Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I’m planted on the couch, notebook on my lap, listening to the rain. The world is wet and green and exceptionally pleasant, and I will be on this here couch for the remainder of the day.

Unless the rain gives up. Then I’ll have to move, as the front room gets too hot for work purposes in Summer.

I’ve been reading Peter Temple’s Black Water in the evenings for the last few days and it’s rather glorious. I started the book years ago, then managed to pack it away into a storage box when I moved into a friend’s spare room; I spent three or four years convinced that I’d lost the book, unfinished, until my parents recent move meant that I finally had to unpack everything I’d stored at their place.

I was mildly tempted to leave it unfinished when I first unpacked it, since it’s one of the stories that got adapted into the Jack Irish TV series, but I figured that would be a mistake.

So now I’m finishing it.

It’s an extraordinarily Australian book, without being an extraordinarily Aussie book. It captures the kind of laconic mood that gets associated with the Australian voice, but its setting is decided urban Melbourne and filled with the minutia of football clubs and horse racing and cabinet making. Little windows into secret worlds that you don’t get to see or comprehend, which is one of those things that makes fiction addictive.

I’m about a third of the way through and it’s already so much better than the TV adaptation (which was very good). Possibly on the verge of challenging my favourite Temple novel, An Iron Rose, for the top spot.

It seems that 90% of my social media feeds are all about Star Wars this week. Perfectly understandable, and the reports have been good enough that I’m booked in to see the film with my dad early next year.

The thing that I’m raving about this week? NXT Take-Over London.

Like many wrestling fans, I subscribe to the WWE network primarily so I’ll have access to the NXT brand. It started out as a small show where the ‘E trained up their newer wrestlers, but it’s evolved into the wrestling show that delivers on the potential of the medium, week after week. It’s grown from a show filmed on a university campus in Florida to a show that attracts a live crowd of 10,000 people in London.

It’s good, is what I’m saying.

But NXT TakeOver London was fricken’ outstanding. It was the kind of wrestling show where everything was thought out, where every match and every result felt like it mattered, and the suspension of disbelief was easy.

It’s the show when two of the three best matches featured female performers, in a company that has a history of treating its women’s division as eye-candy (at worst) or an afterthought (at best).

Wrestling, like writing, is a place where the little things matter. You don’t notice them when they’re done well, but you’ll find yourself loosing interest when they’re handled in a clumsy fashion.

NXT, in this instance, gets the little things right. It may be the show that will convert you into a wrestling fan if you’re not already interested, but if you are a wrestling fan and you’re not watching this show, get the fuck out there and rectify that.

Yesterday, one of my non-geek colleagues turned to me and asked, “so, when are you going to see the new Star Wars?”

I didn’t know.

I still don’t know.

I know that I’m excited to see the film and that I’ll definitely see it at some point. I’ll probably even slouch my way into a cinema to experience it on the big screen, but that’s really as far as my plans have gone.

And yet, it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask – I present as one of the crowd who should be there, lining up on the very first night. I have been that guy, in the past. When they re-released the original trilogy into cinemas, way back in the nineties, it’s possible that I watched the movie once and went straight out to buy another ticket.

And, lest we write that off as the folly of youth, I’m the guy who mainlined thirteen episodes of Jessica Jones in one night when it was first released.

I still get my geek on, from time to time, but I have to admit that my interest in seeing the new Star Wars film early is low. Not because I expect it to be bad, but because I have no interest in being in a crowded cinema with people who are very, very excited about seeing the film. Because I sure as hell have no interest in sitting through the advertising that precedes new films these days – the twenty minutes of ads before Ant Man just about killed me – and because…

Well, because I really, really have no interest in engaging with the Zeitgeist – good or bad – that will inevitably develop around the film as people start talking.

These days it’s hard to figure out what you actually think of a film, with the internet blaring its opinion at you before you sit down in the cinema. The usual response to this is getting in early, or to spend the week before a major film drops threatening every mother-fucker on your Facebook feed with death if they let out a spoiler. I can respect that, to a certain extent, but these days I prefer to wait until the furore has died down and the conversation has moved on.

It lets me figure out what I think, without getting caught in the echo chamber of the internet.

For instance, I heard all sorts of rhetoric about whether a particular season of Doctor Who sucked, or read any number of arguments about the quality of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and both were ultimately pleasant experiences when I finally got around to seeing them. Not the kind of stuff that would go on my must-see list, but not the dire betrayal that seemed to dominate the bulk of the criticism I heard.

I have come to enjoy being behind the times.

While the bulk of the people I know are out seeing Star Wars, I may finally get around to seeing Mad Max: Fury Road.

Or, shit, I’ll sit down and watch The Third Man again, now that I’ve discovered that the film is streaming on Stan. It’s been a while since I had the zither score stuck in my head…