Saturday Morning Brain Drain [6/5/23]

6/5/23 Elliecoo 36
Image by Netlix

What I Watched: Seasons one (co-hosted by Alexa Chung) and two of Tan France’s NEXT in Fashion. My biggest take away is that GiGi Hadid, season two co-host, is a polite, kind, and intelligent human being, unspoiled by her wealth and beauty. That sounds like a bit too much praise, but she really does come off quite well, especially her kindness to contestants. Season one had a $250,00 prize from Net-a-Porrter; season two went a bit downscale with a $200,000 prize from Rent the Runway. So anyway, you know the drill: budding fashion designers, contests, famous guest judges, compelling backstories, etc.

Season One Trailer

Season Two Trailer

What I Read: The eight-book SPI Files series by Lisa Shearin. What’s not like? All manner of supernatural beings, a dragon boss lady, a sexy goblin rogue, and fun description of the dryad who spins creature occurrences into PR spoofs. Here’s the series blurb:

We’re Supernatural Protection & Investigations, known as SPI. Things that go bump in the night, the monsters you thought didn’t exist? We battle them and keep you safe. But some supernatural baddies are just too big to contain, even for us . . . When I moved to New York to become a world famous journalist, I never imagined that snagging a job at a seedy tabloid would change my career path from trashy reporter to undercover agent. I’m Makenna Fraser, a Seer for SPI. I can see through any disguise, shield, or spell that a paranormal pest can come up with. I track down creatures and my partner, Ian Byrne, takes them out.

What I Listened To: Lane 8 – Woman;Benjamin Amaru – Not High On Drugz; and Bob Moses, Amtrac – Back to You (Amtrac Remix / Visualizer).

Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, dearest ones? Darling DeadSplinterites, what is up with you? Please do share your status!

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About Elliecoo 579 Articles
Four dogs, one partner. The dogs win.

36 Comments

  1. Holy shit! I might have and subscribe to Apple TV. I highly recommend the Silo book series on which this show is based. I’ve been too busy to watch anything this week thanks to a silly game called Cats & Soup. It’s supposed to idle… I just can’t seem to let it.

  2. What I watched:  The Book of Boba Fett.  I like this approach that Disney took with a character that has always been an unambiguous villain, and fleshed out the story of the character and made him more than one dimensional.  Acting and story lines are good and Ming Na is always great in everything she does.

    What I listened to:  I lied.  I’m a liar, did I tell you?  I forgot one last album on the tour of the best engineered albums of all time.  This one is Journey by Mighty Sam McClain.  There is an audio equipment company called Audioquest, which is known for their extremely high end (and extremely expensive) cables.  Audioquest also has a small record label which is essentially a vehicle for highlighting their gear as much as anything else (the name of the label changed from Audioquest to Sledgehammer Blues, but the gear company name has not changed).  These are analog recordings using custom built tube electronics, and without the use of noise reduction, compression, equalization or sound limiters.  So, with that as a premise, you can understand that artists on the Sledgehammer Blues label aren’t generally headed for superstardom.  That being said, McClain is a very listenable blues artist and his band is nice and tight.  But, he’s certainly no Buddy Guy.

    Anyway, you can really hear the care taken into putting this album together, but it does highlight the balancing act that has to take place when engineering a great sounding album.  If you push too hard on the audio quality, it can stifle the creativity factor.  Likewise, there are lots of super creative albums out there which sound like shit.  So, yes, the sonics are out of this world.  But this is definitely not a desert island album.

     

    • …with you on ming na…though I thought the book of boba fett was a little uneven on the pacing…& I’d happily have cut the hover bike “mods” to make space for a few more bits of boba actually being on top of his game instead of slightly half-ass-ing his crime-boss routine…felt like he ought to have picked up a few more applicable tricks in his career working for that sort of people?

  3. …ok…so…I saw something I meant to mention but I can’t remember what because I got distracted by a thing called citadel on amazon prime

    …it’s…well it’s sort of how I imagine something written by AI might turn out?

    …the performances aren’t bad…& stanley tucci is a delight…but it’s like a bunch of spy/thriller/shadow-power-struggle/amnesiac lead tropes all stitched together in a way that fails to hide the sutures?

    …there’s currently three out of I don’t-know-how-many episodes…& it’s sort of fun if you switch most of your brain off when stanley’s not on screen

    …oh…that’s what the other thing was…there’s a second season of sweet tooth on netflix

    • TUCCI should be in caps to get the appropriate amount of attention that he deserves. I was curious about the show. I must admit I didn’t even try to watch that prison show he was in.

