The Friday Article Roundup
The week's best pop culture writing delivered right on time.
On Your Desk by EOD:
Thanks to Casper, Dave, Captain Nath, and wallflower for throwing deliveries on our doorsteps this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Vulture’s talks to Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Kieren Culkin about their revival of Glengarry Glen Ross:
Odenkirk: I love playing the vulnerability and the pain of him. My dad was not a salesman, but he had a printing company. He took me and my brother to work two or three times, and we would meet his friends, some of whom were salesmen. They would work until around 11:30 or 12 and then they’d go to lucnh, and they would be fucking hammered for the rest of the day, every day. They all ended up divorced, alcoholic, and in a lot of car accidents. But they would just get together to shoot the shit. […] They were fucking losers, and they all thought they were in the Rat Pack.
Burr: Can I tell you something? I bet they were hilarious.
Culkin: I bet they were a good time.
While we’re talking to people, how about an oral history of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness from Inverse:
[Producer Sabrina] King Carpenter: What was funny was Jurassic Park came out the week that [Sam Neill] arrived up in Toronto and he had no idea it was this phenomenon. I had security ready to pick him up and have him processed out. … So security had to come out and we had a car waiting for him outside, never entering the terminal, and he had no idea that Jurassic Park had just taken the box office by storm and that he was now a big deal. And he couldn’t figure out why I was out there, and why he was being ushered through all the security. … He’s that kind of guy. We’d just settle in for work.
At his blog, Peter Leigh examines the withering critique of “family” values in two of 2024’s most mainstream releases:
There is, in fact, something amusingly Trap-like about the dilemma in which Nicholas Hoult’s Justin Kemp finds himself: appointed to serve on a jury for a homicide it soon becomes clear he may have unknowingly committed, forced to try and manage the situation without inadvertently revealing the nature of his own involvement. But Juror #2 also shares with Trap a kind of nauseating play with the audience’s assumed sensibilities, a probing awareness of the way the family normally functions in an American studio film. It’s a film aimed squarely at the perception that matrimony and fatherhood have the power to redeem, a sometimes shockingly strident commentary on the kind of moral blindness other movies are all too happy to exploit.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jack Lubin muses on the Super Bowl and New Orleans:
It is often said upon visiting New Orleans that it is almost unlike an American city. It’s a point that is difficult to articulate without veering into the colonialist, and it’s one with which I have come to disagree more and more. New Orleans, if anything, is a lens through which you might grasp the contours of the American future. It is a place driven largely by an economy that exists by sole virtue of its ability to sell facsimiles of itself; it polishes and packages a Disneyesque rendition of its mythologized culture while disappearing via incarceration the Black people who drive such culture. The history of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is one of privatization, racial engineering, and the prioritization of New Orleans as export and destination rather than as existing city. In this light, Super Bowl LIX is, if not an endpoint, something of a signpost for the city’s future.
Finally, for Crooked Marquee, Josh Bell looks back on his time in journalism and how well it’s captured by a classic Joan Micklin Silver’s film:
That’s not to say that what I or any alt-weekly journalist wrote about those topics was always exceptional, and Between the Lines makes plenty of room to poke fun at its self-consciously hip characters. Music critic Max (Jeff Goldblum) has legitimate complaints about his astonishingly low salary, and any arts critic watching the movie will identify with his trip to a used record store to sell his promo copies (“I can’t eat records,” he accurately observes). But he’s also not above using his position to score free drinks or hit on women. In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, he gives a lecture titled “Whither Rock n’ Roll” to a group of female college students, and he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Eventually he drops the pretense and just gives them his phone number.
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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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season One, Episode Twenty-Three, “Chrysalis”
The first season finale, and already the energy has come together because of dramatic movement. It starts with the Narn outpost being attacked, and if there’s any one choice that has irrevocably changed everything, it’s Londo making a classic deal with the devil in a pathetic grasp for power. We talk about The Shield tripping up sympathies in how we sympathise with both characters in a conflict, but I think you could also express that as being both understanding and furious with a character, and that very much applies to Londo’s decision here – he gets a speech I find genuinely sad, in which he says ‘One day you look in the mirror and realise you are all you will ever be,’ then explaining one either accepts that, kills oneself, or stops looking in mirrors (also very Shieldian).
When he accepts the offer from the mysterious Morden to ‘do something’ about the Narn outpost, it’s almost half-hearted – he initially rejects it, and seems to vaguely change his mind later. His whole thing is his massive heart, and the heart is whimsical and prone to change; this is especially shown when he realises immediately how badly he’s fucked up.
The other part of this is that Morden fully introduces himself as not only another player at the galactic table, but its new major mover and shaker – it’s a pretty clever move to hint at one conflict only to swerve and reveal a new player (DS9 did largely the same thing, with the Federation/Cardassian war giving way to the Dominion).
There’s a really great moment where the Narn outpost is attacked by a mysterious force, and G’kar breaks down who it could be, dismissing every group for plausible reasons (“Humans wouldn’t do it, Vorlons don’t care,”) and works out a new force has arrived. Mira Furlan is insanely charismatic, and in an effortless way (as opposed to Peter Jurasik, where the joy is how much effort he’s putting in). Sheer ownage of Kosh showing up to Sinclair for no reason.
