A bit of everything? Plus a painting...
Jul. 2nd, 2023 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Well, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson managed to save TCM aka Turner Classic Movies from the evil new executive at Warner Brothers, who attempted to do away with it.
I'm grateful. I agree with them. Our classic films should be preserved.
As IndieWire first reported, the trio placed an "emergency" call to Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav last week following cuts to the majority of the network's leadership, including senior VP of programming and content strategy, Charles Tabesh.
Tabesh, however, will return to TCM with Scorsese, Spielberg, and Anderson acting as unpaid volunteers who will help guide and curate the network's programming, even including host intros and outros. TCM's Classic Film Festival will also continue.
"We have already begun working on ideas with [Warner Bros. executives Michael de Luca and Pamela Abdy], both true film enthusiasts who share a passion and reverence for classic cinema that is the hallmark of the TCM community," the directors said in a joint statement.
Thanks to Petz for the link.
2. Somebody Somewhere on HBO Max of all places, has become my new comfort show. It's a highly relatable series about struggling forty-something singles in Manhattan, Kansas. I finished the first two seasons and was blown away by it.
I'd describe it as hyper-realism. A dramedy, with touching and humorous moments. Relationship drama as opposed to workplace drama, but the focus is on friendship not romantic entanglements, and sibling/family relationships.
The core relationship is between a forty-something woman and a gay forty-something man, and their friends and family. It's among the best shows I've seen, well written and acted. (I admittedly don't find it that funny, but I don't have a raunchy sense of humor. But I found it touching and relatable enough to handwave that. It's also a kind comedy and not cruel like most of the comedies that I've seen to date.)
Here's the Guardian Review - Review of Somebody Somewhere.
omebody Somewhere can be a hard sell. In each of its roughly half-hour episodes, people talk, drive, go home. It is a series of small character studies, set in a sleepy town in Kansas, and whatever plot rears its head tends to gently nudge the drama forward in ever-so-gentle increments. Yet, just as it did in its superlative first season, it stuffs every subtle scene with emotion, poignancy and a great sense of humour.
In season one, Sam (Bridget Everett) returns to her home town of Manhattan, Kansas, from another life, elsewhere, to care for her sister Holly, who was dying of cancer. The action begins after Holly’s death, and follows Sam through a midlife crisis as she struggles to fit back in to the place where she grew up. We see her grieving, friendless, lonely, dealing with an alcoholic mother and a farmer father whose business is disappearing in front of them.
It doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but Sam made friends, found a community of local outsiders and started to use her powerful singing voice at a cabaret night, illicitly camping out in the local church under the guise of “choir practice”. It is a celebration of not fitting in, as well as a tender tribute to the particular love that home can offer, and it’s really quite beautiful.
It returns for a second season largely unaltered, and its unhurried charm is a welcome antidote to some of television’s more stress-inducing proclivities. (It has also just been renewed for a third season, so there is an appetite for this kind of thing.) Sam and best friend Joel are temporarily living together as Joel rents out his house, though the pair are rapidly becoming as close as a couple. Their mutual disgust at anyone who mistakes them for an item is very funny indeed. They try to get their 10,000 steps a day in while playing “pound it or pass” with anyone who walks by, and fail to stick to their Designated Non-Drinking Nights. “You almost make Sam fun,” says her sister, Tricia, to Joel. “Almost.”
Highly recommend.
3. It's official, apparently, that The Flash bombed at the box office - it's barely gotten to $100M domestically, and just scratched $216M world-wide. The film cost over $200 Million to make.
The linked article explains why it bombed - which is simple enough, people like myself decided not to see it in movie theaters and wait for it to pop up on HBO MAX based on the reviews.
I was interested - until I read the reviews, and thought, Ack, I can watch that better on television with far less annoyance.
Scalzi's kid reviews it - HERE - complete with spoilers, although not all spoilers. I thoroughly spoiled - I've read too many reviews. So I know the unpredictable spoilers.
None of the spoilers endear me to the movie.
The movie did so badly at the box office, that they went ahead and announced that Rachel Bronshanan (Mrs. Maizel) will be Lois, and David Corenswet as Superman. [My favs were Christopher Reeves and Tyler Hoechel, I didn't like Cavill's Superman nor Brandon Rousch's. I'm picky, I like the optimistic and kind take - go too dark and gritty and you get awfully close to fascism. Superman does not work well as an anti-hero. Batman, yes, Superman, no.]
