The Friday Article Roundup
Get intellectual with this week's best pop culture writing.
This week, you will expand your horizons with:
The FAR would not be as expansive without the contributions of Bridgett Taylor! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
For The Point, Sheena Meng recalls a literary magazine as an opening to another world:
It was there that I started to nurse what one might call a literary counterlife. Flipping through old issues of Raritan did not supply me with anything as systematic as an education, but given the little regard my family had for reading—I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a single book with them—and the fact that, at school, I had never heard the word “literature” uttered without the one-two punch of “AP” before it, the publication served as a window through which I could see everything I didn’t know, but about which I could learn….The good life my upbringing had laid out for me was something like this: hustle your way into a T-20 for business or computer science, work up to a middle-management position in Jersey, die. Raritan showed there was a path out.
Kevin Ng examines how the Asian ethnicity of a character affects Heated Rivalry for Reactor:
Shane’s ethnicity is always explored in relation to others, whether it be his bosses, fans, sponsors, or peers. In each of these interactions, you see how his ethnicity comes with the weight of expectation, of fulfilling a particular role—and you see how that expectation prevents him from leading an authentic, free life. There’s satisfaction, too, in using hockey—the whitest major league sport—as a medium through which to explore queer Asian masculinity, as if subverting the decentering and desexualization of Asian men in the UFC world despite its origins in Asian martial arts.
R. Emmet Sweeney interviews DTV action king Jesse V. Johnson about his new movie Thieves Highway and finding the realness in a script:
I’m looking for something that has that smell of cattle manure, the smell of diesel in the morning, the shot in Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner where he checks the oil and wipes it with his hand. This is something that someone who has checked the oil in a thousand cars has done. McQueen was a car nut. Moments like that are what stand out to me. Now they don’t assure you of having a fantastic movie. That’s my task, but you have those little pieces of spice in a script, it draws me to it. And the script that Travis [Mills] gave me had 10 or 15 of those in a hundred page script. And that’s a high percentage. And against my better judgment, I liked it. I say that because whenever you get involved in something that has no money or actors attached, it’s going to be a marathon.
At his substack, Peter Raleigh goes long on the factotums of corruption in Michael Clayton and Eyes Wide Shut:
“I’m not the guy you kill, I’m the guy you buy,” Clayton says of himself in the film’s final scene, and it’s a description that could apply to Bill Harford as well: a man easily pacified by a small taste of what everybody else around him is getting. That neither man is truly rich—Harford is certainly well-off but not in the same weight class as his clients, and Clayton finds himself a house-poor member of biglaw’s permanent upper middle class—adds to the quiet disgrace of their collaboration with genuine evil. They’ve both been bought, and they’ve both been bought cheap, by men who could afford to pay a lot better. Their growing self-loathing over the course of both films reflects a dawning awareness of how small they both are, in worlds they’ve waded through the muck to reach.
And in awards season, Reverse Shot recognizes some underseen categories in 2025 films with its annual Two Cents column:
Most Helpful: After the Hunt
It’s nice when movies are instructional. Note to self: do not use masking tape to affix profoundly personal letters and newspaper clippings that reveal treasured secrets about myself to the bottom of a bathroom shelf where they are fully accessible to nosy party guests. Second note to self: do not suggest to one of those nosy party guests that she use this particular bathroom during your gathering of academic sophisticates. Third note: if you have to suggest this bathroom to your guest because the other bathroom of your palatial apartment is indeed out of commission (for renovation or more olfactory reasons), make sure the toilet paper roll has been properly refreshed, therefore not necessitating that said guest will search the cabinets for replacement TP and thus potentially discover your secret trove of profoundly personal letters and newspaper clippings.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
The Friday Article Roundup
There's still time to experience the best pop culture writing of the week.
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 Four, Episode Three, “The Summoning”
Once again, G’Kar and Londo get the coolest story. I was always kind of resistant because the overall arc – enemies to friends – was obvious from the moment Londo howled G’Kar’s name in his opening scene. But the show’s most nuanced writing comes in their scenes, and this arc’s events simply cannot be ignored. Both characters have always been sentimental, but now Londo is forced to be a pragmatist – a position he’s never been comfortable in – whilst G’Kar can gleefully indulge his pride by facing up to literal torture; it makes sense that he’d fuck up the whole plan to spite Londo and Centauri simultaneously in exact opposite ways, because that’s almost a fantasy he’s had the entire show.
