Links and Over Things..
May. 1st, 2020 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Looking for the silver lining...one of the most astonishing things about the pandemic is how incredibly creative and innovative the artistic community has been in finding ways to work around it. It's charming and kind of hopeful and magical, if you think about it.
Here's a few links:
* Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration
* At Home Metropolitian Opera Gala
* Good Omens Lockdown
* Shimmy Care A Thon - basically how to do an egyptian shimmy work out on You tube by my pal the Belly Dancer.
* Soaps in Quarantine - an actress on General Hospital interviews various actors with a friend via Zoom
[Warning - they talk about Luke being a rapist on General Hospital with Anthony Geary, so you may want to skip. Although it is a fascinating discussion of how people acted on soaps in the 70s-90s and how this has changed over time, and why. And the process of creating soap operas.]
Flashback Fridays on General Hospital - where they show old episodes with various enhancements, like inserted flashbacks. Or to stretch the series out - they have inserted lots of flashbacks, because they stopped taping March 13, and have to keep pushing the soap out to stay alive as long as possible. They tape about 4-6 weeks ahead.
I mean people are doing everything they can think of. SNL is doing it from their homes. American Idol is doing it remotely from home. The Talk Shows are airing from home, as are NY1.
Meanwhile - people are holding watercolor/drawing courses, cooking courses, singing courses, writing courses, etc via Zoom. Bible Study and Book Groups are via Zoom.
Meetup groups is doing various things on Zoom. The Center for Fiction - is doing reading group and writing workshops...along with author chats.
2. This Land Is Your Land Story Behind America's Best Known Protest Song
3. The Urge to Share News of Our Lives is Neither New Nor Narcissistic
Talks about how online blogging is not unlike dairy writing back in the day.
4. The Unsung Black Musician Who Changed Country Music
DeFord Bailey walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage with a slight limp. Decked out in a bow tie, pocket square and polished shoes, he stood on a Coca-Cola crate to offset his 4-foot-11-inch stature. It was 1936. Bailey looked out at the audience, sitting on wooden benches in the Opry’s Dixie Tabernacle, just east of Nashville’s downtown core. He carried a harmonica, or “a harp,” as it was often referred to at the time, in his left hand. When he brought the harmonica to his mouth, he played a tune that sounded like the bold whistle of a locomotive train. For 15 minutes, he played a unique blend of country music and blues, bringing smiles to the eyes of the people in the dusty old tabernacle. Aside from his obvious talent and innovative harmonica technique, Bailey broke cultural barriers by becoming the first black country music star, and he was one of the most beloved Opry musicians of his time. He played harmonica for the Grand Ole Opry from 1925 to 1941, and toured the country with his white Opry peers during the heyday of Jim Crow. Yet it would be decades before Bailey’s pioneering contributions to country music were widely recognized — and the accomplished musician died penniless.
5. Undersung Crime Shows To Watch Under Quarantine -this is a list of crime thrillers/mysteries that you can watch. It's not my thing, but I know it's a lot of people on my correspondence list's thing.
Maybe it begins with a body in the woods, half-buried under bracken. Or with a glimmering shot of a city skyline. Or with a furtive deal, carried out at dusk, before an unknown character heads toward an untimely end. The clichés and conventions of crime dramas are their own strange reprieve because of what they tend to guarantee: After a trip into the murkiest corners of the human psyche, an arc will be completed, a villain (or several) will be captured, and the system will prevail.
Over the past two months at home, the shows I’ve craved have either been mindless sitcoms (the televisual equivalent of a bowl of ice cream) or a certain subgenre of crime procedural, many of them British, unfailingly bleak, and loaded with top-tier actors wearing baggy woolen knits and surly expressions. These kinds of shows, as Matthew Gilbert wrote in the Boston Globe a few years ago, aren’t simple TV diversions in the Law & Order mold as much as they’re “haunting reflections on tragedy.” They’re clear-eyed when it comes to the rot in the fabric of humanity, but they typically offer some consolation in the end. The detectives here are as fascinating as the people they profile, and occasionally almost as dark.
