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anchoviesinthenightsky · 3 years

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What’re your thoughts on the impact Luca has had for the queer community and for MLMs alike?

Starting off with some heavy hitting questions today huh? /joking

I really appreciate that I'm a person's whose opinion/ thoughts you'd value enough to ask this kind of question.

I have a couple different thoughts, but let me lay out a framework first so you can see where I’m coming from.

Firstly, I’m not a MLM nor am I in the MLM community, so I don't want to speak to their experience or their thoughts, because I’m not intimately familiar with them.

Secondly, I’m coming at this from an American perspective, meaning that I currently (and for better part of the last 5-8 years) have had a lot of access to television and movies that contain queer characters and/or center queerness itself. I think this conversation about Luca (which is Disney meaning that it’s going to be widely available/ made for an international audience to some degree) and its impact might look very different in a place where there is less queer representation in media. But, I can’t speak to that, so I’ll leave that part of the conversation for someone else.

Okay, the framework is set. Let’s get into this.

When talking about the impact that a story has on a community, often times we’re often talking about a few different things, like: what does this representation do for the queer community? Is there an issue that’s given more attention?

I find that queer stories that leave a larger cultural impact often do one of the following things (and ideally more than one):

represent of queer voices/ queer stories in the story

cast queer people to play a character and incorporate that queerness into the characters

educate about queer issues or identities to the audience

advocate / spread awareness about queer issues

normalize queer topics/ lessen the taboo of them

In an earlier draft of this post, I went on to talk about the show The Golden Girls, and how it did a lot of these things during the 1980s-early 1990s, when most other shows were not doing it. That discussion got kind of long, so I'm cutting it out (but if you want to example let me know).

But the point I'm trying to make is that-- stories that have a positive, long lasting, and significant impact for the queer community in the broader culture, require queerness to be written explicitly into the story. It’s hard to advocate, educate, or humanize a community that you refuse to name.

Luca doesn’t have explicitly queer characters. (We read them as queer, but they aren’t explicitly queer. A good comparison might be The Mitchells vs. The Machines, where being queer isn’t a huge part of Katie’s story, but she’s wearing a pride pin the entire time and is shown to have a crush on a girl.)

I will give Luca some credit, because the movie does feature a voice actor who is bi and who uses they/he pronouns, which is wonderful! And I also wouldn't be surprised to learn if there were queer people in the writer's room and/or queer artists who worked on the film. But the story itself is not explicitly queer, so its impact on/for the queer community will always be limited by that.

But but I think a lot of us queer people often find ourselves looking for queerness in stories that don’t explicitly have it. We want to see ourselves represented in a variety of stories.

I think that’s part of why fandom spaces often end up being queer spaces. I forget the post, but there’s a lovely post by a fandom elder who talks about the way that we steal characters away and make them queer. We read the subtext and the nods, and we create the rest ourselves.

I think that it’s fair to say that fandom spaces are important to queer folks and to queer culture itself, because it’s a community where we can write the stories we want to see without having to worry about appeasing straight audiences (or straight higher ups, or straight networks, or homophobic countries who’s markets we want to sell movies in). There’s just us, and the work we create.

And that legacy goes back incredibly far. It goes back to queer zines of Kirk/Spock Star Trek fanfic in the 1960s and 1970s, and likely far beyond that too. As long as there have been queer people, we've found ways to tell queer stories and to reimagine stories as queer.

I think Luca firmly sits in that tradition. And I think that the queerness we add to Luca in our fan-creations, has the same impact that fan work has always had on the queer community— that it allows us to see ourselves as nuanced, valuable, and loved

And in that way, I think Luca is important.

#ask box #long post #anyway those are my thoughts #i think theres a lot more to talk about and a lot of specifics we could dive into #but at the end of the day-- i dont think that media has to be important and culturally significant for us to enjoy it #the only thing that really matters is if its important to us & if participating in the fandom community gives us joy/ a sense of belonging #plus i think that the lack of a queer romance (but so much queer subtext) is what compels a lot of fan creators to create queer stories #its like an itch we have to scratch #(or at least that's how it feels to be)#another thing to mention to-- I didn't grow up with a lot of queer media. I didn't start seeing people like me on tv until well after #I had come out #so my perspective might be skewed bc of that #i think younger folks who got to grow up with a lot of queer media are often a little less tolerant of things being mostly queer in subtext #but for me... that's almost comforting. it's what i grew up with. you know?#im not saying that queerness should always be subtextual and i don't think it should be #but im also not saying it's a bad thing either #you know? zones of gray

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thatsnotcanonpodcasts · 5 years

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Stress, Picard Prequel & E-Scooters

Here we come, washing over the net, getting happiest looks from everyone we know. Hey hey it’s the Nerds! We are back once again with a brand new episode for your entertainment pleasure. This week we have another fun filled episode for you, and we promise not to sing. First up the Professor continues his series on Game Developers with a lot of information on some funding support that is available. We also look at the negative side of crowd funding with the keyboard warriors and trolls being their useless selves. So if you are interested in becoming a games developer and have been listening in on the rest of the series you are sure to find this helpful and interesting.

Next up we urge you to grab yourselves a cup of Earl Grey, hot, and prepare for some awesome news from the Star Trek universe. There is news that some Picard prequel comics and novels are on the way. At present we aren’t expecting to see a young Picard running around the vineyards in France breaking hearts with the wind blowing through his hair. That sounded like bad fan fiction, sorry. Anyway we are certainly looking forward to this fabulous news material.

Buck has word that e-scooters are not as green friendly as is first suggested. That’s right, Buck is unhappy with the misperception of those zippy little shared e-scooters littering up the city. Apparently a study has shown some data that questions their usage, let alone the materials used in the manufacture of the various components. Then there is the issue of the scooters ending up in water ways. That’s right, some idiots are throwing e-scooters into rivers, creeks, lakes and other various waterways. Some people are seriously troubling in the level of stupid they present to the world.

Next as usual we have the various shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, events of interest and the games we are currently playing, minus one host who was abducted. Was it by aliens, the CIA or someone else we may have insulted? You will have to listen to find out who; then we think we will see who comes up with the most interesting answer. Let us know what you think. As always, stay safe, take care, look out for each other and stay hydrated.

EPISODE NOTES:

The Stress of funding - https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1157298020691644416?s=09

Picard prequel comics and novels revealed – https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/star-trek-picard-prequel-novel-and-comics-on-the-way/

Shared E-scooters - https://phys.org/news/2019-08-e-scooters-green-options.html

Games currently playing

Buck

– Company of heroes 2 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/231430/Company_of_Heroes_2/

Professor

– They Are Billions - https://store.steampowered.com/app/644930/They_Are_Billions/

– DOTA 2 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/570/Dota_2/

Other topics discussed

Epic Games Store exclusivity helps Phoenix Point achieve 191% return

- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/1999-11-30-epic-games-store-exclusivity-helps-phoenix-point-achieve-191-percent-return

Epic Games will fund the cost of Kickstarter refunds for Epic-exclusives

- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-03-epic-games-will-fund-the-cost-of-kickstarter-refunds-for-epic-exclusives

Video games blamed for shootings

- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/sports/trump-violent-video-games-studies.html

International Game Developers Association defend industry following President Trump's accusations against "gruesome and grisly video games"

- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-08-06-igda-igdaf-issues-statement-on-weekend-shootings-in-the-us

Ooblets dev received thousands of "hateful, threatening messages"

- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-08-05-ooblets-dev-received-thousands-of-hateful-threatening-messages-over-epic-exclusivity

Steam takes down Devotion

- https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18239937/taiwanese-horror-game-devotion-gone-steam-removed-winnie-the-pooh-meme-china

Screen Queensland Announces Successful Recipients of the 2018-19 Game Development and Marketing Investment Program

- https://screenqueensland.com.au/news/on-screen/screen-queensland-announces-successful-recipients-of-the-2018-19-game-development-and-marketing-investment-program/

Applications now open for the Game Development and Marketing Investment Program 2019

- https://screenqueensland.com.au/news/on-screen/applications-now-open-for-the-game-development-and-marketing-investment-program-2019/

Screen Queensland (SQ) are inviting applications from Queensland game developers seeking finance for games with a global audience. Applications open – finance for games

- https://screenqueensland.com.au/news/apply-now/applications-open-finance-for-games/?utm_source=Social%20Media&utm_medium=Organic&utm_campaign=GamesFinance19Rd2

Brisbane International Game Developers Association (brIGDA)

- http://www.igdabrisbane.org/

Una Mcormack (British-Irish academic and novelist)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_McCormack

Star Trek's Jeri Ryan Had A Hard Time Finding Seven's Voice for Picard

- https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/08/star-treks-jeri-ryan-had-a-hard-time-finding-sevens-voice-for-picard/

Jeri Ryan in Seven of Nine costume

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0a/SevenofNine.jpg

Star Trek: Voyager (1995 Star Trek series)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Voyager

Kathryn Janeway (Star Trek character)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Janeway

Star Trek: Nemesis (2003 film)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Nemesis

Lead–crime hypothesis (proposed link between elevated blood lead levels in children and increased rates of crime)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis

Huffing: Getting a high from aerosol cans

- https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/the-hills/teens-risk-death-huffing-cans-of-deodorant/news-story/595989e970947a6f6d33537c56b1d653

Submerged Share Scooters Out of The Water

- https://www.pedestrian.tv/tech/share-scooters-water/

Lime scooter helmets

- https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/183700245006_/Lime-Scooter-Helmet-NEW-Size-XL-EXTRA-LARGE.jpg

Elvis Lives (TNC podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/elvislivespodcast

Shoutouts

5 Aug 1914 – In Cleveland, Ohio, the first electric traffic light is installed. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-electric-traffic-signal-installed

5 Aug 1966 - Beatles release single "Yellow Submarine" with "Eleanor Rigby" in UK - https://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/08/05/uk-single-eleanor-rigby-yellow-submarine/

5 Aug 1936 - American athlete Jesse Owens wins 200m in world record time (20.7), his 3rd gold medal of the Berlin Olympics - https://www.olympic.org/news/jesse-owens-completes-the-hat-trick-with-200m-win

5 Aug 2010 - Copiapó mining accident, also known then as the "Chilean mining accident", began with a cave-in at the San José copper–gold mine, located in the Atacama Desert 45 kilometres north of the regional capital of Copiapó, in northern Chile. Thirty-three men, trapped 700 meters underground and 5 kilometres from the mine's entrance via spiralling underground ramps, were rescued after 69 days. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiapó_mining_accident

Remembrances

4/5 Aug 1962 - Marilyn Monroe, American actress, model, and singer. Famous for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s and was emblematic of the era's changing attitudes towards sexuality. Although she was a top-billed actress for only a decade, her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2018). More than half a century later, she continues to be a major popular culture icon. Monroe's troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with substance abuse, depression, and anxiety. Her second and third marriages, to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, were highly publicized and both ended in divorce. She died from overdose of barbiturates at the age of 36 in Los Angeles, California. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe

4 Aug 2019 - Stu Rosen, American voice director and voice actor. Rosen voice directed many cartoons and commercials for television, including Fraggle Rock, the first episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987 TV series), Biker Mice from Mars and many more. Other such shows soon followed: Batman: The Animated Series, X-Men,Spiderman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series directed by Andrea Romano and Phantom 2040 also directed by Rosen. He died from cancer at the age of 80 in Los Alamitos, California. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Rosen

5 Aug 2000 - Alec Guinness, English actor. He is known for his six collaborations with David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, Fagin in Oliver Twist, Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia, General Yevgraf Zhivago in Doctor Zhivago, and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India. He is also known for his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas's original Star Wars trilogy; for the original film, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 50th Academy Awards. Guinness won an Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and a Tony Award. In 1959, he was knighted by Elizabeth II for services to the arts. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, the Academy Honorary Award for lifetime achievement in 1980 and the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award in 1989. He died from liver cancer at the age of 86 in Midhurst,West Sussex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Guinness

Famous birthdays

5 Aug 1862 - Joseph Merrick, was an English man with severe deformities. He was first exhibited at a freak show as the "Elephant Man", and then went to live at the London Hospital after he met Frederick Treves, subsequently becoming well known in London society. He was born in Leicester - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Merrick

5 Aug 1930 - Neil Armstrong, American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who was the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also anaval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM) pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the Moon, and the next day they spent two and a half hours outside the spacecraft while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the mission's command module (CM). When Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, he famously said: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." Along with Collins and Aldrin, Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon. President Jimmy Carter presented Armstrong with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and Armstrong and his former crewmates received a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009. He was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong

5 Aug 1889 - Conrad Aiken, American writer, whose work includes poetry,short stories,novels, a play, and an autobiography. Aiken wrote or edited more than 51 books, the first of which was published in 1914, two years after his graduation from Harvard. His work includes novels, short stories (The Collected Short Stories appeared in 1961), criticism, autobiography, and poetry. He was born in Savannah, Georgia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Aiken

Events of Interest

5 Aug 1888 – Bertha Benz was the first person to drive an automobile over a long distance, rigorously field testing the patent Motorwagen, inventing brake pads and solving several engineering issues during the 65 mile trip. That trip occurred in early August 1888, as the entrepreneurial lady took her sons Eugen and Richard, fifteen and fourteen years old, respectively, on a ride from Mannheim through Heidelberg, and Wiesloch, to her maternal hometown of Pforzheim. As well as being the driver, Benz acted as mechanic on the drive, cleaning the carburettor with her hat pin and using a garter to insulate wire. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen

5 Aug 1926 – Harry Houdini performs his greatest feat, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping. - https://www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/houdinis-last-stunt/

5 Aug 1930 – S. A. Andrée’s balloon polar expedition of 1897 was aimed to cross over the North Pole in 43 hours in a hydrogen balloon then journey on to land thanks to the financial support of the Swedish King Oscar II and Alfred Nobel. Andrée’s balloon lost much of its steering capabilities just after launch when a number of drag ropes fell from the craft and ballast sand was thrown overboard. The remaining ropes could be seen trailing in the water till the balloon vanished out of sight. And that was the last anyone heard or saw of the trio for more than 30 years. Discovery came on the 5th August 1930 when the Norwegian Bratvaag expedition found remains on White Island, on the Svalbard archipelago, of a headless body, disturbed by polar bears propped up against a rock. Further investigations by a journalist revealed the bodies of both his companions and diaries detailing much of their ordeal. A camera was also found, and 93 eerie negatives developed of their tragic journey. The remains of the expedition were brought home to Stockholm to a grand procession, where they were feted as national heroes. - https://www.onthisday.com/articles/strange-story-of-the-balloon-expedition-to-the-north-pole

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

Email - [email protected]

Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094

RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

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paullicino · 5 years

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On America(na)

(This piece of writing was entirely funded via my Patreon, where it was first published earlier this month. I might very well never have written it without the support of my patrons, so my huge thanks to all of them. That Patreon will be hosting more work like this in the weeks to come, some exclusively, plus life updates, travel news and much more. Please pledge if you��d like to support more work like this.)

“The trouble with America,” my father says, “is that it’s too big.”

As he speaks, a morsel of food misses his mouth and begins to fall down his body. Like a climber who has lost their grip, it tumbles down the terrain and bounces off his belly, coming to rest in a crevasse somewhere in his trousers. My father has opinions about America. He has never been there and he doesn’t know any Americans. He never will and he never will.

The time is spring and I am in a small car, winding up around some sort of hillside that overlooks part of Seattle. I don’t know what Seattle really is, nor where it begins and ends, only that the city is spread thin like butter across so many square miles of suburban sprawl, a grey smear that stretches to the horizon and which is marbled with the wet and warm greens of whatever trees have been spared its splay.

The sky is the colour of hope and the thinnest haze falls over everything toward the horizon, turning all that is distant into a ghost of an idea. Somehow, impossibly, someone has painted a grand white spirit above it all, a glowing pyramid grander than any pharaoh's tomb. My mind insists that there is no way that there could ever be any mountain this big, yet it stands there both so large and also so far that my imagination tells me it could never create anything nearly so grand.

I look at the peak and the slopes and the rocks and the snow that trace and shape its features and I recognise them all at once. Their aspect is immutable eternity and their countenance is the unforgiving divine.

The face of the mountain is the face of God.

I first flew to America in the summer of 2002. Flights and accommodation were almost absurdly cheap. Less than a year before, I had taken a day off work to travel into London and meet friends. My workplace was a secure facility where my colleagues would get locked in a windowless room, without access to media or the outside world, and so they began to call me from the office phone to see if it was really true that aeroplanes were being deliberately flown into famous American landmarks. Another friend of mine told me how he had kept trying to change the channel on his television, trying to get away from the same disaster movie and simply find out what was on the news.

I was an idealistic young man and my response was to write a letter of sympathy to the President of the United States. My response to a lot of things is to write about them and I write to politicians and to friends and to authorities and to whoever is waiting outside the window after I fold up the paper and launch the plane out into the world. You never know where a paper plane is going to go.

My father had said that we’d plan a visit to America someday and perhaps rent a car and drive across it, going from state to state, seeing sights like the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building. All of those are near each other, particularly when their pictures are printed on the same page of a holiday brochure.

It seemed eminently possible. It was the 1980s and it was Morning Again in America. Nothing wasn’t possible. I was watching Knight Rider and Columbo and The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team. Mr. T was the coolest person I’d ever seen and I’m not sure if my parents were annoyed that he seemed such an aggressive role model or that their son liked a black man.

My father had lots of plans. Others included building an elaborate model train set and converting the loft. He never did any of these things and after he left my mother, I travelled to America by myself, with my own money, under my own steam, at a time when so many other people were still scared to fly there, even scared to fly anywhere at all.

I ran down the stretched spine of an airport in Detroit, thinking I had only five minutes to catch a connecting flight, because I didn’t realise I’d changed time zone and had an entire hour to find my plane. I landed in Chicago so tired and so sleep-deprived and with arms so ruined from dragging luggage that my hands shook when I tried to lift a glass of water. Nothing out the window of my motel room looked real. From the accents to the asphalt to the traffic to the telegraph poles, it was all sights and scenes stolen from film and television. All these disparate pieces were America, sure, but seeing them all together at once and assembled in front of me felt artificial and alienating.

I burned myself lying in the sun by lake Michigan, reading a physical copy of The Onion, rattled around The Loop on trains that told you which side their doors were going to open and hurtled up to the top of a skyscraper to stare out out so far that I could see Indiana and Wisconsin and the speckled imperfections that flit across my weak and broken eyes. The sky was the colour of hope and the thinnest haze fell over everything toward the horizon, turning all that is distant into a ghost of an idea.

I tried to do everything I could, but the trouble with Chicago was that it was too big. I came back with sheets of notes about my trip and I wrote all about it. I hadn’t flown in eight years and what I most remember writing about is the strange sense of suspension I felt as I crossed the Atlantic. Here’s what I said:

“Blue above and blue below. Right now we've just passed by Iceland and we're going to have a brush with Greenland soon. I feel a little more stable now, which is good, as I previously had a sensation whereby I felt the plane was suspended by a single piece of string that could be cut at any time. Takeoff was not much fun either (it was a lot less fun than I'm having now, which is very little), as I was convinced we were climbing too steeply, banking too quickly and likely to stall at any time. We didn't, which was nice. The engine I can see out of my starboard window has also stopped wobbling about, so that’s good.

The only in-flight entertainment with which I can distract myself has so far consisted of a Cybill Shepherd documentary. As you can imagine, this hasn't helped anything.”

I think now that no small part of that sensation was caused by my repeatedly drinking wine before and during the flight, something that I thought would make me feel more relaxed. It did not. Instead, I constantly worried that the plane would crash and/or explode. I also wrote this:

“I've just been to the toilet, which was fun. Thankfully, no hideous explosions occurred and, as a result, I was not thrown out of the plane into a -31C low pressure environment squirting a stream of piss as I went.”

I was getting into folk music and one song I was listening to was called America. It told the story of two people travelling across the country and trying to understand both it and themselves. There are two things about this song that are very realistic. The first is that they fail. The second is that they get stuck in traffic.

The time is winter and I am in Texas. The world is broad and warm and bright and easy. The roads are impossibly large, huge and hulking raised highways that wind like petrified snakes across the landscape. Infrastructure itself is a monument, a colonnade of concrete that conquers the landscape and rivals any classical architecture, every other onramp or highway a temple to the motor car and its pantheon of petroleum-powered processions. I am a passenger, passive in all of the endlessly ongoing ritual that is traffic.

A freight train slices across the perfectly flat skyline. It is so long that I never see its start or its end, only an infinite horizon of boxcars and hoppers. Every other thing in Texas feels like a stereotype I should roll my eyes at, but I’m instead filled with fascination and delight, even at everything that’s imperfect or ridiculous and, as ever, I can’t stop making friends who are American, some who will become very close and vitally important to me. I can’t stop enjoying myself. The trouble with my enthusiasm is that it’s too big.

I’m not supposed to like America. I grew up British, English, and all the playground talk was about how silly America was and is. The people aren’t as smart. They don’t have a good sense of humour. They have everything easier and still don’t do as well or work as hard in the same circumstances. I don’t now know what this mentality was, but it seemed some sort of contempt or resentment.

My father served with Americans in NATO in the 1960s, just as Kennedy and Khrushchev began to stand nose to nose. They were boisterous and bad at being soldiers, he said. The British were better and, in particular, more sensible. All these conversations, playground or personal, were also always about who was better. There was never the idea of being equal.

Other friends with parents who are more motivated or more middle class will go to America and come back with stories of things we don’t have. Those things are mostly different food or different cars or so many different sights to see. Or more television. They have things like Star Trek and The Simpsons, as well as a life full of tiny and so distinctly different details. I am an idealistic young boy and I can’t help but think about things that are somewhere else and different.

The time is spring and the wind is freezing. I am in a bar in New York with a group of actors who have just performed a superb evening of improv comedy. Paired off, each performed an exercise where one must adhere to a script and only recite lines they’ve learned, while the other has no knowledge of this script and can only react, with no idea what lines might be coming next. The results are a combination of hilarious, ridiculous and ingenious, in spite of all these Americans having such a terrible sense of humour.

We’re served food in small plastic baskets, a detail that strikes me as the most New York thing possible, and the actors talk about the lines they had to learn or the responses they had to invent. The actor sat beside me asks me who I am, where I’m from and how it is that I’m friends with another member of the group, a series of unpretentious questions that suit this very unpretentious group of talented people. We comment that we have the same first name and only later do I discover that he is Paul Rudd and that my friend is a little intimidated by him. A few days later, Ed Harris shakes my hand and fixes me with eyes the colour of an iceberg, but I’m not intimidated by anyone. It’s only Ed Harris.

The time is last week and the weather is Los Angeles. An eighty foot tall palm tree lords over the parking lot I am stood in, its shadow a sundial for an already setting afternoon sun. While my friend takes a ticket out of a parking meter, a man takes the trash out of a nearby bin and selects the most recyclable items, methodically emptying all the bottles he finds. These contrasts are so humdrum that nobody comments on them, though I still see fewer homeless people here than I do in San Francisco or Seattle. Block after block of those cities are packed with so many people who have nowhere to sleep that it’s an exercise in hiding humans in plain sight. Here, across LA, they are still more subtle, camped under bridges or living in every concrete nook the infrastructure affords.

All these cities are about some intersection of media and technology and convenience and big business, so being in them or near them is itself so prestigious and important that it teleports increasingly large amounts of money out of people’s pockets every month. Still, none of the geniuses and products and companies that make so much money in these places can dispel the displaced and disaffected because there is no profit to be made in helping the helpless. Instead, the richest and poorest people in the nation exist right on top of each other, never making eye contact.

It helps to have a motor car. An automobile. Millions of people lock themselves in boxes to travel from convenience to convenience, driving through banks and post offices and diners and cafés, These petroleum-powered chairs play their music and offer holders to place their drinks and demand huge roads and parking lots just so that each person can have their own private and portable room to journey inside. These are supposed to be convenient, but every time I’m inside one, the person in control becomes confused or angry with all the other people in their portable rooms and there is swerving or swearing or long periods of grinding gridlock.

Still, they help because they keep you apart from the disillusioned and the disenfranchised by shutting out the outside world. My problem is that I can’t legally operate an automobile and I like to walk or share my transport with other people. Walking can be particularly odd, even dangerous, as more than a few roads are not built for walking along and, in many places, it’s only the most disadvantaged people who you’ll share the pavement with. It’s a weird way to meet everyone who has been forgotten.

I miss trains.

The time is winter and I am supposed to be rolling through southern Oregon, but there has been some kind of mistake and our locomotive has taken a detour through a fantasy land torn straight from an Ivan Shishkin painting. I am trying to use two cameras at once to capture everything I see, because otherwise nobody will ever believe that I have been here or that any of this could possibly exist.

Every single tree is lathered with snow and a deep gorge runs parallel to the tracks, traced out by the jagged and reckless route of a ragged river. Above it there is a colossal hump of sleeping rock, shrouded in fog, and every curve of our route reveals some new variation of this scene, endless rearrangements of majestic mountains, rippling rivers and frozen forests. Everything everywhere is beautiful all the time and can’t afford to miss any of it in case I might never see it again.

The United States doesn’t have enough trains and it doesn’t spend enough time using them to show people how beautiful its landscapes are, whether those are forests or deserts or peaceful pacific coastlines. Instead, it shuttles everyone through airports with security that will look inside your shoes and airlines who will try to charge you for your seats and your bags. Flying has become a minor melodrama, but if you don’t want to ride your portable chair for forty hours, it’s the only way to put the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building on the same page.

The airports are ugly and the views are as likely to be of clouds or darkness or the seatback in front of you. Not enough people realise that, down there, everything everywhere could be beautiful all the time.

The time is autumn and the air is thick like soup, wet and warm and wrapped around me everywhere I go. I am in Florida and I will drink an awful lot of scotch that will all be paid for by a man who is impossibly rich. The man will never know or notice, because he is also paying for so many other people, plus an extremely famous DJ and to rent an entire theme park. Meanwhile, drunk, I will accidentally damage a toilet stall and a bouncer will mention who I am a guest of and suddenly there was never any problem.

A milkshake will save me from a hangover that makes the inside of my skull feel like cheap carpet charged with static. Someone will joke that, like Las Vegas, what happens in Florida stays in Florida, but I will meet a person who will begin to change my life and the what happens in Florida will follow me to England and then back again to the United States. One night, I will break into a state park and climb to the top of a ridge and see an entire city and coast blinking below, laid out like Christmas lights, while the din of a thousand spawning frogs fills the night behind me. Another night, I will lock myself in a tiny and windowless room, curl up on the floor in the dark and simply cry.

There will be a single ship bobbing in a bay beside a seaside restaurant, a sky-high hotel bar with the best view in the city, the steel outline of a old bridge hulking beside me in the darkness like the skeleton of a long-dead dragon. There will be so many experiences and I will pull all these disparate pieces apart to keep the good ones and learn from the bad.

The time is a year of incredible emotional upheaval. I will stand on a hill and look at city shining in the sunlight, asking myself why I can’t and why I shouldn’t try to live somewhere different. I will stand in front of hundreds of people applauding things I have done, the artificial barriers of the internet finally stripped away. I will stand by the Pacific as I begin a romance of the sort I thought I could never enjoy. I will even visit Florida again to enjoy a kind of demented excess that involves cocktails in bowls, or take a tour of an island chain populated by some of the most expensive properties in the world, all ready to lose every cent of their value as the sea rises around them. I will stand tall across America and, while my life will take me elsewhere, it will be America that gives me the confidence and the love and the inspiration to be more than I already am.

On one trip I take a bus, because that is normal to me in Europe, and the only other person riding with me is a frustrated woman whose ride abandoned her and who needs to get to work. She has her shoes in her bag and she tells me she is a dancer. The shoes are enormous and so I naively ask how anyone could possibly dance in those.

There is a moment where she is deciding if she can trust me or if judgement will follow what she says next. She makes a choice and tells me she is a stripper. I don’t know if she expected shock or disgust, but all I have for her is a whole barrage of questions about what that is like. She talks about the money she is saving and the plans she has to move away from her small town and all the men who can’t understand that they aren’t allowed to touch.

She leaves me her number and says I should call sometime. I try once but the number is engaged and I am not brave enough to try again. I am nowhere near as brave as her.

The time is night and I am waiting for my ride. I am lost and so are they, so I stand on a street corner by the emptying train station and a tall, slim African American man approaches me. He is asking only for spare change, and only for the change I can truly spare, and it’s really no problem if I have none and he really is sorry to disturb me. The man has just come from a place nearby that offers support to veterans and is concerned I may not believe that he is one, so he produces a card to prove his service.

The man is impossibly polite and sincere in a way that I will never be able to be and when I ask him about his service he names places in Vietnam I have either never heard of or would struggle to find on a map. He has no job and no home and no family and still stands straighter and more stately than perhaps any other person I have ever seen. He is a marine and he has more dignity and decency in one toe than I have in my entire body and I feel pitiful giving him the dollars in my wallet. I am not intimidated by anyone, but I am humbled forever by this man.

The time is now and I am in Seattle again, the place I have visited more than any other and where all my memories are the colour of wet sidewalks. I am staying with a non-binary friend who is showing me their huge stockpiles of food and telling me I’m welcome to eat all I like, a statement that makes me uncomfortable as it has just followed a description of all their cost-saving measures and how poor they are. I feel like the majority of my queer friends are poor. For some reason, they all want to help look after me.

This friend, maybe one of the most important people in my life, has just collected me from the airport and has a habit of treating me to road trips I wonder if they can really afford. I don’t think they have the money to try to travel across the country and understand both it and themselves, but they still try to help me do this.

I try to convince them to let me buy them food.

My alarm goes off. It is morning again in America, but I am no longer a child and, in the country of impossible vistas and eminently possible dreams, I wonder what is realistic. I look at the television shows I watched thirty years ago and they’re full of white dudes. I find an old episode of The A-Team where they beat up a bunch of Mexican men and I feel disappointed. I look at my friends here and feel I haven’t listened enough to the experiences of those who are black, asian, hispanic or queer. I listen to my folk song and it’s two white men singing about a nice ride on transport that had often been segregated just a decade before.

It’s morning again in America and more children than ever will be homeless. More than one in ten homeless adults will be a veteran. Forest fires are more persistent and deadly than ever and last week I saw California hills covered in charcoal, as well as damage caused by indiscriminate blazes that burned right to the sea. Violence against LGBT people is on the rise and the number of those being murdered has nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017. There is a new song about America and it feels far more realistic and referential, more candid and circumspect, as well as more appropriate for those who who don’t have the opportunity to travel across the country and understand both it and themselves, who can’t fit the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building into the same life, who struggle to enjoy all the splendour of the country they were nevertheless born in and are citizens of.

The time is jumbled and I am a paper plane and I never know where I’m going to go. I am in Portland, Maine, nestled into one of the oldest corners of the country, and I am peering through the fishy fog at a town like no other in America, but then I am in Minnesota, nervously watching news of a nearby tornado, but then I am in Indiana and sat at Kurt Vonnegut’s typewriter, or looking at Kurt Vonnegut’s Purple Heart, or reading each early draft of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, every one of them abandoned in favour of a fresh start that hoped for something better.

There are so many fresh starts and so many beginnings, each one the same but different, as the author tries again and again. One line in his finished novel will read “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

But then I am in Arizona and the desert is purple, or I am in Virginia, or I am in Utah or New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Colorado, where the rocks are red and I see a saddlemaker for the first time. A saddlemaker.

But then I am in a university and Ursula Le Guin steps in through the door. Every single person in the room begins to behave differently and this tiny woman walks through an atmosphere thick with reverence and respect so rightly earned. Later I will stand up to speak to her and think about how so many important choices I made in my life, choices that seemed terrifying at the time, lead me to that moment, a moment that shows me how they were right and true and that I was so impossibly good to myself in making them. I will ask a question and I will remind myself that I am not intimidated by anyone.

She will speak back to me and the voice of Ursula is the voice of God.

But then I am in Maryland in a rainstorm, the thunder rippling around me and the lightning tearing open a sky too large to exist on this planet. I am in San Diego and there are Bible passages and references on a plumber’s van. I am in Pennsylvania, looking at the Liberty Bell. I am in Los Angeles and it is Christmas and the tree is eighty foot tall. I am trying to be in all the museums in Washington DC and I zigzag across the town like the lines on a Pollock, but the trouble with American history and culture is that it’s too big.

But then I am in love, more than once, and I will give my heart to people who come from this country at which I am supposed to glower or frown. I will want to give them my all.

The time is summer and the Illinois night is flush with chirping cicadas. The kitchen light is too bright and I eat dessert with the grandmother of a young woman I like and she warns me not to go too far south on the Chicago metro.

“When the people turn the colour of the chocolate on your eclair,” she says, “go the other way.”

I have never heard someone say something so brazenly racist in such an everyday setting.

The time is winter and my partner tells me that so much of America hates people like her. I had never considered this before because America is full of people like her, but she tells me stories of violence and assault and racism and being scared. No matter how precious or important I think she is, there are so many people who will never see that.

My father sees America as three hundred and thirty million people who are all the same. I see it as the same number of people who are all wonderfully different. Some of those people are remarkably similar to my father and sure would like everyone to be the same.

What an impossibly stupid idea. How can you even try that in the country where the deserts are purple and the rocks are red and the air is thick like soup and the forests are frozen and the palm trees are eighty foot tall and the old bridge is the skeleton of a dragon and the horizon is a train. Why would you even want to, when there is so much excitement in what is somewhere else and different. There is no way to pull all these disparate pieces apart any more than there is any way to mash them all together or make the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building fit on the same page. There is no America waiting for you to understand both it and yourself, just like there is no life that makes sense from the things you find in gift shops. Both are tasks that are too big.

Trust me, you will never fully know America and you will never fully know yourself. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t love both.

The time is this evening and I edit all I have written here and wonder if I will be called a cynic or a patriot or an idealist or an idiot. I am all of these things and also none, as I pull these disparate pieces of myself apart and mash them back together again. People tell me everything here is going wrong and there is so much to be unhappy about, but my affection for America won’t go away and if I ever think it might, I want you to help me reach for it and pull it back. I will never desert my American friends and nobody can ever erase the joy I’ve felt any more than they can turn back the tears that run down my cheeks as I write this.

I cannot edit this any more, much as I cannot edit America. There is no grand theme I can find, no story I can invent by reshaping and realigning pieces that never joined together in the first place. There is only a messy and imperfect whole, across which I have zigzagged like the lines on a Pollock. I doubt me or my journeys make sense to anyone.

I have spent a small though significant fraction of my life in this country, but I have invested a disproportionate amount of my love, energy and enthusiasm here. I regret none of that and I have received rewards and restitution tenfold. My only problem now is that my experiences have left me with a condition both chronic and terminal: The trouble with my heart is that it’s too big.

(The pictures featured are, in order: The America Map in Denver Airport, Gas Works Park in Seattle, Chicago downtown viewed from somewhere like Roosevelt Road, a still from It's Morning Again, Manhattan, Austin, Dealey Plaza, Times Square, Los Angeles, Hollywood, somewhere perhaps in the Willamette National Forest, somewhere in Northeastern Washington, Orlando, Sausalito, Indianapolis, the WTC Memorial, San Francisco's Bay Bridge, Estes Park, The White House, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum, Ursula Le Guin speaking at Seattle University, the Portland Head Lighthouse, Washington DC, Philadelphia and the Golden Gate Bridge.)

#America #travel #travelogue #writing #Patreon

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atthevogue · 6 years

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“Tony de Peltrie” (1985)

The basics: Wikipedia

Opened: A landmark piece of computer animation, the Canadian short was part of the 19th Annual Tournee of Animation anthology that showed at the Vogue Theater in March and April of 1986.

Also on the bill: At least one Saturday in April, it was programmed in the 9:00 slot after Chris Marker’s Akira Kurosawa documentary A.K. and Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and before a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead, which sounds to me like a very good eight-hour day at the movies. Otherwise, you could have had a less perfect day seeing it play after Haskell Wexler’s forgotten Nicaragua war movie Latino and the equally forgotten Gene Hackman/Ann-Margaret romantic drama Twice in a Lifetime.

What did the paper say? ★★★1/2 from the Courier-Journal film critic Dudley Saunders. Saunders described the Tournee as “a specialized event that shows signs of moving into the movie mainstream,” correctly presaging the renaissance in feature-length animation in the 1990s generally and Pixar specifically, whose Luxo, Jr. short was released that same year. Of Tony, Saunders singles it out as “one of the most technologically advanced,” and that it featured “some delightful music from Marie Bastien.” He then throws his hands up: "Computers were used in this Canadian entry. Don’t ask how.” Saunders was long-time film critic for the C-J’s afternoon counterpart, the Louisville Times, throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In the late 1980s, he would co-found Louisville’s free alternative weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer.

What was I doing? I was six and hypothetically could have seen an unrated animation festival, though I'd have been a little bit too young to have fully appreciated it. Although, who knows, I’m sure I was watching four hours of cartoons a day at the time, so maybe my taste was really catholic.

How do I see it in 2018? It’s on YouTube.

youtube

A four-hour-a-day diet of cartoons was probably on the lower end for most of my peers. I grew up during what I believe is commonly known as the Garbage Age of Animation, which you can trace roughly from The Aristocrats in 1970 to The Little Mermaid (or The Simpsons) in 1989. The quantity of animation was high, and the quality was low. Those twenty years were a wasteland for Disney, and even though I have fond memories of a lot of those movies, like The Black Cauldron, they’re a pretty bleak bunch compared to what was sitting in those legendary Disney vaults, waiting patiently to be released on home video.

Other than low-quality Disney releases, the 1980s were highlighted mostly by the post-’70s crap was being churned out of the Hanna-Barbera laboratories. Either that, or nutrition-free Saturday morning toy commercials like The Smurfs and G.I. Joe. Of course there’s also Don Bluth, whose work is kind of brilliant, but whose odd feature-length movies seem very out-of-step with the times. Don Bluth movies seem now like baroque Disney alternatives for weird, dispossessed kids who didn’t yet realize they were weird and dispossessed. (Something like The Secret of NIMH is like Jodorowsky compared to, say, 101 Dalmatians.) Most of the bright spots of those years were produced under the patronage of the saint of 1980s suburbia, Steven Spielberg. An American Tale or Tiny Toon Adventures aren’t regarded today as auteurist masterpieces of animation (or are they?), but they were really smart and imaginative if you were nine years old. Still, the idea that cartoons might be sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by non-stoned adults was probably very alien concept in 1985.

In the midst of all of this, though, scattered throughout the world were a bunch of programmers and animators working out the next regime. Within ten years of Tony de Peltrie, Pixar’s Toy Story would be the first feature-length CGI animated movie, and within another ten years, traditional hand-drawn animation, at least for blockbuster commercial purposes, would be effectively dead. That went for both kids and their parents. Animation, like comic books, would take on a new sophistication and levels of respectability in the coming decades.

I love it when you read an old newspaper review with the benefit of hindsight, and find that the critic has gotten it right in predicting how things may play out in years to come. That’s why I was excited to read in Saunders’ review of the Tournee that he suspected animation as an artform was showing “signs of moving into the movie mainstream.” His sense of confusion (or wonder, or some combination) at the computer-generated aspects is charming in retrospect, too.

Tony de Peltrie is a landmark in computer-generated animation, but its lineage doesn’t really travel through the Pixar line at all (even though John Lassetter himself served on the award panel for the film festival where it was first shown, and predicted it’d be regarded as a landmark piece of animation). The children of the 1970s and ‘80s grew up to revere the golden era of Pixar movies as adults, and the general consensus is that not only are they great technical accomplishments, but works of great emotional resonance.

As much of an outlier as it makes me: I just don’t know. I haven’t really thought so. I think most Pixar movies are really, really sappy in the most obvious way possible. The oldest ones look to me as creaky as all those rotoscoped Ralph Bakshi cartoons of the ‘70s. Which is fine, technology is one thing -- most silent movies look pretty creaky, too -- but the underlying of armature of refined Disney sap that supports the whole structure strains to the point of collapse after a time or two.

Film critic Emily Yoshida said it best on Twitter: she noted, when Incredibles 2 came out, she’d recently re-watched the first Incredibles and was shocked at how crude it looked. "The technoligization of animation will not do individual works favors over time,” she wrote. “The wet hair effect in INCREDIBLES, which I remember everyone being so excited about, felt like holding a first generation iPod. Which is how these movies have trained people to watch them on a visual level...as technology.” There’s something here that I think Yoshida is alluding to about Pixar movies that is very Silicon Valley-ish in the way they’re consumed, almost as status symbols, or as luxury products. This is true nearly across all sectors of the tech industry now, but it’s particularly evident with animation.

One of my favorite movie events of the year is when the Landmark theaters here in Minneapolis play the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the beginning of the year. Every year, it’s the same: you’ll get a collection of fascinating experiments from all over the world, some digitally rendered, some hand-drawn. They don’t always work, and some of them are really bad, but there’s always such a breadth of styles, emotions and narratives that I’m always engaged and delighted. They remind you that, in animation, you can do anything you want. You can go anywhere, try everything, show anything a person can imagine. Seeing the animated shorts every year, more than anything else, gets me so excited about what movies can be.

And then, in the middle of the program, there’s invariably some big gooey, sentimental mush from Pixar. Not all of them are bad, and some are quite nicely done, but for the most part, it’s cute anthropomorphized animals or objects or kids placed in cute, emotionally manipulative situations. I usually go refill my Diet Coke or take a bathroom break during the Pixar sequence.

Yeah, yeah, I know. What kind of monster hates Pixar?

I don’t hate Pixar, and I like most of the pre-Cars 2 features just fine. The best parts of Toy Story and Up and Wall-E are as good as people say they are. But when you take the reputation that Pixar has had for innovation and developing exciting new filmmaking technology in the past 25 years, and compare it to the reality, there’s an enormous gap. And it drives me nuts, because if this is supposed to be the best American animation has to offer in terms of innovation and emotional engagement, it's not very inspiring. Especially placed alongside the sorts of animated shorts that come out of independent studios elsewhere in the U.S., or Japan, or France, or Canada.

Which brings us to Tony de Peltrie, created in Montreal by four French-Canadian animators, and supported in part by the National Film Board of Canada, who would continue to nurture and support animation projects in Canada through the twenty-first century. A huge part of the enjoyment -- and for me, there was an enormous amount of enjoyment in watching Tony de Peltrie -- is seeing this entirely new way of telling stories and conveying images appear in front of you for the first time. Maybe it’s because I have clear memories of a world without contemporary CGI, but I still find this enormous sense of wonder in what’s happening as Tony is onscreen. I still remember very clearly seeing the early landmarks of computer-aided graphics, and being almost overwhelmed with a sense of awe -- Tron, Star Trek IV, Jurassic Park. Tony feels a bit like that, even after so many superior technical accomplishments that followed.

Tony de Peltrie doesn’t have much of a plot. A washed-up French-Canadian entertainer recounts his past glories as he sits at the piano and plays, and then slowly dissolves over a few minutes into an amorphous, impressionistic void. (Part of the joke, I think, is using such cutting-edge technology to tell the story of a white leather shoe-clad artist whose work has become very unfashionable by the 1980s.) It’s really just a monologue. The content could be conveyed using a live actor, or traditional hand-drawn animation.

But Tony looks so odd, just sitting on the edge of the Uncanny Valley, dangling those white leather shoes into the void. Part of the appeal is that, while Tony’s monologue is so human and delivered in such an off-the-cuff way, you’re appreciating the challenge of having the technology match the humanity. Tony’s chin and eyes and fingers are exaggerated, like a caricature, but there’s such a sense of warmth underneath the chilliness of the computer-rendered surfaces. Though it’s wistful and charming, you wouldn’t necessarily call it a landmark in storytelling -- again, it’s just a monologue, and not an unfamiliar one -- but it is a technological landmark in showing that the computer animation could be used to humane ends. It’d be just as easy to make Tony fly through space or kill robots or whatever else. But instead, you get an old, well-worn story that slowly eases out of the ordinary into the surreal, and happens so gradually you lose yourself in a sort of trance.

As Yoshida wrote, technoligization of animation doesn’t do individual works favors over time. To that end, something like Tony can’t be de-coupled from its impressive but outdated graphics. These landmarks tend to be more admired than watched -- to the extent that it’s remembered at all, it’s as a piece of technology, and not as a piece of craft or storytelling.

Still, Tony is the ancestor of every badly rendered straight-to-Netflix animated talking-animals feature cluttering up your queue, but he’s also the ancestor of any experiment that tries to apply computer-generated imagery to ways of storytelling. In that sense, he has as much in common with Emily in World of Tomorrow as he does with Boss Baby, a common ancestor to any computer-generated human-like figure with a story. When Tony dissolves into silver fragments at the end of the short, it’s as if those pieces flew out into the world, through the copper wires that connect the world’s animation studios and personal computers, and are now present everywhere. He’s like a ghost that haunts the present. I feel that watching it now, and I imagine audiences sitting at the Vogue in 1986 might have felt a stirring of something similar.

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papermoonloveslucy · 6 years

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THREE FOR TWO

December 3, 1975

Directed by Charles Walters ~ Written by James Eppy

Synopsis

Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason play three married couples in three stories about married life.

Cast

Lucille Ball (Sally / Rita / Pauline) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Jackie Gleason (Herb / Fred / Mike) was born in 1916. He became one of America’s most recognized all-around entertainers but is perhaps best remembered for his iconic character of bus driver Ralph Kramden on “The Honeymooners” which was seen on CBS just like “I Love Lucy.” On “The Lucy Show” Lucy Carmichael frequently referred to Gleason even borrowing his “Away we go” exit in a couple of episodes. In 1968 he did a wordless cameo on “Lucy Visits Jack Benny” (HL S1;E2) as bus driver Ralph Kramden. He died in 1987.

Gino Conforti (Waiter in “Herb & Sally”) began his TV acting career in 1968 and has been continually working since, although mostly as one-off characters. He had a recurring role as Felipe on “Three’s Company” from 1980 to 1982, a series Lucille Ball admired. He played the burglar in “Lucy Plays Cops and Robbers” (HL S6;E14) in 1974. He was also seen in “Lucy Gets Lucky” earlier in 1975.

Vanda Barra (Hostess in “Fred & Rita”) made over two dozen appearances on “Here’s Lucy” as well as appearing in "Lucy Gets Lucky” (with Dean Martin) earlier in 1975 . She was seen in half a dozen episodes of “The Lucy Show.” Barra was Lucille Ball’s cousin-in-law by marriage to Sid Gould.

Irene Sale (Woman #1 in “Fred & Rita”) was a stunt double and played Louise (uncredited) on Desilu's original “Star Trek” in 1966. This is her penultimate screen credit.

Eddie Garrett (Man #1 in “Fred & Rita”) did two episodes of “Here's Lucy” and also played a party guest in Mame (1974). He retired in 1986 and died in 2010.

Mel Pape (Man at Table in “Fred & Rita”) was Jackie Gleason's long-time personal assistant. As such he played small roles in such Gleason projects as Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Nothing in Common (1986), and The Sting II (1983). He died in 1995.

Due to the darkness of the nightclub only Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason's faces are actually visible on screen. Barra, Sale, Garrett and Pape remain in shadows.

Tammi Bula (Maureen in “Mike & Pauline”) played the recurring role of Marcia Woolery on “The Waltons.” One of her six episodes aired a month before this special.

Maureen is Mike and Pauline's daughter. She is engaged to marry her boyfriend Steven.

Paul Linke (Alfred in “Mike & Pauline”) also appeared on “The Waltons” in an episode that aired the day after this special was first broadcast. He spoke at the memorial service for his good friend John Ritter, who had appeared on “Life With Lucy” in 1986.

Alfred is Mike and Pauline's son. He recently broke up with his girlfriend Betty Dorsey.

Director Charles Walters was an uncredited director on Ziegfeld Follies (1945) which starred Lucille Ball, although not in the segment he staged. He also directed two episodes of “Here's Lucy” and will also direct “What Now Catherine Curtis?” in 1976.

This special is billed as “Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna's 'Three for Two'” which may indicate that the material was originally written for the married comedy team (who often performed together) instead of Lucy and Gleason. This is James Eppy's only screen credit which may indicate that this was merely a pseudonym for Taylor and Bologna as writers. Screen writer Joseph Bologna will act in Lucille Ball's next special “What Now Catherine Curtis?”

This was Lucille Ball's third prime time special after the end of “Here's Lucy” in 1974. The first two were “Happy Anniversary and Goodbye” and “Lucy Gets Lucky” nine months earlier.

This special is available on DVD from MPI video or can be streamed online. It was originally aired on CBS in the USA and ITV in the UK.

There is no studio audience or laugh track.

Although he made a wordless walk-on cameo as bus driver Ralph Kramden in the second-aired “Here's Lucy”, this is the first time Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason have acted together on screen. This continues Ball's employment of “Honeymooners” alumni:

Art Carney (Ed Norton) in “Happy Anniversary and Goodbye” and “What Now Catherine Curtis?”

Audrey Meadows (Alice Kramden) in “Life With Lucy” (1986)

Jane Kean (Trixie Norton from 1966 on) in “The Lucy Show” (1966)

In form and content, this material resembles Neil Simon's 1968 play and 1971 film Plaza Suite, which is also divided into three stories with actors playing multiple roles. The fact that the first story of the special takes place in a hotel suite strengthens the comparison. The year after this special aired, Simon wrote a similar play titled California Suite which was filmed in 1978.

Like the two previous Lucille Ball Specials, the show reunites many “Here's Lucy” production staff, including hairstylist Irma Kusely, prop master Kenneth Westcott, costumer Renita Reachi, and script supervisor Dorothy Aldworth.

This special was berated by the critics and the ratings were not as large as Lucille Ball's previous specials. CBS worried that it would lose its number one place after more than twenty seasons at the top. This pretty much spells the end of CBS's confidence in television shows featuring Lucille Ball.

“Herb & Sally” (20 minutes) ~ Lucy and Jackie Gleason play Herb and Sally Wolbert, a middle-aged couple from Cleveland with grown children who are on a month-long vacation in Italy after 24 years of marriage. After Rome they are traveling on to Venice, Capri, and the ruins of Pompeii.

As Sally, Lucille Ball has on a black wig with silver highlights. She wears a peach chiffon nightgown (which she also owns in blue and black).

The story opens with Sally singing a carefree verse of “Volare,” a song that Dean Martin sung on the previous Lucille Ball special “Lucy Gets Lucky.”

Oops! When the waiter hands Herb the room service menu, it opens far enough to see that Jackie Gleason has his lines written on the inside. Gleason was not a big fan of rehearsing, while Lucille Ball was a stickler for it.

SALLY: “I gave up a successful career to marry you!” HERB: “You were a screw counter in a hardware store.” SALLY: “I was learning the business.”

Lucy Barker will be co-owner of a hardware store in Lucille Ball's last television series “Life With Lucy” (1986). Herb reminds her that his own career as a bamboo furniture salesman is no fun. Herb demeans himself by entertaining buyers in nightclubs and doing his Peter Lorre impersonation.

HERB: “Do you mean you don't like my impersonation of Peter Lorre?” SALLY: “It stinks, Herb.” HERB: “Then our whole marriage is based on a lie.”

To prove his Peter Lorre impersonation is good, he does it for the waiter: “Did you get the information, Mr. Miller? You didn't get the information, Mr. Miller? You were supposed to get the information, Mr. Miller.” Gleason is paraphrasing Lorre's dialogue from All Through the Night (1942) in which Gleason himself co-starred with Lorre, Humphrey Bogart and Ludwig Stössel as Mr. Miller. The waiter incorrectly guesses he is imitating Gina Lollobrigida!

HERB: (to Sally) “I'm fat! I'm fat! And every pound I've put on you've put there!”

Sally says there are three men in Cleveland that keep her sane: Lou Fergazi, her butcher; Andre Molan, her decorator; and Stu Bridgeman, her family doctor.

SALLY: (yelling to the street from the balcony) “I'm a pleasure object!” HERB: “She's 45 and in two months she'll be a grandmother! You hear that? A grandmother!”

Lucy Ricardo visited Rome in one of the most memorable episodes of “I Love Lucy,” “Lucy's Italian Movie” (ILL S5;E23), where she soaks up local color for a movie role by stomping grapes with her feet.

“Fred & Rita” (5:30 minutes) ~ Lucy and Gleason play banker Fred N. Schneider and homemaker Rita Fledgeman, a couple carrying on a discrete affair and trying to decide whether they should tell their spouses. They meet at Cookie's Tip-Toe Inn, a dimly lit hideaway nightclub.

RITA: “I Love the touch of your aftershave. The sound of your hair when it moves.” FRED: “And I love the smell of your boa.”

Lucille Ball wears an upswept blonde wig and a feather boa. At first, both Fred and Rita wear sunglasses, despite the darkness of the club.

RITA: “I'm only alive when I'm with you. I'm dead at the supermarket. I'm dead at the PTA. I'm dead at the beauty parlor.” FRED: “You think you're dead? I'm dead at the bank. I'm dead at the little league games.” RITA: “Are you dead with Myrna?” FRED: “Of course I'm dead with Myrna. Why? Aren't you dead with Harry?” RITA: “You know I'm dead with Harry. I live only for you!”

Fred is married to Rita's best friend Myrna. Rita is married to Harry, Fred's second cousin. They've been married twenty years.

RITA: (about a possible time to meet again) “The only possible day is Veteran's Day.” FRED: “I'd love to, but I'm marching.” RITA: “You'd rather march than go away with me?” FRED: “I can cheat on my wife, but not the National Guard.”

“Mike & Pauline” ~ Lucy and Gleason play domineering parents involved in a New Year's Eve family crisis as they are forced to recognize their college-aged children's declaration of independence.

As Pauline, Lucille Ball wears a honey-brown wig, topped with a paper crown (because it is New Year's Eve).

Mike lists his best friends as Johnny Bridges, Georgie Shry, Tommy Ritzo, Eddie Kunz, and Lefty Bryan.

MIKE: (about his best friends) “I always listened to their viewpoints and made sure that I had all the facts – before I punched each one of them out. It happens to be the code I live by: logic – and then violence.”

Mike mentions the family's New Year's Eve traditions of watching the ball drop in Times Square, listening to Guy Lombardo, and the kids watching Mike and Pauline dance to “Apple Blossom Time.” "(I'll Be With You) In Apple Blossom Time" was written by Albert Von Tilzer and Neville Fleeson in 1920. It was introduced on big screen by the Andrews Sisters in their 1941 film Buck Privates. In “Lucy and the Andrews Sisters” (HL S2;E6, above), Lucille Ball, Lucie Arnaz, and Patty Andrews sing it as part of a medley of the Andrews Sisters' greatest hits. Guy Lombardo was mentioned on “Lucy and the Drum Contest” (HL S3;E4) when Harry calls him his favorite musician.

MIKE: (to his grown children, angry) “Nobody's going anywhere. No how, no way, no chance! The case is dismissed! Through! Finished! Done!” PAULINE: (calmly) “Now that's fair. Your father's very fair.”

Only one episode of a Lucille Ball sitcom was ever set on New Year's Eve: “Chris's New Year's Eve Party” (TLS S1;E14), originally aired on December 31, 1962.

Alfred wants to quit college and become a nightclub comic. Mike tries in vain to give his son some pointers about the timing of his jokes. Before being signed to a film contract, Jackie Gleason worked as a nightclub comic at New York's Club 18.

In the end, the children go out to be with their dates and Mike and Pauline watch the ball drop on TV to the strains of “Auld Lang Syne.” As they dance in the living room to “Apple Blossom Time” Mike and Pauline become Lucy and Jackie dancing together as the credits roll.

This Date in Lucy History - December 3rd

“Men Are Messy” (ILL S1;E8) ~ December 3, 1951

“The Ricardos Visit Cuba” (ILL S6;E9) ~ December 3,1956

“The Celebrity Next Door” (LDCH S1;E2) ~ December 3, 1957

"Vivian Sues Lucy" (TLS S1;E10) ~ December 3, 1962

“Harry Catches Gold Fever” (HL S6;E12) ~ December 3, 1973

The writing here (whoever is responsible) is what makes the difference. The first segment is familiar territory and feels expected. The shortest segment is the best written and most interesting. The final scene is a family dramedy with some unfunny inferences to spouse abuse and violence. Ball and Gleason are not Meryl Streep and Laurence Olivier, but they do well enough to make it a mostly entertaining hour.

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cheddarjacked-blog · 6 years

Text

Genre

Teen Drama

History

1944 - The word teenager is coined. Advertisers can sell to teenagers. Teen dramas became a marketing force.

1950’s Rebel teenagers; Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild Ones.

1960’s not really

1970’s Loads of films about teenagers. Horror (Carrie) Musicals (Greece) Love Stories (Love story)

1980’s The era of the teen movie (Breakfast club) (St Elmo’s Fire) (Pretty in Pink) (Risky Business)

1980’s in Britain. First teen drama’s (Bykes grove)(Garage Hill)(Press Gang)

1990’s TV teen drama’s hit the box. (90210) (Buffy) (My so called life)

Ever since - A commercial staple.

Why do we watch teen drama?

Morals, style, pump up, fun,

Types of Teen Drama. (sub-genres)

Mystery drama (Riverdale, pretty little liars, 13 reasons why)

Supernatural drama (buffy, vampire diaries, shadow hunters)

High school dramas (90210, gossip girl. It’s either rich high school, or small town.

Sci Fi Drama

History

Frankenstein 1818

H.G. Wells (Time machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth)

A trip to the moon 1902 first sci fi film

Carries on as literary genre. Huge in the 1920’s. Lot’s of Pulp ‘sci fi' Fiction (Asamov)

First British TV Sci Fi. R.U.R 1938. About a robot uprising.

Adaptation of The Time Machine 1949.

Lot’s of sci fi activity in the 1950’s. Because of the space race. (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Quartermasters experiment)

Doctor Who 1963. Very powerful money maker. Star Trek 1966.

Golden age of British Sci Fi. Blake 7, the Tomorrow People. Doomwatch.

1980’s/90’s in America Star Trek, Babylon 5, Quantum Leap, Red Dwarf in Britain

2000’s Doctor Who came back in 2005. Rejuvenates sci fi in Britain: Primeval, Torchwood.

Why do we watch sci fi?

Interesting and new

Bold ideas (black mirror)

Escapism

Sub genres of sci fi

dystopias (handmaid’s tale, the walking dead, the 100)

Space Discovery (Star Trek, Deep Space 9)

Alternate History (Man in the high castle)

Robots/clones (humans, opha black)

Animated comedy (Rick and Morty)

Superheroes

Crime Drama

Edipous

Edgar Allen Po in 1840’s + Wilkie Collins in 1860’s

1887 Sherlock Homes. Reaction to the first police detectives in Britain.

Agatha Christie. 1920 —> 1976 (75 novels)

Thrillers in America become huge from the 1920’s. Prohibition, lawless, hardboiled style.

1930’s first sherlock homes film.

Mystery film huge in 20’s 30’s 40’s 50’s 60’s. Hitchcock, Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon.

Early 50’s Britain crime documentaries. First cop show in 1953-1976 (Dickson of Dock Green)

1970’s and 1980’s Realistic style. The sweeney, Begwar, Prime Suspect, Silent Witness, Crashes.

1990’s crime becomes a bit lighter. Hetty Wainthropp investigates.

2000’s explodes in America. CSI, Bones, The closer, The Mentalist.

Why do we watch crime drama.

To solve a puzzle.

Admire method of the kill and the catch.

To be surprised.

Dark underside of human nature.

Sub genres

Spy thriller, alias, homeland, killing eve, 24,

Police procedural (a department who’s work we’re following). Luther, Happy Valley, The Killing

Gangster. Peaky Blinders, The Wire, Narcos, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad

Forensic. CSI, Silent Witness. Bones.

Fantasy

Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 BC)

Folk tales, fair tales, chjivalrics stories

1920, cabinet di cellarage

1922 - nosforatu

1930 king kong.

1954 - Lord of the Rings published.

1960 first fantasy tv. bewitched, ocean of seive, increbile hulk, wonder woman, (all cheesy)

1980’s knight rider, fragile cock, beauty and the beast. (still cheesy)

1990’s sabrina, buffy, herecles, xena (still cheesy)

2000 merlin, true blood, lost, dolls house, being human. (darker)

2010’s game of thrones.

Why do we watch fantasy?

Escapism

Replace true meaningful experience with simulation

Experiencing fantastical worlds and creatures.

Deep lore.

Sub genres

Childrens 9wolf blood, meslia, scooby doo)

Fantasy/horror (buffy, penny dreadful, the terror

Superheroes (smallville, jessica jones

Anthology (twilight, creeped ant)

Tropes

Tropes are securing elements which help the audience to understand where they are.

In Teen Drama:

Lockers; pranks, framing somebody.

Mean girls; beautiful, popular, clique and fashionable.

Romantic relationships. Love triangle.

Becoming popular, status. Duckling to swan.

Cliques, jocks, nerds/geek

Prom.

Getting laid.

Drugs

Peer pressure

Competitions

Relationships with teachers

Music, the latest hits.

Teenage pregnancy.

In Sci Fi:

New person arrives who doesn’t know the world. Older character who knows everything.

Monsters internal and external. Killer robots rise up.

Categorize: Classes of people. Races of people. AI.

Gadgets.

Conspiracy

Clash of civilizations. Are aliens good or bad.

Space.

Time travel. Were we better in the past.

Rogue.

Good leader.

Angsty teen e.g Wesley Presher Star Trek Next Generation

Immortality

Ancient Civilizations.

Countdown to impact of explosion.

In Crime Drama:

Informant/rat. Nervous, slimy.

Detective. Off the rails. Alcoholic. Wavering moral code. Troubled homelife. Single minded.

Sleuth. Sherlock Homes, professionals who aren’t in a police department. Quirky. Intelligent.

Corrupt officers.

Dead Innocents.

Beautiful young female victim.

Police chief under pressure from above. Shit flows downhill.

Femme Fatale.

Nemesis. Just as smart as the detective but has had more sleep.

Conspiracy to unravel.

Suspect who is innocent (or not)

Gangster/underworld friend

Sarcastic receptionist.

Wild card bad guy.

Detective sidekick.

In Fantasy:

A dark lord

cursed objects

god vs evil

hero has a quest

races and beings

magic swords and rings

medieval settings

damsel in distress

bloodline

overthrowing of tradition

fighting for power

prophecies

You can subvert genre, you can subvert anything you want as long as you keep in mind why people watch the genre in the first place.

Don’t fall back on your genre tropes because it will be cliqué but still use them otherwise it will be confusing.

#tv scriptwriting

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