Peter Jurasik is magnificent in his scenes watching G’Kar be tortured, fully forced to reckon with both the results of his actions and the depths of G’Kar’s personal strength and sacrifice (raw fucking ownage in a show that normally softens it, though this isn’t the first time we’ve seen G’Kar bring that out of the show.
Meanwhile, Delenn’s story is interesting in the sense that it’s less exciting and violent and even looks ineffectual at first; her job is more political, and she’s failing (at least until Sheridan goes full Jesus).
Londo has always been sentimental and what makes this part so effective is how he has to deal with the effects of that sentimentality, the yearning for the past which becomes fascist imperialism so easily. All of the stuff with him and G’Kar rules, and Londo’s pragmatism will go to some great places.
Inside No. 9, “Once Removed”
Deeply fun. We start with awkwardness (a removal man, an anxious householder who seems unprepared for him, and conversations about erectile dysfunction), progress to weirdness (Reece Shearsmith in a hot pink silk bathrobe and dual oven mitts), and land on bloody chaos full of dead bodies–and that’s all in the first five minutes or so, before the episode jumps back ten minutes to show how some of this happened, then ten minutes more, then ten minutes more, and so on. I am usually anti-flashback, but this is done in such a condensed and playful manner that I found it delightful. (Truly, a lot of formal experimentation and tricks are best at short lengths, so I’ll give a half-hour anthology show a lot of leeway.) Funny, lots of ownage. The best and most precise bit of the latter actually comes at the end as both a character action and a bit of writing.
Also rewatched “The Bill.” Still incredibly funny.
Bloodsport
Watched with my friend Scott, and you would not believe how we sputtered and howled when this founder of the White Guy Karate genre (per We Hate Movies) throws up a series of straightfaced “based on a true story” cards at the end. We were dying. (NB: it appears the real-life Frank Dux’s claims were, unsurprisingly, complete bullshit.)
Hilarious nonsense (the training montage alone cracked me up, especially since much of it seems weirdly kinky, especially when young JCVD is blindfolded and serving tea to his sensei and his sensei’s wife: it’s practically a scene out of Secretary). Some good fights (ball-punching!). Bizarre to see a young Forest Whitaker running around trying to stop the plot from happening.
The world did not know what it had with Cannon Films.
KUMITE KUMITE KUMITE
Plus you have Frank’s big bear buddy who tells him very sincerely that he loves him and who he has more chemistry with than the female reporter.
KUMITE!
He and the buddy have a cheek kiss, even! Truly, they’re the heart of the film.
The Sea Wolf – Captain Wolf Larsen rules the sailing vessel Ghost with an iron fist, but his position is challenged by a new crew member who doesn’t take any crap, and the arrival of two survivors of a shipwreck, an intellectual writer and a woman with a past. This utterly belongs to Edward G. Robinson as Larsen, a brutal sadist who is also a closet intellectual. This is very much a Poochy performance, since when’s he’s off screen, we can’t wait till he is back, even though he is a terrible human being. John Garfield as the rebellious crewman and Ida Lupino as the mysterious woman are okay but neither comes alive much. Alexander Knox (the actor, not the character from Batman ’89) is strong as the writer, the only person who really holds his own at all with Larsen. Gene Lockhart and Barry Fitzgerald are strong in supporting roles. Michael Curtiz directs well from a Robert Rossen script, and the special effects of life at sea are stunning.
The Practice, “Manifest Necessity” – The title refers to “a circumstance which is of such an overwhelming and unforeseeable nature that the conduct of trial or reaching of a fair result is impossible and which necessitates the declaration of a mistrial.” And there is a mistrial basically because the prosecution’s case is in such disarray that the DA – Helen’s boss, played by Bill Smitrovich – tries some sleight of hand to make Bobby demand a mistrial and buy some time. But the judge – Richard McGonagle in the robes – sees through the ruse, in part because of Helen’s testimony – declares a mistrial without prejudice and kills the case for good. Interesting to shift the ethical questions toward this sort of prosecutorial misconduct, and towards a character who can be a good mirror to Helen. Also we have a subplot where a client of Lindsey’s is trying to get sent to federal prison so he can get sutgery because the American social net sucks.
