→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ March 18, 2025
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September 5.

September 5 takes the story of the murder of most of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and tells it from a novel perspective: that of the ABC producers and staff broadcasting the Olympics to the United States audience. The shift makes it as much a story about journalism and about the way people react to crises in real time as a story about the attack itself, allowing the film to hold the tragedy at arm’s length without trivializing its impact, and the result is a true thriller even if you already know all of the details of the ending. (It’s streaming free on Paramount+ or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

We begin behind the scenes with what seems like another day of coverage, watching Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decide to focus on the despair of one of the losing swimmers after one of Mark Spitz’s victories, along with a mundane argument about what events to air between Arledge and two of his lieutenants in the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Baden (Ben Chaplin). Not long afterwards, several other staffers, including the translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), think they hear gunshots, and soon afterwards the group learns of the attack and the first killings, leading to a series of decisions of how to cover the events – doing so with a staff and crew there to cover sports, not breaking news, and certainly not this kind of crisis – and how best to leverage their position to benefit ABC. The producers even resort to some subterfuge to get a staffer inside the police perimeter, stare down German authorities who storm the control room to shut them down, and try to learn the fate of the hostages – with the last leading to the one big mistake that the decision-makers make over the course of crisis.

I’m a sucker for a good journalism story, so September 5 is catnip to me, and this movie does an excellent job of keeping the tension ratcheted up to 10 while barely leaving the control room, driving almost everything through dialogue. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, and that’s its greatest strength – there’s no fat on this script, and even though the crisis unfolds outside of the room where our characters are, the film doesn’t lose the claustrophobic sense that comes with a movie in a single, enclosed setting. It’s also unusual in the way it creates so much tension through a story where none of the named characters are ever in any sort of peril

The script doesn’t quite pay sufficient attention to the human tragedy that drives the drama in the control room, however. There are some mentions here and there of individual athletes, and a discussion of the possibility that someone might be shot live on camera where his parents might see it, but by and large this is a movie about the people in the control room. You may argue it’s just not that kind of movie, or that its lean running time – which is just right for the story it’s telling – requires it to skimp on treating the tragedy as such; I think the script could have done more to humanize the events at its core, and in the process giving its characters more empathy in the moment, unless Arledge and Mason and Bader were all just extremely callous men in real life. (Marianne is the one member of the big four characters who isn’t based on a real person, but Benesch – who was outstanding in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge – is so damn good here that I didn’t mind the fabrication one bit.)

The three actors portraying the three real-life ABC employees are all solid, but Magaro – who was excellent in a secondary role in Past Lives and as a mentally ill man in Showing Up – is the standout here, in part because his character has some more complexity and ends up confronting the biggest decision of the day, the one that happens to go wrong for the group. Sarsgaard and Chaplin are solid, but their characters can seem inert by comparison to Mason or Marianne, who show more emotion and seem more attuned to the human tragedy taking place just a few hundred yards away.

This movie is just too much in my wheelhouse for me to dislike it; I was riveted for most of its 90 minutes, once the attack begins and the movie just kicks into drive, never downshifting until the last few minutes. I can recognize its flaws with some separation from watching it, but I was probably as engrossed in September 5 as I’ve been in any movie I’ve watched from the 2024 cycle. It’s so well-told and well-paced that I never had the mental bandwidth to consider what might be missing.

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→ March 17, 2025
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Interior Chinatown.

Interior Chinatown is one of the most inventive, unusual, and funny books I’ve read in the last several years. It’s as if Percival Everett wrote a book about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, while satirizing Hollywood’s special sort of pigeonholing discrimination for people of east Asian descent along the way.

