It’s patriotic to speak out about the injustices in this country.
As-salamu alaykum, my friends.
I hope that these strange times find you at least slightly well. My delayed publishing was intentional. I decided to let the last few weeks breathe out of respect for the issues that needed people’s bandwidth to process. Obviously what I’m talking about here is the wave of protests across the country over police brutality and race relations in the wake of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and David McAtee, and the many whose lives were taken before.
Let me just take a moment to say: Black Lives Matter.
This isn’t a political newsletter so I won’t write some screed on the subject but, if anyone wants to talk about the issues that have dominated recent times, I’m available.
Other than covering local protests and political happenings for the Sun (there’s not been much in the realm of local arts and entertainment to write about during the pandemic) I’ve been mostly spending time listening to Rage Against The Machine, watching bad 70s made-for-TV movies, and playing What The Golf on my Nintendo Switch. It’ll probably be a while before I ditch any of those things.
I’ll be keeping the content of this month’s newsletter a little more brief than usual because other stuff is more important right now but some of things I included would make good respites or educational sources.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
READS
— Justin Tinsley’s piece for The Undefeated on Stevie Wonder’s 70th birthday the other week was touching, well considered, and timely. With all of the political unrest in the air, it’s important to remember Stevie’s music was the soundtrack to the social change of the 1970s. “Black communities were being torn in every single way possible,” said Dr. Zandria Robinson, a professor of African American studies at Georgetown University, told The Undefeated. “That’s why the Motown music as it existed had to shift. You can’t be sitting up here chanting black excellence when this is what is happening to our people. It’s no longer reflecting the majority of the experience of black life — if it ever did.” Later in the article Robinson articulates her thoughts on Wonder’s towering legacy: “What Stevie symbolized, especially during that time, is a fullness of the black experience. Stevie is the black documentarian of the 1970s. He is the documentarian of black life. His work is a full mirror, and not a fun house mirror. Not a mirror that only showed part of us. A full mirror.”
— One of my favorite odd niches of video game journalism is asking a real life experts on something to evaluate how it’s represented in a game (see the Audubon Society’s review of the wildlife in Red Dead Redemption 2) and now Karen Han over at Polygon has written a great piece on Animal Crossing where she asked real life museum curators and professionals about how the museum was put together. I particularly loved how they honed in on the presence of a lab and the intent behind having live animals in it: “[Museums aren’t] meant to be a space of collecting a bunch of dead, unused things, but a place that is constantly thriving and living with real science and real discovery all the time,” said Monisa Ahmed, exhibition developer at the Field Museum. Her sentiment was echoed by Vivian Trakinski, director of science visualization at the American Museum of Natural History: “[The lab] is really interesting because natural history museums and science centers are merging a little bit,” Trakinski said, adding, “natural history museums that used to be much more about observation are now introducing a lot of hands-on opportunities, both to engage audiences, especially younger audiences, but also to help communicate the process of science and how scientists acquire the knowledge that is on display throughout museums.”
— Old rock posters, particularly of the strange and trippy type, are the best. I really dug this profile of Randy Tuten, the Bay Area designer who created the iconic avocado Led Zeppelin poster and numerous other posters for The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, The Band, CCR, and many more through his work for legendary SF music promoter Bill Graham, via Collector’s Weekly. If nothing else, it’s just dope to look through all of his work.
— This oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best movies of the millennium, is essential reading from the NYT.
— Elisabeth Sherman wrote a piece on “yellow filter” — the term for literally putting a yellow filter over footage in American films when they depict “countries stereotyped as impoverished, polluted, or war zones (or all three)” — for Matador Network with the recent release of Netflix’s Extraction. “Yellow filter goes hand in hand with films that depict mostly negative stereotypes about living in the country in question, all while centering the journey of a white hero: Some combination of gangs, extreme poverty, drug use, and war seems to pop up in most of the movies that use yellow filter,” Sherman writes. “Yellow filter seems to intentionally make places the West has deemed dangerous or even primitive uglier than is necessary or even appropriate, especially when all these countries are filled with natural wonders that don’t make it to our screens quite as often as depictions of violence and poverty.”
— “We’ve always believed in the promise of what this country could be; we’re very patriotic,” Spike Lee told the NYT in a piece on his COVID-19 experience and his new movie Da 5 Bloods, “but I think that patriotism is when you speak truth to power. It’s patriotic to speak out about the injustices in this country. That is being an American patriot.” I’m personally really hype to see Da 5 Bloods — which tells the story of a group of black Vietnam veterans going back to find the body of their friend — when it hits Netflix next week.
— “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened,” as Don Draper — the protagonist of AMC’s modern classic Mad Men — once said. This malleable approach to memory in the face of crisis is something that resonates in weird way during these odd times. Matt Zoller Seitz writes about watching the perfect period piece show during the pandemic for Vulture. “It’s an emblem of strength but also tactical coldness, at times cruel indifference. And it’s often rooted in a refusal to truly confront one’s mistakes,” he writes. “Returning to business as usual is less traumatizing, even if it inflicts damage on others.”
BEST PICTURE CHECK-IN
So basically once I got out of the 70s the whole Best Picture project kind of fell apart in terms of how much I was enjoying these films. Annie Hall, I’d already seen and loved though this was the first watch in probably close to a decade. The Deer Hunter I liked a lot more than I thought I would. Kramer vs. Kramer was stunning. Then Ordinary People was good and we started going downhill. Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Amadeus, Out of Africa and The Last Emperor were all pretty much meh to me. Platoon was great, though, I have to say.
The Twitter thread cataloging my experience is still going, as well as my reviews on Letterboxd.
TUNES
This is a mix recommendation more than anything. My favorite music blog, Aquarium Drunkard, put together a compilation called “A Home Away From Home” that collects Brazilian covers of international hit songs. It’s a smash (and a free download), particularly some of those Beatles covers. Here’s Elis Regina’s version of “Golden Slumbers.”
I was watching Pilotinnen, German director Christian Petzold’s debut feature from 1995, and the whole thing takes place basically on the road as a pair of cosmetic saleswomen try to figure each other out and wind up scheming to do something else entirely. Set the week Frank Sinatra dies, the film is filled with American music and I was really warmed by the needle drop of this Marvelettes tune in there.
A constant rotation nowadays is this Broadcast cut from their first album, a quirky slice of icy English trip-hop.
Tuluum Shimmering is back for the second month in a row with some weirdo stretchy, contemplative jams from their cover series. Once again, just elite background stuff. Much love for “Fire on the Mountain Jam.”
Take care and care for others.