The Friday Article Roundup
Wall to wall coverage of the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will draw conclusions about:
Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
T.J. Clark muses on beasts in the 37,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings for the London Review of Books:
Fantasy domination, we now know, was eventually the road to the real kind. But I side with [architectural historian Sigfried] Giedion: we should not assume that representation was in the beginning a demonstration of power or superiority. Ours is apparently the only species that has ‘formed a picture’ of its place in the panoply of animals. I guess we have to concede that the picture became one adjusted to domination, exploitation, condescension, godliness. But that took time. Perhaps the most precious aspect of the caves is that they preserve a picture in which hierarchy and human-centredness don’t look to have been the organising assumptions.
At Boston Hassle, Oscar Goff considers the stifling structure and artistic freedom of The Samurai And The Prisoner:
But, of course, had Kurosawa made The Samurai and the Prisoner as a series, he likely would have had to compromise with a streaming platform more concerned with algorithms than storytelling. Kurosawa shoots his tableaux with a painterly eye which would be anathema to the flat, digital house style which has become de rigeur in the streaming ecosystem. He would have received notes to hit prescribed narrative beats and hold the hands of second-screen viewers, rather than trust his audience to invest themselves fully in the world he’s created. And he certainly would have been asked to dumb down his critique of Japanese culture and, more broadly, the ethical dilemmas of aristocracy in general. In other words, it would have been less of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, and I wouldn’t dream of asking for that.
Audrey Fox revisits the sexual freedoms of The Ritz on its 50th anniversary for Crooked Marquee:
There are no acting choices in this film, only Acting Choices, from Rita Moreno’s cabaret star Googie Gomez with a chip on her shoulder (a role she won a Tony for in the original stage production) to Treat Williams’s undercover agent with an inexplicable falsetto and F. Murray Abraham’s chaotic, kinetic, endlessly horny Chris….But underneath these broad performances, there’s a real heart at the center of the sleazy titular bathhouse. It represents a coming together of figures otherwise ostracized by mainstream society, all with a wide range of sexual interests that are more or less tolerated as members of this Island of Misfit Toys. The fact that a straight midwesterner finds support and a cheery welcome when literal members of his own family are out for his blood speaks to the supportive nature of the denizens of The Ritz. These are their people, their home, and they’ve been too ill-treated by society at large to start turning on each other. If they can’t belong at The Ritz, where can they?
At Burning Ambulance, Philip Freeman considers the work of “edgelord” writers Jim Goad and Adam Parfey:
A lot of people, in the old days, would claim that it was OK to use racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language because they didn’t actually hold those views and didn’t know anybody who did, so it was understood in their circles to be all in good fun. Or they’d argue that when you were exploring the dark side of American culture, you had to expect to get a little bit on you. I don’t know what Adam Parfrey actually believed. His writings are deliberately opaque in that regard. He operates as a mouthpiece for his subjects. Which is fine. But his choice of subjects — the people he thought were worth handing a megaphone to — provide some clues.
And Juan Miguel Martinez covers a combination Circle Jerks show/Repo Man screening for the Milwaukee Record:
12-year-old kid approached the microphone during the question-and-answer session at the Repo Man screening at the Oriental Theatre on Sunday. “Where did you come up with the name Circle Jerks for your band?” The crowd erupted in laughter at his question, which had to have been a scheme pulled by the adult with whom the child was accompanied. Keith Morris, lead singer of the Circle Jerks, straightened up in his chair. He told a story about how Greg Hetson, guitarist for the Circle Jerks, found the name in an urban dictionary in the ’70s. “You’re too young to this just now, but when you get older and are hanging around with your buddies, you may want to try it because it can be a lot of fun,” Morris said. “Sometimes there are cookies involved,” added Zander Schloss, who was on the panel and plays Kevin in the film.
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Department of
Conversation
When I was maybe 14 or 15 my friend had a Circle Jerks poster up in his bedroom. I didn’t know the provenance of the name then either.
“What does ‘the Circle Jerks’ mean?”
“Let’s get four or five other guys over here and I’ll tell you.”
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Eight, “Day of the Dead”
This is famous both as the sole episode after season two written by someone other than Straczinsky – Neil Gaiman* – and also for kind of sucking. The basic concept of characters seeing the dead is pretty cool, but naturally it’s only Lennier and his vision of Morden that really lands. It’s the coolest possible combo of characters; Lennier is pure Lawful Good and willing to give up shit for that; Morden is the ultimate sellout. Only the latter could really torture the former. Everyone else is either a one-note character or was never onscreen in the first place, so I don’t give that much of a shit.
*Better known for other work.
The other concept, with Penn & Teller playing unfunny comedians, is mostly excruciating. The Rebo & Zooty stuff was only intermittently funny as it was; it tends to be at its most funny when describing their antics, and having them onscreen is viscerally unpleasant.
Live Music
This was Ben Roberts doing covers of Johnny Cash on a ukulele, which was significantly less twee than it sounds. Roberts was a charming stage presence, mostly dropping facts about Cash’s life; his performances were good, though I preferred the high energy songs – my favorite was his take on “Folsom Blues” – because they tended to suit the instrument better – “Ring Of Fire” was my least favorite because it actually did fall into twee. His take on “Hurt” was pretty devastating, though as he pointed out it’s a pretty devastating song anyway.
Oh man, this episode. As you note, the Morden/Lennier stuff is good and I think this dovetails with Gaiman being a very good horror writer when he puts his mind to it, he can find pressure points very well. But then there are Penn and Teller. Gaiman is less good at humor, he’ll go twee in that direction, but I think he and Stracynzki are also cognizant of the ‘great art in your art’ problem — if the work that characters are praising was as good as they say, it’d be the damn work the writer made in the first place*. So I think they purposefully make the comedy super corny, but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable. And what really sucks shit is how this is an argument for the importance of comedy/laughter, despicable self-serving woo.
*the main exception to this is music in movies, which can be farmed out to pros a la Josie and the Pussycats — the great hit single there does sound like a great hit single
Babylon 5, “Infection”
A weaker episode, even if it also lays more of the groundwork for (what I understand to be) the show’s concern with combating fascism. The most interesting thing here is the sense that the show is establishing its particular level of realism, one where Sinclair singlehandedly taking on a rampaging fascist artifact in (semi-)human form* is not just Cool Commander Shit but a reason for a good friend to be concerned about him. David McCallum is a welcome guest star, though his character does lead not only to Franklin’s reasonable objections to grave-robbing but also to his ???? objections to an archeologist finding out useful scientific things from the past instead of divining them from experimentation and first principles, I guess.
* Quatermassian!
Garibaldi is filling a dramatic niche of “guy who is perfectly happy as a supporting character,” amiably willing to be pleased by people, competent and dogged but also interested in maintaining a very functional kind of order (see the first episode, where he warns Londo to hide his weapon before he has to search his quarters). Again, it’s interesting on a technical level to see a certain sleight of hand here, where the show uses the assumption of a comic setup of a frustrated story–Garibaldi having to entertain the reporter Sinclair is avoiding–to wrongfoot the viewer before revealing that the reporter’s looked into Garibaldi too. This is a neat trick that people don’t remember to use often enough. It doesn’t hit CJ Cherryh’s rule of having every scene do at least three things, but landing on “two, one of them unexpected” is not bad, especially for what is, again, a weaker installment.
Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann
Fred Ward rides a dirt bike back in time to the Old West. Things happen, but not nearly as many things as you might expect: this is a surprisingly sleepy film that only intermittently gets up off its ass to have some dirt bike time travel action. At least Ward manages to becomes his own ancestor, and the film does make some effort to give us a slightly grittier West than you might expect. But this needs more comedy and more action. Despite that, I had fun with it, especially since I was watching it with a friend.
Spider-Man: No Way Home – skipped this one when it came out because I had issues with the first couple of Tom Holland outings, was generally bored of cinematic universes and felt like the animated Spider-Man films had largely made the live action ones feel obsolete. But everyone’s talking about this new one and I guess I felt some kind of compulsion to catch up, and… yeah this one is a lot of fun. The multiverse stuff, and the return of a bunch of previous characters, is really well done and provides some very funny moments as well as a good emotional journey (see also Marisa Tomei for the latter part).
Oddly I think my favourite moments revolved around Jamie Foxx / Electro, although his previous appearance was in the other Spider-Man film I couldn’t be bothered to watch (and can’t really imagine going back to now). His line delivery on “gotta be careful where you fall” made me laugh a LOT.
The problem remains that I only really have the appetite for one of these every six months or so, so now I’m not sure I can really be bothered checking out the new one. Oh well.
Live Music – Philadelphia power-poppers Hurry were in town last night along with UK kindred spirits Mt. Misery and the slightly different vibes of US Highball (who are, confusingly, Scottish). Kind of a dream lineup for me, to the extent that it contributed to coming home from a holiday a couple of days early. Great show full of chiming guitars, big choruses and sweet harmonies.
Have also kicked off Seinfeld season 9, I know there’s a bit of a “one season too far” feeling from some but George getting hired because of a “disability”, immediately getting found out but refusing to leave his new job is some hilariously awful stuff and I’m still having a great time.
Wooooo live music! And Seinfeld’s ninth season shares some qualities with the Simpsons’ ninth season in terms of stretching the bounds of the show into much wackier territory but it winds up working a lot better in Seinfeld I think.
Yeah it definitely feels like there’s a parallel! The Seinfeld characters getting broader and meaner feels more acceptable though as the show never really had a heart at any point, haha.
Bingo. Seinfeld becomes a meaner, almost parodic version of the sitcom it started as, the Simpsons becomes more self-aware and less expansive and that is a loss.
Andor Season 2 — a little odd the show makes Gorman explicitly French-coded but their resistance feckless and incompetent and in need of outside assistance. Tell that shit to Lino Ventura, Mr. Andor! Anyway, the push/pull between successful personal stupidity and failing careful impersonal planning remains interesting, although the introduction of Mr. Andor having big Force energy threatens to upend that.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Four, Robert Service
Again, this chapter covers a mere two years of Lenin’s development; mostly concerning his political and moral development in the wake of his brother’s execution. In particular, Service notes his admiration and even obsession with the author Nikolay Chernyshevski; amusingly, Service dismisses Chernyshevski as an author (describing his prose and novelistic structure as weak) but makes it clear the profound emotional effect it had on the direction of Lenin’s politics. After all, he did write a book called What Is To Be Done?. Service makes it clear that this is a time of intense study for Lenin, with Chernyshevski simply being the main element of a wide sociological and philosophical stew. Certainly this speaks to the power fiction can have as a propaganda tool.
