→ April 5, 2018
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New music update, March 2018.

Twenty-seven songs on this month’s playlist, which is a lot, but they’re almost all from artists I’ve listed somewhere here before. As always, you can access the Spotify playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Everything Everything – Breadwinner. This is one of four tracks on the British art-rockers’ recent EP, A Deeper Sea, one left on the cutting room floor from their 2017 album A Fever Dream. The EP opens with “The Mariana,” a slow, melancholy meditation on societal ideas of masculinity and the high suicide rates for young males.

DMA’S – For Now. Huge, soaring guitars, mixing electric and acoustic, with a memorable hook in the chorus … yeah, I’m all in. Take all my money.

Post Animal – Ralphie. A fun, bouncy rock track from a new band from Chicago that includes one of the actors from Stranger Things, Joe Keery.

Gang Of Four – Lucky. Gang of Four have always been overtly political, but their forthcoming EP, Complicit, is about as direct an attack as they’ve ever brought on a sitting politician. The EP’s cover is a photo of Ivanka Trump, and the EP’s title is repeated in Russian.

Sunflower Bean – Oh No, Bye Bye. The Brooklyn trio released their second album, Twentytwo in Blue, last week, and it’s filled with sunny, folk-tinged indie rock and great melodies; it feels to me like the album a band makes before they release the album that takes over the world.

The Men – Rose on Top of the World. This is very acoustic War on Drugs-ish, kind of surprising given The Men’s history of harder, punk-tinged songs.

Ride – Keep It Surreal. The second track from the shoegazers’ new EP, Tomorrow’s Shore, which also includes “Pulsar.”

Courtney Barnett – Need A Little Time. The second single in advance of the Australian singer/songwriter’s second solo album Tell Me How You Really Feel.

??????•?)?? ?? ??????? ?? – ? ? ? ?.·??? ? ? ? ? ?.·??? ? ? ? ? ?.·??? ? ? ? ? ?.·??? ? ? ? ? ?.·??? ? ? ? ? ?.·??? ? ? ? ? ?.·??? ?. That’s not a problem with your browser; it’s the actual name of the new project by Four Tet, a very dark, moody, instrumental track that was good enough to get me to copy and paste this ridiculous name, which is pronounced “I’m an asshole.”

The Decemberists – Once In My Life. Never a huge fan of the Decemberists, in part because Colin Meloy’s delivery always teeters on the brink of twee-pop, but it’s weird that they paired one of their best melodies ever with some of their weakest lyrics (a pale imitation of “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”).

Preoccupations – Disarray. This Canadian band’s latest album, cleverly titled New Material, came out on March 23rd; their sound, from reverbed guitars to production that dampens the vocals, gives everything they do a gloomy tinge while harkening back to everyone from Joy Division to Lotion to Mercury Rev. “Decompose” is another great track from the album, with an offbeat percussion line that keeps you off balance for the entire song.

Speedy Ortiz – Lean In When I Suffer. The noise-pop quartet led by Sadie Dupuis will release its third album, Twerp Verse, on April 27th.

Prides – Say It Again. These Scottish pop-rockers first showed up on my radar with 2015’s “The Seeds You Sow,” but they haven’t quite hit that level of hook in anything since … until this song, definitely my favorite track since that debut. Their better songs have reminded me of better Bastille stuff with a little early Coldplay (before they became just pop nonsense).

Artificial Pleasure – On a Saturday Night. It’s a bit slower than their first hit “I’ll Make It Worth Your While” or the track that made my top 100 from last year, “Wound Up Tight,” but I like the glam-rock stylings here even as they get away from the dance floor, with a song that sounds inspired by ’70s new wave (or even Bowie, apparently a hero of theirs) without coming off as derivative.

Young Fathers – Fee Fi. The 2014 Mercury Prize winners released their third album, Cocoa Sugar, on March 9th; as with their previous two, their tracks feature a lot of world-music percussion with less rapping than is typical of that genre.

Snail Mail – Pristine. Snail Mail is Lindsey Jordan, a Baltimorebased singer-songwriter, and her sound is sparse and also reminds me of Lotion – really, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that group in years, now they’re here twice in one playlist – whose voice and sound is way beyond her 18 years. She should tour with Speedy Ortiz.

Belly – Stars Align. That little opening guitar riff feels like a secret message to Belly fans from the ’90s that everything’s OK, Tanya’s here, although what comes after doesn’t have the same energy as King or Star, and I get the sense that Dove, their first album in 23 years, will be Belly-ish, but mellower.

