Pop culture round-up!
For ten months or so I belonged to a crew on a container ship flying a flag of convenience. My passport wouldn't allow me ashore in most ports. The borderless, visa-free ocean was my home.
The American catastrophe had meanwhile entered a new phase that drained the world of any cruel pleasure it had taken in our downfall. Now the overwhelming sentiment was pity. I followed the news with averted eyes.
Much like Ken Kalfus' A Disorder Peculiar to the Country was about 9/11 but also about a couple going through a divorce, this is about Americans forced into migration due to *waves hand around* eventually escalating into full-blown civil war and... something else. I'm not sure what the something else was, though. Kalfus keeps everything frustratingly vague, and I'm sure that's on purpose, but it just made me wish someone else had taken the idea and written a more nuts-and-bolts story about it. Like the idea that someone from a country that has been so hostile to migrants and used them as political punching bags for almost its entire existence--while also claiming exceptionalism because look at how many people want to immigrate here!--being forced into migration could make for a really interesting story, but this ain't it.
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After this I decided to re-read one of my favorite non-fiction books, Elyssa East's Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. It's part true crime; part art history; and part the history of Gloucester, MA. It's also where I first encountered the poem quoted in the header of my LJ, lines from Marsden Hartley's "The Return of the Native". (Hartley was also a painter, and his paintings of Dogtown are how East discovered it. She's very much a character within the story and not just an omniscient 3rd person narrator.)
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I watched the first two episodes of Justified: City Primeval. It's pretty bonkers (in a good way) and the character Boyd Holbrook plays is basically the fucking Joker. The original Justified feels very much like an Obama-era product when you watch it now, and in City Primeval the world has moved on but Raylan really hasn't, giving it an interesting fish-out-of-water feel. I appreciate they decided to do something different with the IP; no one needs a mediocre rehash of the story we all loved a decade ago.
Also damn, Timothy Olyphant is busy. He's also in Full Circle on HBO, a Steven Soderbergh limited series that's in the vein of his other mystery/thriller series Mosaic and No Sudden Move. It's got a really good cast, including Claire Danes (and her timeless sharp bob), Dennis Quaid, and CCH Pounder. CCH Pounder! Where the fuck has she been? I think she was on some Boomer show that I didn't watch, like one of the NCISs. I mean good for her, it was a reliable paycheck.
At one point a character in City Primeval sees Raylan in a bar and tells her friend "Do you watch Yellowstone? I'd fuck the shit out of Kevin Costner." and I cracked up because it felt like a direct nod to the "Timothy Olyphant: The best looking white dude on television" meme. Like Raylan Givens isn't supposed to be some ordinary-looking guy but because it's television he's played by Timothy Olyphant.