Emergency Room Holiday Weekend Watching -- The Frankie Drake Mysteries, First Season

     . . . . According to all the rules of every land and place, with the long weekend of a holiday's other related anxieties, pressures and mishaps -- come medical emergencies.  So the night before the 4th, while all hell is descending and breaking out in our neighborhood, NYC and the country, a medical emergency sent us out into the streets at 11 PM, to find a way to get to an emergency room.  Fortune favored us and we were inside and the patient was being seen to all within 15 minutes of realizing it was indeed necessary to go to the emergency room.

All is now well, in the sense of recovery.  Additionally as we were so fortunate, we didn't rack up tens of thousands of dollars for an ambulance to the ER.  Nor did we need to spend the night.  We were home again via a car service the ER called for us by 4 AM.  Things are going slowly but they are going surely.  And we were very, very, very lucky.  It could have been, well, I don't even want to think about what it could have been.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Frankie Drake Mysteries (2017) season 1, CBC, streaming on amazon prime.

     . . . . The Frankie Drake Mysteries is  brought to us by the Murdoch Mysteries team (2008 -2020, 14 seasons so far). At this point anyway, FD is a more light-hearted, but it too deals with mysteries and crimes. It too has a dependable ensemble cast of characters who live in Toronto. Like MM Frankie Drake frequently features a rotating appearance of real world figures. The first and third eps included Ernest Hemingway as an  intermittent character, Mack Sennett in the 5th, Al Capone in the 7th (I'm up to the 8th ep tonight). However, while MM is fin de siècle, Frankie Drake's time is the Jazz Age.

Happily, unlike Murdoch's Toronto, Jazz Age Toronto brings us lots of good music, which is remarkably well done, meaning how seldom long-running situational television does music well. Unlike Murdoch too, there are many characters of color, including Frankie’s partner in the detective agency, Trudy, who sings wonderfully and has extraordinarily beautiful, huge eyes and a wonderful family with two of the most charming younger brothers ever. Frankie’s intermittent black boxer boyfriend seems to be a model of some sort for one of historical Hemingway’s boxing stories. The series has been renewed for a 4th season so somebody is watching it.

The mise en scène and the costumes are very high quality -- particularly the clothes.  The designers put a lot of art and thought into the costuming.  Classic 20’s fashion, but with their own interpretation of it, which is always a joy to the eyes. The earrings, o their earrings!  They are to die for!

As with MM, I wasn't thrilled by the first episode, but like MM, Frankie Drake quickly charmed me, and charms me ever more in each subsequent episode.  In the case of Frankie Drake what initially captured my interest was that the prejudice and racial conditions (and those of women!) of 1920's North America were not ignored, yet the writers and actors hit the issue with the ensemble characters perfectly in a tone that matches the tone of the show – to my ears anyway. It does not make light of racial prejudice, or how it affects the characters -- but the racism isn't the point of the characters. The point of the characters is always entirely who they are, from backstory with family, friends, lost husbands, and most of all, the work they love and work very hard to get to do.

The show's reshuffled all the characters, locations and other elements that charmed us in Murdoch, with the real difference  of seeing the stories primarily from the perspectives of the Toronto Outsiders, whether of color, entertainers, non-traditionally aspirational women, women, who because of WWI, have lost their fathers and husbands (Canada sent a whole lot of men to the European slaughter). This reveals a Toronto beyond the white British ruling class, the Toronto that has always attracted all sort of immigrants, refugees, criminals, and those who just like moving around. 

Women are centered in each episode. The show is unabashedly feminist, though not preachy about it. Not only white Frankie and black Trudy as the leads, but many other sorts of women are featured, particularly working class women. An Asian woman is a continuing character, as is a plus-size woman. Trudy gets featured at least as much as Frankie. Thus the title is rather unfortunate.  

I’m liking the series a lot.  I wish seasons 2, 3 and 4 were available!

From Wikipedia:

Connections with Murdoch MysteriesIt is revealed in Frankie Drake Mysteries that the series takes place in the same universe as Murdoch Mysteries and that it takes place years after the events of Murdoch Mysteries. Some main and recurring characters from Murdoch Mysteries make appearances in Frankie Drake Mysteries, such as Inspector Thomas Brackenreid (Thomas Craig) who is revealed to have retired as an inspector and head of Station House Four. Also Constable George Crabtree (Jonny Harris) is revealed in the eighth episode of the first season ("The Pilot") to have retired from Constabulary to become a successful investor and Detective Llewellyn Watts (Daniel Maslany) is revealed to have become the successor to Brackenreid as the new inspector and head of Station House Four.[11][12]

Opening the Hell Mouth -- But There's No Buffy

     . . . . To decompress from last night's paid Zoom Event with the California audience, we went outside -- the Buck Moon, you know,

which is a little darker this year than usual.  We could even tell that was so, looking up from the packed street.

