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.
2023 releases
body/negative, everett god gives her sleepiest madeline johnston collaborations to her field-recordingest ambient-pop musicians. this musique is frequently a little too concrete for me but when it leans pop (even beyond the cover of a britney song that, frankly, should be a staple for any goth-leaning artist) i am gd entranced. andy’s on another level when it comes to reinterpretations—pretty sure they were the one who inspired me to go (relatively) long on the ubiquity of a schoolhouse rock sample a few years ago.
health, rat wars LP doing some heavy lifting in making genre moments from the early ’90s that i desperately wish i could get into palatable to me (see: cool world OST). direct middle ground between the band’s first two albums and slaves of fear’s chugging guitars that sound like your fourth grade classmate with one of those guy fieri flame-patterned button downs passionately recreating trans-siberian orchestra’s guitars with his mouth, spit flying everywhere. i always think about how serengeti opens ajai with an enormous sigh—that’s basically the energy jake’s brining to this project at this point and it’s all the better for it.
shapednoise, absurd matter my ‘2023 in review’ is simply that we need way more albums from post-industrial club-deconstructionist producers tapping into the de-jour pool of guest rappers (zelooperz’s vocals in particular are absolutely insane on here—i have no idea what this man is saying—while the production makes moor mother’s verse sound like it’s on that album she did with the bug and the jesu guy). as the foremost authority on What Armand Hammer Should Be Rapping Over the answer should always involve circular saws and/or an intro from a david lynch sound design collaborator.
telos, delude i like to think that it’s totally coincidental that i’ve come across two bands that sound precisely like this (the other being EYES) and that both of them are from copenhagen. this album feels a little djentier (am i using that correctly? if not we’ll go with ‘mathcore’-ier) and less-silly-goose; also, the vocals seem to jekyll-and-hyde between those of the early daughters recs and, you know, hyde.
older albums
ashenspire, hostile architecture (2022) doomy prog-metal soundtracking groundskeeper willie as he passionately leads a working class revolt. i guess the whole ‘manic frontman addressing the way our society is designed to make people sleep outside and also the way our society’s outside is designed to make it impossible to sleep’ thing pretty explicitly ties them to another heavy album from last year, though chat pile never gets nearly as close to showtunes as ‘how the mighty’ does.
home is where, our mouths to smile (2019) insane amount of character development going on here between this debut EP and i became birds just two years later…..like if it weren’t for the harmonica and singing saw (and slide whistle) this could be any post-hardcore-leaning midwest emo band i’ve ever tried to like from topshelf’s roster. glad they realized ‘cops are flammable’ is a way cooler thing to sing over that bridge than ‘bob dylan is my best friend.’ also glad they buddied up to j-mang instead of b-dyl for that matter.
jackie hayes, there’s always going to be something (2021) rare gbogn pop endorsement. no notes, just 13 mins of quality emotional-reset macbook-pop.
kweku collins, nat love (2016) (tmz headline font) kweku collins ’memba him!? i remembered (i mean ’membad) earlier this year upon catching kweku casually opening a show for my friend that this man released a perfect EP in 2017, an even more powerful single the following year, then fell off the face of the earth in spite of achieving p4k (ugh) darling status only to reemerge last winter with a completely ignored LP. between the singles from it and his live show he’s clearly deep in a reggae/jam-band/space-exploration phase but i guess what this record presupposes is that he (astronaut pulling a gun) always has been. surprised to see an early jamila verse on here, even more surprised to see closed sessions remove this record from bandcamp seconds after i purchased it (?). between berating his audience for not dancing i think he told us he works at a pre-school now with his mom?
movies
the holdovers dir. alexander payne (2023) giamatti/payne ‘insufferable intellectual who can’t write a book or flirt’ collab pt 2—this time with aesthetic ties to ashby and thematic ties to the breakfast club (shared extended detention), linklater (boys-will-be-boys-iness and unlikely/feel-good connections), and the homes alone (abandoned kid becomes a terrible menace). much in the same way the ensemble cast slowly gets removed from the narrative to better illustrate the true identity of our two leads—and in order to help them figure that out themselves—the focus of this movie gradually hones in on the parallel between the inevitable repetition of history and the highly evitable fate of repeating your parents’ shortcomings, with the figure whose self-imposed task it is to impart these lesson learning to do so in a way that less resembles the dictators he lectures on. in addition to drafting on visceral memories of the pre-xmas-vacation breakdown of rigid formalities between teachers and students this also does a good job of sidestepping i-like-to-think-they-teach-me-isms in favor of democratizing the learning experience—after all, we’re all on the same antidepressants.
