The Friday Article Roundup
Kicking it with this week's pop culture writing from around the web.
This week it’s:
Send articles for inclusion throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At The Hollywood Reporter, Rebecca Keegan interviews Spike Lee about his return to Cannes, his reunion with Denzel Washington and this “year of living dangerously”:
There are things I won’t do. Can’t do it. And some of that stuff might’ve been to my benefit, but I’ve just got some stuff I can’t do. There are things that — I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Have my films remade, this or that, can’t do it. And artists can do what they want to do. But for me, I just could not live with myself. Have you seen the poster for this movie? There’s a quote on it: “All money ain’t good money.” And look, people have got to do what they’ve got to do. I understand it. But I just think I can’t do it. All money ain’t good money. I’ve got to give love to Mr. Kurosawa. That’s what I love about the premise of this film. It’s a moral dilemma. You’re jammed up. And there are consequences of your actions.
Crooked Marquee‘s Sara Batkie looks back at The Day of the Locust fifty years later:
In essence, this is a hang-out film about people who’ve been hung out to dry. Despite where Locust takes place, very little screen time is devoted to being on set; when it is, Schlesinger makes sure to highlight the artifice of the endeavor. Where others may not be able to resist the period’s old Hollywood glamor, Conrad Hall’s woozy, Vaseline-smeared cinematography emphasizes the era’s seediness rather than masking it. The portents of disaster are inescapable, even before the reveal that Tod is working on a film about Waterloo. When he courts Faye, they drive by other, wealthier people’s houses, locked out of the lives they dream of leading. Meanwhile, the constant whir of the sprinklers in the courtyard lawn sound like the titular insect and Hitler’s on the newsreels.
Nathan Wainstein muses on the difficulties of second person narratives in video games through the two Last of Us games [warning: spoilers for both video games]:
Games like The Last of Us do not merely accentuate our incapacity, common to almost all other narrative forms, to make choices for the characters at pivotal moments in the plot. They also put us in the deeply strange position of acting as those characters with only a limited understanding of their choices in general. We control their bodies without ever really knowing what they’re thinking. Psychological opacity, not identification, is thus the true affordance of video game narratives, and despite whatever tricks games may use to alleviate this disjunction—to simulate novelistic or filmic interiority by having the protagonist talk to themselves, write journal entries, or dream (all techniques that Part II employs)—the weirdness remains. To “be” a video game character is to experience a state of absolute psychological dissonance.
For Sterogum, Tom Breihan talks about the necessity and strategy of creating a transcendent stadium-show by Kendrick Lamar and SZA:
SZA does all the pop-star-spectacle stuff. She has a unifying theme for her whole set — her famously peculiar love of bugs, which makes for some big visual flourishes. I guess I’m about to spoil some of the production choices of the Grand National tour. Should I be worried about that? I went out of my way not to check out any setlists before I saw the show, since I wanted to feel some element of surprise. And a big stadium show can be spoiled, since the scope of the spectacle means that the act has to pretty much do the exact same set every night. But if you’ve read this far down into a Grand National tour review, you might want to know about some of the things that happen on that stage. So without getting too deep into it, SZA rides on a big animatronic ant at one point, and there’s also a bit where she’s got on moth wings and she flies up above the stage in a really long skirt. Stuff like that. It’s fun.
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.
C. D. Ploughman’s ProfileMore articles by C. D. Ploughman
The life and career of a man who found the extraordinary in the ordinary.
The Friday Article Roundup
An assembly line of this week's pop culture writing from around the Internet.
Lunch Links
State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
And It is a material presenter of this week's pop culture writing from around the Internet.
The Friday Article Roundup
A catty roundup of great pop culture writing from the past week.
Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Johnny Dangerously – A silly, periodically very funny ZAZ-like parody that pulls off the very difficult trick of staying entertaining all the way through in that milieu. Definitely not among the classics – for just one thing the music is working very much against the best routines – but good for a few laughs if you happen across it.
I’ll say this for the music–every time someone has posted about this recently, I’ve immediately gotten the tinkly “I want to live … dangerously” bit stuck in my head.
The bit with the car changing color is right out of Ragtime, IIRC, which had been a big hit a few years before.
I like this because without being sloppy it seems like everybody’ having fun, like the “looks like Johnny’s gettin’ laid!” line.
Babylon 5 — more conspiracies and amusingly more redshirted minorities — I think the show is very purposefully casting diverse, moreso than most 90s shows, but this is mostly for background/tertiary characters and they’re the ones who are most likely to get offed. And the last few episodes have been very Earth-centric, didn’t this show used to have aliens on it?
