Stuff and Moonshine

1. The last few times I was in the job market I kept seeing those “you need 5+ years’ experience for this entry-level position” we all complain about, but now that I actually have six or seven years of experience in graphic design, I keep clicking on “Wanted— Graphic Designer” ads, reading the description, and finding out they really want a 3-D animator or an architect or both. 

2. Andrew downloaded the CBC Gems app so we can watch The Kids In the Hall without digging through DVD boxes. For some reason at least half the ad breaks seem to have been sponsored by CAMH and feature narrators solemnly counselling us about the need to get help for clinical depression, or giving us the statistics on suicide.

3. Several years and a month late, I watched the 2016 The Librarians Christmas episode, “Santa’s Midnight Run.” This is very much about what this post calls “second Christmas,” i.e. a secularized version of the holiday as a general festival of good-will that everyone ought to get in on; the Cockney rhyming slang scene was annoying, and the show’s format is a twee half-hour of family viewing; but they hooked me with the opening, in which Santa steps in to talk down an armed (in London?! In a soup kitchen?!) robber, before realizing it’s a ploy to get him to reveal himself so he can be drugged by a dart made of mistletoe. Santa looks like a clean-shaven middle-aged man in a grey three-piece suit and an incongruous velvet hat.

He’s also Bruce Campbell, which is the main reason the show’s parallel Christmas mythology works for me. Campbell only occasionally gets to use his full acting range (he ought to have at least been nominated for an Oscar for Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)), but even when he’s doing his usual wiseguy schtick there’s always something more to it— Ash from the Evil Dead series would not still be a popular character after thirty years of braggadocio and blowing the heads off Deadites if he weren’t played by someone capable of bringing depth to the role.

Santa, in the Librarians universe, is the current persona of an avatar of goodwill who’s really several archetypes in a trenchcoat. The team has to rescue him and get him to the North Pole (or at least the North) before midnight on Christmas Eve so he can release the year’s store of goodwill through the ley lines, otherwise “every city in the world will be burning by Groundhog Day.” Even while delivering lines like “Somebody has jacked Santa’s ride!” or getting into a bar fight in Alaska, Campbell plays the character as warm, avuncular and very definitely not human. I’m curious as to how much of this was developed at the script level, how much through rehearsal and costume design. Jonathan Frakes directed.

4. This Narnia fanfic: A Savage Place. In which the Pevensies are good, but not safe.