The Friday Article Roundup
A reading list of the week’s best pop culture writing.
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Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
LitHub’s Brittany Allen interviews the prop master for White Lotus about selecting the books seen in the show:
I’m thinking of that old fiction adage about “what’s in your character’s purse…”
It’s also what people will tell you is in their purse vs. what’s actually in their purse. It goes with that thing of, which books you’ve actually read and which books are sitting in your house unread.
Colin Burrow writes on a biography of the Brother Grimm and the durability (and malleability) of folk tales at The London Review of Books:
Within bounds, the storyteller can more or less decide on the balance between fulfilling and thwarting expectations. A hare can be a prince. Or a hare can be a hare. The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool. It’s a world of wishes and wonders, in which there are patterns and there are departures from patterns, but the pattern is finally all. But then the predictable gets overturned by the unpredictable. When you read ‘There once was a poor man who had four sons,’ you think: ‘No no no never; it has to be three.’ But sometimes there are four. Just because there are.
At Polygon, Nicole Carpenter runs down the biggest moments of the past year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons:
Actor Elijah Wood delighted the internet when he responded to another New Horizons player’s offer to sell turnips for a desirable price of 599 bells. Wood DMed the player and visited the island to sell off his turnips. As it turns out, Elijah Wood was the most courteous visitor an island could have. Truly, he was an example for all of us. Not long after, Elijah Wood appeared as a guest on Animal Talking, an in-game talk showhosted by screenwriter Gary Whitta, which ran until December 2020 and featured tons of other celebrity guests, including Brie Larson, Selena Gomez, Josh Gad, Sting, and Danny Trejo.
At CinemaScope, Matt Goldberg pays homage to the grisly and funny Final Destination series:
While other horror slashers have to follow rules like Freddy Krueger’s place in dreams or Jason Voorhees being somewhat held by the boundaries of time and space, Final Destination leans into an omniscient, omnipotent killer. Anything that needs to leak, spark or break will do so like a real-time manifestation of Murphy’s Law. The slasher villain is already overpowered, and Final Destinationsimply took the next step by removing any guardrails and letting the world itself act as a killer. As silly as the series can be, it quickly discovered a clear identity that encouraged viewers to wonder what Death had in store for its victims.
The Wrap’s Lucas Manfresi reports on a study by Tubi on the streaming viewing habits of Gen Z vis-a-vis their jobs:
The survey, which was conducted between Oct. 21 and Nov. 1, 2024 among more than 2,500 adults aged 18 and older that stream video at least one hour per week, found that 84% of employed Gen Z viewers said they watch TV or movies while working and 48% said they have lied to coworkers or bosses about it. About 53% of respondents said they put off work to finish a show they were binge-watching and 52% said they do not want to return to the office because they will miss streaming during the work day. Meanwhile, 38% of viewers said they stream their favorite TV shows or movies while at their job site.
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 Friday Article Roundup
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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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The Friday Article Roundup
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Department of
Conversation
I used to watch stuff at work when my bosses were out. I watched more or less the entire 18 hole playoff with Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate in 2008. And last I checked I am not Gen Z. Plus how many millions were watching basketball at work yesterday? If you going to give Gen Zers a hard time, we need to ask: what are the viewing habits of Gen Xers; and are the Gen Zers getting their work done? That latter part is all that matters, and I bet they are.
There’s also work that just has downtime. Last century I worked at a company with a call center and the employees working the phones would usually keep books at their workstations because their jobs were to pick up the phone when it rang and if they were doing something else they had to drop it.
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Two, “Revelations”
It says something about how The Shield has warped me that this episode, full of action, comes off as ominous wheelspinning to me. Dr Franklin and Sheridan use the life-stealer device to bring Garibaldi back, who works out who shot him; Delenn comes back having transformed into a half-human with hair; G’Kar returns and works out Londo was the cause of the destruction of a Narn outpostt, even if he doesn’t know how yet. In forty-five minutes, these are the only real plot points, with everything else being either discussion of what’s happened, discussion of what’s going to happen, or Sheridan talking about his sad backstory.
That said, there’s a lot to like here. The side effect of Sheridan’s backstory coming up is that he’s talking about it with his sister, who ends up becoming something of a Lady Macbeth (or at least a sounding board), which factors into one of his plot decisions. I do enjoy how the show has immediately evolved into something different too, with six plots turning at once (even if they’re not turning as fast as I would like).
