The Steve Reynolds Program - Issue #19
IT'S TWENTY TWENTY FUN, Y'ALL!
Yes, this is the NINETEENTH issue of the newsletter with the slogan "Out of sight; out of mind!" That would be my mind and yours as well. No one has ever messaged or texted, "Hey Wampus, it's been a while since I've gotten that thing that shows up in my inbox sporadically, erratically and enigmatically-- pardon my adverbs." Let's just agree this periodic list of four things is a pleasantry, a well-wish to you and a sign that I'm still engaging with the world, I guess.
I did get to work on this because the New Yorker had a recent article on Substack, the newish platform for newsletters. It seems to be attracting far-right personalities who are making money fobbing off disinformation as embattled facts them damn libs and them damn papers don't want you to know. Gross. I'll stick over here at Revue, a great service that doesn't even email me like anything else you sign up on. Also, I'm an old man in the middle of Oklahoma. No one wants to pay me for a damn email.
Oooooh, now I remember why I haven't been doing these! The crippling anxiety that fascists are taking total control of our country! It's hard to say, "Hey check out this website that collects baseball card misprints" when the ramshackle structure of reality is crashing.
But hey, enough of my yakkin'; whaddaya say? Let's boogie!
Four things
Idaho saves Oklahoma. In a search for an old yard sign for a current insurrrectionist (which may have been designed by the mother of the illustrator of my book Way I See It, still on sale!), I tweeted about my search which led to the Carl Albert Center replying with different commercials that missed the mark. But they did reply tweet with this ad that Suzy and I have talked about for eighteen years. She is adamant that this is what elected Brad Henry and she may be right. Then we wondered if this ad featuring the burning towers just a year after 9/11 had not existed, would we have not put down deeper roots here? Did these thirty seconds change our lives?
New Wave? Uh, she invented it! - TV Movies are the bizarre runt cousin to feature movies. Made in abundance in the seventies and its leadups and followers, they filled what what were the B Movie slots in Golden Age Hollywood - but now they were places for television actors to stretch their chops while taking breaks from their series shootings, chances for old-timers to act (and direct and do all the crew jobs) and spots for ideas too odd to invest too much money in. John and Yoko: A Love Story is the classic biopic on a budget. People sort of look like who they're supposed to be (I found it again because I woke up thinking of Paul's sneer when singing You Never Give Me Your Money, a gesture in a scene I hadn't seen in 35 years-- the curse of a photographic memory!). It's filled with my favorite biopic trope where the main character is doing something you know about but are interrupted by a phone call telling them about some other event you know about-- like in a TV movie about Jerry Seinfeld, there'd be a creepy meet cute with him and Shoshanna in a park when he'd get a call on a giant mobile phone and say, "What!?! New York Times is calling The Contest the best half hour of comedy ever?" Then a montage of magazine covers with Jerry Seinfeld on them while a terrible song like this plays. Anyways, YouTube is a treasure trove of tv movies (including this PG rated Deliverance ripoff Quentin Tarantino recommended on the strength of its ambiguous ending). I do like the prereconsideration* era of Beatlecrap-- when people didn't just go to the now de facto "John's an asshole!" response to dismiss anything the guy did. He was, but he had his good days, too. But the joy in watching is all the cracks in the facade and corny dialogue. A big hoot until the last scene when you're brought back to this dumb world where people kill other people because they get signs from the carousel in Central Park.
And the beat goes on. Sasha Frere-Jones is a critic you probably have heard of. He can be insightful or willfully obtuse, but whatever it is he's always a good read. He wrote about the best music of 2020 and put a lot of it on this Spotify playlist (OBLIGATORY AND UNNECESSARY DEFENSE OF USE OF CREATOR-UNFRIENDLY SERVICE: we got Spotify for the shop when we needed it and now I'm addicted to playlists from friends and places alike). 2020 slowed lots of things down, but music still goes strong. Jones's choices are varied enough and reminds you that music can still affect you in several ways. Don't play this around kids; there is some filth on here. And somehow Mr. Hipster Critic doesn't have the best song of last year on his list, though he does have the second best song of 2020 included.
The several scorers on the Sooners basketball team. The idea that there is even college athletics going on is offensive and dangerous, but alas it is. Those athletes want to play is my shaky moral defense of why I watch. I enjoyed the hell out of the Sooners football season ending with a beatdown of Florida, the team of a zillion excuses. But now, it's basketball time. My mom was the secretary for OU's basketball head coach in the late 70's and I was "stats runner" for a couple of seasons. One extravagance from my Jeopardy! winnings was a few years of season tickets to watch the bball crew, who do not get the love they deserve. This year three different players have scored 29 points in separate games (is that phrased clearly?) of this abbreviated season already. That means they can afford off-games from one or two of their starters and do all right. College basketball is fun because it sometimes seems victories can be materialized via sheer will and magic. It's a potential Disney movie on the court every night.
*Prereconsideration is a good coinage. Please try to use in discussions. Credit me every third time.
Plugs
There's still a pandemic going on so I still ain't going out. You can buy my book if you haven't. It was your resolution to buy books from people with newsletters, right? I'm working on the next book. It's gonna take a hot minute.
If you're in OK, order something from Forward Foods. My wife has worked so hard and persistently to get these delicious foods to you while maintaining the highest safety standards, I stand in awe.