Tag Archives: Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel has come unstuck in time

Leave a reply

I remember being twelve years old and witnessing the reception of Peter Gabriel’s Up, his first album in ten years, with some confusion. “Out of touch,” said Rolling Stone. “Dated” said the Guardian. I was a child out of time, born in 1990 but listening mostly to music from twenty years earlier than that. I was totally unaware of whether anything new I heard sounded current. I’d never heard the Nine Inch Nails albums and big beat music that Gabriel had clearly spent the 90s obsessing over. I didn’t know what anybody was talking about.  

Up was the third record in Gabriel’s ongoing “delayed” period, in which he takes increasingly outlandish amounts of time to finish the records he starts. So took four years–an eternity in the ‘80s. Us took six, and spawned an anecdote that Sarah McLachlan still relates occasionally. Up took an unprecedented ten years to complete, including seven years of active recording. In 1997, Gabriel’s contemporary David Bowie released Earthling, an album inspired by industrial music and drum and bass. At the time, the NME described Bowie as “acutely conscious of his 50 venerable years,” and accused him of belated bandwagon jumping. Five years later, Peter Gabriel released Up. 

Gabriel has always had the impulse to write about social movements, discourses, and subjects out of the news cycle (e.g. “Biko,” “Shaking the Tree,” “The Veil”). He has always had the impulse to introduce new sounds into his sonic palette (e.g. the Fairlight, drum machines). The defining condition of his last 30 years has been that he still attempts to do this, but he takes so long to release his work that the sounds and ideas are no longer contemporary by the time we get to hear them. The question becomes whether they’re still relevant, which is not the same thing. 

Earlier this month, Gabriel finally released I/O, his first album of new material since Up. I’ve been aware of I/O since I was twelve, but it was perpetual vapourware: sidelined in favour of cover albums, legacy tours, and apparently “living.” It is extremely uncanny to hear it after all this time. With a bit more experience and cultural knowledge behind me, I find myself responding to it similarly to the way that some critics responded to Up in 2002. 

I/O’s lead single “Panopticom” offers an inversion of Jeremy Bentham’s proposed prison design, where it isn’t the powerful who possess the all-seeing eye–it’s the people at the bottom, suddenly obtaining the means to hold the powerful to account. It’s an idea Gabriel has been fascinated with since he founded WITNESS, a charity that gave cameras to citizens of underprivileged countries for the purpose of filming human rights abuses. WITNESS vastly predates the role of phone cameras in BLM and the Arab Spring. 

But does “Panopticom?” Given the timescale at play here, it may. And it certainly seems like it does–the song presents a futuristic vision of technology-assisted accountability that has already come to pass. Indeed, the promise of this moment has come and gone somewhat. We now live in a world where citizens’ unlimited ability to disseminate information has turned out to be a catastrophe, and not an emancipation. “Panopticom” is deeply, maybe even charmingly naive in the era of Elon Musk’s X. It is replete with the techno-utopianism of the early aughts. It even has a Web 1.0-style neologism for a title. 

It’s a title that the neologism king Buckminster Fuller might have enjoyed, as might his devoted acolyte Stewart Brand. Brand is the definitive techno-utopian of his (and Gabriel’s) generation, and his influence is a quiet presence throughout I/O–especially on my favourite track, “Playing for Time.” It’s a simple ballad, expressing a mixture of anxiety and resignation about the passage of time. Brand shows his face in the final verse, which describes the Clock of the Long Now, a marvellous initiative from Brand’s Long Now Foundation (I/O co-producer Brian Eno is on the board of directors). The clock was conceived by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis, to help humanity recognize the potential enormity of the future. It only exists as a prototype, but it will eventually be installed inside of a mountain in Texas. It will tick once a year. The century hand will advance once every hundred years. The clock will chime each new millennium, for 10,000 years. 

Intentionally or not, “Playing for Time” is Peter Gabriel’s definitive statement on the last thirty years of his career. If “any moment that we bring to life will never fade away” as he says, then it doesn’t matter if you make an early-90s Nine Inch Nails album in 2002, because no moment, not even the present one, is any more or less valid than any other. And besides, 1992 and 2002 are infinitesimally close together. If it doesn’t seem that way, just listen to the silent clock in the mountain. 

I/O has arrived into a dramatically different world than Up did. It has been received somewhat more positively in its first couple weeks, in spite of being–in my view–significantly less consistent. But we are not so quick to dismiss an artwork for being dated anymore. Now, we name and catalogue the distinct aesthetic trends of the past for easy reference, and we live in a static, patchwork culture of throwbacks and homage. Peter Gabriel was already unstuck in time when he released Up. Two decades later, the only difference is that we’ve joined him. 

A recent newsletter promoting I/O described it as “an album of, and for, the here and now.” This is patently ridiculous. It’s worth noting that the album’s title refers not only to the expression “in, out,” but also to one of Jupiter’s moons. The album was a lunar phenomenon from the start: Gabriel released one song on every full moon of the last calendar year. His music exists on a cosmic timescale now, governed not by human trends but by the rotation of celestial bodies that will still be there when all that’s left of us are charred ruins and a stately old clock. 

Omnireviewer (week of Jul. 18, 2016)

Leave a reply

15 reviews. These small numbers are making me feel so well-adjusted.

Television

O.J.: Made in America: Episodes 4 & 5 — I’ll double down on what I said last time: this is the best documentary I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that’s quite this good at telling the big story and the little story at the same time. This is not just the story of the O.J. Simpson trial. It is the story of the fraught relationship between police and African Americans (yes, this series comes at an appropriate time). It is the story of how a pre-infamy O.J. Simpson made the conscious attempt to distance himself from his race. And most fascinatingly of all, it is the story of how the former narrative, about police brutality, was cynically co-opted by Simpson’s defence team in spite of the latter narrative in which O.J. preferred not to be seen as black. This series also makes a lot of time for Nicole Brown, which is extremely important given that this is as much a story about domestic violence as it is about race. If I go on any longer, I’ll go on much longer, so I’ll leave it there. But suffice it to say that this is head, shoulders and torso above every other new thing I’ve reviewed on this blog in 2016. I will certainly be writing more on at some point. Pick of the week.

BoJack Horseman: Season 3, episodes 1-3 — Oh man, I love this show. So far, this season is relatively light (very relatively) but I’m sure that will change. For now, it’s fun to just reacclimate to the density of visual humour in this show. (The titles on Princess Carolyn’s bookshelf are all bad cat puns, etc.) This is certainly my favourite of the current crop of adult cartoons.

Movies

Ghostbusters — It’s great! It is essentially a delivery system for hilarious jokes and a quartet of excellent performances. The story isn’t much. But, that’s not the point. This is a marvellous update of a franchise that was always more memorable than good. The fact that it stars four women and has a red pill shitsack as its villain certainly adds to the appeal. But mostly, this is great because Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and especially Kate McKinnon are extremely funny and likable screen presences.

Music

Nonkeen: The Gamble/Oddments of the Gamble — I’m reviewing them together, because their titles make it seem like they’re meant to be taken together. That said, they’re no much alike. The Gamble itself is a dark, moody thing that I can’t see myself returning to that often. But Oddments of the Gamble, in spite of having a name that explicitly marks it as the subordinate one in the pair, is enthralling and far more energetic. (It may help that I listened to the latter while watching fireworks, but I don’t think that necessarily kills my objectivity.) Taken together, The Gamble and its Oddments are lovely ambient music. They’re slight, but nice.

Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel (2) — Gabriel’s least-appreciated album has always been an idiosyncratic favourite of mine. It was produced by Robert Fripp, whose primary function seems to have been making Gabriel work quickly. That’s not necessarily as utilitarian an approach as it may seem. Gabriel is an infamous slowpoke, and possibly the easiest way to get him working outside of his comfort zone is to speed the process up. The result is the only Peter Gabriel studio album where it sounds like there may be such a thing as “The Peter Gabriel Band.” It all sounds fairly live, and there’s a consistency across the album, because it was primarily played by the same people. Roy Bittan from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band gives particularly evocative performances on piano. It’s true that there are some weak moments — “Home Sweet Home” is the ghastliest track in Gabriel’s catalogue, vying only with his awful cover of “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” (And for some reason, he put both of them at the end of their respective albums. Self-sabotage? His early album covers suggest he has a taste for it.) “Perspective” hasn’t aged well. And “A Wonderful Day In A One-Way World,” much as I love it in spite of myself, is too clever by half. But, they’re more than counterbalanced by, in my estimation, five classics: “On the Air,” “Mother of Violence” (astonishing), “Animal Magic,” “Exposure” (better here than on Fripp’s solo album of the same name), and “Flotsam and Jetsam.” Throw in “D.I.Y.,” which isn’t quite the “Solsbury Hill” cash-in that some have accused it of being, the pleasantly elaborate “White Shadow,” and “Indigo,” which I love when I’m in my least cynical mood, and you’ve got an album nearly worthy of the two acclaimed classics on either side of it in the discography. I shall sit and wait for the global reappraisal.

Peter Gabriel: Live in Athens 1987 — Having exhausted my Tidal trial (and the second month that I accidentally paid for), I’ve moved on to a free trial with Apple Music. They’ve got a Peter Gabriel collection on there that’s got all of the non-soundtrack studio albums, plus a bunch of live stuff. This was the only live album in there that I hadn’t heard before, and it 100% trumps both Plays Live and Secret World Live. By a lot. Gabriel is at his vocal prime, having built up substantial grit since his Genesis days, but still with every ounce of his flexibility intact. His live band has not yet started to sprawl: it’s a tight four-piece of his long-term collaborators David Rhodes on guitar and Tony “best bassist alive” Levin, plus David Sancious on keys and the completely astonishing Manu Katche on drums. The setlist is heavy on material from the then-recent commercial breakthrough So, but that’s not a complaint. While I prefer other Peter Gabriel albums to that juggernaut, listening to him perform these songs while they’re new is really something. It’s the first and last time in Gabriel’s career that he’s managed to write songs with this kind of directness, and he’s audibly delighting in the extent that he’s connecting with his audience. Two years before Say Anything, “In Your Eyes” is an anthem of white-hot spiritual euphoria. This 11-minute rendition, containing the introductory verse that got lopped off the studio album, is the definitive one. The same could be said for a bunch of the earlier stuff, too — in front of a crowd, “Solsbury Hill” releases all of the latent joy that’s reined in on the studio version. This is incredible, and a great argument for live albums in general.

Chance the Rapper: Colouring Book — This is the album that I wish The Life of Pablo was: big shimmery gospel hip hop with great beats and without Kanye’s 2016 full-time troll persona mucking up the works. In fact, Chance is so likeable that it almost seems like an overcorrection of Pablo. This is the most overtly joyful album I’ve heard this year. It is the only one of my favourite albums of 2016 that isn’t extremely dark. That counts for a lot.

Podcasts

In Our Time: “The Invention of Photography” — Melvyn’s in an odd mood, this time around. At one point he feels compelled to urge his guests to move forward with the story more rapidly. But that made me realize something: some of Melvyn Bragg’s idiosyncrasies come down to his having to preside over a rounded conversation on a complex issue that must fit exactly into a timeslot. What you’re hearing on the podcast has presumably not been altered from what I occasionally forget is a live broadcast. If Bragg seems a bit brusque at times, it likely has something to do with that. The actual content of this episode is enthralling as ever, with Simon Schafer proving an especially compelling guest. The early history of photography is full of personalities, and they’re brought to life here. Nice.

Invisibilia: “Frame of Reference” — At one point in this, Hanna Rosin describes “a science fiction story she once read” that actually sounds like it might just be Plato’s cave allegory. That aside, this is a strong episode. The first story, about a woman with Asperger’s who is momentarily afforded a glimpse of a world seen without Asperger’s is moving as a character-driven narrative, even if the themes don’t hit as hard as the producers probably want them to. But the second, an interview with comedian Hasan Minhaj about how his father’s reference points for suffering hindered their mutual understanding, is really lovely. It helps that Alix Spiegel has a similar relationship with her mom. This season is yet to produce an earth shattering story in the vein of the first season’s locked-in syndrome story. But it is now reliably satisfying me.

Code Switch: “No Words” — This was the first time I heard the tape of Philando Castile’s girlfriend after he was shot. I am glad I have not seen the video. It is appalling and unbelievably sad. Code Switch has had a lot of news to react to since its inception, and it tends to be the kind of news that there’s almost nothing to say about, thus the title of this extra episode. But they’ve comported themselves admirably.

On The Media: “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Bearing Witness” — I don’t tend to find myself in situations where I’ve got to film horrible things on my phone, and also I am not American, so different laws apply. But this was interesting in a more abstract way than it was possibly meant to be.

Radiolab: “David and the Wire” — This is a borderline non-story, and consciously so. But I was riveted. It’s a personal narrative, related by a man who records everything in the hopes that he will someday become Scott Carrier. Radio about radio will always appeal to me. I’m interested to see what else happens on Radiolab while Jad’s away on other business.

The Memory Palace: “Oil, Water” — A slight episode, but nice. It’s good to know that the river doesn’t catch fire in Cleveland anymore. It’s distressing to know how frequently it once did.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Pokemon Go” — Glen Weldon is so often a real curmudgeon that it’s nice to hear him being so wonderfully enthusiastic about something that so many people are being curmudgeons about. I will be checking out Pokémon Go when my life has space for it.

The Allusionist: “Generation What?” — I think this maybe gives a bit too much credit to Strauss and Howe. They’re the guys who devised the generational theory that says the characteristics of generations are predictable in advance, and therefore history is a relatively tight cycle. Their system always read like horoscopes to me. But when Zaltzman focusses on the language, this is great. Also, this has Megan Tan on it from the Millennial podcast, which I’m intending to check out. She is not super insightful here, and anybody who tries to own the label “millennial” is inherently suspect to me. But I won’t write her off until I’ve heard her show. Possibly not even then!

Omnireviewer (week of Jun. 19, 2016)

Leave a reply

23 reviews.

Movies

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

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

Television

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

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

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

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

Games

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

Literature, etc.

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

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

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

Music

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

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

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

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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