Tag Archives: Tragically Hip

Omnibus (week of Oct. 15, 2017)

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It was more of an audiobook week than a podcast week, so once again we’ve got two non-podcast picks of the week.

15 reviews.

Literature, etc.

Jane Mayer: “The Danger of President Pence” — This satisfyingly lengthy feature details all the many wondrous failings and creepinesses of the Vice-President. You’ve probably seen bits of it excerpted on Twitter, but you owe it to yourself to read it in full. Pence would be a disastrous president, because he’s a more efficient political operative than the orangutan who employs him, but he also has no spine with which to stand up to the Kochs, and a truly terrifying case of Jesus freakiness. I’ll decline to quote anything because you should just go read it all.

Stephen King: It (audiobook) — I’m nine hours into this 45-hour behemoth, and I have no regrets. The primary advantage of hearing this as an audiobook rather than reading it is just that you can’t cheat and steal a glimpse at the next page. There’s no way out of the tension. Steven Weber is a marvellous narrator, with a wide range of character voices that don’t feel too over the top. His Pennyworth is more restrained than, for instance, Tim Curry’s (based on the clips I’ve seen). But it’s still creepy as hell. As a book, It is thrilling, and surprisingly ambitious. I shouldn’t make too many judgements yet, because I’ve got 80% of this left to go. But so far, it’s both a convincing picture of the unique horrors of childhood and an interesting exploration of the human tendency to repress trauma for the sake of our sanity. The way it tells two stories at a time — the story of a group of adults reuniting after years apart, and the much earlier story of the horror that haunts all of them subconsciously — works really well. The horror in this first part arises mostly from seeing our main characters through the eyes of others, who are forced to acknowledge that there’s something terrifying about their husband/wife/employee etc. that they’ve never seen before. The best and most frightening scene in the book so far is one in which the author William Denbrough (an obvious King self-insert) tries to communicate as much of his hidden past as he can to his wife without driving her completely insane. It’s the kind of scene in which the book validates its massive length. We’ll see if I still feel that way after 36 more hours of it.

Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass — I never thought we’d get another full novel that ties into His Dark Materials, let alone another whole trilogy. I am delighted on behalf of my inner child, and also young weirdos growing up today. I will be reading La Belle Sauvage with relish, but I need to brush up because I haven’t read the His Dark Materials trilogy since I was eleven. So far, The Golden Compass is as magical as I remember it being. Lyra is one of the great protagonists in children’s literature, and Pullman succeeds in making a university full of fusty old scholars seem like a wonderland in the early chapters. This is like encountering an old friend.

Movies

Blade Runner 2049 — Let’s take a few runs at this. Firstly, let’s look at it as a movie in itself. Blade Runner 2049 is the latest film from Denis Villeneuve, the director of at least two previous masterpieces. (This is the third film of his I’ve seen.) It is his first blockbuster franchise film (even if the box office figures suggest that the block has not been busted to the extent that the studio probably hoped), and the most lavish and ostentatious of his recent movies. It is shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose lack of an Oscar has at this point exceeded pre-2007 Martin Scorsese levels of ludicrousness. As a sensory experience, it is one of the best movies in recent memory. The way the camera hangs and drifts across the film’s beautiful production design invokes a sense of elegance that gets periodically blown away by the film’s shockingly aggressive, kickass score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. (See this in cinemas for the sound alone. It’s Zimmer’s best work.) It contains some specific sequences that deserve to go down in history, such as the construction of a dream of a birthday party, and a fistfight backed by a hologram of Elvis. It tells the story of a person who has to reckon with the notion that he may not be what he thinks he is, and it tells this story without any ostentatious philosophizing. It is a massively good movie. Next, let’s look at it as an expansion of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The original film is in my opinion a sublime masterpiece, and even a great film from one of the best directors of our time is going to have a hard time measuring up. That’s why this is step two in the process. Even though Blade Runner 2049 is not as good a film as Blade Runner, it is one of the best examples of respecting without replicating in this era of endless rehashes. It would have been simple to remake the original film beat for beat, like in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which Iike). But Blade Runner is a different kind of film from Star Wars and calls for a different kind of engagement in a sequel. Blade Runner is slow, thinky, painterly, and not culturally ubiquitous. In keeping with that, Blade Runner 2049 is a slow, thinky, painterly film that relies as much on its director’s unique vision as on the canon it inherits from its generative nostalgia object. This film’s exterior scenes take place in locations with three hues: it starts in a grey place, moves to a black place, and eventually carries us to a red place. Of these, the grey and red places are new. Maybe it seems absurd to suggest that this movie distinguishes itself from its predecessor by adding Two New Colours! But I’ve always thought of Blade Runner as a moving painting as much as a work of storytelling. So, introducing these two new locations with their vastly new aesthetics is a very substantial choice indeed. And right from the start, no less. Only once the story’s new protagonist has been properly introduced in the grey place are we allowed back into the theatrical, horizonless blackness that is the original film’s defining visual feature. Even the elements of the story that involve Rick Deckard, the first film’s protagonist, show facets of him that haven’t seen before. (This is by some margin Harrison Ford’s best role reprisal of recent years.) The new film has nothing to offer in place of Blade Runner’s one truly excellent character, Roy Batty. But it was wise of them not to try. Any attempt at “Rutger-Hauer-but-not” would have been doomed to ridiculousness. Jared Leto’s character flirts with it as it is. Also: the fact that the film reintroduces Philip K. Dick’s idea of non-robotic animals being sought-after items (largely excised from Scott’s film) is a fun touch. I haven’t read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by the way. But I have heard Terry Gilliam describe the plot, which I imagine is just as good. Now let’s look at it as a piece of fanservice. The most gratifying thing about this movie is that it is not primarily fanservice. But when they go that route, by god, they do it well. Gaff’s origami sheep is the best specific example. But the most satisfying element of fanservice in the movie is simply how beautifully recreated all of the environments from Scott’s original are. When we’re in the black heart of future Los Angeles, this movie looks almost exactly like the original, down to the huge Atari logo (a company which we now know will not have survived to 2049). Villeneuve is canny enough to realize that Blade Runner’s visuals are among the least dated of its time, and that its bleak cityscapes don’t require visual modernization to the same extent as, say, the starship Enterprise. The same goes for the hazy, gold-lit halls of power. The light’s a bit more liquid and a bit less gaseous these days, but it’s familiar enough. We also get a curiously lengthy sequence in which an image is enhanced on a screen. And best of all, we get a beautiful ending in which Zimmer and Wallfisch’s brilliant score dissolves into the music that inspired it: Vangelis’s original score for Roy’s death scene in the first film. As a fan of the original, I feel respected without being pandered to. Finally, let’s acknowledge that this film is maddeningly sexist. The original was no great feminist touchstone, but this one is maybe worse. It’s a huge blight on an otherwise excellent film, and it colours my impressions of it accordingly. Devon Maloney’s take in Wired is excellent. Still, I loved Blade Runner 2049, for the same primary reasons as I loved Blade Runner: it is an almost unimaginably beautiful thing to look at and listen to. Pick of the week.

