The fight for diverse and conscious voices

I wasn't super happy with his stuff before the lockdown but over the last 16-18 months he's found a new groove that reminds me of some of his older vibe, but with more chill. The new single is excellent...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfL0y3zyfc

And if you like that you can check out a bunch of sets he's put up on YT that are good study/work music.

This Code 8 is the 2019 Netflix film. It tells the story of a world in which some people have one of a handful of super powers - fire, electricity, physical force, and some rarer ones like mind-reading. These powered people are cast into society's underclass in a world that's moving toward robotics replacing humans. Previously shut out of conventional work, powered people are now at risk of losing even the low-wage manual jobs like construction day labor that they rely on due to rising use of robots. At the same time, criminals are ramping up production and distribution of Psyke, a powerful drug made from the spinal fluid of powered people. 2.5/5 stars for stringing together some bog-standardard SFnal tropes and not doing anything innovative with them.

The 'powered people as underclass' idea is at least as old as the X-Men, when mutants became stand-ins for a variety of marginalized people in the late 20th century. SF and comics told allegorical stories about racism and classism through these fictional people, echoing similar themes in earlier written speculative fiction. Code 8 has nothing new to say in this regard and frankly seems disinterested in exploring that.

Instead, the story centers on Connor Reed (Robbie Amell) who's not only downcast for being powered, he's also the son of a powered criminal and his poor family can't afford treatment for the cancer that's visibly killing his mother. As desperate people will do, he falls in with a criminal gang and thing just go from bad to worse.

I found the movie overall depressing. Reed isn't exactly the typical "good guy among bad people". He's just less bad than one group of them, who are themselves less bad than the baddest bad guys. Even the cops aren't particularly admirable, showing themselves not only brutal tools of the oppressive state but fairly corrupt, willing to cut corners or even outright cheat to get what they want.

No one is so bad as to make the film unwatchable - they're just bad enough that I don't end up caring much about any of them. Connor's mother is probably the only good person in the film, but her role seems to be victim/motivation and although Kari Matchett does the best she can with the scenes she has, it's not enough to uplift the film as a whole.

Not entirely a waste of an afternoon, but not one I'd rewatch.

I kind of fell off the music posting bandwagon. I tend to do a standard group of DJ sets and not as much random music these days. Tabs have accumulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khpL08_O1WE
Over the past year Aron Chupa and Little Sis Nora have released several tracks. This is my favorite of them, both for the tune and the video. It has all the things I like from a modern swing track, the lyrics are fun and a little sly, and the video choreography is excellent. 5/5 stars, this one has been on my repeat play list for some time.

https://soundcloud.com/forkingandcountry/together-r3hab-remix-feat-tori
One of the commenters called this "swingstep" which is an interesting idea. It's definitely not "pop". It combines rich harmonic vocals with an uptempo beat. R3HAB worked with King & Country to do this remix of their track "Together". As with many of these things, my main complaint is that it's too short. As posted the track barely tops 2:30 and I have to believe it could easily be filled out from here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeMGF7oVJEU
I wish I could remember who suggested Harsh Armadillo to me. This ensemble hits several of my sweet spots, particularly the live funky horns, smooth vocals that draw from both older scat and modern rap stylings. They are New England local and I had been planning to try and track them down and see them live pre-COVID. Maybe that's a thing I can do now. I have to point out that this track is also an excellent example of how to mix a rich full sound without swamping out your lead vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxoZbEA7sw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV38vlz0Dq8
Been a while since I did one of these pairings. This is Solarstone's "Seven Cities". This track is popular in many of the DJ sets I listen to and has been off and on since it was first released in 1999. The original is long, high BPM, and almost frenetic. Interestingly, there's a drawn-out synth track that soars behind the speedy beats. So what if you flipped that around, and emphasized the dreamy nature of it? The second version, Tom Staar's remix, does exactly that. Gone are the high BPM and instead we get a track I think of as 'sunrise music'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei3IaJDgZGk
Violet Orlandi was also quite prolific during lockdown. She's released a string of her trademark covers, often collaborations. This cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness" is one such. Ai Mori (https://www.youtube.com/c/AiMori) a Russian cover artist brings the screaming insanity this track requires, leaving Orlandi to do what she does best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obkWmcABqsM

Thanks to Thing 2 for this one. Veela (https://www.veelamusic.com/) is a singer who has fronted for a number of artists - mostly d&b and some vocal trance. As I mentioned a while ago I'm not a huge d&b fan mostly because I find it boring. This is different - nearly an hour of rich quality vocals over energetic beats.

Another Marvel series, another disappointment. This series really felt like it had the potential to be a proper sequel to Captain America: The Winter Soldier but instead we got a muddled mess that doesn't seem to know what stories it's trying to tell, is held back by an apparent need to set up/tie in other things that will come later, and that wastes two of the finest actors in action today (Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan). (1/5 or maybe 2/5 stars).

To be clear, I do mean actors. Both men have dynamic screen presence, wide emotional range, and good dialog delivery. But they need better material to work with than this series gave them.

The series nominally tells the story of Falcon/Sam Wilson becoming Captain America/Sam Wilson. It does so in a story universe that has to contend with 21st-century systemic racism amd also is the first attempt by Marvel to grapple with the effects of the snap/blip. The series' putative enemies - the Flag Smashers - are some unfortunate mishmash of straight-up terrorist, sympathetic defenders of the downtrodden, and weirdly unsympathetic individuals.

We also have to contend with Bad Cap/John Walker/US Agent, who this series makes far more likable than his comic-book version. Apparently he's going to be around later so instead of a resolution to his arc we just get him popping in and out. And a major appearance by old villain Baron Zemo, and Wakanda makes its return in the form of Ayo, and hey there's Sharon Carter because Reasons and we need to set up her future series too.
( spoilers start here )
I like both these characters and I'm really unhappy about how badly this failed to be the story it could have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjzxX9yokrE&list=PL-x7LdqszqWrkaIla22SIblrqRH7Ipcfo

Four remixes of Chali 2na's "How We Do". I like listening to remixes when they give different takes on the same theme. Here Chali has collaborated with four different stylists to get just that.

Of the four, I think the first two are clearly the best. The first one (Krafty Kuts & Dubra Remix) does a really good job of fronting the vocals - which are what I like about Chali the most - and giving it a really electro-funk feel without getting too much into the squeeps and bleeps that annoy me.

The second one (Balkan Bump Remix) is wildly different - so much that it's hard to compare to the other three. I love Balkan Bump in general and I've never heard them take on this kind of funk before. They do a decent job but I feel like the flow and the instrumentals aren't as well blended as I'd want. Essentially, the track has to fade one out to clear space for the other.

The other two are OK, but I wouldn't blog either on its own.

Hi. I still exist and it's Passover week. Usually I post something pre-Passover. It's still my favorite holiday but I really wasn't feeling it this year. I kept thinking I'd post updates and then realizing they'd mostly be depressing so I didn't. 2020 sucked. And as we say about all Jewish holidays - they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.

Last Passover we were hoping to be out of lockdown and able to socialize for this year's Seder. Not so much. We did have Pygment's (fully vaccinated) girlfriend as guest.

This year's Seder started with me reading a passage from the Haggadah intro that talked about the kittel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kittel) a thing I'd never heard of. That prompted Pygment to go get my white lab coat (*) and me to remark: "I see we're having the silly Seder this year."

Other choice bits:
- I need someone to decolonize my Haggadah.

- Technicalities. But of course. It's Judaism so it's technicalities.

- So it starts with a kaiju frog.

- This is no such thing as immaculate liberation.

- The perfect set-up for intergenerational trauma.

- If you are without sin, you're supposed to go to Heaven. I'm so doomed.

- Rabbis made this shit up, and we admit rabbis made this shit up.

- An excuse to hang out with people I enjoy and have arguments. Yeah that's pretty much every Jewish holiday.

- Order of operations: attempt the thing, die, come back and get my corpse, try again with more planning.

We did have a pretty serious discussion about the Plagues this year, caused by Thing 2 asserting that they didn't understand why the Egyptians couldn't change their minds in the face of plagues. That Americans have just demonstrated in ample detail how resistant people can be to changing their minds in the face of an actual ongoing year-long plague was a little too on-point to ignore.


(*) What? You don't have mad scientist coats for everyone in your household? Not my fault, sorry.

Marvel's first foray into serialized television is awkward, poorly plotted, and seems to have no idea how to manage any of its characters. I waver between two and three stars for this. If it wasn't the only game of this sort playing right now I'd say skip it. If you're a fan you've probably watched it already so it doesn't matter. I can't do this without spoilers so consider not reading this or a thousand other commentaries until you've watched.

The series follows Wanda, and the surprisingly not-dead Vision, through a nine-episode story of what should be mystery. Why is he not dead? Where are they? Why sitcoms? Who is actually doing this? One of the series' main failings is that the writers seem to have no idea how to manage a mystery. We get answers in no sensible order, important points turn out to be letdowns or just dropped, reveals that aren't revealing anything, and when it's done we don't know answers to several important questions.

The series draws bits from several comic arcs, and inspiration from classic television sitcoms over several decades. Unfortunately, this pastiche doesn't lead to either a coherent storyline or feel. Marvel went to significant expense for this series, including reproducing cameras and lighting - and filming in front of a live studio audience sworn to secrecy - for the the past-era episodes. I don't think they got their money's worth.

In addition to Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany's Vision, the series brings back Kat Dennings' Darcy Lewis and Randall Park's FBI Agent Jimmy Woo. All four do a good job of filling out the characters we sort of know and giving us more about where they are now. Newcomers Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Kathryn Hahn as nosy neighbor Agnes are also great.

I can't recap the entire series so I'm going to gloss most of it and focus on the ending, which ought to have been the payoff for the whole thing and instead is just one problem after another.

We start off in the black-and-white era, with two sitcoms filmed in b&w that establish Wanda and Vision living in this weird version of sitcom life. The episodes border on creepy at times and seem to be foreshadowing something.

Eventually, we get an outside view of this, provided mostly by Monica, Darcy, and Jimmy where we learn that the town W&V live in is under some kind of bubble that will come to be called "the hex". Apparently nothing goes in or out which leads me to wonder where they get electricity or food, but handwave magic. Darcy also discovers that WandaVision is a pseudo television show being broadcast and Darcy becomes our (the audience's) stand-in, watching the show with us and asking out loud the questions we have been asking.

Probably my single biggest problem with WV is that they go to some lengths to show us that Wanda has engaged in a mass kidnapping and ongoing torture of dozens or hundreds of people. All the "residents" of their town are actual people who are under forced mind control by Wanda. We get hints that things aren't all hunky-dory and then Vision releases one of them and all he can do is scream and plead. We get plenty of evidence that this isn't an isolated case - these people are suffering and other people are suffering. Children locked in their rooms unable to sleep or use the bathroom - it's horrifying stuff.

But it's played entirely without consequence. At the end, Wanda just flies off with no one saying a word. Worse, they make Monica an apologist for her, which is a major part of why I hate the ending. More below.

My second-biggest problem is that they just don't seem to know how to plot a series. In the penultimate episode we learn that it was "Agnes all along". Agnes is Agatha Harkness, you see, a traditional ... nemesis of Wanda's from the comics. (it's complicated; sometimes they fight, sometimes she's a mentor, sometimes it's not clear.)

OK, so what EXACTLY did Agnes/Agatha do? Did she mind-control Wanda into setting up this fake reality and torturing all these people? Um, probably not? (we don't get enough information in the series to be sure.) Did she use Wanda's grief to force/trick Wanda into doing things? Again, probably not. It seems like Agnes murdered a dog and forced a random townsperson to play a fake version of Wanda's dead brother. Her goal is to steal Wanda's magic, which mostly happens by having Wanda throw magic light at her. All the lead up to that was... set up?

So let's talk about set-up. In what should be the climax, Agatha proclaims that Wanda uses chaos magic and she's the Scarlet Witch. ... That thump you heard was was the entire 'reveal' falling flat. There are two kinds of people watching this - MCU/comics fans who've known these two facts for six or more years, or newcomers for whom the phrases "chaos magic" and "Scarlet Witch" are meaningless because the show does zero to tell you what they are or why they're important. So what should be a dramatic reveal is neither dramatic nor revelatory.

And about that dead brother bit - what a giant waste. Getting the actor who played Pietro in the Fox films, and Darcy exclaiming "She re-cast her brother?!" were brilliant moves. These moves played on the common television trope of characters being re-cast in media res without even a nod to the audience, and also to the reality that Disney/Marvel now owns the rights to things like the X-Men and mutants. This could have been a great gateway, but in the end it's reduced to a stupid dick joke. Yes, literally.

More problems:
1. The writers don't seem to care about Chekhov's gun. Things are introduced early on in the series and then just dropped. For example, early on a townswoman named Dotty appears as a major figure. She seems to be controlling things and is a focal point for us realizing that things aren't at all right. Then she just disappears. Literally she doesn't appear in 5/9 episodes.

Early on, Jimmy Woo tells us that he's interested in this town because there's someone important to the FBI there. A witness is "set up" in Westview and it's this witness vanishing that gets the FBI involved. Do we find out who this witness is? Why they're important? Nope and nope. Topic dropped. Jimmy and Darcy make a big deal of tracing out who all the townspeople are by comparing who shows up in the broadcast of WandaVision with their knowledge of town residents. This all feels like it should be leading up to something important, but no.

2. The writers do not seem to know how to motivate characters. Episode 4 "We Interrupt This Program" is the best of the series. We get Monica's story through her eyes. In under five minutes we know who she is and a lot about why she's doing what she's doing. And then they seem to forget what they taught us about her, leading up to a really bad moment in the series finale.

Other characters' motivations are vague at best. Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) - the director of SWORD - suffers from what Film Crit Hulk rightly calls "Sudden Asshole Syndrome". Literally, he's an asshole out of the blue for no reason, leading to a really bad bit in the finale. We could have easily set this up but the writers either didn't care or didn't bother, or it got cut.

Even Vision gets this mistreatment. He spends much of Episode 7 figuring out that the reality is fake, but in the finale he just declares "this is our home" which he should know is untrue.

3. The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. There are so many things here that make no sense, even admitting all the whackiness of the universe and set-up. Just a few:

- Why does nobody care that Wanda has effectively tried, convicted, and imprisoned Agatha? I mean, maybe they can't stop her but I have to believe she's at least wanted for questioning. But no, nobody seems to care. La de da.

- What happened to White Vision? The "Ship of Theseus" sequence is probably my favorite of the entire series. It's so very true both to these characters and to how comics deal with hero-hero fights. Then White Vision takes off and it's "bye". Nobody seems to care? Nobody asks about it?

- Who actually started this thing? At one point Wanda says, effectively, "I can't remember how this all started." That feels like a rather important bit.

Frustratingly, every one of these things could have been handled with a 30 second scene, or a few lines of dialog. But apparently the writers don't care and think we don't either.

OK, last I want to talk about the finale because I really hate it. The biggest problem, as noted, is letting Wanda off the hook entirely for what she did. She's powerful enough that nobody could have stopped her, sure, but someone should have said something. Instead, we get Monica saying she "understands" what Wanda did. That this is a Black woman excusing a white woman's crimes is a bit on point for me, but all along we've had Monica sympathizing with Wanda and not understanding why. Yes, Monica lost her mother. Yes, Monica would have brought her mom back if she could. I get that. But we're not excusing re-creating Vision here and mostly mind-controlling him. We're talking about the crimes against the townspeople. I see no reason for anyone, let alone Monica, to be understanding of that. And making Hayward a Very Bad Person who is opposed to Wanda is also not an excuse.

The finale really mistreats Darcy. She gets one terrible line in one scene. She is the audience stand-in and should have gotten better. Oh, and we went to a lot of effort to explain how getting pulled through the hex barrier can change people, then we set up a tense scene of that happening to Darcy, and then... nothing. All fine, I guess. No need to worry.

At the climax of the prolonged episode battle, Hayward empties his gun at Wanda and Vision's children. I'm just going to let you think about that for a minute. Why? What possible motivation is there for this person to shoot at children even once? But to make things worse, the children are saved by Monica. She literally puts her body in the way of the bullets. Turns out she's OK, but could she have known that? And why is she potentially sacrificing her life to save what she knows are artificial magical constructs?

Also, apparently nobody thought it would be problematic to have a white cop empty his gun at white children and have a Black woman make a sacrifice play to save them. I have no words for how much that angers me.

The ending, like the series, had some good moments. The last interaction between Wanda and Vision is four minutes of the best part of this series. It is intimate and explanatory. It's appropriate and heartbreaking even on re-watch. I just wanted more like this and the series doesn't deliver that.

I'm not sure I can do this thing justice. Let me try - you certainly can't put rating stars on a thing like this because it's going to be some peoples' tastes and some people are going to hate it and both are likely right.

Sturgill Simpson is a ?country? music singer. I say that with question marks because although he works in that style he's made a reputation as a maverick, fighting with the big country music establishment. He's also experimented with other styles. Sound & Fury is his 4th studio album, and it's also the genesis for this Netflix ... adaptation? into an anime-based post-apocalyptic half-hour spectacle written and directed by the relatively unknown Jumpei Mizusaki.

OK, that's not working. Try this... imagine if Heavy Metal (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082509/) was remade with early-21st-century sensibilities, and stripped of all plot in favor of country metal music. Still no?

OK, one more try... imagine if the next sequel to Mad Max was made by people who grew up on Japanimation, violent video games, and country rock. Except without the plot, but keep the violence and greed and over-the-top aesthetic.

Basically, Sturgill Simpson Present Sound & Fury is a heavily thematic pastiche of visual scenes done in black and white hand-drawn, computer animation, stop-motion, and lots of anime stylings.

P.S. Definitely stick around for the post-credits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGW_jkfA6wc&ab_channel=DavidGuetta

When I mentioned his Global Top-100 DJs performance I noted that Guetta is ahead of the pack in figuring out this new artform of broadcast performance. Here he does it again. The setting is less impressive than the Louvre and you don't get the artwork visuals, but whoever is putting this piece together is clearly playing with the form. You get camera angles you wouldn't ever see in a traditional stadium show, and there are interesting video overlays.

Guetta also has it down - he's playing to the (main?) camera the way he'd play to an audience. Most of the dialog this time is in French and I can't keep up but you'll get the gist. He's talking to you, the viewer, making a kind of eye contact that, again, you wouldn't see in a live show where the performer is usually looking down from the stage at the tops of the audience's heads.

I like this form and I hope it continues when live shows come back.

And if you're just here for the music pick most any track off this set and it's good. Probably my favorite is either his mash-ups or the "Future Rave Remix" of Titanium (the last track of the set).