Very Expensive vehicles everywhere, disgorging Very Expensive passengers. many of those vehicles with license plates -- Texas and Florida. None of the passengers wearing masks. The places into which they are sashaying -- nobody is wearing masks either. Except the servers. Nobody's anywhere near 6 feet apart. In many of these places the awnings / tents are essentially inside spaces with some form of a portable a/c unit. There are of course also NY plates on other vehicles. But I made a count and about 1/3 were with Florida and Texas plates.

Many of these places have more tables now on the sidewalks and streets than they were able to have inside. There is nowhere for people like us to walk.

Not a cop in sight to enforce anything. I suppose if they're enforcing, it's in the Bronx.

This is a sleigh ride to hell return to NYC's previous catastrophe.

Also with the sheer number of these places having filled up both the sidewalks and the streets, the number of people stationary for hours in each others' faces, without masks, this number of people far exceeds the 25 - 30 people rule. These blocks of restaurant tables etc., converge, like rain drops converging to make a rivelet, rivelets converge, become puddles, ponds, sloughs, etc. This is very dangerous to us. As per usual in this country, nobody thought this through. All they thought was REVENUE!

So, now, Miami-Dade County has even had to institute a curfew, 10 PM - 6 AM. I wish ours was back. It has mandatory mask wearing. I wish we did too. But I suppose it would only be enforced by the cops on people of color.

E V is having a very unhappy day. He gets them just as I do. Like mine, they come predictably early in the new month as we realize yet another month of being frozen at home with no hope of normal life in sight.

His birthday is the 8th -- Wednesday. We have no plans. Our birthdays have always been so much fun, gatherings of friends, food and music.

Our anniversary is the 25th.

Waiting for grocery delivery. Thank goodness this isn't really like waiting for Godot.  He's doing edits, I am studying and writing.

But the noise coming in from the streets is already nearly unbearable.

Watchful Cooking: Cromwell and Perry Mason

     . . . . Cromwell (1970) streaming on amazon prime.

Brit film with fine cast of actors from the British theater, such as Richard Harris (Oliver Cromwell) and Alec Guinness (Charles I complete with stutter, but far too tall!), who emote in 19th C theatrical mode (hey, it beats the mumble core mode). Though not adapted from a stage production like Becket (1964) and A Man For All Seasons (1966), it sounds like those international box office winners. Queen Henrietta Maria, played by Dorthy Tutin (ya, never heard of her either) what sort of inflection is she bringing to her English? Not that of a native French person speaking English as a second language.

Historically it’s ridiculous, just starting with Oliver Cromwell as a man of the people representin’ for democracy. Film remains dear to many English, because they saw it as children, and because of its lavish production values and gloriously overblown re-enactment of the major battles of the English Civil War. It lacks characterization and narrative drive, as well as good lines, – i.e. a thin script. The film is about pageantry and impressive visuals, not political history.  However, period spectacle does make for watching enjoyment all by itself for my sort of viewer who appreciates that sort of thing.

     . . . . Perry Mason (2020) season 1? HBO Max Original

Overuses the tiresome by now visual trope of evoking classic noir era Los Angeles – the scenes dressed and lighted so murky and mustardy and muddy in color and lighting as to be barely visible. Otherwise I rather like it, having watched the first episodes back-to-back.  For one thing it includes chicanos, which the 30’s LA noir seldom did, as far as I recall from my dad’s tremendous number of boxes in the attic containing crime-and-detection novels going all the way back to his own father’s youth.

It also contains Tatiana Maslany (who was brilliant in Orphan Black, as so many clones, each individual and different from the other) as a the charismatic radio celebrity faith healer of a god-for-profit church cult, sort of like the historical era’s Aimee Semple McPherson. An Aimee Semple McPherson type appears as Sharon Falconer in Sinclair Lewis’s satire of  the USA's peculiar Faith for Money figures, Elmer Gantry (1927). So Maslany gets to act, again!

