Chuck

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.

Do Not Cite the Deep Magic To Me

A simple and hopefully obvious reminder that if we try to learn everything from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

First I have to acknowledge that this post is entirely the result of my being too online over the past couple of weeks. I have been back on the centralized social media apps, and they are bad places that do bad things to people.¹ Everybody got such a rush from so much news happening so fast, some people are now displaying withdrawal symptoms from having to wait for Kamala Harris to announce a VP pick.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough: always-on news channels and infinite social media feeds are a blight on humanity.

But since there are going to be tons of self-proclaimed political science and policy experts going online to offer their opinions, and since I’m apparently helpless to resist going back to read everything they have to say, I’ve just got one simple request: let’s stop acting like things are still the same as they were even four years ago, much less back in 2008.

What prompted this: reading multiple predictions about who was going to be chosen as Harris’s VP, which all sounded identical to conversations that have been happening for as long as I’ve been following politics.² “It has to be Shapiro, because they have to do well in Pennsylvania,” or “they need someone who will go against Trump’s energy,” or “America’s not ready for a gay Vice President,” etc. etc. It’s all so outdated and irrelevant that they might as well be talking about star signs or bodily humours.

It really stood out to me because I was guilty of it myself. When all the “elite” Democrats were going through contractions trying to squeeze out Joe Biden, my biggest concern was that there’d be no one to replace him, forcing the Democrats into reliving the contentious “Hillary vs Bernie” infighting that helped make me disgusted with the party. I have to admit that I’d immediately discounted Kamala Harris, because I immediately assumed that she was too “risky” and would never get the nomination.

What was that based on? Just years of seeing the Democrats be frightened of their own shadows, constantly playing to some mythical undecided strawman in Iowa that probably never actually existed, and always finding a way to be foiled despite being the most risk-averse people imaginable. Plus all the self-satisfied “social media leftists” in the Bay Area, who’d never shut up with the “Kamala is a cop” nonsense.

But we should all recognize that none of that applies anymore, assuming it ever actually did. Everything leading up to Harris’s nomination feels so unprecedented, it’s gotten to the point where it’s unnerving. When am I going to have to be cynical and disappointed again?! For now, though, it feels like we’ve got a candidate for President who’s actually someone who’d be great at the job. Who’s smart and capable, and personable. Not just an emergency fill-in, not just someone who was the safest of all available options, and not just someone who’d be good at getting votes.

It’s an exciting feeling, the thought of somebody getting into office because they’d be good at being President, not just good at strategizing through an election. And I’d hope that whoever is the VP candidate (and it goes without saying, but there are no outright bad options in the front runners), they’re chosen not just for strategy, but for personality, and the dynamic they’ll bring to the campaign.

And frankly, I’d hope that the campaign takes full advantage of their opponents absolutely shitting the bed, and of the Democratic establishment being too scared of the alternative for too much infighting, and continues running a campaign based on the right thing to do, instead of just the thing that “plays best in the flyover states” or “energizes the base.” Or whatever other nonsense the 24/7 political news cycle has poisoned us with. It feels like we’ve been given the chance to do a reboot, and we should take advantage of it.

1
Mastodon is still okay. It seems to be near-impossible to unintentionally “go viral,” and the lack of up-to-date topical news makes everything much calmer.
2
And then getting frustrated and disillusioned and ignoring all of it until the next major election.

Idiotic Design

The blissfully liberating chaos of not trusting anyone who claims to understand what’s going on

The featured image in this post is a screenshot from CNN’s YouTube channel, where the title of a video promised “What the data is saying about who Kamala Harris will likely choose as VP.” It includes headshots of the front-runners, with a precise percentage value under each one. When you watch the video, you see that the “data” is gathered not from polls, but from people betting on the outcome.

In other words: nobody knows shit. (And also: 24-hour news channels were a mistake).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve broken all my pledges to be a mentally-healthier and better-functioning human, and I’ve gone right back to obsessively reading social media.¹ The reason is because Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is nailing it.

They came out swinging with two “channels:” first there’s the campaign, which releases official statements in response to significant events, with thoughtful takes that stay true to the campaign’s message of freedom, unity, and moving forward. Second, there’s “Kamala HQ,” which calls itself the “rapid response” team, and posts memes directly responding to whatever is the hot topic of the moment. It’s legitimately funny and fun to read, building on the unfamiliar sense of optimism that came with Biden’s endorsement and the start of Harris’s campaign, and somehow against all odds making it actually enjoyable to follow a US presidential campaign.

The only reason I’m not even more impressed with Harris’s social media team is because 90% of the time, they just post completely unedited clips and statements from their opponents. Over the past three-and-a-half years of a mostly functioning government, I’d forgotten just how bad the Republicans are at everything, and how much Trump and Vance seem so eager to just completely shit all over themselves on camera.

But again, I think Harris’s campaign has come out strong. And it’s not just because they have a social media team that’s young enough never to have used dial-up internet. It feels like more than any other Democratic campaign in my lifetime, they understand what a Presidential campaign needs to do: tell us what we want to hear and also what we need to hear.

1
Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Smalltown Boys

Two tangentially-related tunes devoted to two tiny towns (NSFW lyrics and video)

After he left Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty wrote a bunch of simpler, pared-back songs and released them on the album and EP Skittish and Rockity Roll. Many of them are just acoustic guitar and a groove box, and most of them are hell of catchy.

My favorite is “Ossining”, which I’ve been singing along to for years without ever bothering to find out what it means. I’d used context clues and the repeated “why not seek Ossining” to guess that it was a playfully made-up word for some kind of enlightenment movement. As it turns out, it’s a small city in New York state. There could still be some enigmatic double meaning to the song, though, and I’m enjoying the continued mystery.

I do know what “Lithonia” is, though — if you haven’t watched that video yet, I don’t want to spoil it but I will warn that it has a jump-scare gory ending — because I grew up near there. So did Donald Glover, since he grew up near there, too. It’s not an especially remarkable city; when I was growing up, the highlight was that it had a Dairy Queen. Now, it has a mall.

Maybe the song isn’t about the city at all, and it’s a character or something from Bando Stone and the New World, Childish Gambino’s upcoming movie. Again, I’m preferring to live with the mystery for now.

I will say that I spent a long time underestimating Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, and I hope I’ve learned my lesson. For instance: I thought it was absurd that 30 Rock picked “Stone Mountain, Georgia” as the hometown of Kenneth the page, and they set at least one episode there depicting it as the smallest, most stereotypical, backwoods shithole in the darkest part of the Appalachians. It’s actually a relatively large city, built up around a landmark co-opted by racists to celebrate the Confederacy. I assumed that the 30 Rock writers intended it as meta-commentary, since the episodes were all about how New York writers had no idea what the rest of the country was really like. Later, I found out that Glover is from Stone Mountain, and he was a writer on the series.

Also, I’d been way too dismissive of Childish Gambino’s music, as just a celebrity side project. I think it was partly a defense mechanism, because it seemed cosmically unfair that someone could be that handsome and that funny and also be a talented musician. It turns out that not only are there some fantastic songs — “3005” in particular — but more importantly, the songs aren’t “celebrity makes a hip hop record” so much as a hugely talented person having too many ideas to fit into one medium.

Freedom

Pausing for a moment to consider the year’s worth of political news that’s happened over the past two weeks

Vice President Harris released her first campaign ad for President, and it’s pretty spectacular. On his blog, Jason Kottke points out the emphasis on “Freedom” — not just the Beyoncé song (although that is absolutely an important part of it), but the ideal — and why it’s such a perfect message to kick off the campaign with.

Kottke quotes from an interview with Pete Buttigieg, pointing out how we’ve let Republicans corrupt the word “freedom” to push an authoritarian agenda, even though it’s actually progressive policies that make real freedom possible. That’s the kind of common-sense insight that made me a supporter of Buttigieg, and it seems especially common-sense insightful when you consider it was from 2018, before the pandemic.

That’s when we were shown repeatedly that the Republican Newspeak version of “freedom” just means “freedom from responsibility.” It’s not “conservative,” since genuinely conservative values assume some level of responsibility to society. It’s not even libertarian, since the idiots screaming “tyranny” at the prospect of wearing a mask or getting vaccinated also have unsurprisingly strong opinions about banning people from getting married or making their own reproductive decisions or receiving health care.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Run Away

Two cardio-friendly tunes inspired by my cat

One morning last week, my cat was performing his daily ritual of standing in the hallway and wailing until we got up to feed him. Instead of waking up immediately to address his concerns, I instead just incorporated his wails into my dream.

I don’t remember what the specifics of the dream were, but now it had a background track of Bronski Beat’s song “Smalltown Boy,” or at least the vocals at the beginning.

I’m skeptical that either Jimmy Somerville or my cat would appreciate being confused for each other, since they were both singing about something so deeply heartfelt and important to them. One the trials of being a young homosexual living in a town that doesn’t accept you, and the other having not been fed for at least six hours.

I really like this interview with Somerville from a Dutch TV show in 2007, where he’s a lot more lighthearted about the song than I would’ve expected, while still being defiant and assertive about what it means. I also have to admit that as many times as I’ve heard it, I never actually knew what it was about until just recently. I’m terrible at being able to decipher lyrics, so I never knew the lyrics beyond “run away, run away,” which I’d thought was the title.

Unlike the song “Run Runaway” by Slade, where I didn’t know the title and only remembered the lyrics “see chameleon, lying there in the sun.”

They’re kind of the opposite of Somerville’s smalltown boy, running back to Scotland to cavort amidst a castle with kilt-wearing pipers and dancers. I’m positive I saw that video back in the 80s, but I saw lead singer Noddy Holder and conflated it with a Doctor Who episode. I guess they’re also the opposite of Bronski Beat in that I’d always heard Slade associated with glam rock, and they are the straightest glam rockers I could possibly imagine.

One Thing I Like About It Follows

It Follows lays all of its metaphors out in the open, but rarely feels as if there’s no room for interpretation

I always like it when movies contain a line of dialogue that serves as a perfect review of the movie.¹ It Follows does exactly that, with “it’s slow, but it’s not dumb.”

The movie has had so much buzz around it for so long, with some people calling it one of the best horror movies of the past decade, that I knew I was going to see it eventually. But it’s hung out in my periphery ever since, with a kind of dreadful certainty, just waiting until the time that I’d be in the right mindset to watch a horror movie that didn’t seem particularly “fun” in the slightest.

As it turns out, it’s very good. It’s absolutely a horror movie, but it plays out more like a suspense thriller: relatively bloodless and honestly not all that scary, but full of relentless tension and a kind of numb despair. The performances are all natural and completely believable. The soundtrack is perfect. It feels very much like an independent horror movie: not in that it’s low-budget, or in that it’s overly pretentious, but in that it feels as if the filmmakers had the freedom and confidence to do exactly what they wanted.

One thing I like in particular about It Follows is that it’s confident the audience will be able to figure out what’s going on without a ton of hand-holding. Some significant plot details are left ambiguous, mostly because knowing the specifics aren’t important to understanding the story. And while there are a few scenes with poems or quotes that are on the nose, they’re delivered as punctuation to themes that the movie assumes the audience has already figured out by that point.

It feels like a perfect introduction to cinema studies, which normally would be a severe insult, but here I mean as a compliment. When I had to take cinema studies, the most influential movie in my classes was Rear Window. Its theme of audiences-as-voyeurs seems like an obvious interpretation now, but for me, it completely changed the way I watch movies. I’m not claiming that It Follows will be the classic that Rear Window is, but it is excellent at inviting you to figure out its themes, while neither being too obtuse nor too direct.

There’s one scene in particular in which Jay and her friends are sitting in a field, listening to more details about how the entity works, and what are her options for escaping it. It’s a scene of exposition, functionally leading into the next act, but it doesn’t really play as one. Instead, the camera focuses on Jay — who at this point seems numb to everything that’s happening to her — as she picks individual blades of grass and lays them on her bare leg in rows. It’s a perfectly child-like thing to be doing, suggesting that she’s coming to terms with the fact that she’ll never be care-free again.

Once you pick up on the theme of the loss of innocence, the metaphors start coming fast and furious. Jay runs to safety on a swing set. A young man has left a well-used stack of porn magazines, the kind that Jay and Paul had been laughing about earlier. Two times, the gang runs for safety to a place that had been important to them as kids with their parents. And while we see the enemy frequently, it’s rarely made the focus, instead hanging out in the frame in a way that makes it feel not so much terrifying as it is inevitable.

In fact, a lot of It Follows feels like a (slightly) more bleak version of a Charlie Brown holiday special. The kids more or less fend for themselves, trying to make sense of things while the adults are rarely shown at all. That’s emphasized in the climax, where they come up with a plan that’s based on a sketchy understanding of how things work.

I don’t want to make it sound as if It Follows had no room for subtlety; it does, and its confident sense of style is what makes it work so well. I liked that for their date, Hugh took Jay to a screening of Charade. And I really liked how there was a mix of modern and dated throughout, with teenagers hanging out watching black-and-white movies on a CRT television in a very 80s-feeling living room, while one of them used a compact e-reader that doesn’t yet exist. Old and new cars co-existed without comment. Even the porn magazines seemed like the platonic ideal of 1980s porn (not to mention that a teenager in 2015 was still using printed magazines). The sense of timelessness gives it a feeling of universal nostalgia, the sense that no matter when you grew up², it looked and felt like this.

But mostly, It Follows invites you to interpret its meaning while staying just shy of spelling it out for you directly. I can understand audiences who were expecting something like Scream or, even more appropriate, Final Destination would be disappointed that it was so slow and relatively non-violent. But I liked that it told audiences how the monster works without (too) directly telling them what the monster means. It’s somehow not all that scary, and simultaneously full of dread about the most primal fear there is.

1
My favorite is a review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that called out its line: “Do not see me.”
2
As long as it was in the American suburbs after the 1970s

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Breeders Banquet

Pride month is over, so let’s turn it back over to the Breeders

The Breeders have released a 14-minute video called “Live in Big Sur,” recorded in the middle of a hiking trail in the most beautiful part of the California coast, capturing stripped-down performances of songs from Last Splash. In addition to some gorgeous drone footage, it’s also got short, clever animations scattered throughout.

The whole package is super charming, and a reminder that the band has a hell of a lot of great songs besides “Cannonball.” Here are two of my favorites:

I like “Wait in the Car” mostly because “Wait in the car, I’ve got business” is something I always thought only my mother said. It really helps sell the middle-aged midwestern punk rock vibe of the whole album. All Nerve is my second favorite Breeders album, and it was such a pleasure to see them get the band back together and still be as weird and funny as they were in the 90s.

Like when they recorded “Safari”. Which just cemented the crush on Kim Deal I already had from the Pixies. She’s just the coolest.

A Shallow But Sincere Pride Message

End of the Pride Month progress report

For the past few years, I’ve tried to make some kind of acknowledgement at the beginning of Pride month in June. But it’s usually a kind of generic “love is love” type of thing, an earnest-but-not-especially-deep acknowledgement of how much better my life has been since I came out, a resolution to keep speaking out in favor of equality and respect, the kind of thing that makes for a perfectly suitable sentiment on a rainbow T-shirt.

This month, though, has hit different. I don’t know if it’s because it coincides with my birthday, so I’m growing deeper into DGAF territory. Or if COVID has kept me isolated in one way or another, with a lot of time to myself to think. But June 2024 has really sunk in as part of an ongoing process I’m calling The Great Unclenchening.

Which means that even through I’m fully out and growing gracefully into my bland, Buttigiegian lifestyle, there are still all of these things that I’ve been holding onto as something I should be embarrassed about. Even though they’re completely inconsequential. Like having crushes. Or conforming to stereotypes. Or even being shallow.

I’ve offhandedly mentioned before how Instagram had an overly large impact on me. For better or worse, but mostly better. As lousy and downright toxic as the platform is, it undeniably helped change how I see myself. For the first 40 years or so, I thought of myself as being gross and ugly, and I felt like there was so much wrong with me. Then I started getting attention from bear dudes on Instagram. All of a sudden, strangers were giving me compliments, and I hadn’t had to do anything to win them over!¹ I was finally being properly objectified!

