The Friday Article Roundup
Racing to bring you the Internet's best pop culture writing from the past week.
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1-Up to Dave for his contributions this week! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past in the comments for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Polygon‘s Chris Plante dives into the tech of the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 and contemplates the company’s gambles and what they portend for the console’s future:
The historic successes of both the Wii and the Switch obscure how risky this gamble has been. The slower hardware — with a few, better-forgotten exceptions — couldn’t run the latest entries in gaming’s most popular franchises, including Madden, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto. Survival hinged on Nintendo’s ability to produce multiple exclusive hits each year, with smaller indie titles filling the gaps. […] It’s also possible a mix of luck and industry trends will once again favor Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft’s reluctance to fully leave the PS4 and Xbox One era behind — coupled with a generation raised on mobile gaming — has trained AAA developers to build for underpowered hardware. The Switch 2 will still trail behind top-tier machines in horsepower, but that may no longer matter. Most major franchises simply don’t demand cutting-edge specs.
Israel Daramola pays tribute to Val Kilmer and his finest roles at Defector:
A dumb comedy can tell you a lot about a great actor. Sometimes, it tells you how behind they are on their mortgage for their vacation home. Other times, it tells you about their process. Kilmer takes this obviously ridiculous movie very seriously, but in a way where you can tell he understands the ridiculousness. Kilmer makes Von Cunth diabolical and hilarious without ever really trying to be “funny” in any real way.
At Photogenie, Matheus Felix inveighs against perfect-shot cinema:
A certain desire for uniformity, homogeneity, in modern cinema, betrays its impoverished state. A John Ford western is both funny and tragic, a Lubitsch comedy is both tragic and funny. To a strong mind, the world is never an impediment to thought, but its food. The unknown is not its obstacle, but its primary condition. If we decide a movie has to look a certain way from beginning to end, then we are, from the get-go, giving up most of the world—all of it that doesn’t fit our arbitrary preconditions—much like a child who’s certain of not liking a certain food without ever having tasted it. But to think is to throw oneself blindly forward.
Related: Here’s Ciara Moloney’s breakdown of one shot from John Hughes’s Uncle Buck for MUBI:
The starting point of that emotional journey is established in an opening sequence that frames the three kids as isolated from each other and their parents. Tia, Maizy and Miles are each portrayed separately coming home to the stately family home, with its arched gateway at the top of the front garden. Tia walks along an oak-lined footpath; Maizy arrives by bus; Miles runs through a neighbor’s garden, framed by slat wall panels and white picket fencing. Each kid occupies center frame, and the editing favors sharp perpendiculars—shots framed at right angles to the last—both touches that would become key elements of Wes Anderson’s trademark style.
For Hearing Things, Ryan Dombal talks lyrics with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and his inspirations including Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, and Jim Morrison:
“My Doors thing goes back to the early 2000s, when I was 30 or so. In fact, I think [Destroyer’s 2004 album] Your Blues is probably named after something Jim Morrison says over and over again in “L.A. Woman.” His poetry just really works on me. I know it’s considered terrible, so it makes me worry that I don’t know what’s bad and what’s good. I mean, the albums are so uneven, there’s really bad songs and then incredible songs. But as far as the incredible songs go, I don’t know why they’re not considered more incredible than Bob Dylan lyrics or Patti Smith lyrics. I’m not trying to troll those artists, because I actively listen to their music and love them. I just don’t think they’re quite as good.”
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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The life and career of a man who found the extraordinary in the ordinary.
The Friday Article Roundup
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State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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The Friday Article Roundup
A catty roundup of great pop culture writing from the past week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Four, “A Distant Star”
A weak episode. I like this show, but I don’t love it the way I do TNG or even Deep Space Nine. The speed of the series plot has been vastly overstated; by this point in The Shield, the Strike Team was robbing the Money Train. The main plot is essentially Sheridan throwing a hissy fit because he’s now a politician and a bureaucrat, only for an old friend to show up and nearly die and get a lot of soldiers killed to make him appreciate life more.
