As the title suggests, so forth.
More Magnum Music Musings
I remember one of the avalanche of retrospectively disparaging takes about the irredeemable network-ness of The West Wing, compared to the ‘adult’ glories of HBO, that oddly fixated on WG Snuffy Walden’s upbeat end credits music. Specifically that it would often crash in on the sombre mood created by the end of an episode and ruin it with its brisk optimism. Sure, it could be startling in that context, but it doesn’t follow that the end credits music ruined a forty minute episode, any more than Robert Towne’s laughable assertion that The Godfather only worked because of the one scene on which he’d done a script polish: Don Vito in his orange grove. The real question is why did people forget they didn’t actually have to do that on network television? ITV4 has belatedly started running the back end of Magnum PI seasons and it’s been noticeable just how many episodes in season 7 will play out with melancholy music from the episode over the end credits instead of reprising Mike Post and Pete Carpenter’s inimitable, and, dare we say it, upbeat and briskly optimistic, theme tune. How did people forget between the end of Magnum PI in 1988 and the start of The West Wing in 1999 that you were allowed to do that? Why didn’t Sorkin push to end episodes like Josh’s confrontation with PTSD in ‘Noel’ with the sound of Christmas carolers, and Toby’s mitzvah for a homeless veteran in ‘In Excelsis Deo’ with the Last Post, or end the traumatic kidnappings and assassination attempts of ‘Commencement’ and ‘What Kind Of Day Has It Been’ with unnerving silence?
Impossibly Polished Pilots
Horror Channel (that was) is re-running Mission: Impossible from the start, and what a start it was. It occurred to me soon after it began that I must not have actually seen the first season when Channel 4 re-ran the show on Sunday mornings in the mid-1990s. It’s kind of startling to see a show arrive so fully formed from the very beginning. Creator Bruce Geller’s pilot script contained the leader flipping thru photos in his folder and tossing them into two piles when choosing the team, after receiving the briefing for the mission in a daft location (using code phrases to make contact with the agent in charge) at which point the briefing recording self-destructs, and of course all the suspense and impersonations played out to Lalo Schifrin’s indelible theme tune as well as his secondary signature music cue ‘The Plot’, which was gloriously showcased in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Not only that but the detail of the tiny team member, who is being hidden inside the vault as the team attempt to take out of play nuclear warheads in a small Caribbean island, having his fingers broken by a door slamming on them made me jolt upright and realise this detail may have inspired an uncannily similar complication of the heist in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 remake.
Austeridad Cultural
I can’t remember where I first encountered the idea that a group fighting another temporarily more dominant group would unwittingly start to mirror the particular madness they were opposed to. Perhaps it’s a political version of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: if you look long into the abyss, remember the abyss also looks into you; if you fight with monsters beware lest you become a monster too. And so I hold that the right wing drive for financial austerity after 2008 produced in response, from 2014 to the present moment, a left wing drive for what I’ve previously dubbed cultural austerity. You can see the same righteous joy in standing in judgement over people, and taking something away from them, then telling them they deserve it because they sinned and they need to be punished. It is the response of Schumpeter and fellow economists of the Austrian school to the Great Depression; it should be allowed run its course unmolested so that toxins can be expelled from the economic system. If that hurts people, well, they deserved it for their misdeeds. The same misplaced moralism that saw us lectured here on ‘how we all partied’. Although not all of us were in charge of government departments and financial regulators i’ faith. Surprise, surprise, but it is a left-wing government minister in Spain that has decided that Spain’s celebrated nightlife needs to end abruptly now. There are other ways to deal with late working hours; split shifts, longer breaks, better rostering, really anything that would spring to mind if you spent about five minutes looking for solutions; but they don’t concern Yolanda Diaz. Because she doesn’t care about solutions, she cares about taking something beloved away from people, and then attacking them from her entirely imaginary high moral ground by insisting that anybody who opposes her is a monster who wants to break the backs of the working class. Cultural Austerity and Financial Austerity are the oddest of odd cousins, but the family resemblance is obvious. A Tory stands in front of you blocking you from entering the library, saying you don’t deserve to have nice things because of your frivolous spending. A Labourite stands in front of you blocking you from perusing the bookshelf, saying you don’t get to read whatever you want because it’s literally harmful violence. The joy is obvious in both cases in taking away something you love.
“By gad, sir, that’s leadership”: Part II
Well, that was a productive use of 20 million euro. Some referendums are forced upon us by necessity, like the endless ceding of sovereignty to the EU. But these were referendums of choice, much like Enda Kenny’s confusion that the words reform and abolish mean the same thing. (How baffled Phileas Fogg would’ve been to have returned home to a demolished building because an Enda Kenny avant la lettre had joined the Reform Club) Just to be clear what the opportunity cost was on all of this, according to my calculations in 2018 an American style trailer would cost in euros from 20000e to 60000e, so allowing for inflation let’s say 25000e to 70000e in 2024. So that would mean 20 millions of euro could have bought as many as 800 American style trailer homes to try and put an immediate band aid on the housing shortage instead of holding a referendum nobody wanted, and nobody understood, including the government forcing it. Or, given the fuss made about where to find the money for buying a Cezanne last year, that 20 million could have been used to buy 10 damn good paintings for the National Gallery of Ireland. If you can find 20 million no questions asked for an unwanted, unnecessary referendum campaign then you can find 20 million no questions asked to flesh out the collection with some Cezanne, Monet, Hodler, Matisse, Mondrian, Orpen, Lavery, Yeats, Sargent. Nobody expects a Rothko for that budget, but there are possibilities.