Fortnightly Culture Thread June 20, 2021
Posted by guestposter in Uncategorized.trackback
gregtimo proposed in comments recently this idea.
It’s a great idea. Currently culture is a bit strange, but people read, listen to music, watch television and film and so on – spread the net wide, sports, activities, interests, all relevant – and any pointers are always welcome. And it’s not just those areas but many more. Suggestions as to new or old things, events that might have been missed, literally anything. gregtimo for example asks…
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
I mbéal na ndaoine
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Halfway through Kim Stanley Robinson ‘New York, 2140’ and halfway through the weekend FT companies and markets pages, am finding it a bit hallucinatory switching between fiction and whatever the other thing is.
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I do like KSR’s work but I do find I have to be in a certain mood, willing to allow for lot’s of time and to really delve into the worlds he creates. I can imagine the FT/KSR back and forth must be very strange.
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Janet Malcolm, my favourite non-fiction writer/ biographer/ journalist, died last week. I’d recommend anything she published. Maybe her book about psychoanalysis, ‘The Impossible Profession’ or ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ would be a good place to start, but she covered all sorts of subjects, from Sylvia Plath to true crime to art, and ‘Reading Chekhov’, for example, is a wonderful short introduction to the writer.
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That’s a very interesting recommendation. I’ll definitely check that out.
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Almost finished Stephen Morris’s book on his time in Joy Division and it’s a great read in terms of just how normal they were and how at odds with that the mythos about them is. Though he does point to some interesting dynamics in the last few months of the band in terms of a slight dislocation between IC and the other three. It’s almost just hinted at, but suggests well I don’t know what.
A word for Truth Seekers on Amazon which was a neat Nick Frost vehicle cancelled after eight episodes. Funny creepy paranormal is the best I can describe it. I’m not a massive fan of Frost or Pegg’s schtick, when they’re good they’re good but sometimes feel a bit overrated. But this was good.
And also there’s an episode in Mythic Quest on Apple TV+ in Season Two which is similar to a retrospective one in Season One and is almost note perfect, way better than the regular show which has its moments but frankly I prefer Kim’s Convenience which I’m now on Season Two and has a lot more heart and soul (interestingly a bit of a controversy over representation in later seasons came out this last week or two).
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Vegging from social realism on MUBI I fell into Anime . Looks awful on the surface I know but some interesting Japanese anti-Fascist allegory in Metropolis and ‘Jin-Roh the Wolf Brigade’ which can be found around the internet
https://www.youtube.com/c/KaiserBeamz/videos
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No time for anything since the Euros started, and I’m only watching one match per day. Holiday season is almost here and the Cixin Liu trilogy is sitting there waiting for that…
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Someone has reorganized The Smashing Pumpkins Machina releases into something approaching a coherent whole and I have to recommend it to those SP fans out there.
Also working through one of those 1,001 albums to listen to do before you die and was disappointed to find I don’t actually like John Coltrane, surprised too. But then Count Bassie roared out of the wilderness to knock me off me feet, so swings and roundabouts.
Breakfast With TIffanys (the movie) will be 60 years old on October 5th.
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You don’t like John Coltrane? *faints*
I thought John Kelly had by now, by sheer repetition, trained everyone in the State to like John Coltrane. Fair play for powers of resistance.
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+1
Maybe I just need to listen to some other albums or it could be those Bix Beiderbecke TV shows in the 80s corrupted my fragile, eggshell mind? Always been a sucker for James Bolam and Barbara Flynn.
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James Bolam! Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.
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James Bolam, When the boat comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Boat_Comes_In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKqhdBDda6c&list=PLHLq3iGdSlcxqbX99ZAr-RbIcSCOT1s76 Well worth looking at
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Only When I laugh too
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+1 Watching Taggart and the Beiderbecke series reently was a shocking cultural contrast with today.
Even took a lash at Porridge to see if the young’un might like it and the casual homophobia was quite shocking and a massive turn off.
Good to be reminded of just how far we’ve come and I wonder about the contrast between GenX & Mill/Zoomer as compared to that between GenX & Boomer/Greatest. It seems that we are far closer to the younger cohorts in perspective than we were to our elders. But as you sagely warned earlier, freedom is a watchword for constant vigilance.
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Yeah, it’s amazing how things have changed – caught an early West Wing recently and that wouldn’t pass muster today for various reasons (and not just the tooth grinding liberalism), not least how few main women characters there were, etc. And I saw something else that was meant to be funny, like Porridge, but can’t remember what it was. Similar issues.
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+1 WbS and You Get Oot Me Head! I’m just rewatching TWW because problematic as it is now I still love Aaron Sorkin/Thomas Schlamme (well at least up until The Newsroom *barf*) and you are dead right, I saw some of the same things and myself and herself were like, wow that wouldn’t pass muster now.
Same with watching Pulp Fiction and all the N*s flying around. It’s a fair distance from a trio of paddies wandering through Dublin singing NWA songs in the early 90s.
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More woes for the Hugo Awards…. the 2021 administration team for the awards announced they’d resigned from DisCon III, the convention hosting the awards.
A meeting between several 2021 Hugo Awards nominees and the DisCon committee took place yesterday, in the hopes of resolving the dispute:
http://file770.com/progress-made-toward-resolving-issues-between-hugo-finalists-and-discon-iii/
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