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
blonde redhead, sit down for dinner loved hearing ‘snowman’ appropriate the ‘hey’ of the ‘stomp/clap/hey’ equation for something way less evil (bossa nova?) but i feel like everything else going on here is simply too (music journalist voice) etheral for me to produce any conclusive thoughts about at this point (i suppose that in and of itself is an interesting trait?). best when it’s at its teen dream-iest. or when there’s a cat purring.
eartheater, powders definitive expression of the specific feeling that is ‘chaotic-neutral atmospheric-horny.’ i think what i loved about phoenix more than any other eartheater release was how focused it was, and as much as i love most of the following unignorable (to me) reference points it felt a bit excessive scattering them across a 30-minute LP: air (the band; just generally), carrie polachek (vox), moby (‘porcelain’ piano), king crimson (specifically the intro to that song from the opening of mandy), drill (there are some rumbles of bass familiar to the genre across the album). getting my Having Been In 8th Grade In 2006 badge removed for not recognizing the ‘chop suey’ cover….also speaking of teenhood one time i wiped out on my bike while speeding down a grassy hill and it looked a whole lot like the album cover.
older albums
anonymous inc., beta 2 (2018) we’ve covered ceschi’s music enough at flood over the years that he’s started following us on socials and it’s been interesting to see what posts of ours he—an equally gifted rapper and folk-punk songwriter, as cringe as that may sound—likes. thought it was an even more interesting blend of influences that went into this resurfaced EP of early-/mid-’00s recordings with his brother until, even more interestingly, i realized that (aside from prog-rock and an interpolation of ‘happy birthday’) they’re all just the most experimental directions jeff rosenstock’s taken in his career, from ska to muted blastbeats. once j-ro does a prog cover of ‘happy birthday’ i’ll know something’s up.
ling tosite sigure, just a moment (2009) second most chaotic j-rock album i’ve gotten into in the past month or so but still a very chaotic j-rock album. spent all my downtime while in dublin last week in my hotel room watching kerrang! tv and thinking back on how firmly divided i saw the mid-’00s alt-rock scene—‘indie rock’ vs. ‘pop-punk’—to be at the time and how close it turns out its poles really were. that said i genuinely think my brain would’ve exploded if i’d heard this band back then as i tried to discern whether its peripherally electroclash-y guitar-rock dominated the bizarre screamo-y vocals (to say nothing of that like….speed metal bridge on ‘7 wonders’?). kinda like how my brain is currently exploding trying to process these track titles. i’m glad the lyrics on ‘seacrest cum’ (?) are not in english.
movies
martyrs dir. pascal laugier (2008) don’t-go-in-the-basement horror b/w lady getting beatten to a pulp for a tremendously unenjoyable, like, 30 mins. i am obviously omitting some things for the sake of dramatics and for the sake of the spoilers crowd but as much as i appreciated this being a constant tonal whiplash back and forth from total cerebralism to dumb shock value without resorting to plot twist mechanics i can’t help but feel that the three interesting things it accomplishes—embodying survivor’s guilt as some sort of body-horroring chad-smeagol whom you must call master, diagnosing the contemporary world as overwhelmingly and increasingly populated by victims, and clinicizing total spiritual clarity through the aforementioned pulp-reduction process—don’t quite fit under one movie title. did john murphy get residuals for the composers basically just covering ‘in the house in a heartbeat’ several times?
maximum overdrive dir. stephen king (1986) sci-fi horror envisioning a world with self-driving cars. concept simultaneously providing a ludicrous explanation for spielberg’s duel, bradbury’s there will come soft rains, and pixar’s cars (haven’t seen it but assume the ‘meteor overhead makes machines alive’ premise here could easily apply) wherein if you pick at any of its execution’s threads (e.g. why not just shoot all the trucks with that rocket launcher immediately?) the whole thing will unravel very, very quickly so you might as well just appreciate it for what it is: ac (thunderbolt) dc soundtracking demolition derby and the lisa simpson voice actor emoting emilio estevez under the table. wastes time being critical of religion and capitalism (reasonable, considering they were steve king’s two biggest rivals in the ’80s) when we’re clearly just here to see an entire minor league baseball team get wiped out by taking pop cans to the dome courtesy of a malicious vending machine.
psycho dir. gus van sant (1998) probably every bit as terrible as you’ve heard but for the record it doesn’t feel like anyone involved approached this as a horror movie. regarding its reputation for being a redundant shot-for-shot remake, this diagnosis overlooks the fact that each frame seems disinterested in re-conveying the horror of its source material’s narrative and instead feels solely invested in the weird late-’90s era of mod fashion resurgence (and/or introducing the cinematography of chris doyle to mainstream western audiences), ultimately making it less of a needless homage and more of a tarsem-esque style-instead-of-substance interpolation of what had at that point already become an archetyped fable among the horror canon. i think it suffered from fire walk with me syndrome where audiences very much expected one thing (a remake employing more modern standards of horror, in this case) which couldn’t have been further from what the director wanted to deliver. actually gonna amend my lede: i don’t think anyone told vince this wasn’t a horror movie. poor guy thought he nailed that psychopath giggle when in reality nobody cared enough to help him workshop it.
trucks dir. chris thomson (1997) adaptation of the same short story that wrought maximum overdrive with a bigger focus on, obviously, trucks, though its considerably smaller budget makes said trucks look way less cool (before, during, and after immolating). in spite of (or perhaps due to) taking itself way more seriously it really makes MO feel competent by comparison while carrying over many of that movie’s silliest traits (trucks driving dumbly in circles, people passionately calling trucks bastards, everyone somehow being unable to hear trucks until they’re already under them) while going out of its way to differentiate itself (diner owner doesn’t like guns—which we know because a guy says nearly these exact words, almost as if to the audience—while an electric knife sighting doesn’t lead to any sort of carnage, let alone animation). maybe the biggest difference though is that these people are all way less likable than the trucks here…..is that supposed to be part of the unexplained supernatural occupation of this town?
the untamed dir. amat escalante (2016) took 35 years but finally another filmmaker was brave enough to elaborate on the possession tentacle FWB. lovecraftian horror delineating the pros (offspring, orgasm) and cons (abuse, never figuring out how to stop peeing their pants) of the necessary evil that is being in a relationship with a man at times in paradoxically straightforward terms while expressing how these factors apply equally to the domestic/matrimonial setting and the more unpredictable, anonymous, and, um, cephalopodic hookup situation (notably depicted here as a rat king of disembodied dong). wasn’t surprised to see the director was an AD on battle in heaven—feels very reygadas-ian that you never know if the next scene in this movie is gonna be some of the most stunning natural photography you’ve ever seen or a crotch. or both!
TV
cunk on earth season 1 (2023) series landing somewhere between fishing with john’s unreliable documentary narration and the eric andre era of shows about making people tolerate someone who’s intolerable, hosted by daft angel olsen. less a for-dummies history 101 course and more just a welcome dramatization of the everyday conversations of the type of adult who types things like ‘for crine out loud’ on FB because they’ve never seen it written out before. kept thinking about that episode of seinfeld where jerry heckles kramer’s gf at work after she heckled him during his set and wondering what a history professor ever did to diane morgan.