Chuck

Hat Speech

When you get maybe a little TOO into a piece of campaign merchandise and what it means for America

Back when Kamala Harris’s campaign took off, she quickly secured the Democratic nomination, and then announced Tim Walz as her running mate, I got swept up in the moment. I quickly blew through my “campaign donation money” budget and even bought a couple of pieces of campaign merch.

One of those is the camouflage hat, which was quickly sold out and was immediately called “iconic” by the campaign. And sure, that’s a little too over-enthusiastic, but not by that much, surprisingly. It’s a pretty great piece of merchandise because it’s got layers of significance to it.

Most obvious is that it was introduced to welcome Walz to the campaign, since he’s apparently an avid hunter. It’s intended to underscore that contrast between Walz as being from the rural heartland, Harris from the coastal urban areas, coming together with a shared vision of America. And it’s pointedly taking back that rural heartland imagery from the Republicans.

For my entire lifetime, the Republicans have somehow managed to push tax cuts for the wealthy and anti-consumer deregulation, all while painting themselves as the America-loving populist party. It’s been a bizarro world for decades, but it’s gotten especially ludicrous as we’ve seen these guys who’ve clearly never been to a fast food restaurant before try to pass themselves off as Champions of the Common Man. It’s fitting that they’ve ended up with Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan as mascots, because they both made fortunes selling a cartoonishly trashy version of America.

And the Democrats have just shrugged and said “let them have it.” What’s also been true my entire lifetime is that the most visible people in the Democratic party have acted like there’s nothing more cringe than being “folksy.” I remember Clinton being sold to us on the idea that he was the anti-Jimmy Carter; southern but with no trace of Hee Haw, cool enough to go on Arsenio Hall’s show with his saxophone, and highbrow enough to fit in with the liberal elite.

One of the things I love about the Harris-Walz campaign is that it’s often felt like a rejection not just of the modern GOP, but of the weird, elitist disappointment that the Democratic party has become. And the camo hat is a symbol of that, too: I would bet you just about anything that Schumer and Pelosi were more comfortable appropriating West African clothing than they would be wearing anything that had a whiff of Wal-Mart about it.

So the hat just underscores the whole idea of the Harris campaign as being a big tent — they’ve stressed that everybody is welcome in their version of the Democratic party: not just rural types and city types, not just all races, but anybody who wants sane politics in the United States. I could tell how clearly that message was coming through by how angry it was making leftists on social media any time a Republican was given the stage at the DNC.¹

So getting a camouflage hat was me being a poseur, but I felt like it was in the spirit of this campaign being a dramatic reboot. Anyone who actually knows me is well aware that not only am I not a hunter or fisher, I don’t even like being outdoors that much. So I figured that a camo hat would be for me like wearing drag. Practical clothes turned into a costume for a pasty-white computer boy. Maybe the beard helps me get away with it? Whatever the case, I figured it would be important as a middle finger to the GOP and to anyone who would reduce all of us to cartoonishly broad stereotypes.

But I have to say that actually putting it on felt more momentous than I’d expected. If I were in an anime, or an early-80s Amblin movie, there would’ve been blue sparks of electricity coming off of the hat. I never expected that a performative show of anti-snobbery would have me flashing back to being a kid. Like I said, I’ve never had any interest in hunting, and I pretty much immediately disliked fishing as soon as I tried it. And that was treated vaguely like a failing on my part. Never quite explicitly, and never by my parents, who were always completely supportive of whatever I wanted to do, but it was all still enough to suggest that I wasn’t quite a “real” man.

And I felt like I had a fleeting moment of clarity. I remembered how much I tried to lose my accent, and how much I aspired to distance myself from anything that would get me branded as a redneck. I realized that I wasn’t so much assigned the stereotype of “gay liberal computer nerd” as I embraced it, and even aspired to it. A bunch of rich people decided that these people fit into a stereotype that has nothing to do with these people, and I’d dutifully picked my side. It was like realizing I’ve been spending all this time putting the clown makeup on myself.

