Said you were gonna grow up, then you were gonna come find me
As of now, my favourite TTPD track, "Anthology" or otherwise (list now updated and necessarily expanded). It's arrestingly beautiful and sad, and showcases one of her low-key most distinctive skills: wringing new life and unexpected feeling from tired and/or obvious metaphors, here transmuting the wistful idyll of Neverland into lost futures, broken promises, and horizons that contract a little more each time she sings the chorus, cellphone flashlights the fairies she wishes she could still believe were real. But whatever residual semblance of magic's all bound up in the music, in the moment; more ephemeral even than youth. Or love. Over in under five minutes. (Lucky Swedes!)
In a Lonely Place
Myriad lights
We Believe That We Can't Be Wrong (Ten Things)
01. Paul & Linda McCartney, "The Back Seat of My Car" Not in any sense new-news, but I've been listening a lot lately to Ram and this is its exquisite pinnacle. And it would be top five, maybe even top three, among the songs of any post-Revolver Beatles album.
02. Zach Bryan, The Great American Bar SceneJust 28 and his catalogue is already as strong and varied and altogether impressive as stalwart singer-songwriters who've been at it for twice as long. I can't say just yet whether this one is his best yet, but just the fact that it may well be speaks highly of its top-shelf quality.
03. Hit Man Linklater's best Bernie-mode movie since Bernie; just as good-natured, as casually perceptive about human nature(s), and, though also concerned with, less necessarily troubled by the matter of murder. In what is low-key one of the film's best scenes (and very much the sort of scene that would simply be cut from and perhaps turn up as a mostly unseen Blu-ray bonus for a lesser film), the protagonist's ex-wife and still close friend suggests, "Everyone is at least a little fucked-up. You just need to find someone who is fucked-up in a way that you like, or that complements your own fucked-up-ness." One might expect such well-said, off-the-cuff sage advice from a longtime real-life friend, but will rarely find it in movies, and particularly not from supporting characters in rom-coms (which this unashamedly is, more or less), whether good ones or bad ones –– save for Linklater's, which weave in a kind of lived-in wisdom of experience that leaves viewers feeling as if they know a little more about than their own lives and circumstances.
04. In a Violent NatureMost so-called "art-horror" films dial down the more extreme tendencies of both the art-house and the horror so as to make a more congruous merger. Yet Chris Nash does precisely the opposite, instead emphasizing the jarring contrast of beautifully composed, ambiently soundtracked long-held tracking shots through vast, verdant landscapes with abruptly commenced ultra-gory old-school-slasher kills, now being roundly applauded for their "creativity" by horror-connoisseur fansites that probably won't be reviewing, say, the next Albert Serra or Nuri Bilge Ceylan features. That the half-baked premise is deliberately flimsy and silly is implicitly but clearly affirmed when the character doing the expositional explaining gets quickly offed mid-explanation, then passed patiently, repeatedly through a log chopper. The film's final stretch (the last 15 or so minutes, after the Final Girl flees and gets picked up by a truck driven by the actress who once played Vickie in Friday the 13th Part II) is really extraordinary stuff, and the cut to credits and song selected are perfect.
05. Tehran, seasons one and two The espionage series done just about as impeccably as possible: breathless suspense somehow sustained across sixteen episodes (so far), a wealth of fascinating characters and shifting relationships among them, even, at times, provocative insights into the intercultural and geopolitical dynamics of the contemporary Middle East. The first season is nearly flawless. The second is slightly more uneven and strained in places; the addition of Glenn Close is never not at least a little distracting, although her performance itself is predictably superb.
06. The first eight episodes of Beef The first seven episodes are superlative black comedy/social satire (with some highly inspired needle drops!), the eighth swerves precariously yet doesn't quite lose its footing; but then in the penultimate episode Beef goes off the rails as the ante is upped in a way that, in its turbo-charged TV-show extremity, feels more by-the-numbers FUBAR, culminating (because of course it does) in someone bisected by their panic room door. And then the finale is something else again...opaquely philosophical or a glib imitation thereof, very much like The Curse that way. Yet, at their respective bests, both shows capture with laser-like specificity a current ('80s-born-generational? national? socio-cultural? almost-but-not-quite-'post-human'?) mood of futility and despair underlying the curation of "lifestyle" as a glib imitation of –– or substitute for –– the cultivation of a philosophically coherent modus vivendi.
07. The third part of Kinds of KindnessNot just for Emma Stone's (premature) celebration dance...though not-not for said dance, which will undoubtedly outlive the minor mixed-bag triptych that makes its audience wait some two and a half hours for that smartly advertised dash of ebullience. But also for the outfits, for Omi and Aka, and for the truly Lynchian dream-weirdness of the sub-plot involving Margaret Qualley's twin characters.
08. Charli XCX, Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not Like the Tortured Poets "Anthology" edition, not to mention the essentially sui generis case of the "Vault"-enhanced rerecordings-not-reissues, these eighteen tracks that hang together well sans skips beg the question(s) –– or at least they do for those of us old enough to wonder how exactly this sort of thing would've been promoted and packaged as physical discs before the immateriality of streaming was assumed as the default mode of consumption –– of what exactly an album/record/LP is and isn't in 2024, or whether that matters. Probably it doesn't, except to aging, persnickety music nerds who Venn diagram-overlap only negligibly with Charli 100–10+10's target audience, to whom "Club Classics" conjures what...late-period Daft Punk? Early BTS? Swift, though, skews just enough 'Old-Millennial' that she's presumably given the matter of The Album some degree of thought, and not only for banal business reasons. (No need to worry / her accountants handle that.) "Clara Bow," named for a silent-film-era actress, is a full-stop Album Closer par excellence, while the Anthology material concludes with a song called "The Manuscript" that encapsulates the less-finished, sketch-like quality of the addenda released simultaneous to and no less accessibly than the album-proper. Brat etc. etc. ends with "Spring Breakers," referring to Harmony Korine's ironic-salacious Floridian gangster fantasia, which by now might be as pop-canonical as Scarface for the young people ('brats' or not) who were too young to see it in situ way back in 2012.
09. Clipped An octogenarian Al Bundy as Donald Sterling was a masterstroke; Laurence Fishburne makes for an excellent Doc Rivers (even though the voice is not quite Cookie Monster enough); and his recurring sauna chats with LeVar Burton are oddly distinctive highlights that feel borrowed from a deeper, more patient and interesting show than the kind that Clipped is actually, consistently interested in being. As such "content" goes, it's not as good as the terrific first season of Winning Time, but much better than its rushed and ruined second season. Sufficiently engrossing if one follows closely the on- and off-court dramas of the NBA, probably solidly entertaining as the reenactment of an early cancel-era trainwreck if one doesn't, Clipped is decidedly less than the sum of its parts. Ed O'Neill and Fishburne deserve awards recognition; maybe also Jacki Weaver, whose accent work is more on-the-mark than Fishburne's; and *definitely* LeVar Burton, from Roots to Star Trek to Reading Rainbow (forever my first point of association) to ruminating on the nature of rage, the intractable problem of race, and the special utility of micro blades for the artful sculpting of facial hair.
10. The first part of Kinds of KindnessAlas, it is getting harder all the time to see Landry Clarke (and Crucifictorious!) the same way ever again.
Current Listening
01. The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times"
02. Zach Bryan f/ Kacey Musgraves, "I Remember Everything"
03. Kacey Musgraves, "Heaven Is"
04. Taylor Swift, "Peter"
05. Steely Dan, "Any Major Dude Will Tell You"
06. The Kinks, "Do You Remember Walter?"
07. The Kinks, "People Take Pictures of Each Other"
08. The Rolling Stones, "Sweet Virginia"
09. The Rolling Stones, "Thru and Thru"
10. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "That Smell"
11. Simon & Garfunkel, "Hazy Shade of Winter"
12. The Bangles, "Hazy Shade of Winter"
13. Jan & Dean, "Surf City"
14. Fire Saga, "Double Trouble"
15. The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do Is Dream"
16. Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"
17. Elliott Smith, "Speed Trials"
18. Drive-by Truckers, "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife"
Watching her do serious, insightful yet visibly perplexed analysis of the Stop Making Sense "Life during Wartime" performance is Must-See TV.
At 18:03: "Like, that's awful, you shouldn't have to live on peanut butter for a couple days."
At 21:30: "It feels like he's, like...laying down for death on stage right now."
You Can Call Me Al or Betty or Deacon Blues
'Mid-life crises' are intrinsically optimistic insofar as they presume based on statistical averages that there's roughly another half still to come and intrinsically pessimistic insofar as they realistically recognize that it's probably, comparatively gonna mostly suck, as quantitative equality ('mid'/'half') is not at all the same thing as qualitative equality.
We've seen the last of good King Richard. Raise up your glass to good King John.
How Strange It Is to Be Anything at All
When you go kinda deep but then your buddy goes way deep, and you're just like...'Yeah, nah. Not just now.' (Or vice versa.)
Keep It Copacetic
Listening nostalgically today (inspired in part by the spot-on song choices in the superb new 1997-set miniseries Under the Bridge) to a '90s playlist on Tidal, I came across this junior high-aged favourite of mine, which still sounds kinda great. It's a more-or-less-forgotten gem from the tail end, or last guttural gasp, of the grunge era, when solid if unspectacular bands far afield from the Pacific Northwest –– from, e.g., suburban Chicago and Australia and London –– tried, post-Kurt, to step up to the plate as the Next Nirvana, though ultimately the best any of them would do, really, was to have their lead singer go on to be Gwen Stefani's far less successful (first) husband.
(Quirky quasi-boast [?]: I saw No Doubt open for Bush on the tour that set in motion said relationship. The Goo Goo Dolls were supposed to play as well, billed second after Bush, but were absent due to the filming of a guest spot for Beverly Hills 90210.)
Yet the rabbit-hole I followed Local H down was not one of '90s alt-rock, but rather the origins of the word "copacetic," which I can always remember people using, and which I still use occasionally myself, with no sense of or educated guess as to its provenance.
The entry in Merriam-Webster is both oddly fascinating and unexpectedly amusing:
The Awful Truth
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 SunshineHit 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.
