I made something today.
Different Trailers, Different Parks (+ new songs!)
I'm very excited to see Kacey Musgraves' show in Vancouver this September, but nonetheless a bit envious of the British fans who are still able to catch one of America's the world's finest singer-songwriters at the peak of her powers in relatively small venues like this one in London--capacity 1500! Here, of course, she'll be in a hockey arena that seats 20,000 (though luckily I was able to get a general admission ticket and will be standing –– as one should, if at all possible, at a concert –– as close to the stage as possible).
The new material sounds fantastic, kicking off with a more rocking than expected "Cardinal" and especially (at 58:00 above) "Heaven Is," which is as purely beautiful as any song (period) with which I'm familiar.
Fun bonus: at 11:25 she substitutes "I don't know why" with "so fucking high" in "Deeper Well"!
Stoics
You know what's really an underrated virtue--generally and universally, but "these days" especially? Sanity. And Jerry Seinfeld, besides (though maybe not wholly separate, or separable, from) being one of the most instinctively funny and perceptive people we have among us, is also eminently and admirably sane.
He says that Marcus Aurelius is his hero. Marcus Aurelius was not very funny per se, but he was also acutely perceptive and mostly sane (for a second-century Roman emperor, anyway). When Bari Weiss, at the end of an interesting and poignant interview, asks why Marcus Aurelius, Seinfeld answers: "Perspective, the most important single word in life."
Note –– tellingly, I think –– the absence of the indefinite article there, plus the syntactically slightly odd insertion of "single." The OED gives 13 definitions for "perspective." III.9.a and, better still, III.9.b (without the indefinite article) get us quite close to what (I think) he means:
III.9.a.
The relation or proportion in which the parts of a subject are viewed by the mind; the aspect of a subject or matter, as perceived from a particular mental point of view. Now only: a particular attitude towards or way of regarding something; an individual point of view.
III.9.b.
The true understanding of the relative importance of things; a realistic sense of proportion.
Per the OED, the former sense dates from 1605, the latter from 1865. Even the Latin scientia perspectiva, for the science (or knowledge) of optics, is late, first appearing in the high medieval scholastic context during the twelfth century. So, more than a millennium after Marcus Aurelius was dead and gone.
Yet readers of the Meditations (presumably the main source of Seinfeld's admiration) can find something like the III.9.a and more so the younger III.9.b sense evinced across its pages. And one suspects its author might have concurred with Seinfeld's encomiastic estimation of its/his foremost virtue of "perspective"--in this particular case sharing some (modern) semantic and/or philosophical range with "sanity."
Walk into splintered sunlight / Inch your way through dead dreams to another land
RIP Bill Walton, by all accounts and appearances a genuinely good and sweet dude, and a singular figure among NBA-adjacent personalities past and present.
Watch (or revisit) Steve James' recent, excellent 30 for 30 doc, The Luckiest Guy in the World, to appreciate the extent of Walton's wonderful weirdness, which went far beyond his unfortunately injury-abbreviated (hence the seeming irony of the film's ultimately sincere title) period of basketball greatness.
What strange forces of nature conspired
Speaking of peculiar poetic affinities, Alan Jackson's "I'll Go on Loving You" is something like the ruminative voice-over from a Terrence Malick film crossed with, say, erotic verse by Hafez or one of the other great Shiraz poets; its nature-derived not-quite-non-sequiturs intoned over seductive-candlelight-dinner-for-two strings adding up to (at very least) the most deeply unusual and expressive of late '90s country love songs. A review at the time called it "the frankest treatment of lust on country radio...a colossal embarrassment and a memorable romantic declaration." And perhaps it is embarrassing for its frankness, as poems (good as much as bad ones) often are. It's enough to make a cowboy blush, though to Jackson's enduring credit he never does.
Too much as they are
Is Wallace Stevens in The Tortured Poets Dept? One suspects yes.
There are resonances and resemblances. In roses picked and figures deployed and the rhetorical space between the object itself and its objectness as metaphor, between substitutive fakes or tricks of the light and the Real Thing.
3 Films, 3 Albums
I Saw the TV Glow There are strong shades here of Jane Schoenbrun's earlier We're All Going to the World's Fair and also of Kevin Phillips' Super Dark Times, but it's vastly more coherent than the former and less ultimately impactful than the latter. Its first two acts (1996, 1998) are really engrossing and well-done, the third (2006) more of a mixed bag, the twenty-years-later denouement perplexing, disappointing, or a bit of both. On the whole, though, its particular wavelength of strangeness is appealing; at times tapping into (if not quite articulating) ideas that feel in some sense new and in some sense right. Schoenbrun is making strides both as a storyteller and visual stylist. I look forward to what will come next.
Abigail A very by-the-numbers, old-fashioned trapped-in-a-haunted-house-(/vampire's-castle) movie, with paper-thin stock caricatures, an overly slick script abounding with cheesy horror-comedy one-liners (esp. puns, of course), an in-theory-poignant but in-practice-just-perfunctory emotional back-story for the Final Girl, and easily foreseeable plot twists paying diminishing returns as it runs out of gas over the last half-hour or so. But if none of these formula components is a deal-breaker per se, it's a reasonably fun diversion made with an amateur's infectious enthusiasm and a professional's basic competence and solid budget. (RIP Angus Cloud, a distinctive talent and presence, gone far too soon.)
Unfrosted If you love Seinfeld (and/or Seinfeld) and hold firmly to the convinction (as I do) that Cabin Boy is one of the funniest films ever made, then this one's for you. Everyone involved is having a ball, clearly, most of all Seinfeld himself, and that pervasive sense of fun and playfulness is infectious enough to compensate when the jokes don't quite land. But most of them do land -- at least if the above criteria apply to your sense of humour.
Billie Eilish, Hit Me Hard and Soft Unbelievably in 2024, there are just ten songs here, most of them quite good or better, namely the first three and last four. The album's middle gets a bit middling and mushy, with a few songs that sound left over from the ho-hum, surprisingly boring Happier than Ever. But (more) happily, the best songs here ("Chihiro," "Lunch," "The Diner") point in a new direction. None sound much at all like When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, a masterpiece of precocious youth and goth-pop pleasures distilled like bottled lightning. I would be very surprised if ever she were to make a more viscerally exciting album, or just a better one; but HMHAS – unlike HTE – restores faith that she is highly likely to keep making good and interesting albums, and the latter may matter more actually, because boring really doesn't suit her at all.
Ariana Grande, Eternal Sunshine Hit Me Hard and Soft would've been an apt title for any of the three of AG's great albums, i.e., 2016's Dangerous Woman (now classic, if it wasn't so instantly), 2018's Sweetener (spottier but terrific), 2019's Thank U, Next (to my tastes her best to date). This new one just hits soft, though in so doing it leaves more of an overall impression than did 2020's Positions, which landed like something of an afterthought.
Dua Lipa, Radical Optimism Sure, it's pretty radical to be optimistic about much of anything in 2024, but that's (thankfully, maybe?) where this album's ostensible radicalism begins and ends. (Which is fine!) Certainly neither the form nor content of Radical Optimism poses any kind of implicit or explicit challenge to anything at all, except for one's ability to sustain a glum mood while listening to it. (Which is great!) To propose another title swap, Eternal Sunshine would've been a perfect name for this one, while Radical Optimism would be a good way of describing that extra, persevering power injected into AG's stronger songs since the trauma of the Manchester concert bombing. Dua Lipa -- whatever her background, biography, or politics (...?) -- is a consummately professional disco diva making slickly polished disco records. If those records will change no one's life, they might at least change the tenor of someone's day. (Which isn't nothing!) What, god knows, we don't need more of in 2024 is over-committed, under-qualified radicals. But we can definitely do with more eternally sunny, professionally committed disco divas.
Live from New York
SNL is 50. And I've been watching it for as long as I can remember.
Here are the twenty-five best musical performances I can recall (albeit with a few conspicuously highly regrettable hosts...) –– some before my time and viewed as re-runs, but most caught live, hence the admitted '90s-forward bias.
01. Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" & "The Boy in the Bubble" [at 26:00 and 52:17] (Nov. 22, 1986; host: Robin Williams)
02. Radiohead, "The National Anthem" & "Idioteque" (Oct. 14, 2000; Kate Hudson)
03. Sinéad O'Connor, "Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home" [at 7:46] & "War" [at 13:30] (Oct. 3, 1992; Tim Robbins)
04. Hole, "Violet" & "Doll Parts" (Dec. 17, 1994; George Foreman)
05. Nirvana, "Heart-Shaped Box" & "Rape Me" (Sep. 25, 1993; Charles Barkley)
06. Sinéad O'Connor, "Three Babies" & "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance" (Sep. 29, 1990; Kyle MacLachlan)
07. Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" & "Territorial Pissings" (Jan. 11, 1992; Rob Morrow)
08. A Tribe Called Quest, "We the People..." & "The Space Program" (Nov. 12, 2016; Dave Chappelle)
09. Taylor Swift, "All Too Well" (10-minute version) (Nov. 13, 2021; Jonathan Majors)
10. Robyn, "Call Your Girlfriend" & "Dancing on My Own" (Dec. 10, 2011; Katy Perry)
11. Rihanna, "Diamonds" & "Stay" (Nov. 10, 2012; Anne Hathaway)
13. The Cranberries, "Zombie" & "Ode to My Family" (Feb. 25, 1995; George Clooney)
14. Sia, "Alive" & "Bird Set Free" (Nov. 7, 2015; Donald Trump)
15. Rage Against the Machine, "Bulls on Parade" (April 13, 1996; Steve Forbes)
15. Talking Heads, "Take Me to the River" & "Artists Only" (Feb. 10, 1979; Cicely Tyson)
16. The Bangles, "In Your Room" & "Hazy Shade of Winter" (Dec. 3, 1988; Danny DeVito)
17. Beyoncé, "If I Were a Boy" & "Single Ladies" (Nov. 15, 2008; Paul Rudd)
18. Rosalia, "Chicken Teriyaki" & "La Fama" (March 22, 2022; Zoë Kravitz)
19. Fine Young Cannibals, "She Drives Me Crazy" & "Good Thing" (May 13, 1989; Wayne Gretzky)
20. R.E.M., "The Great Beyond" & "Man on the Moon" (Dec. 11, 1999; Danny DeVito)
21. Kate Bush, "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" & "Them Heavy People" (Dec. 9, 1978; Eric Idle)
22. Phoebe Bridgers, "Kyoto" & "I Know the End" (Feb. 6, 2021; Dan Levy)
23. Taylor Swift, "Ready for It?" & "Call It What You Want" (Nov. 11, 2017; Tiffany Haddish)
24. Britney Spears, "Me Against the Music" & "Everytime" (Oct. 18, 2003; Halle Berry)
25. Eminem, "Stan" & "The Real Slim Shady" (Oct. 7, 2000; Rob Lowe)
The Best of the Best (since Barcelona)
Like so many people around my age, the summer of 1992 was when I became thoroughly, and forever thereafter, locked in as an avid NBA fan (and not just for a given team). That Dream Team summer also marked a major historical turning point between the end of the Magic/Bird era and the apex of the MJ (+Pippen, et al!) Bulls, with exciting (if mostly unsuccessful) challengers ranging from Barkley's Suns and Hakeem's Rockets to the Shaq/Penny Magic and the Ewing/Starks/Oakley Knicks. These are my picks for the 32 best players over the 32 years since the Barcelona Olympics (i.e., factoring in bodies of work, with some consideration of international play, from the '92/'93 season forward, but not what preceded it):
Five Months in, Tops 5s so far
01. One Life The most shamefully slept-on Great Film this decade, with the distributor as much to blame as critics; less so, general audiences. It's a vitally important and inspiring historical account, beautifully and patiently told, with the finest performance of Anthony Hopkins' career as its centrepiece. That Oppenheimer packed summertime theatres and won truckloads of awards while One Life -- released on January 1 in the UK, on March 15 (five days after the Oscars, incidentally) in North America -- passed by relatively unnoticed speaks to the overall sinister shittiness of our times, with art (or its reception) reflecting life (or where the culture's at right now).
02. The Sixth See below.
03. Stopmotion Think: Showing Up reimagined as a (really good! really scary!) horror movie--though definitely not for the squeamish or faint of heart, in which case just stick to Showing Up.