Television

Downton Abbey: Season 6, episodes 4-9 — “You couldn’t be harder on those potatoes if you wanted them to confess to spying!” Mrs. Patmore, always and forever. This final run of Downton Abbey was engineered to be satisfying, and with a few exceptions, it is. For me the biggest exception is the plotline involving Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes’ marriage. Carson’s tendency to prioritize his responsibility to the Crawley family and their way of life over his responsibility to his wife is played for laughs, and he’s never adequately put in his place for it. He suffers a bit, sure, but I don’t feel like we really got to see him come to understand that there are more important things than the rigorous performance of his duties. He is a terrible husband, and this season paints him as a more ruthless and doctrinaire man than previous ones. Mrs. Hughes can’t help but be steamrolled. But most of the rest of the season is fine. We don’t really ever get to know the fellow Mary ends up with, which is too bad considering that her romantic travails made up the bulk of the tension in early seasons. But I do love that he gets a job as a used car salesman and she’s okay with it. Progress is hard to come by in this show, so we’d best take what we can get. On to the finale. Old Lady Grantham gets the two most apropos benedictions, the most relevant of which being “There’s a lot at risk, but with any luck they’ll be happy enough. Which is the English version of a happy ending.” At first glance, it may not seem like the show itself shares her view — nobody comes off especially badly in the end, and even those characters whose futures we don’t know get sent off with the suggestion of better things to come. Let’s nobody pretend like Tom isn’t going to end up married to that editor. But Lady Grantham is correct when she says “there’s a lot at risk.” If there’s one thing we should have learned by now about the world of Downton Abbey, it’s that present-day happiness does not imply everlasting happiness. It’s all well and good for the show to leave all of its characters in a good place at its close. In fact, it barely even seems cheap, because there’s every chance that Downton won’t make it into the next decade. Lady Grantham’s other benediction is the series’ proper final line. “Makes me smile,” she says, “the way every year we drink to the future, whatever it may bring.” Cousin Isobel responds: “Well, what else could we drink to? We’re going forward into the future, not backward into the past.” To which old Lady Grantham replies: “If only we had the choice.” It’s a joke, but Isobel’s face tells the rest of the story. She is looking at a woman who would gladly reverse a century of progress to regain the prestige she once knew. That’s what Downton Abbey is about, maybe as much for its creator as for its characters: the desire to live in a rose-tinted, imaginary version of a barbaric past. I have enjoyed this show immensely, but I have no idea whether I’ve been reading it against the grain this whole time or not. I suppose that’s the greatest demonstration of its virtues.

