#she understands the inherent comedy of the apocalypse. she gets it.

[pillars-of-salt]

actually i am thinking about bex. she’s my special fucked up girl. she’s the worst but also the best and i love her.

[mermaidsirennikita]

July 2019 Book Wrap-up

July was actually a really good month for me!  I read a ton of books, and a lot of them were actually pretty good?  It’s been a very transitory month for me; and I’m hoping to keep up the momentum as I start a new job.  The standouts of the month include War, of my beloved Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series by Laura Thalassa, and Lock Every Door, a creepy, apartment-centric psychological thriller by Riley Sagers.

What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon.  3/5.  Heartbroken by the death of her grandfather--the only parent she really knew--Anne Gallagher travels to Ireland.  Ireland was her grandfather’s homeland, she she grew up on his stories of a family she has little connection with.  Going out on the lake, she suddenly finds herself thrown back into 1921, in an Ireland on the brink of civil war.  Taken in by Thomas Smith, a friend of her great-grandfather--who himself died young in the conflict--she finds a young boy who is oddly familiar, and a group of people she can’t help but connect with.  As she grows close to Thomas and enveloped in his political struggles, Anne becomes terrified of her lack of control over the time she’s in, or the future she’s facing.  This is a time travel romance, as you’d probably guess.  And it’s really not super amazing or much to complain about.  There is fluff.  There are the necessary “out of time” moments, the tension between the hero and the heroine.  It does seem that Harmon did her research on the Irish political landscape of the 1920s--but I can’t verify the novel’s accuracy.  To be frank, I think that this actually got in the way of the story to an extent.  The amount of time Michael Collins took up in this novel, acting as like...  the best friend character?  Was a bit awkward.  Otherwise, it’s a fluffy, nice read.

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren.  3/5.  Olive and Ethan hate each other, which is awkward as his brother is marrying her sister.  But after the entire wedding party--save Olive and Ethan--end up with food poisoning, they agree to go on the honeymoon trip together, to save it from being completely wasted.  The plan on avoiding each other the entire time; but when Olive encounters her future boss at the resort and tells what seems to be a white lie, they end up having to impersonate newlyweds.  You can probably guess what happens next!  Christina Lauren books usually feature protagonists with a fun, sweet chemistry, and this novel is no exception.  The beach setting and Olive and Ethan’s angsty, unresolved sexual tension makes most of this book a super fun read.  The only reason why I didn’t give it 4/5 is that the last twenty percent or so really annoyed me.  There is a very typical twist, which wasn’t the problem--how our male lead reacted to it was.  It didn’t ruin the book, but it did make me much less likely to give it a wholehearted recommendation.

Lock Every Door by Riley Sager.  5/5.  After losing her job and breaking up with her live-in boyfriend, Jules is desperate for money and a place to stay.  As luck would have it, she stumbles upon an opportunity that offers both.  The Bartholomew is an old building, populated by the wealthy elite; and Jules has long idolized it as the setting of one of her favorite childhood books.  When the apartments are in between owners, their inherent value makes them targets for thieves--which is why the building’s managers employ apartment sitters.  Jules is offered $12,000 to live in an apartment for three months; and despite her wariness, she can’t turn that kind of offer down.  But when her newfound friend and fellow apartment sitter Ingrid goes missing, Jules sets on to a horrifying search for answers, which yield far more than she’s bargained for.  It’s official: I really do love Riley Sager books.  He’s 3/3 so far, and this one just may be my favorite.  Sager isn’t shy about drawing from classic horror tropes, and this novel is no exception--it owes a good bit to Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining.  But of course, another totally out there twist is thrown in, making the story his own.  I can’t say much without spoiling it.  But if you love thrillers and horror, try it.  What pushes the book over the edge for me is that it has a real point about today’s class systems, and the privileges of wealth and the victimization of the poor in America.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary.  4/5.  Following a disastrous breakup, Tiffy needs a flat, and badly.  So when she sees the ad posted by Leon, she’s desperate enough to take it.  As Tiffy is an assistant editor and Leon is a night nurse, they have different schedules.  They live in the flat together and even share a bed--though they sleep on opposite sides--but never see each other, communicating through notes left about the apartment.  At first, it’s stiff--but gradually, as they learn more about one another and their separate troubles (from Tiffy’s obsessive ex to Leon’s incarcerated brother) they begin to rely on each other for more than just room and board...  This is a really fucking cute, very sweet romantic comedy that touches on deeper subjects than you might think.  The way through which Tiffy and Leon connect is pretty unique, and I felt for both of them.  They were pleasant without being annoyingly perfect, and I just had a great time with the novel.

