The Friday Article Roundup
There's still time to experience the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will let slip through your fingers:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Charlie Jane Anders makes the case for making ephemeral art:
People often asked me to turn Writers With Drinks into a podcast or some other more permanent artifact, and I always resisted — partly because I was nervous about having my loopy stage patter and introductions analyzed endlessly on the internet rather than experienced in a brief moment by tipsy people. And partly because I felt like there was something magical about people in a bar having an experience that was only for them, which would never be repeated.
Robin James rips Jacobin’s reactionary rockism at It’s Her Factory:
Not only are the lines between rock, pop, and club music historically much blurrier than they are presented in the Jacobin article, in the 2020s the main vehicles for rock’s return to the mainstream are two arena-pop megastars: Charli XCX and Olivia Rodrigo, who has collaborated with modern rock icons from David Byrne to Robert Smith and had The Breeders open for her on her 2023 tour (The Breeders also opened for Nirvana on the In Utero tour). Rock has been alive and well in the music of women of color pop stars (Charli is half South Asian Ugandan, Rodrigo is Filipino) for a good part of the 2020s, and before that, the one place that rock thrived amid lamentations of its death was a similarly feminized pop space: emo. Nobody ever remembers that emo was huge, because it was huge largely among teen girls, and nobody ever thinks them or their tastes count.
At Little White Lies, Mark Asch weighs in from Cannes on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest, a locked room mystery in feudal Japan:
Kurosawa films the Arioka Castle sets elegantly, with rectilinear framings, and stages scenes of self-sacrifice and slaughter in the courtyard, in the manner of revisionist samurai films like Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri. In the decades after the Second World War, directors like Kobayashi used the jidaigeki to advance a skeptical outlook about an ethos of honor and militarism; the dialogue of The Samurai and the Prisoner, which frequently explores both Christian and Buddhist notions of the afterlife and divine punishment and reward, is more universal in its concerns – as well as being applicable to the ambient violence that characterizes so many of Kurosawa’s films.
Maya S. Cade interviews Alesha Harris about adapting her play Is God Is into a new film at The Cut:
The reason I wrote this is because I needed the answer to the depiction of Black women being abused and just kind of suffering and not having any joy and not fighting back. I needed the medicine for that, the antidote. That’s why I wrote Is God Is. And it works for me. I’m a weirdo, but there are a lot of weirdos for whom this seems to be working. So I hope that people will give it a chance, and I hope Black women will feel reminded of our inherent value and that people, other artists, will be able to point to this and go, Look at how you can be sociopolitically engaged but also writing a sexy, fun story. It’s got to be just fun.
And for Everything Jazz, Andy Beta interviews Immanuel Wilkins about adding to the storied tradition of recording at the Village Vanguard:
For Wilkins, the Vanguard is the platonic ideal of a jazz club. “Great jazz clubs are always that cozy. The better the jazz club is, the smaller it is,” he says. “It kind of has to be small, it has to be dry, it has to have carpet, it needs that old carpet, you know? Even the colour of the Vanguard is perfect, that darkish crimson red you got going on with the curtains. Everything about it feels like the sound of the room, feels like the records, and feels like an old school jazz club.”
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More articles by Dave Shutton
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?
Taskmaster, “Putting Things on Things”
“You thought that Alex wanted ladies to be a little more dilated.”
Kumail instantly doubles over with his head in his hands when Joanna is obviously starting to tell a rambly story.
“If you presented that to your parents at sixteen, I think you should count yourself lucky you didn’t get sent to a boarding school.”
“It’s actually not a big deal to have herpes. You shouldn’t stigmatize.”
“I thought it was broken. Thought it was just bad tasking.”
“Do you guys call blending whizzed-up?”
“Yeah, always.”
“Just be slightly careful with the wires.”
“Yeah, you be slightly careful with your attitude.”
“I’m just enchanted watching Joel do anything, really, because he throws himself into it with such glee, and then every now and again, I just go, ‘Oh my God, he’s forty!’”
“I know. Mad, isn’t it? I pay a mortgage!”
“Don’t look away.” (How is Kumail ripping open a glued-shut remote control’s battery compartment one of the hottest things I’ve ever seen?)
“Am I not touching someone if I touch them with my bum, is that what you’re asking? Because if that’s the case, it’s party time.”
“Can everyone play someone else? Mathematically, does that work?”
“How would you suggest that I do your voice?”
“I mean, just try to do, like, a Pakistani guy. What could go wrong? So how would that go?”
“So now you’ve given me the go-ahead…”
“—We might not show him giving you the go-ahead.”
Joel taping his face up like he’s Hannibal just to keep from accidentally smiling is A+.
“If a soft lob counts as standing up, then there’s hope for many of us.”
Hacks, “The Garden”
This burns through plot at an incredible speed: the “EGOT” episode did the same thing, but just to get Deborah to discard a meaningless goal in favor of a more personal one; this is bigger stuff, so it does comes across as a little rushed. Weed’s reappearance is also the callback this season that’s felt the most shoehorned-in, and Bob Lipka going from a spiteful guy doing damage control to a borderline supervillain doesn’t quite work for me. I was also way more annoyed by the reaction to Ava’s pitch than I think I was supposed to be—I like the idea of Ava hitting on making the show more personal and tying it into her relationship with Deb, but it makes very little sense to me to have that be a network note. What do they care if she’s the only one who can tell the story? Just care if it will make money!
But! All those quibbles don’t entirely take away from the episode’s many highlights. The empty Madison Square Garden is the first huge-stakes thing this season has done, and it’s really affecting as a ghost town. The Deborah/Marty booty call (and her rescuing him from post-forced-retirement stoner depression) was very sweet. Jimmy’s Xena podcast pays off in the best way, simultaneously unexpected and completely sensible, and it’s great to see him get such a cool win. Everyone scrambling to pull off the Central Park show is a lot of fun. And I even get why we’re not spending time on Deborah’s material, because the run-up to the live show was all about that, so making this one more about logistics makes sense to keep it feeling fresh.
Very sad there’s only one episode left.
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Eight, “Intersections in Real Time”
My first thought in the first five minutes was “ownage”, but by the end of the thing, I was in awe; this was one of the few times where having not just a general sense of where the show would go but a knowledge that it would only ever turn out one way actually helped the episode. In fact, in general, all of Straczinsky’s worst instincts were buoyed by the episode’s concept – his habit of overwriting (something I was thinking about before putting the episode on) serves him here in that he’s writing a fascist i.e. a person who believes reality itself can be controlled by talking too much. Raye Birk is magnificent as the Interrogator, a sadist using the rules of politeness not as a mask but as another weapon in his sadism; my skin crawled every time he loudly claimed to be only telling the truth.
I think the mistake a person can make in this situation is to take the fascist seriously; I think even mocking them is validating them in a sick way at this point. I think both Straczinsky and Sheridan realise this; Sheridan’s dialogue becomes simple and forceful, with Bruce Boxlietner carrying most of the episode with expressions. He keeps trying to find ways around the Interrogator’s games, and the solution turns out to be incredibly simple and elegant . Sometimes in life – especially in the System – all you have to do to defeat your enemies is outlive them. They’ll be swapped out for someone else and then you outlive them too. This is how systems are more difficult than people.
Hell yeah. And this — “I think the mistake a person can make in this situation is to take the fascist seriously; I think even mocking them is validating them in a sick way at this point” — is a great insight. The end of the episode is fairly obvious but it is also a gut punch in the sense of its circularity, because at some point facing an endless supply of enemies the only way to defeat them is to depart without giving them what they want. And that gets harder every time.
Widows Bay, S1E1 – Already a hoot with a smart premise: what if you were the skeptical mayor of a cursed New England town where lots of evil and scary things have happened? Laugh out loud funny – one delivery made me explode – that mixes nicely with the genuine dread and tension built into Hiro Murai’s direction and the writing style. Matthew Rhys’ grasp of cinematic exasperation and straight man rigidity are perfect for the perpetually put-upon Mayor Tom Loftis, the rational man in a totally irrational situation. My mom was actually the Town Secretary/Administrator of the Yankee town I grew up in so the Massachusetts locations where they shot felt very recognizable to me and personal in their way. (My town didn’t have Wi-Fi until about five to ten years after the rest of the country.) The clash of the weird and the modern continues.
Tales From The Crypt – Two episodes that are suitably comic book-y and very nasty, though “Til Death” has to rely on some really gross voodoo tropes and ethnic characterizations. “Three’s A Crowd” depends on kind of an idiot plot and is nevertheless outright harrowing and disturbing thanks to Gavan O’Herlihy’s committed performance and a perfect blackout ending.
Widow’s Bay sounds really fun, but I seem to have reached the point where I’m so annoyed at all of the streaming services that I’m unwilling to pay for any of them. Maybe it’s time to get back into piracy.
Yarrrgh, I be encouraging this. My friend has Apple TV so I’m just using her account.
What did we read?
Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins
This is, as the name implies, a look at economics in hunter/gatherer and small agricultural tribes, with the argument that these people were the original affluent societies. It’s not intended as a philosophy work, but I naturally ended up taking it that way; the essential point is that these people may have had limited materials but they were also so abundant in resources as to effectively be rich, by our standards; a kind of reversal of the idea that the poorest people today are richer than they’ve ever been materially, as today’s poor people have not only many more material things floating out of their reach (including but limited to cars and houses) but are working far more. It’s common today to point out how many more days and hours off people of the past had; this book from 1974 lays out the simple work week (and even weeks off) the ‘primitives’ had.
There’s also interesting stuff about the politics; my favourite was the big note that being ‘rich’ in these societies actually meant giving much more than anyone else could as opposed to hoarding it. There was so much food that everyone would be sharing anyway – one study notes that (ugh) ‘primitives’ would be offended by the idea of trading food for anything as opposed to just sharing it – and so the person with the most would have very good reason to be sharing their stuff, and indeed would often be at the mercy of the mob as it were.(Also interesting: the Pareto Principle still applies to hunter/gatherer societies)
Lord Foul’s Bane, Stephen Donaldson
Aka the first entry in the infamous Thomas Covenant trilogy. There’s no getting around it – this is the book where the protagonist rapes a young girl. He’s under the impression that he is dreaming – something I’m surprised to find he believes all the way to the end of this book – which is the only out he’s really given. His goal throughout the book is to survive, and the rape is presented as a terrible thing and specifically as an expression of self-pity.
This is a book about male disability. It appears at first to be about the most divorced man of all time, like a high fantasy Blood On The Tracks – which I was 100% on board with – but it quickly reveals itself as being centered around Thomas Covenant’s rage at being disabled by leprosy. This also quickly reveals itself as being, despite its rigidly realistic prose and characterisation, on the Chronicles of Narniaside of the high fantasy scale; the world is a metaphor for Covenant’s rage and despair, something best expressed by how the main visible villain in the book turns out to be an absurd caricature of his whininess.
If there’s sympathy in Covenant, it’s in his near-maniacal focus on survival when he locks in. He believes fully that he’s simply in a dream that he must survive – which is preposterous to me, because I’ve always leaned to assuming I’m in a real situation with actual consequences when the reality is ambiguous – and it gives him drive and focus that makes him fun to watch, and makes it fun when he’s being morbid around people; going back to Chronicles of Narnia, there’s a lot of Puddleglum (Lewis’s greatest creation) in Covenant when he’s working well.
At the same time, it’s hard for me to really justify the whole rape thing. There’s any number of awful things he could have done in place of that, and I don’t know if the book as a whole works because it feels all a bit generic when it gets going; like, you made me sit through the rape of a horribly young girl – sixteen! – just for a generic-assed fantasy story? Although I will pay that the prose is wonderful in a way fantasy stories usually aren’t – sentences are clean and efficient, conveying entire psychologies in only a few words.
