The Friday Article Roundup
On the pavement, thinkin' about the best pop culture writing of the week.
Something for everybody… yet submitted by nobody! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
At Little White Lies, Callie Petch ruminates on the safe choices of music biopics:
Studio filmmaking in the mid-2020s revolves around a toxic addiction to recognisable IP. Whilst comic books and video games are the most blatant examples, the inescapable prevalence of the music biopic these past few years is just as much a symptom of that. Trading on the substantial existing fanbases of the artists as well as the desire of said musicians to shore up their legacy image for a new generation that’ll buy their greatest hits albums, these are just as much beholden to rigid corporate interests as those of its cape and pixel brethren. In 2024 alone, there were seven wide release music biopics in cinemas, and we have major films on Bruce Springsteen, Nat King Cole and Michael Jackson fast coming down the pipe.
More Sundance coverage courtesy Amy Taubin at Film Comment:
At a time when anti-intellectualism is running rampant as it hasn’t since the 1950s, it’s a comfort to see at least two movies, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Sorry, Baby, that celebrate the life of the mind. The other fiction films I saw ranged from pallid to dismal. Hailey Gates’s Atropia won the U.S. Dramatic Competition’s Grand Jury Prize, but for me, this is not the moment for a mockumentary layered onto a fictionalization of actual war games played by American troops before they are shipped out from California to Iraq.
Meghan Boilard’s Off-Topic devotes a post wondering about all the body horror during Super Bowl commercials this year:
Not one, but two separate commercials involved facial hair gaining sentience and emancipating itself from its celebrity owner, cancelling out whatever comfort that’s meant to come from Rocket Mortgage orchestrating a sing-along to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Even my streaming service, Tubi, offered little reprieve. The commercials I’ve endured over the last year in exchange for otherwise unfettered access to sweet, sweet bottom-of-the-barrel mid-aughts reality swill have been used against me to fund a repulsive ad-campaign featuring a man donning a cowboy hat crafted from his own flesh.[…] Perhaps being subjected to this is a form of twisted karma. Maybe one hundred million moments of collective discomfort is some sort of cosmic atonement, a price that we must pay for the animalistic pleasure of watchinga a handful of men bash and break.
For Atlas Obscura, Allegra Rosenberg tells the tale of a mysterious gravestone marking the resting place of a popular 19th century fictional character:
Pilgrims to Charlotte’s gravestone—men, women, even newly married couples on their honeymoons—left flowers, cards, and their tears at the “shrine of the girl who died for love.” Many of the visitors believed she was a real person, a belief supported by churchyard caretakers who would answer in the affirmative if asked by visitors if Charlotte was really buried there. The grave was so popular that gardeners marked it with flowers—the only location in the churchyard so decorated—so that they could easily point it out when asked. Susanna Rowson always insisted that Temple was based on a real person. Although there was no evidence for this, it was taken as gospel by readers as well as reporters, who observed the continuing popularity of Temple’s tomb throughout the latter half of the 19th century. It became a popular topic for newspaper articles, often ones purporting to know the true story of the woman in the grave and her sad end.
The Defector‘s Kit Fox offers a shocking expose on the true origin of “Sport Stacking” the early aughts trend – and in some places mandated gym class activity – where kids competitively stacked plastic cups:
It has been a minor plot line in Fred Claus, Matt LeBlanc’s Episodes, and Weeds; it’s been the major plot line in a 2022 Thai-language film released on Netflix titled Fast & Feel Love (100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). The infamous “Oh my gosh!” scream in Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” was sampled from a viral sport stacking video from 2008. At its peak, between 2002 and 2011, roughly 5,000 American schools included it as part of their annual curriculum, according to Mr. and Mrs. Fox. That means somewhere between five and eight percent of U.S. adults between the ages of 22 and 35 share the same core memory—and in the ensuing years have asked themselves, their friends, or social media the same question: Why did credentialed educational professionals make us do this ludicrous activity in gym class? I am, perhaps, the person best suited on the planet to answer this question. Because the answer … is my dad.
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 ProfileTags for this article
More 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?
M*A*S*H, Season One, Episode Ten, “I Hate A Mystery”
This shows Hawkeye’s pride, when he’s accused of being behind the rash of thefts the camp has suffered and gets so outraged by the constant attacks on his character that he solves the case with a massive bluff. The thing about this show is its attention to the details; this isn’t just Hawkeye getting rebuffed, though that does happen, it’s also him being followed around by Radar and watched during surgery and unable to live his life. I do deeply enjoy his solution to the whole thing, a plausible bluff that works exactly as intended.
Continuing the appreciation for McLean Stevenson, he’s downright adorable giving his girlfriend gifts. There’s also a great moment where he jerks awake and says something funny.
One thing this show often does is scenes shot entirely in one shot. In this case, we have a scene between Hawkeye and Mulcahey that has a fair bit of slapstick in it that requires the wide. The thing is, it’s not very noticeable and certainly not amateurish; the shot is framed comfortably, the actors don’t move very far, and they have a clear chemistry.
It’s insane how much influence Hawkeye has had on my sense of humour. Just today, someone asked me if I could come upstairs, and I joked, “It’s a big ask, but I think I could manage it.” (It made the Italian chef cackle) Then I get home and put on this and Hawkeye is saying things like “It’s getting so a man can’t even talk to his shrubbery.” But even the way he delivers lines with only a hint of irony is exactly what I’m always shooting for.
Babylon 5, Season One, Episode Twenty-One, “Babylon Squared”
After a few weak episodes, it’s picked up again. This has some of the strongest reveals we’ve had so far, explaining why Babylon 4 vanished: it has fallen through some kind of time mishap. The reveal that the mysterious space-suited ‘One’ is actually a future version of Sinclair is obvious but effective and also really cool. I’m more interested, though, in Delenn; I’ve realised she’s one of my favourite characters, which is largely down to Mira Furlan’s breathlessly sincere performance. Delenn comes off as the most open-minded and curious of the characters, and in this she reveals a deep individuality, abandoning her cultural responsibilities to continue pursuing her interest in humanity and our ‘destiny’. It’s actually kind of cool that we don’t get the full picture but we do know what choice Delenn is making.
(I learned recently that Furlan died at the age of 65! Seems way too young)
The Bride Wore Black – And also wore out her welcome. Though I think if I had not been aware Truffaut was sort of kind of doing an homage to Hitchcock, maybe I would have liked this more. It definitely doesn’t really work as a Hitch pastiche. But it also never entirely comes together for me, a lot of set pieces that sometimes run too long, and a tone that just leaves me a bit cold. (Honestly, Moreau leaving a child fatherless made me lose any sympathy with her.) But at least it looks great and Moreau gives a solid performance.
Kojak, “Elegy in an Asphalt Graveyard” – A young woman Kojak once helped out seems to have killed herself, but Kojak of course is able to prove it was murder, and then works to both get to the bottom of things and to see what sort of life she led in the intervening years. Reasonably entertaining, with the crux of the matter turning on the reaction of the wife of one of the young woman’s lovers finding sympathy her husband cannot. Look for a 21 year old John Glover and several actors better known for the theater such as Priscilla Pointer (Amy Irving’s mom).
Frasier, “Matchmaker” – Frasier wants to set up Daphne with the new station manager, but the new station manager is gay and thinks it’s Frasier who’s interested. A very funny farce that uses the misunderstanding but not the station manager’s sexuality for the humor.
Simon Delmonte Gets Results!! I’ve been watching Kojak for several nights now and am digging on its watered down 70s cop movie vibe and middle management conundrums.
Companion – this got a lot of positive word-of-mouth from friends so I made it out to see it yesterday while it was still in cinemas. Really fun sci-fi / horror / black comedy mash-up with a really strong performance from Sophie Thatcher, plenty of style and a great soundtrack.
A Night at the Opera – figured it was about time I saw another Marx Brothers film and this one fit into my 100-year challenge. I find the brothers pretty funny (less so Harpo I guess) but why did this need a dull, mostly Marx-less romantic plot and so many interminable musical interludes? I guess I can’t be too shocked that there’s a fair amount of opera involved but ugh when the laughs dry up I found this hard work. Not entirely shocked to see that there are many Letterboxd reviews saying variations of “love this film, although I must admit I skip through the musical numbers”.
High Potential, E5: “Croaked” – excellent frog content. I’m not sure this is ever going to rise above “pleasant diversion” for me but it’s filling that spot nicely.
All the boat stuff in Opera is gold (and Harpo is a fucking psycho at points there), the rest not as much from what I remember. But! I do really like the musical number with the boys when they’re on the ship, obviously we all hate the romantic leads and wish they would die but our guys are just having fun playing tunes and it’s infectious.
For all my complaints, it did still have one gag that made me laugh hard enough that I had to pause the movie for a while to catch up, which hasn’t happened in a while.
Driftwood: I say they’re duplicates!
Fiorello: Oh sure. It’sa duplicates.
Driftwood: Don’t you know what duplicates are?
Fiorello: Sure, those five kids up in Canada.
I wasn’t aware that there actually was a famous set of Canadian quintuplets in the news in the mid-30s but this still really got me for some reason.
Hahaha, Chico is the man. Groucho and Harpo are wonderful of course but they’re both somewhat above the fray, Groucho as commentator and Harpo as fey maniac, but Chico is just a regular dude with a somewhat thick skull, they need him to bounce off of.
When they moved to MGM from Paramount the studio insisted they make the films more accessible to then-current popular sensibilities, so they put in a romance plot and some production numbers.
Damn studios! They should consider the viewers 90 years later who only long for anarchy
Murder at 1600 — logy with a cold, it is TUBI time! Well, it is always TUBI time but they have the garbage that hits right now, like this potboiler. Apparently Clint Eastwood saw it was testing well and bumped up Absolute Power to steal its thunder? Absolute Power is very much lesser Clint but it’s still better than this, which is shot like an episode of The West Wing that happens to have people getting knocked off every 15 minutes or so (and this is squibby 90s shit, hell yeah) and has a fairly dopey story, the kind of conspiracy that really needs a Grisham to make it sing. Diane Lane is a fine actress but is sort of bland here, she oddly feels like a replacement for Ashley Judd who would make this stuff her wheelhouse. Wesley Snipes’ charisma is still strong though. Good to doze off to.
Above The Law — a church heroically hides undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, the CIA is running dope and guns to finance illegal wars, classic woke Hollywood nonsense from *checks notes* late 80s Steven Seagal. Who is credited (along with director Andrew Davis) with the story and I think it’s fair to assume that nothing Seagal the actor is saying is too far off from what Seagal the person believes, and Seagal the actor HATES the CIA, far more so than the general wariness the agency gets in these kind of flicks. It’s interesting to chart the political action here, Seagal saves the day and then goes to Congress to testify about how the CIA is totally fucking evil and see title; in 1600 Snipes saves the day and uncovers what is essentially a military coup and this is all hushed up to keep things running smoothly and the movie has very little if any cynicism about this, the 80s may be stupid but they had spine. And they also had Davis, who had a really interesting run of movies about law enforcement both local and national that are skeptical of corruption (Code of Honor, this, The Package) before hitting big with The Fugitive, a great movie that is an old TV show with zero qualms about authority, maybe the CIA got to him. Davis is not at his best here although his mid level still has solid fights (Seagal had the juice*) and decent car chases through Chicago’s streets, it is always fun to see Davis on his home turf and with his pals and here he brings back Joseph Kosala, who looks like Mike Ditka’s cousin and was an actual CPD cop who makes Dennis Farina sound like Keanu Reeves. I cheered whenever he was onscreen, good times.
