The Friday Article Roundup
Make like a tree and leaf through the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will branch out with:
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 NBC News, Angela Yang talks to one of Bad Bunny’s bushes:
José Villanueva said that when he first met the rest of the field cast, they all began speculating about what exactly they were going to be. “My theory was that we were gonna be sharks. The rest of the cast was like, ‘No, we’re gonna be frogs,’” he said. “And then we just see this bush moving, and we’re like, ‘What?’ And they go, ‘Nah, you guys are gonna be trees.’”
Julianne Le profiles a protest bagpiper for LA Taco:
“I thought, ‘I have [bagpipes], I might as well take them to the protest and try and use it to fire people up,” Duffy tells L.A. TACO. Duffy utilizes a skillful musicality to not just empower demonstrators, playing marches like the 11-minute-long, 600-plus-years-old “Black Donald’s March,” but Duffy also communicates his sentiments towards the police and federal agents directly to their faces. “I always play it whenever the police retreat because it’s like, ‘You fucking ran while we stayed,’” he says.
At his substack, Brian Grubb writes about what it means to see Michael J. Fox acting with Parkinson’s on Shrinking:
That’s what I mean about this whole thing being cool, though. The layers to it. The thing where the general public gets to see Michael J. Fox fighting hard and keeping his sense of humor about it and the thing where other people going through a bunch of physical and/or neurological bullshit — Parkinson’s, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, pick any card you like here — get to feel represented by someone who knows what that struggle is like and is able to put it into words accurately. The world of TV and film has not always been very good at this. Progress is nice.
For Kotaku, Ash Parrish describes the justice of Relooted, a platformer where a crack team heists real African artifacts from museums:
Thanks to characters like Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, Nathan Drake, and more, pop culture has sanitized the image of the grave robber into that of the historically conscious treasure hunter and has abstracted and flattened the things they stole, robbing them of their significance. Relooted restores that significance, providing intricate detail on the pieces you’re liberating, and sometimes reestablishes context for items not widely acknowledged as looted artifacts. As a lover of British royal history, I can vividly picture The Sovereign’s Scepter but I’ve never thought about where the big-ass diamond featured in it came from. The game’s final heist has Nomali stealing it along with the rest of the British crown jewels because they were made from diamonds looted from Great Zimbabwe.
And Annie Zaleski considers what’s being lost as outlets cut back on criticism:
What’s also concerning to me is the dwindling opportunities to document music history. Decades ago, we had print magazines and newspapers committing some version of music history in physical form. Today, fragile internet sites mean there’s a big chunk of music history that’s vaporizing. People are already writing about the disappearing hip-hop blogs or the music lost when MySpace went under. Physical media might be scarce, but a digital file can disappear into the digital ether.
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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 Four, Episode Four, “Falling Towards Apotheosis”
Another couple of bitchin’ moments of revelation, when the spirit of Kosh reveals he was inside Sheridan and fights the other Vorlon and also Sheridan revealing he has twenty years left, tops, due to his resurrection. Like most B5 reveals, this owns, and in this case it’s because we have the possibility of seeing Kosh and his adorable personality again, as well as giving Sheridan a time limit that actually feels strangely limiting for being two decades.
Meanwhile, the Garibaldi paranoia plot is kind of weird; him being paranoid is fine and even an extension of his character, but it’s delivered with absolute heavy-handedness that bothers me, particularly when it’s against Sheridan.
A Conversation with Tony Robinson
A live interview with see title to promote his new book. I was surprised by how few Blackadder stories there were – especially considering interviewer Rick Goddard opened with talking about how influential Baldrick was on his sense of humour – but he has had quite the vivid life, with my favourite anecdote being his wacky, slapstick knighting. He did have this fascinating point: when he talked about Blackadder’s extremely troubled creation where the time between the pilot and the first season was long enough that he ended up working on Greek theatre, Goddard made a joke about the jump in tone, and he remarked that he didn’t see that much difference. He used the mask of Greek theatre as a metaphor, observing that he treated his own face as a mask for the audience to project onto in order to sell the jokes.
Another interesting point: he remarked that being naked on stage – or the less embarrassing but still potentially embarrassing status of playing the stupidest man in Britain – didn’t bother him at all, partially because he loves being on stage (having been on stage and preferring it to schoolwork since childhood) but also because when the material is good, you feel in service to that great material.