Frasier, “Moons Over Seattle” – Niles brings Daphne’s dad home, but the Moons are irreconcilable. Daphne is upset that Niles did this without telling her, but a talk with her dad makes her see just how special Niles is (again) and she ends the episode and the season by insisting they run off to elope because she cannot go another minute not married to him. It’s all very sweet but I am not sure this accomplishes much. At least Brian Cox is pretty good as Daphne’s dad. Meanwhile, a bit more follow-up to Frasier and Roz sleeping together as he asks her to critique their night together (presumably because he could never ask anyone he was serious with). I do wonder if in another time, the writers would have been comfortable with letting them be friends with benefits. Their chemistry as lovers but not in love is actually great.
And so ends the ninth season, which builds on the positives of a mixed eighth season and gives us a Frasier more secure in himself, less apt to fly off the handle, less obsessed with finding love, and able to be a friend. While i would be willing to say that ending with Niles and Daphne getting together might have been smart, the show really has found a steady footing despite its many many episodes.
I hope you know that at least one other person appreciated “Alexander Knox (the actor, not the character from Batman ’89).” I need to see this, if only so I stop constantly confusing it with The Sea Hawk.
The Sea Wolf has been on my list for quite a while. Need to finally dust it off and watch it.
Men In Black — family movie night! And a surprisingly cool reception from the 9-year-old nephews, they didn’t really get into it and I’ve been mulling on why — it has awesome aliens and great effects and Smith and Jones are a lot of fun together. It does sort of zip along in what to my eyes is a much-missed efficiency, this is based on a Marvel comic but is not a Marvel movie in terms of needing/making space for larger franchise world-building stuff, maybe that is too stripped-down for them. But I also think they don’t have the larger conspiracy context that MIB uses and riffs on, a gag that the Weekly World News is the most accurate newspaper doesn’t work on people who don’t know what a newspaper is but also who aren’t steeped in this kind of subcultural stuff that was poking through everywhere in the 90s (with the X-Files leading the charge). Oh well, when they’re older they’ll appreciate Vincent D’Onofrio’s insane work here, there is acting possessed and then there is acting like you are literally filled with bugs and D’Onofrio is in a register most mortals can’t find.
Lost In America — in a lot of ways this is one of those comedies without lots of laughs that gets recognition while the real crowd-pleasers are put down, but Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson know how to realize the strengths of this mode, character work that is always funny and occasionally gut-busting (Brooks halfheartedly admonishing a bunch of asshole 12-year-olds not to call him “retardo” destroyed me) and creates very real people even as they get more insane. Hagerty initially doesn’t have as much to do but is amazing at the roulette table and the comedy of remarriage works because of how well-matched with Brooks she proves to be. All of this makes the larger satire of middle-aged yearning and incompetence hit harder, and how this is boomery because of the time it was made and the people making it but is much more relevant, perhaps uncomfortably so, to anyone of this age.
Father Mother Sister Brother — Paterson is poetic, this is more literary. Three shorter pieces (a review called them “novellas,” which seems right) not linked at all by story but full of recurring elements — tea and coffee, discussions of water, Rolex watches, mysterious skateboarders, the phrase “Bob’s your uncle” — that provide links and counterpoints in their deployment. The first segment has two kids visiting their father in New Jersey, the second two kids visiting their mother in Dublin, the final two kids making a final visit to their recently-deceased parents’ flat in Paris (“kids” is relationship-descriptive only, they’re all in their 20s-40s). The first two are full of awkward pauses and relationships that are too tamped down to be fraught, this can be funny but also cringey and in some places just sad, there are moments where a chance to go past politeness is there and no one wants to take it. The Sister and Brother of the final segment, on the other hand, are warm and close with each other and everything you would want in a family relationship — except there is a fresh hole in the family that those prior groups, as warped as they may be, do not have. This is a quiet film and one that is very specific about its families, I don’t have much in common with any of them, but the interplay of its parts makes for something melancholy that still is very affective. Also, Tom Waits has a monologue where he denies being hopped up on goofballs, which is really all one can ask for in a movie.
Garry Marshall is so quietly funny as the casino manager, he maybe feels bad enough for Brooks to hear out this pitch but his question of why a Vegas establishment would need to advertise has no good answer.
Men In Black didn’t click with me until I was really a preteen in part because it’s a lot as you say and also some of the effects are genuinely scary. Donofrio stretching out his face freaked me the hell out.
Marshall is fantastic, a straight man who is essentially the bad guy but whose normality makes Brooks’ insane riffing become a refusal to recognize reality instead of just desperate hope. “I like Wayne Newton.”
When I think of an underutilized actor, Hagerty is at the top of the list. She’s got tremendous acting chops, and, like Catherine O’Hara (RIP), she tended to play women with a crucial lack of self-awareness, but made them as real as characters who have more savoir-faire.
And Brooks, a classic Hollywood liberal, was warning us about how susceptible the boomers were/are for being conned: we now all know what’s happened as a result.
Even seeing the trailer that featured Waits’s “goofball denial” speech did not prepare me for how engaging the first story is, in FMSB, and how Adam Driver’s character is so bland; of course, he claims to be a success in business (whether or not he is), which explains why I’ve always avoided any similar type of career.
Yeah, Hagerty excels at playing someone who appears to have not much going on, in part because of how buffeted she can be by other characters, but has more depth than she appears. This is even a big part of her work in Airplane!, where she’s approaching things from a different angle than the aggressive deadpan of much of the cast and that is essential contrast.
And I thought Driver was a success, at least relatively speaking! He’s certainly successful enough to funnel a ton of money to his old man, “well repair” ain’t cheap. He’s clearly the less forthright of the siblings (and while Biyalik sucks as a human she is damn good here) and more wishy-washy — his second questioning of appropriate toasting material cracked me up. But a lot of this is willing behavior, he is open to being rooked (he was never not going to give out some extra cash) as long as things aren’t questioned or pushed too hard, and ultimately Biyalik is open to this taking place. There’s a lot of inertia on all sides here, the most complicated implication is how Waits lets all this happen not necessarily because he needs the money but it’s because it’s how his kids can justify visiting him and ultimately they need that more than he does.
Yeah, you’re right: the reference to “well repair” would prove that Driver is a “success.” And “inertia” really describes the family. Or maybe another way of putting it, and, hell, why not post such a cool song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leax63ullPE
Ubu always gets a hell yeah, buddy. And how depressingly accurate to view the first two segments as non-alignment pacts — no hostilities but no real relationships beyond politeness. I do think little bits sneak in though, there is a lovely moment at the end of the second segment where Blanchett and Krieps clasp hands while walking away from the house, a gesture that mirrors one shown in several photos of them as young children — there is a bond there, and their mother is knowingly on the outside of it.
Disappointed to hear Lost in America is laugh-light, I mainly wanted to see it because Brooks’ Real Life is somewhere in the rankings of hardest I’ve ever laughed at a movie
It has some very heavy laughs! But there are also a lot of small chuckles and that’s generally the mode of the movie, not like an Airplane!
Seconding that it is still quite funny!
The Thing – Probably the greatest horror film and one of the greatest body horror movies in how parts grow and extend, becoming what they shouldn’t be. A lot here metaphorically about fear of the collective, masculinity, blah dee blah blah, but most of all loss of what we know, until the place we lived in is a pillar of ash and fire. “How do we make it?” “Maybe we shouldn’t.”
Disagree.
The muppet show. Reviving the muppet show in its original variety format is such a no-brainer that I don’t know why none of the previous revivals did it. Sabrina Carpenter has great stage presence; pairing her with Miss Piggy is a natural choice. They both have cultivated personae as being both strong and independent women but also being boy-crazy. Blinded By The Lights and Don’t Stop Me Now were also great. I am begging disney / abc to pick this up for a full series.
Was Muppets Tonight a variety show?
yes, but as a night show instead of literally the exact format of the original show.
I was amazed at how much it felt like an episode of the old series. But for being in higher definition, I have to imagine that’s pretty much the episode Sabrina Carpenter would have made if she’d time traveled to 1979.
What did we read?
My Heart is a Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones
A slasher story filled with analysis of slasher stories. The funny thing about this is how conventional it is; even the meta-analysis is just Scream – which is namechecked repeatedly, to the point of exhaustion. There are points where the story devolves into a list of film names, and the book almost makes the idea that the protagonist has made slasher films into a wall between her and a hurtful world into something compelling. The real emotional core is the friendship she develops with a girl she is convinced is The Final Girl, because she simply can’t comprehend herself as that character given her personal damage.
What Doesn’t Break, Cassandra Khaw
This is a tie-in novel for Critical Role, covering the backstory of the character Laudna from Campaign Three. My DM lent me it (this is the end of my burning through all the books someone has physically lent me), partially on the basis of the character coincidentally resembling my own in our current campaign; hilariously, I seem to have taken the same basic concept – a female character was killed in a previous life and returned as an undead being with powers imbued by a mysterious figure – and gone in the exact opposite direction with them.
