In his final chat with Ken Jennings last night, Sam Buttrey – my favorite of the Jeopardy! Masters – gave an eloquent speech in praise of the unsung writers of the show. Matt Amodio, my second favorite, gave a heartfelt tribute to Sam.
It’s been a great week for Jeopardy! fans, as the half-hour show has been followed by a one-hour show featuring six recent “masters” – a group that contains a number of colorful characters. These latter games are high-intensity, with as much showmanship as is allowed by the format (thanks especially to Matt Amadio, Mattea Roach, Sam Buttrey, and James Holzhauer). And you see what a huge role fate plays in the proceedings. Last night Amadio missed an easy one – answering Peter O’Toole instead of Paul Newman as the actor with piercing blue eyes – that Roach then answered, and shortly after landed the Daily Double, which she got right, and went on to win the game – after having been in the hole at the start of Double Jeopardy! This also illustrated the game’s fatal flaw, which is that someone with prodigious knowledge can be tripped up by a piece of worthless trivia.
The May issue of The Atlantic features an article by Helen Lewis titled “The Magic Kingdom of Ron DeSantis: My very British romp through America’s weirdest state.” Unfortunately (from my perspective) it’s more a dissection of the governor than an exploration of Florida, but there are moments of travel writing that, curiously, made me glad there weren’t more.
Lewis was told that there are the three Floridas: the Panhandle, central Florida, and the south. There are more Floridas, of course; South Florida is a completely different entity from southwest Florida. Also, except for The Villages, central Florida is not, as she states, particularly ripe with seniors (unless you’re counting horses and cattle – which I’m sure she wasn’t; that Florida went completely unmentioned). Retirees, like most Floridians, tend to gravitate to the coasts.
And her summation of “south” Florida? A place “where condo towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back beaches of the Keys.”
Any writer who associates beaches with the Keys is revealing her ignorance. There’s also the strange division of “condo towers” and “Spanish-speaking enclaves” (I’ll ignore the cliché of “bustling” just as I did the one of “laid-back”.) Does she think no Hispanics own condos – even in Miami? In Brickell, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, the condo towers are Spanish-speaking enclaves. Admittedly, they may not be all that bustling.
No one is more critical than a travel writer reading an article on his home.
My filmmaker friend texted me yesterday that the festival to which he had been invited advertised itself as the Palm Beach International Film Festival – a well-known festival that closed in 2017 after 28 years. He added that the people at the Hilton, a reported partner with discounted rooms, had never heard of it.
Feeling a bit better yesterday I drove up to West Palm Beach to have lunch with a friend – a filmmaker – who was in town for the Palm Beach Film Festival. The festival, he said, was a complete bust; the theater that was supposed to host it had filed for bankruptcy and as a result the films were being shown online. This cut down on the number of viewers, obviously, but also the socializing and exchange of ideas. “We didn’t all come here to sit alone in our rooms and watch films on our laptops,” my friend explained. The new head of the festival, apparently, was acting quite oblivious to participants’ complaints.
I thought it would make an interesting story, but searching this morning I found no mention of the debacle – not even in the Palm Beach Post. Newspapers these days are as feeble as film festivals.
We started watching Beef, the new Netflix series based on the idea of road rage, and stuck with it for three episodes. Why are characters now so over-the-top? This is the same problem I had with Succession: nobody seems that believable to me. They all look like the products of writers’ rooms where the writers are having great fun coming up with the most outrageous characters, and giving them the most scurrilous lines, while ignoring the commonplace and the everyday. Of course, it’s much harder to make entertainment out of the quotidian, but people like Pinter and Mamet did it quite well.