Chateau Lloyd

I'm once again binge-watching the early seasons of Miami Vice and I'm thinking it would be fun to set the next installment in the World Series Championship year of 1984.  It's an interesting year for a variety of reasons.  Obviously there is the George Orwell angle, but 1984 marked a rare moment of unity in American politics.  The notion of a a presidential candidate carrying 49 states is inconceivable today.

Whether looking at Cold War politics, cultural differences and of course the far superior music and entertainment, I think it would be fun.

As to the plot...well, that's yet to be determined.  I've got a couple of ideas and I'm sure some of the same characters will be represented. 

Of course, nothing may come of it, but that's the fun of being a novelist - not just the ideas that are completed, but the ones that are tossed around for fun.

One of our commenters made a mention of a 1964 BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End book series (which has three or four books, depending on how one feels about it).

A careful internet search revealed that such a thing did exist and that a DVD was produced not long ago.  I picked one up on ebay for less than $7 (including shipping), which tells you it was not much of a commercial success.

I've touched on the books before (including a lengthy comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy), and so this review is more of a discussion of the content and quality of the adaptation than a discussion of what's in it.

In terms of the packaging, it's a slapdash production, made in Mexico and featuring generic "wartime" graphics that are actually from World War II and completely inappropriate.

The quality of the transfer is better than I expected, but still flawed.  The audio is particularly challenging, no doubt a function of its minimal production quality.  There seems to be a single microphone on the set, close to the camera, and as characters move farther back, it becomes difficult to hear them.  There is also some distortion rising to static, which gives the sense of actually watching a broadcast with some mild atmospheric interference.  I kept wanting to adjust the rabbit ears.

As to the cast, it's excellent.  This was apparently a breakthrough role for Judi Densch, who is very good as Valentine Wannop.  I didn't recognize anyone else in the cast, but they were all solid in the various roles.

Unlike the HBO production, this gives much more prominence to Christopher Tietjens' time in the trenches, which I liked.  Alas, the BBC also did some bizarre graphics, both for the title credits and also to segue into battle which are dated and cringe-worthy.

While I enjoyed it, I can't say as I would recommend it.  If it were cleaned up and properly restored (especially the audio), that would make a big difference.  As it is, Ford fans will enjoy it, but I can see why they're practically giving these away.

A year ago I did a post on how the snakes have come back to Ireland.

By curious coincidence, First Things has an article with almost exactly the same title on the same topic.

The secularization of St. Patrick's feast day is kind of fascinating.  I'm seeing all sorts of promotions for corned beef and cabbage, but of course it is a Friday in Lent, which means that meat is forbidden.  Yes, there are some jurisdictions where dispensations have been made, but it's plain that the concept of the day is now getting drunk and eating bland food.

This is not by any means unique.  Christmas is famously secular these days, mostly pagan myths about a fat old man and flying reindeer.  Still the fall of Ireland is sad to behold.

England has also embraced the same empty, soulless materialism that fascinated the United States.  The allure is powerful.  Who doesn't want to cast aside the restrictive morals of the past to indulge in every form of sin and gratification?  It is a tale as old as Sodom and Gomorrah.

On the positive side, I think we are rapidly reaching the limits of what decadence can even permit.  This was one of the themes of The Vampires of Michigan - at a certain point, you simply can't debauch yourself any more.  There are finite ways of gratifying lust, each carrying progressively greater risk and damage.  Just as with drugs, there is a law of diminishing returns, where each new transgression brings less of a high.

We see this with music and entertainment - stuff that was shocking in my youth is boring today.  Madonna masturbating with a cross in the late 80s is as distant to us as the Elvis Presley swinging his hips was back then.

J.R.R. Tolkien understood this, that the ultimate end of evil must be nihilism.  Evil is all about pulling things down, whether they be moral boundaries or degrading the human spirit.  When at last all depravity has been experienced, there is nothing left but the void.

