The Friday Article Roundup
The week's best pop culture writing, right on time
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Thanks to C.D. Ploughman and The Captain, who are always on time! 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!
Tommy Craggs falls down a music conspiracy rabbit hole at Defector:
The double-beat discourse, such as it was, unfolded in the nested replies of comments sections, one side sneering at the “single-beaters,” the other invoking flat-earthers, each lamenting the other’s tendency toward ad hominem attacks, and on and on and on. Polemics were delivered via YouTube—monologue after self-shot monologue that seemed to borrow its mise en scène and cast from an old VHS dating service, the men drifting in and out of focus on their farty ergonomic chairs, all the accents of the Western Europe professoriat on hand, each finding its own exciting path through words like “ludicrous” and “contemptible.”
Maureen Corrigan has a blast reading the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reissued for its centennial, at NPR:
I’ve only seen the film, so the novel, newly reissued as a Modern Library paperback, was a revelation to me. Think: the zany surrealism of the Marx Brothers crossed with the desire — both sexual and material — of Sex and the City…. Reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is like listening to a Gracie Allen skit on olde time radio: The surface humor derives from how harebrained Gracie, like Lorelei, seems to be, but perhaps the joke is really on anyone who dismisses either of them as just another dizzy dame.
Brian Gaar writes at The Barbed Wire about the quintessential Texas-ness of King of the Hill:
That’s because the show knows Texas on a granular level. Back in the day, it did a tribute to Wichita Falls, which is like making a song about your third-favorite cousin. But they got it right, expertly noting that, near the Red River, people are just as likely to love Oklahoma as they do Texas.
Richard Seymour reviews the work of radical economist David Graeber at the London Review of Books:
Any institution, he writes, involved in the ‘allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments … ultimately rests on the threat of force’. Violence is useful in such a system because it ‘may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing’. Bureaucracy is an ‘area of violent simplification’. And yet, as he also argues in The Utopia of Rules, it is not without ‘a kind of covert appeal’, since the pleasure we take in complaining about red tape implies that if only it were perfected it could deliver the ‘fairness’ it seems to promise.
At Indiewire, David Erhlich reviews Radu Jude’s AI-assisted take on Dracula:
Here is a film that feasts on AI image-making in its ugliest and most nascent form in order to argue that it really isn’t anything new — that its cannibalistic appetite and taste for exploitation are precisely what make this technology such an honest expression of the culture that created it. As a bald man once said: The world is a vampire (sent to drain). With “Dracula,” Jude makes a fun and wildly freewheeling case that it sucks now in much the same way that it’s sucked for the last several hundred years, and in doing so he suggests that AI might be more interesting for what it reveals about the way things haven’t changed than it is for what it threatens to change about them.
And for The New Yorker, Brady Brickner-Wood looks at the welcomely crass late-night comedy of Adam Friedland:
It’s difficult to imagine Friedland ascending to the level of network-television late-night host, let alone accepting the opportunity if it did indeed come. His rendition of the talk show is innately subversive, at direct odds with the squeaky-clean, white-bread humor that is typical of its cable counterpart. Friedland, it seems, would dissolve into ash if forced to abandon dick jokes and the abrasive needling of his guests, if he couldn’t ask someone how much porn they watched in a given week.
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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
That’s a good, thoughtful essay on Graeber. I love Debt: The First 5,000 Years, so I’m going to get around to all of Graeber eventually, and it’s nice to have this well-rounded an examination of his virtues and faults and strengths and weaknesses. The occasionally sloppy research is annoying, and it weakens the underpinnings of everything, but still, he’s consistently interesting and good at envisioning different possibilities for the world (I first came across his work in the context of it being recommended for science fiction and fantasy authors who wanted to imagine new societies).
Saw him speak in 2012 and still regret that I had to leave early for band practice!
He seems like a guy who would definitely favor band practice over lectures though.
What did we watch?
Challengers – liked this, didn’t love it. But I thought the ending was the strongest part, and I’m never going to complain too much when a film leaves me grinning as the credits roll. The general love triangle melodrama stuff was only intermittently compelling but the score is great, the tennis is well done, Josh O’Connor gives a really good performance and that final match is a delight, ball POV shots and all.
