Ahead on Differential

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

Here are ten things.

1. I was on vacation last week! Steph and I went to Ottawa, visited some friends, frolicked in the pool, ate incredibly well, and otherwise had a nice, relaxing time.
2. Prior to that, we went to the Granby Zoo. We picked the warmest, stickiest day of our time off to go, but that just made the wave pool and lazy river feel that much better.
3. My rental was a Tesla. This was my first experience with the Elon Shitbox, and it pains me to say that it's a fun automobile to drive, even if it goes out of its way to take the driving out of driving. It's also over-engineered in a very specific tech-bro kind of way. Having to navigate a menu to be able to adjust the steering wheel isn't a feature, just... leave the little lever on the steering wheel. Damn near everything is done through the dash-mounted tablet, which, if you don't have a co-pilot, is a total cognitive hazard.
4. While in Ottawa, I got reacquainted with the consensus worst piece of fan fiction ever written, My Immortal. This was the first time in a while I thought about it, and the first time ever I experienced the whole interminable thing. What's most insidious/hilarious about this whole endeavour, other than the crass tween edginess and the litany of phobias and isms contained therein, is its repetitive hypnotic quality (the words “black,” “lace,” and, yes, “Gothic,” sound like nonce terms after a while). My Immortal lulls you into its absurd rhythms, which makes every brain-frying left turn feel that much more like a psychic concussion. There truly is nothing else out there like it.
5. I love the Home Run Derby, and I love it even more when a Blue Jay comes out on top. Every All-Star Game should have “ball go far” events. The Pro Bowl should have a longest field goal competition. The NBA should have a logo 3 contest. Hell, I'd watch NHL players fire one-timers from the blue line.
6. Via Andy Baio, the Tiny Awards, which is “a small prize awarded by an equally-small selection committee of online makers to the website which we feel best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.” This is the version of the internet we can still have.
7. But for now, I agree with Max that the internet is for 12-year-olds.
8. Xavier Dolan, the wunderkind Canadian filmmaker whose filmography contains more films that have played the Cannes Film Festival than not (including his debut film, which played the Riviera just a few months after his 20th birthday), has (maybe?) decided to quit the movies, declaring that “art is useless and dedicating oneself to the cinema, a waste of time,” and that he doesn't “feel like committing two years to a project that barely anyone sees.” Now Dolan has already been more successful than I'll ever be several times over and surely has enough clout to make smaller (if less seen, less lauded) projects until the day he can't even lift a camera anymore. But this seems like a loser's attitude. I get that feeling like you're creating art in a vacuum can be frustrating, but if you reframe it just so, it can be the most liberating realization you can make about your practice. If no one's watching, what's keeping you from doing any god damn thing you want? Do what thousands of hobbyists and enthusiasts have done since the dawn of the camcorder: write a script, call up some friends (and Xavier, if somehow you ever read this, I know for certain that you have friends in high places), and shoot a movie on what's available. If Steven Soderbergh and Sean Baker and Park Chan-wook can make entire actual-ass movies on iPhones, I believe you can too. The result might not play Cannes, but it'll be yours, forever. Art matters in the doing, not the touring.
9. Speaking of movies, here's where I landed on my most recent spins of the Watchlist Roulette: a gritty Montreal-set NFB crime movie from the 70s called La gammick, aka The Mob.
   
10. “Author's Prayer” by Ilya Kaminsky (via Pome):

    If I speak for the dead, I must leave
    this animal of my body,
    
    I must write the same poem over and over,
    for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.
    
    If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
    of myself, I must live as a blind man
    
    who runs through rooms without
    touching the furniture.
    
    Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking 'What year is it?'
    I can dance in my sleep and laugh
    
    in front of the mirror.
    Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
    
    I will praise your madness, and
    in a language not mine, speak
    
    of music that wakes us, music
    in which we move. For whatever I say
    
    is a kind of petition, and the darkest
    days must I praise.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. I'm on vacation! I love being paid to sit on my giant ass and do less than nothing.
2. One of the least surprising things about me is that I really like Steely Dan, and it was a big week in Danland: the daughters of legendary engineer Roger Nichols, Ashlee and Cimcee, found a DAT containing a full version of the presumed-lost Gaucho-era track “The Second Arrangement”. Amateur engineers have already taken a crack at mastering the song. Could an official release be far behind? (via Expanding Dan)
3. Vox explores the use of miniatures in Wes Anderson movies.
4. For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri interviews the legendary John Woo.
5. Susanna Hoffs in the Criterion Closet.
6. For GQ, Eric Wills profiles Australian bowler Jason Belmonte, possessor of an unorthodox two-handed delivery, winner of 15 major titles, and possibly the greatest ten-pin player of all time. My main conclusion is that Kingpin is real.
7. For the first time in a long time, I participated in a Magic draft with a set that was still freshly released, which is to say that me and nine other dorks drafted Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth. I'm skeptical of the IP-centric direction Wizard of the Coast is taking Magic but I have to admit this was a fun set to draft. I drafted a solid-enough Boros deck built around Flowering of the White Tree. Gimli put in some good work, too.
8. My good friend Avleen (nom de poésie Mirabel) launched her latest book The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) at Montréal's venerable Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.
9. Watchlist roulette: Wes Anderson's Atomic Age dramedy Asteroid City, current Sight & Sound world heavyweight champion Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the punchy, noirish B-western Forty Guns, and this year's CanCon all-star, BlackBerry.
10. “The Why” by Alex Dimitrov (via Pome)

    I want to be in rooms full of people I love.
    The world goes white then green again
    like the mind telling the body it is not alone.
    The body saying something I can almost hear
    above the sound of a dog barking
    because he feels himself tied and tremendously alone.
    Who would you believe?
    I walk the great streets of New York City
    where many great people have lived
    and think how great it is to live and die on earth
    even if it means having known nothing
    of the why. Nothing of the why.

#tenthings

Here are ten things.

1. In honour of Father's Day, the great Ryan Nanni (part of the SB Nation coaching tree, co-host of the Shutdown Fullcast) asks, What is the most Dad thing you did all year?
2. SlamBall is back, baby? What, you don't remember SlamBall? Teenage me had a lot of time for it. The great Kofie Yeboah is a fan.
3. For Slate, Dan Kois on why the text fields on my phone are littered with periods.
4. For Wired, Paul Ford on archiving his late dad's work.
5. Keith Phipps on the missing six seconds in The French Connection.
6. Would you place Alien in the horror section or the sci-fi section?
7. In font news: introducing Intel One Mono.
8. I was recently made aware of the 12-seat Little Prince micro-cinema in Stratford, Ontario, and it has reawakened dormant dreams of running my own little jewel box movie house.
9. Watchlist roulette: the neo-hixploitation classic Breakdown, the humanistic Korean military thriller Joint Security Area, and the screwball double feature of Bringing Up Baby and What's Up, Doc?.
10. “Summer Grass” by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly (via Pome):

    So much has happened.
    Reality has eaten away so much of us.
    But summer, at last.
    
    A great airport—the control tower leads down
    load after load with chilled
    people from space.
    
    Grass and flowers—we are landing.
    The grass has a green foreman.
    I go and check in.

#tenthings

Source: Instagram/@francisfordcoppola

Here are ten things.

1. I watched the fifth and final game of the 2023 NBA Finals with some friends and marvelled at Nikola Jokić, a bored king dominating the NBA almost as an afterthought.
2. The best thing about Nick Taylor sinking a 72-foot putt for eagle to clinch the Canadian Open is this slow-mo footage of fellow Canadian golfer Adam Hadwin getting absolutely trucked by security while celebrating.
3. SportsNet put out a cute Wes Anderson-esque summary of the totally wackadoo 1992-93 NHL season.
4. Matt Dinan on the semiotics of dadcore.
5. A Max Read doublet on MrBeast (not linking to his YouTube page cos honestly he doesn't need the help): first for the Times, and second for his excellent newsletter.
6. Radio Garden maps out every streaming radio station on the internet onto a spinnable globe. Now you too can know what they're listening to in, I don't know, Malmö.
7. Hideo Kojima paid a visit to the Criterion Closet, which is an event I have a vested interest in. Maybe I should pick up a copy of The Creative Gene?
8. “One of the greatest surprises in life is when you realize you’re elderly. But there’s a gentle comfort coming from that, as everyone loves stories and long ago adventures told by their Grandpa.” This is a quote from Francis Ford Coppola (you know, The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now...) on his first Instagram post. Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.
9. Watchlist Roulette: the gloriously 90s Grosse Pointe Blank (maybe the best of the post-QT crime comedies?), the subpar but better-than-anticipated 65, and cable-TV dadcore classic Cop Land.
10. A poem by Richard Wright, via Pome:
    

    I give permission
    For this slow spring rain to soak
    The violet beds.

#tenthings