The Friday Article Roundup
Cooped up with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week you will cluck over:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
For the CBC, Morgan Mullin reports on a long-lasting Mi’kmaw-language bootleg of Chicken Run:
After the passing of Johnson’s daughter in the mid-90s, he continues, he and his wife Carol Anne hoped that her surviving twin brother would find comfort in watching the sort of movies he’d have watched with her, in the language they spoke at home….After a test run on a scene from the ‘90s kids movie Gordy — a Babe-esque flick about a pig trying to save his family from a slaughterhouse — Tom decided to translate the story of a coop of chickens who dare to dream big in his language, roping in friends and family to populate the cast of voices.
Ibraheem Uthman excavates a forgotten and erased online fount of Nigerian poetry, and the ethics it operated under, at Typebar Magazine:
A mailing list has no algorithm. Nothing is promoted; nothing is buried. There is no quote-tweet, which means there is no way to perform your disagreement to an audience that has not read the thing you are disagreeing with. Your argument lands whole, with your name on it, in the same ninety inboxes that received the argument you are answering, and it lands next to it, and it stays in the archive next to it forever. You cannot win by volume, because everyone gets exactly one copy of everything. You cannot win by speed. You cannot dunk and vanish, because the person you dunked on has your home address, metaphorically and frequently in fact, and will reply tomorrow at length. Accountability was not a value the group cultivated. It was a property of the pipe.
Nick Pinkerton reviews the pleasures, or lack thereof, in Peter Bogdanovich’s diaries for Bookforum:
But What I Really Want to Do Is Direct, per [book editor Sam] Wasson, serves to act as a corrective to “the acrimonious tales of personal betrayal and artistic theft” surrounding Bogdanovich and Platt’s breakup, instead showing their pairing as “a real and buoyant… good time of late nights, great friends, cuddles, ice cream, the adventure of breaking in together, and family.” I can confirm that it does, indeed, do so. What Wasson does not say is why, exactly, this should be regarded as compelling reading.
At The Guardian, Snigdha Poonam investigates the burgeoning literary scam industry:
Pakistan’s fake companies offering literary services operate in a similar fashion to India’s scam call centres. The majority of them maintain physical offices in Karachi and Lahore and employ people aged 20 to 24. Upon joining, the young employees typically get assigned to a unit, each designed around a specific literary swindle. While entry-level employees may only be tasked with outreach, the more experienced ones are entrusted with building long-term relationships aimed at selling multiple “packages” to clients over months and sometimes years.
Shawn Reynaldo eulogizes techno pioneer Juan Atkins and questions where the U.S. media’s priorities are:
Among those who knew his music, Atkins was a revered figure—the outpouring of social media tributes and remembrances that have surfaced in the past two days is a testament to that—but that reverence had its limits. While he was alive, Atkins could always find work, but in many ways, he was treated more like a historical curio than a world-changing visionary, especially within the United States. That treatment isn’t specific to him—the country has a long history of failing to properly appreciate and support its homegrown electronic music artists—but would the death of a similarly transformational figure from another genre be seen as a niche concern or, in the case of The New York Times, be put on the back burner (or possibly disregarded altogether)?
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The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
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What can art do when the world is ending?
The Friday Article Roundup
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Twenty, “Objects in Motion”
Lyta has had the strongest arc in this season, but G’Kar hasn’t been too far behind, and this episode’s best parts are the two of them. One of the complains I heard about this season was that it sets up plots it will resolve off-screen in spin-off books, and I can see that already; Lyta and G’Kar are heading out to walk the universe together, and Lyta specifically tells Garibaldi she’ll be back on the station two years from now, so we know this isn’t gonna work out in the time allotted. This does mean much of the plot is taken up by characters saying goodbye to each other, but there are moments, like G’Kar finally finding peace with his fame.
“Without us, you are nothing.”
“Then I am nothing. Good day.”
