october 2021 (pt. 3)
hallowed be thy ween
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
2021 releases
the body & big|brave, leaving none but small birds honestly? love basking in my ignorance as a non-musician. specifically when an album like this comes out and I’m like ‘ok but the body doesn’t play anything remotely like free folk and neither does big|brave…..how could this possibly have been made??’ yeah I guess if you ‘pay attention’ you can pick up on all the droney stuff but like…..sometimes it’s just hard to do that y’know. when it’s not droney it kinda sounds like stomp-clap lumineers shit with all the stupid joy sucked out of it which kinda rules
ducks ltd., modern fiction favorite album of 2021 by a band whose vocalist I’ve outbowled (so far). which bands am I supposed to be really into if I like this? are the clean and cleaners from venus two different things? ‘18 cigs’ was prob also my song of the summer…..if it was the year 2007 I would almost certainly have posted the facebook status ‘mike lesuer is contemplating messes made’ and a distant relative would almost certainly have left a worried comment on it and someone my age would almost certainly have replied ‘it’s a song lyric google it’
hellish form, remains something very wholesome about the idea of a guy being in a two-person band but also branching out and doing a two-person-band side project with another guy which sounds nearly identical….like sorry bro, can’t join our band, but I’ll do another one with you! def cooler atmospherics than the body void LP, equally cool band name, not sure which I prefer. probably said this about that album too but huge ‘speed metal slowed down 800%’ energy
julia shapiro, zorked literally just learned that ‘chastity belt’ and ‘chastity’ are two separate bands this year….I think chastity belt is the one whose headline set I left after watching strange ranger play one time. love how bleak this is, particularly the instrumental heaviness of the first two tracks and the freaky recounting-of-dream interlude. [hjol self-titled font] it was overcast the entire week I listened to this album but the day I wrote a review of it the sun came out and as soon as I started typing a bird flew into the window directly in front of me (full review)
lala lala, I want the door to open nice to hear all these chicago artists putting out albums prominently featuring a full cast of fellow chicago artists and also ben gibbard. something really cool about being able to identify the vocals and saxophones and whatnot and also ben gibbard. love to see this sense of community crop up in the scene and also ben gibbard. used to dread the concept of artists pivoting to electronic music way more…..still a little disappointed that his project is straying from my weird, specific interests. ‘plates’ in particular bummed me out in the way it subtly channels—unless I am crazy—stomp-clap alt-radio-folk (is that influence bleeding into cool music now or am I just extremely paranoid?). also ben gibbard is on that song for some reason
sirius blvck, cinephile aggressive raps about really liking movies….I’m into it. rules when you find a new guy who sounds cool doing anything and who seems to be sitting on a ton of unreleased music (he’s also in 81355, which is the other coolest new thing I’ve heard this year). also speaking of movies his audiotree is my fav film of 2021 so far
older albums
deafheaven, roads to judah (2011) too scared to listen to the new alb so goin backwards instead lmao. aside from new bermuda might be their most conventionally black metal (or at least most conventionally “~blackgaze”~) LP but also…..the least good. fairly one-note minus the last few mins of ‘tunnel of trees,’ but at least it’s a pretty cool note. yeah, damn, deafheaven could’ve just been an extremely pretty-good black metal band for their entire career
remember sports, sports (2013) didn’t realize these were mostly just extremely rough versions of the songs from their first album….was gonna say ‘did they have to re-record all their songs when they were no longer allowed to be called ‘sports’?’ but I guess that happened after sunchokes. still feel tremendous guilt for betraying this band every time flood covers the surviving sports, a sucky, sucky band
signor benedick the moor, el negro (2013) finally sitting with this record while in the process of throwing together my ‘songs that feature a dramatic coughing fit’ playlist….kismet. dizzying mashup of danny brown, rxknephew, and, like….goya? there’s insane guitar solos, there’s voice cracks, there’s a hilarious (and great??) pop-punk/country banger, there’s a demented, eight-and-a-half min cover of the fresh prince theme rewritten to be about [extremely danny voice] zannies that transitions into some weird ecstasy of shouty blip-hop, immediately followed by an ambient track that absolutely destroys me for some reason. SB saying ‘fuck having brain cells’ in a funny voice over screamo vox on the noise-guitar ass ‘errybody’s a DJ’ sounds like an autogenerated series of things specifically targeted at me. are they saying ‘what the fuck is a FAFSA’ on ‘humanitarianism’?
movies
arizona dream dir. emir kusturica (1993) guess technically a movie about faye dunaway (absolutely wilding out) and john depp (at his hot and bland peak) hooking up and inventing a flying machine but that’s never really addressed, it just kinda happens?……intrinsically to the plot? I imagine I should fault whoever’s responsible for lopping 20 very important-seeming mins out of the final cut but honestly the way literally nothing is ever addressed/explained only makes the movie dreamier, which is the exact point of the movie. dinner scene with faye, j-depp, vince gallo, and the otherwise under-utilized lily taylor is so god damn funny man. blue checkmark pubs can keep their takes about the roman/gerri pseudo-romance being groundbreaking, screenwriters have been penning m(23)/f(50) romances for years (maybe none as cool as this one—you never see harold blasting 3 cigs at once in maude’s bed). guess a character mentioning chekhov's gun in the first act means a gun will have to go off in the final act huh
final destination dir. james wong (2000) movie where rube goldberg finally gets his revenge.. fascinating as a premonition of 9/11 but honestly I think I’m gonna go with: movie about a bunch of high school seniors thinking about and attempting to shape their own fates—their ‘final destinations’ in life—for the first time after boarding a plane for what is presumably their first extended stay away from home. in a really funny way this movie feels like the exact opposite of kicking and screaming (1995), where instead of wallowing in post-college apathy it’s like there’s still this insane pressure behind every single decision they make…..the scene where dev sawa is earnestly trying to rationalize everything as if, spoiler, sean william patrick scott key didn’t just literally get decapitated in front of him is lowkey hilarious. everyone is so sweaty in this movie because it’s june and they’re all wearing jackets?
freddy’s dead: the final nightmare dir. rachel talalay (1991) what 9/11-scale national tragedy did we endure in the early ’90s that we needed this movie where the most famous symbol of evil in 1980s popular film not only gets the shit beat out of him for 90 mins, but that they needed so badly for audiences to know he was about to get the shit beat out of him that they basically titled the movie ‘this guy DIES: we swear to GOD he’s gone FOREVER’? the fact the movie opens with a title card featuring quotes from freds nietzsche and krueger invites all kinds of jokes but honestly the final canonical installment in this series does a good job of contrasting these two ideologies…..lots of freddy’s goofiest punchlines scattered among sobering nihilist dialogue and imagery like jon arbuckle getting stuck in a video game where he’s beaten to death by pixelated versions of his dad expressing disappointment, or fred telling the camera ‘I forgot how painful it was to be human.’ least streaming services can do when they add this to their library is mail us a pair of damn 3D glasses smh
friday the 13th dir. sean s. cunningham (1980) think I can safely say there’s no other pop culture phenomena with a contemporary public perception so disconnected from its original source as this series, and also prob no other pop culture phenomena I am less interested in following thru to make that connection. to me this felt like halloween and the exorcist and psycho—probably more so—in that I can see what would have been attractive about it when it came out, but I can’t find a single thing to enjoy about it now that it’s not, you know…..scary. feels less like a horror film and more like a structural film—we know these kids are gonna honk and then get shredded by some freak, feels like it’s just all about finding an even pacing for it. shoulda got pete greenaway to direct this imo
resident evil dir. paul w.s. anderson (2002) guess it doesn’t really matter how strong the storyline is in a movie based on a major-franchise video game with an overarching plot about dismantling a giant politically-backed corporation experimenting in ideas that will probably wipe out the human race—it’s still gonna have to be marketed to a bunch of horny teens. aside from the scenes with like goopy dogs and that big sloppy tongue guy this feels like something you’d find on the cw like…..every guy in this movie looks like his name is probably ‘josh’ or maybe ‘shawn.’ movie’s entire sense of humor is just ‘what if you call A.I. a bitch.’ insane how perfectly the final scene dovetails with the beginning of 28 days later (also 2002) down to the medically-induced soon-to-be stylish shaved side part. daily affirmation: the corporation’s guilty, not you
saturday night fever dir. john badham (1977) finally, a movie about the mysterious affliction my date comes down with every weekend forcing her to stay home. movie’s actually about a cocksure, comically italian man named tony growing up on the east coast in the 1970s, providing the sopranos prequel we didn’t know we needed. movie feels like a glammed-way-out mean streets, only with slightly more dancing, slightly less violence, and a much broader scope of casual hate speech (anti-black, anti-latino, anti-gay, anti-the-dead (??)). aside from that, surprised at how funny this was (and how new-hollywood it was without really being ‘new hollywood’) but all the sexual assault stuff at the end was uhhhhh kinda of a bummer to put it mildly. our parents were fuckin weird man
TV
the sopranos season 3 (2001) I’ve become plagued by the same dream every night where I tell joe pants’ character in the sopranos that his hair is ‘obviously ludicrous’ and ‘I can’t believe anyone would ever want to be [his] friend’ and then he just absolutely beats the shit out of me. finally felt like I’m deep enough in the series to post sopranos jokes on twitter but when I tried it no one liked the post so now I’m like…..why am I even watching this. also went to youtube the other day and straight up the first recommended video was titled ‘[very major sopranos character] kills [other extremely major sopranos character]’ and I just….finally understand why people are so annoying about spoilers now. only spoiler I will tolerate is if someone could maybe tell me if furio is supposed to be comic relief or?? coolest scene anyone ever shot in the early-’00s of wiseguys slamming ketchup packets in an abandoned van, second coolest scene anyone ever shot in the early-’00s of a guy getting a steak chucked at his head. I will truly never understand the concept of ‘new jersey’
books
sexual perversity in chicago & the duck variations by david mamet (1974) as insufferable as LA people are about movies that take place in LA, I guess I’m out here still riding for dave ‘breitbart dot com slash tag slash david hyphen mamet’ mamet and his plays and screenplays, which I do not even like, simply to catch a glimpse of a chicago thing and be like ‘hey!’ no clue what to do with perversity—couple of horny guys being horny? ok? got it? moving on?—and duck feels like coffee & cigs in that I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to get out of it…..the humor isn’t quite enough to laugh at and the insights aren’t quite enough to inspire deep thinking. clearly written before 2006 bc there is no mention of the bean