Ahead on Differential

The great Shelley Duvall passed away today, and all I can think about are the rougher edges of her story. Her agony on the set of The Shining, that stupid fucking episode of Dr. Phil, her years in the whatever-happened-to wilderness. But I don't want Shelley Duvall to live in my memory as a victim, as someone who was yelled at, ground down, and paraded around as a sideshow. A Cannes Best Actress and Peabody Award winner, let alone of the the iconic American actresses of the 1970s, deserves a better legacy in my head.

Duvall was, in short, the coolest, an instant value-added to any movie she was in, no matter how small the role. What her filmography lacks in volume is made up in pure presence. There is, of course, her god run as part of Robert Altman's stock company in the 1970s, but her idiosyncratic TV work in the 1980s, much of it as the main creative force, is well worth your time and attention. After her heyday, she popped up here and there in the 1990s and 2000s, in projects helmed by everyone from Jane Campion to Steven Soderbergh, and retired in 2002.

Then, 14 years late, that stupid fucking episode of Dr. Phil happened, an episode of television so cruel and callow that Lee Unkrich—the fucking Toy Story guy, who's also Shining superfan number one—tracked her down himself to make sure she was okay.

Broadly speaking, she was. In 2021, Duvall was profiled in the Hollywood Reporter and, for the first time in a long time, she got to tell her side of the stories that loomed over her legend. People loved and will always love Shelley Duvall, but this piece, written by Seth Abramovitch, was key in reminding the world who she was. It made clear as day that behind the big eyes and ingenue roles was a woman tough as Texas leather.

But what will linger with me the longest is the audio of her being coached by Harry Nilsson through her rendition of “He Needs Me,” from Big Swing Hall of Fame film Popeye. Any Altman starring Shelley Duvall is worth your time, but Popeye is kind of a weird miracle. The part of Malta where they shot the movie still looks like that.

“Good, Shelley!”

#obit #movies

Some of these are things everyone's favourite video game plumber has said over the course of his storied career. Some of these things are shouted by Mark Morrison at the end of certain lines of his immortal 90s R&B hit “Return of the Mack.” Your job is to figure out which is which (and also imagine “Return of the Mack” with Mario ad libs instead). I'll say this: there's more overlap here than you think.

1. “It's a-me!”
2. “Hold on!”
3. “Come on!”
4. “Boy oh boy!”
5. “Round and round!”
6. “Here I go!”
7. “Once again!”
8. “Here we go!”
9. “Oh my God!”
10. “Oh yeah!”
11. “All right!”
12. “Be strong!”

This way to the answer key. How did you do?

#music

All right, time to clear the decks.

The arc of life bends long, but I don't know that holding my own writing hostage because I'm not thinking about Mixtape Forensics or Ten Things or (this one is for the real heads) the Ebert Cup is a good or productive idea. Sometimes you just want to write a short missive about what you've been up to.

For good or ill, I often think that I'm pissing my days away doing dumb shit. Then I get in my head about what not pissing my days away might look like. Everyone has their own version of the proverbial “good day”; some of us write legendary rap hits about them. Sooner or later, I start thinking about a post Austin Kleon¹ made in 2017 called “A checklist for every day.” In it, Kleon traces the origin of Goethe's good day—”one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words”—and emphasizes that liking stuff is the first step towards making stuff. But also, doesn't just sound like a nice way to spend your time? Music, poetry, art: what day isn't at least improved by experiencing them?

So how have I been completing the Goethe Haul² lately?

For reasons that can be traced back to the Midnight Special YouTube page, I've had Slade's glam-rock stomper “Gudbuy T'Jane” stuck in my head for most of the last month. Roy Peter Clark's How to Write Short inspired me to keep a book of little poems in my bag. I got reacquainted with the graphic design work of the great Aaron Draplin, a man who loves Dinosaur Jr. and painted signage on corrugated steel in equal measure; as good as his work is (and it is good, peep the archives, read the book), what I admire about him most is his blue-collar Our Band Could Be Your Life approach to working and lecturing. I'm knee-deep in words, reasonable and otherwise: books, podcasts, press releases, Scrabble³, correspondence with friends.

Most of my days are good using the rubric, and that's good enough.