My favourite part of all, though, is Lennier, who is definitely acting as the Cog In The Machine. He walks around, completely comfortable with his place in the order of things, completely commanding every room he’s in despite not giving a single order.
Kojak, “A House of Prayer, A Den of Thieves” – Back door pilot time! Vincent Gardenia (a familiar face to 70s TV viewers despite having never had a successful show of his own) is a NYC cop (and buddy of Kojak) who’s moved to Vegas to raised his orphaned asthmatic nephew. Naturally, there’s a case that loosely involves Kojak, so Telly Savalas got to go to Vegas with Gardenia, but it’s mainly about this new character. While the story is pretty good, I suspect no one was very impressed with either Gardenia’s surprisingly hammy performance or a 12 year old kid helping solve crimes. Great cast, though, including Eileen Brennan, Jeff Corey, and Eddie Barth. And the kid is Mike Darnell, who grew up to be one of the top moguls at WBD in the reality TV division.
March Madness – Bounced around the four evening games till settling on Arkansas vs Kansas (the loser of course agreeing to change the pronunciation of the state’s name to match the winner’s.) I still love the games and the atmosphere, but the vast array of changes to college sports (both positive developments like players having the freedom to change schools and getting paid, and negative ones like the dominance of the SEC and Big 10) have done something to the games that I can’t really put my finger on. Doesn’t help that the imperial head coach is more dominant that ever. Nothing annoys me more than an ex-coach singing the praises of the ethically questionable and eternally grumpy John Calipari. But hey, at least that game was entertaining.
That’s where I’m at on the big revenue college sports – any particular game is entertaining, but anything to do with assigning championships and seeding playoffs? Done with it.
High Potential, “Chutes and Murders” – pretty good one, with a wonderfully elaborate solution. Would like to see more of Ken Marino as an eccentric Canadian PI, please.
Justified S5, “Whistle Past the Graveyard” and “Wrong Roads” – this season seems to be a bit of a throwback to the first couple, with a more standalone vibe to certain plots. The first of these episodes focuses mainly on troubled teen Kendal running off with his “uncle” and it worked pretty well, compelling stuff even if it continues to hint at them not really knowing what this season is doing on the Raylan front. The second is a bit more of a “push all of the plots forward a little bit in slightly messy fashion” episode, but it has Guest Star Eric Roberts and a great scene where he and Raylan turn up just in time to gatecrash a standoff between Wood Harris (and his sidekick) and the Boyd crew. I’m definitely enjoying this season more than S3 but it has a lot of the same issues. Also Danny Crowe sucks so much, honestly. I cannot believe that he has lived this long in such an unscrupulous family.
The Shield, “Animal Control”
– One of my all-time favorite Ronnie moments–and one of my all-time favorite scenes of the show, period–is when Vic, Ronnie, and Julien are all in the car, and Vic’s frantically trying to get Ronnie to cooperate with him to call off the hit on Shane, and Ronnie is having none of it. It’s darkly funny and also so perfectly constructed: in typical Shield fashion, we have the complication of a witness, Julien, whose presence changes everything, and also in typical Shield fashion, so many other decisions lead into his moment. Julien’s there because Ronnie specifically roped him in to impede Vic backing out; Ronnie could do that because Claudette put him in technical charge of the Strike Team while Vic’s hearing is still pending. (And that’s without even getting into why Vic wants to back out in the first place.) One of my all-time favorite dramatic ideas is that you can’t control what happens to your ideas once other people get involved, and even though Vic’s had numerous chances to learn that by now, he still hasn’t, he still expects Ronnie to be an extension of his own will on this, and Ronnie isn’t, and it’s tense and funny and impactful.
– Of course, the hit doesn’t come off, but it’s because of luck, not because of Vic … and everything is worse because of it. Shane knows what almost happened to him, and why, and that tees up the rest of the series right there. And the saddest part is that essentially everyone involved would have been better off if this had worked–not just Vic and Ronnie (and arguably Olivia), but also Mara, Jackson, Franny Abby, and even Shane. Shane circa “Family Meeting,” desperate to make any kind of deal that would keep Mara out of prison, would love to go back in time and take an ostensibly-in-the-line-of-duty bullet in the head to make sure she stays safe, innocent, and free to raise their kids.
