Books:
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
This book, a fiction novel which I'll describe in a moment, was an odd one for me. The entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking this was the kind of thing I'd DNF, as if the person reading it somehow weren't me, yet I, this other non-DNFing Janice, finished the entire thing anyway. The book is about a British family who buys a vacation home in rural Croatia and brings in a local handyman to help fix it up. And, that's kind of the entire plot. The book is told from the handyman's POV and intercuts between his present-day interactions with the family and bits about his past, specifically the past having to do with the house the Brits bought and the people who used to live there and some of the things that are, to a moderate extent, being stirred up in town as a result. The book is essentially about someone who survived the Bosnian/Croatian war/massacre from the '90s but it isn't really a horrors-of-war novel (I mean it is at points) but rather - and I'm being vague to avoid spoilering here - a book about someone whose motives may not be exactly what they seem as to why they do what they do in the course of the book. The reason I kept thinking I'd normally DNF is that almost nothing happens in the book - the family arrives; the handyman integrates into their minor family dramas; there are flashbacks to his youth; towards the end the flashbacks become more tightly woven into the present-day story but really even that's a bit of a stretch. In some ways this book reminded me of Tana French's The Witch Elm, a book I happened to really enjoy but which I know many people found to be a long plotless snooze. I don't want that reference to mislead as this book is not a mystery, but it does have the same slow not-much-happening pace interwoven with the narrator's memories the way that books does; another book I'd compare it to pace-wise is Delia Owen's Where the Crawddads Sing, a book I similarly understood to be slow and somewhat plotless yet which I didn't experience as boring (though Crawddads had better writing compared to this). So my review is this: if the above isn't a total turnoff, this is a well-written book in the Slow-Not-Much-Happening-But-Still-Telling-A-Coherently-Themed-Story genre with a topic a bit outside the norm and you may find yourself drawn in and not DNF'ing the way I was/didn’t.
Nose Dive by Harold McGee
I inhaled (pun intended waa waa) both editions of Harold McGee’s humongous food science compendia On Food and Cooking, and this book, about the science of scent, is equally great. It’s completely fascinating in part because scent, for us, is given such short shrift and, factoid (though not from this book), the reason scent has been pushed aside in human culture is not due to science - in fact, while culture tells us that our sense of smell is weak and unimportant, science actually tells us otherwise and really when you stop and think about it why on Earth would evolution decide to decrease our sense of smell given that every item we consume - like food going bad but not yet showing visual signs of it yet for example - can kill us, and noting something’s chemical composition BEFORE it enters our body is clearly of huge evolutionary value. But the Enlightenment thinkers, who were trying to show how humans had risen above animals, declared, given that so many animals walk on four legs and thus have their noses in the ground all the time, smell to QED be animalistic and, based on absolutely nothing, also declared that humans must de facto have a weaker sense of smell thus “proving” that we were leaving our animal origins behind us on our way to some higher plane of existence. And we all still believe it even though science shows us we can detect certain smells even dogs can’t. This thought has become deeply ingrained in our culture as we can see from the somewhat pooh-poohing of long-COVID’s loss of the sense of smell which is written off as more of a sad issue affecting lifestyle - like oh pooh, no more cinnamon candles - instead of the sensory equivalent of becoming blind, deaf, or a paraplegic which is more akin to what it is.
The book has plenty of factoids of its own but really it shows you what chemical geniuses plants are and have to be since chemistry is both their sole means of attracting animals to spread their seeds and defending themselves against being eaten by other animals. There’s a whole section on floral scents and seeing a rose from a bee’s perspective where the scent draws the bee in but, because the rose is designed so the bee is in a tiny space which amplifies the scent such that it becomes a chemical assault (if you’ve ever sat next to a teenager drowning in a sea of Axe, you’ll know exactly how that bee feels), meaning the bee, rather than doing the otherwise logical thing and chewing through the flower looking for more nectar, goes in, grabs the nectar, and gets the hell out of there as quickly as possible because it’s so atrocious to be stuck in that sea of aroma. The book is filled with stuff like that; it’s also relatively chemistry-heavy though it’s deliberately written in such a way that you can skip past those parts if you want. It’s part information book on how olfaction works but mostly it’s about identifying and linking the underlying chemicals of basically every odor you can think of and is science-y enough to feel legit but not so much that lay people like moi can’t get to the good stuff.
TV/Streaming:
Only Murders in the Building (Season 1):
This is a marginally watchable blah comediocre about a murder in a high-end Upper West Side apartment building and the efforts of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez to investigate the crime and do a podcast about it. In my mind, this was going to be some lite fun, like I knew from Steve Martin's involvement that there would be a lot of stupid jokes (since that's his thing) but that at least some of them would land and that would be fine. I was also fine, knowing this was somewhere in the comedy vein, with a fair amount of absurd unreality around the murder investigation since, well, Steve Martin et. al. I was so fine with all of that. What I was not so fine with was (a) the draggiest plot in all buildings ever combined with (b) a level of unreality that was so insanely stupid that it kept driving me out of the show. For example - and without spoilering - what do you think about two adults being in a room with another adult and then a scene later the two adults are tied up in the back of a van? Are you willing to write that off as part of the silliness of the situation or are you thinking, as I did, huh? What cartoon world are we in now? Or, here, do you believe people can be evicted from apartments THEY OWN because 8 people in the building complained and voted them out? The show is filled with stuff like that, and to the core of my being I don't understand WHY! Because while sure we can all swallow one or two of these types of things, when they happen every episode - well more in the latter half of the season than the former - it just undercuts everything because when the plot is so stupid that literally anything can happen just because the writers say so, well what are you investing in? I mean I know it's comedy but it's also a murder mystery and doesn't that require some kind of at least vaguely logical underpinning? And even if you're not irked by the things like that - writer laziness and the complete failure of the executives involved in giving functional notes - the show suffers from a larger problem which is that, well how do I put this oh wait I know: it really isn't all that funny. In addition to the characters' lives being kinda depressing, there's just nothing vibrant or alive here to hardly mention that so many of the jokes are of the Boomer-Millennial generation gap variety which already feel tired since we have GenZ to pick on now. It felt like the idea of a show - true-crime podcast obsessives try to solve a true crime - without anyone getting much beyond that to flesh out a 10 episode season. I don't know. I watched it but I can't say I wasn't bored in some episodes and found myself getting irritated with the plot contrivances and honestly completely lost in why anyone was doing anything they were doing, like Selena Gomez' character was the only one who had an actual reason to investigate but even hers was incredibly amorphous and hazy and the other two characters really had nothing which, I think, is why the show just kept throwing in side characters played by celebrities as some time-killing smoke and mirrors so maybe people wouldn't notice how flaccid and dead the show was at its core - which is the murder the writers should've actually investigated.
Marrying Millions (Seasons 1-2):
This reality show is exactly as humiliating to watch as it sounds like it would be from the title. It's horrific - terrible, venal people, one wealthy, one not, usually one rich old (man) one poor young (woman) with all variants on lechery and goldigging one could imagine and, yeah. It's bad. Two back-to-back seasons worth of bad for me. You basically have multiple straight couples whose stories (read: producer contrivances) carry across the season to, well I don’t even know what the goal is? Like are we really rooting for the 21 year old restaurant hostess to marry and spawn with the thrice (or around there) divorced 60something who, I think I read somewhere, is also accused of statutory rape? Or the loser construction worker with the sad and lonely megabajillionaire realtor even though they’re the same age? I mean, right, of course that’s not the point; the point is the usual look-at-all-the-wackadoos of all non-competition reality shows (and even some of those actually) but the problem with this show is that, beyond the title, there’s really no concept. You’re just watching people date and judging their motives and - and there’s really no way to avoid this top-level thought across watching two seasons of the show - why is a money for youth tradeoff a bad motive for marriage again? I mean, yeah it’s not some pure disinterested state of simply caring for a person and wanting to bond with them but what’s really wrong with an impure motive? And why are emotions somehow pure? Because we can’t control them? That seems like a super lame definition of purity. Am I still talking about this show? Because this is more or less how I watched it, like I can't even say I was entertained exactly, so I must have entered some kind of fugue state because the next thing I knew it was 30 something episodes later and I don't know what was going on. This is a show that 100% deserves - demands! - your completely divided attention (like 2% to the show and 98% to wondering why you're watching the show) because otherwise you run the risk of building beta amyloid plaques just from the sustained 45 minutes of viewing.
Movies:
Iron Man 3 (Marvel Universe #7) -
When we last left our billionaire White superhero he'd barely escaped with his life after just making it out through the cervix of a big alien galaxy-spanning vagina dentata that had opened in the skies above Earth and which he'd just blown up, and this movie is a continuation of his internal, um, emotional flowering I guess. In the first movie Iron Man developed an actual - and metaphoric - a heart; in the second movie, he discovered that heart was poisoned and replaced it with, in a touching moment that resulted in the flattening of countless buildings and the murder of hundreds of innocents, a heart created by his father; this movie is about his struggles with self-doubt and fear which he deals with via the path of personal growth generally associated with, say, Jason in the Friday the 13th series, i.e. destroying everything he can get his hands on in order to feel better about himself.
For some incomprehensible reason, this movie is told with a framing device and voiceover that goes absolutely nowhere and never resolves into anything but which sets up that a decade or so before the current time, Iron Man (well pre-Iron Man actually I think) got drunk at a New Year’s Eve party and was rude to and/or stood up several scientists, including Guy Pearce, and it’s now years later and those scientists are successful and, reasonably, they’re still so pissed at the snub from a decade ago that they’ve returned with the totally understandable response of wanting to exact their revenge on the planet by becoming a bunch of fire-blooded destroyers and selling their services to terrorist Ben Kingsley who, in addition to ordering the death and destruction of random innocents, commits the even greater sin of interrupting TV broadcasts (remember TV broadcasts?) and, like, who won the Rose Ceremony?!? While that’s happening, Guy Pearce et. al. decide to go after Iron Man by sending in helicopters to blow his mid-century modern Malibu manse into the ocean, and, given the damage, I’d just like to make a personal plea to the Los Angeles Building Commission to design better codes to aid cliffside homes under helicopter machine gun attack. Iron Man then flies away somewhere way out in the ‘burbs (read: the Valley) at which point his suit ends up suffering from what so many of us suffer from these days - friggin' batteries not lasting long enough then taking forever to recharge.
Why this most recent time of barely escaping with his life was different than any of the other times, I don't know just that Iron Man suddenly develops some serious PTSD or perhaps, given the vaginal locale of his last series of killings, PTSTD. Regardless, he's really not happy about anything and starts getting debilitating panic attacks which render him either curled up into a big iron ball on the ground or, in a particularly dramatic moment, sinking slowly to one knee a la Rodin’s The Thinker. He is, therefore, prescribed Hollywood's preferred medication for those struggling with debilitating situational psychological issues: a six-year-old child, the wondrous innocence of which is the cure for any internal malaise. There's an extremely confusing thematic involving Goop becoming a fire person and Iron Man getting rid of his suit which was so thoroughly discombobulating that I’m not even going to pretend to understand the underlying logic - I’m sure it was all related to the panic attacks and whatnot but I have idea. And anyway there’s a far more pressing issue to discuss.
