The Friday Article Roundup
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At downthetubes.net, John Freeman collects tributes to the late Sam Kieth, including one from fellow artist and friend Kelley Jones:
“I met Sam when we were both 16 years old at a mutual friend’s house. I knew his cousin from an art class and she said to Sam, ‘I know a weird guy like you, you should meet him!’ and so we did. The first thing he said was ‘I know my stuff is weird, but you might like it because your stuff is too’.
I instantly loved his work and him.”
For The Financial Times, Danny Leigh reviews a new book about Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and finds it more insightful than previous works:
[Peter] Biskind wrote a gossipy celebration; Fischer gives us a cool, richly detailed postmortem of the party. There are still great stories, but told now with the wry raised eyebrow of a fact-checker. When one of the principals shaves their age in an anecdote, the author corrects the record. Rather than print the legend, the book makes room for awkward small print. (At The Godfather premiere, we find Henry Kissinger, who Coppola has cultivated even while US bombs rain on Vietnam.)
At his substack, William Hogeland criticizes Sinners and goes deep on the vampires who created its authenticity:
Those white guys of the ‘40’s who suddenly latched onto 20’s and ‘30’ records of rural blues, as opposed to the glitzier, big-band early blues records of Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and others, fell especially hard for blues styles prevalent in the Mississippi Delta, probably first heard on recordings by Charley Patton, but also by Son House and of course Robert Johnson, styles that would develop, in the 1950’s, into electrified Chicago blues. And those collectors of then-obscure records were quite weird. Like the head vampire in the movie, they hungered for roots driving deep into Mississippi mud, for ancient Yoruba spells, for authenticity stolen by modernity (to the vampire, that’s Christianity; to the 1940’s blues nerds it was industrialization). Unlike the vampire, however, they were projecting the thing they were looking for onto the music they were hearing.
Saffron Maeve surveys the documentaries of True/False for Screen Slate:
Computer cards fluttering from a burning building. A masc lesbian’s bare breasts buoying in a jacuzzi. Bankers boxes of ancestral remains. A crown made of AR-15 bullets. An airlifted bear’s fur poking through netting. Americans giddily staring into the mouth of the eclipse. A dumpster filled with queer and feminist literature. The conch-lined walls of a school for girls. A death certificate for a glacier. Eyes, so many pairs of eyes. This 23rd edition of True/False left more imprinting images in my mind than years past—a collocation of sights and sounds that I had seen, or felt, before in less lucid forms, but which sit heavy in the corners of my mind.
At Defector, Nicholas Russell interviews Namwali Serpell about her new critical appraisal of Toni Morrison:
She talks about blind spots and repressions and pathologies. When you look at it, it really does feel a little baffling that people would ignore or pretend or pass over these moments that are incredibly racialized even if they don’t feature raced characters…. I found it so revelatory that it’s almost impossible for me to watch a movie like Pixar’s Soul and not see the racial tropes that are being deployed. They seem to go right over the heads of most Americans. When I watched the film, I thought it’s almost too obvious for me to point out these things. But when I published a review, which was very inspired by Morrison’s work, people were furious with me and they kept telling me that I was seeing things that weren’t there.
And on the 40th anniversary of D. Boon’s death, Bob Mehr visits the remaining Minutemen for the New York Times:
Initially asked to reflect on Boon’s legacy for the anniversary of his death late last year, Watt demurred. “I hate that day,” he said. Instead, he proposed a visit closer to Boon’s April 1 birthday to “see the Minutemen ethic in person. Not just two Minutemen still making music together in the town they started in, but in a studio built by a longshoreman,” he added. “D. Boon would’ve dug that. I don’t say that much, trying to guess what he would or wouldn’t have liked. But I think he would’ve dug this.”
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Elementary, “Pilot” – Time for the next watch-through (assuming this doesn’t vanish first). This is the other contemporary Sherlock Holmes from the 2010s, the one set in NYC with a female Joan Watson and with way less of a crazy fanbase. But back then, it was the one I actually liked – Sherlock just rubbed me the wrong way – and there is a lot more of it (apparently it was a big enough hit in Europe that CBS let it run seven seasons despite American ratings).