      I can’t believe they made a S2 of Sweet Tooth. That show was mediocre at best.

  4. I watched both seasons of Single Drunk Female. Some of it was eye rollingly stereotypical, but it is a sort of sitcom so you’ll have that. It was also moving and I love how it explores women’s relationships. Best of all there’s a plus sized character who is a fully realized person, not just played as the heavy friend, and allowed to have genuine feelings and story line, not just sassy one liners.

    I read Bunny by Mona  Awad. Samantha is a grad student in a prestigious MFA program, stuck with a group of women she calls the Bunnies who she loathes but whose approval she also wants. Things get very weird. It’s a satire of the dark academia genre with some magic realism thrown in. Like a dark fairy tail. READ THIS! Seriously, it’s so good, I can’t stop thinking about it.

    I’m playing Cult of the Lamb and it’s great fun. Cult management is much harder than I thought. My followers are so demanding, they want food and better living conditions. But I get to desecrate the bones of my enemies so it’s worth it.

    I posted the title track of Elvis Costello’s King of America on the DOT and that reminded me of how much I loved that LP so I listened to it while I did my morning chores. Love the cover of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.

     

     

     

  5. What I watched: THE CORONATION! Oh my God, I’m still getting over it. My favorite part: Princess Anne, the Princess Royale, on horseback, doing a most excellent impersonation of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo:

    This, THIS is why this country needs a Royal Family. I don’t care who it is, pick somebody out of the phone book. Award them a few estates around the country; there are lots of Gilded Age mansions falling into decline, the Federal government could spruce them all up and run them for less than it costs to run the Pentagon for 45 minutes, and let our Royals loose. Rather than those tedious State of the Union addresses where you have the unmedicated mentally ill, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, screaming “LIAR!” at you, let Our Monarch formally open Congress in a more dignified way and deliver remarks outlining the administration’s plans for the upcoming year in a very vague and hopeful way. No need to get bogged down in details. Some of the members of the family could hold honorary military titles, and they couldn’t be worse than some of the people who hold real military titles. The charities. The patronages. The country is full of depressing and failing cities, towns, and hamlets. Our Monarch could visit them every so often to cheer up the citizenry, whoever’s left.

    I don’t know why this seems like such a controversial idea.

     

    • I just realized something. Our Monarch would probably have to live in Washington. I suppose we could probably kick out the occupants of one of the grand Beaux-Arts mansions that some of the lesser countries occupy as embassies and install them in there. They would need to take up shooting and fox hunting, and I think people still do that in the tonier parts of Virginia, away from DC’s suburban sprawl, so Zillow might have a few suitable offerings. This could all be worked out.

    • Oh oh oh! It can be us, DeadSplinterites! SplinterRIP can be king because he come with national experience, or maybe you CousinM, because of your interest in the monarchy. The rest of us can be duke, duchess, prince, or princess. Farscy can be the ambassador from the Netherlands. Fun!

      • …I don’t think I could pull off the outfits, to be honest

        …I could probably manage to be a footman or something…but arguably even then my knowledge of who’s who (the actual book) & the updated edition of debretts is sadly lacking, I’m afraid?

      • When QEII ascended the throne, many Establishment figures, what the right-wing in America now call the Deep State, were highly doubtful that such a young woman was up for the job, even though it was 1952, not 1752. Others, however, pointed out that Britain was never so prosperous and powerful as when they were subjects of a Queen, and their precedents were Queen Victoria, when Britain ruled a quarter of the globe, and Queen Elizabeth I, who fought off the Spanish Armada. Queen Anne’s brief reign was overlooked, conveniently enough.

        So I think you, Elliecoo, or one of our distaff* family, should be Our Monarch.

        *You know, for so long I thought distaff was a term of disapprobation. It’s the dis- that makes it sound that way, like disappointment or dismissal or disapproval. In fact, it just means female. Your distaff cousins haven’t fallen out of favor; they just have XX chromosomes.

  6. …so…I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade…though it did in fact rain on the parade…enough to make them cancel most of the aircraft in the fly past I gather…but the met had said they were going to take a strict line with anything they thought might undermine proceedings & they did very much that…nicked a bunch of people by the sounds of it…light on detail as to on what grounds…but…seized a bunch of placards apparently as well as hanging on to a few of the collars that got felt in the process

    …so you were robbed of, judging by one pic I saw, such sloganeering masterworks as “pass the dutchies on the public side”

    …in some circles that’d be considered criminal…which bit depending largely on the circle

    …but I’d admit it made me laugh?