4. Wales and I discussed what we're doing on the fourth, and honestly, I think we'll be lucky if we do much of anything at this point. I want to go to the American Natural History Museum - but I don't want to get reserved pre-paid tickets online - just in case everything falls through, and we don't go. So the current plan is to meet at 11:30 Am in Carroll Gardens, and go from there on Tuesday. Worse case scenario we can wander about and do something else.
I haven't been over to that part of the city in years, so that alone would be entertaining.
5. Twitter is back up and running, and everyone is acting like nothing happened, and they've all flooded back after threatening to jump ship.
I honestly think a lot of them have an abusive love/hate relationship with Twitter. I can relate, I have love/hate relationships with NYC, BookStores, Mass Transit, and my church.
6. I'm tempted to get a ticket via TDF to see Merrily We'll Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliff and Josh Groff. (I like Groff, a lot.)
7. My brother's air conditioner went out the other day. The earliest the A/C people could look at it was August. We have been having air quality issues all week long. (Canadian Wildfires - apparently mother nature figured she burned enough of the forests on the West Coast of Canada, and it was the East Coast's turn?) Anyhow, my brother went up into his attic and rewired his air-conditioner, and now its working. My brother can apparently fix plumbing disasters and electrical issues, but not mechanical ones. (Or youtube can teach him how to fix the plumbing and electrical issues, just not the mechanical ones?)
ME: Why not the mechanical ones?
Mother: I'm thinking it's similar to why he can't do software code?
Me: In short he's not an engineer?
This reminds me of a discussion I had with New Gal recently at Crazy Workplace.
NG: I'd like to do CAD drawings. I figure I could learn how to do that relatively easily.
ME: Are you engineer? Because you kind of need an engineering degree for that.
NG: I don't see why - I can read them fine.
Me: We can all read them. But to draw them and interpret them - you need to be able to do the mathematics, the measurements, and understand the width and height, etc.
NG: Oh, I couldn't do that.
Sigh. At least my brother is bright enough to know his own limitations. Plumbing and electrical work he can do, mechanics not so much. He's ahead of me. The best I can do is get the damn toilet to flush. Otherwise, I'm calling the super. See, this is why he owns a house and I rent an apartment.
In other news, the frigging NY medical community is still gas-lighting my poor sister-in-law. I swear they gaslight everyone. This is why we have medical malpractice attorneys. She went to an immunologist with her rash issues. They did blood work. About four weeks later they came back and told her that they found nothing, and have a nice day. That's it. That's all they said. It took her months to find them. Now she's hunted down a new primary, because each time she finds one - they leave. She can't keep one to save her life. The new one won't see her until September. And the doctor she'd found to treat her remotely in California - can no longer proscribe thyroid meds (he was treating the symptoms), because the COVID protocol that allowed him to treat her remotely has expired. So now, she has to convince a doctor in NY to do it.
I suggested to mother that this may be a New York problem, and maybe they should just move to Massachusetts? Maybe doctors are better outside of NY State? My brother apparently wishes he could figure out a way to fix his poor wife.
More proof that we need a complete overhaul of the US medical and health care system, along with the insurance system. Don't give anyone a say or choice in the matter, just do it. If they argue? Bop them in the head.
8. On the book front...
I was reminded recently of my love/hate relationships with book stores. Old Freshman Roommate - who kind of needs a nickname....(Queen Charlotte) - informed FB that she'd sent press releases to area booksellers that she'd published a book. A couple of the booksellers emailed her back that they won't carry anything published via createspace or via Amazon, because Amazon is putting them out of business. And would only carry anything published via Ingram.
That's complete BS.
They don't carry books via other independent publishers - because they can't return them. A book publisher orders books via a catalogue, receives them, shelves, then returns the inventory that wasn't sold to the publisher via that distributor. Ingram is a book distribution agent, they are the distribution channel between the tradebook publisher and the book store, and pre-exist the online publishing industry. I know, I worked in a book store in the early 1990s, before Amazon existed, and we ordered books through Ingrams.
