The Friday Article Roundup
Good vibes in the week's best pop culture writing.
This week you’ll feel great about:
A surefire way to feel good is to send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail! Post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Carl Wilson attempts a definitive history and defense of poptimism for Slate:
In fact, the optimism in poptimism was part of the general techno-optimistic mood then—we thought the whole music world was loosening up, that online discourse would foster a new eclecticism of taste and an almost unlimited range of discourse. Like pretty much everyone else’s hopes about the internet, ours have come back to bite us in the ass. What we’ve gotten instead is indeed a click-based media economy, in which publications do try to produce as many headlines about a handful of big names as they can and are more hesitant to pay critics to write about new discoveries or obscure favorites, because they won’t get any views.
At his substack, Steve Hyden brings the hate for Jesse Welles, on both a lyrical and musical level:
How can anyone who claims to yearn for a protest song revival not appreciate the importance of a good chorus? The whole point of these songs having civic utility is that you can sing along with them at a large gathering, such as a … protest! “This land is your land, this land is my land”; “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind”; “Four dead in Ohio”; “We’ve got to fight the powers that be.” These aren’t just great protest choruses, they’re also great pop earworms. They endure not only because of the “right on” messaging, but also because you couldn’t erase those hooks from your mind even if you tried.
For Letterboxd, Marya E. Gates surveys the movies that made Bruce Springsteen:
A few years earlier, speaking with Rolling Stone, Springsteen discussed what he hopes people get from his music, saying, “dreams and possibilities make you strong.” He then references a scene in John Huston’s 1979 film Wise Blood, stating, “One of my favorite parts was the end, where he’s doin’ all these terrible things to himself, and the woman comes in and says, ‘There’s no reason for it. People have quit doing it.’ And he says, ‘They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it.’”
Maureen Ryan announces a new book on the Battlestar Galactica remake, and considers what made the show timeless then and now:
By stripping away the specific markers around the geopolitical turmoil of the Aughts, it freed itself to explore power dynamics, morality, faith, oppression, war and rebellion in refreshing, unexpected and surprising ways. And it made those events riveting by exploring ever-evolving relationships that had the kind of texture, heft and weight that put it in the top tier of television programs.
At The Baffler, John Semley asks why U.S. cinema is no longer sending its heroes against foreign powers:
It may be that Hollywood cinema’s gaze no longer extends across the vistas of real-world geopolitics, or there may be no external foe to cast in these roles. There is no longer a foreign “elsewhere” where we can displace our anxieties. America is the imperial, authoritarian “Other.” We are—to paraphrase a bit from the British sketch comics David Mitchell and Robert Webb, in which two Nazi officers take inventory of all the skulls and lightning bolts on their uniforms and begin to question their own moral standing—the baddies.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/kneel-before-zod-semley
And at 1900hotdog, writer Merrit K “discovers” the secret e-mails behind the creation of the ill-fated cartoon adaptation of DarkStalkers
Having [Anakaris] say “for a fishman you are strangely attractive,” “curiously attractive for a scaly freak,” and “I can understand the attraction of the fishman” all in one episode is great. Actually, could we just have everyone say that? Like get at least one instance of every DarkStalkers character saying that they’d bang the fish dude, presuming he has genitals? (Unsure what he’s working with — Capcom’s files don’t have any info on this.)
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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
Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Live Music – The Beths! Great to see one of my favourite bands for the first time in a few years, they’ve released two great albums since I saw them last so the setlist had evolved considerably and it’s pretty incredible how many great songs they have at this point. “Expert in a Dying Field” in particular is one of my favourite songs ever and finally getting to hear that one live made me a little emotional.
Woooo live music! Wooo having a ton of great songs for a setlist! Wussy is in a similar position, the “why didn’t they play X?” is answered by “they have A-W”.
The Practice, “The Battlefield” – Typing these titles on a regular basis makes me wonder if, since the titles never appeared onscreen, these were perfunctory out of a dogged laziness. “Well, it’s not like anyone is going see them.” We wrap up the arc with Edward Herrmann, where Lindsay’s appeal comes up short, she kicks herself for her incompetence, and in the aftermath she and Bobby rekindle their relationship. This is the first time we’ve followed into an appeal and it’s interesting enough but I can see why we don’t do it often. Meanwhile, the Vogelman case comes together very slowly and again, nothing at all here to indicate that we are not supposed to think he’s gulity after all. Finally, Jimmy is hiring by a cousin to defend the indefensible firing of a woman for being Iranian. Jimmy feels guilty, does a good job playing on the jury’s prejudices, and is relieved when the judge tosses the verdict. Which is all well and good (and a nice mirror to the state of Islamophobia before 9/11), but then Jimmy also gets a crush on the plaintiff and that’s kind of yucky. (Jimmy is getting to be kind of a drag overall.) Shiva Rose, then married to Dylan McDermott, playing the plaintiff.
Frasier, “The Late Dr. Crane” – A fender bender sends Frasier to the ER, where he decides not to put up with the wait and someone else grabs his spot in line and drops dead of a heart attack. So naturally Frasier’s death is reported on the news. And of course this leads to some soul searching and a solid final scene where it’s clear what he wants at that moment is a second chance with the neighbor he screwed up with earlier in the season. But of more importance is that at the hospital, Niles goes to talk with Maris’s plastic surgeon, who is still billing him, and it turns out she is as compulsively neat as Niles but also oddly like Maris. Introducing Jane Adams as Dr. Mel. This is going to be matter very soon.
Woooooo live music!!
And emotions!!
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Six, “Dust To Dust”
So, uh, this is a show about fascism. And not in a major way, like Andor; it’s a secondary concern presented as an unpleasant but understandable alternative to righteousness. Earth is falling further and further to fascism (hard to watch the shopkeeper in the cold open nearly get arrested for criticising the government, even if I like the way this makes it distinct from Trek), and as much as I love Bester as a character, he also has many of the traits that make fascists so fucking annoying, like his attempt to use language to bully people as opposed to connect with them. He’s kind of a fascist fantasy for the liberal writer the way Sideshow Bob and Jack Donaghy were conservative fantasies for liberal writers; he’s genuinely curious about the world and a true believer that doesn’t give a shit that you hate him; if Straczinsky were a fascist, this is the kind he’d be.
Meanwhile, Londo is having absolutely none of his usual fun being an authoritarian; he repeats fascist talking points (particularly in dismissing Minbari as ‘soft, decadent’), but it’s clear he’s being more and more disconnected from the people around him. It’s G’Kar who presents the opposite; he accidentally ends up on a vision quest that drives him to Degree Absolute. What does he care more about: revenge or keeping his people alive? Defeating the Centauri or saving the Narn? Humiliating Londo or being comfortable with himself? “It no longer matters who started it. It only matters who is suffering.” Sheridan gets a line that’s almost embarrassing in its sincerity, “Fight them without becoming them.” But G’Kar feels like he’s putting that into practice, defeating tactics rather than people.
G’Kar ends up with a bit of the X: The Man WIth The X-Ray Eyes thing going on.
G’Kar’s vision quest comes out of something extremely horrible! The show very casually introduces chemical/biological warfare (and as always they are just pulling from regular old history here) and it is a shock after all the lasers and such. And yeah, Londo is in an alternate Peter Principle situation, where he is rising not past his skill level but past his emotional/moral level. This is where TV works so well, because of the first season or so of Londo, Fun Scheming Diplomat we have a sense of how he really is good at manuevering and how he really does care about Centauri glory but also that he enjoys the relative cosmopolitan atmosphere of Babylon 5 and the opportunities for pleasure there — he’s getting what he wants for his people but he’s learning that want may have been better as desire than actuality if this is the price.
Liberals and moderates have a bottomless need to believe in “reasonable conservatives.” First, to flatter their own ability to empathize with the “other side” (as long as they’re in their social class). Second, because if conservatives are really unreasonable, what does that make liberals for constantly trying to work with them.
Miracle Mile — the negative of Repo Man, LA apocalypse as romantic and doomed as opposed to cynical and aspirational. Anthony Edwards is a great lead in this regard, his casually charming nerdery in the opening giving way to desperation when the turn happens, and writer/director Steve deJarnatt makes that turn (and a subsequent one) with real skill, not so much flair as a confidence in the story he wants to tell and how he will tell it (and he fought for years to do so without interference). A visual metaphor at the beginning is clocked as such but it becomes non-metaphoric at the end and that is the kind of thing deJarnatt is up to, going all the way into what’s coming down the pike (and this is foreshadowed by a casually brutal icing of a couple cops due to their own very stupid actions, this is what you get you morons). Kurt Fuller and O-Lan Jones are some of the great faces on the way but it ends with the faces of Edwards and Mare Winningham on the way to becoming something else. Really good stuff that is going to stick.
Hell yeah. Keep meaning to watch this again, but my one viewing has definitely stuck.
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai – Was maybe a little too not sober for it but a very good movie. Jarmusch makes his own weird, sleepy, idiosyncratic gangster movie where the gangsters watch cartoons but can flip into sudden startling violence, much of it well-shot, as if to say, “Of course, I could do this all the time, I am cool, but that’s not what I’m giving you.” Whitaker is incredible at, much like Kavanaugh and Saw, giving a solitary and possibly insane character an inner clarity and righteousness. A lot more to say but there’s a great GZA score and interesting stuff here too about cross-pollination between cultures and backgrounds even when those cultures are prejudiced against others, one gangster loves Flava Flav (while spewing the N word) and even in private this is sincere.
peacemaker. I love how Gunn can be extremely subtle or extremely on the nose, with very little in between. This week’s twist was foreshadowed if you paid attention to the extras in the background in the previous episodes in the “good” alternate domination. Or rather, if you paid attention to who wasn’t an extra. And of course it’s a time honored that any sort of utopia you find yourself that seems too good to be true in an unearned way is of course actually too good to be true. So we get like 3 or 4 episodes of subtle foreshadowing. Then when he drops the bomb on us we’ve got
Super impressed with everyone’s character this season. Special
shout out this week to Freddie Stroma for his role as vigilante.
Rick and Morty, season 8. I am a huge sucker for when dark and sarcastic shows get sincere. The finale with memory Rick is great.
another peacemaker note: Vigilante noticing all the little
differences in the new universe? That’s me, clapping like a seal
whenever there is a little bit of
effort put into the
production design of an alternate universe.
What Did We Read?
Murder Clear, Track Fast by Judson Philips – pulp crime in the world of horse-racing. My girlfriend found a second-hand copy of this at a motorway service station (!) and grabbed it for me because it looked trashy and fun, and it was both of those things! A really enjoyable murder mystery with some fun characters and not TOO much horse terminology. The plot kept me guessing and the twists were lurid and shocking, hell yeah.
8 Bit Theater, 0090-0120, Brian Clevinger
What I always liked about 8 Bit Theater is that it kept layering and layering new ideas onto the framework it established; I always noticed this with style (the comic is still mostly using sprites for backgrounds at this point, but there is one moment where Garland’s catastrophically terrible speech is emphasised with an eerie photoshop effect), but it’s also clear with jokes. This introduces Fighter’s journal, where he gives his, uh, unreliable take on what’s been happening, and there’s a classic gag of the characters fighting on camera in the background while Garland and Sara talk in the foreground.
At the same time, it’s also clear how strong that framework is already. This has become an intricate network of running gags; there are a few cases where the Light Warriors each react in predictable ways to the same concept (great one: White Mage giving everybody advice that ends with her telling Black Mage to die), as well as throwing in the Forest Imps fucking with Garland, BM’s Hadoken, and Red Mage’s understanding of experience (which leads a misunderstanding Thief to lecture on the nature of time).
(I also never stop laughing at how any pain is intentionally made as needlessly excruciating as possible)
These end up supporting us through to the really great and original gags; my favourite is one where Thief knocks over RM onto Fighter’s sword, with the gag being that this was impossible because it started out sheathed (“I really botched that Athletics roll.”), but also great is the attack on Garland falling apart because BM’s Hadoken for the day was already spent, Thief gets tired, and Fighter is distracted by popcorn (and none of it mattered anyway because Garland had no intention of killing them).
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, Vladislav M Zubok
Read on Conor’s recommendation. I found this a bit dense at points, but the arc is clear in its fuzziness; Gorbachev perfectly achieves his goal of revolutionising the Soviet Union and fails to follow it up with anything else, leading to the rise of Yeltsin. In the conclusion, Zubok makes the fascinating case that Gorbachev simply lacked the willingness to gamble whereas Yeltsin did nothing but; on the other hand, the major driving forces seem to be the Russian people more than anything else. Zubok observes how many of them are as indecisive as Gorbachev, and the major shifts in society are kicked off by their collective actions – strikes starting in Poland that weaken the economy and connection with the West where they see the decadence and comfort of the American people for the first time lead to major shifts that people like Gorbachev react to.
Lush Life, by Richard Price — right around the time Price joined the writing staff of The Wire he published this panoramic novel about a murder in New York City and its fallout (set in 2003); one of the leads and many of the major characters are cops and it is really interesting to read this now. Price’s dialogue is unmatched and he lets characters speak for themselves, there is a lot of cynicism and cruelty here on the part of his detectives but it is ultimately in the service of The Job, finding a murderer; this is displayed in a phenomenal interview/psychological torture scene early on and it fucks up the case nearly beyond repair — Price is very aware of this and yet there is a Wire-ish sense of individuals making bad actions as part of a broken system rather than a corrupt one. But Price also shows the world this system is a part of and it’s not exactly a walk in the park, and how the grief that comes out of a murder is something that can’t and must be borne. The real focus of the book is the aging hipster who witnessed the murder and how first that and then the cops are breaking him, and how his own failures are the real crack that is tearing him open — Price is brutally good at this stuff, which he already riffed on in his underrated Samaritan; here he marshals the wider focus and landscape that he fumbled in Freedomland. A memorial service is a breathtaking depiction of mourning both performative and real and sometimes in between, it should be the last word in early aughts “irony.” Still a great novel, really nails the Dickensian aspect.
Started a re-read of The Eyes of the Dragon, one of my favorite Stephen King books, if also very much not a typical one. So far, so good, but just got going.
Moving through Midnight in Chernobyl, which is well written and gripping, but it’s a horror story as the deaths begin, as the people of Pripyat await their collective fate, as the Soviets dither.
And done with Lincoln’s Lieutenants. I never quite grasped that the war between Lee’s army and McClellan/Meade/Grant’s army in Virginia was, outside of the marches to Maryland and Gettsyburgh, a war of attrition designed at first to wear down the Union and then trench warfare 50 years before the Western Front. Even though Lee is barely in this book, it’s easy to look at this overview and not really see a genius so much as a man lucky to have home court advantage and two years of mediocre generals facing him. But the main focus is the generals of the Army of the Potomac, and there were really quite the mixed bag. Stephen Sears is a bit fan of George Meade and Winfield Scott Hancock (and also Winfield Scott), respectful of Grant but a bit critical of Grant’s impatience, and scathing about a lot of the other field leaders beyond McClellan, who no historian likes much. This is very much a book for Civil War buffs and goes into the weeds a lot, but outside of a few places that could stand for better edits, it’s a good work.
I got The Eyes Of The Dragon through the damn Scholastic book order in fifth grade! It’s hilarious how this really is King in Young Readers mode and he still manages to work a penis or two in there. I have a real fondness for it, if there is some King Bloat it’s still comparatively minor and in the service of a fantasy world that can hold it.
It’s also more of a fairy tale than Fairy Tale, which I like but I think there King is trying to hard to reinvent the wheel and here it’s just a story for his daughter and Peter Straub’s son.
Where they wind up as a couple! That seems sort of For Better Or For Worse creepy, taking the charming “bedtime story where the kid is a character” vibe a little too far. But yes, completely agreed on Fairy Tale and what King is straining for there while hitting more effortlessly here.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Weird security issue at work led them to basically ask us to down tools for the full week which has been odd, they still want us present and ready to answer questions but without being able to actually do anything. Seems like things are slowly getting back to normal but it has resulted in a very slow week that I’ll be glad to see end.
So the spit finally hit the fan at work. Since I limit tales out of school here (and also don’t want to give away my real identity), let’s just say if you Goggle New Jersey and public media, you will know what is going on to some degree. It’s really ugly. And it happened while all the other public media stuff is crashing into us, and while a good percentage of the staff was trying to observe the Jewish New Year to some degree. There are board meetings next week that will be incredibly unpleasant.
Otherwise, waiting on test results for my wife, nervously.
Results came back good. Whew.
Glad you have this good news, at least. Sorry you have to deal with the rest.
Yay!
Year of the Month update!
Here’s a primer on some of the movies, albums, books and TV we’ll be covering for 1973 in October!
TBD: Patrick Mio Llaguno – The Long Goodbye
Oct. 7th: Lauren James: Working
Oct. 22nd: Lauren James: The Wicker Man
Oct. 2oth: Sam Scott: F for Fake
Oct. 29th: Lauren James: Don’t Look Now
And this November, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 2018!
Nov. 24th: Sam Scott: Ice Cream Man