War by Laura Thalassa.  4/5.  As the apocalypse rages on, Miriam struggles to live in an Israel ravaged by the literal War--that is, the horseman of the apocalypse.  When the supernatural warlord stumbles across her in the battlefield, he’s taken aback by her own fury, and declares that she was sent by God to be his wife.  Thrown in with War and his followers, Miriam is exposed to the true horror of the battlefield--while also learning that there may be more to War’s purpose, and her connection with him, than she thought.  This is the sequel to Pestilence, and part of a big fat series about women falling in love with the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  And I love them.  War is a surprisingly endearing hero, though Thalassa never shies away from how brutal the horsemen are--which I so appreciate.  You never forget that War isn’t a human, however you may love him.  Miriam is another fun heroine, and one of those lovely characters who is honestly quite softhearted but still aggressive and never weak.  It’s a cheesy romance novel, and it’s exactly what you should read right now, immediately.

Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson.  3/5.  Elisabeth is a foundling, raised in the Great Library of Austermeer to take care of its magical grimoires.  When the library is attacked and its most powerful grimoire unleashed, Elisabeth is implicated in the crime.  Sent to the capital to be dealt with, she becomes wrapped up in a conspiracy, with only a suspicious sorcerer to rely upon.  I adored Rogerson’s first novel (An Enchantment of Ravens), and I wish I’d loved this one more.  It was well-written, and the characters were interesting, but I just found the story a bit hard to get caught up in.  Honestly, I think this had less to do with the plot itself and more to do with the pacing and length of the book.  It took way too long for things to get started, and things just moved too slowly for my taste.  However, I do think that tons of people will LOVE this book--if sorcery and slow burns are up your alley, go for it!

On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves.  2/5.  Thirty-year-old Anna is happy to take a dream teaching job--she’s tutoring the nearly-seventeen year old T.J. as his family vacations over the summer in the Maldives.  Flying separately from the rest of the group, Anna and T.J. are thrown off course when their pilot has a heart attack and crashes into the sea, leaving the two of them trapped on an isolated island.  As the years pass and Anna and T.J. survive together, they come to face the reality of a new world--and their changing feelings.  I had to read this for the what the fuck factor, basically?  To clarify, nothing happens between the leads until the guy is almost nineteen, and by then they’ve been alone for so long that it’s honestly pretty understandable.  I feel like this could have been great, trashy fun and it still kind of was, but the writing was so........................................  Not great?  It was really clunky and really awkward, and the characters kept repeating things to each other that didn’t need to be repeated.  The dialogue took me out more than anything else.  But I don’t know, I wasn’t disengaged?  It’s a spectacle of a book.

The Royal Secret by Lucinda Riley.  3/5.  After the death of acting legend Sir James Harrison, reporter Joanna is set to cover his funeral.  There, she meets a mysterious older woman, who sets her on a path to uncover a secret that has been hidden for more than seventy years--connected to the royal family.  I don’t have much to say about this one.  It intrigued me because it was actually published a little over 20 years ago, but due to the timing--it was written when the royal family was at a peak low in terms of popularity, but published right around the time that the popularity took an upswing--it did rather poorly.   It was an interesting enough read, but never grabbed me. The characters felt disconnected and bland, and ultimately the thriller aspects were pretty light, or maybe just not the types that I enjoy.  It’s not a bad book, but it’s also not for me.  

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo.  2/5.  This non-fiction book follows three women throughout the years, focusing on their varied sex lives.  This just wasn’t for me.  Other people will love it, but I was looking for something less...  intentionally poetic.  I wanted it to be more honest and upfront and analytical.  

The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting by Ben Lewis.  4/5.   An account of the history of Salvator Mundi, the allegeded Leonardo da Vinci work sold for $450 million.  Lewis writes in an engaging manner, revealing both the painting’s history and the case for and against it being a Leonardo--and what I really love too is his examination of the questions surrounding its value even if it is a Leonardo, considering the painting’s extensive restoration (which could have arguably taken away from the artist’s original hand) and its general quality compared to other works by Leonardo.  I’m not sure if people who aren’t into art history or at least history would be into this, but I found Lewis’s skepticism and reserve regarding the topic weirdly refreshing.  I have a lot of feelings about Salvator Mundi, and I appreciated the way he communicated his.

The Descendant of the Crane by Joan He.  4/5.  After the death of her father, Hesina is left as the heir to the throne.  The issue?  She thinks that her father was murdered--and in her pursuit of the truth, she seeks help from a sooth, one of the magic-users forbidden by the Eleven, the wise people who restructured the kingdom years ago.  She is then set to work with Akira, a thief who’s meant to represent her in court as she struggles to find the killer--but ends up on a path that will reveal more than she’d bargained for.  It’s hard to not spoil this one?  It has many twists and turns, to the point that it did get kind of convoluted (and the ending is far from resolved, though there’s no guarantee of a sequel). But I admire He’s ambition and the scope of the story.  I hope we do get a follow-up!

[the-invisible-self]

I copied the text of this article below for anyone who is unable to read it behind the content blocker:

Summary: In the second season of Netflix’s series The OA, its creators question the relentless technological progress of our time, but the result is somewhat scattered.

The OA

Article by Sanja Grozdanic

In early 2017, soon after the release of the first season of The OA, its co-creator Brit Marling spoke at length with her friend Malcolm Gladwell about the series for Interview magazine. During the conversation, Gladwell asked Marling why she is so drawn to fantasy and speculative science fiction, both as a writer and an actor. These genres, she explained, best reflect her view of the world and the deep mythology she naturally invests in everyday moments and objects.

“I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don’t,” she said. “I feel very alone when I don’t feel that.”

Social isolation, technological domination and the profound discontent of a generation are all explored by The OA, a series that positions itself against the exploitation demanded by capitalism and is strung together by a storyline dense with time travel. Understandably, it has divided audiences. It has been called “absolutely insane”, “batshit” and “brilliant” – and yet has also gained a cult following and brought into focus a desire for the construction of new narratives and mythologies.

As Marling told Gladwell, “The OA is our attempt at writing and making a new human language through movement, this mythology we’re inventing.”

The series began its first season with Prairie Johnson (Marling), a woman missing for seven years who is rescued following an ostensible suicide attempt. Prairie was once blind – now she can see. She will not reveal to her family how she gained her sight, nor tell them what happened to her. She denies she was trying to kill herself, insisting she was only trying to “go back”. To where is the central mystery of the show’s first season, tagged as Part I, slowly revealed over eight episodes.

As the first season unfurled itself, I understood The OA to be an extended metaphor for post-traumatic stress disorder. In another life, in another dimension, Prairie is held captive by the show’s central villain, Dr Hap (Jason Isaacs), a scientist obsessed with near-death experiences and the power they bestow on survivors. Prairie, I believed, constructed her captivity as a trauma response – a hyper-fantasy of good versus evil, which allowed her to regain a sense of control.

The show’s perplexing narrative structure echoed a survivor’s frenzied mental state, a reading of existential crisis that I liked. When mental illness is feminised, it is often depicted as tepid and lifeless. But The OA gave weight to Prairie’s somatic condition, depicting it not so much as a defect but as a lifeline; a way to give form to what she cannot say. “Madness as a defense against terror. Madness as a defense against grief”, as Susan Sontag described it. One cannot live in such a world, but its genesis is all too human.

Part II of The OA proved my reading entirely incorrect.

In this season, the series relocates from North Carolina to San Francisco, California. It feels a fitting evolution in many ways – from the margins to the centre of technocapitalism.

In San Francisco, Prairie awakens in the body of Nina Azarova – a Russian heiress who lives in a penthouse, dresses in Gucci and is engaged to a tech billionaire named Pierre Ruskin. She has no memory of this life of material excess, but no one from her former life – of Prairie, the blind orphan – remembers her. Concerned for her welfare, a psychologist sends Nina to a facility on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for a 14-day psychiatric hold.

At the same time, elsewhere in the city, private investigator Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is hired by an elderly Vietnamese woman searching for her missing granddaughter, Michelle. Michelle disappeared after winning thousands of dollars playing an app, which seems to alienate and consume its users, while tempting them with the possibility of vast riches.

Following Karim’s attempts to trace the app back to its creator, the series starts to question the ethics underlying the startling decadence and terminal decline of the Silicon Valley social order. Karim discusses the app with a tech worker who suggests crowd-sourcing is nothing more than a euphemism for free labour. “What, erase the boundary between work and play, hide your sweatshop in the cloud?” he asks her. “Exactly,” she replies.

Who will protect those most vulnerable, like Michelle, in this rigged game? How are we compromised when our most intimate, private desires are mined as data? In a sprawling converted factory, Karim finds young women held in a literal dream farm, an attempt by a tech billionaire to instrumentalise the social unconscious in a search for the secret to time travel. A dystopia perhaps not radically removed from our present.

But amid all these subplots, the point is scattered, lost between too many narrative arcs. The choice to be so laser-focused on Marling’s character feels like a misstep – particularly while the profound discontent of this season’s younger characters seems far more urgent and vital than Nina’s struggle. Those characters are sidelined. Instead, the series insists upon a love story that has long since lost its romance or intrigue. Karim, too, is denied sufficient screen time and character development.

It is clear The OA is attempting to tap into something deeper. A renewed interest in the exploration of multiple dimensions and realities, including the series’ Netflix stablemates Russian Doll and Stranger Things, suggests a general recognition of a profound cultural lack. Suspended over a void, we face several conflicting futures. History repeats itself endlessly – infinite parallel worlds with interchangeable players.

Pierre Ruskin could be Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor long dogged by rumours he wants to inject himself with the blood of young people to stave off the effects of ageing. In another, more socially minded dimension, he could have been Alexander Bogdanov – the Soviet physician, philosopher and science fiction writer who also had an interest in what blood transfusion could do, but from a communist, rather than hyper-capitalist, perspective.

The 19th century defined the idea of progress as an infinite and irreversible improvement; the Hegelian idea of cumulative progress. Indeed, the myth of progress has been the West’s ruling ideology. But for downwardly mobile millennials facing social collapse, environmental catastrophe and unprecedented species extinction, this narrative has lost its primacy, or indeed its validity.

In the final episode of Part II, detective Karim saves one of the app’s users, but in doing so only manages to seem moralising and out of touch. Though addicted to the physically invasive, impossible game that inherently negates social life, the millennial doesn’t want to be saved. Remorseless and defiant, they see no future in the present Karim offers.

With this season, Marling and her co-creator, Zal Batmanglij, show themselves to be genuinely interested in moving The OA beyond emotional landscapes to the structural conditions fomenting this discontent. As Batmanglij explained, the pair sought to make “a gangster movie without the gangsters, because it’s the idea that it’s not just killing one bad guy or two bad guys, but it’s a whole city is to blame”.

But the question remains whether a show commissioned by Netflix – a company now worth more than Microsoft founder Bill Gates and only slightly less than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos – can ever honestly critique our present moment, shaped by the dominance of the tech giants. A successful Netflix product can be judged by its compulsive consumption; how quickly do viewers watch a season? “At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, et cetera,” said Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings. Where profit was once maximised with families and romantic comedies, in our moment of precarity it is apocalypse that is commercially seductive.

[beyondthedreamline]

