Author Archives: Matthew

Omnibus (week of March 25, 2018)

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If you’re one of my six regular readers, you will likely already know that I got a job recently. This has resulted in a general sense of stability, clear headedness, and purposefulness that I haven’t had for a while. So, what does one do with one’s suddenly guilt-free spare time on an occasion such as this? One plays computer games.

I’ve been avoiding games for a while because they stretch out to fill the time. And when there’s too much time for them to stretch out into, they can take a toll on your self-worth. But I have plenty of that at the moment, so I played no fewer than three games this week. They’re all very short, to be fair. But it feels good to be back to this medium for at least a while, because all three of them were extremely interesting, and it was hard to pick just one to recommend. Read on to find out if I managed — and to find out which of the gaming podcasts I tried out was the best. When I get in a mood, I commit. 

Also, I had three pieces on the radio this weekend. Readers here will likely be most interested in this one. 

17 reviews.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero: “Un Pueblo De Nada” (and assorted miscellany) — Kentucky Route Zero’s final intermission minisode is an elegiac trip behind the scenes of a declining small-town public access station. I could have identified that as a KRZ premise even if you hadn’t told me it’s a video game. The minisode itself has less to offer than its two immediate predecessors: “The Entertainment,” which opens up the possibility that the entire game is a stage play being written by one of its supporting characters, and “Here and There Along the Echo,” which makes trawling through a touch-tone telephone menu fun. But when you take into account the fact that “Un Pueblo De Nada” has a slew of online videos associated with it, all of which are live-action renderings of broadcasts from the public access station we explore in the minisode, it rises to the level of prime KRZ. I watched the videos first (save for a couple of hour-long, out-of-universe media art pieces that may be edifying but don’t seem crucial), then played the actual game. I think I recommend doing the opposite. Or at least save the final, longest video until after you’ve played the game. I’ll say no more, except that if you intend to play KRZ at any point, you can’t skip the intermission features, because in spite of their brevity they are as enthralling as the actual chapters of the game. (A final note for obsessives: it looks like the airstrip from the first chapter, which initially seemed like little more than a haunting non-sequitur, is actually going to take on more significance. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I really liked it as an inexplicable, beautiful moment that’s basically unmoored from the rest of the story. But then, if there’s any developer we can trust not to make anything too tidy, it’s Cardboard Computer. So I still feel like the ambiguity won’t be explained away to the point where the airstrip vignette becomes banal.)

Subsurface Circular — This is a miniature, dialogue-driven story game that takes place on a single, continuous train ride. It observes the Aristotelian unities more aggressively than maybe any other game I’ve played: it takes place in real time, as far as I can tell, and your character does not (and cannot) move from their seat in the subway carriage. It is written by Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame, and like that game it is about artificial intelligences. However, in Thomas Was Alone, that fact was basically only relevant to the plot: the character drama proceeds as if the characters are odd humans. Subsurface Circular has a little bit more fun with the fact that its characters are robots, encumbering some of them with really strange traits, like having their mood entirely determined by the mood of a separate robot. The story is a straightforward mystery that you investigate the only way you can: by talking to people on the train. The dialogue is choice-based, in the vein of Telltale, except that your choices don’t seem to have a great deal of impact on the actual story — or even the relationships between the characters. That’s not a flaw. It still presents a compelling story and offers you the opportunity to role-play within it. Still, to progress through the story you must hit on certain crucial bits of dialogue. Getting to them is less a matter of cleverness and more a matter of simply exhausting all of your options. Given my own propensity to try and see as much of the text as I can in one sitting, this can get a bit tedious. And it’s partially my fault. But the writing and the story are really, really fun. I highly recommend this to people who loved the writing in Thomas Was Alone, and to people who like text-based games in general.  

Virginia — I love this game. I can imagine what the key critiques of it are, even without reading anything about it. I can hear people’s objections about the lack of even the illusion of player choice, and the way in which you are driven through its spaces on tracks without any real opportunity to explore. (In that way, it is fundamentally different to some of the games it will inevitably be compared to, i.e. Gone Home, Tacoma.) But the way that Virginia tells its story is completely ingenious and wouldn’t be possible in another medium. The story itself is fairly simple to describe, at least until near the end. You’re an FBI agent, assigned to investigate a missing person with another FBI agent — and while you’re at it, you’re expected to carry out an internal investigation of your partner. Virginia’s FBI is a paranoid body where duplicity is par-for-the-course. It even invokes J. Edgar Hoover: a figure whose time would have been up long before this game takes place, but who looms large in the FBI’s institutional memory. You experience the story from a first person perspective, in which you walk down corridors, search for things in rooms, and frequently find yourself jump cutting to another location altogether. Those cuts are the game’s masterstroke — they convey a sensation of the unreliability of memory, perception and reality. The cuts are simple at first: you’re walking down a corridor, only to find yourself walking down a different corridor. The message is simple: we’ve elided part of the story, because it’s not important. But soon, you find yourself cutting from the present-day to a memory, from a dream to reality, and maybe even into the perspective of another character altogether. All of these are bog-standard techniques in film editing, but they make you disoriented and paranoid in this context. Also notable: nobody speaks in Virginia. It proceeds with visual storytelling akin to a Méliès film or a Pingu short, minus the grunting. That only adds to the vagueness. In fact, Virginia avoids words almost entirely, only deigning to put them on screen when there are especially crucial plot details that you can’t afford to miss. (After an hour of wordless gameplay, a key revelation is delivered via microfiche.) The point is this: Virginia is deliberately obscure because of its central themes. Virginia is a game about transgressing the boundaries of what’s true. It is about the levels of artifice that exist in relationships between people, the disconnect between what we perceive as real and what is empirically real outside of us, and how truth can be deliberately distorted for one’s own means. It is strange, unique, powerful, probably unknowable, and it has an original score performed by an honest-to-god symphony orchestra. I love it. I can’t wait to play it again. Pick of the week.

Movies

Isle of Dogs — Hmm. Look, it would be an excellent movie if it weren’t so culturally insensitive. I want to like it, believe me. Wes Anderson is one of my favourite directors, with The Grand Budapest Hotel standing particularly tall among my all-time favourites. And there’s much to love in this film. It contains some of the most objectively gorgeous stop-motion animation I’ve ever seen. And all of the stuff involving the dogs themselves is gold. Bryan Cranston gives a fabulous performance as the hardened stray that the other dogs both look up to and resent. Jeff Goldblum is hilarious as the town gossip. And Harvey Keitel puts in a curiously heartbreaking turn as a dog for whom desperate times called for desperate measures. But much of the remainder of the movie takes place in a Western fantasy of Japan: a Japan with only its aesthetics intact. A key element of the film is that the audience is not supposed to understand the human dialogue throughout much of it. But… presumably those members of the audience who speak Japanese will not get the benefit of that choice. Like Pop Culture Happy Hour’s Linda Holmes pointed out, Japan isn’t Narnia. It’s a real place that exists in the world. Much of Isle of Dogs constitutes textbook cultural appropriation. Shame, too: if this had been made to take place in an actual fantasy world, I think it might be a near masterpiece. As it is, I spent much of the movie’s duration squirming uncomfortably.

Literature, etc.

Brian Vickers: “Too too solid: On the Norton Shakespeare and the New Oxford Shakespeare” — I have been meaning to buy a proper complete Shakespeare for a while now. Reading Moby-Dick in the Norton Critical Edition has opened my eyes to the advantages of a solid critical edition, even for recreational reading. This opinionated, not to say catty, review of the two most recent editions of Shakespeare from perpetual rivals Oxford and Norton highlights the latter as a pretty clear winner. Even if you’re not in the market for one of these, this is worth a read simply to watch Vickers excoriate the Oxford for its misbegotten attempts at trendiness: referencing Hamilton, referring to Shakespeare as “the ghost with the most,” and eschewing critical introductions to the plays (probably the whole point of a critical edition for most readers) in favour of something they call “Shakespeare tapas,” in which they sample one or two lines from essays and interviews with notable Shakespeareans out of context. Norton it is.  

Music

The New Pornographers: Mass Romantic — Somebody mentioned them in conversation recently and I was reminded that I’d never heard a full album. I’m not sure I’d even listened to a song with any real intention. I began where one begins: with “Letter From an Occupant.” That song is a miracle. Neko Case’s voice is a laser, and it contains the lines “I cried five rivers on the way here, which one will you skate away on?” That’s a Joni Mitchell riff that improves on the original. There’s something you don’t see every day. Nothing on the rest of the album quite compares, except maybe the title track. After one full listen, my sense is that I’ll be compelled to revisit the Neko Case songs (I’ve listened to “Letter” probably a couple dozen times this week) immediately, and the A.C. Newman songs may yet grow on me. Good album.

Jack White: Boarding House Reach — It’s not all excellent, but it is so crazily heterogenous and energetic that it doesn’t matter. This is the album where Jack White finally embraces the digital, and it turns out not to actually affect his aesthetic all that much. This is as messy, weird and disjointed as any White Stripes album and also toes the same line between knowing ludicrousness and total sincerity. It’s a succinct demonstration that an artist is not defined by their chosen tools, but by their approach to them. Highlights include “Corporation,” which injects an unexpected dose of P-Funk into the record, “Ice Station Zebra,” which contains the much-complained-about rapping (as if we’ve forgotten that he did it on “Lazaretto” too and nobody minded), “Over and Over and Over,” which is the closest we come to a classic garage rock track, and “Respect Commander,” which does some intensely fun stuff with tempo adjustment, and “Get In the Mind Shaft,” which is probably the closest Jack White will ever get to making a Daft Punk song. His best work since Icky Thump. Freaky good fun.

J.S. Bach/John Eliot Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists et al: St. John Passion — It’s Easter. On Easter we listen to Bach. I’ve always preferred the St. John Passion to the St. Matthew, which I can never get all the way through. Where Matthew is mutedly passionate, John is explosive. The opening chorus is a particular favourite — one of the most openly dramatic things in Bach’s entire oeuvre. There’s nothing quite like a big, awesome choir making their first entrance with “HERR!! HERR!! HERR!!” Speaking of, the Monteverdi Choir are the true stars of this fantastic recording with Gardiner. Neither he nor they are afraid of “letting it rip,” as the kids are saying. The English Baroque Soloists play with a sense of individuality that befits their name. And the vocal soloists put in lovely performances, particularly Anthony Rolfe-Johnson in the often thankless role of the Evangelist. Have a listen. At least check out the choruses.

Podcasts

Retronauts: “Zork,” “EarthBound” & “Broderbund” — In my recently rediscovered enthusiasm for video games, I felt compelled to check out a couple things from the doubtless well-populated gaming podcast space. True to its name, Retronauts is a roundtable chat podcast that focuses on retrogaming. In general, I am a modern gaming person, but I played just enough games in my childhood that I can occasionally conjure some nostalgia for eras of gaming gone by. How surprised was I, then, to find that the most recent episode of Retronauts focussed on Broderbund, a company whose edutainment titles made up a big chunk of my early exposure to computers. This episode reminded me of the existence of Living Books, which I’d forgotten entirely, as well as The Print Shop and the Carmen Sandiego games, of which Where in Time is permanently imprinted on my DNA. The Zork episode is a fun exploration of that game, which I’ve put many hours into and never even really come close to beating. I do feel that the panel may have a limited experience of post-Infocom parser-based interactive fiction, in light of which Zork’s puzzles look counterintuitive and inexpert. The EarthBound episode is the one with the most difficult task, namely to say interesting things about a game about which there is little left to say. It’s probably the Super Nintendo equivalent of Bowie’s Low. Alas, much of the discussion focuses on the game’s music, which is deeply beside the point. Still, I’ll listen to more of this. They’ve got a rich back-catalogue with at least one thing I care about for every dozen that I don’t.

No Cartridge: “Desert of the Real Fictions” — The second gaming podcast I checked out this week is this loose conversation show hosted by a professor. A conversation between that professor, Trevor Strunk, and the developer of Night in the Woods, Scott Benson, is bound to be fun. This particularly focuses on the question raised by gamers who demand better endings from game developers — as if a game is something other than a thing made by a person, but rather a thing that exists whole in some other universe and has been dragged imperfectly into this one by a flawed human vessel. It shines a light on the ways in which a large swathe of the gaming hordes are substantially lacking in critical facility. A fun listen if you’re into that sort of thing.

On the Media: “Big, if True” — One of the best things about OTM is that it’s always there on the stories you need it for. The Cambridge Analytica story was one of those. This is as good an exploration of that as you could hope for.

Song by Song: “Bride of Rain Dog” & “Anywhere I Lay My Head” — I’ve enormously enjoyed this podcast’s breakdown of Rain Dogs. These final two episodes are the general summation you’d hope for. It’s all well that they chose to do that, since I’m really not sure there’s much to say about “Anywhere I Lay My Head” that it doesn’t say for itself. It is one of Tom Waits’s most poignant creations. I’ll be returning to this show for Frank’s Wild Years — my idiosyncratic favourite Tom Waits album, an opinion I know the panel does not share.

Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up — It came to pass that I agreed with Linda Holmes (and not Chris Klimek) on Isle of Dogs, a very problemsy movie. In other news, High Maintenance sounds not for me, Ready Player One sounds intensely not for me, and the SXSW wrap was sort of repetitive after hearing All Songs Considered’s coverage in its entirety.

Theory of Everything: “Utopia” parts iv and v — This hasn’t been my favourite mini-season in ToE’s history. But there’s much to enjoy here, in particular Andrew Calloway’s trip to a pagan utopia in part iv.

Imaginary Worlds: “Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin” & “Stuck in the Uncanny Valley” — The Le Guin episode is a good primer that I’ll look back to when I am in search of an SF novel to read. The uncanny valley is one of the better Imaginary Worlds episodes in a while, in no small part because it draws on Eric Molinsky’s expertise as a former animator.

The Memory Palace: “Outliers” & “A quick update and a bonus episode” — “Outliers” is a brief thing about the reasons why a person might decide to take part in a freak show in the 19th century. It is as compassionate and broad minded as you expect this show to be. Oddly, though, the bonus episode that follows it is almost better. It transitions seamlessly from being a bland housekeeping episode to being a really lovely tribute to Lavinia Dock, whose suffrage slogan, “the young are at the gates” is now being repurposed movingly as a slogan for the Never Again movement. This show is an ongoing miracle. Pick of the week.  

The Nod: “Peak Reality” & “Sister, Sister” — It’s been awhile since I listened to this. I heard a preview for “Sister, Sister” on another Gimlet show and figured I had to hear it. But first I listened to a completely different episode by mistake that turned out to be even better. “Peak Reality” finds Eric Eddings arguing to Brittany Luse that 2016 was the best year for reality television. There’s nothing like smart people talking about dumb things. As for “Sister, Sister,” it’s an interesting bit of family drama in which a producer finds out her sister doesn’t identify as black and is upset by this. Alas, the actual conversations with the sister in question make it plain immediately that this sister’s issue is simply that she is in college, with all of the attendant confusion. It’s less compelling than it might be.

Omnibus (week of March 18, 2018)

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Can I just say for a second how good it is to be busy? Honest to god, it is so much easier to get up in the morning when you have a million things on the go. Consequently, I am happy to say this was yet another week during which I consumed not much more media than I produced. HOWEVER, I have also started running again, after a too-long hiatus. So that probably means the podcast count will go up again in coming weeks. We’ll see.

Seven reviews.

Television

Broadchurch: Season 1, episode 1 — Not for me, I’m afraid. Given all its ties to Doctor Who both previous and forthcoming, I was hoping to enjoy it. But nothing in this really lept out and convinced me it’s significantly different from any other cop show — save for its beautiful cinematography. But in the absence of an unconventional story or characters more defined than “brooding cop with a troubled, mysterious past,” I think I’ll leave it at this.

Movies

Best of Enemies — Anybody with any interest in the media at all should watch this deeply engaging documentary about ABC’s televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley in 1968. But even if you don’t have any particular interest in that, you should watch it anyway because these two are among the most interesting characters of their milieu, and this is ultimately a character-driven film. The debates, it must be said, were character-driven debates. It probably speaks to the film’s quality that I changed my mind halfway through as to whether the debates were actually a good idea. At first, I marvelled at the notion that there was a time when a major network would devote a significant amount of time to lofty discussions of the issues by people with a decidedly academic grasp of language. How our discourse has been degraded since then, I thought! But then I realized that these debates weren’t about the issues at all — they were two-way character assassinations motivated more by mutual loathing than by any principles at all. By the time Buckley delivers his famous rejoinder in which he threatens to punch Vidal in the face, you realize that you’re watching the invention of modern political discourse on tape. Also, this film contains footage of Buckley playing Bach on the harpsichord, badly. As if we needed more reasons to find him noxious. (The filmmakers get bonus points for pairing that footage with Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, which came out in the year of the debates.)

What We Do In The Shadows — Taika Waititi is one of the funniest people alive. This isn’t entirely his movie, of course. He co-stars and co-directs with Jemaine Clement. But he steals every scene he’s in, right from the sublime opening, in which he floats out of a coffin and immediately grins goofily. You understand his character before he says a word. What We Do In The Shadows is consistently funny from start to finish. Every joke is contingent on the character speaking it, and the characters are all brilliant, so there are very few jokes that don’t land. (“Werewolves, not swearwolves” is a personal favourite that would not be funny in another context.) And there’s even a bit of heart. There are few things sadder than a vampire watching a video of a sunrise on YouTube.

Music

The Decemberists: I’ll Be Your Girl — Let’s start with the single. “Severed” was the first track I heard from I’ll Be Your Girl. That was before I knew it was produced by John Congleton, so it didn’t make a lick of sense. Once you know that, everything slides into place. Suddenly it’s hard not to hear it as a John Congleton song feat. Colin Meloy. You can even imagine Congleton singing it: lyrics like “I alone am the answer/I alone will make wrongs right/But in order to root out the cancer/It’s got to be kept from the sunlight” wouldn’t be out of place on Until the Horror Goes. Realizing this made something click into place for me that might otherwise have caused me to hate this album: for three albums now, the Decemberists’ goal has been to push the limits of what it means to be the Decemberists. (The Hazards of Love was pushing something, but it’s still resolutely in their Anglophilic comfort zone. So is The Queen of Hearts, for that matter.) I have had mixed opinions of how well this has worked. I adore The King is Dead and listen to it as often as the period classics from my high school days. What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World didn’t do much for me because I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was trying to be. So far, I’ll Be Your Girl sits somewhere between those two poles, but an awful lot closer to the good end. Like The King is Dead, it has a clear premise. The King is Dead was a migration of the band’s folk influences from England back home to America. It was a revitalizing switch-up. I’ll Be Your Girl is an earnest attempt to merge Colin Meloy’s archaisms and affectations with John Congleton’s deranged postmodernism. Part of that attempt involves paring back Meloy’s trademark long-windedness to an uncompromising opposite extreme: several of these songs revolve around one or two key lines repeated at length. This too is revitalizing. Like The King is Dead, this album is a reminder not to only expect one thing from a band. I’ll remark on a few key tracks. “Severed” isn’t the only song that could belong on a Congleton solo record: “We All Die Young” is even more deranged, with Congleton’s signature rough drum sound and a children’s chorus shout-singing the title line as a call-and-response in the chorus. That’s a Congletonian touch if ever I’ve heard one — and a particularly disturbing one in light of the recent school shootings and protests against gun violence. It steps right up to the line of being tasteless, but manages to land on haunting instead. Also: when I said that “Severed” was the first track from the album I heard, that’s not strictly true. It was the first recording from the album I heard. But I heard the Decemberists do “Everything is Awful” and “Sucker’s Prayer” in concert last year. Coming off the disappointment of Terrible/Beautiful, they were a ray of hope for the future. The former is an instant classic. Calling it plainspoken would be an understatement: it consists almost entirely of its title and a wordless singalong outro. Set to a chipper acoustic accompaniment that morphs into stadium rock over the course of three minutes, it is a perfect evocation of what it’s like to hate everything while trying to maintain your sense of humour. On that note: I’ll Be Your Girl is Colin Meloy’s most openly depressive album to date, and also the one where his debt to Morrissey is most pronounced. “For Once In My Life” is nearly a rewrite of “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.” And like Morrissey, when Meloy writes about depression, he does so with the self-awareness of an elderly man and the overwrought drama of a teenager. “I wanna love somebody, but I don’t know how,” he sings on “Sucker’s Prayer,” before throwing all that self-knowledge away with the line “I wanna throw my body in the river and drown.” None of this is what you’d expect from the Colin Meloy of “The Infanta” or “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.” And that’s fine. But there is one thing here for the Picaresque and Crane Wife crowd. “Rusalka, Rusalka/Wild Rushes” is a prog folk epic in the vein of “The Bagman’s Gambit” or “The Island.” It’s nice that it’s there, but it’s frankly not one of the best tracks on the album. And that’s maybe the most encouraging thing: where Terrible/Beautiful made me long for the Decemberists of old (ye olde Decemberists), I’ll Be Your Girl makes me confident that while they can still do what they used to do, they’re now actually better at doing something else entirely. Pick of the week.

Literature, etc.

Jorge Luis Borges: “Notes on Germany and the War” — Not everything in this collection of Borges’ writings against the Nazis has aged perfectly, but it’s worth reading for the general thrust of his arguments about the people who support fascism implicitly without realizing it. It also contains this peal of slightly petulant but sympathetic wisdom: “the true intellectual refuses to take part in contemporary debates: reality is always anachronous.”

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: SXSW Late Night Dispatches, recap, and New Music Friday: March 16 — I’m always a fan of All Songs’ SXSW coverage. Points out a bunch of stuff I need to check out. But frankly, there are too many recent and upcoming releases from artists I’m already invested in that I doubt I’ll get to any of it soon. The recap episode is the most useful for actually finding new music. But even without actual music, the late night dispatches are great radio featuring a group of people who are as overstimulated as it is possible to get while also being sober. Plus, this was the first New Music Friday episode I’ve heard, which is a fun feature. I’m glad I put this show back in my regular rotation. It is as useful as it is fun. Pick of the week.

99% Invisible catch-up — The most recent five episodes of 99pi is a pretty strong run — as is appropriate, given that they’re coming up to their 300th episode. Imagine. Specifically, the two-parter on the Bijlmer is outstanding. The Bijlmer was a neighborhood built by modernists that fell into disrepair almost immediately. It’s a great story. It was also nice to revisit episode 200, “Miss Manhattan.” I don’t remember it being a favourite the first time around, but maybe I was distracted. It’s lovely. Next week, the big three-oh-oh, and an appraisal of how the show’s been since the epoch-defining Kickstarter that allowed it to expand its team to the extent that it now has.

Omnibus (week of March 11, 2018)

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Another busy week, another paltry instalment of Omnibus. Still, some good stuff here.

Eight reviews.

Movies

Thor: Ragnarok — I don’t normally watch Marvel movies unless I’m seeing them in a theatre with friends. That’s what they’re for. They’re an outing. But I’d heard enough good things about this one that I made a point of actually sitting down and watching it myself. It is without a doubt one of the very top-tier Marvel movies. Black Panther, this, Civil War, and maybe the first Avengers. Those are the ones that really make the MCU concept worthwhile. In this particular case we have a movie directed by somebody with a distinctive comedic sensibility, Taika Waititi, packed with a cast of outstanding comic performers — some of whom haven’t gotten to do as much straight comedy in their Marvel roles as you’d like. Partially I’m thinking of Chris Hemsworth. But it applies even more to Mark Ruffalo, who is hysterically funny in this, as both Bruce Banner and a slightly more verbal incarnation of Hulk. But the scene stealers are all newcomers. Tessa Thompson is brilliant in the hitherto unconceived-of role of “drunk Valkyrie.” Waititi himself absolutely kills as the universe’s most ineffectual revolutionary. (My favourite line in the whole movie is “Piss off, ghost! … He’s freakin’ gone.”) Best of all, Jeff Goldblum is here, and he Jeffs as Goldblum as he’s ever Jeffed, all over this whole damn movie. (“Wow, I didn’t hear any thunder, but out of your fingers — was that, like, sp-sparkles?”) Also, let’s talk aesthetics. Firstly, the Marvel Symphonic Universe problem is solved at last by none other than Mark Mothersbaugh, who delivers an electronic score that kicks ass when it needs to, and is just as content to camp it up in the comic scenes. Also, this is the first Thor movie to really take advantage of the fact that a key element of Norse mythology is the RAINBOW BRIDGE. We have some colours going on. Thank god. Also — and I don’t want to overemphasize this, because ultimately Thor: Ragnarok is just a well-made, silly fantasy comedy — we have a sly anti-colonial narrative on our hands, here. We learn that Odin took the nine realms by force with Hela as his executioner, then covered the whole thing up because of, I dunno, public image troubles? The need to suppress revolution? This is how colonialism works. This movie isn’t Black Panther — it is not explicitly political. But for every couple dozen good gags, there’s one halfway decent insight. I’ll take it. Pick of the week.

Annihilation — I liked it, but I wanted to love it. It’s possible I was overhyped for it. I was told it was bonkers. I’d heard comparisons to 2001, which is always going to be hyperbole. But I was hoping at least for something with a layer of abstraction to it — something that would cause me to leave the theatre wondering what actually happened. This isn’t that kind of movie. It isn’t especially open to interpretation. It isn’t The Tree of Life. It isn’t The Fountain. It’s a movie I will inevitably like better on a second viewing, because I will be able to approach it on its own terms, rather than on the terms of the movie I hoped it would be. That said, there is much to love about it on a first viewing: the casting is good, with Natalie Portman giving a creditable lead performance bolstered by outstanding supporting performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson. And it really is a visual feast. Even its mundane shots are elegant. (It envisions the savage wilderness with more atmosphere than The Lost City of Z did, and that movie’s visuals were the one thing that lived up the the hype.) And when the monsters, mutant plants, and hallucinatory cosmic phenomena begin to crop up, it truly becomes a wonder. Annihilation is a good movie. Chalk it up to unreasonable expectations.

Literature, etc.

Jorge Luis Borges: “When Fiction Lives in Fiction,” “A Defense of the Kabbalah” & the prologue to Bartleby the Scrivener — I waltzed into the Paper Hound the other day, a rather excellent small bookshop on Pender Street. “Just browse a little,” I said to myself. “Maybe pick up something light,” I said to myself. Six pounds of books later, I find myself leafing through the selected non-fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, whose essays read much like his fiction does — because so many of his stories are formatted as essays on books that simply don’t exist. My first casual flip through these characteristically miniature pieces includes three essays on topics I find particularly interesting these days: metafiction, the Kabbalah, and Herman Melville. The Bartleby prologue is primarily about Moby-Dick. It is the piece in which he refers to it as “the infinite novel,” an appraisal that many editions of Moby-Dick still trumpet on their back covers today. He should have said “the fathomless novel,” but this is a translation and I shouldn’t quibble. In any case, I should also probably actually read Bartleby the Scrivener, because I sort of have no idea what this is all about. “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” contains a suggestion that I find intensely seductive. Borges suggests that we find metafiction creepy because we look at a story within a story and feel as though we ourselves may only be part of an endless chain of fictions, subject to the wills of the storytellers beyond the veil. (I brought this up in my comics writing class today, and our instructor compared the idea to the distressingly popular Silicon Valley notion that we are all in a simulation, because simulations would exist within simulations, ergo there must be a long chain of simulations and it’s infinitesimally unlikely that we’re at the top of the chain. I thought that was quite clever. My instructor’s comparison, mind you — not the actual idea. The idea is nonsense.) I feel as though I’ve read Borges saying this in a more direct way, but it’s hinted at here. Maybe I’m just connecting the dots myself. Who can say. This essay also contains some favourable remarks on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, one of my favourite novels, and a deeply Borgesian book — by design or not. The Kabbalah essay contains a contention that I find rather interesting: “every object whose end is unknown to us is provisionally monstrous.” He’s talking about God, whose endlessness isn’t necessarily something to be worshipped in Borges’s view, but rather something to be put off by. That idea that the things that extend beyond our field of vision — things we can only see in part, if at all — connects this essay with the metafiction essay. Borges is distressed by the notion of God for the same reason he’s distressed by stories within stories: both make him feel like he’s not in control of the strings. I sympathize. Again and again, reading Borges feels like talking to a really smart friend.

Elaine M. Will: Look Straight Ahead — A webcomic assigned in the comics writing class I’m taking. I was uncertain about it at first, because if anything it is a too accurate portrayal of the overwrought inner monologue of a high school student. But once the main thrust of the story gets underway, which deals with a psychotic break that goes far beyond standard adolescent alienation, it picks up steam. The visual presentation of the protagonist’s psychosis is deeply immersive and makes up for some lingering weaknesses in the dialogue and captioning. Fine.

Music

Gustav Mahler/Leonard Bernstein, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra & Helmut Wittek: Symphony No. 4 — Oftentimes when I’m writing these reviews, I’ll throw on a symphony. Usually it’s something I’ve reviewed before, or else I don’t get through the whole thing and it’s not worth remarking on, so I don’t. I’m not sure why I love symphonic music particularly for this kind of writing, but it’s increasingly what I fall back on. As I type this, I am listening to this particular recording over a glass of rather good Australian petite sirah. One must have these little rituals — even at the risk of becoming a caricature of one’s self. *sip* As for the recording, it’s one of two Mahler fours I return to, the other being the CanCon preference, Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s recording with Orchestre Métropolitain. I believe that was the second Mahler recording I ever bought, after a deeply dodgy Naxos recording of the eighth, which remains one of my least favourite Mahler symphonies, even in a good recording. (Chailly’s recording wins, BTW, and not only because it’s got Ben Heppner at his best. That does help, though.) Still, as much as I find nostalgic value in the YNS recording, I’m always going to go for Bernstein in a pinch. He’s a legendary Mahler conductor for a reason: he brings out all the music’s extremity and drama. There’s nobody who imbues this music with more energy than Bernstein, and energy is what’s called for. Mahler is not Bach. He is not one of those composers whose music seems to unveil natural laws. He is a composer who writes his own rules — his music is intensely human and requires a human interpretation. I’ll always prefer hearing an adult soprano (i.e. Karina Gauvin in YNS’s recording) to a boy soprano. But that aside, Bernstein’s rendition of this most light and pleasant Mahler symphonies is a treasure.

Podcasts

This American Life: “20 Acts in 60 Minutes” — A classic of the genre. Ira Glass once told Chris Gethard that his favourite episodes of This American Life are the ones where they break the format. This episode from 15 years ago is one of the most explicit of those. It features no fewer than 20 stories, many of them from producers who have gone on to become icons. Jonathan Goldstein tells the story of the time the Penguin (the Batman villain) meets Mary Poppins, and they find they have little in common save for airborne umbrella travel. Starlee Kine talks to an actor about the most mortifying moment his quasi-celebrity has ever brought him. Scott Carrier falls in love. Davids Sedaris and Rakoff do their respective things. Chuck Klosterman compares things to other things. But the best stories come from incarcerated youths. A pair of newly-minted investigative reporters in a juvenile delinquency centre look into the possibility that the kitchen staff has been urinating in the pudding. And a troupe of teenage girls in another facility apologize to their families — in song. Outstanding. The sort of thing that makes people want to become radio producers. Pick of the week.

All Songs Considered: “New Mix: Courtney Barnett, Exitmusic, Okkervil River, More,” “Margaret Glaspy Writes A Bookend to ‘Emotions And Math,’” “Guest DJ: Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats Hop Across An Eclectic Playlist” & “SXSW 2018 Preview” — I have decided that All Songs needs to be a bigger part of my life this year, because it is a legitimately excellent way to get turned on to music that might be part of the critical conversation — but also weird stuff that’s going to get overlooked. In these episodes, I heard music I loved by Courtney Barnett (whose debut I still need to hear in full), Margaret Glaspy, Les McCann (thank you, Guest D.J. Nathaniel Rateliff), Chloe Foy & Skyway Man. Who’s to say if I’ll ever dig in further, but their names are now on my blog, and I’ll know if I ever look back here that these are musicians I once enjoyed, and should maybe have a listen again. I intend to listen to their complete SXSW coverage this coming week. Should be enlightening.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Atlanta” & “Talk Show Talk” — I have to watch Atlanta. I’ve been told by many many people, and by one person many many times, that I have to watch Atlanta. Soon. But this week’s standout PCHH is the talk show episode, featuring Guy Branum, host of Pop Rocket, a ruder and less insightful PCHH on which he is the bright light. They even momentarily made me understand Jimmy Fallon. Also, there’s a particularly nice moment here where Linda Holmes rediscovers why she’s friends with Glen Weldon by way of Cole Porter. This show almost never gets my pick of the week, nor will it this week. And it doesn’t show up on my year-end lists, because it’s a really weird thing to stack up against, I dunno, The Heart. Or even Code Switch, which does get out of the studio from time to time to make something a bit more ambitious than your standard panel chat. But I routinely enjoy Pop Culture Happy Hour more than anything else on my subscription list, and I love when I’ve got a backlog of episodes to listen to, because it’s so much fun.

Omnibus (week of Mar. 4, 2018)

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Sometimes on weeks when you feel like three different people are pulling your hair in six different directions, you’ve got to spend as much time as possible in a movie theatre for the sake of your own sanity. I’ve seen six movies in theatres in the past two weeks, plus the Rio’s live broadcast of the Oscars. It is the ultimate refuge. Netflix will never be able to compare, because Netflix does not force you to forego the rest of your life during the duration of the movie. That, more than the big screen or even the crowd of like-minded strangers, is the best thing about seeing movies in a theatre. You are at the mercy of the projectionist. Surrender or leave.

Here are this week’s 21 reviews, four of which are of things that took place in movie theatres.

Live events

Gentlemen Hecklers present: Twilight — The only way to watch Twilight is to watch it with three comics heckling it from the sidelines. I know two of the Gentlemen Hecklers from their role as ubiquitous Vancouver trivia hosts. They are funny people. But more than that, Twilight is really bad movie. The Hecklers’ best bit by far was also possibly their easiest: a drinking game where you drink whenever Edward Cullen does or says something that is a relationship red flag. It is perhaps apropos that Robert Pattinson has recently become such an interesting character actor, given that his breakout role was an abject failure to be anything resembling a leading man. Between him and Kristen Stewart, the human face is contorted into more inexplicable formations during the course of this movie than in Jack Nicholson’s entire career. This was a good time. Twilight is awful.

Movies

The Florida Project — I talk a big game about my propensity to cry during movies. I make myself out to be a right basket case: the champion of vulnerable masculinity. But the truth is that very few movies that are not directed by Wes Anderson have ever really opened the floodgates for me. But the final moments of The Florida Project put me in a right state. The tone of this movie is so nonchalant and whimsical in the face of truly bleak subject matter that its final dive into unalloyed tragedy is a knife to the heart. That’s as close to a spoiler as I’ll come. I love everything about The Florida Project. I love each and every glorious shot of a tacky Orlando novelty shop front. It is one of the five or six best new movies I’ve seen since I started writing this blog. A lot has been made of this movie’s nuanced portrayal of impoverished people, and with good reason. The film’s adult protagonist, Halley, faces impossible alternatives throughout. There’s no way to watch this movie without feeling the pressure she’s under — probably with a lot more sweat on your brow than she’s got. There’s a moment in a scene with Willem Dafoe and Caleb Landry Jones, the two recognizable actors in the film, that I suspect is meant to serve as a Rosetta Stone: Jones’ character Jack finds bedbugs in his father Bobby’s motel. Jack berates Bobby for blowing a bunch of money on purple paint to add an air of whimsy to the motel’s exterior when what he really needs is an exterminator. But think of this from Bobby’s perspective: if that coat of purple paint pulls in a few families of tourists per week, he’s that much closer to keeping the motel in business. It’s a counterintuitive decision that might make it seem like Bobby doesn’t have his priorities straight. But when you’re scraping by, priorities look different. It’s the same with Halley. Stealing a meal from a hotel buffet might not seem like a good idea from where you’re sitting. But when you’ve got no money and a daughter to feed, maybe it’s worth the risk. The Florida Project is perfect. It is toe-to-toe with Get Out in the 2017 sweepstakes that are now long over. Pick of the week.

Wild Strawberries — The Cinémathèque is doing a whole series to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman’s birth. As a programmer explained before this screening, they couldn’t bring themselves to start the series with The Seventh Seal. It’s just too overexposed. Wild Strawberries, then: the best-known Bergman film that hasn’t been subjected to ruthless parody. I hadn’t seen it before. I hadn’t seen anything by Bergmann except The Seventh Seal, which pleasantly shocked me with its balance between thinky darkness and complete siliness. But Wild Strawberries is an altogether more successful integration of heavy, existential themes into a compelling narrative. I think it’s probably the better of the two movies. It’s a story about an old doctor named Isak Borg, and the impact he’s made on the world and the people around him. The key connection that we as an audience have to that impact is Marianne, Isak’s daughter-in-law. Marianne has had to spend her life in love with Isak’s son Evald: a man who, like his father, is constantly on the verge of giving up on life altogether. I daresay that for all of the film’s brilliant ideas — and for all the brilliance of Victor Sjöström’s performance as Isak — Marianne is the movie’s masterstroke. It is Marianne that prevents Wild Strawberries from being a movie primarily about depressive, brilliant men and their problems. Because in the one or two heartbreaking scenes where we really come to know something about her relationship with Evald, the film’s focus shifts definitively towards the way that those men affect the world around them, rather than the way the world around them affects those men. It’s a beautiful meditation on family. For all its darkness and occasional cynicism, Wild Strawberries is deeply cathartic. I liked it a whole lot.

A Wrinkle in Time — It’s a mixed bag. On one hand, it takes a powder on Madeleine L’Engle’s most ambitious ideas: the explanation of how a tesseract works; the segment on a two-dimensional planet. On the other, it’s a family-friendly blockbuster with a distinctive aesthetic and some compositions worthy of Oscar winner Roger Deakins. (I’m going to call him that from now on, every time I mention him. I’m just so happy for him.) For every stroke of brilliance (i.e. the casting of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and GIGANTIC SPACE OPRAH as the Mrs. Ws), there is a disappointment that feels like a betrayal of the source material (i.e. the casting of Levi Miller, The Most Boring Teen In The World, as Calvin). The movie’s primary theme is “love yourself,” which is a deeply valuable theme — especially considering that it is a film for children, starring a young black woman who comes to terms with herself over the course of the film. But what it gains over the book in heart, it loses in brains. L’Engle’s novel contains a borderline nonsensical but deeply compelling metaphysical matrix that is almost entirely glossed over here. That disappoints me. What it all comes down to is this: Ava DuVernay is a master of her craft, but she’s working from a flawed script on a project for a massive corporate juggernaut. It’s worth seeing, and I hope it makes a pile of money, because it’s great when taken on its own merits. But as an adaptation, it’s a bit wanting.

Moon — I don’t know why I wanted to watch this. Certainly it has nothing to do with Sam Rockwell’s recent Oscar win, which I am actually a bit miffed about. But it’s the kind of movie I wish we saw more of: a small, interesting science fiction movie, in the vein of Ex Machina, but six years before. Its actual story is less interesting than it might be: in a sense it reduces Blade Runner to a high concept story about human replication. But Rockwell’s performance as two different facets of the same person, and the excellent, understated screenplay lift it above its premise. I enjoyed this a lot. It’s on Canadian Netflix. Check it out.

Television

Lady Dynamite: “Pilot” — Wow, this is weird. I love Maria Bamford, but this is so completely bonkers that I didn’t laugh much. I’m told I should stick it out. I may. We’ll see.

Literature, etc.

Kris Straub: Broodhollow, Book 2 — Immeasurably better than the first book. Where the first arc of Broodhollow deals with the question of whether or not everything crazy going in is happening in the protagonist’s head, this book dives into the much less travelled idea of a whole town forgetting its traumas. It’s something that Stephen King dealt with in It, but Broodhollow has another take. The masterstroke here is the introduction of a second town society. Where the first was an all-male Eyes Wide Shut riff with absolutely no idea what’s going on in Broodhollow, the second is a ladies auxiliary that, in spite of its innocuous trappings, knows more about Broodhollow’s threats than anybody else. I really enjoyed this, and I’m appalled at the cliffhanger it finished in. I hope Kris Straub is hard at work on book three.