Having now watched the entire Iron Man trilogy, aside, obviously, from the scintillating observations I made in prior Media Reports (IM #1 & IM #2), the thing that strikes me most in these movies is how they rely on an us/them scenario where, unlike with the other Marvels I’ve seen so far, both sides are human. Which makes these movies… creepy. Here’s what I mean. The “us” is a vigilante savior who's investing all of his bajillions into offense/defense against a vision of a world in which there are enemies - “them” - coming at “us” from all sides. Whereas in the other Marvel films the enemies are mostly things like alien colonizers whose motives don’t need to be explained because there are none beyond territory acquisition, in these movies, because Iron Man’s enemies are human, they all have human motivations, specifically they’re people who've decided to make personal grudges into global destruction, meaning these movies have this weird underlying belief - more than a belief: a given about the world - that we need someone with seemingly unlimited power to defend us against another someone who, say, because they weren't invited to the cool kids party when they were ten, has now grown up into a bitter vengeful human being who invests all of his/her/their time, energy, and money to wreaking vengeance on a world where they felt less-than, with these slights, real or imagined, magnified into a desire to wipe out parts of humanity and control the rest. In other words, the villainy isn't for anything in particular, but just this seething underlying inferiority complex - or, in the first film, planet-busting moneygrubbing - that's so angry it wants to destroy it all. That’s the justification for allowing Iron Man, who could also wipe all of us out, to exist and with all of us assured he won’t get an inferiority complex at some point and turn on us too, i.e. as the PTSD in this movie makes clear, the fate of the world relies on the mental state of one person which would make me, were I a citizen of the Marvel Universe (I am) pretty nervous. To me it all feels very QAnon, like we’re trapped in some psychosis: Iron Man is there to backstop a sort of niche problem, this extremely tiny group of (a) seething wronged grudge nurturers who (b) have tech skills and money, (c) never manage to move beyond whatever negative feelings they had and (d) can't be appeased under any circumstances QED we need the cool kid in his tech to battle back.
But you can reverse it in which case the Iron Man movies are collectively the story of various abusees told from the POV of their bully as if he's the hero for crushing all the enemies who were overreacting to his rudeness. What these three movies make apparent is that you could make an equally valid series of films in which a dismissive weapons-manufacturing billionaire who's in league with the government and has the military is pocket is attacking anyone whose innovations or motives contradict his own and therefore must be stopped at all costs because he has so much power, influence, money, technology, and a sociopathic charm (which his team has spun into "heroism") that he could take over the entire world and in fact the only thing that's stopping him is that he simply hasn’t decided he wants that yet. So who's the enemy? Iron Man or all the people whose lives he's ruined in his wake? The movies present Iron Man as being reasonable and everyone else - Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Guy Pearce - as overreacting to imagined slights or just having no motives beyond being pure evil or greed - but isn't this thinking basically where the word “barbarian” stems from and, um, more or less exactly how Mao’s Great Leap Forward political cleanse justified wiping out 50 million dissenting Chinese? How Stalin used Pravda for PR spin?
In these movies, more so than in the other Marvel movies I've seen thus far, the bad guys aren't doing horrible things - like bringing a squad of lizard people to invade the planet for example - but are rather more engaged in kind of moral policy disagreements: Should our company be selling weapons or not? Why should you be the only one with that tech? Why should America decide what's right and wrong? What these movies do is what humanity's done forever in war, which is dehumanize the enemy and paint them as ruthless evildoers with impure personal venal senseless motives who don't deserve to live. But there's another side to that, one in which WE are the enemy who doesn't deserve to live and the only reason it doesn't read that way is because this trilogy of Iron Man propaganda films was written and directed by the Marvel equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl.
I mean I don't know, but I guess if I have one sure takeaway after watching this movie it's that, whatever you do, don't be rude to White people at parties.
Didn’t you know Iron Man is 100% based on The Life of Mark Zuckerburg, eternally grudgy about not getting laid till long after his billions in stock options vested? Congress and China need to be very very careful about not agitating the 30 Year Old Virgin. Once he gets his dander up, the fate of the world— of all of us—rests in the placenta-moisturized hands of Goop and though he knows now the vagina can kill, he’s too arrogant to believe that applies to him. Only China can save us now. Which is why they embedded his current wife in his fortress.