Partway through I thought of the most hilarious, insane way the movie could end, and then the real ending was about 75% of the way to what I came up with. Definitely goes out on a high note.
The X-Files, “Soft Light”
The first episode written by Vince Gilligan! I’ll say upfront that this has a couple of minor plot holes, but I’m only bothered by those if they completely ruin the story’s internal logic (these don’t) or if the episode is weak in other ways (this isn’t). So I don’t care.
Tony Shalhoub plays a physicist whose pesky workplace accident has turned him into a would-be Spider-Man villain whose shadow has become a void that devours anyone it touches. (They fall through sudden Who Framed Roger Rabbit holes and leave scorch marks behind.) One of the things that makes this fun is that the episode thinks through how Shalhoub’s character would try to deal with this: he spends most of his time in a train station, seeking out the diffuse “soft light” that eliminates or minimizes his shadow, for example, and he tries to loosen light bulbs around him to protect other people. One of the things that makes this dramatic is bringing in the full force of the conspiracy, with a rightfully paranoid Shalhoub knowing in advance that the government will want to grab him. He’s a frightened, desperate man, and he’s also a scientist who doesn’t want to see his work–bound to his body, in this case–used for evil, and that pushes him to some extreme places.
There’s an arc and tension to how he commits more and more to his goal over his natural dislike of violence. The first few deaths we see him cause are either completely accidental–in one case, he doesn’t even know the victim is there until it’s too late–or unintentional, with him trying to warn victims away from him. But the horror of being taken and used is worse than the horror of being a murderer, so when Mr. X’s men come to snatch him, he commits to deliberately using his shadow against them for the first time, and it’s a great moment, one where we get to see the choice a split second before the action. I also like that it’s then made a little more complicated by him doing the same thing with the less-immediately-menacing detective, an old student of Scully’s, who comes to arrest him. Technically, she’s just as dangerous to him in the long run, since she’ll put him right back where the conspiracy can grab him, but it’s more abstract and several steps out, whereas the guys from earlier were slapping duct tape on his mouth. (And the episode has spent more time with her character, so her death is more significant to the story–and obviously to Scully.) But Shalhoub’s Banton has committed enough at this point that he’s not going to risk too much hesitation.
A lesser episode would then have him become outright villainous, but Gilligan stays committed to the dramatic force of characters making decisions by their own particular motivations. Banton hasn’t suddenly started thirsting for blood: he still wants what he always wanted, which is to keep this power away from the wrong hands and to not be a danger to anyone anymore. (If he’d trusted that his death would do that, it’s clear he would’ve let someone kill him already.) He takes the necessary action to achieve his goals, but tragically, he runs into other characters with their own motivations, and that leads to one of the bleakest endings the show has given us yet.
Also, there’s a good Tooms reference! And Mulder temporarily calls it quits with X, though for the wrong reasons! Williams does a good job seeming jaded and tired in this episode: he’s not as far down the path of disillusionment as Deep Throat was, since he’s still a more active participant in some pretty horrifying parts of the conspiracy, but he’s getting there.
I think I liked most of Vince Gilligan’s other episodes more than this one, but it’s definitely a cool idea. I’d completely forgotten that it was Tony Shalhoub! Stop making me want to revisit so many of these, haha.
This begins the process of Gilligan’s episodes having both an imaginative concept and really ironing out the plot, both in details and it fitting together and flowing in a really compelling way.
