The Friday Article Roundup
Only the best of the week's pop culture writing.
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You know who’s great? FAR contributors John Anderson and Guillermo Jiménez! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At The AV Club, Jesse Hassenger takes a look at the collaborations of Delroy Lindo and Spike Lee:
The core of the Lindo/Lee collaboration, though, comes through in Lee’s Malcolm X follow-ups. The Brooklyn-set Crooklyn (1994) and Clockers (1995)—something of a homecoming after the location-hopping epic that preceded them—weren’t received all that rapturously in their day, despite the way they develop Lee’s talent for zooming in on New York neighborhoods as a means of exploring Black communities and social dynamics. Lindo plays a father figure in both movies, creating a compare-and-contrast exercise so vivid it borders on obvious. Maybe it escaped some notice at the time because Lindo simply wasn’t attracting as much attention as he deserved; at very least, Crooklyn may have arrived too early for viewers to understand how much range Lindo was showing in it. In the greater context of his career, where he’s since become more familiar playing men of authority or menace, his warmth as the father to five kids growing up in 1970s Bedford-Stuyvesant feels revelatory.
For BookPage, Alden Mudge interviews Susana M. Morris about her new biography of Octavia E. Butler:
Exploring the genesis of these novels and others, like her own personal favorite, Wild Seed (1980), has led Morris to view Butler as not only a great writer, but also one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century, one who, Morris writes, “routinely envisioned futures with Black women at the center, changing the course of human life and culture, modeling how those who are often dismissed and erased have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world.”
Jake Cole examines the dissipation and dissolution displayed by 70s movies for Indiewire:
Nicholson, hair prematurely thinning but possessed of a boyish spark he retained well into his elder years, is perhaps the ultimate symbol of a certain kind of developmental stasis among the Boomer generation. And while he would ultimately come to be seen as a rebellious figure on-screen, it’s here that one gets the clearest view of the underlying secret of so many of his most famous characters: Their refusal to conform or obey is ultimately an impotent gesture against forces larger than themselves.
Alex Lei reviews My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow for Screen Slate:
[Director Julia] Loktev and co-editor Michael Taylor quietly tighten the coil of her iPhone footage until it bursts into pure thriller territory when the war starts. For a documentary shot in such a candid manner, Loktev’s cinematic eye pops in contrast to the staid conventions and formalities of TV journalism. Pushing in on the character’s faces at once treats them like movie stars, while also peeling back their professional veneer and revealing them as people.
At the New York Times, Tim Teeman profiles a collaboration between novelist David Levithan and Magpies-approved musician Jens Lekman:
What makes the book unique is signaled by a QR code at its beginning, which gives the reader access to the 10 songs that [its lead character] sings. They were composed by the acclaimed Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman, who, while releasing five wry, melancholy albums and many EPs, has had a longtime side gig as a wedding singer. His co-author, the award-winning Y.A. novelist David Levithan, has written the book’s main narrative. Lekman dedicates the novel to ”the 132 couples whose weddings I’ve played at over the years,” adding, ”I hope my presence turned out to be a blessing and not a curse.”
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Wow, I am so torn by my newfound appreciation of Jens Lekman vs. my extreme dislike of David Levithan.
(Excessive screed: some of his books are fine. Every Day is a fucking catastrophe of “let me construct my lead character as the above-it-all correct viewpoint, inadvertently revealing that I have extremely limited empathy and also a ton of loathing for fat people specifically.” Seriously, the disembodied spirit who hops between different bodies every day and therefore has supposedly universal empathy lectures their girlfriend about not being attracted to them when they’re possessing a girl’s body–sexual orientation is so shallow–but talks about how understandable it is that she’s turned off when he’s possessing a fat boy, because this spirit would never have let itself go like this, and this fatness says something about a person’s character.
Another highlight includes the spirit, A., possessing a religious boy for the day and utilizing his body for their own purposes, causing huge disruption in his life and tension with his family who don’t understand why he went AWOL for the day–and then getting mad and condescending about the boy conceptualizing this as demonic possession, an extremely predictable and understandable move!)
Hahahaha, your write-up of Lekman coincided with me seeing that article so I figured it was perfect FAR material, and now bonus anti-Levithan ranting! That book sounds fucking terrible and to be honest the new one does not sound like my cup of tea either, but it’s an interesting concept.
What did we watch?
Slow Horses, “Fiasco”/”Follies” – The season wraps up with more action, more revelations about River Cartwright (the action hero lead) and Jackson Lamb (the actual lead), and a priceless scene where Lamb is keeping a horde of MI5 agents waiting while listening to – and mouthing – “500 Miles” in the SUV he’s, er, borrowed. Remember how I said I almost bailed on the first hour because of how obnoxious Lamb was? He’s still hard to take, but I can see how this character is supposed to work. Oldman is very good, as you would expect. But the best parts of these two episodes were the stuff with the three nationalist yobs and their hostage, and I think you could have done a movie with just them. Overall, a very solid if still somewhat messy spy show, not as funny as it’s supposed to be, but wella acted and well assembled. I will keep going as long as my free subscription runs, and since I think my wife will want to come back for season two of Murderbot, I will eventually watch the whole thing unless I get bored.
The Practice, “Truth and Consequences” – Rebecca is the only witness to a murder at a gas station, and is threatened by the suspect’s gang member brother (Raymond Cruz). She insists on testifying at the probable cause hearing, but when it becomes clear that her life will stay in danger throughout the trial, Helen Gamble arranges things so that the brother is our of the picture. This is a really dark ending, and if the previous episode, ending with a police funeral, was copaganda, this one is definitely not. Also, the power lines cancer cluster case starts to move forward, and while nothing really interesting happens, the pieces are in place for what will happen.