*he also hilariously wastes a guy for mouthing off after he disarms the guy, talk about above the law
Not worth sharing my own WDWW post. But was at my mom’s and happened to catch Seagal’s Beyond The Law, which is not a sequel to this nor a sequel to Exit Wounds as it also stars DMX. Seagal sits through the whole film smoking cigars and spouting his dialog. There were also no scenes with Seagal and DMX together, which I assume is due to dislike on both sides. As I’m won’t to do I read the IMDB trivia page afterwards….
Seagal was stung by a wasp in his trailer and was very distressed and upset about it. Bizarrely he refused first aid but instead demanded an ambulance to take him to hospital. He didn’t return to set for a week, causing scenes to be shot much differently and also using a body double. Despite production problems, the cast and crew was happy to have a week without Seagal on set.
Hard to believe, but there was a time that Segal was, by the standards of competing 80s-90s action heroe’s a liberal, if only due to environmental activism. Not a nice guy back then in other regards, though.
The Brutalist – I’ve seen Brutaler.
So being the ignoramus I am, I thought this was another American immigrant gangster story and wasn’t looking forward to trying to decide how good it was while being tired of the whole milieu. But no, it’s actually more like The Fountainhead if The Fountainhead kind of hated rich people instead of fellating them. You know, Brutalism! Architecture! For kids!
This is another movie that’s super proud of its format (VistaVision!) but I’ll allow it because it’s well-shot and with fantastic production design. Great score, great performance by Adrian Brody. The three and a half hours don’t feel so long, and although the ending seems designed to buck people off at the end of the journey, it has a last-minute reveal that maybe brings it back around. Worth discussing anyway.
Must get thoughts from Conor (Philly) and Dave (pitching modern architecture to feisty meeting attendees).
Still finding myself thinking about this one quite a bit. I think I maybe enjoyed the experience of seeing something that felt like a proper epic (intermission included) with a near-sell-out crowd most than the actual movie, to some extent? Feel like I’ll look back and reminisce on the occasion but maybe not so much what was on the screen. But yeah, good performances and production design (especially on a fairly small budget) certainly made it a pleasure to sit through once.
That does sound great. Bring back intermissions!
I knew about the architecture but was unaware there was HOT PUBLIC MEETING ACTION! Will see and get back to you on how well it measures up to Evil Does Not Exist.
It can’t measure up to EDNE, and certainly not in terms of percentage of runtime devoted to public forums.
As an amatuer fan of architectural history I really want to see this.
I was planning to see this in the theater, but I am now unemployed so I have to stop spending money. But it’s ironic, because who else but the unemployed has time to watch a 200 minute movie?
MONDAY (Forgot to log it)
Live football
My wife and I went to Estadio Caliente in Tijuana to see Chivas Guadalajara tie Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente 1-1 in Liga MX Femenil. It was a fun game throughout, with both teams having good chances and pushing each other on both halves. Chivas broke the deadlock at 69′ with Gaby Valenzuela scoring on a fast break, but couldn’t find the second goal. Alicia Cervantes in particular came out unlucky, missing a few chances and even putting one in the crossbar. This gave Xolas a chance to tie it, which they did in the 89th after a defensive mistake in a free kick set piece let Natividad Martínez score with a great volley in the top corner. Martínez was feisty all game along, even getting in a scuffle after pulling Carolina Jaramillo’s shirt late in the second half, resulting in yellow cards for both. The tension stayed high, resulting in a double card for Chivas’ Daniela Calderón at 90+3′, but it was too late to meaningfully impact the game.
We had a very good time, despite the cold, and there was plenty of entertainment inside and outside the pitch. Felt good to finally watch Chivas Femenil play live. Hope we can repeat soon.
Dale Rebaño
Woooo! Live foooootball!
That’s what I’m talking about!
There better have been some music, or at least poetry, during the intermissions!
Yeah, there were plenty of music breaks during pauses of play and halftime. As for poetry, some of those songs were hip hop so maybe that counts?
All right, this is good, we’ll allow the wooooooo.
What did we read?
The Last Battle, CS Lewis
Nah, I was right, I did like this. The thing I like most is commitment, and this truly follows all of Lewis’s impulses to their logical extreme; his vivid visual imagination, his weird elitism, his preachiness, his Christianity. I deeply enjoyed not only the apocalyptic imagery of Narnia collapsing, but the specific context of its god unmaking it, and the final twist of the kids having died at the start of the book and essentially fighting their way into (very British ‘everyone you love is there in your old house’, though I am aware he’s riffing on Plato) Heaven is brutal, but consistent with Lewis’s morality up until now.
This is also true of what he does with Susan. I’ve been complaining that Lewis is a tedious asshole all the way up here, and his dismissal of someone preferring lipstick and adult problems over children’s stories is completely, 100% in his wheelhouse; what’s impressive (and horrifying) is that he allowed one of his previously sympathetic protagonists to be the ‘bad guy’ here. Yes, even a seemingly good person can become an atheist grown-up! Obviously, it’s very different from my own morality, but I admire the complete refusal to compromise.
I was deeply attached to this one as a kid, but for, hilariously, essentially the opposite reason: Lewis’s religious worldview, as uncompromising as it is in its own way, was still so much more compromising (with other people and cultures and with the idea of punishment/damnation) than my own evangelical background that it really opened up a necessary window for me and let in some fresh air.
Which is always the kind of thing that means I can’t review it, because its biggest impact on me was entirely personal. But purely on aesthetic terms, I do love the “further up and further in” heaven, with the intensity of beauty scaling up as you go, and with the world now easily reachable from each other.
