Dancing Lessons From Lucy Maud (a note on risk assessment)

For "travel suggestions" read book recommendations, 
and for "dancing lessons" read book recommendations, again,
and for "Bokonon" read Kurt Vonnegut.

 Apologies for the tomorrowness of this post, but I think my body clock's running to a thirty-six hour day now, so look I'm just going to go with it. I walked up Parliament Hill yesterday at 4am, or the hill next to Parliament Hill, and I listened to Ken Campbell's Letter To Bob Anton Wilson. Pretty much all of Campbell's shows have now been released as podcasts now and subjects overlap, but I'd never heard him talk before about Anne Of Green Gables. There's a video of the "Letter" too, and here's a bit of it (or a lot, depending on how long you keep watching):

 A series of "redemptive vignettes" is how Campbell describes Lucy Maud Montgomery's series, capable of reducing the hardest of men to tears and forcing the maestro to finally confront his own "a**holery". Obviously I love a good children's book, the clarity and care and genrelessness, and so by the time I'd got home I considered this a recommendation, and I went to bed. But my body was having nothing of it, so I decided to sit myself down in front of the telly and finally watched Russian Doll on Netflix. I binged all eight episodes. I loved it. But...

 Natasha Lyonne's character Nadia, self-consciously but effortlessly hard-bitten and initially impermeable, turns out to have been anchored to humanity by the children's book "Emily of New Moon". For the second time that morning therefore, a narrative of fractured universes was recommending to me the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery. This actually didn't seem so weird given that in both Campbell's and Lyonne's world "clues fucking abound" to quote Nadia, and yet that thematic aptitude was itself a further coincidence, and probably should have made it feel weirder.

Footage of Ken and Daisy Campbell "astounding their selves into being" at Damanhur

(unavailable on the podcast).

 What I found more interesting, on a zeitgeisty level, was how Russian Doll toyed with an idea I'd seen come up a lot recently - in the Live, Die, Repeat machine from the Vat of Acid episode of Rick and Morty - or in the extraordinary, even more recent, choose-your-own adventure finale of Kimmy Schmidt (again on Netflix). You could call it "risk assessment", although the latter show offers more an opportunity for catharsis, impossible with any previous telly technology.* It seems decisions themselves might be the new monster, the new Atom Bomb. And television's extraordinary at the moment. And it seems a good time to stay in.

* UPDATE: Watching this Nathen Zed video on The Last Of Us 2 I realise I'd probably be less surprised by all these developments if I gamed more.

A Surer Evil Timeline Check Than Goatees

 I finally watched the mirror universe episode of Star Trek: the one where Kirk and Bones accidentally beam into an evil universe, and Spock has a goatee – the first instance, I think, of facial hair being used to denote an evil switch. (In 1960, The Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll had the doctor actually lose a beard to become Hyde. I will always, first and foremost though, associate the evil beard with the twin of Michael Knight.)

 As a simple statement of the values of the Federation, Mirror, Mirror works incredibly well, a bit like – now I think of it – how Pottersville in It's a Wonderful Life realises the malevolent effect upon characters we've already met of living in a world similarly gone to shit (although in that darkest timeline, spectacles on a love interest take the place of the goatee). My favourite moment comes about twenty minutes into the epsiode, when we finally cut back to our universe (assuming optimistically Star Trek is set in our universe) to find out what havoc the evil Kirk and company have been committing on the original Enterprise while their counterparts have been attempting to steer the evil universe away from planetary looting and domestic tooth and claw, and it turns out they've committed no havoc whatasoever, but have instead been dragged, almost immediately, kicking and screaming to the brig. Because of course they have. Because what's a utopia without checks and balances? That's how you really tell which timeline you're in: not by looking for goatees, but by seeing who's in prison, and who's walking around still allowed to be in charge.

 (A few more telly thoughts: I'm finding it hard to get into The Next Generation. I can't shake the sense that the ideals of the Federation have lapsed into snobbery. You shouldn't be able to ask of a Star Trek "Which character's the curious one?" They should all be curious. Unlike in The Original Series, the aliens of TNG aren't mysteries to be learnt from, but sleazy, third-world-coded fops, there to be taught a lesson. I did finally get into Community though, hard. Hard, but like Rick and Morty not immediately, having to wait nearly a series for it to bloom from a hate-friendly Scrubs-without-stakes into a hate-friendly Muppet Babies-for-grownups, which is much more my thing.)

Dan Harmon playing Minecraft is very "Rick and Morty"

 I've never played Minecraft, but enjoy hearing people talk about video games, maybe more than I enjoy playing them. It takes less time for one thing, but also, the definition of what a game actually is, or should be doing, is still so unsettled that if interest is keen enough, conversations can go anywhere. Here's Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon, going full "Pickle Rick"on a podcast that I enjoy a lot, How Did This Get Played, accompanied by footage of some project called Titan City which seems populated by nothing but pigs and chickens. Maybe too apt now, but it was either this or another post I had in reserve about Endgame, and this seemed the happier Monday. Whether I'm talking about Samuel Beckett's Endgame or Marvel's you'll find out tomorrow. In the meantime, stay safe, me ol' unattendees, and if you're still looking for something to do here is a link to a VR reconstruction of Rick's Toilet of Solitude...