This is why I am hopeful, because darkness ultimately cannot triumph.  Clearly it is my task to keep the lamp burning through the night until the dawn inevitably comes.  St. Patrick showed us how it was done and we will have to do it again.

My recent perusal of Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels brings out another critique of post-war America, which is the erosion of religion in public life.

Today much of this blame falls on the Baby Boomers, but Thompson himself was born in 1937, and I think much of the loss of faith can be blamed on the unprecedented prosperity in America following World War II.

A general historical principle is that affluence and prosperity breed decadence and depravity.  Being afflicted by the mortal sin of pride, humans naturally turn from the divine and attribute their success to their own cleverness and intellect.  Only fools still follow the old ways, which limit both human imagination and the scope of available pleasure.

The Old Testament is chock full of examples, and records of other peoples in different cultures confirm the same tendency.  Contemporary accounts of prosperous reigns almost always include a lamentation that the gods and their morals are being neglected.

It this was true of the US, but with two key additions.  The first was the sheer scale of wealth, which gave common people a quality of life beyond the reach of the super-rich as recently as a half-century ago.  While the Robber Barons of the gilded age might have had a luxurious estate and gold utensils, they didn't have x-rays, antibiotics or radios.  To evade the heat, they had to retreat to an estate on the lake or in the foothills, but by the 60s and 70s, air condition was something middle class people had.

The second was the pervasive influence of the Puritan founding.  Though their religious practice is all but forgotten, their beliefs regarding individual success and failure endure.  Put simply, people who are doing well are seen as morally superior to those who have failed.  Whereas this was once seen as a sign that they were among God's Elect, it has increasingly been folded into the secular concept of the "meritocracy," the notion that the best and brightest should be accorded more prestige and therefore power.

This no doubt fueled Thompson's hatred of the middle class, since he keenly felt the stigma of not achieving conventional measures of success.

He also detested what he considered their primitive and dull-witted adherence to the old moral codes.  His writing (and that of his contemporaries) generally sneers at organized religions.  In this telling, religious people are either hypocrites (and often running a racket) or simply too stupid to sin. 

Thompson himself is something of an aesthete - sampling drugs like rare vintages of wine.  It's interesting that he regarded the Kentucky Derby as "decadent and depraved" but felt much more at home among the Hell's Angels or various hippie communes.

The problem with society wasn't immorality, but morality itself.  If people would just back off, stop judging and enjoy life, everything would work out fine.   It was the stuffed shirts who ruined everything.  This is the ethos of Caddyshack.

That's all when and good when one is young and carefree, but it ultimately doesn't satisfy the soul.  The significance of The Big Chill was that it was the first warning to the Boomers that the party would eventually end.

At that point, it was the rubes who went to church who were having the last laugh while the materialists frantically try various cosmetic and health procedures to preserve their youth.

I've written about Carly Simon's semi-conversion, but John Voight's change is even more profound and striking.  In the 1970, he was making edgy fare like Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, but he's now offering public prayers for the salvation of the nation. 

There's a hint of Evelyn Waugh about that, and one of the great might-have-beens is if Thompson had a similar conversion.  Alas, he shut himself completely off from God.  Even his funeral was a mockery of religious observance.

Ultimately, that's where materialism leads.  At some point the drugs no longer produce the same highs, one's possessions seem old and tawdry and the end of football season looms (Thompson's suicide note actually cited this as part of his depression).  At that point, the god of the two-car garage falls silent.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been talking things over with Chris Braly of Bleedingfool.com and the contents of that interview are now available on the site.

Long-time readers of my blog will find few surprises, but it was nice to see the management step out side the normal comic/geek culture box and examine how geopolitics can shape American culture.

I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of people interested in both Chinese military history and comic books has a fairly shallow overlap, but there is a connection.

As I note in the interview, Hollywood has largely abandoned middle America and has turned instead to the vast Chinese market for money.  This has allowed them make a fortune selling vapid super-hero movies, but the drive to put "woke" themes in everything is something the Chinese have proven far more resistant to than Hollywood expected.  This leaves the big studios (particularly Disney) in a place where their biggest market and the home market both hate their products.  Hence the layoffs.   Anyhow, read the whole thing.

