The Friday Article Roundup
This is no dream -- it's the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week you will be haunted by:
A spooooky thank you to Casper for submitting! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At the new publication Darker Times, Aigner Loren Wilson writes about learning horror from her uncle’s tall tales borrowed from the movies:
Instead of showing me these movies or reading me the books, he would tell me the stories as if they were real. He’d start off by lighting a cigarette and staring off into those thin Jersey trees and marshlands and say, “This looks just like Freddy Krueger’s home. You know, where all that bad stuff happened.” And, of course, I didn’t know. I was 7. But I wanted to know because even at that young age, I knew knowing the truth of the world was powerful.
Ethan Beck looks back at the overpowering alchemy of “In A Big Country” for Pitchfork:
Part of what distinguished Big Country was Adamson and Watson’s conscious effort to play their guitars as straight as possible. No bends or blues riffs—“Basically, I’ve heard enough of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ to last me the next 25 years,” Adamson told Rolling Stone in 1983. His soaring guitar part for the band’s only hit in the United States—which interrupts the first verse, scaling the fretboard after Adamson sings, “another season passes by you”—came from mixing an MXR pitch transposer with a dash of distortion and chorus. Few guitar leads have ever sounded as searing as Adamson’s, even if that transposer-affected sound plagued Big Country with the guitars-as-bagpipes designation for the rest of their career.
At The Rumpus, Raechel Anne Jolie interviews Alicia Kennedy about her new memoir that revolves around her eating:
When I started to explore veganism, it alienated me from all mainstream food culture, and I couldn’t believe that there would be such strong animosity toward that. I’m vegetarian now, but being vegan is one of the most important decisions I have ever made in my entire life. And it determined everything about my life that came after. But I would write about food and just realize that no one in the food media world took vegetarian or veganism seriously. And I also realized it was considered feminized to be vegetarian or vegan. Trying to untangle all of that was really generative for me.
At Indiewire, Dana Harris-Bridson surveys the current YouTube-to-Hollywood hits and offers words of warning to filmmakers:
My unsolicited advice: Please know that Hollywood is trying to import an asset it doesn’t know how to build internally. That’s leverage and should be treated as such. Studios see what’s happening as a watershed and they’re right, but a watershed moment for studios means an opportunity to acquire. For filmmakers, it means negotiating power at a moment when the system needs them more than they need it. The question for every creator-filmmaker now entering this conversation is: What are you giving up, and at what moment in the leverage cycle are you giving it up?
And the Demon Dog himself, James Ellroy, talks about his new novel with The Guardian’s David Smith:
[In the novel] Nixon, an arch-villain according to conventional wisdom, is treated with tenderness bordering on affection. Ellroy was 20 when he watched him win the White House in 1968. “I recall thinking, this guy is just like me. And by that, I mean I’m coming out of my skin, I always need to shave, my clothes don’t fit me, and you know, what else? I will burn your ass down behind my implacable will.”
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The Friday Article Roundup
I kid, I kid, it's just the best pop culture writing of the week.
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.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Taskmaster, “Maybe someone else wrote Veep?”
“Have we run out of ideas? Well, judge for yourselves, because this time, it’s the thing you’d most enjoy winching up from a well in a bucket.”
“Then I was like, if you’re going to do eight, may as well do ten. Then I went, ‘Sod it, get eleven.’”
“That is actually Ed Gamble’s trophy. And when I asked him if I could borrow it for this, he said, and I quote, ‘It is my greatest love, equal to my wife. If you lose, I will never speak to you again.’ So it’s a real win-win for me.”
“I didn’t understand your plan or logic.”
“I’m coming to the realization that I didn’t have one.”
“Do you, um … do you ever think that maybe someone else wrote Veep?”
“I thought of my idea when I went to the toilet to fix my hair in the mirror.”
“I just couldn’t take my eyes off Joel eating a cooking apple. I found it excruciating.”
“I had eleven.”
“I can move in five seconds.”
“Oh no you can’t.”
“There’s never one solution, there’s always–”
“I know, don’t give me the whole thing.”
“This is an old Pakistani catching technique called giving birth.”
“Do you have any recollection of flip-flop forfeits?”
“I’ve never heard that term before, because you made it up.”
[cut to gotcha footage of Kumail himself not only coming up with a flip-flop forfeit but actually coining the term]
“Je suis désolée pour le poo-poo avec le jus.”
In response to a demand to give Greg one pound per second planking:
“2:47.”
“So that’s 247 pounds?”
“No, minutes have sixty seconds in this country.”
“Joel. Why did you still have no trousers on?”
“Even me speaking now, it’s giving me PTSD.”
“But I was watching you on your hands and knees in your pants, being tortured by your own soul, and I found myself welling up a little bit. … Five points to the broken boy!”
Task ownage: Armando eviscerating the tennis game by carrying all his balls over to Alex’s side of the court and then using the gong rule to keep Alex standing still the whole time, to the great pleasure of all his fellow contestants. Kumail even gets up and crosses over to shake his hand for it.
Inadvertent task ownage: Joel drawing his own flip-flop forfeit and getting forced to listen to his own recorded voice for an hour. While still in his underwear. He eventually just lies on the grass and writhes in despair. But he wins five points, and in the studio, his very deep call-back pun in response to Greg gets him a standing ovation from his fellow contestants. Victory for the real brave boy!
Sad lack of task ownage: Kumail figures out the coolest, most low-tech strategy for the light bulb task. Unfortunately, both random correct guesses and putting mirrors and phones on sticks were faster.
The Good Die Young – 1954 British noir directed by Lewis Gilbert about four men, two British and two American, in bad places in their lives and their marriages, who agree to rob the Post Office, where old money is waiting to be sent for destruction. Gilbert and cinematographer Jack Asher, the former to later direct Alfie and James Bond and the latter to be the main cameraman on Hammer’s early movies, do a good job creating the mood, but the movie sometimes has pacing issues and the aftermath of the heist is a bit murky. Cast includes Laurence Harvey as the sociopath who makes the plans, John Ireland as an USAF sergeant with a movie star wife (Gloria Grahame), Richard Basehart as the other American (with pregnant wife Joan Collins), and Robert Morley as Harvey’s very rich dad, and all of them are very good.
After the night was all said and done, I watched a few episodes of Stumble, because writing Thursday’s column and talking about it last night reminded me just how much affection I have for it.
Oh, and I’ve been watching Mad Men again for reasons I’ve yet to understand, particularly because it’s a show I haven’t particularly cared to revisit outside of my favorite episodes. I tried one of these the last time I watched “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” and I only made it maybe six more episodes. And this time I’m somewhere near the middle of season 5. I may come up with something as to why it appeals to me now in a way it didn’t before.
Also, the show had some well-known-by-now casting finds, but one that most people will overlook is that Parker Young plays Johnny Teenager or whatever his name is that catches the attention of Pete’s crush at driving school.
Half of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and one of the things that makes this an unusually insightful con artist movie is that while Lawrence is technically a better (and much more likable, he is investing much of his money into preserving art and gardens) grifter than Freddie, they both embody very different skill sets. Lawrence is all about pose and appearance – a very funny gag when he simply stares up at the sky looking sad about being a refugee prince – and Freddie is good at emotional manipulation. It’s a shallow generalization but it’s the old difference between the European and American mindset. (Martin especially is amazing at being cluelessly obnoxious.)
Widows Bay, Ep. 8 – Fuck yeah Patricia! This lets Andrew DeYoung make a forty minute slasher and it’s really visually strong with at least one scare that made me jump. This is a great take too on a grown up final girl without the “traumatic loner” bullshit, Patricia is more pragmatic than scarred. (Hilarious gag when she keeps the gun pointed on the Boogeyman’s seemingly dead body even at the point of cremation, something every slasher victim SHOULD do.) Meanwhile Evan has discovered the truth about his mother and Rhys is utterly heartbreaking as he is honest with his son for the first time in a long time. (“Because it would have made me as sad as I am now.”)
Tales From The Crypt, “For Cryin’ Out Loud” – This depends on your mileage with the voice of (I think) Sam Kinison; the idea is Marty’s conscience is talking to him so it’s intentionally annoying, it’s just…that starts to drag. Still a mostly fun episode with a great Katey Sagal appearance (underused imo) and Iggy Pop as himself, bless him.
Live Music – early-evening in-sore / album launch from Rosa Walton, formerly (?) of Let’s Eat Grandma. I saw the other member of Let’s Eat Grandma do an album-launch at the same venue five months ago and Rosa got a smaller crowd despite putting on a better show (full band, rather than acoustic) and I think probably having the better songs, although I like both of their solo albums quite a bit.
What We Do In The Shadows, S4E2 “The Lamp” – sort of realising why I drifted away from this show, it does seem to prioritise the concept and production values over Actually Being Funny a lot of the time.
Woooo live music! I guess the band had to split up once they finished eating grandma.