The subplot is an incredibly corny “doctor wants his patients to eat right and they resist” comic subplot. It mostly works because of the sheer gravity Richard Briggs brings to it; there’s one part where his three patients have swapped their various diets around, and he walks behind them and glares at them, shaming them into eating their own food. On the other hand, it’s unintentionally funny in that Franklin looks like a real prick of a doctor, claiming to treat them as partners in their health when it’s more like he’s policing them, which admittedly fits with the morality of the show but is also why people (especially women) don’t like doctors.
(This is not to imply his patients aren’t also being weird assholes about this. The second-best thing about not being depressed anymore is not having to force myself to eat well anymore, and even then I still did eat pretty well a lot of the time)
Best part of the episode and best part of the show is Delenn, who has sat firmly in the Rawling category of characters who manage to be the coolest characters on the screen whilst spouting philosophy I fiercely disagree with that even borders on fascism (at one point, she says something like “Understanding is unnecessary. Only obedience.”), though I admire her view of the universe as all one. A lot of my appreciation comes down to Mira Furlan, who sells a powerful internal drive and complete acceptance of the world around her.
Tombstone – RIP Val Kilmer. In the wake of his passing, I saw a lot of people saying his performance here is great and really makes the movie. I would say instead it’s good and one of only two nuanced performances in a film that doesn’t really like being subtle (the other such performance is Sam Elliott). Kurt Russell has his moments but never quite feels right. Everyone else here is not served well by the script. And beyond that, we go from a fairly reserved first hour to an overwrought second hour that revels in Wyatt Earp’s state sanctioned murders of anyone wearing a Cowboy sash (and yes, I know that it somewhat happened that way, but that still doesn’t make it fun for me to sit through). From what I can tell, this is fairly accurate in some ways, but I read a book on the subject some years back, and it’s clear that even if the Cowboys were not good people, neither were a lot of folks on the other side. Maybe someday we will get a more nuanced approach to this material. Or maybe we will just stop making it into a myth instead of the historical footnote it perhaps should be.
Frasier, “The Show Where Diane Comes Back” – Does what it says on the tin. And does it very well, though if you had never watched Cheers you would wonder why anyone liked Diane Chambers or how the show was built around her and Sam for five years. The high point is a play Diane’s written that is basically Cheers but through her eyes, and the actor who plays the Sam analogue doesn’t look a thing like Ted Danson but has his voice and mannerisms down cold. Two episodes in a row, however, where Roz only appears in the teaser. Vacation time for Peri Gilpin?
I love Tombstone but agree that Russell is not up to the standard set by everyone else — part of that may be on him shadow directing half the thing, but I think he’s also stuck in the boring ass romance that no one else has to deal with. He’s not bad, but everyone else is more interesting.
I saw more than a few suggestions that Elliott should have been Wyatt Earp (he agreed but also wasn’t so enamored of the script that he was upset not to have the role).
And not everyone is more interesting, since the three Earp wives are interchangeable. Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (who I know has some talent because of Fletch) has nothing even a little interesting to do.
Heh, I was not even including wives in that statement. While Tombstone technically has female characters it is spiritually a movie that passes the anti-Bechdel Test, the Bronson Test (the movie has no 1. female characters at all, 2. female characters who speak or 3. female characters who could be cut with no one noticing).
The Dirt
The Mötley Crüe group biopic, for movie discussion group. I don’t think this is a good movie, but I will say I discovered something about my own limitations while watching it: I always thought I could at least intermittently empathize with essentially any character, no matter how horrific their actions, but apparently there is a dead zone inside me when it comes to rock stars stagily being obnoxious, gross dicks to people who are just … existing near them. These poor people are just trying to quietly hang out at a hotel pool, not get roped into watching you fight for the chance to lick up piss. How is this the only thing you can think of to do with your time? Go swim! Read a book! Honestly, do more drugs if you have to! Somehow, I would understand it more if they were making someone else do this, rather than putting on a one-man show to incidentally repulse people. Don’t get me wrong, that would be worse, but apparently cruelty would correspond more to my own internal makeup than … whatever this is. I’ve loved characters who do far more harm and have far more problems than this lot, but there you go.
I also think this is structured like garbage (so many of the beats are profoundly, annoyingly predictable), and apparently it omits an awful lot that would make the story more complex, but none of that unlocked revealing truths about my own nature.
“apparently there is a dead zone inside me when it comes to rock stars stagily being obnoxious, gross dicks to people who are just … existing near them.”
This sounds similar to an issue I have, where I get increasingly annoyed at characters who exist to be used by the protagonist. Not something like a one-off character on a series TV show who comes in and does plot stuff that affects our heroes and leaves, that is part of the game; and more to the point not a person who only exists to be acted upon in a cruel way — the rando who says “hey, you can’t do that!” to the villain and then gets wrecked. Because like you say, that cruelty is still active. The example that always comes to mind is the hick asshole in Big Fish, who exists solely to make Ewan McGregor look good and whose every action is pre-ordained in that manner — he is trying to exist but his existence only matters in relation to McGregor’s story. I think this all ties into that vile attitude of calling actual people NPCs; ignoring people still grants them the dignity of living without you but this imposes your life on theirs because you assume they exist for your benefit.
One of the pieces of writing advice I’ve done my damnedest to internalize is that everyone in a scene, down to the villain’s four silent bodyguards, has a point of view.
This is me with Succession, it’d be a lot easier to watch these pricks if they were interesting but they’re similarly wasting their time and enormous sums of money.
My dead zone further increases whenever I’ve had real-life moments of being forced to be around wanna-be rock stars being obnoxious, gross dicks.
High Potential, “Partners” – penultimate episode of the season and not a particularly strong one, for me. I know a lot of the pleasure here is the way it leans into plenty of familiar procedural-show plots but the “forced to work together with an ex-partner with a grudge” stuff just fell a bit flat, I need the guest characters to be a bit more interesting to elevate these stock plots. The family stuff was more engaging than the mystery for once, but yeah I’m not watching this show for high art, it’s a nice weekly dose of fun.
The Store — “Style is the perfection of a point of view,” a man says early on here as he pitches the latest threads to the floor sellers of Neiman Marcus’ flagship Dallas store during the Christmas season of 1982. He too is a salesman and sales, as the store’s head says in a speech to staff at the beginning of the movie*, is the reason for the store’s existence, not the pampering and perks and fancy food and Christmas carolers creating the atmosphere for the sales (he makes increasingly weird comparisons to doctors and undertakers along the way). But he’s not wrong, and Frederick Wiseman’s style is his point of view — cameras taking things in without visible commenting, but in angle and frame making choices and in editing creating perspective. There is a lot of upstairs/downstairs stuff here, customers perusing the clothes and jewels on the floor and the workers in the basement constructing them, and what each of those groups looks like is clearly displayed. And the varied interactions between salespeople and customers get lots of play, one guy selling furs is clearly good at working pressure points while another dude in the dinnerware section has zero leverage against the older lady looking for a deal, I would probably not want to meet her in real life but it is hilarious to see her own this guy with an eyebrow raise. A wonderful shot of a jewelry counter catches another strong salesman at the counter and a woman trying on rings in the counter mirror, but the eye is drawn to her husband also visible in the mirror, the guy who is looking stonefaced at the shit he’s going to have to pay for. This buying and selling is great, but Wiseman also includes a lot of boardroom scenes where execs discuss ad buys and commercial strategies — this is snoozy shit and it’s interesting to think on why, the datedness of their references is enervating when the specificity of the styles we see is fascinating and this is down to the abstraction of the selling here, the discussion of how to sell a sales job is not the same as a physical sale, I wonder if there are echoes of how things used to get made in this country here.
But sales need salespeople and the devotion of the salesperson to the store is a big theme here — ladies are put through calisthenics for their hands (to ring up the registers) and their smiles (for the customer!) in a creepy scene, and middle managers talk about how employees can namedrop their occupation to awe and respect. A young woman applying for a job gives a fervent speech about how much she loves the store when asked for her biggest accomplishment, she is very sincere and it’s a pretty good sales pitch in itself. Nothing is heard from those tailors and jewelers and artists in the basement. The structure partially echoes City Hall, with a speech at the beginning laying out basics and a valedictory at the end, here it is the store’s 75th anniversary party and if it is not shot like a Nuremberg rally, per a review I dug up, Wiseman’s style allows that to seep in — a fancy banquet with a terrible song that everyone applauds (Wiseman also shows the servers prepping the food in a mad rush, one makes sure to place a garnish under the prime rib — salesmanship!), a celebration of Stanley Marcus’ brilliance. But like City Hall, the climax comes just before in an extended scene away from the public eye. An older employee is celebrating her birthday in the breakroom and for the occasion her co-workers have hired a guy in a bird suit, a cross between Big Bird and the San Diego Chicken, to tell rather crappy jokes and make increasingly off-color comments in a semi-roast. The guy has charisma but no timing, frequently stepping on his mark’s willing responses, because he has a set to work through and that set includes a lengthy anti-birthday song about how this woman is old and going to die soon. It goes on for ages, and then the chicken man starts a striptease, as in out of his chicken costume, until he is only wearing bikini briefs and the chicken head. Wiseman’s camera has caught background employees yukking it up for part of this but by the striptease he has pulled back to just show the nearly nude chicken man and the birthday woman — and she is losing her mind laughing, having the absolute time of her life. A successful sale leaves the customer happy, that store leader said, and if the salesman here is not at the top of his game the person he is selling to has still bought in. And this scene has absolutely zero to do with Neiman Marcus’ selling and its customers buying, what the store leader said is the reason for the store’s existence. But it’s in Wiseman’s Store. The perfection of a point of view.
*this is worth watching in its mix of corporate derangement and boredom, I love the guy next to him smoking a cigarette with a totally-checked-out expression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWEXqO67nJA
Man, feeling the need to sit with some Wiseman coming on again. I’m going a little sideways from your entry here – this is a private institution rather than a public one – but I suspected his documenting of public works would be valuable to the future and now I’m thinking it will be crucial. A document to refer to when it’s time to pick up the pieces.
Had a grim chuckle on the documenting early on, a sign in the window is advertising the holiday sale with a slogan riffing on Christmases Past and Present, noticeably absent is Future because we all know who is running the show there and if it took a while, the store in question shut down this year after 120 years in operation. But the company’s market value is doing strong! You’ve talked about Wiseman as a chronicler of institutions and public works in the past and I was thinking about this last night, here is how things worked. Who they were working for and why is contained within that as well. That is something else to think about when picking up the pieces. Anyway, the local theaters have been hosting a Wiseman retrospective and I’m hoping to hit a few more.
The 1981 Pippin with Ben Vereen as the Leading Player (again), and this is BASICALLY the Bob Fosse production but with some weird, rightly criticized cuts, especially “I Guess I’ll Miss The Man”(!) which feels crucial to the whole, and a hilarious, very 80’s freeze frame ending after Fosse’s aggressively 60s/70s sense of sex and dance as one entity. (The choreography isn’t just incredible but creepy as hell, white clown and circus performer faces in shadow, bodies overwhelming Pippin with will and form.) Easy to analyze entirely as a Fosse fan – one show in many where an ambiguous, devilish figure wants to lead us into a kind of hell, or is it show business? – but Schwartz’s score is in fact very good, especially “Magic to Do” and “Extraordinary.” Siddhartha but for gifted theater kids, where the main character’s epiphany isn’t that he’s the Chosen One but that there’s no such thing. You’re not special, you just had a shitty dad! On Tubi.
Primal
Season 2, Episode 6. “Vidarr”. First time.
SPOILERS
Back to our regular prehistorical programming, we catch up with Mira nursing Spear and Fang on the boat we last saw them in. They both took some heavy damage during their massacre of the vikings, which was easy to forget given the sheer, near-supernatural terror of that sequence, but Mira manages to get them back in fighting shape soon enough. And just in time, since the viking chieftain and his son catch up with them fairly quickly and another great fight between both groups ensues, this time across two boats in a raging river. The pace of this show and the ambition and scale of its action remains incredible.
And of course, pace like this can’t be sustained without some pauses, so after the fight both groups catch their breath. The vikings gather their strenght, plus a couple of giant vulture/eagle hybrids to fight with. Spear, Fang and Mira stop to repair their stolen ship but Fang freaks out, runs wild for a few minutes, starts making a hole in the ground to set up a nest. I had suspected this was happening but what I could never imagine was the sheer joy this brings out of Spear, who immediately embraces Fang and starts collecting fish for her. It’s like his fatherly love is reactivated for the first time in ages. It’s a beautiful, touching moment, and it drives home how this show has embraced maturity this season, as well a conflicted, complicated notion of family and society: These two were brought together by losing everything and now, against all odds, they might get a second chance at becoming a family. (And with Mira still around as a potential love interest for Spear to boot.)
However, with this also comes the danger of losing all your happiness again, and the fear every parent must have that you might not always be able to protect your offspring, as exemplified by the vikings returning to do battle while riding the vulture-eagles. This particular fight is distinctive not just because it’s taken to the air but because Fang and Spear are limited by their need to protect Fang’s eggs. They manage to overcome it, greatly injuring the viking chief and killing his son, bringing back the aforementioned familiar conflict: In a sense, we as viewers see the justice in the vikings’ attempt at revenge and feel the loss of the kid as much as we felt the loss of Spear and Fang’s first families and we fear what might happen to their new one. This is driven home in the final scene: after the battle, Spear, Fang and Mira regroup and share another tender moment by the nest and Tartakovsky cuts away to a long shot of them, including the site where the viking son fell to his death. It’s a remarkable, quiet image that nevertheless speaks volumes and lets us take stock of the magnitude of what these characters have done, and what they might do still.
“it drives home how this show has embraced maturity this season, as well a conflicted, complicated notion of family and society”
I think the show’s very ending might be more complicated than it realizes in this regard, but you will get there. And as you note, this has given different stakes to this season and the focus on the family has come with more serialization, which is really going to hit in the next episode.
What did we read?
”Nyarlathotep”, HP Lovecraft
This is important less for its own sake – though it has its moments – and more for expanding Lovecraft’s mythology. It’s a very low-action high-vibes story, even by Lovecraft’s standards, and most of the story is just cool-sounding words mixed together. You could say this is just Lovecraft playing with words in a way that will be more important when he has much firmer goals. But I do love the idea of Nyarlethotep, especially presented here, as a voice of cosmic horror cheerfully bringing ruin to civilisation, and the unspoken (indeed unspeakable) implications of a lot of his actions.
I’ve gotta get back into more intense reading. I’ve been kind of tired and burned out because writing fiction has taken over my focus. There’ll be a balance.
Close to the end of Bryson’s One Summer: America 1927, and it shows a bit more that he’s not a historian. His on-one foot approach oversimplifies, for instance, the cause of Prohibition to “Wayne Wheeler was a one man crusade” and ignores the roles of women’s groups (indeed, there is very little here about the role of women in the first years of women’s suffrage). And he mentions there were two talkies before The Jazz Singer but doesn’t say what they were. He lacks either the rigor or the desire to delve further into things, which is to be expected from a catch-all survey. I suppose I can’t really fault him for the book he didn’t set out to write. And I can always find books on such subjects if I am interested (as I have already found a book on Sacco and Vanzetti and reserved a book on Fordlandia). So there is enough here that I will try other things by Bryson, but not enough that I would recommend this to more serious students of history.
Raised in Captivity, Chuck Klosterman – On the positive side each one of these short stories has a really interesting idea, something I could see several different directions it could take and I’m anxious to see what kind of twists and outcomes it produces. On the negative side, each story is extremely short, to the point that it ends just about the time it’s getting going. It ends up reading like a well-proofread sketchbook of ideas. Usually ending a story with the reader wanting more is a positive thing, but here I’m wanting more flesh, less peel.
The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro
Finally finished. I think Robert Caro is one the greatest living writers, and while this isn’t quite as phenomenally good as his multivolume LBJ biography, “phenomenally good” still applies.
Caro convincingly paints Robert Moses as a larger-than-life tragic antihero, a true genius with an untouchable drive, work ethic, and talent for converting ideas into grand reality–and a man whose arrogance, contempt, and lust for power gradually overwhelm his talents, insights, and ability to make meaningful, positive contributions to the world. (The bit with him at the end, a once famously beloved public figure now scouring the newspapers for his name and finding it only rarely, and only as an insult, is as good as Vic in the office at the end of The Shield.)
To some extent, this makes some of the later sections more of a slog, because the grim and often illegal crushing of others to his will is no longer counterbalanced by him offering anything genuinely beautiful or useful (even if it was only ever useful to a select, white, reasonably moneyed population). You can get swamped for a while in “and then Robert Moses ignored logic and reality to build yet another expressway, ruining everyone’s lives.” But 95% of the time, even the human misery that his “progress” brings is artistically and unforgettably rendered: Caro has a real gift for unearthing the human stories of people and neighborhoods crushed by Moses’s plans and finding the perfect illuminating anecdotes for them.
It’s fascinating but unsurprising that what hurt Moses’s power late in his life–besides the publication of this book, which pretty much finished off his reputation as a reformer and a positive influence, even if Caro admits his genius and gives him his virtues as well as his flaws–isn’t the worst things he ever did. Those mostly happened to the poor, so their stories didn’t get told. He’s taken down, instead, by a series of relatively minor incidents, one of which he didn’t even want to be involved in (and only was, ironically, because of an actual misapplied virtue on his part–he wanted to be loyal to his loyal subordinates), and then, finally and most decisively, because he messes with a Rockefeller. It’s hard to overstate how gleeful I was at the first real bit of comeuppance, when Nelson Rockefeller finally has enough money and political influence to call Moses’s eternal bluff about resigning–and then Moses’s long deterioration, tricked into giving up his remaining power for a ghost of it and slowly losing even that, still managed to be emotionally affecting anyway, even though the guy absolutely deserved to get taken down. Classic pity and terror.
I think this mostly lacks the great prominent supporting cast of the LBJ books, but it did absolutely sell me on a biography of Governor Al Smith, a Tammany man who rose from nothing and used corrupt and practical politics to affect a ton of substantial change bettering the lives of New York’s poor … while also unfortunately bolstering Robert Moses, but you can’t have everything. (Moses’s own reciprocal loyalty to and lasting adoration of Smith is one of his more redeeming qualities.) There are also some other highlights, like Governor Lehman and Mayor La Guardia, but aside from those–and awful, indelible, ferocious Moses himself–the best “characters” are the walk-on ordinary people trying (often in vain) to fight against Moses’s policies.
So many great scenes, sequences, issues, and forces of nature here, all portrayed in Caro’s clearsighted prose (few people are as good at making me feel just how damning something is, and few people are as good at making me feel how admirable something is, weirdly or otherwise). Very much recommended.
Over and over, tragedy keeps being displayed as the real story the world is built around.
Finished my reread of Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, my sixth overall and my first since 2014. It remains a haunting and perfectly told story. Still uncovers new layers of character in every reading. More than a story, it’s virtually an entire world, with Comala standing in for the things México can’t run away from.
Started a re-read of Rulfo’s short story collection, El Llano en Llamas, and advanced in my first-time reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Came across the mouse’s long, sad tale and wow, God-tier level trolling. And please Alice, stop talking to the vermin about your cat.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Goodbye, NEH. Which affects my current employer, and the entire public media industry. And also my former employer and pretty much every museum in America. The vandals are here, but we knew that already. I am happy to report, however, that the DOGE and pony show where the heads of PBS and NPR got pilloried by Taylor-Green aired the same day as the Signal Follies hit the news, so no one really noticed.
Otherwise, just a quiet stretch as we gear up for Passover, plus we managed to squeeze in another D and D game, though it was late because our DM – the woman who was in the bad car wreck six weeks ago – is now dealing with both an ailing grandmother and a suddenly difficult mother. Thankfully, we were there for her to vent to. But she is just having it rough.
I think I had my first Gluten Contamination Incident since changing my diet, I had been warned that the symptoms get worse after you’ve significantly healed and… yeah. It pretty much wiped me out for a few days, indigestion and fatigue that was no fun at all and while I was already being careful about it, I guess I need to step up the caution. It’s frustrating that this kicked in right after my move back to the city where I want to be a bit MORE free and impulsive, not having to plan all my meals and snacks in advance. Oh well, mostly feeling better now and at least it wasn’t a week when I had a ton of social stuff.
More positively, probably, I kind of unexpectedly got a promotion of sorts – teams changed around at work and I’ve been given some line management responsibilities that I’m a little wary of, but on the other hand I was so sick of my existing role that I’m happy to try something a little different. If it sucks, more motivation to leave. Amusingly my first act in this role will be to entirely miss the next quarterly planning session, because:
Off work next week for a little family break as it’s my sister’s 40th birthday and also school holidays, so we’re off to a Welsh village to hang out and probably not do very much for most of the week. Should be nice! Weather looks like there’ll be plenty of spring sunshine.
Happy birthday to your sister! And RIP to you, going to a quaint Welsh village for a vacation, your ass is getting Wyckyr Mynned.
Eh, I guess I had it coming.
Greeting from the frontlines of the future, apparent threat to and enemy of the federal state if not the local one. More importantly, 6th grade literature! Was not familiar with Jerry Spinelli’s Star Girl, quite delightful for the first six chapters, this better not head to Terabithia.
As reported in other channels, I passed the Praxis exam that qualifies me to get licensed as a real teacher, not the sham stopgap one I am now. These days I’m skeptical about about the value of my test-taking acumen back in school, but passing this one (with a near-perfect score, monocle emoji) gave me an involuntary “I still got it!” rush. Plus it included material I hadn’t thought about in literally two decades and some pedagogy that I had never been exposed to, studying was in order and the effort was rewarded. When a kid got smart with me in third hour I informed him I passed the Praxis 5038 and he dropped back into his seat in astonishment. Third hour hasn’t happened yet, so I’m calling my shot here, discrepancies with reality will not be reported.
Cannot wait for the viral video “Substitute Teacher DESTROYS Wiseass Student With Test Scores!”, followed up by “Wiseass Student DESTROYS Substitute Teacher By Catching Him Posting On Pop Culture Blog During School!”
Exactly one of these videos has a chance of happening.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 4th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Straight Story
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 11th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Balloon Farm
Apr. 15th: Ben Hohenstatt: The White Stripes
Apr. 16th: James Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 17th: Cameron Ward/Cori Domschot: The Mummy
Apr. 18th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Hand Behind the Mouse
Apr. 22nd: Sam Scott: Titus
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: The Matrix
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999
And the open call for May starts now! Our year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
My band, Silverstiles, is gonna have a record-release party Nov. 1 at a cool theater in Holland MI, playing with Tobin Sprout (from Guided By Voices). Now have we actually started recording it yet? Well, that’s another story — but the drummer from Sprout’s band will be on it.
Nothing like a hard deadline to spur the creative process along!