Long Posts
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On the way home from school pickup, my daughter was asking for a song but didn’t really know any of the words or the melody or really anything about it other than the singer’s voice being “so smoothing”1. We tried the whole way home but didn’t get anywhere. I love this game and get a little obsessed with trying to figure it out, so I kept thinking about it while we prepared dinner. I eventually got it. Mel McDaniel’s “Louisiana Saturday Night.” What a trip.
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When I arrived to pick up my son from his after school program at the community center, he was in the middle of coloring an Adventure Time coloring page and he was so excited about it that he talked about all of the characters the whole way home (sometimes over his sister’s descriptions of the song with the smoothing vocie). He has this way of getting so excited about something–could be a picture he’s drawing or coloring, or a Lego set he’s working on, or an obstacle course he’s built, or whatever–that he strings words together like he’s sprinting downhill… It’s pretty great.
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Yesterday, I bought a set of hair clippers for about $30 and decided to start cutting my own hair again. As a kid I almost always just let mom or dad or a friend’s dad cut it with clippers, then I started doing it myself as a young adult while in college, and had gotten away from it for the most part (with a short pandemic-related exception), but I’ve always liked the look of it and hated going to the barber even more. So, I’ve embraced it again. I cut it yesterday and did a pretty nice job. If I stick with it, the one-time cost of that pair of clippers is about the same as one haircut but I can use them again and again for years.
- There’s been a coolness to the air throughout the day that feels amazing. Now that the sun’s down it feels almost like fall is rolling in. I’m sure it’s short-lived, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
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She always says this. It’s the best. ↩︎
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And what a great name for that concept. ↩︎
- Andor, s1
- Empire
- Rogue One
- TLJ
- A New Hope
- The Force Awakens
- RotJ
- Mandalorian, s1
- Mandalorian, s2
- Solo
- I got back into reading physical books this year and realized that this is my preferred medium. Of the 15 books that I finished in 2023, three were on my Kindle and the rest were all physical hard copies. I did not listen to any audiobooks this year.
- My favorite book I read this year was, without a doubt, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I cannot wait for the follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction, which I’ve already pre-ordered and is scheduled to ship on January 16th. I loved everything about this book.
- I also read several others that I would give a full five-stars to: Heat 2, Demon Copperhead, A Walk in the Woods, and This Census-Taker.
- Every book I finished this year was worth the time. One of the changes to my approach that I’d credit with this “good book year” was a new policy to give up on a book more easily than I’ve done in the past without any guilt. Sometimes, a book just doesn’t click for whatever reason and I think that’s OK. This has been a sticking point at times in the past where I’ve tried to keep making it happen and felt like I couldn’t' move on to something else until I’d finished what I’d started and then wound up reading nothing instead of just moving on. Life’s too short and there are way too many books for that. The one exception to this was Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, which I did not like but read to the end anyway, even though it was also the longest book I read this year. Even though I didn’t like it, it had some really interesting ideas and at least one or two interesting characters that made it worth the slog.
- I read the two Narnia books with my six-year-old son. He really loved them and I loved experiencing them with him. I even enjoyed revisiting these books, despite some negative associations stemming from an undergraduate C. S. Lewis survey course. I expect that we’ll continue exploring this series together this year.
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Not someone to whom I wish to draw unfair DeSantis comparisons, but this was not one of his better moments, obviously. ↩︎
- Who knows how long this will actually last, but for now, while my Pixel is still relatively new, it’s great. ↩︎
Notes, 2024-08-19
It’s been quite some time since I’ve done anything with any of my various blogs. I got super busy with work and, since a lot of that busy-ness deals with writing words and thinking about topics, the blogs tend to suffer when it picks up like that. But since things have slowed back down a bit, I’ve still had a hard time getting back into the habit (not that it was every anything approaching _regular_). Part of that, I think, is the initial hurdle of thinking of something worth writing about. Then I read this post from Thomas Rigby today and figured it was as good a time as any to take a shot at a public day note. I’ve kept day notes in Obisidian (or before that, Notion/Roam/BuJo, etc.) for things I’m working on but haven’t ever tired combining them with the more personal “whats-going-on-in-your-life” kinds of notes. I don’t know why. So, with that preamble, here are some notes from today.
👌 3 Good Things
⭐️ Bonus Good Thing
RIP Willie Mays, who "was baseball" ⚾️
Of the many Willie Mays tributes I read through today I, unsurprisingly, thought Ray Ratto’s at Defector was the best.
