The Friday Article Roundup
Get close to the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week you will get turned on by:
Send your own picks throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At 4 Columns, Jo Livingstone considers a new exhibition of medieval art focusing on desire:
If the Middle Ages existed before capitalism, which is the axis of our sexuality, then what can contemplating the hot red pussy of a pre-credit-card God do for us? In the simplest and most radical sense it proves that there is desire—there is you—beyond and behind and before and after money as we know it.
Damon Krukowski says we are already engulfed in AI slop — and it’s time to plan for the future:
When I look past AI, I feel rather cheerful. Because what AI is bad at, necessarily, is what humans are good at. Could there be a more positive development, at this absurd moment of capital spinning out of control, than a rededication to the value of human labor? Music may again – I hope it will again – go first in this regard. Because what puts music in the forefront of so many technological trends is the same thing that rescues it after each debacle: music is simple to make, easy to share, and universally enjoyed.
At Film Comment, Alice Lovejoy reports on the film laboratory L’Abominable taking over a film studio’s shut-down factory:
Under L’Abominable’s watch, a section of the Éclair laboratories is not only returning to its original function, but also assuming some of the multipurpose identity that made Éclair so central to the film industry in the first place. Part of this has to do with the machines that L’Abominable has amassed over the years, which already allow it to accommodate a film’s entire postproduction workflow, up to the release print and laser subtitling. When the Navire Argo is finished, its work will extend to photochemical film’s projected and archival lives.
Nathan Goldwag looks at the particular and pernicious relationship between science fiction tropes and our visions for real life for Heat Death:
But what’s genuinely unusual about this particular set of shibboleths is that they aren’t merely plot dressing or vehicles for character dynamics. Instead, they’re fully-formed things: physical objects that could theoretically exist, that were designed by people who thought they would exist, and that have been subject to a considerable amount of speculation and analysis about how to bridge the gap between reality and imagination…. Whether or not (currently fictional) helium-3 mining is feasible is a question that millions (billions!) of dollars hang on — something that makes “helium-3 mining” a very different kind of TV trope than, say, to “there was only one bed” or “enemies to lovers.”
For the Washington Post, Chris Richards takes in a Geese show and tries to get out of his head:
After the show, I lurked outside on the curb to see who funneled out, and it wasn’t exactly America’s youth. There were some teenagers, and I felt bad for them. First, for having to share their new favorite band with so many Xers. Second, for having a new favorite band that didn’t repel these older people in the first place. Meanwhile, sidewalk chatter from the 20-somethings seemed to bristle with anxious positivity. “Awesome!” “So sick!” “Amazing, right?” The tone of their voices felt as sticky inside my skull as Winter’s — the sound of young dudes trying to confirm that other young dudes had just witnessed a miracle that nobody felt quite sure about. Then I snapped out of it. How dare I presuppose to understand what goes on inside bros’ minds? A state of not-knowing is where I should want to be, anyway.
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode FIfteen, “Interludes and Examination”
“We carved up the galaxy, you and I.”
Not all what I expected it to be, based on the title. A lot of B5 episodes are trying to be what this is and tend not to succeed nearly as well – it’s a middle beat between two other beats, over and over. The Shadows finally come out of the open, Franklin is finally honest with himself about his addiction, Londo recommits to being evil, and Kosh finally makes a move and is killed for it. That second one has the most substance, to me – Franklin’s character is rooted in a Mackeyian self-righteousness that even Sheridan doesn’t have, something inborn and prepared as opposed to reactive – which is always at its most delightful when it’s turned back on itself.
Londo’s plot is pretty fun, though – it’s kind of like the second season finale in Avatar: The Last Airbender, where Zuko goes back to being evil; it works a lot better here because a) Babylon 5 has a lot more going on and b) it’s happening not just as a general subversion of expectations but as an extension of Londo’s basic character; as he points out in a flashback*, he’s a sentimentalist, and specifically he basically responds to whatever is happening around him. When things were going well and everyone was grumpy and unfun with him, he was reconsidering; one woman dies and suddenly he’s vindictive against the universe. He has the emotional resilience of a toddler.
*The flashbacks are cheesy as hell, but they work so fantastically because that’s exactly how Londo would remember those moments.
Absolutely sick alien design with the gas mask alien.
MST3K Turkey Day – If you missed it yesterday, don’t worry, it’s going till Sunday. The big twist this year is that the Netflix movies have escaped the paywall, and are paired with older films thematically related in some way (Time Travellers and Time Chasers, Avalanche and The Day the Earth Froze, etc). The good news is that I found myself laughing almost as much as the Jonah era as the Mike and Joel eras. The bad news is that watching the original Mads and Pearl the same day as Felicia and Patton, the latter just look that much worse. Leading to the low point of the day, a new take on Mr. B Natural with the new Mads doing the riifing. And doing it badly. Some good gags but they have no timing for it at all. Anyway, stuck around on and off till dinner time, marvelled at Time Chasers anew, and found myself actually engaged by the story in Time Travellers.
Bad Day at Black Rock – Saw this a long time ago, and my memories of it were not quite right. I thought this was a very spare movie with a small cast filmed entirely outdoors. The reality is something with a pretty sizeable (and talented) cast, and a lot of indoor shots that aren’t as well composed as the outdoor stuff. And maybe ir’s because I knew what was coming, but everything was awfully on the nose. But Sturges’s direction is excellent and Tracy is excellent and all those other big names are excellent. Is this the first contemporary Western? Could be.
The Practice, “Settling” – Donnie Wahlberg as an ex-con who gets out of prison and kidnaps bobby, who he blames for not mounting a proper defense. In retrospect, Bobby agrees. I am not sure of the point of this since it’s almost a foregone conclusion this ends badly for Wahlberg, and since it’s not like Walhberg is going to actually get anything useful from this exercise. But within that limitation, fairly well done.
Ride the Pink Horse – a really interesting noir, if perhaps not the most entertaining. Robert Montgomery (who also directed) plays an army veteran who tries to blackmail the mobster responsible for the death of his best friend. The setting is unusual for noir (a town in New Mexico, during fiesta) and much of the plot revolves around the odd relationship between the protagonist and a young local woman who becomes fascinated with him after having a premonition of his death. There are some offbeat supporting performances (the bad guy has a hearing aid, and when he loses it towards the end of the film he starts talking like Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks) and a few really striking scenes, particularly one where Pancho the friendly local carnival operator gets beaten up while a bunch of kids look on in horror from his merry-go-round. Much of the climax of the film takes place while Montgomery is badly injured and staggering around the town which is always a tough trick to pull off, his inability to string a sentence together becomes a bit of a struggle. But it’s pretty solid overall and definitely stands out from the crowd thanks to the unusual plot elements and setting.
Blues Brothers – in the theater, with the nephews! Who had some trouble with the theater’s admittedly crummy seats and the later time but still thrilled to the car chases. The movie itself remains an all-timer, and the “Think” scene in particular is musical perfection.
The Eternaut (ep1) – Follows the opening of the graphic novel fairly closely with a group of friends playing their weekly card game when the world suddenly goes to hell with a mysterious “snow” falling. One leaves the house and immediately drops dead in the mysterious “snow”. The men decide they must reach the outside world to see what’s going on. The episode ends with Juan leaving the home in the iconic Eternaut suit. It was quite tense while introducing the characters and establishing things. Glad they kept the middle-age group of men and didn’t age them down, which I feared with the opening scene. Looking forward as the mystery unfolds and timey-wimey stuff. The comic is so great as an allegory for fascism in Argentina. Author Hector German Oesterheld and most of his family mysteriously disappeared under the military junta.
What did we read?
The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin
Easily my favourite Le Guin so far. No bullshit, just her beliefs for a good society presented in a clear-eyed story. And it specifically uses the qualities of a story; whilst it delves into the theory of an anarchist society, it’s definitely much more about the emotions a born-and-bred anarchist would have, and it manages to win me over by successfully conveying that living in an anarchist society would still be aggravating as hell, just far less aggravating than living in an authoritarian capitalist one.
The most interesting part of the book is when she almost outright says that capitalism is child abuse that warps a person for the rest of their lives into seeing other people as enemies, competitors, and resources as opposed to fellow citizens, drenching us in flopsweat as we analyse each other for threats. She convincingly argues that the anarchists simply don’t have the trauma that would drive them to use or seek revenge on each other, even when they find each other irritating.
Also, one drive of the book is that the individual doesn’t have to do work they don’t want to do; the protagonist is repeatedly disturbed by coercion as a method of either punishment or productivity, seeing it as something that inhibits drive; on top of this, he basically opens the book with an observation that excess is seen as excrement, so people mostly don’t make things they don’t need anyway; their individual work is enough and they don’t feel the need to force it on everyone else.