The ecumenical/openness of the apocalypse is well done and absolutely necessary for the books not to end in hectoring bullshit, and I think it reflects Lewis’ actual beliefs too. The Calormene guy being told that he may have been worshipping the wrong god but was doing so in the right way and that still works for Aslan is a game-changer. (Although it has the great counter-scene with the dwarves, who to my eyes have been coded Jewish throughout, and their refusal to see what’s in front of them — it is harsh but still in tune with free will, they have always had a choice, and if that is not fair it is still a choice.) But as I get older I see some condescension there, even if it is well-meaning. “You were on my side the whole time” means I never got to really pick a side, it’s the kind of cheery fatalism that creates a Garth Ennis.
But it’s hard to argue against that ecstatic ending. Mandatory Further Up and Further In material:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T43IMe4Llrs
Yes … ha ha ha … yes! This is another reason Magician’s Nephew is so good as the penultimate book, because Aslan making the world is still fresh in your mind as he unmakes it. YOU FUCKED UP, NARNIANS. Lewis is a real dick here but this is another thing that runs through the books, the average Narnian is pretty haphazard when it comes to belief (and why not, it’s a haphazard place because of Lewis’ design) and Lewis has always held this in genial contempt until the contempt gets real here. And story-wise this hits hard, the Ape’s con is fairly stupid on the surface but its success as it snowballs is disturbingly plausible. And while a bunch of the books revolve around rebellion/restoration plots, this is the only one that really feels desperate and the players all acquit themselves well.
With Susan, I think the allegory and straight up good storytelling of a believer falling away (how lame would it be if everyone made it?) runs headlong into the casual misogyny of “women be accessorizing, and therefore backsliding into sin.” The latter has overwhelmed the former and Lewis only has himself to blame for that. Personally I think the real problem is not excluding all of those stupid Pevensies.
the casual misogyny of “women be accessorizing, and therefore backsliding into sin.” The latter has overwhelmed the former and Lewis only has himself to blame for that.
The irony being that this ends up feeling like the final argument that Lewis is childish, not childlike, right? Like, he’s comfortable writing girls, he’s comfortable writing matrons, but he clearly doesn’t want to see women, for whatever reason. Not that one has to write sex or romance, but combined with fetishising childhood (uh, nonsexually), it comes off weird.
One of the things about Lewis is that – even at his weirdest and most dickish – he remembers that he is supposed to be Christian, so Susan survives, meaning that she must have an unimaginable amount of pain and survivor’s guilt, but hey! she still has a chance to get into Heaven if she smartens up. Oh Clive. The things that were wrong with you.
The biggest problem with The Last Battle, I think, is the problem of Heaven, where it all just sounds so boring, and as a result there’s a hollowness to it.
“Susan survives, meaning that she must have an unimaginable amount of pain and survivor’s guilt” — again, is it really so sad to no longer have the other Pevensies in your life? I think Susan is probably pretty OK in this regard. But more to the point, you’re totally right about how Lewis is leaving the door open and thinking he is being charitable here, lots wrong with that but he isn’t totally excluding her here.
I’m still fond of Edmund, ngl.
That’s what I mean about how British Lewis’s Heaven is, and in fairness it’s not like you really can find some universally appealing image. Although you make me realise the irony of a guy whose visual imagination I’ve been boosting this whole time being unable to write an appealing Heaven.
I often wonder, when this stuff comes up, what a post-Joy Narnia would have read like. I think he lost a lot of naivety.
Says a lot that the definitive version of heaven is by Dante, who throws up his hands multiple times and says, “I can’t explain this shit.” See also the Book of Revelation.
The iconography of Narnia is so powerful. One of the bookshops I visited this week had a wardrobe at the very back, and if you opened it, there was the children’s section in a hidden room.
That would be so magical for a kid!
It was so charming. There was even a sign on the door saying ‘Only children allowed’ – but the woman on duty winked at us and told us to go ahead. You also had to use the old key to open it so it was a very complete experience.
That’s just lovely.
It’s been a while, but my biggest problem with it is the first half is a typical Narnia story about Prince Titian, and then that story doesn’t get resolved so much as cast aside because they’re all dead.
The Home-Maker, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Interesting and surprisingly tense domestic novel from 1924. This is about a lower-middle-class American family made viscerally and hauntingly miserable by the usual home arrangement. The father, Lester, is a sweet man and a natural daydreamer, completely unsuited for a professional daily grind requiring pep and ambition; the mother, Eva, is innately driven and ambitious, but her conviction that a wife and mother’s place is in the home forces her to pour all her strength into perfecting work she finds mundane and enervating. (She would love to get to where she could afford to hire someone to watch the kids, but with Lester’s job performance, that’s unlikely.) Their children are suffering under Eva’s rigid, joyless care, falling apart with nervous stomachs, seething fury, and paralyzing shyness. Everyone is unhappy, and their unhappiness is genuinely upsetting—Fisher renders it really well, making you feel how trapped this family is.
And then—due to still more unhappiness—Lester loses the use of his legs. Suddenly, it’s socially acceptable for him to stay home and look after the children while Eva goes to work. Both of them blossom, and so do the children, and their newfound happiness is (almost) as vividly rendered as their earlier misery. (Some great and compelling thoughts about parenthood in here, as well as a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of how Eva could love her children but be entirely unsuited for raising them on her own—she’s a much better and more relaxed parent when she doesn’t have to be a traditional “mother.”) It’s idyllic … until the tension comes back in the possibility that Lester’s injury could heal, and everyone knows that they couldn’t bring themselves to continue their arrangement once they no longer have an “excuse” for it. There’s something very hellish about that possibility, but I like that too—a lot of stories act like it’s very easy for characters to simply decide to fly in the face of convention, but The Home-Maker is about people acutely aware of both their own weaknesses—that the social disapproval would cut them to the quick—and the effect that kind of disapproval could have on their children.) Does have an unusual kind of happy ending, and I’ve rarely been so grateful for one.
Sounds a bit like Revolutionary Road but maybe kinder to the characters? Sounds decades ahead of this kind of social realist novel in 1960 or ’70.
Oh, that’s a good comparison. It’s not as literary, but the suffocating world is similar, it’s just that here the characters can eventually find an escape from it. And it’s interesting to think about it in relation to the later social realism movement–I think it feels ahead of its time partly because it does gradually become a political novel, with aspirations towards a better future. (When that goes wrong, it can instantly make the book a time capsule, a portrait of utopian ideals that led nowhere, or led somewhere terrible; Fisher pretty much gets it right.) It presents only a personal solution, but it provides a lot of material for argument about how the default familial setup–both between husbands and wives and between parents and children–could be legitimately fatal to some families’ happiness, so it’s engaging with ideas about the future and a wider world. And that hope that things could be different and better gives it a freshness that later novels in the tradition–after decades of things not getting that much better, and in fact sometimes getting worse–couldn’t always capture.
Further into the life of De Gaulle. He’s just essentially made himself dictator, but as this stopped a military coup, an argument can be made this was a good thing. Not an argument I am in the mood to make, mind you, but France was a mess as it struggled with the fate of Algeria.
And was getting to the end of Oscar Charleston’s playing career when my NYPL library card expired. Waiting for them to renew it remotely, but why does it expire every three years?
De Gaulle has always struck me as a ‘whatever it takes’ type, which is great when you’re fighting Nazis but more complicated beyond that. I might have to read this.
The Battle Of Algiers making it explicit that what makes the French counterinsurgency leader so effective at cracking down on insurgency is his past in the resistance against the Nazis is a real gut punch. “Whatever it takes” not as a strategy applied to a fixed concept (resisting tyranny), which is harsh and maybe not “just” but consistent as philosophy, but as a personal system applied to anything you want, wherever you happen to be at the time. This too is consistent, I suppose.
4:50 from Paddington – finished this, it’s a typically fun Agatha Christie mystery. Maybe not one of the most satisfying resolutions – Miss Marple being absent for most of the story and still figuring it out is fine, but the logic is a bit of a stretch. Still, very enjoyable!
The Sinners and The Last Of The Innocent, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips — the comic book store had these for cheap and I snapped them up because Brubaker/Philips rule and their Criminal series (of which these are part of) is god-level crime; I’ve read these before but always up for a re-read. The Sinners is noirish goodness that continues looking at the idea of corrupted and doomed youth that has run through the series and points to how it becomes more of a focal point going forward, the twinning of the lead and a young counterpart is well done and leads to a damning final panel, some shit is not forgiven. But The Last Of The Innocent is even better (and its final panel has stayed with me for years, it is relatively anodyne in content but in context and aesthetic it is pure horror) — it follows a guy in the early 80s who needs money and decides to murder his wealthy wife while revisiting his hometown, all while flashing back to his childhood in the late 60s. And Philips renders those flashbacks in an extremely obvious riff on Dan DeCarlo’s work for Archie Comics, with our anti-hero and his cohort mapping onto those characters, but the situations frequently are racier and Brubaker’s dialogue is straight throughout, profanity etc. when appropriate. This is not a parody but an increasingly disturbing vision of nostalgia, how the lead remembers the past that he’s trying to return to combined with what that past actually shows bleeding through. Some other characters of 60s youth fiction make appearances too and it rides the edge of being too cute but ultimately works, because they are still moving forward while our “Archie” is not. He just sucks things in, a black hole of a person. It’s a masterwork, although best approached after getting a handle on Brubaker/Philips’ general style first to fully appreciate how they tweak it here.
Been a long time since i read these, but I remember being totally impressed how well Philips changed his style to evoke DeCarlo while staying in the Criminal lane.
Val Staples and Dave Stewart’s shift in colors/tone are perfect too. But yeah, Philips keeps certain expressions that Archie et al would not make, even if he renders them in their line. I hadn’t read this in a long time either and I was blown away all over again.
Oh wow is The Last of The Innocent fantastic, as you say a masterwork at deconstructing nostalgia right up to the last piece of art. I own it somewhere. Also what’s the difference between this guy and that ginger bastard in Riverdale, fuckboying his way through Betty, Veronica, and Cherry Blossom?
Ha, if you mean Riverdale the show I noped out on that fairly early precisely because I hated Apa’s Archie. But Archie the comics dude has the excuse of being trapped in time, he can never escape Riverdale and be nostalgic for it so he might as well just fuckboy away.
Would like to be pedantic and note that Cherry Blossom’s incarnation on Riverdale is gay, making her not an option for Archiekins.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness – The overall thesis of this book, the advent of smartphones and giving children unfettered access to them is the cause of a dramatic decrease in mental health starting in about 2010, is something I don’t disagree with. The methodology, a heavy reliance on Twain’s “damned lies” i.e. statistics, is less compelling. All the graphs with sharp angles at the 2010 mark start to look the same, which I know is the point, but none of it is as compelling as the empirical evidence I’ve experienced with social media first hand. And while I know science is necessary to making a solid case, he also presents his previous book’s theory – that peoples’ minds have been too coddled in recent years by attempts to eliminate unpleasant ideas and interactions and their subsequent lack of durability has contributed to a decline in mental health – as a first step that smartphone culture then carried over the finish line. But those near-identical slopes are far less compelling evidence for this, and without judgement on the “coddling” idea by itself, it looks to less like an alley-oop between the two ideas and more that he’s piggybacking an old thesis onto the much stronger case for the new one.
As far as practical advice, it turns out I’d independently reached the same prescription: No social media for kids. He suggests no internet-connected device until age 14, no social media until 16. (Our rule is no social media until 18/legal adulthood.) I would say no social media for anybody, but I have dominion over exactly 1 adult, and I’ve been indulging a Calvinist line of thinking that I don’t actually have much dominion over that guy. The value in the book, and I do think there’s value in reading studies of things you think you already know, is its reinforcement of my perception of social media as this generation’s smoking, except smoking didn’t topple a government within a handful of years (suddenly remembers Virginia colonists plowing up Native American lands to plant tobacco), hold on, I’ll get back to you on that one. But anyway, bad for kids, probably bad for adults but at least their brains are developed (unless they were raised on social media), the evidence is there in those bendy lines. Now to get on to indulging my preferred drug, caffeine.
“I have dominion over exactly 1 adult, and I’ve been indulging a Calvinist line of thinking that I don’t actually have much dominion over that guy” — Tristan! This man needs some snooty Anglican allegory, quick!
Social media is of course bad, but does the book get into the social aspect of it for kids? As in, what does it mean to not be on it when everyone else in your cohort is? I’m thinking of a scale pertaining to my youth, of “didn’t have cable” to “homeschooled” in terms of being able to interact with fellow kids on a shared reality, and my concern is “not having social media” would be closer to the homeschool end of that scale.
It does indeed and points out that it’s a big problem in breaking the habit (or not starting it in the first place). And the harm is known by the companies themselves, of course (and just like with smoking the harm is part of the business model), which is why the unenforced “must be 13 to have an account” rule exists at all. His argument is short of legislation (which won’t happen) is to have school districts ban (or at least curb) phone use in the classroom and preferably the whole school (this is happening) and for there to be societal norms on what age kids can get on social media, just like there is for other unregulated activities like sleepovers or sports. He throws out ages that makes sense with the research, and of course there will be personal variation, but variation on a norm is better than no norm at all.
It goes with how much of this is known, but not “known,” if that makes sense. Like, as parents we all know this shit is bad, but it’s also (or at least until recently was) very new, so we had no set idea when you give a kid a smartphone or when you let them have facebook, so one day when you’re tired you’re like, sure, have some fun making animal faces on insta and off you go. Now here’s a suggested norm, and if enough parents have the same idea, we’ll get a generation through that knows how to make eye contact. If “sleepunders” can catch on, this can too. The book also helpfully defines social media a little more narrowly, e.g. texting is not, facetime is not, YouTube is right on the border but ultimately is not. Many of the studies that don’t show a significant decrease in mental health lump all Internet activity together, he argues this is specific to facebook, twitter, instagram, TikTok – everybody knows what we’re talking about here.
As for my experience – and I don’t know how typical it is – not having social media hasn’t been a big deal for my 13-year-old (not having a phone that can connect to the Internet/play games has been a larger bugaboo), but she can group text with her sports teams and video chat with her friends in the evenings. There’s alternate uses of the tech for communication that aren’t “Like and subscribe” based. We’ll see how that changes when she gets to high school – I think a lot of this is helped by a friend group who do the same thing (and whether she got these friends because they’re also disallowed from social media is a chicken-or-egg question).
More to your point, I’d put no social media much closer to the “don’t have cable” end of the spectrum. My daughter still gets memes and slang and “skibiddy sigma” and all that nonsense, she just gets it like I do, filtered through some secondhand source. Only the Greatest Hits, baby! Maybe we’re not on the ground floor, but at least we don’t have to sit through all of Toto IV to get to “Africa.” (See, clearly my cultural relevance isn’t affected at all.)
The harm reduction is difficult, for cigarettes it is offloaded to the middleman selling the cigarettes and there are a limited number of them so enforcement is fairly easy. If also easily circumvented via older friends, but there still has to be some kind of additional effort/action as opposed to just lying on that checkbox. Not to carry water for evil companies but yeah, enforcement is pretty much shot outside of relying on another middleman (instead of convenience stores on the supply end, schools on the usage end). I like the groupchat as middle ground, it also points to one of the earlier social media iterations, AIM — that could be interactive in the larger world but it was mostly friend-based in practice, right? In terms of evil corporations, there might be a marketing opportunity for AOL here.
“for there to be societal norms on what age kids can get on social media, just like there is for other unregulated activities like sleepovers or sports” — sports have (or at least had to a greater degree) a regulated middle ground, right? Youth leagues/YMCA stuff, a way to play and learn the sport at a theoretically relaxed level before going to more heavily regulated and demanding stuff as a teen. And of course you can always play pickup with your friends anyway, maybe there’s the groupchat again. There’s no “run around and occasionally kick a soccer ball” version of social media, I’m vaguely remembering those kids-only chatroom things and I suppose YouTube Kids has a similar vibe but it’s just deep end or nothing.
And off topic, but what has happened to sleepovers? I remember them being a big part of late elementary school (and the Simpsons is backing me up, thinking of Lisa and her pals in the Flaming Moe’s episode); I only catch bits and pieces of this discourse, but they are bad now?
Yeah, on the one hand you don’t have an intermediary to stop social media from getting to your kids, on the other hand you can take the SIM card out of their device and stop it yourself, the only smoking option for parents like that was an at-home tracheotomy, and this was rarely employed. Since government and evil corporations are now one and the same, it will all come down to individual control. And the “run around and kick a ball” of social media would be talking and arguing and fighting, which kids do a lot less of when they’re scrolling.
The combination of fears of strangers and memories of shenanigans (actually harmful and otherwise) has created a movement where a lot of parents regulate (or outright ban) sleepovers with a heavier hand. The compromise is letting them stay until midnight (or even later) and then picking them up when the kids would (ostensibly) be going to sleep, takes away the few hours of relatively unsupervised time. Under any circumstances I think the parents should be at least familiarly acquainted before any sleepover and I’ve often thought of this as a little draconian. But then someone in my close family just this week found out one of their sleepover policies intersected with someone that was later charged with sexual liberties with a minor* … so I don’t have a lot of judgement to pass at the moment.
