Dexter's First Season is Odd

It happened unexpectedly. I saw Dexter's devilish face peering from the Netflix carousel, and I thought: yeah. Now's the time. Let's get into Dexter, I guess. And so, I watched the first season in something of a trance. Every day, first thing in the morning - perhaps a rousing episode of Dexter. Before bed, nice and cosy - perhaps a soothing episode of Dexter. 

There's our boy.

What I loved about it immediately was its bold, wry sense of humour. We open with a voiceover monologue from Dexter himself, and the presence of this voiceover steers the show, and sets up a beautiful solid line between the functioning world of Miami and its utterly repulsive police department, and our cutely childlike fully grown serial killer.

LaGuerta + Dex 4eva

We only hear his perspective through this narration, and so there's a wonderfully insular feel to it. We, the audience, are the only ones with ears pressed right up to Dexter's heart. And he is, as it turns out, one of few sympathetic individuals in an ecosystem of malignant freaks.

There's the corrupt, rancid crew of officers and forensics boys - ranging from Masuka, a man who can't resist making lurid, pervy comments on every chopped up female body he swabs, to Doakes, the stern muscle-man who always has one eyebrow raised, easily the best of them. Arguably most important, though, is Deb - Dexter's chirpy cop sister. I despise her.

Every line she delivers, every thought she has, even, has the distinct energy of a delighted, scheming twelve-year-old who is about to be massively brought down to Earth. She seems to do zero police work, instead relying on her brother to feed her spontaneous crime-solving clues. I hate to see her happy, honestly. She's like an amoeba.

Dexter himself has an unshakeable appeal. He's a little sweetie. Michael C. Hall plays him with this wonderful, wide-eyed quality. He's always vaguely startled, yet he is also always smizing impishly. This guy is up to something, but in a cute way. This is bolstered by his relationship with his timid girlfriend, Rita, who is by far one of my favourite characters. I just love their dynamic together as two people with very different interpersonal fears that ultimately manifest in very similar, often complimentary ways.

Rita is a victim of rape and battery, and I find the scenes that deal with her hesitance surrounding sex in relation to that very sweet and touching. Unfortunately, later in the season the show starts to irritate me by bringing in her evil husband Paul and sort of making him a normal guy character that has to be in the episodes just to piss me off. His ongoing presence and the flippancy with which the show begins to treat him and his abusive behaviour ultimately undermines some of the more thoughtful writing that comes earlier on. And that's a big clanger.

She's just so cute.

At first, the show appeared to have a sort of complicated and interesting relationship with its cast of characters. Here are the corrupt and magnificently peurile police force, failing at everything and generally being unbelievably stinky. And then here's Dexter, the secret killer with a heart of gold. They are at odds with each other, and yet they fit perfectly together. Dexter defiles, harms, and kills people in the name of justice (à la Light Yagami), and so do the police. But the more I watch, the more simple it seems.

We're not supposed to consider Deb a whiny incompetent when she acts put upon when her superior asks her to hurry up and bring a bottle of water to a thirsty child who had been trapped in a car for days. We're not supposed to judge her when she solicits a prostitute for a misogynistic amputee and sends her into his hospital room with a grin. We're not supposed to judge Doakes when he shoots first at a fleeing suspect, because that suspect did really bad stuff and so it's simply justified for a police officer to execute him.

Sad Doakes :-(

We're not, obviously, supposed to judge Dexter for killing nasty guys either, but the show reveals through its moral consideration of the other characters that he is less a subversion of the justice system, less a warped, acerbic continuation of it, even, and more of an expression of the average person's vibes-based approach to justice - just get the bad guys. Everything else is window dressing.

Yes, Dexter is a killer, but the point is that his inhuman urge to do murders, his inability to feel, gives him an almost heightened humanity. He cares about his victims' victims in direct contrast with almost every other character's ceaselessly narcissistic view of the world. It works so beautifully, until the show unravels into gratuitous, weird, and reprehensible behaviour by the others thats treated as if its on par with Dexter's Dextering. Enough. I can't buy that.

By the end of the season, the Ice Truck Killer feels idiotic. The reveal that he's Dexter darksided older brother is, yes, very funny, but it's also like - who is this dweeb? Why on Earth did Deb accept a marriage proposal from this wiry little freak? There is a flattening that happens here. Yes, this man can use his one contraption to drain people of their blood, but beyond that, he really isn't so smart and special. The end of his plan feels like playground stuff. Then again, that's what they're doing. Playing.

Kiss <3

In any case, some of the electric lustre wears off by the finale. The misogyny running in a thick current through the show is not there to be explored as much as it is there to titillate, no matter how good and kind and murderous a man Dexter is, and how interesting that dichotomy is. But Dexter is there, nevertheless. And he's pretty great.

