Weekend Reads: Slowdive, Huey Lewis, Korean Cinema, NFL Graphics, "The Good Place" & More
Recommended weekend reading material for February 15, 2020.
Here are some of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable articles, blog posts, and reviews that I’ve read over the last week or so. They span a variety of topics, but regardless, I hope they’ll make for some good weekend reading material.
One of my favorite albums, Slowdive’s Pygmalion, turns 25 this month, and The Quietus’ Joe Banks reflects on the album’s legacy.
So what kind of record is Pygmalion, and why are we talking about it 25 years on? It’s clear that the 5EP, with its electronica underpinning, had a big impact on Slowdive’s way of working. But instead of pursuing a chilled techno sound, they went in the opposite direction, stripping back their wall of noise to reveal its shimmering, ghostly outline underneath. In doing so, they created a minimalist post rock masterpiece that may have struggled to be heard in 1995 — blotted out by both the brouhaha of Britpop and the baggage of their own reputation — but sounds today like a visionary blueprint for generations of bands to come.
Related: My review of Pygmalion.
Also from The Quietus, Lee Brackstone looks at the napalm bomb that was Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR on that album’s 20th anniversary.
XTRMNTR belongs in an industrial tradition and its classic tracks betray a coherent if deeply bleak vision. It is a record which seeks to unsettle, and its target is the soporific, self-indulgent 90s. This is rock & roll as apocalypse not salvation. The album represents an awakening but only in the way we wake from a bender to serve notice of recrimination on ourselves. This is an album of fear and (self)-loathing in Camden Town.
Back in the ‘80s, Huey Lewis and the News dominated the charts with singles like “Heart and Soul,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” and “If This Is It.” But now, Lewis lives on a Montana ranch where he tries to figure out a solution to his deafness.
It’s particularly cruel that music sounds like distortion to him, because the albums he made with the News were meticulous pop-rock, with the smoothest harmonies this side of the Beach Boys. It’s difficult to imagine from today’s perspective, but after the release of Sports in 1983, Huey was ubiquitous and well-liked. He had every subset of the 1980s American teenager on his side, like he was Ferris Bueller’s cool uncle. To know Huey Lewis and the News was to love them, whatever else you naturally enjoyed.
Parasite was the first Korean film to be nominated — and win — a “Best Picture” Oscar, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Birth.Movies.Death has compiled a list of more noteworthy Korean films.
It took the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences their entire existence to learn what the world already knew: cinema from South Korea is among the finest ever made. For decades and decades, South Korea has produced films that thrilled us, scared us, made us laugh and made us cry in ways we kept with us our entire lives.
Related: I’ve tweeted a thread of my own Korean film recommendations.
If you watched the recent Super Bowl, you might’ve noticed that Fox’s broadcast featured some newfangled onscreen graphics.
Fox reinvented its on-air look to thrive in a world where, for many fans, to watch the game means both to view the game and to share the game — viewing and sharing are two components of one fluid, multi-screen experience. And the sharing happens on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Stories, where the swipe-able convenience of vertical video reigns supreme. If today’s youth insist on squeezing football into a tall, skinny window, blurring and distorting the game with their giddy cinematography, the network wants its visual branding to emerge intact, or at least reasonably coherent.
Via Daring Fireball.
For much of its four seasons, The Good Place was one of the best comedies on TV. But K. B. Hoyle explores why its finale proved underwhelming.
I was never under any delusion that the writers of The Good Place were going to take a sharp turn into Christian philosophy in the last season, and certainly not in the finale, but I watched with interest to see how they would have their four human characters “fix” the afterlife. What the final several episodes ended up being were an interesting study in a self-proving philosophy of why a man-made eternity doesn’t work.
I know I’ve been critical of certain aspects of Netflix’s The Witcher, but its sword duels are on point (npi).
I suspect 15-year-old Greg would have loved it! 40-something Greg … I can appreciate what they are trying to do — make Geralt’s fighting unusual and dynamic — and at least the fights are fast-paced and competent. Which is more than I can be said for Game of Thrones, which, for as slick as its battle scenes could be, managed to produce some of the worst dueling scenes I think I have ever seen.
Even if you’re not a font nerd, you might’ve noticed that the Gotham typeface is everywhere.
Gotham is a typeface first designed in 2000 for GQ and released for public use in 2002. An abbreviated list of where it has appeared includes: Coke bottles; Twitter; Spotify; Netflix; Saks; New York University; The Tribeca Film Festival; TV shows including CONAN and Saturday Night Live; movies including Inception, Moneyball, The Lovely Bones, and Moonlight. If the advertisements in the train stations and bus stops in your city don’t use Gotham, they probably use a Gotham look-alike.
David French reflects on the moral compromises that Trump-supporting pro-life Christians are making these days.
I’ve been pro-life from the moment I understood what abortion was. I formed a pro-life club at Harvard Law School that existed for two decades. I’ve worked for the most powerful pro-life legal organizations in America, and I’ve represented pro-life students (pro bono) in cases from coast-to-coast. I’ve helped raise millions of dollars for pro-life causes. I’ve never voted for a pro-choice politician, and I don’t ever intend to. But in more than three decades of pro-life work, I’ve understood two things quite clearly — the defense of the unborn does not justify sin, and the battle for the unborn is far more spiritual and cultural than it is legal and political.
Miguel Delaney explains, in great detail, why modern soccer/football is broken.
[F]ootball’s embrace of unregulated hyper-capitalism has created a growing financial disparity that is now destroying the inherent unpredictability of the sport. This is not just the big clubs often winning, as has been the case since time immemorial. It is that a small group of super-wealthy clubs are now so financially insulated that they are winning more games than ever before, by more goals than ever before, to break more records than ever before. They are stretching the game in a way that has caused the entire sport to transform and shift.
And finally, I posted a deep dive into the Silver Surfer cartoon that ran on the Fox Kids Network back in 1998.
With its portentous dialog, trippy visuals, cosmos-spanning storylines, and philosophizing on topics like war, slavery, imperialism, and mass media, Silver Surfer got especially heady for a ‘90s Saturday morning cartoon. Having finally seen the series for myself, I can’t help admiring the chutzpah of everyone involved in its production.
In addition to being a fun thing to write about my favorite comic superhero, I’m especially proud of this post because it’s the 6,000th post on Opus. I don’t usually track blogging milestones, but that one’s pretty significant.
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