*There were years between declined invite and incident, don’t want to make this sound too harrowing while trying to stay vague for peoples’ privacy
This tracks with my impression, fear of adults moreso than kids getting up to bad shit. And I suppose I don’t know what my parents did in terms of checking up on other parents (or how they were checked up on), but my perception is “familiarly acquainted” did the job. I guess there is always the potential for abuse per the person your family member luckily avoided, but the attitude seems to dovetail with the child protectionism that can cover for child control and tends to ignore that most abuse comes from family members, not strangers — that goes to hysterical places very quick, and the “think of the children” mindset is already being used to justify really shitty and bigoted behavior in other arenas. Anyway, “in-home tracheotomy” would be a classic sleepover shenanigan, RETVRN to idiotic dares.
No one has time or energy for sleepovers is the bigger thing. The biggest problem I have with most of these ‘social media for kids bad’ articles (and don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely damage there, I just have a lot of additional questions that don’t get properly answered) is that they erase a lot of the other context, like kids now being scheduled to within a minute of their day, so that most of their social interaction that’s not supervised and scheduled is social media. Kids with money are pushed into activities to Get Into A Good College; kids without are providing childcare for younger siblings or working. It’s harder to have privacy, it’s harder to have five minutes to yourself, and your over-invested parents are watching your every move. (In part because they are getting awful messages from their phones!)
I’d spend all my time on Instagram or whatever too.
This is confirming to me that all the researched points in the book are discovering what general wisdom has long known. The overscheduled/supervised kids is part of the pre-rewiring “coddling” section (and, I think, a lot more compelling than other components of that section). And the hard part, of course, is even if you send your kid out to do unsupervised play, etc, if all the other kids are spending this time elsewhere or on screens, what is your kid going to do? This is why I have stopped paying attention to my kids and spent the morning chatting with all of you fine people.
Ha, only now am I considering the VCR as a key if not the key element in sleepovers of my generation — the hell with dealing with you kids, sit down and watch a bunch of movies and try not to break anything, I’ll be in the other room with a beer. A great attention-holder allowing for limited choice that has none of the potentially dangerous avenues of the internet, allowing for a certain amount of relaxation for the beleaguered parents.
The great counterweight of social media being bad for kids is, as you say, parents having social media (and more to the point smartphones) as a way of tracking/scheduling their kids. In both cases it’s a matter of giving someone a tool and watching them exploit it to the fullest regardless of how its use in this way is creating further problems.
The big one for me is queer kids and also generalized weirdoes. I grew up in a very small town, and finding ‘your people’ wasn’t as easy as signing up for chess club, if you get what I mean.
That is a good point, and the book admits that as a positive (and I’d agree). I guess my only argument would be I’ve found my weirdos on message boards like these, so the Internet can and absolutely should facilitate finding your people, but the big social media apps maybe aren’t the best avenue. Easy for me to say.
I think the engagement-over-all algorithms have done just a stunning amount of damage to the fabric of our society, kids through elders.
Same here, think what I’d want looking back was the kind of decentralized, algorithmless social media people have talked up more recently, though that would still be addictive on SOME level.
Don’t know what you mean (reloads page for 100th time to see if there’s more posts).
Yeah, the webring era was just less pressured and didn’t reward the most extreme, worst stuff.
Yeah, the internet was certainly invaluable to me as a kid for the same reasons, but in the (relative) absence of social media, I did okay with fanfic and Television Without Pity.
It was three decades ago and pre-social media, but for this reason the internet arguably saved my life. Or, at least, gave me some hope that the world outside of my shitty small town and family could be better, once I finally got there.
I think a lot about whether or not I would have been more or less depressed as a teen. I do think I would have felt less alone.
Deleted all socials off my phone and definitely running into that problem but as an adult, Instagram is often for socializing to some extent compared to Blue Sky or the dead zone that was Facebook.
Just now got asked (in person) if I was going a retrospective for a friend/mentor of mine in a few days which I had heard nothing about because I’m not on Facebook! Oh well, it’s good for figuring out which social groups you’re actually in and which ones you were just clinging onto.
The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley – Barrent wakes up with no memory of who he is. He’s told he’s a murderer and is shipped to Omega, a prison planet where conformity and the rule of law is based on evil. A place where the only way to survive and be upwardly mobile is to commit crimes, including murder. It’s a maaaad house, a topsy-turvy world of social hierarchies where Sheckley can examine today’s society with the satirical despair of Swift – dry and dark wit hidden by some sharp social satire. Can Barrent survive in this chaotic world? A world where rules and rights are kept hidden, because if you don’t know your rights, you can’t protect yourself, and if you don’t know the rules, you can’t break them properly. But what Barrent really wants is to survive, to remember and to go back to Earth. I wish I could see Sheckley’s face when he realizes what he got so wrong and yet so right about the 21st century.
300+ pages into The Power Broker and getting to learn a lot about younger FDR, who is a key enemy of Robert Moses when he’s New York governor. Want to emphasize how great a writer Robert Caro is, worth the hype, able to take a lot of dense and complex real-life information and spin it into a compelling narrative about hubris and ability.
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister – A family has had a compact with the local bog by it’s decrepit house for generations – the patriarch, dying, is sacrificed to the bog and the bog spits out a wife for the new patriarch to mate and marry. But what if the bog refuses? This is a really strong gothic novel that also subverts Jackson, Bronte, and the like without fucking them over, rich in detail about the swampy terrain and the psychology of families who’ve been in the same location far, far too long (and the uneasy tension with the members who left and have come back.)
