Another week of bad news in the headlines and not much more to say about it, so I thought I’d keep this short and stick to recommendations after the jump.
I’m also thinking about putting together another print-only issue in the next couple months. Last time, I wrote a longer piece and asked some friends to contribute brief thoughts and blurbs on whatever they’d been thinking about. If you have any feedback or ideas, or want a copy of the previous one, feel free to comment or reply to this email.
Hope everyone’s hanging in there.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the screen
Better Call Saul, currently in its final season, is a Breaking Bad spinoff that centers around Saul Goodman, Walter White’s flashy, crooked lawyer. Better Call Saul could have gone the way of Disney’s origin stories and spin-offs, which choke plot with fan service, character reveals, and pointless explanations of minor details. While the show does feature many of the same characters as Breaking Bad, it is not beholden to them, and manages to weave its own story that only gradually builds towards the events of the original show. We become less interested in how Goodman ends up where he does in Breaking Bad than in what happens in his own show.
Still, Better Call Saul is an inconvenient show to recommend. It requires that you watch Breaking Bad first, which itself itself runs five seasons long. It’s currently only available on AMC+, yet another streaming service you have never heard of and probably don’t want to pay for. (I have been watching through other, less legal, means.)
The barrier to entry may be high, but the ride is worth it. In addition to succeeding as a prequel, Better Call Saul is one of the few TV shows that feels meticulously and imaginatively storyboarded. Expanding on the cinematographic toolkit of Breaking Bad—cryptic tracking shots at the beginning of episodes, wide shots of interiors, extreme close-ups of significant or symbolic objects—Better Call Saul shows how developing a visual language can be far more effective in creating a compelling atmosphere than over-reliance on color grading, set design, and special effects.
on the bookshelf
Recent heat maps of India have had me thinking about The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 sci-fi novel, which opens with a devastating heatwave in India in the very near future. Of all the climate-related and post-apocalyptic literature I’ve read or perused, this chapter sticks in my head the most. You can read it here. I’ll drop it in the Discord, too.
from the archives
The New York Times ran a wonderful interactive piece about the discovery of a cache of cassette tapes in a Fire Island house:
The tapes, which were accumulated from 1979 to 1999, capture the sonic evolution of disco into more modern house music — often on the very same night. More than a catalog, the tapes are the soundtrack to a critical juncture in gay history as the AIDS crisis emerged and a new generation of activists fought for their rights and survival.
You can listen to the Pine Walk Collection on MixCloud here.
I also stumbled across another incredible piece of cassette tape salvage work, Syrian Cassette Archives. The site is a vibrant repository of Syrian music from the 70s to the 00s. Geeta Dayal wrote about the site for 4Columns:
A wide scope of genres is represented, including folk, twentieth-century Arabic classical, the irresistible party music known as dabke, the sinuous pop called shaabi, comedy, spoken word, poetry, and bird songs. It’s in stark contrast to the sterile taste of Syria’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who apparently favors Western soft-rock crooners such as Phil Collins
from the discourse
Lincoln Michel ran a nice interview with Alexander Chee in his literary newsletter, Counter Craft:
[Chee:] And I think in social media you get the idea “they all know it’s me, I won’t even tell them who I am” and that’s where you fly off the rails. Where you write something that doesn’t do enough work. It’s all about the mixed context, the private self versus the public self. The private self is the character telling the essay, if it’s a personal essay, the public self mediates. They are both at work.
from my incoming texts
“me bopping to french music in the library”
“Woke up thinking about Bolsonaro India”
“Had to look it up to make sure it wasn’t like fictional or something”
“Securing that chain on the tire also precarious but with just a wheel no tire it would probably be perf”
weekly wiki
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