The Districts – Nighttime Girls. The Districts feel like a mixture of Preoccupations (see above) and the Hold Steady, with the former’s general sound and style (including echoing vocals) with the dry delivery of the latter.

The Horrors – Fire Escape. The Horrors’ new single includes this song and “Water Drop,” with one of the keyboard loops repeated throughout both songs; this track has more of an identity, like an actual single rather than a B-side or deleted scene. I love the heavy guitar/drum break around the 1:10 mark that introduces the vocals.

Starcrawler – Different Angles. This LA glam-rock act released its debut album, produced by Ryan Adams, in January, with a good sound but not enough good hooks to sustain a full record. This was my favorite track, which, like most on the album, comes in well under three minutes.

Turbowolf – Cheap Magic. I wasn’t familiar with this Bristol psychedelic hard-rock act before a few months ago, but this is the second great, heavy rock track from them (think INHEAVEN) in the last 90 days, this one a collaboration with Death from Above’s Sebastien Grainger.

Underoath – Rapture. Underoath is, or perhaps was, a Christian hard-rock band, although it seems like their faith or stance on it is at least no longer the core feature of their music. This would have been considered metal when I was in high school, somewhere between glam rock and thrash (death metal existed, but had almost no audience or mainstream awareness at the time), and earned some nostalgia points with me.

Bicurious – Sleep. Bicurious describe themselves on their Bandcamp page as “a confused, loud, instrumental and experimental duo based in Dublin.” There’s some jazz in here, a little heavy rock, and what sounds like a good bit of two-hand tapping (or maybe even a Chapman stick?). It’s not boring, though.

Melvins – Stop Moving to Florida. King Buzzo is back – although I think I’m nominating him for “aging rocker most likely to go milkshake duck” – with a song that gives you two minutes of conventional grunge and then turns into abject silliness for the rest of its run time.

At The Gates – To Drink from the Night Itself. Pioneers of the Gothenberg sound, At the Gates will release an album with this as the title track in May, their first record without founding guitarist Anders Björler.

Memoriam – Weaponised Fear. I’m pretty sure Memoriam was supposed to be a one-off project, a tribute to the late drummer Martin Kearns, who played in the legendary British extreme metal act Bolt Thrower along with two members of Memoriam. They’re back now with a new album, The Silent Vigil, that continues the first album’s doom-influenced thrash with more growled vocals, not too far away from the sound on Bolt Thrower’s final studio album, Those Once Loyal.

Barren Earth – Further Down. Barren Earth is a Finnish supergroup that features Kreator guitarist Sami Yli-Sirniö, producing progressive death metal that incorporates symphonic, technical, and even folk elements.

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→ April 3, 2018
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Ranking 2017 movies.

So I finally saw Loveless, the one film I thought I had to see before I could put together a ranking of all the 2017 films I saw, which can also serve as an index of my reviews. I still have a few I’m waiting to see in theaters or on demand, including The Insult, Foxtrot, In the Fade, The Other Side of Hope, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, which I’ll add to this post when I see & review them. I have seen all nine Academy Award for Best Picture nominees, all five Best Animated Feature nominees, all five Best Documentary Feature nominees, and four of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees. All links go to my reviews on this site; there are a few animated films I never bothered to review near the bottom.

1. The Florida Project.
2. Dunkirk.
3. Loveless.
4. A Fantastic Woman.
5. The Shape of Water.
6. Columbus.
7. Phantom Thread.
8. The Big Sick.
9. Call Me By Your Name.
10. Get Out
11. Logan Lucky.
12. The Girl Without Hands.
13. Lady Bird.
14. On Body and Soul.
15. City of Ghosts.
16. The Sense of an Ending.
17. Coco.
18. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
19. In This Corner of the World.
20. A Ghost Story.
21. The Wound.
22. Icarus.
23. The Breadwinner.
24. Faces Places.
25. I, Tonya.
26. Graduation.
27. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
28. Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
29. Dealt.
30. Marjorie Prime.
31. Ethel & Ernest.
32. Our Souls at Night.
33. Last Men in Aleppo.
34. The Square.
35. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.
36. The Beguiled.
37. The Lego Batman Movie.
38. The Post.
39. Loving Vincent.
40. Darkest Hour.
41. War Machine.
42. In Search of Israeli Cuisine.
43. Good Time.
44. The Lost City of Z.
45. Ferdinand.
46. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children.
47. Strong Island.
48. Baby Driver.
49. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea.
50. Boss Baby.

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→ April 1, 2018
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The Wound.

