notes: july 2026 (pt. 2)
american critic with blog takes his all-important fucking notes
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.
old, ancient albums
leapling, suspended animation (2016) sounds like ben gibbard if that man ever bothered to write songs at the beginning of a relationship rather than once it’s already very much over. i was introduced to this project via “alabaster snow,” which feels distinctly exploding-in-sound to me, though everything else on here sounds a little too reverent to Big Indie Rock—specifically circa the decade when its bands were mostly very happy—for my taste. “one hit wonder” is kind of just “the underdog” by spoon without the horns.
muse, showbiz (1999) genuinely think muse could’ve inspired a space-rock revival (or even piano-rock revival) on par with what deftones did to shoegaze if they hadn’t gone off the deep end five or so years later, obviously, but also if their debut helped them to realize that they didn’t need to attempt these gentle love ballads (it is kind of funny that before all the conspiracy stuff all of their most cosmic tracks were just about women—i suppose the goofy album cover gives that away, though). moments like “overdue” betray how this band was initially riding the coattails of bends-era radiohead, sure, but it’s also crazy how much “escape” opens like a a low track.
+/-, holding patterns (2003) sounds like ben gibbard if he released an indietronica album in 2003. can’t help feeling like this band got a raw deal with the postal service steamrolling their glitched-out take on post-transatlanticism emo—i guess the fact that there never was a follow-up to give up only makes +/-’s discography all the more necessary. on the other hand they did resurface a few years ago with their first new album in a decade alongside pro-AI music tech sentiments, which suddenly makes the postal service’s disappointing 2020 announcement far more acceptable.
movie
communion dir. philippe mora (1989) a take on the shining that’s so overwhelmingly spielbergian that the inherited mental illness stuff never scans as anything beyond family bonding. this production seemed pretty doomed from the start, with the guy who wrote the book that the hunger was adapted from struggling to turn the single close encounter he had into a hollywood script as everyone onset laughed off his alleged experience. with seemingly very little wiggle room to embellish the earthbound portion of the narrative, there’s really nothing interesting going on outside of the few scenes where chris walken is dapping up the gray guys and enjoying every moment on the mothership, away from his cloying family. incredible how much this leans into synth-driven sci-fi/horror only for the soundtrack to be plagued by eric clapton’s wailing guitar.
“weird wayward daughter(s)” double feature
housekeeping dir. bill forsyth (1987) so much about this movie feels rote to me as someone who came of age within the aughts’ dysfunctional family dramedy era, and it’s very rare that ’50s-nostalgia movies do much for me (to say nothing of the quirky aunt/housekeeper canon), but there’s something so dreamy about this movie that it was hard to feel hung up on deadpan line deliveries like “there’s a fish in your pocket.” i guess part of that has to do with the incredible landscape photography, and some of it being that it’s a distinctly british movie set in rural idaho (the serbian-directed arizona dream matches this movie’s kitchen-sink surrealism), but the rest could probably be chalked up to its bleak representation of a family curse symbolized by their admiring mountaintops while actively drowning in a lake or flooded house, with generation after generation of teenagers left to decide whether they want to isolate themselves in the woods or among their peers in the city, destined to grow up and be about as useful as a soaked-through piece of furniture when it comes to raising the next generation—assuming they don’t submit to auto- or locomotive suicide first.
palindromes dir. todd solandz (2004) movie that makes juno look cowardly in its aftermath, and which surely inspired the casting gimmick for that bob dylan biopic. feels a bit more ambitious than solandz’s usual cringe-comedy MO as it explores two very opposing and very gendered approaches to sex, a word that’s tellingly not palindromic: one pure and utilitarian, the other hedonistic and predatory to the point that it feels downright satanic. somehow the funniest of his movies yet also easily his bleakest, reducing each of its characters to their biggest faults (perceived or actual, and often criminal and/or deeply perverted) while explicitly stating that we’re unable to undo any of our internal programming. every solandz movie i see makes me think that surely they won’t let him get away with doing this again, and yet somehow we got two decades of these.
books
two weeks in the midday sun: a cannes notebook by roger ebert (1987) as i learned long ago during a big kafka phase, there probably aren’t a whole lot of people outside of anais nin whose diaries i’m interested in reading, but ebert was such a fascinating figure—an unabashedly midwestern individual rising to the top of a near-exclusively bicoastal industry—that i loved the idea of reading something so casual from him. as i’d hoped, it’s less about film and more so just musings on the state of culture journalism, if not also a travelogue or wolfe-esque experiment in observing the fundamentally ludicrous nature of a ritual that’s been performed so many times that no one who partakes seems to notice it anymore (more than anything else, his realization that he’d spent cumulative months at cannes in between a decade-plus of festival trips made me think about the my own annual family reunion where we do little more than talk about how we do the same exact things every year). i already knew ebert was a boob man, but i’ve never read any of his work that so relentlessly confirms that.
also, i love all the endearing sketches, none so much as the ones that openly attack cinephiles and/or the french:
