First Quarter Consumer Report
Howdy Y’all
Apologies for the sustained quiet; it’s been busy outside this little writer’s corner. But I’ve been making progress on pieces that will make an appearance here sooner rather than later.
In the meanwhile, I thought it’d be fun to share what I’ve been consuming this first part of 2024. To maintain my robust writing schedule, I try to intake just as much as I produce (and usually a lot more) to ensure my creative engine is well lubricated and firing properly. Below you’ll find what I’ve been fuel injecting directly into my four-cylinder wonder machine, with some mini essays/blurbs scattered throughout to speak on the works that have super charged my imagination.
Q1 Books
“Night Sky with Exit Wounds” & “Time is a Mother” by: Ocean Vuong
“Of Wolves and Men” by: Barry Lopez
“Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick” by: Zora Neal Hurston
“The Left Hand of Darkness” by: Ursula K LeGuin
One of my all-times favorites, and my dear friend An bought it for me as a Christmas gift for her, our bestie Ashley, and myself to read. We’ve all been so busy we haven’t had the time to meet in person to discuss even as were well into our next book club. But getting to share a book you love profoundly with the people you love, what else can I really say? It was a highlight of my life as a reader thus far.
“A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance” by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Just this past Monday night (which technically falls into Q2, but whatever, get over it, it’s my blog) I had the pleasure of seeing Hanif speak in person and do a reading from his latest book “There’s Always This Year”. It was a night shared with friends and fellow lovers of his work alike. Hearing him speak, you could feel the energy in the room, how magnetized we all were by a guy whose prose is the emotionally rawest you’ll ever read, written with a magnitude of power that will leave you floored if you are not ready. To hear him speak on a range of topics and then meet him at the end of the night was my first time I encountered an author I admire in the real world and one I won’t ever forget.
This passage below comes at the very end of one of his more recent works “A Little Devil in America”. The last couple years of my own internal tumult only are amplified by the world at large and sometimes it’s hard to feel like writing blog posts, getting sucked into books, or those beautiful fleeting moments with art and/or friends are enough to shake off those globe spanning specters that possess our little lives. To be able to capture something that feels so universal to a lot of Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, while still so specific to his own experience like Hanif is able to below, I believe, is his greatest talent as a writer. And why I continue to come back to his work, no matter the subject he expounds upon through his unique lens.
"The horrors of returning to the world make for desirable escapes, but also a shrinking window to enjoy those escapes in. If I turn away too long, I might forget what it is to mourn. The newest thing that cloaks me in fear is the idea that I've become too numb to a world that increasingly demands furious engagement. I went to sleep again, and when I woke up, there were fifty Muslims dead in New Zealand and people once again arguing over who deserves to live a full life and how those people deserve to live a full life. In all of my group chats, no one really knows what to say, and so no one says anything. I have run out of jokes to break the silence with. On the Internet, someone mentions all of the things our collective grief can turn into: rage, hope, something useful against the exhausting scroll of violence. Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument. When the interviewers asked Buster Douglas what his plan was in 1990, days before the fight, he responded I just hit him, I guess. And trust, I have dragged myself back to the walls of my fears and thrown my fists into them, hoping a crack might open for the sunlight to gallop through. But it turns out I'm not the fighter I once was, and I was never much of a fighter in the first place. It turns out all of my fears have become immovable. I am afraid not of death itself, but of the unknown that comes after. I am afraid not of leaving, but of being forgotten. I am in love today but am afraid that I might not be tomorrow. And that is to say nothing of the bullets, the bombs, the waters rising, and the potential for an apocalypse. People ask me to offer them hope, but I'd rather offer them honesty. Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn't always serve reality. Hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery. The milk crate is still a milk crate, but with the right opening, a basketball can make its way through. If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to a grave."
“Dune” by: Frank Herbert
“The Prophet” by: Kahlil Gibran
Currently Reading
“The Brothers Karamazov” by: Fyodor Dostoevsky
I really wanted to challenge myself with my reading this year. I decided the best way to go about that was assigning myself two massive classics I hadn’t read before to finish by the end of 2024 (which for this challenge I’ve dubbed “Must Read Monsters”). Those two were “Moby Dick” & “Infinite Jest”. But since I’m a glutton for punishment and love to involve my friends in said torture, I asked two close friends of mine (Jack & Trav) to assign me two titanic favorites of their own (hereby titled “Mystery Monsters”). They chose “House of Leaves” and “The Brothers Karamazov”, respectively.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Brothers K since late January, and that’s both out of enjoyment but also necessity. In theory, I suppose you could power through it. And I’m sure some have: It is a dense book that does not hold easy knowledge one can simply glean if not fully engaged with it.
To me though that feels like fast forwarding though a sunset. Or binging a Michelin Star meal. Why even bother with it if that’s how you’re choosing to engage with it?
I wept like a child within the first hundred pages of this masterpiece. I’ve come to love the characters because their flaws as well as their virtues are readily on display. It’s one of those classics that make you reexamine your own values. Making you consider what it means to be human when presented with humanity at its most ascendant and at its lowest debasement. I can’t give it a better endorsement than that.
While it requires a zealot’s devotion to adhere to its dense, methodical pace, so far, I’ve savored every step.
“Sixty Stories” by: Donald Barthelme
“The Children of Hurin” by: J.R.R. Tolkien
“Shadow of Night” by: Deborah Harkness
“The Return of the Shadow” by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited and compiled by Christopher Tolkien)
If you’ve ever wondered how the Master of a Genre reaches his final draft, this is the book for you. As a die-hard LOTR fan, reading through these multiple drafts is as eye opening as it gets. In this collection, Christopher Tolkien has taken every effort to give you a window into his father’s mind and process.
The pattern that seems to have emerged is in the first two or three drafts is when Tolkien is taking his biggest swings. Uncertain of what the story is going to become, those early drafts often shift wildly. Did you know that instead of making Frodo the key protagonist, one of Tolkien’s first inclinations was to make the trilogy about his son, Bingo? You read that right, a son named Bingo. Who, after lavishly burning through his father’s hoard of treasure, sets off on his own adventure to refill the family coffers.
Once the drafts slowly begin to resemble the story you know and love, you might be tempted to skip to the next chapter or ditch the book entirely. I will be the first to admit it is not a breezy read. It does feel like proof reading and annotating a master’s work. This one is for the editors, the lore obsessed, and the dorkish to pour over.
Q1 Music
I’ll let the music speak for itself. I’m putting a lot of my creative energy into my first attempt at music journalism (coming out later this year). In the meanwhile, enjoy some of my favorite tracks from what I’ve heard in 2024 so far!
Q1 Movies
I write reviews of varying length on Letterboxed. Come by there and check them out! I included a couple of my favorites from this quarter as a preview of what you can get for free over there if you follow me.
The Act of Killing
The City of the Dead
A couple interesting ideas and tricks the first twenty-five minutes, but then decides to essentially repeat that storyline twice more to pad out the already lean seventy-seven-minute runtime. This would have been way more effective as a Twilight Zone episode than a feature film. Who knew witchcraft and devil worship could be so monotonous.
When they came up with the phrase “Tall, Dark, and Handsome” they had a young Christopher Lee in mind.
Soul Plane
Fallen Leaves
38 at the Garden
Rat Race
In Whose Honor?
George of the Jungle
The Addiction
Dated in some ways, it still does an incredible job of portraying vampire mythology and expanding on it in a modern setting. Using addiction of any kind, whether it be blood, drugs, or power over others, as a lens in which to examine existentialism and how that path trends fascist or faithful, based on the person’s world view.
Docked half a star for an overreliance on Cypress Hill to drive already obvious points into your head again and again.
American Fiction
Ghosts
Captain EO
Three years after “The Return of the Jedi”, Michael Jackson, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola are at Skywalker Ranch, railing mounds of the finest Colombian pep powder off an Ewok’s ass.
The three have been tasked with the impossible: Make a 17-minute short film to screen at Epcot Center for sun burned Middle Americans.
The budget: $24,000,000 ($63,000,000 in 2024)
Francis (jittery, visibly agitated): What are we going to do, George?!?! We just snorted our whole budget!!
George (sniffing heavily, wiping his nose): “Now Francis, I need you to calm the fuck down, Pal. Look, why don’t we just recycle all this Star Wars shit? It’s just lying around! Then we spray paint Michael’s Thriller outfit white, I’ll get Henson to stitch some extra limbs and butterfly wings to a few background puppets from Mos Eisely Cantina, and no one will be the wiser. What do you think, Michael?”
Michael (a big grin spreading across his face, he giggles as he descends upon the quivering teddy bears buttocks): “I’m going in.”
The other two roar with laughter. They spend the rest of the day chasing a dwarf in a costume around George’s office while talking like Yoda. They eventually all fall asleep in a dog pile, the little bear man wedged underneath them as they dream speedy, teeth grinding dreams.
The rest, they say, is history.
Dune: Part Two
I read the book before I went in so I could be the pedantic nerd walking out of the theater complaining about all the things they changed. A lot of them were good quality of life choices for a movie series basing itself off the patriarch of epic Sci-Fi novels:
-Chani being an autonomous revolutionary leader instead of a trad wife defending an abusive husband was absolutely necessary, especially if they plan to continue making more installments.
-Paul initially being pro-Fremen self-liberation and pushing back against the messianic prophecy propaganda made him much more sympathetic than book Paul who seemed to lean into it.
- Paul murdering his Grandfather instead of a toddler who gains God like prescience from a bad acid trip while in the womb was the right call. I think that scene would have been too absurd for this interpretation of the book.
All these major changes I applaud Villeneuve and the rest of the cast and crew for committing to. However, in their desire to speed up the timeline (I suspect for expediency sake) I think they sacrificed a lot of necessary character development:
-Paul in the book is with the Fremen for four years and has a child with Chani, making his final task of riding the worm feel incredibly impactful and earned when he truly and finally becomes one of the people… and devastating when the Harkonen’s attack and he loses his infant son. Turning to the Life Water as a last resort to gain revenge on the people that killed his Father, friends, and son and watching it slowly dehumanize him feels all the more tragic as even with it in his system he tries to fight its influence and seems to only want the power to stop what he believes he can still control.
-Jessica being a power crazed manipulator is definitely in her character. But in the book even after four years under the Life Water’s sway, she still has some of her humanity. While the tracks have been laid and her prior actions have more sinister overtones the longer we spend with the character, she has not yet become some puppet master pulling her son’s strings. Having that happen over weeks/months instead of years felt rushed.
To be fair, I haven’t read all the other books in the series. It may be likely the film’s creators did accelerate some characters arcs if they weren’t sure how many more of these they’d get to make. It’s easier to let things drag when you have an 800 page book to start, followed by half a dozen sequels, or a prestige TV series with multiple seasons to stretch things out.
Villeneuve so far has seemingly done the impossible, with even an auteur like Lynch being totally bamboozled by this book. Despite my points of concern above, I’m blown away by the world that’s been built and am cautiously ecstatic for what’s next. I’ll reserve any serious criticism until this series is completed.
Loves Lies Bleeding
“Love Lies Bleeding” is a(n) _______ "
A.) Stylistic Crime Drama
B.) Revenge Thriller
C.) Queer Romance
D.) Zany Psychedelic Trip featuring an Amazonian woman.
E.) Effortlessly and gloriously, all of the above.
Napoleon Dynamite
I missed “Napoleon Dynamite” when it was a cultural phenomenon 20 years ago. Despite not having seen it, I had a strange Deja Vu throughout. Watching a hitherto unseen film yet knowing nearly every line and story beat second hand from kids quoting it in the hallways and at my lunch table made for a surreal experience.
Now having seen it, I’m impressed that a comedy like this became a major hit. The humor, characters, set design, and even the way it’s shot pretty much goes against the grain of popular comedies of that era or anything before or since. The closest comparison is maybe “Little Miss Sunshine” or early Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket” or “Rushmore” the nearest overall in my mind). Even with those similarities, it still has something uniquely awkward and off beat about it that makes it all its own.
I’ll never be able to experience that moment in time where I could wear a “Vote for Pedro” shirt and call my friends “a Fat Tub of Lard” and everyone would know what the fuck I was talking about. But at least now I can finally say I saw it and hey, I liked it!
Docked half a star for not incorporating nearly enough Rex Kwon Do.
Q1 TV
Cheers
The Last Dance
X-Men 97’
If you were a child of the 90s, it was almost impossible to not have borne witness to the X-Men animated series. Extremely popular and readily found on basic cable every Saturday, it drew adolescent eyeballs the way superhero cartoons hadn’t since “Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends” or “Super Friends” (turns out comic adaptations titles have always been derivative). The show was action packed, drama laden, and full of bizarre twists and turns.
Of all the superhero properties, I always loved X-Men most because it felt more like a soap opera than anything. Is your favorite character acting a little odd this episode? Hypnotism, cloning, or an alien shape shifter are all legitimate reasons to explain those discrepancies in the X-verse. But they could also just be acting moody because one of their mutant powered teammates was now dating their “X” (tee-hee). Everything melodramatic and “Uncanny” was on the table.
Now that era of X-Men has been continued with “X-Men 97” (a direct sequel to the original series) it has everything a fan of that show could want. The animation and fight sequences are top notch, with the art team finding incredible new ways to display and combine the team’s range of abilities. But more importantly, it’s adapted yet again to the premise every iteration of the team has had to live by: “Heroes to a world that hates and fears them”. And when faced with that adversity the team turns within to support, comfort, and uplift each other. Some of the best moments of the show being when the characters are building their relationships rather than blowing up Sentinels. My inner child and adult self are harmoniously aligned on this in a way few “reboots” or “sequels” to stuff I adored as a kid have ever been before with the love and time spent on these characters felt in every second.
(Also, there may have been a small melt down on the internet about that image of Gambit above, with Disney being the first of the companies that owned the franchise to even slightly hint at what writers of the character have wanted to explore for over a decade but had been shut down by Marvel and Fox as being “too controversial” at the time: Could Gambit be bisexual?
A cohort of older fans nearly broke their wrists hammering out diatribes about how cool and super straight Gambit was. The rest of us ranged from this being a positive addition to the character as he’s always been hyper romantic/flirty with everyone to (in my case) pretty indifferent about the change. X-Men as a series and Gambit in particular, with hindsight, has always been pretty queer coded. You’re telling me the French speaking Cajun, who loves to bake, throws sparkly playing cards and twirls a baton to fight, all while in a skintight pink body suit and leather duster might enjoy men as well as women? Color me shocked. Like all of the LGBTQ+ representation Disney does, it’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” situation. With them paying lip service to the community without any real commitment to actually representing them. But understandably queer folk are desperate and deserving of representation. I say let them have Gambit AND now the only way he can activate his powers is if he’s kissing a really hot guy.)
the Detroit Pistons
(-are having their worst season of basketball since the franchise began in 1941)
After many hard years, the Lions are a very competitive football team. My best friend has been there for over 30 of those years. Loving them (and literally bleeding for them) when the team ran the gamut from wholly forgettable to truly atrocious. Now they’ve won their first division title since 1963, two playoff games, and were one game away from a Super Bowl appearance; they will be back with a vengeance this year. And all of a sudden, out of the woodwork, comes a horde of supposed die-hard fans that “always” supported the team. I say, root for whoever you want, but if I was my friend with a Honolulu Blue Lion on my shoulder and three decades of bittersweet memories with the team, I’d be pretty pissed at those acting like they’d always been there.
Having said that, I didn’t feel worthy of accepting the mantle of “Lions Fan” when I hadn’t really ridden or died with them. But I’ve wanted to get back into sports for a while and cheer for somebody. Then I remembered when I was a younger kid, I was a Pistons fan. I had CHAUNCEY BI-BI-BILLUPS as my Myspace profile picture. I followed the 04-05 championship team passionately. Since then, it has been a long, awful slump for the franchise with them hemorrhaging fans as the team continues to worsen year after year.
And that got me thinking: “Hey! The Pistons are still an awful team… I can get in on the ground floor!”
Now just how bad is bad? Well, their worse than worst in their division, worse than the worst record they’ve had as a franchise before this year. The Pistons are most likely ending their season 14-69, which is only 7 wins away from having the worst record in the history of the NBA. This video essay below was made when the Pistons were projected to set the record for the worst record ever as a team in all of organized sports in North America, so the numbers are a little skewed now that they just barely eeked past that benchmark. But it still does a fantastic job of giving you context for how bad a team once titled The Bad Boys (ironically, for a whole other set of reasons) really are.
I’ve always loved an underdog story though. And now I’m quickly numbing to every blow out and buzzer beater loss, while every win feels like they’ve won a championship. I’ve bought merchandise and even a decent seat back in February to see them barely lose to the Magic. I’m all in for this team despite my emotional well-being and hopes being nowhere near the levels of shatterproof that a seasoned Lions fan has. But the deepest loves are forged in the hottest fires. And I’m ready to be burned.
LETS GOOOO PISTONS!
That’s Q1 all wrapped up. I’m back to ingesting large quantities of high-octane brain magic as I prepare to send more of my #content down the pipeline. I hope the first quarter of the new year has been kinder to you than the Pistons have been to my naive heart <3
Love Always,
MATTIE B.