The One With Prince and Punishment Park
Hope everyone’s doing well. Welcome to the first official edition of this reawakened newsletter. I’ve been entrenched lately in learning about inventory taxes, reading a book on Bing Crosby and trying to get my cat to not knock over his water bowl. I’ll try not to be too diaristic up top here, but…anyways, here’s the rundown.
READS
— Dan Piepenbring’s New Yorker piece that’s essentially the making-of story for “The Beautiful Ones,” the forthcoming Prince memoir, got me a little teary-eyed when I read it late one night. I’m really looking forward to reading the defining testament of the Purple One when it comes out this fall.
— I chuckled my way through Amanda Mull’s hilarious journey into the world of Goop for The Atlantic — trying out crazy vitamin packs, hairbrushes, bowls and all manner of Paltrow-endorsed ephemera. (she’s a great Twitter follow, too: @amandamull)
— Shea Serrano’s glowing profile of Candace Parker for The Ringer is a must-read for any basketball fan. I’d also recommend Kim Tingley’s big piece on the Atlanta Dream and the big picture in the WNBA right now, which ran in the New York Times Magazine recently.
— This incredible (and funny) Twitter thread on the history of Abaco — sadly one of the Bahamian islands hit hardest by Hurricane Dorian — and how it was the site of the most successful slave revolt in U.S. history.
THE BIG WATCH
(I’m going to be putting extended thoughts on some movie, TV show or music video here usually)
“America is as psychotic as it is powerful and violence is the only goddamn thing that will command your attention,” one of the defendants — played by relative unknown Patrick Boland — spits at the tribunal early on in Punishment Park, Peter Watkins’ hard-lipped, brutal 1971 satire of the broken political systems around the world.
Watkins’ faux documentary is a scathing indictment of police, government, prison and politics that’s set to turn 50 in just a year’s time. It should feel heavy-handed, but instead it feels vital. The core of the plot is this: Nixon decides that a certain set of individuals are a threat to national security (hippies, progressives, people of color, intelligent women) and sentences them to three days in Punishment Park, a desert-set training facility for U.S. military and law enforcement. There they will be hunted down by the authorities as part of a training exercise.
The cops gibe and taunt them, trying to pull them out of their pacifism and get them to engage so that they can escalate the situation to violence. It’s something that feels all too familiar.
Punishment Park is available for free through Hoopla (a library video and content service) and it’s also on Amazon Prime for $1 (rent or purchase). Many of Watkins’ other films are scattered around the web, including The War Game, his chilling fake documentary that won an Oscar for Best Documentary by detailing the effects of nuclear warfare on a small town in Great Britain in the 1960s, and The Trap, his post-apocalyptic millennial tale of nuclear woe.
TUNES
So I’ve been really into Pom Pom Squad lately. A few years ago, “Protection Spells,” off HATE IT HERE surfaced on some blog. Front person Mia Berrin gave me some Mitski vibes and I just sort of moved on. Now with this new release, Ow, they’ve leveled up. Alex Mercuri from Long Neck/Sailor Boyfriend played guitar on this ish, too, so there’s some great riffage. There’s some stuff going on underneath the surface here that could end up taking this Brooklyn crew places.
These Double Double Whammy label darlings get more fun with every release. A lot of the people in the video are just people in their scene and friends. Def stay to watch Tyler Andere two-step.
100 gecs seems to have bubbled through every layer of the internet. The NYT’s Jon Caramanica describes them best, in that they assimilate the “technicolor, spasmodic, thrashing punk-rap of Brokencyde; the hyperdigital electro-pop-punk of 3OH!3 and Breathe Carolina; [and] the arena-sized dubstep of Skrillex.” For something like two weeks, they kept coming up in the tweets of fave follows and now I have seen the darkness and the light of this listless, hyperactive, ChatRoulette outrage of a band. The whole record is just over 23 minutes long and it will leave you breathless, even if that’s because you couldn’t stop saying “what the fuck?”
Tyler, The Creator dropped the music video for one of my favorite songs off of IGOR: his smooth-as-hell break-up tune “A BOY IS A GUN.” It’s pretty and strange in a way that only Tyler could pull off while wearing an insane blonde wig in a mansion.
STUFF I WROTE
I’m also going to try and toss in things I write that I think are actually good here at the bottom. What’s helpful about this is that, for the first time ever, the Paducah Sun’s paywall is soft. Meaning you can read three free stories a month. Since this is the first one, here’s some of my personal faves from the last calendar year:
A profile of Harry Lookofsky, an innovative jazz violinist from western Kentucky who wound up playing under Toscanini in the NBC Orchestra in 1950s NYC where he befriended a man by the name of Quincy Jones. Jones and Lookofsky would work together on and off for decades as Lookfosky became one of the most in-demand studio violinists of the era. He’s a fascinating person.
I got to cover local country artist Kelsey Waldon’s signing to Oh Boy Records — the personal imprint of John Prine — which went down at the Grand Ole Opry. It was a real treat to see them perform together on that hallowed stage because I’ve known Kelsey and her father for years and I know how much it means to her.
Symsonia Video is where I grew up renting movies and I was surprised to find that not only is the mom-and-pop place still open, but they’re still renting VHS tapes to folks. So I wrote about how its owner, Carol Turner, is keeping the business alive in the age of streaming.
For the 50th anniversary of Woodstock in August, I spoke with some locals who were there for the climactic musical event of the 1960s. Though the memories for some have faded, the mark it left on them is indelible.
One of my favorite things about doing what I do is being able to give local music press attention that I know probably wouldn’t get the time of day otherwise. So I spoke with the righteous dudes of DayWaster and wrote up their eponymous album. It’s not every day you see an album cover like that in a local paper.
Yo. If you dug this, please share. And if you’re interested in talking with me about anything, hit me up on Twitter @doperle or just reply to this email.