Jorge Luis Borges: “German Literature in the Age of Bach” — I wandered into The Paper Hound this week, a Vancouver bookshop that I particularly like. Just go in and browse, I said to myself. Maybe pick up something light, I said to myself. Six pounds of books later, I have begun reading the collected nonfiction of Jorge Luis Borges in this completely arbitrary location. I’m not sure what exactly precipitated Borges’ lecture on this topic, but I like to think that somebody asked him to speak about this topic, and he discovered for himself as a result of this that there was virtually no interesting literature to speak of in Germany while Bach was composing his masterpieces. Still, being Borges, he does his due diligence and reflects on the reasons for this, and also muses on the virtues of some of the literature from this period that has perhaps not aged especially well. Also, he passingly mentions an idea of Paul Valéry’s that it might be interesting to write a literary history without proper names. I share a birthday with Valéry. Maybe one of these days I should do something like that. A music history podcast, perhaps.

Music

Yes: Tales from Topographic Oceans — This was my favourite album from the ages of about 12 to 20. It has always pained me slightly to demote something that was an all-time favourite to a lower rung on the ladder. But these days, the top of my list is populated by albums I discovered a little later (e.g. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love), albums that grew on me over the course of many years (e.g. Brian Eno’s Another Green World) and one album that has lost none of its lustre since I first heard it as an impressionable teenager (Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick). Even among albums by Yes, my first favourite band, I’m not sure that Topographic would come out on top these days. For all its flaws, Fragile has the moments that most define what I continue to love about the band: the drama; the casual virtuosity; the personalities of five individuals all emerging from ensemble compositions. But listening through Topographic again for the first time in years did genuinely some strengths that are immutable. Its second side, “The Remembering” was always, and remains my favourite. With its delicate Mellotron and jangly acoustic moments, it is a cosmic folk song in memory of childhood. It isn’t even one of the most popular songs on this album, but I still think it’s one of the crowning glories of progressive rock. Likewise for “Ritual,” the one track from Topographic to become a regular live favourite. Having learned and grown since I last heard this, I now have a bit of trouble with the line “we love when we play.” Throughout this album, and to some extent his entire career, Jon Anderson comes off as a child prophet. If you can’t accept him on his own terms he’ll alienate you right out of the genre. But I also feel like anybody who can’t accept him must be harbouring a particularly toxic kind of cynicism, because the man just has so much love for the world. So much love. I’ve always had a soft spot for “The Ancient,” probably the most difficult of the album’s four tracks. The acoustic outro is a flat-out classic moment in the Yes corpus, but the Steve Howe freakout that leads up to it is no mere virtuoso display: it is a masterclass in how to generate tension with instruments. The one track that disappointed me upon returning to this album was the one that has perhaps become the fan favourite: “The Revealing Science of God.” It is structurally the closest thing on this album to the long tracks on the albums that bookend Topographic. Where “The Ancient” is a showcase for Howe, “Ritual” features lengthy solo spots for the rhythm section, and “The Remembering” (not quite the Rick Wakeman feature the liner notes make it out to be) channels an atmospheric side that the band does not generally foreground, “Revealing” is an attempt at an integrated full-band feature with internal symmetry and a dramatic arc unto itself. And in that respect, it doesn’t rise to the level of “Close to the Edge” or “The Gates of Delirium.” Still, this was like rediscovering an old friend. A final note: Apple Music does not have the Rhino remaster of the album that I grew up with, so I now understand why so many people complained about the sound quality. The unremastered digital files are abominable.

Tom Rogerson & Brian Eno: Finding Shore — Eno’s latest project is as a sideman to an improvisational pianist who is willing to allow Eno to twist his music about into an electrified finished product. That sounds like a role where Eno will thrive. And he does. This album begins with a collection of electronic plinks that do not identifiably come from a piano. But about a minute and a half into the album, the origins of the sound make themselves obvious as the piano crashes in. This entire album is an absolutely gorgeous collaboration, and one of Eno’s most worthwhile projects in some time. Much of the credit must clearly go to Rogerson, who is the actual composer of this music. Listen to this. Do.

Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno: Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks — I needed something more to listen to while I was writing up this week’s reviews, so I revisited another old favourite. This is one of Eno’s finest ambient albums, perhaps only behind Music for Airports and On Land. It’s certainly best known for “An Ending (Ascent),” which is lovely. But the best moments are the ones that most clearly feature Daniel Lanois’ appalachian-tinged pedal steel. Lanois’ “Silver Morning” may be my favourite on the album. Essential Eno.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up —  Their Oscars coverage is always the most fun in the business. Audie Cornish doing the Regrettable Television Pop Quiz is a sure bet. Their Wrinkle in Time take turned out to be about right, when you take the average of the whole panel. Will watch: Annihilation. Won’t watch: Queer Eye.

On the Media: “Face the Racist Nation” & “Everything You Love Will Burn” — These two episodes on the alt-right in collaboration with The Guardian are worth hearing, though I feel like I’ve heard these arguments advanced in a less consolidated fashion on a combination of previous episodes of OTM.

The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Memories of an Invented City” — This old story about Cuba’s most influential author in a generation is a lovely thing. It has plenty of his personality, interspersed with vital readings from his work and enough context to make sense of it all.

The Hilarious World of Depression: “Highlights From A Hilarious Night of Depression” — This is great. Come for the comedy, stay for the genuine insights into mental illness that come from doing a whole season of interviews with people who suffer from it.

Reply All: “Trust the Process” & “The World’s Most Expensive Free Watch” — Two perfectly fine episodes of a great show. One has Alex Blumberg explaining sports to the hosts, which is a pleasant switcheroo. And we get Gene Demby as a bonus, so that’s fun. The other is about how even internet scamming is a scam. So that’s really distressing. Nice stuff.

This is Love: Episodes 1-4 — I love Criminal, but I might love that team’s new show even more. The first episode of this has everything you need to know about it. The guest is nobody of particular note, but he’s got a love story that’s worth hearing. Subsequent guests have more unusual tales to tell, i.e. reuniting a grey whale with its mother and founding one of the most acclaimed restaurants in America to pay tribute to one’s parents. But all of these episodes are completely compelling. A new favourite. Pick of the week.

Criminal: “The Manual” & “Willie Bosket” — “The Manual” is appalling in a good way: a story of how the first amendment is sometimes considered more important than human life. “Willie Bosket” is fine: a story of a particularly rough juvenile case. Both of these stories have far-reaching legal implications. Listen for that alone.

It’s Been a Minute: “‘Black Panther’ with Glen Weldon and Evan Narcisse” — I’ve heard and read enough about Black Panther now. But hearing noted comics expert Glen Weldon and actual comics writer Evan Narcisse bounce ideas off of each other is great fun.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Jennifer Lawrence” — This is an awkward interview. Lawrence has become self-conscious about her guilelessness with the media, and Maron’s show is the worst place to find yourself if that is what you’re currently self-conscious about. But they seem to like each other in spite of it. I dunno, it’s okay.

Code Switch catch-up — Definitely check out the immigration status episode. Three members of the same family, with three different immigration statuses. Complications ensue.

Omnibus (weeks of Feb. 18 & 25, 2018)

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If you are one of my seven regular readers, you’ll have noticed that last weekend was the first one since the beginning of this blog when I did not post an Omnibus, save for that time I was in the mountains. My apologies. Things have been busy. In any case, here are two weeks of reviews, with only one week’s worth of picks of the week, because honestly there’s not enough here to justify doubling it.

Also, I don’t want to talk about the Oscars.

19 reviews.

Comedy

Maria Bamford: Live at the Vogue — I love Maria Bamford. She is flat-out my favourite comedian right now. I love how convincing her characters are, and how quickly she can switch between them. I love how she interrupts herself and barely whispers some of her punchlines. I love how she interprets her own inner monologue as conversation. There’s nobody like her. Seeing her live was fantastic, but also a reminder that we are used to seeing our favourite comics in a highly edited and curated fashion. This was a selection of familiar material from Old Baby and unfamiliar stuff that ranges from instantly classic to bits I think could do with some paring back. In the first category: a bit about sexual roleplay involving intractable social problems (gentrification, living wage, human trafficking). In the second, a long bit where Bamford pits herself against her mother to see who is better at living by the Bible’s teachings. (Though I must say that Bamford’s account of the closest thing she had to a religious revelation is intensely satisfying: it is Nick Nolte coming out of the brush with a comically oversized submarine sandwich.) A great show, but also a reminder that live comedy is live comedy — even when it’s the best comedian in the world.

John Mulaney: New in Town — Mulaney does this thing I love where he establishes the details of a premise, then immediately takes it in a direction you didn’t think of. I guess that’s just what comedy is, but it’s really exposed here. There’s a bit about Mulaney encountering a wheelchair on its side on the street, with nobody in it. “That’s not a good thing to see,” he says. “Something happened there.” Pause. “You hope it’s a miracle.” Marvellous. I’ve watched this a couple times before. There’s a joke here and there that hasn’t aged well, but on the whole this is one of my favourite stand-up specials.

Movies

Call Me By Your Name — Of this year’s Best Picture nominees, this was the only one that I neither actively wanted to see nor actively wished to avoid. I can’t believe how much I loved it. You’ve likely heard people talk about the story of this film: a gay love story with a big age gap. And you might have heard comment on Timothée Chalamet’s brilliant, understated performance that will inevitably fail to win him an Oscar against Gary Oldman’s prosthetic jowls. But what makes the movie great is its ambiance. It is shot largely outdoors, entirely on-location in the Italian countryside, on glorious 35mm. Its exteriors are set in bright, verdant groves and by lakesides in the light of the romantic summer moon. Its interiors are set in airy country homes with studies lined by shelves of leather-bound books. It is soundtracked by the sublimely elegant music of John Adams, Bach, Ravel, Satie, and Sufjan Stevens. Magnificent food is seldom far from the centre of the frame. It is a movie about people with good taste — a movie that isn’t ashamed of its own aspiration to present things as straightforwardly beautiful. There’s nothing arch or cynical in Call Me By Your Name. It is a warm and glamourous sensory experience with a genuine emotional core and a brain. Also, the supporting actor category is a sham without Michael Stuhlbarg. Pick of the week.

Black Panther — We all expected it to be in the top tier of Marvel movies, and it is. There are quibbles to be had, i.e. it’s nice to see Andy Serkis’s actual face for once, but did we really need to see so much of it when Michael B. Jordan is the main villain? Almost everything else is glorious. Specifically, Wakanda is the most well-illustrated setting in the MCU thus far. The architecture, the clothes, the ceremony, the technology — every element makes Wakanda feel more real than the renditions of actual cities that other Marvel movies take place in. The cast is uniformly outstanding. Much has already been made of Jordan’s performance, and Chadwick Boseman is all kinds of regal. But my favourite performance in this movie by a million yards comes from Letitia Wright as T’Challa’s quippy little sister and science consultant. I loved Wright in Russell T. Davies’ Cucumber as well, so I hope we see her in many more gigantic productions in the coming years. Also, I am 100% there for more superhero movies in which different ideas of how to behave in the world are pitted against each other. This is an action movie that actually has time to discuss the relative merits of isolationism and interventionism — and to do so in the context of life for black people in modern America. Let’s have more of that, please. I have perhaps said this about too many movies for it to be meaningful anymore, but this time I mean it: if we must sit through this endless cavalcade of superhero blockbusters, I want more of them to have this kind of singular vision.

It — Being an adaptation of only half of a gigantic and famously discursive novel, this is about as good as it can be. Fundamentally, what is good about King’s novel makes it virtually unfit for adaptation: it is good not in spite of its various blind alleys and rabbit holes, but because of them. A big Hollywood movie has no choice but to pare the story down to its basics. So we get a tale of seven children, with variously well-established backstories, waging war against an evil shape-shifting clown. It’s a fine story, but it is a sliver of the rich tapestry King offers in the book. It is also deeply concerned with its familiar iconography: there is a much, much higher concentration of Pennywise here than there is in the book, and he appears in his famous clown form a far greater percentage of the time. Fine. There’s still got another whole movie to go, and since that one will focus on these seven characters’ adult selves, there’s still time for this franchise to hone in on the most fascinating element of the book: the fact that the real enemy is memory.

Music

Rued Langgaard/Berit Johansen Tange: Piano Works Vol. 3 — My coworkers and I have been obsessed with the criminally overlooked Danish composer Rued Langgaard since the new music director of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra name-dropped him in an interview I did. Honest to god, this composer is the very best of all the forgotten composers I’ve come across in my classical music writing career. Every single piece of his I’ve heard is brimming with personality and excitement. None of it sounds even remotely like anybody else’s music. Ten years from now Langgaard will be the new Mahler. So, I was shocked to hear that one of my colleagues was deeply disappointed in this recording of some of his shorter works for solo piano. I have never heard a disappointing Langgaard piece. But here we are: most of this is only okay. Some of it is beautiful: particularly the chorale-like Shadow Life and the frenetic As a Thief in the Night. But much of it is a bit academic — not a trait I had previously associated with Rued Langgaard. I think this marks the end of my honeymoon with this composer. I still love him — but not unconditionally. It had to happen. Also, Berit Johansen Tange plays all of this with maximum conviction. She’s not afraid to get deranged when necessary. Props.

Literature, etc.

Greg Rucka & J.H. Williams III: Batwoman Elegy — The second full comic we’ve had to read in the comics writing class I’m taking. Lovely stuff. Superhero comics are not normally my speed, and there were indeed some stumbling blocks for me here: I am really not that interested in action scenes, even when they are as characterful and motivated as they are in this. And I’m definitely not interested in reading about any more grotesque, Lewis Carroll-inspired villains. (When will people be done with grotesque Lewis Carroll? Just let him be whimsical.) But Kate Kane is a brilliant character whose out-of-costume storyline is really compelling. In superhero stories, there’s always a central question of why this person feels compelled to operate outside the conventional justice and security apparatus of the state. Kane’s answer to that question is simple and possibly the most sympathetic of all: don’t ask, don’t tell. That in itself is a masterstroke. And Williams’ art is a wonder to behold. My one other encounter with him, in Sandman: Overture, found him in maximum psychedelic mode. He’s less over-the-top here, but still deeply artful and inventive — sometimes, it must be said, at the cost of clarity. But when it’s so pretty to look it, who cares. I’m surprised at how happy I am to have read this.

Kris Straub: Broodhollow, Book I — More required reading for comics class. This is a good fun webcomic with elements of comedy, horror and character drama all thrown together without jostling in the slightest. I am on the fence about it in general because I find the story so completely reliant on tropes (exposition on a therapist’s couch, outsider finds his way into a creepy little town, secret society with weird robes, things happening that might be all in the protagonist’s head, menacing businessperson, people forgetting the bad things that happen to them — Stephen King’s had the last word on that one) that there’s not much that’s memorable in it. But the execution is outstanding to the extent that I almost think that critiquing the story is beside the point. Straub is willing to just show our main character silently walking home after a supernatural encounter in a state of complete shock, and have that be a whole page of the comic. He’s a master of serialized comic storytelling, where each miniature strip (because it is very nearly a comic strip) is a complete unit in itself, aside from being an integral part of a larger whole. It’s good comics. It’s a pedestrian story told so well that it doesn’t matter. Almost. It kind of matters. This is mostly good.

Podcasts

Theory of Everything: “Time Travellin’ Trump” — Theory of Everything is surely the only podcast where you could ever get a story about Donald Trump inheriting a time travel ring invented by Nikola Tesla and using it to affect football outcomes.

Showcase from Radiotopia: “Secrets” episodes 4-6 — I can’t help but feel like I committed to this mini-series for the sake of committing. But I’m happy I stuck it out for the last episode, which is the story of two whistleblowers who went on the run from MI5. This has been mixed. Showcase in general has been mixed. I guess that’s the point.

Song by Song: “Downtown Train” — I’m happy they like this one. “Downtown Train” is one of Tom’s best, and the music video, which I’d never seen before, is gold.

Imaginary Worlds: “Travelling in the TARDIS” & “Behind the Daleks” — I’d listen to more of this mini-series on Doctor Who, but alas it is over. Focussing the three episodes on the Doctor, the companions and the Daleks respectively was a good idea, but there are so many specific avenues this could have taken. Hopefully Eric Molinsky revisits this in the future.

On the Media: “Blame it on the Alcohol” & “Back to the Future” — Brooke Gladstone’s special on alcohol in the media is a good time, and the episode on youth movements in politics is really great context for the Never Again movement. Listen to On the Media. Do it regularly.

Constellations: “karen werner – swimming through butterflies” & “jeff emtman – dream tapes” — “Swimming Through Butterflies” might be my favourite thing I’ve heard on this show so far. It’s the story of a scientist walking through a forest full of butterflies — that’s all that happens — but it’s accompanied by elegant cello playing that puts you inside the experience in a way that nat sound couldn’t. “Dream Tapes” is inscrutable and not for me.

The Memory Palace: “Hercules” & “Big Block of Cheese” — Two brilliant and utterly contrasting episodes of this magnificent show. “Hercules” tells the story of one of George Washington’s slaves. Nate DiMeo tells the story in a way that sheds the largest possible amount of light on Hercules’ humanity and the inhumanity of Washington’s slave ownership. It’s deeply moving and brilliantly written. “Big Block of Cheese” is a hysterical story about a man who wanted to become a notable American and did, for the stupidest reason. Pick of the week.

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law — “The Tenth Amendment” & “The Poisonous Tree” — “The Poisonous Tree” is the highlight among these two. I confess that I always enjoy this show but my retention of its stories is limited. I blame myself.

Beautiful Conversations with Anonymous People: “Sober Mathematician” — This guy is a bit too much of a Chris Gethard fanboy for it to be an entirely authentic interaction. I did enjoy hearing about his sobriety story, though. Gethard is a very good sounding board for people to tell those stories.

The Kitchen Sisters Present: “The Mardi Gras Indians — Stories from New Orleans” — A selection of stories about one of the most fascinating musical traditions in America. I really enjoyed this, and I can’t wait for this new series by the Kitchen Sisters about archivists to get underway.

Radiolab: “Smarty Plants” & “The Curious Case of the Russian Flash Mob at the West Palm Beach Cheesecake Factory” — I’m always down for a Radiolab story where Robert Krulwich takes the lead. Thus, “Smarty Plants” is fun. I am almost never down for a quick turnaround political story on Radiolab. Thus, “The Curious Case” is exactly the reason why this is no longer one of my top tier podcasts.

Omnibus (week of Feb. 11, 2018)

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This is both late and somewhat halfhearted. I apologize. Things have been pleasingly busy. Only one pick of the week, since it’s a small one.

Nine reviews.

Music

Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band: Live 1975-85 — This live set is a perfect capper to Springsteen’s golden age. Its 40 songs (!) represent all seven studio albums he’d released up to this point, plus an assortment of oddities and covers, like his classic rendition of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl,” a song that sounds genuinely strange in Waits’ voice, but which works perfectly for the more romantic Springsteen. The only downside is that the set starts too strong and never quite rises to the level of its opening. The acoustic rendition of “Thunder Road” from 1975 is one of the greatest live reinventions you’ll ever hear. I can’t say it better than I did in my column on North by Northwest from a few weeks ago, so just scrub to 2:00:57 in this podcast and kindly ignore the fact that I said pathetic fallacy when I meant dramatic irony. Other highlights include Bruce’s top-shelf storytelling on “Growing Up” and “The River.” He’d be great on The Moth. Also, the slightly amped-up renditions of songs from Nebraska are satisfyingly different from the album versions, and work better than you’d think in a huge arena. I think I actually prefer this version of “Johnny 99,” just for Springsteen’s more dramatic vocal delivery. It’s a fabulous live album. It’ll live on my phone for a while, I’m sure.

Kanye West: 808s & Heartbreak — Like many people, I strongly disliked The Life of Pablo when it first came out. But it’s possible that I just wasn’t ready for it and I’ll revisit it in two years and think it’s a masterpiece. Because that’s how the entire world seems to have responded to this album. These days, auto-tuned, performatively vulnerable rappers are a dime a dozen. But Kanye did it first, and now that we’ve all realized the extent of this album’s impact, we can basically all agree that he did it best, right? Before this week, I had never heard 808s from start to finish. (I think there are still a couple Kanye albums I haven’t listened to straight through, which I will likely rectify in the coming weeks.) I’m not sure it isn’t my second-favourite Kanye album after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. For all his occasional lapses of lyrical taste, Kanye West is one of the greatest musicians in modern hip hop. And this album gives him an opportunity to show off his musicianship in a different light than any of his other albums — because it contains more self-imposed restrictions than any of his other albums. Most obviously, of course, he does not rap on it. But it also builds on a very specific musical aesthetic, based around the sound of the TR-808 drum machine. The economy of this album points ahead to Yeezus at times, and at others the cinematic sweep of it points to Fantasy. Those two future approaches come close to converging in a single piano line on “Welcome to Heartbreak,” an economical thing that over the course of a very long four bars, only uses five notes. It looped and looped in my head for a whole day, earlier this week. For me the other highlight is “RoboCop,” which contains some of the most florid, melodic musical material on any of Kanye’s records, and lyrics that approach Morrissey levels of hangdog irony. I love it. I love every song on it. Pick of the week.

Television

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Season 3, episodes 9-13 — Let me paraphrase a joke that made me laugh and laugh. “I took a career aptitude test once. It said I should be either an unlicensed barber or a police informant. And now look at me: I’m both.” I don’t know how anybody can write this stuff. Honest to god, I cannot remember anything about the story of this season, and I just finished watching it. But I laughed and laughed like a maniac. It is good television.

Podcasts

99% Invisible: “Border Wall” & “Making a Mark: Visual Identity with Tom Geismar” — The border wall episode is a nice collection of mini-stories dealing with that topic. And the Tom Geismar episode is a good example of a “Roman Mars does an interview” episode of 99pi, which I do generally enjoy.

Song by Song catch-up — I dunno, I like “Blind Love.” It’s amazing how much of this I’ve listened to given that I didn’t even like it at first.

Code Switch catch-up — The Valentine’s Day episode is properly contentious. Seek ye out that one. It is here.  

In Our Time: “Cephalopods” & “Fungi” — So I just learned that some cephalopods can change colour but can’t see colour. Thank you, BBC, for making me sad. Also, the thing that links these two episodes together, aside from being interesting discussions of the natural world, is that neither of their panels can agree on a single pronunciation of their subject. KEFF-ah-lo-pod? SEFF-ah-lo-pod? FUN-jie?

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The Winter Olympics” & “Black Panther and What’s Making Us Happy” — I have no television, and therefore will likely pass the Olympics by entirely. But Black Panther, whoo boy, am I ever in.

Desert Island Discs: “Christopher Nolan” — He does not have interesting taste in music, it turns out. His picks are all film scores, save for one Radiohead song he tried and failed to get the rights for when he was making Memento (“Paranoid Android”) and the blandest, weirdest pick for a song by his late, lamented former supporting actor David Bowie (“Loving the Alien”). But the interview is good: I always like hearing from artists who value order and discipline over chaos.

Omnibus (week of Feb. 4, 2018)

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Happy Family Day. 13 reviews, one of which is basically just a link. But it’s a link you should click.

Literature, etc.

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick — Hey, look over here.

Stephen King: It (audiobook) — At last, I’ve gotten through all 45 hours of this behemoth. I’ll start by praising the audiobook. The TV actor Steven Weber does a bang-up job bringing the dozens of characters in King’s sprawling narrative to life: many of whom in both child and grown-up forms. He seems to particularly relish Richie Tozier, who obsessively does voices himself. Frankly, Richie’s variously-offensive stereotyped characters get really annoying after a while, but that’s King’s fault for writing it that way. Weber’s commitment is commendable. As for the book itself, I’m comfortable saying that it’s one of the most extraordinary works of popular fiction I’ve read in a long time. There are elements of it that are dated, offensive, or simply a bit dumb, but they’re drowned out the same way that “Rocky Raccoon” is drowned out on the White Album. It is so sprawling, ambitious and heterogenous that its most flawed moments can easily recede from your mind when you consider the whole. Except one. You may have heard about the controversial child orgy in It? It is just as icky as you think. King has responded to criticism of this scene by saying: “it’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders.” That only serves to demonstrate that he doesn’t understand the problem. Child murders are terrible, but they are a thing that happens. Fiction is a perfectly good way to try and work through that fact. But that sex scene, which involves eleven-year-old children, is both explicit and completely arbitrary. The whole time it was happening, all I could think was “Man, you didn’t have to do this! Why did you do this?!?” I like Stephen King, and I think he is a decent person. But this one moment is really very bad. Since we’ve gone straight into the negatives, so is his general treatment of his one substantial female character. But all of this is a preface that will allow me to enthuse in more general terms about the rest of the book. In On Writing, King has some very convincing things to say about theme. Basically, he thinks you should write your story, and then figure out what it’s ‘about.’ Once you’ve figured that out, keep it in mind while you edit, and work to emphasize it. It is a strong book because King clearly knows what it is about. It is about memory: about the way we selectively recall our pasts, forgetting things for our own sanity. It’s about how the memories we choose to suppress can continue to subconsciously inform our lives, and how they can come back to hurt us suddenly and unexpectedly. Most of the time when horror is about something in this way, the metaphor is personified by the monster. (See Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s endless cavalcade of beasts, each reflecting an element of high school life.) It doesn’t work that way, though. The shapeshifting Pennywise is a marvellous, terrifying creation, but he is not materially a representation of memory or suppression. Instead of baking his theme into his monster, King bakes his theme into the book’s structure. Throughout the novel, we flash back and forth in time, learning about a group of children’s brave stand against Pennywise in 1958, and simultaneously about their adult selves’ return to Pennywise’s domain to finish what they started in 1985. And as we learn more about the events of 1958, we begin to become wiser than our protagonists’ adult selves, who remember none of this, and are thus walking blindly into a danger they can intuit but cannot understand. King’s metaphor of choice for their amnesia is the phenomenon where you forget your nightmares almost immediately, only recalling them in vague detail much later in the day when they can’t disturb you anymore. Pennywise is aware of all this, but he ties into a different theme in the book: belief. His power, like the power of many childhood story characters, comes from people believing in him and believing him powerful. Still, though: Pennywise knows the importance of memory to this story, and he ties the two key themes together in one of the book’s most powerful lines: “Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all — how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.” Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that the book is most powerful in these moments: the moments where Stephen King indulges in a bit of autocritique. I particularly love one moment with the young Stan Uris: a skeptical, bullied, Jewish boy who later claims that he’s fine with being scared, but can’t abide being dirty. He can’t abide things that present an offense to how he thinks about the world. He can’t find the words to express it to his friends, but the thought crosses his mind: “It’s offense you maybe can’t live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think maybe there’s a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five sides and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.” This passage is what this book is capable of at its best. It sprawls because it goes deep: deep into the history of its setting and characters, deep into the moments that change people’s lives, deep into the parts of our communities and minds that we don’t want to think about. That we’d rather forget.

Alison Bechdel: Fun Home — I have always wanted to write a book like this: a book that approaches real life as a subject for literary criticism. But unlike mine, Alison Bechdel’s early life actually justifies that approach. Fun Home tells the story of her relationship with her distant father, a complicated aesthete living in a tiny Pennsylvania town, who died young in a probable suicide. This is a man who spent his free time obsessively remodelling a dilapidated old mansion to old world splendor: a mansion that served as the family home. Immediately, you know this guy has to be interesting. The other major story element is Bechdel’s coming-of-age story, leaving home and discovering her own sexuality. The two stories entwine with one another and prop each other up. But the real connective tissue in Fun Home is the mutual obsession that Bechdel and her father have with classic literature. Each chapter revolves around a different work of literature that resonates with Bechdel’s story: the myth of Icarus and Daedalus as told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, Camus’s A Happy Death, a side-by-side reading of The Great Gatsby and The Portrait of a Lady, In Search of Lost Time, The Wind in the Willows, The Importance of Being Earnest, and finally — because that’s not enough of a reading list — Ulysses. This is the perfect kind of story to tell as a graphic novel. Again and again, Bechdel allows her expressive, beautiful cartoons to tell the surface-level story of her life with her parents, and reflects on this literature in the text that runs parallel. Never has a book that muses at length about Joyce been so staggeringly moving. It’s easily in my top five comics. Maybe top three. Read it immediately. Pick of the week.

Theatre

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop: Jabberwocky — I’ve wanted to see a production by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop since way back in high school, when I was a marginal contributor to a puppetry company myself. I dunno why I never did. I now live even farther away from them than I did back then. But this show was a marvellous entrée into their weird world. Jabberwocky is a cheap and janky-looking production that was clearly engineered to show all of its seams, and that’s what makes it so compelling. From the very start, the four members of the on-stage company make you feel like you’re witnessing something that will barely hold together. And then, within the context of that aesthetic, they tell a story that just knocks you flat. It’s a reinterpretation of the famous Lewis Carroll poem — specifically just that poem, and none of the Alice-related material surrounding it. So, it really is working with a bare minimum of source material. Essentially, the story of “Jabberwocky” is: a father warns his young son to beware of a terrifying monster, that young son impetuously goes off to slay that monster, and he succeeds and makes his father happy and proud. The Old Trouts have rethought this elementally simple story as a parable on how we shunt off all of our hopes and dreams for ourselves onto our children. It is a multi-generational retelling of “Jabberwocky” in which nobody gets to slay the Jabberwock. It is brilliant storytelling, brilliant theatre, and a brilliant reinterpretation of a too-familiar story.

Television

The Chris Gethard Show: “Whatever Happens, Happens” & “Bring It Home” — I like this show because I like Chris Gethard, but I sometimes wish he’d spend less time talking about how he wants to break the format of a TV talk show and more time just getting on with it. Still, there are great moments in these episodes: Nick Kroll staring down the camera, a cameo appearance by a goat, and a recurring bit in which Ira Glass wanders around the studio, alone.

Doctor Who: “The Ribos Operation” — The first classic Doctor Who story that I’ve watched a second time. I think there’s an argument to be made that this is not only one of the most brilliant and non-dated episodes of the classic series, but that it is the best possible starting point for new viewers. The writing is solid, of course; this is Robert Holmes we’re talking about. But it’s also one of the most self-aware stories in the classic series, where the comedy lands most successfully. It introduces an awesome new companion who, in spite of the Doctor constantly being a dick to her, holds her own and is a boss. It takes place in a few easily-rendered locales, so the sets aren’t too embarrassing. And most crucially, the acting is great all around. Every actor in this serial knows exactly what kind of story they’re in, namely a silly quasi-medieval space caper with terrible monster puppets, and they seem to appreciate both its ridiculousness and its brilliance. That is everything you can hope for from classic Doctor Who. This is amazing, and if you haven’t ever seen the classic series, watch this. I’m not saying you’ll love it, but if you don’t, I doubt there’ll be anything much for you in the rest of the series.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Season 3, episodes 1-8 — I didn’t love the second season of this because the jokes weren’t landing for me. But they sure are in this season. I’m uncertain about some of the ongoing jokes, like the caricatures of campus leftism who are seemingly the sole denisons of Columbia University. But Maya Rudolph as Dionne Warwick is a thing to behold, and there are jokes in this that I can’t believe anybody could come up with. “You know what yuppies eat? Ice cream that tastes like lavender.” “No! That’s a smell!” Love it. I’ll probably finish it in a couple days.  

Music

The Rolling Stones: Some Girls (Deluxe Edition) — The latest instalment in my increasingly tortured attempt to listen to every Stones album up to Tattoo You in order. I like Some Girls, but I feel like those who call it the best post-Exile Stones album undervalue Goats Head Soup. And the bonus material on this deluxe edition that I decided to check out for god knows what reason is fairly strong, but only by the standards of a band that was already on its downward slide.

Bruce Springsteen: Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. — This is maybe the clearest demonstration of “early promise” ever recorded. Compared to its successor, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, which remains one of my favourite Springsteen albums, this is Wordy As Hell. And while Bruce’s best songs will always be a bit hyperverbal, this is a bit much. For the only time in his career, Bruce’s lyrics are more clever than they are meaningful. I still like it, and “Spirit in the Night” is particularly essential. It’ll probably grow on me.

Bruce Springsteen: Born in the U.S.A. — This marks the point where I’ve heard every studio album from the Boss’s heyday. This week, I listened to the records that are commonly thought to bookend that period: this and Asbury Park. I deliberately saved them for last because I had a feeling that they were going to be the ones I liked least, and I was right. That said, neither one of them are outright bad. I find Born in the U.S.A. a bit slick. The title track, regardless of its universal misinterpretation, is a cliché. So is “Glory Days.” But weirdly, I like “Dancing in the Dark.” That chorus has three iconic lines in a row “You can’t start a fire without a spark/this gun’s for hire/even if we’re just dancing in the dark.” That’s skill, right there. And the smaller songs on this are really great, especially “Darlington County” and “My Hometown.” Now I’ll just round this whole binge off with the live set, and commence repeat listening.

Podcasts

Slow Burn — This series from Slate about the weirdest, freakiest details of the Watergate scandal is a great binge listen, and it’s done now, so get to it. The main idea is that it took Watergate a long time to find its way into the public consciousness, no matter how shattering an event it seems now. The show is a reflection on a state of scandal that resembles the current political craziness, but in a pre-internet age. It’s a bit wonky — this is Slate, after all. But listen to the first episode, which is about a woman who was forcibly tranquilized to keep her from talking, and see if you’re not hooked.

Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up — The Grammys will always disappoint Stephen, an Eagles victory will always delight Gene, and Roxane Gay will always be a fantastic chat. Darkest Hour sounds dire. Over and out.

More Perfect: “One Nation Under Money” — The second season finale keeps up the pace. This, as much as any other episode of More Perfect, made me understand a debate that I didn’t know was happening. Essentially, it is about the legal and ethical knots that America ties itself into when lawyers try to win cases by making everything about money. That is a vast oversimplification, but like all of the best things Jad Abumrad is involved with, it cannot be summarized easily. More Perfect is the best thing he’s done in a long time, and this is a great episode of it. Pick of the week.

Notes on Moby-Dick (which I have not finished): Part 1

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OKAY. My Norton Critical Edition has taken up long-term residence on my nightstand and I am PUMPED to SET SAIL.

(Edit, 2022: These notes are essentially just me recapping Moby-Dick as I read it very slowly and deliberately over the course of what has turned out to be several years. I’m writing it primarily for my own benefit and posting it for the interest of about five people who might care. Lightly edited out of sheer embarrassment.)

Etymology and extracts

I suspect this introduction has a lot to say about what kind of book this is going to be. Most novels start with one or two epigraphs that are relevant to the story or themes. If you’re Steven King, maybe you’ll indulge yourself and stretch it out to five or six. Moby-Dick starts with A WHOLE CHAPTER OF EPIGRAPHS. There are EIGHTY of them.

Also, most authors present their epigraphs without comment. They just put them there in the middle of an austere, mostly empty page. NOT HERMAN MELVILLE. This guy has to make up a little story about where all this came from. Evidently he got his etymology of the word “whale” from a schoolmaster who died of tuberculosis (“a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School”) and his cavalcade of epigraphs from a vanishingly minor drone at a public library (“a Sub-Sub Librarian”).

Given that the story hasn’t even started yet you might imagine that this, at least, is true. But it isn’t; neither of these people are real. Melville is already trolling us: he did all this research himself. And quite the accomplishment it is! Imagine trying to find eighty resonant extracts about whales in texts ranging from Shakespeare to ship’s logs without the help of the internet. This is a writer who’ll always go the extra nautical mile: no mere storyteller, but a person who Knows Stuff and has Read Things and Really Could Go On For A While.

So: let’s take stock, quickly. We’re ten pages in and we’ve already witnessed a gratuitous display of erudition, nested in a weird structure game where you can’t quite tell the real from the fake; the comical from the plain faced; the sane from the mad.

Onwards.  

Chapter 1: Loomings

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Richard Basehart in the 1956 movie version I haven’t seen.

This chapter is what made me want to read Moby-Dick. Before I picked up the book and read chapter one on a whim, I’d assumed that Moby-Dick was a somewhat bloated adventure story. This chapter immediately dispels that notion.

I read this countless times before I managed to move onto the second chapter. I love it; I love to read it out loud. That’s the way to really get your head around it. This book’s narrator, Ishmael, is simultaneously one of the most famous characters in fiction on account of this book’s famous first line, and somewhat underrated. He’s maybe my favourite first-person narrator ever, partially because he’s so hard to figure out. “Call me Ishmael” is a suspiciously phrased introduction, best read through narrowed eyes. I don’t think we’ll ever know this guy’s name. 

But we can forgive Ishmael for being cagey, because he’s also a genius and a polymath with a manic fascination for language. He loves language so much that he often gets excited and uses more of it than he needs to. Catch him in one of his really good flights of fancy and he’s the personification of all the joy there is to be had in observing the world.

He is also traumatized. I’m not finished the book but I know as well as you do that it does not end happily. Ishmael is telling the story in retrospect, some years later, “never mind how long precisely.” Surely he didn’t emerge from his maritime ordeal unscathed. And there are tells, here and there. Look at the way he first brings up the whaling voyage that’ll be the whole subject of the book: “But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage…” That sentence is the turning point of the chapter. It’s the first indication of what the story’s going to be about. And it’s just sitting casually in the middle of a paragraph. Ishmael can write super emphatically about all the abstract reasons why water is important (anticipating the best bit of Ulysses by almost 70 years) but he crab walks into the actual story with great hesitancy. I have a personal theory that part of the reason Ishmael beats around the bush so much and talks about pyramids and Niagara Falls and other irrelevant topics is that he’s actively trying to avoid telling the story for as long as possible, because it is going to be an emotionally taxing story to tell. Moby-Dick is a novel where a storyteller peels off an emotional band-aid as slowly and haltingly as possible. (Editing this in 2022, I’ve become aware that this is also a key thesis in the morally dubious new Darren Aronofsky film The Whale, which I probably won’t see, proving nonetheless that old adage about stopped clocks.) 

There are indications that Ishmael had some issues before he ever set foot on the whaling ship that traumatized him. He proclaims, semi-jokingly, within the first few sentences of the book that he likes to go to sea “whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off.” This is CONCERNING TO SAY THE LEAST but it is also exactly what pulled me into the novel in the first place. I’m not sure how interested I am in revenge stories, maritime adventure, or obsessive captains. But I’m quite happy to spend some quality time with this narrator, no matter how reluctant he is to actually tell the story he’s ostensibly telling.

The other thing I love is that even though Ishmael clearly has some serious baggage related to his time at sea, he knows how good the story is. Look at how his language takes flight at the very end of the chapter, as he’s about to launch into the narrative proper: “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” How can you not love a guy who can conjure up that kind of wonder in relation to the worst experience of his whole life? “I am quick to perceive a horror,” Ishmael tells us, “and could still be social with it — would they let me.” We should all be so generous to our trauma.

In chapter one, we meet our mysterious, manic, melancholy guide through the tale of Moby-Dick. He tells us essentially nothing about the story or about his past life. But he does something much more profound and compelling: he shows us how his mind works. He tells us about why he loves the sea and why he loves being a lowly sailor rather than an officer. He tells us about the doldrums that take hold of him when he lingers too long on land. And, maybe half by accident, he exposes us to the sheer force and charm of his personality and makes us want to pay attention, whether he’s getting on with the story or not.

Chapter 2: The Carpet-Bag

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This is what a carpet bag looks like. Whatever his many virtues, Ishmael is not a strong accessorizer.

Ah, look! We have some honest-to-god story! Things Are Happening! Essentially, the next several chapters detail Ishmael’s wanderings in New Bedford, a whaling town that seems at this point to have superseded Nantucket in its industry prevalence. But Ishmael, being something of a Hipster Whaler, makes a point of expressing his disappointment in this fact. He is headed for Nantucket, thank you very much; nothing but the OG whaling port will do for a man of history such as our narrator. Still, he can’t help but start his narrative long before the action begins. So, we’ll follow him around New Bedford for a few chapters while he waits for something to happen. (When I said that Things Were Happening I was speaking in the broadest possible terms.)

In chapter two, Ishmael walks through the streets of New Bedford with his weird bag, looking for a decent place to stay. It contains one of my favourite comically overstuffed sentences in English. Ishmael means to say “I didn’t have much money, so I needed to find a cheap hotel.” Instead, he says: “With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.” Marvelous.

In any case, Ishmael settles on a place called the Spouter-Inn, which will make up the setting and title of the next chapter.

Chapter 3: The Spouter-Inn

Our narrator’s account of his arrival and first night at the Spouter-Inn contains a bunch of top-shelf Ishmaelisms about the weird painting by the bar, and one crucial plot element. This is the chapter in which we meet our first non-Ishmael main character: Queequeg, a cannibalistic harpooneer from a made-up island in the South Pacific who unexpectedly becomes Ishmael’s literal strange bedfellow.

Queequeg is a somewhat troublesome character, but let’s give Melville credit for what he’s trying to do, which is to present a character whose cultural difference from the novel’s white frame is an asset and not a deficiency. Nonetheless, best to acknowledge that some specifics of his characterization, particularly the pidgin English, do rankle a bit.

It’s telling that the first truly racist attitude we see in the novel comes from a thoroughly unsympathetic character: Peter Coffin, the landlord of the Spouter-Inn. (“Coffin” is a word which will come to take on a substantial significance for both Ishmael and Queequeg later in the book, which I know because I have cheated and read the epilogue.) Coffin is a jackass. He decides that Ishmael and Queequeg will sleep two-to-a-bed this night, and as soon as he makes that decision it becomes a huge private joke for him. Coffin’s well aware that Queequeg is harmless. Still, he insists on dropping cryptic, racist hints to Ishmael that his sleeping companion may in fact be mortally dangerous. So basically, before we get to know Queequeg through Ishmael’s more progressive eyes, we see him as he is seen by the bulk of the white Americans he interacts with: as a disfigured monster, a person so profoundly “other” that one cannot relate to him. It’s a thuddingly obvious point, but actually this book’s real disfigured monsters are both white.

At the end of the chapter, Peter Coffin’s practical joke pays off: Queequeg is startled to find a strange man unexpectedly in his bed, and Ishmael is mortally frightened to find himself in the company of a startled man he has every reason to think is a murderer. Hearing the commotion in the room where he’s paired them off, Coffin arrives to defuse the situation, and all is well. It’s as close as classic literature gets to farce without actually being a straight-up farce.

Chapter 4: The Counterpane

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For the faint of sight: “Queequeg and his Harpoon”

Ishmael wakes up to find Queequeg’s arm flung around him matrimonially. Hmm, I wonder if I Google “Ishmael/Queequeg fanfic” what would OH MY GOD

This is the chapter where we’re introduced to the real Queequeg, as opposed to Peter Coffin’s made-up monster. Ishmael regards him as a bit of an archeological curiosity, which isn’t entirely progressive, but hey, we’re headed in the right direction.

Also, every time Ishmael shares a memory from before the start of this story, it is fucked up. First the thing about knocking people’s hats off in the street. Now this nonsense about him hallucinating a phantom hand as a child. The man is barely coping.

If it seems like I’m glossing over the plot, that’s because it still isn’t happening. You’ll hear no complaints from me. 

Chapter 5: Breakfast

Ishmael descends from his room to eat a hearty morning meal. He generously forgives Peter Coffin for his skullduggery. He observes that you can tell how long a whaler has been ashore from his tan. And he complains that none of his fellow tenants at the Spouter-Inn want to talk at the table. It’s easy to assume, because he’s such a verbose narrator of the book that Ishmael is one of those people who never shuts up. But how could he have become so worldly-wise if he weren’t also an accomplished listener? I understand his frustration at this silent breakfast. These people clearly have stories. How DARE they keep it all to themselves. They’re depriving a writer of potential material. Shameful. 

Chapter 6: The Street

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I promise not to go long on this, but man, New Bedford sure sounds a lot like my hometown. I’m from Fort McMurray, Alberta, a mid-sized oil town in the frozen north. Like New Bedford, it is a place where the land itself is almost comically inhospitable and ugly. When Ishmael describes New Bedford, he tells us that “parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony.” And yet, “the town itself is perhaps the dearest [most expensive] place to live in, in all New England.” He makes a big thing of how big and lavish the houses are in this landscape that ought to be desolate, all because of whaling: the mad slaughter that was at the time the fifth-biggest industry in the United States. All these mansions, Ishmael says in a cinematic turn of phrase, “were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” Sub out whaling for oil, and you’re pretty close to the place I’m from. Maybe that’s another part of what pulls me in. 

Chapter 7: The Chapel

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The present-day Seaman’s Bethel in New Bedford, on the same land as the previous one that burned down.

Ishmael and Queequeg spend the next three chapters in church. I understand the church they go to actually exists: it burned down in the 1860s, but has since been rebuilt. It was originally a church specifically for the whalers of New Bedford and their families, a place to go and pray that neither you nor any of your loved ones will get eaten by sea monsters. It’s a necessary public service, considering that death at sea was frighteningly commonplace. The main purpose of this chapter is to establish that fact. The memorial plaques on the wall of the chapel make us aware of the fact that we are following Ishmael on a journey of staggering risk. It’s Melville’s way of ratcheting up the tension, the way a fantasy writer might point out all of the human bones in the cave that the would-be dragonslayer has just entered.

It’s also one of the most powerful chapters in the book so far, clearly expressing the unique pain and uncertainty of losing a loved one at sea, with no body to serve as confirmation. As Ishmael observes the grieving families around the chapel’s memorials, he reflects: “Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these.” 

Chapter 8: The Pulpit

The one comedic factor that undercuts the power of these chapters in the church is that the chapel’s décor is super tacky. The pulpit is fashioned in the likeness of the prow of a ship, as if the pastor thinks the congregation needs to be reminded of who they are. There was a seafood restaurant like this in Fort McMurray, which is full of nostalgic expat Newfoundlanders. Rigging along the walls, part of a rowboat affixed to the ceiling. I always thought, how can this possibly be helping? Wikipedia tells me that the tacky pulpit was Melville’s invention and that the actual chapel was tasteful and neutral. But after Moby-Dick became a hit, they went ahead and installed a prow-shaped pulpit, proving that the Disneyland impulse to shape reality in accordance with fiction extends to the literary world as well.

A final observation: Ishmael opines that the pulpit is at the head of the world. The person giving a sermon is in the lead, and everybody else follows. Coming from Ishmael, this doesn’t feel so much like a display of religious conviction as a show of faith in the power of language. The pulpit is a place where speeches are made, and people act on those speeches. Before long, Ishmael will meet another excellent speaker who demonstrates the dark side of this power, and it’ll completely ruin his life. 

Chapter 9: The Sermon

If the chapel’s decor was tacky, then Father Mapple’s constant use of sailor-speak is downright condescending. Nevertheless, his sermon is pretty clever. He starts off with a hymn: a whaling-inspired adaptation of Psalm 18 in the hymnbook Melville grew up with, in which a sinner is filled with fear and anxiety before finding salvation in prayer. For an even better version, with kickass piano and no happy ending, see Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.”

After the hymn, Father Mapple tells the story of Jonah, which is A LITTLE ON THE NOSE YOU’VE GOTTA ADMIT. But he tells the story in a way that reflects the theme of Psalm 18, and also reflects Ishmael’s antipathy towards paying passengers in the first chapter: “In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

I wonder if this priest talks about Jonah every single Sunday. Maybe Ishmael and Queequeg just drop in on Jonah Day by coincidence. Maybe he alternates between Jonah and the whale and Noah’s ark. Surely this guy doesn’t have time for Bible stories about the desert.

Chapter 10: A Bosom Friend

First, the plot: Ishmael gets back from church, bonds with Queequeg, and worships a wooden idol with him: no small thing for a Presbyterian.

This is one of those chapters where my Norton Critical really comes in handy. Dr. Hershel Parker’s footnotes point out that the 30 pieces of silver Queequeg gifts Ishmael with are an echo of the 30 pieces of silver Judas received for betraying Jesus. Parker also informs me that, in spite of Ishmael’s admirable justification for joining Queequeg in his worship ceremony (he just thinks it’s nice to be friendly!) it is a blasphemous justification according to the conventional reading of Exodus (“I am a jealous god.”) So, 30 pieces of silver for a betrayal of the lord.

The footnotes also assert that Melville’s blasphemy was the second-most important reason why his writing career ended prematurely. The most important reason was piracy, but not the skull-and-crossbones kind; that would just be too on the nose. Just normal, boring intellectual property theft.

Chapter 11: Nightgown

This is presumably the chapter that makes people read Moby-Dick as a queer novel where Ishmael and Queequeg are fucking. Ishmael carefully elides any sexy business, but really he’s just leaving space for the internet to do its own nasty work. 

Unrelatedly, I really love Ishmael’s point about us not being fully ourselves unless we have our eyes closed. It’s a way of shutting out the reality outside and constructing our own reality. Ishmael is a benign narcissist. His narcissism allows him to understand others better because he has fully taken stock of himself.

Chapter 12: Biographical

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These pictures are from Rockwell Kent’s illustrated edition, which I mostly really like.

At last we get to hear Queequeg’s backstory. He’s the son of a king on a Pacific island that doesn’t exist in the real world. “It is not down in any map,” Ishmael informs us. “True places never are.” Sure.

Basically, Queequeg decided one day after an encounter with some white men who came by on a ship that he’d like to visit Christendom, learn what he can, and return to his people to help engender some kind of cultural exchange. So, he managed with great difficulty to convince the captain of the ship to take him to America. But soon he came to realize that white Christians could be cruel and venal and that this wasn’t his world. But at this point, his home island wasn’t home either. He felt he was too Christianized to rightly ascend his father’s throne. He is a man without a country: a seafarer who can live nationlessly aboard whaling vessels until he feels it’s right to go home. Much later, Ishmael will tell us that “in landlessness alone resides highest truth.” By that standard, Queequeg is the truest person in the story.

Chapter 13: Wheelbarrow

WE’RE MOVING. After eleven chapters in New Bedford, our narrator has finally set off for the OG whaling port of Nantucket on a schooner. He’s got Queequeg in tow and thank god for that, because his presence allows for AN ACTION SCENE.

One of the would-be whalers (Ishmael calls him a “bumpkin”) on the schooner dares to mock Queequeg, and he responds with a display of Jackie Chan-style comedy violence. Immediately thereafter, the ship’s boom comes detached: a problem Queequeg swiftly resolves in a whirlwind of jumping and lasso twirling. Ishmael finishes the chapter with great bluster, having now established that Queequeg is Spider-Man.

Do these tall tales of Queequeg’s derring-do strain credulity? Maybe. But remember what book we’re reading. You can’t quite tell the real from the fake; the comical from the plain faced; the sane from the mad.

Onwards.

To be continued.

Omnibus (week of Jan. 28, 2018)

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I’m not sure there has ever been a smaller omnibus than this. I have spent the bulk of the week with a pair of problematically anti-racist novels by American white men (Moby-Dick and It). I have nothing to say about either of these at the moment, being relatively near the start of one and enticingly close to the end of the other. So, content thyselves with these two reviews of a wonderful piece of music that everybody should hear and a brilliant season finale to a show that everybody should watch.

Music

John Luther Adams: Four Thousand Holes — I return to this fairly often when I need something cathartic, yet slow-paced. Adams’ music always moves at a rate that’s slower than your brain wants to move, which is how it pulls you in. But the title composition of this album is, I think, a particularly special piece because it slows your brain down, and then proceeds to build up to a satisfying climax while it has you in a trance. I daresay it does in a chamber music context what his epochal Become Ocean does with a full orchestra. The fact that it invokes the climax of “A Day in the Life” in the process is a nice touch, but unlike many “art music” works that reference iconic pop songs, it is not the entire point. I really adore this. Pick of the week.

Television

The Good Place: “Somewhere Else” — It’s a smaller finale than the season one finale, but that’s inevitable. Once again, this show has drastically altered its status quo: a thing it does several times per season. This is a particular barnburner for Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, whose barroom scene is one of the best in the show so far. How long do we have to wait for season three???

Omnibus (week of Jan. 21, 2018)

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A big week for podcasts, a small week for everything else. Also, if you’d like to hear me try and make a connection between a prototypical sound recording from 1860 and a Bruce Springsteen song, you are cordially invited to scrub to 2:00:57 in this podcast.

24 reviews.

Literature, etc.

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick — This is happening. I’m putting my whole reading list on hold for this, and I have no regrets so far. For now, I will only signpost that I’ve started it. I guarantee I will have lots to say about it at some point, but who knows when and in what form that will come. In any case: I have started reading Moby-Dick. Pick of the week.

Adam Gopnik: “The Corrections” — This is a long essay I found thanks to a link in a shorter essay I found thanks to the fact that I’m reading Moby-Dick. (By the way, I’m reading Moby-Dick.) Gopnik wrote it in 2007, which was actually a fairly long time ago, and it contains some blasé sexism that I suspect Gopnik would regret nowadays. Or, maybe I should say — it contains some blasé acceptance of the sexism in James Bond movies, but it adds up to the same. Also, it hails from a time when DVDs were dominant and people watched movies with director’s commentaries. (I do miss director’s commentaries.) Still, it’s a good piece of criticism. The subject is essentially alterations being made to established texts — like the abridged version of Moby-Dick, or Apocalypse Now: Redux. The Moby-Dick bit is the best. I’ll quote his conclusion here and leave you to read the rest should you see fit: “…when you come to the end of the compact ‘Moby-Dick’ you don’t think, What a betrayal; you think, Nice job — what were the missing bits again? And when you go back to find them you remember why the book isn’t just a thrilling adventure with unforgettable characters but a great book. The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby.”

Music

Barbara Hannigan: Tiny Desk Concert — What a perfect choice for the tiny desk. Hannigan is maybe the most exciting artist in classical music, full stop. And in this miniature set, she sings four weird German art songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler, Hugo Wolf, and Arnold Schoenberg, which are all captivating. I would say I’d like to hear more art songs at the tiny desk, but frankly most art songs bore me to tears. It takes an expert curator with sublime musicianship to bring this off. It’s great.

Movies

Don’t Think Twice — I’ve been meaning to watch this since it came out, and was reminded of it on Chris Gethard’s last podcast. I confess, I have a personal stake in this because I feel as though it outlines an alternate timeline version of my life. It’s about a troupe of 20/30-something improv comedians on the precipice of either breakout fame or the need to give up entirely. I was an improv kid in high school, and I can attest to the accuracy of this movie’s portrayal of adult improvisers. When you spend so much of your time on an art form that demands constantly saying yes to everything and essentially ignoring your god-given impulse control, it can cause you to act really strangely in social situations. I gave improv up after high school, studied classical trumpet, and was never spontaneous again, thank Jesus. But I know people who kept going with it, and they were increasingly difficult to associate with because improv makes your brain work in a weird way, like you’re constantly on a mild stimulant. Mike Birbiglia (who directed this and wrote the bits that aren’t actually improvised) understands this, and in that sense, Don’t Think Twice is a fascinating movie to watch. The casting is flawless, with Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs standing out in particular as two very different kinds of people that improv attracts. Key is the hyper-performative show-off whose sense of self depends on the attention of others. (I was this.) Jacobs is the team player who believes in the art, and the slightly mystical notion of “group mind” that it’s based on. Birbiglia’s best decision as a writer was to take these two archetypes and put them in a relationship. The personal drama in the film springs from the same personality differences that make its two central characters such different presences onstage. Birbiglia and Gethard flesh out other important elements in the troupe’s collective psyche. Birbiglia plays the flipside of Key’s character: the one whose hunger for attention goes unsatisfied and makes him an insecure man-child. And Gethard plays, seemingly, his younger self: a person who can’t find purchase in the world around him, and takes solace in an increasingly untenable dream. (If you don’t like movies about sad creatives, give this one a miss.) The problems I have with the movie are the same problems I have with Birbiglia’s stand-up. He’s a fantastic storyteller, but he always has a theme in mind and he’s completely unwilling to let it arise naturally. His impulse is always to use the most obvious metaphor. For example: he establishes at the beginning of the movie that the first rule of improv is to say yes. When you negate something a teammate says onstage, it’s called “blocking” and it’s the most basic error in the improv book. Near the end of the movie, Birbiglia has a relationship come to an end during an improv scene — in which the breaker-up blocks the break-upee. It’s too much, and in a movie about spontaneity, it really exposes the strings in a way that takes you out of the experience. This sort of thing happens a lot: an audience member will shout something to the troupe for the purpose of showing the movie audience how the characters are feeling, or an improv scene will ham-fistedly reflect on the goings-on offstage. But the contrivances in the story can be mostly forgiven because of how real the characters feel. I suspect this is a movie that plays a lot better for people who have some experience with improv. Watch it if that describes you, or if you like any of the actors in it, because it’s worthwhile for the performances alone.

Television

Doctor Who: “The Romans” — I enjoyed this more than I expected to, given my lack of enthusiasm for a) historically-focussed episodes of Doctor Who, and b) the William Hartnell era in general. But for all its manifold flaws, there are some charming things in this. First off, Hartnell himself is finally playing the Doctor as a character that’s identifiably the same as his future, more famous incarnations. You need only look at his gleeful expression when he realizes his role in the burning of Rome to recognize that Hartnell, for all his manifold flaws, invented this character in a way he’s not always given credit for. He’s flubbing his lines as much as ever, but he’s so charming in this. This version of the Doctor, the gleefully Rome-burning one, comes back in many a future “geronimo,” “would you like a jelly baby,” and “oh, brilliant!” It’s also marvellous to have Vicky around instead of Susan, because she was always a problematic character to say the least. Maureen O’Brien plays Vicky as intelligent, curious and brave — three things that Susan was manifestly not, in spite of the characters’ assertions that she was. I’m quite a fan of Nero being portrayed as a bumbling idiot whose key purpose is to get fucked with by the Doctor, who is in a particularly playful mood this time around. I am less fond of Nero’s tendency to chase Barbara — the show’s longest-standing female character — around his palace in a clear attempt to commit some form of sexual violence. That last bit aside, I have basically just enumerated all of the redeeming qualities in this story, which very much remains television from the 60s that is mostly of historical interest.

The Good Place: “The Burrito” — I’m still waiting for this show to repeat itself. This takes place almost entirely in settings we haven’t seen before, and introduces another whole mechanic into the show’s cosmology: an ageless judge played by Maya Rudolph — my second-favourite guest appearance in this show so far, after Maribeth Monroe as Mindy St. Clair. She can spin a line like nobody else. Still, I find myself much more interested in the twists and turns of the story itself than I do in the show’s larger thematic concerns or, crucially, the jokes. To a certain extent I think The Good Place is the first sitcom I’ve watched where the jokes aren’t always funny but it doesn’t matter. There’s a perfect example in this episode. Near the beginning, Jason comes up with the loony idea that perhaps the burrito sitting before the group is in fact the judge they’ve been looking for. Tahani replies: “Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. Judges aren’t food, judges are serious people who wear long silk nightgowns and big white powdered wigs.” In a Tina Fey show, that would not pass muster. It’s a moment where, according to the rhythms of a single camera, non-laugh track sitcom, there should be a joke, and that line fills the space — not especially well. But you don’t really need to laugh during this scene, because, crazy as it sounds, you’re actually caught up in the question of what is actually going on with that burrito. And Eleanor refocusses the conversation on that pretty much immediately afterwards. It’s a very distinctive comedy that can make you care about the identity of a burrito more than you care about the jokes.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “Viking’s Choice: The Year In Cathartic Screams And Meditative Drones,” “New Year, New Mix: Typhoon, Lucy Dacus, Anna Burch, More” & “New Mix: David Byrne, Sylvan Esso, Nils Frahm, More” — I always love the year-end Viking’s Choice episode with Lars Gotrich, but the MVP of these three episodes of All Songs is definitely the most recent of them. It features a David Byrne track, co-written with Brian Eno (I’m already salivating), an appearance from Tom Huizenga to talk about Nils Frahm (whose new album sounds more promising than his last, which I did like), and a beautiful track by Darlingside, who I hadn’t heard of but whose album I will 100% check out. Likewise for Typhoon. Mostly I’m writing this to remind myself what to listen to later.

Imaginary Worlds: “Brain Chemistry” & “Doctor Who?” — “Brain Chemistry” is a collaboration with The Truth that I liked well enough, though I never especially like The Truth. This is about a guy who gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up as nothing but a brain. Listen if that sounds like a fun premise. The real attraction, though, is the first episode of Eric Molinsky’s Doctor Who mini-series. It’s very 101, but for most people that’ll be necessary. Also Molinsky does something here that he’s done before, which I always love: he focuses in on the reception of a piece of fiction rather than its making, and he finds people whose reception of that fiction is unique in some way. The best part of this episode features an interview with a trans man and his wife about how the Doctor’s constant state of change gave them a language to use in reference to his transition. It’s lovely stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing what more specific topics Molinsky dives into.

Constellations: “joan schuman – walking in bad circles” — Of all the podcasts I listened to while I was cooking this week, this is the one that probably got the rawest deal. Always listen to Constellations through headphones, folks. It’s the only way it works. All the same, I really like the phrase “walking in bad circles,” which makes up a significant part of this short piece.

Criminal: “The Choir” — A deeply affecting story about Lawrence Lessig, of internet law fame, and the way he dealt with a horrifying instance of childhood abuse by a predator. This is one of the heavy episodes of Criminal, which I can sometimes find hard to take. I like when this show does light subject matter, because it shows the flexibility of their premise, which is basically “crime!” But this one’s good.

The Memory Palace: “The Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin: Highlights of a Study of Counts, Behaviour, Turnover, Movement and Habitat” & “The Nickel Candy Bar” — The Memory Palace has a few kinds of stories that it does often. One of them is “driven, iconoclastic woman from a bygone time defies the norms of her era.” This is a good kind of story, and the first of these two episodes is a particularly good iteration of it. It also incorporates elements of another Memory Palace standby: the environmental parable. So, it is altogether one of the most Memory Palace episodes of The Memory Palace, and that is a good thing. “The Nickel Candy Bar” is a lovely thing with a bit more structural adventurousness than usual. It starts with one story, abruptly transitions to another, brings them together, then undercuts the whole thing. Marvellous.

Bullseye: “Rian Johnson & The Go! Team” — The Rian Johnson interview is what makes this worthwhile. He’s a charming and funny guy, and this conversation really drives home the thing I’ve been saying about The Last Jedi all this time: it’s just a Star Wars movie. A very good but totally ordinary and in no way groundbreaking or unusual Star Wars movie. The only exception to this that Johnson and Jesse Thorn get to is that the reveal about Rey’s parentage reverses the franchise’s reliance on bloodlines for narrative importance. Granted, that’s not a small thing. But it’s only one thing in a whole movie full of things that strongly resemble everything else about Star Wars.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Four-episode catch-up — I’ll be seeing The Florida Project ASAP, but I believe I’ll give Mrs. Maisel a miss. This panel wasn’t hot on Phantom Thread, which doesn’t surprise me, but I’m quite certain I’ll like it more than them. I’m prepared for it not to be There Will Be Blood or The Master. But I’ll like it. I’m 90% sure. Will I watch The Good Doctor? No I will not.

Reply All: “Apocalypse Soon” & “The Bitcoin Hunter” — Okay, now I’m starting to want more bespoke stories and fewer segments on this show. “Apocalypse Soon” is a fine and deeply entertaining episode. Anything that finds Alex Blumberg giggling about a meme is okay by me. And “The Bitcoin Hunter” is a captivating Super Tech Support that does everything you want a Reply All story to do. But I want more Sruthi Pinnamaneni.

The Kitchen Sisters Present: “House of Night – The Lost Creation Songs of the Mojave People” — This is the story of two men who recorded and archived hundreds of Mojave songs. Being a Kitchen Sisters piece, it’s full of amazing archival tape and sounds great. But the story is compelling in itself. I always love how the Kitchen Sisters foreground the way that recordings and archives don’t just document, but can actually affect the course of history. In this case, a recording of a mostly forgotten song helped to save the Ward Valley and Colorado River from development by proving the longstanding Mohave connection to that land.

Theory of Everything: “Utopia (part iii)” — Instead of reviewing this I will tell a story about something that happened to me as I was listening to it. I started it on my lunch break, at which point I went out for a salad. As I sat and ate, I had a realization of a kind that I frequently have: that somebody I know has been trying to get my attention. In this case, it was a co-worker, and she was about to give up completely and leave me to my lunch when I looked up and saw her. Little did I know, this was not the whole story. The next day, a different co-worker came up to me and told me that he’d been waving at me and calling my name in that same restaurant at that same time, to no avail. He was just about to walk up to me and tap me on the shoulder when I noticed my other co-worker standing in the line. Two separate people tried and failed, or nearly failed, to get my attention while I listened to this. I guess it must be good.

Radiolab: “The Voice in Your Head – A Tribute to Joe Frank” — Oh god, how I wish I could dive into this guy’s archive for free. Joe Frank is a radio innovator I had never heard of until a few weeks ago, and I can already see how his work informs so much of what I love in radio. This features Jad Abumrad, Brooke Gladstone and Ira Glass talking about him, but aside from those three I see a huge debt to Frank in Nate DiMeo’s work, and even more so in Jonathan Goldstein’s. I could even see Kaitlin Prest being an acolyte of his. The stories they play here are outstanding and I will definitely be buying some of his pieces from his website (this is how he operated, even in a post-podcast world). This made me want to go make radio immediately. Pick of the week.

Beautiful Conversations with Anonymous People: “Boy Crazy” — This is a lighter episode of Beautiful/Anonymous, and also a lesser one. The caller is a 21-year-old artsy college student with some insecurities. The thing that makes the conversation work when it works is that Chris Gethard really relates to her, having been in much the same situation himself. But it’s awkward and meandering in a way that these conversations usually avoid being. I mostly enjoyed this. But the appeal of this format is that it isn’t always going to work. Really, the appeal of anything Chris Gethard does is that it isn’t always going to work.

Fresh Air: “Paul Thomas Anderson On ‘Phantom Thread’” — P.T.A. seems like a decent fellow. I’m prepared to basically enjoy Phantom Thread without being over the moon about it. But hearing the director talk about working once again with Daniel Day-Lewis and Jonny Greenwood makes me remember how much I love this guy’s work and everybody in his orbit.

99% Invisible: “Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud” — Coincidentally, I just started a class on writing for comics. I read Understanding Comics a few years ago, and it blew my mind. McCloud is a very clever guy, and hearing him talk with Roman Mars is fun because they both get angry about bad design.

Song by Song: “Gun Street Girl, Rain Dogs, Tom Waits” — Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer are the only two guests so far in the Rain Dogs episodes who haven’t really worked. You need pop culture geeks for a show like this, and as much as I love Criminal, Phoebe Judge manifestly isn’t that. Lauren Spohrer may be slightly more so, but this isn’t a very enlightening conversation.

Code Switch: “The ‘R-Word’ In The Age Of Trump” — In which Kat Chow gets called out by a listener for not calling Trump racist. But… institutions like NPR are huge beasts that can sometimes force you to work against your better judgement. Fortunately, there’s such a thing as Code Switch, where conversations like this can happen publicly.

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law: “The 4th Amendment and the Border” — “The border” is not a line, legally speaking. It is a space of up to 100 miles wide. Who knew?

Showcase from Radiotopia: “Secrets #3 – Broken Dreams” — A man hides his unemployment from his father for months. A good story, but the weakest of this series so far. I am not very invested in this, I’ll confess. But I’m too far in now to quit.