Weekend Reads (March 7): Punk Rock, Georges Méliès, ’90s Websites, Make America Hot Again
Recommended weekend reading material for March 7, 2026.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend. Note: Due to some upcoming travel, there will be no “Weekend Reads” newsletter for March 14, 2026.
It’s common knowledge that 1977 was the year that punk rock broke out in the U.K. thanks to albums like The Clash’s self-titled debut and Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. However, Jim Allen argues that 1976 was the true beginning of British punk rock.
Britpunk had been spreading its message one gig at a time since at least November 1975, when the Sex Pistols debuted at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. But it was on Oct. 22, 1976 that the roar of real U.K. punk in all its reckless, rabid glory was heard on record for the first time. Stiff Records, barely two months old at the time, pushed beyond the barroom-brawl soundtracks of pub stalwarts like the Tyla Gang and Roogalator to venture into uncharted territory with the savage assault of the Damned’s single, “New Rose,” produced by former Brinsley Schwarz member Nick Lowe.
Faster, louder, and more in-your-face than anything before it, “New Rose” was the snarl that set an entire generation on a new course.
Watch the music video for The Damned’s “New Rose”:
Related: Nicolas Finet and Thierry Lamy’s Punk Rock in Comics offers an excellent and engaging overview of punk rock’s history, featuring icons like The Clash and The Ramones as well as lesser known artists, and explores its various influences and offshoots. Highly recommended.
Longtime Opus readers know that one of my all-time favorite bands in Starflyer 59. Daria Slikker recently interviewed frontman Jason Martin concerning the band’s three-decade-long existence, and in particular, the band’s sophomore album, Gold.
I remember finishing it and thinking that I ruined it, and didn’t really listen to it for years because I didn’t like the way it turned out. When I finally went back and listened to it years later it struck me as an odd record — it took on its own life in a way. I would not have thought then that that record would define the band as long as it has, but I’m good with that. I've made my peace with that album.
Related: Gold is probably my favorite Starflyer 59 album, and back in 2015, I wrote about it for the “Chrindie ’95” project. “Gold features some of Martin’s mopiest, and therefore, most soulful songwriting ever.”
Also related: All of my Starflyer 59-related posts.
Over on Treble, Adam Blyweiss digs deep into the “goth-dancefloor shoegaze” of London’s Curve.
I don’t remember which of their releases really did it for me — Doppelganger, the EPs collected on Pubic Fruit, or even a deep cut included on an edition of the British CD magazine Volume, imported by the music store at the college across the street from mine. But I know Curve’s origins coincided with certain musical sounds starting to blend and breed curious offshoots at the start of the 1990s, especially in the UK.
Post-punk was morphing into early “college” and “alternative” rock, including the shimmering reverberations of shoegaze and dream-pop. All of these were also folding back in new wave’s synths and digitized percussion that had taken off-ramps to an array of other club sounds like industrial, rap, and house music. The largely electronic rave movement then extended out from that branch of music’s family tree, as would its intertwined Madchester scene that often relied on more traditional band structures. Acidic keyboards, wiggly earworms, hypnotic grooves, and remixes were everywhere, with Curve deftly navigating these paths as they converged and diverged.
Confession time: Curve has always been one of those bands that I know I should be more familiar with than I actually am. After all, “goth-dancefloor shoegaze” is squarely in my wheelhouse. Thus, I’ve taken Blyweiss’s article as inspiration to address this particular gap in my musical experience.
Social media and streaming music habits are changing the definition of what it means to be a music fan, which makes it increasingly difficult for promoters to know which artists to book — and artists to gauge their success.
This is the biggest open secret currently rotting the music industry from the inside out: The total decoupling of “consumption” from “fandom.”
I made the same mistake when I used to book acts for a music festival. High follower counts, mid-level monthly listeners, yet no fans.
We are building an entire ecosystem — festivals, advances, touring routes, and brand deals — on a foundation of fake math.
Although it’s currently a juggernaut, Spotify’s days could be numbered.
I’m going to take the diplomatic hat off here and say with brutal honesty: Basically everybody in the music business hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It’s a platform that sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain a healthy profit margin.
The streaming business model is fundamentally broken. And eventually, its demise will become more and more obvious to recognize. I’ll break down exactly why the [Digital Service Provider] era is coming to a grinding halt, why the major labels are quietly terrified, and why the artists who don’t pivot now are going to go down with the ship.
Georges Méliès is one of cinema’s original pioneers, and is best known for 1902’s A Trip to the Moon. The Library of Congress has just restored one of his long-lost silent films, which depicts what might be cinema’s very first robot.
The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l'Automate — Gugusse and the Automaton — was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely. The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ website, depicts a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer.
[…]
“Today, many of us are worried about AI and robots,” said archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. “Well, people were thinking about robots in 1897. Very little is new.”
As the article notes, the word “robot” didn’t exist until Karel Čapek coined the term in his 1921 sci-fi play R.U.R..
With its Shakespeare-inspired storyline and award-winning special effects, Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet is one of the all-time great sci-fi films. The film turned 70 this week, so now’s a good time to re-share my friend Geoffrey’s review, which he wrote for the film’s 60th anniversary.
