Pop culture round-up!
Words not only mattered but they were power. Words were muti. Words were weapons. Words were magic. Words were church. Words were wealth. Words were life.
Glory is a political satire about the end of Robert Mugabe's rule in Zimbabwe and its aftermath. The characters are all animals, in homage to George Orwell's Animal Farm, but it isn't as important to the plot as it was in that novel.
It is fucking wild to me that Mugabe wasn't ousted until 2017. He was the last remnant of those horrendous African tyrants that pretended to be socialists so they could suck up Soviet aid, while really possessing no actual politics beyond amassing power and wealth and crushing anyone who dissented (or who just wasn't a member of his own ethnic group). But he outlasted the fall of the USSR by about 25 years!
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Speaking of the Soviet Union, I am now in season 2 of my Americans re-watch. I forgot what a great open the season had, almost as good as the chase scene from the pilot set to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk".
Click to viewSeason 2 Philip really goes through it; at one point he comes within a hair's breadth of beating the shit out of his daughter's pastor. (I am on Philip's side in that one, what kind of fucking asshole accepts a $600 donation--in 1982; that would be like, almost 2 grand today--from a 14-year-old.)
The Americans also addressed the African proxy conflicts of the Cold War, although that came in a later season. I remember at one point they show a South African apartheid collaborator get necklaced, which, fucking yikes. I mean fuck those guys, obviously, but like, you can just shoot them and get it over with.
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This is what I'll be watching on Sunday:
I read the book it's adapted from (also named Last Call) and it was really good.
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Full trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon!
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I'm re-listening to the audio book of Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall while I wait for my next Audible credit. I don't listen to a lot of fiction on audio, but this is one of my favorites. The book is written as an oral history about the making of a British folk album recorded in the early 1970s that goes on to become a cult classic, largely because of what happens to one of the band members (no spoilers), and they got a different actor to read each character. So it really feels like you're listening to an actual documentary.
It helps that I also love Elizabeth Hand. Some people like to complain that this book is too "thin" or doesn't have enough of a plot. But I like that Hand doesn't hold your hand and explain every little thing, because life is often like that: You don't get definitive answers to all your questions, you just infer things after the fact based on contextual clues.
People talk about carrying the torch, but I always think of that man they found in the ice up in the Alps. He’d been under the snow for 1,200 years, and when they discovered him, he was still wearing his clothes, a cloak of woven grass and a bearskin cap, and in his pocket they found a little bag of grass and tinder and a bit of dead coal. That was the live spark he’d been carrying, the bright ember he kept in his pocket to start a fire whenever he stopped. You’d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that’s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark. Folk music is like that. And by folk I mean whatever music it is that you love, whatever music it is that sustains you. It’s the spark that keeps us alive in the cold and night, the fire we all gather in front of so we know we’re not alone in the dark. And the longer I live, the colder and darker it gets.
(BTW based on what I know of British folk rock, I'm fairly certain that Windhollow Faire's Wylding Hall was inspired by Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief.)