Shorts by Jem Cohen — MTV, Criterion-style! “Free” is a one-minute abstract agitprop, I liked it, and three music videos go in very different directions than typical video styles. “Nice Evening, Transmission Down” is an extended video of a Sparklehorse song, partially performed live by Mark Linkous in a field and then heard over ghostly footage of him in the studio, all filmed on Super 8 and haunting. “Opened Ending” takes Jessica Moss’ droney string-heavy piece (referred to as post-rock by the channel, it is on the chamber music rather than Slint side of things) and places it over liminal New York City spaces — dudes sleeping on the subway, diners closing down, an eerie water tower isolated against looming clouds, a cat hiding underneath a car. The kind of thing you can zone out to and that isn’t bad, because you snap to in a new space with the music tugging you along. My favorite was “Aerie,” Jim White on drums and Melissa Anderson on guitar doing the real post-rock bit as a young boy tries to lean sticks on each other somewhere upstate, with shots looking down and through the small town the boy is above — the music is more my speed and Cohen has a knack for angles and compositions that feel considered but not studied.
Quinns Quest Reviews: Delta Green & Impossible Landscapes
Outside of one abortive attempt in grad school where no one really knew what they were doing, I’ve never played a TTRPG. I kind of want to! I’m intrigued! I’ve just never had a group of friends who were all simultaneously into the idea. But I watch Quinns’s reviews of them anyway because Quinns is one of my favorite people on the internet: he was an early writer for Rock Paper Shotgun (one of my favorite sites for PC gaming reviews), and then a founding member of the excellent boardgame review site Shut Up and Sit Down; now he has his own channel where he focuses on TTRPGs, with all the S1 reviews framed as though they’re ’80s VHS tapes you sent away for and the S2 reviews (thus far) framed as though they’re CD-ROM specials, all the better to amplify the kitsch, lean into the history of tabletop roleplaying, and make the whole thing funnier and more visually interesting. Anyway, Quinns is delightful, and I really like how he lets himself pivot to fields he’s grown more interested in instead of staying stuck in a particular mode.
He’s frank about Delta Green’s failings–a whole lot of needless material in the (sometimes very dry) DM’s guide, for example–but praises it for taking Cthulu-style storytelling into the realm of the gritty, sometimes despairing spy thriller. Impossible Landscapes is a pre-written adventure (focusing on The King in Yellow) that he particularly loves, and it’s interesting to hear him discuss the differences between being a DM creating an adventure (more like writing a play) and one running a very well-done pre-written adventure (more like directing a play). Also cool to hear from the friends he plays with, complete with funny on-screen notes about their play styles.
I will promote Quinns by recommending his great half-hour video for Shut Up and Sit Down on “How to Get Into Tabletop RPGs.” I love this, and it makes me wish all over again that I could talk people into playing one of these with me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9NtdF51GWE
The Mule
But in the meantime, I do watch movies with friends, which is also nice! This was our shared viewing for last night.
I know this was a true story, but there’s still something intrinsically hilarious about everyone in Clint Eastwood’s character’s life giving him the heartless careerist treatment–you missed every important event your family ever had! You were always on the road! You always cared more about your job than you did about us!–that movies usually reserve for high-powered businessmen, cops, lawyers, doctors, etc., but here he was just a guy who grew very nice day lilies and would skip out on his daughter’s wedding to go win awards at flower conventions. Big Horticulture claims another!
Anyway, I technically have a number of bones to pick here–the cartel keeps making wildly dumb decisions, Bradley Cooper is much more of an asshole than the movie seems to think, and the ongoing “joke” of Eastwood’s character breezily saying offensive things to various marginalized people without meaning it feels like Eastwood sprinkled Gran Torino over this for seasoning (but it made more sense, and served more of a function, in that movie than it does here, where it just feels ill-conceived and offensive). But this is a strangely likable movie anyhow, partly because the fish-out-of-water element of a 90-year-old man becoming a drug mule while singing “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” on his muling trips is fun, partly because every time Earl (Eastwood) uses people’s perceptions of him to get away with something or to smooth something over is intrinsically satisfying (loved him bribing the cops with caramel corn and fooling a police dog with Bengay), and partly just because Eastwood’s fundamental competence makes it all easy to slip into. I was lukewarm on the family stuff, but I did really like the bonds Earl formed with (most of) his cartel handlers. Some beautiful landscapes, too.
Lesson learned: don’t go into the flower business. It will destroy you and your family.
“there’s still something intrinsically hilarious about everyone in Clint Eastwood’s character’s life giving him the heartless careerist treatment–you missed every important event your family ever had! You were always on the road! You always cared more about your job than you did about us!–that movies usually reserve for high-powered businessmen, cops, lawyers, doctors, etc., but here he was just a guy who grew very nice day lilies and would skip out on his daughter’s wedding to go win awards at flower conventions.”
A little while back I watched Absolute Power, ready for some Klassic Klint, and was disappointed — the anti-Clinton stuff is very funny but the movie is pokier than I liked and what really drags it down is the stuff with Clint’s thief and his estranged daughter. Clint was Never There for her (in jail, for one) etc., but he Still Cares and late in the movie the daughter finds out the Clint was Still Keeping An Eye On Her All These Years and is forgiving. Bah! Eastwood was a notoriously shitty husband and father in terms of skipping out on his family to do his movies, so this read as really bullshit wish fulfillment to me. At this point, Eastwood and his kids seem to be getting along and he casts them in his movies, that’s great, but to finally get to the point, I thought this aspect of The Mule worked really well. Clint the mule is personable but is most comfortable doing work that is not with people, that makes him a good gardener who can speak to plants and great mule that lugs stuff around, but he won’t do that work with his family. I think he’s happy at the end, and that is pretty grim.
