The Friday Article Roundup
The best pop culture writing of the week, alive and kicking.
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Thanks to the undying heroism of John Anderson for contributing this week! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
At his substack, Dave Barry goes to war with AI over the crucial issue of whether Dave Barry is dead:
Google AI Overview kept the only statement I objected to — specifically, that I was dead — and removed the accurate statements. It apparently replaced these with information about a completely different Dave Barry, a political activist from Dorchester who died in 2016. For the record, it sounds as though that Dave Barry was a much better person than I am. He fought for what he believed was right, whereas the only principle I ever have really stood for, over the course of my journalism career, is that Americans should not be required to use low-flow toilets. I’m confident that the late Dave Barry from Dorchester would not have wanted to be mistaken for me.
Darran Anderson revisits Elliott Smith’s second album at The Quietus and argues against facile interpretations and eulogies:
By comparison, Elliott Smith is stripped right down to its essence. It’s an exceptionally brave album in this regard (this was the year of ‘more is more’ albums like Mellon Collie…, Astro-Creep: 2000, Disco Volante), and his live shows at the time were even more so, relying on nothing but voice and guitar and songs designed to be so intense you could hear a pin drop, which took far more courage than going on with a loud and disorderly slacker band. Yet it also meant that Elliott Smith is a vulnerable album in more ways than one. By being so exposing, some listeners will be tempted to abandon the positioner of listener for the role of psychoanalyst, moralist, or even coroner, in order to find out ‘what happened’.
For BFI, Jenna Dorn writes about growing up in LA with a health-conscious mother trying to avoid death and the illusion of safety shattered in Todd Haynes’ [Safe]:
When Carol flees to the Wrenwood Retreat’s protective barriers and extreme insulation in the final act, her health theoretically should have improved. Instead, she seems to only grow sicker, with every additional sequestration and safeguarding. I never knew exactly what scenario my mother was afraid of, if not all of them, but I think it came down to a deep, immanent fear of vulnerability, of circumstances outside of her control: that something bad could happen to me, my brother, or her, despite her best efforts.
Laura Lippman muses on the men and the records in her life at I Have That On Vinyl:
I began seeing more of the musicals I loved, hatching a plan in January 2020 with one of my best friends to become Sondheim completists. Less than a month later – correlation is not causation – my marriage was over. It fell apart the way that Hemingway once described bankruptcy: Gradually and suddenly. I don’t think the dissolution had anything to do with our musical tastes, although I wouldn’t have minded being allowed to control the car radio every now and then. I think my ex left because we were miserable and he had the wisdom to extricate himself from the situation. Me, I would have stood over the corpse of that relationship for years, applying the paddles and shouting: CLEAR.
At see-saw.fun, Evan Minsker casts a skeptical gaze on Superman’s self-proclaimed punk bona fides:
With the emotional weight of a giant corporate summer blockbuster contingent on that scene, Superman (2025) demands to be viewed as a punk movie. I don’t make the rules. Lois and Clark have a flirtatious punk credibility debate and Iggy Pop sings “I’m a punkrocker, yes I am” over the credits. My dad, who raised me on comic books, looked over and laughed at how audibly I was biting my tongue during every punk invocation. It is deeply fucking bewildering when corporations pay to mass-produce fiction that attempts to define the spirit of punk rock with the asterisk “remember that rich murderers are people, too.”
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Hostage
I can’t quite call this a good movie – it’s about what you’d expect for something you’d catch on TV every now and again – but it is much weirder than it needs to be, so I left it with a lot of affection. The main draw here are the initial villains, a trio of dipshit teenaged boys who are slightly more interesting than you’d expect; the initial expectation of a dominant boy and more quiet one gives way to something stranger, when the initially dominant boy finds himself completely out of his depth and flailing whilst the quiet boy reveals a level of sadism and impulsiveness you wouldn’t expect. Meanwhile, Bruce Willis plays a masculine figure who reveals a great deal more vulnerability than normal; he cries at least three times in the film, with the first being in the opening scene (this movie won my attention when it brutally killed off a young boy in the opening to motivate Willis later).
The imagery gets downright bizarre by the end; it doesn’t cohere dramatically (though at least two characters die in a very Justified kind of turn), but it makes up for it in sheer weirdness of imagery, including one villain dying at the climax when he’s already started burning the rich guy building down and simply drops a molotov on himself, dying engulfed in his own flames.
