Weekend Reads (Oct 8): James Bond, Loretta Lynn (RIP), “Taste the Biscuit,” Gen X Politics
Recommended weekend reading material for October 8, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
60 years ago this week, the very first James Bond movie, Dr. No, arrived in theaters. But at the time, studio execs had little faith that Sean Connery would succeed in the role.
James Bond movies began by breaking the rules. On October 5, 1962, Dr. No hit theaters, and overnight, an entirely new genre of action movies was born. Sixty years later, the impact of the very first James Bond motion picture is obviously huge, and the success of the film is all because of Dr. No’s cast, specifically, its breakout leading man, Sean Connery. But, before Dr. No hit the theaters, American reps for the studio United Artists, had little faith in Connery. Why would American moviegoers bother seeing an action thriller starring a “limey truck driver.” But, Connery’s mix of working-class vibes and superspy class created something the world had never seen before — a dangerous anti-hero who redefined the concept of cool.
Related: With Daniel Craig’s retirement from the role, there’s been a lot of discussion swirling around the next 007. However, the producers have assured fans that the next Bond won’t be a young ‘un.
Country music icon Loretta Lynn died earlier this week. She was 90 years old.
In the 1960s, Lynn’s trailblazing country chart-toppers established the model of the female country star as an independent woman who stands her ground against cheating men and no-good homewreckers with unflagging, good-natured spirit. Lynn adapted her autobiographical 1970 hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter” into a bestselling biography, which was later made into an Oscar-winning film, introducing the story of a hardscrabble upbringing in Depression-era Kentucky that Lynn celebrated to people who never even listened to country music.
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Lynn wrote most of her hits, and as the first female singer to make her name as a songwriter in Nashville, she paved the way for modern artists like Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift.
In her recently released memoir, Lush’s Miki Berenyi reflects on her childhood abuse, her musical career, and her hatred of Britpop.
In bands, she found the constant company she craved; with her image, she made a feature of her innate difference: “If I was stared at, I could tell myself they were reacting to the clothes, the hair, the makeup. The stuff I’d put on deliberately,” she writes. “Not the girl I couldn’t help being inside the disguise.” She passes gruelling US tours in a state of wonder, sitting upfront with the driver all night on the bus. She is endlessly thrilled by the famous people she meets, even when she’s quite famous herself. But Britpop felt mean, like the playground of one of her many primary schools. And it homogenised what was interesting about British music in the years leading up to it, she now thinks.
I love Lush’s music, particularly their early shoegaze material, as typified by a song like “Sweetness and Light,” “For Love,” and “Superblast!”
Relevant’s Jesse Carey ranks Christian music’s most insane album art, including such gems as Mike Crain’s God’s Power, The Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real, and Erick and Beverly Massegee’s Amen.
In the world of Christian music, where many artists used the cover to blend spiritual metaphors with airbrushed supernatural entities, inspired outfits and creative font selections, there is truly something that modern music fans are missing.
Interestingly, Carey picked the “tamer” version of P.O.D.’s Snuff the Punk. The artwork on the original 1994 release was some decidedly more violent and less overtly spiritual. And I’m a little surprised that albums from the likes of Blackhouse, Mortification, and Vengeance Rising didn’t make the list.
On a related note, what was it with Christian singers and puppets and ventriloquist dummies? Do any of my fellow ‘80s church kids remember Little Marcy?
Alissa Wilkinson has noticed a recent trend in movies: star-studded casts seem even more star-studded than usual.
For audiences, the effect is more than just amusement. You get the sense, watching a movie like Amsterdam, that this whole world is familiar to you. You belong there because you know these people. It’s comforting, soothing, fun to watch and rewatch. You know, going in, you’re in good hands.
But I can’t shake the idea that the plethora of cast-of-thousands movies right now is the effect in a gargantuan cause-and-effect relationship. And I think the cause is Avengers: Endgame.
I think we can all agree that internet memes are pretty weird and random; therein lies part of their charm. And then there’s “Taste the Biscuit” by Toasters ‘N’ Moose.
Shaw, an accomplished pianist and composer with a long-running jazz trio based in the Bay Area, celebrated the resurgence of “Taste the Biscuit” on his Twitter account. “It’s been a fun and weird (in a good way) journey!” he tells me. “I love the life, er… lives the song has had and continues to have. Who knew when we were making our little zero-budget film that something like this would happen? Although I do think the film is a little (hey, it’s a succinct 61 minutes long) gem, and I wish more folks could check it out.”
“I kinda love that it’s having a resurgence yet again, and that so many of the comments are similar to the ones in 2010,” Piper says. “What’s also cool is what people are doing with it now that we have more media and more tools to play with. Some of the ones we’ve seen are pretty incredible.” Besides the “silver ladies,” she enjoys musicians adding their own instrumentation and harmonies to her seminal version of “Taste the Biscuit.”
The song originates from a 2010 mockumentary titled Chickens in the Shadows, which you can watch below.
Edd Kimber won the first season of the The Great British Baking Show, and shares what it was like during the beloved series’ first season, and how its jocular and drama-free tone evolved.
Overall that first weekend left me with two very clear memories. It was freezing cold and rained most of the time and we were in a tent with no heating, so we would turn the ovens on, open the door and huddle in front of them to keep ourselves warm, we also drank a ridiculous amount of tea. The second thing was my admiration for Sue and Mel. There was, of course, a million jokes but also a huge amount of support. The duo would walk around the tent, chatting and cracking jokes, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. They always seemed to be there for a supportive hug and with a few words of encouragement right when it was most needed. But what most people may not realise is just how much they set the tone of the show.
Related: Despite that drama-free tone, The Great British Baking Show’s current season has been criticized for perpetuating racist stereotypes in a recent “Mexican week” episode.
Alan Moore has written some of the most acclaimed comics of all time, including Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, and From Hell. But now he’s “definitely” done with comics altogether.
[H]e now looks with dismay on the way the superhero genre in which he once worked has eaten the culture. “Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys — and it was always boys — of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s — to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional — when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying “Comics Have Grown Up.” I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”
Unlike many other countries around the world, Generation X has yet to make a significant dent in America’s political leadership.
The oldest members of their group could have first been running for president back in 2000, when the dot-com bubble had yet to burst and September 11 was just a date on the calendar. The boomers George W. Bush and Al Gore had something to say about that, and there’s hardly been much of a serious peep from Gen X in the five ensuing presidential races. The nation isn’t in the final two years of the Martin O’Malley administration. President Beto O’Rourke isn’t about to launch his White House reelection campaign.
But “it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen,” Sen. Cory Booker, a 53-year old who made his own ill-fated 2020 presidential bid, told me in a conversation about when he thought a fellow Gen Xer might finally make it to the White House.
“Unless, of course,” the New Jersey Democrat added, with a reference to the 40-year-old transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, “we get a millennial president.”
William Shatner — Captain James T. Kirk himself — went into space last year on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle, but the experience was not what he expected.
I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold… all I saw was death.
Shatner experienced what author Frank White called the “Overview Effect,” that is, an “appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.”
From the Blog
AI-powered art generators like Stable Diffusion and Dreambooth allow users to create stunning artwork with just a few keywords, but only because they’re copying existing artists’ styles.
For all of its impressive-ness, AI-generated art seems like yet another example of developers and engineers assuming a “values neutral” stance and racing ahead without pausing to consider the legal and ethical implications of their work. To paraphrase the eminent Dr. Ian Malcolm, they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
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