Yeah, Another Blogger

“Neil, how come you usually write about things you enjoy, rather than about those that, in your opinion, bite the big one?” I asked myself the other day.

“Well,” I answered, “I’ve ripped into people I loathe. Trump and Putin, primarily. And I’ve discussed situations that worry me or piss me off. But there’s no denying that my natural orientation is to comment about aspects of life that ring my bell.”

“I understand,” I replied. “There’s no reason right now for you to mess with your natural orientation. So, let’s take a look at some of your recent bell-ringers. And, maybe, your readers then will tell you what they’ve been into of late. Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong!”

Okay! First up is a miniseries my wife and I watched two months ago: Escape At Dannemora, seven episodes in length and available on Paramount+ and elsewhere. It had been on our to-be-viewed list for a couple of years. Fortunately, we finally got around to it. It bowled us over. I place Escape in the pantheon of miniseries I’ve encountered, along with The Queen’s Gambit, Anxious People, The Investigation, Godless and a handful of others.

Escape At Dannemora came out in 2018, three years after the true events from which it draws its inspiration. Set in the town of Dannemora, in rural upstate New York, the show aims its beam at David Sweat and Richard Matt, convicted murderers imprisoned in Dannemora’s Clinton Correctional Facility, and at the married prison employee (Joyce Mitchell) who became emotionally and sexually involved with them. Ultimately, Mitchell helped them escape from jail.

Escape At Dannemora is not a docuseries. Anything but. All, or nearly all of its dialogue is imagined. After all, it’s not as though conversations between Sweat, Matt, Mitchell and the story’s other principals were recorded. And what dialogue! Completely realistic. No artificial ingredients. I’d never heard of the scriptwriters (Brett Johnson, Michael Tolkin, Jerry Stahl), to whom I now publicly tip my hat. As I do to Paul Dano (Sweat), Benicio del Toro (Matt) and Patricia Arquette (Mitchell), the actors who employed the scripted words to create characters as nuanced as French pastries. Ben Stiller directed the production with economy and precision. As couldn’t be more obvious, I highly recommend this show.

My dad loved halva, a moist, semi-sweet treat that, as I learned from doing a bit of research for this piece, originated well over a thousand years ago in Persia (present-day Iran). Unlike him, I wasn’t infatuated with the product, but ate it now and then while growing up. Halva disappeared from my diet, though, when I was in my 20s, maybe earlier, for reasons I’m not sure about. Possibly my obsessions with pizza and Cheez-It crackers left no room for halva, a product that isn’t easily found in stores in my country (the USA), and which the majority of the world’s population likely never heard of.

And probably I’d never have had halva again were it not for my pals Cindy and Gene, who bestowed sesame-based halva, the variety I am familiar with, upon me and my wife Sandy twice in the last several months (there are other types of halva in addition to sesame-based, as the Wikipedia article, the link to which is in the above paragraph, explains).

“This a weird gift,” I thought to myself when I saw what Cindy and Gene had presented to us on the first occasion. Man, how wrong I was!  Halva was the perfect gift. That wouldn’t have been the case with the too-dense halva made by the Joyva company, the brand I knew in my youth. But the halva they’d chosen, from the Seed + Mill firm, is incredible. Its sesame paste is perfectly balanced with chocolate and salt. And the texture, light and slightly granular, is wonderful. Hallelujah, I’ve been blessed!

And finally: Some songs have the power to bring you up short and make you say, “Holy shit, this is fantastic!” I Want To Know, by the quite obscure rhythm-and-blues group the Gay Poppers, did such to me two weeks ago when the tune burst forth from SiriusXM Radio’s Carolina Shag channel.

I Want To Know came out in 1960, and the Gay Poppers were from North Carolina, USA. Not much else about the song or about the group can I find online. Except that the recording at some point became popular in parts of the dance-club world. It makes me want to dance, because its beat won’t quit, and because the Gay Poppers’ vocal prowess damn well is off the charts. Without further ado . . .