Weekend Reads (Jul 16): “Stranger Things,” Roger Corman, “RoboCop,” James Webb Space Telescope, Johnny Cash
Recommended weekend reading material for July 16, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
If you’re like us and watched Stranger Things’ latest season with the subtitles on, then you probably saw some creative captions like “eldritch gurgling,” “tentacles undulating moistly,” and “tense music intensifies.” They’re all part of Netflix’s efforts to make their shows more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers — and deepen the show’s inherent nerdiness.
A creation like Vecna really allows me to get as florid and over the top as I want to because it’s a perfect mix of marriage of the material. “Eldritch” is a good word for [his powers], but also because it’s a reference to Dungeon & Dragons. There’s this warlock… I’m trying to figure out how nerdy I should get here. The warlock class, which is one of the classes you can play in D&D, their signature spell is “Eldritch blast,” and they are a class that has made a deal with an alien in power, whether it’s a demon or an Archfey, or whatever it is. I also thought it was a great word for the tactile sensation of it. The reference to making bargains with forbidden powers was a great nod too.
Related: A list of Stranger Things 4’s best descriptive captions.
Also related: We all know that Dungeons & Dragons is a big part of Stranger Things. But now you can play as your favorite Stranger Things character in your next D&D session. (I choose Steve “The Hair” Harrington.)
Also related, too: Netflix has always been about releasing shows all at once so that people can binge them. But why did they deviate from that strategy for Stranger Things’ fourth season? Matt Birchler thinks it might be a strategy to fight declining subscriptions. Via Frosted Echoes.
The Quietus certainly did it up for their mid-year “albums of the year” list. It’s about eclectic as you can get.
There is a running joke that gets posted in the comments on Facebooks or our mentions on Twitter whenever we post our albums of the year and half-year charts — or in my case as a Quietus editorial staff member, said directly to my face at family gatherings by snarky relatives — that we’re making up half of the acts that are included. I tend to take that as a compliment; the reason our lists contain some of the names that are not included in other publications, is that those names are rarely written about at all by other publications… yet many of the same publications will be writing extensively about these names in years to come. We hope that in the 100 records below you find something new that you love as much as we do, and that you continue to lend us your crucial support.
A recent Bandcamp feature profiles Caterina Barbieri, Steve Roach, Tangerine Dream, and several other electronic/ambient musicians who create “utopian” sounds.
Like much new technology, synthesizers come with the utopian promise that a better machine or improvements to an older one represent real progress in the course of human social history. That this is rarely true is not the machines’s fault; rather it’s the veil of materialism as amelioration that we tend to pull over our own eyes in lieu of actually fixing anything. Still, musicians like Vangelis have used synthesizers to create utopian sounds fit for a world where things aren’t just better — they might be perfect. This is both material and spiritual, bounded on one side by the formal precision and sleek elegance of Kraftwerk, and on the other by the transcendental soundscapes of krautrock bands like Ash Ra Tempel and CAN and the Berlin school of modular synthesizers, heavy sequencing, and large scale, cinematic pieces launched by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze.
Steve Roach is one of my favorite ambient musicians, thanks to classic albums like Structures From Silence and The Magnificent Void. As for Caterina Barbieri, her “Fantas” was one of my favorite songs from 2019, a true synthesizer music juggernaut. (Watch Barbieri discuss, then perform her music.)
Related: NPR’s Lewis Gordon reviews Caterina Barbieri’s new album, Spirit Exit, and how her music was impacted and influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Linda Holmes argues that quiet movie scenes can be just as powerful as those bolstered by loud, bombastic scores.
The last eight minutes or so of the 1974 film The Conversation — minutes that really put the “paranoid” in “paranoid thriller” — are also a fascinating study in scoring, in part because when the music cuts out, you hear small mechanical sounds like unscrewing screws and taking apart a phone. Tension with the sparest of scoring is certainly not gone, please don’t misunderstand. But it’s always interesting to return to it as a counterpoint to bombast — and I say that as a person who often loves bombast.
Speaking of movie scores, you may not know the name Monty Norman, but you know his work: he composed the James Bond theme, arguably the most iconic movie theme of all time.
For the main theme, the composer dusted off one of his previous compositions — Bad Sign Good Sign, from an abandoned production of VS Naipaul’s A House For Mr Biswas — and re-wrote it with the suave spy in mind.
After switching the main riff from a sitar to an electric guitar, Norman knew he had captured the essence of 007.
“His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it's all there in a few notes.,” he later recalled.
Norman died this past week at the age of 94.
Jim Vorel interviews the legendary director/producer Roger Corman about his storied career, favorite films, and the MCU.
In the years since he wrote his first script, 1953’s Hollywood Dragnet, the legendary B-movie director and producer has gone on to produce more than 500 projects in Hollywood, personally directing more than 50 of them. Renowned for his efficiency, business savvy and seemingly innate understanding of what audiences wanted to see, Corman’s filmography is a jaw-dropping menagerie of vintage westerns, monster movies, science fiction stories, dramas and more, a showcase for the way he managed to reinvent himself time and time again as the consummate Hollywood survivalist. Even now, at 96, he can’t bring himself to simply sit back and rest on his laurels — he refers to himself as “semi-retired,” but his eyes light up as he describes his ambitions for future projects. This is not a man with an ounce of quit in him.
Sam Greenspan explains why RoboCop might be the best-written movie of all time. Yes, that RoboCop.
[W]hile the near-perfect symmetry was an accident, the underlying elegance of the RoboCop script was not. As much as a movie like RoboCop feels like it could’ve been a monkeys-on-typewriters screenplay, it was meticulously plotted. So meticulously, in fact, it turned out to be one of the best structured screenplays of, well, the entire history of cinema.
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched last December, and spent several months getting into location. NASA finally released the first images captured with the telescope this week, and they are stunning, especially its first “deep field” image, which captures some of the faintest objects ever observed in the universe.
Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies, including some seen when the universe was less than a billion years old. This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours — achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks. And this is only the beginning. Researchers will continue to use Webb to take longer exposures, revealing more of our vast universe.
Psalm 19:1-4, indeed.
Related: Just how much better are the Webb Telescope’s images compared to the Hubble Telescope’s images? Waaay better.
Also related: Whenever I look at “deep field” images like the Webb Telescope’s, it raises the same question every time: Why is the universe so… extravagant?
Scientists have identified a new dinosaur species, Meraxes gigas, that looks like the famous Tyrannosaurus rex thanks to its big head and tiny arms, but is a completely new and unrelated species.
Although similar-looking to a T. rex, the researchers contend that Meraxes come from a different group of dinosaurs called the Carcharodontosauridae which lived around 20 million years prior during the Early Cretaceous period. Previously, predators of that size with large heads, long legs and small arms had mostly been attributed to the same group as the Tyrannosaurus. But the discovery of the similar characteristics in an unrelated species millions of years apart shows that both creatures evolved independently to embody the same physical trait. Scientists have various ideas as to why this happened.
My Christ and Pop Culture colleague Alisa Ruddell has written a very clever — and convicting — article about smartphones in the style of C.S. Lewis’ classic The Screwtape Letters.
You say she has become aware that her phone is not an untrammeled good but rather an insoluble problem that requires her to make concessions she’d rather not make. Encourage her to think that the blame lies entirely on her own personal weakness and lack of self-control. Don’t let her suspect the systemic nature of it, that hoards of programmers are actively catechizing her in mini-habits for their benefit at her expense, and that this fight is a thousand to one. She participates as one of five billion branches in that tangled vine of the web, and despite her apparent sense of agency, she is actually nudged, redirected, pushed, and pulled in ways entirely invisible to her. As long as she thinks she is using the internet, all is well. But the moment she suspects it is using her, the game is up.
There’s a lot of debate going on right now concerning masculinity, with some challenging “traditional” notions of masculinity while others promote a vision of manliness that embraces “toughness.” Maybe both sides should listen to some Johnny Cash.
Cash throws a wrench into the politics of American manhood. He is not tame or domesticated — after all, he cultivated an outlaw image. But he also didn’t toe the party line, and by contemporary definitions, he would likely have been considered woke. His music reflects a deep compassion for those on the margins. It’s almost as if knowing his own faults made him slow to judge the struggles of others.
From the Blog
The Macross franchise is one of the most beloved and influential anime franchises of all time. Unfortunately, decades of lawsuits and legal issues have prevented it from being legally distributed outside of Japan. A recent agreement, however, means that various Macross titles are finally coming to the States.
But if you don’t know your VF-1S from your VF-25F, or your Vajra from your Varauta, then here’s an overview of the Macross saga and its various installments over the last four decades, from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross to the more recent Macross Frontier and Macross Delta.
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