Monday, July 26, 2021

TV Made Me Read

A friend recently suggested the series "Babylon Berlin" from Netflix.  It's great.  Much like Peaky Blinders or Boardwalk Empire, it's about shell-shocked WWI veterans assimilating back into normal life (but in Berlin, not Birmingham or Atlantic City).  One of them is a cop investigating a murder which spirals into a whole kerfuffle.  

I'm halfway through the third season and, like most modern TV shows, you have to give it a few episodes to set everything up but once you do it pays off.  Turns out Berlin was pretty wild in the 1920's, lots of booze and prostitution with a little cocaine and fluid sexuality to boot (Das Boot?).  Despite being a relatively straightforward procedural it occasionally veers off into Teutonic Lynchian weirdness, which I enjoy greatly.

It's also very literary, with aspects of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises coming through.

Any excuse to use that video again.  At some point I thought to myself "This must've been a book originally, there's no way a television scriptwriter came up with this" and sure enough, it's from a series of books by a guy named Volker Kutscher.  So I got the first book and started reading it.  So far so good.  Check out the show or the book unless you're Dave, in which case you already read the books.

15 comments:

Juan Carlos said...

I tried Babylon Berlin a while back but didn't get into it. Maybe I need to try again.

zman said...

Emu Temple sounds like a refuge for large birds.

rootsminer said...

This seems like an opportunity we don't want to miss!

zman said...

Tonight's bon voyage TR gathering was very different from our bon voyage Pika gathering.

rob said...

wait, ‘was’? shouldn’t you be rocking out until the wee hours?

Mark said...

Agreed. Or at least a second boozy goodbye with a smaller group?

I’ll watch Babylon Berlin. I’m watching Undercover now. It’s a Belgian show on Netflix. I don’t know if it’s great but its pretty entertaining.

TR said...

A boozy dinner was had a couple weeks ago. We are awaiting movers in the morning and scrambling to get ready. One beer was about all I had time for. Another kind gesture by Juan Carlos and Zman to say goodbye.

Wife and I took our kids to sleepaway camp in Mass on Sun morning. My youngest, who had the best all-around six month stretch of his life this year, was devastated and cried in the car. Was an awful feeling. When he finishes camp, I will fly in from Denve, scoop him and bring him there. It was his last time leaving the house he loved. I had mixed feelings about this house, but it was a damn good home for my family and the near-term uncertainty is tough to deal with.

rootsminer said...

Best of luck for a smooth move and great next chapter for your fam, TR.

Danimal said...

My best to the Rez's....painful now for the kiddos but they will in all likelihood look back and see it as the greatest thing that happened to them. I do not envy the actual moving part tho.

zman said...

Did anyone else's son pour sand down the bathroom sink this afternoon?

rootsminer said...

Kids do the darndest things, eh?

TR said...

Today was in the 99th percentile of stressful/grueling life days I’ve ever had. Movers started at our storage place at 8 AM and left our house at 730 PM. We were promised 4-5 dudes. We got 3. I ended up getting a workout myself that day, as I can’t hold back from doing labor to get shit done.

Wife and I are now at a nearby hotel. No idea where our lives’ belongings are. We plan to drive ~690 miles to South Bend tmrw. Not too many sexy stopping points on the straight line route. My Catholic wife can see a couple things before we charge on to Iowa City. Yippee.

zman said...

"We were promised 4-5 dudes. We got 3. I ended up getting a workout myself that day" sounds like the introduction to a scheißer video.

Mark said...

I didn’t even think about the driving part of this move. Ugh. That’s brutal. Probably not as brutal as the scene you described when you took your son to camp though. As someone who spent his entire childhood in the same house, moving cross country at that age would be gutting. I’m sure he’ll adjust but I felt for both you and him, TR.

Whitney said...

Godspeed, TR.

Dusty Hill of ZZ Top has moved on to that party on the patio in the sky. It’s an outdated image, but in the old days he’d be greeted by someone upstairs with a beard as long as his.