UCLA Gymnastics

Wow, Camille won another accolade, and we were gifted another quartet of tickets to Pauley Pavilion, this time to see the home-opener for the UCLA gymnastics season. They were competing against Nebraska, both schools being odd members of the Big 10, historically at least. But here we are.

And there we were! It was general admission, so we found a front row seat up on the second level, which, despite the photo, felt right up on the action.

The way it worked was: one school would do one event while the other school did a different event, and once each school's six (or seven) competitors were done, they would switch. Once the six or seven were done again, they would move across the floor and repeat the process with two new events. First: UCLA had the vault and Nebraska has the uneven bars. After they finished and switched, UCLA had the balance beam and Nebraska had the floor routine. We watched the first set of rotations, but left about halfway through the second set, when UCLA was on the floor routine and Nebraska was on the balance beam.

One cool thing was that we got to see American gymnast star Jordan Chiles land a spectacular vault, crushing a 10 out of 10:

During Camille's gymnastics winter extravaganza, the balance beam gives me the most anxiety, but this time it wasn't as nerve-wracking...maybe because they're super professional and badass:

Whoa...in the past fifty days we've been to Pauley Pavilion twice. It's both pretty weird and pretty awesome.

Uneven bars are incredible to watch in person, by the by. All of these events are, really.

Netflix Piles of Burning Cash

Decemberween was awesome and our tiny apartment was packed full with Norm and his boys. It was glorious. Cass and Simon would wake up early and go explore the building's inner workings before we'd head out to Santa Monica.

After the festivities and before the kids had to go back to school, we got to expose our kids to a pretty nice slice of our childhood.

There was a time a while back where I joked with Corrie that in the weeks after Thanksgiving we should begin a rewatch binge (evenings only, of course) of Stranger Things with Cass, so we can be caught up when the finale arrives on New Year's Eve. She rolled her eyes---basically---and said, "That show is WAY too scary for Cass..." and I mostly agree. We're pretty locked down on what we let them watch, but we didn't want to necessarily want them to miss out on everything mono-culture adjacent. 

Also, since their bedtimes are so close together, an entire episode of something like Stranger Things wasn't going to work, even if we decided that it would be okay for Cass, since Camille at 5 is still too young. We went in a different direction: towards Charles Addams' creations. First we watched the 1991 classic "The Addams Family," and the 1993's "Addams Family Values" to set up the general ethos and visual vocabulary for Netflix's Wednesday.

This was the first of the three Netflix series I wanted to blahblahblah about here. It was scary-adjacent enough to be exciting for both kids, it gave Cass a pair of young ladies to develop crushes on, and it introduced the concepts of cliffhangers to our young media consumers.

I enjoyed the design of the show when I first watched it as well as when we watched it again with the kids, I enjoyed the callbacks to the Barry Sonnenfeld movies, I enjoyed the callbacks to the original Addams comics (Luis Guzman vs Raul Julia, even while I love Raul), and I even enjoyed Fred Armisen's Fester, as a closer study of Jackie Coogan's television show portrayal and different that Christopher Lloyd's Uncle Fester (whom I also liked).

The cliffhanger at the end of Season 2 had both of our kids demanding to know the release date range for next season (yeesh, looking like summer '27), and they got a taste of the old school havin'-to-waits.

The next show on the list of supernatural-adjacent Netflix projects was finished after only two seasons, but both were lavish and expensive, and the source material had many fans:

In a conversation with my dad and brother about the comic this show is based upon, my dad asked why it was specifically popular with college girls. The Sandman was a popular and beloved comic during the age of hilariously beefed up dudes and their super-babe counterparts with enormous proportions of their own. But saving Gotham or fighting against anti-mutant initiatives was not what this enterprise was about. 

Morpheus is the name of the titular Sandman, also known as Dream of the Endless. Dream has six siblings, all of which are more concepts than proper people: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, the twins Desire and Despair, and Delirium (previously Delight). The seven endless are in control over their, er, roles in the lives of entities on Earth. They also have kingdoms and nearly unlimited powers in their kingdoms, but it seems like only Dream likes to go visit the world of humans often.

The conflicts in the books are emotional and generally dealt with in mature ways---processing and discussing the issues---and resolutions come with humility and suffering, just the sort of thing Gen X college girls in the early 90s were all about.

The two seasons of the show cover a few of the major arcs of the finite 75-issue run of the series. It begins just like the comics, with Morpheus getting trapped by some powerful magic in the hands of poorly-trained zealots who were trying to summon and imprison Death, but got Dream instead. Inside a glass sphere he sat, angry and uncommunicative, for 75 years. He watched the old men die, their sons plead and bargain and lie, trying to make deals they couldn't understand, and then they too, grew old and died. Eventually he gets free, and sets about exacting revenge.

It turns out the dude is pretty impetuous, and as he rebuilds his kingdom and tries to see what no dreams for 75 years has done to humanity, we see a guy who maybe wants to change how he may have acted for the past ten-thousand years.

The episodes follow pretty closely the first few books, as he regains his tools and strength. The end of season two follows the end of the comics, but the dude playing Morpheus is playing "generic sad British boy" through most of the season.

The best stand-alone episode starts with Dream and Death arguing about mortals and heading to a pub to settle their argument. It's 1389, and a guy is bragging about deciding not to die. He's a veteran of the Hundred Years War, or the remnants of it at the time, and tells his buddies he's decided not to die. Dream thinks that mortals are stupid and that not dying would be terrible, and his sister, Death, sets the dude up to live indefinitely, until he wants to die. He agrees to meet Morpheus in 100 years time at the same pub, where Morpheus expects him to beg for death.

In 1489 they meet, in 1589, in 1689, in 1789, in 1889, but in 1989 Dream is still locked up, but he swings by a new pub, as that structure was in use for nearly 700 years. Each year it's something new, but the gentleman never decides to call it a game. He has some tough times, like watching his wives and kids grow old and die, and later makes a fortune in the slave trade (about which Morpheus scolds him), and later still renounces said-slave dealings. Perspective and history and the possibility of friendship all swirling around a once-a-century bar date.

Also, the way the demons are depicted in a television or movie program is my favorite ever. They're like tarry nebulous balls of mist and razor teeth.

And that brings me to the biggest pile of burning cash Netflix has going for it, Stranger Things, or, more accurately right now, Stranger Things 5:

I had other things I wanted to write here, but then time went by, and I'm still sick, and I really don't care enough to hold the strands much longer in my head. We started season 5 after New Years Day, binged the exposition-heavy, clunky scene behemoth over a few days, and watched the finale in a single two-hour sitting. It was exhausting, and reminded me of being in a wedding: you're just looking forward to the whole thing being over.

Anyway, I just wanna talk the ending, so consider the following area to be SPOILER zone.

I looked up online in the days since, looking up theories and shit, and none of it looked like what we just watched. And now, as time meanders on, and I stop caring, I thought I should write it down...

Isn't Vecna just the herald of the spider-critters, like Silver Surfer and Galactus? So, this is what I remember,a nd how I got to my conclusion: The boy Henry, after he beats the dude with rock in the mine and opens the briefcase, grabs the glowing rock. The rock absorbs into his hand and he starts hearing the voice of "Vecna" saying "Find me," or "Find me, Henry." Then he kills the dude for real with his new powers. That all happened.

Then he's found and used by the government to make more telekinetic kids, and that part of the unwieldy, "two or three different epic stories pasted together" gets started.

I interpreted what happened ultimately to be: the rock was from the spider-critters, enormous alien animals on the other planet that also have psychic powers, and maybe they used the humanity of young Henry to make their earthling-herald, Vecna, to come and prepare this world for the merging. Isn't Vecna attached to- and getting life force from- the spider-critter? I figured it was them who sent the talking stone and the exotic matter that created the wormhole and the Upside Down, like a shitty invitation. Maybe Vecna was the spider-critter version of Henry, and a vessel he could in turn use and morph into...