Books have a relatively short shelf life. The lovely thing about print on demand services, and online book sellers like Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, is that your book never goes out of print. It has a long shelf life - someone can always order it. The down side, is libraries and booksellers won't order it - because it's not in the catalogues that they order books from. And even if you put it in that catalogue - they only order it if someone asks for it specifically and there's a demand. (See Colleen Hoover's books, Fifty Shades of Gray, etc.)
Booksellers who say, oh, evil Amazon, we don't carry? Are bull-shitting you. Dean Koontz is currently being represented by Amazon Publishing. Amazon Publishing has a large catalogue of books that they are representing and publishing - which book stores do carry. Barnes and Nobel has an online books service, as do many book stores.
The truth is - booksellers and libraries are not writers friends. Readers, yes. Writers, no. And not all readers. They discriminate against specific genres. It is hard to find queer romances in most book stores and libraries. Also hard to find fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels, etc - that don't fit within a relatively narrow academic definition of literary work. They can't carry a broad selection and make a profit, and nitch book sellers struggle to stay alive. Instead what they tend to carry are the books they are given by "trade publishers" and "imprints" to push. Or best-sellers. So you most likely won't find Cat Sebastian or Martha Wells novels in your local book store. But you will find the latest beach read by Jennifer Weiner, or the latest new adult romance by Colleen Hoover. It's not until someone makes it big - that you see books by them in the store.
I tried to get them to carry my book. Had a long discussion with one guy, and he was honest with me. He told me that he couldn't afford to take my book or any independently published book. If he doesn't sell them, he can't return them. And he can't afford to give me - the writer of the book the percentage. (His book store went out of business in 2018.)
So let's look at how this works?
Writer - Publisher - Catalogue - Bookseller. The book is say $30.00.
The bookseller buys it for about $20 from the catalogue. The Catalogue gets $10, the publisher gets $8, and the writer gets...maybe $2, if that.
The more people in the chain, the less you the writer get. On Amazon? I get maybe $2, possibly $1 for every sale. But my books are sold at $12-14, and $2.99 Kindle, or $.99.
The books in a book store are sold at about twice that amount. They have to be, because they are ordered from a catalogue, and the bookseller has to pay the catalogue who pays the publisher, who pays the writer. In some cases it's direct from the big trade publishers, which is a better deal for the writer. But big trade publishers don't like risky stories, and prefer paint-by-number sure things.
Ugh. This is all made so much worse by the fact that only those books that a big trade publisher or imprint tells the bookseller to push get on the tables. Or are in demand. So your book that you wrote - and put on ingrams, gets hidden on the shelves, and no one sees it or picks it, until it is returned to the catalogue and slowly falls out of print.
9. I have been in a long reading slump. I get through audio books, but not actual books. Almost done with Moonlighting - an Oral History - which could use a better narrator - the one it has - has a very thick nasal New Jersey accent that's annoying me. Also, the author seems to want me to think Cybil Shepard was a diva, but I'm beginning to think she was more a victim of a misogynistic and sexist show-runner/producer who favored Bruce Willis.
The head show-runner, Glen Caron, didn't want Bruce Willis to do a movie during the show's production. But Cybil Shepard got pregnant with twins - which he wasn't happy about. So, Willis got to do his movie. They shot her scenes (while she was pregnant) when he was off doing his movie. They also shot the love scene between Maddie and David, when she was six months pregnant, and Willis had a broken collar bone due to a skiing accident. Cybil got most of the blame. Curtis Armstrong - the supporting player, who played Ms. Deposito's love interest - got a line that he says to Maddie - which Armstrong refused to say. He told the author of the book that it was deeply misogynistic and he could not say that line, also it was something David Addison would say. So it went up the chain, the head-writer, who wrote it, called him and asked why - and he diplomatically stated it was out of character, something David would say, and wouldn't work - that it came across as mean. The line was cut.
But that tells me pretty much all I need to know. Cybil Shepard may have been a little divish, but here's the thing, Charisma Carpenter and Sarah Michelle Gellar were also accused of this - on their shows. Yet David Boreanze who pulled practical jokes and wandered about with his dick hanging out, and Bruce Willis who did crude jokes and played games, and took movie roles during production - weren't? That's a sexist work environment. I'm sorry it is. The women weren't divas, they were struggling to survive and have some power in a male centric misogynistic work environment and in a misogynistic industry.
I found part of an episode on Youtube and Daily Motion, and a) the show is overrated, b) yep it was sexist. The Shakespeare episode? Taming of the Shrew, not As You Like It or Twelth Night.
Have made it through graphic novels or comics recently.
X-men Red (2022-Present) is really good. It's kind of like Game of Thrones for the X-men. Lead by Storm and Magneto, also various other lesser known characters.
Actually the current run of the X-men verse falls heavily into speculative science fiction, and focuses on a broader range of characters. It's a nuanced and character driven serial. Not as a much of a relationship soap opera like in the 1990s and 20th Century.
The Cat Sebastian Historical Romance is moving slowly for some reason. And I couldn't get through The Witch King (too much world-building, and war mongering, not to mention speechifying, and not enough character stuff) - I got bored and my attention drifted away from it. Also I'm not a fan of Judeo-Christian mythology, and this relies heavily on that - and witch/demon mythos, which doesn't work for me, personally.
Reading is, as I tried to explain to Wales today without much success, is a subjective sport. What's to one person's taste won't be to another's. Doesn't mean the book isn't any good, just that it isn't to my taste.
10. Finished my latest painting/drawing - this was inspired from a picture of a fictional couple that I've been following on a soap opera. It's not real close to the picture, at all. But I did like how it came out. I found it to be interesting, and better than expected.
So sharing beneath the cut.
I'm grateful. I agree with them. Our classic films should be preserved.
As IndieWire first reported, the trio placed an "emergency" call to Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav last week following cuts to the majority of the network's leadership, including senior VP of programming and content strategy, Charles Tabesh.
Tabesh, however, will return to TCM with Scorsese, Spielberg, and Anderson acting as unpaid volunteers who will help guide and curate the network's programming, even including host intros and outros. TCM's Classic Film Festival will also continue.
"We have already begun working on ideas with [Warner Bros. executives Michael de Luca and Pamela Abdy], both true film enthusiasts who share a passion and reverence for classic cinema that is the hallmark of the TCM community," the directors said in a joint statement.
Thanks to Petz for the link.
2. Somebody Somewhere on HBO Max of all places, has become my new comfort show. It's a highly relatable series about struggling forty-something singles in Manhattan, Kansas. I finished the first two seasons and was blown away by it.
I'd describe it as hyper-realism. A dramedy, with touching and humorous moments. Relationship drama as opposed to workplace drama, but the focus is on friendship not romantic entanglements, and sibling/family relationships.
The core relationship is between a forty-something woman and a gay forty-something man, and their friends and family. It's among the best shows I've seen, well written and acted. (I admittedly don't find it that funny, but I don't have a raunchy sense of humor. But I found it touching and relatable enough to handwave that. It's also a kind comedy and not cruel like most of the comedies that I've seen to date.)
Here's the Guardian Review - Review of Somebody Somewhere.
omebody Somewhere can be a hard sell. In each of its roughly half-hour episodes, people talk, drive, go home. It is a series of small character studies, set in a sleepy town in Kansas, and whatever plot rears its head tends to gently nudge the drama forward in ever-so-gentle increments. Yet, just as it did in its superlative first season, it stuffs every subtle scene with emotion, poignancy and a great sense of humour.
In season one, Sam (Bridget Everett) returns to her home town of Manhattan, Kansas, from another life, elsewhere, to care for her sister Holly, who was dying of cancer. The action begins after Holly’s death, and follows Sam through a midlife crisis as she struggles to fit back in to the place where she grew up. We see her grieving, friendless, lonely, dealing with an alcoholic mother and a farmer father whose business is disappearing in front of them.
It doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but Sam made friends, found a community of local outsiders and started to use her powerful singing voice at a cabaret night, illicitly camping out in the local church under the guise of “choir practice”. It is a celebration of not fitting in, as well as a tender tribute to the particular love that home can offer, and it’s really quite beautiful.
It returns for a second season largely unaltered, and its unhurried charm is a welcome antidote to some of television’s more stress-inducing proclivities. (It has also just been renewed for a third season, so there is an appetite for this kind of thing.) Sam and best friend Joel are temporarily living together as Joel rents out his house, though the pair are rapidly becoming as close as a couple. Their mutual disgust at anyone who mistakes them for an item is very funny indeed. They try to get their 10,000 steps a day in while playing “pound it or pass” with anyone who walks by, and fail to stick to their Designated Non-Drinking Nights. “You almost make Sam fun,” says her sister, Tricia, to Joel. “Almost.”
Highly recommend.
3. It's official, apparently, that The Flash bombed at the box office - it's barely gotten to $100M domestically, and just scratched $216M world-wide. The film cost over $200 Million to make.
The linked article explains why it bombed - which is simple enough, people like myself decided not to see it in movie theaters and wait for it to pop up on HBO MAX based on the reviews.
I was interested - until I read the reviews, and thought, Ack, I can watch that better on television with far less annoyance.
Scalzi's kid reviews it - HERE - complete with spoilers, although not all spoilers. I thoroughly spoiled - I've read too many reviews. So I know the unpredictable spoilers.
None of the spoilers endear me to the movie.
The movie did so badly at the box office, that they went ahead and announced that Rachel Bronshanan (Mrs. Maizel) will be Lois, and David Corenswet as Superman. [My favs were Christopher Reeves and Tyler Hoechel, I didn't like Cavill's Superman nor Brandon Rousch's. I'm picky, I like the optimistic and kind take - go too dark and gritty and you get awfully close to fascism. Superman does not work well as an anti-hero. Batman, yes, Superman, no.]
4. Wales and I discussed what we're doing on the fourth, and honestly, I think we'll be lucky if we do much of anything at this point. I want to go to the American Natural History Museum - but I don't want to get reserved pre-paid tickets online - just in case everything falls through, and we don't go. So the current plan is to meet at 11:30 Am in Carroll Gardens, and go from there on Tuesday. Worse case scenario we can wander about and do something else.
I haven't been over to that part of the city in years, so that alone would be entertaining.
5. Twitter is back up and running, and everyone is acting like nothing happened, and they've all flooded back after threatening to jump ship.
I honestly think a lot of them have an abusive love/hate relationship with Twitter. I can relate, I have love/hate relationships with NYC, BookStores, Mass Transit, and my church.
6. I'm tempted to get a ticket via TDF to see Merrily We'll Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliff and Josh Groff. (I like Groff, a lot.)
7. My brother's air conditioner went out the other day. The earliest the A/C people could look at it was August. We have been having air quality issues all week long. (Canadian Wildfires - apparently mother nature figured she burned enough of the forests on the West Coast of Canada, and it was the East Coast's turn?) Anyhow, my brother went up into his attic and rewired his air-conditioner, and now its working. My brother can apparently fix plumbing disasters and electrical issues, but not mechanical ones. (Or youtube can teach him how to fix the plumbing and electrical issues, just not the mechanical ones?)
ME: Why not the mechanical ones?
Mother: I'm thinking it's similar to why he can't do software code?
Me: In short he's not an engineer?
This reminds me of a discussion I had with New Gal recently at Crazy Workplace.
NG: I'd like to do CAD drawings. I figure I could learn how to do that relatively easily.
ME: Are you engineer? Because you kind of need an engineering degree for that.
NG: I don't see why - I can read them fine.
Me: We can all read them. But to draw them and interpret them - you need to be able to do the mathematics, the measurements, and understand the width and height, etc.
NG: Oh, I couldn't do that.
Sigh. At least my brother is bright enough to know his own limitations. Plumbing and electrical work he can do, mechanics not so much. He's ahead of me. The best I can do is get the damn toilet to flush. Otherwise, I'm calling the super. See, this is why he owns a house and I rent an apartment.
In other news, the frigging NY medical community is still gas-lighting my poor sister-in-law. I swear they gaslight everyone. This is why we have medical malpractice attorneys. She went to an immunologist with her rash issues. They did blood work. About four weeks later they came back and told her that they found nothing, and have a nice day. That's it. That's all they said. It took her months to find them. Now she's hunted down a new primary, because each time she finds one - they leave. She can't keep one to save her life. The new one won't see her until September. And the doctor she'd found to treat her remotely in California - can no longer proscribe thyroid meds (he was treating the symptoms), because the COVID protocol that allowed him to treat her remotely has expired. So now, she has to convince a doctor in NY to do it.
