Highlights from a beautiful little book about Prince

Prince’s The Beautiful Ones is a great, fast-read book written mostly by him and consisting of many photos, scratch paper with famous lyrics scribbled on them, an 11-page early treatment of the storyboard for Purple Rain the movie, and various other memorabilia.

Touching insights into Prince from the book:

• He called Michael Jackson’s music all about magic, and Led Zeppelin’s all about law breaking. He called his own music all about healing.
• He sat upright and was an “impeccable” turn signaler when driving.
• He often rented out a local movie theater after hours to watch films like Kung Fu Panda 3.
• He wanted his voice and that of the author’s to blend together, creating an unusual kind of memoir, in honor of building a community, a brotherhood, unlike what he felt like most rap artists, like Kanye West, were doing in being selfish and Ayn Rand-like greedy.
• Prince was his given name.
• As a toddler, Prince loved the outdoors and his little girlfriend and he performed a long tap dance and also had seizures.
• He was diagnosed as a child as schizophrenic after his alcoholic mother killed his abusive father, a scene painfully re-enacted in the Purple Rain movie.
• His real name was Prince Rogers Nelson.

My new coronavirus TV schedule

As boredom continues to wend its way into all our socially distanced lives, I figure one of my hours each day should be devoted to catching up on all the peak-era TV I've missed over the years, especially in the last dozen since committing so much of my life to my kids.

After all, I'm still only halfway through The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. The tricky thing is that it may be tough to watch those shows when there is so much amazing new television being released at a raid-fire pace.

I started this week by adding to my RSS feed the awesome can't-miss TV list prepared at the start of each week by TVLine. This should help me from wavering on what I'm going to watch each time I turn on the TV and instead go right to what I've already decided upon. Then I'm trying to watch one or two things as they are released each night.

So far this week:

• Monday - Ozark: The final episode of season 3 continues masterfully a show that is quickly leaping up to threaten Mad Men as my favorite drama of all time. And Jason Bateman reports that there will be a season 4, thankfully.
• Also Monday - Stranger Things, Season 1 Episode 4: Even though I already watched Season 1 (but I haven't seen subsequent seasons yet) a while back, my son and I started it over so we can watch the whole E.T./Close Encounters/Spielberg thing of beauty again.
• Tuesday - Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill: Of course this is hilarious, like having a new hour of his TV show's jokes firing at you, all focusing on the absurdities of the little, everyday things in life.
• Also Tuesday - I watched the first half of HBO's new documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind because I'm fascinated by all things Robert Wagner, who played "self-made millionaire ... quite a guy" Jonathan Hart in another one of my all-time favorite dramas, Hart to Hart.

Coming up ... the rest of the Natalie Wood movie (it's gripping even if you don't have a Daddy Wagner crush like I do), Brockmire, the Dead to Me season 2 premiere, and episodes 4-6 of the Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance.

Speaking of Michael Jordan, maybe that's why I suddenly have all this time to catch up on peak TV. No sports.

What are you watching? Any good recommendations?

Best Magazine Reads: Morrison Hotel was the last and best hurrah for The Doors

Morrison Hotel is, by far, my favorite Doors album, and I’m not too sure how normal that is. It stands to reason that it would be a stinker, since Jim Morrison was in the throes of alcoholism before taking off for Paris and his eventual death Further, he is under the microscope of the law for exposing himself in a concert in Miami.

Other albums by The Doors may have had better songs, but the spectrum of psychedelic pop across sides A and B of Morrison Hotel are untouchable: Waiting for the Sun, Peace Frog, The Spy, Queen of the Highway, and Indian Summer, to name a few.

In an article in the under-rated British magazine Classic Rock, lots of great nuggets are revealed about the making of Morrison Hotel:

• As early as 1967, the lead singer’s prima-donna tendencies were already surfacing. The Doors, according to their manager, did not appear at Woodstock because they were “only headliners.” 
• The album was originally supposed to be called Hard Rock Cafe. 
• They were quickly becoming blacklisted throughout the country so they went into the studio to “work out their demons.” 
• The night before starting to record Morrison Hotel, the singer was arrested in Phoenix after being disorderly on a plane en route to see a Rolling Stones concert.
• In one session, Morrison drank 36 beers. The group had an intervention and he admitted to his alcoholism but then suggested they go get a drink. He then came back with the Roadhouse Blues lyrics, “woke up this morning, got myself a beer.” 
• The album’s cover photo was one of the rare instances in 1969 that Morrison was actually clean-shaven. 
• The band’s final album hit #4 on the U.S. charts, but Morrison was rapidly approaching the bottom and, soon, death.

The Intenet has made monsters of Millennials. How do we fix that?

Jia Tolentino's new collection of essays, Trick Mirror, detail what it means to
 live the Millennial life. The insights kick in fast
 in the book's opening essay, "The I in the 
Internet," which asks how the medium
 got so bad.


She notes Erving Goffman's 1959 theory 
of identity, making what could read like
 a master's thesis into a gripping tale
 of how we became eternal performers - 
how we are similar in job interviews to
how we constantly present what we think
  of as our best selves on the Net
.