lilya 4-ever dir. lukas moodysson (2002) dardennes movie if a mid-20s harmony korine (or whatever age he was when he first saw wings of desire) was liberally consulted on the script. type of mudsliding tragedy where once you accept the fact that it’s about how tragedy tends to mudslide you’re free to overlook its overwrought plot points and more deeply examine its nuances, such as the relatable central idea that the further out of our way we go to avoid becoming our parents the more chillingly their mistakes tend to materialize in our own lives; or how etching our names into the world won’t stop employers and exploiters from simply calling us by a different one. can’t think of a more dramatic tonal shift between a director’s successive movies than the almost propagandistic feel-good abba needle drop at the end of together into the abrasive introduction to this movie’s aesthetic universe via rammstein.
may december dir. todd haynes (2023) movie about herzog’s hornets-that-sting approach to doc filmmaking as adopted by a research-intensive biopic star. all these persona references feel—in the spirit of this movie—a little dramatic for what i perceived to be a story about a woman (and, by extension, an audience) slowly making the connection that an absurd tabloid story is, in fact, tethered to our universe rather than the nearly science-fictitious fantasy it’s sold to us as on newstands. like a rosetta stone for tabloid fodder the movie provides a weirdly on-point analysis for why relationships fall into dysfunction (using a funhouse-mirror image of one familiar to scandalous headlines) as both factions were led to believe the other was steering the ship from the get go, where it takes a third party with intimate familial details (typically one with a doctorate) to provide a fresh perspective—to insist on a more protected environment for the larva to develop and molt. huge ‘i feel like i’m sitting on an atomic bomb waiting for it to go off’ energy in this movie. or as gracie’s sugar ray ass son would say at his childhood bday party ‘i feel like i’m eating too many atomic warheads and i’m waiting to get you off.’
the people vs. larry flint dir. milos forman (1996) movie beginning optimistically with the democratization of porn and ending as one of those courtroom dramas (or worse: courtroom comedies) where the guy on the stand makes everybody laugh by saying naughty things and the judge is all ‘order! order!’ embraces all the most grating aspects of oliver stone’s righteous crusades to reclaim america across the accelerated pacing of a poorly structured biopic with the only meaningful insight being its explanation for why gen x libs are like that on social media. i’ve always had an aversion to biopics being made about figures who are not only still alive but directly involved in the project and the scene where the guy playing jerry falwell shakes his head, almost smiling, and says ‘the depth of his depravity sickens me!’ only further confirms it.
poor things dir. yorgos lanthimos (2023) unlikely frankensteining of jeunet’s aesthetic sense with that charlize theron subplot in arrested development s3 and what i can only assume is the central plot to rochelle, rochelle. i think there’s this weird film-crit kneejerk reaction to classify this as some scathing, ‘delicious’ sendup of high society but much like the steampunk vision it mines it’s predominantly in dialogue with highly dated ideas of properness purely for comedic effect while integrating a more substantial storyline based on a highly contemporary sense of feminism and how women today—no longer coming of age with the old-as-time/male-written/evil narratives about their sexuality—are able to piece this now-pretty-common-sense worldview together once their fathers send them off to college or whatever sexed-up environments they bildungsroman within and toddle through, figuratively speaking, though in the case of this movie also literally speaking, where they will inevitably date what turns out to be the worst man of all time. at least until they find socialism.
TV
barry season 2 (2019) series that increasingly feels like wishbone as its main character fades in and out of some fantasy world, only in this case reality is the theatrical one and the fantastical one involves mass murder. throughout this season there’s such a bizarre dichotomy of actors (within the show) who clearly don’t understand grief trying to channel it for their art while others are actively struggling to process it in real time—all while those around them have no clue how to properly sympathize. some interesting stuff about the willful rashomoning of memory, though ultimately it feels like the season was defined by the weirdly gendered dual themes of daddy issues and hashtag me too. gonna start one of those obnoxious film accounts that posts cinematic parallels but only include various pics from this series where bill hader shows us all of his eyes.
books
out of sheer rage: wrestling with D.H. lawrence by geoff dyer (1997) book-length commitment to writers’ favorite bit which is explaining how far they go to procrastinate on a writing project. after a hundred or so pages the parentheticals about how this book will never get written become tedious, and on top of that the narrative feels deeply unrelatable at best and offensive at worst in the same way every rohmer movie i’ve seen is: as a writer, why is your biggest hurdle in life trying to figure out where in europe you want to vacation? the parallels he draws between himself and D.H. feel a little flimsy to me, the writer’s-block-as-comedy routine was perfected with adaptation a few years later, and the conclusion (about combatting depression?) feels abrupt if not slightly out of left field. maybe i’d have a better opinion if i’d ever read a single lawrence text or found anything of interest in the few books of letters i’ve read from my own favorite authors but to me this book just read like a consolidation of excuses he sent to his publisher.