The Friday Article Roundup
Return to the land of the living and its best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will stay upright with:
Thanks to the very much alive Lauren James! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Dave Holmes writes for Esquire about how MTV shut down last week — except it didn’t:
At the time of that MTV UK/Australia announcement, the reporting on this story was mostly pretty accurate. But the headlines had “MTV” and “GOING OFF THE AIR” and “NEW YEAR’S EVE” in them, and the less explosive facts were buried much deeper into the body of the articles than anyone bothers to read anymore—which is to say, in the first paragraph. So the story became “MTV GOING OFF THE AIR NEW YEAR’S EVE.” TikTok and Instagram news-aggregator sites ran with it, and all of a sudden adult human beings started to believe MTV was going off the air because they saw it on, like, @PopBarf420. And people posted tributes. Lots of them. Even people who should have known better.
At Vulture, Will Tavlin examines how Mubi’s efforts to expand undermined its authority:
In recent years, Mubi has hired top executives from Netflix and Discovery. This year, it acquired its first new television shows: Mussolini: Son of a Century, Joe Wright’s dramatization of the rise of Il Duce, which turns the history of fascism into titillating pop, and Hal & Harper, directed by Cooper Raiff, a pseudo-mumblecore family drama starring himself and Lili Reinhart as 20-something siblings. The company is building theaters in Los Angeles and Mexico City and spoke to the Lower East Side’s Metrograph about a possible sale. The point of all of this is expansion: The Sequoia investment is supposed to help Mubi prepare for an IPO, which (CEO Efe) Cakarel hopes to launch in something like ten to 12 years.
Emma Silvers at Coyote reports on longtime Bay Area rock club Bottom of the Hill preparing to shut down:
Yes, there are weighty operating costs (insurance alone is now about $34,000 annually). But massive shifts in San Francisco’s demographics — like ever-fewer working-class folks and people in the service industry — have also played a role. Then there’s the increasing corporatization of the live music ecosystem, which has made it harder to stay competitive when booking talent. Meanwhile, societal changes that arrived with the pandemic (people staying home more often, and relying on streaming services for entertainment) mean it’s tough to do business the way they used to. Keeping ticket prices low has become a challenge.
At The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch makes the case for reading as indulgent pleasure instead of noble calling:
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
And after being laid off, Vadim Rizov looks back at a decade-plus at Filmmaker Magazine, and the intersections of work and film and life:
I wanted an interview with Frank Beauvais about his Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, and I thought an all-archival essay-film with a literary bent would be of interest to archival producer/documentarian Sierra Pettengill. As we all settled into pandemic torpor, Sierra conducted an email interview, in which she correctly guessed that Annie Ernaux’s The Years was an influence on the narration. I didn’t know Ernaux’s work, made a note of it and the next year finally got around to The Years. I immediately realized I needed to buy and read everything she’s ever had translated; the following year, I was ready to to be one of three journalists in a room for an interview about her film made with her son, The Super 8 Years, and later that year she won the Nobel. Pretty good!
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Twenty-One, “Shadow Dance”
Kind of a mediocre episode; I keep saying this, but it really is frustrating that the show is at its least interesting when moving pieces into place. Franklin’s colliding with his own self-righteousness is alright, if a bit predictable; the final reveal of Sheridan’s wife is great. Outside of that, it feels like we’re slogging our way to the big reveal. I’m coming to the conclusion that, when it comes to serialised fiction, twenty-odd episode seasons are actually severely overrated and 13-episode seasons are better; less than that, and you don’t have enough time to really feel the narrative, more than that and you end up spinning wheels for a while.
Granted, Franklin’s walkabout has proved as fruitful as G’Kar’s time in prison, but there’s so many places in this show where the season is marking time until we get to the good stuff. Buffy and Angel both managed to find the balance so much better, mainly because both have strong MOTW elements; even the first season of this managed to keep steady using that concept. Makes me think the best time for serialised television was the 00’s, where shows like LOST and Battlestar Galactica and even Scrubs managed to remember that episodic storytelling is a necessary element.
What annoyed me most about the first season of the show was when it spent time with characters I found boring (humans, mostly) at the expense of cool characters (aliens, except for the non-Delenn and Lennier Minbari). As the show went on, the characters largely improved, so I enjoy it for time spent with those characters and wheel-spinning is generally less of a concern. Franklin is a good case in point, the show pushes his addiction as far as it can go and realizes it can’t stretch over the whole season, his walkabout is pretty stupid as a concept and is padding him out until the end of the season, but as time spent it’s largely fine.
Stranger Things, “The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” – Well, more like abduction since we see it happen, but of course the title is a callback to the beginning. Having gotten everyone together once, the team goes back to groups of two and three. Highlight: the plot pivots on a Back to the Future reference.
The Practice, “The Case of Harland Basset” – Basset being the sad sack lawyer played by Ernie Sabella, only the suit against Big Pharma not doing nearly enough to test drugs for use by kids or to prevent doctors from going off labels has energized him, and he stops being the worst lawyer in Boston. The case is interesting – and dear lord, if the FDA was considered the gold standard when it was already sleeping with Big Pharma in the 90s and making lots of mistake, how bad are things now? – and Sabella is excellent here. But by having Basset be totally competent, we get just another civil suit, drama wise. This could have been a season two Jimmy case. For the third week in a row, Bobby barely appears. What’s up with that?
Frasier, “Juvenilia” – Plot A: Frasier is pushed to go on a teen-oriented talk show, and finds the hosts ready to tear him limb from limb. Only a timely intervention by Kirby the former tutee turned intern saves the day. Some funny bits here and maybe it’s because I am not so young, but seeing Frasier put the teens in their place was satisfying. Plot B: Niles, trying to come up with a new gift for Daphne, tries to steal a street sign from Daphne Lane. Modetare hilarity ensues. Plot C: Frasier is not sure why a co-worker he made out with at a staff party is being standoffish. Really not much to this, but Lindsey Crouse gets to guest star.
Babylon 5 — season four ends with two episodes of denoument/epilogue and a damn dedication before the credits, why did it go on for another season? I suppose there are threads to follow (and hey, work is pay is health care, nothing wrong with keeping that going another year) but this really feels like a conclusion. There is some happiness and compatibility that does not exactly ring true, floods of water under certain bridges, but it is countered by the season finale and its skips through time, explicitly referencing a sci-fi classic that is nowhere near as optimistic. The episode, like a lot of previous ones, is concerned with truth and lies, it’s another media story of a sort and there is a really dark bit if you think about it about preserving truth at the expense of vast amounts of life. But it’s ambitious and knotty, the show at its best.
The Nest — Icelandic short where Hlynur Pálmason films his three kids building and playing in a pretty sick “tree” house (it’s actually on a pole in the middle of nowhere), shot from one perspective over what the press says is a year. Iceland’s extremely variable weather does not make that clear, certain assumptive signifiers of time passing made it seem like more time was passing and this affects how the viewer interprets something, not sure if that is intentional. But good, the fixed perspective seems precious but requires submission to a rewarding rhythm.
Extract — rewatch of a very shaggy and funny flick. Mike Judge’s companion to Office Space, where Jason Bateman is a dissatisfied boss at the see title factory, he and his wife Kristen Wiig are in a rut and this spills over to his dealings with the business he started. Bateman is far more active than Ron Livingston and his supervisor role is portrayed as necessary and benevolent, especially because everyone on the floor is a dinkus (as JK Simmons, Bateman’s number 2, describes them) — this could be superior but it is just true because Judge as always has a great eye for faces and foibles. Beth Grant is hilariously bitchy and righteous, Clifton Collins Jr. is swaggering and well-meaning if dopey, TJ Miller is in this and nearly unrecognizable as a dirtbag metalhead, Ben Affleck is in this and looks (and in many ways is acting) like TJ Miller, his dirtbag mode is always so welcome compared to his leading performances. Nearly walking away with the movie is Dustin Milligan as the pretty boy gigolo Bateman hires to seduce Wiig (in a complicated and drugged-out scheme to justify his own potential cheating), he is dumb as a post and hilariously earnest. Things amble along for 90 minutes and a lesson or two is not so much learned as remembered, Judge is in many ways a conservative guy but that works for a low-key film like this, Tubi providing a service for the tired and hungover individual.
The Nest is a pretty great short, with a surprising amount of suspense generated at one point!
Lol, that suspense is what I was talking about! The resolution is ultimately what I was expecting when the action first took place but but the way time appeared to be passing sure seemed to indicate it was likely not happening.
I’ve got to assume there was a little mischievous intent there! It certainly gives the film a little more juice, although it’d be a fun way to spend a little time anyway.
Apparently B5 was originally planned to have five seasons, then they thought they were going to get cancelled in season four so they powered through all the plot beats, then they got season five anyway. They shot a finale for season four, but decided to move it to the end of season five and shot a new finale for season four. It’s all quite simple, actually
Always Sunny – currently have access to Netflix again which is where this resides here, so figured I’d catch up… but turns out I’m only one season behind rather than two, which I didn’t realise until I was a few minutes into “The Gang Inflates”. Kept watching anyway because it’s a funny episode, especially Dee gluing her hands to stuff way beyond the point where it makes any sense. Then jumped forward to the actual first episode I hadn’t seen, the Abbott Elementary crossover. A few funny moments but watching a crossover with a show I don’t watch or have any interest in left me a bit distant.
The episode unintentionally makes for a pretty good critique of Abbott Elementary, namely that the show does not have enough awful people to create strong comedic tension and chaos. If characters were pissing into lockers every season, I’d watch it! (My friend also observed that as a native Philadelphian, the kids aren’t mean/tough enough.)
The kids are also very ill-informed about 9/11.
Funniest scene as the Gang get so piqued they talk themselves into thinking 9/11 was staged. “Have you ever seen the Towers?”
I think Abbott has enough tension to do what it wants to do, which is be an old fashioned hugging and learning sitcom, but throwing it up directly against Sunny ended up exposing both show’s weaknesses to a point.
But there’s the rub, I don’t think this exposed any of Sunny’s weaknesses because it actively pisses on most real learning, whereas Abbott’s fervent need for a lesson (and unintentional normalizing of dysfunction, per my city government friend) is debilitating to its humor. If I was in the writers room, I’d build a MORE FUNNY buzzer whenever they pivoted to stuff about being nice to the kids, teaching, blah dee blah dee blah. This isn’t a ted talk, it’s a comedy.
Having sat through two crossovers to shows that don’t even exist anymore on The Practice, I can so relate.
My Bloody Valentine 3D
A stronger-than-I-expected remake of a beloved, cheerfully grubby slasher classic. This is obviously glossier, but it commits to its depressed coal mining town setting enough to muster a fair amount of atmosphere, and Jensen Ackles is a pretty good center figure, even with most of his charisma and liveliness dialed back. Bonus points for Kevin Tighe and Tom Atkins, and for letting Edi Gathegi make it to the end of the film. Best of all, when the rest of horror was still bogged down in winky-winky meta movies that learned all the wrong lessons from Scream, this was out there playing it straight. It actually still, interestingly enough, borrows a lot from Scream, but it’s mining the movie for story tips (how to set up certain red herrings, for example), not tone. Some pretty good, gory kills, although it sometimes went too CGI for my tastes. A surprising amount of full-frontal nudity.
What did we read?
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0510-0540, Brian Clevinger
Great joke of BM writing down his own stupid joke and stopping everything to do so.
