The Friday Article Roundup
Who wouldn't cuss in anticipation of the week's best pop culture writing?
The article reservoir overflows with:
Thanks to no damn body for contributing this week! 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!
Movies Silently reports on yet another cash-in comic adaptation, the trend-chasing and postcard-based 1905 film The Whole Dam Family And The Dam Dog:
Edwin S. Porter’s film adaptation doesn’t stray far from its source material, displaying the members of the Dam family one by one like a sweary Brady Bunch, each with a play on their shared surname and displaying obnoxious behaviors like incessant talking, gum-chewing and smoking. The actors’ faces are exaggerated with makeup, putty and possibly wires to provide snub noses. (A loop of wire was attached to the tip of the nose and fastened behind the head, pulling the nose up. It was difficult to detect head-on.)
At his substack, a depressed John Paul Brammer considers whether the new Smurfs movie will speak to his condition:
As far as plots go, though, this one was workable. Compelling, even. Relatable? Yes! Imagine my excitement when the movie introduced a magic talking book as a character. Would it give No Name Smurf some fragment of language that would help him out of his rut? Some paragraph of arcane wisdom that No Name will have to translate and, between its lines, find himself? Was Smurfs (2025) speaking directly to me, to a depressed individual (also blue, in his way) whose lack of ability to communicate his plight was manifesting in feelings of isolation from the slick, glossy, colorful world around him?
Saloni Gajjar praises the many faces of Alan Tudyk in Resident Alien at The AV Club:
The duality of trying to be a person without truly understanding what it entails allows Tudyk to go all in on physical comedy. His awkward, restrained, yet never cartoonish performance will leave you wheezing, whether he’s hogging down pizza slices, fighting with a kid who can see his real self, giving CPR to an octopus, making out with an avian alien (played by Edi Patterson), or just attempting to smile. No, really, the way he grins in Resident Alien is straight out of a horror movie, but kudos to Tudyk for grounding a kooky fish-out-of-water story with humor and surprising nuance.
Anthony Cougar Miccio makes the case for continuing to reluctantly use Spotify:
So why haven’t I jumped ship? Utility. A lack of confidence. My kid loves to listen to music through our Roku, and Qobuz isn’t on Roku. Neither is Tidal. I’ve also seen some grumbles about the relative lack of playlist searchability and accessing the apps through Apple CarPlay. Still, the music industry (even just the obscure, arty side!) could give one of these apps a vote of confidence, and devalue Spotify by abandoning it. That would be great. Or Tidal or Quboz could make clear they’re really hoping to match Spotify’s UI and market share. That would also be great. But, until either happens, or Ek reveals plans more diabolical than Google’s, I’m just not convinced I wouldn’t be giving up convenience for a dubious, fragile sense of pride. Buying a Tesla once seemed like the right thing for Mother Earth, too, y’know.
And for the Cambridge Day (yes, the FAR is hyperlocal!), Michael Gutierrez plugs hands-off third spaces as a way for young people to create their own culture:
The major fallacy that sleeps in the hearts of most adults who fancy themselves proponents of youth culture is that culture is a gift that can be given to youth the way you leave a present underneath a Christmas tree. Hence the preponderance of local arts and cultural opportunities for children that are mediated, to greater and lesser degrees, by the magnanimity of adults, who, unsurprisingly, have very adultlike ideas about the who, what, where, when and why of art. The truth is that culture can’t be gifted – you’ve got to reach out and make it your own.
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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.
The Friday Article Roundup
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
KOTH when a broke Cotton has to move to Arlen. Nothing new to say but I really like how Cotton, awful as he is, has real dignity that can be denigrated and deserves more, and I also think the way his shins move is a great bit of animation. “I killed fitty men!”
THEY TOOK MY SHINS IN THE WAR!
Young Guns
Watched this with a friend. I enjoyed the movie–cheesy fun with a good cast, even if it dipped into way too much slow-mo at the end (usually when I say that, I mean “any at all,” but truly, this is a mind-blowing amount of slow-mo)–but the best part of the experience was my friend reminiscing about how often he and his buddies used to quote this at each other. As he said, “It was Kansas and there was no internet: we had to entertain ourselves.” This all also reminded me that I need to watch Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett movie.
Peckinpah’s film feels like “Old Guns”, actually
Babylon 5 — see, when you bring in all-timers like Brad Dourif and Bruce McGill, it just makes duds like fucking Marcus more insulting. But he’s gone for a few episodes, hooray! And boy is shit hitting the fan, new alliances formed and older alliances called into play. The show is working a weird line of our heroes in peril and yet generally managing to escape/reverse bad situations, some of this is down to “being a TV show” but it feels unsustainable. But for now we get some DELEN OWNAGE, hot damn.
The Trip To Spain — oh man, one of the restaurants here looks absolutely amazing, it’s interesting to consider editing here and what is left in and cut and what it means when our boys are losing their minds over every dish at one place and when they don’t really have much to say about food at another. Lots of Cervantes references and an odd melancholy into surreal ending here, perhaps it is a reference too? But even as our dudes continue to play the hits (although they delay Caine until the finale) they find new bits. Whenever our guys are hanging with Coogan’s long-suffering agent and the photographer, another woman, the dynamic always brings out their competitive peacocking and there’s a great bit here where Brydon takes the stage and Shakespeares all over the place; Coogan attempts to match him but then shifts into the role of a casting director casually dismissing Brydon’s “audition.” This is very funny and Brydon knows he can’t counter it directly so he leans into it, doing his own bit as a needy actor, and attempts to take control that way — this is pitch-perfect guy behavior, one-upmanship that is still present despite the comedy. And Brydon pulls off one of the finest rake gags I’ve seen later, when Coogan starts talking about the Moors with the ladies at the dinner table — Brydon uses this as an excuse to riff as Roger Moore, blithely going on about his family in medieval Spain, it is a good joke and then unbelievably stupid and then side-splitting, Brydon never breaks his genial self-centered recollections (except to immediately call Coogan out when Coogan, getting annoyed, starts referring to the “Muslims” as a way to not give Brydon material) and even Coogan admits defeat in the end.
Slow Horses, “Failure is Contagious” – We have Apple Plus for two months thanks to Target. My wife is going to watch Murderbot – she’s read all the books – and I figure I should try something this time. (The last time we had Apple Plus for free, I just watched Snoopy in Space.) And…I almost bounced after half an hour, but soon realized that at least this episode is pretty okay but dear lord Gary Oldman’s character is just painful to endure. Can we swap him for more of Jonathan Pryce? The problem I see immediately is that it’s clear the hero will save the day, and but still be consigned to Slough House for several more seasons, which makes no sense. Well, best to take it one season at a time, and at least the seasons are short.
Murders in the Rue Morgue – A 1986 made for TV movie that adds a lot of backstory to Dupin’s life and several characters since the story otherwise is too short. It was filmed in Paris and has great costumes, but the only thing that holds it together is George C. Scott in the lead role. A young Val Kilmer is eh as his assistant, Rebecca DeMornay is not very good as his daughter, and Neil Dickson and Ian McShane are okay. But it falls down twice at that ending. Both in the ridiculous ape costume and in the actual story. “It was really an ape” just feels like something to make fun of on Futurama.
Frasier, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz” – Frasier is set up with Amy Brenneman by her mom, but mother and daughter think Frasier is Jewish and he has to hide the truth from the mother. I am of two minds about this one. It’s very funny, especially Niles trying so hard to act “Jewish.” But it also leans hard into Jewish Mother tropes and other stereotypes. It’s not even a little mean about the stereotypes, but it just feels off. And how could anyone assume the two whitest man in Seattle are Jewish? Broadway legend Carole Shelley plays the mother.
I’ve only watched a few episodes of Slow Horses but I’ve read all the books — if you do not want more slovenly Oldman, you should probably bail. But! The books generally do a good job of making the “heroes” fuckups, they can take heroic actions but also extremely stupid ones and there are larger forces that believably keep them down. One of the tensions in the books that is fairly quickly discounted is how people think they can get out of Slough House, that is not going to happen because of those larger forces. Redemption, if it exists, is entirely outside of the power structure. Don’t know how this plays out across the TV show but it’s handled well in the novels.
I will report back after the first season. But we are immediately told by Pryce – the hero’s grandfather and clearly a LeCarre character in someone else’s story – that Slough House is usually just for six months. (What I am trying to figure out is why if these people are such screwups they aren’t just fired.)
Lol what? Don’t remember that in the books, or if it is in there it is clearly Pryce’s character (who does exist and is absolutely a LeCarre character) giving clearly phony encouragement.
The “why aren’t they just fired?” question is answered by a combination of investment — MI6 has spent a lot of time/money to train these people, they want as much of that back as they can — and HR conniving. If you do want someone gone, better to have them quit than to fire them and potentially face pushback. I think they work in conjunction with each other, instead of having an angry fired spy you have a spiritually crushed one that you still got some bullshit work out of for a bit. It’s enough to set up the conceit for me.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Salvage” – more like “Savage”, am I right? That twist, brutal. Already joined in on this week’s article but I dug this one seemingly more than most.
Poker Face, “Time of the Monkey” – another fun one although I feel like I could feel a few bits where the writing had to stretch a little further than maybe it should have to justify things. It sets up the culprits as more likeable than the victim and then has to drop in something hilariously over-the-top in their past to make them the “bad guys”. Messy but nothing that got in the way of the solid entertainment.
Every instance of “I just want you to be happy” in “Salvage” is so great on the rewatch.
I know it sounds weird to complain that Poker Face is too anti-murder, but there really are a couple episodes where it’s like the show realizes late in the game that it’s made a killer too sympathetic and so it frantically pivots to either establish some awfulness on their part or, more annoyingly, have Charlie lecture them about it. Sometimes it still pull off a more poignant ending for its culprit, where “caught” doesn’t necessarily mean “defeated and dejected,” but there’s a bit of S2 grandstanding about it that really got on my nerves. That said, “Time of the Monkey” is, as you said, a fun one. It’d be worth the price of admission just for that “You refer to electroplay” line.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a weird balance because Charlie has such an anarchic, anti-authority personality but the premise of the show inevitably forces her to be aligned with the authorities a considerable amount of the time. Every episode prior to this has seen her working to fix things on behalf of somebody that she has met and connected with and while it’s nice to see the show trying something different, it really feels like they’re having to jump through hoops to get there.
“Pervert Pete” was very well used in this episode! I won’t rush into season 2, not least because it doesn’t actually seem to be available in the UK yet…
“Charlie has such an anarchic, anti-authority personality but the premise of the show inevitably forces her to be aligned with the authorities a considerable amount of the time” — this is a huge structural issue for the show, at least for me. The model is Columbo but Columbo is a cop! It’s his job to do this shit, and more importantly he has the authority to do something about it. Charlie can do Columbo-style investigating but ultimately has no power to do anything about it aside from vigilantism, so the resolution has to come from outside. Columbo’s fantasy is that there is a good cop (Columbo), this is believable because we spend time with Columbo; Poker Face’s fantasy is that Charlie can call good cops, and I think this is harder to believe because the rest of the show’s attitude and structure pushes against this (and Charlie doesn’t have the consistent Sherlock/Poirot relationship of being on the outside of the cops but still regularly dealing with them).
The “ability so solve crimes but no power to make arrests” thing is kind of interesting in theory but it definitely feels like something they’re already struggling to actually deal with, five episodes in. I’m finding the humour and Lyonne’s generally appealing presence enough that I don’t really mind at present but I can see why people have started bouncing off the show now that they’ve gone into a second season seemingly without finding a fix.
Columbo operates on the logic that criminals lack empathy, which helps to develop a coherent depiction of justice. But Charlie’s being able to tell when someone is lying is basically a superpower, which puts her, even with her “who, me”? attitude, above the law. It then feels sorta like justice, just, like happens, man.
The other part of Columbo being a cop is that it is his job to go to a crime and figure out what happened because crime is bad. “Crime is bad” is pretty basic morality but it is also universal (theoretically and considering the wealth of many Columbo culprits, put into practice on the show). Charlie’s lying thing means that Charlie gets involved with crimes because the criminal has lied to her, I think Charlie also believes that crime is bad but she always gets involved because of what she takes as a personal affront, and that also contributes to the “above the law” feeling.
Yeah Columbo does communicate that “crime is bad,” but the idea of morality is still rather complex. Note how Columbo, in “Greenhouse Jungle,” doesn’t judge a rich woman for having an affair. For him, that’s cool. What’s not cool is when rich people act like they’re better than him; at the same time, he acts deferential to these people, both out of politeness and to trip them up. I think the more universal (and now more radical) idea is that everyone deserves respect.
Which is why Columbo quickly dismisses any possible suspects (whom he knows didn’t commit the crime), because he doesn’t want these people to go through the hell of “being seen as guilty, but really innocent.”
Early on in the series, Columbo said that any criminal has likely one shot to commit the perfect crime, whereas he gets much more practice in solving them. For me, that’s a pretty convincing riff on the old “crime doesn’t pay” adage.
” there really are a couple episodes where it’s like the show realizes late in the game that it’s made a killer too sympathetic and so it frantically pivots to either establish some awfulness on their part or, more annoyingly, have Charlie lecture them about it” — bingo. Plus, the two people here did nothing wrong! I feel like the pivot to badness here is hilariously over-the-top but also finds the one segment of this larger class of victims where yeah, it’s good to nuke them. But I also really liked the very ending of this, where the crooks are unrepentant and murderous to the end and tough shit for you, Charlie, a nice spiky send-off.
Yeah I liked how the spikiness of the crooks remains consistent but the other events shift our opinion of them. Just feels like they could have done it more subtly without the sledgehammer reveal of their original terrorist plan from back in the day – the additional killing to cover up the first one was probably enough.
One of the strengths of Poker Face’s trench-coated grandfather is that sometimes the murderers Columbo dealt with were, if still murderers, somewhat sympathetic human beings. There was no need to pivot at the last second because the killer’s humanity, however compromised, was still there. And then Columbo could save the lectures for the times the murderer was clear a PoS. But that was then and this is now, and Columbo was, however reluctantly, the Man.
This — “sometimes the murderers Columbo dealt with were, if still murderers, somewhat sympathetic human beings. There was no need to pivot at the last second because the killer’s humanity, however compromised, was still there” — is another thing that Poker Face’s structure actively counters. Like Columbo, Poker Face’s episodes begin with the murder and the murderer’s point of view, where we can see their rationale and emotional stakes. But Poker Face selectively edits this to overplay the murderer’s sympathy (and to hide Charlie’s ongoing involvement/proximity most of the time), and then reverses those sympathies as previously concealed information comes to light. As a gimmick it is interesting once or twice, but it turns into getting off on withholding very quickly for me. And more importantly, it does not trust the viewer to do what you describe above — view humanity and possibly sympathize. Poker Face’s complex structure winds up denying the complex and sophisticated viewer reaction that Columbo can traffic in (although some people are indeed just dicks).
With the caveat of “probably won’t have Peacock until the NBA Playoffs, assuming I can’t just watch on Amazon,” I keep being told by friends that I should really give Poker Face a try. And then read commentary that convinces me I will be really annoyed by it. But I figure the next time I do have Peacock, I should at least give it a try. Worst that happens is I bounce.
I really liked the first couple of episodes (watched it on a plane) so I think you’ll at least enjoy it for a while.
Reading all the criticisms of Poker Face in this thread has me like, “Why aren’t you people watching Elsbeth instead?” It’s the same format, but unpretentious and not aiming to be prestige, the way Columbo would have wanted it!
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Twenty-One, “Comes the Inquisitor”
Needed its own essay. Short explanation: bullshit premise, one extremely Great scene. More to come.
The Twilight Zone (Jordan Peele version)
Season one ends with an incredibly stupid finale that downright shits all over The Twilight Zone (Jordan Peele version) and Rod Serling. The first two episodes of season two are fine.
*looks up Babylon 5 episode* oh yeah, that one — your read sounds right to me! Definitely hated the premise and the twist, which I called immediately — it is a bizarrely prevalent one in sci-fi, I feel.
The twist I’m fairly indifferent to – it makes sense in the context of this show, and I’m okay with the episode using it as spice to a larger stew.
Fake Rod Serling is such an awful, obnoxious touch. (The end of S2 also tries another direct pull from the original, as opposed to a simple background reference, and it’s something that has the potential to be interesting and resonant and instead gets used for the dumbest possible joke.)
Rome
So much fucking fun. Fellini takes his the flirtation with non-linear storytelling he started circa 8 1/2 as far as it can go into full stream-of-consciousness-meets-anthology-movie. I’d say this means he’s gotten as far as possible from his Neorealist roots, but multiple segments here are some combination of real and fake documentary footage, so I guess the apple doesn’t fall that far. The best summary is it’s just Fellini filming all the stuff he thinks is coolest, but fortunately, he’s a very good judge.
What did we read?
The Assassination of Julius Caesar – Popular history by Michael Parenti. Parenti has biases like any aristocratic historian, just different ones* but is also checking the likes of Gibbons and Plutarch and their sometimes blatant disinterest in material considerations like land and wealth distribution. One “time is a flat circle” moment here is that Gracchus is proposing pretty basic reforms, same with Caesar, and they get mercked. I’m sure he’d have a lively debate with Mary Beard, but they’d both agree that Cicero was a bougie fuck and a coward.
* He is right that Roman slavery was awful – a silver mine slave was working a living death sentence – what he doesn’t point out is that a lot of them were conquered subjects who, in terms of ancient morality, would’ve figured “Well, those are the breaks” because they’d have done the same thing.
Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes – Yeesh the misogynoir and lesbophobia gets weird especially near the end. Yet I would call this Not Optional, a great plot of American hustles, hypocrisy, racism and ownage with a great firefight in prose format at the climax.
Three by Ann Quin – Strikingly modern 1960’s experimental novel about an older bourgeois couple searching the detritus of the young girl who lived with them then disappeared. Veers into prose poetry without feeling tedious.
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI, by Kevin Roose
Damn, this field moves so fast and in so many wrong directions that even though this was published in 2021, generative AI–my current most-loathed form of the shitshow–is barely featured. Roose is focused more on algorithms and the kinds of bots that automate behind-the-scenes processes, and I realized how a fair amount of this has become invisible to me, so it was good to have it highlighted. A lot of the book is understandably bleak–one of its best points is that most AI is what Roose calls “so-so automation,” just good enough to eliminate jobs but not promising enough to create any more or open up new avenues for human creativity, so this isn’t a case of “technology destroys old jobs but creates a lot of new ones, too”–but it also focuses on how people whose livelihoods are threatened by AI can resist that in various ways.
He mostly sticks with a personal approach because while he supports UBI and wide-scale social changes, he doesn’t see those developments happening in America anytime soon, which is, again, bleak but also understandable. (And only more so now than when he wrote the book in the first place.) Roose’s thesis is that workplaces have spent decades implicitly or even explicitly encouraging people to be more machine-like, but what really gives people value when the shit hits the fan is their ability to be human: he comes down to the rule of “be surprising, social, and scarce.” (It’s alliterative to a fault, because he’s using “be scarce” not as “hardly ever be around,” but as “cultivate knowledge and skills that few people have,” which isn’t immediately intuitive.) There are other ideas as well, like “leave handprints” to show the human craftmanship and care that’s gone into something.
It was interesting to me to think about how we practice all this here, in an age where a lot of entertainment writing is increasingly AI-generated. (It’s something Roose thinks about re: his own journalism.) We have features like All-Time Top Five, which are designed to be surprising; we have conversation in comments sections to encourage socializing and make this a place where people want to hang out; we have articles that explore off-the-beaten-path media in off-beat ways, with connections other people wouldn’t necessarily think to make, because we’re all openly informed by our own particular likes and sets of references. So I think we’re doing all right on that front.
Anyway, this was a brisk, interesting read, sometimes dispiriting and sometimes encouraging. It’s got some clumsy bits, and the self-help angle means that it’s not as angry as I am, but the anecdotes are good and the advice feels solid.
Unfortunately, it appears that Roose has become a credulous dolt in this regard? https://www.wheresyoured.at/optimistic-cowardice/ . He and others keep pushing this as inevitable and that is so clearly not true. Or at least their fraud cases aren’t true. The internal combustion engine was invented in the 19th century and “individual motorized transport” was inevitable at that point, but “car culture” was not inevitable — people invested in it created it and pressured others to accept it. Anyway, I think what we do here is absolutely a part of resisting this kind of thinking.
A strain of credulity–or at least a willingness to go along–was not invisible in his book, alas, although I got enough value from it to still enjoy it. But there’s a bit early on where he’s talking about being at an event where CEOs are chowing down on foie gras and talking about how they can use AI to eliminate “comfortable jobs,” and Roose says he thought about saying, “Like jobs where you eat foie gras at a work meeting?”, but didn’t because he was trying to be polite. But while I get not wanting to ruin relationships with sources, surely part of journalism is sometimes asking hard questions that might annoy your interview subjects!
My wife is reading The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.
I’m a little more old-school: I think the AI hype was predicted by Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.
I really wish tech was being driven by Lanier rather than the doofuses that have the loudest voices at the moment.
I have the AI Con on my want-to-read list after listening to a few podcast episodes featuring the authors.
Also have been meaning to pull out my copy of Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget for a reread.
Jews in the Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, the Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II by Judith Rakowsky – does what it says in the title entirely, and does it reasonably well. The author – a Boston-based journalist – follows the titular survivor (an older cousin) to Poland in search of another relative who they learned also survived but never restored contact with the family. They never find the woman (who might have simply chosen to bury the past and her Jewish identity). but do undercover a series of massacres of Jews not by Nazis but by Polish partisans. The “secret history” is not that secret on the macro level, since it’s now quite clear far more Poles sought to harm Jews than to protect then during the war, but at the family level author and cousin unearth the mass grave of some parts of the family – the “Jews in the garden” – and also unearth both revisionist history to hide the past and those would would confront the truth. Rakowsky is not a great writer – news reporters often have trouble with longer form – and loses steam as she goes along. But any work that interrogates the darkness of the past is welcome. And her cousin the survivor is a bit of an inspiration, having lived a full life, become a speaker about the Holocaust, and living to the age of 99.
The 600lb Gorilla, Robert Campbell
Obviously, I picked this up because of the title and back cover, and it turned out to be weird, but not in the way I expected – it’s a quirky police procedural, with a narrating cop that speaks in a slightly awkward and naive way without being actually dumb. The plot concerns two gay men who were apparently killed by a gorilla being stored by a zoo, with our narrator delving into the Chicago queer scene; his main point of contact is a lipstick lesbian (literally described as such; this book is from 1987) running for office.
The main tone over the whole thing is an easy-going detached amusement; despite the heavy plot concept, characters are mostly quirky in a Coen Bros kind of way, though the crime is seen as a crime and further crimes – including the murder of a likeable trans woman – are treated with deadly seriousness. This ends up papering over both the copaganda aspect (with the narrator being fairly open-minded and kind) and the awkward elements, like not fully respecting the identity of said trans woman. I ended up enjoying this book a lot.
Catch Me If You Can, Frank W Abagnale with Stan Redding
I knew going into this that at least some of it was exaggerated, so I was deeply amused when I looked it up and discovered literally the entire thing was bullshit. So far as I can tell, Abagnale’s parents divorced and he did grow up in Chicago, but otherwise, everything else he says is a complete fiction. One particularly galling part is how he repeatedly says he never targeted individuals, only large faceless corporations, and he, uh, targeted quite a few in reality.
The idea he largely sells is of taking advantage of people accepting the image they see. Dressing like a pilot, speaking with confidence; one story is of acting like an FBI agent when exposed to someone outraged by this guy who ripped off her bank, for the obvious irony. It’s an attractive idea that certainly flatters the reader for seeing through the scheme; a friend of mine has told a story about being in the army and pulling off that exact thing in a wargame.
(Also, he claims to get laid a lot)
A large part of his narrative also involves having a spectacular memory – you may recall that line in the movie, where Frank reveals he passed the bar to become a lawyer by, uh, studying, and there’s a lot of that in this book, where he clearly could have been quite successful had he gone straight and his turn to a life of crime was more of an easy choice that snowballed out of his control until passing bad cheques was the only path he had. The reality is that Abagnale probably could have had a great career as a fiction author, which is equally as tragic.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron. Short and breezy, and knowing it’s about her breakup with Carl Bernstein is fascinating.
Currently about halfway through I Want My MTV, which is full of juicy information but also beautifully structured as a book. Worth reading for the chapter on “Rock Me Tonight” alone.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Well, while we wait for whatever layoffs are coming, three is going to be one salary off the books: my direct report is leaving after 14 years. She told me Monday and her last day is today, so she is kind of racing out the door. I am not that surprised, not just because this is not a good time to work in public media but also since she took a year long maternity leave in 2023-24. (I suspect she made up her mind before she came back, and that there was something in her leave paperwork that required her to come back for a given amount of time.) I don’t think that this will affect my work situation too much as the woman who filled in for her last year stayed on and will at least for now take over her portfolio. And I work well with her. But I haven’t seen much in terms of a transition plan this week, so I am a bit nonplussed. Beyond that, this is the first time I need to deal with losing a direct report. My old job and a boss who is there forever was weird. (She’s still there. 45 years and counting.)
Whatever repercussions of this mild reorg will wait, however, till after Worldcon. We are flying out, knock on wood, Tuesday afternoon and will be there till late Sunday (there are surprisingly few flights from NYC to Seattle, so it’s the redeye home). Sunday is packing day. The con starts Wednesday, and I am just a bit nervous about going to such a large event, about being overwhelmed by too much to do, and about being with so many people for the first time since the pandemic arrived. (Apparently the convention center there is state of the art in terms of air filtration, but we will still mask as much as possible.) A programming note that I will probably not post anything here from Wednesday to Sunday, hopefully resuming service Monday after I get some sleep.
And when we are back, my wife needs a biopsy. It’s likely not to be serious, but we won’t know for a while. We plan not to think much about it at the con.
Looking forward to hearing all about Worldcon once you’re back. (I should at least go to next year’s Bouchercon and do a con report….)
Best wishes for your wife, and I hope you both get to spend your vacation not thinking about it.
Good luck with work but have fun at the con! Although apparently we need to find a pinch hitter for Frasierposting now.
I will be in the land of Frasier, but the view of the Space Needle aside, there’s not much from the show that exists in reality. Why isn’t there a Cafe Nervosa to go with the Cheers bar in Boston?
Still just feeling kinda exhausted most of the time and I’m not sure if it’s a health thing or a psychological thing or a work thing or… some other thing. This coming weekend is a quieter one so I’m hoping I can get back into a more sensible routine and hopefully feel a little less burned out. Feeling more and more keen to start looking for a new job, since I’ve made so many steps to improve my life recently – loving the new home, having a great time in the new relationship, old job continues to absolutely suck – but I feel like I need to be a little more energised first to really approach that task in the right mindset.
As my sporadic posting this week probably indicates, things are getting quite real in the school. First day with students (for me) is next Tuesday and I’m currently finishing the lesson plan for… that Tuesday. I had no idea how much my teachers were winging it. Or, possibly, I’m very slow at this. (Once we get into curriculum the teachers are working together from our very dense textbook, so that will actually get easier planning-wise.)
Lots of staff meetings and it’s very clear that 1) we have a challenging district and 2) we have a supportive admin. If I had to choose, I think I’d take the better admin over the “easier” district so hooray for that.
There’s a lot of winging it, especially in the early years.
Hey, Tony Cougar Miccio thanks for comparing the notion that musicians shouldn’t get ripped off to your little nugget of received wisdom: “Buying a Tesla once seemed like the right thing for Mother Earth, too, y’know.”
The FAR tries to bring in all points of view! The FAR may also select excerpts for what they unintentionally reveal about the argument!
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. 8th: Gillian Nelson: Noah’s Ark
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
Bonus! I.e., discovered and sent way too late last night! Support your local FAR!
For Criterion, Aliza Ma talks to Bandsplain host Yasi Salek about the unique phenomenon of 90s movie soundtracks:
I keep thinking what a miracle it is that Pump Up the Volume got made and released without there being a commercial guarantee. That’s so cool. And its soundtrack really shows you that the subculture of music was already bubbling up in the late ’80s.
On the other hand, you have Singles, which was made and shelved until grunge became big. Suddenly they rushed to put it out, like, “Wait, where’s that movie? Put that out right now!” Again, Cameron Crowe had tapped into something starting to happen in the late ’80s. And the minute the music broke through, the film was ready to go. The Singles soundtrack is an artifact, a slice of time—it’s anthropology.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8883-the-genre-blending-phenomenon-of-90s-soundtracks-a-conversation-with-yasi-salek
The FAR should’ve checked the e-mail later! And I will check this out, but one of the big factors in 90s soundtracks is not necessarily taste but availability, i.e. what does the music label that is also an arm of the movie studio have under contract? This could produce weird but interesting results, Clerks is the one that always comes to mind for me.
The Pump Up the Volume soundtrack is so good (and last I checked, not fully available on Spotify).