Weekend Reads (Jun 10): The Cure, Disney Censorship, Mid-Year Lists, Alien Life
Recommended weekend reading material for June 10, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Earlier this week, I fulfilled a lifelong dream and finally saw The Cure (my favorite band of all time) in concert.
In preparation for finally seeing The Cure live and in person, I watched a clip of them performing The Head on the Door’s “Six Different Ways” from an earlier date on the “Shows of a Lost World” tour. Out of curiosity, I then pulled up a clip of them performing that same song, only way back in 1986. Robert Smith’s famously tousled hair might be gray and thinning these days, but his voice? The last 37 years have donenothing to diminish it. It’s still as unique, weird, and achingly beautiful as ever, something that was impressed upon me time and again during a three-hour set that featured songs spanning The Cure’s massive catalog.
Now, on to the rest of the links…
Disney has apparently removed a scene from The French Connection that contains a racist slur, leaving fans and critics very upset and accusing Disney of historical revisionism.
Those watching William Friedkin’s 1971 drama on US streaming platform Criterion Channel were left confused by a clunky edit during a scene roughly 10 minutes into the film.
The sequence, set in the New York police precinct, features a conversation between detectives “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider), in which the former utters a racial slur.
The six-second sequence has been completely removed, and the edited version instead cuts to midway through the pair’s conversation.
This touches on some fascinating issues. For starters, it should be a reminder that while digital copies of your favorite movies are convenient to watch, they can always be altered and changed. If that notion bothers you, then you should probably buy physical copies on Blu-ray/DVD as a backup.
Second, it’s an example of the incredible power of media consolidation. The French Connection was originally released by 20th Century Fox, which Disney now owns after merging with Fox in 2017. It stands to reason, then, that other 20th Century Fox titles could receive similar “updates.”
And finally, some will no doubt wonder what’s the big deal about not getting to see Gene Hackman say the “N word.” But censoring films after the fact, without any attention paid to the film’s historical and cultural context — yes, even with regard to racial slurs — is troubling. Putting a card before the film warning of potentially offensive content is one thing; that puts the onus on viewers to decide for themselves. But removing those scenes without any apparent regard for the filmmaker’s intentions? That’s something else entirely.
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video promise us access to a nigh-infinite selection of movies and TV series. But the truth is that a number of classic TV series are nowhere to be found on any streaming service.
Seminal series including Smart, Laverne & Shirley, Mork and Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati and Homicide: Life on the Street aren’t on any major paid or free subscription service. Some aren’t even available to purchase digitally. It’s a darn shame, not just for the older generations who grew up watching these shows and want to revisit them but for younger ones who never get to experience the drama and hilarity. Just as our cultural memory grows longer, thanks to newfound accessibility, series left out will fade further from the view of new generations who consume their art by algorithm.
Consider this yet another argument for purchasing your favorite titles on physical media. In other words, hold on tight to those Mork and Mindy DVDs.
Dave Holmes has re-discovered the joys of mid-’90s rock, or as he calls it, IPA-core.
There is something in the air about that medium-mope, wounded-dude mid-’90s music moment: Counting Crows, Collective Soul, Soul Asylum. Somehow I’m hearing it more now than in 1996, my glory days of wearing a Kangol hat backward and trying to use hype as an adjective. The soul-patched soundtrack of alternative radio, a revolution that was ignited at least partly by our disdain for classic rock, has become our new classic rock.
Although he disliked the term, pianist George Winston became one of the leading figures of the “New Age” music genre. He died this week after a long battle with cancer. He was 73 years old.
Born in 1949 in Hart, Michigan, Winston was raised in Montana, Mississippi, and Florida. He cited the New Orleans pianists James Booker, Henry Butler, and Professor Longhair as early foundational influences; and, in the early 1970s, he discovered the stride pianists Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. Winston released his first solo piano album, Piano Solos, on John Fahey’s Takoma label.
After moving to the Bay Area and signing with William Ackerman’s Windham Hill label, Winston had his breakout with three platinum albums: Autumn, Winter Into Spring, and December (which went platinum three times over). He followed up that run with a collaboration with Meryl Streep, accompanying the actress’ reading of children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit on piano.
We’re about half-way through the year, so Pitchfork discusses the year’s best and worst songs (so far).
Our weekly podcast includes in-depth analysis of the music we find extraordinary, exciting, and just plain terrible. This week Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel hosts Associate Editor Cat Zhang and Features Editor Ryan Dombal for a mid-year chat about some of our favorite tracks of 2023 — by PinkPantheress and Ice Spice, TisaKorean, Christine and the Queens, and more — along with the megahits we can’t escape, for better or worse.
Meanwhile, the Treble staff have posted their list of the year’s best albums (so far). For instance, Depeche Mode’s Memento Mori:
After the death of longtime Depeche Mode member Andy Fletcher, Dave Gahan and Martin Gore recapture the kind of gripping emotional investment that the group last captured on 1997’s Ultra. Memento Mori is one of the strongest Depeche Mode albums in years, channeling their ’90s-era heights (which were underrated heights, to be sure), but rather than the drug-fueled introspection of the time, they offer a meditation on grief. It’s channelled into the grooves and melodies of these songs, breathing life into Gahan’s baritone croon while Gore picks up his guitar again. Dark and urgent, Memento Mori is a reminder of the kind of power that Depeche Mode first showcased more than three decades ago.
And over on IndieWire, they’ve identified the year’s best movies. For instance, John Wick: Chapter 4:
The John Wick franchise has evolved from a small-scale tale of revenge for the death of a wife and the killing of a do to a globe-trotting epic that spans continents, dozens of characters, and an intricate mythology. In its fourth chapter, director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves bring this franchise back to its roots while expanding the world and the story to bigger and bolder places. The result is not only the best movie in the franchise, but also one of the best American action movies since George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
Related: My exploration into the inner workings of the John Wick universe.
Polygon has a bunch of mid-year coverage, including 2023’s best TV series (Abbott Elementary FTW!), best sci-fi and fantasy novels, and best video game… cats.
The initial appeal of Saltsea Chronicles, like so many cozy games, is the vibe. Die Gute Fabrik has put a great deal of effort into the ways the cats swat at butterflies and coyly curl their tails. Objectives (little dots hovering over certain people and places) will guide you to the narratively critical bits, but they’re just one of many things to do. You can try to solve local problems, though some are unsolvable. Or you can just collect stickers for your almanac. Either way, people rest around Los Gatos, waiting to chat, though who you spark up conversation with is entirely up to you.
A military whistleblower recently claimed that the U.S. government possesses alien craft (or vehicles of “non-human origin,” as he puts it. But how might scientists tell the world if they discovered proof of alien life?
As confident as astrobiologists may be that their quest will soon bear fruit, however, they are far less certain of how to communicate that success if and when it occurs. How should they go about informing the world that we are truly not alone in this universe — especially given their field’s long, troubled history of dubious claims and false alarms? They have been fooled before, after all.
All this talk of alien life inevitably bumps up against the Fermi paradox, which attempts to reconcile “the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.” But it’s possible that advanced alien civilizations (if they exist) are either hiding or simply extinct.
From the Blog
30 years ago this week, Projekt Records released one of my favorite albums of all time: Soulwhirlingsomewhere’s Eating the Sea. Even after three decades, the album remains a darkwave classic.
Every music obsessive, I think, is on a continual lookout for another one of those albums. That is, an album that appears at just the right time to fill a previously unknown void in your life. An album that says things to you that you never knew you needed to hear. An album that helps life make just a little more sense than it did before you started listening. An album that opens you up to new ways of thinking about music, life, and existence.
As soon as I pressed “Play,” I knew Eating the Sea was one of those albums. The languid and wistful synth tones on “One of These Days Some Eyes Will Be Opened” immediately set the mood: listening to Eating the Sea would be a supremely personal experience unlike any other album I owned, one best-suited for solitary late-night listening sessions.
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