The Oscars’ process for determining nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film is a little strange, and I don’t think it’s very widely understood – I only came across it within the last few years because I decided to see as many of the nominated films as I could. Any country can submit one film released in its market between October 1st and the following September 30th (so twelve months) in the year leading up to the awards; for the 2017 Academy Awards, a record 92 countries submitted films. The rules mean that a country with a long history of producing critically-acclaimed films, like France, or a country with a huge population and a large native film industry, like India, gets to submit the same number of films as Iceland, which was the smallest country (by population, 348,000) to submit a film this year. Last year, the South Korean film The Handmaiden, among the most critically acclaimed movies of the year, wasn’t even its own country’s nominee. This year, Loveless nearly lost out on a nomination because of political objections to its content.

The Academy changed their process about a decade ago to release a shortlist of nine films before they announce the final list of five nominees, which gives another little boost of publicity to four more films that would otherwise be shut out. This year’s shortlist included Félicité, the first-ever submission by Senegal; In the Fade, from Germany, which won the Golden Globe in the same category; Foxtrot, from Israel, which is just getting a U.S. theatrical release now; and The Wound, from South Africa, which is available now on Netflix. With dialogue primarily in the Bantu language Xhosa, with occasional Afrikaans and English, this 88-minute film feels like a thematic cousin to Moonlight, looking at a closeted gay man in South Africa as he tries to hide his identity from a traditional culture that sees homosexuals as less than men.

Based on a 2009 novel by the South African author Thando Mgqolozana, The Wound tells the story of Xolani, known to his friends as X, a quiet, lonely worker in a South African warehouse who is asked by a family friend to come serve as the ‘caregiver’ to the man’s son in the amaXhosa circumcision ritual known as ulwaluko, which marks the passage of young men, called initiates, into full manhood. The ritual takes place over several weeks on ‘the mountain,’ where X meets his old friend and secret paramour Vija, who has a wife and family at home. X’s charge, Kwanda, is seen as ‘soft’ (I think that’s code for gay) and pampered both by his father and by the other initiates, who also suspect that he’s gay, but while he’s not ‘out’ in the western sense, he’s certainly less willing to wear the mask that X does and fights back against the bullying of the other boys. Kwanda quickly grasps what X and Vija are up to, and that X is far more emotionally invested in the relationship than Vija is, eventually pushing X in a student-teaches-the-teacher twist to demand more for himself, if not with Vija then with someone else. The wound of the film’s title refers, of course, to the wounds of circumcision – treated in ghoulish fashion with traditional ‘herbs’ and techniques rather than modern medicine – and what X presumably has carried inside him his entire life as a gay amaXhosa man whose family and culture would view him as a degenerate and less than a man if they knew his orientation.

The South African film ratings board caved to public pressure and gave the film an X18 rating, akin to labeling it pornography, even though there’s nothing explicit in the film and any sex scenes are shown either in silhouette or at a distance. This only reinforces the story’s point, that the tyranny of these traditions actually serves to dehumanize men who are born gay into a world that won’t accept them. Kwanda has a dryly humorous rant towards the end of the film about how the ritual just shows how men are obsessed with their own genitalia – not long after one of the other initiates is showing off his “Mercedes-Benz” circumcision, which, fortunately, is not pictured – and serves as a sly, figurative criticism of the importance placed on a traditional ceremony focused on one physical manifestation of manhood that tells us nothing about the man within.

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→ April 1, 2018
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Raleigh and Durham eats, 2018 edition.

Downtown Raleigh has seen a huge renaissance over the last few years, especially in the area where Ashley Christensen’s main restaurants are. Now just one block over on Blount Street are two of the best new restaurants in the Triangle, according to Eater, in Mofu Shoppe and Bharvana Brewery.

Mofu Shoppe grew out of the Pho Nomenal Dumplings food truck whose owners won season 6 of something called the Great Food Truck Race and invested their winnings in their first brick and mortar location, with their signature pork and chive dumplings on the menu. I went with small plates so I could try more things at every place I tried for dinner this week, which here included those dumplings, crispy Brussels sprouts with sweet sriracha sauce and bacon, and the pork belly rice bowl. The dumplings are superb, pleasantly chewy, with the right amount of filling and very even flavors of chive and garlic. The Brussels sprouts were my favorite, even though they’re about a grade spicier than I would typically eat; the bacon lardons are thickly sliced and stand up to the sprouts well, but I didn’t care for the crème fraîche served underneath, which was too tangy, like sour cream. The pork belly rice bowl is a great concept, although I ended up liking it less than I expected. The idea seems to be to take the flavors of German potato salad and put them into a dish similar to bibimbap, so you get rice, a poached egg, pork belly, and a slaw with a mustardy vinaigrette. The dressing on the slaw overwhelmed the other flavors in the dish, unfortunately. For dessert, I went with the Vietnamese coffee mousse, which is just what it sounds like; imagine the texture of softly whipped cream and the flavor of good coffee ice cream.

