Saturday Morning Brain Drain [25/6/22]

A place to let it all out.

25/6/22 butcherbakertoiletrymaker 30

What I Watched:  The Fargo TV series.  It’s…..interesting.  I guess I like how they take a completely different approach and timeline with each new season—which is how I am able to justify watching it even though it doesn’t meet my 5-season minimum rule.  Theoretically the 5th season is supposed to air this year but I don’t know when.  The writing and the acting are very good, and the weird isn’t so weird that it distracts from the plot lines.

What I Read:  OMG.  I’m never going to finish this fucking book.

What I Listened To:  Our latest stop on the tour of the best engineered albums of all time brings us to Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty.  Engineered by Mike Campbell, Don Smith & Bill Bottrell, this was Petty’s first “solo” album, although he used a number of the Heartbreakers on the album.  In fact the only member of the band to not participate was drummer Stan Lynch who absolutely hated playing Full Moon Fever tunes during subsequent Heartbreakers tours.  The style of the album was a definite departure from Petty’s earlier work with the Heartbreakers, having a more Beatles-ish feel to it.  Considering that George Harrison contributed acoustic guitar and backing vocals to one of the tracks, this becomes a little more obvious.  Roy Orbison also threw in some backing vocals on the track.  Unsurprisingly, Dylan was not asked to do anything because he sticks out like a sore thumb. 

Petty, who was known for his general disdain of modern recording techniques (he used to wear a button that said “Back to Mono”), also threw in a little tip of the hat to the days of LPs and cassettes, by adding a short spoken word clip after the end of Runnin’ Down a Dream where he points out to “CD Listeners” that this is the point at which a vinyl album would need to be flipped over.

Fun fact:  Mary Jane’s Last Dance was written during these sessions but Petty couldn’t quite figure it out here and worked on it some more for a later album.

Overall, the album has very good sonics.  It’s a little reverb-heavy for my taste, but not so much that it washes everything out (Looking at you, Dream of the Blue Turtles).

So, Deadsplintererererererers, what’s up?  What have you been reading or watching or spinning?  Tell us all about it.

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About butcherbakertoiletrymaker 602 Articles
When you can walk its length, and leave no trace, you will have learned.

30 Comments

  2. I watched The Deep End on Hulu. I’d never heard of Teal Swan before, but apparently she’s huge on YouTube and Instagram. She’s a shaman who uses a typical mishmash of cultural appropriation and psychobabble to grift, vulnerable people, out of their money.  And I’m now listening to The Gateway, a podcast about her done by Gizmodo. She’s the scariest spiritual leader since Jim Jones, just as controlling, narcissistic, and power-mad as he was, and has set up her cult in the jungle of Costa Rica. I predict this isn’t going to end well.

    I’m playing Spiritfarer on Nintendo Switch. I plan on doing that all day because I need mindless entertainment.

  3. i watched the condemned

    it fell short of expectations…and it being a steve austin wwe produced movie…expectations were not high

    i had hoped vinny jones would improve things….i like him…he can only play one role…which is the angry hard englishman…but he usually plays it well

    and well…i guess he did play it fairly well again…but it was still meh

    sure as hell was a lot better than following the news tho…and thats all i needed it for…so it served its purpose…but i wouldnt reccomend it…unless you are looking for some brain off time

  4. We’re rewatching Veep interspersed with Arrested Development. Next on the docket is a Thick of It rewatch probably interspersed with Parks and Rec or what I like to refer to as comfort food. Also, watching Stephen Colbert and John Oliver – which we don’t normally do – but I don’t know – it just seems like they get it? My anxiety is very high so one of the fam just brought me some cbd gummies – we’ll see how those work.

  5. The first two seasons of Fargo are some of the best things I’ve seen on TV. The next two had flashes but seemed not well thought through.

    MINOR SPOILER

     

    Bob Odenkirk’s police chief has felt like the perfect encapsulation of the mindset of most people in charge these days.

    They are so hung up on a nostalgic idea that there can’t be any monsters anywhere that they end up deliberately blocking people with the evidence and letting evil spread and grow.

    A couple of deaths turn into way more because they can’t accept that Ol’ Lester (or Jared or Ivanka or Bill Barr) could ever be more than a blubbery little person.

  6. …for those that like that sort of thing strange new worlds continues to be a pleasant if temporary antidote to the bleaker shades of reality at present

    …while the boys continues to try to out-bleak everything but throw in the occasional bit of wry humor that if I’m honest I guess I still fall for – the disclaimer text at the beginning of the latest episode being an example, which began “some scenes may not be suitable for some, really most, let’s be honest all viewers” & ended “aren’t real, harmed no one, and in fact cost a hilariously large amount in visual effects”

    …but ms. marvel continues to be pretty much delightful & fun for all the family…& the closing episode of the kenobi thing did a pretty good job of pulling off what it needed to

    …haven’t got around to watching the dr strange movie but that’s streaming now…as is (I think) another season of the umbrella academy…which I’m hoping might offer a welcome distraction?

    • I agree again about Ms. Marvel. Fun and smart… the one thing I find a bit puzzling is her discovery of her powers seems like not a big deal to her. It seems like it would be pretty much all consuming to the point of skipping school and losing sleep just to see what she could do.

      Saw Dr. Strange 2 and I think I probably should have seen it on a big screen. It seems like a lot of cool shots mixed in with endlessly expanding and contracting magical powers that vary depending on what the moviemakers want at any particular time. Bend the fabric of space and time AND be unable to do something until you slowly walk somewhere? Sure, why not both things.

      • …I think when you’re adapting a superhero comic to a live action thing on a screen you pretty much always have to handwave some stuff…& to some extent which things you handwave & which you try to show/explain can make a big difference to what I guess I’d think of as the tone of the show?

        …& in one sense she’s presented as being thoroughly immersed in the genre/culture to the point that a slightly au fait attitude is sort of plausible in a “that’s a lot to process” sort of a way…& maybe to one that could let a lot of viewers put that down to just “this is how it’s done” when it comes to powers developing at the speed of plot

        …that said, from my recollection of the comics (in which the powers & the set up for them work somewhat differently) she’s initially both hesitant in the sense of not being sure what’s going on or how they work but also because she’s considerably afraid of the consequences of her parents finding out…so…between that part of the set up being the same & the whole thing starting in the last stages of setting up a wedding I was content to put that down to it being difficult to find time without being found out, I think

        …I know what you mean…& there’s the handy boy genius school friend that seems like a way to fast forward that side of things…but peter parker just had to avoid tipping off aunt may…not a full household in the grip of an extended bout of familial logistics on a strict deadline?

        • I think one of the many good things about the show is that it makes a really compelling case why she would want to keep her powers under wraps.

          It’s really well connected to all of the overarching and very well done family and community issues she’s dealing with, so it feels completely natural.

          Although I’d still like to see her a bit more curious and sneaky about them.

    • The new Dr Strange movie looks a lot like a horror movie compared to a superhero movie and I don’t really like that genre, so I’m on the fence with watching it. Yes I know it’s PG-13 and yes I’m a big wuss.

      • …the “what if?” animated series they did certainly had some horror elements to what that did with the dr strange character (& I think also had a zombie episode at one point) so that seems plausible…I think before he was a movie character a lot of his roster of villains were demons or demon-adjacent sort of entities…but I never read all that much of the dr strange stuff so I could be wrong about that…either way he’s definitely the occult end of the marvel spectrum?

  8. I’m going to be very brief for once. I watched Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style, which was much funnier and better than the plot summary would suggest. Then I also polished off Sign of the Gladiator, a sword-and-sandals epic from 1959. A Syrian queen, played by a very blonde Anita Ekberg, falls in love with a captured Roman general, played by Georges Marchal. It goes like you’d expect, but there is plenty of midcentury beef- and cheesecake to keep all viewers entertained. It comes in at less than an hour and a half, so it’s no Ben Hur.

  9. Last week we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum but before we did, we watched the series about the biggest unsolved art heist in US history at said museum.

    https://www.netflix.com/title/81032570

    I have to say that the series was very unsatisfying but did make the museum more fun, especially the rooms with empty frames where the art was.

    I’m still reading the George Carlin book which is even more timely now if you remember his views on abortion.

    Listening to something that might interest my buddy @farscythe

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