– The return of Tavon! His reappearance here is such a highlight, and one of the most notable things about it is that he’s much more generous than he really needs to be–and it’s the kindness of someone who’s gotten back complete control over himself, who once again has the self-knowledge he drives home into Shane. We left him before at his lowest, convinced he’d done something that made him feel sick, and now he’s completely sure he never did, and that certainty infuses everything. And he gives Shane multiple chances to confess, enough rope to climb out of the hole as well as hang himself, and you can feel the force of Tavon’s judgment when he finally decides that enough is enough. (Honestly, if I’m Tavon, I’m also going after Vic for lying to me, but Tavon’s probably a nicer person than I am.) Brian White is such a great screen presence, and the sense of cool control overlaying all his emotion here is perfect.
– Let’s just say that the case Shane and Tavon are handling is especially painful in retrospect. I’ve always hoped this girl never hears the news about Shane. But he is, as Tavon says, good with her–caring and genuinely invested in her security and happiness, but also calm and steady and professional. Like some of his domestic scenes with Mara and Jackson, it feels like a quietly sad, haunting look at who he maybe could have been.
– Dutch’s sleepwalker case is harrowing, and if I downgrade it just a little, it’s because it feels the tiniest bit like a rehash of part of the Cuddler Rapist plot, when, to angle for a confession, he convinced the one-time offender that people couldn’t change and then couldn’t take that back, leading to new horror and devastation. I think it’s just a little bit more effective in that first case. But that’s not to say it’s not effective here, especially since this time it leads to a new dramatic development by making him reach out to Billings. Dutch has repeatedly asked Billings to be a more active participant in their let’s-make-the-best-of-this partnership, but before, it was always a slight against Billings’s laziness. Here, it’s Dutch sincerely pleading for help that he knows he needs, and Billings responds to it.
– Another genuine response: Shane actually taking in what Tavon says to him, going to Vic and Ronnie and offering, despite Vic’s assurances, to transfer after all. It’s also a mirror of what he says to the father he’s arrested–sometimes it’s too late to make things right. And he recognizes all of that all at once (as he approached it in his conversation with Ronnie last episode) and tries to accept it and act on it. Obviously it doesn’t work–all it does is briefly complicate Vic’s feelings–but it’s one of those story beats where it feels like it matters that it happened, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere. It has weight on its own.
– Corrine pleading with Vic not to take the kids away from her, and flatly acknowledging in the process that she knows he’s capable of that, is a terrific, gutting moment, with some very good Cathy Cahlin Ryan. Corrine’s been looking ravaged lately, wrecked by sleeplessness and worry and stress, and here that transforms into this kind of dark clarity, like she’s gotten to the very bottom of herself and found a raw strength and desperation there. Along with, maybe, a new ability to admit what her ex is capable of and face him down about it.
– Great, great ending.
– I’ll finish the series rewatch over this weekend, and there’s no way I can cram together even the most slipshod of notes on the back half of S7 for one comment on Monday, so this is probably the last of these rambly posts. I’ll just add that I’ve been revisiting Grant’s essays as I go, and that’s still (and always) a reading experience I highly recommend. <3
Annie Hall — Returning after some months to my Woody Allen retrospective. I think one reason this was so successful is because even though it is *about* the dissolution if the relationship, the bulk of the scenes are set during the early part when they’re flirting or settling in together. And that part is a lot of fun both to be in and to watch.
One experiment we don’t see Allen do very much in other work is breaking the fourth wall. He frequently included monologues to camera, and he always has these little comic asides which the other characters often don’t notice (self-skewered here in a great scene with a new girlfriend after he breaks up with Annie who simply refuses to ignore his mumbled “sixteen years” when asked when he quit smoking). But here he actually speaks to camera in the middle of a scene. Most famously in the Marshall McLuhan scene, but he does it a couple other times. Mostly it doesn’t come off. More successful is a couple split screen efforts, such as the dueling therapy sessions between Annie and Allen’s character Alvy or an interlocution imagined between Annie’s super-WASP family and Alvy’s working-class Jewish one. Anyway, this is, while plainly an effort by Allen to move into more serious material, also really funny and, as such, less of a departure from his earlier work than it seems in hindsight. Oh, also he skewers the pretentiousness of Bob Dylan, so you know I’m going to love it.