Willie Mays, who died Tuesday at the richly merited old age of 93, was baseball itself, more than anyone else ever connected with the game. Not just the best player, which he was. Not just the most joyful great player, which he also was. Not only the most extravagantly gifted of all the five-tool players that played during the richest era in the game’s history, although he absolutely was that as well. He was baseball, period, full stop.
Born in 1984, I never had the pleasure of watching Willie Mays play. As a lifelong, die-hard fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, if given the opportunity to watch any player from the past I would choose Roberto Clemente. But there’s no doubt that Willie Mays would be the undisputed top choice among players who did not play for the Pirates.
Here’s Ratto again.
Mays was there at the moment when talent replaced race as the sport’s prime directive, when even the most recalcitrant segregationist owners finally found the time and financial inclination to teach their scouts color blindness; when the sport finally became what it could be, Willie Mays was something very like the living fulfillment of that promise.
Johnson City's Blue Plum Festival
Had a great time celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Blue Plum festival last night. Great food and music, lots of fun stuff for the kids, cool stuff from local artisans, and friendly people.
The festival has changed quite a bit over the years since I first moved here more than 20 years ago, but it seems to have regained a lot of its old momentum since Covid.
I’m consistently reminded of how grateful I am to love the place we live.
# 🎵 An hour-long Oasis playlist
After getting hooked on @adam ’s St. Vincent playlist and the rest of their “Finest Hour” series in which they “compile [their] favorite of an artist’s songs into a playlist not a minute longer than 1 hour in duration1,” I decided to take the format for a spin myself, starting with Oasis.
Gtting this playlist under an hour was an excruciating task. I had to cut a dozen or more songs that I consider among my favorite by any artist. Initially, I had almost four hours. But I’m proud of what I ended up with. I love having the constraint of an hour… takes me back to the days of recording cassettes or burning CDs and being by their capacity.
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.
–Igor Stravinsky
Winging it
This is now my fifth post of WeblogPoMo across three different sites. Maybe I’ll try for four by the end–I’ve heard great things about Pika. There are things I like about each of the trio of micro.blog, weblog.lol, and scribbles.page. I guess it’s nice to have options. Maybe through sheer volume I’ll have some semblance of a plan or path by the end of the month.
Star Wars Day Top 10 #WeblogPoMo2024
As a kid whose most formative years fell in the early 90s, I missed some of the Star Wars craze, and might have missed it altogether if not for my friend Geoff. He had a couple older brothers who I think had introduced him pretty early on and he was obsessed. I remember watching the original trilogy on VHS at Geoff’s house many times (Star Wars and Sega and Space Hog), and I know for sure that was my initial introduction. At the time–I think I was maybe 8?– Return of the Jedi was my favorite.
The “Special Edition” theatrical releases came out while I was in junior high and by then Empire was my favorite (of course). I remember going to the theater with Geoff and several other friends to catch these and it really took the experience to another level to be able to watch on the big screen. I wasn’t attached enough to the originals to take offense to any of the changes, but I empathized anyway.
The prequel trilogy debuted around the time I started high school and I also remember going to see all of them in the theater with groups of friends. I did not care for them, but I had one friend who really loved them.
We had this super cool theater in the town where I grew up that was kind of a dump–a relic of another time. One screen. Old, saggy seats. Bad concessions. But it was in our town. And it got new movies. And a bunch of us could meet up there and watch something and then use the pay phone on the corner to call for a ride. It was amazing.
I never got into any of the animated series, and kind of let Star Wars as an entity fade from my mind in the years after the prequels, but I was, somewhat surprisingly, super excited about the announcement of the new sequel trilogy and have really liked several of the films and tv series. Anyway, all of this is intended to lead in to my (a relatively casual fan who needs to do a lot of catching up on stuff) completely non-definitive ranking of my top ten favorite Star Wars properties, in terms of how much I like them on this May the Fourth of 2024.
Lifelong Learning
I realized recently (or, maybe just remembered) that learning is one of my favorite things in the world. This week, it came up in a work context wherein I volunteered to cross train with another department despite being completely buried with my own work at the moment and having already committed to other similar opportunities that haven’t even begun. I’m fortunate enough to work in a role and for a company that values learning and puts enough priority behind it that we can actually take advantage and build some new knowledge within our company and field. It’s the most excited I’ve been for a new project in quite a while.
