The Friday Article Roundup
Get what you're owed in the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will get the back end of:
Thanks to Captan Nath for submitting! Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Kay Hanley tells Devion Ivie of Vulture about how she’s never been fairly compensated for her singing in Josie And The Pussycats:
Now, here’s a helpful comparison to another one of my bigger projects. 10 Things I Hate About You, right out of the gate, was being shown on cable television after its theatrical run. The residuals started coming for me immediately. Josie and the Pussycats didn’t have that. It was never on television or anything like that. It was a slow, cult film. They didn’t even make a Blu-ray for it. It wasn’t easy to find for a long time. 10 Things was hugely popular at Blockbuster. It was always a smash on the secondary run, and the streaming era brought a whole new revenue stream to it. Over that film’s lifespan — which, I should note, I’m also briefly onscreen for — I’ve made about $50,000 in residuals. I’ve received less than $1,500 for Josie and the Pussycats. My last payment for it was in 2009.
Joshua Rivera muses on Jackass for Aftermath:
There’s always been a tricky ouroboros-esque quality to the Jackass crew, the knowledge that they’d probably never do any of this crazy shit if they weren’t a little messed up, and that doing all this stuff – in addition to the fame that came with it – likely exacerbated whatever their flaws were. Jackass director and co-creator Jeff Tremaine, referring to the cast’s extraordinary mix of charisma and recklessness, called them “a collection of exceptional fuck-ups,” noting that the magic of Jackass really is in these specific guys coming together in this specific way. This is the subtext to the damage they put themselves through, and the way they help each other up: Who else would do that? Jackass is about a group of guys who saved each other, and did so by developing a practice of pulling each other back from the brink of disaster on a nigh-daily basis.
At Embedded, Nick Catucci surveys music critics about where to find the best music criticism:
Chuck Eddy, author and former Village Voice music editor: Right now, my favorite place to read music criticism is Dave Moore’s The Other Dave Moore. He is tireless when it comes to tracking down new pop music (especially music outside the English speaking world, which pretty clearly is no longer where the action is), and he’s basically the last person I’m aware of who consistently comes up with fresh and interesting ideas about this stuff, week after week. Beyond Dave, the pickings these days strike me as depressingly slim….Until recently I would have included The New York Times, which I subscribe to in physical form, but over the past couple years it’s been really disappointing in its awkward attempts for its music writing to read as “journalistic” or whatever.
Sean Burns looks back at a beloved (by him) bomb in a review of David Hughes’ book The Unmaking of Hudson Hawk at Crooked Marquee:
The production’s mismanagement becomes downright hilarious when they end up tossing huge chunks of the script because they’re behind schedule – you might recall that in the final film Hawk only steals two of the three Da Vinci treasures – eliminating Waters’ entire third act set in Moscow. Yet everyone still had to fly to Budapest to shoot interiors that could have been filmed in Los Angeles. The over-scaled, elephantine heedlessness of the film becomes part of its charm. There will never be another movie like Hudson Hawk. Studios now have entire departments whose jobs are to make sure something like this never happens again.
At The Tonearm, Carolyn Zaldivar Snow interviews Félicia Atkinson about improvising a live soundtrack for Eyes Without A Face:
Suspense appears as a subject and a contingency while making the music itself. I think I would not make music if I knew where it would end. This is why I make experimental music—because I am going down a path that is mostly unknown. I think it’s a perilous path because this is not what is asked of musicians these days. We ask musicians to come with solutions, with clear answers, whether they are academic or pop. I am coming from an art school background. I am making music to understand why and how I am making it. It’s about process, and this process brings suspense, in the sense that we don’t know how the resolution will appear. I love to hear this feeling of suspense, for example, in jazz music or in music for film, and since this record was connected to a horror movie, it made sense for me to explore those tensions.
And Emmett Rensin reconsiders the Weather Underground at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
It is strange to revisit the Weather Underground now, at least for me, a decade past my own dalliance with revolutionary politics. I spent years in and around what passed for radical and socialist organizations in the early 21st-century United States, most notably the (pre–snaps-not-claps) Democratic Socialists of America. I mean that I used to believe a better world was possible. Reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, what struck me most was what utter pussies we all were. We never did anything that would put the president and the director of the FBI in fits or provoked them into dedicating the full force of federal law enforcement into disrupting our activities, assassinating our leaders, or breaking up our meetings by force….It is difficult to take the idea that the Weather Underground just went too far seriously when a far less radical era of the American Left met precisely the same ridicule and bullshit moral panic.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Two, “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari”
This was kind of a whole lot of nothing. It’s really just saying out loud what has already been perfectly adequately explained through action before now; indeed, it seems like it’s treating Londo as something he hasn’t been for a while. What, saving the Narn people (from, uh, himself) wasn’t enough? The best part of this is Delenn’s meditation on him as he lays dying; “Sometimes I even liked him, despite not wanting to,” is cliche but funny, even if Straczinsky characteristically goes about six words longer than he needs to.
