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
dan meyer, kneeling having seen this man throw himself all across the stage at agriculture’s live shows, this is certainly not the debut solo album i was expecting—first half lands comfortably between teen suicide’s blissed-out lo-fi and fleet foxes’ harmonic indie-rock appalachia, all furnished with biblical imagery; second half makes a surprisingly not-jarring switch to reverently scuzzy atmospheric black metal. real mood music for a solo backpacking trip. or maybe a duo trip with phil elverum.
manslaughter 777, god’s world maybe i’m confusing it with any number of the other dozen or so side projects initiated by one of the guys from the body over the past five years, but i didn’t recall the MS777 debut being this exclusively informed by dance music outside of the drum ’n’ bass breaks that fueled it? this one basically opens with a moment of harsh noise and immediately pivots into what is basically a single, unbroken stream of samples-based instrumental ’90s dance music tethered to the extended the-body universe by blown-out bass kicks. it almost feels plunderphonic, with the seamless transitions between tracks bringing since i left you to mind.
81355, bad dogs no better sign of the impending wholesome-ssance that rolled in with the first trump era than the guy who i’ve been getting my minute-by-minute updates on gaza from via compulsive retweets helping to create something this unexpectedly optimistic. been interesting watching this project expand from a bedroom-scaled hip-hop outlet to a full band—lots of great instrumentals blending those two influences here, though unfortunately i also think that this post-genre element abets ooh-flimsy-steve syndrome on some of these choruses.
older albums
candy, flipping (2024) aside from the occasional breakbeat and the weird crystal castles stuff on “feelings,” this is way less existenz-cyberpunk than the it’s inside you LP from earlier in the year and more aligned with the himbo-hardcore movement the band seems to be associated with. i think the EP cover reveal was the last cultural event that ever shook music twitter.
themselves, crownsdown & company (2010) i’m realizing that one through line in my music-listening habits between the mid-aughts and now is that i’ll still purchase and listen to a defunct artist’s remix collections when i miss them enough, like staring at an unflattering picture of a dead pet you’d never seen before sent to you by a friend. cool to see dalek, baths, and bracken on here, as well as core anticon figures like alias and odd nosdam, but even the unreleased/un-remixed single tacked onto the end is immediately forgettable. good album art, though!
ulcerate, cutting the throat of god (2024) the problem with being a diehard fan of a very select range of metal bands largely confined to a single subgenre is that sometimes you encounter a title or album cover that goes so hard that you can’t ignore it, inevitably leading to you engaging with music that makes no impression on you after several listens. this isn’t even the only ulcerate album i’ve purchased from bandcamp—it appears as if i’ve gotten got by this band at least twice.
movies
the beast dir. bertrand bonello (2023) secondarily a tragedy about fate succumbing to the endemic cataclysms of three distinct time periods—AI, incelism, highly flammable dolls—but first and foremost a movie about the timeless quality of roy orbison’s music. despite mostly doing a good job of intermixing three period-piece storylines, i’m having trouble untangling at least two different movies here, one about the imminent AI revolution’s refocusing of human affection from objects and individuals that mirror it back at us into non-entities that indifferently swallow it, the other a doomy romance conflating an impending love affair with a looming natural disaster. it certainly doesn’t help that the movie’s biggest tonal influence is derived from the millennial-era output of haneke (the remote control effects of funny games, the blurred fictions of code unknown, the digital/physical home invasions of cache) and lynch (the mobius strip structure of lost highway, the shattered LA dreams of mulholland drive, the sense of dreaming within a dream of inland empire)—two of our best filmmakers when it comes to hiding all of their movies’ clues in the unreadable faces of their leading actors. oh, and i guess harmony korine because of the trash humpers stuff?
the manhattan project dir. marshall brickman (1986) distinctly ’80s-blockbuster allegory of a stepdad-vetting process commonly seen in teen comedies reimagined as a nuclear holocaust thriller. the obvious point of reference here is wargames, especially during the jauntily soundtracked montages of a high schooler macgyvering a homemade atomic bomb, though this movie at least attempts to broach subjects like mutually assured destruction and fantasizes gen X as heroes of the cold war—and responsible saviors for their parents’ sorry generation more broadly—rather than tailspinning into propaganda kowtowing to a president who ironically got spooked after watching it. not particularly the project i expected from woody allen’s co-writer on his most famous movies. i guess they trusted him with anything that had “manhattan” in the title?
queer dir. luca guadagnino (2024) fascinated by this category of movie that’s like, “surprise i have a second movie coming out this year and you’re not gonna like it nearly as much!” feels like a cathartic style dump for guadagnino after his previous movie’s definition of sexy was knee-length board shorts and hard-top jeeps, with fashion and music specifically cherry picked from the 1950s, ’80s, and ’90s (also can’t ignore the knowingly goofy CGI flourishes that fondly recall the aughts) to furnish this tragic story of a lonely man and his emotionally opaque partner going deep into the jungle to procure the psychoactive gaydar he desperately needs. lamenting the 15 years dan craig spent getting typecast for his pouty blue steel and posh britishness when we could’ve had him playing all these weirdo americans. not sure what you’d call this accent, but at its most pronounced it’s kind of like heath ledger’s joker?
summer of sam dir. spike lee (1999) PSA about not leaving your dog outside overnight. gotta be one of the most not-written-by-spike-lee spike lee movies, though thankfully instead of leaning into true-crime tropes it instead feels like what scorsese would’ve done with saturday night fever or something he could’ve created while still high on the experience of screening boogie nights. the opening scenes of wall-to-wall period-specific music had me worried, but like the more personal crooklyn this lands on the linklater side of the nostalgia-movie spectrum rather than the american graffiti side in the sense that it’s approachable no matter the viewer’s age (if you squint it’s also just the height-of-summer culture clash of do the right thing refit for the studio 54 crowd versus the emerging CBGB scene). not a lot of directors out there brave enough to have adrien brody doing a purposefully bad british accent greeting his hairdresser friend as “warren beauty.”
28 years later dir. danny boyle (2025) as a big fan of boyle and garland it’s hard to ignore the fact that they’ve lost the collaborative balance they had in the aughts, with the first act of this movie swinging heavily towards boyle’s deeply evil abstract video-art experimentation (and, of course, dutch angles) before abruptly straightening out into a more visually subdued (well, spines continue to be pulled out of living human bodies) allegory familiar to garland’s arsenal of stories about struggling to live in a world filled with alpha males and other genetic mutations. i struggled a bit with all the lore-building (somehow there are infected jason momoas now) and franchise implications, as they mostly distracted from the very broadly human narrative everything else is ultimately in service to, with the emotional climax seemingly expressing some sort of grief specific to losing a family member during covid to an unrelated illness. i liked ralph fiennes as jaunty kurtz.
books
the message by ta-nehisi coates (2024) didn’t expect this entire book to essentially be a lecture to writing classes, given what i knew about its subject matter, though i think the link between radical action and good journalism is solidified by the section on the teacher who got between the world and me banned from her school for teaching it in an essay class rather than anything supposedly CRT-based. my biggest takeaway is the early use of the word “haunting” being used to define good writing—a point that itself haunts the rest of this book as we learn things that are more objectively haunting with regards to the israel/palestine conflict, something that we’ve maybe been taught is “complicated” in order to absolve ourselves for the genocides the U.S. has carried out on our own land (i feel like israel building something called the “jewish museum of tolerance” on top of a muslim graveyard is a pretty straightforward offense, even if you don’t view it as synecdoche for this whole conflict). i imagine that final chapter lost a bit of its forcefulness given that a lot of this stuff has become way more out-in-the-open to coates’ target readership since the book went to press, but if nothing else its publication still led to a masterclass in very publicly fielding offensively bad interview questions.