Friends, Assorted Season One Episodes
Visiting my mother and she was watching this at one point. I get why people don’t like it because it’s not really about jokes, but I see how the popularity came from it basically being a slice of life show, where the stories are just strong enough to carry the charisma of the actors.
Two and a Half Men
In terms of his contempt for every aspect of life, Chuck Lorre is the Michael Bay of American sitcoms.
Die Hard
Perfect. This time I appreciated that McClain’s extreme, reckless actions reflect the honest desperation of his situation, like throwing a dead body out a window.
“In terms of his contempt for every aspect of life, Chuck Lorre is the Michael Bay of American sitcoms.” This is a solid assessment/burn.
The point where I realized Die Hard wasn’t like other action movies I’d seen was McClane struggling with the broken glass in his feet; it really dwells on the sheer pain and the practicalities of extracting the pieces from your skin.
Back to the Future – Can you believe it’s 71 years since the invention of time travel? (Would rather watch this than mark Guy Fawkes Day with V for Vendetta, which is very good but not even a little fun.) My attempts to watch were undone, though, by trying to watch using a portable DVD player and something went wrong when Marty was writing his letter. Fortunately, it’s not like I haven’t seen this a dozen times. Was trying to notice people’s faces in the background: Doc trying hard to not react to watching the Oedipal soap opera when it’s happen; and Biff’s friends clearly aware than it’s not “make like a tree and get out of here.” There is so much going on here. And I came away with two new questions: just who are the guys in Marty’s band? What did Lorraine’s dad mean about “another one of these damn kids jumped in front of my car?” Did that happen before?
Elementary, “Through the Fog” – An aerosol device goes off in the 12th Precinct. Is a drug cartel that attacked a Mexican police station with anthrax at it again? Now it turns out that this is all a feint, a cover for a heist, and it’s at least the third time a seeming terrorist plot is a cover for a heist. But up till that point, this is a gripping (even chilling) episode with Gregson and Bell going excellent work in the quarantined precinct in parallel with Holmes and Watson outside. While Aidan Quinn gets a lot to do overall, we rarely see Gregson get to be a good detective and it’s a nice change.
Barney Miller, “Moonlighting” – Harris takes a second job to fund his fashionable and expensive lifestyle, and Barney is not happy. A priest is arrested for selling stolen merchandise in his thrift shop. And a numbers runner is taking advantage of a low fuctional mentally challenged kid. Harris trying to justify his high spending is quire funny.
This Much I Know – Saw a play by Jonathan Spector last night for review purposes at the Proscenium here downtown, and will save most of my thoughts for said review. This is a surprisingly moving and intimate three-hander about history and blame, similar to Tom Stoppard or Arthur Miller. There was actually a fire alarm which went off and interrupted the play’s introduction, and credit to the stage managers and theater team because we all went outside (briefly) without much fuss or panic.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula – I was keen to revisit this after loving the novel, even though I remembered not liking it all that much the first time around. Amusingly when I looked back at my previous review, I saw it just after my first viewing of The Devils and couldn’t help comparing it unfavourably. Ten years later, I rewatch it the week after seeing The Devils again and come to the same conclusion. It’s full of fascinating visual ideas but none of the actors seem like they’re in the same movie and at 2 hours it feels overstuffed while also missing out (or severely abbreviating) a lot of the best stuff in the book, which would be more forgivable if the stuff they added wasn’t so pointless. Did anyone really need a Dracula origin story? And there’s also a bunch of Count / Mina stuff that I’m assuming was added to give Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder more screen time, since the book largely sticks with Dr Seward, Van Helsing and co. in the middle stretch.
Would love to be part of the cult following for this one but it didn’t work that well for me before I’d read the book and it didn’t work that well afterwards either. Maybe if I decide that it needs a third viewing at some point I need to make sure I haven’t watched The Devils recently.
Highway Patrolman — not the Bruce Springsteen song, the Alex Cox movie he filmed in Mexico with an almost entirely Mexican cast/crew (aside from Zander Schloss providing surprisingly lovely music) after Walker’s epic flameout. Lorenzo O’Brien’s superb script follows Roberto Sosa as see title, from cadet to idealistic officer to jaded trooper to vengeful COP WHO GETS RESULTS, except not really. Getting results and the impossibility of doing so is in some ways what this movie is about — Sosa is a scrawny dude with an expressive face and he is not dissimilar to Emilio Estevez, and in a lot of ways this plays like a skewed Repo Man, our hero working for the system instead of on its margins but still bouncing through odd episodes and weird situations. The absurdism is there but tamped down, ultimately there is no transcendence to be found here. So what do you do? This has a quieter rhythm than I expected and you have to get on its wavelength, but this is helped by Cox filming in fluid yet unostentatious long takes (apparently there are only 180 edits in the film) and he apparently talked about the “tyranny” of the shot/reverse shot goosing the viewer into a certain passivity of viewing, here you watch and are not given the relief of a shift in perspective (this is not to say the film is brutal or assaultive, though there is violence typical for a cop flick). Sosa tries and fucks up, sometimes this is funny and sometimes not, he drives around (Cox is one of the greatest filmers of cars out there) and doesn’t go anywhere. His life is as intense as he wants it to be, and maybe intensity burns you out. This did not get a lot of notice when it came out but the people who liked it really liked it and they’re right to, this is a remarkable movie. On Criterion til the end of the month, hop to it folks.
The Lowdown — love the extended look at prison exploitation, a fantastic subject to dig into. But what exactly is the role of the governor of Oklahoma? He sure seems to have a lot of free time, this was a small thread in the first season and pretty hard not to notice now. Still good! But off in this area.
A rewatch of Avengers: Endgame which is still thrilling while also maintaining a level of darkness that I really appreciate. Paul Rudd is usually a comic actor but dear goodness how he plays waking up into a world that he has no idea why it is papered with Missing posters and memorials; there’s a level of desperate grief in his performance as he’s catching up to what people have been living with for five years that really struck me.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Sixteen, Robert Service
Conflict is beginning to escalate in Russia, and that is revealing a few things about Lenin. His aim is total Bolshevism – no compromise. Service notes a few things about his charisma, and he attributes part of it down to Lenin’s sincere and complete love of the concept of Revolution, which reminds me of similar things people have said about Zohran Mamdani – that part of his wild and unrestrained success comes down to the fact that he sincerely loves talking to people and people respond to that. In this case, the rising interest in violent revolution means people see what they want to see in Lenin, with the added advantage of him being completely decisive.
Of course, reality is not perfect. Lenin still isn’t known that well outside the party – at one point, one of his allies is arrested as him despite them looking nothing alike – and the Bolsheviks are incredibly poorly organised. Though I’m amused that this obviously didn’t kill them in the crib; it’s easy to think the annoyances of the moment represent the annoyances of one’s whole life.
Inside Out, Maria V Snyder
Unrelated to the Pixar film. This is so strongly a ripoff of The Hunger Games that it proudly advertises itself as such. I picked it up specifically because the protagonist is stated on the back to be a janitor, which I correctly assessed to mean it would have a bit more grit to it than these things usually do. Interestingly, this is workmanlike to a fault; it has the minimum amount of work needed to make a functional book. The ideas are pretty much Baby’s First Dystopia without being actively bad reading, like a mass underclass used to fuel and maintain a wealthy elite and propaganda used to keep both sides going (even when they think they’re against the System). The best part is the basic setting; it’s a massive facility that, as you’d expect from the title, appears to be inside somewhere and a mythical Outside is spoken of in hushed whispers, and the big reveal at the end is that Inside is actually a spaceship.
Where this falls down a bit is that the emotional aspect is the most half-assed element. Story beats are given the absolute minimum of emotional investment, and there’s, like, two characters in the whole thing. Although, I did end up comparing this to Divergent, with which it shares many qualities; that has more emotional investment and characters, but is also more pretentious and less grounded; ultimately, I preferred this, even if I’m not gonna read the rest of the trilogy.
Undone!, Paul Jennings
This is a collection of short stories; Jennings was a prolific short story writer when I was a kid, and his stories do actually convey what it was like to be a kid in Australia in the Nineties. Each story is structured extremely traditionally, building up to twist ending that acts as a punchline; they also follow very traditional rules of punishing the wicked and rewarding the good a la EC Horror comics. There are two differences: one, the style is naive to the point of being crude, with short and blunt sentences that leave no room for interpretation (they are for children, but I think Jennings also just writes like that).
The second is that the details are completely, utterly deranged. There are two unifying aspects to Australian culture, I think; a sense of communal tradition overriding almost all other concerns (regardless of whatever community you belong to), and a bizarre head for imagery. Jennings is very much in line with those two ideas, and overcomes the weakness of the first principle with that intense understanding of short story structure that gives him a constant direction to move in. It’s often hard to explain the premise to his stories because they have so much going on.
My favourite is “Noseweed”, which is from the perspective of a grandfather (who is trying to grow a new breed of apple in remembrance of his dead wife, which will be important later) trying to convince his grandson to start eating cod liver oil (which the grandfather loves). Through a series of mishaps, the boy gets cod liver oil mixed up with muesli in his mouth, and in trying not to swallow the oil, ends up with a tree growing out of his mouth. Long story short, in messing with this, the tree grows apples that taste exactly like cod liver oil. Not every story is as complicated as that, but they all have insane premises along those lines.
Morality-wise, they’re about crudeness in various forms; crude bullies violently punish anything they perceive as abnormal and get violently punished for it; well-intentioned people ultimately get rewarded for being kind; kids try and fit in and take care of their family. One thing that makes Jennings stand out is how willing he is to jump around in perspectives; the story from which the cover draws its art is from the perspective of a bully, for example.
Capitalism: A Global History, Sven Beckert
Exactly what it says on the label. Beckert has four principles he’s getting at over the course of this book. The first is that capitalism, despite how it may feel considering how deeply entrenched it is in our lives, is novel to the point of being peculiar. This is not, traditionally, how human beings treat each other, the land, or time itself; right from the beginning, in which he lays out the trial of a man in the early 1600s who was accused of putting profit over community, Beckert lays out how unusual capitalist ideals were when they first emerged. This also ties into the second principle: capitalism is intimately entwined with the state.
One of the most fascinating insights is the early section of the book, laying out how India, China, and to an extent Africa had innovated early capitalisms (Beckert notes how many forms of capitalism there are, and indeed that one of capitalism’s strengths is its malleability), and Europe came relatively late to the concept due to a weak state; on the other hand, that weak state also allowed capitalism to flourish, as both merchants and state leaders needed each other, with the former providing funds for wars and the latter creating and enforcing laws that maintain control to the point of monopolies. The funniest line in the whole thing is a parenthetical in which Beckert notes that anyone who associates capitalism with low taxes is not a student of history.
Which, of course, flows into the third principle: the majority of actual work in a capitalist society is done outside of markets – not just education or even family labour associated with women, but straight up slavery. There is a very dark gallows humour in that, after all these years of capitalists talking about the violence and deaths associated with communism, to have crimes done in the name of capitalism laid out all in row like this. In capitalism’s defence, slavery was a part of the world long before capitalism, but the sheer bloodthirsty scale becomes hard to read after a while.
(On the note of violent revolution: there are, of course, many violent revolutionary acts noted in this book – not just literal revolution, but simply violent pushback on colonialism and repression – and to my increasing frustration, many of them ended with “the uprising was repressed”. So far as I could tell, the most effective acts of violence were against people who weren’t part of institutions, like private landlords. On the other hand, general strikes were wildly successful (as well as, like, slaves just running away), often far beyond what the strikers were expecting, and indeed most successful acts of violence were coupled with this. I will also concede that the violence required to create capitalism as the dominant system points is an argument in favor of its effectiveness)
The fourth principle – which doesn’t flow through my points as effectively – is that capitalism is a truly global phenomenon. Beckert is far from the first to point out that capitalism is ideologically flexible, but it’s through this that he observes that how many ideologies capitalism has been hooked to and how this means there isn’t really one single capitalist you can point to as either origin or embodiment, even Adam Smith. Beckert observes that capitalists band together intensely, even during the neoliberal phase where capitalists become obsessed with competition and conflict as an ideological imperative (as opposed to the development of liberal capitalism that’s theoretically based around improving life for all), not just in terms of class conflict* but in how capitalists constantly learn from each other and adapt.
*Another great note: working class ideals emerged pretty much immediately.
A Place Both Wonderful And Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks, Scott Meslow
Not quite as insightful as the title hopes, but still good. This was written after David Lynch’s death, so Mark Frost ends up dominating much of the book – which is great, because I really enjoy the insights into Frost’s side of the creative process of the show. As he himself points out, he’s the more rational and optimistic of the partnership, and much of his work is, in some form or another, weaving together Lynch’s flights of fancy into something coherent. This applies to the logistics of running the show day-to-day as much as it does the actual storytelling; remarkably, the myth that the show went rancid after Lynch left in season two isn’t quite right, as he actually left to make Wild At Heart immediately after the pilot and came back at the end of the season.
What really happened was Frost left at around the rancid time, and the writers talk about how they really did their best trying to spin more story out; there’s a great section where Harley Peyton exasperatedly apologises for the grievous sin of the James-on-the-road plot, and he talks about trying to work the noir angle into the whole thing. The conversations with the writers tends to be the best part of the book outside of Frost’s observations, as they talk about the trials and tribulations of writing for the biggest show on TV. One of the little things here is a loving puncturing of the myth of Lynch’s niceness, where he is indeed quite selfless and giving in many ways – he’s apparently totally loyal to his actors and gets the same in return – but he also is prone to being insanely self-absorbed, like wandering away from the show almost immediately, nearly walking away from the revival on a whim, and the occasional violently loud loss of temper. Nothing unforgivable, but you see he is just a guy with a spectacular imagination.
What’s the Worst That Can Happen? – My first Westlake was Kahawa, the least Westlakian novel he ever wrote, but good enough that I started to track down whatever Westlake i could find in the library (which has never been much). So when I found this, I had to grab it, despite having not read any other Dortmunder books. I naturally loved it, and eventually read all the rest. But reading it now, after reading both all the Dortmunders and all the Parkers, I can appreciate this so much more now. I know who these characters are better, know their history of failures and partial failures, and can really enjoy seeing Dortmunder and his gang make out like, well, bandits. But I can also see this as both Dortmunder’s The Score and his Butcher’s Moon. It’s the former in that it’s his big job, the one with the most moving pieces. It’s the latter in that Dortmunder becomes a single minded actor looking for a share of revenge. Of course this being a Dortmunder book no one dies and the offending party is not a mobster but a self satisfied rich asshole, but there are moments when Dortmunder really seems to have found his inner Parker. Also, this is just a funny funny book. I have no idea why the the gags about the Watergate Hotel and a “third rare burglary” that goes over Dortmunder’s head are always funny. One other thing: the critic who runs The Westlake Review insists that the rich asshole is more Donald Trump than Rupert Murdoch, but I don’t see it. Mas Fairbanks might be an awful person and all, but he is far more competent than Trump even was.
Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir by Bryan Burrough – A long and relatively slow read that I will probably pause for newer books from the library. Burrough’s thesis seems to be: a) the Mir was a deathtrap and NASA should have never signed a deal with Russia to keep it going; b) the rudderless NASA of the 90s maybe had no reason to keep going; and c) the vast majority of people in both space programs, especially the astronauts, were assholes. I have no way to know how accurate all this is – there are no footnotes or bibliography – but it feels really unbalanced, a reporter who had a story he wanted to tell and cherry picked facts to support it. Of course, this was written in the 90s and maybe in hindsight, with the success of the ISS, a new account would see things differently. Still, I wonder why he spent so much effort writing this if he doesn’t actually like the space program. (He also does not mention once NASA’s non-manned missions, which seems like a huge oversight.)
Hell yeah What’s The Worst That Could Happen! It was my first Dortmunder as well and I liked going back through the series and spotting the first appearances of guys who show up here. And Marie is a great late-period addition, she and Kelp work really well together. Such a fun book and I’m with you that there isn’t as much Trump in the villain as the Westlake Review thinks, but there’s more than I realized on my first read decades ago. I still have never watched the movie because of how bad it looks.
The movie only exists in so far as the cover of the book I borrowed is the movie poster. And the sad thing is that I could see Danny DeVito being an okay Max Fairbanks.
Yeah, DeVito would emphasize different things but still be the character. Lawrence as Dortmunder … I got nothing.
Carrie via audiobook as read by Sissy Spacek. It occurs to me that one of her secret weapons as an actress is her voice, as she’s so good at getting emotion across to any audience. This is a dark, cruel book and one still with a deep sense of nuance and empathy; the show seems to have completely missed that Carrie is not an inherently sympathetic person. She is shown nothing but cruelty, until the prom, her entire life, and this doesn’t inherently make her a KINDER person ala Cinderella. (As Sondheim observed, being nice and kind while getting nothing but mistreatment will not make sense to you.) Carrie is understandably full of anger and resentment, and when she gets some real power, she doesn’t actually hesitate about using it to get what she wants or to lash out, even early on in the book. There’s real dimension to that observation, and I immediately thought of Israel and how victims can become victimizers.
Carrie: I have telekinesis! *immediately shoves dipshit toddler to the ground* She is sympathetic but very real in her reaction to this power and how brutal it is. I can see Spacek doing a great job on an audiobook, but how did she handle the non-narrative stuff? There’s so much of it, it works as text insert in a book but I can see it being weird read aloud.
Very well, it helps that some is still from a specific person’s narrative. The stones part nearly brought me to tears.
King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby — as a writer, Cosby has his own style that is generally straightforward structure with vivid description and no fear when it comes to metaphor, so clunkers sit side by side with effective sweeps of emotion. This has more clunkers than other books of his and that can be frustrating, and I wonder if this is in part tied to his protagonist, a wealth management dude who comes back home to help his siblings deal with the family crematorium after their father is nearly killed in a suspicious hit-and-run, their mom has been missing and presumed killed by their dad for decades. Cosby’s prior leads have been on the lower end of the economic scale (and one makes a nifty little cameo here), this guy is loftier. But this slowly becomes the point, he underestimates and gets brutally owned, but then takes further action and Cosby ties together some very, very dark stuff about families and secrets by the end (one superbly-planted detail caught me completely off guard). Brutal stuff even for him, whatever the TV show they make looks like I don’t think it will have a lot of the action here. If Cosby bites off more than he can chew at times he’s taking big damn bites, glad he’s doing it.
Year of the Month updates:
This November, you can write about anything from 1968 — here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Black Lizard
TBD: Cameron Ward: Horus, Prince of the Sun
Nov. 6th: Gillian Nelson: Never a Dull Moment
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 13th: Gillian Nelson: Understanding Stresses and Strains
Nov. 19th: John Bruni: The Swimmer
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
And then we’ll be wrapping up 2026 with a look back at 2020! That was a great year for everybody, right? Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Dec. 4th: Gillian Nelson: The Owl House
Dec. 11th: Gillian Nelson: Prop Culture
Dec. 25th: Gillian Nelson: COVID closings at the Disney parks
I’m trying to get back into proper writing and I have personal reasons for wanting to tackle this one. May I have The Queen’s Gambit for December? Say for the 18th or so?