The Friday Article Roundup
Not to be confused with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will get the dirt on:
Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Sasha Geffen considers the legacy of Primus’ Pork Soda at Pitchfork:
Primus could easily have been a blip, one of many abortive major label risks in a decade when the industry was swimming in cash. Instead, we havenโt yet left their shadowโฆ.Pork Soda, in particular, foreshadowed the weight of nu-metal acts like Korn, who also deployed sagging bass in service of profoundly unsettling narratives. Beyond their immediate descendants, you might well say that every generation gets their own Primus. We millennials split the difference between occult circus performers Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and the playful, warbling Battles. These days, Gen Z gets the polka-dotted French Canadian time travelers Angine de Poitrine, a band so fully in character it could have sprung fully formed from an Adventure Time cel.
For Reverse Shot, Jourdain Searles talks with Ngozi Onwurah about the re-release of and original reception to her debut Welcome II the Terrordome:
We started to have a few press screenings, the kind of questions that were coming at me afterwards were a lot to do with violence, and violence not being the answer. Was I saying that violence was the only way, the solution to the problem? So there was this feeling that I presented this world where everybody was just really angry, and everybody was taking revenge, and they were excluding the white woman, they were abandoning the white woman, and was that my solution? And so it was this idea that I should come up with a solution, a palatable solution. Instead of just going with my characters: this is what happened to my characters, this is how they felt, and this is how they responded to it, and that’s logical. What you’re saying is there has to be an add-on to that, where I, as a member of that oppressed group, have to give my oppressors the solution to the problems, right? I can’t tell the story without also having the solution. I don’t know the solution. I still don’t know the solution. But that doesn’t mean I have to stay silent, or it doesn’t mean I don’t get to be angry until I come up with a solution.
At Mubi, Thomas Quist examines the conflict between spectacle and mundane in Christopher Nolan’s movies:
Itโs dangerous to critique something that is not there in a filmmakerโs work. Nolan is under no obligation to include depictions of everyday life in his films. But he is fascinated by the way spectacle can annihilate what is ordinary and everyday, and therein lies the paradox: His films are caught between what they want and what they rarely show. And so often, when that everydayness is depicted, it is given only minimal texture and the barest pretense of plausibilityโฆ.The arrival of a spectacle offers a genuine threat to the textured fabric of ordinary life. The two scales deepen in the way they play dialectically off one another, and this is one of the main lessons Nolan has not taken from one of his major influences, Michael Mann. A Mann film, unlike a Nolan film, modulates its scale in accordance with the everyday realities of its characters.
Mankaprr Conteh profiles R&B artist Isaia Huron for Hammer & Hope and comes away with unpleasant answers:
The manosphere promotes narrow-minded approaches to menโs health, social life, and status, all in the name of reasserting dominance. Often, misplaced evolutionary biology and psychology fuel these ideas, sentiments Huron loosely echoed when he told me that โmen are supposed to provide โ thatโs kind of like whatโs naturalโ and that sex is โreally kind of pointless unless thereโs like children being made,โ adding, โWeโre kind of missing the point of the usage of our organs.โ Contrary to a previous interview in which he suggests โFiddy,โ the second track on Concubania, is about โtreating a sex worker with kindness,โ Huron told me that sex work is actually first introduced later in โList Crawlerโ as โa representation of what it looks like for somebody who is morally unstable to hit something close to rock bottom.โ When asked if his religious upbringing influenced his perspective on sex, Huron said, โNot even slightly. Thatโs pure logic.โ
And at his blog, Larry Fitzmaurice mourns BrooklynVegan and other recently shuttered publications, but side-eyes death-of-music writing:
In recent years, I’ve also been faintly bemused at the bemoanings regarding The State of Things becoming its own industry of posting from music writersโa replacement for actual writing, perhaps, or at the very least an acknowledgement that banging the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” drum for the cause of music writing can get more attention than writing about music itself. Feel free to group me in this phenomenon for a second, since I am quite literally writing in this vein as we speakโbut if this gets eyes the way I expect it to, it’s just more proof that beating one’s chest about the future of music writing also functions as a more effective audience honeypot than, again, writing about music itself.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
The Friday Article Roundup
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Live Music – Australian band Media Puzzle, who do the fast, jerky, Devo-derived punk kinda thing that for some reason basically all of the Australian bands who come to play the tiny UK DIY venues do. And it’s basically always good! These were particularly fun though, really tight band including some unexpected brass (non-ska division) and the songs were short but stuffed with good riffs and catchy shout-along choruses. Really enjoyed the more straightforward garage punk kinda sound of the main support, Exotic Pets, too. The local openers were more of a shoegaze affair although the drummer and bassist looked and played like they were in a metal band. Odd combination, didn’t totally work for me but they were very young and had an excellent command of the FX-pedal wall of sound. They just didn’t really need the drummer to have a double-kick pedal and use it liberally.
Also this week’s Twilight Zone, which was really great.
Woooooo live music! As someone who thinks shoegaze generally is high floor/very low ceiling, adding metal sounds good to me. Bring on the double-kick, Lars!
Woooooo live music!!
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Seven, “Secrets of the Soul”
An empty nothing of an episode, though admittedly, it does have a fraction of forward movement on the Byron plot, finally. That aspect has largely refused to move forward; Straczynski seems to be under the impression that Byron spouting half-assed philosophy is enough to carry him. Thereโs simply not enough action or forward momentum to keep this compelling; even something that complicated the situation would be great. This does basically start with him taking punches for fun and end with him frustrated enough to switch to violence, which is at least some kind of change.
On top of this, the lack of forward momentum unfortunately makes the episodic scifi stuff less interesting; Franklin himself has survived the transition to this season unscathed because his motivation is, paradoxically considering his devotion to medicine, also self-serving in the sense that he can do it anywhere and in any system. Unfortunately, we know the race oโ the week wonโt affect the plot and wonโt affect Franklinโs character, so who cares?
Scarlet Street
This is one of Fritz Langโs American films, and itโs pretty good. I liked the premise, in which a lonely, middle-aged amateur painter makes friends with a young slacker, and it spirals out of his control. The middle of the film starts to struggle to find something interesting; I was starting to think it was worth it only for Edward G Robinsonโs agonisingly shy performance, as he struggles to express himself in any real way. Langโs Expressionist style is present, particularly in intense moments, but I like it best in the protagonistโs paintings, which he describes as trying to capture a feeling. The ending ends up being awesome, finding just about the most brutal ending for each of the characters you could imagine, targeting each of their flaws and motivations as awfully as possible.
W*A*L*T*E*R
This is a pilot Gary Burghoff did to try and continue Radar – who rejects his nickname – in civilian life, and it, uh, sucks. There are occasional flashes of it working; any times Walter does something we saw him do in Korea, like seeing his marvellous hearing used to rescue a bird, it really comes alive, and he thinks about Hawkeye a few times that come off sweet, but thereโs a reason all the best stuff is basically taking us back to the good show. You can see actors trying their best to make it work, but even Burghoff doesnโt really seem alive most of the time, and to be frank, the premise makes no sense for the character.
Also: this has the single worst fake laugh track Iโve ever heard in anything.
The Delta Factor
This is the adaptation of that Spillane book of the same name I read a few weeks ago. It was produced by Spillane, and itโs interesting seeing an independent American film of this specific time period; itโs unsurprising that they canโt afford squibs but weird that they canโt afford lights, but this also leads to interesting aesthetics. Things look dirtier and grimier, of course, but sometimes you also have things like heads floating in dark space. Merely being a film elevates this story a bit; actors imbue even bit parts with a bit more life, so these people feel like they exist more than as objects for the narrator, and Christopher George is far more emotionally expressive than he needs to be for his dirtbag character.
Hell yeah Scarlet Street, that ending really packs a punch. Dan Duryea’s performance in that one is probably up there with my favourite in any noir. Robinson playing against type is really interesting too. And it’s packed with lovely archaic slang!
I think I’ve spent years subconsciously getting Scarlet Street confused with The Woman in the Window, which I wasn’t that fond of. Past time to correct this error.
Apparently Robinson thought this was far too similar to The Woman In The Window, so you’ve got a good reason, I’d say.
Woman in the Window really does feel like a rough draft for Scarlet Street. Not bad, but this one is a huge step up
Hell yeah stuff that sucks.
Full Sentinel mode on our stupid telepaths here. Fuck off with your mind orgy nonsense!
But Scarlet Street owwwwwwwwwns, like you say the ending twists the knife on everyone in the worst way. Actual sympathy for god of scumbags Dan Duryea here!
Captain Blood
Swashbuckler Summer #14. Rewatch, and my first Flynn of Swashbuckler Summer, since I went on an Errol Flynn kick a few months back and watched a bunch then. This is terrific: Flynn is incredibly vibrant in his first big role (and almost his first role, period), selling Blood’s charisma, humor, and talent, and he and Olivia de Havilland instantly have firecracker chemistry (even though de Havilland sadly gets less to do here than she would in, say, The Adventures of Robin Hood). The battle scenes are varied, exciting, and well-paced. I think I had this at four-and-a-half stars on Letterboxd because I was trying to differentiate my Flynns more and already had Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk at five, but fuck it, those battle scenes earn it a bump up. Join the top pantheon, Captain Blood.
My friend Scott pointed out that the supporting cast gets its interests better represented here than they do in most modern movies, especially since Blood and his crew deliberately form a less-structured, less-hierarchical alternative to the hell they’ve been in; it’s notable that everyone here is calling him “Peter,” not “Captain.” When his interests contradict theirs and he’s briefly a dick about it, they intervene and he recognizes their right to do so and cedes power. Them changing their minds about it almost immediately because, uh, he’s sad and hot is technically played for laughs, but even as a joke, it’s grounded in the reciprocal regard and history we’ve already seen everyone here share.
Honeymoon in Vegas – Nic Cage, who promised his mother on her deathbed he would never marry, finally agrees to elope to Vegas with long term love Sarah Jessica Parker. But in Vegas, professional card sharp James Caan spots her, and wants to be with her since she is a dead ringer for his death wife. One thing leads to another, and Nic has to agree to let Sarah Jessica spend the weekend with Caan to pay a poker debt. Hilarity ensues. Or tries to. This is the second Andrew Bergman scripted film I have seen this year that I used to like (the other being The In-Laws, and now find a lot less watchable. (At least The In-Laws has Falk and Arkin.) Cage is over the top but not appealing. Caan has little comedic spark, and is more interesting playing it sincere and sad and lonely. Only Parker has any energy as a woman who is not happy to be treated like a thing. This also has a strange racist portrayal of a Hawaiian native obsessed with Broadway (despite the title, half the film takes place in Kauai), and a flock of Elvis impersonators that, along with a soundtrack full of Elvis songs and covers, only remind me how little I care for Elvis. On the plus side, still more fun than the other Cage film with Vegas in the title. (He’s done like seven films shot in and around Vegas.)
Elementary, “Murder Ex Machina” – A Russian oligarch is assassinated, and then his assassins find their car hacked so they drive off a bridge to their deaths. After a few red herrings, we learn the oligarch is in NYC to secretly negotiate an end to the 2014 Russia-Ukraine War, and that he was killed by someone who makes self driving cars and rocket engines to prolong the war and prevent Russia from being able to sell its own engines to the West again. At one level, this has not aged well since a State Department official seems both unsympathetic and unimpressed with Ukraine’s efforts, but it does posit someone very like Elon Musk could commit murder, so that has aged too well. Meanwhile, Joan figures out that Morland was possibly targeted for assassination some years ago, and is missing part of his stomach. Guests include Betty Gilpin between Nurse Jackie and GLOW as a neuroatypical woman who for some reason can’t tell if Sherlock is or is not atypical (of course he is), John Ventimiglia as a somewhat crooked union boss, and Tom Wopat as an arms dealer who actually wants the war to end so his payment in rubles from the Russians for his wares is worth something.
Theres a musical of Honeymoon In Vegas and its actually pretty good though it bombed on arrival.
Andor, end of season 1 — fun carnage at the end of the season! A stormtrooper getting booted out a high window made me cackle. The show has a not entirely successful double focus of the title guy, who has protagonist invincibility and is generally not as interesting as other people, and the contrast in systems of empire/rebel, which is much more fun to examine. Both seek control despite the impossibility of fully having it, the rebel side ultimately seems to embrace the idea that people will be stupid and not helpful so the best thing to do is try to incorporate that into your plans as it happens.
Andor, start of season 2 — the stupid rebels are hilariously stupid, they cannot be incorporated, I love them. Such a hoot, the revolution will always have dipshits. The entire wedding plotline could’ve been an e-mail.
What Did We Read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Three, Robert Service
This covers the two year period in which first Leninโs father dies, then when his older brother Alexander is executed for an attempt on the Emperor’s life. The former, as much as it causes grief in little Lenin, also frees him of fear of an adult figure; Service dismisses Soviet propaganda that it caused him to step away from agrarian socialism and instead believes it caused him to deepen his proto-revolutionary views as he becomes dedicated to figuring out why his brother would have done what he did – not only the attempt itself, but claiming responsibility up and above what he actually did.
Service observes how Russian society was in the middle of a chaotic period, with very sudden capitalism and industrialisation on the horizon, and dozens of views of how to deal with it all, as well as how to deal with the emperor. The most fascinating note is that the socialists tend to find workers are more sympathetic to their cause than peasants; also something I noticed was true in that book on the Zapatistas.
Somewhere past the midway point of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I figured it was important to get a Woolf read as she’s the most represented author on the Guardian list I’m working through, happily I’m finding this to be a fascinating read and will be looking forward to the others! More when I’m done.
I remember this being interesting paired reading with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was very openly influenced by it and has Woolf working on Mrs. Dalloway as part of the book, but I’m sure you have enough Guardian list reading to get on with without adding other things! (And I cannot speak to how well The Hours works now, since I haven’t read it since college.)
Yeah unfortunately! I have a decent sized backlog outside of The List too, after Dalloway I’ll have read ten books from the list so I think I’ll treat myself to something from outside that very specific canon before launching back in. I’m very momentum-dependent on these things!
Finished Shawn Levy’s bio of Paul Newman. He doesn’t really engage as much with late career stuff – he talks about Cars but does not actually say what he thinks of it at all, quite unusual for this writer – and he very much takes Newman’s careers as race care driver, businessman, and philanthropist at face value. (Surely there is more room to question someone past 60 racing cars.) Overall, a solid work and odds are I will read other things by Levy at some point.
Started the first Witcher book on my wife’s recommendation. And so far, it’s a lot of fun, and reads very well for a book translated from Polish. There is a “fractured fairy tales” aspect but it’s really not played for laughs, and the characters so far are quite likeable and human.
And started a book about the New York Giants baseball team at the start of the 20th century, written by Frank Deford. I loved Deford as a sportswriter as a kid and teen, and was one of the nine people who regularly paid for The National Sports Daily (which was ahead of its time since now we pay for The Athletic and ESPN instead). But this book every so often trips over Deford trying to add little pithy bits of narration and the sorts of stuff that would be at home in a short NPR essay but not a history work. Not that this is a bad book. It’s just kind of trying too hard to be more than just a book about baseball.
I’ve read a couple of Levy’s other books, Rat Pack Confidential and The Last Playboy. The former is easy if not exactly uplifting, and the latter is a bio of gigolo and diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa. Both very readable and frequently overlap since all involved ran in the same circles. Rat Pack was the basis of an HBO movie in the late 90s which I don’t remember being great but did introduce me to Don Cheadle, who tears it up as Sammy Davis. And where else are you going to go for ลฝeljko Ivanek as Bobby Kennedy? The Rubirosa biography gives you all the 60s scandal sheet gossip you could want, along with some history of the Dominican Republic and other playboys of the era (and a bit of racing, if you need more of that).
Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca, by Ferdinand Mount
Fascinating memoir-adjacent book where Mount starts with one bizarre lie of his aunt’s–that the child briefly framed as his cousin’s new adopted baby sister, who then suddenly disappeared from their lives, was not really adopted at all, they were just helping her overwhelmed parents for a while (no, she was really adopted and then unadopted)–and follows it out into a whole web of family complications and misrepresentations, all inflected by class and gender. I’m assuming no one else is going to read this, so I’ll just say that one of my favorite parts is when Mount–having already been dealing with his aunt claiming her son was her younger brother–finds out that his aunt’s friend who was like a sister to her and an honorary aunt to him … was in fact actually her sister and his literal aunt, but that this had to be concealed because said sister hadn’t hidden her working-class origins while Munca had spent years pretending to be from a minor branch of a prestigious family. And also many years younger. And also someone with a completely different name, because she was hiding from legal charges of bigamy.
There’s obviously a lot going on here, so the surprises are fun, but Mount also just writes smooth prose and does some interesting character analysis of everyone involved; it’s also a good book if you’re interested in mid-century British life, including manufacturing towns and racecar driving, and especially if you’re interested in archival research and trying to coax life histories out of spotty records in a time where consistency was a virtue but not a requirement. It’s fascinating to see how many people were able to reinvent themselves even in an ostensibly rigid social order.
13 at Dinner, by Agatha Christie – The original title is a huge spoiler, it doesnโt matter. My fourth or fifth Christie and maybe just average. I donโt know how it stacks up among other Christiephiles. Simple style to read but also complex plotting involving multiple characters. She gives us a book full of twists and turns and red herrings that makes you suspect everyone. This probably sounds like everyone of her books. Lord Edgware is an Asshole Victim so everyone has a reason to kill him – a trope in every other Murder, She Wrote.
I had an awkward experience with this one recently where I’d read it years ago, remembered liking a key element of how it played out, and recommended it to a friend–without realizing that there were two versions published, one with a surprising amount of antisemitism even for Christie, and one without. I’d read the later “without” version. My friend, who is Jewish, picked up the “with” version without realizing it and went in without a heads up to it all. That’s kind of marred the book for me in retrospect, though I do still think the biggest element of the reveal is a good one and that it has a good ending.
Year of the Month update!
This August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
Then, this September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 4th: Gillian Nelson: Moose Hunters
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
Can I get Stage Door for September 22?