This week, you will unite alongside:
Be part of the in-group! Send articles to be featured throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Kyle Tran Myhre writes for Racket about how artists can help in Minneapolis and beyond:
Local artist Ricardo Levins Morales says that “hope is the oxygen of rebellion.” And for me, hope is something we cultivate not just through writing anthemic songs or painting inspiring pictures. We cultivate it through showing up, collaborating, and modeling a way of being with each other that is less individual and more collective, less transactional and more relational.
A.S. Hamrah and Nick Pinkerton talk about the dark visions of Land Of The Dead at Metrograph:
AH: And of course, in this movie made in 2005, when we were starting to understand that in the 21st century it was no longer going to be an analog world, there’s this emphasis on tools. When the zombies are coming to consciousness, they start to understand they can use the tools in their hands to, say, smash the glass to break into Fiddler’s Green.
NP: And of course, the zombies show much greater capacity for acting in concert, as a disciplined mass, than the living do. Which goes back to what we were talking about earlier, the sense that Romero, even if he has some faith in humans as small, mobile units, doesn’t seem to have the highest opinion of the human race as social beings willing or capable of cooperating towards the shared good.
Paula Harper tracks trends in political music on TikTok at the Boston Globe:
Take the a cappella croon of TikTok creator AGiftFromTodd, whose catchy dystopian ditty “Hostile Government Takeover” became the soundtrack to online dread of the second Trump administration — especially once it got the remix treatment in February 2025 by musician Vinny Marchi. In Marchi’s edit, as AGiftFromTodd’s brief chorus ends — “And if you say, ‘Wait a minute, who do we have to stop this?’ / We had one but you didn’t want that lady in office” — a kaleidoscopic beat drop opens up space for a dance break, for the onscreen creator and scroller alike. “Hostile Government Takeover” wasn’t a meticulously crafted pop single — but it didn’t need to be. Catchiness and speed are the priorities in this new world of political music-making. The point is to inject a song quickly into the digital bloodstream where it can be shared, serving as the soundtrack for videos by like-minded creators.
At The Baffler, Lydia Kiesling writes about how the seeds were sown for AI slop lists by the original internet list culture:
Five minutes with the sausage-making of list culture was sufficient to understand how arbitrary the process really was… The capsules in these gargantuan lists are written by a handful of people who are, judging by my experience, scraping the thesaurus and clawing out their eyes by the end of their allotted blurbs. I began to feel that I was helping make these lists purely so that I could pay myself to make more lists and retired from the whole sordid racket in 2022.
And at The Film Stage, Nick Newman interviews producer Rodrigo Teixeira about the state of movies and where the good ones are coming from:
But outside of the United States, I think the cinema is being very interesting. If you see this year, you have Sirāt, which talks about something. When you have Sentimental Value, which talks about sentiment, about emotions. When you have It Was Just an Accident. When you have Sound of Falling. When you have the Park Chan-wook, which is a comedy but leaves a message for you. When you have these types of films being made outside of the U.S., you ask: why is this happening outside of the U.S? For one reason: because we have freedom of speech, and you guys do not. And we don’t need Netflix or Amazon to finance ourselves; we have subsidies that help us to do our films. That, for me, is the reason why I go to see the young international filmmakers, or I go back to see old American films: because I don’t think America, right now, is doing great films. For the first time in years, I’m not seeing America doing the best films.
More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode One, “The Hour of the Wolf”
“If there’s a madman on the throne, you and Refa put him there. He is your responsibility, as you… you are mine.”
Londo’s story, as often is true, is the most interesting one we have here. I can’t quite say this is the true beginning of his redemption, but it feels like part of it; it feels equivalent to “Felina” in Breaking Bad for Walt, where he has achieved his goal and even suffered some tragic loss and is now initiating a new story (it’s also got Morden undergoing a drastic physical change, which owns). The Emperor showing up after three seasons of hanging over the story is a hell of a thing; him wearing slightly less ridiculous hair is an extremely funny spinning of the show’s mythology.
My favourite scene of the episode, however, is G’Kar going over Garibaldi’s stuff, trying to get into his head; the joke about Daffy Duck potentially being a god to him is an obvious one, but it’s actually funny here because not only would Garibaldi passionately argue that Daffy Duck is effectively a god to him, he’d be right. Sincerity goes a long way; Garibaldi sincerely believes in Daffy Duck, and G’Kar is sincerely interested in this because he sincerely considers himself Garibaldi’s friend and is sincerely trying to understand him.
Least cheesy credits so far.
Went diving on Kanopy for the first time in ages, and first came up with It’s All Right, Jack, a 1960s British satire of management and labor in the years after the war. But I wasn’t find this even a little funny, and gave up from boredom. Even Peter Sellers was dull.
Moved on to the 80s Miss Marple (specifically part one of “The Body in the Library”, a show I watched back in the day and haven’t revisited since. My memory of the genteel theme song was accurate. And “genteel” is the word. Someone has been murdered, there is another body lurking, and while there is some pathos and sadness, everything is remarkably calm. I don’t think I would say Agatha Christie wrote what I would call cozies, since a certain darkness informs a lot of her novels, but this show probably counts as one. Which is not to say that this isn’t entertaining, though it remains to be seen if stretching out the adaptations to three hours will work. (The Poirot adaptations of the same era usually wrapped up books of the same length in ninety minutes.) Hickson is a very good Marple, sweet, a bit self effacing, observant of course but not an out and out deductive genius, and not the force of nature early versions tended to be.
Walter Koenig is the biggest coup of the recurring guest stars but Ed Wasser is right up there — he plays Morden as a recurring guest star, a guy very much hanging in the background of our heroes until it is least convenient for him, and he nails the smugness of a guy you really want to squash but can’t. So him getting squashed is great, and he leans into how that seething rage is now part of his character.
I think this season had an opportunity to do more with the Garibaldi/Daffy Duck thing, which I agree has been well done, but largely whiffs on it. Until very late in the game, where he gets a great Daffy moment.
Babylon 5 — Harlan Ellison escapes jail after being arrested by Mitchell and co-writes an extremely cheesy episode, LOCK HIM UP. This is feels like a classic later-season idea, following two maintenance grunts around the station and getting this world from their point of view for an episode, but it’s hurt by our grunts being mid-tier at best in terms of the show’s performers and more particularly by their need to still interact with the main cast. Sometimes this is handled by them being in the background of a scene, in particular a nice one with Londo and G’Kar, but other times they’re interacting directly with the main cast and not only does this feel forced, it is outside how the show we know operates on a regular basis — Franklin will absolutely righteously run his mouth, he won’t do so at a rando. Elsewhere, a larger plot is building around an annoying guy who replaced another annoying guy and is possibly more annoying! What an annoyance. Better is the new United Space Nations having to deal with strife and machinations, this comes down to bashing one of the minor alien groups and I think they have been bashed before, it’s hilarious — yes yes yes the Centauri are genocidal but they’re at least good at it, these guys are incompetent clowns and dishonest to boot. Squid Guy would never!
Dogra Magra – film club with a friend, he picked this out from his blu-ray backlog and I opted to go in completely blind. It turned out to be a very confusing amnesia-based mystery about a man in a psychiatric hospital who may be a murderer, but can’t remember anything. The mystery is pretty convoluted and unfolds in a muddled order, perhaps too muddled for my liking – although the film is visually striking and full of interesting characters so I enjoyed it even if I found it incredibly hard to follow. One of the doctors has an excellent laugh (deployed at all the most inappropriate moments) and the script includes lots of apt dialogue like “insanity is very complicated!”
Ha, I bet you would’ve liked it better if it was Catra Magra.
A cat does feature but it’s deceased and “has been used as poison”, mysteriously.
Inside No. 9, “The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge”
Historical folk horror. I appreciate the commitment and precision of Reece Shearsmith’s “Vincent Price in Witchfinder General” impression; Shearsmith’s a genuine folk horror enthusiast, and that shines through here. Some excellent jokes, from the magistrate’s obvious enthusiasm for ass play to the sheer construction-to-punchline ratio of the gag that starts with the introduction of cobbler Richard Two-Shoes. This comes to a satisfying end and then tacks on something overplayed and so annoying that I’m going to spoil it out of spite: I’m so sick of “oh, but she really was a witch” twists in witch trial stories. It cheapens all the genuine engagement with how appalling and illogical the “witchfinding” process was! This episode is invested in the grating awfulness of that–it’s very funny, but it’s also very honest about the self-interest and stupidity at work here–and then it drops it all for a twist that’s even more tired than I am. Still, very good up until the literal last minute.
Primal, “Kingdom of Sorrow”
Sending up the Guillermo signal now! Also, lions! I always appreciate the presence of lions. Two incredibly poignant bits in this episode: the giraffe-okapi creatures reacting to Spear’s unnatural presence with violent fear (we saw this kind of thing last episode too, but it continues to be heart-wrenching; they’re not running from him because of what he might do but because of what he now is, and so it feels like his resurrection has removed his ability to keep any kind of company with animals) and him leaving a newfound spear behind, which really feels like abandoning part of his rediscovered identity even as he continues to hunt after another relic of it (those visions of Fang).
Spear fails to walk without rhythm and so attracts the worm.
My wife, looking up from her book: “Did he just beat a lion to death with another lion?”
Me: “Yes. This is a great show.”
The Gambler
Okay, technically Kenny Rogers as The Gambler, but that looks ridiculous. This is a lightweight but charming hangout Western, made on the cheap but with a fair amount of charm. I expected Bruce Boxleitner’s Han Solo move at the end, but the exact way it was staged–with him actually intervening before Rogers has even arrived on the scene, let alone gotten in trouble–was clever and surprising. Good monologue from Lee Purcell.
You have me thinking about that cliche twist ending now, and I wonder if it isn’t a hard thing to escape. A witch trial story has two endings — she is a witch or she isn’t — and if she isn’t, where do you go? Because the people holding the witch hunt aren’t going to have a moral reckoning over what they did, so all you have is a procedural with no doubt (as opposed to a more typical trial story that likely makes a case for both ways before the judgment) and an atrocity at the end. Witchfinder General is atrocity all the way down and can make this work because of the scope a movie (even a short one) affords, I can see an anthology running into trouble here. So “she WAS a witch!” offers a reveal, a “point” to the story, even as it undermines everything about that story. I think there is probably a third way out of this but it would involve a shift in focus from the trial/hunt to another direction, where someone else can have that reckoning or action that would turn the story into something other than a court report.
With SPOILERS—
That third way is what the story briefly goes with, actually: the witchfinders have come in pairs, and one of them has obviously become disillusioned with the process and doesn’t believe they’re chasing down anything but rumors created by venal opportunists. His doubts get him implicitly threatened by his more Vincent Price-esque colleague. At the end, the more skeptical witchfinder (Pemberton) used the upcoming burning at the stake as a way to kill the zealot, gagging him and putting a sack over his head so that he’s burned in place of the “witch,” which is the first death in a long time that he feels is an actual act of ridding the world of evil.
But then: also she was a witch all along!
Booo! That is disappointing, they had something good there.
Lions! As always, the craft here is impeccable, making every quiet little moment land as hard as the big blows. Love the shadowplay that makes the lions appear as Fang initially, the unassuming calm of the herd at the start before they sense anything off, the lions retreating when they realize it’s over, and holding in that static final shot as Spear quasi-mindlessly walks away from the spear, nearly emptying the frame as much as his mind is.
Also, is Vomas a lion guy? I mean, these lions aren’t particularly cat-like, but a connection can be made.
The animation continues to be so gorgeous and kinetic. The show is such a pleasure to look at: I’d happily frame some of this and put it on my walls.
Oh, excellent way of putting that part about the ending.
Watched an old video essay about how insane the Glee pilot is and my god is it batshit. There’s a layer of what’s at last become cheese to revisiting these late 2000’s haircuts and fashions, including the hybrids of fauxhawks and emo cuts. Then there’s horror at what was seen appropriate or morally fine by the creators, like teachers having zero boundaries with students (touching them, blackmailing them, spying on them in the shower(!)) and characters who bully disabled kids later becoming lovable. The creator isn’t here to totally trash the show either – he praises (some of) the jokes and Jane Lynch’s performance. He’s probably right though that Glee should’ve been a movie, because it’s hedging its bets between parody and actual teen dramedy, and as a TV show the tone becomes downright bizarre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAoof3GSyE&pp=2AbXCA%3D%3D
What did we read?
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0570-0600, Brian Clevinger
The comic continues to trundle along with its complex system of jokes, which makes it fun to read and hard to analyse, so I’ll analyse its easy-to-readness. Technically, it is telling the same jokes over and over, but the network of jokes is so complex that it feels more like reading a language than hearing the same jokes; this is comforting, the way 30 Rock and Always Sunny are comforting. That said, it’s continuing to have fun suggesting a genre plot a la Game Of Thrones’s mysteries (like R+D=J), planting seeds suggesting the story is going somewhere specific.
In this specific case, Thief is tricked into entering a deal with a trickster god we’ve never met before, when he’s convinced he’s dead and in hell (a place of infinite wealth with nothing to steal, suggesting Thief is motivated much more by the ownage of stealing than the actual material reward).
“Thief, you just blew my mind.” / “It would blow your mind to learn that wheels are, in fact, round.” / “Black Mage, please. I can only be blown so many times in one day.” / “That’s it, I’m outta this conversation.”
Absolutely stupid gag of Fighter interrupting a story to make it about him playing a bitchin’ sword-guitar solo.
The Norse Queen by Johanna Wittenberg – Based on the true story of Asa, a queen of the Vikings at a time such things were rare. A perfectly cromulent work of fiction, neither a great novel nor a bad one, merely readable and entertaining. Which should be fine, but the author’s insistence that our heroine would treat the role of women in her society as keepers of the hearth and the home as unworthy is, from what I know, inaccurate. Yes, there were almost definitely some women warriors, most women would have been socialized to value their roles, and it’s fair to say that many had soft power in that role. Our heroine, however, doesn’t see it, and I would call that too modern a view. Still, as the book feels six feet from fantasy, I can ride with it. I would just ride better if the author were a better writer
Ghost stories chosen by Edward Gorey — with illustrations of course! And he likes to pick seemingly unthreatening scenes that he imbues with unease. The basic premise of “August Heat” by William Fryer Harvey — getting a glimpse of your future death — has been done a million times but was probably less of a thing in 1905 and Harvey has the great idea of doubling this, two people seeing each other’s death. And why might that be? There are a lot of classics in here (“The Monkey’s Paw” of course shows up, and why not) and this is where I finally caught up with M.R. James’ “Casting The Runes,” about a guy who curses people who poorly review his literary material, I assume this is about Tristan. The ending fizzles a bit although the final sentence is uneasy in terms of what it implies not just about what happened to a person but about how people can’t leave well enough alone; the atmosphere set up early on is what really makes this. James takes a generally hilarious premise — a mean man purposefully scaring children who run on his lawn — and makes it extremely unnerving, so much of this story is someone describing something they saw to a third party (or relating what a third party told them), there is a distance that does not let the reader clearly see the horror and what can be glimpsed is all the more frightening.
No Bones, by Anna Burns — caught up with Burns’ acclaimed debut, you may know her from Solute Book Club selection Milkman, a Booker prize winner and a fantastic novel. That was her third book, told from a tightly limited perspective about the constrictions and pressures of growing up in Belfast in the 1970s; Little Constructions, her second, is set in a Not-Belfast but clearly inspired by goings-on there (less Troubles than interpersonal and especially gender-related conflicts) and also narrated but much wilder and woolier. No Bones seeds these, it follows the Troubles from beginning to mid-90s and is largely but not exclusively following a likely Burns surrogate (the woman is a Middle Sister, the protagonist of Milkman, and a milkman has a role here!) as she breaks down. The book veers from straight description to complete psychotic breakdown depending on the chapter and each chapter, while short, covers a year or an event therein — there is a lot here and sometimes it doesn’t all gel as a whole work, even as it is clearly supposed to be represent the fracturing of self under this paranoid and unintrospective (because to ask questions is to run the risk of death) life. But it is still quite good (and as always there is dark and deadpan humor, this isn’t total misery), I think it suffered a bit for me from coming to it after her other books but strong recommendation for any Milkman fans.
Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon is a wonderful adaptation of “Casting the Runes,” if you haven’t seen that.
Oooh, will look for it! Curious how James translates visually, so much of his appeal is the lack of clarity.
At one point (forced by the studio, apparently) it does resort to a dopey but endearing puppet, but a lot of it is quite good at keeping the tone.
James is wonderful, “Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” is also recommended. Antiquarians do write some fine horror.
The later 20th century gets into suburban horror, the intrusion of the supernatural into supposedly safe spaces (Poltergeist, Amityville, large chunks of Stephen King); I love “antiquarian horror” as something different. The landscape is part of it but it’s more pastoral, it’s the lifestyle that is what’s been removed into an ostensibly safe and calm area and while suburban horror often side-eyes suburbia there’s a greater sense, at least in Runes, of a world that is right and steady and that makes intrusions more ominous.
The flipside of this is Lewis Carroll, a (likely asexual) English antiquarian who is able to create an illogical world and illustrate stability and logic in the process.
Seconded. Love M.R. James, and anything that ever gets compared to him is something I’ll check out.
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Simply one of my favorite novels of all time, with a beautiful, ruthless commitment to story and letting its characters make revealing choices and experience consequences. This has some of the best images of any Western: Pea Eye’s naked crawl through Montana, the snakes in the river, the lightning on the cattle horns, the pyramids of bones. I was trying to explain to my wife how all of this was emotionally devastating at times–I was sobbing over the book, after all–and I had to draw on Grant’s comments about The Shield being ennobling even its heartbreak because it respects its characters as fully human and believes their choices matter. There are so many threads of action and character you can trace through this: Jake Spoon’s character arc, where at every point he makes the most Jake Spoon choice possible, defining how we see him and bringing him to a point where he can finally see himself and choose to act on that rather than act instinctively, is a masterpiece all by itself.
Really looking forward to Bridgett’s upcoming article on this, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say in comments there. But this is a masterpiece, the kind of 850-page novel I’m sad to have come to an end, but which ends exactly where it needs to.
I should rewatch the miniseries now too.
The coming storm this weekend is offering the perfect opportunity for a reread of this. Co-sign everything, an absolutely magnificent novel. Thinking about this in relation to the Aubrey/Maturin books, which also follow two bros on long journeys — that is a series of course but beyond that there are missions and hierarchies, the demands of empire, and while Gus and Woodrow are in some ways mapping the territory for a future empire they are at looser ends and that greatly affects who they can and can’t be.
And the miniseries is great too, the most obvious casting you could want and Duvall and Jones are perfect.
Finished David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials by Violet Lucca, a lush and beautiful text that feels essential for any fan. My one quibble is that she could’ve gone deeper into Jung’s religious views and how these might mesh (or clash) with Cronenberg’s material atheism. The Shrouds isn’t a great movie yet it and Crimes of the Future seem like culminations, a godless man recognizing the numinous as a possibility even in a damned world.
I also started Berlin Alexanderplatz on audio, more to come.
Saw your write-up of The Shrouds earlier — I think it is a lot more muddled than other Cronenbergs (Violence and Promises are much straighter genre structures, as is The Fly) and I need to rewatch Videodrome, because I feel like it would compare to that confusing transformation. But I thought the muddle was purposeful and often quite funny — this is in some ways How Cronenberg Got His Groove Back. His avatar in Cassel here has been focusing on the body to the point of self-destruction through the soul, the opening line of “Grief is rotting your teeth” is the thesis in some ways, an intangible wreaking havoc on the tangible. As he embraces/is drawn into the intangible, the conspiracies and unresolved mysteries, he winds up getting laid every other day even as he’s haunted by dreams and ghosts. The last scene caught me off guard but it is if not intangible then in transit, Cassel has given himself over to the confusion and is up in the air.
I liked the ending, more that the journey there is such a wild goose chase that I found it unsatisfying. Maybe I’ll enjoy it more next time.
The World Jones Made by PKD – Reread for the upcoming tv series, though that is “sometime in 2026”. Early PKD and not one of his best but still has a lot of good ideas he did better elsewhere. The classic themes are all here. The fantastic power of a precog predicting the future, frustrated by the impossibility of influencing it. A totalitarian society, the conspiracy of the few against the many, an invasion by alien entities, maligned but benign mutants, and an ideal utopia on Venus. It’s ripe for today’s climate. The charismatic, populist leader at the center with his brand of absolutism clash with the ideals of relativism in much of society. The messianic leader promises unattainable and alluring goals and promises. The more impracticable these goals become, the more the masses will be ready to follow the leader, with their xenophobic instincts ignited into hating convenient scapegoats. Here they are the Drifters, harmless interstellar aliens persecuted by the populist ideology, and the maligned mutants looking for a better life.
This FB post from Samuel R. Delany made some waves in some book Discords I’m in. It sounds really sad and there are a few other stories possibly buried within.
The majority of my personal library, from my apartment at 184 West 82nd St, in New York City, is currently in a CubeSmart storage unit.
Once upon a time, I lived in an 8-room apartment with books all up and down the hallway, along with my own little room and library at the very end. From there I went to my daughter’s house in Wynnewood, where there was room for the entire library (it filled their entire basement), but when Dennis and I were kicked out (with an hour to pack) we came to this three-room apartment. Most of my books went into storage, initially a 320+ cardboard cartons filled with literature, philosophy, current thought, and advance copies of my own work and some science fiction.
It’s almost as much money to store my books as it is to pay my rent, and I don’t even get to read them.
Soon, I am planning to sell my collection to a corporate book reseller. If anyone has any suggestions for a better fate, I’d love to hear it.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AaGnCk6LW/