Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 296

Bones 10.6: A Thousand Cuts

An ethically powerful Bones 10.6 tonight, about the heartbreak of slave trafficking, and the impossible situations it can put fundamentally good people in - not our central characters, in this case, but they're all affected in their own ways nonetheless.

But there is an ethical crisis of sorts between Bones and Arastoo, except neither really sees it as a crisis, and Bones in fact is sure she's doing the right thing.    She turns down Arastoo's doctoral research proposal, because she wants to encourage him to do something better, which she knows he is capable of doing.

Being a PhD student is no cake walk.  I often tell my current students that if someone said they would treble my salary, if only I would submit to being a doctoral student again, and apply myself to getting a second PhD, I would say no thank you.   It's been said that students are the slaves of the world.   If that's so, a PhD student is one of the worst kinds of slaves to be.  You can work for years, and have that work torn to shreds in a moment by a mentor who doesn't get it.

Of course, in the case of Bones, she does get it.   And even though Cam does not - at first - Arastoo soon does, and in not only comes up with a new dissertation topic which Bones quickly approves, but is instrumental in solving the murder mystery in tonight's episode.   How can a little cuticle remover be an instrument of murder?   By being used to stab the victim over and over again, until she bleeds out.

And what is Arastoo's new dissertation topic?  Using his talents to come with ways of combatting human trafficking.   This puts a nice bow on the story, which also has the added benefit of  François Chau - Lost's Dr. Chang - on hand in an important guest starring role.

See also Bones 10.1: The Fulcrum Changes ... Bones 10.2: J. Edgar and the DNA Confession ... Bones 10.3: Meets Rush and a Dominatrix ... Bones 10.4: Brennan and Angela on a Bench in the Playground ... Bones 10.5: Two Jokes and Three Times
And see also Bones 9.1: The Sweet Misery of Love ... Bones 9.2: Bobcat, Identity Theft, and Sweets ... Bones 9.3 and NCIS 11.2: Sweets and Ziva ... Bones 9.4: Metaphysics of Death in a Television Series ... Bones 9.5: Val and Deep Blue ... Bones 9.6: The Wedding ... Bones 9.7: Watch Out, Buenos Aires ...Bones 9.8: The Bug in the Neck ... Bones 9.9: Friday Night Bones in the Courtroom ... Bones 9.10: Horse Pucky ... Bones 9.11: Angels in Equations ... Bones 9.12: Fingernails ... Bones 9.13: Meets Nashville, and Wendell ... Bones 9.14: "You Cannot Drink Your Glass Away" ... Bones 9.15: Hodgins' Brother and the Ripped Off Toe ... Bones 9.16: Lampreys, Professors, and Insurance Companies ... Bones 9.17: Spartacus in the Kitchen ... Bones 9.18: Meets Day of the Triffids ... Bones 9.19: The Cornucopic Urn ... Bones 9.20: Above the Law ... Bones 9.21: Freezing and Thawing ... Bones 9.22: Promotion ... Bones 9.23: The New Intern ... Bones Season 9 Finale: Upping the Ante

And see also Bones 8.1: Walk Like an Egyptian ... Bones 8.2 of Contention ... Bones 8.3: Not Rotting Behind a Desk  ... Bones 8.4: Slashing Tiger and Donald Trump ... Bones 8.5: Applesauce on Election Eve ... Bones 8.6: Election Day ... Bones 8.7: Dollops in the Sky with Diamonds ...Bones 8.8: The Talking Remains ... Bones 8.9: I Am A Camera ... Bones 8.10-11: Double Bones ...Bones 8.12: Face of Enigmatic Evil ... Bones 8.13: Two for the Price of One ... Bones 8.14: Real Life ... Bones 8.15: The Magic Bullet and the Be-Spontaneous Paradox ... Bones 8.16: Bitter-Sweet Sweets and Honest Finn ... Bones 8.17: "Not Time Share, Time Travel" ... Bones 8.18: Couples ... Bones 8.19: The Head in the Toilet ... Bones 8.20: On Camera ... Bones 8.21: Christine, Hot Sauce, and the Judge ... Bones 8.22: Musical-Chair Parents ... Bones 8.23: The Bluff ... Bones Season 8 Finale: Can't Buy the Last Few Minutes

