thetangential

[thetangential]

In the title of 501 Essential Albums of the ’80s, though, the adjective is doing some work. In an introduction, editor Gary Graff explains the philosophy: “What we looked for and chose were albums that defined the decade.”

While that doesn’t mean — as Graff is quick to point out — each album was a big seller, it does put a finger on the scales in favor of albums that linger in the pop consciousness as redolent of the decade. Another approach, emphasizing artistic quality and enduring relevance, animates lists like Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the 1980s.

Pitchfork’s top-ranked album not to make Graff’s book is Arthur Russell’s unclassifiable outsider album World of Echo. From the other perspective, consider: Pitchfork includes not a single album by Billy Joel (three in Graff) nor from John Mellencamp (also three, so many that even the book needs to acknowledge it’s weird American Fool didn’t make the cut).

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Review: “Andor” final season is heart-stopping, jaw-dropping

The second and final season of Andor raises the bar so dramatically on what an adult Star Wars series can be, it nearly escapes the orbit of the franchise that birthed it. Still, there’s a moment in the original Star Wars movie that opened the door for a show like this, a show fans have long awaited.

It’s the moment when Luke Skywalker, returning to his home on Tatooine, finds his aunt and uncle — the only parents he’s ever known — incinerated. The graphic carnage is given Wagnerian weight by John Williams’s score, but isn’t overplayed. Luke has taken his “first step into a larger world,” in more ways than one.

The world of Andor is absolutely vast, and not because of the Force. The show explores a nascent Rebellion that’s heterogeneous in method and philosophy, from the secret military being funded by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) to the independent force led by an impatient Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) to the high-wire spycraft of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård).

That much was outlined in the show’s acclaimed first season, but the second season is so epic, it makes the initial run feel like mere prelude.

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Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is full of Yorkshire vocabulary that will fascinate American readers. There’s “aught,” for example, which can either mean “anything” or “nothing” depending on the context.

The word that I find myself dwelling on, though, is “sozlike.” It’s a form of “sorry,” but that “like” is in there at every instance, making the expression sound conditional. I’m sorry, like…I’m, like, sorry?

Among the three girls at the center of Brown’s debut novel, the expression is sometimes made in the form of a simple shrug, omitting the explicit apology altogether. That’s a function of how well the girls know each other — mere body language is enough — but it can also be read as a symptom of a culture where neither emotional vulnerability nor self-expression are particularly prized.

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Theater review: “Mean Girls,” at the Ordway, plumbs perennial teen angst

The touring Broadway production of Mean Girls opened yesterday at the Ordway in St. Paul for a six-day run (April 8 – 13). Like me, you may wonder about seeing a show about people being mean, particularly in our current world. Seeing the show, I found that it is indeed like being back in high school. No matter what role you played during your high school years – most popular, most athletic, friendliest, quietest, a math and science nerd – you will be able to relate to this story.

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[thetangential]

As the United States marks five years since the onset of COVID-19, while also watching our system of government enter uncharted territory, the politicized pandemic looms ever larger as a dividing line in our culture. America was already sharply divided when the coronavirus arrived, but something has changed when the president who initiated “Operation Warp Speed” appoints the country’s most infamous vaccine skeptic as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Neal Shusterman’s All Better Now leverages the unsettling sense that as our country took sides over pandemic precautions, it almost seemed like some people were downright eager to let COVID romp. In this near-future tale, a dwindling number of the uninfected are left wondering whether a peculiarly persuasive virus will succeed in transforming humanity.

Shusterman, already established as a blockbuster talent in YA speculative fiction, imagines the coming of a second virus that’s superficially similar to COVID: claiming millions of lives even as most of the infected survive. In the case of “Crown Royale,” however, those who recover find themselves basking in a permanent sense of well-being. In fact, they begin to believe that it’s morally wrong to deny others the benefits of infection.

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Is there anything more redolent of the 20th century monoculture than a fascination with the inner life of Johnny Carson?

The hold Carson had on the nation’s attention in the late-night hours, most weeknights for 30 years, is difficult now to imagine. Tonight’s late-night hosts only pull a fraction of his numbers, even while following a formula he set in stone. The band, the announcer, the monologue, the desk, the couch, the skits. The formula still works, but the world has changed. No one will ever again be the default, as Carson was.

“Default” is not a very exciting way to describe a show-business professional, but the marvel of Carson was that he never wore out his welcome. The host had a sure sense of his skills and his limitations, including knowing exactly when to bow out. He said the May 22, 1992 episode would be his last, and it was. He went out on top, living out his 13 remaining years enjoying private pursuits like yachting and learning Swahili.

Carson became such a legend that it took a legend to write his biography.

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Do we hate children?

I don’t need to detail what a person I know was talking about the other day when they declared about this country, “We actually hate children.”

Take your pick of reasons why a person might reasonably come to that conclusion. There’s the fact that child mortality is ticking up for the first time in decades. There’s the youth mental health crisis, and the growing bipartisan consensus that — whether you’re pro-natalist, anti-natalist, or natal-neutral — it’s increasingly difficult and expensive to raise a child in this country.

But is this all really happening because we hate children? The question is of particular interest to me not just because I happen to have a child, but because I spent years studying the sociology of childhood: tracking the changing ways societies have understood and interacted with their newest members. Have our attitudes towards children really, fundamentally changed?

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Now that digital devices have thoroughly insinuated themselves into all aspects of our private lives — from dating apps to remote-control vibrators to daycare updates — it’s quaint to realize how awkwardly computers first tiptoed into our homes.

In a 1980 piece of software described by Reem Hilu in The Intimate Life of Computers, two members of an intimate pair would take turns at a keyboard answering a series of questions about their mood and proclivities. The computer would then refer the couple to one of the “interludes” described in an accompanying printed manual. Was it a night to curl up alone with a novel, or to be bent over the bathroom vanity and ravished from behind? Only you and your Apple II could say.

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It’s hard for anyone who grew up in the ’80s not to be taken aback that Dungeons & Dragons, which parents were warned off during the Satanic Panic, is not only still thriving but actively embraced as a sanctioned youth activity. The game involves math and reading and no screens whatsoever…why did it take so long for schools to realize that?

Shelly Mazzanoble’s new book How to Dungeon Master Parenting goes even farther and suggests a little D&D experience might help kids’ parents as well. The volume’s premise is that the skills required to successfully lead a group of players through a quest are transferable to the real-life challenge of leading a child from birth to independence.

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Where Max Boot particularly excels, as a biographer, is in connecting his subject’s accomplishments and failures to his essential character. If Ronald Reagan’s triumph as President was to act the part superbly, Boot argues, the ways in which he let Americans down are related to his shortcomings as an actor.

Reagan felt and appeared sympathetic, but he lacked true empathy: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes.

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Has “The Phantom Menace” been redeemed?

Let’s take a look at the three main dings against The Phantom Menace when it was first released.

[thetangential]

Each short episode of Star Wars: Tales of the Empire ends with one name, before all others. “Created by Dave Filoni.” Sure, George Lucas’s name comes next, but there’s no question that Tales of the Empire is a journey into the Filoni-verse.

Lucasfilm’s chief creative officer has proven adept at steering the storylines for hours of streamable entertainment, while maintaining an internally consistent canon, by branching out from the franchise’s signature characters in quasi-fractal profusion: revisiting themes and tropes while leaving room for variation, always keeping a clear path back to faces familiar from ’80s bedsheets.

Tales of the Empire, being released as a dash of Disney+ spice on Star Wars Day, is a series of six animated episodes totaling 81 minutes — the second in an anthology series that began with Tales of the Jedi (2022). In two three-episode arcs, the Empire episodes show the beginning of one character’s journey (Morgan Elsbeth, seen in middle age in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka) and picks up with another (Barriss Offee) we last saw taking a dark turn way back in The Clone Wars circa 2013.

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The cultural imprint of Dungeons & Dragons is so vast, it’s hard to believe there was a time when D&D seemed like a has-been. Circa the turn of the 21st century, it was far from clear that the game would ever regain anything like its pop culture footprint from the 1980s, when — as David M. Ewalt chronicles in Of Dice and Men — D&D co-creator Gary Gygax left Wisconsin and went Hollywood, pursuing ill-fated but not entirely implausible dreams of parlaying his tabletop celebrity into a multimedia empire.

Though Gygax died in 2008, the tide had already turned for D&D by the time the original edition of Ewalt’s book was published in 2013. The company Wizards of the Coast, which bought D&D in 1997, successfully steadied the rollercoaster trajectory the game had followed under Gygax’s company TSR; when Of Dice and Men was first published, Wizards was preparing to launch a new edition that would facilitate rulebook modularity so players could choose their own depth of complexity.

The book has now been reissued for the 1974 game’s 50th anniversary, expanded to track D&D’s remarkable ascent over the past decade. The growth of online networking and the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, neither of which might have been obvious candidates to spur the growth of a traditional tabletop game, facilitated the rise of an avid multigenerational participant group — including young players attuned to the game’s appeal by media like the Netflix hit Stranger Things and streaming play sessions.

Given the game’s current ubiquity, if Ewalt was starting from scratch he might not feel the need to give quite so basic an orientation to the game’s central concept. Much of Dice and Men involves walking the reader (or listener) through sessions of D&D and other games, with narrative texts interpolated to convey the game characters’ perspectives.

While Ewalt covers the bases of the game’s invention and spread from its Upper Midwest cradle, Of Dice and Men is a work of gonzo journalism told from the perspective of a player who’s been embedded in D&D culture for decades.

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In a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, a bookworm (Burgess Meredith) survives a nuclear apocalypse and glories in the fact that he finally has uninterrupted time to read.

A cruel twist ending helped the episode make an impression, but it also dramatized a particular brand of fantasy: the idea that one might retain the means of intellectual exploration while having all social obligations stripped away by forces beyond one’s control. A new audiobook production of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Blackstone Publishing) highlights the way in which Jules Verne dramatized this fantasy a century earlier.

In Aria Mia Loberti’s performance, Captain Nemo is not a mysterious genius over whom one might obsess. He comes across as almost comically stuffy, even a little constipated. The harpooner Ned Land is tamped down as well, in contrast to the two characters whose shared sense of awe emerges as the novel’s animating quality: narrator Pierre Arronax and his faithful servant Conseil.

Loberti, a newcomer who was cast as lead of the Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See (2023), is one of few women ever enlisted to narrate a professional recording of Verne’s novel, originally published in serial installments from 1869-70. Passages from Twenty Thousand Leagues figure in All the Light, based on a 2014 novel by Anthony Doerr.

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Remember the quarter-life crisis? Its prominence in the discourse harks back to a more innocent era, when stories about young urbanites couldn’t be faulted for omitting floods or wildfire smoke and when no U.S. presidential candidate actively fighting multiple felony charges had ever led polls in key battleground states.

Although Naoise Dolan’s The Happy Couple takes place in the present-day British Isles and its characters are generally aware of the dire state of the world, its characters are principally focused on understanding their own loves and libidos. The novel brings a more authentic perspective on sexuality than readers might have found a decade or two ago — both members of the eponymous couple are bisexual — but its core concerns are timeless.

That gives the book a certain universal appeal, but also presents a challenge: this is not the first will-they-or-won’t-they wedding story ever told. The author takes a kaleidoscopic approach to storytelling, rotating among the perspectives of friends and family members surrounding the eponymous pair of betrothed.

Each character intrigues, but in a relatively short novel — the audiobook runs five and a half hours — it’s hard not to feel cheated of deeper dives into the characters whose eternal happiness is most immediately in question.

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How did Patrick Stewart possibly manage to make it into his 80s before publishing a memoir? His longevity is a gift to him, and the fact that he held off this long is a gift to us.

Making It So is just about everything readers could, or at least should, expect from this memoir. It’s carefully judged, richly detailed, often very funny, and — as one would hope — captivatingly performed.

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Sociologists caution against reading too much into a society’s cultural products, be they books or banner ads, but it’s impossible not to see each year’s selection of British Arrows award-winning ads as a barometer of the masses’ mood.

When the annual parade of video spots first gained Stateside popularity through holiday season screenings at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, British humor was a principal draw. Side-splitting ads have remained part of the mix, but over the decades the program has become more wide-ranging. The internet became a major medium, digital effects became routine, and onscreen representation of the nation’s diversity increased dramatically.

There’s also been a gradual deflation of the optimism following the end of the Cold War. Hot wars, global warming, resurgent authoritarianism, and the coronavirus pandemic have all contributed to a more somber mood among consumers. In marketing circles, authenticity and transparency have become watchwords for companies hoping to convince consumers they’re committed to an open and honest relationship in these challenging times.

This is all to say that this year’s British Arrows are a little moody, conveying the sense of a capitalist economy where we’re all holding hands but we can’t say whether it’s out of genuine attraction or sheer panic.

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