The Friday Article Roundup
Turtle powering through the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will dine on:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Pete Croatto gets the inside scoop on being a Ninja Turtle from Josh Pais in an AV Club Random Roles:
AVC: The physical part of the role, being in that 70-pound costume, how did that help you down the line as an actor?
JP: From morning to lunch break, we would lose five pounds. It was so incredibly intense. It felt like your blood was boiling. I used the intensity of being in that suit to create with. It helped me create the angst, the agony, everything that Raphael was going through. I let it emerge from my pores, through Raphael’s pores. Going forward from that, it taught me to trust [that] what I was experiencing in my body was the perfect juice for the character in that moment.
Mike Ryan makes the case for losing ‘fuck’ and bringing back a healthy ‘damn!’:
There’s an elegance to “damn.” A long, dramatic “damn” has a gravitas that other expletives just do not have. When an elongated “fuuuuuuuuck” is used, it just sounds too much like Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We need a “damn” resurgence.
For Mother Jones, Anna Merlan covers a rare bookseller’s encounter with a sketchy company and its bots trying to buy his wares:
[Brandon Thomas DiSabatino] decided to call “Crystal” at Blue Angel and get some insight into the orders. When he was connected, to him she simply didn’t sound like a real person. He suspected he was speaking to a bot. When he asked what Blue Angel wanted with his books, he says, “It giggled. It kept just doing this coy giggle.” When he asked, “Crystal,” DiSabatino says, “wouldn’t give any straight answers.” …To test his theory he was talking with some sort of machine agent, he started asking questions “that had a nonlinear aspect… ‘What do you see when you close your eyes?’” he inquired. “’Can I ask, do you dream of electric sheep?’” In response, DiSabatino says “it glitched” and that Crystal repeatedly said “I’m sorry, I think you’re breaking up,” followed by more robotic giggling. He says he tried slightly less surreal questions: “’Do you know what a high school is? Do they program you to have a high school in the cybernetic world in which you’ve been created?’” Again, he recounted being rewarded with a robot giggle and the words, “I think you’re breaking up.”
Adam Nayman praises Zach Cregger’s take on Resident Evil at The Ringer:
For Cregger, it seems, less is more, at least as far as duration goes; having pulled the same structural trick of doubling back in his first two features—effectively in the nasty and nightmarish scenario of Barbarian and more enervatingly in Weapons, which never quite fills out its own epic narrative or thematic canvas—the director has given himself permission to go full steam ahead. Instead of trying to score sociological points, he’s simply exulting in the visual and visceral possibilities of point-and-shoot. With respect, the lowered ambitions suit him; he comes off as a better and more fluid director. Call it de-elevated horror, and give its maker his due.
And at the San Francisco Chronicle, Jordan Michelman describes a longtime wine dealer’s newest venture: a Japanese-style jazz kissa bar:
[Owner Alex] Bernardo has his speakers hooked up to a variety of vintage hi-fi equipment that might make even the geekiest audiophile gasp: a Dynakit Mark 3 mono block amp, a vintage 1960s McIntosh MX110 tube pre-amplifier, a Concept Wood turntable from Clear Audio outfitted with a Blue No. 3 “High” cartridge from Sumiko, and a high-fidelity CD player from the early 1980s made by revered British brand Meridian. The McIntosh and Dynakit tubes deliver sound with warmth and depth, buttressed by astonishing lucidity from the deep elliptical stylus on the Sumiko, while both the Meridian and Clear Audio units are considered “reference level,” befitting studio sound engineers. The end result is a level of sound quality that borders on emotional, capable of evoking uncommon depth of feeling. For those more familiar with streaming audio through their AirPods, the experience of listening to a system like this is startling, like drinking a bottle of vintage Ridge Montebello after a life of Boons Farm.
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The Friday Article Roundup
A safe harbor for the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
The best pop culture writing of the week, wasted on the worst pop culture.
The Friday Article Roundup
Good grief, it's the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Ripping the cord on the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Fourteen, “Meditations on the Abyss”
Kind of a meh. This has Lennier, which is good. He’s suffering as much as anybody from the lack of anything to do, but he gets to own somebody here, so that’s good. It has G’Kar adjusting to being a religious figure, which is great stuff and overcomes the lack of anything specific to do by showing him fumbling about, trying to be a religious leader, and discovering to his annoyance that it doesn’t really matter how well or badly he does because his followers will find something in anything he says. This also has Vyr owning, which I’m surprisingly indifferent to. Right down the bottom is the stupid Voyager-esque approach to plotting Garibaldi’s fall to alcoholism, which mixes incredibly weak acting from Jerry Doyle (which is hilarious given he did struggle with alcohol in real life) with cliche writing.
“It has G’Kar adjusting to being a religious figure, which is great stuff and overcomes the lack of anything specific to do by showing him fumbling about, trying to be a religious leader, and discovering to his annoyance that it doesn’t really matter how well or badly he does because his followers will find something in anything he says.” You have passed where I left off but I can see this so clearly, it’s great. G’Kar all frustrated that his followers are doing the easy bit of drafting off him instead of all the scroll-pondering he’s done. Picturing Lennier owning dudes is of course extremely easy.
Elementary, “Wrong Side of the Road”/”Fidelity” – Kitty Winter, the young woman Sherlock took on as apprentice in season 3, is back, convinced that the apparently not-suspicious deaths of three people involved in a high profile case they worked on in London were all murders, and that the man they sent to prison is seeking his revenge. But when the suspect is also killed, Sherlock, Kitty, and Joan discover it’s all part of a strange and elaborate plan by a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst to start a war with Iran. Really. Oh, and this plan also involved manipulating a Venezuelan election. I will say this for the show: there are times it was really prescient about geopolitics. The plot requires a huge dose of suspension of disbelief, but Scott Shepherd is a great bad guy and I am sure the passage of time has sadly added resonance this did not have in 2017. But there’s more! Kitty arrives in NYC with a baby and is scared that Sherlock will not deal with her being a mom or her decision to quit being a detective. And even though this part of the story doesn’t mesh well with the mystery, the emotional beats and the brief return of the connection between Sherlock and Kitty bring back the very human underpinnings of the show I commented yesterday are missing. And since Kitty doesn’t stick around, no doubt this will be missing again next time. Guests also include Blair Brown and Regina Taylor.
U-Turn – aggressively 90s Oliver Stone desert neo-noir with an absolutely ridiculous cast – Sean Penn, J-Lo, Nick Nolte, Billy Boy Thornton, Powers Boothe, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, Julie Hagerty, Jon Voight… even the person who turns up in the background when Penn is begging desperately for a bus ticket out of town is Liv Tyler, for some reason. This is one of those films that turns the basic noir template up to about 14 for the post-censorship era and so everyone is attempting to fuck, fuck over and kill everyone else at all times – I can’t deny I wouldn’t mind just a little bit of 1940s restraint being retained. But it’s good fun watching these awful, doomed people for a couple of hours and the hyperactive camerawork and editing has a certain charm even if it’s a bit exhausting.
Ludwig, S2E4 – the case-of-the-week this time is a fun one, with Stephen Merchant as a past-it snooker player probably killing off his long-time rival after a rematch, if only they can figure out how he did it while being on camera at the time. It gets wrapped up pretty quickly though as this one is heavy on the main plot arc, which remains pretty compelling and takes some big steps forward this episode.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Ten, Robert Service
This chapter kicks off with Bloody Sunday; protestors getting massacred, which kicks off strikes and even more unrest than before, which Lenin swiftly tries to take advantage of. As Service points out, Lenin can’t really do much from a foreign country, so he ends up a rhetorician as opposed to a leader. He does solidify his position in the Bolsheviks; while he’s not doing much now, many of his views – including his preference for violence as a main tactic and his approval of war on the basis that this makes things more difficult for the Tsar – will factor into his success later, when they become politically popular (this is also something that factored into John Howard successfully strengthening gun control in Australia).
There’s also talk about the Bolshevik approval of bank robbery as a means of financing the party. This will become more relevant to me when I get to that section of Stalin’s biography.
The Fault In Our Stars, John Green
So I’ve never liked John Green. This is the first time I’ve read his books – I just always found his internet presence (alongside his brother) deeply annoying. I don’t think either of them are bad people, I just think they’re wankers. But Green and The Fault In Our Stars particularly are cultural touchstones for a whole generation of women, and I’ve long been fascinated and slightly put out by fans of the book who seem embarrassed by their teenaged love for it. It’s always puzzled me that women who would not only agree that things young girls like tend to be shat on by society but would passionately argue that without any prompting, would become visibly embarrassed by things they earnestly enjoyed as a teenage girl.
Not that you need it, but I’m here to report that the book actually is good. I’ll grant that the over-written prose gets a bit old at points; Green has the sense to recognise that Hazel was insecure enough to hold back on that because she fully unleashes a capacity for purple prose once she really finds herself. But the basic story and emotions are very affecting; Augustus is ludicrously pretentious, yes, but he’s a real person going through an extreme situation. What I found myself thinking was that all the things that made Green obnoxious to me – above all else, this neurotic people-pleasing that comes off in his work, but also being overly clever with words – made him the perfect person to write a work for teenagers. I think ‘specifically for teenagers’ is an underrated fiction genre; Joss Whedon was always the master of it (and much of this reminded me of Whedon; particularly a man in his thirties trying to write an empowerment story for teenage girls), but there’s also Metal Gear Solid or Death Note.
It requires a specific mixture of earnestness, humour, and familiar genre tropes, and I think a preoccupation with the cosmic is a definite part of it; teenagers trying to find their place in the world will be drawn to the world and the biggest questions. Cancer often strikes me as a lazy plot point used for shock value; here, it strikes specifically at what teenagers would be thinking about – what am I here for? What’s the point of all this? – and takes it seriously (it also provides a list of easy cliches that the audience would be familiar with and could pretend, through the narrator, that they are cynically above).
Finished the second Witcher book, which serves to set up the next book (the first that is a complete novel and not a set of short stories), and it does seem to set it up well. Our hero is a fascinating figure thus far, created basically to kill monsters and have as little human connection as possible, and yet ever more reluctant to kill the monsters (since it’s pretty clear who the real monsters are) and forever making deeper connections than he thinks possible. It’s also interesting that he is a background player in many stories, but I suspect that will change,
Started Stacey Schiff’s biography of Samuel Adams. Not far into it yet, but so far three things stand out: 1) Schiff is a big fan of Adams, and even if she can point out his failings, I don’t think she will be too critical (she even sees his failures as a businessman as somehow good for him and us); 2) she is a good writer, better than many historians I have encountered; and 3) while there are many primary sources from the Revolutionary War era, there are very few letters or writings from Adams himself so the book is likely to have gaps you don’t often find in a work from that era. More to come.
“Adams developing a mid beer paved the way for better beers!”
Year of the Month updates:
Here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 4th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Pi
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 13th: John Bruni: High Art
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
And coming in November, get ready to write about anything from 1968! Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.