A piece analysing True Detective and modern TV through the lens of one exceptionally well-crafted one-take scene.
It’s as if True Detective happens in a diorama. Walking out of a coroner’s office, Cohle tells Hart, “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town. And the memory’s fading.”
Staring at this diorama like a blinking god, watching these men at a crossroads, watching their cars coursing across gray highways is Fukunaga’s camera. With the wonderful cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom, Top of the Lake), he captures the two protagonists as they are pulled toward their inevitable reckoning.
In the early episodes, this perspective has a unique power. It’s like Cohle and Hart are the only two people on earth. True Detective’s pacing mirrors Cohle’s drug use. In the first three episodes, it’s moody and ponderous, as Cohle pounds cough syrup and swallows ’ludes. But as Cohle hooks back into the “Crash” persona and meets up with his old Iron Crusaders cohort, switching to speed and coke, Fukunaga tightens the vise — the cutting gets quicker, the scenes play faster, and the camera movement goes from languid to frenetic.
An examination of the movies that are being made, and just how little originality is out there. I love this description of a scene from the movie Birdman.
“Now, in a hospital bathroom, he finds himself face to face — or really, beak to beak — with not only his own remade reflection but Birdman himself, who has, in full costume, made himself comfortable on the commode in a way that reawakens questions about certain superhero practicalities that have crossed the mind of every kid who ever read a comic book. So there they are, the two of them, taking each other in: silent, irritated, perplexed. Whatever kind of contest between Riggan and Birdman we’ve just been watching, it seems to have ended in a futile tie.
What does this moment mean? In the movie’s artistic scheme, it means Riggan can’t ever truly free himself of the needy, frail ego that his sturdy, gruff alter ego represents. But if you work in or follow the movie business, what we have here is a grim joke with a grimmer punch line: There is no escape anymore. We will never get away from Birdman, even as he threatens to poop all over everything. If movies have, for a century, been the repository of our dreams, and every generation gets the dreams it deserves, then ours is Rodin’s The Thinker reimagined as a superhero poised on the edge of the crapper, and the rest of us poised on the edge of … well, it may be a little extreme to invoke the abyss. But we’re on the edge of something, and thesomething is big and dark and annihilating. So call it what you will, but come up with a name fast, because we’re all about to get sucked in.”
I’ve spent a bit of time wondering about how, given the emerging sense that video games are an art form, we’ll start to see some interesting stuff that goes beyond the ‘games make young men violent’ trope exploring the idea that how we approach games, and in game decisions, might reveal something about our own character, and also teach us about the world around us. This is an interesting exploration about how games where you play as someone not like you, or very like you, might do different stuff for you. I’ve also read some cool stuff like the dad who watched as his four year old played GTA, just as an emergency services worker (alternatively, there’s this violent cussing grandma playing it very differently – language warning), how another guy played Skyrim committed to non-violence (there’s a whole movement of non-violent gamers, more), a guy who played Far Cry 2 as though he only had one life (then wrote a 391 page book about the experience), and a piece about a war photographer who found playing a war game hit too close to home for him when he conducting an in-game photo shoot. What’s interesting to me is the way the approach we take to games completely transforms our experience of those games – such that when people talk about how a game necessarily produces X result for all people who play it, those people are talking about games from a much more linear time, and not really understanding the medium.
But while the solitary experience of reading a book is mitigated by the ability to share it with other people (since everyone more or less experiences the same events in a book in the same order and context), the solitary experience of gaming increasingly loses the sense of being a shared experience the more choice is presented to the player; when you can choose not only whether you traverse none, some, or all of the optional side-quests, when you can choose whether or not to romance one or more of the other characters, when a vital character might die halfway through for me but live to the end for you, when even the name, race, gender, appearance, sexuality, specializations and abilities are certain to be different for every player who takes on this protean persona, a game risks exchanging an increased sense of empathy for a draining-out of the sense of community that comes from having the very same aesthetic and narrative experience as countless other experiencers out there in the world.
I’m not sure that’s a game design problem, exactly…but it’s a design decision that’s important to consider and to keep in mind, whether you’re making a game or just playing one: what does this game force me to be? About what or who does this game compel me to care? Just how far can you abstract empathy? If Hawke can be whoever you want, who actually is Hawke?
An interesting story about the persecution of Christians around the globe, but especially in the Middle East, with a pretty anthropocentric conclusion.
“Just as important is a resolute stand for the principle of religious freedom everywhere. Religious belief is fundamental to many human identities. Freedom of faith must be defended, irrespective of whether the attacks come from totalitarian atheist regimes or theocracies. For the faithful, what they believe about God is inseparable from what they understand about human beings. But God’s rights must never be allowed to trample on human rights.”
I hover between thinking the argument from fine-tuning is compelling evidence for God, and finding Douglas Adam’s sentient puddle quote a useful antidote to overreaching with the explanatory power of this kind of thing.
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
I find most of the tit-for-tat arguments around the existence of God based on natural evidence neither here nor there. The bits that show how incredibly complex the natural order of things, which I believe are naturally ordered by God, fascinate me, and reveal something to me about the nature of the God I believe in, but I feel like, if I try to unpack why I believe in God, I can see things from the other side of the fence.
I feel like science, the data it produces and our understandings of the mechanics of life in this world, will only ever support the view of the person interpreting the data. I might be wrong. But I think it’s only when we’re able to say that finding out about the universe God made doesn’t actually do anything but describe the world God has made that we can properly talk about science and God. We’re not going to find God’s signature in the mathematical improbability of our existence if we’re not looking for God, and a better place to look for God’s signature is in the way he marks the world with word and image. Jesus. His word made flesh, the man made in the image of the invisible God. And people being transformed by God into bearers of this image.
I think, when I read articles like this, and when I think about why I believe what I do, that I don’t necessarily believe in God because I’m alive, as a product of my very existence, I believe in God because I am convinced Jesus lived, died, and was raised.
At church in term 1 next year we’re experiencing the Gospel of Mark as though social media was around when Jesus was alive. Through the eyes of the characters who feature as eyewitnesses in Mark. It’s potentially going to be a lot of fun. Join in from afar. Or near.
When you think about it, very few people in this world stand and fall on their ability to stand and deliver a compelling public speech. The field narrows somewhat when you’re talking people performing largely as themselves, or under their own names (not in character). Comedians. politicians. TV and radio presenters, motivational speakers, preachers… and Professional Wrestlers. In this post I’m going to air some dirty laundry – revealing that I know more about (and think far more about) professional wrestling than I should… but bear with me.
He’s a manager (essentially paid to be a mouth piece to help people who can’t speak for themselves get over with the crowds).
In that video he’s standing next to Brock Lesnar. He’s a bona fide fighter. WWE might be ‘sports entertainment’ – but Lesnar was the UFC Heavyweight World Champion. He just can’t speak (he’s not mute, he’s just not interesting). Paul Heyman has built a career out of speaking for guys like Lesnar.
A speech, in wrestling parlance, is called a promo. Promos are up there with in ring ability when it comes to advancing WWE storylines. Here’s another Heyman special.
There’s obviously a fair bit of bombast involved in the professional wrestling world. It’s over the top. And that sets the stage, and frames the delivery. But the audience is along for the ride. Hanging off every word. Booing and cheering when they should.
They are in the palm of Heyman’s hand. What’s extra impressive is that this speech is happening in the slot a typical WWE episode reserves for the ‘main event’ – the much hyped (but usually unresolved) match between two (or more) guys who will headline the next pay-per-view. It’s prime time in this prime time programming. And instead of over-muscled, juiced-up, meatheads grappling with one another for the cursory few minutes before outside interference renders the match void (to hold the finish over until a bigger pay day), we have a speech. This “speech in the place of a fight” both is, and isn’t, unconventional. Despite ostensibly being all about wrestling the WWE is nothing without speeches. Because the WWE’s product is the stories it tells. And the stories it sells.
The WWE stands in a long and rich history of pugilistic endeavours being played out as the circus element of ‘bread and circuses.’ Cajoling an audience into cheering for the hero who is coming up against an exaggerated pantomime villain (while they hand over fists full of money) is an old formula , but it still works. The WWE is big business. And it relies on guys like Heyman (and the more articulate wrestlers – like Chris Jericho, pictured above) to sell tickets and move merchandise by telling compelling stories that the audience buys in to – with their money, their voices, and their emotions.
There’s some really nice writing underpinning this second Heyman speech – the building of intensity with a nice use of cadence and the escalating repetition in the paragraph quoted below which works because of the punchiness of the verbs, and the way they’re doing the heavy lifting when it comes to advancing the storyline.
If you want to overthink wrestling – Grantland’s Masked Man is a stunningly interesting commentator and historian on the phenomenon of professional wrestling. His book The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling is worth a read to get a handle on this quirky corner of the entertainment world. The Masked Man spends a few thousand words explaining why these promos from Paul Heyman are the archetypal pieces of wrestling oratory, there’s something nice, for instance, in the way Heyman plays with the fourth wall (in wrestling this is called ‘Kayfabe’) he mixes truths about wrestling and its fakery/scriptedness with fiction, and even with a bit of a hat tip to exactly what it is he’s doing as he speaks…
“I don’t just stand out here and spew hype and hyperbole; I exploit historical facts to shove my points down your throats. To wit, I offer you what happened the last time my client Brock Lesnar zeroed in on someone and decided to give them a beating.”
This para throws to a video clip of Lesnar’s very surprising (and totally scripted) win over the indomitable Undertaker at Wrestlemania. It’s driving the storyline towards the next pay per view, where Lesnar won’t be facing the WWE’s perennial pin-up boy, John Cena. Lesnar is a part timer. The time allowed for his stories to get traction with the audience is contracted, Heyman’s job is to throw fuel on the fire – giving the story significance as quickly as possible.
“At SummerSlam my client Brock Lesnar will take John Cena down. Brock Lesnar will punch John Cena’s face in. John Cena, you’re going to be hurt by Brock Lesnar. Brock Lesnar’s going to injure John Cena. Brock Lesnar is going to mangle John Cena. And then, and only then, Brock Lesnar is going to F-5 John Cena and strip John Cena of the dignity of being the WWE World Heavyweight Champion, the same way Brock Lesnar stripped the Undertaker of his dignity and exposed the streak as just being a myth — the same myth that Brock Lesnar hears every week on television when John Cena is referred to as being the greatest WWE Champion of all time. Fifteen world titles in 10 years: Now that sounds like something worth conquering.”
So. I contend. There is much that preachers can learn, should we so choose, from the WWE. I’m not suggesting we ditch church and start up Christian Wrestling Federations (as some are in the habit of doing), or that we recruit preachers from the ranks of the WWE (a road surprisingly well-travelled – hall-of-famers Ted DiBiase and Shawn Michaels are engaged in various preaching gigs). When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about the flashy orators he wasn’t going to be like as a guy preaching about the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s likely the flashy orators he had in mind were oiled up guys who shaved their chests after spending too long in the gym… but it’s also fair to say Paul’s writings and the records of his speeches suggest a fairly sophisticated understanding of the guys he positioned his approach against… his opponents… the ‘heels’ (wrestling term for bad guys) to his ‘face’…
… And, if you want to get really technical with the wrestling stuff – Paul had a pretty massive ‘face turn’ – where Acts positions him as one of the worst of the bad guys – a Pharisee shooting up the ranks, and then depicts his conversion into the leader of the Gentile church. Paul’s biography is the stuff wrestling promoters have been copying for years. But I digress…
I’m also fairly convinced that Paul knew about oratory, that he learned from orators, and as a result (and because he was also being led by God) he was able to present the story of Jesus in a bunch of compelling ways that varied depending on his audience (as you see in Acts). And so I’m convinced that we, like Paul, should be looking around at people who are telling stories in ways people find compelling in our day and age. I’m not an expert preacher – and I’m so not experty that I’m prepared to learn from anyone who might help.
1. Understand your audience(s)
Wrestlers know they can get the crowd on side (if they’re good guys) or off side (if they’re bad guys) with a quick bit of contextualisation. If you’re a good guy you know who the local sporting teams are, you give them a shout out, you praise the town, and you get a ‘cheap pop.’ If you’re the bad guy you insult the town, insult the sporting heroes, and you get ‘cheap heat’… but there are more audiences to consider at every event. The beauty of Heyman’s speeches are that they play to the ‘cheap heat’ stuff, while also tapping into the genuine loathing of John Cena amidst the fans who consider themselves ‘insiders’ – people who see past the surface level fakery of wrestling and still choose to invest themselves in the WWE universe. Heyman nailed his appeal to these guys, because he understood their language and their disposition, and spoke to them.
There’s something in this for preachers – not just in reaching sub-cultures via their idiosyncrasies, but also in knowing what your audience is expecting from you and choosing to either deliver on expectations or subvert/exceed them. I like the idea that preaching needs to be sufficiently local that the people who you are preaching to feel like you’re speaking to them, especially if they’ve never heard preaching before, but also rich enough that people who think they know how preaching works are surprised by what you’re doing with a genre of communication they believe they’re familiar with.
2. Tell a story that connects the audience to something bigger (than you, and them).
The really good wrestlers – the ones that get big and headline big events – are the ones who’ve managed to achieve something like wrestling transcendence. Historically, these are the guys that non-wrestling crowds recognise. They get into movies or reality TV. They start movements of fans who influence the writing of the shows (most recently an anti-hero named Daniel Bryan managed to get so popular with the fans that he became WWE World Champion). They do this by capturing the imagination, by being relatable, and by including the fans in their stories. Incidentally, the WWE has poured bucket loads of money into building a presence online, especially on social media. It’s not uncommon for WWE storylines to be trending on Twitter, and for the Twitter stuff to become part of the storyline. WWE has democratised its product, giving certain amounts of control (or the illusion of control) to its fans. The more enfranchised the fans feel, the more connected to the process, the more they feel involved in the stories, the more they invest themselves into what’s going on. Emotionally, and, more importantly for the WWE, financially. Fans identify with wrestlers in these storylines – and they buy the T-Shirt to prove it…
There’s something about the power of the good v evil story that wrestling tells over and over again that gets the audience engaged. And you know who has a better good v evil story to tell than professional wrestlers? Christian preachers. We have a big story, our preaching should always connect to it, or we’re telling small stories that might move some people, but will (if the wrestling world is any reflection on reality) be a flash in the pan. There are plenty of wrestlers who didn’t cut it because their stories never became significant, multi-episode, entities, and as a result never reached the stage of including or exciting the audience.Sometimes I feel like I’m so caught up in the facts of the Gospel story that I forget how much the story is my story, and is also the story I’m inviting every body listening to belong to. Christianity is about more than buying a T-Shirt that says ‘Team Jesus’ – but the story is so compelling it can produce radical transformation to those who become part of it.
3. Play to the emotions (not just the head)
Part of the whole story-telling to get buy in thing involves moving the audience to cheer for the good guys (or the smart audiences to cheer for the bad guys), and boo the bad guys. Listen to the crowd in the Heyman speeches, watch the faces of the kids (and adults) in the crowd when their favourite wrestler loses a match, and you’ll see the real emotional connection people make with these wrestlers through these stories. Here’s a photo of the crowd response to the Undertaker losing to Brock Lesnar (before that he’d been 21-0 at Wrestlemania).
The thing about preaching is that we want people to be making an emotional connection like this – but not with us. With Jesus. I think we want to move people’s emotions, but we want our emotions to be moving in the same way. There’s a Cicero quote about his desire to never producing an emotional response in his audience that he didn’t feel himself first. Which is a good rule of thumb (or voice).
The great thing about preaching about Jesus is that we’re not the main event, we’re the fans who help shape the story of our hero as we tell people about him and participate in his victory. We feel emotions (or we should) when we’re talking about Jesus like those kid fans do. This means we’re in a position to deal in the emotional space with real authenticity. Unlike in the fake world of professional wrestling.
All too often I’ve found myself avoiding dealing in the emotional space. I think this is often because I forget I’m the kid in the stands and think I’m a vital piece of the show – where the pressure is on me to deliver. It’s not. Jesus wins the cosmic wrestling match. We cheer. We know the outcome. We wince with every blow now, as the bout carries on. But his victory is assured and we share the spoils. We will experience the emotional highs of victory. Our emotions need to ride this rollercoaster for us to really appreciate the story, and for us to really tell it. I think part of my inability to engage the emotions as I preach is, in part, because I’m worried that being emotional makes the story (or my preaching) about me. The nice thing about remembering that preaching is telling Jesus’ story (that it’s not about me at all) is that it frees me to respond emotionally as I tell it. I can be the fan who feels like my fate is caught up with the guy I’m cheering for – because it is.
4. Understand your character (and your role)
Using Paul Heyman as the example driving this piece is interesting because he’s not a conventional wrestling orator, by today’s standards. Most wrestlers do their own talking, and their success (in the ring, and out of it) depends as much on their ability to tell a story as it does on their in ring prowess. In fact. Because wrestling is scripted – even the stuff in the ring – wrestlers are judged on their ability to ‘sell’ the in ring action as well. They have to be able to tell a compelling story with everything they do. They have to be part of the story.
Every wrestling character has a role to play. And the story – like a piece of theatre – depends on them playing that role. These stories don’t work if everyone wants to be the good guy, or if everybody wants to be in the spotlight. In the normal wrestling equation there can only be one hero.
Heyman has made a career out of shining the spotlight on others (sort of, he’s never far from it, or from controversy). Even when he’s focusing the spotlight on others he is in your face and part of the main event. Preachers need to know our role in the story of the Gospel. It’s not about us, but we do have a part to play – as do the people we’re speaking to. The pull to make myself the star of the show is something I’m constantly aware of – partly because I like being the centre of attention, partly because sometimes I believe I should be…
5. Don’t write cheques with your mouth that your body can’t cash.
One of the enduring truths about wrestling – even with its occasional David v Goliath underdog victory – is that if you’re going to run your mouth, you need to match it up with action. There’s a stereotypical heel character who runs his mouth, and then runs away (or relies on underhanded tactics to get cheap victories). These are probably the least popular bad guys. The lowest of the low. The really famous wrestlers – guys like Steve Austin, The Rock, Hulk Hogan – they were able to deliver on the mic, and believably back up the talk with action.
There’s something in this for preachers. Wrestlers can’t live by anything that looks like “win the match, where necessary use fists” any more than preachers can “preach the Gospel, when necessary use words” – but both words and actions are necessary for in ring and in pulpit success. It’s a credibility thing as much as an authenticity thing. For compelling wrestling, and compelling preaching, words need to meet deeds with sublime consistency.
6. Be different.
Wrestlers don’t get attention by copying the gimmicks of those who have gone before. They might borrow the occasional move, in tribute to past greats, or to align themselves with wrestling lore and history. But originality is important. Finding a balance between imitating the people worth imitating and developing your own voice on the mic, and moves in the ring, is part of winning the crowd and influencing people. The really fun wrestlers know what the mould looks like but choose to break it. They innovate on the mic, they innovate in the ring. They figure out what sort of unique contribution they can make, and what sort of unique stories this enables them to tell.
I think this is true in preaching too. There’s a massive temptation the more other preachers move sets and voices dominate the podcast airwaves to borrow too much. To be a clone. That might work on a local scene where nobody has heard of the big famous guy, but it doesn’t work when everybody else listens to the same guy you’re imitating. People can spot fakes who are faking it in a fake world, I think it’s probably more damaging if you’re caught faking it in the real world. I heard some advice once, I forget who it was from, that preachers who are just starting out should listen to as many preachers as they possibly can, rather than just a hero. There’s something insightful in that. But I’d rather figure out what it looks like for me to preach as me, than for me to preach as a pastiche of my favourite preaching heroes.
7. Practice on the ‘indie’ scene
Practice makes perfect. There’s that (potentially debunked) Malcolm Gladwell theory about 10,000 hours being required to master something, and this could well be true for wrestlers. The best wrestlers hone their skills for years in small halls, regional promotions, wrestling has beens (ala Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler) and wannabes until they get noticed. This is the ‘indie’ scene. It’s where the guys who have tasted success in the WWE in more recent years have cut their teeth. Especially the ‘original’ guys – not the carbon copy muscular supermen who can’t string sentences together but look tough in speedos so experience a certain degree of success naturally guys – but the guys who tell unique and different stories. Guys like CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, and Dean Ambrose (guys the Masked Man and other internet commentators write about with a certain degree of admiration bordering on obsession – see, for example, this treatment of the rise of Daniel Bryan).
I suspect part of finding your voice is using it. As much as possible. Wherever possible. To whoever possible. And getting a sense of what flies and what doesn’t. I don’t know what this looks like when it comes to training for preachers in this day and age, but I certainly haven’t racked up 10,000 hours of preaching (even with the equation including prep + delivery). That’s a 10 year project, assuming one preaches every week for 48 weeks of the year and takes 20-25 hours to prepare and deliver a sermon. So I’m comfortable that it’s going to be quite a while before I feel like I shouldn’t be preaching to 12 people in a dank school hall.
8. Always stay in character
The line between in-show character and real life person/actor is pretty blurry when it comes to your typical WWE superstar. The world of ‘kayfabe‘ means wrestlers are meant to only ever appear in public in character. Personas in tact. This is doubly true for what happens during a show – the wikipedia article on ‘breaking’ (which Jimmy Fallon was hilariously notorious for on Saturday Night Live) has its own special section reserved for professional wrestling.
It’s as important for my preaching as for the success of a wrestler committed to ‘the business’ that I stay in character. The difference between wrestling and preaching is that preaching isn’t fake. I am my character. I perform under my own name – for Jesus’ name. I don’t perform under a stage name for a multi-billion dollar company that depends on my ability to uphold an act. As a preacher I genuinely want everything I do to be telling the story of Jesus. In the pulpit or at home with my kids when visitors pop in. Christianity is part of who I am. I am part of the story of Jesus in every sphere, there is no room for breaking for the preacher (that’s not to say there isn’t room for stuffing up – part of the great news of the Gospel is that God forgives sinners like me through Jesus’ victory).
9. Try not to gasp
Because somebody might do this to you. And that would be bad.
Muse has a new album out. It’s better than I expected given the dub step promo, and a couple of songs at the end of the album where Bass player Chris becomes front man show that Matt Bellamy is the reason that Muse isn’t Nickelback… The middle half is the best.
Muse can be accused of taking themselves too seriously, or parodying those who take themselves too seriously – one can’t really tell, except that they do some pretty funny stuff like this position switch when told they have to lip sync for live TV:
What other pieces of musical criticism open with a paragraph like this:
We all know that the media has been decentralized in the past three decades and the audience has been carved up among countless, niche-oriented platforms. From a consumer perspective, this is mostly a big improvement. If it were still the bad old days, you wouldn’t be checking this website for pop culture coverage, because it wouldn’t exist. Instead, you’d be stuck with the lifestyle section of your local newspaper and forcing yourself to be interested in a story about Halloween decorating tips. The future is now, and it’s much more readable.
Which leads, a little later to this:
Looking ahead, it’s generally assumed that culture will continue to break down into an infinite series of hyper-specific subsets with finely detailed points of demarcation between micro-genres. But I wonder if we’re actually headed in the opposite direction, where genres will become so jumbled in our heads that they will cease to have meaning as distinctively different properties. Maybe all forms of pop music in the future will basically sound like the same nonsensical mess operating on its own sense of bizarre yet unerring inner logic; the only differences will be the headgear and footwear of the performers.
And then the Muse=Radiohead meme gets pulled out, and pantsed…
“Muse is a British trio that has been putting out records since the late ’90s and can be credibly called one of the world’s most popular rock bands. Critics frequently compare Muse to Radiohead and Queen, because front man Matthew Bellamy sings a lot like Thom Yorke, and the band affects a mock-orchestral grandiosity that borders on camp. But for the most part these comparisons are reductive; lazy writers decided these were Muse’s most appropriate reference points in 2003 and haven’t paid close enough attention since then to update them.”
And…
“Bellamy has describedThe 2nd Law as a “Christian gangsta-rap jazz odyssey, with some ambient rebellious dubstep and face-melting metal flamenco cowboy psychedelia.” Actually, it’s a lot more convoluted than that. “Panic Station” is like an outtake from an unreleased Rush album from 1986 produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, except really odd. The torch-y balladry of “Explorers” imagines a scenario in which Celine Dion performs Jeff Buckley’s Grace in its entirety while riding a flaming seahorse through downtown Las Vegas. The very pretty “Save Me,” one of two songs sung by bassist Christopher Wolstenholme, dials it back a bit, crossbreeding Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song” with the opening track from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity.
This probably sounds awful, and some of The 2nd Law is exactly that. I consider myself a Muse fan, but I’d never argue this band gets it right most of the time. I find that the idea of Muse is often more enjoyable than Muse’s music.”
This isn’t all of it. Read the article. Grantland’s Steven Hyden pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about every Muse album since Absolution.
One-third of Muse songs are unlistenable, another third are merely ridiculous, and the final third are stupidly exhilarating.
Have you listened to The 2nd Law? What did you think?
Grantland is firmly established as my favourite blog. Even if 90% of its content covers American sport, it’s just filled with the kind of writing I aspire to.
Here are some recent samples of Grantland writing that you should most definitely flick through. This seems as good an opportunity as any to put a new tweet-a-pull-quote plugin I’m trying.
“Over the past 20 years, there have been five bands totally acceptable to hate reflexively (and by “totally acceptable,” I mean that the casual hater wouldn’t even have to provide a justification — he or she could just openly hate them and no one would question why). The first of these five acts was Bush (who, bizarrely and predictably, was opening for Nickelback that very night). The second was Hootie and the Blowfish, perhaps the only group ever marginalized by an episode of Friends. The third was Limp Bizkit, who kind of got off on it. Obviously, the last two were Creed and Nickelback. The collective animosity toward these five artists far outweighs their multiplatinum success; if you anthologized the three best songs from each of these respective groups, you’d have an outstanding 15-track album that people would bury in their backyards.”
“The day before the New York show, Kroeger appeared on a Philadelphia radio station and was asked (of course) why people hate Nickelback so vehemently. “Because we’re not hipsters,” he replied. It’s a reasonable answer, but not really accurate — the only thing hipsters unilaterally loathe is other hipsters, so Nickelback’s shorthaired unhipness should theoretically play to their advantage.[pq]A better answer as to why people dislike Nickelback is tautological: They hate them because they hate them[/pq]. Sometimes it’s fun to hate things arbitrarily “
“I boarded the Jockey Club elevator with a group of filthy-shoed men I assumed were from California; they headed to the Winner’s Circle, I headed back to the proletariat. They were staid and dignified. One of them shot his cuffs and adjusted his tie, ready for his picture. Just another day at the office.
The elevator opened and dumped us out into the throng. People were lining up at the windows to cash their tickets and collect the $1.20 in winnings that Secret Circle paid on a $2 bet. It was nowhere near the six figures that Secret Circle’s connections had won, but these fans were high-fiving and back-slapping like their ship had come in. Perhaps my dad was right. Having a winner was fun, even if everyone else in the track had it, too. I pulled my tip sheet from my jacket pocket and unfolded it. Disgusted, I read the words Secret Circle — BEST BET!”
“The insane advertising and development costs of the Harry Potter–style franchises we consistently reward at the box office have turned studio heads into marketers trying to find audiences big enough — i.e., young enough and male enough — to justify the cost of movies whose budgets routinely exceed $200 million. At that kind of rarified airspace, in which the marketing budget amounts to as much as half or more of whatever is spent on the actual film, you need a sure thing,like a toy, or a preexisting brand; [pq]auteur types and people with new, unproven ideas are dangerous and threaten the bottom line.[/pq] Better to just make a movie called Candy Land starring Adam Sandler and pray that people remember that a board game of the same name once existed.”
“Throughout his early life he’d been consumed, Valdés had, by the fear of failure and compulsive perfectionism that tend to haunt top goalkeepers.”The mere thought of next Sunday’s game horrified me,” he has said. And: “[pq]Playing in goal was, to put it mildly, a special kind of suffering…[/pq]
For Guardiola, joy was also instrumental. He had realized that, in order to play the game the way he wanted, his players would need to be tuned in a certain way, that it would require a kind of psychic generosity for them to read one another well enough to move in the perfect tandem he envisioned, and that even the goalkeeper had to be part of that, which, odds were, would be impossible if the goalkeeper were sealed in a self-created hell. “Have fun,” the way Guardiola said it, was a cliché, and a profound statement about the nature of the game, and a tactical manipulation as fussily meticulous as the kind that used to torment Victor Valdés.”
“Back in the 1920s, there was a wrestling stable called the Gold Dust Trio. They were the most powerful group in pro wrestling’s fist heyday, and they helped mold the sport into its modern form. The Trio’s members were Ed “Strangler” Lewis, the champion; Billy Sandow, the businessman; and Toots Mondt, the enforcer and, more important, the wrestling visionary.
Prior to the Trio’s ascendance, wrestling mostly took place on fairgrounds and in vaudeville halls. It was, more or less, real. According to legend, grapplers would travel from territory to territory, taking on local tough guys, and if the wrestler began to feel overmatched, he would wrangle his opponent back against the curtain at the rear of the stage, where an accomplice would clock the local with a blackjack, unbeknownst to the audience.
The subsequent era of higher-profile, “championship” matches had its share of fixed bouts, but they contributed to a more fascinating reality. The Gold Dust Trio would change everything. Sandow hired Mondt to be Lewis’s sparring partner and enforcer; Mondt would take on opponents before they got in the ring with Lewis to make sure they were “worthy” foes, but in reality, he would soften them up for his colleague. Then, when wrestling audiences started to dwindle, Mondt conceived of a new style that combined Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling with brawling and boxing.”
There you go. If you’re not persuaded now, you never will be…
is worth a read to get a handle on this quirky corner of the entertainment world. The Masked Man 