Dangerous & Lazy

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

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 features of the comic cannot be directly translated to a TV show; the challenge of adaptation is to find analogous modes of expression which work with the TV form. The show is so bland because it never finds such modes of expression, and indeed it rarely tries.

Recent

What do workers control when they control the means of production?

I’ve been reading Jean-Louis Cohen’s Building a New World: Amerikanizm in Soviet Architecture, and one of the striking features of the early chapters is the enthusiastic reception of Taylorism in Russia. That Taylorism was popular among reforming liberals in the pre-revolutionary period is not surprising, as Taylorism is a feature of advanced industrialism these reformers […]

Austerity TV

I hadn’t heard of Yellowjackets until I saw people sharing the Vox post calling it “prestige Pretty Little Liars“. If by that they mean it’s not as good as Pretty Little Liars, I agree. But Pretty Little Liars is tremendous, a classic of 00s TV, a Klute for the early smartphone era, etc., so there’s […]

The official chart of 2021

My favourite songs of 2021. Check out the gratuitously long Spotify playlist of basically everything I liked this year (with the best first, more or less), or carry on reading for some explanation of why I liked them.

Trump’s neoliberal melodrama

I recently noticed Elisabeth Anker’s Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom on my bookshelf, and that’s a title that resonates at the moment, as the emotional register of politics ramps up, especially in the US. But the book, although advancing a theory of melodrama as a general political mode, is primarily about […]

Better things aren’t possible

A recent (recent in actual time, if not in internet time) review of Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now has led to a steady stream of moderate leftists acting scandalized at Lewis’s suggestion that abolition of the family should be at the centre of left-wing politics. This response, when it isn’t just incredulous scoffing, generally emphasizes […]

Snippets

This is very cute, but I also feel like there’s an extraordinary amount of gender going on here.

Breadrich by International AnthemStill not sure if Anna Butterss or Mary Halvorson wins the award for most brain melting jazz guitar of 2024.Jlin also a competitor in at least one of these categories (as it turns out I like her work better when it veers away from strict footwork and more towards jazz), as is [...]

Lost by Daniel HerskedalDaniel Herskedal put out two albums this year, A Single Sunbeam and Call for Winter II: Resonance, both excellent, but while listening to them I discovered I’d missed his 2022 album with Emilie Nicolas, Out of the Fog, which I think is really fabulous - Herskedal’s lyrical tuba really lends itself to [...]

Piri & Tommy adding some new strings to their bow with their new EP, with intelligent jazzy bedroom D&B. This general vibe (e.g. Memphis LK, Coupdekat) remains one of my favourite things in music at the moment, especially Erika de Casier’s delicate, floaty beats.Some somewhat parallel evolution in k-pop (NewJeans) and k-pop adjacent (Katseye) 2-step [...]

A vintage year for stupid drum and bass, although surprisingly Nia Archive’s Silence is Loud is not as stupid as her previous work promised, opting instead for a 90s sound that’s a fascinating excavation of the indie-dance interstices of britpop.Tiesto, Rudimental and Absolutely’s “Waterslides”, on the other hand, is stupider than mere mortal minds can [...]