Ned Raggett

So let me tell you about my meningioma

Now, before ANYTHING else:

I'm fine. I feel perfectly fine, I am asymptomatic. A meningioma is NOT a direct in-the-brain tumor, it's not a glioblastoma, I am not counting my days. A meningioma of any sort is in fact relatively common, and most of the ones that are found are essentially benign. None of which is meant to handwave or dismiss this, since surgery at some point is entirely possible, if not likely, but nowhere in the near future. My neurologist and I have already talked over this in detail, the surgery itself sounds rather straightforward if it happens, and given that both my dad's had extensive brain surgery himself the other year and came through just fine, and at least one other friend of mine has had meningioma surgery and is doing well, I am, in my own particular way, just chilling for now.

So please -- PLEASE -- no frantic messages of worry or concern. General good thoughts, I'll always welcome them, but this is a hard world where a lot of people in the months between my initial diagnosis and the present day have truly faced far worse, and are continuing to do so, for any number of reasons, from the medical to the political and more. I do not need a fundraiser or anything, but if you feel so inclined, please direct efforts elsewhere -- consider Meningioma Mommas, for instance.

Got it? We're good? You've taken a deep breath if you felt so inclined? No freakouts?

Great! So, let me tell you about this, as I mentioned.

So I'm one of those people who finds out about things like this by chance, and in recent decades as technologies have improved, that's exactly what's occurred. To explain a bit more about meningiomas -- here's a basic Mayo Clinic overview -- they appear in the meninges themselves, namely the layer that covers the brain and the spinal cord, thus my distinction at the start. And as noted I am asymptomatic, and would have had no idea that it was there at all beforehand, and didn't.

Which of course begs the question: how did I find out? For this, I must thank one who is no longer here.

Last year, some of you may recall the fundraising effort I coordinated for Keith McIvor, better known as JD Twitch, a Scottish DJ and music aficionado who was a good online friend to many of us. Sadly, he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, and in the course of far too short an amount of months, he left this world, to our collective sorrow.

Meantime, back in 2024, I caught, for the first and I hope only time, a case of COVID. Without claiming that I have long COVID at all -- I do not feel like it and I know others who have had far worse effects -- there were enough odd little twinges and things that lingered for a bit here and there that when I saw an announcement of a general long COVID study held in the same general institution I work for, I thought "Well, why not participate? If I end up being more of a control group, they still need that too." And I've been happily participating since then. (Let me throw in at this point that there's no specific connection between my case of COVID and my meningioma as far as anyone knows -- meningiomas still have obscure causes, though apparently childhood radiation exposure can be a factor.)

Anyway, besides the general study, there are additional studies branching off it that I've been offered to participate in; given COVID's neurological complications, an offer for a brain MRI in general made sense. At the time it was offered, Keith was, I seem to remember, about a month out before his departure, and we had all sadly accepted that it was going to be sooner than anyone would have wanted. I remember sitting in the clinic and thinking "You know, I will do this for him -- something like that had to have been a terrible shock for him. I have no worries myself, but I would rather know."

So it was scheduled for mid-October, and I went in and had it done, all very straightforward -- I've dealt with MRIs before, you wear earplugs and treat it like listening to a set by Main or something of the sort. (Hurrah for enjoying avant garde music.) A couple of days later I was having lunch on the cafeteria terrace at work when I saw a text message from someone involved with the study saying they needed to urgently speak to me. And you can now guess what the subsequent call was about.

Now here's the thing: I've shared this news with a very close circle of people since then, primarily but not solely my family, and when I called my folks almost immediately, a very good friend of theirs in the area was visiting, a recently retired doctor. She was the first of an initial series of people saying what I've told you at the start: don't panic, don't freak out, it's obviously something to be aware of, but this will take more observation and time first, and it could just come down to keeping an eye on it. So I had that knowledge to hand well before I even had my first proper neurologist appointment.

Still, it had to take some reinforcing over the next couple of weeks. I won't lie, given that Keith had been dead for some weeks at that point due to what he suffered -- and then of course Kaleb's wholly separate but wrenching death soon after -- I wasn't completely in the best of spirits for a couple of weeks there. If you didn't notice it, well, good, that was intentional, but again let me add that I wasn't keeping this to myself or anything, simply keeping the circle very close, and I am grateful for that. Once I got more used to it -- though I admit to having a near anxiety attack at one point in early November that was almost psychosomatic in nature, as far as anyone knows -- it was a matter of having to do something that can be hard for me: waiting.

This was down to a couple of factors. Now I did get my neurologist referral almost immediately, and one of the reasons I've urged you all initially not to freak out is that when you live in a city like San Francisco and work in a wider institution that includes a world-class neurology department with its own dedicated building, as well as having insurance provided by said institution and a swift way to get there from in the same city, well, you see the good fortune at work. I don't want to dwell on this but I don't want to ignore it either; anything different could have been much more difficult to deal with for any number of reasons. So point being, getting the appointment was easy.

But it couldn't be immediate, and since I wasn't showing anything in the way of symptoms or even had an idea I might have something like this, it was reasonably assumed there was no need for an emergency consultation. I do get that, but I admit I was a little bummed I wouldn't be able to see anyone there until, initially at least, late March. So I concentrated on other things as I could and did -- this also included, for other reasons, a desire to improve steps on health and nutrition, and I'm delighted to say that among other things I've lost twenty-five pounds over the previous twelve months strictly through diet and a little extra exercise, along with reducing my blood pressure further with adjusted medication and so forth. (I'm under no illusion this was going to somehow fix the meningioma or anything, but I figured, hey, might as well improve what you can.)

Thanks to a spot opening up, I was able to have my initial booking in early February, though this was essentially an intake interview, which confirmed that due to the size of the meningioma surgery should be expected at some point, but that since I continued to show no signs of symptoms -- the key one, I gather, is dizziness and lack of balance, and believe me, as someone who currently walks something like fifty miles a week for work and exercise and more, I would have noticed that -- it would be up to the neurologist to say more. That meeting happened in late March -- he's a very good sort, I liked him immediately and got a good sense of both his technical knowledge and his straightforward rapport, which I appreciate -- and he said the best thing to do was to take another MRI scan to see if anything has changed.

The results of that scan you see above in the photo attached with this, and the key point is this -- nothing has changed by his estimation, so surgery is not immediately needed, and the idea is to scan again next year and see how it stands, but to alert him if any symptoms do emerge. Now as you look at that photo, it looks huge, of course, but remember it's the covering of the brain, not the brain itself, so this not a lump you see there, more of a layer. The fact that it hasn't changed in size at all as noted is the main factor, and as someone who has a couple of other things under long term watch -- family history stuff, in short -- I not only get that, I'm happily used to it. So after the follow-up discussion with my neurologist after that second scan establishing this basic 'stay the course and keep an eye on it' path, I felt comfortable enough that I decided I wanted to go public with this, in my own way.

Now, I don't have to. And indeed, had the second scan shown that surgery soon after was recommended, I was going to wait until after that to talk about it, as has been the case with some less major surgeries over time I've been through (I don't recommend getting double hernias if you can help it!). Further, as I've asked my neurologist, there's no real test for meningiomas beyond an MRI, and being realistic, that's not something you can just up and schedule for yourself to be on the safe side. After all, the only reason I had one in the first place was for this long COVID study I mentioned (and both the study folks and my neurologist have confirmed that everything else about my brain looks fine, which is certainly a relief).

But again, I did this in the first place for and because of Keith, and consider learning about this and creating these plans to keep an eye on it a real gift from him, an unexpected one and an indirect one, one he of course should have never had the need to 'give' in this kind of way. It's been a time of thinking about him again -- not only is the anniversary of his announcement and the fundraiser I coordinated coming up, but the other week the last direct release he helped bring into the world via others' work has appeared. Please read the liner notes provided for Darkness Within Darkness by Feon for the full story from both the person who ended up releasing the album and the artist themselves for the full details, including the note on the album's final track, "Shanti (For Keith)," a beautiful hail and farewell to a remarkable person.

So I consider this something that I am not paying forward so much as simply sharing in the hopes that others may find some value in it. We live in this imperfect world and of course, here in America, medical coverage of any sort is often terribly expensive or unavailable, and as noted, this is not something subject to a simple test for clarification. But if this helps someone in some form, whether prompting a general medical checkup or something more, just to be on the safe side, then I am glad for that. I mentioned the Meningioma Mommas group up top and there are other groups out there.

You may find yourself in my position one day, or you may be the one someone close to you turns to if something like this happens. It's heavy, no lie, and I hope I am not being glib in any of this. But just being there is enough sometimes. Having the many friends and people I know over all these years in my life remains a continued gift and all I will ask for from anyone is a kind thought here. I am not worried, but if the time comes where things might be more serious, then nobody need be surprised. Again, though: please instead help others now who need it most, in any form, in any way. Keith was insistent on that himself in his last weeks, and that is the best spirit to share even in my own much less worrisome situation.

An absent friend.

Friday, over on my Patreon, I published a piece that I knew I was going to have to write at some point, about Keith McIvor, more well known to the world as JD Twitch. The reasons why are there, but it was also a chance to meditate on losses I'd experienced over the years, where people who I knew were there one day weren't. Sometimes there was a chance to know in advance, other times there was no chance. In some cases I still, quietly, grope in the dark still over what that means, and what was left hanging as a result.

I am not, by nature, a downbeat person. I believe this was ultimately down to luck and the accident of birth. My parents have always been supportive and loving, not to mention very humorous in different but complementary ways. I grew up in a successful household thanks to my dad's long running Navy career and more besides, and I used the advantages they were able to give me -- financial coverage of an undergrad degree at UCLA, for instance, back when it was increasing, certainly, but not as bad as it has become -- to the full. It helped that, after all, being a straight white guy in this society is automatically a leg up, which combined with that kind of upbringing and more has meant a happy life in general. I'm the kind of person who experienced my baby sister falling some twenty-five feet onto hard concrete back in 1975 and after a terrible swirl of activity finding out she only had a small bruise on her elbow. I reflect on what my existence and upbringing would have been like if that luck wasn't there. I think it would be dramatically different.

So when I grope in the dark, it feels like a phase in ways. Writing that Patreon piece was a way, for the first time in my specific memory, to account for a number of people I knew that are gone, by no means all, and to acknowledge that I think of them still. When I published the piece Friday morning, I felt I had done Keith right in terms of accounting for our connection, how I knew that he'd understood and felt it among such an outpouring of love. His loss is terrible, we feel the gap in many different ways, but, as is so rarely the case, I felt I had made sure there was some sort of accounting, and I was grateful.

The rest of the day went along well enough. Then late that Friday night, I got a phone call.

I didn't want to believe it at first. Of course it was Conrad who called me. Indeed I consider myself fortunate once again that it was him. Fourteen years back, I was at a show I couldn't believe was ever going to happen: Jandek playing at UC Irvine, a truly surreal combination, even more so than the famed Sonic Youth show there in 1990. I wasn't around for that but I sure wasn't going to miss this, and I didn't. Numerous friends came down from LA for it, Conrad, who I'd gotten to know via ILX, and he'd come with a classmate and friend in turn, someone also interested, obviously enough, in music but more things besides. Young guy, like Conrad, very early twenties; I was forty. This fellow already known some of my work and had very kind things to say about it and I appreciated it and thanked him, and soon after we were mutual follows on social media.

And that's how I got to know Kaleb Horton.

That's why I'm fortunate that it was Conrad, the person who introduced us back then, who called, in distress, sending me a screenshot saying that Kaleb had died suddenly of a seizure earlier that day. My initial reaction was denial and anger. Oh I was so fucking angry, not at him at all of course, but at the universe. Pissed fucking off. Distressed in turn too -- Conrad and I ended our call both hoping this was some mistake; the rest of our conversation is for us alone. I tried to go to sleep but it took a while. Part of me, that bouncy self, was clinging to something. But most of me was just dully looking at my bedroom door. I held off on posting or sharing anything; I was not going to be an accidental conduit until things were clearer. I've been through that before.

