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In keeping with recent Seinfeld-related posts (though this is probably how we want to remember her, i.e., “in our best ages”):

2023 brought with it news that the new series from the husband-and-wife team who brought us Dark wouldn’t be renewed (which corporate cost-cutting has ironically made a considerable concern despite all the competition for content), and while the first season hadn’t convinced everyone that it would be something just as special, I did enjoy my late-night viewings on the old couch, overcoming my hesitation about the period setting, appreciating the confluence of languages where before there was only Deutsch, and certainly relishing the dream-like transitions between realities through the crawlspaces.As exquisitely as they crafted the imagery, this was a quality production, the way I like my WTF, because the creators got a chance with their vision and ambition. Shame, I was relieved more than anything those two threw us for a loop on their maiden voyage and I was expecting no less than another from them, especially after pulling the ending straight out of the shitty US remake of Life on Mars… Wait a minute, Ashes to Ashes ended with “Heroes”, and so did Regular Show?

Never seen this video before, but holy shit, Bowie was a god!
Back when he passed, I wrote an obituary of sorts on the old job’s content-starved Yammer site (thought that was bad enough, then after being taken over by a nearly 1K-large organization, theirs was still manned by a single executive whose role seemed to be to do nothing but), accompanied by this picture:

I remember some banter about David Bowie before the last staff meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I was rummaging through some of the boxes in the garage only to unearth these relics from a bygone era. 7th-generation [iPod] nano for scale… to think I ran with that thing, which really is as heavy as it looks! (And isn’t Apple getting a lot of flak over rumors that their next iPhone is going to do away with the headphone jack, it being what, 2016 now?) All the memorials may have since passed, but the “Heroes” cassette was surprisingly cued up for the title track—like a kind of time capsule, almost—and while the playback reminded me just how old this stuff is, it was a fine personal tribute to the artist.

Bonus: The song is just as brilliant in languages I’ve studied in my lifetime. Sadly, the only music I brought in to play on Mrs. Hogshead’s box turntable was Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” 12-inch. (Pardon if the lyrics don’t display upon hover, the Soundcloud iFrame seems to interfere with the <title> tag. These links are all bound to fail one day, anyway, so best to preserve the content elsewhere.)

Jeff Lynne’s music sounds all the same, doesn’t it? Not that I’m complaining.

Just an incredible filmography, practically all our favorites from Shaw Bros.

r/KillingEve had a meltdown after the series finale, and though one might easily snicker at the lugubriosity, the writing had certainly been on the wall, hit the fan then the wall, anywhere else in the house or down the plumbing except that nice stack of paper in the Stephen J. Cannell Productions closing credits. They might as well have given the characters the happy ending (together) the fans wanted, because it wasn’t as if they were doing something meaningful with them, regardless. I very much prefer the fate, however more conservative, of Korean version “K”, who at least we see in the end still defined by her own psychosis instead of a connection to another person. Same can’t be said of Ruth Wilson’s Alice Morgan or worse, Criminal Intent’s Nicole Wallace; the latter as it turns out, was un-fridged in a head-scratching single-seasoner set in English-speaking Paris and up to her old tricks with a different leading man.