The interesting thing about this is that, as a tie-in novel to people playing a board game where the ending is very clearly known by most people looking into it, it very obviously can’t do anything really ‘scary’ – in fact, the book itself has a character divide between fun-scary and scary-scary and puts the lead down as the former, which about sums it up right. It’s very technically proficient, but there’s an air of obvious artifice hanging over the entire thing. On the other hand, given that it’s literally the result of play, I feel like a bit of a dick to point that out; on the third, mutant hand, it’s an honest reaction.
Like all entertainment that promises not to be too scary, there’s gestures towards intellectual depth; a minor runner is about how women are often sorted into virgin/matron/crone archetypes and vague thoughts on revenge, but the main point is to explore the concept of an undead person with a mysterious voice in her head – which, admittedly, is a pretty great concept. I kept finding myself frustrated, though; you can definitely feel that this character is supposed to be part of an ensemble, and she’s not actually all that interesting on her own.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0630-0660, Brian
Clevinger
In this section, the Light Warriors change class. This is a riff on tabletop gaming specifically, though I do believe it’s also a thing in Final Fantasy games. It works for me mostly as an aesthetic shift, indicating time passing in the narrative; aesthetic shifts are a minor and underutilised ability to change the status quo itself. It also has an extended meditation on the concept of ‘blue magic’; Black Mage describes all magic as white (restorative) or black (destructive), with blue magic being a theoretical different kind that changes the self rather than the world. This is the comic’s serious side showing up; this also shows up in the hints that BM and Fighter’s patrons are warring with each other.
“Oh god, now I’m ejecting things I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Hold on, you can’t cast blue magic. You’re wearing red.”
“So are you.”
“Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.”
This is one of my all-time favourite jokes in the comic. Red Mage’s retort in no way addresses Fighter’s objection, but the sentence is so simple and so stupid that it breaks Fighter’s brain.
There’s also the iconic twin jokes of Thief stealing his new outfit from the future and his ninja outfit not only apparently changing colour, but retroactively being changed in the previous strips.
Have you read Jones’s The Only Good Indians? That’s his knockout work for me: terrifying, moving, and culturally specific in a way that adds more weight and resonance.
I did like My Heart Is a Chainsaw–meta slashers are in vogue right now, but Jones, unlike some of the authors tackling this, actually semes to like the material he’s drawing from–but not nearly so well; I read the second book in the trilogy but never the third. I do remember this one having a hilariously specific-to-me misdirect where I spent a huge amount of time convinced that the ultimately kind sheriff was going to be the culprit purely because Jade kept not mentioning The Prowler in all her movie round-ups.
I haven’t, but I am interested.
Seconding the recommendation for that one. The first section is a quiet horror story all on its own and then it keeps going.
Khaw’s A Song For Quiet is good, in part because it’s a novella so it has to do a lot in a short time, but it probably does have the “not TOO scary” problem.
Yeah, my boyfriend is a fan of them and offered to lend me that exact book under the idea that it enjoy its weirdness more.
The Hunter, by Richard Stark
The plan to read all the Parker novels in 2026 begins here!
A nearly flawless masterpiece. (The way the ending stutters–bringing Parker to a culmination, then undermining it, then coming to another decision, then setting up a continuing adventures format–is the only fault; all of those scenes are good, especially the bullshit with the cops, but they throw off the pacing and structure.) You’ve got process (even on a small scale, it’s a pleasure to watch how Parker builds up some survival money at the start of the novel), the specificity of who Parker is (his irritation at the unnecessary death of the woman with the stuffed-up nose who dies when he gags her is a fantastic character detail), action (fuck yeah to the whole sequence at the end of Parker picking up his $45,000), and a deftly characterized supporting cast who round out the world (Wanda is my favorite in that regard).
The dramatic criminal beat of the novel is Parker easily slaking his fury for Mal and then realizing it’s not enough to satisfy him, that it was disproportionately easy compared to how much Mal destabilized him, and starting a kind of war on the Outfit for closure. This is done with no sentimentality or self-analysis: Parker’s personal instincts are Stark’s/Westlake’s professional instincts, where–to paraphrase Ellroy–the only morality is narrative.
SICKOS DOT GIF. Pumped my fist when I saw this, hell yeah.
The ending is a bit amusing because you can so clearly see the seams where Stark rewrote it — the book was intended as a one-off where Parker dies at the end, but Stark’s editor saw potential and told him to turn it into a series. I think what really makes the book interesting in retrospect is how certain aspects were not changed but dropped very quickly in future works. Parker’s annoyed response to the woman he inadvertently (you can’t say accidentally) kills is very true to the character but this is the kind of thing a serial character can’t get away with, future killings (and there are many of them!) are always in some way tied to people engaged in criminal enterprise as opposed an “innocent” like her. And there is some self-analysis and even metaphorical language from Parker (thought but not spoken, he’s not going to gush) when it comes to Lynn, who is the real destabilizer here. This book becomes Parker: Origins in retrospect and the betrayal that drives the initial part of the story is something he ultimately does not and likely could not fully resolve on his own, Lynn does it for him (although Parker’s cold-blooded clean-up of this is one of the darkest parts in the series). In some ways he is putting the part of him that could be sentimental aside in this book, like a person who has already boxed up something but is now shipping it off.
YES … HA HA HA … YES!
Yes, Parker’s inability to get back at Lynn–the closed-off way in which he acknowledges that he’d never planned on killing her, despite her betrayal and near-murder of him; the way he’s thwarted by her suicide–is terrific and, in the way it forces him to sublimate all that beneath outward action not specifically tied to his official goals, almost Shakespearean. He tells himself at the end that he can find a Lynn anywhere, and it feels like the only time he’s lying to himself as opposed to simply not exploring something further. (Hell yeah on that body disposal, as you said, especially removing her face.)
“He tells himself at the end that he can find a Lynn anywhere” is a great little subthread that runs through the next seven books (all of which were for that same editor/publisher). The Parkers are all great on their own, there’s never a point where you have to have read the prior book because Stark doesn’t catch you up, but read in order there is a clear throughline in plot — Parker takes a job in book Y because the job he did in book X didn’t work out — and subtle shifts in character that only become apparent in a longer view.
Thinking on it a little more, the ruthlessness toward relationships and the getting away with it are a big part of why there has never been a truly faithful adaptation of The Hunter, despite its acknowledged classic status. Point Blank keeps the former but goes into weirdness with the latter, and Helgeland’s Payback, while very good, still has to provide Parker with a female companion of sorts (and complicates the getting away with it aspect as well). This is just too cold to put on screen, apparently.
“When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”
One of the greatest opening lines and it took me a long time to realize it’s an inversion of another one of the greatest opening lines, The Postman Always Rings Twice’s “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The original is a man being rejected by society, Stark is a man rejecting society; both men go on to seed chaos and death among society but Frank Chambers is a horny guy whose emotions emmesh him in the world while Parker is ice cold and just cuts through it.
Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years by Charlotte Brooks – Hard to be much more specialized than this, but if you ever wondered why the Chinese-American population in San Francisco had political power for some time and the one in NYC never has, this book explains it. There is a complex mix of local, national, and international politics here, dealing with issues of racism, economic injustice, machine politics, and the influence of the two Chinas on local matters. I am definitely learning things I never knew, and getting a good sense of how not all politics is local.
Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman by Mark Cohen – A bio of the once-hugely famous comedy songwriter, and also an attempt to examine the course of assimilation by American Jews and how Sherman altered that course with his Yiddish-ish humor. It’s a good bio if perhaps too apt to psychoanalyze Sherman, but i think the author tries too hard to make Sherman into a specifically Jewish cultural icon.
Interesting — does Boston’s Chinatown and its population merit mention? They are not kingmakers but they’ve become an important constituency that no one takes lightly.
Not much mention of other Chinatowns, I think mainly because she stays focused on the biggest populations. There is a lot of material just from NYC and SF’s many many Chinese language newspapers and magazines, all of which need translation. So I can’t blame her if she wasn’t going to other cities. But it certainly does leave space for other historians.
Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Tarantula – The first four issues of the Vertigo comic by Matt Wagner and Guy Davis updates the Golden Age character bringing out an intellectual sensitivity to Wesley Dodds, being a bit overweight and wearing glasses. Davis’ revamp of the costume almost makes him look villainous in some ways until we get to know Dodds better. It has a good first mystery to it while also setting a mature noirish and pulpy (what I assume is) NYC. It’s so far removed from the original being much more gritty and dark it would be hard to see this version of the character joining the JSA or even fitting in anywhere in the greater DCU. I can see this being a big influence on the likes of Ed Brubaker or Brian Azzarello.
Definitely NYC.
There are some guest appearances in SMT by JSAers, most notably the original Starman, and in turn there is a crossover into James Robinson’s Starman comic that has Wesley and Dian in their (much) later years that makes them fit into at least that corner of the DC universe (though you could argue that Starman is about a foot from being Vertigo). More recently, there was a Sandman comic set in the 40s that kind of split the difference between how Wesley was written by Wagner and Seagle and how he was written in the 40s, and it was pretty good. The same iteration is currently appearing in a new JSA origin story and he clearly doesn’t quite belong.
Skyscraper Pantheon: Surrealism, Magick, and Psychogeography in Atlanta & Applachia by Steven Cline – Sent to me by the writer from an esoterica discord I’m on, and I feel bad not liking this as a result. It’s more pretentious than revalatory.
babel , RF Kuang. Pretty good, though maybe too didactic at stretches towards the end.
Babel is somewhere in the fantasy – speculative fiction spectrum about an alternate history where translation can be used to basically do magic. The basic idea is that you write two words on a piece of silver in two different languages and the space between the meaning of the words resonates in the silver and produces a real world effect. This only works if you’re fluent in both languages. Oxford is the center of this because of the concentration of linguistic expertise and british power at the height of the empire.
It’s late 1830s england, and our protagonist is a Chinese boy who has been adopted by an oxford professor and raised to be fully bilingual in english and mandarin (and also cantonese, latin, and greek, but they’re mainly worried about Mandarin). Even with the fantastical elements, we get a barely fictionalized account of the run-up to the first opium war. Kuang and the characters get a lot of time to ruminate on the nature of language, translation, empire, and, of special concern for both our protagonist and for the author, a Chinese American woman who studied in Cambridge, how the empire mines people and culture from the imperial periphery and what to do about it.
Overall it’s really good. It’s at its strongest when dealing with the tensions between enjoying the life of the mind and the real world impacts of academia or the tension of being a person from the periphery enjoying the privileges of the metropole. By the end, Kuang is making the argument that violence is the answer, and I can’t necessarily say I disagree. (Though I do feel like the Black dynamite meme— “but RF, I’m an educated professional class white man living in the imperial core!”)
thematically, the idea that translation is not truly possible because you can’t perfectly convey what the word means, as if there’s an Adamic language in between any two languages resonates with the way the characters both implicitly and explicitly present personae of themselves to the world. And thematically the way translation can be exploitative resonates with the way the above personal translation can be exploitative. It doesn’t quite cohere thematically with the necessity of violence or of dismantling the system. The pace of the plot picks up when the violence does (for kinda obvious reasons—it’s violence. Can’t just sit around when you’re being violent) so those ideas don’t get as much room to breathe.
Burn Marks, one of Sarah Paretsky’s groundbreaking V. I. Warshawski novels. Pretty good! V.I. is a cynical private eye with a heart mostly of gold; when her deadbeat, alcoholic aunt shows up homeless at her doorstep, she gets sucked into a criminal conspiracy with double-dealing and arson. She gets beat up and gets to fuck just like the hard-boiled men do, mostly without any awkward girl power underpinnings. The one bad note was a racial slur that was used as a ‘this person would say X’ kind of way and wouldn’t fly at all today. The other things that dated the book, like V.I. getting transparencies ready for a presentation and getting teased for not having a computer in her office yet, were much more charming.
Speaking of instructional art, Tyler Childers gives advice, in “Watch Out,” a song with a killer groove, about looking out for snakes:
Watch out where you reach
You could come back penny-in-handed
In the rocks and weeds and the woodpile
There’s copperheads everywhere
“penny in handed”: penny is another term for a copperhead snake
Year of the Month update!
Coming in February, we’ll be looking at 1957, including all these movies, albums, books, TV, yadda yadda.
Feb. 6th: Gillianren: The Story of Anyburg, USA
Feb. 12th: Bridgett Taylor: The Music Man
Feb. 13th: Gillianren: The Truth About Mother Goose
Feb. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Incredible Shrinking Man
Feb. 20th: Gillianren: Our Friend the Atom
Feb. 27th: Gillianren: Sleeping Beauty’s Castle
This March, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, TV, etc. from 1980.
March 5th: Cori Domschot: The Music Man
Mar. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Magnum PI