Also, I call them spider-critters because I refuse to call it the Mind Flayer. Maybe "mind flayers" is better than spider-critters, but I thought there were more of them on the landscape. I think that's a false memory. 

I do want to give props to a show that at the cumulative 42nd hour mark is like: actually it's a giant psychic alien spider critter that seems to be imperiling earth using an exotic matter-created wormhole. Hats off to ya'll, Duffer Brothers. It goes right for it, and whether or not you like it is beyond the point. It had the qualities of not-seeing-it-coming and being bombastic as hell, and topped maybe even the reveal in Dark when she realizes: Wait, I'm my own grandmother?

Anyway, three supernatural-adjacent programs, one done after two seasons; one likely done after next year's third season; and one done after (checks notes) roughly 43 hours and ten years, and probably on a scale not likely to be seen again...three mostly satisfying visual programs.

There was a time...there was a time when this streamer went nutso with money. Not everything was a masterpiece, but lotsa stuff got made, and that was pretty cool.

In Praise of Kibuishi's "Amulet"

My son, just like me, loves reading. He likes books of all kinds and all reading levels. Once at our local library (Billie Jean King in the house!) my son came to me and said, "Dad, you should read this. It's so good. I hear at least. let's get the first few of them..."

I shrugged and said, "Yes! What a wonderful way to bond with you, m'boy!" 

Um...not exactly, but after I sat with the first issue and read over the first few pages, I could tell the reading would be fast, and with the main character's dad dying in those first few pages, I thought, maybe it wouldn't be dreck.

And I can say, now after finishing all nine of the Scholastic published graphic novels, it is most certainly not dreck.

We follow Emily Hayes and her younger brother Navin as, after their dad dies in a car accident, they move with their mom to her great-great grandfather's rural house. Inside there turns out to be a ghost-like apparition that may or may not be nefarious, and the mom gets abducted by a bizarre animal and taken into a closet or wardrobe.

When the kids enter, there turns out to be an entire world sprawling out from the closet portal, and the kids get wrapped up in a series of adventures as they learn about their surroundings, and their destined place in those surroundings.

A series that touches on many genres---horror, thriller, heavy duty fantasy, philosophical introspection, and rounding out into sci fi---the creator Kazu Kibuishi mastered the art of the cliffhanger. Not necessarily in events always, but it story-aspects, major plot points often times are dropped a few pages from the end of the book, leading to a desire to grab the next book immediately to get some closure. Bravo, dude.

The publication dates are interesting when viewed as a whole, and we imagien a reader in the era of awaiting its new releases. These weren't comic books in the general Superman/Batman?Spiderman sense, these were smaller-dimensioned books of about 180+pages each, and they were released pretty rugularly for a while: Jan 2008; Sep 2009; Sep 2010; Sep 2011; Sep 2012; Aug 2014; Feb 2016; Sep 2018; and the final, 200+ page release was in February 2024, a wait of five-and-a-half years.

All said, the story is deep and iconoclastic, confident and angry at established norms that are hard to swallow, and, for the few melodramatic dialogue flourishes, the point the characters are making remains salient: you have to believe in one another and trust that people can change to actually make any changes.

I read pretty fast, I suppose, but each one of these takes, maybe, a half-hour to read. And when they're all at the library, the commitment of time time, money, and storage here at the apartment is low. Plus Cass and I got to gossip about the story? Priceless.

After that half-decade between #8 and #9, the fair question is: Did it stick the landing?

I won't spoil anything, but Kibuishi was bold enough to introduce a major new idea in that last book which kinda reshapes belief structures in their world.

Cass and I are monitoring the news that Netflix is getting into the Amulet business, as in they're working with Kazu on an upcoming project. We're excited for that, and hoping it actually comes to fruition.

Happy New Year 2026

The rain stopped long enough for us to take Cass's new bike out on a ride, The day was eventually beautiful, or what it was worth.

We rode over to the sweeping incline/decline at the lighthouse.

And while the debris was steady in the sea, as the river channel emptied out into the ocean proper, the water looked a strange kind of enticing.

Happy New Year to you and yours! Let's see of we can't improve the lot for so, so many in 2026.