Newsletter of Recommendation
Some things I have been enjoying lately.
I am on hiatus from a part-time editing job — a three-week break, ahead of which I decided I had to finish one of the many incomplete projects stored on my laptop. You remember how we were all going to write our King Lears in quarantine? I decided I had to do that in the span of a few weeks. Luckily, I had begun a lot of King Lears in the last two years, so I had a head start: I spent last week working on a pilot I began writing a few months ago. By Sunday it was finished, and I sat back and marveled at the fact that I now have a competed half-hour comedy pilot. I’m not exactly sure what to do next when it comes to the script, but as for the remaining two weeks of my hiatus, the answer is: nothing.
Now I am “on vacation.” I am not going anywhere, but I am paying less attention to my email and trying not to think of any money-making possibilities with which to occupy myself. Here are a few things I’ve been enjoying in the last week or so.
Sharon Van Etten feat. Norah Jones - “Seventeen”
I was obsessed with “Seventeen” from Sharon Van Etten’s last album, Remind Me Tomorrow. I’ve long been a fan of hers, and I was not put-off by her musical shift from “sad songs you can sing along to while you cry in traffic” to “sad songs you can dance to.” This song in particular is sort of like “This Used To Be My Playground” meets “Losing My Edge” — a singer looking back at her youth with mixed feelings and giving a delicate side-eye to the kids now populating her old hangouts. I just found out about this version she recorded with Norah Jones, which makes it a little bluesy and adult-contempo (my mom would probably prefer this one). Ultimately it is one of my favorite songs from the last year! Von Etten also has a brief appearance in Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the trailer for which serves as a nice alternate music video for the song. (It’s also the only great movie that has come out this year. I know we are starved for actual movies right now — which must explain the glowing reviews for The Old Guard and Palm Springs — but Never Rarely Sometimes Always is so much better than the straight-to-VOD material we’re getting while the studios hold their best movies for when theaters reopen… next year?)
The Las Culturistas Top 200 Moments in Culture History
Las Culturistas is my favorite podcast. (Have I recently listened to my own episode from years ago to cheer myself up? Yes, I have.) I have my own personal countdown of my favorite episodes (Patti Harrison’s second appearance on the show remains one of the most delightfully unhinged things I have ever heard in my life), but this three-part behemoth (I’m linking to the first part here) stands on a pedestal of its own. A six-hour countdown of iconic pop-culture moments? It’s our generation’s version of a VH1 nostalgia clip show. Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang can somehow make the least significant cultural moment — to me anyway — seem like the most important thing that has ever happened. This is cultural criticism, this is comedic genius, this is personal and collective memoir. Every single item on the list is perfect and correct and absolutely bananas and off-the-wall. At no point could I possibly disagree with them, even if I immediately started compiling my own list of glaring omissions. (Christina Ricci’s powerful anti-Thanksgiving monologues in both Addams Family Values and The Ice Storm? Gonna have to get Ms. Ricci’s name back on THAT one.) Every best-of list is naturally 100 percent correct, you just can’t deny it. It’s how the Internet works! But I don’t think anyone anywhere can beat this one, because it changed the game.
“The Balletic Millennial Bedtimes of Normal People” by Lorrie Moore
In another time, I may have begrudging weighed into the particularly annoying discourse on Twitter surrounding Lorrie Moore’s review of Hulu’s Normal People for NYRB. (I just have to assume that people fought about this online.) Ultimately I loved this piece very much. I have not watched Normal People, but I read the book last year — I liked it fine, probably as much as any Lorrie Moore book I’ve read, and I have read them all — and this is a great piece of criticism. When I told my friend Dan I liked this essay, he replied, “Spoken like a true Gen-X/Millennial cusp.” I will let that speak for itself, I suppose. But also this line!!!! “Is not their use of social media a version of the old-fashioned Christmas card letter?” Drag me, bitch. And subscribe to my Substack!
The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
I often think about what Roger Ebert wrote in his review of The Life Aquatic: “I can't recommend it, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it.” That’s sort of how I feel about anything James Ellroy writes. I picked up this book — the second entry in his L.A. Quartet, between 1987’s The Black Dahlia and 1990’s L.A. Confidential — because John and I have been watching (and enjoying!) HBO’s Perry Mason, and I was eager for another L.A. noir. I read The Black Dahlia right after I moved here, and of course I have loved the film adaptation of L.A. Confidential (even if I don’t think it’s as brilliant as I thought it was when I was 15.) This one, however… Mamma mia. It’s got everything: Commie nymphomaniacs, crooked cops, latent homosexuality, cannibalism, incest, and cameos from Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato. Ellroy is such a macho psychopath with perverted obsessions that he doesn’t really have you rooting for anyone, much less the hero cops who drive the story forward. (If you didn’t know much about his politics, it could be read as anti-cop propaganda — sort of like how I thought The Fountainhead was satire until I realized Ayn Rand actually believed that shit.) Ultimately, I don’t need to root for a character; I’m often rooting for the story to be interesting and believable (and this one spirals out of control in its third act, despite it being fully realized up until then). Ellroy is likely despicable, but he certainly nails the rhythms and tone of post-war Los Angeles in a way that isn’t white-washed or hopeful (compared to the saccharine revisionist history of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, for example). I “recommend” this one lightly; in order to enjoy it, you may have to do a lot of intellectual compartmentalization. It is well-crafted problematic trash and not for the faint of heart.
The Long Good Friday
John suggested we watch this on The Criterion Channel after listening to Helen Mirren’s appearance on WTF. The thriller stars Bob Hoskins as a London mobster who tries to go straight by setting up a major real estate development deal in the hopes that his gamble will pay off several years later when — and if — the city is picked to host the Olympics. Things go awry with the IRA starts planting bombs and scares off the American mob who Hoskins has roped in as potential investors. At least that’s what I think was happening — I have this affliction where my brain cannot process any complicated criminal grifts depicted on screen. I watched The Irishman four times and I still do not understand what Robert De Niro was pulling with all that frozen beef. Luckily for me, this movie is full of style and has a bitchin’ main title theme that was stuck in my head for a day. It also features a very young and cuuuuuuuute Pierce Brosnan as an Irish hitman; he queer-baits one of Hoskins’ associates in a locker room shower and murders him. And speaking of shower scenes, there’s a long one with Bob Hoskins? I jokingly balked at the Bob-Hoskins-as-sex-symbol notion, but John replied, “If Bob Hoskins can get Cher and Jessica Rabbit, then Bob Hoskins could get me.” A fair and ultimately accurate conclusion, I must admit.
Lisa Rinna confronting Camille Grammer-Meyer on this week’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
“You’re an asshole on Twitter. I’m going to say that to you, but it’s nice to see you.” I mean! I’ve heard it, I’ve said it, I’ve lived it, I love it.
xo Tyler