I lucked into this one. When I was like six years old my parents had tickets to see Ravi in Iowa City, and a few nights before the show my sister broke her leg. My mom wanted to stay home with her instead of getting a babysitter, so my dad took me to the show instead. The music was amazing, but what I remember most about that night was feeling like I got to sneak in to Grown-Up World for a few hours. Quite the coup.
Last: Alanis Morissette
Still kinda can’t believe I finally got to see her live. Jagged Little Pill was such a huge part of my childhood and I’d always seen Alanis as this like, mythic figure, and she completely lived up to it while also coming across as totally human and relatable. Amazing show, 11/10.
Worst: Yellowcard
Total snoozefest, literally – I fell asleep halfway through.
Loudest: Dinosaur Jr.
The first time I saw Dinosaur Jr. I went in with no earplugs and they shook my brain most of the way out. I had to go to work at Chipotle the next day and I could not hear anything that anybody was ordering. Hope they got the burritos they wanted.
Best: Ween
Every Ween show is something special, but I’d give the edge to the last time I saw them, at Red Rocks in August 2023. The band was playing super tight and grooving together really well, and it created a powerful vibe that encompassed the whole amphitheater.
Most Surprising: Wilco
I didn’t really know them, and I expected something less interesting than what they turned out to be. The show made me a fan.
Happy I got to see: Weird Al
I saw him on his second Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, where the setlists were all original songs and no parodies. It would have been worth it just to hear my favorite Al song, “Why Does This Always Happen To Me?”, which was incredible, but the rest of the show was just as great. They closed with a straightforward cover of REM’s “End of the World”, so I finally got a chance to yell LEONARD BERNSTEIN along with a packed audience.
Wish I’d seen: Arrogant Sons of Bitches
Jeff Rosenstock live is a treat no matter what year it is, but I never even heard of him until long after his early high-energy ska band was in the past.
I became a blog addict because I was a kid who loved movies. In the early 2000s, the movie blogosphere was a very exciting place for developing nerds to find themselves. The first movie website that I got really into was the AV Club, back when Nathan Rabin, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias, and the rest of the original crew were there. I was already a devoted reader of the AV Club supplements from the old print Onion, so it was a natural transition to their website. Plus, one of my best buddies was a big fan of the site as well, so it provided frequent conversational fodder, that led to more reading on the site, and so on.
When I would run out of AV Club articles to read (and once I had finished poring over the IMDB trivia listings for every movie I could think of) I started looking around for other places to get my movie fix, and the big one that really stuck for me early on was CHUD (Cinematic Happenings Under Development). Founded by aspiring movie producer Nick Nunziata, CHUD had an irreverent editorial bent that gave it the “edge” my teenage self craved and employed a lot of great writers, including Jeremy Smith and massive asterisk Devin Faraci, who wrote a LOT for the site, from reviews to opinion pieces to an obsessively detailed series of pieces on each individual Star Trek episode called “Star Trekkin”. No other site at the time (at least not one that an immature Midwestern teenager like myself was aware of) featured the combination of breaking news and set visits with timely reviews of new releases and interesting pieces about older films that CHUD had.
There were plenty of other movie blogs doing brisk business at the time, and since they were all competing for scoops in the same news ecosystem, you couldn’t read CHUD without finding your way to plenty of others. I was soon spending time on Collider, JoBlo, Latino Review, and the 800 pound gorilla of the scene, Ain’t It Cool News.
Ain’t It Cool was, in the parlance of our times, a land of contrasts. The site was built on the success of its scoops and insider Hollywood information, gleaned from industry professionals and a cultivated “spy network” of production assistant-types and test screening-attenders, and on any given day along with the news you might find great and thoughtful pieces from pseudonymous writers like Quint (Eric Vespe), Massawyrm (C. Robert Cargill), Moriarty (Drew McWeeny) or Mr. Beaks (Jeremy Smith, also of CHUD) alongside Harry Knowles’ aggressively terrible movie reviews and a thoroughly insane comment section. But Harry owned the site, and it was his connections that kept it running, so he got to post as he pleased.
During the site’s prime, it really did do a great job of making the world of movies (and to a lesser extent, TV and comics) feel alive, exciting, and accessible. Looking back on it now, that particular corner of the internet blogosphere also reinforced a very dude-centric perspective on movie fandom and culture, which I didn’t even really notice at the time. Astute readers will notice that all of the writers on all the non-AV Club sites that I just mentioned were guys. Self-educated in the world of movies, in the mold of their idols like Quentin Tarantino, they wrote without much seeming awareness of their cultural blind spots – most of the movies that got the heaviest coverage were American, and targeted at an audience of young men. When the coverage broadened, it was often to include similar demographic fodder like Asian action movies and French extreme horror. There’s nothing wrong with any of those subjects, but when they make up such a large portion of your cinematic worldview they can lead to a kind of tunnel vision that leaves out a lot of other worthy art by many other worthy artists. It can also have an impact on your real world worldview, leading to a tendency to see men’s stories as the important ones by default and, if not necessarily discounting stories by and about women, perhaps not thinking about them much at all.
Devin Faraci left CHUD to kick off a movies and culture blog for the Alamo Drafthouse: Badass Digest, later renamed to the more marketing-friendly but punctuationally frustrating Birth.Movies.Death., which massively expanded his personal profile. Alamo had a lot of cachet as the “cool” movie theater chain, which landed Devin the kind of access to the world of Hollywood that he had only dreamed of before. It went to his head. He’d always been an opinionated snarker on blogs and message boards, but in his new position as a geek-film kingmaker he became downright abusive in the way he bullied his critics and “enemies” over social media. His notoriety also led to the exposure of a sexual assault that he’d committed years before, after which he was “fired” from his editorial job while remaining active behind the scenes at the Drafthouse organization writing copy. When this closed-doors employment arrangement was exposed, the reputational hit to the company led to the soon-after shuttering of Birth.Movies.Death. Though to be fair, the site was already floundering for a new identity after having built so much of its brand around Faraci’s personal voice.
Around the same time, the other one-time king of the movie nerd internet had to take responsibility for his own nasty history, when Harry Knowles was exposed as a serial sexual harrasser, having behaved abominably toward seemingly every woman who came anywhere close enough to him at a film festival or screening to be groped or subjected to lewd verbal assaults. Ain’t It Cool was already deep in decline at that point, having long since lost the talented writers who made the site worth visiting and ceded its cultural relevance to Badass/BMD and their ilk, but Harry’s downfall put the last nail in the coffin.
One site that Faraci hated was Gawker, which should have been an early red flag about his personality. I started reading Gawker in the late aughts, and before long my Google Reader feed was filled with Gawker and its suite of sister blogs (Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, Kotaku, er… Fleshbot…). You started following Gawker blogs because they were consistently entertaining, often salacious, and always a delight to read, and over time they grew on you as you grew with them. They expanded your worldview and introduced you to new things you might never have tried – I got hooked on Deadspin because of the quality of the writing, and over time grew to understand what their subject matter (sports, primarily) meant to the writers as people, and gained an appreciation of sports and sports culture that I never would have had otherwise.
Gawker was also an incredible talent incubator. Site alums founded or contributed heavily to some of the Internet’s most beloved blogs – The Awl, The Hairpin, The Toast, and Popula to name a few, and have become bestselling authors (Danny Lavery, Jia Tolentino and Jason Schrier, among others) and even a New York Times Styles section editor in Choire Sicha.
The Gawker sites covered a huge variety of subject matter in many very different ways, but the driving ethos behind all of the sites was simple: tell the truth. You had Gizmodo reporting on the reality of what was going on behind the shiny PR of tech companies, Lifehacker helping readers improve their daily lives by gaining a deeper understanding of the tools and habits they rely on, Jezebel pointing out the ways that our mainstream media landscape degrades its subjects and shames its consumers, Deadspin piercing the veil of access journalism that held a tight grip on our understanding of the world of sports, and Gawker itself, a gossip blog, eschewing tabloid fabulism in favor of truly uncomfortable truths about the worlds of media and celebrity and coming up with a product orders of magnitude more compelling than its predecessors. Gawker’s defining post tag was “How Things Work”: at their best, posts on the network tried to understand a subject from the inside out, and to explain what the writer knew and learned about it in a truthful way, including acknowledging the truth of the writer’s own subjectivity.
This extended to Gawker Media’s proud tradition of reporting on themselves. The “Journalismism” tag, another popular one on the sites and their successors, covered reporting on mainstream and fringe media, and it was also used by writers on the sites to air their own dirty laundry. The most famous example of this is probably Megan Greenwell’s The Adults in the Room, her piece about what it was like trying to edit Deadspin while being micromanaged by their private equity ownership, and this article represents well the spirit that Gawker Media bloggers carried forward. It also led to the end of her tenure at the site, and not long after to Deadspin’s de facto shuttering when all of the rest of the writers walked out in protest of those same owners.
After the downfall of the main Gawker site, prompted by a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan over their publishing of a sex tape of his (and funded by Peter Thiel in revenge for their coverage of his personal life), the company was sold off to Univision, which added a politics site (Splinter), then sold the whole package again to a dunderheaded private equity concern that was convinced by their “success” in transforming Forbes magazine into a hollow but lucrative content mill that they could turn Deadspin into the next ESPN and Kotaku into the next IGN. The new owners had no idea what readers valued about the site (they were there, and not on ESPN or IGN, for a reason), and seemed hostile to the idea of anything other than profit having any “value” at all, and made such a mess of their new properties that they wound up either losing all of the writers people went to the sites to read – Deadspin writers, for example, formed Defector together after leaving their previous job en masse, and Kotaku’s writers moved on to a new collective as well – or parting them out and selling them off to companies that were at least marginally interested in running actual media concerns, like their sale of Jezebel, Splinter, and the AV Club, which they had also acquired via their Univision purchase, to Paste Magazine. Gawker itself was briefly relaunched by Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg, who proved to be more game than expected to the Gawker spirit. But ultimately his investment in the site was financial rather than spiritual, and after a couple of years of delightfully mischievous posting it was shut back down.
Many of the writers whose work populated the best of those blogs have struck out on their own. Most of the old AV Club staff left to create the amazing and sorely missed site The Dissolve for Pitchfork, and after Dissolve dissolved moved on to critic-in-residence positions at legacy magazines and Patreon/Substack sites like The Next Picture Show and The Reveal. Max Read of Gawker maintains the subscription site Read Max and Gawker/Splinter/Deadspin all-star Hamilton Nolan writes reported pieces and opinion blogs at on his own platform, appropriately titled How Things Work.
Stories about characters like Punisher that dig deep into the grimmest, darkest grim darkness are, Frank-ly speaking, a dime a dozen. It takes a writer like Garth Ennis, with a vile and blackhearted sense of humor and a grotesquely sprawling imagination, to make one of these stories feel like something special.
Welcome Back, Frank may move with the rhythm of a sleazily efficient 80s action movie, but the thing that sticks out the most to me about it is how funny it is. The action setpieces are structured around violent visual punchlines that showcase Punisher’s gruesome ingenuity. It’s a little like a creative slasher movie (think mid-period Friday the 13th), but you’re watching lowlife mobster types, instead of horny teens, get knocked off, and there’s more explosions.
Dillon’s dramatic action angles combine with his excellent page layouts to create a propulsive reading experience. It really moves.
The story is pretty standard Punisher stuff – he’s eliminating a mob family mook by eviscerated mook, being surveilled by the cops all the while, and trying to maintain a low profile. The collection of weirdos with whom he shares an apartment building give his po-faced grimness a welcome bit of colorful contrast and lighthearted comic relief, kinda like Batman’s extended family if Batman was an even bigger psychotic asshole than he already is.
The copy I picked up from the library has this warning sticker on it:
Which made me chuckle a bit. It certainly contains material that is not appropriate for children, but this is a Garth Ennis joint, so it’s about as far away from a mature theme as Frank Castle is from a stable, healthy life.
Team-up books can be a lot. Morrison leans hard into the just-too-muchness of an all-in Justice League story by following news broadcasts and other mass communications from place to place and character to character, creating a pulsing rhythm that kept me engaged where I sometimes find my interest drifting in these types of stories. Well done!
Sarah Wynn-Williams began her career in diplomacy and international relations. At the UN, she found herself working with other bureaucrats who got into their line of work because they care – about peace, about climate and our environment, about improving quality of life for people around the world. She also found that the organization she was a part of was devoting a large share of its energy to petty arguments over matters of little consequence. When she saw Facebook beginning to become a powerful political force, she left to work for the company as an envoy to governments and world leaders.
When she got there, she found that Facebook’s leadership had very little understanding of what roles their company was playing socially and politically, and she took it upon herself to try and educate the people she was now working with about how they could better relate to the human beings and societies they served. She worked under the assumption that her colleagues and bosses may have been naïve about human concerns due to their technology and business backgrounds, but that given Facebook’s high-minded, even utopian, rhetoric and stated goals, her co-workers cared about the consequences of their work and about making the world a better place.
Boy, was she wrong.
When she brought up instances of lawbreaking that the company was engaged in, her leadership responded by trying to hide or obfuscate their illegal activities (when the laws in question belonged to the US or other powerful nations) or just flat out ignored them (when the country in question was poor, small, or provincial enough for them to deem beneath their concern). Faced with the ugly real-world consequences of their ad-targeting tools being used to take advantage of people in vulnerable emotional states, the primary response was to incorporate the effectiveness of this manipulation into their sales pitches to potential advertisers. After Facebook’s products were used to amplify the power and reach of authoritarians and influence the outcomes of elections for the worse, Zuckerberg toyed with the idea of using his platform to run for president.
The carelessness of these and (numerous) other terrible things the company has been responsible for is more than just a lack, I think. It’s the expression of a philosophy. The belief that the pursuit of wealth and power is what matters in the world, and that anything standing in the way of their individual pursuits is not just unjust but irrelevant. That rules don’t matter if you have the power to ignore them. That having our needs met as human beings is not a right, but a prize to be won. It’s “getting yours” as a be-all and end-all.
It’s a nihilism of convenience, masquerading as rationalism and objectivity. Adopting the position of cool aloofness that money is morally neutral, that business is apolitical, provides an easy way around the difficult questions of what one must do as a moral actor when all that power falls into your lap. And once you’ve dispensed with any notion that the rule of law is good or right, you might prefer dealing with authoritarians, dropping the pretense that you respect any rules you find inconvenient and exercising your power transactionally.
If they are careless (they are) it’s because caring is something they don’t believe anybody should have to do.
I love to read a time travel story that’s as well thought out as this one. While tearing through the fast-paced plot, you’ll notice over and over again that something that was set up earlier without even appearing to be foreshadowing thunks perfectly into place. Using the inherent limitations of historiography as a framework, the story does a great job of refusing to provide any simple conclusions about free will or determinism, while remaining certain that individual choices have real meaning.
The way magic works in this book is mysterious, rigorous, consistent, and satisfyingly dangerous. There’s always a grave and personal cost to using it, and no characters ever finagle any easy outs to get around those costs.
A strong second outing for forensic accountant/shaggy neo-noir hero Marty Hench.
Doctorow writes with a passionate point of view and a strong social conscience. He is mad about the private prison industry and its abuse of human rights in the name of profit, and he illustrates how the whole ugly scam plays out in a thrilling and grounded narrative.
Ever the booster, he can’t resist throwing some book recommendations into the story, but his enthusiasm for them is so genuine that it comes across as ingratiating. There’s only one recipe in this one (after what felt like at least three in Red Team Blues), and it’s presented in a way that moves the plot forward so it feels less like a distraction this time around.
This book meanders its way through Cleveland’s history and episodes from Pekar’s life with the rambling cadence of a stroll through an old neighborhood.
Even with so much of the focus on historical facts, Pekar finds plenty of moments to delight in the splendor of being alive.
He was a very sensitive person, which I think led the public who knew him from his Letterman appearances (if they knew him at all) to pin him as “just” a curmudgeon, but his heart and his work were as attuned to joy and beauty as they were to struggle and injustice, and he writes about each subject with the openness and vulnerability of a person who doesn’t know how to be any other way.
Reading Pekar always reminds me just how much purpose and possibility there is to be found in the life of a “regular guy” like me.
I bought this collection after hearing the rave reviews for Tom King’s Batman/Elmer Fudd crossover. It lived up to the hype and then some – the author and artist play the Ed Brubaker-style retro-noir-with-Looney-Tunes-guys angle absolutely straight and allow the humor to emerge naturally, and it hits just the right notes.
I was delighted to find that the rest of the crossovers were a lot of fun as well, standouts including the Wonder Woman/Tasmanian Devil and Bugs Bunny/Legion of Super-Heroes entries. The Legion issue especially pokes great fun at the “teen soap opera” genre of comics with the retro Legion kids and their exaggeratedly overwrought dialogue and unnecessary exposition serving as Bugs’ straight men.
This book plays out like an exciting transitional episode of a serialized TV show, and I mean that as a compliment. Murderbot finally catches back up with its primary crew of humans, and Wells does a fantastic job revealing important elements of Murderbot and Dr. Mensah’s personalities through moments of action as well as quiet conversation, complete with her trademark snappy dialogue.
I am enjoying the Murderbot’s agonized process of engaging with its own emotions.
Soup Is Good Food 