Something New (This Week)
An older generation, a Wes Anderson suite, and the near future
Happy extremely late Saturday night. This is a busy season for me, as my day job workload increases, and the team I coach makes a final push towards our National Championship tournament. As my writing takes a minor backseat, I’m devouring things at a high rate, and still can’t wait to tell you about things, even if it’s in smaller chunks. Here’s some new (to me) things the past two weeks:
Gen-X inspo
As strange as it may sound, I’m currently having a great time getting older. The generations behind me are an endless marvel, but the generation just in front of me continues to be a similarly wonderful inspiration. I love dipping into the art they were consuming in their developing ages, when I was but a wee boy. We all know Nirvana and Madonna and Heathers and Trainspotting, but finding the gems below the headliners has been a treat, especially recently.
Last Friday, a new mixing of an old record came out. Tim, by The Replacements, is a classic among connoisseurs and big fans of the alt rock genre, but they are completely new to me. This record, and it’s new sound, are an absolute blast, and a delightfully obvious product of their time and an inspiration to other bands that I know and love. I enjoy the breadth their sound covers on this record, and the anthemic choruses and blazing riffs that play alongside them. I’ve been slamming this thing in the car for two weeks, pretending I’m back in my parent’s basement where my sister would blast her Green Day and Bloodhound Gang.
https://spotify.link/j60w0lKLxDb
Yesterday I finished American Tabloid, a 1995 novel by James Ellroy that feels like absolutely pristine dorm-room fodder for an American male of a certain type (the type who now have podcasts that I listen to). Taking place over a swath of years surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidency, the novel follows three men working with, against, and around the police, the CIA, the mob, Cuba, the Civil Rights movement, and more. Wide-sweeping and flip-flopping, the functional action takes place within historical realities, and plays wonderfully alongside a certain conspiracy that had a lot of traction in the 1990’s. The book is a nasty, dreary, precise work, and I devoured it.
A New, New, New, and New Wes Anderson
This weekend, Netflix released four short-film adaptations of Ronald Dahl works by director Wes Anderson. Anderson, who also released the feature-length Asteroid City this year, is no stranger to Dahl’s stories: he directed the stop-motion animation adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009, and has been trying to find his way into an adaptation of Henry Sugar for over a decade now. The combination worked wonders in Mr. Fox, and the freedom, financial and creative, provided by Netflix, who purchased the rights to the Dahl catalog back in 2021, has given Anderson another chance to put his vivid imagination to work.
I have yet to see any of the shorts, and I’ve been mulling over the relationship of current readers to the author Dahl, who is a known racist and whose work some are trying to edit in order to sanitize some ideas within. As many wrestle with the separation of art and artist, Anderson retains his childhood affection with the work and retains his interest in adapting it for the screen.
Tis the Season
It’s my favorite time of year: spooky season. For me, that means mainlining a certain type of movie: not just horror, something a little more expansive than that label (though yes, mostly horror). I love the pursuit of horror in filmmaking; it attempts to realize and visualize deep-seated fears and emotions that are buried inside everyone. The specific strategies used from story to story tap into wonderful imaginations, and create wonderful images. And by wonderful, I mean deranged and disgusting and perverted and many other typically negative things. But in spooky season? You get to shoot your demented shot. I’m particularly interested in the local offerings from The Hollywood Theatre here in Portland, and in the 90’s Horror and the other collections that The Criterion Channel is putting up this month. And, as always, I’ll return to several canonical texts: HALLOWEEN, HOCUS POCUS, HALLOWEEN II, HALLOWEEN TOWN, HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, THE EXORCIST, HALLOWEEN IV, and several other HALLOWEEN sequels.
https://x.com/criterionchannl/status/1708481580488900628?s=46
That’s it for me this week. I’m continuing to work on something about music I listen to every fall, and on a Halloween movie or two. What have you been reading? What did you listen to last? What Halloween art do you return to every year?
I’ll see you next week with more things, new and old.
TTFN,
B