I made a playlist for the music I’ll be sharing here.
This Place Rules (Andrew Callaghan, 2022)
Unsettling to watch this documentary about how Americans will do anything (including overthrow the government) for clout a mere month after I decide to establish a new sub-genre of my self to blog about.
A Short Story (Bi Gan, 2022)
This kind of thing gets me so pumped. I’ll be on the edge of my seat, completely amped for the magical realist vagaries of an adult fairy tale.
There were practical effects in this which, despite giving a low-budget impression, I still could not fathom how they were done. What makes the hat seem to float like that at the end? I don’t know!
Is it a commercial? Film Inquiry says it was “commissioned by a cat supply company.” I’m losing my mind.
The African Desperate (Martine Syms, 2022)
This is a horror movie for introverts. Absolutely too much socializing in one day.
Impromptu (James Lapine, 1991)
As planned (it’s important, in life, to follow through on plans) I am “getting into” the George Sand-Frederic Chopin-Franz Liszt love triangle. This was my entry point. It was sublime. A rom com about how relationships are definitely bad for you. The penultimate scene: an anguished “She’ll kill him!” And reader, she did. (Or did she? It’s highly disputed! I’m sure, by watching more Chopin rom coms, I will get to the bottom of it…)
I will continue down this path.
No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022)
A perfect film—one of the best of 2022. Panahi was imprisoned after making it.
Unlikely as it seems, this lengthy plot description applies equally well to either No Bears or Stephen Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022):
A filmmaker protagonist encounters two moral lessons about the destructive power of film: one, the photographic medium can reveal hidden truths with devastating consequences for all concerned; two, film can create an alternate reality which does psychic damage to its subjects.
No idea what it means but… on some level, on the mythopoetic plane, they are the same movie?
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Crime begets crime. It’s because Marion Crane has committed the crime of theft that she is adrift, alone, unaccounted for—and thus vulnerable to violence. (Norman Bates is diligent in his reconnaissance. He asks just enough questions to be certain that no one knows where Marion is. He notes that her signature in the guest book does not match the name she gave him in conversation.) But the original crime, the first domino to fall, isn’t Marion’s theft. It’s tax fraud. The guy whose money she steals, when he’s grotesquely coming on to her, indicates to Marion, so briefly you might miss it, that the only reason he has such a large amount of cash on hand is because he doesn’t “report” his financial dealings. So it’s tax fraud which creates the conditions for theft: the mere existence of so much unaccounted for cash is what makes theft possible—just as later on Marion’s presence as an unaccounted for woman makes her murder possible. And similarly to how Norman Bates will later on clue in to details in Marion’s backstory which alert him to the fact that he could very well get away with killing her, so too is Marion, as she listens to the grotesque rich man boast, aware that she might very well get away with stealing the criminal sum of cash, since its owner would be loath to report it missing to the authorities—which is of course exactly the scenario that plays out. A private investigator is hired, the police are not involved. Crime begets crime, secrecy begets secrecy, and progenitor of it all, the crime to birth all crimes, all perversions of the human spirit: tax fraud.
The Pale Blue Eye (Scott Cooper, 2022)
This is by no means a good movie but Harry Melling is mesmerizing as Edgar Allan Poe.
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Proto-Tár.
Mother Earth’s Plantasia: warm earth music for plants and the people who love them (Morton Garson, 1976)
Surely a simple case of amor fati, but I think this is the best music to listen to while coming down with covid. Like the plants, you will receive powerful energies.
Random Thoughts (Faye Wong, 1994) and Sky (Faye Wong, 1994)
These are impeccable vibes. Been listening to both albums because they both have covers of “Dreams” by The Cranberries on them (one in Mandarin, one in Cantonese).
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (Arctic Monkeys, 2018) and The Car (Arctic Monkeys, 2022)
Ben told me he thought I’d be into this sound because it’s “sleazy sci-fi lounge music.” He wasn’t wrong about me.
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 — The Leningrad Symphony (1942)
One day when I had covid I was really fatigued but wanted to take a shower so I put on the Leningrad Symphony because I had seen a tweet (which I cannot find and possibly hallucinated) that said when the Nazis at the Siege of Leningrad heard the symphony coming over the wall or across no-man’s land or whatever (my grasp of the geography of the siege is shaky), they realized they could never take Leningrad, because it was a city of heroes. I am not going to factcheck this because focusing on the mantra “they can never take a city of heroes” really helped me get through that shower.
Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes (Mary Lou Willims, 1964)
Incredibly rad. An “avant-garde jazz mass” for a Peruvian saint.
Music for the Masses (Depeche Mode, 1987)
Like any good philistine a lot of the time I end up listening to something not even because I read about it in a tweet, but because I heard it on my teevee (c.f. “Dreams” by the Cranberries) and so I’ve been listening to this album because of how “Never Let Me Down Again” played at the end of episode one of The Last of Us (Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, 2023). Eighties means trouble =’(
Stuff You Missed in History Class — “The Invention of the Raincoat” (Tracy B. Wilson and Holly Frey, 2023)
I’ve learned a lot of important stuff from these ladies over the years but this episode is exquisitely inessential.
Tetris on my phone (Alexey Pajitnov, 1984)
They say it makes you calm, because there are no words.
An Excruciatingly Deep Dive into the Avatar Theme Park (Jenny Nicholson, 2018)
After I mentioned Kevin Perjurer’s youtube documentary Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History in last month’s Look & Listen Report, a reader (an old friend, hi Jennifer!) referred me to Jenny Nicholson’s Evermore: The Theme Park That Wasn’t, another famed youtube video about a theme park. I went to look at it when I was couch-bound with covid but was like, oh surely I don’t have time for a four-hour video, so I scrolled through Nicholson’s channel and… watched probably four different hour-long videos. This was my favorite one. It is… also about a theme park. I’m really into theme park videos I guess. (I have been to a theme park one time.) I will watch the four-hour one, almost certainly.
The cat art of Louis Wain (1860-1939)
Been thinking of this because of a tweet too. I spent a lot of time on twitter when I was sick I guess. Glad I’m better now and can stop looking at twitter forever! Ha ha. Ha.
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