And see also Bones 7.1: Almost Home Sweet Home ... Bones 7.2: The New Kid and the Fluke ...Bones 7.3: Lance Bond and Prince Charmington ... Bones 7.4: The Tush on the Xerox ... Bones 7.5: Sexy Vehicle ... Bones 7.6: The Reassembler ... Bones 7.7: Baby! ... Bones 7.8: Parents ...Bones 7.9: Tabitha's Salon ... Bones 7.10: Mobile ... Bones 7.11: Truffles and Max ... Bones 7.12: The Corpse is Hanson ... Bones Season 7 Finale: Suspect Bones

And see also Bones 6.1: The Linchpin ... Bones 6.2: Hannah and her Prospects ... Bones 6.3 at the Jersey Shore, Yo, and Plymouth Rock ... Bones 6.4 Sans Hannah ... Bones 6.5: Shot and Pretty ... Bones 6.6: Accidental Relations ... Bones 6.7:  Newman and "Death by Chocolate" ...Bones 6.8: Melted Bones ... Bones 6.9: Adelbert Ames, Jr. ... Bones 6.10: Reflections ... Bones 6.11: The End and the Beginning of a Mystery ... Bones 6.12 Meets Big Love ... Bones 6.13: The Marrying Kind ... Bones 6.14: Bones' Acting Ability ... Bones 6.15: "Lunch for the Palin Family" ...Bones 6.16: Stuck in an Elevator, Stuck in Times ... Bones 6.17: The 8th Pair of Feet ... Bones 6.18: The Wile E. Chupacabra ... Bones 6.19 Test Runs The Finder ... Bones 6.20: This Very Statement is a Lie ... Bones 6.21: Sensitive Bones ... Bones 6.22: Phoenix Love ... Bones Season 6 Finale: Beautiful

And see also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles ... Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby ... Love with Teeth on Bones 5.13 ... Faith vs. Science vs. Psychology in Bones 5.14 ... Page 187 in Bones 5.15 ...Bones 100: Two Deep Kisses and One Wild Relationship ... Bones 5.17: The Deadly Stars ...Bones Under Water in 5.18 ... Bones 5.19: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.20: Ergo Together ... Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings ... Bones Season 5 Finale: Eye and Evolution

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A different kind of police fiction
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Manhattan Romance: Woody Allen Rebooted

If Woody Allen were in his late twenties or early thirties and made a movie today, it would be a lot like Manhattan Romance.   And, in fact, Woody Allen is mentioned early in the movie, and Tom O'Brien, who is about that age, wrote, produced, directed, and stars in Manhattan Romance - which is a delightfully sage movie, and better than some of Woody Allen's recent efforts.

Danny - played by O'Brien - is making a documentary about love in Manhattan in this day and digital age, but the main story is what happens off the screen of the documentary, in the real lives of Danny and women who are in the documentary.   Two women in particular play major roles in Danny's off-camera life.   Beautiful, new-agey Theresa, well played by Caitlin FitzGerald - seen to good effect the last couple of years as the alternately suffering and liberated wife of Dr. Masters in Masters of Sex on Showtime - is desired by Danny, who gets little more than a hug and a chance to give Theresa a massage with happy endings for no one.  In true Woody Allen fashion, Danny's take away from this relationship is frustration.

That would be ok, since we soon come to realize that Danny loves someone else - Carla, zestfully played by Katherine Waterston, who was on the screen in Boardwalk Empire last season.   But Carla, though she feels something for Danny, has opted to be with a woman.   And even though we see clearly from the outset that that relationship isn't working so well, there's no dividend for Danny.   He spends most of a night together with Carla in bed, but all that happens is good talk and sleep.

