I'm back from my trip east, which turns out to be exactly what was needed to bring this whole ghastly pandemic* period to a close (and don't you get any ideas, Delta variant!)
Fourteen months later, we finally had a funeral/unveiling/shiva for my father. It was emotional, overwhelming, and -- as befitting my dad -- a little unusual:
Yes, that is a Vulcan salute on his footstone. I had advocated for the inscription to read “Quiet dignity and grace” but I was overruled. I am considering getting that as a tattoo instead.
When a parent dies, you end up doing lots of things you never really considered before. I think the oddest one for me was going into the contacts on my phone and changing my dad's address to the cemetery.
While I was back east, my sister Dana and I took a day to drive up to the area we grew up: Rockland County, New York. It had been a long time since we'd been back, and we spent the day driving around and jogging our memories. Dana shot some video and added commentary.
It all looks very different with adult eyes. We found ourselves asking questions like: "The next street over was called "South Gate Drive" -- where was the North Gate?" While driving down Spook Rock Road, we wondered if the Spook Rock was just one of five powerful rocks in the county, and if you collected them all would you become the ruler of all of Rockland? It got quite silly. Because silliness was one of our key tactics for coping while growing up in this place.
We made a point to stop for lunch at Fortune Garden in Nanuet, which was the go-to Chinese restaurant of our youth.
I was prepared for the actuality of the food to pale in comparison to my memory of it, for nostalgia to raise my expectations to impossible levels. So imagine my shock when it tasted exactly as great as I remembered!
Rituals are good and fine, and serve as containers in which to place impossible and unfathomable emotions. And yet, on the day, there’s so much to attend to, so much busy-ness, that it can be hard to leave the space to connect with the feelings. And for someone as good at disassociating as I am, that was to be expected.
So another event, later in the week, served as a perfect second part of the ritual — going to see the Mets play.
Like with Star Trek and Star Wars, I got my Mets fandom through my dad. We went to countless games over the years. So it was sitting in the stands at Citi Field, surrounded by 25,000 cheering fans, that I finally felt like I was able to exhale and say goodbye.
Project News
A couple of the things I've been working on lately are finally beginning to see the light of day, and I'm excited to be able to share a little bit about them.
Hunt A Killer
I've had the pleasure of working on a couple of experiences for Hunt A Killer, who make solve-at-home murder mysteries. One of the projects that I contributed to is about to come out: Camp Calamity.
In between sessions at Camp Ashburne, the staff throws a bonfire party. The next morning they find one of the counselors lying dead in the embers of the fire. The police say he was drunk and fell into the fire. The camp mourns and tries to put it behind them. Everyone wants things to go back to normal. But when the daughter of the camp's owner stumbles onto evidence that points to the death being intentional, she doesn't know who she can trust. Horrified that she might be spending the rest of the summer with a killer, she turns to a private investigator for help: YOU. Do you have what it takes to find the killer and bring them to justice?
Camp Calamity comes out at the end of July, and is available for pre-order right now.
Moth+Flame
I've been working once more with the VR company Moth+Flame. Previously, we’ve done 13 Reasons Why: Talk to the Reasons, Avenues, and 2nd Civil War. Now we’re doing a whole series of projects for the US Air Force, creating interactive experiences to help train airmen on how to deal with the overwhelming levels of suicide and sexual assault in their ranks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/us/politics/air-force-vr-virtual-reality.html
These have been challenging and rewarding projects, and not anything I ever expected to be doing. One of the amazing things about working in new media is that you never quite know what the next project will be.
Tak For That
The run of superlative Danish TV continues with Arvingerne aka The Legacy.
I suppose you could describe The Legacy as a combination of Succession and Six Feet Under, full of warped family dynamics that are hard to watch yet relatable. It's hard for me to write something coherent about this show without it just turning into a long list of superlative adjectives. This is one of those stories where you think about the characters long after you stop watching. There is a scene at the beginning of the second season that is one of the most shocking and memorable moments of tv I've ever seen. They add a young child to the cast in Season 3, and it's one of the only times I can recall where the addition of an adorable moppet actually makes the show better, a reverse Cousin Oliver.
The cast is stacked with incredible actors in every role - Carsten Bjørnlund, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, and Jesper Christensen are especially memorable. And then there's Trine Dyrholm, who is somewhere in a stratosphere all her own. We'd need to invent completely new superlative adjectives to describe her work. The best approximations I could come up with were "She would have made an incredible Cersei Lannister" and “why isn’t she as famous as Cate Blanchett?”
She did make an incredible Nico in a film a few years ago, and while it’s not wholly a satisfying movie its a staggeringly brilliant performance.
We've now been doing the Danish TV binge for so long, we're in danger of skipping unseen shows and just rewatching the ones we've already watched.
There are quite a few Danish shows that are now available on Netflix. We've been watching Rita, which is a lot of fun (and features Carsten Bjørnlund wearing shorts all the time, if that's your thing). We might try The Rain next, mainly because it seems to be Mikkel Boe Følsgaard’s transformation into an action star. Netflix money is bringing us a fourth season of Borgen, which is filming now. And they just dropped the first teaser for The Chestnut Man, from Forbrydelsen's Soren Sveistrup, also starring Mikkel Boe Følsgaard and Bedrag's Thomas Hwan.
Randomness
* We’ve begun abbreviating “pandemic” as “panda.” It’s just more fun to say, “survived the panda.” And these days, we take the fun wherever we can get it. 🐼
Hej hej!
-Jay