It’s been a good week – light on work. I’ve been trying to cook at home more (the pandemic and intervening years got me far too used to ordering in), and that’s been going well.
Health-wise, I’m doing much better – no pain these days, though I’m diligent about continuing my physiotherapy-mandated exercises. It took me a few months, but I realised that my pain resurges precisely when I stop doing these, so I can’t be complacent just yet. But I’m back to actually typing these on the computer rather than dictating them or typing them on the phone.
Work-wise, last week saw the releases of Robin: The Boy Wonder #1 with Juni Ba and Chris O’Halloran, The One Hand #4 with Ram V, Laurence Campbell, Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller, and The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #9 with Tate Brombal, James Tynion IV, Isaac Goodhart and Miquel Muerto.
I only lettered about thirty pages this week – finished up The One Hand #5 and Dawnrunner #4, started on w0rldtr33 #11. Worked on the font quite a bit – I think another few days and I’ll have a working version. I have that, and one or two books I could’ve been lettering this week, but I needed a bit of a rest after three pretty frantic months.
After a three-month break due to work, family and health stuff, I’ve recommenced work on CODENAME SEASIDE, and as always, I’m a bit surprised to come back and read what I have so far and not find it completely horrible. The current hope is that this version of the outline will be wrapped by next week and off to my first readers and my prospective editor.
On Friday, K and I took in Kanan Gill’s current stand-up tour The Kanan Gill Experience.
For my money, Gill has been the only funny Indian stand-up comedian for far too long (though now I’d add my friend Omkar Rege to the list). There are other stand-ups who are funny in short durations (Karunesh Talwar, Rohan Joshi etc.) but no one other than Gill has been able to put together a special and make it structurally unified without sacrificing the pace and volume of jokes.
His best special remains his first – Keep It Real on Prime Video – which, sadly, isn’t available to watch in India at this moment, presumably because it had an extended routine about cows in India (though, handily, VPNs exist). Gill’s style integrates physical comedy, wordplay, anecdotes and observations in a way that’s far too rare in India.
His second special on Netflix, Yours Sincerely, Kanan Gill, was also quite good, but I felt that by his third show, Is This It?, his stylistic tics had taken over from the joke-telling, which wasn’t helped by the fact that it’s a two-hour special.
A big part of the problem is that when you do English-language stand-up comedy in India, you’re working with a small audience, you can’t hone your routine everyday at open mics like you can in the US or the UK, and your contemporaries don’t necessarily challenge you, so it’s easy to reach a certain level of quality and then plateau there.
Thankfully, Gill’s current show shares none of the weaknesses that had begun to show in his work. The Kanan Gill Experience is hilarious – an incredibly energetic and well-structured hour-and-a-half that starts slow and ends in a magnificent 20-minute anecdotal routine that got belly laughs.
The tickets we bought said that this is his “final” tour, but I hope that’s not the case, because I want Indian stand-up comedy to keep getting better.
I’ve been skipping between multiple books at the moment, in various states of completion, but I did finish one book this week.
The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science: (Also published as The Heretics) This starts out like any other series of non-fiction profiles based around a topic – this time about people who excessively believe in UFOs, conspiracy theories and pseudosciences – to the point that I was close to abandoning it around 20% of the way in. But from there, it took a sharp and curious turn to talking about people suffering from diseases that don’t exist (Morgellons, which I’d never heard of), neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, and to Skeptics themselves. From there, it starts an enquiry on why we believe things – how our consciousness is organised, how we perceive the world, and how we turn it into stories. It ends up being a far more interesting book as a result, more interested in the ways people work than in litigating who among his subjects is actually right.
I only watched one movie last week – Monkey Man – and I fully intend to write about it at length, because it speaks to my creative journey as an Indian who grew up on American and British literature, films and television and struggled to combine that with my home-grown influences. In the meantime, here’s the short review from my Letterboxd:
I’m far more enamoured by the film this wants to be than the film it is. I have a lot of time for what it’s doing with its mishmash of influences from Bollywood, Hollywood, Hong Kong action and anime – it’s the story of one man trying to process his creative forebears and trying to come up with something that is his.
The result, of course, is distinctive without ever being original, always interesting but not always good.
I would, however, love to see what Dev Patel does next.
In tv, I’ve been making my way through Baby Reindeer and Ripley, but both are heavy watches, so I thought I’d leaven them by rewatching an old favourite of half-hour tv (this was inspired by Baby Reindeer’s length, which I believe is the ideal length for tv shows).
So I rewatched Fleabag Seasons 1 and 2, and the original stage show it was based on – National Theatre Live: Fleabag.
When I first watched Fleabag, I liked series 1 well enough – it was certainly more sophisticated and mature than Waller-Bridge’s other show Crashing – but it was series 2 that elevated it to one of my favourite shows of the year.
Here’s what I said about it in my old newsletter when series 2 was still serialising on the BBC (I used to post a recommendation at the end of each newsletter):
Since I’ve been obsessed with Fleabag series 2, which is about to end, I couldn’t really recommend anything else to you. I loved series 1, but with a few reservations, specifically to do with how the title character’s central trauma was revealed. I was definitely excited about series 2, but didn’t expect it to end up pretty much my favourite set of tv episodes in the last few years, since Chewing Gum, in fact, which I recommended in these pages a few editions ago, or maybe since Russian Doll, which I recommended even more recently.
With every episode of series 2, Phoebe Waller-Bridge made me a bigger and bigger fan of her writing, particularly of scenes of people trying to communicate around a central conflict because relationships would break down if they tried to communicate through it. “Fleabag” herself is one of my favourite tv characters in ages – a person who superficially reads as horrible but who makes you sympathise deeply with her struggle.
I think there’s a reason these three series came to mind – these are all shows written by women, about difficult women, which don’t try to convince you that they deserve affection, they just get on with the business of telling their stories.
Which is why, especially if you’re tired of Serious Drama with Serious Men going about Being Serious written by other Serious Men – fuck them, watch Fleabag instead.
I wrote a bit more about it when the entirety of series 2 dropped on Amazon Prime and the Internet went apeshit. I found myself specifically interested in the difference of experience between watching it weekly and waiting for the next episode vs. watching it all together.
I watched the second season during its original serialisation, and, as much as the show itself, I treasured my experience of watching each episode a week apart.
Talking to a lot of people afterwards, it feels like it was a fundamentally different experience from watching it all at once with no gap between episodes. There were emotional lacunae at the end of many of the episodes that, for me, were enhanced by having to wait for a week to see them resolved.
It also speaks to a difference between genre storytelling and drama. As I wrote the words “emotional lacunae” up there, I realised that what I was talking about were essentially cliffhangers, but their resolution was not in discovering the solution to a mystery or in the next thing that happened to the characters, but in the choices the characters would go on to make.
As the experience of watching things all at once becomes more convenient, a lot of tv struggles with what can be done to make the audience come back the next week. The solution that a lot of tv writers seem to have found is to have ongoing mysteries that can be sprung on the viewer, sometimes to do with a character’s history or nature. The problem, for me, is that this tends to be an appeal to a fairly low part of the brain – the pleasure of bridging the gap between not knowing and knowing. But this is confection rather than protein. The difference between watching something like that on a binge or episode-by-episode is appealing but not ultimately nutritious (the big problem with Westworld as a show). With something like Fleabag on the other hand, the gap gives you something that doesn’t necessarily leave you once it’s bridged, because it’s fundamentally tied to human concerns instead of mechanics.
Reading this, I realise that this was when I decided that if I like a tv show, I will not watch more than one episode of it per day – I am determined to leave a gap between episodes to let me think about the experience as I’m going through it – simulate serialisation, if you will.
A couple of things I want to add to this from 2024:
- If you’ve never seen the theatrical production of Fleabag, you owe it to yourself to do so. It’s a stronger, darker version of series 1. It’s got much the same plot, but it’s structured better, and it handles the central revelation of series 1 far better than the series does. When I watched the stage show, I wondered why Waller-Bridge had changed it for the worse for tv, but rewatching both now, I realise that it was done to a) cover the same territory visually and not via dialogue and b) to accentuate the device of fourth-wall breaking as dissociation that’s scattered throughout the series. It doesn’t work as well, but it was a more worthwhile attempt than I gave it credit for.
- I’ve always felt a bit tetchy about the fact that the stuff that the Internet seems to love best about Fleabag – the monologues and sweeping declarations about men and women and about damage – are what I like least about the show, but they’re such minor quibbles that I daren’t hold them against the show as a whole. As YouTuber Broey Deschanel elucidates, these are the moments when the story stops being specific and tries to be general – when it becomes an essay instead of a story – and that’s why they’re weak to me, but it’s also easier to like generalisations than messy, ambiguous moments. Most of the show, in any case, is so intensely personal, about each person’s specific damage and what it does to them and the people around them, that it handily transcends these moments.
- I also noticed this time the difference between watching and rewatching. When I first watched series 2, it felt incredibly intense – every interaction the most important, each one fraught with the potential for beauty and ugliness. The second time around, it was a much more relaxing watch, because I remembered the broad strokes. Speaking to what I said up there about emotional lacunae and cliffhangers, this is also the non-genre version of what we call “spoilers”. When we don’t know what’s about to happen, every moment is full of potential, and it’s a wonderful experience to see that unfold in real-time and have to wait for resolution instead of knowing ahead what is going to happen ahead of time.
- Finally – I’m so used to seeing the serious/dramatic aspects of Fleabag discussed, that it was a bit of a shock to remember that it’s a sitcom, and a very funny one at that. I don’t think a funnier line has been written than “Get your hands off my miscarriage!” from episode 1 of series 2.
There we go, a nice end to a nice, relaxing week. Tomorrow is voting day in Pune. Fun times.
Bide well, gang.