I can only assume they finished grandma and moved on to having beef with each other.
(I don’t actually know anything about their decision to pursue separate solo careers but since they’ve both changed their sound in extremely similar ways for these new albums, it definitely doesn’t seem to have been “musical differences”)
Catching up!
Whistle — what Lauren said. Back in MY day we had Final Destinations! But it’s what it is.
Not Fade Away — David Chase’s quasi-memoir of early adulthood in New Jersey in the 60s and playing in a rock and roll band. Interesting in structure where it moves along in moments that can have days or months in between them, about five years pass overall and it does seem like lead John Magaro is 20 for at least three of them. But it’s the details that make this sing, literally in Magaro’s case — he has a very solid voice that works perfectly in the role of guy who takes over from the band’s first vocalist (who is serviceable but not great) — and in the song that he and his band write as their would-be break-out; it is actually written by Chase pal Steve Van Zandt, a guy who knows a thing or two about garage rock getting some polish, and it’s superb, a pitch-perfect near-classic Nugget. But that’s not enough for success, Brad Garrett gets an excellent F. Murray Abraham bit of not seeing money here, not yet, and the trials of young doofuses are hard to overcome in the name of work ethic. James Gandolfini is Magaro’s father and he has a lot to say about these damn kids but on the other hand his life is sloping downhill fast and his work hasn’t led him anywhere but New Jersey; the movie has the grace to show how he and Magaro are unable or barely able to connect but not judge this (it does, with wry distance, judge Magaro’s overall dickishness as a young person who thinks they know everything, perhaps relatable and yeeeesh). Good stuff.
Live music — local band Unmade Bed playing what was apparently their second show, they advertise as “face-melting” riffs and if they didn’t fully melt it was still shreddy goodness. Thalia Zedek played solo and her songs of course stand up without a band behind them, in some cases feeling more powerful in their vulnerability. And The Whimbrels were headlining, a supergroup of arty NYC noise freaks (guitarists from Swans and Glenn Branca’s groups involved) doing sick jams of that nature, great shit to clean out your ears. A perfect bill at the club down the street, what more do you want from a show.
I’m starting to think Thalia Zedek might be following you.
What did we read?
Just discovered a late era Westlake yesterday, The Scared Stiff. How did someone come out in 2003 and not get my attention?
Finished Shawn Levy’s Clint Eastwood bio. The second half covers a lot of Eastwood’s movies I haven’t seen and probably won’t see, and while Levy is still not afraid to be critical, he’s critical a lot less. For instance, he accepts the presentation of the NTSB hearing in Sully without noting that it was changed from reality to serve Clint’s libertarian leanings. I think it is fair to say that Levy is so in love with Clint’s mature skills that he is not looking to question them that much. Or maybe these movies really are that good, but I am not really interested in Gran Torino or The Mule so I will never know. Levy also seems to lose interest in Clint’s still cluttered personal life, writing virtually nothing about Clint’s most recent known long term partner, as if to say Clint now deserves privacy despite treating most of the women in his life poorly at least some of the time. And Levy really has no idea how to engage with Clint’s political views, and really has nothing to say about the Empty Chair speech that sheds any light on it.
But overall, this is a solid biography by an admiring but not sycophantic writer, and I think the book was helped by Levy having no access to Clint at all. He doesn’t always keep a distance, but he keeps a lot more of one that he might have with more face to face interviews.
One small thing that bothers me more than it has any right to: Changeling, a nearly forgotten Clint film from about 20 years ago, was written by J. Michael Straczynski. Levy often talks about the backgrounds of the screenwriters whose stuff was purchased by Clint, but not one word here about JMS. Not even one sentence about how the writer came from a scifi background and how this was a total change of pace for him. Does Levy not know that? I doubt it. Maybe he just doesn’t care?
Gwuh? I never heard of this Westlake either, interesting but also ominous.
And that’s very annoying about the treatment of Sully — it is very well-documented how much Eastwood diverged from reality and how that divergence aligns with a career-long ideology! Come on man. I will make the pitch for The Mule and especially Grand Torino (and Cry Macho while I’m at it), superficially these are all films that indulge Eastwood’s politics and attitudes and let him express them in cranky ways, but I think he is a lot better at digging into this and criticizing these attitudes when he’s acting in fiction as opposed to adapting non-fiction. The Mule in particular is quietly damning at the end.
Makes a note about the “grumpy old man” trilogy. And will add that having read this, I wanted to find some of the Eastwood films I have not seen – Bird and White Hunter at the top of the list – and so very few are on any streaming service.
