Meanwhile With Trevor
Culture • Lifestyle • Fitness & Health • Movies • Books • Food
How a Netflix Movie is Like a Chicken Breast
June 14, 2024

Should you ever be so unfortunate as to get stuck with me on a long bus ride, and then make the mistake of letting me direct the conversation, things will inevitably turn to Story or food. Depending on the length of our journey and whether or not you change seats at the first stop, it’ll probably be both. Today, however, seems like a good time to combine the two.

Please remain seated. No smoking.

My favorite food investigative journalist is Mark Schatzker, and yes food investigative journalists are a thing. Recently I’ve been listening to The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor. Watch any cooking show and you’ll see an emphasis on sauces. Watch any toddler fix his lunch and you’ll see an emphasis on sauces. Heck, go to the back-alley bar to order chicken wings and you’ll be presented with a whole flight of sauces. If undressed food is so bland, how did people survive before the invention of ranch?

Food didn’t always taste this way.

Schatzker spends several chapters talking about two of the most tasteless foods in the kitchen: chicken and potatoes. Apparently, in the not so recent past, they didn’t require brines, marinades, sauces, and spices. The chicken our grandparents ate tasted rich and buttery. White potatoes tasted more, uh, potato-y, I guess. But in order to get more product out faster and cheaper, we tampered with our food. Things grow bigger and faster now, just at the expense of tasting good. Or tasting like anything.

So then the flavor scientists came on the scene.

They broke down what chemicals taste like what, and the next thing you know we’ve got faux-vanilla made from pine cones. The problem is, our bodies and brains are tuned to respond to flavors. And coincidentally, food stripped of flavor is lacking nutrients. The end result is that we’re always metabolically confused, which makes us feel bad, physically and mentally, and fat when our bodies could self-regulate. Food didn’t need fixing, but here we are.

Just imagine the consequences of tampering with human reproduction in similar ways. Oh wait, we’re seeing that. Birth control, anyone?

But I don’t know much about sex. I do know about Story and I see the parallels. The oldest piece of fiction we have is The Epic of Gilgamesh and it’s still remembered today. Homer and Shakespeare did a pretty good job too. They worked long before anyone was thinking about story beats, test screenings, market research, or any other sort of analysis. I’m not saying that knowing the elements of Story is a bad thing, unworthy of attention.

Breaking food down to chemicals and trying to reconstitute never works, though.

Right now opening Netflix is kind of like going to the grocery store. Everything we see is big, factory made, and bland. Chicken breasts are ginormous and taste like pillow stuffing. The latest movie on streaming is bloated and forgettable. What happened? It was probably constructed by a bunch Story scientists working from known elements that theoretically make a good movie. Our brains are wired to respond to it as one, yet a few hours later we’re about as satisfied as if we’d eaten a bag of Doritos for lunch.

They know this, so they season it with the artificial flavors of cynicism, snark, and stupidity.

Woke ideology is the equivalent of antibiotics that kill off culture.

What’s the answer? Well, older chickens make tastier soup. If, of course, they’ve been eating more bugs, getting more sunshine, living more life. Same goes for writers. The classroom to writers’ room pipeline has hurt our stories. Being curious and having real experiences will improve the quality of the work. But also, writing organically works. There’s nothing wrong with a recipe or a story outline, but a good cook knows when to adjust and follow intuition. We need to just let the truth be the truth, just like we should’ve let potatoes be potatoes. 

Our stories, and our food, can be nourishing and flavorful again when we get back to basics.

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Tuesday Update

New article is on the way, but I'm feeling too overwhelmed to crank it out.

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Update!

I cover it in the the video, but I've got some new professional writing opportunities coming up and I'm trying to finish my next novel, all while navigating a change in schedule. So look for more pictures and videos, and new articles here on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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He Who Rides on the Clouds - Conclusion

Leo and Britt come face to face with a prehistoric god a new cult on Saturn. Can they save the children doomed to sacrifice and escape?

He Who Rides on the Clouds - Conclusion
He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 2

Leo and Brittany have arrived on Saturn, but not in the way they'd hoped. Captured by a pagan cult, they don't have time to stop the unthinkable from happening. But they'll try anyway.