Baldrick’s a holy fool sometimes which helps. His angry questioning of why the countries can’t stop being at war in S4 doesn’t come from logic, it’s common sense.
I can’t remember if I said this already, but Garibaldi’s stuff this season is a good idea executed ineptly. There is a really good reason or at least suspicion for why he is acting this way and no one ever seems to think about it, just lazy stuff.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, S1E2 – Tug of war, giant cocks, and jousts! Another really good episode concerned with the gaps between how Dunk thinks of Ser Alfred and the person he was, as well as who Duncan is and what he can be. I get the sense that Dunk isn’t stupid – he’s often observant and thoughtful – merely not imaginative or especially quick-witted. (Which happens when you don’t have the means to read books and spit repartee the way the nobles do.) This naturally makes for a fine comedy pairing with Egg: big and small, clever and not so clever, and you see how they will complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Highlights include the epic tug of war, with Lyonel leaving the competition momentarily to grab a drink, and Baelor’s kindness to Duncan. Egg being unusually smart for his age and remaining a kid, cheering when the knights bash each other up. Breathed a sigh of relief that Dunk isn’t having a Pitt-esque trauma flashback at the joust and instead contemplates Alfred’s legacy, namely himself. Rooting for the guy to hook up with this cute puppeteer lady.
Fried Green Tomatoes — Jessica Tandy stop playing old sassy Southern ladies challenge. This was one of those taped-off-TV movies in my household so I saw it a fair amount (moms LOVE this movie) but I hadn’t watched it in decades and it’s interesting how in fairly significant ways it comes off worse than Driving Miss Daisy in the whole segregation department — DMD does take place in the Civil Rights movement era but it also gives its black characters more prickliness in general and has the Jewish focus to sidestep what the Christians were getting up to, FGT casually and I don’t think intentionally posits a friendlier Alabama Klan to those asshole Kluxers in Georgia, it’s part of a general reluctance to let people be villains (outside of a perfectly cast Nick Searcy as a racist abusive prick). But all of this is balanced by the other half of the story, where Kathy Bates is drawing this out of Tandy and slowly coming out of her shell, Bates does great work with this transformation, and extremely ripe accents aside, Mary Stuart Masterton and Mary Louise Parker are very good in the flashbacks and really make the melodrama hit at the end. Unfussy but appreciated 90s movie craft in service of cannibalistic ownage, what else do you need in a Tubi flick.
Michael Clayton — a while back I threw on my DVD of this and it was fucked, a third through it just started skipping despite being in fine condition. Frustrating! So I went to the library and got one of their copies, this made it 2/3 through before utterly crapping out. What the fuck is going on here? Is Tilda Swinton behind this? Extremely cheesed off.
Margin Call — I need my “shady aughts guys in suits” fix, Tubi to the rescue for a rewatch! The immediate moral of the movie, “if you have Stanley Tucci you are a fucking moron to get rid of him,” is of course true but JC Chandor does a very good job of pulling everyone, even Tucci, into the muck here. A sympathetic person would call this a moral quagmire and Chandor is not sympathetic in this regard, what these guys are up to is horseshit and bad, but it is also the fullest expression of the life they have chosen and if Chandor has no sympathy he lets that play out without comment. It gives me no pleasure to report that Kevin Spacey is superb here, and his big speech at the end where he tries to balance all this is the heart of the movie, because ultimately there is no balance, nothing to take with you but stolen cash and a dead dog*. There’s no other choice, as characters say here echoing forward to a movie from 2025, but there’s always a choice. In an unrelated matter, getting special thanks at the end of the credits: Anthony Weiner.
*I have gained a reputation as “guy who puts on a movie to watch with his wife without realizing a dog is going to die” in the Shutton household and I legitimately forgot about this poor mutt, I am on very thin ice right now
Was really shocked when I realized the crux of FGT was Tandy and co. feeding Searcy to a whole restaurant ala Titus Andronicus. I was fine with the murder, but not the unwitting cannibalism! (This feels like an Always Sunny joke.)
This is something the movie is not going to get into, but — the disposal of the car is very important (river) and the disposal of a large part of the corpse is very important (tasty BBQ), but what about the bones? Can’t turn them into brisket. Your delicious cannibal plan doesn’t get you entirely out of the soup, folks!
