The Friday Article Roundup
Weighty matters in the week's best pop culture writing.
This week, you will
The FAR is living large thanks to Bridgett Taylor! 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!
Alex Press mourns the death of writer and photographer Kaleb Horton:
Like a character from an earlier time, too cool for today. As it turns out, that was true: he couldn’t make a living at writing, not in a world where being a genius makes you unemployable…. Plenty of great writers have to do other work, that’s not news, but talking with friends over the weekend, everyone sounded mystified by it. People won’t pay this guy to write? He should’ve been a household name, but the world doesn’t run on “should.” “The last magazine writer” indeed: might as well call it and write an obituary for writing itself instead. He said he wanted to write a novel “about the dust bowl that takes place over the duration of a man’s life and begins in Oklahoma and ends in Bakersfield and opens and closes with the line ‘can you swing a hammer?’” Somebody should’ve strapped him to a chair and covered his room and board until it was done.
For I-D, Max Wolf Friedlich looks back at his time writing the life of a fake influencer:
My day-to-day job is to write Miquela’s captions. Online, the exchange rate for the written word is zero. If analogue talk is cheap, internet speech is free. I make her whoever we need her to be. Suddenly, millions of people are reading the words I put in her mouth. My boss confides that the long-term goal is to create a social-media-based cinematic universe, the “new Marvel,” with me as Stan Lee…. Despite being a 23-year-old Jewish man, I am the internet’s most mysterious 19-year-old It girl. Every day, dozens of people beg to see my tits. Still, more tell me to kill myself. I have made it in Los Angeles!
Nick Strum dances on the grave of The Best American Poetry at Defector:
Institutions work tacitly to produce consensus. In the case of The Best American Poetry, that consensus is reinforced through a circumscribed roster of poets and publications whose prestige serves to filter the series editor’s culture wars within the trusted colophon of a Big Five publisher. Poetry’s aesthetic variousness, radical discontinuities, and political efficacy are smoothed over into a marketable narrative of the genre’s ongoing resurgence in the face of difficult odds. The anthology’s profits are spent to sustain poetry’s corporate shine, legitimating [founder David] Lehman’s reactionary ideology as apolitical orthodoxy.
For Reverse Shot, Violet Lucca looks at how the form of One Battle After Another gives juice to its function:
Anderson’s decision to make the “present” not very different from sixteen years earlier, implies that this type of violence this is merely part of the United States—and it is. The powers and precedents Donald Trump uses were established during George W. Bush’s administration; 1954’s Operation Wetback, the largest mass-deportation in history, was militarized in a way that’s not dissimilar to ICE. One must merely look at history—the right kind of history—to see that these overreaches are endemic, not aberrations. The film’s strength is that, as an action movie, it refuses to sugarcoat its fairly radical politics without preaching: it shows, it moves on, it doesn’t stop.
The editors of n+1 survey the written word’s response to AI incursions, and pen their own manifesto:
Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI’s further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don’t publish AI bullshit. Don’t even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post’s Ember, an “AI writing coach” designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that’s cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that tries — as Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” — “through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.”
And Cameron Cross at the Curioustorian looks at the history of an old local movie theater:
Donald Hunt filled in for a friend playing piano to accompany a silent movie showing at the Nugget. The friend was unable to play one afternoon and he asked Don to take over ‘because he knew I could play the piano,’ my grandfather recalled. Unfortunately Don knew only one song, ‘Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider.’ He played that song throughout the show. He played it louder and/or faster during the exciting parts of the movie, then softer or slower during the dramatic parts. This led attendees—mostly Dartmouth students—to yell, ‘Music, more music,’ followed by people yelling, ‘No music.’
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
May December – interesting handling of an unusual and difficult subject, with some strong performances and an excellently dramatic score. Didn’t immediately strike me as top-tier Haynes but it doesn’t do much wrong either, some of his films just hit me harder. I can imagine this one sticking around in my brain though.
Charles Melton robbed of a Best Supporting nom but I can see why the Academy may not have loved a movie where actors are self-absorbed succubi glomming onto traumatic reality for attention and a kind of creepy symbiosis. (The chutzpah of Portman producing this…)
Honestly I suspect some of it was also the snobbery of not wanting to nom an actor whose most prominent role was in Riverdale.
I remember watching this, thinking mid-film “Hmm, all these years I’ve seen American pop culture and never actually nailed down how old a freshman is, I should take a quick lookOOOAAAAGH.” This was long before we actually get a horrifying picture of him from the age it happened.
In terms of memorable scenes, the one that stuck with me is when Joe is smoking weed with his son, and he says something like “I’m not sure if we’re bonding or if I’m creating terrible memories with you.” His whole performance is magnificent, a child stuck in an adult’s body.
That’s such a great line! That and Moore’s one about naivete.
That scene on the roof is a stand-out for sure, and the one one where he confronts Julianne Moore about their history. For some reason I had it stuck in my head that this was inspired by a true story, it isn’t of course but that doesn’t make the themes any less troubling.
It is the kind of thing that’s happened enough that there’s lots of real cases they probably drew on. I feel like there’s one on the news every two or three years.
The movie was inspired by a case involving the daughter of a congressman from Orange County California. She did jail time for engaging in inappropriate sexual relations with a 13 year old student in one of her classes, and later married the student once released. Although they later divorced they stayed close until the teacher’s death in the 2010s. The student has since spoken very negatively about the film.
You are absolutely right that, at least during my teen years, this was a big problem. Speaking just from anecdotal experience, I can name 4 teachers/administrators in my high school who were romantically involved with students, 3 of whom married their charges within a couple of years after their graduation. I also had a friend who lived in another city who was in the early stages of being groomed by a female teacher before his parents put a stop to it.
Oh I guess I must have heard about this at some point, hence the confusion! Thanks.
Well, it kind of is. It’s a thing that happens distressingly frequently, and as Griff notes the Letorneau case was widely reported, including periodic updates when they got married.
That line haunts me. So beautifully delivered, too. Seconding the “Charles Melton was robbed” position.
Babylon 5 — shit is getting REAL! Another conflict is in full swing and a certain person gets iced and it is pretty cool, meanwhile Londo is at the top of his scheming game and this shit rocks, he is in a very precarious position but he’s also always been good at this and he comes up with a damn fine scheme, too bad that the person he is scheming against is evil and nutso, some off-screen pain is pretty nasty (and this comes after a bunch of onscreen pain). And there is clearly a ticking time bomb in terms of another character. I don’t know how long this can be maintained but it’s pretty good right now.
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Seven, “Exogenesis”
This really is a liberal take on fascist resistance, fascinating to compare and contrast with the leftist Andor. I don’t think the show quite realises what it’s saying with the aliens taking over people in slums because nobody notices or cares (and it certainly doesn’t notice how awful Garibaldi’s dismissal of them is, ACAB includes Garibaldi), even as Marcus becomes even slightly interesting with his virulent defence of them. Straczinsky has this idea of people desperately wanting to be special and some being denied that, as opposed to economic oppression.
The actual image of the bugs infecting people is great, and I think was ripped off by Stargate: SG-1 for the Goa’uld. I’m sure my notes of this come off as criticism, but I actually love that about that show – how it interpolated all these old and popular ideas into a new concept. I can better see why they thought they could do the same thing with Stargate: Universe following Battlestar Galactica and LOST.
I enjoy the note that Franklin will, at the drop of a hat, go into a speech about everything coming down to biology or math. Franklin absorbed most of the show’s more intense speechifying and it is just self-aware enough to make jokes about that.
Eh, I’m with Garibaldi in a larger sense — the show never really gets a handle on the slum/underclass folks (bring back Mantis Guy!) so I’m inclined to dismiss them because I know they’re not important in the larger stuff the show is dealing with, and this episode is one of those sci-fi short story conceits grafted on to take up space. Which is not entirely bad, just done poorly here, and it certainly doesn’t help the rest of the episode is z-grade rom-com shit with Ivanova and Marcus and that fucking dud Corwin, who replaced Cool Russian Lady in the dome and sucks bland handsome ass, Hiatt-style.
Garibaldi’s dismissal is essentially that anyone who ends up in the Down Below is there because they’re abnormal, which makes me think that the political errors are intimately tied in with the storytelling ones; I think you’re right that the Lurkers were thrown in because it was felt there should be poor people living in slums for whatever reason.
At the beginning of the show the conceit is very much “space city/port/hub of 250K people” and I can see “a city this big has an underclass” following fairly logically from that. What does not follow logically is where they came from (getting to the space station is still a big deal) and more importantly how they survive there — in a place of limited resources, maybe you should space the homeless! I think all of this could be addressed but it would be a larger part of the story than Strascynzki is willing to give them. It’s been a while, but I recall Battlestar Galactica doing a better job with this sort of division in part because political division and resource management was baked into that show from the start.
Yeah, I was puzzling out how this even happens as well – the show says they mainly come from people coming to Babylon 5 and immediately running out of money, unable to afford a ticket home, but it’s like – you’re on a spaceship! Even on a ship this size, space is at a premium.
Battlestar Galactica had the opposite problem for me, where I couldn’t figure out how a ragtag fleet of ships rammed together could somehow have a class including journalists and political commentators, picking up right where they left off. Who is paying these people? Who is listening to them?
Battlestar is at least good about where the media class came from (doing bullshit coverage of the ship right before the attack), and I think there is a decent throughline to them continuing to exist in some form. Journalism is information and there is a big interest in information considering the top-down nature of communication that is spread out over the fleet — people want to know what is happening! And the politicians/military actually have an interest in letting professionals handle communication rather than trying to handle it themselves, it is important for the fleet to know what those leaders want the fleet to know. So the groundwork for the media is clear, this facilitates the politics and further commentating. The final ingredient is “because Balthar is conniving,” he can use other self-interested people to advance his own ends.
Slumber Party Massacre – A truly unusual slasher of it’s era, somewhere between the real thing and funny (uh) dissection where the guys arguably get it the worst and the one slutty girl isn’t punished for going to get laid as much as for ditching her friends in the process. Given the pedigree of the feminist crew, this tracks. The killer’s symbolism is obvious – many funny Letterboxd reviews riff on how “sometimes a drill is just a drill” – but something subtle emerges with the jump scare fake outs that were probably more of a gag in the script. Being a teenage girl means people, whether it’s guys your age, middle-aged singles, or even other snobby teenage girls, are often out to get you one way or another.
A really fun one, definitely manages to have its cake and eat it too in terms of being a fun slasher and also a slasher parody of sorts. It’s not quite as smart, probably, but I love the first sequel so much and it has one of the all-time great fictional movie bands. Really need to track down the third one but it never seems to be streaming anywhere for some reason.
There’s even another franchise that came out of a movie which was supposed to be SPM 4! Wild.
I knew about Sorority House Massacre (although haven’t seen any of them) and the Slumber Party Massacre reboot (which I have seen but forgot about because I didn’t like it that much) but the planned SPM4 ended up being Cheerleader Massacre? I did not know about that, but I love how ridiculously resilient horror franchises are, haha.
This is a lot of fun as a hangout flick and as vomas says, the sequel is bonkers stuff, strong recommend.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “A Bullet for Baldwin” – Entertaining but really doesn’t make much sense. Lauren, as usual, nails it.
I should have a special upvote for anything saying this.
Surely at some point you will say something that Vomas or I fervently disagree with, but so far so good.
“Puerile, insipid and just plain stupid: Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ ‘The Cat Who Joined The Mets’ is the worst TV episode of all time.”
You have Hitch confused with Rod Serling, who once posited that the Dodgers’ rotation was made of robots. (Not one of the TZ episodes people clamor for.)
Adolescence, “Episode 2”
Weaker than the first episode, but obviously not without merit. This one follows Bascombe and Frank around Jamie and Katie’s school, which also happens to be Bascombe’s son’s school, and (mostly) stays with them as they circle around and try to find a way into a hostile youthful world they can’t understand. This is more interested in commentary than the previous episode, and there’s a real sense of despair at how the school, despite its neat corridors and uplifting bulletin boards, is a barely managed pit of chaos. We’ve all seen bad schools in fiction before, but this isn’t the traditional one, where it’s non-stop violence and noise–although there is a fight–but a newer version, where the kids are cynical-bordering-on-nihilistic and won’t get off their phones and the teachers just numbly show videos and don’t engage. But we also see that, despite Bascombe’s horror at it all, there is some engagement and care, even if it’s not enough. Maybe, as Frank says, all the kids need is one thing to feel good about, to hold onto. (Though we also see what happens when Katie’s best friend has lost her one thing.)
It doesn’t quite work for me to suddenly paint the compassionate Bascombe as an intermittently, if unintentionally, emotionally neglectful dad, whose son acts like he expects Bascombe to put everything else ahead of him; I don’t know how well it gels with what we’ve seen–his son’s also reacting to behavior we don’t even see on display here, which makes it hard to judge how justified that reaction is–and it feels a shade too busy. Bascombe worrying about his son being bullied, on the other hand, is handled very well. Anyway, the son translate the emoji usage to reveal that Katie was calling Jamie an incel (or budidng incel, at least), and Bascombe interestingly interprets that as Katie bullying him–which could certainly be true, but he doesn’t even seem to consider that it could be a response to Jamie actually parroting incel rhetoric at some point. Frank’s reaction is more ambiguous, but while it makes sense that she’s concerned that Katie’s getting lost in the shuffle through the focus on Jamie, that 1) is a bit rich from a show that’s also focused on Jamie, and 2) is another bit of the show that builds off something we haven’t seen, which is Frank talking about how they’ve been chasing around trying to get into Jamie’s head, when we actually haven’t seen that much of that yet. And they did try to talk to Katie’s friend!
So I do think this is a weaker part of the story, though I’m open to the idea that it will work better as part of the whole once I’ve seen everything. And it still had numerous good bits, especially the ending, with Bascombe taking his son out for chips instead of accompanying Frank to go charge Jamie and Eddie laying the flowers for Katie.
The Monkey
What if Final Destination-style deaths, but more rapidly paced, and as part of a full-on horror-comedy? Answer: very entertaining. This is ghoulish fun, and I like that it works its way towards a sincerely made point–life is chaotic, death can be sudden and terrible, you have to accept that and enjoy what you can–without ever dropping said sense of ghoulish fun.
That crane pull from the school to Eddie with the flowers is one of the best uses of the single-shot technique in the whole show. That and the out-of-nowhere chase in this episode.
Also, brace yourself for the third episode.
Yes, I love how the crane shot opens up the single-shot technique without actually violating it. Stunning to watch. And ditto on the chase, which is also great for characterization: Bascombe frantically yelling for the kid to be careful as he sprints across the street is perfect.
I’ve heard that about the third episode, but I suspect I somehow still won’t be prepared.
It’s great that Osgood Perkins’ quick, dark, mean, “difficult sophomore album” follow-up to Longlegs sounds like a much more fun movie.
He’s got range! I also liked The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and it would be hard to find something more dissimilar in tone or style: that’s definitely quiet indie horror, with emphasis on both “quiet” and “indie,” and you would never know it was by the same director. Very good at its thing, though.
I liked I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House too, very dryly funny.
Star Trek – “Arena”
“For a superior race, they really rub it in.”
The Sopranos – “The Happy Wanderer”
This T-1000 really screwed up the mission. Didn’t do jack to look for John Connor, mostly just gambled and cried a lot.
“It’s startin’! It’s fuckin’ startin’!” has stayed in my head for some reason. Same actually with “SAY – that’s a nice bike.”
Also the way he says “I’m tapped” to Tony with a slight smirk on his face, I’d be mad too. Also that his plan for getting out of gambling debt seems to revolve around more gambling. He’s already into Richie for 8 large, no problem, just play at a table with higher stakes next time.
Spoilers, but Richie Aprile never did get a boat with three propellers.
peacemaker, most recent.
. lmao. This episode had everything. By everything, I mean violence. Lots of grade A violence here.
I’ve ever killed in a swimming pool with a telephone wire.”
“what’s the second most?”
“four.”
There is also, near the start of the episode, a ZAZ level gag that isn’t really realistic with what we’ve seen so far (how did neither the audience nor Chris see that?) but it’s hilarious.
Gunn is doing this very funny thing where the politics of his DC projects are extremely unsubtle and then he does press where he’s just like “what are you talking about? I’m not commenting on Israel or on the rise of Fascism in America. I’m just a wordle birthday boy telling my wordle stowies.” It’s kinda the opposite of Lucas and Verhoeven, who are also not subtle, and did press spelling everything out, and there are still loads of Star Wars and Starship Troopers fans who don’t think those are political. I have to think Gunn is doing reverse psychology here, or maybe it’s a tyler durden situation and he has no idea how he’s writing these scripts.
This was such a good episode. Really just the peak of what Peacemaker is at its best – hilarious, emotional, horrifically violent, dramatic, surprising.
Apologies if this posts twice — it appears that the site ate my original post despite not giving me any error message.
Radio Days — Again taking up my Allen retrospective with this, one of the Allens I’ve seen a million times. His fictionalized reminiscence of growing up in Brooklyn during the Golden Age of Radio, this combines a bunch of stories about radio personalities with his life living in a home crowded with family. (His uncle’s refrain when arguing with his aunt — “Take the gas pipe!” — has been part of my family’s argot for decades.) Farrow is very funny as a bubble-headed Canarsie cigarette girl who becomes a radio star once she takes diction lessons, although the best role is Dianne Wiest as Allen’s young (but no longer so young) single aunt who swings from emotional crest to trough as a reaction to the men that come and go.
But the real trick here is how Allen blends different emotional goals — most of the family scenes are broad comedy with lots of bickering, insults, and mock violence. But then there is a sweet scene with Allen’s father and uncle joining in as his cousin dances to Carmen Miranda. Then the film climaxes with the emotional wringer as his family listens to the fictionalized reports of a little girl who had fallen down a well (based on a real incident), and this followed by the catharsis of Diane Keaton making a return appearance in Allen’s oeuvre singing Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”
September — Allen follows Radio Days with this, another film about a house crowded with family and guests. But these are WASPs, so it’s rather a different vibe. Here Farrow is the mousy Lane whose Vermont house has been invaded by her larger than life mother (Elaine Stritch in the Elaine Stritch role) as well as a series of friends and neighbors involved in several interlocking and unrequited love triangles. Apparently when Lane was a teenager she killed Stritch’s violent mobster boyfriend and has been shellshocked about it ever since.
I saw this once years ago and didn’t care for it, but I liked it much more this time around. The linchpin is Stritch, a force of nature who, like a tornado, blows in and disrupts everyone’s lives. Not out of malice, but simply because other people’s feelings aren’t something she is capable of noticing. Meanwhile everyone else is restrained and polite, so clearly burdened by their inability to ask for what they want. (Although a few people eventually do, and it rarely works out for them.) And while this isn’t really a comedy, Allen manages the tension with pieces of business here and there — at one point Lane, a realtor, and her client walk in on two people kissing that shouldn’t be kissing, and the client (Ira Wheeler) slowly disappears out of frame like Homer in the bushes, another example of Allen blocking scenes like nobody else.
As good as Stritch is (as is Denholm Elliot as Lane’s neighbor), it is once again Dianne Wiest who does my favorite work in the picture. I sometimes find Wiest too broad with her Olive Oyl warbles (I don’t love her in her Oscar-winning role in Hannah and Her Sisters). But she was perfect in Radio Days and she’s great here, pulling way back as Lane’s married best friend who is being seduced by the handsome lodger (Sam Watterston).