EDIT: very much agreed on Casually Racist Clint, that worked very well in Gran Torino but not here. Casually Not Racist Clint in Cry Macho is much better.
That’s a great point about him being at his best either when he’s on his own–cultivating plants, appreciating solitude, amusing himself–or in short bursts; being an (idealized) prison gardener where he can grow things and then have one short family visit once a month probably does work for him, and there is something sort of morbid about those contented shots of him at the end. I do want the guy to be happy at that point, so I’m glad he is, but it’s a neat illustration of what he actually values, no matter what he told Bradley Cooper.
The Delta Green setting came after I stopped playing CoC. But I’ve read some Delta Green fiction and really like it. Interested in this video.
He actually recommends coming at it through the fiction, IIRC, since the manual is heavy sledding at points, but he says that if you come to the fiction first, you’ll probably want to play something set in that world.
Kojak, “I Was Happy Where I Was” – Someone’s killing drug dealers and numbers runners and the like in the barrio, but no one is talking since no one trusts the cops. Kojak finds a cop who grew up there but left there after high school to go back and go undercover. Naturally, he discovers that the killings are being done by his old gang, only his old gang has turned vigilante. The story tries to examine questions of identity and loyalty, and of the failures of the White Man to create a safe neighborhood in the barrio, but it’s all a bit ham-fisted, if well acted. The filming is once again in NYC – I think we have only two episodes so far this season noticeably filmed in LA – and it’s now winter. The scenes shot in Central Park with the bare trees and faint sun are, for 70s TV, quite gorgeous.
MLB, Phils vs Rays – Stayed long enough to see the Phils mount a comeback. I don’t think I recognized a single Ray. The Phils I know, as a rival of the Mets, as a frequent playoff team, and as a team with a well produced broadcast. Tom McCarthy is a very good play by play man.
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Nine, “The Coming of Shadows”
Finally! Here we go! The plot is actually moving now, and everything immediately picks up. Stephen Furst has consistently been the weakest actor on the show, and even he improves drastically in a moving plot; his shifts from goofy overactor to a normal guy who recognises he’s in an apocalyptically bad situation – he’s looking at Londo like, “That’s the guy I’m going to hell for.”
G’kar rules. It’s really hard to pick between him and Delenn as my favourite character, and they’re both cool mainly because of their actors, and each actor is cool for different reasons. Andreas Katsulas plays G’kar as a full-on visionary; there’s a great moment early on where he initially loses his temper, then restrains himself as he figures out what’s happening and, more importantly, how he’s going to respond. If he’s one element of this show taken to an extreme, it’s the singular sense of vision – as he observes at one point, his path has become perfectly clear.
Meanwhile, Londo commits to a brutal, horrible action that pushes the galaxy into war; it’s vile and he knows it’s vile and he’s going to do it anyway because he just can’t resist. The ironic thing about Londo’s big heart is that he’s destroying himself for himself. It’s funny; technically, Londo’s action is completely pragmatic, if evil, and he’s revealing that he doesn’t have the stomach for pragmatism, and he’s clearly going to pay for it.
Meanwhile, Sinclair pops up! His scene is a fantastic way to keep Sinclair in the story without needing to have Michael O’Hare onscreen directly, it’s extremely clever and I love it. It turns Sinclair into a kind of spectre hanging over the story.
Us
Sadly, I have to with the grain here and consider this weaker than Get Out , though I do believe it isn’t overstuffed as some accused it of being. In fact, I think it’s kind of weak on ideas, losing any central metaphor that Get Out had but not replacing it with anything specific. The mythology is kind of cool but also aimless; one could project mental illness onto it but it lacks any plot cohesion. That said, Peele definitely has a gift for imagery – my favourite is the first guy to hold his hands out, waiting for the others, and the hands-across-America thing worked like a charm. He’s also got a gift for writing everyman protagonists; it helps that he certainly has a gift for casting them.
My big problem with Us is that it falls into a kind of logistical uncanny valley, where it gives so much explanation that the Tethered fall out of pure nightmare/”your psychological shadow” territory, but the explanation then invites more practical questions than it answers. “We’re mistreated, neglected doppelgangers of you who deserve as much as you but have had much less” works on an emotional level; bringing in where they were housed, how they survived, etc., and suddenly it has to work on a realistic level, but the story isn’t actually interested in thinking that through.
But yeah, fantastic imagery, incredible acting, excellent scares, some good jokes, etc., and I love the reveal about Adelaide/Red. I wish my weaker works were as good as Jordan Peele’s.
Winston Duke has been in some huge movies but he’s still undersung. He postures believably as an iron-fisted ruler in Black Panther and a dorky guy with Dad-bod in Us. How is this possible, I can only pull off one side of this equation.
Sinners rewatch in the theater! Think I’d agree with the “second half isn’t as good as the first” critique, but it’s still an overwhelming experience, and an interesting evaluation of not just cultural erasure (Remnick is genuine about not seeing race, he’s a vampire from a time before whiteness, and his people were also persecuted by men who used Christianity to justify their exploitation, but he also wants the Soviet Communist conception of race, where difference is subservient to the collective) but also the Christian concept of sin. Sammie chooses to be a sinner, he will not let go of the guitar and be a “righteous” man, in dominion of the earth and really other people, and while this may not actually make him happy, it’s the only path that is true to his individual soul. Interesting stuff, curious if Son of Griff has seen this yet. The “I Lied To You” scene again brought tears to my eyes, Gram Parsons’ “Great American Music” theory given the full weight of diaspora and time.
Live Music – Canadian punks PUP were the headliners, a solid band I’ve never completely clicked with, but I was there for their tour buddies Illuminati Hotties, meaning weirdly I got to see two favourite artists on two consecutive days, both of whom are from LA and both of whom required me to take a trip to Leeds. IH were outstanding and well worth the drive, local openers Goo were also very good and since the bulk of the audience was there for the headliners I got to be right at the front for “my” band and also leave a little early, hell yeah
Wooooo live music right at the front!!
Wooooooo live Canadian music!
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
This is so very much my shit. Deliberately using forward thinking technology to capture a reflection on old school Hollywood, but using that technology in a way that inherently creates distance from what’s on screen. This is a film designed to alienate, and you’re either on board and feel the pull of a compelling old school narrative (Ebert’s review suggests this would feel at home starring Lilian Gish) overcoming the standoffishness of the craft of filmmaking, or you think this is pretentious twaddle. I am the former. Von Trier’s unique brand of fuckery is something I quite enjoy, even as I acknowledge that he’s a shitty shitty person.
The Shrouds
I know people are generally meh on this, but it hit me in just the right way. This is a movie that ends with a dude so afraid of confrontation that he fucks off to Hungary. There’s a deep vein of comedy to be mined from Karsh dancing around the truth and going down rabbitholes of conspiracy theories. It’s almost like one of those laconic sunshine noirs like The Long Goodbye or The Big Lebowski. And to cite another Coen Brothers film, I literally walked out of the film saying out loud, “the Russians?” I think distance from people seeing this as Cronenberg processing his grief through a self-insert fantasy will help the film age well.
Love Dancer in the Dark. It really does work simultaneously as both forcefully conveyed melodrama and Dogme 95 naturalism, and both styles enhance each other for me: you get the extremes of emotion in a way that feels unvarnished and close to home. And now I need to listen to “I’ve Seen It All” again.
Andor
Season 2, Episode 9. “Welcome to the Rebellion”. First time.
The fallout of the Ghorman massacre hits Coruscant, and Mon Mothma decides she can’t take it anymore. “Decides” might be a stretch, more like she reaches a point of no return
and Genevieve O’Reilly really sells her growing shock and desperation, and her reserve of composure when it comes to do the one thing she has left in her power to do and speak up in the Senate floor. I read her firing her assistant as part genuine hurt that he’s been a double agent for Luthen and part giving him an out he ends up not taking.
The middle section of the episode is the show intertwining two of its best strengths: a rousing political speech and spy action with mounting tension and rousing beats. I liked the charge of O’Reilly and Diego Luna finally meeting, the latter pulling off the extraction thanks to his characterstic steady nerves and quick draw. Really dig how the writing in this sequence serves the action well but vividly conveys character even in the bit players, like the ISB officers trying and failing to shut down Mothma’s speech or Luthen’s allies sabotaging them. There’s a lot of emphasis in this episode on how rebel subterfuge goes deper than we see on screen, like with Mothma’s assistant but also
.
As an aside, ever since her appearance in Return of the Jedi I’d always wondered how a Senator breaks off from the Empire to become a Rebel leader and pulls off a clean getaway, and this lives up pretty well to that idea. Prequels are always an iffy proposition but they can work when you latch into some genuinely interesting notion in the original work and use it for dramatic action, but there has to be some potency or potential in that notion, like this one. Or, like in the work that got the Andor ball going, “Who actually stole the Death Star plans, and how?”
The last third of the episode gets us back to Yavin, and a pretty big breaking point for Bix and Cassian. I was really sold on it thanks to Arjona’s loving delivery of the moment and the knowledge that she is right to do what she does but it really can only end in heartbreak and tragedy, and may in fact just ensured it will.
AHH “Beast In View” (s2e21) – Helen Clarvoe is being harassed by Dorothy Johnson. Dorothy blames Helen for the break-up of her wedding engagement. Helen hires lawyer Paul to put an end to the harassment. In his investigation Paul begins to believe that Dorothy has murdered a photographer. Eventually Dorothy holds Helen captive at gunpoint in Helen’s apartment. Paul arrives outside the apartment with the police. They hear Helen and Dorothy arguing inside. Then another woman arrives claiming to be Dorothy. Things start making sense.
