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
higher power, there’s love in this world if you want it for some reason i clocked this band as an alternate-reality turnstile that unwillingly grew up on britpop when they dropped their last album ahead of glow on—i feel like maybe i was onto something now that they’ve surprise-released this one a few weeks after never enough was a relative disappointment. same vein of positivity-powered pop-hardcore, albeit with a singer who sometimes i’m not entirely convinced should be doing that.
marissa nadler, new radiations i don’t know what’s so hard to understand about marissa nadler, she’s a classic C&W murder-balladeer who happens to only be friends with metal artists, who often makes music with and around these metal artists, and whose entire fanbase seems to consist of metalheads. par-for-the-course later-career release, though it does features an absolutely haunting ballad about encountering a man with an ICP tat.
no joy, bugland after getting really into this band again with motherhood, i feel betrayed that jasmine has suddenly come out as pro-bugs? to me this feels more like a shoegazer’s intro to fire-toolz than anything that fits comfortably within the realm of what no joy had decided it was going to become four years ago, but i respect her increasingly strange dismount from the genre’s sinking ship despite my neat-freak sensibilities getting in the way of fully enjoying this type of digital-age impressionism. i guess she did release “slug night” back in 2013, maybe the clues were there all along.
teethe, magic of the sale standard search result for “slowcore,” “elliott smith,” and “alt-country” tags on bandcamp according to me, someone who’s made very little effort to familiarize myself with any of these canons. i like the song about (?) iron & wine, but i fear i may never truly learn how to take ’er easy.
older albums
hum, inlet (2020) can’t help feeling like this would’ve hit a little harder if i’d heard it in 2020 before the market for this very specific type of thing had become oversaturated to the point that disney+ is dropping documentaries about failure, but at the same time i can already tell inlet’s longevity far surpasses a lot of the bands hum have inspired (or bands inspired by the bands they’ve inspired). i think the literally-just-some-guy vocals really betray the fact that this group is in no way concerned with aesthetic, despite carving out a niche that specifically tends to coast on aesthetic—to them, rock music is just louder, grungier, proggier, more metallic, and more epically scaled than most peoples’ conceptions of it is.
portrayal of guilt, portrayal of guilt (2017) it’s been cool hearing this band get increasingly experimental on their past few releases, but it’s also always a bit deflating going back to these completely flawless, sub-10-minute early releases of sludged-out screamo. i’m afraid no one this disgusting has achieved anything this impressive since.
rage against the machine, rage against the machine (1992) nothing but respect for this band, and i still think battle of los angeles is a near-perfect album, but there’s something so powerfully silly about all of tom morellos little guitar solos aiming to dismantle imperialism—it reminds me of when christian rock bands get flashy, as if demonstrating that christ is behind their impressive riffing. some of the lyrics here feel a little “movie about white lady teaching inner-city youths that rapping is just poetic expression and anyone can do it,” and i’m still mystified by the early ’90s funk-rock fad, but obviously this album was a net positive for its transparently corruptive messaging that we continue to learn went over its republican listeners’ heads every time morello lib-posts.
double feature: insanely paced 2020s far-right-brain-rot horror-comedy
eddington dir. ari aster (2025) only a slight exaggeration of the covid era as one where a new set of rules that weren’t strictly enforced by law turned a casual trip to the grocery store into a wild-west standoff. love the division of this movie between early scenes of IRL confrontations separated by a panel of glass and a preview of the all-out vigilante justice we’re still eagerly hoping to see unfold beyond a couple of murked CEOs, with a recreation of the oscars slap marking the turning point. feels like a pretty accurate coda to hypernormalisation for an era when linear, agreed-upon political narratives have exploded into verifiable truths that are incompatible with mainstream journalism and various sects of insane conspiracy theories that ironically serve to simplify world events, where the most common entry point to a career in politics is rage posting and anyone with a live stream can become a powerful renegade figure prone to shifting allegiances. anyway, far more importantly: i had fun. gotta invent some sort of earl hays honorary oscar for whoever did all the fake social media scrolls here.
weapons dir. zach cregger (2025) i know absolutely nothing about this cregger guy besides the fact that he seems deeply troubled by the thought of what kinds of witchcrafty stuff is going on in the basements of midwestern suburban homes. opens with a series of compelling vignettes that unfortunately each get put on the back burner long enough that they lose their simmer as we learn all kinds of stuff about how sorcery works—though admittedly i did tear up during the cathartic final act when this all fell comfortably into place as an allegory about the hysteria stirred up by the too-online right wing’s cadre of estranged distant relatives and their schemes to militarize grade schoolers against their compassionate and already very stressed-out school teachers, which the police and many of the parents tend to fall victim to. always interesting to see what representation for my hometown’s area code looks like in hollywood.
