Showing My Cards: September 2024
MUSIC
Chart Courtesy of tapmusic dot net.
Earworm of the Month: NO HANDS by Joey Valence and Brae
Rap has gotten too serious nowadays! Everyone out here tryna be Ta-Nehsi Coates on their records. Hitting me with that eight minute childhood trauma joint with the jazz horn samples to trigger the Kendrick Lamar Pavlov reaction in white music critics. Still better than the oblique references to some social media feud on every god damn album. I don’t give a shit about what Freddie Gibbs said on IG live before getting banned for the sixth(?) time. I’m not parasocial like that! Knock it off!
Joey Valence and Brae are not “good” rappers in the strict mechanical sense of the term but they are undeniably having fun with the act of rapping and this counts for far more than one might be led to believe. Analyzing NO HANDS further beyond this essential quality would intellectualize things and therefore blunt the fun.
Bit of a month of new releases for me, besides. Maybe we write about one of those next month.
FILM
Eyeworm of the Month: Blood and Black Lace directed by Mario Bava
My movie intake has been restored to peak efficiency and I have been living full time in the Giallo Dimension. Criterion has offered me the all you can eat buffet with the Golden Corral chocolate fountain spitting out fake blood and I have been going back for seconds, thirds, fourths, etc.
I had a few possibilities I could pull from here. We have a Dario Argento offering in Deep Red and a Giallo-Police Procedural Hybrid directed by Sergio Leone cinematographer Massimo Dallamano. Both compelling, but I’m giving the nod to Blood and Black Lace. Just dripping with Italo-Sleaze and murderous intrigue. Maybe the ideal film for jumping someone into the Giallo lifestyle. Chekhov’s suit of armor looms large. Great gowns, beautiful gowns.
LITERATURE
Wordworm of the Month: The White Serpent by Tanith Lee
After two months of teasing, here it is. Prose good. Plotting good. Few, if any, notes. Tanith Lee is a tulpa conjured by the collective artistic angst of Goth Girls worldwide.
Think I realized about two thirds of the way through this one that I’m not a sword and sorcery guy, really. Genre fiction is, of course, far more than an escapist medium and The White Serpent certainly has a lot more going on than a cool fella with a sword and a destiny and a spooky albino lady. But the escapism, I think you’ll agree, is a necessary feature of genre fiction’s appeal. And if I’m escaping somewhere I’d prefer to escape somewhere with modern medicine that has abolished slavery and feudal codes.
Lucky for me, around the time I was reaching this epiphany was the time White Serpent decided to drop the set dressing and reveal that it’s actually a story about leaving your debauched early twenties, making peace with never being as famous, sexy, or fashionably deceased as you wanted to be in those years, and realizing that hitting your thirties is actually pretty comfy. Leaving your degen years behind is only a tragedy if you treat it as one.
VIDEO GAMES
Pixelworm of the Month: Red Dead Redemption 2 developed by Rockstar Games
Another tease finally paid off. My “Summer Gaming Project” which actually ended up being a mostly-September project is finally revealed. Sixty-ish hours in and I can comfortably declare it a superlative hunting, fishing, and poker simulator. There’s also a pretty great sad cowboy game attached to it!
Rockstar are one of those creative concerns whose reputation has diverged wildly from their actual output. Kind of like how corporate superhero action comedies are still advertised as originating in “the twisted mind of James Gunn.” Your parents likely still associate Rockstar with the golden age of Grand Theft Auto games. Difficult to articulate how scared people were of those games in our modern era of Chicago Drill Roblox RP servers for children. Safe to say America’s parents have waved the white flag in the war on digital violence.
Like any good transgressive artists, Rockstar seem to have lost interest in the dependable old diversions of digital strip clubs and shooting rampages. Red Dead 2 opts for a slower, more contemplative experience, emphasizing role playing, following the last days of a gang of career outlaws seeing their way of life become obsolete. The law is closing in, the wide open spaces are getting narrower all the time, the scores are fewer and further between. I really found myself taken with the character writing here and it confirmed for me that Rockstar are much better at this kind of straightforward genre stuff than they are at “satire.” Granted, that’s very difficult to do when you now make one game a decade, making basically any social commentary you attempt obsolete before the game even sees the light of day. But all that amounts to is a great argument to not do it. I’m gonna be heartbroken when GTA VI comes out packed to the gills with cryptocurrency jokes and TikTok dances named with vulgar puns.
BLOG BIZ
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it here: I’ve either gotta grow this thing or I gotta go do something else with my time. I have two short stories I want to try and place and a novel I could feasibly finish within the next few months. Letterboxd (where I actually am starting to see some growth) keeps me honest and in practice as far as writing exercises go. This doesn’t take much effort but it’s still a bit too long for my tastes. I wanna get back to essays but essays take time and editing, things that feel wasteful when no one reads this.