Showing My Cards: June 2024
I have entered midsummer in a transitional period. I’m in the midst of moving apartments and dealing with the headaches any of us will encounter when attempting to box up our lives and move the contents therein from one spot to the next. Rest assured, however, that I’m as gluttonous as ever at the media trough. In fact, I may be more so. Let’s dive in.
MUSIC
Chart Courtesy of tapmusic dot net.
Earworm of the Month: Bobby Digital in Stereo by RZA
I had a bit of a Wu Tang thing going on in the early weeks of June, mostly born from a desire to dig more into the individual members' solo work. I didn’t end up following through as much as I would have liked, as interstate driving had me reverting to some tried and true listening to eat up the long and lonely miles.
I’ll say though that one record which made an impression was RZA’s Bobby Digital in Stereo. Not because it’s good. If I want a good RZA project I have like five or six I can throw on (GFK’s Supreme Clientele is a personal favorite). That’s not to say Bobby Digital is particularly bad, either (at least not bad enough to get mad about). No, Bobby Digital is charming, and that charm overrides any dry, numbered scale critical assessment given the correct mood.
It’s such a “no one can tell me no” type project. Delusional star energy sweats from every pore of this thing. RZA cannot rap and yet he insists on trying. It’s a concept album where the concept is “what if I was a cool guy and women loved me?”
The really fucked up thing is that absent the marble-mouthed delivery from the RZA and the C-tier bars from his more talented lyricist buddies, the production is actually pretty great. An instrumentals-only cut could become a mainstay for me.
MISC. THOUGHTS:
Oh boy! Here I go Challenging again! The Boys Noize mix is even more perfect listening than the virgin OST.
You can kind of track my relative mental health by looking for certain albums on this thing. Crash soundtrack on there? Rough sledding (blame the move). Fat of the Land? Means I’m trying to lift my mood after acknowledging things are Getting Bad™. Love that happy little crab. OM Namah Narayana, OM Namah Narayana.
FILM
Eyeworm of the Month: Tenebre, directed by Dario Argento
I literally had this one half-written for the May edition before I realized that I had watched it on the first day of June. Oh well! Running with it!
The sleazy genre film boom of the 70s and 80s in Italy drew a large number of foreign actors into Italian productions. These films generally offered starring roles to once-bankable American or British talent fallen on hard times and in need of top billing to raise their profiles. The supporting cast are usually a real rag-tag international coalition; Germans? Swiss? Austrians? Italian locals? The director or producer’s teen daughters? All on the table, usually getting knife-murdered by a man standing over the table, wearing leather gloves, while a separate man rushing on dirty European cocaine plays whack-a-mole on a synthesizer. It’s called Giallo and I love it.
Now, with a veritable UN Task Force of talent, you must be wondering how they decided what language everyone on set would speak? The answer is; they didn’t. On a typical Italian production of this era, all actors present would act in their native language and then all dialog would be dubbed over in post. The effect is more subtle than you may imagine, but becomes unmissable once you know what you’re looking at and looking for.
Brian Eno once said: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.” A similar thing (I find) happens with Italian films. While eminently lampoonable, the Tower of Babel approach to filmmaking on the cheap contributes to the subtle, almost dreamlike unreality of Italian films of this era. It’s a vital component of that stylistic and emotional space they inhabit, what I call The Giallo Dimension. Initially off-putting for their violence and sleaze, Italian films of this era become genuine comfort food in a shockingly short time-span
So what about Tenebre? Not telling. Go take a vacation in the Giallo Dimension and see for yourself.
MISC. THOUGHTS:
Bit of a month of odd double features for me. Packing for a move goes more smoothly with background noise and so I threw on some insubstantial Italian genre slop. Movies bad, vibes good.
I will say tho, that last one; Inferno and Phase IV, woof. Wild energies. Shoutout to the homie Alex for dialing that one up for me.
LITERATURE
Wordworm of the Month: Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Another month, another gripping nonfiction tome pulled (sans dust jacket) from the jaws of a nearby little free library. You’ll have to forgive me for this failure to expand my horizons. I had a two-book month again and my only other option for this award was Alan Dean Foster’s Bloodhype, which, you wanna know what I think of Bloodhype? Here:
Fuck Bloodhype!
Anyway, you ever think about the Mormons? I do. I have to pass their Temple during regular highway trips. Appropriately enough for an American religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is perhaps one of the greatest marketing successes in human history. Turning into the skid really did do wonders for them. From separatist, polygamist, millenarians on the brink of open war with the US government to the wacky magic underwear entrepreneur religion within a century. There’s lessons there for all of us in learning to laugh at ourselves. You know you can see a production of the parodic musical Book of Mormon, penned by the South Park guys in Salt Lake City sponsored by the LDS Church? “Haha, yeah,” they seemingly say, “we had a bit of a polygamy phase! We didn’t change our minds about black people until like the 80s! Aw, well, we all gotta learn and grow, right?” It’s that disarming earnesty in ironically detached times that defines the character of the modern Mormon. Wholesome success mindset guys and Live-Laugh-Love women operating an economic perpetual motion machine built off selling each other multi-level marketing schemes. It’s very American, very White, and seemingly wholly divorced from the fire and brimstone revival origins which drove Joseph Smith to (allegedly) unearth a new testament of Jesus Christ from a hill in upstate New York.
Of course, as when any subculture moves towards the mainstream, certain folks are gonna dig in and refuse to yield to the normalizing forces which drove them to the fringe in the first place. Krakauer’s book weaves together a gripping true crime narrative, a history of the Mormon faith, and a broad survey of the fundamentalist apostates that pursue their interpretation of the true faith in barren, isolated little theocracies across our continent. It’s got like 100 more pages than Bloodhype and I got through it in about the same amount of time. Again, fuck Bloodhype.
VIDEO GAMES
Pixelworm of the Month: N/A
Didn’t finish any games this month, didn’t involve myself enough in any of them to write about em. Once again, blame the move. Will return next month.
BLOG BIZ
So here’s the deal:
I have two completed essays in the can, ready to go whenever. I haven’t posted them here because I’d like to get them published elsewhere. The simple fact of the matter is that without traditional social media channels, it is next to impossible to grow this blog without placing work in more widely-read outlets. The best way to get a platform is to make use of someone else’s platform.
As such, Showing My Cards will likely comprise the majority of my output on brainworm for the time being. S’what it is.
Nicely done! Always enjoy your recommendations!