The Friday Article Roundup
There's also more great pop culture articles from the past week but really, what more could you ask of us?
-Image credit: Mark Mahaney for GQ
The Goggins! On a horse! Our job is done here! Other than…
Thanks to Casper and the horse she rode in on for contributing this week. Send articles to the FAR throughout the next week via ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Alex Pappademas profiles Walton Goggins for GQ:
In person he somehow looks more like Walton Goggins than he does onscreen, if that makes sense. The wall of white teeth, the crown of stringy hair, the close-set wild-prophet eyes, the easy laugh that seems to involve his whole head. Skinny legs in skinny jeans, white shirt unbuttoned, gold necklace, gold watch, gold ring, yellow-box American Spirits in the pull-cup of the Vacilando’s driver’s-side door. I’ve known him for about 90 minutes and I feel like we’re bros. Chances are you feel like you’ve known him forever too. Goggins has made close to 50 feature films since he started acting in the early 1990s, and he’s been good in the great ones and the not-so-great ones alike, which made him a Hey, it’s that guy Hall of Fame actor long before a lot of people knew his crazy name. But more important, he’s had a count-the-rings run on some of the best TV shows of the medium’s 21st–century renaissance period. He estimates he’s done around 250 hours of television all told, from The Shield to his nuanced-and-sensitive recurring role as a transgender sex worker on Sons of Anarchy to his run on Justified as the floridly articulate redneck gangster Boyd Crowder. Boyd was supposed to die at the end of the Justified pilot; instead, Goggins became a fan favorite and eventually a de facto co-lead.
Sundance dispatches! Get your Sundance dispatches! Here’s some from Clint Worthington for The Spool:
Kicking off with a hazy, film-shot look that fits somewhere between Donkey Skin and The Wicker Man, The Ugly Stepsister centers its cruel yet sympathetic gaze on Elvira (Lea Myren), the moon-faced daughter of social climbing widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), daydreaming of her own prince charming while traveling so Rebekka can marry her new beau. When the new groom unexpectedly croaks, they all learn far too late that neither party was as wealthy as the other thought; they’re right back where they started, with a new stepsister, the beautiful Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) aka Cinderella, now in tow. But another chance comes when the prince announces a ball three months hence, inviting all the virgin girls in the land so he can choose one to marry. Naturally, Rebekka begins styling Elvira to give herself the best shot possible—a move that requires some decidedly stomach-churning sacrifices.
For rogerebert.com, Marya E. Gates talks to Zeinabu irene Davis about a recent restoration to her 1993 indie film Compensation:
Did the digital restoration process also allow you to add more layers of sound?
No. I’m an old school filmmaker. When the film is cut, the film is cut, even though I could have done blah, blah, blah, no. What happened was that because the 16 millimeter was a mono track, so the sound was squashed. But I spent at least three months on the sound originally. I love sound. I spent about three months working on the sound at Maestro-Matic, which was a sound studio in Chicago with an amazing team, Mark and Dave Carlson. Mark came from a more experimental background, so we would do crazy stuff. We put a microphone in a condom and put it inside of the bathtub and swished it around to kind of get some of the sound effects. Because talking to Michelle about her experiences with sound as a deaf person, she would describe sound that seemed like being underwater. We tried to apply that to the concept of our sound recordings. It’s more in the contemporary part of the film. There’s a more experimental section where you see the train tracks going overhead, and Nico and Malika are in a different mode, so there’s more of those sound effects.
The Guardian‘s Stuart Heritage runs down famous films where the actor apologized for participating:
Paul Newman’s screen career seemed to get off to a flying start in 1954, when his first feature performance, in Victor Saville’s The Silver Chalice, resulted in a Golden Globe nomination. Despite this, the film has not been well remembered, holding a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its lumbering script and inauthentic sets. However, it was Newman – who played the artist who made the chalice that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper – who had the worst to say of it. Calling the film “the worst movie produced during the 1950s”, Newman actively tried to scupper its legacy. When it played every night for a week on a Los Angeles TV station in the early 60s, Newman took out adverts in trade papers reading: “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week – Channel 9.” This only drew everyone’s attention to the film, which received unusually high ratings.