Considering how big a fan I am of Miller’s Crossing, I should know that sometimes a hat is just a hat. But I really, really like the idea that we’re chipping away at the last 50 years of stereotypes and assumptions and finally understanding that people are capable of a hell of a lot more than a bunch of political strategists ever gave us credit for. I like the idea of actually moving into the 21st century.

1
To be fair, more or less: Nancy Pelosi has frequently gone on about the need for a sane, rational, and functioning Republican party in the US, but there’s a very clear sense that she wants to go back to the pre-Trump days, where there was an eternal stalemate between Reagan/Bush Republicans and Clinton/Obama Democrats. No thanks.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Firestarter Starter

Two tunes to help make your own 90s dance hit

Hey! Do you remember the international mega-hit song “Firestarter” by the Prodigy from 1996? It wasn’t my favorite track from that album (I still say “Breathe” is a more interesting song) but it sure was popular and made them a ton of money.

If you’d like to get in on a piece of that action for yourself, it’s pretty straightforward: first you just need a charismatic and interesting-looking singer¹, a sewer to hang out in, and samples from a few songs.

Easiest to guess, especially if you’re a fan of The Venture Brothers, is the “Hey!” from Art of Noise’s “Close (to the Edit).” That’s a Tuesday Tune Two-Fer repeat, unfortunately. I’d hoped to include the drums from “Firestarter,” which are sampled from a remix of the song “Devotion” by Ten City, which I can’t find on Apple Music.

The biggest surprise to me, though, was that the other main sample in “Firestarter” was from a song I’d heard about a billion times by 1996, because I listened to Last Splash obsessively. It’s from “SOS” by the Breeders. Which I never noticed, and only learned just recently, over 20 years later.

I think we’ve all learned something important here today.

1
Who, by literally all accounts after his passing, was a really nice guy

One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

Even in the middle of super hero fatigue, the WandaVision spin-off insists that it has a reason to exist.

I could tell that I had hit my over-saturation point with promotional material for Agatha All Along when I was watching an interview with Aubrey Plaza. The interviewer mentioned Patti Lupone, and I said — out loud, even though I was alone in the room at the time — “Oh, what are you going to say? That they lived together? That they were roommates? Oh, what fun! What an unlikely pair, huh? I bet there are some zany stories that came as a result of that, I tell you!”

And I felt bad, because they seem like fine people, and it’s not their fault that YouTube and Instagram have spent years honing in on my interests to such a degree that I’m now getting practically nothing besides ads for and interviews about the series, all the time, on every possible channel. And it’s not their fault that Disney is so eager to promote the series. But what it does is really drive home the inescapable fact that the show is product.

As is every piece of commercial art. It feels like a weirdly Generation X fixation to always look for the exact point when “art” becomes “commerce,” when the reality is that they’ve always been inseparably entangled. It’s just especially noticeable with something like Agatha All Along, which is not only a spin-off series, but part of a 14-year-old, multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. The MCU has programming slots to fill, whether or not you’ve got a groundbreaking new idea to fill it with.

That all sounds like a cynical, damning-with-faint-praise set-up, but the truth is that I’ve been enjoying Agatha All Along, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I loved WandaVision, and it’s still one of my favorite television series of all time, so I was predisposed to like the spin-off, but I was also predisposed to hold it to an impossibly high standard. From what I’ve seen so far — at the time I’m writing this, I’ve seen the first three episodes — it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it is engaging and clever TV with a bunch of outstanding actors. Which as I understood it, was the whole point of the MCU on television.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: They Don’t Love You Like I Love You

Two tunes that weren’t as tangentially-related as I thought but I like them anyhow

The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell.

As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on a variant of “Maps” and sent it to Beyoncé, who turned it into “Hold Up.” Even if it’s not that complicated a story, it still is interesting to me just how much that article in Billboard is a bizarre time capsule. How many of those words would be recognizable to somebody reading it 100 years from now?

Or even farther? It’s fun to imagine a far-distant civilization that had never heard of Karen O, Vampire Weekend, Diplo, or Twitter, and had only vaguely heard of Beyoncé (in the same way that we know of pharaohs only by mention of their names), somehow discovering this pop culture Rosetta Stone and suddenly being able to piece together entire sub-genres of 21st century popular music.

And they’re both great songs, without feeling like just a cover or a sample. “Hold Up” not only borrows a lyric from “Maps” and a hook from Andy Williams, but even the idea to combine them from Ezra Koenig. But it’s still undeniably a Beyoncé song, something powerful built on top of a base of something clever.

My only context for “Maps” was playing it in Rock Band enough times for it to become a favorite. And then hearing it in countless karaoke nights, with the entire room singing along by the end. All my connotations of the song feel completely separate from the “meaning” of it, and couldn’t possibly have been in mind when it was written and recorded, so it seems like it’s gone on to have a life all its own.

Except that the reason the song is so memorable is because its hook isn’t just musical, but meaningful. I’m not sure I understand the lyrics to the original song, but I feel like I get the hook, and it’s universal. So maybe it’s not getting reinterpreted and reinvented, but actually Karen O was so good at capturing an intense emotion inside a single lyric, that she’s shared that exact feeling with everyone who’s ever sung it.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Nobody Loves You More

Two tunes from someone so cool that no matter how cool you think she is, she’s even cooler than that

I’ve been a fan of Kim Deal ever since I first saw the video to “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies — they were all doing the same gag, but she was the one really selling it, said my impressionable late teenage mind. On top of having a voice that sounds like only one other person in the world, she’s maintained a kind of integrity that I think is completely unique. It feels like she doesn’t care in the slightest about being a rock star, but cares a lot about music.

It’s something that seems to baffle a lot of people. I’ve seen multiple videos purporting to document The Breeders from formation through Last Splash and the years afterwards, or talking about the success of “Cannonball,” and the guys¹ making them just seem incapable of getting Deal’s work on its own merits. It’s always framed as a competition between The Breeders and the Pixies², as if she’s incapable of ever escaping the looming shadow of Charles Thompson. And people can’t understand how a song as non-traditional as “Cannonball” became such a big hit, without dismissing it as a one-hit-wonder fluke of the 1990s.

I may be a little guilty of it, too, since when I heard that Kim Deal was releasing a solo album called Nobody Loves You More, I wondered why not just make another Breeders record? After hearing the two singles so far, “Coast,” and “Crystal Breath,” it’s obvious: this isn’t going to be a Breeders record.

Usually with a Breeders record, even when I can’t tell who’s singing what part, I can tell what each instrument is doing. It’s odd to hear Kim Deal songs with a ton of production around them, instead of two guitars, a bass, drums, and sometimes violin. “Coast” emphasizes horns — it initially reminded me a lot of Blondie’s cover of “The Tide is High” — to feel lazily tropical. “Crystal Breath” emphasizes the back beat, and it reminds me a little bit of St Vincent’s self-titled album.

The trick is that all the production is still in service of a Kim Deal song, and she is a master at coming up with hooks. In 2013, she released a bunch of disparate singles not collected into a single album, and “The Root” was my favorite. It’s pared back to nothing but guitars and drums (and a car’s back-up camera in a snowy parking lot, for the video), and it still gets stuck in my head.

“Cannonball” still baffles some music critics because it seems too weird to be popular. I think the truth is that it’s full of hooks, but they’re not in the expected places, and I think that’s a recurring trick of Deal’s. She could be cranking out catchy songs non-stop, but she seems to be more interested in making songs that are catchy enough to stick, but weird enough that they don’t just evaporate from memory the second they’re over. I still can’t say I’m a fan of Pod, but in the rest of The Breeders’ albums and her solo work, I think there’s a lot to be said for making music that challenges you to ignore it.

I get the sense that Nobody Loves You More is something like the opposite of all the “Unplugged” performances that bands were doing in the 1990s. Those were intended to show that the bands being given tons of money by record labels were actually talented musicians underneath all the noise and over-production. Kim Deal’s new album seems like it’ll show us what’s core to her music, whether it’s stripped down, or with guest musicians and a full suite of studio tricks.

1
Always guys, it’s worth pointing out
2
Without mentioning Frank Black and the Catholics or his solo albums, which seem like a better comparison?