30 Rocks — Wesley Snipes is so terrible, but in a very interesting way. Peter Dinklage from a few seasons ago was a pop-cultural savvy smartass in a middle management job, just like Liz Lemon, but he was relaxed and cool in a way Liz could absolutely not be, she was not ready for a relationship with a mature person. Wesley is judgmental and self-righteous and decently successful professionally — just like Liz Lemon! This isn’t a full-on Seinfeld “I hate me!” relationship but the overlap between them is a pit of quicksand. Liz ultimately becomes more mature and also finds happiness with a person who is not like her in a lot of ways, and fitting into each other’s spaces is its own maturity.
Heh, I like the insight that Dinklage is too mature for Lemon since she spends the whole relationship covering up that she thought he was a literal child when they first met.
Ha, great catch.
I’ve been toying with an idea for an article on the evolution of Liz Lemon’s boyfriends, and the way she kind of lurches towards Criss over the years.
There’s a certain amount of intentional punching-above-her-weight-level to her boyfriends a la Seinfeld again, but they also all last much longer than his gals of the episodes. But they are impressively mixed — outright duds (Wesley, John Hamm’s idiot), misfires (Sudekis), better-than-her (Dinklage), too-close-to-her (Damon, Dennis Duffy), only for the sex (Grizz). It’s definitely telling that Criss has the most in common with Dennis in a lot of ways in terms of ambition and charm, just in different registers.
I think part of the reason 30 Rock relationships last longer than Seinfeld’s is Seinfeld built them episodically and 30 Rock built them on next-episode twists. I remember Matt Damon and Jon Hamm both showed up as impossibly perfect boyfriends before revealing themselves to be jackasses.
“Doctor guy, pilot guy, Cleveland dude, British guy, rich dude, James Franco. I’ve been with the same woman for 22 years. No judgments, but to me, Liz Lemon is a sex maniac.”
The Shield, “Hurt”
– This would count as a great episode even if it all it were was Shane and Vic alone in the dark, guns drawn, with Vic knowing Antwon’s pressuring Shane to kill him (and, in what we know is a potentially effective move, using Shane’s family as leverage). Vic’s little “after you” motion for Shane to go ahead of him in all this is a bleak and phenomenally hilarious beat. And so much great tension with the two of them breathless together in the dark: close-ups on Chiklis knowing, close-ups on Goggins feeling (and while the next episode will show what Shane does, I think it’s an open question whether or not he’s already chosen that course: Goggins is incredibly expressive here, all yearning and anxious, but what that tells us is he’s longing for a way out, not that he’s figured one out yet).
– Also great bits of dark comedy re: Lem and Ronnie in this scenario, with Lem in that scene being like, “WHY DON’T I GO WITH YOU,” and Ronnie buttonholing Vic earlier to get him to look at the Shane-Antwon tape, and yeah, Vic, you really do want to see that immediately.
– I love it whenever Vic does something he has five separate motivations for, because it turns him into a really interesting Rorschach test. Here he ruins Shane’s operation in the process of finishing up the Garage Sting on his own terms, and it’s up to the audience how to weigh out the different factors driving him here: he’s preventing arson and murder, he’s doling out ownage, he’s making a point by decisively resolving a job he’s been ordered away from (even if he can’t get official credit for it), he’s screwing over a sleazy informant, and he’s professionally humiliating Shane while processing the idea that Shane might be about to kill him. I don’t even think he’s aware of how all this factors in: he’s the reverse of Shane in that he knows what he’s doing but not what he wants.
– The foster care case is one of the show’s bleakest and most memorable, and I like that it shows Rawling’s frustrations at being, as Tristan said, an authoritarian reformer: she’s confronted here with the fact that even at the height of her power, she can’t make the difference she wants. It’s all the more effective because she’s not even coming up against any vast evil–this is no Anton Chigurh–just varying and all-too-familiar shades of apathy, overwork, scant resources, selfishness, and desperation.
– Absolutely adorable bit of Dutch/Corrine in this episode, as he confides in her about how the case is weighing on him–how the living victim makes it much more than a puzzle–and she cradles him with real affection. (This is probably more than Vic has ever told her about any individual case.) And then Dutch is so good with Megan, so unbothered about the embrace being interrupted so he can read a picture book to her again. Cathy Cahlin Ryan just lets Corrine radiate this fragile, can-I-even-believe-this happiness while she’s watching them.
– Julien using the asset forfeiture playbook on the white guy with a bottle of corked wine and some bootleg DVDs is one of my favorite Julien moments, honestly: it’s really interesting to see his passion turned in a pointed but petty direction for once.
The Seven-Ups
I’m going to write this up for Streaming Shuffle, but I’m going to go ahead and start hyping this as an unfairly lost ’70s crime gem. One of cinema’s best car chases + Roy Scheider at peak hotness.
Seven-Ups is on my list for the short term. Didn’t realize it has Scheider,
The ending of that car chase is so hilarious. Chase OVER! I need to rewatch this, it’s been a while — its main problem is The French Connection exists so there is a fair amount of overlap with a classic, but in my recollection it’s a bit more Shieldian in its crew of bad cops and has more “fun” (like the beginning total fuck-up/destruction).
Scheider walking away from the end of that car crash absolutely kills me. No, sir, you’re 100% dead, not just lightly bruised.
The ending of The Seven-Ups feels even colder than The French Connection does. Because the “fun” opening will then bring us to the realization that betrayal is “no fun” at all.