The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History, Nan Sloane
As the title implies, this is about the formation of the Labour Party of Britain and a general look at the rise of British socialism, with a specific focus on the women involved. This is some fascinating work; there are occasional fantastic moments of imagery, like a time when the party manages to shift public opinion on minimum wage laws with a large demonstration of the work people must do done by the people who actually do it for a living, but for the most part, the work is thankless and miserable; much of it seems to be a combination of writing the laws themselves and speaking engagements, and at least three of the women we track die before middle age simply from being worked to death, which feels typical.
Also typical: the book presents progress as a painfully slow and miserable process; in the epilogue, the author notes that even the most level-headed and methodical protagonist of the book had underestimated how long it would take for her vision to become reality, given that it already hadn’t by the book’s publishing.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 1040-1070,
“BEHOLD MY HUMAN LASER!”
“Oh dear ever-handsome elf gods, are we actually stupid enough to have voted on nothing at all?!”
“One of them can’t read or count, and the other one’s Fighter.”
“Which one be ye?”
“Thus I suffer through no fault of my own.”
“You complain about the situation in one breath and profit from it in the next!”
“Hey, I’d be as dumb as the rest of you if I didn’t take advantage of the rest of you for being so dumb.”
“Look, the other warriors don’t hate each other.”
“Impossible. They’re too… nice.”
“I don’t claim to understand it, I’m just telling you how it is.”
“Well, technically I merely stood idly by while my friends killed him. Then I took credit for the kill whenever it was politically convenient.”
“Damn. That’s practically defending him under elf law.”
“Like it says in our national anthem, “Elfland And Fuck You Too”, ‘We Are A Race Of Total Bastards’.”
“You stole that from us when you stole the kingdom, you know.”
“Yes, I believe there’s a line in the song about that. It goes: we are a race of total bastards.”
“I walked into that.”
Aha! This section is the nadir of the comic, where even I get exasperated by the plot not moving forward. But now it’s officially over and it’ll pick up all the way to the end.
I had a school friendswho was obsessed with the Thomas Covenant books. I think this one is the only one I made it through, and all I recall is that sort of offputting sulky bitterness.
“It appears at first to be about the most divorced man of all time” – made me laugh but there’s no way this guy is taking Graham Linehan’s throne.
My partner got a laugh out of your last sentence there.
It will never not astonish me how easy it would have been for Linehan to just kick back and enjoy some well-deserved success, and instead, he chose vicious, frothing hatred.
Shoot The Piano Player – A fantastic David Goodis crime novel I blew through in about two days, with Goodis’ trademark loser poetry and heartbreak. Where Thompson could be gleefully nihilistic, Goodis cares so much about what happens to these often broken, sad characters.
You Should Have Been Nicer To My Mom – Cool hook. Great title. I still knew I was fucked when the phrase “toxic masculinity” appears twice in the first thirty pages. The writing is a strong argument against the entirety of fanfic and young adult fiction, with all it’s weaknesses (petty grievances not being masked properly, one-dimensional characters, an inability to think outside of the main character’s POV, lack of specificity), none of the strengths, especially in not feeling visceral enough for horror, and spelling out every single thing the protagonist feels and thinks via clumsy prose. I also thought it was pretty goddamn funny that the writer goes to such painful lengths to spell out the Haitian/Dominican racial and class politics to the extent that they left an awkward author’s note at the end and the plot turn here still amounts to “This Haitian woman the Dominican family hates and looks down on? Turns out you really can’t trust her!” I blame the editor, the writer, shallow attempts at progressive politics probably produced in a myopic echo chamber, and the entire publishing industry.
In The Midst Of Death, by Lawrence Block — found an early Matt Scudder book and devoured it in a day. Block wrote several Scudders in the 70s and 80s and nearly retired the character before bringing him back for a long run after, with the big change being Scudder’s admission of alcoholism and subsequent sobriety; it was really interesting to read this and see that he was very much an alcoholic back then, drinking a lot more than the standard boozy private eye and more importantly knowing at some level that this is a problem (while deflecting from other people commenting on it), Block did not pull his big switch from nowhere. But Scudder’s character is also fairly solid from this early time too, he is both dogged and sensitive and has a moral compass that he knows is his own and not indicative of the rest of the world. The case involves police corruption (and that swings in really hard at the end, Scudder can also be naive in some ways) but also publicity and trying to hide from the same. Scudder sees himself as a person who does work and he doesn’t like fronts and excuses, this internal monologue could come from any book in the series:
“Did he think I was a priest? I didn’t car whether he was a nut or a crook or both or neither. I didn’t want to hear his confession. He had had me brought here, presumably for a purpose, and now he was justifying himself to me.
“No man has to justify himself to me. I have trouble enough justifying myself to myself.”
Butcher’s Moon, by Richard Stark
OWNAGE. No wonder this was the last Parker book for years and years: it legitimately feels like a firecracker-filled finale to everything that’s come before it.
Parker’s had enough of his recent bad luck, so he partners back up with Grofield (not in prison for hand-waved reasons that I assume are further explored in Grofield’s spinoff novels, which I will certainly read at some point) to finally retrieve the stashed-away money from Slayground. Unfortunately, it’s not where he left it–spirited away by the local branch of the mob, presumably, and we all know how Parker feels about organized crime operations taking his money. He starts turning the screws, Outfit-style, to get it back, getting (somewhat) drawn into the mechanics behind the organization’s potential takeover in the process, and right as it’s seemingly wrapping up, a trigger-happy corrupt cop kills Grofield. Parker can accept that (though there’s the barest suggestion that he’s a touch more bothered by it than he has been by previous partners taking a bullet), but what he absolutely fucking will not accept is the revelation that they’re keeping an unconscious Grofield on ice and planning to send him to Parker piece by piece–little finger first–until they get what they want. This leads to one of the most YES … HA HA HA … YES! scenes I’ve ever read in my life:
Parker leaned far to the right, aiming the pistol out at arm’s length in front of him, the line of the barrel sighted on Shevelly’s head. Shevelly read his intention and suddenly thrust his hands out protectively in front of himself, shouting, “I’m only the messenger!”
“Now you’re the message,” Parker told him, and shot him.
Prison and death are the reasonable risks of their profession; this is not. Parker rounds up a Greatest Hits squad of people from previous books (including at least one guy I’m 99% sure is supposed to be dead, but I don’t care), sets them up for lucrative scores, and then gets paid in a rescue operation that should also net him his original score. (It doesn’t, not quite, but he’s willing to settle for what he gets, which is a transcendent line, even better than Dortmunder smiling twice in one day. Again, no wonder this feels like a final book.) It also makes sense that the emotional thrust of the finale would be in this line–for one thing, we’ve seen Parker go to extreme lengths before for Claire, so I’m sure Stark didn’t want to repeat himself, but also, having it be Grofield unifies any ambiguously personal pull there with Parker’s professional drive. This is shit you do not put up with on a job; Calesian has betrayed the work as much as Lynn betrayed Parker back in The Hunter.
It’s all enough to put Parker back in an instinctive, emotion-driven mode, where he wants what he wants, rational or not, and will do what it takes to get it, and I like that he’s put in a position here where he has a crowd of people around who are baffled by seeing this in action. Even Handy (RIP to his diner) doesn’t know what do make of it! But even if it’s out-of-character for the Parker they know, it’s not for the one we do, and Stark knows exactly how to play it, ferocious and unsentimental, with any justifications between the lines.
Incredible heists and setpieces here, including that spectacular raid on the dark house at the end, with the cars’ headlights shining through the windows. (Parker asking the doctor if he does fingers and then killing him: more spectacular ownage.) Wonderful bits of characterization and dialogue, from Stan Devers befriending Wycza on the plane to Wycza and Florio bonding over health food to the specific language of Mackey’s “I know Grofield, he’s a pleasant guy, we don’t want anybody out there dismantling him” to the snoring wife to the stockbroker who’s almost forgotten what he does for Lozini. And all the mob entanglements and Red Harvest possibilities–enough for their own novel–are excellent as well, and I love how Stark charts the flow of power, from Lozini (who attains a real sense of pathos in recognizing that he’s losing his control) to Buenadella to Calesian and away yet again.
What a perfect novel.
Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found, by John Maloof
Maier was (predominantly) a street photographer whose massive, previously unpublished body of work was discovered by happenstance soon before her death and only really picked up afterwards (she worked most of her life as a nanny). These are phenomenal pictures, showcasing both incredible style (I love some of her use of shop window reflections) and an incredible eye (Maier had a gift for choosing striking subjects, like a woman asleep on the grass next to a pulp novel, and also picking out sublime faces and bits of physicality). You can find a lot of the work published in this book here:
https://www.vivianmaier.com/
Also has a nuanced, well-written introduction and a good foreword by Laura Lippman.
Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, by Pamela Bannos
You’d think a biography under 300 pages wouldn’t feel like a slog, but here we are. This is dire. Bannos is so philosophically allergic to the “sensationalized” idea that there’s anything interesting about the nanny/photographer split in Maier’s history–preferring instead to treat her only as a photographer–that she systematically refuses to interview almost anyone in Maier’s personal and (official) professional life until she finally runs out of photographs to talk about, which means that we get almost no insight into her that we couldn’t have gotten from looking at the photos themselves until almost at the end. There’s such a dearth of actual material here–Maier was very, very private–so we’re stuck with endless pages of summarizing Maier’s presumed actions based on her photos. Oh, we know she went to a park and took this photo. Here’s a short description of what it looked like. Then she took this other photo. She also took some photos over here. It’s so intent on being respectful that it’s absolutely dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, Bannos clearly loathes Maloof, who–thanks to an auction and some careful dealing and management afterwards–wound up in control of the lion’s share of Maier’s photography and her intellectual estate and was very, very good at marketing her … and marketing himself as an implied sole discoverer and part of her story. Bannos cannot mention this guy without being condescending and taking everything he does in the worst faith possible, but it’s not until near the end of the book that we actually get any elaboration on why she might resent him (and even then, the best explications of it are quoted from other people, whose language at least jazzes this up a bit). I spent two hundred pages reading about this guy eating crackers before I ever found out why he was a bitch.
It’s a miserable experience that put me more on his side, because the pettiness of it all was so annoying. Also, there’s a limit to how much I can care about the “injustice” of someone’s intellectual property benefitting a couple guys who found and aggressively marketed it vs. a technical relative who never actually met Vivian Maier and whom she obviously didn’t care about either.
There is some interesting material here–Maier lived in France from age 6-12 and then spent the rest of her life obviously faking a French accent and claiming to be a native, she developed a hoarding problem that may have been connected with her late-in-life tendency to store her photos without even developing them–but it’s swamped in petty nitpicking (this blogger’s selection of Vivian Maier photographs unfairly represented his interests instead of hers!), insufficiently developed criticism (Maier found men uncouth, so Bannos thinks it’s wrong that men are handling her intellectual property), and a willful determination to sap all the gossipy and analytical pleasures out of a biography (because it’s wrong to treat Maier’s life as something to be curious about and also wrong to try too hard to “know” her).
Definitely look at the photographs: they’re incredible work. Do not read this. But in deference to Bannos’s Maloof hatred, I’ll throw in the sick burn another blogger had about Maloof daring to claim copyright infringement over his reposted (and properly linked and credited) Meier photo: “I don’t really give a shit and here’s why. … I think I’ve taken proper steps to cover myself. After all, it’s not as if I just found an old photo in storage, attached my name to it, claimed all rights, and sold limited editions of that photo for thousands of dollars. I could see how that might raise questions. But I’m not doing that so I should be covered.”
Man, you’ve got to be a real asshole to turn people against you simply describing someone else. It feels very internetty.
To be fair, reading this made me realize that part of the problem is that I don’t feel contempt very easily and I react to expressions of it badly, especially when I feel like the author is trying to move me towards it without actually establishing why. Like, I don’t think I generally have justice sensitivity except when it comes to someone or something being belittled, trivialized, or demeaned for minor or unexplored reasons (and not primarily as a joke), and then I honestly find it a bit distressing.
I can feel contempt very easily! But that sense of being nudged, inclined there without the right work (or without the right vicious language) flips that contempt over to the person trying to encourage it very quickly for me.
Huge problem in You Should Have Been Nicer To My Mom as well – the protagonist is autistic so there’s some justice sensitivity at play here, and yet the grievances often feel so insanely petty and one-dimensional. (One reviewer pointed out that three characters are merely annoying where three others committed actual CRIMES).
“I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s like me or not. These people nailed my foot to the floor, I’m going around in circles, I’m not getting anywhere. When was it like me to take lumps and just walk away? I’d like to burn this city to the ground, I’d like to empty it right down to the basements. And I don’t want to talk about it any more, I want to do it.”
Like you say, where do you go after this? Parker owns everything in sight and I like the distinction you make between Handy noting how this is out of character and how that fits with what Handy has seen versus what the reader knows — neither perspective is wrong. Parker can be incredibly patient whether just waiting for the time to act or for the right time in a bad situation (and will have cause to be even moreso in the future) but here his actions are circumscribed by a place and a system in a way that, in his very effective (and surprisingly extended) metaphor, hobbles him instead of constraining him. In Slayground Parker is thrown in the shit but can fully act, a much more favorable outcome — this is closer to The Seventh in how much Parker is constrained by others’ control over his actions, and that pushes him to act in riskier ways. But dealing with an entire mobbed up town is easier in some ways than dealing with an unknown psycho — one of my favorite parts of the book is Parker coming to town and assuming who the mob politician is because of the number of campaign signs, when he finds out otherwise it is not a mark against him but against Lozini for failing to see the machinations in front of his face. Parker knows how these guys work, or should work, and like you say Calesian is a fool whose actions are insulting and infuriating.
And of course Parker going his own more controlled version of blood simple just hammers the Red Harvest structure home. What’s really interesting is how Butcher’s Moon not only deviates from that book’s first-person narration but from every Parker book before and since in structure, this is more “novelistic” not just in size but in shifting POV throughout (instead of being confined to a section), and I think this puts more weight on Richard Stark as author, to corral all of this. And boy is he up to the task. It’s not just the ownage, but how it is sustained at length and through different characters (Lozini confronting Calesian is great and yet Stark does not go for the easy win there), and this too makes it feel like a point of no return. Poisonville is out on the fringes, it can be lanced like a boil and people from civilization brought in to deal with the damage, Parker guts the post-industrial American city and walks away with no concern for the corpse.
And in terms of Grofield, The Blackbird is the book that shares an intro with Slayground (and I believe was written first!), it is probably the second-best Grofield and has an incredible moment toward the end; it also is like the other Grofields in not quite understanding what to do with the character. They’re lesser but still worth reading.
Poisonville is out on the fringes, it can be lanced like a boil and people from civilization brought in to deal with the damage, Parker guts the post-industrial American city and walks away with no concern for the corpse.
It does feel like no one adapting this to film could ever resist the chance to do a news footage wrap-up at the end, where we see this town grappling with what the hell has unfolded in the middle of it over the course of this night (not that that night was the first of it, but it was certainly the worst of it).
Hell yes to that Lozini-Calesian confrontation and how brilliant it is–and not only does it not lead to the easy win, it also makes things worse in complicating ways, because Calesian is able to spin the idea that Parker killed Lozini, and Shevelly never even learns better. (Parker clocking what he thinks happened and then simply not giving enough of a shit to correct him before he kills him is such a perfect beat.)
Hahahaha yes, this is very much a Parker Handy would recognize — this information has no value, discard.
And ending-wise, Stark is partially ripping off/referencing a movie that came out the previous year with his abrupt conclusion and where it takes place, it works on its own but is a funny little nod.
Is this book sort of a commentary on RED HARVEST? The “Poisonville” reference, among other things, makes this sound rather explicit.
The book doesn’t refer to Poisonville but Stark/Westlake was a big Hammett fan and Butcher’s Moon is very clearly inspired by Red Harvest in its basic structure of “guy comes to crooked town and fucks things up” (and a few years earlier Ross Thomas wrote his own tribute/riff on this, The Fools In Town Are On Our Side). But when all is said and done the Op is an agent of order and works to restore that, Parker does not care about order at all; and consequently the Op spends more time with ostensibly order-friendly areas like the police, the only cops Parker deals with are entirely within the confines of the mob rule. Put another way, the Op has to work to navigate more established power structures, Parker is more removed from these groups.
Sunds like my shit. I’ve read about three of these, but when I went through my Westlake phase in the 90s the Stark books were hard to come by.
BTW– Attention for all, but particularly you, Lauren and Tristan–a preview from The Demon Dog.
https://books.google.com/books?id=qxabEQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y&fbclid=IwY2xjawR9YglleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeYmoy-jrqItqocxnGv4RWgCZ2PT_0xgnkiT20ard88shvs6Tj0F8ZrbkbvYU_aem_DD5MKD1e7mniBskCkcLgsQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
“It’s a double dose of jerkoff jubilation” our boy is BACK!
And Butcher’s Moon is 1000 percent up your alley, but my standard caveat is that it reads best after you’ve read the prior books, or at least a bunch of them — that makes the difference in style and scope really stand out. The good news is it is easier than ever to get the original run, much more so than it was in the 90s where only a few were reprinted when Stark started the series up again, the University of Chicago brought all of the first 16 including Butcher’s Moon back in print some years back and I think they’re available as e-books too.
AW, YEAH. Delighted to see this.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology – In some circles this is the seminal cyberpunk manifesto-anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling with a big assist from Ellen Datlow (many of these appeared first in Omni), heralding the computer revolution in the literary sphere in the mid-1980s. A symbol of the movement more than Neuromancer. If legend and high prices of secondhand copies* (yeesh) gives you high expectations , you always end up a little disappointed, especially forty years on. So how is the actual quality of the stories included, some of which are not cyberpunk. Both The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson, the genre’s clarion call with its satire and sharp critique of Golden Age SF, and Red Star, Winter Orbit by Gibson and Sterling appeared the same year in Gibson’s Burning Chrome. These are still very good. Freezone by John Shirley, has some amazing worldbuilding. A rocker wants the music’s essence without the computer technology of today’s music. Seems relevant. These three are the real standouts. Others are good to average and full of the tropes. Mozart with Mirrored Glasses by Lewis Shiner and Sterling, corporate shenanigans exploit alternate histories for profit. Snake Eyes by Tom Maddox, an ex-military man with a hardwired brain. Pat Cadigan’s Rock On is thick on style and atmosphere with its own vernacular. 400 Boys from Marc Laidlaw, biker punks living by a Bushido code. Solstice by James Patrick Kelly, a dystopian world with free drugs. Paul di Filippo’s Stone Lives: It was cyberpunk, it was ok. Until We Are Awakened by Human Voices by Lewis Shiner, scuba-diving cyberpunk? Decidedly not cyberpunk: Petra by Greg Bear and Rudy Rucker’s Tales of Houdini. I liked this overall. It’s full of the attitude and style that has influenced music, art, computer tech, and fashion (plenty of aviator glasses) the last forty years.
*Rudy Rucker, one of the authors, posted a free cyber copy on his website.