(no subject)

The Orange Countification of the Vancouver area continues apace. Very mixed feelings about it. At least it's improving the cuisine, one of the only two big problems when I lived here pre-Olympics. Hasn't been at all good for traffic, the other.

If you don't even try to think about what's contingent on it overseas, or in our carbonated future, prosperity plus a few dabs of socialism is kind of a neat combo to witness, even. Hope the latter won't be endangered. Everyone becoming a (technical, real estate) millionaire does tend to change opinions about taxes fast. But maybe enough people understand they're living on a bubble - reminiscent of the literal, geological one - to accept that a flush government may be needed to save all asses soon.

Neat thing about this area has always been the visibility of all the mighty processes at work, human included. This last transformative wave is as fascinating as any, I guess. But about as demonstrative of intention or reasoned control as most of the others.

(no subject)

So not just Twin Peaks but the X-Files is returning, Mr. Show basically is, and Seinfeld did in every way that matters with that great Curb season. Cue mean joke about only The Simpsons not being resurrected, of the great '90s shows.

Revivals are cute and all, but I'm not very enthusiastic about any of these upcoming ones. (Well, Twin Peaks, but just to see anything at all by Lynch.) I'm afraid Futurama taught and retaught me the dangers of zombie tv shows enough for the lesson to finally sink in. (Thus RIP Hannibal and Community. You were (mostly) motherfucking sublime.)

Though Better Call Saul is a spinoff and The Leftovers a sort of annotation, and both are fine. I guess the trick with sequels is to be doing some other distinct thing just close enough to take or leave what fits from the old? Shows that keep going long enough end up doing that anyway. Adventure Time's initial version is cute, but I assume not terribly far past the Sponge Bob level - not that I know anything about the Sponge Bob level, but no one could have predicted anything as amazing as what it became, especially recently. I'm just assuming they've peaked. I'd be a bit scared if they haven't.

Not even Shakespeare's franchises were always worth it, I guess. Maybe instead of thinking of shows as being along the lines of novels or movies we should compare them to authors' collected stories or poems, where we're used to the catalogue starting little more than amusingly (Chekhov) or derivatively (Shelley), and, when premature death is eluded, ending in self-repetition (Borges and Hawthorne, mostly), comparative triviality (Whitman, Dickinson), notes-to-self oddity (Blake) or total surrender to sucking in style and/or substance (Wordsworth). But people are supposed to be like that. Maybe we don't know quite what to suppose yet, here. Past that we're supposed to be disappointed most of the time.