Reading, Watching, Listening 11/15/2024
A few words about birthdays
It’s been a strange week. Maybe you’ve been feeling it, too. We don’t need to get into why. I turned 36 yesterday. Another year down, something like half my life behind me. I celebrated without much fanfare, though I did go out at night (and stayed out very late) to a bar where a friend was spinning records. It was a great time, much needed amid myriad stresses. I also ate too much pizza.
What I didn’t do this week was a lot of media consumption. I did start watching 9-1-1, which is some incredible network television. I also started Euphoria, which I’m liking quite a lot, though maybe not as much as 9-1-1. I watched Steve McQueen’s Blitz, a movie I’m still mulling over. It’s at once conventional and unconventional, often like witnessing a wrestling match between form and content. Hans Zimmer’s score is deliberately discordant, and many sequences are impressive. There’s one, though, that sticks out. It’s among the best scenes of the year, by my estimation. A montage of women working at a factory in London, producing shells for the army, part of the valiant effort to defeat the Nazis, but where such a scene would ordinarily be pitched triumphant, McQueen sets to to jarring, oppressive music from Zimmer. This is the machinery of war, the film suggests, and even when it appears “for a just cause,” it is still a system of mechanized violence.
I had one update on the newsletter, earlier this week, about a screening I attended of Joris Ivens’ extraordinary documentary The Spanish Earth, about the Spanish Civil War.
For those crazy enough to enjoy hearing my actual voice, I made another appearance on my friend Jesse Hawken’s podcast, Junk Filter, to talk all about Clint Eastwood and Juror #2. It was a fun conversation about a great film. So go check that out, too.
Next week, I’ll be continuing my Five-Star Three-Star Cinema series with a new entry, so stay tuned for that. The series is for paid subscribers only, so do sign up for a subscription if you’d like access. In the meantime, I’m making the original post on the subject, inspired by Twister, free. You know, like a sample.
I’m also making the second entry proper in the series, about National Treasure, free to sample. One note, though. I had been calling the series “Big Mac Cinema", but that will be changing going forward. Five-Star Three-Star Cinema it is.
Reading, Watching, Listening
Another week, another admission that I haven’t been reading, or listening, or even watching as much as I’d have liked. Still, a couple of things to share with you.
Hyperpolitics in America, by Anton Jäger is a scholarly work, so perhaps not the most immediately accessible. The film critic Adam Nayman shared it prior to the election last week, though it took me many days to finally get around to reading it. Add my endorsement to Adam’s. In the article, Jäger outlines a theory of politicization in contemporary America, in which the post-politics of the Clinton era has fully given way to a new kind of individualized politics, short-term in its thinking and reflective of the ephemerality of experience on the web. It’s about a lot more than that, but do read it for yourself if you’ve got any interest in leftist politics and a lens through which to understand the world we’re all dealing with these days, even outside America’s borders.
The O.C. Season 4 Is Good, Actually, by Frazier Tharpe over at GQ is exactly what it headline says, an argument for the fourth season of The O.C. being good, actually. I’ve been an O.C. fan for a long time, and for all that time I have maintained that season 4 is great, and runs neck-and-neck with season 1 as my favourite overall. It’s a season picking up the pieces after the bummer that was season 3, and the departure of Mischa Barton, and it’s also a season throughout which the writers knew they were likely not surviving to see another. So they went for broke, making the show funnier, stranger, and generally speaking more fun. “It’s bemusing that the fourth and final season is a breath of fresh air, and somehow, the silliest and most comedic iteration of the series,” Frazier writes. I’m happy to see my posse growing.