Content warning: language and sexual situations.

He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 2
He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 1

Star Wars is dead and the more apathy you show the faster it will be allowed to rest in peace.

Instead of griping about what Disney has done, why don't you listen to my space adventure story? He Who Rides on the Clouds is supernatural noir that spans space and time. When children on Mars go missing, Alexis Leonard and his ex-wife Brittany go looking. Their search leads them to a pagan temple and an ancient religion.

If you'd like to buy the story and read ahead, it's available in the Fall 2020 issue of Cirsova, available here: https://amzn.to/3yRRywY

He Who Rides on the Clouds - Part 1
No Posts This Week

Hey everyone, with BasedCon coming up this weekend I'm busy catching up on things and getting ready to go. But I'll be back next week with lots of new thoughts!

Big Changes Ahead

Hey Friends, I've got some big life changes on the horizon and should be able to create more content. What would you like to see? More fiction? More fitness? Maybe you'd like more video or audio content. Let me know in the comments.

Also, if you aren't a paid subscriber, what would get you to pay $5 a month?

Is Ladyballers Doomed from the Start?

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Ironheart and Superman: A Failure to Launch

Yesterday two trailers were released for upcoming superhero projects. First, we had Marvel's Ironheart, which Disney has been sitting on for years at this point. Apparently it follows Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a young black woman at MIT who is (was?) intended to take over for Tony Stark as Ironwhathaveyou. If you haven't seen the trailer yet, take a look.

I stopped paying too much attention to the MCU a long time ago, but apparently Riri was introduced in Wakanda Forever, and her fans have been clamoring for a standalone show ever since (/sarcasm). Watching the trailer, I can't help but notice how many times we're told she's smart and capable. Any suggestion that she can't do something is shot down immediately. We're supposed to believe that The System is against is her because she's poor, I guess, and doesn't have Tony Stark's advantages.

Remember Tony Stark? Sure, he was rich. But he was also a self-absorbed man-child who found himself in a cave in Afghanistan who had to engineer his own escape with scrap parts. Tony Stark, who had to learn about self-sacrifice and the consequences of his actions. Robert Downey Jr. make us like the guy, with his easy charm, even though we wanted to see him grow up. There was room for a character arc. No offence to Dominique, but she doesn't have the charm, and her character clearly has nowhere to go.

A few hours later, Warner Bros./DC released the trailer for James Gunn's Superman, the latest reboot of the iconic superhero. We've been waiting for a good Superman for a long time. Something to reunite the fans, the casually interested, and possibly the entire country. And to be honest, I don't think this is gonna do it. Take a look.

Before I go any further, I want to spin my theory on the interview scene, which is a little different from what I'm hearing from most anyone else. Notice how David Corenswet pitches his voice really high when he says, "Sure!" At this point in the movie, I don't think Lois (Rachel Brasnahan) knows that Clark is Superman, and thinks he's just playacting. But when Clark drops his voice, he's showing his cards a little bit. Then, when he completely loses his cool, he's just acting how Lois thinks Superman would respond. In context (the scene is reportedly ten minutes long!), it might be interesting. Out of context, in a trailer, it's a stupid decision.

Throughout the entire trailer we see Superman smacked around, knocked out, screaming out in self-defense, and made fun of for having a dog. There are some super-heroics, to be sure, but they're mitigated by the overwhelming amount of thrashing he takes. Unlike Riri, I guess he's got some room for growth. But it doesn't inspire me to see the movie. Some are defending this approach, suggesting that someone with such a clear cut understanding of right and wrong would be frustrated and confused by our complex, political climate. And I agree. But his moral compass and grace towards an unfair world should have been set before leaving Smallville and going out into the world.

So on the one hand, we've got a flawless female character. And on the other, we've got an immature Superman. Neither character is attractive, warts and all. Neither character is relatable or inspiring in the ways the filmmakers intended, as presented. Maybe the show and movie will be good. But someone else will have to let me know. Because right now, I'm not inspired to see either one.

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What Do We Want? Familiar Originality! When Do We Want It? Now!

There is an ongoing debate over what movie audiences really want. On the one hand, there are those who bemoan the upcoming slate of films that are nothing but sequels and prequels. “People want original movies!” they say, and use the spectacular failure of recent comic book movies as proof. But when an original movie like the recent Black Bag doesn’t make a dent at the box office and is quietly shuffled onto streaming, the other side can say, “No they don’t.”

So which is it?

I say, both!

The average viewer likes familiarity. That’s why every night on TV millions of people watch the latest episode of their favorite procedural. Every episode is the same. Has been for years. Doesn’t matter if you’re watching Bones, House M.D., or NCIS, at the end of the day, the story beats are invariably the same. The characters fill the same archetypes. 

Even if you aren’t a student of scriptwriting, you know the flow.

Engaging with a story is sometimes like singing a song. Sometimes you want to sit back and listen to a master perform, but other times you want to join in. And if the tune is simple and familiar, you can learn new words that much more easily. If the melody is complex, with tempo and key changes, it demands attention. That’s when you just sit back and appreciate someone else’s artistry. 

More often than not, we’re drawn to the familiar. 

We go to the movies to be entertained more than we go to be challenged.

But Hollywood seems determined to challenge us. They challenge our ideas of who are familiar are. They challenge our core beliefs about right and wrong. When they do make something that isn’t from a well established intellectual property, they challenge us to accept an unfamiliar actor, who likely isn’t attractive or charming. Why should we want to get to know this person and the character he or she is playing?

We don’t. 

Mass appeal isn’t difficult. Our mainstream entertainment providers are making it difficult, probably in large part because they don’t know or understand what we want. And unless they do, people just like us will move to replace them. 

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Book Review - The Revenant and the Cult - Book Two: The Terror in the Wychwood

In the forward to The Revenant and the Cult - Book Two: The Terror in the Wychwood, author Herman P. Hunter mentions that his influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis, and H.P. Lovecraft. While it may seem odd to intersperse deeply religious writers with those antagonistic to the idea of a benevolent God, from a writer’s perspective it makes sense.

For a fantasy writer, particularly one of faith, they are essential.

It’s also worth remembering that all four men were producing their greatest works around the same time on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Theirs was the golden age of worldbuilding, and it’s practically impossible for today’s writer of the fantastic not be influenced by their work, consciously or through osmosis. But to fully appreciate modern genre fiction, it’s to our advantage to drink deeply from their bibliographies.

Because genre fiction doesn’t always mean science fiction and fantasy.

As I noted in my review of The Revenant and the Cult - Book One: The Missing Spy, that story draws heavily from western tropes. Howard, always one to blaze his own trails, also dabbled in Lovecraft’s mythos, but before taking his own life seemed to be moving into writing cowboy stories. He was a Texan, after all. Unlike many authors, he was never satisfied staying in category for too long. 

With his series, Hunter is doing something similar, but different.

Tolkien’s work may be the pinnacle of fantasy writing and the standard to which all fantasy writers are held, as well as the guiding influence of Hunter’s work. But with The Terror in the Wychwood, he again draws heavily from his American brethren. In this story our main trio, Halsedric, Herodiani, and Roe must traverse through a swampy forrest of Lovecraftian horrors, fighting through hoards Frank Frazetta would have been happy to depict.

Two words: Moonlight Hunters.

But while Conan believed in Crom, an absent god who took little interest in the lives men, and Lovecraft only wrote of terrible Ancient Ones who would wipe out humanity like stepping on insignificant ants, Halsedric has a relationship with his Allfather. There is incredible evil in this world, but there is also an all-powerful good, and our hero is His representative. One need not believe in God to appreciate the story, as it’s never preachy, but it’s a fearless attempt to stand alongside all the works that inspired it.

Christian and otherwise, alike.

As the series has gone on, Hunter’s writing has only gotten richer. The books fly by and are pleasant reading, even with the elevated style of the classics. Anyone looking for the pulp violence of Howard, with the weird of Lovecraft, the tenderness of Lewis, and the worldview of Tolkien will feel right at home.

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