This Week, Get Wild with:
- a kinky master
- a forgotten film
- a chaotic queen
- an empty wasteland
- all you tie-dyed buddies!
Thanks to FAR Phanatic C.M. Crockford for contributing this week! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Familiar face C.M. Crockford writes at Strange Matters about the increasing relevance of the queer, kinky love in the work of David Cronenberg:
Over the course of nearly two dozen feature films, Cronenberg has evolved as steadily as Seth Brundle or Saul Tenser, moving out of psychological determinism and towards existentialism. He is ever fascinated by what we mean to one another, by monogamy and non-monogamy, sexual jealousy, fluidity, and whether those connections weaken if one party literally becomes someone – or something – else entirely. His portrayals of relationships cloaked in BDSM, casual affairs, and fragmented identities have become increasingly mainstream. 21st-century North American twenty- and thirty-somethings cope with increasing isolation while simultaneously engaging with virtual spaces, kink, polyamorous relationships, queerness, asexual orientations, and many different forms of intimacy from what their parents shared. Love isn’t dead, but in a Cronenbergian era, it has interesting, even exciting new organs and growths.
At Vulture, Gayle Sequeira spotlights the free website Rarefilmm the self-proclaimed “cave of forgotten films”:
To give you an idea of the site’s range, its many obscurities include a 1983 doc exploring sex and intimacy in the disabled community, a TV drama starring a 15-year-old Adrien Brody, and a 1972 Italian Tarzan knockoff called — what else? — Karzan, Jungle Lord. Rarefilmm is perfect for anyone who wants to know more about Peplum, the subgenre of Italian mythological and historical epics, or get into Eurospy, the ’60s films and parodies that cashed in on the popularity of James Bond, or any other highly specific subgenres of the visual past. Whitehead was inspired to launch it after stumbling onto rare and little-known films on invite-only online forums. “I started looking for a blog that was posting them, and I couldn’t find anything,” he explains. “I thought, Why not share all these beautiful and unknown movies with the world instead of gatekeeping them?”
For The A.V. Club, Manuel Betancourt touts Kaitlin Olson as “the queen of chaotic comedy”:
Although a very different project, that kernel of what Olson can bring to a character is on display in High Potential. […] Olson’s many signature moves are here: the self-serving and -sufficient attitude, the lack of regard for authority, the quick and biting wit, the grating and oft-off-putting demeanor, and even that outrageous and provocative style. But it’s funneled into a network procedural which feels both like an unusual fit and yet a welcome gamble. (Hopefully, she’ll garner a swath of new fans eager to dive deep into the Olson catalog, which is remarkably robust and captures an always entrancing, unpredictable brand of humor.)
James Ball looks into the question of how long it would take to discover you’re the last human left online at Prospect:
The idea began to gain traction almost a decade ago, with the “time of death” of the internet typically given as being around 2015 or 2016—but in the years since, reality has begun to mirror this once unserious conspiracy. The complaint of the modern internet is that it is filled with “slop” content, the spiritual successor to email spam. Low-quality content—such as trashy viral images or regurgitated news articles—created by artificial intelligence is filling up social media, search results and anywhere else you might look. But while junk memes are near impossible to avoid, they are just the most visible sign of the AI detritus that is coming to dominate our online worlds.
And Rolling Stone‘s Alex Scordelis looks into the phenomenon of Grateful Dead nights at major league baseball parks:
The Dead’s long, strange trip to the heart of baseball started on MLB’s Opening Day in 1993. On that occasion, Garcia, Bob Weir, and Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick belted out the national anthem at Candlestick Park, the Giants’ former stadium. As a young baseball fan in the Bay Area, I remember that Garcia, Weir, and Welnick singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” was divisive. In the early 1990s, a large chunk of baseball’s fan base were from the Greatest Generation, a demographic that didn’t exactly vibe with hippies. “It was divisive amongst the Deadheads, too,” Trixie says of the ’93 anthem performance. “It was like, ‘Oh, are they doing stuff for the man now?’” But Garcia, Weir, and Welnick electrified the crowd — Deadheads and squares alike — with their a cappella performance. “It’s two very American things coming together,” Trixie says of baseball and the Grateful Dead.