From The Old Blog: The Finer Things, April & May 2023

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(Reader note: this is an old blog post from the old version of this site, which I’m bringing back simply as an example of how long the The Finer Things used to run before I reigned it in a bit.)

(Also, eventually that “Ballerina” John Wick spin off is gonna drop, I’m gonna see it in theatres, and I inevitably am going to want to link back to this to point out that I Have Opinions On John Wick. So yeah. We’re necroposting this one.)

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HahaahaAHAAHAA fuck this is late

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been busy. As much as I’d like to, I’ve not had much time to pen a long column about what I’ve been up to in my spare time, much less had much spare time to spend. Snakes, Barren, and a couple other upcoming projects have kind of monopolized most of my attention, and I’m a bit late on having a second to sit down and write about fun stuff. Hell, we’re skipping an entire month here cuz I don’t even remember what I did in March at this point.

With that stated, I have listened to a whole lot of new records and watched a bunch of new shows and movies this month¹, and very much would like to share ’em all with you. So, without further ado…

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WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO

It’d be a long, long list if I were to type out every sonic novelty that’s held my interest over the past three months, but here’s a short list of records I’ve had blasting on mocp over the past bit, sorted by the two main places I listen to records–during my workouts, and in the studio.

(I’ll be skipping doing Recommended Tracks for the “Workout Jamz” section, primarily because I was listening to each record/mix the whole way through while pumping iron or doing cardio and I didn’t have much time to pick out individual tracks for you to check out. Still recommend you check out each record in their entirety, though, regardless of which list they’re on.)

WORKOUT JAMZ

Now that the roads aren’t (consistently)² prohibitively snowy, I’ve been finally able to hit the gym with some sort of actual consistency again. And, as a direct result, I’ve been listening to a lot of longer mixes, re-visiting some old favorites, and generally putting on two hours worth of either mixes or variations upon a theme of podcasts while I do fifteen reps of my body weight on the sus machine and try to avoid cute muscle boys catching me checking them out so I don’t get the fuck kicked out of me in the locker room. ³

A lot of this list are gonna be accompanied by Youtube links–the sets don’t seem to be available anywhere else that I could find, although I refuse to use Spotify for obvious reasons so they may be on there. I should point out that, when on the move ,I either use Newpipe via F-Droid if I have my spare Android device with me or sxmo’s implementation of youtube-dl if I have my Pinephone to snag them. In the studio, I use Freetube, which has the added boon of allowing you to pipe through Invidious rather than going through the Friendly Panopticon’s servers directly. Privacy is important and so is making local archive copies of things you love.

MALA - BOILER ROOM LONDON

This set is legendary for a reason, and not just because it’s one of the only times Mala has appeared on video during a live mix, much less had his mixing wizardry recorded at all. Ample rewinds, an insane track list, and a level of bass that almost necessitates a full stack, if not an entire sound system proper–this set has it all, and Mala spins the entire thing dancing along with the audience. Fantastic stuff.

DIESELBOY - THE DUNGEONMASTER’S GUIDE

I haven’t listened to this in almost a decade, and put it on basically on a whim. Unsurprisingly, it still rips. A masterpiece of aggressive drum-and-bass paired with a fantastic selection of samples (including Red Queen’s monologue from the Resident Evil movie on the track ‘Infection (E-Sassin’ mix)’) as well as an introduction from Optimus Prime himself (Peter Cullen), this whole record is a treasure trove for the specific type of dork that spins records back because she knows she heard that sample somewhere else before.

It’s me. I am that specific type of dork.

SKINNY PUPPY - THE GREATER WRONG OF THE RIGHT

At some point, and again mostly on a whim, I decided to search out an old music video I watched back when I was younger. It still holds up as one of the greatest music videos I think I’ve ever seen⁴, the tune slapped as well, and I put it on the Jazz Program as bump music for a bit. Looked it up while in the gym for a bit, and it turns out the rest of the album slaps as well. I’ve heard it described as their “most accessible”, and seeing as I tend to turn off most industrial records halfway through, I’m kind of glad for that.

AMORPHIS - QUEEN OF TIME

Sometimes you gotta get back to your roots, man. I’ve been finding it weirdly difficult to listen to black metal since Ophelia Drowning went kaput and The Forest At Night left Radio Dark Tunnel’s lineup. Something about it just doesn’t give me the good brain chemicals it used to, and if anything hearing genres I used to try (and repeatedly fail) to be a part of the community of kind of just makes me depressed.

