May 2024 Media Log
How to force yourself to write when you think you don't have anything to write about
In my late-March return announcement, I mentioned a long-standing desire to get back into writing for publication at a regular interval.1 One way to facilitate that is by picking a regular format and sticking to it. Essays about the topics that are really stirring my soul are all well and good, but the time to finish and polish them is notoriously unpredictable. So, I once again find myself thinking about the Media Log, which was a format with some set parameters.
In the Media Log, I would pick 2-3 things to write 5+ paragraphs about that I had enjoyed that month, and then I would usually also shout out some other things I liked and share reviews of the things I went into more depth about. I’m going to keep that as a guideline, but with the freedom to change things up if I want.
I’d been so focused on getting my essays on Asteroid City and Black Conflux done that I didn’t really consume new media in April and May. Or at least that’s what I thought, before I started brainstorming. Even so, I was feeling like I didn’t have much to say. But that’s the point of the exercise, is it not?2 So let’s dive in.
Your Next Great Binge
The streaming model is bad, and Netflix is one of the worst of the streamers. That being said, Formula 1: Drive to Survive is one of their best offerings. I possessed less than a zero precent interest in Formula 1 before my boyfriend started watching this show, a television documentary series about the drivers and team principals (aka the big boss) of the different F1 teams. Sure, one of my favorite movies of all time is the Wachowskis’ 2008 Speed Racer adaptation, but I didn’t think automobile racing could be that interesting when not guided by the cinematic flourishes of great action filmmakers.
Do the races in Drive to Survive take place on technicolor tracks that pop off the screen in eight dimensions? Sadly, no. If you’ve been to a local amusement park with a go-kart attraction, take your image of that tire-lined course, stretch it out, and you’ve pretty much got the idea. But while the races are obviously important, it’s the off-track personal drama that provides the real engine for the show. Every team has two starting drivers, whose relationship can range from friendly to quietly resentful to openly hostile. Drivers and team principals can get booted mid-season, and drivers seemingly love to announce that they are leaving for another team while they still have dozens of Grand Prix races with their current team to go.
You’ve also got a great cast of characters. Daniel Ricciardo is an Australian himbo for the ages. Christian Horner, AKA Mr. Ginger Spice, is not technically an aristocrat, but he is a British (derogatory) automobile racing nepo baby, which is close enough for him to be the villain.3 Lewis Hamilton is the effortlessly cool British (non-derogatory) former champion who bears the burden of being the one Black driver in the sport, Max Verstappen is the robotic Dutch current champion who absolutely does not want to be part of the show.
Truly, this show is helping me get over national stereotypes. I don’t care much for Frenchmen, but my favorite driver is Pierre Gasly, a man with one of the most French names ever. I find Germans off-putting, but my favorite team principal4 is the perpetually harried, sometimes-smiling-sometimes-scowling Guenther Steiner…who is actually Italian5. So, if you still have a Netflix subscription, give Formula 1: Drive to Survive a spin.
Link Roundup:
“You Want to Know the Real Pierre?”, Pierre Gasly writing for The Players’ Tribune
Pierre Gasly and former teammate Yuki Tsunoda being hilarious together
“How Guenther Steiner Became Formula 1’s Unlikeliest Household Name”, Scott Mitchell-Malm writing for GQ
“Netflix’s Drive to Survive is losing one of its favorite F1 personalities”, Austen Goslin writing for Polygon
Reconsideration Corner
This is a section where I’m going to discuss two works of art I previously had mixed feelings about, and the critical discussions that have made me want to revisit them.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright whose work I’ve sometimes admired more than enjoyed. He is a student of, and a deconstruct-or of, theatre history, and his first three major plays are steeped in the history of race and performance in the American theatrical tradition. Those plays are Neighbors, where an all-black family, played by black actors in blackface, move next door to an interracial family; An Octoroon, which is an adaptation-cum-deconstruction of a 19th-century anti-slavery melodrama that features blackface, redface, and whiteface; and Appropriate, a riff on the naturalistic White family drama play that tends to win acclaim. That’s the one I want to talk about.
Appropriate concerns the Lafayette family, reconvening in the crumbling Arkansas plantation home of the recently deceased patriarch. Over the course of the play, the family grapples with an unspoken history of racial violence against Black people, and it is by turns both a razor-sharp satire and a bleak, brutal drama.
I saw Appropriate in Washington, D.C., the same city where Branden Jacobs-Jenkins grew up. I grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a mere 20 miles from Jacobs-Jenkins’ Takoma neighborhood. Gaithersburg and Takoma are both known for their racial diversity. While our experience of this diversity couldn’t possibly be identical - Jacobs-Jenkins is a Black man and I am a White woman - I felt it gave us some common ground. Which is why I was so taken aback by one of the characters.
Appropriate gets going when Ainsley, a young child, finds a photo album containing lynching photographs among the Hoarders-esque clutter of the house. The adults quickly try to take control of the situation, although nobody can really agree how. Some are fixated on whether this album belonged to their dead father or not, others want to know if it’s worth anything, while others want to destroy it. The one commonality is that they want to leave the kids out of it - they don’t want to tell them what it is or why it’s there.
Ainsley’s older sister, Cassidy, is in her early teens. Like any curious teen, she wants to look at something her family doesn’t want her to see. She’s also not from here, having been educated in a Northern city. But when she does sneak a peek, she doesn’t see what the big deal is, and doesn’t seem to have any concept of what lynching is.
This moment took me out of Appropriate, and from that point on I think I stopped hearing what the play was saying. At the time I framed this issue as one of realism - it wasn’t realistic, I insisted, for this White girl from an East Coast city not to know about lynching, or know why it’s bad, or not be viscerally horrified by the photos. Did she not realize she was standing in a haunted house?6 I insisted there was something wrong with the playwright’s story because the character on stage who was most like me wasn’t acting like me.
Ten years on from that production, Appropriate is now playing on Broadway. The actor Justice Smith talked about seeing it on the pop culture podcast Keep It, and specifically talked about his experience as a Black audience member:
…it's an art piece within itself because even watching the play with a predominantly White audience, the things that the White people were laughing at and the things that me and my partner were laughing at were completely different things. Like the things that gagged us were like, oh shit. Like, that's terrible. And the White people were like, oh, we're so kooky.
In two reviews (both by White critics), there were sentences that made me sit up in my seat, made me re-contextualize the sour taste I had all those years ago:
It’s the kind of laugh line — there are also guffaws, cackles and strange gasp-giggle combos — that works because we think we know more than she does. But it’s also a stinger because, the play suggests, we may not. (link here)
In the show’s most shocking moment, a child appears wearing a Klan hood, and some in the audience erupted in laughter; others sat silent. After the uproar, I felt the house onstage settle back on its joists, its awful windows like eyes. Had it been watching us? And, if so, what had it seen? (link here)
Both reviews also let me know that the second act has been substantially re-written, and a new version of the script will be published later this year. I am looking forward to reading the new script and interrogating my defensive response from years earlier.
Stephen King is a writer you’ve probably heard of. I enjoy the worlds he builds, the fantastical nightmares he takes us to. And I especially enjoy his coming-of-age narratives7. My favorite movie is Stand By Me, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of King’s novella The Body. Though the story is about four pre-teen boys in the early 1960s, and though I had never lost a sibling, or had an abusive parent, the way these four boys struggled with friendships and the looming future spoke to me. Similarly, It’s gang of misfits, The Loser’s Club, are kids dealing with an ancient, cosmic evil, yes, but they are also kids dealing with bullies and crushes and the creeping realization that the older generation is perfectly willing to sacrifice them on the altar of comfort. Hmm. Wonder what that’s like.
Stephen King’s 2013 novel Joyland is his rare coming-of-age tale focused on someone who’s almost an adult. Devin Jones is a working-class college student, juggling classes with shifts in the cafeteria and a girlfriend who doesn’t really make time for him. He’s the kind of person who needs a summer job; she’s not. Sensing that the break-up is imminent but not wanting to deal with it, he takes a gig several states away, at a sleepy amusement park in North Carolina - the titular Joyland. The novel is set in the 1970s, and if malaise is the watchword for that decade, King bottles that essence in Devin’s monotonous days sweating it out in a dog mascot costume, and listless nights sprawled out on the bed listening to The Doors. Jim Morrison’s bluesy vocals crackling on vinyl mixes with the steady rush of ocean waves crashing and retreating. The tide, like Devin’s heartbreak, seems never-ending.
But this is a King novel after all, so naturally there is a ghost haunting one of the park rides, a serial killer who hasn’t been caught, a precocious and precognitive kid, and of course, an awkwardly written sex scene between our hero and a gorgeous woman.
When I read Joyland last year, I dismissed it as lesser King, the kind of beach read his critics accuse all his work of being. My thing with King is that I rely on the theme, the plot, or the characters, to be captivating enough to combat the King tics that get on my nerves. Joyland didn’t deliver.
The Losers’ Club is a Stephen King podcast that I adore. They cover everything King, from the books to the film adaptations to King’s bottomless appetite for tweeting. The book episodes, in my opinion, are the reason to listen. They bring a level of in-depth analysis to the text I haven’t seen anywhere else. This includes both being critical about flaws8 and being willing to give more consideration to the themes of a “lesser” King.
Their recent episode about Joyland homed in on the coming-of-age period covered in the book, noting its uniqueness in the King canon. They also looked at it as an example of how King uses nostalgia in his work. King’s approach to nostalgia tends to fall somewhere between fondly recalling the past and probing its dark underbelly. It can make you feel the joy of the Losers having free reign to run and play at the quarry, while simultaneously pointing to the parental neglect that allows the children to disappear in play - and disappear in death. 11/22/63 shows a man traveling back in time and relishing how the food tastes, the lack of internet, and a sense of small-town calm, but never lets him forget that relishing in this environment requires the subjugation of everyone who is not a White man like him.
Joyland fondly recalls the relative ease and freedom Devin and his fellow college-age co-workers have to travel several states away and live on their own for the summer. It also wrestles with how these conditions made the 1970s seemingly riper for serial murder. Joyland is rapturous in its descriptions of amusement park life and is sad that this independently owned and operated place will soon be put out of business by the Big Mouse a few states down. But nobody’s ever been murdered at Disney World.9
I have an oblong storage bin that lives in the empty space under my kitchen counter, where the sleek stools would go if I ever got around to hosting sophisticated dinner parties. I deposit all my books that I mean to get around to donating into that storage bin. That’s where my copy of Joyland was when The Losers’ Club made me want to give it a second chance. Maybe next time I’m at the beach, or on the boardwalk, I’ll take Joyland out for another ride.
Link Roundup:
Music Medley
This is just going to be some quick hits on new music, new old music, and yes, Kendrick/Drake.
Cowboy Carter was always going to be a big event for me, as an enjoyer of Beyonce and of country music. It is a considerable project, reclaiming and re-contextualizing country and Americana music’s buried Black history, with 27 tracks spanning about 78 minutes. Beyonce felt the need to take on this project after the backlash to her appearance at the 50th Country Music Association Awards, where she performed her country-zydeco song “Daddy Lessons” with The Chicks.
Watching this performance makes me teary, because Beyonce is SO JOYFUL and you can see on some of the audience members’ faces that they do not want her there.
The album is a bit too long for my taste, but to be fair to Beyonce, there’s a lot of ground to cover! From honoring Black country artists of the past like Linda Martell, to boosting modern-day alt-country Black artists like Shaboozey, to having Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton lend their hip, country bonafides, there is a lot to unpack here. I love the instrumentation, I love the different versions of Country she plays with - murder ballad, flirty country-pop, soaring gospel. Could I have predicted that the Post Malone duet, '“Levii’s Jeans”, would be my favorite song on the album? Nope - and that’s what I love about Beyonce - she’s full of surprises.
Only God Was Above Us is the fifth Vampire Weekend album, and many would say it is a return to form after their last album, Father of the Bride. I’m a contrarian who really likes Father of the Bride, but I had not realized it was essentially a solo Ezra Koenig project. So, it makes sense that Only God Was Above Us returns to the sonic pallet the band is known for - world music influence, lush orchestral riffs, and a piano line like no other. But lyrically, I would argue that Only God Was Above Us builds on Father of the Bride, which built on Modern Vampires of the City.
In Modern Vampires of the City, this brash young indie band is starting to ask questions about the meaning of life, God, and what the country is doing. “I’m not excited, but should I be? Is this the fate that half the world has planned for me?” In Father of the Bride, the band is growing up and falling in mature love, but the world is more chaotic than ever. “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.” And now on Only God Was Above Us, the band has had kids, and is thinking about not only their place in the universe, but the next generation’s place. “Too old for dyin’ young, too young to live alone; sifting through centuries for moments of your own.”
Sitting in the claustrophobic tube of airplane that is still grounded hours after it was supposed to take off10, I finally decide to listen to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan. Released in September 2023, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess builds on a slow-but-steady journey that began in 2020, although Roan’s story goes back even further to 2015. Roan was signed to a major label at just 17 years of age based on her YouTube uploads. Things did not go well. In 2020 she released “Pink Pony Club”, a synth-pop dance song celebrating gay bars and California dreaming, a song that represented the direction she wanted to go in. The label dropped her.
Let me list the things I love about Chappell Roan:
She’s the queer Carly Rae Jepsen! Readers of Bildungsroman Blitz, and anybody who knows me in real life, knows I am obsessed with Carly Rae Jepsen and her femme bops/confessionals of the cis-straight-female experience. Carly Rae says to feel your feelings, have emotions! So does Chappell, but from a decidedly queer, sapphic perspective.
She represents the working-class side of being a musician. She had to hustle with a bunch of side jobs in California, she went broke and had to move back to Missouri, where she also saved up by working in the service industry until she could go back and try again. Relatable queen!
Elaborating a little bit on the first point: what Chappell Roan shares with Carly Rae Jepsen - and also with Olivia Rodrigo, who she’s been opening for - is the ability to craft a pop song with a devastating observation about modern romance and dating.11 The two Roan songs that do this the most for me are “Casual”, which dissects the pain of a surface-level noncommittal relationship that is anything but:
Knee deep in the passenger seat, and you’re eating me out
Is it casual now?
Two weeks and your mom invites me to her house in Long Beach
Is it casual now?
And “Good Luck, Babe!”, which is a very specific song about being dumped by someone still in the closet:
You can kiss a hundred boys in bars
Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling…
…Well, good luck, babe
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
But most importantly - she’s just plain fun to watch:
A long time ago, I bought Drake Bell’s album It’s Only Time. I was, in many ways, the target demographic: I loved Nickelodeon/Drake & Josh, I loved The Beatles almost as much as Drake Bell did, and I was a sucker for a vaguely charismatic White man with a guitar or piano. See also: my old Jason Mraz/Kyle Riabko/Ben Folds CDs.
Many years later, Drake Bell is accused of grooming and sexual assault, and other abusive behaviors. This is very upsetting for me, as It’s Only Time remains a comfort album, but I believe his victims and don’t seek his new music out.
Even more years later, the documentary series Quiet on Set is released, where it is revealed that Drake Bell was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a child while working on The Amanda Show. While his abuse in no way negates any of his own abusive behavior, it does paint a fuller picture of this damaged human who really loves making music.
I feel like compassion, for me and me alone, means the potential to hold space in my heart for Drake Bell and for Drake Bell’s victims. And it’s because I know that people have the capacity to change and grow. I don’t think it’s bad to want Drake Bell to have a redemption arc - wouldn’t the world be a better place if he walked through it with care? People can be held accountable for their bad actions and still be entitled to a life. I also recognize that I have a parasocial relationship with him, one where I still see him as a very musically gifted kid my age:
I guess this is just a big preamble for me to say that I’ve been re-listening to It’s Only Time, and listening to his newer music, and you definitely don’t have to, but I find it quite beautiful.
And finally, let’s move from one former child actor named Drake with allegations of grooming to another.
I’m a White girl who grew up in the suburbs. I do not have the range to cover the complex, racialized history of hip-hop. I am going to point people to better summaries of the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef. But I will say that watching it unfold in real time was one of the most thrilling musical experiences I’ve had in recent history. I have always hated Drake specifically for his misogyny, and for his alleged interest in underage girls. But my hating has nothing on Kendrick’s, which tackles that angle, and the angles of Drake being a culture vulture, being a dead-beat Dad, and just in general being a phony, annoying dude:
Lines from Kendrick’s four diss tracks still swirl in my brain like intrusive thoughts a whole month later: AIN’T EVEN GOTTA BE DEEP I GUESS; YOU MUST BE A TERRIBLE PERSON; LEBRON, KEEP THE FAMILY AWAY; I THINK THAT OAKLAND SHOW WILL BE YOUR LAST STOP. My boyfriend got to chant “O-V-HOE” at the legendary Blue Note jazz club in New York City, where Terrace Martin, one of Kendrick’s key collaborators, was playing. 2024 is only halfway over, but I think it’s safe to say, this is the defining musical event of the year.
Link Roundup:
“Beyoncé Asks, and Answers, a Crucial Question in Her Latest Album”, Tressie McMillan Cottom writing for The New York Times
“‘When I was younger I was arrogant’: Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig on fatherhood and growing up”, Shaad D’Souza writing for The Guardian
“Chappell Roan Has Taken Over My Life: A Musical Analysis”, Eve Jones writing for The Harvard Advocate
“It’s wall-to-wall lesbians out there! But the sudden acceptance of queerness is slightly complicated”, Rebecca Shaw writing for The Guardian
“Why Drake Bell Refuses to ‘Fall Back on’ His Past ‘Traumas’ in a ‘Moment of Weakness’”, Brendan Le writing for People
Editing note from future Maddie: I started writing this in April, lol.
Additional editing note from future Maddie: next time, let’s actually get it done within the month.
He’s also possibly a sex pest, so there’s that!
Although he’s retired now. Rest well, king.
The set design for the Woolly Mammoth production specifically leaned into this, with peeling wallpaper exposing rotted wood and unsettling angles.
If it’s not obvious that I love coming-of-age stories, look at the newsletter’s title again.
Hilariously, to the point where people on the Stephen King Reddit insist that the hosts must hate King. As the hosts have pointed out on numerous occasions, why would they dedicate years of their life to a podcast about someone they allegedly hate?
That we know of. Plenty of people have died for other reasons.
Blame the giant runway at JFK International Airport.
In my notes app, there is now a brainstorming list called “Pop girlie playlist with songs that are devastating observations about love”. Stay tuned.