The Friday Article Roundup
Get in the pit with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will shout at the devil about:
Keep the heads banging! Send your own picks throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At High Country News, B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster (with photographer Russel Albert Daniels) goes long on what the Fire in the Mountains festival brought to Blackfeet Nation, and vice versa:
Some folks joke that you’re either a hip-hop Native or a metal Native. If anything, Natives seem over-represented in the metal community. “A lot of it is land-based,” said Meg Skyum (Oji-Cree), who’d come to the festival from Ontario to see the Native black metal outfit Blackbraid and get a sneak preview of their third album. Atmospheric black metal in particular is “about the fucking trees and shit,” which Natives appreciate. Plus, Natives and metalheads, Skyum added, both live in the margins of ordinary society. “We’re fringe, they’re fringe.”
Kayleigh Donaldson examines the tactile films of Lynne Ramsay at The AV Club:
But motherhood, through Ramsay’s lens, leads Grace to dissociate, which evolves into a pure sensory assault. Grace’s dripping breast milk mingles with the ink she tries to wield into a new story. The sounds of the countryside grow louder, like the buzzing of the bees and the barking of a tragic dog, as Grace’s psychosis leaves her raw as a live wire. What was once tranquil is now unbearable.
For Limn, Sarah R. Kessler writes about her past life as a ghostwriter:
“Sarah’s my writer,” A. once bragged to a famous person who visited the museum. I don’t remember who it was (there were a lot of famous people who visited the museum), but I recall A. saying this by way of introduction. Instead of telling said famous person that I was a curatorial assistant, which was the job I’d been hired to do, she claimed me as a tool, her tool, an automatic text-generator, a metaphorical mouthpiece for the pearls of wisdom raining from her margarita-loosened lips.
Steve Macfarlane interviews co-director Alex Winter and FX whiz Bill Corso about making Freaked for Filmmaker Magazine:
Winter: I’ve been inside the industry since I was nine years old, and the industry has always been hard. It has always been filled with a mix of people who love movies and people who hate movies, plus people who have a fuzzy idea of what movies are but they love putting on a suit and hanging out with movie stars. There’s a lot of those. This idea of the artist versus the machine, it’s just a crock of bitter, resentful shit. I’m not saying that’s what Ron Shelton is saying, by the way—I don’t know Ron Shelton from a hole in the wall. But I reject the sentiment as you paraphrased it—the juvenile, punk rock, “us versus them,” self-pitying perspective. The world is hard and there are people in that world who will fight to the death to help you get your shit done.
Grayson Haver Currin profiles John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats at GQ:
The magic, though, is how much they remind me of a couple of high-school kids as they do this, finding and finessing their language in someone’s borrowed garage. The Mountain Goats aren’t the same band they were 35 years ago in Norwalk or even five years ago in Durham; no assessment, I think, could make Darnielle happier. “What we’re doing right now is something new,” he gushes. “And newness inspires continually.”
On the occasion of Neil Young’s 80th birthday, Stereogum surveys 80 artists about their favorite Young songs, including Alan Sparhawk on “Heart Of Gold”:
My most vivid image associated with the song is from a basement hardcore show I saw as a teen where a band called King Pickle covered it as part of their blazing 20-minute set. The singer wound it up, mischievously singing the “Keeps me searching for a heart of gold” line but then the ferocious-looking, shirtless, lanky, mohawk-crowned bass player lurched up to the mic and screamed “AND I’M GETTIN’ OLD!” Desperate violent time-travel. Like lightning. I can still feel the spit and heat. As I write this, I’m reminded that Neil couldn’t have been a year or two older than that bass player when he wrote the song.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Ten, “A Late Delivery from Avalon”
This is a middling episode with a few great scenes. Marcus became genuinely charming for the first time; not just because I like the famous quote shared below, but because he’s willing to empathise with ‘Arthur’ and allow him his point of view, and even better, have practical reason to, given that Sebastian is common knowledge now. I also love G’Kar immediately and gleefully joining up with him out of a desire for a good black-and-white moral fight (“No moral ambiguity!”). G’Kar was introduced as a pompous blowhard, and the war has wounded him; ultimately, he’d rather be pompous.
“You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.” I’d heard this quote before and I like it.
Lol, I hated this one. The Jack The Ripper episode felt like a sci-fi/Trek conceit that was still molded to specific Babylon 5 stuff, this mostly feels like a generic “King Arthur” bullshit plot plopped into the show. The exception, as you note, is G’Kar, and his reaction is indeed very cool. I assume the other reason this exists is to have a payoff down the line with the return of “Arthur,” hopefully he’ll get eaten by a Zarg.
The Lighthouse – First time since 2019 and this is Eggers’ masterpiece, dense with symbolism, fluids, Pinteresque comedy (“WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT”), and the cost of vulnerability and destruction. An incredibly good time, beautiful to view and giddy at the fucked up shit that can be put on camera. Thomas’ genuine hurt when he’s told his cooking sucks, the cut off scream of horror and despair when shit flies back into Ephraim’s face…this is what we go to the movies for, folks.
Rocky Horror Picture Show – What’s fascinating about this movie is how a chief flaw – the dead air born of awkward stage adaptations – made it such a great theatrical experience and also still fun to watch friends. It is absolutely Baby’s First Queer Movie, John Waters and glam rock horror filtered so 13-year-olds can get transgression without as much sacrilege. Tim Curry, however, still kills, and the songs are the kind of catchy glam-R&B numbers that’d die out by 1976 – or evolve into punk – and endure after.
Babylon 5 — the only good Minbari is a dead Minbari, so good times this episode! Although things are resolved in a fashion that is cool in isolation but comes out of nowhere as a concept (characters in this episode reference discussing it last episode, maybe I dozed off? But I don’t think so), so it’s weird in that respect. And Strascyznski goes toward one of his patented humanitarian if not Communist solutions and it feels very condescending if also sincere. As opposed to condescending and devious, which is Bester’s mode and man what a shot in the arm he is every time he makes an appearance, Walter Koenig is the best. And at this point he is needed more than ever, because the show has reached a period that hits almost all successful TV dramas — the cast that we enjoy watching has been split apart due to the consequences of their actions, so dramatically things make sense while still feeling rather disjointed. The episode ends with an extremely rash decision out of nowhere from people we’ve barely seen in a while, but hopefully this will pull some threads together if nothing else.
It Happened Tomorrow — reporter Dick Powell starts getting issues of the next day’s newspaper, will this make him happy and wealthy or lead to troubles he must learn a lesson from? Made in 1946 but because of the day’s news being fairly grim war stuff it is set in the turn of the century and apparently Frank Capra was going to take this but passed it to Rene Clair and it definitely would’ve benefited from Capra’s darker touch. The Gay Nineties vibe is weird* and feels not just inconsequential but somewhat phony, people playing dress-up, and this contributes to a film that is not manic enough for the lightly fantastic comedy it’s making and is too frothy to deeply engage with its ideas. Perhaps a companion piece would be The Hudsucker Proxy, although I think that film actually works a lot better than it initially appears to and does find a casual profundity in the shenanigans. Tomorrow does reach a clever ending but is unfortunately bracketed by a prologue and epilogue that feature a singing four-year-old so zero stars, let this expire from Criterion in disgrace.
*I had similar problems with the 40s-made/90s-set Strawberry Blonde, and it’s making me wonder how future audiences will react to our period pieces
Alfred Hitchcock Presents – an episode I seem to have enjoyed more than the consensus for once! More info over on that article.
Had some of the England football (soccer) match on while listening to records but while they played well, it didn’t really engage me all that much. Think I’m a bit bored of football (soccer) tbh.
The Lady in the Lake – Robert Montgomery stars as Philip Marlowe, but also directs this rather odd movie that for the most part is shot as seen by Marlowe. In essence a first person shooter, even though Marlowe never once does any shooting. The idea was to recreate the feel of the books, but the execution feels off-putting despite the effort put in to make everything work. (A car chase seen from the driver’s seat is especially interesting.) Montogmery is an OK Marlowe, at the lower end of the actors who’ve played the role, but the cast (Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Jayne Meadows, Leon Ames) is strong enough to keep me engaged while we don’t get to see Marlowe. And as ever, the story is convoluted mess, but as I said last week, you don’t come to Marlowe for the plots.
The Practice, “Marooned” – A woman stands accused of murdering her mother, a crime she does not remember. For it seems very likely she was sexually abused by her now-dead father as a child and went into a PTSD fugue state. Rebecca and Eugene have to prove all this is true, and that means trying to get the accused’s sister to admit it is possible the father abused both girls. The defense works but then the poor woman has another flashback and kills her sister! Up to this point, the story is quite good, with William Atherton returning as the sort of DA you expect William Atherton to play: harsh, sardonic, intelligent, but showing hints that he might have his doubts. And then we get that ending. Do people with PTSD really get THAT lost in flashbacks? Meanwhile, a tiff over wearing Bobby’s mother’s wedding gown turns into something deeper and Lindsey admits she didn’t like being proposed to in the ICU. Some stuff is hashed out, but I am not sure we needed to have this stuff to hash out.
Frasier, “The Show Must Go Off” – While stopping briefly at a sci fi convention to look for X-Men comics for Freddy, Frasier finds the actor who long ago introduced him and Niles to Shakespeare. Saddened to find that the actor is best know for playing an android named Tobor, the brothers arrange to have the poor guy reprised his one man show. Only they make the shocking discovery that the actor is, and was, terrible. Farce ensues, but thankfully our guest actor is Sir Derek Jacobi, hamming it up with elan in his first ever appearance on American TV, taking home an Emmy. Also along for the ride is Patrick MacNee as Jacobi’s elderly father (his final role). Of course, when this aired no one knew that Kelsey Grammer would eventually appear in the X-Men franchise, but his run-in with a Klingon was long after his cameo on TNG.
The Prowler – A minor noir classic but with some flaws. Van Heflin is a bad cop who doesn’t want to be a cop. He becomes obsessed with Evelyn Keyes, the wife of an all-night DJ, after she reports seeing a prowler. Helflin has dreams of owning a motel in Vegas. He sees his payday when he discovers the DJ’s will, a whopping sixty-two thousand dollars. Heflin sets up Keyes’ husband, “mistaking” him for the prowler and killing him by “accident”.
Heflin is great playing a bad cop; he’s a disgusting, manipulative slob. Keyes is also very good as the woman who fears she married a murderer. But I had a hard time imagining her marrying this guy to begin with, she’s kind of dumb the way she falls for Heflin, that’s on the writing. It happens very quick and easy. She hates Heflin for killing her husband then comes running back to him in what feels like five minutes. To be clear, she marries the man who killed her husband and nobody in town is suspicious. When the couple discover they are having a baby, then they worry with the timing of the pregnancy that could raise suspicion. The third act has them hiding out in a ghost town in the desert playing house, really strange. It’s got some great photography going from the dark black night of the city to bright sunny desert. Keyes finally sees the light through Heflin’s manipulation and wants out. I still thought this was very good if a little more implausible than most noir is already. What’s interesting is that the original prowler is never caught. He’s still out there in his own movie.
What did we read?
Discretions & Indiscretions, Lucy Duff-Gordon
You may recall that, about a year ago, I read a book called Shadow of the Titanic, which tracked stories of Titanic survivors. One of them was the tragically farcical story of the Duff-Gordons, a well-off couple who ended up on the ‘millionaire’s lifeboat’, accused of buying their way onto a lifeboat and seeing their reputations destroyed. Lady Duff-Gordon went on to write memoirs, which I was so intrigued about I decided to get them.
Interestingly, her story is largely about her lifelong business of designing dresses; she notes multiple times that it was the part of her life that brought the most meaning to her, and recognises at the end that she barely said anything about her husband. She personally invented the very idea of a catwalk and the modern model (amusingly, she refers to the clothes as models and the women wearing them as mannequins), and her life and self-image is that of an artist championing self-expression – not only her own, but those of the women she dresses, attempting to make their clothing match their qualities.
One interesting thing about the book is that Duff-Gordon sees herself as a relic, having been born in 1860ish and writing the book in 1931, in her late sixties. She observes the difference between Victorian women and the ‘modern’ one, but with no judgement (certainly none of the judgement of her fellows, from her perspective); she frequently notes that ‘modern’ women are allowed much more freedom and self-expression than women of her day. Ironically, this ends up pointing to women’s issues being eternal; the language, the sense that women are having more sex than ever and are more self-sufficient than ever is apparently never-ending.
Duff-Gordon frequently has these interesting anecdotes and asides about the problems of the women she knows, as well as her own; women who were abandoned by husbands, or chose not to get married, or tried (or were forced) to get work. The most interesting note in the whole book actually ends up being more about America than women – when she moves to New York, she finds Americans are driven far more by status than their British counterparts, and that she can sell a dress very easily by observing that so-and-so already bought it – as if Americans are so driven by individual expression and power that they can inadvertently drive straight into conformity!
She also notes how often she ends up being what we would now know as therapist; late in the book, she ends up working for a woman who is effectively stalking a Hollywood heartthrob, and she is privy to a lot of gossip and secrets women drop on her. Meanwhile, the Titanic stuff ends up coming late into the book and taking up three chapters; it’s almost hilariously small and petty compared to everything around it, and considering its outsized effect on her life (to the point that it would be the reason most people bought the book at the time of release).
Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey
This is the end of my serious pursuit through the Dragonriders of Pern series; I’ll read the other ones on a looser basis but now my travels through the high fantasy genre will move onto the next author. This was a good one to end this little journey on because it’s the best so far, not just structured better but written more smoothly and conveying a sweeter, more specific emotional arc; it’s still another coming-of-age story, but it’s about a girl who dreams of being one thing, suffers an accident, and ends up coming at her dream from another, even more beautiful angle as she sings for a bunch of fire lizards.
It’s also got the thing my mother laid out as an appeal of the series, as we get a cameo from Jaxome that shows this is happening at around the same time as the previous book; it makes this world feel real and interconnected, with many tiny stories within. Menolly and her well-meaning, slightly overbearing mother feels like a very tiny story but all the more important because it’s part of a bigger picture.
8 Bit Theater, 0271-300, Brian Clevinger
These strips cleans up the remainder of the Elfland arc. You reduce it to plot, and it’s ‘the Light Warriors defeat Drizz’l, recover the Crown, and return to find the evil chancellor is actually a disguised dark elf getting revenge by plunging Elfland into a civil war’. Obviously, it’s the details that make this work; I’m thinking now how the plot is essentially running under the logic of a joke, with shocking reveals that force the reader to reconsider events up until now, except with serious details as opposed to jokes.
In terms of new ideas, this is where BM’s status as comic foil is most strongly challenged; it has a section where he’s humiliated by being the last LW still stuck to the spider web, and it forces introspection for a moment as he almost chooses to grapple with his motivations and nearly recognises that his bravado covers insecurity; this is brought back about a dozen strips later where he engages in much more serious and extended introspection that is undone when Fighter says something stupid and distracts him long enough to forget what he was thinking about.
This kind of serious grappling is what makes the nihilism of the comedy so funny; heroic fantasy fiction provides the foundation for the story’s comedy, and Clevinger easily writes not only standard fantasy tropes, but writes them with the same elaboration that he writes the punchlines. In fact, the increasing complexity and sincerity of the setup only makes the stupid jokes even funnier.
“You realise of course this means Fighter is the smartest.”
There’s an incredible gag where Fighter’s new swords are shown off, one labelled Stabby and the other labelled Slashy, with Stabby crossed out (Fighter having presumably forgotten he already named the other one Stabby).
There’s another incredible gag where WM gently reminds the LW of their quest to destroy Chaos, and they mistake him for a government official – great moment of comic escalation when WM angrily says he’s not an elected official and BM responds “Ah, one of those appointed by committee types then.” Comic escalation is hard; riffing on the same idea risks predictability. BM’s response is completely out of left field but, unfortunately, a logical reaction. It even escalates further when the discussion descends into violence in the next strip.
Thief and BM take bodies from a campground to be murdered in their place, and these turn out to be Onion Kid’s parents and sister, continuing the running gag.
The Elfland plot climaxes in BM accidentally killing the villain with a joke so terrible it causes his body to give up on life. This is one of my favourite anticlimaxes in the whole strip.
Very glad you got around to Dragonsong. I have noted that i like the earlier dragon books more than you did, but i thought this smaller person story within the fantastic milieu would work better for you.
There are two sequels to this, Dragonsinger and Dragondruns, neither of which is as good.
Near the end of the book on Amelia Earhart and her hubby. The final, fateful, fatal flight was a bad idea badly executed, and no amount of admiration by the author for Earhart can fix that. This is just a hard book to recommend. For all that Laurie Gwen Shapiro did her research, the writing is sometimes sloppy and often repetitive, and she is trying too hard to excuse Earhart’s husband on the ground that Earhart loved him and so he wasn’t THAT bad. I am not buying it.
Making my way through Baseball: The Movie by Noah Gittell, which is a selective history of baseball movies. Despite some recommendations from people I respect, I am finding this to be fairly superficial in its movie criticism, and trying too hard to connect the movies to the eras they come from. I daresay that the sociopolitical film criticism here, even when I disagree, is a lot deeper and more well thought through than anything in the book so far, even when I agree. About the best thing I can say is that more than ever I want to see Bingo Long.
Does this Baseball: The Movie: The Book contain any recommendations for movies that are specifically suited to viewing while recovering from horrible viruses? Asking for myself, circa 2021.
Kessler’s writing is acidly funny: “lack of game recognizes lack of game.”
Extremely damning piece! And I will put another plug in for the lead feature, just superb reporting at a level of depth that is heartening to see still exists.