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
billy woods & kenny segal, maps bill woods out here proving that as long as you put out at least one universally acclaimed album per year you can make a decent (rural) living off bandcamp receipts alone. i guess at this point i should stop worrying about billy/AH doing album-length collabs with producers who don’t match the level of grimey i appreciate about backwoodz releases because they keep being good even beyond all the head-spinningly cool things being said over the beats (and, increasingly, A-list (by my standards at least) guest spots). i like that he laughs on his songs now. i never heard him do that before
boris & uniform, bright new disease 50/50 collab between an operatic, occasionally silly cult metal band and a group that’s just a guy having a dramatic meltdown over an evolving cast of horrorcore instrumentals—sounds about as cohesive as i’d expected. seems every five years uni halts production of their near-perfect records to deliver something i truly do not know what to do with and as a fairly collaborative band this is the first time their equation doesn’t quite make sense to me. file this under ‘the music’s fine but boy am i happy for everyone involved’
home is where, the whaler cathartic listen for all to whom every day feels like 9/11. hard pivot from sounding anything like NMH (minus the singing saw….also the cum stuff) but there’s always something weirdly disappointing about when a band with a perfect EP (and audiotree sesh) under their belt puts out a full length that’s kind of just a rehash of that only stretched to 30+ mins. maybe unrelated to the album itself but this band makes it hard to believe how recently libs were widely reciting the dumbass mantra of ‘at least we’ll get some good punk rock out of this’
misericorde, self deprivation starting to realize ‘dissonant’ is my entry point to death metal. these are my people (panicky guys with very french name who aren’t actually french)
older albums
cult of luna & julie christmas, mariner (2016) in case you were wondering here’s what would happen if the charly bliss singer joined an atmospheric sludge metal band. as someone who likes cult of luna but who often has a hard time digesting their vox (i make jokes about their singer sounding like he’s always just saying ‘rahrahrah’ but i’m pretty sure that’s an actual lyric on a stretch of ‘transition’?) i kinda wish they’d given j-xmas more space…..feels like there’s way too much going on when they try to layer the vox. certainly some high points on here (how did they make ‘wreck of the s.s. needle’ something that makes me seasick) but i gotta say the peak is when they randomly bust out the ‘joker and the thief’ riff on the closer
floating room, tired and true (2020) favorite genre is ‘singer-songwriter pronouncing vowels funny for no particular reason,’ second favorite genre is ‘i found out about it from post-trash.’ i’m sorry but ‘everybody loves a freak show / they don’t like the freak though’ is a way cooler lyrics than ‘i’m a creep / i’m a weirdo’
open mike eagle & paul white, hella personal film festival (2016) final chapter in mike’s class-clown era, a thing which was enormously important to me while it was happening and a thing i can’t seem to get excited about again now (i distinctly remember this album dropping at the peak of my interest in OME and also the peak of me not having money to buy it). obv lots of funny bars but i feel like the beats only feel slightly tuned up from mike’s earliest self-produced stuff. on a scale of 1 to 10 how much of a coincidence was it that the somber tonal shift of brick body kids landed at what appears to be the end of mike’s alliance with busdriver
rejoice, promo 2022 (2022) drunkdriver-core seemingly fully committed to anti-cop messaging—fun for the whole family!
movies
cruising dir. william friedkin (1980) newly obsessed with this specific year in hollywood when directors literally thought they could get away with anything. frankly i don’t know what the deal is here but if you’re willing to put up with some boring cop stuff you get like 40 mins of al pacino as an undercover officer looking scared out of his mind—if not extremely like an undercover cop—observing gay S&M clubs where most of the clientele are so deeply invested in their S-ing and M-ing that they don’t even notice (friedkin famously cut 40 additional mins of specifically this to avoid an x rating). movie suffers from silence of the lambs syndrome a bit as the punning title and ‘precinct night’ scene suggest gay men filling in for criminals in the cops-and-robbers genre’s ‘both sides of the same coin’ messaging, though the exploitativeness of relying on queer culture as a set piece can nearly be forgiven halfway through when we see pacino’s character (and pacino for that matter) evidently having fun for the first time in his tedious heterosexual life while, depending on how you read the final scene, suppressing some realizations. imagine being married to a cop…..he gets all quiet and weird and disappears and then one day just randomly comes home stressed out and dressed full leather papa
maelstrom dir. denis villeneuve (2000) denis’ expression of bitterness that he didn’t get to direct one of the posthumous kieslowski scripts. weirdly structured two-part story where the first act is all out-damned-spot guilt stuff seemingly set off by an abortion while the second half meticulously crafts an air-tight work of hyperlink cinema introducing interwoven characters loosely implied earlier in the movie who each fit neatly into this compact tale of sex, death, fatalism, and unsmiling black humor (the main character accidentally drinks to her own extremely violent demise at one point) similar to kieslowki’s later ideas. in being a quebecois production it consistently lands directly between an aggressively american movie and a caricature of a french film: the moral hangups with abortion, for example, clashing with the belief that any event can lead to l’amour, including vehicular manslaughter. they really put that ’90s trend of bookending movies with old people presenting the narrative as some kind of bedtime story to rest by making a big dirty fish do it huh
martin eden dir. pietro marcello (2019) movie about how getting published only makes the most insufferable writers you know even more insufferable. i was gonna say something about how the acceptability of making ‘being a writer’ your entire personality the moment you decide to start writing during the era in which this movie takes place has aged about as well as the fedora this italian jake gyllenhaal wears but i spent the entire movie trying to figure out whether the time period was supposed to be immediately post-war or, based on a volvo we see in the final scene, the 1980s? i imagine this blue velvet-y sense of timelessness was intentional (it’s aided by a soundtrack and frequent intercut found-footage-y montages spanning various decades) as the movie’s message about the financial roadblocks implemented for creative individuals—told by the comfortably wealthy to include less suffering in their writing—are pretty ubiquitous too, tho can currently best be applied to filmmaking, as foreshadowed by the now-familiar parade of production company names opening every non-major-studio production. do the italians still cook pasta in the middle of their newsrooms
miracle mile dir. steve de jarnatt (1988) west coast after hours only instead of the entire universe conspiring against the lovelorn yuppie protagonist it’s just the soviet union. certainly no shortage of dopey romcoms, nuclear disaster movies, or stylish nocturnal thrillers scored by tangerine dream in the ’80s but this movie begs the long overdue question of what would happen if you combined the three while punctuating it with day of the locust’s abrupt apocalyptic tonal shift. ultimately the thesis here seems to be that the only thread holding civilization together by the end of the cold war was a collective fixation on when exactly everything would unravel—without that tension there’s nothing left worth grabbing your +1 and shortsightedly going up in the sky with seemingly no plans beyond that for. need more romance movies where a guy from revenge of the nerds says jarringly nihilistic shit to his gf. ‘i think it’s the insects’ turn’ god damn boy
nobody knows dir. hirokazu koreeda (2004) most extreme episode of old enough yet. movie about a single mom playing the long game and teaching her four kids to be so inhumanly well behaved that by the time the oldest is in sixth grade she can peace out and leave them to pursue their own lives uninhibitedly…..or idk something like that. everything i’d read about this movie made it out to be a miserable two and a half hours (also didn’t see much mention of the fathers’ absences—feel like they’re just as much to blame?) when in reality it’s kind of just a slice of life movie documenting a sad situation coinciding with four kids’ comings of age (with that in mind it also precedes boyhood in its filming technique as the kids visibly age over the year-long chronological shoot). rather than exploiting the situation it’s loosely based on it just feels like a cautionary tale about restrictive housing regulations and reliance upon utility companies breeding a new category of poverty, if not increasingly alienated (again, not always by choice) city life allowing for it (if not requiring it) to go totally undetected
TV
i think you should leave season 3 (2023) perfect blend of old stuff (characters emotively refusing to let certain moments go) and new stuff (lots of tim robinson characters wearing enormous suits). something i noticed about this show last season with the ‘you gotta give’ sketch is that it stresses me out when he does longform (i.e. over like 1 min) sketches even if the payoff ultimately feels worth it, which made the third season of this no-attention-span-having-ass show the most frustrating for me upon first watch. loved seeing beck bennett cast as the tim robinson character up until the moment the real tim robinson shows up (in the biggest suit you’ve ever seen) and out tim robinsons him
books
cat’s cradle by kurt vonnegut (1963) (re-read) required reading leading up to barbenheimer. novel positioning the A-bomb as a form of religious second-coming while predicting it as the sort of unnecessary fatal event that eternally begets more unnecessary fatal events we can’t seem to remove from the world after they’ve entered the public consciousness—such as school shootings, or the titanic, evidently. what sets KV’s great novels apart from the rest of them is the way they’re so clearly written as an exercise in processing the heavy recurring themes in all his books, in this case hashing out the earnest humanist ideals (as proclaimed by vonnegut-surrogate bokonon) in a time of nuclear war where everything feels hopeless and it’s the writer’s job to make life tolerable and create hope in a void. feels like he’s casting himself as the antithesis to dr. hoenikker (who creates something lethally ‘real’ for the world at large but imaginary for his children) in writing a book that has no bearing on adult reality whatsoever but speaks to the childlike part of the brain requiring a digestible story to address the fact that the 20th century is progressing at a ludicrous pace, as parodied with the rapidly (and hypocritically) conservativized island nation of san lorenzo. love the use of title cards every other page. feels like i’m watching frasier
god bless you, mr. rosewater by kurt vonnegut (1965) (re-read) book about how gd weird rich people are. i got gotcha’d a few years ago for saying i liked ‘harrison bergeron’ by someone who promptly pointed out how inherently critical it is of communism and who preceded to question KV’s politics, tho i feel like the rise of goldwaterism (the name ‘rosewater’ can’t be a coincidence) at this point inspired him to write this peculiarly mid novelization of his thoughts on how ludicrous it is for folks not to support marxist ideals. was surprised at how poorly the ‘hello babies’ monologue has dated for me as it now feels like twee synecdoche for this facebook-lib approach to vonnegut’s familiar hyperlink-cinema humanism specifically taking on this era of american history where it becomes clear just how much of our everyday existence is sponsored by like 8 billionaires and their products we’re forced to rely on who miss the irony of their inherited wealth more-equating to the perceived hoarding of welfare recipients, people with little utility in the eyes of corporate-minded right-wing caricatures. yeah, i guess i can maybe finally see why KV is the patron saint of HS lit class