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Nineteen, “Divided Loyalties”
So Lyta returns from the pilot movie, and in the coolest way possible. It’s a small thing, but I enjoy when a character comes back with a completely different personality and aesthetic, implying a powerful offscreen journey – The Shield did this with Kern a lot, and Mad Men did it with Danny Strong’s character when he becomes a film producer offscreen. This turns to two different twists that aren’t on the show’s usual level; Ivanova reveals she’s actually a latent telepath, and Talia has had a dormant Manchurian Candidate personality in her head this entire time and has now effectively ‘died’.
Character development tends to get two different meanings – either a character changes over the course of the story (rags to riches, riches to rags, strong to weak, that sort of thing) or a character reveals more and more details to themselves; this show deals pretty heavily in the latter. I prefer the former but I’m having some fun with it; it’s usually something I prefer in a comedic context (see 30 Rock) because long-form comedy usually requires some form of stasis.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Seventeen, Episode Three, “Mac and Dennis Become EMTs”
Next one, I’m gonna put on Nath’s post.
“You’d think a jazz man would be more accustomed to spicy foods.”
“We are an OPEN, working bar!”
“You’re not cake, are ya?”
The Lawyer!
“Plus, I really feel like we should know how to do CPR.”
“That is scientifically more better.”
“Less is more. That’s on me.”
“Class, don’t listen to him.”
“Yeah, it’s a brick-based medium.”
The Gang ‘microdosing” hot peppers kills me.
“Why would I say any of those things?”
“The illegality of what we’re doing is spicy enough for me.”
“Macrodosing? That’s cool because that’s my name!”
“Let’s make her unconscious because this is becoming a whole thing.”
God, this show is so good. People have been off the past few seasons, thinking it had gotten past its prime, but it hasn’t even begun to peak.
“You know, I’m in the weeds, boys, I need this just to get by.”
Charlie getting obsessed with being called chef is completely the kind of thing he’d do – swapping out Law & Order for The Bear.
“I’ve always wanted to suck out snake venom, you know this!”
Oh, and I showed my boyfriend Jackie Brown. They were disconcerted by how funny I found it when Louis explained how he shot Melanie to Ordell.
I’ve seen JB three times in the theater and that scene always gets the biggest laugh, probably due to Jackson’s expression upon hearing the news.
It’s this stuff with Talia and the conflicts she has around it that made me realize Christian really is the best actor of the troupe. (Well, her and Katsulas.)
Oh, easily.
My one knock on TUBI is that it has ordering problems, it places the premiere movie at the end of Season One so when we tried to watch it it felt incredibly wrong and “regressive” in character and we just turned it off. So Lyta here didn’t mean much in that regard (although the show does a decent enough job explaining her deal — it is very funny how we are in the part of a show that benefits from “previously on” segments and how much I have gotten used to them, their absence is jarring). I like your character breakdown, the main person in your first category is Londo, right? He is changing, not by revealing more of himself but by shutting more of himself down.
The X-Files, “Excelsis Dei” and “Aubrey”
“Excelsis Dei” was instantly recognizable as the episode Tristan mentioned where Mulder is dismissive of a rape victim’s claims in a way that makes zero sense for his character. (I hope it’s instantly recognizable as such, anyway, because if not, it means this happens more than once.) Fox Mulder does not see a widely documented (non-religious) paranormal phenomenon and dismiss it out of hand, especially not when it comes with a pile of “here be bad/weird shit” evidence. Mulder as a character is almost defined by the fact that he doesn’t act as unempathetic and incurious as he acts for most of this episode. The bit where he says that the nurse must have drummed up the incident to get off work is especially harsh and jarring and nonsensical for him. And I don’t know what any of this is for, either, since while the episode has the spectral rape be real and has Scully point out the obvious–the victim had real and serious injuries, did she fake those too?–it never feels like anyone is trying to Teach a Lesson about believing women and consciously making Mulder an asshole so people can learn from it. It’s just there, being bullshit when it’s supposed to be an X-Files episode.
There’s also some ’90s-style mystical Eastern medicine material in this episode that’s worth a hearty eyeroll, although at least it doesn’t get established characterization wrong in the process: it’s the show getting the outside world wrong, not the outside world and itself. But again, still annoying. I’d say the series is generally not great at dealing with non-USian cultures, even if it may not be worse on that front than other shows of the time.
Anyway, all of the above is especially a shame because the essential idea of mysterious, part-supernatural, part-almost-telekinetic phenomena in a nursing home is great, and I want several horror movies and novels on this subject immediately. The basic conceit here, while overcomplicated, is unusual and rich. The episode also musters some real pathos when fixing the problem also means all the residents relapsing into dementia and confusion: it’s a sad, haunting way to end things.
“Aubrey” takes up one of the basic ideas from “Excelsis Dei”–the essential will of the powerless elderly being acted out via supernatural means, and that particular empowerment not being a good thing in this case–and gets a much better episode out of it. (Not an instant classic, but very enjoyable.) Like a lot of good X-Files episodes, it’s the opposite of streamlined, being kind of a soup of ideas of possession, psychic visions, and genetic memory, but as I’ve already said, that explicatory fogginess works for me on this show. It feels like the various causes are simply the best explanations and interpretations Mulder and Scully can muster for the events unfolding before them; like key evidence always sort of getting out of reach by the end of the episode, it keeps up the sense that this is real unexplained phenomena. Not all of the explanations quite work, so it’s all simply phenomena the characters have to live through and deal with, not something they can weaponize their understanding of or necessarily deal with more effectively next time. The night is dark and full of terrors.
Anyway, not only do our leads get good characterization in “Aubrey,” the guest cast does, too. Strang is good as the distraught BJ, even if she doesn’t get enough to do as herself–informing O’Quinn of her pregnancy via note when he’s in the middle of a phone call is baller, though–but the real standouts are Terry O’Quinn (spending the whole episode feeling like Chekhov’s character actor, but while I was waiting for a murderer reveal with him, he turned out to have genuine emotional involvement in BJ’s plight, committing to being on her side even as everything’s going downhill), Morgan Woodward as the elderly murderer Cokely, and Joy Coghill as Cokely’s surviving victim, Linda.
The last two are especially dynamite. Cokely’s scenes with Scully–sneeringly calling her “little sister,” as he did to his victims–are loaded and venomous: it’s a twisted kind of power play, with a seething Cokely essentially acknowledging that they both know he would still kill if he could and that he even wants to kill her now, but that they also both know that his infirmity means he can’t … which means she has no real authority over him, and he can be as open about his evil as he likes. And Coghill conveys both Linda’s kindness and the trauma she can never leave behind (always in that house, always walking past the landing where she was raped and tortured), and there’s also a force of character to her. When she appeals to a semi-possessed BJ, I can believe that her presence is enough to “remind” BJ that the genetic memory comes from both sides. And that’s the coolest idea in the episode for me, I think: BJ has the memory and drives of both attacker and victim, both the terror of the pain and the desire to inflict it. I feel like it would be an even stronger, cooler execution of the premise if she were their daughter rather than their granddaughter–the episode could have used slightly younger actors and just had Cokely be unable to kill because of a severe injury or illness. The last bit of genetic memory being passed to BJ being the both-sides experience of her own blood-soaked, horrifying conception feels much more potent than “it skips a generation.”
On a side note, the notification of The X-Files departure from Hulu seems to have been removed, so maybe it will continue?
I was looking that up, and apparently its streaming contract semi-regularly “expires” on Hulu but then immediately gets renewed, so maybe this was just the end of one contract’s run.
With Mulder, it’s especially infuriating because his sympathy and curiosity aren’t just part of his character but part of his charm – I tune in specifically to see Mulder be nice to people and believe victims of horrifying things! Why am I being denied a basic pleasure of the show? Like, I could buy it if it was tied into his character (like a Shield character).
Always Sunny, “Thought Leadership: A Corporate Conversation” Didn’t need the Succession score parody* but this is a wildly funny episode and I love the structure, everyone going over the previous events, and everyone’s bowdlerized versions of corporate speak and charts (Charlie’s “3 year old’s version of a chart” made me howl). Also great: the Gang’s longing for a very specific Gen-X version of the future with ugly metal Cybertrucks and hot women mud-wrestling. “The women have stopped going wild!” “Because they’re not wet enough! They’re too dry!” “I’m gonna say it, guys, the Cybertruck is ugly.” “I KNEW YOU’D SAY THAT!”
*This also speaks to Succession’s weird place in TV as both a prestige drama and a joke on glitzy prestige drama, something more intentional than even detractors like me will acknowledge, it’s more that Succession having almost everyone at the same level of incompetence makes for slow, turgid plot, hence why we have Arrested Development at home.
I think it’s noteworthy that Succession’s score is worthy of parody, because it fucking rules. Brittel knows his shit! Especially compared to other prestige themes (let alone Netflix garbage).
Agreed, the way the melody cycles back around can become bone-chilling in the right context or just absurd.
Compulsion – The Leopold and Loeb case, with the names changed and the queer all but gone, but more or less how it happened. A flawed movie in many – the accused were 18 and 19 respectively, but Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman always feel too old; the movie never feels like it’s set in 1924 – but a strong cast and solid direction by Richard Fleischer carry things along well, and then Orson Welles arrives as Legally Not Clarence Darrow and he’s next level good. His impassioned plea against the death penalty (inspired by Darrow’s eight hour long closing argument) runs a bit long, but it’s captivating. As much as I am into The Practice, Welles dances circles around that whole in showing how the closing is done.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents – see Lauren’s post for my comments.
Frasier, “Sweet Dreams” – After Frasier goes to a protest against a favorite bookstore closing but runs away leaving Daphne to be arrested, he takes a firm stand against reading an ethically dubious ad. Which costs the lovable new station manager his job. Frasier takes another firm stand with the (heretofore unseen) CEO of the station, only to accidentally get everyone fired because the CEO decides to change format to Latin music! The fifth season ends with a bit of a cliffhanger but this is the weakest finale yet. It really doesn’t build in any way on anything that came in the past season. It’s more the sort of thing we see all the time, but without an ending. And we’ve already seen the “Frasier refuses to do something unethical” bit before. This isn’t a bad episode, it’s just a letdown. Overall season five was very mixed. Some incredible highs but a few flat notes, as I suppose most 24 episode seasons had.
Welles was such an electric performer. We obviously have a fair amount of on-screen work from him, but I wish we had even more. May have to see Compulsion just for him.
Simon Callow says Welles wasn’t a great actor but a great stentorian, and I imagine this, Kane (the way he destroys the room!), and Othello really refute this view. (Callow maybe reflecting a British actor’s idea of what a performer is?)
Welles said himself in “The Orson Welles Story” doc that he was like one of the old “king actors” in a traveling troupe. The guy who might not be the best actor in the troupe, but he always plays the king because he’s unarguably the very best at that. And I think that underrates him a little bit, but he followed it up with “I have to play authoritative roles . . . or I discombobulate the scene. It’s a kind of handicap.” Which is much more difficult to disagree with. He played a lot of FALLEN kings, to be sure, but Hank Quinlan is a king all the same.
Micheál MacLiammóir’s comments on Welles’ audition for him come to mind as well.
‘Is this all the light you can give me?’ he said in a voice like a regretful oboe. We hadn’t given him any at all yet, so that was settled, and he began. It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end but with all the qualities of fine acting tearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect, his personality, in spite of his fantastic circus antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort of demoniac authority was arresting; a preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did. One wanted to bellow with laughter, yet the laughter died on one’s lips. One wanted to say, ‘Now, now, really, you know,’ but something stopped the words from coming. And that was because he was real to himself, because it was something more to him than a show, more than the mere inflated exhibitionism one might have suspected from his previous talk, something much more.
“only to accidentally get everyone fired because the CEO decides to change format to Latin music!” is a remarkable bit of late-90s dating. Curse you, Ricky Martin and “Smooth!” Not a slam on the music/genre at all, but it’s such a moment in time.
Babylon 5 — annoying! Just by seeing the title I knew that dipshit number 2 security guy would be all over the episode and he was, my god is his fucking voice annoying. Can’t wait for him to die, although his presence in the opening credits suggests I will have to wait until the end of the season for this. And of course Z-grade Andor is here as well, with his incredibly unconvincing roguish charm, he is clearly being set up to be a love interest for a character who deserves much better. But what is really annoying is how good Shari Shattuck is as the latest Nazi from Earth come to fuck with our heroes, she anticipates every Fox News anchor/White House press secretary of the past two decades in her evil steamrolling and Shattuck plays it to the hilt with no winking. Every “prescient” sci-fi show is just riffing well on things that already exist, but this is stuff that is existing very hard in real life at the moment and getting it on my 90s TV show was not exactly a good time.
Dodge City – One of the more obvious inspirations for Blazing Saddles. Errol Flynn is way too sophisticated for a cowboy, he’s engaging so somehow it works. Alan Hale and Olivia de Havilland’s headstrong romantic interest/newspaper woman are fantastic. Directed by Michael Curtiz in the classical Hollywood style. It’s filmed in brilliant technicolor with that overly “clean” look westerns from the period have – brand new clothes with nothing lookin worn-out or even worn-in, fresh hair styles and make-up “dirt”. There is some comedy like Alan Hale taking a bath and a little kid cracking jokes after a tense situation. This all belies the fact that it is quite violent. The main villain is completely forgettable, no, the real threat is the town itself. Dodge City is so lawless, so violent, that it’s almost a parody before Mel Brooks reimagined it as a spoof. Infested with bad guys causing a ruckus until enough is enough and Flynn decides to play Wyatt Earp and clean the place up. The result is indeed quite violent with a lot of innocent people killed. But I don’t know what it is, whether the bright colors, Flynn’s persona, or the boisterous set pieces, the film manages to feel fun and playful through all the carnage.
“There is some comedy like Alan Hale taking a bath”
*falls in water trough* DARN YOU, MOON!
Digman!, “The Hunt for Bella” – Finally got to see this last night, and the show is still as good as I remembered. More detail in next week’s article.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Thought Leadership: A Corporate Conversation” – watched again with the Mrs., since I watched by myself to get something in in time for the Week in TV article. Still funny!
Andor, “Nobody’s Listening!” – I got my buddy to watch the show when he was visiting last week and he told me last night he was through episode 8, so I decided to pick up a little to watch alongside him. Although I’ve seen this so many times at this point I don’t even know if I need to.
What did we read?
The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930’s, James Harris
The central argument of this book is that The Great Terror of the Thirties specifically came from Soviet Russia being gripped by unnecessary fear of threats, both internal and external. Like many historians, Harris tries to separate history of the individual; he makes the convincing argument that Stalin’s hold over Russia was less a carefully worked-out plan and more the culmination of a series of policies; most interestingly, he frames Stalin’s slow grasp of power as him putting people in charge across the country and then giving them fairly free reign over their jurisdiction. It strikes me as saying that, if Stalin had personal control over the country, it was more in his attitudes filtering down (and even then, Harris describes Stalin’s attitudes as hardly unique).
If there are specific actions that spurred the Terror, it’s these: Russian history as a whole leaning towards xenophobia, Bolshevik history specifically being driven by paranoia (I’m wary of using the term, but there’s no better one), Stalin’s reorganisation of Soviet Russia, the extraordinarily difficult ambitions of the first Five Year Plan, and Sergio Kirov’s assassination causing tensions to explode.
Harris observes that much of Stalin’s bloodthirsty policies can be tied into the intel he was getting, suggesting that the Soviet Union faced far more threats than it actually did; the black comedy of all this is that the Thirties were when Stalin specifically and the SU in general were at their most powerful and unassailable, and the mixture of bad intel and Soviet preconceptions meant constant searching for the obvious conspiracy screwing everyone up.
The Five Year Plan does a lot to exacerbate this; workers and leaders are forced to exaggerate their successes and find people to blame for failures, which further exacerbates the sense of a conspiracy (in the conclusion, Harris notes the NKVD leader Nikolai Yezhov is driven to despair because he thinks he can’t find the bottom of the conspiracy). One thing I’ve been picking up about reading up on the Soviet Union is how many of its evils and triumphs are specifically tied into attempts to quantify the human experience as much as possible; I was struck by how the Five Year Plan mirrored my fiction-writing routines, with the difference being I recognised the limits of my own humanity and scaled back my ambitions more strongly.
Trotsky: A Biography, Robert Service
Wanted to finish out the trilogy of Communist Russian leaders. Pretty much all I knew about Trotsky was that he and Stalin hated each other, and Stalin had him killed in exile with an ice pick through the head. It didn’t take long for me to be all, “Yeah, I’d probably have shoved an ice pick through his head too.” It’s not so much that his fate of exile and murder was inevitable as it was what he seems to have really wanted; his ambition seems to have been the right to criticise everyone rather than leading a group. Service lays out how Stalin is building a system of allies and procedures while Trotsky is talking shit about people.
There are some people that want to be artists and end up becoming dictators; Ayn Rand is one of the few wannabe dictators that ended up becoming an artist. Trotsky was somewhere inbetween, an obsessive writer (admittedly relatable) moonlighting as a dictator, not quite putting in the effort. Like all the Communists, he was fanatically Marxist, but that ended up channelled more into writing than in specific organisation; late in the book, Service notes Trotsky’s brilliance at rhetoric and idiocy at actual systemic thinking or even philosophy, falling into insults and hectoring (he would have loved social media).
It almost seems like becoming an anti-Stalin communist symbol is what he really wanted in life, and churning out text to sell across the world is where he really wanted to be, criticising everyone else from a distance. To put it another way – he was a natural critic, which is a dangerous thing to be when surrounded by revolutionaries. It’s notable to me that Service characterises Trotsky as a dedicated member of the Soviet Union who simply felt Stalin was fucking up, not the project was flawed; capitalism wasn’t his enemy, his fellow leftists were.
The last sentence is true of every leftist in history.
The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie
I last read this twenty-odd years ago, so I’d mostly remembered it as “the one where Hastings meets his wife.” Other bits and pieces did come back to me as I went along, and that actually surprises me, because this is weak Christie. (Well, it was early. But she’d publish The Murder of Roger Ackroyd only three years later, so you can’t accuse her of taking a while to hit her stride.) Christie had a rare talent for vivid character sketches, letting her create large-cast mysteries where the suspects are all distinct and memorable, but you wouldn’t know that from this. The only supporting character who stands out is Poirot’s self-proclaimed rival, Giraut, and that’s mostly because his non-Poirot-like investigative techniques tend to present themselves as physical comedy. Not a dire novel, but far from a good one.
I couldn’t finish this one.
The Best and the Brightest – An absolutely damning book. Gets bogged down in my mind near the end with the Army and Taylor’s machinations. Still it successfully conveys not just tragedy (one conservative critic not inaccurately cited Halberstam’s tendency to view everything as a big movie-style arc, which is fair, yet this is also how life works sometimes, especially in politics), but how rationality and pedigree and the belief that you know what you’re doing will not save you, will in fact damn you. Ellsberg comes across as an increasingly sane man among the insane, Johnson a bully led by his instincts and secret insecurities, and McNamara and the others are human calculators who cannot admit they were wrong even when the cost is human lives. (Halberstam calls McNamara a fool which is brutal ownage given that this is a guy championed as hyper-intelligent.)
The Trees Grew Because I Bled There – As I said on Ruck’s Discord, look I’m sorry that you’re also on Lexapro, but you HAVE to write short stories with first-person narrators who are not depressed, or I am going to get bored.
Finished MacArthur Reconsidered. James Ellman is so disdainful of MacArthur that he doesn’t even have much good to say about the invasion of Inchon. It’s an interesting book and a necessary balance to more admiring works, but I feel like we need something that tows a middle ground.
And into Dan Jones’s book on the Plantagenets. He’s a good writer and a solid historian, but he’s really racing through events pretty quickly. OTOH, this is also a very long book. I figure he’s trying to find a middle ground of his own. And once again, I am annoyed that the play and movie Beckett reduce two of the most formidable women in English history, Empress Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine, to a pair of shrill stick figures.
Solito – Memoir by poet Javier Zamora about his journey as a nine-year-old boy from El Salvador across the border into the US. Zamora uses sentences simple enough that a nine-year-old could read them and assembles them into a touching, exciting epic that would be unbelievable if it weren’t so common. Throughout I tried imagining my own young son making such a journey on his own and it was terrifying. An excellent, excellent book.
Sharpe’s Rifles, by Bernard Cromwell — a new leader of men deals with wartime responsibilities in the context of fighting Napoleon in Spain, and is a former Irish enemy going to become his friend? Cromwell is clearly doing Land Aubrey/Maturin but is able to put his own spin on it. His prose is not Regency-inflected the way O’Brian’s is and not as good but it is solid and he uses his terran setting and battle maneuvers well. And his lead is significantly different from the upper lower middle class Aubrey (a Tory and born officer who is still down the line from the nobles), Sharpe is a jumped-up prole with a lot of insecurity and is frequently a dick. A good read, will have to check out more of the series.
Ducks, by Kate Beaton — Beaton published this a few years ago, an autobiographical graphic novel (term justified, this is a big book) about her life immediately after graduating college and deciding to pay off her loans by working in Albertan oil fields (like a lot of Canadians looking for hard cash and willing to do hard work in a hard place). A good chunk of this takes place before she started publishing Hark! A Vagrant and gained comics fame, and though those comics are mentioned, this is a story about labor and what you have to do because you can’t do the thing you want, you don’t have the money for that. It is also a story about sexual violence both overt and as constant threat, and how that intersects with the need for money. The refineries and tar sands Beaton works at pay a lot and pull in lots of men from across the country whose other occupations were shut down (miners, for example), and they put those men in at best company towns and at worst livable but dull camps that slowly boil attitudes into entitlement, and Beaton depicts this from the perspective of one of the few women there. Her work is not the rough exuberance of Hark but it retains the fairly simple lines and deceptively simple faces and expressive postures and eyes, perhaps toned down but no less eloquent. And this also depicts camaraderie and care, Beaton is sensitive to how people in shitty conditions will hold to their experiences as their own and be distrustful if not disdainful of people who haven’t been there and don’t understand — all of this comes together in the gut punch of a final panel. But toward the end Beaton the character is shaken by the realization that other people have been in these conditions for far longer and are getting nothing but grief and pain without even that financial promise in return, and she is clear about her own naivete in this regard too. Beaton could potentially have made this in 2010 or so, right after the experience, but approaching it over time and with time gives the book perspective and weight it wouldn’t have otherwise (also, there are funny bits too). An essential book about work and self and a particular kind of dehumanization, strong recommend.
Ducks is stunning and thoughtful. The part where Beaton can’t take it anymore and gets a healing but far less lucrative job elsewhere and then can’t make her loan payments and has to return to the oil sands, this time knowing full well what she’s going to be facing, is so grim. Really major book, and this is a great write-up of it.
Thank you — it’s a book that demands consideration from the reader. It holds so much conflicting emotion and need, one of the thornier things about Beaton’s respite in Vancouver is how she’s surrounded by people who are outside of the world she’s come from (and has to go back to) and who don’t really understand that world — it is a small thing, but note how she doesn’t give that section the same little cast of characters frontpiece the other sections get. Obviously money is the overriding concern here but there’s a sense of not fitting in and recognizing that you have a certain place in the bad place, and that is a complicated thing.
Cornwell approaches the historical adventure more from the C.S. Forester angle than the more literary position that O’Brian leans in with. In the Sharpe series (which is surprisingly consistant over the course of 25 books) this works really well as it clearly delineates the protagonist’s enemies and clarifies his goals.
Hahaha, 25 books? My copy lists ten or so with “Waterloo” as the last title, O’Brian famously stretched time midway through the Aubrey/Maturins after he realized he’d dug himself a hole but I think Cornwell might have to venture into Harry Turtledove territory to move past that.
Orphans In The Sky by Robert Heinlein – Early generational starship story about a community aboard a ship that no one can remember launching or what the original mission was. The builder is deified as a god. It’s an enclosed world for the inhabitants with no windows to see out what’s beyond their immediate environment, until a young man is captured by outcast mutants in a forgotten wing of the ship that has windows upending the belief system of the community. It’s a fix up of two novellas with the narrative a bit clunky. It’s quite implausible, but slim and fast paced with interesting ideas – a religious allegory showing how the origins of a community can be forgotten, misinterpreted and distorted with the long passage of time. With the discovery of the universe the old religious paradigm is overthrown through violence replaced with a new one with problems of its own. It’s interesting to think Joe-Jim, the two-headed mutant was an inspiration for Adam’s Zaphod Beeblebrox down to the personality. Also, the population has incredible technology and weapons at their disposal but choose fighting knives as their primary weapons. Not top tier Heinlein but still pretty good.
In fairness to Google AI, I also kinda thought Dave Berry might be dead. Good to know he’s still kicking and hasn’t changed a bit.
I did too, but I think that is maybe because the short-lived Dave’s World TV show loosely based on his life starred Harry Anderson, and Harry Anderson has been dead a while.
Brains are weird.
Oh, and also I almost sent in an article last week gushing over “hope punk” Superman, but I couldn’t be bothered, even as a starting point for discussion. It’s pretty funny to see the opposite point features in this week’s FAR.
The whole column is great, the endorphin rush I got when he dropped a “I am not making this up” will sustain me through the weekend. Barry rules.
What’s Up, Everybody?
Finishing an over week-long trip through the upper-Midwest with the fam, hitting several notable cultural destinations that are never mocked for their round names and unassuming facades (Omaha! Fargo! Ogallala (NE)!) We spent three nights in tents in Roosevelt National Park, seeing some great sights and having our late dinner further delayed by a herd of buffalo on the road. We stopped by Devil’s Tower where I sadly was not abducted (a surprising low-key Close Encounters presence overall, aside from one reference at the visitor’s center and a few alien-themed souvenirs… probably just as well since it’s also a holy site for some Indigenous tribes) and Mount Rushmore, where I sadly didn’t get to rescue Carey Grant from the top of Washington’s head. More driving today, will be good to be home.
Look on the bright side — if you were abducted, you’d have to hang out with Richard Dreyfus.
No fate worse!
Well, Ben Dreyfuss would be worse.
“JFC Dreyfus we are getting probed eighty miles above the earth will you shut your—“
“You know what’s really weird? All these new ideas about gender!”
The big boss addressed the staff yesterday. I think he should have done this earlier in the week, mainly because what he had to say didn’t depend on new information. But he was at once blunt and vague. Vague about what the station is going to do and what the industry is going to do; blunt in that layoffs and possibly salary cuts are coming, and in that federal funds for public media might be gone forever. (My wife thought I was being too pessimistic when I said this, but sadly I was right.) He was trying to be optimistic, quoting the meme out there of “defunded but not defeated,” but I am really not sure about that. Especially since I am starting to see more and more signs of industry infighting – someone from a red state PBS outlet is blaming PBS and NPR for being too woke, as if he didn’t chose to work in that system – signs of every stations for itself. It’s going to be ugly. And alas, the promise to tell the staff the good news about how well fundraising’s been going didn’t materialize. I know already we are doing well, but why sit on the actual number.
In health news, my father in law is not having his gall bladder taken out next week. He’s just going for a pre-op exam, with the date TBD. I am a bit perplexed by this, but if his doctor thinks they can hold off, so be it. My wife is in need of a test following a test for a potential (if not likely) health issue. There is a good chance that as she can’t get the test till August 7, we will go to Worldcon on August 12 without knowing the results of this test. We are both trying not to be too nervous, but that is never easy for me.
Prep for the con continues. We discovered that everything wraps up at this con Sunday afternoon, so we decided to change our flight home by a day. Or rather a night, since it’s a red eye. Even with the higher cost for this ticket, we save money by checking out of the hotel a night earlier. (We thought about just playing tourist for a day, but between not having a car and my wife wanting an extra day at home to decompress, we voted for less time there.) Also, wife is antsy about making plans with the friend from Seattle who pushed us to come in the first place. Turns out that the friend is too busy to attend the con for much besides professional obligations – she’s a known writer I have mentioned a few times – and also commuting to the con. So there is a chance the downtime my wife wanted will not happen. She’s not upset that we decided to go to the con but I can sense she is just a bit upset at our friend.
Lots of family health problems lately–my dad’s kidney are evidently on the verge of failing, which means his doctor had him touring a dialysis center this week as a kind of preview of how it all would work, and I found out last night that a cousin had a stroke and isn’t expected to make it through the weekend.
My own mental state has been all over the place, too. Don’t like being like this, but it seems like the best I can do for right now.
A friend recently got two kittens, though, so I’ve been requesting and receiving a deluge of adorable pictures. I’ve been enjoying the X-Filesing and Takening. The former will be on hold next week, but I’m hoping to use that as a chance to finish the latter and also knock several films off the long watchlist.
Kittens are a good way to cope with stresses.
Is your dad likely to get a kidney transplant?
The kittens are a great boon.
Unlikely on the kidney transplant, unfortunately.
I’m really sorry about your family health problems. Been there on the dad with kidney issues, dialysis is not fun and it is costly, but I think it is better than it used to be (although the privatized centers…). If I can get on a small soap box, kidney donation chains are a way for people who can’t donate directly to a family member to still facilitate that family member getting a kidney — I don’t know if this is something that would work for your family and your dad but I wanted to throw it out there.
Thanks, and I’m going to research the donation chains. I knew a little bit about them before but hadn’t dug into it that deeply.
This is an older breakdown (with perhaps a very personal connection to me) but I think it sets the stage and provides some good places to dig deeper: https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/opinion/2013/09/03/web-essay-a-new-option-for-local-kidney-transplant-patients/2758147/
Went to a noisemaking event for Gaza which felt cathartic and kind of powerful, a lot of people banging pots and pans, as it turns out, end up creating a rhythm and beat on cue. Frankly the genocide is really affecting me, even if I also don’t want to make an ongoing catastrophe ABOUT me – having stressmares, not sleeping great, and dealing with a lot of anger and despair. I’m channeling it into this kind of thing, giving away money, and angrily calling my representatives like Genocide Shrek AKA John Fetterman (not my phrasing but I love it). I am seeing my family on Wednesday and trying to work out how to compartmentalize this stuff without simply ignoring what’s happening either.
“a lot of people banging pots and pans, as it turns out, end up creating a rhythm and beat on cue” — this would’ve made the FAR were it not from 2012 and merely new to me, but it is a fascinating (long) read on this subject from a really smart dude and it is specifically in a historical/political context and inspiring in its implications, huge recommend for anyone but especially you:
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2012/06/04/casseroles/
Will check it out, thanks
Had a really fun weekend with my friend’s visit, just been trying to get back into the normal swing of things since he left Monday. Played one poker tournament after the gym Tuesday and finished 2nd. Tried to play a session Wednesday but it wasn’t going well early on and I wasn’t feeling it so I just shut it down rather than dig deeper. Been spending a lot of the week on organizing and decorating the apartment and some household tasks. There’s some satisfaction in that, but I would like to start budgeting time for something more fun and creative.
Of Montreal tomorrow for The Sunlandic Twins 20th anniversary tour! Maybe that’ll motivate me to finish turning my album-list entry into a YOTM article.
Hey, nice to see IHTOV on here. Michele is cool and we chat a bit about music on the ol’ social media.
Cool, the writing there is always top-notch. And you should read the whole piece, I think you would enjoy the small but purposeful digs at Lippman’s second husband.
I’d probably have written something there already if I actually had a vinyl collection, rather than “a couple of records I wanted that were on sale and that I’ll maybe listen to if I ever get a record player” and “one gag purchase” (“Alley Cat,” which I simply had to as a Get a Life fan).
Also I opened it and immediately laughed at imagining Nelson Muntz reacting to the Andy Williams dig.