What Netflix’s ‘Lost Pirate Kingdom’ Got Right (And Wrong) About The Golden Age Pirate Gang | Talking Points Memo

No idea what that one is, but for some reason I get recommended a lot of teen dramas, I mean a lot, which does worry me a bit. I watched the Dolly Parton one years ago.

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Yes, it grew on you that Series. Just as you had a preference for the NY actor played Charles Vane, I had a strong like for the South African actress who played Lady Hamilton. Who also had a premature ending and exit from the Show. I liked the character of Rackham but it took me awhile. He just seemed to be a comical schlemiel, ALL the time. And the sunglasses pissed me off. Historical poetic license.

I liked Ann Boney or however you spell it, even if she was too good to be true. And I actually liked how they wove in the Treasure Island characters. It took me awhile for the bell to ring because I read Treasure Island in Sixth Grade. Which for me was 1966-67 school year.

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Netflix has been positively hounding me to watch Bridgerton which just looks tweenish and stupid to me.

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They’ll be telling us next that Captain Pugwash didn’t have crew members called Master Bates, Seaman Staines, and Roger the Cabin Boy.

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It is is tweenish and stupid, that is, if you allow your tweens to watch R-17 movies.

In any case, we found it immensely enjoyable–if you take the setting on its own terms and not as a simulation of anything closely resembling history. It’s similar in that way to the Sophia Coppola movie about Marie Antoinette, the one with the punk rock soundtrack, or musicals like Amadeus or (dare I say it) Hamilton.

Was that the cabin boy played by Michael Palin on SNL? Kidnapped and forced to serve on the pirate ship The Raging Queen? Captained by John Belushi?

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Speaking of cheesy looking museums…since you are friends and since you have Netflix, you need to find the Nate Bargatze stand up segment on the multiple Stand Up comedians series. It has a pretty funny segment about his discovery of and first visit to the Cape Fear Serpentarium while on the road in North Carolina. He gives an update in his own Netflix special, the one in Las Vegas taped during the Pandemic (with audience socially distanced and wearing masks).

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Nice place to live. Wouldn’t want to visit.

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I adored Jack Rackham too. And what I ended up loving the best about it was how every pirate in it was based on a real pirate except one - Long John Silver. And he became a legend on purpose. I thought that was well done.

I agree with you about Ann Bonny but without Jack, she wouldn’t have had a story really.

@jacksonhts - My favorite was Jack. I just really liked looking at Charles Vane’s body - that actor has one. Alllll over And he had no problem with nudity.

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@rascal_crone
@tena

This thread, sitting and remembering Black Sails and the more recent Lost Pirate Kingdom, have reminded me of a history book about the Golden Age of Piracy, neither which was particularly referenced in either Series.
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The epigraph is a quote from a Donald Barthelme short story. And it goes something like this - “No interviews!!!” shrieked the Pirate. “Especially no interviews to little girls!!!” I will have to find that short story some day to see how the only North American author with a sensibility for the absurd worthy of Julio Cortazar could have worked that quote in to one of his The New Yorker intended short stories.

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Yes, the Charles Vane actor is from NYC. He had absolutely no problem with nudity. And besides Long John Silver, Captain Flint is also from Treasure Island, and so is Billy Bones. Maybe Captain Flint is already dead during Treasure Island, or out of the picture. But I am pretty sure he is referenced. Because otherwise, why would I have ever heard the name Captain Flint? Embedded deep in the recesses of my mid sixties old memory.

Anyway, here is the IMDB page for Zach McGowan. You’re quite welcome. :sunglasses:

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Ever read John Barth?

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Yeah that guy is just gorgeous - no two ways about it. Gorgeous all over.

O and thanks for the other bits from Treasure Island. I love finding out more levels to these things. hahaha

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No. But I will definitely try if you give me a story or book to try. I just recently joined the local public library in my new location. And late fines are suspended for the duration of the Pandemic!!! Win, Win!!!

I can only think of books. The Sot Weed Factor has pirates. Giles Goat Boy, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.

You mentioned Barthelme and I think of he and Barth almost together - they are both postmodernists.

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Ok! Thanks. The titles do ring bells. But for most of my adult life in NYC I was still warming down (on the very slow and gradual plan) from my cultural anti Americanism, from coming of age in the general PR Independence Movement, and having the Chilean Sept 11, 1973 Coup D’Etat occur during the very first week of my freshman year of college.

Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo were the two authors who got me, in the 1980s and 1990s, to abandon my youthful fanatical refusal to read anyone who had ever published in The New Yorker.

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Yeah that was a good thing to abandon. I discovered Haruki Murakami in the pages of the New Yorker. They published an excerpt from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as a standalone story and I was instantly hooked. Some of my happiest reading hours came from Murakami - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Dance Dance Dance, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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After I widowed in late Oct 1993, my first book was Pronto! by Elmore Leonard. My second book, from the Jackson Heights Branch of the Queens Library, was Dance, Dance, Dance. My son was three years old at the time. Over time, he became an avid Haruki Murakami reader and has outpaced me in keeping up with his books. My best Jesuit HS in Puerto Rico friend (going back to the first week of 7th Grade in August, 1967) got into Murakami. He advised me to get a Kindle, as he had done after his wife protested at the space taken by all of his lifetime accumulation of books.
So, I tell him I have become a Kindle owner. And what does he do? He proceeds to order me hard copy of both Murakami’s 1Q84, which is at least 1,000 pages, and Arturo Perez Reverte’s El Asedio (The Siege) which is 816 pages. So, if I ever have a need for two really heavy doorstops, I do have them.

The last Murakami short story collection I read, I was not crazy about. During the 80-90’s Mario Vargas Llosa went for me from a point where I loved everything he wrote to where I cannot read him or stand to read about him. Don DeLillo too, during the early 2000s. The last short story collection by Murakami, which I read during a late night baby sitting gig in 2018, was that kind of experience for me.

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Yeah that happens and I have had the same problem with Murikami. The last one I read - Killing the Comandante - is a big fat No.

I read 1Q84, last one I really liked.

I have two houses full of books and I only read on my kindle now. My eyes are shot and I need the lighted screen. That’s one reason I’m here all the time too - I just can’t read books right now. I need surgery but COVID nixed that last year.

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Good luck with the surgery. I have found myself unable to read without two hours of subway time every day. I have read books here in my new digs. But definitely not at the old clip. Last week I started re-reading Camus’ The Plague. But without the subway commuting, I only clock about 40 minutes a day reading actual books.

I have a friend set me up with an app called Kody that allows me to stream movies (for free). I own a good number of DVDs as well. So, I am getting my share of movie viewing in. I hope you are able to enjoy movies.

I hope you have your cataract or whatever surgery you need soon. When I was growing up in PR, everyone would travel to Springfield, Mass, for their cataract surgery, one eye at a time over about a year’s time. My little brother, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently had both of his done the same week.

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