Thankfully, Amorphis hits nowhere near that mark, especially their later stuff. I’m sure I’d get endless amounts of flack for this were I to put this comment in some kind of metal forum or what-have-you, but “Queen Of Time” specifically hits a lot of the same notes for me as the post-hardcore and melodic metalcore I listened to growing up. Combine that with some heavy-hitting lyrics about love, loss, and overcoming obstacles on one’s journey, and yeah. This is something I can bench to.

HYBRID MINDS - BBC RADIO 1 ESSENTIAL MIX

Hybrid Minds are gods. If you consider yourself to be among the throngs of little faith, go check out this set and peep the tracklist. You cannot find a more energizing, enrapturing, and borderline spiritual set of soulful tunes and smooth, divine track transitions without just heading back ten years to the age of classics like Oakenfold’s Goa mix. Perfect for doing kettlebell work, in my opinion.

SOFT MACHINE - THIRD

Look, we all have days when we’re in weird moods. My weird mood days just happen to have me staring off into the æther while I leg press twice my body weight as ‘Slightly All The Time’ wails into my ears.

I’m not telling you this is a bad album. It’s a certifiable classic. I’m also not going to sit here and get oddly braggadocious about how “lol i’m so edgy” for listening to avant-garde tripe in inappropriate places, because I made enough of those in my mid-twenties when I was dumb enough to think I was cool. I’m just autistic as all hell, and sometimes I have Bad Brain Days and need the Weird Noises to accompany me on my bold journey to having a thicker ass than half the cisgendered cardio bunnies in this here Planny Fitty.

STUDIO JAMZ

This one’s a bit of a weird one, because half the time in the studio I’m putting on the same exact records I’ve been listening to for most of my career, especially if I need to get my brain into “work mode”.⁵ With that stated, once I’m in work mode, I’ll put on a variety of records–either stuff I plan on featuring on the radio, records I’ve heard about or heard tracks from on other radio shows that I’d like to check out⁶, or old records I love that I just want to hear again.

I won’t list the last one here–my “comfort food” in the studio could take up seven or more installments worth of five thousand word columns–but here’s a few interesting samples and selections from the first two categories.

THE MICROPHONES - THE GLOW, PT. 2

At some point in the past few months, I jokingly told an old friend of mine about a great new black metal record I thought they should check out. That record was “The Glow, Pt. 2”, and I was only half being a jackass.

The Microphones hit a lot of the notes that got me into DSBM and post-black metal in the first place, both emotionally and sonically, and I’d unironically rank it up there with (and in borderline the same category as) Agalloch’s “The Mantle” or Lifelover’s “Pulver” as far as records go. This entire record is a beautiful and devastating emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend it.

Recommended Tracks: All of ’em. The piece doesn’t really work if you don’t listen to the whole thing cover to cover.

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT - FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

Yeah. Yeah, I know. No, I’ve never sat down and listened to “Fire Of Unknown Origin” until this month. Yeah, I’m just as surprised as you are.

I don’t know what I can say about this one that hasn’t already been said. It’s either up there with or takes the top spot of BOC’s best records, depending on who you ask, and the whole thing is a nerdy, energizing, and generally wonderful record. If I had never “gotten” BOC before now, this would be the record that would have made their style click, and seeing as the record that made them click for me was “Agents Of Fortune”, this is just more of what I liked from that album, cranked up a notch or two.

Recommended Tracks: Burnin’ For You, Fire Of Unknown Origin

CHIEF XIAN ATUNDE ADJUAH (CHRISTIAN SCOTT) - STRETCH MUSIC

Hooooly fuck. I heard ‘Perspectives’ on KUVO this month, and I had to track this record down. I have been trying for what seems like my entire life to find more records that scratch at or near the itch that listening to early The Mars Volta records at a formative age have just kind of left there, and…yeah. Did not expect that void to be filled by a trumpeter from NOLA, but here we are. I’ll most likely be spending a good amount of time with the good Chief’s music over the next month or so, because the rest of the work I’ve heard from him is equally as fantastic.

Recommended Tracks: Perspectives, Sunrise in Beijing (feat. Elena Pinderhughes), Tantric

THE LYMAN WOODARD ORGANIZATION - SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL/DON’T STOP THE GROOVE

WHEN IN DESPAIR
DON’T TAKE TO THE AIR
SIT DOWN AND FEEL
WHAT YOU KNOW IS REEEEEAL

CREAAAATIVE MUUUUUUSICIANS
KEEP ON ROLLIN’ RIGHT ALONG
YEEEAAAH, YEAH, YEAAH

….that’s it, that’s all I got here.

Seriously though, lyric quotes aside, go listen to Lyman Woodard. I don’t know how one can listen to his records and not feel the urge to dance and create.

