notes: october 2025 (pt. 2)
4 arguments for listening to some stuff that came out before the year 2025
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
vile haint, abound with malice less “atmospheric black metal” than it is raw black metal done atmospherically, if that makes sense—sounds like blut aus nord’s recent material with a slightly less defined vision of hell. gonna be cool to hear after they have, like, 25 more years to shape their vision of hell.
older albums
denisa, st. bernadette (2023) pretty classic non-metal deathwish release: doomy, cathedral-set post-rock with peripherally religious lyrical themes. aesthetic and big, clean drums remind me of a tranquilized brutus, though her vocals sound a little more gen-z indie-rocker.
mr. lif, i phantom (2002) i may have spoken too soon when i said i wished el-p had pursued production work over his solo career in the mid-2000s given that his contributions here don’t add much. i will say that the songs he worked on at least have personality when compared to the generic beats that supply the rest of the LP (i can’t tell how purposeful this is, but i do like that the “status” instrumental sounds like a blatant rip off of abilities’ beat for “big shots,” especially since the song lands between skits where lif tries to buy a beat for 40 cents). i also appreciate how much more politically radical lif was than his def jux peers, and specifically how anti-boss he is here—apocalyptically so—even if he can’t quite touch aesop rock’s anti-having-a-job sentiments from this period. i’m surprised that vast aire’s only appearance here is on the opening skit; i’m even more surprised that the album’s near-title track only appears here in the distant background of that skit?
rew, quiet all the time (2022) recently learned that the dream of BIRP!-era music sharing is alive and well via a youtube channel with a massive following called “i’m a cyborg but that’s ok,” which curates tiktok-esque syncs of dream-pop tracks to movies that are almost certainly all in the criterion collection. there’s a bunch of zoomer-sanctioned classics in there by cocteau twins and duster, but they also do a good job of spotlighting artists like rew who don’t seem to be finding listeners elsewhere, despite quiet all the time being a really unique blend of shoegaze and hypnagogic pop with fairly emo vocals and lyrics. kinda like a lite take on bedroom blackgaze projects like abriction or all those south korean lo-fi bands like parannoul.
the world is a vampire, blightseed (2017) still not entirely clear on what this band’s story is or how they’re any different from thou (even down to the multiple EPs they released in 2017 and 2018, respectively), especially now that thou has dropped their most the-world-is-a-vampire LP to date with umbilical. anyway, if you wanna hear a deepfake of thou doing “mad world,” tap in.
movies
the cruise dir. bennett miller (1998) bennett miller’s version of what demme did to document spalding grey’s niche work funneling his deep well of life experiences into monologues, in this case spotlighting another figure who was doing something similar with his equally deep well of cultural and historical knowledge. he doesn’t quite manage to mine the existential depths that linklater would tease out of speed levitch a few years later, instead angling for more of a stylish, fly-on-the-wall portrait of an anachronistic figure who managed to turn a tedious, endlessly repetitive job into an art form sometimes worth waking up early for, developing his own personal philosophy around the vulgar modernism of his employment. perhaps as the-city-itself-is-a-character as movies come, with speed constantly sexualizing familiar NYC landmarks and insisting on referring to its past denizens in the present tense. really puts chicago’s architectural boat tour to shame.
him dir. justin tipping (2025) neon-era stylized horror handled with the allegorical grace one might expect from a major production company trying to sell a movie about how evil the NFL is to fans of the NFL. in addition to questioning the deranged hierarchy of needs celebrated by the corporate powers upholding the league, which seem guaranteed to take an unthinkable physical and psychological toll on the players, it also pushes back against the contemporary MJ-ification of sports: it’s no longer about the game, but instead revolves around debates about whether someone new is going to become the best at it, furnished with sadistic fantasies about what sacrifices they’ll need to make in order to achieve that status, which this movie incessantly reminds us have inherent christian undertones (i don’t know a lot about pro football, but it can’t be a coincidence that they cast a guy who looks like pat mahomes in the lead?). i feel like the demographic for this movie was men convincing their girlfriends it’s a good date movie (“julia fox is in it!”) only to later pretend they hated it, but then also secretly rave to their buddy that it was “a real mindfuck.”
vanilla sky dir. cameron crowe (2001) pretty accurate depiction of what it’s like to be 33 and a VIP at a magazine. bro-code fable about the difference between how people treat you when you’re rich and how people treat you when you’re rich and also a little bit ugly that feels like an enormous misfire now that we have eternal sunshine, but also surely fell flat at the time with its relentless shyamalaning which also keeps misfiring. cameron crowe is like an american version of danny boyle circa life less ordinary in the sense that he’d gotten the blank check and clearly just wanted to show you a bunch of songs he currently likes rather than direct a movie that would be remembered 24 years in the future, which is weird because obviously we all knew about R.E.M. and jeff buckley at that point without his curatorial vision. after 20 years as a leading man tom cruise had gotten so good at playing a really specific guy who absolutely has never exist anywhere but inside of his own head.
books
four arguments for the elimination of television dir. jerry mander (1978) (re-read) confirming that this is, in fact, my favorite book, not only because it deeply examines the evils of an inherently consumerist medium that we sort of just glossed over before willfully installing it in every single home—and, more broadly, ultimately, every facet of our waking lives—but also because who doesn’t want to read someone’s bitchy memoir cathartically dumping on an old job they hated? great to have the perspective of a lucid writer sharing dispatches from within the mid-century marketing machine, likely providing me with my initial introduction to de-intellectualized explanations of capitalism’s many enduring ploys, such as buying ourselves back and the manipulative workspaces we’ve come to adapt to that are meticulously built to minimize comfort and maximize productivity.
one of my biggest takeaways this time around is mander’s rejection of mcluhan’s coyness, going so far as to label the ironically opaque understanding media as harmful, a net-negative to the media studies canon. another is the early introduction of the word “schizophrenic” to describe the result of the rift between experiential learning and TV learning, which feels particularly prophetic to read about in the midst of our current political moment exhibiting the natural endpoint of that schizophrenia as the exact powers mander wrote about pulling the strings reap the rewards from the resulting mania. frankly it’s kind of impressive that we nearly made it 50 years before all this kimmel stuff went down, and i imagine they would’ve permanently pulled his show if the incident hadn’t produced such a good radical-leftist strawman.