notes: june 2026 (pt. 1)
meet me in the backroom
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.
2026 releases
big long sun, love songs and spiritual recollections i was lured in by the cuts that sound like deerhunter and chad vangaalen, which is to say that i wasn’t informed about how english-folk this project is at its core—surely learning how to enjoy belle and sebastian as a teen would’ve helped me out here. wish more of it was as strange as “stars aligning,” which sounds like smith westerns doing the unicorns, but also, now that i’m feeling sinister, i feel compelled to also point out that it feels like zero consideration was put into this album’s tracking?
genghis tron, signal fire i vaguely remember enjoying this band’s reunion album a few years ago, but i didn’t recall them getting the guy from the armed to sing on it, effectively turning the project into a the-armed thing between the instantly-recognizable vocals, backing screamer, and chaotic, digital-age take on post-hardcore. i guess it’s the points of contrast that stand out most to me, then: the late-period TWIABP slightly-out-of-place metal riffs on “future worship” (not to mention the death-capitalist lyrics on tracks like “born prey”), the phil collins-scaled percussion anchoring everything, the salvation of the title “signal fire” from the only dud on the spider-man 3 OST.
warning, rituals of shame it’s become such a trope within the space of aughts-era heavy music that a band will return 20 years later with some of their best material yet that it’s probably more disappointing than it should be when a two-decade absence instead leads to new music that picks up precisely where the last album left off. this just sounds like watching from a distance b-sides recorded in a different studio that doesn’t quite carry the same magic; it’s like looking at a high-resolution image of the clo mor cliffs rather than standing at the foot of them.
older albums
j fisher, broken sp-404 x op-1 (2021) weirdos complaining about being poor due to making weirdo rap for other weirdos gotta be one of my favorite kinds of rap, especially when there’s this much self-deprecating self-referentialism involved (should we throw a part? should we invite mike eagle?). pretty standard j-fish record—and, more broadly, a pretty standard deathbomb release among their experimental hip-hop catalog—though i did appreciate the spot-on avey tare impression that closes out the album.
outkast, stankonia (2000) i was already at least somewhat familiar with all of these songs, though it was definitely interesting to hear “so fresh so clean” and “ms. jackson” again within the context of this album (not to mention with headphones—i never caught the bridal chorus and excessive sound effects on the latter). it also never occurred to me that this is such a guitar-heavy record, perhaps because it otherwise has all the makings of a classic rap album from this era: several bad songs, just as many songs that are absolutely filthy, a few that are both, and one thousands corny skits that are very tempting to delete from the track list. wish gangsta boo was on a cooler song, but otherwise i love all the features—it’s remarkable how well they’re embedded into something that is so distinctly from the brains of these two-of-two individuals. andre’s voice on “gasoline dreams” is still the best anyone has ever sounded.
wavves, babes (2023) for whatever reason the late 2000s was full of insufferable guys who made really good music that it’s taken me over a decade to accept the value of, with wavves as their irony-drenched ringleader with his love of weed and pizza and babes and baseball and seemingly nothing else. i vaguely remember the drama about his hyped zach hill album falling through in favor of king of the beach, though i had no idea that it was salvaged and (somewhat) officially released back in the year of our (land)lord 2023. great range of straight-up punk (“hula hoop”) and unabashed spector homage (“baseball cards”), though most importantly this serves as a reminder that the KotB material was all so strong that i don’t mind hearing multiple slightly different versions of it. how come zach began trying to hitch his wagon to a star around this time when he clearly was the star?
movies
backrooms dir. kane parsons (2026) kind of exhausting that all movies are about trauma now but it’s also exhausting knowing that everyone’s brains seem to shut off as soon as that becomes evident—as shoehorned in as the outie scenes feel, i think the movie benefits from the fact that trauma is explicitly addressed via therapy sessions so as not to make it the big reveal, but is instead as much of a presence in the movie as it is in many moviegoers’ lives. after all this is a story about navigating grief in the 2020s, when human cognitive function is still a mystery to physicians and therapists alike, yet we’re carelessly spelunking into the uncharted and uncanny territory of AI; when nostalgia has become so prevalent that we can smell the past just by looking at images of how a room is lit. i don’t know that everything fits together seamlessly, but it manages a compelling balance best summed up by the scene that’s effectively an homage to the texas chainsaw dinner scene until it gets interrupted by what is effectively an homage to the stay puft marshmallow man—a balance of horror and comedy, rational and irrational. i also kept thinking about how this movie contrasts with barbarian, as the guy gets mad about how much the backrooms’ lighting is costing him instead of how much more he can charge renters for the newly discovered square footage.