It’s based on the Edgar Award winning novel of the same name by Margaret Millar. Like many of the hour long Hitchcock episodes this suffers from too much padding missing the tight construction of the half-hour episodes. Too much time is spent with the photographer for one. The story reminded me of Norman’s relationship with his mother in Psycho. With that you might see where this is headed. It’s not hard to figure out early on. Joan Hackett is amazing in the dual role of a woman suffering from schizophrenia. Kevin McCarthy as the lawyer looking confused and flabbergasted – the best McCarthy – is great. But what makes the run time tolerable to some degree is the effect in the mirror conveying Helen’s duality. It has a kind of a pre-Bergman’s Persona montage thing going on. Also, proto-supermodel Peggy Moffitt has a small role. But when she is on screen her striking beauty becomes the focus, stealing every scene she is in.
The book this is based on is fantastic, strong recommend. Millar took no prisoners with her writing there.
What Did We Read?
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon – I had a teacher in high school who wrote horror novels on the side, was a huge King fan and – this was shortly after its publication – declared this one of his best. I read it soon after that and I think like a lot of people, enjoyed it but found it a little slight compared to the usual master of 500+ page horror. Coming back to it now, I see she’s right. Much as I love sprawling King, there’s a rare few books where he narrows his aim and hits the target with impact – thinking of (in order of length) “The Jaunt,” “The Mist,” and The Long Walk. This is better than all of those, this is exquisite. King’s description has never been better and his daring is there. His limited omniscient protagonist is a 9-year-old girl but it never feels like he’s putting on a falsetto or making her age elastic to accommodate the plot (King with his unfiltered running of the mind is uniquely suited to tapping into what a kid sounds like internally). The pacing is perfect and the themes gently massaged in so that when a gesture returns in the final moment it brought a tear to my eye. When King hits it out of the park you give it the best review he could imagine: this is a good book.
Oh, hell yeah. I adore this one and reread it pretty often. Both the authentic wilderness survival horror elements (like the berries that make poor Trish so sick) and “the God of the Lost” are terrifying, and agreed that the whole thing is beautifully paced and compelling. Glad to know I’m not the only one who would put this high up on my list of favorite King novels.
I have long said that King leaves all other YA writers in the dust and “it never feels like he’s putting on a falsetto or making her age elastic to accommodate the plot (King with his unfiltered running of the mind is uniquely suited to tapping into what a kid sounds like internally)” nails why — he is so good at this, and GWLTG’s straightforward story keeps that skill disciplined in a way his more sprawling stuff dilutes and emphasizes it in a way even his other great works necessarily sidetrack because of other protagonists (thinking of Mark Petrie in Salem’s Lot here). But yes, this is top-tier work from him, and special kudos for the perfect Guy-ness of Tom Gordon as the ballplayer to hold onto, exactly the kind of favorite player a kid would have and more resonant than a famous person who would be recognized years down the and seem cornier for that.
He’s also unafraid to make his references specific. A few music references that Only 90s Kids Remember and a number of advertising and radio personality references that Only 90s Kids Who Tuned Into AM Radio on the East Coast Remember.
And is there a more specific reference than Tom “Flash” Gordon, who was popular in Red Sox fandom (and pretty good) but not necessarily known to every baseball fan (never mind King readers who love horror and wish he’d shut up about the Sawx). But it’s more interesting than, say, the girl who loved Pedro Martinez.
Definitely dodged some Steroid Era bullets in the selection. The Girl Who Loved Mark McGwire just wouldn’t seem right.
I do remember chuckling at the youth in Under The Dome digging LCD Soundsystem, which struck as being not out of the realm of the possible (at least more possible than the dome itself) but King really pushing up to the edge of being “with it” on youth tastes. But! Like you say, he traffics in the real (unless art/artists are the subject and must be necessarily be faked) and that ultimately gives his work the power and association of his readers’ relationships with that art, so much better than authors who invent fake bands and sound like dipshits. My favorite example of this is the running Jeopardy! bit in “The Moving Finger,” it helps ground the ridiculous (perfectly so) horror premise in normalcy and of course make its ridiculous horror land harder.
The Mourner, by Richard Stark — a reread but for the first time in a long time and Parker is maybe at his harshest here? He tortures a woman (who is tied into crooks trying to kill him, but still) half to death, to the point where her confederates finish the job, and is pretty menacing to another woman (who to be fair has been fucking him over pretty hard, setting up the plot of the book) — the rest of the series pulls back from this direction. Lots of good stuff and an antagonist who is pretty clever, just not clever enough.
James, by Percival Everett — the logline is “Huck Finn retold from Jim’s perspective” and that is not quite accurate. First, although some things are one to one (the discovery of a certain body, for example) there are some significant diversions/reworkings, especially and not surprisingly at all around the end. But more importantly is the tone and style, Huck Finn is adventurous and often comic and rollicking and James is a survival narrative. James the narrator has very little time for description when he has to devote nearly every moment to staying alive, a good chunk of which comes via Everett’s big stylistic swing of having James and other slaves speak in Twain’s dialect to white people (and said dialect was praised as very realistic at the time) while speaking in proper or at least casually correct English to each other — fucking this up and talking like a person to white folks will give the game away. White people almost uniformly speak in uncouth English, for even greater contrast, and this points to the ideas of mixing and separation that animate the book. At one point Jim is wearing blackface over whiteface over his own black face as he performs in a minstrel band of other white people in blackface; he is assisted by a black guy in the band who is passing as white. It is absurd and horrible, like the idea of a “good” master or more viciously that the North is safer for a runaway than the South, that there is any material difference between the two. Yet white people define themselves by difference and so must their victims, to the point of displacement and disassociation. As the title suggests, this story is how James redefines himself, but it is not a triumph.
Still have to read James but my dad sent me four or five Everett books and none of them have missed. (I Am Not Sidney Poitier is straight up one of the funniest ones I’ve read in years.)
This is what I’ve heard about Everett — although not a lot of humor here, understandably.
I mean, some molasses thick irony too that Everett has written about exactly the kind of experimental Black writer he is getting respectability only when he creates something the white establishment will adore (though I assume James is actually good, Everett seems like a guy who could actually take “rewrite a classic from a new POV” and make it powerful as hell).
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson – The key takeaway is that the deck was stacked against the two anarchists, as the evidence was spotty and contradictory, as the establishment in Massachusetts was probably never going to give any immigrants a fair hearing, and as the system itself was designed to prop itself up. (A hearing about misconduct by the trial judge was conducted by…the trial judge!) But Watson also makes it clear we don’t know the truth and never will, and that there is at least some evidence Sacco (but not Vanzetti) was part of the robbery and murder. Watson does a good job with the research, and is a generally good writer, though occasionally trips over himself trying to be colorful. He’s also not quite successful in explaining the zeitgeist of the time, but in concert with Bryson’s One Summer, I have a pretty good idea of America in 1927.
Butter, by Asako Yuzuki
Unusual Japanese crime novel, one that is far less interested in crime than in the way its criminal’s violation of social and gender norms–and a cultural and personal obsession with that violation, constantly shifting the meaning and value of it –provides an opportunity for one journalist and her circle of friends to redefine themselves. It’s like if talking to Hannibal Lecter encouraged Clarice Starling to cook more, shake off caring what other people thought about her, and also open herself up to greater vulnerability, and maybe Hannibal killed people and maybe he didn’t, maybe he only caused emotional damage, but also that havoc was worth examining in its own right, but also maybe his victims sort of had it coming, but also maybe they didn’t? And the human heart is a mystery, but you can learn to appreciate butter and be true to your authentic self. A potential serial killer’s mind games and a semi-boyfriend’s obsession with a teen idol group and his scorn for his favorite gaining weight (as the protagonist is also doing) both have equal narrative significance, and the latter gets far more thematic and emotional significance.
I realize this all sounds like it shouldn’t work, but I enjoyed it a lot: it’s great on food porn, good on messy ambiguity about who people are and how much we can understand them (and what we can learn from them whether we understand them or not), and intriguing in its protagonist’s halting but ultimately courageous efforts to figure out how she can best be happy and make others happy, as well as where her responsibilities really lie. Very glad this got a translation.
This Wretched Valley, by Jenny Kiefer
Horror novel with a Descent-like premise that made it instantly intriguing to me: seeking to “discover” a new rock formation in rural Kentucky, a group of grad students and climbers head out into wilderness that is actually cursed and malevolent.
I hated this book so much. It’s such a short novel to have practically become my nemesis over the last week, but that’s how much I had to drag my way through it. (I have to get better at putting books down when they’re not working for me.) The characters are so flat and insubstantial that I found it impossible to care about them, so them mechanically moving from one well-enough-described horror to the next didn’t matter at all. The opening also makes it explicit how (most of) their bodies are discovered, which, while sacrificing a ton of tension, is supposed to amp up the dread, but again, the characters were voids, so I didn’t dread their fates coming to them. I was just waiting for us to get to the skeleton factory or the “body surgically gutted” factory. It also does something I almost always hate in horror, where the characters’ minds are messed with to the extent that they can be made to think or do almost anything at any time, and their perceptions can’t be trusted. This absolutely does not help with their flatness, because now, in addition to being poorly developed, they’re puppets being yanked around. There’s nothing coherent about what they would do or feel, because that can change depending on what the setting/author wants. So there’s no there there.