what she says: I'm fine

what she means: So it’s interesting how the fact Loki probably had to have sex with Jeff Goldblum to keep himself alive and safe was both never made textual AND used as the butt of a joke (lol pun intended), because it doesn’t matter if Loki was sort of willing and it doesn’t matter if he’s sort of evil either - how can you give consent when you fall headfirst on a planet dominated by a psychotic pervert and why is sexual violence such a fun thing when it’s about men and this is James Bond all over again and how they inserted that ‘Maybe I got fucked before, you don’t know’ line during a high tension moment leading up to torture and possibly rape because that’s what’s fashionable now, gay subtext, amirite, which I’ve got nothing against but funnily enough it never seems to lead anywhere and hey, coming back to 'Thor: Ragnarok', isn’t it neat how the sexually ambiguous, feminine-coded brother ended up as a courtesan-slash-sex slave and the painfully straight übermensch brother got sent to the arena to fight and die and yay for novel and groundbreaking storytelling, right, because this is new, how women are sold into sex and/or need to pretend to be willing sexual partners to madmen so they have a shot at escaping violence and death while men are made to fight and somehow their kind of enslavement is recognized as terrible and tragic and something they're no part of, but women, eh, who can be sure about them, and my God, Loki couldn’t have been more stereotypically gay if they’d tried, I mean, Fashion-Conscious Drama Queen Initiates A Reign of Self-Obsessed Musical Theatre and how is that okay on top of Valkyrie, a canon bisexual woman, being coded as Thor’s love interest and also - #thor ragnarok #marvel #loki laufeyson #abuse for ts #rape for ts #negativity #imo this is the other problem with representation #we get one non white director #and we want to like him #we want to think he can do no wrong #but this movie #my god #it read like fanfiction #and not in a good way #also it was probably #the most misogynistic thor movie to date #just compare it with the first thor #where women were allowed to be women #also themselves #bc one thing i don't need #is women to get drunk and belch on screen #i mean sure #sometimes women do that #but this sudden idea #that feminist movies #need to have women act like (fictional) men do #well i hate it #sorry for ranting #but i do #i'd take a thousand jane forsters @awed-frog Okay, I reblogged the original post by @awed-frog but the text came out so strangely that it’s irritating the hell out of me, so I’m making a new post in the hope Tumblr doesn’t glitch it up too. This perspective on ‘Ragnarok’ is so interesting I have to respond to it, because I had completely the opposite reaction to everything! I loved the structure and pacing and the endless supply of in-jokes (the Douglas Adams reference most of all). This is a story with distinctly Antipodean humour, which you may or may not get – I sometimes struggle with the American humour in Marvel movies, different cultures tell their jokes different ways. The emotional beats were quiet and strong, trusting in the audience to understand their significance without overstatement: Thor going through funeral rites as best he can while imprisoned, Loki’s visible distress at the idea of Thor leaving him behind. There was also finally some solid textual support for Loki being more than a villain – which, given all the things he’s done to Earth, Asgard and Thor specifically, is no mean feat. I mean, at the point when you have a character who has faked his own death TWICE while trying to commit genocide BOTH TIMES, you have to lean hard into the inherent morbid comedy of the thing to keep it all from spiralling into cartoonish ridiculousness. I like Loki, largely because Tom Hiddleston has great facial expressions that can sell inconsistent characterisation, but seriously, it takes the actual apocalypse for him to step up and be useful. ‘Ragnarok’ reminds us that while Loki loves to play the victim and the martyr, he rarely is one. Usually, he’s the opposite. Trickery and charm are his great skills and as Thor pointed out, Sakaar was the perfect environment for him to thrive. We see him chat up girls, watch fights with the Grandmaster and act as a kind of pet bounty hunter, all of which he would hardly need much coercion to do. You can definitely read sexual subtext into their interactions, but I saw no implication of Loki being any more sexually threatened by the Grandmaster than Valkyrie was – that is to say, not at all. This is the guy who was willing to shove his brother straight back into the arena if it meant getting a step up in his new life, why would he feel uncomfortable sleeping his way to the top? I love the detail of him turning his 'death' into a play because he's literally the actor, the liar, the manipulator of events. In the end, Loki is a conman, and a very talented one. I’m sad that Jane won’t be returning to the Thor franchise, because I loved her character from the start and I truly enjoyed her dynamic with Thor. Also, DARCY. I will sorely miss Darcy Lewis. The truth is, I can’t think of a really satisfactory way for their departures to be handled on-screen, because I did not want them to depart at all. I feel like it should be pointed out, though, that ‘Thor: the Dark World’ was essentially Jane and Thor’s second date, and Jane was already running low on patience with his trans-Bifrost lifestyle. He’s kind and adorable and undeniably high-maintenance. If Jane had to have an exit, I’d prefer it like this, a low-key and everyday break-up rather than some big melodramatic event for Thor to brood over and Jane to be eventually talked out of. Also, just because I love Jane doesn’t mean I can’t love Valkyrie, and vice versa. It’s not a competition, however much Marvel tried to make it one. I’m a bit uncomfortable with your tag comment about the first Thor movie, describing it as the one ‘where women were allowed to be women’, because women are all kinds of things. I think I understand what you mean, there is rather an excess of traditionally masculine misbehaviour in mainstream media, but sometimes women are angry and disillusioned and drink way too much in order to cope, and that’s a story worth telling too. Honestly, I was on board with Valkyrie’s character from the minute she fell off her spaceship. She’s not a ‘better than the boys’ stereotype, she’s an embittered alcoholic warrior who gets dragged into friendship with Thor against her better judgement, and while that friendship might eventually shift into something romantic, it wasn’t shoehorned into her arc, for which I am intensely grateful. Ragnarok is, in so many ways, a movie with its foundations in the anger of the dispossessed. There are plenty of articles written on the subject by people better qualified than me. All I can say is that, as an Australian, I live in the messy aftermath of colonialism, with the awareness that my nation as I know it was founded on a violent invasion and that its impact is still being felt today. The line ‘where do you think all of this gold came from?’ was so flawless it kind of knocked my breath away. Hela tore apart Odin’s legacy and the narrative backed her right to do so the whole time. The only way to defeat her was to acknowledge that her claim was rightful and her story was true. That’s unbelievably powerful. Emotional resonance is a weird thing. So much of what we love in a story is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps it also depends on what other narratives are around us at the time – I, for instance, am personally tired of grimdark superheroism that’s all about how we can’t trust each other. What I need right now is Thor’s relentless optimism in the face of disaster, the man who makes friends wherever he goes, the god-prince who loses everything but rescues what really matters out of the ashes. Ragnarok isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s the best I’ve seen in a very long time and talking about it has made me want to watch it all over again.

[arthurpendragons]

A model performer | Writer, director, actor and even cinematographer, Eoin Macken has proved he’s more than just a pretty face

THE FIRST time we see Eoin Macken in the new Resident Evil film, Milla Jovovich has him in a headlock. The Bray native might be the closest Ireland has to a renaissance man — given his dalliances with writing, acting, directing, modelling and cinematography — but when crushed between the biceps of a former supermodel who is versed in Brazilian jiujitsu, he looks surprisingly useless. Macken proceeds to fight zombie dogs, repel armies of undead with a nail gun and risk amputation from giant turbines.

In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, a conclusion to the action horror franchise, he plays Doc, the leader of a group of rebels attempting to survive the apocalypse. The film is solid action from start to finish. In the most emotionally revealing sequence involving Macken and Jovovich, the pair converse while running.

“Milla had a baby about six months before we started filming,” says Macken, 33. “She was doing all these action sequences. I don’t know how she did it. I was knackered after 12 hours. She was doing 18 hours [a day], including training. She’s hardcore.”

Arriving at a bar on Dublin’s Leeson Street, the actor has more important things on his mind than zombie armageddon: he left a woollen hat on the Dart and is mourning its loss. Then he receives a call from his mother; at the same time I receive a text message from mine. “What a pair of mummy’s boys,” he snorts. No wonder Jovovich could have had him for breakfast.

Despite the gruelling workout, he insists the film was a breeze. Jovovich and Paul WS Anderson, the director, are married and have made six Resident Evil films together since 2002, so it’s a family affair. “Because they’ve been doing it for 15 years, they never get stressed. It’s a $70m movie; we’re in South Africa — Johannesburg and Cape Town — in these mad, wrecked locations; but it was very easy.”

When we meet, Macken is just back from the movie’s Japanese premiere, which was almost as unhinged as the film. Capcom, the Japanese videogame company behind Resident Evil, laid on a red carpet, and fans turned up dressed as zombies. His mother accompanied him and they visited robot restaurants, temples and sumo wrestling bouts. He wanted to see the Aokigahara woods, the setting for The Forest, a recent horror film in which he acted, but requests for directions were lost in translation. Locals thought he was looking for the electronics district Akihabara, he explains with a sigh.

Over the past few years he has worked in Tunisia, Morocco, Serbia, Canada, France, Spain and Mexico. He has lived in Los Angeles and spent a lot of time in Albuquerque, where he shoots The Night Shift, a series for NBC. Macken plays a doctor, TC Callahan, following in a long tradition of medical screen hunks.

As you can see from an early publicity photograph in which Macken sits astride a motorbike in a hospital lobby, while badly Photoshopped characters run in all directions, the show does not take itself too seriously. It’s more M*A*S*H than ER.

“I knew you were going to bring that [photo] up,” he says. “We all had a laugh about that. Why am I on a motorbike in the studio? No one knew. The show isn’t quite as cheesy as that. The Night Shift has a mixture of comedy and drama. It’s not as dark as a lot of medical shows. There’s a warmth, even a cheekiness, to it.”

Although his mother works as a nurse, Macken insists that he would not be any good in a medical emergency. “Hopefully that won’t happen. We did a week of medical stuff before we started the show, and we do a few days’ top-up before each season.”

The show premiered in 2014 and has been a hit with audiences. It was recently commissioned for a fourth series, making its leading man a hot property. When in Japan, he met the voiceover artist who dubs him for the local version. “He also does the voices for Frozen, Tangled and Tom Cruise,” Macken marvels.

He never wanted to restrict himself to a single line of duty. While studying psychology at University College Dublin, he moonlighted as a model and an actor. But he suffered the same prejudices that Jamie Dornan faced at the start of his career: casting directors refused to take him seriously. “Because I did modelling, people would remark on it in a derogatory way. Casting people questioned why I wanted to act. In America, they don’t care. In Ireland, they did. It didn’t really bother me, though.”

In 2009, he teamed up with another male model to make a documentary, The Fashion of Modelling, which he sold to RTE. The concept may have teetered on Zoolander territory, but the screen credits revealed a production-oriented mind. Macken was credited as director of photography, director, editor, producer and writer. From his early days as an actor on Fair City, he strove to explore every facet of film-making.

“Modelling paid for my acting training, camera equipment, and ultimately allowed me to make my own films. I went to New York to model and spent four nights a week training. After finishing college, I studied cinematography for a year.”

In 2008 came his first outing as an auteur, when he wrote, directed, edited, acted in and worked as cinematographer on the film Christian Blake.

He piled a cast and crew of 10 into a Volkswagen camper van, which he used as a production base, and crafted a slipshod narrative out of action sequences. The results were amateurish, he admits, but the actor was eager to learn and unafraid to experiment.

He worked the cameras on Stalker, Mark O’Connor’s stunning yet underappreciated 2012 film starring John Connors as an unhinged vagrant. He also shot Charlie Casanova, a Terry McMahon opus that provoked an angry critical reception in 2011. “I’m even prouder of that film now,” says Macken. “A crew of six people made it. Terry made the film for about €1,000. Some people were scathing because it misses aspects from a $2m movie. It should be celebrated rather than denigrated.”

The actor considers his entire career a learning process. Working with independent Irish film-makers such as O’Connor and McMahon encouraged him to create experimental projects. The Inside (2012), for example, was a found-footage horror, shot in Dublin, which included a 20-minute unedited sequence in which the actors cut loose.

Leopard (2013) and The Green Rabbit & The Ice Cream Girl (2015) were inspired by his love of Wim Wenders and John Steinbeck. The latter was shot in Ireland, the former in the Mojave desert in southern California.

“The more I’ve lived away from home, the more I want to come back and make a film in a style influenced by America or European cinema in Ireland. Being away makes you look at Ireland in a different way,” he says.

In 2014, Macken made his debut as a novelist with Kingdom of Scars, a coming-of-age story. Hunter and the Grape, his second novel, about a road trip from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, is due for publication later this year.

Ultimately, he considers himself an actor “because that’s what pays the bills”. But his diverse talents inform his roles and on-set interactions. “Film-making is a collaboration: from acting to sound, costume to cinematography. Sometimes actors can be overly celebrated. There’s an inherent narcissism attached to the job. Understanding how it works behind the scenes is important. I suppose I’m an actor who likes to make things.”

The Night Shift is broadcast on RTE, but the show has more traction in the US, South America and Asia, so he longs to work more in Ireland. For his next project, he has adapted Here Are the Young Men, Rob Doyle’s novel about a debauched summer in Dublin at the height of the Celtic tiger.

Homesickness may have been inevitable, but seeing the world has informed his creative vision. One of his most formative experiences, Macken reveals, was travelling to Mozambique in 2014 to make a documentary about Sightsavers, which tackles avoidable blindness — he was overcome with western guilt. “It was humbling and made me appreciate friends, family, everything I have. It made me question my place in the world, what I’m supposed to do with my life.” He sighs. “I’m still figuring out what type of films I want to make, which is why I’ve tried so many different things.”

Macken is determined to reach creative enlightenment, one headlock at a time.

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