🔗 Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
A shocking look at the inner workings at Boeing from Maureen Tkacic at The American Prospect.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor.
What will it take for corporations like this to start putting something–anything! safety! literal lives!–ahead of stock price?
The real action is in novelty 📚 💬
I can’t believe all these animals we have are real and we just take it for granted I said before drinking half of my glass. Growing up our parents tell us there’s no such thing as monsters so we’ll go to sleep but a bear is a monster and a moose is a monster and a bird is a monster too. Every bird in the world would rip your head off if it were somewhat larger and you were somewhat slower.
Imagine if whales didn’t exist and then one showed up out of nowhere? We’d never stop talking about it Joe said. We would never get over it.
It’s probably no coincidence that the most famous novel ever written was about how fucked up a guy got after knowing about one particularly angry whale.
It’s just that we get used to the things that are scary Joe said. The real action is in novelty.”
― Luke O’Neil, “Kingston Street” from A Creature Wanting Form
Year in books, 2023 📚
Here are the books I finished reading this year.
This was a very good book year for me. Probably the best in a decade or so in terms of both quantity and quality. Here are a few themes and highlights.
Looking forward to reading even more in 2024. Bring on the weird.
This fuckin' guy ⚾️
Yesterday, Commissioner Rob Manfred held a press conference following the MLB’s owners meetings. This has, of course, been covered pretty thoroughly by the usual baseball writers and I continue to grow more appalled every time I read a new iteration of that coverage.
First, Keith Olbermann worked it into the sports segment of his daily Countdown podcast, in between his latest takes on the Trump indictment. This, I found fitting because, while Rob Manfred has certainly not done as much damage to something so important as the United States of America as has Trump, he continually forces the comparison (at least in my mind) with his repeated smugness and apparent disdain for the people he claims to serve. And, while he has not accounted for any real or imagined damage to the nation (that I am aware of, anyway), every time Manfred speaks publicly I again feel that same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I felt throughout Trump’s presidency and that I again feel every time a new revelation comes to light outlining the myriad and despicable ways he abused the power of that office: a mixture of disgust at watching something I love so much being destroyed from the inside by someone who claims to be helping and a powerlessness to do anything to make it stop.
That said, there is one clear difference between Manfred and Trump, and that is the cause of the hopelessness part of the feeling I described. With Trump, that hopelessness was caused by the fact that so many folks around me–including many, many people who I otherwise hold (or held) in high esteem or who were, for all intents and purposes, normal insofar as I consider myself relatively normal–were seemingly participating in a version of reality that was altogether different from mine. This person, who was repeatedly saying the most vile, ignorant things imaginable and repeatedly proving himself to be unfit for the both the office of president and for life in civilized society, was somehow appealing to these folks. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand that appeal (and every plausible explanation is too simple and depressing to dwell on for too long). And that inability (or unwillingness) to understand led to that hopelessness. If I had so misunderstood so many of my friends and colleagues, how could I hope to convince them that my way of seeing the world was in fact the correct one? If we we’re essentially experiencing different realities and speaking different metaphorical languages, what hope was there of finding a common ground or of making sure things were better the next time around?
With Manfred, that hopelessness is entirely different. All the normal people in my life–friends and family, colleagues, baseball writers, etc.–think this guy sucks. From baseball fans, at least, it’s nearly universal agreement and this guy is an awful person hell bent on making baseball worse. So, it’s nice to feel like I’m experiencing the same reality as my peers, but it’s no help when the commissioner of baseball is not elected by my (or really anyone else’s) peers; his power is not awarded by us normals, but by the owners, and the owners have a lot more in common with Trump than with any “normal” people by any definition. But I’ve got the same chance of wresting control of baseball from the owners as I do of ever understanding Trump’s appeal to so many.
Anyway, the second recap of these Manfred comments that got me wound up enough to write a blog post was the incomparable Craig Calcaterra at his excellent Cup of Coffee substack. I’m going include a lengthy excerpt because Craig says it all so well.
Evan Drellich of The Athletic faithfully transcribed the Q&A with the press. I’ve been writing about baseball and the crappy men who run it for a long time now and even I was shocked by just how horrible Manfred came off.
Here he is talking about how Major League Baseball, which Manfred claims prefers teams to not move, has come around to being OK with the Athletics moving:
I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland. I do not like this outcome, I understand why they feel the way they do. I think that the real question is, what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. And it’s not just John Fisher. You don’t build a stadium based on the club activity alone. The community has to provide support and you know, at some point, you come to the realization, it’s just not going to happen.