EDIT: Slightly in their defense, I think we only ever see the Georgia sheriff eating long pig, it’s unclear if they fed Searcy to their normal customers
The cannibalism’s in the book too, along with a more explicit relationship.
Yeah, I was wondering about the lesbianism — the movie is pretty uh straight about Idgie’s orientation, or at least massively coding her that way, but while there are a few moments that point to Ruth being at least curious she seems pretty hetero overall. What was really weird was the whole “Idgie got married and had a kid and let’s talk about that for two minutes and never again” bit, that really comes out of nowhere and felt sort of jacked in.
Yeah, they’re pretty explicitly a couple in the source text so this is a pretty textbook example of straightwashing. (Fannie Flagg, a delightful Match Game contestant back in the day, does not appear to have ever Officially Come Out but she was, er, roommates with Rita Mae Brown.)
Miss Marple, “Pocketful of Rye,” part two – This sort of comes apart as I can’t figure out how the murderer, by all accounts in Africa before the murder, was actually in England and manipulating the poor lovesick maid into putting poison into thing unwittingly. In fact, the more I think about it, the less sense any of this makes. This is the sort of Agatha Christie story I read when younger that made me not like her stuff for a long time. We are not helped in that Peter Davison as the killer goes for varying levels of histrionics and it doesn’t work. Plus for the second straight story we have the “someone is secretly the child of someone who was screwed in the past.” At least Tom Wilkinson is very good as the detective.
The Practice, “Eat and Run” – The team defends a man accused of murdering three women and then eating their remains. Who says he thinks he’s Hannibal Lecter. And fixates on Lindsey and calls her Clarice.
Yeah, I got nothing. And it’s only going to get worse and be a repeat of the stuff with Michael Emerson only without Michael Emerson. I am sticking this out to the end, but I can see why the ratings drop so much in the next season. But at least we can be thankful for no one imitating Anthony Hopkins. (I wonder if Thomas Harris got paid for this use of his copyrighted character’s name,)
Inside No. 9, “Death Be Not Proud”
A bit of a sequel/companion piece to Pemberton and Shearsmith’s previous series, the horror-comedy Psychoville, and therefore quite different in tone even to a series that is tonally varied: the humor in this is edgier, splashier, and more about deliberate line-crossing and comedic grotesquerie.
Kickboxer
More white guy martial arts, courtesy of We Hate Movies’s programming for the month. JCVD starts off as the cornerman for his obnoxious, overconfident brother who thinks he’s a good enough kickboxer to easily win in the country that invented it: he immediately gets his spine pounded into the floor, and JCVD starts studying Muay Thai to get revenge on the other fighter. He then accumulates additional reasons for revenge in the form of a raped girlfriend (bafflingly gratuitous, even for Cannon) and a hurt dog. Not enough kickboxing, but lots of splits, martial arts training, and dopey JCVD.
Ulysses – Lavish 50’s adaptation of The Odyssey with Kirk Douglas. It takes big liberties leaving out huge chunks of the book. The episode with the cyclops, Polyphemus, and the sirens are really the only big set pieces. Nobody eating lotus, no bag of winds, no Calypso and no Athena. There is a sort of underworld scene where Ulysses meets Agamemnon. An Italian production from Dino De Laurentiis, so temper your expectations accordingly. But it does look amazing, like many other 50’s sword and sandal or biblical films. Directed by Mario Camerini, but an uncredited Mario Bava did some of the cinematography, all the lighting and directed the cyclops episode.
Uncredited Mario Bava? You had my curiosity but now you have my attention.
What did we read?
Four Tragedies and Octavia, Seneca
The four tragedies are, specifically, Thyestes, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Oedipus. Seneca was kind of a weak writer – the collection here contains a hilarious number of criticisms from the editor, including the potent observation that his simplification of Oedipus completely kills emotional investment – but his eye for human emotion is undeniable, and indeed the sum of his tragedies is people succumbing to emotion. It’s easy for a modern day person to think we’re more rational now, but the argument of reason versus emotion was something that concerned the ancients.
By far the best sections are when Seneca allows his characters to spar with each other, creating fascinating philosophical dialogues – he even manages to pull off having a character named after himself give good arguments against someone he actually knew (though it helps that said person is Nero). There are some genuinely good meditations on leadership and trying to be a good person here.
8 Bit Theater, 0660-0690, Brian Clevinger
The characters are testing their new class abilities in this section. It’s interesting, actually, that they are legitimately more powerful even as the comic has to maintain a ‘everything sucks’ tone for the laffs. It’s particularly notable with Red Mage, who wants to use his Mimic ability all the time, past the point of reason.
“Are we quite done with buffoonery?” / “In an immediate or overall sense?” / “Immediate. I have no illusions about the latter.”
The Goblin Punch, a technique that involves kicking one’s opponent in the nads, named by Blindy O’Sightless. BM does it right back, and you see the monster flying in the distance as the characters talk.
There’s a really great strip where the rest of the LW nitpick Thief’s elven superiority (like why their tech is on par with humans despite the nine thousand year headstart).
There’s another really great strip where BM is unleashing a extremely violent rhetoric against Sarda, but you can’t read it because the speech bubbles of everyone else are covering it up.
Started Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles – The first book by the author of acclaimed bios of Custer and Vanderbilt, and it’s not quite what the title suggests. Oh, we get biographical material about Jesse James, but up to a certain point he’s a bit player in a bigger story and kind of a cipher. Instead, this is about Missouri before, during, and after the Civil War (I have just reached 1866), a place where secessionists turned terrorist and never surrendered their “Lost Cause.” Overall this is very well researched, and Stiles has no love lost for James or other “Bushwhackers” who became bank robbers (possibly the first of their kind). But he seems a bit too immersed in the sociology of warfare to fully hold James and others morally culpable for their deeds – he rejects the word “barbaric,” but I would embrace it for men who were committing atrocities – and he dislikes the “Radicals” who were as uncompromising about establishing full civil rights for freedmen and about proper punishment for the rebels. I am not surprised by this since Stiles embraced a similar attitude in his Vanderbilt bio. I guess he wanted a the Reconstruction we got instead of the one we should have had. But overall, a good book if short on details so far about the title character.
Read Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood thanks to the Weird Studies podcast and the title story is going down in the Weird fiction canon at some point, maybe sooner because of them. Striking, with a British gutter style to the prose while remaining immaculately well-written. The other stories aren’t quite as strong but are still pretty great, though I fear audio was not the right medium for writing this strange and exact, with Onwuemezi using her character’s instability to render their worlds as terrifying even if this mostly stays away from science fiction after “Dark Neighbourhood.” (More like that though please.)
Starve Acre by Michael Andrew Hurley – The Loney is amazing, this is merely good. I think it’s too much slow burn and the main character is incredulous to a fault. Best as a study of parenthood and stubborn, rational denial in the face of inexplicable horror, building up to a truly dread-inducing end.
Hit Man, by Lawrence Block — an odd novel about see title, a guy who gets assignments and carries them out. This doesn’t have the depth of a Scudder novel but Block wisely isn’t trying for that — it’s more a collection of linked short stories and I think this is the best way to handle the subject matter, Block keeps his guy at a remove but lets him slowly develop in various situations, as opposed to a longer structure that would require an overarching plot. There is not so much procedure about the killings themselves as the process of staking out and insinuating into the world of the target, and how our guy uses this as a jumping-off point for considering other paths in his life. There are only so many places to take this, I think there’s one more book in the “series,” but an enjoyable if off-kilter read.
The Wheelman, by Duane Swierczynski — not the same story as the movie of the similar name, but a balls-out story of the title guy dealing with a heist gone bad and the complications that arise. Swierczynski namechecks Stark and Westlake but is in a different mode, going full Jim Thompson at the end. The novel’s greatest strength is also its biggest weakness — the momentum never lets up but it drags in more and more characters in the manner of a 90s post-Tarantino flick, and this doesn’t allow for more interesting development or the ruthless precision of a Stark character sketch. Swierczynski also has some surprisingly sloppy writing, repeating words within the same paragraph that could’ve been edited into something smoother and stronger. A decent read, not sure if I’ll continue digging into Swierczynski though.
