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John from Cincinnati

I ran across this very good review by Thad Ziolkowski of my current-fave television show, John from Cincinnati. Zilokowski, a surfer himself, writes that the show is unusually accurate about surfing. Acknowledging its surreal forays into magical realism, he says that, "But if JFC wants to deepen its surf reality, it's not the supernatural that needs emphasis but the mundane."

The daily reality of surfing is one of checking the waves (at the beach or, these days, on a Web cam), surfing if there are any waves (and often there aren't and if there are, they aren't particularly good), looking at magazine spreads of exceptional surf photographed elsewhere in the world, watching surf videos, and daydreaming.

I never was a surfer but I was always interested in that world, in the way surfer's establish and intimate relationship with nature with the wave as an interface. That's powerful, and one thing I get from the "John" series is an ironic sense of the intersection of the absolute and zen-sense perfect with the more degraded aspects of human nature - the sense of the divine mixing with the fallen. The theme song is "Johnny Appleseed," by the late great Joe Strummer:

Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nine
Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line
We think there is a soul, we don't know
That soul is hard to find

jon posted this at 3:21 PM
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