Thieves’ Highway – The dark and violent underworld of a produce wholesaler is a tough one for Richard Conte. His dad’s legs were pared off with an axe by bad apple Lee J. Cobb. In a pickle Conte teams up with sketchy string bean Millard Mitchell to get revenge on Cobb. Ripe and juicy femme fatale Valentina Cortese works for Cobb cheating Conte out of his money but she gets second thoughts after falling for him. Conte’s engagement to Barbara Lawrence has gone sour and is growing fuzz anyway. Everything is peaches and cream as the two lovebirds drive off at the end. This reminded me of They Drive By Night. Directed by Jules Dassin it lacks crisp bite like the director’s Brute Force or The Naked City. It’s squishy and over ripe with sentimentality at times like with Conte’s phone call home in a crowded restaurant and Conte’s truck driving competition are there for laughs. But it’s a convincing and fast paced plot with a couple of action-packed set pieces. Great acting all around. Cobb and Conte facing off at several points is explosive, like Gallagher smashing a watermelon.
*gets to the “pared off”/”bad apple” sentence*
Ha, that’s funny, you did that deliberately because of the produce wholesaler bit.
*reads rest of comment*
I am blown away by your commitment to the bit.
I’m a big Jules Dassin fan and really enjoyed this one, although I definitely wouldn’t put it on the same level as Naked City / Night and the City which I think are my two favourites (really need to see Rififi again).
“Not as hard as Brute Force” is a nearly-impossible bar to clear! This does get very sentimental at the end and it feels like the old Code switch got flipped, it’s very abrupt and easier to dismiss as such, unlike *glowers downward* Rebel Ridge. The atmosphere here is fantastic, and the no-brakes truck scene genuinely harrowing.
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Twenty-Two, “The Fall of Night”
Ownage and revelations. The reveal of what Kosh looks like in his suit is perfect, and fits the show’s particular skill at answers being ten times better than the questions, but the plot in general is boiling over nicely. I really didn’t anticipate the story turning out like this; I would have thought the Centauri would have continued to fall apart while the Narn become aggressors, but it’s really the other way around, and in the more specific sense, G’Kar becoming a beaten-down, agonisingly vulnerable freedom fighter. The Centauri are beginning to really invade while Earth is getting more fascistic, which is miserable in real life but really exciting in fiction. Sheridan’s the most exciting here, not caught between the two but pretty definitively throwing his hand in with one lot, which will reverberate outwards.
The episode opens with Lennier and Vyr getting together for what is clearly a regular venting session, which is hilarious. Londo also gets one really great line: “Do not start getting delusions of grandeur. You will not survive them.”
The Twilight Zone (Jordan Peele version)
Finished this off. The only episode that I would say is unreservedly great is the one with Topher Grace, because it’s the only one that’s coherently holding together; I was suspicious of it being a cheap cathartic fuck you to stupid men until its killer final moment, having him make a humiliating and deadening choice that humanised him without absolving him, only emphasising he heroine’s triumph. The season finale was intensely stupid, though I appreciated the aliens and even found their queen pretty creepy. “8” was also pretty awesome, at least until the goofy-assed ending, but I found the octopus the most sympathetic character this show has ever done.
Ultimately, the show was worth watching, even if it was almost wall-to-wall lumpy. But it has really made me want to write more Twilight Zone-like short stories to really show them how it’s done.
Love Topher Grace and Kylie Bunbury in “Try, Try.” And yeah, that final beat is great.
“You Might Also Like” annoys me a lot because a direct sequel to “To Serve Man” could actually be an incredibly cool, resonant idea for a 2019- series to tackle: the idea of an Earth where people are, for the most part, safe and materially comfortable while also aware that sooner or later, they could be culled, they’re just penned-up animals waiting for the slaughter … that’s a promising setup for a story about someone finally choosing to risk that safety and comfort for a different kind of life. (Echoes of part of Watership Down here.) And instead, we get an okay meditation on consumerism and a dumbass “original or extra crispy?” joke.
Both this series and the original TZ always make me want to write this kind of story. They’re really fun to brainstorm. I’m rooting for both of us to actually do this now.
Oh, they’re those aliens! Okay, this is further push to actually watch the original show at some point.
I won’t lie,. in mulling over this, I was thinking “I wonder if I can nudge Lauren into a TZ homage-off. Some kind of regular short story thing.
I very much support some homaging! We absolutely should.
And I should say, as a major champion of the original show, that there are, to be fair, a number of bad episodes and weak stretches, so in no way should you expect total excellence. But, with that caveat in mind, there are still a ton of that are good-to-incredible, including some that other pop culture works haven’t referenced as often. I think you’d have a good time with it on the whole.
All anthology shows are by their nature pretty uneven but The Twilight Zone has the best batting average and the peaks are downright iconic and revelatory.
I wrote episode-by-episode reviews of the first season once and couldn’t believe how many classics there were right off the bat. Really incredible.
Also, speaking of TZ, I came across this Serling quote today that I love:
“I just want them to remember me 100 years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote a single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”
“The reveal of what Kosh looks like in his suit is perfect, and fits the show’s particular skill at answers being ten times better than the questions” — ha, felt completely opposite about this. The conceit of Kosh’s appearance being different to different people is good, the execution is very mid 90s and looked dumb to me — the more details you try to use for this sort of thing, the blander it looks. I preferred the question and the suit!
I’ll rephrase to “the idea of Kosh’s actual form is perfect”, I’ll concede the visuals themselves are dorky as hell, although I take that in stride for this show.
Dalziel and Pascoe — visiting my mom, so British mystery time! Warren Clarke has to tone down Dalziel from his portrayal in the books to be palatable for the median TV viewer but he is clearly having a blast and Colin Buchanan is excellent as Pascoe. And the British TV format has a certain ceiling but that is much higher than streaming standards, fine location shooting and solid blocking that is very pleasurable to watch and fall asleep to.
Rebel Ridge — visiting my mom, so I have access to Netflix! Finally caught this and while Saulnier is great with action, as a craftsman he just knows how to film this with an eye toward clarity and impact, his story instincts without Macon Blair are another matter. This drags on for a surprisingly long time, with a focus on the ins and outs on civil forfeiture and legal manipulation, and it became clear Saulnier was dawdling because he didn’t want to get to the dogshit ending he came up with, unbelievable nonsense that had me looking online to see if I had missed some crucial bit of info. I don’t think I did! I’m hoping to find a Netflix conspiracy that forced this Hays Code-ass bullshit, because if Saulnier is fully onboard his instincts are in trouble.
Managed to catch the latest It’s Always Sunny last night, and while I’ll have more thoughts on Thursday (particularly since I may need to watch again, given the circumstances of last night) I found it very funny.
What did we read?
Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard – an easy read that still took me a month to get through for whatever reason. Very character-based without too much of a plot to drive it, which might explain that – not an unfamiliar vibe for Leonard but often there is a central crime / heist / whatever for everything to revolve around whereas this one just sets up a bunch of characters (sleazy judge and his psychic wife, parole officer and a couple of criminals she’s responsible for, a sensitive cop) and hangs around to see whether any of them end up killing any of the others. An enjoyable time, I was going to say “but I can see why this one has never been made into a movie” only to fact-check myself and discover there’s a seven-episode 90s TV version with Beau Bridges as the judge. Huh.
I’m two-thirds of the way through Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple. He’s the son of William Dalrymple of the Empire podcast, and is following in his father’s footsteps as a historian focusing on India and the surrounding regions. Shattered Lands covers the dissolution of the Raj starting from splitting off Aden and Burma (now Myanmar) in the 30s, to Independence and Partition in 1947 and then the splitting of the princely states to India or Pakistan, followed by the middle eastern princely states, and finally East Pakistan breaking off to become Bangladesh in the 70s.
It’s a lot to cover, but it handles the scope and flow of events really well, with a lot of colour in quotes from contemporary news, letters, and interviews. The scale of it all is staggering and incredibly tragic.
Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet, by Alice Robb
Interesting, lively, thoughtful combo of memoir and anecdotal history. Robb, who spent a couple years at the School of American Ballet, uses her personal history with the most athletic of artforms–and the life stories of some of her one-time classmates–as a way into looking at ballet’s past and present, with regular detours into the life stories of famous dancers and choreographers. I like that her perspective in a lot of cases boils down to “it’s complicated”: Robb is frank about the detrimental effects ballet can have on dancers’ physical and mental health (the anorexia, the arrested development, the constant criticism and body-shaming, the enforced culture of submission and zero boundaries) but also recognizes why she and others continue to be drawn to it (the beauty of dance, the satisfaction and solid ground that comes from training and discipline, the heightened feeling of being present in one’s body).
She highlights some of the contemporary movements that try to move away from the worst aspects of ballet’s history–for example, there’s now a pointe shoe manufacturer who makes beautiful shoes that are much kinder to the dancer’s feet, although many major ballets snub them because, uh, they’re not going to take the easy way out by refusing gratuitous suffering–but she also, in a way I personally recognize, continues to draw on what moves her, even when it comes from messy, troubled, or terrible sources. She spends a significant amount of the book delving into the sins of famous choreographer Balanchine–his sexual harassment, his possessiveness and sometimes vicious retaliation, his championing of slender reed figures, and on and on–but still comes back in the end to the artistic lessons she got from his work and life that she admires and embraces. She’ll learn lessons worth learning from whoever she can, which I think is generally a pretty good approach.
Really made me want to reread Ballet Shoes, so that may turn up next week.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C Heller
The tragedy of the failed individual. I read this as a way of cleansing myself after putting myself through Atlas Shrugged, hoping to take pleasure in the suffering Rand went through. At first, I was sorely disappointed; her early life – more on that in a second – was the story of escaping oppression, but the way Heller laid it out – a LOT more on that in a second – it seemed her family mostly navigated through the problems of revolutionary Russia indirectly affected by its problems. Heller makes a very convincing argument that Rand’s story is really that of the Russian Jew; for starters, her extensive education*, to an extent, her necessary paranoia, and most of all, her belief in ideas as the main way to shape the world, something Heller repeatedly characterises as the kind of thing a Nineteenth Century Russian intellectual would say.
*With the very small sample size of biographies I’ve read on the subject, I suspect that what antisemites base their conspiracy theories around can be more adequately explained by Jewish people basing their traditions around what we would recognise now as a standard middle-class education, regardless of economic status, allowing even poor Jewish people upward mobility, or at least autonomy.
The funny coincidence about reading Rand’s life story now, after reading her hated Communist leaders like Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin, is that I can kind of see where horseshoe theory is coming from; not so much as Look Into The Abyss stuff or as an extension of the inherent similarities between two philosophies, but as two political groups drawing on the same traditions, even as they use them to go different places.
Anyway, once Rand hits America, I was aghast to see she was actually almost immediately successful, and had to console myself with both her not grasping how well she was doing (thus suffering in some way) and in her hypocrisy, as she does things completely in contrast to her later (and even then) stated ideals. I had to hold out faith that I was reading tragedy, with someone achieving all they set out to do and then living with the consequences, something that paid off handsomely.
Rand’s life actually could be described as a three-act structure, with the first act leading up to the writing of The Fountainhead, the second act leading up to the publishing of Atlas Shrugged, and the last twenty years of her life being one in which she is inactive, aside from responding to events of her previous actions. Those middle years in which she publishes three of her four books could be accurately described as the happiest of her life; when AS bombs critically, she spends the rest of her life in a depression and caught up in polyamorous soap opera dramatics, as she slowly cuts off every single person in her life aside from the most lickspittle.
That last twenty years is where the psychological aspect of horseshoe theory comes in; Rand ends up acting exactly like her hated Communists, cutting out people at first for betrayal, then for disagreeing with her even mildly, and demanding fealty from her followers whilst ignoring any responsibility she has for the way her life turned out (there’s one great bit where she goes into a white-hot rage over someone saying that maybe AS failed critically because it’s a lousy book and she’s a lousy writer).
There’s a lot of great characterisation of her from the people around her; one person outright says to her that her principles over something are irrational, provoking her outrage (and also proving my theory that Jim Taggart is really her avatar), but there are also plenty of people observing that, deliberately or otherwise, she’s built a cult of conformity around her (Heller observes Rand initially found her followers annoying, but then takes advantage of them emotionally).
Above all, though, is everyone around Rand recognising that, despite her bravado and despite her characters, she’s driven by fear. Multiple people describe her in these years as the most frightened person they ever met; one salient point is that she continues going around places with her ageing husband because she’s terrified of being anywhere alone (poignant, considering he’s portrayed as almost completely without will through his entire life). This is the tragic revelation of character; Ayn Rand was a frightened little girl her whole life.
Which brings me to Heller herself. This is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, because it’s the only nonfiction book I’ve read that not only has an Unreliable Narrator, it has a very specific kind akin to Colonel Pyat, where she’s admirably committed to the facts but keeps interpreting them the way she’d prefer and consciously overlooking things that contradict her views. In the introduction alone, Heller describes Rand as expertly spotting and skewering hypocrisy (amongst other things), and then not two paragraphs later, quotes Rand self-describing as someone who took no help from anybody despite having quite a lot of help from quite a few people.
Things like this end up peppering and occasionally overwhelming the book; there’s an early anecdote where Rand as a child is intrigued by a girl who is more popular than her and equally as intelligent, and she walks up and asks this girl what matters most to her, to which the girl replies, “My mother”, which causes Rand to instantly dismiss her as vapid and walk away from her forever. Heller observes that there are any number of explanations for why the girl would say this (including, but not limited to, being surprised when someone she didn’t know walked up to her and asked a blunt question) that never even seem to occur to Rand, even in telling the story later.
Heller becomes neither the first nor the last to diagnose Rand as a narcissist, but she definitely gets one of the most artful, when she describes the protagonist of one of Rand’s books, then observes this is a perfect, textbook description of narcissism, then observes this is a perfect description of Rand. Over and over, she illustrates Rand’s shortsighted, irrational, selfish, and self-rationalising thinking, but at no point can she ever bring herself to criticise Rand as a thinker or writer. In fact, the most tedious parts of the book are when Heller melodramatically, enthusiastically, and unconvincingly describes the ‘brilliance’ and ‘necessity’ of Rand’s works (when it gets to criticisms of her books, one gets the sense of Heller trying way too hard to convince the reader to dismiss them).
This is an unfortunate flipside of Heller diving into Rand’s influences, which interest me regardless of the quality of a writer – the mixture of early Soviet works as well as Victor Hugo (who I incorrectly referred to as her favourite writer, when in actuality Les Mis was a model for her work), as well as the real people who influenced her characters. It was a fistpump moment to find Hank Rearden’s mother and wife were, very likely, based on her mother as I guessed, and extremely embarrassing to read that her satire of college professors and scientists was based on secondhand stories from the nineteen-year-old students she was befriending/seducing. Also interesting: that her weak scientist was based on her one meeting with Oppenheimer. Too bad we didn’t see that in the movie.
What I ended up thinking of, as well, was why I was even doing this to myself – not in a self-pitying way, but in a thoughtful way. Given things like the genocide happening in Palestine or the rise of fascism in America and the UK, focusing on a long-dead author of books widely regarded as shitty seems weird. I decided it’s because there are more similarities between Rand and I than differences; we’re both idealistic authors with clear goals based in becoming successful authors, enamoured with individuality as a philosophy, lacking interest in banalities (up to and including small talk), with a weird distance from the rest of humanity. The difference is that I could not be mistaken for a narcissist and would rather everybody actually be happy, and this seemingly minor difference grinds my gears as I see her come so close to being, like, a human being.
Tristan reading the book: Fail, damn it, fail!
Rand’s life resembles many other California self actualization movements, in which demands of cult like adulation of the founder lead to an inevitable instititional implosion. While her main core organiation still keeps her works in circulation (where their influence on libertarian philosophy has grown), it has failed to maintain a monopoly on Objectivism as an evolving philosophy or grow it beyond a minor movement, A lot of that has been done by other groups, such as the Atlas Society and the Brandon Institute, which are schismatic movements based on the core of her work. She, and her heretical ilk, mirror motivational trends in social psychology that are hugely influential in both business education and recovery movements, and many such groups, like The Landmark Forum (an offshoot of EST) utilize Rand and he wayward disciples in their curriculum. She is part of a secret history of the Self, and I eagerly await someone to dig into the wider influence her disciples had on therapeutic cultural movements.
I did find it fascinating that Rand’s first follower was the inventor of cognitive psychology (and also infuriated, given how useful that field actually is) as well as the general idea of the self-esteem movement.
The Rib From Which I Remake The World – A decent Stephen King-style horror novel about a 40’s small town invaded by a malevolent theater troupe should have less of a pure heavy metal title. Otherwise it’s a bit too much of a slow burn to support such ambitions and promises, we’re just getting to the nastier imagery halfway through and not sure if the character’s traumatic backstory is working for me at all.
Binti – So far so good, an Afrofuturist novel that’s blessedly 90 pages. I like that the standard YA/genre friends and love interest are taken away from the plot in the most brutal manner possible, forcing the protagonist into a very different story of survival and negotiation.
I don’t think I ever read the third Binti book, but I really liked the first two. And yeah, that early genre shift kills.
I taught Binti in my Intro to SF college class, and the students really liked it.
Machines In The Head by Anna Kavan – I liked Kavan’s Ice which was paranoid, apocalyptic SF. This collection of short stories taken from various opp collections is thematically and stylistically similar. The stories are surreal and full of Kafkaesque absurdity, existentialism, paranoia, social isolation and abstract guilt never defined being inflicted by unnamed enemies. The psychological plots are slow motion panic attacks full of atmospheric ice, cold and winter imagery, possibly an expression of Kavan’s heroin addiction (which she was advised to take by her tennis instructor to improve her swing!) It’s only the last quarter of the stories that get into Kavan’s late career interest in SF with shades of cosmic horror written in tone similar to J.G. Ballard’s calm deadpan detachment, and being something much more introspective than the usual SF of the time.
Hey, friends, what’s up?
Struggling to work through another heatwave this week, it’s days like this where I really miss being able to go and hide out in an air-conditioned office. Otherwise, things are largely the same: work bad, personal life good.
Public transit cuts going through, which just sucks, there’s no way around it. Otherwise I’m doing alright, mostly struggling with poor impulse control but the book’s coming along and I’m taking care of my friend’s cat in the evenings.
One of my best friends showed up to town yesterday morning for a few days (as did another friend who I’m not as close with in the evening, good guy though). We took him around town mostly for beers yesterday until we met up with friend #2 and our Denver friend they’re also close with. Today it looks like we’ll be heading into the mountains.
They were planning to go to My Morning Jacket at Red Rocks on Saturday, which I wasn’t planning to do because a)it’s my birthday and my wife has to work, so I wanted to do something with her in the evening and b)it’s the second of two shows and they’re playing Z in full tonight, with no repeats between shows, so I didn’t want to go if I wasn’t going to get to hear from my favorite MMJ album.
But they decided this morning to go tonight’s show as well, so I think I’m gonna join them for that.
Everything else is OK. Next week when things calm down I am looking forward to getting back to playing poker and actually putting in work on my next project and getting over my anxieties about it.
Hoo boy, I am tired, these kids in my classes are exhausting. Lots of impulse and behavioral control issues, this is going to be a challenge. Friday was a pep rally day, and while these are usually pretty lame in my opinion (particularly in middle school), this place does it up right, having the students prepare all day for a competition and encouraging them to really get into it. A good, high energy way to end the week so that I don’t spiral into too bad of a “what am I even doing here?” mindset over the weekend.
Year of the Month update!
This August, we’ll be covering 1959. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Pillow Talk/Some Like It Hot
Aug. 15th: Gillian Nelson: I Captured the King of the Leprechauns
Aug. 20th: John Bruni: Shadows
Aug. 22nd: Gillian Nelson: Khrushchev Goes to Disneyland
Aug. 25th: Sam Scott: Imitation of Life
Aug. 27th: Lauren James: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Aug. 28th: Cliffy73: Sleeping Beauty
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
Aug. 31st: Tristan J. Nankervis: North by Northwest
And in September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday
The article title immediately made me think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfzLwUR04ng