Tag: Game of Thrones

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Film Features Film/TV

House of the Dragon

Paddy Considine stars as King Viserys I Targaryen in HBO’s House of the Dragon.

I will start this review of the pilot episode of HBO’s House of the Dragon, the official prequel (eye roll emoji) to the smash-hit fantasy series Game of Thrones, with what we Extremely Online folk call a “hot take”: The last season of Game of Thrones wasn’t that bad.

Story-wise, the endgame of the eight-season tale was pretty reasonable: Jon Snow, who belatedly discovered he had a claim to the coveted Iron Throne, murdered his fiancée Queen Daenerys Targaryen after she opted for mass slaughter by dragon during the final conquest of Westeros’ capital, King’s Landing. Snow was re-exiled to the Black Watch for his crime (which was probably just as well, as he didn’t really want to be king), and his half brother Bran Stark, a post-human, magical being who can see both past and future, is proclaimed king by what’s left of the noble houses.

Personally, I didn’t buy the “Daenerys has shown her true genocidal self and has to go for the good of the kingdom” argument. If it had been me in Jon Snow’s fur collar, I would have taken the dynastic marriage and used the raw power of my smoldering sexuality to positively influence the khaleesi. But what do I know? I’m a lover, not a fighter, and the great game for control of Westeros favors the bold and bloody.

The real problem with the final season of Game of Thrones was that it was rushed. Instead of the standard 10-episode season, show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss opted to produce only six installments, redirecting their extravagant budget into one blowout battle scene for “The Long Night.” But the night battle turned out to be a bust because (surprise!) it’s hard to see what’s happening in the dark, so instead of watching Jon Snow and Daenerys go from love to deadly suspicion over four hours, we didn’t get to see anything, really.

But that’s all 172 years in the future from House of the Dragon, which informs us in a lengthy preamble that we’re going to learn how the dragon-riding Targaryen dynasty all but exterminated itself. When we last left King’s Landing, it lay in ruins. We return in its heyday, as King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine) rules over the (reasonably) peaceful city. His queen Aemma Arryn (Sian Brooke) has been pregnant five times, but only one child survived. Unfortunately, Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock, for now) is female, and the Westerosi patriarchy frowns on the concept of queens ruling alone. Instead, the king’s brother, Prince Daemon Targaryen (former Doctor of Doctor Who Matt Smith) is the heir apparent — unless the queen’s current pregnancy ends with the birth of a son.

The king is so confident in his son-siring ability that he calls all the knights and noble houses in the Seven Kingdoms to a tournament, just as the queen is scheduled to deliver. If all goes well, the chieftains will be there to celebrate the beginning of another generation of political stability.

Reader, all does not go well. As the tournament devolves from chivalric jousting into a general brawl, Queen Aemma Arryn’s labor results in a breech baby and botched cesarean delivery. (Westerosi magic has many strengths, but obstetrics is not one of them.) Prince Daemon, having shown his brutal character as the castration-happy commander of the city watch, is still scheduled to take over the throne. Thanks to the machinations of the King’s Hand, Ser Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), Viserys decides to buck tradition and name his embittered daughter Rhaenyra as his heir. What could possibly go wrong?

The House of the Dragon pilot is carefully engineered by new showrunner Ryan Condal and author George R. R. Martin to be both just familiar enough not to turn off the fans while promising new adventures, this time with a whole bunch of dragons. Rhaenyra is basically Arya Stark with Daenerys’ hairdo. Considine gives the most compelling performance as the well-meaning king, traumatized by the sudden loss of his wife. Smith continues his post-Doctor run of ace villains. The joy of Game of Thrones has always been the sprawling cast of supporting characters, and we’re introduced to plenty with potential. But still, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire began as a response to the bloodless, unsexy high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. House of the Dragon’s got plenty of on-screen blood and sex, but the tone so far has a distinct Tolkienian stiffness. Here’s hoping Condal and his cast grow into the chain mail boots they need to fill.

House of the Dragon is streaming on HBO Max.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Interesting Times: Trump in London

CREDIT: Reuters | Peter Nicholls

There’s a Chinese expression that goes “May you live in interesting times.” I always thought it was a toast or an expression of goodwill until I looked up its origins (or “oringes”). I discovered that it’s called the “Chinese Curse” and that it’s actually a wish for misfortune toward another — the significance being that uninteresting times are peaceful and uneventful.

So perhaps the Chinese were prescient when it comes to our current state of instability — but no one should have to live like this. It’s difficult knowing your country’s chief executive is a schizoid, delusional megalomaniac when every day — every day — brings a fresh outrage. I’m not a morning person, but my wife is, so we have a ritual when I wake up. I ask, “What new horror happened today?”

Reuters | Peter Nicholls

Protesters fly the baby blimp in the U.K.

