Tag Archives: All Songs Considered

Omnireviewer (week of Nov. 20, 2016)

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Do you ever listen to podcasts at 1.5X speed? Pro-tip: do that. You can listen to more podcasts that way.

27 reviews.

Television

QI: “Keys,” “Jumpers” & “Jobs” — If I am not mistaken, I have watched three episodes (in a random batch of six) of QI in the past two weeks that all reference bungee jumping.

Fleabag: Episodes 1-3 — Watched on the recommendation of the panel on Pop Culture Happy Hour. I’m really enjoying this, even if my snootiest, least charitable self wants to believe that I had it pegged as a Louie-esque-difficult-person-dramedy-with-an-occasionally-cloying-indie-sensibility right from the start. The important thing is not that it happens to fall into an increasingly identifiable box, but that it’s brilliantly executed and succeeds at being both sensitive and hilarious at the same time. Also, it’s always nice to see a show that succeeds without having a big, pitchable marquee concept (“women’s prison show” or “washed-up cartoon horse”). How would you summarize Fleabag? “A young woman deals with grief?” Yawn. Yet, I’d love to see more of this sort of thing. Television producers take note: “show with ordinary, real-life story, interesting characters, and good jokes” might actually be an elevator pitch worth paying attention to.

Movies

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them — Well, I went to a movie theatre and was pleasantly diverted for a couple of hours, so I guess that’s a win. But this is not a very good movie. Aside from just being sort of superfluous in general (also, five movies!?!? that’s far too many movies), it has some problems even when taken entirely on its own terms. The plotline suffers from the sense that groundwork is constantly being laid for later things. Jon Voight shows up pointlessly about three times, and will presumably be important later. Also, in the end, the focus turns to a thing called the Obscurus, which is a big evil repression monster, but the bulk of the movie is just people running around chasing other, unrelated escaped monsters. Those plotlines don’t sit easily together, and I think Rowling should have just picked a thing. Story concerns aside, there are also character concerns. Namely, the two main characters are both ill-conceived ciphers. Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander is fun to watch in the way that Eddie Redmayne is usually fun to watch, but he has to state outright that he has the tendency to annoy people because he is never seen to do that thing. Anyway, this is genuinely weak in most respects, but also strangely hard to dislike. It’s nice to be back in the wizarding world, even though the absence of Great British Character Actors A through Z makes this feel like a drastically different thing, tonally. (The cast here is fine, but the thing that makes the Harry Potter movies occasionally more than workmanlike is that particular species of British acting proffered by Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Michael Gambon, Robbie Coltrane, Helena-Bonham Carter, and tons more. Nothing of the sort here — by design, clearly. But I do miss that.) If there’s one silver lining to an American-set wizarding world franchise, it’s that modern fantasy’s least subtle left-wing allegorist has been unleashed on a country that just elected Donald Trump. This is not necessarily a winning formula, but I’ll hold out hope that future instalments could be interesting. Also thievery platypus.

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House — This is my kind of horror. The premise is classic pulp fodder: a young hospice nurse moves into a house to care for a senile author who used to write horror novels, and the house turns out to be haunted. But this film takes a dramatically more ambitious approach to this material than you might expect. It is slow and contemplative, with deliberately artificial performances and artfully framed static shots. The bulk of the script is delivered in voiceover, pairing enigmatic images with obtuse, circuitous discussions of themes rather than exposition. It’s a movie that actively challenges you to figure out what it’s really about, given that its story is so basic and told at such a slow, deliberate pace. I’m not entirely sure what the answer to that is. There’s lots in there about the act of looking, but I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Seems like something I might be able to parse on a second viewing, when I’m not preoccupied with the curry I’m eating. And there will be a second viewing. This is that kind of movie.

Literature

Dan Fox: Pretentiousness: Why It Matters — I can’t remember the last time I read a book that felt this much like it was written specifically to connect with me. This monograph by Dan Fox is a stunning defense of thinking and behaving in ways that contravene convention. It is by no means a refutation of populism, but rather a love letter to broad-mindedness. Fox notes the obvious point that the word “pretentious” is generally used in a derogatory fashion: to put somebody back in their place when they’re perceived to have overstepped a social boundary. But he argues persuasively that the act of overstepping social boundaries — which necessitates a certain amount of pretense or pretending (to the throne, even) — is inherently praiseworthy. And he has some choice words for those who prefer the epithet “elitist,” too. He cites a Guardian columnist who literally professed hatred — hatred — for a pair of flashily-dressed young people he saw randomly at a contemporary art exhibit. And he tears that columnist apart for what he rightly calls “cheap, them-versus-us populism.” He continues: “It speaks to an ugly intolerance for difference, to an expectation that people must share the same aesthetic tastes and appearances and that if they don’t they must be complicit members of an elitist racket hell-bent on excluding ‘ordinary’ people from its world. Those ‘ordinary’ people, it is assumed, could not possibly be interested in complex ideas and conversant in different forms of visual literacy.” Boom. That quote alone is reason enough for everybody in the media to read this book. There’s a personal anecdote in the postscript about how Fox grew up in a time and place when a young person could be introduced to the films of Kenneth Anger and the music of John Cage by way of the public broadcaster. Makes one wistful, frankly. There’s a quote near the end of the book that I consider words to live by: “To fear being accused of pretension is to police oneself out of curiosity about the world.” Open-mindedness is an ideal among ideals. Fox doesn’t quite go there in his book but I think if more people were devoted to the cultivation of a broad base of knowledge, as opposed to fearing or resenting the same in others, societies would be stronger, less divided, and make better decisions as an electorate. Pretentiousness is not the enemy. Quite the opposite. Pick of the week.

Alanna Bennett: “The Harry Potter Fandom Is At A Crossroads” — This is a fascinating portrait of a fandom growing up. The really interesting thing about the Harry Potter fandom right now is that they (we? I would include myself, if I weren’t so obviously less invested than the superfans referred to here) learned about social justice in part from Harry Potter, and now they find themselves butting heads with J.K. Rowling herself when she does boneheaded, offensive things like trying to fictionalize Native American culture. This is fascinating. About halfway through, I stopped to reread the first chapter of The Philosopher’s Stone. (It’s all I could get on iBooks; my own copies have been packed away in boxes in my hometown for years.) And I suddenly understood the fans in this story even more. It sort of all came rushing back: even at that early stage, writing for young children and nowhere close to the height of her powers, J.K. Rowling wrote the most compelling characters in modern children’s literature and was brilliant at conveying a sense of place. As soon as Albus Dumbledore appears for the first time, sucking the light from the streetlamps of Privet Drive, you’re forced to think of modern Britain as a hiding place for another whole, glorious world. It’s a magical book. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how so many fans have had more trouble than I have accepting the mediocrity of Rowling’s post-Deathly Hallows Potter projects. I’ll reread these books just as soon as I can get into those boxes.  

Music

Kate Bush: The Dreaming — I think I’ve returned to considering this my favourite Kate Bush album. I gave it a listen this week in anticipation of her new live album, which has nothing from this on it. And holy smokes, this is the most intricate songwriting, maybe ever. There’s a tempting narrative about Kate Bush that suggests that the directness she embraced on Hounds of Love was the result of lessons learned from the critical and commercial failure of The Dreaming. But that’s ridiculous — why on earth would she care? I think that a better reading is simply that The Dreaming represented the furthest possible extension of this kind of songwriting. There’s no out-dreaming The Dreaming, so Bush took a different approach. Both albums are masterpieces. But this is the more virtuosic by far.

Pink Floyd: Cre/Ation: The Early Years 1967-1972 — God, I want that 27-disc box set so bad I could curl up in a ball. This paltry two-disc sampler only makes me lust after it more, because so much of it is exactly what I’ve been wishing for from Pink Floyd for ages. It is only the very nerdy among us who are interested in hearing an early version of “Echoes” that consists almost entirely of the triple-time bit that comes right before the final reprise on the album version, but I am extremely nerdy. I want to hear every miniscule step in the evolution of this band. I suppose I’ll have to wait for it to gradually find its way onto streaming services. Because I do not have the wealth to indulge this obsession. Still though, for a two-disc sampler, this is really a lot of fun.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “Guest DJ: The Politics and Passions of Roger Waters” — “I know I sound like a crazy person, but I’m not. I’m actually a wise man.” He’s not wrong, on either count. Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are simply not the people to interview Roger Waters. He is far too given to extraordinary statements and long rants for a pair of music broadcasters to handle. Marc Maron managed, somehow. But this is a mess.

Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything: “Targeted” — I can’t quite tell if Walker’s story about giving his son a stuffed Pepe is true. If so, that was a dumb move. The segment about facial recognition software is as disquieting as anything in this series so far.

All Songs Considered: “What Was It Like To See Pink Floyd In 1966? Joe Boyd Knows” — This is the highlight of the three parts of this show’s Pink Floyd week. Joe Boyd has a unique perspective on the band, given that he was right there in the early days, but his recollections aren’t necessarily coloured by having been involved beyond that. I will say that I think he gives Rob Chapman’s argument in the book A Very Irregular Head a bit too much credence. Chapman is probably right to argue that the narrative about Barrett declining because he took too much acid is too simple. But considering the extremity of his post-Floyd condition, Chapman’s assertion that his behaviour was part of a grand conceptual art project is patently ridiculous, and clearly born from an impulse towards hagiography. That aside, this is a nice interview. I do wish that Boilen had chosen to play some of the previously unreleased stuff from the box set instead of just returning to the iconic songs. That’s what the box is for, after all. Ah, well.

99% Invisible: “Space Trash, Space Treasure” — A fascinating look at the necessity of cleaning up the junk we keep leaving in space. But the really fascinating part is an interview with a professor who responds to the moniker “Dr. Space Junk” about why we should also consider leaving some of it there for anthropological reasons.

Code Switch: “Everyone Is Talking To Barry Jenkins But Our Interview Is The Best” — I need to see Midnight so bad. This is one of Gene Demby’s best interviews, partially because of how much he obviously loves the movie, but also because of how much he openly identifies with elements of the story and the filmmaker’s perspective. I think this show is really successfully walking a tonal tightrope where it acknowledges some of the tropes of thinkpiece journalism — but still does it, because the alternative is being dumb.

Reply All: “Flash!” — One of the most lacklustre episodes of Reply All in a while. The Yes Yes No segment is as funny as usual, but the story of a lost tortoise ad on Craigslist ends up being exactly as boring as it sounds.

Science Vs: “Antidepressants” — The subject matter of this is fascinating, but there is a recurring Hamilton reference that defines what I find grating about this show. There’s a thing in mental health research called the Hamilton scale, and every time but one that it is referenced here, a sample from Hamilton is used. A reference. Is not. A joke. And I know it may be a little much to expect top-notch humour from a science podcast, but this kind of thing is so much a part of its aesthetic that I think I’m out at this point. That was the last straw. Never thought it would be Hamilton.

A Point of View: “In Praise of Prophets of Doom” — A wonderfully curmudgeonly defence of dissatisfaction from Howard Jacobson. I tend to be a rather optimistic sort, though I have my particular doomy moments. It’s vindicating to hear something like this in a world that often feels full of mindless boosters for things that aren’t making our lives better.

NPR Politics Podcast: “Musicals and Politics” — This almost made me feel better about politics. What’s most incredible about this rundown of political musicals (aside from the regrettable absence of any Kander and Ebb) is not so much that there’s such a preponderance of them, long before Hamilton. It’s that Hamilton still stands head and shoulders above them all. It’s not just that there are no other musicals that have engaged so thoroughly in the political process, it’s that there are barely any other works of art that have done that. Save a few by Aaron Sorkin.

99% Invisible: “The Shift” — I’ll listen to sports stories when they’re on 99pi. That said, this is really the same story as the earlier one about basketball: innovations in the game make it less exciting and provoke a backlash. Still, fun.

On the Media: “Debunking the AIDS ‘Patient Zero’ Myth” — A quick story about how horribly Gaëtan Dugas was treated by the media: he did not give the world AIDS. That’s the Coles Notes version.

StartUp: Season 4, episodes 4-6 — Dov Charney is a compelling character, but this isn’t popping out of the headphones for me. I appreciate the return to serialized storytelling (I remain one of the few staunch defenders of StartUp season two) but I can’t help but think that this show is now suffering by comparison to its more consistent Gimlet stablemates. (I have not been reviewing Heavyweight because of an upcoming thing I’m doing, but informally: it is one of my favourite new shows of the year.) We’ll see how this ends.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Doctor Strange and Moonlight” — I wish the rest of the panel had given Kat Chow a bit more space to say her piece on Doctor Strange. It does sound like a fun movie that I’d like to see, but the whitewashing is some serious bullshit. Moonlight on the other hand sounds like something I am going to love unreservedly. Can’t wait.

99% Invisible: “Reverb” — Ooh, this is some great 99pi. I was aware of Wallace Sabine before, because the story of his minuscule acoustic measurements is incredible, but I was unaware that his formula has become obsolete in our increasingly quiet world. There’s also apparently a technology that simulates different reverbs in the same sized room using microphones and speakers distributed around the walls and ceiling. I would love to experience that.

Reply All: “Hello?” — The premise “P.J. and Alex open their phone lines to anybody for 48 hours” was bound to result in something bonkers, but this is far longer and more bonkers than you could possibly expect. A meandering, borderline pointless, destined classic of this amazing podcast. Pick of the week.

Code Switch: “Want Some Gravy With Those Grievances?” — The Code Switch team plays phone messages from people who are dreading Thanksgiving dinner because they have family members who voted for Trump. It is what it is.

Theory of Everything: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” — Benjamen Walker’s speculative story behind the appalling image (which I missed on election day) of Trump spying on Melania’s vote is a brilliant way of working Trump into his surveillance season. I mean, there are other more obvious ways. But why go the obvious route? I love the approach Walker is taking right now, of just continuing to do his show and respond to current events, but through the lens of surveillance. This series is going to get awesome eventually. It’s already great.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “ Romantic Comedies With Kumail Nanjiani” — Nanjiani and Linda Holmes talking about rom coms is great. Throw in a markedly less enthusiastic Steven Thompson and a MUCH less enthusiastic Glen Weldon, and you’ve got… almost gold. Yellow-tinged silver.

99% Invisible — “Dollar Store Town” — Audibly a shorter version of a longer, more visual documentary. Still, the fact that there is a town in China where they manufacture  nearly all of the worthless tchotchkes sold in American dollar stores is amazing.

Omnireviewer (week of Nov. 13, 2016)

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So, I was just sitting in a restaurant next to what seemed like a second or third date. And the guy was trying to come off as being way less into video games than he obviously was. Like, the conversation about how he’s not really much of a gamer went on for a lot longer than it would have needed to if he actually wasn’t one.

Anyway, here are 20 reviews of things that are not video games and one comparatively long review of a video game that I didn’t even really think about all that much, honestly. Didn’t really even register.

Live events

A Tribe Called Red: Live at the Commodore — I’m not much of a dancer. Fortunately, in Vancouver you can go to a show like this and not worry too much about it. I wasn’t the only one. A Tribe Called Red is a phenomenon. And it seems to me that their live show is a better illustration of their basic musical thesis — that First Nations chanting and drumming works really well as an element of EDM — than their recordings. We Are the Halluci Nation is still one of my favourite records of the year, but it strikes me that genre fusion is easier when you are ostentatiously making a Work Of Art. Whereas, when you’re in front of a dance floor, on which people are dancing (or not, as the case may be), there’s another set of expectations at play. It’s perhaps a more workmanlike task, and the result was for me still less effective than listening to We Are the Halluci Nation (this was inevitable). But the fact that A Tribe Called Red can do as good a live set as this and get people moving is the ultimate proof-of-concept. And while they can’t just have Joseph Boyden show up from time to time in a live show to read about Chanie Wenjack, their social message remains intact through a clever video accompaniment composed entirely of culturally appropriative images. There were also kickass dancers onstage. A Tribe Called Red is one of the most inventive and skilled acts in the country. Saul Williams was a hell of an opener, too. Pick of the week. 

Music

Depeche Mode: Speak and Spell — I found myself unexpectedly in the mood for some plinky synthpop after hearing Yazoo’s “Only You” on an episode of This American Life. After discovering that the writer of that song was the creative force in early Depeche Mode, I decided on this as my poison. “Just Can’t Get Enough” isn’t a strong enough song to survive its overexposure, but everything else on this album is viscerally satisfying. Hits you right in the lizard brain. Plus, it’s so dated that it sounds exactly like modern music. It sounds a little bit like what I’d imagine a collaboration between Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream would sound like, provided Eno had his pop songwriter hat on. Really enjoyed this. I understand it’s drastically different from the music that Depeche Mode would become more esteemed for in the late eighties and nineties, so I’ll go on to check that out too. But this is definitely worthwhile in itself. “New Life” is endlessly repeatable.

Depeche Mode: Violator — This is objectively a better album than Speak and Spell, but it’s less what I was looking for at this very moment. This is a gritty, rock’n’roll electronica record. If I hadn’t come to Depeche Mode specifically for really 80s-sounding synthpop, I think I would have loved this immediately. I’ll probably listen again real soon. “Policy of Truth” and “Personal Jesus” strike me as the real highlights.

Justice: Woman — I’m tempted to say it’s Justice’s best album. Being more a fan of their second album than their first, this is probably going to be an easier opinion for me to arrive at than many. But this has the initial effect of making me want to listen to nearly all of its tracks on repeat. The three singles they released in advance are all album highlights, particularly “Safe and Sound,” which may be their most infectious track ever. Of the album tracks we’re now hearing for the first time, the highlights for me are “Chorus” (the least rock and roll track on an otherwise very rock and roll album), and “Heavy Metal” (which takes its gothic vibe from a tiny Bach paraphrase: very metal, indeed). This is up there with Coloring Book as one of the most purely joyful releases of 2016.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja & the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra: Death and the Maiden — This is the second time this year that Patricia Kopatchinskaja has sold me on a piece of music that I hadn’t previously cared much about. Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is obviously a masterpiece, but it’s never been one that I’m actually compelled to listen to. But Kopachinskaja’s imagination in interweaving the movements with adaptations of early music by Dowland and Gesualdo as well as the contemporary composer György Kurtág, emphasizes the most dramatic and existentially terrifying dimensions of Schubert’s piece, which has otherwise been rendered a bit tame by way of canonization. If there’s a downside, it’s simply that Kopatchinskaja’s playing is less prevalent here than on her excellent duets album or her wonderfully cracked recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto. But as a record in general, it is marvellous, and suffused with the particular idiosyncratic intelligence of an artist who is quickly becoming my favourite person in classical music.

Movies

O Brother, Where Art Thou? — I’m not sure this isn’t my favourite Coen brothers movie. Usually, I’ll cite Fargo. But this film’s sheer verbosity makes it a bit more fun. There are lines in this movie that could only be from this movie. Lines like: “Say, uh, any a you boys smithies? Or, if not smithies per se, were you otherwise trained in the metallurgic arts before straitened circumstances forced you into a life of aimless wanderin’?” Or: “Well, Pete, I just figured it should be the one with capacity for abstract thought. But if that ain’t the consensus view, hell, let’s put her to a vote!” Or: “I’ll press your flesh, you dimwitted sonofabitch! You don’t tell your pappy how to court the elect ‘rate!” And speaking of Pappy O’Daniels, this is one of those movies with two stories: one about a group of protagonists, and one larger narrative that they find themselves unexpectedly crossing paths with. These days, the state election between O’Daniels and Homer Stokes almost reads as a cruel inversion of the recent catastrophe: an outsider candidate who claims to represent “the little man” but who is actually just a virulent racist loses the election to an uninspiring establishment figure. There’s a decisive moment in the middle of the film where Stokes seems to go from being a Bernie Sanders analogue to a Donald Trump analogue, so this film is in a sense a forecast of Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign — which gets most everything except the ending correct. But if we may put aside these comparisons for a moment, the election storyline in O Brother is one of the most classically absurdist Coen brothers plotlines ever to not be Burn After Reading. It shows a fictional electorate blindly stumbling into the better decision because of how much they love the music of an integrated folk band whose very existence is part of a harebrained scam. And the decision that they make is still clearly not a very good option: O’Daniels is comically insincere and probably corrupt. (Again, we’ve put aside the comparisons at this point. Lest anybody misunderstand.) But there’s a major difference between this and many other Coen comedies. To a certain extent it shares the nothing-happens-for-a-reason-and-the-universe-is-indifferent mentality of other films. (“Ve believe in nossing.”) But this movie goes out of its way to sow doubt in that. It essentially sympathizes with its rationalist protagonist, and assumes that we will as well. But even after all of the proto-Burn After Reading meaningless bullshit that’s happened by the end of the movie, it still goes out of its way to leave a supernatural interpretation open. The sight of the prophesied cow atop the cottonhouse is the most obvious tactic, but it’s also there in the implication that the old man on the railroad might be God and that the sheriff might be the Devil. (“The law. Well, the law is a human institution.”) Given that things do work out, relatively, for the best at the end of the movie, this suggestion that there may indeed be a benevolent force at work makes O Brother, Where Art Thou? maybe the Coens’ most optimistic movie.

Television

Last Week Tonight: November 13, 2016 — Well, after all of those shit opening jokes characterizing the 2016 election as various species of can’t-it-be-over-yet, Oliver gets a punchline. Because yeah, this is worse. And, for all of the crap I’ve said about Oliver over the past few weeks (which I stand by) I feel the need to defend him against those who have written him off for failing to prevent Trump’s rise. Because that’s obviously not the point. The point is to write good, prescient jokes — which is something that you can rightly critique him for not always doing. But Oliver was one of the first to treat Trump as a threat worth joking about rather than implicitly a joke. And now that the worst has happened, Oliver is goal-oriented. Rather than encouraging the sharing of the episode, which he can usually pass off as a sort of righteous-minded quasi-activism (only last week, for instance), Oliver basically acknowledged that such minuscule acts are empty virtue signalling and only play into the echo chamber problem that got us here. Instead, he highlighted a number of organizations that you can donate actual money to which will work to mitigate some of Trump’s inevitable atrocities. And in terms of messaging, Oliver hits a home run by imploring his viewers to remember that this is not normal. The worst thing that can possibly happen at this point is for Donald Trump to be viewed as an ordinary political figure. The season’s end fell in an appropriate place, given Oliver’s ongoing rhetorical war with the man who has just become the most powerful person in the world. The outro montage is a bit damp, though. You can’t just say “Fuck 2016” over and over and expect it to be funny or cathartic. You need to write jokes. At the beginning of Oliver’s third season, I thought Last Week Tonight was the best thing on TV. Now it frustrates me immensely. But I still think that it’s valuable on balance and I’ll keep tuning in next year.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: November 14, 2016 — Even on the most high-minded comedy shows, it’s sometimes the dumb jokes that work best. “Eerie R.N.C. Pubis,” indeed.

QI: “Danger,” “Jeopardy” & “Jumble” — I was planning on doing some work this Saturday evening. Even made sure I had no plans because, important things to do. Instead, I mainlined three episodes of QI. I have no regrets.

Literature, etc.

Dan Fox: Pretentiousness: Why It Matters — Yeah, I’m reading a book about why it’s not bad to be pretentious. Laugh it up, folks. It’s very short and I’m almost finished it, so expect a report back soon. For now, I’ll just say that the central argument — that pretentiousness need not be dismissed as a symptom of elitism when it can just as easily be a side-effect of a healthy, open mind — is only about a quarter of what’s going on here. There is historical context o’plenty, including a short history of notions of authenticity in acting — professional pretentiousness. It’s well worth reading, as I think Fox’s arguments tie into some of what’s wrong in contemporary politics, and certainly what’s wrong with the media. It’s also well worth checking out Steven Poole’s Guardian review of the book, which takes its argument in a couple of new directions. More when I’m done.

Alan Moore: Jerusalem — Speaking of things I’ve just started reading, but not of things that I am likely to finish any time soon, there’s this. I am eleven pages into Alan Moore’s 1200-page literary epic and already thinking “what have I done.” It is entirely readable thus far, but its sheer bricklikeness is causing me inertia. Perhaps I’ll really put some time into it over Christmas. Until then, I foresee progress being slooooowwwww.

Games

Pony Island — I’ve always thought that there’s nothing scarier than metafiction. Borges speculated (pretty sure it’s Borges, though I can’t place the citation off the top of my head) that the reason for this is that when we see the characters in a story becoming aware of their unreality, it attunes us to the idea that we may also be unreal and thus trapped in an infinite regress of fictions all the way down. (It’s notable that this idea can be seen as either horrifying or absurdly hilarious, accounting for metafiction’s twin strong suits of horror and comedy.) But I’m not entirely sure that it works quite the same way in metafictional games. In fact, the anxiety that the most effective metafictional horror games play off of is almost the inverse of what Borges suggests. Rather than beginning to suspect one’s own unreality as the reader of a metafictional story does, the player of a metafictional game may begin to suspect that the characters in the game are more real than they initially seemed. (Spoilers ahead for both Pony Island and Undertale. But, you should really mostly be concerned about the Undertale ones, because Pony Island is far less effective and very derivative — at least in its themes.) If Pony Island is disquieting, it is so primarily because it shows you a basic arcade game interface that gradually reveals itself to be able to do things it shouldn’t be able to do. It takes advantage of the fact that our PCs are astronomically more advanced than arcade games to portray an arcade game that’s uncanny and occult. What’s that Asimov aphorism? Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic? Then, what’s a modern PC but a magic (and/or haunted) arcade cabinet? I digress: the thing that makes Pony Island’s scariest moments scary is that the characters inside the arcade game (e.g. literally the Devil) gradually appear to have greater capacities than they should, given that they’re in an arcade game. They begin to appear real. The opposite of Borges’ anxiety about self-aware literature. Conceptually, it is genuinely horrifying. And the reason I’ve gone into this much detail about how I think it works is that this sort of thing in games generally has a shattering impact on me. Metafictional horror in video games is one of very few sets of tropes in media that can actually keep me up at night. And if I’m tuned into this on such a fundamental level, you might expect that any iteration of those tropes should prove preoccupying for me, almost without regard for everything else in the game. But it didn’t work in Pony Island. And I think it didn’t work because I’ve seen all of these tricks before. So, I’ve learned something about myself: these tropes need to be employed in a surprising way if I’m going to be affected. For reference, there are two older games which, when combined, account for everything that should be scary in Pony Island. Obviously, there’s Undertale, the most frightening moment of which is recreated nearly verbatim here. More on that in a second. But there’s also The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, the monster of which manifests as glitches in the game’s interface — moments where the game appears to be able to do more than it had initially seemed it could. (And aside from merely coming first, that game also has some social commentary going on that Pony Island doesn’t remotely attempt. Which is fine. I’m just saying: TUWWFN has more plates spinning.) Anyway, the most frightening moment in Undertale is also probably one of my top five most frightening moments in all fiction. And that’s the moment at the end of the standard, neutral story that you’re most likely to get on your first time through where the primary antagonist shuts down the game. That moment nearly coincides with the game’s most clever reveal, which is that “saving” is an in-universe superpower possessed by your character, and not a mere administrative task you perform as a player. The thing that’s horrifying here is that the game’s final boss is becoming aware of the organizational infrastructure that exists just outside of the story. He knows about saving, and that it’s possible to shut down the game — and he’s learned to do those things, in order to turn the tables on you. For a moment, he appears terrifyingly real. (Would this be a weird place to quote Hamlet? Nah, couldn’t be bothered, anyway.) There’s nothing nearly this sophisticated going on in Pony Island. There are moments where the game appears to have the capacity to shut itself down. And there’s a sort of internal consistency to the logic of this, much like in Undertale. But I didn’t detect any further twist on the trick. So, I wasn’t discomfited in the least. Which is actually really disappointing. Anyway, as reviews go, I feel like this has been a very idiosyncratically negative one. I’m sure than most of these concerns are of absolutely zero consequence to most of the people who will play this game. So, aside from all this, Pony Island is good. I do think that the premise of “video game haunted by literally the Devil” is a bit limp. But the gameplay is completely fantastic, both in its action sequences and its puzzles. Both are challenging, but never unfair. And at six bucks, it’s a hell of a deal. So, if you happen to have read this far without having played Pony Island, I guess I… recommend it???

Podcasts

The Gist: “The Autopsy” — Okay, I guess I’m still listening to election wrap-ups. I said I’d stop, but it’s what all of my favourite news-hooked podcasts are talking about, so I guess I’ll just cede a portion of my sanity and continue. This is terrifying, because it doesn’t focus on why Trump won like everything else, but on what his early presidency will actually be like. Sample horror: Newt Gingrich could be in the cabinet, and he’s expressed interest in reinstating HUAC. Smile into the abyss.

Code Switch: “Apocalypse Or Racial Kumbaya? America After Nov. 8” — Good lord, were we ever so optimistic as to even ask the question? These panelists, speaking before the election, express the thought that America will inevitably be in a better place in four years after having been forced to reckon with the racism of this campaign. I wonder if they took the possibility of a Trump win into account at all???

This American Life: “The Sun Comes Up” — A basic, bare-bones series of interviews with Americans from various backgrounds reacting to the news of Trump’s election. It’s the best thing TAL could have done this week. The highlights are the saddest segments, alas: a Mormon woman petitions for gender equality within her religion, supports Hillary Clinton, and gets ostracized; and a black British TAL producer phones his mom to talk about their immigration status. It’s not an earthshaking hour of radio, but it’s exactly what you want This American Life to be the week after Donald Trump’s election.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Lin-Manuel Miranda” — If anybody can get Marc Maron singing, it was always going to be Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is a great chat, with both of them seeming at-ease. Must help that they’re fans of each other, and they know they’re fans of each other. It’s especially great to hear Miranda’s stories of finding himself in the school play. And it’s gratifying to see that somebody who was obviously so precocious has turned out so normal.

The Gist: “The Liberal Hegemony of Pop Culture” — Mike Pesca has a knack for finding reasonable voices on the right. And honestly, listening to reasonable voices on the right is probably important right now. Because as much as I think that voting for Trump was a morally wrong thing to do — no grey area there — it’s probably not right to write off all of those voters as people. Which is what Ross Douthat is accusing virtually all of pop culture of doing. I definitely don’t agree with that, but I can muster a certain amount of sympathy for his case in the abstract. That’s about as much as I’m willing to budge at this very moment.

Radiolab: “One Vote” — This is a fantastic episode, with three great stories (multiple stories per episode has always been my preferred mode of Radiolab) about the extent to which a single vote counts. And it survives the election (which hadn’t happened yet) right up to the point where Robert Krulwich talks about how decisive the difference between male and female voters is. And certain metrics would now seem to undermine the point he’s subtly trying to make. It’s a quibble, and it’s not even really his fault. This is good Radiolab.

All Songs Considered: “Guest DJ Nick Mason On Pink Floyd’s Early Years” — Inevitable nitpick: Bob Boilen mistakes an actual flute for a Mellotron in this episode. But at least he has the forethought to play “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” while he’s actually got Nick Mason in the studio. Admirably, Mason doesn’t even seem that embarrassed.

Code Switch: “Another Black President Says Goodbye To Washington” — Chris Jackson is a wise fellow. The way that he’s chosen to think about Washington’s resignation gives him a legitimately unique perspective on how we ought to respond to the election result. And as for Hamilton, I’m sure whoever plays Washington next will be at the top of their profession but Chris Jackson was the perfect choice for the role and his interpretation is one of the strongest in a strong bunch.

Imaginary Worlds: “Dumbledore’s Army” — This mini-season about Harry Potter is maybe the best thing Eric Molinsky has ever done. (Except that semi-fictional Cthulhu thing. That was amazing.) Between this series and The Cursed Child, I’ve recently come to realize exactly how much Potter nostalgia I have. We all kind of marinade in shit-talk about J.K. Rowling, and her various indiscretions in storytelling (the house elves being “happy slaves”; the probably-accidental-but-still-regrettable anti-Semitic caricatures who work at Gringotts). But hearing about people who have used Harry Potter as a springboard for various causes, and as a way to deal with trauma has brought back all of the warm feelings I once had for these stories. I may even re-read a couple favourites within the next year. I haven’t read any of the original seven novels since they came out. Easily rectified. Pick of the week. 

Omnireviewer (week of Oct. 30, 2016)

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Slow week for media consumption. This is partially because I’ve been busy, partially because I’ve been listening to fragments of albums rather that full ones or podcasts, and partially because I’ve been playing a fair bit of Sunless Sea, which I think has gotten pretty close to enough words expended on it on this blog. For now.

14 reviews.

Television

Last Week Tonight: October 30, 2015 — I’ve observed that I’m always more involved in Oliver’s long segments when they’re about stories that I’m not especially familiar with. And I was sort of familiar with the state of school segregation in modern America, thanks to This American Life’s staggeringly good two-parter “The Problem We All Live With.” So, my thoughts on this generally were that I knew most of what was discussed, and having just watched it, I can’t remember any of the jokes. This would seem to lend credence to the idea that Oliver is a better pundit than a comedian. Still, that clip of Joe Biden’s reaction to hearing about the Anthony Weiner emails is amazing.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: “President Obama” — The Obama segment isn’t the highlight of this, though watching the president laugh at Samantha Bee’s millennial impression is curiously satisfying. It’s the segment where Bee interviews Russia’s government-employed professional trolls that really steals the show. Also, I’m always happy to watch funny people getting angry about the Alt-Right.

Movies

A Nightmare on Elm Street — I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. I’ve generally steered clear of the classic slasher movies because they’re neither scary nor smart. But, firstly, this is the perfect thing for a Halloween movie night because it’s campy and full of incredible overacting (Nancy’s mom is amazing in every scene). And secondly, the premise of a killer who stalks people in their dreams to kill them in reality is truly, genuinely creepy — even if the execution doesn’t live up to the concept. Worthwhile.

Music

Buggles: The Age of Plastic — I was getting a haircut last weekend, and “Video Killed the Radio Star” came on the radio. Not being much of a haircut conversationalist, I actually listened to the song — for the first time, really. There’s a difference between “hearing” and “listening.” And I had it stuck in my head for several days. That’s not a thing that normally happens to me, but “Video Killed the Radio Star” is a different kind of infectious once you really listen to it. Because, it’s got so many moving parts in it, and every one of its dozen-or-so musical motives is a hook. It’s an enormously complex and fussy pop song, befitting an album called The Age of Plastic. And the lyric conjures a classic and still-relevant anxiety: what happens when the machines take over the things we care about? It’s a staggeringly good pop single. The rest of the album, which I figured it was about time I checked out (knowing the Buggles not just from this single but also from their befuddling tenure as members of Yes, during which they made an album I actually love) is less excellent, though “Living in the Plastic Age” is impressively detailed. Its dated production even manages not to chafe, given the obvious campness of the Buggles’ devotion to synths. After those two opening tracks, things go downhill, though not so far that I’m unlikely to listen again. The Buggles make a truly attractive sound. Trevor Horn is a really fantastic singer, and Geoff Downes’ keyboard-playing is like nobody else. The combination of his staccato attack on the electric piano with his symphonic approach to synths is instantly recognizable. This is a band that’s due for a widespread rediscovery, given that modern life has given credence to their obsessive anxieties about technological innovation.  

Yes: Drama — I couldn’t not follow up The Age of Plastic with this. It’s an extremely unusual entry in Yes’s discography, of course, but for my money it’s the creative equal of Going for the One. Having heard a Buggles album, it’s especially remarkable how much Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes’ sensibility comes out, here — and how compatible that sensibility is with the musical direction of Chris Squire, Steve Howe and Alan White during this period. Aside from “White Car,” which is literally just a Buggles song (only Horn and Downes play on it) the tracks that the Buggles brought to the table (“Run Through the Light” and “Into the Lens”) are essentially Buggles tracks where the bits that would be symphonic synth parts are instead performed by the most proficient band in rock music. That is self-evidently something worth hearing. The other tracks benefit from Horn’s straightforward lyrics (what Jon Anderson would have done with these songs is extremely hard to imagine) and Downes’ symphonic approach to synths, as opposed to Rick Wakeman’s soloistic approach. This lineup was clearly unsustainable, but the one album we have from them is one of progressive rock’s (and, I suppose, new wave’s) most treasurable anomalies.

Opeth: Blackwater Park — I gave up on Opeth after Heritage. Not because they quit metal, but because they abandoned a distinctive (I just about dare say unique) musical idiom in favour of bland throwbacks. There are plenty of bands out there who do ‘70s prog nostalgia, and that’s all well and good. But once you’ve established yourself as that rare band who can infuse an entirely different sort of music with the spirit of prog as opposed to its actual aesthetic and tropes, I feel like it’s almost a betrayal to start aping King Crimson. I haven’t heard Sorceress, and it’s possible that I’ll never listen to a new Opeth album again. But I’m no longer so disappointed by them that it’s painful to listen to them in their prime. And Blackwater Park is Opeth in their prime. It’s probably my favourite album of theirs, for the way that its songs effortlessly weave together the band’s two extremes: pastoral folk and growling death metal. It’s an album less interested in the middle ground than many of their others, and yet it coheres better than any of them. “The Drapery Falls” is the most obvious illustration of this, with the lighter side coming through in the details of even the track’s heaviest moments. (Think of the acoustic frills in the background of the song’s first heavy bit.) But it’s the driving aesthetic of each of the album’s main pieces (“Harvest” and “Patterns in the Ivy” being lovely in themselves, but less substantial), and that’s what makes it really work. “Dirge for November” has always left me a bit unmoved — more repetitious than the other tracks, and with less inspired material to repeat — but it’s the weak link among a staggeringly strong group of compositions. I didn’t get far in my exploration of metal. It took me a while to warm to it, and once I did I quickly found myself more interested in other things, like Mahler and Kanye. But Blackwater Park is objectively a masterpiece, and I imagine I’ll return to it periodically for the whole foreseeable future.

Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker — I’ve been listening to heavy metal lately. And yet the most gothic music I’ve heard in recent weeks is a gospel record by an 82-year-old poet. You Want It Darker finds Cohen sounding more vampyric than ever, and offering recitations that blur the line between talking to a lover with whom things are complicated and talking to a god with whom things are complicated. The title track is the clear highlight, both musically and lyrically. The instrumental track sets the tone immediately: it’s anchored by a choir, recorded distantly and with plenty of room noise. If you haven’t come to this record to pray, you may be in the wrong discography. Gospel organ and murky bass guitar complete the picture, and when you feel (yes, feel) the opening words of Cohen’s lyric, it’s clear that we’re in ritual territory. “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game,” Cohen intones, and he continues in that vein for the next 35 minutes. It’s an album about fruitlessly seeking attention from personages who’d rather you left them alone. It’s an album about giving up on connecting with God and your fellow man. And the irony of all this is that any reasonable music fan would not want Leonard Cohen to disengage. His god may have abandoned him, but music geeks emphatically have not. It’d be good luck for us if he does in fact turn out to be a vampire. Pick of the week. 

Literature, etc.

Adam Gopnik: “Why Trump Is Different — And Must Be Repelled” — A fabulous analysis of Trump’s apparently not-yet-dead campaign, which is most notable for rigorously denying the condescending narrative that Trump supporters are to be pitied for they know not what they do. It’s part and parcel of the veneration of the “white working class,” a group that Gopnik is careful to point out is not at all monolithic: “The white working class built unions and raised children and fought wars—and lynched black people and supported Joe McCarthy. Sometimes those attitudes could be held together in a single personality. No group is invulnerable to bad causes. We should have no hesitation in calling deplorable attitudes deplorable—without imagining that those who hold them are deplorable people. They can be wrong without being bad. And, in any case, it would be good to balance the endless hand-wringing about the pathos of the Trump voter with some countervailing sense of the pathos, still larger, of the Clinton voter: the Latina motel cleaner in Nevada or the single mother in Brooklyn. No category of voters in a democracy is especially virtuous, none immune from evil.” That is a staggeringly good articulation of a thing that’s extremely easy to forget.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “EL VY’s Song Against Trump, New Conor Oberst, Kristin Hersh, More” — Great show. The Conor Oberst and Kristin Hersh tracks are particularly fantastic. I even went back and listened to that chunk of the show a second time. Hersh’s new double album is now on my list of stuff to check out, but it unfortunately also means I have another book to read this year, because they’re packaged together. Where will I find the time.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Roger Waters” — I could listen to Roger Waters talk all day. He’s that rare thing: an aging baby boomer rock star with a social conscious that hasn’t become an affectation. None of the requisite blandness or platitudes here. He’s passionate; he has wit. He knows the power of rhetoric and employs it advisedly. He’s earned his place as an intellectual among rock stars in a way that I’m not always convinced that people like Pete Townshend or Neil Young really have. He’s really earnest, but you can forgive him because he’s got a whole career’s worth of consequential activism behind him. There are a few moments that chafe, sure. Like his slightly condescending attitude towards the underprivileged children he brings onstage during “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.” His heart’s in the right place, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that he’s using poor kids as props. On the other hand, his blatant refusal to allow the children of arena-owning executives onstage with him is quite charming. You can picture him flying off the handle: “They get everything! They don’t get to have this!” Naturally, it’s fascinating to hear Waters talk about his evolving thoughts on the dark times in Pink Floyd’s tenure. Interesting that he felt condescended to by David Gilmour and Rick Wright. I find that hard to picture, somehow, and I do wonder how much of it was insecurity on Waters’ part. Because, there’s no denying that for all his brilliance as a songwriter, builder of musical structures and concept artist, he was the least sophisticated musician in Pink Floyd by a fair margin. (Nick Mason wasn’t a great drummer, but he was a more distinctive drummer than Waters was a distinctive bassist.) And while he’s right to claim that writing an opera is a real challenge and a badge of honour, it’s super weird than anybody ever asked him to write music to a pre-existing opera libretto. It’s the exact opposite to the appropriate task. I think he’d probably be a great librettist. He’s the most sophisticated dramatist in rock music. Also, Maron is right to point out that this podcast is the appropriate venue for old rockers to read long poems. The one Waters brings out near the end of the episode is cringeworthy in places — Waters himself makes it clear that it’s “doggerel,” but he values it because it’s heartfelt — but it’s nice to have it out there. He clearly doesn’t want to talk much about the past. But Maron dances around his unwillingness with more grace than he can usually conjure. This isn’t as good an episode as the one with Margo Price, but Waters is a compelling guest.

Imaginary Worlds: “Caps Lock Harry” — This mini-season about Harry Potter is proving to be the best thing Eric Molinsky has done aside from his Cthulhu story. So far, he’s isolated two of the most fascinating things about the series: first the implications of the Sorting Hat’s logic on educational philosophy, and now the way that J.K. Rowling depicts Harry’s PTSD. I wasn’t one of the kids who got annoyed with Harry’s moodiness and anger in Order of the Phoenix, but I do recall wishing that the literal use of caps lock would go away. But it’s obviously much more meaningful to people who have experienced similar traumas to Harry. One of Molinsky’s guests has an absolutely heartwrenching personal analogy to the Mirror of Erised, which has always been one of the richest, saddest elements of the Harry Potter canon. But the whole episode is full of marvellous, moving stuff. Really outstanding. Pick of the week. 

Science Vs: “DNA and the Smell of Death” — Think it’s time to relegate this to sometimes-listen status. While this is notable for really making Dr. Arpad Vass look horrible — this is a scientist who claims not to understand the importance of replicability in studies — I confess to finally being sick of the tone of this show. I’ll listen to the season finale, and probably just drop in occasionally from there.

On the Media: “The System is Rigged” — One of the best episodes of On the Media this year. And it has been a great year. For On the Media. It brings together the two best elements of the year’s coverage: Bob Garfield’s critiques of how the media covered Trump during the primaries, and Brooke Gladstone’s series on poverty myths. Gladstone’s piece is the clear highlight here, including such great writing as the line where she characterizes the story of the modern American safety net as “the narrative equivalent of ‘boom-SPLAT.’” Brilliant, sad, upsetting stuff.

Reply All: “In the Tall Grass” — I guess everything has to be about the election now. I’m not being spiteful, it just appears to be true. In keeping with that, Reply All highlights a useless app that promises to bring the country together, and a cartoonist’s efforts to reclaim his cartoon frog from hateful trolls. As election-related journalism goes, it’s admirably non-exhausting.

Omnireviewer (week of Oct. 16)

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Dear me. Verbose, this week. Well, I’ve had some spare time, which will be mercifully less spare fairly soon. 32 reviews.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3 — My favourite of the first three acts by miles. The sequence with the Xanadu computer is one of my all-time favourite scenes in a video game. The fact that Donald built this thing as a bitter memorial to his relationship with Lula and friendship with Joseph is even sadder when you know that the first adventure game ever was inspired by heartbreak as well. Xanadu is clearly based on Adventure, which was made by William Crowther (another Kentucky-based computer scientist and cave explorer) as an attempt to reconnect with his young daughter after he and his wife divorced. On this playthrough, I came across a section of the Xanadu scene that I hadn’t before, where Lula explains why cave paintings are so sad: somebody wanted to memorialize something — a person or relationship, maybe — and we can barely make out any detail. How like the ruined Xanadu computer, and the primitive parser interface of Adventure. There are other highlights, here. I’d love to see the full text of Donald’s Kentucky-set version of “Kubla Khan.” And, as the party of player characters grows, so does the range of responses to any given situation. Conway is reflective, Shannon practical, Ezra whimsical, and Junebug totally off-topic. Their responses represent different types of gaming. I’m the sort of player who likes to linger and mull things over, so I tend towards Conway’s dialogue options. But it’s nice to have Shannon around to progress the plot, and the other two to throw occasional monkey wrenches into conversations. Also, the moment in the final scene where the game momentarily takes over the mouse to express the inevitability of Conway’s return to drinking is absolutely chilling. I am actually a bit scared to see how that develops in the next episode. I’ve come to love all of these characters, but if things work out badly for Conway, it’s going to be crushing.

Kentucky Route Zero: “Here and There Along The Echo” — I take back what I said about “The Entertainment” being my favourite of the KRZ mini-episodes. It’s a dead heat between that and this one. The notion of formatting a game as a telephone hotline menu is not only novel: it opens up a world of possibilities for interactive audio. (The only other example I’ve seen is Papa Sangre, which is essentially hide and seek in the dark, and I really don’t have much time for it.) Like so many other moments in this second playthrough of the pre-2016 portions of Kentucky Route Zero, I had intended for this to be a quick perusal, and then straight on to Act 4, which is new to me and super exciting. But, I ended up spending two hours going through the options, and listening to this fascinating character talk. It was worthwhile for the devs to briefly abandon the text-based aesthetic of this world to introduce spoken audio, if only because it allows a voice actor to give a convincing performance of what people might sound like in this universe. As a side note, anybody else who enjoyed his list of the different types of water as much as I did would do well to check out James Joyce’s list of water’s admirable attributes from Ulysses.

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 4 — Well, it didn’t let me down. This is a quieter, slower, more deliberate Kentucky Route Zero than we’ve seen before. And it is the first one to be more concerned with the characters and their respective arcs than it is with exploring themes. Rather than presenting simulations within simulations, or posing high-minded questions about whether we’re inside or out, this act presents us with Shannon’s abiding anger over her parents’ death in the mine, Johnny’s yearning for a third person to ride with him and Junebug (he wants a child, essentially) and most devastatingly, the effects of Conway’s return to drinking. The subtlety with which Conway becomes a different character in this act is both masterful and sad. And the moment when he appears to literally become a different character is the most destabilizing thing in the game so far: the loss of that character and of his particular way of moving through the world seems likely to be more of a paradigm shift than the introduction of the Zero. In general, Act 4 encourages us to take a time-out from our obsessiveness about what everything means and how it connects, and just spend some time empathizing with these characters. But I’m still left with lots of thoughts about the various thematic moving parts and conspiracies at play, here. We know that the power company is evil. We know that they’re engaged in debt buying, because they acquired the pharmaceutical company that Conway owes. We also know that the distillery is evil. (How lovely to see a thriving business like the Rum Colony not pouring Hard Times, hey?) We know that the distillery is also involved in debt buying, since they bought the outstanding bar tabs from Harry at the Lower Depths pub. So, how are they connected? Are they connected? We know, at least, that Conway’s medical bills (owed, indirectly, to the power company) will be paid off by the distillery in exchange for work (though his labour was already an exchange for having drunk the top-shelf whiskey at the end of Act 3… I smell duplicity). And there’s definitely some significance to the fact that Conway’s descent into more and more abject debt is represented by his gradually turning into a creepy electricity skeleton. So, what are we going to find out about the connection between those two companies in the grand finale? It’s possible that the answer is nothing. I would be surprised if Conway doesn’t appear in some capacity in Act 5, but we probably won’t learn any specifics. Kentucky Route Zero has never been the type of game to do anything so vulgar as explain itself. It is working on the same level as the conceptual artworks it is so fond of displaying within itself. I’ve read some muted complaints about this act that criticize it for being less exploratory and interactive than its predecessors. And it’s true that you’re not allowed the agency to explore the Echo River at your leisure in the same way that you were with the Zero or overground Kentucky. But video game people sometimes need to be reminded of the fact that all art is interactive. The most important act of the movie is the one that happens in the car on the way home, when you talk about what it all meant. Paintings don’t live in galleries; they live in your brain. So, even if Act 4 of Kentucky Route Zero puts you on tracks in a way that previous acts didn’t, there still ought to be plenty for you to do as a player. End of review. But here are a few stray observations, A.V. Club-style. (And still, I refuse to employ a paragraph break. The nerve.) One. The airplane is back! When I first played Act 1, the thing that really stuck with me is a scene where you can’t do anything except for watch two men push a broken airplane down a road. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I still don’t quite, but that image of struggle left a big impact. And there’s a moment in this act, in the gas station scene, where the two men drift past on a barge with their airplane. You could almost miss it, and it’s never mentioned in the dialogue, nor is it witnessed by Conway, who was the only character to have seen it in the first place. It’s the little things. Two. This act really feels like it comes from 2016. The increasing preoccupation with oil in this reflects the same development in the real world during the two years since the last act of Kentucky Route Zero came out. Also, online dating is a thing in the KRZ world now, just as it’s been mainstreamed. Three. One of the small pleasures of this act is actually visiting the locales that were referred to in “Here and There Along the Echo.” I’m glad I spent as much time with that as I did, now, because I had a bit of advance knowledge of Sam and Ida’s, the Rum Colony, the Iron Pariah (what the hell is up with that!?) and the memorial to something that we can’t remember what it is, among other things. In spite of what I said above, if I could request a single expansion to this game, it would be a more open-world model of the Echo so I could actually be the drifter/pilgrim that the Bureau of Secret Tourism was courting. But then, I suppose that would more or less be Sunless Sea. Four. The flashiest, most formalist moment in this act is the one where the narrators are watching security footage of the events after the fact, but you’re controlling the characters on that security footage in real time. It’s pure Andrew Plotkin. It constitutes the most satisfying cognitive dissonance I’ve felt since I cheated my way through Spider and Web. Five. Again, it’s the little things: Sam and Ida remember their origin story a bit differently. She remembers that he was drinking malt liquor and doing a sudoku. He remembers coffee and a crossword. Six. I can only imagine that Shannon’s reunion with Weaver is going to be a bit awkward once she realizes that Weaver used her genius to (I think) invent a new kind of debt, as it was put in “The Entertainment.” Maybe she’s the missing link between the distillery and the power company. Who knows how long we’ll have to wait to find out? I’ve got to say, though, I honestly don’t mind because if it’s a long wait, it’ll give me an excuse to play through the whole game a third time. As it stands, I think I’ll do a second playthrough of Act 4 fairly soon, because it’s definitely more than two playthroughs worth of game. I shall report back. Pick of the week.

Literature

Magnus Hildebrandt: Kentucky Fried Zero — This is an indispensable primer on the sources for Kentucky Route Zero, ranging from dustbowl photography to Buckminster Fuller and on to the more expected reference points like computer science and Samuel Beckett. The three parts of this are quite short, and you get the sense that Hildebrandt could easily track down and elucidate many more references and influences. (He even says as much in the second-last paragraph of part three.) I hope that he will go back and expand these once the final act of the game is out and we know what we’re working with.  

William Blake: Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion — Look, I didn’t enjoy this. I just didn’t. I have very limited patience for this kind of inscrutable literature. I mean this kind as distinct from, say, Ulysses. At least Joyce’s obscurity seems to be motivated at least partially by a sense of fun: he’s laying out a trail of breadcrumbs, and trusts that you’ll arrive at some kind of understanding eventually. Blake doesn’t seem to know he’s being obscurantist. It appears to me, a deeply undereducated reader in these sorts of texts, that Blake isn’t trying to be obscure; he’s failing to be direct. And so, the proliferation of characters without fixed identities and the religious commentaries so idiosyncratic that I can barely relate them to what I know of a given religion are not endearing at all — they are massively frustrating. Blake’s canon, unexplained as it is, is like jargon. It’s like hearing Scientologists talk about thetans and SPs. I did enjoy doing a bit of reading about Blake, and what he’s apparently on about in this. But my actual time spent reading the poem, with its brilliant illuminated plates, was not fun. I suppose I have to accept that now that I’m a couple years out of grad school, I am effectively “the everyday reader” and so these kinds of texts that are not meant to be understood without rigorous study are simply no longer the kinds of things I’ll take pleasure in. And I’m totally okay with that. Anyway, now I feel prepared to tackle Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. I’ll get to it soon.

