Things I Hate!

Yes, of course, I hate genocide, climate apocalypse, the unequal distribution of wealth, etc. This is intended to be a relatively light list (in rough order of most to least hated) from someone of pretty considerable privilege.

1. The phrase “We are so fucked" - Usually uttered by people who are not, in fact, so fucked. What it really means is, "I don't want to fight against injustice."

2. Pop ups - We managed to do away with pop-up ads. Why can't we obliterate those aggravating suggestions to sign up for Pitchfork New Music Friday or whatever?  If you know a program that blocks these irritants, tell me tell me do! A perfect segue into...

3. Signing up/in everywhere - Every site wants your email address and yet another password. Even worse, every site is now an app. Question: why? Why do you need an app for YouTube? Why does Pitchfork have an app? (Okay, I know why but ARGH!) And what's with this cloud business? Use your Apple ID login or your Gmail account on your new iPhone to access your junk on the cloud. No! Let ME do it! I spend half of my life on data migration anyway so I'll drag my pix over thank you very much.

4. Vagueposting - When it's not passive-aggressive, it's flat-out annoying. You do you. But never bitch about lack of engagement in my digital presence. 

5. Leaf blowers - Listen, I've internalized so much noisy music/noise that I regularly interpret non-musical sounds as music, e.g. the automatic garage door in my childhood home reminds me of a song from the excellent first half of My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything (Creation, 1988). But leaf blowers are a gas-powered menace, strafing the environment for miles around with its humming miasma. I'm pleased to learn that several states are looking to outlaw them. 

6. Onion Fascism (and perhaps an encroaching Cheese Fascism) - I've long since abandoned my run for the mayor of Sherman, Texas on the Stop Onion Fascism Now platform. But I'll forever rue the many minutes I've spent picking onions out of a dish, onions that the menu or packaging never signposted! This is especially upsetting since I give unto onions but they never give unto me. I like onions when they're fried to funk. I love French onion soup and salsa, sofrito, pico de gallo, etc. I dig green onions and chives. So DON'T be putting them in my food without telling me! A friend tried to convince me that you don't need to tell anyone that onions will be in their food since onions form a part of mirepoix, hence, they're a basic flavor base. As the French say, neauxp! Force an onion into my cream cheese and broccoli omelette (hi, The Omelettry in Austin!) and I'll be shoving unannounced octopus in all of your dishes! Cheese is poised to take over onion's fascist bent nowadays. I love cheese. But so many American restaurants ram it into all of their sandwiches. A French Dip with cheese? Tastes fine but too heavy overall. 

7. Crappy on/off switches - The design of my coffee pot and bedroom fan forces you to hold the entire apparatus in order to turn it on or off. And having to dip your whole damn arm down or up a lamp shade to turn the lamp on or off is why The Clapper was invented. I thought all that's solid was supposed to melt into air.

8. The words “traveling” and “shower” - Because they are insufficient descriptors. No one likes traveling*; they like being in different places. And at the very least, a "shower" should be called a "shower and dry" since the toweling off must be incorporated into the activity, especially in the summer when you can never get fully dry. *Yes yes, train/plane/car rides can be fun and even productive. But face it - if you could snap your fingers and be in Paris, you'd take that over a pleasant 7-hour plane ride (with many hours attached for the car ride to the airport, getting through TSA and customs, waiting to board/take off, etc.).

9. Brackets - This is low on the list because as a sports hater, I never encounter them. But some fellow music geeks engage in such asininity and I just don't get it. I grasp the overall point but you start with...just whatever? Who gets to choose the initial "teams" (Maxinquaye vs. Nevermind, say) and how? (These are rhetorical questions. I don't really want to know the answers.)

9.5. Instagram - Half because it has many pros. Its algorithms are excellent in that I may actually want to buy some of the products advertised (yo, YouTube - I'm never ever buying a car so you can stop forcing me to watch car ads now thanks!). The search function leads me to cute guys and campy commercials. I hear more new music via TikToks here than on any other platform. But, ugh, uploading pictures is a slog. If they're not in a square, then they must be cropped. I have an app called Instasize to properly format pictures for Instagram fussiness. But it's laborious and time wasting. And why get another app when the original app should have that function? Also, you can't download pictures as easily as you can with Tumblr and Facebook. Not very 2023, Insta. 

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

The problem with this one is easy, especially if you recall the fiasco of Deckard's narration in the original version of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). You'd think filmmakers would have long since learned that unnecessary voice-overs can not only induce derisive laughter but deflate the narrative tension as well. One must assume Fincher as well as screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (adapting the graphic novel by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and Luc Jacamon) had more freedom than Scott did forty years ago so the blame for the risible narration intoned by the titular assassin (Michal Fassbender) falls on them. For the first third of the film, the nameless Killer spends almost all of his time alone waiting for the moment to assassinate a high-profile target. But instead of maintaining an air of menace or existential dread from the visuals and sound design, the Killer's preposterous voice-over thoughts about his profession take a sonic front and center. I swear I'm not trying to be cute when I claim that this narration has the pseudoprofundity of Bela Lugosi's in Glen or Glenda? (Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1953) for competition. This is doubly irritating since Fincher punctuates the sequence with a brief meeting between the Killer and the client paying for the assassination. That's more than sufficient narrative explanation to ground a voice-overless exposition. Instead, Fincher brings us right back to the Killer's rub-a-dub-dub-three-men-in-a-tub philosophizing. 

After that, the damage is done even though the narration calms down. But that gives way to a tired revenge fantasy in which yet another actress (Sophie Charlotte) serves as mere foil with barely any screen time. The cameos are fun, particularly Tilda Swinton in Ice Queen mode (does she have any other mode lately?). But the sole reason to watch, or rather, listen is the music. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score alternates between inorganic electronica and non-musical sounds such that any notion of the natural becomes irretrievable. And, for some reason, the Killer listens only to the Smiths as he jet-sets between assassinations and revenge plots. Instead of benefiting the narrative in any discernible way, the indifferent locations blow back into the music and wind up deepening Morrissey's self-absorbed warbling. The world truly doesn't care about him and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," say, takes on an unexpected pathos as a result.

Grade: B-minus (upped a notch for the music but then down again for the Killer's ridiculous pseudonyms - Archie Bunker? Why not Mickey Mouse?)

October Top Ten

1. Jungle: "Candle Flame"(featuring Erick the Architect) (Caiowla/AWAL).

Single, video, and choreography of the year. As the oft acid jazzy duo Jungle, Brits Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland seemed some of the least likely candidates to create music worth holding dear. But with "Candle Flame," they lay claim to haunted house, a specter of soul moaning above a post-disco beat. The apparently unsampled vocals sound like a dream of records past with all identifying marks fried out of distinction and twinkling doo-wop patterns hovering around the edges. It's such a raw, arresting sound that the duo felt it necessary to add Erick the Architect's raps as a placeholder more tethered to the earthly here and now. They needn't have bothered given how much presence and humanity the miraculous video, directed in one shot by Charlie Di Placido, returns to the song. Shay Latukolan's astonishing choreography uses the flow of gossip to activate his dancers. Individuals form canons as others pick up and spread the news. They attach to one another with copycat precision in a parody of bitchy clubgoers. But at the song's climax, the entire ensemble breaks free from the robotics and move together in looser-limbed ebullience. It's one of the most euphoric rejoinders to the idea that music organizes time. Here, music forges relationships and the dancers unhaunt the song, the emotional gibberish of the vocals finding a moment of articulation in their synchronized bliss-energy. 

2. Vladimir Sorokin: The Queue (NYRB, 2008; originally published 1985). 

Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy (Adam Curtis, 2022).  

Tetris (Jon S. Baird, 2023).

Save for 21 blank pages intended to represent sleep, Sorokin's novel is comprised entirely of dialogue. 33 pages are devoted to a roll call. Several pages of oohs and aahs stand in for sexual activity. But mostly, people in the former Soviet Union chat with one another waiting in a series of lines for unnamed goods. With no other enunciative force in place, the novel forces the line to encounter itself as Sorokin makes clear in an incisive 2008 afterword: "The collapse of the line was much more painful for the collective Soviet body than the collapse of the Soviet Union...Gray and boring, but inescapable, the line dissected the body into pieces, pacified and disciplined it, gave people time to think about the advantages of socialism and about the class struggle; and in the end they were rewarded with food and goods" (261; 257). 

Curtis gives viewers seven one-hour episodes to think about socialism for his latest Molotov documentary. As with The Queue, TraumaZone abjures similar enunciative functions such as voiceover and non-diegetic music, using only occasional explanatory titles over undeployed footage from the BBC's Moscow bureau. Less sanguine than Sorokin about the line, Curtis nevertheless mourns the loss of any ability to think collectively. How even Francis Fukuyama could view the subsequent slide into capitalist kleptocracy as utopian destiny defies belief. 

For a more triumphant narrative, Tetris, an Apple TV+ production, recounts the struggle to wrest the licensing rights for the evergreen video game out of the Soviet union just before its collapse. Given Hollywood's inability to think collectively (or to collectively bargain), the story is told via car chases, last-minute reversals, and characters partitioned off into Good and Bad categories. When the principal players (to name them would go against the spirit of this entry) finally get the game in proper capitalist hands, the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" plays over their triumph/the closing credits with no apparent irony.

3. Assassins, Kweskin Theatre, Stamford, CT (June 17). And at the same time that Fukuyama was proclaiming the end of history, this is the democracy he was celebrating. In what is quite possibly Stephen Sondheim's greatest achievement, all the Americans who attempted and/or succeeded to assassinate a president come together to sing "Everybody's got the right to be happy/to their dreams" as each points a gun at the audience. Also, please allow this entry to serve as a reminder to support local theater since this production was a far more unforgettable experience than Sweeney Todd on Broadway.

4. Pierre Leguillon: The Barefoot Promise (Triangle) A coffee-table book of film stills of the human foot in various forms. And far less cheap than that might seem. It sometimes takes a good scan to see how the foot signifies in certain photos - a renegade toe from Ozu's The End of Summer or a recessed Cinderella. Which means this is a gift from a true scholar of cinema, one who knows that much of the art of mise-en-scène lies in pulling your eye away from the main action.

5. Rectify (Created by Ray McKinnon, 2013-2016) A rewatch of The Sopranos is in order. Until then, this is the greatest serial of the Peak TV era I've ever seen. After nineteen years on death row, Daniel Holden is exonerated with the help of DNA evidence. But his return to small-town Georgia is far from Edenic. In Daniel's subsequent quest to keep meaninglessness at bay, we're forced to confront the decisions we make on a daily, even hourly basis. No other series and few films have glimpsed so penetratingly into quotidian existence. And while I've been known to make condescending remarks about the art of acting, the performances here humble me. Aden Young as Daniel is damn near extraterrestrial in his portrayal of Daniel. But Abigail Spencer, J. Smith-Cameron, Adelaide Clemens, Clayne Crawford, Luke Kirby, Bruce McKinnon, Jake Austin Walker, and J. D. Evermore (I need to list their names) all dumbfound.

6. To Leslie (Michal Morris, 2022)

The Lost King (Stephen Frears, 2022)

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023) Three absolutely fantastic middlebrow films. Believe the hype re: To Leslie, a tale of redemption told with such simplicity, hell, such purity that I was crying buckets at the end when a clear line communication between the principals is finally opened up. Frears is the finest middlebrow director extant so the high quality of The Lost King is no surprise. A biopic on Philippa Langley's quest to exhume the remains of King Richard III, it has trenchant things to say about urban planning and the victors of history. It's a measure of the freshness of Judy Blume's 1970 book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that it took such a criminally long time to make it to the screen. Hopefully, this consistently inventive adaptation, along with the terrific 2023 documentary Judy Blume Forever, will inspire more Blume-authored projects.

7. Jason Farago, "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill," The New York Times, October 10, 2023, p. 38 This bullshit again. It's a fool's errand to pick apart each nugget of wrongness in this venal thinkpiece on why "ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years." For the real goal of articles like this is to assure the Times-reading landed gentry that the world is not changing.

8. Hugh Hodges: The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britain in 21 Mixtapes (PM) As a catalogue of popular/semipopular musicians' response to Thatcherism, essential; as a reading experience, numbing. "I knew I was never going to get everything and everyone I wanted into these pages" (155), Hodges rues. But boy does he ever try. Organized around 24 mixtapes (not 21 since 3 come in two parts), his pedantic, rockist prose cries out for pruning. And that's without mentioning the ten pages of recommendations for further reading and the 39-page annotated discography. In a footnote listing songs that addressed nuclear war, he admits/threatens, "I could go on" (137). Oh, we know, Hugh, we know. 

9. Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay: Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press) The rare book that deepens the mysteries of a discography. Pappademas respects the abyss at the center of Steely Dan's music. Seizing on the inexpressive codes of Brill Building pop, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker disappeared themselves behind lyrics knotted with proper nouns and a sound besotted with jazz heard from a suburban afar. "The music tells you nothing about the people who made it," (3) Pappademas tells us early on. So with the help of LeMay's wry illustrations, he provides exegeses of damn near every lifeform populating the Steely Dan songbook. Dr. Wu, Kid Charlemagne, Josie, the Gaucho, Third World Man all get a chapter. Fagen and Becker too - they're the most prominent aliens on board. It's the most trenchant analysis of the Dan extant. And still you close the book knowing that you will never get to the bottom of this parallax view of an oeuvre.

10. Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (Concrete/Motown/Quality Control, 2023) Album of the year. Some may welcome the insight Rodrigo's lyrics provide into the travails of dating while famous. Me, I'm in it for the music, man. Not since Lady Gaga has an artist evinced so much joy in the sheer craft of songwriting. She rocks, she pops, she Fleetwood Macs, she raps some. Even her parlor ballads exude variety and inventiveness. Two great albums already and she's not yet 21. So to all potential suitors, I have this to say: Dude (or gal, cf. "Lacy"), don't bother! You'll probably just bore her and, even worse, keep her from writing songs.