This is objectively false. There was an all-but-done deal with Oakland to build a stadium at Howard Terminal. It was a hell of a lot closer to being done than anything in Las Vegas at the time. The A’s broke off negotiations with Oakland, however, not because they weren’t getting an offer on a stadium deal but because one was imminent, it was quite clearly going to be a much better offer than anything Las Vegas was offering, and would’ve, in fact, been much better than what the A’s eventually got in terms of public money to be spent and out-of-pocket expectations for John Fisher. It’s an offer that, once official, would’ve been very hard for the A’s to turn down and still leave town, that’s for sure.
The problem was that if Oakland’s offer was hanging out there, waiting for the A’s to accept or reject it, it would screw up Fisher and Kaval’s “Oakland doesn’t want us here" rebop that, in their minds, justifies the move. And yeah, the fact is that they, and Major League Baseball, want the A’s to be in Las Vegas, not Oakland, full stop. They want the close associations with the gambling industry, they want the glitz and glamor that comes with it, they think they have an opportunity to make massive amounts of money by virtue of corporate partnerships, and I suspect Fisher and Kaval themselves believe they will stand to benefit far more personally from the relocation than they would if the A’s stayed in Oakland. It’s their business, of course, and if they want to make decisions like that they can make decisions like that. They just didn’t want to say it out loud and now they’re weaving lies in order to trash Oakland and rewrite history to cover for it. It’s a horrible look.
Manfred was then asked if he was aware of Oakland fans’ “reverse boycott” on Tuesday night, when fans showed up to protest the team’s imminent move to Las Vegas and show their support. See if you can detect the shitty sarcasm:
It was great. It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.
If you’re the Commissioner of Major League Baseball and you’re finding yourself giving quotes gleefully shitting on passionate baseball fans who were desperately trying to keep their team in town, you may want to ask yourself what in the actual fuck your problem is. Tuesday night’s showing in Oakland was one of the coolest and most inspirational fan moments in recent memory. It was a genuine show of love and support on the part of baseball fans who, despite likely knowing the gesture would be futile, wanted to express their love for their team. And then in wades Manfred with this shitty and backhanded wisecrack. I’d call him a turd in the punchbowl, but I have too much respect for turds to tar them with such a disparaging association.
Manfred was then asked about whether he sees it as his job to help baseball owners get public funding for stadiums. He kinda dodged for a moment but then said “it is in fact good business to have a public-private partnership to get those facilities built.” This was the followup question and answer:
How do you reconcile that there’s a large volume of academic studies that say these stadium subsidies do not produce positive benefit?
I love academics, they’re great. I think, take the areas where baseball stadiums have been built, OK? Look at what was around Truist Park before that was built. Look at the area around Nationals Park before it was built. I lived in that city. You know, academics can say whatever they want. I think the reality tells you something else.
Rob Manfred is not a dumb man and he knows better than this. He knows what the studies say and that just because there are shiny new buildings near a ballpark that it does not mean that public subsidies have created a net benefit. Indeed, he has hired bought-and-paid-for-experts to try to combat those studies when it suits him and he’s never been able to do so convincingly. The fact is that Rob Manfred is simply an asshole who has contempt for everyone except the 30 men who pay his salary so he has no trouble whatsoever spouting anti-intellectual claptrap like this which he knows to be false. Doing so helps him get past a question he doesn’t want to answer and ingratiates him to his employers, so he does it.
Manfred was then asked if he thinks Oakland fans will or should support the A’s once they move.
I hope so. I hope that they stay baseball fans, whatever they decide to affiliate with. Again, I’ll say it again: the piece of this particular series of events that’s the most disturbing to me is the idea of fans that have supported the team losing a team. We hate that idea.
Yeah, he hates it so much that a mere three minutes prior he was making fun of A’s fans for showing up and supporting their team. So you know it’s a totally genuine sentiment.
No matter how hard Manfred tries to be ambassadorial — and he tries less these days than he used to when he first got the job — he’s actually a petty and unpleasant little man. It comes through fairly often, but it’s been a minute since he packed this much slimy, disingenuous crap into one public appearance. It was a truly bravura performance.
Rob Manfred is a bad guy all around. Many in the game knew that already, but it’s remarkable how little he tried to hide it yesterday.
The Garden-Spade Technique 🔗
I’m a little ashamed to admit how hard I laughed reading this admittedly silly piece by the always great Albert Burneko at the always great (and, to quote the piece, “incredibly deranged”) Defector about the recent Daily Beast story about the eating habits of Ron DeSantis.
The quote in the Daily Beast story from a former DeSantis staffer is great – and probably because of that, I’ve seen the same line quoted in probably half a dozen other summaries since it was originally published. In it, the staffer claims that DeSantis “would sit in meetings and eat in front of people [. . .] like a starving animal who has never eaten before.”
Burneko picks out the most hilarious and disturbing nugget from the story and gives it the full Defector treatment:
The story’s most vivid detail concerns DeSantis once memorably slurping chocolate pudding out of his own bare goddamn hand like a fucking freak:
Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert–by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.
It’s the “three of his fingers” detail that really makes this anecdote sing. Because now you kind of can’t help but picture it, right? Not just “with his fingers” or “out of his hand,” but specifically three fingers. Really disturbing stuff!
While I laughed embarrassingly hard while reading this story, Burneko is 100% wrong about one thing:
The likeliest possibility seems to me to be a pincer type of deal: The index and middle finger, plus the thumb, sort of gently pinching a glob of pudding like a wad of chaw and lifting it to the face of Ron DeSantis, to be slurped at by his large wet tongue, with the now spit-sucked pincer then returning to the chocolate pudding dessert, like the world’s most accursed prize-machine claw, for another disgusting saliva-impregnated clot of chocolate goop.
Having been, in my younger and more vulnerable years, party to a similarly disturbing display in which a friend of mine1 drunkenly devoured corn syrup from a makeshift honey pot as part of a dismantled Winnie the Pooh Halloween costume, I can say with some amount of confidence that the method employed to eat pudding with one’s fingers is much more likely to be the “garden-spade technique":
Three fingers lined up and pressed tightly together, stabbing down into the pudding dessert and scooping out a little heap. This could be the index, middle, and ring fingers (a Large spade) or the middle, ring, and pinky fingers (Small).
“Blaming Workers Again” by John Russo and Sherry Linkon — Working Class Perspectives
Super interesting read that articulated a few points that have been on my mind recently.
The notion that smaller rust belt communities like the Youngstown-Warren area haven’t tried to diversify their economies reflects basic ignorance. Mayors, economic developers, and business leaders in these communities have done almost nothing but try to attract new industries, but — not surprisingly — they have a much harder time doing that than their larger neigbors, which began the battle for economic recovery with major universities, hospitals, and corporate headquarters already in place.
Nothing frustrates me more than seeing many factions on the left advocate leaving this group of people behind, almost vindictively, out of an assumption that most of them were Trump voters and are thus “getting what they deserve.” These are long-term problems that go back much further than that, and these are people who should be an important part of the liberal agenda. The fact that many among this demographic (although, notably, not Mahoning County) were able to be swindled by Trump just highlights the fact that they felt ignored by the mainstream Democratic Party.
Blaming the working class has long been a default move for elite and middle-class people. Some have faith in the cultural myth of meritocracy. They see their success as a matter of effort and talent and assume that working-class people just don’t have enough of either. For others, judging workers is a way to displace their own anxieties about the uncertain economy. Both project their biases onto the working class and reassure themselves that they deserve their economic privileges.
No wonder working-class people are rejecting mainstream politics, embracing populism, and, increasingly, taking to the streets.
Appalachia Can’t Breathe - Progressive.org
Sick.
. . . radiologists in Kentucky are no longer allowed to diagnose black lung for the purposes of a benefit claim, meaning that physicians . . . must defer to certified pulmonologists. As of last year, there were only six physicians in the state that can diagnose black lung and at least four of those have a history of helping the coal industry with claim appeals.
Whoa
Aeon: The weird wonders of combining 3D printing with the maths of pinecones and sunflowers:
Using rotating, 3D-printed sculptures that he displays under a strobe light, the US designer John Edmark [. . .] creates dynamic 'blooms' that look like sophisticated computer-animation exercises come to life.
Amazing.
Took the words right out of my mouth
Vlad Savov at The Verge perfectly summed up something I’ve been feeling for a long time, but have struggled to put into words.
Whatever it is, I’ve been gripped by a fever of indecision caused by comparing Apples iPhone X and Google’s Pixel 2 XL side by side.