Comedy

Patton Oswalt: Annihilation — This has been a good year for sad comedy. Chris Gethard’s Career Suicide is barely comedy for much of its duration. Maria Bamford’s Old Baby finds her in better shape than previous specials, but she’s still playing emotional sudoku. Annihilation is Patton Oswalt’s public reckoning with the death of his wife. That’s not all it is — there’s some Trump material that’s relatively similar to Marc Maron’s Trump material from his special this year. (If ever there were a topic about which two comics were going to arrive independently at the same jokes, it’s Donald Trump.) There’s some outstanding crowdwork. And there’s a hysterical story about the best fight Oswalt ever witnessed. But the meat and potatoes of the set is Oswalt’s material about trying to help his daughter through the loss of her mother, while he himself wasn’t even close to finished grieving. The rawest emotional territory is often the most fruitful for comedy, and that’s clearly the case here. Grief has made Oswalt notice the tiny absurdities that interrupt his numbness very acutely, and he spins it into some great jokes, including a particularly excellent bit about a well-meaning Polish airport security officer who ruins his daughter’s day. This is draining stuff at times, but it’s very good.

Games

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist — This 20-minute free game from one of the folks behind The Stanley Parable is delightful. I played it twice, once in the suggested 20-minute fashion, and once in a more luxurious 50 minutes. It’s worth playing twice, since the second time bequeaths you with a tape deck that allows you to play cassettes littered about, which contain voice work by Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland. But even without him, the voice work is great. The narrator is Simon Amstell, in full-on panic mode. As a meta-comment on walking simulators and choice in games, it’s nowhere near as insightful as The Stanley Parable, but it’s free! And it’s funny! And it’ll take almost none of your time. And it’s more detailed than you might initially detect. What excuse do you have?

Music

Kendrick Lamar: DAMN. — It took a while, but I’ve come around to thinking this is one of the best albums of the year. “DUCKWORTH.” in particular blows my mind, but “FEAR.” is one of Kendrick’s best tracks too. “HUMBLE.” is super catchy, definitely this album’s “King Kunta.” It’s a grower.

The Tragically Hip: Day For Night — Look: those of you who think this band is undistinguished generic rock, I hear you. I think lots of their albums fit that description. But Gord Downie’s lyrics are the exact opposite of generic. They approach Kate Bush levels of specificity. And that is always the case. But here is an album where the music actually rises to the challenge of illustrating Downie’s poetry. It’s an album of moody sonic landscapes as much as it is an album of guitar shredding. I was actually surprised to find that it wasn’t produced by Daniel Lanois. It doesn’t have the same density of recognizable classics as Fully Completely, but it is for my money a much more satisfying start-to-finish listening experience. Tracks like “Thugs” and “Titanic Terrarium” are as good a demonstration of why the Hip are a good band as “Courage” and “Wheat Kings.” If you pay close attention to Gord on this album, I’ll wager there’s a lyric in every song that’ll lodge in your head. “I want a book that’ll make me drunk/full of freaks and disenfranchised punks,” he sings on “An Inch An Hour,” which is a song you’ll only hear if you’re listening to the record. Ditto for “Yawning or Snarling,” the chorus of which goes “Take a look at this photograph/clearly his teeth were bared/he could have been yawning or snarling/the story was never clear.” By most estimations, the classics from this disc are “Grace, Too,” “Nautical Disaster” and “Scared,” all of which are brilliant, the last of which is probably my favourite song by this band. I have no idea what it means. I just know I have a visceral response to it. Maybe because I’m scared of everything? Who can say. In any case, I humbly suggest if you’ve never heard the Hip that this is the album you should hear. I knew very little about them until this whole country went into a completely understandable fit of acute sadness over his cancer diagnosis. This was the album that made me understand why. I miss him already. Pick of the week.

The Rolling Stones: Goats Head Soup — Why stop at Exile? We’re on a roll, SO TO SPEAK. And besides, it looks like three of the next six albums in their catalogue are reasonably well regarded, so I may as well get at least up to Tattoo You. This album is nearly as unfocused as Exile, but without the sprawling length that makes it feel like a purposeful lack of focus. Still, it sounds like a band fully in control of their dynamic, and its best songs are outright classics that would have fared well on any previous album. The lead single, “Angie” is not one of those songs. Not that it’s bad, but it’s hard not to compare it to previous ballads like “Wild Horses” and “Shine A Light,” in which context it falls hugely flat. The best stuff here is “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” which is the most successfully funky the band has ever been (thank you, Billy Preston), and “Winter,” which is like “Moonlight Mile” having been brought back down to earth. I like this. I’ll listen to it again. I think I like it better than Beggars Banquet.

The Rolling Stones: It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll — The best thing on this album is the rim shot sound on “Time Waits For No One.” The way it’s recorded is so satisfying. It’s like snapping a particularly snug top back on a bottle. But there isn’t really much on this that I loved. “Till The Next Goodbye” is a pretty good ballad, but the rockers feel like pale imitations of earlier, better hits. So begins the fall, I suppose. Well, at least Some Girls is coming up soon.

Podcasts

The Daily: Oct. 18 & 19, 2017 — Two great instalments: especially the October 18 episode, which features a fantastic interview with Shannon Mulcahy, a steelworker who found great freedom in her job, until it was shipped to Mexico. President Trump hasn’t fixed the problem the way she hoped. This is an adaptation of a print story, but it’s told as a true radio story, with tape and everything. Thursday’s episode on the state of the Islamic State is a good summation of a topic I can’t keep track of.

Constellations: “miyuki jokiranta – no event” & “Is This an Exercise? By Julie Shapiro” — I’m noticing a pattern in the episodes of this sound art focussed podcast: the sort of experimental audio they favour is the lyrical, lugubrious sort. This is all well and good, but I’m looking forward to hearing something really propulsive at some point. Anyway, these are two great pieces, especially the one by Miyuki Jokiranta about a medical procedure and our perception of time. You should be listening to this.

Imaginary Worlds: “The Haunted Mansion” — Let’s just say it’s the second best horror-inclined, Disney-related podcast of the month. Not that I’m biased.

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law: “Impeachment” — I’ve decided I like this show. I particularly love how aware Roman Mars is that his audience wants to see the back of President Trump. I will keep listening.

Omnireviewer (week of Jan. 22, 2017)

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If things seem a bit scant this week, well, I’ve been busy with my annual wrap-up, which I posted yesterday, and from which some of this is repurposed. 21 reviews.

Movies

Arrival — I came out of this genuinely feeling that it’s the best movie of the year. One gradual process I’ve been through this year is that I’ve come to see how spoilers are an actual thing that’s worth avoiding. And it’s really hard to talk about Arrival without dealing with the twist. This is one of those movies that becomes an entirely different film from start to finish once you know the whole of the story. I suspect that’s probably why everything I’ve seen written about it seems more effusively positive than it can actually back up with analysis. To talk about what makes this movie extraordinary as opposed to great is to spoil it. This movie’s ending is a narrative rug pull of Steven Moffat proportions. Still, for the bulk of Arrival’s running time, we don’t know the big secret, and it’s still an excellent movie. Amy Adams gives one of the best performances of the year (again, a performance that is elevated by knowledge of the ending) as the person that the military brings in to help them communicate. Specifically, with aliens. Couching a first contact story in terms of understanding language is a winning premise, especially when the story introduces the idea (a real idea in linguistics) that language actually fundamentally affects the way that a person thinks. That makes it critical to any understanding of another culture, yet alone another species. As far as I can tell all of this comes straight from the Ted Chiang story that Arrival’s excellent screenplay is based on. But if the movie were only a brute force expression of some clever ideas, it wouldn’t be my favourite of the year. Director Denis Villeneuve imparts an element of profound lyricism to the story by allowing us to see small moments, and letting our eyes linger on images that one assumes the citizens of this movie’s world are being fed through a much more frenetic TV news approach. Villeneuve is a director that I’ve been aware of since he made Incendies in 2010, but this is the first of his movies that I’ve seen. It’s clear that he’s a major talent, and one hopes that he’ll continue making movies like this, even after he’s made his franchise juggernaut debut later this year with the new Blade Runner.  Pick of the week.

Mad Max — I saw Fury Road when it was in theatres, because it was essential viewing. And oh my god am I ever glad I did. But I hadn’t seen any of the previous Mad Max movies. Now I’m rectifying that. This is astonishing for having been made for $2.3 million, adjusted for inflation. So much is communicated by implication here, with cuts made in opportune places so that major events are left to the imagination. It’s both dramatically effective, and a great way to cut expenses. Considering how far off from Fury Road this movie is — in terms of time, budget and the series not having yet built its cultural legacy — it’s incredible how many of the ingredients are already in place. The deranged gang of predatory biker dudes in this are so over the top that they don’t even need makeup. But, when you throw a bit of magic character design juice over that same basic formula, you get Fury Road’s war boys. And of course, their leader is the same guy, just younger and with more of his face visible. Neither of the Mad Max movies I’ve seen have especially involved stories, but of course this isn’t a problem. It’s more of a problem in Mad Max, though. Because, in Fury Road, the chase scenes are so detailed that plot can occur at a micro level: every chase and fight scene has dozens of tiny plot events. A character gets plucked from a friendly vehicle into an unfriendly one; a man being pursued spies the promise of sunlight through a grate; the unconscious guy chained to Max as he’s fighting wakes up. That’s what $150 million well-spent buys you. In the 1979 rendition, you have to be content with a slightly blunter instrument. Still, well worth the hour and a half.

Television

Downton Abbey: Season 3, episodes 6-9 — At its best, this season is like a less thoughtful, more conservative, British Horace and Pete. More than either of the previous seasons of Downton Abbey, it foregrounds the series’ central tension, which is that things can’t remain as they are. Lord Grantham is the most interesting character, at least symbolically, because he is the primary representative of the old guard, and we see him undermined again and again: regarding how his estate is to be run, the church in which his granddaughter will be Christened, whether his middle daughter should be allowed to write a newspaper column, and most compellingly which doctor to listen to when there’s a life at risk. The fact that he makes his every decision based on a crumbling value system that will only lead to his own ruin is a tremendously interesting throughline that also serves to explain at a granular level why the big houses like Downton fell, historically. It really comes down to people like Grantham being entirely out of touch with any traditions and ways of life save their own. (A personal favourite moment: Grantham’s valet is released from prison and his chummy advice for how to spend his first day of freedom is: “Stay in bed! Read books!” Honest to god.) However, that’s where the positives stop. This is the first season where the upstairs plotline has struck me as substantially more interesting than the downstairs plot, which in this season is completely insufferable. It revolves around O’Brien trying to take brutal revenge on Thomas for something I don’t remember, and a messy, dull love pentagon between Thomas, two new footmen, Daisy and the kitchenmaid. Good lord, kill me now. And then, off in their own tangentially connected world, are Matthew and Mary, who have been highlights of previous seasons, but who are actually worse in this season than the love pentagon. Even if the huge twist at the end of the season is incredibly contrived (and Jesus Christ, the writing around it could not be more hamfisted), I’m quite happy that it’s removed a relationship from this show that has become a source of aggravation. Actually, the entire final episode of this, a Christmas special, is awful. The worst episode of the show so far. At some point during its running time, Lord Grantham bids his fellow toffs “good hunting,” which only reminded me of that other show I’m much more enthusiastic about getting back to.

Literature, etc.

Emily Nussbaum: “How Jokes Won the Election” — This feature is a good corollary to HyperNormalisation. It argues that the rapidly thinning line between “joke” and “not a joke” is a clear contributor to Trump’s victory. It also contains an excellent assessment of Trump, Obama and Clinton as varying comedic personalities.

Michiko Kakutani: “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read” — Here is a confession. I have never read 1984. Here is another confession. I have been lying about having read 1984 for years. In fact, I think I’ve been lying about having read 1984 for so long that this isn’t the first time I’ve gone public about not having read 1984. It may actually be the third. But nonetheless I feel another confession is necessary, because it’s a lie I’ve repeated as recently as a couple of weeks ago. And it’s such an easy one to keep up, given how familiar the central tenets of 1984 are in our culture. But perhaps I should take this opportunity, while this whole American fascism thing is going on, to see for myself why it is so enduring. I’ll add it to the list.

Olivia Laing: “The Lonely City” — The very act of writing a book about one’s own loneliness is an act of bravery. If this book were simply Olivia Laing’s account of the period in her own life when she felt the most alienated, it would still be worth reading, and not at all self-indulgent. Nothing could be less self-indulgent than proclaiming loneliness, because we all intuitively know that such a proclamation will have the counterintuitive effect of worsening one’s own isolation. But Laing only uses her own narrative as a spine: a framing device that she uses to string together her readings of the lives and works of several definitively lonely American artists. Though it is often conflated with depression, Laing considers loneliness as a unique affliction: an undesirable one by definition, but one without which the human experience is incomplete and possibly less inspired. The chapter that focuses on Andy Warhol’s outsiderness, his alienation through not having a firm grasp of language, is shattering and actually makes Warhol’s famous repeated images take on a bittersweet quality that I had never detected in them before. Laing is sensitive to the alienating tendencies of patriarchy and heteronormativity, and offers compelling portraits of people who lived lonely lives due to a society-wide lack of understanding. A substantial amount of the chapter that begins by focussing on Warhol veers off to consider Valerie Solanas, an early radical feminist of some genius who has since become known for only one thing: shooting Andy Warhol. The Lonely City is a beautiful book: equal parts sad and validating. It made me want to jump on a plane to New York to go look at art. By myself.

Music

The Tragically Hip: Live Between Us — I’ve been into live albums lately, and it occurred to me that maybe I could start to understand the Hip a little better if I heard a full live show from them in their prime. I think it worked. Gord Downie has always been the part of the band that I liked: his lyrics, his whimsical character as a frontman, his conscience. It’s the rest of them, with their almost aggressively generic sound that always posed a problem. But live, that sound is almost a virtue, because there’s no more semiotically rich sound than two guitars, a bass, drums and a screaming crowd. This is straightforward rock and roll, with a very non-straightforward frontman. I’m sold.

Podcasts

Reply All: “Man of the People” — This is another story from the annals of American demagoguery — and one that played out on a similarly massive scale to the current one, relative to its time. It’s about John Brinkley: a fake doctor who patented a raft of fake medicines and marketed them to a nation of credulous customers on a radio station that he owned. (This was the earliest days of commercial radio, and it already sucked.) It’s gratifying to hear that flimflam was always a thing. It’s depressing that it’s still just as much of a thing in an era where we’re each equipped with far more of the facts than we were in the 20s.

99% Invisible: “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle” — The story of the taser is as fraught as you’d think it would be. Framing this as a design story is a great idea, because then it becomes the story of whether the design of the taser is a fitting design or a catastrophic one — and that depends, of course, on whether you’re talking to a police officer.

Crimetown: “Power Street” — Ohhhh, it’s back. This show is catnip to me. It’s basically everything that Criminal isn’t, which isn’t a slight to either of them. Criminal is a show that demonstrates the multifacetedness of criminality, and thrives on telling stories of all sorts of different characters. Crimetown is True Crime, note the capitals. It’s got charismatic gangsters, fisticuffs, mob hits, and corruption that goes right up to the top. It’s a yarn that you can just get lost in the grisly details of. It’s the best. I’m just as much looking forward to hearing what city their next season will focus on as I am to how they deal with the rest of this one.

Welcome to Night Vale: “[Best Of?]” — This basically proves that it’s the structure of Night Vale that annoys me most. Every time they break from the structure, I love it. This episode responds to Cecil taking a bit of time off by installing a mysterious new host in his seat. It features a clip from Cecil’s early career (but not as early as you’d think, considering) where he reports on the invention of radio, which of course begs the question… how was he reporting it? This is clearly one of the classics, and has an absolutely haunting twist at the end. If I can expect periodic episodes like this one, I’ll happily groan my way through a few potboilers. Pick of the week. 

Chapo Trap House: “Mr. Chapo Goes To Washington” — An incredibly edifying hour of the Chapos and their guests bitching about the inauguration, which is clearly the worst thing that ever happened. Just as good: general bitching about Washington, D.C., which is clearly the worst place that ever happened.

On the Media: “Future Tense” — This is an hour on the future of the White House press corps in the Donald Trump administration. The usefulness of that institution isn’t universally agreed upon, even in the media. So this is a contentious hour with no easy answers. But easy answers are not what you come to On the Media for in the age of Donald Trump. You come to it for the BIG WIDE 70MM SUPER CINEMASCOPE view of how fucked we are.

The Gist: “Don’t Mind Us, We’re Just Collapsing” — Ahhh, lovely. This features an interview with an archeologist who’s actually calling from the jungle to talk about the warning signs before the fall of a civilization. I love that they thought to talk to somebody like this. Pesca’s spiel about reconsidering #oscarssowhite is less convincing to me — last year’s Oscars were so white.

Twenty Thousand Hertz: “What Makes up a Movie Soundtrack?” — This isn’t that interesting, story-wise. A big segment of it is given to the great sound designer Ann Kroeber. She’s a good talker, but the stories she tells about getting animal sounds for movies don’t really go anywhere. (This is something that 99% Invisible does too — where it just throws stuff at you rather than telling a linear story. But I think you’ve really got to be a radio grandmaster to pull that off.) The most interesting bit is where they take apart the layers of sound in a movie explosion. I could have listened to more like that: an entire episode of deconstructing sound effects would have been great. (Explosion Exploder?) Anyway, this show has mostly been really good in its short life so far. It’s allowed an off week here and there.

The Gist: “Deregulation Nation” — I think I need to read this guy’s book. Jacob Hacker argues that it was the effective use of government that made America prosper in the first place, and that Republicans have fundamentally misunderstood the history of policy-making. Really interesting.

The Gist: “Yeah, We’re Scared Too” — Oh, good. Here’s an interview with a Bush appointee about how establishment Republicans are still as terrified of Trump as during the primaries. Excellent. Flippancy aside, Eliot Cohen is a reasonable person, and it’s good to know they exist in Trump’s party, even if they have no hope in hell of actually swaying him to the centre.

On the Media: “New Reality” — Bob Garfield visits the flailing White House press corps, and commiserates and berates in equal measure. That’s something we needed. Also, there’s an interview with Jay Rosen, who’s always great to hear on this show, on the question of why the hell anybody would even bother interviewing Kellyanne Conway.

99% Invisible: “The Revolutionary Post” — The post office invented America. That’s a hell of a premise, and with evidence found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and in the life story of Benjamin Franklin, it doesn’t seem absurd.

On the Media: “Week One” — Sean Spicer is a piece of shit. Honest to god, there are no decent people among Trump’s staff at all. The most powerful country in the world is being run by goblins. The only thing that makes him seem a little less noxious is that Steve fucking Bannon is even worse.

Imaginary Worlds: “Winning the Larp” — I love the idea of LARPing. I just love it. The part of me that used to do improv and also the part of me that admires Wagner for fusing a bunch of art forms together are both complicit in this. But I don’t think I’ll ever do it, because there are lines that even I won’t cross.

Omnireviewer (week of Aug. 21, 2016)

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33 reviews! Holy smokes!

Television

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

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

Comedy

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

Music

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

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

Literature, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games

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

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omnireviewer (week of Aug. 14)

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16 reviews. What on earth have I been doing? (Playing my new accordion. That’s what I’ve been doing.)

Movies

Shadow of a Doubt — I haven’t seen a lot of Hitchcock, and I honestly find him a mixed bag. I do not share the rest of the world’s reverence for Vertigo, and I think that Psycho is essentially saved by Bernard Herrmann. But I enjoyed this movie, screening at the Cinémathèque, on a number of levels. First off, the structure of establishing at the start that Joseph Cotten’s character is being chased and may be guilty of something terrible, and then avoiding the reveal for most of the movie worked brilliantly for me. In terms of the things that are happening for the bulk of the running time, this is mostly a comedic family portrait (it’s co-written by Thornton Wilder) with a Hitchcock-shaped cloud hanging over it. The tension of not knowing what Cotten did, or if he did it, is heightened by the fact that the family’s interactions are such a pleasure to watch. In fact, if there’s a real problem with this movie, it’s that the small-town comedy of manners is a better movie than the thriller it lives inside. The precocious young girl Ann is a complete scene stealer. And Herb the eccentric neighbour is far and away the best thing in this movie. I’m uncertain if some of the things I found funny were actually meant to be. Certainly, some of the laughter in the theatre was at the expense of the old-timey values espoused by the script. (“No champagne for me,” says the local priest. “And none for my wife, I’m sure!”) But there’s a fine line between reading the film as openly misogynistic and patriarchal and reading it as a critique of those same ideologies. It seems I prefer lesser-known Hitchcock movies to the critical juggernauts. As it stands, this is neck-and-neck with Saboteur for the mantle of my favourite Hitchcock movie. Bearing in mind that I have problems with both of them.

Television

Deadwood: Season three, episodes 7-9 — This is still great. In fact, two of these three episodes probably rank alongside season two’s best. “Unauthorized Cinnamon” in particular is just a classic hour. But “Amateur Night” is a joy as well, because it makes Brian Cox, a relative newcomer to the show, into an audience surrogate: he and we are both just enjoying the usual business of being in Deadwood. If this show manages to screw up the landing as badly as everybody says it does, it’ll have to do it real fast, because there are only three hours left and this season is still brilliant.

Last Week Tonight: August 14, 2016 — Neither here nor there. It’s fine, but it’s probably the least excellent episode so far this season. I have no further thoughts.

Comedy

Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theatre — The first time I watched this it completely blew me away. I’ve cited it as my favourite stand up special on at least a few occasions. It holds up. Louis is amazing down to the tiny details, like “he sticks his face right in the front of his fuckin’ head…” His bit about not giving his first-class airplane seat to a soldier is possibly the definitive Louis C.K. bit, and there are few comedy bits with more repeat value than the segment on the evil child called Jizanthapus. I do think that even in the few years since this, he’s matured a bit in terms of knowing what he probably shouldn’t say. His bit about First Nations peoples is well-intentioned, but still stereotypes massively. His bit about men being bad at sex is similarly well-intentioned, but heteronormative. You take the good with the bad, I suppose. This is still a very, very good comedy special.

Music

St. Vincent: St. Vincent — Unbeknownst to me, this was my first exposure to John Congleton. He and St. Vincent are a great match, because he’s very good at blending rock and electronic music, and Annie Clark is a songwriter with a modern sensibility but also a virtuoso guitarist. This is a really great album. “Rattlesnake” and “Severed Crossed Fingers” are especially irresistible. But this time through, I also developed a greater appreciation for “Regret” and “Bring Me Your Loves.”

The Tragically Hip: Day For Night — I never got into the Hip. But right now, it’s pointless to resist getting sucked up into the Hipmania that has swept the nation. And rightly so. In preparation for last night’s epochal broadcast (not reviewed for CBC reasons, and also because the knowledge that you’re witnessing history makes assessment sort of beside the point), I listened to my first Hip album. I went with Day For Night rather than Fully Completely on the strength of “Scared,” a ballad I listened to for the first time on Friday, and then immediately five more times. It’s a really good album. I won’t pretend like it’s a clear all-time favourite. There are moments that feel crashingly generic to me — only musically, though. Gord Downie’s lyrics are anything but. I completely get why this band is so important to so many people. The Hip have a distinct identity, even when a song is sonically just cookie-cutter 90s rock and roll. The songs stretch past five minutes, just for the luxury of it. It’s not a statement; they just don’t really care about economy. There are good solos to be had. But mostly, this is a showcase for the very, very good songwriting of Gord Downie, accompanied by a very competent backing band. The songs that are the most obvious heavy-hitters are classics. Aside from “Scared,” which is still my favourite, “Grace, Too,” and “Nautical Disaster” are outstanding mood pieces. Downie’s lyrics are at their very best in the latter. Also, perhaps strangely, the other song on this that made a lasting impression is “Titanic Terrarium.” I’m not even sure what it’s about, or how the various threads of lyrical imagery running through it are meant to connect. But any song that starts with the lines “Growing up in a biosphere/ no respect for bad weather” has me straight away. This is a band that’s at their best when they are at their most idiosyncratic — lending credence to my theory that it’s intense specificity that endears audiences to artists’ broader oeuvres, even if blandness isn’t necessarily a hindrance to producing gigantic hit singles. This won’t be the last I listen to the Hip, even if they are a phenomenon that will keep me slightly at arm’s length, despite their admirable efforts to welcome all. My estimation of this may be higher than it would be otherwise, owing to the zeitgeist. But regardless, this is certainly the thing that has preoccupied me most this week. Pick of the week. 

