The Steve Reynolds Program - Issue #1
Hey hey! According to the first paragraph of an article I read, "newsletters are really awesome and podcasts are not!" The site then wanted money to read the rest of the article about this assessment of today's media, but my wallet's in the other room and I'm just gonna be cool with only reading the first paragraph.
The good deal is a newsletter is not linked through Facebook so it doesn't have comments from random dingalings and cuckoo-britches. It's just me and you, buddy.
Watch Out, The Psycho Genius Is Up In This House
On the road to and fro beautiful Arizona "Orange County Eastern Adjacent," I read Because The Night by James Ellroy. (I never drive on road trips. We'll discuss in a later issue.)
I love a good crime novel. And Ellroy can write. He's got a good straightforward style that hammers a story along.
But this isn't one of his better books and it brings up a trope I've seen in fiction before, The Genius Who Really Isn't That Smart.
See, in fictional works, there will be a character who is supposed to be a genius. But the author who is writing the character isn't a genius. Sure, they're bright but they have created a product they can't sell. It's like in a movie when someone supposedly has created the most beautiful painting ever. The scene comes where they show it and invariably it's pure schlock and looks like it should be hanging in the lobby of an office building. Think Lionel Richie's bust in the video for Hello (http://gph.is/2b8gGkd). Or Mr. Holland's Opus.
In Because The Night, the villain is supposedly a diabolical genius, graduated at the top from Harvard Medical School, became a leading psychiatrist and has grown a cult of devoted followers who will kill for him.
But nothing really shows he's that smart. There's excerpts from his papers in the book and they're basically jargon salad. Plus he was psychically traumatized by his Jack The Ripper style father so it would seem a genius in the psychological field would recognize his issues and solve them to be better, right? Nope, this clown kills, just like daddy.
Aaron Sorkin does a similar thing that I see in many shows and movies: The Totes Awesome Speech Complete With Reaction Shots Of People Blown Away By The Knowledge Dropped In Said Speech (TTASCWROPSBABTDISS). But I'll save that for another day.
The Tres Randos
1. I have rediscovered the classic Comedy Central series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist which I didn't watch when they were released due to disdain of standup at the time and that godawful animation. I now love standup and now just put on the headphones and only LISTEN to it, sans Squigglevision™! It's great this way, like a well-done podcast.
2. Steven Tyler, singer of Aerosmith and owner of gnarled toes, was a judge at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow when the alleged pee pee tape with Trump was made. A great* Off-Off-Off-Broadway play could be made of Steven in his hotel room while the Greatest Rumor Of Our Time was taking place.
3. Sonic was started when someone said "I like McDonald's but wish I could make the employees walk outside once in a while."