To the Ends of the Earth

It often happens that whatever video I choose to watch shares some thematic similarities with whatever book lies at that moment on my bedtable. This is likely less a matter either of conscious decision or of spooky synchronicity than of a consistency in my taste both for books and movies. As that may be, my most recent read and watch were both post-apocalyptic. 

The book was Finally Some Good News by an author who prefers to go by the pen name Delicious Tacos. Like many authors nowadays (David Wong, Andy Weir, Hugh Howey, et al.), he bypassed the gatekeepers of traditional publishers by first self-publishing online and building a substantial following there. Print publishers will take notice of authors who already are popular. The old path to print always has been rocky for a new writer. The handful of traditional major publishing houses in NYC, for example, receive an average of 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts per month; the chances of yours being one of the few hundred per year they opt to publish are, to put it gently, not good. At least now there is another way to attract houses’ attention – or to ignore them altogether. 

Finally Some Good News is an un-PC but darkly funny tale of men and women caught up in the nightmare frustration of everyday modern life. They struggle to pay rent and bills, face rejection on OKCupid, deal with frenemies and strangers who are either actively or callously hostile, and work at disagreeable jobs that are hard to explain: “His company provided data driven solutions to optimize cross platform branded content.” When the nuclear bombs go off, a common reaction among the survivors is relief: “We were slaves. And now we’re not.” 

The behavior of many survivors (not so much the two protagonists, though they are hardly pure) is utterly beastly and they seem to enjoy it. This echoes Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents in which he says that the price of civilization is unhappiness because it requires repressing much of basic human nature. Freud thought the trade-off was worth it, of course. The characters in this novel aren’t convinced. 

Thumbs cautiously up. 

As for the video, in the past months of covid constraints I’ve been sampling scifi TV series that only lasted one or two seasons. There are quite a few that I missed when they first aired. (So, apparently, did most other viewers.) Currently I’m halfway through the DVD set of Dark Angel, which first aired in 2000 and lasted two seasons. 

Dark Angel is set 20 years ahead in a post-apocalyptic “future” (which is to say about now) in a Seattle with a trashed downtown and homeless on the street. (I won’t make the obvious remark – it’s too easy.) Every other American city is much the same. They haven’t been nuked in the usual sense. Instead, high altitude nuclear airbursts generated electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that obliterated communications and computer records, thereby crashing banks, the economy, government records, and social order. A depression is in progress that makes the 1930s look like the Good Old Days. Government has become (more) authoritarian and corrupt. Max (Jessica Alba) is a genetically enhanced human with special abilities: as a child she escaped from a military experimental laboratory, the director of which is still looking for her. (Yes, this sounds a bit like the show’s contemporary The Pretender.) She teams up with a wealthy tech-savvy rebel to fight the good fight against the corrupt powers-that-be. 

This series has a sky high audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes but only a so-so rating from critics. I usually side with the audience on a split like that, but not this time. This has the credentials for a good show. It was created by David Cameron and stars Jessica Alba, for goodness sake. Yet the characters are one dimensional. They lack the rounded humanity that Joss Whedon, for example, brought to the characters in the contemporary show Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which villains are often sincerely charming and heroes badly flawed. Dark Angel’s characters lack such complexity. The dialogue is stilted and the plotting predictable. The post-apocalyptic setting is completely unnecessary. The show would work as well without it. That’s not to say Dark Angel is a bad show. It isn’t. Alba does fine in her part within the limits of the scripts and there is enough action to hold one’s attention through each episode. The series doesn’t inspire binge-watching however – at least not by me. 

Thumbs sideways. 

So why all the apocalypses in literature and the arts from ancient times to the present? The word means revelations in Greek, so what is revealed by them? Something about ourselves presumably. Some of the fascination with them may be akin a taste for horror stories in which the deaths of characters in some way help us value our own lives more. Yet, I also think Delicious Tacos is onto something with his airy misanthropy. Oh, I don’t think relief would be anyone’s actual response to the real thing, but there is a widespread sense that the civilization we have built has gone terribly wrong somehow. Thinking about its destruction has a cathartic aspect. The thought is so common that Car and Driver offered a list of cars best suited for surviving the apocalypse. On some level the notion of re-starting civilization from scratch is appealing – at least until we give serious thought to what that would entail. There is also a personal question that interests us. How would we act in the circumstances? If the social order is gone, would we opt to be beasts or would we be something else? Perhaps we shouldn’t be too sure of the answer until faced with event, which one hopes means never.

Shawn Mullins – Pre-Apocalyptic Blues

Breakfast Epiphanies

The covid lockdown varies in intensity from one state to another in the US, but New Jersey’s regimen has been and remains among the most restrictive. [Aside: I initially mistyped covid as corvid, which brought to mind enjoyably Hitchcock-ian images.] Restaurants and pubs have been shut for months. A few eateries with the space set up outdoor tables (often in the parking lot), but even at the height of summer NJ weather is unreliable. This September many mornings are about  50F (10 degrees C), which is great for outdoor activities but a bit brisk for a sit-down. I’ve passed on the experience. At long last indoor dining is returning, albeit only at a maximum 25% capacity. Many smaller eateries remain shuttered, but enough have opened their doors for me to breathe a sigh of relief – a masked sigh, of course. You see, I am a lousy cook. Oh, I can rise to the occasion on special dates such as Thanksgiving, but on a daily basis I simply don’t have the patience to sauté onions, mix sauces, chop peppers and all the other feats of kitchen chemistry that make a good meal instead of something plucked out of the microwave with the flavor and texture of a boiled sandal.

This is why, prior to 2020, it was my habit to go out for a meal most days at some reasonably priced establishment. (See my 2018 post Dinner and a Show: https://richardbellush.blogspot.com/2018/09/dinner-and-show.html.) Fortunately, NJ (“the diner capital of the world”) has a lot of them. Or did. How many have been put out of business permanently remains to be seen. Some restaurants throughout the spring and summer have had curbside pickup of take-out orders, and I was grateful for those. Pick-up of brisket and ribs from the nearby Minuteman Smokehouse rescued me from more than a few boiled sandals. Still, eating out of a bag, while better than eating out of a microwave, lacks a certain something – including just being out in the world and bantering with a wait staff who know your name. Online chatter is no substitute for (suitably distant) mask-to-mask interaction. On the contrary, virtual conversation is a recipe for misanthropy. 

So, last week I enjoyed my first “real” breakfast in months at one of my old haunts: country fried steak with eggs over easy, hash browns, and buttered rye toast. (And, yes, the server said, “Hi. Richard.”) The comfortably full feeling afterward was better and longer lasting than an opiate high – and without the nasty side effects. There is so much more to rediscover: corned beef hash, apple cinnamon pancakes with maple syrup and sausage, French toast, Taylor ham (an NJ thing), chili jalapeno omelets, and much more. Once I’ve revisited the breakfast menus there is the continent of lunch to re-explore.

In a harsh and problem-filled world in which each of us sits under a sword of Damocles, a tasty breakfast in a pleasant environment may seem a trivial matter – and it is. But if we don’t appreciate simple pleasures when we can get them, the depressing stuff will be all to life there is. Allowing that to happen no doubt accounts for the rise in alcohol sales during the pandemic. According to the trade magazine The Spirits Business, in August 2020 compared to August 2019 sales of all alcohol products in the US were up 18% with the largest rise in hard liquor: “Across the whisky category, American whiskey increased by 27.8% and Irish whiskey saw value sales rise 27.6%.” Better to enjoy blueberry waffles and a mug of coffee with endless refills.

Trout Fishing in America – Breakfast Blues

Reading Bones, Clubs, and Vices

Once upon a time I was wont to browse the shelves of physical book stores because… well… it was the most effective way to browse. To be sure, I did buy from mail order catalogues, too, but at least 80% of my purchases were from brick and mortar stores. Nowadays, of course, nearly all my browsing is online – most commonly ER Hamilton and Amazon. There is a difference in outcome. Due to limited time, I would tend to concentrate on only a few sections (sometimes just one) of an actual bookstore per visit (e.g. scifi, history, new releases, or what-have-you), so I tended to walk away on each occasion with books in the same genre. Today, the contents of each “shopping cart” (especially from ER Hamilton) are hodgepodge. There is something to be said for each shopping method, but below are three from one such hodgepodge.

Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton 

Thanks to a backlog of manuscripts on his hard drive, the prolific author Michael Crichton continues to publish books more than a decade after his death. Though the tone and prose style are very much vintage Crichton, the 2017 offering Dragon Teeth differs from his usual genres. It is a historical novel set in the old West in 1876. The backdrop is the very real rivalry between dinosaur bone hunting Professors Marsh and Cope. “Rivalry” scarcely describes it, since it extended to shots fired.

On a bet, effete Yale student William Johnson, from a wealthy Philadelphia family, joins Marsh’s expedition to dig for fossils out West. The paranoid Marsh suspects him of being a spy for his rival Cope and abandons him in Cheyenne. He joins Cope’s expedition in turn but finds himself separated again in the midst of the Sioux Wars. Harrowing experiences follow in the badlands and in Deadwood including with the Earp brothers.

This is a solid adventure tale informed by Crichton’s usual depth of research. It offers a window into 1876 with details about everything from wet plate photography to the demography of Deadwood.

**** ****

CBGB & OMFUG – with text by Hilly Kristal and David Byrne

I wasn’t sure what to expect of this, but it was discounted to a few bucks so there didn’t seem to be much potential downside. It turned out to be more photo album than text, but that is fine given the topic. It covers the whole existence of Hilly Kristal’s dive club CBGB from 1973 to 2006, but of course the highlights are from the 1970s when the Ramones, Patti Smith, the Cramps, AC/DC, Talking Heads, the Police, the Runaways, Lydia Lunch, Blondie, and many many other later-famous bands played there. The letters stand for Country, Blue Grass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers, but from the outset proto-punk and punk bands dominated the stage. This caught Kristal by surprise, but he was OK with it.  

Regrettably, I didn’t see any of those bands until after they were famous and had expensive tickets. I did hang out in NYC music clubs in the 1970s, but usually in the Village and Midtown. CBGB was in the Bowery which at the time was run-down and isolated from the major nightlife areas. I was clueless that the ‘70s were happening there. By the time I was fully aware of the club’s importance, it wasn’t so important anymore.

Missed opportunities of this type are not unusual. My footfalls typically alight a few steps behind the times. In the 60s this wasn’t as noticeable since I had a hip older sister who introduced sounds and trends into the house when they were avant-garde rather than last year’s news. By this point in the 70s, however, she was living in Hollywood, so I lacked proper direction. At least this photo album shows what was missed.

The 2013 movie CBGB, btw, didn’t get a lot of love. The main complaint by viewers seems to have been the use of recordings from real bands to which the actors portraying the youthful musicians lip-synch – as opposed to playing live covers. If one makes allowances, however, for the budget and production constraints that led to this decision, the film isn’t bad. (Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW0Dqims9c)

**** ****

The Good Vices: From Beer to Sex, the Surprising Truth about What’s Actually Good for You by Dr, Harry Ofgang and Erik Ofgang 

Despite the subtitle, none of this is very surprising to those who have followed news about health research in the past couple of decades. However, there is still a lot of resistance to the message in some circles, so the book has some value. Since the Wellness movement of more than a century ago many health enthusiasts have seemed to argue that any satisfying pleasure must be bad for you. Those arguments haven’t gone away entirely. Some of them are even right: it’s hard to find anything redeeming about tobacco, for instance. Yet, a great many more have been undermined by recent studies on everything from egg yolks to alcohol to animal fat. The key, of course, is moderation.

Regardless, the authors remind us, nothing saves us from the reaper in the end. They mention the old Rodney Dangerfield joke about how his doctor told him that if he ate right, exercised, and got plenty of fresh air, he’d get old, sick, and die. So, personal happiness always should count in the equation.

Martha Tilton – A Little Jive Is Good For You (1941)

It's a Mystery

This covidly inspired summer of solitude has much left time for recreational reading. Among the books that spent time on my bedstand was the last of the six (so far) Benny Griessel mysteries by South African author Deon Meyer. The Last Hunt is a suspenseful and politically edgy novel. Recovering alcoholic Griessel and his partner Vaughn Cupido of the Hawks detective unit of the Cape Town police investigate the murder of a private security guard who had been thrown from a train. The trail leads them to an assassination plot extending to Bordeaux, France, against “captured” (corrupt) politicians who, in the view of the plotters, have ruined their dreams for a bright and just post-apartheid South Africa. Between corrupt officials and plotters’ allies within the government, the case could prove career-destroying or even deadly to Griessel and Cupido.

Rovos Rail, operator of the train that was the site of the murder, is a real rail service. It offers various routes through scenic countryside in southern Africa. It is touted as the most luxurious passenger train in the world. (Prices vary depending on route and options, but between $6000 and $8000 is normal.) I had never heard of it before picking up The Last Hunt but while I was halfway through the book the Smithsonian Channel, in an instance of synchronicity, happened to run an hour-long documentary on Rovos: one their Mighty Trains episodes. I chanced upon it while channel surfing one evening. It helped me visualize the setting – and tempted me to book a ride. (Maybe someday.)

Deon Meyer has become my favorite living mystery writer, and second only to Raymond Chandler if I remove the “living” limitation. He draws his individual characters well, each with strengths, weaknesses and quirks. The social setting in which they live adds a special layer to their stories. Meyer is an insightful observer of his own country, which has a uniquely complex history and demography. Yet other Western readers – Americans in particular – will find much of relevance as tensions in their own countries regarding identity politics intensify. Wherever the USA is going in these matters, South Africa is already there.

Each entry in the Griessel series works fine as a standalone novel, but the characters do develop over time. So if the reader wishes to read them in order, they are as follows:

1. Devil's Peak (2007)

2. Thirteen Hours (2010)

3. Seven Days (2012)

4. Cobra (2014)

5. Icarus (2015)

6. The Last Hunt (2019)

There is also a novella (or perhaps an extended short story) The Woman in the Blue Cloak (2018) for those who wish to be comprehensive. I recommend trying at least one, and suspect it will be its own recommendation for the others.

Rovos Rail

 

Pickup Lines

I don’t typically get sentimental about cars and trucks. OK, that’s not entirely true. I do associate memories of my past vehicles with memories of other things, events, and people who were in my life at the time, so there is a nostalgia factor at work. Several years ago when I bought a Chevy Cruze (still in my garage today) I even dedicated a blog post to 10 of those vehicles. (See The Road Worrier.) But I don’t get attached to them in a way that makes it hard to sell them when the time comes, nor do I miss them when they are gone. I just remember them fondly – or in a couple of cases unfondly. Yet there is more than a little twinge about this one.

Even so, it’s not the vehicle itself causing the twinge. The 1998 GMC 2500 Sierra was purchased new by my father. He died in 2000. Even though I’ve owned it 10 times longer than he did, it still feels to me very much like my dad’s truck. So, selling it is severing a connection to an earlier phase of life. Nonetheless, during the course of its most recent visit for some basic service, a trusted mechanic informed me that it is time to let this one go. Much like myself (he didn’t make the comparison) it is aging more on the inside than on outside. Any vehicle can be kept running indefinitely, of course, if you are willing to foot the expense of constant repairs (and/or are a good mechanic yourself), but there comes a point when one has to ask why. That time has arrived. It has arrived at the irksomely appropriate changing of the seasons. Though it is still technically summer, there are yellowing leaves in the trees. At this latitude, regarding the summer as ending on August 31 is not entirely wrongheaded – orbital positions notwithstanding.

I won’t miss the GMC per se, but I sorely will miss the cash expended to replace it – and I do wish to replace it. I don’t need a pickup truck for daily use anymore, but I do need one occasionally. (Given how long I keep trucks, it likely will be my last.) Have you looked at the prices of new trucks lately? They are simply ridiculous. (I considered used, but then I might as well keep the GMC.) Further, the trucks in local dealers’ lots are all decked out with bells and whistles that add $10,000 or $20,000 to the price. I seek neither bells nor whistles. I’m not a high schooler trying to impress his date to the prom. Nor do I need anything heavy duty. A baseline model that every now and then can carry lumber, roof shingles, wheelbarrows, or what-have-you is just fine. These start in the mid $20,000s according to the manufacturers, though not a single dealer in three counties (I live near the border of two and not far from a third) has anything listed in current inventory close to that number. Most listed models are in the $40,000s. I suspect the tendency of many buyers to look at monthly cost rather than the actual price accounts for much of the popularity of these more upscale vehicles. This is not a new phenomenon. A century ago Will Rogers offered this cure for traffic jams: “Don’t let vehicles on the road until they’re paid for.” Plus ça change…

I might end up having to order a baseline model since no one seems to stock them. At the moment I’m leaning toward either Chevy Colorado or Nissan Frontier. I hesitate to mention any of this before actually buying a new vehicle. I have no doubt that as soon as this blog is posted the AIs that scan blogsites and social media posts will incessantly inundate me with ads for trucks – particularly Chevrolets and Nissans. I’ll let the “Labor Day Sales Event” promotions pass. On the off chance there is something appealing in a dealer’s lot (if some other sale fell through or something), it’s best if the banks and insurance companies are open so I simply can drive it home instead of stretching out the process, so maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. If the experience is discouraging enough, I might end up forgetting the whole thing and stretching the old GMC’s life with maintenance tweaks after all. The new version of the same model Sierra is priced over $70,000 (!), which in inflation-adjusted terms is a huge increase over what my dad paid in 1998. (I had no idea I was driving such a swanky vehicle.) Whichever way it goes, it will not be for sentimental reasons.

Grateful Dead – Truckin'