Just across the street is Bhavana Brewery, a combination brewery, restaurant, book store, and flower/home decor store. (That’s not an April Fool’s Day joke.) The owners also run a Laotian restaurant next door and this menu is heavily East Asian-influenced, although it doesn’t adhere to any particular tradition from that continent. Again going with small plates, I took my server’s suggestions and ordered the steamed soup dumplings (xiao long bao), the vegetable gyoza, the seafood dumplings in mushroom sauce, and the duck egg rolls (that was my one pick among the four). The soup dumplings were the best dish, filled with a mixture of crab and pork meat, with a good balance of broth, meat, and dough, with the crab balancing out what could have been a fairly heavy filling had it been only pork. The vegetable dumplings were my least favorite, with a grassy note and a flat flavor that needed some heat and probably more salt/umami to boost it. The server did recommend the scallion pancake with bone marrow, but that sounded way too heavy for me. They do indeed brew their own beers, with a wide and rotating selection, but unfortunately their limited book selection did not include Smart Baseball.

The Lakewood is the new restaurant from the chef-owner of Scratch Bakery, which closed its downtown Durham location about a month ago and reopened in the space adjacent to this new restaurant just off Chapel Hill Road a little west of downtown. The Lakewood has a straightforward menu of small plates and sides that are more vegetable/seafood-focused and a half-dozen meat-centric main plates, plus, of course, fantastic desserts. I stuck with small plates once more and went with the roasted cauliflower with salsa verde, the parsnip pierogis with radishes, and the shrimp toast, the last of which was the star of the meal, coming drenched in a slightly sweet soy-sesame sauce. The cauliflower was a bit of a miss, as it was unevenly seasoned and underdone in the center of some of the florets; I probably should have caved to my baser instincts and ordered the Brussels sprouts with bacon jam instead. I chose the weirdest dessert on the menu, a rice tart with roasted carrot sorbet, which came in a traditional French tart crust with a thick custard in it that had some broken rice grains and was not terribly sweet, since the sweetness came from that carrot sorbet. That was the best thing on the plate, with a deep, earthy sweetness and a gorgeous deep orange color.

Jubala Coffee in Raleigh serves Counter Culture Coffee with multiple single-origin options, even offering two for espresso drinks in addition to the regular blend. They also offer sweet biscuits with various options, including egg and bacon or sausage sandwiches, with the eggs cooked to order; I prefer biscuits without that sweetness, but the texture of these was still excellent and the over medium egg was cooked perfectly. On the Durham side of the triangle, Cocoa Cinnamon, a recommendation from a co-worker of mine, roasts its own coffee (under the 4th Dimension label) and offers a couple of pour-over options, as well as churros at their Lakewood location, although I went to a different shop and didn’t think churros for breakfast was the most sensible plan.

I did hit two places I’ve been before: Durham’s Nanataco, which has never failed me yet and had one of my favorite special meat options, hog jowl, as a monthly feature; and Raleigh’s Beasley’s for fried chicken.

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→ March 31, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 3/31/18.

Three new Insider pieces since last week: My annual season predictions post, a Grapefruit League scouting roundup (including Phils, Tigers, O’s, Rays, Pirates, and Atlanta prospects), and a draft blog post on three possible first rounders. No chat this past week, as I’m in North Carolina for the NHSI and am headed over to East Carolina today to see the two big bats for Wichita State.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, just in time to put one in every Easter basket you hand out this year.

And now, the links…

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→ March 31, 2018
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Loveless.

Loveless was one of the five nominees for the most recent Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the latest film from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan), after it won the Jury Prize at Cannes and earned a nomination for Best Film at the European Film Awards, where it lost to The Square. It is a grim, intense, misanthropic film that expresses the director’s extreme discontent at the decline in his home country’s society under Vladimir Putin, and despite how painful the film can be to watch, it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen from 2017.