I still haven’t seen Bird but White Hunter Black Heart is excellent and an interesting merge of the above modes — it’s an adaptation of a fictional book that is very obviously based in the factual filming of The African Queen, and this blurring is reflected in Eastwood playing John Huston with a gusto that is outside his typical range. But it is also extremely critical of the ego of powerful men and of artists and Eastwood does not shy away from that.
I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy
You know what, I’m glad her mom died too.
McCurdy was a child actor who eventually had a high-profile Nickelodeon career. She also never, ever wanted any of it: she was maneuvered into it by her passive-aggressive, controlling nightmare of a mother, who explicitly told the kid Jennette that she always wanted to be an actress and couldn’t be, so Jennette should become one, and her mom would manage her career for her. Jennette was introverted, painstakingly shy about being evaluated, and found no natural joy in performing, all of which made show business agonizing for her, but she loved her mom and didn’t want to let her down. The two of them were in a claustrophobic, emotionally demanding relationship that asked pretty much everything of her, and she’d barely gained any distance or perspective before her mom’s death (when Jennette was 21).
Schooling Jennette on how to develop an eating disorder to keep her from getting breasts (her longed-for hope was that Jennette would only weigh 89 pounds) is one of the most obviously horrifying and damaging things here–hearing about it is what made Jennette’s therapist identify the relationship as abusive, which she couldn’t accept at the time–but this is wall-to-wall batshit. Her mom insisted on getting in the shower with her and bathing her until she was 18 (and even then, it was basically a fluke: her cancer forced her to stay behind while Jennette was on tour, and Jennette finally got to shower on her own; her mom made sure to tell her that her hair looked greasy because she wasn’t washing it right). When paparazzi snapped photos of Jennette with a secret boyfriend, was her mom concerned about how he was much older? Hurt by the secrecy? Not really. She retaliated with a screed about how Jennette had humiliated herself by being exposed like this, and she was going to go on her online fan club and insist the fans stop following Jennette and follow her instead, since she was the true architect of Jennette’s career. (She actually did this.) The email ended with a postscript demanding Jennette send them money for a new fridge. Etc.
This could easily be pure misery memoir, but McCurdy keeps it brisk and doesn’t get too introspective or analytical until the end, conveying what she thought and felt at the time and only letting her adult perspective in later. There’s an energy and tartness here that really work to make it easier to spend time in all the interpersonal horrors. (In addition to all the mom stuff, this is another book that’s subtly about how maybe we just shouldn’t have child actors.) A valuable, cathartic, funny fuck-you.
Comeback, by Richard Stark
We’re back!
Like a lot of series characters, Parker goes a bit outside time here, staying current with the publication date but getting fuzzy in terms of age or exact chronology. This is a natural hazard of writers having longer active careers than, say, professional heisters, and I’m fine with it.
Parker and Co.–Mackey and Brenda (!), as well as the less-known and (deservedly, as it turns out) less-trusted Liss–rob a touring televangelist, the kind who regularly books out stadiums; they’re tipped off by an inside man who’s become dismayed with his boss gloating over his cash hoard like a dragon instead of putting it to good use in the world. In short, as the other characters point out, he’s gotten religion, which is a big problem in his line of work. He believes the heisters will give him a 50:50 split and that he can use his share for charity. In actuality, of course, they hit him over the head as part of the job and take it all. (I feel like a little more pragmatism could have saved him here. We’ve seen Parker and his associates give a cut to fingermen before–but never 50%. And to be honest, to them, knowing this guy wants to use it all for philanthropy probably makes them even less likely to agree, no matter what percentage he asks for. It’d be one thing to do it afterwards, but talking about it in advance marks him as a naive rube in their eyes.)
The escalating complications in this book are maybe a tad too plentiful and, at this point, a tad too familiar. This isn’t a big ding, though, because even if we’ve seen one member of the crew turn on the others before, and even if we’ve seen a peripherally informed character try to jack the score before, it’s all still fun to watch it unfold. Again, maybe a little too busy, but the details ground it: bringing in the finger’s girlfriend’s brother and his jackass friends would be exquisitely worth it if only for the interrogation scene where the evangelist’s security man gets disgusted with the cop’s obvious sadistic pleasure in toying with him over his sister’s death. This is the kind of character work Stark/Westlake does as well or better than anyone in the field.