Yet more masterful stunt driving from Bill Hickman!
As for Roy Scheider hotness, I wasn’t prepared for him to be Brad Pitt Fight Club ripped for Marathon Man. Holy moly.
The most recent episode of Abbott, solid as always and with an amazingly fun B-plot for Janine and Gregory, and then the pilot of Everybody Hates Chris so I could see baby Tyler James Williams and Vincent Martella.
Just got to the end now of the chase – there is a surprisingly well placed ad. How on earth did I not know about that chase?
No Way Out (1987) – i am noting the year because there is another totally unrelated film of the same name with Sidney Poitier that I might watch soon. So don’t confused. Anyway…RIP Gene Hackman. But just because he’s good in anything does not mean anything he’s in is good. This is in in fact a mess, with a twist ending that makes some sense – it definitely explains some things – but that also adds nothing to the actual plot. Hackman is quite good as a Secretary of Defense who accidentally kills his mistress, who is also involved with one of his aides, Kevin Costner. And whose broken moral compass leaves him at once sinister and pathetic. Costner is fine in a standard action hero role. Will Patton as the SecDef’s Smithers is way over the top. Sean Young as the fulcrum of the triangle cannot act. And the most interesting performances are Fred Dalton Thompson in a bit part as the head of the CIA and Howard Duff as a Senator Claghorn type, both of whom feel like they came from a less muddled and messy film. Good action sequences, and good use of the DC area.
Doctor Who, “The War Games,” last two parts – As things get ever more out of hand, the Doctor does the one thing he swore never to do: call the Time Lords for help. To some degree, this really ends with part nine, as part ten is more interested in introducing the Time Lords and ending Troughton’s run. But it’s still a generally well done conclusion to the serial and to the era. Not that I am done yet, since I am just watching this stretch in whatever order I want. But I suspect fans of the Second Doctor went away, if not happy, at least more satisfied than with the end of the First Doctor’s run.
Absolutely love Troughton. What little we have of him, along with Pertwee and Tom Baker is just a fantastic run of Doctor stories. Whichever one of the three I’m watching at the time is my favorite Doctor. If you haven’t seen The Tomb of the Cybermen it is a great “base under siege” story. Lost until 1991 it’s the earliest surviving complete Second Doctor serial.
I still have Tom Baker in first place for favorite classic Doctor – and neck and neck with Tennant for all Doctors ever – but Troughton and Pertwee are really not far behind now..
Wait, ANOTHER movie with Hackman as a federal official who kills his mistress?
Absolute Power corrupts until there is No Way Out.
It’s kind of weird. I assume Hackman planned to do a whole series like this. where he plays different cabinet officers and agency directors opposite other major leading men. We really missed out on him as a murderous head of the FCC.
I agree that Patton is too cartoonish, but I think No Way Out really works *iff* you don’t know that there’s a twist ending coming.
I did enjoy being surprised for once, if nothing else. (I guess if you wait long enough, twists that become common knowledge are forgotten. I would just how many people know what’s coming now in The Crying Game.) I also might go back someday and look for clues in a rewatch.
The Shark is Broken – woo, live theatre! This is the play written by (and starring) Robert Shaw’s son, about the downtime on the Jaws set while the three main actors were waiting for the troublesome shark to be repaired while shooting on the Orca. Really enjoyed it! It’s very funny but also a touching and balanced tribute to Shaw sr. – the play goes into the clashing personalities between Shaw (old-school, alcoholic) and Dreyfuss (young, neurotic, on drugs), with Scheider largely the peacemaker between them. I haven’t been to the theatre in years but this was an excellent reintroduction, hopefully I’ll make it out to more stuff.
Easy Living (1937) – screwball fun written by Preston Sturges before he made the leap to directing, but already featuring many of the actors who would become his stock company. Enjoyable but a bit too much “comedy is just people yelling at each other” for me, I think Sturges handled the fully anarchic screwball stuff better once he took full charge, and his later collaboration with director Mitchell Leisen on Remember the Night (one of my favourites!) benefits from a gentler romantic comedy style that suits Leisen better. Still a good time but not top-tier screwball for me.
Justified, S4E3 “Truth and Consequences” – loads of snake action. I’m enjoying Boyd coming up against another preacher and being uniquely placed to call his bluff (also plenty of opportunity of elaborate Biblical speeches). The stakes of the season’s main plot get raised in very intense fashion in this episode too, very much enjoying season 4 so far.
High Potential, “One of Us” – good high-pressure episode with Morgan and some of the cops stuck in a hostage situation that is slightly ridiculous but mostly in a good way. Enjoyed the use of Morgan’s daughter in this one, the family stuff hasn’t been my favourite part of the show so far but it’s growing on me.
Aw, The Shark Is Broken was playing in a local theater near me recently, but it didn’t have a long run and vanished before I could get to it. Glad to know it’s a lot of fun, and I hope it’ll eventually come back around.
Yeah it’s a real crowd-pleaser! The set design is really fun too. Hope you get another chance.
Wooooo live legitimate theater! But I prefer the original version of the play, Waiting For Bruce.
Easy Living has the triad, right?
I think you’re thinking of Design For Living, which I still need to see.