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
The third-person objective POV here shows incredible discipline: I’ve tried it before, and I can’t keep it up for this long, and certainly not with this kind of muscularity. It’s flying in the face of what the novel is traditionally for, but it’s easy to see what the book gets from it–it forces close observation of physical movement and authorial attention to action and the constant development of story.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my personal fondness for problematic queer representation in older works (not even always that old–it’s not like the ’00s and ’10s didn’t hit some of the same buttons), and I think part of it is the lack of self-consciousness at play. This has obvious downsides–when you have zero concerns about offending someone, you’re often, you know, offensive–but it also means that the characters are there, sometimes vigorously so, in a way they wouldn’t be if the author decided that this wasn’t their lane. You get a lot of authors who are compelled by what they see as strange or grotesque, and that compulsion can lead them to some interesting places where the sense of subliminal horror is also fascination, and the objectification leads (if there’s enough talent at play, which is always key) to subjectification. Joel Cairo isn’t remotely how a progressive author would write a queer character now, and Gutman isn’t how they would write a fat one, either, but the characters are there, taking up space, taking actions, claiming part of the world. Cairo’s relationship with Wilmer matters to him and to the text, and he persists despite any contempt. This all hits for me in a way more careful and technically better depictions sometimes don’t.
I often want criminals in books to get away with things. Which leads us to ….
The Man with the Getaway Face, by Richard Stark
I read this last year and wrote it up here then, so I won’t say much more. Lucid, stark (ha), and beautifully crafted.
The section of Stubbs’s time in the fruit cellar and his shaky recovery thereafter is some of the best and most precise writing in the book: Stark finding a way into Stubbs’s POV and portraying it both honestly and in a way Stubbs would never be able to portray it himself.
“it also means that the characters are there, sometimes vigorously so, in a way they wouldn’t be if the author decided that this wasn’t their lane” — I really like this examination. This is something that oddly comes up a lot in crime fiction and through a law enforcement angle (if not official cops), Lawrence Block hits this a lot with the Scudder novels. There is a baseline where these characters are not “normal” but the lead character is used to operating in a world where they exist as a matter of fact, so he (and let’s be real, it’s probably going to be a he) needs to see them and see them clearly if he’s going to be any good at his work. And this is true of the author writing the character as well.
This ties in nicely with Stubbs — I think Stark has some minor contempt for the guy’s lefty past (somewhat for the collectivism but mostly because 30s Communists got their asses kicked) but he doesn’t let that deny Stubbs’ capabilities, rough as they are. And Parker even finishes his work at the end, this is of course something he sees as useful in any case but it does feel a bit like a professional tying off a loose end for another worker. Stark pulls another single-character third section soon but in general he takes a broader view in the Dissolution sections of his books; in any case his closely limited third person POV is a remarkable achievement.
Yes, I’ve noticed that in Block too! And good point about how this carries over to Stubbs: Parker takes gratuitous action to finish Stubbs’s work for him, and it almost fits with him sending someone money earlier (“it wasn’t any kind of debt, just a friendly gesture”). There’s an implicit acknowledgment of coexistence there.
And everyone remember that “gunsel” does not mean “hired gun” or something similar.
It always amuses me that that made it into the movie because the censors didn’t recognize it, and then other hardboiled/noir works started using it as “hired gun” because they also didn’t recognize it, creating a wave of accidental boytoys.
Plus repeated use of the word “punk” and we know what that means before 1977.
Questionable depictions of queer characters in literature of the past, you say? Tom Ripley has something to say about that.
I read this many, many years ago, and again merely many years ago. Red Harvest aside, I’m more of a Chandler man. But also I love the movie so very much, and the movie character takes some significant liberties.
The movie is superb. Possibly my favorite Bogart performance, and great supporting actors as well.
And ha, I was just thinking that I have exactly the same POV on this that you’d expect from someone who owes her first real memory of feeling “seen” in literature to The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Remind me not to go boating with you.
You remind me of the sniggering homoeroticism of the stuff I watched in my youth, which can be embarrassing but was also, simultaneously, a sincere expression of love between two men that usually ended up romanticized, if not romantic – the three ultimate examples being JD/Turk, Alan/Denny, and Snake/Otacon, though a gesture to Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s characters.
Yeah, that kind of thing often hits for me too–it’s the visibility of the feelings, even if the identity isn’t quite there, and it usually moves me.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith. A book that makes one want to write.
I wonder what it would have been like to come into this not having seen the movie, even years ago, and therefore knowing what kind of story it was to become. I remember being pretty shocked when it happened in the movie, too.
Tom is an excellent viewpoint character for this because of just how relatable his imposter syndrome makes him.
This is Highsmith’s great strength — the pressure points she pushes down on in her unsavory and unsettling characters are in us too.