Still of the Night — I stumbled across this, which I’d never heard of before, but as you know I love an ‘80’s thriller. Roy Scheider plays a shrink whose patient was murdered, and he begins to fall in love with the victim’s colleague/paramour (an extremely dishy Meryl Streep) who maybe was the killer. This was directed and co-written by Robert Benton (Bonnie & Clyde, Kramer vs. Kramer), and it’s never going to be considered one of his best works. In particular the screenplay leaves a lot to be desired, coasting on vibes, several Hitchcock homages, and a solid performance by Streep to paper over motives and exposition that should have been made explicit. (Streep once called it the worst movie she’d ever been in, but honey, Ive seen Mamma Mia 2!) But Benton does manage a handful of legitimately thrilling scenes and jump scares, as well as a very creepy dream sequence. It’s nothing I’d recommend, but I enjoyed it.
Radio Days might be the last Allen I watched and it has a perfect elegiac ending. Gonna have to try some old-school radio soon.
PLAY DIRTY– Hate to say it, but this is a total misfire, from a miscast Mark Wahlberg as Parker to a needlessly complicated plot tethered to a swing-at-anything tone from scene to scene. Parker isn’t really a Shane Black character, at least since he began directing, and his action-comedy chops don’t really land with the material. This is Wahlberg’s second attempt, by my count, to craft a reboot of a popular hard boiled crime character to his persona, and, once again, he doesn’t care, much less understand, what makes the formula of those books work in the first place.
Also a re-watch of INHERENT VICE. While this might be a more difficult film to enjoy than other PTA works (it’s claustrophobic framing and dialogue centered exposition is aesthetically rigid and requires a lot of concentration), I think it really captures the archetypal private eye’s significance to the culture of Los Angeles as it pertains to memory, forgetfulness, and the push to a future of consumer domination. I’m particularly haunted by Owen Wilson’s line about police interrogations expressing a need for the interrogator to confirm, through outside corroboration, what they already know and believe, and this makes a lot of sense as Doc Sportelo’s cases intersect in ways in which his recollections shift in light of new contexts and force him to confront an inherent aggression that he thinks he’s too cool to engage in, but only places him as a pawn in a larger game of power behind the scenes. Even the one moment where he squares his conscience with his actions underscores the pain of his own nostalgic longing. I’ve written on the old site about how a CHINATOWN’S paranoia disavows the public’s complicity with the corruption of the city’s founders. I think that PTA (and Pynchon) as well are trying to address that lapse in 70s’ crime dramas in terms of a psycho-philosophy of time, and the degradation of remembrance through consumerism and just plain-old desire to indulge in the fantasy of a “better” place lost due to personal foibles and social and the allure of political coercion. Again, Wilson’s line that Nixon’s underground cabal “wants to help people” feels very sad in its seductive naivete.
Everything about Play Dirty is making me mad, I will give Wahlberg the slight not-credit-but-not-demerit of being the second choice here as Robert Downey Jr. was the original lead. And also a fucking terrible choice! This seems almost entirely on Black refusing to recognize his own strengths and weaknesses, just infuriating shit. I hadn’t realized he was pulling full on Parker history here, various character names and roles from the books in a way that has not happened/been allowed before, so he clearly wants this to be a Parker movie and not just something inspired by the books. What a fucking dunce. EDIT: even the title is bad! “Play” is not a word that should be anywhere near a fucking Parker story, and it’s just generic bullshit anyway, lazy crap from a guy who definitely knows and has done better (The Long Kiss Goodnight! Kiss Kiss Bang Bang! The ironic The Nice Guys! Even Lethal Weapon!).
What Did We Read?
8 Bit Theater, 0120-0150, Brian Clevinger
It continues to fascinate me how this comic keeps building and building ideas on top of the structure it already has. There are still new elements being built on top of this, including the style (and I know the style will be elaborated on further). There aren’t just non-panels to emphasise a character’s thoughts; there are anime-like gradients to break up the visuals and indicate a character thinking and responding. By this point, the characters have gained thick pixellated outlines to make them stand out from the background better. There’s also more layers of jokes.
There’s one in particular where White Mage knocks Fighter over as she rushes up to yell at Black Mage, with him making funny commentary the whole time, that made me think about this comic having a high density of jokes that come from taking advantage of the medium. Zucker/Abrams/Zucker had a rule that you only ever have one joke at a time – if the gag is in the background, the foreground just has serious dialogue. This makes sense for film and television, where you only have so much of the viewer’s attention, but in comics the reader has all the time in the world, and Clevinger takes advantage of that.
Also significant is a long page where he details a monologue from WM, where she conveys a genuine terror that they’re all going to die and the prophecy (and thus her life’s work) was for nothing. This is very sincere, and it perfectly sets up the gag that the acid the Light Warriors were about to be dipped into was Mountain Dew (due to the forest imps fucking with Garland), a turn so monumentally stupid that it makes me cackle. Comedy requires something you take seriously, and the more seriously you take it, the easier it is to subvert it (“Don’t let it all be a lie. Please…”).
(In this spirit is BM being morally outraged when Black Belt pushes the story forward by brutally kicking the shit out of Garland, and of course he’s only outraged because he would never be able to get away with that)
Meanwhile, there’s also the first gag where a character is actually so stupid that they break the universe, when BB gets so hopelessly lost in a very simple design that he falls into a parallel dimension that spits him out one second before he fell in, meaning two are running around speaking in an echo. This kind of gag always tickles me; it’s a logical extension of the carefully-phrased stupidity, where you actually warp reality with your own thoughts but in the least convenient way possible (“It’s a straight line! There’s no maze!”).
In terms of new stuff, this has the first appearance of Akbar, a scam artist selling characters useless products with “not” deceptive names. This first use is really great, and leads to a short runner – Thief uses “amnesia dust” that’s definitely not talcum powder, only for it to fail; Princess Sara uses it later, and it works because she uses sheer force of personality on Fighter. There’s also the first of a few fake endings, a gag the strip will come back to a few times.
There’s also something it drops: Clevinger’s author interrupting. I think there’s only one more, when he has his face in the background; I don’t think it works as well as, say, David Willis showing up in Shortpacked!, partly because Clevinger never finds a comic persona for himself (in the comic anyway) but also because direct fourth wall breaks never really gel well with the style; it always grates against the loose reality of the comic somehow.
“No, no, no. This [plan is] much better. It depends entirely on Fighter.”
Great gag where WM expresses the amount of duress she’d have to be under to spend time with BM as “If the contents of the entire universe were to collapse into a single point, it still would not be enough duress. I don’t like you.”, and he suggests testing that theory before realising how foolish he looks and apologising.
There’s an absurd little joke where, to BM’s chagrin, everybody keeps using the word mystery.
“We’re about to witness an inverse relationship between the number of stab wounds I inflict on you and the number of answers you start giving me.” I had a discussion with my boyfriend this week about wish fulfillment vs role model, and how comedy characters can fall into the former without falling into the latter (like Bender, but also Leela on Futurama). Black Mage is short-tempered, but also you get why he’s so angry all the time, but you also get that it goes very stupid places when you fall down his temper tantrums.
There’s a tiny, incredible gag where BM asks if anyone heard something (it was Sara slipping away) and everyone says “No”, followed by Fighter wondering if he already answered (he did).
Dragonquest, Ann McCaffrey
Can confirm now: these are not to my taste but I do respect the craft and clear-headed pursuit of a goal. I know McCaffrey treated this as a real history she is slowly articulating to the audience, having worked out everything that happened ahead of time and simply putting it together, and the end result is that this feels like a soap opera. The interesting thing is that the story is largely constructed of, for lack of a better phrase, social techniques; characters are deliberately provoking reactions out of each other.
The consequence of this is that the book feels less like a story and more of a series of events, with the negative implications that come with that – I read this book cover to cover and could not tell you a single character that appears in it. In fact, I would go further and say that the work seems to go out of its way to prevent me from empathising with the characters; they’re talking to each other about things they have knowledge of and I don’t, they’re operating according to alien customs, for some reason McCaffrey goes out of her way not to describe things, and most of all, the action isn’t driven forward by a single character.
Like, this isn’t a plot where someone sets everything in motion and sees the consequences come back on them, and in fact it feels like very few characters and their motivations drive the story forward; there isn’t even really a situation in the traditional sense. It’s more like a series of scenes. It’s interesting because my mother is a huge fan of these books – I’m borrowing her copies – and it actually does match with her way of engaging with fiction; she’s always loved soapy stuff, she has a much less meta sense of storytelling than I, and I recall her particularly enjoying the Chicago shows and arranging their timelines so she could figure out the chain of logic between them.
Which is a very fannish approach to fiction, come to think of it, as opposed to my more amateur-academic approach. “This is a real place, and I’m enjoying this like a carnival ride through an experience” as opposed to “This is something somebody intentionally put here for a specific reason, and I want to know what it is”.
The Long Walk, by Richard Bachman — umpteenth re-read, post-movie. I understand the movie’s swerve into the dystopian aspect and the resistance of said dystopia, but a large part of the novel’s strength is avoiding that — Ray’s dad gets mentioned here and while Ray is obviously not happy about what went down he broadly if depressedly agrees that his dad was a fool for speaking out. What dominates the story, via epigraph, is the mentality of the game show — something that is perhaps rigged and definitely not beatable in the end, but the only game in town. And one that contestants choose to play. This fatalism makes the story cut deeper than the movie’s rebellion (although the book of The Running Man repurposes the game show to be more oppressive and important to fight, we’ll see what that movie does).
The Eyes of the Dragon – A totally satisfying Stephen King fairy tale. Well, maybe not the avatar of Naomi King marrying the avatar of Ben Straub (Naomi is queer and I suspect looks back on this with some bemusement). But otherwise really does what it sets out to. And if you never read another King book, you have a complete enough Flagg story that you need not care about The Stand or The Dark Tower one little bit.
On the one hand I think King sort of dropped the implications of Flagg’s timelessness, but on the other hand I really like how he’s here in one mode while also technically running around Gilead at this point with no real explanation/detail. He’d make for an interesting anthology subject for other writers to tackle.
I love this one. The napkins are such an excellent fairy tale touch, and then the more emotionally complex elements, like pitiable Thomas, work too; it’s impressive how tonally and stylistically balanced it all is.
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
I have now finally made my way through my Penelope Fitzgerald collection!
I can’t think of anyone else who’s ever written historical fiction with quite this same approach; it doesn’t abide by any of the genre’s conventions at all and is something much slippier and more intimate. (This is not a burn on traditional historical fiction, which I love.) Fitzgerald also have a gift for picking subjects and even periods that no one else would: in this case, an inside look at the Romantic poet Novalis before he was Novalis, when he was just a brilliant young man in rural Germany who surprises everyone by abruptly falling in love with Sophie, a twelve-year-old girl who seems neither especially bright nor especially pretty. I think this material would likely be handled very differently today, but in Fitzgerald’s treatment of it, Fritz comes across more as inspired than creepy. He doesn’t see Sophie as prey, but he sees her as a kind of abstract Romantic vision–even her earthiness is poetic fuel–and that can lead to its own problems. His brother eventually falling for Sophie as well feels less like a weird overflow of poetic sentiment, and while he also somehow manages to not come off as creepy, after a while, I start to feel very “Her?” about it all. Sophie is a nice enough kid; she can be funny, and she’s even brave. But I don’t get it. There are numerous other female characters in this book they could all become obsessed with instead.
I think being less compelled by Sophie does hurt my experience of the book to some extent, but not too much. There are a lot of excellent characters here–enough that the brutal, real-life wrap-up of their fates at the end genuinely hurt–and it is, as is true of all Fitzgerald, beautifully and sharply written. (Maybe especially so when it comes to what happens with Sophie, where the prose is so unsparing even as it lacks any real sense of gore or horror. The only atmosphere Fitzgerald ever goes after is one of dizzying clarity.)
Also, Fritz is that rarest of things: a character who is actually convincing as a genius.
Love this book – his obsession with Sophie is in my memory read to be a bit inexplicable, like Novalis needed some kind of source of incandescent obsession, and she was around. (This is also based on real life.)
the power fantasy, the first 2 TPBs. Kieron Gillon’s creator owned book starts with the premise that if you had superheroes with potentially world-ending level powers the most important thing would be for those heroes to have a workable balance of power. I really liked Gillon’s recent marvel stuff and this works on similar themes but without the restrictions of marvel editorial. (Two of the characters are, to varying degrees, riffs on Xavier and Magneto).
It’s really good. Maybe there’s a little too much flashbacks; I don’t know how much of this we’ll
really need for the climax. I’m enjoying it so I don’t mind, but it’s nice for stories to have endings.
Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss – A twist on the usual Halloween fare and very different from the Corman classic. In the far future of 2020 space nukes have opened a rift in the space/time fabric causing Joe Boderland to be hurled back to the Victorian age where he meets Byron and the Shellys, but also a very real Victor Frankenstein and his monster. Aldiss uses the meta-novel for his philosophical, historical and societal musings on scientific overreach, human fear and hatred of the other, and the origin and history of SF. Aldiss creates some great gothic atmosphere as Boderland debates the poets, sleeps with Mary and fights her two creations.
I tore through Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing if the Dog, a time-travel comedy/romance, her second novel about Oxford historians using time travel after the much less comic Doomsday Book. I’m now stalled about halfway through Richard Mawetheson’s Bid Time Return, the novel upon which Somewhere in Time (which I watched last week) is based.
How about that contrast between Dog and Doomsday? Dog is delightful and pointed me toward Three Men In A Boat, which rules; I remember reading Doomsday and thinking “this is really good but not that harsh, considering” and then that last section hits. The other Oxford books are not as bleak as that one but tend more in its direction than in Dog’s, they’re both excellent though (and the original novella that kicks the conceit off is great too).
Yes, it’s quite a tonal shift. I found Doomsday sort of a strange melding when I read it, with so much comedy in the Oxford sections even as they were undergoing a pandemic of their own. But then the last section is just devastating.
I’ve been devouring Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series over the past few weeks. It’s kind of Hunger Games meets Dune with a side of Gundam/Evangelion and a little bit of Game of Thrones world expansion with each book (but doesn’t feel like it’s spun out of control yet). Even though the characters are all basically meta-humans with genius intellects, it does a pretty good job at having the bad guys be just as crafty, so the ‘reversal’ and ‘body blow’ plot moments keep coming quite convincingly. The concept of the ‘Iron Rain’ (where spaceships do an aerial bombardment of a planet with hundreds of thousands of missiles that are super soldiers in high-tech exoskeletons) is also pretty boss. Enjoying these a lot.
How’s It Going, Pals?
Life is going suspiciously well. One of those situations where anything bad happening to me is my own fault, which makes me worry how precarious it all is. But every single day, I’m doing some meaningful work, and it’s all organised straightforwardly. The sole improvement to my life would be making enough from the work I like doing that I wouldn’t have to do the work I don’t want to do.
What isn’t happening? At least at work. Monday, a board meeting for an entity that we will be winding down by June, a meeting almost no staff were allowed to attend. Followed by several board members resigning, though oddly at our partial behest as this somehow helps us? Tuesday, the other board met, and that went very well. Zero tech issues, which is always welcome, and a lively discussion about everything. Wednesday, my department head announced he is leaving in November. This is going to force a lot of paperwork – he is one of a few with full signatory authority for the corporation and for the boards, plus his portfolio is huge. I don’t blame him for leaving, though. But I liked working for him. A laid back boss is to be valued, and lord knows what his replacement might be like. Suffice it to say, I am going to keep that resume up to date.
In somewhat happier news, another grand-niece (our 10th grand and third grand-niece). This birth was induced a bit early, so the baby is still in NICU to make sure her lungs are fully working, but hopefully all will be well. And my second grand-niece turned one and her parents – my brother’s daughter and son in law – threw a party. The kid had no idea what was going on, but the vibes were good and my wife (who usually avoids any contact with my sister in law) actually almost had a good time. Babies always win her over.
I am so sorry but also congrats on the baby!
Congratulations on the new grand-niece!
And here’s hoping your new department head will also be laid-back.
Congratulations on the new family member!
The NICU is scary but the people there are wonderful. Hope her stay is short.
Work continues to be hilariously broken, another solid week when I’ve basically been unable to do any proper work because of a “security incident”, looking forward to finding out how completely messed up all the planning / schedule stuff is once they finally get us properly back online. They keep suggesting we use the free time to “learn more about AI” and I keep not doing that, because I’d rather do absolutely anything else.
Cannot recommend that n+1 piece enough on the AI front.
My work recently had an organized event where they listed what AI was good at, including “deep analysis” (???), and then acknowledged some of its drawbacks, like racism and a lack of reliability about the facts. You would think those two factors might complicate being “good at deep analysis,” but apparently not.
Mild creative crisis along with depression – my friend’s taking awhile to read my book but also has strong criticisms, and the state of the world has me in this weird inertia. Not sure if I’m actually made for the current moment even if this isn’t quite surrender either. Just blah. My friend is also staying with me because of a crisis again, which also throws me for a loop.
As someone definitely not made for this current moment–and who does a lot better with routine than sudden household rearrangements–I sympathize with this and hope your sense of your footing firms up soon.
Take heart that your book is not the one being fileted in Defector (seriously, check out that piece). And if you’re helping out a friend in crisis even if it’s hard, you’re absolutely made for this current moment.
Heh, might read this Defector article with some real gleeful satisfaction given how I’ve reacted lately to poetry book blurbs.
Just existing is so hard these days.
Belated Serlingfest comment, since work kept me too busy for it last Friday. It was fun! My wife and I won a prize in the raffle–a TZ notebook, a signed copy of Marc Scott Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion, and (coolest of all) a binder full of prop documents from the show. (Well, that’s what they called it: I think it’s a possible misnomer, and at least some of them may be fan-made, but they’re endearing either way.) We also got interviewed by Alan Sepinwall for the book he’s working on about Rod Serling. I said nothing of value and will hopefully not be directly quoted, but my wife was great. And Sepinwall was very nice.
Work has had some high school-esque drama lately, which has been getting inside my head in a bad way. But at least it’s finally properly fall, where it’s getting cooler outside and I have candy corn. And tickets to see One Battle After Another tonight!
Looking forward to your response to ONE BATTLE.
FYI, on the One Battle front I just got around to this and it’s an excellent analysis:
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/one-battle-after-another-pta-pynchon/#
From this article: “One Battle After Another offers up a fantasy of revolutionary esprit de corps, where every ex-radical, migrant laborer, longhair, stoner, sympathetic social worker, and skateboarding punk is part of an expansive underground movement.”
Well, I dunno; as opposed to “fantasy,” we do see evidence for how these revolutionary subgroups develop (rather than “expansive,” they’re all limited in some way). And to be sure, karate teacher/sensei (Benicio del Toro) epitomizes the concrete steps needed to build a “movement” from the ground up: do the work — be a skilled organizer, a good communicator, and know when/how to step into the breach.
“Expansive” in the sense of all of these disparate folks working together and in their own way, right? What they are working toward is “help Bob,” which is interesting as a goal and points to venerating the past as much as trying to create the future, but the skaters spiriting him away and the nurse unlocking his cuffs may never meet but are united in a cause. I think the “fantasy” is tied to the momentum of the groups in action and being revolutionary without a lot of the background that gets them there — they appear, help Bob, move on (outside of Sergio), which is absolutely the right choice for the movie. I think Bob’s aborted viewing of The Battle Of Algiers is a nod to this — that movie is grounded in harsh reality, this movie acknowledges reality while being in a more entertaining fictive mode.
Finally scheduled to start the new job the day after Columbus Day, and we’ve been assured the shutdown won’t derail it. Fingers crossed.
Good news, and good luck!
Cat’s sick, I’m exhausted. Same as it ever was, I guess.
Wishing for better days for both you and your cat.
Thank you. She’s fifteen now and has basically never been in good health so we’re just here doing our best.
Whoa, I went to the Nugget just this summer as it’s close to my grandparents’ former house and my mom!
It’s still a lovely little theater! Did you get boba across the street? (We really should try to meet up sometime you’re my way.)