Finished The Fall!

The Fall is one of those TV shows that has ended up in countless watchlists on the various streaming services it has done time in which I had always meant to dive into but just never did probably because despite the sheer degree of true crime stuff I consume I realized it was likely going to be a pretty unrelentingly dark show by its very nature.

However, I'm glad that I finally did. Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dorman both give absolute powerhouse performances and I love every second on screen and fleeting few they get together is dangerous magic. The writing could get a bit over-the-top and too cute and action movie or soap opera for its own good, but its made up by a lot of great character development and fascinating procedural sections. Every episode is beautifully shot and I enjoy the many good looks we get at different parts of the Belfast area, and let me tell you those accents are to die for.

Legacy Motor Club and Jimmie Johnson

Jimmie Johnson was never really a driver I liked. First, he started out as a protege handpicked by Jeff Gordon whom I loathed to drive a car Gordon co-owned with my least favorite team in Hendrick Motorsports. He also had such a polished, inoffensively bland personality that it was just hard to ever really get into him even if I can appreciate him more in retirement. However, I am excited that he is now officially the majority owner of Legacy Motor Club as announced today and getting a new big-monied minority owner in an investment firm.

No offense to Maury Gallagher but this is the man who founded and ran Allegiant Airlines, one of the most cut rate, poor quality budget airlines in existence in this country, it isn't surprising that Maury wasn't going to do whatever it took to get Legacy MC into fighting shape, his focus was purely on minimizing expenses and maximizing profits. I have great hope that Jimmie Johnson now being in control of the day to day operations of that team with presumably a bigger budget to work with now will result in better equipment, better personnel, better driver support, and a real effort to improve. Jimmie learned under Rick Hendrick, who I may not like but he is the most successful Cup team owner for a reason, and he's always been a perfectionist in his career.

They've already got some good sponsorship partners and one really talented driver in Erik Jones to build around, and a really promising young talent in Corey Heim peeking around the corner if John Hunter Nemechek doesn't step up this year, so their foundation is solid.

Folk and Posi Punk: Aged Like Wine

A lot of bands made music in reaction to Bush in the 2000s that hasn't particularly aged great for one reason or another, being too specific about the subject or alternately being too generalized and neoliberal to have great impact among the increasingly polarized politics of this modern day. Call this the Green Day Syndrome

However, I will say that the bands who have aged pretty well from the 2000s are explicitly far-left folk-punk bands like Against Me and Defiance Ohio as well as "posipunk" bands Latterman and the related projects that followed which were explicitly feminist, pro-lgbtqia+ etc. Anybody riding the line of anarchism in the Bush era were wildly ahead of their time when at least on social media their numbers have greatly increased over time, and I love their music more than ever these days even if I myself am not an anarchist.

Nosferatu (2024) - A Rare Remake I Really Enjoyed

I have a pretty rabid dislike of remakes, reboots, and "legacy sequels" and anybody who starts learning about my taste in film quickly picks this up about me. However, I've never been done wrong by a Robert Eggers film yet, so when my best friends suggested we rent the recent Nosferatu for movie night on Friday I was definitely on board even as a big fan of the silent original who knew it'd be hard to live up to.

The film doesn't quite reach the heights of the original nor some of my favorite Dracula/Nosferatu films, however it quite succeeds in most categories as a really, really good film. The direction and cinematography was stark and incredibly spooky and atmospheric, the set design and in particular sound design is pitch perfect, most of the performances other than Lily Rose Depp who is a tad wooden are really great, Dafoe in particular is fantastic every second he's on screen. The film suffers a tad for lack of on screen action for much of its runtime, but it looks so nice and builds such a pleasantly suffocating experience that I rarely ever found myself bored even when they are just debating the veracity of The Occult. They probably could have made Orlock himself look more monstrous than he does, if anybody can find him remotely sexy (I've seen people who are into it) you are making a Dracula movie and not a Nosferatu, but the character design grew on me especially as they mostly keep him in shadow and indistinct.

Once again Eggers does not do me wrong and I will definitely end up rewatching this movie sometime in the future, happy to experience it with friends rather than by myself.

The Convenience Store and the Thrift Shop

There are two completely fictional recurring locations in my nightmares that sometimes merge. One is a convenience store that shares its grounds with a multimedia type store (books, DVDs, music etc) while the other is a thrift type shop that usually attracts a very rough crowd of customers. Sometimes, these two concepts combine into one, or sometimes both will appear independently within the same dream.

I honestly don't know the origin as there is no real world analogue known to me for either, I think the big anxiety they latch onto is that of financial insecurity as I am often in these shops without the ability to pay for things that I really want, but in reality I love thrift shops and convenience stores, they are some of my favorite places where I buy the stuff most important or enjoyable to me.

Tom Kristensen

Big fan of NBC Sports solving a problem, the fact that both of their star color commentators in Townsend Bell and James Hinchcliffe were on track at the same time, by bringing in the legendary Tom Kristensen to pull about an hour in the booth. Fascinating hearing the insight of a king of the artform and of course he's an old friend to IMSA broadcasts with him often doing an annual Zoom interview during the 12 Hours of Sebring where he was wildly successful.

Tom never managed to get a win at Daytona, but with 9 wins at Le Mans it is safe to say dude knows what he's talking about when it comes to longform endurance racing and it was something a little bit different than the norm which is always welcome even if it was mostly them being cheap not wanting to hire another full color commentator for the race.

Soap Operas and Me

When I was a kid we first got digital cable or satellite around 2000ish, and one of my favorite things to watch in those first years was all the reruns of old soap operas on SoapNet. I didn't understand what was going on like half the time, but I really enjoyed the drama nonetheless. So I guess I shouldn't be shocked that suddenly in my 30s as I am the weakest I've ever been to pure nostalgia in my life that I've suddenly developed an interest in soap operas again.

I've been watching Dark Shadows and looking for high enough quality versions of the Passions series that don't hurt my eyes as I loved the work by its creator as a kid and watching Dallas and deciding that next week there are a 1-3 daily soaps that I plan to start watching starting on Monday through a couple streaming services I have access to. When I do, I'm going to start doing a post about them once a week, minireviews I guess or documenting my path trying to catch up completely blind to what's happening initially anyway.

What David Lynch Meant To Me

When I was a kid, my first introduction of any kind to David Lynch was the Twin Peaks segment on one of the I Love the 90s series that VH1 did during the early-to-mid 2000s. The handful of clips they showed left me fascinated for years, but with a lack of syndication at the time and streaming still being years away it wouldn't be until the very late 2000s/early 10s when I would download the entire series and binge the entire thing in like a 48 hour period on my computer.

The mix of mystery, humor, surrealism and soap opera spoke to me in a way that nothing else ever really had and so little else to that degree has, I could barely make myself sleep while watching it. Of course quickly after that came Twin Peaks: FWWM, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr, Lost Highway, The Return years later etc. As somebody who has a schizoid disorder that at that point in my life I was still very much struggling to keep a hold of, these films seemed like the answer to a question I still don't quite know, but kept and still keep searching for. Suddenly my entire concept of cinema changed, films I had loved for years quickly seemed really lame as I dug deeper for things that emotionally resonated with me more than the entry level indie films that had made up so much of my tastes in my teens and even early 20s.

As I grew up, my love for David Lynch and all his work only deepened. He drastically had a great effect on my taste in music as somebody who these days listens to more dreampop than anything else, my taste in film and TV it almost goes without saying as I explored his favorites and influences, my taste in artwork, my greater acceptance of other people, my use of meditation to manage my mental health symptoms day to day, my life of constant coffee consumption and so much more. He is the the personal embodiment of art for the sake of art in any form. My life will be so, so much less rich without him even if his productivity as a filmmaker had slowed considerably in his final couple decades.

I don't really have any original tribute that people are lot more talented than me haven't already written, my story is the story of so many people living on the fringes of society who found Lynch when they most needed him. I loved him and will continue to for the rest of my life.