The Friday Article Roundup
It's a straight line to the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will pencil in some time for:
The poster child for sending in articles is Hannah! Send your own pics throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
For the New York Times, Jason Bailey mourns movie poster art masters Renato Casaro and Drew Struzan and celebrates their astonishing imagery:
But both artists could also masterfully dispense with such complexity and create images of startling simplicity and beauty — Casaro’s gorgeous yet stark art for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Sheltering Sky,” for example, or Struzan’s brilliant use of dark shadows and blasts of light in his unforgettable poster for John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” They weren’t just talented; they were also versatile.
At her substack, Esme Holden considers the appeal(?) of late-period Looney Tunes:
Daffy sees Speedy planning a party, feels excluded and tries to sabotage it. Soon enough Walter Lanz studio and Hanna-Barbera alum (hardly prestigious institutions in my book) Alex Lovy, who directed most of the shorts from this period, falls back on Will E.Coyote style misfirings. But they are animated so minimally as to convey no pain, physical or emotional — suffering and humiliation were at the core of many of the greatest Looney Tunes, and they never needed expensive, hyperactive animation. Just the kind of good drawing and strong posing that left the studio with Chuck Jones.
At Them, Samantha Riedel interviews Gretchen Felker-Martin about her new novel and breaking through self-imposed boundaries:
Black Flame limits itself to only one protagonist: Ellen Kramer, a Jewish film restorationist living in New York City in 1985 who is so deeply closeted Felker-Martin describes her as “emotionally cauterized.” …Ellen’s desire, stoked even hotter after accidentally eavesdropping on two women cruising in a theater bathroom, finds a target in Rachel, a lesbian Jewish film critic who relishes life’s creature comforts and confidently embraces her own fat body — which Ellen, waifish and miserable, is repulsed by yet yearns to taste. (Their first meeting at Katz’s Deli features such a sensual description of a pastrami sandwich, Felker-Martin recounts with a laugh, that readers have already asked why she made deli meat horny. “That’s just how I am.”)
Susannah Breslin remembers “Mirror In The Bathroom” for a ska feature at HiLoBrow:
At the time “Mirror in the Bathroom” was released, I was around twelve or thirteen years old and in the seventh or eight grade. I have no recollection whatsoever of hearing this song for the first time. In all likelihood, I listened to it on the stereo in the living room of the house that my father had left not long before. I was a latchkey kid — that is, I spent a fair amount of time by myself in an empty house after school — and I can easily imagine this smaller version of me turning the radio up full blast when this track was on and dancing around in a kind of spastic ritual. The stark loneliness of the lyrics — “Cures you whisper make no sense” — would have been relatable to me.
On the occasion of their latest pan, the Guardian revisits its small cache of zero-star reviews and whether they had any effect:
Martin Creed, concert review, 2004
What we said: Alexis Petridis (again) wrote: “This show is provocative only in that it seems less like a gig than an experiment to see how charmless and pleased with himself a man can appear before the audience storm the stage and physically attack him.”
Was it justified? In 2017, Lyn Gardner reviewed another of Creed’s concerts for the Guardian. She awarded it four stars and called it “endearing, exposing, ticklish and so totally unassuming that it’s hard to resist”.
And at his substack, Dan Ozzi remembers making an incredible mix CD and sharing it with his friends:
OK good one Dan, Matt said. He reached for the skip button but I swatted his hand away and said oh hell no absolutely not. Don’t you dare skip this track. I worked hard on this mix CD and we are gonna listen to it. Every song is critical to the sequence. I turned up the volume even louder.
After “Jump Around” finished the third time, Matt warned me that the next track better not be “Jump Around.”
Matt, it is my solemn promise to you that the next song is most definitely not “Jump Around,” I said as the horns on “Jump Around” started blasting.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Twelve, “Sic Transit Vir”
This is a really good one – Vyr’s arc is one of the strongest in the show, because he really is quietly and gradually becoming someone else as he accumulates skills, contacts, and most of all, confidence. This builds off the scene with G’Kar, where we find out he’s been going full Schindler getting Narn safe passage. Centauri revenge against the Narn is really driving the plot here; the scifi plot beats mean that it can’t be neatly mapped onto any real-world conflict, because this is two equal superpowers where one has gained a significant advantage and is actively, cruelly humiliating the other. Vyr hasn’t a cruel bone in his body, and is largely baffled by it; I enjoy Stephen Furst’s performance as he slowly processes the horrible things his fiancee is saying.
Lots of dorky humour in this one; the runner about Ivanova’s dream is hilarious, but Sheridan’s awkwardness gets hit a little too hard as he comes off like a teenage boy. I’m also a huge sucker for characters analysing big changes after they happen, as happens in the opening scene. It can always risk falling into “as you know, Bob”, but when characters are sincerely interrogating their feelings, it makes it work.
Vyr rules and this episode is quite good (the dream stuff is terrible though, yeesh), but it hugely whiffs at the end, doesn’t it? Perhaps I missed something, but the last act ends with Vyr forced to make a choice and then the epilogue … ignores whatever choice he made, leaving it unknown to the audience? And it is not the kind of choice the audience can just gloss over, what the hell.
English Teacher – Four episodes over two days, which is a lot for someone who is typically anti-binge! Incredibly funny, like the velocity and volume of jokes here should embarrass Abbott Elementary, plus a funny cast the show has mostly figured out except maybe Rick. The principal proves again that exasperation is the most cinematic emotion and the kids all get little moments and jokes that give them personality. (“What do you think a bit is, Jeff?” “When you do something and you really mean it.”) You’ve also got an “issues” episode that remains funny and even made me think they were gonna do an entire school shooter episode. (Evan’s face when he hears the shots is plausibly terrified.) Featuring some good 80’s classics like the Streets of Fire number “I Can Dream About You” too.
Funny you say that, because I definitely felt like the writers didn’t totally get a handle on Rick until late in the first season. But they do.
I kinda figured, there’s always one or two sitcom characters where early on they need figuring out.
Also, Markie has been my favorite character mostly, and the endings of the pilot and “Kayla Syndrome” show why.
Markie rules! Both a bro and genuinely insightful/able to learn and gain stuff.
“The best way to maintain power is to artificially give it away.”
I already went over the entire scene at the end of the pilot in my 2024 in TV, so I won’t again, other than to say that was the scene that immediately sold me on Markie.
The Chair Company, “Life goes by too f**king fast, it really does.”
I wish I didn’t find Ron’s destabilizing irritation at other people refusing to get on his wavelength relatable, but unfortunately I am in danger of someday also finding myself saying that a restaurant is kind of a mall.
There’s the sense that he’s just offbeat enough that while he’s learned how to approximate other people’s social scripts and imitate them effectively–he can nail the presentation, he can pretend to brush off his epic crash and laugh at it the way he’s supposed to–his own internal sense of how things should go is rarely echoed in the world around him, and he’s never compensated for that, in part because he won’t share how he’s actually feeling (he’s not going to just tell the people he works with that actually, the chair breaking sort of humiliated him, and he’s genuinely upset about it) and makes up unwieldy justifications for it instead … but also in part because sometimes what’s upsetting him, however superficially normal, is kind of shitty and it’s frustrating to not get anyone to agree that it’s “really quite weird.”
Unbuttoning the shirt at the end is a genius move, and I love that it leads to the Lynchian image of this shirtless, slightly flabby-chested old guy trucking it across the parking lot.
“I just think HR should know that you saw up my skirt. On my birthday.”
Angel Has Fallen
Watched with a friend. It’s dumb fun, and then partway through, Nick Nolte shows up and gives an actual performance that’s way more affecting than anything in this movie should be.
This has an amusing number of similarities to the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Nick Nolte hugely unbalances the movie — because, as you note, he’s actually good, but also because he is FAMILY and fuck that noise! Gerard Butler doesn’t have family, he has people he kills and various White House people he tolerates! Nolte enters as the president is sidelined for the rest of the movie and that is a dumb call. I think London Has Fallen is the best of the series although it is absolutely reprehensible as politics, Chuck Norris wishes he could’ve told an 80s terrorist to “go back to Fuckheadistan.”
I think you’ve pointed out why I had put The Chair Company on the back burner after watching the 1st episode (that, and The Lowdown is just so captivating): I couldn’t find a way into this guy’s world.
But as you’ve noted, the discomfort that Tim Robinson is known for, and really cranks up in this show, is that, “what’s upsetting him, however superficially normal, is kind of shitty and it’s frustrating to not get anyone to agree that it’s ‘really quite weird.'”
Well, that’s part of our typical coping strategy, which is to just not think too much about trying to explain (to ourselves and to others) what’s really bothering us. Robinson’s forte is to remove that coping strategy from our experience of watching his performances, whether in longer-form narratives, like The Chair Company, or shorter comic set pieces, like I Think You Should Leave.
I think the refusing to let people in on how he’s actually feeling is a big part of it here. It would be a lot easier for him to process it and let it go if he did! But that seems to be a common strain in Tim Robinson characters, and particularly with Ron, there’s more going on there (that I think will become more evident the next few episodes, if it isn’t already) that other aspects of Ron’s psychology incline him to take the approach he’s taken here.
Babylon 5 — hey, the Minbari don’t completely suck for once? Perhaps it is because they are doing cool Centauri backstabbing shit to each other? One of the show’s recurring guests is very good here. But in terms of manipulation, Sheridan gets off a great semi-comic false flag deal on the second-tier aliens, who I love to see running around doing shit — they’re bamboozled and it’s awesome but hey, they are out in the world doing stuff, the show is at its best with this kind of expansive vision.
Spaced — great comfort food as always, unfortunately I died after a teen pulled finger guns on me.
Life Without Principle — a pun, as the characters here are all fucking around in/getting fucked by the stock market and much more to the point the banks involved in it, the banks rake the interest from their principal and when the principal goes down the banks still win. Johnnie To loves to dig into financial stuff and this is a very interesting and convoluted tale of three people who also have to make decisions of principle when money is involved and oddly the cop is the only one not in a crooked situation and is arguably behaving immorally by hesitating (in his relationships more than in the market) — the parable of the talents says you need to invest to truly honor your talents. This of course is an invitation to greed and the other two characters get caught up in more classic “dirty money” scams, one through a weird loyalty to his gang and one because she works at a bank that is laundering money for crooks and laundering money from its customers, Denise Ho is very good here and reminiscent of Alison Lohman in Drag Me To Hell. The standout scene here is restrained and uncomplicated by To’s standards, lots of two-shots in a small room, as Ho convinces an older lady to put her life savings in a risky trust fund created by the bank (Ho needs to bring in clients or lose her job), this is done step by step, repeatedly starting again so the lady can follow a script that will take her around measures designed to prevent this kind of thing, it shows how weak those measures are but lets that lady make her own choices. Everyone wants money, that’s why they call it money. Perhaps a bit too knotty at times (the gangster-heavy middle section is actually not as compelling as the bank stuff early on) but very good, one of the many Tos expiring this month on Criterion so get on it.
Live music — Boris! Touring behind the 20th anniversary of Pink, a great great album and they played a lot of it. And a lot of young people who may not have even been born when it was released were there and moshing (as were some older folks), I stayed on the periphery. The band is tight as hell and guitarist Wata has both James Hetfield’s right hand for rhythm and Kirk Hammett’s wah-loving solos (although in her own style), the heavy and punky shit here was fantastic, but the longer pieces really landed (and the album’s closer, “Just Abandoned Myself,” hits both areas, it owned live). The encore was 20+ minutes of “Feedbacker,” slow slow build to furious release, but the song of the show was “A Bao a Qu,” another slowly building and utterly hypnotic piece, the band takes its name from a Melvins song and like that band has mastered the difficulty of slow, letting a rhythm ride for ever while Wata’s three-note riff echoes without resolving, until her solo took over in Eddie Hazel tones. I was recently reading about Damascus aka watered steel, how skilled smiths folded metal over and over in a process that creates an incredibly strong blade with remarkable and distinct patterns along the blade; the method has supposedly been lost for some time but I’m pretty sure I saw it in action the other night.
Hell yeah, live Boris.
I consistently missed them when they came through before, better late than never. Appointment show-going, anyone on their tour schedule!
The finger guns shootout is one of the most sublimely funny bits I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.
The Wild Robot – love robots and this is from the director of Lilo & Stitch so I had hopes it would be one of the best of the recent crop of animated films. I enjoyed it well enough but it feels like it’s been assembled from all the leftover ideas from other robot movies, falling into a lot of generic plot tropes (training montage, a bit where everyone has to team up against scarier robots etc). It still got to me emotionally though and some of the characters are fun (others, for example an elderly goose voiced by Bill Nighy, Fucking Suck). So yeah sadly a “decent kids movie” rather than anything more, but that’s fine.
Murder, My Sweet – Before Bogey played Philip Marlowe, one-time matinee idol Dick Powell looked to change his image and took on the role of everyone’s favorite hard boiled detective. He seems a bit too pretty for the part, but none other than Raymond Chandler thought Powell was the best of the early Marlowes (the character in the book is in fact supposed to be handsome), and I certainly would agree that his performance is very good, with the sort of voice that works for the world weary narration. Edward Dmytryk does a very good job in setting the tone, and in helping to invent noir, though the high point is a sequence where first we are in Marlowe’s drug-induced nightmare and then seeing the world through “solid smoke” as he is only half conscious. But for all that, the story is about what I’ve come to expect from Chandler. I think I like the movies more than the books because the style and the settings allow me to forget how byzantine and clumsy the mysteries really are. (In fact, I saw the Mitchum remake of this, a pretty good movie, and only remembers about a fourth of the plot).
My trip through Marlowe movies is nearly complete. Two more big screen versions, and one from HBO. Considering how famous Marlowe is, it’s a bit surprising there have not been more adaptations, or any actors who’ve played the part more than once besides Mitchum. There is a report that Bad Robot is working on a TV show, but I am not holding my breath.
The Practice, “Free Dental” – The fourth season starts with almost a quintessential episode for what the show has become. The main case involves a dentist accused of murdering a female patient who comes in every day for a cleaning. Is he having an affair? Why did he kill her? It turns out that it’s much odder than it seems: the woman is helping our dentist get off through a rather weird fetish. And it also turns out that the killer is the dentist’s disgusted son but the dentist would rather go to jail than condemn his kid. So we get weird and sordid, but also have some pathos and a case that is build on the revulsion of the jury and not on any facts, so legal drama of the sort we like. Plus we have Henry Winkler as the dentist, the start of his return to making more regular appearances in front of the camera following his post-Happy Days run as a producer, and leading to Arrested Development and Barry. Winkker got an Emmy nom for the role, and gets the tone just right, alternately pathetic and determined and not a hint of the Fonz in sight. Elsewhere, we can’t get rid of George Vogelman, still hitting on Ellenor; and Jason Kravitz joins the cast as short, balding, Jewish-coded, and thoroughly pugnacious DA Richard Bay, here to alternately be obnoxious when Helen can’t and be a friend to Helen on her side. Oh, and Bobby now has a hairstyle that looks like he was trying out for 60s Star Trek down to the sideburns.
I like this one very much indeed, although I read the book between my first and second viewings and knowledge of the source material did kinda reveal a few flaws that I hadn’t spotted first time around.
Still need to see the Mitchum ones, I noticed they were on one of the free UK streaming services the other day so might give them a go soon.
Poor Things
I found The Lobster too upsetting to get much out of (that poor dog!) and only reluctantly agreed The Favourite was as good as everyone says, so I took too long to get to this one, and now I regret it. (Or maybe not, since now I have access to the blu-ray.) This was nasty in its own way, but Emma Stone’s performance and Lanthimos’ infectious affection for her character keep her from just being a misery sponge like so many of his other characters. It’s incredible what they’ve done together, letting us see this character grow to maturity over 2 1/2 hours, from the (gonna be honest, pretty Simple Jack-y) literal baby brain of the first act to the brilliant, confident surgeon of the last. Stone runs laps around the other fake Brits here (the hell is Mark Ruffalo’s accent?) and delivers some of the sexiest sex scenes I’ve seen since Nicole Kidman in Babygirl.