Ooh, The Bog Wife sounds intriguing. What an arresting title / premise.
Not exactly a plotty novel but every scene has consequence and weight, and it really builds on the main idea until you’ve got essentially a pisstake/deconstruction of Lovecraft and Poe’s cursed antiquarian ancient line.
The Education Wars, a reasonably slim volume everyone in the US probably needs to read right now. Depressing and angering and useful, I hope.
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. More intellectual than Fun Home but still a very good read. No one does it like she does.
Good reminder to watch the Fun Home musical.
I have never heard of Sport Stacking before. That article was a hell of a good read!
I still need to read it but the premise is uncanny to me, a person who did all sorts of pointless activities in gym class but a few years before this hit and had no idea it was a thing. There is something weird and unsettling about being just on the outside of a trend/cultural craze, not watching it from afar (those kids and their Tik Toks!) but somehow being unaware of what happened just over the border.
In this case I’m happy to just write it off as “some American shit” but I know what you mean, I’ve had similar experiences where some fairly major trend has just completely passed me by until years later, and then suddenly people are reminiscing about something I never knew existed.
That was my favorite read this week, a really delightful story and well told. I was only aware of it as a fad that my younger cousin demonstrated to me one time, I was as politely confused by it as I was (then) Pokemon and (now) white Crocs. Learning it was part of gym curriculum I got a little riled, but the article does a good job of walking you through how this could logically happen and it’s pretty delightful. Now to find the inventor of Jolly Ball!
It’s such a warm portrait of a somewhat unusual family as well as being a good primer on the unusual “sport”. Lovely stuff.
My Crocs are yellow.
But do you have little charms that decorate them/advertise your interests?
Now that you mention it, I *have* been told that I have little charm.
Oh, I remember this! We did it in gym class, insane.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Halfway through the month and I’m lagging behind a bit on the annual songwriting challenge I do every February (since 2008! jesus) – having no trouble coming up with musical ideas but my brain is so reluctant to come up with lyrical ideas or expand upon the ideas that I do have. It’s tempting to just outsource that part of the songwriting to others but also feels like I’ll never get back into better creative shape if I don’t work the brain-muscles a bit.
Anyway here’s one that I did let a friend loose on, to great effect: https://write.fawm.org/songs/309289
And here’s one where I pushed through the fog myself: https://write.fawm.org/songs/309735
Cinema Whispers is astonishingly good. I would easily add it to a playlist. Congrats; it’s a great song.
Thank you!
Fully shifted back to my regular job minus a few dangling meetings that I created on Outlook. The temp ended her time Wednesday, and I bid her (and her pets) farewell. All things considered, she did a good job and even started some practices I will continue. I am happy to be back where I was, even if I am quickly remembering all the things I didn’t miss over the three months in the other gig.
Sat in on a higher level management meeting yesterday – I was supposed to help out with a Powerpoint show but there was no time for it – and heard a briefing from some lawyers about the efforts to kill DEI. It was not clear to me till now that the goal is make doing anything at all to diversify, and maybe even to combat racism in any way, illegal. That unconscious bias seminar I took? That’s DEI! The dark place is even darker than I thought.
Meanwhile, we have successfully vanquished the insurance company and got my wife’s lower dose Trulicity pens. We will see if the lower dose means less side effects. I can hope.
The closer you are to the beast, the darker it gets.
Waffling between whether people don’t know what’s happening to the government or people don’t care what’s happening to the government, and I think there’s a fair amount of both. But it’s clear it’ll take significant pain for lots of people before there’s a change in either case, and I’m sorry for those that did know and care and will feel the pain anyway.
Grappling with a certain SAD winter lack of joy but also am doing okay. My cat for one makes me happy, as does reading and good culture, and while my job isn’t especially interesting, I’m quite good at it. Also looking around for a cheaper apartment…wish me luck.
Good luck!
Definitely feeling that winter lack of joy. Kinda almost got a little sunshine today so I made sure I went out for a good length walk but otherwise it’s just been cold and grey and it feels a little relentless at this point.
Just wrapped up my first week at my new job! Lots of training and one-on-one guidance sessions this week, prepping me for shadowing and reverse-shadowing next week, so I’ve taken a lot of notes (increasingly less readable to anyone but me). Gotta say, after all the news, it’s been nice to see that the school still has a lot of DEI support in place, from an office to a Black History Month celebration to pride flags everywhere. I hope they hold out on that front.
Went for a mid-week country escape with one of my best friends. Stayed in a gorgeous cottage on a larger farm estate up in the hills, complete with geese, alpacas, sheep, cows, horses and a very bad-tempered little Shetland pony. The weather was fine and things were pretty lush by the standards of an Aussie summer, so we also got to enjoy the greenery. Starting to feel restored enough to start inching closer towards getting back to work.
Had a job on Monday. Not on Tuesday. You know who is responsible.
God dammit. I’m sorry, Cliffy.
Thanks. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t expect it quite so soon.
Ah, I’m so fucking sorry. Fuck him.
Sorry to hear it. Likely our household will be joining you soon.
Year of the Month update!
This February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016, including these movies, albums, and books.
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 18th: John Roberts: Silence
Feb. 20th: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
Feb. 23rd: Ben Hohenstatt: My Woman
Feb. 27th: Cori Domschot: Hidden Figures
Feb. 27th: John Bruni: Jet Plane and Oxbow
Feb. 28th: Sam Scott: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
And 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. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Of course, with the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special coming up, lots of publications are running their retrospective pieces. I enjoyed this one from The Ringer, which interviews some of the creatives about their favorite sketches they did. A fun walk down memory lane, mostly with videos of the sketches available. I really enjoyed the look back at “Schmitts Gay” in particular.
https://www.theringer.com/2025/02/13/tv/best-snl-sketches-cast-member-favorites