dangerous game dir. abel ferrara (1993) a behind-the-scenes look at the psychological chaos of an abel ferrara set, if his DVD commentaries are any indication of his professional personality, a presumption that’s only echoed in ferrara’s actual wife playing the role of the keitel-as-philandering-ferrera’s spouse and a clapboard for the movie-within-the-movie clearly reading “A FERRARA” at one point. certainly pales in comparison to mulholland drive and code unknown and even living in oblivion’s later deconstructions of the ways in which reality and performance become uncomfortably mixed (to put it mildly), while it doesn’t have much to say about the paradox of trying to be a good dramatic filmmaker and a good person when good drama generally requires both autobiography and “turbulence” (as the movie’s poster puts it) beyond merely presenting it. you know you’re in for some crazy psychosexual tragedy when harvey keitel’s hair is grown out that long.
missing dir. costa-gavras (1982) odd-couple comedy about two politically-opposing in-laws’ journey to a mutual disdain for henry kissinger which never finds an inch of space for humor. there’s something timeless about the theme of americans feeling invincible while literally walking through hailstorms of bullets, so blinded by either radical-progressive optimism or nationalist confidence that they assume a quickly escalating fascist state would never arrest the innocent—regardless of whether our own country is pulling the strings—while the coming-of-age arc that is learning that most americans’ interests aren’t “american interests” feels equally familiar. pretty utilitarian in terms of storytelling, though i much prefer this to oliver stone’s melodramas or coppola’s needing donald rumsfeld’s permission to tell his little war stories, for whatever reason (costa-gravas was sued by one of the US diplomats in the film, leading the movie itself to go missing for a few decades). i don’t think i’d ever seen jack lemmon in something where he isn’t an absolute delight or saying “cocksucker” a ton.
train dreams dir. clint bentley (2025) i am forever haunted by that lynch quote about how we should all be puppies with our tails wagging all the time when instead we’re either working our stupid jobs or completely exhausted from working our stupid jobs—the family tragedy at the center of this movie almost feels excessive when the main character had already been microdosing it for years. the more peripheral tragedy here, of course, is about how despite all of our medical and infrastructural advancements a hundred years later, people are still suffering through gig-economy hell—or worse, dying in warehouses while their coworkers have no choice but to finish their day’s work as they’re told how important it is, as if that’s why they’re doing it. i was caught off guard by the way the final moments circle around to justify what initially scanned as capitalist propaganda, albeit presenting the same idea through a far more ecological lens: that in the end, our lives feel like shifts we’ve worked on earth that will have a far greater impact on future generations than it will on our own. feels like what david gordon green would be making in 2025 if he’d never hired danny mcbride as a second unit director of george washington.
“alright what’s up with teenagers” documentary double feature
teenage dir. matt wolf (2013) rare look at the pre-beatlemania youth culture born in the wake of WWI when child labor laws gave way to two new paths into adulthood: state-sanctioned community endeavors like the boy scouts and the hitler youth, which funneled kids into military service, or a socially unacceptable waywardness that led to sex, drugs, or anything else that could be used as another excuse to enhance measures for corralling the next generation into the pockets of nationalism and consumerism. really striking to see history repeat itself in the troubled bright young things movement producing what feels a lot like the type of myspace celebrity and tumblr infamy i grew up with, while the subdebs seemed to inspire the 1940s version of that seventeen mag “am i emo?” spread. ultimately this feels like a prolonged advertisement for the book it was adapted from, though there’s some pretty incredible footage throughout set to compelling (though loosely structured) passages from its source material and a great score from bradford cox. also: the equally dulcet sounds of ben whishaw’s voice and jena malone very reasonably laughing through the unbelievably mid-century code term for female horniness: “khaki-whacky.”
american teen dir. nanette burstein (2008) opens with “i’m not gonna teach your boyfriend how to dance with you” and continues to cater exclusively to those of us who were teens when laguna beach was on the air up until the credits roll with MGMT. in the documentary tradition, you can feel the strings being pulled behind the camera to create a sense of drama that makes it less enjoyable as a jarring time capsule reminding us how ugly everything really looked in the 2000s now that so many of these styles have cycled back into fashion. i enjoyed the awkward small-town familiarity of this—the first dates at KFC, the lone holdout still wearing a livestrong bracelet—as well as the community microdramas (e.g. the tragic basketball-prodigy-to-elvis-impersonator pipeline), though i can’t help feeling like a lot of this (particularly the insane animated sequences) would be endearing if there was any indication that the teen subjects were behind it rather than adult filmmakers. reminds me of the music teacher i had in grade school who gave herself a solo at our spring program.
TV
starting 5 season 2 (2025) really great series for reinforcing any previously-established hero/villain arcs in the league, often times enhanced by the orbiting family members we’re introduced to. of note in this season, jalen brown (undoubtedly a villain in my book) earned hero points through the introduction of his grandfather, while tyrese (a hero after last year’s knicks series, even though i was rooting for new york) becomes something of a villain the more we learn about his high school musical ass relationship (people who love puppy chow are one kind of person, but people who explain puppy chow to you are another). as if the way the playoffs ended for him last season wasn’t devastating enough, learning that he was trapped in a hotel room with his fiancee ultimately pushes him over the edge of villainy back to being a sympathetic figure—there’s no better way for this season to end than seeing him stuck in bed with his partner resigned to watching love island, the streaming hit distributed by his new employer, netflix. as you sow etc., etc.