Loveless skips the prologue, so when the film opens, the couple Zhenya and Boris are already divorcing and at each others’ throats, trying to sell their condo and dispose of their unwanted 12-year-old son Alexey (also called Aloysha within the movie). An early, harrowing scene shows the two insulting each other while trying to avoid taking responsibility or custody of their son, whom Zhenya wants to just ship off to boarding school; unbeknownst to them, Alexey is hiding in the next room, caught in a silent scream as he cries and hears how neither of his parents wants anything to do with him. Both have already moved on to new relationships, Boris with an attractive and very pregnant young blonde named Marsha, Zhenya with a slightly older but very fit and successful man named Anton, and the first 40% or so of the film shows them happily adjusting to their new lives and having lots of sex.

The film’s tone turns abruptly when Zhenya calls Boris to say that Alexey’s school called and that he hasn’t been seen in school for two days. Both parents were so busy screwing their new partners that neither noticed he was missing. The remainder of the film follows the search for Alexey, from disinterested police to the volunteer crew that helps find missing people to the virulent acrimony between the two parents, neither of whom seems all that broken up over their son’s disappearance.

The story takes place against a backdrop of a literally and figuratively cold Moscow, full of abandoned and decaying buildings, denuded forests in midwinter, and people who can barely bother to care about anything but themselves. Boris’ employer is a fundamentalist Christian who requires his employees to be married with kids, and he fears losing his job if his divorce is discovered; Zhenya owns a beauty salon where her employees all seem to have similar stories of faithless ex-husbands. When the investigating police officer and then the head of the search-and-rescue force both come to talk to the parents, the two reveal that they know little about their son’s life, struggling to identify any more than one friend or to say what his interests might be. Characters often disengage with the people around them by mindlessly scrolling social media sites – none more so than Zhenya, who can’t even pay attention to Anton, the man she supposedly loves, for a full dinner.

Zvyagintsev’s disaffection at the state of his country extends beyond the mere callousness of its citizens to the manipulative autocracy established by Vladimir Putin. (There was even a political campaign against this film before the Russian board chose to submit it as the country’s nominee this year.) We hear radio and TV news broadcasts that decry fake news while also disseminating heavily one-sided reports on the country’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. The state is useless to its citizens; the police can barely be bothered to look into the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy, and the officer dismisses the parents’ half-hearted concerns by discussing the stats on runaways and suggesting that the kid is probably just hanging out at the mall.

The long shots of empty buildings, bare forests, and peeling trees give the movie a dystopian feel, as if we’re in the Eurasia of 1984, even though there’s nothing overtly dystopian about the plot. Zvyagintsev keeps the overt political references to a minimum until the very end of the film – which, mild spoiler, there isn’t going to be a happy ending to this story – instead depicting the individuals in the story as selfish to the point of sociopathy, including the two parents and Zhenya’s lunatic, paranoid mother, who seems to loathe her own daughter and thinks that this is all a scam to try to con her out of her house or whatever meager possessions she might still own. The question that lingers over the story, unstated but strongly implied, is what kind of state might lead its citizens to such savage ideas even when their material needs are met.

The two lead actors, Aleksey Rozin (Boris … why is it always Boris) and Maryana Spivak (Zhenya), are superb, but Matvey Novikov steals the few scenes he has as Alyosha/Aleksey, even though it’s his first credited role. Alexey Fateev also shines as Ivan, the head of the volunteer force, the only truly ‘good’ character in the film, bringing a convincing blend of command and empathy to his role, which involves leading the search and dealing with these two feckless parents who didn’t even notice their kid was missing for two days.

A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar over Loveless, and the Chilean film is a more entertaining movie with a more important message and a command performance from Daniela Vega, a trans woman playing a trans woman, to power it. That’s a movie I could recommend to just about anybody. Loveless is, in a way, like a great Russian novel of the peak period in that country’s literature: It’s brilliant, searing, overwhelming, and yet bleak and incisive enough that many viewers would likely rather turn away than fight through to the mirthless finish.

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→ March 30, 2018
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I’m a bit late to the Star Wars party, but I finally watched The Last Jedi (now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) on Thursday evening, which I believe makes me the last person in the United States to see this movie. I have seen The Force Awakens and would agree with what I think is the consensus that this movie is better than that one was; if TFA was the greatest hits album, TLJ is the album after that where the band tries to recapture the sound of its best output, and intermittently succeeds.

I imagine most of you have seen this already, so here’s a briefer than usual plot summary. The movie picks up right at the end of TFA; Kylo Ren is still Mad in Space, Rey is still with Luke Skywalker on the island planet, Finn is still boring, Leia still kicks ass, and the Rebels are still lucky to exist given the firepower and numbers the First Order brings to the fight. After a Pyrhhic victory to open the film, the Rebels find themselves chased even through lightspeed travel, which we’re told is impossible (the tracking through lightspeed, not the lightspeed part, which is actually impossible), and must thus find a way to disable the First Order’s tracking capability so they can escape to a safe hiding spot to regroup. Meanwhile, Rey wants to grow up to be a Jedi and find out who her parents were, and Poe Dameron still has problems with authority and is a poor judge of what constitutes acceptable losses in battle.

The women absolutely carry this film, and I don’t think that’s entirely by design. Daisy Ridley stole the first film in this trilogy as Rey, apparently to the surprise of the studio, and she remains a riveting, central figure in this film. Kelly Marie Tran debuts as Rose, another character like Rey – it’s hard to imagine these films without them – and just underscores the point that casting more women even in roles that studios would historically have handed to men adds something, rather than just avoiding negative PR. Creating female characters who are tough and resourceful, who can fight but who also think well on their feet, isn’t any harder than creating male characters who are or do these things, and it’s no less credible. If anything, The Last Jedi gives Rose short shrift by dropping her into the film without much character development, but it’s possible she’ll play a larger role in the next installment, too. Carrie Fisher’s final turn as Leia may come across as even more powerful because we lost her before the movie was even released, but the increased role the writers of these last two films gave her character has also helped put them above The Phantom Menace trilogy. Laura Dern also appears as Admiral Hodor … er, Holdo, another Resistance leader who takes over when Leia ends up in a coma, and while Holdo’s plan is kind of terrible, Dern, a generally tremendous actress in any role, does a superb job of threading the needle between stern by-the-book authority to contrast with Poe and presenting herself as a thoughtful, strong leader willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Rebels alive.

This was also the funniest Star Wars movie by a wide margin, with some dopey physical comedy (that still made me laugh because inside I am just a 12-year-old boy who laughs when people in movies fall down), a good bit more sarcasm than I’m used to from these films, and an utterly brilliant nod to the now ancient Star Wars parody short “Hardware Wars.” Johnson is absolutely playing with viewers’ expectations throughout the film, and where TFA gave viewers the answers they wanted, The Last Jedi goes in the other direction, setting up an obvious answer and then responding to it with sarcasm or a twist. Given the reverence afforded to this saga, a little nose-tweaking here is warranted and does help avoid the self-seriousness that permeated both TFA and especially The Phantom Menace.

The Force Awakens was a perfectly cromulent film – entertaining, but nothing new beyond the special effects. We got our cantina scene, our flying through narrow passages battle scene, our light saber fights, Jedi mind tricks, a Kessel Run joke, and too many other allusions to the original trilogy. It worked, but it felt too much like a nostalgia play, and perhaps a plea to forget the intervening trilogy of films. The Last Jedi is less derivative of the series, but now we’re devolving into this pattern of “let’s put the heroes in extreme jeopardy, kill off a bunch of redshirts, and save the characters with names” over and over in the films, and that becomes a bit tiresome. It invokes adrenaline fatigue and tends to come at the expense of story and/or character development. There’s a real lost opportunity here when Rey is with Luke Skywalker and, in theory, learning about the Jedi religion and traditions; the biggest revelation she gets about her character comes not from Luke, but from Kylo “my parents didn’t love me enough” Ren.

And that’s the other aspect of both of these new films I haven’t really bought. I’m all for changing up the archetype of a villain in space epics, but “goth kid” isn’t all that compelling, and Driver’s mopey delivery comes across as depressed, not depraved. This script does a better job than its predecessor in explaining Ren’s backstory, and how the son of Han and Leia could become the most dangerous person in the known universe, so I’m holding out hope we’ll get more of his character development in the third film. This film was replete with plots and subplots and probably more named characters than it could really handle in 150 or so minutes, but there were still arcs that could have used more exploration.

They also could have cut Finn’s story substantially to make room for further depth in the narratives around Rey or Kylo. I know Finn is a popular character and John Boyega is likable, but I don’t think he has any charisma at all in this role – certainly not next to Oscar Isaak’s Poe, who is drawn with some very sharp lines but that at least let Isaak tear up the proverbial fucking dance floor. I’m still unclear on what Finn’s role in the greater story arc of these two new movies is, and the side plot where he and Rose go off to the gambling planet to find a master codebreaker (master … breaker?), played in fine scene-chewing fashion by Benicio del Toro, is the weakest part of the film by 12 parsecs.

