I heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?

I may be toast at the end of this week, but I would not trade the gorgeous double feature of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) with which rushthatspeaks and I wound it up. Late to the party, I saw Hoosiers (1986) for the equally first time last month and Dennis Hopper at the top of his game really could do anything. We were passing Porter Square afterward when we saw a loose collection of action along the sidewalk that turned out to be a troop of redcoats marching down Massachusetts Avenue, presumably on their way to fight Lexington. Thanks to the street we lived on in my childhood, my very favorite iteration of Paul Revere's ride was the year in which, instead of clattering under the window shouting per usual, he came in a truck and explained his horse had broken down. No kings.

Tomorrow some new building will scrape the sky

From my office window, I just watched a visitor deliberately smell a Bradford pear and regret it. The trees have really broken into bloom, so I took my camera out into the blotter-paper overcast that kept thinking about raining and then not quite.

( Once I was outside Penn Station, selling red and white carnations. )

spatch has been showing me Hill Street Blues (1981–87), which after a season and a handful I can see resembled nothing else in the Nielsen ratings of its time, structurally, tonally, perhaps even politically, since what I would not have expected from a cop show of the early Reagan administration is so much emphasis on what we would now call non-toxic masculinity as an ideal if not always achieved. Its attitudinal snapshots are fascinating. It is working seriously for diversity. Its interlocking narratives and human messiness make sense of it as the yardstick for J. Michael Straczynski in creating Babylon 5 (1993–98), which is how I heard of the show originally and what it is currently doing in my eyes. I am also enjoying the worldbuilding of its fictional city, whose geographical location is deliberately obscure but whose individual neighborhoods and businesses and sports teams are throwing out runners all over the plot. Actually, to my surprised pleasure, it reminds me distinctly of Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride.