Black to Techno sits somewhere between arthouse and documentary. Its main argument – and it very much has a clear, coherent argument – is that techno emerged from Black workers in Detroit. These workers spent so much time using and being around these large, complex machines that they would develop an animist connection to them, and that techno is simply an extension of trying to find the soul in a machine (as well as an extension of Black American music itself). Black to Techno is the work of Jenn Nkiru; ultimately, I would describe this work as arthouse with elements of documentary, where the main goal is a long montage with the aim of creating an emotional impression that happens to use some talking heads and a lot of historical documents. Nkiru hops between clips before points have been finished; the piece is informative, but that’s a necessary side effect of feeling immersed in Black Detroit techno culture.
One early, superficial reaction that a white person can have is a sense of white guilt; oh god, we even took techno from Black people. Someone with a superficial understanding of techno (me) will immediately think of the mediocre techno we’ve heard throughout the decades, compare it with the original article present in this film, and see the same patterns of white artists using creative ideas developed by black people, commercialising it for lesser emotional effect and greater financial reward. I prefer to follow this immediate thought to somewhere more interesting, and to do so requires asking: are white people capable of creating something soulful?
The answer is obviously yes, but it requires one to ask: what is soulful art? This is where Black to Techno gets really interesting, because it provides a very practical, straightforward answer that’s accessible by anyone: one must believe in soulfulness in some form. The interesting thing about the animism-ish attitude of the Detroit workers is that it’s very similar to attitudes IT workers have about computers (as I understand it, IT workers are some of the most superstitious people on the planet), and, in fact, is very similar to my own attitude about stories. It’s a recurring idea across all different fields and disciplines, from baking to water polo; that you have to treat your objects like people, with their own motivations and goals and inner life.
Whether this is true or not, it forges an emotional connection to the work that brings out ‘soulfulness’. Maybe not loving the object itself, but at least loving the process itself; imbuing the work with emotional choices as opposed to purely ‘rational’ ones. One may ask, what do ‘rational’ choices mean in the context of art – by that, I mean choices made purely for commercial appeal and external validation. I think that if there’s any single philosophical ideal that is at the center of Western civilization – or at least capitalism – it’s ‘number goes up’. Not just the most money, but the most views, the highest grade, the most years lived, the best health, the most places visited. Quantifiable numbers that can be made more big.
There’s a place for this, obviously; I prefer to do what I do in the healthiest and safest way. Watch movies and play video games, but also take regular breaks for my eyes. Having this be the highest ideal, however, goes against soulfulness and leads to some really weird and often counterintuitive behaviour; see that rich guy doing everything possible to live forever and possibly killing himself with anemia. When deciding a direction to go and a way of living day-to-day life, it’s much better to choose based on love. Black to Techno’s presentation of that is compelling. The montage connects those details across space and time; the building of cars and the production of techno music, the critical analysis next to the preaching of Onyx Ashanti, whose increasing, joyful passion sweeps up the viewer.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Year of the Month
High fantasy for people what who have to work for money.
"There are other things than smart." / "Yeah, those are not smart."
Year of the Month
Well, it's not realistic. I suppose it's socialist.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Fourteen, “Meat The Parrots”
“Who put in so many ‘the honourable Elija Muhammad’s?”
“Ali was on last night.”
“My dad got bangs.”
“That was more of a grown out Cesar.”
“No, those were bangs.”
“If you’re not gonna play with me, I’ll play with myself.”
“I want to see how this shakes out.”
“White power.”
“Hold up, what?”
“Dave, I’m sure it’s not easy hearing that your dad has a new girlfriend or that Penny got rotary-dialled on your pool table.”
“Big time.”
“Alex, what was so important that you called us here? I was right in the middle of doing nothing.”
“Me, Hitler, Carmen Electra. Tauruses, yo.”
“Alex! Those are my Tibetan mood rings!”
“Sorry, Alex.”
“It’s okay. Turns out I’m not that upset about it.”
“Why would she be chesty?”
“Because your Mom is uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHH–”
“When I was a kid, we used to do that in tuxedos.”
“Yeah, we remember.”
“Wedgie! Oh. Okay, you’re not wearing any underwear, but. Okay, hand sani, be right back.”
“Yeah, well, saying ‘just like on Blue Bloods doesn’t have the same pop.”
This is the point in the show where it feels like the cast have completely locked in with each other – you can tell, because they’re all starting to get really physically intimate with each other.
“That one’s not great.”
“I told you it was a reach.”
“Hope those are hisses of excitement.”
“YOU TELL US WHERE THE WHORES ARE AT!”
“I just got a coupon for a tantric workshop taught by Rabbi Sexenstein! Don’t think that’s his real name.”
“Trying stuff is stupid!”
“Come on, man, I got nine kids, just buy something.”
“I want my old dad back! The one who ate steak and thought singing was gay! Now I didn’t particularly agree with that point but I still miss it!”
“Okay, now this may actually be a bad time to tell you guys that I have never actually seen The Wire.”
“I don’t know, Penny, I don’t have time to read everything that’s stuck to me!”
“And over here, this was the first place I ever mastur… ed playing the keyboard.”
“Well, in our defence, you’re an idiot.”
“It is what it is.”
“It’s only three words in Arabic, so it’s really a lot shorter.”
“Now who’s stupid?!”
And Then There Were None
The staged version, done by John X Presents. I’m thinking Agatha Christie stories are actually best expressed in play form – what you lose in the ability to flip back and see all the clever clues, you gain in the compression of both detail and time. Actors have so much to work with in her ability to convey entire, very banal personalities; I was struck in particular by her (and actor James Colbourn-Keogh) at conveying the captain as a smug, superior kind of guy who isn’t quite as smart as he’d like to be but is pretty smart.
This particular production was pretty slick and cool – they had a curtain with a kind of screen door thing over it, which they mostly used as they changed the set around (with a great detail that the ‘dead’ actors came on and helped with that) but also once to convey it being night-time. Real Art Deco look ot everything too that felt very authentic. The bum note is the last two or three lines, which change the ending to something happier at the expense of a great deal of unintentional camp.
The play sounds cool. Listened to And Then There Were None read by Dan Stevens who really crushes the theatrical effect of the book.
Speaking of audio books, have you seen all the promo shots online of Jonathan Bailey in the recording studio for this new Dracula?
Casino – “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to see another film about the Mob from Scorsese.” There is a ton to like here, from some very good performances (Sharon Stone is a worthy Oscar nominee, and Don Rickles is perfect as the almost totally silent Sherbert), to some stunning camerawork by Robert Richardson, to some incredibly smart directing choices by the master. But two big things and one small thing hold this back: the small thing is the almost relentless soundtrack that sometimes gets intrusive (though the rare silences do have more impact); the big things are that Scorsese himself admitted there’s not plot and that the movie has nothing new to say about organized crime, Las Vegas, toxic masculinity, or America. (In fact, the people who inspired the main characters had already inspired characters on the TV show Crime Story, never mind the obvious comparisons to Goodfellas.) Still, given how many movies feel too long at two hours, this one does very nicely with three. Interesting aside: the man who inspired DeNiro’s character was revealed after dying to have been an FBI informant. I wonder how that fact might have changed the movie.
Elementary, “Moving Targets”/”Scrambled” – Another partial two-parter, or perhaps better to say the former sets up the big two part finale of the season long Shinwell arc, as Shinwell is found dead! (That’s twice in three episodes that we have the last scene being a body on the floor, even if the first time the body wasn’t dead.) The plot of the former involves a contestant in a “Most Dangerous Game” reality show competition being killed, who turns out to be a New Jersey sheriff who was investigating a bribery campaign by a gun manufacturer. Reasonably good mystery where the pieces actually line up well. And then we get to the latter episode, where our heroes turn their attention to bringing down the drug gang Shinwell was spying on once and for all, and things get very convoluted. To the degree that the gang is using Enigma devices to encode their texts. That seems a bit much. And what’s with the woman hounding Sherlock about another case? I sort of feel like we are close to “Computer, create a foe that Data can’t defeat” territory (to reference another Sherlock Holmes of sorts). To be concluded.
MASH, “38 Across” – Hawkeye, desperate to solve the last clue in a crossword, calls a friend on an aircraft carrier for help but the message is garbled and the friend, along with his boss the admiral, comes to deal with an “emergency.” Cute if unlikely. Also, Klinger tries to eat a jeep. Guests include familiar faces Dick O’Neill and Oliver Clark…
Barney Miller, “Noninvolvement” – …and look, it’s Oliver Clark again! Here, he’s a man with a compulsion to expose himself. But the main plot has Wojo arresting someone for not helping chase a purse-snatcher, as there is a law on the book about non-intervention. (Somewhere between Spider-Man not stopping the man who would kill Uncle Ben and the finale of Seinfeld.) This works because it does ask a serious question of what anyone can expect from a bystander, and because the arestee threatens to sue, and basically is fine with just an apology. Alex Henteloff makes his first appearance as Arnold Ripner, a pesky and persistent ambulance chaser and semi-regular.
Interesting, did not know this about the real Rothstein! I think Casino is most interesting as a warped Bible story where they do indeed fuck up a good thing and are cast out of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. That and the sheer amount of procedure compared to Goodfellas fascinates me – the nuts and bolts of running a casino, bilking people, and skimming. (It’s why I’ve never really gambled in casinos as I figured someone was making me money off me, not the other way around.)
CASINO really connects the illusion of control to surveillence, creating a nice parallel structure between the conflict between its dual lead male characters, who are trying to tame Ginger, to their operations of Las Vegas, culminating in that huge conflagration outside of Rothstein’s house. A lot of people think it’s shaggy and undisciplined, but I think Scorsese and Pileggi actually do a remarkable job of keeping its narrative and metaphors on track, maintaining thematic consistency as it digresses from the plot in order to show the operations of the casino biz.. It’s an epic film in scope but an elegantly simple story, and a savagely comic one, about hubris, as it factors in assumptions about friendship, marriage, and the management of large systems.
Simon, I thought of you when I read this interview with Jane Leeves and David Hyde-Pierce yesterday. Apparently she has a biography coming out.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/oct/07/frasier-jane-leeves-david-hyde-pierce-interview-daphne-niles-love-story
Thanks! While I am glad both actors resisted any desire to reunite on Frasier 2.0, I think they could slide back into those roles with utter ease. And I might have to look for that book.
Dream Lover – A retelling of “The Green Ribbon” story with Madchen Amick’s pearls and necklaces functioning as a visual reminder of that tale’s dream logic. Too bad the third act dives into actual, concrete plot. Spader is wonderfully, gleefully vengeful at the end, even as the plot curdles into misogyny, but the movie’s most interesting in the second act when Lena’s duplicity is still ambiguous and even sympathetic. Madchen Amick is heartbreaking in those scenes, less Lana Turner and more Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai, and they point to a deeper, sadder thriller about the impossibility of knowing anyone, than the one we have.
V/H/S Mixtape – Shocked at the low average rating on Letterboxd, this is much better than the other entries, and I especially liked “Heartbeat” and the nastiness of it’s twist even if it could have gone for longer. Featuring Ernest Dickerson doing a Music of Erich Zann adaptation. (Do not believe Miller’s lies – about this movie. Or not all of them, the last entry is pretty weak.)
Reservoir Dogs – Still wows and I love the crushing, decisive logic of Nice Guy Eddie re: Mr. Blonde’s “turn.” “HE’S JUST GONNA DECIDE, OUT OF THE FUCKING BLUE, TO RIP US OFF?!” The 90’s rips of this movie do not have the script’s basic interest in performativity as well as honesty among men and thieves.
On my personal “movies that made me” list, RESERVOIR DOGS comes in at #8. I’m only 2 months younger than Tarantino, and only slightly more formally educated in film history, but that movie just seemed, upon arrival, to summarize what I, and a coterie of my movie fan friends (all male, I should ad), wanted Hollywood to embody at that time.
Would have to think about this but Pulp Fiction might take that spot!
Coming across all of those lists in my Facebook feed made me realize that my list of 9 is pretty much a CIS male canon, albeit one that explores the intersectionality of masculinity, history, and spectacle with ambivalence and ambiguity. What I like about the framing of this project is that, as opposed to simply rating your favorite, or what you might consider your best movies, albums, T.V. shows, books etc., is how it reveals thematic consistencies and variations within the range of your taste preferences. I think it forces oneself to recognize something more personal about your individual relationship to art and perception of one’s social environment.