Easy Living is about a working class woman who is given an expensive fur coat by an eccentric businessman and finds her life is completely upended as a result. It’s got that fun “all of this nonsense came from one fairly innocuous incident?” screwball thing but… too much yelling
Heh, that’s the exact reason I dropped 2 /12 stars on Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 after rewatch. The Oingo Boingo-scored highway killing still goes hard, though.
Yeah that’s a pretty abrasive movie! I enjoyed it once… I haven’t felt the need to go back.
Desperate Living (1977) – Probably the worst of Waters’ early movies I’ve seen – the story is way more convoluted and “ambitious”, a mix of fairy tale and Sirkian melodrama – but even then I’m still having a ball with Edith Massey’s horned up, entitled queen and her rabies infected daughter. One of those directors where the playful, truly wild tone and sense that nothing in Hollywood, even now, is this provocative, transgressive, and queer, makes up for a lot of shortcomings. (Also cool to see these real Baltimore locations like the wrestling match that seems like it’s actually in some grimy ass boxing gym they rented for an afternoon).
I guess Thursday night is procedural night around here now…
Matlock, “Pregame”
Matty is a bit off her game this week since the memories of Ellie we visited last week are still fresh in her mind. Probably not aided by a case that ties into Olympia’s current class-action lawsuit (which is to get the non-union Mexican equivalent of Four Loko off the markets). At a sorority party at Fordham, a girl with a heart condition dies after drinking a drink spiked with not-Four Loko, and the lead suspect insists she didn’t do it, although her sorority sisters all think she might have. It’s also “Family Day” (a non-denominational Easter celebration) at the firm, and Matty is trying to decide whether to bring Alfie. And Matty’s sister has been calling a lot lately, too…
Anyway, “Pregame” seems appropriate, as this one felt a bit shabby and like it was setting up some big plot bombs to go off soon.
Elsbeth, “Tearjerker”
An elderly real estate mogul dines with what appears to be his mistress, and we see her seemingly crush a pill into his drink, and later bring him to his apartment, where she leaves the pills, and then oddly tosses the to-go steaks down the garbage chute… maybe all is not what it seems here. Jordana Brewster plays the woman, so you know she’s going to be involved somehow, but what the case actually ends up being is pretty interesting. (And there are some very funny moments along the way, like Elsbeth’s initial interactions with the “consulting service.”) More interesting than the jerk detective Wagner takes in as a favor traded for getting the murder case Elsbeth was on the jury for reopened, but maybe he’ll grow from this experience. Good fun episode all in all.
Good Cop / Bad Cop, “The King’s Assassin”
Really enjoyed this one, now that we get past the inciting incident and deeper into the siblings’ relationship (as well as their relationship with their father). This one does a really good job of tying the personal development and the work on that relationship organically into the case. A few crypto bros come into town to take mushrooms before they prepare to launch their IPO, and one of them dies somehow (although if you know anything about psilocybin mushrooms, you’ll know something is wrong as soon as he says his taste sweet).
I like seeing Lou and Henry’s relationship develop more, even as a lot of it involves Lou needing him about his ex-girlfriend and pushing him to contact her. But they work really well together, with complementary skills and an easy way of understanding the other that sells the sibling chemistry very well. I also like that, whatever Henry’s deal is, whether he’s supposed to be autistic or not or something else, there’s no real special treatment there: Nobody treats him like he’s too magical to be encouraged to grow as a person, and the show definitely doesn’t act like his jerkish social behavior is somehow tied in with his intelligence– and Lou and Big Hank often call him out on it.
There’s also some good comic relief, particularly with Officer Bradley, in the B-story where someone has to figure out who stole the donation jar at Big Hank’s pediatrics fundraiser. Also, Shane is right, Lou’s burgundy velvet blazer is fire.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this episode– the first one I enjoyed enough to keep going; this one I enjoyed enough to look forward to more.
American Dad!, “Tearjerker”
I mean, it’s just impossible for any other show to use that episode title and not have me think of this. Anyway, it’s a parody of both Bond films and Oscar bait; what’s not to love?
“Nine hours of a baby chimp trying to revive its dead mother!”
Uh… I think this is a comment on Oscar bait, but I’m not sure and also it’s not even close to “Oscar Gold” or my own pitch.
Isn’t it a line Roger drops when his plan fails – his backup pitch for Oscar Gold?
Ohhh, haha, probably. I didn’t even remember that or notice it this time.
The Royal Tenembaums
Rewatch. G.I.P. Gene Hackman. He’s fantastic in this, ornery, duplicitous, erratic yet you can see a good heart underneath, mysterious even to himself. His scenes with Anjelica Huston are still incredible, specially their first one together where Hackman recoils at her, his body knowing that he’s fucked up before his brain can register. Everyone’s great in this one, including many like Luke Wilson, Paltrow and Glover how receded in Anderson’s filmography later and wouldn’t register the same again. “Needle in the Hay” remains haunting. Hadn’t seen this one in over 15 years, before Anderson made even Moonrise Kingdom, so it was quite something to go back to the quieter, less kinetic style of this one: lots of pauses, dead silences and the lived-in New York environment though still very much a dollhouse aesthetic when it counts. And I’m still picking up things in it for the first time, like Margot taking the bathroom TV with her when she moves back to her mother’s house.
Glover is wonderful here, love his little beat with Chaz about their mutual widowerhood. Always surprised that people think Anderson isn’t emotional, much like Sondheim – during one scene near the end, maybe because of my own dad, I had to pause the movie, I was crying so hard.
The crane shot panning all through the fire truck tableaux is no less miraculous now than ever before.
And speaking of actors who never returned to the Anderson fold and wouldn’t hit this particular register again: Alec Baldwin.
What did we read?
The Waste Maskers, Vance Packard
This is a book remarkable less for what it says and more for when it was published – it contains all the standard criticisms of capitalism, including mass commercialisation and consumerism, a decline in quality (including a whole chapter on planned obsolescence, which it divides between things intentionally designed to degrade every few years and things merely designed to be quickly unfashionable), an increase in spiritual dissatisfaction, and the destruction of the environment and social fabric in pursuit of the almighty dollar, except it was written in 1960 when these trends were only just being observed.
What’s most interesting is the number of businessmen the author describes who are at best ambivalent about their participation in the destruction of society; there are a few lone voices loudly insisting they shouldn’t feel guilty or responsible as businessmen, but the majority are either uneasy or outright hostile to the idea they have no moral responsibility. It’s obviously quite depressing, given that selfishness is now a clear part of the American fabric and these people lost. In fact, one can see how the Boomers – only just coming of age at time of writing – were almost wired for consumption, and that what they’re doing now was basically inevitable given their environment.
The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K Le Guin
My trawling through the high fantasy genre in mostly chronological order leads me to Le Guin’s Tales From Earthsea cycle, and as I’ve already read the first one, I moved onto the second. This now feels like someone from the same school as Tolkien and Lewis, if not directly influenced. It also feels like the middle ground between Tolkien’s completely freeform imagination and the industrial output of today’s fantasy authors following a blueprint; her story is much more clearly structured than Tolkien but also more loose and fairy-tale-like than the ones who followed.
In a lot of ways, this feels more like vibes than a story, just like her contemporary and friend Philip K Dick, but with more grounding than him (certainly more interest in a plausible world) and more of a left-authoritarian than left-libertarian bent than him. I know that’s weird to say, especially given this is about a girl throwing off the shackles and power of a religion-driven society, but she’s clearly more interested in a functional world that gifts personal freedom than starting with personal freedom and finding the weird, messy world that results (no negative connotations intended).
I found the book a bit of a drag to read, but I must admit a) I preferred her to Tolkien and Lewis and b) the ideas and world she presents are fascinating. Granted, much of it has been lifted by other works, but I enjoy this little world, particularly the casual note that the characters have been black this whole time.
The Classic Slum, Richard Richards
This week was a real theme of ‘the problems of capitalism are cyclical and neverending’! This is Roberts’ personal account of coming of age in 1900-1920 Britain’s slums, but it’s deliberately arranged less like an autobiography and more like a historian’s account. Richards sets out to counter the distant and clinical tone historians often take for a more emotionally invested account – one of his big themes is that many poor people are perfectly intelligent but held back by circumstance.
The overarching idea that emerges is how people in poverty search for dignity. He explains the mass conservatism amongst the poor as a preference for identifying with people of means, and indeed romanticising them; not quite ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’, because Roberts makes it clear how many of them are perfectly aware of the impossibility of upward mobility, but rather as a way of establishing their own dignity and sense of purpose.
A different angle: Roberts goes into detail about how poor people generally keep their house spotless, partially because they have the time and mostly as a way of exerting a level of control over something. This defines much of the culture Roberts explores; there’s a deep culture of manners and morals comparable to a drawing room novel that allows otherwise powerless people a sense of superiority and power over others.
It gets really interesting towards the end, when World War One causes a sea change in attitudes; both immediately, with women and the remaining men taking more control over things and feeling a sense of self-respect and power, and in the long-term, as it (along with the invention of the radio) lead to a greater level of literacy.
(If there’s one effect this book had on me, it was greater appreciation for the access I have to entertainment, knowledge, healthcare, and good food despite also living in poverty.)
Sold on both the nonfiction books. I have an odd problem with Le Guin where I really love several of her short stories (especially “Solitude”) but never quite get on with her novels–I always wind up feeling like there’s not quite enough friction for me to grip them properly.
I agree about LeGuin’s longer works. Too bloodless. It’s forgivable in a shorter work. Obviously, the exception is The Word for World is Forest, which she herself disliked because it was too emotional.
Bridgett has a really good write-up of Tombs of Atuan over at the old site! https://www.the-solute.com/let-there-be-light-persia-on-the-complicated-labyrinth-of-the-tombs-of-atuan/
I suppose there is Tolkein in Earthsea, hard not to have him in fantasy and this is a fully mapped-out (literally) society with its own language, but Le Guin’s “more interest in a plausible world” is always anthropological (as opposed to linguistic) and generally anthropomorphic — there are some nonhumans in the series but this is about different peoples rather than Tolkein’s different species. Neither is necessarily superior but to me Le Guin’s mode can dig deeper into how her people interact with the world without the exterior pressure of “also there are elves doing shit.” Atuan is definitely vibe-heavy and not as plot-intensive as Wizard, the next book swings back hard in the other direction, but it is very effective in examining that tension of self vs. self, self vs. society, self vs. gods, through Arha/Tenar. She’s in a dark place and coming out of it is not easily done.
I moved it over here too (https://www.mediamagpies.com/let-there-be-light-the-complicated-labyrinth-of-the-tombs-of-atuan/), but thanks for remembering! Gosh, I love Tenar.
D’oh, should’ve checked here! And yeah, I think Le Guin is open about how she didn’t fully understand the implications of the ending until later but I think she is an honest enough writer to have Tenar still very aware of her loss even as she escapes. I am very curious to see Tristan’s reaction to Tehanu.
Me too!
Another middle-ground between Tolkien and the “industrial output” of today’s endless volumes is Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. Like Tolkien it owes a lot to Scandinavian, Germanic and Icelandic writing but is tight, packed and epic but fleet in its few hundred pages.
Fascinated by how all the early post-Tolkien high fantasy were these slim volumes given how I now associate the genre with massive books that combine into a trilogy.
Similar issue in The Power Broker – “dude bends and fucks over democratic norms to accomplish goals” is a problem past and present.
Seconding Lauren James – putting both those non-fictions on my reading list.
Comfort crime! Found used copies of Richard Stark’s Plunder Squad and Comeback and snapped those fuckers up, rereads of course and still good to great. Plunder Squad is the penultimate book of the first run, Charles Adai’s smart introduction describes it as “autumnal” and Lucy Sante’s introduction in another book calls it “sadistically frustrating,” both are accurate! Parker cannot get a heist going and has to deal with other bullshit, when the job finally goes off it’s immediately fucked in multiple ways. Stark is not saying that crime does not pay, just that it is a god damn grind like everything else. A character from this shows up (rather surprisingly, given the circumstances) in Comeback, the first book in the second run (hence the title) and 20 years down the road there is still a lot of shit to deal with but in this case it’s a heist made sour by a traitorous partner and the immediate fallout of being stuck in a city with a manhunt going on. Stark always has great secondary character action and this one has more involved secondary characters than normal (their section is the largest in the book I think), there are three morons trying to horn in and a real asshole cop (there are many bad people here but he is clearly the most loathsome) and a security man who is smart and competent but not as smart as he thinks. And in the end a question of not loyalty but reliability is answered, there may not be honor among thieves but there is professionalism among the ones who know this is work, and you’ll have to work with other people again.
And another bookstore coughed up Coward and Lawless, the first two Criminal comics from Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips (and Val Staples on colors) — also rereads but it’s been longer. Some questionable uh “urban” dialogue at points but otherwise this is still great, the series hit the ground running and right from the start dealt in poisoned families and the sins of fathers and sons. Lawless in particular does a really good job with this, an older brother investigates the death of his younger brother and muses on how their abusive father really fucked them over, and that shadow darkens more than even he can see.
Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O’Brien – The title is a warning of what’s to come. And what comes just after Rose is banned from baseball for life is a screed. In essence “sure, Rose deserved what he got, but it’s really awful that the lords of baseball couldn’t go after all those steroid cheats that way, too. Baseball now sucks!” It was a strange thing to put in at that point in the narrative, and also just a strange thing to put in. But I am pretty sure that as much as O’Brien (an admitted Rose fan from his youth) is willing to accept that Rose was a pretty awful person, he cannot let go of the idea that Rose was some sort of platonic ideal of a ballplayer. Despite Rose’s limitations as a fielder and a hitter, despite Rose not necessarily being even the third best player on the Reds teams of the 70s. The screed took me out of the book instantly, and I am not sure I want to finish it now.
Which is a pity since it’s pretty well written and does a great job summing up all of Rose’s misdeeds related to gambling and the investigations of his crimes against baseball and against the IRS. Some sequences feel like that scene in Goodfellas where everything careens off the rails to the chords of Layla. Where the book falls down is in terms of baseball. We get a deep dive into all things Reds from 1964 to 1976, and then suddenly we hear very little about Rose’s teams. No mention of the Reds trading for Tom Seaver, no mention of anyone on the world champion 1980 Phils but Rose. I think for O’Brien, baseball ended in 1976 and all that remains was Rose and the rule against gambling. It’s a bit weird.
Complications, by Atul Gawande
I really like Gawande’s writing, and this early essay collection on surgery, the medical profession, and the frustrating limits of knowledge and experience shows that he came out of the gate strong. The piece on “when good doctors go bad”–i.e., when highly competent doctors fall into shocking declines, often with horrific consequences for their patients–may be my favorite: empathetic and clearsighted and troubling.
The Best of Richard Matheson
This was edited by Victor LaValle, who, in an oversight, assumed he was supposed to pick what he thought was the best of Matheson, instead of what I think is the best of Matheson. This is an understandable but tragic mistake. However, it’s hard to go wrong with 400-odd pages of work by one of the genre’s best pure storytellers, especially when you still get “Born of Man and Woman,” “Prey,” “Witch War,” “Dance of the Dead,” “Dress of White Silk,” “Duel,” “Third from the Sun,” “The Last Day,” etc. And LaValle did succeed in introducing me to the great “A Visit to Santa Claus,” which is Matheson doing grim, muscular crime storytelling and should not be missed.
Matheson excelled at a kind of stripped-down, action-driven writing (he could work very well in other modes, like in “Born of Man and Woman,” but this is maybe his most characteristic), and it means his works translate ridiculously well into adaptation, losing very little and sometimes even gaining power. (He’s behind some of my all-time favorite Twilight Zone episodes, unsurprisingly.) It means it’s easy to miss his stories in their original form, because it feels like many of them have already filtered out into pop culture already, but they still have a great force to them and stir up some how’d-he-do-that boggling.
