The Friday Article Roundup
A safe harbor for the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will crew up with:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At The Arts Fuse, Mark Favermann reviews a new exhibit that highlights how Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko used their time in Gloucester:
The Gloucester light steadily changes the terms of the work. Color grows more liberated, forms become increasingly distilled, and landscape begins to dissolve into an emotional language of sea, sky, tide, and radiance. One can almost imagine the three artists talking as they drew and painted along the Gloucester shore. Gottlieb was particularly responsive to biomorphic Surrealism; he developed a symbolic vocabulary marked by buoyant shapes, pictographs, and a narrative impulse. Avery and Rothko, meanwhile, found increasingly resonant equivalents for the abstractions of sky and water. Their paintings make the visible world feel both immediate and elusive—seen, remembered, and transformed.
The late Cat Frazier, an artist of early-internet-influenced visual design, is memorialized by Clay Risen at The New York Times:
Ms. Frazier’s retro-maximalist aesthetic did not exactly represent nostalgia. But her embrace of an earlier, rawer and arguably more fun era of the internet reflected a growing backlash against the corporatization of online life, as the once-wild communities of GeoCities gave way to the blandness of Facebook groups and Twitter threads….In interviews she often talked about her frustration with readers who assumed that, as an online creator with a dry, sardonic wit, she had to be a white man. She responded by subtitling the account “dad jokes if your dad was a Black lesbian.”
At The Shfl, Nate Patrin checks in with Mike D’s new solo album:
Opener “Switch Up” is the best example of this throwback appeal; its groove shuffling between drum’n’bass and big beat to get at its glitch-punk common denominator while it careens through how to deal with its state of self-aware confusion (“Need to get reception/Need some self reflection/Try to take a beat cause/I can’t take the message”). But as its sound expands to spirit-of-‘98 art-school boom bap (“What We Got”), fizzing Reznorisms (“That’s Right”), new wave booty bass (“Make It Stop”) and poolside stoner indie-pop (“Back to Star”), it pulls together a sense of leg-stretching wandering, an oldhead realizing his stylistic fascinations have a new generation waiting for them.
Richard Brody finds more depth in John Wilson’s new documentary than on his TV show at The New Yorker:
As in the [How To With John Wilson] series, there’s an element of free association in Wilson’s method, as he flits from subject to subject on the basis of seemingly random connections that he draws out with montages of images and copious voice-over (often addressing himself in the second person). His approach to dealing with idleness is, he explains, to “put the instrument”—the camera—“in your hands.” The format of “The History of Concrete” is similar to that of his TV episodes, but the tone is different. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the show’s sense of faux-magpie messaging, how its ostensible spirit of curiosity always left elements lining up just so. The movie, by contrast, is rich in an authentic sense of discovery, not least because its titular subject, superficially banal, is also profoundly and strangely universal.
And author Sarah Kendzior describes the onslaught of fraud writers now face from AI thieves and cowardly publishers:
On September 9, the surreal nightmare reached new heights. A fake publicist wrote an AI-generated email to the fake author of my stolen book — but sent it to my real email address. I read a conversation from one robot to another about how to profit off my labor. The email resembled the scam spam emails with which authors are deluged on a regular basis from fake “digital marketing experts” working a long con. I deleted the email before it could delete me. Then I thought how I had already lost this battle and retrieved the email from the trash to add to the records for my war.
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The Friday Article Roundup
The best pop culture writing of the week, wasted on the worst pop culture.
The Friday Article Roundup
Good grief, it's the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Ripping the cord on the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
The best and cheekiest pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Thirteen, “The Corp is Mother, The Corp is Father”
This rules. It’s basically a lost episode of the Bester procedural, where he’s tracking down a single runaway telepath with two assistants, giving us more insight into Bester’s character. Bester is a man who sold out humanity, in multiple ways; on one, he’s willing to divide human beings into two (mundanes and telepaths) and completely disavowed himself of the former. On another, he’s destroyed his own, inner humanity to become a Concept – no actual connection to other people, only a mask. Koenig’s performance backs this up completely and I don’t think it’s better than in this episode; pushing aside his own feelings and instincts for a well-practiced image.
It’s on this level that the show most successfully conveys the mindset, if not the actions, of a fascist – the fascist’s relationship with himself. Koenig especially manages to make me ambivalent about the experience they seem to put themselves through; he gets tremendous pleasure out of the act, but there’s something missing here – not in the sense that he’s missing some essential part of humanity, but in that he’s denying himself it. There’s no real connection to other people here; his playful conversations with his subordinates are an act that actually creates distance from them, burying his real emotions under corny artifice.
Aw man, this sounds awesome. Bester is the best, if he’d been running things in Andor the Empire would’ve gotten shit done a lot cleaner.
Live Music – Francis of Delirium, who I’m going to go ahead and confidently say are the best indie-rock band ever to come out of Luxembourg. I got into them via their first album, “Lighthouse”, which was one of my favourite records of 2024 and it has some great kinda sweeping, emotional songs – “songs that make your heart hurt”, in the words of the friend I went with. This year’s follow-up is a bit more of a straight-up rock album and while I haven’t clicked with it as much on record, it made a lot more sense live – they have a great energy and also a ton of charm, I was really impressed with how they got the crowd energised on a Thursday night. Support was a local-ish singer and her five-piece band that I can only really describe as “slick” – everything felt a bit stage-school, from the mannered vocals to every band member getting an intro and a solo. They didn’t put a foot wrong at any point and it was devastatingly uninteresting.
Wooooo live music! Interesting note on the slickness, I think that works for musicians who have clearly been around for a while and are performing as professionals but it can be off-putting when you haven’t earned that.
Yeah it can definitely be a good thing if the artist has found their own voice / sound and then polished it up. These guys had skipped the first step and it just felt a bit soulless and empty.
To quote Thelonious Monk: they’re making the wrong mistakes
Submarine X-1 – A Royal Navy commander, having lost his sub to a Nazi battleship, gets the chance to avenge himself by training the crews for three pocket subs that will go after the battleship. A fitfully entertaining movie distinguished by some pretty good underwater effects and scuba scenes, and by the willingness to kill off two of the sub crews. But nothing special overall. James Caan is the lead, apparently a Canadian but no one ever says that out loud.
Elementary, “Be My Guest” – Sherlock accidentally reads the lips of a man at the scene of the end of another investigation and soon learns the man is holding a foreign woman in captivity. The mystery has the usual slightly hard to swallow twists, but it turns out that one of the bad guys is an ICE agent years before it was clear just how bad ICE is, that’s okay.
Always Sunny, “The War on Alcohol” – Maybe one of the show’s funniest cold opens. One of the best bits of later seasons is how Mac is more comfortable being out of the closet and remains incredibly needy and annoying. “…Do I look hot?” I actually work for a sorta marketing company with two days only in-office so this episode somewhat hit home. “Behold, the perfect secretary!” (Notes on drawing: NOT DEE and CAN BE GOOSED.)
Live music — local hero Dennis Brennan and other scene mainstays playing blues and roots at the tavern down the road. Which hosts musicians but is more of a restaurant than a venue, I don’t think they have a pa per se and the music was good but not at full force (the guitarist in particular was ill-served, the sax and drums on the other hand made the most of the un-mic-ed space). Fun and no cover but it’s better to hit the pub further away that knows how to let these guys rip.
Adults — prequel and first two episodes, funny stuff! The comparison to Happy Endings is dead on, but everyone already seems fleshed out as opposed to that show’s quick pivot for a few characters. But it’s a bit odd in that vibe, while the show is clearly contemporary and doesn’t hide that (a gag involving a Ring camera) its tone is very much of a decade ago. The show’s creators were in their very early 20s a decade ago and this has the feel of wistfully looking back on young shenanigans, when you were dumb and sturdy enough to do a lot of ridiculous shit. The theme song in particular has a pre-2020s feel and the prequel’s use of a remixed Edward Sharpe only heightens all this. Anyway, the show is good!
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Nine, Robert Service
This covers Lenin’s trip to London where he forms the Bolsheviks. Service lays out much of adult Lenin’s attitude here and how it fully forms; particularly, the way the communist doesn’t care for communal living and prefers an environment he has complete control over (one detects meaning in his loving London). This extends to attempting to control his own body; Lenin frequently bemoans that he’s not a machine, but repeatedly treats his body as one, overworking himself at all times out of fanatical zeal. One gets the sense that, like Steve Jobs, Lenin simply believes (based on his father’s own early death) that he doesn’t have much time.
Also of note: Lenin has a strong distaste for Christian socialism, believing socialism and atheism are tightly linked. Lenin is suggested to have an Irish accent when speaking English.
In terms of constructing a leftist ideology, it’s extremely amusing to me that Service notes Marxists being drawn to arguing over the tiniest niggling details and filtering absolutely everything through their ideology. Every now and again, I see people say that leftist infighting online is a CIA psyop or something, but every single bit of leftist history I read – from the Soviet Union to the Zapatistas – has noted a tendency to nitpick each other to death, so maybe we’re just like this.