¹ The decks may have been cleared, but one thing that will never change here at Ahead on Differential is most of my good ideas can be traced back to either Kleon or Kottke.

² A “haul” is what soccer fans call a four-goal hat trick, or so Reddit tells me.

³ Not only is Scrabble still an ongoing concern, but I am paying someone to teach me to get better at playing it.

#blog

Memory's funny. I have forgotten key facts about the people I love and cherish the most, but somehow, I still remember the eight seconds of Canadian basic cable where the Beastie Boys dissed Al Di Meola. If memory serves, and it may well not, it was on MuchMusic (i.e. Canadian MTV). The context for this cross-genre drive-by has been lost to time, but I distinctly remember there being a cutaway from the Beasties to a dude who looked like a bad guy from RoboCop twiddling knobs while strip-mall martial artists and tech demo assets dance around him. It's a baffling cultural artifact from an era thick with them.

The video for “Sequencer,” and its parent album Scenario, were unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1983, the year jazz fusion broke on MTV. This wasn't because of Di Meola: the video for “Sequencer” is, charitably, the dorkiest thing I've ever seen. Di Meola is doing is best Rick Wakeman impression throughout, what with the capes and synthesizers and all. It is the visual equivalent of a katana hanging on an otherwise bare apartment wall (and not only because there are literal katanas in this video). No, jazz fusion broke on MTV because that same year, Herbie Hancock took over MTV with the funky avant-garde nightmare fuel of “Rockit.” This was not a fair fight. Hancock was filtering his sound through the nascent idiom of hip-hop; Di Meola filtered his through Miami Vice, which makes sense, since the credited songwriter is the smuggler himself, Jan Hammer. So while “Sequencer” isn't great jazz fusion, it is superlative arena-rock cheese.

I still don't know a ton about Di Meola or his work. I'm familiar with Friday Night in San Francisco, his landmark live album with fellow guitar wizards John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, because every used record store on Earth is legally required to have one copy of it in stock at all times (see also: August and Everything After, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and that one ELO compilation, you know the one). I'm not a big Chick Corea/Return to Forever guy; my taste in jazz fusion runs funkier, towards Casiopea or, say, Herbie Hancock. But the main lick of “Sequencer” is catchy, the synthesized percussion in the middle reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's work (consider this my plus for his wonderful 1982 album Awakening, and the music video is an all-time piece of kitsch, memorable enough to appear on my brain's front door last month after literal decades of not thinking about it.

#music

Okay, this one requires a little table-setting.

There's this cartoonist/animator from South Korea who goes by Ramdaram. If you've encountered any of her stuff in the wild, it's likely one of her animated music videos starring her OCs, one for Jack Stauber's “Two Time” (24 million views at time of writing), one for Tim Legend's “Soda City Funk”^[1] (52 million views). The OC lore is extensive and cryptic in the way these self-contained universes tend to be (no doubt exacerbated here by my inability to speak Korean), but the videos are fun explosions of Gen Z webcore energy. “Poison” is a newer, moodier entry in Ramdaram's “Underfity Friends” story cycle^[2], soundtracked by Evgeny Bardyuzha's “Tastes Like Poison.”

There isn't much online when you search Bardyuzha's name, which leads me to believe he's just a dude out in Chelyabinsk who likes making electronic music, sometimes for clients (those motivational business videos don't score themselves, shout out to the library music producers out there), sometimes for fun. “Tastes Like Poison” is indeed fun in a club-goth Drive-core kind of way. It sounds like the Weeknd and M83 trying to write a crossover EDM hit. Ramdaram seems to be doing well for herself as well: just south of a million YouTube subscribers, a handful of viral videos, a steady stream of new work on Instagram (movie dork bonus: her most recent piece at time of writing contains a nod to Chungking Express). There's something heartening about stumbling onto the work of people plugging away on the other side of the planet.

[1] It is absurd how hard “Soda City Funk” goes. I mean, it's just “Got to Be Real” plus “Do You Wanna Get Funky?” at 1.7x speed, but it works.

[2] Perhaps sensing there were a bunch of non-Korean goofballs like yours truly among her subscriber base, Ramdaram released an English-language lore explainer last year with the circuitous, oddly poetic title of “Story of a city where it's not strange for a person to go missing.”

#music

Continuing from last time: “The Surfer” sounds like Vampire Weekend's version of a lo-fi hip hop song, down to the drum machine, leisurely tempo, and woozy processed piano. But “The Surfer” also has Ezra Koenig singing and some sick George Harrison-esque guitar, which, honestly, more lo-fi hip hop should have.

As indie-heads of a certain vintage shuffle towards middle age, one question lingers in their hearts: does Vampire Weekend pass the Five-Album Test? I couldn't hum you a single bar of anything on Father of the Bride right now, so I'll have to revisit it before I set my take in stone. But to hear father of the Five-Album Test Steven Hyden say it, the band has sailed over the crossbar with room to spare. This discusson can be heard on a recent episode of Hyden's Indiecast podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow music writer Ian Cohen. It's a banger of an episode: they talk about that one time Pitchfork reviewed a Jet album with no text, just a video of a monkey pissing into its mouth, but they're dead wrong about Good News for People Who Love Bad News being overrated.

But there's at least one thing my fellow greying Xillennials and I can agree on: Only God Was Above Us is awesome! It rocks hard! The workrate has slowed down (Koenig was otherwise busy daisy-chaining hyphenates in the five years since Father of the Bride was released, just as he was in the six years between that album and Modern Vampires of the City) but the work, crucially, is still good.

#music

I want to invoke a gentler version of Sturgeon's law: 90% of lo-fi hip hop sounds interchangeable. That's not a knock against the genre: I, along with tens of thousands of people this very second, have chosen lo-fi hip hop (or its hacker cousin, synthwave) as my ambient music of choice. It's what courses through my ears when I read on the couch in the wee small hours. The idiom is still in its infancy, still evolving out its clichés, making it reasonably easy for an artist to stick out. One of my favourites, the Finnish musician Kupla, sets himself apart with waltz times and free reeds. “just can't help it” by Vancouver-based producer Ngyn grabbed me with a simple, evocative vocal hook. Sometimes that's all it takes to end up on a playlist.

Lo-fi hip hop's fuel is nostalgia. Yours, someone else's, real, fictional, it doesn't matter. Now, if I were younger and more guileless, “just can't help it” would have 100% inspired me to make my own track, one sampling, say, Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea saying “I can't beat it,” so I understand the impulse to make of this kind of art. It's the same impulse that drives people to make AMVs soundtracked by “Somewhere Only We Know” or similar, nightcore versions of Rural Alberta Advantage singles, or sadboi moodboards set to the score of Minari (I believe the technical term is “webweaving,” which appears to be the Tumblr arm of the TikTok Sadposting Industrial Complex). People on the internet are often sad, so they create these digital pamphlets and readymades that are conduits for their own aches and lightning rods for those of others, all refracted through the lingua franca of a pop culture, if not the pop culture. The only difference between then and now is the tools used to perform these microcultural emotional exorcisms got easier to use.

In other words, lo-fi hip hop at its worst is kitsch, gunning for unearned pathos using trite shorthand. But at its best, it can evoke a whole world, not just your childhood bedroom. It can come by its resonance honestly like any other kind of music: through the alchemy of instrumentation, performance, arrangement, and production. Hell, even a good song title can help; “Rat Salad” kicks ass in no small part because it's called “Rat Salad.” The same is true for “Mist Beneath Your Apartment.”

#music

I wanted to post my monthly mix for April (here it is, by the way) but decided I wanted to go long on each of the songs. So now you know what the next dozen of so posts are going to be about.

One of my absolute favourite bands got namechecked by the biggest pop star on the planet on her last album. Could this be the bump the Blue Nile needs to grace the world with their presence once again? Unlikely. I've written about the cult Scottish sophisti-pop group before, so I've definitely mentioned their slow workrate; their fourth and presumably final album came out two decades ago this August.

But bands with small outputs sometimes pad their discographies out with live records and odds-and-sods collections, catnip for the hardcore faithful. The Blue Nile have neither to their name, but deluxe versions of their four studio albums have been released with supplementary material. “The Second Act,” the b-side of the band's first single, was included in the new version of their great 1984 album A Walk Across the Rooftops. It's an unrepresentative track of the band's output, but the bare production and frail lead vocal by Paul Buchanan make it a perfect candidate to kick off any budding bootlegger's hypothetical Decade-esque career-spanning Blue Nile compilation.

#music

• Here's a take: things that sounded like shit 40 years ago can still be novel because the mid-to-late 1980s were the last monoculturally uncool era, but things that sounded like shit 20 years ago still sound like shit because culture is stuck in a tightening recursive loop. In sartorial terms, I'm not saying I wouldn't wear Crocs, I just never thought I'd see the day they'd become de rigeur.
• Do not judge an album by its eight-minute second track, as I foolishly did with Wednesday's Rat Saw God.
  • If you're a band, and you're recording an album, and you have an eight-minute track with an extended coda where your lead singer sounds like they're getting sucked into a black hole made of tar, their shrieks and screams getting more and more muffled in the mix as the song reaches its conclusion, my advice is to make that song your closer. This has been Thoughts on Album Sequencing.
• I now know approximately 1,500% more stuff about the Smashing Pumpkins than I did at any previous point in my life, stuff like “holy shit, Tommy Lee drummed on their 2014 album Monuments to an Elegy” (shout out to Sarah).
  • The best recommendation engines have always been and continue to be your cool friends and your own curiosity. Link-hopping can lead to some weird and beautiful places.

• No not that Molly Lewis, the other Molly Lewis, the Paganini of whistling.
• Is “Susanne” the best Weezer song? Maybe!
• Dude I spent hours trying to find the specific mix of “Smooth Operator” that I got off LimeWire in college, and I don't think it's on Spotify. It might be the 12” single mix.
• Kiwi Jr. are the leaders in the clubhouse because I still believe in the 12-string electric guitar.
  • Jeremy Gaudet, if you see this, drop the Letterboxd, brother!

#music

Here are ten things.

1. Between the record rainfall, multiple tornadoes, and sinus-destroying smoke wafting on down from the fires up north, I would say my beloved hometown is in its Biblical weather era.
2. SAG-AFTRA is now on strike alongside the WGA for the first time since 1960, further putting the squeeze on the studios. As ever, solidarity with the writers and actors, and may they get everything they're asking for and then some.
3. I am fairly certain “girl dinner” is just charcuterie, or as I've called it in the past, “indoor picnicking.” There truly is nothing new under the sun.
4. NEW JON BOIS JOINT IN AUGUST, THIS IS NOT A DRILL
5. Austin Krance's devilishly sticky browser game Sports Under 150 will gobble up every available second you have while at your desk. The premise is simple: you are presented with a country, select a sport they are ranked highly in, fill out your list, and aim for the lowest possible score. Get ready to wonder how good the Polish national baseball team is.
6. I have fully pivoted to being a Scrabble sicko. I busted out my tattered 20-year-old copy of Word Freak, downloaded some key pieces of study software, and started memorizing valid two- and three-letter words (god forbid I ever play CUM against one of the sweet old ladies at the Scrabble club).
7. Speaking of Scrabble, Babbl is a charming 8-bit Scrabble clone with an infinite board and no clock.
8. Variety put out a list of the greatest action movies of all time, and though it's hard to argue with #1, I found plenty to quibble about: only one 70s/80s martial arts movies not named Enter the Dragon, only one Jackie Chan movie, Terminator 2 outside the top 15. But at least Seven Samurai is in the top 10.
9. Headlining this edition's Watchlist Roulette is the certified pop-culture phenomenon known as “Barbenheimer.” Some friends packed into my friend Jerome's comically compact car and drove to the Carrefour Angrignon to take in all three hours of Oppenheimer (IMAX and/or 70mm will have to wait), had a light lunch, and treated ourselves to Barbie for dessert. A fun time was had by all. On the home front, I popped an adult gummy and watched Gilda on one of those free-view channels on my Roku device; highly recommended
10. “Go Ahead” by Roger Mitchell (via Pome):

    Go ahead, said the great crested flycatcher,
    lie in your bed all morning with the yellow curtains drawn
    and write poetry. No one will see.

#tenthings