All of this is situated in a great, pulsating New York ambience, in which memorable characters make brief appearances, and there's even a little jazz in the air.   The guy Theresa is sleeping with - she's not against sex, just apparently sex with Danny - is a fount of lay-back aphorisms, or afflicted with "spiritual Tourettes," as Danny aptly puts it in one of the many good lines in the movie.   Zach Grenier, of Good Wife fame, plays Danny's mother's husband, and delivers a suitably zany, stoned performance at a wedding.

The movie ends with a great meta-piece about the nature of endings - in stories and realities - and I won't tell you more than that, lest I spoil the ending of that ending for you.   The movie premieres at the Big Apple Film Festival this Wednesday.   See it if you've ever wondered how the genre Woody Allen created half a century ago would play on the screen if it was almost brand new today.


Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Affair 1.4: Come Together

An unusually tender and beautiful episode - 1.4 - of The Affair last night, different in two important respects from the first three episodes.   We see no major characters except Noah and Alison.   And their stories are not parallel but sequential - Alison's commences in time right after Noah's concludes. We thus get a true hour of story, rather than two half hours superimposed on one another.

The acting was truly superb, as well.  Dominic West and Ruth Wilson were nonpareil in their delivery, facial expressions, and body language.    We see the lead-up and aftermath of Noah and Alison making love, which is literally the fulcrum point between the two accounts, Noah's the lead-up and Alison's the aftermath.

But in some ways the most powerful moment happens at the very end of Alison's segment, when she tells Noah about the loss of her son.   We learn why she feels a revulsion for Cole - he has a tattoo on his back that says Gabriel, the name of their son, and it's the first thing she sees when she wakes up every morning.   We also learn why she pulls away from Noah in her account the second time they're in bed - he asks about the scars on her thigh, and they of course remind her of Gabriel, since she's been cutting herself to make her "feel better," as she says, in her grief about Gabriel.

Noah's reaction is also wonderful, and about the most human and admirable we've seen of him in this story.  When Alison asks if he sees death when he looks at her face,  he says no and takes her in his arms, and they're soon in bed together again, and this time it's good for Alison, too.   Given that this is Alison's story, this moment is especially significant:  she's telling us that Noah is making her happy.

The Affair continues to be a superb piece of television, and this episode shone.   It did this with a much shorter police segment than usual (and it contained the one discrepancy between Noah's and Alison's account in the hour - he tells Noah he's divorced and Alison that he's happily married).   And that's fine by me.   There are many good police stories on television, but few stories of human relationships as compelling as The Affair.

See also The Affair Premiere: Sneak Preview Review ... The Affair 1.2: Time Travel! ... The Affair 1.3: The Agent and the Sleepers

a different kind of love story 

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Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Homeland 4.6: The Biggest Reveal

Some shockers in Homeland 4.6 tonight, but in many ways the biggest - the one with most far-reaching significance for our story - is the realization that the brunette Pakistani operative, whom I think of as Carrie's counterpart, is really working not for Pakistani intelligence but the terrorist Haqqani that Carrie wants to kill.  Or, maybe she is working for Pakistani intelligence, but she's also working for the terrorist.

And, this, in turn, means that the professor being blackmailed by the brunette is also, unknowingly, working for Haqqani, too.   Aayan's Uncle killing Aayan, though brutal and horrifying, is just the tip of this destructive iceberg.

Carrie was presumably so furious at Haqqani shooting his nephew in the head that she was willing to take out Saul along with Haqqani - that's, at least, what Quinn probably thinks, and maybe what we're supposed to think, too.   But I think Carrie is better than that, and, though she hated to see her handiwork ruined like that, was focused as she was saying on ridding the world of Haqqani, whatever it took, including killing Saul.  After all, she was ready to take out Aayan along with Haqqani, so Haqqani's killing Aayan could not have rattled her all that much.

I think Saul, had he been in Carrie's situation, would have ordered the hit.  In fact, if I recall correctly, didn't he do something like that last season, when he ordered Quinn to stop Carrie, and only Quinn's superb aim prevented Carrie from being killed?  Well, maybe Saul was banking on that, but he certainly was willing to put Carrie's life in imminent mortal danger.

Of course, television being what it is, there was no way that Saul could have been killed tonight. Mandy Patinkin is too important an actor to leave yet another hit series, especially without warning, so you had to have the guy with his finger on drone trigger listening to Quinn and not Carrie.  But the last few minutes of this excellent episode put almost everything up in the harrowing air, and continued to mark this season of Homeland as one of its best.

See also Homeland 4.1-2: Carrie's State of Mind ... Homeland 4.3: Quinn and Carrie ... Homeland 4.4: Carrie's Counterpart ... Homeland 4.5: Righteous Seduction
And see also Homeland 3.1: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 3.2: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 3.3: Two Prisons ... Homeland 3.4: Twist! ...Homeland 3.6: Further Down the Rabbit Hole ... Homeland 3.7: Revealing What We Already Knew ... Homeland 3.8: Signs of Life ...Homeland 3.9: Perfect Timing ... Homeland 3.10: Someone Has to Die ... Homeland 3.11: The Loyalist ... Homeland Season 3 Finale: Redemption and Betrayal
And see Homeland 2.1-2: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 2.3-5: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 2.6: What Brody Knows ... Homeland 2.7: Love Me Tinder ... Homeland 2.8: The Personal and the Professional ...Homeland Season 2 Finale: The Shocker and the Reality
And see also  Homeland on Showtime ... Homeland 1.8: Surprises ... Homeland Concludes First Season: Exceptional

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  different kind of espionage



Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Walking Dead 5.4: Hospital of Horror

Hospital are scary places, and have played decisive roles in many a horror movie.  Hey, they're scary in real life, especially in our day and age of Ebola and who knows what.   So, it makes sense that The Walking Dead, or one of its main characters, would sooner or later be situated in a post-apocalyptic hospital.

Beth has been out of sight but not of mind since last season, when she was kidnapped not quite under Daryl's nose but close enough.   We still don't know how exactly she got from the kidnapping car to the hospital in Atlanta, but there she is, in a place populated with the requisite mixture of people who prey on the weak, people struggling to maintain some sense of order, and those with a few shreds of humanity still intact.

Actually, on that last point, those shreds are pretty thin.  The doc who befriends Beth has her kill a bed-ridden patient, simply because, as we learn at the end, the patient was himself a doctor, and the doctor in the hospital of horrors didn't want any competition.

This hospital comes replete with a pit - literally - making this an episode of The Walking Dead meets Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum.   But there are a few glimmers of hope, for Beth, maybe.   The orderly who helps her escape does make it to freedom, himself, even if Beth does not.   When I saw this, I was thinking, good, he's the way Daryl and Rick will now be able to find out where Beth is.

But the ending held another nice surprise - Carol wheeled in on a stretcher.   Not that seeing Carol on a stretcher is nice.   But she's still alive, and if anyone can get Beth sprung from this quiet madhouse, it's Carol.

Another good standalone story, which wraps up nicely with a splash of the reality - in the person of Carol - we've come to know and look forward to.

See also: The Walking Dead 5.1: The Redemption of Carole ... The Walking Dead 5.3: Meets Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone

And see also The Walking Dead 4.1: The New Plague ... The Walking Dead 4.2: The Baby and the Flu ... The Walking Dead 4.3: Death in Every Corner ...The Walking Dead 4.4: Hershel, Carl, and Maggie ... The Walking Dead 4.6: The Good Governor ... The Walking Dead 4.7: The Governor's Other Foot ... The Walking Dead 4.8: Vintage Fall Finale ... The Walking Dead 4.9: A Nightmare on Walking Dead Street ... The Walking Dead 4:14: Too Far ... The Walking Dead Season 4 Finale: From the Gunfire into the Frying Pan


And see also The Walking Dead 3.3 meets Meadowlands ... The Walking Dead 3.4: Going to the Limit ... The Walking Dead 3.9: Making Crazy Sense ... The Walking Dead 3.10: Reinforcements ... The Walking Dead 3.11: The Patch ... The Walking Dead 3.12: The Lesson of Morgan ... The Walking Dead 3.13: The Deal ... The Walking Dead 3.14: Inescapable Parable ... The Walking Dead 3.15: Merle ... The Walking Dead 3.16: Kill or Die, or Die and Kill
And see also The Walking Dead Back on AMC ... The Walking Dead 2.2: The Nature of Vet  ... The Walking Dead 2.3: Shane and Otis ... The Walking Dead 2.4: What Happened at the Pharmacy ... The Walking Dead 2.6: Secrets Told ... The Walking Dead 2.7: Rick's Way vs. Shane's Way ...  The Walking Dead 2.8: The Farm, the Road, and the Town  ... The Walking Dead 2.9: Worse than Walkers ... The Walking Dead 2.11: Young Calling the Shots ... The Walking Dead 2.12: Walkers Without Bites ... The Walking Dead Season 2 FinaleAnd see also The Walking Dead 1.1-3:  Gone with the Wind, Zombie Style ... The Walking Dead Ends First Season#SFWApro


no cannibalism but at least a plague in The Consciousness Plague
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Bones 10.5: Two Jokes and Three Times

An excellent Bones 10.5 night, mixing humor and seriousness, as is Bones' wont, with mostly humor, which is ok by me.

Bones is to give a speech at a convention.  She previews the beginning of her talk to Booth - a joke about Schrödinger's cat.  What's that cat about?  Schrödinger sought to highlight a problem in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - which holds, in effect, that reality can exist in two contrasting forms, and doesn't obtain a single form until we observe it.  Schrödinger said that's like a cat being in a sealed box, alive and dead at the same time, and the cat doesn't become alive or dead until someone opens the box and looks at the cat.   Bones tells a joke which is funny only if someone knows what Schrödinger's original cat hypothesis was all about.

So, of course, Booth finds it not the least bit funny, and counters with a joke about a restaurant on the moon, which has good food but no atmosphere - a joke, that is, that could be found funny by anyone. Bones starts her speech at the convention, but before she has a chance to get more than a few words out, she's interrupted by the murder of the evening.

Bones resumes her speech after the murder is solved, in a plot that implicates Hodgins - for the third time in the series, as he points out (first devoted fan who can tell me the other two times - in a comment to this review - will be awarded a free copy of one of my ebook novels, the commenter's choice).   Bones tells the cat joke, which gets a big laugh from the scientifically astute audience.  But then she tells Booth's joke about the moon - which evokes no laughter from anyone except Booth.

In the show, that is.  But I found Booth's joke funny, as I'd bet did 99% of the television viewing audience.   And that's one of the beauties of the show - the interplay between the scientific sophistication of Bones and the everyman common sense of Booth.

Booth had a good night with Wendell, too,  who's in remission, but understandably gets worried when someone else in his group, last week in remission, takes a turn for the worse.   The talking that Booth gives Wendell, about not giving up, about fighting, was short, effective, and inspiring.   Booth not only tells a good joke but makes a good friend.

See also Bones 10.1: The Fulcrum Changes ... Bones 10.2: J. Edgar and the DNA Confession ... Bones 10.3: Meets Rush and a Dominatrix ... Bones 10.4: Brennan and Angela on a Bench in the Playground
And see also Bones 9.1: The Sweet Misery of Love ... Bones 9.2: Bobcat, Identity Theft, and Sweets ... Bones 9.3 and NCIS 11.2: Sweets and Ziva ... Bones 9.4: Metaphysics of Death in a Television Series ... Bones 9.5: Val and Deep Blue ... Bones 9.6: The Wedding ... Bones 9.7: Watch Out, Buenos Aires ...Bones 9.8: The Bug in the Neck ... Bones 9.9: Friday Night Bones in the Courtroom ... Bones 9.10: Horse Pucky ... Bones 9.11: Angels in Equations ... Bones 9.12: Fingernails ... Bones 9.13: Meets Nashville, and Wendell ... Bones 9.14: "You Cannot Drink Your Glass Away" ... Bones 9.15: Hodgins' Brother and the Ripped Off Toe ... Bones 9.16: Lampreys, Professors, and Insurance Companies ... Bones 9.17: Spartacus in the Kitchen ... Bones 9.18: Meets Day of the Triffids ... Bones 9.19: The Cornucopic Urn ... Bones 9.20: Above the Law ... Bones 9.21: Freezing and Thawing ... Bones 9.22: Promotion ... Bones 9.23: The New Intern ... Bones Season 9 Finale: Upping the Ante

And see also Bones 8.1: Walk Like an Egyptian ... Bones 8.2 of Contention ... Bones 8.3: Not Rotting Behind a Desk  ... Bones 8.4: Slashing Tiger and Donald Trump ... Bones 8.5: Applesauce on Election Eve ... Bones 8.6: Election Day ... Bones 8.7: Dollops in the Sky with Diamonds ...Bones 8.8: The Talking Remains ... Bones 8.9: I Am A Camera ... Bones 8.10-11: Double Bones ...Bones 8.12: Face of Enigmatic Evil ... Bones 8.13: Two for the Price of One ... Bones 8.14: Real Life ... Bones 8.15: The Magic Bullet and the Be-Spontaneous Paradox ... Bones 8.16: Bitter-Sweet Sweets and Honest Finn ... Bones 8.17: "Not Time Share, Time Travel" ... Bones 8.18: Couples ... Bones 8.19: The Head in the Toilet ... Bones 8.20: On Camera ... Bones 8.21: Christine, Hot Sauce, and the Judge ... Bones 8.22: Musical-Chair Parents ... Bones 8.23: The Bluff ... Bones Season 8 Finale: Can't Buy the Last Few Minutes

And see also Bones 7.1: Almost Home Sweet Home ... Bones 7.2: The New Kid and the Fluke ...Bones 7.3: Lance Bond and Prince Charmington ... Bones 7.4: The Tush on the Xerox ... Bones 7.5: Sexy Vehicle ... Bones 7.6: The Reassembler ... Bones 7.7: Baby! ... Bones 7.8: Parents ...Bones 7.9: Tabitha's Salon ... Bones 7.10: Mobile ... Bones 7.11: Truffles and Max ... Bones 7.12: The Corpse is Hanson ... Bones Season 7 Finale: Suspect Bones

And see also Bones 6.1: The Linchpin ... Bones 6.2: Hannah and her Prospects ... Bones 6.3 at the Jersey Shore, Yo, and Plymouth Rock ... Bones 6.4 Sans Hannah ... Bones 6.5: Shot and Pretty ... Bones 6.6: Accidental Relations ... Bones 6.7:  Newman and "Death by Chocolate" ...Bones 6.8: Melted Bones ... Bones 6.9: Adelbert Ames, Jr. ... Bones 6.10: Reflections ... Bones 6.11: The End and the Beginning of a Mystery ... Bones 6.12 Meets Big Love ... Bones 6.13: The Marrying Kind ... Bones 6.14: Bones' Acting Ability ... Bones 6.15: "Lunch for the Palin Family" ...Bones 6.16: Stuck in an Elevator, Stuck in Times ... Bones 6.17: The 8th Pair of Feet ... Bones 6.18: The Wile E. Chupacabra ... Bones 6.19 Test Runs The Finder ... Bones 6.20: This Very Statement is a Lie ... Bones 6.21: Sensitive Bones ... Bones 6.22: Phoenix Love ... Bones Season 6 Finale: Beautiful

And see also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles ... Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby ... Love with Teeth on Bones 5.13 ... Faith vs. Science vs. Psychology in Bones 5.14 ... Page 187 in Bones 5.15 ...Bones 100: Two Deep Kisses and One Wild Relationship ... Bones 5.17: The Deadly Stars ...Bones Under Water in 5.18 ... Bones 5.19: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.20: Ergo Together ... Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings ... Bones Season 5 Finale: Eye and Evolution

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A different kind of police fiction
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

The Case Against Halloween

Fist and foremost, Halloween is dangerous.  As a parent, you want to protect your children.   What could be worse than putting them at the mercy of who knows what strangers put in their candy?  Yeah, I know you usually go calling on friends and neighbors for your trick or treating, but even so.   Why risk that someone next door who was a good person yesterday had some kind of psychotic breakdown overnight, leaving your kids holding the perilous bag.

