Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Sensational communism

I generally find out about TV shows either through links to thinkpieces posted on Twitter, or through gifsets posted on Tumblr. I suspect the gifsets have tended to be a more reliable guide to good shows than the thinkpieces, a suspicion that was reinforced when I finally got round to watching Sense8 recently. As the gifsets promised, it’s great, but it’s great in a particular way – formally challenging, conceptually fascinating – that I’m surprised I didn’t see more thinkpieces about it. Read more↴

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Serious cynicism

Blunt Talk and You’re the Worst are both shows where the premise depends on our cynicism about redemption narratives. Blunt Talk begins with Patrick Stewart’s character Walter Blunt standing on top of a police car drunkenly declaiming Shakespeare. This sets up a parody of the now-familiar PR-ed apology and public appeal for forgiveness, including a stirring avowal […]

Lost Girl, camp, and form

Canada’s premiere supernatural drama Lost Girl came to an end last week, more, it has to be said, with a whimper than a bang. The last episode was the resolution of a storyline involving the mysterious dark plots of Bo’s dad (who turned out to be Hades), a storyline that the show has been vaguely teasing […]

Aufhebung

Talking to a friend a while ago, he expressed surprise when I said that I found, in sad music, not tears and catharsis, but an odd sort of strength, or even cheer. “But listen to Miles Davis playing Concierto de Aranjuez,” he said; “how can you not feel the bleakness, the absolute despair in that […]

New TV from 2015

I started writing my weekly music posts to generate some #content, or, to put it another way, to try and get back into the habit of posting here with something low stakes where I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about running out of stuff to write about (because there’s always new music being released). I […]

How not to adapt a comic

The Sandman is a pretty mediocre TV show, but what’s more interesting is that this is due in large part to it being a terrible comics adaptation. The reason The Sandman is such a good comic is that it exploits the specific possibilities of comics as a form. Because they’re specific to the form, these […]

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The Official Chart for January 2017

So, maybe I’ll continue to do this regular music post thing, but once a month? And rather than struggling to find something to say about every track I hear that I like, I’ll just write about the tracks I know I’ve got something to say about, and stuff the rest on a Spotify playlist (and […]

The Official Charts of 2016

In no particular order, and somewhat arbitrarily selected from a bunch of other great stuff that came out in 2016 (and also collected in a Spotify play list) Top tracks Karó, “Silhouette.” Florrie, “Real Love.” A bass line like a thunderstorm. Carly Rae Jepsen, “Fever.” “My breath was lost when you said ‘friends’ / well that […]

The official chart for August 21

New Britney! When I first heard “Do You Wanna Come Over?“, I thought “Britney doing Girls Aloud,” although actually the guitars are more “Sweet Dreams my LA Ex”; either way, this has something of the sound of mid-2000s British pop, the golden age of popism, a sound Britney didn’t embrace at the time (though there is the […]

The Official Chart for August 14

Last two weekends I was in France, which is why I’ve skipped a couple of my regular music posts. While I was there, I read the French edition of Elle, which seemed keen to undermine the stereotype that French people are fashionable, by advocating “urban pirate” as a key look for Autumn; and to undermine stereotypes about French […]

The Official Chart for July 24

Doing this weekly music post thing has encouraged me to seek out more new music, which is good, but is a problem when a record comes along that requires more than a week to really get to grips with. Such a record is Róisín Murphy’s new album Take Her up to Monto, one of the strangest records […]

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