The end of the book delves into how even the anarchists have fallen into staid enforcement of social rules that go against what they ostensibly stand for; not enough to go anywhere really interesting with it, but enough to satisfy my understanding of human nature, and Le Guin’s point becomes how revolution can be eternal without truly being exhausting.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0330-360, Brian Clevinger
This sequence covers the first half of the Dwarflands arc; Thief is convinced by his father to rejoin the Light Warriors and set out to the Dwarflands for the Earth Orb. This is interesting because it’s an incredibly rare case of the comic taking itself seriously; King Elf waxes lyrical about the nature of elves and their ties to the old rules, and it’s a bunch of cool sounding BS. Even better, it’s also a rare sequence where Thief and Black Mage end up teaming together to inconvenience Red Mage specifically – he’s the one trying ot keep the plot moving, and the two of them – Thief out of racism, BM out of general malice – get caught up ruining his plans by murdering all the dwarves.
It’s a fantastic moment of comic escalation that kills me every time, and clearly Clevinger let himself get carried away with it – the first few times have some buildup, but then it escalates and escalates. More than any other storytelling, comedy has a rhythm to it that can only really be found, not made, as an idea seizes you. In this case, a Thief/BM teamup is fairly rare, and RM being the one trying to keep things running is even rarer. The originality of the idea makes it even funnier; it’s rare to see Thief basically lose impulse control, but it makes sense that he’d get caught up in bloodlust over dwarves.
This also has the first of the nerd fight conversations RM and BM will indulge in; this one is Batman vs Dr Doom, and BM uses a combination of character details – both characters are generally well-prepped and intelligent, and a neutral ground that gives neither the advantage is a necessary part of the conversation – and narrative theory – BM argues that Batman is necessarily a reactionary character and villains like Doom initiate things – to argue Doom, with the killer idea being that if Batman is fighting Doom, it’s because Doom wants him there, and if Doom wants him there, it’s because even defeat will advance Doom’s plan.
This reveals that RM’s transvestite sensibilities come from daddy issues.
Fantastic gag of RM and Black Belt discussing the components of an airship then revealing they have no idea what they’re talking about.
The quiet game! Fighter sees a huge flaw in the plan but can’t bring himself to lose the quiet game. It also has Thief try and provoke Fighter into talking by getting him to imply he hates swords.
RM suggests an explosively suicidal plan, and when asked about landing, insists that planning too far ahead is calcifying.
Some King Steve! He rules because of his good-natured positivity. When informed that 52% of pollsters literally took a hole in the head over him, he simply remarks, “Tough but fair.”
There’s a great moment where RM casts an illusion spell so that dwarves see dwarves and the LW see them as themselves, only for the characters to descend into philosophy because of semantics, to RM’s irritation as he complains about them taking it literally.
I will come back to this when I have more time but yes, this is great LeGuin. The walk away aspect surfaces in Omelas of course but here LeGuin is grimmer about what is walked away from and how it is a darker choice than utopia, anarchist utilitarianism at its worst. But the other great thing about the book, indicated by the dedication, is how it is also a love story and LeGuin writes beautifully in this regard, with the larger thematic resonance of how actual people can and do exist here.
Le Guin is a terrific essayist, and you can see that gift in The Dispossessed, but it’s fully fleshed out and embodied through the story in a fascinating way. Her novels can be hit-or-miss for me even when I recognize their greatness, but this book alone make a good argument for the idea that there was never a more effective writer of utopias.
I need to read Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, which is in conversation with this in what I presume is an interesting way.
I know I read The Dispossessed (my books list tells me in was in 2007], but I recall literally nothing about it.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera — This took some time to get moving, but there!s a big twist about 50 pages where the story that was set up changes into something else. Mostly a comedy with some psychological insight. Also real horny.
Stephen R. Donaldson writing as Reed Stephens, The Man Who Tried to Get Away — the third of, so far, four books in this hard boiled mystery series by Donaldson, better known for his fantasy work (viz. the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which I found extremely powerful and moving). This is the first of these that really feels like the same writer. The other two were more potboilers with some internal conflict. This is the kind of morose story about a man fundamentally at odds with his existence but unwilling to give up that I come to Donaldson for. I understand why people could find his work hard to take, but I love it, and so this is in my view the best of the “Man Who” novels so far.
Not a good reading week. Started Billy Bathgate and could not stand the purple prose, not what I expected from the author of Ragtime. Started a book about how the brain has altered to be able to read by a neurologist, but she both is having trouble writing for laymen and also very purple. So now it’s to the 24th Inspector Rebus novel (there since a 25th), and while these are reliably readable, I do wonder if Rankin should have stopped where he had seemed to in 2007.