Recommended Tracks: Creative Musicians, Don’t Stop The Groove, Theme In Search Of A Sportspectacular

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WHAT I’VE BEEN PLAYING

Not much, honestly. Since, again, I haven’t had much time to sit down and faff about, I’ve been sticking to either games that I can turn my brain off to or games that I absolutely need a walkthrough of some manner for because I’m too stupid to figure out the inner workings of the game designer’s mind.

I contain multitudes, dammit. Multitudes!

THE CASE OF THE GOLDEN IDOL

Supergreatfriend tried this one out for an hour a while back, and after sitting there screaming the puzzle solutions at the screen I decided to give it a shot to see if I’d have any better luck than he did.

And, for the first few puzzles, yes. Yes I did. The issues comes later, where the designers force the clues to compound between cases and require you to remember who’s who and which face goes with which person…which would be fine if how the characters are drawn was consistent between chapters, which is hit and miss at best. It’s a minor detail, but very much something that can be hair-rippingly frustrating at times.

CONQUESTS OF THE LONGBOW

This game is gorgeous. One of the first Sierra games to feature in full VGA color, if not the first depending on how you calculate it–the previous in-house game was Quest For Glory II, which featured EGA graphics and a text parser–and somehow they managed to nail it right out of the fuckin’ gate. The art is painterly yet restrained, the character portraits are beautiful and portray emotions remarkably well given the limitations present in both hardware and experience, and there are entire scenes that are just moving in their beauty. Old-school Sierra were always masters of romanticism and fairy-tale universes, but it’s fascinating to see how a simple color-palette upgrade takes it all to the next level.

How’s the gameplay? Well…it’s a Sierra point and click. Does it still include its fair share of Sierra bullshit? Absolutely. But if you can look past the moon logic, figure out how to work the strange mouse navigation from screen to screen, and if you remembered to track down a copy of the manual–also beautifully illustrated, because of course it is, but as is tradition your ass is not getting past the copy protection without it–it’s a remarkably enjoyable point-and-click with some of the most memorable graphics I’ve ever seen from this era.

PEGLIN

Look, I’m a simple dipshit, aaight? I see a game about goblins throwing rocks, and my status as the undisputed Queen of Goblins legally requires me to play it.

I blame Kikoskia for this one. I have his VODs and Let’s Plays going fairly often for background noise while I’m in the studio, and he picked up this game at some point in the past month. I saw it, picked it up, and haven’t really put it down since.

It’s still in Early Access, unfortunately, so there’s a lot of little bits and bobs either missing or outright broken. Hell, there’s a couple treasures you can pick up whose text outright doesn’t display for me on the version I have. With that stated, the art’s charming, the concept is simple and has an addicting gameplay loop, and the sound design (especially the final boss theme) is immaculate. Highly recommend snagging it if you enjoy simple arcade romps, plinky pachinko boards, or deck-builders.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING

TEE VEE

X-FILES (SEASON 1)

Gonna be real with you here. I don’t see it.

Sacrilege, I know, but I genuinely can’t get the appeal. Maybe it’s because I didn’t watch it in its heyday, maybe it’s because I expected to be able to take it seriously than I clearly was able to, and maybe it gets good after Season 1. But on god, half these episodes are god-awful (notable examples–which I will not be calling by their actual names–include S1E5 “Mulder Has A Cavewoman Fetish”, S1E8 “Hey Skully, You Ever Seen ‘The Thing’? No? Well This’ll All Be New To You Then”, and S1E9 “Oh No, There’s A Spoopy Face On The Moon, Time For A Second Challenger Disaster”) and the other half are only vaguely interesting (S1E3 “OH GOD ITS IN THE WALLS ITS IN THE WALLS ITSINTHEFUCKINWALLS”, S1E2 “It Turns Out That If Your Dumbass Partner Breaks Into A Top Secret Black Site You Can Just Point A Gun At The Cops To Get Him Back, Trust Me Bruh, They Won’t Shoot You, It’s Chill”, and S1E6 “The Case Of The Haunted Desk Plaquard With A Ben Franklin Quote” being the most meh examples).

And I like schlock pulp teevee, dammit. I’ve watched the TV adaptation of La Femme Nikita, I have the complete run of the 2001 Witchblade show on my hard drive, and I have both Total Recall and Eraser in my VHS library. Hell, I almost prefer the trash 1990s Mike Hammer reboot over the ’80s run, and that’s nearly explicitly because I think the idea of “There’s No Way She’s Not A Body Snatcher Because No One Stays Lookin’ That Young That Long” Velda and “Young Troubled Boy We Brought Onto The Show Because It’s The Nineties, Maaaan” Nick trying to teach “Definitely Not A Body Snatcher Because Holy Shit He’s Aged Fifty Years Since We Saw Him In The Eighties” Old Man Stacy Keach how to use the computer is funny as shit. The schlock ain’t the issue here.

Rather, the root of the issue seems to be that the writers clearly want me to take it far more seriously than I’m even remotely able to, and at the same time it doesn’t play what tongue-in-cheek humor it does have evenly enough for it to work. I basically clocked out right at S1E11 after skipping half of the previous few episodes midway through because I just couldn’t do it, and seeing as S1E14 is literally called “Gender Bender” and I can’t imagine they’re gonna play that hand with any subtlety or compassion⁷, my trans ass is almost glad I skipped out.

So yeah, despite on paper being the target demographic for it, I just cannot seem to grok S1 of X-Files. Maybe I’ll start in on Season 2 at some point and it’ll be more tolerable. Hell, if anyone has any advice on exactly when in S1 it starts getting tolerable, email me and let me know. Maybe I’ll give it another college try at some point. But right now…nah man, I’m good.

Oh, and speaking of Mike Hammer…

MIKE HAMMER (1990s) (SEASON 1)

…guess what I’ve been making Autumn ████████ watch during Studio Movie Night?

The 90s run of Mike Hammer, as I briefly touched up above in my rant about Scully and Mulder’s Sexual Tension Adventures, is balls to the wall 90’s as fuck. Like a good amount of reboots in the nineties (“Escape From LA” immediately comes to mind, and not just because Stacy Keach also plays Commander Malloy in that one), the 90’s run of Spillaine’s signature big ugly bastard plops the best actor to have ever played the role out of the gritty ’80s of his previous appearance and directly into the Brave New World of cable news, Internet porn, and b-ball. I’m not just pulling those tropes from a hat with the words “things the 90s had lying around” written on it, by the way–those are literally the Big Bads of episodes 2-4 of Season 1, respectively. It’s campy-ass nonsense complete with requisite gruff pulp monologue narration from Keach himself, and while the topics retain the same level of grit as you would expect from a Spillaine-inspired romp–the Internet porn episode’s “final boss” is a snuff film ring–it does not for a second expect you to take it with any gravitas.

HARVEY BIRDMAN (SEASONS 1-3)

If you’ve been tuning in early to my three-hour block on Tuesday nights over on datafruits.fm, you probably know that I tend to test my connection to the radio server by doing a small segment loosely called “…until then, here’s this.” I usually have a few minutes before Talkie Time and between Talkie Time and The Jazz Program each week, and I tend to fill said minutes with random tracks interspersed with stupid TV and movie quotes.

You probably also might have noticed me sampling Harvey Birdman a lot. If so, that’s because Autumn’s retaliation for me making her watch Mike Hammer learn what cable is was to make me watch Steven Colbert play a washed-up superhero-turned-lawyer.

There’s definitely a few episodes that get uncomfortable in that “early Adult Swim” kind of way–S3E9 “The Return Of Birdgirl” is a notable one, as the writers stumble their way through attempting to comment on legalizing gay marriage and somehow manage to fuck up so badly that it almost seems like they’re equating gay marriage to incest–but all in all, the series holds up as well as shit like Sealab 2021, Space Ghost Coast To Coast, and other early AS romps, while using its 13-and-a-half-ish minute time limit to not overstay its welcome in each episode.

AUTUMN AND Piper’S BIG DUMB MOVIE NIGHT

Thanks to Autumn ████████’s schedule and my constantly being vaguely busy, our little studio/found family doesn’t have much time to sit down and do much together that doesn’t involve working on shit these days. We do, however, try and find time to have some kinda movie night every so often, and we tend to strike a happy medium between her preference for off-the-wall nonsense and my firm love for shite action garbage. Note that a good portion of these selections should not be taken as reflections of our taste–the two of us have a tendency to just pick shit that will actively annoy the other.⁸

Here’s what we’ve had on over the past bit. I’m leaving out some of the ones we watched, as well as a bunch of the movies I watched in the gym during cardio, because…well, I’m running out of space here. Most of the ones I’m leaving out were movies I watch every so often because I love ’em, so they’ll come back at some point.

PUNISHER: WARZONE

I honestly expected this to be bad. I didn’t expect it to be boring.

Autumn sold me on this’n by describing a scene in which Frank Castle straight up lights up a drugged up dude doing parkour with what looks like a surface-to-air missle, and that hit so many Bullshit Action Movie Points for me that, in my hubris, I demanded we fill at least one movie night slot with this tripe. I knew it would be complete trash going in. Combine the mid-2000s tendency to make action flicks in general overly edgy for no good reason with it being an early superhero film–one that features Frank Fuckin’ Castle, to boot, the king of Edgy McEdgelordbait–and I was expecting garbage, sure, but entertaining garbage.

Nah, man. This flick’s just fuckin’ dull.

Hell, even the action scenes constantly find themselves batting in the low .100s when they’re not fouling out or swinging into embarrassing strikes. The closest thing this film had going for it was the obvious queer-coded (and, I’d argue, borderline reclaimable as trans-coded⁹) duo of Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim, and the most hilarious part of that is that not only does the movie fail to even manage to make the “villian” part of “queer coded villain” trope stick–the scene where Frank Castle tosses the mobster into a glass crusher and fucks up his face bad enough to turn him into Jigsaw is so unreasonably brutal that you honestly kind of empathize with the guy for wanting to fuck up Angry Cop Mans–but it makes them more interesting than the title character himself. Frank Castle is boring, and spends half the film being an self-hating little whinebag when he’s not busy getting his ass handed to him or somehow managing to bumble his way into slaughtering rooms full of what I assume we’re supposed to take as “bad guys” blatantly ignoring how modern arms work in favor of The Rule Of Cool.

Hell, even The Rule Of Cool doesn’t save this film here–while writing this, I actually completely confused one of the action scenes in this movie with the staircase scene from Shoot ‘Em Up., and got halfway through writing about a “staircase scene” before realizing I was confusing one edgy hyperviolent movie about an angry maladjusted white guy shooting his way through multiple cartoonishly evil villans and entire mobs worth of gangsters in order to protect a woman and child with another, slightly better movie with a nearly identical premise.

Seriously, if you wanna watch a movie about a maladjusted angry guy shooting people he doesn’t like, just watch Shoot ‘Em Up. It’s not good either, but at least it’s at least somewhat fun, and you won’t get bullied by people who think it’s funny that they tricked you into watching a Punisher movie. Looking at you, Autumn.

THE MATRIX

Believe it or not, I had never seen The Matrix until this year when Autumn pulled it up for movie night.

It was okay. I guess I get a lot of pop culture references now. The fight scenes were great.

I honestly don’t remember most of it, though.

^{…boy howdy between this and my opinion of the x-files i’m gonna get some aaaaangry emails aren’t i}

JOHN WICK 1, 2, & 3: PARABELLUM

John Wick 4 hit theaters relatively recently, and while both of us wanted to go see it, Autumn had only seen 1 and 3 and I had only seen 2. So, we decided to just sit down one night and watch all three before booking tickets to 4.

I’ve already burned way too many words on Being Angry At Frank Castle’s Big Gay NYC Adventure, so in order to prevent me from screaming at clouds once we get deep enough into this, I’m just gonna sum these up in one paragraph each.

JOHN WICK 1

Not the best action film of its era, but pretty high up there. Wick 1 suffers from some pacing issues, especially in the first half, but they’re the kind of pacing issues you’d expect from a movie that knows full well that it only gets two hours or so of runtime, and while it speedruns through most of Wick’s motivations it does in fact let you see where they take him in violent, bloody fights with fantastic choreography and a choice selection of obscenely beautiful shots. I’ve heard the Wick series called “Hollywood’s answer to John Woo”, and it does its best to set the stage for that here, especially in its fantastic final fight.

JOHN WICK 2

This is the one I’ve seen, and the best of the three as far as I’m concerned. The homage to kung-fu cinema is even more blatant here–the use of what looks like a green screen close-up with heavy color grading and heavy vignetting just before the subway fight scene with Cassian screams Hong Kong cinema to me–and key concepts such as the Continental are introduced here, which both flesh out the blood-covered world Wick inhabits and makes it incredibly fascinating. This is also where a lot of cracks in the armor start to show as well, unfortunately–the complete lack of music or other audio during the Cassian fight, while atmospheric, makes the fight drag on just a little too long, which is something the third movie drags into the ground–but all and all this is the best Wick film in my opinion.

JOHN WICK 3: PARABELLUM

sigh

Okay, I lied. I can’t keep this to one paragraph. I’m mad at this one.

Autumn jokingly described this one as “the movie where they deal with the consequences of the first two”, and she’s right. The issue is that the consequences are introduced way too quickly, often end up on express trains to Nowhere Land before derailing and crashing just before shit could have gotten even remotely interesting, and then it spends half the film dealing with the assassin’s equivalent of an insurance claims agent bitching at everyone to pay up because god forbid your liability policy covers anything.

The film tosses a lot of interesting (Sofia, Berrada), not-so-interesting (John Wick Fanboy Guy Whose Name I Forgot), and, occasionally, insufferable (The Adjudicator) characters at you, and then barely does anything with the good ones and drags the insufferable ones (LIKE THE ADJUDICATOR) across your face like the ballsack a greasy frat boy who’s been training to hold a squat as long as possible explicitly so he can teabag you more effectively (HAVE I IMPLIED HARD ENOUGH THAT I FUCKIN HATE THE ADJUDICATOR YET).

And speaking of The Adjudicator, the universe–especially the enigmatic High Table–is fleshed out rapid-fire, and the film teaches you that the High Table it fleshes out both sucks and is mired in weird bullshit that also sucks. It introduces this tiny shaven goth lady called The Adjudicator as The High Table’s token representative for the movie, and it spends half the film making you watch every single person the previous two films built up as literal gods in a world of hired killers pissing themselves at the prospect of having to deal with what appears to be nothing more than one hundred and ten pounds of cranky art school dropout turned HR Auditor. It also teaches you that John Wick–you know, the guy the first two movies set up as basically the second coming of Assassin Jesus? The Baba Yaga? Fortnite Battle Royale Numbah One?–is a little bitch when faced with even the prospect of dealing with the High Table, a writing choice which, again, is complete bullshit, weird as hell, and really sucks.

The fight scenes are mostly great, but every second one seems to take the “no music” thing that pushed the Cassian fight in the second film just barely into insufferable territory, then tosses the engine into first gear and drags its fuckin’ cargo up a steep grade at an unbearably slow pace. Any concept of shot consistency is more or less gone. A particularly egregious example is the upstairs fight scene with John Wick Fanboy, which is just a clone of the mirror room fight from 2, if said mirror room fight was way too fuckin’ long, had no actual continuity, almost no music, and inisted upon Wick’s opponent being a clone of Banderas’s “I Wanna Be Number One” character gimmick from “Assassins” but borderline Jokerfied in his fanboyism and stripped clean of the feral energy that made Banderas’s character work in the first place. Fact is, when your fights are topping ten-minutes-plus at the high end of their runtime, often lack music entirely, make it impossible for the audience to follow what’s going on, re-use gimmicks from previous films with barely any actual iteration on the themes, and feature dull, unlikable characters, that just doesn’t add up to what I expect from a franchise like John Wick.

And to be completely frank, all of this almost redeems itself at the end. The Continental fight is one of the best in the series. Winston putting Vivaldi on the loudspeakers is an immaculate brushstroke, the fight fleshes out Charon and Winston quite a bit–which is great! they’re two of the most interesting characters in this universe!–and despite making you suffer through the aforementioned mirror fight at some point during all this, the whole shebang ends with a satisfying victory in the form of The Adjudicator throwing in the towel, calling a parlay, and coming to the table to negotiate. All would be fine if the living embodiment of “Do You Know Who My Daddy Boss Is” got her comeuppance at the end of the film, and we come real fuckin’ close to that happening and this film closing out with a satisfying ending. Hell, maybe toss her off the roof to send a message to The High Table. That’d be fun. But, despite a huge shootout to defend The Continental against her bullshit, our boys Winston and Charon just acquiesce to her and toss John off the roof instead out of almost nowhere, giving John WIck 3 the most anticlimactic bullshit ending this side of Lost.

I’m not gonna lie, I vetoed watching John Wick 4 in theaters after 3. We’re waiting ’till it leaves theaters and watching it in the studio. Lord knows we do not need to get kicked out of another theater due to me screaming at the screen, and seeing as the end of the third film sees My Least Favorite Character getting her way and The Continental tossing Keanu out on his ass and into Ya Boy Morpheus’s sewers, I don’t even think focusing on Lawrence & Keanu’s Excellent Adventures will make me think dropping thirty bucks on tickets and a tenner on popcorn will be worth it if Assassin HR Lawyer Team Girl is back for a second round.

So yeah, we’ll come back to this in six months or however long it takes for this thing to get out of theaters and onto my smaller screen. And yeah, you bet your ass I’m probably gonna have Opinions on that one as well. Stay tuned.

THE ROCK

There’s a fan theory going around that states that Sean Connery’s character in Michael Bay’s The Rock, James Mason, isn’t who he says he is. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that–while not official in any capacity–points to Mason actually being Connery’s last role as James Bond.

I bet you can imagine why I demanded this be a movie night selection.

Issue this film has is the exact same one that Punisher: War Zone had, but in reverse–the only two things this film has going for it is Connery in the role of Mason and Nick Cage in a lead role as bomb disposal expert Dr. Stanley Goodspeed. The villians suck, the supporting cast is mid, and the plot is nonsense. Every single thing this film has going for it is driven by these two powerhouses, and nearly every quotable or memorable scene is either because they’re both damn good at their jobs or because Michael Bay–even this early in his career–is laughably and demonstrably shit at his.

And, in fairness, this all adds up to peak Bay. Let’s be real here: you don’t watch a Michael Bay film because you expect it to be good. You don’t watch it because you expect a full cast of interesting and well-developed characters. No, you watch Explosions McBullshit Brand films to see one or two insane but entertaining dorks bumbling their way through awkward interactions with what few women are in the film, inane and often ham-fisted plot twists, unreasonably high stakes driven by certifiable and irredeemable villains who get way more screen time and backstory than they really deserve, and explosions. Lots of explosions.

In that, The Rock delivers.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

I promised you all some insights on my reading list last time, and never let anyone say I don’t deliver, even if it takes me a bit longer than anticipated.

LEE CHILD - KILLING FLOOR

Jack Reacher is a man after my own heart. His interests include diners, blues, old cars, sex, and blowing off the heads of the local rich goon’s lackeys with stolen Ithicas. Add into that the fact that he’s six-foot-five and is built like a brick shithouse (and ignore the fact that he doesn’t know what commitment is) and he’d be the type of man that I’d have trouble keeping out of my heart as well.

sigh

Yes, I have a type.

Killing Floor is the first released full book in the series, and it established the character as a force to be reckoned with in the modern noir canon for a reason. The book starts strong, with honestly one of the best opening lines in recent memory (“I was arrested in Eno’s diner”) and doesn’t let up from there. Lee Child paints a fantastically in-depth portrait of a man who both never really gave up the war and never really gave up on his freedom, either, and the supporting cast is fantastic and painted as boldly as any strokes from the masters like Spillane would be.

Speaking of The Man Himself…

MICKEY SPILLANE - I, THE JURY

…I also spent some time revisiting his masterstrokes. Managed to snag a copy of The Complete Mike Hammer, and “I, The Jury” was Selection Numero Uno. It’s a strong start. All the notes one would expect from the biggest, ugliest leading beast in dime store crime are hit–dead friends, colorful allies, dangerous goons, and seditious, murderous dames are all present. The climax of the book is honestly one of the best in Spillane’s catalogue as well, as a country club full of a rogues gallery that would intimidate even Poirot turns into a bloody routing of the murderer and the finale of the who-dunnit as all the remaining suspects lay dead and the final culprit turns out to be the one closest to the heart. It’s a knockout.

JOHN LECARRE - THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

I re-read this every year, and every year I turn up something new. John LeCarre is a romantic in the purest form, which makes his subject–the ins and outs of global espionage–all the more intruiging in how he paints it. “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” is a prime example of his unique touch, as the damned Leamas finds himself falling out of love with his country and in love with a Party member. She saves him from himself, he saves her from the hands of the bloodiest man in communist Berlin, and in the end none of it matters in a climax that still takes its place as one of the bleakest in spy fiction. If you ever wonder why everything I write is a love story at its core no matter the subject…here’s where I get it from.

TOM CLANCY - PATRIOT GAMES, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

“Patriot Games” is one of the only non-religious and non-Boxcar Children-lookin’-ass books I was allowed to have a copy of when I was a kid (for reasons I will never understand) but “The Hunt For Red October” is one I never sat down and read, despite its film adaptation being hands-down my third favorite movie of all time. ¹⁰ This re-read–especially now that I’m a bit older and have had more than my share of Troubles with over-degreed and well-pedigreed fucks over the past few years–hits a bit different.

A large part of why Patriot Games resonated so much with me as a kid is because of one line that to this day has always stuck with me. There’s a scene early on in the book where Jack Ryan–at this point in the timeline just a lowly ex-Marine who teaches history at Quantico and occasionally does some work for Relno The Story-keeper’s favorite recurring villain that he Just Can’t Talk About–finds himself a fish out of water at a dinner with the Royal Family. Sporting a busted arm and an overwhelming sense of anxiety and dread, he’s put at ease by the Queen herself stating gently, “Jack, the reason everyone here is fond of you is because of who and what you are. Try and keep that in mind.” Keeping that line in mind, especially as someone with my own battles with social anxiety, has carried me through quite a few shitty imposter-syndrome-laden dinners of my own, and for the most part Patriot Games keeps that anxiety at the core of the book. Jack being way out of his depth is a plot point that humanizes the man, and in the film adaptation of “The Hunt For Red October”¹¹ it’s the crux of his character. And it works.

Issue with the novel is that he’s not that. He’s a man whose background has a lot of weird amounts of prestige added to it, and the entire book is filled with folks who seem to belong to the Patting Themselves On The Back Club, Skull And Bones Chapter. Literally the only relatable character in the book is Captain Marko Ramius himself. Everyone else seems to have stumbled their way upwards through either generational wealth, generational status, Good Old Fashioned American Exceptionalism^TM that just seems to be written in the same way that the people that glorify fail-upwards-morons like Daddy Elon seem to write their characters, or a little of Columns A, B, and C. This is a problem that would persist in every subsequent Clancy novel from there on out–albeit to much more enjoyable Action Movie Bullshit levels–and it is a problem in Patriot Games as well. Hell, there’s a scene in Patriot Games where Clancy insists upon showing you that Jack Ryan has a superhuman sense for making Good Stock Trades, which is undermined juuust a little bit if you overlook the fact that what he’s doing is acting on privileged information he shouldn’t have and could, if he were any less rich, fall under the lines of “prosecutable insider trading”–a point which Clancy touches on, then utterly ignores.

Whole thing, annoyingly enough, feels tone deaf now that I’m not an impressionable youngster and will never be a Harvard grad. Still recommend the movie tho, and Patriot Games still has a slammingly good climax and some fantastic writing to it–assuming you can overlook the whole America Gud Third Wurld Not Gud parts, that is. Older I get, the more I have trouble doing so.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN SMOKING

If you’re seeing a pattern in the first words of the entries in this section here, that’s because there is one. Pipes And Cigars had a blowout sale on Peterson tins, and seeing as I thought I’d be out of Denver by now I went ahead and stocked up so I wouldn’t have to pick up more tobacco once we get into the new place if I ran out.

Turns out, most of these aren’t to my liking.

PETERSON’S DE LUXE NAVY ROLLS

First time trying a coin cut, and at first I didn’t exactly know what to make of it. I smoked through the entire tin in six days, though, so clearly I enjoyed it. Then again, I tend to enjoy VaPer blends, so there is that.

The room note is a bit strong, even by my standards, but it does smell pairs well with fresh-brewed coffee. And seeing as I nearly always have a pot going, that’s not a bad thing in the slightest.

PETERSON EARLY MORNING PIPE/PETERSON NIGHTCAP

A fairly iconic duo of Latakia-headed blends that I suppose I expected more from. To be honest, Early Morning is a bit more to my liking than Nightcap was, but then again that would check out anyways, seeing as I tend to enjoy Virginias over Latakias.

PETERSON IRISH FLAKE

I jotted this one down when I originally penned the table-of-contents for this column, but despite making a point to do so at the time, I don’t even remember smoking this one. Usually, the Irish and I tend to see eye-to-eye on a good many things–we share the same sentiments on whisky, beer, tea, and (I would imagine) pipe tobacco. So you would assume I’d remember smoking this one.

Somehow, I don’t. I have to imagine it wasn’t awful, or I’d have at least remembered that. But I don’t remember if it was good, either.

Welp. Not much of a review, but still. If I ever pick up another tin of this, I’ll let y’all know what’s up.

…assuming I remember to, of course.

PETERSON’S PERFECT PLUG (3P’S)

Just finished smoking a pipeful of this now as I’m writing this, actually. I will say that it’s much, much more compact than any other plug tobacco I’ve smoked–you’re going to need a knife for this one. With that stated, I like it. It burns well, has a heady yet tolerable hit (I do love my heavies) and sports a lovely, woody room note. As long as you have a decently sharp blade on hand–my Opinel carbon steel works lovely–it’s well worth a try.

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WHAT’S NEXT

I expect to be doing a LOT of reading over the next few months, although it’s not the kind of reading I’m going to be doing for pleasure. “Snakes” is proving to be far more of an undertaking than I’d imagine, and I’m going to have a shelf stacked full of case law, queer history, and current events articles for me to slog through.

I do, however, also expect to have a few more movies and teevee shows to gripe about, seeing as I just loaded my Android device back up with more big dumb action movies. So look forward to that.

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That’s all I got for now. I’m jumping right from penning this to quickly hammering out this month’s Jazz Program and Talkie Time schedule, so you should be able to peep that right after you peep this as they’ll probably find themselves out on the same day. I’ve also got a new column that I hope you folks will enjoy hitting this site soon, so stay tuned for that as well.

Regardless, thanks as always for reading. You’re all amazing and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not. Talk soon.

–Piper

…Oh, and before I forget: fuck The Adjudicator. Lame-ass character.

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Footnotes…

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