The Friday Article Roundup
It's a Friday morning party with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you won’t pass up:
Send your own picks throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Zito Madu spikes Chuck Klosterman’s new book about the coming collapse of football at The Nation:
One of the clumsiest parts of Klosterman’s book is his attempts at political punditry. His first provocation is arguing that “all thirty-two NFL teams share their TV revenue equally, the most visibly successful example of American socialism.” What he refers to as “socialism” is the billionaire owners’ profiting from a closed system, and private companies that often force cities to pay for their stadiums and renovations while the owners keep the profits. And that’s without going into the power imbalance between the owners and the labor class of the NFL. Klosterman’s idea of socialism and its ethic of redistribution just doesn’t make sense, unless it’s simply the class solidarity of billionaires.
A.G. Sims looks at William Greaves’ Once Upon A Time In Harlem, a documentary of then-living Harlem Renaissance artists reminiscing about their times, for Reverse Shot:
Shot on color 16mm and seemingly layered with a warm sepia filter, the film is made even more beautiful by the elegant threads of the ’70s, cast against a backdrop of exquisite interior architecture and design afforded by [host Duke Ellington’s home….They sat and stood in a collegiate-looking sitting room with teal velvet drapes and certificates crawling up the wall, surrounding a dark mahogany mantel. Arguing, shouting, talking over one another, clutching cocktails that threatened to spill over, they discussed and debated the impact of the Harlem Renaissance, returning again and again to the relationship of art development and political struggle, as if orbiting around the topic might pull them closer to a definitive truth hovering just out of reach, something they might all agree on.
Editors Alisha Jones and Benjamin Tausig throw down the gauntlet introducing the latest issue of The Journal Of Popular Music Studies:
These departments of music periodically convulse in a backlash against the putative overreach of ideas and aesthetics that suggest that race and gender matter to musical practice. Old canons are forcefully reasserted, interlopers attacked. But this backlash, just like the right-wing backlash that infests so much of the political world as we write this, is pitched against an imaginary overreach. Search your local library for recent work on hip-hop, electronic dance music, house ball, reggaeton, and so on. You will find that all of these remain quite marginal. Conservative music departments install conservative curricula, which require courses that in turn fuel publishing and hiring demands reflective of a white supremacist canon. The “popular music” overreach that these departments fear has never, in fact, arrived.
At Rogerebert.com, Clint Worthington considers the morality and politics of Godzilla Minus Zero:
Like the previous film, the greatest thrills come from watching our dogged heroes make plans, seeing them fail, and pivoting until they maybe get it right. In this respect, “Godzilla Minus Zero” echoes the wartime morality plays of classic Hollywood, even as this one veers away from the prior film’s apparent nationalism towards a broader critique of governments and systems and their willingness to throw away collective safety at the altar of tactical superiority. Even Godzilla might be worth keeping around, if the right government can steer him towards their enemies.
And at his blog, Damon Krukowski cuts through the noise of the numbers, be they Ed Sheeran’s or Spotify’s or AI’s:
Stripping away the grand abstractions from language spoken by capital is a necessary step to hearing what it is really saying to us. Ed Sheeran is saying shut up and agree. Live Nation and AEG are saying shut up and agree. Spotify is saying shut up and agree. GenAI companies are saying shut up and agree. It’s the same speech, over and over, delivered from stadium platforms of all kinds – speech designed to absorb and neutralize any individual action as deviation from the inevitable power of numbers.
Tags for this article
More articles by Dave Shutton
All-Time Top Five
Telling off the Gray Lady with the truth about the best TV of the age.
The Friday Article Roundup
Turtle powering through the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A safe harbor for the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
The best pop culture writing of the week, wasted on the worst pop culture.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Fifteen, “Darkness Ascending”
The stuff with Lyta is the best part of the episode; this feels the most Shield, to the point of almost making Byron worth it for some Lyta pick up his work (and also almost outright stating she and G’Kar boned). Lennier’s stuff comes close, almost saving the tedious Centauri shit simply by having him be a badass (the Centauri shit is just dramatic repetition).
Winchester ’73 – The conceit is a bit odd: Jimmy Stewart wins the titular rifle, a “one in a thousand” model of the gun too good to be sold for some reason, and then loses it to the man he’s vowed revenge on. And then we follow the gun from owner to owner even as we follow Jimmy and the rest of the cast across a idealized but gritty Old West. But this is really about the revenge tale, and it’s the first collaboration of Jimmy and Anthony Mann, and aided by William H. Daniels behind the camera, it’s a banger. Not perfect since we have stereotype native Americans (led by Rock Hudson!) and since Jimmy was on the wrong side in the Civil War. But well made and well acted with a solid cast of familiar faces to back up Jimmy. Shelley Winters, as a showgirl trying to settle down, steals every scene she’s in. Winters is one of those actresses who doesn’t get much love anymore but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad performance by her (and she is maybe the first Jewish sex symbol, FWIW).
The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” – A classic but also really hard to watch as things get worse and worse. Also, I suspect the final scene of the Treehouse of Horror “Monkey’s Paw” story is evoking the final scene here.
Barney Miller, “Bus Stop” – A crook’s attempt to rob the passengers on a city bus leads to a crash, and the suspect and those not needing medical care are brought to the precinct. The story isn’t very interesting outside of that none of the witnesses are willing to press charges because it’s too much of a hassle. Meanwhile, Dietrich tries to get along with his new colleagues and seems to think that nine months of med school mean he can offer medical advice. But what makes this one work are a couple of scenes with Fish that are hysterical.
Suitable Flesh – A “The Thing On The Doorstep” adaptation, written by Dennis Paoli of Dagon and From Beyond, uh, fame (only pervy horror nerds like me probably know and love this guy), and starring Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton?! Slam dunk, right?! RIGHT?! I had a lot of fun watching this and it’s evident that Graham especially had a hoot getting to play multiple characters. But the color grading is egregious – please, for the love of god, take 5 more days to plan out your color scheme and photography, I will send you the money myself – and it’s easy to see how this was a script pulled out of a drawer. It goes on about fifteen minutes too long and needed some tighter revisions. That and I think this is one of the Lovecraft stories with the greatest sexual and gender implications that are only hinted at with this film. I’d love for a trans director to take a crack at the material.
I saw this at a horror festival a few years back and yeah I remember it looking like absolute shit, which was a shame as it has quite a bit going for it otherwise. The bit with the car and the reverse camera was a pretty inspired bit of gross-out gore and it’s great seeing Heather Graham going all-in on horror but why did nobody care about the visual side of it at all?
Same, I am not a photography fanatic but the movie felt like something they might teach ten years down the line about digital photography and color choices.
Live Music – Dutch “supergroup” The Hobknobs, perhaps a bit of a stretch on the “super” side as they’re made up of members of Lewsberg and The Klittens who aren’t exactly household names. But I love The Klittens and Lewsberg are pretty good too so I was curious to see what their side project was like. And I guess I’d call it… antifolk maybe? Much more stripped back than either of their main bands, focused on their two vocalists and simple guitar / bass arrangements, some songs with a simple drum machine backing. They were engaging and charming performers, as was the support act who had some songs with a similar kind of “humorous non-sequitur” quality to them that reminded me of Adam Green. Good fun all round.
Wooooooo live music! Wooooo supergroups!
Silence Of The Lambs — this is sometimes called the only horror film to win Best Picture, it is surely the only bukkake film to do so (and Foster the only Best Actress to take a facefull of jizz). First time in quite a long time and I had forgotten how much procedure as well as procedural is in this, Lecter’s escape is shown in all its gory detail and misread reaction (although to be fair to Chris Isaak it’s hard to imagine how things would go down) and of course the final showdown in Buffalo Bill’s* house. Which has a corpse stew rotting in a bathtub, it’s remarkable how much grody imagery is in this acknowledged and nearly middlebrow classic. And reading up on trans writers’ criticisms afterward led to some grim thoughts on this — the gore and grotesquerie can exist on this level because there is a larger monster and aberration to vanquish. Definitely got an “oh no” moment when the movie tries to cover for itself — Bill is not a “true” transsexual, we know this because the medical establishment denied him treatment! Criminy. This is a great movie with a huge flaw at the center, it’s certainly better than Gone With The Wind but I wonder if a similar broader reaction is in store as time goes on.
Live music — Pelican and Russian Circles, who needs words. Pelican came out ahead on the evening, their multi-guitar attack led to more variance in tone (and they tended toward more symphonic structure), the old song “Drought” in particular kicked amazing amounts of ass. Russian Circles was heavier than the already-heavy Pelican but also more atmospheric and meandering at times — while drummer Dave Turncrantz is an absolute beast (although he fucked up the intro to a song, the band laughed it off but Frank Zappa would’ve killed him) Mike Sullivan’s guitar had more shimmer than bite for large chunks of the show. A lengthy proggy suite in the middle was a highlight though, and they closed incredibly strong with some heavy fucking riffers. Hell yeah.
*somehow it only occurred to me on this watch, seeing newspaper coverage of Bill with the name everywhere, how fucked up this would’ve been for the football team
Are Pelican and Russian Circles both fully instrumental bands? I’ve never really given either a go but I do tend to enjoy heavy stuff without vocals.
Pelican may very rarely have a guest vocalist but they’re all instrumental. Russian Circles is not only fully instrumental, they literally didn’t say a word last night! Came out, played, waved goodbye. Impressive commitment to the bit! Definitely recommend both for non-vocal heaviness.
Batman: Caped Crusader (s2) – Keeps the momentum of season one but still making the pacing better overall. Gotham is noir and timeless like B:TAS, but also a little Universal Horror. The characterizations with the gender flipping and recontextualizing them has made things fresh. Harley is not crazy manic. She is more neurotic as Harleen but reserved and intelligent leaning into her doctor background when she is in the Harley persona in the Harlequin outfit. The Riddler is a sociopath with a tommy gun, reminding me of Richard Widmark or Dan Duryea. Mr. Freeze is more Mr. Zero. It’s nice they went with Rose/Thorn instead of another Ivy interpretation, even though I think of her as a Superman villain. I really like the Flass and Harvey Dent dynamic. After events in season one Dent is busted down to walking a beat while Flass is guarding the mayor and being a thorn to Gordon, Montoya and Batman. But I’m not sure I like the Joker so much. The creators are not afraid to kill the villains off which opens some new avenues in storytelling, at least in the animated world. Some great one and done type episodes with The Spectre/Jim Corrigan. Liked the Harley and Batman team-up. The Carrie Kelley episode with her being more Grey Ghost than Robin was the highlight for me.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Eleven, Robert Service
In this section of the book, Lenin’s fanatical self-belief really comes to the fore. He manages to reshape the party in his own image; he pushes out his main enemy in the party, Bogdonov, partially by gaining funds through a very ethically dirty scheme (getting two party members to marry rich women, meaning they no longer require Bogdanov’s money to fund the party) and philosophically by attacking his moral relativism. Service lays out how Lenin believed, completely, in the evidence of his eyes and ears, and found subjectivity grossly disgusting. Service makes it clear that Lenin believed himself fully and completely objectively correct about everything, and he shows how this made him enemies at the time but also served him.
It made me recognise that partly what draws me to the stories of the Russian Communists is that religious, almost Messianic self-belief many of them carried themselves with, and particularly that they did this alongside being ardent atheists, and that this is a quality I recognise in myself. Not that I approve of, uh, all their actions or think them heroic, just that we share some basic qualities like that (I made a semi-public spectacle of myself in Nath’s Discord earlier this week by defending Pauline Kael believing in herself the same way, even though she doesn’t really deserve that kind of defence or the level of nitpicking I was doing).
Service goes into how Lenin eats, breathes, and sleeps Marxist politics, even at the expense of relationships and his own health (as well as the fact that he doesn’t always live up to them). His self-belief sustains him through even the most miserable circumstances; these aren’t quite wilderness years, but they come pretty close to it, and he persists through it all. One thing Lenin apparently lacked that I have is a neurotic awareness of and curiosity in the emotions of others; it leaves him cold and distant, but it also means he doesn’t get wrapped up in
“It made me recognise that partly what draws me to the stories of the Russian Communists is that religious, almost Messianic self-belief many of them carried themselves with, and particularly that they did this alongside being ardent atheists, and that this is a quality I recognise in myself.” Same thing with the French revolutionaries, and this is where I’d recommend Camus’ The Rebel which compares rebels with revolutionaries. The revolutionary believes the ends justify the means, the rebel believes the means justify the ends. Guess which I prefer.
Get wrapped up in what?
Making my way through Stacey Schiff’s Samuel Adams bio, just past the “Boston Massacre.” It’s well written and well researched but kind of at odds with itself. Schiff is an admirer of Adams and clearly wants to salute his accomplishments in helping to jumpstart the revolution. But she can’t hide that under his cool calm approach to things that balanced out the mobs of Boston, he was a master propagandist and teller of exaggerations, half truths, and outright lies. And without intending to, she seems to lets Thomas Hutchinson, the leading loyalist voice in Boston, serve a mirror for Adams and has him found wanting sometimes. But it’s really fair to say that we don’t get many biographers who are neither fans of their subjects or detractors. You need to care to spend that much time on a subject. (I think I appreciate Service’s Trotsky book more now since he clearly dislikes Soviet Marxism, but has no trouble acknowledging Trotsky’s talents.)
Sort of a problem with a recent Napoleon biography I read reviews of – I don’t really like Napoleon and it was apparent that the biographer did. (I dunno, I don’t think it’s hard to go thumbs down on the guy who brought back slavery in the French colonies.)
I have two big biographical holes, Napoleon and Churchill, mainly because most of their biographers are big fans and cannot admit the flaws of either. (At least Churchill has detractors but they are usually not very balanced either and it makes the books less bio and more polemic.)
Those are some suspicious quotes around Boston Massacre, sirrah! Be ye one of George’s toadies?
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo – another one from the Guardian top 100, this one jumped to the top of the list as soon as I found a cheap second-hand copy as the premise sounded really intriguing: a man travels to a ghost town after the death of his mother to seek revenge on the father he never knew. It’s a literal ghost town too, much of the dialogue is between actual ghosts. Unfortunately I found it a little hard to get on the right wavelength, there are some beautiful images and a general sense of bleak unease but I never quite clicked with the nonlinear storytelling, which is a bit of a puzzle to unpick. Possibly one that would be more rewarding on a second read, having studied the timeline of events on the Wikipedia page, haha.
How Black Music Changed The World – Essential book, especially when author (and renowned bass player) Melvin Gibbs gets into the Yoruba and Bantu philosophy that reflects and may have shaped African-American grooves and rhythms. I’m always amused at the point made in some science books, and here, that physics scientists may have hit the point of the irrational in their discoveries; the rational realm doesn’t have the vocabulary for quantum mechanics.
A Handful of Dust – Super Friends narrator: Meanwhile, in the British conservative realm! For all his faults – an Anti-Semite, diehard Catholic and conservative who chafed at Vatican II – Waugh is an incredible prose writer and is very good at nailing the British upper class to the cross, so to speak. Threads an interesting needle, as a divorce novel, between ruthless satire (one character reflects Waugh’s Orientalist prejudices and a certain kind of self-absorbed white wannabe Easterner who would only grow in population across the decades) and genuine melancholy. About 2/3rds in.
I saw the Gibbs at the library and thumbed through it and it became a must-buy immediately. His writing is clear and direct and the rhythmic diagrams and philosophy with them looked fascinating.
Highly recommended, it is extremely compelling stuff.
Year of the Month updates:
Here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 4th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Pi
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 13th: John Bruni: High Art
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
And coming in November, get ready to write about anything from 1968! Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem