All we have left is right now

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2021.  

#39 : Pose

Ryan Murphy’s series about New York City’s African American and Latino LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming drag ball scene was already an important show. But in wrapping up the story, Pose became an out and out celebration of an under-represented demographic. It’ll be missed.


Skipping over #38 for a bit (it's a work in progress), I'm moving on to this because I know I can get it out of the way quickly.  I've never heard of it and, whilst I'm sure it is both important and well done (Ryan Murphy has a lot of well regarded shows to his name), this is the third season and it feels like I'd have to start at the beginning for it all to make sense.  And, I'm sorry Mr Murphy, but I'm just not going to find the time or the inclination to watch 26 episodes.  I'm also not convinced I'd like it - without seeing it, I can't help but feel that "New York City’s African American and Latino LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming drag ball scene" might just be a niche I can't quite relate to.  I've literally no idea why I might think that though...

However, I am going to give a guest reviewer a chance to take up the mantle - I suspect the lovely Mrs Reed would actually quite enjoy this.  And to encourage her I'm going to point out that Mr Murphy is the man behind Glee, 9-1-1 and Ratched - three very different programs, all of which she enjoyed.  If she takes up the challenge, I'll let you know her verdict - I'm guessing it might well be "You sooooooo wouldn't like it".

#38 - Surprisingly entertaining and educational
#40 - Dazzlingly ambitious

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more