In terms of his life, Lenin’s dedication to his studies – he proves quite successful at anything he tries and tools with the idea of being a lawyer – is not enough to prevent his dismissal from school, and his mother chooses to move them all to a different part of the country to try and protect them all – especially Lenin – from politics, though with increasing failure.
Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp, by Molly Tanzer
A Weird Western that opens very, very strong and then ultimately goes a bit too gonzo “everything but the kitchen sink” for my taste. Lou is a half-Chinese psychopomp in a world where ghosts and–we gradually realize–pretty much every other kind of monster are widely known hazards; the book opens with her navigating a Chinese-style haunting in a white household, as immigration has gradually created a melting pot of supernatural traditions, even if racial biases remain firmly in place among the living. This is all very cool, and Lou is a great, unusual character: determined, funny, intuitive, empathetic, capable of screwing up.
(There’s some ambiguity about her gender, as she was raised as a girl but prefers to present as male for both professional utility and personal comfort; she occasionally tells someone she’s a woman, but she also basically shrugs when someone else goes out of his way to exempt her from gender completely, so she feels like a reasonably good portrayal of a genderfluid character in a time before people had done much thinking about that. Someone eventually calls her both “Mr. Merriwether” and “she” at the same time, which feels right even though he’s trying to kill her.)
So we have multiple supernatural traditions, and then we have the reveal that this world has sentient bears (the North won the Civil War by forming an alliance with them, which has resulted in a major reduction of western expansion, as the bears don’t want more railroads) and a few other sentient creatures, like sea lion ferrymen, and that’s cool too … but by the time we got to vampires, immortality potions, flying metal dragons, etc., I couldn’t help feeling somewhat fatigued. This is why it’s harder to make mysteries–even non-fair play mysteries–work in fantasy settings: you need to have some idea of what the world looks like in order to reasonably concentrate on solving a problem within it. I was excited for Lou to investigate the missing Chinese laborers, and she got to be clever about it in ways I could understand and even sometimes anticipate; the more elements got added in, it felt less like a story and more like a heap of shiny things. However, this was Tanzer’s first novel after some time writing exclusively short stories, and I think that’s mostly the problem: she’s trying to get more length by repeatedly throwing something new onto the pile. I’m curious if her latest novella will be a little more controlled on that front, and I’ll have to check it out at some point.
Finished Mrs Dalloway on holiday. Really unusual, intriguing novel – loved the way it drifted between characters to form a strange, wistful portrait of the times, with Dalloway’s agreeably casual lifestyle contrasted with the struggles of a WWI veteran. Woolf obviously had her own mental health struggles which makes her handling of Septimus Smith’s mental state ring true, but I love the affection she has for most of the characters we touch on here – with the notable exception of the doctor who fails to help Smith. Looking forward to more Woolf.
Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King — King is a guy with quirks, you accept them or you don’t. I am a big fan of his work with the existing language, where he creates would-be colloquialisms that sound insane, but am much less a fan of his forays into actual made-up language and this has a lot of the latter. And this is more of a problem than usual because the book revolves around a dead author and a magical world that has a pool the author views as the fount of language, from which people wade and fish and pull phrases — it’s a fine metaphor that is rarely borne out in practice via the book’s actual language. In the afterword, King praises his editor and chides people for the criticism that his books need more editing but this is the other problem with his language here — there is so much of it, the above clanging phrases repeated again and again and in general descriptions and emotions (the latter in particular a talent of King’s) losing intensity through elaboration and repetition. Music plays a significant role in the book, as it often does with King, and the biggest problem is how he is playing his usual tune but with a baggy rhythm that prevents those quirks from building in intensity, sweeping the reader into the world, and instead keeps them as annoyances. Disappointing.
I grew somewhat fonder of this in retrospect after getting married and realizing how often my wife and I also use bonkers made-up words and intentional mis-phrasings that would be absolutely obnoxious to anyone else, but the problem here is that knowing firsthand that this kind of thing does happen doesn’t necessarily overcome the “obnoxious to anyone else” problem. Sometimes inside jokes are really only good inside. And like you said, all the language here gets repeated so often that it becomes The Thing about the book–I certainly remember it more than 90% of the plot, aside from the can opener sequence.
Yeah, King gets a ton of mileage out of personal and shared language (the one that comes immediately to mind is the insane “horse race” in Paul Sheldon’s head early on in Misery) and it’s something he’s uniquely attuned to*. But the execution here is just so poor.
*it occurs to me that before he started sucking, Edgar Wright also had skills in this realm
Year of the Month update!
This August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
Then, this September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 4th: Gillian Nelson: Moose Hunters
Sept. 6th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Lenin in October
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich