don’t forget to share this newsletter if you’re enjoying it and the recs. i wasn’t joking when i said we need to engage the “hype-function”: capital essentially wants us to be related to what we interact with passively — to binge watch series on netflix without really thinking, hooked on some kind of superficial pleasure. the challenge for us to start treating what we “consume” actively: to pass things on, to circulate, to add to, hack, hype… it’s the only way out…
i always feel ridiculous rec’ing things that are already very famous and well-renowned, but the sopranos really is worth it. shannon and i are watching the boxset (myself for the 2nd time), and are currently midway through season 2.
after finishing season 1, shannon said she had expected the show to be “more glamorous”, a tension or contradiction which i think actually goes right to the roots of what the show is about. indeed, it is a kind of dialectic (for lack of a better word) between Mundane and Spectacular that drives the sopranos: mafiosos meet in shopping malls and doctor’s offices; they complain about the mud when burying people they’ve killed under overpasses; and family functions double up as mob get-togethers. and this is all distilled in the character of tony soprano: the machismo, murdering mob boss, who also suffers panic attacks, bouts of depression, and trouble with his mother.
it’s this dialectic that also makes the sopranos one of the funniest television dramas out there, something that anyone who’s seen the show can attest to. a highlight of season 1 is when tony inadvertently ends up setting off a mob war because he jibes his uncle (and superior in rank) about him performing cunnilingus, which is seen as emasculating and embarrassing. (which leads to this hilarious scene.) the sopranos is constantly setting up these two levels, that of mundane family life and the shocking mob operation, and collapsing them into one another, bleeding them into one another, and it is from this release of tension that much of the show’s humour derives from. all the characters seem aware they are involved in something ultimately farcical(/tragic), constantly bemused at the situations they find themselves in, and yet ultimately powerless to stop it, because it is beyond them.
in this sense, the sopranos is massively unedifying. no character emerges with any respectability, there are no visionaries, no promises. the mob life provides no escapes, no glamour, no happiness. the Mundane, the grey concrete and tarmac of post-industrial new jersey, always pulls you back into the mud — in weird, uncanny ways that always seem beyond our comprehension, just at the edge of consciousness.
in what is rapidly hardening into a dull routinised format which will need exploding imminently, here are some other good “bits and bobs”:
after reading that article on the fall linked in #17, i listened to their 1980 album, grotesque (after the gramme) (youtube here), which is great (though as a fall fan, of course i’d say that). it strikes me as a bit more poppy or accessible compared to say, hex enduction hour, as mike e smith comes off a bit more humanistic, veering even on a cheeky chappy persona at points, which is interesting. in general though, it’s more grotesque greatness from them.
🌅 NEW SUMMER ANTHEM ALERT 🌅 credz goes to nick for reminding me to listen to tom misch and yussef dayes’ new record what kinda music, which features an early contender for 2020’s SOUND OF THE SUMMER, “last 100” (youtube linked). the song is a banger, and the album is one smooth, polished listen. if you’re looking for summer sounds, hit it up, it’s very good.
really enjoying (only 30mins in) this talk by robin mackay on the possibility of a Pop Philosophy. those who have been reading the blog the past few months will know that the promise of Pop has been a key concern for PLAYTIME for a while now, evidenced in this blog post, and mackay makes some very good points about how “philosophy” traditionally conceived is basically only possible to engage in if you’re a bourgeois aristocrat with loads of free time - so what do we make of philosophy when, from every angle, our free time is being taken from us? there’s also a good anecdote on mark fisher:
I turn here […] to something that Mark Fisher once said to me. I was bemoaning to him the fact that — we were listening to the Wu Tang Clan and I was saying, “people like us are never going to do anything as good as this.” And Mark just said, well, “we don’t come from the street, we come from the living room.” I thought that was brilliant. In a way, it kind of sums up Mark’s authenticity to who he was and where he came from. But in the current context, we also don’t come from the palace or from the Greek agora. And what does the living room mean? The living room means not being a first-hand participant in culture, and especially high culture, but being immersed in and surrounded by technologically mediated mass cultural products: TV, film, records, comics, paperbacks… We don’t come from ancient Athens or from Yan’an so, while we can have admiration for all of these historical figures, I feel like it’s our duty, if we’re not gonna be fakes, to take seriously Deleuze’s demand that we find our own way of doing it.
rep the living room!
/// next installment = saturday morning /// stay safe / share / hype/ send recs /
jake x