Other major highlights include Parker’s stint as an undercover insurance investigator (it makes sense that this lie comes to an end when it does, because it’s honest to Thorsen’s intelligence and lack of understanding of when and how to deal with this particular man, but also, damn, I could have read about this forever), Parker’s careful breakdown of Mackey and Brenda’s thinking (it’s fascinating to watch him almost mechanically feel his way through a kind of empathy), the gas station hideout and its matter-of-fact ending (“Everybody needs help”), and the atmosphere of the dark house at the end. All in all, not absolutely top-tier–it feels a bit longer than it needs to be–but nonetheless great.
I just don’t remember Comeback, though I did read it a long time ago. I do think that having the story involve an evangelist is an echo of all those years of writing Dortmunder books where the “victims” were always people is was easy to root against. Not that we didn’t see that sometimes in the first wave of Parker books (I mean, The Outfit and Butcher’s Moon), but my vague memory of this and a few of the other second wave books is that such heists are more common. Though I suspect a character who’s religion was in some small way Westlake’s only faith peeking out. (He was a devout enough Christian to have written a novel channeling his anger at the persecution of Christians by Idi Amin, the very un-Westlake but still readable Kahawa.)
The other aspect of the evangelist is practical — in Deadly Edge, Parker and crew rob a rock concert because it’s cash-only at the door and it’s the same dynamic with the football game in The Seventh; but cash is disappearing from those venues in the 90s. A revival still has lots of Benjamins in envelopes.
One of the great modern titles. If I was an agent, I’d buy it on that alone. Jesse Welles’ “Nickelodeon” is a good apertif to the book most likely, a real heartbreaker of a song. I grew up on the channel which made it all even more horrifying. (And I remember McCurdy, ironically a decent actress given how much she hated doing it.)
Comeback definitely feels longer than usual and a bit like Stark shaking the rust off, as you note the plot is not particularly different than previous ones and usually Stark finds more variation in heists. I think the next book is back on firmer ground (and to your point about fuzzy time, I really like the take that Backflash actually takes place in the 80s as a “what was Parker up to during that decade” tale, the name itself is a pretty clear clue) but this is still a damn good time. Parker as insurance investigator goes right up to the line of how long he can believably pull this off and even then it’s a bit of a stretch, but I believe this becomes a more frequent dynamic than in the past. Parker occasionally pretended to be other people in the original run but he largely is acting outside of society; the world has changed and he must integrate himself, however falsely, into it in order to survive.
the world has changed and he must integrate himself, however falsely, into it in order to survive.
Oh, I love that way of thinking about it. Everything is more accounted for in his new time, and so he must account for himself somehow too.
The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow – Ripped through this, an epic spanning thirty years about a DEA agent’s war with two brothers running a Mexican drug cartel. Heavily researched and you can tell; the most interesting insight here is that the cartels succeed and the mob eventually failed because there isn’t as broad a hierarchy. In the Mafia, there’s a consigliere, underboss, captain, etc. so there’s always someone to rat out, and in cartels and other drug orgs, it’s all about franchises. You kick up a certain percent to the bosses and keep the rest for yourself. Didn’t get a ton I didn’t already know, and really, I’m here for the ownage and there is a ton, including the ownage of Christian forgiveness and a single head nod that costs a man his soul. Mild beef is the “hooker with a heart of gold” – and still she gets a lot of depth and Winslow neatly skips a predictable end for her – and some pretentious quotes for every section.
Meanwhile, almost done with The Wretched of the Earth (largely very good, Marxist theory is very intentionally dry, for better or worse), and I started a Donald Goines biography I found outside a thrift store in the ghetto, which is arguably the most Donald Goines way to discover a book about him.
This FAR feels very geared towards my specific interests! Not only do we have horror and Ellroy, we even have “In a Big Country,” a song I could listen to over and over again (and have listened to over and over again).
Aigner Loren Wilson’s article reminds me that a lot of horror movie plots got passed around when I was a kid via playground anecdotes, which is how I heard almost all of the story of The Omen a decade before I saw it, though the kid who told it to me gave it (accidentally? deliberately?) a cooler ending that I actually still prefer.
The Big Country article is excellent but very sad, I didn’t know the rest of the story there.
While the story is sad, I think it’s kind of funny that the use of guitar effects that were out of my price range at the time (and now, priced as “vintage,” still are) had ways of changing the tone that some people liked, but now sound dated.
I think both James Ellroy and Richard Nixon could have afforded clothes that fit.
This is when Ellroy was down and out but I’d argue Nixon, resentful non-Ivy Leaguer that he was, didn’t KNOW how to get clothes that fit.