The Friday Article Roundup
Examine the best in this week's pop culture writing.
This Week Squint Your Eyes At:
Spare a warm glance for Casper who contributed this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Director Peter Weir and star Anne Louise Lambert discuss Picnic at Hanging Rock in The Guardian as the film’s 50th anniversary approaches:
Weir: A potential distributor in the US supposedly threw his coffee cup at the screen at the end of the film, saying: “Whodunnit?” He felt he’d wasted a couple of hours. The film was a modest success, but did very good business on college campuses. Picnic was one of those milestones for the Australian film industry as it evolved in the 70s – it was remarked upon around the world. When I went back to the site years later, they told me people often take pieces of the rock home as a souvenir – but return them, thinking they bring bad luck.
Polygon‘s Pete Volk writes about how he rekindled a love for sports video games by playing them as a manager only:
It does sometimes feel like I’m wrestling with these games to make them into something they aren’t. Games designed to be management sims allow you to make midgame adjustments, but these don’t, so it feels more like you’re simulating being a general manager than a coach. In the football games, for some reason, you can’t set both teams to being AI-controlled, so you have to use the game’s “SuperSim” feature and set the speed to slow in order to actually watch the games. And it’s actually really difficult to figure out spectating when both teams are user-controlled (Austen and I had to toggle the “autopilot” setting for one of the teams to make that work in Madden). Plus, the simulations themselves can have their own issues, whether it’s difficulties running the ball or aggravating CPU player decisions. But when I’m not behind the wheel and just observing the simulation, it’s easier for me to dismiss that kind of stuff as “both teams playing under the same (bizarre) conditions,” especially because as a human player recognizing these patterns, you will naturally try to exploit these issues, warping your gameplay decisions around the game’s shortcomings.
For Jacobin, Kristen Ghodsee interviews film writer Julia Alekseyeva about her new book Antifascism and the Avant-Garde:
Alekseyeva: For the filmmakers I discuss, the form and content were not just interwoven or supportive of one another. The films are usually about leftist political issues, yes, but their style is their politics. Like the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, Japanese and French filmmakers of the 1960s saw cinema as uniquely capable of transforming the way people feel, think, and act. For many of these artists, especially Matsumoto Toshio (but all of them to an extent), the language of film can produce a rupture of consciousness that would lead to increased political awareness. Many of these filmmakers were inspired by surrealism or were surrealists themselves. Surrealists saw their art as leading the viewer or reader from the familiar to the unfamiliar through unforeseen pathways — from the status quo, from things-as-they-seem, to an unveiling of mysterious truths, to things-as-they-are, or things-as-they-could-be. This is the true goal of politics.
For Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey writes about the heady times of exploring music online in the early 2010s:
In the past year alone, I must’ve had two dozen conversations with other writers and musicians who look back on this era as uniquely fulfilling—some of them a few years older, some ten years younger than me. I’m not quite sure whether to chalk this up to the fact that we were young and dumb and living in cheap apartments in some kind of delusional Obama-era bubble, or that we had not yet been lobotomized by our willing participation in the “attention economy,” or that digital streaming apps had yet to replace the fun of self-guided discovery with algorithmic slop, or that frivolous pop music could be enjoyed as such without pretending it was of grave socio-political importance. Whatever the case, I don’t know too many people who would agree their life is edified by hanging out online in 2025, the way many of us would have back in 2012.
And finally, at Letterboxd you can see the first film by a 17-year-old Coralie Fargeat (The Substance):
30 years ago, when I was seventeen years old, I made a little Star Wars film. Using my family’s camcorder, I animated my toys frame by frame in stop motion, disguised my friends as Ewoks and stormtroopers, and edited on a VHS video recorder (which was the top device at the time!). It was such an amateur endeavor, but everything I loved about making films was already there… It was the place where I felt free, passionate and alive, and able to fully express myself. It’s after I made this little film that I knew that I wanted to be a director… Today as I am nominated for Best Director, I can’t help but remember this little film…Follow your dreams!
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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The life and career of a man who found the extraordinary in the ordinary.
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State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season One, Episode Twenty-Two, The Quality Of Mercy”
Excellent, another really good one. Franklin episodes tend to be great because, of all the characters, he’s the most fundamentally decent but also has the most practical goal: preserving human life. The episode opens with Ivanova discovering he’s running a free clinic in the station’s slummier areas, and the plot is him chasing down what he thinks is a quack con lady only for her to be using alien tech in a way that disturbs him on a fundamental level, then to escalate into a death penalty story. Compelling stuff!
There’s also a really cool tech idea introduced in this episode: mindwipes as a punishment. I find the show’s use of them a bit naive – something like this would immediately be co-opted, I should think – but it’s nevertheless cool and edgy.
There’s also a really great comedy subplot teaming up Londo with Lennier. It opens with an insanely great gag: Londo remarks he knows nothing about Lennier, to which Lennier responds “From birth, I was raised in the temple and studied the ways of the religious caste. Six months ago, I came here. There is nothing else.” On one level, it’s funny as a bucket of water over the show’s very tone; in a universe of complex backstory and incredibly elaborate dialogue, Lennier delivers a simple line about his simple existence.
But it’s also funny because self-awareness can be incredibly funny, and Lennier specifically knows he’s a huge dork and is fine with that. If this is a show about the grand actions of the galaxy’s movers and shakers at the top of the System, Lennier is a guy comfortably down the bottom.
Cause For Alarm!
Lauren needs to get to this ASAP. Three words: domestic women’s noir.
This has an absolutely killer premise: a woman’s sick husband has become convinced she’s trying to kill him, and events keep escalating against her. And there’s no real criminal, no bad guy, just a shitty situation happening to a completely ordinary woman that gets worse and worse and worse. Loretta Young plays the protagonist as a perfectly nice lady who slowly disintegrates over the course of the film. Barry Sullivan is great as her husband; in his final scenes when he’s gripped by his obsession and about as ill as he can be, he switches his voice to a cruel, almost demonic growl. And the situation in the second half of the film is so cruel and keeps turning worse and worse, and you’re watching and hoping she gets out of it.
Hideout In The Sun
This isn’t pornography – it’s propaganda for the nudist lifestyle. Aside from one scene that’s basically suggestive shots of the female lead, this is incredibly wholesome to the point of tedium in its treatment of the nudity. All the most interesting stuff is in the first twenty minutes before the nudist camp – when the movie leans into and compensates for its insanely low budget by going almost completely subjective and simple in its moves.
I actually love how the inciting bank robbery is shot, and I love the ‘one step away from Lynch’ dialogue. There’s something about really, really amateur dialogue that fascinates me – a slight over-explaining of everything, as if asserting control over how the world works.
I am summoned! Definitely heeding this recommendation.
Me Too!!
Kojak, “The Trade-Off” – A drug dealer has the wife of Kojak’s boss, Capt. Frank McNeil, kidnapped, and will only let her go if Kojak destroys key evidence. For half the episode, Kojak tries to find the kidnappers without letting on what’s going on, running the squad ragged. Finally, Bruce Kirby, playing a sergeant we’ve seen only rarely, finds the nerve to ask what the hell is going on. After that, everyone is in on things, including McNeil. Kirby is in some way the linchpin here, making the most of the appearance. I haven’t said much about McNeil because he is pretty much a standard issue boss who alternately tolerates Kojak and is friends with him. It’s not a bad thing to have some of the plot focus on him and his wife, but I doubt McNeil will ever be very interesting (though Dan Frazer is good in the part).
Frasier, “Adventures in Paradise,” part two – Frasier’s reaction to Lilith being in the next room is as cringeworthy as I remember, so I just fast forwarded through it. But after that is done, the final collapse of Frasier’s fling with JoBeth Williams is not as hard to watch, mainly because the episode becomes more about Lilith coming to Frasier to tell him she’s engaged. Even at this point, despite the rawness of the wounds from their divorce, there is a strange tenderness between Frasier and Lilith. Also, this has a classic ending with a surprise cameo by Shelley Long (a surprise even to NBC).
Tried to watch the Sixers-Celts game, but as has been the case most of the time this season, the Celts made mincemeat of their opponents and the game got pretty dull pretty fast.
30 Rock — it is cold and bad, so time for Winter Madness! Still an all-timer in a show not short on greatness, the Seans alone are so meanly funny. “A Worcester man accused of trading his foster son for gasoline” (juiced even further by Moore’s perfect delivery) killed me all over again, this is season 5 Simpsons level of precision writing.
Spenser For Hire — more Mass TV! Spenser fails to stop an art theft at my alma mater (unlike Twofer, I actually went to school in and not near Boston) and then heads to “the Berkshires,” a road sign clearly shows he is outside the metrowest suburb of Lincoln. BUSTED! I don’t think I will ever like Spenser himself and Urich’s portrayal feels true to the character, I don’t like it either but I think he’s doing a good job in the role. Hawk, on the other hand, continues to own, more Avery Brooks dammit. Anyway, this remains a fun show to trainspot (they may futz the details but there is still a ton of location shooting that is cool to see) and to goof on, it turns out the heist was pulled by a stupid knob in order to get money to stop foreclosure on his gormless girlfriend’s “daycare for abused children,” a construction so baldly and insultingly pitiable we spent the rest of the episode mocking it. Come to the daycare for abused children — you can beat your kids, but you can’t beat our rates! Sorry, no non-abused children allowed.
“daycare for abused children” is itself a Simpsons Season 5 gag somewhere!
2024 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts (2025) – Presented in order watched. Overall, a very good batch.
Magic Candies – A story about a lonely boy who buys a magic bag of candies that allow him to hear things that you can’t normally hear. The couch tells him where to find the remote that’s hurting the couch. The dog says he’s tired and doesn’t want to play as much because he’s older now. It’s a clever concept that the film manages to explore in interesting ways even in a short amount of time. Good balance of humor and sentiment.
In the Shadow of the Cypress – Very very pretty, but the story lost me over time. It’s thuddingly obvious with its metaphor. I get it. The whale represents the father-daughter relationship. But the film doesn’t really do anything with that. And because it follows all the standard beats, it never grabbed me emotionally.
Yuck! – A cute little film about two kids who become interested in kissing each other while surrounded by a group of friends that are grossed out by anyone kissing at all. Not deep, not even funny, but cute. The part where every single tent in the encampment lit up because everyone was dreaming about kissing? Not appealing.
Wander to Wonder – By far the weirdest film, and therefore my favorite. It’s hard to concisely explain what it’s about. Imagine a Mr. Rogers-esque kids show with an older gentleman and three little creatures. Now imagine that the little creatures are actually tiny people in costumes, and it’s years after the show has gone off the air, the Mr Rogers figure is dead, and the tiny people think that using a camcorder to record new episodes (that have no way of leaving the house) will get them the help they need. It’s all very dark and absurd, and it felt like it didn’t have much to say about the human condition, but I adored it.
Beautiful Men – A film about three balding Dutch brothers in 2021 who travel to Turkey to get hair transplants. I deeply appreciate films about masculinity and dudes trying to break out of their predetermined roles, so this was very appealing to me. The relationships were written well, and the characters touched me deep in my soul. Very satisfying watch.
Rankings:
1. Wander to Wonder
2. Magic Candies
3. Beautiful Men
4. Yuck!
5. In the Shadow of the Cypress (my prediction to win the Oscar)
It is a little dispiriting sometimes to watch these and guess the winner based on which is the most obvious or cloying. But sometimes a surprise! Giving it to a (hilariously absent) Wes Anderson for live action last year was cool .
High Potential, “Hangover” – really liked this one. I’m always a sucker for amnesia as a plot device and alcohol-related amnesia is particularly relatable, thanks to my misspent youth. The “family life” stuff was almost completely absent from this one which suits me, to be honest. Those elements have been pleasant enough but it’s the procedural stuff that I really enjoy about the show so far.
I really liked this one too. I think it hit the right balance with Morgan. She was doing the crime-genius thing but wasn’t behaving as outrageously inappropriately as in previous episodes (her not signing for her keycard for example).
She’s a loose cannon! But, you’ve got to admit, she gets results
I’m kind of with the establishment here in the view that results that end up being inadmissible in court don’t really count as results.
Raiders of the Lost Ark –
Nazi #20: Hey Hans, you don’t think anything’s gonna happen to us because of this scary Jewish artifact do you
Nazi #21: No way Klaus! Don’t worry about it man, we even survived the trucks and that one American asshole! We’re gonna get back home, I’ll marry my beloved Greta soon, and everything will be fine
Nazi #20: You’re right Hans, I shouldn’t be so gloomy! Tbh I can’t wait to see what’s inside that thing
Nazi #21: Oh jah, me too!
Incredible movie they’ve been trying to remake for 45 years, including it’s own makers, and failing. The Ark theme during the map scene gives me giant goosebumps.
Tired: Raiders Of The Lost Ark is Spielberg using pulp technique to destroy exploitative Nazi bigots with literal Old Testament vengeance
Wired: Raiders Of The Lost Ark is Spielberg taking the Old Testament back from the mercy of the New and (in a way that weirdly aligns with the Nazi impetus for objects of occult power) restoring the idea of Yahweh as incomprehensible, mind- body- and soul-flaying Lovecraftian entity. Exhibit A: The Ark Theme.
DOGFIGHT– I’ve been putting off watching this because its inciting premise ( a contest by marines as to who could bring the ugliest date to a party) was a turn off, but as it has been recommended by friends here and elsewhere, We made it a family movie night. As Lauren mentioned, that set up turns out to be a minor part of the film, and it progresses into a very Linklater-like direction, focusing on communication, both interpersonal and cultural, as a facilitator for social needs and one -on-one connection. Overall, despite a few quibbles (The flashforwards and coda didn’t strike me as necessary) I was pleasantly surprised.
More Resident Alien. The show’s growing on me. By episodes 6 and 7 the pacing is actually improving. Acting like someone who is impersonating someone else (in this case, a human) is, I’m convinced, one of the most difficult technical challenges for an actor because they have to go through two layers of interiority. They have to accurately inhabit the first character and inaccurately inhabit the second but in the way the first character would. Even if I’m wrong about its difficulty, it’s one of my favorite things to watch. I am
a huge sucker for this.
Also tudyk’s character is maybe a little neurodivergent coded? Or maybe a lot neurodivergent coded.
Also, remember Gran Torino? And how this cranky old white racist gets a crash course in hmong culture? The second lead Sara Tomko (who is native american but not affiliated with a tribe) plays a character who is part of the Utes and keeps visiting her extended family, and bringing in native american culture. I’m always glad for representation, but it is sometimes Gran Torino clumsy in the show. It’s fine but it is sometimes a little unintentionally funny in how it’s added. (On the other hand, the anti-dei backlash is making me even more pro-dei. I will tolerate the most ham-fisted tangents. Tomko could start every sentence with “according to ancient Ute cultural practices…” and I would support it, even if I keep noticing it’s clumsy.)
Good Cop / Bad Cop, “Peace in the Valley”
Decided to check out this new show on the CW (or on Stan if you’re in Australia, apparently) starring Leighton Meester, since the reviews were pretty good and she is a very funny performer. It’s… I dunno, a dramedy, a procedural-ish? Meester plays Lou, a detective in the sleepy small Pacific Northwest (probably Washington, although I don’t think they were clear) town of Eden Vale, where her dad Hank (Clancy Brown!) is the chief of police and determined to keep Eden Vale’s reputation as a safe, crime-free place (even if by shady methods like redrawing the city lines or dumping cases onto the county sheriff).
Well, after an apparent double-attempted-robbery of the town pharmacy (as in, one robber comes in in the middle of another robbery), Lou complains to him that she could use a partner to help out. So Hank brings in… Lou’s brother Henry Jr. (“Just Henry. I had my middle name legally removed.”) He’s been off in Seattle training to be a detective there, after having some rifts with the family (Big Hank wouldn’t give him a job, because Henry… wrote an editorial in the paper criticizing his father’s shady tricks for keeping the crime rate in Eden Vale technically low).
So, Henry. I’ve read somewhere that he’s supposed to be autistic coded, and I’m not totally sure about that. He is brilliant in his own way, and also has zero social skills, seemingly having a gift for saying the rudest possible thing in every situation. But he’s also enough of his own specific character that I don’t really feel like he’s supposed to be some kind of representative for autism or anything. His particular skills at detective work make a great complement to Lou, even as his personality grates on basically everyone around him, but the sibling rivalry and family dynamics come off as very real, and the show already has some good vibes and is a fun little ride. First episode was quite a bit of fun, so I’m definitely gonna be sticking around.
Matlock, “This Is That Moment”
Olympia takes on a custody case for a woman she’s fond of, divorcing a rich international businessman as they fight for custody of their son… and it gets ugly. That’s made worse by Julian taking up the ex-husband’s case, escalating his own divorce feud with Olympia to another level. And for Matty, it brings back memories of her and Edwin’s court battle to take custody of Alfie from Ellie until she got clean for good. So kind of a rough and devastating episode (emotionally, not quality-wise) on that front.
On another front, though, Sarah seems to be making a real effort with her people skills and to patch things up with Billy, which is nice. And it pays off with a couple of keen observations and insights into the case.
Finished season 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I’m so glad they didn’t cheat us of actually seeing a mini-Producers. The reveal at the end was perfect, not least because it addresses something I’ve been complaining about constantly throughout: why on earth do people keep voluntarily signing up for high-stakes collaborative projects with this man?!
As a bonus, my husband has now expressed an openness to watching The Producers (musical), which means more Nathan Lane in the near future.
What did we read?
The Grass Is Singing, Doris Lessing
Another off the pile Caspar gave me. This is a brutally realistic novel about two white Africans in Rhodesia who live in crushing, mind-numbing poverty, so I was naturally surprised at how alive it feels. The book tracks each character’s viewpoint so intimately that very little of it has any dialogue, covering years over the course of paragraphs, and it specifically tracks their life decisions and why they make them. This ends up with a cornucopia of ideas that all bounce off each other.
It’s not just the lead protagonists, Dick and Mary Turner, are racist or trapped in poverty or particularly bright or particularly stupid, it’s that all of these things end up interacting in ways impossible to control or predict; one eventually gives up trying to diagnose these characters because their situation is horribly inescapable. Mary is proud and clever and ruthless, and Dick is a kind dreamer, and that interacts with their racism in weird ways.
There’s the section where Mary finally has to look into Dick’s farm due to his illness, and she spots tonnes of inefficiencies he never bothered with, recognising that things she took fault in in their marriage are also present there – disorganisation, jumping from idea to idea without developing it. On the other hand, when she takes over, she lacks even Dick’s level of mercy and humanity; pushing the black workers through instead of allowing them five minute breaks every hour as Dick does.
Both of them have condescension and disgust towards black Africans, considering them lazy and ill-disciplined, and this is clearly a mixture of cultural imprinting and projection on their part – as part of his dreamer mindset, Dick desperately wants to be the self-made man, and he just doesn’t have the discipline or intelligence for it and hates himself for that. Meanwhile Mary is clearly traumatised by her shitty childhood, driven by an intense feeling of shame; she’s clearly much happier as a single woman in the city (and says as much towards the end of the book) and only got married at all because she realised people gossiped about her, and her deep sense of shame drives her further and further into madness.
(Weird insight: this is the realistic non-supernatural version of The VVitch)
A big theme of the book is how humiliating poverty is and how racist poor whites can turn that humiliation to black people. Both of these characters are deeply naive in different ways; Dick keeps falling for the one neat trick that’ll save his farm, and Mary doesn’t know even half of what she thinks she does; like I said, as soon as she gets the chance, she really diligently explores farming and immediately seems to master it. Both of them also sink further and further into their farm, losing their connections with the wider community almost entirely. There’s a lot to this book for something barely spilling over two hundred pages.
Sounds great – did you read The Fifth Child?
Not yet!
As you say, it’s such a densely packed book for how short it is – I found it an incredibly intense experience to read (I was literally weeping for the last quarter or so). Mary and Dick are doomed on so many levels.
Zooming out a bit, I also find the picture it paints of the rigid Rhodesian society to be really vivid and horrifying – the opening chapter focusing on the recently arrived assistant and the journey into assimilating into the racist worldview has stayed with me, as has the plot point about their wealthier white neighbours being desperate to help them purely because they can’t stand to see whites failing.
I would also suggest this for Lauren James’ reading list – I was thinking of this book while reading her review last week.
One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
Essay collection. Shortly before the U.S. entered WWII, White and his family (New Yorker editor Katharine S. White and their young son) pulled up roots to live on a saltwater farm in rural Maine. White recounts that a writing world friend of his said, with curled lip, “I trust you will spare the reading public your little adventurers in contentment,” and White does not, but he does generally make them funny and illuminating. They’re similar enough in tone that this bogged down a little when reading too many back-to-back, but still, this is good, and it’s interesting to watch White—who believed strongly that America needed to enter the war and become part of some unified, peaceful world government afterwards—grapple with the difference between his idyllic surroundings and the darkness and chaos elsewhere that keeps haunting him. He’s also impatient with people philosophizing about fascism:
“Mrs. Lindbergh feels that the war is so large and so dreadful that a man must at all costs keep his perspective and look at it in the broader way, but I think it is even more dreadful than that, and that we ought to fight and win it.”
I did not expect this E.B. White comment to have the same structure as a Norm Macdonald joke, but it does, and it’s all the better for it.
Interesting and charming, if occasionally a little too winsome for its own good.
The Road to Ruin, by Donald E. Westlake
Not as jam-packed with excellent, surprising developments as the best Dortmunder novels, but plenty of breezy fun. I particularly liked Kelp throwing himself into his undercover identity as the rich pariah’s private secretary who’s helping him rehabilitate his public persona. The entangled subplots about the outraged former business partners and the down-and-out union guys never quite pick up steam for me, at least not until the end, when there’s a hilariously mean denouement. Great final, disgusted revelation from Dortmunder. Again, not top-tier, but entertaining.
The denouement is certainly mean but I don’t really think it is hilarious that everyone in the book gets eaten by the remorseless bloodthirsty plant *finger to earpiece* ah, ROAD to Ruin. I think the last stretch of Dortmunders are generally not as strong as the first few or mid-period ones but Dortmunder is always fun to hang out with. And the final one, Get Real, is right up in the top tier again.
That idyllic surroundings/reality bit sounds relevant!
Yeah, it’s safe to say that aspect has aged regrettably well. There are some especially painful bits where the reality intrudes in on the idyll, too, like when he sees antisemitism that he knows is now emboldened.
Here’s a thing: NY Public Library cards expire every three years, and you need to renew your physical card in person. As I almost never go to Manhattan, I really am not in a position to do that now. (And for some reason, renewing by email with proof of address won’t work anymore.) So my old card is going to be kaput. Fortunately, I am still entitled to a digital-only card, and it’s the e-books I want anyway. So I have a new digital account. But it’s really a hassle. (They require renewals because they want to minimize how many non-New Yorkers are borrowing e-books, since libraries pay through the nose for them.)
The last book I read before my account hit the wall was the biography of Oscar Charleston I previously mentioned. Overall, it’s a very worthy effort to fill in the gaps about a Negro League star who might have been the best ballplayer of his time, Black or white. But author Jeremy Beer comes from a conservative background, and there are little things here and there that minimize at least some racism. The most notable example is his insistence that when Jesse Owens called having to race anyone or anything before and after baseball games to make a living demeaning in his memoirs, Owens was eliding the truth. But the thing that sticks in my craw most is when he briefly mentions Effa Manley, co-owner of a Negro League team and the only woman in the Baseball Hall of Fame, he called her “libidinous.” What the hell is up with that, Beer? So I give this a qualified recommendation for baseball fans, but suggest critical reading.
South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami – picked this up from the book-swap at my favourite local live music venue a while ago. I’ve only read one short story collection from Murakami prior to this, and it basically delivered the expected melancholy, romantic longing, jazz, cigarettes etc. Not enough cats in this one though. It was an enjoyable read but left me a little cold in the end, I’m not sure there’s really too much under the surface beyond “even people who seem to have everything still long for more”.
CM Crockford gets results! About a third of the way through The Bog Wife, because you can’t tell me about a book with the title and premise of The Bog Wife and not expect me to read it. Bog Wife! Loving it so far, a gothic Dogtooth, harrowing in its descriptions of decay but infused with a kind of is-it-or-isn’t-it mysticism that you lean in to learn more about. Plus a guy what had his testicles crushed by a falling tree. Bog Wife!
I’m glad I’m passing it on, it seems to be quietly picking up a great reputation in the horror/lit community.
The Rhinoceros, Eugene Ionesco.
Very funny play, centered around Berenger as everyone around him turns into a rhinoceros and he goes crazy. It’s a political allegory for the rise of fascism in pre-war Romania. As the rhinoceros epidemic spreads, the responses are increasingly absurd.
The first act introduces the problem. Berenger meets his friend Jean at a cafe. Jean berates Berenger for being late. A Rhinoceros charges through. It’s alarming but it’s just one. They continue chatting. Another rhino passes. They almost come to blows arguing over whether it was the same rhino, whether it had one horn or two, and which of African or Asiatic rhinos have one or two horns.
By the end, Berenger is talking to a different who refuses to judge the rhinos because after all they’re the majority now and it’s human-centric to think living like a human is better.
During 2017-2020, especially 2020, the vibes were very Albert Camus’s The Plague. Lots of stoic resistance and solidarity. 2025 is the year of the Rhino.
Also I’m about halfway through 100 years of solitude. I’ll say more about it when I’m done. I’ll note now I have extremely crippling parent brain because I keep thinking “I’m getting a lot of encanto notes from this.”
Hell yes, I have a collection of 4 Ionesco plays – that kind of playful absurdism, Pinter, and the Ubu plays were an influence on my writing for sure.
Encanto as the G-rated version of One Hundred Years of Solitude… Hmm.
I’ve been told the film version of “Rhinoceros” is not very good overall, but Wilder’s final scene is great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzI2wy31K9s
40 pages into The Big Gold Dream by Chester Himes as well as No-No Boy by John Okada, and they’re due back tomorrow! Eeep! Luckily, the Free Library doesn’t have fines anymore. Both books are good, but I’m distracted instead by The Power Broker and American Prometheus, the Oppenheimer biography. Struck by how faithful Nolan was to the book and his story despite obviously fucking with the timing and structure. One element that’s different: Kitty claims that she was there during the Chevalier incident and actually said “That would be treason!” Oppenheimer claimed it was him while protecting her from being implicated (possibly – all of this is literally he said, she said, as with a lot of history, even recent accounts).
Finished Master Slave Husband Wife. The narrative loses some urgency after the Crafts escape the United States, but it’s interesting to see how their lives shaped up in England. I wish we had more contemporary sources, and I think the author did too.
On to Scum Villain volume 2, which should go fast.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Another fun stressful week in public media! Plans of all sorts trying to deal with a regime that is ignoring every mode of behavior that has ever existed in government, and having that feeling in collective guts that someone would like to not just take our money but force us out of business. As well as a feeling that not a single one of the people on the right in Congress who hate NPR and PBS but have liked the local stations is going to be on our sides now. Plus on top of that are just all the changes are going on because the media landscape is not the same, and boy work is stressy.
But it could be worse. We had a friend visiting who works for the National Archives, is openly queer in terms of dating preferences, and not so openly nonbinary. They are utterly freaking out. But a couple of days with us watching MASH and talking about fanfiction did them a lot of good. First visit to us by this friend since maybe two years before the pandemic, so this was quite welcome. (Also briefly saw my sister in law and family, but we tend to see them more often.)
And went tech shopping with Mom, which is its own brand of stress. Because that is always followed by tech support. The new laptop had the wrong time zone (easily fixed). And has a glitch that is preventing her from setting up a log in PIN, so for now she needs to do two step authentication all the time. The new printer did not in fact have ink in it, so I had to add the ink and re-calibrate. (At least this is a new sort of ink that comes in bottles and not cartridges.) The printer can receive from the computer, but cannot send, so we need a cable in order to save scans. The tech call Monday took three hours, and I need to go back Sunday. And it’s Windows 11, so my mom has to relearn how to use the OS, again.
And lastly, had yet another trip to the hygienist that looked like it would be over in 30 minutes till the dentist looked in and said “you need laser surgery!” Honestly, I don’t know if the hygienist missed something serious or if he errs on the side of caution or of I really needed to have the surgery at all. But that part of my mouth has been a trouble spot for my gums.
“so for now she needs to do two step authentication all the time” my blood pressure spiked 50 points just reading that. Bought a new laptop last year and it was stupid, stupid, STUPIDLY fucked from the start. Ed Zitron has a great story about a third of the way down here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ about buying the top-recommended laptop on Amazon and how incredibly bad it is as a piece of equipment, not “it won’t play a game fast enough” but “it is going to catch fire after being on for two hours” and it made me realize my experience was actually on the better end of things. Infuriating.
To be clear, I think I should be able to fix the issue on her computer. And I am half convinced that there is some sort of “do not work well” field in her apartment or the computer knows she’s 82 years old and refuses to be nice. But yeah. Thing is. I got her what is basically the same computer she had, and we both had that computer and were reasonably happy with it. But…well, I needed to replace my computer the first day of my current job to be able to do my work. So thinking back on it, maybe I did not choose wisely any of these times I bought. (It’s an Acer, which is pretty much the sort of standard computer someone who only uses her computer for email, some browsing, and the occasional online meeting should be able to use. Or maybe not.)
Had an old Acer circa 2000-03, it was a damn fine Do Basic Shit computer. I honestly think companies do not make these anymore, unless they are cheap bullshit powerbooks. Defaulting to two-factor and increasingly baroque forms of ID is not Do Basic Shit, it is needless information-thieving frustration.
My employer suddenly announced a wave of redundancies on Tuesday, with no prior warning. I’m currently unaffected which is good I guess, although getting a pay-off to leave this shitty job wouldn’t have been the worst outcome. I feel bad for the people who are at risk, many of whom are vastly more important to the business than me. I spoke to one colleague yesterday who thinks that losing this job might actually kill him (for legitimate health reasons that I won’t go into), I wasn’t really sure what to say to that but needless to say morale is at rock bottom, especially since this announcement has neatly lined up with trying to get an extremely important project finished and the busiest period of work since I’ve been at the company.
Work chaos is also sapping my energy for the month-long songwriting project thing I’ve been doing, although I’ve still managed to make a little progress – I’ll share this one as evidence: https://write.fawm.org/songs/310813
Somehow despite the work shit, ongoing and new health problems (including the one referenced in the above song) and no real sign of more agreeable weather, I’m actually feeling a little better in myself this week. And I have some time off next week to catch up on the creative stuff before the end of the month so hopefully that will be productive.
Jesus that’s awful about your colleague, hope it doesn’t hit you though it doesn’t sound like a great job or company. (Understating here.)
Yeah, not a great company anyway and since it got bought out by UHG (ugh) things have inevitably gotten worse. I’m happy to be able to leave on my own time though.
Great song! Very catchy and clever, I actually missed the sticks/clicks puns at first because they work so well straight.
Cheers! Sometimes I get hung up thinking that every song I write should be serious or meaningful in some way but the ones that are just full of puns usually end up being my favourites so why resist?
Back in the future mines with the next wave of degenerates that will inherit humanity’s latest mess. Will they successfully clean it up? Will they contribute further to it? Will they live in a techno dystopia, a bleaker Matrix where they knowingly and willingly climb into warm pods and submit their energy into an uncaring network? I don’t know, but all options are on the table!
It’s a series of high-school level electives, so I’m basically babysitting while they work on their projects or read silently or watch garbage on YouTube. This is the first school day we’ve had all week thanks to the weather, so I’m happy they’re as focused as they are. Ready for Spring when it gets here.
Taking a look at apartments and really need something below my current rent, otherwise more than half my take-home gets eaten. My bedframe rules though my windows are not really insulated enough so there’s an obvious draft I’m trying to close up. Otherwise, I’m okay. Gonna try and do some writing today and pass in a new essay about not posting or doomscrolling at the best possible point to do so (and not to).
Intrigued by The Monkey, the short story is one of Stephen King’s best and apparently the film runs in a darkly funny direction? Strong review from Sean Burns at WBUR but he closes with this (non-spoiler):
“The monkey itself is a marvel of design, all grinning, glass-eyed malevolence. Notably, the iconic, cymbal-banging toy seen on the cover of King’s short story collection could not appear in the film. This monkey plays a drum because the crashing cymbals were trademarked by The Walt Disney Company in 2010 for a character in “Toy Story 3,” and anything that looked too close would be vulnerable to claims of copyright infringement, even though variations on this toy have been around since the 1930s. It seems the only thing more insurmountable than death itself is Disney’s greed.”
What in the actual fuck. https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/02/20/stephen-king-the-monkey-osgood-perkins-film-review
And in more stuff I forgot to send to the FAR, Kaleb Horton produces the definitive ranking of the only good TV ever made, partial excerpt below:
“8. King of the Hill, especially when your life is ruined and nothing makes sense. Skip the ones where they switch to digital animation unless it’s one with Tom Petty
9. Eastbound & Down
10. Regis Philbin
11. The Larry Sanders Show but not if you’ve been laid off from a media job in the recent past
12. Newsradio but start emotionally distancing yourself in season four and skip season five
13. Dick Cavett”
https://kalebhorton.ghost.io/the-only-good-shows-ever-on-television/
I can’t argue too loudly with a list that starts with Rockford and doesn’t take long to get to Columbo.
No The Shield, and I don’t care too much for entry 21…
…oh, and this?
“Kids in the Hall but you gotta fast forward through a lot of it”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Very fair on number 21! And I like it as portrait of a vibe, “I realize I don’t like TV. It’s basically a numbing agent, and it doesn’t work on me anymore. I just dissociate or think about dying” sort of tells you what is going to be on the menu here. Blogs like this are more fun to me than something like that Variety would-be comprehensive list from a week or so ago.
Billionaire supervillain destroys James Bond!
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/james-bond-amazon-mgm-gain-creative-control-1236313930/
Next Bond girl Lauren Sanchez as Amazon Prime.
I’ve heard Henry Cavill’s name bandied about as a pick for the next Bond. He’s British, he’s handsome. I guess that ticks off two important boxes. What do you think?
Bah, if the old structures governing Bond have been nuked then why adhere to their format? Get me an non-British, ugly Bond! An accelerationist Bond to destroy the franchise for good and all! That’s right, I’m talking about Armisen. Fred Armisen.
Only if he plays Bond as Prince, then I’m in.
Armisen’s easy charm and ability to blend into a scene make him the perfect fit!
I mixed him up with nutjob Jim Caveziel for a moment and had a great punchline involving “Q”. So I’ll have to with my first answer: sure.
Is there a James Bond/Superman joke that you can make? Like, no one will recognize Bond if he just wears a pair of wire-frame glasses.
Not now that I’ve just been served with the gold standard of Superman/Bond mashup jokes! Best I have is “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to fly!”
Feel awful about this in a specific, complex way I may write about.
The FAR title reminds me of the classic Philly Action News intro:
Move closer to your world, my friend
Take a little bit of time
Move closer to your world, my friend
And you’ll see