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: The Worst Cake

Two tangentially-related tunes for going through a down time

Pictured is my attempt to make a belated birthday cake for myself, since my favorite kind is just a yellow cake with chocolate fudge frosting, and it seems foolish to order one from a bakery when they’re (ostensibly) so easy to make. As the keen-eyed viewer might be just able to make out: the process didn’t go well. The cake tore apart in multiple places, and the frosting was too runny and never solidified. The message of that cake is not so much “Happy Birthday” as “Why Do I Exist?”

Honestly, I thought the whole thing was funny. But it also happens to be a good metaphor for my overall mood the past couple months. Varenicline (aka Chantix) is a wonder drug in terms of helping me quit smoking when literally nothing else can, and as of today, I’ve gone five weeks without a cigarette and haven’t missed it a bit. But the side effects of the drug (and withdrawal) are lousy. For me: getting extremely nauseated after I take one, and a lengthy depression.

It takes over gradually enough that I’d forgotten that the same thing happened last time I took varenicline (and quit smoking for three years). It feels like something gunking up the gears in my brain, so that they grind imperceptibly slower each day, until they just sieze up. That means going from not really enjoying anything, to being not motivated to do anything, to just not being able to do anything, no matter how urgent it is.

“On Being Blue” is from Art of Noise’s last album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, from 1999. That means I was either on my way out at LucasArts, or I’d just left, and was likely suffering from career-ambition-oriented depression at the time. The song is actually about mood and color, though, which you can tell was a fixation of Debussy’s just by listening to La Mer, a composition that doesn’t sound like the ocean so much as feel like the ocean.

“Sunless Saturday” is from Fishbone’s The Reality of My Surroundings, released in 1991. That means I was in my second year of college and probably still feeling pretty optimistic. Fishbone was singing about injustice, not depression as a side effect of medication, but the reason I like it so much today is the same reason I liked it so much then: it doesn’t shy away from describing what it feels like to be in the pits, but it also doesn’t wallow in them.

It’s stabilizing to know that whatever you’re feeling is temporary. I’ve only got a few weeks left of this prescription until I’m done with it and the needless hassle of smoking. And of course, the upcoming election is filling me with hope instead of dread, for once. If you’re in the US, remember to verify your registration — or register to vote! — at vote.gov.

One Thing I Like About Ready or Not

Ready or Not is a black comedy/suspense movie that feels completely like an independent production

I just learned tonight (from the Dead Meat channel on YouTube) that Ready or Not, along with Abigail and the new Scream installments, were made by a group called Radio Silence. I think that’s worth pointing out for a couple of reasons: first is because this movie is so similar to Abigail that I would’ve accused the latter of being derivative. Second, both movies feel like stubbornly independent original projects.

It’s possible that I’ve just stopped going to theaters except for big franchise installments, but it does seem increasingly rare to see standalone, self-contained movies get much popular attention. No doubt the production companies would like to be able to turn them into long-running, profitable series, but Ready or Not seems to reject any attempt whatsoever to continue the story.

There are a lot of aspects common to both Ready or Not and Abigail: A premise that could work as the “twist” that sells the movie, but it’s given away in the trailer. A protagonist trapped overnight in a huge gothic mansion. A combination of comedy and pretty extreme violence. And a few gory specifics that would be spoilers if I gave any more detail. It almost feels like Ready or Not was a kind of first draft for Abigail, because I think the latter is quite a bit better.

One sequence I liked — or I guess it’s more accurate to say admired — in particular: main character Grace has been found and gets wounded by a bullet. She ends up falling into a horrific pit (something that also happens in Abigail), and after being fully traumatized by what she sees down there, she has to climb back out, wound and all.

The reason it works so well is because it’s excruciatingly suspenseful, in the way the best horror movies are suspenseful. You’re not wondering what’s about to happen; you know exactly what’s going to happen, because there is a single shot of an exposed nail that the camera lingers on for just a second too long at the start. And after sticking that image in your mind, the movie makes you wait an eternity for it all to play out, as if it were a Final Destination sequence. When it finally ends, it’s made a hundred times worse, because we’ve had to imagine the pay-off for so long.

That pay-off is also a good example of my biggest problem with the movie, though: the tone is all over the place. The studio lists it as a “horror comedy,” but there aren’t enough scenes where it’s both at the same time. Once the action starts, it feels like it’s spending most of its time either putting its protagonist through horrible and not-particularly-funny situations, or trying to draw out too much drama from the characters who are supposed to be sympathetic. It seems to take itself too seriously for what the trailers and screenshots implied.

But I thought it all came together satisfyingly in the end, even if I wished more characters had gotten their comeuppance earlier on. (I haven’t seen You’re Next, but from what I know about it, the structure is more like what I’d been expecting from Ready or Not). And I liked that it felt almost old-fashioned, for telling a complete, original story from beginning to end, with no hint of a sequel.

The Audacity of Cringe

Giving up smoking and other bad habits, and rebuilding a better outlook based on The New Honesty, Good Vibes, and Trust

I mentioned that I started using social media apps again once I noticed that the Kamala Harris campaign’s account had started firing on all cylinders, making politics fun and engaging instead of anxious and dreadful.

But what I hadn’t considered was that I’d also quit smoking around the same time. In retrospect, I was just trading one previously-reliable dopamine-hit distraction for another. And once I made that connection, it also helps explain so much of everything I’ve been turning over in my mind, trying to make sense of things that refuse to make sense, and wondering how we all ended up in this state.

There are several eerie parallels between addiction and this whole social/political dystopia we’ve made for ourselves in 2024:

The distraction becomes the focus. For me, the “quick smoke break to clear my head” gradually turned into “I’ve got to finish this so I can have another cigarette.” This doesn’t feel that different from watching the glut of political media put all of their focus on the politicians and their campaigns, instead of the real-world problems that they were trying to address. People have been pointing out for years that the emperor has no clothes, which the political media has taken as a cue for incessant discussions about The Power and Significance of Nudity In America’s Fast-Changing Political Climate.
It rejects the idea of ever having enough. In the 80s, it was 24-hour news channels. Now, it’s having to fill every pixel of every screen, and every nanosecond of the day, with content. Old-fashioned notions of relevance and newsworthiness were discarded long ago, because there always has to be something to focus on, something we can make seem important, even if it isn’t.
It feeds off of self-awareness. I always felt like being aware of how much I was smoking was the same thing as being in control over it, but for me, it wasn’t.¹ With media — traditional or social media — and politics, self-awareness is never used towards changing behavior, but reinforcing behavior. People on Twitter came up with the ostensibly ironic term “doomscrolling,” and then dove back even deeper into their phones and their imaginary, perpetually angry and miserable communities. And one of JD Vance’s least-harmful bits of weird behavior was saying that he had a Diet Mountain Dew and “people will probably say that’s racist.” The GOP is perfectly aware that they’re (with good reason) perceived as racist, but instead of engaging in any actual introspection, they’ve simply decided that the accusation is meaningless.
It reinforces the same patterns over and over again, until it loses any resemblance to the original. It’s been over a decade since I actually enjoyed a cigarette; by the end, it became more of a burdensome obligation than anything pleasurable. I’m reminded of that when I see how political media took the necessity of fact-checking and turned it from actual journalism into the performative ritual that it is now, giving nonsensical rebuttals to obviously true statements, presumably just because they have to write something. So now, instead of being a reliable source of truth, they just reinforce the (false) notion that everyone is always lying to some degree or another.

1
Respect to people who’ve been able to quit with willpower alone, but I never have been able to without chemical help.

Hillbilly L-Shaped Sectional

An obvious, absurd, and harmless lie is the best way to show contempt for someone without ruining the mood

I hate it when people over-explain jokes. And I really hate how modern media has so much space and time to fill up with “content” that it’s resulted in a surfeit of professional and amateur pundits generating so many unnecessary essays and opinion pieces and think pieces about every inconsequential thing.¹

But this is bugging me. In this Presidential campaign, there’s one scandalous rumor that seems to have spread like crazy and really resonated with people. It’s based on a shitposting tweet from someone claiming that VP candidate JD Vance, in his memoir, describes having sex with a couch.²

There has already been a ton written about this phenomenon, ranging in tone from angry, to humorless, to scolding, to earnestly over-explaining. Some of them, like Charlotte Clymer’s post calling out the hectoring scolds in media for paying attention to the wrong things, are good. Others, like a post on Platformer making a false equivalence between an obvious, harmless lie and deliberately inflammatory misinformation, are so off-base they make me angry. But I have yet to read one that I think gets at the core of it.

The point isn’t to make anybody believe it, since it’s too absurd to believe. And it’s not to trick Vance into having to deny it, since it would be a waste of time. And it’s not really meant to put them on the defensive by humiliating them, since, like saying Trump has small hands, it would be a stupid thing to get defensive about. Even if it were true, it’s harmless. Weird, but harmless. Especially when compared to the dozens of legitimately offensive stuff that we know to be true about him. It’s just a bafflingly dumb insult.³

Which is the whole point, and I think it really is that simple. The reason it feels like a fever has broken in the United States is that people are tired of being angry and worried and miserable all the time, and we’re ready for some happiness and some reckless optimism. This dumb thing lets us show contempt for the contemptible without having to think about how terrible they really are.

I’m tired of news and social media presenting a never-ending succession of unforgivably awful things that Trump has said or done, milking yet another cycle of outrage for everything it’s worth, tricking some of us into believing oh this time, for sure, he’s gone too far! and then going on with no consequences. And seemingly no memory, as they set us up for the next one. It’s more fun to say he has tiny hands than to say he’s a racist, misogynist, narcissistic, incompetent grifter. The “tiny hands” thing isn’t true, but it lets me express my utter contempt without feeling like his virulent hate has infected me.

Vance is a reprehensible person. It’s a good thing he’s such a laughably terrible candidate, because hearing his beliefs from a more competent person would be alarmingly repulsive. I don’t want us all to keep wasting our lives fighting battles of attrition against regressive people who have nothing of value to contribute to society.

In fact, I don’t want to think about that couch-molesting dipshit at all. I’d rather be happy.

1
In my defense: posts on this blog aren’t meant to persuade or really even inform, but are just me trying to sort out how I think about a topic. You get what you pay for!
2
The tweet expertly cites page numbers in the book, and independent of anything else, is just a masterfully-executed shitpost.
3
Completely unlike actual disinformation, and anyone with any sense should be able to tell the difference.

Happily Outside the Room Where It Happens

What happens when an already-dysfunctional political system comes into contact with ten million experts

Previously on Spectre Collie, I presented my grand theory on the state of American politics in 2024, which is that nobody actually understands what the hell is going on. And more importantly: the more confidently somebody asserts that they do understand what’s going on, the more suspect they are.

With a few notable exceptions. After the past few weeks, the only people that seem trustworthy to me and insightful enough to say what’s actually going on are Harris, Walz, and Buttigieg.¹ In other words: I’ve become the guy smitten with politicians and extremely distrustful of the “mainstream media,” the New York Times in particular.

In other words: what the f@$#?!²

I think the short answer is that everything has been allowed to get so weird and nonsensical that it requires a full reboot. I already thought that we were seeing a reboot of the Democratic party, but it looks like it’s turning into a total turn-the-entire-system-off-wait-30-seconds-and-turn-it-back-on-again to reset everything to the center.

And yes, obviously, it is the center. Maybe slightly left; it’s hard to tell anymore when they’re on stage at a Democratic rally saying how much they respect the Second Amendment. Everything in the Harris/Walz platform is just widely popular common sense. The only reason it’s ever interpreted anywhere as “dangerously leftist,” or even “boldly progressive,” is because corporate journalism and social media have failed us.

1
And a smattering of independent journalists
2
Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

One Thing I Like About Abigail

Abigail is a mean, gory, often funny, action/horror movie that I hope never becomes a franchise

The completely spoiler-free premise of Abigail is this: a group of mercenaries are hired to kidnap a 12-year-old ballerina and guard over her until the ransom can be delivered. But they quickly discover that the girl’s father is a legendarily powerful crime boss, and he’ll be sending his most ruthless hit man to kill them all.

If you’re completely spoiler-averse (and that seems like something you’d be into, of course), then I recommend watching it without knowing anything else about it. Including this post, of course. The larger premise is “spoiled” in every trailer and every description of the movie, so good luck avoiding that! But also, there’s enough going on that it’s still interesting and surprising even if you think you know what you’re getting into.

My overall take: it is the horror/action/black comedy mash-up that I’d been hoping it would be, in a similar spirit as Orphan: First Kill, Malignant, and M3GAN, although not quite as good as any of those. It’s comedically mean-spirited, full of violence and blood and gore and people being nasty to each other, but keeping all of it just enough over the top that it’s still fun.

In fact, I was enjoying it enough that I wondered why it seemed to just disappear with little mention; I suspect that’s because the third act is a mess. It goes on too long, stops doing anything interesting with its premise and just becomes one fight scene after another, tacks on at least two unnecessary endings plus a Teachable Moment, and overall just feels like the result of extensive rewrites and studio intervention.

Until that point, though, it had a great “they don’t make them like this anymore” energy to it. It had the feeling of independent filmmakers working with an original premise and a big studio budget, gathering a cast and crew who all seemed to understand exactly what they were making, and put out into the world as a standalone project with no concern over franchises or tie-ins or “lore.” Considering that it’s already being called a “flop,” it seems unlikely that Universal will try to turn it into anything that it’s not¹, and that may be the best thing for it.

1
Except maybe a Horror Nights house? That could work.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: White Noise

Two tangentially-related tunes to help drown out the bad thoughts about diversity, equity, and inclusion

Lately you might have been hearing cool and totally normal people sounding the alarms about “DEI hires,” which is a real and normal thing to be concerned about, and not just a lazy repeat of the same old dog whistles that go back seventy years or longer. Much like “urban,” and “hood,” all the way through “CRT” and “woke,” it serves a very important purpose: it lets people express all the ideas behind the n-word, without the unpleasantness of the n-word itself.

So let’s take a closer look at diversity, equity, and inclusion, while listening to some comforting white music!

First up is “One Bad Apple” by The Osmonds. This song was written by George Jackson originally intended for The Jackson 5, but went to The Osmonds after the Jacksons chose to record “ABC” instead. Clearly yet another in the countless examples of perfectly competent white performers being passed over in favor of more ethnic ones.

People like to sling out terms like “racist,” or “misogynistic,” or “inexcusably racist and misogynistic,” whenever someone raises concerns about DEI, but critics insist that it’s actually about fairness. And the logic is clear if you think about it for even a second: if anyone who’s not a straight, white, male gets a job or a promotion, that’s a “DEI hire.” That means that every job should be given to a straight white man by default, instead of some racially-motivated special-interest virtue signaling. Why are you bringing race and gender into a discussion about the things to which straight white men are entitled?!

While you’re appreciating that airtight bit of logic, here’s a song by Jack White: his cover of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” with The Electric Mayhem for a Muppets album. This song was written and made into a classic recording by Stevie Wonder, but it took White to make an impression of the original with a “Seven Nation Army” hook grafted onto it.¹

And Muppets often have me thinking about rainbows, and how something that was once so simple and beautiful has been co-opted to have all these weird connotations of “different people living together with respect and harmony” and “freedom to pursue your own happiness.” And how this whole “DEI fad” doesn’t do much for white men like me.

Well, except for how working for a company with an explicit and extensive DEI policy means that I’m surrounded by co-workers at every level with a wider range of life experiences than I’ve ever been in a 30-year career. And I guess that I don’t have to spend every conversation worried about fallout if I mention that I’m gay, and I don’t have to worry that my job is at risk the next time politicians decide to use sexual orientation as a wedge issue to make up for their complete lack of policy.

Actually you know, now that I think about it, anybody throwing a tantrum about DEI is a nonsense-spouting dimwit who can go get stuffed.

1
Non-sarcastic note: I genuinely like Jack White and think he’s extraordinarily talented, but doesn’t add anything to this song and the cover is inessential at best.