biweekly newsletter listing all the music, movies, books, and, tv i, mike, have experienced for the first time over the past two weeks and also the things i have thought about them. again, i am mike.
2025 releases
backxwash, only dust remains unfortunately “backxwash” started happening very early in the pandemic making it nearly impossible to know just how many albums there were, which one(s) i’ve heard, or how much i really liked them without doing a bit of research, but among all that noise i don’t recall this project being rap-rock prior to this release? glad “wake up” wound up on an album, even gladder that that album matches the track’s broad-scope freneticism. all due respect to bell hooks, but i had no idea how bad her public speaking skills were?
divide and dissolve, insatiable this band seems to be chasing the beach house trajectory of releasing a decade-defining LP within their genre (in D/D’s case the much more specific category of anti-colonialist instrumental pop doom-metal) only to willfully replicate that formula to diminishing returns until eventually hiring a third member at some point, TBD. can’t help reading the first few songs on the tracklist like ciara describing the beat on “1 2 step.”
older albums
hot hot heat, scenes one through thirteen (2002) my biggest “hear me out” ever. file this—a compilation of HHH’s pre-makeup synth-punk/post-hardcore ragers—under the same category of indie-rock anomaly as chromatics’ early no-wave stuff, death from above formerly being femme fatale, and interpol sharing personnel with saetia. cool to finally hear steve bays’ naturally obnoxious vocals being put to good use, plus i like the infrequent appearances from the backup singer who sounds exactly like the kid in the hall who isn’t funny. i think you’re allowed to be nostalgic for the post-punk revival and be mad about what it deprived us of at the same time.
moodie black, MBIV (2024) this project seems to be in-flux at the moment and that’s pretty well reflected here, though i really like how the evil-trap closer cycles back to the doomed and dissociated noise of nausea. i guess the opposite end of that extreme that’s newer to moodie black is the sass-rap vocals that occasionally make this sound like the return of true neutral crew.
warning, watching from a distance (2006) all-time weird way for a doom-metal vocalist to sound, but also probably not coincidentally maybe the most affecting doom metal album i’ve ever heard. seven-sisters-scaled sorrows sighed by what sounds like scott hutchinson doing rush as butt-rock 800% slower.
movies
american pop dir. ralph bakshi (1981) jukebox musical spanning the 20th century to date that lands somewhere between godfather ii and forrest gump and that’s made entirely bearable by the fact that its real focus is bakshi’s transfixing animation. explores the roots of celebrity eclipsing spirituality as the engine fueling popular music while drawing attention to the fact that the medium of song always seems to parallel moments of extreme violence; also, it shows us some really, really crazy looking guys. in essence it feels like its thesis merely sums up the body count we had to rack up internationally before we could have “night moves.”
the day after dir. nicholas meyer (1983) i vaguely recall being shown this in middle school around the time day after tomorrow came out and being disappointed that it didn’t live up to the standards of contemporary hollywood disaster movies, but in revisiting it, that’s precisely what makes this one of the most upsetting movies i’ve ever seen—it’s an all-too-real look at the brutal best case scenario of nuclear holocaust taking place somewhere that doesn’t feel urban or rural enough to be a movie setting. with the first hour serving as an intro to the mundane lives of an ensemble cast whose stories we can only assume will intersect, it depicts how difficult it is in practice to remove yourself mentally from relatively trivial daily concerns in the event that the air sirens don’t just represent another drill. the made-for-TV factor likely keeps the scale relatively small, though it doesn’t stop the makeup crew from going all out on gruesome depictions of radiation sickness that provide a surprising sense of realism amid an era when gore was quickly becoming a fantastical art form. it feels like what twin peaks would do again a few years later: use TV’s restrictions to create something quietly horrifying.
the doom generation dir. gregg araki (1995) movie about body counts and the increasingly daring ways young folks abet each other in racking them up. something about the constant ’80s lingo retrofit for an equally persistent soundtrack of slowdive and ride, photography that brings christopher doyle to mind, and a road-movie structure sharing a balance of goofy and evil with wild at heart really brings out the sense that this is truly the tail end of the gen-X teen film, with harmony korine and larry clark simultaneously revamping the genre on the other coast. fascinated by this continuum every early-’90s american indie film seems to exist within where the characters all either frequent convenience stores, work at them, or both.
nowhere dir. gregg araki (1997) dazed and confused if linklater had given in to pressures to film in LA, and also if he’d gone to film school and made movies that were 110% less heterosexual. second (at least) in araki’s series of movies where jim duval learns to share his girlfriend, but the first where that leads to any sort of tension (fair, granted his gf is hooking up with the da vinki twins). love the way this vibe-y hyperlink-cinema teen movie maintains the specter of horror even beyond the presence of its sci-fi entity as the characters are slowly picked off one-by-one in order to build the movie’s undefined sense of tension before ultimately establishing itself as an aggressive new form of pop art using campbell’s soup cans.
riddle of fire dir. weston razooli (2023) movie that mystically foresaw the extraordinary value of eggs. a real one-percenter among feature films carried by a preteen cast as the three leads embark on an endless series of side quests that land somewhere between the enchanted-forest aesthetics of zelda (aided by dungeon synth on the soundtrack and woodland mythologies that feel a little pagan-black-metal) and the criminal violence of GTA (shoplifting, scoping bystanders, shouting “those bastards” about everyone) which, when ultimately achieved, will, per the film’s central irony, permit them to finally play their new video game. the final boss of cultist poachers looks like they could’ve been signed to saddle creek in 2012, despite the name “enchanted blade gang” sounding more like a band of swedish rappers. and also one of them very possibly being MJ lenderman.
to live and die in LA dir. william friedkin (1985) french connection’s driving directly into oncoming traffic while yelling at everyone to get out of the way mode of urban policing updated for the ’80s era of shoveling money and art directly into the fire, though maintaining its predecessor’s staunch resistance for “are we the baddies” moments of self-realization nearly as adamantly as it maintains a passion for weaving car chases through train tracks. aesthetically a compelling marriage of muller’s glowing neons and mann’s palm-tree-lined angst, though could’ve gone with the cooler types of soundtracks both of those figures tended to court. is this where every casting director got the inspired idea to hire john turturro as the rat?
waltz with bashir dir. ari folman (2008) surprisingly kind of just waking life if the characters in that movie had war crimes to suppress. it isn’t a particularly popular sentiment to express at the moment that IDF soldiers are the real victims of said crimes now that they have to live with them for the rest of their lives, though this movie mostly goes a bit deeper than the shooting-and-crying trope to prod at the psychological questions nearly every american war movie that didn’t receive funding from our military pretends to ask as we watch the naive protagonist observe his peers razing vietnamese villages. kinda shocked how much they were allowed to cop to with the ending (israel famously isn’t keen on the big “G” word when it comes to their military tactics), though it also sort of implies that this particular massacre of palestinians was an isolated incident.
books
white noise by don delillo (1985) (re-read) i think recently reading boorstin’s book on pseudo-events really helped me unlock something here, and i don’t doubt that delillo had that reference point in mind when devising this portrait of postmodernity where human behavior appears as apathetically driven by media and the technology it hocks as michael scott driving directly into a lake because his GPS told him to. it’s society as dictated by TV, a medium which inherently distorts the world to fit our perverse desires, which we in turn process as truth and recreate to the best of our limited human ability. it’s showing symptoms after exposure to the media event surrounding the man-made disaster that lists symptoms for exposure rather than after exposure to the disaster itself.
humor really feels like a last-ditch effort here after academics spent two decades warning us about the unchecked psychological implications of rearranging our lives around TV, with the book’s central observation being that the only antidote to a rational fear of death at the hands of an also relatively-unchecked pharmaceutical revolution is the infinite number of directions our attention is being sent in at any given moment due to panoramic screen activity. humanity is reduced to stock TV characters and data storage: beings self-consciously attempting to fit into their self-prescribed roles and pre-teens speaking like siris reciting AI-generated misinformation and spoonerized factoids back and forth.