Weekend Reads (Mar 2): The Cure, John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, Secret Societies,
Recommended weekend reading for March 2, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
One of my favorite songs of all time is The Cure’s “Charlotte Sometimes,” an otherworldly single originally released in 1981 as a follow-up to the Faith album. The song was inspired by Penelope Farmer’s 1969 novel of the same name, and Jude Rogers reflects on its influence on both The Cure and himself.
All versions of our lives leave things out — trauma, buried feelings and desires, rolling internal monologues — but in Charlotte, you hear that unease, one she articulates to the reader directly and powerfully. In The Cure’s take on her story, this unease becomes epic, shivery pop music, something to be sung along to and shared. For me, through this strange metamorphosis, Charlotte remains a conduit for things people want to do, things they want to say, for the confusion and sadness they feel, that still returns, as the little voices inside keep piping up in their older, wearier bodies.
Juliet Ivy and Beth Gibbons’ latest singles espouse a certain nihilistic impulse that I find rather compelling in this recent piece that I wrote for Christ and Pop Culture.
[Although] the Christian should undeniably reject Ivy’s assertion that we’re all just products of random chance who are “less like gods but more like plants / Who can’t stop making up reasons we’re alive,” she hits a nerve there, as well. Specifically, our desperate scramble to find some semblance of meaning in our lives, an impulse that often leads us to find solace in sex, relationships, money, careers, and material possessions — all good things, but hardly capable of providing any true sense of meaning or purpose.
Forty years ago, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s In 3-D cemented his status in the pop music pantheon thanks to his classic parodies of Michael Jackson (“Eat It”), Men Without Hats (“The Brady Bunch”), and The Police (“King of Suede”).
Unlike his first record, he limited use of the accordion, and — hoping to capitalize on his earlier MTV success — he added more visual, comedic elements to his songwriting. The end result was an album that transcended musical comedy to reach the realms of mainstream pop music and radio play, making “Weird Al” a household name to every kid with a boombox and enough money to afford the cassette tape.
Lofi Girl and Synthwave Boy are two incredibly popular music channels that play an never-ending stream of music that’s perfect for reading, studying, or just chilling out. And both channels have recently undergone some updates.
Lofi Girl has a new channel called “peaceful piano radio — music to focus/study to” where she sits in bed with her cat and continues to work, and Synthwave Boy has a stream called “dark ambient radio — music to escape/dream to.” Lofi Girl’s new feed shows her in two different scenes: one on a park bench and the other in bed while twinkling piano music plays. Meanwhile, Synthwave Boy also has a new animation showing him looking up into the night sky all alone as he listens to atmospheric music.
The channels are available on YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, and other streaming platforms.
When you think of classic filmmaking duos, a few names immediately come to mind. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Wes Anderson and Bill Murray. Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. But don’t forget about John Woo and Chow Yun-fat.
It can’t be said with the utmost certainty that Woo and Yun-fat are unquestionably the greatest director/star partnership there’s ever been. However, examining their lasting legacy across cinema as a whole — and the ripples it created — offers an indication of just how far-reaching their influence has been.
I watched the first 30 minutes or so of Woo’s The Killer several weeks ago and it was electrifying, particularly the boat chase sequence. As far as I’m concerned, few things are better than classic ’80s and ’90s Hong Kong action cinema.
Matt Zoller Seitz makes the case for streaming ads being way worse than traditional ads.
Are tech companies deliberately making the experience as bad as possible to get more money out of us? I wonder. When you log onto YouTube or similar services, the first thing you usually see is an ad promoting the ad-free version of the service. It has a feeling of a protection racket: If you don’t want us roughing up the art, pay us. They are already making money from ads, and from selling your personal information, but if you want even a smidgen of a work’s integrity to be preserved you have to pay extra.
Yet another reason to buy physical copies of your favorite movies, TV series, etc.
Speaking of physical media, the DVD/Blu-ray industry may be in decline as a whole, but anime DVDs are experiencing a new golden age.
Brands like Funimation, Viz Media, and Discotek are typically associated with newly remastered anime classics. And it’s through partnerships with postproduction companies like MediaOCD that they’re able to bring those types of projects to market as physical discs. According to MediaOCD founder and CEO Justin Sevakis, many niche publishers have found success by playing specifically to the small, passionate communities of fans who want to own a piece of the media they love. Though major studios don’t usually consider physical releases for projects that aren’t expected to move at least 50,000 units, according to Sevakis, “a good hit in the niche Blu-ray space will move something like 5,000.”
I bought a Blu-ray copy of Iria: Zeiram the Animation, one of my favorite OVA titles from the ’90s (read my review), and was very impressed with the crispness of Discotek’s remastered video.
Comic book artist Ramona Fradon, who worked on Aquaman and co-created Metamorpho, died earlier this month. She was 97 years old.
The news comes shortly after Fradon, who had remained active as an artist, continuing to take commissions from fans and create covers for DC, announced her retirement at the start of the year. Fradon was one of the few women active as an artist during the Golden Age of Comic Books, and was best known for her work at DC Comics and on Brenda Starr, Reporter, including creating the superheroes Aqualad, Fire, and Metamorpho.
Fradon also worked on Fantastic Four, Plastic Man, and Super Friends.
In this length interview with Zach Rabiroff, comics writer Ed Brubaker talks about his career and his latest work with artist Sean Phillips.
Their latest book, Where the Body Was, is both of a piece with their earlier works, and something grippingly, beautifully new. A spin on the old, and largely forgotten, series of mapback books published by Dell Books in the 1940s (which, as their name implies, were set entirely within the bounds of a map printed with a key on the book’s cover), it’s both a mystery revolving around a dead body and a runaway teen, and an autobiographical reminiscence of misspent California youth in the 1980s. It’s about drugs, and crime, death, and affairs, yes — but it’s also about growing up, and learning what you can control, what you can’t, and which of the two matters more.
I’m a big fan of Brubaker and Phillips’ work. Last year, I devoured their Reckless series — which chronicles the misadventures of a washed up and cynical P.I. as he delves beneath the sunny surface of early ’80s California — and I’ve got a stack of their other titles on my shelf, just waiting to be read.
A few weeks ago, I shared an article about some of the world’s more interesting secret societies. But what, exactly, do secret societies actually do? And are they really plotting world domination?
By the early 20th century, nearly all of America’s white wealthy elite belonged to one secret society or another. That fueled suspicions—still rampant today—that Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and other fraternal members have employed occult rituals to gain or maintain their power. But a collector named AR8Jason, who has posted on Collector Weekly’s Show & Tell, thinks the appeal of such clubs was much more simple than that.
“Some of these groups are simply the big-boy versions of the little boy clubs,” he says. “As a little boy, I lived in a small town in Oklahoma. There, my friends and I started a club. We had the secret handshake, the passwords. Then, I grew up and I found out that grown men were doing the same thing. They just had better uniforms.”
The next time your uncle starts spouting Freemason conspiracy theories over Thanksgiving dinner, you can send him this article. Of course, maybe this article is just telling us what they want us to think. How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Disney has spent untold millions on affecting cultural impact, which has led to the rise of adult Disney superfans.
Whether Disney adults are embarrassing or enchanting is largely a matter of opinion. What is missing from endless comment sections is the fact that they are a creation of the Walt Disney Company — a character constructed just as carefully as Elsa or Donald Duck. Disney does not hide its desire to create lifelong consumers. In 2011, Disney representatives visited new mothers in 580 maternity wards across the US, gifting them bodysuits and asking them to sign up for DisneyBaby.com. In 2022, the company announced plans to build residential “Storyliving” communities across America, with special neighbourhoods for those aged 55 and up.
What should sports fans do when their beloved players, coaches, and teams engage in behavior that’s beyond the pale, and why does it matter?
Those who dismiss fandom as trivial fail to recognise the importance of these ethical communities, the way they shape the identities of those involved, and the bonds of loyalty that are forged among their members. The diehard fans who could never consider withdrawing their support make a related error. These fans fail to recognise the importance of the values embodied by these communities. When a community strays too far from these values, staying true to the ethical values of the community — being a good fan — requires standing up for these values.
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