Gawande is really the best kind of pop science writer.
The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. van Vogt – Five thousand years in the future a group of dissidents operate transient weapons shops that move from city to city and town to town selling specialized guns – they are tuned to one person and can only be used in self-defense – to help repress the tyranny of an imperial government. Fara is conservative and in support of the imperium. He finds the weapons shops an affront to the empire, a threat to the status quo but also a giant corporation quashing small business in his town. Cayle Clark, Fara’s young son, defies his father, striking out on his own with the help of a young woman associated with the weapon shops.
With the Shops slogan “The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to be Free”, philosophy like “People always have the kind of government they want” and the resistance to tyranny themes, the book has been adopted by Libertarians and the right-wing. The pro-2nd Amendment advocacy is not thinly veiled. But for me I thought van Vogt left it ambiguous as to who the heroes are and who are the villains. Beside the two antagonists there is a third force. There is also a shift in one character’s perspective. There are also the rules of the weapons being tuned to one person and only used defensively and never for murder. It makes me think van Vogt’s beliefs lie somewhere in the middle of the themes he’s exploring. The story was superb and embodied everything that is good about Golden Age science fiction – pulpy, speculative and packed with tropes. It’s plot driven, moving at a good clip. Unlike many Golden Age stories the characters are well developed, dealing with the same issues pertaining to the 2nd Amendment 5000 years in the future as we do today. The book is a fix up, a term coined by van Vogt, of three short stories stretched to novella length with van Vogt writing in a dreamy style. You can tell where the sections are as each ends on a cliffhanger, a little crude in that regard. But at the climax there is a conceptual breakthrough, something I didn’t see coming, turning the world upside down and putting me back on my heels. This final twist in the last sentence was a supernova aimed right at the eyes. Looking forward to the sequel, The Weapon Makers.
Two short stories:
The Day Before The Revolution by Ursula K. Le Guin – It’s Le Guin week! Sort of prequel to The Dispossessed with the events occurring 200 years before the novel. An origin story of Odo, the wise Taoist-like, anarchist figure whose ideas and spiritual works are the basis for The Dispossessed. But here Le Guin humanizes her as an aged widow, a little grumpy and with a bad back. It grounds this “God” demystifying her in the humdrum banality of a mortal.
The Private War of Private Jacob by Joe Haldeman – Many of Haldeman’s stories reflect his time in Vietnam with themes of teamwork, loyalty to the man next to you in battle and ineffectual command. Here higher ranks don’t do as much in battle as the lower ranks except bark orders, stand back and laugh. So it is with Jacob’s Sargent Melford who Jacob hates. Advanced technology allows soldiers to immediately download the tacit knowledge and battlefield experience about the enemy from other fallen soldiers with knowledge building as it passes from soldier to soldier. When Jacob is tasked with downloading Sargent Melford, essentially a promotion in battle, Jacob becomes exactly like him, laughing while soldiers are wounded. A wild nightmare. Haldeman enjoys the last-minute twist in which things go very bad for his characters.
I only know of The Weapon Shops of Isher because of “The Shop” in Firestarter, which is directly named for the book.
Yes! Exactly!
70 percent through American Prometheus and the nuclear and geopolitical politics at play here are even more complex than what Nolan in Oppenheimer could get across in three hours (understandably). Oppenheimer vascillates goes back and forth in his testimonies and stated beliefs, arguably susceptible to anxiety and pressure, especially when he names names at the start of the Red Scare where his brother, an actual party member, doesn’t fucking budge. The movie if anything is too easy on Edward Teller and his insane attempt to get a hydrogen bomb going in Los Alamos (again!) Also something not gotten across as much in the movie for sheer time: Oppie having some violent mental episodes as a young man and depressive periods until he stabilized. The editing, performance, and structure in the movie, however, also can find the character psychology here where the book by default cannot, namely that this repressed, complicated guy is so easily able to channel his passions and turbulent emotions, harnessing them much as you would the power of an atom.
Finished Nerve by Eva Holland, excellent pop-science-meets-memoir on the science of fear and how humans can manage it, as well as the second volume of Scum Villain, in which Our Hero (such as he is) has figured out that he’s changed the narrative but not that he’s changed the narrative so much that the book has hopped genres. Whoops. Currently reading Maria Bamford’s memoir, and that’s going to be a quick read.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
On the annual trip to the True/False film festival! Will report in much more detail next week. Good to get some time away from reality, especially for my wife.
Last day of the month-long songwriting challenge and I’ve hit the 14-song target but with a couple of disclaimers, so I’m still hoping to get a couple more things sketched out today. Kind of pleased with my output considering how shit work has been this month but on the other hand not sure if many of the songs will fit into my live set, which was my main objective with a couple of gigs coming up in March and April. Hopefully one or two will work, because I get bored of playing the same ones so quickly – I don’t know how the pros manage it!
From the last week I’ll share “Early Daze” from my solo output, a song about the mixed emotions of life in a new town: https://write.fawm.org/songs/313651
And also a new collaboration with my long-time transatlantic band-mate, “Sunday Night”: https://write.fawm.org/songs/313181
It’s weird that despite making music being a thing I Love To Do, I’m really looking forward to March and the pressure to be creative being off. Although as above, I have my first gig since last August so I still need to rework and practice for that.
Outside of music, I seem to be stacking up the weird health complaints and I’m trying to find a new (used) car but struggling to settle on exactly what I want, spending large chunks of money on unreliable machinery stresses me the fuck out.
This might be more than I should be saying anywhere outside the virtual office but…my company is unwinding any hint of DEI. Somewhere some lawyers are probably telling us “better safe than sorry.” Even though we are not a federal agency. Even though a court ruled for the moment that the executive order is not allowed. I know the MAGAs and the Project 2025 people are coming for us. And I think we should go down fighting. At the very least, if they want to come after us for “illegal” multiculturalism, let them and then we will change the rules. Till then, we should be refusing. But we aren’t. Honestly, though, our DEI commitment has been paper thin anyway. And we seem really stuck on how to draw diverse audiences anyway. But that doesn’t mean I am happy about our lack of fight on this. Alas, I am not in a position to say anything. I can only hope someone who is, does.
Otherwise a quietish week. Work has been surprisingly slow, and not a lot going on at home. But a quiet week can be welcome.
Where I work has been quietly rephrasing things and not really changing anything yet, especially since some of the places where we would be pushing inclusion we just…need warm bodies in. We’re not turning white men away, we don’t have any of them either.
I’m so tired and angry.
I don’t think I’ve had a chance to write one of these posts all year. There’s been a lot going on.
Work has been very busy. I really struggled toward the end of 2024. My mental health always struggles with the holiday season, and then I actually got sick for two solid weeks after my trip, which meant no exercise, which took a toll on my physical health, which also took a further toll on my mental health. I was struggling with a lot, including my work– both getting it done well and showing up on time.
So my performance was kinda tanking and I’ve had to get it together. On top of all of that, two of our associates are out on parental leave right now, so there’s been even more work to pick up. The upshot of all this is, I’ve not only had to get my own performance together, but I’ve also had to have a bit of a crash course in a few other tasks on the job. I started as a writer here, and I’ve basically had to cram in a lot of on-the-job learning this year for client interaction and our data / analytical side of things, too.
But the hardest part honestly hasn’t been the work, it’s been the lack of sleep (and the stress about that leading to more lack of sleep). I’m already not much of a morning person, and being behind all the other offices and most of the clients, time-zone wise, has made for some very early mornings. And my insurance doesn’t want to cover my sleeping meds until I hit my deductible, which means I haven’t been able to afford staying stocked up on them. (I have enough other shit going on right now that I’ll probably hit my deductible soon, but let’s put a pin in that for now.) So, while I’ve gotten adjusted to having a bigger workload, and I’m actually enjoying the kind of work I’m doing right now, I still feel like I’m going to crack up soon if I don’t find a way to get to bed earlier and get better sleep.
But I do like the work I’m doing. Obviously you all know what a great writer I am, but technical writing doesn’t suit me so much– in part because in a lot of cases I didn’t work closely with the client, and figuring out what exactly they do on my own and then putting it into words can be a real drain. I wasn’t kidding on some of the on-the-job crash course stuff, though– I had a 7 AM client meeting a couple of weeks ago my boss was late to and I basically had to conduct it with no prior experience doing so until she showed up.
I’m not worried about having to rise to the occasion; that’s never been a problem for me when I need to. (Getting better at rising above the occasion when I don’t need to, that’s still a work in progress.) It’s just been a whole lot thrown at me, and the sleep aspect is giving me more struggles than I would have otherwise.
Oh, on top of this, I’ve been having nerve issues in my elbows, which apparently stem from problems in both my elbows and my shoulders, so I’ve been going to physical therapy weekly for that. On top of my weekly mental therapy. (I at least did find a therapist I really like and who seems to get me.) And I’m getting surgery on April 1 to get a cyst removed from my wrist. There’s no greater concern with it, it’s just been steadily getting worse the last few years and when it swells up it really affects my ability to do things. Anyway, hence the above comments about hitting my deductible very soon.
Well, I think that’s about the extent of my problems I feel comfortable writing about. On the bright side, I’ve been– with some admitted fits and starts due to the aforementioned lack of sleep– getting back into my regular workout routine, which I’m still nowhere near my max, but just doing it regularly improves my physical and especially my mental health. Now I just gotta find some lower-impact cardio on the regular and maybe some dietary changes.
On top of that, I’ve finally been feeling like I’m in a good enough place mentally to get back to poker. Not just mentally well enough to play well, but actually excited about getting back in the game after a long hiatus. Made two final tables in a Sunday session but finished 5th and 6th– disappointing as opposed to 1st/1st, but still profitable and encouraging. And ClubWPT has launched a new real-money site that, from what I’ve seen and heard, has some very soft play more akin to the boom days… so I might even check out the cash games there and see if I can win some steady money that way on top of the tournaments.
Year of the Month update!
March is going to be Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 4th: Lauren James: The Most Dangerous Game
Mar. 10th: Sam Scott: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Mar. 11th: Bridgett Taylor: Something Fresh
Mar. 20th: Cori Domschot: Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Mar. 24th: Tristan J. Nankervis – Birth of a Nation
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 27th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
And in April, we’ll be movin’ on up to 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
Apr. 16th: Sam Scott: Spongebob Season 1, Wakko’s Wish, Elmo in Grouchland, and/or Bartok the Magnificent
I’ll take Wodehouse’s Something New/Something Fresh for March 11.