But let's say the treats are what they're supposed to be:  good, wholesome candy.   The problem is that there is no such thing.   Everyone agrees that refined sugars are bad for you.   Sure, you can tolerate some.   But you and your children are better of eating more complex sugars - such as those found in fruit - and even less of that, if you can.   Instead, Halloween trains your kids in the worst possible eating habit: binging on sweets.

And the fundamental logic of the holiday is off kilter, too.   What does trick or treat teach children?  That, if someone doesn't reward you, your proper recourse is to mess them up?  And in the case of Halloween, the so-called reward - again, candy, which is no good for you - is in no sense justified.  You're not getting it because you did something out of the ordinary, or even just because you performed some task well, or did someone a favor.   Instead, you're in effect demanding the reward - because, again, it's Halloween.

Being a parent - our kids are now in their late twenties - I know it's not easy to say no to Halloween.  Kids, understandably, feel a sense of entitlement to Halloween and its candies, and resent not being allowed to reap what they see as justified bounty.   But life's not a piece a cake, and sometimes you have to stand up and refuse to go along with a tradition that's just stupid and dangerous.   Better not to demand cake and sweets from strangers on this or any other day. Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music

Why I Don't Like Halloween

Fist and foremost, Halloween is dangerous.  As a parent, you want to protect your children.   What could be worse than putting them at the mercy of who knows what strangers put in their candy?  Yeah, I know you usually go calling on friends and neighbors for your trick or treating, but even so.   Why risk that someone next door who was a good person yesterday had some kind of psychotic breakdown overnight, leaving your kids holding the perilous bag.

But let's say the treats are what they're supposed to be:  good, wholesome candy.   The problem is that there is no such thing.   Everyone agrees that refined sugars are bad for you.   Sure, you can tolerate some.   But you and your children are better of eating more complex sugars - such as those found in fruit - and even less of that, if you can.   Instead, Halloween trains your kids in the worst possible eating habit: binging on sweets.

And the fundamental logic of the holiday is off kilter, too.   What does trick or treat teach children?  That, if someone doesn't reward you, your proper recourse is to mess them up?  And in the case of Halloween, the so-called reward - again, candy, which is no good for you - is in no sense justified.  You're not getting it because you did something out of the ordinary, or even just because you performed some task well, or did someone a favor.   Instead, you're in effect demanding the reward - because, again, it's Halloween.

Being a parent - our kids are now in their late twenties - I know it's not easy to say no to Halloween.  Kids, understandably, feel a sense of entitlement to Halloween and its candies, and resent not being allowed to reap what they see as justified bounty.   But life's not a piece a cake, and sometimes you have to stand up and refuse to go along with a tradition that's just stupid and dangerous.   Better not to demand cake and sweets from strangers on this or any other day.
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The Affair 1.3: The Agent and the Sleepers

For some reason, my favorite scene in The Affair 1.3 was the one with Noah and his book agent, who takes shots at fantasy and self-publishing.   The latter I can understand, coming from an agent.  After all, self-publishing would put agents out of business.  But why fantasy?

So why did I enjoy this conversation?  Because, it captured the arrogance of agents in general so perfectly.   And the capture of personalities - especially Noah, the somewhat struggling author, and Alison, the waitress but much more - is the great strength of this beautifully photographed and otherwise rendered series.

It's now become a little more clear exactly what we're seeing in the two accounts that make up the hour - Noah's and Alison's - and how this relates to the conversations with the police detective.  First of all, the accounts, or recollections of Noah and Alison, cover much more than the conversations we see with the detective.  I thought, at first, that the full episode was a depiction of what Noah and Alison were each telling the detective.   But there's no reason that Noah would have told the detective about his meeting with his agent, or Alison's feelings about seeing the boy in the hospital.

So Noah's and Alison's renditions are, in effect, God's-eye views of that they are experiencing, or think they are experiencing, in their lives.   But what makes this so interesting is not only when their accounts differ about what happened when the two of them are together, but how their accounts overlap in a syncopated kind of parallelism.   Noah and Alison each sleep with their respective spouses - and, moreover, not only initiate the sex by waking them up, but tell their spouses not to wake up.   Although a part of this seems unrealistic - it's doubtful that Noah and Alison would literally both use the same exact words - the sentiment expressed makes perfect sense in the circumstances.   On the one hand, Noah wants to sleep with Helen, and Alison with Cole, as a way of reaffirming their marriages. But Noah also wants to imagine he's sleeping with Alison, and Alison wants to think she's sleeping with Noah, rather than with their spouses.   Telling their spouses not to wake up enhances the prospect for their illusions.   Yet these are short-lived, because Helen and Cole each do wake up - symbolizing in a compelling way the vulnerability of the affair to reality, and/or that their affair hasn't quite happened as yet.

Also of interest on this point is that Noah goes much further in his account with Alison than she goes with Noah in hers, as if to underscore that, though powerfully attracted to Noah, she's still a little bit more ambivalent about where this is headed.   So did they actually have sex together yet or not?   This puts the relative truth of their two accounts back on center stage, where it always was, and which makes this series so good.

See also The Affair Premiere: Sneak Preview Review ... The Affair 1.2: Time Travel!

science fiction not fantasy 

#SFWApro
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Photography Flips into Snapchat

One of the joys of understanding McLuhan is how his insights can leap forth at unexpected times to supply us with a connection or a new insight about a matter - or medium - at hand.  About six months ago, I came to realize that the photograph has flipped into the selfie in our own day and age.  Just yesterday, I did a little podcast on this subject - in which I also pointed out that radio has flipped into the podcast. And today, just a few hours ago, I realized that photograph has also flipped into Snapchat.

One of the best things about McLuhan's tetrad or four laws of media is that a given medium can enhance, obsolesce, retrieve, and flip into multiple media.  In case you'd like a quick refresher on the tetrad, it is an exploratory tool that McLuhan developed to help us make sense out of the emergence of media.   Take radio, for example:  It (1) enhances or amplifies sound (speech, music, etc) sent instantly across great distances simultaneously to lots of people; (2) obsolesces the written word as in newspapers as a mode of news delivery; (3) retrieves the spoken word that of course never really went away but was eclipsed to some extent by the products of the printing press; and radio, when it is pushed to its limits, (4) flips into television, which broadcasts like radio but re-inserts the visual into the mix.   And, radio, the professional mass medium, also flips into podcasting that anyone with a microphone and a connection to the Internet can do.    More on the tetrad in my book, Digital McLuhan, pictured below.

But back to photography: its flip into Snapchat is profound indeed, because permanency has always been one of photography's hallmarks.  As Andre Bazin so aptly noted, a photograph rescues an image from "its proper corruption in time".  In contrast, the Snapchat photo is deliberately intended to corrupt over time - and very quickly.  Because the essence of Snapchat is that you send someone a photograph that you want him or her to see only when they receive it, and not any time after.  If only former Congressman Anthony Weiner had known about Snapchat!

So we can now add Snapchat to the selfie as one of the media that photography has flipped into.   Like a reflection in a pool of water, which can also be a selfie and also can disappear as soon as the person staring into the pool walks away, Snapchat epitomizes the ever percolating evolution of media to forms that are at once both new and well established in our past.

See also Marshall McLuhan and the Kindle and Tetrad on Eyeglasses Flipping into Google Glass 



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