What I Was Digging 9/1/24
"It's just a fucking stick!"
Music
Talib Kweli & J. Rawls - "Native Sons" [track]
I haven't historically been the biggest Talib Kweli fan outside of his work with Mos Def on Blackstar, but I've really enjoyed the last two collab tracks he's dropped with J. Rawls. On this newest track, Kweli raps his ass off over Rawls's nasty boom-bap production that takes some surreal turns.
Pixey - "Give A Little Of Your Love" [track; off the album Million Dollar Baby]
A twinkling synth-based dreamscape.
Shows I'm Watching
Survivor: Micronesia (Fans vs. Favorites) [Season 16]
-Episode: 7-9
What's going on: The Airai tribe loses its second member despite not having lost any immunity challenges after a fan calls it quits; the first true strategic battle between fan and favorite goes when a fan gets desperate; and after the merge goes down, romances become tangled, Jason is revealed as a dingbat, and Ozzy receives a rare loss in individual immunity.
Currently reading
-Current short story: "Lonelyache" [Finished]
Plot: The depressed Paul recalls his separation and eventual divorce after a toxic marriage, the series of empty one-night stands that followed, and the dark creature growing in the corner of his home.
Thoughts: Stands out as the first psychological drama in a collection of lofty sci-fi/fantasy shorts (yes, the loftiness does clash with the lengths). Ellison's relationship with women confuses me - and likely himself - and that complexity certainly emerges in what he claimed to be one of his most personal stories.
Memorable lines: "They trembled there together in a nervous symbiosis, each deriving something from the other. He was covered with a thin film of horror and despair, a terrible lonelyache that twisted like smoke, thick and black within him. The creature giving love, and he reaping heartache, loneliness."
Short Story Rankings:
- I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
- Lonelyache
- World of the Myth
- Big Sam Was My Friend
- Eyes of Dust
The Oxford History of World Cinema
-Current section: "The Silent Film: Serials" [Finished]
Rad passage: "[The film industry] saw the commercial logic of adopting the practice of serialization, already a mainstay of popular magazines and newspapers. With every episode culminating in a suspenseful cliffhanger ending, film serials encourage a steady volume of return customers, tantalized and eager for the fix of narrative closure withheld in the previous installment. In this system of deliberately prolonged desire punctuated by fleeting, intermittent doses of satisfaction, serials conveyed a certain acuity about the new psychology of consumerism in modern capitalism."
Impact: Essentially, the screen foundations of television series were created in the 1910s with the introduction of short, interconnecting silent films - or 'serials' - that featured returning heroes, villains, and overarching storylines. Similar to television, serials were often shunned as nothing but mindless mass media that relied on the sensationalism of sex and violence to attract and maintain its dominantly working-class viewers. The serials' popularity quickly declined throughout the 1920s, and by the 1930s, they were seen as children's media, primarily appealing to young boys as the content shifted to superheroes and comic book/pulp magazine protagonists (at the height of the genre in the late-1910s, female heroes were the norm, including plotlines and characters that were often early cinema's closest connection to the era's feminist ideology).
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