Offline, at least, there are "forms 
of relief," in which the audience turns 
over and the you at your job interview
 is different from the you who meets up 
with friends for a drink afterward and
 is different again when you go home 
to read yourself to sleep.

The Internet was one thing, Tolentino 
argues, but social media is a whole other 
level. People scroll through reams of
 content, viewing "all new information 
as a sort of direct commentary on
 who they are." Further, there's a
 constant pressure to expand one's
 audience, unlike in real life
, when we don't seek more likes and more 
followers and more hearts. Friends
 don't go home from dinner parties
 on the Internet. "The online
 audience never has to leave."


And as Millennials lives have
 gotten busier and busier, there
 is less time to politically engage 
and, besides, the Internet provides
 a cheap substitute" for such actions.
 Having an opinion online is often
seen as the end, rather than the
 beginning, of something. The
 Internet allows us to "seem"
 politically engaged.

This means that opinions have needed to get
 wilder and wilder. Gawker, Deadspin, 
and Jezebel were outlets designed to
 drive conflict. Upbeat ones like 
BuzzFeed, Grantland, and Upworthy failed to take,.

The Internet "brings the I into
 everything" because it can "make it
 seem that supporting someone means
 literally sharing in their experience."


Tolentino concludes that the Internet
 will collapse at some point, but that
 first we need to somehow start caring
 less about our online identities, to
 be "deeply skeptical of our own
 unbearable opinions," to "be careful 
in thinking about when our opposition serves
 us," and to not always put
 ourselves first.

Joker is super creepy - and brilliant in pretty much every way

It's understandable that critics had mixed
 feelings about Todd Phillips' Joker.


We're living in different times than the
 1970s, which is the decade the movie
 feels like it's from. Movies from that decade like Dog Day Afternoon,
 and Taxi Driver were character studies of people
 who rebel against the rules and morals
 of society.


Joaquin Phoenix is the best version 
of Batman's Joker that will ever exist.
 He is brilliant and deserved his best
 actor Academy Award. But, like Travis
 Bixler and other 70s anti-heroes, he 
is beaten down both literally and
 figuratively by everyone around him.
 Joker is a man with a physical
 condition and a mental illness that causes 
others to bully and berate him. Viewers 
are taken along by his struggles and
begin to side with him, even as his
 acts become more and more heinous.


Some have argued that Joker is 
irresponsible in that it could inspire
 crime by gun-toting outcasts and
skinheads who feel victimized.  While I suppose that could happen,
 it seems more likely that this is a
statement of how bad the problems -
 of income inequality
, bullying, and and throwing our mentally-ill
 population onto the streets without any
 medical care - have gotten.


Joker: 5 out of 5 stars


Other Joker facts of note:


• His campaign of terror has been
 going on as long as his nemis 
Batman has existed. He appeared 
in Batman comic #1 in 1940.

• Joker is the highest-grossing R-rated
 movie ever, making more than
 $1 billion.

• No wonder I liked the movie so
 much. Other than Phoenix's master
 class in acting, Phillips directed
personal faves The Hangover and
 Old School
.
• In the comics, the Joker was, in 1988, appointed 
UN ambassador to Iraq by
Ayatollah Khomeini.

• In 2011, he had his own face cut off,.
• Perhaps another thing that makes the
 Joker so interesting is that he has
 numerous origin stories. He's an
 enigma, un-categorizable. He tells
 different stories about himself at
 every turn. In this movie, he was
 abused and tortured as a child,
 or at least that's the story that
 eventually surfaces inside his own
mind.

Debbie Downer interlude: What about the world without us?

This seems like a prescient time to go back 
and finish Alan Weisman's classic science
 exploration The World Without us.
 I didn't quite finish it when it was
 released in 2007. The chapter "Where Do
 We Go from Here" seemed like a good one to visit.


It begins noting when animals would
 miss us, perhaps especially timely as
we hear fake news reports of dolphins
 having returned to the boat-less canals
 of Venice. Turns out the answer is
 that not many would miss us, except
 for hair and body lice, and follicle mites, which are so tiny that hundreds
live on our eyelashes alone. The 200 
bacteria species inside of us would also 
miss us.

A CDC expert featured in the book
 says that threats like the SARS Coronavirus
 can take out a lot of people but have
 a tough time penetrating everybody, and
 just having access to soap and water
 can go a long way to preserving humans.
 Fruit bats are suspected to be the source
 of the worst viruses, which then spread
 through infected human body fluids.

Some experts interviewed thought new technologies or environmental destruction are likelier sources of our demise. They also say no virus could kill all the people on earth. Even a 99.99
 percent die-off would 
leave hundreds of thousands of survivors. One expert points out that the one virus
 that could be most successful would be
 one that would make our sperm impotent.
 Crisis-pregnancy centers would be the first
 to notice because nobody would be visiting.


In 21 years, there would be no more
 juvenile delinquency and, as resignation sets in,
 spiritual awakening would replace panic. The seas and land would replenish with animal
 life and forests and wetlands would come back 
because of less need for new housing. We 
probably wouldn't have resource conflicts and,
 thus, no wars. The planet would slowly return
 to the Garden of Eden.


Some silver lining to our current COVID-19 virus, eh?

Best Magazine Reads: Trash is new, and so are ways of composting it

I don't know if composting will ever take off in the U.S. But at home in Takoma Park, the city picks it up weekly and it's a service I've really come to appreciate.

The days of throwing food in with the rest of the trash are long gone. No more stinky kitchens. Plus, we have a big bucket of food waste each week that is going back into the earth rather than joining the landfills and oceans like most of the world's trash.

While composting sounds like such a new and novel thing, it's actually what has been done with our discarded stuff through almost all of history. As an article in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker notes, "trash is new."

In the 1800s, there was almost no disposable packaging in existence and food waste was reused by people, turned into products such as soap, or shipped to farms for animals and agriculture.

While my home town in way ahead of the compositing curve in the U.S., according to the article:

• We've got nothing on South Korea, which recycles 95 percent of its food waste.
• South Korea's 13,000 tons of food waste each day becomes compost, animal feed, and biofuel.
• New York City hopes to reduce landfill dumping by 90 percent by 2030.
• Most people in the U.S. have no idea what composting is. When the author asked a middle-aged New York man what a nearby bucket was for, he guessed "bones."
• One idea New York could enact would be to charge people by weight for their trash, offering incentive for
• people to separate out food. In San Francisco, a similar idea has resulted in an 80 percent capture
• rate for food waste, and in Seattle, a 60 percent rate.

Maybe there is hope for us.

A perfect near-spring day in DC

If you ever have to go to a DC United game, go with my friend Peter. Not only is he just a generally great guy to hang with, he also cheers relentlessly for the home team. 

We tend to ride our e-bikes everywhere together, which is by far the best way to zip around Washington DC. That means that we can efficiently get around to see much more than the average traveler in this city. We can also drink a little more than the average traveler. Sure, you're not supposed to drive and move around, but it's quite a bit safer on a bike than behind the wheel, as long as you know what you're doing. 

Anyway, I had missed seeing DC United last year in their first season in the beautiful new stadium in southwest DC. This was the first game of their second season there, and they came back for a 2-1 win over Miami.

Before that, we went to the final Georgetown game of the regular season - a heart breaking 1-point loss to #ll Villanova. And after that, I moved on to my buddy Jason's kids-friendly 45th birthday party. 

It was kind of the perfect day in the fantastic city that I've now called home for 21 -21! - years. Life is good. And I'm glad I get to spend it with friends and family. And sports. That I love.

Where in the world do I wanna go?

My bucket list of places to go travel is still pretty big. I've been lucky enough to visit all the continents so far except Australia and Antarctica. And I think I've hit 45 states in the U.S. But there are still plenty of nooks and crannies to get to.

One of them is coming up for a family spring break (coronovirus-willing): campervan-ing across Southern California. We'll start in L.A. 'burbs Santa Monica and Malibu, then we'll make our way out to Palm Springs. The Frank Sinatra-sparked allure of the place has always intrigued me. Then we'll camp in perhaps Coachella, Joshua Tree, perhaps the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, and Red Rocks outside Vegas.

Also high on my travel list to still see?

• Hawaii, for beach beauty and mountain hiking
• Japan, for the majestic mountain peaks - and subway-rich cities 
• Hong Kong and Singapore. while we're in that region 
• Riding a train around the parts at Europe I haven't seen, like Croatia, Portugal, Italy, and Greece
• All of the parts of Africa I haven't been to yet. If north and west Africa are anywhere like west and south Africa, they are can't miss, and that, to me, feels like the way humans were supposed to live, not like the plastic wasteland we live in here in the (somehow still beautiful) U.S.
• Honorable mention: India, Australia, New Zealand, and the Amazon (I've been to many places in Brazil, but not the deep forest yet). 
• Oh, and also, Ireland and Scotland (for ancestral purposes), Liverpool (for, I would hope, obvious purposes), and Costa Rica (for adventurous purposes).

Time for the Star Wars universe to come to an end for me?

So I’ve now seen all nine ... count em, nine ... Star Wars films, and also the two loose-end ones, Rogue One and Solo.

The new ones certainly can’t compare to the wonder of the original three, but the final chapter, The Rise of Skywalker, does justice to the franchise. It wraps up most of the loose ends and offers a good share of unexpected moments.

These kind of action flicks usually bore me to sleep, so why is Star Wars different? It must be the focus on character. People my age (in our forties) have known these people and creatures our whole lives.

I’m not that into superhero movies and part of that reason may be that I really haven’t known most of the characters my whole life. Many people have, which possibly explains their popularity, but not me. I was more into Archie comics than Batman and Superman ones when I was a kid. The core characters of Star Wars feel more like Archie characters to me than Superheroes.

Archie as Luke Skywalker. Reggie as Han Solo. Betty and Veronica as princesses Leia and Rey. Jughead as C-3Po?

The Star Wars universe will no doubt continue on somehow, quite possibly without me. But it was great while it lasted.

The Rise of Skywalker: 4 out of 5 stars