Frasier, “Decoys” – Niles schemes to break up Donny and Daphne by getting Roz to go after Donny (her ex). Before long, we land in farce territory as Niles has to hide his scheme from Martin and Frasier, and ends up pretending to be with Roz. Not a top level farce, and frankly Niles acting this way is awful, but still pretty funny, and these go down better when Frasier is not the one acting like a pompous asshole. Also, Frasier and Marin go duck hunting, which is actually sort of sweet, and sets up one of the best credits gags with a duck call and Eddie.
Scrubs, “My Old Man” and “My Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Two old favorites, since I needed something shorter and lighter than The X-Files before my movie last night. I started off with “My Old Man,” and then my wife asked, “Didn’t JD have a brother?”, and that led me to my favorite episode with Tom Cavanagh’s Dan. All the emotions in both of these episodes work for me, like JD recontextualizing his dad as a struggling middle-aged guy rather than a not-terrible-but-not-great father or Dan appealing to Dr. Cox to mentor JD in a way he never could (my wife pointed out how well that parallels DJ and Ava’s christening interaction in Hacks, and isn’t she insightful? She’s so cool), and there are a lot of great jokes too. My favorite one may be courtesy of Elliot’s dad and Dr. Kelso:
“I haven’t seen a ward like this since Vietnam.”
“And where in Connecticut was your National Guard unit stationed?”
(Or maybe Dr. Cox’s “regarding the rum and coke issue: couldn’t be more confused!”)
I feel, on the basis of no real evidence, that Donald Faison’s excellent performance as Turk is underappreciated. But both Turk and Faison rule, and Faison deftly pulls off making Turk hilarious even as he’s unobtrusively better-adjusted and more emotionally healthy than just about everybody else on the show.
Slap Shot
Rewatch with a friend, inspired by the Screen Drafts episode on the best sports movies of the ’70s. Great flick, and one of my favorite bits is how gleefully it throws away a classic sports movie moral at the end: the idea of a redemptive, fair game honoring the sport of hockey gets tossed out the window the second the team finds out there are scouts there looking for a brawl. The transition from “Scouts?” to everyone slugging it out on the ice is fantastic.
Newman has to be one of the actors to best manage his transition from sex symbol actor to (still very sexy) visibly aging actor. Late-career Newman has so many highlights, but this is definitely one of them.
Also, great Michael Ontkean striptease.
Slap Shot fucking rules. The striptease is such a funny “fuck you,” and the anti-redemptive ending is something 70s sports flicks did so well, bring back cynical sports movies!
And I think there’s a case that this is the best Newman ever looked — obviously an extremely handsome dude from the get-go but a few lines take the callowness out of his face, George Clooney clearly studied how this was done.
I buy this Newman argument. (My highlight may always be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is where I first saw him.) One of the most stunning things about him in this movie is how totally he lights up whenever he’s feeling gleeful, and that probably works even better on a face that has a few more lines on it.
John Ritter had a pretty great late-period (sniff) career, huh? This, Buffy, Bad Santa.
I really oughta see this!
We should’ve gotten so much more later-period Ritter! This episode had me marveling all over again at how good he was at creating a real character even in just a few minutes of screentime.
8 Simple Rules, his last show when he died unexpectedly, wasn’t very good but I remember the episode where the cast grappled with his character’s in-universe death being surprisingly devastating.
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode One, “Matters of Honor”
Good news: I hated Marcus on sight. It’s funny, because he doesn’t actually do anything wrong, he just has one of those faces. I think this is the show’s dorkiness hitting it – or, to be more accurate but less American-friendly, naffness. ‘Naff’ essentially means lame – specifically in the sense of it lacking coolness as opposed to not being cool (a weird distinction, I admit). Dave Shutton compared Marcus to Andor, which is apt; whatever my criticisms, that work is fundamentally cool in a way Babylon 5 isn’t and never could be. Part of this is down to budget; everything will look shiny and new, not in a cool way but in a ‘we don’t have the budget to make this look old’ way, and the acting is generally weak across the board.
So he’s supposed to be a rugged warbeaten hero, but he comes off as a kid playing around in a costume, and that insincerity is annoying in a way that Delenn, Sheridan, Londo, or even Lennier are not. All those guys are larger-than-life, where their fakeness comes off as existing in a different plane of reality from my everyday concerns; they embody the specific, corny reality of Bablyon 5 so totally that I’m invested in it most of the time. Marcus’s fakeness comes off as naff imitation.
On the other hand, I do enjoy the addition of the White Star. It’s a cool concept and seems like a fun toy for Sheridan to play with; I’m particularly amused by the detail that none of the crew speaks English. It reflects the way the wars between both the Narn/Centauri and the Vorlons/Shadows have escalated, with Sheridan and Babylon 5 navigating the middle without actually being neutral. Also part of this: the incredibly corny new opening credits that I still enjoy, even if the heads of the characters popping up over their names nearly pushes it too far.
As part of this, I enjoy Londo having made his bed and now trying to weasel out of it. One of the risks of long planning like what the show is engaging in is becoming fixated on a single point you’re getting to; this show is doing well at reaching points earlier than expected and then moving onto the next one, so Londo has effectively already gone through the first act of a tragedy. Also part of this: Kosh having become incredibly endearing now that his weird way of talking has been established as him not being entirely sure how to talk to non-Vorlons, like a scifi autistic.
Londo reporting that he saw the ship in a dream and G’Kar relaying an ancient legend are both funny as hell.
“Good news: I hated Marcus on sight” YES!
“So he’s supposed to be a rugged warbeaten hero, but he comes off as a kid playing around in a costume, and that insincerity is annoying in a way that Delenn, Sheridan, Londo, or even Lennier are not. All those guys are larger-than-life, where their fakeness comes off as existing in a different plane of reality from my everyday concerns; they embody the specific, corny reality of Bablyon 5 so totally that I’m invested in it most of the time. Marcus’s fakeness comes off as naff imitation.” — oh wow, this absolutely nails it. Naff as fuck. Glad you are on board the Marcus hate train, the bad news is it has lots of stops. And the new credits are sooooo corny, Mrs. Miller noted they look like character selections for a video game, but corny is still better than naff. What struck me most about them is how the first two seasons have a hope for peace and now the credits are not just looking for victory but positing that as greater than peace, which feels like Stracynzki trying to maintain the rhythm of the intro without thinking how the words sounds.
The new opening credits are corny as hell, but they’re also sincere – you really get the sense everyone is proud to be playing their character and pleased to have a moment in the sun, something ambitious but earned, I feel – I do like these characters and want to spend time with them! With the words, it definitely feels like Straczynski trying to convey that shit just got real.
The Limey — obviously. Still great and it had been long enough that I had forgotten some stuff, like how Stamp’s hilarious blowhard act in front of Bill Duke is a joke on himself that he doesn’t get until later, and how Barry Newman fucking owns (the car chase!) but not enough, and how Fonda’s first line of dialogue is telling the girl he’s fucking he was there when her parents named her, just incredible skeevy shit, Lem Dobbs was also at the top of his game here. Sarah Flack’s editing is what “Mary Ann Bernard” has been chasing her entire career. And how sad is it that not only Stamp but Nicky Katt is now gone, he fucks up his plan in a classic dumbass criminal way but he steals the damn movie.
Murder By Decree — an odd duck, Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack The Ripper, and this follows the classic conspiracy that goes all the way to the top so it comes off as Holmes in Chinatown to some degree. Holmes detects and gets used and the final scene laying everything out goes on way too long and is ultimately too soft-pedaled, there is a both-sidesing going on here regarding some anarchists that works for plot machinations but is pretty lame when compared to a predatory monarchy. But Christopher Plummer and James Mason are quite good as Holmes and Watson, Mason’s weird drawl in particular is a hoot and his Watson is a bit slower than Holmes but no dope. Bob Clark directs and putting the guy behind Black Christmas in charge of Jack The Ripper killings makes for some uneasy slasher stylings and at least one moment of real, bloody horror — this is another thing that Holmes is not really equipped for and the disjunction is striking.
The Split — finally caught up to this Parker adaptation, of Richard Stark’s “The Seventh” starring Jim Brown as Parker. Brown is OK and of course not playing Parker (he’s “McLain”) the ruthless unfeeling bastard, he has a girlfriend in Diahann Carroll, but making Parker a black guy in the 60s leads to some interesting dynamics regarding trust that help paper over some creaky changes to the plot — the novel spends three pages on the heist and the rest of the story on the fallout after a rando jacks the loot and puts Parker in the jackpot; the movie spends 2/3 of its time on the setup and heist and then jams the rando and complications in the last 20 minutes or so, not a bad decision but an ungainly one. And instead of Brown just having a crew, he “auditions” them by fucking up their lives and seeing how they handle it (i.e. running a potential driver off the road), perhaps that is why they do not trust you dude! But dear lord, the crew — Ernest Borgnine! Donald Sutherland! Jack Klugman! Julie Harris as a total invention, the bankrolling planner, who is great! Young Gene Hackman strolls in at the end as a semi-bent cop and fucking owns! And then there is the man himself, Warren Fucking Oates as a safecracker, and he has never been more Gogginsish, I think Shane may have gotten his jacket and general attitude from his introductory scene*. So not just Guys but Dudes, a very solid heist that uses actual Los Angeles Rams football games (at the Collesium!), a Quincy Jones soundtrack — it’s not really Parker but it is a damn enjoyable time. On Tubi, of course.
about 19 minutes in here, so good: https://tubitv.com/movies/100042842/the-split
Murder by Decree has been on my to-watch list for forever. I feel like I judge all Holmes stories by how well they do Watson, and Mason’s Watson sounds very promising. Plus, Bob Clark!
The Limey, of course, rules, and now I have to see The Split, too. (That cast!) My big reading project for 2027 is going to be going through all the Parker books, though, so maybe I’ll save it for then.
Decree is also on Tubi! I would go in with mid-level expectations, there is a lot of convoluted stuff and the denouement was called out at the time for being something you could leave during and be better off for. But Mason definitely makes it worth the watch.
And if anything, I would recommend watching Parker movies before you read the books, lest you turn into a miserly picker of nits NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT. The Split definitely works on its own as a 60s heist movie and would benefit from not knowing the source material; The Outfit probably works better in that vein too (some of it is incredibly faithful to the book’s tone and knowing that makes it even better, but Duval and Black are distractingly different). And I think Point Blank should definitely be watched before reading The Hunter because of how close it is in some respects — Marvin is ideal for Parker — and how much Boorman literally through the script out the window to make his own vision. Point Blank is an A art crime film and a C- adaptation of the text, the A part is what matter but if you know the text it can be very distracting. (The Helgeland cut of Payback is probably a B+ crime film and B adaptation of The Hunter, it is also definitely worth watching; the Gibson cut less so.)
