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
keep, almost static grungegaze LP kinda just doubling down on sounding like this. doesn’t quite carry the glimmer of personality i perceived on happy in here, for worse (eerie calm of “pull the curtain back” teasing a new dimensionality that doesn’t materialize here) or for better (less silly album cover). maybe i’m just disappointed the closer on this one doesn’t live up to that of their last album because it isn’t the built to spill cover i assumed it would be.
maria somerville, luster surprisingly rare 4AD-core release among 4AD’s 21st century roster of rock bands like the national and big thief that are whatever the opposite of “ethereal” is, despite us being a few years into another “ethereal music” era. i imagine there are probably deeper cuts from the label’s early years than cocteau twins being referenced here, but i’m stuck on just how much “projections” and “corrib” sound like O+S? orenda fink flowers when, etc.
mckinley dixon, magic, alive! being a fan of mckinley despite hating jazz feels a lot like digging through trail mix for the salty M&Ms—really stacked guest list here helping to buoy his compelling verses above the instrumentals that do very little for me. seems like a tried-and-true formula that makes everyone else happy, but still hoping some day he metamorphs beyond to pimp a butterfly and into the more confrontational DAMN his vocals seem better fit for.
new not shameful/trust blinks., split respect to NNS for bypassing lonesome crowded west and tapping into an earlier era of modest mouse that’s both more chaotic and more slackily drifting, shaping it into shoegaze and slowcore, respectively. trust blinks is sort of exactly what i hoped the new john galm solo stuff would sound like.
older albums
cocteau twins, heaven or las vegas (1990) feeling weird about the fact that nothing on this, cocteau twins’ most beloved record, hits anywhere near as hard as the intro to that heavily ambient collab with billy budd or whoever that they just reissued. guitar throughout is an absolute dream, though—we just ran an interview with robin guthrie where he talks about being an idiot teenager who knew nothing about music and landing on that sound by complete accident and i’ve been thinking about that a lot.
ekko astral, quartz (2022) retroactively naming ekko astral “most improved of 2024”—their debut EP sounds to me like a low-tier riot fest band that might gain a decent audience for a noon set, whereas pink balloons seemed to be appreciated by just about everyone besides those who couldn’t get past the twitter-speak lyrics. given that those lyrics are playful-snarky here rather than urgently dire i guess now i sort of know where those takes are coming from.
predatory void, seven keys to the discomfort of being (2023) occasionally recognizable as the amenra offshoot that it is, cutting out the post-rock stuff in favor of balancing high-priestess doom a la king woman and the scuttling blackened death metal of wretched blessing. lightly gaze-y, sufficiently sludgy—fun time!
quiet lights, the big fear (2011) shoegaze from the tail end of the genre’s prohibition era that hits a couple pretty big highs, though mostly clings to wispy dream-pop deeply indebted to blonde redhead. if nothing else, this reminds me that the spreadsheet i pull releases from must date back at least 14 years.
movies
another day in paradise dir. larry clark (1998) opens with the familiar larry clark imagery of sex and drugs and violence and teens getting in way too deep but quickly veers into some weird lane of generic crime-film conventions soundtracked by ironically upbeat vintage soul-funk (the movie takes place in the ’70s solely to suit the brief scene where they watch clarence carter perform at a club?). given that it landed between kids and bully it’s disappointing that the script continues down the exhausted path of one-last-job looming tragedy when clark was surely sold on the project due to its complex relationship between the two couples, inviting his favorite theme of wayward youth looking for direction in all the worst places as here they stare eerie projections of themselves as a couple 25 years in the future in the face without recognizing themselves, tragically overlooking the more wholesome possibilities of a “much-needed father figure and the children that are biologically impossible to conceive” arrangement. really seemed like it wanted to be drugstore cowboy when instead it could’ve easily been a predecessor to van sant’s aughts run.
the brutalist dir. brady corbet (2024) coming-to-america fable about the paradox of true visionaries always being a step ahead of the benefactors who permit them to continue their work only when it’s confirmed to be good by an elusive third party, about artistic vision eroding alongside national identity, about unbearable stress and insufferable ego coming part-and-parcel with the american dream, and, ultimately, about building a legacy for oneself that’s infinitely more structurally sound than that of an industrialist wiped from history after the surfacing of cancelable offenses. which is all to say i’m sure they understood the irony that a three-and-a-half hour movie that’s vaguely about all of this stuff, which centrally inserts graphic literality where crass metaphor does perfectly well, is mostly made bearable by some of the most compellingly ornate cinematography and title design seen in years.
la chimera dir. alice rohrwacher (2023) mystical heist film (does “the englishman” not sound like a statham alias?) by way of romantic and/or historical tragedy about distinguishing what should be salvaged for the present versus what needs to remain in the past. rohrwacher appears to be the rare post-fellini italian filmmaker to contest that italy is fun and even whimsical, actually, with this movie’s carnivalesque exterior blending surprisingly well with its personally and culturally philosophical central idea of the past being permanently superimposed over the present, which makes cemetery of splendor its unexpected secondary reference point. i like how after 45 minutes of slow and very abstract exposition, everything that’s happened thus far is very unambiguously greek-chorused to us out of nowhere.
friendship dir. andrew deyoung (2024) i often think about a tweet i saw that was like, “why did johnny cash look so much older at age 40 than men do today,” quote-tweeted with something to the effect of “because he didn’t wear graphic tees”—which i feel like is the crux of the tim robinson character, as most intently sketched out in this movie. obviously the yelling man-child has been a staple of comedy for decades, but there’s something so contemporary about this specific form of arrested development that’s baked into familiar family life and a broader suburban community, rather than existing within the vague if not totally surreal bachelor living spaces of mr. bean and pee-wee—and there’s something so funny in a particularly relieving way to observe these childish traits in someone roughly our age when we’ve long since outgrown them (i viscerally remember a time in my prepubescent life when there was nothing more life-changing than being shown a really cool tunnel). the joke at marvel’s expense in the trailer felt a little low-hanging-fruit to me, but within the context of the movie that franchise feels integral.
gentlemen broncos dir. jared hess (2009) after the safe-bet mainstream comedy that was nacho libre, this feels like an even safer bet in the way it reheats that movie’s broadly appealing absurdism while aggressively trying to recreate a millennial spencer’s-gifts cash cow with self-conscious napoleon-esque one-liners. it features a lot of the same small-town imagery as napoleon dynamite (interiors of school buses and auditoriums, shag carpeting), as well as a mutual wonder at the infinite possibilities of community access television (and, tragically, another unaddressed low-income, single-guardian household), only this world is notably inhabited by familiar actors who only make the film’s jokes at the expense of sci-fi fandom feel like bullying, underlying just about everything i’d previously appreciated about the hesses. i’m mad at myself for how often i laughed at this, though 90% of that was just in response to whatever mike white and lonnie were doing with their mouths at any given moment. curious if there’s any autobiographical element to the screenwriter’s-plight narrative, or the parallel don’t-meet-you-idol cautionary tale?
gleaming the cube dir. graeme clifford (1989) far more neo-noir/police-procedural than what i’d expected from a movie that features stunt work from rodney mullen, consultation from stacy peralta, and a decent-sized acting role for tony hawk, as the plot focuses on christian slater very quickly replacing his murdered adopted brother with a member of the orange county police department while enlisting his help to take down a rogue mr. wilhelm. this doesn’t feel like a particularly layered movie but i do think something went over my head with regard to its allegory for international affairs in the wake of the vietnam war, sold to young audiences with a more transparent message defending skateboarding as an activity and as a broader culture. unfortunately that’s all very much negated when slater throws away his punk ethos for a girl (his dead brother’s gf!) and his skateboarding hobby is only made acceptable once he uses it to chase down a criminal. love the scenes where he takes out his angst by freestyle flatgrounding and nailing a beautiful mctwist.
the last emperor dir. bernardo bertolucci (1987) beginning to realize there are two very different kinds of jeremy thomas production and that i’m really only interested in the pervert kind. i guess there’s a reason why everything i previously knew about this movie was confined to the historical gentrification tale of its first hour, before the movie settles into its groove as an oscar-thirsty, diplomacy-heavy, stuffily-eurocentric biopic at least doing a better job of tying together the present-day scenes that frame the historical meat of the story than most of the like-minded ’90s epics would do, merely employing them as bookends to ensure maximum weepiness. wasn’t much here for me beyond the cinematography and costume designs, though the latter was essentially plagiarized in phantom menace, so nothing i hadn’t seen before.
pink flamingos dir. john waters (1972) can’t think of another movie that has “dead dove do not eat” so clearly written across it and i have to respect the number of people it’s inspired to peek inside despite knowing exactly what to expect. in addition to reveling in the ’60s pop culture that by the turn of the decade had spoiled like an attache full of eggs, it’s easy to see john waters projecting himself onto divine in this aggressive statement of purpose against hypocritical cinephiles he’d expected might reject something this trashy when europeans seemed to be getting away with it (among the many art film posters in the “perverted” couple’s home is a pasolini title, reminding us we were only a few years out from salo). precedes decades of iconic horror movies revolving around the reveal of an in-home basement torture dungeon while also proving once and for all that any script can be twisted into a courtroom drama in its final minutes.
books
overexposures: the crisis in american filmmaking by david thomson (1981) i feel a bit baited-and-switched by a book with this dramatic of a subtitle, published during an era famously signifying a crisis in american filmmaking, only for it to be an essay collection in the tradition of stan van gundy’s pessimistic school of crit that pokes holes in several of the most iconic movies released in the 1970s, not to mention needlessly dragging george lucas and john travolta through the dirt at every turn (i remember facing a similar disappointment when reading thomson’s television omnibus about a decade ago, with that book promising something much more scathing with its cover borrowing that still from poltergeist). these are “essays” in the same way los angeles plays itself would later be called an “essay film,” though: captivating prose that’s often hard to follow as its breadth slowly widens. i liked the handful of director profiles tossed in near the end (james toback confirmed evil sex pest lunatic dating back to fingers), though a lot of the criticism reads like someone who’d much rather be making these movies.