At Kill Your Darlings, Em Meller paints a picture of attempting to balance creation with a day job:
Before work, at 5am, I make watery coffee to drink at my desk. There is an amber-coloured hourglass I place by my laptop. I like the weight of it, the way sand runs so serenely through its neck. Each morning, I have two hours—or six turns. Later, as the train rushes into the tunnel, into the dark beneath the city, I repeat lines to myself, trying to hold it all in my head as I get some version into my phone notes, which I will transfer to a document, and then, finally, when it feels ready, into the real document. There are hundreds of notes in my phone. Some of them whole paragraphs; some just a word, misspelled. Some no longer make sense by the time I transfer them to the working draft. They are hasty and shallow. And I can tell when a text I read has been made in this way, as a series of notes, fragments composed on trains or in breaks. You can feel it. In the internet novels, the Carver-pilled fiction, the fragmented ‘experimental’ essays. Like Gatsby, I think, if he snorted Ritalin recreationally. Hasty, shallow.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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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?
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The Friday Article Roundup
A catty roundup of great pop culture writing from the past week.
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season One, Episodes Nineteen and Twenty, “A Voice In The Wilderness”
This two-parter is heavy on backstory and technobabble that doesn’t really advance the plot or have an interesting story, saved by an amazing ending. This feels like a side effect of chasing lore; there’s this one really neat idea – a computer at the heart of the planet that Babylon 5 orbits around, maintained by one mind – and a bunch of details designed to get us there, as opposed to people acting to get what they want. This is generally not a show I would regard as tense, even if I do care about what happens. It’s very likely this radically changes in season two when all the place-setting is done, considering fans frequently describe the first and last seasons as the least good.
That said, I love that Garibaldi has this incredibly cliche backstory because everyone else has incredibly creative backstory, so it doesn’t seem so bad.
At one point, Londo complains to Delenn about how confusing it is that humans teach their children the Hokey Pokey (“It does not mean anything!”).
Lupin the Third: Blood Seal of the Eternal Mermaid – The internet tells me this one was noteworthy for being the first made in the HD age – and it looks great, with some amazing set pieces – and the first with new actors for Fujiko, Jigen, and Zenigata, which is apparently a big deal in the anime world. This one starts off messy, with the introduction of a 14 year old who demands to be made Lupin’s apprentice and who feels like she stumbled in from another kind of anime entirely. But it all comes together for a smart story that takes a sudden turn when we learn that the treasure our hero is seeking was once found but not taken by his grandfather. L-III is suddenly introspective, maybe for the first time, and ponders just what it means to be heir to Arsene Lupin. Though of course this doesn’t last and even gets turned on its ear. A really strong outing, the only weak parts being an overly clownish Zenigata and a turn towards some horror elements in the denouement.
Kojak, “Close Cover Before Killing” – A small businessman decides the best way to get rich is arson for the insurance but his partner disagrees and ends up dead. Kojak and crew have to both prove the killer’s guilt and find the man he hired to start the fire. Alex Rocco is solid as the killer, David Ackroyd surprisingly sympathetic as the chemistry professor turned firestarter, and young Erik Estrada ia a red herring.
One of Them Days (2025)
My first 2025 movie as opposed to the 2024 leftovers I’ve been watching. I liked it! It hits all the beats, it it does them well. I think the film is too nice to SZA’s character, who completely fucks them over at multiple points for some good dick, but other than that the film works really well. Shout out to Katt Williams who steals every scene he’s in.
Katt Williams is incapable of not stealing a scene.
Burn After Reading — more to come. This time out I noticed that Swinton is absent from the wrap-up at the end and once you see that it’s pretty weird, considering what goes down there’s no way she is not somehow involved if only to be bought off, I wonder if there was dialogue to that extent but it was cut to get the rhythm of that final scene. Anyway, still mean, still great, even better than Pitt’s Schwinn line is a minute earlier, when he gets in the car face to face with the guy he’s trying to extort and breathily intones “Os-borne Cox” in the same way he did on the phone trying to remain anonymous, just incredible stupidity even for a Coen character, magnificent shit.
“I thought you might be worried… about the security… of your shit.”
The uncomfortable realization I have every time watching this movie is that if there is one Coen character I am closest to temperamentally it is Osborne Cox, and him losing his mind at how stupid all of this is while still engaging with it is quite the cautionary tale. The minute he heard Pitt say that he should’ve just hung up.
His dropping the breathy voice with “Give us the money, douchebag!” is amazing, every Pitt line and beat here is sublime dumbassery as many have said.
“Give us the money” having strong Lebowski echoes and Pitt and McDormand here wind up making the Dude and Walter look pretty competent in comparison.
The two parts I laugh hardest at are sadly not dialogue: Pitt’s expression before he gets shot in the face and Clooney’s expression afterwards.
High Potential, “Survival Mode” (episode 4) – really enjoyed this one after finding episode 3 a little weak. Basically this is just good comfort food TV though and I don’t have much to say about it beyond that.
The Shield S1E4 “Dog Days”. Random observations: this has a hilariously fake dead dog which actually makes the scene more absurd in a good way. Great character beat here of Mackey’s outrage at being seen as up for sale (and Kern respecting that) – he is in charge, he is not to be bought or paid for, as he also tells Rondell (“I am your LANDLORD”).
That fake dead dog is indeed hilarious, especially when it’s laid out like Exhibit A, smack in the middle of a table. (I also love that Lem reflexively petted the dog when he met it before. And then it died, not so much from T-Bonz but from having reached the pinnacle of its life in getting a pat from Lem.)
He even calls T-Bonz a dog killer at the end, he’s clearly pissed!
Haha, I was listening to the commentary on “The Enemy of Good” (the Doomsday episode) and they also mentioned they had to use hilariously fake dead dogs, meaning they couldn’t even really put them on camera too long or too clearly or it’d be obvious how fake they were.
The Final Insult
Charles Burnett’s half-documentary/half-fictional look at LA homelessness, and I’m not convinced those two halves blend as well as they need to for this to have the impact it should. Parts of it are great. One of the bleakest, most resigned moments is Box wearily explaining that he gets by working as a kind of roving efficiency expert for banks, telling them that it’d be cheaper to fire their full-time employees and get by on a patchwork of temps, like him, that they never have to give health insurance to, and that he knows he’s putting more people in his own dire straits in the process (“Even to survive for a moment, you have to become part of that system”); other times, you get at least flashes of a kind of incidental joy and connection, like when one white man sings a Korean song (learned years ago, off a record) to some delighted young Korean women. But it’s much easier for the bleakness to spiral and compound, whereas the sense of pleasure and community is less tangible, less permanent, and less likely to spread like kudzu. I just think that would’ve had more impact if I didn’t have to wonder, “Wait, is this one of the real parts or not?”
I can’t help but wonder if it would’ve had more impact if it didn’t share a title with The Naked Gun 33 1/3.
Flow – Grandeur need not have complexity. This embodies that in its animation which focuses on movement and framing over detailed textures. Some of that is the standard of computer animation has risen so that video games have surpassed this film in complexity. But its resemblance to a cut scene is only superficial, it contains moments of larger-than-life awe and still can convey precious details. Nothing the biggest blockbusters can throw at the scene has the delight of a spooked capybara changing direction.
It’s also deceptively simple in story, specific on the action (until one transcendent moment) while enigmatic on the backstory and details. Is this a fable? A children’s story? A road movie? Maybe this is a near future where global warming means scrambling for a boat every so often. Maybe God decided to try the flood thing again and got it right this time. Whatever the situation, we have a brave cat, a sleepy capybara, a noble heron, a greedy lemur, and… dog. A wonderful bunch of characters brought to life by artists similarly acting at a higher level than most members of their species.
There are few sequences as thrilling in movies the last few years as the cat finally learning how to swim and immediately fishing for the rest of the crew. Honestly felt proud of the cat in that moment.
Did you catch the post credits scene? I didn’t.
Abbott Elementary, “The Science Fair”
The teachers take the student science fair a little too competitively and end up kinda ruining it for the kids. Kinda predictable, though it was nice to see another drop-in from Ava’s father. Ava gets some great moments here, too, but outside of that, I dunno, nothing special about this one.
Matlock, “Crash Helmets On”
The main case involves defending a nursing home in a wrongful-death suit, but the Olympia-Julian cold war is also about to turn hot, and there’s an elderly apartment owner whose co-op is trying to evict him… and it’s a lot for Matty to juggle to both do her job and do anything she can to further her real mission. She might be making mistakes… or at least, in Shieldian fashion, making decisions to get herself out of the fire now that have greater consequences later. That makes this a pretty good episode.
Elsbeth, “Finance Bros”
Alan Ruck plays twin brothers with a highly successful venture capital firm. One of the brothers survives a near crash in his private jet and has an epiphany to quit this life and give away his money. The other brother does not take kindly to this. Can Elsbeth unravel the mystery?
Elsbeth also finally gets some resolution on the Van Ness case after Carter drops in from The Good Wife universe to warn her the firm is going to pin the suppressed police report on her. She cleverly figures a way through it. And I liked that the show, even though it isn’t terribly serialized, acknowledges the history we’ve seen between the characters. Captain Wagner instinctively believes Elsbeth when he tells her it’s not true, because he saw the effort she put into getting to the real truth when he was being framed for corruption.
Mythic Quest, “Breakthrough”
Poppy calls in “sick” so she can spend the day in bed with Storm, but as much as anything she wants to skip Ian’s Warrior Within Day, where he likes to do goofy pseudo-philosophical nerd shit. He recruits David and Jo to join him instead, since they’re going through crises of their own. But of course, difficulties aside, Ian and Poppy still spend a lot of time talking about each other and their creative partnership…
Meanwhile, Brad tries to help Dana and Rachel get their lives and finances together and have a long-term plan for the future. It doesn’t work. “I told you I don’t want to be the only Black person in Boulder.” Hahaha, fair! Well, once Deion Sanders leaves.
Not an episode where a lot happens plot-wise, but it’s quite funny with a lot of good lines. (“I think you’re just engorged by the moment.”)
Suburgatory, “Blame It on the Rain Stick” and “About a Boy-Yoi-Yoing”
You know what, Tessa is right about Evan. Fuck his feelings and fuck being nice to him because he’s a nerd; he’s a pervert and creep.
What did we read?
The Magician’s Nephew, CS Lewis
In discussing Narnia with people, I’ve found this one is pretty popular, and I did very much enjoy it. It’s got the best story next to Lion, Witch, etc, and in fact can be seen as a twisted retelling of it – Digory is essentially given the same choice as Edmund, but the fact that he has something important to lose appears to be a weakness but is in fact a strength, along with the fact that he has Polly with him to ‘knock some sense into him’.
Both the Queen and Uncle Andrew are fun Lewisian villains; I enjoy that he actually puts work into their thought processes, admitting that what they do makes sense from their perspective. The Queen comes off as a genuine evil counterpart to Aslan – all his focus, most of his even moods, focused on destruction and evil rather than cultivating goodness.
It also contains surprisingly little prequel bullshit – obviously, it’s the literal origin of Narnia, but that’s successfully woven into Digory’s story. There’s the origin of the streetlamp, but that feels like a charming detail no different from any other.
Very much looking forward to The Last Battle – historically, when I’m working through a series I don’t like, I find myself either indifferent to or even taking pleasure in things fans don’t like. I’ve always been impressed by Lewis apparently just going full ball into his preachy bullshit, right down to having a character who doesn’t get into Heaven in the end, because that really does sound like following one’s own logic all the way.
Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt
A philosophical, somewhat scientific exploration of why traffic works the way it does. Vanderbilt’s main point is that people are far less rational or smart as they claim to be, and he explores both the mental shortcuts and backwards emotions people have about driving, starting with the fact that people are generally worse drivers than they think. One big point he makes is how frequently people pursue self-interest at the expense of the proper flow of traffic; the book opens with an explanation of ‘late merging’, or the argument that when two lanes merge into one, whether you should merge as soon as possible or as late as possible.
One of the most interesting sections of the book is laying out the philosophy of Hans Monderman, who argues passionately against most traffic signals and signs on the basis that it makes people dumber drivers, and indeed demonstrated as such with a redesigned town square he did. The flipside is that most people (especially tourists) tend to find the area feels more dangerous, the flipside of that being that this feeling of danger, paradoxically, is what makes it safer.
Vanderbilt lays out how the feeling of safety tends to make people take greater risks, and much of driving and traffic comes from these kind of paradoxes where what’s good for us often doesn’t feel good. Similarly, much of the book lays out how we perceive simultaneously much more and much less than we realise; misspelled stop signs will hardly get a notice, and the things that actually cause us to slow down and drive safer tend not to register as such.
(There’s also a section in which, once again, designers of massive systems of humans must take notes from golden era Disney. Another amusing note: the reason there are so many bad drivers is because we don’t actually get as much meaningful feedback as we think we do)
In terms of tips for driving: if you’re not afraid, you’re probably not a very good driver. Slower is inarguably better.
“It also contains surprisingly little prequel bullshit – obviously, it’s the literal origin of Narnia, but that’s successfully woven into Digory’s story. There’s the origin of the streetlamp, but that feels like a charming detail no different from any other” — exactly. Lewis’ patchwork construction is uniquely suited to make this work, it’s not deep lore but an explanation that is just as random as the original image, which is memorable because of its randomness. (This is also exhibit A in my rage at the re-ordering of the books to make them in-story chronological as opposed to chronological by publication — as Lewis wrote the books, the lamp is two delightful surprises, as re-ordered it is a process instead of a mystery.) And yeah, there are some Implications of the Queen coming from outside Narnia but that whole setpiece — the dying world, the frozen banquet, the gong — is eerie and ominous and makes her a nearly equal threat.
I remember talking to an engineer decades ago about traffic and he said no one is stuck in traffic, they ARE traffic, and that has stuck with me. Not just the truth of it but the re-ordering of perspective, you are not the protagonist here. That said, “afraid” and “cautious” and “aware” are all different things and fearful drivers are drivers you cannot count on to do the right thing at the right time (merge when you’ve given them space, pull out at a stop when it’s their turn) and that is its own problem — their fear makes them the protagonists. I’d rather drive with da king of da highway.
no one is stuck in traffic, they ARE traffic
That specific line shows up somewhere in this!
A dem fine woman, as Uncle Andrew says IIRC.
I’d be surprised if you enjoy The Last Battle much. Its greatest fault is literary.
You’re supposed to merge as late as possible, right? This is a debate I had constantly with a friend who drove like an asshole and would always bypass the line and wedge himself in at front. Then he sent me a study that showed traffic flows better and faster if both lanes are used as long as possible until the merge point, so taking the freer lane is the correct move. Turns out he was a correct asshole!
The problem is while that philosophy is demonstrably correct for a Y-merge or zipper merge — two lanes into one — that is not how lanes work for the other merge, getting on an off-ramp. The “merging” lane there is a through lane that becomes a default merge when one person is no longer using it for travel. I don’t know how to create a better solution, but I’m comfortable with calling that asshole behavior.
That one for sure, though as somebody who almost has gone by a busy exit not realizing the line two miles ahead of it was for that exit, I’ve got a little sympathy for the merger in error there. The study was for parallel lanes merging.
Last year our highway under construction went so far as to put up multiple signs telling everyone to use both lanes and marking the merge point with a specific sign. People still lined up for miles in the right lane. Whatcha gonna do?
Working my wait some more through the bio of De Gaulle. Kind of amazing how this hopped up junior general became the recognized leader of the Free French even though his contributions to the war effort itself were minimal. And man, he was cold to the Resistance after the war, eager to consolidate power and to ignore anyone who dared question him, even the people whose sacrifices put his to shame.
Also reading a biography of Negro League legend Oscar Charleston. He was by all accounts an incredible talent who of course deserved better. But it’s also interesting to see that despite the painful segregation of baseball,. barnstorming teams of Black players and white players met all the time. White players and white fans knew from the start of the Negro Leagues how good Black players were.
Wait til ’68!
What can a poor boy do?
Started 7 books because I’m a wildcard – more to come. A new book, The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister, a PA local, is excellent, a gothic novel with notes of Bronte and Shirley Jackson, especially the insulated family stuck in a decaying old house. Not far along enough into The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse but…this is actively predicting the 21st century, especially the project of cataloguing and mashing up art into categories and ideas.
I’m about halfway through 4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie. I saw and thoroughly enjoyed the 1945 murder mystery movie Lady on a Train a while ago and this (1957) novel borrows the basic premise of a woman seeing a murder from the window of a train but finding it hard to get anyone to take her seriously – not sure if it’s an intentional lift or coincidence but there is certainly a lot of overlap! Christie’s version throws in Miss Marple but only on the fringes of the story, most of the action follows a friend of hers that she enlists to help out by enlisting as a housekeeper at the estate where the body is found. It’s a bit of an odd concoction but a fun, easy read so far which suits my current level of brainpower fine.
“Hmm, there appear to be marmalade paw prints around the body… call the airport, stop all flights to Peru.”