Point Blank is the only Parker adaptation I’ve seen! Although I think I had read The Hunter already, but there was at least a decent gap between one and the other, so I cold appreciate Marvin’s Parker without getting too bothered by the changes. Very good to know about the order in which to generally approach things, though. I’m absolutely inclined to being a miserly picker of nits in that regard, so I should go at it in a way to maximize enjoyment rather than nitpicking.
The “danger” of movie first for me is that a portrayal of a character can lodge itself in my head and take precedence when I’m reading the book — the one that comes to mind is James Cromwell as Dudley Smith, although this is also not a problem at all considering how boss Cromwell is. But none of the Parker movies come close to getting the character right, so it’s a non-issue.
Somewhere out there, there is a Holmes vs the Ripper novel that takes a very different approach to things, but for the life of me I cannot remember its title. But I remember it better than Murder by Decree.
I think that THE OUTFIT works as a 70s crime film. It’s gritty and uses bleak colors well, but the tone never develops into an approximation of the book, a problem afflicting many an Elmore Leonard adaptation of that era, too. The weirdest thing about it is an array of stars from the film noir era popping up, without much of a hint of noir stylings showing up on screen.
I like The Outfit a lot, Duvall’s performance (and also the writing of his character) warps the tone but all of the stuff around the margins rules — there is no reason to include the bit at the mechanic’s house but Flynn does because that is Parker’s world and it is pitch-perfect. And Joe Don Baker is superb as a mix of Handy McKay and Grofield, the movie veers into weird buddy stuff with him and Duvall but on his own the performance is exactly what it should be.
Always Sunny season finale – Aw, RIP Lynne Marie Stewart, what a good tribute and a funny episode. (One reveal I would dare not spoil on that note.) I kinda hope Carol Kane comes back at least for a few episodes.
I’ve been dragging my heels on catching up with Sunny but…. Carol Kane? Hmm, you have my attention.
She’s great, of course.
Seinfeld, first three episodes – would you believe I’ve never seen an episode of “Seinfeld” before? My girlfriend has decided I need to fix this, and she has all the DVDs, so here we go. Good ratio of laughs right from the start, she warned me that the stand-up bits are not as good as the sitcom bits and I agree with that so far, Jerry’s jokes are fine but the gold is in the character interactions. Looking forward to seeing this develop, my biggest laugh so far was Jerry’s Uncle Mac (a character I am devastated to see made only this one appearance) talking about how he’d written his autobiography – the way he cheerfully exclaims “it’s based on my experiences!” kept making me laugh for ages afterwards. Anyway, 177 episodes to go, I guess.
Losing Uncle Mac paves the way for Uncle Leo, a hall of fame tertiary sitcom character. Also, you get Jerry’s original dad in the first season!
Absolute hall of fame.
Northern Pursuit – A Nazi spy tries to convince a Canadian Mountie with German heritage to switch sides for a secret mission in the Arctic North. Directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Errol Flynn as the conflicted Mountie this is an entertaining and intense war film. Flynn is at his dashing, indomitable best. He knows the inhospitable white wilderness like the back of his hand. He is more than matched in the villain department by Helmut Dantine who manages to be both charming and cruel. Gene Lockhart plays an enemy agent. The plot is good. Magpie fans of The Grey and The Edge might find a lot here to enjoy. Filmed in the middle of WWII there is some obvious propaganda moments but it is overall tight and crisp. Raoul Walsh crafts an exciting film. But the real standout is the art direction of Leo Kuter and Stacy Roberts who faithfully recreate Canada’s frozen tundra and mountains on a studio back-lot making the film feel like it was shot on location. There is also some great model work, like when the U-boat breaks through the ice. Surprised see this ranks in the middle of Walsh and Flynn’s filmography, at least on Letterboxd. I thought it was fantastic.
Oooh, for fans of The Grey and The Edge, eh?
Watched the Sunny finale, which was great– a good capper on a really excellent season– and also gave us Carol Kane in a significant guest role! Awesome. Best season since 12, which I thought had some all-timer episodes.
Also watched a couple of older Sunny episodes. All this will be discussed in more detail Thursday.
What did we read?
Zone One, Colson Whitehead
This feels like a literary author dicking about with ideas from video games he played as a kid. This is a gritty zombie narrative with a grim, borderline sociopathic protagonist, elaborated on by Whitehead’s creativity and insight. The protagonist ends up the most interesting part of this; he self-defines as a mediocrity, never failing but never really standing out, and concludes that this exact quality is what makes him thrive in a zombie apocalypse, where all one needs is a desire to survive.
One of the concluding ideas is how each of the main characters ends up projecting their idea of who isn’t a person onto the zombies; this ends up feeling like a bit of a commentary on the zombie genre itself, although for the most part, I think Whitehead is just having fun diving into a grim video game mindset; there’s hints here and there that Whitehead is naturally empathetic and curious and is just, you know, turning that off for a while. It’s not the greatest book in the world, but it’s a fun diversion.
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Definitely one of the great works of allegory. The commentary on Stalinism, totalitarianism, and the circular possibilities of revolution have been laid out long before I was born, obviously, but I do appreciate how doing a 1:1 link between the action of the story and Stalin’s Russia means a relentlessly plotted story that flows logically; Orwell’s brilliance is very carefully working so that everything perfectly fits the actual, if fable-like, reality of the story. In a lot of ways, this is the perfect expression of Orwell’s writing because it’s the best expression of his slightly smug, superior tone – fables requiring that kind of tone as a matter of course.
In fact, I would go further here. I think Orwell was an elitist man who ranked the people in his world by how smart and stupid they were; a typical product of a man of his class, position, education, and above all, politics (let’s face it, we leftists can often come off as smug and superior occasionally, and Orwell was no exception). One underlying aspect of Animal Farm is that the pigs seize power largely because they, as a group, are the smartest and best at reading; few of the animals even can read, and this is largely how they’re controlled.
Thus emerges an idea: there is an elite, and the best way to join it is through education, and the ideal society would create a functional education system. It’s not quite that the pigs would have failed if the other animals were as smart as them – we saw how Napoleon dealt with Snowball – but they would have had more of a fight on their hands. In fact, this idea has relevance not only to the Russian Revolution – most of the main revolutionaries, including Stalin, had at least middle-class educations – but to today. How many of America’s fascist problems – up to and including social media misinformation – come from the way your education system has been completely dismantled? Most of your adult population can’t even read.
The other good thing about the allegory is the way it universalises the story, especially given how it feels like this story could actually happen in Britain, with very distinctly British personalities in the animals. The Russian Revolution was a specific event in a specific place and a specific time, but it could have happened anywhere.
“In fact, I would go further here. I think Orwell was an elitist man who ranked the people in his world by how smart and stupid they were; a typical product of a man of his class, position, education, and above all, politics”
Hmmm. I think Orwell put himself into Animal Farm in the form of Benjamin, the cynical guy who is smart (and can read) and judges other beings’ smartness and stupidity and is willing to go along despite knowing (“knowing”) things won’t work out the way idealists say. And he winds up more fucked than he knew. Anyway, I haven’t read Down And Out In Paris And London in years but I remember it being very good and funny (especially the Paris part), if Orwell was slumming he knew it and let that knowledge inform his perspective while still remaining curious.
The Road to Wigan Pier is in part a critique of socialist party members and exactly this: you cannot lead a successful, equal proletarian revolution if you are weird, socially awkward, and think the proletariat is largely beneath you.
My school district had ANIMAL FARM on its 8th grade required reading list (and we also had to watch the animated film). Back when literary education was deemed important, the book was seen not only as a way of teaching the formal elements of genre, but as a pedagogical tool for identifying the logic of authoritarianism and, to quote Monty Python, the violence inherent in establishing systems of collective action. Caspar and i mentioned that the overall ideological thrust of ATLAS SHRUGGED didn’t seem so appalling when encountering it in out teens–It’s virulent call for individual autonomy and the radical skepticism it displayed for collective enterprise,had been latently seeded in the curriculum engaged in a liberal cold war kulturekampf. In doing so it established a meme leading to the dismantling of liberal public education. I find it interesting how The Ploughman is going to teach FAHRENHEIT 451, which was also used for the same purpose.
Working on ESPN Texas NBA beat reporter Tim McMahon’s book on Luka Doncic. It does what I would expect, offering a solid overview and decent insights into the Slovenian star, but is never more than a book by a (fairly good) sportswriter. Also, he had to add a new ending when the Mavs made the finals, and is probably adding another new ending for the paperback following the Luka Lakers trade.
Breakout – Parker is arrested on a job gone wrong, and breaks out of the holding facility to avoid extradition for the crimes he committed way back in The Hunter. He then gets sucked into a bad gig, and has to break out of an armory converted to a wholesale jewelry store. And then has to both get out of town and get his occasional partner Ed Mackey’s wife Brenda out of jail. I read this one long ago when it came out, at a time when the second run of Parker novels were widely available and the first were not, and as such I greatly enjoyed it. And then I caught with the first run, and those just seemed so much better than the later stuff. But I hadn’t actually revisited any later stuff till now. The good news is that the writing is as sparse and tough and straightforward as any 60s book. The less than good news is that the plot feels a bit light. “Parker keeps getting in and out of trouble” isn’t new, but after a while, this feels like a video game made of side quests and not a cohesive whole. The heist is almost an afterthought. But this is overall an entertaining book with the return of Ed and Brenda Mackey – the only first run characters to play a major role in the second run? Dave, feel free to correct me – and some really interesting new one off characters.
The Mackeys are the main connection between the first series and the second, although there are others — a bunch of people from Plunder Squad show up in Backflash, and the last three books involve a rather minor guy from the first series. And Firebreak involves both some older heist guys and antagonists from The Sour Lemon Score. But the Mackeys play big roles in two books here, I think Stark realized he had an interesting dynamic with them. I think Breakout’s other big change is Stark having a black guy as a major character for the first time — in the 60s and 70s it makes sense of a sort for Parker’s crews to not be integrated, just in the way of who can walk around in a racist society without drawing attention to themselves — if society is still racist in the 90s and 00s it is still more surface-level diverse and it would be very weird for Parker to be dealing with nothing but white guys forever.
The plot is definitely jerky, it’s reminiscent of Plunder Squad — constantly having to do other bullshit as part of the criminal life. But it kicks off the autumnal final stretch of the series, which largely proceeds in four-book mini-runs. The first four books of the return are Parker coming back and dealing with the modern world, the last four books are about how hard it is for a guy like him to be in this world and how the walls are closing in.
One thing I like in Breakout is that if you take away the cellphones, it would be close to the same if you set it in the 60s. We are at about the last moment when people still have maps in their glove compartments, for instance. But the thing that’s changing about the world for Parker, which is so striking in Nobody Runs Forever, is not cellphones and cybercrime, it’s the post-9/11 world, where independent operators like Parker don’t stand a chance against militarized police forces and the surveillance state.
I think that Ed and Brenda are sort of a mirror to Parker and Claire, the sort of partners in crime that would never, ever work for a man like Parker.
It’s not that cybercrime exists, but that it is increasingly the only money crime that can exist in a world moving on from cash. One of the joys of The Split is how it recreates the stadium heist where the gate is cash-only and there’s a lot of fun business of just seeing those bills in action. How could you not want to steal it! It got me thinking about trying to come up with a similar heist structure of physical infiltration/acquisition (the great shit in any heist movie) but with a tech-based goal, not cracking a safe but hitting the computer that gives access to cash at its root. Blackhat does a variation on this but I’m thinking more classical heist structure.
And yeah, Ed and Brenda are a fun remix of Parker and Claire, I like how Stark is always very up front about Brenda being the brains of the operation (and Ed and Parker knowing this). This is something else the last four books point to, because Claire winds up getting a lot more involved than she normally does.
The last Dortmunder books dealt somewhat better with the shift in how money works because Dortmunder so often chased after things besides cash. Cash might go the way of the dodo, but diamonds, collectible cars, and old master paintings will always have some value and also comic potential.
Great point — the Dortmunders increasingly rely on rich antagonists too, which is the vector for those objects. Parker never steals from an individual (non-Outfit at least), right? Not out of morality, it was just not the kind of gig he would think to do and back in the day it wasn’t necessary.
I took a quick look at the synopses for the 60s books, and The Mourner does seem to involve a theft from an individual, albeit one who is an diplomat what all that entails, and it’s a job foisted upon Parker by Bett Harlow and father. It was, however, the sort of job that could no doubt put anyone off stealing from individuals. (Parker does occasionally steal from rich assholes, but that’s more of a bonus for the reader. I mean, we love seeing a Nazi lose everything in The Handle, but if Parker cares the guy is a Nazi, he never lets on.)
On Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, by Harry Kemelman
Kemelman says that he retooled this to include a mystery because his original slice-of-life story about a superficially meek but resolute rabbi was too low-key, and to be honest, you can tell that the mystery is an afterthought here, and not an especially well-developed one. But the minor culture clash and efforts at understanding here are all interesting and not exactly widely covered, like how even much of Rabbi Small’s only casually observant congregation assumes his job has a one-to-one equivalency with, say, Catholic priesthood or Protestant ministry, because American culture has left them better informed about Christianity than they are about their own cultural and religious traditions and practices. Interesting light reading, with some thoughtful bits about the value of specific ways of looking at the world–this feels like it was written right in the middle of the major cultural turning from “melting pot” to “diversity”–and I like the idea of using rabbinical logic as a detective tool, but this never quite picked up enough steam for me. Might still try one of the sequels, though.
This reminds me that I’ve actually played a point-and-click detective game where you’re a rabbi solving a noir-ish murder mystery, The Shivah. It’s pretty decent.
On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, by Emily Guendelsberger
Guendelsberger used to write for The AV Club, including reviews of Don’t Trust the B–, which means that at least some of you may have read her before!
This is a kind of contemporary (much of it was written during 2016) riff on Nickel and Dimed, which Guendelsberger explicitly acknowledges as an influence: after being laid off from her newspaper job, she took three separate low-paying jobs from major employers in three different parts of the country, looked at what the work was like, and wrote about it. We probably need one of these books every few years, honestly, and this is a good one–conversational and anecdotal but insightful.
It also makes an interesting contrast with Nickel and Dimed, because while Ehrenreich focused more on the effects of living in barely-scraping-by poverty, Guendelsberger focuses more on the physical and psychological effects of these low-paying jobs themselves. (Though she does get into the constraints of poverty, and the part where some of her coworkers are matter-of-factly discussing trying to treat an abscessed tooth at home and use pet store fish amoxicillin for antibiotics is grotesquely memorable for the sheer indignity and pain people are forced into.) The title of the book refers to how magnified and horrible obsessive tracking of workers’ time has gotten, to the point where her call center work involves being forcibly clocked out for bathroom breaks and where her Amazon shipping center tracker beeps furiously at her as it counts down the seconds it takes her to do something. The constant stress and the way employees at this level aren’t treated as human beings have huge, caustic effects on people’s lives, and Guendelsberger gets into that too. (Because it’s 2016, a non-zero part involves looking at how this kind of environment produces the 2016 election, and I’m not always totally convinced by her analysis on that, but some parts of it certainly ring true.)
Sometimes a tad too chatty and self-consciously colorful, but overall a good, useful read, as well as a window into three really shitty jobs (most of which are with corporations that don’t want much about their practices to get out). And there’s an intriguing, flipping-a-typical-pop-culture-article-on-its-head bit where she’s working at McDonald’s when the Rick & Morty Szechuan sauce stunt happens, and she talks about being so frustrated that almost none of the coverage of this mentions what a difficult pain-in-the-ass this was for the minimum-wage employees who had to deal with the outraged customers and huge lines of people who didn’t want to take no for an answer. Also a little bit of historical “here’s how we got into this situation” that explains efficiency experts, automation, and how capitalism tends to reward lower levels of empathy.
I read all the rabbi books, and they’re all right. I agree that the mysteries are hardly that gripping, but I like them as a window into the environment and thinking of people (and particularly highly assimilated American Jews) of, mostly, my grandfather’s generation. (I first became acquainted with these books because he had some of them lying around.)
I also read the Rabbi Small books, though my lens on them is from an Orthodox world that has different ways of observing but the same sort of synagogue politics. I cannot remember a single mystery but still recall a lot of the details of a congregation that maybe wasn’t sure it wanted such an intellectual rabbi.
The two of you have sold me on continuing these. I’ll lower my mystery expectations and just appreciate exploring the world. That was my favorite part of this first one anyway.
Empire of Pain – Drips with dramatic irony, ala The Power Broker, and it’s amusing how much Succession’s resemblance to the Sacklers (so really the Murdochs) is more coincidental than anything, given this was published in 2021: miserable, evil rich families really aren’t THAT different from each other because they’re all largely driven by greed and hubris. Richard is an ironic echo of Arthur Sackler, also brilliant and ambitious, but he will of course drive the family to their downfall where his uncle wanted to be enshrined. They get to keep the money but they’re permanently stained in public memory.
Pax by Tom Holland – Not that Tom Holland. This is pretty good as a history of the Roman Empire from Nero on, but indulges in a weird repetition of “*declarative sentence*…or did it/was it?” That wasn’t good the first time, Tom. Amateur prose shit.
68 pages into Weldon Kees’ Complete Poems. Truly bitter but very good stuff, please take a moment to read “For My Daughter.”
The Organization Is Here to Support You by Charlene Ellsby – Severance, eat your heart out, this is strong existential horror, and I like how the information that the office workers in this company have become mutants who can’t stand sunlight pays off as a plot point. From Weirdpunk Books.
Moment for “For My Daughter” taken, and oh yeah, that has a real striking, bitter oomph to it, especially in the turn of those last lines. (Also, I’m always very pleased when I run across roughly contemporary poetry that rhymes. It’s fine when it doesn’t, obviously, and I have favorite poems that don’t, but you can get such nice power and inevitability from rhyming, and it makes it easier for me to memorize the poem and carry it with me.)
I have a fellow poet who hates rhyming, but I enjoy the sheer challenge of rhyming in poetry (and have flirted with writing the lyrics to a musical if I had the right project/collaborator.)
Not THAT Tom Holland? You mean the director of Fright Night isn’t writing histories?
“Tom Holland’s historical writing was well-served by his prose style … or was it?”
Haha I enjoy his podcast with Dominic Sandbrook but haven’t read his books – I also would be driven up the wall by seeing “but was it?” constantly popping up on the page.
Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss – This owes an imaginative debt to Orphans Of The Sky by Robert Heinlein. That book is about a group of primitives living in an artificial environment who turn out to be descendants of the original crew of a large spaceship on a generations-long voyage. Aldiss’ first book follows the same pattern, with significant new twists and is much more developed thematically. A big difference is the central character, Roy Complain, who is anti-heroic. He is petty, impulsive, mean, vindictive and, well, stupid, but he grows in moral stature as the story goes on. We discover the vast ship (it’s no spoiler since the US release is known as Starship) is made up of tribes, who depending on their location in the ship have different levels of intelligence and knowledge of the past. Roy is part of the Greene tribe, perhaps the most primitive. He lives in a literal jungle of small unfurnished rooms and endless corridors choked with ‘ponic’ vegetation growing in the artificial light. The tribe lives off the vegetation and wild mutated pigs, remnants of the ships farm system. There are no windows, the only books are a few by Freud which the tribe treats as a religion, and one technical manual of the ship, which is hidden as forbidden knowledge. Roy and a few companions begin to question their surroundings, stealing the manual and going on a journey to the fabled and civilized land of ‘forwards’. On their journey they discover educated men who maintain the ships technology and intelligent mutated rats. The men reach the ‘sea’, the vast reservoir of water for the ship. Roy eventually reaches forwards, where the ponics have been cut back and everything is tidy and shiny with blinking lights in the consoles. But even the educated people of forwards are unaware of the true nature of their world. The story goes on with some ingenious revelations, a couple of which are mind blowing epiphanies and ironies abound. It isn’t really a happy ending for Roy as he discovers he is the victim of a giant cosmic joke.
Hey, friends, what’s up?
Dropped the older kid off at college yesterday. A very strange experience. Made perhaps stranger by the fact that she is matriculating at an internationally recognized research university that’s a 20-minute drive from my house. So the processing and conceptual work that most families do on the long drive back to Altoona or Carson City or wherever was absent in this case.
Congrats to you and the kid!
Congratulations on the big milestone!
So here’s the thing about Worldcon: it has lots and lots of stuff going on that distinguish it from smaller hotel-based conventions, like a grand masquerade and the presentation of the Hugo Awards and lots of room parties and dances – but if those things don’t interest you, it’s just a longer, more expensive, much more crowded version of a sci fi convention. I am very glad I got to go to one at least once in my life, but I don’t think I am likely to go to one again till it’s close enough to get to by train. (Between con fees, airfare, and hotel, this was the most expensive vacation I ever took with maybe the exception of the week in London in 1995).