With this peculiar type of comfort in mind, here’s a list of some of the superlative crime-drama binges from the past decade that are available to stream. There are plenty of high-profile shows with similar attention to psychological depth (Better Call Saul, Unbelievable, American Crime, When They See Us, Fargo, Mindhunter, True Detective), but for the most part I’ve tried to stay away from obvious choices, to highlight some undersung options instead, grouped according to the things crime series do best. Not all are strict procedurals. Nor is this list exhaustive (The Bridge, Wallander, Borgen, and Trapped are among those deserving of their own inventory). Hopefully, though, you’ll find at least one or two new options to consider.
twisty and propulsive THRILLERS
DES WILLIE / BBC AMERICA
luther
It’s hard to imagine Luther functioning so well without Idris Elba, whose ability to radiate ennui and gravitas while stalking through London in a gray tweed jacket is at least half the show’s appeal. Everything else in Neil Cross’s five-season series, which debuted in 2010, is ludicrous, Victorian-novel excess: serial killers in LED masks, occult blood fetishists, psychopathic academics with oral fixations who murder their entire families, right down to the dog, for attention. It’s the latter, Alice Morgan—a depraved genius played with operatic lunacy by Ruth Wilson—who becomes the Hannibal to Luther’s Clarice Starling, popping up to aid him and occasionally opine on the intricacies of the criminal mind. For all its absurdities, this is a series where the momentum rarely falters.
Watch it on: Hulu
The fall
Before Killing Eve, the knottiest cat-and-mouse game on television was between the icily glamorous Detective Inspector Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) and the swaggering serial killer in sweatpants, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). In the first season of the show, Gibson flew to Belfast to help investigate the murders of several young women, all of them committed by Spector, whose criminality The Fall revealed from the beginning. The narrative engine driving the show isn’t whodunit; it’s whether Gibson will solve the case before Spector strikes again, and whether either can curtail their growing obsession with the other. Anderson has never been more compelling as Gibson, a woman whose brilliance is grounded partly in her gender, and her ability to comprehend the psychology of a misogynist murderer. In the third and final season, The Fall veers slightly off the rails, but the first two alone make it worth watching.
Watch it on: Netflix
informer
For all the consolation of shows that stick to a formula, the ones that upend generic conventions can be even more gratifying. The hero of Informer isn’t Detective Sergeant Gabe Waters (Paddy Considine), a London counterterrorism officer trying to crack a ring behind attacks in other European cities. It’s Raza (played brilliantly by Nabhaan Rizwan), a second-generation British Pakistani man whom Gabe—in an act of callous ethnic stereotyping—coerces into informing on potential terrorists in his community, and who’s by far the show’s most sympathetic character. (“I don’t know any terrorists, bruv!” Raza exclaims in protest. “Not yet, but you will,” Gabe replies.) Even the ways in which Informer tweaks the visuals of London-set shows feel fresh—there are far more panoramic portrayals of Shoreditch streets and East London council estates than sweeping vistas of the Thames. And as the show barrels towards its climactic finale, it never loses sight of which people are victimized in the official quest to keep everyone else safe.
Watch it on: Amazon
marcellA
You can also file Marcella under “engagingly batty serials,” and yet for all my complaints about the show—its trope-y “troubled-but-brilliant heroine” setup not least among them—once I started watching, I couldn’t stop. Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) plays the titular detective Marcella, who at the show’s outset has come back to active police work after a personal crisis and the seeming return of a serial killer she’d long hunted. The only problem is her ongoing blackouts, after which she tends to wake up muddy, covered in blood, and suspicious even of herself. Florence Pugh (Little Women) has a brief but committed arc in Season 1 as a sex worker who steals from her customers, and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael also pops up as a student criminologist. But Friel is the real draw, giving her character just enough grit and vulnerability to keep viewers on her side.
5. Why the Coronavirus is so confusing?
6. IT's Okay Not to be Okay
“Choose joy.”
“We’re in this together.”
“Good vibes only.”
In the midst of the pandemic, reminders to stay upbeat are everywhere. Mottos, memes and maxims along with Twitter hashtags and Instagram accounts are devoted to preaching optimism as an approach to manage the epic uncertainty.
But for some people, the relentless focus on the bright side can go too far.
Psychologists, who coined the term “toxic positivity,” point out that the mind-over-matter message isn’t always the right approach, especially when it ignores, suppresses or dismisses negative feelings caused by grief, trauma or mental illness.
“Telling someone who is hurting to be positive is well-intentioned, but it backfires,” said therapist Sherry Merriam. “It asks people to stuff their very real feelings. It makes the people it’s supposed to help feel even worse.”
A licensed professional clinical counselor, Merriam recently moved her practice from her Edina office to her Hopkins dining room, where she now sees her clients via computer screen. While the toll from the shutdown has been widespread, Merriam said the losses are particularly harsh for those already dealing with mood disorders and anxiety.
“It’s as if this turned up the gravity on the planet. For those people, whatever they were trying to do feels harder and heavier now,” she said. “Now we see the pressure to make something positive out of this situation — get that sourdough started, read those books. It’s wonderful for those who can use those things as coping mechanisms, but a lot of people can’t and they feel like a failure. That’s what makes it toxic.”
Long before the arrival of the coronavirus, JD Holmquist learned firsthand about toxic positivity.
In 2009 when he was a college student, he was drugged, beaten and sexually assaulted. As he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath, he grew weary of being told to cheer up and count his blessings.
“Right from the start, I got a lot of unsolicited advice from everyone I interacted with in positions of power — police, nurses, doctors,” said Holmquist, of Milaca, Minn. “The message was, ‘If you’re sad or depressed or experience a panic attack, cover it up.’ ”
Holmquist, who has an undergraduate degree in psychology and master’s degrees in public health and criminal psychology, is now a victim’s advocate. He regularly lobbies for more professional support for people who have survived trauma.
“It makes other people feel better when they tell you that things will look up. They can think, ‘I gave you wonderful advice on how to manage your mental health,’ ” he said. “For a long time I tried to force myself to believe that and I wound up ignoring very real conditions. Pushing away something that needs to be felt can make it fester. It’s OK not to be OK.”
7. Why Zoom is Terrible
Here's a few links:
* Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration
* At Home Metropolitian Opera Gala
* Good Omens Lockdown
* Shimmy Care A Thon - basically how to do an egyptian shimmy work out on You tube by my pal the Belly Dancer.
* Soaps in Quarantine - an actress on General Hospital interviews various actors with a friend via Zoom
[Warning - they talk about Luke being a rapist on General Hospital with Anthony Geary, so you may want to skip. Although it is a fascinating discussion of how people acted on soaps in the 70s-90s and how this has changed over time, and why. And the process of creating soap operas.]
Flashback Fridays on General Hospital - where they show old episodes with various enhancements, like inserted flashbacks. Or to stretch the series out - they have inserted lots of flashbacks, because they stopped taping March 13, and have to keep pushing the soap out to stay alive as long as possible. They tape about 4-6 weeks ahead.
I mean people are doing everything they can think of. SNL is doing it from their homes. American Idol is doing it remotely from home. The Talk Shows are airing from home, as are NY1.
Meanwhile - people are holding watercolor/drawing courses, cooking courses, singing courses, writing courses, etc via Zoom. Bible Study and Book Groups are via Zoom.
Meetup groups is doing various things on Zoom. The Center for Fiction - is doing reading group and writing workshops...along with author chats.
2. This Land Is Your Land Story Behind America's Best Known Protest Song
3. The Urge to Share News of Our Lives is Neither New Nor Narcissistic
Talks about how online blogging is not unlike dairy writing back in the day.
4. The Unsung Black Musician Who Changed Country Music
DeFord Bailey walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage with a slight limp. Decked out in a bow tie, pocket square and polished shoes, he stood on a Coca-Cola crate to offset his 4-foot-11-inch stature. It was 1936. Bailey looked out at the audience, sitting on wooden benches in the Opry’s Dixie Tabernacle, just east of Nashville’s downtown core. He carried a harmonica, or “a harp,” as it was often referred to at the time, in his left hand. When he brought the harmonica to his mouth, he played a tune that sounded like the bold whistle of a locomotive train. For 15 minutes, he played a unique blend of country music and blues, bringing smiles to the eyes of the people in the dusty old tabernacle. Aside from his obvious talent and innovative harmonica technique, Bailey broke cultural barriers by becoming the first black country music star, and he was one of the most beloved Opry musicians of his time. He played harmonica for the Grand Ole Opry from 1925 to 1941, and toured the country with his white Opry peers during the heyday of Jim Crow. Yet it would be decades before Bailey’s pioneering contributions to country music were widely recognized — and the accomplished musician died penniless.
5. Undersung Crime Shows To Watch Under Quarantine -this is a list of crime thrillers/mysteries that you can watch. It's not my thing, but I know it's a lot of people on my correspondence list's thing.
Maybe it begins with a body in the woods, half-buried under bracken. Or with a glimmering shot of a city skyline. Or with a furtive deal, carried out at dusk, before an unknown character heads toward an untimely end. The clichés and conventions of crime dramas are their own strange reprieve because of what they tend to guarantee: After a trip into the murkiest corners of the human psyche, an arc will be completed, a villain (or several) will be captured, and the system will prevail.
Over the past two months at home, the shows I’ve craved have either been mindless sitcoms (the televisual equivalent of a bowl of ice cream) or a certain subgenre of crime procedural, many of them British, unfailingly bleak, and loaded with top-tier actors wearing baggy woolen knits and surly expressions. These kinds of shows, as Matthew Gilbert wrote in the Boston Globe a few years ago, aren’t simple TV diversions in the Law & Order mold as much as they’re “haunting reflections on tragedy.” They’re clear-eyed when it comes to the rot in the fabric of humanity, but they typically offer some consolation in the end. The detectives here are as fascinating as the people they profile, and occasionally almost as dark.
With this peculiar type of comfort in mind, here’s a list of some of the superlative crime-drama binges from the past decade that are available to stream. There are plenty of high-profile shows with similar attention to psychological depth (Better Call Saul, Unbelievable, American Crime, When They See Us, Fargo, Mindhunter, True Detective), but for the most part I’ve tried to stay away from obvious choices, to highlight some undersung options instead, grouped according to the things crime series do best. Not all are strict procedurals. Nor is this list exhaustive (The Bridge, Wallander, Borgen, and Trapped are among those deserving of their own inventory). Hopefully, though, you’ll find at least one or two new options to consider.
twisty and propulsive THRILLERS
DES WILLIE / BBC AMERICA
luther
It’s hard to imagine Luther functioning so well without Idris Elba, whose ability to radiate ennui and gravitas while stalking through London in a gray tweed jacket is at least half the show’s appeal. Everything else in Neil Cross’s five-season series, which debuted in 2010, is ludicrous, Victorian-novel excess: serial killers in LED masks, occult blood fetishists, psychopathic academics with oral fixations who murder their entire families, right down to the dog, for attention. It’s the latter, Alice Morgan—a depraved genius played with operatic lunacy by Ruth Wilson—who becomes the Hannibal to Luther’s Clarice Starling, popping up to aid him and occasionally opine on the intricacies of the criminal mind. For all its absurdities, this is a series where the momentum rarely falters.
Watch it on: Hulu
The fall
Before Killing Eve, the knottiest cat-and-mouse game on television was between the icily glamorous Detective Inspector Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) and the swaggering serial killer in sweatpants, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). In the first season of the show, Gibson flew to Belfast to help investigate the murders of several young women, all of them committed by Spector, whose criminality The Fall revealed from the beginning. The narrative engine driving the show isn’t whodunit; it’s whether Gibson will solve the case before Spector strikes again, and whether either can curtail their growing obsession with the other. Anderson has never been more compelling as Gibson, a woman whose brilliance is grounded partly in her gender, and her ability to comprehend the psychology of a misogynist murderer. In the third and final season, The Fall veers slightly off the rails, but the first two alone make it worth watching.
Watch it on: Netflix
informer
For all the consolation of shows that stick to a formula, the ones that upend generic conventions can be even more gratifying. The hero of Informer isn’t Detective Sergeant Gabe Waters (Paddy Considine), a London counterterrorism officer trying to crack a ring behind attacks in other European cities. It’s Raza (played brilliantly by Nabhaan Rizwan), a second-generation British Pakistani man whom Gabe—in an act of callous ethnic stereotyping—coerces into informing on potential terrorists in his community, and who’s by far the show’s most sympathetic character. (“I don’t know any terrorists, bruv!” Raza exclaims in protest. “Not yet, but you will,” Gabe replies.) Even the ways in which Informer tweaks the visuals of London-set shows feel fresh—there are far more panoramic portrayals of Shoreditch streets and East London council estates than sweeping vistas of the Thames. And as the show barrels towards its climactic finale, it never loses sight of which people are victimized in the official quest to keep everyone else safe.
Watch it on: Amazon
marcellA
You can also file Marcella under “engagingly batty serials,” and yet for all my complaints about the show—its trope-y “troubled-but-brilliant heroine” setup not least among them—once I started watching, I couldn’t stop. Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) plays the titular detective Marcella, who at the show’s outset has come back to active police work after a personal crisis and the seeming return of a serial killer she’d long hunted. The only problem is her ongoing blackouts, after which she tends to wake up muddy, covered in blood, and suspicious even of herself. Florence Pugh (Little Women) has a brief but committed arc in Season 1 as a sex worker who steals from her customers, and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael also pops up as a student criminologist. But Friel is the real draw, giving her character just enough grit and vulnerability to keep viewers on her side.
5. Why the Coronavirus is so confusing?
6. IT's Okay Not to be Okay
“Choose joy.”
“We’re in this together.”
“Good vibes only.”
In the midst of the pandemic, reminders to stay upbeat are everywhere. Mottos, memes and maxims along with Twitter hashtags and Instagram accounts are devoted to preaching optimism as an approach to manage the epic uncertainty.
But for some people, the relentless focus on the bright side can go too far.
Psychologists, who coined the term “toxic positivity,” point out that the mind-over-matter message isn’t always the right approach, especially when it ignores, suppresses or dismisses negative feelings caused by grief, trauma or mental illness.
“Telling someone who is hurting to be positive is well-intentioned, but it backfires,” said therapist Sherry Merriam. “It asks people to stuff their very real feelings. It makes the people it’s supposed to help feel even worse.”
A licensed professional clinical counselor, Merriam recently moved her practice from her Edina office to her Hopkins dining room, where she now sees her clients via computer screen. While the toll from the shutdown has been widespread, Merriam said the losses are particularly harsh for those already dealing with mood disorders and anxiety.
“It’s as if this turned up the gravity on the planet. For those people, whatever they were trying to do feels harder and heavier now,” she said. “Now we see the pressure to make something positive out of this situation — get that sourdough started, read those books. It’s wonderful for those who can use those things as coping mechanisms, but a lot of people can’t and they feel like a failure. That’s what makes it toxic.”
Long before the arrival of the coronavirus, JD Holmquist learned firsthand about toxic positivity.
In 2009 when he was a college student, he was drugged, beaten and sexually assaulted. As he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath, he grew weary of being told to cheer up and count his blessings.
“Right from the start, I got a lot of unsolicited advice from everyone I interacted with in positions of power — police, nurses, doctors,” said Holmquist, of Milaca, Minn. “The message was, ‘If you’re sad or depressed or experience a panic attack, cover it up.’ ”
Holmquist, who has an undergraduate degree in psychology and master’s degrees in public health and criminal psychology, is now a victim’s advocate. He regularly lobbies for more professional support for people who have survived trauma.
“It makes other people feel better when they tell you that things will look up. They can think, ‘I gave you wonderful advice on how to manage your mental health,’ ” he said. “For a long time I tried to force myself to believe that and I wound up ignoring very real conditions. Pushing away something that needs to be felt can make it fester. It’s OK not to be OK.”
7. Why Zoom is Terrible
no subject
Date: 2020-05-02 07:05 pm (UTC)Re: Sondheim, I didn't realize that Jake Gyllenhall sang.