Saturday Morning Brain Drain [7/1/23]

7/1/23 Elliecoo 31
Image via Reel Mockery

Welcome to the first Brain Drain of 2023!

What I Watched: Three Pines, based on Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Series. There are four two-part episodes; each set has an individual murder, while the entire season is linked by a crime against indigenous teenagers. The show has a tip o’ the hat to the original Twin Peaks, with the terrain and odd residents providing a sense of low-level dread. The entire backstory of indigenous peoples, church schools, missing women . . . it is too much for a detective series to tackle. Here is the blurb from Variety:

 As Gamache attempts to solve that first murder in Three Pines, he also begins investigating the disappearance of an Indigenous girl named Blue Two-Rivers (Anna Lambe), whom the Sûreté du Québec have dismissed as a runaway, despite insistence from her family that she’d never leave them or her young daughter behind. It’s a storyline that’s not present in the novels, and serves as the entry point into a broader conversation in Canada right now, where there is a long history of police ignoring or closing the book on missing Indigenous women. As the rest of the season unravels, it’s just one touchstone into the Indigenous communities, as the adaptation makes other changes to further those conversations.

Three Pines Trailer

What I Read: Doctor Galaxy: A Science Fiction Romantic Comedy (Pax Galactica Book 1) by Jenny Schwartz. There is a lot going on in this book, between action, angst, and social/political agendas. Here is the blurb:

New ER doctor Alexi Sur always intended to join an aid agency. She’d just expected to work among humans. But when the Pax Galactica Corps becomes her only option (don’t ask – the debts aren’t hers, but the family is. Much to her regret), Alexi finds herself traveling the galaxy and learning alien physiology and culture, all while becoming a reality TV star. Being pursued by camera drones and starring in her very own Welcome-to-the-Universe documentary was never on Alexi’s to do list. She’s positive the show will flop. After all, Alexi is boring. That’s why her boyfriend left her for her stepsister. But as trillions of aliens tune in to watch Alexi discover the universe in Doctor Galaxy, what she discovers is the existential threat facing humanity. Major Soren Agha already knows about the danger. He’s currently playing peacekeeper for the Eripi of the Pariah Sector whose tragic fate could be humanity’s: conquered, exploited, lost. Can one dedicated doctor save humanity? Can she, as Soren believes, also save the Eripi? And would anyone really notice if she sabotaged a couple of pesky camera drones?

What I Listened To: Deathsport – Nightdrive; New Order – Love Vigilantes (TV Pitch Instrumental Edit); Brendan Benson – People Grow Apart; and Warhaus – Best I Ever Had.

Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, darling DeadSplinterites? Happy New Year, dearest ones! What was up with you, this first week of 2023?

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

31 Comments

  1. I actually have something to contribute for once! This is one of the best Graham Nortons ever. His primary guests are Adele, who needs no introduction, Miranda Hart, who is one of my favorite comedians and had her own sitcom, Miranda, which I watched I think on YouTube, and Jack Whitehall, one of my other favorite comedians. Jack Whitehall has done a ton of work since this episode aired. He was in Good Omens, there was a movie version of his Bad Education, and he was in Clifford the Big Red Dog.

  2. What I watched:  I finally broke down and watched Blade Runner 2049.  It was…long…and slow.  It wasn’t bad, per se.  I mean, the acting was excellent and the story line itself was very good.  But, damn, the pacing was not great.

    What I listened to:  This week’s stop on the best engineered albums of all time brings us to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.  Released in 1959 and engineered by Fred Plaut, this album is a testament to what can be done with a three-track analog tape machine.  By it’s very nature, analog contains a fair amount of internal noise.  Analog hardware has a hum.  Analog tape has a hiss.  Put those two together and you have a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio, which is one of the reasons why digital was such a huge change.  Contrary to popular belief, digital isn’t completely free of noise, but the amount of noise introduced into the signal is so low that it is essentially invisible.  In order to get that same effect with analog, you have to hit the tape hard with a loud signal (like Kevin Gilbert did on Thud).  But, this is an acoustic jazz sextet.  Not exactly 100 dB material.  But, Fred was able to record the seminal audiophile jazz album.  To be clear, there is noise that is heard on the recordings, but considering the source material, it is mind-bogglingly low, and the sound of the instruments is very clear.  Also, the sound-staging for this recording is quite impressive, especially considering that they basically shoved all of the musicians in close together.

    Probably the most impressive thing about this album are the performances themselves.  Davis was widely known to be difficult to deal with–and we’re not just talking about his temper.  He also refused to do any rehearsals or provide the band with any charts prior to the recording session.  He just gave them sketches of scales and melody lines on which to improvise.  Then he gave them a brief idea of how each song should go, and they rolled tape.  While only Flamenco Sketches was recorded in one take (which, alone, is unbelievable), the fact that they were able to put this album together at all with so little preparation really shows just how these musicians had mastered their instruments and their skills at playing within an ensemble.  Of course, this particular band had such legends as Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, so it’s not really a surprise.

    The whole album was only five tracks, so here you go:

     

    • HOW DARE YOU! 2049 is a classic that should be treasured not criticized!!!!

      /typed out with a smirk and a great deal of sarcasm/

      I thought Blade Runner was slow paced when I was a teen which I didn’t appreciate till I was older, but this one is as slow as Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in the Crystal Skull.  I liked the story, but it seemed everyone was on Quaaludes in this entire movie.

      • …I feel like there’s a way that part of the problem is sort of a consequence of them trying to play to a perceived strength but having an unrealistically high bar to get over for it to merit the share of the screentime they give it?

        …the original made it into seminal territory in hollywood terms as a work of cinematography sort of in parallel to the part where it was what may or may not still be called a “cult movie”…so the whole look/tone/vibe/whatever of the thing became the sort of thing you see echoes of in subsequent films & shows & other bits of culture & media

        …so I can see how they maybe came in looking to make par against that sort of baseline…& that part of it shaking out so the pacing loses out to something that comes across like indulgence on account of an intentional-shading-into-incessant focus on the “in media res” of it all

        …technically that wouldn’t be the right term, I guess…flashbacks or no it seemed (to me at least) like they were so proud of all the stuff you’d call world-building in a novel that they thought the audience would appreciate soaking it all in…but it felt a bit more like getting marinated when you wanted things to be cooking?

        …to take a more exaggerated example…the first avatar movie (I assume also the second & however many others they filmed at the same time…which I think was at least a couple) where basically most elements of the thing are borderline vestigial bits of scaffolding designed to showcase the “look at what it looks like” stuff…”unobtanium”…that’s basically trolling your audience levels on a spectrum of similar priorities…you might as well just call it “ore of mucguffin”…but for most of the target audience in avatar’s case it’s sort of beside the point…which in a sense I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be for what I’d think of as the target audience for a blade runner sequel…though…that doesn’t prevent those audiences not just overlapping but being sort of interchangeable depending on what kind of film you feel like watching at a given moment

        …I don’t mind slow-paced stuff…& I don’t think a longer, slower film can’t be better for it…personally I don’t think the blade runner sequel was…& yet…I’d probably say it’s overall a better film than avatar…if a lot less fun than the fifth element…which, though probably about level with avatar in terms of narrative nonsensicality…seems like a pretty decent example of doing more with less when it comes to the visual/fx/backdrop/contextual stuff…& in fairness it’s hard to go the way they did in the fifth element when you’re leaning into a sort of drab noir aesthetic where you’d kind of sworn off anything much colorful

        …hmm…I’m pretty sure I’m back where I started & circular thinking is generally not to be relied upon…so take that with the proverbial pinch of salt, I guess…imho/ymmv/all that sort of thing…&…now that I’ve been pondering noir-transposed-to-another-genre films with good pacing…has anyone else seen brick?

        …it’s not sci fi or anything…but it’s basically a teen high school movie spliced with a raymond chandler novel & for my money it’s pretty great?

  3. …I know I watched a bunch of stuff while feeling generally grotty over the post-christmas period but I clearly wasn’t paying a lot of attention since I haven’t got much to recommend off the back of it…which is bugging me because I swear I enjoyed some movie or other I meant to remember

    …treason…did not improve…so I guess that’s sort of an anti-rec

    …the latest round of archer was still pretty funny despite the tragic lack of jessica walters

    …& I’ve reminded myself why peter f. hamilton’s doorstop-sized sci-fi books are something I generally skip…al capone back from the dead with added sci-fi superpowers just ought to be a whole lot less of a tedious read than the 2nd installment of the reality disfunction books actually is

  4. the missus got me into watching bluey

    its wholesome as fuck..lol

    and listening to knorkator

    and being depressed that everyone i grew up listening to is old people now…..makes me think i might be getting there too

    didnt read anything….coz…uhhh… well…i read in bed and i havent seen that place for more than 4 hours a night for a while now

    (unrelated… im tired and my head hurts has been my norm for a while now too)

  5. I stared watching The Rig. A Scottish drilling crew is stranded on an oil rig. They are cut off from the rest of civilization and strange shit starts to happen. I’m sure you would recognize some of the actors.

    Minor spoilers:

    It feels like a sci-fi show, from the tired but noble captain and the shit disturber who is constantly trying to start a mutiny to the isolation and limited resources and they even throw in a proto-molecule-like invasive species. which is why I’m enjoying it.

  6. I hope you feel better soon @Elliecoo.

    I watched The Menu last night. It had an all star ensemble cast and lots of tension. Once you knew where it was going there weren’t many surprises though. So good but not great.
    I’m reading The Library at Mt. Char by Scott Hawkins. It was advertised as horror/fantasy but that doesn’t seem accurate to me. It’s more like a Marvel universe where all the superheros are bad guys. Holy cow this book is insane! It has a warrior villain dude in a tutu, an entire neighborhood of reanimated humans, and lions. It’s wildly violent and chaotic. @farscythe, I thought you might enjoy it. But there are dog deaths, literally hundreds of them, done in self defense though and there’s no emotional connection to them. I’m hoping to finish it this afternoon.

    • …I have no idea…if it has delusions of knives out it might be secretly genius & possibly funny…if it thinks it’s more succession-esque…I think I’d approach with extreme caution?

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