One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 3)

Rounding out my list of my favorite things from season one of Poker Face

Previously on Spectre Collie… I couldn’t wait until I finished the season to mention more of my favorite things from each episode. Now I can finally round out the list with the last two episodes of season one.

I’d been avoiding reading anything about the series, so that every aspect of it would come as a surprise, but I’ve seen that a second season has already been ordered by Peacock, so I’ve got something to look forward to. It’s good knowing that Rian Johnson has so much cachet (and so does Natasha Lyonne) that I can be pretty confident that he’ll end the series on his own terms, instead of letting it drag on indefinitely.

Lots of unmarked spoilers, so please don’t read until you’ve finished season one!

Continue reading “One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 3)”

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Undercover

Two tangentially-related covers that I like better than the originals

Look, I get why people like “These Days” by Nico. It’s a lovely song, and her delivery brings an unmistakable quality of earnest regret and sadness to it. But it’s just not for me.

That’s why I’m glad that St Vincent did a cover of it. It is, undoubtedly, St Vincent doing Nico doing Jackson Browne, but I think the polish is what makes me like it — all of the beauty of the song, if not quite the same emotional weight.

The one time I saw St Vincent in concert, she performed “These Days,” but it didn’t land like she’d probably hoped since the crowd in San Francisco wouldn’t shut up and pay attention.

That crowd probably would’ve had a better time at a Me First and the Gimme Gimmes show, since they’re at the other end of the spectrum. A huge part of their whole schtick is taking heartfelt, emotional songs and making them raucous and fun. My favorite is “Danny’s Song.”

I really appreciate that video, filmed at The Mint, because it reminds me how much I don’t miss San Francisco.

One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 2)

Picking out more of my favorite parts from Poker Face season one

Previously on Spectre Collie… I’ve been so impressed by Poker Face that I already wanted to start calling out my favorite aspects of it even though we were only halfway through the season.

We’ve still got two episodes left, but at the rate we’re going, it’ll be a while before we can finish the season, and I’m impatient. So here are some more favorites from episodes 6-8 of a series that continues to be excellent.

Lots of spoilers throughout, so avoid reading this until you’ve watched up until episode 8.

Continue reading “One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 2)”

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Houses by the Sea

Two tangentially-related songs about how much better life is when you’ve got beachfront property

This week’s two-fer is in honor of the Dirty Projectors concert I went to over the weekend.

One lovely and calming song from 5 EPs is “On the Breeze”, a perfect melody that the band kind of treats as a sketch, giving it just enough time to vibe with before fading into memory. The problem with a band this talented is that I listen to their other songs on repeat, leaving wonderful bits like this neglected.

Something I definitely haven’t neglected is The Shepherd’s Dog by Iron & Wine. It’s one of my all-time favorite albums, and listening to it feels a little like slipping in and out of a dream that’s haunting but still relaxing somehow. That might be because I most often listen to it while I’m on a plane, nodding off while a bearded man whisper-sings into my ear. And also listening to The Shepherd’s Dog.

It’s hard to pick my favorite song from the album, because it’s near perfect. But one of my favorites is “House By The Sea,” which is fortunate, because it’s thematically consistent.

Song of the Earth

Seeing Dirty Projectors with the LA Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

I’ve got a list of must-see attractions in Los Angeles, and I’ve been slowly ticking them off since we moved. I should be able to see everything on the list at some point within the next 30 years or so.1For contrast: I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 25 years, and I’m a fan of Vertigo, but I still to this day have never visited the Legion of Honor. One of those was seeing the LA Philharmonic perform at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. So I was happily surprised last year to see that Dirty Projectors, one of my “new”2New in that I first discovered them within the last few years favorite bands, would be doing a performance with the orchestra in March.

The performance was the US debut of Song of the Earth, which was described as “…a song cycle for orchestra and voices written by Dirty Projectors leader David Longstreth. A kaleidoscopic work that takes inspiration from Gustav Mahler’s 1908 piece Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth) as much as Brian Wilson’s pocket symphonies, Song of the Earth explores the cyclical character of life and death, nature, and the transience of all things.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I definitely didn’t expect to love all of it. While there are a dozen or so songs by Dirty Projectors that I absolutely love, I have to admit that I rarely listen through the entire album, and there are still dozens of songs that I have yet to even hear. My quick-and-shallow take on David Longstreth — with the obvious acknowledgement that the band isn’t a solo act, and several of their songs are collaborations — is that he’s “an easily-bored genius;” he’s entirely capable of writing catchy and melodic alt-rock or alt-pop with a memorable hook, but he has little interest in leaving it at that. Most of their songs have some weird twist to them, like sudden changes in rhythm, voices that shift from harmony to discord and back, overlapping time signatures, or layers of percussion or unexpected sound effects. A blurb on Apple Music accurately described it as “dense.” I expected that even if I didn’t love all of it, it would at the very least be interesting.

Continue reading “Song of the Earth”
  • 1
    For contrast: I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 25 years, and I’m a fan of Vertigo, but I still to this day have never visited the Legion of Honor.
  • 2
    New in that I first discovered them within the last few years

Not That Many Unhappy Returns?

Reporting on whether people online have been returning their headsets says more about the state of tech journalism than anything else

Last week, The Verge and the shambling leftovers of Gizmodo were both eagerly trying to make a news story about the huge wave of unsatisfied customers returning their Vision Pro headsets to Apple stores. It was interesting to watch as it took over the corners of social media that I still follow: apparently, the feverish mass hysteria leading up to release had finally broken, and people everywhere were furious to discover that the emperor had no clothes. It’s just a VR headset. It seems magical… until it doesn’t. Damn!

As far as I could tell, the source for these stories were a couple of posts on Reddit and Twitter, and a smattering of “Apple fans” that weren’t entirely unbiased, and not necessarily the representative sample they’d have you believe. Last week, it was made to sound as if there were an epidemic of returns. This week, I’m hearing that the return rate is actually estimated to be less than 1%, which is kind of low for computing devices.

I will tell you that I am an “Apple fan” who is most definitely biased, but I still couldn’t tell you which version is correct, or even if it does or should matter to anyone outside of Apple. All it tells me is stuff I already know:

  1. VR headsets aren’t for everybody, and a lot of people will find them uncomfortable.
  2. There is not yet a use case for the Vision Pro that makes it a must-have outside of die-hard early adopters and people developing software for it.
  3. A lot of people have more credit cards than they have patience, and they wanted a take-home demo instead of the 30-minute in-store one.

Even though I’m both literally and figuratively invested in Apple, and I am the owner of an infrequently-used Vision Pro, I don’t feel like I need to go out of my way to defend it. Even die-hards like me will acknowledge that it’s not for everyone, and it will need some significant hardware revisions to get traction outside of the die-hards.

So what bugs me isn’t that people are talking trash about my shiny new toy. It’s that if I, a layperson, know enough to have a realistic idea of this device’s appeal, how come the writers and editors of tech blogs don’t?

I’ve repeatedly made fun of The Verge‘s review of the Vision Pro, but because it’s largely irrelevant to me, not because it’s inaccurate.1Earlier I did say that it was misleading, if not outright wrong, to say you can’t share your content in the headset with other people, since you can cast it over AirPlay to a TV or iOS device. But the spirit of the criticism is valid. It is an almost entirely personal and private headset. And it seriously needs to have support for multiple accounts and not just its insufficient guest mode as currently implemented. Screaming “BIAS!!!” whenever I read a review I don’t agree with is something I’ll leave for trolls on YouTube and comments sections. But I do get concerned when it seems like they’re working hard to make something a story when there’s no real story there.

I won’t claim to be entirely high-minded about it, since it’s mostly because I’m a fan of gadgets and devices and computers finally being able to do the things I imagined they’d someday be able to do when I was a teenager. And since Yahoo seems to be hell-bent on destroying Engadget, there’s not a lot of reputable, sufficiently-funded options out there.

But I think it’s worth at least mentioning that the companies that tech sites are covering are the companies that are gaining increasingly outsized influence on everything. There needs to be some real journalistic rigor happening, beyond just product reviews and attempts to turn Reddit threads into news stories.

For instance: I still don’t understand how the hype around Elon Musk every happened at all, much less was allowed to grow to the extremes it did. I’ve seen a lot of comments to the effect that he was misleadingly insightful until he suddenly went batshit insane — the phenomena of those bumper stickers on Teslas that say “we bought this car before we knew he was an asshole” — but I’m not buying it. Every time the guy opens his mouth, a flood of red flags comes pouring out. There were plenty of people writing for papers and blogs who came into frequent contact with him, years and years before he bought a social media site to prove to the world what an asshole he is. So why were they perpetuating the “real life Tony Stark” nonsense instead of calling him out?

Anyway, as I said: I’m not actually trying to draw a real connection between anecdotal stories being turned into “news,” and the rise of our corporate-ravaged cyber dystopia. I’m just saying that the audience for tech journalism is much wider and more relevant than it was even ten years ago, and we should keep that in mind.

In my opinion, a much better story than “Are People Returning Their $3500 First-Generation VR Headsets?!” is “Is Apple Committed to the Vision Pro as a Long-Term Computing Platform?” Granted, that’s a little harder to glean from Reddit posts and a few tweets, but it seems to me to be far more relevant. You’ve got a lot of people who spend a lot of time seeing every new product that comes out, dealing with companies a lot both directly and indirectly, and overall spending a lot more time immersed in consumer technology more than I’d be able to.2Or would ever want to.

It seems like they’re in a unique position to see trends, make insightful observations about how things fit into company’s overall strategies, and make predictions about where the technology might be headed. That requires making observations that go deeper than companies’ PR, not just in the vacuous gainsay “Apple doesn’t want me to call this a VR headset, but that’s what this is and you can’t stop me!!!” version of “keepin’ it real,” but in having a frame of reference that goes beyond the past six months and actually trying to put new developments into the proper context. That kind of coverage seems a lot more useful than filming a video wearing it on the subway or while cooking or skiing. I’d rather get a clear-eyed and realistic assessment — even if it’s one that I don’t agree with — of what it means for computing in its current state and how it might evolve, than a warning that it might mess up my hair.

  • 1
    Earlier I did say that it was misleading, if not outright wrong, to say you can’t share your content in the headset with other people, since you can cast it over AirPlay to a TV or iOS device. But the spirit of the criticism is valid. It is an almost entirely personal and private headset. And it seriously needs to have support for multiple accounts and not just its insufficient guest mode as currently implemented.
  • 2
    Or would ever want to.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Vampire Weeknd

Two tangentially-related tunes to prove that I do sometimes listen to music made within the last decade

When I was younger, I imagined that at some point in my 40s or 50s, a switch would flip, and I’d suddenly find myself too old to listen to any new music. I’d turn into a cartoonish version of the elderly, complaining about all the profanity and the screeching and the caterwauling and how the youths didn’t appreciate the good, mellow, old-fashioned music I listened to, like the Pixies.

Turns out my prediction was half right. As I’ve settled into middle age, I do almost always retreat to the safety of my turn-of-the-millennium college radio music. But the reason isn’t that contemporary stuff is too intense for me, but that it’s so boring. There’s so rarely any hook to it; it feels like instead of getting more daring or experimental, it’s mostly just over-produced and predictable.

At our house in Oakland, there were frequently some teenagers who’d park their car nearby and blast their music while they were doing whatever teenagers do — probably involving drugs and premarital sex! — and I was often right on the verge of being the stereotypical geriatric white man storming out of the house, demanding that they turn it down. But I’d be yelling, “Turn that racket down! It’s too vacuous!” I’m in the enviable position of having virtually every new song available to me on demand whenever I want, and I’m most often saying, “Nah, I’m good.”

But I do often make an effort! Sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I think Olivia Rodrigo is the real deal, for instance. It’s very much pop music, accessible enough for superstardom and Apple tie-ins. But on top of the hook required for a pop hit, there’s such a great combination of influences and styles that it all feels really interesting.

My favorite by far is “Vampire.” The album version starts out as a breathy piano ballad, which could quickly turn into the kind of maudlin showcase for a pop star trying to show off their range as a Real Musician. But then it starts to throw in all kinds of stuff that give it depth, not just gloss. The end result feels like an extremely media-savvy artist who knows how to navigate an industry in the 2020s and get 93 million views on YouTube, but never at the expense of making it feel anything less than sincere. (And as it turns out, the stripped down piano ballad version is pretty good, too).

The Weeknd is more towards the other end of the scale for me. Most of his stuff is inoffensive, but there’s rarely any hook that I can get into. Apart from “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Blinding Lights,” I can’t really tell his songs apart from each other, and those I recognize only because they were played constantly.

But the other thing I didn’t predict back in my teens and twenties was what would be required to be a superstar in the 21st century. It can’t be just about the music; it has to be a full-on media blitz. And while there’s not a lot for me in The Weeknd’s music, I respect the hell out of what he does with the overall presentation.

Until Universal Hollywood Horror Nights made a house themed to his music, I had no idea that “Blinding Lights” was part of a whole horror-themed concept album, with a series of interconnected videos about fame, image, self-image, and the evils of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Part of that is the video for “Too Late,” which has a pair of plastic surgery-obsessed women finding The Weeknd’s decapitated head in the middle of the road and then taking it home to have sex with it. (And not to tell them their business, but completely unnecessarily murdering a stripper to attach to Mr Weeknd’s head. Even though the things they were doing didn’t even require him to have a body. So wasteful).

The music doesn’t really grab me, but that video was one of the few things in modern pop music that was genuinely able to shock middle-aged me. Are they even allowed to show that kind of thing?!

One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 1)

Poker Face is so clever that every episode has at least one thing I love

It’s probably inaccurate to say that I’ve been “surprised” by Poker Face, since I knew I was predisposed to love it based on Rian Johnson’s involvement alone. But I have been a little surprised by how much it’s been surpassing my expectations.

I’ve got to acknowledge that I haven’t seen that much of Columbo, and I don’t remember that much about the episodes that I have seen, apart from the most basic premise (you know the murderer(s) from the start) and Peter Falk’s performance. But a huge part of what makes Poker Face feel so novel and so clever is how it’s all about manipulating the audience’s expectations and sympathies, and how it is constantly re-contextualizing what you’ve seen so far. It seems like they took the stuff I loved about Glass Onion and then spent an entire season’s worth of television exploring all the different ways you could change up or expand on the concepts.

For the first time in a very long time, I’ve been loving a series so much that I desperately wish I could write scripts for it. Are spec scripts still a thing? Do I have to resort to fan fiction?

I’ve already written about the first episode, twice, but I’ll try to keep things more focused this time. And this will only be the first part, because we’ve still only seen the first five episodes at this point. Lots of spoilers throughout; assume that you shouldn’t read any of these until you’ve watched episodes 1-5.

Continue reading “One Thing I Love About Every Episode of Poker Face (part 1)”

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Rock and Roll Hall of Presidents

Two tangentially-related tunes for Presidents Day

Look: there are a lot of Tuesdays in a year. They can’t all be winners.

This Monday was Presidents Day in the United States, a great reminder to Americans of how it’s an office of importance that should theoretically still be respectable. And how the whole idea of “anyone could grow up to be President of the United States” is supposed to be wholesome and aspirational, not an ominous warning of a terrible design flaw.

First this week is “Ana Ng” from the They Might Be Giants album Lincoln. It’s always unsettling watching old TMBG videos, because 1988 John Flansburgh looks eerily like 1988 me. (Or maybe vice versa).

I can’t choose a favorite song off of Lincoln, but it’s probably a toss-up between “Ana Ng” and “Mr. Me.” An edited version of the latter was used as the closing theme music for an animated cartoon block on a local station in Atlanta, so I kind of just assumed it came from somewhere in Cartoonland. It was a surprise to hear it years later, popping up out of nowhere on a CD I’d bought after getting really into Flood. But it tracks, seeing as how they’ve always been at least a little bit cartoon-adjacent, making weird music for nerds and the children of nerds.

Here’s a fun fact: did you know that Martha Wash’s last name is actually Wash? I always assumed she’d shortened it from “Washington,” but no. So that’s why you’re saved from having “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” as the second song this week.

Instead, it’s “Concrete and Clay,” my favorite song from the soundtrack to Rushmore. Consider it an upgrade; that’s like Washington and three whole other presidents. It’s nice to remember how impressive Rushmore was when it first came out; it seemed to come out of nowhere, full of self-confidence and a surprising amount of sincerity. Now I’m getting nostalgic for the late 1990s.

The Uncanny Z-Axis

Furthering the case for comics in 3D

Last week I saw a post from Ron Brinkmann’s Digital Composting blog about viewing comic books on the Vision Pro. Using the iPad version of Apple’s Books app1Which I admit I kind of forgot existed, he experimented with both The Sandman, spreading multiple pages into a panorama across his space; and an older issue of Detective Comics, which could be displayed like a museum piece, letting him get close enough to see the half-tone printing in full detail.

Static pages wouldn’t require any effort from comics publishers or artists. It’d give you the opportunity to turn a comic into a kind of museum exhibition, walking around the layouts and seeing them unbound by the restrictions of a page or a screen. It’s basically a no-brainer.

And because it’s a straightforward idea with no real downsides, I filed it away as “would be nice, but probably will never happen.” Or gain enough traction for anyone to pay attention to it, at least. The Marvel Unlimited app doesn’t show up as a compatible iPad app on the Vision Pro, for instance. And ever since Amazon acquired Comixology, it’s been nothing but repeated demonstrations of how we can’t have nice things.

So if it were just publishers and comics creators saying, “Okay, sure, you can look at PDFs on your headset. Knock yourselves out, nerds,” I’d be inclined to think of it just as the most niche of niche applications. But the more I think about what could happen if publishers and creators made a real effort to adapt comics to 3D, the more I think it could be one of those rare cases where minimal investment results in a big win for everyone.

Continue reading “The Uncanny Z-Axis”
  • 1
    Which I admit I kind of forgot existed

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: King Cake

Two tangentially-related tunes to let the good times roll

(King Cake photo by Caitlin Bensel for Southern Living)

Today is Fat Tuesday! As a protestant who’s to this day never once visited New Orleans, I can’t claim to be an expert, but I have got to respect any holiday that so prominently features religious desserts.

In honor of that, here’s a song by Elvis Presley, who’s The King to most, but never meant shit to me except as a karaoke song. I have to say I can do a pretty good rendition of “(You’re the) Devil In Disguise”. (That’s a painfully on-the-nose animated video that’s “official” or whatever, but of course the best animated video to that song is in Lilo and Stitch).

Tangentially related: I was a big fan of the band Cake back in the late 1990s, which is when it was most appropriate to be a big fan of the band Cake. I let my fandom lapse since then, but back when they hit it big with “The Distance,” I felt squarely in their target audience of hipsters and aspiring hipsters. I’ve never had a bucket hat, and I’ve only sporadically had a goatee, but I still thought each record was like finding a special surprise.

One Hundred Twenty-Eight Gigabytes of Solitude

I TOLD you not to bother me while I’m jacked into the Matrix! (Thoughts about isolation and VR headsets)

As a chronicler of the hottest tech trends and their impact on our society, I have to warn you that Apple has released a device that threatens to rip apart our social fabric as we know it, forcing humans to keep their eyes locked on screens instead of engaging in meaningful contact. They did this in 2007, and it was called the iPhone.

I was initially pleased to see that reaction to Apple’s Vision Pro wasn’t just concentrating on technical specs and feature comparisons, and instead seemed to have more high-minded thoughts about the social impact of technology, the future of computing platforms, etc.

But I’d been optimistically assuming that those conversations would be based on a realistic look at the technology we have today, and how we use it. Not on some late-1990s screenwriter’s notion of jacking into cyberspace.

I’m not objecting to the notion that technology is isolating. I just object to the claim that the problem is somehow unique to a head-mounted display, or that it’s significantly more ominous than what we’ve got now, or what we’ve had forever. It’s a social problem, not (strictly) a technology one.

Continue reading “One Hundred Twenty-Eight Gigabytes of Solitude”