Matthew Rhys, made famous by the long-running series, The Americans, plays Perry Mason. So far, I am not liking Rhys’s Mason.  But then, once it was clear that The Americans was making heroes of Russian spies working to bring down the USA, I ditched that show, because it seemed utterly insane to be pulling for that!  And guess what? it was true!  it happened! 

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     . . . . Made potato salad for dinner tonight, which somehow took me the entire afternoon, starting around 1 PM, not finishing until 5 PM.  First rendering the lard out of the bacon.  Boiling the eggs. Peeling and cooking the potatoes.  Chopping celery and pickles. Slicing the potatoes. Slicing the eggs. Mixing them together with some vinegar and pepper and mayonaisse.  Why so long?  Even though I washed everything in-between each step, including the heavy big chicken skillet with lid, in which I rendered out the bacon?  Dealing with bacon grease is complicated, to make sure none of it goes down the drain.  So that was quite a few steps / procedures right there!

Gay Pride Weekend, Weather, Refugees and Immigrants, & History

     . . . . Hot, very. Not so sunny though, and the predicted t-storm has arrived, thank goodness.  We've had no rain for all of June.  Drought has arrived I think.

~~~~~~~~~

Nothing can stop LGBTQ from Priding the last weekend of June in NYC. Big gathering going on at Washington Square Park, in concert with a BLM protest as well. Funny.  All was peaceful.  Then cops arrived.  Squadrons of cops.

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It has been commented at Charlie Stross's place, where many commentators are hooked into EU news far more widely and closely than I am, that the EU policy of excluding entry of US tourists isn't so much about the plague as it is to keep US refugees from coming to Europe. Which ends up being quite a lot the same thing, as NYers ran dragging the virus with them to Florida, etc., and now are running back to NY dragging covid-19 with them this direction.  But the EU certainly don't want the MAGA mad cohort coming in to swell their own numbers of crazy.  But more than that, the way the US has just stopped even trying to deal with the pandemic, and that this huge number of deathcultists are screaming that mask-wearing is satan's signature, things are going to be so insane here by January -- not to mention shortages and all the rest -- that again, merkins will want to hide from it in Europe.  Not having that! the EU says.

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Finished Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome (2020) by Douglas Boin. Maybe I have a handle finally on what the differences are between a hun, a goth and a vandal. The book's structure and organization was confusing and the content felt very thin, despite the author's hitting the keys relentlessly on his theme, that Alaric's ultimate reason for bringing and army into Rome for 3 days was that Rome was disdainful of outsiders and immigrants, denying advancement and acceptance of him even in the army to which he'd given so much. The reviews made the book sound better and more important than it was. But then what do we know about either Alaric or the era that begins toward the close of the 4th C A.D. opening into the 5th and 6th centuries? My real take-away is that the initiation of what we call(ed) the Dark Ages comes when the Christians in the west are dominating Western Rome and tolerance of any kind they WILL NOT TOLERATE! To be sure the author didn't say that, that is what I am taking away.

Now I've begun another history (besides the ongoing ones that are huge and that I don't read in every day): Charles King's 2014 work, Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul. This is another of Constantinople-Istanbul's many eras of many diverse immigrants renewing the city.  It's also Jazz Age Istanbul, which Istanbul had enthusiastically, complete with myriads of jazz bands.  Agatha Christie saw it all, visiting Istanbul several times in this era. She did ride the Orient Express, inspiring one of her most famous works, Murder on the Orient Express, among other works of hers that are set at least partly in Istanbul. This is the era in which the Orient Express is created, the surprise and awe of all of Europe.  As per usual, I am struck hard all over again by the mirroring of Venice and Constantinople-Istanbul, not only in their architecture, but their trajectories as trading empires and their intimately shared past.

Yesterday's E-Letter Answered Today

     . . . . Hello, our dear C!  You know just how to get me laughing:

"The robins try to talk to me and tell me to  go to the garden and dig around so they can get worms, they  have eaten all my strawberries and have started on the blueberries."

​So like robins!  Thank goodness they didn't get all the strawberries; for me personally, it's been a grand 6 weeks of strawberries. I think I'm eating at least two pints of them a week, with other berries and nuts and yogurt.  My breakfast-lunch, and it keeps me going until about 5, when, like the robins, my stomach wishes to start on something else. This is inconvenient because we're not really scheduling dinner until 6:30 - 7:30 PM, pretty much as we have for years.

It's been crazy around here with all the Protests -- we're right in the middle of all the marches coming up out of Brooklyn, coming down from Harlem -- all heading one way or another before or after to Washington Square Park, City Hall Park and so on.  We were ground zero for the really bad weekend of looting, with fires and the rest.  That was scary.  And now everyone is acting as though covid's over, and the people coming in from everywhere to drunkenly howl cheek by jowl, w/o masks or distance, and keeping the vulnerables inside -- the restaurants have taken all the sidewalk space, the parking lanes, a lot of STREET space and the small parks for their tables and bars. There is no where for a pedestrian to keep distance -- and bikers are also riding straight at one on both streets and sidewalks.  At some point I expect drunks and drivers will duke it out . . . . 

El V, B and I go out after 11 PM, to meet in one of the little parks here, with masks, gloves, our own stools, wine and glasses and sanitizer, and sit 6 feet away and chat.  It's really nice. We are very close and very long time friends.  We know he's as careful as we are, and vice versa.  I cook and give B stuff, he bakes and gives us stuff, he's always bringing items from Trader Joe's that I might be out of like onions -- how many onions I use a week is rather astounding. And so has become my spice and herb collection for that matter!

For Juneteenth the pastors, black and white, of a consortium of churches in New England, asked us to conduct a two hour teach in via Zoom around The American Slave Coast.  This was recorded with the pastors asking us questions that we tried to answer, for them to show their congregations this last Friday.  It was a rather exhausting thing since el V and I had to be in a single Zoom box, as having both our computers up and running meant having two microphones open at the same time, and that caused a feedback loop. So we shut mine down.  But as I was in el V's window, which was supposed to be only for a single person, I couldn't move, because, when I did shift, even a tiny bit, my 'portrait' kept blinking in and out, like some sort of weird teleportation action.  That was hard, physically.

El V's continuing the production and editing of the video shot in 2019 and January of 2020 of religious ceremonies.  He's taught himself how to use the programs necessary to do all this -- which is very difficult.  But he's amazing smart and talented, which once again he just demonstrated.  He's and I work together to keep the domestic situation operating.  Before, he was gone so much that even when he was home there was no point in him paying attention to all that.  Now that we're fairly closed down and can't travel and everything is much more difficult and time-consuming due to safety, he's pitched right in. We've been so lucky with whom we are living with.

El V has experienced some spooky health concerns, but they are getting resolved at least, with this reopening, meaning he's been able to have tests, CAT scans and sonograms, and we have learned that nothing is life threatening, i.e. not tumors or infected lymph nodes and so on.

Then my debit card number got hacked, as we learned last weekend from an inquiry text from the bank regarding a charge's legitimacy as we were enjoying a splendid Saturday night dinner. We checked the bank account, and since the 17th the number was racking up charges all over the country!  We reported it to the bank, we reported it to the police, the bank reported it to the police, el V got a temp card and a print out of all the charges, and I already have my new card. Thank goodness, because someone tried to use it with a money transfer site -- 5 figures worth, which would have emptied our account all right! But it looks as of today, that that charge never went through.  

How they got my debit card number I don't know.  I haven't even used the card in months, and certainly not since sometime in April when I used it, over the phone to the service that fills the cash card key with which we can turn on the washers and dryers in the basement. But it certainly spoiled that rarity of perfect balance of peace and contentment and enjoyment that we had been experiencing up to that text message.

The weather has been wonderful until now with the scorching heat having come in.  Nor has it rained for days, after at least two years when it rained nearly every day, and sometimes for several days in a row, and there wouldn't be sun for days.  We could use rain now.

I'm glad you're so well, C.  I wish we could be sitting in your garden like we used to. Dinner parties, o, like you, how we miss dinner parties!  But I think we're kinda stuck with this, at least we here, until deep into next year at the least, since deathcultchief and his cultists are racing around the country and spiking all the new cases by the thousands. The cases all around the country are spiking as badly as they did here in April. 

Yet everyone is acting as though covid's over, and the people coming in from everywhere to stand in place, drunkenly howl, cheek by jowl, w/o masks or distance, and keeping vulnerables inside. The restaurants have taken all the sidewalk space, the parking lanes, a lot of STREET space and the small parks for their tables and bars.  At some point I expect drunks and driver will duke it out . . . .

For another thing, the cases among the under thirty demographic are spiking the highest, and that age group is everywhere, including here, and nowhere, including here, are they practicing any of the safety protocols for themselves or others. They are now the superspreaders. 

The Young are of course among us all, wherever we are. They are where we / you are. And as Young will do / do do, as we did, they move around a lot -- to and from parents, back to apartment, to lover's place in another state, back home here, to visit a friend in another city, back home here. Despite what these governors think they can do to stop it.

In another couple weeks, hoo boy.  Fortunately, it seems people in the Protests aren't sick or getting each other sick either.  They wear masks, and they keep moving, and they are outdoors -- unlike the political yahoos cheering for the man who can send them to the hospital and if they come out alive, they come out accompanied by a million dollar bill.

But [Your Town] continues to thrive, to continue healthy, with the actions of its wonderful residents like you.  I'm so glad there is a [Your Town], that has such wonderful people in it, and is so beautiful.

Love, Us

P.S. Cuba, by the way, is CRUSHING the virus.  Alas though, they are having serious food shortages. .

Horses Have Their Part FOR Black Lives Matter

     . . . . Horses continue to do their part for Black Lives Matter, as opposed to the horses coerced by police against Black Lives Matter.

How one woman on a horse at an Oakland protest became a symbol for revolution‘You can’t ignore a big, old pretty horse with a black woman on it,’ says Brianna Noble

Since she brought Dapper Dan to downtown Oakland on May 29, she’s inspired black cowboys and cowgirls throughout the country to join protests.

Though somehow Owen Wister*, author of The Virginian (1902), which takes place in Wyoming, and his best buddy, Theodore Roosevelt, who proudly claimed the title of Cattleman and Rancher to describe himself, and both wrote extensively about "the cowboy", somehow they both managed to not notice there were black cowboys. Theodore Roosevelt went so far as to say, invoking his slaveowning Georgia family, that being a "Cattleman" was as good as being a plantation owner.  Owen Wister's Virginian flatly stated that the West was "white man's country."

Judge Henry, the Rich Feller in Wister's novel, who like Theodore Roosevelt, in North Dakota, owns the vast kingdom that he calls his ranch, which is made up of public lands to great extent, flatly explains to the effete eastern school teacher, that all this land was made for his exploitation, and when he's extracted all the animals, grass and minerals, they will just move on.  

Explains a lot about this country, doesn't it.

Thus these stories of Black Lives Matter riders, both men and women, are particularly important parts of correcting our erroneous ideas of history, both of who 'settled' the West and who made western culture.

~~~~~~~~~

*  Wister was one of the children English actress, Fanny Kemble, lost, when she left her husband, Pierce Butler, perhps at the richest slaveowner in the USA, appalled when she learned what slavery was.  Some years later she published (1863) Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839. This was done at the urging of abolitionists in the hope this account of a slave plantation would mobilize British opinion against the CSA.

During the course of researching and writing The American Slave Coast, we got to visit St. Simon's Island, where the plantation Fanny Kemble lived on, was situated.  Bits and pieces of it are still there.

Black Lives Matter, The Young, and Activism

     . . . . The BLM Protests seem to be having salutary political effect across the board, actively uniting us, of all heritages and conditions in life, in a way not seen in the USA in decades.  May this be only the foundation for permanent change and progress, Please Universe!

Expanding the hopefulness of the moment: 

. . . . We are Informed As What To Do About Racism.

As each succeeding generation of the Young, bless their hearts! (and I mean this sincerely) invent sex, so do The Young invent social justice and activism!

Our friends' children, who are in their 20's, are sending their parents and their parents' friends open letters on how to listen to People of Color, understand that all POC are not the same in culture and experience and attitude, to not get angry when called out for racial behavior, and not to hide behind, "But I have a black friend." Speak out when injustice and insensitivity and ignorance are displayed among our friends. Also, "understand that there is racism in the music industry and that everyone has profited from black music and racism."

This isn't really funny, I suppose, but we all cannot help but at least, to enjoy the lecture. Starting with the content of the lecture, the very words generally used, we've been hearing this -- and hopefully learning this -- since we were younger than the kids are now.

Still, you know, I'm down with their advice! It was good advice back then, and it's still good advice now.

Though and additional bit of advice should be addressed to we white people: Do these things, including speaking out against racist action and systemic abuse to our friends. But! Do not make it about yourself. Do Not request / expect special recognition and gratitude for being a very special good white person from all and sundry. Being decent person should be typical behavior, not about making anti-racism about oneself, and getting awarded gold stars and stickers.

It's the equivalent of a husband noticing finally that his wife is working constantly all day, every day, while he doesn't do a thing to assist her/him.

He says, "Honey, wow, you work so hard!  And now I've earned special husband points for noticing how hard you work."