We can’t escape from watching the news like it’s a poor man’s Game of Thrones miniseries. It’s exhausting keeping up with the unpredictable conduct of this vile man when your rage and disgust have already been sapped. I have become drained by the daily onslaught of his boasts, his warped opinions, his disdain for the rule of law, and his endless mantra of “No collusion. No obstruction. Witch hunt.” 

During Trump’s on-camera meltdown during last Thursday’s press pool spray, he unleashed a tsunami of lies. One account had him telling at least 21 lies about the Russia investigation. Trump’s endless repetition of falsehoods points to his misguided fascination with “The Big Lie,” as espoused by Germany in the 1930s. It used to be verboten for a credible journalist to compare the evils of any American citizen to Hitler, but those unwritten rules are no longer viable in the age of Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. In a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, said that her husband often read a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he kept in a cabinet by his bed. I’m surprised that he reads anything at all, but in reading Hitler’s verbiage, he might have come across this quote, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Or perhaps he came across this aphorism from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” 

But let’s get real, Trump doesn’t read.The most likely explanation is that he learned the technique from his late attorney, Roy Cohn, who was once described as “The … most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54.” Trump tweeted, “I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.” He later deleted his Freudian slip.

In a single week in the post-Mueller-Report Trump-world, he threatened Mexico with a pyramid scheme of tariffs if they did not stop the influx of wretched immigrants fleeing violence from Central America. Trump man-splained, “It’s about stopping drugs as well as illegals,” to which Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador replied, “Social problems don’t get resolved with … coercive measures.”

After Trump’s tariff announcement, the stock market dropped like an anvil. Even Republican firebrands were incensed. Doddering Iowa Senator “Chuck” Grassley said, “This is a misuse of presidential authority.” Iowa’s junior Senator Joni Ernst said, “Progress to get this trade agreement [USMCA, the acronym for the rebranded NAFTA] across the finish line will be stifled.”

After threatening Mexico, Trump issued an “emergency declaration,” allegedly provoked by Iran, in order to sell billions of dollars worth of arms to Saudi Arabia while bypassing Congress. He then taunted Iran saying, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.”

Then it was reported that while Trump was in a Japanese harbor, a White House directive to move the USS John McCain from the fragile president’s view was received by the Navy. Since it is cumbersome to put a destroyer in reverse, the Navy ended up obscuring the ship’s name with a canvas tarp and then denying the entire incident.

By the time you read this, the Trump three-day family excursion to England will be over, so we have to wait to see what shameful conduct occurs. Before leaving, Emperor Trump interfered with British politics, endorsing doppelganger Boris Johnson as the next Prime Minister; insulted Princess Meghan Markle in the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun saying, “I didn’t know she was nasty,” then denying it, until it was learned a recording existed; and claimed Europe is destroying its culture by admitting so many immigrants.

There are protests planned all over England and Ireland during Trump’s official visit. He will be met by the image of a giant penis mowed into property owned by a landscaper on the approach to Stansted Airport, as well as the familiar giant inflated Trump baby blimp soaring above the city. London Mayor Sadiq Khan claimed Trump was “one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat” and compared his language to “fascists of the 20th century.”

Trump retorted in a tweet, saying Khan was “a stone cold loser.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for these times to be a little less interesting.

Randy Haspel writes the Recycled Hippies blog.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Game Of Thrones Ends With A Meditation on the Horrors of War

Drogon is silently judging you.

Game of Thrones was a great show that grew to love the wrong thing. Its early adopters worshipped how it fully realized its alternate universe. Its increasing budget to film battle sequences (off-screen in the manner of a stage play at first) became what its makers thought its true worth. Seduced by the dark side of their production schedule, spectacle became their master, writing their afterthought. Details grew fuzzy, their beautifully constructed dollhouse fell apart, as its audience watched not with desire but light hatred, not in fire but ice.

But even in its death throes, the penultimate episode took time to be true to itself and deflate its heroes. It numbed the viewer with endless shots of medieval civilians running from dragon firebombing by former savior, Daenerys Targaryen. Innocents ran down corridors, caught on fire, and turned to ash. Modeled after U.S. and British massacre of German civilians in Dresden during World War II, it was disgusting. All-powerful ninja Arya and stern-faced warrior Jon Snow ran around helplessly while Daenerys and lieutenant Grey Worm went mad. It may be garbled Cliff Notes for an ending George R.R. Martin may never write, but I’ll hold onto it the way a housecat does a dead mouse: long past the point of usefulness. I loved this show.
[pullquote-1] It is not normal for TV shows to end well, especially sci-fi fantasy. Lost and Battlestar Galactica adopted religious smokescreens for their inability to come up with secular answers to long-posed riddles. Game of Thrones didn’t, completely abandoning the lore of its competing in-universe faiths. Instead, it built to tough-guy nihilism, followed by happy outcomes for the majority of its action heroes and some light Tolkien-style epiloguing. Bran is king, for some reason.