    • Of course it rained, it’s London. One of the reasons why they held QEII’s Coronation on June 2nd was the thinking that the rain was likely to hold off in early June. Of course it rained. And did the Brits care? No, they did not. They wouldn’t live in Britain if they couldn’t stand a little rain. They’d all try to move to LA or Phoenix.

      • …it’s true…the numbers of people who turned out on the mall could only be described as “droves” despite the weather

        …I’d guess there were some soggy folks staked out around various outdoor big screens, too since they set them up in a bunch of spots & the ones that do the same thing for wimbledon matches seem impervious to wet weather so it stands to a sort of reason

        …but if the weather has been finer I expect those parks would have been as packed as the mall?

          • …harry was, I believe, sighted at a few points…entered the main venue with andrew’s kids, I believe

            …& didn’t make the cut for the balcony as that was only “working royals” apparently…which implies child labor is totally fine…but also let them keep andrew under similar wraps without singling him out for unique slighting

            …he had some set of robes I believe but I think it seems off that although he rightly got stripped of rights to military formal attire harry, as a rather more meaningfully veteran & civilian isn’t allowed either…not the sort of thing I put a lot of stock in but it seems one of those is more of a raw deal than the other?

            …either way several people I’m related to did indeed get at least somewhat into the spirit of the thing on both sides of the atlantic…while I was drifting in & out of the kitchen fixing drinks & making lunch & such…on account of being least bothered about missing bits

            …& at least where I was wasn’t the sitting that included whatever vegetarian hell the “coronation quiche” turned out to be…& I didn’t have to contend with flags, miniature or otherwise

            …on the other hand some commemorative tea towels have been purchased so I’m fairly certain we’ve correctly observed the ritual in the time-honored fashion according to birthrights & what-have-you

            …pics or it didn’t happen is all very well for your hoi polloi…but if there isn’t a tea towel…ya basic?

            • Yes, the tea towels, and the commemorative tea cups and saucers, and the key chains and spoons, and the T-shirts. Did I ever tell you that I went to Brighton once in the 90s (I’ve been several times but this visit I remember) and a friend of mine, not Better Half, he was working in London at the time, and I stumbled across the very large junk shop/consignment shop/second-hand store, it was very weird. It was chock-full of two things in particular: tat related to Chuck & Di, and tat related to the Spice Girls. The Chuck & Di stuff was ironic, because their marriage had been over for a while and she was globe-trotting and dating “the Arab,” so she wasn’t yet sanctified by the British public, far from it, and Chuck had divulged on a hacked phone call that he wanted to be Camilla’s tampon. The Spice Girls stuff was totally serious, though.

              I don’t know what it is about the Brits and kitsch. I suppose Americans collect it too and I just don’t notice it.

        • I spent most of the day so far cooking ahead. It was CousinM recipe week, wherein I made his nanaimo bars and mushroom fettuccine with mascarpone. Picks will follow next week, but for sure not made by a food pro or stylist.

          • Did you enjoy them? Believe me, if I submitted pics of what I make, blurry strangely cropped images taken from my barely functioning 13-year-old Android, of sloppy offerings with a black Lab’s snout a couple of inches from the plates, people would close their browsers and never return to Deadsplinter. But I know how to feed my family, and a crowd should it ever return to that, and I’ve gotten no complaints!

            • We will see, haven’t had either yet. Already, I think I will switch to an 8×10 pan and double the chocolate topping. Also, had to order the custard powder online because apparently assortment is no longer a thing in local supermarkets.

  7. What’s the band that gets shared around here sometimes that is like 4 guys in black suits and banjos/bass. They have one video where they are walking and there’s different backgrounds. Help me deadsplinter brain trust!

  8. READ

    “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside” by Nick Offerman: Not sure what I was expecting (OK, I was probably expecting a more comic writing), but this book surprised me, and in the best way. Offerman is a fan of writer/agronomist Wendell Berry, and uses the relationship that he has developed with Berry and others to write some tangentially related stories. Part travelogue, part land-use treatise, part pandemic diary. Highly recommended.

    LISTENED

    This album was in my rescued box of LPs, and I love it even more now.

    WATCHED

    A Dutchman hikes the Balkan region mountains in both winter and summer. Well shot, and the two seasons are well-contrasted. And I’m sure he worked his butt off, especially in the winter.

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