The One With An Extra Helping
Hey all!
I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving wherever you are. I got to go to the Operle family dinner for probably the first time in four years or so where I played with all the babies and had a ton of delish Missouri cooking. It’s been a bit so this one (like myself) is a little extra stuffed. I deeply appreciate all of you who take the time to go through this and I hope you get something out of it. You’re what I’m thankful for.
READS
— One of the best pieces I’ve read in a while is AP Film Writer Jake Coyle’s piece about the possible striking down of the Paramount Consent Decrees and how it could affect small-town theaters and drive-ins. Passed in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court decision originally served as an antitrust law forcing distributors to divest themselves from the theaters they owned. Now in a market with very few (and much more powerful) distributors — Disney accounted for nearly a third of all movie tickets sold last year all on its own — that could make life much harder on independent theaters due to potential discrepancies in ticket pricing and movie booking.
— A few weeks ago, Rosa Lyster wrote a wonderful piece for the Outline called “This essay is just Harry Potter for people who think comparing things to Harry Potter is stupid.” The crux of the piece is that the whole internet methodology of saying x is just y for z (Some of her examples include: Fight club is just the matrix for incels. Big Thief is just Fleetwood Mac for sad bois. Billie Eilish is just Avril Lavigne for girls who have too many cups in their bedroom.) “turns a constellation of possible meanings through which we might better know each other and ourselves into a vast Extended Universe.” Essentially saying that it reduces a deep well of possible words into a mishmash of referentiality, but that maybe that’s where we were always heading:
The dream of the internet was that each of us would be able to access the knowledge of all of human history, and the nightmare that resulted is that we are now expected to know so many more things than before, such that the only way to really get a grasp on any of it is to superficially connect them to other things you also barely understand.
— What do you know…another debate has sprung up about limited releases. This time the National Theater Owners Association and Netflix are arguing over Marty Scorsese’s new picture The Irishman. The president of the group, who overwhelmingly wanted to take the picture wide, thinks it’s a disgrace that the Scorsese’s movie is going to play on “one-tenth of the screens it should have played on,” likely fewer than 45 total screens in the U.S. for in 26 days before it went to streaming. For comparison’s sake, Netflix ran Roma, Alfonso Cuaron’s 2018 best picture nominee produced by the streaming service, on 250 domestic screens.
— Dana Schwarz wrote about one of my favorite reading topics: the canon — whether we need it and if we should burn it down and start again. “People who want to be well-read will read the books on the list of the greatest books of all time, and then when they make their lists of the greatest books, it’s more than likely that those earlier books will be included,” she said. “The canon is a massive ship with a tiny rudder; it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy in order to shift its direction. Without a conscious effort, we’ll be regurgitating the limited scope of art from back in the days when the only perspectives that were considered important enough to care about were from white men.”
— I enjoyed this conversation between David Byrne (lead singer of the Talking Heads, and Tierra Whack, two wildly different, eccentric artists at the opposite ends of their careers. It feels random but also earnest because Byrne has never been shy about declaring his admiration for young artists (St. Vincent, Janelle Monae, and now Whack). Byrne, now 67, has been performing for nearly five decades between the Heads, his work with Brian Eno, and his solo career and Whack, 24, is in a stage of infinite potential. Her first record, Whack World, dropped last year and tore apart expectations about the hip-hop genre, song structure, and the streaming environment with 15 one-minute tracks and a short film/music video for the entire thing.
— There’s something that’s always fascinated me about archival culture, when things that were thought to be lost were somehow saved in an older, unexpected medium. A couple efforts over the past month or so have wandered across my feeds. The much cooler story is how what once was an act of piracy is now an act of preservation in the form of online torrent clubs: “dedicated cinephiles with the time and inclination to not only track down some super-rare Mexican horror western from 1959 but digitize it, in some cases make custom subtitles for it from scratch and upload it to a private bit-torrent tracker for likeminded weirdos.” Also, the Internet Archive has expanded its digitization efforts to records, doing high resolution scans of all the elements and archiving the audio as well.
— It’s always a treasure to read Marissa Moss and her recent piece for Teen Vogue on how Lil Nas X wasn’t the first gay man to win a Country Music Award is no exception. “Country is slow to progress, and that's the truth. And country — with an emphasis on country radio — absolutely can be, and is, exclusionary. It has written out the story of gay people, and people of color, since the early origins of the genre,” Moss writes. “That kind of erasure is erasure with sinister intentions.” The first out gay artists to take home a CMA were Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark in 2014, when they shared the Song of the Year award for a writing Kacey Musgraves excellent “Follow Your Arrow.”
— I got nostalgia reading this Mel Magazine oral history of Limewire, which at one point in time was responsible for 80 percent of the music piracy in the United States and most of the space in my iTunes library. The piece also delves into Grapevine, the company’s short-lived attempt at a Spotify-like streaming service, and the fall of the company.
THE BIG SOMETHING
Access is important for any fan of culture. And in this high tech day and age, it’s never been easier to find an obscure Velvet Underground demo, order a long out-of-print sci-fi novel, find digitized versions of old punk zines, or stream some piece of classic cinema that’s escaped me until the present. The internet is also why I hate being stuck in a small town because it’s often prevented me from having literal physical access to the stuff I’d like to get my eyes and ears on.
The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla wrote an essay last February called “The Delayed Gratification of Midwest Oscar Season” in which he talked about the woes of being a film fan in Columbus, Ohio, waiting months after the major markets to see Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread, and Ladybird in a theater. “Nowadays, with most major film events, either the whole country waits together (see multiplex-demolishing sensations like Black Panther) or nobody has to wait at all,” Harvilla opines. He goes on to quote Columbus Alive film critic Brad Keefe, who wrote: “This is one of the best films of the year. You can see it in a month.”
It’s a frustrating phenomenon because probably something like 80% of the country has roughly the same level of access to these films as me, but social media magnifies that 20% of people to make it feel like everyone on Twitter has seen something before it hits the local Cinemark (or if I’m lucky our lovely little arthouse, Maiden Alley Cinema). The highest grossing foreign film of the year, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, is making it to Paducah this coming week after being screened at assorted festivals and in various markets for the better part of three months.
The best and most disappointing part of this is always when a movie goes [biggest set of fucking airquotes ever, guys and gals] “wide” (last time out I detailed the history of the wide release).
The incessant amount of buzz that builds around the most critically respected films (which often have the smallest marketing budgets and release pattern) is one of the bigger annoyances for film fans today and as Max Covill wrote for Film School Rejects last year: “Audiences are tired of hearing about a film they can’t see…The way we experience news and how we hear about the latest movies is instantaneous. Word of Mouth doesn’t need the same amount of time to build, films like The Florida Project and Call Me By Your Name needed to be in front of as many eyes as possible within days of release, not weeks.”
There’s probably no realistic solution to something like this. Streaming services could become the go-to? You can drive to a bigger market to catch a showing? Maybe find an illicit online way of watching it? More realistically, though, you’re going to have to hurry up and wait.
TUNES
I caught Jazz Monroe’s review of Office Culture’s A Life of Crime on Pitchfork early in the month and I knew pretty much instantly that I was in. “Sophistipop” seems to be the phrase applied to them the most. They fit into a weird kind of chill soft rock continuum that would be at home on 80s blue-eyed soul records. I’m about it.
Lekman is always welcome in my headphones. He has a strange, infectious, sincere lilt to his music, like some kind of more happy version of Morrissey.
I’m just happy to have new Tennis out in the world.
Mellotron Variations — collaboration of Pat Sansone, John Medeski, Jonathan Kirkscey, and Robby Grant — wanders through the desert emanating strange soundtracks to a movie you’ve never seen with one of the lesser-used instruments in the pop arsenal, the titular mellotron, which was used prominently on The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” NPR’s writeup on the history of the instrument and the group’s effort to bring it into the limelight is a fun read, as well.
Twinkly, cold, and far away. Ed Schrader’s Music Beat is a strange crew that goes back and forth between little punk rippers and ornate little pop numbers like “Riddles.” This one is a constant on cold walks.
STUFF I WROTE
— I was sad to have to do a story on Boaz Shoe Repair closing their doors. The business has been open and mending soles in some capacity for 101 years in downtown Paducah. It’s not even for a lack of business. The owner is just moving and no one wants to take it over in the age of disposable footwear.
— Check it out! I spoke with the junior and senior world goose calling champions, who just so happen to both be from west Kentucky, a few weeks ago. They were good dudes and they didn’t laugh at me when I asked them about whether or not they have an understanding of goose empathy.
— I chatted with members of the Jackson Purchase Historical Society about what makes their organization so vital to preserving the history of the region. The amateur group was just recognized as the volunteer organization of the year by the Kentucky Historical Society.