works of wanderlust

I have been dabbling in my media consumption. I have half a dozen books on the go and it’s a dead heat to see which one I’ll race ahead and finish first. I’m deep into at least four different video games right now. I’ve got a couple movie-watching missions on the go. And I’ve been tackling my episodic entertainment on the streaming platforms with a scattershot abandon.

My lack of focus is probably linked to a couple of things happening in my professional life and my inability to sit still for longer than thirty minutes, it seems, lately. I have this overwhelming sense of something that I can’t really describe in other way than as a sort of productivity fomo, a fear of missing out on making or doing something more important than what I am ever doing at that moment, so I can’t sit still and just do much of anything.

But my neurosis aside, I did manage to push through a couple of series.

The last couple of weeks I watched:

streaming: Umbrella Academy, Season 1

I watched this whole series the first time, start to finish, pretty much as it rolled out.  Each new season release turned into a binge watch with the Kid. Binge watching is not my preference. I think it must be a generational thing. Kids these days! I prefer my suspense to hangout at arbitrary act breaks determined by the commercial nature of broadcast television that forced me once to wait an entire week between episodes. Gah! Alas, there was a part of me that felt like watching it in binge-mode the first time through had my poor old guy brain at a disadvantage and that a slower paced rewatch was in order. I spread my second go at season one out over about six months, which admittedly, might have been a lot slower than the spirit of my long lost self intended.  If you have not partaken of the Umbrella Academy quite yet think of it like a kind of off-brand Marvel superhero-type story blended with a bit of goth style, some retro-alternate-futurism and a dash of dark humour. Oh, and a lot more random death. It was the brainchild of Gerard Way founder of My Chemical Romance and cousin to conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan, which should tell you more than enough about the vibe of this thing.  I watched it first time with a fourteen year old and now she is doing an arts degree in drama and film studies. Correlation or causation, you tell me. The backstory is far too complex to explain, except maybe to say kids with mysterious powers are raised by the world worst parent without access to therapy and what could go wrong? The end of the world could go wrong, that’s what could go wrong. Worth your time, but maybe watch it over a few weeks and neither two days nor six months.

streaming: Avenue 5, Season 2

I have a soft spot for comedic science fiction. In fact, did I have the confidence of prose to compose comedic narrative in a science fictional setting it would almost certainly be my genre of choice. I even wrote a series of articles trying to wrap my head around the mechanics of the absurd, thinking (probably vainly) that if I could put some logic to creating the illogical I might have a thread of hope upon which to grasp and thus, perhaps foolishly, try to write some silly sci fi. The conclusion that I ultimately came to was that writing absurdist and funny spec fiction is actually hard—and so much more difficult than writing “big guns in space blow shit up” fiction or “evil robots chase frightened people” stories. The thing is, I grew up on a steady diet of Douglas Adams and Red Dwarf, and I know for my endless efforts of looking for it that good absurdist comedic science fiction pretty much remains a genre with a lot of empty shelf space. Again: because it’s hard to do well. And I mean sure, modern casual science fiction bros like Dennis Taylor or Andy Weir have written great stories that are funny-adjacent, often providing a good belly laugh, but those and other funny-adjacent authors are storytellers who are telling serious stories while acknowledging that sometimes regular people do funny things. People are not generally absurd all the time, is what I’m saying, and neither are their characters. What I’m talking about here are mostly slapstick among the stars humour, buffoonery and chaos and, yeah, absurdity. Avenue 5’s cast was stuffed full of great comedic actors but only earned itself two short and obscure seasons of what turned out to be a cliffhanger serial narrative because—I’d like to think—it was misunderstood. I finally tracked down the second season last week and watched it in the span of twenty-four hours binging, and too watched it with the eye of someone looking for absurdity in space. Anyone looking for a moral or a message would be disappointed of course, but like all great comedy it had heart and that should have earned it a couple more seasons—and not an abrupt cancellation.