Rainbow Sprite

“Holly Wheeler, style queen,” is not a takeaway I’d expected from Stranger Things season 5.1, let alone for it to be the takeaway. But what can I say, it’s been a strange year. (No real spoilers in the following.)

Holly — who has been newly recast with a different actress this season, one who is the same height as her much older co-stars, for reasons; Karen Wheeler makes a joke about Ted not knowing Holly’s age, because at this point, Holly’s age has fallen into Hawkins’ generalized quantum singularity — has two primary looks in the first four episodes of season 5. One is the rainbow romper knitwear, pictured above. Later on, she armours up for a walk in the woods:

Style. Queen. And she’s a Cleric, which is siiiiiiiiick. My first character was a Cleric. I miss him.

Seeing Holly’s little-girl bedroom, though, kicked loose a memory I’d completely suppressed about my own, which is: how hard I was trying to have a little-girl bedroom, when I was a little [penis-haver]. I found a particular rainbow wallpaper — heaven knows how I found it; the Consumers Distributing catalogue?? — and nagged my parents for months and months and months till they let me redecorate the room with it.

This after my favourite sleepwear was a nightie with a rainbow moon on it that I literally wore until it was so too-small for me that it scarcely covered the lower half of my ass. Cheer Bear — the care bear with the big pride flag on his tummy — was my spirit animal, even though I was the furthest possible thing from a cheerful kid.

Christmas lights? I actually thought I was the only person (on Earth) who understood how to use them correctly. Light Bright? Obsessed, for years. No wonder I saw my sister’s Rainbow Bright doll and thought to myself, that is basically the perfect look. She was everything I wanted to be.

(Unrelated to rainbow aesthetics but not unrelated to Stranger Things 5, bopping around the house to “I Think We’re Alone Now?” Not not a thing that happened. Although “How Will I Know?” was my actual dance-around-like-a-girl song when I was that age.)

So yeah. Holly Wheeler. Style queen.

I’ve said this many times many ways, but thank the heavens for my parents. It’s not like they were wholly immune to the time they were living in; but they were really, really chill with the fact that their eldest wanted rainbows everywhere and insisted, in no uncertain terms, on a Pizzazz doll for Christmas in 1986. All the pressure was coming from outside the house: perhaps they felt that, somehow, too.

Here’s something I don’t get. How do we remember things we’ve forgotten? Is everything locked in the hard drive somewhere, waiting to be pulled up by the right combination of keystrokes? Is anything actually erased (what it feels like) or are we sitting on faded recall of our entire lives (frustrating) that we simply don’t know how to access?

Other people writing other people’s people

For no particular reason while overseas, I was sucking down mass-market thrillers from legendary franchises, written by new authors after the original author had died.

One was Kim Sherwood’s expansion of the James Bond franchise, Double Or Nothing. I am not not snotty about Bond, so please understand what I’m saying when I say, Sherwood nailed this.

In fact, if we had not (in the handful of years since the novel was published) transitioned fully into this racist, misogynist, post-inclusion hellscape, I’d say that if Amazon fucking Prime must continue the Bond films, Double Or Nothing would be the best possible hedge against just how hard it’s going to be to replace Daniel Craig.

In the book (first of a trilogy), Bond’s been taken by the bad guys, and the other double-ohs have to pick up the slack. Sherwood introduces three: 003, Johanna Harwood, a doctor whose loyalties seem to undulate like silk until you realize they’ve been one colour all along; 004, Joseph Dryden, Black, gay, deaf in one ear and one hell of a prizefighter; and 009, Sid Bashir (epic lol), who may or may not have gotten Bond killed.

What really impressed me with Sherwood’s project here, though, is the degree to which it genuinely feels like exactly how Fleming would go about expanding the franchise, if he were alive now, applying the same general strategies as he applied to his own work, and knew what a “franchise” was.

Sherwood gets all the authorial details exactly right — the settings that are simultaneously luxurious and lived-in; the tac-ops and spycraft and kickass cars; and the gruesome, darkly ironic musings about the job that always seemed to tickle the back of Bond’s mind whenever he slowed down long enough to think them.

It was such a goddamned treat I re-read it immediately and have ordered its follow-up. There are not a lot of non-Fleming paperbacks on my Bond shelf, but these ones are fully in the canon, imho.

In this regard, I must also note one of my other bullet-train reads, which was David Lagercrantz’s expansion of the Lisbeth Salander novels.

I gobbled up Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy in the spring and took The Girl in the Spider’s Web to Japan. Neither it nor its follow-up (or, for that matter, Played with Fire or Hornet’s Nest) can match the original Dragon Tattoo for characterization, plotting, or thematic ferocity; but Lagercrantz sure nailed the feel of how Larsson approached his stories.

It’s one thing to seamlessly integrate with an existing prose style; it’s (I would imagine) one large step harder to construct a narrative structure that feels like it was constructed by the original author’s mind.

And Lisbeth remains such a delightful character. Offputting, mean-spirited, brilliant, weird, way luckier than she should have been by this point (I mean honestly Lisbeth: stop leaning into the punches). And given Sony’s very concerted efforts at turning Lisbeth into a superheroic world saviour, it’s nice to find right where Larsson left her, avenging the helpless one by one, one on one.

Growth over guardrails (derogatory)

That’s the whole thing, innit? I mean, about now. About this year. About this decade.

• The phrase comes from this piece by Casey Newton; scroll down to section II if you want to reacquaint yourself with why I deleted my Instagram account last week. (Oh fine I’ll spoil it: it was “[Meta] gave users 17 attempts to traffic people for sex before banning their accounts.” Bye Insta friends! I’ll miss seeing all the pictures of your kids dressed up for Hallowe’en!) As I’ve said before: you don’t have to think your tiny little action will have any impact to realize that you can still serve your conscience before the needs of the broligarchy, and move on. (Platformer)
• Films about the church responding to “a splintered world in which everyone gets what they think they want at the cost of true human connection.” After glancing at Wake Up Dead Man and matters of faith in last week‘s newsletter, this larger exploration by Sarah Welch-Larson was wonderful to read. (BW/DR)
• New by me this week, I had a look at Criterion's new 4K update of spine #97, I Know Where I'm Going! (Screen Anarchy)
• I sincerely hope any of the words of this are true. And since I generally skip American News these days, a lot of this was actually a nice surprise / good summary! (Meditations in an Emergency)