Karen Page: The Vegetarian Flavor Bible — I am not a vegetarian, nor am I likely to become one in the near future. But, as part of my ongoing mission to be more creative in the kitchen while eating a bit less meat, I have gone ahead and purchased this tome. It is basically an encyclopedia of flavour combinations, specifically for plant-based diets. I am well aware of the existence of the original Flavor Bible, with its lamb and its bacon, and I will almost surely purchase that as well if this one proves to be useful. But my first priority is getting a handle on creative cooking without meat. I confess that the introduction to this volume is a little bit depressing compared to the one in its meaty predecessor (I read the Kindle free sample) because it focusses almost entirely on nutrition. Maybe that’s predictable. I’m interested in nutrition, insofar as I want to be healthy. But my god, is it ever a boring topic to read about. Still, that’s hardly the point. I have already prepared some middling-to-good, but at least interesting vegetarian meals using this as my guide. One, with wilted spinach and nutmeg served on a grilled portabello mushroom with crumbled ricotta was actually pretty excellent. I shall keep you apprised.

J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — I was never not going to read it, and I liked it a lot more than the fan consensus. It’s flawed, but it’s a decent afternoon’s-worth of nostalgia. And it is openly nostalgic for the first seven books, in the way that Jason Segal’s Muppet movies are for the original Muppet Show, or that certain modern Doctor Who stories are for the classic series. The story of Harry Potter’s time at Hogwarts is as important and formative a narrative for the characters in this story as it is for the people who grew up reading Harry Potter books, and thus the younger characters are effectively surrogates for us. Or at least, Scorpius Malfoy is. Albus Potter is a touch too resentful. It’s fitting, then, that the key plotline should involve time travel, and specifically time travel back to the days of the beloved Goblet of Fire. Because, The Cursed Child is more of a time capsule than it is a modern Harry Potter story. It’s a way to go back, and see familiar things from a slightly different vantage point. (This happens literally in the play’s final act, which takes place largely [spoiler] in Godric’s Hollow.) Its canonicity, as much as such things matter, will always be slightly compromised by the fact that it’s a play and not a novel, and that it mostly wasn’t written by J.K. Rowling. But that’s not the real issue: the real issue is that reading a script is a very incomplete experience. Without actors to bring the characters to life, their emotional arcs seem a bit rushed. Think of it as the opposite of the languidly-paced Order of the Phoenix. The biggest flaws really do come down to the difficulty of representing a stage play on the page — which isn’t even what this purports to do; it’s a script from which staged productions are meant to be extrapolated. I think most of the extremely negative critiques fail to take this into account. Jack Thorne comports himself fairly well, even if his dialogue never made me laugh. (Rowling doesn’t get enough credit for her wit.) Still, I’m left somewhat unsure of whether my beloved His Dark Materials is in good hands or not when Thorne adapts it for the BBC. Because that’s happening. There are really only two substantial problems with this in terms of story. One involves the play’s breakout character, Scorpius Malfoy, who is by a series of machinations briefly transformed from a school outcast to an immensely popular teenager. We’re meant to believe that, under a certain set of circumstances, there’s a part of Scorpius that could allow this to happen. And yet, he immediately casts off his good fortune for the greater good, with virtually no inner conflict at all. I found that a bit of a let down, and it certainly wouldn’t have played out that way in a novel, where the narrative need not be so collapsed. And the other issue is time travel. You have to completely ignore the time travel mechanics if you want to have a good time reading this. It’s not so much the divergence from the mechanic in The Prisoner of Azkaban that chafes: it’s a scene in which people in the present talk about a person who has gone to the past and tried to change it as if that hasn’t already happened — which, by definition, it has. And even this contradicts the way the time turner was seen to work earlier in the play. But the authors don’t let a thing like that get in the way of a good story. And the positives outweigh the negatives, even if the most satisfying moments are basically fan service. It’s immensely gratifying to see Hermione as the Minister for Magic (ergo, Harry’s boss). Too bad she got saddled with such a schlub of a husband. Ron seems to have shed what little charisma he had with age. But he wears his schlubbiness well. Possibly the deftest touch of all is the way that the acrimony between Harry and Malfoy is maintained into adulthood without Malfoy seeming like an overgrown schoolyard bully. They’re just two adults, living adult lives, who don’t get along. And, as star moments for fan favourites go, the sweepstakes are easily taken by Severus Snape, who gets to make his heroic sacrifice a second time. But there’s an impressive showing from Professor McGonagall as well, who offers a stirring rebuke to basically all of the other characters in the play for treating a peaceful world recklessly in spite of all that’s been sacrificed to bring it to bear. This is well worth reading. If you’re a fan and you’re on the fence, just do it now. You know you will eventually, anyhow.

Television

Last Week Tonight: October 16, 2016 — A strong episode containing very little of what I don’t like about this show. Oliver’s segment on Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will likely be the most widely seen piece on either of them during this election, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it actually affected their polling numbers.

Charlie Brooker’s 2015 Wipe — I’ve decided to go down a Charlie Brooker wormhole. It starts here, with him speaking direct to camera about what he thinks, and it will continue with Nathan Barley and the first two seasons of Black Mirror, in preparation for the new one. I’ve seen Brass Eye, but it was a long time ago, and that’s mostly Chris Morris anyway. This is worthwhile for Philomena Cunk alone, but Brooker himself gets some great lines as well. It’s also actually a good New Years’ program, which is as far as I know, unique on television.

How Videogames Changed the World — I like Charlie Brooker. I kind of want to be him. This special on video games (in my world, it’s two words) is limited, as an under two-hour documentary has to be. And, it focusses on the really gamey kinds of games that kind of don’t do much for me. (The history of the kind of games I like starts with Adventure, not Pong.) But it still has time to bring up stuff like Papers, Please, which remains one of the most powerful interactive experiences I’ve ever had. And this show’s real virtue is that it manages to cover the major moments and conflicts that video games stirred up in real life: moral panics, feminist critiques, the staggeringly gradual mainstreaming of the medium, etc. Brooker’s list of the most important games is self-evidently selected for ease of narrative rather than actual quality or influence, but that’s the only way to make a show like this, and it would have been profoundly boring if it were just a bunch of people talking about why a bunch of games that I probably mostly don’t care about are really good. (And that sight gag with the Braid mechanic is really clever.)

Black Mirror: “The National Anthem” — First, the shit. Naturally, the one female reporter in this episode with lines sends a nude pic to a government staffer for a scoop. This is a trope so depressingly common that it has the air of tragic inevitability whenever a female journalist is introduced into a show. The rest of the episode is astonishing. It doesn’t even matter if you already know the premise and the ending, which you inevitably do given this episode’s renewed relevance after David Cameron’s alleged porcine indiscretions. The remarkable thing is how straight it’s played. It’s wrenching human drama on a national scale. Everybody is cheapened by having watched what they watched. If it weren’t for that one lazy and harmful bit of misogyny, it would be a masterpiece.

Movies

Requiem for the American Dream — Chomsky is somebody who I’ve been aware of for years, but he falls just far enough outside the scope of my education that I never actually read him. This documentary, which is built entirely on original interviews with Chomsky, seems like a good primer for the most germane points of his philosophy. It focusses specifically on the process by which wealth and power are acquired by a smaller and smaller segment of the population: namely, the reduction of democracy. It’s brilliantly argued, and makes modern America make a sad sort of sense.

Music

Isabelle Faust, Claudio Abbado & Orchestra Mozart: Berg & Beethoven Violin Concertos — I realized after recommending this recording in last week’s VSO review that, firstly, I haven’t heard it in a really long time, and secondly, I have in fact never listened to the Beethoven that fills the disc. First the Berg, though. It’s flat-out one of my favourite recordings. I love this piece. I love its expressiveness and the way that it develops its melodic material. I love the way that it throws torrents at you, only to back away gradually and leave you breathless at the end. I love the Bach quotation in the winds in the second movement, and how the violin solo line plays against it. It’s a masterpiece. And of the handful of recordings I’ve heard, this is definitely my favourite. Faust plays with elegance, even when the melodies start to take on the rougher topography of Berg’s Second Viennese School compatriots. And Abbado will probably always be my favourite conductor of Berg, because he realizes that Berg is the true heir to Mahler. His approach to the orchestra in this concerto has the same lushness that he applies to Mahler 9 (a work that he absolutely owns, for me), and it is just as much of a study in contrasts. Everybody should hear this. Now, the Beethoven. The violin concerto is not one of my favourite pieces by Beethoven. The first movement has a nasty habit of going into a minor key right when I want to hear a triumphant reiteration of the theme in major. The third is one of those mid-tempo dance finales that usually doesn’t work for me. I do like the second movement, but compared to some of the slow movements from Beethoven’s middle period symphonies, even that falls a bit short. So, this recording has more labour to do with the Beethoven than with the Berg, because it has to sell a piece I like a lot less. And it doesn’t really. That’s about all there is to say.

Vulfpeck: The Beautiful Game — Difficult second album. On one hand, it’s got “Animal Spirits” (and heartfelt lyrics) which is one of their best and catchiest ever. Very much this album’s “Christmas in L.A.” Also, The Beautiful Game expands the palate to include house-reminiscent beats, which as far as I can remember, is new for Vulfpeck. But it certainly doesn’t have as many jump-out-of-the-headphones moments as Thrill of the Arts did. I might pick “Animal Spirits,” “1 for 1, Dimaggio” and “Dean Town” as highlights here. (And I do love that Klezmer clarinet intro, but it’s basically not a song.) And it’s notable that the former two are both transparent Jackson 5 pastiches (“Animal Spirits” is “I Want You Back” and “1 for 1” is clearly “ABC”) Think back to how many great tracks there were on Thrill, though: “Welcome to Vulf Records,” “Back Pocket,” “Funky Duck,” “Rango II,” “Christmas in L.A”… I will almost certainly warm to this, but there’s no way I will come to love that many of its tracks.

Tangerine Dream: Phaedra — I don’t know what possessed me to listen to this just now. I’d never heard it, and the only other Tangerine Dream I knew was Force Majeure. This is far more abstract than that, and it strikes me as an album that has more historical importance than modern-day interest. It’s like the electronic music equivalent of plainchant. Mostly it just made me wish I were listening to Tim Hecker, which I think I will now do. (And I did. My feelings about Love Streams are the same as when I reviewed it before. It’s some of the best music of the year.)

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: Atomos — That is a very overwrought band name, sure. But this is decent ambient music. I’ve been listening to stuff as I read, this week, and this is great for that. I’m not so sure it would stand on its own. That’s a key distinction in this milieu of modern classical music. John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, for instance, is profound and beautiful, and in spite of some superficial similarities to Atomos, it can sustain attention. Same goes for Max Richter — and he wrote music for sleeping. Still, this did the trick. I dunno if I’ll listen again.

Brian Eno: Another Green World — This is in my all-time top five, and as with all things that I love passionately, I try not to overexpose myself to it. But I was on a long bus commute recently, and it just seemed like the right thing. Incredibly, I had been listening to this semi-regularly for years before it struck me that it’s more than merely excellent and is in fact perfect. I can’t think rationally about this album anymore. Listening to some of these songs I feel like I could walk into traffic and it would pass right through me. Eno is strangely averse to the idea of love songs, but there are several ravishing ones on here, most notably “St. Elmo’s Fire”: the finest song with lyrics that Eno ever made. Without ever using the word “love,” Eno perfectly conjures that feeling of ecstasy that so many songwriters fail to describe. He does it by allowing the music to do the bulk of the heavy lifting, and especially Robert Fripp’s guitar solo which is the most beautiful guitar solo ever recorded. In spite of being fast and technical, it also feels human and brittle — the way it cracks and stammers at the ends of phrases just kills me. And the other ninja move that this album employs is the most ingenious track sequencing maybe ever. Rather than trying to balance out the energy throughout the record, it allows itself to gradually sink into a reverie at the end. The way that “Zawinul/Lava” builds and falls, and ejects us into “Everything Merges With The Night” (more ravishing guitar from Fripp), and then finally into the comparative uncertainty of “Spirits Drifting” is one of the greatest closing sequences on any record ever. At this point, you’d expect me to make it my pick of the week, but I feel a strange pressure to play against type, this time. Everybody who’s ever read anything I’ve written or been in the same room with me knows how much I love Brian Eno. KRZ takes it.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Lupita Nyong’o, Cameron Esposito & Rhea Butcher, and the Best of TV” — Nice that PCHH  can manage so often to cobble together a show even when they have no panelists. These interviews are great, specifically the one with Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, because they are very funny people. But it’s also nice to hear Linda Holmes’ much-discussed friend Alan Sepinwall make his PCHH debut. TV: The Book sounds like something that would frustrate me immensely in its format: ranking the top 100 shows? Really? But I expect that these two authors would have something interesting to say, at least. Given that they’re basically already advertizing the second edition, I may sit this one out and wait for it to be updated. (But I’ll probably flip through it in the bookstore next time I’m browsing.)

Fresh Air: “How Free Web Content Traps Us In An Abyss Of Ads & Clickbait” — Nothing like a good bit of #content-related #content. Tim Wu’s new book, The Attention Merchants, sounds incredible and depressing. He talks about how advertising on major web platforms has cheapened web publishing and made the internet worse. I think I’m going to have to read this.

Love and Radio: “The Enemy Within” — Part of the appeal of Love and Radio is just purely listening to someone tell you a story with no interruptions. So, when Glenn Loury tells his story of womanizing and drug abuse while teaching economics at Harvard, you want to listen. But, being Love and Radio, it’s also more complicated than that and addresses not only the discrepancy between his own conduct and his socially conservative politics, but it also problematizes the very notion that a person’s actions can invalidate their arguments.

In The Dark: “What’s Going On Down There?” — This has become a truly excellent podcast in the late phase of its run. And I’m only partially saying that because this features an actual police investigation where a man was told by (clearly awful) police officers that his missing son may have been eaten by turtles. I laughed out loud at that and subsequently felt a little bad. Anyway, last week’s survey of wide-ranging police incompetence in the town where Jacob Wetterling was abducted started the train towards this episode’s staggering finish, which posits that the way America handles policing is deeply and inherently flawed. Local police departments are not held to any kind of standard by the federal government, which just seems wrong. If I were the Stearns County sheriff, I’d be huddling in a corner right about now. This would have been a powerful finale, but I’m looking forward to the one episode that they’ve decided to add to this.

NPR Politics Podcast: “Previewing The Final Debate” — I’M NOT WATCHING THIS DEBATE! LA LA LA LA LA! Because they’re not going to talk about policy, they’re just going to talk about Clinton’s leaked emails (actually worth talking about, if only it wasn’t an orangutan doing the talking) and Trump’s temperamental unfitness to be president (EMINENTLY CLEAR). The fact that the panelists on this show are willing to entertain the fact that policy may enter into this is frankly adorable. I do love them.

99% Invisible: “Half a House” — A lovely complement to the previous episode about Chile. 99pi can lapse into design boosterism at times, but really it’s just boosterism for human ingenuity. Like, you have a problem: an earthquake levelled a city and there’s not enough public money for the necessary subsidized housing. And, you have a solution: build people half a house. It sounds ridiculous, but people can build the other half for themselves when they’re back on their feet. It seems to be working. There’s a moment in this where Roman Mars confirms that the reason this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the U.S. isn’t lack of money or lack of necessity, but simply a difference of values. Which is why I have very little respect for American values. This is 99pi doing what it does best. I haven’t enjoyed it this much in a long time.

All Songs Considered: “Pusha T and Rivers Cuomo Join Zeds Dead, Amber Coffman, TOY, More” — Whole lotta meh. I liked the Agnes Obel track well enough, but I haven’t heard much on this show that I want to check out for a while. Not their fault. I’m probably just not in music discovery mode.

Radiolab: “Seneca, Nebraska” — This story is just begging to be told in a not public radio way. The Radiolab crew obviously knows that in the story of a small town that voted to unincorporate because their 20 residents couldn’t get along, they have a parable. So, why not tell it that way? Where’s Nate DiMeo when you need him? Hell, even Scott Carrier would suffice.

On the Media: “Race to the Bottom” — Gladstone’s poverty myths series has moved from debunking myths about impoverished people to debunking the myths that America tells itself about how it approaches poverty. In this one, it’s the bootstrap myth. That is a sad narrative to turn out to be a myth, because it means that there isn’t actually much of a chance that a person can better their lot — not without an astronomical amount of luck. It’s also interesting to hear about the origins of the phrase “pulling oneself up by their bootstraps,” which actually started off as a metaphor for impossibility before it started representing the American Dream. And then, in a demonstration of the profound power of metaphors and ideas to shape society, the American Dream became impossible to attain.

The Gist: “Rapid Response: Cirque du Debate” — Okay, so I did end up watching the debate. And I’m happy I did, if only to have context for Mike Pesca’s latest round of spin room misadventures. It is so obvious listening to Trump’s surrogates talk that they just do not have anything under control. Ben Carson straight up brushing Pesca off is the highlight, but the whole thing is chaos. The best that a non-American such as myself can hope for in this election, given that I am not one of the millions of unauthorized voters that Trump predicts will swarm the polls in November, is to be nearly as entertained as you are bewildered, and I confess to having been that while listening to this.

NPR Politics Podcast: “The Third Presidential Debate” — The fact that this debate is being praised as the most substantive of the three is both accurate and still really depressing. The panel is right to assert that the most notable thing about this phase of Trump’s campaign is his insistence that whenever he doesn’t win something, it’s rigged. I’ve known people like this. People who believe that “unfairness” is coextensive with “bad things happening to them, specifically.” I think that it’s a kind of logic that underpins much of what’s wrong with the world. The notion of having a president of the U.S.A. that thinks like this without a shred of self-awareness is void-screamingly, cliff-jumpingly frightening. Fortunately, it won’t happen because he’s also too dumb to know when he’s shooting himself in the foot.

A Point of View: “In Praise of Difficulty” — Why must every critic who has the bravery to stick up for difficult art and educated audiences also have a stick up their ass about pop culture? This is a pretty good vindication from Howard Jacobson of the kind of art that gets the shaft from the shitty kind of populists — but then it nosedives into jabbing at the kind of art that appeals to the good kind of populists. There is an emerging kind of intellectual for whom the phenomena and iconography associated with boy bands and thrillers (Jacobson’s examples, not mine) are fodder for a rather exciting sort of criticism, in much the same way that Shakespeare was for many prior generations. Can’t we acknowledge that fact while also shitting on people who don’t understand Shakespeare? I really think it ought to be easy to have it both ways. Additional thoughts: I would generally stick up for the rights of the reader over the rights of the writer, in opposition to Jacobson, but I’ll provide here that the reader has to earn that right by being an interesting reader. (Read as: critic.) That is why, in my review for the staggeringly difficult work by William Blake that I’ve just slogged through, I blamed myself for having nothing to say.

Fresh Air: “‘Black Mirror’ Creator Dramatizes Our Nightmares About Technology” — Charlie Brooker is a less-than-scintillating interview, and I’m not totally convinced that Black Mirror is as smart as all these old people think it is. I’m one episode in, and I did like that episode, but it seems like the more explicitly it engages with modern media, the more vapid its critiques become. That’s sad to see, because I’m also watching Nathan Barley right now (review to come when it’s done; it’s useless to critique in part) and that is remarkably prescient for having been made in 2005.

StartUp: “Shadowed Qualities” — This is such enrapturing radio. The bulk of it is taken from a single conversation — virtually a therapy session — between Alex Blumberg (holy moly is he having a rough month) and an executive coach who we heard from in season two. And while I am usually quick to dismiss such people as snake oil salesmen, this fellow gets to the heart of Blumberg’s reluctance to step up and command his company as opposed to focussing on story edits really, really efficiently. And hearing Blumberg work through that in real time is fascinating. Traditional radio has moments that they call “driveway moments,” where you stay in your car to hear the end of the story even when you’ve already gotten home. Podcasts don’t have that, obviously. But at several moments during this episode, I forgot that I was eating breakfast. That seems like a logical equivalent. Pick of the week.

You Must Remember This: “The Blacklist,” parts 12-13 — Elia Kazan is one of my new favourite characters in this series. Looks like he’ll be back soon, too.

Omnireviewer (week of Oct. 9, 2016)

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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. 28, 2016)

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27 reviews, featuring the point where I finally caught up with my podcast subscriptions. Always a moment of joy and satisfaction.

Literature, etc.

Thomas Ligotti: “Gas Station Carnivals” — Another corker. Ligotti likes to make his narrators into straightforward authorial inserts: in this, “Sideshow” and “Teatro Grottesco,” the authors are writers of grim prose. It isn’t self-aggrandizement; it lends a terrifying verisimilitude to the stories, because you start to feel like these things could have actually happened to Ligotti. Cleverly, this entire story proceeds nearly to the end without anything unsettling specifically happening, but rather, a series of unsettling things being described to our incredulous narrator by a third party. I’ve found time and again that Ligotti is as impressive for his structural cleverness as for the specific details of the horrors he conjures.

Thomas Ligotti: “The Bungalow House” — I don’t know if it’s just the effect of taking a bit of a break from this short, but extremely intense book. But, I’m finding this final run of stories especially fantastic. This story is sort of built around a twist, and it’s a twist you can see coming for a mile. But that didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story at all. It’s about a person who finds a kindred spirit in a series of tape recordings. (Does this resonate with me? To a point.) That premise, and the prose descriptions of the recordings in question make this another of the best stories in Teatro Grottesco.

Steven Pearlstein: “Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature” — Pearlstein’s a bit condescending to accountants, I’d suggest. But then, how can you not be? While the broad sweep of his (admittedly familiar) argument is intensely sympathetic, the real reason I’m reviewing this is that shitty headline. This is an opinion piece, and a somewhat re-cooked one. There are almost no actual quotes from the reluctant parents the headline promises to introduce. I wanted a hate-read and I got a bland editorial. Screw you, WashPo.

Television

Stranger Things: Episodes 1-3 — I see why this is striking a chord. There’s more to it than just the ‘80s homages, which are great in themselves, though none of these reference points are especially meaningful to me, I must say. It’s just so fun. It’s a great yarn, strewn across familiar character and plot beats, with some truly great performances by many people, some of whom are barely teenagers, and some of whom are Winona Ryder. I feel like this is the sort of show I’ll have gotten the gist of before the story actually ends, but let’s not pre-judge that.

Music

Paul Simon: Surprise — This past Wednesday, a colleague casually mentioned loving the album that Paul Simon and Brian Eno made together, and I was thinking “why have I not heard that?” The answer, naturally, is a general prejudice against late works by legacy artists. We all have that prejudice, don’t we? But Simon’s poetic gifts had not waned substantially by 2006 (if the track I’ve heard from his most recent album is any indication, they still haven’t), and Eno remains a restless innovator. There are a few needlessly on-the-nose couplets here and there (It’s outrageous, the food they try to serve in a public school/Outrageous, the way they talk to you like you’re some kind of clinical fool”), but by and large this is one of the better pop albums made by a person over 60. Faint praise? Maybe. Here’s this though: the best track on this record is as good as the best stuff on Graceland. “Another Galaxy” is a marvel. It tells a simple story with astonishing economy (two verses and a chorus), it matches the peaks and troughs of the melody with the emotional highs and lows of the lines, and it offers a glimpse inside of its central character’s head with really simple language. This, from a guy who’s known to pack 20 words into a line when he can. Simon’s voice slips beautifully between the notes, and Eno’s electronics are perfectly complementary to the acoustic ballad that this is at its core. If there’s one problem with it, it’s that the broad strokes of the lyrics recall “Life On Mars” a bit, which is a comparison that does no song any favours. Both are about young women in difficult situations, romanticizing outer space as a place to escape. But where Bowie offers a generalized sort of discontentment, Simon’s is ultra-specific. There are other songs on this album that are nearly as good, which ought to demonstrate that, though this isn’t a masterpiece, it’s a really great album. Pick of the week.

IQ: The Wake — I had an inexplicable urge to listen to Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood yesterday. It’s an album I loved in high school, but has since grown insufferable to me for its preening self-pity and overwrought, empty bombast. Still there are memories in it, and I managed to get about ten minutes in before I began shuddering so hard I had to turn it off. I remembered my recent survey of The Seventh House by IQ, Marillion’s erstwhile neo-prog rivals, and how much better I liked it than the bulk of the Marillion catalogue, which is completely inaccessible to me now, save occasionally for Clutching at Straws and Brave. I figured perhaps it was time to give their most relevant period piece a listen. This is almost exactly concurrent with Misplaced Childhood, so unlike some of IQ’s later, more beloved albums, it actually belongs to the neo-prog moment that they are perpetually and anachronistically attached to. It’s a conflicting listening experience. On one hand, there are occasionally moments where a melodic snippet or solo leaps out of the headphones in the way that the best classic prog does. On the other hand, this is very much of its time. It sounds more ‘80s than Marillion ever did, and the recording fidelity is pretty dodgy, even by that era’s standards. Musically, it sounds a bit like what it is: a younger generation attempting to revive a lost art. The members of IQ are ‘80s prog’s hipster woodworkers. It’s like they’ve got a list of things that the old masters did, and they check as many boxes as they can while still sounding like a band that isn’t Genesis. At least Marillion had a distinctive personality fronting them. Fish’s vocals and lyrics frequently grate, but there’s nothing like his intensely introspective, confessional style in prog prior to Script for a Jester’s Tear, with the very notable exception of The Wall. (I just learned that Script and The Final Cut came out within a week of each other. Who poured self-pity into England’s water supply?) On The Wake, singer Peter Nicholls is clearly trying, but his performances and lyrics remain fairly generic. He would improve drastically, along with the rest of the band, by the time of The Seventh House. The closest they come to something as distinctive as “The Wrong Side of Weird” here is “Headlong,” which is also the one track on this album I could see myself returning to. I came to this expecting an interesting period piece, and I found a slightly dull one. But it never made me shudder the way that “Lavender” does.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Pete’s Dragon & Kids and Their Monsters” — Wow, they’re rough on Pete’s Dragon. I was half-inclined to see that movie after reading the reviews. But… we’ll see. Also, Stephen Thompson mentioned the Hip! I love that, even though the Hip will never be a thing in the States, the story of their denouement is making the rounds down there.

On The Media: “Define ‘Normal’” — Lots of good stuff, here. The opening segment on therapists doubling as specious pundits (specious therapists doubling as pundits?) is of particular interest, but the discussion of sexism in the Olympics, as it relates to gendered physical/physiological traits is also worth sticking around for.

Criminal: “The Editor” — One of the best prison correspondence stories I’ve heard. A man who was never taught to read (shame on American public schools) teaches himself to read in prison, reads 600 books, and starts finding errors in the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia. So, he contacts the editor, and they become lifelong pals. Brilliant. And brilliantly told.

The Memory Palace: “Numbers” — One of the good ones. DiMeo cedes the spotlight to archival audio from newscasts in this episode. His writing and delivery are still first rate, but they’re bolstered by the incredibly matter-of-fact reading of the Vietnam draft lottery. The archival audio highlights the way that DiMeo is able to weave plausible fictions around his historical material. Probably in my top five episodes of this show. Profoundly moving. Pick of the week.

Code Switch: “‘Southside’ and Black Love at the Movies” — Karen Grigsby Bates is a relatively recent introduction to this podcast, but I’m definitely a fan. It could just be that this is about movies, and I’m always all about the pop culture-focussed episodes of this show. But this conversation with Bob Mondello is good listening.

Love and Radio: “An Old Lion or a Lover’s Lute, Special Extended Cut” — I listened to the additional conversation tacked on the end of this, because I remember the original clearly enough. It’s a classic episode of Love and Radio in that it defines the show’s central ethos, which is the notion that it’s better to listen to people than not to. Jerome, the cat-calling man of dubious gender politics who is the subject of this episode, is too complicated to write off completely. So are most people. This show recognizes that. Hearing the producer Ana Adlerstein talk to Jerome once again about people’s responses to the episode only makes it explicit that this is what she and the show’s regular producers are trying for. It’s a profound approach that challenges listeners to engage empathetically, even as it realizes that many of its protagonists (I’m thinking especially of the sex offender in “A Red Dot”) will not win the audience’s sympathies.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: MTV’s Video Music Awards 2016” — Stephen Thompson wants fights at the VMAs. And who can blame him? Still, I’m yet to watch that 15-minute Beyoncé performance, so I likely shouldn’t judge.

On The Media: “Bob’s Grill #5: Former CNN President Jon Klein” — AKA “Brooke’s Grill.” This is a nice reminder that Gladstone can summon Garfieldesque umbrage when need be. If there’s one thing I hate in a smarmy interview subject, it’s that thing where they say to an established journalist, “if you were only listening to me…” Shut up. There’s no way that Brooke Gladstone’s not listening to you. If her questions don’t line up with what you’ve told her, it’s because you’re not making sense, or you’re bullshitting. In this case, the latter.

Radiolab: “The Girl Who Doesn’t Exist” — The story of how it’s possible to be born in the United States and not have a birth certificate — and of how some assholes think that this is okay. Honest to god, that sovereignty bullshit makes me go out of my mind. But this is mostly the story of a girl escaping from a family who has that ideology and finding herself, perhaps ironically but perhaps not, more free.

The Memory Palace: “O, How We Danced” — A small thing. A tiny word painting of a dancing marathon that got shut down by the police for obviously specious reasons. Nice, but I listened to it mostly because the below showed up in my feed.

The Memory Palace: “Remixx: (o how we danced with miley) — It’s just the above episode, with Miley thrown in. Not an especially clever remix, and you get the feeling that it’s something that the three people who work on this show thought was funny when somebody brought it up, and then somebody actually made it as a joke, and then they released it. Which is a thing that I like, when it happens. Fine.

All Songs Considered: “Breaking Up With Your Favourite Bands” — It seems that Bob Boilen and I have some similar reference points. We are both baby boomers, see. However, when Boilen is discussing why he doesn’t listen to ELP anymore (something I definitely do not begrudge him for), he does not seem to have the facts at the tip of his tongue. Carl Palmer never played with the Nice; he was with Atomic Rooster and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown prior to ELP. Also, when Robin Hilton comments on the guitar sound, Boilen seems not to be aware that it’s a synth. Tut, tut. Also, he’s the only person in the room who’s heard of Cockney Rebel… but I have too! They’re so glammy that they even made the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack. All nitpicking aside, this is a really fun conversation. The notion of breaking up with bands you once loved doesn’t hit me quite so hard as many, I’d imagine, since most of my favourite bands did their best work 20 or more years before I was born. I never had a whole lot of interest in what Jethro Tull was up to in the ‘00s. We were preemptively broken up. I suppose there’s Opeth, though. Time was, I’d look forward to everything they put out. But then nostalgia took over, and even an openly nostalgic music fan such as myself couldn’t handle the constant reiterations of tired prog tropes. I haven’t cared since Heritage, and probably won’t listen to any of their new albums going forward.

Fresh Air: “Remembering Gene Wilder” — Amazing that this 2005 interview doesn’t even touch on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Still, Wilder was a gentleman, and a fabulous comic actor. This is a lovely remembrance, and Wilder’s story about how Richard Pryor fixed a racist scene in Silver Streak at a moment’s notice is fabulous.

Code Switch: “What’s So Funny About The Indian Accent?” — I’m curious about how many Indians and Indian-Americans will listen to this conversation, in which a panel of Indian and Indian-American people claim not to be that offended by stereotyped Indian accents à la Apu, and think, hey wait. Obviously, I haven’t the slightest clue about this, but it strikes me that people could pretty justifiably get upset about Apu’s accent, given that it’s actually spoken by a Greek American man with no ear towards accuracy. I’m surprised it didn’t come under more intense scrutiny, here.

Reply All: “Boy Wonder” — “Can you solve this?” “Yeah, you’re a Yeti.” I dunno, Reply All has done this story before. Down to the same online diagnosis community, the same New York Times columnist, and the same references to House. Like House, it is frustrating for its repetition of things past. But it does have a great central character. If you do tune in, stick around until he starts reading self-coined platitudes.

Millennial: episodes 1 & 2 — I caught up with my subscriptions! I can finally start listening to new shows! But at this point, I’m committed to listening to every episode of so many podcasts that I need to be judicious about which ones get added to the pile. This show has its merits. The host, Megan Tan is very self-aware about the fact that making a podcast about being a millennial is extremely #millennial of her. And she’s a good storyteller with an engaging presence. But… I’m not sure how badly I need to hear the story of a person graduating journalism school and then struggling in a tricky job market when… well, this story bears a certain resemblance to EVERYBODY’S LIFE WHO I KNOW. I imagine it’s more interesting to people who are in less similar situations to Tan than I am. Also, I don’t relish the part of this story where her podcast gets picked up by Radiotopia like, three months in. I mean, really. But the primary reason why I don’t think I’ll listen to more Millennial is just that I’m more than 20 episodes behind, and I am not super willing to commit to a serialized podcast of that length with everything else I’ve got to listen to. Especially since I’m hoping to get back to my beloved You Must Remember This, which does tend to come in large chunks. It’s a shame, though. This is a good show. If I could stop time, I’d definitely listen to this.

Science Vs: “The G-spot” — This is a departure for the show, in that it doesn’t do its standard bullet-point interrogations of the major questions regarding a topic. Instead, it tells the story of public awareness of the G-spot since the 80s, with much giggling. Wendy Zukerman also takes an interesting detour into the history of anatomists suppressing the knowledge that the clitoris exists. This is definitely becoming, if not one of my favourite Gimlet shows, at least one of the good ones.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “You’re The Worst & Mixing Comedy and Drama” — You’re The Worst doesn’t sound like my kind of thing, but Glen Weldon explaining how stories work always is. This reminded me that I really need to listen to the audiobook of his Batman book.

On The Media: “Kids These Days” — Some great segments here. The one on millennials in the media is mostly satisfying for correctly identifying that Strauss and Howe’s generational theory is completely loopy. The one on music in presidential campaigns is fantastic, and pointed me towards this crazy art film of an attack ad for Nixon’s 1968 campaign, of all things.

Seminars About Long-term Thinking: “Neil Gaiman: How Stories Last” — I’m more interested in commenting on the form of this than the content, which is a perfectly good bit of Neil Gaiman in Neil Gaiman mode. This is a podcast provided by the Long Now Foundation, a fascinating organization co-founded by this program’s host, Stewart Brand, and best known for the very large, very slow clock they are constructing as a symbol for how much more long-term humanity should be thinking. It is also well known for including Brian Eno among its board members. This is a particular kind of podcast offering that doesn’t get included in lists of recommended listening. It fits alongside BBC Radio 4’s annual podcast of the John Peel Lectures, and other such things. Seminars About Long-term Thinking is simply an audio series made from the foundation’s lecture series of the same name. It is unedited, as far as I can tell. Very much in keeping with the philosophy of the Long Now, Gaiman is allowed to stretch his talk out for a substantial time, repeating himself at will, and allowing for long, pregnant pauses. The full episode is 103 minutes long. Brand is an occasionally bungling host, without an ear for when Gaiman says something interesting and worth picking up on, but that’s not really the point. This is a way to immerse yourself in a new way of thinking. The lecture series has a broad enough focus — long-term thinking — that its individual episodes can be about anything. But it is always framed by the fascinating philosophy of the organization that produces it. I can’t say for sure whether I’ll listen to any more of this. But I do admire it.

Code Switch: “ Singer Juan Gabriel’s Sexuality Was ‘Open Secret’” — This is a nice 20-minute primer on why Mexico is going all Canada over Gabriel’s death. (The parallels between Juan Gabriel and Gord Downie are extremely few, it would seem. But we can sympathize with the feeling of losing, or being about to lose, an icon who was uniquely of your home country.) It occurs to me that this episode may not be of much value to people who already know who Gabriel was — which is to say, apparently every Spanish-speaking person living within a hemisphere of Mexico. But Code Switch shouldn’t be held to that standard. I’ve learned something from every episode I’ve heard.

Omnireviewer (week of Aug. 21, 2016)

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33 reviews! Holy smokes!

Television

Deadwood: Season three, episodes 10-12 — Okay, so Deadwood doesn’t get a series finale with the intentionality of The Wire and The Sopranos (whose finale was a piss-take anyway; a beautiful piss-take). But I’m not convinced that the lack of an ending actually compromises the show all that much. Deadwood’s a show about a continuing process: the formation of a community. It’s also a show about its own genre, and a critique of the classic western movie value of rugged individualism. It isn’t so much a show with tightly woven, neat narrative arcs. In that sense, it may be one of the most discursive shows ever on television. Even Orange is the New Black, discursive as it can be, walks a traceable line from the beginnings to the ends of its seasons. Deadwood doesn’t so much walk from one place to another as it, to borrow a word from a favourite character, perambulates. These final three episodes of the show are three more hours of time spent in an interesting place, populated by interesting people. The people have changed gradually, along with their community. Regardless of whether that’s the point where the show was meant to end up or not, it’s a fine place to leave off. Deadwood is one of the best series in the history of television. I’ll watch it again for sure.

Last Week Tonight: August 21, 2016 — The chartered schools segment is a bit joke-light, but segments about Ryan Lochte and getting Trump out of the race compensate, mostly.

Comedy

David Cross: Making America Great Again — Does it make me a really good person that I thought all of these jokes were very very obvious? I think it does. This is an okay special. But I really don’t think that most of the people who’ll be inclined to watch it on Netflix will come away with their views challenged, and they probably won’t laugh much either. Because, when you laugh at, for instance, a great bit by Louis C.K., you’re laughing because he’s helping you see a thing in a way you hadn’t been able to see it before, because it was counterintuitive until it was communicated in a certain way. (“People have to do their favourite thing!”) David Cross has a few of those moments. There’s a completely brutal, absolutely wonderful bit about guns in schools that is a real highlight. But depending on who you are, most of these jokes will either make you very angry, or make you feel validated. That’s what Facebook does, and I hate Facebook. Comedy for the age of the viral mill. 

Music

The Tragically Hip: Fully Completely — Definitely not as good as Day For Night. I understand that this is the album where the Hip “broke through,” but they still sound a bit like a very good pub band on this. A very good pub band with several obvious hits in their set and extremely high-calibre lyrics, but still. “Nautical Disaster” is in a different universe to this music. I’ll still probably listen to it a bunch, because it’s compelling nonetheless. And I do have this one very large caveat to my general indifference: “Wheat Kings” is glorious. It tells a bittersweet story by way of small images, and it ties that story inextricably to its setting. And it does all of this in three verses and a minimalistic chorus. The band always plays beautifully in these acoustic ballads, and Downie’s voice delivers pathos without ever stepping over the line into indulgence. “Wheat Kings” easily eclipses the rest of the album, but that’s not so much an indictment of Fully Completely as a demonstration of this particular song’s power.

The Knights: The Ground Beneath Our Feet — I like it when a classical disc is programmed around an idea. This live recording by a new music ensemble I hadn’t heard before is based around the concept of the concerto grosso — a form where a small group of instruments is pitted against a larger group. It’s a broad enough notion that it can encompass a huge range of musical styles. The record is divided into halves that can roughly be characterized as “old stalwarts” and “proper new music.” The oldest of the stalwarts is Bach, whose Concerto for Violin and Oboe is well played here. I wonder why they didn’t go for Corelli, given his importance to the concerto grosso as a genre. Nonetheless, in this setting, Bach shines. It may be simply the company he’s keeping on this record, but it occurs to me that he’s got a more modern sensibility than many composers who came after. It’s got to do with his working within rule structures rather than prioritizing a personal idiom. Compared to, say, Beethoven, he’s a glib hipster. Historically, the next figure on the program is Stravinsky, whose Dumbarton Oaks concerto is an absolute gem that I’d never heard before. I’ve always loved Stravinsky’s neo-classical works, for similar reasons to why I love Bach. There’s something unforced about both of those bodies of work, but still beautiful. The other stalwart is the ubiquitous new music god Steve Reich, whose Duet for Two Violins and Strings finds him in a meditative mood. It’s quite wonderful. As for the proper new music, we’ve got two collaborative compositions. The first, by Brooklyn Rider’s Colin Jacobsen (whose music I adored on A Walking Fire) and the santur virtuoso Siamak Aghaei, is a double concerto for their two instruments. It has its moments, but it’s the weak point of the disc by a long shot. The second, the disc’s title track, is collaboratively composed (semi-improvised?) by various members of the ensemble. It’s based on a ground bass by the obscure Italian Baroque composer Tarquino Merula (get it? Ground beneath our feet?) and when it picks up, it’s absolutely thrilling and often ridiculous and stupid, which are characteristics I like in new music. This is the kind of disc that I really love from classical-derived ensembles these days. It devotes half of its running time to traditional but not overplayed selections from the rep, and the other half to taking risks. Whether the risks pay off or not is almost beside the point, though I’d say that about half of the new material on this disc is really good. I don’t review all of the classical music I listen to on this blog, because I listen for work, and a lot of the time I don’t make it through the whole disc. But I have heard a bunch of classical recordings from this year, and this is one of the standouts.

Literature, etc.

Lois Tyson: Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide — You may have realized that there are never any books or stories in Omnireviewer these days. I mean, I’ve been busy. But I’ve also been catching up with a lot of my favourite bloggers (whose work I don’t review because of my rabbit-hole rule, see Omnireviewer no. 1). And I’ve been reading this. Tyson’s prose is engaging and she takes on the explicit role of a teacher throughout, and not just a scholar. It’s trivial to breeze through a chapter on a long bus commute. I’ve done so on three commutes, now: one each devoted to the chapters on psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminism. The really great thing about this is how the chapters are structured. Each one starts with a series of simple explanations of the given theory’s terms and premises (sign-exchange value, materialist feminism, etc.) with even-handed accounts of the debates within these scholarly communities, and concludes with a practical application of each theory to The Great Gatsby: a short, good book that everybody has read. I have no specific need for these theories in my own work at the moment, but I do hope to do some of the sort of writing where they could be useful in the near future. I’d recommend this to anybody who wants to sharpen their criticism chops.

Tom Scocca: “Gawker Was Murdered By Gaslight” — I find many defences of Gawker’s ethics a little dubious, but there’s no arguing with Scocca when he says that the publication’s practices don’t really have anything to do with why it is ceasing to exist. The fact that we’re living in a world where journalism outfits have no legal defence against powerful rich people with vendettas makes me very uncomfortable.

Nick Denton: “How Things Work” — Denton comes off as a bit compromising in Scocca’s piece, but here he gets to be an idealist. Not a kind of idealist I like, mind you. The idea that Gawker’s goal was to “reduce the friction between the thought and the page” troubles me. There should be things that keep you from saying exactly what you think in public forums. Lots of things. People’s unfiltered thoughts are dangerous garbage. But I understand Denton’s impulse towards radical freedom of information in principle, even if it was practiced poorly. Plus, the site’s ahead-of-the-curve realization that a form of intensely critical journalism was needed to cover the new powerbrokers in Silicon Valley is a major moment in the culture of the internet. Which, of course, only makes the source of its demise more ironic and troubling.

Joseph and Amanda Boyden: “For Gord Downie, Seven Love Songs” — I mean, it’s a bit gushy. It’s a bit like rock criticism of old, where the subject is to be idolized and venerated. But, come on. The Boydens are friends of the Hip. They deserve to wax grandly poetic in public for a few thousand words. I think I’m done reading about the Hip now.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings — I found this for six bucks at one of my favourite used bookstores (MacLaod’s on Pender; seriously, it’s the best shop wander in the city) and figured what the hell. Trust Borges to elevate the encyclopaedia to literary status. This is literally what it says on the cover: an alphabetical listing of fictional beasts from various cultures. Most are described in Borges’s own prose, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, working with Borges himself, but some are simply extracts from the prose of local experts. It’s not meant to be read from cover to cover, so I won’t. I’ll just keep it around and pick through it occasionally. A few highlights so far: the entry on the Squonk of Pennsylvania is excerpted from a guidebook by William T. Cox, which is the source for the Genesis song of the same name. Borges’s entry on the Golem focusses in a fascinating way on the idiosyncrasies of Kabbalistic magic. Also, there is apparently a fictional monkey in northern China that is only about four inches tall, jet black, and likes to drink India ink. It is described as waiting patiently with one forepaw resting on the other, until a person is finished writing, and then it drinks whatever ink is left in the inkwell, resting satisfiedly afterwards. Adorbs.  

Thomas Ligotti: “Teatro Grottesco” — It is good/terrible to be back in the world of Ligotti. The title story from the collection I’m reading proves not only to have the most demonstrative and catchy title, but also to be one of the highlights of the book. I’d place it alongside “The Red Tower” as the best I’ve read so far. It’s a story about weird art, written by one of the great weird artists. And, though it doesn’t obsess over its own structure as much as “The Red Tower” does, it is equally concerned with concepts and processes. Several pages are just the protagonist agonizing over what logical process could bring down the nebulous force called the Teatro, and it’s fascinating and horrifying. There’s not much to say about this without explaining the mystery away, so I’ll just encourage you to read it when it’s dark and shitty and you want to feel unsettled. Pick of the week.

Games

Pokémon Go — I don’t get it. I really don’t. It’s possible that I’m just doing it wrong, but I found so few Pokémon during the half-day I spent periodically doing this thing that I have very little inclination to continue. I have no prejudice against “casual games,” but I do tend to prefer when games are discrete units of experience with beginnings and endings, like movies. They fit into my life better that way, because I can decide that I’m going to devote X hours to them, and then be done forever. (Regular readers will know that I’m especially predisposed to games that only take a few hours to beat. I like my games to be as much like movies as possible.) Games with the potential to expand outward into the rest of my life are more inconvenient than anything. I don’t think I’m going to get into this.

Podcasts

Theory of Everything: “pass” — I’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating. It’s a not entirely comedic monologue about what happens when the self-driving cars become self-aware. Walker is a really good writer, and I’m just as happy for him to do stuff like this as I am to hear him do docs.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch” You’re Listening To Delilah” — This is worthwhile just to hear the rapport between Linda Holmes and David Greene, whose show I have never heard because I am neither American nor a morning person. I have also never heard Delilah’s radio program, which is one of those funny artefacts that’s just as much a part of a place as an old road or a gaudy neon sign. This interview is really great, though, because it demonstrates why she’s exactly the right person to be doing this job, and it also puts her opposite Greene, who gets to be a radio listener in the context of this piece, as well as a radio personality. Fun.

99% Invisible: “Photo Credit” — The best episode of 99pi in a while. Lucia Moholy took iconic photographs of Bauhaus architecture and Walter Gropius, like a shit, denied her any credit for years. This contains some basic context about the Bauhaus, a diversion into copyright law as applied to photographic images, and also Nazis. Fantastic.

The Heart: “The Big House” — The memoir of a dominatrix brought to life. This doesn’t even really need to have a narrative arc to be fascinating. It’s a glimpse inside a world most people will never see, for our own various reasons.

All Songs Considered: “Bon Iver, the White Stripes, Ed Harcourt, Lambchop, More” — I’ve always resisted Bon Iver, but I really liked this track, I’ve got to say. I may even listen to the album. I was also super into the tracks by LVL UP and Lambchop. I want to like the instrumental, percussion-heavy track from Thor and Friends but I actually thought it was pretty bland. Good episode altogether, though.

The Gist: “The ‘80s Really Were the Best” — Were they, though? Both host and interviewee are very nostalgic for the original Ghostbusters, and I cannot figure out why the hell anybody still gives that movie the time of day. But I can listen to Pesca talk about anything.

Planet Money: “Oil,” episodes 3-5 — My podcast feed is obsessed with fracking, these days. This series was a wonderful, wild venture, and the contextual stories about the invention of fracking (by accident, no less) and how oil got into all of our consumer products are just as interesting as the tale of two intrepid NPR producers trying (and failing) to make a profit off of 100 barrels of oil. The mini-series finale is a lovely speculative exploration of how history might have unfolded differently if there were no fossil fuels. It is in itself a really great podcast episode that I think everybody should hear.

On The Media: “Bob’s Grill” parts 1-4 — This is a brilliant concept for an ongoing series of mini-episodes: Bob Garfield grilling people in the media who’ve been shitty. It isn’t uniformly great listening, but it’ll scratch the itch. These four focus on Judith Miller, who misreported on the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Hunter Moore, a revenge porn enabler who is the honest to god scum of the earth, James O’Keefe, a gotcha videojournalist who habitually distorts quotes and manipulates footage, and ExxonMobil’s Richard Keil, who denies that Exxon funds climate change denial. Garfield is adequately hard on Miller and Keil, but he doesn’t corner O’Keefe as thoroughly as I’d like. The real disappointment is Hunter Moore, whose very existence seems to depress Garfield so thoroughly that he can’t tear into him adequately.  

Code Switch: “Struggling School, Or Sanctuary?” — This is a crossover with Embedded, a podcast I likely won’t listen to, because I hate “ostentatious journalism,” even when the reporting is solid. But this story of a low-performing school in a predominantly black suburb that got closed down is a real heartbreaker. I’m reminded of This American Life’s two-parter about Harper high school. It’s not quite that good, but worth a listen.

The Sporkful: “Beyond Pot Brownies” — Dan Pashman and Jad Abumrad getting high together was not something I knew I needed in my life. But, there you go. Pashman’s key point in this episode are that in order for weed edibles to provide a good eating experience, in tandem with the intoxication experience, you need to be able to eat a full serving of whatever the weed’s baked into and not go out of your mind. It makes you wonder if some point in the future, weed edibles will become something like beer or wine, as opposed to being like tequila shots: you consume them for both halves of the experience, the taste and the high. I’m not super sure what Abumrad and the other Radiolab staffers are doing here. There’s a great moment when Jad gets too high and the sound design goes all Jad, to the point where I halfway thought he must have done it. The credits proved me wrong, alas. Maybe the Radiolab folks are just infamous stoners in the WNYC building?

This American Life: “The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms” — Holy moly. This is honest to god the most enthralling radio I’ve heard in weeks. I love a lot of shows for a lot of reasons, but I really understand why TAL maintains its radio dominance: it can string you along like nothing else. This is a twisting, turning, film noir of a story about a horrible person who tried to make a reality show by committing crimes and staging stings — with a troupe of “soccer moms” who doubled as P.I.s. It’s amazing. I heard Ira Glass speak one time and he said that storytelling is as simple as saying what happens, and then what happens next, and then what happens next. This story could serve as proof-of-concept for that idea. Pick of the week.

Radiolab: “Playing God” — A good week for the juggernauts. This is a deep dive into the ethical considerations involved with hospital triage. It’s a collaboration with the New York Times, and their reporter Sheri Fink, who wrote that book about the hospital in Hurricane Katrina that I’ve been meaning to read since it came out. This hour asks the impossible questions that Radiolab always does at its best, and tells engaging stories. It’s got some great original music. It also has an incredible line from Robert Krulwich at the very end. It’s their best of the year for sure, not counting every episode of More Perfect. 

Sampler: “Paul F. Tompkins, The Mayor of Podcastland” — I listened to this in the hopes that it would make Paul F. Tompkins’ massive offering in the medium of podcasts more approachable and comprehensible. It didn’t, but I did get a great interview with Paul F. Tompkins, and that’s not nothing.

The Gist: “The Year Nirvana Lost Out to Bryan Adams” — Mike Pesca should not sing Hamilton parodies. But he should definitely keep talking to this music critic, who I’ve heard on this show a couple of times now, and he’s always great. And at least Pesca’s a bit less religious about fucking Ghostbusters this time around.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Stranger Things Creators The Duffer Brothers” — I am beyond excited to finally watch this series. Next week.

99% Invisible: “On Average” — Man, I feel like it’s two years ago. This week, I’ve listened to two great new 99pi episodes, and the other best shows of the week are This American Life and Radiolab. This piece on why designing things for “the average person” is a bad idea should serve as a parable for anybody making anything ever. But, even as a straightforward piece of journalism, it’s a remarkable story about how a seemingly good idea got way out of hand.

Code Switch: “Nate Parker’s Past, His Present, And The Future of ‘The Birth of a Nation’” — A nuanced, complex discussion of whether or not Nate Parker’s very righteous movie about a slave rebellion ought to functionally expunge his past as an alleged rapist. And, nuanced and complex as it is, it mercifully comes to a conclusion nonetheless. The answer is no. No it shouldn’t.

All Songs Considered: “The Beatles are Live And Sounding Better Than Ever” — Giles Martin is as much a gentleman as his father. And he’s also doing God’s work by cleaning up old live Beatles records. I can’t wait to hear the new Hollywood Bowl reissue. Even considering that those years are not my favourite part of the Beatles’ career, it’s really exciting to have these recordings back, and sounding good.

Reply All: “Making Friends” — This is a lovely story of a person who is living on a fine line between mental illness and a healthy imagination. She has four imaginary friends who help her through her life. She belongs to a community of people who have these so-called “tulpas” (a great, great word), but she’s also trying to exist within the institutions of conventional human society (for example, marriage). One thing I love about Reply All is that, being focussed on the internet and the communities that form there, it covers a vast swathe of humanity. All of the strange, wondrous, troubling corners of modern human experience are fair game on this show.

Theory of Everything: “revolutionary slogans will be written by the winners” — The story of a definitely totally real drinking contest between Guy Debord and Mitt Romney. There’s only one podcast that could happen on.

Science Vs: “Organic Food” — Here’s another issue with this new show that I desperately want to love: when the science is inconclusive, it makes for frustrating radio. I’m going to keep listening to this, though, because its best moments are truly great.