Is that narcissistic? Hell yes it is! But it’s also rippled out to make a subtle but profound difference. Just this morning, after I took a shower, I saw myself in the mirror and I didn’t give a dejected sigh. Instead I thought, “that’s me, and I’m fine with that.” I don’t have to immediately shut down anybody giving me a compliment.² I don’t have to try desperately to make people laugh to get them to like me. I can just relax.

And it wasn’t lost on me that I was making this observation on the last day of Pride month. How it doesn’t just mean flags and parades, but shedding any sense of shame or embarrassment over the millions of harmless things that make up you. It also made me feel a step closer to understanding what transgender people go through, finally being able to have an outward appearance that matches how they feel on the inside.

Obviously I don’t want to underestimate the significance of coming out, or the importance of political activism and solidarity. But I feel like Pride month reduces a ton of ideas to symbols, flags, and cliches, so that it’s easy to forget it means a complete rejection of shame, embarrassment, and fear. Refusing to listen to anyone who’s getting in the way of your pursuit of happiness, even if — or maybe especially if — that person is yourself.

1
Except maybe grow a beard?
2
I’m still bad at that, but trying to get better.

Trainwreck Revisited

Reconsidering my take on a mostly-forgettable movie from 2015 that is still depressingly relevant

After Trainwreck — the movie written by Amy Schumer, directed by Judd Apatow, and released in 2015 — was released, I wrote an overlong defense of it on this blog. I’m reluctant to link to it, partly because so many of the images and links are now broken.¹ But mostly because reading old posts on here often has me thinking, “Who the hell is this asshole?” My last post was mostly responding to two reviews of the movie that I feel completely missed the point, and I was needlessly hostile and argumentative.

But I still agree with the points I was trying to make, even though I don’t like the post itself. Similarly, although I thought the movie itself was middling-to-forgettable, the ideas in it were more nuanced and mature than most people gave it credit for. And since it was released during the Obama administration, and we’re still suffering from the ultra-right-wing backlash to that, I think it deserves a revisit.

My interpretation of Trainwreck is that it’s a rejection of any form of feminism or progressivism that’s more prescriptive than inclusive. It’s presented as a gender-swapped twist on romantic comedy cliches, where this time it’s the woman who’s the slutty one! Can you even imagine?! But the more meaningful twist is how it flips the notion of conforming to society’s expectations.

It sets up the story with two sisters listening to their father go on an anti-monogamy tirade while telling them that he and their mother are getting a divorce. He has them repeat: “monogamy isn’t realistic.” Years later, one of them has taken that to heart and done everything expected of her: she drinks and parties as much as she wants, she has sex whenever and with whomever she wants, she refuses to be tied down to a committed relationship, and she still has a successful career. The other sister Kim is the “bad sheep,” in that she’s chosen to have a quiet life in the suburbs, married and expecting a baby.

When the movie was released, Schumer went onto Twitter and said explicitly what it was about: “I hope you see it. It’s a love letter to my little sister.”

Because it takes the format of a conventional romantic comedy, which implies a level of earnestness and taking everything at face value, it’s easy to see why so many audiences interpreted it as conservative. By the time you get to the end, it might seem like the message is, “Women need to reject single life, stop drinking, stop sleeping around, and devote themselves to a life of Traditional Heterosexual Monogamy to truly find happiness. Victory Through Conformity!”

But the movie isn’t a celebration of monogamy, or conservatism, or heterosexuality, but instead a celebration of self-determinism and mutual respect.

1
Especially since the studios are now insisting on removing so much of their content from the internet.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Are You Not Entertained?!

Two tunes to irrefutably prove why everyone should like Soul Coughing as much as I do

Monday I got tickets to the Soul Coughing concert in Los Angeles (I live in Los Angeles, but I am not going to Reseda). It’s part of a tour that, as the site’s tag line says, the band said would never happen. Mike Doughty even wrote a book about it.¹

While I’ve been freaking out ever since the short teaser video was released — since I’ve gotten to see Doughty solo a couple of times, but have never seen the band perform live — it doesn’t seem to have hit everybody with the same magnitude. I’ve seen a couple of other fans comment on it, and the reactions are either this is the greatest thing that has ever happened, or who? (Maybe oh is that the super bon bon band? That’s nice I’m happy for you.)

For me it’s another one of those reminders of how I don’t get music on a fundamental level. Usually it’s about composing/creating, but here it’s about appreciating. Music has such a specific appeal for different people, and for me at least, it’s completely unpredictable. I can usually get to know someone and think, “Oh, you’d probably enjoy Battlestar Galactica,” or “I think you’d like Young Frankenstein,” or “You seem like you’d be a fan of David Foster Wallace’s books,”² with a fairly good success rate. But I can’t do the same with any music. Even recommending bands similar to the bands I already know someone likes.

That also means that I just don’t get why people aren’t as blown away by Soul Coughing as I am. El Oso, my favorite of their albums, is near-perfect and not quite like anything I’d heard before, even from the band itself. Much of it feels like it was discovered like a Voyager gold disc, sent from a planet with an advanced civilization of jazz hipsters.

So I tried to pick what I think are the two Soul Coughing-est songs on their three albums, with the condition that they can’t also appear on their greatest hits album. The first is “Disseminated,” from Irresistible Bliss:

The upright bass, a looping sample from Raymond Scott, the stream-of-consciousness-seeming lyrics, a reference to chocodiles, the shuffling drums, and a backdrop of perfectly weird sounds that seem like the Mos Eisley Cantina band tuning up. What’s not to love?

The other is “I Miss the Girl” from El Oso:

This is like the climax to an amazing album full of amazing songs. Its creepy opening hook repeated over and over, getting more intense, and then everything building and building in creepy intensity until it ends in a cataclysm of sound, and then suddenly stops. (Leading perfectly into the quieter “So Far I Haven’t Found the Science,” which to me feels like what would happen if Soul Coughing made a song for a Muppet movie).

Anyway, I love them, and you should too. I keep having to remind myself that their last album was released in 1998, because to me it still sounds like music from the distant (and cooler) future.

1
I haven’t read the book (yet), but from what I’ve heard it sounded like he was completely done with the band for good.
2
Which I mean in a non-derogatory way, although I’m aware there are many who’d consider that the gravest insult.

Literacy 2024: Book 5: The Man Who Died Twice

The second book in the Thursday Murder Club series

Book
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Series
Book 2 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
Not long after finding the culprits behind a double homicide in the first book, retiree Elizabeth Best receives an intriguing note from someone in her past life as a spy. Following up on the note involves Elizabeth, along with the rest of the Thursday Murder Club and their new friends, in a case involving multiple murders, mobsters, and the disappearance of a fortune in diamonds.

Pros

Gets right into the story, now that the characters and their relationships have been established.
Doesn’t feel as aggressively cozy as its predecessor, treating its characters from the start not as “elderly people solving crimes,” but actual characters with a ton of life experience.
Light-hearted throughout, but one line in particular actually made me laugh out loud.
Does a pretty good job of capturing “the banality of evil.” We see into the minds of (some of) the villains, and are shown that even when we’re in their point of view, they’re not fascinating or even exciting, just willfully ignorant and selfish.
Often anticipates the reader’s main theories about what happened, and has a character explicitly call it out, to reassure the reader that they’re in sync.
The character of Elizabeth, which I didn’t like much in the first book since she was essentially a super-hero of plot convenience, is more fallible and relatable here.

Cons

One of the main clues was disappointingly obvious.
The tone overall is “light-hearted but poignant,” so the moments where it descends into outright comedy just feel weird and out of place.
Overuses the gimmick of building tension by having a character reflecting on how good their life is right now. (Although the last one was pretty sweet).
The climax strains credulity past the breaking point, insistent on tying up every loose end at once.
Although I do really like the character of Bogdan, he’s clearly become the infallible super-hero of plot convenience for this book.

Verdict
I think it’s better than the first book, more confident in its main characters and a little less eager to make them quirky and charming. The side characters still seem a little too try-hard, some of the jokes are extremely corny, and the gag of “old people so stubborn and seemingly harmless that they always get their way” has been over-used to its breaking point. But it is absolutely still a fun and light, character-driven mystery story that’s not so light that it evaporates.

Spoilers after the break