Memories, Savory and Not - Friday video distractions, with Mike Norton

 

     Another week in covid country, which has had more strikes close to home recently that it's otherwise had at any other point in the past year. Thanks to different potential exposures, in the past two weeks we've had half of the household quarantining from the other, and then me having to further isolate myself because my junior tech in the lab tested positive following an exposure at home. Adding to this, a friend and co-worker of over 20 years recently landed a new job at another company. This drove home all the casual companionship this past year has stolen from us. In a final twist to the week, any notions of slipping in for an appropriately distanced goodbye get-together on Friday (I'm hopeful that my second, confirming negative result, will be coming through sometime early in the day) were dashed when the nearly departed pal tested positive mid-week, and so is isolating. In a congratulations and farewell note I left him a couple days earlier - venturing in after hours to leave it on his desk - I noted his departure as the final nail in the coffin of "normal", because those (often long) workweek lunches and accompanying conversations ain't coming back. Whether it's four months, eight, a year or whenever when we're back to taking lunches together, eating at the same table, we'll no longer be looking to see if he's in that day and able to join us.
     So, an undercurrent of life's ephemera - those wholly underappreciated in their time elements - have been increasingly on my mind this week. Not early enough for me to plumb them properly as a theme, but definitely shading my thoughts.

     Coming to Amazon Prime April 9th is the first season of Them. Described as a horror anthology series, if I'm reading between the lines correctly the tacit promise seems to be that future seasons will deal with different times and places, much as American Horror Story does. To that end, this first season is subtitled Covenant. Let's see if this survives to see other seasons first.
     Set in the 1950s, it follows the Emery family rides the patriarch's professional success to move from the Jim Crow South to the white suburbia of Compton in Southern Los Angeles. (That last bit of elaboration is for yokels like myself who've never been farther West than Indiana.) There the shining promise is soon eclipsed by general, increasingly aggressive racism both at home and in the workplace, and a supernatural force with much the same intent in both places.

     My initial skepticism is based on the vague sense that the blended theme (An African American family facing both supernatural and all too human racist forces) is riding the coattails of HBO's Lovecraft Country and the big screen work of Jordan Peele. In the latter case, I couldn't have been the only one who saw the poster and the title and immediately wondered if it's a sequel to Peel's Us. Hey, I can't tell how much of it is just my own, white provincialism. Here are posters for each:

     None of this, I remind myself, is a basis for dismissal, as even at worst, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and anything successful immediately launches a rush to find "the next <fill in the blank>". Further, I don't have anywhere near enough information to go on the origins of this project. The current entertainment landscape is giving an often sincere effort to find new voices, so it shouldn't be a great surprise that generations of racial issues and personal horrors in that vein would spawn similar ideas. It's extremely likely that I'm just not used to being aware of these long-excluded voices and visions, and am being as completely unfair and dismissive of them as anyone who looks at the ever-increasing flood of superhero and costumed vigilante fare and seeing it all as the same thing.
     Either way, I only know as much as I've shown above about this project. Sometime a week or so from now, once it arrives, I'll know more and better and will give some of my own impressions.

     My remaining reservations about this particular stripe of mixed genre entertainment includes the concern that the supernatural horror bids to distract from the all-too-earthly and human variety. Worse, the former could provide some cover and excuse to the latter. As Flip Wilson used to say, "The Devil made me do it!" though here without the levity. Still, hey, if that sort of mythology allows a relatively dignified path from bad behavior to good, then it has some merit. The supernatural element helps get a foot in the door for some, allowing the rest of the message at least a chance at making a pitch. In practical terms, we're ultimately concerned more with the behavior than the thought behind it.

     The rest of my concerns are that I don't enjoy cruelty of any stripe. There are many things I haven't revisited in years because of that. It's the main reason I haven't rewatched Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in so many years; the sustained psychological abuse.
     So, the very real situations I'm expecting to see the members of the Emery family face from neighbors and co-workers will be difficult for me to watch. Dealing with supernatural threats, however terrifying, operates at a different level. We expect shadowy monsters to be monstrous. Evil people, that cuts through differently, at least for me. I can't stomach it. Real or fiction, it sticks with me.
     Not long after my family moved to Levittown, PA in 1966, the house next to us became a focus for many in the neighborhood. A progressive organization used a dummy buyer to buy the house and allow a black family, in the parlance of the era, to move in.
     I was only 5 when we moved to Levittown, and was largely oblivious to so very much. I played a little with Barney, their son who was approximately my age, but for whatever reason it's mostly a blur. I remember one time there were some other kids bothering us for some reason - most of the memory's audial rather than visual. That was the summer when a misadventure climbing a chain link fence resulted in my left forearm snapping - either the radius or ulna - I mainly remember my horror at landing on the other side of the fence with my hand facing the wrong way, and running home, probably screaming. (The things I put my poor mother through...) That comes to mind because I spent much of that summer with a cast on, and when those faceless, nameless kids were bothering us I remember Barney calling out for me to hit one of them with my "cee-ment arm." That particular event didn't go anywhere, as I recall, just another of those brief dramas of childhood.
     Just an odd snippet of memory. I don't think that overall I was much of a friend to Barney, though, likely folding to unrecognized biases by another friend to find some urgency in going farther away to play. In the decades since I'd come to learn that my main friend's father had long been a member of the John Birch Society, and that his views included fears of an eventual race war -- definitely a rising topic there in the mid-sixties. What was casually poured in my friend's ear at home, I'll probably never know.
     That Barney was probably about a year younger than us - a significant gulf when one's still in mid-single digits - made it easier to not stick around with him often. A different era and area, the degree to which we were set free for completely unsupervised roaming while barely of school age back then would horrify modern patents, I've no doubt. From an older vantage point, I can only imagine the constant apprehension Barney's parents must have had, and how desperately unsafe it would have been to allow Barney to get out of line of sight. That I ultimately, unmindfully abandoned a little kid in so toxic a neighborhood, where he had no other even nominal friend, leaving him to the isolation of his yard, haunts me.
     The family moved away after they took a small trip only to come home and find that their house had been completely emptied - furniture and all - in an operation that must have involved many hands and a moving truck - and "no one" in the neighborhood "saw" anything.
     That's a hell of a murky memory.
     Shifting view...
     Newly arrived on Netflix, but as yet almost entirely unsampled by me, is a supernatural adventure turn rooted in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes: The Irregulars.  Specifically, it's centered on a titular group of street urchins, the Baker Street Irregulars - which in this version, I'm told, are being  coordinated by Holmes' companion and chronicler, Dr. Watson. They're directed toward mysteries with more supernatural elements than were ever a part of Holmes' ultimately hyper-rational casebook.

     A much more racially diverse cast than we would generally associate with this sort of period drama, that's perhaps best emphasized by actor Royce Piereson being cast as Doctor John Watson.
     Having marked it in my Netflix account, and expecting to watch it, I've been avoiding review info so as to keep the viewing as fresh as I can manage. Ideally I'll be able to add some personal impressions of it next week.
     With respect to memories of a much older and varied sort, we're already in the second day of Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscar. This year, running from April first through May 1st, it's an A-to-Z of Academy Award winners in various categories.

      Today they'll pass out of the A's around midday, with some the personal B highlights of the day being Being There (1980) and Ben Hur (1959).
     I haven't checked yet to see how much of this is to be reflected on the HBO Max TCM subdivision, but it's likely worth looking into, especially in those cases where someone might have HBO Max but not have a service that's offering them TCM by itself.
     Meanwhile, Syfy had an enjoyable first season wrap for their small town, extraterrestrial, sci-fi, murder mystery comedy series Resident Alien.  Starring Alan Tudyk, it turned out to be much more entertaining and less disappointingly formulaic than I'd feared.

    Disney+'s Falcon and the Winter Soldier hits its third episode this week, and so the series' mid-point, and has become something I look forward to. In my weirdly time-shifted schedule (I get to my professional responsibilities at all odd hours of the day, as when I run calculations and write reports doesn't include any requirements that those things be done between 9 and 5 -- so long as the people who need them get them.) I've done first watches of this fairly close to 3:01 am each week, just after the new episode goes live. So far each episode's been entertaining and information-packed enough to bear up under several rewatches as the universe-building continues.
     On the same weekly release schedule we now have the animated series Invincible on Amazon Prime, which I covered last week when they launched it with the first three episodes. Now we're down to one new one each Friday. Great voice talent, and nicely paced based on those three episodes.
     Oh, and Godzilla vs Kong (in theaters and on HBO Max) was a fun time and perfectly good for what it was intended to be. If you enjoyed Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Kong: Skull Island, especially the latter, then you'll enjoy this, which builds on those stories and within the same framework. Some nice nods to Edgar Rice Burroughs, too.
     I really should keep a list of the turkeys I've tried out, as it should be some minor duty to at least warn people. Instead, I've just shrugged off the disappointment and moved on, and most of the services I use tend to bury things from view that I've already looked at so I don't have a handy discard pile to glance at. I'll work on remembering to jot down reminders as I go.
     For now, though, I'm out of time! Stay well and entertained, and if this is a holiday weekend for you, try to enjoy that, too.  See you next week.  - Mike