Literature, etc.

Assorted Tragically Hip-related thinkpieces (Stephen Marche in the New Yorker, Chris Koentges in Slate, Michael Barklay in Macleans) — Before I get to these, I’ll say that my favourite single example of Hip-related media on the night of the concert came from Vox TV critic Todd VanDerWerff on Twitter. VanDerWerff happened to be vacationing in Canada and watching the Olympics on CBC, and then he tweeted this: “I didn’t even choose to watch this concert. I just turned on the TV in our cabin, and it was on. Like it was mandatory Canadiana.” Yup. We’ve got a bunch of problems up here, and Gord Downie has helped point them out as poetically as anybody. But I love that this is a place where there’s a band whose final concert is your civic duty to watch. VanDerWerff rightly proposed that there is no American equivalent to this. Of the three pieces listed here, my favourite is Koentges’s in Slate, where he frames Downie’s final tour in terms of post-Terry Fox Canadian heroism. Marche’s contains the best prose in terms of quantifying the Hip’s appeal. Barklay’s goes into the most detail about Downie as a figure in the broader Canadian community of musicians. But honestly, the only reason to read all three of these is if the Hip is all you’re thinking about for a certain period of time. And, speaking as a person who had very little interest in them two weeks ago, that is definitely the mood I was in after the show.

Podcasts

The Sporkful: “Is This Pizza Worth Waiting For?” — I want pizza. Dan Pashman makes me hungry. Also, this managed to be a convincing exploration of the psychology of expectation, as well as a narrative about a legendary pizza place. It’s a subtle narrative stunt, but it’s pretty impressive radio making.

Fresh Air: “Meryl Streep” — Streep’s a dull interview. But Terry Gross does her best to get an interesting conversation going by using singing as a throughline. Streep’s there to promote her new Florence Foster Jenkins biopic, from which there is copious hilarious audio in this. Streep’s approximation of Jenkins’s terrible singing is enough to maybe compel me to see this movie. But when she talks about Jenkins, this thing happens that often happens with very empathetic actors: she gets defensive of her character. Jenkins was a bad singer. A terrible one. That’s what she’s known for. That’s why there’s a movie about her. And even though Streep had to painstakingly learn to sing in the particular bad way that Jenkins did, she still has a tendency to try and point out Jenkins’s musical virtues, of which there are none. Still, once Terry Gross moves past the new movie and starts talking to Streep about singing more broadly — as a young woman studying opera, as a professional doing Broadway, and as a major movie star in Into the Woods — things pick up.

Reply All: “Sandbox” — Most of this episode is devoted to an alternate cut of P.J. Vogt’s story about his mom and his aunt for Invisibilia. But, tellingly, this cut is substantially different and actually a fair bit better. It is framed as a story about two people using technology to interact in a way that highlights their respective idiosyncrasies — two people who happen to be Vogt’s mom and aunt. That whole intro was lopped off in Invisibilia, which takes emphasis off of some of the broader implications of the story. Maybe I’m just a Reply All partisan.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Steven Universe and Board Games” — I probably won’t watch Steven Universe, not because I’m averse to children’s entertainment, but because committing to a children’s show feels weird to me. I saw Finding Dory like the rest of the world. But I’m not putting more than a couple hours into something like that, no matter how awesomely social justicey it is. And it does sound like a really great kids’ show. The discussion of board games that follows is an odd thing. Three of the four panelists are really devoted to talking about mostly pretty traditional games that aren’t pop cultural productions in any meaningful way (spades?), and Stephen Thompson keeps hearkening back to a prior discussion of board games from a couple years prior. Ehh.

Criminal: “Eight Years” — A pretty sobering tale of ongoing, long-term internet harassment. The founder of one of the major Harry Potter fansites, from way back in pre-social media days, has been mercilessly abused by one specific, clearly mentally ill person for nearly a decade. It’s a crazy story.

Science Vs: “Guns,” parts 1 & 2 — I’ll confess to already being slightly put off by the hokey tone of this. But the content is spectacular. Wendy Zukerman cuts through rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum — though as any reasonable person would expect, the arguments posed by the gun lobby are more thoroughly untrue than those opposing them. I’ll definitely keep listening to this.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “Small Batch: Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail” — I’m not interested in this show and I’m not interested in this man.

WTF with Marc Maron: “Werner Herzog/Godfrey” — The Godfrey segment is funny because Maron’s a jerk. But like most everybody, I expect, I listened to this to hear Werner Herzog’s Bavarian deadpan for an hour. It’s a miraculous interview, in which Maron proves himself to be a far more existentially anxious person than Herzog, but only because Herzog has come to know the void that they both stare at with much more depth. Herzog has come to terms with the void. Maron’s quaking in his boots. I can’t wait for Herzog’s four upcoming movies. Pick of the week.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: “The Get Down and TCA 2016’ — I hope Brittany Luse comes back to this show often. They ought to make her a regular fourth chair. That is essentially what’s notable about this episode, the discussion topics of which are not totally compelling to me.