The One Where We're Not Alone
Just when I feel like we’re getting closer to the end of the gray months here in western Kentucky, we get hit with another three day forecast of rain. But oh well, hopefully this e-missive reaches you safe, sound, and dry wherever your inbox calls home.
February’s been just fine. While work has been weird lately, it’ll hopefully level off soon. Some of my favorite stories from the month were this piece on an author who spoke at local schools about the first Olympics to feature basketball (which happened to be the 1936 games in Nazi Germany), an article on the five-year anniversary of Dry Ground Brewing Company, a strange historic piece on a Murray cultural critic getting into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and a feature on Matt Ortt, who makes liquid-filled vinyl records in his Paducah home workshop.
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Let’s do this thang.
READS
— Just in case anyone forgot about Oumuamua (a peculiar cigar-shaped object that rocketed through our solar system in 2017), Isaac Chotiner did a fantastic Q&A with Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, on the subject for the New York Times. Loeb sums up why the object is very likely the product of another civilization and why it’s likely: “I do not view the possibility of a technological civilization as speculative, for two reasons. The first is that we exist. And the second is that at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the chemistry of life as we know it could develop. If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone.”
— My number one boy, NYT pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote about the recent years’ rash of law suits over pop music and melodies (Marvin Gaye/Robin Thicke and Tom Petty/Sam Smith, among several others) and what they may mean as pop music moves into the future. “Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap,” Caramanica noted. “Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts.” Another great piece from Caramanica this last month: a feature on 10k.Caash, a Texas rapper who’s moving past songs to “whatever comes next.”
— A lot of books have come out over the past five years about the perils, pitfalls, and pleasures of minimalism and culture commentator at-large Jia Tolentino tried to synthesize them all for the New Yorker, as well as praise Kyle Chayka, another favorite of mine, for Longing For Less, his new book on the subject. “Less is more attractive when you’ve got a lot of money, and minimalism is easily transformed from a philosophy of intentional restraint into an aesthetic language through which to assert a form of walled-off luxury—a self-centered and competitive impulse that is not so different from the acquisitive attitude that minimalism purports to reject.”
— If you didn’t see Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, you should. But you should also know that it’s not the only adaptation of the over 150-year-old novel. In addition to renditions in the 1930s, ‘70s, and ‘90s…there are some versions from the silent era that have been lost to time. Zach Schonfeld tells the story for Vulture. Elsewhere in the Little Women department, The Ringer’s Katie Baker wrote a great piece about how Gerwig’s screenplay came to be and how it’s different than any that have come before it.
— Atlantic writer Amanda Mull wrote about how laptops have destroyed the work-life balance of a generation. It’s depressing. “An office used to be a thing you went to for a certain number of hours a day; now, work is an entire plane of existence.”
— One of the best pieces I’ve read in the run up to (and wake of) the Oscars is Manohla Dargis’ NYT Critic’s Notebook piece on Brad Pitt. She deconstructs the legacies of other pretty boy actors who weren’t respected as being something a little deeper and Pitt’s contributions to Hollywood history through depictions of varied masculinity. “There’s nothing new about how we punish beauty,” Dargis writes. “The history of movies is filled with the victims of this malignant love-to-love and love-to-hate dynamic, not all of them women.”
— Stephen Hyden, normally a music critic, tackled Quentin Tarentino’s legacy as a film critic for Uproxx this month, explaining how the voices of his characters and the references Tarentino explores can be boiled down to reveal the director’s views on film and the culture surrounding it.
— If this year’s Best Picture winner, Parasite, has somehow eluded your eyes to this point, you should really give it a chance. It’s vital. Maybe A.O. Scott can convince you. Here’s a wild YouTube video of someone building the house (which Bong Joon-Ho had built for the movie) in everyone’s favorite God simulator The Sims.
BEST PICTURE CHECK-IN
My march through every Oscar Best Picture winner continues! I’m solidly in the 1950s now. I’ve been documenting my progress as it happens in this Twitter thread. Otherwise, monthly progress graphics here and regular Letterboxd reviews. Here’s posters for every one I watched in February.
Undeniably my favorite during this run was All About Eve — the story of a stage star and her adoring fan and how stardom spoils all. The WWII fallout continued, particularly in the form of From Here To Eternity and The Best Years Of Our Lives. Some stagey kitsch in The Greatest Show On Earth, a just okay musical in An American In Paris, and the worst sort of musical in the Bing Crosby vehicle Going My Way.
THE BIG RECALIBRATION OF MY MIND
I’ve been thinking about Richard Linklater’s Slacker, which I watched for the first time this January.
Released in 1990 after being filmed on a shoestring budget of less than $25,000 on location in Austin the year before, Linklater’s second feature (his first being It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books) is a cult flick for the ages. The wandering plot follows threads of conversations around a community, never staying with a person or group of people longer than ten minutes or so, flitting from a couple fighting about pretension to a kids running off after spying on a guy to wandering conspiracy theorists and people just trying to grab a cup of coffee after getting off the train.
The script is chock full of what’s become Linklater’s signature walk-and-talk musings that would be captured so sweetly in his Before trilogy over the following decades. People just going about their business and all the while chattering about music, politics, love, art, conspiracy theories, and the weather.
Kalman Spelletich (credited as “Video Backpacker,” very few characters in the film have actual names) plays an artist and video collector who has neighborhood scavengers bring him old and broken televisions. He espouses one of Linklater’s many theories that are strewn about his work, filtered through the eyes of a character, the power of the digital image:
“We all know the psychic powers of the televised image, but we need to capitalize on it and make it work for us instead of us working for it. A video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event. Back when I used to go out — when I was last out — I was walking down the street and this guy like came barreling out of a bar, fell right in front of me, and he had a knife right in his back. Landed right on the ground. I had no reference to it. I can’t refer back to it. I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slo-mo and see all the little details. And the blood? It was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. Like the hue was off and I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real and it just wasn’t right.”
Louis Black, publisher of the Austin Chronicle, plays a raving conspiracy theorist. Teresa Taylor, drummer for the Butthole Surfers, plays the character on the poster who tries to sell a Madonna pap smear to some passersby.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Denise Montgomery’s character (Having a Breakthrough Day) who’s standing on a corner offering anyone who walks by an Oblique Strategies card:
“They tell you, look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, there is no tunnel. There’s just no structure. The underlying order is chaos.”
Oblique Strategies was a set of strange cards devised by legendary electronic and ambient musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt. They present a sort of strange prompt not unlike a fortune cookie for creatives, things like “It’s not building a wall but making a brick” or “Reverse” or “Discard an axiom.” I used to use them in college for when my creative juices ran dry. They’ve been sitting on my bookshelf for years and that moment in the movie felt like kismet.
Ultimately, Slacker is a dreamlike wandering through the lives of disconnected strangers. It’s funny, romantic, charming, eccentric, paranoid, and highly intelligent — much like its director, Richard Linklater.
TUNES
A new country rap titan has arisen in RMR, an anonymous YSL bulletproof vest wearer, who interpolates Rascal Flatts’ “Bless The Broken Road” into an anti-police ballad. It’s beautiful and exactly what the doctor ordered.
NYC rockers Pom Pom Squad dropped a Valentine’s Day single. Hard driving and hard loving are abound in the sparkly, ruby-colored video. Run me over with a car Mia Berrin!
The long-awaited (for me) second single for Christian Lee Hutson’s debut record, Beginners, is finally here in “Lose This Number.” If you like Phoebe Bridgers, she produced this. He’s also a member of Better Oblivion Community Center with co-writing credits on boygenius tracks. A seriously talented (and sad) songwriter.
I just watched Martin Scorsese’s After Hours this last fall and the Weeknd’s homage to it is pretty great. The video follows the artist on a woozy and wild night that goes off the rails and ends with Abel Tesfaye in considerably better shape than Griffin Dunne’s character in the movie. This song is the title track to the Weeknd’s upcoming LP.
A new Christian Lee Hutson song and a new Phoebe Bridgers single in the same few weeks?! Holy sad, Batman. “Garden Song” is chill and I’m into it.
THANKS FOR READING.
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