I’m also extremely suspicious that they’re turning my man Lennier into a whiner.
Murder by Numbers
Don’t know why, but I had a compulsion to rewatch this after like twenty years. It’s a common refrain – and I’ve said it myself – that even bad movies back in the day were better than the bad movies of today, but maybe that’s not always true – this is actually bad in the same way a lot of modern movies are bad, becoming pretty shapeless when it runs out of cliches. The premise is Rope without the conceit of one take (and, admittedly, that the boys are a sensitive nerd and a bad boy), Bullock’s character is an edgy, traumatised cop with no life and bad habits who gets results, and much of the dialogue is just pop psychology bullshit.
The three leads – Bullock and a very young Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt – are magnificent, all exuding movie star charisma, but nobody else has the same energy brought to them, especially in the writing. The one thing it really does have going for it is the fact it was shot on film.
It’s been a minute, but isn’t this about Londo truly recognizing what he’s done, rather than just using pragmatism and apology to acknowledge it? The whole admitting one’s evil bit. The deathbed business is a cliched conceit but I think it actually works as a break from the relentless action of the past few seasons, Londo has only himself now and has to deal with that. I think it is also necessary on a meta-end for the viewer, Londo started a genocide and yet he’s still hanging around as not just a character but a “good” guy! He needs to be put through his paces a little for balance.
No comment on Lennier.
Bullock is a fine actress but this even at the time felt like casting against type in a way that was not going to benefit anyone. I’d forgotten Leopold and Loeb were Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt, though! (Do they kiss?)
Widow’s Bay, “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!”
“But he got bit by an animal and became that animal.” Well, TV, you have about six months to see if you can give me a line this year I’ll like better. I don’t think you’ll manage it.
Strong ending, with alternately poignant and pitch-black comedy with Tom and Ruth–Tom looking around helplessly for signs that it would be a kindness to put her out of her “misery” and only finding things like the full calendar of a useful and happy life is brutal and classic–and plenty of good drama too: no matter what kind of case she makes for life vs. an individual’s moral choice, no matter how lovable and loving she is, when he feels his son’s life is on the line (a general problem exacerbated by radioing in to hear only chaos and screams), there’s only one choice he’s going to make. Which means the show’s narrative choice at that point is also obvious, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t rule. Fantastic use of Bechir in this episode, too, as he also goes to extraordinary lengths to try to protect his child.
The informational film reel was a lot of fun, and the conceit is a good payoff for the earlier church bells and a good setup for next season.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
It’s a 100 fucking degrees out, so I tried to summon a little bit of autumn. I’ve read the book, but this was my first time with the film. It’s excellent until the finale, which goes magnificently big but feels like it loses some of the internal logic in the process. Until then, though, this is beautifully shot and staged, with a wonderfully spooky October feel and the ability to press on the gas to juice up a few darker, more visceral moments. The kid actors are weak, but a young Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark is awe-inspiring here, sort of like Garrett Dillahunt’s Wolcott crossed with Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka: nervy, magnetic, and terrifying. He gets all the best scenes, whether he’s clenching his fists so tightly he’s dripping blood down on Will Halloway’s face or offering Jason Robards’s Charles Halloway his youth back and tearing away the possibility a year at a time (my personal favorite).
Elementary, “The Illustrious Client” – This title is taken from a late Conan Doyle story, the one that had a character named Kitty Winter, and for the first time the writers are not just vaguely channeling a story, they are adapting it. So having Holmes’s new apprentice be named Kitty Winter had a goal. In part one of this two parter, the hunt is on for the man who raped Kitty, and they think they found the bastard, running a sex trafficking ring. But anyone who read the story, and anyone who know that if Stuart Townsend is the guest star, Stuart Townsend has to be the real bad guy, knows they had the wrong man. But at episode’s end, when Kitty recognizes the voice of Watson’s new boss, everyone knows. But the mystery isn’t the important thing, it’s how Kitty handles things. And she handles them badly and threatens the sister of the sex trafficker with bodily harm and maybe told the trafficker’s mobster bosses where to find him. We leave wondering what Kitty will do to get revenge, and if Holmes and Watson can stop her. Good stuff.
World Cup, POR vs CRO – The offsides rule in soccer just barely makes sense to me. But railing against it won’t d much good. Still, after an ending like that, I do wish it were less harsh. Or maybe the whole point is to reduce fans to tears and the brink of madness. (Also, really wanted to see the last of Rolando, though he is one of, by my count, four people in the World Cup accused at some point of sexual misconduct. Such things are hardly unique to soccer, but soccer seems to be less inclined to take them seriously than most sports. Which is saying something.)
It’s the second game in two days that a penalty kick was awarded to the higher-seed team for a rather soft foul. As my partner pointed out, given the massively-corrupt FIFA, perhaps not merely a coincidence.
Live Music – Good Flying Birds, over from Indianapolis to play their fast, jangly, chaotic songs for us. They might be a little too committed to the scrappy style for my tastes, for example if the guitarist didn’t need to extensively tune his battered guitar after every song it might have helped them build up a little more momentum. But some of the songs really clicked and when that happened they were a joy to behold. Support was a local band called Cucamaras that I hadn’t seen before and they were pretty great, indie-post-punk tunes with shout-along choruses.
Aww, as someone who was raised a Hoosier and has a lot of lingering fondness for Indianapolis, I’ll have to check this band out.
Their album “Talulah’s Tape” is pretty great, although it has a few too many throwaway interlude tracks between the good stuff.
Wooooo live music! But yeah, excessive tuning, especially when you’re in unfamiliar territory and really need to build that momentum, is a bummer.
I don’t really get it, the guitar I use when I play live was inexpensive and generally holds tune for a full set. Why do people tolerate an instrument that is so unreliable? He was also tuning by ear even though he had a tuner pedal available which was loud enough that it prevented the other band members filling those gaps with wry Indianapolis wit.
In my musical circles, that’s called amateur hour.
Veronica Mars — wait a minute, Past Veronica ratted out multiple friends’ cheating? Veronica, you snitch! This is a backdoor into yesterday’s discussion of serialized storytelling and the episode/miniarc/larger story balance — in general, the Case Of The Week involves high schoolers and the larger Who Killed Lily Kane case (despite being about a high schooler) does not, it is also tied to the Who Is Veronica’s Real Dad case which fucking yawn. Episode by episode the show does well by this but there is often a weird sense of “finally, a big break in the all-consuming murder mystery! Now to ignore it for 40 minutes of teen shenanigans!” My recollection is by making the big murder explicitly teen- and school-based, Season 2 does a much better job tying this all together. But still lots of fun, although it’s weird how Mac’s sex history scam scheme hits now — it’s given a very light touch in the show and of course everyone involved willingly participated, but “selling teenagers’ sexual history” is pretty creepy even if it’s for a good cause.
More of The Nanny! I think if I keep watching this I’m going to suffer the fate of binge-watchers everywhere: wondering how fucking long they can put off the main couple getting together before it just makes everyone look stupid. I’m going to keep going, obviously, but it’s like episode 6 and my God why haven’t they kissed yet. (It makes me appreciate Abbott and Parks and Rec for not extending out the will-they-won’t-they for too long.)
The Dark Knight
Batman Begins is Christopher Nolan making a Batman movie. This is a Christopher Nolan movie with Batman in it.
I started high school a couple months after this came out, so of course I’ve seen it so many times I had to wonder if I could possibly get anything new out of it. But I’m doing a Christopher Nolanthon since The Odyssey’s coming out, and it turned out that was exactly what it took. See, I watched this right after Nolan’s previous movie, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight turns out to have more in common with that and Nolan’s other stories of tragic obsessives (Memento, Oppenheimer, etc.) than the standard superhero formula. The Prestige was all about forcing you to ask how much a man will sacrifice — more importantly, make others sacrifice — for something as frivolous to everyone else as a magic trick. For all the copaganda, Nolan seems to get how immature and selfish the whole Batman fantasy is — the guy who knows everything, can do anything, and is right about everything. He and Dent and Gordon are “playing detective” the same way as Guy Pearce in Memento, and as much as the movie indulges in that action hero fantasy, it still poses the same questions as The Prestige. I couldn’t help thinking of Borden driving his wife to suicide to maintain his double life when I saw Barbara Gordon’s reaction to her husband faking his death.
What did we read?
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 Eric Foner
The rise and fall of America’s racial harmony. This is an explicit rejection of a then-popular take on America’s post-Civil-War era, with Foner undoing the idea that America’s black population ‘wasn’t ready’ for voting and that this contributed to disastrous economic policies; as you might expect, this was largely racist revisionism. There’s a classic moment of great structure, in that Foner first describes the extensive and difficult work freed slaves immediately set to in building churches, schools, and communities to support one another, and a few chapters later jumping over to the immediate white supremecist response in which they complain, frequently and loudly, that black workers are lazy. It’s impossible to come away from this book without thinking the white racists are projecting – and indeed, Foner quotes a contemporary who says as much.
If there’s one question the book raises, it’s ‘why the fuck are white racists like this?’. Each step of the way, there’s a confusing revelation of the white racist’s lack of grip on reality. Embarrassingly, there’s also the Northern whites – sympathetic, antiracist, but still inclined to believe that black Americans (Jesus, do I not feel comfortable just writing ‘blacks’) are acting out of laziness and short-sightedness, as opposed to methodically chasing control over their own lives. If there’s a single motivation behind Western civilisation and particularly the white conception of it, it’s Number Goes Up, and friend and enemy white alike assumes blacks also want a number to go up.
Though interestingly, one of Foner’s central points is that the Black American Experience is very much an American experience – black Americans were very much chasing individual fulfilment, preferring the sharecropping lifestyle or substance farming where individual families can be supported and raised up and avoiding collective living that they associate with slave living. At the same time, there’s a very very strong sense of collective community and raising each other up; presumably a natural response to having the same enemy (the white planters certainly don’t think much bigger than their own families in the face of economic depression).
Foner also regards the failures of Reconstruction to come down to the failures of the North to enact the political will of suppressing white racists in the South. The black community is easily the most long-thinking of all the groups laid out in the book; the South racists think in violent, stupid ways, and the Northerners keep using short-term solutions and not holding them down; the suppression of the Ku Klux Klan actually goes pretty well, but they fail to support their black citizens all that effectively, and it costs a lot of lives. I read this and it’s like, ah, I see where a lot of stuff about America comes from.
Started Robert Service’s bio of Trotsky. Slow going, as Service seems intent on going into very great detail about Trotsky’s life. But interesting at least insofar as it captures the outlines of how the Russian revolution got going. And Service manages to be balanced in his portrayal of Trotsky despite his contempt for the Soviet Union.
Out of the three big bios Service did of Soviet Union leaders, I like Lenin the best, though that may be down to me finding him the most interesting subject. Trotsky is interesting, but it also becomes pretty clear pretty quickly why someone would shove an ice pick into his skull. I do enjoy how Service dives deeply into the procedure of the Soviet Communists.
Nobody Runs Forever, by Richard Stark
This fell flat for me. None of the supporting characters particularly stood out–if pressed, I suppose Wendy-the-sister, as opposed to Wendy-who-renamed-herself-Gwen-the-cop, is the one I’m most likely to think of later–and the bank merger heist has so many obvious budding problems that it feels off that Parker doesn’t walk away from it. This one is obviously doomed, and he’s not in a desperate position at the moment.
The best part is the ending, which does place him in a desperate position and is the most traditional cliffhanger we’ve seen so far: Parker, his only ID burnt, walking up a steep hill, with the barking search dogs below and the unknown at the top.
Obstetrix, by Naomi Kritzer
Five-minutes-into-the-future novella where a right-wing Christian cult kidnaps an obstetrician (who was trying to rebound after going on trial for performing a medically necessary abortion in North Dakota) to serve as their compound’s ob/gyn, especially since there’s an upcoming delivery that will need a Cesarean. Tense and well-characterized. This avoids what I think of as the Jonestown problem, where portrayals of cults often forget how many people come there as true believers and turn into abused hostages: part of the protagonist’s struggle involves figuring out who to trust or who might already have contraband or plans that she could use or attach herself to.
Ask the Parrot, by Richard Stark
Now this is back on form. The climax/denouement may be a little sloppy, but that’s its only fault. We have a fantastic supporting cast here, from a surly former whistleblower-turned-hermit who wants revenge on his old workplace to a posse member who mistakenly shoots a homeless man to the two twins to the gas station attendant/mechanic …. Good stuff, and as usual, they bring out some of Stark’s finest and most incisive prose. I especially like Parker’s sense of the sub rosa logic at play in the posse member’s mind:
Parker could see that Thiemann thought he was supposed to be punished now, but he was smart enough to understand he couldn’t punish himself without punishing other people, too. First his wife, and the daughter will in college. But Tom Lindahl after that.
So what Thiemann was doing back there now was trying to separate himself from the other people who’d get hurt. Tom Lindahl was a stranger to him, a hermit who had turned sour. His wife wouldn’t give him understanding, she’d just give him boilerplate stock responses. He couldn’t think about these unworthy people, he could only think about himself.
The escalating complications here are all very well-done too, to the point where I don’t even care that they get a bit messy by the end. It’s interesting, though, that this is a book where Parker’s presence activates an enormous amount of chaos and bloodshed, really fucking up this small town (he doesn’t do it all himself, but he’s also a catalyst for other people to act) in ways that feel almost apocalyptic. We’ve seen that before to an extent, but this version feels different because the chaos is less processed. It feels of a piece with the title: anyone in the aftermath can ask what the hell happened here, but they’re never going to get a real answer.
RIP to this parrot. And only one Parker left now!
No love for our bounty hunters in Nobody Runs Forever? The exit of one of them is arguably the most brutal Stark gets, it’s definitely a “still got it, motherfuckers” moment. I think you’re right about how many problems are at play from the start here, a bit reminiscent of The Green Eagle Score in sour relationship dynamics really fucking things up. Contrast to Parker actually bringing Claire along as cover of sorts! I think this plays best as a throughline with the other books — this heist has problems (and they really should’ve seen the marked bills from the start) but in general cash is a lot harder to come by these days.
I absolutely love the idea of Ask The Parrot as small-scale Butcher’s Moon, Parker nuking a town without pity. But here it’s not for money or the vengeful shutting down of others’ nonsense, it’s just to escape. Things are getting harder and harder for our guy! I think this one is a bit unrealistic in spots in some ways but the superb characterization, of the other folks and as you note Parker’s ruthless reads of them, makes that a non-issue. And Tom is one more wild card, like Larry before him, who falls under Parker’s influence and his exit is decidedly ambivalent. But he’s still on his feet.
The bounty hunters are pretty good, and yeah, that unceremoniously brutal send-off is very strong. This is what happens when you get too clever for your own good with people with violent instincts! And that’s a good point about the low levels of cash available in society in general operating as a kind of unspoken, larger-scale reason to press on despite the problems.
That last glimpse of Tom, with the money but possibly not with much time before he’s inevitably caught (Parker keeps trying to tell him that it’s no longer easy to disappear and live off cash alone), really lingers. It’s a particularly good touch that he thinks right up until the end that Parker might shoot him and take all the money, so he’s extra-unmoored by that not happening.
I actually think Nobody Runs Forever should have been the last Parker novel. I enjoyed it immensely, more than the two that followed, but the ending is exactly how it should end: Parker has now entered the post-9/11 world of militarized police who might not be more competent than all the ones who chased him before but who can squash him with ease. Nobody, even Parker, runs forever, and in the end he should end up like so many of his colleagues no matter how good he is.
Though I suppose if Dortmunder never got run to ground, it’s only fair Parker doesn’t either.
I hadn’t thought about the post-9/11 aspect in particular, but there’s a detail here that really speaks to that, where Parker’s thinking about how quickly the news of his now-burned ID will spread, which wouldn’t have been true before.
I can imagine Dortmunder eventually retiring–even if he’s still going to, say, pinch something here and there–but I can’t imagine Parker ever being satisfied with growing old and stepping away from his mastery of his profession, so in a way, a gunshot (though maybe not prison) would be kinder and more appropriate. Even if I wasn’t wild about the book as a whole, I could see that last sequence, with the kind of uncertain sense of doom hovering over it, could have made for a good finale. It’s a superb final image.
Dortmunder would have always had some little thing in the pipeline, maybe urged on by Kelp, who would figure out just where the crypto billionaire is hiding something of actual value. But I think he would get antsy sitting at home all day as much as Parker would, just May would probably try to talk him into hanging it up when Claire knows that would not work. (Idea for dissertation: comparing the women in the Parker books and the women in the Dortmunder books.)
Year of the Month update!
This July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 3rd: Bridgett Taylor: Apocalypse Now
Jul. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Stalker
Jul. 14th: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Guards! Guards!
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!