I went to a variety show last night! A live one! It’s not often that I go out to cool, off-beat events like that, only because I’m quite lazy when it comes to seeking these things out. Thankfully, I got an invite to this one, from Ronnie K. of the Reel Love podcast and her co-host Joey Litvak.
The event in question was Corn Puff Records Presents… Today is an Adventure! A Show with Jojo Richard Mitten.
I really had no idea what to expect walking into the small event space at Array Music, and even the small detail I knew—that my friend Alan Jones had made a short film being screened during the show—turned out to be somewhat wrong. There was a short film, and Alan was in it, though he hadn’t made it. But the film was just one small part of a long, delightful show. Hosted by Jojo Richard Mitten, the event was a celebration of Dick Mitten—he prefers Dick to Richard or Jojo—arriving in Canada from the faraway land of Tasmania and out of the clutches of Mother, from whom he was born.
The Andy Kaufman-inflected show was entertaining off the bat, and ended up including musical performances by Noa Bonen and the band Amelia Ear Heart’s Sonic Aviary, a local trio whose music sounded very mewithoutYou to my ear, which I of course appreciated. There was a whole bit with clarinetist Zack Goldstein, plus a video game demo from designer Jack Harrison of Digital Joy, and Dick Mitten sat down for a couple of live therapy sessions with Ronnie K., which led to an emotional breakthrough for the lonely Tasmanian. It was, as the event was sold, an artists showcase, and it was a genuine pleasure to see what a bunch of creative people in the city were up to. I’ve gotta get out to more stuff like this.
No professionally published work this week, but I did write about Adam Curtis’s new documentary essay series Shifty, which is about the last decades of British life in the 20th century, and which has some striking parallels to my beloved 28 Years Later.
Also, don’t forget to toss me a question or two to answer in my upcoming AMA, which I announced this week and will be publishing here on Monday, July 14.
Let's Do an AMA!
Hey hey! I’m going to try something new here. An AMA! That’s “Ask Me Anything,” for those whose internet speak is lacking.
Reading, Watching, Listening
Here are some things I’ve consumed and enjoyed over the last week.
Superman is out now in theatres, and I’ll be seeing it at a late show in IMAX
tonight, so you might want to look out for some writing on that down the road if it inspires me. In the meantime, though, I saw that director James Gunn has assembled a set of official playlists for each character in the film.
These are all songs that Gunn believes those characters love and would put on playlists themselves. It should come as no suprise that the guy behind the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks has great taste in music, but my god, Gunn has great, deep taste in music. These playlists run the gamut from Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, all the way to a style of Japanese bubblegum metal called kawaii. Clark Kent listening to a lot of 2000s pop punk warms my heart. All the songs are available in one long playlist on Spotify, plus I went ahead and compiled each playlist for Apple Music, all available on my profile here.
Gordon Matta-Clark is a name I was wholly unfamiliar with until this week, when I attended TIFF’s monthly Wavelength programme. Born in 1943, Matta-Clark studied architecture, but did not work as an architect. Instead, he devoted his life to an artistic engagement with architecture in society, becoming best known for his elaborate building cuts—literally cutting out sections of buildings to expose their innards in unique ways. TIFF showed a collection of short films Matta-Clark made, which function as art pieces unto themselves, but also served to document his work and the process of making it. One short, “Conical Intersect,” documents how he and his team cut a hole through a 1690 building in Paris that was about to be demolished amid ‘70s gentrification.
The most beautiful of the shorts screened was “City Slivers,” Matta-Clark’s mournful exploration of New York’s urban verticality in light of his twin brother’s suicide.
Matta-Clark himself would die from pancreatic cancer in 1978, at the absurdly young age of 35.
“New TV Novels” is a great (long) new essay by Lisa Borst at N+1, all about the ways TV has drawn from novels, and in turn affected how and about what novelists are writing.
“More than any of the other new TV novelists, Brodesser-Akner has already successfully traversed the fiction-to-TV pipeline — in 2022 her first novel, the bestselling divorce dramedy Fleishman Is in Trouble, was adapted into an FX miniseries — and the new novel, warmly received by the kinds of book reviewers who presumably, as Senna writes, “stand around the water cooler talking about what they watched last night,” betrays itself as the work of an author who’s already gotten a taste of life as a screenwriter and showrunner, and who’s back for more where that came from. Its prose doesn’t just suggest future adaptative potential but appears to actively anticipate it.”
Shakespearian Baseball, the classic Wayne and Shuster sketch, came into my life this week. I was familiar with the Canadian comedy duo, but I can’t say I ever watched much of their work. Before my time. But after Superman inspired me to share this old Heritage Minute on Bluesky, the great crime writer Sarah Weinman siezed on the Shuster connection—Superman co-creator Joe Shuster was the cousin of Frank Shuster—and shared the hilarious clip. It’s exactly what it sounds like. A game of baseball rendered as Shakespearian drama, which makes it a great Shakespearian comedy. "A manager's blessing upon you all!"
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, and thanks for subscribing. It really means a lot. Come back next week for more!