There are many popular theories about why, outside of outpacing their source material, the writing quality of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss has gone from more thoughtful than most fantasy to exactly as loose and empty as much of it. Cocaine and burnout are solid options, as is a desire to move onto their recently-announced Star Wars trilogy, or the cosmic injustice of a cruel god. I think that, just as they relied on assistant-turned-writer Bryan Cogman for heavy lore lifting in the first seasons, they are relying on a different one now, Dave Hill (who helped elevate the character of Olly), and he’s just not as skilled at helping them craft sturdy plots.

A victorious Daenerys Targaryen addresses her troops in the ruins of King’s Landing.

As many have pointed out, the series dilutes the antiwar message of the novels by its sometimes glorification of the hard-bitten warrior. How cool the Hound looks fighting the Mountain with a dragon flying behind them registered more strongly than his late assertion to mass-murderer Arya that revenge is hollow. (Likewise the online cry of “Cleganebowl!” was initially ironic: people mocked treating a death fight between brothers like an organized sport, until repetition made them sincere). The point shouldn’t be that Daenerys went crazy and killed civilians: it should be that all mass violence leads to noncombatant death, and warriors and states use it far too freely, with increasingly meaningless justification.

Director Miguel Sapochnik and Emilia Clarke did excellent work selling that slaughter. But the lack of characterization in Dany’s turn from a protector of the common people to their mass murderer made the moment nonsensical. Her reasons work when written out: a need to rule by fear, losing advisors and dragons, and numerous surrender bells frustrating or stimulating her bloodlust. Onscreen it creates a disconnect, that does clumsily get the nature of being bombed right. One minute you’re following the propaganda of a government at war, the next you’re being indiscriminately killed. Violence does not resolve character arcs. It just ends you.

Iron Throne? Not so much.

Martin’s ongoing suggestion is that this would happen with any king or queen in the right circumstances. The show’s unfortunate implication is that Dany is worse than her formerly gray, also-murderer co-heroes because she is female, from a foreign land and rides magic lizards. It’s special pleading that the other warriors suddenly care so much about collateral damage.

For the American audience, the use of Dresden as source material is a quiet self-indictment. Your tax dollars prop up one of the most powerful militaries in the world. My favorite show is saying that all war is immoral. If only the comfort and catharsis its audience found in that message could translate into peaceful action by us.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

CREDIT: courtesy HBO

courtesy HBO

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) rides Viserion into battle.

How I feel about my longtime favorite show, Game of Thrones, crystallized recently when I saw a behind-the-scenes promotional video featuring George Lucas’ visit to the set. The show has journeyed from Star Trek to Star Wars, from science fiction carefulness about its worldbuilding to fully realized mythic fantasy. And within that, another movement: from the revelatory appeal of the original trilogy to the bloated nature of the prequels. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were adept at adapting George R.R. Martin’s novels, cutting the excess and creating momentum from the morass of detail. But having run out of novels to adapt, they now make up material whole cloth. They favor sudden reveals of plot and character development, twists which pay off simultaneously with half-convincing explanations of how they occurred.

Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

Now it’s unclear where characters’ foibles end and where their stupidly for the sake of plot movement begins. The political bickering is nonsensical, the speech less thoughtful and more modern. The pleasures of the show are that of any well-made spectacle. Dragonriders Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have fallen in love with the all the conviction of bored real estate attorneys in a late afternoon deposition. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) gets chided for his lack of cleverness, in a retcon of how TV has softened him from the novels, where he is a more murderous and angry drunk. A long-awaited battle has come and gone.
courtesy HBO

Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Wildu) and Ser Brianne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) prepare for the undead onslaught during the Battle of Winterfell.

Because the second half of this season is yet to air, I cannot say whether these storylines will pull together into a beautiful meditation on all that comes before (online spoilers work like prophecies in the books—vaguely and inconsistently). They still could. I still worship the show even as I criticize it, and spend free time discussing and studying it. But always at my back, I hear my snobbery toward sports. How am I different from a casual football fan? Where the avid sports watcher admires the skill of athlete, I admire the production craftsmen who make this extravaganza. Both are fundamentally passive relationships. The only difference is when the show was better, I was using my brain to work out the mechanics of a fictional world. Now I just receive it, like dictates from the Pope.

The battle between the living and the dead in episode 3 of this season was wonderfully tense. I like director Miguel Sapochnik’s continual stress on the confusion of violence, and how one’s personal narrative gets lost in the chaos of battle. Jon Snow again unheroically flounders through combat. His dragon collides with his lover/aunt’s, foreshadowing what I suspect will be the real conflict post-White Walker. However, that the series’ demonic threat would be defeated in one moment after a single battle with many survivors, felt like a cheat and a mistake.

Criticisms of the episode’s lack of battle geography and dark cinematography miss Game of Thrones’ current strengths. In large setpieces, it gets the feeling of small horrific or supernatural details right. Commenters pointed out that it was an incorrect use of cavalry for the mounted Dothraki to charge into blind darkness and a zombie horde from an opening defensive position, but the visual of soldiers watching their comrades’ fiery swords go out in faraway silence communicated the ebb and flow of hope in a battle. You get the sense of how it feels to be an individual swept up in a mass event.
courtesy HBO

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark

As a fan of this one, sometimes my only recourse to imaginatively engage with a story is to criticize how it fails my expectations. At worst this can be criticism similar to a shoe-buyer complaining about a tight fit: the consumer and his product, in a swan song as their life goes by. But at best the simple act of discussion can engage with communal storytelling, and the ideas stories communicate. Two here are that might makes right, not honor, and that the upper classes focus on increasing their power instead of dealing with threats to the lower classes. I would say this is a general condition of humanity. How can the majority of us be truly free when the powerful always corrupt whatever structure contains them?

Where before describing these ideas was exciting, the show is now something like America’s Most Photographed Barn in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I can feel the meaninglessness of my voice among the din. But the ritual is a balm, and the central allegory is still there, and still important.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Off the Rails: Phrases We Never Need to Hear Again

A year has passed without me complaining about the phrases and words I hear on a regular basis that cause me to go “off the rails.” I know it may seem like a “nothing burger” to you, but I am mystified by “that moment when” one person said something clever, and it metastasized into slipshod nationwide verbal swill. There are plenty of “bad actors,” so let’s “play the blame game.” There are some repeat offenders that “rolled over” from last year but, “believe me,” there are plenty of fresh ones that would “literally” gag a buzzard off a shit wagon. “Does that make sense?” 

So. The award for the major annoyance for the second consecutive year is the word, “so.” So, when did this affectation take hold? Ask someone a question, and if they’re pundits, reporters, or teens in the mall, they all seem to have the need to preface every sentence with “So.” For example, “How’d you get that scar on your face?” “So, I was at home trying to train the cat to leap through a ring of fire, and she went for my eyes.” If you haven’t noticed yet, now you will.

Dropping the “T” in the middle of a word. This may not sound impor’ant to you, but it’s cur’ains for the lingua franca. I mean, are we speaking La’in now? I first thought this was just a cultural thing, especially among the British, and it is. This irritant is called a glottal stop, and it’s been studied in England since the 1800s. I’m not sure how it reached our shores, but it spread through every strata of society like a norovirus on a cruise ship. Maybe it was Vladimir Pu’in.

The Adult in the Room. All the grownups have left the building so Donnie can haz cheezburger. “All alone” is the pathetic whimper of an insecure man. But don’t worry. Soon there will be all the “executive time” one inmate can stand.

Moving the Goalposts. I saw this once when Tennessee beat Alabama “back in the day,” but they tore that one down. The only other time I’ve actually seen the goalpost move is when a field goal kicker doinks one off the crossbar like the Chicago Bears did last week. That was “literally” a “game-changer.”

Woke. This is what happens when oblivious lawn servicemen crank up those goddamn leaf blowers at 7 on a Saturday morning. Sweet Jesus, didn’t this city used to have some sort of noise ordinance? It feels like I’m trying to sleep on the deck of an aircraft carrier. By this time, everybody’s woke.

Yeah, no. This expression is the common-law spouse of “Sorry, not sorry.” Which is it? Have some gumption and pick a side, “just sayin’.”

LOL. This was cute back in the chat rooms of America Online, but now that there are a variety of smiley-face emojis, this acronym has become archaic. However, people are saying this in public now. Don’t say “LOL,” just go ahead and laugh. This includes ROFL, LMAO, LMFAO, and SMH LMAO. Of course, all this is IMHO.

Drill down. Cable TV hosts use this expression when they’re fixing to get to the bottom of something. We’ll be hearing a lot more of this phrase in the coming year, but out of professional courtesy, it should be reserved for dentists.

Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones

References to Game of Thrones. Would you believe that there are people who aren’t into Fantasy/Science Fiction and, thus, don’t know what the hell you’re talking about? I’ve never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones, and I don’t like dragons. I am also uninterested in Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and all the Marvel superheroes movies. Does this make me a bad person? I can quote large swaths of dialogue from The Godfather, but I don’t just throw it out there casually. And I’ve frisked a thousand young punks.

MAGA. Fuck you and your made-in-China hat.

No collusion. “No puppet, no puppet. … You’re the puppet.”

Guardrails. See “The Adult in the Room” above.

Thoughts and prayers. I know you mean well, but instead of praying you might consider actually doing something. And they’re always “going out” there somewhere. Shouldn’t they be going in? Just for variety’s sake, after the next mass murder, change it to prayers and thoughts. This illuminates your priorities.

Fake news. It’s curious how the supposed “fake news” keeps turning out to be true. It’s strange that “Individual-1” will only grant interviews to Fox News personalities. Judge Jeanine Pirro will never cross-examine him. He likes Fox and Friends because there’s always a young blonde co-host sitting on the couch in a short dress with her legs crossed. All the time. “This Rusher thing, with Trump and Russia” gets truer every day. All this bombast and middle-school taunting was merely a diversion to distract from the very real news that the president of the United States was under investigation for being a Russian asset. We are living through a nightmare “the likes of which the world has never seen.” But “chillax.” Special Council Mueller is about to “take it to the next level,” literally.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Game of Drones

So the latest season of Game of Thrones ended like most of the other seasons have ended: A seemingly essential character who everyone really liked was hideously murdered. Of course, we won’t know if Jon Snow is really dead until next season. But if he survives getting run through with several broadswords, it will probably have to involve dark magick or be revealed as a dream sequence or some other screenwriting chestnut.

Aside from massive battles, there are really only two types of deaths in Game of Thrones (and in most fiction, truth be told): the really satisfying ones, where a loathsome, evil creep finally gets what’s coming to him, and the “Oh, no, not HER!!” deaths that just tick you off. And since GOT is set in a medieval, pre-gunpowder world, most deaths come via sword, knife, arrow, or spear — not a pleasant way to go, one assumes.

Anyway, all this bloody entertainment got me thinking about how human weaponry has shaped human culture, fictional and nonfictional. We’ve gone from knives and spears and arrows to muzzle-loaders and small cannons to machine guns and bazookas. We “progressed” to fighter planes, bombers, nuclear missiles, and, most recently, to drones and robotic weapons. And, of course, we can’t overlook chemical and biological warfare. Very efficient.

Through history, our art, literature, film, and even music have reflected our weapons: what we use to wage warfare, to enforce the law — and to just generally kill each other off. Movies and books set in the future usually feature some sort of glitzy advanced weaponry — lasers or such — but we’re still just basically shooting at each other with one thing or another.

But increasingly, modern warfare has evolved into a video-game scenario, with “soldiers” in front of computer screens carrying out deadly drone attacks on the other side of the world. For the side sending in the drones (us), this seems like a good deal, a much safer and sanitary version of warfare, with little danger to our combatants. For the people in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East where death comes out of the sky with no warning, it’s not such a good deal.

When we read in the morning paper that a U.S. drone attack has killed yet another al-Qaeda “second in command” or ISIS leader, we can only hope they got it right and killed a murderous creep who deserved it and avoided killing “Oh, no, not HER” innocents. But if we were honest, we’d admit that that real death on the other side of the world affects us less than the fictional death of Jon Snow. We don’t see the rubble, the blood, the body parts; we don’t demand proof that our country has killed righteously. We just hope they did. Then turn to the sports page.

Maybe that’s why ISIS atrocities — the stabbings, the beheadings, the mass killings with old-school weapons — horrify us so. It’s a kind of warfare that seems uncalled for, ancient and medieval, reflective of a brutal, fundamental inhumanity we can’t get our heads around — one that we prefer to restrict to HBO. Hopefully, Game of Drones won’t have a surprise ending.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Now open: Julles Posh Foods and Chef Shuttle.

CREDIT: Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

To walk into Julles Posh Foods is to be pleasantly surprised. Nothing about the address suggests excellence. It’s wedged into a strip mall between a Lenny’s and Walgreens. But the owners, MK and Julliet Bhupesh, are doing something refreshingly different for East Memphis: They’re cooking light.

“There’s a lot you can do with a drop of oil,” muses Julliet. “You don’t have to fry it.”

MK and Julliet both grew up in India, but they didn’t meet until much later, in California. At the time, MK was working as a consultant at Accenture, while Julliet was a pastry chef at the Grand Hyatt in Monterey. Her culinary training is classically European: She has worked at five-star hotels alongside celebrity chefs like Anton Mossiman and Gordon Ramsay. So what drew her to MK?

“He had a sly smile,” recalls Julliet. “He cooked shrimp with coconut for me, and I thought that was very brave.”

At Julles Posh Foods, the menu changes weekly, according to the season and Julliet’s whims. On a recent Monday, the menu featured a Trio of Bean Salad with Lemon Dressing and Grilled Chicken ($14), as well as a Pistachio-Crusted Wild Salmon with Maple Mustard Vinaigrette ($20).

But I was pumped for the Spicy Shrimp ($20). Here, crisp white asparagus and a bean ragout make a zesty bed for some truly peppery crustaceans. For fun, pair it with one of Julliet’s cold-pressed juices. I liked the “Boost n Run” ($9), a gingery potion of beets, carrots, and kale.

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

Nearly all of these dishes are gluten-free, and several are vegan. That’s a perk, says Julliet, but it isn’t the point. Rather, it flows naturally from her philosophy of cooking light and using predominantly fresh, local ingredients. Recent examples include fingerling potatoes from Woodson Ridge Farms and amaranth microgreens from Rocking Micros.

If you have time, you really ought to dine in. Julles Posh Foods is executed in the sunny style of a Euro café: white and tidy with green and yellow accents. But for busy families who prefer to eat at home, there are actually two more ways to get this food.

First, you can pick up. Julliet prepares and plates each dish, then flash-chills it in an oven-safe container. (An aside: It’s rare to see this level of care taken with prepared foods. Even in black plastic, these dinners look immaculate.) Finally, you can arrange to have your meals delivered. Visit jullesposhfoods.com to order online.

You’ve probably heard about Seamless, the site that lets you order food online. It currently works with 8,000 restaurants in more than 600 cities. Alas, the list does not include Memphis.

But wait! Before you let fly with that familiar, world-weary sigh: Memphis now has its own, homegrown version of Seamless. Back in February, Chef Shuttle started delivering meals to six zip codes in the eastern half of the city. Founder Ryan Herget says he plans to add more neighborhoods in the coming weeks.

Here’s how it works: Go to chefshuttle.com and pick a restaurant (there are currently about 20 to choose from). Order from the menu; the prices are the same as dining in. And that’s it. The food shows up at your door within an hour, and all for a flat delivery fee of $4.95.

I had been meaning to try Chef Shuttle. Also, I had been meaning to check out Game of Thrones. So on a recent Wednesday night, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. At 5:30 p.m., I ordered dinner from 4Dumplings, a Chinese joint in East Memphis. Then I cued up season five, episode one, and pressed play.

5:32 p.m. Opening credits — followed by a dizzying, two-minute montage that attempts to summarize the past 40 episodes. Anyone who hasn’t already seen those episodes will be utterly confused by this. Confused, I open a can of Wiseacre Tiny Bomb pilsner.

6:08 p.m. Food arrives, well ahead of schedule. The friendly delivery driver, Nancy, confesses, “I’m a people person. I love meeting people.” Meanwhile, onscreen, a naked knight cuddles with another knight. I kind of hope Nancy didn’t see that part.

6:11 p.m. Do these characters ever actually meet each other? In a pyramid, a busty woman wearing white says she won’t reopen the fighting pits. I break into the food and am pleased to find that it is piping hot. First up: a bowl of hot & sour soup ($3.50).

6:18 p.m. The woman is in bed now, attended by her lover. They talk a lot, but that’s okay, because they are very attractive and very naked. I open another beer and move on to pork dumplings ($8), which I dip into a delicious, vinegary sauce.

6:26 p.m. A man being burned to death is shot through the heart with an arrow. According to the show’s unusual logic, this is supposed to be merciful. Really? As the closing credits roll, I lay into a bowl of homemade noodles topped with spicy Mongolian beef ($9). The show remains inscrutable, but the food, at least, was good.

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Game Of Thrones Season 5

Game of Thrones is about a vampiric government sleepwalking toward impending disaster. Some would say that is why it has captured the zeitgeist. Others would say you just throw money at the zeitgeist and it does what you want. We are the ruled. The exercise of power in our lives — whether by government or corporate house — is something
we receive.

The premiere episode of the fifth season, which aired last Sunday, returns to the subject of obtaining and maintaining power. It’s appealing because the serfs — us — are mainly offscreen. So many of its favored characters are royals or nobles or secret royals. They are born into agency, then according to their respective empathy levels, proceed to brutally or morally pursue change.

Game of Thrones, Season 5

The audience I saw it with was rowdy. They yelled at man ass and gasped at cut throats. They were wearing costumes — I sat near a lovely Tormund Giantsbane and Brienne of Tarth — drank from fake goblets, and ate chicken legs. As the show started its plot machinery for the year, they maybe wanted a little more action, a little more thrill. Instead, it started contemplatively, giving us a childhood witch’s prophecy that fuels the neuroticism of the evil but sympathetic queen Cersei (Lena Headey). Elsewhere, a eunuch warrior went to a brothel in order to be held. Lancel Lannister (Eugene Simon), one of my favorite comic-relief characters, returned with a monk’s tunic and a shaven head, having found consolation in religion. We saw warrior king Mance Rayder’s (Ciarán Hinds) proud bearing ebb away into vulnerability on his way to being burnt at the stake. These tender moments are good.

But couched in that is something sad: doom. This is a nondemocratic world about to crumble into apocalypse. Ice zombies and dragons are closing in on Westeros from either end. There’s tension between the portrayal of medieval realpolitik — what series author George R.R. Martin calls “Aragorn’s tax policy” — and how reassuring a godlike eagle’s eye view of doom can be. The realistic character work and worldbuilding are spiced not only with heavy dollops of fantasy war, titillation, and sex, but the comfort that a corrupt world is explainable because it’s fueled by the Olympian lusts of a powerful few. Order in a crooked universe is preferable to the anarchy without it.

“The future is shit, just like the past,” says Tyrion Lannister on being freed from the crate in which he’s been hiding on an eastbound ship, recounting pushing his literal feces out of holes in the side. The premiere’s director, Michael Slovis, wonderfully shows off his Breaking Bad roots by giving us first-person glimpses of a passing marketplace through those holes. The eunuch Varys tells him he wants to install dragon mother Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) on the Iron Throne to create “Peace. Prosperity. A land where the powerful do not prey on the powerless.” Tyrion answers, “Where the castles are made of gingerbread and the moats are filled with blackberry wine. The powerful have always preyed on the powerless, that’s how they became powerful in the first place.”

Peter Dinklage

This is the bedrock of the show. It soups up its soap opera by making its deaths more realistic and therefore unpredictable. But the emphasis on face-crushing and disemboweling also implies that the world is so brutal it may not be worth sticking your neck out. That’s a defeatist sentiment those of us interested in complex and decadent entertainment may not agree with. It’s the opposite of The Wire, which tried to explain the complex way a social order regenerates itself and traps its participants, who were often dirt poor. Game of Thrones is not revolutionary, even though the horribleness of its hereditary monarchy is a foregone conclusion. You get lost in the details of this lovingly realized, tragic world.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss get better each year at streamlining those details. They have removed Viking pirates, vengeful zombie mothers, and much repetition. But the digressions that strangle Martin’s literary narrative also keep its hopelessness from becoming airtight. Streamlining the world makes it more clockwork in its dourness. The moneyed are further removed from changing things, but they are the only ones who can. This may not be accidental. Martin is a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from New Jersey. Benioff is the son of the former head of Goldman Sachs.

Tearing down corruption is a hopeful thing. When your dragons breathe fire, you want them to
shine bright.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Weekend Roundup Part Four

Thelma and the Sleaze play Bar DKDC Saturday Night.

Like live music? You’ve come to the right place. From local bands to up-and-coming touring acts, here’s a selection of whats going down around town this weekend.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6TH:
JoJo Jefferies and Ronnie Caldwell, 6:00 p.m. at Lafayettes Music Room.

The River City Cadillacs, 6:00 p.m. at Murphy’s.

Dank, Zigadoo Moneyclips, 8:00 p.m. at the Hi-Tone (small room), $5.00.

Weekend Roundup Part Four (3)

Star and Micey, Magnolia Sons 8:00 p.m. at 1884 Lounge, $12.00.

Big Barton, 8:00 p.m. at The Cove.

Weekend Roundup Part Four (2)

Marcella and Her Lovers, 9:00 p.m. at Bar DKDC

CCDE Bob Marley Tribute show, 9:00 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Cafe (big room), $10.00.

Whores, The Devils Right Hand, 9:00 p.m. at the Buccaneer Lounge, $5.00.

Weekend Roundup Part Four

Ori Naftaly Band, 10:00 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 7TH:

River Bluff Clan, 11:00 a.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room.

Prosevere CD Release, 6:00 p.m. at the New Daisy Theater, $10.00.

Waka Winter Classic featuring Agori Tribe and more, 8:00 p.m. at the 1884 Lounge, $5.00.

Jeremy Stanfill and Joshua Cosby, 6:30 p.m. at Lafayette”s Music Room. 

Churchyard, Toxie, Liquid Teens, 9:00 p.m. at the Lamplighter, $5.00.

Weekend Roundup Part Four (5)

Dead Soldiers, Strange Wave Connection, 9:30 p.m. at the Young Avenue Deli, $10.00

Weekend Roundup Part Four (4)

One Word, Hazy Skies, Orion, 9:00 p.m. at the Buccaneer, $5:00.

Atlas Road Crew, 10:00 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room.

Jack Alberson CD Release, 10:00 p.m. at P and H Cafe.

Faith Ruch, 10:00 p.m. at the Hi-Tone (small room), $5.00

Good Paper, Art Edmaiston, 10:00 p.m. at the Hi-Tone (big room), $5.00

Thelma and the Sleaze, 10:30 p.m. at Bar DKDC, $5.00

Weekend Roundup Part Four (6)

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 8TH:
Poppa Top’s West Coast Turnaround, 4:00 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room.

The Local Saints, 7:00 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room.

Enabler, Call of the Wild, Dawn Patrol, 8:00 p.m. at the Hi-Tone, $10.00

Weekend Roundup Part Four (7)

Elizabeth Wise, 10:00 p.m. at the Buccaneer.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

2014: The Year Television Kicked The Movies’ Ass

Television continues to be the narrative televisual storytelling medium par excellence. It allows you to identify traits with human faces over a longer period of time, instead of for two hours, and thereby more easily dupes you into believing fictional people exist.

Game Of Thrones

This year Game of Thrones continued to get better and better at being subtly modern, showing us a world in which major problems are ignored for short-term politics. It was nowhere near The Wire, but still unique in using the medium to create a complex, multilayered world, more than any large scale cinematic shared universe. The show’s problems continue to be its backwards treatment of women and women’s bodies. Women are naked in traditional male gaze fashion, while penises are mostly off limits. Elsewhere, the show added a sexual assault to the adapted storyline and seemed to be confused about whether there actually was one and why it was there. The director and showrunners gave different answers in interviews, and the character in question blithely pursued his heroic arc.

True Detective

True Detective also had problems writing its female characters, but was distinguished by a beautiful opening credits sequence and fun Matthew McConaughey monologues set in a generically miserable Louisiana. McConaughey’s philosophy wasn’t anything you couldn’t find on the atheist section of Reddit, but it was operatic, poetic and accurate. Almost everyone else around him was cardboard. The series undercut this exciting pessimism by ending with action scenes and hope, not horror, with all the resounding tonal shift of a wet fart.

Orange Is The New Black

The show that was best at humanizing even its most minor characters was Orange Is The New Black. Although it may not be the most accurate depiction of the prison industrial complex, wherein we throw everyone possible in prison and make money off it, it certainly stressed the dehumanization of our system and treated the prison population with empathy. Despite all the stand-up routine style jokes, that made it a political show. Those politics were a rarity even as mainstream attention to the way police and prisons can treat civilians (murderously or corruptly) came to the forefront of newscycles this year. Television is a landscape of cops eternally breaking rules to throw criminals away. As public discourse changes, media companies sometimes allow politics that actually concern us to appear on our screens, and this is an example.

Probably my favorite cringeworthy horrible show of our modern era, 24, a show that actively and aggressively tried to act as an apologia for torture and once cast Janeane Garofalo so that its main character could yell at her, returned this year, as stupid as ever. The few episodes I watched seemed slightly more tasteful and less likely to suggest that torturing the hell out of someone is a superheroic act, but it had also lost its campy, 80’s action movie vibe.

Agents Of Shield

A lot of shows are mostly concerned with cross promotion —for example, Gotham which was mainly meaningless call-forwards to Batman characters. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had the 24 aspect of praising rule-breaking government agents with no oversight, but when it tried to be morally gray it just came off creepy. It got better this year, but was still most clear about its goals when advertising other products or films.

A procedural I did like was Happy Valley, a Netflix British import, because of the strength of its acting and writing, with only a little War on Drugs paranoia thrown in.

Attack On Titan

Other standouts included the anime Attack on Titan, widely available in the U.S. this year. The actual writing was horrible but whenever its overtly psychological monsters appeared it was wonderful. Hannibal’s Grand Guignol improved its procedural, and Transparent took Jeffery Tambor’s crossdressing from Arrested Development and remixed it humanely into the story of a transgender woman coming out to her family.

Black Mirror

Another import, Black Mirror, was accessible previously in the U.S., but just became available to most U.S. consumers via Netflix less than a month ago. Its scant six episodes are nice modern Twilight Zone parables, none better than the science fiction worldbuilding in “Fifteen Million Merits,” which dramatizes how the emptiness in working towards buying meaningless things does not go away when consumers recognize it. A consumerist system persists because it is easy to co-opt rebellion against it as a critique. Here, that means a dystopian society composed of people looking at computer screens from elliptical bikes get no catharsis when they watch an America’s Got Talent show. Their attempts to disrupt it only upgrade its edginess.
In terms of direct politics, one half of Comedy Central’s continuous critique of mainstream news, Stephen Colbert, abdicated for CBS. Given how David Letterman lost most of his verve upon decamping there, it is not a good sign. Meanwhile Aaron Sorkin’s humorless but passionate retelling of news from a few years ago, The Newsroom, finally died. From what I’ve seen of the show it seemed to be so mired in Sorkin’s voice that its political opponents were strawmen.

Finally, one of America’s most beloved television dads was revealed to be a serial rapist. This was a fact long ago: we’re just learning it. It is better to know, and for a corrupt, powerful person to be shamed if they cannot be prosecuted. His downfall was brought about in part because his handlers did not understand how new media works. For as long as it takes them to learn it, the world will change.