The Usual Suspects — I have my ups and downs as a parent, as do we all, but at least you can say about me that I taught my kids about Keyser Soze before they could learn it on the street.
“Rat on your pop, and Keyser Soze will get you.”
March Madness
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! (Except the part where CBS preempts Matlock and Elsbeth for basketball.) The Battle for Pronunciation went well for my pool (as in, it was the only upset win among my teams). I also got to see my hometown school pull off the biggest upset of the day, which is the last time I will ever express any kind of hometown pride.
Mostly I just love being able to watch 16 games a day these two days. (And 8 games a day the next two isn’t too bad, either.)
I also realize I’ve only been writing up new stuff I’ve watched, but there isn’t much interesting to say about reruns. I will say that, having watched some season 4 NewsRadio lately, “Jackass Junior High” is a weird episode. It asks us to accept two strange premises: one, that everyone sees Lisa as one of the guys (especially odd since these are the episodes Walt is crushing on her), and two, that Phil Hartman isn’t funny. (Especially odd that nobody seems to recognize any of his impressions, when earlier this season, there was a whole plot about him doing Bill Clinton and “interviewing” him, to the point where he got hauled before Congress.)
What did we read?
”Dagon”, HP Lovecraft
Was unfocused and struggling to start anything, so I decided to jump into something simple and go to my earliest favourite Lovecraft story. This already has a lot of what I like about Lovecraft; despite his reputation as a stylist, he had a brilliant eye for both sensory details (like his description of rancid dead fish on the island) and, more importantly, processes – here, he describes the narrator’s attempts to navigate by the stars and survive on an island, and that’s really compelling.
It also has a few of his flaws and ‘flaws’. We get a bit of his taste for words and spelling that were archaic in his own time, some of which I find endearing like ‘shewn’ over ‘shown’. In “Dagon”, this never gets unreadable, although he can get pedantic about it. It’s also got one of his famous endings in which the narrator, writing down his experiences, ends with ‘no the monster is coming for me!!!’. It’s stereotyped as the narrator scribbling away during a life-or-death situation; here, the narrator is wasting away in a mental institution, convinced that Dagon is stalking him and just out the window.
The flaw with this story is that it ends slightly too early and slightly anticlimactically – right when it seems to be building up steam, it just ends. I enjoy the argument that “Dagon” is effectively a dry run for parts of “Call Of Cthulhu”, though there’s also parts of “At The Mountains Of Madness” here; part of what I enjoy about going through Lovecraft’s output is that he kept revisiting and reusing plot points and ideas, tinkering with them until he got them right.
A couple teleplays for the prospective TV comedy Madison Square, written by our own Captain Nath
This is a series about the Knicks struggling to get their act together–alcoholic one-time dilettante Jimmy, who never expected to become the owner but is intent on proving himself, has hired stats geek general manager Paul to Moneyball the team out of its slump. One of Paul’s obstacles–besides his own rookie diffidence and Jimmy’s screw-ups–is traditional coach Cliff, who mostly disagrees with his approach, at least at first. (Cliff has his own abilities and insights, though, and he’s a bulwark–a nice thing to have, once you stop battering yourself against it.) The complicating (and gloriously comedic) factor is former player and coach Blue, now coasting his way to retirement with Zen breaks in his schedule, doling out wise aphorisms everyone’s having trouble interpreting.
This is funny, first and foremost, but there’s also plenty of forward momentum and well-structured conflict–the characters’ strengths and shortcomings are always in play, alternately aiding and impeding their plans. I’m not a huge sports person, but I really like a lot of sports movies/shows, in part because of what Madison Square captures: the complicated network with a lot of dramatic players, the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing, and the high-stakes profession grounded in a literal game, which gives you an always-intriguing combination of tones. Here, you can add that it’s always satisfying to watch people struggle to pull something together–it gives the show a direction that you can see taking shape before you, even when there are setbacks, and that’s irresistible. Deeply enjoyable.
And almost half of The Power Broker, by Robert Caro. I’ll save my comments on it until the end, but I already adored Caro’s still-in-progress LBJ bio, and I’m loving this too. I still feel like Caro is a must-read for Shield fans, especially if you appreciate Aceveda.