Charles Yu writes Interior Chinatown as if it’s a film treatment – all of the daily occurrences in our protagonist Willis Wu’s life come through the lens of a police procedural called Black and White, starring a Black male cop and a white female cop who have the usual not-witty banter and unaddressed sexual tension. (It reminded me of those abysmal Bacardi commercials about a pair of spies or whatever they were named … Bacardi and Cola. I’ll let you guess which was the Black guy.) Willis is a Generic Asian Male who usually plays Background Oriental Male, but hopes to work his way up to Kung Fu Guy some day, a status achieved by his father, who is now a sad, drunken Old Asian Man. The lives of Willis and his neighbors in Chinatown are split between the way they act when they’re on screen, falling into accented English and stereotypical behaviors, and when they’re off it, both of which constrain their futures, seen through Willis’s parents. The one exception is Willis’s Older Brother, who was on his way to becoming Kung Fu Guy but left Chinatown to go to law school, disappearing from the scene literally and figuratively. Willis eventually reaches a breaking point with this life and demands a bigger role, which he gets, but when he’s killed on the show he has to take 45 days off before he can work again – which puts a damper on his budding romance with another character on the show, Karen Lee.

The whole endeavor is gloriously absurd and Yu never breaks with the conceit. Everything is theater, and written as such, right down to the font choice and the equivalent of chapter and section breaks. The dialogue from the show is spot-on with the nonsense we see on copaganda network shows, and even the Black actor/character points out that he’s pigeonholed in his own way. (Yu could have kept going – south Asian characters, Muslim or Arab characters, and so on, each placed in their own little buckets by oh-so-progressive Hollywood.) It’s quite a trick to make racism and discrimination funny; Everett has done it, Paul Beatty did it beautifully in The Sellout, but very few have pulled it off like Yu does here.

Yu uses the device of the TV show as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, and there’s a layer here I know I can’t fully appreciate as someone who’s not Asian and whose parents were born and raised in the U.S. The idea of parents giving up something of themselves to try to make their kids’ lives better, and the kids striving to do better than their parents did in a system that doesn’t want to let them do so, come through in the depiction of the TV show that won’t even consider Asian-Americans as anything but background players.

There’s also a hazard in finding a credible way to conclude any story this inventive, something Everett hasn’t always done (The Trees comes to mind), but Yu pulls it off by both talking fast and switching venues for the big finish. The whole novel moves quickly, as Yu’s prose is light and there’s a lot of white space on the pages anyway, but once we get to the last two sections things start flying even with more exposition from Willis and Older Brother. I bought it, at least, and could see how Yu might map what happens in the book to some of the more positive stories of second-generation immigrants here. I can certainly see why this won the National Book Award in 2020 – it’s a tremendous book and one that says something important and new about American life.

(I haven’t seen the TV series adaptation, which premiered on Hulu a few months ago.)

Next up: Speaking of Percival Everett, I just finished his 2017 novel So Much Blue and am now on Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha.

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→ March 16, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

At the Athletic this week, I posted my annual column of potential breakout players, a draft scouting notebook from seeing UNC-Stanford, and a scouting notebook on the Mariners-Guardians Breakout game with some notes on some Brewers guys. I’ll also have a scouting notebook up shortly on the Giants-Rangers Breakout game.

And now, the links…

  • A website with AI-generated content accused a scholar at Yale of having connections to a terrorist group, without evidence or any apparent involvement from a human writer or editor. Yale suspended her anyway.
  • Armenia and Azerbaijan might be ready to sign a peace agreement that would end nearly 30 years of hostilities between the two neighboring nations, both former USSR Republics. Azerbaijan took control of the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023, but the two share a complicated border; Armenia separates Azerbaijan proper from its constituent republic Nakhchivan, and there are several tiny exclaves along the shared border between Armenia and Azerbaijan proper.
  • Sarah Spain, my former colleague at ESPN, was honored for her efforts to promote gender equity in sports coverage. I admit I hadn’t heard of the award before and don’t know anything about it, but Sarah has worked very diligently for a very long time in an industry that remains male-dominated and just generally allergic to change, all in the name of promoting women’s voices. She deserves the accolades.
  • A Seattle chef and Top Chef contestant announced he’s closing his last restaurant, Taku, citing his other non-restaurant obligations, including appearances on Food Network’s Tournament of Champions.
  • Bernd das Brot is a “depressed loaf of bread” that appears on a German kids’ TV show and has developed a cult following over the last 25 years.
  • Three board game Kickstarters to highlight this week. Space Lion 2 is a standalone version of last year’s Space Lion that’s specifically designed for two-player games. POND is a deckbuilder with area control elements that the designer says was inspired by Root. And The Great Harbor is a worker placement and dice-drafting game from the designer of 2022’s Magna Roma.
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→ March 14, 2025
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Combo.

Combo is the latest game from new publisher Happy Camper, whose first title was Trio, an import from Japan that is one of my favorite games of all time. Combo’s not quite at Trio level, but it is another very easy-to-teach game that revolves around one pseudo-cooperative mechanic that helps it stand out from the sea of small-box games that arrive on my porch.

Combo is really just a deck of cards in six colors (suits … or fruits, which is the theme of the art here), numbered 1 through 12, with point values on the cards in inverse proportion to the face values. Players will play cards from their hands to the table in each round, and once all players have played the required number of cards, all players determine the most valuable set of four or five cards (depending on player count) they can make from everyone’s played cards. The values are just those of poker: a straight flush beats four/five of a kind, which beats a flush, which beats a straight, which beats an X-high set.

You score points in Combo by having your played cards as part of the most valuable set at the end of each round. So if I played an orange 8, and the best set was an orange flush (we are agents of the free) that included my 8, then I’d take that card and place it face-down in my “full value” pile, which means I’ll get the higher point value printed on the card. There are cases where multiple cards could be used to make the most valuable set, and in those cases of true ties, the players who contributed those cards put them in their “half value” pile and get the lower point value, which is, of course, half of the higher one.

The start player changes each round, and you play until everyone has been the start player twice, as there’s definitely an advantage to going last. The number of cards you play varies by player count, as does the size of the set. There’s a two-player rule where each player plays a card, then you draw the top card from the deck as if a third player played it, repeating that whole cycle, and then each player plays once more so you have eight cards on the table. With two or three players, you play three cards each; with more, you’re playing two. With five or six players, you’re making a five-card set rather than a four-card one. That’s about the whole game. Also, the first-player token is a pineapple.

It’s a little unfortunate for Combo that it came out right around the same time as The Gang, which is also poker-themed, and is just a better game – which is not to say Combo’s bad, not at all, but The Gang is great. Combo is fun, and it’s very easy to teach and to play. You can really just play it even if you don’t entirely get the poker-hand scoring; just about anyone can understand the ideas of sets, runs, and flushes, and you just want to put in cards to muscle in on those so you get some points. Higher cards are more likely to be included in the most valuable group of four or five cards at round’s end, but they’re worth fewer points, so there’s some strategy in what you play when; you may want to hold a better card for your last play to make sure it’s going to get scored.

This is a retheme of a Korean game called Surfosaurus Max, which I’ve never seen, but the rules are identical – Boardgamegeek has them listed as one game, which is a little confusing. It’s a good filler game for the family, or to play with relatives who say they like games but maybe don’t really like most games, just the easy ones. And there’s a place for that in just about any collection.

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→ March 12, 2025
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Sing Sing.

Sing Sing has no business being as good as it is. This movie sounds like it’s going to have more sap than a pine forest, and instead of devolving into sentimental claptrap, it tells its story in an understated way that doesn’t try to tell the audience how to feel or what to expect. Of all of the movies I’ve seen from the 2024 cycle so far, it’s not the best movie or close to it, but it’s the one I’m going to recommend to the most people, because it should have very broad appeal, and has the second virtue of actually being good, even if it’s a little superficial in the telling. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story is set at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and follows several incarcerated men who are participating in the prison’s Rehabiliation Through the Arts program, which holds workshops in several performing and writing arts in prisons across New York state. Divine G (Colman Domingo) is a fervent participant both as an actor and a playwright, and becomes the de facto leader of the acting troupe, which works with coach Brent Buell (Paul Raci) to stage productions every six months or so. The group’s dynamic is upset when another longtime inmate, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), joins the classes and brings a new perspective while also learning to deal with his own frustrations and anger, while also becoming frenemies with Divine G. The film follows the dance between the two men as they try to find ways to first work with and then help each other, all as the group works to put on a show and both men try to gain their freedom through a difficult legal process.

The story was co-written by Divine G and Maclin, along with the two screenwriters who eventually wrote the script, with all four listed when they received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It’s based on an Esquire story by John Richardson called “The Sing Sing Follies.”) Once you know that, it’s hard to see the film in any other light – this is a pretty remarkable piece of storycraft that gets at some real character development from both of the two leads, more than you find in many movies or even novels. Both Divine Eye and Divine G have clear story arcs, and the interplay between their characters and their characters’ stories is the beating heart of the film. Domingo’s superb as always, and more than deserved his Oscar nomination, but Maclin’s performance is excellent as well – even if he’s playing a version of himself.

The main problem with Sing Sing is that it’s almost too positive. The story focuses on the theater program and shows very little of prison life outside of it. There are some scenes in the prison yard that depict some illicit business, but that’s about all we get. The inmates in the theater program mostly seem to have significant freedom within the prison, even in how they dress, and the audience only hears about the struggles of incarceration, rather than seeing any of it. That’s part of why it’s a feel-good movie – you’ll feel good about how successful and meaningful the arts program is, and you won’t feel bad about how terrible it is to be locked up for years, even more so for a crime you didn’t commit. Prison just doesn’t look that bad in Sing Sing and I don’t think that’s accurate.

Nearly all of the cast here comprises formerly incarcerated men who came through the program; Domingo, Raci, and theater actor Sean San José are the only exceptions I see. Most are playing themselves, but it’s still remarkable how easy these performances are – there was never a point where it was clear that someone wasn’t a professional actor, even the many cameos (including the real Divine G, who appears early in the film as another inmate who asks Domingo for an autograph). It adds to the verisimilitude of the film, of course, but also underscores the point about the value of the program, which I interpreted as an argument for the value of many kinds of social-development programs for incarcerated people. These programs, like the one in Daughters as well, reduce recidivism, which is supposed to be the goal of most incarcerations (rather than punishment, or vengeance, which is what our carceral system is really about). We’re seeing men – there are almost no lines spoken by women in the film at all – who went through the RTA program, got out, and haven’t returned. Their very presence on the screen is a feel-good story. The script probably should have delved a little more into the horrors of life on the inside, but that would have been a very different movie, too. I’m flummoxed that this wasn’t a bigger hit – it only made about $2.5 million at the U.S. box office, coming out last summer, then returning to theaters when it started earning award nominations. Critics loved it, and loved Domingo’s performance. The ending is upbeat, but not saccharine. CODA was a critical success and Best Picture winner with less. I’m hoping Sing Sing finds its audience now that it’s streaming, because it deserved more than it got.

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→ March 11, 2025
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A Song for a New Day.

Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day depicts a United States in the near future where people are compelled to stay at home and avoid any kind of public gatherings in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks and a pandemic that killed some unknown part of the population. She published it in 2019. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel on June 1st, 2020. I am going to say I think this one might have included a little bias – this is a perfectly cromulent novel, but I don’t think it’s really up to the historical standard here, even though that wasn’t a great year for sci-fi/fantasy novels.

A Song for a New Day follows two main characters, both queer women, through plot lines that intersect, split, and intersect again, with one of the two jumping forward in time. Luce Cannon (say it out loud) is a singer/songwriter whose band happened to play the last concert before the world shut down; Pinsker tells her chapters in first person, and begins her story with that final show before moving forward to the future time when live music is essentially banned. Rosemary Laws (no relation) is a young naïf who lives with her parents and works for the everything-store SuperWally (subtle) in customer support, dealing with users through a sort of virtual reality that works through wired hoodies. Through a small coincidence, she ends up getting a job with StageHoloLive, a company with a monopoly on recorded music and that streams ‘live’ shows to the SuperWally user base, again through virtual reality. Rosemary becomes a recruiter, going out into the real world in search of underground music venues to find new bands for StageHoloLive to scoop up, which eventually puts her in the crowd at one of Luce’s shows. Rosemary is, naturally, a true believer that these conglomerates are benevolent and that their services really help people, while Luce and her counterculture friends and acquaintances have other ideas – or, they just have ideas, and they help Rosemary come up with some, too.

The best parts of A Song for a New Day don’t revolve that much around the characters, neither of whom is that special or memorable, or even that tangible off the page – it’s the music, as Pinsker must be a dedicated fan of music, especially live music, to be able to evoke the sense of watching a great band in person just through her descriptions. Some of the music she describes is a little too far-fetched, as we’re talking maybe fifteen years in the future, not two hundred, but the descriptions of just being there, hearing it, feeling it in your bones, recognizing a song but also hearing it in a new way because it’s live, are the real standout here. There’s some fun and intrigue in the narrative around Rosemary’s attempts to find these illicit shows and scenes; it dovetailed nicely with my watch of A Complete Unknown, where Bob Dylan and some of his peers get their starts in little coffeehouses and other underground (albeit legal) venues in New York.

Pinsker also takes aim at Big Tech dominating more of our lives, a philosophical view I happen to share, but she lays it on so thick that it loses some of its bite. The company names, like many of the character names, are too obvious, and there’s the usual blame-the-consumer part going on – I can never blame people who simply choose the cheapest option, regardless of the hidden costs, or people who say yes to same-day delivery of something for no extra fee. That’s rational economic behavior. It’s also not in our natures to consider the externalities of anything we do; you have to learn those behaviors, like separating your recycling from your trash to keep it out of a landfill or breaking down those cardboard boxes so you’re not making more work for someone else. The blame should fall on the complicit governments that allowed these companies to get so much control over our lives and our economy – and now our Administration – but not on the consumers.

Even from my spoiler-free description, you can probably guess most of where the plot of A Song for a New Day ends up. There were virtually no surprises in the story or the development of Rosemary’s character – I don’t think Luce’s develops at all, except maybe for one sentence near the end of the book that hints at something further – so while it’s pleasant, it’s not as compelling as it could have been. The novel functions much better as a paean to the power and beauty of live music than anything else, and maybe that’s good enough for most readers. I just wonder if it would have won the Nebula if it hadn’t had a pandemic baked into the back story.

Next up: I just finished Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and started Ursula Le Guin’s Nebula-winning YA novel Powers.

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→ March 10, 2025
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The Substance.

The Substance has a great concept for a sci-fi/horror film, and an even better theme. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat depicts Hollywood’s obsession with women’s looks and youth, and the patriarchy’s obsession with the same through an aging actress and fitness-show star who learns about a cheat code to become a 20-year-old version of herself again – but only every other week. It is such a shame that Fargeat had no idea what to do with the story once she got the setup in place; the second half of this movie is a literal and figurative mess, so much so that it’s appalling that this profoundly stupid movie got Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on Mubi.)

Demi Moore plays the idiotically-named Elizabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-ish figure who was once a huge star and now hosts a daily aerobics show, because I guess this movie is set in 1985 (although it never specifies when it’s set). On the day she turns 50, the show’s producer Harvey (as in Weinstein, because this film is just that subtle) fires her because she’s too old. (Harvey is played by Dennis Quaid, who hams it up as the role demands.) Elizabeth is so upset as she’s driving home that she gets into a car accident and ends up in the hospital, where somehow she doesn’t have any broken bones or internal bleeding or anything of the sort, but a creepy young nurse with ridiculously smooth skin slips her a flash drive that tips her off to a fountain-of-youth scheme called The Substance. She jumps through all kinds of hoops to get a hold of it – the film’s best sequences, really – and eventually tries it out: A second, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) emerges, literally, and takes over the lead spot on Elizabeth’s show. The hitch is that each week, Elizabeth and this new her, who takes the name Sue, must switch places: one goes into a sort of coma, and the other gets to run around and be alive and such. But when one of the two decides to take a little more than the allotted time, the center cannot hold and things fall apart – including the plot.

The whole setup is pretty brilliant, like something from a modern Philip K. Dick fable. (PKD did write at least once about “anti-gerasone,” a serum that reversed the effects of aging.) The attention to detail in the way the whole scheme works, right down to the packaging of the various parts of the Substance, would seem to presage a really thoughtful, smart conclusion, regardless of whether it works out for Elizabeth. There’s a wide range of points this story could have made about how society as a whole and the media industry in specific treats women as disposable assets with early expiration dates. It applies to women on screen in films and on TV, even news and sports anchors, but also applies to general societal attitudes towards women, even in what is supposed to be a more equitable and enlightened era. (Or was, I suppose.) Men who are Elizabeth’s age see her as old, then fawn over and leer at Sue, including, of course, Harvey.

Instead, we get a thoughtless, gross, and sloppy conclusion to all of that early promise. There’s an inexplicable rivalry between the two halves – which I interpreted as a commentary on women who step on or attack other women rather than standing together against the patriarchy – that leads each of them to try to sabotage the other during their waking weeks. And when one starts stealing time from the other, things go very awry, and it becomes clear that Fargeat never figured out the end of the story. The big concluding scene is a bloody mess, either way you want to interpret that phrase, and is also absolute nonsense: The hyperrealism that fills every part of the film outside of the use of the Substance is gone, and we’re no longer making or even pondering a point. We’re just covered in blood. There’s no further exploration of the entrenched misogyny across our society, or our obsession with youth and beauty. There’s no biting, satirical conclusion that takes down the Harveys of the world – or even the just normal, just innocent men who are probably contributing to the environment in all manner of little ways (and I’m not exempting myself here, either). Fargeat wrote herself into a corner, and instead of writing herself out of it, she just went for gore. I

Moore’s performance in The Substance earned her a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress; I don’t think this was a close contest between her and Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for her performance in Anora. Moore is very good, but there’s some sentiment in the plaudits; she’s not even in the movie as much as a typical lead performer. There’s some daring to the performance, certainly, and she also has to act out some pretty gross scenes that couldn’t have been easy. Qualley didn’t get anywhere near the same attention, but she’s excellent and essential to the movie – she has to play a sort of scheming ingenue, and in any of her scenes at the studio, especially anything with Harvey, she nails the look and demeanor of someone who knows how to manipulate the hell out of the idiot man in front of her. She’s not better than Moore in the film, but she could have gotten some supporting actress support.

This just isn’t a good movie by any definition I would use. It’s very smart and entertaining for about half its length, and then it falls apart. It’s not smart, or interesting, or even entertaining in the second half, beyond the tension because we’re watching Elizabeth-Sue heading for some kind of terrible crash. I’m almost offended that it got a screenplay nomination, because the writing is the whole problem here. The performances are good, the effects and makeup are fine, but the writing is just lazy. A big violent finish is the easiest and least thoughtful way to end a story. This story, and the women it’s ostensibly supporting, deserved better.

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→ March 9, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

  • Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.
  • The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.
  • Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.
  • Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.
  • Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.
  • People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

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→ March 7, 2025
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Music update, February 2025.

I always think February is going to be a lighter month for music, but that makes no sense since it will always have four Fridays, same as most months, and it’s not like December when labels do try to avoid releasing new albums. This month was pretty packed, and I’m sure I missed stuff – I’m behind on some of the full-lengths released in the last four weeks for sure – but here’s what I’ve got. As always you can see the playlist here if you can’t access the widget below.

Blondshell – Two Times. I was lighter on Blondshell’s highly acclaimed self-titled debut album when it came out in 2023, but this song, from her upcoming LP If You Asked for a Picture, is by far the best thing she’s ever done, with revealing storytelling with off-kilter harmonies over a mesmerizing guitar line.

Waxahatchee – Mud. I actually drove right by the actual town of Waxahachie on my last scouting trip to Texas, while I was listening to this song (and playlist), an extra track from the Tigers Blood sessions.

Sharon van Etten – I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way). I’ve never quite gotten the critical acclaim for van Etten, who often sings like she’s stoned, but she does have a great voice when she lets it rip, and I’ve sense a stylistic shift over her last two or three albums to include more rock and other genres and away from the minimalist arrangements of her earlier work.

Heartworms – Just to Ask a Dance. Heartworms, aka Jojo Orme, released her debut album Glutton for Punishment last month to some pretty glowing reviews. It’s a frenetic, energetic mix of gothic new wave, dance, and industrial elements, with plenty of guitars, calling back to the several points of the 1980s (there’s some early NIN in here) while managing to also sound modern and inventive.

Matt Berry w/Eric D. Johnson – Why on Fire? I didn’t know the British actor Matt Berry, who appeared on The IT Crowd and What We Do in the Shadows and voiced a character in The Wild Robot, was actually a musician first, with his first album coming out in 1995. His newest LP, Heard Noises, has gotten a ton of praise, but I actually just like this one song; the rest of it is very nostalgic, almost a throwback to the ‘60s, and not the part I particularly enjoy.

Sports Team – Bang Bang Bang. This is the best of the three singles Sports Team have released so far from their upcoming third album, Boys These Days, due out May 25th. I loved this art-rock/post-punk band’s last record, Gulp!, which had great guitar-driven hooks and witty lyrics throughout, but the previous two singles they put out didn’t have the same energy this one does.

Sam Fender – Little Bit Closer. I confess I have to listen to Fender’s whole album People Watching, but this and the title track are both outstanding roots-rock tracks from a freaking British guy who just turned 30.

Fontaines D.C. – It’s Amazing to Be Young. A one-off single from the lads to commemorate one of the members becoming a father for the first time. Between this and “Favourite,” I might almost say they’d gone pop.

The Murder Capital – Death of a Giant. This Irish rock band just released their third album, Blindness, on February 21st, featuring this track and “Can’t Pretend to Know.” I wrote in October that they’re somewhere between punk and post-punk, but this song is almost math-rock (I don’t love the term, but it fits), and definitely goes beyond their punk-ish roots.

Adwaith – Gofyn. I’ve included a few more Welsh acts in the last five years because my wife is of Welsh descent, but this band actually popped up on an American-based playlist I follow on Spotify. They sing in Welsh, and use a sort of spare, post-punk style that sounds very DIY. They just released their third album, Solas.

swim school – Heaven. I’ve seen this Scottish band described as indie-pop, grunge, and shoegaze, all of which sort of fits. I’m into their sound, whatever it is, and I bet they kick ass live. This track is very shoegazey; it’s their first new music since their “mixtape” Seeing It Now came out last April.

Preoccupations – Focus. Preoccupations does one of the best revivals of mid-80s post-punk, right down to the guitar tones, so I’m pretty much going to include any track they release on here … but come on, that guitar riff at the start is “Uncertain Smile,” right?

The Horrors – Ariel. The Horrors’ follow-up to their magnum opus, 2017’s V, comes out on the 21st. Night Life seems like it’s going to turn hard into the psychedelic and shoegaze parts of their sound, based on the three singles so far.

Friendship – Free Association. These guys are from Philly and have put out four albums already, so I’m a little abashed that this is the first song of theirs I’ve ever heard. I love the music, the pulsing percussion lines and the haunting piano and string lines, but I do wish the singer would just … sing. He’s kind of warble-talking, and it detracts from the song.

The Tubs – Chain Reaction. Probably my least favorite single of the three released so far from this offshoot of the defunct band Joanna Gruesome. Their jangle-pop sound is right up my alley, although the earlier two singles had better hooks. They released their second album, Cotton Crown, today.

Tropical Fuck Storm – Goon Show. I suppose with a name like that, you kind of have to not give a fuck about anything, right? This song is weird and witty and at some points barely seems like a song. “It’s raining cats and dogma” is a great line, though. They’re promising a new album but have offered no details, so this is just a one-off single from the Melbourne supergroup.

Brooke Combe – Butterfly. Combe’s full-length debut, Dancing at the Edge of the World, came out on January 31st, featuring this smooth ‘70s-infused R&B/pop number along with the superb “This Town.”

Self Esteem – Focus is Power. I hadn’t heard of Self Esteem, the nom de chanson of Rebecca Taylor, who was half of Slow Club, before this song, but it seems like the kind of pop banger that could easily take off with its gospel-backed chorus and its trite, vague lyrics about self-worth and being powerful. I still like the melody, though.

Little Simz feat. Obongjayar & Moonchild Sanelly – Flood. Simbi’s back, with her next album Lotus coming out on May 9th. That’ll be her first full-length since 2022’s No Thank You, although she’s put out music in the interim via EPs and mixtapes. This track features more of her frequent collaborator Obongjayar (“Point and Kill”) than it does of Simz herself, which might be a negative if it weren’t for the tremendous beat behind all of their vocals. How is she only 31? I feel like she’s been recording for fifteen years now.

WOOZE – 4 Lovely Children. WOOZE’s self-titled debut album came seven years after their first release, and it hits the mark – the songs are ridiculous, bouncy, snarky, and just all-around fun.

Bartees Strange – 17. Strange just dropped his third album, Horror, and based on the four songs I’ve heard so far he’s expanding his sonic palate substantially, although I also understand the criticism of Jack Antonoff’s production style, which tends to mute Strange’s guitar work.

Anxious – Never Said. I don’t think these guys are an emo band, but that’s how I see them labeled in the music press; they’re somewhere between hard rock and hardcore, and even with some screamed vocals it’s pretty damn good. Their second album, Bambi, came out on February 21st, and it’s in my queue.

Doves – A Drop in the Ocean. I didn’t love the new album, Constellations for the Lonely, anywhere near as much as I’d hoped after hearing the killer first single “Renegade.” It’s just uneven, in both songwriting and production, and the third single “Saint Teresa” was just a mess. Singer Jimi Goodwin doesn’t always sound fully invested in the songs, which is disappointing as his voice is my favorite of the various band members’.

Momma – Bottle Blonde. This is more like it after their last single was heavily derivative of Veruca Salt’s “Seether,” more in that lo-fi indie-pop vein that characterized their best track to date, “Speeding 72.”

Andy Bell – apple green ufo. That’s the Andy Bell of Ride, not the one of Erasure; Bell just released a solo album Pinball Wanderer that is a spaced-out psychedelic trip, nothing like his music with Ride or Hurricane #1 or Oasis, and even includes a mellow cover of “I’m in Love with a German Film Star.”

Verbian – Fruta caída do mar. I get emails from a lot of music publicists, too many to even open most of them – it’s not like this is my job – but something got me to open this one, and even though it’s not the sort of experimental metal that email led me to expect, it is novel, with the percussion especially standing out here for the way it gives the song different textures throughout.

Mekons – War Economy. I didn’t realize the Mekons were still going, but they’ve been quite prolific, at least up until the pandemic, after which they didn’t put out any new music for five years, until last month’s Horror. I also don’t know their music very well, or even their history, given how often I confuse them with the Melvins, two bands with nothing at all in common.

Raven – Can’t Take Away the Fire. I can’t believe these guys are still going; Raven started in 1974, became one of the leaders of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, never breaking through commercially beyond that core audience, and they’ve never had more than a brief hiatus in their fifty years. More notable is that the band still has its two original members, the Gallagher brothers – no, not them – with John Gallagher still handling vocals and hitting the high notes at age 66.

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