Weekend Reads: Daft Punk, "Your Name," "Ted Lasso," Joss Whedon, Recipe Blogs
Recommended weekend reading material for February 27, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
After nearly three decades, the musical robot duo of Daft Punk has called it quits in an appropriately Daft Punk-y manner.
Daft Punk, one of the most influential and popular groups to emerge in the past 30 years, have announced their retirement via a video titled “Epilogue” posted Monday morning. The duo’s longtime publicist, Kathryn Frazier, officially confirmed the split to Variety and declined to provide further details.
The eight-minute clip features the duo — Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — who for many years have concealed their features behind a robot concept, walking around the desert, wearing in their familiar space helmets and leather jackets. After a few moments, one of the members looks at the other, removes his jacket and reveals an energy pack on the back. The other touches a button on the pack. The first member walks away quickly, and then explodes.
Billboard’s Kat Bein has put together a list of Daft Punk’s 20 best songs while Pitchfork celebrates the duo’s iconic music videos. And back in 2014, I wrote about Daft Punk’s showstopping performance at the Grammy Awards alongside Nile Rodgers, Pharrell Williams, and Stevie Wonder.
Zara Hedderman argues that Stereolab’s music was unjustly maligned by critics during the late ‘90s and ought to be re-evaluated.
Revisiting these deep-cuts from their catalogue and presenting them to audiences in an official capacity some twenty years later reaffirms an appreciation for Stereolab’s inimitable innovation. Electrically Possessed, featuring previously unreleased outtakes and rarities recorded between 1999 (immediately after the release of Cobra And Phases) and 2008 (in which they released their ninth studio album, Chemical Chords), reminds Stereolab’s audience — as if they could ever have forgotten — that they are a group of musicians comfortable with excess and absurdism. Moreover, it captures the essence of how they always found an equilibrium between futurism and nostalgia, surrealism and simplicity.
I’ll never not be fascinated by Christians musicians making music on the fringes of Christendom, and it doesn’t get much more “fringe” than Christian black metal.
As a genre, black metal is an acquired taste in the holistic metal canopy, which is not an understatement to metalheads. For subscribers of the subgenre — and, typically, for followers of niche subgenres writ large — there is a fervent passion for the art form despite the lack of mainstream appreciation. Often referred to as “unblack” in the Christian world, it can be difficult to find your way when you’re getting started in the realm. We’re here to help. You’re already a fan of the genre? Great: We’re here to take you deeper.
Catecinem is one of my favorite film blogs, and he’s been slowly recounting his top tens of the 2010s. Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name is his favorite “romance” film.
Among niche-y fantasy conceits, the time-traveling body-swap romance does not strike me as one with a particularly luminous roster of credits to its name… Not only does Shinkai embrace this conceit wholeheartedly, he infuses it with his trademark blend of melancholy and rapturous aesthetic splendor.
I thoroughly enjoyed Your Name. I was fortunate enough to see it in an honest-to-goodness movie theater (remember those?) back in 2017, and found it thoughtful, winsome, and visually gorgeous.
If you have HBO Max, then I highly recommend Batman: The Brave and the Bold, one of the best and cleverest superhero cartoons of all time. Here are some of its “best and brightest” episodes.
Created by James Tucker and Michael Jelenic, the animated series veered away from what we’d come to know from Batman’s animated adventures and instead presented a more retro-inspired, lighter, and wilder take on Batman as we’d come to know him — embracing the wider DC Comics world in the process. In a world that saw the key to adapting Batman out of the comics in his darkness, the show remembered that Batman has had a long, strange, and often silly history, and embraced it wholeheartedly — while also never forgetting the nuanced tragedy that underpins the character.
One of my favorite aspects of The Brave and the Bold is the dialog, which is peppered with hilarious lines like “Look, I’m not going to explain the intricacies of time travel to a man without a library card” and “The Hammers of Justice will always pound straight the bent nails of evil.”
Emily VanDerWerff explores the appeal of Ted Lasso and its place within the realm of “comfort food TV.”
Ted Lasso is way more than just a (quite good) cult TV show. It’s also a window into a handful of pop culture trends that have swirled together into one unassuming little package. Ted Lasso isn’t just a show about a coach who cares about his players more than wins and losses. It’s also a show about the way we wish the world would be.
Via The Loop. We watched Ted Lasso near the end of 2020 and absolutely loved it.
As if you needed yet another streaming service subscription, Paramount+ has announced their upcoming line-up. It include several series based on famous movies (e.g., The Italian Job, The Parallax View), the return of Frasier Crane, and the long-awaited live-action adaptation of the Halo video game.
Kelly Faircloth explores the rise and fall of Joss Whedon.
In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds — the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But [Charisma] Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.
Jessica Sidman interviews former employees at the Trump Hotel to find out what it was really like to wait on President Trump and his friends and family.
Garnishes were a no-no. Melania Trump once sent back a Dover sole because it was dressed with parsley and chives, says former executive chef Bill Williamson, who worked at the restaurant until the start of the pandemic. Trump himself never returned a plate, but if he was disappointed, you can bet the complaint would travel down the ranks. Like the time the President questioned why his dining companion had a bigger steak. The restaurant already special-ordered super-sized shrimp just for him and no one else. Next time, they’d better beef up the beef.
The article’s most disturbing detail? Trump eats his steaks well-done and with ketchup.
One web development trend that I’ve become intrigued by lately is that of sustainable or “green” websites, i.e., websites that are specifically designed to use as few resources as possible. The new Formafantasma website, however, takes that to an extreme.
You probably haven’t thought about whether some websites can be more sustainable than others, but in fact, web design choices can affect how much energy the site uses. In this case, the Formafantasma team made visual choices that had a direct effect on the site’s sustainability. They didn’t just choose Times New Roman and Arial because they liked them, but because they’re standard default typefaces — and therefore, the most sustainable typefaces on the web.
Via Typewolf. If you’re curious about your website’s environmental friendliness, calculate your website’s carbon footprint. And though this article specifically discusses WordPress websites, it contains plenty of principles (e.g., use simpler designs, reduce resources and trackers, lazy load images and videos) that can apply to all websites.
The next time you find yourself cursing under your breath as you scroll through a long, convoluted introduction to get to a recipe, don’t blame the recipe blogger. Blame Google and advertising.
The length of a recipe blog post very often dictates how much money can be made off of it. The headnote is prime real estate for stuffing in keywords to improve the blog’s SEO, which will boost readership and the amount of money the blogger can charge for ads and sponsored posts. Writes Chloe Bryan at Mashable, “Recipe bloggers want to catch the attention of the illusive Google algorithm — and, ideally, land their recipe on the coveted first page — so they must demonstrate ‘authority’ in their field. This means more comprehensive content, which is really hard to pull off with a concise recipe alone. (Tons of people will be using the phrase ‘apple crumble,’ for example, but only you can write your own story about it.)”
On a related note, did you know that my wife and I share a recipe blog with several of our friends? I can personally vouch for the quality of many of its recipes, including the greek chicken kabobs, pozole, ginger cookies, French bread, and the appropriately titled green bean, red potato, bacon casserole thingy.
From the Blog
I had to write my own tribute to Daft Punk in light of the band’s breakup.
I know this will sound cheesy, but awesome beats and gorgeous arrangements aside, what I enjoyed most about Daft Punk was how they brought mystique and wonder back into popular music. From their classic silver and gold robot helmets, which they wore whenever in public, to the secrecy surrounding their projects and reticence concerning interviews, Daft Punk successfully remained enigmatic even as the zeitgeist demanded more openness and access to celebrity.
And yes, Random Access Memories has been this week’s primary soundtrack.
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I guess I was reading different magazines in the late nineties, but I remember Stereolab being almost universally revered. They have got some great songs, but they can also take the plodding to extremes. I saw them play in the late 90’s and the club was packed. I remember them jamming on the same chord for about 20 minutes, at one point. When I was leaving, I heard some guy say, “man, people don’t even understand what was going on up there.”