The most aggravating example of the way the book distanced me from its characters came at what should have been an emotional, devastating moment. Luke had his beloved dog Slade go missing early in the trip, and he already felt that his professional climber girlfriend, Dylan, wasn’t as sympathetic about it as she should have been (she was more focused on what this trip could mean for her new sponsorship deal). Then he discovers Slade, dead, with Dylan’s knife in him. Dylan is currently being chased by a ghost, and she thinks Luke is coming to her rescue, but now Luke is determined to kill her himself. But the author is so focused on evoking tragedy that she gets out ahead of anything I might feel or suspect to tell me that actually, the dog is not Slade, and a clearheaded Luke would realize that, and the knife isn’t even real/Dylan’s, and this is all just the woods manipulating them. So I don’t actually get to share in Luke’s experience at all, I just get to pity him for having it foisted on him. (The prose was not beautiful enough to pull off making that moving in its own right, either.)
Honestly, a lot of this is competently written, and it’s a first novel, so many of its faults are probably growing pains. I’m not at all ruling out Kiefer growing into being an author I might really like. But this was just … the exact opposite of almost everything I want in a) horror and b) art.
“I was just waiting for us to get to the skeleton factory” I am dead. So I guess you now have a skeleton at least? Savage stuff that sounds deserved, I feel like our good buddy Stephen King has played with that “evoking tragedy” mode although I’ll be damned if I can remember where, but I think that works best in a very limited dose. Here, it sounds like the author has realized the same problem you describe (all dream = no tension) so she has to go straight for the tragedy, and it’s a cop-out instead of a recognition. Your description made me think not of The Descent but The Ruins, I still haven’t seen the movie but the book is excellent and I’m gaining more appreciation for Scott Smith because he pulls absolutely none of this shit, it’s all ruthless narrative.
Bits of the setup actually did remind me a lot of The Ruins, and agreed on how great and ruthless that book is: I should read it again to get the taste of this out of my mouth. To add insult to injury, there’s even a bit here that recalls the excellent, devastating part of The Ruins where one character keeps cutting into himself to try to get out the vines he can see under his skin, only it makes me shudder to think about that, and this is just a whole lot of nothing.
I think you’re right that King does go to that well sometimes, but he does it much better and in much more, as you said, controlled doses–usually it’s accentuating the tragedy (or adding a bittersweet/melancholy edge to a particular scene) rather than trying to GameGenie it into existence.
You’re thinking of Pet Sematary, because I complained about it there – though it wasn’t enough to ruin the book for me – and you defended it essentially on this angle.
Yes, that’s it — the Gage dream scene.
“It’s like if talking to Hannibal Lecter encouraged Clarice Starling to cook more, shake off caring what other people thought about her, and also open herself up to greater vulnerability”
Suggested title: Eat, Prey, Liver
”The Unnameable”, HP Lovecraft
A weak entry from Lovecraft, though that’s kind of the point; it’s a joke you’ll see coming from the title. But it does point to Lovecraft having pet themes and plot structures; this is a fairly typical “guy goes underground and gets a horror” structure he’s used since the start of his career with the flavor of a self-aware joke about a criticism he sometimes got. I do enjoy an author having a bit of fun working criticism of their story into a story from time to time; it helps that Lovecraft took this onboard and wrote real stories in-between.
Have to head back to work but enacted the “Creep at Window going Ha Ha Ha Yes!” meme as I reach the Fall to Power section of The Power Broker. As Caro observes, only a man of equal vision and arrogance – and more money – Nelson Rockefeller could destroy Robert Moses, though Moses does also destroy himself with his pure fucking pride. Very Walter White in that moment of resigning and expecting his bluff to work.
I didn’t think about this until right now, but I love how his failed bluff with Rockefeller recalls Caro’s opening to the book, where college-aged Moses threatens to resign from the swim team if they won’t let him be flagrantly unethical, and the swim captain is like, “Uh, okay.”
Oh I didn’t either and you have a great point.
James S.A. Corey, Cibola Butn — the fourth Expanse novel (of nine), and they remain gripping reads, but they’re also sort of all the same — humans in extreme situations let their passions get the better of them and they start killing each other for no reason, then there’s a catastrophe related to the alien technology, and most of the humans stop killing each other to deal with that, except there’s one or two particular guys who don’t.
Ha, imagining the characters getting to the catastrophe part and drawing straws to see who gets to keep killing for no reason while the others have to do damage control.
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett – I knew this mainly by reputation as one of the most brutal classic crime novels and also one that many have borrowed from but nobody has fully adapted. It absolutely delivers on the brutality, this is a Molotov cocktail of a detective novel in which the protagonist quickly realises the best way to obtain his goal is to burn it all down. Absolutely fantastic, Hammett’s use of language here is sensational and following his nameless protagonist through the devastation is a hell of a good time.
Fuck yeah, Red Harvest! There are a ton of great short stories about the Op too, but he never goes off as much as he does here.
Burning Chrome – Thirty years ago when I first read William Gibson it felt like reading Matrix code or a “Licensing Agreement” to a program. When I first read Neuromancer somebody older than myself told me if I understood what was happening the first time through I wasn’t reading it correctly. I understood a drop in the ocean of something bigger I didn’t understand, I’m now up to a 1/4 of a cup, maybe. The stories are conceptually stylish noir. They are metaphor rich and Gibson uses “chrome” and “neon” at least once in every story. A lot of the stories deal with technology in the neoliberal world, amplifying the real while at the same time disintegrating the social and dehumanizing the user. Everybody is a slave to the tech, a victim of it or trying to make a quick buck off it. This has all come to pass. There are at least three or four stories here that spawned movies. All are good. My favorite of these is still the “Gernsback Continuum”. “Red Star, Winter Orbit” feels like a Lem adapted Tarkovsky film. But my favorites are still “Dogfight” and the titular story.
I picked this up immediately after reading and loving Neuromancer, and I really need to get to it. I’ve read a couple of the stories already (slowly making my way through Gardner Dozois’s Best Of anthologies, and Gibson unsurprisingly turns up a lot), at least, and “Dogfight” is a particular favorite. I know it’s basically an SF-reskinned version of The Hustler, but it’s so clever and so good.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Headed up to visit the parents this weekend. Supposed to get oriented at the new job next week at which point I think it will feel real enough to talk about in more depth. Also had some positive feedback on my documentary which will hopefully lead to it actually being available. A couple wins this week! Focusing on feeling good about those instead of getting anxious about the next steps.
A week later, and my company and all of public media have concluded that Trump’s executive order is totally illegal since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a government agency and simply does not fall under presidential purview. So off to the courts we go. Of course, we all know that Trump cares not for the law, but my guess is that whatever monies CPB has either in its coffers or has distributed will be spent. And then come the fall, we see if the people in the GOP who support at least some of PBS’s mission will get the funding put back into the budget. (Rumor has it that the bill to claw back the money already distributed was not put forward because there weren’t enough votes. So maybe a tiny glimmer of hope, not that I think Trump will then respect a budget even from his own party.) All that said, there is some worst case planning underway.
Beyond that, one Board meeting over and one to go. Too many moving parts. And beyond that, I have been waiting for two weeks for minutes from someone on our advisory board. The whole idea of him taking minutes is so I don’t have to. Maybe that is not a good idea after all.
Meanwhile, my father in law ended his visit. He seems old for the first time. He was dealing with various ailments, and after telling us he never gets jet lag, he was seriously jet lagged when he got home. Plus I think the scare that let him needing a pacemaker has added stress to his body. He turned 79 last weekend, and it shows a lot more than 78 did. Plus his memory is starting to slip. There is nothing here that by itself is cause for deep concern. But time is passing.
Aside from the agenda and the cruelty (massive things to put aside), just the absolute shoddiness of planning means all government agencies and, I imagine, public broadcasting stations are on constant pins and needles which makes for a poor environment for productivity in a time when they’re supposedly being encouraged to do more with less. Is this what roughly half of people think leadership looks like?
Honestly been spending a lot of spare time calling my senators and reps about Palestine being starved to death by the Israeli government, even walking to my city councilwoman’s office only to find it closed. Might go to a City Council meeting though I can feel the justice sensitivity burnout coming. It’s taking an emotional toll but given the US government’s full complicity (of either fucking party, cannot stress enough that Biden is a war criminal) in their deaths and genocide, I owe these people my help.
I forgot to mention this. I got a work call from Wes Anderson. Not that Wes Anderson, of course. Rather, the curator of a historical society in the Dakotas, asking for help getting rights to screen something. Amazingly, both he and the society still use Hotmail addresses. I mentioned this to a friend, and she posited quite accurately that she could easily see the famous Wes Anderson having a hobby of being a curator of a small historical society in the Dakotas and have a Hotmail address.
I still have a Hotmail address!
Given the size of his ensembles, statistically, one of us had to be a Wes Anderson character.
Had a brief but intense virus / flu thing last week just as I entered a run of many gigs in few days. Was worried it would make me miss them all but after making sure to rest hard last weekend I managed to bounce back pretty quick which is a huge relief, aside from the disappointment it would have also been a massive waste of money. Luckily I also booked yesterday and today off work following the two out of town gigs so I haven’t had to work through any remaining fatigue after long drives either. Hopefully will be back to 100% after this weekend and can get back into some regular exercise etc. as I was doing pretty well there before illness derailment.
My cousin and his wife were in town for a day last weekend and we did all the tourist stuff. It really is funny seeing the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument through the eyes of someone who had never seen them before instead of the way I usually see them these days, to wit, as a landmark to remind me where to turn left.
Spike can’t possibly go to Cannes as long as the Knicks are still in the playoffs!
Came to this late, but Steve Hyden interviews Anthony Fantano, a guy who does extremely popular music criticism via YouTube and thus a person I was primed to hate but who has a lot of interesting things to say:
https://uproxx.com/music/anthony-fantano-interview-music-criticism-needle-drop/
Year of the Month update!
May’s year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 19th: Bridgett Taylor: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
And coming in June, we’ll be moving on to 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 9th: Sam Scott: El Sur
Jun. 23rd: Sam Scott: Codex Seraphianus
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill