I’ve been in posting semi-retirement since Twitter started going downhill and I need a new outlet for that stuff, so I’m ripping off my friend Josiah’s idea and starting a weekly newsletter about all the content I simply love to consume.
It’s starting to feel like a proper winter in Chicago and with the holidays, vacation days, and couple bouts of illness I’ve mostly been on a couch staring at different-sized screens since mid-December. What follows is some of the content which appeared on said screens.
WATCHING
I’ve been rewatching the Fargo series with Aja and we just wrapped up season 2. It still feels like the high-water mark for the show, though I have yet to finish any of the subsequent seasons. Growing up most of the adults in my life were icy about the film, finding the portrayal of Minnesotan people and culture a little insulting. While exaggerated for effect, I found it to be largely accurate and the show continues to nail that balance. The show feels like watching all of my uncles do gangster shit. I’ve been to the Gehrhardts’ farm, I’ve eaten at the Solverson’s table, so to speak. It’s all true, even though it’s all made up.
Besides Fargo, it’s been a combination of sitcoms, normie YouTube channels, and Dropout media shows.
I finished The Great North, which is fun. Got caught up on Bob’s Burgers, which I can’t believe has been running for over a decade at this point. I started rewatching Community, which is starting to show some age but largely holds up.
A new development in visual media consumption, to me, is normie YouTube. I watch and like The Try Guys, and think they’ve only gotten better since dropping Ned. I’venalso been getting into Good Mythical Morning and Mythical Kitchen, which has some weird exvangelical vibes but is overall very fun light entertainment that is largely food-based. These are great things to watch over coffee and *legal substances* on a weekend morning.
As for Dropout, their game shows and D&D stuff are great. Funny people doing high quality shows at a modest budget level. No complaints here.
Rounding out the visual category with the movies. I feel like my cinephilia is at its lowest ebb in awhile. I’ve let my Criterion subscription lapse and haven’t been getting out to theaters much in these last few post-pandemic years. I largely watch things agreed upon rather than seeking out new stuff for myself. It is what it is.
Since Christmas I have watched 4 films: Love and Monsters, Room, The Art of Self Defense, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Love and Monsters was a lot better than expected. Fun YA post-apocalyptic monster movie that has a lot of fun creatures and gags and has a pretty sober take on young romance. Great pick for a cold winter day.
Room was really great. Everybody was correct to rave about this. Strangely uplifting even though the subject matter is so, so dark. Worth catching up on if you haven’t.
I really liked The Art of Self Defense. It feels a bit like a throwback to some of the stylized pseudo-indie stuff that was pretty common in the late aughts/early 10s though it was marketed as a timely tale about toxic masculinity. This could have come out in the same moment as Observe and Report and I wouldn’t have batted an eye. I recently read John Ganz’s newsletter about his theory of jock/creep fascism and it’s interesting to see how much of a theme “resentful, plotting creep with authoritarian aspirations” is in Jesse Eisenberg’s filmography. Playing Mark Zuckerberg changed him.
Finally: Killers of the Flower Moon. Undoubtedly major Scorsese. Believe the hype. The dynamic between William Hale and Ernest Burkhart is a profound illustration of a particularly American kind of ignorance and malice. Really didn’t expect the radio show wrap up at the end and got a kick out of a very brief Jack White cameo.
READING
I’ve started reading a little more voraciously than In had been for the back half of last year. I devoured Marie Kondo’s book over Christmas, though I have yet to put any of her advice into practice, and I’ve started Gravity’s Rainbow, The Way of Kings (vol. 1 of The Stormlight Archive), and Soldato #2: DeathGrip! which has a cigarette ad in the middle of it. For shortform stuff, Josiah’s aforementioned newsletter, Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism essay, John Ganz’s Jock/Creep fascism article, and the headlines in The Financial Times.
Marie Kondo’s a very engaging writer and her program isn’t as militantly minimalist as its often caricatured. I’m not sure I’ll ever give my apartment the full KonMari treatment but I have done the work of acknowledging that it might be ok to maybe throw some stuff out that I don’t really use at all.
It’s still early days with the three novels. I already feel Gravity’s Rainbow altering my brain chemistry. I’ll have to get back in touch with my old lit prof to discuss on completion. Conspiracy theory and the sheer insanity of the 20th century have been pet obsessions of mine for the past couple years and it’s about time I engaged with one of the foundational texts of that type of thing.
The Way of Kings is my first Brandon Sanderson. I haven’t engaged with much contemporary/post-Tolkien fantasy outside of A Song of Ice and Fire and this one seems as good as any. I was ready to be a bit of a hater but Sanderson is very good at the particular thing he’s doing. We’ll see if I stick it out through the next 3 volumes of The Stormlight Archive.
Soldato #2: DeathGrip! is some incredible pulp so far. The prose is unadorned and the premise is incredible: a pissed off Italian American businessman hires an ex-prosecutor and an ex-mob enforcer to do counterinsurgency against the mafia. The gaudy yellow paperback came out in 1975 and is definitely not metabolizing the legacy of the Vietnam War, definitely not at all.
The short form stuff and news is of a piece. I’ve been taking advantage of a subscription to the Financial Times through my job, and it has already proven Noam Chomsky’s advice to be true: if you want accurate reporting, pay attention to the business press.
The news has been fairly depressing this week. The Western world opens up another front in the forever war to ensure the prompt delivery of autoparts; the free world contemplates another dalliance with fascism as the centennary of World War 2 and its attendant horrors looms. In order to interpret the business press, I read about fascism.
Since making the move from designating a specific movement to becoming a general term for a variety of political tendencies, fascism has become like pornography; nobody knows how to define it exactly, but we know it when we see it.
Far from being exhaustive analytical works, Eco and Ganz’s brief pieces are notes toward a looser and more expansive definition of fascism: its ideal types, social and aesthetic tendencies and correlations rather than specific policies and programs. I have no hard answers myself, but it’s hard not to notice its resurgence in my lifetime and I refuse to ignore it. Maybe next week I’ll have some more thoughts.
LISTENING
It’s been a light month for music and podcasts. Much like film, I find myself a little less voracious than years past, though my interest in current music is on the rise.
The past year has been a bit of a watershed: I decided that I am a hardcore guy that likes metal instead of a metal guy that likes some hardcore and it’s been pretty liberating. It turns out all I really need from music is a palm-muted power chord on a drop-tuned guitar.
Funnily enough I haven’t been listening to that much hardcore over the past couple weeks. I did start digging back into my modest vinyl collection a few days back and spun Swans’ 2010 “reunion” record My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, a performance of some Wagner pieces that used to belong to my grandparents, Santana III, and Couch Slut’s sophomore album Contempt.
Less hardcore, more on the experimental/No Wave side of things. I appreciated the Swans record but I’m going to have to live with it a little more to have any solid thoughts on it. The Wagner was appropriate to read a bit of Gravity’s Rainbow to. Santana is always a good time.
Then there’s Couch Slut. Their debut record is a mushroom cloud at the center of my music taste. That band ruined the entire genre of metal for me for almost a decade. There’s no individual component of their sound that is “heavy” in and of itself, but it all works to create a malevolent and menacing atmosphere that puts most extreme metal to shame. And most of it based on the sadly common experience of being a woman who’s into the guitar music scene. Not for the faint of heart but maybe my favorite band of the past decade.
PLAYING
I also play video games. We were fortunate enough to receive a Nintendo Switch for Christmas so there has been a lot of MarioKart in the house. I’ve also been playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and can confirm it is the Far Cry 2 of Zeldas. Lighter fare than I usually go for but the game is extremely well made and very fun to play. I’m excited to play more Zeldas.
On the edgier side of things, me and Aja just finished a playthrough of GTA 5 in anticipation of the new one. Wild how well the thing holds up gameplay wise, and to a lesser extent cultural commentary-wise. The music has changed in the past 10 years but the villains stay the same.
Finally, I’ve gotten back into Far Cry 3, the entry in the series I’ve put the most hours into. I replayed 4 earlier last year and think it might be objectively the best game to play in the series, but 2 remains my favorite for its ambition if not its execution, and 3 a runner up for perfecting the gameplay. Storywise it is a reskinned orientalist whiteboy fantasy and is pretty indefensible on that level, though the “bad” ending goes a little further towards subverting it. Problematic, but a fave nonetheless.
Those are the media objects I have been spending time with recently, I’ll let you know what changes next week.