A Walk in New York

The phone is indeed a sort of locked treasure box of gems left in a dark room to never be touched. Today I would like to present to you some of its secrets: photos I took in New York in January 2022. For some reason, at this time, I was really into taking these long vertical photos. I'm not sure why. They sure are long.

My favourite of these is this picture of some beautiful fruit art on the back of a van. Look at this cute fruit gang. I really like them.

I find the tall, urban sprawl of the city quite comforting, but also really well complemented by its pockets of art, whether municipal, or displayed neatly in an art gallery space, or indeed, as is often the case, some kind of wall or vehicle art. I love this chunk of the Berlin Wall near Battery Park:

Cute little guy.

I also found this beautiful drawing of a pony:

Very inspiring.

Around this time, I took a lot of waterfront walks, and I loved the view of the skyline and the river and the bridge so much. They knew this, and they put a heart on the pier just for me.

There are so many good shapes and signs and things in Manhattan.

And, naturally, they have the greatest pest of all time. The raccoon. Give the raccoons what they want, I say. Let them have at it. They deserve it. 

Wobbledogs: The Game Where You Wobble Some Dogs

Look man, sometimes you just need a game where you breed multi-headed, brashly-coloured dogs that can barely walk. Sometimes you need to pick those dogs up and fling them about the place. Sometimes that's the only thing that really helps.

Enter: Wobbledogs. A bright and colourful, CalArts-adjacent wonder in which dogs lay eggs and machines pump out slices of yummy garlic bread. It's a simple, addictive sandbox game, and your only task is to bring dogs to life, and watch them shit out neat pink poo piles.

Much of the fun comes in breeding them. At first they are beautifully simple little cartoon creatures with respectable rectangular bodies. But very soon they are mutated freaks, lunging and falling over and making horrible grimaces. They are undoubtedly in great pain. Yet they are charming. They're weird. The first time you grow a dog with a fluffy tail, you'll gasp. The sweet wonder of life made new again.

What I love about Wobbledogs is that those dogs are a sort of alien approximation of what a dog might be. They are facsimiles of dogs. They can have wings and tendrils and many heads. They lay eggs. They spin themselves into cocoons which hatch new, slightly mutated versions of the previous dogs.

Yet, for all this eldritch and un-doglike behaviour, they eat and play and snarl and defecate, and you, the player, watch silently. Hatch a new dog egg, why don't you? It'll be fun.

There's a love letter to the sciences in this that shines through even in the colouring, which reminds me of the bold, toddler-friendly sections you can find in most good science museums. The perfect reminder of the sheer fun and delight to be found in genetics. It's funny, really, that I can take generations of mangled mutts and craft them into the perfect tiny-headed, long-legged block of cuteness.

I made this dog. Now I shall wobble it. Good day. 

I've Got my Eye on You

The wonderful thing that you can do with a scanner, its uniquely mesmerising ability, is: warp.

Take me, for example, a normal woman with normal-shaped eyes. I can drag my face along the scanner, following the beam of light, and turn my eyes into long shadows. The result is a moderately spooky image.

This is the true joy of making an image via some progressive means. Panorama modes on phones can do pretty interesting things too, but the scanner is so much more controllable. It sits still, and you have to move. This means that you can effect a sort of theatrical, slow dance with the scanner. The glass and the line of light create a tiny stage for you.

The rapid blurring and dimming of any element of your scanned object that isn't directly touching the glass really adds to the startling sense of wrongness that can occur. It's not just the weird segmenting of the image as the scanner-beam moves across the glass that makes for a gorgeously distorted image, but also the fact that the beautiful clarity a scan can offer only goes so far when you're scanning something 3D.

It gives the arresting effect of emerging from the darkness. The world is so narrow. The shadow is so thick. Here I am - looking in.

More Junk

Here are some more pages of my junk journal, including this sensational collage featuring a photo of my aunt, Lindsay:

For some reason, her own aunt sent her a framed picture of herself some time ago. A beautiful present. A picture of yourself. Everyone wants this. But recently, Lindsay decided to put various framed images up on her walls, and so re-used the old frame and gave me the photo of her standing on the rocks. I knew what I had to do with this image. That's prime junk.

I think my favourite aspect of it is that the picture itself is quite low-quality. There are not that many pixels in there. Perfect.

Other pages have been largely filled up with packaging from various treats I've been having - my important Christmas chocolate orange (which was, in fact, mint flavoured), and selected teas, fruits, yoghurts, etc. I quite like incorporating this sort of waste scrap into collages - it becomes a sort of weird diary of supermarket foods, not the kind of thing I'd usually document, but obviously quite a large part of life. Something about looking back on those things is quite satisfying.

I've been using this journal as a regular notebook before collaging over all those initial notes, and so I also started incorporating the notes into the altered pages. It's a nice way to essentially use the same notebook twice, and I like the way it adds to the thoughtless messiness of the thing.

It's as if my thoughts give way to a scrambled, textured set of memories, which is a pretty fun representation of how thoughts really travel and recede. My thoughts are now - as they should be - on my next teabag.

My New Favourite Song: You're So High by Eli & Fur

I have become obsessed with a brooding dance track I heard in a restaurant. This is how it happens. This is how I get into house.

That's Eli & Fur.

Let me set the scene. I'm in the concrete basement of a Japanese restaurant. A woman at the only other occupied table in the room has told me about her Groupon voucher, and how she often visits new restaurants via the beautiful deals available to her on Groupon. The waitress is also in very high spirits, laughing often. I have just consumed a good amount of sushi and sashimi, and there is some kind of marinated bass dish on its way. I have consumed a drink called 'matcha dream'. The ambience is good - the dim lights and all of the fish already in my stomach are making me nice and sleepy. And the songs are soft club tunes, which adds to that hazy feeling. We are not in the club, but the club is in us, the people in this room.

And then a new song starts, with a bold rhythmic synth and a mountain of echo, a sequence of distant exhales, and some classic claps for percussion. "You're so high," sings a woman who sounds as if she is emerging from a foggy lake. "Do you think of my heart?"

A bassy synth kicks in, and it is impossible for me to resist the music. By the time the chorus arrives, and the woman sings, "hey hey, I need a love right now" I am lost in the undulating, reverb saturated bliss of it. I feel as if I have entered a cloud. It's like when you're falling asleep and the pure relaxed pleasure of the process subsumes you. This is pure dreaming music.

I found out later that this song was You're So High by dance duo Eli & Fur, a 2013 debut track that apparently reached the top 3 on Hype Machine. At around that time, I was really into Hype Machine, but I had no idea it was still going strong to this day. Good for you, Hype Machine. Love you.

They describe themselves as 'platonic soulmates' on the about page of their website, which is pretty funny. Okay ladies. Well, in fairness, I did see them and think "oh, lesbians?" I stand corrected. This page also talks about a 2024 album in future tense, so I guess they haven't updated the site in a while.

I thought they might be lesbians because... they look really cool.

Anyway, the point is: I am going to listen to this five thousand times. Bye. 

I Saw the Totoro Musical

They did it. Those madlads actually brought huge, fuzzy freak Totoro to the West End, to a sort of musical-light show at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, where I once saw Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella before it transferred to Broadway and became BAD Cinderella (a truly iconic and insane move).

Bloke spotted.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this, because shows aimed at kids can often veer towards the predictable and bland. I'd seen a few pictures from past My Neighbour Totoro performances, and the puppets and sets looked really cool, but as far as the story's translation to the stage was concerned, I had modest expectations.

Sure enough, the sight of two adult women playing bombastic, screaming children took a little bit of getting used to. Sometimes I feel like this sort of thing works better through the TV than on the stage, somehow. Looking at real people in person can change something about the believability of the performance, or my ability to suspend my disbelief for this, and there are a few scenes in particular (one where Mei sits on the ground and cries in that stop-start way that tiny children do, for example) during which I thought, unstoppably: that's a woman.

Women alert!

It's kind of a strange thing - and also perhaps worth noting that there was no child in sight in the audience - but after a while I more-or-less forgot about it, especially with Mei, because her actress, Victoria Chen, really channeled the pure energy of a four year old. She had some absolutely perfect small child expressions. I was convinced.

Photo via Victoria Chen's Instagram, @vhickles.

The biggest star of the show is the big man himself, of course, and he looks phenomenal. Totoro is some sort of balloon puppet creature, and his movement is so smooth and impressive. When he grins, you grin. When he roars, you sit in silent reverence. This guy is great.

Large.

There are so many gorgeously designed elements of the show - numerous puppets, and beautiful sets that are moved in very inventive ways that really propel the narrative. There's some new sort of visual delight to be seen almost always, and let me tell you, when Catbus arrived, its headlight eyes casting frightening beams of light through the darkness of the stalls, I gasped.

The gorgeous inflated feline bus entranced me. I couldn't resist it.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I did enjoy the show. The thing is a glorious spectacle. It's cute, it has some good little moments of humour, and quite frankly, it's Totoro. 

I loved it. 

***

The photos used in this post are from various productions.