I suggested to mother that this may be a New York problem, and maybe they should just move to Massachusetts? Maybe doctors are better outside of NY State? My brother apparently wishes he could figure out a way to fix his poor wife.
More proof that we need a complete overhaul of the US medical and health care system, along with the insurance system. Don't give anyone a say or choice in the matter, just do it. If they argue? Bop them in the head.
8. On the book front...
I was reminded recently of my love/hate relationships with book stores. Old Freshman Roommate - who kind of needs a nickname....(Queen Charlotte) - informed FB that she'd sent press releases to area booksellers that she'd published a book. A couple of the booksellers emailed her back that they won't carry anything published via createspace or via Amazon, because Amazon is putting them out of business. And would only carry anything published via Ingram.
That's complete BS.
They don't carry books via other independent publishers - because they can't return them. A book publisher orders books via a catalogue, receives them, shelves, then returns the inventory that wasn't sold to the publisher via that distributor. Ingram is a book distribution agent, they are the distribution channel between the tradebook publisher and the book store, and pre-exist the online publishing industry. I know, I worked in a book store in the early 1990s, before Amazon existed, and we ordered books through Ingrams.
Books have a relatively short shelf life. The lovely thing about print on demand services, and online book sellers like Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, is that your book never goes out of print. It has a long shelf life - someone can always order it. The down side, is libraries and booksellers won't order it - because it's not in the catalogues that they order books from. And even if you put it in that catalogue - they only order it if someone asks for it specifically and there's a demand. (See Colleen Hoover's books, Fifty Shades of Gray, etc.)
Booksellers who say, oh, evil Amazon, we don't carry? Are bull-shitting you. Dean Koontz is currently being represented by Amazon Publishing. Amazon Publishing has a large catalogue of books that they are representing and publishing - which book stores do carry. Barnes and Nobel has an online books service, as do many book stores.
The truth is - booksellers and libraries are not writers friends. Readers, yes. Writers, no. And not all readers. They discriminate against specific genres. It is hard to find queer romances in most book stores and libraries. Also hard to find fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels, etc - that don't fit within a relatively narrow academic definition of literary work. They can't carry a broad selection and make a profit, and nitch book sellers struggle to stay alive. Instead what they tend to carry are the books they are given by "trade publishers" and "imprints" to push. Or best-sellers. So you most likely won't find Cat Sebastian or Martha Wells novels in your local book store. But you will find the latest beach read by Jennifer Weiner, or the latest new adult romance by Colleen Hoover. It's not until someone makes it big - that you see books by them in the store.
I tried to get them to carry my book. Had a long discussion with one guy, and he was honest with me. He told me that he couldn't afford to take my book or any independently published book. If he doesn't sell them, he can't return them. And he can't afford to give me - the writer of the book the percentage. (His book store went out of business in 2018.)
So let's look at how this works?
Writer - Publisher - Catalogue - Bookseller. The book is say $30.00.
The bookseller buys it for about $20 from the catalogue. The Catalogue gets $10, the publisher gets $8, and the writer gets...maybe $2, if that.
The more people in the chain, the less you the writer get. On Amazon? I get maybe $2, possibly $1 for every sale. But my books are sold at $12-14, and $2.99 Kindle, or $.99.
The books in a book store are sold at about twice that amount. They have to be, because they are ordered from a catalogue, and the bookseller has to pay the catalogue who pays the publisher, who pays the writer. In some cases it's direct from the big trade publishers, which is a better deal for the writer. But big trade publishers don't like risky stories, and prefer paint-by-number sure things.
Ugh. This is all made so much worse by the fact that only those books that a big trade publisher or imprint tells the bookseller to push get on the tables. Or are in demand. So your book that you wrote - and put on ingrams, gets hidden on the shelves, and no one sees it or picks it, until it is returned to the catalogue and slowly falls out of print.