The Kill James Bond podcast did Reservoir Dogs just the other week. They really dug into those elements you mention re. performative masculinity.
C’mon C’mon – I wasn’t the biggest fan of the previous two Mike Mills movies, but this one mostly won me over. Strong performances from Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffman and the kid, gorgeous B&W cinematography and a charming tale of unexpected surrogate parenthood all combine nicely, and while I still had a couple of issues with Mills’ writing at times, it was much reduced here and left me very satisfied.
Live Music – indie-punk kinda stuff on Friday night, headliners Fuzzy Heart made a good raucous, melodic noise and local support Possum Kid are an unusual proposition that I really enjoy, bunch of slightly eccentric-looking youngsters who play music vaguely reminiscent of Silver Jews, perhaps?
Saturday was a more low-key matinee affair featuring long-running indiepop band The Would-Be-Goods and C86 supergroup Railcard, very sweet melodic songs and Railcard had a trumpet player, I’m a sucker for trumpet in indie-rock.
Seinfeld, S9 – “The Frogger”, final episode on the penultimate disc! What a journey this has been. This was a really fun one, George accidentally recruiting morally dubious guys (including Peter Stormare!) to help him move his arcade machine was very funny, and Elaine’s cake-focused subplot and Jerry dating a woman who finishes his sentences both had great moments as well.
Always Sunny, S17 – was thinking about this show after the “best 21st century TV shows” discussion last week, I kinda feel like my affection for it has waned a bit just due to it never ending – even though the standard is still high, I just think maybe I’ve reached my limit. I’m far more likely to really fall for a short-lived show I can rewatch than one where there’s always something new so I never go back, perhaps? But then I figured I should at least watch a couple more episodes from where I last left off at the start of S17, and they were both pretty fantastic, so who knows? “Frank is in a Coma” in particular made me laugh, great ending. “Mac and Dennis Become EMTs” was also very good though, excellent escalation and the chilli-pepper conceit is delightfully stupid. I kinda feel like they’re riffing on “Another Round” and its premise of always being exactly the right amount of drunk, but nothing on the internet seems to confirm that?
I like what I’ve heard from Railcard. The group released a new album last month,, which I want to check out.
They’re good fun, I like that they have multiple songwriters and share lead vocal duties. Always a dynamic I enjoy!
Woo live music!
What did we play?
Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse (Demo) on Nintendo Switch
Finished the demo and this definitely has the juice. The anesthetic is very Castlevania while looking like no other game in the series, the music goes great with the action, Rose Belmont plays like characters in the Nintendo DS games but better, and the first boss was tough but fair. The action also gives me Castlevania III vibes, which happens to be my favorite in the series. Only shortcoming is some of the characters don’t look great on Switch handheld mode, but I’m definitely getting this game, probably soon.
Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration on Nintendo Switch
Checked out some of the docs on the early years of Atari. Some very cool history, from drug use, to infighting, to forgotten, flawed Pinball boards. Also played some Breakout, Pong (which I forgot doesn’t have a single player mode proper, and I tried playing both players at once, which is hard to do but still fun), and different versions of Pac-Man, Galaga, Xevious, etc. Lots of fun.
Hollow Knight on Nintendo Switch
Picked up my save from a few months back, explored for a bit, then opened the vaginal-looking Black Egg. I think that’s the way to the final boss, because the game just decided to show me my completion percentage (67%), and I came across a big bad guy in chains, and instead of taking him on I decided to go back, stash my money, and do some rounds on the map, circling back to places I marked to check later. Once I do that I’ll give the guy a go, though I suspect I won’t get the good ending (which I haven’t checked the requirements for) on the first try anyway.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound on Nintendo Switch
Beat another level, which had me riding a bike and shooting bad guy from a 2D sidescrolling perspective. Pure, classic, awesomeness. Definitely hoping there’s another level like that later on.
Year of the Month updates:
Here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 13th: John Bruni: High Art
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
And coming in November, get ready to write about anything from 1968! Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem