Category Archives: Video games

Omnireviewer (week of Oct. 9, 2016)

Whole bunch of fun stuff this week, including separate entries for each instalment of Kentucky Route Zero that I replayed. Also, an additional recommendation: don’t let a bit of rain stop you from running the seawall. Did that this afternoon, with a bunch of podcasts lined up, and it was a highlight of my week. 31 reviews.

Television

All Aboard the Starliner: The Making of Full Circle — I am not about to become the sort of person who watches the special features on old Doctor Who DVDs. But it seems I have indeed watched this one, so why deny it. It’s most fun to watch Christopher Bidmead and Lalla Ward, two people I quite admire, slag off Matthew Waterhouse mercilessly. But it’s also nice to hear the story of how Bidmead encouraged Andrew Smith, the very young writer of this story.

Last Week Tonight: October 9, 2016 — Firstly, this is fine. Secondly, the bit about the, ahem, “spray-tanned Furby eating KFC and screaming at a gold star family” is exactly the sort of non-joke that I wrote about last week that I wish this show would stop doing. Finally, the quality of the argumentation in the Guantanamo segment proves my earlier point about Oliver being most valuable as a pundit.

Doctor Who: “State of Decay” — It’s really wonderful the extent to which K-9 is seen as a joke even within the show at this point. In this story, he becomes weaponized, in the most ironic way possible. Love that. Altogether, this is a less worthwhile story than the previous one. It’s attempt to rationalize vampires is clumsy, and aside from the crackling scenes of the Doctor conversing with the rebels, this is a bit dull. No matter. I’m really only watching this to have the necessary context for the next story, which I suspect I will completely adore.

Full Frontal With Samantha Bee: October 5, 2016 — I think this just found its way onto my weekly viewing list, which currently only contains Last Week Tonight, a show that I’m becoming less enamoured of by the second. For better or worse, John Oliver tends to comment on current events from above the fray: the closest thing to righteous indignation that he can conjure is bemusement. Whereas Sam Bee is right in the shit, getting publicly angry on behalf of us less clever people, just like Jon Stewart used to do. I feel a bit dumb for not having watched this regularly. The episodes I’ve seen are the best satire of the year.

Doctor Who: “Warrior’s Gate” — Oh, I like this a lot. Mostly. Romana doesn’t quite work here, in spite of it being her swan song. Lalla Ward may be slightly to blame: you couldn’t blame her for having one foot out the door, considering everything. But there are story problems as well. She’s forced to be mysterious rather than whimsical and she’s also robbed of her competency once she’s captured. Annoyingly, this would have been easy enough to fix: just have her accompany the freighter crew out of curiosity rather than suspicion, and allow her to find her own way to escape rather than having Adric rescue her. She wouldn’t even necessarily appear credulous; she could just do what the Doctor always does and take a risk with relative confidence that she’ll find her way out of any tight spot that arises. This alternative also leaves Adric with nothing to do, which is a bonus. But aside from all of this, “Warrior’s Gate” is fabulous. I haven’t seen the show this abstract since the first episode of “The Mind Robber,” which this bears some obvious aesthetic similarities to. And, “episode one of ‘The Mind Robber’ stretched out to a full story” is a pretty decent brief. And the fact that time travel actually plays a role in the story makes it feel like my favourite bits of the new series. It’s weird and arty, and a bit austere. If this entire season could have kept up the pace and the tone of this and “Logopolis,” it would be one of the high points of the classic series.

Cabaret (televised broadcast of the Sam Mendes production) — I was recently defending my opinion that there are good musicals other than Hamilton (though only a handful that I really love) and I realized that my opinion of Cabaret, always a favourite, is entirely based on the film adaptation. That movie is brilliant, but it excises most of the songs. So, I figured I’d scour YouTube for a filmed theatrical production and I found this. Holy shit. Everything that was implied in Joel Grey’s performance as the Emcee is made as explicit as possible in Alan Cumming’s. Where Joel Grey says “Ladies and gentlemen,” Alan Cumming says “Ladies and gentlemen.” This is that rare thing where two performers make something so completely different out of a piece that they can’t meaningfully be judged against each other. Part of the beauty of Joel Grey’s leering creep is that you can never quite tell whose side he’s on. Alan Cumming’s emcee is so aggressively of the counterculture that he couldn’t possibly be aligned even slightly with fascism. He’s a one-man middle finger to Hitler. The other thing that this made clear is that Cabaret’s best songs are in fact in the movie. Kander and Ebb’s other masterpiece, Chicago, isn’t as dramatically satisfying or profound as this, but it’s got better tunes, on balance. Still, Cabaret is a classic. Pick of the week.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 1 — I’ve decided to replay the first three acts of Kentucky Route Zero before approaching act four, because this is so enormously dense that I couldn’t possibly remember everything that’s important. It turns out to be built for second playthroughs. As far as I know, it’s probably built for fourth playthroughs. Kentucky Route Zero is brilliant at offering up tantalizing little thematic threads that you can pull on but you can’t quite connect with each other. Right from the beginning of this, it’s clear that there’s metafiction at play: Joseph’s computer in the first scene is foreshadowing of how that character will recur in the third act, and of the idea that computer programs will form a central element of the story. I’m fairly convinced that the three people in the basement of Equus Oils, who appear again in “Limits and Demonstrations,” are also serving as an element in this set of themes. When they first appear, they are playing a game, the rules of which are unclear. So is the player when they first encounter these characters. Next time we see them, they are surveying weird art. So is the player, at every point during Kentucky Route Zero. Indeed, the entire notion of watching, listening to and examining things is central, here. There are tape recorders strewn around, and televisions that become games when moss grows on them (more foreshadowing). Soon enough, we’ll be watching theatre in “The Entertainment” and hearing music in the pub in Act Three. Also, the theme of hardship stemming from economic recession is immediately obvious, with the power to Equus Oils having been shut off, and the Márquezes having fallen on hard times. It’s tempting to try and tie these threads together in some cogent fashion. But there’s part of me that resists the idea of forming one unified theory of Kentucky Route Zero’s story. It seems like it ought to be bigger than that. Like a David Lynch movie or a Virginia Woolf novel, it need not be pinned down by the need to answer the question “what does it mean?” Still, as I play through the next three acts and the interstitial features between them once more, I’m going to see if any connections come to me unbidden.

Kentucky Route Zero: “Limits and Demonstrations” — It’s worth noting that this computer game is as good an art exhibit as I’ve ever seen in Vancouver. The first time I played through “Limits and Demonstrations,” I had already been through the first three acts of the main game. So, it didn’t strike me just how much explicit foreshadowing there is in this. It also didn’t strike me the extent to which the three characters you accompany through this exhibit are mirrors of Lula, Donald and Joseph. I still do not know entirely what to make of this, but it certainly adds a layer to Kentucky Route Zero’s pre-existing sense of performativity. And these characters only seem to appear when there is metafiction afoot. I’ll follow these thoughts up when I get through Act 2 for the second time.

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2 — I had really meant to make this playthrough of the first three acts a quick one, just to refamiliarize myself before playing Act 4, but it’s impossible not to immerse yourself in this. Even the bits that I remember really clearly, I still feel compelled to go through in detail. (I did give the Secret Tourism locations along the Echo a miss, this time, though.) Just wandering through the Museum of Dwellings, observing the structures and listening to what people say is satisfying. And the format of having that entire segment take place in past tense, from the perspective of the people Conway and Shannon talk to rather than by Conway and Shannon themselves is a brilliant little method of distancing. It also gives us a broader picture of the world where this is taking place: each of the people living here is having similar problems to the characters we know better, like Joseph and Weaver. I’m also particularly intrigued by the scene that takes place in the storage locker. The idea that there was once a church here, but that everybody stopped coming, and now the janitor is keeping it alive by posting pictures of the congregation on the wall and playing tapes of the sermon is pretty rich. It’s a facsimile of a thing: a digital representation of reality, much like the cave systems in William Crowther’s Adventure — the first adventure game, and a key reference point in Kentucky Route Zero Act 3. I think this is overall my least favourite of the first three acts, but I still love the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, with its BBQing organist and its floor full of bears.

Kentucky Route Zero: “The Entertainment” — This is my favourite of the three interludes Cardboard Computer has released so far, though it lacks the high-concept gusto of “Here and There Along the Echo.” I’ll never forget the first time I played this and gradually realized what was going on: that the scene before me was in fact a play, that there was an audience present, and that I was an actor. This second time through, one of the first things I saw when I started looking around was the lighting rig above the stage. I can’t recall whether my first experience was similar, but of course I wouldn’t have known what to make of it anyway. It’s interesting to note that this sort of faux-Iceman Cometh old-time bar setting seems to be in the air again, these days. This captures the same sort of misguided nostalgia for a time and place that wasn’t actually any good that Horace and Pete does. And, to boot, they are both essentially theatrical productions taking place inside a different medium. I’m not sure where to follow that train of thought to next, so I’ll use it as a segue to discuss the most interesting thing about “The Entertainment,” which is its ostentatious, explicit theatricality. And the fact that it’s story is presented as a play is undercut by the fact that some of the characters are later seen in a non-theatrical context: this bartender will later show up in this bar again, but as a real character and not an actor. Similarly, Lula Chamberlain and Joseph Wheatree are credited as the play’s set designer and adapted playwright, respectively. I have written before about how it’s probably best to resist interpretations of Kentucky Route Zero that attempt to wrestle it into internal consistency. But “The Entertainment” makes it tempting to go against that. If anybody has a plausible explanation of how this bar can exist both as a play within a game and as a diegetic locale in that same game, I’m all ears. Bonus points for explaining how Lula and Joseph can exist both inside of this story and outside of it.

Music

John Coltrane: Meditations — My favourite Coltrane album by a mile. The strange noisiness of “The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost,” with Pharaoh Sanders and Rashied Ali squeaking and banging as hard as they can, would be hard to appreciate in isolation. But, that track along with the other free sections of this recording only make up half of the yin yang. This record also features some of McCoy Tyner’s most beautiful playing on record, and Coltrane himself at his simplest and most direct. It demands to be listened to from beginning to end, because without each of its segments to prop each other up, it loses its integrity completely. But, when approached on its own terms, it is a timeless classic. Too bad it broke up Coltrane’s core quartet. But, he had other business to attend to anyway. (Also, I listened to this while reading Blake, and it paired rather nicely — two examples of unorthodox spirituality expressed in occasionally bewildering ways.)

Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap — Colouring Book was definitely a step forward from this, but it’s a mostly great record with its own merits. It isn’t as straightforwardly joyful as its successor, but that’s not a bad thing necessarily. He is definitely much more stoned on this one, and a bit less grown up. But it’s a good record that I’ll return to — albeit probably a bit less frequently than Colouring Book.

Live events

Vancouver Symphony Orchestra/Karina Canellakis & Karen Gomyo: Live, Oct. 15 — Bless me father, for I have sinned. It’s been… two years since my last symphony concert. Quite frankly, the VSO is yet to convince me that paying for a ticket to hear them live will reliably be a more worthwhile experience than staying home and listening to a recording of the Concertgebouw in the same rep. But when a friend invites me to go I’ll happily attend, especially when the Berg Violin Concerto is on the program. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of the 20th century, and essentially the only work from the Second Viennese School that I would recommend unreservedly to anybody who’s interested in classical music. (Check out Isabelle Faust’s recording with Claudio Abbado. The ending is heartstopping.) Karen Gomyo played the solo part with all of the expressiveness that Berg wrote into it, and she tackled the technical bits with substantial derring-do. Karina Canellakis is a really solid conductor who possesses the clarity that all of the most acclaimed conductors in recent history seem to lack. But that didn’t stop the orchestra from struggling with parts of the Berg. Most of it came off okay, but the glorious ending of the piece was compromised by the band not playing together. There were even some issues in Mozart’s Magic Flute overture — including outright wrong notes in the violins during the slow opening. But Canellakis took it at the fast clip that it needs to stay aloft, and once it got going, I really enjoyed it. It never gets old, the Magic Flute overture. One of those rare pieces that survives overexposure. The second half of the program was Rachmaninov 2, so they were starting from a deficit. Rachmaninov all blends together for me. I like the third concerto, but for the most part he’s one of the surest composers to make my eyes glaze over. Which they did, about halfway through the first movement, and I didn’t check back in until the third, which I thought Canellakis conducted brilliantly. She restrained the orchestra enough for the bulk of the movement that the huge romantic climaxes felt properly cathartic. And the final movement is a jolly romp that it’s hard not to like. Interestingly, this was very much a “clap between the movements” kind of crowd, which I always find reassuring, because traditions are stupid and I prefer the company of people who are either ignorant or irreverent of them. I noticed more young people around than I usually see at classical shows. That’s nice. The friend I went with even ran into some folks she knows who are also our age. Guess they ought to program more Berg. This was fun. If I get a chance to hear Canellakis conduct live again, I’ll go for sure. My general standard of success for a night out at live entertainment is whether or not it was as good as seeing a decent movie. This was. Chalk it up as a win.

Podcasts

The Gist: “Rapid Response: The Town Hall Debate” — Pesca is a public discourse poet. I didn’t watch the second debate because there are limits to how successfully I can remain sane. But this essentially confirms my suspicions: that the format would make it a complete shambles and that nobody would say anything new. Okay, now onto a longer podcast recap of this same inane thing…

NPR Politics Podcast: “The Second Presidential Debate” — I have to say, the panel on this podcast is doing god’s work by making it so I don’t have to actually sit through these godawful debates. They tell me what happened, offer a bit of analysis, resist total partisanship, and also don’t act like Trump isn’t a buffoon whose campaign is well off the tracks. It’s what anybody needs to stay informed and also sane.

You Must Remember This: “The Blacklist” parts 9-11, plus Lena Horne rerun — The Lena Horne piece is an absolute highlight of this show, partially because it corrects the major issue with most episodes, which is the absence of tape. I love You Must Remember This, and I love Karina Longworth, but I’m sometimes frustrated by the fact that she thinks she can write a script and read it over music and that’s radio. It obviously doesn’t stop me from listening, but when I heard the Lena Horne episode, which has a great deal of archival tape of Horne telling her own story, it made me wish that the show would be like this more often. Podcasts aren’t audiobooks. Fortunately, You Must Remember This is an excellent enough audiobook that I don’t mind when it calls itself a podcast.

99% Invisible: “Project Cybersyn” — A lovely story that ties Chilean socialism in with nationalized design. In general, 99pi tends to position its stories as stories in themselves, as opposed to sub-narratives of larger stories. It’s nice to see a staunchly design-oriented story that ties into a political narrative that is larger than itself.

NPR Politics Podcast: “Trump v GOP” — I don’t foresee myself ever having anything much to say about this podcast, but I will continue forcing myself to go through the motions of reviewing it each time. I have principles. I will say this: I was really sceptical of this podcast’s claims in its early advertising to be a functional one-stop shop for political coverage. I still don’t believe there’s such a thing, and the very suggestion of it is a little bit dangerous. But having started to listen fairly regularly, it definitely comes closer than any other source of election news that I come across.

In The Dark: Episodes 5-7 — This really picked up for me in the sixth episode, where the story went broader and started getting into the national consequences of Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance, such as the very first sex offenders registry. It keeps the momentum through the seventh episode, which moves backwards to explain how the narrative of “small town cops who’ve never seen this sort of thing before are in over their heads” is bunk. Because, it turns out, the very police department that mishandled the Wetterling case so badly had mishandled a bunch of other cases in the past and failed to adequately debrief. This is nearly over, I assume, but it has become quite dazzling.

Imaginary Worlds: “Magical Thinking” — A wonderful consideration of the storytelling pitfalls and opportunities associated with magic. This episode splits fictional approaches to magic into two camps, which Patrick Rothfuss calls “poetic” and “scientific” magic, the idea being that in the latter category, the magic is defined by a Dungeons and Dragonsesque set of strictures, whereas in the former it is allowed to exist essentially unexplained. My favourite example of “poetic” magic is actually from an ostensibly SF narrative, not a fantasy one: the sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who. These days, the rule about whether or not the sonic can do something is basically, if it would cheapen the story for it to be able to do that, then it can’t. On the other hand, if it could potentially get the story past a boring obstacle set up by another element of the plot, then it definitely can. In other words, the story dictates the specifics of the magic, and not the other way around. The other way around, where the story sort of emerges from the magic system’s specific set of cans and can’ts (haha cants) is totally valid too — and it’s worth noting that it’s an approach that really jives with the creative approaches I admire most in music. Specifically, the rule-based approach of Brian Eno. But I’ve come to deeply admire writers like Steven Moffat, whose respect for consistency (and canonicity) is limited to whether or not it improves the story in his head. Well, look! This episode spun out a nice set of thoughts, didn’t it? Gold star.

All Songs Considered: “Solange, Gillian Welch, Cuddle Magic, More” — The talk outweighs the music on this episode, which Solange handily wins (though, as Robin Hilton will tell you, it’s not a competition). The most interesting thing to happen on this episode is Bob Boilen outright hating a song that Hilton chose, which I’m not sure I’ve ever heard happen before. The sticking point was Boilen’s contention that the guitar solo is dead. And, rocker though I am at heart, I can’t easily disagree. In the past… twenty years, I can only name a handful of really distinctive guitar soloists (not guitarists, mind you, but soloists specifically) with something to say through the medium of guitar solos. I’m thinking of Johnny Greenwood, Jack White and St. Vincent specifically. The era of proliferation of great guitar soloists has certainly ended. But, the existence of those three artists, and I’m sure many others I’m not thinking of right now, demonstrates to me that there’s still potential in the guitar solo. Basically, I come down more on Boilen’s side than Hilton’s, in the sense that I think we’re past the era where guitar solos should be the norm in any specific kind of music. We’re in an era where they must only be employed advisedly.

The Memory Palace: “The Met Residency Episode M2: One Bottle, Any Bottle” — These episodes for the Met do suffer a bit when you’re not actually at the Met, looking at the things that DiMeo is talking about. Not just because of the fact that you don’t know what they look like: in this episode, DiMeo actively conjures the mystique of the place, and the value judgements implicit in having an object occupy space there — space, where the listeners themselves are presumably standing also. It’s still a nice bit of radio, but inconsequential out of context.

StartUp: “Diversification of Worry” — Okay, so I definitely just typed out and backspaced a really angry, unfair screed about the cancellation of Mystery Show. Basically, I think we can trust Alex Blumberg’s judgement when he assures us that there’s only so much he can say about the situation without it being harmful. He could be protecting Starlee Kine as much or more than he’s hiding his own (mistaken?) decision making process. So, I don’t think we can expect to hear much more, and we probably shouldn’t get up in arms about it. That said, I don’t know why Blumberg didn’t make more of an effort to get out in front of the story and not seem like the guy who cancelled a beloved show without telling anybody until the show’s host told the world on Facebook (while Blumberg all the while vaunted an air of “transparency” around his company). But that’s not what concerns me most. What concerns me most is the notion that we may have witnessed the outer limit of the art that can feasibly be produced within the confines of a venture-backed company concerned with its revenue targets. I can only assume that Mystery Show was super expensive (Nick Quah breaks this down a bit in his most recent issue of the Hot Pod newsletter, which is well worth a subscription if you’re interested in the podcast biz). And given the company’s obvious need to not have gigantic expenditures with low returns, it makes sense that Mystery Show was untenable. But the thing is, it was so good. One of the best podcasts ever. Blumberg doesn’t deny that. So, perhaps this is a limitation of his business model — a limitation that might not have existed in the public radio world that he left to start Gimlet. And I wonder if Mystery Show could have survived had it been developed for a publicly-funded platform — any such platform that could offer a podcast with an idiosyncratic release schedule. Maybe that would have presented a whole different set of problems. But I do think this is evidence that companies like Gimlet are not the future of podcasting. They can only be a part of it. Public media is irreplaceable, because we can’t afford to have any more Mystery Shows get canned.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “A Fall Movie and Television Preview” — This is always one of my favourite episodes of the year, because Glen Weldon is always so obviously wrong about what television will be a ratings success. Also, I am now massively looking forward to a season of great movies. Manchester by the Sea is at the top of my list, but there’s a bunch of stuff mentioned here that I hadn’t heard about, and will check out.

On The Media: “Personal Responsibility” — Gladstone’s series on poverty myths is off to a wonderful start, with an instalment on maybe the most pernicious — and certainly the most ruthless — myth of all: that poor people are lazy. It ties a profile of a present-day poor single mother to a larger narrative about the gradual erosion of welfare, culminating in Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms, the consequences of which are only beginning to show themselves now.

Science Vs: “Forensic Science” — The bad jokes are really starting to bother me. It’s a shame, too, because this is a really solid show in every other respect. I may have to demote it to an occasional listen. We’ll see how I feel after the second half of this two-parter.

This American Life: “My Undesirable Talent” — This features two incredible stories: one about a gentlemanly Mormon with a gambling addiction who became an accomplished thief, and one about a black Californian kid of Ugandan parents who convinced an entire liberal arts college that he was actually from Uganda. He did the accent and the whole bit. That second story is the real highlight. It’s hysterically funny, for one thing, and for another, it has a lot to say about African-American identity. I always say I should listen to this show more. I should listen to this show more.

The Sporkful: “Who is this Restaurant For?” Parts 1-4 — A nice compliment to Pashman’s earlier “Other People’s Food” series, this drills down on the specific issue of restaurants sending signals to people of various races, to either intentionally welcome them, or covertly ward them away. The first and last episodes are the highlights, the former because of Code Switch’s Kat Chow, whose expertise in talking about race and culture gets the series off to a reassuring start, and the latter because W. Kamau Bell is really funny. Recommended.

Theory of Everything: “Burning Down the Panopticon” — Firstly, I am fascinated to see the long game that Walker is playing with these non-existent ad spots. Secondly, one of my favourite modes for Theory of Everything is the mode where it engages directly with difficult thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault. So, I quite enjoyed this. Another of my favourite modes for Theory of Everything is when Benjamen Walker expresses extreme wariness of a facet of modern life. Surveillance is certainly a facet worth being wary of. So, this mini-series is sure to be a winner.

StartUp: “You Can’t Wear a Suit Here” — It’s hard to stay angry at Alex Blumberg. It’s also hard to say just how willing his subordinates are to paint him in a negative, or even nuanced light when they’re tasked with telling a story in which he is a character. I have no doubt that he means well, but having myself worked in creative jobs where it felt like the person who was supposed to be giving me feedback had checked out in favour of stuff that doesn’t directly relate to the product we’re ostensibly making, I found myself siding with Eric Mennel on this one, even though the story takes pains to show him as a person who is juggling as much as anybody at Gimlet. And I promise that this isn’t about Mystery Show. BUT. Everybody at Gimlet seems to think of Blumberg as a person who has more optimism than practicality. Maybe that’s why he saw fit to greenlight a show that pretty obviously would be both incredible and extremely unprofitable. In any case, next episode, it looks like we’ll really get a look at what everybody thinks of him. Or, as much of a look as we can be afforded, given that anything can be edited out.

Reply All: “Boy in Photo” — Outstanding. This is Reply All in “Zardulu” mode — where they take a seemingly unimportant internet phenomenon and do investigative journalism until they find something resembling the real story. And this one has layer after layer after layer — in spite of the fact that there’s really nothing of consequence at its centre. It’s just a great story about a whole bunch of ordinary people, who were thrust into a really narrow, specific spotlight because of the internet’s inherent weirdness. Reply All is very seldom less than great, but some weeks I love it more than anything, and this is one of them. Pick of the week.

Omnireviewer (week of Sept. 25, 2016)

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If you’re interested in being frustrated by me more frequently and for shorter periods at a time, I’m now doing this on Tumblr as well. I post the reviews as I write them. I’ve got three followers already! Two of whom I don’t even know IRL!

17 reviews.

Literature, etc.

The Book of Tobit — I read the version of this that can be found in the “Shorter Books of the Apocrypha” volume of the New English Bible, along with the commentary provided therein. I know nothing about whether or not this is a good way to read Tobit. It’s just what my library had most conveniently at hand. It’s the first Biblical reading I’ve ever done, aside from a brief teenage tear through Revelation. Odd choices, I’m sure. An apocryphal text and a fever dream. But I’m now the proud owner of a copy of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and I understand that the demon from this Biblical story makes a substantial appearance there. Might as well do my homework. So, how was it? Well, I learned that the Grateful Dead got their name from one of the folktales sourced in Tobit. Also near the start, Tobit is blinded when a sparrow poops in his eyes. Also there’s a bit where the archangel Raphael appears in disguise, and talks about his friend “Gabael.” Seriously, Raphael? You might as well have said “Schmabriel.” You are bad at subterfuge, and I bet your disguise is just Groucho Marx glasses. Also a huge fish tries to swallow a man’s foot, but the book never says whether it tried to bite it off first. Odd phrasing. Very hard to swallow a foot when it is still attached to a leg. So basically, laffs o’plenty.

Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale: Batman: The Long Halloween — Superhero comics aren’t really my speed, these days. But a friend leant this to me and I LOVED it. It’s less of a conventional superhero story than it is a crime drama, and its clearest reference points outside of the Batman canon come from The Godfather and The Silence of the Lambs. Tim Sale’s art is both stylishly noirish and practical in its storytelling — many things are illustrated that did not actually happen, but it is always clear what they are. There are a lot of bad guys in this story, and while shoehorning in multiple antagonists has hurt movies like Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight Rises, Loeb finds a way to make each iconic villain’s appearance serve the main thrust of the narrative. Indeed, the structural device of “iconography of a major holiday + recognizable villain + grisly murder by an unknown hand” in each issue makes for nearly perfect serialized storytelling — especially when the structure begins to break down in the Riddler chapter. I laid down on the couch to start reading this early on a Sunday afternoon, and did not get up until I was finished. That’s the mark of a good suspense story. Pick of the week.

Tanya Gold: “A Goose in a Dress” — This Harper’s feature from last year addresses the shitty side of the culture war by way of lacerating, hilarious food criticism. A selection of top-tier New York restaurants is made to exemplify what is wrong with America’s cultural elites, and products made for ostensibly refined tastes are exposed as a consequence of intense anti-intellectualism. This can apply to so many elements of “high culture.” Intellectual laziness is easily bred in environments where an artistic idiom’s value is held up as unquestionable (see also: classical music, Shakespeare). This is why you cannot learn anything worthwhile about the world from reading Gramophone magazine, but you can learn plenty from reading reviews of Kendrick Lamar records. Gold’s piece is the necessary (and hugely satisfying) negative side of poptimism applied to food. For the positive spin, look no further than the Sporkful podcast: a labour of love on behalf of the full spectrum of culinary experience. This feature is incredible. Read it. There’s a line about Charles Foster Kane that is so brilliant you’ll eat your computer.

Adrian Tomine: Shortcomings — I don’t quite know how to respond to this. I was totally involved in the story and completely believed the characters, but I came out of it without a clear sense of what I was meant to take from it. I’ve never been one of those people who writes off a story because of unsympathetic characters. Which, you just can’t be if you’re going to get anything out of this. The protagonist is an unrepentant jerk with zero self-awareness. But I feel like it’s going to stick with me. And I like that feeling — when there are just thoughts swirling around, and eventually they may coalesce into a broth. And that’s basically what this blog is: just a record of that process in something close to real-time. But where this comic is concerned, it isn’t happening fast enough for me to have anything much to say. I do think it’s probably very good. It’s definitely engrossing, in a soapy kind of way.

Television

Last Week Tonight: September 25, 2016 — One joke format that I love when it is delivered well is the “ruthless overkill” joke. John Oliver saying “fuck you” to an eight-year-old Ron Howard is exactly what I mean by that. Also, this show’s occasional compilations of ads for WCBS News features are always hysterical and remind me why I mostly hate television. The main course was especially relevant since I watched this immediately after subjecting myself to the first presidential debate. More than any specific factual misrepresentation or shameless dogwhistle, I found myself enraged at the general tenor of the debate, which was light on policy and heavy on accusations of scandal. This helps put a lot of that in perspective, but it is still absolutely not what I want to hear the candidates talk about. And I think we can expect more from exactly one of the two.

Games

The Last Door: Season 1 (Collector’s Edition) — This game offers proof of concept remarkably quickly. In its opening scene, it shows you something extremely disquieting, rendered in its self-described “lo-fi” 8-bit aesthetic, and the juxtaposition of that terror with the lack of detail in its illustration is intensely effective. It’s like what Scott McCloud writes about the power of cartoons: you can impose yourself onto a figure without much detail. It’s a tremendously effective technique to draw on in a horror game, because it makes the terror that much more visceral. The key reference point in most reviews seems to be H.P. Lovecraft, but as ever, his influence is overestimated compared to that of Poe. Sub out crows for ravens and you’re halfway there. Lovecraft rears his head in the form of a Thing That Lies Just Beyond Our Senses That Is Incomprehensible And Ruthless, but the aesthetic of this is firmly in Poe’s Romantic idiom. It is so unsettling. I’ll play through the second season as soon as I get the chance.

Music

Margo Price: Midwest Farmer’s Daughter — You know, it scratches an itch. Country music is a sometimes food, but Margo Price is the real deal: a hard living, mistake making modern human with a killer band and a capacity to express hard personal truths with directness. I’m not sure I love this as much as some of Price’s biggest fans, but — and I never thought I’d say this — it’s possible that I’ve listened to more country music than some of this record’s cheerleaders. So it isn’t revelatory, so much as merely excellent. I love “Hands of Time.” This has no weak tracks, but that one is an instant classic.

Miles Davis: On The Corner — Jeez, let me tell you, listening to this in the grocery store makes for some odd juxtapositions. Hearing John McLaughlin soloing over tablas and Miles’ wah-wah treated trumpet while you sort through the onions for a firm one just feels wrong. In spite of its prosaic title, this album isn’t the sort of thing that pairs well with real life. The music of On the Corner sounds like it couldn’t have happened in a place, no matter how hard that title tries to wrangle it down to earth. It is artificial music — fictional music. No doubt that’s the result of Miles, a person who came up in a musical idiom where whatever happens in front of the microphones is what goes on the record, actively swerving as far as he could to the other end of the spectrum. Bitches Brew may be more adventurous; Jack Johnson may be more rock and roll. But On the Corner marks the farthest point out on Miles’ electric peninsula. I love it. It might be my favourite Miles Davis record.

Podcasts

Radiolab: “The Primitive Streak” — Jad is clearly not taking his vacation seriously. Still. This is one of the best Radiolab stories in recent memory, maybe partially because it strongly resembles the Radiolab from two or three years ago that I remember so fondly. No media outlet does the “science deals with a difficult ethical question” story as well as Radiolab does. And good luck finding one with such glorious eerie synth music.

The Gist: “Rapid Response: The First Presidential Debate” — It’s as good as it can be. Of course I’m going to listen to recaps like these, but I’m just tired. What’s there to say anymore?

NPR Politics Podcast: “The First Presidential Debate” — This podcast is incredibly useful, in that it features people who I can stand to listen to talking about people I can’t stand to listen to.

In Our Time: “Zeno’s Paradoxes” — This is marvellous, easily the best episode of In Our Time that I’ve heard. It is propelled forward by Melvyn Bragg’s total fascination with the hysterical, raving absurdities of paradoxes like Achilles and the tortoise, and Zeno’s arrow. His guests are articulate enough to make you genuinely think twice about the notion that a line could possibly be made of discrete points. This sort of abstraction is totally fascinating to me. References to the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who are just a bonus. Okay, that’s the end of the review, but this made me remember a story I feel compelled to relate. Once, way back in grade 11 chemistry, our teacher Ms. Agnew was trying to demonstrate pipetting. The chemical reaction she was undertaking required a super specific amount of a solute to be added to a beaker of some solvent or another. She asked for a volunteer to attempt the feat, and when only the usual suspects raised their hands (yours truly, and a few of my friends), she forced the stoner in the back row to step up. I can’t remember his name. Let’s call him Jordan. Just a listless troglodyte of a teenager. He dragged his knuckles up to the front of the room and started going through the motions of the demonstration, as Ms. Agnew instructed. When he had just about added enough of the solute and the solvent had still failed to change colour, like it would with the proper amount, Ms. Agnew told him “just add half a drop.” Jordan froze. He turned his head slowly, and uttered more words than any of us had ever heard him say before: “you can’t have half a drop.” Agnew brushed him off and told him to just try and add the tiniest bit more to the solution, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded from this question that now occupied him. “No, wait — it’s not possible to have ‘half a drop.’” Agnew asked what he meant. Thus began the pantomime. Jordan put his right hand to his forehead and raised his left index finger, eyes clamped shut as if in mental agony. “A ‘drop’ is however much water falls out of that thing. If I try for ‘half a drop,’ that’s still just a drop. A smaller drop.” Ms. Agnew was running out of class time, but this was a train she couldn’t help chasing. “No, the pipette can dispense sort of average-sized drops, and if you’re really careful, it can do half-drops.” Jordan would not relent. The rest of our class was spent watching this debate, which was not unlike the conversation on this episode of In Our Time. After 15 years of semi-sentience, this ontological impossibility had hit Jordan in the brain so hard that it roused him from catatonia. It was a thing to behold. Pick of the week.

You Must Remember This: “The Blacklist Part 5: The Strange Love of Barbara Stanwyck: Robert Taylor” — When this podcast promises “secret and/or forgotten” stories from Hollywood (god, how I wish she’d quit with the and/or thing) it certainly delivers. This episode reveals not just how a now forgotten actor typifies the attitudes of blacklist-era Hollywood conservatives — it reveals how the HUAC hearings may have been the direct result of his participation. This is consistently outstanding stuff.

The West Wing Weekly: “Special Interim Session (with Aaron Sorkin)” — I don’t really understand why this is now a member of Radiotopia, aside from it being Hrishikesh Hirway’s other show. It’s not story driven or audio rich: it’s really just a discussion show, and a niche one at that. Which isn’t to say it isn’t good. As a huge West Wing fan, I really enjoyed this discussion of the gap between the first and second seasons with Sorkin himself. I’ll probably listen again when they discuss my particular favourite episodes. (“Two Cathedrals” is coming up pretty soon.) So, all well and good. Just, it’s going to be Radiotopia’s strange fish from here on out.

Code Switch: “The Code Switch Guide To Handling Casual Racism” — Code Switch inherits a proven formula from On the Media. The panel gives several examples of times when they either have or have not called out casual racism when it occurs, and use that as a starting point to figure out when it’s best to say something, versus just leaving it alone. News you can use. Code Switch is awesome.

All Songs Considered: “Brian Eno Sings, New Dirty Projectors, Leonard Cohen, More” — I didn’t love the track by the Gift that features Brian Eno the first time I heard it. I found the first two minutes generic, and it only picked up when Eno took the lead vocals. I’ve since listened to it a few more times and seen the video, which is amazing, and I’ve warmed to it enough that I might check out the album. The Gift has a female lead singer who sings in a baritone register. It’s an amazing sound. And that moment when Eno comes in hits me right in the Here Come the Warm Jets centre of my brain. Dirty Projectors’ new song is a four-minute abyss gaze. I loved it. And oh boy, am I ever excited for the new Leonard Cohen record. I’ve skipped a couple, but the title track from You Want it Darker is brilliant.

Desert Island Discs: “Joyce DiDonato” — Considering what my job is these days, I don’t know why I decided I wanted to listen to an interview with an opera singer in my spare time. (These days my job is producing a podcast/radio show of opera-related interviews.) But Joyce is special. Before I heard her recital disc of music from Naples, I’d never really been wowed by an opera singer before. Operas, yes, but never a specific musician. She is probably my favourite classical singer working right now, and it is so wonderful to hear about how her total virtuosity was built on a foundation of hard graft as much or more than natural ability. She’s coming to Vancouver soon, and I have only been this excited to see a classical recital maybe twice before in my life.

Omnireviewer (week of Sept. 11, 2016)

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Every so often I write a review on here that I’m actually pretty proud of. The Captain America: Civil War review comes to mind. I’ll just flag right here that I’m very happy with my brief assessment of the final story in Thomas Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco. It is a very good story and I nearly gave it pick of the week, but not quite, because apparently I like indie games better than anything else these days.

26 reviews.

Movies

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — Really really fun. Just, concentrated fun in every scene. Naturally, since this is the classic, beloved Shane Black movie that The Nice Guys isn’t, I’m obligated to stack them up against each other. I’ll say this: it’s not as clear a victory as some would have it. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has a better story and sharper dialogue, but I find Robert Downey Jr.’s overtly ironic narration a bit dated. Maybe it’s just that over the course of the decade since this movie, the tropes that he’s lampshading have begun to parody themselves. You know: a straightforward iteration of the “clearly-dead-man-survives-wait-WTF” trope might be funnier than having it highlighted in the voiceover. But it’s a quibble. The real area where The Nice Guys outshines this is the performances. Robert Downey Jr. is great here in the Robert Downey Jr. role. But if we’re comparing apples with apples, Ryan Gosling ekes out a narrow victory in the Hapless N’er Do Well category, Russell Crowe far outdoes Val Kilmer in the Goon In Over His Head category, and as wonderful as Michelle Monaghan is in this movie she is handily outclassed in the Smarter Than She’s Given Credit For Sidelined Female Role category by the 14-year-old Angourie Rice. Nice Guys has more ingenious action set pieces, too. What I’m saying is not that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn’t as good as its reputation. I think it’s almost exactly as good as its reputation. It’s just that The Nice Guys is fantastic and deserved way better than its lukewarm reception.

Television

Chef’s Table: Season 1, episodes 1 & 2 — First off, if you’re going to use the Richter Four Seasons in your show, why on earth would you pick that dumb 7/8 movement? It’s literally the only bad part of that piece, and they picked it as the theme song. As for the actual content of the show, it’s amazing to get a look inside the kitchens of these really interesting chefs, but I can’t help but feel like the director’s camera is a tool for worship. These portraits are hagiographies, which I don’t necessarily mind. But there are only so many slow-motion shots of a man talking with his hands that you can see before you start to wish they wouldn’t manipulate you quite so obviously. It gets to the point where these episodes start to feel like they were made by marketing professionals, helping these chefs leverage their personal brands. It’s chefs presented as Silicon Valley magnates. They seem really cognisant of the camera. (“Let’s go do some good,” one chef says to his crew after a pep talk. Fuck you, chef.) In the second episode, there are long stretches of people spouting platitudes. There’s a promising hint of tension at one point, when the chef in question cops to having a temper. You suspect that maybe it was prompted by something that a sous-chef said in an interview, or some tape they got of him blowing up in the kitchen that he felt he needed to address, but you never see it. So, instead of being a guy with a temper, he gets to be a guy who’s “working on his temper.” It only contributes to the sense that these documentaries are worshipful above all else. Also, it may just be because I’ve been editing audio for hours a day for weeks on end, but I’ve been hearing every single edit in the interview tape. I know it’s less important to be seamless in video than in radio, but come on. It’s distracting. I’ll probably watch more of this, because good god this is some interesting food, but as a show it has some serious problems.

Literature, etc.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “How Breitbart Conquered the Media” — Hillary Clinton needed this. Ta-Nehisi Coates does a brilliant job defending Clinton for her recent statement (containing the only memorable turn of phrase in this brutal election cycle) that half of Trump’s supporters were in the “basket of deplorables.” If anything, he suggests, that figure is too low. No shit.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “What O.J. Simpson Means to Me” — It’s basically a re-hash of the themes in O.J.: Made in America (still the best thing that’s been made this year, for those keeping score), but it’s in Coates’s prose and it contains a really wonderful extended metaphor involving Houdini, as characterized in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.

Thomas Ligotti: “The Shadow, The Darkness” — The last short story in a collection doesn’t really need to be a summation of everything that came before it, but this is a really fantastic way to finish Teatro Grotesco. (I am aware of an alternate edition that contains three more stories past this, and I regret not having access to them, but none could be a more fitting conclusion.) Like the other stories in the book’s third chunk, subtitled “The Damaged and the Diseased,” this final story deals with the creation of art: specifically its futility. It’s a story that will resonate with any creative person who has ever found themselves in a situation where success seems contingent on the extent to which you can sacrifice your sense of self. Any number of characters, from the narrator to the failed artist Grossvogel (Big Bird?) to the man penning a pamphlet on “the conspiracy against the human race” (the title to a book that Ligotti himself would later publish) could serve as plausible authorial inserts. Given that I don’t know anything about the man — nor does anybody, seemingly — I’m at pains to decide what that could mean. But maybe it’s totally irrelevant. Without spoiling anything, because this is a story that definitely starts in one place and ends in another, “The Shadow, The Darkness” calls into question the very notion that meaning can be communicated through words. For Ligotti, the ultimate horror is that everything we can understand is fake (“nonsense and dreams,” he phrases it in this story, “nothing but show business,” he suggests in another) and everything that’s actually real is incomprehensible. The idea that the entire communicative infrastructure that he’s been using throughout all of these stories that seek to pull back the veil on the world’s horrors is itself false and fruitless is the biggest, most all-encompassing horror of all.

Games

Oxenfree — Looks like creepy 80s throwbacks are just on the air these days. But in spite of being a mysterious, Stephen King-esque horror story with teen movie tropes and a synth score, Oxenfree feels like much more than Stranger Things: the game. While Stranger Things wore its tropes on its sleeve, it does not necessarily allow those tropes to control the narrative in the way that, say, Doctor Who or Mulholland Drive do. Oxenfree, on the other hand, is a game whose horrors live in media-within-media, like Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels, or Mulholland Drive’s entire first two acts (ask me to explain this at your peril). And delightfully, the media in which they live is radio broadcasts. I did not mean to play two brief indie games involving radios in as many weekends, but somehow I have. Thank you 2016, for this at least. I feel like I will definitely have more to say about this after I’ve played it once or twice more, which I hopefully will by the end of the year. I’m sure there are some staggering alternate endings. I have ideas on the tip of my brain about how this game distinguishes between the possibilities for horror in live radio broadcasts versus the possibility for horror in reel-to-reel tape. But I’m not going to be able to articulate them until things have percolated a bit. I’ve only played two new games this year, but both have been corkers. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “HGTV and Cooking Shows” — Pop Culture Happy Hour is to me what HGTV is to the panel on Pop Culture Happy Hour. It just makes me feel comfortable. This was all the way at the bottom of my feed and I listened to it anyway this past Sunday, because I just wanted my comfort food podcast. This is great.

A Point of View: “The Ring of the Nibelung” — Note: this positive review is about to be almost totally negated by the one below it. But let’s start where we must start. This essay, which comes from a BBC essay program I only just discovered, is the sort of thing I’d like to hear on the radio about the arts all of the time. Roger Scruton, the writer and reader of this treatise on Wagner’s Ring, is an influential philosopher of music whose work I’ve read in small bits. Like Harold Bloom, he is absolutely fascinating when he is talking about art he loves. And he clearly loves the Ring. His reading of it as a story of gods for a modern people with no gods left to believe in is absolutely compelling and made me want to go listen to the Ring again. It also made me slightly regret what I wrote in last week’s Sweeney Todd review about no operas being great works of literature. Beautiful, smart radio from a beautiful, smart public broadcaster.

A Point of View: “Roger Scruton: The Tyranny of Pop” — So, I went on to check out Scruton’s most seemingly notorious contribution to this program, which is an act of witless intellectual cowardice the like of which any broadcaster should be embarrassed to host on their airwaves. Scruton argues against a few key phenomena associated with pop music. Firstly, that it is foisted upon us in public places. He believes that music should be exclusively for the purpose of active listening and that humans have lost something through the proliferation of recorded music. (RECORDED MUSIC. He’s questioning the value of recorded music in 2015. This man is a walking sweater vest.) Needless to say, this argument would have drastically displeased Erik Satie. And it would have robbed the greatest composers of the Baroque of their livelihoods, given that many of them wrote ceremonial music that was explicitly intended as ornamentation. He suggests at one point that pop music may have something to do with modern young people’s inability to speak properly, by which he clearly means our inability to speak like him. I know this is what he means, because he goes on a lengthy tear about how to solve this grievous problem in which wise, classical music-loving teachers must play their students the music they love, and then tell them all that other music is bad. That’ll show ‘em. Nothing changes a teenager’s mind like the opinion of an authority figure. But beyond the impracticality of his strategy, what kind of person even thinks like this? That the solution to the world’s problems is to indoctrinate the young with the most reactionary value system possible, while stomping out all traces of the modern? I’ll tell you what kind of person thinks like that: the sort of person whose views fit so squarely into the intellectual hegemony of the Eurocentric consensus that they’ve never ONCE in their life had to interrogate their own prejudices. That is where my charge of intellectual cowardice comes from. When I first heard this, I was most bothered by what I saw as Scruton’s cardinal sin of refusing to engage with art on its own terms. But that’s not even quite it. Anybody can feel free to engage with art on whatever terms they like, as far as I’m concerned. But, Scruton only possesses one set of terms with which to deal with art, and they are the terms that have been set by the generations of straight, white, male academics who have determined what constitutes great art. He has not even established his own set of terms, and that is why his brain falls out when he hears Lady Gaga. He is obviously a fine thinker when he is dealing with art in his ultra-limited wheelhouse, but this essay is far more intellectually lazy than the pop gobbling youths he so disrespects. Ah, well. ‘Twas ever thus.

Fresh Air: “Actress Pamela Adlon On ‘Better Things’” — My my, Terry Gross is in a good mood! Obviously, Adlon is great conversation, and that must help. This was a fun discussion that really helps to shed some light on how Adlon’s sensibility has helped inform Louis C.K.’s various TV projects. Now that they’re collaborating in the other direction, I’m really excited to see where it goes. I’ll be checking out the first episode of Better Things sometime in the coming weeks. We’ll see if it grabs me.

On The Media: “Brooke Gladstone is a Trekker” — Obviously, she is. This is a decent whistle-stop tour of Star Trek’s cultural impact, and it’s got clips of some great lines from the various iterations of the franchise. Hearing stuff like this always makes me think I should redouble my efforts to get into Star Trek, but I just find it so bland. Maybe someday.

Imaginary Worlds: “The Hobbits and the Hippies” — Now this is some serious SF/F history. The story of J.R.R. Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings is familiar, but the story of its widespread adoption in America by the hippie counterculture is not. And the discussion of how, oh how, it could be possible for so retrograde a text to have countercultural importance is truly fascinating. I’m enormously looking forward to this new season of Imaginary Worlds. Pick of the week.

The Heart: “No Way Out” — This isn’t one of The Heart’s more unconventional stories. It’s basically just a window into an unpleasant adolescence. Certainly, it’s a more unpleasant adolescence than most, given that it involves physical violence by an alcoholic stepfather, but altogether this is a fairly conventional story that’s made interesting by sheer emotional honesty. I’m liking this season a lot.

Code Switch: “The Dangers Of Life As An American ‘Nobody’” — Marc Lamont Hill is an extremely persuasive speaker, to the point where his view that we should abolish prisons doesn’t seem completely outrageous by the end of this episode. The guy’s thought this through.

The Allusionist: “The Key part I: Rosetta” — I should have seen the Long Now Foundation’s fingerprints on this from just reading the episode description. This is a wonderful, and typically funny, discussion of how a language might be transmitted to humans thousands of years into our future. Fascinating.

All Songs Considered: “Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, King Creosote, L.A. Salami, More” — I was always going to hear the new Peter Gabriel track. May as well hear it on this show. Wow, he’s really abandoned subtlety, hasn’t he. I’m willing to be surprised, but I really feel like when he eventually releases his first proper album in 15 years, it’s going to be pretty damp. “The Veil” doesn’t so much have lyrics as a straightforward recitation of the Edward Snowden story. Compare with “Down to Earth,” another song he did for a movie, which succeeds in capturing the mood and sentiment of WALL-E without reference to the story at all. “The Veil” doesn’t stand alone. On the other hand, the new Nick Cave song they play on here is amazing, and L.A. Salami is one of the best discoveries this show has led me to.

The Gist: “Hillary’s Campaign Manager on Pneumonia, Swing Voters, and Strategy” — He goes a bit easy on the Clinton campaign manager. But to be fair, all of the major criticisms being levelled against that campaign, strategy-wise, have been bullshit. “Basket of deplorables” is the best thing anybody’s said in this election so far, and honest to god why does anybody care about the pneumonia.

Reply All: “Lost in a Cab” — First off, it’s interesting to hear Reply All finally bouncing up against the possibility of a conflict of interest with their advertiser, Google. I remember back in an old episode of StartUp, when Alex Goldman (maybe it was P.J. Vogt? but I don’t think so) expressed extreme anxiety over the prospect of tech companies advertising on their show, given that they cover tech. It’s taken a long time to rear its head, but here it is. They’re handling it well, though. Still, I feel like they’d really love to tear into Google Adwords, because who doesn’t. And they can’t, because not only is Google a Gimlet sponsor, Adwords is the specific product they were advertising on Reply All. Juicy. Also, this story is a good listen, even if it does have a shaggy dog ending. Plus… there’s some increasingly elaborate mixing on this show, including new renditions of the theme song. It’s almost like Breakmaster Cylinder is on their staff, or something. OR SOMETHING…

The Sporkful: “The Woman With A Keg In Her Coat Closet” — A fun, but not super immersive romp through the world of women drinking beer. Women drink beer. Also they make it! If there’s one really interesting thing in here, it’s the various women interviewed telling tales of horrible bros assuming they don’t know anything about beer. This is, of course, something that we already knew was happening, even if we’d never specifically thought about it.

The Gist: “‘Mrs. Robinson,’ ‘Hey Jude,’ and Some Utter Schlock” — I love when Chris Molanphy is on this show. I had never thought of 1968 the way that it’s portrayed here, because not all music that proves popular in the short term goes down in history. “Mrs. Robinson,” “Hey Jude” and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” do. But it’s the very strange other stuff that’s played here that’s most interesting. Nice.

99% Invisible: “Making Up Ground” — Something you don’t think about: much of the earth we stand on is manmade. Virtually all of the Netherlands. Imagine.

Radiolab: “Update: Eye in the Sky” — The episode itself is not one of my favourites, and the update is consequential, but fairly short. I dunno. Fine.

Code Switch: “Why Do We Still Care About Tupac?” — One of the best episodes of this show yet. I know nothing about Tupac, and this was a great introduction. The presence of one skeptic, Gene Demby, only enhanced it.

On the Media: “After 9/11, Nothing Was Funny” — It’s most interesting to hear an interview with Marc Maron from five years ago, complete with a clip from Maron’s act fifteen years ago. When you’re used to only hearing him on his own turf, where little is left off the table, it’s easy to forget that he is the kind of thoughtful guy who sounds really authoritative in interviews. A little editing goes a long way.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Documentary Now! & A Documentary Roundup” — I really hope Sam Sanders is back on this show sometime. I can listen to him talk about anything. I’ll probably check out Documentary Now!, or at least a few of the episodes that this panel recommended. And, I will swallow my distaste for Chef’s Table for long enough to watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

On the Media: “Damned If You Do…” — More Ta-Nahisi Coates in here, which is just fine. But the best thing on here is the segment on why Facebook’s inability to find a middle ground between too much human editorial intervention and a dumb, dumb algorithm will not ultimately keep it from rolling on regardless. *Shudder.*

Omnireviewer (week of Sept. 4, 2016)

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First off, a few things from the category of “things I don’t review” that I would like to recommend regardless. Firstly, the A.V. Club has a food section now, called Supper Club, which already has a bunch of good reads up. It promises to be as fearlessly catholic in its purview as The Sporkful, but with the A.V. Club’s brand of casually obsessive geekiness. This will soon become my entire internet, I imagine. Also, Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast put out an episode this week where he talks with Michael Enright, Robyn Doolittle and Jeet Heer about movies that deal with journalism. It is quite excellent. I’ve also been listening to and enjoying Love Me, which is a CBC podcast, and thus doesn’t get its own reviews, but it is produced by two of the key producers of the late, lamented Wiretap. Speaking of, that show’s host announced his new Gimlet show this week, which I am very excited for, but will not be reviewing on account of an upcoming episode of the Syrup Trap Pod Cast.

Now. On to our 15 reviews.

Literature, etc.

Ian Parker: “Pete Wells Has His Knives Out” — This New Yorker profile of the New York Times’s restaurant critic is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read this year. It is perhaps most interesting for its small observations into the details of this job, like the strange unwritten code that dictates that critics must not be acknowledged by restaurant staff, nor acknowledge themselves in restaurants. Everybody must simply act as if everything is normal, even when the head chef shows up halfway through the evening to ensure a full-capacity performance. Parker illustrates this with an anecdote about Wells and Jimmy Fallon coincidentally sitting next to each other at a sushi bar. Both were recognized, but only Fallon was acknowledged, and Wells was served more fussily prepared food. Or, there’s this: Wells sometimes shies away from restaurants before he hits the Times’s three-dinner minimum because he can’t think up a review that will be interesting to read. Declining to review for “literary reasons,” as Parker puts it, rather than anything to do with the food. Restaurant reviews are for reading, after all. (Speaking as a person who has forced himself to review every episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour since last October, I sympathize.) But Parker’s piece is also a fascinating portrait of a person who is carefully considering how best to wield a very specific kind of power. Wells can break fine dining establishments with a single snide remark in an otherwise positive review. The costs and benefits of that must be weighed attentively. Jobs are on the line, and not just those of people who’ve made fortunes in reality TV. Parker portrays Wells as intensely cognizant of how needless a pan can seem, even as David Chang derides him as old-fashioned and a bully. Also, in the “things I have to mention because I am me” category, apparently Wells uses Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies to combat writer’s block.

Thomas Ligotti: “Severini” — It’s in pieces like this where you can most clearly see Ligotti’s influence on China Miéville. Both of them are obsessed with horrors conjured by the act of human creation. They’re obsessed with art, but morbidly. Miéville is the more dazzling writer, and the more interesting accidental art critic. But Ligotti’s comparative directness and obsessive paranoia conjures a mood of dread more consistently.

Television

Stranger Things: Season one, episodes 4-8 — This show finally captured me in the opening moments of its fifth episode, where the children figure out what’s going on because of their awareness of the tropes of the kind of story they’re in. It’s not the first time this has been done, certainly. Parts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and nearly the whole of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who use the same trick. But it signalled a moment where the show ceased to be a genre homage and started to become a genuine postmodern pastiche. By the end of the episode, Stranger Things is invoking Under the Skin and courting our modern paranoia about surveillance. How brilliant to have the villains of a piece be people who listen. Villains are usually acting; scheming; talking; monologuing. But our key villain in this show says very little — his power is in what he hears. How contemporary. But it also fits perfectly into the show’s Cold War setting. Then, in the next episode, another character figures out the monster (there’s a monster; that’s not a spoiler) with knowledge of predators that she gleaned from her nerdy childhood obsession with animals. This is a show where power comes from knowing things. I love that. I can’t say I was totally satisfied with the ending, but the second season renewal was announced just after I started watching, so I don’t have to be. Well-made television that scratches an itch.

Music

Björk: Debut & Post — You know how sometimes you listen to an early album by an artist you admire, mostly out of curiosity, thinking that it’ll at least shed some light into their later masterpieces? That’s not what listening to Debut is like at all. This album completely stands up on its own merits even today. Honestly, I’m inclined to say that however much Björk’s songwriting had matured by the time of Homogenic, this album has actually aged better, sonically. “Human Behaviour” is a totally nutty single on which Björk undercuts a great pop hook by singing in what first seems to be a different key. And the album starts as it means to go on. Every track on this is surprising, and never in the ostentatious way that art pop people can sometimes be on their debuts. This can stand alongside Björk’s best work, and thus alongside the best music of the ‘90s. Post starts off even stronger, with “Army of Me” and “Hyper-Ballad,” two of her best songs. But it meanders a bit from there. It seems like the sort of album that will be a grower in the same way that Vespertine is, and that Debut and Homogenic are not. Will revisit frequently.

Brian Eno: Ambient 1/Music for Airports — No need to review this a second time, but I feel I should at least express gratitude for it. It’s been a frazzling week. But when I put this on, I could feel my heart rate slowing practically from the first second. This isn’t just good music, it’s good-spirited music — an applicable boon to all humanity.

Brian Eno: Ambient 4/On Land — I have adopted the two outer portions of Eno’s Ambient quadrilogy as true ambient music this week. But where Music for Airports soothes, On Land maintains an air of slight discomfort. It is the lesser album, but when fed through overworked iPhone speakers and placed on the dresser, it makes a grand soundtrack for reading Ligotti.

Stephen Sondheim: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Original Broadway Cast Recording) — There are no operas, not even Wagner’s, that can be considered great works of literature as well as great pieces of music. There are few musicals that this can be said of, but this is self-evidently one of them. For all of its typical unlikely plot elements (Todd’s seafaring companion just happens to fall in love with his daughter by sheer coincidence?) and less than plausible romances (Mrs. Lovett, what were you thinking?), Sweeney contains a dozen sublime verses ranging from the devastatingly simple (“You are young. Life has been kind to you. You will learn.”) to the magnificently virtuosic (“There’s a whole in the world like a great black pit” etc.). And even if their would-be love story is a tad undercooked, Todd and Lovett are two of musical theatre’s most fully-realized characters. This piece feels strangely ahead of its time, given how inundated we currently are with antihero narratives. But the highest compliment that can be paid to such a story is that its protagonist’s actions are genuinely sympathetic, even as they are unconscionable. And Todd’s actions are certainly unconscionable. The fact that this story exists at the emotionally heightened level of reality where musicals live means that Sondheim can throw a philosophy directly into Todd’s mouth and not have it feel hackneyed: “They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why: because the lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us, death would be a relief.” Todd is not merely an avenger for his ruined family. He is avenging the entire world for having been ruined by itself. This is a kind of person that exists. Sweeney Todd is every disillusioned nihilist who’s ever shot up a public place. He is also every religious fundamentalist who has committed atrocities. He is everybody who has ever ended a life in the name of a philosophy. And yet. It is difficult to despise Todd completely. This has less to do with his tragic history (angry-man-avenges-wronged-woman plotlines are a dime a dozen and they are sexist and bad) than it does with the fact that, like his fellow bloodstained musical theatre villain Aaron Burr (and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s model for Burr, the far less effective Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar), Todd has a legitimate grievance. “The history of the world, my love, is those below serving those up above.” Todd is an elegant enough thinker to see the poetry in baking unsuspecting Londoners into pies. For Todd, mass murder is the only true social equalizer. Todd is unforgivable. He is damned, even within the confines of his own play. But anybody who is aware of our civilization’s various systemic inequities may find it hard not to lick their lips as Sweeney slits throats.

Jon Anderson: Olias of Sunhillow — Parts of it feel like something that might be played in a spa. But all in all, I absolutely adore this and have since I first heard it. This is essentially Anderson doing what he always does, but without the rest of Yes to help him realize his vision. Working within those constraints, he makes something that is entirely unlike Yes music, but which is maybe the most fully realized iteration of his mystical vision that we have on record. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it is an exceptionally good solo album that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend even to people who hate Yes.

Games

Lethophobia — I’ve barely begun, but I’m quite enjoying this. It’s a free browser game made with Failbetter Games’ StoryNexus tool. So, basically, the mechanics are the same as Fallen London and the text-based portions of my beloved Sunless Sea. This is the first game I’ve played on this platform that isn’t actually developed by Failbetter, though I have had a bash at making one. (Didn’t get far.) Lethophobia starts in a familiar adventure game place: amnesia. Also, you’re by a house in a clearing. Rings a bell. But so far, it’s distinguishing itself with excellent, funny writing and by making interesting use of StoryNexus’s quality-based story progression. The real test of this is whether I return to it after my initial session. Never a guarantee with games I didn’t spend money on.

Firewatch — Yeah, this is what I want games to be like. I mean, not the only thing I want games to be like, but if this could be the default that would be fine by me. Firewatch is a walking sim with a branching narrative stacked on top of it. It gives you the freedom to explore a compelling place that Gone Home offered, but with the addition of the sort of choice-based dialogue that Telltale’s Walking Dead games are known for. Mechanically, this is a perfect union. It fixes potential problems with both of those pre-existing models for gaming (loathe as I am to entertain the notion of problems with Gone Home). It adds choices and agency to the Gone Home model, which really just basically throws you into a space and says “walk around!” And, it combats the ruthless constraints of the Telltale model, which allows for choice but confines you to exploring one small area of space at a time. I could see this exact set of mechanics working brilliantly for just about any story, and I imagine we will see that happen in the coming years. But the story we have here is pretty magnificent in itself. The premise of a video game where you’re a fire lookout may seem to hold a whiff of Papers Please-esque perversity, but that’s not what’s happening here. There is no “look what I can make fun!” in this game. The fact that your character takes a job as a fire lookout in a huge, gorgeously-rendered national park is straightforwardly and obviously a setup for a proper adventure story. Of course, that story does turn out to be only about a quarter of the point, tops. The real beauty of playing Firewatch is in hearing the interactions of its two main characters: Harry, the player character (voiced brilliantly by Mad Men’s Rich Sommer), and Delilah, his boss in another lookout tower who is available only by radio (voiced equally brilliantly by Cissy Jones). These two both have some shit to work through. You don’t voluntarily isolate yourself in the brush if you don’t. And it’s the relationship that forms between them (which can presumably be very different depending on your choices) that forms the core of the game. Firewatch is a rare thing: a fun, unpretentious video game that nonetheless feels like it’s for grown-ups. I love it. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

WTF with Marc Maron: “Joseph Arthur/Peter Bebergal” — A great episode featuring two guests I’m interested in but whose work I’ve never gotten around to. Bebergal’s book about rock music and the occult, The Season of the Witch, has been on my list for ages. He’s not a great interview, but he seems like the sort of person who might write a good book. Also, Maron is curiously comfortable talking about magic without caveats and provisos. At no point did he say something like “but you know this is all bullshit, right?” Maybe he understands that magic is only ever a metaphor, which indicates that it has meaning, which means that it has power regardless of its ontological status. Or maybe he just remembers what it was like to be on coke. Either way. Also, the conversation with Joseph Arthur is interesting as a peek into the career of somebody who had votes of confidence from Peter Gabriel and Lou Reed but never quite made it. I’ve known who he is since Gabriel’s Big Blue Ball came out belatedly in 2008: a dubious, messy record made from three weeks of sessions at Real World Studios in the 90s. I liked Arthur’s contribution. But I never checked out his records. Perhaps I should. He sounds like what Marc Maron would be if he were a musician.

Love and Radio: Season 5 preview — Not the most exciting preview that came out this week (Again, I’m recusing myself from reviewing Heavyweight) but I’m definitely excited to hear stories about transgenic humans.

99% Invisible: “Public Works” — Roman Mars remarked on Twitter that this would be the nerdiest episode of 99pi ever. It kind of is, and it is also one of the best of recent times. It’s just a flat-out discussion (not a story, mind you) of the history of the notion of “infrastructure,” a word so new that the Washington Post put it in quotation marks like I just did as recently as the ‘80s.

The Gist: “A GOP Apostate Explains Her Vote for Hillary” — The best Gist I’ve heard since picking it up. Firstly, it contains a reasonable interview with a reasonable Republican, which is the unicorn of this election season’s press coverage. Secondly, it contains the most delightfully discursive and amusing spiel I’ve heard. It’s about the notion that sophistication does not necessarily equal excellence, but that’s an oversimplification. Pesca takes his time getting to his point, and he wheels through a whole bunch of implications without warning you it’ll happen. Radio doesn’t have to proceed in a straight line. Pesca’s success as a podcaster is proof that listeners are smart enough to follow along with a train of thought, even when the tracks have corners. Pick of the week.

All Songs Considered: “New Sylvan Esso, Sharon Van Etten, R.E.M. Acoustic, More” — Stephen Thompson’s presence is always appreciated. I recognize the value of Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton and I’ve come to love both of them as inviting presences on this podcast. But Thompson is smarter than either of them. As for the music, the Kate Tempest track eclipses all of them handily. I’ll definitely be checking out that record.

Omnireviewer (week of Aug. 7, 2016)

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23 reviews. That seems to be my upper limit, these days. But I’m slowly and surely catching up with my podcast backlog. Relatedly, my average running pace is getting gradually quicker.

Television

Last Week Tonight: August 7, 2016 — Jason Sudeikis’s role in the final kicker of Oliver’s journalism segment is the villain of our times. He is shiny and dumb, utterly clueless and convinced of his own rightness, and he values the new more than the good. I have met this person a number of times and so have you. Individually, they are an embuggerance. Collectively, they are an intellectual apocalypse lying in wait. Thank you, John Oliver, for leading the charge against the shiny dummies.

Deadwood: Season three, episodes 1-6 — Thus far, season three of Deadwood is scarcely less excellent than season two. Its reputation and my knowledge of its hasty cancellation leads me to expect disappointment within the next six episodes, but so far I’m just enjoying being back in this richly-drawn setting with these characters and their gutter-Shakespearean dialogue. Brian Cox is a very welcome addition to the cast, even if his character isn’t involved in anything much resembling a story at this point. George Hearst is proving a more fearsome monster even than Francis Wolcott was last season. On that note, the most interesting thing about this season so far is the vastly different power dynamic that takes hold when Al Swearengen and Cy Tolliver are no longer vying for dominance under the watchful eye of Sheriff Bullock. Such trifling matters must be put aside when an individual as powerful and ruthless as Hearst threatens this entire civilization that’s been so miraculously built from nothing. (It may not be “civil,” but Deadwood represents a civilization nonetheless.) The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff had a great line of argument about the first season of the show: you can tell who Deadwood’s “gods” are because they assay their domain from on high. Al and Cy have their respective verandas, and the very wealthy (if comparatively retiring) Alma Garrett has her high window. Telling, then, that the first thing Hearst does when he gets into town is roughly tear a hole in the second-story outer wall of his newly-purchased hotel to fashion a crude veranda. I have no idea how the town is going to get out of Hearst’s grasp. Given the slapdash end of Deadwood’s production, I suspect they may not.

Literature, etc.

Michael Lind: “Intellectuals are Freaks” — A very valuable essay about how the life experiences of the chattering set tend to blind them (us?) to certain realities. I know many people whose life experiences have placed them in an intellectual bubble wherein there are no ideologically-opposed people to them. And look, I’m as horrified about Trump and Brexit as anybody. But I think that a certain amount of exposure to a variety of viewpoints within my own family has made me slightly less incredulous about how these things can happen. I’m still massively blinkered, I’m sure. But I know lots of people who could do to read this. I will say that Lind’s conclusion that all opinion writers and professors should spend a year working in a shopping mall or warehouse seems a bit facile to me. Surely, that’s hardly enough to counter the rest of their lives?

Bernd Brunner: “Encyclopedia Blue” — Lind’s article appeared on a site called The Smart Set, which I hadn’t heard of and decided to give a shot. I went with the article most prominently displayed on their homepage, which was this disappointingly brief article on the colour blue. It cites two full books on the topic that sound like they would be interesting. But if you’re going to do the whole “thinkpiece about a colour” thing, I think I deserve at least a couple thousand words in return for the click. Come on, now.

Music

Simon Rattle & Berlin Philharmonic: Schoenberg Orchestral Works — This is perhaps an atypical recording to be in my most listened-to classical discs ever. But, according to my iTunes play count, so it appears to be. To be fair, that stems mostly from the recording of Schoenberg’s brilliant orchestration of Brahms’ G minor piano quintet that starts the disc off. Being Brahms, it’s a long way off from the dissonant, bizarre music that Schoenberg is best known for. But it’s also got more than a little of Schoenberg’s taste for the grotesque in it. The rapid string passages and loud percussion of the first movement conjure similarly nightmarish images to Schoenberg’s own early works, Erwartung in particular. Given that this is the only recording of this orchestration that I’ve heard, it’s hard to say how much of this is there in the score and how much of it is Simon Rattle leaning hard into the Schoenberg side of the Brahms-Schoenberg collaboration. But it’s exciting music, marvellously played. I listen to it more than any recording of an actual Brahms symphony. The Schoenberg originals that follow it keep the pace admirably, though I find myself listening to them less. Accompanying Music to a Film Scene is the one piece here that casual listeners might find distressing. In the absence of memorable melodic material, Schoenberg’s virtuosic orchestrations hold the attention. He really doesn’t get enough credit for his talents in that area. This recording of the Chamber Symphony No. 1 isn’t my preferred one — I do tend to like it it best in its original chamber orchestra scoring. The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s recording is the real classic, I think. This music calls out for a one-per-part approach. There’s something about that feeling that you’re dealing with individuals rather than sections that makes the music easier to keep track of, somehow. But it’s hard to complain when it’s played as well as the Berlin Phil plays it here. An idiosyncratic favourite, I suppose. But I’d recommend it unreservedly to anybody who’s interested at all in classical music.

Kyle Craft: “Before the Wall” — A beautifully-timed old-school folky protest song about Trump’s wall. Given that you can record and release songs so easily now, I don’t know why social isn’t being constantly flooded with latter-day Woody Guthries and Pete Seegers, having their say about The Big Thing, and following in step with the news cycle. The kinds of contemporary, time-hooked songs you could write in a day and perform at a club that evening in the ‘60s are now the kinds of songs that you can write and record in one, two days and throw online to a potentially much bigger audience. Is this happening? Am I just in an echo chamber? Are we all? In any case, this song is tremendously moving at this specific moment in time. It will inevitably mean less next year, but that’s not the point. Kyle Craft now has his album — his big statement of arrival that I’ll probably be listening to for years — and this single, which in an equitable world would introduce him to a much larger audience, if only for a short time. “If the wall it goes up and your Jesus comes back/And he knocks on the door will you stand to attack/If he don’t have his papers and he don’t have much cash/Would you take him in, jail him, or just send him back?” Pick of the week.

Games

Sunless Sea — This remains my favourite game to return to. I played a fair bit this week, and I actually chose to end the story of my longtime character, when he finished a particular matter that led him through a vast gate to the far north of the game’s world, and onward to his poetic death. That is the sort of thing that can happen in Sunless Sea. I confess to being slightly disappointed with the sendoff that Captain Webern got. (Yes, I name my video game characters after avant-garde composers. Are you really surprised?) But my new character, Captain Alban (yeah, I know, Alban Berg died before Anton Webern; but who’s counting?) will certainly find his way to the corners of the game that Webern never managed to survey. If it seems like I’m strangely invested in this, I am. Sunless Sea is one of the great works of fiction of our time. I urge anybody with any inclination towards games at all to check it out.

Podcasts

Invisibilia: “Outside In” — Hanna Rosin has been a good addition to this team, but this season has still been weaker, all-in-all, than the first. It’s unfortunate that this final episode of the season is one of its strongest, with two major segments produced by outsiders. I’ll likely switch this over to an occasional listen, rather than a commitment next season.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: MTV Classic” — I’m so glad that Stephen Thompson works at NPR. His Onion roots show through frequently, and that’s a nice thing to have on current affairs radio.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Match Game” — This is seven minutes of Glen Weldon being extremely funny and Stephen Thompson delighting in how funny Glen Weldon’s being. You’ll notice that my responses to this show are as much about the people on it as the things they talk about. That’s the mark of a good panel show, I think. The people who actually make this show may disagree, who knows.

The Heart: “BFF” — This diary series is going to be great. This opening episode is everything you want from The Heart: it’s intimate, irreverent, beautifully produced, and yeah, kind of hot. Also, it’s got great music. I feel like I never have anything substantive to say about The Heart, but it really is one of my favourite podcasts.

99% Invisible: “The Magic Bureaucrat” — Welfare is a sticky topic, and I do not personally have any time for arguments against it. But this story about how the Bill Clinton-era welfare reforms (which I think were a travesty) were designed is really interesting because it folds a policy-making process story into the rhetoric that’s spouted by some of the sources here. It also contains horrific anti-welfare propaganda music. Worth a listen.

Reply All: “Dead is Paul” — This entire episode is devoted to a recurring segment, which is kind of the journalism equivalent of a bottle episode. But I have never been disinterested in P.J. Vogt and Alexes Goldman and Blumberg together in a studio. This is good fun, and very much the sort of thing that I look to podcasts to contribute to my life.

Code Switch: “What Does ‘Objectivity’ Mean to Journalists of Color?” — It’s great to hear some journalists of colour talking specifically about how they deal with reporting on Trump, given that he has been so outspoken in his racism. Pilar Marrero from La Opinion is particularly trenchant: her paper has no problem calling Donald Trump racist, because there is a preponderance of evidence that this is the case. There’s a bit of debate about this point in this episode, and it’s interesting, but nobody ever really quite eclipses Marrero’s analysis.

Theory of Everything: “The art of the deal” — This is just a flat-out conspiracy theory, which is exactly the sort of thing I want from this show. It starts off reasonably enough, but it ends with Donald Trump’s sons fighting ISIS on reality TV. Lovely.

All Songs Considered: “A Conversation With Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood” — Greenwood is a reticent fellow, and not a very good interview. But there are gems littered throughout this, like the fact that “Burn the Witch” is the first Radiohead song that’s been built on strings, rather than having strings added after the fact. I should probably listen to A Moon Shaped Pool again. The cuts Bob Boilen plays here are better than I remember.

99% Invisible: A Sea Worth its Salt” — This story about the fraught preservation efforts being put towards the Salton Sea in California is not quite as compelling somehow as the earlier story about the ruins of California’s public baths. It may seem a strange comparison, but they’re both stories about things that have dubious cases for preservation, though the Salton Sea’s dubiousness seems less dubious.

The Memory Palace: “Dreamland” — Another lovely, elegiac prose poem. This one comes from the back catalogue, but I haven’t been listening long enough to have heard it. It hones in on a specific element of Dreamland — a Coney Island theme park that burned down in 1911 — that’s really poignant: at this time, when travel was prohibitively expensive or inconvenient, this was a way for people living nearby to feel like they’d escaped their surroundings. That makes its destruction more tragic.

Code Switch: “Say My Name, Say My Name (Correctly, Please)” — A deep, funny discussion of why it sucks when people say your name wrong. I have never dealt with this, so it’s probably good for me to hear other people’s experiences with it.

All Songs Considered: “Blood Orange, NAO, Joyce Manor, Factory Floor, More” — Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Saidah Blount are always great to hear from, and they play some good tracks here. I was particularly taken by Swet Shop Boys “T5,” which makes me suspect I should probably check out more that Heems has been involved with.

Planet Money: “Oil,” episodes 1 & 2 — Oh, yes. This is what I want to listen to for the next few weeks. The team at Planet Money are learning about the oil business from the inside. By which I mean, they actually bought a hundred barrels of crude oil with cash and they are planning to transport, refine and sell it. Perhaps the gonzo spirit of Alex Blumberg survived his departure from this show. Pick of the week.

The Gist: “Mike Birbiglia and Ira Glass Followed the Fear Here” — Interviewing Birbiglia and Glass together is something you can just expect from Mike Pesca, I suppose. It’s more interesting than the other Birbiglia interviews I’ve heard surrounding Don’t Think Twice. This episode also contains an amusing riff on podcast tropes as pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s new (real) podcast. Also, this contains the second seemingly unmotivated Yes reference I’ve heard in this podcast in the relatively short time I’ve been listening to it — and I’ve only been listening occasionally. I’m impressed.

Imaginary Worlds: “Finding My Voice” — Maybe it’s a bit narcissistic of Molinsky to just bring in his old editor to talk about his development as a producer. But the actual stories here are interesting. And for those of us trying to figure out radio, it’s actually interesting all the way through.

Omnireviewer (week of Jul. 31, 2016)

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It’s been quite the week. I MCed a wedding and then climbed a mountain. Stay tuned for more on that. In the meantime, it’s been a week of mostly doing stuff that people around me were doing. And also listening to podcasts. A rather slight 20 reviews.

Movies

Meru — This is a deeply nerve-wracking documentary about three guys trying to make the first ascent of Mount Meru, a treacherous and technical climb. I watched it with my mountain geek friend with whom I had just done a teeny-tiny (yet quite eventful) climb in Canmore. It’s got some beautiful photography by Jimmy Chin, one of the climbers in the party. And it has been shaped into a narrative with stakes by introducing backstories for all three climbers. What these guys went through on the mountain is extraordinary. And the movie manages to make them seem merely compulsive and not actually insane. It seems for climbers, there’s no glamour in recklessness. These are smart people who want the world to know that they’re not just risk-seekers; they do this sort of thing because they are hyper-competent. I’d love to see this in a theatre.

Games

Mario Kart 64/Star Wars Episode I: Racer/F-1 World Grand Prix — A couple of friends and I spent a relaxing evening playing racing games for the Nintendo 64, a side of that platform that I never really explored when I used to play it. Of these three, Mario Kart 64 is the clear winner, of course. And not only that, but it also handily excels over its more modern iterations. In my limited experience of Mario Kart 8, there’s so much crap all over the screen, and such complicated tracks, that it detracts from the experience. The simpler, the better. And as for the Star Wars podracer, it is certainly better as a racing game than it was as a scene in a movie. It’s still a tad complicated. As hovercraft racing games for N64 go, it’s no F-Zero X. I never really got the hang of F-1 World Grand Prix. It’s obviously the only one of the three that makes any motion towards realism. But that feels strangely beside the point, to me. Give me homing turtle shells and Chain Chomps any day.

Television

Last Week Tonight: July 31, 2016 — This is actually better than his episode on the Republican convention. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Oliver more genuinely angry than when he refutes Trump’s response to Khizr Khan’s speech. It’s the first time he’s stepped away from glib amusement and occasional pathos and veered towards Jon Stewart’s old territory of righteous indignation. Beautiful stuff.

Music

The Decemberists: The Crane Wife — My Decemberists journey essentially ended with loving Picaresque as much as everybody and checking out The Hazards of Love to see if it’s as bad as they say. (It’s not; it’s brilliant.) It’s time I checked out the rest of the catalogue, I think. This seemed to have been the most egregious gap in my experience, since it’s about equal to Picaresque in terms of fan acclaim. And while on first listen I think that there are a few more middling tracks on this than there are on Picaresque (“Yankee Bayonet” and “Summersong” evaporated upon finishing), it also has some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard from this band. All three parts of the title track, “O Valencia!,” “When the War Came” and “After the Bombs” are all lovely story-songs in the vein of the best tracks on Picaresque. Colin Meloy’s lyrics are more traditionally “lyrical” here than on that album, wherein he wrote almost exclusively “ballads” — not in the sense of slow songs, but in the romantic sense of rhyming stanzas that relate whimsical narratives. Rather than focusing on what happens to a character, as is the case on “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” for instance, the songs on The Crane Wife make more of an attempt to tell the emotional, interior story: especially on the title suite. But the real surprise on this is “The Island,” a prog epic that sounds more like Thick as a Brick than anything from The Hazards of Love. While I’d hesitate to call it a lyrical highlight, the band’s playing on this track is absolutely top-notch, and it’s got some fabulous riffs and a wonderful arrangement. In fact, on this album the band has upped their instrumental performances substantially. To keep our comparisons in the progressive story-song milieu, it’s like the sound transition from Foxtrot to Selling England by the Pound. A beautiful, cathartic album that I will revisit frequently. Pick of the week.

Kyle Craft: Live on KEXP — He’s a little pitchy in “Pentecost,” but altogether, holy smokes he’s great live, too. Plus, he’s got that slightly nervous manner that you want from a rootsy singer who claims to have been living under a pool table. Who can I drag to a Kyle Craft concert?

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Stranger Things and Weddings” — Having listened to this the morning after MCing a wedding (highly recommended experience), the second part of this discussion had extra resonance. I can confirm that weddings are definitely not always boring and shitty, even if the panel is right to point out that they are very much a lazy trope much of pop culture. Stranger Things is very much on my to-do list, though I’ll need to decide whether I’m going to get back to Deadwood first.

Love and Radio: “On The Shore Dimly Seen” — Alright, this is what I’m talking about. Love and Radio has been doing solid public service during its off season by programming inventive features by other producers. Nick van der Kolk introduces this semi-documentary by producer Gregory Whitehead by saying that you can’t find this guy’s work online all that easily. Ironic that some of the most experimental audio productions are still coming out of terrestrial radio operations like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I really want there to be more of this kind of experimental radio available in the podcast world. Although there’s a whiff of art school self-seriousness around this piece about torture in Guantanamo, I appreciate it for taking a risk in presenting information in a new way. This is very nearly an oratorio (much of it is sung), taking its text from interview transcripts and government documents. More than any radio I’ve heard, it reminds me of Ted Hearne’s The Source, which is explicitly labelled as an oratorio. Self-seriousness aside, I want to hear more like this. If radio/podcast producers accepted the premise that you can tell stories in a way that has nothing to do with This American Life, there would likely be more noble failures out there, but there would also be more like this.

Invisibilia: “The Secret Emotional Life of Clothes” — There are six stories in this episode and I’d say one of them is great: the very last one, about a Jewish concentration camp prisoner who was able to keep his head down by wearing a Nazi shirt. He went on to become one of the great tailors in America, having dressed three presidents and a vast range of celebrities. The rest of this is forgettable.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Comic-Con Dispatches” — It’s always interesting to hear the work that these panelists do elsewhere at NPR. Glen Weldon’s piece on hard SF offers no new perspective, but Petra Mayer’s Wonder Woman celebration is lovely. It’s especially great that she talks only to women.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad” — I’m behind on this, and every other podcast. But I couldn’t resist jumping ahead to hear what they had to say about these two apparently pretty bad movies. Jason Bourne sounds more superfluous than anything, and I think I’ll just stick with the original trilogy, thanks. But Suicide Squad sounds like a complete disaster, and this conversation between Glen Weldon and Chris Klimek about why that is may be the best thing to come out of it. On that note, let us momentarily travel back in time…

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Swiss Army Man” — Weldon is absolutely correct that Klimek is dead wrong about this movie. Swiss Army Man is one of the best films I’ve seen in awhile, and Klimek’s assertion that it’s a short that got wrongly extended to feature length is completely ridiculous. The fact that there is this much of the Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie is definitely part of the joke. But that aside, I also agree with Weldon that it absolutely builds as it goes. Still, you’d be best off to heed both Weldon’s advice to see this movie and Klimek’s advice to throw a few bucks at The Nice Guys, because that’s really great too.

The Memory Palace: “Local Channels” — This story of the great swimmer Florence Chadwick is at its best when it gets elegiac near the end. I suppose The Memory Palace is seldom not elegiac. But, when DiMeo really gets to sink into a narrative of diminishment, he’s at his best. I don’t know what it says about me that I think that.

99% Invisible: “Combat Hearing Loss” — Boring and slightly markety. Hearing loss among soldiers is obviously a problem, but the design solution isn’t that clever or interesting.

Code Switch: “A Letter From Young Asian Americans, To Their Parents, About Black Lives Matter” — Kat Chow remains a secret weapon of this podcast. This episode is another of those that sheds light on something that isn’t necessarily hitting the big headlines, but is massively consequential to communities that I don’t belong to. This is why I listen to this show.

Imaginary Worlds: “Legacy of Octavia Butler” — I’m finding that when Molinsky focuses on a specific text or artist in a single episode, he can get a little dull. It’s easy to just explore abstractly in this format, whereas when you take a specific concept that could apply meaningfully to a number of texts, like the relationship of economics to genre fiction, you’ve got to do some real thinking. So, this one’s mixed.

Reply All: “The Picture Taker” — The Super Tech Support that anchors this episode is firmly in the middle of the pack as they go, but P.J. Vogt’s constant interjections make it worthwhile. He has a real knack for taking serious, grown-up problems and phrasing them in terms of man babies living in fantasy worlds. Also, the half-episode of Science Vs that’s tacked on her is very, very promising. About which more promptly.

StartUp: “Introducing Science Vs” — This whole “only put half the episode in the established podcasts’ feeds” strategy is a good one, because now I’m subscribed to Science Vs. And I don’t even feel like I’ve been suckered. This show is great. I’d say it’s starting off strong, but of course it’s been on in Australia for a full year already. The only real reason to listen to this episode of StartUp instead of just heading straight for the new show’s own feed is that you get to hear a bit about the acquisition, which is interesting to those of us who like geeking out about the insider world of podcasting. (Do you subscribe to the Hot Pod newsletter? You should.)

Science Vs: “Attachment Parenting” — There’s a fine line between reasonably assessing problematic assertions based on science and doing whatever Richard Dawkins is up to on Twitter these days. This show is firmly on the right side of that line. It is deeply satisfying to see snake oil salesmen getting debunked, especially when the host is as funny and engaging as Wendy Zukerman. I am going to enjoy this.

Science Vs: “Fracking” — I immediately knew I was going to like this show when Wendy Zukerman and P.J. Vogt were talking in the Reply All preview of this and Vogt said he didn’t like talking about fracking because he didn’t like talking about politics — to which Zukerman immediately replied that it shouldn’t even be about politics. There are facts to be considered, and that’s that. We need this show in a time when we are so inundated by political talking points and marketing that facts are seemingly ignorable. Pick of the week.

Radiolab: “From Tree to Shining Tree” — This is amazing: trees don’t actually absorb the bulk of their own nutrients with their roots: it’s done for them by near-microscopic tube-shaped fungus. This will completely change the way you think about your primary school science classes.

Omnireviewer (week of Jul. 24, 2016)

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I was underwhelmed by podcasts this week, so I’ve chosen two non-podcast picks of the week instead. And here they are at the top.

Movies

Swiss Army Man — You know this as “The Daniel Radcliffe Farting Corpse Movie.” What you don’t know is the extent to which that is exactly what it is for its entire 97-minute duration. But, in spite of And, because of its relentless devotion to its own ridiculous premise, Swiss Army Man is one of the most entertaining movies I’ve seen all year. It is essentially a feature-length two-hander, with Paul Dano and Radcliffe together in almost every frame of the movie. The fact that the whole thing doesn’t come crashing down under the weight of its own childishness is largely due to the fact that Dano and Radcliffe both offer grounded, emotionally realistic performances within an absurd context. Even Radcliffe, who plays a talking (farting) corpse, gives his character a believable emotional arc. The movie’s dreamlike magical realist logic comes to life in the hands of directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who don’t get bogged down in the mechanics of what’s real and what isn’t. Instead, they turn the whole story into a visual fantasia, piling found objects one on top of the other in elaborate hallucinatory montages. It’s hard to say what, if anything, the themes of this movie are. But that seems almost beside the point. It is realistic character drama that takes place within a high-concept, gross-out, borderline trolling indie comedy that gets laughs out of subjecting a corpse to untold indignities. It almost seems like a deliberate response to assholes like me who complain ad nauseum about how there are no new ideas in the movies. But honest to god, I would take an endless stream of weird, unpredictable, probably bad movies with crazy premises like this one to another year of bland superhero blockbusters. Pick of the week.

Television

BoJack Horseman: Season 3, episodes 4-12 — This is now officially my favourite Netflix original. I loved the fourth season of OITNB, but if you take the past two seasons of both of these shows and average them out, BoJack wins by a mile. The fourth episode of this season does a thing that I wish cartoons would do more often and proceeds with almost no dialogue. It is completely virtuosic and manages to be dark and moving in the way that this show always is even while it’s doing silly sight gags for the entirety of its duration. Two episodes later, we get a wonderfully non-hand-wringy story about abortion. Episode eight is one of the most beautiful episodes of TV comedy I’ve seen since last season’s “Hank After Dark.” It addresses one of the strangest elements of storytelling, which is our tendency to root for the protagonist regardless of everything. It’s an episode where everything falls apart for all of the characters we’re supposed to care about, which results in a happy ending for a few characters we don’t. It’s brilliant. This show has everything, including one of the best casts on any current show. I may just be misremembering, but it seems to me that Alison Brie and Paul F. Tompkins have substantially upped their game this time around. Tompkins in particular is bringing out many subtler shades of Mr. Peanutbutter than existed in prior seasons. I think that this is currently my second-favourite scripted program of 2016 so far, next to Horace and Pete. Pending my capriciously changing opinions, it will beat Better Call Saul by a narrow margin. Pick of the week.

Lost: “Solitary” — Ooh, I dunno about this. The love story segment of Sayid’s backstory is maybe the most contrived element of this show’s first season. Even Sawyer, while generally a shit character, has a better backstory than this. On the other hand, Hurley’s plot in this is one of the most beautiful moments of the season. A mixed bag.

Last Week Tonight: July 24, 2016 — This contains one of this show’s greatest moments ever and one of its most lacklustre. (Is it “most lacklustre?” Or just, “least lustrous?”) The good one is a moment where Oliver pulls a distressing if-then formulation from an interview with Newt Gingrich. In the interview — whether out of ignorance, malevolence or whatever arcane combination of the two is currently fueling the GOP — Gingrich asserts that feelings are facts. Or, at least, he fails to understand that this is not the case. Given this, Oliver provides this calculus: if candidates can create feelings, and feelings are facts, then candidates can create facts. “That is the closest thing to an actual magic spell I think I’ve ever seen,” says Oliver, and he is shudderingly correct. The least lustrous bit is the celebrity feature at the end where a bunch of major recording artists sing about how they don’t want candidates to make unauthorized use of their songs, which is a thing that happens constantly. It’s one of those things where the writers obviously just trusted that having a whole bunch of celebrities would be sufficient, so they didn’t write any jokes. (Sorry, they wrote one joke: about Spotify. And they gave it to Josh Groban to sing, because he was the only one who appeared to even care. Josh Groban loves being on TV.) This is fine. But I wish this show wouldn’t do that sort of “event” programming. They don’t need to: no matter what Oliver talks about, he’s going viral the next day.

Literature, etc.

Laurie Penny: Welcome to the Scream Room — No, this isn’t another of the Lovecraftian horror stories I’ve been so into this year. It’s a series of five posts on Medium about the 2016 Republican and Democratic conventions. Penny is a spectacular writer, almost to the point of showing off, and her existential dread at the implications of both conventions is intensely relatable. She sees the same apocalypse in the Republican convention that every sane person in the world does, but she also decries the horror of the lesser-evilism that was the spirit of the day at the Democratic convention. “Outside,” she writes, “an epic summer storm is breaking over the Democratic Demilitarized Zone like the world’s laziest metaphor.” Nearly every paragraph has a sentence that good. But the cream of the crop, and the most enraging thing I’ve read in awhile is “I’m With the Banned,” a crazy piece of first-person journalism that tells the story of Penny’s experience at the Republican National Convention with the infamous Twitter hate speech geyser Milo Yiannopoulos. Throughout the evening, she also encounters Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, and most disturbingly, Roosh V, whose relative lack of cynicism marks him as especially dangerous. This series is a quick, engrossing read, but have something calming nearby to serve as a chaser.

John Hermann: The Content Wars — I am finally finished reading this and I am too anxious and confused to have any feelings. I will say that I highly recommend Hermann’s writing. He has a wonderful way of clearly stating what’s happening in cases where most writers would find it hard to even quantify, and rather than directly editorializing, he’ll just lapse into an intentionally glib, irony-laden voice. So, he never comes off as a prophet of doom, in spite of his considerable scepticism about the future of platforms. The sheer imperiousness of his writing makes him much harder to ignore than even highly-regarded but slightly frantic tech-sceptics like Benjamen Walker. One last lengthy quote before I leave this be forever: “Maybe at some point pundits look back at access-based journalism and think, wow, that never made sense, how rude of those weird “publications” to hold readers hostage and blackmail their subjects. The triumphalist pundits will explain this, and why it matters, but also doesn’t, and why basically everything is good and getting better, anyway. Maybe, at the same time, other pundits will lament the media’s lack of interest in certain Important things. This will be dealt with by people who will explain what is actually Important, and what does that even mean, and who, actually, you’re talking about when you accuse the media of doing or not doing something you want them to do (yourself) and why that matters, or doesn’t, and whose fault it all is. (It’s yours.)”

Music

Nils Frahm: Solo — I listened to this while I read Penny’s piece on Milo Yiannopoulos, which is probably why I didn’t claw my eyes out during the course of that. It is immensely calming without feeling cheap. Think Brian Eno and Harold Budd. It is worth hearing simply for the sound of the piano itself, which is an unconventional thing about ten feet tall. It is marvellously sonorous, and well recorded here.

Strawbs: Ghosts — This is far better than I expected this band could be after a few listens of their apparent masterpiece, Hero and Heroine, many years ago. I dare say that this is much better than that album, with even the middling tracks reaching the heights of Hero and Heroine’s best ones (“Autumn,” the title track). Both albums find them a ways from their folk origins, playing a unique sort of laid-back symphonic prog. But this one is lower on treacle. Perhaps the album doesn’t quite belong on the prog 101 syllabus, but anybody who likes that genre ought to hear its best two tracks: “Ghosts” and “The Life Auction.” My favourite ‘70s prog discovery I’ve made in a while.

The Decemberists: Picaresque — Ah, memories. I first heard this album around the time when I first became amenable to music that was made after 1975. It was an easy sell, because Colin Meloy’s theatrical story-songs smacked of Genesis. That’s not the end of their prog connection: it would only be a few years before the Decemberists would go full neo-Tull on The Hazards of Love, which I like far more than most critics did. But Picaresque is their masterpiece. Every song is good, most are excellent. This album hits that perfect mark several times, where both the melody and the lyrics have a hook simultaneously. “16 Military Wives” may be the definitive song of the George W. Bush administration, and “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is as funny and haunting as ever 11 years later. A classic.

Games

Undertale — I sunk a bunch of free hours into a second playthrough of this, and thank god. Without spoiling anything, all of this game’s endings require you to take drastically different approaches throughout. So, it actually didn’t feel like a second playthrough so much as a totally different game taking place in the same overworld. I saw completely different sides to several of the characters I encountered on my first time through. These new characterizations in no way contradict the old ones; rather they suggest that these pixelated video game characters contain multitudes and respond in drastically different ways to drastically different circumstances. But the real genius of Undertale, I’m realizing, is its capacity for staggering narrative rug-pulls. The one in my first ending was earthshaking; this one less so. But still, the fact that playing the game through once will only yield a third of the story at most is properly impressive. My initial assessment of this game as being overrated is entirely due to how tightly it holds its cards to its chest. It is in fact a marvel. And I’ve still got one ending to go.

Podcasts

Imaginary Worlds: “Ghost in the Shell” — This kind of slipped past me, honestly. I will say this: there is no defence for casting Scarlett Johansson as an Asian woman. None. I won’t see that movie. I’ll just watch the original anime. (Maybe. But probably not.)

99% Invisible: “The Mind of an Architect” — This features never-before-heard tape of several renowned architects participating in a study about human creativity. That alone should make you want to listen.

Code Switch: “Black and Blue” — This is a more structured and thoughtful extension of last week’s extra episode about the most recent spate of violence between police and black people. I’m sure the Code Switch blog always did this kind of thing, but I’m really glad that it comes directly into my podcast feed now, because there’s no way I’m going to ignore it.

Reply All: “Stolen Valor” — The main segment is a really interesting story about people who attempt to shame people who falsely wear military uniforms in public. It’s great, and does a great job of demonstrating why there are people who find this very offensive and others who are taking it way over the line. The attempt to do something, anything, on the police violence of the previous week is as good a take as you can ask for from a show that focusses on how our experiences of the world are mediated by the internet. It’s an angle I hadn’t heard before, even if it is a bit of a paltry response.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “On Endings And Road Trips” — This is a rerun, and awww, they all sound so young! It’s a fun show, and if anything it ought to clear away any notion that they’re treading water these days, because the panel is actually less engaged-sounding here than they are on 2016 episodes.

On The Media: “The Country of the Future” — A bit of appealingly self-conscious parachute journalism from Bob Garfield and Alana Casanova-Burgess. This will be really edifying for anybody who doesn’t know anything about the Brazilian media. Considering that Brazil has a controversial publicly-funded broadcaster, I’d actually like to see more Canadian journalists take these topics on. The implications for our audience would be dramatically different from those for Garfield’s presumed American one.

All Songs Considered: “My Cell Phone Rights At Shows Vs. Yours” — This isn’t a reasoned debate so much as it’s just Boilen’s platitudes vs. Hilton’s curmudgeonliness. Maybe this would connect with me if I went to more concerts.

More Perfect: “Object Anyway” — This is only tangentially related to the Supreme Court, but the history of racism in jury selection, and the ineffective rules put in place to prevent it, is a really interesting story.

Invisibilia: “Flip the Script” — Another pair of stories without distinction. The first finds some Danish cops choosing to treat radicalized young Muslims with respect and discovering that this is an effective way to fight radicalization. Well, who’d have thought. I could have told you that. The second is about a guy with a really dumb idea about how to fix online dating. StartUp did a whole season on people with a good idea about how to fix online dating. I don’t need this story.

NPR Politics Podcast: Democratic National Convention coverage — This podcast was posting daily during both conventions, which is a great thing for a show like this to do. It’s good conversation. Being a politics show, it’s not as appealingly frothy as Pop Culture Happy Hour, but it’s as close as you can come to that show for politics. This was my media of choice throughout the convention because I hate TV (and don’t have one) and Facebook is worse. It was a great way to keep up without feeling like you’re being beaten over the head with messaging. I’ll certainly return to this when the convention’s over and they’re back to regularly scheduled programming. I bet the episodes on the Republican convention would have driven me insane, though.

Fresh Air: “The Rise And Fall Of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes” — This is a somewhat airless discussion, but the topic is fascinating. Roger Ailes is, of course, the scum of the earth. And now it turns out that creating Fox News isn’t even the worst thing he’s done in his life. Check this out for some horrifying context about this mess.

The Heart: “The Understudy” — A lovely piece by Sophie Townsend that was first produced for Love Me, the CBC podcast from the producers of WireTap that I somehow haven’t checked out yet (but which I won’t review for obvious reasons). The premise of having an actor portray her ex, and then using mostly the parts of the sessions where he talks about how he can’t get the lines right is brilliant. It’s a perfect metaphor for the fact that the ex in question wasn’t quite able to play the part of Townsend’s dead husband. Really nice.

99% Invisible: “America’s Last Top Model” — “Knowledge creates wonder.” If there was ever a credo for this show, it’s that. The rest of the episode, about a gigantic ridiculously accurate model of the Mississippi River floodplain that could predict levee failures more accurately than modern computers, is vintage 99pi.

Fresh Air: “Comic Mike Birbiglia” — A fun interview, but it touches on a lot of the same topics that are in Birbigila’s well-known specials and his first movie. It would have been nice to hear more about the new movie.

Code Switch: “46 Stops: The Driving Life and Death of Philando Castile” — This gets far into the weeds of Castile’s driving record. That’s a worthwhile thing to do. It’s not just discrimination in policing that’s the issue, although it’s the main one. It’s also housing discrimination and segregation.

Theory of Everything: “Something will happen, eventually” — Benjamen Walker is the only person who can do a reported piece based on an interview and make it sound like a prose poem. This show begins with the premise that coincidences aren’t as unlikely as they seem and weaves a tight 14 minutes around that idea without ever defaulting to the standard formats and techniques of public radio. If I were giving a podcast pick of the week it would go to this, but I’m not, so consider it a technical victory.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Ghostbusters and Mr. Robot” — I think they’re pretty much spot on about Ghostbusters. It’s a perfectly fine movie, but definitely lesser work from all those involved. Mr. Robot has never particularly drawn me.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Chuck Klosterman” — I think Klosterman slows down for Maron’s benefit here. But a fun chat that offers some insight into culture criticism’s most accomplished dilettante.

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 26, 2016)

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23 reviews. Again!

Literature, etc.

Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky: Sex Criminals, Volume 3 “Three The Hard Way” — I love this comic so, so much. I love how it manages to be deeply insightful about modern sexuality and relationships, while also being hilariously immature. There’s an issue in this collection that pretty much offers a microcosm of the whole comic. The story intercuts a lecture, given in a lecture hall, about feminism and the suppression of female sexuality with a scene where the protagonists fight a character that is honest to god actually referred to as a “semen demon.” It is exactly as head-spinning as it means to be. Also, Jon and Suzie continue to have possibly the most believable relationship in current serialized fiction. The supporting cast is really getting fleshed out now as well. If I have one complaint, it’s that in two subsequent issues, Fraction avoids writing a difficult scene by going meta. The first time it happens, it’s brilliant and contains some top-notch Zdarskyana, but when it happens again one issue later, you can’t help but think that Fraction’s using the jokey tone of the book to avoid specific writing challenges. It’s a minor quibble, though. I love this comic so, so much.

Music

SebastiAn: Total — Having spent a fair bit of time with Justice at this point, I was exceedingly happy to listen to some dance music with less shitty mastering. Which is only halfway a dig — I still love both of those albums. I love this, too. M.I.A.’s guest vocal was always going to be a high point, but I also love “Jack Wire,” “Love in Motion” and of course “Tetra,” because I love anything vaguely Baroque-sounding. There will be more listens in the future.

Yes: Relayer — Another old friend. I spent many years liking this more than Close to the Edge, but I can’t say I did this time. It’s really wonderful, no question. But Jon Anderson’s lyrics on “Gates of Delirium” are, if anything, a little too comprehensible. Almost trite, in places. I love him best at his most obtuse, and his most indifferent to grammar. Which is not to say there’s not great stuff in there: “burn their children’s laughter on to hell” is a compelling line, for instance. And the entire outro — “Soon,” as it’s called in its single edit — is one of the most beautiful moments in the Yes discography. “Gates of Delirium” in its entirety is possibly the farthest point out on the thin peninsula of post-60s Flower Power. Anderson apparently wrote the bulk of it at a piano, but you can imagine most of it strummed on an acoustic guitar, sung to an audience of Vietnam war protesters. I do think Relayer has a better side two than Close to the Edge, though. Patrick Moraz’s playing on “Sound Chaser” might be the best keyboard performance on any Yes recording. And “To Be Over” is pure catharsis. Speaking of catharses, I saw Jon Anderson on a solo tour shortly after he’d been booted out of Yes. He’d been in the hospital the previous night for a resurgence of his respiratory ailment. It was October in Edmonton: not really the best place for a person in delicate health to travel to. But he sang beautifully. He even managed to pull off “Long Distance Runaround” transposed up a couple semitones, because he’d forgotten to take his capo off. He could only last about half an hour, but when the audience gave him an ovation, he came back out and sang “Soon,” which he said is the song he’d written that had been the most helpful to him throughout his life when he needed to heal from something. It was a hell of a moment. I think of it every time I listen to this.

Fiori-Séguin: Deux cents nuits à l’heure — I can’t speak to how this record is remembered in French Canada, but in my neck of the woods, this collaborative record by Harmonium’s Serge Fiori and the songwriter Richard Séguin is entirely forgotten. Which is a shame, because, it’s probably the best Canadian prog album I’ve heard that isn’t by Harmonium or Rush. The pair of them both have great voices: Fiori’s being more strident and Séguin’s being a bit more fragile. And their songwriting style is entirely complementary, and lent cohesiveness by the arrangements, written by Harmonium’s road band. Every track on this is great. It bears a certain resemblance to Harmonium’s L’Heptade, but it’s lighter. I’d highly recommend this to anybody who likes the more pastoral side of prog — early Genesis, Fairport Convention, the Pentangle, or even the Canterbury scene. This is the definition of a buried gem.

Games

The Walking Dead: Michonne: Episodes 2 & 3 — This has everything that the previous seasons of the Walking Dead game has: great characters, fantastic writing, a gripping story and somewhat superfluous combat. Yet it isn’t as successful as it predecessors. The weakest part of this mini-season is the addition of a psychological horror element. Normally, I’d be all for that. And it does illustrate the effects of Michonne’s emotional trauma. But the actual deployment of the psychological horror is the same as in pretty well every game ever, which is that the camera shakes and changes colour to differentiate a hallucination from reality. In its most effective moments, Michonne jumps between reality and somewhat fanciful flashbacks by hard cuts. Whenever other devices are used, it gets a little clichéd. I’d still recommend it if you like the series and can find it on sale.

Jazz Jackrabbit — There are shreds of my childhood that I can’t quite get ahold of as an adult, because they fall outside the narrative of my life that I’ve spun for myself. I recall that as a child, I was not allowed to play games like Jazz Jackrabbit: a PC platformer that shamelessly rips off both Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers in equal measure. And yet, I clearly did play it. When I was a kid, computer games were a matter of what my mother deemed edifying and what my father deemed affordable. On my mother’s authority, I played mostly Learning Company edutainment games. They ranged from unimaginative (Treasure Cove) to pretty compelling (Gizmos and Gadgets) to treasures of the PC gaming canon (Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?). An honourable mention ought to go out to Sierra’s The Incredible Machine 3, which remains a game I wish I could find a way to play again. These occasionally limp but well meaning programs are the video gaming experience that I have chosen to define my childhood. Together, they represent a substantial moment in the origin story of the persnickety infosponge that I’ve grown into. But on my father’s side of the equation, there was an entirely different and equally prevalent experience: games like Hugo’s House of Horrors, Heroes: The Tantalizing Trio, and Skunny: Return to the Forest. These were shareware titles, often made by tiny DIY studios, that my dad had no idea were moderately to substantially subversive. What mattered is that they were cheap. They came 50 to a disc, and those discs couldn’t have cost more than a few bucks apiece. Jazz Jackrabbit was one of the better executed and more conventional of those games. Revisiting it now on the Internet Archive brought back a wave of the best kind of nostalgia — nostalgia for something you’d nearly forgotten. Something you’d intentionally forgotten, wrongly.

Television, etc.

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared — Oh jeez. Pretty much at a loss, here. This is thoroughly unsettling and mysterious, and I am not likely to put it all together in the near future.

Last Week Tonight: June 26, 2016 — The Brexit debrief outshines the doping scandals feature, but I’m not complaining.

Game of Thrones: “The Winds of Winter” — If not for the first few minutes this would be a typically un-‘splody Game of Thrones finale. But that opening sequence, I tell ‘ya. It unfolds with all the clockwork inexorability of its Philip Glass-inspired score (the reprise of which at Cersei’s coronation is ingenious). The fallout of that opening sequence (pun intended) is brilliantly portrayed. And from there, this episode contents itself with watching the dust settle. And that’s a mode that I especially love in Game of Thrones: people examining the consequences of things. That scene with Daenerys and Tyrion is just a shimmering gem. It feels like the flipside of the famous trial scene from season four, and it can join that scene among Peter Dinklage’s best moments. Taken in combination with the previous scene with Dario, it’s one of Emilia Clarke’s best as well. And Lena Headey, my perpetual favourite cast member, finally gets to revert to evil mode. How gratifying. This is a great finale to a season that turned out shockingly well, considering its weak start and the low calibre of the season that preceded it. Game of Thrones is over for another year (or whatever), yet I’m starting to feel like it’s back.

Orange is the New Black: Season 4, episodes 5-13 — Boy does this season ever hold its cards close to its chest. Nearly everything that happens in the first ten episodes is part of a huge invisible clockwork machine that’s setting up the events of the last three. Like every season of this show, there’s plenty here to shock and appall and move you. There’s an almost unfair number of excellent performances in it. But what sets it apart is the way that the various seemingly unrelated components of its story are all set up to lead inexorably to a conclusion. The way that this season examines consequences of decisions that are made on an institutional level — the macro story feeding into the micro story — reminds me of nothing more than The Wire. That’s maybe most obvious in Sophia’s storyline, which is remarkably the most dramatic that character has ever had, even though Laverne Cox gets substantially less screen time than in any prior season. Having a central character’s season-long arc occur nearly entirely offscreen is a masterstroke, and it’s only one of many. I’m trying to decide whether I like this better than season two. I have rosy memories of that season, but thinking back, it’s mostly just Suzanne’s arc that I’m attached to. Every strand of season four is extraordinary. I’m really happy we’re getting at least a few more seasons of this, because it seems far from tired out. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

WTF with Marc Maron: “Neil Young” — Neil’s in an obliging mood for this one, which is good. Because on an ornery day, he would have eaten Maron alive. As a Neil Young fan, there are a lot of moments where I felt like a great question was staring Maron in the face and he didn’t ask it. But for the most part, this is an engaging conversation that even touches on some of the less well-regarded stuff in Neil Young’s catalogue (Trans, Everybody’s Rockin’). It also made me halfway think I should probably listen to his new album. It sounds ambitious, if nothing else.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch” The Outs with Adam Goldman” — The Outs sounds great, but I will likely not get around to watching it. On the other hand, hearing Glen Weldon interview somebody is fun.

The Gist: “Billboard Hits From 1964” — I’m really getting into this show. This episode is a lot of fun, focussing as it does on the British Invasion in the week of the Brexit. I have an infinite capacity for Beatlemania chart statistics, but I do suspect that many people who don’t might also enjoy this. Also, in Pesca’s post-Brexit breakdown, he makes the single most gratuitous Yes reference I’ve ever heard. (Actually, to be specific, it’s not even a Yes reference — it’s an Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe reference, which is way geekier.) That makes me wonder what references in the other episodes I’ve heard flew past me.

Theory of Everything: “sudculture (part II of II)” — It’s ToE at its most straightforward, but sometimes that’s a good thing. This nicely problematizes elements of the craft beer revolution, like the herd mentality beer bros who will follow delivery trucks from one liquor store to the next so they can stockpile small batch sours and IPAs. The most interesting moment comes near the end when a pair of craft brewers talk about the time their art professor asked them if brewing was art. Which, firstly, fuck anybody who thinks that’s even a worthwhile question. That professor sounds like an insufferable professor. But their response that producing a good flavour can’t be an art because it’s supposed to be straightforwardly pleasant is compelling. And I’m inclined to agree, if only because they’re right to place the power to answer that question in the hands of the audience (the beer drinker) rather than the artist (the brewer). The production of beer may be as subtle and complex as painting or sculpting, but the optimal response is different. And while that prof is still an asshole for bringing it up, at least it gave Benjamen Walker an opportunity to end the episode on a really ToE note.

99% Invisible: “Home on Lagrange” — This is one of the best episodes they’ve done in ages. It’s about Gerry O’Neill, the scientist who made actual designs for human settlements in space. And rather than straightforwardly tell his story, the 99pi crew offers up a kaleidoscopic vision of all of the inspirations and implications of his work, including his intellectual offspring in the modern world. Fascinating.

Code Switch: “I Don’t Know If I Like This, But I Want It To Win” — I hope we get more of Gene Demby and Kat Chow co-hosting this show. I know them both from Pop Culture Happy Hour, and to some extent, this is just that with PCHH’s three regulars excised. It’s good to know that there will be pop culturey episodes of Code Switch, because this is really good. And the thing that sets it apart from other pop culture shows is that it’s a story. Kat Chow takes us through this crazy saga of Asian-American television, wherein an Asian-American critic, Jeff Yang, writes a review that’s credited with the cancellation of All-American Girl, a not-very-good sitcom about an Asian-American family. In the risk-averse television industry, an event like that can have terrible consequences. Namely, there were no more network television shows starring predominantly Asian casts for 20 years. The next one to be greenlit was the currently-running Fresh off the Boat, which in a drastic twist of fate, stars Jeff Yang’s 12-year-old son Hudson. You couldn’t make that up. The interviews with both Yangs are totally compelling and raise interesting questions about how a critic should deal with television that reflects a possible positive change in the industry, but just isn’t very good.

Song Exploder: “CHVRCHES – Clearest Blue” — This isn’t one of the most interesting episodes I’ve heard, but this is a great song, and it was fun to hear CHVRCHES talk about the rules they established for themselves when they were writing this — it should be laid back, and have only two chords — which they swiftly broke.

All Songs Considered: “New Mix: Bellows, Cornelius, Keaton Henson, A-WA, The Wild Reeds, More” — This contains a lot of music that I don’t especially care to hear again, but I’m glad I heard once. I think I may have written this exact review before…

In Our Time: “Songs of Innocence and Experience” — I’ve decided I love this show. I’ve decided that because I’ve realized that it’s the only podcast I’ve ever listened to that never condescends to me. Jad Abumrad, Ira Glass, and even more idiosyncratic hosts like Benjamen Walker and the Reply All guys all present stories in a way that assumes limited knowledge in the audience. But in lots of areas, my knowledge is not especially limited. Melvyn Bragg is the opposite of everything that North American media types think of as a good radio host — he interrupts his guests, he opines, he’s not afraid to show off his own knowledge, and he mumbles. In short, he’s an intelligent person first, a radio personality second. (Probably the closest thing to Melvyn Bragg in American media is Mike Pesca, and even he feels the need to throw in dodgy jokes and a dumb signoff phrase.) In Our Time is uncompromisingly smart, and probably really alienating to a lot of people. It’s pretty much my ideal for what public broadcasting should be like. This episode on William Blake demonstrates everything that I find enthralling in this show. It tackles ideas head-on without sugar coating them, and takes for granted that its subject matter is interesting, which of course it is. I hope the BBC recognizes what it has here. This sort of thing is what makes it the best public broadcaster in the world. Pick of the week.

Love and Radio: “The Neighborhood” — I love hearing non-standard, non-narrative approaches to audio production. This collage is the sort of impressionistic thing that I can only take in small doses, but it’s pretty brilliant, actually. Scott Carrier has a great ear for interesting tape, and that’s enough to carry this short piece about the neighborhood where he lives. Maybe I need to start listening to Home of the Brave. Grumble. Another one. Great.

StartUp: “Up in Flames” — This season has picked up rather dramatically. This story is told in a very NPR fashion — interviews, narration, music and basically no field tape — but the story is incredible. It’s about a man whose business decisions drove him out of his mind, so he burned down his yogurt factory. You should listen to this.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Finding Dory and Great Voice Acting” — Stephen Thompson’s 11-year-old daughter is one my favourite minor characters on this show (along with Glen Weldon’s husband Faust, and producer Jessica Reedy). At the start of this episode Thompson refers to her as a “sullen crank,” which is a hilariously aggressive descriptor for one’s own daughter. It’s the little things that make this podcast.

Invisibilia: “The Personality Myth” — This is an hour of radio about how people don’t have fully fixed personalities and how it’s all actually very much more complicated than that. I was unaware of the specifics, but I think that when you listen to a lot of podcasts and just generally consume a lot of media, at some point you become inured to the idea that things are more complicated than they seem. So, when somebody tells you that, you just sort of say “oh, of course,” and get on with your day. I reached that point about seventeen Radiolabs ago. So, unless a given commonly-held belief is oversimplified in a really interesting way, I kind of don’t see why I should listen. And this episode explores the notion of fundamental human change in the most predictable way possible: through the lens of incarcerated criminals. Maybe I’m just Orange is the New Blacked out, but that seems facile to me.

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 19, 2016)

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23 reviews.

Movies

The Nice Guys — Seldom have I been so totally entertained. This is a big, rompy action comedy that just allows itself to be that thing. It’s trope aware, but most of the humour in this doesn’t come from undercutting the tropes: it comes from great, great iterations of those tropes. There are physical comedy setpieces in this that are so beautifully intuitive you wonder why you’ve never seen it done before. Both leads are good; Ryan Gosling is fabulous — and unexpectedly dextrous at physical comedy. We knew he could deliver a joke from The Big Short. But jokes aren’t the primary comedic currency of The Nice Guys. It says something about both Shane Black and Ryan Gosling that the move can get laughs from pratfalls in 2016. Also, this movie corrected a problem I’ve been seeing in a bunch of movies (mostly by the Coen Brothers): it’s got dumb comedy liberals in it, who stage vacuous protests about social ills they don’t adequately understand — but it also has comedy conservatives who monologue villainously about American exceptionalism. In a Coen Brothers movie, the monologuing villain would have been subbed out for some variant of the plainspoken cowboy, who espouses moderate views and good old-fashioned common sense — as if that’s what the liberals are fighting against. And yet it doesn’t feel like South Park-esque false equivalency. It’s nice to see a movie that calls out its comedy liberals for being dumb — because, in this movie, they really are very dumb — without actually siding against them or their cause. Go see this movie! The reviews are lukewarm, but they don’t take into account how much fun it is.

Finding Dory — I was an actual child, or something like it, when Finding Nemo came out. (Though old enough to be mighty annoyed by all of my friends constantly going “Mine! Mine!” like those damned seagulls.) My memories of its details are hazy, so this movie didn’t really have many nostalgia points going in. But it’s really cute (the frequent flashbacks featuring a saucer-eyed baby version of Dory, voiced by a seven-year-old, are almost too adorable) and it’s got some great sight gags. I imagine as soon as the words “camouflaging octopus” were spoken in a meeting, a hundred animators began seizing with joy. Ellen DeGeneres is fantastic, obviously. Also, there is a character in this — Gerald the sea lion — who is not identifiable as a Disney character. He comes straight from the dankest part of the internet. (Oh! And apparently Adrian Belew wrote the music for the opening short! It does not consist entirely of noisy guitar squalls. The man contains multitudes.)

Television

Orange is the New Black: Season 4, episodes 1-4— This season is enormously hyped, but so far it seems to be playing its cards close to its chest. I will withhold judgement until things explode. (Speaking of withholding: going three full episodes without Sophia was a masterstroke. Makes her eventual return feel super momentous.) For now, it’s just great to have these characters around again.

Last Week Tonight: June 19, 2016 — A marvellous episode that breaks Brexit down probably exactly enough for most non-British people to understand. (Were it not for Slate’s Political Gabfest, I would have been clueless going in.) It also boasts an excellent shorter segment on the Dickey Amendment, which lends clarity to how the NRA can be so effective yet so small.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: June 20, 2016 — The thing that Full Frontal has that Last Week Tonight doesn’t are Bee’s remote pieces. John Oliver used to be great at those too, on The Daily Show — and I know he’s done a couple on LWT, the Snowden one being especially great — but he’s mostly put them away in favour of just sitting at his desk. He can do a lot from that desk, to be fair. But when Bee visits a Cherokee tribal court to learn about how white people can pretty much do whatever they want on native land and take no responsibility, you’re reminded of why it’s good for satirists to get out in the world a bit.

Game of Thrones: “Battle of the Bastards” — As hour-long episodes of nothing but brutal violence go, this is extremely well deployed. It is essentially a whole episode of wish fulfilment, in the sense that the worst people in the show (the masters, Ramsay) suffer gruesomely at the hands of the most noble (Daenerys, Jon, Sansa). And while my feelings about Ramsey’s demise are more relief than satisfaction, I will confess that his particular battle tactics in this episode were marvelously in keeping with his entire brutal character. As big ‘splody episode nines go, it isn’t “Baelor,” and it certainly isn’t “Blackwater.” But it isn’t bad.

Games

The Walking Dead: Michonne: “In Too Deep” — I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Telltale. To some extent, all of their games are the same, but only in the sense that they share all of their mechanics. Those mechanics can be used to tell dramatically different kinds of stories. In fact, within the Walking Dead universe alone, we’ve seen a bunch of different kinds of stories. I’m not familiar with Michonne’s character having never read the comics and not having made it that far into the show. But this game’s opening does a brilliant job characterizing her efficiently. In fact the fight that starts this episode might be the most ingenious one in the series so far, because of the way it invokes backstory as it proceeds. Looking forward to the two remaining episodes — and really looking forward to season three in the fall.

Literature, etc.

Thomas Ligotti: “My Case for Retributive Action” — Ligotti is really good at tying the stakes of his stories to specific traits of their narrators. He did it brilliantly in “Sideshow,” and here he does it in a more straightforward setting. Our narrator has a nervous condition. He is very clearly unwell. The story wouldn’t be very effective without that little bit of knowledge. But given that, it’s really disconcerting. Loved this.

Thomas Ligotti: “Our Temporary Supervisor” — This actually builds on ideas in the previous story, particularly the mysterious corporation/governing body called the Quine Organization. I tend not to be a fan of world-building and continuity in short-form narratives, but the Quine Organization, being a shadowy company with a stranglehold over the citizens of whatever fictional nation this is set in, offers a particularly interesting set of tropes with which to tell labour-related parables. I understand Ligotti went back to that well in his collection My Work is Not Yet Done, which would also have sufficed as a title for either of these stories. I wonder if Q. Org makes an appearance?

Peter Henderson: “Back to the Drawing Board” — This Maisonneuve feature (which I read because I was, and am, trying to convince myself to subscribe) tells two stories of artistic obsession. One is about the animator Richard Williams, best-known for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He spent years and years on his would-be masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler, only to have it taken away from him by a studio who couldn’t handle the blown deadlines any longer. The other is about Garrett Gilchrist, a struggling filmmaker who abandons all potentially lucrative work to try and piece together a complete version of Williams’ film from what scraps remain. It’s a fabulous pair of yarns that also encompasses much of animation history. I may subscribe to Maisonneuve yet.

Music

Yes: Close to the Edge — I don’t think I’ve ever gone longer between listens of this album than just prior to this time through. It really feels like an old friend. For a lot of years, I sort of wore myself out on this Yes album. Even my beloved Tales From Topographic Oceans got less play, because you just don’t have the time to listen to an 81-minute-long record quite so frequently as a 37-minute one. But now that it no longer feels overfamiliar, all of its original impact came roaring back. The title track is one of the most perfect album sides ever made — and not perfect in the meticulous sense that people wrongly associate with Yes. The best moments of “Close to the Edge” are organized chaos — five people making music together in a room, playing fast and loose within a predetermined structure. There are moments here that, in spite of having heard them hundreds of times, made me gasp aloud on the bus, or tear up a bit behind my sunglasses: the first entry of Jon Anderson’s voice, just for a beat, a cappella; the moment at the end of Steve Howe’s opening guitar solo where finishes on nine sixteenth-notes in unison with Bill Bruford’s snare drum; Anderson’s repeated refrain “I get up, I get down,” gradually ascending to a climax just before Rick Wakeman’s church organ solo; Chris Squire’s dissonant bass note, just before the final “seasons will pass you by.” It’s a masterpiece. If there’s anything wrong with this album, it’s just that the first side is so complete in itself that the second side seems superfluous. Which isn’t to say it’s not good — “And You And I” would have been the best track on a couple other great Yes albums. “Siberian Khatru” isn’t a personal favourite, but this lineup of Yes never rocked harder. Close to the Edge is one of the best records of the 70s, in any genre. If prog rock’s not your thing, then you obviously won’t be into this. But any outright malice you may hear expressed towards Close to the Edge can only be born of blind prejudice. Pick of the week.

Peter Gabriel: “I’m Amazing” — Peter Gabriel has never been known for the timeliness of his records. When Up was released in 2002, reviewers pointed out that it had been in development since the early days of industrial music and marked it down as DOA: Dated On Arrival. (Taken in retrospect as an album divorced from history, it works a lot better. It’s one of my favourite records ever, actually.) Yet here’s Gabriel releasing a new track about Muhammed Ali, shortly after his death. It’s decent. Neither a classic, nor an embarrassment. It’s got some African vocal samples near the end that demonstrate how Gabriel still hasn’t quite wrapped his head around the notion of cultural appropriation, in spite of his famously good intentions. But it’s fine. What’s really interesting is that “I’m Amazing” has apparently been in the vault for years, which is why Gabriel was able to get it out so comparatively quickly after Ali died. This suggests that Gabriel may not be the notorious procrastinator, or the anti-prolific elder statesman that some of us have pegged him as. We know that he records a lot more than he releases. This is the first glimpse behind the curtain, and it’s not that bad. What other interesting experiments are locked up in that vault?

Justice: Audio, Video, Disco — I’d say it’s self-evidently better than their debut, if that weren’t obviously untrue on account of how few people agree with it. But I was way more swept up in this than I was in Cross, which I also liked. It’s probably just on account of how proggy it is. But I also think that it has a greater wealth of melodic invention than their debut record, which is important to me in dance music.

Podcasts

The Gist: “Chuck Klosterman is Wrong! (He Says.)” — I had meant to check out The Gist since hearing Brooke Gladstone refer to Mike Pesca as one of the smartest people she’d ever worked with on the Longreads podcast. Now I see why. This is two acclaimed abstract thinkers talking abstractly, and neither one is obviously smarter than the other. Pesca is less insufferable, though.

The Memory Palace: “A White Horse” — A beautiful, timely, sentimental (in the absolutely most tolerable and completely earned way) tribute to gay clubs as safe spaces. DiMeo has the ability to harness the emotional power of language moreso than probably anybody outside of hip hop. This week, he used that power in service of a mourning community. I don’t want to paint him as saintly, or anything like that, because that would be crass. But this is beautiful, and you can definitely spare ten minutes to hear it.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “O.J.: Made in America and a Television Quiz” — Okay, that settles it. I’m watching O.J.: Made in America as soon as I’m done Orange is the New Black. Gene Demby has some really interesting context to offer about Simpson’s troubled relationship with his race. This is one of many times when this show has tipped me over the edge and encouraged me to check out something I was only halfway planning to.

Radio Diaries: “Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl” — This is outstanding. It completely proves the value of first-person narratives as journalism. Majd is a fabulous narrator of her own life. It’s really wrenching to hear the conflict she feels between wanting to be a successful scientist and an independent woman and hoping her family (particularly its male members) can accept that decision. Great radio. Pick of the week.

On The Media: “Never Again, Again” — I’ve got to confess, this was kind of noise to me this week. We’ve reached the point in Orlando coverage where it’s just turned into the same depressing stew of narratives that surfaces after every similarly atrocious act of violence. And those narratives tend to be either self-evident or obviously bullshit to me. As for Brexit, that story has me totally lost at this point. Maybe another podcast about it will help…

Slate’s Political Gabfest: “The ‘Brexit Pursued by a Bear’ Edition” — I confess, the episode title had a lot to do with my decision to listen to this. I don’t tune in very often because Emily Bazelon is kind of the only member of the panel I enjoy listening to. And she’s not here this week. So, mm. The Orlando segment provoked a similar reaction from me as OTM’s. The Brexit segment, however, was invaluable. The Economist’s David Rennie is as level-headed a guide through the whole sordid affair as you could ask for. By the time this review is posted, the vote will be in, and you will be depressed. But if you’re still clueless about why it even happened, go back and check this out.

Invisibilia: “The New Norm” — I was mixed on the first season of Invisibilia. On one hand, the stories were really moving in a lot of cases. On the other hand, the show’s voice (not the hosts’ voices, mind you — I’m speaking abstractly, here) can be cloying. This episode displayed both sides, right from the top. The opening segment, about the first McDonald’s in Russia, is spectacularly forced in its attempt to introduce the episode’s theme. But the story of the southern oil rig where employees were encouraged to set aside their macho bullshit and open up to each other is totally compelling. I anticipate another mixed season.

StartUp: “From the Cell to the Sell” — The second part didn’t disappoint. This story of a drug dealer turned startup founder is the high-water mark of StartUp’s third season so far, and given my prior frustrations, I expect it to remain so.

This American Life: “Tell Me I’m Fat” — This is an astonishing and provocative hour of radio that brings up stuff I’ve never even thought about. Lindy West is at the centre of it, reading segments of her new book Shrill, which sounds fantastic. She puts forth the view that fat people (that is her preferred term) shouldn’t be obligated to lose weight, but rather should find a way to be happy as they are. The showstopper, though, is Elna Baker, who tells the story of successfully losing half her body weight, along with a good chunk of her identity. The way she talks about how her relationship to the world changed along with her weight is viscerally distressing, as is the way she talks about the surgery she had to remove her excess skin.

The Gist: “Brexit Stage Right” — I came for Pesca’s take on Team Leave (yeah, they’d already left, but I was still confused) and stayed for his interview with Big Freedia. Pesca is respectful without being deferential, and treats Freedia with engaging irreverence.

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 5, 2016)

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Every week, I tag my Omnireviewer posts with the relevant categories: movies, TV, comedy, books, comics, classical music, popular music, video games and podcasts. This week marks a new milestone: the first time I’ve got all the categories in one post.

*party favour noise*

Here are this week’s 28 reviews.

Movies

Captain America: Civil War — I LOVED this movie. But before I praise it to the high heavens, I need to puke up the obligatory caveat that cinematic universes are a bad idea and I want there to be small, self-contained movies again. The trailer for Rogue One at the start of this actually cast a shadow over the opening scenes of the movie. The idea that there are just going to be a million Star Wars movies now appalls me. Back when there were just two trilogies, the batting average may have been low, but at least there wasn’t a saturation problem. That seems inevitable now. On the other hand, Civil War gets maximum mileage out of the advantages that a sprawling canon affords. Every major MCU character save for Thor, Bruce Banner and Nick Fury are here, along with the bulk of their supporting cast. And when they all fight (spoiler: they all fight), their previously established relationships inform the way that fight plays out. The character dynamics in this remind me of two very different movies, both of which are far better than this one, but the fact that I’m even thinking about them speaks highly of Civil War. One of those movies is Mad Max: Fury Road. I wrote about the fight scene between Max and Furiosa in my year-end wrap up for 2015. The huge fight scene that serves as Civil War’s central set piece is far less focussed and less high-concept, but it is similar in the sense that the characters are not just trying to mow each other down and emerge victorious. There are more complicated dynamics at play for everybody here, from Black Widow and Hawkeye not wanting to hit each other too hard to Spider-Man being an obvious newbie and eager to impress. And, just a side note before I continue this line of thought: it looks like the third time’s going to be the charm where Spider-Man movies are concerned. The Tobey Maguire ones have aged very badly and the Andrew Garfield iteration was DOA. But this Tom Holland kid (says the guy who’s five years older than him, but spiritually, forty) has got the goods. If the writing for Peter Parker in the next Spider-Man movie is as sharp as it is here, we’re saved. This is the wisecracking, verbose, overenthusiastic character that I remember from the cartoons of my youth. I am similarly excited for Black Panther, though I don’t actually know the character. Anyway. The other movie that came to mind while I was watching this was, stay with me here, The Rules of the Game. Like I said a couple weeks ago, that’s a movie where everybody does what they think is right, and there are terrible consequences anyway. There’s no bad guy. There is a bad guy in Civil War, obviously. This is a Marvel movie; not a French drama from 1939. But, the villain here is essentially a MacGuffin. He even almost conceives of himself as a MacGuffin: he’s just trying to start a process that he himself will not have much to do with. This is the closest thing I’ve seen to a juggernaut franchise blockbuster that doesn’t have time for the idea of evil. Even Mr. MacGuffin doesn’t turn out to be evil, necessarily, though it takes a certain amount of ruthlessness to respond to his circumstances the way that he does. The point is: it’s almost immaterial whether you align yourself with “Team Cap” or “Team Stark”: the important thing is that they both think they’re doing what’s right, and violence ensues regardless. That is almost unprecedented in this kind of movie. But, this movie is trying to be a subtly different kind of franchise movie in a few different ways. Let’s return to Mr. MacGuffin for a moment. The big reveal about his character near the end of the movie is the exact opposite of the trick that Star Trek: Into Darkness played with Benedict Cumberbatch’s character, where they reveal some time into the movie that he’s actually been a huge iconic villain from the canon all along. Mr. MacGuffin’s big reveal is that he’s nobody. At this point, that’s more legitimately surprising in the MCU than, say, revealing that he’s the Green Goblin. It’s a willful subversion of a trope that has been established — largely by Marvel — only in the age of cinematic universes. Also, the fact that he’s a previously inconsequential victim of the carnage in Age of Ultron is an apt response to the appalling body count of many of these types of movies. The character Vision is one of the least interesting in the movie, but he has one interesting thing to say. He suggests that the presence of superheroes in the world leads to the inevitable presence of super-threats. What he’s really saying is that the Avengers need to be careful how they act, because their very existence proves that they’re in the kind of story where cities get levelled by monologuing AIs. Tony Stark is ready to not be in that story anymore. So, he tries to turn the story into a political drama. Stark has little to lose, narratively speaking. He can function just fine as a quippy guy in a boardroom. Cap’s not having it, though, because he can only function as a superhero. The fact that all of these themes are demonstrably present in this movie without it ever descending into explicit metafiction (not a given from a pair of directors who worked on Community) marks it as something special. The fact that I’ve written this much about a Marvel movie without saying anything outright negative marks it as something approaching a miracle. Pick of the week.

Television

Last Week Tonight: June 5, 2016 — I never have anything substantial to say about this show, because I feel like it leaves everything pretty much said for itself. This was a fantastic episode that completely transcends its headline-grabbing gimmick of forgiving $15 million dollars of real-world debt. I was thinking as I watched this, I think part of why it’s so good isn’t necessarily because it’s funny from top to bottom. Take note of where the audience laughs versus where they applaud. Part of why this feels so good is that it’s skilful rhetoric. That word has taken on a bit of a ghostly pall these days, and deservedly so. Rhetoric is used by politicians to peddle talking points, and in that service it need not necessarily be reasoned. But John Oliver has a standup comedian’s ability to take you gradually from point A to point B to point C, until you reach clarity. I can’t name a moment where I’ve actually disagreed with John Oliver, and while that might be partially because we are approximately the same species of liberal, I think part of it is simply because of the power of his argumentation. That’s not scary in this instance; it’s laudable. I lump him in as much with people like Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone as with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I haven’t given this show pick of the week very often, and I’m not going to this week either. But as a sustained thing that I check in with each week, it’s absolutely one of my favourite things being made right now.

Archer: “Deadly Velvet, Part 2” — Well, shit. Now I’m definitely watching the next season. This was really funny, and brought the story full-circle in a way that made some jokes pay off after an entire season of waiting. Archer is still capable of intense cleverness, even if it is starting to feel a bit thin in places.

Game of Thrones: “The Broken Man” — Ian McShane! The Hound! Jon and Sansa are building an army! Arya got stabbed! Oh, so much for Ian McShane.

Lost: “Confidence Man” — There are so many characters that don’t work in this first season. Sayid is almost one of them, just due to Naveen Andrews’s atrocious fake accent. But mostly I’m talking about Sawyer because he is noxious. And frankly, even a sympathetic origin story and the considerable writing talents of Damon Lindelof himself cannot paper over that.

And Then There Were None: Episode 1 — If I’m not mistaken, not only have I never read anything by Agatha Christie, but I also have never seen an adaptation of her work. The closest I’ve come is that silly Doctor Who story where she gets attacked by a giant bee. This unfamiliarity makes it interesting to watch a series that perceives itself to be telling a familiar story. And Then There Were None, elegantly retitled from Christie’s original very racist title, introduces its characters with great ceremony, as if they’re all James Bond or Sherlock Holmes. Presumably, they are better known to the average BBC viewer than they are to me — Christie is a nearly unparalleled British cultural touchstone, of course, and I am a mere hayseed from the colonies. But once you get over the feeling that you’re being presented with the phenomenon of Agatha Christie: familiar thing, the story rockets along in this miniseries premiere. The acting is the most obviously phenomenal thing, and the show gets a lot of mileage out of just letting Miranda Richardson be charismatically horrible, Burn Gorman be charismatically skittish, and the rest of them be charismatic variants on other unsavoury traits. But it’s also wonderfully written, shot, paced, etc., and the sets are fantastic. I’m loving this so far, but I’ll leave it there for now because I suspect things are going to go bonkers in the next instalment.

Comedy

Mitch Hedberg: Comedy Central Presents Mitch Hedberg — This is amazing. It’s like a battle between a man, his sense of self, and an audience that he wrongly perceives as hostile. Actually, listening to the audience only sort of get the jokes is half the fun. There are so many quotable one-liners packed into these 37 minutes, that it’s hard to fathom how long it must have taken him to put together all that material. His whole career, I assume. This is messy and weird and probably still one of the best specials I’ve seen.

Literature, etc.

Thomas Ligotti: “The Red Tower” — This seemed to me to be the most hyped story in Teatro Grottesco, and I certainly understand why. It is exceedingly unorthodox not just in its subject matter, which is a given for Ligotti, but in its approach. Aside from the narrator, about whom the reader never learns any details, there are no characters in this story. It is simply a description of how an incredibly unsettling supernatural factory operates. It left my skin crawling, because I’m certain that it’s a metaphor for something but I’m not sure what. The operation described in this story has the shape of a vaguely familiar thing, but twisted into a grotesque parody. That feeling of not quite being able to put your finger on the reason you’re upset is, I’m learning, a hallmark of Ligotti’s writing. I’m not sure this is my favourite story in Teatro Grottesco so far — I’m still quite fond of “The Town Manager” — but I suspect it’s objectively the best one.

Alex Clifton: One Week // One Band, Punch Brothers — Having grazed through bits and pieces of this group blog’s back catalogue, I’ve found that there are some weeks that feature solid critical theory worth revisiting long after the fact, and others that take a more companionable approach something like a really smart radio host. This is the first week that I’ve followed as it goes along, and Clifton tends towards the second approach — but boy does it work better when delivered in real time. Every so often, you’ll get another dose, and by the end of the week, you feel like you’ve got a handle on the band. The Punch Brothers are a band I’ve meant to get into for ages, having seen a bunch of Chris Thile related stuff on YouTube. Now I’ve got a bunch of context and I’ve seen a bunch of live stuff that I might not have if I’d just dove in with an album from the start. I think this is what Tumblr is for. This made me not hate social media for a while, which is a real trick in a week where I also read…

John Herrman: The Content Wars — I dunno about you, but I’m feeling more and more like Facebook is leading us all to the brink of an intellectual apocalypse. And I’m starting to feel the backlash coming on. The first inkling of it that I observed outside of my own head was Vox co-founder Joshua Topolsky’s post on Medium a few weeks back. Then, I heard my favourite fellow tech sceptic Benjamen Walker bring it up on Theory of Everything. And that episode led me to John Herrman’s column The Content Wars that ran on the Awl throughout 2014-15. Being me, I decided to read every column, straight from the top. I’ve got a ways to go yet, but so far it is excellent and frightening. The upshot is that social platforms, Facebook in particular, are interested in promoting content (Herrman always stylises it as CONTENT) that makes people use those platforms more. Whether anybody clicks on or engages with a publisher’s CONTENT is essentially irrelevant. Thus (and Herrman doesn’t argue this didactically though he clearly feels it very acutely), publishers who produce content in the hopes of taking advantage of Facebook’s algorithm are not only cheapening their respective brands. They are also helping Facebook cement its monopoly on the sharing of information. Which, in turn will force more publishers to cater to Facebook’s algorithm, and we’re suddenly in a big dumb feedback loop of fail videos, listicles and inane hot takes. Some of Herrman’s posts are newsy and of their time, but the best ones are the most abstracted, and they’re still very relevant a year later. It ought to be required reading for anybody working in any media company because the impact of social media on editorial CONTENT is bad and it is real and it will either end soon and take us all with it or it will lead to the utter nadir of human thought. Unless we stop it. Read this series to know what I’m talking about.

Matt Fraction/Gabriel Bá: Casanova, Volume 3 “Avaritia” — Man, this comic is really hard to follow. I can’t imagine what it’s like to actually follow on an issue-by-issue basis. I can barely keep track of everything when I’m reading the trade collections. But the penny does usually drop at some point, and that moment was pretty awesome in the second volume, so I will hold out hope. Also, Fraction is the only writer who composes an SF story this intricate and still fills it with recurring sight gags.

Music

John Storgårds, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Gerald Finley, Mika Pohjonen et. al: Works by Rautavaara — Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the best living composers, and probably one of the most revered by people who are inclined to revere people like him. But his name hasn’t quite punctured through into the mainstream classical consciousness in the way that, say, Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt have. I wish it would. Rautavaara’s music sits exactly on that perfect line between Romantic familiarity and postmodernist novelty. Storgårds and his Finnish orchestra are no strangers to this music, and perform it wonderfully. Gerald Finley’s performance on the first work on the disc is typical of his dramatic, unforced approach to concert material and reminded me why he’s one of my favourite baritones — not only can he really, really sing, but he’s also a great champion of new work. (This song cycle was commissioned for Finley specifically by Wigmore Hall.) Tenor Mika Pohjonen is new to me, and honestly not my kind of singer. He’s got that paint thinner vibrato; you know the kind. But he’s tolerable in the fairly small tenor part of the cantata Balada. And the Helsinki Music Centre Choir gets their time in the sun during Four Songs from the Opera Rasputin, an opera which I am now determined to see. Anybody looking for a way into Rautavaara’s music should check this out. (Then high-tail ‘er straight for the Latvian Radio Choir’s amazing recording of his sacred music. That’s also incredible.)

Punch Brothers: Who’s Feeling Young Now? — Alex Clifton’s recommended starting point did not disappoint. The music on this album seems generally more straightforward than some of the stuff on their first two, though that doesn’t stop Chris Thile from pulling out an inscrutable polyrhythm on “Movement and Location.” There are no bad songs on this, and it’s so much more than the novelty you might expect from a bluegrass group fronted by a mandolin virtuoso that does Radiohead covers.

Games

Super Meat Boy — I confess, I played this for a few minutes this week just so that I could finally sweep all of my Omnireviewer categories. But since I’m here, I may as well talk about how this sort of game is the kind of thing that I can appreciate, but never really enjoy. I bought it out of curiosity after watching Indie Game: The Movie, and the beauty of the mechanics was obvious from the start. Still, it is much too “video game” for me, in general. I like my games to be books. This is very much not a book. I will say, though: I beat a few levels I’d been struggling with, and man did it feel good. Mark this down as a potential danger to my health.

Podcasts

More Perfect: “Cruel and Unusual” — This story of the way that lethal injections enter the United States, the first in a miniseries from Radiolab about the SCOTUS, is the best Radiolab-related story I’ve heard in some time. And that’s coming from a staunch Robert Krulwich devotee, and he’s not in this. It contains the most amusing bit of tape I’ve heard in awhile, where a dogged but pathologically good-natured British reporter presses a cartoon villain of a pharma reseller with questions he absolutely does not want to answer. It’s glorious. The whole thing is. Jad’s theme song is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in my damn life, though. Pick of the week.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “X-Men: Apocalypse and Supervillains” — On one hand, I’m not sure why they decided to do this, since none of them seemed to have strong feelings about the movie one way or another, but having Chris Klimek and Daoud Tyler-Ameen in lieu of Glen Weldon’s usual brand of comic book geekdom is refreshing in a topic like this. And I admire Linda Holmes’s tenacity in constantly referring to Apocalypse as “Oscar Isaac Blue God Man.”

On The Media: “When to Believe” — Worth it for the story of a New York Times reporter who changed the way the media covered AIDS. It’s hugely moving, in a way you don’t normally expect from this show.

The Heart: “Hands on the Wheel” — I can’t make it pick of the week every week, but I’m tempted to. The Heart has already found its way into my top podcasts of the year, on account of this series alone. Which is not to say that The Heart isn’t always good — it is. But this series is gut-wrenching and well-made and if you’re not listening to it right now you’re doing podcasts wrong. Or, you don’t want to hear a long, detailed story about a woman grappling with her childhood sexual abuse, which is totally fair. But if you’re open to hearing that kind of story, get on this.

The Bugle: “VIB – Very Important Bugle” — I saw that title and thought, oh, John Oliver must be leaving The Bugle. And I was right. The Bugle is great, but I’ve only been listening for a short time, and even then only occasionally. I can’t help but feel that its best days were prior to my having found it. Maybe the upcoming soft reboot, with a rotating panel of second chairs (Wyatt Cenac! Helen Zaltzman!) will reinvigorate it into a show I feel compelled to listen to when the title isn’t “Very Important Bugle.”

The Memory Palace: “Family Snapshot” — A lovely, slight little thing, but when it comes to moon landing-related episodes of The Memory Palace, there’s only one for me. You know how it is.

All Songs Considered: “Sean Lennon’s Surreal Ode to Michael Jackson’s Pet Chimp, Bubbles” — This is an odd, odd song. I feel somewhat tempted to check out the album, just on account of how odd this song is. Sean Lennon is a strange bird, but can you blame him?

Radiolab: “The Buried Bodies Case” — This is quite basic in its approach, but it’s a super compelling story. It starts with an account of a manhunt that’s totally absorbing, and then it moves into a discussion of the criminal defence lawyers in the case, and the unusual position they found themselves in where they had to disobey their consciences to be good lawyers. Really interesting.

Theory of Everything: “Not Soon Enough” — I had to go back and listen to this whole episode after Roman Mars played the opening on 99pi and Nate DiMeo cited it as his favourite on The Memory Palace. The middle portion didn’t make a lot of sense, I’ll admit, probably because I hadn’t heard the episode where this character (a real person, maybe?) was introduced. See below. But the beginning and end, featuring a pair of monologues from Benjamen Walker about trying to jump into a painting, are glorious. This is that magical thing: a combination of fiction and nonfiction with a bit of art criticism thrown in for good measure. This show is unlike anything else and I love it so much that I’m going to listen to two more episodes now.

Theory of Everything: “Admissions of Defeat” — I listened to this in the hopes that the middle section of “Not Soon Enough” would make more sense. It does, but I’m still not sure how much of it isn’t real. It shouldn’t matter, but today it did for some reason. The rest of this episode is amazing, though. Walker attends (well, no he doesn’t; he just says he does) a post-gentrification, tech bubble psychic, and a correspondent explains an NSA plot to put backdoors in podcasts. This is the only show tied to a major podcast ring that’s got the guts to go this far out. I love it so much.

Theory of Everything: “sudculture (part I of II)” — Okay, this is a bit earnest. I love craft beer, and I am all for any anti-corporate attitude that results in a more flavourful brew. Actually, I am pretty much for any anti-corporate attitude. But this is the first time that Walker’s statement-making felt like rote hipsterism to me. I suspect that the second part, which he’s suggested has something to do with craft beer opposing one corporate monoculture only to impose another, will be more interesting.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: The Black Film Canon” — A useful summary of a Slate piece I’ll likely skim fairly soon.

99% Invisible: “H-Day” — There’s a feeling you sometimes get as a radio producer where you find a piece of tape that is so absurd, so wonderful, and so unexpected that you know it will make everything around it more memorable just by proximity. This episode has a song, funded by the government of Sweden, intended to remind people to drive on the right side of the road. The key lyric, approximately translated: “Keep to the right, Svensson.” That song is going to make this a 99pi I will remember. But it’s also just pretty fantastic in general. Other revelations include the fact that the Swedish government instituted a sweeping infrastructure change in spite of a referendum that showed over 80% of the population opposed it, and that there’s a phone number you can call to be connected to a random Swede.

Code Switch: “Made for You and Me” — This podcast is proving to be a massive reintroduction to the extent of my own whiteness. This is an entire episode about the stereotype that people of colour don’t do outdoorsy things. I didn’t even know that stereotype was a thing.

The great and shameful archive

of Matthew J.R. Parsons, retired blogger

Category Archives: Video games

Omnireviewer (week of Oct. 9, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Sept. 25, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Sept. 11, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Sept. 4, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Aug. 7, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Jul. 31, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Jul. 24, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 26, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 19, 2016)

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 5, 2016)