9. I have been in a long reading slump. I get through audio books, but not actual books. Almost done with Moonlighting - an Oral History - which could use a better narrator - the one it has - has a very thick nasal New Jersey accent that's annoying me. Also, the author seems to want me to think Cybil Shepard was a diva, but I'm beginning to think she was more a victim of a misogynistic and sexist show-runner/producer who favored Bruce Willis.
The head show-runner, Glen Caron, didn't want Bruce Willis to do a movie during the show's production. But Cybil Shepard got pregnant with twins - which he wasn't happy about. So, Willis got to do his movie. They shot her scenes (while she was pregnant) when he was off doing his movie. They also shot the love scene between Maddie and David, when she was six months pregnant, and Willis had a broken collar bone due to a skiing accident. Cybil got most of the blame. Curtis Armstrong - the supporting player, who played Ms. Deposito's love interest - got a line that he says to Maddie - which Armstrong refused to say. He told the author of the book that it was deeply misogynistic and he could not say that line, also it was something David Addison would say. So it went up the chain, the head-writer, who wrote it, called him and asked why - and he diplomatically stated it was out of character, something David would say, and wouldn't work - that it came across as mean. The line was cut.
But that tells me pretty much all I need to know. Cybil Shepard may have been a little divish, but here's the thing, Charisma Carpenter and Sarah Michelle Gellar were also accused of this - on their shows. Yet David Boreanze who pulled practical jokes and wandered about with his dick hanging out, and Bruce Willis who did crude jokes and played games, and took movie roles during production - weren't? That's a sexist work environment. I'm sorry it is. The women weren't divas, they were struggling to survive and have some power in a male centric misogynistic work environment and in a misogynistic industry.
I found part of an episode on Youtube and Daily Motion, and a) the show is overrated, b) yep it was sexist. The Shakespeare episode? Taming of the Shrew, not As You Like It or Twelth Night.
Have made it through graphic novels or comics recently.
X-men Red (2022-Present) is really good. It's kind of like Game of Thrones for the X-men. Lead by Storm and Magneto, also various other lesser known characters.
Actually the current run of the X-men verse falls heavily into speculative science fiction, and focuses on a broader range of characters. It's a nuanced and character driven serial. Not as a much of a relationship soap opera like in the 1990s and 20th Century.
The Cat Sebastian Historical Romance is moving slowly for some reason. And I couldn't get through The Witch King (too much world-building, and war mongering, not to mention speechifying, and not enough character stuff) - I got bored and my attention drifted away from it. Also I'm not a fan of Judeo-Christian mythology, and this relies heavily on that - and witch/demon mythos, which doesn't work for me, personally.
Reading is, as I tried to explain to Wales today without much success, is a subjective sport. What's to one person's taste won't be to another's. Doesn't mean the book isn't any good, just that it isn't to my taste.
10. Finished my latest painting/drawing - this was inspired from a picture of a fictional couple that I've been following on a soap opera. It's not real close to the picture, at all. But I did like how it came out. I found it to be interesting, and better than expected.
So sharing beneath the cut.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-03 05:43 am (UTC)A big advantage I have when it comes to my work in audio is simply due to the fact that for the first 16 years of my work life I did major appliance and refrigeration repairs. And since I worked for independent dealers (two of them) I also did installation work, like plumbing, electrical, HVAC, rven a little carpentry here and there.
Why would that be an advantage in my later audio career? Because many audio techs are good with pure electronics, but not with mechanical things. So, for products like tape decks or turntables... they're lost on the mechanicals. Also, they may not have installation experience, and for custom AV work, that's mighty useful.
Nevertheless, one problem I do not have is trying to do things I am not good at. Unhappy customers are the likely result.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-03 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-04 05:33 am (UTC)I'd never attempt to work on the brakes of any modern car, or for that matter, I'd maybe even be reluctant to just change the oil. I'm not easily scared off by machines, but one look under the hood of my current car, a 2008 model, is enough to say, "Nope, uh-uh, pro car techs only." A current model? Even more scary.
Your brother's AC may have only needed some minor electrical work, like changing a faulty thermostat or start relay or somesuch. The mechanical aspects of that are usually fairly straightforward, and you've stated before that he's generally fairly handy.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-03 09:29 pm (UTC)Wow. Makes me grateful ours is ok -- I just wouldn't be able to sleep without it at this time of year.