The Friday Article Roundup
From the hub of the universe, the best pop culture writing of the week
This week, you will park the car in:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At Bright Wall, Dark Room, Laura Goode looks at the aggressive, insular ethos of the Boston movie:
In this bellicose, self-mythologizing way, Ben [Affleck] serves up Boston’s denomination of a ruggedly individualistic American antihero-cum-hero: the sexy, taciturn, drunk, ethnic-white, underrested, hostile, misunderstood genius, loyal to and performing for his homosocial male coterie, underdelivering at life and overachieving at transgression. Ben Affleck’s first credited film as a director pledges allegiance to these Boston values. His first short film, dated 1993, is titled I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney.
Josh Gondelman furiously makes the case for They Might By Giants to any uptight hipsters out there:
Do you know that They Might Be Giants has a song called “Kiss Me, Son Of God”? It came out in 1988. Put that in your American Spirit cigarette and smoke it, all you fools who thought Sufjan Stevens invented songs about being gay for Jesus or maybe just being regular gay although in this case I think it is primarily about Jesus. The song “She’s An Angel” contains the lyric “just ‘cause you’re following an angel/doesn’t mean you have to throw your body off a building.” You’re telling me you can’t imagine Cameron Winter from Geese mumbling those exact same words? Be honest with yourself. Why would it be better if he sang that song? Because he’s 6’4”? Grow up.
At The Christian Century, Jessica Mesman surveys recent hunger horror novels, including Lucy Rose’s The Lamb:
What if the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” had a daughter?…The allegory might feel heavy-handed if the prose weren’t so beautiful and the writing so perceptive about how our reproductive functions can make women feel like animals. “Humanity, Margot, is made up,” says the strange and terrifying Eden, who escapes being made into supper to embark on a sapphic, cannibalistic love affair with Mama that creates an even more nightmarish existence for Margot. When Eden tells a dreadful yarn about eating her own, the cultural anxiety around recent losses of abortion rights is loud on the page. Motherhood is eat or be eaten: “That’s the thing with babies,” Eden says, “they’re destructive little things before they’re even out of you.”
And Philip Christman takes a deep dive into Tears For Fears co-founder Roland Orzabal’s autobiography and its revelations of the band’s origins in Primal Scream therapy:
Roland’s friends, and his bandmates in Graduate, find his obsession with Primal Therapy a little weird. Except for Curt [Smith]. Curt buys into it completely. They decide they must go off on their own to make music that makes sense in the new conceptual world that Dr. Janov has introduced them to. When they make enough money off said music, they can fly to LA and get Primaled the right way, by the man himself. What will they call the new band? Die Laughing? History of Headaches? The Upside-Down Clinic? (These are all absolutely incredible ‘80s band names and probably better than Tears For Fears, if you ask me.) It’s Curt who suggests Tears For Fears, from one of Janov’s little formulae: Tears as a replacement for fears.
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The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
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All-Time Top Five
Telling off the Gray Lady with the truth about the best TV of the age.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Eighteen, “The Fall of Centauri Prime”
Okay, this is actually a really good episode. One of the big strengths of this show is payoffs, and the reveal that the Centauri were manipulated by a servant of the Shadows is actually really cool. More importantly, we have the final piece of Londo’s story, where he has, as he puts it, complete power and no choices.
There’s also this great bit of dialogue, ownage and recognition and love and hatred all at once. It really sells the other great moment, that the Narn can’t forgive the Centauri but G’Kar can forgive Londo.
“You risked your life to save mine.”
“Ehhhh, you would have done the same.”
“Yes, but I am a better person.”
Live Music – my girlfriend’s band, Rattle, had a show in the cool local venue that is also a woodworking space (it’s so photogenic and full of interesting clutter, but also sounds great) and it was the first time I’d seen them since they got back from a two-week tour of Europe so they were on top form, maybe the best I’ve seen them? They were supporting a guitar / sax jazz duo that was inevitably A Bit Much for me as a noted jazz-disliker, although I enjoyed the parts of their set where they let the music breathe quite a bit (less so the mad shredding parts) and their set was a good length to keep me mostly on board.
Always Sunny, S17 “Thought Leadership: A Corporate Conversation” – after a couple of episodes that renewed my enthusiasm for the show, I thought this one was a little weak. The cybertruck stuff was pretty funny though, and it was good to see The Waitress.
Woo live music!
Woooooo live music! Now that you’re a Seinfeld completionist, could you tell if the sax player was playing hot and heavy?
I also watched some new Sunnys and while there are many funny things it’s a bit off. I think this is because I don’t watch the show regularly so I haven’t seen the Gang aging in real time, DeVito in particular is an old dude (and seems to have less material or at least dialogue). And they’ve all had a fair amount of work, Howerton in particular has an unsettling Tom Brady look at times.
I would say that the sax player definitely obtained a state of heat and heaviness at times!
Yeah it’s a funny one, I think Sunny can still deliver episodes that live up to their finest work (I really loved “Frank is in a Coma”) but when they’re not firing on all cylinders then I do start to focus on the unforgiving HD look and their stretched out faces a little too much. I think I’d look more fondly on it generally if they’d called it a day a few years ago, but it remains a solid option to throw on while eating dinner or whatever.
Great call on the HD look — the first season is truly dingy (sort of a Tracy Ullman vs. regular Simpsons vibe) and more interestingly is shot at angles and perspectives that are quickly abandoned for the ongoing house style, but if subsequent seasons cleaned things up a bit they were nowhere at the current level of shininess and glare.
The King and Four Queens – Drifter Clark Gable hears the story of a set of bank robbing brothers who were run down by a posse with three killed in a fire, and one fleeing. Leaving their loot hidden by their ma and also four widows, only since one might not be a widow, the ma makes them all act like widows. So along comes Clark and despite being older than all the women – even Jo Van Fleet, playing the mother – all the widows want him. Despite Gable’s easy and lasting charm – he and Cary Grant might very well have been the sexiest 50somethings ever – and some interesting twists and some nice set pieces, this doesn’t really amount to much. Though I guess it’s refreshing to find a western with a minimum of gunplay. And any movie from the 50s as horny as this. Eleanor Parker is pretty good as the one woman as conniving and charming as Clark.
Elementary, “Give Me the Finger” – A former Yakuza man is found in a fire, clearly murdered, but unlike the previous episode the fire is an accident, and also just to be strange, the man has a fake pinky with a thumb drive in it – a pinky drive! The mystery involves, among other things, the Yakusa at one remove, the computers that run the Air Force’s missile system, legacy computers, and the recipe for the not-actually-paper-but-in-fact textile paper money is made from. LisaGay Hamilton, late of The Practice, is the killer, but even fans of that show like myself would be hard pressed to call her a bug name guest. Meanwhile, Gregson’s daughter admits to being an alcohol, which sets up some interesting stuff, and is also being stalked by our serial killer, which feels like a hat on a hat for a character we’ve met twice.
Barney Miller, “The Rand Report” – A new report from the infamous think tank claims the real work of the police is done by uniformed cops and not detectives, and the brass decree that all third grade detectives spend a week a month in blue. Which in our case means just Wojo. He is not happy about this. Officer Levitt, OTOH, is thrilled. The meat of this is Wojo’s reacting, not played for laughs. Also, a woman chases a purse-snatch into an elevator, which promptly gets stuck. And her husband is sure the crook is going to rape her because men cannot resist her. And both the husband and wife are in their fifties, and it’s kind of nice to see that she still drives him wild.
Compared to Grant, it’s very unfortunate that Gables films haven’t, like the actor, aged very well. One wonders how his legendary screen star status would have been elevated if he had starred in more big name, or auteur directed classics as opposed to having Rhett Butler as your most recognized role.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) – Hell of a Pre-Code, lascivious movie with these distinctive POV shots that lend a lot to the movie’s hypnotic feeling. I still don’t know how they did the one mid-transformation shot and frankly I don’t want to know – it’s that good of a magic trick, though I do know March is physically incredible throughout, makeup or no. (I joked on Letterboxd that the Academy awarded a menacing and physically transformative horror performance once and then never did it again.) One bummer as mentioned by Lauren is how obviously Hyde’s look is based on a racial idea of the Other and it makes the movie look more distinctly of it’s time where the focus on sexual abuse and hypocrisy does not.
I thought you’d dig this! Really glad you liked it. (And yeah, the racializing of Hyde is unpleasant. Wish they’d gone in a different direction there, and it’s more disappointing since, like you said, it doesn’t feel so embedded in its time outside of that.)
And it’s so specifically a good critique of Victorian manners and hypocrisy! A disappointment in that regard.
The Lowdown — first two episodes. Good stuff so far, noted Okie Jim Thompson is referenced but so far Hawke has more Travis McGee vibes and this is wise, Thompson is not a guy who sets up long-term sustainable characters or situations. Great dumbass vibes from the bodyguard brother and his bro, the always-welcome Macon Blair is hopefully sticking around in the “beloved side character offering legal guidance/snark” role, and Dale Dickey drops by to casually kill it as per usual. Dickey is one of the greats and all the more so for generally being cast in such a narrow lane, but she’s so good in it! And it’s hard to think of anyone else who is remotely in her league in this regard, which does not speak well to the faces allowed on screens these days. But Sterlin Harjo (and casting director Amber Midthunder) seem intent on changing that.
Spider’s Eyes — Kurosawa Koctober Kontinues! No, I’m not changing it. Kurosawa filmed this literally back to back with The Serpent’s Path and it is a purposeful dyad about revenge. Path follows a man who, with the assistance of a suspiciously capable helper played by Sho Aikawa, hunts down the gangsters responsible for the rape and murder of his young daughter; this becomes a farce as everyone the pair captures pins the blame on someone else and then it becomes something much darker, another journey into hell. In Eyes, Aikawa is the grieving father on the hunt and in the first five minutes he finds, tortures and kills the guy. So now what?
He eventually falls in with a weird freelance hit squad that does work for the mob (there is some grim subtle humor about how the woman used as sexual bait is doing all the work but gets no respect from her partner and the bumbling teen duo who are largely on the margins) and then attracts attention from the mob itself, including the big boss. Who is a goofy old man obsessed with paleontology and who in a lengthy one-take scene shot at a high distance tells Aikawa to catch him and takes off running like he’s a kid on the playground. All of this is very deadpan (and one scene of a mid-boss repeatedly driving by Aikawa and taunting him is hilariously weird, another one-take perfectly blocked) in its hangout, but the bodies pile up. And Aikawa doesn’t care. His wife tries to move on and at one point sees the ghost of their daughter, it is a frightening scene but Aikawa’s dismissive comfort is ultimately more unsettling Path builds a trap of emptiness, in Eyes Aikawa’s emptiness radiates throughout the movie and eventually overtakes it, as in many Kurosawa films most people wind up dead. And there is a final swerve that is not so much a recognition as a completion. The big boss tells Aikawa that emptiness is a point to start over from, the movie has other ideas and despite its more offbeat vibe it may be darker than Path.
Hell yeah The Lowdown, a very Miller-coded show especially in the great penultimate episode by Walter Mosley.
I saw Moseley’s name in the credits! I assume this means Mouse will show up at some point.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Fourteen, Robert Service
So, things aren’t going well for Lenin at this point – the death of his mother especially means he’s fallen on lean times, and the sheer lack of luck he’s had in his life has left this feeling repetitive a bit. This is where he gets the idea from both debate and workers’ movements to replace the capitalist institutions with soviets; he also rejects the idea of cultural revolution to purge humanity of authoritarianism and individualism; he believed in absolute truth discoverable by the individual.
He also decides* to study Hegel so he can properly understand Marx, and ends up going backwards to Aristotle and falling in love with him. But these are all just ideas, and despite evolution in his thought, he’s pretty much set in stone and starting to lose whatever respect he has. Material conditions are just not quite right for Revolution yet.
*out of spite in an argument, which, relatable.
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
My first Rushdie, and I was surprised at how much this reminded me of much shlockier material I’ve read. Rushdie is better educated, more insightful, more curious, and more emotionally open that most hacks, of course, but there’s a similar slipperiness to the material; he jerks and veers wildly, with the plot shifting almost randomly, and he has a very playful (to my eye, too cutesy) approach to language. This reveals itself at the end as the writing of the narrator trapped in confinement and writing down his family history and life story, which certainly explains a lot; it comes off most of the time as like hearing gossip about a completely unfamiliar group of people.
Finished the third Witcher book – spoiler: it does not have an ending – and Jimmy the Kid. Started a book about the Mir Space Station and how everyone involved in the 90s was a moron, and an old timey baseball mystery by Troy Soos, who wrote a bunch of these. Waiting eagerly for the new bio of Rod Serling.
Not had much time to progress with Dracula the last couple of weeks but I’m keen to finish it by Halloween so I’ll make sure to get stuck in this weekend. I’m still loving it when I do get a chance to read, the way he writes Van Helsing’s Dutch accent / broken English is incredibly charming.
Started Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ Electra and damn do the ancient Greeks have great lines. “This is the edge of action” only two or three pages in.
Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt, his biography of Christopher Marlowe. Runs into the problem of a lot of biographies of people before 1700 where there just aren’t a ton of written accounts or recordings compared to now. We don’t know Marlowe’s favorite beer or sex position; we get an idea of him, a genius, nihilistic provocateur who perhaps didn’t have much of a conscience and got trapped by his role in the state. This works best as historical revisionism about Elizabethean England, not as a Golden Age but as a paranoid, religiously bigoted police state where you were burned at the stake for being a proto-Reddit atheist. Greenblatt made me laugh with his droll commentary on the period and it’s hard for me to chuckle out loud at a book so points for that.
Absolutely dying at “This is the edge of action,” it’s a good line but it also sounds like the tagline for a movie where Electra is solving murders on rollerblades.
And have you read Anthony Burgess’ A Dead Man In Deptford? Historical fiction about Marlowe, it’s been years and years but I remember it being quite good and hitting the “historical revisionism about Elizabethean England, not as a Golden Age but as a paranoid, religiously bigoted police state where you were burned at the stake for being a proto-Reddit atheist” vibes, although from a more Catholic angle.
I have not! I should, I have only read A Clockwork Orange re: Burgess and am one of the righteous minority who thinks the novel’s ending is sentimental/insane and the movie one is correct.
Burgess is a weird guy, a very talented writer who is also a sort of crypto-Catholic and very conservative. I think in some ways it’s good he’s been dead for a while because I can see him going down some very bad and stupid paths this century. But he’s got some good stuff!
He kind of did go down that path with his A CLOCKWORK ORANGE follow-up, THE WANTING SEED, which MAGA would probably promote if they could actually read.
Yeah, I remember reading The Wanting Seed as a young person post-Clockwork Orange and giving it some side-eye.
Marked, by PC and Kristen Cast — PC is the mom, Kristen is the daughter and this is their first book in a series about a teen girl who is see titled as a vampire (excuse me, vampyre) and is sent to vampyre boarding school. This was chosen for a book club out of a hat of frequently banned titles and it gives me great pleasure to report that the banners are 100 percent right, no one should read this terrible garbage. Our teen is of course a Chosen One, not just special by virtue of being a vampyre but the most special vampyre who ever lived, she also is both self-pitying and condescending (it’s hilarious when the book introduces her roommate, a clearly non-threatening supplicant who makes Milhouse Van Houten look like Big Pete Bondurant; it is less hilarious how much she clearly despises her best friend) and of course all of this is in the first person. 300 pages of mostly setup, certain long-term plot points are introduced and they’re the kind of thing a character can not grasp over the course of a novel but need to be resolved by the end lest that character look like an incurious dullard, guess what choice this book makes. Awful and tedious, the worst part is how the book’s badness makes it difficult to read without stopping to simmer in hate, it doesn’t even have page-turning momentum — I will watch pretty much any bad movie but have almost no tolerance for bad books so this was excruciating. The authors do innovate the over-the-pants blowjob though, so the book has that going for it.
Carrie, by Stephen King — a teen girl gets powers! Revisiting this for the first time in a long time for obvious reasons and while I remembered the general vibe I had forgotten how mean and bitter this book is, old-school King has a lot of chips on his shoulder and this makes him a perfect chronicler of teens and their discontents, and the larger world they move through:
“Miss Desjardin employed the standard tactic for hysterics: She slapped Carrie smartly across the face. She hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard. A first-year teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.”
And this is one of the book’s more sympathetic characters! But note the pitiless third person perspective, observing and commenting, and doing so from the point of view of a person who was a teacher himself and is not denying things. Anyway, things are of course only going to get better for Carrie from here.
The main knock i have seen for Flanagan’s Carrie (distinct from “you turned a finite book into a show designed to run for years?”) is that the meanness is missing entirely.
Based on Flanagan’s own comments, I’m not sure he understands that kind of pitilessness, let alone horror itself.
With the caveat that I have not seen Midnight Mass, which supposedly is a riff on Salem’s Lot and has good stuff even if it is super bloated (I believe even fans believe this), I really think TV fucked Flanagan up in this regard. Oculus is a nasty little flick and Absentia, his first movie, is excellent low budget horror. He had a sentimental streak too but movies helped keep it in line, episodic TV’s structure lets him indulge it and sort of encourages it. Netflix was the worst thing that could’ve happened to him.
EDIT: Hush and Gerald’s Game are also quite good, solidly in the horror-but-happy-ending camp but hey, so is Stephen King a lot of the time, the scares along the way are the point.
Year of the Month updates:
This November, you can write about anything from 1968 — here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books from 1998 this October.
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown