Weekend Reads (Mar 12): The Cure, Brandon Sanderson, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” Swedish Psychedelia
Recommended weekend reading material for March 12, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material. Note: There won’t be a “Weekend Reads” edition for March 19, 2022.
As a longtime Cure fan, I learned early on to always take Robert Smith’s words with a grain of salt, especially when he talks about a new album. (The Cure’s last album, 4:13 Dream, was released in 2008.) And yet, this is The Cure we’re talking about, so of course I get excited when I read something like this.
Calling it “the doomiest thing that we’ve ever done,” Robert Smith this week announced that the first of two new albums from The Cure — a 10-song set he says will be called Songs of a Lost World — could be out as soon as September, ahead of the band’s European tour.
In addition to two new Cure albums, Smith is also apparently working on a long-gestating solo album.
Related: The Cure’s Wish turns 30 next month, so now would seem to be the perfect time to release the previously announced deluxe edition. (The Cure has previously released deluxe editions of many of their albums, including Disintegration and The Head on the Door.) But even if that doesn’t happen, I still plan on doing something special for Opus subscribers to mark the album’s anniversary. (How’s that for a subscription push?)
BrooklynVegan’s Bill Pearis reflects on Ride’s sophomore album, Going Blank Again, which turned 30 this past week.
Released on March 8, 1992 in the UK by Creation Records and the next day in the US by Sire, Going Blank Again was the sound of utter confidence backed up by great songs, creative arrangements, muscular playing and production that makes everything shine. You feel it from the first song, “Leave Them All Behind,” a towering statement of intent that mixed shoegaze guitar heroics with one of their best-ever basslines, constant crushing drum fills, elements of dance music, and organ cribbed from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” It thrills across all eight minutes, and is one of the great album-openers — and set-openers — of all time.
Earlier this month, sci-fi/fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, the author of The Stormlight Archive series and co-author of The Wheel of Time novels, launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the release of four new novels and various “swag boxes” related to his other works throughout 2023. To date, his campaign’s raised over $27 million to date, making it the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time… and it still has almost three weeks left to go.
Sanderson’s campaign and success has received some criticism, but what is he doing that’s so wrong, asks Laura Miller.
[I]t’s hard to take issue with a guy who’s simply selling his books directly to people who really, really want to read them. Sanderson wouldn’t have such a large following, of course, without the benefit of years of publishing conventionally, with the full resources of a traditional publishing house and its distribution networks behind him. (He also wouldn’t have that following if he weren’t reliably pleasing his readers.) And that $23.3 million won’t go as far as an old-fashioned advance, since Sanderson has to print, warehouse, and ship the books himself, along with the swag boxes and special collector’s editions that many of the project’s subscribers have purchased.
John Scalzi, who’s a pretty great sci-fi/fantasy author himself (I highly recommend his Interdependency trilogy), weighs in on Sanderson’s success, noting that much of it’s due to Sanderson’s work ethic and solid reputation.
Related: The highest earning Kickstarter campaigns of all time. The previous titleholder was the Pebble Time smartwatch, which raised just over $20 million.
A brief history of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, aka, my favorite books in grade school.
A decade prior, a lawyer named Edward Packard had hit upon an idea. He often told his kids bedtime stories, and whenever he couldn’t figure out how to resolve a story, he asked them to weigh in with options. He soon realized that they enjoyed the stories more when they helped choose the endings.
This interactivity was a valuable storytelling device — it both harnessed the kids’ attention and took advantage of their innate creativity — and Packard wondered whether there was a clever way to package it in book form. During his commute, he began writing a shipwreck adventure called Sugarcane Island, with multiple storylines that required reader participation.
It’s fascinating to me that these books had their genesis all the way back in 1969, and yet, they presaged the sort of interactive fiction and multi-line storytelling that is a given in today’s video games.
Almost 200 books comprised the original Choose Your Own Adventure lines. I can’t remember all of the ones I read, but I do remember enjoying Your Code Name is Jonah and Space Patrol. (Even just looking at the cover art brings back good memories.)
Related: You Chose Wrong collects all of the “bad” endings from the Choose Your Own Adventure series as well as similar series like Give Yourself Goosebumps and Be an Interplanetary Spy. I love how ridiculously bleak and grim the endings get, and I wonder: if my parents and teachers had known that, would they have let me check out so many Choose Your Own Adventure books from the library?
Also Related: Another Choose Your Own Adventure-type book that I enjoyed were the Lone Wolf books by Joe Dever, which incorporated RPG aspects into the format. I stumbled across one in the library when I was in 5th or 6th grade, and was instantly fascinated by both the storytelling and the gameplay. Several of the books can be downloaded in various formats from Project Aon.
Itch.io’s “Bundle for Ukraine” will net you almost 1,000 video games, RPGs, soundtracks, comics, and more for as little as $10, and has already raised over $4.1 million for Ukrainian relief efforts.
Alissa Wilkinson — another one of my favorite film writers — has penned a thoughtful piece comparing the morality of The Batman with that of 2019’s Joker. (With some nods to the influence of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.)
That two recent filmmakers, Phillips and Reeves, found inspiration for Gotham in the grody, rat-infested mid-’70s New York of Taxi Driver is not surprising. The Batman comics have always grappled with the fuzzy line between light and dark, between being the good guy and a bad one. What’s extraordinary is the different meanings the films themselves seem to take from the same inspiration. It’s not just the characters, iconic nemeses, that have wildly different ideas of what it means to ride the line between hero and criminal.
Related: The Batman had the second most successful opening weekend of any pandemic-era film, earning $128 million. (Last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home earned $260 million.) Here’s a brief roundup of Batman reviews, good and bad.
Steven D. Greydanus considers how popular Disney and Pixar movies, like the recently released Turning Red, treat their moms.
In an important way, though, Turning Red follows Encanto in developing a new spin on the Junior/Mother Knows Best trope: In these cartoons, for the first time, the roots of the maternal figure’s rigidity in her own youthful struggles or trauma are explored, and rapprochement between mother and daughter turns on the daughter empathizing with the mother’s experiences and coming to see her as someone not so different from herself. This approach to humanizing the overbearing parental figure hasn’t been seen before — not even in Brave (as relatable as Elinor is, we learn nothing about her background) or in Coco (where the trauma is not Abuelita’s, but two generations prior, and the emotional climax turns on connecting emotionally with Miguel’s great-grandmother).
Related: Here’s a brief roundup of Turning Red reviews, good and bad.
The secret history of Star Tours, Disney’s classic immersive Star Wars ride, is rather convoluted, involving George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Jackson.
A few months after “Captain EO,” on Jan. 9, 1987, Star Tours would open at Disneyland. Lucas and Eisner were on hand, with Mickey and Minnie in their iconic silver space suits (with the rainbow on the chest), joined by C-3PO. Instead of a pair of oversized scissors, they used a lightsaber to cut the ceremonial ribbon. Just like “Captain EO,” they left the park open for 60 hours straight to meet demand. It was a smash out of the gate. But the success of Star Tours ultimately derailed an aspect of the attraction Eades had designed for the project: that every three years, the ride film would change. (That’s right, he said at some point you were actually supposed to get to Endor.)
I got to ride on Disneyland’s Star Tours back in the mid ‘90s, and I remember being absolutely blown away by the experience.
Bandcamp’s J. Edward Keyes — one of my favorite music writers — delves into the world of Swedish psychedelic Christian music from the ‘70s.
Unlike American Jesus Music, which existed almost entirely outside of the church, in Sweden, the Christian rock movement was practically church-sponsored. “In the mid-‘60s, Sweden hadn’t been secularized yet,” Kéry explains. “It was a total, 100% Christian nation. You sang a Psalm in the morning at school, and the teacher was playing the organ. It was just a part of everything — the fabric of the country. We had this free church movement that had already been happening. If you went to a free church, you went to Sunday school on Sundays, and you got to play music there and, eventually, you would get to perform in church. That’s part of the reason everyone is so damn professional in all of these bands — because everybody here in the Christian community got their start playing early in Sunday School, and they were pushed to perform in front of the church. Soon, the kids began saying, ‘We want to play pop music so that we can start inviting all of our friends to church.’ Because at the time, most teenagers in Sweden were fed up with going to church.”
I know folks are concerned about Epic’s acquisition of Bandcamp, but as long as they keep publishing articles like this, I think things will be OK.
Also on Bandcamp: The story behind Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s lost cassette debut, All Lights Fucked Up on the Hairy Amp Drooling, which was leaked onto YouTube back in February nearly three decades after its creation.
Last week, I wrote about the Gizmodo Media Group Union going on strike. Since then, the strike has been successful.
“After four days of picketing in the first open-ended strike in digital media, management has acknowledged the strength and demands of our members,” the WGA East/GMG Union said in a statement on Sunday. “To this end, G/O Media agreed to raise salary minimums, severance, and parental leave; maintain our health care while requiring it to be trans-inclusive; and ensure annual increases for our unit members.
Jake Meador writes about the value of cold weather.
The cold has a way of asserting itself to you, grabbing you by the collar and telling you that you are human, that you are flesh and bone living in a world outside your control and in which you are frequently at its mercy. Though this is simply the experience of being human, there are countless ways that our post-industrial world has equipped us to insulate ourselves from these things. A car with a heater in it means that in winter months I can not only transcend the human scale spatially, but I can also do it while never even experiencing the cold. My point here isn’t to say that these technologies are just inherently bad for this reason, but rather merely to note that taken in aggregate many of our technologies have had the effect of obscuring to us what it means to live in a body in a world. But when you allow yourself to be cold, you can’t really escape this blunt fact.
I didn’t have a car in college, so I walked everywhere. One winter morning, I was walking to campus — which was about a mile-and-a-half from my apartment — and it was so cold that I started crying, and the tears froze to my cheeks. And this, despite being as bundled up as possible.
I’ve never complained about the cold since. (And of course, as a dad, I’m contractually obligated to tell family members to put on a sweater whenever they complain about our house being too cold.)
Finally, Robert Rackley notices how upside down things have become.
I feel like those days of easy judgments are never coming back. Now everything takes so much discernment. Issues may have always been as complex as they are now, but they were simplified for our poor human brains. Low cognitive load used to be the social order of the day. Now we’re inundated with news that we often don’t know how to process. We still try to fit things in boxes, but they don't seem to settle as easily. Like a game of Tetris gone wrong, our pieces abut each other in strange angles with too many holes full of white space.
I’ve said this before, but in recent years, it’s been frustrating, confusing, and even heartbreaking to see so many religious leaders fall all over themselves to promote, praise, and defend a man who violates the very values to which they supposedly subscribe. And it’s not so much that I care who they vote for, as I care about what their hypocrisy does to the witness of the American Church at large.
From the Blog
Back in January, a YouTuber named Dan Olson posted an epic two-hour-long critique of NFTs and cryptocurrency. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I watched it, and wrote about the responses to Olson’s video as well as my own crypto-related concerns and skepticism.
Returning to Olson, I think his point here would be that newer systems like NFTs and crypto don’t automatically equate to better systems, especially if the newer systems end up promoting the same old power structures — albeit in a newer, cooler, tech-ier guise. And it would certainly be foolish to adopt something simply because it’s hyped by celebrities and influencers, it dominates Super Bowl airtime, or is otherwise surrounded by a distinct air of FOMO. (And the less said about certain cringe-inducing YouTube videos, the better.)
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