Tag Archives: Marc Maron

Omnibus (week of June 3, 2018)

Greetings. What you don’t see represented here is the substantial amount of reading I did this week, mostly of New York Times features and things linked to in New York Times features. These sorts of things generally do not justify a review in my opinion, though there’s one I’ve started that will recieve one next week. I love the New York Times. I’m starting to love that paper the way people love bands.

Of my week’s reading, a not insubstantial part of it consisted of memorial pieces to the wonderful Anthony Bourdain, who I at some point, however briefly, wanted to be. When Bourdain had a conversation with somebody on television, he always ensured that the other person was the most important part of the scene. That’s in spite of the fact that Bourdain himself had a huge personality, a tremendous amount of expertise in his subject area, and an incredible ability to tell a story. He was the rare media figure who managed to have it both ways: he could be the show when the occasion called for it, and he could also be a conduit to focus our attention on people and places we wouldn’t otherwise have thought about.

Unrelatedly to all of this, there was a poignant quote from Bourdain in one of those pieces I read: “I will find myself in an airport, for instance, and I’ll order an airport hamburger. It’s an insignificant thing, it’s a small thing, it’s a hamburger, but it’s not a good one. Suddenly, I look at the hamburger and I find myself in a spiral of depression that can last for days.”

I see you, Tony. R.I.P.

17 reviews.

Music

CHVRCHES: Love is Dead — It’s fine. It’s CHVRCHES. I’m less enamoured of it than I was of their previous albums on a first listen or two. Particularly not the last one, which is still one of my go-tos when I feel the need for rousing pop. But Love is Dead has some great tracks, including and especially “Graffiti” and “Get Out.” The rest is likely to grow on me.

Danny Brown: Atrocity Exhibition — I first came to this shortly after it came out, and I was not feeling it. But it also struck me as an album that, one day, I would return to when curiosity struck and it might win me over. It did. Brown’s voice is the most batshit thing I’ve ever heard, and the beats on this, produced largely by Paul White (and in one case by the excellently monikered Black Milk) are the freakiest shit I’ve ever heard. Atrocity Exhibition is a difficult listen. It is ceaseless sensory overload. And yet the pieces seem to all fit together. Brown himself is an enthusiastically outspoken user of a wide range of intoxicants, and also seemingly an anxious depressive. His music is a manifestation of his inner life, and thus his lyrics, delivery, and the beats he raps over are self-consciously disorienting and bizarre. Imagine being a rapper and hearing the beat that would become “Downward Spiral.” Where do you even start with that? Still, for all his capacity to alienate, Brown is also a good hand with a hook. “Ain’t It Funny” and “Dance in the Water” are both likely to get stuck in your head in spite of their manifest abrasiveness. I love this. It’s grisly, depressive and freaky. It’s dark psychedelia for the 2010s.

Belle and Sebastian: If You’re Feeling Sinister — It’s got some nice tunes. Ultimately I’m happy that my way into Belle and Sebastian was the much more varied and professional The Life Pursuit, but I can see reasons other than nostalgia why this might strike some as superior. The lyrics are openly sentimental, but also clever. The characters in the songs are well-drawn, which is a rare thing in songs. The melodies are nice. I like it. I probably would have written it off if it had been the first thing I’d heard from this band. But as it stands I’ll put it into rotation and it’ll certainly grow on me.

Pusha-T: Daytona — I’m trying to warm up for the inevitably confusing experience of listening to ye, and this seemed like the way to do it. The frustration of being a Kanye fan is summed up neatly in “What Would Meek Do?” in which he has an embarrassing feature verse, but also builds the beat out of a moment in Yes’s “Heart of the Sunrise” that’s so insignificant it changes in every live version. I almost didn’t spot it. It’s genius. The man has the ears of a god, anyway. I enjoyed this a lot, though it went by awfully fast. I quite like its brevity, which makes it the right length to walk home to from most of the places I’m likely to be walking home from. I don’t have much to say about Pusha himself at this point. Further listens required. But I will register my initial approval here.

Literature, etc.

Brooke Gladstone & Josh Neufeld: The Influencing Machine — I’m ashamed of not having read this earlier, given my line of work and my devotion to On the Media. But I was in the library the other day and picked up half by accident, and now I’ve read it. Gladstone is one of the most cogent explainers of complicated things we have in this world, and we should take her for granted at our peril. This book distils centuries of history in the way we process information en masse into a graphic format that’s readable in a couple of sittings. It’s a marvel. Still, Gladstone’s implication that our furor about the state of the media circa 2011 was just a continuity of affairs since the beginnings of collective communication seems pollyannaish today. It’s still worth a read, though there are other problems as well. The illustration is sometimes dissonant in unconstructive ways: for instance, depicting Brooke Gladstone as the statue of Saddam Hussein in Al-Firdos Square. Just because she’s the one talking and that’s what she’s talking about doesn’t make the two of them co-extensive with each other. That’s what the cartoon implies, which is obviously not what it means. These things are important. Scott McCloud, for instance, wouldn’t be so imprecise with his comics avatar, which works in a similar way. Given that I read a copy from my public library, I was gratified to see that a previous reader had made some cogent notes. Gladstone writes about Ray Kurzweil’s opinion that humanity has just over a 50% chance of making it through its hardest trials. She continues: “And he’s a glass-half-full kind of guy.” My predecessor has scribbled out the “and” and replaced it with “but.” Thank you, predecessor. I suspect you’re right. I enjoyed this. But it’s no match for the up-to-the-minute media analysis that Gladstone does on her show on a weekly basis.

Movies

A Trip to the Moon, The Astronomer’s Dream & The Eclipse — I went to a short program of films by George Méliès at the planetarium across the street from my apartment. Seeing Méliès screened on a dome-shaped screen in a planetarium is a whole thing — if ever there was an artist who looked out at the cosmos and envisioned it in art, it’s Georges Méliès. And the planetarium gives the opportunity to look out into models of the stars as we now know them to be. That juxtaposition of a dream of space travel with the contemporary reality of it was really powerful. Other elements of the presentation were less powerful, but I was honestly just there for the films. These were projected alongside fairly placid live music that brought out the movies’ dreamlike strangeness rather than their comic timing, but it worked reasonably well. All three of these shorts have aged remarkably well for films that will be a century and a half old in not too long. The Astronomer’s Dream is certainly the creakiest of the bunch, but it was 1898. Credit where credit’s due. The Eclipse is the latest of the three, and certainly the most technically accomplished, though not the best. It contains a wonderfully suggestive space ballet in which the sun and the moon have a thing, and it envisions a meteor shower composed of human women in white dresses. That shot may be one of the most beautiful and imaginative things in the history of film, though that’s a thought that passes through one’s mind relatively frequently when watching Méliès films. Something about the complete lack of cinematic grammar that existed when he was first making movies prompted a sort of aesthetic originality that few have ever matched. The presenters mentioned David Lynch as a contemporary reference point, and I can certainly see similarities. Though, Lynch’s dreamlike aesthetic is deliberate and fussy, whereas for Méliès it seems to have simply been his way of hooking viewers through novelty. That leaves A Trip to the Moon, the most familiar of Méliès’ films, and one of the best damn things ever. The most iconic shot is the one where a rocket lands in the man in the moon’s eye, but the one that received the most attention from this program’s presenters — and incidentally, the one that stuck out to me in a way it hadn’t before — is a shot of our wily astronauts, having just arrived on the moon, seeing Earth from afar. It’s a shot that imagines a moment that wouldn’t happen for more than fifty years — and the fact that Méliès thought to include it, however briefly, demonstrates his sublime eye for a poetic image. This is the only image that could have prepared us for how moving it turned out to be to see photographs of the Earth from space. Now, that moment in A Trip to the Moon stands as a historical signpost of human progress, both cinematic and exploratory: how great an achievement, and yet how far we’ve come. Old movies make me sentimental. I like it that way.

The Death of Stalin — Far from Armando Iannucci’s best work, but it’s got plenty of good stuff. Casting Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev was genius. My attention was slightly divided while watching it, which I imagine is not ideal for this movie. In fact, you know what, I’m just going to watch it again sometime and review it properly then.

Hot Rod — As much as The Death of Stalin does not play in a situation where you’re not quite paying attention, this movie almost certainly plays BEST in that situation. It is one instance after another of Andy Samberg getting hurt. It is actors taking words and making them into just sounds. It has the emptiest, most vapid love interest character maybe ever. Smartly, it never lampshades this, because that characterization is, in itself, the joke. Its best bits include a man aggressively giving high fives for no reason and a hapless AM radio host with a complicated tattoo. It is cleverer than it seems on the face of it, but still very stupid. It’s a good comedy.

Comedy

Tig Notaro: Tig Notaro LIVE & Happy to be Here — “Good evening, hello! I have cancer! How are you?” is probably one of the best jokes ever told. It’s almost unfair that Tig Notaro’s career was given such a boost by Tig Notaro LIVE, which is the set where she abandons all of her previous material to give a detailed explication of the absolutely terrible year she’d been having, which included not only her cancer diagnosis, but a terrible digestive disease, a breakup, and the tragic death of her mother. It doesn’t work because it’s “vulnerable” or “intimate” or any of the other reasons people are likely to give, which have nothing to do with comedy. It works because Tig Notaro is an expert at reading the room. By that, I don’t mean that she gives the crowd what they want. Rather, she uses their displeasure to her advantage. The funniest part of LIVE is when Notaro suddenly pivots from her cancer material straight back into the sort of absurdist observational comedy she would have done otherwise. Suddenly the jokes, which are funny in their own right, are hilarious because of the perversity of her telling them in this context. It’s a very good set. However, when I say it’s unfair that this set is the one that propelled Notaro to another level, that’s because she is an equally good if not better comic when she is dealing with totally quotidian subject matter. This year’s Netflix special Happy to be Here has very little talk of personal misfortune in it because, by the looks of it, Notaro’s life is pretty great now. The most significant thing to have changed between the two sets is Notaro’s marriage to the actor Stephanie Allynne, who sounds like she’s basically Karl Pilkington. Don’t meow at the kitten, Stephanie cautions Tig. You don’t know what you’re saying to her. Happy to be Here contains much of this domestic material, and it’s all great. But the thing that makes it an outstanding special is an extended bit about the Indigo Girls where Notaro uses the same sublime ability to take advantage of her audience’s annoyance that she does throughout LIVE. It’s worth watching for that alone. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

Love and Radio: “Counter Melody” — This is the story of a resentful obsessive who has a stupid idea about what the “enigma” in Enigma Variations is, and it ruined his life. It’s good.

In the Dark: “Punishment” & “The Trials of Curtis Flowers” — This is getting better and better. My question with journalism like this is often, how is it so easy for journalists to explain the weakness in the case of the prosecution, yet so difficult for defence lawyers? This goes some way towards answering that question, by demonstrating that the prosecutor did everything in his power to ensure an unfair trial. Listen from the beginning of the season. It’s well worth it.

Out of the Blocks: “Steal This Podcast” — This is a fun deconstruction of how an episode of this show is made. They go into a lot of detail about how to interview, and a fair bit about how to structure the tape you get from an interview. I do wish they’d talked a bit more about the design elements and the process of writing the music. But it’s still edifying, both as a listener and a producer.

Theory of Everything: “The Fake in the Crowd” — This episode of Benjamen Walker’s series on fakeness opens the door to the possibility that nobody advocating for any cause is actually who they are. This is clearly not true, but it’s a dangerous and fascinating idea because it’s the basis for a worldview where you can trust literally nothing.

The Daily: “Charm City” — This five-part series about race and policing in Baltimore follows one family through three generations and tracks the changes in black Baltimoreans’ relationship with law enforcement decade by decade. It’s magnificent journalism. The Daily is so good. The New York Times is so good.

Caliphate: “The Briefcase” — Speaking of the New York Times being very, very good, this is maybe the most affecting episode of Caliphate yet. In it, Rukmini Callimachi finds a briefcase full of documents that yield a great deal of information, and it traces back to one particular member of ISIS. The team tries to track him down, and only finds his family. And in that family, intense shame for what this man has gotten himself into. The story they tell about his childhood and how he came to his extremist views is the most penetrating single detail this series has offered about the process of radicalization so far. Pick of the week.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Anthony Bourdain from 2011” — Bourdain and Maron have a lot in common. But Maron seems to have escaped the darkness to an extent that Bourdain didn’t manage. This is a good conversation if you’re looking to understand Bourdain’s self-destructive side, which I imagine lots of people are right now.

Fresh Air: — “Anthony Bourdain,” “The Life and Death of Robin Williams/’Jessica Jones’ Star Krysten Ritter,” “Tig Notaro” & “Ronan Farrow” — The Bourdain remembrance is a Dave Davies interview and not a Terry Gross interview, but it’s still worthwhile. Though, there are a few moments that would appear to disprove the assertion in a few appreciations written this week that Bourdain didn’t repeat himself in interviews. If you want one audio interview to commemorate Anthony Bourdain, go with Maron. As for the rest of these, the interview with Dave Itzkoff about his new Robin Williams biography is well worthwhile, as is the Ronan Farrow episode. That last one doesn’t just focus on his Weinstein investigations, but his entire crazy life as a genius prodigy and son of celebrities. The Tig Notaro episode is fine, though there’s a weird moment where Terry Gross almost tries to defend Louis C.K. in spite of obviously finding him repulsive. It comes out of nowhere and is super weird and I don’t know why she felt compelled to do that, especially with Notaro seeming as viscerally uncomfortable as she is.

Omnibus (week of May 13, 2018)

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Let’s see, what have we got here. We’ve got a movie I should have seen a long time ago, a great season of TV, a couple albums, and a broad assortment of journalism in written, audible and even visual form. There’s some stuff I’ve got on the go right now that’s not accounted for here that you will hear about next week. This particular omnibus may lead you to wonder about my seemingly arbitrary use of links. I link the things I review when they are both linkable and urgently worth your time. Other that that, links are for reference. That is all.

Oh, also, I had a review column on NXNW for the first time in a while this morning. But to hold you over until it’s online, here is a thing I made about how I don’t like Gilbert and Sullivan so I went to find some people who really really do in the hope that they can make me see what I’m missing. (They didn’t. But they were lovely.)

20 reviews.

Movies, etc.

This is Spinal Tap — Possibly the most frequently referenced movie that I had not actually seen until yesterday, This is Spinal Tap is also a remarkably durable parody that has aged pretty much impeccably. As an avid fan of quite a lot of music that sounds a bit like “Stonehenge” and quite a lot more music that sounds like “Jazz Odyssey,” I can attest to the calibre of the style parodies themselves. But this movie’s greatest success is the fact that its jokes don’t rely specifically on recognition to succeed. Certainly, if you’ve heard your share of Led Zeppelin, Queen, Scorpion, Motley Crüe, the Zombies, Yes, King Crimson, Lonnie Donegan, and any number of other artists of variable consequence throughout the history of rock and roll, you will get something out of this that those without that context will not. But fundamentally, This is Spinal Tap is character-based comedy, with the jokes coming from the same place that the stakes of the story do, which is relationships. Michael McKean and Christopher Guest do the heavy lifting here, but there’s comedy even in the occasional shot of actual prog rocker David Kaff playing keyboards, at an almost complete remove from the story at large. Parody is hard. This is the benchmark.

Lindsay Ellis: The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy, etc. — Lindsay Ellis’s justifiably three-part video essay on the un-justifiably three-part Hobbit trilogy is some of the best media criticism I’ve seen in a while. The first and second parts tackle the low-hanging fruit: namely the myriad ways in which the movies themselves are narrative failures driven more by studio fiat than creative control. But the third part is a work of honest-to-god journalism, telling the story of the labour disputes that nearly sundered the production of The Hobbit and the laws that were passed to exploit the New Zealand-based actors who took part. It’s worth a watch as much to learn about all of that as to remind yourself why the original Lord of the Rings trilogy is a masterpiece worth revisiting.

Television

Atlanta: Season 2 — Donald Glover is the pre-eminent creative person right now. Atlanta is farther out than anything else on TV, and its experiments didn’t let it down all season. In “Teddy Perkins” we got a horror movie with a monster as simultaneously ghastly and tragic as Frankenstein’s. In “FUBU” we got a coming-of-age story that takes place over barely more than a single day. In “Champagne Papi” we got Waiting for Godot with(out) Drake. In “North of the Border” we get a road movie that isn’t insufferable. And those are only the best episodes. I always have trouble finding things to say about shows I watch quickly, and this one contains such multitudes that I feel this review was doomed from the start. Watch Atlanta. Pick of the week.

Literature, etc,

Tad Friend: “Donald Glover Can’t Save You” — The profile is not a genre I am always fond of. Too often, they are excuses for a writer to show off their own character in relation to their subject’s rather than simply focussing on the ostensible task at hand. But this one’s really good. Friend focuses on simply recounting what Glover did and, more to the point, said while they spent time together. Witness this paragraph: “Do you look up to anyone? ‘I don’t see anyone out there who’s better,’ he said. ‘Maybe Elon Musk. But I don’t know yet if he’s a supervillain. Elon is working on ways for storytelling not to be the best way of spreading information.’ Musk’s new company, Neuralink, intends to merge human consciousness with computers, allowing us to download others’ thoughts. ‘It will turn us into a connected macroorganism, but it will make our individual desires seem trivial,’ Glover went on. ‘Sometimes I get mad at him—”You think people are insignificant!” But we probably are at the end of the storytelling age. It’s my job to compress the last bits of information for people before it passes.’ He sighed. ‘The thing I imagine myself being in the future doesn’t exist yet. I wish it was just “Oh, I’ll be Oprah,” or “I’ll be Dave Chappelle.” But it’s not that. It’s something different and more, something involving fairness and restoring a sense of honor. Sometimes I dream of it, but how do you explain a dream where you never see your father, but you know that that’s him over your shoulder?’ It was very quiet. ‘It’d be nice to feel less lonely.’” Go read.

Robert Silverman: “My dad painted the iconic cover for Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung,’ and it’s haunted him ever since” — Not to be confused with the Canadian pianist of the same name who is celebrating his 80th birthday this week, Robert Silverman is a writer whose father is the painter Burton Silverman. This feature tells the story of how Silverman Sr. painted the cover of one of my least favourite albums by one of my favourite bands, and how he received no royalties for it. Robert Silverman does a great job of emphasizing how shitty this is. It’s not clear that he was actually stiffed out of any money — nobody did anything illegal, it seems. Burton Silverman simply had no way of predicting that the album he was working on would turn out to be iconic and that his cover would become Jethro Tull’s most merchandisable image. He had no reason to think that he should request royalties, or the continuing ownership of his intellectual property. He caught a bad break, and he’s mad about it. Who can blame him? But what’s to be done? All the same, Ian Anderson comes off as a complete shit in this, even refusing to be interviewed at the last minute. I always knew that Ian Anderson didn’t like the cover. But it now seems even shittier for him to have said that so freely when the artist was so poorly compensated. Insult to injury. Also, given Anderson’s own efforts to maintain copyright over his work, there’s irony here.

Jennifer Egan: “Children of the Opioid Epidemic” — Jennifer Egan’s portrait of several different mothers and their struggles to do right by their children while suffering from addictions is a thing that not only exhibits empathy, but manages also to explain the lack of empathy these women receive in a way that makes it seem ludicrous. It is heartrending journalism without the barest hint of voyeurism. Read it.

John Luther Adams: “Becoming Desert” — I was shocked to learn that my favourite living composer, John Luther Adams, had left Alaska. It’s a place he’s identified with as much as Prince is identified with Minnesota. But at least he lives in a desert now. I don’t need to reconsider my image of him as a man of extremes. I haven’t heard his new piece Become Desert yet, because it hasn’t been recorded. But I’m told it’s spectacular and worthy of the legacy of its predecessor, Become Ocean, which is my favourite orchestral work of the past decade. Can’t wait.

Music

Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats: Tearing at the Seams — My experience with prior Night Sweats albums has been primarily in cars paying little attention, save for their amazing single “S.O.B.” So, Tearing at the Seams is in a sense my introduction to them as an albums band. And it’s great! It’s a lot of fun. It’s primarily made up of soul and R&B music with a full horn section and plenty of Hammond B-3. But every so often, as with “I’ll Be Damned” and “You Worry Me,” it sticks a toe into piano pop territory. Nice to know they’re not purists. “Intro” is the track I can’t stop listening to, though if it has ever been an intro to something, that context is lost on this album. All the same, whenever somebody asks me about a thing I am proud of, I shall henceforth reply “Ahhh-aaaahhh-HEEEY-Yeah!”

The Flaming Lips: Zaireeka — The first Flaming Lips album I haven’t entirely enjoyed. These days, the 0.0 Pitchfork review of this is arguably more famous than the album itself. It’s an interesting read if you haven’t seen it — not because it’s good criticism, because it isn’t. But it does probably read more sympathetically today than it did at the time. If you’re unfamiliar, Zaireeka is a bonkers piece of concept art that consists of four CDs to be played simultaneously in four separate CD players. This concept was born of some genuinely interesting live experiments that Wayne Coyne and co. had done where they put their audience in control of car stereos and boomboxes and made genuinely participatory performance pieces. But as a commercial product for home consumption, Zaireeka made itself inaccessible to the vast majority of its potential audience, who likely wouldn’t have four CD players just lying around. This is the crux of the Pitchfork reviewer’s complaint. In a post-Occupy world, this seems entirely reasonable. In 1997, I imagine it was scandalous. But lest I seem like I’m needlessly extolling a piece of writing that was merely ahead of its time, let me clarify that Jason Josephes, who wrote the review, appears not to have bothered with any sort of aesthetic appraisal of the record. And while I can get on board with the notion that mere aesthetics may be secondary to the basic fact of accessibility for audiences of all income brackets, if you are being paid to assess a work of art, you have to clear a higher bar than just being pissed off about how you can’t listen to this record because you’re broke. Call me old-fashioned. It’s just how I feel. The irony of all this is that the way I chose to hear Zaireeka was through a YouTube video that mixes down the four CDs into a single stereo signal that I can listen to through a single pair of headphones. And what makes this doubly ironic is the fact that the four CDs taken together actually sound like four separate things happening simultaneously, having little to do with each other. It’s entirely possible that Josephes, listening to the record in piecemeal fashion, had a more aesthetically pleasing experience than I did. Pity he couldn’t be bothered to say anything about it.

Podcasts

In the Dark: “The Confessions” — It continues to be a convincing argument for the prosecution’s shoddiness in the case of Curtis Flowers, and it continues to introduce compelling voices that will ring in my head long after the season’s over. In The Dark has officially proven itself to be a more durable investigative operation than its blockbuster big sibling Serial.

The World According to Sound: “Sound Audio: Edward R. Murrow” — Stunning. Those of us who only listen to podcasts, and are too young to remember a world where terrestrial radio was king would do well to pay attention to this series, which highlights recent and long-past audio alike. This time around, the wartime bulletins of Edward R. Murrow, complete with an explanation of how he strung together mic cables to reach the roof of the BBC, so he could report on a proper aerial view of the London blitz. It’s tempting to say they don’t make them like this anymore, though of course they do. (Witness Caliphate.) But Murrow was an original, and I’ll be seeking out more of his work, out of professional interest.

Out of the Blocks: “200 W Read St.” parts 2 and 3 — Any show whose mandate is simply to tell “everybody’s story” is going to get saccharine at some point. And I do bristle a bit at the forced pathos of some of the stories here. But ultimately that’s secondary to my appetite for simply hearing people talk about their lives. I don’t care what the stakes are; ultimately I’m fine with just listening to people — mostly, people don’t talk about themselves, so it’s fun to hear how they respond when they’re asked to. This is a great show. You should hear it.

Caliphate: “The Heart” — The most disturbing episode so far details an incredibly garish murder, perpetrated by the main interview subject of the series thus far. It is a hard listen, but a worthwhile reality check. I am confident that what’s coming up in this series will problematize the content of this interview to no end. If it doesn’t, that would be a problem.

Judge John Hodgman: “Wedding Clashers” — It’s been a while since I listened to this, and I had nearly forgotten how satisfying it is. The premise here is that Hodgman must decide whether a couple will have a traditional wedding, like the dude wants to, or go off and elope, like the lady wants to. His decision is not straightforward, which is in itself a demonstration of how seriously Hodgman takes the ludicrous task he’s set out for himself within the context of a comedy podcast. I love that he’s never dismissive of the decisions that people have to make in their lives. It takes a show that could so easily be mean spirited and makes it the opposite.

Theory of Everything: “S-Coin” — Benjamen Walker’s continuing exploration of fakery forays into cryptocurrency. It’s everything you ever wanted from Benjamen Walker. This mini-season has been a lot to process so far, but I’m finding it rewarding — even just to puzzle out what’s real and what isn’t.

On the Media: “Africatown” — This episode, focussing on a town formed by the last slaves to be brought to America from Africa (illegally) on the Clothilde, gets into so much more than just the story of that town. I won’t go into it, just listen to it. It’s a Brooke Gladstone solo episode (in the sense that there’s no Bob Garfield; Alana Casanova-Burgess is here in full force), which means it’s going to be complicated and it’s going to take the long view. Listen.

Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up — I did not watch the royal wedding. I will likely not watch Deadpool 2. And while Vida sounds great, if I’m being honest with myself I will not get to that either. My ability/willingness to keep up with pop culture has waned enormously over the past year, and listening to this show has made it clear just to what extent that is the case. I am okay with that, and I’ve still got this podcast to at least let me know what I’m missing.

The Memory Palace: “Snakes!” & “The 8th Story” — Two episodes of The Memory Palace that reinvigorated my love for the show — a love that never goes away entirely. “Snakes!” is an outright laugh riot, which is a rarity for Nate DiMeo. And even though it gets all of its milage out of the absurdity of cobras being released in a Missouri town, it does contain one genuinely affecting line: “In the absence of laws, and in the absence of shame, you can just lie and lie and lie.” The next episode, “The 8th Story,” features a formal trick I’ve never heard before on this show, namely DiMeo’s narration being interrupted by SFX. Given how much of an anomaly it is, it works really well. It’s also a great story, but it doesn’t involve cobras being loose in Missouri. Pick of the week.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Melissa McCarthy” — She’s funny. No surprises there. It’s a fun conversation, but nothing earthshaking.

All Songs Considered: “New Music Friday: May 18” — Some nice stuff here. Many albums I should check out but likely won’t, due to my general sense that I’d rather fill gaps in my existing knowledge than keep up on what’s new — thereby forming new gaps in my knowledge. But I may actually listen to the Remember Sports and Courtney Barnett records.

Omnibus (week of Mar. 4, 2018)

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

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

Live events

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

Movies

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

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

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

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

Television

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

Literature, etc.

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

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

Music

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

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

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

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omnibus (week of Jan 14, 2018)

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I’ve had a big week for wasting time, and also a big week for getting stuff done that allows me to also listen to stuff simultaneously. You may enjoy the fruits of my labours below.

25 reviews.

Literature, etc.

Chris Onstad: Achewood — It’s been ages, but I went back to Achewood this week and fell right back in. I got the the end of 2004 in the comics, which was also the year when Onstad started writing in-character blogs as all of the major characters. I’m making my way through the first year of those now, because what’s a rabbit hole if you only go halfway down? The blogs are interesting because they’re less explicitly comedic than the strips are. They’re basically sincere character studies where every single character seems unique and well-rounded. That makes them a bit of a mixed bag. Ray’s blog, for instance, is intermittently insufferable because Ray is a rich asshole whose life is a fantasy from a men’s magazine. Seen from a third-person perspective, this is always funny. But when it comes straight from him, it can be rough going because he’s less ridiculous when seen through his own eyes. But the blog never drifts out of character, which is a testament to what a fantastic writer Chris Onstad is. Other characters fare better. I’m particularly fond of Pat’s blog, because Pat is the least sympathetic character in the strip, and thus the most likely to have a completely insufferable blog. So the very existence of the thing is a joke in itself. Also, it features a plotline in which Pat attempts to place the mailman under citizen’s arrest because in Pat’s crazed worldview, junk mail constitutes litter. Achewood is a marvel. It’s a whole universe. I love it.

Movies

The Shape of Water — I’ve always loved Guillermo del Toro as a visual stylist, but the only movie of his that really stuck with me for some time after I watched it was Pan’s Labyrinth. I think what I liked about it was that it presents a very simple metaphor about childhood trauma and takes for granted that you’ll pick up on it. So, it just focuses on telling a story and, even more crucially, presenting a cavalcade of memorable and distressing images. The Shape of Water is much the same. It is not a subtle movie. It finds del Toro wielding Michael Shannon like a bludgeon. More troublingly, it also finds him casting Octavia Spencer as a walking trope, which, ugh. That makes the movie’s central civil rights metaphor a tad less resonant. But all of the stuff that del Toro packs around that metaphor is really marvellous. Maybe the best light to see the movie in is as a tribute to the romances of golden-age Hollywood. Del Toro has always been a film geek first, a storyteller second. And this movie finds him geeking out not only about monster movies, which is his perpetual obsession, but also with musicals and melodrama. And look: there are days when I’m a chilly aesthete, and there are days when I’m totally on board for a musical monster melodrama. This hit me on one of the latter kinds of days.

Coco — I don’t much like to cry in public, so there were some uncomfortable moments in this. *sniff* Coco has one of the most satisfying narrative switcheroos I’ve seen in a while. If you’ve seen it, you know the one. It’s a late-game reveal that I genuinely did not see coming, which is also the element the film’s emotional impact hangs on. Where Inside Out’s effect comes from a sustained melancholy, Coco’s comes from a single surprise gut punch. And what a gut punch it is. I don’t like this quite as much as Inside Out or WALL-E, which remain my two favourite Pixar movies. (Were they this good when I was an actual child??) But Coco goes beyond those movies in a couple of ways. First off, it takes place partially in a convincing (according to my Mexican friend) version of small-town Mexico. Its visual style is a pretty brilliant amalgam of Mexican art and architecture with Pixar’s usual fantastical whimsy. Once the movie finds its way to the land of the dead, it really turns into a visual marvel. And it’s not just the setting — it gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that most of its characters are skeletons and can thus be deconstructed and rearranged at will. There’s a character in this, Hector, who is maybe the closest any animator has gotten to the genie in Aladdin in the past ten years. Story-wise, the tension that drives Coco is the same as in Ratatouille: there’s a kid who wants to be an artist but his family forbids it. But where Ratatouille portrays its protagonist’s family as mere philistines, Coco manages to find a reason why they act like they do that makes them sort of sympathetic. I think that points to a way that children movies have matured since I was a kid: there doesn’t have to be an obvious villain anymore. Coco does have a villain, but for the bulk of the movie the key antagonists are the hero’s own family, who basically have some version of his best interest at heart. This is much more subtle than The Lion King. This is charming. And I’ll note one final detail: the town it takes place in is called Santa Cecilia. Cecilia is the patron saint of music in Catholicism, and thus a significant symbolic figure in this story. Nothing’s an accident in a Pixar movie.

Music

Gustav Mahler/Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic Orchestra et al.: Symphony No. 3 — Man, it’s probably been five years since I listened to this. Famously long, obviously. But when you’re sitting at home with a glass of Petite Sirah (I am a caricature of myself) and a few open browser tabs, it flies right by. The scherzo is one of my favourite movements in Mahler’s whole oeuvre. I remember learning the offstage trumpet parts back when that was a sort of thing I did, and for all of their endurance challenges, they are some of the most satisfying orchestral excerpts I ever had to practice. There’s a haunting delicacy to that section that’s the sort of thing only Mahler can muster. This isn’t altogether one of my favourite Mahler symphonies, but even his lesser works are essential, to me. And that scherzo. Man oh man.

Bruce Springsteen: The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle — I think I prefer this to Darkness on the Edge of Town. I definitely prefer it to The River. Elements of it feel in retrospect like a warm-up for Born to Run, but it has an unexpected soul element that Springsteen wouldn’t really revisit after this. And I like that facet of this record. Much of the credit should likely go to David Sancious, a marvellous keyboardist who makes his final E Street Band appearance here, to be replaced by the equally brilliant but totally different Roy Bittan. Sancious is all kinds of funky throughout. “The E Street Shuffle” is a truly rollicking opener, and it’s the sort of thing that just wouldn’t fly on either of Springsteen’s next two albums. It’s got the requisite keen observational poetry, but it’s just too… fun for Born to Run or Darkness. Pete Townshend once said “When Bruce Springsteen sings, that’s not ‘fun.’ That’s fucking triumph.” It’s presumably those two albums, and Born to Run in particular, that he was talking about. The element of that classic style that E Street Shuffle is missing on about half of its songs is the profound romance — the seriousness. And while that makes it a less effective album, it also makes it a fundamentally different one, which can serve a different purpose in your rotation. On the other hand, if you’re worn out on “Jungleland” and “Backstreets,” “Incident on 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade” can easily fill in for them.

Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska — I can see myself coming to like this Springsteen album best of all. The guts it takes to make a record like this at that point in a career, I tell you. He’d just had his first major hit with “Hungry Heart,” and he comes back with an album of what were meant to be demos of almost unrelentingly bleak songs. But even that doesn’t quite get to the gutsiness of this release: try and think of a solo artist whose sound is more dependent on their band than Bruce Springsteen. The E Street Band is a way bigger part of their particular equation than, say, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was of theirs. And yet this album happened. Thank god Columbia Records had the guts to let it happen, too. Because, different as it is from everything else in his imperial phase, Nebraska has a delicate beauty that makes it stand up alongside Born to Run in terms of its ability to connect. Its palate of mostly acoustic guitar with a few ornamentations and a generous dollop of reverb reminds me of the first Bon Iver album, except made in 1982. My personal highlights are “Highway Patrolman,” which has a gorgeous melody and lyrics that compel you to actively listen to the story, and “Reason to Believe,” which may only feel as strong as it does because it’s positioned at the end of the album. After so many stories of hardship and wrongdoing, it’s nice to hear Springsteen sing about people’s tendency to keep their chin up in spite of it. I’m still processing this. I can tell I’ll be listening to it a lot.

Television

The Good Place: Every episode thus far — Look, I had some spare time this week, and not a lot of willpower to be productive. It’s been a dog’s age since I had a good long binge, so I binged on this. I am a big fan of Michael Schur, primarily because of Parks and Rec: a show that was one of television’s greatest joke factories, and also had a cast of characters it’s almost dangerously easy to get invested in. The Good Place is an astonishing show, but for neither of those reasons. The Good Place is the first television comedy I’ve watched entirely out of interest in the story. I’m not sure I’ve watched a show whose fundamental rules change as often as this one’s. Maybe Lost. But I’d wager that the twists-per-minute ratio of this show is even higher. I’m going to leave it there. If you’re thinking about watching this, watch it. Don’t read anything more about it, just watch it. If you don’t find it funny, just keep watching it. You will eventually realize there’s a sort of virtuosic storytelling at work here that is incredibly rare in TV comedy. Pick of the week.

Podcasts

Love and Radio: “The Machine” & “The Secrets Hotline, Vol. II” — The secrets episode is much the same as the first one, which is to say it’s a bunch of secrets told anonymously on an answering machine. It’s great. “The Machine” is a really great story about a guy who bulldozed a bunch of his town before committing suicide, and managed to be remembered as some kind of hero. Being the show that this is, nothing is allowed to be that simple. It’s great.

The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Levee Stream Live from New Orleans” — A live episode consisting of interviews taking place in the seat of a sawed-in-half Cadillac, this is the sort of thing that could only come from a collaboration including the Kitchen Sisters. New Orleans is a super cool place I really want to visit, and this is a great evocation of its contemporary culture.

Pop Culture Happy Hour catch-up — The highlight of the slew of PCHH I listened to this week was their annual resolutions and predictions show, which I always love because they’re always so wrong except for Kat Chow. Good listening.

The Hilarious World of Depression: “Linda Holmes Leaves Law to Concentrate On Watching TV and It Works Out Great” — It’s always a shock when you learn about the difference between a person’s public-facing aspect and their private life. I’ve been following Linda Holmes’s work for NPR and as the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour for years, including during the period that she identifies during this interview as a mental health crisis. It was never less than amazing. I hadn’t listened to this show before, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily for me, but this is a really good conversation. Holmes’s story really demonstrates that there are gradations of depression and anxiety and that even the lower gradations need to be acknowledged and dealt with. Lovely stuff.

Beautiful Conversations with Anonymous People: “The Puppet Master” — This starts off as a pretty ordinary episode of Beautiful/Anonymous with a guest of middling interest. Then he laughs. And as soon as Chris Gethard hears this guy’s laugh, we’re off to the races. I listened to this on a train at seven in the morning. I had to keep pausing it because I was losing my shit. There’s nothing like listening to people laughing. And he really does turn out to be interesting later. Everybody is. That’s the point of this show.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Darren Aronofsky,” “Marc’s Family” & “Ta-Nehisi Coates” — These are all great episodes. Aronofsky turns out to be quite funny and engaging. He was a fan of Maron’s from way back in his struggling stand-up days. Also, Maron hasn’t seen the end of mother! He’s actually interviewing Darren Aronofsky about that movie without having seen it all. I love that. The episode of conversations between Maron and members of his family feels like some much-needed catch-up on the years of the podcast that I missed. And the Ta-Nehisi Coates interview is completely scintillating. Maron is enraptured with this guy, and Coates just loves how good he is at listening. It’s fabulous. Listen to that one.

The Organist: “How to Be in Two Places at Once: The Firesign Theatre in the US and Vietnam” — I am so glad this show exists. We need more arts and culture podcasts that are about long-form storytelling rather than conversation and criticism. I love those shows too, but I feel like Studio 360’s American Icons series has been cornering the market for long enough. I actually found a record by the Firesign Theatre in the five dollar bin at my local record store while I was digging for a gag gift recently. I did not pick it up, but it left me wondering about what it was. Apparently, they were a group of avant-garde comedians and sound artists who made records that had a substantial countercultural impact in their day. This is a good introduction to Firesign because it focuses not on the members of the troupe themselves, but on the people who listened to and understood the records in various contexts. Too often arts journalists default to interviewing the artists. The artists are arguably the least important people involved in a work of art. I will listen to this show a lot, I think.

Trump Con Law catch-up — The episode about whether or not you can prosecute a president is maybe the archetypal example of this show: it opens up the possibility that a thing you want to happen could happen, then shuts it down and makes you realize that it might not actually be a good idea anyway. I’m getting into this now, even if it kind of makes me even more fearful.

On the Media: “The End Is the Beginning” — Come for the retrospective on early third-wave feminism, stay for the tribute to the late Joe Frank — a radio producer I didn’t know and now am in love with.

Uncivil: “Song” — Basically, “Dixie,” the song widely regarded as the anthem of the Confederacy, was written by a white Yankee. Except actually no, it wasn’t, because it was probably taught to him by a black man. It’s a complicated, compelling story and if you want it in detail, this episode is the place to be.

Longform: “Zoe Chace” — Chace is one of my favourite This American Life producers, but the story of how she got there is pretty familiar. You just get an internship to get your foot in the door and do everything you can to stay there forever. That’s the gist of this, though it’s a good conversation because she’s good at talking.

Theory of Everything: “Utopia (part ii)” & “False Flags” — The second utopia episode features an attempt at utopia that seems to be falling apart less than the attempts in the first episode. But that’s because nobody there regards it as a utopia. So that’s interesting. But it’s “False Flags” that really caught my attention. Benjamen Walker merges his argument about the increasing prevalence of conspiracy theories with an amusing fictional vignette about him getting yelled at in the airport. That’s what I come to this show for.

The Daily: “Special Episode: The Year in Sound” — This is largely Barbaro-less: a collage of mostly Trump-adjacent sound bites from a completely insane year. Remember Scaramucci? I had completely forgotten about that guy. What kind of a year lets you forget that Anthony Scaramucci was in the White House for, what was it, a week?

Showcase from Radiotopia: “Secrets,” episodes 1 & 2 — This new series from Radiotopia’s rotating exhibition space is not particularly experimental or innovative, but both of these episodes have told really compelling stories. The first is about an undercover cop, and the second is about a wildlife photographer who faked his photos. Start with either.

Home of the Brave: “Two More Stories About Mountains” — The first of these two guest stories is an interview with Scott Carrier, with added music. But it’s the second that knocked me flat. “The Ascent to K-2” is a story by Joe Frank, who was still alive when Carrier released this episode, but who died shortly after. I became aware of him thanks to On the Media, and heard my first full piece of his thanks to this. This is an intensely odd narrative about the strangest (totally made up) attempt to climb K-2 that has ever been undertaken. It is radio storytelling at its oddest and best. Pick of the week.

The Turnaround: “The Turnaround with Dick Cavett” — Ah, I forgot how much I enjoy hearing Jesse Thorn interview people about interviewing. Cavett is good fun, and he taught me a new word. I’m going to paraphrase my favourite part of this interview. Cavett says, I think the lack of a sense of humour is the ultimate lack. It is un-human and inhuman. Thorn says, I wonder if the president finds anything funny. I’ve never seen him laugh at something funny. Cavett says, oh no, he’s a born clodpate. CLODPATE! I love it. Great stuff.

99% Invisible: “Mini-Stories: Volume 4” & “Thermal Delight” — This might be my favourite batch of mini-stories yet, but “Thermal Delight” came and went from my brain. To be fair, I was in the heat of cooking at the time, and sometimes that happens. It’s nobody’s fault but mine.

Code Switch: “This Racism Is Killing Me Inside” — This is about weathering, which is one of the most unsettling effects of racism. If you want to know more, you should listen to this episode. This should be a show you listen to always.

Omnibus (week of Sept. 3, 2017)

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Okay, this media detox thing is for the birds. This week I watched six of Wes Anderson’s eight movies and some other stuff to boot. This also means that I’ve now seen every Wes Anderson movie and can therefore rank them, because this is the purpose for watching movies. Here is where I stand on it right now:

The Grand Budapest Hotel > The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou > Moonrise Kingdom > Rushmore > Bottle Rocket > The Royal Tenenbaums > The Fantastic Mr. Fox > The Darjeeling Limited

I reviewed The Fantastic Mr. Fox last week and The Darjeeling Limited earlier this year. Search them out if you want my opinions on them, which have not changed. Basically, I don’t think this guy has ever made an outright bad movie. And the ones I’ve ranked as the top four are all masterpieces, as far as I’m concerned. So let’s get into this. Anderson first, everything else after.

19 reviews.

Movies

Bottle Rocket — I’d never seen either of Anderson’s first two movies before this week, so these are first impressions. Bottle Rocket, his debut feature, is surprisingly fantastic, but definitely a first movie. There are elements that feel like they could have been pulled from any later Wes Anderson movie, especially near the beginning: a coil-bound notebook outlining a 75-year life plan, a hysterically precocious child, a slightly crooked toy soldier being minutely adjusted. But for the most part, Bottle Rocket is a visually straightforward and almost plain film by Anderson’s standards. (The fact that several scenes were shot in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright puts that in perspective.) But for all of the distance that Anderson still has to travel in his visual style, Bottle Rocket’s dialogue and performances are already pretty close to what they’d be in his best movies. In fact, I’m tempted to say this movie’s MVP is not Anderson but his star and co-writer Owen Wilson. Wilson’s performance as Dignan, the more delusional of two very flawed protagonists, is one of his best — impressive, given that this is his first feature as well. There’s a bit of early Coen brothers in the mix here, and it’s felt most when Wilson’s onscreen. He’s that fun kind of character whose behavior and way of talking is massively out of step with his circumstances: a Coen standby. It’s always fun to be reminded that you like an actor, in spite of not liking the bulk of their movies. I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It’s one of those movies you watch more out of historical interest than actual enthusiasm, but that ends up delighting you regardless.

Rushmore — I was momentarily concerned that I’d end up liking the somewhat anomalous Bottle Rocket better than this, the film that made Wes Anderson’s reputation and established the aesthetic that I love him for. But as soon as Jason Schwartzman folded up his newspaper and said “I’m sorry, did someone say my name?” I banished all such thoughts. This is where Anderson’s ability to tell heartfelt stories in a deliberately arch style really flowers. Our 15-year-old protagonist Max Fischer is the first of a particular kind of Wes Anderson hero: the effusive can-do guy whose outward displays of spirit mask deep turmoil. This puts him in a category with the likes of Mr. Fox and Gustave H. And while I doubt any Anderson character will ever seriously rival Gustave H. for me, Max is a masterful creation. He acts according to his own idiosyncratic code, but as the movie progresses, we start to see glimmers of awareness that there are certain conventions he probably shouldn’t breach. This may be the Wes Anderson film with the most interesting character relationships. It’s built primarily around a deeply implausible love triangle, but all three relationships in that triangle are fascinating in their way. Max’s infatuation with the age-inappropriate teacher Rosemary Cross is a one-way street, but it’s clear that Ms. Cross sees elements of her late husband in this strange kid. His relationship with the wealthy industrialist Herman Blume isn’t quite a father/son dynamic. Clearly Blume sees it that way, and would that he could make it so simple, because he sees nothing of himself in his own children. But one of Max’s foibles is that he sees himself as a peer to the adults in his life, so Blume can’t quite make the father/son thing stick. And, of course there’s Blume and Ms. Cross’s relationship, which is the least plausible thing in the movie, but it reshapes the movie’s tensions into something strangely Oedipal, considering that there aren’t any actual family ties at play. How Anderson (and Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the screenplay) manage to resolve all of this into a “have it all” sort of ending and not make it seem cheap is a miracle. One of my first thoughts when I finished this was that I’d probably have been more impressed by it if I’d seen it before Brick, Rian Johnson’s later film about precocious high schoolers that adds a layer of film noir and has even more stylized dialogue. That’s as dazzling a film as this one, but the more I think about it the more I think it’s a ludicrous comparison. Taking Rushmore on its own terms, it’s a beautiful film, and the first real demonstration of Anderson’s brilliance.

The Royal Tenenbaums — You’ll note the rather low placement of Wes Anderson’s most acclaimed (probably) movie in the ranking above. I promise I am not being wilfully perverse. I really like this movie. But it clearly doesn’t hit me as hard as it does a lot of people. It certainly doesn’t hit me as hard as some of Anderson’s other movies. Like Rushmore, its drama is based around relationships, which distinguishes these movies from pretty much all six of the other Wes Anderson movies, which are at least partially adventure stories. Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are Anderson’s only movies where the characters don’t really go anywhere or try to accomplish anything especially unusual. (Even Max Fischer’s prodigious accomplishments all happen within the walls of high school.) I imagine that’s what people like about these movies. But between the two, Rushmore is enormously more effective to me. Where Rushmore focusses on the relationships between three main characters, and delves pretty deeply into those relationships, Tenenbaums offers sketches of the relationships between a far vaster cast of weirdos. To Anderson’s credit (and Owen Wilson’s, who returns as co-writer and co-star), these sketches are marvellous in their efficiency. The pairings of Margo and Richie (Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson) and Royal and Chas (Gene Hackman and Ben Stiller) are especially effective. But other characters who start the movie looking promising end up in shaggy dog stories, especially Owen Wilson and Bill Murray’s characters. Eventually, Anderson will master the art of the huge ensemble cast by not pretending that every character is especially important. But here, he isn’t so graceful, and the depth of his characters’ relationships suffers. In a movie like this, that dulls the impact more than it would in a more knockabout film like Moonrise Kingdom or even Bottle Rocket. But there are still parts of this that kill me — the culmination of the Royal/Chas plotline in particular. And the opening is one of Anderson’s best. And this guy knows how to start a movie. So basically, it’s a movie I wish I connected with more than I do. But I do still like it.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou — I suppose for a time it would have been considered a minor heresy to prefer The Life Aquatic to The Royal Tenenbaums, but I get the sense that’s changing and I’m very glad. The Life Aquatic is the most diorama-like of Wes Anderson’s movies thus far and it has more cartoonish characterizations than any of his previous films. But that lightness only serves to cast the movie’s story of grief, loss and failure in even more shadow. Steve Zissou is a more dominant protagonist than appears in any other Wes Anderson film, including Rushmore. The story of this movie is very much the story of a trying time in one man’s life. As excellent as Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston and especially Cate Blanchett are in this, they’re all basically just other people who are present at Steve’s turning point. This is Bill Murray’s second-best film performance after Lost in Translation. His hangdog expression cracks just frequently enough to imply that there’s more than just a general malaise plaguing this character. I really like that Anderson has made one movie like this, with a distinct protagonist whose struggle we sympathize with. It’s not his usual M.O., but it really works here. Also, I just love how much stuff there is in this movie: stuff like Seu Jorge’s unmotivated but delightful constant David Bowie covers, the fake animals, and the ludicrous diorama that is the set of the Belafonte. It’s more than just sugar that helps the medicine go down: it’s a deliberate distancing tactic that makes it necessary to extend yourself that bit further into the film to find the humanity. The Life Aquatic requires a significant investment of empathy throughout most of its running time if you’re going to be on Steve’s side. But if you succeed in this, it pays off with one of the most sublime and openly emotive endings in Wes Anderson’s catalogue. I should say: I’ve ranked this higher than Moonrise Kingdom basically only because of the submarine scene. They’re pretty much neck-and-neck in my view, but the ending of Life Aquatic hits me straight in the gut every time. I love this movie. I haven’t even been able to get to everything I love about it. I love that this is Anderson’s movie about moviemaking: he went for theatrical in Rushmore and literary in Tenenbaums, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest, but he’s got one movie that’s straightforwardly about doing what he does and I love that. In keeping with that, I love how fake everything looks, especially the obviously-filmed-in-a-tank deep sea dive scene. I love this movie.

Moonrise Kingdom — Ah, the first Wes Anderson movie I saw, and the one I hadn’t seen for longest. This is really glorious. It might be Anderson’s most whimsical movie, partially because its protagonists are children, but also because of how seamlessly the adults in the story fit into their bizarre little lives — especially the scout masters played by Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman and Harvey Keitel. It might also be Anderson’s most beautifully shot movie, with the ropey diorama of Steve Zissou’s boat having been refined into a beautiful sort of doll’s house set for the opening titles. And it’s almost certainly Anderson’s most uplifting movie. Most other Wes Anderson movies, even those with basically happy endings (I’m thinking particularly of Rushmore) end with people learning sad lessons. The two children at the centre of this movie have had their fill of sad lessons already when the movie begins. They end the movie having realized that life can be good. Plus, it’s fun to see what happens when Anderson puts aside his British Invasion fetish in favour of Benjamin Britten. Stick around through the credits of this one. It features a Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra-inspired tour through Alexandre Desplat’s original score. (Or is it Tubular Bells-inspired?)

The Grand Budapest Hotel — Upon a third viewing of this, I think I need to make space for it in my all-time top ten. The Grand Budapest Hotel is more than Wes Anderson’s frothiest, rompiest contrivance, though it is that. It is also a story about the pain of being displaced by historical forces beyond your control. Consider why, for a moment, this movie takes place in a hotel rather than another sort of institution or locale. Hotels are places that aren’t home. They may be novel and extraordinarily pleasant, but they are elsewhere. They are temporary places for people who aren’t in their main place. And yet this movie doesn’t make a lot of time for the Grand Budapest’s guests. Normally, you’d think that a movie about a hotel would take advantage of the fact that so many colourful people may come and go from it. Yet, aside from the narrator, we only really meet one and she dies almost immediately. This is a movie about people who live and work at a hotel — people who are in a transitory place on a permanent basis. That is the heart of this movie’s sadness. Zero the lobby boy, we learn, is a refugee whose family was killed in the war. That’s why he’s at the Grand Budapest. And our hero, the concierge Gustave H., is as displaced in time as Zero is displaced in space. He’s a man of extreme elegance and refinement, in spite of his modest circumstances, and he’s found himself in an era defined by fascist brutality and simple mindedness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the story of two people who, for different reasons, no longer recognize the world around them. And the only thing that softens the blow is the magnificence of the transitory place in which they’ve found themselves. The relationship between Zero and Monsieur Gustave is the most beautiful of many beautiful relationships in Wes Anderson’s catalogue, because each of them intuitively understands the other’s suffering. And through his mentor, Zero learns the value of pageantry as a coping mechanism. This is the purest expression of something Wes Anderson has been doing in his movies since Bottle Rocket: he makes his characters do ridiculous things and adhere to ridiculous codes, because if they aren’t occupied they’ll be consumed by their own sadness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a sublime film. It is sublime not in spite of its ridiculousness, but because of it. Pick of the week.

The Wes Anderson Collection — I complimented my survey of Anderson’s movies with these video essays by Matt Zoller Seitz, one of the great film and television critics. It’s a lovely series, with the instalment on The Grand Budapest Hotel being especially fantastic. Seitz dives into the influence of the writer Stefan Zweig on the movie, which only makes it more poignant, considering Zweig’s own wartime displacement. He shares a great deal with Monsieur Gustave.

Music

Sigur Rós: Ágætis byrjun — Yeah, The Life Aquatic made me want to revisit this. It’s rainy as I write this but when I listened to it, it felt like the peak of summer in Vancouver. So, an odd time to listen to a work that nobody seems able to listen to without envisioning glaciers. But whatever. It’s always Iceland in my heart. Ahem. This is exactly what I remember it being: occasionally very moving, with tracks in between that feel like biding time. “Starálfur” is justly overexposed: that chorus will just eat you alive. And I’m a big fan of “Olsen Olsen,” with its big, drunk sounding chorus. The one I loved that I didn’t remember loving is the title track, which indicates to me that after several years with this album, I may not yet be done with the growing process. That’s nice.

Sigur Rós: () — I know I heard Ágætis byrjun and Takk… in high school, because a) I have them on CD, and b) I remember them clearly. But I’m not sure I’d ever actually heard this, which is a shame, because I would have adored it then. To be clear, I adore it now as well. On first listen, I think it has the potential to become my favourite Sigur Rós album. It’s starker and more minimalistic than the albums on either side of it, but it also has more range in terms of how loud it’s willing to get. That makes it really effective. I’ve got to listen to Takk… again. I used to love that. Wonder how it holds up.

Television

Twin Peaks: The Return: Parts 17 & 18 — I have never needed to watch something a second time more than I need to watch Twin Peaks: The Return a second time. Watching this show on a week-by-week basis has provoked the illusion that it is a television show that you can watch like other television shows: expecting effects to result from things that look like causes, and expecting to discover the causes of certain unexplained effects. But Twin Peaks has never worked like that, this most recent season least of all. There’s a moment I love in the first season of Twin Peaks, in the episode that immediately follows the introduction of the Red Room and the Man From Another Place. It’s a scene where Cooper and his colleagues sit around a table and try to make sense of his weird dream. The reason I love this scene has nothing to do with its actual content, and everything to do with what it says about the production of Twin Peaks. The Red Room scene comes from the brilliant episode “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” which shares its writer/director credits with all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return: written by David Lynch and Mark Frost, directed by David Lynch. Neither Lynch nor Frost receive either credit on the following episode. It seems to me that the fact that we got an attempt to make sense of the show’s freakiest sequence in the very next episode is the direct result of Twin Peaks having been made with a rotating crew of directors and writers who are, meaning no disrespect, mostly not surrealist auteurs. They are in the same position as the rest of us when presented with something like the Red Room: i.e. “what the hell do we make of this?!?” And then, like us, they devise possible solutions. It helps that they had access to a character like Cooper who, in his hyperverbalism and supernatural competence, can generally find a compelling explanation for anything. Twin Peaks: The Return has nobody writing or directing save Frost and Lynch, and it has virtually no Dale Cooper. The upshot of this is that as an audience trying to interpret Twin Peaks, we no longer have allies on the inside. Gordon Cole is the closest we get in this season, and it’s foolish to expect David Lynch to put all of the answers in his own character’s mouth. Let me try and express this another way: in the original run of Twin Peaks, there were inexplicable things that happened within the text, but the inexplicability of those things was the primary plot driver. The characters in the show were trying to explain the same stuff that the audience wanted to know. Twin Peaks: The Return is doing something fundamentally different and much more similar to other David Lynch projects like Eraserhead and Inland Empire: the text itself is the mystery. A central question the viewer is forced to pose while watching is simply “why am I being shown this?” Why do we hear lovelorn stories from roadhouse patrons who are irrelevant to the central plotline? Why are we seeing these scenes with Audrey, which don’t seem to connect with anything. What was the purpose of that one random scene with Ben Horne’s secretary’s sick husband? Between seasons two and three of Twin Peaks, the central mystery changed from “what happened” to “why is this show like this.” That’s why I need to watch this all again: because that’s a question that no character in this show — not even a 100 percent awake Agent Cooper — could possibly be equipped to answer. That’s on us.

Comedy

Marc Maron: Too Real — Watched this the day it came out. I really like Marc Maron, by which I mean, I enjoy him as a person. And that’s really what’ll make or break your response to this, because he doesn’t really do a lot of “jokes” in this. Well, he does, but there are long bits where he doesn’t. Maron seems happy, these days. True to form, he doesn’t really know what to do with that happiness, or how to respond to it. But there’s a contentedness about him this time around that’s sort of new. And it’s nice to see. It certainly doesn’t make him less funny. I’ve always appreciated Maron’s willingness to risk his audience not having the same cultural signifiers as him. A joke like “Ronnie’s a problem” won’t work for a crowd that isn’t moderately well versed in Rolling Stones lore, but that doesn’t stop him. The one thing in this that outright does not work is when he does a whole extended bit twice: once as a comedy bit and once as a narrated children’s book, the joke being that his earlier bit basically has the structure of a children’s book. But all he had to do was say that and we’d get it. He doesn’t have to demonstrate. Still, it’s hard to begrudge him because the fact he’s doing it at all is part of the joke. It’s a good special. I laughed a bunch.

Literature, etc.

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (audiobook) — Well this is depressing. I let my Audible subscription go on for a while and accumulated credits I didn’t need, so I cancelled the subscription and nabbed this and Stephen King’s It to get my money’s worth. Claire Danes reads this, and rather well, too. The text itself is certainly not a fun time, but it is an ingenious and affecting story so far. I’ll get into it more next week, at which point I’ll probably be done it.

Podcasts

Radio Diaries: “The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel (Hour Special)” — This was a good Labour Day listen. It’s just the great Studs Terkel, interviewing people about their jobs, in the 70s. It’s fascinating. There’s nothing like archival tape. This really feels like time travel. It’s worth it for the story of the private detective who was hired to catch a butter thief. There’s plenty more than that, but that’s really something.

The Memory Palace: “Two Small Sculptures” — These Metropolitan Museum residency episodes have been a lot of fun, and they really make me want to go to that museum and listen to them all again.

99% Invisible: “The Age of the Algorithm” — Oh nice, 99pi tackled algorithms. This is a really good episode about where the line is between good and troubling algorithms. It’s one of the ones you should hear even if you’re not really a fan of this.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Mother-Daughter Directors Nancy Meyers and Hallie Meyers-Shyer” — A nice interview about a movie I probably won’t watch.

The Heart: “Bodies: Itch” — This is a story about an itchy butthole.

Code Switch: “An Advertising Revolution: “Black People Are Not Dark-Skinned White People” — A Planet Money crossover about the first powerful black ad man. It’s fascinating to hear about the specific ways that an all-white advertising industry was failing to appeal to people of colour. I mean, you obviously know that’s a thing. But this dives into it.

Reply All: “The Case of the Phantom Caller” — Ah, they’re back. This is a real winner. It’s the story of a mysterious series of phone calls that play music, or modem sounds, or the ambience from a basketball game, or a person reading a text or… It’s really unsettling, and the journey to hunt down the answers is fascinating. Pick of the week.

Omnibus (week of July 16, 2017)

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Three picks of the week, this week. It was that kind of week. Also, here’s the latest NXNW segment. It’s a really good one, this week. I talked about three things from very recent weeks that I’ve especially loved. I’m at 2:09:42.

19 reviews.

Movies

Baby Driver — I have a friend who tells a story about how Brian Eno saved his life. “I suffer from tinnitus,” he wrote. “These days I’m mostly able to ignore it, but when I first noticed it, it was terrifying. I couldn’t sleep through the night without having this track (“Music for Airports 1/1”) on repeat in the background, just loud enough to distract me from the buzzing in my own head, just quiet enough to allow me to sleep.” He went on to coin a phrase I like: “societal tinnitus”: the terrifying sensation that the world is inescapably noisy. I know for a fact that he’s not the only person to have found Music for Airports necessary for drowning out one metaphorical tinnitus or another. But music’s function as a tonic runs deeper than a mere physiological response to calming ambient music. Music can offer a near-complete respite from the obligation to be present in the world. When you put in earbuds, you are doing two things in equal measure: connecting yourself to an imaginary reality that exists in a recording, and disconnecting yourself from the auditory portion of the empirical reality around you. It’s wrong to view the latter phenomenon as a byproduct of the former. Your inability to hear while in this state — and increasingly the willingness of others to simply accept that you cannot hear them while wearing earbuds and thus not try to engage you — is a feature, not a bug. “The world is so loud.” To escape, simply superimpose a louder one. Disengage. A pair of shades to avoid unsought after eye contact completes the coping mechanism. Making compulsive use of this function of music is surely unhealthy. But for all that it may cost you, it repays you with moments of unmatched vibrancy in your inner life. Everybody else is walking to work, lining up for a sandwich, waiting for the bus. And you may be doing one of those things too, but you are wholly within yourself: a bespoke intelligence expending the minimum amount of mental energy on the world that begins where you end. This is when you are most yourself. These moments are a joy and a necessity. And the music itself is almost incidental to the appeal. Baby Driver is the first movie I’ve seen that captures, or even attempts to capture, this feeling. When Baby dances down the sidewalk in the long take that makes up the movie’s title sequence, he is allowing “Harlem Shuffle” to subsume his reality. (Ansel Elgort’s essential charmlessness helps to sell Baby’s total disengagement.) When he makes his immaculately choreographed getaways to the strains of various energetic scores, he is imposing his own reality on the world around him. Baby Driver’s relationship with music is different from that of lesser films like Garden State or even High Fidelity, both of which are about how a person’s relationship with specific genres, songs and artists help to inform that person’s identity. Baby Driver isn’t really about any music in particular, but rather about the act of listening itself, and the functions of that act. Baby’s musical taste has little bearing on his character. For Baby, music is neither indulgence nor signifier, but a basic necessity. He requires it to drown out his tinnitus — which he possesses in both literal and metaphorical forms. In a bit of boilerplate but not entirely unrelatable backstory, we see that Baby’s tinnitus and his psychological trauma were caused by the same event. We see that even prior to this event, Baby was using the noise-cancelling properties of Apple earbuds to drown out a noisy household. (“So this is what the volume knob’s for…”) For Baby, music will always first and foremost serve a practical purpose. Baby’s not a music nerd. His taste in music doesn’t serve as personal branding or narrative shorthand. (And what would we be meant to learn about him from the fact that he blasts “Tequila,” anyway?) He simply does not have the freedom to exist without music. He cannot do his job in its absence, and he cannot avoid his literal and metaphorical tinnitusses without it. This is what Buddy misunderstands when he deafens Baby: he’s not taking away something Baby loves, he’s permanently curing the disease that the music was only ever a treatment for. Without tinnitus, Baby is free to continue living his rich inner life unencumbered by the noise of the world and the noise in his head. He is free to be the most himself, always. Deafness is a permanent and equal alternative to the superimposed reality of his iPod. He even already knows sign language. Baby Driver is not a music nerd movie. It is not a movie about listening to music. It’s a movie about not having to listen to the rest of the world, which is loud and confusing and stressful. That is an effect that listening to music has. It is a feature, not a bug. This may turn out to be one of those movies with which I develop an inappropriately intense relationship. Pick of the week.

Television, etc.

Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 10 — Is it foolish to criticize the amount of violence towards women in a show that started off about the brutal murder of a homecoming queen? Because, 26 years later, Twin Peaks still submits its female characters to an awful lot. This, more than any other episode of the season, is where these dubious instincts come out a bit too much. There are three separate instances of physical violence towards women in this, two of which are in the first ten minutes. Also in the first ten minutes is a somewhat troubling sequence in which a woman is too stupid to realize that if she swats a fly that’s sitting on a person’s head, she swats the person as well. Subsequently, she cries for the whole day and asks the swatted man “how can you love me after what I did?” This in spite of the two other women this man keeps around the house wearing the same fetishistic outfit. I mean, she could be up to something, but this is one of very few shows where it’s possible she might just actually be that way. Hmm. Pity too, because it would be a good Lynchian joke if this show were a little bit less dudeish these days. (Where the hell is Audrey??? I’d understand if she’s reluctant to show her face because her son’s a shitsack, but I need her in this show for the same reason I need Cooper back, i.e. I need somebody to start figuring shit out.) I’m also starting to seriously question what the point was of casting Naomi Watts as such a dunce. This hasn’t really stuck out to me over the past nine episodes, but I’m now starting to wonder whether this show’s attitude towards women is actually worse than it was in the early 90s. On the other hand, I’d really like to see more of Harry Dean Stanton singing folk tunes. And I was OVERJOYED to see Rebekah Del Rio, whose performance in Mulholland Dr. is my favourite moment in all of cinema. So, with those notable exceptions, this was my least favourite episode of the season so far. I hope the next few episodes follow through on Part 9’s promise to start allowing plot threads to converge. That, or just do more awesome freakouts like Part 8. If you’re going to be obtuse, GO ALL THE DAMN WAY.

Game of Thrones: “Dragonstone” — Well, this is off to an abruptly better start than the last couple of seasons. I have a lot of trouble getting excited for GoT the way that the rest of the world seems to. But when I actually sit down and watch it, I inevitably remember that I like it. Highlights here include Arya brutally slaughtering dozens of people and shortly thereafter trying to fit in non-awkwardly with a bunch of normal-seeming soldier dudes. Maisie Williams’ forced laughter in this scene is a thing to behold. It’s entirely possible that her performance is my favourite in this show. Also, Sam is attending Gross University. The Hound is gonna find religion. And Jorah is dying slowly. Those are my key takeaways. Mostly I’m just happy that there are no plotlines in this show right now that I’m barely tolerating. Should be a good season.

Deep Cuts: “A Guide to BRIAN ENO” — Oh no, I have a British doppelganger and he’s better and more prolific than me. This is an impressively thorough trip through the Eno catalogue, dealing with his solo albums and collaborations. Oliver J (a cursory Google did not yield a full surname) has some nice bits of analysis in here, like when he points to Eno’s habit of giving descriptive names to his own instrumental credits (e.g. “Snake guitar”) as an indicator of how good he is at communicating about music — and therefore why he’s such a good collaborator. I hadn’t thought of that, and I think about Brian Eno more than just about any artistic figure. It’s a marathon, but it’s worth a watch if you’re trying to parse Eno’s catalogue for stuff you might want to check out.

Porkin’ Across America — This is a very dark story, courtesy of the Onion, about what happens when a man neglects his family in favour of travel, fame, and pork. It starts to get dark immediately, but you have no idea how dark it will get by the last episode. You have no idea.

Games

The Dream Machine: Chapter 5 — Chapter five is the strangest, most discursive and in some ways most ingenious chapter of The Dream Machine. As I said in my review of chapter four, Victor has essentially completed his character arc at this point, and all that remains for him is to save the day with his newfound maturity and empathy. (I’m assuming that’s what chapter six will entail, but I haven’t gotten there.) So, in this penultimate chapter, the devs just cut loose, envisioning two dreams that have little bearing on Victor’s psychology, but which are simply good fun to walk around in. Selma’s dream is probably the most significant accomplishment in the game in terms of its (literal) construction (from clay, cardboard and found objects). The look of the place is a wonder: a hazy fairytale forest in a state of perpetual gloaming. Its crowning glory is the inside of a squirrel’s hidey hole, bark and wood walls all covered in lichen and mushrooms. The detail in these interactive dioramas is like nothing we’ve seen so far. And though its characters are not dealing with struggles that resonate with Victor (the only familial relationship here is Selma and her grandfather, and that relationship is only sketched in broad strokes), they are probably the most memorable group of characters in The Dream Machine. (One of them is, alas, basically the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but with the delightful twist of being actually dead, and still unwilling to acknowledge it.) If I follow my usual theme of this game being the story of a young man learning empathy, then I suppose this chapter’s role is to expose him to subconsciousnesses that are drastically different from his own. The people he meets here are new types of people for him: a persecuted vampire, for instance. Or the mysterious presence that calls itself (themselves?) “Legion”: a seeming manifestation of Mr. Willard’s doubts and anxieties, lurking at the bottom of an abyss. Is it too personal to reveal that Mr. Willard’s dream is the one in this game that most resembles my dreams? Mine tend not to try and kill me quite so often. But when I remember my dreams, which is infrequently these days, they tend to take place in indeterminate, abstract spaces like this. For all that Selma’s dream is the most impressive construction in this chapter, it’s the aggressive simplicity of Mr. Willard’s monochrome stress vision (with Victor appearing in black and white, to boot) that I really love. Both dreams have some of the game’s best (and hardest) puzzles. But this chapter’s real masterstroke is the reveal that its two dreams are connected by a dividing wall, just as Selma’s and Willard’s apartments are, and that it is possible and necessary to transgress this boundary. That central conceit, that you can leverage the logic of one dream world against another to solve its puzzles, is The Dream Machine’s most ingenious idea from a gameplay perspective. The narrative apex of chapter four is ultimately more satisfying than anything in this chapter’s story, but chapter five is more ostentatious, more dazzling, and therefore occasionally more fun. Chapter six will have to be extraordinary to measure up to the standards of its two predecessors. Thank god I don’t have to wait for it this time.

The Dream Machine: Chapter 6 — Wow, this did not end anything like I expected it to. That’s not to say that the ending wasn’t essentially in keeping with my concept of the game’s themes, because it was. But I didn’t expect the ending to be so perverse. The Dream Machine is a game about a man who learns the value of other selves, and by extension he learns how to put himself second. He started the game wishing he could retire to an island and fish for the rest of his life. In this episode, we learn the significance of this image: Victor regards the first time he killed a fish for no good reason as the end of his childhood. It’s also the point where he stopped fishing. So, his island fantasy is a straightforward reversion to childhood. We always knew this, but now we can fill in the blanks. I expected Victor to end the game in a dramatically different place from where he started it, and of course he does. But only emotionally. Physically, he’s trapped in the exact state he’d initially fantasized about, wishing he’d been careful what he wished for. It’s the dark culmination of an unexpectedly dark final chapter. The previous moments find Victor walking back inside his mother’s womb (it’s as literal as that) and performing a coat hanger abortion. That’s ground I never expected this game to tread. I confess to being of two minds about the ending. I see how it makes poetic sense, but I also can’t help but feel it’s a betrayal of Victor’s character arc. Because even if he does end the story with a selfless act that he wouldn’t have been capable of previously, he also does not get to be the father he’s learned to be from his travels through other people’s subconsciousnesses. But focussing on the ending alone isn’t fair, because there’s a whole chapter that leads up to it, and it’s a very good one. It benefits from having (slightly reduced) versions of all of the previous dreams available to explore and manipulate, but it also has its own entirely new area which is one of the game’s best. The centre of the dreamscape is a blacklight fantasy that is effectively one big puzzle. Like the cruise ship of Alicia’s dream in chapter three, it is populated by multiple Victors. But unlike chapter three’s Victors, these Victors are (or were) on the same mission that our Victor is. And so, the game eventually takes the form of Victor having an extended conversation with himself about how to solve the puzzle. The greatest pleasure of chapter six is tapping the other Victors, who are drastically different in their attitudes, for information — and cross referencing that information with what you managed to get out of all of the other Victors. They’ve all tried and failed to solve the same puzzle you’re trying to solve. They’re playing the same video game. So basically, I really liked this chapter, and I’d probably put it above the first three in my ranking. But the ending rankles. And it’s making me see my initial theory, the one I was so proud of, that the whole game is just an enactment of Brian Eno’s song “On Some Faraway Beach” in a very new light. Gradually, throughout this game, Victor came to see that faraway beach as a more lonely and sinister place, and no longer wanted to “die like a baby there,” as Eno sings. (I’ve explained this more thoroughly in previous reviews.) Now it appears he’ll live there forever. And of course, the theme has to be driven home even more perversely with a quote from an entirely different song: “Where I End And You Begin” by Radiohead: a song about a failure of empathy. The devs are to be congratulated for being so wonderfully unpredictable. I need another playthrough to sort out my feelings on this, but altogether, The Dream Machine is a masterful creation, and something that any fan of adventure games should hasten to play.

Music

GZA: Liquid Swords — This is an album I listened to once or twice a couple years back, liked a lot, and am only now revisiting. I find it hard to decide between this and 36 Chambers, honestly. The proper Wu-Tang debut benefits from the presence of nine unique MCs, but Liquid Swords benefits from GZA’s primacy for the exact opposite reasons. The parade of disparate personalities on 36 Chambers keeps it entertaining from front to back, but Liquid Swords is more consistent by virtue of putting Wu-Tang’s most skilled MC up front. (Anybody who doubts this assignation is advised to closely consider GZAs verse on “Duel of the Iron Mic.”) RZA is honestly not one of my favourite beatmakers — his key contribution to Wu-Tang in my view is as the “ideas guy,” curating the Clan’s constellation of recurring cultural touchstones and self-imposed mythologies. But there’s an atmospheric quality of the beats on this that matches GZA’s more contemplative moments pretty well. The only downside to this is that the preponderance of features from other Wu-Tang members come from MCs who aren’t really my favourites. Barring welcome appearances by Method Man on “Shadowboxin,” RZA on “4th Chamber” and a vanishingly small snippet of ODB on “Duel of the Iron Mic,” I don’t really care for any of the feature verses. Still, this is a genuine classic.

Literature, etc.

George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo (audiobook) — This is a beautiful, beautiful book. If you’ve read any of the hype about it, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is primarily a book concerned with history, or with America, or with a president. It is not. The Civil War, and the person of Abraham Lincoln are just a generous seasoning sprinkled overtop of a story that is first and foremost about the universal experiences of grief and regret. Naturally, given that this is a story that takes place in the immediate aftermath of the death of Willie Lincoln, a certain amount of the grief and regret in the story are the grief and regret of President Lincoln. And the brief passages in the book where we get to see inside of his head feature some of Saunders’ most powerful writing. One passage, where Lincoln imagines himself and his wife as two puffs of smoke who became mutually fond and mistook each other for permanences (I’m paraphrasing as nearly as I can since I don’t have the text in front of me; it’s an audiobook) has been particularly haunting me. But the most significant characters in the book are essentially unaware of the war, having died and become trapped in a middle-ground between the world we know (referred to by them as “that previous place”) and the next one, long before any such war ever began. The reason to read this book is not Lincoln; it’s the double act of Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, two deceased people who are deeply in denial of this fact and consumed by regret for what they did and did not do during their time in that previous place. They, and their fellow death deniers are so defined by their regret that they take on physical characteristics that reflect the specific nature of those regrets. (Vollman, who never consummated his marriage, is blighted by a comically large erection. Saunders has him describe it with skillful and hilarious euphemism, e.g. “my enormous disability.” And Bevins, who believes himself to have missed out on appreciating the world’s simple pleasures, is afflicted with an overabundance of sensory organs: far too many eyes and noses, for instance.) The purpose of Lincoln and his son in the narrative is not as a focal point, but rather as a catalyst for Vollman, Bevins and the other denizens of the bardo (that is what this middle-ground is called in Tibetan Buddhism) to understand their condition differently and to see their particular experiences of self-grief and regret in a new light. It could only be the Lincolns who catalyze such a thing, because they are people in a particularly extraordinary situation, dealing with an entirely specific experience of grief. But, their identity as historical figures in a familiar narrative is ultimately secondary to the coincidence of their intersection with the historical nonentities that populate Saunders’ bardo. So, don’t come to this expecting a work of historical fiction or a rumination on a divided America. Come to it expecting a beautiful fantasy, rendered in gorgeous prose, about the saddest moments in human experience. (And do listen to the audiobook. Nick Offerman and David Sedaris’s central performances will make you cry on the bus.) Pick of the week.

Jorge Luis Borges: “Death and the Compass” — Without meaning to, I seem to have read the entire Garden of Forking Paths collection, so I figure I may as well make a concerted effort (though an out-of-sequence one) to read Artifices as well, thus completing the two-part Fictions collection. This strikes me as a superior detective story to Borges’s better-known “The Garden of Forking Paths” and an obvious precursor to some of the most prevalent detective narratives of our era. It might be the times talking, but I see a particular resonance with Twin Peaks. Detective Lönrott’s willingness to explore mystical, kabbalistic elements of the murders taking place could be a direct inspiration for Agent Cooper’s fascination with Zen Buddhism. The twist, which I am about to spoil, is a lovely one in which it is revealed that the detective in this detective story is not simply a plot element trying to figure out what transpired, but also a motivating factor in the crimes themselves. I’d watch a television series about Lönrott. And considering the story’s willingness to entertain the notion of reincarnation, this story could be either the first or the last episode. Get on it, Bryan Fuller.

Podcasts

Mogul: “Gucci Boots” — Here’s where the story starts to get dark. Reggie Ossé and his team discovered a police report that reveals Chris Lighty’s domestic violence record. I think they went about covering this in a really responsible way. In spite of the high regard that Ossé holds Lighty in, he doesn’t make any attempt to mitigate the horror of this side of him. Moreover, he calls the chief communications officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline for advice on how to proceed, and actually puts that conversation on the show. This is the point where Mogul becomes more than just a compelling story and starts to coalesce into a whole biographical portrait.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Twin Peaks: The Return” — I think I’m going to like this show’s new format, but I might start waiting until Friday to listen to both weekly episodes in succession, because I like gulping it down in big chunks. Still, the bit of news at the end of the Tuesday show could serve as a nice way to mark things as they happen rather than once everybody’s forgotten about them. As for the Twin Peaks discussion, it is as contentious a conversation as that show deserves. It speaks to the complexity of Twin Peaks that you can read and hear every opinion on the internet about this show and still not come across your own.

The Turnaround: “Errol Morris” & “Jerry Springer” — The Errol Morris interview is some kind of extended break with reality. Jesse Thorn tries as hard as he can to use Morris’s own tactic of just not saying anything to the interview subject against him, but Morris just meanders nonsensically. Which is not to say that it isn’t entertaining, it’s just… something. There’s a wonderful moment when Morris reaches his most discursive moment only to circle back immediately and unprompted to the question “what even is an interview??” The Jerry Springer interview is most revealing for the fact that Springer also thinks his show is garbage. But he’s also really good at rationalizing why it’s worthwhile regardless. Two episodes that seem out to prove that The Turnaround isn’t trying to be journalism school — it’s way weirder than that.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Keb’ Mo’ & Taj Mahal,” “David Remnick,” “Edie Falco” — After my big doubtful tirade against interviews with artists, all I want to do is listen to interviews with artists. Weird. Let nobody ever hold me to my convictions. The Keb’ Mo’/Taj Mahal double is great mostly because of how temperamentally different they are. Keb’ is thoughtful and considered in his speaking, and Taj is a raconteur par excellence. But they both seem to really enjoy talking to Maron, and that’s the deciding factor on this show. David Remnick is an interesting fellow who has as much range in his conversation as you’d expect from the editor of the New Yorker. But the Edie Falco interview is the best of them, mostly because it’s the sound of Maron’s preconceptions shattering. Like Jesse Thorn said on The Turnaround, Maron’s key move is bringing his preoccupations all with him to the interview and allowing the guest to confirm or deny. Great radio.

The Daily: July 20 & 21 — Two banner episodes of this podcast in as many days. The first features a debrief with the reporters who interviewed the president shortly before, along with (low-quality) audio from that interview. The striking moment is a bit where Trump’s granddaughter comes in the room and starts being adorable. This was one of those moments that happens ever more frequently where I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake. Obviously, it could have been a planned stunt. But there’s no actual reason for me to think that, except that this president constantly tries to reshape reality as he speaks. Regardless, it’s Friday’s episode that stands out. It’s a desperately sad story about women who were taken prisoner and raped repeatedly by ISIS militants. Don’t listen to it unless you want to feel terrible. But it’s important work, undertaken with the utmost discretion. This may well be the defining podcast of this era in the medium. Pick of the week.

Mogul: Cameos: Joan Morgan & N.O.R.E. — Two great bits of tape that were excised from the main story. The N.O.R.E. episode is particularly amusing because everybody involved, including the host, is drunk.

On the Media: “Not Repealed, Not Replaced” & “Doubt It” — Two essential episodes of a show whose essentiality continues unabated into the Trump campaign. First off, Brooke Gladstone calls up her key source for her incredibly effective poverty myths series from last year to give some long-view context to the recent failure of the GOP to repeal and replace the ACA. And in the main episode, she and Bob Garfield revisit their dust-up the morning after the election, which remains the most disquieting and memorable podcast episode of last year. Turns out, Bob Garfield has had a change of heart. I was never quite sure whose side I was on to begin with, so I’m not sure how to react. I will say this: Brooke Gladstone’s constant interrogation of the way we process information and the reasons why we process it that way is unique among current affairs journalists, and it’s been as useful as anybody’s work these past few months. So, Garfield is probably right to swallow his doubts and start taking the long-view.

Radiolab: “The Ceremony” — This is a fun story, but it has a seemingly big twist in it that they make a big deal of but that turns out to be nothing. I’d go into more detail if it had delivered on its promise, but it didn’t, so it’s just another episode, really.

The Nod: “Hunter Green Thong” — This is a great addition to the Gimlet stable. It’s a funny and thoughtful show about blackness. Not something I see myself listening to religiously, but definitely something I’ll check in on from time to time.

Omnibus (week of July 9, 2017)

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Oh, but it’s a good one this week. We’ve got theatre, a pair of superhero blockbusters, some great new music, the start of a chapter-by-chapter rundown of a truly excellent episodic adventure game, and the most unexpected literary classic of recent years from a sports website. Also a metric tonne of podcasts. I’ve been procrastinating again.

32 reviews. Eat up.

Live events

The Merchant of Venice (Bard on the Beach) — Like The Winter’s Tale, this is not a play that I know well. I know it as Shakespeare’s most fraught play, since it is widely considered anti-Semitic. Given my lack of knowledge of the text itself, I can’t easily judge whether that’s the case, because this production is intensely sympathetic to Shylock. It paints him as a man who insists upon his own dignity in spite of the world’s hatred and disregard for him. It paints his ruthlessness as a symptom of the constant abuse he suffers at the hands of Christians. Mind you, that’s present in the play itself to the extent that it allows Shylock the interiority to know his own intentions and the reasoning for them. The “hath not a Jew eyes” is evidence enough that Shakespeare has some sympathy for Shylock. But that only makes it more perplexing that he goes on to ruin Shylock’s life and write him out of the last act. After watching what happens to Shylock in this production, it is almost viscerally unpleasant to watch the play as it refocuses on the foibles of newlyweds. This is probably intentional: director Nigel Shawn Williams makes clear in his notes that he is more interested in the play’s struggles for dignity and power than with its romances. He associates this theme of struggling for dignity with Shylock, Jessica, Portia and Antonio: the latter two of which I have a bit of trouble accepting — Antonio in particular. But nonetheless, it is the struggle between Antonio and Shylock that really soars in this production, thanks in very large part to excellent performances by Edward Foy and (especially) Warren Kimmel. Kimmel will also be performing in Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock in September, and I’m going to get my tickets real quick. The lovers are less inspired. This is partially due to the decision to turn the males in these plotlines into insufferable nightlife dudebros, but it’s mostly because some of them really shout a lot more than they need to. Still, on the whole, I enormously enjoyed this. It’s probably my favourite of the three Bard productions I’ve seen so far.

Literature, etc.

Amanda Petrusich: “MTV News, Chance the Rapper, and a Defense of Negative Criticism” — Whither music criticism? “Pivot to video.” Sigh. This is a lovely piece about the importance of the sort of music writing that doesn’t depend on access. I feel it ties in slightly with what I wrote about the first episode of The Turnaround last week, particularly Petrusich’s last graf: “A funny thing about journalism is that it’s contingent upon the willful participation of a subject; a reporter always needs a reliable, talkative source. People agree to coöperate with journalists for reasons of self-promotion or, on rare occasions, moral obligation. But criticism doesn’t require its subject to acquiesce. For anyone accustomed to high degrees of control, this can seem, at first, like an affront. But well-rendered criticism confirms that the work is high stakes. This criticism can be illuminating and thrilling, and might offer an important vantage on a very private experience. It is, at least, less strangulating than a feedback loop of endless, bootless flattery.” Read the rest.

Jon Bois: 17776 — If you’d told me in January that one of the highlights of my pop culture year would be a story about football that came from SB Nation, I… would probably have believed you but also been very surprised. This story of life in the inconceivably distant future is one of the most effortlessly, unassumingly funny, bittersweet and occasionally heartbreaking stories I’ve come across in a very long time. The fact that it’s so surprising and so totally different from anything else I’ve ever seen a major news/sports/culture publication do is only part of the appeal of this. Mostly, it just knows exactly what it is and follows through again and again. I’ll try not to spoil too much, because the novelty and element of surprise are nice. But a certain amount of spoilers are inevitable from here on out. Basically, 17776 is a story about a world where people stopped dying, stopped aging (or, stopped aging involuntarily at least), stopped getting sick, and invented a way to prevent all accidental death and injury. It envisions a world where the people who inhabit earth in the year 17776 are for the most part the same set of people who inhabit the earth now. Having arrived in a post-scarcity world, where even time is not scarce, humanity (particularly the American portion of it) now occupies itself with increasingly long, large-scale and absurd games of football. It is largely told from the point of view of three incredibly loveable protagonists, all of them space probes launched in the 20th and 21st centuries who have over time become sentient. It just took me 126 words to describe the premise of this thing. That should give you some sense of its amazing strangeness. Pioneer 9 is our real protagonist, and our audience surrogate. The story begins with Nine finally attaining sentience and having a whole lot of questions. Fortunately, their little sister (or big sister, depending how you think about it) Pioneer 10 is around to explain the new status quo. The third main character, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is the story’s masterstroke. You know that slacker dude you used to hang out with who also might be the smartest person in the world? That’s JUICE. Reading this trio’s banter is an unbelievable pleasure. Each of them is a perfectly defined character who is more than what they seem: more compassionate, more astute, wiser. Jon Bois is a weird writer with his own voice and a sensibility unlike anybody else, but he’s also got the basics down pat, and he knows how to write characters that provide a human throughline in a story that involves really quite a lot of talking about football. Okay, let’s touch on that. I have seen a total of two, maybe three football games in my life and my grasp of the rules is laughably rudimentary. But I ate up the sections of 17776 that are about the gameplay and logistics of future football games. As a work of speculative fiction, 17776 is very whimsical. But as a set of works of speculative football, it is impressively rigorous. Bois uses the premise of the story to propose several wonderful games of borderline Dadaist football, mostly with fields that stretch across several states. In one, the end zones are in Washington and New Mexico, but the field is still just the width of a normal football field, so you have no choice but to climb mountains, jump off cliffs, etc. if you want to move the ball. In another, Bois asks how a contemporary NHL game might evolve if it were allowed to continue nearly indefinitely. He devises a parody of commercial football so absurd that it may well be my new favourite fictional anti-cap parable. Here’s the moment when I fell in love with JUICE, as he explains his love for this game to Ten, lack of apostrophes and all: “this IS capitalism you donk. this is what its supposed to be, this is how it ends. if it isn’t there its only because it isnt there yet. its like youre staring at a cake in the oven and wondering if its gonna be a cake. things went the other direction in america and thank god for that. but capitalism deserves a zoo like this one. it’s a beast of the wild, as wild as any grizzly bear with fawn’s blood in its mouth. i think you see deeds and contracts and bureaucratic bloat and see that something went wrong. something was ALWAYS wrong y’all. i love it. i love to watch it. in a zoo, where it can’t hurt me.” Unspeakably brilliant. This is the same character who waxes nostalgic for Lunchables and spells “Wolverine” as “wolferine.” He’s the best. Jon Bois’ brain works in crazy ways. There are tossed off observations here that for other people would become the premises of whole stories. I’m thinking particularly of a moment where Al Capone and his brother are likened to Greek gods, and then Bois points out that they lived in a town called “Homer.” It’s infuriatingly clever. But we’re yet to touch on the single greatest thing about 17776, which is that it fashions from its premise an idea about humanity’s place in the universe and why we are drawn to aimless, arbitrary pursuits like playing and watching football. The “intermission” section of the story features Bois’ most beautiful writing. Through the mouthpiece of Ten, Bois offers a picture of humanity’s purpose and destiny that outstrips Star Trek by basically inverting it. The humans of 17776 are bittersweet creatures who long ago stopped striving. This is not fine, but there’s nothing to be done. So, they play football. As JUICE says, “the point of play is to distract yourself from play being the point.” As an obsessive consumer of a frankly unwise amount of pop culture, I feel that I can sympathize with the sports fan impulse that produced a sentiment like this. If we really have so much left to accomplish, and such a great destiny, shouldn’t we feel inconceivably terrible about wasting so much time? And even in a world where time is not a factor, it’s hard to look at a passive humanity as anything other than a failure. This is what these characters are grappling with. This is something that the very obsessive among us understand best, provided that the obsession in question is essentially non-generative and consumerist. 17776 is the saddest and most inspiring thing I’ve read this year. It is extraordinary. Also, it is the only work of fiction that will ever make you mourn for a light bulb. I’m serious, Bois turns a light bulb into the most important thing in the universe. This is what the internet was always supposed to be. We need more Jon Bois. Pick of the week.

Television, etc.

Pretty Good: “I Wish Everyone Else Was Dead” — Here is more Jon Bois. Pretty Good is a YouTube series he does “about stories that are pretty good.” This particular instalment is about 24, the single most fucked up show I have ever watched (and liked in spite of myself). 24 is a show that takes suspension of disbelief to an entirely new level. It makes you suspend your entire value system: your entire reality. Bois points to the ruthlessness with which the show kills its named characters and the ways that people die to make a very clever point about America’s Goliath complex and the tendency of the privileged to think themselves persecuted. It also really highlights how incredibly gruesome the show was by cutting together a bunch of its cruellest moments. Other highlights include insights about 24 as a form of post-9/11 wish-fulfilment (it in large part negates the war on terror) and its incredibly fraught relationship with the office of the president. It is frankly unfair that a sports writer should also be this insightful about television. Watch this.

Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 9 — Exactly the episode that we needed after last episode’s abstract freakout. This is the most classically Twin Peaks this series has felt since it returned, mostly because it actually features people figuring things out instead of people treading water as more and more inexplicable things transpire around them. Don’t misunderstand me: I really like the show in the latter mode as well. But now that we’re in the back half of this season, I am ready for things to start coming together. Is it foolish to expect that between Gordon and his FBI cohorts, Truman and his Twin Peaks deputies, and the trio of clownlike Buckhorn detectives, we may have enough investigative advances at hand here to bring the Dougie Jones plotline to an end next week? Because I am still very much in need of Dale Cooper in this show.

Movies

Spider-Man: Homecoming — Third time’s a charm. I grew up a Spider-Man fan, but my enthusiasm for the character flagged with each passing cinematic adaptation. I am far less fond of Sam Raimi’s trilogy (yes, even the second one) than most, and the Andrew Garfield franchise was DOA. But this! Oh, this! This movie is light on its feet! And it’s completely lacking in the ostentatious moralizing that defined previous incarnations! Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is every inch the clever misfit I want Spider-Man to be. The opening sequence of the movie, in which he excitedly vlogs his way through his initial encounter with the Avengers in Civil War, sets the tone of ecstatic joy that the bulk of the movie traffics in. This is what I’ve been missing in superhero movies. Even the last Guardians of the Galaxy sidelined its comic lead in a misbegotten daddy problems plot. (The closest we get to that here is in a plotline with Tony Stark, and frankly it’s him who’s got the daddy problems.) This movie just allows Peter Parker to be a goofy kid trying to get a date while also trying to save the day. Classic Spider-Man. Moreover, the stakes aren’t at the permanently escalating heights of the Avengers movies: this is primarily a movie about your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. He negotiates curfews with his super cool Aunt May. (Casting Marissa Tomei was a masterstroke: she’s the last person you’d expect to play that role, which revitalizes it completely.) He helps an old woman and gets a churro for his troubles. He raises the ire of a housing block by setting off a car alarm. I love all of this. And I really love the film’s brief excursion into the suburbs, which are not Spider-Man’s natural habitat. The film’s weak moments are its huge action setpieces, which feel like they could come from any other Marvel movie with any other combination of heroes and villains. But these are refreshingly far apart, and they’re enlivened by a Michael Keaton performance by Michael Keaton who continues to play wingèd super persons, even after having parodied himself for doing just that. Having the villain of the first movie for this Spider-Man be small potatoes like Vulcan was a great call. It further localizes Spider-Man as a non-international superhero, and a street level personality, without the gigantic platforms of a Tony Stark or a Steve Rogers. But as fun as Keaton and Tomei are, Homecoming’s best supporting performances come from its ensemble of convincingly teenage teenagers, from Peter’s crush Liz, the classic overachieving senior, to his would-be tormentor Flash (played by Tony Revolori; I kept hoping he’d get captured so I could shout “GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY LOBBY BOY!”). The movie’s absolute MVP is Jacob Batalon as Peter’s best friend Ned. This guy is so exactly the guy who should be Peter Parker’s best friend that I can’t believe anybody ever thought James Franco fit-for-purpose. I really hope Ned doesn’t turn out to be the Hobgoblin. There are too many delightful moments in this to get to. I haven’t mentioned Donald Glover, who plays straightman to Holland in one of the film’s funniest scenes. I haven’t mentioned Peter’s rapport with the strangely empathetic yet bloodthirsty AI who talks to him in his suit. All of it is good. This is now tied with Civil War for the title of my favourite Marvel movie. I still resent universes and franchise juggernauts, but every so often Marvel makes a movie good enough to make me forget about that.

Wonder Woman — Now that awkward moment after giving a great review to the SIXTH Spider-Man movie where you admit to having mixed feelings about the ONLY major superhero movie with a female protagonist. My general thoughts are that Wonder Woman is fantastic, Gal Gadot is fantastic, and the movie’s take on the character is solid. It makes her comical without undermining her power, and powerful without being stolid and bland like the other DC heroes are these days. But I wasn’t a big fan of the straightforward punch-em-up war movie that she finds herself in here. The third act is particularly bland. But fuck my opinion. This is utterly necessary. The acclaimed no-man’s land sequence is pretty magnificent, and should become a cultural touchstone, at least until we get a better Wonder Woman movie, which I trust we will.

Music

John Luther Adams/The Crossing: Canticles of the Holy Wind — Another lovely offering from new music’s poet of the elements. Though this choral piece is not entirely original — some of the best moments are also present in his wonderful piece for strings, Canticles of the Sky — it feels like a new direction for Adams, whose music does not generally revolve around voices. However, with the new national prominence of The Crossing, the extraordinary Philadelphia chamber choir who astonished even more thoroughly on Ted Hearne’s record from earlier this year, he’s got access to an ensemble with the chops for his often sustained and minimal music. But the choral medium alone isn’t the only new innovation here. Adams also takes advantage of the extraordinary voices at his disposal to write music that relies on the play of birdsong against silence. I’m not sure there’s anything else in Adams’ recent oeuvre that is as staccato and abrupt as “Cadenza of the Mockingbird,” nor can I think of anything he’s written that requires the same level of ostentatious virtuosity from the musicians. That said, it isn’t a highlight of the work. High voices imitating birds wears out its welcome more quickly than Adams thinks. And there are other weak points: “The Singing Tree,” with its ceaseless triangle tinkling crosses the line from a genuine conjuration of the majesty of nature to nature boy drum circle nonsense. My impression of this might change with repeated listens, but I generally come to Adams for music of peace and majesty (The Light that Fills the World for the former, the world-destroying magnificence of Become Ocean for the latter). Canticles of the Holy Wind presents a picture of nature not only in all its majesty, but also all its banality. This is a worthwhile thing to do, especially with access to as versatile an ensemble as The Crossing. But it makes for a rougher listen than some of Adams’ other music. Still, there is much to marvel at here, and I far prefer it to 2015’s percussion music recording with Glenn Kotche.

Offa Rex: The Queen of Hearts — This is as great as I’d hoped, though to be fair, the feature episode of All Songs Considered on this from a while ago dropped enough hints at its greatness that it was a relatively sure bet. I likely wouldn’t have listened to this if not for the Decemberists’ involvement, but it is much more Olivia Chaney’s album than it is theirs. Mind you, they sound great, and the notion that they’d be involved in an English folk revival… revival album is entirely in character. But I challenge you to not get a bit miffed when Colin Meloy starts singing on the his two vocal features. Chaney’s voice is an incredible instrument, but better still she knows what to do with it. On the title track, listen to how she gradually sings more and more with the lead guitar throughout the song, eventually harmonizing with it. And the best track has no Decemberists on it at all, as far as I can tell: Chaney’s harmonium-adorned rendition of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Say what you like about the Roberta Flack version, and there is much good to be said. But Chaney’s version strips everything about the song, including the chord progression, down to the most basic possible version of itself. And the way she delivers the melismas at the ends of the lines is just chilling. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s “Sheepcrook and Black Dog,” which is the album’s best evocation of the more rock and roll side of the English folk revival. It even gestures towards Jethro Tull at times: shades of “No Lullaby” and “Velvet Green.” I’m still waiting for somebody to write something detailed about the provenance of each of these songs. I’d really like to do a deep dive into this, and listen to some of the 60s and 70s recordings of these, as well as earlier acoustic versions, if they exist. But some are obvious. For now I’m going to listen to “The Old Churchyard” again. One of my favourite albums of the year.

Steeleye Span: Hark! The Village Wait — Is it wrong to like this more than Liege and Lief? Because on first listen, I do. “The Dark-Eyed Sailor” and “Lowlands of Highland” are particularly attractive. It’s just old folk songs performed well, with electric instrumentation. It’s sort of undeniable. I can feel myself sinking into a British folk rock phase. Thanks, Offa Rex.

Games

The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 — I realized recently that the sixth and final chapter of this magnificent game came out two months ago! How did I not hear? In any case, it’s been long enough since I’ve played this that I think it’s wise for me to play it from the beginning again, which will be a pleasure anyway. I’m going to take this one chapter at a time, like I did with Kentucky Route Zero when the most recent episode of that came out. The first chapter of The Dream Machine isn’t really demonstrative of what’s great about it: it doesn’t really come alive until you encounter the dream machine itself. But its visual aesthetic is instantly impressive — the headline for The Dream Machine is that it’s a handmade point-and-click adventure game, where every image is constructed from cardboard, clay and found objects. That is astonishing in itself, though the built environments are better in episodes that aren’t so tied to the apartment complex that is the game’s primary setting. But visuals aside, on a second playthrough, it’s really clever how this episode plants seeds of the themes to come throughout its relatively simple story. Starting the game in a dream is an obvious, but profitable choice. Firstly, it establishes what the game’s primary modus operandi: namely, cardboard and clay constructions of dreams. Secondly, it offers a crash course in the psychology of our protagonist, Victor. Should you allow the conversation to drift in a particular direction, Victor’s wife Alicia will be kind enough to do the armchair psychoanalysis for you. Victor’s dream of a desert island is an escapist fantasy that allows him to get away from his doubts about the new life he’s about to embark upon in a new apartment with his expectant wife and regress to a situation where his own self is the most important thing in his world. And indeed, there are plenty of indications throughout this chapter that Victor Neff is a bit of a man-child, from his self-assurances that he’ll start up his music career again once the apartment is set up to the ever-present conversation options that imply he can sometimes be a bit of a selfish jerk to Alicia. This is very clever exposition, since The Dream Machine is shaping up to be a sort of delayed coming-of-age story for Victor. (Bear in mind that I’m yet to play the final chapter.) He’ll be spending subsequent chapters tramping through other people’s subconsciouses (including Alicia’s, which is teased in this chapter), which is as direct a way to learn empathy as exists. That’s what I love most about The Dream Machine: it doesn’t just contrive a roughshod frame narrative as an excuse to make you solve puzzles inside of dream worlds, it actually works as an arc for its protagonist as well. Throughout The Dream Machine, Victor finds the tools to get out of his own head by literally getting inside the heads of others. Having not played the final chapter yet, I can only conjecture, but I assume this will assuage some of his fears and doubts about starting a family. The appeal of this is coming back quickly. A couple of additional observations: another theme that first emerges near the end of this chapter is voyeurism. (The game’s tagline positions this front-and-centre: “an award-winning game about dreams and voyeurism.”) Alicia thought the camera above the bed was creepy. Just wait. Also, the dream sequence at the start of this is my first bit of evidence for a personal crackpot theory: that The Dream Machine is a long and detailed enactment of the Brian Eno song “On Some Faraway Beach.” I’ll develop this theory in later reviews, as I gather more evidence. But to start, I’ll just point out that the song is a work of deliberate escapism to a place where there are no other human souls around to care for or to rely on. And I’ll also mention that the devs confirmed their Eno fandom to me on Twitter. So that’s a start.

The Dream Machine: Chapter 2 — This is where things really get going. Mr. Morton’s dream is the first proper one in the game, but nonetheless one of the most abstract. Where subsequent dream sequences will convey something close to a possible physical space (though Edie’s dream deconstructs this observation and Willard’s contradicts it entirely), Morton’s takes place in an abstract world seemingly constructed entirely of the anxieties and traumas brought upon him by a lineage of flawed and obsessive forebears. We meet the three previous male members of the Morton lineage as huge stone heads, and we learn about their relationships to each other. We learn that our Mr. Morton was coddled by a sympathetic father as an antidote to the abuse he received from his grandfather. Victor doesn’t even know what’s going on yet and already the dream machine is teaching him about parenting. This theme will become less explicit in future episodes, but it behooves the game to lay its cards out at this early stage. In terms of gameplay, this is also where we get our first substantial puzzles, with the dream journal sequence, getting each statue to talk, and finding Mr. Morton. From the start, I thought that this game had some of the best puzzles I’ve ever encountered, if only because they are fair. A moderately skilled puzzle solver won’t get stuck very much in The Dream Machine, which is good, but the puzzles still require you to observe closely and think through possibilities. (I recall chapter five’s puzzles being several levels harder, but we’ll get there.) The only problem I had with the puzzles in this chapter, this time, was that it took me a while to realize (indeed, remember) that there were hatches on the sides of the statues. They’re hard to see, and it always sucks when your failure results from a design element being virtually invisible. But it’s a vanishingly minor quibble, and honestly, the meat of the game doesn’t really start until the next chapter. The first two chapters are thematic and narrative exposition and throat clearing. They’re wonderful, but the best is yet to come. Now, what you all came for: more evidence for my theory that this entire game is actually about the Brian Eno song “On Some Faraway Beach.” Only one piece this time, but it’s the first substantial one: the title of the song — phrased exactly that way, with the word “some” rather that “a” or whatever other article — is one of the key repeating phrases in Morton’s dream journals. This isn’t the last time it’ll be namechecked in the game. But, as I implied in the chapter one review, the game and the song do have a compelling thematic link. “Given the chance,” sings Eno, “I’ll die like a baby on some faraway beach.” This is Victor’s attitude at the start of the game: jealous of his unborn child, and wishing to revert back to a pre-adult state. I also see a hint of Mr. Morton in some subsequent lyrics: “Unlikely I’ll be remembered/as the tide brushes sand in my eyes I’ll drift away.” Morton was thrust into his family’s legacy from early childhood, against his will. Even in old age, he still was unable to come to terms with that legacy, or the extent to which it had eaten up his life. Morton dies childless, breaking the cycle and providing a useful negative role model for Victor. And Morton’s final wish is for his life’s work, and his family’s, to be destroyed. Better to be forgotten than to be remembered for something hideous.

The Dream Machine: Chapter 3 — I am remembering now that this is my least-favourite episode of The Dream Machine, though it is still, on balance, excellent. This is the episode where the puzzle structure is most obvious: complete three tasks for three different people, then complete three more tasks for those same three people to get to the endgame… the wires are on display here a little more than in other episodes. Plus, it contains fewer areas to explore than other chapters. But the puzzles themselves are delightful and the premise of the episode is solid. Here, Victor finds himself inside his wife’s recurring dream — and face to face with a gaggle of clones of himself, each of them one of Alicia’s subconscious impressions of a facet of Victor’s personality. In spite of the fact that nearly all of the characters in this chapter are clones of the player character, they’ve all been given different postures to reflect their different personalities. The dreamer’s resting position is looking up at the sky. The pompous one has his arms behind his back at all times. The player character just keeps slouching his way through the game. It’s the small details that make this game great. I especially love it once it turns into a detective story. Investigating Victor Eleven’s disappearance is a great opportunity for the writers to show different elements of the same story through the voices of very different characters. The conspiratorial busboy is the highlight of the episode, for me. You can tell from the way that others talk about him that he’s the sort of guy who’s always got a conspiracy theory, but it just so happens that this time he’s right. Psychoanalytically, this is a harder one to parse than the first two episodes. But I think my central contention that this game is about a man learning empathy pulls through, here. This is literally a case of Victor seeing himself as somebody else sees him. Fortunately for his ego, the person whose eyes he’s seeing through is somebody who loves him, and who also knows him well enough to know that he contains multitudes: hundreds of Victors who vary from moment to moment in intelligence, self-sufficiency, leadership, and the propensity for ambition, pretension, paranoia and good humour. Another person’s dream of Victor might have been more disillusioning. Also, boy, does this ever get creepy at the end. This is The Dream Machine’s equivalent of the mid-album slump, but we’re right on the precipice of some of my favourite moments in any adventure game. If memory serves, Chapter Four made me all verklempt last time. Alas, no further evidence for my crackpot Brian Eno theory in this one. Will report back.

The Dream Machine: Chapter 4 — This isn’t the most formally inventive chapter of The Dream Machine; that’s chapter five (bearing in mind that I still haven’t played the final chapter). But it may be my favourite. This is the point where the segments between dream sequences start to really work. The sequence of puzzles that allows you into Edie’s dream is ingenious, and by far the hardest thing in the game so far. It took me ages to figure out the first time. But as with the previous two chapters, the main event is the dream sequence itself. Edie’s dream is my favourite in the game’s first five chapters. The kind old lady’s mind, as Mr. Morton tells us in chapter one, is not as sharp as it once was. And indeed, her memories are literally fraying around the edges. The people she once knew, and the person she once was, are aloof spectres in her subconscious. The fragility and mutability of the dream is moving in itself, but it’s made deeper by what we learn about Edie’s life from the tableaus that we see in each room of her dream apartment. And again, the focus is on family. Edie spent her younger years in a not entirely happy marriage with a very pious man. Her husband, whoever he was — his dream self is a fading cipher from Edie’s past — has parental issues to match Mr. Morton’s. The bulk of this dream deals with the end of life and the death of Edie’s mother-in-law, a stern and ruthless figure who haunts her so much that the dream machine takes on her form. The most telling moment occurs in the bathroom of the dream apartment, which Edie’s subconscious has repurposed as a memorial for two late family members: Edie’s mother-in-law, and her child, who presumably died in infancy. When you shoehorn Edie’s younger, spectral self into this room along with the ghost of the mother-in-law, they stand together by the child’s grave. And the latter says “Sin brings forth death.” Which is, just, an incredibly shitty and unkind thing to say. And it’s the kind of thing that sticks with you, because it prompts guilt. And, in one of the game’s very best images, we see that Edie’s elderly self is tethered to her memories by the image of her mother-in-law. So, if it’s guilt and regret that are keeping her in this decaying, dilapidated mental space, perhaps it is best to let go. The ending of chapter four is the most affecting moment in the first five chapters of The Dream Machine, because it finds Edie drifting away from her memory palace, presumably losing that part of herself forever — but also losing the trauma that comes with those memories. It is perhaps the most gentle and loving portrayal of a person with dementia I’ve seen in a work of fiction. And as with everything in The Dream Machine, it has profound emotional consequences for Victor. His final exchange with Edie is the closest thing he has to a specific moment of epiphany. He realizes, with Edie’s help, that he’s doing something extraordinary for the sake of his family. It isn’t just the implicit nature of dreams that’s helping Victor to accept the forthcoming new phase of his life as a father, it is also the explicit threat that the machine poses to his family. This is the moment when all of Victor’s character development in the first three episodes comes to a head. For the first time he realizes consciously that something has changed inside him. And the fact that this change is finally expressed among the detritus of Edie’s regrets — all of which are risks for Victor: the risk of a child’s death, of a failed marriage, and of not escaping your own lineage — just heightens the effect. And Edie caps it all off with yet another explicit Brian Eno reference: “We’re just sandcastles, Victor. I’m sure some part of me will reform on some faraway beach somewhere down the line. Perhaps we’ll meet again there.” Edie, in the end, is alone. Her bridge club can hardly substitute for the relationships that, for better or worse, defined her earlier life. Victor started this story dreaming of some faraway beach where he could be alone and life could be simple. Now, with Edie’s bittersweet farewell, he sees the lonely side of that fantasy and he’s ready to return to reality. If memory serves, chapter five is less explicitly concerned with Victor’s character arc, which is fine. Putting this crucial moment at the end of chapter four allows the devs one episode to just indulge in some intense formalism before getting back to the story’s main thrust. But unless chapter six unseats it, this right here is the defining chapter of The Dream Machine.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “New Mix: St. Vincent, Mogwai, Benjamin Clementine, My Bubba, More” — This finds Bob Boilen in a distractingly mellow mood, frankly. I’m all for chill, but Boilen’s side of this mix is very very chill. I came to hear the new St. Vincent song, which is very lovely but doesn’t really offer any insights about what a hypothetical forthcoming St. Vincent album might sound like. The standout here, if only for its total commitment to its own weirdness, is the Benjamin Clementine track. I didn’t know this guy, and I can’t say I’m entirely sold on the basis of the track they played here — it’s really overwrought, though possibly intentionally so. But it is definitely not like anything else, and considering that my favourite music from last year included John Congleton and Let’s Eat Grandma, I’m sort of starving for that right now.

The Daily: July 11-12 — I have been meaning to check out this new trend of daily news podcasts for a while, and this seemed to be the one. NPR’s entry into the budding canon sounds like a newscast, which is not a thing I like or see the point of. And I’m aware of The Outline World Dispatch. I may in fact have neglected to review an episode or two of it, but I am generally fond of it. However, the New York Times’ rendition of this evolving new form is the clear current gold standard. Michael Barbaro is a personable and smart host, and the one-two story format serves the listener well. The two episodes I heard this week dealt with the Donald Trump Jr. emails, and was a great way to get my head around that story. There is an element of “behind the story” to Barbaro’s approach here, which is welcome given the extent to which the Times is a major player in the way that events have transpired with this. Other stories about the devastation of Mosul and the reintegration of thousands of rebel fighters into Colombian society make it reassuringly clear to me that this is not going to be all Trump all the time, or even all American federal politics all the time. And thank god, because there’s a whole world out there. This is one of the great innovations in the recent history of podcasts, and shame on the world’s public broadcasters for letting a newspaper perfect it first.

Love and Radio: “The Boys Will Work It Out” — WOW this is something. Our main character is a prolific author of Lord of the Rings slashfic and an enthusiastic sexual roleplayer as Elijah Wood. Through the magic of radio, we’re even treated to an enactment of one of those fantasies with Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan soundalikes. Listen advisedly.

StartUp: “Building the Perfect Cup of Coffee” — Worth listening to for the delight of hearing a cup of coffee described as “plump without being… portly.” But man, has this season of StartUp ever evaporated on impact. This is one of the shows that kicked my obsession with podcasts into high gear. First there was Radiolab and 99pi, then there was season one of StartUp. Amidst that company, Serial doesn’t even register. The thrill of listening to Gimlet coalesce in real time was and is one of the glories of the medium. And I enthusiastically stayed onboard for season two, the Dating Ring season, which I idiosyncratically consider season one’s equal. Season three’s non-serialized format didn’t do much for me, but Lisa Chow brought the show back in magnificent fashion for season four, the story of the fall and rise of Dov Charney. The lesson here ought to be that this show is best when it’s serialized, and particularly good when it’s serialized in real time. I’d gladly listen to another season in the vein of season two, about a company that is in the midst of its startup struggles. But failing that, I think I might have to reduce this show to sometimes food status.

Criminal: “The Procedure” — A marvellous entry in the “crimes of conscience” category of Criminal episodes. This is about a network of clergy who would help women safely get abortions in places where they were illegal. Wonderful stuff.

The Sporkful: “Why Lefties Buy Less Soup” — Aww, I thought it was going to be about why liberals buy less soup. That would have been interesting. Still, a fun episode, though I remember most of this from the introduction of The Flavor Bible, which posits that flavour is the result of a confluence of factors above and beyond mere taste. Visual stimuli and social context, just to give two examples, also affect your experience of food. Also I am SO HAPPY to hear that Dan Pashman favours the inside-out pizza folding technique. I do this as well, and it is so good that I feel like I am constantly surrounded by idiots: outside-in folding assholes who are just rubbing bread all over their tastebuds instead of the delicious cheese and sauce alternative that’s RIGHT THERE on the other side of the slice. THANK YOU, Dan.

Home of the Brave: “The Continental Divide, Part Two” — I am so conflicted about these “talking to Trump voters” stories. On the one hand, you can trust Scott Carrier not to be condescending or self-abnegating, both of which are death in these contexts. But even if the conversations are civil, which these are, how do you make headway with a person who constructs reality in a way that’s entirely different from you? On one hand, I can accept that a guy who’s been involved in fracking for decades knows more about it than I do. Much more. But I’m also inherently suspicious of that person’s perspective, because the practice is normalized for him. I know this territory very well, given that I am a current, self-identified coastal elite who nonetheless grew up in a blue-collar oil town where everybody is delusional about climate change. Where I grew up, the notion that the Alberta oil sands are somehow sinister is laughable. It’s not because anybody especially takes pride in the industry — though in these divided times, that pride appears to be taking root retroactively, as a defense mechanism. It’s because the oil sands are normal. When I talk about the negative impact of the oil industry with friends and family from Fort McMurray, I may as well be telling them that shoes are evil, because the collective impact of all our human stomping is making the earth uninhabitably small. Global shrinking. It’s a ridiculous notion because shoes are too normal to be harmful. I’m getting off topic. My point is that Carrier is right to think that the two sides of divided America need to be able to talk to each other, but I don’t actually know what he or I is supposed to learn from that exchange. Ultimately I still think that systematic learning and teaching that can be expressed in statistics, research and reasoned argument in both academic and media spheres is the way to draw conclusions about the world. And the fact that at least two of the people Carrier interviewed expressed doubts about the value of education relative to the value of their specific lived experiences makes me crazy. Anecdotal experiences are valuable, but if you shape your worldview around them in opposition to the best available information (which happens every time poverty comes up in this program), you’re just wrong. And I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that.

The Heart: “People Who Need People” — Lovely. This rerun is The Heart at its simplest: a relationship forms in the crucible of a difficult moment of somebody’s life. That’s the whole of it. But it’s worth revisiting in light of recent events in the characters’ lives.

The Turnaround: Episodes 2-6 — Okay, I’ve fallen into this in a big way. In spite of my previously-stated doubts about the necessity for so many interviews of artists in the world, I do think interviewing in general is an absolutely fascinating craft, and this is the deepest dive into it that I’ve heard, though Longform is often about interviewing also. Let’s take these one at a time. Susan Orlean’s interview is most notable because she’s so completely different from Jesse Thorn in the product she’s trying to make. She can go down rabbit holes with very little hope of getting anything useable because ultimately interviewing is an exploratory process for her. She’s learning what the story is as she goes. The Marc Maron episode is one of the highlights for basically the opposite reason: he’s probably the closest of all of the interview subjects so far to Thorn’s method. And this actually made me realize that Maron has a way of getting around the arts interview pitfall that I identified in my last post on this show (i.e. that there’s no way for the journalist’s insight to factor into an interview without making the guest superfluous). Maron goes into every interview with an idea of why people are the way they are and why they do what they do. And in the interview, he takes the opportunity to present an artist with his impression of them and have them either confirm or deny it. Or, more likely, just to complicate and deepen it. It’s a way he has to get past the branding. That’s valuable, and I guess it’s what makes Maron my favourite interviewer of artists. Audie Cornish is probably the guest on this program whose work I am least familiar with (Pop Culture Happy Hour notwithstanding), just because I’m Canadian and we have our own daily news programs up here. But her episode is the highlight of The Turnaround so far. It gets a bit contentious when Thorn presses her on the supposed dispassionate delivery of NPR hosts, and she kind of schools him. It obviously affected Thorn’s thinking profoundly, because he brings up that moment in nearly all of the other interviews. The Larry King episode is the least valuable, partially because he’s the worst interviewer on the show and partially because Thorn lets him get sidetracked from the topic of interviewing. But, I mean, he’s Larry King. What are you going to do? And then there’s Brooke Gladstone, who is simply the most valuable person in the entire American media. Hearing her talk extemporaneously is incredible because she is preternaturally gifted with the ability to put complicated ideas in a logical sequence. It’s really similar to listening to Reza Aslan talk. The only reason it’s not the best episode of the show is that she did a longer interview on Longform a while back that covers some of the same ground. The Turnaround is some of the most fascinating radio of the year. Can’t wait for the rest of it. Pick of the week.

WTF with Marc Maron: “GLOW Writers & Creators” — A nice nuts and bolts process sort of interview with some folks Maron worked with on GLOW. I haven’t really had room for TV binges in my media consumption schedule lately, but once I do this will be among the top priorities.

99% Invisible: “Repackaging the Pill” — A design story that is also about undermining the paternalism of the mid-20th-century medical profession. Nice stuff.

Reply All: “Minka” — Sruthi Pinnamaneni is so valuable on this show, which is very silly very often. It’s always refreshing to have her come in and do a real, reported story about something very consequential — in this case, nursing homes and how terrible they are.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Spider-Man: Homecoming and Tour de Pharmacy” — I am so onboard with Audie Cornish when she says she’d trade this incarnation of Spider-Man for the Tobey Maguire movies. Also man oh man, you can pretty much be certain that when Andy Samberg does something, this show will make note of it. Maybe it just seems that way. But if they talk about a comedy, there’s a pretty solid chance it’ll either involve Samberg or Paul Feig. That probably says more about the world than about this show.

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law: “Presidential Immunity” — Oh man, I guess it might be impossible to sue the president. That sounds really bad and I hope it doesn’t stay that way.

Judge John Hodgman: “Live in Chicago at Very Very Fun Day 2017” — The couple at the centre of the main case here didn’t turn out to be the best: one has a tendency to show instead of tell, which works for the live audience, but not the podcast audience. And the other is a jerk. The swift justice segment is better.

Imaginary Worlds: “The Book of Dune” — I never really got Dune. I recall having read it the summer that I read 20 novels at my boring summer job. And I just found it a bit of a slog. (I also ready Paradise Lost twice that summer, so, one man’s trash etc.) But I never stopped to think about the influence of real-world religions, and especially Islam, on the text. I wouldn’t have known enough to notice it. So, this is a fun crash course in Frank Herbert’s relationship with Islam, including a discussion of its classic “white saviour” narrative. I wonder how (and if) Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation will reckon with that? Maybe by not casting a white person as Paul? I’m not even sure that would be enough, since it’s still a story about a high-born outsider saving a marginalized people. I guess we’ll see. Anyway, it’s bound to be an improvement on the available adaptations. I don’t think I ever actually finished the TV series, and the David Lynch movie is infamous. (Personally, I think it has its charms, but it’s been a while so maybe it’s worse than I remember.) In general, I’m inclined to believe that the best version of Dune is the one that exists inside of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s head. And even that is almost certainly much better than the movie he would actually have made.

Ear Hustle: “Looking Out” — The warden is already my least favourite character. But hey, good on him for approving a story even though he thought it was bad. This is the lighter side of Ear Hustle, so far. But I guess that’s part of the prison experience too?

On The Media: “Three-Dimensional Chess” — Good decision to focus a large part of this episode on Raqqa and Mosul, in the week of the Don. Jr. email scandal. America is only part of the world.

Omnibus (week of June 25, 2017)

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Greetings! A normal week. 18 reviews.

Television

Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 8 — I’m willing to entertain the notion that this is the strangest, most obscure thing ever to be seen on television by an audience that exceeds the low dozens. This is the hour of television in which David Lynch reveals himself as the Black Lodge doppelganger of Terrence Malick. It is the second story I’ve seen this year that frames the origins of an iconic, totemic evil from a beloved old franchise as a consequence of human technological progress. But unlike Alien: Covenant, Lynch’s account of BOB’s birth in the crucible of the Manhattan Project is expressed through lyrical, abstract, largely wordless filmmaking. This helps to mitigate the potentially prosaic quality of the plot point that goes: “BOB is an evil spirit summoned by a nuclear bomb.” In practice, it doesn’t seem prosaic at all. Instead of focussing on the narrative, the cause and effect, Lynch tells us the story with reference to its abstract emotional quality. This type of filmmaking talks past our rational brains and communicates a sort of meaning to us that is ineffable. It works in a similar way to instrumental music in that way, and indeed, it gets a significant assist from Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. That piece of music is connected to nuclear weapons by its title, but the music itself wasn’t written with any such thing in mind. It was meant to be an abstract, academic piece of music. Regardless, it seemed from the first to elicit a muted version of our universal human response to inconceivable horror. So, title or none, it is music with the same goal as Lynch’s Stan Brakhage-like terror painting in this episode. So, instead of simply expressing a new piece of continuity in the usual way, Lynch’s approach offers a sense of the horror and disorientation of a world that’s recently been made aware of a new outer limit in human ruthlessness. Given that, it seems totally natural that BOB should arise from this. Pretty much any other approach would have seemed dumb and overwrought. Like Alien: Covenant. But in bypassing rationality entirely and speaking to something more primal in us, Lynch has deepened the world of Twin Peaks more here than in any other single episode of the show — possibly including the one that introduces the Red Room in the first place. Pick of the week.

Doctor Who: “The Doctor Falls” — A more than serviceable finale, though one that I feel works better on a scene-by-scene basis than it does all-in-all. I’ve said before that I like Moffat best in “big idea” mode, and he got most of that stuff out of the way last week with the time differential stuff. But what’s left to do is the emotional labour of a season ending, and this manages that just fine. Still, two characters overshadow the Doctor’s story here. The first, obviously, is Bill. Her arc from Cyberman conversion through her departure from the series (I think?) is the highlight here. I’m particularly fond of the mirror scene, which Pearl Mackie plays brilliantly. Also, this is the second companion departure in a row that feels like a spinoff waiting to happen — and a pretty killer crossover that would be! Bill and Heather the water creatures meet Clara and Ashildr the immortals in a diner-shaped TARDIS. Somebody write that. The other highlight is the two Masters, and who knows how that’s going to turn out. These are self-evidently the best (Michelle Gomez) and second-best (John Simm) renditions of this character the series has ever managed, and I’m delighted to have seen them together. I do hope Gomez isn’t finished with the role yet, but it would be a good way to go out. Also interesting how pigheaded misogyny is the Simm Master’s new calling card. Perhaps when he was last on this show, the possibility of such a blatant sexist being elected to public office seemed a bit of a hard sell. Oh, what a world. And as for the Doctor, this is to some extent a less impactful retread of Eleven’s last stand on Trenzalore, but we’ve still got a proper regeneration story to go. And what a corker it promises to be. I’ve been saying since the beginning of Peter Capaldi’s tenure that this is a Doctor who somebody needs to pair with the First Doctor. I always assumed that if it were to happen, it would be in a comic or a novel. But David Bradley has a history with playing William Hartnell, so why not playing his character as well? Part of me thinks it feels like a bit of a slight to Hartnell that he’s the only Doctor whose character has been played by not just one but two other actors. But the promise of what these two characters can do together is too much to pass up — especially since Moffat and his writers spent so much of the early part of this season focussing on the legacy of Doctor Who, right from 1963 on. This looks like it’ll be an opportunity for Moffat to say goodbye to the series with one more rumination on what it is at its core and why it’s great. This is now the primary reason I am looking forward to Christmas.

Movies

Lost in La Mancha — A bit of pop culture news you might have missed if you’re not me is that Terry Gilliam finally finished shooting The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he’s tried and failed to make eight times over the course of twenty years. I am super happy about this, especially since it will reunite Gilliam with his Brazil leading man Jonathan Pryce, who is only now the right age to play Quixote. I’m prepared to completely love this movie, but the truth is that I’m not sure it’ll surpass the story of Gilliam’s struggle to make it. (Many would say the same about Brazil, though I’m sure as hell not one of them.) Lost in La Mancha tells the story of Gilliam’s first attempt to film the movie in 2000, which was a complete disaster. The frequent reference points for what went wrong are big, obvious problems like unexpected noise from a nearby NATO base (F-16 target practise turns out to be very loud), a lead actor with a herniated disc, and a flash flood that nearly carried the crew’s equipment away. But the film documents a thousand tiny hurdles as well. The narrative doesn’t just play out in setpieces of acute misfortune — it plays out in the looks on the crew’s faces. If you like watching people’s expressions grow from contented to concerned to worried to frantic, then this is the film for you. There’s a costume designer who is particularly wonderful in this respect. You will know her when you see her. But in the middle of it all is Terry Gilliam. “How are we doing for time?” he asks his first assistant director. “Badly,” the first AD replies. “Good,” says Gilliam without missing a beat. It’s hard to judge the extent to which he’s deluding himself throughout this process. Certainly, he’s always aware that things aren’t working. But it’s Gilliam’s occasional sense of total imperiousness in the face of harsh realities that makes Lost in La Mancha so captivating to watch, if possibly through your fingers. And it’s that quality that may yet make this documentary an even better modern adaptation of Don Quixote than Gilliam’s own film will turn out to be.

Live events

Much Ado About Nothing (Bard on the Beach) — I always look forward to Bard on the Beach, because I am from a small town and I think it’s a damn miracle that it’s possible to see several productions of Shakespeare mounted by professionals every year. So, all snark must be weighed against a sense of perspective. However, I’ve seen theatre at Bard over the past four seasons that has run the gamut from extraordinary (Kim Collier’s multimedia saturated Hamlet, Anita Rochon’s refreshingly minimal Cymbeline) to garbage (an appalling massacre of Love’s Labour’s Lost with showtunes). More than that, though, they’ve been fine. They’ve been the sorts of productions that can run for a whole summer in a city of Vancouver’s size. This Much Ado is basically that. Set, completely arbitrarily, in an Italian movie studio in the 1950s, it evokes the glamour of black and white cinema in a way that mostly made me wish I were watching Joss Whedon’s wonderful film version from a few years back. The performances here are mostly good, but suffer from the expectation that the actors will deliver Shakespeare’s fiery repartée while also performing hackneyed physical comedy. The impulse to over-choreograph pays dividends in only one scene: the masked ball where Beatrice and Benedick pair their verbal fencing with dancing. That’s really the one scene where I got the sense that this production understood the point of this play, which is listening to two world-class wits spar with each other. There are other good scenes, but I mostly found this a pretty dull production of a comedy that I actually really like.

Literature, etc.

George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo (audiobook) — The last time I reviewed a full-cast audiobook, I basically reviewed it in two layers: the basic text of the book, and the performance layer on top of that. I don’t think I can do that with this one. The audiobook production of Lincoln in the Bardo feels like its own thing. The book isn’t written in the standard third-person or first-person voice, so its audiobook edition is going to work a bit differently. (The 166 narrators advertized on the cover art might have tipped you off.) This is a very stripped-down radio play, basically. And the performances feel like an integral part of the text — not an additional layer that you’ll endeavour to see past to the basic elements. The Nick Offerman/David Sedaris double act is reason enough to choose the audiobook over the paper book. The former gives as good a performance here as he does in film and television roles, and it’s fun to hear the latter reading somebody else’s work. I’ll leave discussion of the story for next week, by which time I’ll have heard all of it.

Geoff Edgers: “Why My Guitar Gently Weeps” — There are a few points of interest in this story, namely the numbers. It’s kind of amazing to read about the economic troubles of Guitar Centre, Gibson, and other businesses who rely on the fashionability of the guitar. But I actually think it’s mostly a pretty bad piece of journalism. Speaking as somebody who deals a lot with classical music, a musical tradition that is in a long-standing and seemingly permanent economic/identity tailspin, I have seen all of this before. The story that Edgers is telling is the story of the culture changing in a way that displeases the people who thrived in the previous version of the culture. And nothing that Edgers writes in this piece really indicates that he understands the extent to which the phenomenon whose demise he is mourning lines up with white supremacy and patriarchy. This is as true of the particular species of baby boomer/Gen X rock music that he’s discussing as it is of Western Art Music. (Say it like “WEST-un AHT mew-zik.”) That’s not to say that either kind of music is bad, or even badly intentioned! But things change, and they should. Insofar as the much vaunted “death of the guitar” is a real thing, it’s not by definition a bad thing. (And the best thing about this piece is the extent to which it uses sales figures to demonstrate that the guitar is materially less enticing to potential musicians today than it has been.) This is the same feeling I’ve had when I’ve read stories about how symphony orchestras are struggling to stay in business, opera companies are folding, and classical music audiences are aging. Of course they are. You can’t expect a generation’s music to outlive that generation and maintain the same popularity. Everything becomes a niche at some point. (Granted, the classical canon has managed to hang on an awfully long time. I’d say that has a lot to do with how it brands itself as “timeless.” Say what you will about the ineptitude of classical music’s modern-day branding professionals. Their late-19th century counterparts did their job so well that it stuck for a hundred years.) It’s almost surreal to read in Edgers’ piece about guitar classes where kids find a sense of community while learning about the great classics of the rock and roll repertory. (I find it intensely gratifying that “The Spirit of Radio” is among the lessons on offer.) This is the same sense of guardianship of a dying tradition that exists in the classical space. And frankly, more power to them for doing that. Classical and rock music are both traditions that deserve defending — but not with the end goal of retaining their cultural dominance. That ship has sailed, and good riddance to it. On the other hand, it’s worth checking out the Cut’s riposte to Edgers, which is simply a playlist of kickass recent guitar music being made by women. This is an altogether better argument than the one I’ve just made. Basically, “Brittany Howard, St. Vincent. Your argument is invalid.” Yes, fine. I’ll round out my metaphor by recommending you go listen to Caroline Shaw, Nicole Lizée and Jennifer Higdon.

Jorge Luis Borges: “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” — Solidly middle-of-the-pack by the standards of Borges’s Fictions collection, but that’s only to say it’s really great. This is the most straightforward iteration of Borges’ strategy of writing a critical essay about a fictional book that I’ve seen. It’s clever, but it doesn’t have the imperious ambition of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”

Music

Felix Mendelssohn/Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, RIAS Kammerchor: Symphonies 1-5 — I honestly rarely listen to new classical discs in their entirety, at least when they’re recordings of familiar rep like this. But it occurred to me that I might not actually have heard all of the Mendelssohn symphonies (the fact that I’m not sure ought to demonstrate what I think of a few of them), and I am in general favourably disposed towards YNS. So, why not binge them along with a few of my coworkers. The best thing that can be said about Nézet-Séguin is that he’s a clean windowpane: he gives you a clear picture of the music. And while I’ll always fall on the side of classical artists who offer personal, idiosyncratic interpretations, there’s value in the sort of artist who is a superb technician with a firm grasp of any given score, but who will defer to tradition when it comes to interpretation. (I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing here, because I don’t know most of this music well enough to judge. But I’ve heard a lot of his other recordings, and I think it’s a valid general characterization.) This is especially valuable when there’s a great orchestra involved, and up-to-the-minute recording techniques. Judging by YNS’s readings of the two symphonies I do know quite well (numbers three and four), this is a Mendelssohn set that could easily serve as a new standard for anybody wanting to familiarize themselves with these works. (I’d then send any such person straight to Leonard Bernstein’s “Scottish” with the Israel Philharmonic, to hear what it sounds like with a lot of energy.) All that said, the truth is that I’m unlikely to revisit any of these recordings aside from the two symphonies I know and love. Because my milage with Mendelssohn varies, and ultimately I only connect with him when he’s at his most joyful. Mendelssohn is that rare composer who can express actual joy, and not just contentedness, in a way that makes it contagious. And for that you should turn to the third and fourth symphonies, because the others are a bit serious and Beethovenesque. I’ll take actual Beethoven instead, thanks. In any case, this is a marvellous set that you should hear if you want to hear some good Mendelssohn. And you should check out the first movement of the “Italian” regardless of what you want.

Podcasts

WTF with Marc Maron: “Jenji Kohan” — This is a lot more fun than the interview I heard with Kohan on Fresh Air a few years back. Maron gets her in anecdote mode, so we get to hear about her enthusiasm for dominoes and how her dad wrote David Bowie’s countermelody in the Bing Crosby Christmas special. It’s a fun chat, and she’s a genius.

Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking: “James Gleick: Time Travel” — Thus returns one of the strangest things in my podcast subscriptions to make its 2017 debut on this blog. I have, in my limited experience, found the Long Now Foundation’s podcast seminars to be totally engrossing listening, bland title be damned. This talk by the author of the brilliantly titled book Time Travel: A History is no exception. Particularly wonderful is the idea that before the technological maelstrom of the early 20th century, the idea of time travel didn’t really exist. It’s fun hearing James Gleick explain the pains that H.G. Wells took to explain the basic idea of time travel, which was totally anathema to basically every writer who came before him (except Mark Twain, and even he didn’t quite commit). But as is to be expected from these, the question and answer segment with Stewart Brand after the actual talk is the highlight. Brand is a loveable eccentric whose questions never adhere to a standard interview formula. He’s just a smart person who really listens to the talks from beforehand. Pick of the week.

Arts and Ideas: “Canada 150: Robert Lepage, Katherine Ryan” — I had to hear this because I haven’t actually heard an interview with Lepage about 887, the incredible performance of his that I saw early last year. It seriously is one of the best experiences I have ever had in a theatre. But I didn’t enjoy this program very much at all, because the host, Philip Dodd, is an idiot. He handles Lepage reasonably well, although he spends altogether too much time huffing disapprovingly about Lepage’s identity as a “multidisciplinary artist.” I don’t see the issue there. (The one amazing upside to that part of the conversation is a bit where Lepage turns the tables on Dodd by referring to Wagner as a multidisciplinary artist.) But Dodd really shits the bed in his interview with Katherine Ryan. He is five to ten years out of date in the discourse about comedy. Ryan outlines the pretty standard rule for modern comedy that you punch up and not down, and Dodd seems to take this (or something else Ryan said, who knows what) to mean that comedy isn’t supposed to offend anymore. Sure it is! It’s just supposed to offend the relatively privileged or powerful! “You’re starting to sound like a Guardian reader,” he tells her. Who exactly does he assume his audience is? I’ve enjoyed the programs that come through BBC’s Arts and Ideas feed before, but I think I’ll avoid Dodd like the plague from here on out.

All Songs Considered: “Listeners Picks For 2017’s Best New Artists (So Far)” — Most of this didn’t catch fire for me, but it picked up at the very end of the countdown. Gracie and Rachel, Charly Bliss, and especially Overcoats are all now on my must-check-out list. The listeners’ number one pick, Diet Cig, worked for me too, but not like those other three. I’ve got to say, last year’s equivalent episode of this was better. This one has a lot of generic guitar rock.

It’s Been A Minute: “Lena Waithe from ‘Master of None’” — The first episode of this left me cold, partially because of its ostentatious format. But if these Tuesday episodes are going to all be like this, I’m in. Presumably the whole reason Sam Sanders has his own show now is that he’s a preternaturally gifted conversationalist. So, giving him the chance to just talk to people in a not toooo structured way (i.e. this is an interview, but it doesn’t feel like one) is probably the best way to leverage his talent. But even if only one of every two episodes works for me, this is still a really good thing to have in the world. Also, Lena Waithe is amazing and I’m going to have to resign myself to putting some time into Master of None.

99% Invisible: “Mexico 68” — This starts off like it’s going to be a sports story without an obvious design angle, but then it turns into a pretty awesome exploration of why it matters who is involved in a project and what happens when design is repurposed for political means. Also, the Mexico 68 Olympics are just really interesting. I’ve really reconnected with this show in recent weeks. I love 99pi.

Radiolab: “Revising the Fault Line” — Another revisit of an older episode, and a really great one, too. This is a story I remember well, about a guy who does something terrible, possibly because of a neurological condition he can’t entirely control. But it goes beyond that story — it gets to a point where Jad and Robert are actually debating with a guest whether free will is a thing that exists. Ye olde Radiolab.

Code Switch: “It’s Our Anniversary” — This episode revisits a few of the most contentious and noteworthy episodes from this podcast’s first year. Mostly, it’s just a really good reminder that Code Switch hit the ground running and is now one of the most valuable podcasts in the public radio space. Many happy returns.

Ear Hustle: “Misguided Loyalty” — There’s a moment here that really drives home a potential issue with this show, which is just that it’s absolutely crucial for the inmates who are telling their own stories be allowed to do so in a way that works for them. It’s possible that this means the show sacrifices a certain amount of emotional honesty. This features a man reading a script about the murder of his family in an almost shockingly affectless way. Better this than the alternative, though. I don’t want anybody’s emotions to be harnessed for the sake of radio art.

On the Media: “Newton Minnow Still Cares About the Media” — Newton Minnow is an interesting fellow. A former advisor to President Kennedy, he made the improvement of television his professional cause. I’m with him on this, though I do think there’s a place in the world for Gilligan’s Island.

Omnibus (week of June 18, 2017)

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Yeah, I changed the name. I never liked the old name. Onwards.

The second instalment of the NXNW segment aired yesterday on Radio 1, and it is a whole level weirder than the first. Basically, I tried to convince Sheryl MacKay that the central tenets of medieval alchemy are still alive and well and living in pop culture. Every so often I make something I’m really proud of. This second segment is for sure one of those. I’m at 1:22:34 in this podcast of the show.

Ran a 5K this morning. Boy oh boy were there a lot of people in that. You’ll see more podcasts here than there have been in weeks, because I figured even a 5K shouldn’t be approached with a totally cavalier attitude. Many kilometers were run, and many hours of audio accompanied them. If you’re new to this, this instalment is a bit closer to my usual approach than recent weeks have been: lots of podcasts, shorter reviews. 38 of them, to be precise.

Television

American Gods: “Come To Jesus” — After last time, I didn’t actually expect Jesus to be played for laughs. But there is honestly nothing funnier than seeing a whole herd of diverse Jesuses just milling about. Except for the bit where Wednesday refers to them collectively as “these assholes.” That’s funnier. This season finale is actually my least favourite episode of American Gods so far, but that’s a very relative thing to say. Mostly, I’m just mildly peeved that the story hasn’t gotten to a point where the supporting deities like Nancy and Czernobog are relevant to the story on a consistent basis. I’m as happy as I thought I’d be to see Nancy again, but it would have been nice to see him do more than offer exposition for another character. (I miss the story about tiger balls from the book.) Also, the somewhat overwrought segment where Wednesday reveals his real name to Shadow is the first sequence in the show that hasn’t worked for me. Partially it’s just the Michael-Bay-spinning-cameraness of it all, but mostly I just find it hard to accept that Shadow, or any portion of the audience, would be surprised to learn that a one-eyed god who goes by “Wednesday” would actually be Odin. (This is a problem the show inherits from the book.) On the other hand, this episode makes two substantial improvements on the book. One is in the relationship between Bilquis and the Technical Boy. I suppose it’s still possible that Technical will kill Bilquis at some point, but that moment was one of the most jarring parts of the book, and I’m very glad that she’s survived their first meeting. The other improvement is Kristin Chenoweth’s Easter, who is angrier, funnier and altogether more ruthless than her book analogue. I especially love the way she listens to her adorable messenger bunnies, only to invariably respond “oh, shit!” I realize that throughout these American Gods reviews, I’ve focussed an awful lot on the relationship between show and book. Probably that’ll subside next season, at which point I will have read the book substantially less recently. But I still think that American Gods is as compelling an act of adaptation as a show to be taken on its own merits. Between this and Hannibal, I think Bryan Fuller has confirmed himself as the master of the modern television adaptation. Benioff and Weiss wish they were this good. Season one of American Gods has been some of the best television of recent years. I can’t wait for the next season. Hope it’s longer.

Better Call Saul: “Lantern” — Sometimes I start to write these reviews before I’m finished watching the episode. Here is a brief passage from what I’d written before I watched through to the end. “Chuck. Is. Noxious. The writers of this show, and Michael McKean, should pat themselves on the back for creating such a convincing yet completely insufferable character. The thing that makes him so hard to take is a simple juxtaposition of two traits: he has no compassion at all, and he always perceives himself to have the moral high ground. This episode features one of the most painful scenes in the show so far, in which Chuck intentionally tries to hurt Jimmy, and feels entirely justified in doing so because Jimmy colours outside the lines. He feels no complicity in the rift between the two of them. This is the worst kind of person, and this is a kind of person who exists. I know these people and so do you. Chuck is scum. Chuck is irredeemable.” At the end of the episode, I softened my view rather dramatically. In his more loathsome moments, Chuck makes it easy to forget that he is not at the peak of mental wellness. In retrospect, he might be the highlight of this season, because of the way both McKean and the story emphasize his uncompromising cruelty and his struggle with mental illness at the same time. The show even gives us a handy yardstick by which to assess the reasonableness of our hatred for Chuck: Howard Hamlin. Since the season one reveal that he actually isn’t that bad, Howard has been one of the most sympathetic characters on Better Call Saul. And even he would rather part with millions of his own hard-earned dollars than work with Chuck any longer. He has become genuinely impossible, and well and truly cruel. He was also in a lot of trouble. And he completely alienated his one-man support system, who to be fair, is a person with no small amount of flaws himself. I expected this episode to be all about Kim after last week’s cliffhanger. And while it is bittersweet to see her finally realizing that she needs to take time to breathe, her season arc basically ended with her car crash. This episode belongs to Chuck. But its subtext belongs to Jimmy. It’s easy to read Chuck’s suicide as a final “fuck you” to his brother. This is only a small part of an inevitably complex equation, but think about this: their last conversation consisted of Chuck telling Jimmy that he would always hurt people and he might as well embrace it. Then he kills himself. Meanwhile, Jimmy has alienated himself from the elder law practice that could have been his saving grace. (I’m delighted that Mrs. Landry is okay.) The path to Saul Goodman has never been clearer than it is now. Pick of the week.

Twin Peaks: The Return: Parts 3-7 — Okay, the internet was right. This Dougie Jones business needs to stop. At first, I was amused — not so much by Kyle McGlaughlin’s performance, which finds him working substantially below his pay grade, but by the constant way that everybody around him basically fails to acknowledge that there’s something really wrong. Particularly wonderful is Naomi Watts as his wife. The fact that she’s not more concerned really makes you wonder what kind of shit-for-brains asshole the real Dougie Jones was. I love the idea that this might not actually be that out of the ordinary. Suppose that’s what you get for marrying a homunculus. But after four episodes of this, I’m ready to have Coop back. I don’t even need to hear him talk about coffee and pie. I don’t even need a thumbs up. I just want him to be here so that the show has a central intelligence in it again who can start to put together the disparate threads that are remaining maddeningly allusive without him. In general though, I’ve really been enjoying this. I don’t have that much to say about it because it’s still got its cards super close to its chest. I’m definitely hoping that we’re not done with David Lynch’s modernized, expanded take on the Black Lodge. The sequences that take place there are truly terrifying, and among the most compelling television I’ve seen in recent times.

Doctor Who: “World Enough and Time” — Okay, now we’re cooking. This is classic Steven Moffat, operating in “hey here’s a fun idea” mode. In this case, the idea is that there’s a huge spaceship right by a black hole, so time works differently at one end of it and the other. The real storytelling masterstroke, though, is stranding the Doctor at the slow end of the ship, so that the situation seriously escalates before he’s able to formulate a plan. Aside from that, this is notable as a real return to Moffat’s signature horror. You could say that the monks constituted horror, as did the notion in “Extremis” that the entire universe is a projection and you cease to exist if you step outside of the beam. But nothing since “Listen” has really gone whole hog into horror territory the way that this does. The scene with the volume dials is one of the most disturbing things Moffat has ever written. And the patients in general, all on their way to becoming Cybermen, are terrifying in that existential way that the Cybermen manage to be when they’ve got a good writer behind them. (Unless that good writer is Neil Gaiman, in which case they still don’t work.) And all that good stuff happens even before we get the big reveal of John Simm. Which, I mean, we all knew he was going to be in this, but am I stupid for being INCREDIBLY FUCKING SURPRISED that character was him? Am I? Come on, be honest. This was an amazing episode: straightforwardly the best of the season. Can’t wait to see what comes next.

Games

King of Dragon Pass — So, the Steam summer sale is on, but I realized that I’m not actually even close to finishing the games I bought during the Steam winter sale. Because *some of us* like to go outside sometimes, amirite? At this point I think the Half-Life series is a lost cause for me. I was so terrible at the first one, and the story is so minimal, that I’m forced to conclude it is literally the opposite of what I appreciate in a video game. Moving on to King of Dragon Pass, then: another classic of an entirely different sort. This is dated, and its high fantasy aesthetic isn’t really my thing, but I’m compelled regardless. Basically, it’s a text-based resource management game with elements of choose-your-own-adventure. So, it’s kind of Sunless Sea before its time. Except that the writing isn’t anywhere close to that level. It has its moments, mind you. I quite like this: “Your men whooped with Orlanth and drank the Eight Known Drinks, so that your heads would hurt during the ceremony.” Also unlike Sunless Sea, its representation of women oscillates between fairly progressive and a bit, erm, medieval. But there’s enough in this to compel me. I’m particularly fond of the way that your progress is compiled into a document called “the Saga,” which actually reads a bit like an Icelandic saga, given that those stories basically are just lists of accomplishments. So far, this seems like the sort of thing I’ll probably play until I manage to beat it on the easiest setting and then I might put it aside. Still, it’ll probably grow on me.

Literature

Jorge Luis Borges: “The Lottery in Babylon” — A substantially simpler and more direct story than some of the others I’ve read recently. Still brilliant, and the way that Borges casually drops details into the framework of ideas that makes up the narrative reminds me once again of how much Neil Gaiman owes to him. Look at this bit: “A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that the ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out.” This comes at a point in the story where it’s been established that owning tickets can result in terrible things happening to you as well as good things, but the specifics have been vague. Borges just drops this punishment into a sentence that’s actually a rumination on what’s supposed to happen in the case of the theft of a ticket. His narrator doesn’t make a big deal of it. That, more than anything in this story, gives the sense of a fully-formed world with defined parameters that are simply taken for granted. I continue to be astonished by this writer.

Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie: The Wicked and the Divine, Volume 4: “Imperial Phase, Part One” — I don’t know how anybody reads this issue-by-issue. When the trade collections come out, I wolf them down in one sitting and I still feel like I need more. This is probably the most exciting collection so far from this perpetually exciting comic. The real showstopper is the the first issue in the collection, formatted as a (beautifully designed) fan magazine in which members of the Pantheon are interviewed by actual journalists (with Gillen filling the role of each god at the other end of a chat window). The best of them is Laurie Penny’s piece on Woden, who is self-evidently the shittiest god. Having read Penny’s piece on Milo Yiannopoulos, it just felt right. My favourite part of the story in this issue is the way that the Pantheon is forced to reorganize and rally behind their logical leaders, Baal and Urdr, in the absence of Ananke. The dynamics between all of these characters just keep getting more interesting. Persephone in particular is the best thing going on in this book right now. Love it.

Kelefa Sanneh: “The Persistence of Prog Rock” — An excellent piece on the contemporary reception of 1970s prog, with reference to David Wiegel’s recent book on the subject. I’m reminded that I need to eventually finish the books cited by Edward Macan, Bill Martin and Will Romano, though I think all of them (especially Romano’s) are quite bad. The most interesting idea raised here is that progressive rock was parochial. This is something that I struggle with. It definitely was parochial — the most recognized bands in the genre were such idiomatically British eccentrics that albums like Selling England by the Pound almost seem a bit Brexity in retrospect. On the other hand, that means that prog largely avoided the garish spectacle of cultural appropriation that a lot of other British rock proffered. The Rolling Stones and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers seem a hell of a lot more retrograde in retrospect than ELP does. And ELP, lest anybody forget, was the band whose use of classical music in their performances was meant to get the kids listening to “music that has more quality.” The mind reels. I sympathize with Lester Bangs’ distaste for this sentiment. But I’m not sure he ever really saw the other side of the coin. I’ll be reading Wiegel’s book very soon.

Music

Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner & James McAlister: Planetarium — Well, it doesn’t make it easy for us. Planetarium is enormously ambitious and enormously long. Every song on this gave me the sense that I’d definitely like it a lot more next time I listen to it. Honestly, that’s one of my favourite reactions to have to a piece of music, but this does meander a bit. I’m curious to know more about the process of this: I’m familiar enough with Stevens, Muhly and Dessner’s work (the latter only as a composer, admittedly — I’ve never liked the National) that I feel like it should be easier than it is to isolate their particular contributions. They seem to have genuinely merged into a many-headed beast. My personal highlights here are “Jupiter” and especially “Mercury,” which has a melody worthy of Carrie & Lowell. But I’ve now heard “Saturn” a few times and it has grown on me from the point of initially leaving me cold to the point where now I actually bring up Apple Music to listen to it specifically. And the 15-minute “Earth” hits my prog rock structural pleasure centres, but there’s too much in it to take in for me to assess it yet. I think this is really good. I’ll probably check back in about it when I listen to it a bit more.

Neil Young: Live at the Riverboat 1969 — Like the Canterbury House instalment of Neil’s archives series, this is most notable for his amusingly awkward, stoned audience banter. I wish I’d been at one of these early acoustic shows, but I wasn’t born until 21 years later. Anyway, I’m actually pretty happy to be moving past the pre-Crazy Horse segment of my quest to hear the Complete Neil Young. Solo acoustic guitar music gets tiresome.

Neil Young: Live at Fillmore East 1970 — Ah, now we’re talking. What’s most notable about this is how much it sounds like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Crazy Horse has always sounded really live in the studio. All the same, the presence of an audience makes “Cowgirl in the Sand” pop a bit more, with the band really trying to ratchet up the tension to keep them into it. I suspect 1970 is the year when things really get interesting. I’ve enjoyed my exploration of Buffalo Springfield and the late-60s limbo state from which the self-titled album emerged. But it’s with the foundation of Crazy Horse and Neil’s induction into CSNY that the phase of his career we know him for really began.

Podcasts

Ear Hustle: “Cellies” — This podcast is a beautiful idea. It’s also staggeringly ambitious. I can only imagine the logistical nightmare it must be to produce a podcast in prison. But these are stories that don’t get told. And when they do, they sure aren’t told by the inmates themselves. This premiere episode introduces some fun characters, including two brothers who ended up as cellmates and nearly drove each other out of their minds. I’m also rather endeared by Earlonne Woods’ resistance to his non-incarcerated co-host’s attempts to apply relationship metaphors to cellmates. He ought to know what metaphors are and aren’t apt. This is the most promising addition to Radiotopia since Song Exploder.

The Pitch: “Babyscripts” — Not for me. This has a solid premise that’s basically guaranteed to yield drama: it’s basically Dragons’ Den. But I’m just not interested enough in business to be interested in these kinds of conversations. Worth a shot if you are.

StartUp: “Life After Startup” — A catch-up session with some of the people in previous StartUp episodes. Most notably, we revisit Dating Ring, the company followed in the show’s underrated second season. I really found the ending of that season heartbreaking, so it’s good to know that even though the business didn’t pan out, the founders are living happy lives these days.

Imaginary Worlds: “Imagining the Internet” — It’s a common refrain among science fiction critics that the internet is the modern technology that the genre failed most egregiously to predict. But this provides a corollary to that view by, in part, bringing Mark Twain into the fold. One highlight of this is hearing the actor who does the readings adopt the personas of their respective authors. I’m especially struck by how similar his Twain is to the genius voice actor that I brought in to do Twain at the end of the last episode of the Syrup Trap Pod Cast. I guess he’s just a voice that people have a sense of.

In Our Time: “The American Populists” — A pleasingly contentious conversation about the short-lived party that briefly promised to offer a real alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans. So no, it’s not about Donald Trump. Trust In Our Time to remind you that history is worth knowing about, and it doesn’t always have to be covered with explicit reference to current events to be relevant.

Love and Radio: “Relevant Questions” — A middling episode of one of the best shows around, so quite good. It’s about the first polygraph operator to speak out against its use. But he’s not straightforwardly heroic, even if he sees himself that way. It’s got a twist that’s done cleverly, in a similar way to the twist in “A Girl of Ivory,” but that’s not a comparison that does this any favours because that episode was a classic. Still, pretty great.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Wonder Woman And The Tony Awards” — Okay, I’ll see Wonder Woman. I was kind of going to anyway, in spite of my serious superhero fatigue. This is different. Man, the Tonys seem to have nothing for me this time around.

Radiolab: “The Gondolier” — This is a good story by the standards of recent Radiolab episodes, but I can’t help but hear the Love and Radio episode that could have been. It’s a story about a person who was touted internationally as “Venice’s first female gondolier,” which turned out to be super wrong because he’s a trans man. That last sentence is almost a spoiler, because this episode actually treats Alex, the main character, as a woman for a portion of its duration, in accordance with the reporters’ misunderstanding of his gender identity. The media has traditionally been Alex’s enemy, and this is supposed to provide an antidote to that. I’m not at all the person to judge how it succeeds at that, but I do feel like this is a case where the Love and Radio approach of cutting out the reporter’s voice altogether would be useful. I’d love to hear the version of this story that’s just Alex telling his own story. But Radiolab’s gonna Radiolab, so we have to have a certain amount of ponderous processing and deconstruction. It’s fine.

Home of the Brave: “The Continental Divide” — One of the things I really like about Home of the Brave is that Scott Carrier will sometimes release one of these brief missives in between proper radio projects. I sympathize with his inability to talk to people who disagree with him right now, but I admire his decision to give it another go.

Fresh Air: “Jay Z” — An old interview, from just after the release of Decoded. Terry Gross sounds slightly uncomfortable interviewing Jay Z because she kind of thinks he’s sexist. But Jay is charming and indulgent, even if he does get super defensive when Gross actually brings up sexism. Mostly a very good interview.

This American Life: “Say Anything” — The bulk of this is taken up by a tape that a guy made for his suicidal friend, without ever intending for it to end up on radio. It’s very affecting. But the real highlight is a list of fears written by a developmentally disabled man. It is both funny and insightful. A cameo from Jonathan Goldstein is always appreciated as well.

Fresh Air: “Roxane Gay” — A marvellous interview about Gay’s new book, which sounds like a deeply insightful, really rough read. She’s one of those articulate people you’ve just got to be thankful for.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin” — To some extent, this is shameless self-promotion for GLOW, the new show he’s in. But it sounds like a really great show, and I’m always in for an Alison Brie interview. She is completely charming. I didn’t realize that I knew Betty Gilpin, but her American Gods performance is really hilarious and the way she describes it as a wilful misunderstanding of the tone of the whole show is amazing. A good listen.

It’s Been A Minute: “Hey Y’all” — I’m reservedly excited about this. I love Sam Sanders. He’s always been one of my favourite guests on Pop Culture Happy Hour and I miss him on the NPR Politics Podcast. I just hope it doesn’t keep explaining ordinary idioms like “it’s been a minute” to me.

Sampler: “Introducing The Nod!” — Thank god Gimlet found something for Brittany Luse to do. She’s brilliant, and she was always above Sampler. Looking forward.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Sofia Coppola” — This has its moments, and Maron clearly admires and understands Coppola’s filmmaking. But did he have to talk about her dad so much? Surely she’s sick of that. In any case, Sofia Coppola is a genius and I can’t wait to see The Beguiled.

99% Invisible: “You Should Do A Story” — A roundup of miscellaneous stories that didn’t become full episodes. It’s worth hearing for a few simple descriptions of household design solutions from specific places.

The Heart: “Doing Time” — I heard an interview with Kaitlin Prest on a great podcast I don’t review called The Imposter where she said that the launch of Ear Hustle and the themed episodes Radiotopia did for its launch resulted in a hurried finish to the “No” season, which doesn’t actually come off in the last episode, but it sucks. In any case, this brushed-up episode from the back catalogue is perfectly fine.

Code Switch: “What To Make Of Philando Castile’s Death, One Year Later” — This won’t help you process the acquittal of Philando Castile’s killer, but it does feature an interview with a friend of Castile’s that is heartbreaking.

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law: “Pardon Power” — Is this presidency really so unprecedented that we’re entertaining the notion that a sitting president could pardon himself? Guys this is not normal.

The Gist: “Scaachi Koul on Surviving the Trolls” — Scaachi Koul is one of the funniest and best writers about sexism and racism. If you don’t read her on Buzzfeed, what are you even doing. I’m really looking forward to reading her book. This interview isn’t one of Mike Pesca’s best moments, but it is plenty good on Koul’s part. He gets all tone policey and she doesn’t let him get away with it. Satisfying in a way.

StartUp: “How To Invent A New Sport” — This is about a guy who made a new version of basketball. The best part is the story of a pitch meeting in China. Listen for that alone.

The Gist: “Do Radicals Change the World?” — Jeremy McCarter is familiar to me from the Hamiltome, but this new book doesn’t sound like something I’ll especially enjoy. I’ll take China Mieville’s 1917 book, thanks. He’s got no doubts that radicals change the world.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “GLOW And Lena Waithe” — Hmm, here are two shows that make me wish there was more time in a day. I’m finding it hard to commit to the idea of watching GLOW and Master of None. The former has a bunch of people I love involved, but I’m not sold on the hype. And Master of None sounds like it’s got a slow first season and a killer second. That’s a stumbling block. You’d never think it from reading this blog sometimes, but I’ve got to be judicious in my choices. Even I only have so much time to allot to this stuff.

It’s Been A Minute: “Likes Don’t Matter” — I don’t know how to feel about this. Part of me wants to think that it’ll find its legs, but it’s also totally clear that this has been given dry run after dry run, so it’s already got a fair bit of mileage behind it. Sam Sanders is one of the cleverest, most magnetic people at NPR. But this feels kind of forcedly colloquial to me. I liked Sanders a lot on the NPR Politics Podcast, where they had a mandate to really get into the grains of it, because Sanders was the guy who could inject a bit of air into the proceedings. He was as good at talking politics as the rest of the panel, but also funnier. In a less explicitly focussed situation, I’m not sure what to make of him anymore. I’ll keep listening, because I really do think he’s great. But I have reservations.

Beef And Dairy Network: “Gareth Belge” — Ahh, I like this. I like this show a lot. This features a hilarious segment about how cows act as body doubles for actors more than you’d know. That’s this show in a nutshell. Beautiful.

Mogul: Episodes 1 & 2 — I resisted this at first because it came out initially on Spotify, and I’m dead set against windowing in the podcast world. But I had to hear this story. It is magical. It is the story of Chris Lighty, the powerful hip hop executive: how he rose to prominence and how he died. Combat Jack hosts (going by his birth name here, Reggie Ossé), and he brings a level of expertise on this topic that probably nobody else in the world could top. The joy of listening to this is not just in the character-driven story of Lighty, nor is it even in the brilliantly rendered history of hip hop’s evolution. It’s in Ossé’s intense engagement with the material. I’ve always known somebody would make a podcast like this sometime — a show that deals with the history of music in a story-driven, audio rich way. Song Exploder isn’t quite it. This is it. I’ve been waiting for this. If you have any interest at all in hip hop or in knowing something about the music of the last forty years, check this out. It’s a beautiful thing. Pick of the week.

Omnireviewer (week of June 4, 2017)

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Busy week! I seem to have gotten behind on my television watching. But never fear, next week will bring reviews of the most recent episodes of Doctor Who, American Gods and Better Call Saul. And maybe even some of the new Twin Peaks, because I finally finished my rewatch. Let’s start with that.

But first, some news! This dumb blog is now a substantially less dumb and more professional recurring segment on CBC Radio 1! Every so often, I’m going to be on B.C.’s weekend morning show, North by Northwest, to talk to Sheryl McKay about some things I like. This morning’s inaugural instalment was deliberately whiplash-inducing, very much in the spirit of this project. I brought in Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings and clips from the new Maria Bamford special Old Baby and Ted Hearne’s glorious cantata Sound from the Bench. If you’d like to experience this blog, except 50% more dulcet, I highly recommend it. I’m at 1:43:27 in this podcast.

16 reviews.

Television

Twin Peaks: Season 2, episodes 10 & 11 — What’s to say? These are terrible episodes. They’re far from the worst the series would produce, but by this point the show is in a full-on identity crisis and it doesn’t have any of the things that make the first season and a half good. Several plotlines I hate are now well underway — James’s road trip, the Lucy/Dick/Andy love triangle, and Ben Horne’s encroaching insanity. This is the point where I’m going to take the New York Times’s advice and skip straight to episode 21, which I recall also being terrible, but apparently important for keeping track of the finale. I’ve read a bunch of synopses of the next bunch of episodes, and I’m trusting that’ll be enough. Wish me luck.

Twin Peaks: Season 2, episodes 21 & 22 — These two episodes almost don’t bear reviewing together, because one is ghastly and the other is a thing of almost unmatched brilliance. So let’s breeze past episode 21 (“Miss Twin Peaks”), pausing only to say how glad I am to have skipped nearly everything involving Windom Earle: the most bog-standard melodrama villain they could have come up with. Moving on. The final episode of Twin Peaks before its cancellation is not perfect, but only because the spectre of a terrible preceding half-season looms large upon it. David Lynch is back in the director’s chair, and he makes short work of the dumber subplots his underlings introduced in his absence. Earle is presented here simply as a person who exists and is bad. He is mercifully not allowed to do any of his “master of disguise” schtick before being dispatched in rather stylish fashion by BOB, the show’s real villain. (A weirdly cathartic moment.) The teenage Nadine plotline is dutifully allotted one brief scene. And the Andrew Packard puzzle box plotline collides with Audrey Horne’s environmental campaign in a genuinely great scene. These are still bad plotlines, but Lynch deals with them in the exact opposite way that he does with Earle and Nadine: instead of drastically reducing their presence, he drastically elongates the one scene where they appear. He elongates it so much it’s hilarious. The actual things that are happening to the key characters in the bank scene isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the bank manager’s hilarious decrepitude (yes, we’ve seen this gag before with the room service waiter, but it never gets old) and the fact that Lynch is content to hold the camera on him while he takes a hysterically long time to do everything. David Lynch always has an idea. He’s got one up on everybody else involved in this show. But so far, we’ve only dealt with the bad stuff that he manages not to screw up. The legitimately brilliant part of this episode is the Black Lodge. I like Twin Peaks. I really do, for the most part. But its biggest flaw is an inevitable one: the Red Room/Black Lodge sequences are so brilliant, iconic and unsettling that they eclipse the entire rest of the series. Cooper’s dream, back in the third episode, will always be the definitive iteration because it came first. But Cooper’s journey through the Black Lodge in this final episode has so much more going on in it. I’d be lying if I said I had any idea what’s going on here — or at least, I’d be lying if I said I had any more of an idea about it than the broader fan community whose theories and decipherments I’ve relied upon in my viewing of Twin Peaks. But it is viscerally terrifying in a way that nothing else in the show ever was. Especially distressing are the Man From Another Place’s laughing doppelganger and Laura Palmer’s backwards scream. It all defies rational description. In spite of all of the loose ends it left (some of which are presumably no longer loose) the Twin Peaks season two finale is one of my very favourite episodes of the show — probably only topped by “Zen, Or the Skill to Catch a Killer.” I hope the new series is as much like this as possible. And with Coop trapped in the Black Lodge, I imagine it will be. Nobody tell me anything. Pick of the week.

Movies

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — Ha, I forgot that this started with the image of a TV getting smashed. Chip on your shoulder, Mr. Lynch? Well, I’m glad you’re over it, and presumably so is Showtime. It’s a divisive film among Twin Peaks fans, I know. I have always been resolutely on the ‘pro’ side of the debate, since the David Lynch side of the show is what I really love. In general, that opinion held up after this viewing. But, there are problems. The simplest is just that the sexual violence need not have been so explicit. On television, there were useful limitations on what could be shown. So, Twin Peaks managed for the most part to be a story involving sexual violence without being creepily voyeuristic about it. Fire Walk With Me had no such limitations upon it, and I’m dubious about the way Lynch chose to use that freedom. The other problem is just that there are a few places in this where characters really don’t seem to match up with the versions of them we meet at the start of the series. Obviously, it’s a particular problem for Donna, who’s been recast. But the casting isn’t even the biggest problem. Mainly, I just don’t buy that Donna could have had these intense experiences with Laura and then have been so appalled by the darkness she uncovers in her life in her subsequent investigation. And are we seriously supposed to believe that the numbskull Bobby we meet in the pilot, who is a long way from realizing how far in over his head he is, has recently killed somebody? I guess you could easily retcon that by saying that Laura hallucinated it all, but I dunno. On the other hand, this does emphasize several of my favourite elements in Twin Peaks to the detriment of elements I hated. The primary pleasure of this movie is watching Sheryl Lee get to play Laura Palmer at greater, less interrupted length. Dead or not, she’s one of the most skilled actors in the cast of Twin Peaks. Scenes with her, Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie are pure, chilling magic. Aside from Kyle McLaughlin, that trio emcompasses the best performances in the whole show. Have I mentioned the extent to which Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie are national treasures? Because both of those actors are fucking geniuses. Wise in particular shows a different side of Leland here that I think is really interesting. Fire Walk With Me blurs the line between Leland’s possession by BOB and his own personal, non-supernatural darkness. Leland is not the sort of man who would rape his own daughter or commit murders for pleasure. But this movie opens up the possibility that he may at least be the sort of man who’d pay for sex. Also, for all the flak this movie takes for eliminating several of the show’s most pleasantly eccentric characters, it should get some credit for introducing new ones. Kiefer Sutherland’s nervous, bowtie-clad “toehead” is particularly loveable. In general, Fire Walk With Me is no more brilliant than an average episode of Twin Peaks, but it’s no less brilliant than that either. Alright. Done studying. Let’s get on with this new shit.

Music

Radiohead: Hail to the Thief — A friend started a thread on Facebook recently inviting us all to provide our top ten Radiohead songs. (Mine, in increasing order of preference: “Let Down,” “I Might Be Wrong,” “15 Step,” “Reckoner,” “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box,” “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A,” “Idioteque,” “Everything in its Right Place,” “Pyramid Song.”) Looking at the lists compiled on the thread, I realized that Hail to the Thief is the Radiohead album I’ve been neglecting. This, to me, was always the awkward odd record out in Radiohead’s imperial phase. It’s the one where they stepped back from the freaky electronica of Kid A and Amnesiac (my two favourites of theirs, in either order depending on my mood) and hadn’t yet arrived at the vibrancy and lushness of In Rainbows. And while another listen still has me questioning how it came to be that Radiohead made a fairly austere alt-rock album in the midst of a slew of electronic sensory overload records, I liked it a lot better this time. “There, There” is the clear highlight. One of the best things about Radiohead is Thom Yorke’s ability to isolate a particularly resonant lyrical fragment and make it the hook of a song. “Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there” is one of his best, and it’s tied to one of his loveliest melodies. I adore the way it drops lower, resignedly, on the second time through. Also, from the “it’s in the details” files, I love the six snare drum hits that occur twice in the song: once after the first chorus and once at the very end. Both times, it seems like a setup to a crash on beat one, but the crash never happens. It just kind of subtly leaves you hanging. Among the album’s other tracks, the one that’s so good I can’t believe I forgot about it is “A Wolf at the Door.” It’s terrifying, and Yorke clearly means every word. Still, for the most part, Hail to the Thief continues to be an album I admire more than I like. It’ll probably grow on me. The King of Limbs did, and nobody seems to like that one.

Belle and Sebastian: The Life Pursuit — I haven’t listened to this since my other dumb blog went on hiatus. Looking back on what I said about it before, it seems like two years ago I was way worse at discovering new music, way less curious, and not quite as fatigued with my old standbys. I guess I do change. But I still like The Life Pursuit. I still haven’t checked out any other Belle and Sebastian albums. I may. But this one is working for me. My favourite tracks are probably “Another Sunny Day” and “The Blues Are Still Blue,” though “Dress Up In You” has the album’s best moment: a trumpet solo. It’s a song I’ve played on the piano occasionally, but I’m always a bit dissatisfied when that part happens and I’m physically unable to play the trumpet solo as well. It isn’t part of my regular rep.

Podcasts

Judge John Hodgman: “Vehicular Man-Squatter” — I think maybe this is the first one I’ve heard where the dispute is between two young adults. That makes for an interesting dynamic, because Hodgman has to factor in the extent to which they just don’t really have their lives figured out. Or, in this case, one of them doesn’t. This is about a guy in college who has made the conscious decision to live in his car. (“This is an almost acceptable bit of transitional weirdness,” says Hodgman, with admirable equanimity.) This fellow has a rationale for this that is both amazingly logical and completely crazy, which I won’t spoil, but look forward to Jesse Thorn exclaiming “It’s tax deferred!” a number of times.

Home of the Brave: “Trump’s Wall: Your Neighbor” — A simple interview with an undocumented farm worker. It says a lot in a short time.

In Our Time: “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” — A particularly amusing instalment, in which Melvyn Bragg’s self-professed literal mind keeps him from quite being able to get past the inconsistencies in the Book of the Dead. This is the farthest thing on the radio from a personality-driven show, but what personality it has is refreshingly unforced. Also, the Egyptian Book of the Dead is really interesting, as it turns out. The papyrus copies of the book were often sold with blank spaces for the buyer to copy their names in. Imagine. This is full of stuff like that. Love it.

Criminal: “Bully” — A story of a truly terrible person who actually intimidated his way to an “above-the-law” status. The ending is incredible. The way that the town where all of this happened responded to it is jaw-dropping.

In Our Time: “Purgatory” — More thoughts on death from Melvyn Bragg! The best part of this is an explanation of the actual function served by the idea of purgatory for the church, and the fact that they had an interest in making it seem horrible because otherwise they’d have a bunch of apathetic sinners running around hoping to pay the piper later.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “When To Break Up With Television And Pop Culture Advice With Mallory Ortberg” — Mallory Ortberg is so clever. Oh, to be that clever. Glen Weldon holds his own admirably in this live show as well.

WTF with Marc Maron — “Mark Lanegan/Mac DeMarco” — Brilliant stuff. Mac DeMarco is a surprisingly thoughtful fellow when he sits down for a civil conversation. My opinion of him is actually pretty similar to Maron’s: namely, I like his music a lot but I’m not sure why. I’m always surprised to find myself liking it. The interview with Mark Lanegan is intense. He’s an intense guy. Don’t let the fact that this is split in half fool you: Maron goes deep on this one. A great episode.

A Point of View: “In praise of the elite” — Eh, I dunno. Howard Jacobson is funny enough to not be really offensive, and there are elements of his argument that I buy. But I think this piece lacks class consciousness to a certain extent. He seems to be saying “if you want to be a member of the elite, be one.” Which isn’t really how it works.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The Handmaid’s Tale and a New Comedy” — I need to watch The Handmaid’s Tale, but I need to read it first. Somehow I’ve read four Atwood novels and that isn’t one of them. I will not be watching Good News.

StartUp CatchUp — I listened to the last three episodes of this, including one where the famed “CEO Whisperer” counsels a entrepreneur who’s having trouble balancing work with family, one where a biotech researcher tries to develop a flu vaccine for pigs, and one where somebody’s trying to get people to eat bugs. I’m sort of starting to listen to this out of sheer inertia. At first, I listened because it was fun to hear Alex Blumberg tell his own startup story in real time. It was the most intimate radio I’d ever heard, and it’s still one of the most extraordinary things anybody’s done with the medium. I used to listen to each episode as soon as it came out, regardless of where I was or what I was doing. Unlike many, I stuck with the show through its second season, which I feel has a similar appeal. It’s not a personal story, but it is an intimate look inside of an interesting, high-stakes creative venture. But when StartUp isn’t serialized, I kind of wonder why I bother. (The American Apparel season was also absolutely outstanding.) I’m not interested in business stories. And, unlike other show focusses like, say, design, there is a certain extent to which every startup story is the same. In a serialized show, I can really get attached to the people this is happening to and their specific relationships and struggles. But in one-off episodes it’s harder. And these are good episodes. I enjoyed these episodes. But given how many goddamn podcasts I listen to, I find myself asking hard questions about what’s worth my time, these days. You’ll note that Invisibilia has already hit the chopping block. Might this be next?

99% Invisible binge — You know what I really needed to do? I really needed to take a break from 99pi. Because this show’s rhythms get in your head after a while and it becomes background noise. But that’s too bad, because it is genuinely a wonderful show, and deservedly the grand dame of the medium. The live story “This Is Chance,” featuring members of Black Prairie and the Decemberists playing a live score, is one of the best things I’ve heard in awhile. The story is amazing in itself: how a news anchor in Anchorage became a locus of communication during a catastrophic earthquake. But the other stories I listened to in my binge yesterday, more conventional though they were, were almost equally enjoyable. One, about the redesign of the Brazilian soccer shirt, proves that I can be interested in anything — even sports — when Roman Mars is telling me about it. Another, about squatters in the Lower East Side, is a whole element of New York history that I didn’t know about. But the really exciting thing is the preview of Mars’s new show about Donald Trump and constitutional law. With Roman Mars and Jad Abumrad both spinning off into legal shows, I feel I will soon be basically a lawyer. Pick of the week.

The great and shameful archive

of one Matthew J.R. Parsons, retired blogger

Tag Archives: Marc Maron

Omnibus (week of June 3, 2018)

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