FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
22hr ago
I watched this in the cinema with my ex years ago. She'd seen it years earlier as a child, and after we came out of the cinema, she commented that, upon a first watch, she hadn't appreciated the significance of the scene where Jeff presents Fran with her Christmas present: a crisp $100 bill. As a child, she'd thought – how kind of him! It was only later she was like ohhhh, he's just treating her like a prostitute.
If you haven't seen it, I'd also highly recommend Wilder's earlier film Double Indemnity, which stars Fred MacMurray (the actor who plays Jeff here). It's one of my favourite movies ever, literally in my top ten. Most "thrillers" from the fifties or earlier can be quite slow and dull by modern standards, and even the better ones are quite far from "thrilling". Double Indemnity is the exception, a movie which is just as tense and nerve-wracking as the year it came out
Almost exactly two-thirds of the way through Cryptonomicon. It might well be the funniest book I've read all year, aside from Rejection. If I can read 35 pages a day I'll be finished before the new year.
Edit: said "one-third". Meant two-thirds.
FtttG
1d ago
Just sounds like you're a straight man tbh. And I've yet to be persuaded that "cis-by-default" means anything.
FtttG
1d ago
Water boarding seems like a plausible enough metal band name to me.
Intelligence is increasing
If you look at buildings from 200 years ago, the door frames are much lower, because people were much shorter back then. All of those short people passed on their genes to descendants who were much taller than they were. The genes themselves didn't change, but because their descendants grew up in a caloric- and nutrient-rich environment, they were better equipped to fulfil their maximum height potential as encoded in their genes than their ancestors were.
Conceivably the Flynn effect could be partly explicable by a similar dynamic, as modern people have a much better understanding of the importance of early childhood nutrition and so on than our ancestors did. But other than that, I'm sceptical of the idea that intelligence is increasing over time. In point of fact our society seems profoundly dysgenic in numerous ways. Fertility rates are in freefall across much of the West, and the only solution suggested by elites is to import millions of people from cultures in which intergenerational cousin marriage is the rule rather than the exception.
FtttG
1d ago
I would recommend reading Scott's and Rob Henderson's reviews of it, and if it piques your interest*, give it a try. But fair warning: it's probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read in my life.
*Which is to say, if you feel personally attacked.
FtttG
2d ago
Wonderful Christmastime I hate the Beatles, which makes this pretty straightforward. Saccharine and awful.
pedant alarm Strictly speaking this is a McCartney solo single. Obviously I agree with you, I despised this song for years before learning it was written by a man widely considered to be one of the best songwriters of the twentieth century. What the fuck kind of off-day was he having?
My most boomer take, I hate the phrase Happy Holidays.
As part of my ongoing war against the intrusion of American culture into Ireland, I recently learned to my dismay that children in primary schools are now being instructed to say "happy holidays" rather than "happy Christmas". In Dublin, the river Liffey runs through the city, with the southside stereotypically considered more posh and affluent than the comparatively impoverished northside, and whenever I venture into the southside I discover that it's been so infected by secular woke nonsense that they literally aren't celebrating any religious holiday anymore. Seriously: the Christmas lights (for everyone knows that's what they are) fall under the banner of "Winter in Dublin".
Winter in Dublin. What the fuck. Every time I see that stupid sign I want to tear it down. I'm sure if I asked whatever idiotic gang of apparatchiks responsible for the decision why they went for "Winter in Dublin" rather than "Christmas in Dublin", they would be completely unable to articulate why, just listing off a string of incomprehensible woke word salad about "inclusive" and "modern Ireland". It's got me thinking about the concept of asymmetric multiculturalism: Christians in Christian countries aren't supposed to ostentatiously celebrate their faiths, but Muslims in Christian countries can do so to their hearts' content. No Muslim in Ireland is going to be saying "happy holidays" to any of his co-religionists when Ramadan next rolls around. But to my relief, I noticed that one set of Christmas lights on the northside wishes everyone a happy Christmas, not a happy (ugh) "winter in Dublin". Working-class Dubs evidently have no time for woke nonsense of this description.
(In Dublin City Council's defense, there's also this sign reading "Nollaig Shona Duit" on the southside's Grafton St, one of Dublin's main shopping streets. "Nollaig Shona Duit" is Irish for "happy Christmas". The message is crystal clear: you can celebrate your faith, as long as you do so in a language no Muslim is likely to understand.)
FtttG
2d ago
Even as a confirmed John Lennon hater (this article might as well have been written about me), I can't find it in my heart to get too up in arms about that one. It's inoffensive background music with a predictable melody and chord progression, and it seems that, for once, John was able to persuade Yoko not to do any atonal wailing and screeching atop it. Nowhere near as irritating as any of my least favourite Christmas songs, from a compositional, lyrical or sonic standpoint.
FtttG
2d ago
Thanks for the review. It's on my bookshelf, I might give it a go in the new year.
Christmas songs thread
We're quickly approaching the end of the period of the year in which Christmas songs are an omnipresent aural nuisance, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity for us to talk about our favourite and least favourite songs in that genre. I am here defining a Christmas song as an original composition in the pop genre created for commercial reasons, and hence excluding all carols and traditional tunes.
Favourite Christmas songs
- "The Christmas Song" — Nat King Cole: An obvious choice perhaps, but it occurred to me this year that there is literally no other Christmas song I prefer. Cole may have had the single most beautiful male singing voice in the history of pop music: I found myself tearing up in the office a little bit, not because this song is sad, but simply for how remarkably rich and sonorous the timbre of his voice is. The chord progressions and instrumental arrangement still sound fresh and unexpected eighty years later, and the production is warm and intimate. It's amazing to me that this song may well have seen more airplay than all of the other entries on both lists combined (definitely if you count all of its innumerable cover versions), and yet it still doesn't feel "overexposed" to me.
- "The Power of Love" — Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Widely considered a Christmas song even though the lyrics don't refer to the holiday even indirectly, its cover artwork and music video nevertheless had a strong Nativity theme. An arrangement and vocal performance so striking and forceful that it completely overpowered the act's original camp ironic intent — listening to it, it's almost impossible to believe it's from the same album as "Relax" (also a great song in its own way).
- "Fairytale of New York" — The Pogues: This long occupied my #1 spot, which probably had more to do with a sense of misplaced nationalism than anything else. But in spite of that, I cannot deny how stirring I find the traditional arrangement, MacGowan's limitations as a vocalist are well-compensated for by the duet format with MacColl (all the more haunting now that both singers have left us), and the nostalgic-yet-venomous lyrics make it easily the most bittersweet Christmas song ever composed.
- "Driving Home for Christmas" — Chris Rea: Charming and jaunty, with a wonderfully grizzled vocal from Rea.
- "All I Want for Christmas is You" — Mariah Carey: I don't care if it's overplayed: Carey's vocal performance is a staggering accomplishment, the composition and arrangement sound timeless (it's no accident that "who originally sang AIWFCIY" is a common Google search: it does legitimately sound like a song first composed in the 60s and given a fresh arrangement by Carey in the 90s, and I mean that as a compliment), and it's aged far better than most Christmas songs (hell, most songs) from the era of its first release. Carey's retirement plan was well-earned.
Honorable mentions: "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande, "Snowman" by Sia, the only decent original Christmas songs composed in the last thirty years.
Least favourite Christmas songs
An effective punchline would just be for to me to write "1. All the other ones", but that's not in keeping with the spirit of this space, so to be more specific:
- "Merry Xmas Everybody" — Slade: This is what Hell sounds like to me. Tedious, monotonous arrangement; performances which are both boring and bored-sounding (as if the musicians can't believe they're debasing themselves by recording a Christmas song, and are just gritting their teeth and trying to get through it as quickly as possible); flat, muffled 70s production; a tiresome and not remotely catchy chorus which recurs a whopping six times, as if the band are hoping to beat you into submission through rote repetition alone. It's appropriate that this song is guaranteed to get played at every boring office Christmas party where no one really wants to be there and the cheap white wine isn't serving as an effective social lubricant, as it literally sounds like a boring office Christmas party. It occurred to me this year that I literally cannot think of any song where, if forced to choose between listening to this song and another song, I would pick "Merry Xmas Everybody": it is just that annoying. Any of the musical compositions released by Crazy Frog (who was literally designed to be annoying)? Yes. "Cotton Eye Joe"? by Rednex? Yes, in a heartbeat. Anything by Limp Bizkit or Nickelback? Easily. "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt? No question. "Zombie" by the Cranberries? Definitely. Anything by 100 gecs? No doubt. The only song which I might have to think about for a minute is "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes, and they'd probably still cinch it in the end. Seriously. Fuck this song.
- "Do They Know It's Christmas?" — Band Aid: Music criticism is a difficult discipline because it can be enormously challenging to convey in words why you find a particular melody annoying, why a synth tone gets on your nerves, what it means to say that a vocal performance sounds lifeless or that a mix sounds sterile. Faced with this obstacle, a lot of music critics retreat from music criticism and focus instead on lyrical criticism (which really has more in common with literary criticism), as it's much easier to convey in written words why you think a piece of text is badly written. It's striking how often lists of "worst pop songs ever" are really lists of perfectly adequate pop songs with bad (or "offensive") lyrics e.g. perennials like Paul Anka's "You're Having my Baby" or Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" — I don't think anyone would argue that either song is especially obnoxious from a compositional or performance standpoint. An excessive focus among critics on lyrical quality over musical quality rather misunderstands the nature of the enjoyment the average listener gets from music: "great composition with mediocre lyrics" is probably the rule rather than the exception among beloved pop songs, and lyrics have to be really bad before they'll make me not want to listen to a well-composed, well-produced song (the only example which immediately springs to mind is "Hardly Getting Over It" by Hüsker Dü, which literally would have been better as an instrumental); conversely, I don't care how good your lyrics are if the composition sucks and the performances are annoying (i.e. Bob Dylan and 90% of post-punk music sucks). This is a very lengthy preamble to convey that, from a musical, compositional standpoint, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is actually fine: Phil Collins's drumming is solid, the synth tones haven't aged half as poorly as many from that era, the melody is legitimately catchy, and the dozen or more vocalists sound like they're giving it their all. But the lyrics are so obnoxious, smarmy and self-important that it's all for naught. There won't be snow in Ireland this Christmastime either — where's our charity single? I understand that Bob Geldof (who wrote the song alongside omnipresent 80s journeyman Midge Ure) rather regrets the song, although for my part I would still say it's one of the better-composed songs in his back catalogue, and doesn't sound half as dated or irritating as "Rat Trap" or "I Don't Like Mondays". But more than just the obnoxious lyrics, when listening to this song I can't help but think it might be indirectly responsible for the ensuing decades of pompous grandstanding from pop, rock and punk musicians. Every time a punk band has paused in between songs so the singer can deliver an impassioned but clumsy ten-minute speech about how Orang Man Bad, Save Teh Trees and Muh Free Palestine, they're channelling the holier-than-thou spirit of Band Aid, if unwittingly (even if they would profess to despise the song for its white saviour qualities).
- "Christmas Tree Farm" — Taylor Swift: This song was unavoidable on the radio last year, and I didn't know who it was by but found it enormously irritating. This year I Shazam'd it, discovered that it's by Swift and thought — well, that checks out. I have to admit, the Cult of Swift is one of the things I find most baffling and alienating about the modern era. I'll hear people gush about how memorable and timeless her songs are, and then I listen to them and they sound functionally indistinguishable from those of any other teenybopper (by popular consensus her artistic peak was "All Too Well", and to me that sounds like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that they left off the album for not meeting their rigorous quality control standards). I'll hear people talk about how her lyrics make her the spokesperson for an entire generation of Western women (hell, Western people) — and then I read them and they're just spiteful put-downs towards her contemporaries or an embarrassing list of groan-worthy penis puns. Far from "growing with her audience", Swift now seems even more spoiled and adolescent than she did when she actually was an adolescent. Who knew the weird horsey girl and the toothy-head giving (but I repeat myself) demographics wielded such power and influence?
- Anything by Michael Bublé: Mickey Bubbles: "As a self-confessed Christmas prostitute, I would like to release a Christmas song." Producer: "Okay cool, let's come up with a chord progression and a vocal melody." Bubbles: "No, I don't want to write a Christmas song — that would take too much effort. I just want to record a cover and release it." Producer: "Okay, why don't we do a straight cover of $ChristmasSong? After all, it has such a memorable melody and hook that it's been beloved by generations of Westerners. A cover version is sure to do numbers." Bubbles: "Awesome. But I want to put my own spin on it, so I'm going to alter the phrasing and introduce loads of completely unnecessary syncopation and flourishes until the original melody is barely recognisable." Producer: "... okay, I see where you're coming from. But the entire reason people liked the original is because of its memorable and instantly recognisable melody." Bubbles: "Yeah." Producer: "... and so if you release a cover that has the same lyrics as the original but the melody and phrasing are altered beyond recognition, people won't like it as much. In fact, they'll probably find it really annoying and distracting." Bubbles: "Yeah." Producer: "... and that would be bad." Bubbles: "Yeah."
- "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" — Bruce Springsteen: I needed something to round off the list, and it was either this or "A Spaceman Came Travelling" by Chris de Burgh: that one seems to have fallen out of favour quite a bit and I can only recall hearing it twice this Christmas, whereas I heard "The Boss"'s (ugh) rendition of this classic several times a week since mid-November. Aside from Clarence Clemons's lively saxophone break, this isn't a patch on the Jackson Five version, and Springsteen's pre-song ad-libs to the audience and his backing band are impossibly grating and forced. The Cult of Springsteen isn't as hard to understand as the Cult of Dylan (unlike Bob Dylan, Springsteen can carry a tune, and I can't argue with the sheer majesty of "Born to Run"), but the more of his music I'm exposed to the more overrated I find him*, and many of his affectations seem just as contrived as those of, say, Bono. Even seeing him perform live didn't move the needle for me much (granted that seeing him perform when he's in his seventies is going to be a very different experience to seeing him perform as a younger man). Maybe I should listen to Nebraska from start to finish and it'll click for me.
Dishonorable mentions: "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" by Patsy & Elmo, "Stay Another Day" by East 17, "Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry, "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" by Gayla Peevey.
*I understand why he objects to "Born in the USA" being played at Republican rallies by politicians who seem to have missed the point of the song; on the other hand, perhaps he should be grateful that the song is played in public at all because it fucking sucks, and the less said about "Dancing in the Dark" the better.
FtttG
2d ago
The Children of Men was on my to-read list for this year, but in the end I deliberately decided not to read it. What did you make of it? How did it compare to the film adaptation (assuming you've seen it)?
FtttG
3d ago
I read The Road and was sobbing literally for hours when I got to the end. That's what you ought to expect.
FtttG
4d ago
Two Yankees pitchers traded families in the 70s.
Could you elaborate on this?
FtttG
4d ago
A passage from Cryptonomicon which had me laughing out loud on the train this morning (no spoilers):
Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte's only actual employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a totally alienated, abstracted office in the Springboard Capital corporate incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that nascent high-tech companies must not hire pudgy fifty-year-old support staff, the way big established companies do. They must hire topologically enhanced twenty-year-olds with names that sound like new models of cars. Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled ᴄᴀᴜᴄᴀsɪᴀɴ, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones — not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked "other" and then wrote in ᴛʀᴀɴs-ᴇᴛʜɴɪᴄ. In fact, Kia is trans- just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans- she is post-.
This book came out in 1999. Intellectually, I was aware that what we call wokeness was previously ascendant in the nineties, at which time it was called "political correctness". Still though — if you didn't know better, you would assume that the passage above had been published in the last ten years.
FtttG
4d ago
I can't imagine even the most gung-ho Americans would want to be publicly associated with a band called something like "Waterboarding".
The name "Kneecap" specifically refers to the IRA torturing suspected informants. I think this scans rather differently to torture committed by agents of the state, which is the first thing people think of when they hear "waterboarding". A lot of Irish people still carry a residual fondness for the IRA (hell, one of our most popular political parties is literally the parliamentary wing of the IRA). I agree that American politicians would probably not want to be publicly affiliated with a band who named themselves after a torture technique used by agents of the state. But there are plenty of Democratic politicians who are eager to sing the praises of hip-hop musicians, many of which describe murdering e.g. their rival drug dealers in their lyrics.
FtttG
4d ago
A few weeks ago I spoke about Ireland's new President, the outspoken leftist Catherine Connolly. So far, her presidency is going about as expected:
I didn't think it was possible to be so annoyed by a single sentence.
*The President's residence in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
**A hip-hop band from Northern Ireland who were recently facing charges in the UK of incitement to violence and offering support to proscribed organisations, owing to their conduct at various gigs in which they urged attendees to "murder [their] local MP", chanting "Up Hamas" and leading attendees in chants of "Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!"
FtttG
7d ago
The edition of The Outsiders I read was a mere 216 pages, you could comfortably read it in a few hours if you were so inclined.
FtttG
8d ago
A Confederacy of Dunces: Absolutely the funniest thing I've ever read
I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one, I really did not understand the hype. Most of the book I just felt sorry for this fucking loser's poor mother.
FtttG
8d ago
Less Than Zero by Ellis
I'm not sure if he ever surpassed the debut. Maybe his sophomore novel, The Rules of Attraction. Less Than Zero might be the only book of his which isn't way too long.
It was probably my third favorite fiction book this year, as evidenced by the fact I read the 600-page tome in 2 days.
Glad I wasn't the only one here who loved it.
Your points about the relative privacy of the modern era are well-founded. On the other hand, in the fifties, if you checked into a hotel under an assumed name to bed your mistress and your wife's best friend spotted you in the lobby, it'd be her word against yours. If it happened today, she'd take a HD photo of you.
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