Hello, welcome to issue 52 of Notes From Table 30. I'm Jack. (Or John. Or 'Gabe's Dad'.) It has been a very eventful couple of weeks. I graduated from The Evergreen State College Tacoma last weekend. And then this past Monday I received a call from Goddard College saying I that I have been accepted into their low residency MFA program.

Goddard is based in Vermont, but has a satellite campus in Port Townsend, Washington. It is an interesting program that includes my working on a major project (another book I'll refer to here as Project Untouchable) and a teaching component. The way it is set up, we spend the first week of the semester on campus and then spend the next 16 weeks doing assigned readings and papers, along with our project with continual contact and support with our mentor. 

Assuming all the i's have been dotted and t's have been crossed I'll be attending next semester. The catch is that next semester is July 11th. So my Summer vacation is already almost over and Summer just started a couple of days ago.  

What I've Been Watching
It is rare that I go to a movie knowing in advance that it's probably going to be bad, but it felt wrong to see every X-Men movie in the theater and not see Dark Phoenix. I try not to prejudge movies, but the title alone gave away the franchise's mistake.

For those unfamiliar with the Dark Phoenix story in the comics I'll give you some quick background: One day Jean Grey and her fellow X-Men are on a mission in space. Being a telepath, Jean is the only one who can fly the damaged space shuttle back to Earth. She does so, saving everyone's life and seemingly killing herself, only to emerge more powerful than ever and now calling herself Phoenix. This story begins. in Uncanny X-Men #101 which came out in October of 1976.

After getting her new powers, Jean continues to be a hero. At one point she even saves the universe. (Issue #108 which came out over a year later.) It isn't until issue #129 that there begins to be any big hints that something might be wrong with Jean. That issue came out in January of 1980. So Jean Grey as the Phoenix (or as we'll find out in later retcons the Phoenix as Jean Grey, but don't worry about that) was a hero for over three years of publication time. Dark Phoenix did not come until later. 

So when I saw that they were making a 'Dark Phoenix' movie rather than a Phoenix movie, I already knew they'd made a mistake. Worse, this is literally the same mistake they made before with X-Men: The Last Stand. One cannot tell an effective story of power corruption without first establishing the potential good the power could do. Otherwise it's not a tragedy. It's just a story about a bad guy. The Phoenix Force isn't necessarily evil. Not that you'd know that from the movies. 

(Side note: In all honesty, the best Dark Phoenix story I've seen so far on screen was Elektra's character arc in Daredevil and Defenders. And sure, I understand that a television series has much more time than a movie to establish characters and that story compression is often necessary in order to fit the story into two and a half hours, but it's not like it's impossible.)

You'll notice here that I'm not spending too much time talking about the actual movie. That's because it isn't worth talking about. It's not the worst X-Men movie, but it is the worst one since X-Men: The Last Stand. 

Rather than talking about it, I thought I'd tell you how I would have done it if they had told me I had to write a Dark Phoenix movie. This will get into spoiler territory. At the end of X-Men: Apocalypse, Jean seems to manifest the Phoenix force to stop Apocalypse. Only in Dark Phoenix the story explicitly ignores this event. 

Instead, the way to start Dark Phoenix is by throwing the audience in the deep end and letting them see Jean Grey save the universe right in the opening scenes. This not only shows her as a hero, but also establishes that she's been walking around as a hero with Phoenix powers over the last decade since X-Men Apocalypse took place. This also allows for a thematic continuation from MCU's Avengers Endgame. (Oh you saved the universe? So did we. Here's what happens next.) Basically I would write it pretending that there were movies in between Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix where Jean was a hero. And then start showing her slow fall into darkness.

Ultimately this is about pacing. If you understand basic story structure (and many Hollywood studios clearly do not,) you'll find that things need to happen in a certain order and in a certain way. If a character dies in the first scene they're in, I'm not going to care too much. A great example of the difference between these two things is watching the Firefly movie Serenity with someone who has never seen Firefly. When characters die in Serenity, it's hard to care if you has never seen Firefly. But if you watch thirteen episodes of Firefly and then watch Serenity, the character deaths mean something. To paraphrase Dan Harmon, if I take a pencil and break it you don't care even if I tell you the pencil was named Steve after. If I take a pencil, name that pencil Steve The Pencil, and then break it, a part of you cares that didn't before. None of this is difficult or high level writer stuff. But it is clearly outside the scope of many in Hollywood.

What I've Been Clicking On
Here's an account of the President of the United States being a rapist. (This strangely got less media coverage than Biden touching a woman's shoulder.)

It's not only okay, but we need to get dirty again. 

Alexa, (or more likely a product like Alexa) could be used to detect when people are having a heart attack.

A reminder that for every time a gun is used in self-defense in America there are 34 other gun deaths.  

And here's a cute story about a little god.

Better Know A Presidential Candidate

I am of the opinion that maybe attacking people in our own party isn't the way to get another Democrat elected President of the United States. And so I'm spending some time talking about the candidates and why they'd be good Presidents compared to Donald Trump.

This issue we're going to talk about Andrew Yang. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur and found of Venture for America, a company that specializes in funding startups for recent college graduates. He's been running for President since 2017 on a very basic platform: Give everybody 18-64 $1,000 a month. No strings attached. 

This is a version of Universal Basic Income or UBI. It is a form of wealth redistribution which is something we are in desperate need of. UBI has its critics and it has honestly never even been attempted on the scale that Yang is suggesting, but it may very well be that to get out of this unprecedented situation in which the top 0.1% has as much wealth as the bottom 90%, maybe we need an unprecedented solution. 

Of course Yang is a long shot. He's polling somewhere around 1%, but like Jay Inslee, I want him in the race as long as possible because the issue he's running on is of vital importance and needs to be a part of the national debates.


That's it for this issue. Next issue will be July 6th. Stay safe until then. You can write me by responding to this newsletter. 
- Jack Cameron