The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes, by Lawrence Block
This was a bit of a miss for me, alas. I usually have good luck with Block’s standalone crime novels, but this felt like it had the drawbacks of sleaze without the accompanying pleasures. It is–as the novel’s own characters note–another riff on a standard noir plot (a woman and her lover scheme to kill the woman’s husband), and it makes some cool, disconcerting moves in that mode, starting off with an unusual and thorny bonus problem (how can you get away with murder when the law already knows you’re planning on committing it?) and eventually pushing the ultimate scheme into some very dark places. But the sex–and there is a lot of sex–feels oddly sterile and clinical for the most part, like it’s written from too distant a perspective to invite you into the fantasy, and that makes it hard when instant, life-changing attraction and the dark pull of romance are key elements. The violence winds up feeling much more vivid and memorable, which has an interesting but not necessarily compelling effect on the overall ending.
Very close to the end of Nabokov’s **Pale Fire**. The book is ostensibly the original publication of an epic poem by poet John Shade with commentary by his friend (?) and neighbor Prof. Kinbote, a visiting professor from the fictitious nation of Zembla. And the joke is that Kinbote doesn’t know shit about poetry. His critical insights are all completely wrong and have nothing to do with Shade’s actual work, plus he keeps seeing allusions in the poem to the escape of the deposed king of Zembla that aren’t there. And it’s great fun, a arch commentary on literary criticism, and also the stuff about the king is a legitimately enjoyable yarn even though it has nothing to do with the poem and is just a product of Kinbote’s self-aggrandizement. (He had related the king’s story to Shade and assumed that was what the poem was going to be about.) But the problem is this — the poem is fucking incredible! I’m enjoying the commentary section both because of the king’s adventure story and watching Kinbote as the butt of the novel’s joke. But none of it is as good as the poem itself, so even as I greatly enjoy the novel, I mostly just wish I were reading more of Nabokov’s poetry.
Love this book and heard the complaint before, I don’t think it’s unfair, but Kinbote’s genuine need for his friend to not die overpowers me. Obviously there’s the Sam Johnson/Hodge comparison but also Socrate and Plato (I complained once about Republic until someone noted that Plato is, in his own misguided way, building a world where his lover can’t die).
When I realized how good the poem was, I read it straight through before I started on the notes, and I stand by my decision.
Oh, yes, absolutely. The fact that Kinbote suggests differently is one of the first signs that he is not to be trusted.
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Planet and Ourselves – Enjoyed this a lot. It’s more history than I was expecting, highlighting the inventors and capitalists that created each evolution in the “cold chain” that now supports the entire food economy of the western world. All were solving problems without knowledge of the impossible-to-see consequences of their inventions getting scaled to unimaginable sizes, miles and miles of coolers holding our food and drawing untold amounts of energy. I also appreciated that the book detailed the imminent problems of the system without being prescriptive about what you should do about it in your own kitchen. Unless you’re going to 1) tend a sizeable vegetable patch and raise and slaughter livestock or 2) stop eating, you’re not going to escape the refrigeration system as it is, and even if you do it’s a drop in the bucket. Nice to read something honest without being dour. There’s a lot of interesting possibilities on the horizon, like a coating that covers fruits and vegetables and keeps them as fresh as if they were refrigerated at room temperature (the spray itself is made from food wasted and is completely edible even matching the FDA definition for food).
Reverently leaping to my feet and taking off my hat at the FAR header image like a Rock Ridge resident hearing the words “Randolph Scott.”
It’s going to be hard to ever top that as a header image. My heart wants what it wants.
Maybe just use it as the header image for every article going forwards? Nobody will mind.
I support this.
I should point out that there is much more Goggins goodness in the GQ article – including a mesh shirt! Doubtful many of you have subscriptions, but if there were a way to remain incognito while looking at the article it would give you a window into its content.
I sent the article to Chris with the subject line ‘Patron Saint of the Solute?’
Looks like the question mark can come off that sentence!
Year of the Month update!
This February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016, including these movies, albums, and books.
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
Feb 7th: Gillian Nelson: Queen of Katwe
Feb. 11th: Lauren James: Inside
Feb. 12th: Bridgett Taylor: Doctor Strange
Feb. 13th: Cori Domschot: Ghostbusters
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 18th: John Roberts: Silence
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
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. 10th: BurgundySuit: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Joys, sorrows and shameless self-promotion!
Wife is getting switched to a lower dose of her injectable. Once it clears the insurance company’s desk. In the meantime she is off the higher dose since the side effects were not fun. But I have no idea what will happen if the side effects continue with the lower dose.
Moved back to my regular job more or less. This liminal space between jobs is a bit weird. The temp is also not quite moving as fast as I would like wrapping things up.
Work is absolutely chaotic at the moment, everyone is trying to get ready for a major switch in systems as we finally merge with the bigger company that acquired us recently and it’s – unsurprisingly – mostly being handled very badly, for example we had a series of hour-long meetings about “the new timesheet system” which seems to be identical to the old timesheet system but with enough subtle differences in what we have to actually pick that nobody is sure what they’re doing, and we’ve discovered that the person in charge of the transition has the day off today, the first day everyone in the company has to submit their first week under the new codes. They put all the information in a powerpoint file that they shared with the group but didn’t give anyone access to. Kinda hilarious. Since I don’t like the job anyway I’m quite enjoying the madness honestly but it’s also quite exhausting.
Still suffering from various winter flu / cold ailments so probably another weekend with no fun social stuff, which isn’t the end of the world because I mostly set February aside for creative projects but at the moment my head is fuzzy enough that I’m not doing too well on that front either – I seem to have no trouble at all writing music but the part of my brain responsible for lyrics has atrophied away to nothing. I’m sent a couple of new tracks out to regular collaborators and I’m sure they’ll come up with great ideas but I really want to write new stuff I can play at some of my upcoming gigs so I need to find a way past this mental block.
It’s bad. The denigrating of government workers continues, careers decades in the making getting tossed aside with no thought except malice. Congress isn’t going to do anything. Guess we have the possibility that the courts will step in next week, but we’re not holding out much hope. Career-wise and philosophically we’re committed to environmentalism and education and we live in a nation that values neither of those things. But hey, who cares, let’s watch a fucking football game.
I’m sorry, man. I think lots of people value those things, the nihilism of Congress in refusing them to defend them makes it easy to be nihilist (myself very much included here) about other people in general and that is a bad and destructive feeling to have when things inevitably get worse and the need to rely on other people is at its greatest. I hope you guys get some relief from all this shit this weekend.
The last eight years have been the worst but we’re going on 25 years of the idea that winning the slim majority of votes for one office gives you a mandate over the people. Now the people who have never known another way to consider it are adults, after a while the idea that politics is tied to compromise and not convincing the unwashed masses to hate your phantoms just long enough to give you votes will pass out of living memory. That’s the future my kids are headed for and they won’t be able to imagine a different way any more than I could get them to understand what a Blockbuster Video was like.
Too late to be submitted, but incredible interview with Sarah Hagi at Variety about Hagi finding Karla Sofia Gascon’s racist tweets, Hagi takes zero shit:
V: Some might argue that digging up old tweets is an example of “cancel culture” looking to “cancel” the next person.
SH: I entirely disregard those people intellectually on every level. These tweets existed from 2016 to 2023, which I found based on the words I searched. Who knows what else is out there?
Later:
V: What would you say directly to Gascon?
SH: Nothing. She’s just another racist.
https://variety.com/2025/film/awards/journalist-sarah-hagi-discovered-karla-sofia-gascon-tweets-1236293396/
One thing I noticed in one of the tweets (the one about Hitler and Jews) is that it reads like a rhetorical device, an ironic repeating of racist sayings in order to expose their bigotry. It’s hard to say with any confidence that that’s what it was, especially since the tweet she was responding to no longer exists so crucial context is missing, but it seems a reasonable assumption to make, even more so when read in Spanish. My wife was watching Gascón in an interview last night, where she said that she often assumed a voice on Twitter to expose things that she doesn’t believe during arguments online. It wasn’t terribly convincing but I could see how that could be the case in the first tweet, and maaaaaaybe some of the others.
Now, I don’t want to defend Gascón, who seems disingenous and defensive at best, and it might just be that she really believes despicable things. But the certainty with which Hagi jumps to read a racist motivation (not without reason, of course: you should definitely watch out whenever a Spaniard starts talking about ‘the Moors’) without examining if there’s something else going on might be cause for concern as well.
TL:DR: There’s a good chance here that Gascón isn’t racist and that she’s just smug, whiny and a piss-poor online debater/troll.