December 31, 2020 by Michael Janairo

So long, 2020!

Art, Photography, Reading, Writing
2020, 2020 in review, Art, Books, dogs, music, poetry, tv, year in review
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Someday, 2020 will make sense. As the year draws to a close, there are a few pre-pandemic “lasts” to remember.

Last movie at a movie theater: “1917” on Feb. 2 — Glad I saw it in a theater on a big screen. At the theater I often go to, there is rarely a big crowd for the movies I want to see (and by then “1917” had been out for a while).
Last meal in a restaurant: Le Colonne Restaurant at the Hilton Hotel at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport on March 11 — The food was fine — I can’t remember what we had, but tables had been spread apart for social distancing, and there were diners at only about four other tables. We were only there to be sure to get our morning flight out of Rome, leaving the country early as more and more flights were being canceled, including our flights out of Genoa.
Last workout at the gym: Feb. 29 — I did some warmups and cooldowns, with a 5K run on the indoor track in between at a time of 33 minutes and 22 seconds
Last day working in person at the office: Tuesday, March 3.
Last time I had a cold: Maybe sometime in 2019

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July 17, 2019 by Michael Janairo

That’s me on the TV

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Awesome, Saratoga Race Course, tv, TV interview, WTEN
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That’s me being interviewed about the Tang Teaching Museum during a day when nonprofit museum and art spaces got to meet people spending the day at the Saratoga Race Course.

I use the word “awesome” in it, and I wonder about that word. My use refers to something that fills one with awe, is “awe inspiring” or is full of awe, or is “awe-full.” “Awful,” though, is a word that at one point meant what “awesome” now means. So how did “some” come to stand for “full”? Some blame overuse in the 18th century.

But I wonder: Are there other -ful words that have become -some words?

How about “dreadful” and “dreadsome,” or are those both used, and both mean about the same thing (though maybe dreadsome sounds a little more archaic). It isn’t like people once said “beautiful” and now we saw “beautisome”; or “painful” —> “painsome”; or “thoughtful” –> “thoughtsome.”

Then again, there’s the relationship between “handful” and “handsome,” which in the first means something that can fit in a hand OR something (or usually someone) who is hard to control, versus someone who is good looking. Though that interpretation may mean someone who is easy on the eyes, or whose looks are easy to handle, which then gets the word closer to first definition of handful.

February 18, 2019February 17, 2019 by Michael Janairo

Should I give up on ‘The Passage’ TV show?

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Amy and Brad, drama, fox tv, FX, television, The Passage, The Passage Trilogy, tv
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Saniyya Sidney as Amy and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Brad in “The Passage”

I enjoyed reading “The Passage” (as well as “The Twelve” and “The City of Mirrors,” which I wrote about here), and it has been long enough since I read those books that I could approach the new Fox drama with a fresh perspective.

But after three episodes, I’m not sure if I need to see any more. There’s both too much (too many characters, too far-fetched situations, too quick moving, especially in terms of Amy’s swift move through the foster system), and not enough — not enough character development, not enough at stake between Amy and Brad, actually not enough reason for me to understand or care that much about Brad at all.

One thing that struck me even before seeing the show is that I thought I would find it on FX, instead of Fox. FX is where the edgier shows are. Show that I watch, like the first season of “Legion” and “Fargo” and, yes, “The Strain” (which starts with a mystery — what happened to these people on that plane? what’s about to happen to everyone else?). Fox, meanwhile, is home to shows that I might try and quit, like “The Orville.”

Remember “Lost”? Remember how much time was spent, at least in that first season, with flashbacks that helped us get off the island and to get to know the characters. It is always a sign that This Character Is Important. So far it seems the longest extended flashback is of Babcock — one of the death-row inmates turned into a viral. Is she that important? Is she more important than Brad or Amy?

One thing I can’t tell yet is whether the TV is slow or if it just feels slow. Sure, lots of things are happening — chases and stuff — but if feels slow because I think I keep waiting to feel a connection with a character, especially with Amy.

Part of the problem might be Amy’s voice-over, which just raises the questions of where is Amy now and to whom is she talking?

Another issue might just be the cinematography. So much of the show looks too bright and clean to be dark, creepy, and scary.

Or maybe its because there isn’t much mystery to it. Everyone knows they’re made vampires, as one does to counter a bird flu epidemic. There are moral quandaries about it. What could be the central tension is showing the actions needed to exploit the virals for a health cure, while at the same time showing people doing things to mitigate their fearsome bloodsucking. Instead, it looks like the holding areas of the virals are well established and protocols are in place, and every now and then mucketymucks sit at a conference room table and confer. Worse yet, even as the scientists are slowly realizing that the virals have psychic abilities, they are doing nothing yet to see if that is true or to try to stop them.

There are long moments when Richards, who seems to be the head security guard for the bad-guy scientists, is utterly frozen in place and staring dumbly nowhere as the viral Babcock plays her melodramatic backstory in his mind. After three episodes, that seems to be a good analogy for “The Passage” as a whole, so much inaction in the face of melodrama.

Are you watching the show? Are you sticking with it?

March 17, 2015July 4, 2017 by Michael Janairo

Photos: A hidden narrative in “Person of Interest” featuring my spouse’s artwork

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Deborah Zlotsky, painting, person of interest, Q&A, season 4 episode 15, story, tv, visual art
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NOTE: If you are a fan of Person of Interest and haven’t seen Season 4 Episode 15 don’t read this because it is probably full of spoilers. It also contains wild speculation that probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the ongoing narrative of the show.

Here’s the IMDb description of “Person of Interest” Season 4 Episode 15, “Q&A”: “Reese tries to protect a software programmer with a mysterious second life, but it’s unclear which side of her life the threat is coming from. Meanwhile, Claire, a young hacker that Finch protected, reaches out to him for aid.”

Though “Person of Interest” has been praised as “powerful political science fiction” by i09, I was watching it to see artwork by my spouse, Deborah Zlotsky.

So in the show, her paintings were used as set decoration for a fictional software company in which much of the main plotline (about the programmer with a mysterious second life) is set. Though most viewers probably wouldn’t pay all that much attention to the artwork hanging in the background, it was what I was looking for — and the use of the work reveals a strange hidden narrative about one of the workers in the software company.