Tag Archives: John Herrman

Omnireviewer (week of Jul.10)

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A mere 16 reviews. Don’t you scowl at me. There are other things in my life, you know.

Live events

Romeo and Juliet (Bard on the Beach) — I mostly really enjoyed this. Hailey Gillis’s Juliet and Jennifer Lines’ nurse are the highlights. Gillis plays Juliet as young and excitable, but also cosmically self-aware. And Lines plays the nurse not as a character who bumbles and rambles because she is unaware of her station, but one who talks as much as she likes because having raised her lady’s child she knows she’s earned the right. I’ve seen Lines in three or four Bard productions now, and she’s always marvellous. The same could be said of many of the returning regulars in this production. Getting to know the company and their respective calling cards over the course of a few seasons has been fun. Also, there’s some fabulous music in this by the likes of Max Richter and (I think?) Arvo Pärt, which adds to the religious subtext of the play. All this said, the most interesting thoughts I had after seeing this were spurred on by one element that I wasn’t especially taken with, which was Mercutio. Maybe he just had an off night. Still, Mercutio needs to be massively charismatic, because his death is the most consequential moment in the play. It is his confrontational, urm, mercurial nature that leads to the death of Tybalt, and thus to the entire downward spiral of the second act. There is also a more interesting, more superstitious reading of Mercutio’s impact on the plot. This is a deeply religious play. The friar, the prince and Juliet all comment on the notion that the heavens are responsible for suffering. If you do bad things, or participate in ridiculous enmities, God will punish your innocent loved ones. So, when Mercutio dies, and says “a plague on both your houses,” it should give the impression of an actual curse — a moment where a dying man actually wills God to strike down both the Montagues and the Capulets — which of course is fulfilled with the death of the protagonists. Mercutio needs to be strong because as an audience, we need to believe that he has that level of determination over the narrative. (This will be expanded on mightily in Hamlet and Othello, about which more momentarily.) But it’s a fine production. It’s more conservative than Kim Collier’s last outing with Bard, her fabulous Hamlet in 2014. But it is entirely decent Shakespeare.

Othello (Bard on the Beach) — If you ever wanted to hear Gilbert Gottfried play the Shakespearean Iago rather than just the red bird from Aladdin, go see this. It’s amazing the extent to which this Iago seems like he’s in the wrong play. This character should be witty and charismatic in his evil scheming, and the audience needs to be seduced by him because he is effectively writing the play as he goes. Boring Iago = boring play. However, the seduction of the audience must stop well short of the broad comedic performance that’s given here throughout act one. Mugging for laughs is the wrong kind of ingratiation. Iago is the weakest point of this rather weak production. There is one really clever bit: at the start of the second act, Othello sits alone at his desk while the rest of the cast march around the outside of the tent singing William Billings’ “Now Shall My Inward Joys Arise” (a period-accurate hymn for the Civil War setting of this production) and Othello pointedly looks up when they sing the verse that goes “Why do we now indulge our fears/suspicions and complaints?/Is he a God and shall his grace/grow weary of his saints?” It’s nice. But then they keep singing in solfege for some reason. Skip this.

Literature

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human — Whenever I read or see something by Shakespeare, I read the relevant chapter in this. Bloom is undeniably frustrating, and his lack of understanding of the need for feminism and postcolonial criticism in the humanities makes him deservedly persona non grata in the academy. But I don’t think that should prevent me from adoring him for his insight into Shakespeare. For instance, he begins his chapter on Romeo and Juliet by lamenting the incursion of feminism into modern productions of the play, which is an extremely troubling starting point. But, he goes on to outline a vision of the play in the context of Shakespeare’s visions of love that’s both compelling and amusing. Take this for instance: “If there were an Act VI to Shakespeare’s comedies, doubtless many of the concluding marriages would approximate the condition of Shakespeare’s own union to Anne Hathaway.” This is a book that anybody who loves Shakespeare should own. Grit your teeth through the bombastic bits. It’s worth it in the end.

John Hermann: The Content Wars — New favourite Content Wars quote: “One of the great triumphs of Silicon Valley is its success in framing its companies’ objectives as missions, and their successes as pure contributions to progress. This is a sentiment that would not stand quite so easily in most other contexts: the success of a single business does not map perfectly onto the greater success of the economy, which does not map perfectly onto any useful concept of human progress. Anyway, what were we talking about? This is all going to seem so insane in twenty years. Or two years.”

Reggie Ugwu: “Inside the Playlist Factory” — Sure: Google, Apple and (to a lesser extent) Spotify are big evil companies. But, am I so wrong to be slightly heartened by the fact that they are all aware of the superiority of human tastes to algorithms in making playlists? This is a fun exploration of how human curation is working in these companies’ music services right now. The one thing I wish Ugwu had probed into deeper is the fact that these humans who make these playlists are still beholden to the data they receive about their audiences’ behaviour. We see this at play in the piece as curators struggle to understand why certain songs aren’t working in playlists. Surely, the fact that they are attempting to react to audience behaviours rather than simply exerting expert authority represents an impulse to imitate algorithms?

Music

Margaret Glaspy: Emotions and Math — Another one of those albums I heard a promising snippet of on All Songs which turned out to be not quite my thing. Glaspy’s a good songwriter and an interesting guitarist, and when she’s got a couple more albums out, I may look back on this as better than I’d initially thought. But a lot of it feels a bit too sleepy to me, and there’s very little variety in its power trio textures.

Jeroen van Veen: Michael Nyman, complete piano music — Mind you, if variety in texture is something I care about, why do I love minimalist solo piano music? The side of Michael Nyman that I have traditionally been drawn to is the side that’s on display in his Peter Greenaway scores: the cartoonish neo-Baroque music performed by his charismatically bizarre-sounding band. And there is a bit of that on here, reduced to solo arrangements by the composer himself. (I will confess that this rendition of “Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds” is pretty weak sauce compared with the Nyman band’s original or the Motion Trio’s arrangement for accordions.) But the largest chunk of the album is Nyman’s music from The Piano, a movie I haven’t seen, and from which the only thing I previously knew was “The Heart Asks Pleasure First,” which I’ve always found saccharine in a way that Nyman’s more lyrical music for Greenaway (like “Fish Beach” from Drowning by Numbers) isn’t. But hearing it in the context of the rest of the movie’s music is revelatory. (I imagine that hearing it in the context of the film itself would probably help too, but I remain uninterested.) The music from The Piano finds Nyman in 19th-century salon music mode — the farthest he can get from the Purcell ground basses of his previous film music. But just as he subsumed the Baroque aesthetic into his modernist style, he does the same with this completely different historical period music. Jeroen van Veen plays beautifully, and indeed one of the greatest pleasures of this set is simply hearing Nyman’s piano music performed by somebody other than Nyman himself. Nyman lacks subtlety at the keyboard to such an extent that it appears an aesthetic choice. (And in fact, I’m sure it is — much like his band’s dodgy intonation.) I love Nyman’s piano playing, but van Veen is far more skilled, and it’s certainly nice to have this as an alternative to the composer himself. A very nice set — essential for fans of minimalism.

The Highest Order: Still Holding — Right in the 1965 sweet spot. The Highest Order are the latest reincarnation of mid-60s, country/folk-inflected American psychedelia. Except that they’re Canadian and can write songs. I love this album. It is spacey and jangly and every other adjective that can generally be applied to things I love. Plus, it does that happy/sad thing where the music is mostly profoundly euphoric, while the lyrics remain ironically bleak. Fantastic. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “Daniel Lanois, Deap Vally, Nonkeen, Pinegrove, More” — Starting off with a double-hit of ambient music featuring Nils Frahm and Daniel Lanois is a surefire way to get me interested, and probably a surefire way to turn a lot of people off. Both of those albums sound like they will be fabulous. I shall investigate post-haste.

The Gist: “The Life and Death of Aaron Swartz” — In Pesca’s spiel about how justice is inevitably coming to the police who commit violence against black people, I’m not entirely sure he knows how his optimism sounds. On the other hand, the segment where he talks to Justin Peters about Aaron Swartz is great. I barely knew the story, and this is a nice introduction.

Theory of Everything: “Because there’s nothing else to do” — A not-especially-distinctive take on Brexit, but it’s nice to hear somebody associated with a relatively major media outlet (PRX) calling Nigel Farage a fascist, casually and as a matter of course.

The Gist: “A Kamikaze Mission to Jupiter” — This is the value of a daily(ish) podcast: it can talk news, or when there’s nothing new to say about the news, it can talk to an astrophysicist about probes being sent to the moons of Jupiter. Very compelling listening. The Gist is my favourite new discovery of recent weeks.

Code Switch: “You’re A Grand Old Flag” — If there’s a problem, it’s earnestness. But it’s also delightfully complicated. Nothing much more to say except this remains good.

Reply All: “Disappeared” — I’ve missed this show during the break. This isn’t even an especially gobsmacking episode, but it does have Alex Goldman thinking through the implications of open source culture, which is the sort of thing I love about this show. It also has P.J. Vogt apologizing for a cultural oversight in the most heartfelt way possible. That’s another thing I love about this show. Pick of the week.

The Gist: “Art That Makes You Angry” — I’m finding that Pesca’s interviews, in which he is prone to the sort of spontaneous reference-making and obviously unscripted detours that are the exclusive province of the world’s very smart interviewers, more compelling than his monologues. If there’s something I can’t quite get behind in this podcast, it’s Pesca’s big-personalityness. He really does exert dominance over the audience every second he’s by the mic. But he’s smart enough that it doesn’t really bother me.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The BFG and The Great British Baking Show” — I will not be seeing The BFG. It’s so seldom that so much of the panel seems so annoyed by the thing they’re talking about that I’m sure it must be very poor. But it is always fun to hear them get annoyed. It’s also fun to hear Linda Holmes call Glen Weldon out for his shitty views on art. The thing I love about this show is that it is frictionless enough that when Holmes does that, it doesn’t feel like confrontation. These are people who like and respect each other, so they can disagree amicably. That’s what puts PCHH above other similar shows for me. Also, I likely will check out The Great British Baking Show. I need something calming and slow in my life right now.

Omnireviewer (week of Jul. 3, 2016)

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22 reviews. I’m slipping! (Also busy.)

Television

O.J.: Made in America: Episodes 1-3 — I think this is the best documentary I’ve ever seen. I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll save my final assessment for next week.

Music

Banco del Mutuo Soccorso: Io Sono Nato Libero — I’ve been aware of Banco since I was probably about 12. I heard a couple of their songs at that point, but in the absence of streaming services or the willingness to engage in piracy, that was as far as I got. This is the first time I’ve heard an album of theirs all the way through, and it is glorious. It is strange and ambitious and incredibly beautiful at times. Ugly at others, like all of the best prog rock. Francesco di Giacomo had some serious pipes, which is primarily what puts this above PFM for me — though I’m not sure there’s anything on this quite as flawless as “Impressioni di settembre.” I’d like to know what the lyrics are about. Next time through I’ll keep a translation close by.

Harmonium: L’Heptade — A classic. This is my favourite Harmonium album, edging out Si on avait by a tiny smidgen. What I love about this is that the folk and chanson elements are still very present, but they’ve broadened the palette into full-on prog. The addition of drums adds weight, and the fact that they’re used sparingly doesn’t take too much from the effervescence of prior albums. The concept of L’Heptade, a person passes through seven states of consciousness within a day, is certainly similar to the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, and the orchestral interludes amplify the comparison. But this is far more ambitious and far stranger. Serge Fiori deserves to be spoken of in the same sentences as Robert Fripp and Jon Anderson. Taken together, Harmonium’s three albums are an absolutely crucial body of work in ‘70s prog.

Lucy Dacus: No Burden — An All Songs recommendation. A few songs are great, and a few are a bit dull. I might listen again, or I might not.

Literature, etc.

Thomas Ligotti: “In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land” — All three stories in the second section of Teatro Grotesco (subtitled “Deformations,” as if it applies more to these specific stories than all his other ones) deal with a place across a mysterious border. The Quine Organization doesn’t appear in this one, and it isn’t labour-related. But it does confront the possibility of nearby societies behaving mysteriously. This clearly unsettles Ligotti, but not in a racist way like his weird fiction predecessor H.P. Lovecraft. It’s more a matter of a place that’s similar enough to home to be familiar but different enough to be, well, lethal. This story is actually four stories, all of which take place in the same town and presumably are told by the same narrator. What’s really interesting is the way that they paint a cohesive picture of a place when taken together. Not one of the better stories in Teatro Grottesco so far, but still good.

George Saunders: “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” — This has supplanted Bob Garfield’s On The Media Trump coverage as my favourite piece of writing about this campaign. Saunders hits all the right notes here, whether comparing Trump to Ralph Kramden (“He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry — but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it.”), directly quoting a man muttering as he leaves a rally (“Hey, I’m not paying for your shit, I’m not paying for your college, so you go to Hell, go to work, go to Hell, suck a dick.”), or using inventive metaphors to express why the right and left in America cannot understand each other (“You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ the other only ‘Game of Thrones.’ What is the meaning, to the collective ‘we,’ of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it.”) It becomes less silly and more sad as it goes on, and the final kicker is really something. Go read. Pick of the week.

John Herrman: The Content Wars — “Internet platforms inherently favor their own content; more subtly, they create the conditions for their users to do the same.” This, in a nutshell, is the problem. Facebook and Twitter are naturally self-interested, and also very powerful and popular (at least, Facebook is). So, their progress will tend toward a total monopoly on human attention. And, as that quote implies, they won’t necessarily do it by Machiavellian means — they inherently privilege content that works better on their feeds. This makes them no less twisted.

Podcasts

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Game of Thrones” — A nice, but inconsequential discussion of the changing role of women in Game of Thrones. Still a ways to go, it would seem.

More Perfect: “The Imperfect Plaintiffs” — This is the first episode of the constantly fantastic More Perfect to feature more than one story. It’s a dyad of stories that elucidates the odd world of test case lawsuits filed by activists. First off, we learn how an LGBTQ leader had a sodomy law in Texas deemed unconstitutional based on the case of two men who might not have even had sex with each other. Then, we dart over to the loathsome side of the political spectrum to learn how one man is trying to roll back decades of civil rights legislation, including the affirmative action case that was decided a few weeks ago. Fascinating stuff.

99% Invisible: “Remembering Stonewall” — This is a great piece from 1989 featuring the voices of people who were at the Stonewall riots telling the story from their perspective. The narration is minimal, so the story feels like fragments strung together. It’s apparently the first documentary made about Stonewall, so it’s very much worth a listen.

Imaginary Worlds: “Undertale” — Molinsky doesn’t quite get to the heart of what makes Undertale a fascinating and revolutionary game, partially because he hadn’t finished it when he made this, and partially because any adequate discussion would involve spoiling the most shocking moment in any video game ever. And that moment must go unspoilt, even to the spoiler-unconcerned such as myself. What Molinsky does get into is the idea that Undertale deconstructs certain video game tropes. Which is true, of course, and Undertale is an effective metacritique even before its staggering, unspoilable conclusion. But it’s far from the first to deconstruct the idea of choice in video games (The Stanley Parable did it first and does it better), or even the idea of death in video games (Adam Cadre’s parser game Endless, Nameless did it first, though less compellingly). So, this has its weak points, but it did make me really want to go back and play Undertale again. After all, I’ve still got two whole endings to discover.

Code Switch: “I’m Not Black, I’m O.J.” — Ezra Edelstein is disappointingly uninteresting in conversation, but I could listen to Gene Demby talk about this documentary series for days.

All Songs Considered: “Your Favourite New Musicians of 2016 (So Far)” — Not a lot of this music jumped out at me, but this did prompt me to check out Lucy Dacus and Margaret Glaspy.

More Perfect: “Kittens Kick the Giggly Blue Robot All Summer” — Silly mnemonic title aside, this is as wonky as you’d hope a story about the establishment of the Supreme Court’s powers would be. God, was Thomas Jefferson awful.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The State of the Sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, and a Quiz — This broad discussion of sequels is a lot more interesting than a segment on Independence Day: Resurgence would have been. Quizzes, on the other hand, are not generally my favourite part of this show.

In Our Time: “Sovereignty” — If there is a weakness to In Our Time (and there are many, in spite of my undying affection), it’s that discussions focus almost entirely on European thought and history. It’s very old-guard academia — no critical theory here. So, in this discussion of the concept of sovereignty as extrapolated from Aristotle by Bodin and elaborated upon by Hobbes and Rousseau, I found myself wishing for a discussion of First Nations sovereignty as it relates (or doesn’t relate?) to those principles. Naturally, it never came, because In Our Time is only actually interested in our time in a rather limited way. That’s a serious liability for a radio program that purports to be about the discussions and debates that define our era. On the other hand, where else are you going to hear about this stuff in this much detail? Radiolab? No.

StartUp: “2680 Madison Road” — This starts with a needlessly long and falsely suspenseful trek through a semi-abandoned building. But after that, it gets going. It uses the brilliant premise of charting the rise and fall (or the rise and further rise, in some cases) of businesses that were started on the same lot: 2680 Madison Road, just down the street from Alex Blumberg’s childhood home in Cincinnati, to highlight the fickleness of business. The back half of this season of StartUp has been fantastic. I still hope they go back to serialized stories next season, though.

Invisibilia: “The Problem with the Solution” — Now I remember why I mostly liked the first season of Invisibilia — it occasionally brings stories that are so astonishing you can’t believe you’ve never heard them before. I constantly felt like the first season of this show was pulling my leg: that eventually it would reveal that all the stories had been made up as part of a social experiment to see how far they could stretch their audience’s credulity. This episode, about a Belgian town where families take in boarders with serious mental illnesses and care for them for an average of 28 years, is one of those stories that seems like it can’t be real. It’s great.

The Memory Palace: “Natural Habitat” — This is one of the good ones. Their all good, but this is a really top-shelf episode of The Memory Palace. It tells the story the first American woman to bring a live panda home from China. It manages to be a love story, an adventure story, and a tale of evolving notions about animal captivity at the same time. Plus, it throws some anti-imperialism in there. It’s long by this show’s standards, but completely sustains the length. Again, this is the best writing in radio. Pick of the week.

Invisibilia: “Mr. Kitt” — A fun character piece about a man who lives in the progressive housing development from the week’s full episode. This is a good week for Invisibilia.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Jeff Goldblum” — It turns out that Jeff Goldblum does the Jeff Goldblum thing when he’s not acting as well. He’s a lovely fellow, and less eccentric than you might think. Maron’s a real steamroller for the first third or so of the conversation, but he eases into a rhythm eventually and lets Goldblum talk. You might not expect this podcast to contain an elevated discussion of acting technique, but it does, and it is quite marvellous.

99% Invisible: “Unpleasant Design” — I’ve discovered that I like this show best when it dives into a concept and its implications more than when it tells a story. This is outstanding. Probably the second-best thing I heard this week.

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 12, 2016)

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29 reviews. A week of awesome music. Mostly.

Music

The Punch Brothers: The Phosphorescent Blues — Come to think of it, I listened to this when it first came out, loved it, and never listened to it again. Well, now I’ve listened to it again. It’s more ambitious and more polished than Who’s Feeling Young Now? but it’s also a bit slicker than anything they’ve done before. Drums make their first appearance, and there’s a general sense that when they’re not doing ten-minute prog tracks, they’re trying to be bluegrass Coldplay. Maybe that sounds like a dig, but bluegrass Coldplay sounds like a more appealing proposition to me than regular Coldplay. The lyrics’ obsession with smartphones, and whether or not we’re still capable of connecting, or living in the moment is a bit cliched, and the Punch Brothers don’t really have anything meaningful to add to the discussion (nobody does), but that’s not what anybody wants from any band, or shouldn’t be, at least. I don’t like this as much as Who’s Feeling Young Now? but “Familiarity” and the midsection of “Julep” are selling points for this band in themselves.

IQ: The Seventh House — It’s been a long time since I listened to anything like this. I really only ever listened to neo-prog when I was at my most prog-obsessed, maybe ten years ago. These days, I tend to think of prog as a moment — a moment that lasted from about 1969 to 1977 — and my exploration of it tends to go deep into that time period, rather than broadly across others. It’s not that I think nothing of value has been done in prog since then. But there’s a point where it became a “genre,” with tropes of its own to be imitated, rather than a dispersed music that takes cues from elsewhere. And that point was around the beginning of IQ’s career. Still, I really enjoyed The Seventh House. I remember hearing “The Wrong Side of Weird” on ProgArchives years ago, and loving it, and it totally holds up. Prog may have been a moment, but neo-prog of IQ’s vintage was too. Bands like IQ and Marillion come very much from the same context as new wave, and it’s fun to hear a take on prog that shares that characteristic directness with the Smiths or Joy Division. Yes, I know The Seventh House was made in 2000, but it’s quantifiably different from the nostalgic symphonic prog that younger bands were making at that time. Given the choice between IQ and a band like the Tangent, whose music is far more similar to classic 70s prog, I’ll take this.

Big Big Train: Folklore — Speaking of. Big Big Train is very much on the Tangent side of that line. I won’t say there weren’t parts of Folklore that I liked. I’ll probably listen to parts of it again. (I know there are prog fans out there who’ll tell you that you can’t get a handle on a prog album on the first listen, and I think that’s true for the really good stuff. Certainly, I’m still finding new angles in Relayer hundreds of listens in. But this is not Relayer.) It’s got some great playing, nice orchestrations that aren’t overbearing, good singing, the whole bit. But part of the reason that I like prog better than lots of other kinds of music is that I want to form relationships with the musical personalities involved in the records I listen to. I don’t love Steve Howe for his technical facility; I love him because his playing is weird and singular. I love how he can evoke Wes Montgomery and Carl Perkins within the same phrase, and how he uses the lap steel for symphonic effects with no reference to the country music it’s normally found in. I couldn’t give you that kind of description of any of the instrumentalists in Big Big Train. It mostly feels like prog by numbers to me.

Let’s Eat Grandma: I, Gemini — Holy shit. This is so weird. So, so weird. It’s also one of the best albums I’ve heard this year. If you’d told me last year that the best psychedelic record in years would be made by a pair of teenagers… well, I’d likely have believed you because I’m credulous. But I would have been mighty taken aback. There are parts of this that remind me of early Pink Floyd, other parts that bring Captain Beefheart to mind, a bit of Tom Waitsy sinister calliope music. But for the most part, there are very few reference points that make any sense for this music. It is very much it’s own thing, and the fact that the people who made it are so young is astonishing. Odd that two of my favourite albums of 2016, this and the John Congleton record, should be explicitly tied to horror. Just having that kind of year, I guess. But while Congleton’s horror is thought through and intellectual, Let’s Eat Grandma traffics in a more liminal sort of horror — you can almost tell what it’s about, but the fact that you can’t quite makes it more distressing. This album meanders, and winds and strolls along. It makes no compromises to anything as glum as “focus.” I love it. I can’t even adequately describe it because I can’t really process it fully. Anyway. Pick of the week.  

Justice: Cross — It’s loud and lo-fi, but it’s pretty rock and roll. And I like my dance music to be at least a little bit rock and roll. “DVNO” is irresistible; Uffie is insufferable. I suspect I may prefer their less acclaimed second album, but I enjoyed this. We shall see.

The Beatles: Abbey Road — When it comes down to it, I’m a White Album man. But I think Abbey Road is probably objectively the strongest Beatles album. Also, it is possible that I am the only Beatles fan who thinks that “Octopus’s Garden” is the best track on side one. The combination of that childlike vulnerability and that staggeringly good guitar solo gets me every time.

Television

And Then There Were None: episodes 2 & 3 — I wish I’d seen trailers for this, if only to know if they contained Miranda Richardson saying “Trust in God. But perhaps also we should lock our doors.” This is fabulous in a Lord-of-the-Flies-for-grownass-Brits sort of way. Even small details like watching these characters go from eating elaborately prepared lobster hors d’oeuvre to eating tinned meat are somehow satisfying. I had absolutely no idea how this was going to turn out, but there’s a lovely poetry to it. This will end up being one of those bits of television that not a lot of people in this part of the world actually watch, but that is regarded as a treasure by those who do. I don’t know how faithful it is to Agatha Christie’s original, but if it does follow the story at least approximately, I 100% understand why she’s so revered. This is beautiful narrative clockwork. Also, I wasn’t hugely convinced of Burn Gorman’s performance in Torchwood, but I sure love him here. At some point, he emerges as a real standout among the cast. Which is a real trick in this cast. Watch this. It is astonishing in every single scene.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: June 13, 2016 — I’ve been meaning to watch Samantha Bee’s show since the beginning, but I only just got around to it. I always liked her on The Daily Show because in the face of insane injustices, you could count on her to be a vessel for righteous anger. John Oliver will never be that. And after the senseless, ludicrous tragedy in Orlando, that is exactly the comedic sensibility that is required. Bee’s merciless attack on Florida’s asshat governor Rick Scott is the most meaningful thing in comedy this week, and I urge everybody to watch it by whatever means necessary.

Last Week Tonight: June 12, 2016 — Oliver may not be capable of the level of sheer rage necessary to properly address the shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, but he is capable of generating pathos, and he did so reasonably well in his opening segment. Still, he loses the week in comedy, because Sam Bee was willing to tackle it head-on (albeit with an extra day to prepare). Which is not to say this isn’t a great episode of Last Week Tonight. They all are. But a show like this has to tap into the national mood, and that mood was basically just being sad and angry about a horrible tragedy. And they kind of missed. To be fair, they owned up to that fact. But it still feels weird.  

Game of Thrones: “No One” — Plenty of needless brutality in this one, and not just one but two military strategies that don’t make a lick of sense. Other than that, it’s perfectly fine. I’d put it at about average for the season, which is shaping up to be quite good.  

Literature, etc.

John Herrman: The Content Wars — In Herrman’s post of predictions for 2015, he wrote that “in 2015, notable (choose your definition) publications will declare their intentions to go fully distributed — or some other term that means the same thing — effectively abandoning their websites and becoming content channels within Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Vine or Instagram.” Mercifully, that hasn’t happened as of 2016. But it still feels like something that could be in the future and, mark me, it will be the end. On the other hand, there’s also this quite canny prediction: “GamerGate will return under different names in multiple venues. Its agents will not be GamerGaters or even necessarily know what GamerGate is, but they will behave almost indistinguishably.” Hello from the recent past, Hugo fascists! Also, this entire blog features an incredibly amusing selection of robot gifs that become weirdly threatening in context. Also: “There will be a backlash not against podcasts but against the podcasting voice, which is really an extension of Ira Glass voice [30 seconds of post-rock] which is a mutation of NPR voice.” I love Ira and a lot of the other people Herrman’s probably talking about (Alex Blumberg), but that backlash would actually be really nice to see. A bit more idiosyncrasy in public radio-mode podcasting would be great. I nominate P.J. Vogt and Benjamen Walker as potential ways into a new approach. Here is another quote that I like, from a different post: “A new generation of artists and creative people ceding the still-fresh dream of direct compensation and independence to mediated advertising arrangements with accidentally enormous middlemen apps that have no special interest in publishing beyond value extraction through advertising is the early internet utopian’s worst-case scenario.” And yet, it has come to pass. When I get to the end of this blog, I’ll do something more than just copy quotes. But again, if you happen to be an editor of a substantial web content enterprise who is reading my blog for some reason, go read Herrman’s instead.

Matt Fraction/Gabriel Bá: Casanova, Volume 3 “Avaritia” — I feel like I could have used a refresher before I started reading this third volume. But I totally enjoyed it, insofar as I had a clue what was happening. Gabriel Bá’s art is absolutely astounding. Every so often in this book, somebody experiences a time paradox and starts… fluctuating? I don’t even know how to describe it. God knows how Fraction expresses it in his scripts. But the way that Bá devises to illustrate it, a sort of psychedelic cubist freakout where giant lips and eyes protrude from a haze that envelops the character, is genius. Casanova is great fun. And the final chapter of this volume has a fantastic payoff to a story arc that’s been going since the beginning. I’ve got the next volume sitting right here, still in the shrinkwrap. I was going to read more Ligotti before I get going on that, but I hear volume four is sort of a soft reboot of the story and that sounds like something I could really enjoy right now, so…

Matt Fraction, Michael Chabon, Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá: Casanova: Acedia Volume 1 — This is very much the new Matt Fraction we know from Sex Criminals going back to his old property. Acedia is far and away the most straightforward arc of Casanova, and I would highly recommend it as a starting point for anybody wanting to get into this — certainly moreso than Luxuria, which is both the least satisfying and most confusing arc. It’s called “volume 1” rather than “volume 4” for a reason. The key difference between this and previous arcs is that the story in Acedia takes place entirely in one timeline, which simplifies things immensely. It’s nice to see that this is something that’s possible with Casanova, but I can’t help but miss the craziness of realities converging, like it was in Avaritia. Also, Michael Chabon’s backup stories to each issue are quite perfunctory, and one feels that they were only included in this trade collection for the potential sales value of having his name on the cover. Backup stories don’t belong in trades. I’m with Kieron Gillen on that. Still, this is a good story, and a compelling new direction for the comic. I’m looking forward to the continuation of this arc.

Podcasts

The Heart: “Salt in the Wound” — A quiet denouement to the “Silent Evidence” season. It’s just Tennesee Williams talking over the events of the series with Kaitlin Prest — a format we don’t normally hear in The Heart. It serves its purpose, which is just to unpack the last three episodes, but it also reveals new information about yet another traumatic experience Williams suffered while she was making the story. It’s appalling, as many elements of this series have been. But it never loses that ray of hope, either. Again, I can’t recommend this series highly enough.

Reply All: “On the Inside, Part IV” — I’ve been effusively positive about this series for its entire run thus far but I have to say, while I was listening to this part, I couldn’t help but think… why this story? When Sarah Koenig decided to relitigate Adnan Syed’s case on Serial, that was because there were innumerable serious problems with his trial and and a relatively convincing counternarrative to be unearthed. I don’t know that the same thing applies here. Where in Serial, you heard Koenig become more and more doubtful of Syed’s guilt (if not exactly convinced of his innocence), in this series Sruthi Pinnamaneni seems to become more and more convinced that Paul Modrowski did in fact murder somebody, and thus that justice was carried out properly. So… what’s the story? The farther we’ve gotten from the standard Reply All internet story of an inmate who writes a blog, the more I’ve been forced to wonder what the point even is. I’m looking forward to a new story next week.

StartUp: “Happy Ending” — Winning the Gimlet sweepstakes for the first time in months, StartUp introduces us to a drug dealer every bit as enterprising as the fictional ones in The Wire. This fellow, who is now running a company that means to hire ex-cons as personal trainers, is charisma personified. The story doesn’t brush away the fact that he was involved in an illegal trade that materially hurts a lot of people, but it also doesn’t paint him as a villain. This is far and away the best story of this season, provided next week’s conclusion doesn’t let me down.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Making Music Funny” — I will likely not see Popstar. But I think it’s about time I watched Spinal Tap.

On the Media: “Sad!” — Bob Garfield’s essay from a few weeks ago on how the press tacitly legitimizes Trump was a masterpiece of media criticism, but I’m not sure I totally agree with him that the press needs to become actively partisan where Trump is concerned. On the other hand, I’m not totally convinced by Paul Waldman’s claim that traditional, old-fashioned shoe leather reporting and fact checking is the best way of dealing with Trump. Trump, as we know, exists outside the concept of truth. But here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s necessarily partisan for a journalist to behave in the way that Garfield suggests they should: by calling Trump out for racism and misogyny. We do possess reasonably stable definitions of those two behaviours, and I believe that people in general think that they are Bad Things (even as many of them fail to acknowledge those behaviours in themselves). So, it ought to be possible to make a factual statement that “Donald Trump is racist,” and to hold him accountable for that. Partisanship need not enter into the conversation. That small semantic quibble aside, Bob Garfield continues to be the public personality with whom I find the most common ground on Trump. Gone are the days when I thought him to be merely an equal horror to Ted Cruz’s theocratic raving. This hour of radio (edited by Brooke Gladstone, but featuring Garfield as the sole host — a canny decision in this instance) demonstrates why.

Code Switch: “Re-Remembering Muhammad Ali” — This is a discussion of what was missing in the coverage of Ali’s death. In being that, it is also an excellent remembrance of Ali.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: 2016 Tony Awards” — God, I wish I’d watched the Tonys. Glen Weldon’s right that we may well see a Hamilton backlash soon, but when it happens it’ll be empty hipsterism, because there’s nothing in the text to justify a backlash. Hamilton remains the most unimpeachable work of art since Abbey Road.

More Perfect: “The Political Thicket” — I am loving this. I dare say it’s my favourite political journalism anybody’s doing right now — insofar as On The Media is a media show rather than a politics show. This second episode is better than the first one. It tells this incredible story of how the Supreme Court completely changed because of one decision, which Jad Abumrad illustrates brilliantly with archival tape. Seriously, it contains his best sound design moment in years, probably. This is the best argument for long-view journalism that I’ve heard in a long time. The world today will make more sense once you listen to this, even though it tells a story that happened decades ago. Magnificent. Pick of the week.

All Songs Considered: “A Conversation With Paul McCartney” — This is fun, but it also illustrates a problem that I have with arts journalism in general, which is that the people who do it lose track of their opinions when an actual artist is present. I’ve toyed with the idea in the past that we should just stop interviewing artists altogether. Anybody who wants to get into arts writing probably knows enough about it to write compellingly without having to ask an artist what their work means. Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton just take for granted that the listener to this won’t think twice when they imply that McCartney’s career has been wholly worthwhile for six decades. But everybody would think twice when faced with that. Why are interviewers forced to ignore orthodoxies like “Paul McCartney’s solo work is patchy” when they ask their questions?

Reply All: “Friendship Village” — 120984957918379 19345734579171 39847896823151 168038645120 6857906565452210 6874121968595 9874848 649521062128 976218 0954021089510 951098500736587654 0687052180321084052 9945256889 0968408155094 987304267 0987450854098521220842 9765385659765764 0968740524 0987524210845240 7656 098732109842109684510 654524 09875135578952197970 741741455 0865118518410 984189748951984 0984984954954 9849809849512 98409 984984984984

99% Invisible: “The Blazer Experiment” — This is a great example of how a design angle can be used to tell a really huge story. This is basically the story of the British and American police forces and their respective relationships to the citizens they police. That story naturally includes a lot of branding. It’s not the most direct, incisive journalism about the police that we’ve seen in the past couple of years, but it adds context to the current controversies over policing.

All Songs Considered: “The Tallest Man On Earth, Lisa Hannigan, LP, More” — Nothing leapt out, musically and Bob and Robin are spouting platitudes this week. Oh, well. Sometimes you miss. On the other hand, I’d have never heard Let’s Eat Grandma’s album from this week without this podcast to point me there.

Code Switch: “How LGBTQ People of Color Are Dealing With Orlando” — Well, they had to address it somehow. And it happens that these producers/hosts are tapped into the best American writers about race, so they have plenty of people to call up. More than anything, this emphasizes the extent to which Code Switch is a welcome addition to the NPR podcast offering. They’ve had to deal with both this and Ali, right at the start of their podcast’s run. I do hope that they can double back to doing episodes that aren’t so explicitly news-hooked, but it’s great to see right at the beginning that they’re capable of responding thoughtfully to current events. (I mean, of course they are; they’re NPR journalists. But the show is still demonstrating what it can do, and impressively so.)

Reply All: “Vampire Rules” — Exactly what we all needed after “On the Inside.” A Super Tech Support about a suspicious Tinder photo, followed by a Yes, Yes, No about Hillary Clinton. I love Reply All. I love it as much for this dumb stuff as I do for Sruthi Pinnamaneni’s awesome investigative stuff.

Imaginary Worlds: “The Year Without a Summer” — I’ve heard the story of how Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein over and over, but I hadn’t realized how the climate (literally) of that time links Frankenstein’s ideas to our current early-stage eco-apocalypse. Interesting.

More Perfect: “Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl” — I had heard this story before on Radiolab, and I think it’s one of their better political stories. It sits at that uncomfortable crossroads between a law that’s been really effective on the macro level, and one personal injustice that threatens to overturn the whole thing. I still think that the work this team has been doing on new episodes of More Perfect is better. There’s nothing like processing contemporary issues through the lens of history.

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 5, 2016)

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

*party favour noise*

Here are this week’s 28 reviews.

Movies

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

Television

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

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

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

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

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

Comedy

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

Literature, etc.

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

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

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

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

Music

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

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

Games

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

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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