something queer going on

I almost forgot to try a new thing this week! But I remembered at the end of my weekend, and listened to Billy Bragg's 2021 album The Million Things That Never Happened last night.

I was a huge fan of Billy Bragg in the late 80s. (So much of a fan that a friend once somehow got me a pre-release bootleg cassette of Workers' Playtime so that I wouldn't miss the release while I was studying abroad. It turned out to be perfectly possible to buy the album in France, but I was happy to hear it early.)

Round about 1991's Don't Try This At Home, I started falling out of love with Bragg's music. The great strength of Bragg's early songwriting was his gift for story, and in particular for getting his political points across via story, without being obvious or preachy. And even the songs that were obvious were sharp and clever. But by the early 90s it felt like Bragg was giving in to two fatal impulses: didacticism/moral-drawing, and Big Anthems.

Around the same time I got very interested in Irish traditional music anyway, and stopped listening to rock much for several years. I came back to rock but never to Bragg.

He reappeared on my radar via Twitter, of all things. He's been doing very good work there (and offline) standing up for trans people and sex workers against the likes of J K Rowling. If you're on Twitter, he's worth following.

Anyway, I decided to give his latest a listen. I'm afraid I continue to like his politics better than his post-1980s music. Thematically there's a lot interesting going on: aging, the difficulty of being an older activist seeing young people take new approaches, the transformation of politics by social media, and some looks at depression that feel very personal. But the music and lyrics don't rise up to the themes. Even the best songs have moments of cringe-inducing banal lyrical obviousness, and there are musical choices I can't comprehend, such as the twangy country-and-western sound of a lot of the songs (it feels like musical cosplay) and the painful overuse of a background chorus of women's voices (especially on "Good Days and Bad Days," which is a quiet, affecting song about depression and, specifically, isolation right up until that chorus kicks in and ruins it).

The best song, by far, is the title track, which reflects on the bits of our lives we've lost to the COVID pandemic without ever saying those words. I also enjoyed "Reflections on the Mirth of Creativity," the most joyful song on the album as "The Million Things That Never Happened" is the most elegiac. "Reflections" is a jaunty, boppy look at a day when things go right for the first time in a long time, a feeling we could all use more of.

Some other songs are half-good. "Freedom Doesn't Come for Free," is a funny but over-obvious tribute to the (true) story of a bunch of libertarians who tried to create their own utopia in New Hampshire and predictably failed, while "Pass It On" begins with the aftermath of a parent's death and seems like it's going to be a successor to "The Million Things," but goes very wrong when it tries to be uplifting and anthemic. "Lonesome Ocean" is slight but nice, which is kind of a relief amidsst so many songs that want too badly to be important.

The truth is, a lot of musicians peak early and then decline. How they cope with that decline matters. I may not want to listen to much of his music, but I'm glad that Billy Bragg is still around and still (unlike my other 1980s idol, Morrissey) a person worth admiring.

I got lucky with the thirteenth new-to-me thing: Fashions of 1934, a just-barely-pre-Code movie starring William Powell as a charming con artist and Bette Davis as the artist and designer who helps him launch a new scheme: pirating Paris fashions as soon as they hit New York. The collapse of this plan sparks another new plan, and so on, until Powell finds himself the owner of a Paris fashion house and the crimes have expanded from piracy to forgery, blackmail, and several varieties of fraud. It's all very light-hearted, helped along by a brisk run time of 1:17 including a Busby Berkeley musical number. Lots of fun and some stunning 1930s fashions, too.

It's streaming (in the US) on HBO Max if you feel like watching it.

This week's new-to-me thing was Top Hat, the 1935 musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with support from Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick.

It's a great movie for the first half hour or so, but then it falters as the unbearable mistaken-identity plot overshadows everything, including (sadly) the dancing. It's got a lot of individually funny moments, though, as well as a gleeful let's-annoy-the-censors attitude that means a ton of queer coding and queer jokes. On the other side, some ethnic stereotyping and a big dose of "If a woman doesn't like you, keep bothering her and eventually she will."

Still, fun overall, and that first half hour is magic. I adore the first two-and-a-half dance sequences: there's Astaire's energetic hotel-room tap dance (with Rogers as the annoyed downstairs neighbor trying to sleep) and its soft-shoe coda, and for me the outstanding sequence, the gazebo dance where Rogers, in a riding coat and jodhpurs, mirrors Astaire right down to his masculine mannerisms. Obviously I have particular reasons for being entertained by this, but I still think it's great.

Back to music again this week, with Paul Simon's eponymous 1972 album.

Simon's Graceland is one of my favorite albums of all time, and I know and enjoy most of Paul Simon's hits, but he's never been an artist I seek out.

Paul Simon was maybe not the place for me to start, though it seems it's widely considered a classic. To me, it felt like an album of B-sides and experiments. A few songs hold together: "Peace Like a River," "Congratulations," and of course " Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," but otherwise it's all over the place and mostly feels unfinished. There's a lot of trying on of styles and personas (including entirely too much of Simon trying to sound like a Black blues singer, which was probably already weird in 1972 and has not aged well) and not much of the wry observational wit I associate with Simon.

On Spotify, the album contains a few bonus actual demo versions of its tracks. I only listened to the demo of "Me and Julio," but it was eye-opening. That demo version feels of a piece with the rest of the album, instead of being the absolute standout track. So I'll say: listening to Paul Simon is like reading a fic that isn't bad, but could have been great if it had been revised a couple more times.

My first DNF! I gritted my teeth through the first hour of Sam Mandes's 2022 film Empire of Light in a constant state of intolerable secondhand embarrassment for Olivia Coleman's character Hillary. ( The rest, slightly but not highly spoilery, is under the cut )

This week's new thing was the film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, written and directed by Taika Waititi. It's about a young New Zealand boy who's been in a series of foster homes, then finally finds one where he's happy--but some things go wrong, and he ends up on the run in the wilderness with his curmudgeonly foster-uncle. It's about one-third comedy, one-third heartwarming found-family drama, and one-third adventure/thriller as the two end up the subjects of a nation-wide manhunt.

Tonally and in certain details it has a lot in common with Our Flag Means Death, which makes me wonder how much influence Waititi had, behind the scenes, on OFMD's writing.

I don't have a ton to say about it, but it was mostly a lot of fun and the scenery was fantastic. I also enjoyed Taika's cameo and ( casting spoiler )

Below the cut are a couple of content notes I wanted to mention: ( some spoilers )

This week, it's an album: Bleed Out, by the Mountain Goats, from 2022.

Fair warning: my reaction to Mountain Goats songs is often, "That was awesome. What the hell was it about?" And I haven't read any reviews of this album.

But having said this, to me, Bleed Out feels like the flip side of 2020's Songs for Pierre Chuvin (an album I adore, which was one of very few new things I tried or enjoyed from 2020 to now). SfPC, inspired by historian Chuvin's work on pagan holdouts after the Christianization of Rome, was about resisting to the last breath, knowing you're going to lose, but resisting anyway. Mourning as resistance, resistance as mourning. Released after 4 years of Trump and the early months of the pandemic, it was--at least for me--the perfect music for that moment.

Bleed Out revisits those themes in light of the right-wing backlash since Biden's election. None of that's specifically mentioned, because (as the Mountain Goats tend to do) it's all filtered through pop culture tropes, specifically thriller/action movies. There are a lot of killers in these songs, a lot of people out for revenge of one kind or another, who feel lucky to have the opportunity to die or kill in a good cause. And the songs are nearly always from their point of view.

That's the tricky and brilliant thing. John Darnielle clearly wants to explore the rise of the violent neofascist right, but he's also thinking a lot about the common myth of redemptive violence, and how every political mass murderer is a hero in their own mind. I've been thinking a lot about the lure of violence myself lately; in the current atmosphere of attacks (journalistic, political, or literal) on trans (and other queer) people, some queer people have said, "We need to get armed and look out for ourselves, because we can't trust anybody else." The other day I saw a truck with a bumper sticker showing a trans flag; superimposed over the flag was an assault rifle, and the caption was "Defend Equality."

I get it. I feel it too. I'm not even sure it's wrong. But it scares the hell out of me.

The album ends on a quieter, but equally bleak, note with the title song "Bleed Out." It takes the big themes of the rest of the album and reworks them on a smaller scale, looking at failure, self-destructiveness, the inevitability of death, and the even greater inevitability of someday being forgotten. (I find this kind of thing weirdly comforting; you may not. I would recommend taking your emotional state into account before listening to this album.)

BTW, I know I've talked entirely about themes and not at all about music. That's because I know nothing about music! I can tell you that there's a "1970s thriller soundtrack" feel to a lot of the album, and some amazing trumpet (really) in "Extraction Point."

Tracks are on YouTube courtesy of Merge Records. Here's my favorite song from the album, "Hostages."

Just to be clear: I'm not necessarily going to write long detailed posts about everything, because I don't want this project to start feeling like homework when it's meant to be fun.

Anyway, this week's new thing was Glass Onion, the second Benoit Blanc movie after 2019's Knives Out (which, coincidentally, was the last movie I saw in the cinema before the pandemic took hold). I still haven't been back to the cinema; Glass Onion is streaming on Netflix in the US.

I was mostly unspoiled for it, which is a good state to be in for this movie. It was tremendous fun, and more than that, tremendously satisfying given the current state of . . . everything. In fact it ended up more timely than could have been planned for. But I think it will age well, even when its topical references are (let's hope) no longer topical, because it's got good bones. Not to mention good costumes.