The Minotaur, Stephen Coonts
This has a quote from Tom Clancy on the cover, which should get across the kind of book it is. This novel is oddly muddled in its intent; it’s half military thriller and half soap opera, never quite pulling off either. The plot concerns someone nicknamed the Minotaur leaking secrets to Russia (the book coming out in 1990), with our hero – a middle-aged ex-Vietnam pilot – getting scooped up in the conspiracy, and so much of the story feels essentially random and arbitrary; characters and incidents feel like they simply emerge and fall as necessary for the plot in the moment, and there’s a lot of pointless incident that confuses me.
On the other hand, maybe that’s the point. The book is at its best when it’s urgently characterising someone, and we frequently get the inner lives of people who feel that life is something that happens to them. Some of these people are simply guys with victim complexes – the single most successful section of the book conveys the last day of one of the spies whose action kicks off the novel, a small, petty, and pointless man who knocked up some random woman and essentially ruined her life by marrying her, and counting down first the hours and then the minutes until he’s killed by a car bomb. But some of them are more sympathetic, and yet still are people who consider life to be a series of random events that simply cannot be controlled.
The Body in the Library, Agatha Christie
You may recall that article a while back where a guy interviewed Brandon Sanderson, clearly didn’t like the guy, and described his writing style as sentences that were fun to read without any of them being memorable. Many people (especially Sanderson’s fans) found this patronising at best and dismissive at worst, but I always found that observation striking and in fact describing many writers, including ones I like – I think it’s a pretty accurate description of Elmore Leonard, mid-and-late Quentin Tarantino, Alan Moore, and also Agatha Christie.
Her appeal is less down to her plots or even individual characters (outside Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot) and more down to her vision of the world; the witty ways she sums up people in a few words, which are great less for the individual lines and more for the way they convey the feeling of analysing people as they talk – a slight sense of amused superiority, for one thing.
“Lenin is suggested to have an Irish accent when speaking English.” I’ve listened to the few recordings of Lenin and Stalin speaking and it’s hard to tell what they actually sounded like because the sound is so tinny via phonograph. Stalin did have a higher register than you might expect.
“maybe we’re just like this.” Every leftist should read Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier where he observes that Socialist Party members in Britain are fundamentally correct but are largely prickly, well-educated to a fault, nitpicky, and socially awkward, so they have an extremely hard time achieving anything. In my own travels I’ve noticed leftists love correcting even newbies which does not exactly make you feel welcome.
Very funny to me that Stalin’s voice is higher than people expect and Hitler’s voice is deeper.
The second Witcher book is more of the same, well written and clever short stories built around a fantasy world and the title character’s profession as a monster hunter who is choosy about what counts as a monster. He is, however, not the main character in the stories so far. A very interesting way of doing things.
Moonflow – Straight up one of the best horror novels of the past few years, by turns queer and feminist satire, psychedelia, and cosmic horrorshow, in part because of the tonal mastery and intelligence at hand. This isn’t a Making Points novel, it’s too smart for that. Karella gets right that at the heart of TERFy, bullshit, hippie, second wave feminism is repression, rage, jealousy of patriarchal power (which is undeniably awful and the cult in the book is the direct consequence of terrible male behavior). Breaking free of this means embracing the collective unconscious and the divine masculine/feminine. Burrow deep within. Eerie and funny and crazy.
Ta-Nahesi Coates’ The Message, as eloquent and well-thought out at times as Coates’ forbearers Baldwin and Du Bois. The book is addressed to his students and is evidently a public intellectual finding he is still learning and discovering – hence why he’s faced backlash from the liberal intelligentsia for acknowledging his own faults and seeing Israel as very obviously an apartheid state.
The Tommyknockers, by Stephen King — a group of people become obsessed with initially useful but ultimately empty and enervating technology that allegedly boosts intelligence but actually works toward a collective mindlessness that is powered by stolen labor and energy, they try to take over the world but are thwarted by a heroic drunk. Inspirational! More to come, hopefully.
Only things I know about this are (1) I think Jimmy Smits in the mini-series(?) and (2) King said this is the one book he didn’t remember writing while deeply drunk/addicted AND he hated it. (Cujo he didn’t remember and he was surprised at how good it was.)
I saw the miniseries ages ago (and it is not streaming, what the hell TUBI) and remember it being largely crap-ass but Smits was a great Jim Gardener. And the note at the end of the book says it was written over five years, which is pretty nuts for King, and it has references to other things he was putting out during that time (The Talisman, Firestarter, IT, also a direct allusion to himself as a trashy writer). It is overstuffed and at points feels like an actual rough draft, as in sentences are repeated in the manner of something edited with the original not struck out, this is beyond normal King bloat. But it has some great stuff in the mess, and it may be even more of a Boomery book than IT, it’s a guy in the 80s dealing with 60s failure and Cold War/nuclear apocalypse and making bad decisions the whole time — write what you know.
Is this your way of telling us you’re planning to stop the AI / rationality cult takeover?