TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

Thats the stuff fizzles take it as it is and theres a hollow dread to it, and tbh vaughn delivers as it goes on

Interested what you think the farther you get into it. My first post in this thread, after a couple of episodes, was positive too. By the end, I was exhausted.

The acting was really good imo. Some of those monologues were super-clunky but they (esp Semyon and his girlfriend) sold it well

The monologues were almost showily awful, like it cannot have been purely incompetence imo

aerial shots of freeways and intersections are unfortunately not enough to connect place to that morass, which is a shame

I felt the opposite, in its attempt at being a Great California Novel. It felt like so many strands of California fit into the story, from agriculture to casinos to cults to the landscapes. I wish the Guerneville/Bohemian Grove sections either had a greater sense of place/location or were moved to somewhere plausible in SoCal.

Also, maybe it was shared way up above, but the NY Times did a good story on Vernon, CA.

I felt the opposite, in its attempt at being a Great California Novel. It felt like so many strands of California fit into the story, from agriculture to casinos to cults to the landscapes. I wish the Guerneville/Bohemian Grove sections either had a greater sense of place/location or were moved to somewhere plausible in SoCal.

interesting. there was a bit where they were going to interview someone out by some crop irrigation, and i did think that it was good the way they were weaving in hard industry (toxic waste), casino and prostitution and driver services, crime and cults. so, yes, in fact i think you're right. i guess i felt that it didn't quite map on to a topography for me, which might have made it more powerful. oddly you get very little sense of them driving along via those intersections. unlike the first TD, there's perhaps not so much external sense of them driving.

Yeah, the first episode, ending with that amazing shot of the crime scene pulling away off the coast at sunrise, sets up the show for having a greater sense of how areas connect, rather than cutting from one to the next with the same freeway shots.

well too old to die young sure is something, like taking all the boring parts of td2 and patiently stretching them into taffy. thx brad and thread

seems like as good a place as any for this

Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties

Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of “Asian American” as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women’s movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture.

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors’ storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis’s awardwinning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose.

“The familiar, monochromatic picture of Los Angeles in the sixties—all Hollywood pop and Didion ennui—required a million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry to be ‘edited out of utopia,’ as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it. What those people actually did, alongside antiwar feminists, high school students, and others, is the heart of this book, and it’s a big heart. No one could tell these intersecting stories better than Davis and Wiener, and their book gives us back a great city’s greatness in its movements, edges, and other centers, so many of them forgotten.”

I don't know, maybe those people could have told their own stories better than Davis and Wiener. We'll never know, though, will we?

i hope they’ve got a good bibliography of primary sources. but i liked mike davis’ city of quartz v much (still need to finish it ofc) and may give this a go. my god my reading backlog though :/

“This angst cop drama you’ve got goin’ on”

Did everyone watching this report back, im v curious as to how the endings stick

with your angst cop drama and your cocaine tongue
you get nothing done

I feel like this season is conscious of how ridiculous it often is (and I like that)

i have paused on this, but will be returning.

Re-watching this now for the first time since it was new and liking it a lot.

Every time you watch this show Anthony Kiedis reproduces a clone (asexually, but you never know).

liked it the second time around much much better


maybe they shouldn’t have called it True Detective idk

Seriously; just calling it Nick Lottapizza's California Noir would have been just fine.

happy to have been on the right side of history for this one