After all he's just a man
The ninth periodic Tropical Depression digest post
Here’s your ninth periodic digest post reviewing the last few entries and tossing in some recommendations, tidbits, etc.
I have a soft spot for teen-oriented genre television that puts gratuitous effort into character, story, humor, and vibe. Or I don’t know if that’s true across the board, but Veronica Mars is one of my all-time favorite shows.
For the first time in ages, I found a show that scratches that itch—American Born Chinese. Its epic story is filtered through recognizable high-school angst, in the manner of Veronica Mars, and like Mars it has a humane, observational care in its depiction of classic archetypes. The genre lens in this case is mystical kung-fu.
The show is highly self-aware about the representation of Asian Americans in the media, so I will just readily admit to the faux pas that I am about to make, but the visual whimsy and storytelling style shares some of the flavor of Everything Everywhere All at Once (and shares cast members, too, with Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan).
These issues of representation and Asian American experience are dealt with forthrightly, and I suppose didactically at times. But I found these depictions to be, again, humane—and nuanced, with as many questions as answers. In filtering these complications about identity through the perspective of teenage uncertainty, they had a refreshingly clumsy and open quality. Instead of lectures, they felt experiential—human beings doing their best, stumbling through.
The fantasy elements are rich and weird, with some adventurous meta fun with the medium of episodic television. For me this was kind of a sweet spot for the potential of Disney+: family entertainment with kind of a 1980s storytelling style, modern sensibility, good performances, fun gags, hammy entertainment, page-turner narrative, teeny-bop emotive drama.
I watched with my daughter. At first she didn’t really know what was going on. She was pretty skeptical as things got confusing—and I was slow to answer her constant questions because I was immersed in the show myself. Also, my daughter just turned six and is pretty clearly too young for this show. But I don’t subscribe to the idea of “age appropriate” entertainment. For me, the marker should be quality, and I will brutally pressure Marigold to keep going with a vaguely family-oriented show if I actually enjoy it for once.
After not too long she dug it, or at least dug watching it with me. We watched a whole season over the course of two days, a sort of binge-watching I haven’t done in years because it’s basically impossible as a parent. I’m not going to say it’s a classic, but we got a kick out of it. Recommended.
It’s been a hectic month, which is part of the reason for slow posting of late (the other reason is I’m working on some longer posts that are taking more research/writing; the third reason, alas, is I just couldn’t find the same mojo in my substacking time windows).
We moved my mom down from Nashville to Fort Myers earlier this month, completing a plan we first hatched when we were in Jersey City and my dad was still alive. It was her birthday on Saturday—she’s 74. It’s not easy, adjusting to a new place at that age, or any age, really. She had a writing group in Nashville that she loved. I’m hoping she can start one here. It is nice to write things down, and share it with others.
It was also my daughter’s birthday this month, and mine. “This is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations,” Moses told the Lord. So there’s that.
My wife’s grandmother passed away amidst all these birthdays. I called her Granny, upon instruction, as everyone did. She was, maybe, 91. She lied about her age, to the very end. One time she visited us in New Orleans and we took her dancing at the Spotted Cat. She pulled me up to the bar, and I wish I could remember what she said. It was something about love, relationships, dancing, being young, getting old. The gist was, she told me to have fun.
When we were moving my mom in to her assisted living facility here, I was taking boxes out to the recycling dumpster and struck up a conversation with a Caribbean woman who worked in the dining room. I told her how we were getting my mom settled.
“This is the life,” she said. “Today it’s hers. Tomorrow it’s yours.”
In honor of the June birthdays, here’s a special discount for 20% off a yearly subscription to Tropical Depression. If you’re currently subscribing for free or haven’t subscribed, this is the best way to support my work and will make my birthday an especially happy one. Offer good until the end of June!
I’ve got a mixtape coming this week to share with y’all, but here’s a lagniappe in the meantime: The masterful DJ KCJ was kind enough to make a special mix for my birthday, featuring cameos in the interludes from my children! It’s fantastic, give it a spin (you can check out more of his mixes here—I highly recommend his work).
Recent posts
Wednesday, May 31
Too-good-to-check tales from the Alabama swamp.
Thursday, June 1
And there is nothing hidden from its heat
On Jimmy Butler: A good dog; a bad dog; a dog.
Friday, June 23
Honky-Tonk Weekly #11: Jimmie Dale Gilmore, “Braver Newer World”
Eleventh edition of a weekly column here at Tropical Depression. Every week, I listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. This week, we’re spinning round and round and round and round with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Featuring psychedelic adventures, the annihilation of the self, rebirth, and mixed feelings on discursive thought.
Vibrations from behind the Iron Curtain
Slovenian band Pankrti, formed in the 1970s, was one of the best known Yugoslavian punk bands (they liked to bill themselves as the first punk band from behind the Iron Curtain). They have a distinctly UK ’77 kind of sound. This 1982 song, “Za železno zaveso” (which translates to “Behind The Iron Curtain”) is a slayer.
According to a translation I found on the internet, here’s a rough English translation of the lyrics, which honestly seem more evocative to me than anything Johnny Rotten came up with:
Old women behind the Iron Curtain
Pulling red beets
Darkness falls on the Iron Curtain
Beets for breakfast, beets for lunch, beets for dinner
The Iron Curtain reaches the sky
We drown in red beets, and patch up holes in the Iron Curtain
Shit is made from red beets
We break off rust from the Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain hides in the darkness
Even dead horses cannot go to heaven behind the Iron Curtain
Yoko
Here’s a very provocative 1972 essay by Yoko Ono. Maybe it’s famous but it was new to me. She was such a profoundly off-kilter creative force and a fresh, vivacious thinker—she was like a playful prophet, cooler and more daring than Warhol, a Delphic scribe on the strangeness of the culture. Pity that she got sidetracked by her relationship with the member of the boy band unfortunately marketed as wise. Her overall artistic output went downhill after she teamed up with him, in my opinion. But she was still a wonder.
When I saw a retrospective on Ono’s work a some years back—and saw what I viewed as a crude souring to much of her work once she began collaborating with her husband—I thought to myself, the Beatles broke up the Yoko! I thought this was a good line, but the blues writer Robert Palmer got there first, sort of. In the liner notes to the six-hour CD box set Onobox, released in 1992, Palmer wrote that “having John Lennon fall in love with her was the worst thing that could have happened to Yoko Ono’s career as an artist.”
That’s the kind of perfectly provocative statement that’s almost too pithy to be true. She was married to Lennon when she wrote this essay, of course. I guess for me there was something more playful in her early artwork, more wide open and curious. The instructions, or “scores,” for potential artworks from her 1964 book Grapefruit have always stuck with me—little stabs of imagination and invitation long before she became a kind of ghostly icon.
On craft
Perfectly structured lead1 from this recent AP story:
A New York fertility doctor who was accused of using his own sperm to impregnate several patients died over the weekend when the hand-built airplane he was in fell apart mid-flight and crashed, authorities said.
Know by that—something on my mind
My favorite performance of one of the best songs ever about clandestine loving—from the Alan Lomax archive, R.L. Burnside at his home in Independence, Mississippi, 1978:
IMHO
Recommended: a very solid Turkish psych song from 1974; a piece by Rachel Glaser in The Paris Review on her love of NBA playoff basketball; a takedown in the art reviews that nods to a better way; an addictive sci-fi tv show; a poem; a short story; a history book; a novel.
Every picture tells a story
One thing you could say about the history of rock & roll, perhaps, is that Rod Stewart wanted to be Tina Turner and Tina Turner wanted to be Rod Stewart.
Don’t stop to count the years
To take us out, here’s John Prine singing “Sam Stone,” I believe around 1971.
As we’ve noted before, the Tropical Depression style guide does not recognize the abomination “lede,” which is less a word than a shibboleth to the saddest of clubs.
Happy birthday to you both!