That said, I attended a fair number of panels that were interesting, though almost none with big name authors. Well, except for the ones with Seanan McGuire, who has enough sales, Hugo nominations, and popularity to count as a big name, if not quite Brandon Sanderson or Martha Wells. But no one, and I mean no one, can bring more wild energy to a panel than Seanan. Want to hear her talk about the X-Men at 10:30 am? No worries that it’s too early, because she brings it. And does not hold back. (She’s still mad at Marvel for canning a diverse writers room to make way for Hickman, and pissed over how Spider-Gwen is being handled.) I was at some other lively discussions, and also a couple of duds. (Sad to say, David Gerrold on a Sunday afternoon had no energy and admitted he hasn’t read any notable books in years.) We also attended a lot of filk related stuff, plus a delightful Tom Lehrer memorial sing-along.
The worst part of the con is socializing takes a lot of work. Everyone is busy and lost in the crowd – over 6,500 – and my wife’s BFF so wanted to hang with us but it never worked out (at least she’s local to us). Luckily, my wife ran into friends we wanted to see on the escalators, and those friends were making arrangements with friends from Seattle to just hang out, so we got to see people we haven’t seen in over a decade. I also had the pleasure of telling one of these friends, Rebecca Fraimow, how much I loved her novel, which really made her smile. And somehow my wife’s oldest friend – they grew up together and have stayed in touch over the years – discovered we were at the con, and we went to Pike Place with her.
Pike Place was one of two bits of sightseeing we did, the other being taking the monorail to Seattle Center. I really wish we have more time and energy to sightsee, but the con is a huge timesuck. We skipped going up the Space Needle since it’s pretty expensive, so we only got to see the mountain when we arrived.
And lastly, the hotel left a lot to be desired as for some reason our reservation for a king sized bed turned into a double bed room, and after being told to ask about whether a room had opened up three times, we gave up. There were other small issues along the way, but this one really irked us. I have a call scheduled with the hotel to talk it through, but somehow I doubt we will get much satisfaction. (Almost no chance they refund any of our payment since all rooms cost the same.)
So that was Seattle Worldcon. Back to work and to post-end-0f-federal-funding chaos. There is stuff going on that I can’t talk about but that is really disheartening beyond the loss of money. Oh, and I seem to have a mild cold. But having tested four times this week – and not having the same sore throat as when I had covid – I am pretty sure it’s just a cold I caught after the con while exhausted. (There have been, by now, about 40 confirmed cases from the con, meaning probably a lot more unreported. The air filtration system at the convention center was not as good as its website claimed. Masks, however, still work just fine.)
Okay week, just not enough sleep and slow revisions on the book. Hoping to do more this weekend but have been catsitting a loony kitten. I also scraped my knee tripping on the sidewalk and somehow it is at the exact place where the nerves scream whenever I move, lol. Taking the day off Monday which will be nice.
One of my cats managed to get an “infected nail bed” on her paw this week which led to a somewhat costly vet trip and having to squirt medicine into her mouth every day, I guess I shouldn’t complain too much as this is the first medical treatment either of them have needed (outside of the essentials) in their seven years on the planet, but still – unexpected stress and expense, boo! The medicine seems to be doing the trick though, even though I’ve ignored their instruction to put a huge cone on her to prevent her licking the infected paw – I tried it and it just was NOT happening, also she doesn’t seem to be licking at the paw anyway so fuck it.
Work has been a bit better this week, probably helped by the sudden drop to vaguely autumnal temperatures which are definitely nicer to work through even if I lament the hazy summer evenings being suddenly snatched away. Still feel like I’m struggling to get back to good energy levels though, trying a few dietary tweaks in case I’m not getting enough protein or something, really hoping I can feel a bit more energised soon as I have a couple of gigs to practice for in the next couple of weeks and at the moment I’m just not feeling it.
Poor kitty – hope she comes good soon!
Week 2 teaching in the bag and, no small feat, I no longer feel anxious 24 hours per day. I have an appetite and I am able to sleep at night. These are big steps. Huge steps.
Today was a good day, though there’s a number of kids who will not report it as such. My lunch period was a bloodbath with disruptive kids getting sent out of the room left and right. After they settled in (or sat in resentful fear), we had a decent class, and even some kids who usually don’t speak up participated of their own free will. Pull a few weeds and there’s room for other things to grow, who knew? (I expect those weeds to be good plants next week, for the record) Applied the same pressure to my last hour of the day and they were downright tolerable.
We’re doing The Hero’s Journey which is, eh, whatever, but we’re applying to Big Hero 6. So I’m getting kids to engage with a (good!) Disney cartoon. Taking the win, but not pretending it’s going to be the same difficulty level as “Ithaca” next week.
Miss keeping up with you guys, next step is to get far enough ahead on planning that I can check in during the day (school begins right as the morning thread goes up so it’s going to be tricky in any event).
Really glad to hear the new job anxiety is already reducing, and that you’re coming in hard on the classroom management!
Year of the Month update!
This September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday
And there’s still time to sign up for 1959 this month. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Pillow Talk/Some Like It Hot
Aug. 22nd: Gillian Nelson: Khrushchev Goes to Disneyland
Aug. 27th: Lauren James: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Aug. 28th: Cliffy73: Sleeping Beauty
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
Aug. 31st: Tristan J. Nankervis: North by Northwest
Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens would makes a super downer 1970s double feature. If Five Easy Pieces shows us “increasing isolation in a country that resembles Edward Hopper’s bleakest, loneliest paintings,” then the King of MG peers into the void in a way that reminds me of Harold Pinter’s plays. When Jack Nicholson (playing way against type as a nerdy, passive-aggressive, late-night radio monologuist) has decided he’s had enough of his brother (a very manic Bruce Dern)’s get-rich schemes, you know it’ll all be a rapid downward spiral from here on out.