Joseph

Finished reading: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 📚

How my Sunday is going.

Burnt wood.

Coronado Bridge.

Deejay Melly

I spent hours—four, maybe more—shaping last week’s session of Kult: Divinity Lost, trying to make sense of it, to coax it into coherence. Only halfway through. It holds. Just barely. The rest waits. Belle and Grayson and the dream they shared. Wexley’s visitation, his encounter with what cannot be named but must be described.

Been reading Arctic Dreams. Lopez. I can feel the rhythm of his language moving through mine. Don’t know if it’s influence or infection. Doesn’t matter. It’s in there now.

Finished reading: Fatale by Ed Brubaker 📚

Finished reading: Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist by Alton Chase 📚

Finished reading: Generation Kill by Evan Wright 📚

This project has been on the back burner for the last year. Time to start cooking!

𝗕𝗢𝗥𝗜𝗦

He used to fall for the views. Boris Lebedev was a legend of gravity and social media. But the views dried up and so did the fame. Until one routine stunt caught more than air. Now, the man who fell for fame is running for his life. You only go viral once. Make it count!

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 22 “Paper Dove” (1997)

Okay, that’s a wrap for season one. Looking back, I realize I only caught two episodes when they originally aired. What’d I think? The pacing is slow. Sometimes the show can be boring, but somehow always riveting. And Lance Henricksen always delivers.

Finished reading: Write Ahead the Future Looms 2019 📚

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 21 “Maranatha” (1997)

This episode’s mood was so thick you’d choke on it. It was steeped in the history of the Chernobyl disaster and its related mythology of the apocalypse. Chernobyl translates into “wormwood,” which many compared to the Biblical star of Wormwood in the Book of Revelation. The episode was pretty gruesome for 1997 mainstream TV: shotgun blasts to the head, the cutting of fingers, and an autopsy. Oh, and the devil may or may not have made an appearance. But actor Bill Nunn definitely did.

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 20 “Broken World” (1997)

“We’re witnessing the birth of a psychosexual killer.”

Oh, hey, look, it’s Donnelly Rhodes! Loved him as Doctor Cottle in Battlestar Galactica. He almost looks naked without a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Love the Equus vibe of this episode. Now I think about it: What if Richard Burton played Frank Black? And I gotta wonder if this episode influences Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 19 “Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions” (1997)

I’ve been craving a major arc for this series, but now that I’m getting what I wanted, I want the show to go back to serial killers. But I guess I’m in the long haul because I just purchased season 2 from eBay.

Oh, and in this episode, a mother’s neck was slit with a Swiss Army knife. Is that even possible?

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 18 “Lamentation” (1997)

Late last century, TV producers have been leaning more and more towards telling a larger story in a series rather than the monster-of-the-week. Almost, but not quite. This episode was gripping, but by the end of it, I was wondering how it would wrap up. But it didn’t. A supporting character died, Frank’s marriage is in doubt, and a killer is still on the loose. And not even a “To be continued.” I had to restrain myself from immediately watching the next episode.

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 17 “Walkabout” (1997)

Whoa, brutal cold open. Literally gave me chills. Millennium was steeped in the fears and taboos of later 20th-century America, and “Walkabout” was about our nation’s increasing usage of antidepressants and why.

Horror aside, one of the things I like about this series is that it’s almost always raining in every episode. And you can see breath streaming from everyone’s mouth when they shoot outdoor scenes. I also like that everyone’s clothes look normal, not tightly fitted, as we see on TV shows today. The clothes on Lance Henriksen hang off his body.

📺 Millennium, S 1 E 16 “Covenant” (1997)

Mark Snow does a fine job scoring music, but I do not like his work. That said, the music Snow composed for the opening scene was pretty, and the camera work using reflections was creative.

Over the years, I have accumulated many books I never finished. I have resolved to read this book within the next two years. So far, the process has not been the slog I thought it would be. Marguerite Duras’s The Lover was simultaneously crushing and romantic and stylistically written as if by a more elegant Cormac McCarthy. Phil Freeman’s Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century turned me on to many musicians and albums I need to listen to (I’m playing an album by Zonal as I write this). Write Ahead the Future Looms 2019, which is one of the books I am currently reading, is breezy cyberpunk, and one of the reasons I enjoy it is due to unintentional editing; one of the writer’s story notes was revealed, giving me insight into how other writer’s work.

Up next is Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, which I’ve put off reading for far too long.