The characters land in an icy wasteland. Which leads to the fantastic squidhead cultist plot. This is the point where even offhand lines are incredibly quotable (“Other than you guys, and especially Fighter, my hatred of Sarda is without peer.”). The lines aim to be iconic but are just enough rooted in the specific situation to be applicable and grounded (even when the characters are pulled into a space outside time and also space). We are actually deep into the point where the characters don’t need justifications to insult each other; the sheer chemistry at this point is carrying them.
Got into a big chunk of Mansfield Park. So far it appears to be Austen’s Regency version of Cinderella, with an underappreciated and overlooked female ward of a crappy family, complete with awful mother figure. This means it inherits some of Cinderella’s problems, specifically the passive protagonist – hard not to compare Fanny Price’s modesty with Elizabeth Bennett, a clever, resourceful woman who’s stubborn to a fault – and even for me, the awfulness of most of the characters seems overdone. Still well-written and Austen’s ability to walk this tightrope between moral ambiguity and social satire is always awe-inspiring. The adaptations tend to lose her sarcasm and that she refuses to tell readers exactly how to respond to the behavior on display.
Petersburg by Andrei Bely – Only 70 pages in because it’s dense. Fantastic prose and it appears at least a few years ahead of what Modernists were up to in Paris and beyond.
Visions of the Future – The recent translation of Mishima’s later short stories. One of these is an outright ghost story akin to Aickman, good stuff. I might be old enough now to condemn Mishima’s solipsistic obsession with beauty and youth, to be preserved by violence, as demonstrated in “Peacocks.” His most interesting works – and the ones his critics don’t cite enough – are the books and stories where he can condemn his own point of view or see it with a more jaded eye. (The Temple of Dawn, his last work, ends with a kind of Buddhist nihilism, rebuking the reincarnation cycle which has gripped the main character his whole life as delusion).
Working my way through Millard’s Destiny of the Republic. Solid book about not just Garfield and his killer but of the time, though Millard’s writing style feels just a bit too friendly. I guess i like history to be Serious.
Also reading a book about the 1966 baseball season, with a focus on the Orioles and the Dodgers. Spring training cannot come soon enough, but this helps.
The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog – another Christmas present, about 2/3 of the way through this and enjoying it very much. It’s a study of truth, with chapters on things like how truth is represented in documentaries and how some lies can get at a deeper truth despite not technically being true in themselves. Currently on a long chapter about the history of “fake news”, i.e. important lies that have had historical impact. As ever, reading in Herzog’s voice inside my head makes it about 100 times more enjoyable.
Will probably agree with The Atlantic for once. The obsession with art as virtue, inherently moral and good, is very understandable and not even wrong, exactly. As they say, though, kids don’t want to get into a hobby because it’s healthy. I’m still too much of a Wildean to go for that thinking anyway (“art is, in and of itself, quite useless”)* and I immediately want to delve into what “good” exactly means in this context. Tote-bag wearing liberal? Decent petit-bourgeois citizen of society? One more “capitalism involves no ethical choices” millennial?
*Something that always drew me to queer nihilist art like Kathy Acker and John Waters was that they saw the society around them as contemptible and hateful towards the marginalized, so they had zero interest in making art that was “good” for you, the citizen of said society.
Amazing troll job by the Atlantic to include a link to a Thomas Chatterton Williams piece in the middle of this. That’s right bitches! This is who we are!
The article, and to be fair the organizations/attitudes it cites, conflates reading as the act of experiencing art via the printed word with reading as the act of demonstrating literacy, I think the latter is what is being tied to virtue and certainly perpetuating of self-government. I don’t think that is necessarily wrong but it is certainly not logically consistent, one does not guarantee the other. And I think that ties back to the art case — reading does not make you good. There is a really interesting unpulled thread here though, the author makes a strong case for reading as individual pleasure but what about oral performance? The word spoken as opposed to just written, from Homer to certain poets in our midst even now. That is communal and perhaps democratic as well.
Too democratic for The Atlantic perhaps, to go to an open mic and exist among the PLEBS?