Alphabetology Vol.14
Posted: 06 May 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
Ever since Brittany Spears 1st marriage that lasted 55 hours, nothing has been the same.
- Airplaneguy_DC, [Twitter thread about Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing]
Nothing has been the same!
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Art
Local Artists 2
Movies
A Colt is My Passport (1967)
Civil Engineering
In Search of Lost Scaffolding
Music
* The Killers
Spoon
Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard
The Regrets (90s post-hardcore band)
* Polvo
Weatherday
Art
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Local Artists 2
I wrote about a handful of artists I met through La Bodega Gallery a few weeks ago, here is a follow up of more local artists who I have had really fruitful discussions about our artwork with and been inspired by.
Tess Michalik creates beautiful paintings that are sometimes flowers, sometimes patterns. Her work is beautiful and captivating, blurring the line between florals and patterns with bold colors and thick textures, and has been one of the biggest inspirations on my own art.
Up next is Weihui Lu, an artist I met at an art crit at Trestle Gallery. She is one of the most thoughtful artists I know, and speaking with her and hearing her walk through her approach to art, her thought process, and the intention of her works has pushed me to try to be more coherent with my own artistic intentions. It is difficult to tread the line between overly-literal and incomprehensible when you create work this sincere, and I think she treads it beautifully. And the work is abstract! Truly an achievement.
This sample of work is not a great representation because a chunk of her work is very colorful, I just have a personal preference for the more monotone pieces.
And to round off this week’s artists we have Amelia Galgon, another artist I met at Trestle Gallery, with whom I bonded over our both being figurative painters. There aren’t as many as you’d think! Her work explores vulnerability and identity in an honest way that I think is very brave and difficult. Also, her draftsmanship is incredible — she doesn’t have any drawings on her website, so I had to pull one down from instagram, but her contour drawings are unbelievably good.
Movies
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A Colt Is My Passport (1967)
Simultaneously a western and a gangster movie, set in Japan, you get exactly what you signed up for. The opening shot is really good and the final scene is outstanding. Joe Shishido [1] plays an assassin who takes a job for a crime family to take out a different crime boss, which he does very efficiently at the start of the movie. We spend most of the movie watching him and his assistant try to make it out of Japan to hide from the consequences of the murder and the machinations that go into that. A Colt Is My Passport has some of my favorite action choreography I’ve seen in a movie, it looks fantastic, but it is also completely incongruous to the point that some parts that seem unintentionally comical in an otherwise somber and serious movie.
It’s a good movie to just throw on, and does a really outstanding job turning a Japanese crime movie into a western, but it seems like it (pardon the tired phrase) values style over substance. The twists and turns are great, it’s really predictable but engaging, it almost watches like a campy superhero movie. Within the first five minutes a mechanic asks Shishido’s partner “I understand souping up the engine, but why a second brake”? And we get our answer fifteen minutes later when it gets our heroes out of a sticky situation.
Unfortunately, anything you start thinking about falls apart instantly. A B-plot is introduced surrounding a waitress (a damsel in distress) who is stuck working at the hotel they stay at. Our hero arrives like a ray of light, except they don’t really talk at all, and he doesn’t really do anything to save her, she does the work herself. Her main antagonist just vanishes and never bothers her again immediately after his introduction, her entire presence in the movie is kind of bizarre and forced. The main driving force behind the movie is something like there being no honor among thieves, but the ending sequence flies in the face of that and is predicated on gangsters respecting our honorable assassin’s requests. A film full of half-baked ideas, partially executed.
It’s a fun movie to watch but is really a mishmash of a whole bunch of different inspirations and cool bits — it (surprisingly) works, and is very cool. Just don’t think about it too much, and enjoy. The shootout at the end is truly a marvel to behold.
Civil Engineering
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In Search of Lost Scaffolding
There’s too much of it! [2] Some new scaffolding went up in my neighborhood recently and I have had enough. A diagram of where I live and the coffee shop I like to go to:
With the main issue being that I’m not in the habit of walking the “made in the shade” route. And I suspect that if I do start taking that path, someone will rat me out to Bill de Blasio directly through a telephone hotline, and scaffolding will promptly be put up on my one remaining scaffolding-free route.
It is only people like me who have to face these kinds of horrors who truly understand what Proust means when he writes about the differences between Swann’s way and the Guermantes way. Perhaps I, too, will one day bite into a madeleine cookie and remember, in detail, the agony and difficulty of picking a direction to walk.
Music
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* The Killers - Hot Fuss (2004, Indie Rock/Post-Punk)
I listened to this album a bunch in high school when I was first “getting into music” and it sounds like a fond memory. “Mr. Brightside” is obviously an all-timer song [3], but they’re all great songs, and they’re very of the post-punk revival era, if that’s something you are nostalgic for.
Spoon - Ga ga ga ga ga (2007, Indie Rock/Post-Punk)
Gax5 (what a cool way to shorten this album name) is another album I listened to at the same time in my life as Hot Fuss, which I don’t feel as fondly about on re-listen. It doesn’t hit the same.
Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard - Yn Ol I Annwn (2019, Doom Metal)
Incredible band name, the music is a little slow, a little TOO cosmic.
The Regrets - New Directions: Results Beat Boasts (1996, Post-hardcore/Experimental)
This is cool, I really like experimental music that people record in their garage or whatever. I like how sincere and in-the-moment it sounds. The acoustic tracks on this are great.
* Polvo - Exploded Drawing (1996, Math rock/Noise rock)
A favorite album of mine — “Feather of Forgiveness” and “When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams” are fantastic songs, the album works really well. I think a lot of math rock gets kind of boring and having the noise-y slant to it takes it really far.
Weatherday - Come In (2019, Emo/Noise Pop)
Yes!!!!! This is it. This is the future. Hyperpop/emo. I am super into this genre, I think it rules: it has guitars, it sounds fresh, it’s really experimental and raw sounding. Not since 2001’s The Glow pt. 2 have drums sounded this distorted. Not until a few years ago has anyone thought to do this again, and just max out every single sound. The only issue is the experimental music in these areas is all over the place with hits and misses, this album included, but there are a ton of really beautiful moments.
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[1] Joe Shishido’s cheeks look outrageous in this movie. I looked it up afterwards and he very famously got cheek implants as an up-and-coming actor to set himself apart, and it worked and landed him a bunch of roles. Incredible.
[2] There’s an excellent episode of the HBO show “How to With John Wilson” about scaffolding. Check it out, it’s a really good show.
[3] One of my favorite bits of trivia is that people in the U.K. love “Mr. Brightside” more than anyone else on earth. At the time of writing it holds their record for being on the charts (~5 years cumulatively, [link]), which is incredible to me because it’s been on and off since 2007. 14 years of “Mr. Brightside.”
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That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, have a great day.