The Default Position

Apologies for the radio silence here over the past couple of weeks, folks — as I have discussed/alluded to numerous times in this space, the last year-plus has been a wild odyssey of Big Things That Will Not Stop Happening, and while someday I'm sure I'll look back and feel grateful for the many ways in which I've been pushed, pressed, and stressed to various limits during this period, right now I'm just looking forward to being on the other side. The long version would undoubtedly bore you; the short version basically just boils down to "recent life events have proven less than conducive to creative writing."

The good news, at least if you're really hungry for some extra prose from yours truly and/or you give a damn about old movies and AOR, is that June saw me return to the fold at Ultimate Classic Rock after what was basically a seven-year absence. (I did write a couple of things for them in the spring of 2023.) This is still just freelance stuff, and I have no idea how long it'll continue, but for now, you can read my picks for 12 Wrongly Forgotten Movies from the Summer of 1985 and Rock's 31 Best Movie Soundtrack Songs of 1985. ("Lot of Rocky IV in here," muttered my editor.)

The timing of my UCR resurrection proved fortuitous in more ways than one. Yes, it's wonderful to get a little boost in the checking account after looking for work for over a year, but also, my recent professional focus on classic rock has dovetailed with a general drift toward musical comfort food, which almost always leads me back to the mulleted AOR I was mainlining throughout the latter half of the '80s. To that end, I was recently delighted to stumble across a preposterously massive Spotify playlist dedicated to exactly this sort of thing:

There are some caveats. First, it's 10,000 songs long, which is way too long for some people (like perpetual playlist complainer Jason Hare); second, it's larded up with a lot of tracks that were released long after the '80s and early '90s. I do not begrudge the efforts of anyone interested in excavating that old AOR feeling with new bands and new music, but I'm far more interested in hearing obscurities from the original era than I am in listening to new stuff from Frontiers Music acts and/or the surprising array of enthusiastic facsimiles that is evidently pouring out of northern Europe on a daily basis. What I'm trying to tell you is that I did a lot of release-date checking while making my way through this playlist, which means I didn't listen to anywhere near 10,000 songs — but I did find a whole bunch of fun stuff that was 100 percent new to me, which I added to my very old #AORTears playlist.

This is a playlist that's been gathering dust in my Spotify library since I put it together on a whim after a series of conversations with Mayor Wardlaw back in... I don't know, 2012 or something, but lately, it's been my soundtrack during my trail runs. When I initially assembled it, I knew most of the songs by heart, but now that it's at least twice as long, I find myself hearing stuff I have no real familiarity with — and yet I know the essential form and basic ingredients of every song intimately. The net effect is kind of like watching J.J. Abrams' Super 8, which I believe I compared at the time to returning to your childhood home and discovering rooms you never knew were there. There's a comfort in this, but also something that sort of pokes at the edges of the feeling I think we're all really looking for when we say we want a sequel or revival to something we loved many years ago — it isn't necessarily that there's any reason to continue that specific thing, it's that we never stop hoping we can somehow recapture the way we felt when we fell in love with it. I think I'm dangerously close to getting way too intellectual about a stress-induced collapse into nostalgia, so I'll shut up about it now. Long story short, I haven't been spending a lot of time exploring actual new music lately, and this is why. I regret nothing.

Watching: God, it's been so long since I wrote one of these cultural consumption posts, I don't even know how many shows I've made my way through in the meantime. I can tell you that like everyone else, I watched the most recent seasons of The Last of Us and Hacks, but I have yet to make time for Season 2 of Andor, even though I know it's great; I haven't thought too deeply about my lack of interest in that direction, but I know it stems from the disappointment of the most recent Star Wars movie, as well as the diminishing returns that have come with many of the latest Marvel/SW Disney+ series. (I'm pretty sure the last Marvel show I tried to watch was Secret Invasion, which I bailed on before finishing the first episode.)

Lately, it feels like my viewing has been one "it's fine" series after another. Duster is perfectly fine. So was Your Friends & Neighbors. So is Stick. I'm only an episode and a half into Season 4 of The Bear, but the seams are showing on that show too. Streaming TV has given us a wild proliferation of shows assembled with the type of money and talent that classic network series would have killed for, but the longer this era of television goes on, the more risk-averse everything feels; there are a lot of good shows to choose from, but few that are legitimately great, and while that's always been the case, there's never been this fucking much of it all. I tend to think that's why you can pretty much count on a backlash arriving to harsh the buzz of any given critical darling, usually around Season 3 or 4 — as has definitely been the case with The Bear.

Those of you who know what I used to do for a living will understand why I currently take great joy in having no idea what the critical response is to anything anymore, but even I am aware that people have been bitching about The Bear since at least partway through Season 3, and the pile-on has continued into the current season, which was dumped en masse onto Hulu with surprisingly little fanfare last week. Again, I've only just begun my S4 journey, but I think I can kinda understand the bitching; like a lot of streaming series, this is a show that has something important to say, but it really only needed a couple of seasons to do it, and we're now at a place where only the most obtuse viewers have failed to grasp its central themes.

On the other hand, I think those themes are important. At the very least, they resonate deeply with me. At its core, this is a show about passion, and what it costs you to follow it. It's about the hard truth that no matter how much you might love something, you probably won't love it forever, at least not consistently — and the steps it takes to reach that realization require so much sacrifice that they're liable to leave you wondering whether it's worth loving anything at all. As hard as this show has started to hammer on its message, it's still one that hits me on a fundamental level, and I think I'll be inclined to give it a lot of leeway until it's well and truly run its course.

Reading: I haven't really been a franchise reader since the days when I couldn't get enough of Piers Anthony's various series, but we're halfway through 2025, and I really haven't read much of anything beyond Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder books. As that title implies, they focus on a guy named John Dortmunder — a low-level cat burglar whose intellect is matched only by his comically bad luck, which always finds a way to scotch the deal no matter how thoroughly he plans things out. Because I'm currently working on a novel that essentially amounts to Chinatown with jokes, I've been in the mood for crime capers with a sense of humor, and the Dortmunder books definitely fit the bill. If you're a film fan with a decent memory, you probably already know that a few of the installments in this series have been adapted into feature films, starting with 1972's The Hot Rock, starring Robert Redford:

That was followed by 1974's Bank Shot, starring George C. Scott:

Finally, we were "treated" to the lamentable What's the Worst That Could Happen?, starring Danny DeVito and Martin Lawrence:

The books are better than the movies, especially that last one. And if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, the first three or four won't cost you anything extra. They certainly won't change your life, but they're (mostly) tightly plotted, and every one of them contains its share of laugh-out-loud moments. I'm up to Book 11 out of 15, and I recommend them all unequivocally.

Elsewhere: Aside from my recent Ultimate Classic Rock posts, you know you can find me writing about General Hospital every week at Diagnosis Daytime. I recently crossed the two-year mark with that column, which means I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 words about the show. This isn't an achievement I expect any of you to celebrate with me, but I'll celebrate it nonetheless.

Around the Corner: I recently recorded another appearance on the Ultimate Classic Rock podcast, which will go live whenever Mayor Wardlaw presses the "publish" button. We're also due to resume activity on the Record Player podcast sometime soon — we have an album picked out and everything. Just a matter of elbowing my way into my gainfully employed co-host's busy schedule. There's also my work with Harmonic, which will doubtless be the subject of several posts in the not-too-distant future. Stay tuned — and if you're a paying Jefitoblog subscriber, please join us at the site's Discord server, which is active every day. (You should have received an invitation when it launched, but if it's been lost, hit me up; I'm happy to send another.)