Tag Archives: Mildred Pierce

Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 24, 2016)

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20 reviews, and I seem to be gradually getting back on track with podcasts. Only 26 episodes to go before I’m caught up with my subscriptions. Also, I finally finished Three Moments of an Explosion and can now finally begin writing up my favourites of 2015. So, you know, look for that eventually. These things take time.

Literature, etc.

China Miéville: “Listen the Birds” — There are two or three tiny stories in Three Moments of an Explosion that are formatted as scripts for movie trailers. The trailer is a medium that Miéville is particularly adept at, it turns out. Because, a trailer introduces a premise and a sense of mystery or suspense, and leaves you with lingering uncertainties, so that you might like to see the film. And that’s kind of the same way that Miéville’s stories work. I don’t mean to say that they end unsatisfyingly, but there’s a sense in which resolution is sort of beside the point. The stories in Three Moments are all sort of like trailers, actually. But of the ones that actually go for that explicitly, this is far and away the best. I’d love to see the trailer produced. It would take a profound genius to actually make the movie, though.

China Miéville: “A Mount” — Occasionally, a writer manages to reproduce my own thought processes on the page, with added clarity and purpose. This guy does it an awful lot, including here. It makes me very, very jealous.

China Miéville: “The Design” — The final story in the collection, and one of the most remarked-upon in reviews. It is one of the most simple stories in its telling, but one of the most beautiful for the relationship between its narrator and its protagonist. It also contains one of the most beautiful sentences I’ve read recently, which will not spoil the wonderful premise of the story by my quoting it here: “I sat alone in the kitchen, in a world in which beautiful, elegantly wrought secrets lie hidden less than an inch from sight.”

Television

Mildred Pierce: Parts 4-5 — In its last two parts (which aired together on HBO), Mildred Pierce finally becomes one of those Todd Haynes works that makes you go, as Marc Maron put it, “Shit, I’ve gotta reckon with this.” Now that Veda’s grown up into an entirely different actor (Evan Rachel Wood), she’s an amazing character. Still deeply frustrating, but in a good way. Without revealing too much, there is a scene in this in which we watch several people listening to the radio, and it is the most compelling moment in the entire series. Mildred Pierce is a flawed television program, but since there are only five episodes, and two of them are these excellent ones, I’d recommend it for sure. Pick of the week.

QI: “Medieval and Macabre” — Apparently, Air Singapore has “corpse cupboards” on their planes to store people who die in-flight.

Doctor Who: “Paradise Towers,” episode 1 — It’s been a while since I sat down with some ropey old classic Doctor Who. This is unambiguously fantastic. Much of it looks like a crap 80s video, but the premise is super and the acting is frequently hilarious — and not in the way that classic Doctor Who sometimes is, where you expect that the actors aren’t in in the joke. As a general rule, the McCoy era is one of my favourites. For all of its shortcomings in terms of production (let me reiterate that this looks completely terrible), the writing was more consistently sharp than in any other era and its taxpayer-funded anti-Thatcherism is a wonder to behold. There will be more to say specifically when I’ve finished the serial. But for now, suffice it to say that it’s one of the funniest stories I’ve seen that isn’t “City of Death” or “The Ribos Operation.”

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “New Music From Ray LaMontagne, Lucius, A Bowie Cover From Glen Hansard, More” — This is essential for Hansard’s “Ashes to Ashes” cover alone. It’s at the beginning. Just start listening to this episode to hear it, then keep it going, because there’s a bunch of awesome, huge sounding pop on it by people like Lucius and Theo and the Get Down Stay Down. I’d heard of neither of them, but loved both.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The Giant Foam Finger: How Do You Choose Your Favourite Team?” — This is PCHH’s occasional sports themed edition. I listen to these not because I’m a sports person at all, but mostly just because they show up in my subscriptions. I do enjoy them, though, because it’s not “sports people talking sports” — it’s an NPR music guy and the lead blogger for Code Switch talking sports. (Everybody go check out Code Switch. It’s NPR’s blog about race and culture, and it’s really good.) Stephen Thompson and Gene Demby are such culturey types that they’re more interested in sports as a phenomenon than as an actual thing with its own mechanics to discuss. This one’s basically about the concept of fandom, which I’m totally on board with. So basically, this is the proof that there’s nothing Pop Culture Happy Hour can do to lose me.

Fresh Air: “From ‘Lost’ To HBO’s ‘Leftovers’ Show Creators Embrace The Unknown” — Damon Lindelof is a thoughtful guy, but I’m still not going to watch The Leftovers. No matter how much awesome, moody Max Richter music there is in it.

Slate’s Culture Gabfest: “Lazarus Edition” — I think I’m just about through my Bowie mourning podcast playlist. (Though you may have noticed that I’m not reviewing any music lately. That’s because it’s still pretty much non-stop Blackstar.) This is the perfect example of how this podcast is less fun than PCHH. Everybody present has smart, interesting things to say — especially Carl Wilson: the best music journo in all the land. But they don’t seem to have any interest in what the others are saying, or what it says about those people’s tastes and personalities. This is fine. It’s really only ever fine.

All Songs Considered: “Our Top Discoveries At globalFEST 2016” — A solid 8/10 for picking interesting music from all over the world. About a 5/10 for having anything interesting to say about it.

The Memory Palace: “Below, from Above” — This starts off as “Nate DiMeo does 99% Invisible,” which actually works really well. But no podcast except this one could conjure the labour and misery of working for weeks at a time at the bottom of the East River, building the Brooklyn Bridge. Also, it’s nice to hear that DiMeo has been able to hire another producer the help out with the audio. The more time DiMeo can spend writing, the better. 

Song Exploder: “MGMT — Time to Pretend” — I don’t know this band, but the snippet at the end of the last episode pulled me in. This is fun. It’s especially interesting to see how the final version of the song evolved from an earlier version that the band made on a crap laptop in college.

99% Invisible: “The Fresno Drop” — This is a story about how credit cards started with an experiment in Fresno. It goes through a bunch of different early iterations of credit cards and why they worked and didn’t. It’s a lot more interesting than I’m making it seem. But if you listen to this show, you’ve learned by now that everything in the world is interesting.

The Heart: “The Wrath of the Potluck” — A charming, funny story of a dude getting what he wants at exactly the wrong moment. As always, trying to write about The Heart is making me bashful. Just, everybody go listen to an episode of The Heart.

99% Invisible: “Fish Cannon” — I think I’d heard about the Salmon Cannon on John Oliver, but I didn’t know about the opposition from anti-dam activists who claim that it’s treating a symptom of a larger problem. Really interesting. Although, Roman Mars does this thing sometimes where he starts an episode talking about a totally different thing than the episode is about, and when the episode is about shooting fish out of cannons, you wonder why he wouldn’t lead with that.

Reply All: “Raising the Bar” — I love this show’s “Yes Yes No” segment, and I also love how frequently “Yes Yes No” involves Alex Blumberg wading unknowingly into the most horrible, hateful parts of the internet and subsequently feeling dirty and awful about humanity. But the actual story in this episode is one of Reply All‘s best: the tale of why Twitter’s only black engineer in a leadership position quit. It’s for all the reasons you might expect, by the way, but this story (reported by the brilliant Alex Goldman) dives into the actual math of diversity in workplaces and emerges with an incredibly compelling conclusion. Pick of the week.

Reply All: “PSA: Hidden Trove” — Even when these guys don’t have a story and they’re just telling you about a thing they used to make for a couple of minutes, they’re still entertaining.

Serial: “The Captors” — I love that there is now a popular platform whereby a great journalist can go into way more detail on a story than journalists are normally afforded. But I can’t say that the details of Bowe Bergdahl’s story are interesting me as much as Adnan Syed’s. I’m sort of waiting for the part where he gets home and finds himself the subject of intense controversy. I guess it’s weird that I find that more interesting than the story of how he survived captivity, but I’m really starting to feel like the part of the story that takes place in Afghanistan has run its course, now. All the same, I got more out of this episode than the previous one because the Haqqani network is really interesting and I didn’t know anything about it.

Serial: “Announcement: New Schedule” — It’s no “PSA: Hidden Trove,” but what is?

Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 17, 2016)

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It was a week of trains, busses and airplanes. That explains why there are more podcasts and stories than usual, and also why some of the reviews barely reviews at all. Regardless, there are 23 of them:

Movies

The Revenant — I was expecting this to be a joyless slog, and most of the people I went with seemed to come away from it with that impression. It is possible that I am a monster, because I actively enjoyed this from start to finish. It’s the second most visually stunning movie I’ve seen this year (next to another film with Tom Hardy in a supporting role). My initial reaction to the first few shots of this was “Well, here comes another year in which Roger Deakins will not win an Oscar.” But even through this movie is super dark, I found it totally thrilling. Part of that is just the effect of Emmanuel Lubeski’s long takes, but it’s also that the movie really puts you on DiCaprio’s character’s side — not through characterization, but just by making you a witness to his willpower and ruthlessness. I’m almost ashamed of how badly I wanted Tom Hardy’s character to bite it by the end. This is a big, messy, gorgeous, ambitious, singular sort of movie and you should see it in whatever format costs the most. Pick of the week.

Television

Mildred Pierce: Part 3 — It’s a rare moment in scripted television where there’s a fist-in-the-air moment that comes out of the intricacies of front-of-house restaurant management. In this, that moment comes courtesy of an actress named Mare Winningham, who I don’t think I’ve ever seen in anything but is my new favourite person. (Oh, wait. Apparently I’ve seen her in Torchwood and 24. I feel bad now.) Mildred’s daughter Veda is still intolerable and every scene with her in it is a slog. (I wonder if the direction “furiously plays the Can-Can” appeared in the screenplay anywhere?) Also, aside from Mare Winningham and Melissa Leo’s characters, Mildred lives in a universe of awful people. Truly terrible people. I am not one of those dummies who can’t watch anything that’s got unlikeable characters in it, but this is toeing the line, even for me.

QI: “Menagerie” — The average number of legs for an animal, when you take into account all of the animals is approximately none.

Literature, etc.

China Miéville: “Covehithe” — I’ve mentioned a bunch of times before how Mieville’s greatest strength is his premises. But the flipside of being able to come up with limitless unpredictable premises is the ability to make them not seem ridiculous. This is a story about decommissioned oil rigs coming to life and walking ashore to take their revenge. It’s a brilliant thought, but it shouldn’t work in a story that’s not played as broad satire. But Miéville makes it work through brilliant description, making the live oil rigs into impressively scary monsters. This seems to have been one of the stories from this collection that made the largest impression on the critics, and I can see why. Though I can’t say it’s one of my favourites.

China Miéville: “The Junket” — In which China Miéville impersonates a smug, mediocre magazine writer. He’s still fun when he’s slumming. Also, as usual there’s a clever structural trick. Miéville’s narrator talks about a controversial, fictitious movie for half the story without ever revealing its title or subject matter. When the penny drops, so much becomes clear.

China Miéville: “Four Final Orpheuses” — One of the shortest stories in the book: too short to make much of an impression. But the idea of posing alternate theories about why Orpheus looked back is a good one. Because it’s never made any sense.

China Miéville: “The Rabbet” — Nightmare-inducingly scary. Miéville doesn’t reveal his premise until about halfway through, so to say too much would be spoiling it. But this is definitely one of my favourite stories in the collection, even if it isn’t one of the most accomplished. Just because it’s so damn frightening.

Podcasts

Fresh Air: “David Bowie” — Not really a very good interview. It’s 2002, and Bowie isn’t in the mood to talk — especially not about the 30th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust, which is what he’s there to talk about. It’s a half-hour of Bowie rejecting the premises of Terry Gross’s questions, and Gross never quite catching on to the game he’s playing.

StartUp: “Disorg Chart” — Lisa Chow tries really hard to put Alex Blumberg’s feet to the fire in this, but he’s still her boss and it shows. Time for StartUp to move on to another new company. I don’t understand the people who actually think this show is better when it focusses on Gimlet. This mini-season has been fine, but the Dating Ring season is the best thing this show has done so far.

Sampler: Trailer — Normally I would think this is a bad idea. Shows that just stitch together bits of various podcasts the producers like have been done before by companies that shall remain nameless, and it’s dumb. But I already love Brittany Luse as a host, and I suspect she has sufficiently left-field taste that I’ll discover some crazy stuff through this that I’ll want to subscribe to. Or, maybe I’ll discover some crazy stuff that I definitely won’t want to subscribe to, but am glad I at least heard once. A sort of All Podcasts Considered, you might say. I am tentatively excited for this.

Reply All/Radiolab: “The Cathedral” —  Firstly, it’s about time Reply All got a plug on Radiolab. It’s been a better show than Radiolab for a year. This is a story about the making of That Dragon Cancer, a game that’s famous in some circles, about dealing with having a one-year-old son with cancer. The game sounds more emotionally draining than I’d like to deal with. But hearing the story of its development, and the story of how the family who made it dealt with their loss, is totally worthwhile. Sruthi Pinnamaneni is one of my favourite radio producers anywhere. I liked this enough that I listened to both cuts: the Reply All cut and the Radiolab cut. Which one you should listen to depends on whether or not you feel you need a crash course in the concept of “grown-up” video games. If so, go with Radiolab. If not, go with Reply All. However, the best line comes from Abumrad: “How do you finish a game where you don’t have many choices and you can’t win?” Pick of the week.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Comedian John Mulaney” — Audie Cornish is good at talking to funny people, and John Mulaney is one of the funniest. That is my review of this podcast.

The Heart: “Samara+Kelsey” — I’ve really enjoyed this season of The Heart. They’re technically incredible radio producers with an ear for great characters. But it’s kind of difficult to describe what makes it good. Just go listen to this, and you’ll either like it or not.

99% Invisible: “Best Enjoyed By” — News you can use, from 99pi. Basically, the dates on groceries aren’t related to food safety. Didn’t we kind of know that, though?

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “American Idol and People We’re Pulling For” — Two panelists I’d never heard before! This show does have new tricks!

Reply All: “Perfect Crime” — This is another of those clever things that only Reply All can do, where they tell a story that doesn’t actually have anything to do with their stated intent of making “a show about the internet,” but then present it in a way that says something to a web-steeped audience. This is ostensibly a story about an off-Broadway play that nobody likes, but it’s actually a story about our need for validation, on- and offline.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The Hateful Eight and the Evolving Theatrical Experience” — I love this podcast because it always forces me to pause it and talk to myself. Regarding The Hateful Eight, I’m totally on-board with Linda Holmes’s reservations regarding the treatment of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character, but I’m confused by the fact that everybody on the panel seemed to find this movie a brutal slog of the “accomplished but difficult” persuasion. I don’t think Tarantino means for the violence to be difficult to watch, certainly. He takes a perverse delight in cinema violence. I normally don’t, but in Tarantino films (with some very notable exceptions) his delight tends to rub off on me. That was mostly the case with The Hateful Eight, which I found tremendous good fun. And as for “the evolving theatrical experience,” I felt the need to rush in and offer the “millennial perspective”: I don’t think that whole idea of the home movie experience getting better and better and thus cinemas becoming obsolete is really valid anymore. I know too many people who watch movies mostly on their computers to buy that.

Fresh Air: “Critics Pick The Best Film & Television of 2015” —  Yeah, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with podcasts. The time has come to for god’s sake start running again. I recovered from my cold weeks ago, and my rolled ankle months ago, so really. Come on, Parsons. Anyway, when that eventually happens, there’ll be a lot of obviously old episodes of things showing up here. But for now there’s just this, which is really not that interesting and I’d skip it if I had my time back.  

Fresh Air: “Jennifer Lawrence” — I downloaded this before I learned Joy was bad. But Gross doesn’t dwell on it too much, and Lawrence is a totally fascinating person to listen to. She’s in a more businesslike mood here than we’re used to seeing her on late night shows, and whatnot. Because, I mean, it’s NPR. That makes it really worth listening to because she gets more of an opportunity to be thoughtful than she does elsewhere.

Radiolab: Year-end specials #2-4 — I have too many podcasts backed up to actually listen to these producer-chosen reruns, but I did scan through them to at least see which episodes the producers picked as their favourites: “Guts,” “The Bad Show,” and “Galapagos.” Of those, “The Bad Show” is certainly among my favourites. I can’t believe nobody picked “Inheritance,” “Stochasticity” or “Lost & Found” though. Those are three of the most sublime hours of radio ever made.

Song Exploder: “Courtney Barnett — Depreston” — I hadn’t loved a lot of what I’d heard of Courtney Barnett’s much-admired first album. But the thing about Song Exploder is that it really makes you pay attention. Isolating the vocal on this really brings out the (actually really obvious) fact that the lyrics are incredible. I think I’ll check out the rest of the album.

Theory of Everything: “Holy War” (parts I and II) — I really do appreciate that there’s someone as radical and willing to be divisive as Benjamen Walker in Radiotopia. If not for his incredible skill, he’d seem like the sort of person who would be kept away from mainstream podcast networks at all costs. That’s why I love him. This two-part speculative fiction satire of America’s Christian right is one of the outright angriest things he’s ever written, but Walker also actually engages with the specific faiths of his characters, especially in the second half. His critique of Christian America is stronger than his critique of religion more broadly — near the end of the first part, things veer uncomfortably close to Richard Dawkins new atheist territory, though he does pull back at the last minute. I used to sort of consider ToE just basically WireTap methadone. But stuff like this and “New York After Rent” would never have flown on that show. Benjamen Walker is more heretical than Jonathan Goldstein ever was.

Bullseye: “John Cleese and Dee Dee Penny” — I should really listen to more Bullseye. Damn, this is a good show. As for this specific episode: Cleese can be a real dick sometimes, but he’s in a good mood here. Jesse Thorn pulls great clips to facilitate the conversation, and they dive into Cleese’s early years. It’s amazing to hear how tentative his first steps into comedy were. He was on track to be a lawyer. Imagine. I admit I kind of spaced out during bits of the Dee Dee Penny interview. But I love some of the tracks Thorn pulls.

Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 10, 2016)

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Here’s the non-Bowie portion of my week. The Bowie portion is here. 10 reviews. No picks of the week. Nothing stood out. (Scan down to the fourth item on the list and decide for yourself if this is a deliberate provocation.)

Television

Mildred Pierce: “Part 2” — Oh my god the children in this are insufferable. It’s not just the acting, it’s the way the roles are written, too. If Haynes’s next movie is going to be starring four children, as he recently told Marc Maron, I’m genuinely concerned. Not sure he knows what he’s doing. Everything else about this is pretty much fine. It’s certainly the least remarkable thing I’ve seen of Haynes’s so far, but even his worst work is still pretty great.

QI: “Making a Meal of it” — I cannot unknow the fact that one time, five drunk royalists cut their own butts off.

QI: “Incomprehensible” — Sometimes you just have to sit down and watch two episodes of QI. I will say, though, if there’s one episode of this show that demonstrates what’s good about it, it might be this. Watching Ross Noble and Brian Cox (the professor, not the actor) riff off of each other is completely wonderful.

Movies

Star Wars: The Force Awakens — I liked this exactly as much as I expected to, which is to say, about as much as the original trilogy. A good Star Wars movie takes you on a grand romp, delivers some laughs, tugs at the heartstrings a bit, and lets you get on with your week. This did that. And I got to see my cherished C-3P0 again, if only for a few precious moments! Though I must say, Anthony Daniels is really giving a folk memory performance of his character in this. And to be fair, the writers pretty much wrote a folk memory version of C-3P0. His bluster seems more caricatured than before.

Die Hard — Alan Rickman will be dearly missed. But Die Hard is not a good movie.

Games

SOMA — I’m struck by the extent to which SOMA’s story is Stasis done right. (You’ll recall I spent many weeks playing Stasis, all the while strongly disliking it.) As with that game, this one is structured into a number of related areas, all of which have been affected differently by the same disaster. But where Stasis strained credulity by having its entire backstory told through diaries left scattered about for all to read, SOMA embraces unreality and just lets you hear the final moments of the corpses you pass by touching them. It’s genre fiction: you can make the rules up as you go. If a ludicrous convention allows you to tell better stories, go for it. But mostly, SOMA is better than Stasis for a really obvious reason: the writing is of an entirely higher order. This game is a blunt instrument at times — it is horror, after all. It needs to be scary, and dammit, it is. But it’s also quite thoughtful a lot of the time. For instance, it doesn’t mind slowing down the pace to let you piece together the story of a man who refused to abandon his post in the face of disaster, even after his entire crew had deserted, and gradually lost his mind. It’s a familiar-seeming story but it’s told piecemeal, one poignant discovery after another: like a log on his PC, noting that he’d just won his 1000th game of computer chess. Then, before you know it, you’re being chased by terrifying electromagnetism zombies again. I’m quite taken with this.

Literature, etc.

China Miéville: “A Second Slice Manifesto” — Another short thing, quite excellent. It isn’t served well by coming after “Keep,” which, if I didn’t make it clear last week, is definitely one of the three-or-so best stories in the collection so far. What’s interesting about this is that it’s not even a story. It’s really more of a thought: one that starts off intriguing and gradually becomes disquieting.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “16 Number One Songs From Our First 16 Years” — I’ve decided I really like this show. I knew a surprising number of their picks, actually. I’ll probably never understand Arcade Fire or Bon Iver, but everything else here was awesome. That Radiohead track really took me back. It occurs to me that In Rainbows might have been the first album that I bought when it was new, ending 16 years of thinking there was nothing worthwhile in modern music.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Star Wars (The Force Awakens)” — The best thing about finally having seen Star Wars (aside from finally having seen Star Wars) is being able to read/listen to all of the spoilery stuff I’ve been avoiding for nearly a month. This was basically just ten minutes of companionable enthusiasm, but I certainly agree with Holmes and Weldon (has Linda Holmes ever said “elementary, my dear Weldon” on this podcast?) about the miracle of magnetism that is John Boyega.

Imaginary Worlds: “The Expanded Universe” — At long last, I get to finish Molinsky’s five-part series. This made the movie better, actually. As ever with Star Wars, I find the discussions in the fandom more interesting than the actual movies. And in this case, I got more feelingsy hearing fans react to [GIANT BUT INEVITABLE PLOT POINT THAT MUST GO UNSPOILED in spite of me being the last person alive to see this movie] than I did when it actually happened in the movie.

Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 3, 2016)

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I suppose I should start putting the year in the titles of these things. I guess when I started this I didn’t think I’d still be doing it in 2016. But here we are. My weekly exorcisms continue. So, here’s the first fully 2016 edition of Omnireviewer, with 19 reviews.

Movies

The Hateful Eight — On first viewing, I think this is Tarantino’s second-best movie. I adored this. It’s slow and talky (until it’s not) and made up almost entirely of the sorts of scenes that are my favourites in other Tarantino movies. That scene in Inglorious Basterds in the bar, with the three fingers? That’s this whole movie. Sam Jackson and John Travolta in the diner at the end of Pulp Fiction? This whole movie. It’s worth seeing in 70mm, because it’s just the kind of movie that deserves a lavish presentation, with an intermission and an overture. Speaking of which: apparently Ennio Morricone is still alive and writing brilliant movie music. In terms of satisfying cinemagoing experiences of the last 12 months, this is second only to Fury Road for me.

Literature, etc.

China Miéville: “The Bastard Prompt” — This is certainly one of the more twisted stories in this broadly speaking fairly twisted collection. What’s best about it is that it’s the story of something that happened to someone close to the narrator, but not to the narrator himself. All the same, the narrator has his own interests that don’t directly involve the story at hand, but do influence his telling of it. This is the sort of thing that’s just par for the course for Miéville, I’m learning. Even if you don’t respond to his stories, you can’t help but be dazzled by his technical capacity.

China Miéville: “Rules” — Another tiny story, and a very enigmatic one. You can read it in two minutes, and you should, if you happen to see Three Moments of an Explosion on a shelf in a store. If you like it, you’ll like all of these stories and should definitely buy the book to read larger more wonderful stories like “The Bastard Prompt” and “The Dusty Hat.”

David Day: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded — I always like to have something in the vein of cultural criticism on the go, and now that Good Night and Good Riddance is done, this seems like just the thing. It’s a large, handsome hardcover volume that I got for a good price at the Indigo hardcover sale (Jesus Christ, I’m out of control). Each page contains a segment from Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic (one of my favourites as a kid, and still), and the text is surrounded by David Day’s entertaining analysis. His argument is that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is essentially a full classical education delivered in code. Aside from being a marvellous read, so far, this is such a beautifully designed book. It’s filled with paintings and photographs referenced in the text. I feel like this is one of those rare books that I probably won’t be constantly putting down to Google stuff, because it’s basically the internet in paper form.

China Miéville: “Estate” — This is one of those stories I feel like there’s a definitive “point” to, but I missed it.

China Miéville: “Keep” — Another fabulously counterintuitive premise from Miéville. This is a story about people with a disease that causes trenches to form in the ground around them when they stand still for too long. This guy writes amazing stories out of the sorts of random thoughts that I discard three or four times a day. Would that we all followed through like he does.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2 — Even better than the first act. I still don’t know what this game’s on about, but I’m becoming increasingly invested in the story, which is basically just some guy’s quest to get a shipment of antiques to an address that isn’t real. I feel like there was a lot more to see in this act than I actually saw, which is not something I can usually say. I’m one of those slow, deliberate gamers. It often takes me twice as long as average to make it through a game. But with this, I felt an urgency to the story that compelled me to keep going. I’ll probably play all three available acts again before Act 4 comes out, though, so I’m not worried about missing anything. As with the first act, this is full of wonderful strange details My special favourite is an office building that has an entire floor occupied by impassive bears.

Papa Sangre — I don’t think I’ll be finishing this. I bought it weeks ago, played it for about twenty minutes, and another twenty just now, and it really doesn’t seem like it’ll ever be anything other than a game of hide-and-go-seek-in-the-dark. Which is a shame, because the possibility for storytelling and world-building in a game that’s all sound, no visuals is immense. I got this for cheap with two other games from the same developer, so I suppose we’ll see if those are any good, then possibly wash our hands of the whole thing.

Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3 — This remains mysterious and obscure, but in this act it always feels like it’s about to tip its hand. An offhand reference to mold and transistors back in the first act now feels like it might be the key to the whole thing. Meta-references to digital narratives abound. (One scene may simply be an extended riff on Adventure and/or Zork or it may be something more. An elegy to the limitless vistas of parser-based interactive fiction? Hard to say. There might even be one character who’s meant to stand in for the guy who wrote Adventure. There’s a resemblance.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge is important, somehow. There are frequent allusions to the effects of the 2008 economic crisis: homes being reclaimed, people not buying consumer goods anymore, that sort of thing. As fantastical as this is, there remains some thread of connection to the real Kentucky. So, much like Lost or The Shining (or, I suppose, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), this game actively encourages not just close readings but paranoid readings: where every detail, however minute, seems like it could be significant. This isn’t just rote surrealism. Whatever’s going on here, it’s not nothing, and better yet it’s not one specific thing. Apparently Act 4 is nearly done. It had damn well better be. Pick of the week.

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The wonderful bleakness of Kentucky Route Zero.

SOMA — My computer can pretty much run this, when I turn the graphics options down to the lowest settings the game has. So, yay! Anyhow, I’ve written before about my ambiguous thoughts on horror. I think that, in the same way that comedy succeeds if it makes you laugh, horror succeeds if it actually scares you. I think both of those standards are perfectly acceptable for those genres. There’s plenty of comedy and horror that has other goals as well (more “literary” goals, we might say), and that’s great and I personally tend to like that stuff best, but it’s not fair or right to critique horror or comedy on the grounds that it’s merely funny or merely scary. If it’s that, then it’s fine. But the trouble with horror movies that aim primarily to frighten you in the moment is that they don’t work on me. I just don’t get scared watching movies. But I do love being scared. And that is why I like horror games. Because, for whatever reason, horror games scare the living crap out of me. I guess it’s just that in games, you have to actually respond to a threat. So, you can’t just passively accept an outcome and move on like you have to do in a movie. Horror games leave you scrambling to come up with a solution to a problem under pressure. They engage you in a way that almost no other medium does. But then, the issue with horror games is that they have all of the problems associated with games more broadly: most notably, the caliber of writing and voice acting in games is just lower than it is in movies. That’s not to say that there isn’t any top-shelf writing in games, just look at Kentucky Route Zero, for Chrissakes. Also Sunless Sea, 80 Days, The Stanley Parable, anything made by Simogo, tons of Twine stories and parser games and probably a bunch of more conventional stuff that I’m overlooking. Likewise for acting: The Walking Dead game has better acting than the show. But you can’t play an acclaimed game and have the same level of assurance that the writing and acting will be good as you can when you see an acclaimed film. The art form hasn’t gotten there yet, and don’t let any videogame boosterists try to convince you otherwise. It’s a bit too early to judge SOMA on these criteria, but the few bits of sustained story I’ve seen so far have been pretty solid. The voice acting for the player character is excellent, which is a great mercy. Nothing worse than being trapped inside a crap actor’s head. A promising start, and already pretty spooky.

Television

QI: “Messing with your Mind” — This Tommy Tiernan fellow, I dunno.

The Daily Show With Trevor Noah: “Wednesday, January 6, 2016” — I meant to check out Noah’s Daily Show long before this, but this episode seemed essential. And it was good. Not outstanding, but good. There are moments in this where you kind of go “that’s a joke.” And Noah’s monologue about Obama’s gun control executive order finishes with an inadequate kicker. But it’s definitely, on balance, good. Which is nice, because towards the end of Jon Stewart’s tenure, that’s pretty much what you could say about his Daily Show as well. (On the other hand, the correspondent piece about the Nike resale market is insane.)

Mildred Pierce: “Part One” — So far, Kate Winslet makes this. It’s a gorgeous-looking series, as you’d expect from Todd Haynes, but the drama isn’t taking off yet. Every scene with Melissa Leo is gold, though. Almost makes up for the children in this, who are difficult to take. Actually, if the whole series were just Kate Winslet and Melissa Leo talking to each other, that’d be fine.

Podcasts

All Songs Considered: “Viking’s Choice 2015: The Year In The Loud And The Weird” — This is what I’m talking about. I’d heard none of this music beforehand, and I think the only artist featured that I’d heard of was Iron Maiden. I suspect it would be the same for most people. Which is a shame, because people need more weirdness and extremity in their lives. I sure do.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Melancholidays, Sisters and 2015 Highlights” — Not much to say except that it’s always nice to see an indication that there are others equally obsessed with Hamilton as I am.

Radiolab: “Year-End Special #1” — The opening of this show reminded me that there really were some spectacular episodes of Radiolab this year. I’m thinking specifically of “The Rhino Hunter.” But the rest of it — which consists of Radiolab’s top three most downloaded segments ever, all from the last two years —  reminded me how much I miss the version of Radiolab that did shows like this.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Ciao 2015, Hello 2016!” — Everybody who loves pop culture should listen to this if only to hear a recap of Linda Holmes’ predictions for 2015, which are a fabulous indictment of the entire culture industry. She literally just wrote a huge rant and read it into a microphone and it’s entrancing and forceful and fantastic. I should really read her blog more.

Fresh Air: “In ‘Carol,’ 2 Women Leap Into An Unlikely Love Affair” — Terry Gross’s interview with Todd Haynes and Phyllis Nagy is a quiet thing of spectacular virtuosity. I came for Haynes, but it’s Nagy that Gross gets the most interesting stories out of. Nagy wrote the screenplay for Carol, which I loved, based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt. Nagy and Highsmith knew each other well, and Nagy is keen to portray her late friend as the real-life Therese Belivet, Rooney Mara’s character in the movie. But, without ever becoming indelicate, Gross prompts responses from Nagy that imply there may have been a certain amount of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) in her as well — though Nagy is careful to clarify that she herself was never Therese to Highsmith’s Carol. I have never heard Terry Gross more artful than this. Also, there was unexpectedly a snippet of Gross’s 2005 interview with the recently deceased composer/conductor Pierre Boulez, who’s always been an interesting figure to me, and made some of my very favourite recordings. I never anticipated he’d be so charming. So that’s a bonus. Imagine: Todd Haynes being the least interesting part of a podcast. Pick of the week.

WTF With Marc Maron: “Todd Haynes/Sarah Silverman” — Thank God this exists, then. Maron is nearly as much of a cinephile as Haynes is, so this pretty much turns into two film geeks babbling. In the process, they appear to confirm everything I assumed about Haynes in my review of Carol a couple weeks back. Haynes explicitly talks about how this movie is concerned with which character is looking through the camera at any given point (especially pointed since Therese is a photographer), which I’m taking as total validation of my interpretation of Carol as a vast, all-encompassing metafiction. Say what you like about Maron, but he’s not afraid to go deep with his interview subjects.