Forbidden Planet was thrilling for its day, and while we may expect better special effects and more sustained action sequences in today’s sci-fi fare, the film still holds up pretty well. Indeed, on several levels, it was downright innovative by mid-20th century standards. More than that, however, Forbidden Planet delivered a solemn, countercultural warning about humanity’s interactions with technology, a warning that’s no less relevant to 21st century audiences.
If you were seeking a sublime experience, the schlocky exploitation films of Jess Franco would probably be one of the last places you’d look. But to his surprise, that’s precisely where Morgan Meis encountered something otherworldly.
Consider the opening credits of Vampyros Lesbos. A large commercial vessel sits in the water of an industrial port somewhere along the coast of Turkey, perhaps the port of Istanbul. It is early morning, or late evening. Funky music plays, drums and sweeping electric organ and the indecipherable noises of what could be a garbled radio transmission. We just see the boat in the water with a light mist over the whole scene and a sort of blood orange sun hovering in the misty sky like something you’d expect on a canvas by J. M. W. Turner. Jess Franco does capture something in that moment, a mood, a certain mystery and foreboding and longing that is almost perfect. The feeling is soon dashed completely by the ridiculous sexy-vampire-lesbian scene that comes next. But for a brief moment, Jess was onto something.
You might know his name, but if you’ve ever watched classic Disney animation, then you’ve definitely seen his work. Animation Obsessive writes about the remarkable life and career of Iwao Takamoto.
Takamoto entered Disney’s studio in 1945. You find his touch in films like Sleeping Beauty and Lady and the Tramp — he led “quality control” on Princess Aurora and Lady. Among other things, he guided and polished the spaghetti kiss. “Iwao was the only one who could’ve been entrusted in doing that scene as perfectly as it was done,” said Willie Ito, an artist assigned to the same shot.
A Disney career was a big turn in Takamoto’s life. Shortly before he joined, he’d been in the camps.
When it was released in 1995, the Batman Forever website represented a distinct evolution in web design.
[I]n the first half of 1995 we saw a few websites emerge that had a pronounced visual flair — these sites felt like something to be experienced, rather than simply a collection of pages to read.
The Batman Forever site was one of these new experiences. It was designed by three creatives at Grey Entertainment, a New York advertising agency. One of them, Jeffrey Zeldman, went on to become one of the Web’s most influential web designers. The other two, Alec Pollak and Steve McCarron, later had successful careers in digital marketing. But in early 1995, when they were tasked with creating a website for an upcoming movie sequel, they were all inexperienced in web design.
I discovered the web in the spring of 1995, and was immediately hooked. Of course, I loved surfing the web, though I don’t remember ever visiting the Batman Forever website. More importantly, I loved figuring out how websites were built. When I got my first HTML tutorial in the summer of 1995, that sealed the deal. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and I never looked back.
The burgeoning “Make America Hot Again” movement is trying to entice young women back into the Republican party even as it wrestles with different ideas of what it means to be conservative and female.
For a decade, something particular to Donald Trump — his agenda, his vibe — has united America’s libertines and religious traditionalists under the same red cap. But now that coalition is cracking. Young women drove Democratic wins in three states earlier this month; and as Republicans argue over how to win back female voters, MAGA women are engaged in an existential clash about what, exactly, it means to be a conservative woman in 2025.
For Debono, the battle line is drawn between the irreverent, socially libertarian types like herself and the religious conservatives — or, to use Debono’s shorthand, the “city Republicans” versus the “tradwives.” This particular conflict, which plays out largely on social media, can feel mesmerizingly petty. But to those involved, the stakes are high. If the right wing doesn’t lighten up soon, Debono told me, “they’re going to push every woman out of the Republican Party.”
For the longest time, if you wanted to maintain some privacy online, you could just post things under a pseudonym. But LLMs have the potential to completely upend that.
Researchers from ETH Zurich, MATS, and Anthropic published a paper this month showing that LLM agents can deanonymize pseudonymous online accounts at scale, automatically, for $1–$4 per person — matching what would take a skilled human investigator hours. The classical methods that made this hard before? Near-zero success. The LLM pipeline? Up to 68% recall at 90% precision.
Via TLDR Dev.
I used to post under various pseudonyms. But then I realized that given the fact that my name is all over the web thanks to Opus, pseudonyms probably didn’t matter all that much. But as the article points out, this has greater ramifications than just uncovering who posted what on Reddit. Governments could use this technology to uncover dissidents, journalists, and activists, while companies could use it to target even more advertising at consumers.
In short, be smart when you’re online and never assume privacy or confidentiality.
From the Blog
A recent tweet (that’s since been deleted) from AI investor C.C. Gong sang the praises of AI-generated music, and in the process, revealed a pretty bleak view of art and creativity.
Her tweet, however, is framed entirely by solipsism and convenience. Music is no longer about discovering connections with other humans and experiencing the world through their unique perspectives. It’s no longer about finding beauty, inspiration, and connection in someone else’s unique artistic expression. It’s no longer about experiencing something that takes you out of yourself. Rather, it’s about curving inwards and reinforcing your own tastes and preferences in as easy and convenient a manner as possible (e.g., “anyone can create exactly what they want to hear instantly”).
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