04. All You Need Is Death If there's nothing truly new under the sun, a slow-burn horror story about people competitively searching out, collecting, and selling rare Irish (or ancient, proto-Irish) songs and peculiar variants thereof feels close enough to count, especially when it's so thoroughly well done and all-in on its specific, fascinating premise. Highly (though not to say "warmly," as there is nothing warm about this film) recommended!
05. Challengers Luca Guadagnino: contemporary cinema's (tortured?) poet laureate of horniness; our Rohmer, say, or Bertolucci, maybe. It's not as poignant as Call Me by Your Name or as hilarious as A Bigger Splash, but Zendaya's performance (her best yet outside the Levinsonverse) and the Reznor/Finch score are terrific.
01. Kacey Musgraves, Deeper Well It may not win all the Grammys and CMAs and critics' polls that Golden Hour did, but this is low-key her best album to date; quietly exquisite, achingly lovely, without a wasted note or overwrought lyric, much less a skippable track. "Heaven Is" might well be (appropriately) her Forever Song. It's also the best agnostic guess at heaven since Belinda Carlisle. Or maybe since the Talking Heads.
02. Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department By no means a misstep, but a curveball of sorts. Awesome in its breadth and scope, if knottier and/or thornier than expected, it's above all, with the (largely excellent) "Anthology" bonus songs, an exceptionally generous gift from an all-world artist at the peak (?) of her powers – a gift that attentive, receptive listeners will still be unwrapping come Christmas, no doubt finding new surprises and pleasures therein.
03. Sleater-Kinney, Little Rope No Janet, no problem? Not exactly. But it's the strongest front-to-back S-K album since The Woods, which came out the day I turned 20 (!). They're even older than I am, which is old enough to know it's only rock n' roll – and at least one of them no longer needs to depend on making new music to make a living – but they like it.
04. Shakira, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran The most sonically varied, adventurous, and all-around exciting record she's ever made, and yet her singular, still-indomitable voice remains the raison d'être, no matter the genre, producer, sonic engineer, or famous guest dropping by to genuflect and bask in her glow.
05. Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter Brilliant, monumental, idiosyncratic, imperfect, ultimately exhausting in its quest to be exhaustive – but, in the first place, brilliant.
The Tyranny of the Mob
Prioritize seeing the new excellent documentary The Sixth, not the concurrent, thinkpiece-conjoined Civil War (Nomadland meets the Purge franchise but yielding less than the sum of its parts and somehow both ho-hum and histrionic). Thoughtful and mournful, serious and specific, The Sixth is the Election-Year Film that merits adjectives like “important” and “vital,” and not only because it could be (but doesn’t have to be) déjà vu all over again come the Sixth of November this year or sometime between then and Jan. 20, but also because this senseless shit has just happened, is happening, or is threatening to happen right now in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Austin, Madison, Ann Arbor, et al., even (if characteristically a bit late to the antisocial antics) Vancouver and Toronto, just, mutatis mutandis, with brainwashed hate-spewing left-wing populist radicals instead of brainwashed hate-spewing right-wing populist radicals.
Recall: a few years prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection, what were those MAGA neo-Nazis in Charlottesville all chanting? “Jews will not replace us”? Sounds an awful lot like “From the River to the Sea,” which merely cloaks its eliminationist end-game slightly less conspicuously—much like, say, the leftover Covid masks repurposed to do, in effect, the same identity-concealing work as Klan hoods. If “love is love is love,” hate is hate is hate, and these days it is, very sadly, as much the lifeblood of the ultra-far-left as of the ultra-far-right.
Unlike the ultimately superficial Civil War, The Sixth offers up some hope and thought and care that things don’t get have to get more dystopian still. That all is not lost. That cooler, saner heads can still prevail.
And here’s to hoping they will – tomorrow, next week, on Nov. 5, and beyond.
I was fortunate yesterday evening to attend an event, organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, centred on a remarkable conversation with Mosab Hassan Yousef –– really one of the more compelling and vivid speakers I've seen up close in person.
Thankfully it was recorded, and has now been posted (above), because more people should absolutely see/hear this right now.
The strongest, most impactful part of the talk, in my view, is from 47:23–1:09:00.
Also, from the Q&A (with both Yousef and journalist Rahim Mohamed), 1:18:00–1:26:15 is particularly interesting.
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