Almost immediately, the show is where it wants to be. The initial mystery is somewhat absurd but designed to test Holmes and Watson (though not so difficult that the NYPD could not have figured it out eventually). Holmes is immediately established as, well, Sherlock Holmes, irascible and intense and weird and brilliant (and maybe on the spectrum), Watson is reworked almost entirely to be Holmes’s sober companion instead of a practicing MD but clearly very bright and clearly not going to let Holmes reduce her to a sidekick. Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu are great and have instant platonic chemistry (the best thing about the show is that they start partners and never lovers the whole way through), Aidan Quinn is very good as the NY cop Holmes works with (Gregson and not Lestrade, as they were saving Lestrade for later), and the NYC settings are clearly going to be a regular feature. (I watched one winter pass as I could tell when an episode was filmed based on how much snow was on the ground and how bundled up the actors were.) It will be fun to see what holds up and what doesn’t. (I suspect the CBS levels of copaganda will occasionally annoy me.)
NCAA Men’s Basketball, Iowa vs Nebraska – An entertaining game between two evenly matched and very similar teams, called by the inimitable Kevin Harlan. A shame this game will be remembered for Nebraska having only four players on the floor at a key moment near the end. (And dear lord, does streaming these games instead of watching on TBS get a lot of the same ads over and over. I think I saw the ad for Mando and Grogu’s Cash Grab ten times, Christopher Walken selling beer eight times.)
Laughing out loud at “Mando and Grogu’s Cash Grab,” which sounds 1. like a sleazy 70s crime flick and 2. something that is definitely cooler than what the actual film will be.
Red Letter Media’s new video What Are These Movies?! which is funny yet mildly depressing about all of these theatrical releases that hit 1000+ theaters and made no money. This gets into some pretty good speculation regarding why some modern movies are hits and some aren’t – for one, companies like A24 and Neon know how to reach social media audiences and get tons of (annoying, awful) influencers onto red carpets – and the future of movie theaters. (Probably not good.) I for one would like to posit that I’m broke and going to the theater requires planning and money I don’t always have, something usually missing from these analyses, even good ones.
Pinky And The Brain — which is on TUBI, of course! It’s weird, I was of an age and situation to watch Animaniacs, which aired on network TV, and always liked the P and B segments, but their standalone show was on the WB and we didn’t have that, and I was aging out of cartoons at that point. So all of this is untapped, and I was delighted to see that of course Maurice LaMarche’s Brain is Harry Lime in a Third Man parody. But Rob Paulsen, last seen in Body Double asking about a cum shot, is also a hoot of course, Pinky is a great moron and this gains an even funnier edge when he’s playing the Joseph Cotten role here. The B short has guest voices Ernest Borgnine and Tress MacNeill as Brain’s parents, fun stuff.
The standalone show is increasingly weird, with some stuff I still can’t believe got past the WB censors (there is no chance some of that would have been on Fox). The use of the, er Orson well is one of the best things about the show, even if no kid is going to get it.
Just skimming through the title screens it was clear the show increasingly went for old movie parodies as a plot source — this makes sense, coming up with world-conquering ideas is hard, and I’m guessing the jokes largely work on a kid level even as there is deeper reference material.
Le Cercle Rouge – extremely cynical, extremely patient. Excellent heist movie. Loved how this leans into the doomed inevitability of everything, we know these guys aren’t going to get away with it even if their plan is impeccable, and it feels like they do too. Yet heist they must! Excellent sound design and carefully deployed, percussive score to fill in some of the gaps where nobody is speaking to each other. Also obviously I loved that the cop on their trail has three large cats.
Seinfeld, S7 – “The Sponge” and “The Gum”. The first of these was a solid, slightly messy episode as much of this season has been. The second one was quite a bit better, with a few early lies and misunderstandings leading to an old friend of George’s thinking he’s lost his mind.
Live Music – Canadian indie-pop band WUT, over from Vancouver. They do the “simple songs with good hooks and sweet harmonies” thing well, after seeing Heavenly at the weekend I feel like I’ve had a fairly twee week, but I don’t mind that as long as the songs are good. And these songs were good.
Wooooo live music! And WOOOOOOOO Le Cercle Rouge! I think this mops the floor with Le Samourai, the heist shit here owns but the inevitability you mention hits harder because of how these guys are interconnected and acting, as opposed to Deleon’s mopey ass hitman moping his ass around.
I liked Le Samourai quite a bit but it does feel like it’s coasting on “pure vibes” a lot of the time, whereas this one has more under the surface. And considerably more cats.
I loved the marksman and his refusal to actually accept any financial reward for his part in the heist. He just needed a purpose.
Scrubs, “My V.I.P.”
The show really benefits from throwing JD and Dr. Park together: Joel Kim Booster’s controlled and professional seethe is a delight, and I think he’s one of the best additions the series has ever had. Very strong, funny episode, with some great character moments–Blake getting pushed towards vulnerability and choosing an unexpected off-ramp instead is hilarious and revealing (and just as effective!), and the Turk-Elliot friendship continues to be one of my favorite low-key throughlines.
Inside No. 9, “Plodding On”
The show’s finale goes meta, with an episode set during its own wrap party and with Pemberton and Shearsmith playing fictionalized versions of themselves, with their friendship in crisis as a comically selfish Steve, hitting some kind of 25-year itch with having his career tied to Reece’s, considers taking a new job in America. This hits all the right notes, serving as a loving, Easter egg-filled celebration of all nine series–there’s a nod to every single episode–and a tongue-in-cheek self-piss-take (the duo scripting people saying they’re “past the leave-them-wanting-more stage” and having beloved colleagues and friends turn up just to sigh in relief at dodging the bullet of working with them again) and a comedy (Nick Mohammed continuously interrupting his podcast recording to deliver ad messages was my favorite bit) and something with genuine emotional stakes, which is to say that both the fight and the low-key reconciliation here work very well.
Also watched the behind-the-scenes wrap-up documentary, Inside No. 9: The Party’s Over, which is a very endearing celebration of the show as a whole and the real-life friendship at the heart of it. It’s nice that this includes appreciations of things like costume and poster design that it would be easy to overlook.
Quigley Down Under
Saving this for Streaming Shuffle!
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner – Topical Stanley Kramer. The handsome stagebound production, painted backgrounds, plastic flowers and structure of an old-fashioned drawing room comedy is in sharp contrast to the realism of Bonnie and Clyde or The Graduate the same year. It’s still a heartwarming and lovely film but perhaps better capturing a moment in time than real cinema. The film tackles interracial marriage in the charged time of 1967 with great sensitivity and gentle humor, taking enormous care to humanize all of its characters and justify their points of view (over and over). It’s all admirably earnest but eyerolling to a modern audience — maybe a little too earnest to be totally effective as drama. Poitier’s character is so flawless and the case against his relationship with Houghton so laughably flimsy that the story’s dramatic engine eventually starts to peter out a little. The reason to watch is for Hepburn and Tracy together one last time. Tracy’s final speech on the power of love is broken up over days of filming and strategically cut as he could fall over at any moment. He’s like Ozzy using whatever gas is left in the tank for one final powerhouse performance then deflating like a balloon and passing just weeks later. The scene in the middle where Kate and Spence go for ice cream was the last shot. Tracy looks haggard compared to the film around it. A little Bunuel-like having no one actually eat dinner.
What did we read?
Working on The Inner Lives of Cats, a 2017 book that looks for important but often ignored research about cats’ brains and minds and bodies, and seems to be aiming to offer advice to those who have cats. I don’t know if this is really going to improve anyone’s relationships with cats, but it is interesting.
Finished The Plots Against Hitler by Danny Orbach. His handling of the facts of the 19444 assassination attempt and coup plot is very solid. His assessment of the plot, I find to be on weaker ground.
Fascinated by the one study I heard about where, in contrast to dogs having a sense of consciousness and that humans are NOT dogs, cats don’t particularly care about what they are. Maybe this book says differently.
Cats have attained perfection and no longer care about anything.
China Meiville’s Kraken which is a hoot, Michael Moorcock for the modern apocalypse or Neil Gaiman with actual values. (The benefits of a Communist writing a fantasy novel: there’s a magical familiar labor union and “ghost” policemen start beating them up.) Overstuffed and weird in the way those writers or Alan Moore can be and this is a compliment. Meiville wrote this in 2010 and in some ways it’s already of that era, and in some ways not; he nails how the end of the world is happening and life simply goes on.
Hellmouth by Giles Kristian and Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke are both good horror novellas and the rare ones where I wish they were longer. The former especially I’d recommend for medieval nerds.
A Dance At The Slaughterhouse, by Lawrence Block — the Scudder-pilling will continue until morale improves! *reads book* morale not improved. The Scudder books are always grim and frequently dip into the minds of the depraved, here the killer is only seen from the outside but the seeing is particularly unsettling — this revolves around a snuff film, involving a teenager no less. This device is often used to indicate an escalation in evil beyond standard criminal behavior, even “regular” murder, and while Block does not describe everything in the film he gets at why this is so unsettling, even for a guy like Scudder who has seen a lot of shit. A person might witness a murder, a person watches a snuff film, implicating themself and seeing in a way that is both more removed and more detailed, something the killer alludes to. And the killer uses these films to seduce people into his world, making them participants before they inevitably become victims. The thrill of transgression. What makes this especially effective is how the story involves Scudder’s best friend Mick Ballou, an Irish bar owner who robs and not infrequently kills people (professionally, but coldly) and how Scudder comes to see how Ballou’s actions might be not only useful and justified but joined. Late in the game the killer gives Scudder the old “we’re not so different, you and I” bit and Block has Scudder acknowledge a few surface similarities while letting something larger simmer until it boils over. Can you do a right thing for the wrong reasons? The story ends with Scudder settled but the reader not so much, good stuff.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson – found a copy in a charity shop a while ago and figured it was a blind spot I should fill. Turned out to be a copy that had been affectionally annotated and doodled upon by a previous owner which actually added to the charm of the experience considerably! Hell yeah used books. Went into this more or less blind and enjoyed the slow burn psychological thriller elements and the way it feels like it could have supernatural elements in a way that I’m not sure were intentional fakeouts or if I was just leaning on my limited knowledge of Jackson having written some famous ghost stories. Excellent cat content, shame the consensus on the film adaptation seems to be faint praise at best as it feels like this could work beautifully in a Shadow of a Doubt kinda style.
Great book, and the opening chapter in particular is incredible. While the story is strong I think turning this into a movie would be hard because of how tied you are to Merricat’s point of view.
Yeah it would be tough, I could kinda imagine how it might work as I read though. I think in the right hands it could be great, but for whatever reason the version we did get came from a director I haven’t heard of and the co-writer of Candyman 2.
The Jugger, by Richard Stark
I remember Dave mentioning the grueling-in-a-grounded-way middle section of this, where a corrupt police offer grinds down on an elderly man, one of Parker’s contacts, tormenting him through relentless presence and somewhat deniable harassment before eventually just openly torturing the man because the cop–a fucking rube–thinks he has far more money stashed away than he does. This is, indeed, effective and chilling and exhausting; it’s like a sliver of a realistic horror novel, especially in terms of how the pressure undoes the man’s mind.
This is another novel that ends with Parker facing a major setback he’s spent the whole book trying to prevent: in this case, the burning of his most significant cover identity. Stark is very good at pulling off this kind of reversal without ever making you feel like it reflects on Parker’s competence. There are just some things you can’t know, no matter how good you are.