An alcoholic owner named Jimmy? Nath better be really careful since the actual owner named Jimmy is the sort of prick who sues other NBA teams. OTOH, this sounds funnier than the actual team right now. 🙁
Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of lawsuit worthy stuff in here. Jimmy even has his own band, a la JD and the Straight Shot. The lawyers will have to go over this one if it’s ever gonna get made.
(I wrote Blue with the idea of something like “75% Phil Jackson, 25% Bill Walton, as played by Fred Willard.”)
A good way through Packing for Mars by Mary Roach. Roach is a good writer and tries to approach the subject – various research conducted on Earth and in space towards the goal of manned space missions beyond the moon – with both cheer and respect. But at times she is perhaps a bit too flippant, and whether she intended to or not, this book is something of an argument against manned spaceflight. She’s also not a scientist, and I sort of wish there was more rigor to this, but I suppose if I want that i can find it in books that are not meant for general audiences.
Just passed the halfway point on Monday Begins on Saturday by the Strugatsky brothers. Not really sure I’m into the satirical / fantasy vibe of this one as much as their other two big novels, but it throws in ten new crazy ideas every chapter and I respect that.
Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics – a recent Quarterly Essay by Lech Blaine (who wrote the QE on Scott Morrison and Australia’s perversion of the larrikin myth that I sent to Tristan last year)
First of all, I love Blaine’s writing style. His sentences have a rhythm that feels like he’s throwing punches.
Secondly, a good reminder of how different Queensland has always been from Victoria and New South Wales. Vic Mackey would have been right at home policing there in the 80s and 90s.
And then, a disturbing reminder of all the mean and nasty stuff the Liberal party did through the 2000s and late 2010s (not to let Labor off the hook, but the meanness always seems to start with the Libs), all laid out in sequence. Remembering the Tampa and the Children Overboard always hurts, as does the long-lasting cruelty of offshore processing. Did you know that there was a time (2016) when our border security measures seemed bizarrely nasty to Donald Trump?
All in all makes me feel a bit apprehensive about our upcoming election this year. Thirty years ago Howard famously said “The times will suit me”, and the times suiting another Liberal stint under Dutton today is a dreadful prospect.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
My sister-in-law and her kids are visiting this week. Her family is probably the one most like ours in worldview/intereste, and vice-versa. It’s too bad circumstances mean we live far apart, but at least we take the time to visit fairly regularly.
Aww, I’m sorry you don’t live closer, but I’m glad you’re getting to see each other now (and fairly often).
Suddenly a quiet week at work, though not quite dead either. Nothing more fun than scrambling to set up a special board meeting with very little notice. Though related to this, I did get some, er, entertainment. We are dealing with a state agency’s request for proposal, and under the laws pertaining to that, the agency is required to post any questions from potential respondents and any answers to those questions. There must be seven instances on the site that are basically “in answer to your question, please refer back to the RFP.” A master class in bureaucratic obfuscation.
Already mentioned my gig on Wednesday night, which went very well. Also good – I finally replaced my ailing car with a relatively new used one at the weekend and it’s nice being able to Go Places without getting the “is this thing going to fall apart?” fear. Also I ended up buying it from my cousin who I trust far more than a used car dealership, it was nice to combine the car buying trip with a family visit too.
Less good – just feel like I’m full of anxiety this week, part of which was around playing live music in public for the first time in months but also just general social stuff, spending time with new people, overthinking conversations, letting it disrupt my sleep and fuck around with my general wellbeing – I figured I’d be better at this kind of stuff by now but I guess the human brain cannot be trusted.
Congratulations on the gig and the car! As someone with a similarly untrustworthy brain, I really feel you on the anxiety, and I hope it abates soon.
Thank you!
Sort of down this week about being collateral damage in the president’s effort to destroy the country, which is why I watched a bunch of movies instead of job hunting, which is what I should be doing. Well, next week starts with a free ticket to the Nats-O’s exhibition game, so maybe that will be better,
I’m sorry to hear that, Cliffy.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 16th: Sam Scott: Spongebob Season 1, Wakko’s Wish, Elmo in Grouchland, and/or Bartok the Magnificent
Apr. 18th: Cameron Ward: The Mummy
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
And there’s still time to join us for Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 24th: Tristan J. Nankervis – Birth of a Nation
Mar. 27th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy
Mar. 30th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
I have questions about the Animal Crossing article… as someone still playing daily I’m pretty sure absolutely nothing noteworthy has happened in a long time!