Showing My Cards: May 2024

A new month has begun and that means it is time once again to show my cards. Once again, this will be an after-action report on the things I’ve read, played, watched, and listened to, with positions of honor saved for those which occupied the lion’s share of my headspace rather than that which I thought was “best.” (Unless, of course, the two overlap, Google “foreshadowing.”)

MUSIC

Chart Courtesy of tapmusic dot net. 

Earworm of the Month: Challengers (Original Score) - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

After two months of weekends dominated by apartment hunting, I decided I’d take my birthday for a bit of dedicated “me time.” Me time meant a chemically enhanced double feature, the first leg of which was a matinee showing of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers at a nearby AMC. I’m a bit of a Luca novice, if I’m honest. Call me By Your Name and Bones and All both slipped past me upon their respective releases and I had half-decided to avoid Challengers as a silent gesture of annoyance at how many times I had to see that trailer with the Rhianna song in it. 

Then someone pointed out to me that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were doing the soundtrack and, well, that changed things. Rebalanced the whole equation. I did not go to that AMC for Luca or Zendaya or either of the boys with haircuts and muscles and sportswear (whose names escape me). I went for Trent and Atticus and got exactly what I was after. 

I’m so fucking ready for techno to be back. We need it. All the (male) rappers are getting old and boring. Rock is so dead it’s passing into myth. Young people don’t drink enough anymore for country to hold cultural purchase. Techno is the genre we both need and deserve for the modern cultural moment of taking uppers to stare at the computer for eight hours and then going home to take a weed gummy and disassociate until bedtime. The raw electric pulse of the Uniqlo/Lululemon/Adidas/Lacoste Imperium.

FILM

Eyeworm of the Month: Targets, directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Another good month at the movies. Already bragged about my birthday double feature. I’ve also reached 500 Letterboxd reviews with a special screening of RoboCop by the good folks at Shaolin Jazz. A live DJ re-scoring a film I’d seen many times before gave it a new texture that I really appreciated. The addition of an eclectic mix of Detroit-based beats (mostly J. Dilla) to the decidedly non-hip-hop futurism of RoboCop makes for an engaging contrast. 

I’m gonna give the nod to the best thing I saw this month. Targets is like the penicillin of American film. It’s unambiguously great and achieved that greatness entirely through serendipity. Roger Corman, the god of budget filmmaking, had a long-running habit of reusing footage and re-cutting existing films to make new ones. As it happened, he approached Peter Bogdanovich with a proposition. Corman was owed two days of work by horror movie icon Boris Karloff. The idea was to get the most movie he possibly could out of two days of work from Karloff, and supplement it with b-roll from The Terror, an earlier Corman/Karloff collaboration shot in similarly ad-hoc fashion (also featuring a young Jack Nicholson! Good rule of thumb: if someone in Hollywood rocks, the odds are good that Roger Corman gave them their first job).

To say the resulting film was a success would be a gross understatement. Targets is a beautiful, prismatic diamond of a film. A breezy hangout movie, an edge of your seat thriller, and a ripped from the headlines horror story all in one. Bogdanovich zeroes in on American masculinity, gun culture, celebrity culture, social decay, spiritual flatness, and the changing of eras in the mid 20th century. His commentary is incisive and efficient, necessitated by an artful ninety minute runtime. It deserves a spot in the pantheon of art attempting to diagnose the sickness of the American spirit.

I really cannot overstate the amount of ass this thing kicks. Seek it out immediately.

LITERATURE

Wordworm of the Month: Generation Kill by Evan Wright

Said I needed to read more last month and I’ll be damned if I didn’t figure out a system! That’s what life is about sometimes, figuring out systems. I’ve landed on a winner where I take one paperback with me wherever I go (within reason) and leave one larger, hardcover volume by my bedside. This has led to me finishing three books this month. Namely an essay collection entitled Nobody Knows My Name by the inimitable James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (as seen on HBO starring one of the Skarsgards and Ziggy from The Wire).

With respect to Mr. Baldwin (who sure as hell doesn’t need any respect from me) I’m giving the nod to Generation Kill. It’s both more recent in my memory and less intimidating. My white ass offering even jocular, admiring, “fuck him up Socrates” commentary on Baldwin would be like running stark naked through a field of land mines. The best case scenario is embarrassment. As for ol Kurt Jr, well… stay tuned.

I suppose polishing off Wright’s front-row account of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq was about the only thing I did to celebrate Memorial Day. In addition to just being a generally entertaining road narrative starring a Recon Marine platoon full of caustic freaks tweaking on pre-workout, pissing where they please, and shooting everything that comes within thirty meters. Generation Kill feels like a cultural innoculation against all the War on Terror-era media where Mark Wahlberg (or a more affordable replacement) sheds a single tear before capping a brown fifteen year old who was about to shoot a death ray at a UNICEF convoy. The “shoot and cry” genre has received what I consider to be an appropriate level of critique and analysis in modern media criticism circles. But you get a renewed revulsion at how perverse the origins of such War on Terror tearjerkers really are when you go right to the primary sources. 

Generation Kill’s Recon Marines are a real cultural cross section of 00s masculinity, informed by the vulgar wave of the 90s. Modern war has left the earnestness and stoicism of Jimmy Stewarts, John Waynes, and Lee Marvins in the past. Your sergeant is an antisocial gamer addicted to getting speeding tickets on his illegally modified motorcycle. You will love him when he rewards you with with a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and a copy of Juggs (to be shared amongst the platoon) after several weeks spent getting foot fungus in your hazmat suit and driving directly into ambushes so your CO who refers to himself in the third person can get kudos from certified anti-Trump Man of Integrity General James “Mad Dog” Mattis. The slurs are flying in proportion to the bullets. America’s war machine runs on junk food, Ripped Fuel, and combat-adjacent onanism. I wasn’t expecting this to be as much of a story about class conflict within the military as it is. Enlisted men from the slacker/dirtbag/immigrant/minority underclasses consistently chafe against the indecision, incompetence, and psychopathy of college educated officers. 

The important thing to remember about the American Armed Forces in the modern era is that they are a volunteer, professional force. That indicates a level of being “down for it” among the enlisted men that may prove off-putting to the layperson. That eagerness to do violence among the rank and file makes it more difficult for we, the civilian public, to pretend that we’re oh-so-very reluctant to make war. So we just ignore it. We’re insulated from the human consequences of war and can therefore buy our troop-branded apparel and lawn ornaments while refusing to make eye contact with homeless veterans. Evan Wright himself has said that the American public is disconnected from the people who fight their wars. He’s right. The average American doesn’t wanna know how good we are at teaching a young man to kill.

VIDEO GAMES

Pixelworm of the Month: Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Firaxis Games

I’ve had this problem in gaming for the past few years. I play too many games that can theoretically be played infinitely. (Do not ever ask how many hours I have accrued over the past several years of Football Manager releases, I will invoke the castle doctrine.) This is partially the curse of the dedicated strategy fan. Games where you move little guys around on a map and click menus to make things happen tend to present a near infinity of choices just out of the box, and that’s before you even get into fan-created content. 

I’ve been endeavoring to play games with actual endings where the credits roll and you can safely go play something else. I suppose I backslid a bit this month. Civilization is decidedly not that. It is perhaps the ur-”just one more turn and then I’ll go to bed, oh man it’s 2 AM” franchise. 

Civ is at its core a board game. You take the reins of a historical culture and people (represented by some caricatured representation of a recognizable historical figure) and guide them from the stone age into the future. You found cities, build things, develop your nation, and try to win. “Winning” can mean military conquest, cultural ascendance, religious harmony, diplomatic cooperation, or just loading everyone onto a big rocket and going to colonize outer space. 

Civ VI was released in 2016 and has received two expansions with a smattering of smaller, sundry premium updates, mostly new leaders with new playstyles. I’ll say I’d consider the expansions pretty essential. It speaks to a recurring problem in these sorts of feature-rich games. New releases end up feeling barren in comparison to the games they’re meant to be replacing. Indeed, many of my friends still prefer Civ V over its successor. For my part, I can’t go back. 

Having said that, I do understand my friends’ perspective. It can be argued that the more reactive, optimization heavy gameplay of VI is a detriment to the lizard-brained, dopamine-dispensing zen of slamming the end turn button for hours on end. That hypnotic effect is central to the franchise’s appeal. The other thing with VI, and this obviously a matter of taste, is that its art style for the Civ leaders sucks and I hate it. V had a nice middle ground where world historical figures were appropriately video-gamey but still realistic in modeling and animation. By contrast, everyone in VI looks like they walked out of a Despicable Me movie. 

BLOG BIZ

The Taco Bell Cantina made me depressed. No, not in the way you’re thinking.