In a rare departure from my normal practice, I  am actually streaming a show rather than owning it on physical media.

This is because my previous 80s TV exploration was not very satisfactory.  While The Equalizer had its good points, it didn't lend itself to binge viewing and I doubt I will get through the whole thing any time soon.

That's why there is a place for streaming, especially if it incurs no additional cost.  That's how I am watching Remington Steele.  This is yet another 80s production I was too young to watch (it aired at 10) or understand (most of the references would have been lost on me).

For those who don't know, the premise is that Laura Holt, a young, beautiful and ambitious private detective (played by the delightful Stephanie Zimbalist) decides to set up her own agency under her own name.  As the intro credits explain, it turns out that an agency with a female's name is considered too feminine, so she invents a man - Remington Steele - who will be the titular head of her new enterprise.  There is of course no such man, and the pilot episode centers around how she and the other employees have conspired to make him invisible but ever-present.  "Mr. Steele never involves himself in cases," is their boilerplate excuse.

In the course of that episode, a mysterious debonair thief enters the scene and cleverly assumes the identity of Remington Steele.  This was Pierce Brosnan's big break and he's remarkably good.

The focus of the series for its first few episodes is trying to determine "Mr. Steele's" true identity, but by mid-season , there are cases to solve and so the focus shifts to how Steele helps or hinders these. 

Because Steele is something of a con man and international rake of mystery, this allows Brosnan to assume different roles, further exploiting his dramatic skill.  The writing is generally excellent, and in addition to clever wordplay regarding romance, one of the running gags is that Steele is the ultimate detective movie buff, and his "investigative technique" is chiefly trying to find which movie he's a part of at any given time.

Not only is this satisfying for film nerds, it's a clever way of poking fun at the genre, because by the early/mid-80s, just about every detective plot had been used at least once.

And that gets us to one of the weaknesses of the detective format, which is the lack of an overarching plot.  This became apparently late in the first season of Remington Steele, because with Brosnan's character now contributing to the agency, the initial dynamic of cast had changed.

At the start of the pilot episode, the core cast included Zimbalist, James Read as her co-investigator Murphy Michaels, and receptionist Bernice Fox (Janet DeMay).   Brosnan's addition therefore crowded out the other two.  For a brief time Fox (invariably called "Miss Wolf" by Steele) was a rival for his affections, but this faded as his relationship with Holt heated up.  Similarly Read's character went from being loyal, competent and somewhat envious to a spiteful try-hard, and what we would call today a "beta orbiter." 

For an actor as talented as Read, this was an unacceptable role and I'm sure he was afraid of becoming typecast, so he departed the show.  This was probably the right decision because it opened the way for him play George Hazard in all three "seasons" of North and South.  This was his best and most famous role and also introduced him to his second (and current) wife, Wendy Kilbourne.

I should note that the Reads (she took his name) are remarkable not only in the longevity of their marriage, but their low profile.  Read works intermittently, chiefly doing guest spots.  Presumably this is because they both made a bundle doing North and South and Mrs. Read is now a practicing attorney.

The second (and most successful season in terms of ratings) has just started and Doris Roberts has been added to the cast as receptionist Mildred Krebs.  Unlike her predecessors, she has no knowledge of Remington Steele's background and simply takes him at face value.

Thus we have a core cast of the two investigators and their loyal clerical assistant - a dynamic that will be repeated in Moonlighting, which is my next show on tap.

In addition to the exceptional writing, there show has considerable romantic tension between the two leads, a tension heightened by their clashing roles.  It is hard to imagine something like this being done today, but the 80s was still capable of having a push-pull romance where a woman in charge found herself at risk of being subordinated by a strong man she was passionately attracted to.

Another nice element is the music.  The show features a theme by Henry Mancini and then incidental music by Richard Lewis Warren.  When Warren isn't reprising Mancini's theme, he's using a similar style of music, a throwback to 1960s smooth jazz and vintage detective movies.

As is often the case, this is something of a rough draft for a future Bleeding Fool column, and there I'll explore that dynamic more fully.

This past weekend was drill for my old unit, so in addition to sleeping in, I set up a wargame I haven't time to play for years.

The game is question was R.A.F., a solitaire game of the Battle of Britain.  Designed by John Butterfield and published by West End Games, R.A.F. is somewhat unique insofar as there is no option for a second player.  Once wargaming became big enough for market research, it was clear that most games were played solo and many of them had ratings for both complexity and solitaire play included in their advertising.

I'm not here to do a review per se - you can find a complete inventory on boardgamegeek.com or grognards.com, the point here is that this is how I spend much of my youth - playing wargames, with or without human opponents.

Wargaming could be competitive, but for me it was a way to interact with history.  Instead of just reading a book, I could become and active participant (usually while reading books on the topic).  Much of what I know about military history was acquired by playing a wargame on various conflicts.

West End Games was an eclectic outfit, and one without any particular focus.  In addition to R.A.F. it published the brilliant Imperium Romanum II, a wonderful and sweeping study of the Roman Empire.  Yet much of the company's product line centered on less erudite topics, such as sci-fi roleplaying (Paranoia) and some licensed products.

It seems incredible now, but back in the 80s, obscure lightweights like West End obtained the licenses for both Star Wars and Star Trek gaming systems.  At that time, both franchises were assumed to be "kid stuff" and so anyone willing to try to make a buck on them in the new niche hobby of gaming was welcome to try for a relatively modest fee.

West End took the ball and ran with it, particularly in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game.   A plethora of supplements, adventures and other aids flooded the marketplace and were eagerly devoured by fans left high and dry by the end of the original trilogy. 

I was not one of them.  I bought a couple of the wargames, but by that time I was putting Star Wars in the past, along with other 'kid stuff.' 

How times have changed!  Now even superheroes are unabashedly followed by people well into adulthood.  We truly live in an age where childhood never ends and the phrase "act your age" had no apparent meaning.  Back in the 1980s Bill Shatner could infamously tell a bunch of Trekkies in a Saturday Night Live skit to "get a life," but fandom is here to stay.

I don't think that's a positive development.  Many of my contemporaries are developmentally locked in the late teens, and have abandoned relationship formation and child-raising in favor of a perpetual adolescent emphasis on hobbies.  On a personal level, I haven't talked to most of them in many years - precisely because I have so little in common with them.  On the macro-scale, we see plummeting birthrates and a culture where people are sharply divided in large part because they have so little in common.

A childless ever-teen isn't going to have the same approach to political questions as parents trying to bring up a family.  Indeed, the oddly casual attitude to sexualizing children is part of this - people without proper adult formation see no need for such boundaries.

Meanwhile, West End ultimately lost its licenses and went out of business, along with most of its contemporaries.  Gaming continues, but it is both more accepted and also more fragmented, sustained in large part by advances in print-on-demand services and online communities.

Thus, gaming and geekdom are still growing strong and have never been more accepted - which is a serious problem.

While I've been retro-watching the 80s shows of my youth, my memory does in fact extend into the 70s as well.  Sad to say, the few attempts I've made to go re-watch old programming did not go well.  Hulu had M*A*S*H on about a year ago and I could not get into it.  It was painful to sit through.  Maybe one of the later seasons would be better, but neither my wife nor I could stomach it.

However, The Rockford Files has aged reasonably well.  It's got the usual detective tropes and comically unsafe firearms use that is emblematic of the period and as I'm closing in on the halfway mark of the first season I can see why it was successful.

James Garner is perfect for the role of Jim Rockford and he has the easy charm and charisma that is sorely lacking in today's stars.  He's genuinely interesting to watch.  Such qualities made often made the difference between schlock and decent programming.

The setting is of course iconic - a guy who lives in a battered trailer set up in a ocean side parking lot.  The interior is nice, but it's constantly the target of various break-ins.  While perpetually broke, Rockford nevertheless boasts a sweet ride - a gold Pontiac Firebird.  This of course anticipates the 80s tropes where private investigators have sweet rides and/or helicopters (or speedboats, or whatnot).

Rockford therefore walks the line between being plausible and relatable (perpetually broke, often beat up) but also admirable (handsome, has cool car, total ladies' man).  There is not a trace of the Mary Sue in this show, which demonstrates how far Hollywood has fallen.

I'm not sure how long I will stick with it, but for now it's a welcome diversion while I finish publishing Walls of Men and recharge my batteries for my next creative venture.

After a cold snap around Christmas, winter turned unexpectedly mild.  January was gloomy and chilly, but temperatures generally got above freezing during the day, causing all the snow to melt and given the world a brown and dreary appearance.

I think one of the things that makes winter in Michigan tolerable is the snow.  Not only is it attractive, it reflects light, and since the latest snowfall, things are a lot more cheerful.

Snow also absorbs sound, amplifying the natural quiet of winter.   Before the weather changed, it felt like late November - no snow and the scattered holiday decorations hinting that Christmas season had just begun.

Now it's bitterly cold, with temperatures threatening to go below zero and fine powder wafting through the thin air.  This is as it should be this time of year.

At least in this part of the state, bitter cold also brings brilliantly clear skies, and I'll happily trade sub-zero wind chills for some sunlight.

This is very much indoor weather, and I'm making use of it in terms of modeling and painting.  When spring comes, it will be time to set up the garden and then the fleeting joy of summer will keep me outside.  But for now I don't have to feel guilty about watching a movie or playing a game.

I saw Lisa Marine Presley died the other day.  It was all over the supermarket tabloids.  I don't generally pay attention to the news, sot that's where I get most of my pop culture information.

Seeing the pictures of her with her father reminded me how pervasive Elvis Presley once was in American culture.  Almost every month a tabloid would report an "Elvis sighting" because of course the King of Rock 'n Roll wasn't dead, he was merely in hiding.  Like James Dean, he's supposed to have faked his death to escape the pressure of celebrity.

I never understood that line of logic - celebrity status isn't a lifetime entitlement.  It has to be constantly shored up, and that's what generally makes famous people succumb to drugs and depression.  If you want to stop being a celebrity, stop doing anything.  There are lots of celebrities who did just that and no one talks about them.  Heck, Olivia de Havilland lived for decades in obscurity and was one of those people about which it was said:  "She's still alive?!  Amazing."

Not to digress, but James Dean would easily have vanished.  His whole persona was that of an alienated youth, and without that, I'm not sure what he would have brought to the table.  Yes, I'm sure the long slow retreat into either "Where are they now?" or "famous for being famous" would have been annoying, but it takes a lot less effort than faking one's death. 

I'm reminded here of Dirk Benedict, who achieved considerable notoriety in the 80s as the One True Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica and then starred in the A-Team.   Having made his money, he retired, surfacing briefly to denounce the feminization of his old character.

The point is that just quitting show business is pretty easy.  There's always some new face for the press to fixate upon.

Anyway, not only have the Elvis sightings stopped, but I couldn't remember the last time I heard his music.  The "oldies" stations these days rarely go back into the 1960s.  When they do, it's to play songs recognizable through commercial licensing.  Even "classic rock" formats ignore the King, which is weird because I should think his rock is about as classic as it gets. 

My life only briefly overlapped his, but I know his music well because it was pervasive throughout the 80s.  Indeed, one of the strange games memory plays on us is that we often associate music with events that happened years after its release because while a given song may have peaked in one year, it may well enjoy heavy airplay for many years afterwards.

In putting together playlists based on decades, I've found that the change of a calendar is pretty meaningless, and that well into (for example) the 80s, 70s music was getting plenty of use. 

(As a sidebar, there's also the issue that music is continually evolving, which is why 1981 sounded very different than 1985 or 1989.)

Anyhow, it's strange how something that was once pervasive can vanish entirely.