The Friday Article Roundup
This week's best pop culture writing links include gaming, movies, books, television and art.
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Send articles to be featured here throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
ReverseShot rounds up the best games of 2024 (yeah, this is from this week, it’s been a busy year):
I played this [Animal Well] over a wonderful month with my partner, in the evening, after our kid went to bed, an hour or so at a time. At first, we explored together, but after we found our footing in the game’s universe, we’d play alone to continue our obsessive spelunking. We’d send each other pictures of new discoveries and when we reconvened in the caverns, excitedly relate exactly how we’d found our way to some new cave or what an unconventional use of one of the tools had allowed us. It became a team pursuit to open up the entire map. This makes Animal Well, which has little built-in story of its own, unexpectedly narrative-driven—we related to the game through telling each other about our individual experiences. And it seems we weren’t alone—a few of the game’s puzzles required crowdsourcing to solve completely. I haven’t played it for months now, yet as I write about the game’s virtues, I’m feeling the itch to go back in and see what else might be found.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza talk about their new film Warfare with Clint Worthington at rogerebert.com:
AG: The lack of score was a no-brainer. It would have been weird, putting music in this. It would have felt crass and intrusive. I think the sound design team—this guy called Glenn Freemantle, I’ve worked with him for 25 years—is just really good. Of course, film is collaborative; I want to stress that above everything else because it’s so often not presented or seen as such. In this case, the primary sound design collaboration carried some abstractions that were sort of hearty. But one of the things about this film’s sound design that makes it work so well is this incredible precision when it comes to the sounds of battle. Ray and Glenn worked closely on that: Not doing the kind of tricks that we often employ in movies (add some sub to a gunshot to make it slightly sexier), but just aiming for fidelity.
At Hyperallergic, Julia Curl takes in an exhibition of larger-than-life photographer Weegee and considers if he’s been miscategorized:
But if we look at what comes later, as this exhibition encourages us to, something curious emerges: a sense of Weegee as a proto-Pop Artist. Facing a wall of his distorted portraits, we come face to face with images of pop culture (and Pop Art) icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. Suddenly, we recover something curiously Warholian in Weegee’s early photos of criminals and murderers: Are these not the gleeful precursors to the Pop Art paragon’s 13 Most Wanted Men (1964) and Death and Disasters (1962–67)? By embracing the spectacle of horror through the hyperbolic, larger-than-life persona that Weegee constructed for himself, does the photographer not occupy an odd middle ground between the news media and its parody? Was Weegee a Pop artist? That question would have seemed strange to me six months ago — but after seeing his 1965 portrait “For Senator Andy Warhol,” I’m left wondering.
The A.V. Club‘s Danette Chavez investigates “how Hacks takes the gloves off in season 4“:
But regardless of who wins audience sympathy in the first round, a game of one-upwomanship is afoot. Series co-creator Paul W. Downs—who also plays Jimmy Lusaque Jr., who has his own seesaw dynamic with a colleague (Megan Stalter’s deceptively dippy Kayla)—cited that “grist” between Ava and Deborah as the “magic of the show.” When he and co-creators Lucia Aniello (who also directs) and Jen Statsky write for their leads, Down said they focus on “action and reaction,” particularly in the first half of this season. Describing the interplay as “really fun and juicy,” Downs told us Ava won’t be holding back: “She’s always clapped back at Deborah in the past, but it’s like the gloves are off. It is a different level, and it’s really fun to write that.”
For The Los Angeles Review of Books, Skijler Hutson consider the role of the L.A. freeway system in fiction with examples in Bradbury, Pynchon, Didion and many others:
Both Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) imagine possibilities for racial and class repair through dystopian destruction of the city’s freeway system; by the end, both books transform the freeways into footpaths and shelter for the multicultural homeless. Far from offering perfect solutions, they transfer contemporary social feelings into a future in which (infra)structural inequality is literally leveled. […] Perhaps it is the mimetic impossibility of the freeways that has made them so enticing as a postmodern subject. Freed from the shackles of representation, freeway novels have offered other ways of imagining modern urban life. It would make sense, then, that in recent years novelists have turned toward a literature of ambivalence. If the freeways should one day fall, it will not be through the imagination of their collapse. The duty of artists, rather, will be to demonstrate other possibilities for navigating Los Angeles, to create another sort of mythology.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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Department of
Conversation
Hey, Tropic of Orange!
That reading of Tropic of Orange’s freeway material tracks very well but man, I do not see what the fuck she is talking about in relation to Sower, at least not in that excerpt. Racial and class repair? The book is about survival first and the dream of transit is extraterrestrial, which is certainly one way to navigate L.A. albeit “away from.”
I absolutely do not have time to resurrect it at this point, but I very much enjoyed The Solute Book Club.
That ReverseShot article makes me feel like I may eventually figure out Balatro, despite having never quite had a handle on poker itself. I’ll dare to dream, anyway. In the meantime, Animal Well!
I’m eager to click on that Hacks article once I’m caught up, so probably by next week.
The opening two episodes of the season are so good!
I went from “eh, yeah it’s pretty decent I guess” to “hmm I’d better install this on more devices” with Balatro in a disturbingly short period of time. While it uses the poker hands it’s much more about the joker combinations and just getting high scores, which turns out to be a pretty irresistible formula, dammit.
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Five, “The Long Dark”
This show is incredibly frustrating. I just know it’s going to kick into gear when the plot gets moving, and it’s taking forever to get to that. More of these episodes are written by J Michael Straczinsky; the first season had a traditional writer’s room and benefited enormously from that. As the show goes on, Straczinsky became the sole writer, which is impressive in terms of sheer hard work, but he also reveals his peculiar strengths and weaknesses. His strengths are that he’s got brilliant ambition and ideas (the one big reveal we’ve had so far has been fucking sick); his weakness is that he’s actually not that good at the basic building blocks of plotting; he keeps meandering and gesturing instead of just fucking doing anything.
This particular episode is fairly heavy on the backstory, and not even backstory that has much to do with our protagonists. I’ve worked out that it’s not that backstory never works in fiction, it’s that it intellectualises characters and distances the viewer from the emotions they feel. We see Shane Vendrell experience a trauma at the end of season five of The Shield and we experience his emotions and ‘recovery’ with him; by comparison, an actor delivering a monologue about his shitty life makes us feel bad for him. I don’t like that philosophically or aesthetically; I don’t like treating people as anything other than people.
There’s one scene here where Franklin almost explicitly rejects the Star Trek ethos of people evolving to be better.
Hacks, Season Four, Episodes One and Two, “Big Brave Girl” and “Cover Girls”
We’re back. This feels like the most plotted this show has ever been; these two episodes alone get us with the two making an uncomfortable but sincere alliance. In a way, getting this show is the Money Train of the duo, and we’re already seeing everyone get crushed – or not – under the pressure. I love that we immediately see already that Deb isn’t frustrated by any one thing; she’s genuinely starting to actually crack under the sheer weight of her new responsibilities, and Ava isn’t far behind her, though the latter has a much stronger emotional base than she used to and both have a massive structure of friends and allies holding them up; I’m particularly tickled by Helen Hunt’s character putting them both in their place at the end of the second episode. Of all things, I didn’t expect Deb to let her feelings get in the way of the job, although as Hunt points out, she’s in entirely new territory.
Ava is fascinating in that she’s starting to really take on Deb’s qualities; her threat to fire Jimmy especially reminded me of Deb. Jimmy and Marcus, meanwhile, are revealing their incredible resilience throughout all this; the former is having his moments where it seems to slip out of his control (I was cackling when he saved them at the party because it looked like he was about to genuinely lose it) and the latter is revealing powerful strength after his initial nervousness in simply barrelling through Deb’s bullshit and separate from her.
There’s also a small runner where their past is coming back on them slightly and it ends up making them look even more insane than it did at the time. All the things they’ve done look nuts now that they’re actually successful.
“Where the fuck did you learn that?” Borders on “Who taught Tracey about anagrams?!”
Also love the meta gag of “No one’s even buying half hours!”
Line of the night for me:
“You can’t unsend an email!”
“You can’t! You’re still using hotmail!”
I also cracked up at:
“I’d prefer you don’t assume my sexual orientation.”
“Totally. There’s…a picture of you marrying a man in your office.”
“You don’t know who that man is.”
And “Smile, we’re on camera” was chilling.
Yes to all this. Shades of Don Draper with that first one; shades of Larry discovering his lawyer isn’t Jewish with the second.
You can unsend emails?
Hacks, “On the Market” and “The One, the Only”
I’m very tempted to go ahead and watch the new S4 episodes, but I’m going to resist so that I can watch them with my wife once she’s all caught up–which, at the rate we’re going, shouldn’t take long. S2 ends in magnificent style: so many great moments in that finale, from Jimmy’s forced smile as he gets ready to sell his lie about the death mid-show to DJ grappling with the disconcerting fact that her mom actually tried and this is still how it all ended up to the emotional Deborah-Ava conversation at the end. (Putting Ava in the dress Deborah bought for her on the road and not commenting on it is a great move.) And I love how the whole season teases Deborah inevitably dropping the lawsuit against Ava only to do it when it will hit Ava more like a sucker punch than a hug. Perfect.
Navy SEALs
And now for something completely different! My friend had had a rough week and needed a dumb action movie, and this fit the bill to the point where we spent half of it riffing on the concept of this actually being a lost ’90s TV show called Boat Fire, with a backdoor pilot for the superior Sub Fire. Every week, a different boat would get set on fire! You need this kind of thing to entertain you while watching Navy SEALs, because it’s not as fun as it should be. It does, however, have a very fun cast, so you at least get to hang out with Charlie Sheen, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton (his character’s callsign is “God”), Dennis Haysbert, etc. I’m not sure we were supposed to get so distracted and pissed of by the fact that Haysbert starts the movie right about to get married only to have his wedding interrupted by Urgent Navy SEAL Business … and then he and his fiancee never seal the deal when he gets back, so when he inevitably and unsurprisingly dies, this poor woman gets nothing! No flag, no pension! They were three minutes away from getting married! It’s obviously supposed to be bittersweet that they didn’t get to go through with the wedding, but my friend and I were way more invested in how much this woman just got screwed financially.
Oooooooooooooooh, NAVY Seals! And that is hilarious about Haysbert, reminiscent of the wacky wedding near-interruption of License To Kill, at least that couple gets hitched before gruesome drug revenge happens.
Babylon 5 — Jeffrey Coombs sighting! Hell yeah, we better get more of him. Once again a threat is neutralized due to some clever rule following/general righteousness and more and more it feels like something is building up in this regard.
Real Genius — this is more ramshackle than I remember (so many montages) but still a joy, Kilmer’s goofery rules and he plays the switch of the betrayal so it has real weight, fellow nerd Jon Gries brings up the point of what you would use this laser for and you can believe Kilmer never really thought about that before either due to not caring or to getting too wonky. But so much of this movie also rides on Atherton, he is increasingly costumed in these hilariously large sweaters draped over his skinny shoulders and the effect is a dipshit trying to look big, his villainy is both normal and not that powerful (he has to answer to the CIA after all) and yet more than enough to fuck with the students and be loathsome (and the film has the brilliance to give him Kent to kick around, so the viewer winds up rooting for him on occasion). He and Kilmer are perfectly managed in antagonism.
Ali — I remember critiques of this as a quasi-Malcolm X biopic in its first half and that stood out on rewatch, not that the material is bad (Van Peebles is excellent) but in how his presence has weight pulling against Ali’s ascent. And Smith has some very good moments and is believably pissed in the ring, but the connective tissue of his change over time isn’t very strong. His Ali is a performer and sometimes you can see the performance. The ring stuff still rules (the trio of dudes playing Liston, Frazier and Foreman are all incredibly believable ass-kickers) and the soundtrack is god-level, and that opening sequence still stuns — just not Mann’s top tier.
I had the good fortune to watch Ali after reading a good biography tracking the X/Ali friendship, so that ended up informing the gorgeous imagery of the film to me, but it does feel very dreamlike. I do think the movie makes a successful argument that Ali was an artist working exclusively in the medium of boxing, though; intentionally making choices every time he was in front of the camera or in the ring, and seeing him make those choices when alone – best choice in the film is showing his friendly relationship with Howard Cosell (if I remember rightly) before Ali gets all antagonistic on camera.
The moment where Ali runs off course in Zaire is incredible and it parallels his draft refusal earlier — in a crowd but on his own, making a choice and seeing it play out. But those are the big moments of interiority for me, Ali is placed in combat with boxers and wives and Cosell, at varying degrees of intensity and reality (the Cosell stuff is so much fun), and that winds up covering for Smith on his own, I think. Mann had done more work in duality to this point, I think Thief is the real exception and Smith is not at Caan’s level (and to be fair Ali is operating at levels Frank could and does not want to dream of) — maybe the closest comp comes years later with Ferrari, which I’d also place as lower Mann.
The Aviator — Regular readers may recall that I’ve been doing a dribs and drabs catch up on the (many) Scorsese films I never got around to because I don’t rate Goodfellas as high as everyone else. And I absolutely adored Killers of the Flower Moon and The Age of Innocence. But they can’t all be home runs. This has strong performances by DiCaprio and Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn (I also liked Beckinsale as Ava Gardner in a less showy role — prestige cinema lost something when she decided she needed to start getting paid). But there just isn’t a lot to it. Are we supposed to see Hughes as the triumphant hero? That’s hard to square with his many failures. But if he’s supposed to be a tragic figure like Icarus, why ~end the picture with two great triumphs? The movie is enjoyable enough, but it really falls into all the biopic clichés. You don’t necessarily notice at first because most biopics aren’t directed or performed with this kind of verve, but there’s little soul to this picture.
I like to think of this film as a counterpoint to Scorsese’s “man suffering with the eternal battle between good and evil” theme, in that it has the exact same structure but is about a man battling with his own mental illness. But yeah, it’s pretty bloated.
I will rewatch at some point, but “You don’t necessarily notice at first because most biopics aren’t directed or performed with this kind of verve, but there’s little soul to this picture” nails it for me. But the first part is not without its charms! That plane crash, holy shit.
Kojak, “A Summer Madness”/”Law Dance” – The former is a dour story of a cop with a dead son, a broken wife, and a mistress. The wife chucks a Molotov cocktail into a bar where the mistress is, killing her, and the cop is so busy covering for the existence of the mistress that he doesn’t get his wife is the culprit. Well put together and very noir, but just really hard to take. Good effort to convey an NYC summer, though. The latter has Crocker testifying in a murder case, even as the one viable witness to the crime is killed by the defendant’s brother. This one is a bit complex as these things go, with a rare speech from Kojak about the public expecting the cops and the DAs to bring justice to a city that had 1,700 murders in 1975, one that veers into law and order rhetoric but also makes an interesting point that public opinion about the cops is a pendulum and that the cops need to accept that. We also have a great moment where the wife of the witness, played by Jeffersons regular Roxie Roker (mother of Lenny Kravitz), condemns the betrayal of her husband’s “Black American dream.” Other guests include Sharon Gless and Martin Kove, future co-stars on Cagney and Lacey.
Frasier, “Crane vs Crane” – Niles is hired to give testimony in the high profile competency hearing of a timber baron, and Frasier is recruited to defend the man. Naturally, things don’t go well between the brothers, and things get weird once the hearing happens. Donald O’Connor has a bit of fun as the old man, but this one is pretty rote.
Last One Laughing UK – family holiday viewing after the nephews went to bed. Ten comedians in a house, told they aren’t allowed to laugh, if they do so twice then they’re out. A fun reality TV variant since the filming took place over several hours and not weeks, and the different comedic styles bouncing off each other made for some good laughs. Fun seeing people go on the offensive only to be unable to keep a straight face at their own ridiculous story, falling on their own sword. Not bothered about checking out any of the other other regional variants but it was perfect for tired evenings.
What did we read?
“The Music Of Erich Zahn”, HP Lovecraft
A masterpiece. Easily my favourite of Lovecraft’s early works, easily my favourite of his shorter stories. All of Lovecraft’s best qualities, none of his worst ones (not a trace of racism or even elitism). The basic concept is magnificent; a musician playing for dark forces is powerful enough to build a short mysterious story around, and it doesn’t just play into Lovecraft’s strengths, it plays into his interests and goals. Music is the perfect subject for Lovecraft’s indescribable horrors because he can absolutely convey its essence in such a way that I can make up in my head what it sounds like without it feeling like a cheat (and this has only improved given I’ve listened to much more classical since last reading this).
I also love his description of the Rue d’Auseil, not just conveying a sense of decaying horror in itself, but in conveying the character of the narrator, their circumstances, and Erich Zahn’s circumstances. In some ways, Zahn is an alternate version of Lovecraft himself, living in shabby circumstances and churning out weird, alien art sent to him from another universe. This points to another of Lovecraft’s obsessions; it’s hard to think of a time he better conveyed that something horrible was happening just out of our comprehension, but that we might understand it if we only had a bit more information. Who is Zahn playing for?
(He also gets elaborate with his prose without becoming pretentious. I particularly love the phrase “seating himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs”.)
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
A strong argument against realism as a goal in fiction by virtue of being a horror story that’s totally realistic in its action and steeped in a sense of supernatural horror. The actual action of the story is that a woman has gone vegetarian, something initially tolerated by her family until they prove themselves violently frustrated even before she genuinely starts starving herself to death; in the middle of this, her brother-in-law paints flowers on her body and films her in surreal images in a situation that climaxes with them having sex.
It’s hard to summarise this story’s themes. The book is divided into three parts, following from the perspective of three people; her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. Her husband is incredibly cruel and sociopathic, having clearly chosen her because she’s meek and docile, and he’s more confused and infuriated by the inconvenience of his wife’s condition than anything else. You may have heard that men tend to abandon wives who get sick at a rate so alarming they counsel female patients about it as a matter of course, and you effectively get that story from his perspective.
Her brother-in-law is less sociopathic but, in his own way, seeing her as an object just as much. He’s consumed with these images and feelings he gets from her, and he’s desperately guilty but that never stops him using her for them and, eventually ruining his marriage in pursuit of them. When we get to her sister, she struggles to comprehend the events that have happened but, eventually, realises how deeply she can empathise with and comprehend what her sister is doing.
In a way, this is a story about policing people. In a way, the woman is taking the basic principles she has been presented with her whole life – you are not a person, you are an object to be controlled by others – and pushing them to the most extreme, reducing herself to a tree with no actions, thoughts, or opinions. And in a way, this makes her impossible to police; she’s defined more by what she’s not doing than whats he is, and she simply cannot be reasoned with or changed (the one supernatural element is her absurd strength for a person who has nearly starved to death by the end of the book). Do men want women, or do they want trees?
The Digger’s Game, by George V. Higgins — reread and man, the sequence where the main character goes to Vegas and has too good a time one day is still one of the funniest and most brutally accurate depictions of the aging body just not fucking taking your nonsense anymore. Out in Vegas he blows $18K on blackjack and this sets up the rest of the book of him doing crimes to get the cash and the people waiting or not waiting on him to get it, his “work” such as it is is full of risk and an amateur is set to fuck people badly at the end, but it is comfortably low level. This contrasts with the people who have his marker and set up the trip, their sections are literally office drama — three guys in a space, with the new employee promoted to a major role and immediately fucking things up with his initiative. He is a total asshole but that does not make his opposition righteous, and their deference to Mob mores is shat on pretty hard at one point — this is ultimately a corporate fuckup and a corporate fix. An odd novel but a very good one.
Memory aka The Actor, by Donald Westlake — an odd novel and if not completely successful still fascinating at points. This was recently published but it was a trunk novel Westlake originally wrote in the early 60s, right before he hit on Parker and it somewhat fits the vibe he was trying out then of a man damaged by a past attack trying to get his life back in order. But the damage for this actor is that while he’s banging a woman while on the road in the Midwest her husband knocks his head in and as a result he loses most of his long-term memory and more crucially has little short-term retention — unless he relies on notes, he’ll forget the most basic things. No tattoos, but the Memento vibes are strong.
However, this is not a crime novel, although the lead is run out of town by the cops for committing adultery and is fucked with by cops later on. Because he has no money and can’t remember any of his friends back in his home base of NYC, he gets stuck in a small town doing scut work at a factory and Westlake’s eye for financial detail that shines in the Parker books is turned toward tense and grim ends here, how easy it is to fall behind through payday loans and how a cheap hotel can be not so cheap — our man is sinking in a pit and while he knows it he can’t remember it. But he also builds a small life here as he forgets more of what he’s trying to do and is this something to stick with?
He (spoiler) eventually makes it back to NYC, where he runs into people who remember him if he doesn’t remember them, and tries to fit back into a life he can’t recall. This is where the book’s conceit starts to work against it, because our man’s struggle to find his old self is increasingly the story of a man without a self, without motivation or drive, and that idles for a while. It takes him a long time to realize what the reader has come to understand about his ability to regain what he’s lost, too long for a book that is fairly unstylish (in Westlake’s good straightforward way but also due to the blankness of the lead). And our man generally doesn’t tell people about his condition, which is sensible in some cases but leads to other times where you want to shake him — get help! So much Westlake is about self-reliance and where that will take a person and that is great, but without a self to rely on our man is a muddle. But the end comes through, although it is extremely depressing, maybe as big a downer as Westlake ever wrote. Not for newbies but definitely necessary for fans.
Nobody Runs Forever, by Richard Stark — self-reliance, straight no chaser. The end is bleak, but Parker doesn’t care. He just keeps going. As opposed to a guy on his trail who thinks he is hot shit and tries to pull off a gambit that doesn’t work, here he is musing at the bar of the man he’s trying to brace:
The world was filling up with people, it seemed to him, who pulled their punches everywhere they went in life. Light beer, decaf coffee, low-sodium seltzer.
And where that attitude gets him a few minutes later:
This time the bat smashed his jaw and flung him into the side wall. “Naa!” he screamed. “NAa!”
But the jaw wouldn’t work. He’d always used words; he was a talker; words got him into places and out of trouble, got him answers, got him everything he wanted; words had always saved him and protected him, but now all the words were gone, the jaw couldn’t work, and all he could bleat was, “Naa! Naa!” Even he didn’t understand himself.
Folks, that is how you fucking do it.
I came to decide that Nobody Runs Forever should have been the last Parker. In part because the next two aren’t as good, in part because how he gets out of the mess in the next book is too contrived, but mainly because this is how Parker’s run should end. Out of options, unable to get home, his allies in the past. The world changed, where the police now outgun him as a matter of course, where crime still exists but his kind of crime lives in the past. The end should be a cliffhanger, with the reader left to decide if he can make one last escape, or (as I concluded) if he finally meets his end but on his terms.
But I know there are those who like the final two Parker books so I could be wrong.
Nobody Runs Forever definitely feels like it could be an ending, like you say the world has changed a lot and the game is much harder and the book has an autumnal setting and feeling that plays into the narrowing options of that final page. But I like the remaining two books! Ask The Parrot is great as a look at Parker in agent of chaos mode, he has a very simple task but it winds up knocking so many people off course (and it’s an interesting look at the co-lead, who is sort of Parkerish in his anti-social tendencies and is given the opportunity to go all the way). The last one really leans into the new world catching up to Parker and for the first time Claire; I read someone theorizing that if Stark had lived longer the next book would have been a true finale with that relationship put to the test.
I’ve been holding off on Memory for so long because I have the idea that I’ll love it and want to somehow pick the perfect moment for it, so I should take this as a sign and go for it already.
Also, it’s a great reading week that gives you Westlake and Stark.
I have been reading lots of crime lately, it is comfort food. Especially Westlake/Stark, perhaps something to unpack later.
Memory is not a book that lends itself to love, I think — such an odd bird of circular momentum and Westlake is not quite the writer he would become, I think this has seeds of the vibe that would later be realized in The Ax but not that book’s ruthless focus. But has some outstanding setpieces and is definitely worth your time!
Making my way slowly through Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Mirror of Her Dreams. This is the beginning of the (two book) series he wrote after the original six Thomas Covenant books, which I’ve discussed multiple times in this space. I found that series incredibly powerful and moving. So far this follow-up doesn’t have a lot to it. I saw a comment by Donaldson that in creating this series he wanted to write a fantasy that was as different from Covenant as he could make it, and in that he succeeded. But what it means is his protagonist is submissive where Covenant was stubborn and the world she travels to is full of internal strife and dissipated characters while the people populating Covenant’s Land were fallible and mortal but always staunch and resolute in the face of tremendous adversity. It’s interesting as an experiment but it’s not as compelling a read. OTOH people online, the few who know it, rave about it. So maybe I will become sucked in eventually.
Started two books:
The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands – The author explores the life of a ranking Nazi official who oversaw mass murder in present day Poland and Ukraine, and also touches on his legacy. The former is interesting but hardly anything new, the latter is what gets my attention in part because the son of the Nazi was for a time friends with the author and how that friendship collapses due to the son’s embrace of the father is more important in the present.
Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age by James Essinger – A sprightly bio of this pioneering thinker, though whether it’s accurate to say she or Babbage actually launched the digital age remains to be seen. Essinger spends maybe a bit too much time talking about Byron, but once we’re past that, he is quite good at bringing Ada to life.
Finished Monday Starts on Saturday by the Strugatskys, there’s an author note at the end where they say that they struggled to figure out a plot to match the intriguing setting and… yeah, I could have guessed. Found the third part more fun than the second but it was still a lot of zaniness without much payoff, definitely not in the same league as Roadside Picnic / Hard to be a God but you can tell they had fun writing it.
The Man with the Getaway Face, by Richard Stark
Mentioned this on Discord and got some immediate enthusiasm from Dave, and he’s right, this slaps. It’s fascinating how small-scale it manages to be: just one not-that-spectacular robbery and a couple of nested complications. Stark makes that enough, with all of this feeling logical and inevitable, and it’s fantastic to see Parker so purely in his element. Mann-like levels of hard-edged professional focus here, just a guy doing the next necessary thing coolly and without sentiment (though with an occasional embedded sense of fairness or distant appreciation–Parker ultimately taking the doctor’s nosiness in stride, accepting his own code of professionalism, and explaining the heist to him simply to reward his curiosity is a great low-key touch).
I also love whenever we duck into other characters’ POVs. It fleshes out the universe to have more shades of emotion and morality than Parker can process; it adds a slightly tragic reality to everything works really well. One of my favorite bits actually involves another doctor, the one who tends to poor loyal Stubbs (who is no longer smart enough to do what he’s doing, and who can’t even process the extent of his own trauma; Stubbs is also great):
The doctor was surprised at how much money there was in the wallet, and it made him curious as to what this man had been doing to get so run-down and have so much money, but he kept this curiosity to himself. He was a doctor with a small practice in a poor neighborhood, plus work at a clinic, plus being house doctor for this hotel and two others very much like it. He had the constant feeling that violence and evil were all around him, kept just out of sight because these people needed him as a doctor, but if he were ever to turn his head fast and see the evil they would have to kill him, whether they needed him or not. Because of this, he had trained his curiosity to be a small and private thing.
Beautiful in its plainness and lucidity. This is a shabby and violent world, but it’s full of people who feel like they have their own reality and–right or wrong, smart or stupid, good or bad–their own dignity. The failure mode of bad authors trying to write books like the Parker novels is to have everything and everyone around the Parker figures be cartoonishly deserving of contempt. This never feels like that.
How to Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix
When Hendrix is good, he can be very good, especially at the actual horror in his horror novels. He can be very good at the agonizing family details and sense of trauma–The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires manages a mundane but devastating dog death, for example–and I think he means them sincerely, but he’s still better at crafting high-octane, original scares than he is at the more “prestigious” corner of things. The family elements here never work for me 100%, but they hit some good highs, and the terrifying puppets are incredible and genuinely nightmarish. I’m calling bullshit on establishing this imaginary dog only in the moment the story needs it, though, and I can’t believe an editor let him get away with that. I can’t even believe his own instincts let him get away with that. Move that dog story earlier in the narrative, don’t give me the flashback introducing the thing as the thing attacks!
But this was a quick, captivating read, and again, the puppets were incredible. Hendrix commits to his scares as opposed to just using them as way to make a story of generational trauma more marketable, and they’re dynamite.
Oh man that passage about the doctor is so good, I had forgotten that bit! Clearly another read is in order. And bang on about Stark’s imitators — a certain D. Simmons (too obvious, let’s call him Dan S.) clearly wanted to write hard but cannot manage that level of small and private curiosity within the detachment when it came to the other people. (And it occurs to me that poor Stubbs is a riff on the lead in Memory in certain ways.)
The Voyage Of The Space Beagle by A. E. Van Vogt – Classic Golden Age, space opera fix-up from three or four short stories. The cracks are many resulting in something more episodic than a smooth novel length narrative. But it still has its charms all these years later in its (dated) scientific ideas about space travel and especially in the fantastic aliens with well-characterized psychologies. It’s perhaps better known for planting the seeds for so much that came after including Star Trek, Alien and D&D. There is of course the scientific vessel encountering strange new worlds filled with a captain, several science officers, an engineer and a doctor. But unlike the relatively harmonious crew of the Enterprise the men – only men – of this crew each have their own professional goals, agendas and rivalries. It falls on the newest member Nexialist Elliot Grosvenor whose interdisciplinary (nexus, get it?) approach to science saves the ship more than once. His use of gathering multi-disciplines into decision making is a threat to individuals specializing in one field. He shows that any scientific approach requires different disciplines working together to solve problems. After Alien was released Van Vogt sued the studio due to the similarities in behavior of the Xenomorph and his Ixtl – both species implant parasitic eggs into the crew. An undisclosed sum of money was paid and a “Thank You” was added to future releases of the film. As a D&D playing kid reading this pre-internet my limited imagination didn’t connect the description and abilities of the Coeurl with the game’s Displacer Beast until the internet told me years later.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
It’s almost Passover. And dear lord are we exhausted. The process by which we move into Passover mode is usually the same, but we are not as young as we were so everything just takes its toll when it didn’t ten years ago. But we are almost there.
Lots of stuff boiling at work, some related to How Things Are In America in 2025, some not. My own work load is manageable, but I can see the iceberg of the next Board meetings on the horizon.
We don’t have a Seder every year, but since this is the last opportunity before the kid goes off the college I guess we’d better.
Family break for my sister’s 40th was pretty great, gorgeous sunshine every day and the place we were staying was ludicrously well equipped – private pool with sauna, large garden, pool table, arcade cabinet etc. So for the most part we just hung out there with a couple of short jaunts out to explore (one of my nephews is 2, so shorter trips out suited that part of the family). Ate and drank too much but a daily swim probably balances that out somewhat.
Back now and assumed I’d be plunged into madness because of the new team I’m co-leading but it turns out that most of them have the day off today so I’ve actually come back to weird silence and an awkward feeling that I don’t know what I should be doing, which admittedly isn’t a new experience in this job. Hopefully things will pick up a bit and make more sense next week.
Playing live music at a matinee gig on Sunday afternoon. Need to fit in some serious rehearsal time before then although initial signs are good, not throwing too many new songs into this one due to the holiday so I should be alright.
The longing that activated in me at the description of that 40th birthday party location! Glad everyone had a good time, but now I’m envious and vowing to take a vacation that will involve both a private pool and a pool table where no one can see how bad I am while I mess around with it.
Fingers crossed for work becoming more comprehensible next week and for Sunday’s gig going well.
Cheers! It was pretty ridiculous, the owner met us on arrival and said he rents it out because most of the time he stays at his girlfriend’s house. I can only assume she owns a water park, or maybe a zoo.
She Bought A Zoo
Wooo birthdays! Wooo future live music!
My wife and I had our ninth anniversary this week! Going out for a nice dinner tomorrow to celebrate.
Mazel tov!
Congratulations! Eat like Parker after the job, not during.
Congrats!
Congratulations!
Greetings from endless corridors of unripe citizens. Today is lessons in being superfluous. Sometimes you get handed a garbage lesson plan. When you go to sell it, you may expected to have it heaved back at you, but disappointingly, many classes will just choke it down as quick as they can. Today for an introductory business class the whole near-hour was given to completing a brainstorming worksheet. This took about 15 minutes, and the rest of our precious instruction time leaks away with me swatting away phones and them messing around on laptops. One kid used his spare time to watch an episode of Pawn Stars and it was the saddest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I wanted to teach that kid about anarchy. I wanted to do anything but waste 30-40 minutes of all our lives, but with the only context of the class being a dinky assignment, I didn’t have much of a jumping off point. I didn’t really need to be there.
My hour off, which means I fill in for another class. This one is in the Journalism department, in a remote and windowless hovel of a room with the wrong number on the door. I’m not needed here either. Three senior advisors catch me up on what everybody’s working on as soon as I walk in. They point out where the kids will be checking out their own equipment, signing themselves out to do interviews, and emphasize that they all have stories to finish. I decline their offer to take attendance for me so that if anybody asks later the kids will remember that I was present in the room. Then I read a book, pausing to marvel at their self-directed work ethic. This is a wonderful classroom, full of bright and motivated young people.
Too small a sample size to draw any scientific conclusions about business classes vs. journalism students, so I’ll leave this in the allegory category. And probably I’d find the advanced classes in the business much more interesting, will find out this afternoon. Hopefully I’m unneeded in the good way.
That introductory business class does sound depressing, but I’m enjoying picturing the high school version of His Girl Friday for the journalism class, with you kicking back with a book while teenage Hildy Johnson does peak screwball comedy dialogue in a faux newsroom.
Hahahahaha the journalism kids in the shithole room definitely tracks. And education-wise, it sounds like those kids were learning and applying knowledge, while the business ones got “brainstorming,” not exactly engaging stuff.
It had a very tall, modern free-standing cooling apparatus, clearly provided by a teacher tired of smelling hot, stale air all day. An update on a bladed fan next to an open upper story window.
Had my follow-up appointment for my wrist surgery today and got the splint removed, which is nice. Seems to be healing fine. Not 100%, though. I still have some pain and some limited movement, but we’re definitely improving. They gave me a brace to wear for “activity” and I have a follow-up in four weeks. So hopefully I can start getting back to my usual activities. Between that and my back problems I haven’t had a proper workout at the gym with no issues in a solid month. I’m not sure if my wrist is well enough to go back yet. I may test it out soon.
I dunno what else to add, that’s kind of been my only real concern lately. I stopped drinking, though, I’m hoping that will help my mental well-being even if I can’t get the exercise I need to usually be in peak (or peak possible, anyway) mental health.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 15th: Ben Hohenstatt: The White Stripes
Apr. 16th: James Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 17th: Cameron Ward/Cori Domschot: The Mummy
Apr. 18th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Hand Behind the Mouse
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: The Matrix
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999
And the open call for May starts now! Our year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
Ugh, I forgot that you guys are crazy. So it goes. Keep on writing, though!