Willem Dafoe is great too, using his soft Scottish brogue to turn his entry in the parade of awful men into a great tragic monster. His deathbed reunion with Stone, and all the complicated feelings it brings up for her, almost brought me to tears.
And the production design! I’ll bring up the sapphire-blue Paris in winter dotted with red trees and all that suggestively curvaceous architecture, but pretty much every location is that good. I have to wonder if Lanthimos decided to film Stone’s captivity in black and white just to make sure the explosions of color in the rest of the movie really knock your hair back.
Still think Stone shouldn’t have gotten the second Oscar (and she seemed flustered/surprised so this isn’t on her!) but the physicality in the opening makes her a step up beyond Simple Jack, if only because she commits to “this is how a human moves when they don’t know how their legs work.” I have mixed feelings on this movie, and I’d like to see it again, but my fellow autistic and I at the theater really related to how Bella processes emotions differently from other people without the film judging her for that distance.
Definitely agreed on the autism rep — what rung truest to me was her difficulty understanding why people get so worked up over things that don’t make sense to her, and care so little about what she does care about (why doesn’t somebody just feed the kids in the pit?)
The scene at the yacht’s restaurant is autism 101 what with “I don’t know why we’re being coy and witty about these subjects, it’s not a big deal.” Also quickly reveals how Ruffalo’s character isn’t at all some cool, free spirit rogue but stiff and hyper-concerned with appearances in society.
FYI the same writer of Poor Things*, Alastair Grey, was probably autistic and his masterpiece, if you like experimental fiction, is Lanark.
*which is evidently very different in the second half, a deconstruction of the kind of reanimated monster woman story told here.
What did we read?
The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey
Finally, one of these books feels like a real novel. This mostly tracks from Jaxome’s point of view, making it a basic coming of age fantasy story that even makes it a bit clearer to follow what’s actually happening and how this world works.
Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Woman of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley
This is a collection of short stories my boyfriend lent me, aiming to share obscure ghost stories from Victorian women. Delightfully, each story begins with a short biography of the author. I’m enjoying reading one before bed.
“A Revelation”, Mary E Braddon
More of a thriller with a ghost setting off the story than a horror or ghost story – Braddon’s writing is very compelling, very fast, and oddly modern in its lack of description. It concerns a man who has seen his friend’s ghost and returns to England to follow it, only to uncover bigamy and fraud. Braddon sounds like a fascinating author and I would love to read more of her stuff.
”The Sculptor’s Angel”, Marie Corelli
A very simple story of a hypocritical, self-serving monk who bangs a young woman who takes her own life, only for him to sculpt her and be haunted by her as a result, delightfully slathered in exaggerated text.
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
This gets two interpretations generally: that it’s about the inherent qualities of human nature, and that it’s about the specific case of British schoolboys in Golding’s particular time period. Unfortunately, I have to take the camp that the middle is most accurate; it’s not so much about either specifically (though the fact that Golding is parodying specific works and people is very clear in the first and final scenes) as it is authoritarianism. The boys have operated under a strict and clear social order their whole lives, and this leads them to initially make arbitrary rules and then to jockey for power as opposed to problem-solve; Ralph works so hard to focus on problem-solving whilst everyone else is just happy that they get free time, with Jack seizing the opportunity to just be in charge.
For what it’s worth, I found the behaviour in the book disturbingly accurate, and I would suggest that the very people who criticise the book’s depiction of human behaviour are usually the very people who escalate conflict for no goddamned reason in their day-to-day lives.
8 Bit Theater, 0240-0270, Brian Clevinger
There are two very important developments in these strips. The first is aesthetic: Clevinger finally begins to use blurred stock photos for the background. This is where the strip’s total aesthetic is finally fully established. It has the dual effect of drawing the reader’s attention to the characters – who fully stand out from the photos in a way they didn’t from the sprite backgrounds – and also being crude enough to comedically contrast with the characters.
Secondly, this reveals Thief’s backstory as Prince of all the elves. This gives us a villain who could be described as ‘tertiary’ – not having the same level of characterisation as Garland but having more than random NPCs. He has a single satirical point – elves are arrogant and corrupt, doubly so when they’re chancellors – and so most of what he says is cliches with 8BT followups. We know he’s going to die and while we want to laugh now, we don’t want to care when he does.
“Now that we’re not in dresses anymore–” / “‘Cept for Black Mage.” / “Man, getting zinged by Fighter. How much does that have to suck, huh?” They then riff on different angles for how much it sucks.
“What do you mean I’M the cutest one?! You can’t even see my face!” Love that this skips over part of the conversation to get straight to the funny part.
There’s an absolutely hysterical moment where the characters are discussing their nightmares, and BM wins with a dream that he took off his hat and looked exactly like Fighter.
When discussing Thief’s backstory reveal, BM remarks that he’s not sure Thief is the elven prince, and that he could have set up the pillow thing weeks in advance to discredit the doctor.
There’s a great moment where Thief, who BM intends to stab, turns to expose his back to the others (stating outright that he’s doing so), only for BM to stab Fighter instead (“I should be surprised by that, but I’m not.”).
Another new development: Thief summons his law-ninja for the first time.
BM tries stabbing the shit out of Fighter, only to hit all of Fighter’s ketchup packets from RM’s plan from ages ago. This comic really has a gift for convenient justifications.
Jack crying and running off to start his own horrible little tribe feels very accurate to what a child would do even in normal circumstances.
The behavior in Lord of the Flies is ridiculous and I will kick the shit out of you for suggesting otherwise!
But the rules!!! The rules!!!
The White Dragon is my least favorite of the original trilogy because it is most like a conventional story instead of being about all the cool shit that happens when you’ve got dragons around.
Rereading as an adult I did like how callow (not *callous*) Jaxom is specifically toward Lytol. That’s parenthood for ya’!
Did you/will you read the Harper Hall books? Dragonsinger was the first Pern I read as a kid (save one short story) and I think it’s the kind of thing we might agree about more than the other Pern you’ve read.
I’m gonna keep reading them, though at a much slower rate – my mum has a huge collection, and I’m going to read one every time I visit now. I’ve already moved onto Dragonsong, which I like best out of all the ones I’ve read so far – it’s extremely conventional in presentation but also using it’s particular world a lot better – making me think I’ll like the future ones.
I really enjoyed Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, for what it’s worth. (Victorian sensation novels are the shit.) Fun thrills with some well-conceived, deftly sketched human moments.
Yeah, I think the intro to the story brought that up as her most famous? I’ll throw it on the list.
Tom Holland’s Rubicon, the first in his trilogy about the Roman Republic and Empire, which is very good and it’s making me want to watch Rome. He’s good at depicting societal trends in the Republic during all the political goings-on, and it is insane/hilarious/bleak how much we – and by that I mean America – IS Rome, with it’s obsession with celebrity gossip, worship of individual freedom mixed with aristocracy, misogyny, ideology queasily clashing with empire, endorsement-backed athletes/gladiators, and excess mixed with ascetic urges.
The first Fletch novel which is, well, showing it’s 1974 origins, with the main character sleeping with a fifteen year old addict (eew, fucking ew, dude). I almost turned it off there, but the central mystery was too clever and intriguing to not figure out alongside Fletch, plus there’s the great misdirect causing the B-plot to intersect with the A-plot at the climax. Fletch is a son of a bitch, to the extent that the book’s misogyny is an obvious, gaping weakness, much like Look Back In Anger (is this character complicated or just an asshole to women?), but he genuinely cares about injustice and working out complex problems, and it makes the book unusually intelligent even for your average mystery novel.
Slower going with the other books I’m reading, Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, but maybe I’ll make more time for them this weekend. The latter is a pretty devasting picture of an unhappy, uncertain, and alienated person masking to compensate for what they perceive as a “lack of being human.”
It’s interesting how much Fletch had to be watered down for the movies, but who on earth would have wanted to watch the guy from the books played by Chevy Chase? Maybe by Jon Hamm.
Hamm is good at that friendly jerk material in Confess, Fletch, though I didn’t picture him as the character here because he’s so young, 29 or 30.
Our Lady of Darkness, by Fritz Leiber
Excellent late October/early November reading. This is effectively a hangout novel–with a vivid and highly specific and detailed sense of time and place–that’s punctuated with some genuine terror. The inciting and climactic horror moments are as good as any I’ve ever read, and they play in two very different keys. And then you also get to hang out in mid-century San Francisco with a thinly veiled version of Leiber himself (some great details about the life of a working author here, too: I love Franz putting genuine effort into his novelizations and tie-in novels about a third-rate genre show), unraveling a supernatural and historical mystery. (Not a book for people who are going to be bored by lots of scenes of characters sitting around talking about things, to be fair, but very much my jam.)
There’s a lot here that’s interesting on a time capsule level, too. We’ve got some nonjudgmental references to fluid sexuality that are pretty damn good for a guy born in 1910: Franz overhears part of what he’s pretty sure is a minor lover’s quarrel between two of his male friends, roommates who both have girlfriends, and is embarrassed about being peripheral to it and curious about the overall thrust of the relationship, but not bothered by the notion that there a “degree” of queerness there; two minor female characters are apparently bisexual. Characters rightly defend pot as being no worse for you than alcohol, and probably better, just with less social backing. Leiber is too entertained by doing accents, but he has a couple minor Peruvian immigrants as characters, and they don’t feel like complete stereotypes. And–very 1977–we have the openly discussed notion that a lot of men are attracted to teenagers but that it’s sleazy and shameful to do anything about it (actually, fairly principled for that era: realistic-to-cynical about urges, but not thinking wanting should be the same as having), but not so sleazy and shameful that it’s a deal-breaker to have a friend you suspect you shouldn’t leave alone with a teenage girl. On an academic level, at least, it’s interesting to see writers who lived through major social shifts trying to work out a new form of sexual morality on the fly after they’d realized how many flaws were in the old one.
Anyway, this is good, especially if you like hangout novels, horror, ominous research, and very particular settings. Would recommend.
El Dorado Drive, by Megan Abbott
Abbott’s latest, though I let it sit on my shelves for shamefully long, considering how much I love her work. This is good (the only Abbott I haven’t liked is The Turnout, and I’d still reread it to see if I’ll like it more later), a strong and typically atmospheric suspense story about an MLM-adjacent scheme in the economically collapsing suburbs of Detroit and how it affects three sisters.
One of my favorite plot escalations and catalysts is the sudden appearance of a dead body in connection with a thriving crime ecosystem that’s been nonviolent until then: this is the shit that threatens to blow everything apart. Suddenly, the cops are nosing around your “club” that’s actually a thriving pyramid scheme; suddenly, people don’t trust each other anymore, and they might start talking. Abbott handles both the pre-collapse giddiness of the scheme and the post-collapse paranoia incredibly well. Her prose always has a slightly feverish quality, and it works very well here. There’s a red herring that feels a little too deliberately constructed, but that doesn’t matter too much, because this isn’t a proper mystery–it’s about being immersed in all this simmering hope and suspicion.
Nicely complex characterization here, including of the supporting characters.
Glad you confirmed my interest in Lieber! Something really positive I got from living in SF during my college years was exactly that sense of sexual fluidity – your neighbors and friends may not be straight, and that’s a fact of life, not a huge scandal.
“The inciting and climactic horror moments are as good as any I’ve ever read, and they play in two very different keys” — it’s been easily 20 years since I read this and those are still in my head, that first one of seeing … something … in the window is especially outstanding. Great atmospheric stuff and an influence on Ghostbusters’ haunted architecture?
Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders by Al Murray and James Holland – If you want a fluffy and quick glimpse at the war of WWII in Italy, Germany, and Japan, this will do. If you have a greater knowledge already, this covers familiar ground. I learned a few new things – there was a failed coup on the cusp of Japan’s formal surrender – but I feel like this book was not for me. And the afterword, with a section about What We in 2025 Can Learn from WWII, really didn’t need to be there.
Moving along in Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s book on Amelia Earhart and her promoter husband. Even though it’s fair to say that without her hubby to make her famous, Earhart probably would not have achieved what she did as a pilot and moreover as a feminist, her hubby is still really hard to like, even if she really did love him. Shapiro is a pretty good writer and researcher, but this book is rife with repetition. Whatever happened to editing?
Stations Of The Tide by Michael Swanwick – An unnamed government bureaucrat is sent to a distant planet experiencing flooding from cataclysmic polar melt to recover forbidden tech that could save it. There is more than that simple synopsis going on, much of which is unstated, elliptical, or only hinted at. This is science fiction but Swanwick’s prose borders on surrealism in its evocative descriptions of Miranda. The world building is detailed and complete, not directly stated but filled in from the edges of the story. Miranda is filled with magic (real or perceived) and hidden knowledge. There is an AI construct which constantly confuses the protagonist and the reader. Just what the stolen tech is is surprisingly difficult to answer. The running theme is secrets and limitations of knowledge and the assumptions we make from evidence. It’s a puzzle book with Swanwick dropping hints in the manner of Gene Wolfe. I tried to reexamine clues after the end when the bureaucrat exposed the deceptions. I think the clues were all there, placed in all the scenes that didn’t make sense, or in the brief encounters. The whoa, paradigm shift, at the end caused things to come into focus only slightly as scattered puzzle pieces. I got The Tempest allusions, and the nameless bureaucrat’s quest feels like Kafka’s The Castle. There are references to Dune, Asimov and the whole thing feels like Pratchett at times too. It required work and my reading was done at night when I was tired. Difficult to recommend but there is something going on here that won it the Nebula for its year.
Looking at the Looney Tunes one and respectfully, I cannot read anymore articles – or as I call them, Bafflers – about how this pop culture genre or cultural touchstone has declined or gotten worse in late capitalism, not because they’re wrong, but they’re all increasingly predictable and depressing. We know! We know things have gotten worse! The stoic in me asks, “Okay well now fucking what?”
No! No!! That article is excellent and the FAR perhaps did it a disservice in the description, it is about the actual late-period Warner Brothers Looney Tunes in the 60s, when changes to the studio and the broader theatrical landscape meant a cheaper model without most of the beloved characters. It is historical, in other words, and while certain declines are perhaps tied to existing systems this gets into details about how these cartoons did and did not reflect issues of the day while analyzing them well (and brutally!) on an aesthetic level. It is really good!
Oh my bad, I made a huge assumption! But maybe I need to write my own Baffler about how much this kind of writing bores me instead of unloading it here lol. I also grew up in the video store era so I watched a ton of these also-ran Looney Tunes movies and compilations from the seventies and eighties too.
I can see why you would assume that, the FAR has perhaps gone to that well too often! Would love to read your counter-piece. And the article alludes to those movies, which stitched together a lot of Tunes that may have been lesser but were still of the era before this — they have Bugs Bunny, for example. This shit is the real dregs.
And based on The Day The Earth Blew Up, the Looney Tunes are in good hands artistically if not studio-wise.
Gonna hard disagree with you, but glad someone liked it.
I think it suffers a bit for being a movie, but is clearly ten shorts stitched together to make a movie, so that is good. The tone is a bit up-to-date but I think that’s necessary at this point? I liked the mania a lot and the focus on character is mercifully minimal (again, the demands of a feature rear their heads but oh well).
Imagine if they had met at The Carnegie!
Year of the Month update!
This November, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 2018!
Nov. 7th: Gillian Nelson: A Wrinkle in Time
Nov. 10th: Bridgett Taylor: Aquaman
Nov. 12th: Ben Hohenstatt: Bark Your Head Off, Dog
Nov. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Christopher Robin/Mary Poppins Returns
Nov. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros
And in December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery