and also "this Grimm show is fucking stupid" but the latter doesn't distract me as much as the former. Don't get me wrong, it's not that it's dumb that I object to, it's that there seems to be an assumption on the part of the production staff that the viewer is. Based on episode 1, I am not a fan.

sometimes when I think about coming home to you, I start crying in my car

That's not a heart monitor, it's a machine telling me I'm low on khakis

In non-scribbling-related news, I'll be having arsehole surgery in what passes for "the immediate future" with the sorry state of the NHS these days, but I at least have the consolation of being able to say "I'm having arsehole surgery - to cure me of being one" should the fancy take me.
I remember when we first got our local government over here and it was populated by (alleged) terrorists, it was somehow even more disappointing to see them turn into a bunch of ineffectual money-grubbing heels than if it was just your usual Tory lot on the make, as it kind of looked to me like "yeah, we killed all those people to get here, and now we're gonna close some hospitals anyway, so fuck you."

--and sometimes in the middle of the day - for no reason at all - I like to make myself a big pitcher of margheritas and take a nap out on the sundeck

Reading: Static Shock #1, which is okay, I guess, but there seems to be an odd back and forth between the comic it wants to be and the comic that the greater editorial vision for the New 52 wants it to be, on one hand full of the trappings of the 1990s cartoon show and on the other there's all this violent dismemberment, and while this dichotomy will no doubt give rise to gurning online about what DC is doing wrong (though they're shifting books in the short-term and short-term sales are what monthly comics are all about in this "waiting for the trade collection" age), there was something here that didn't ring true that I could not put my finger on until it struck me that Static (or rather his alter-ego Virgil) is not allowed to be poor.

He was poor in the cartoon to the point he couldn't take a bus to school and had a home-made costume rather than a body condom as seen in the newest comic, but in the comic he's not allowed to be so badly off and instead his home is a compact but comfortable brownstone, his costume is shiny and expensive-looking and he has a secret base full of technological wonders that's bankrolled by some sort of black Iron Man-type character with whom he has a student/teacher relationship that I don't see working too well dramatically since Virgil's actual father is still alive and present. The comic equates being less well-off than necessary to live comfortably as being the same thing as poor, as if being poor is basically the same as living in student digs for a year or two while you get your art history masters or become one of those insufferable Media students. Virgil/Static isn't some sort of projects-based superhero living a life of stark contrast to the surburbanites that typify superheroic fiction, but you get the impression that's where the writers wanted to go with it except the trappings and visuals don't back them up.

Static/Virgil seems a typical teen superhero and I'm not sure why I should care to read his book before any of the other teen superhero books on the market, or even the teen superhero books of yesteryear like Darkhawk, which I am still reading my way through now and then. All these teen heroes seem to live in houses with a garage, they all go to college, their big problems are romance and popularity issues caused by some some pesky supervillain - I suppose this might be a conscious thing in these Occupy Wall Street times to give people wallowing in poverty the escapism that superhero comics represent, like when Batman kept having crazy adventures after the war because that was what people wanted to distract them from their misery - although this might also have been because Fred Wertham accused Batman of being a bit of a gaylord and DC - displaying the winning grasp of public opinion that's kept it a powerhouse in North American comic books to this very day - made Batman as camp as humanly possible because, naturally, that is how you dispel gay rumors.

Whatever the case may be, Static Shock made me think about the class system in American superhero comics - or to be more specific, it made me think that North American superhero comics are increasingly distracted with being middle class, and that's a bit of a shame as I seem to remember some great comics from my youth that championed the poor, the underclass, the underdog or whatever patronising label I should be utilising, while nowadays it seems that comics are less about real people escaping into a fantasy world and more having a window into the lives of a defacto ruling elite of posthuman snobs, so I guess it's been worth checking out for that reason if no other, but I don't really get why I should care about this book. The original gave us a decent cartoon show and made a black teen superhero popular, but while that was trends being set, this update seems more like trends being followed, if that makes sense as a criticism - I mean, a comic is under no obligation to blaze a trail or anything even if I think it'd be nice if it would try something new.

The last time I checked my watch, it still said America

Watching: Charlie's Angels (2011) 1.4. Hey, did you know that Charlie's Angels is great? This is an actual exchange from the last episode I watched that takes place between Bosley (who is a buff playboy super-hacker and globe-trotting womaniser) and Lois Lane from Smallville (who is a dreadful actress):

Lois Lane: The last time I saw you, you were a hacker playboy who spent his days penetrating the firewalls of European banks, and spent his nights doing the same to European women.
Bosley: Until I met you.
Lois Lane: We did have a good time, didn't we?
Bosley: A blast... until I discovered you were CIA.

And then it goes and becomes even more awesome by being a plot about rapes, which I liked because other shows would get sidetracked with being goofy and trying to entertain their audience without being a total downer, but Charlie's Angels brings a bit of heavy realism to the table, and in a show about bikini-clad private detectives that is exactly what has thus far been missing and exactly what I and many others clearly want to see in a programme about multi-ethnic demographic friendly casts who infiltrate fashion shows and sea cruises for plot-related reasons that also require white tank tops to be worn when it's raining.
The plot sees evil, corrupt Cubans - not communists, mark you, but the actual Cuban people as a whole who are to a man portrayed as corrupt, on the take, totally okay with torture and counting the days until Castro dies so the Americans can come and give them money - are framing American tourists for crimes and then locking them up in prison where they're farmed out as prostitutes by an American businessman. Now... a lesser show would probably address why these girls were being framed and sent to prison in stitch-ups since their whereabouts are unknown to their families and the American authorities because, you know, if you can make them disappear, you don't actually have to go to the bother of framing them for anything, and likewise, a lesser show would have someone point out that actual prostitutes would be much cheaper, easier to organise, willing, and unlikely to kung-fu your guards and shoot you to death, and that is why other shows don't last a season - they're so hung up on signposting every bit of illogic and tripping over themselves to write in a rebuttal or an explanation that makes sense that they forget to be Charlie's Angels. Charlie's Angels makes no such mistakes, I assure you! It never loses sight of being Charlie's Angels and it never forgets exactly what it thinks of its audience - that Charlie's Angels' audience want mentally traumatised women - in this instance practically a child - screaming and twitching onscreen as they flinch at the touch of their sneering rapists, but also wearing sexy dresses as this goes on.
When all the women in sexy prostitute costumes were fleeing - one shot during this actually framed by an actress' legs - I remember thinking when they make a game of this, they should absolutely call this level 'The Great Rape Escape', because I was very disappointed that this was not the title of the episode.
And surprised.

I also watched the melodramatic and overblown American Horror Story, which is daftly entertaining in its own way, though it doesn't feature rapes so I'm on the fence about the makers' commitment. A couple undergoing a difficult patch in their marriage blah blah new house, blah, history of violent events, blah, angry teen daughter, blah blah, jump cuts and flashbacks, blah. It is unsubtle like you would not believe, and I think that's a big part of the charm so far (two episodes in), though where once the season-long story arc was once greeted as an innovation in television storytelling, nowadays all I can think of is shite like Terra Nova and how it's a risk investing in a show as a viewer of late because there's no guarantee that you'll ever see a payoff to the threads sewn throughout the early episodes of even really good shows. This is still worth a gander, I'd say, as it entertains without being completely unpleasant, try though it might to be the latter.