Yep.
Later, he gets into what I think is the real crux of the problem — that, aside from all the ecosystem arguments and camera comparisons, actually using the iPhone X, with its gesture-based interface is such a great experience.
There is pure kinetic joy in swiping up from the bottom of the phone to summon the home screen, or sideways to switch between apps. I marvel at the fluidity and beauty of this human-machine interface. It’s fast, unerringly smooth, and unfailingly satisfying to use.
His experiences are also similar to mine in the advantages of the Pixel: its battery life1 and its camera.
. . . the iPhone doesn’t match the Pixel 2’s camera, and in my experience it’s not even close.
My experience has been the same. Chalk it up to personal preference — I’ve seen all the great comparisons people have posted online and the difference is much less clear in that context — but in my use, the Pixel 2 XL’s camera is head and shoulders above the iPhone X. For me, this is the single reason that it’s hard to switch. I have a 6-month old son, and the photos that I have routinely captured with the Pixel 2 XL are just so good. Far better than what I expect to capture with my smartphone. The iPhone X similarly does a great job, but the photos look like really good smartphone photos rather than really good photos. Aside from all the other conveniences of the iPhone — the ecosystem, third party apps, iMessage, AirPods, etc.—this is the one reason that I’m having a hard time really making the switch.
But, like Savov:
. . . as soon as I was back on the Pixel, tapping the multitasking button like some 20th century plebeian, looking at the less impressive display, listening to the less stellar speakers, swiping through the Twitter app with the buttons at the top instead of the bottom… I started feeling sad.
Finally, he sums it up perfectly with this line:
The iPhone (X) is every Android fan’s worst nightmare: the outsider that shows you how nice life could be.
How Fake News Turned a Small Town Upside Down
From The New York Times Magazine…
WARNING: sensitive material.
For the TL;DR crowd, there’s a podcast version.
Carrie Coon and Midwestern Soul
I knew there was something in particular that stood out about Carrie Coon, and this Joanna Robinson story in Vanity Fair finally helped me pin it down.
When Lindelof and The Leftovers novelist Tom Perrotta first auditioned Coon in 2012, she had just a few tiny TV credits to go along with her body of theater work. It was a certain midwestern stoicism that made her stand out from the pack and land the role of The Leftovers most tragedy-stricken figure: Nora Durst.And:
Coon, raised just outside of Akron, Ohio, has a straightforward, unstudied, demeanor distinctly different from her L.A. and New York-bred contemporaries. “To be an actor in a small town,” she says, “and to leave that small town,” means having that town “still be so much a part of your fundamental makeup that it’s inevitably part of your work.”
As Perrotta says, “Other people we looked at tended to make the choice to present Nora as extremely emotional. What you saw, with Carrie, was the effort of control. I think you’re always trying to be open when you watch people read for a part. But, we just didn’t have to look at anyone after that. It was just like, ‘Oh, there’s Nora. We found her.’”
That control that Perrotta speaks of is just so "it." It's that thing that made me love the character and Coon as an actor. And, of course, it's something that, as a fellow native of Northeast Ohio, I found instantly charming and recognizable.
The strength and stubbornness and stiff upper lip come across completely genuine and vulnerable -- and completely opposed to how these are often portrayed by male actors in less competent performances.
I find it incredibly interesting that show-runner Damon Lindelof gives Coon a lot of credit for helping the show take shape in its second season. The difference between season one and the second two seasons is really staggering. It's like a completely different show. Had they stayed the course with what they had started in the first season it would have been thought-provoking, but ultimately forgettable. The willingness to take it to some place completely different is what made this show great.
Here's Lindelof's quote:
I think that the tonal bandwidth of the show was just this one note on the way left hand side of the keyboard that sounded a lot like the Jaws theme. Carrie started playing notes on the right hand side of the keyboard, and minor notes, and chords. She began to demonstrate all these interesting roads to go down. It wasn’t that the other actors weren’t able to do that. It’s just we were really only writing the show inside this one key, and she was the first one who started moving outside that. When we started doing it for other characters, they were ready, willing, and able to partake. She was also funny, I think.
I have not yet watched season three of Fargo, but the second and third seasons of The Leftovers were some of the best television I've ever seen, and Carrie Coon was a big reason why (Robinson aptly describes it as "Coon's gravitational pull"). I can't wait to get caught up on Fargo now to see how these roles play off one another.