Yesterday has been a blur. Other writers have already said more -- besides Ben Collins flying the flag with a key Bluesky post, I defer to pieces by Luke O'Neill, who helped break the news widely yesterday morning, and Matt Pearce, but they were also likely thinking similar things to me: how can we do justice to someone who himself was a writer of sublime perfection when it came to the dead? That sounds like it's meant to limit or dismiss, make him the modern George Jessel or something. Anything but. It's just that he was so very good at that, among so many other things -- and it was never simply just that either.

Take, for instance, the piece that I remembered sharing widely when he published it back in 2016. Merle Haggard had died, part of the great harrowing of that year in terms of musical genius, and I immediately, intrinsically knew his piece -- at that time he was a regular freelancer for MTV's site, a place where so much good work of his would be done -- would be the one I was going to want to read. (And again, he would have been, what, 26? Think about all the people who had known his work for far longer, or had decades-long writing careers already, or the like. All well and good. But I knew HIS was the piece I wanted to read, a native of Bakersfield who knew his music in general talking about Haggard. Everyone else, I'm sorry to say, was secondary in my mind.)

"Merle Haggard: Son of Bakersfield" is, to my mind, one of the greatest pieces of nonfiction writing in English of the 21st century. A bold claim, yes. But I kept coming back to it year after year, not as anniversary read when Haggard died, just to savor the work's excellence. It is the story of a life, yes, but it is a story of a society and its lives, and that is the key. That is THE key, and you will find yourself understanding more about Haggard and where he was from and what his society then and now was like than you maybe ever have before. If you have not been fortunate enough to read it before, I envy you the joy of it. The version I have linked there is even more lovely because it has an extended introduction from earlier this year, when he reupped it on his most recent writing site, explaining more of the circumstances of its creation. I think he knew how key it was.

Now, something to bring up here, that's often missed: Kaleb wasn't just a serious writer, but a funny one. His sense of humor was honed and perfect. Saying someone is 'darkly comedic' is a glib way to summarize a wide range of possibilities when it comes to discussing how humor functions for its creators and its audiences, there's such a wide range of possibilities as to what it means or can mean. Calling Kaleb someone who was in the zone of 'dark comedy' is a dissservice and I won't stand for it. It's something else in his hands.

So reread that Haggard piece again, even or especially if you have just read it for the first time perhaps. Now, note the careful spacing of the beats, note the placement of some stories and lines and quotes, note the portraits and visions he creates. You're not seeing cheap cheery comedy but you are seeing where the humor runs through things, all intertwined with the serious. Then read his other great Haggard piece from earlier this year, "Good Lord, I Found An Episode Of Art Bell With Merle Haggard." The serious, the humorous, and it's all there in that title too, that sense of 'you are SO kidding me,' the type of statement on the face of it that has to provoke more than a smile, more of a startled laugh. Just keep all that in mind, when you dive into his work -- as funny as any next level writer could be, in just the way he wanted to be.

You haven't dived into his work? You will. That's part of my goal here. It's also part of why I was so angry, because Kaleb was not only dead but dead without being a household name or at least a "BREAKING" subject in a news media blast. So many of us saw to it yesterday that he deserved to be that. It was mostly on Bluesky where I saw it in the midst of so many posts; if you want a basic starting point, this thread by another longtime friend and admirer of his, Jake from Glorious Noise, is still being added to. It captures so many of the big swings -- and there are many more. There's the comedy podcast from the mid-2010s. There's the photography, which I think in some corners he was more well known for than the music, and that link just has a small, small part of what he did. There was his legendary Twitter feed, back when that mattered, and where he rightfully built up a massive following and posted even more photos. Heck there was even the Tumblr on here he did with another friend of mine which I didn't even know existed. There will be more out there.

I helped make sure everyone knew about his Haggard obit all over again but my own real contribution to the flow happened by chance. Scouring and searching on Facebook yesterday, I stumbled, without looking for it in the slightest, onto an amazing friends-only post he'd done on September 18, 2017. All the MTV freelancers he'd been part of had been let go in a heap a couple of months beforehand because of the pivot-to-video lie, and if I dwelled on that here I would get completely sidetracked. As he details, he had done something recently with his future wife, Marie, and wrote about it -- a visit to Toys 'R' Us. I read the post, and reread it, and thought, "Good lord, THIS is a lost piece of his, easy. He absolutely would have published this formally if he was still at MTV." So I prepped the screenshots and alt-texts and sent it out to the world, and it's still getting reshared and commented on this morning. Now imagine how deep all this might go in terms of things he just posted just to post them.

Last night, as that upset wreck of a day drew to a close, after all the many thoughts and tributes and responses from people who just today had learned about him and realized suddenly how remarkable a writer he was, Conrad posted his own private remembrance of Kaleb on Facebook, which I will of course not quote here. [EDIT: some days later, following requests from others, Conrad put up this post in an entry on Substack. Please read it.] It is an extensive accounting of a friendship, its ups and downs over time, the tale of two young men turned slightly older but now suddenly the story of just one, and the things still left unsaid, the thoughts left hanging.

There are other personal thoughts out there too, which shows how Kaleb's life had been changing lately. Referring solely to a couple of direct posts I have seen: Marie mentioned their separation of late, mixed with her own fraught emotions; his current partner, who had known him as a friend for a decade, was equally in grief. Theirs are their stories alone to tell if and as they wish. Another friend who had met up with him in March and I texted and there's more we'll talk about when we sit down next, I'm sure, and that is for us to keep to ourselves. Others will do similarly. (I will add at this point that this was not the first time Kaleb had suffered such a seizure, as he had posted some while back. I don't want to assume his death was inevitable, but the cause was, sadly, not a surprise once I took it in.)

But to turn back to Conrad's post on Facebook -- after reading it, I posted a short note of thanks that he was the one to contact me on Friday night, that I heard it from him.

Then Conrad said something I didn't expect in response:

"No one was a bigger reason for people reading him than you were, Ned. I didn't have a place for that up there but he and I talked about that at some point."

I don't have the words to best respond to that knowledge. I really don't. I am deeply humbled to know this. But I don't have the words.

I've been fortunate in my life, as I've mentioned. I've had many people over time offer praise for my writing, I'm deeply grateful. I was once rendered a bit speechless when someone told me it was my writing that inspired him to start writing in turn -- that's better than gold. I know editors who say my work introduced them to music in general and thus their later careers. Todd in the Shadows, known for his YouTube work, has kindly thanked me and one of Kaleb's other great early supporters, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, as specific inspirations. I value all this greatly.

I would not have ever expected Kaleb to have said something like that feeling Conrad mentions to me, because, as with all the other figures I've just named, I would never have been expecting it to begin with. Personally I always thought that the success and profile he did gain -- even if it was the kind of profile that still doesn't put food on the table or a roof over one's head on a regular basis, as he was always clear about -- was simply the result of his work, his building connections, taking chances. To even -- slightly -- assume that I had some sort of key role in it just by having met him, starting to get know his sensibility and work and therefore talking it up when I could, that I would never, ever, EVER have allowed myself to think.

Not once.

It is not my place.

And I find it hard to think about now, for this reason:

That meeting in 2011 was far from our only one, happily. We met in many contexts, some random and some not, over time. There was at least one other show, there were coffee shop chats, there were dinners, there were hangs. I moved to SF in 2015; one time his brother needed care at a hospital in town and he came up so we caught up directly then, at which point I learned to my delight his brother had attended the same Mountain Goats show as me back in 2015 itself shortly after my move -- in fact I think Kaleb said he was in one of the photos I took that night.

We exchanged messages and notes and things as we did, of course, and at various visits down to LA to see mutual friends we all caught up over a couple of dinners. The last time, I want to say, was a year and a half ago. But I've been a couple of times since, and I didn't make the time then, when I could have and should have asked. The last time we exchanged messages, was, I think, last year, when I was trying to figure out how to properly subscribe to his site on ghost.io when the interface was being cruddy.

So, some time back.

I didn't think to ask, or maybe I was too busy with other things. (Was I really that busy?)

You see the issue here.

To turn back to my Patreon post on Keith -- all this summer, here I've been, thinking about him, hoping for the best for his care, someone who I had a longer knowledge of and direct connection with, but who had never actually met, you see. Strictly mediated, but a strong bond in that context, thus my interest. Writing that post felt like as good a way as any to salute someone facing a clearly inevitable deadline, a sense that I'd done right as I could.

And then within twenty four hours, I was reminded -- as I'd said in that very piece -- that sometimes there is no time, and sometimes the promise to yourself to catch up again with someone never gets to be made true. I'd missed those changes in his life, though maybe he would have wanted to keep them close, and that's his right to do so. I missed what else might have been happening too.

Now I will never know.

And Conrad's words hang heavy.

I cannot thank the dead for kind words when the time is past. And I cannot ask the dead for understanding or to accept a poor excuse at an extended if unintended silence. So I will not. But to be reminded again of the necessity not to let something fall away just because is hard because it's, after all, a lesson relearned, not learned.

Kaleb Horton is dead, too young, a writer who should be more well-known. The work will finally be better known, when he should have been here to see it be more better known. His voice will be clearer, though it was always clear. He'll always be young enough, while the aches of time are in their own ways starting to settle in in my mid-fifties.

But about that headline to this post, right below that photo of his, that great photo.

I am not here to put Kaleb on a pedestal; he would have hated that. In noting his death, Marie was clear that he hated it when people are said to have 'passed' when 'died' is the correct word. He would not appreciate cant or sugary sentiment. I am not here to claim full knowledge when struggles were sometimes clear, sometimes kept closer, and how I would have reacted to things, I do not know. I am terrible with advice, but I would hope I could show empathy. Had he messaged me again at any point I absolutely would have responded as soon as I could.

Let me tell you about someone I knew named Cheryl deHoll.

As you can see in this photo, I met her a little early. There I am, not really knowing what's going on, in my dad's arms, and there's Cheryl with a fun, wicked little smile, pretending to give me a sip of whatever beer that presumably is. (My dad was the Coors drinker so I assume she's holding that in her other hand for him.) This would have been 1971, my birth year.

The bearded fellow next to my dad and also looking on with a smile and a laugh is Bob deHoll, at the time one of my dad's fellow Navy officers. Bob and Cheryl had recently married, and as I grew up I got to know them a little bit, or at least be more aware of them. I've no doubt I consciously saw them earlier than this time I'm about to recount, but my earliest specific memories center around the late seventies and very early eighties, when my dad was assigned to the Mare Island naval base while his sub was being refitted. A couple of years prior Bob had received his law degree at UC Hastings in SF, but he and Cheryl lived over in Oakland, a short drive away from where we were and all. We weren't visiting every week or the like, but we were definitely stopping in more than once.

Bob and Cheryl had a son, Chris, and my sis and I and he got up to usual kid hangout things, and I remember Bob and his beard and his always busy humor and wryness, and Cheryl with a great smile and a sense of proper cheer. I got warmth from her whenever we visited, not in the sense of just directed towards me, but in general, someone who was engaged and talkative, someone you always enjoyed seeing. I remember us visiting an ice cream spot called the Creamery, if I have it right, during those visits, and somehow it's all bound up together.

Soon, Bob and Cheryl and Chris moved to South Carolina, with Bob settling into a legal career with a focus on environmental law and succeeding very well at it all these decades. Cheryl herself, having graduated from the University of the Pacific here in California, later earned her MLS degree from the University of South Carolina, with a career focus on cataloging. So much for the employment side of things, if you will, but as people they lived and very much thrived there -- neither Cheryl, a Californian, nor Bob, from Tennessee, had grown up there, but that's where I saw them again for the first time in 1983, when our family did a trip up and down the East Coast. We were living in upstate New York around then, and seeing them in Greenville was the southern terminus of our trip. Chris himself was soon joined by a younger brother Andrew.

Now, it took me a long while to see any of them again after that, admittedly. Life went on, we all moved back to California, college, grad school, etc., all that other stuff. But I'd hear from Bob and Cheryl every so often, got updates on Chris and Andrew -- especially when Andrew got into guitar and long hair in the 1990s, I approved of course -- and, especially after my folks settled into Carmel, my dad's hometown, in the mid-1990s, for a number of years I had the pleasure of seeing Bob and Cheryl in particular on visits to see my folks (plus Andrew came out once with his girlfriend and now wife of many years Leigh, a real treat). They always loved the Bay Area still, Bob's a car nut and thrived at Car Week in the Monterey Peninsula in mid-August, and Cheryl always enjoyed talking knitting with my similarly yarn-mad sis.

Cheryl loved all of us, frankly, and we appreciated that. She and mom could talk for hours and hours and for many years would be doing that on a weekly basis on the phone in any event, a close confidant. (I remember, going back in time a bit, impulsively calling her long distance when I was still a kid, probably sixth grade, just to hear her voice -- this was in the days of expensive long distance calls too! My mom enjoyed chatting with her after that but probably said I shouldn't do that again without asking.) Hanging around with Cheryl and Bob on their visits was always wonderful, especially getting to know Cheryl as an adult -- her sharp mind, her sense of animated political passion (very much a liberal, and Stephen Colbert was her adopted home state hero or among them), her love of reading and movies and TV and many different things. We even talked library stuff here and there, delightedly discovering how a colleague of mine at UC Irvine had met her at a conference by chance and the like.

I had a chance to visit them in South Carolina a couple of times as well. The first was in 2008, part of a general East Coast jaunt following attending the final Terrastock festival that summer. I went from there to Charleston, where they now owned a really lovely spot, and visited for a couple of days, doing a few touristy things happily, reflecting on the mix of legacies of the city -- some beautiful, some far less so. Perfect hosts both and I was kinda delighted to be able to share a little 'just me' time with them at last. A couple of years later, my folks and I flew out to see Andrew and Leigh get married -- no shade on my sis, she was very busy at the time! -- and that remains a wonderful couple of days in my memory. All that planning and work, well, Cheryl was as busy as any, but she had a blast as well.

Time passes, memories mingle. One time Cheryl and Bob visited SF a few months after I moved here in 2015, my folks came up and stayed for a couple of days at a favorite hotel, we had some hangouts and great times. Sadly, that was around when my uncle Jon, my dad's brother, suddenly passed down in Carmel, so that particular visit is still strangely bittersweet. But there were other visits and catch-ups and the like too. Of course, the pandemic brought things to a halt there for all of us for a bit. Still, a couple of years back, there was one last visit to SF by them both, and my sis and I joined them for a lovely meal in town, conversations and chats and more. I was very grateful and still am.

You see, Cheryl's health was starting to take some turns. I need not dwell on the details, since some of them, especially as treatments and surgeries got more involved, are upsetting to contemplate, however necessary they were. I kept up with what I could in knowing what I could, but it is not my place to discuss specifics as noted, though we learned that the time was drawing near. Yesterday, a brief call from my mom brought the news, and Cheryl is free at last from pain, but now gone from this world and this life, too soon always, always too soon even after decades and decades, life and love, children and grandchildren, but it is always too soon. It is always.

Cheryl deHoll was my mom's beloved younger sister, my dear aunt. Bob, as well as Chris and Andrew, their families, and the many, many people who just simply had the pleasure and privilege of knowing her, her laugh, her energy, her wit, her talent, her beauty inside and out, all feel this loss in profound ways. My mom, my dad, my sis and I, no less so, because we were so lucky to have known her so well.

So guess who finally saw a certain David Fincher-directed film thirty years after the fact.

And you're all "What? Did you live under a rock or something in the mid-90s?" Anyway, I noticed that my local Drafthouse was doing screenings of it this week, which I've only just learned was a tie-in to the new 4K version out a month back, and so I figured, "Yeah I suppose I *should* finally see this thing." You gotta understand that there are a LOT of things that at the time slipped past me but that's the case for many things in general for all of us, I'd argue back. Also, the mid-90s was not a prime movie viewing time for me anyway, my major interests when not in grad school mode were very much music-focused, I generally speaking am not much of a bloody thriller/gorehound type (which arguably this isn't entirely but even so) and back then there wasn't any particular combination of actors and director plus subject matter making me go "I gotta see this." And so, now here we are.

In terms of being spoiled, believe me, I already knew about the box, so arguably I was more appreciating where the relentless drive of it all was going to end. But since everything else was new to me, I went in aiming to appreciate it for what it was, and it was strangely fascinating having an experience for something where I had zero nostalgia for it in and of itself and yet immediately 'placed' as mid-90s for a variety of reasons. (For instance, I had heard about the opening sequence being this notable thing and it absolutely is, but rather than it being the 'wow you can do this with opening credits?' shock for a lot of people that it was, I was more "Oh okay, so this is where a lot of that style people ripped off must have come from. Nice Coil remix of NIN there too.")

In any event I will say that I was honestly most taken by the combination of modes throughout, the easy mix of intensity and relaxed conversations, a remarkable balance of strong script, strong leads and a hell of a director/DP combination. The character actor turns were ridiculously deep, the undercut police-hero-mode moments were kinda amazing (Howard Shore knew what he was doing with the cues), and I kept thinking about how very strange it was that by default I didn't see Brad Pitt AS Brad Pitt so much as "So if they made this now Austin Butler would be playing this part easy."If, by default, the melodrama around Yet Another Secretly Genius Twisted Elaborate Plan Serial Killer is annoyingly weary to me now -- I get why it exists the same as why copaganda exists etc. -- but I take it as something where I contrast what I would have thought of it then as to where I am now, and don't mind being here to take it in.

There are two things I will conclude on -- first, I already implicitly knew it WAS a Se7en knockoff but now I gotta rewatch one of Steven Seagal's post-peak cheeseball efforts from the later 90s, The Glimmer Man, which dispatches its serial killer halfway through in favor of the usual corruption/conspiracy nonsense, has Seagal matched with Keenan Ivory Wayans in their buddy cop setup, and includes Bryan Cox as Seagal's corrupt gay former CIA boss Mr. Smith, plus music by Trevor Rabin. A real fucking artifact.

Greetings, hello. So, back in the summer of 2023 I revealed a truth: it had been almost thirty years since the first one and yet all this time I had not seen any one of the Mission: Impossible movies. Not a one. Honestly I think this is neither here nor there since everybody has any number of things you’re ‘supposed’ to be paying attention to in art/life/culture but that’s the point, everyone of us comes at that question differently. In my case, it was a combination of my never really following actors across careers – a film interests me for other reasons and the last time I saw Cruise in a first-run anything was, I’m pretty sure, Interview With The Vampire back in 1994 – and the fact that I was generally “Hm so it’s a bunch of spy movies but he does his own stunts I hear?” which still wasn’t enough.

But time went on and I kept hearing more and more people go “No wait these are actually really good, even if he is insane.” (Insert reasons why insane here, I’m sure we all know them.) So with the seventh one about out and noticing the first six were all on Paramount+ anyway (of course I subscribe, Star Trek and Drag Race, c’mon), I figured “Well let me buy a cheap ticket to see this new one and meantime let me actually watch all these older ones in the runup.” Which I did very quickly over the past week prior to that seventh one coming out, and then watched the seventh, and then I shared honest-to-god fresh thoughts about them all for you here. Fast forward two years, the eighth one is now out, and so I continue the tradition with this added-to and slightly revised post. My summaries follow, and they’re absolutely and totally accurate. Totally.

Mission: Impossible – But Not As We Know It: It’s 1996 and gosh darn it people sure are excited about email and early Zip drives! More on that in a bit. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt playing a smugfuck, but when Jon Voight is your boss sometimes things rub off. They all go to Prague to live the life of post Cold War slackers and get free food at embassy parties, but after various objections most of them are killed while trying to be leet haxorz and the like, so Ethan grabs some sushi to go before another bunch of slackers can hunt him down for his haircut, but not before telling him that they’re sure he is a bad guy who sold out and sold them out. Sure hope this issue doesn’t end up being a constant in Ethan’s career, that would be very frustrating! Ethan remembers something about god and how Emmanuelle Beart is hot (understandable, really) so that leads him to first use a janky Usenet client, then an impossibly showy and memory-eating email program, and then to tell everything to Vanessa Redgrave because why wouldn’t you tell everything to Vanessa Redgrave. After asking Ving Rhames to be an imposing funny guy and Jean Reno to be stubbly, they realize they desperately need the copy of Minesweeper stored at Langley but kept in a way that mostly results in death, which they avoid aside from a rat. But best to keep your knives strapped more closely to yourselves next time, that can cause problems! Jon Voight turns out to be Not Dead but basically argues to Ethan that French people are evil and corrupt which is why they all work for him because he too is evil and corrupt, as one becomes in his stage of his career working 30 years for the state. (Wait, I’ve worked almost thirty years for A state, hold on here.) Anyway, this is a geopolitical argument Ethan objects to, for he has a good heart, and also knows something about bibles placed by the Gideons, so it’s wise to be a theologian. So now it’s time to get on the Chunnel train, get a wind machine to the face, and then after the bad people all die, arrest Vanessa Redgrave. Rude! Time to settle into a nice long nap on a plane, except Ethan remembers too late that maybe the free flight he got on IMF Airlines had some strings attached. Back to the grind! (Real talk: obviously what at the time was controversial as such – ditching all the old characters except a recast Phelps and then reveals him to be the chief asshole this time – was secretly genius, enabling both film and eventual series to keep what was transferably iconic – disguises, handwavey tech, “Your mission should you choose” setups, general skullduggery, heists and breakin schemes, credit sequences showcasing moments from the plot itself and of course the two core Lalo Schifrin themes – and drop everything else. Honestly the quietest of all the films in ways and I will credit de Palma for that, because having everything fuck up at the start and then play the afterechoes out makes Hunt, who after all is being introduced as a character here, seem unsure at times as much as he ramps up plans; the whole London hideout sequence is a good example before we hit the train at the end. Best action sequence: even though it’s anything but fast motion, it’s pretty obviously the CIA breakin, barely any dialogue, tension ratchet to the max and the clearest callback to the original series’s inspiration, Topkapi. Uncredited role: Emilio Estevez, who gets some sharp metal to the face! Wait until President Bartlet hears about that! End theme: U2’s rhythm section when they all thought they were DJs, and they make the theme 4/4 instead of 5/4 so they should be the targets of Ethan’s next mission. Rating: 3.5 out of 5 water condensation drops.)

Mission: Impossible 2 – Slow-Motion Birds: Ethan Hunt decides crawling all over big rocks that will kill him with the help of gravity is a logically relaxing way to spend a day off, but before he can get to El Capitan and film a documentary his new sunglasses talk to him because he was supposedly in a plane that crashed earlier. But surprise! It’s Dougray Scott playing Mr. We’re Quite Alike Really You And I wanting to steal some dread disease to sell to the highest bidder so everyone can probably die including himself if he’s not careful, showing that once again maybe the IMF’s real problem is a bad hiring and HR process, something that will continue to crop up. So Ethan goes to Spain to atmospherically find a required recruit and it pretty quickly turns out that both Mr. We’re Quite Alike and Ethan have a thing for skilled and notorious thief Thandiwe Newton because come on, who across the gender and sexuality spectrum WOULDN’T have a thing for Thandiwe Newton. After that it is determined that Ethan’s hair, jacket and sunglasses means he’s required to go to where The Matrix was filmed and hit all the tourist spots, including horse races where it is vitally important to track down Brendan Gleeson and tell him that acting in In Bruges will be an excellent idea. Ving Rhames and another guy pause from telling sheep dip jokes in the Outback to conclude that escaping by kangaroo is just a myth and Mr. We’re Quite Alike must be confounded before he does bad stuff, and that this all involves breaking into a building and sneaking around while avoiding dying miserably, as opposed to just opening the front door and pretending they’re looking for the toilet. Can’t they be more practical? However, Mr. We’re Quite Alike has already inhabited Ethan’s mindset and face a few times and knows his every move, so Thandiwe decides she’s had enough of both bros and injects herself with something Ethan should have just gotten rid of more quickly but he was dicking around. Typical. Mr. We’re Quite Alike turns out to be a day trader and really wants some cash so he can invest in Beanie Babies, so Ethan and friends break into a special secret place and blow shit up and swap faces and run around, to Mr. We’re Quite Alike’s nettlement. Eventually a bunch of assholes die in cars, on bridges and riding motorcycles, sometimes all at once, leaving Ethan and Mr. We’re Quite Alike to almost but not exactly kill each other until one of them finally does, Thandiwe is convinced that cliff-diving is best done in Acapulco, and eventually Ethan and Thandiwe go hang out so they can look at the Opera House and why the fuck did the universe keep us from having them be the power couple for the rest of the films to follow, come on now. (Real talk: the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom of the series, I guess? Pretty obviously John Woo making a John Woo film and that’s why the birds, the fights, two evenly matched types in the end and so forth. But really, isn’t it kinda obvious – especially given the disguise/swapped personality motifs – that Dougray Scott should have been replaced with Woo veteran Nic Cage? The final showdown alone would probably still be talked about if it was Cage in maniac mode, he probably would have wanted to actually ride some of the bullets he shot and they would have made it work, I just know it. And, let’s face it, Cruise and Newton have a screen chemistry that WORKS. Best action sequence: the end insanity is admittedly great but I do especially like the building breakin and then subsequent fuckup, it’s simultaneously almost what you expect and ‘are you kidding me right now,’ which is key, really. Uncredited role: Anthony Hopkins as a black turtleneck sex cult guru pretending to be an IMF leader, because why wouldn’t he be. End theme: I had seriously almost forgotten that probably one of the most important things in the history of recorded music – Metallica’s freakout about Napster that brought the concept of file-sharing to the mainstream and essentially fully transmogrified the business for the literal next century – was due to their ‘are we nu-metal now?’ contribution to the end, talk about an aural beauty mark. Rating: 2.5 out of 5 physics-defying kicks because while it’s still great and all, in fucking up things with Thandiwe Newton’s experience of filming, the M:I machine lost the perfect foil and the chance to fully go into a Hollywood action equivalent to Lupin III with her as a Fujiko Mine for the rest of the series, nothing against Rebecca Ferguson you understand. Or I guess Michelle Monaghan but SPEAKING OF WHICH…)

Mission: Impossible 3 – Conventional Heterosexual Matrimony: *pulls Rainer Wolfcastle pose and shouts to the sky* “ABRAAAAAAAAAAMS!” Jesus Christ. Okay no, it’s not a disaster really but good Christ almighty. Anyway, fine: flashforward aside where we all realize “Wait can’t we just watch Philip Seymour Hoffman kill people instead?”, Ethan Hunt realizes that settling down in a polite suburb with the world’s most polite and fake-laughy engagement party happening is a really dull way to spend any more time so he goes to the local drug store and asks Billy Crudup “PLEASE get me the fuck out of here, what was I thinking.” Billy Crudup obliges but needs to let him know that he will be dealing with puzzlebox bullshit at the end of it all but such is Ethan’s desperation that Crudup says “Fine, you and Ving go rescue Felicity with the help of Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers” and before Ethan can say “Isn’t that a little on the nose for the mid-2000s” it’s off to Berlin and Felicity’s head exploding a bit, ah well. Laurence Fishburne in his floating across franchises role as Mr. Authority gets mad but Billy Crudup says nice things so obviously Billy’s the real bad guy and what do you know, turns out later he is! Doesn’t Ethan get briefed on this stuff? Anyway, newcomer Simon Pegg, having noted that Ving’s got a pretty sweet deal going, decides to join the early retirement plan on offer, though he’s still working up the ranks by creating Myspace profiles. Ultimately Philip Seymour Hoffman is just too damn charismatic and good an actor so logically he must be captured. Ethan and Rhys-Meyers need to play stereotypical Italians in traffic, to the point where I was surprised their disguise was as DHL guys rather than singing pizza delivery dudes or something, and then they and Maggie and Ving avoid stealing all the Pope’s secrets and the lists of child abusers he’s protecting or whatever in favor of an instant makeover, because it’s all Spy Eye for the M:I around here. Sadly everyone finds out that Virginia is not for lovers, unless you love blowing up bridges, and Ethan gets suspected of being bad again. He definitely has a real problem with that issue, he should talk to somebody about it, like Billy Crudup, and then he runs away because he’s good at that for sure. Anyway Michelle Monaghan got kidnapped, shanghaied if you will, so Ethan laughs politely at Hoffman’s little joke and notes that diving off a tall Chinese building is really fun at night, especially with the help of an automatic pitching machine. Sadly he eventually gets himself kidnapped and outacted by Hoffman demonstrating that he demands better of his minions, leaving Eddie Marsan to go “Wait, am I in this movie?” and Crudup to try and explain that W’s foreign policy is Good, Actually, which Ethan is not pleased with. Pegg helps Ethan run around a lot, alas Hoffman discovers that the laws of physics means he is not in fact an immovable object, and Monaghan saves Ethan with the power of love, because it makes one man weep but another man sing. (Real talk: fucking Abrams, thank god he just retreated to producing and occasional “I have an idea” stuff for the series after this because otherwise the rest of this watch would be a slog. Yes, he can make a solid entertainment at times, he’s done it more than once, but more than anything else in this series this REALLY felt like an extended TV episode of something, not even just Alias. It didn’t help that Michael Giacchino’s music added a lot of sap in the solo-piano moments that are waaaaaaay of their time and place, and I’m mildly surprised a cover of “Hallelujah” didn’t happen at some point. Still the machine itself functioned and while it was still going to need some improvements, I guess it started to figure exactly what M:I as continuing star vehicle needed to be – it’s weird to realize that this IS indeed the only George W. era film of the bunch and it sure does feel like his second term on any number of levels. Also, thank god there were delays on production because Simon Pegg’s role was originally cast with Ricky Fucking Gervais, and I don’t care if Pegg’s not quite your thing because imagine if we had THAT gurning fucking mug to deal with in the rest of the series. Best action sequence: thankfully the whole deal in Rome is pretty engaging, and we get the delightful moment of Philip Seymour Hoffman literally having to act as Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and thus climbing around and doing shit, the film is honestly worth it for that, and RIP to him once more. But honorable mention to the counterintuitive move of not showing anything inside the Shanghai skyscraper once Ethan gets in. Uncredited role: nobody this time but yeah that WAS Aaron Paul wasn’t it. End theme: WOW speaking of mid-2000s, a Kanye track with Twista and Keyshia Cole? Perhaps they realized after this that just going with random cuts and otherwise sticking with the score in the actual end credits was the solution. Rating: 2 out of 5 confused Greg Grunbergs.)

Mission: Impossible 4 – I Climb Thing: Hmm, a movie set in Hungary, Russia, Dubai AND Mumbai? Why this won’t be a problematic watch in 2023! In a surely not symbolic move at all, Sawyer from Lost runs out of a building into the street and is immediately killed by Lea Seydoux. I like this movie already! Ethan Hunt meantime is prepping mentally for a nude fight scene with Viggo Mortensen at some point but is interrupted by Paula Patton and Simon Pegg going “WOULD YOU JUST” so he concludes Dean Martin is just the thing for a prison riot. (Seems like it.) Turns out Paula is sad about Sawyer, but before anyone can ask her to take a psych eval, they are asked to break into the Kremlin for thievery reasons, the concept of ‘too much too soon’ having escaped the IMF. Sadly our Big Bad just beat them to the punch and then proceeds to blow up a big chunk of the Kremlin, which rather irritates the Russian government, leading Ethan to excuse himself before facing a full medical exam without anesthetic and with certain instruments. An actual IMF Secretary explains some more things to Ethan but puts himself in the line of a bullet completely by accident, isn’t that the way! Jeremy Renner insists it wasn’t him because he would use a bow and arrow but Ethan isn’t amused and everyone meets up to go over the fact that they’re now disavowed and without resources except for a train car that would supply most modern governments and the ability to end up in Dubai just like that, very handy. There’s a big shady deal going down but it had nothing to do with the Qatar World Cup bid, whatever do you mean, they’re over there. Regardless, Ethan seeks to make sure Sepp Blatter doesn’t immediately get the launch codes to destroy the DOJ Anti-Corruption Unit, but not before he shows everyone how a real man washes hotel windows. Everyone then seeks to double cross everyone else, which only makes sense, though Lea sadly has irritated Paula some and thoughts are exchanged, except Jeremy goes “Ah fuck it” and uses a gun even though it’s very uncivilized. Ethan runs after a bad guy who is another bad guy, then they go talk to another bad guy who is a good guy who acts like a bad guy to deal with a good bad guy. Heads spinning, they fly to Mumbai and finally Ethan gets to be James Bond! Or at least wear a tux. Dudes get negged, other dudes die, cars drive, people run around, and the bad guy persuades a Russian sub to destroy San Francisco, which causes me consternation I admit. Happily Ethan really has honed his ‘I just need one second, really’ approach, so only the Transamerica building is nicked, but the missile lands right in the water where my sis and her whaleboat rowing crew often practice and that would have been tragic! Hey fuck you Ethan Hunt, do better next time! (Real talk: okay, whatever groundwork Abrams sorta laid down obviously gets perfected here, Brad Bird and team just make this thing sing, something indicated by returning to a version the opening credits style of the show and the first movie, and while the fine tuning of the ensemble wasn’t quite there yet it was much closer than it was, while the full sense of “Oh wait, Tom Cruise really MIGHT actually die” as a marketing hook was now absolutely in place. A quietly genius move NOT to have the chief villain be a big presence, instead someone always just about slipping from their grasp up until the end; meantime, having everything constantly trip them up – even after the Kremlin/Secretary thing, the mask machine breaks down, everyone arrives at the Burj too early, etc. etc. – allows for more thinking on the fly instead of just being a well-oiled machine. While there were plenty of typical comedy moments here and there in a formulaic ‘gotta break tension’ way in the first three films, I honestly believe it’s Cruise’s “No SHIT” moment in the Burj which points the way to the rest of the series knowing how to make comedy actually work from there on in. There’s just enough distance to maybe be able to place it as a mid-Obama era film now in retrospect but it still feels like we’re in the actual sense of these films knowing what they are at last based on where everything would go, as opposed to the formative years. In essence, this was the point in my watch where I went “Oh I get it now” in full, and the fact that the movies started rolling out more regularly, however driven by Cruise going “Wait I’m not getting any younger,” makes total sense. Best action sequence: Dubai obv., part climbing madness, part caper, part shootout and part “Can a man actually outrun a sandstorm?” Uncredited roles: Tom Hollander going “If Hopkins can do it so can I” and Ving Rhames and Michelle Monaghan going “Uh we’re still here, thanks.” Rating: 4.5 out of 5 insufficiently charged climbing gloves.)

Mission: Impossible 5 – Fasten Your Nonexistent Seatbelts: Ethan Hunt suddenly realizes he doesn’t need to check any luggage and happily just makes the last seat on a flight out, though sadly there’s no real time for any drinks service. Annoyed, he decides to leave with their cocktail mixes, for which he is thanked. Suitably relaxed, he goes to a London record store to pickup a Crosley turntable for his Record Store Day purchases, accidentally resulting in the backing up of a bunch of pressings for starving younger bands. As it happens, Ian Curtis is there already looking for a particular bootleg pressing of early demos by Warsaw, so when Ethan scratches the last remaining copy Ian makes his feelings known, adding “All you agents beware.” Lady Jessica almost gets a chance to use the gom jabbar on Ethan but various Sardaukar claim precedence, making Jessica realize that Ethan is perhaps actually the Kwisatz Haderach instead. In Washington, wouldn’t you know it, Ethan’s being accused of being a contrary asshole AGAIN, doesn’t his union step up for him? OG Jack Ryan says the IMF fucks around too much instead of doing proper agent stuff like getting on a submarine in the middle of the Atlantic while Jeremy Renner desperately hopes he won’t be asked about his side gig with the Bourne group. Simon Pegg has had enough of his regular performance reviews and agrees that he needs to relax but confuses a Vienetta with Vienna, but Ethan doesn’t mind and promises him some Phish Food later. Lady Jessica, having been told by the Bene Gesserit to stop fucking around with the Face Dancers and vice versa, complicates matters as do two random Teutons but the show must go on, except the explosive climax is unplanned. Ving Rhames and Renner are too old for this kind of shit but they’re off to Morocco where Ethan really really wants to finally ride a sandworm. Lady Jessica tells Ethan that fear may be the mind-killer but that Ian Curtis desperately wants the master tape for Unknown Pleasures kept in one of the secret Fremen water storage tanks. Everyone proceeds to betray and/or chase everyone else, a perfect excuse for eventually remaking Easy Rider at 200 mph. Thankfully Simon Pegg made a DAT copy but the master tape itself is erased, leading Ian Curtis to swear revenge on behalf of Martin Hannett, kidnapping Pegg and forcing him to listen to muddy Crawling Chaos bootlegs and thus requiring Ethan to deal with the UK Prime Minister as ultimate keeper of all Factory records, except the movie came out a couple of weeks after the Brexit vote so most would have just given up David Cameron to him anyway. Ethan taunts Ian Curtis by driving up the prices of OG vinyl pressings of “Transmission” on eBay as he and Lady Jessica force him to go to the center of the city where all roads meet, looking for them. In the end Ian Curtis is lured into a third stage Guild Navigator’s breathing chamber on Lady Jessica’s suggestion and is captured, as the confusion in his eyes says it all. (Real talk: the Christopher McQuarrie years begin and pretty much all the pieces are about in place now in terms of a core ensemble with moments of variety after; if Bird set the template and tempo for where it all should go then McQuarrie had a perfect handle on how to make all the implicit nonsense make perfect sense in the moment, all while once again finding new ways to kill Tom Cruise or nearly so. One of the best signs came early: the opening credit sequence is now truly a ‘greatest hits’ series of clips of what we’re about to see as per past show and first movie practice, quick, immediate, gives away nothing, sets expectations up. Rebecca Ferguson absolutely brought some necessary energy as well, she and Cruise clearly click in a ‘yeah our characters could fuck’ sense that Newton absolutely had with Cruise and Monaghan just doesn’t (even though it’s clearly shown in 3 that they’re the only characters that did, go figure!). Sean Harris as our chief baddie and implicit Blofeld to Hunt’s Bond is another sharp move, a classic cold English villain who you absolutely want to see get fucked up more than once. Alec Baldwin mostly grouses but hey. Best action sequence: oh Casablanca easy, from the planning the raid on the storage facility to the end of the motorcycle chase, barely any pauses, the whole thing’s a marvel. Rating: 4.5 out of 5 lathe-cut terrorist messages.)

Mission: Impossible 6: Free Mustache Rides – Ethan Hunt is trying to enjoy a nice relaxing dream but Ian Curtis keeps telling him “This is the way, step inside,” and it’s not helping. Ethan is told that three pawnshop balls have been repainted and are being auctioned to the highest bidder, which just shows you how tough the economy continues to be. Sadly the usual exchange of niceties between him and his crew and a generic arms dealer turns out to be an issue due to a bunch of raincoat-wearing Curtis followers insisting there’s a third Joy Division album somewhere. After Ving Rhames skins Wolf Blitzer alive and stuffs Simon Pegg into his pelt, they fool the Norwegian Unabomber and it’s off to Pari–no wait a minute, Angela Bassett employs her low voice against Jack Ryan’s rasp and insists that for the balance between the Big Two that Superman come along, since Jeremy Renner is somewhere upstate checking out on a family that mysteriously dissolved. This Superman, using the cover name Mr. I’m Obviously Going To Betray You, seems more Bizarro-like when he leaps out of a plane and reenacts that one The Dark Knight Rises image with the lightning but Ethan demonstrates that there’s more than one way to crash a party. Working their way through a crowd of pleasures and wayward distractions trying to find Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter Vanessa Kirby of the House of Vanessa, Superman explains he’s trying for a Tom of Finland look but a bunch of French bros laugh in the bathroom and ask when he’s going to the Kingsman auditions and things get complicated. Luckily Lady Jessica is back, and wants to know if Ethan’s just trying to fold space again. Turns out Kirby is in deep cover as amoral blonde Princess Margaret and everyone’s trying to kill her, we can’t have that! She tells Ethan and Superman they have about twenty four hours to spring Ian Curtis if they want the pawnshop balls, and while Ethan realized he wanted time this puts things in perspective. Happily everyone is distracted just right except when they aren’t and a bunch of French people on all sides of the law are angry, time to go! Ian Curtis gets sprung by Simon Pegg, who asks him to sign the Sordide Sentimentale single since they are in France and all, while Lady Jessica shows that Fremen needle guns are good but lasguns might have been better. Logically since everyone’s in Paris they go to London, presumably inside the train this time. OG Jack Ryan is irritated and everyone leaves but Superman confronts Ian Curtis and says “I tried, please believe me, I’m doing the best that I can!” Whoops! Turns out Simon Pegg wanted Superman’s autograph too, but the Curtis fanatics break in after a further triple double dog dare cross and ol’ Jack is left stuck to a flagpole by his tongue, but thank you for your service. Ethan gets his jogging in for the day but Superman flies off to say he stands for truth, justice and the American way but he means the Zack Snyder version so he’s just going to kill everyone instead. Time to crawl around Kashmir before this happens and Michelle Monaghan is there! She’s doing good things! She’d like to catch up over coffee but Ethan notes that he has to pick up his DoorDash delivery assignment within fifteen minutes or he’ll lose his star ratings. Grabbing a helicopter to chase down Superman, who has a competitive route, he leaves Lady Jessica and Simon Pegg to fight Ian Curtis, who complains that the noose around the place is cheap irony, while Michele chats with Ving a bit while adding “Should that be ticking?” Various Things Happen but in the end Ethan remembers “Oh hold on I DO climb rocks don’t I” and taunts Superman by quoting Blues Traveler’s “Hook” at him, which shows he is no better than Benjamin Bratt in Poker Face, the fiend. Still, all three sections of the team simultaneously score Taylor Swift tickets, the world is saved from a fakeout ending, Ian Curtis is left to be a middle-aged man with the weight on his shoulders, Michelle gives Ethan her blessing to apparently make suggestive crysknife jokes to Lady Jessica, and everyone’s happy forever! [Editor’s note: this was later shown to be false.] (Real talk: I really do get what everyone was saying now about how, in a real upending of expectations when it comes to open-ended franchises starting big and petering out, Fallout might well have been the best of the movies to that point. It felt like everyone had everything absolutely down by now, from McQuarrie to the stunt teams to the actors, all the comic moments landed even better than in the last one and those were pretty solid, and for the first time points of continuity from the previous film all have an impact, whether it be the performances of Harris, Baldwin and Ferguson in particular or things like returning composer Lorne Balfe’s musical score, which is easily some of the best of the whole sequence and for once shows a composer working to contrast the Schifrin themes rather than simply shade and riff on them – the various well-employed fakeout/dream sequence sections get soundtracked with this melancholy and ominous chill, a solid move. Hell, even the call back to the rock climbing of M:I 2 made sense because it didn’t have to be explained at all, and it settled the Monaghan arc too in a way that was both obvious for plot mechanics and strangely sweet. Though I kept expecting her new guy to be an Apostle undercover, which was probably the point. Henry Cavill and Kirby were both perfect additions to the overall pool in turn, and the point a friend of mine made the other day that this movie feels the starkest of the bunch – like there’s a tiny group of people at the forefront and all the huge city populations around them are distanced and serene – is apt. Best action sequence: honestly this almost felt like a response film to Mad Max: Fury Road because it barely seemed like it broke for anything. For once the ending felt absolutely earned rather than a ‘we gotta end it because the script is over’ necessity but the actual best sequence is probably the Paris crash/chase/crash etc. deal, though shout out to the bathroom fight as the first near wordless sequence since the CIA breakin in the original movie. Rating: 5 out of 5 Cavill sleeve tugs.)

Mission Impossible 7: And Under The Polar Cap Bind Them -- Somewhere in the Arctic a Russian submarine attempts to reenact The Hunt For Red October except nobody told them that they’d be playing the part of the actual sub that was blown up, a minor detail. This is less important than our introduction to the newest ensemble cast member, back after a lengthy retirement, Sauron! Sauron, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give him a round of applause. Ethan Hunt is in Amsterdam chilling so logically he’s got the munchies, only to be told that Lady Jessica hijacked a spice shipment and the Guild is pissed. Near Sietch Tabr, Lady Jessica busies herself with speeding up the irrigation process with some fresh fertilizer, but Ethan suggests letting it lie fallow for a bit. At ComicCon, Hall H is full of bloggers trying to figure out how to use typewriters while backstage there’s an argument about if they can do anything now that the strike’s on. Ethan asks everyone to pardon his stinkbomb but meantime deals with the guy who was chasing after him back in the first movie. He’s his boss now, time for wacky hijinks! It’s straight back to Dune with Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, only for them to realize that they can’t escape ComicCon no matter how hard they try because Deathstroke, Mantis AND Agent Carter are all there stealing and/or stalking them and each other, not to mention the members of an official US antimasking squad who seem bitter that not everyone agrees with the science they really did study themselves. Turns out Mantis isn’t interested in feelings so much as other people feeling dead, which Deathstroke approves of, while Agent Carter has fallen prey to kleptomania, it’s one of those days! Off to Italy where, when in Rome, Ethan does what the Romans do and becomes an impossibly polished and fashionable lawyer just like that, while Deathstroke shows that it’s always vital to carry out research. Agent Carter is narrowly sprung from her plan to simultaneously enter all the national competitions for next year’s Eurovision all at once, but then pretty much every moving vehicle in the city and the occupants and riders therein decide that she and Ethan will jaywalk no more. A typical day in Rome, granted, but their sweet ride seems a little sour while Mantis is very annoyed someone cut her antennae off and wants to explain this with weapons. Agent Carter decides to check in on whatever Hank Pym is doing these days but Lady Jessica is back, having had a refreshing time on Caladan. Turns out Princess Margaret is throwing a big party in Venice so who wouldn’t go there next, and she’s invited everyone! Ethan, Lady Jessica, Agent Carter, Deathstroke, why even Mantis is there but she’s dressed as Harley Quinn and the ComicCon crew doesn’t know what to think. Sauron shows up as well demanding the smallest of things, a mere trifle, and Deathstroke reveals he’s actually the Witchking of Angmar and would like to help kill everyone, but Ethan realizes that the DJ is driving him nuts and he needs some fresh air, a touch the antimaskers still don’t get. Harley Mantis insists it’s actually an Adam Ant tribute but Ethan argues she seems more My Chemical Romance, but sadly Lady Jessica gets stabbed with a Morgul-blade. Ving needs to update his antivirus software while Agent Carter decides that maybe this bunch isn’t as Hydra-ridden as SHIELD. An attempt to combine Murder On The Orient Express with a gender-flipped The Prince and the Pauper proceeds to play out, while Ethan insists to Simon Pegg that he has a totally legit FastPass for the newest Disney ride, though he’s still arguing some of the details as he goes. Wait, a fight on top of a train again, at least there’s no tunnel this timAAAAADUCKDOWNQUICK! The Witchking rues the day magic was invented, Ethan and Agent Carter are relieved that Mantis appreciates a good turn done, and elsewhere Sauron wonders if a tower would be a better hiding spot. Tune in next week year for more! (Real talk: so having taken all the other films in in a rush I did wonder how exactly the pacing would work for this one as a two-part story, and I think they handled it pretty smartly; it’s not as high a peak as McQuarrie’s two previous efforts but it doesn’t have to be as a result. Instead of the near wall-to-wall rush of the past two, there’s a much more deliberate pace here, which oddly enough (but, if the original plan of this being the capping off of the series holds, logically as well) is one of several callbacks to the original film throughout. Henry Czerny as Kittridge most obviously, also all the sleight of hand stuff, and easily most notably Ilsa Faust’s death, the first time a team member (as such) has died since said first film. There’s one other interesting move where, for the first time in the entire series, we get a sense of what Ethan Hunt was like before the IMF -- it’s all fairly tropey, but by not exploring that at all until now it actually feels like an earned moment. My sense of what’s happening is that this is the big setup and the concluding film will be full-on action madness, and the tinges of haunted chill in the last one have a stronger resonance here -- the introductory sequence for Hunt is pretty damn bleak for a start, and after Faust’s death you get a sense of everyone going through the motions for a bit, not as actors, but as people hit with a sudden loss would do, and the film takes a little time to understandably breathe. The absolutely killer sense of how to make comedy work continues: the entire Rome chase scene is just as amazing as that as it is straight action, while the capping insane stunt as teased in the trailers, Hunt going off the cliff, is also the culmination of a ridiculously perfect dialogue between Cruise and Pegg, and I literally laughed at how the stunt ended, all while the tension in the train scenes was building up. And yet, none of it undercuts the action, the sense of time running out -- indeed, so good was all that that when the cliff setting first appeared I was actually surprised by it, even though it was so heavily featured beforehand as noted. I joke about Sauron but seriously, not only is the Entity just one big eye, and also a bit of a One Ring type thing too, the whole setup where instead of letting other governments control Ethan will set out to destroy it is VERY Lord of the Rings, so I think it’s more key to all this than might be guessed. But oddly enough, perhaps, I will argue there’s a specific Bond film you all should go back and check out -- the first one I ever saw, and Roger Moore’s best tougher turn wih the character, 1981′s For Your Eyes Only. That too notably has a Macguffin centered on advanced tech on a wrecked ship, there’s a car chase with a very unsuitable car early on, and how the film ends feels not dissimilar to where this likely will be leading in the conclusion next year. Just a hunch! When it comes to newer cast members, Pom Klementieff is mostly a wordless killer and whether or not you buy the end twist as such, hey, but she does a good enough job, while Esai Morales -- been great to see more of him recently, he did a solid supporting turn in The Master Gardener earlier this year, and he has one of the most underrated speaking voices in acting -- is just a coolly commanding bad guy in the right mode, solid casting and I think better as a more grizzled and equal figure to Hunt than Nicholas Hoult would have been, as was first the case. Hayley Atwell pretty obviously is the main get and you do get a sense of a calm spark with Cruise but, given the film’s plot, no more than that for now, and she holds her own as someone who clearly has done a lot of shit but quickly realizes she’s dealing with a whole new level of it. While I’m a touch suspicious that there’s a feeling of rotating actresses and in out with Rebecca Ferguson’s departure after this -- I will absolutely miss her but I’m glad we had enough of her as we did -- that comment I made back in my M:I 2 review about how Thandiwe Newton could have made the series of a hell of a Lupin III riff? Well here we are with another accomplished career criminal and hell the Rome car chase is centered around a yellow Fiat 500, what more of a nod could you have! Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis pretty clearly feel escaped from a more typical buddy cop setup but it doesn’t break anything, and I do like the office politics grouchiness from Whigham about the IMF ‘clowns.’ Meantime kinda great to see Kirby get to do the playing-someone-playing-someone-else big turn this time, and I’m totally thrilled to see she’ll be back in part two, she’s a fun elegant chaos factor character. Best action sequence: you know, I’m not entirely sure! Again I think the actual best ones we’re going to get in part two so it felt a hair held back at points, but the Rome chase sequence was both amazing and funny as noted, the alley fight with Pom K. pretty brutal if relatively quick, and the train tension/chase/fight/bomb buildup to wrap it up was a smart spot to end on. Rating: 4 out of 5 cigarette lighters.)

[EDIT: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE NEWEST MOVIE YET, STOP READING HERE, Y’KNOW?]

Mission Impossible 8: Precioussssss -- Ethan Hunt has decided to give himself a bit of a break and get into collecting old VHS tapes, only the sound is kinda screwed up on one of them and appears to be talking to him, and then it takes out the janky JVC player he’d scrounged online. But apparently Sauron has decided he really wants to reboot WarGames big time and this is causing some furrowed brows. Naturally this leads Ethan to find Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames while busking on the London underground -- again! Taking a quick break to free Harley Mantis from having to hear endless variations on “The Blue Danube” and inviting the younger antimasker from last time to consider proper considerations of what a virus can do, they go back to Old Blighty and then Ethan and Agent Carter get either double- or triple-crossed, or took out one team and then got taken out, or something like that. Whoops, Deathstroke is back and he’s kinda annoyed and wants revenge on Sauron, and Ethan had better help or else Agent Carter’s fashions will get smudged! (Though Deathstroke’s more fully zaddy than ever, as he does.) After various portentous exchanges on personal philosophy, marital relations and the necessity of theft, Ethan decides that suicide is a solution and--psych! He means OTHER people should die, since they keep trying to kill him. (Reasonable, under the circumstances.) Deathstroke, duly annoyed, takes it upon himself to force Ving to fix a broken electronic Rubik’s Cube while he runs off with Ving’s portable playlists for his house sets. That’s not very nice! Ethan then decides to take a break in an isolation chamber for a while to get his head together but it would be so much better if the constant messages from Sauron about tourism in South Africa weren’t regularly implanted in his retinas. He then tells the team that’s about time to consider just going ahead and holding the annual retreat without him for once, though he’ll join in for the Outward Bound part. Ethan attempts to assist with the Rubik’s Cube but Ving shoos him away and says he was about ready to finally retire, but please, watch where you step when you exit the ride. The older and crabbier antimasker then is all “Oh hi Ethan, you won’t believe who my dad is!” and indeed we don’t but unfortunately we can’t leave the plane we’re all on so it’s off to the one place nobody would think to look for anyone: West Virginia. There we confirm that Angela Bassett has gotten a pretty nice promotion! (I hear there’s a four year review.) Accompanied by Kittridge once again, a bunch of advisers and secretaries, plus Nick Offerman and Mark Gatiss -- it’s always Mark Gatiss, isn’t it -- she listens to Ethan spin the most ridiculous and convoluted scenario anyone has ever heard anywhere in the entire history of the planet. Logically, her response is to practice Ye Olden Arts of Calligraphy and Wax Seals, M’Lord. Ethan is whisked away to a carrier group in the Pacific and whaddaya know it’s beloved streaming character Rebecca Welton being butch except she insists on saying things like “So you’re saying we’re in...the DANGER ZONE!” Ethan quickly begs off before she can start singing The Love Boat theme, while Everyone Else goes and checks out a polar island that turns out to hold original copies of the first three games in the Ultima series. Well hey it’s the guy who had that copy of the CIA’s Minesweeper game from thirty years back, he’s married with dogs now! Sadly Russian neighbors are visiting and mistranslate what a fire sale means, so Agent Carter decides it’s time to race the Iditarod in order to retain a sense of cosmic balance. Meantime, Ethan has switched from Top Gun to Hunt For Red October in an attempt to crossbreed franchises while stripped down to his skivvies, though it’s a pity the one autograph hunter wanted to carve his name in Ethan’s skin. Deciding that going for a swim is the best idea, Ethan shows that it’s always good to keep keys, flares and Ziploc bags with you in case of unforeseen incidents like potentially live torpedoes and definitely dead bodies. His attempt to join the Polar Bear Club does go somewhat awry but Everyone Else including the new island recruits show the value of planning ahead for certain scenarios, specifically the ones avoiding death. (Well, some forms of it.) Anyway, taking the travel advice from earlier, Ethan and crew are off to South Africa to see the world’s only useful computer server farm, apparently (because nobody knows about it) oh and did we mention that this whole time Sauron has been idly breaking into nuclear weapon systems just because? He’s so good! Wait he wants to kill everyone and rule...nothing? Sauron really needs therapy at long last here, all that time floating around shapeless will do that to a fallen Maia. Before Ethan and crew can check in to their four star salt mine, Deathstroke reappears and explains that bombs are bad, so please, if only Ethan could just give him that portable solid state drive, he absolutely needs to download all the FLACs of 90s pirate radio techno mixes he can. Hey wait it’s Kittridge and the older antimasker, here to save things for the US Gubmint once more! (Namely, save the Entity for themselves, must they always be so greedy?) But then Deathstroke’s team attacks them and it’s all fun and games and blood down here. Wait, should that be ticking? Several piles of bodies later, it’s up to Harley Mantis to save Simon Pegg from death courtesy of a metal tube and booze, for Agent Carter to tilt the pinball machine juuuuust right to ensure an extra life for everyone, for the other team members to collectively run faster than Usain Bolt ever could under less than optimal conditions, for Angela Bassett to go “What we if we just flicked it all on and off except we just turn it off” and for Ethan to reenact what Snoopy and the Red Baron would have been like crossed with the UFC. Deathstroke ends up with a splitting headache, Ethan does a hard reboot of the portable drive, Sauron never realizes he should have seen that old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode about what happened with Professor Moriarty, manly/cool/righteous handshakes are exchanged, Ving speaks from beyond the grave while Ethan stares at cows and everyone goes back to London so Agent Carter can give Ethan a bitchin’ glowstick for the next rave. That is all that we want out of life, isn’t it? (Real talk: well if this isn’t meant to be the last film, they sure weren’t doing a good job in hiding it. Clips, memories and callbacks all over the place, most obviously to the first one but I was amused at how hard they leaned into, of all things, a key plot/Macguffin detail from the third one -- the third one! THAT one? -- to retrofit the general Entity plot here. (Though I will say this: since that film specifically didn’t show Cruise heisting said Macguffin in Shanghai, as I noted above, they had to create a sequence for it thus ensuring everything fit together. Which, in its own silly way, does work!) It’s left open ended enough that if the idea that a new team now exists formally consisting of Cruise, Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff and Greg Tarzan Davis will continue going forward, they could, but honestly this really does feel valedictory in a ‘exactly how can you top this’ vein, with its flashbacks, the sense of a full on career over the course of the entire cycle considered, etc. etc. I will say that it succeeds in its brief: it really should have been punchier -- longest movie of them all by far and didn’t need to be -- by the time everything was heading into the final act I realized I was wound up -- sweaty palms even! -- so hey, bring it. Not bringing back Rebecca Ferguson and actually killing off Ving early on -- the true great survivor of this entire cycle until now besides Cruise, appearing in all the films one way or another -- actually raised some stakes, and I even thought Pegg was going to buy it for a sec there, though it sure is weird to realize that he is the new long term veteran of this whole thing. Cruise is again Cruise, what to add -- it is kinda great that the whole insane and manic intensity of Hunt as a character combined with his hyperprecise planning and deeply convoluted summaries of bizarre scenarios and the like gets actively called out on more than once, but the hero’s gotta hero and then disappear into the shadows once again. And boy he REALLY wants to show that he’s still reasonably jacked more than once, there there, I’m sure you are, sir. Everyone else major beyond Pegg having already been introduced in the previous film or earlier kinda means there’s equally little to say there, there’s some good humor beats, good action ones, and everyone’s perfectly adequate to the general pattern of the franchise -- though I will single out one hilarious moment where instead of seeing what Cruise does to a couple of bad guys we see Atwell reacting to it instead with increasingly incredulity, then cut to what might as well be a Warner Bros cartoon ending with knocked out bad guys, if with more blood. Sure, why not! Esai Morales is underused, frankly -- he appears at the beginning and at the end, in essence, and he’s kinda missed during the middle stretch, a properly charismatic villain that the good ol’ Entity just can’t be. There’s not much in the way of new character introductions beyond Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, a very good Tramell Tillman and a couple of other sorts -- though shout out to Katy O’Brien playing a take-no-shit Navy diver on the sub, I would be down with her as a future team member, frankly. In keeping with the flashback impulses I do especially appreciate the crazy deep cut of bringing back Rolf Saxon from the very first film -- indeed, sent to Alaska like Kittridge said -- and Lucy Tulugarjuk as his wife, though not deeply sketched out, plays a solid ‘seems nice but will merrily conk you on the head for your bullshit’ sort. McQuarrie does the job, Lorne Balfe does fine, it’s a big entertainment, and if it maybe should have been released last summer as planned rather than the murky mess of a world that we’re in now, well, that’s timing for ya. And -- once again -- you can never knock that amazing theme in combination with the opening credits, it always works whenever deployed. Rating: 4 out of 5 USB drives.)

No need for me to be fancier than that!  And yeah I realize that nobody should be using Tumblr any more but until I figure out a proper revive of my old Wordpress site, this will do for now.

So anyway: I wrote this up for a private email list reflecting on the end of the year in terms of things I especially enjoyed culturally. Well, why not share it?

My year went very well — steady at work and in life, being 47 means more aches and pains but you have to learn to live with it.  The state of the world is something else again of course and we need not spend more time on the blazingly obvious.  That said, the history bug in me has been constantly intrigued by the slow drip of the investigations (and revelations) and were it all fiction, I’d be thoroughly enthralled instead of quietly apprehensive, of course.  November did provide some partial relief on that front so bring on the new year.  In terms of my own written work, nothing quite equalled my heart/soul going into last year’s Algiers feature for NPR, but my two big Quietus pieces this year — on Gary Numan’s Dance  and Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings  — were treats to write, while my presentation on the too-obscure Billy Mackenzie at PopCon was a great experience.

In terms of music this has been one of the most concert-heavy years I’ve spent.  Even having moved to SF in 2015 I only did the occasional show every so often — there was so much going on (even in a local scene lots of long-timers say has been irrevocably changed) that I was almost spoiled for choice, and part of me also just wanted to relax most nights.  But deaths like Prince’s and Bowie’s among many others served as a reminder that there’s no such thing as forever, and you never know what the last chance will be.  More veteran acts than younger ones in the end for me — greatest missed concert regrets this year included serpentwithfeet, Lizzo, Perfume Genius and Emma Ruth Rundle among the younger acts, while being ill when Orbital came through will be a lingering annoyance, still having never seen them live.  But the huge amount of shows I did see outweighed that, ranging from big arena stops like Fleetwood Mac to celebratory open-air free shows like Mexican Institute of Sound to small club sets by folks like Kinski, Six Organs of Admittance, Kimbra and many more, including, for the first time in years, a show in the UK, specifically a great performance by Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera.  If I absolutely had to grade my top picks among shows, Cruel Diagonals, Johnny Marr, Wye Oak, Peter Brotzmann/Keiji Haino, John Zorn/Terry Riley/Laurie Anderson, Laurie Anderson again separately, Nine Inch Nails, VNV Nation, Jarvis Cocker, Beak and, in terms of no real expectations turning into utter delight and thrills, a brilliant set by Lesley Rankine under her Ruby guise, with Martin Atkins on drums.  Best damn combination of righteous ire, hilarious raconteurism and compelling, unique approaches to how performance can work I’d seen in a while.  (As for recorded music in general, uh, endless?)

TV, as ever a bit sporadic, with a few things on my to-do list — still need to catch The Terror for sure, and what I saw of The Alienist looked good; I love both books so I need to see how it all worked out, similarly with the just-dropped version of Watership Down.  Pose I definitely need to catch up with since it sounds like Ryan Murphy stood out of the way to let the best possible team do the business on it, but my real unexpected delight of a show this year was also Murphy-based, American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.  While not down the line perfect, it was absolutely more compelling than not, and in fact at its best was a shuddering combination of amazing music cue choices, a reverse structure that helped undercut any attempt at making Cunanan seem sympathetic or an antihero, and, at its considerable best, a ratcheting up of terror and horror that a friend said was almost Kubrickian, and I would have to agree.  And, frankly, Darren Criss really did the business as Cunanan, a controlled and powerful turn. Only a few of us seemed to be following it at the time, but when it scored all those Emmys, then while it was as much a reflection of Murphy’s status, it honestly felt well deserved.  Meantime, you’ll pry my addiction to all the RuPaul’s Drag Race incarnations from my cold dead hands but it’s the amazing online series that Trixie Mattel and Katya do, UNHhhh, which remains my comedy highlight of the year, with at least a few jaw-dropping/seize up laughing every episode. (Kudos as well for Brad Jones’s The Cinema Snob, ten years running online and still funny as fuck while digging up all kinds of cinematic horrors.) Also, tying back into music a bit, late recommendation for something you can only see on UK TV/streaming so far, but get yourself a VPN and seek out Bros: After the Screaming Stops, in which the two brothers in the late-80s monster hit pop band Bros (never had any traction here but pretty much owned the entire Commonwealth and beyond) try for a comeback.  It’s an unintentionally hilarious and harrowing portrait of two twins who have a LOT of issues, have clearly been through a LOT of therapy, but are still…not quite there.  UK friends said it was a combination of Spinal Tap, Alan Partridge and David Brent and they were ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. 

Movies, less specifically to choose from — I remain an essentially sporadic populist when it comes to what I see in theaters, but I can say for sure that Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse is a hell of a thing and will almost certainly prove to be a real year-zero moment down the line.  Possibly the most affecting watch was Bohemian Rhapsody, in that I also saw this in the UK — in Brighton, which besides making me think of the band’s song “Brighton Rock” is also notably the country’s most LGBT-friendly city; those I was with felt the movie’s themes, successes and flaws/elisions deeply, and the constant discussion of it for the next few days was very rewarding. As for books, John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, delving into Theranos and the amoral duo behind it, was properly enraging and compelling, while Beth Macy’s Dopesick, if not perfect, nonetheless adds to the good literature on the opioid crisis, while as ever indirectly calling into question who’s getting the focus and care now as opposed to in earlier times and places. My favorite music publications as such probably remain the two I most regularly write for, The Quietus and Daily Bandcamp, while Ugly Things is the print publication that I most look forward to with each issue, and am never disappointed. 

Podcasts now consist of a lot of my regular cultural engagement, kinda obvious but nonetheless true.  Long running faves include My Favorite Murder — Karen and Georgia are an amazing comedy team who have figured out how to reinterpret their anxieties in new ways — The Vanished, which at its best often casts a piercing eye on how official indifference from law enforcement is almost as destructive as their more obvious abuses (recent discovery The Fall Line does this as well, even more explicitly), Karina Longworth’s constantly revelatory Hollywood histories You Must Remember This, Patrick Wyman’s enjoyable history dives on Tides of History, my friend Chris Molanphy’s constantly excellent investigations into music chart history Hit Parade, the great weekly movie chats by MST3K vets Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu along with Carolina Hidalgo on Movie Sign With the Mads, and The Age of Napoleon, which really has hit my history wonk sweet spot.  New to me this year was It’s Just a Show,  a really wonderful episode by episode — but not in exact order — deep dive into every episode of MST3K ever, by two fun and thoughtful Canadian folks, Adam Clarke and Beth Martin. (Adam also cohosts a new podcast, A Part of Our Scare-itage, specifically looking at Canadian horror. It’s not just Cronenberg!). Among the excellent one-off series this year: American Fiasco by Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett on the failed US World Cup attempt in 1998, Dear Franklin Jones, a story about the narrator’s experience growing up in a California cult and how his parents came to be followers in the first place, and the Boston Globe’s Gladiator, their audio accompaniment to their in-depth story of the life and ultimate fate of Aaron Hernandez. Finally, totally new series this year that quickly got added to my regular listening: American Grift, a casual and chatty look at various scams and schemes, overseen by Oriana Schwindt, The Eurowhat?, a running look at the Eurovision competition throughout the year from the perspective of two American fans, and The Ace Records Podcast, an often engaging series of one-off interviews with various musicians, fans and so forth by UK writer Pete Paphides (I highly recommend the interviews with Jon Savage and Sheila B). Hands down my two favorite totally new podcasts of the year were The Dream, a more formal story of American grifting in general hosted by Jane Marie — this first season’s focus was on multilevel marketing, and Marie and company’s careful way of seemingly backing into the larger story makes it all the more compelling and ultimately infuriating, especially in the current political climate — and the hilarious Race Chasers, a RuPaul’s Drag Race-celebrating podcast by two veterans of the show, Alaska and Willam, loaded with all kinds of fun, behind the scenes stuff, guests and an easy casualness from two pros that strikes the perfect balance between going through things and just shooting the shit.  Returning podcast I’m most looking forward to next year: the second season of Cocaine and Rhinestones, hands down.  Check out the first season for sure.

And that’s a thrill, it’ll be my first time presenting there since 2010.  Thanks again to the committee for the nod of course!

Here’s my proposal as submitted -- based on an initial draft I’ve worked up, the exact focus will be a little more specific, but this covers the general ground.  Very much looking forward to talking a little more about the wonderful Billy Mackenzie and his music.

--

A Matter of Gender: The Fluid Life of Billy Mackenzie

“Personal taste is a matter of gender.” So sang Scotland’s Billy Mackenzie on 1980’s The Affectionate Punch, the first album by his band the Associates. Lyrically addressed to a ‘Marguerite,’ the song could seem to simply be a bit of glib camp, nothing more. But the deeper waters of identity and sexuality suggested surfaced throughout his artistic life, only ending with his tragic suicide in 1997. 

Mackenzie had a knack for hiding in plain sight as well as hiding in private, resisting any absolute categorization in favor of an eternal state of play. Whether in his lyrics, his famed Top of the Pops performances, cover art or any other form of presentation to the world, he countered heterodoxy and fixed identity with individual insouciance; away from the public gaze, he cautiously but thoroughly separated his core emotional and physical life even from much of his deeply loyal circle of family and friends. Ultimately -- and perhaps, as he saw it, happily -- most of his secrets passed with him.

It didn’t work.  And while I wasn’t surprised by that, I did want to tease out why, at least for myself.

I honestly was openly skeptical of Blade Runner 2049 for a while, so I can’t hide my bias there.  I wasn’t totally ‘salt the earth and never mention it again’ then and am certainly not saying that now.  But each new trailer left me feeling more ‘uh...really?’ and the explosion of immediate praise from many critics even more so.  I wasn’t contrarian, and neither did I think groupthink was at work, but I suspected a massive wish fulfillment was. 

So I generally avoided reactions after that and figured I’d wait for things to die down a bit -- even more quickly than I might have guessed, seeing its swiftly collapsing commercial performance over here. My Sunday early afternoon showing near here was about maybe 2/3 full on its third weekend, so it’s found an audience, but I’m in San Francisco -- I expected an audience there. Enough friends have posted theater shots where they were the only person in the room to know this is dying off as an across the board thing, and never probably was.

I’m not glad it failed, but I’m not surprised -- in fact, being more blunt, I think it deserved not to be a hit.  The key reason for me played itself out over its length -- it was boring.  It’s a very boring movie.  It’s not a successful movie except in intermittent moments.  

That said, of course not everyone agreed (I’ll recommend as an indirect counterpoint to my thoughts this piece by my friend Matt, which went up earlier today). And boredom is not the sole reason for me to crucify it -- there were a variety of things one can address.  I’ll note two at the start since they could be and in a couple of cases I’ve seen were particular breaking points for others:

* The sexual politics of the movie, however much meant to be in line with the original scenario as playing out a certain logic, were often at least confused or hesitant within a male gaze context, at most lazily vile beyond any (often flatly obvious) point-making.  I often got a mental sense of excuses that could be offered along the lines of ‘well...you know, it’s supposed to be like that in this world, it’s a commentary!,’ which is often what I’ve seen in positive criticism of, say, Game of Thrones. Maybe. That said: not that any sort of timing played into it, but the fact that Harvey Weinstein’s downfall began two days before release, and the resulting across-board exposure and on-the-record testimonials from many women against far too many men, couldn’t really be escaped.  Further, since the fallout was first felt, after all, in the film industry, seeing any film, new or old, through the lens of what’s acceptable and who gets through what hoops -- and who is broken by the experience -- is always important.  It’s not for nothing to note that the original film’s female lead Sean Young got shunted into the ‘she’s crazy’/’too much trouble’ file in later years where male actors might perhaps find redemption; the fact that she played a small part in the new film made me think a bit more on her fate than that of her character’s.  (Another point I saw a few women brought up as well -- having a key to the whole story be pregnancy and childbirth as opposed to infertility wasn’t warmly received.)

* It’s a very...white future. Not exclusively, certainly. But people of color barely get a look in, a quick scene here, a cameo there. A black female friend of mine just this morning said this over on FB about the one African American actor whose character got the most lines, saying: 

to have the only significant black character be this awful, creepy man who seemed to be an "overseer" type to the children, was really uncomfortable and another perfect example of scifi using an 'other' narratives or american slave narrative but within a white context. We all know what it's supposed to represent and so it's just straight up lazy writing at the end of the day and exploitative.

Meantime, another sharp series of comments elsewhere revolved around how a film perhaps even more obviously drenched than the original in an amalgamated East Asian imaginary setting for the Los Angeles sequences barely showcased anyone from such a background. Dave Bautista certainly makes an impact at the start, but after that? The fact that I can think of three speaking roles for actors of that (wide) background in the original, as in actually having an exchange with a lead character, and only one in this one, maybe two if you count the random shouting woman in K’s apartment building, is more than a little off.  Add in a ‘Los Angeles,’ or a wider SoCal if you like, that aside from Edward James Olmos’s short cameo apparently has nobody of Mexican background, let alone Central American, in it, and you gotta wonder.  My personal ‘oh really’ favorite was the one official sign that was written in English and, I believe, Sanskrit.  Great visual idea; can’t say I saw anyone of South Asian descent either.

Both these very wide issues, of course, tie in with the business and the society we’re all in -- but that’s no excuse. And there are plenty of other things I could delve into even more, not least my irritation over the generally flatly-framed dialogue shots in small offices that tended to undercut the grander vistas, or how the fact that Gosling’s character finding the horse carving had been telegraphed so far in advance that it was resolutely unremarkable despite all the loud music, etc. My key point remains: boring.  A sometimes beautifully shot and visually/sonically striking really dull, draggy, boring film.

The fair question though is why I think that.  A friend in response to that complaint as echoed by others joked what we would make of Bela Tarr films, to which I replied that I own and enjoy watching Tarkovsky movies. Slow pace and long shots aren’t attention killers for me per se; if something is gripping, it will be just that, and justify my attention. Meanwhile, the original film famously got dumped on for also being slow, boring, etc at the time, and plenty can still feel that way about it. Blade Runner’s reputation is now frightfully overburdened and certainly I’ve contributed to it mentally if not through formal written work; it succeeds but is a flawed creation, and strictly speaking the two big complaints I’ve outlined above apply to the predecessor as much as the current film, it’s just a matter of degrees otherwise. But if you told me I had to sit down and watch it, I’d be happy to. Tell me to do the same with this one, I would immediately ask for the ability to skip scenes.

I’ve turned it all over in my head and these are three elements where things fell apart for me, caused me to be disengaged -- not in any specific order, but I’m going to build outward a bit, from the specific to the general, and with specific contrast between the earlier film and the new one.  These discontinuities aren’t the sole faults, but they’re the ones I’ve been thinking about the most.

First: it’s worth noting that the new film brings in a lot of specific cultural elements beyond the famed advertising and signs. Nabokov’s Pale Fire is specifically singled out both as a visual cue and as an element in K’s two police station evaluations, for instance. Meanwhile, musically, I didn’t quite catch what song it was Joi was telling K about early in the film but a check later means it must have been Sinatra’s “Summer Wind,” featured on the soundtrack.  Sinatra himself of course shows up later as a small holographic performance in Vegas, specifically of “One For My Baby,” while prior to that K and Deckard fight it out while larger holographic displays of older Vegas style revues and featured performers appear glitchily -- showgirls, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis in his later pomp, Liberace complete with candleabra. All of this makes a certain sense and on the one hand I don’t object to it.

But on the other I do.  Something about all that rubbed me the wrong way and I honestly wasn’t sure why -- the Nabokov bit as well, even the quick Treasure Island moment between Deckard and K when they first talk to each other. The answer I think lies with the original film. It’s not devoid of references either, but note how two of the most famous are used:

* When Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty introduces himself to James Hong’s Hannibal Chew, he does so with a modified quote from William Blake’s America: A Prophecy. (This fuller discussion of that quote and how it was changed from the original is worth a read; it’s also worth noting that Hauer brought it to the table, and wasn’t planned otherwise.) But he doesn’t do so by spelling out to the audience, much less Chew, that it is Blake at all.  You either have to know it or you don’t. If, say, we saw Batty clearly holding a copy of the book -- or maybe more intriguing, a copy in Deckard’s apartment -- then that would be one thing...but it becomes a bit more ‘DO YOU SEE?’ as a result. Clunkier, a bit like how Pale Fire worked in the new film.

* Even in the original soundtrack’s compromised/rerecorded form, I always loved the one formally conventional song on the original soundtrack, “One More Kiss, Dear.” I just assumed as I did back in the mid to late 80s, when I first saw the film and heard its music, that it was a random oldie from somewhere mid-century repurposed, a bit of mood-setting. It is...but it isn’t.  It’s strictly pastiche, a creation of Vangelis himself in collaboration with Peter Skellern, an English singer-songwriter who had a thriving career in his home country. It just seemed real enough, with scratchy fidelity, a piano-bar sad elegance -- which was precisely the point. You couldn’t pin it down to anything, it wasn’t a specifically recognizable element. It wasn’t Elvis, or Liberace, or Sinatra. 

This careful hiding of concrete details -- even when the original film showcased other clear, concrete details of ‘our’ world culturally, but culturally via economics and ads -- is heavily to the original’s benefit, I’d argue.  There’s a certain trapped-in-baby-boomerland context of the elements in the new film that, perversely, almost feels too concrete, or forced is maybe a better word. It’s perverse because on the one hand it makes a clear sense, but on the other hand, by not being as tied to explicitly cultural identifiers -- whether ‘high’ literature or rough and ready ‘pop’ or whatever one would like to say -- the original film feels that much more intriguingly odd, dreamlike even. I would tease this out further if I could, but it quietly nags -- perhaps the best way I could describe it is this: by not knowing what, in general, the characters, ‘human’ or not, read, listen to, watch in the original, what everyone enjoys -- if they do -- becomes an unspoken mystery. Think about how we here now talk about what we read, listen to, watch as forms of connection with others; think about how the crowd scenes in the originals feature people all on their own trips or in groups or whatever without knowing what they might know. We know Deckard likes piano, sure, but that suggests something, it doesn’t limit it.  We know K likes Nabokov and Sinatra -- and that tells us something.  And it limits it.

My second big point would also have to do with limits versus possibilities, and hopefully is more easily explained.  Both films are of course amalgams, reflections of larger elements in the culture as well as within a specific culture of film. The first film is even more famously an amalgam of ‘film noir’ as broadly conceived, both in terms of actual Hollywood product and the homages and conceptions and projections of the term backwards and forwards into even more work. It is the point of familiar reference for an audience that at the time was a couple of decades removed from its perceived heyday, but common enough that it was the key hook in -- the weary detective called back for one last job, the corrupt policeman, the scheming businessman, the femme fatale, etc. etc. Set against the fantastic elements, it was the bedrock, the hook, and of course it could be and was repurposed from there, in its creation and in its reception. 

2049 is not a film noir amalgam.  Instead, it’s very clearly -- too clearly -- an amalgam of exactly the wrong place it should have gotten any influence from. By that I don’t mean the original film -- above and beyond the clear story connections, its impact was expected to be inescapable and as it turns out it was inescapable.  Instead it’s an amalgam of what followed in the original’s wake -- the idea of dystopia-as-genre -- and that’s poisonous.

Off the top of my head: Children of Men. The Matrix. Brazil. Her. Battlestar Galactica, the 2000s reboot. A bit of The Hunger Games, I’d say. A bit of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (not a direct descendant of the original at all, of course -- George Miller always had his own vibe going -- but I caught an echo still). The Walking Dead. A fleck of The Fifth Element. Demolition Man, even, if we want to go ‘low’ art.  But also so many of the knockoffs and revamps and churn. There could be elements, there could be explicit references, there could be just a certain miasma of feeling.  But this all fed into this film, and made it...just less interesting to me. 

Again, the first film is no less beholden to types and forebears.  But the palette wasn’t sf per se, it was something else, then transposed and heightened and made even uneasier due to what it was.  2049 has to not only chase down its predecessor, it has to live with what its predecessor created.  But did it have to take all that into itself as well? It becomes a wink and a nod over and again, and a tiring one, a smaller palette, a feeding on itself. And it’s very frustrating as a result, and whatever spell was in the film kept being constantly rebroken, and the scenes kept dragging on.

This all fed into the third and final point for me -- the key element, the thing that makes the original not ‘just’ noir, the stroke of genius from Philip K Dick turned into tangible creations: the replicants, and the question of what it is to be human. Humanity itself has assayed this question time and time over -- let’s use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a start if we must for the modern era, it’s as good as any. We as a species -- if we individual members can afford the time and reflection at least -- seem to enjoy questions of what makes us ‘us,’ and what we are and what we have in this universe.  This much is axiomatic, so take that as read.

The replicants in the original film -- famously thought of differently by Dick and Ridley Scott, to the former’s bemusement when they met and talked for their only meeting before the latter’s death -- set up questions in that universe that are grappled with as they are by the characters in different ways. Between humans, between replicants, between each other, lines always slipping and shading. Their existences are celebrated, questioned, protested against. But we don’t live in these conversations for the most part, we tend to experience the characters instead; it’s often what’s unsaid that has the greatest impact. And if the idea of a successful story-teller is to show rather than tell, then I would argue that, again, flawed as it can be, the original film succeeds there be only telling just enough, and letting the viewer be immersed otherwise. (Thus of course the famous after the fact narration in the original release insisted upon by the studio, and removed from later cuts to Scott’s thorough relief.)

By default, that level of quiet...I would almost call it ‘awe’...in the original can’t be repeated with the same impact. The bell cannot be unrung, but that’s not crippling. What was crippling was how, again, bored I was with the plight of the characters in 2049. How unengaged in their concerns I generally was. One key exception aside, I never bought K’s particular angst outside of plot-driven functionality, and frankly they often felt like manikins all the way down from there. Robin Wright’s police chief had some great line deliveries but the lines were most often banal generalities that sounded ridiculous. Jared Leto’s corporate overlord, good god, don’t ask. As for Joi and Luv, Ana de Armas and Sylvia Hoeks did their best, and yet the characters felt...functional.  Which given the characters as such would seem to be appropriate, but their fates were functional too. Of course one would do that, of course the other would do that, of course one would die the one way, of course the other would die that way, and...fine. Shrug. 

So, then, Deckard? Honestly Harrison Ford had the best part in the film and while I found him maybe a bit more garrulous than I would have expected from the character, he did paranoid, wounded and withdrawn pretty damn well. Not to mention comedy -- the dog and whisky combo can’t be beat, and it’s worth remembering his nebbishy ‘undercover’ turn in the original -- and, in the Rachel scene, an actual sense of pathos and outrage. I bought him pretty easily, and it made everyone else seem pretty shallow. When K learns about the underground replicant resistance and all, the bit about everyone hopes they are the one was nice enough, but the rest of it, clearly meant to be a ‘big moment,’ was...again, dull, per my second point about the limited palette. A whole lot of telling, not much showing, and such was the case throughout. It was honestly a bit shocking -- but also very clear -- to myself when I realized how little I cared about humans or replicants or any of it at all towards the end. It all felt pat and played out, increasingly unfascinating, philosophy that was rote. It could just be me, of course -- maybe this is an issue where the stand-ins of replicants versus realities of robots and AI, along with the cruelties we’re happy to inflict on each other, means the stand-ins simply don’t have much of an imaginative or intellectual grip now.

Still, though, I’ll give the film one full scene, without Ford. As part of his work, and to answer the questions in his own head, K visits Ana Stelline, a designer of replicant memories. This, more than anything else in the film outside of certain design and musical elements, felt like the original, or something that could be there. It introduced a wholly new facet -- how are memories created for replicants? -- while extending the idea that instead of one sole creator of replicants there are multiple parts makers with their specialized fields in an unexplained (and unnecessary to be explained) economy. Stelline’s literal isolation allows for space and the limits of communication to be played out in a way that makes satisfying artistic sense, and Carla Juri plays her well. It builds up to an emotional moment that sends K into an explosive overdrive that is actually earned, and Juri’s own reaction of awe and horror is equally good.  But -- even better -- the scene ends up taking a wholly new cast later in the film, when more information reveals what was actually at play, and what K didn’t know at the time, and makes the final scene a good one to end on in turn (and by that I mean back in her office, specifically).