MISCELLANEOUS

One of my all-time favorites, and one of my Top 10. A heartbreakingly beautiful film ..

I love this short story in The New Yorker last week. I think @AgrippinaX might like it. Or not.

Amazing that Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938, but can write a short story that is very modern today.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ce-carol-oates

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Is there anything worse than jamming up one’s shredder? Took me at least one hour to unjam ours yesterday. Lesson learned: one page at a time.

I did enjoy it.

See what you mean there — it does feel quite modern, but I also feel JCO’s distance from the girl with the iPhone, so yes and no. I do admire prolific people like JCO. I read one interview where she said she seems to be thought of as ‘less than’ because of the sheer volume of what she’s written.

A client told me recently that she’s more of a New Yorker person after I told her I was an Atlantic person. A funny and apt distinction.

I really liked the ‘feeding frenzy’ bit.

Had an in-person work meeting today, me and a large group of people who all work together — technically, for me. The antisocial and asocial me is always apprehensive about those (even more so now that I’m finally fully remote), but this was actually quite nice. We only really talked about movies and that made the lunch very worthwhile. One guy said his favourite recent film was A Real Pain and I thought, This is exactly why I’ll always have these people’s back professionally.

I mean, he also preferred Better Call Saul to Breaking Bad, but none of us is perfect.

I wish i could find a movie buff outside of here. I did recently but wasnt going to exchange numbers with a complete stranger and they live in my apartment complex. We saw the same movie last Tuesday. (Not this Tuesday that just passed). I said Im sure I will run into you again here. (The cinema).

Been reading the New Yorker my entire American life. Sometimes wonder why I’m still there, but, whatever. Never ever read the Atlantic.

Don’t think I made it through the pilot for Better Call Saul.

A Real Pain was pretty good, but I would never watch it again.

I just kind of fell into it. I like the vibe, can’t explain it. FWIW, I love the New Yorker, too.

Why wouldn’t you? Do you find it ‘heavy’ or just not interesting enough for a rewatch?

Yeah, I watched the entirety of Better Call Saul, but only once. My ex loved it. I’ve posted about this before, but it’s really odd how for someone as committed to film/cinema as I am, I ended up with someone where our tastes were completely incompatible.

I used to think it would be interesting; that I would be exposed to the sorts of films/shows I wouldn’t normally watch, and that was true to a degree, but most of what he liked, I didn’t. I respect what Better Call Saul is trying to do and does, with much success. It just wasn’t for me. I wasn’t particularly invested in any characters.

A Real Pain was fun to watch. Both leads good. But instantly forgettable for me.

Saul probably came too soon for me as I had just finished BB, which I loved. Just was not interested in any more of Saul.

Yeah, that’s totally fair. That I do relate to. It doesn’t measure up to BB at all for me, though I see what people mean when they say BCS is the more mature show.

What does that even mean? Mature?

Well, emotionally mature. It’s far less plot-driven, shows a very broad evolution of human character, etc. It’s all-encompassing in ways that BB isn’t, tackles a longer time span, etc. But that doesn’t make it better for me.

I may as well go and find my ex’s emails on the topic; I lack sufficient expertise, heh.

I don't think so; both shows are on the same level of maturity for me, but one was noticeably less gripping for me, and that was Saul. I mean, it's a very good show, I just don't think it was ever going to be on the same level as its parent show, if because of nothing else but diminishing returns when it comes to that particular universe.

So I went and read through the emails with my ex (yes, we discussed film over email because my long-form thinking isn’t a fit for texting) about BCS. @Citizen Rules, see why I don’t delete them? A goldmine of context!

I thought at the time that BCS was ‘sad’ on a plotting, meta-level; somewhat to your point above, it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere and there was nothing for me to get invested in. It’s ironically how many people define ‘maturity’: loss of idealism, a kind of tempering of all ambition and hopes and plans, just kind of settling for life being very meh and things one wanted as a young person being laughably impossible. This is what how I would describe Saul’s vibe. It was just so ****ing bleak, like the best of Russian literature, heh. Not that I think a mature optimism is impossible, but it’s rare.

Things could only go from bad to worse in Saul, even if you tried to ignore the additional BB context. Of course, plenty of genre writers argue that things going from bad to worse is exactly what perfect plotting looks like, but I guess I just wasn’t feeling it.

Then again, I also have a bit of a personal grudge against the films/shows (often revered classics) that kind of descend into sheer negativity and hopelessness. That’s how BCS came off to me, though I know plenty of people felt differently.

The more times I’ve seen it, the more I’ve come to feel that BB’s ending isn’t at all depressing and that it all kind of ends on a good note in every possible sense. Maybe that’s my warped perception of reality. People usually don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m used to it.

I know this is morbid/ridiculous, but I saw this headline (yes, this is behind a paywall, but added a Yahoo link, and honestly it’s not about the article, just the headline) and my immediate thought was, ‘How odd that a plagiarism claim against a near-50-year-old movie is in a national…’

https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/kathy-bates-recalls-mothers-surprising-053957404.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...nd-girlfriend/

Odd story: for most of my life there's been this legend or rumor in my family (I believe on my father's side) that we were somehow related to the actor William Holden.

Today, while going through a drawer of my parents' keepsakes I found an envelope containing a bunch of antique holiday postcards.
These dated back to the early 1900's! Several of them were addressed to W.J. Holden and some to "William Holden" who was located in New York State. I thought I'd found the connection - perhaps this was William Holden's father or grandfather. (I couldn't really tell who the sender of the cards was outside of some of them being signed by "Grace".)

Well, this evening I looked up the actor and... he was born William Franklin Beedle, Jr. in Illinois. At age 3, his family moved to Pasadena.

So, what I'm guessing happened - someone in my family was aware of these postcards - obviously someone (perhaps one of my ancestors) had written to a relative, friend or associate named William Holden in New York. Someone else saw these more recently than the early 1900's (just as I did today) and thought, "Hey, that's the same name as that actor. Maybe we're related to William Holden." And maybe that's how the rumor began. Maybe these postcards are completely unrelated to my family, but someone kept them just because they are so old? Unfortunately, there's no one left alive to ask who might have known.

I'm declaring this rumor unofficially & temporarily debunked.