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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

Strange Currencies

In between working and a spiralled construction project, I've been watching TV which is one of my favorite things to do (I was going to say "favorite things to do to unwind" but no: it is one of my favorite things to do, period). One thing was watching Season 3 of "The Bear" which has given me Complicated Feelings and I wanted to write it down.

Season 1 of "The Bear" was, I think, excellent. It was intense day-at-work stressful to watch in the way that sometimes gets overdone (Aaron Sorkin I am looking at you) but here it felt fine, it felt real, and I felt that the characters were believable (for the most part) — nuanced, flawed, vulnerable, human.

Season 2 felt like the payoff earned for white-knuckle stressing over someone else's job in season 1. Episodes that would have felt saccharine (an aspiring pastry chef gets a fully funded trip to Copenhagen to live an absolute fantasy — a respectful and nurturing educational environment, a European city, living on a houseboat, a cat that doesn't sleep on your face) — because it was prefaced with the realism of season 1, season 2's sweetness felt genuine. I liked how they showed people grappling with how the decision to get better necessarily starts with seeing your own flaws, that insecurity, and how hope can be so terrifying. And season 2's "flashback" episode was gorgeously acted, beautifully filmed, hilarious and heartbreaking, achingly real.

Season 3… Here, I will summarize every episode: Go fuck yourself. I love you. A verse of a song you loved, started inexplicably mid-scene with lyrics that don't seem to connect in any particular way to the otherwise wordless scene (again), and the song cuts off after one verse or less. Go fuck yourself. I love you, but I can't say so.  A silent food montage. Go fuck yourself. I'm sorry, but I can't say so. Some nonsense with highly incompetent but purportedly loveable people who in no way would be allowed to stay if this job is really so precisely demanding and everyone is taking it more seriously than a cancer diagnosis. Why do we insist on these bumbling minor characters? Is it so we can keep calling this "a comedy"? I am tired of Carmy's profile. I am tired to my bones of characters who can't express what they are thinking and feeling. I feel like every actor in this is amazing and none of them are being allowed to reach their potential. For example, Oliver Platt can sell the corniest dialogue but I wish someone would give him better things to say. The way this show anvils its foreshadowing would get you kicked out of television writer school. Go fuck yourself. I was going to quit mid-way (see also: Ted Lasso) but then Jamie Lee Curtis made me cry and I'm on a full tangent of my delight in watching people I admired as a young person continue to be people I admire as we all age. Oh, can that woman act. And finally dialogue worthy of someone. I love you. I think, though, that I'd tell past Anne to just watch "Ice Chips" and skip the rest of the season and spare herself the Fak-ing aggro.

Season 4: Apparently there is a season 4. Why. 

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