The ending of this one nukes nearly everything and Parker just rolls with it, because what else is there to do. But I think it’s funny how his professionalism saves him in a very bougie way here — he is an aloof but consummate guest at the hotel and is respected as such by the manager, and the manager gives him the tip-off out of a certain assumed alignment in values, we are both discreet and conscientious businessmen here so we have a distaste for the law poking its nose in.
But yeah, that middle section. Stark gets into a lot of bad minds in his non-Parker sections over the years but rarely ones who have the power of authority and it gives this an extra edge. And the other factor is how a book’s non-Parker section generally gives us new information or context for the heist/fallout plot, but in this book the plot is a mystery — who killed Joe? Parker makes for a grimly funny detective, and then Stark reveals the killer in all his venal stupid cruelty and gives you the solution at length. Ugly stuff. What’s great is how Stark and Parker’s morality is disgusted with this but it also does not respect the sanctity of life, this has probably the most brutal disposing of an amateur in the books, at least in Stark’s two-sentence description.
I brought up that two-sentence description in Movie Club last Sunday as an example of how hard-hitting (and telling) Parker’s brisk handling of the material could be!
Great point about the professionalism saving him with him having cultivated the hotel manager. That’s the necessary other part: he couldn’t know about the suicide angle, but when that trips him up, his overall consummate execution of his profession has still given him resources to let him know the jig is up in time to clear out. And of course it will give him the ability to rebuild, as well.
The next few books put an interesting strain on Parker’s professionalism — by nature of his profession he is always assuming a certain amount of risk but when he’s this short on funds he has to stretch those risks. And convince others to stretch as well.
Westlake came to dislike the book immensely, saying this in a much later interview:
“I spoiled a book by having him do something he wouldn’t do. The sixth book in the series is called The Jugger, and that book is one of the worst failures I’ve ever had. The problem with it is, in the beginning of the book this guy calls him and says “I’m in trouble out here and these guys are leaning on me and I need help,” and Parker goes to help him. I mean, he wouldn’t do that, and in fact, the guy wouldn’t even think to call him!”
This isn’t one of my faves, but it does have its moments. Just not enough to get me to revisit it.
It’s so funny to me how much Westlake disliked this and for why — the book clearly shows why the dude would call and why Parker would go! It’s self-preservation, not altruism. If the book has a flaw it’s in the resolution, Parker’s scheme is a bit convoluted and while he does a good job (as always) playing on his mark’s desires and emotions in order to make it work, it still feels a bit much. But that is very minor, I think the general consensus now is that The Jugger is top-tier Parker and I agree with that. EDIT: As alluded to above, in the next book Parker makes a decision that I think is much more questionable in terms of his character, although he has his reasons there too.
To be fair to his own book, though, one of the reasons Parker goes to “help” him is that he thinks he might need to kill him for his own self-preservation, since he can tell Sheer’s gotten mentally wobbly at that point! That’s not exactly cuddly.
White guy doesn’t like what Black filmmaker has to say about white people stealing authenticity from Black culture! I’ll read the article, especially as in another timeline I was one of those weirdos. Coogler clearly sympathizes with Remnick’s theft given his status as a creature without country, it’s just…still theft, the same way Alan Lomax Sr. was stealing and putting his credit on songs he never wrote.
Yeah, his whiteness bothered me too. But Hogeland starts out by saying he thought Sinners was a terrible movie altogether, so I am left thinking maybe he’s even less not the right guy to write this.
Psst…not everyone needs your opinion, especially when your thing seems to be early American history and not the delta blues.
“One of the cool and useful thing about blues is that almost anyone can play it”: okay, so you’re not a serious musician, nor do you have a very accurate understanding of musicology.
But I do think that the argument, as it’s being presented, would point to an interesting connection between the play/film of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Sinners.
I will have to pair those up. Also just finished watching THE WATERMELON WOMAN and it would also make a great dialogic pairing with SINNERS.
His point is that your final link in the chain — “authenticity from Black culture” — is itself a construct, at least as it pertains to the Delta Blues. And he does a good job citing others to back this up (and spreading it out, the Irish material also comes in for scrutiny). I liked Sinners a lot but I thought this was an interesting read.