This movie looks incredible, as you’d expect given the studios behind it and the money invested in it, but Rian Johnson has also clearly given consideration to how he can use things like color or establishing shots to contribute to the feel of the story. There’s a lot of red in the film, including Supreme Leader Snoke’s henchpersons and the tracks left in the salt on the rebels’ disused hiding planet. (I know we’re supposed to think ‘blood,’ but it kept making me think of Australia’s Simpson Desert, where iron oxide in the sand turns the entire landscape a deep red.) There’s also a lot of moving water in the film, including some stunning waterfall shots, designed to give you the sense of descent and to feel several characters fighting the current, especially Rey as she resists the dark aspects of the Force within her and the pull of Kylo’s own darkness. Such small, subtle additions to a script that often feels bombastic and certainly doesn’t shy away from huge battle sequences or grand gestures by its characters may be lost on viewers caught up in the extensive plot, but they do help set the tone and, I think, establish a more complex worldview than any of the preceding films offered.

At 153 minutes, The Last Jedi is probably both too long and too short; Johnson had enough thematic material to go three-plus hours, but the repetitive nature of some of the plot details wore on me by the end, and there really isn’t much doubt who’s going to live to see the end of the film and who’s not, so the question becomes “how will Johnson write them out of trouble this time,” rather than the more intense question of “who’s going to survive?” Unfortunately, Johnson isn’t involved in the as-yet untitled Episode IX, which will be written and directed by JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio, which I don’t interpret as a positive sign given some of their recent projects (The Cloverfield Paradox, Batman vs. Superman) and the wealth of material bequeathed upon them by The Last Jedi. With principal photography set to begin in just four months, it’s probably vain to hope that they’ll get another voice in the room to help give these arcs the resolution they might deserve.

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→ March 29, 2018
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The Origins of Totalitarianism.

I spent my first year in college as a Government major, with some vague idea of studying law and/or working in politics after graduation, but abandoned the major completely by the middle of my sophomore year because the reading absolutely killed me. I like to read – I would hope that was evident to regulars here – but the kind of writing we were assigned in those classes was just dreadful. There was a book by Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order) that ended any interest I might have had in the subject because it was such an arduous, opaque read, and I eventually switched to a joint sociology/economics major, which got me into more of my comfort zone of a blend of math and theory.

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism reminded me tremendously of Huntington and John Stuart Mill and other books I was assigned in Gov 1040 but never actually finished, both in prose style and in tone. I understand that this book is considered extremely influential and an important work in our comprehension of how movements like the Nazi Party arise and even gain a modicum of popular support. The arguments herein, however, are almost exclusively assertions, with anecdotal evidence or no evidence at all, and the circumlocutory writing style meant that even though I retain a lot of what I read in most cases, I found I wasn’t even retaining what I read here from one page to the next.

Arendt’s main thrust here is that totalitarian governments, which she distinguishes from mere autocracies, arise when their leaders follow a rough playbook that sets up specific groups as enemies of the state, rallies disaffected followers against those groups, and often makes their supports into unwitting advocates of their own eventual oppression. Such governments then retain power by eliminating the possibility of what Arendt refers to as human spontaneity through an Orwellian system of truth-denial and unpredictable favoritism that puts subjects on ever-shifting ground, preventing them from mounting any effective system of dissent or resistance.

At least, I think that’s what she was arguing, but she used a lot of extraneous words to get there – and some of what she described in the early going, where she addresses the history of the so-called “Jewish question,” sounded a lot like victim blaming. She certainly says the Jews of Europe did not adequately understand how they were being used by European elites or how their connections to unpopular leaders like the Hapsburgs thus put them in the crosshairs of populist movements that aimed at overthrowing the monarchical or despotic status quo. She also seems to credit the same movements with their willingness to employ efficient methods of killing for its surprise value – no one expected anything like the Nazis’ system of killing masses of people, based itself on a process of dehumanization of entire classes of the population.

Whether I fully grasped the arguments Arendt makes in this book – and I freely acknowledge I probably did not – but much of what she does assert seems apposite to our present-day political situation, including the way in which Trump supporters, including his sycophants in the media, have repeatedly handwaved away his distortions of fact or his apparent collusion with a hostile foreign power. I’ll close, therefore, with this selection of quotes from The Origins of Totalitarianism that could just as easily have been written today about our current environment.

In the United States, social antisemitism may one day become the very dangerous nucleus for a political movement.

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies,” “one against all,” that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

The rank and file is not disturbed in the least when it becomes obvious that their policy serves foreign-policy interests of another and even hostile power.

(The Nazis) impressed the population as being very different from the “idle talkers” of other parties.

The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

Hitler circulated millions of copies of his book in which he stated that to be successful, a lie must be enormous.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (I.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (I.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

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→ March 26, 2018
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The Beak of the Finch.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time should have ended most of the inane arguments still coming from creationists and other science deniers about the accuracy of the theory of evolution. Weiner tells the story of the Grants, a married couple of biologists who spent 20 years studying Galapagos finches – the same species that Darwin spotted on his voyage with the Beagle and that helped him develop his first theory of adaptation via natural selection – and observed natural selection and evolution in action. This remarkable study, which also showed how species evolve in response to changes in their environment and to other species in their ecosystems, was a landmark effort to both verify Darwin’s original claims and strengthen them in a way that, again, should have put an end to this utter stupidity that still infects so much of our society, even creeping into public science education in the south and Midwest.

The finches are actually a set of species across the different islands of the Galapagos, with the Grants studying those on Daphne Major, an uninhabited island in the archipelago that has multiple species of finch existing alongside each other because they occupy different ecological niches. Over the two decades they studied these species, massive changes in weather patterns (in part caused by El Niño and La Niña) led to years of total drought and years of historically high rainfall, with various species on the island responding to these fluctuations in the environment in ways that affected both population growth and characteristics. The beaks of the book’s title refer to the Grants’ focus on beak dimensions, which showed that the finches’ beaks would change in response to those environmental changes. In times of drought, for example, the supply of certain seeds that specific finch species relied on for their sustenance might become more scarce, and there would be a response within a few generations (or even one) favoring birds with longer or stronger beaks that gave them access to new supplies of food. Many Galapagos finches crack open seed cases to get to the edible portions within, so if those seeds are rarer in a given year, the birds with stronger beaks can crack open more cases and get to more food, given them a tangible advantage in the rather ruthless world of natural selection.

Weiner focuses on the Grants’ project and discoveries throughout the book, but intersperses it with other anecdotes and with notes from Darwin’s travels and his two major works on the subject, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He incorporates the discovery of DNA and how that has accelerated our ability to study and understand evolutionary changes. He goes into the famous example of the white English moth that found itself at a severe disadvantage in the polluted world of the early Industrial Revolution, and how a single gene that determined wing color led to a shift in the moth’s population from mostly white to mostly black (to match the soot covering trees near Manchester and London) – and back again after England finally took steps to clean up its air. This one example is especially instructive in our ongoing experience of climate change, which Weiner refers to throughout as global warming (the preferred term at the time), and opens up a discussion about “artificial selection,” from how we’re screwing up the global ecosystem to antibiotic resistance to the futility of pesticide-driven agriculture (with the targeted pests evolving resistance very rapidly to each new chemical we dump on our crops).

Although Weiner doesn’t stake out a clear position on theism, the tone of the book, especially the final third, goes beyond mere anti-creationism into an outright rejection of any supernatural role in the processes of natural selection and evolution. While that may be appropriate for most of the book, as such processes as the development of the human eye (the argument about the hypothetical watchmaker) can be explained through Darwinian evolution, Weiner does overstep when he discusses the rise of human consciousness, handwaving it away as perhaps just a simple change in neurons or a single genetic mutation that led to the very thing that makes us us. (Which isn’t to say we’re that different from chimpanzees, with whom we still share 99% of our genes. Perhaps David Brin was on to something with his “neo-chimps” in the Uplift series after all.)

The most common rejoinder I encounter online when I mention that evolution is real is that we can’t actually see evolution and therefore it’s “only a theory.” The latter misunderstands the scientific definition of theory, but the former is just not true: We do see evolution, we have seen it, and we’ve seen dramatic shifts in species’ characteristics in ordinary time. Some speciation may occur in geological time, but the evolution of new species of monocellular organisms can happen in days (again, if you don’t believe in evolution, keep taking penicillin for that staph infection), and natural selection in vertebrates can take place rapidly enough for us to see it happen. If The Beak of the Finch were required reading in every high school biology class, perhaps we’d have fewer people – the book cites a survey from the 1990s that claims half of Americans don’t accept evolution – still denying science here in 2018.

Next up: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, among the favorites to win the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction this year.

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→ March 24, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 3/24/18.

My column identifying some potential breakout players for 2018 is up for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Reiner Knizia’s Sakura, a light, quick-playing game where players all chase the lead ’emperor’ token, but where you can move your opponents as well and try to push them into the emperor, costing them points and sending them to the back of the queue.

Smart Baseball is out in paperback! U.S. Residents can enter a sweepstakes from HarperCollins to win a copy of the book and a phone call with me.

And now, the links…

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