regular movies (well)
first blood dir. ted kotcheff (1982) movie about how the viet cong were only as barbaric and indiscriminate as the local police force in jerkwater, USA. i’ve read gender studies essays that make this movie sound propagandistic as a text that exemplifies the reagan-era masculine ideal, though i can’t think of a better example of a mainstream movie that pits republican viewers’ most sympathetic causes against each other: a loyal, well-trained GI versus a no-shit-taking police force. surprised to see rambo portrayed as a sort of post-hippie leftist folk hero ludicrously carrying out the only scenario in which american-trained soldiers could ever use the skills they’ve learned in combat again—skills they learned in lieu of literally anything that could ever help them comfortably integrate into american society—as they’re stuck living with the fact that domestic life is somehow worse than the hell that was vietnam, where at least they had freedom, a sense of purpose, and a network of friends. obviously a pretty stark tonal contrast from new hollywood, but ultimately i think this carries those bleak ideologies into the ’80s, even down to its deflated and oddly abrupt ending.
heavy petting dir. obie benz (1989) doc about how bizarre ’50s teen sex mores had begun to seem by the late-’80s, composed of little more than scenes from the era’s puberty videos, youth-culture films, and PSAs about how masturbation causes incurable perversion, all intercut with a strange assortment of talking heads (which range from NYC’s kitchen scene to the guy who played herod in jesus christ superstar to a venture capitalist) who recount personal anecdotes that graphically back up the film’s unspoken thesis (speaking of talking heads, everything dave byrne has to say is as uncomfortable as you might imagine, somehow made significantly worse every time the light catches his ponytail against the black backdrop). couldn’t help noticing that anytime anyone tells a story from their teenhood about something more scandalous than their own escapades they all smilingly dox the person, first and last name and everything. humiliating.
double feature: ’90s comedies where billy crystal looks really small standing next to NBA players
my giant dir. michael lehmann (1998) ashamed to say my first billy crystal movie was the one that elucidates elephant man’s entertainment-industry metaphor without really understanding the element of exploitation at the heart of it. seems like crystal was inspired by the comedic potential of those photos of muggsy and manute together to create this evil composite of king kong and jungle 2 jungle (and, forthcomingly, shrek) that manages to infantilize gheorge muresan for both his giganticism and his eastern-europeanism while using him as a set piece for a cliched story of a film-industry player whose marital problems are tied to his professional shortcomings. to the movie’s credit it does buck expectations in its final moments when crystal’s character never learns to view his clients as people, never learns not to put himself first in his relationship, and never learns to call on deus when his situation doesn’t require any ex machina, despite each of these revelations being clearly set up. instead everything miraculously falls into place as a result of his most self-centered ploy of the whole movie, rather than from the lessons he would’ve learn had it all blown up in his face.
forget paris dir. billy crystal (1995) the pitch “woody allen’s before sunrise” sounds absolutely unbearable to me, but i feel like the primary plot point of it also being about the emotional turmoil of a tiny NBA ref sort of cancels all of that out. given that i’ve never seen any of woody’s movies from this era, the primary reference point i had in mind was the tedious oh-my-god-just-let-her-break-up-with-you-dude pseudo-conflict of midnight in paris (despite an endearing scene where debra winger refers to crystal’s character as her “little referee”), but that’s at least balanced out with a surprisingly robust slate of on-court player cameos to rival space jam’s that kicks off with a hilarious revisionist history of the 1993 western conference semifinals that reminds me a bit of the cuba gooding jr. backstory in rat race. i guess it delivered on the promise inherent in learning about this movie through reggie miller’s TNT co-analysts roasting him about it on air.
TV
limmy’s homemade show (2020) i’m curious about when these episodes were filmed (minus the pilot from 2018) given that this brief reboot was released in march of 2020, yet falls directly in line with the early-pandemic era of celebs filming themselves around their homes while they sadly try to entertain themselves under the guise of entertaining us. there’s certainly an element of draft-dumping to these sketches in comparison to the original series’ run (deedee and jacqueline mccafferty feel as absent to these episodes as limmy’s big green coat is), with his lack of supporting cast leading him to dialog with himself in a very post-tiktok way. but aside from the fact that he seems more self-conscious of the show being viewed outside of his native scotland (he talks about living in glasgow a lot), it’s almost eerie how little this man and his very weird sense of humor has changed over the past 15 years. for all i know he even had those crow’s feet on the original run’s standard-definition stream.