Tag Archives: fandom

Can I ask you a question?

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Photo Credit: Eva Rinaldi

I’m a latecomer to the world of Taylor Alison Swift and realize, for some, that leaves me on questionable ground from which to opine. No, I can’t quote her lyric for lyric. I don’t know the more trivial details of her childhood in West Reading or of her rise to prominence through the music scene in Nashville. I do, however, recognize an absolute juggernaut when I see one.

The Eras Tour is currently crashing through 20 American cities, where Taylor is putting up the kind of attendance numbers Donald Trump couldn’t imagine in his most frenetic fever dream. Sure, a lot of those showing up are under 5’ and under 18, but there are a hell of a lot of them… and they don’t seem to be in any way deterred by the inconvenient reality of not having a ticket to get into their local (or not so local) venue. The past weekend in Philly, she sold out Lincoln Financial Field three nights in a row and had 20,000+ fans banging around in the parking lot just to be close to the action.

My question, only partially asked in just, is: Does the federal government keep its eye on Taylor Swift?

I can’t think of a single politician, living or dead, who could announce a stop in Philadelphia and fill 69,000 seats with 20,000 people to spare… let alone one who could do it three nights in a row and then do the same thing in 19 other cities over the course of three months.

It feels like Taylor could assemble the world’s largest standing army with as little effort as a few posts on social media to announce when and where to show up. After that, a million bejeweled and sparkling Swifties deploy to await further orders from mother. The woman could lead some kind of revolution and there’s a non-zero chance I’d answer the call.

That kind of social power and engagement is impressive and just the slightest bit terrifying.

All games must end…

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There are probably thousands of websites where you can get all the hot takes, spoliers, and analysis of eight seasons of Game of Thrones, especially now that it has come to an end. I had to let the series finale sit with me for a couple of days before offering up my own opinion.

I was a latecomer to the series and didn’t start watching until someone recommended it to me in 2012. After a bit of binging through seasons one, though, I had the fervor of a convert. Episode-for-episode, I think it stands up as some of the best drama ever put on television – with even its weaker episodes and seasons standing tall against most competition.

That brings us to the ending. Was it everything I had hoped for? No, it wasn’t. The compressed final two seasons made scenes out of what in early days would have been entire episodes. I would have gladly watched as many more hours as HBO would have aired. The ending wasn’t how I’d have wrapped things up – but unlike another storied HBO series, at least there was an ending that felt like a reasonable place to let the story stop.

It’s easy to raise hell and cast the producers and writers as villains. The thing is, though, I didn’t have $100 million to throw at making a television program. The decisions on what to put in and what to keep out rested with others. Although I was invested in the fandom, I’m a rational enough fan to realize those decisions belonged to someone else. They made the artistic and financial decisions and then brought the curtain down.

As Ramsay Bolton famously said, “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” Maybe that one line is the thread that really binds the entirety of the series together. No one has ever been all happy about the way the game played out.

Trek…

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Since I was old enough to start making my own decisions about what television to watch, I’ve been a fan of Star Trek. There was a time in the late 80s and early 90s when I could have probably quoted every line of the 3 seasons of the original series, watched in syndication and taped to re-watch countless times on a score of clunky VHS tapes. Six movies and The Next Generation followed, adding to the franchise. I largely fell away during the era of Deep Space 9 and Voyager and Enterprise, though.

I wasn’t overly thrilled about the prospect of bringing the old girl out of mothballs with J.J. Abrams at the helm. I don’t generally like the current Hollywood approach of reanimating every old TV show and movie in an effort to pump more cash from an already tapped well – as if having an original idea or story to tell is some kind of crime against humanity.

With that being said, I’m pleased to report that Beyond manages to hit most of the right notes for this old Trek fan. As troubled as I was originally about these new movies breaking off onto a new timeline, I think this installment comes just about as close to the tone and feel of an original series episode as a fan could hope without putting everyone back on a low-budget set with a bunch of flashing lights and toggle switches. Although I’d never threaten to call this new incarnation of the Start Trek universe “campy,” it finds the proverbial sweet spot somewhere between keeping most of the old timers happy without alienating a new generation of fans. It was nicely done.