Some families take copious photographs of their holiday dinners. My family doesn’t. I only realized this on the way home from Delaware, after three days of maximum sloth; before jumping into the jeep, to commemorate our first Thanksgiving since I got married, I snapped four of the worst selfies ever taken of a family, eyes all pointed in different directions. You will never see that photo; here, instead, is a chicken I saw recently.
Sloth can be useful, and for a few hours last week, I started compiling the first of the end-of-year lists that’ll finish off the first year of this journal. Did I finish? Let me inform you: I come from a family of introverts, people who use time off as a license to read books, watch movies, take walks to avoid sinking into the couch, then drink red wine and repeat the process. We read a ton, we caught up, and I put the journal down for a bit, realizing late on Sunday that I needed to finish it.
There’ll be less sloth this week — I’m heading to Phoenix for work — but I can share what I have. First, my favorite podcasts of 2023.
“Junk Filter.” Lucky me: I got to know Jesse Hawken before he launched this pop obsessions podcast. We met on Twitter, for a while a good place to meet people who shared your interests and might be fun to riff with. In 2019, when I took a brief mid-campaign vacation in Toronto, Jesse took me out for Korean BBQ at a restaurant with tasteful wood paneling and engineered a night out with writer-friends on our wavelength, at a bar with — say it together — tasteful wood paneling. He launched the podcast a year later and, as you’d expect from a polite Canadian who is still telling jokes about the Johnny Depp spy farce “Mortdecai,” has been kind enough to bring me on. Each episode tackles some artifact that interests Hawken and a guest. Rareness and underground cred does not matter; I came on to do “Eternals,” the episode before mine covered the great, mostly un-streamable works of Bill Forsyth. (You can stream “Eternals” on Disney+ right now, but I don’t know why you’d want to do.) Hawken, like other content enjoyers, likes to categorize genres and movements, and followed the “gospel” of Will Menaker to build out “Dudes Rock” canon. I have asked him to explain what this canon is:
Dudes Rock is about the joys of male friendship and how men can become better men by the end of the movie through th,e love they have for each other. Extra points if they hate each other at first but join forces by the end (like LA Confidential or John Woo’s The Killer / Hard Boiled).
The scene in OUATIH where Rick asks Cliff if he wants to come up to watch the FBI episode and Cliff answers “Well I just assumed we would.”
The scene in LA Confidential where Bud White (who tried to kill Exley 2 min ago) says “You really want to take this whole thing down?” “With a wrecking ball. Wanna help me swing it?”
There has to be some homoerotic content too.
Another Dudes Rock moment is in Rolling Thunder where Devane tells TLJ “I found the men who killed my family” and TLJ just says “I’ll go get my gear” and fills a gym bag with guns, no questions asked. A huge Dudes Rock moment.
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is Dudes Rock: Origins.
Hong Kong action cinema is another source of Dudes Rock elementals.
There’s a great one by Johnnie To called A Hero Never Dies where the guy’s best friend gets killed and he uses the guys corpse to help him waste the bad guys at the end - not even death can stop Dudes from Rocking together at the end.
Best episode: “Tubi or Tubi” with Doug Tilley, originator of the #TubiOrNotTubi hashtag. Two dudes talk for 73 minutes about the most anarchic streaming channel, where great works of the silent era mingle with amateur Christian slasher movies that were scooped up to fill the library. This is how I learned about “Joker's Wild,” an exploitation horror film inspired by the Aurora theater massacre — a bad taste frontier was broken before I knew it existed.
“Who? Weekly.” Years ago, without much consideration of what was happening, people stopped caring about the source of their celebrity news. Photos, obtained by swashbuckling, creep paparazzi, were copy-and-pasted everywhere for free. News, reported and lawyered by well-staffed magazines, was ripped off and posted by accounts that knew how to recast it for Twitter. We had real metrics of what people were interested in — clicks, retweets. But the media had become less necessary, celebrities had more control over their own image, and people with no internal lives could shape the discourse about them.
This show, hosted by the very tall Bobby Finger and less tall Lindsey Weber, covers the news you “need to know about the celebrities you don’t.” Celebrities are “them,” meaning legitimately famous, or “who?” — of questionable fame. This is the grey zone that pop news accounts pull from, posting stolen images of people who will never be famous to anyone over 35. It is all the pop culture I need and extremely funny.
“The Kingcast.” From the time he could pick his own books from the library to around the release of “Cell,” my friend Dean read every Stephen King novel. A conversation with him this year turned into me buying “Night Shift,” then me buying “Skeleton Crew,” then me downloading this Fangoria series. I’ve learned since that there’s another popular King completist show, but I found this first, and I like the guests better; it is heavy on people from film and TV, brought in by the premise of discussing a King story and its adaptation.
Best Episode: “Camp Nightmares and Dreamscapes,” the 200th episode spectacular that cycles through 23 guests to discuss King’s third short story collection. (I’ve killed flies with the hardcover copy.) The hosts eventually allowed in stories that Hollywood didn’t turn into Marketable Content yet, widening their options, even though someone seems to talk through “The Mist” again every 30 episodes.
Stavvy’s World. It’s nice when a solo project works out. Stavros Halkias split with “Cum Town” last year, releasing a hit comedy special on YouTube and growing his audience. His co-hosts created “The Adam Friedland Show,” which has soared too; the pull-in on Friedland when Norman Finkelstein graphically described a lynching and challenged him to tell a joke about it (“so, I gave you the sequence of events”), was maybe the funniest thing I saw all year.
But Stavvy’s stand-up and podcast are both quick and stupid, the apotheosis of Guys Chilling podcasts. There’s an ad read for a mango-flavored male enhancement pill (“I’ve tried ‘em all”) that last four minutes and detours into a story of Stavvy luring confused girls home to his apartment with fresh fruit salad. The interviews are even better. I am ashamed to admit how much I like this, and grappling with that shame by posting about it.
Best episode: #48 with Conner O’Malley.
Post Mortem with Mick Garris. I discovered this show’s existence because it was ending; until October, I had no idea that talented horror journeyman Mick Garris ran an interview show. But it’s great, with the only questions I want asked of filmmakers anymore, deep bio stuff and persnickety craft details. Best episode? I couldn’t pick one, but in a year or so I’ll be through the archive.
Read more than I listened this week, and I’ll run through the rest of this quickly.
The Best Thing I Read: Roger Ebert’s “Life Itself,” a memoir I remember seeing mixed reviews for. My copy, hardcover, had an $8 markdown tag on the front, usually a sign that someone bought too many copies of an over-hyped doorstop. (I’ve seen Barack Obama’s memoir on the cheap pile, black marker stripe to denote its worthlessness; I have, once, seen my own book in a discount pile, and it haunts me.) The readers of 2011 missed out: This is a rich and rewarding look deep inside of Dwight MacDonald’s heir, a voracious reader and watcher with a clean, clear writing style, and a late life cancer that robbed him of the ability to eat and talk. Ebert spent his convalescent years thinking more deeply about his past, excavating memories of childhood crushes (and adult - he asked out Oprah!), meals at Steak and Shake, drunk afternoons with Lee Marvin. Delights on every page.
Tough competition this week - Ebert had to beat “The Scarlet Letter.” But he pulled it off. I picked up Mark Waid’s “Irredeemable” collection at The Comic Book Shop, my childhood funny-book store, which was selling all paperbacks 20% off for the holiday, a perfect chance to grab this nearly 1000 page compendium of an insane story I had stopped reading halfway through the initial run.
Waid crams worlds into this story - flashbacks, time travel, accidental child murder, hero/villain sexual tension, genetic mutation, hell, ghosts, and a nuclear extinction ripped from "On the Beach." The"superhero breaks bad" narrative wasn’t new when Waid got to it; the most famous version of this, especially since it was adapted into an Amazon Prime show, was Robert Kirkman’s “Invincible,” which gave the reader a few issues of a normal-sounding superhero comic before revealing that its Superman stand-in was a member of a genocidal alien race.
Waid’s work is much stranger; if you lied and told me he finished this thinking it was his last book, I’d have bought it. He opens with humanity living in fear of The Plutonian, a Superman stand-in who has gone mad and destroyed his version of Metropolis. By the end of issue one, he has disintegrated a minor enemy while his child watched, and lobotomized his ex-sidekick. Flashbacks, some induced by the superman's alien parents, reveal the insults, neglect, and trauma that he barely kept suppressed when he debuted as a hero. Overlapping narratives follow the heroes who now have to get rid of him, but can't, for convoluted but dramatically worthwhile reasons.
The ending is the weakest part of this. Waid's said that his goal was "a tale of horror exploring how the lessons we learn about right and wrong as children can become warped and twisted when challenged by the realities of the adult world." He tells that story, but finishes it with an appeal to goodness and sentimentality. It still works, and doesn't lessen the impact of the preceding 900 pages.
Books purchased: Mark Waid, “Irredeemable”
Books read: Peter Beinart, "The Crisis of Zionism" Will Eisner, "To the Heart of the Storm, Mark Waid, "Irredeemable," Clare Nina Norelli, “Soundtrack to ‘Twin Peaks,’” Dade Hayes, “Open Wide”
The Best Thing I Saw: Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not To Be,” the best contemporary screwball comedy about Nazis; “The Great Dictator” takes that turn at the end, with its Very Important Speech. I caught up a bit with 2023’s movies, enjoying “The Killer” (the best stuff is the methodical narration about planning murders, which is good because there’s a lot of that) and tolerating “Napoleon” (a few great battle scenes, one fun-to-watch performance, some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in a historical epic).
That’s it - I can only push my artificial deadline so far! See you next week.
The ne plus ultra Dudes Rock moment has to be the twenty minute long fight scene between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live. It is only through that slugfest that they can learn to work together.