The not-so lazy days of summer

Movie, book & music recommendations

Now that I’ve been home for a few weeks I’ve settled into my summer routine. The weather is famously mild in San Diego but we live in a condo on the second floor without air conditioning. The day revolves around keeping the house cool, opening all the windows in the morning, closing the curtains against the sun, and knowing when to get the hell out. We eat lots of fruit and salads during the day, exercise in the evening, and avoid turning the oven on at all costs.

Late summer is when baseball begins to impact the rhythm of the days. On most days of the season I can tell you how many games ahead or behind the Dodgers are in the standings in the National League West (today they’re in first place, with a five game lead on the Giants) and I generally know the team’s schedule for the next few days (on the road tonight in Arizona and back home tomorrow for a three-game series against the Colorado Rockies) but beyond that it’s a blur.

After the All-Star break, my interest ramps up and I’ll listen to the games on the radio more frequently. (I rarely watch baseball on TV.) For me, the voices of Charlie Steiner and Rick Monday are the sounds of late summer. Each team plays 162 games a year, and those games don’t become truly meaningful until the back third of the season when the trading deadline has past and teams make—or don’t make—a final push toward the playoffs in October.

I went to a game last week at Petco Park. The Dodgers came from behind in the eighth inning to steal a game from the Padres. It was a beautiful night at the ballpark. I ate pizza and popcorn, connected with a good friend, but there are few feelings like hearing the crack of a bat, leaping to your feet, and watching a baseball sail into the night as the crowd erupts all around you. (Ok, maybe not all around me, but there were quite a few Dodgers fans in the crowd.)

What are your summer routines? What sights and sounds say summer to you?

Today I’ve got recommendations for two movies, two books, and two records. As the late Vin Scully might say its deuces wild at Message from the Underworld…

Two movies

I went to see a pair of movies I enjoyed quite a bit: Christopher Nolan’s heady summer blockbuster Oppenheimer and Danny and Michael Philippou’s disarmingly engaging possession flick Talk to Me.

Oppenheimer has to be the fastest three-hour movie I’ve ever seen. It’s got a unique structure that plays out over multiple timelines, which is worth the price of admission alone. The acting is incredible, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

Talk to Me has an interesting premise: a group of kids get their hands on a creepy conduit to the spirit world that puts them in touch with the recently deceased and their filmed adventures of the experience go viral. But there’s a catch (there’s always a catch): you can only stay in the grip of this in-between place for 90 seconds or else the spirit can follow you back to the real world.

There’s a lot to like. It’s an Australian film, and nowhere near as slick as a lot of films that A24 distributes. It was a big hit at Sundance and I think that’s because the movie genuinely cares about the characters—unlike, say, Bodies Bodies Bodies—and there are a handful of moments that don’t necessarily serve the plot but deepen our connection with them. A lot of horror movies make these gestures but few pull them off.

I think both films are worth seeing though perhaps not in the theater. I struggled with both movies for different reasons. Oppenheimer is an incredibly loud film. That might seem obvious for a movie about a bomb but that’s not it. The score is bombastic which distracted me enough to take me out of the movie.

I don’t wear my hearing aids to most movies. A lot of horror movies, especially cheap horror movies, manipulate the volume during jump scares, and I really don’t want to have a heart attack in a movie theater. Anyway, because the actors are all Australian I missed a lot of dialog on account of the accent, especially at the beginning of the film. I’ll probably watch Talk to Me again when it hits the streamers.

Next up: Two horror films on my radar are Cobweb and The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Two books

After wrestling with The Savage Detectives for much of the summer I’ve been catching up on books whose writers I crossed paths with this spring and summer. I read Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda, and Gallows Dome by Nolan Knight, which I thought was excellent.

Gallows Dome is a California noir set in places off the beaten path: Long Beach and the Central Valley. The story revolves around a string of missing girls and the people who won’t stop looking for them. The main character is a woman named Lena whose life goes off the rails when her daughter disappears but refuses to give up looking for her after the police have run out of clues.

Lena’s search leads her to an ornery bartender whose daughter went missing a decade prior and the private detective her hired he keeps searching for her. They uncover a tangled web of connections between a criminal enterprise involving drug dealing, prostitution, and a mysterious cult known as Gallows Dome.

Knight really excels at fleshing out the characters so that the reader is always one step ahead of both the criminals and detectives. A lot of crime writers give lip service to character development in favor of fast-moving plots. Knight comes at the problem the other way around, with complete, complex characters hurtling toward their fates. I don’t know how he pulled it off but it’s devilishly dark ride through California’s underbelly that fans of Barry Gifford and Jordan Harper will enjoy.

I also listened to Claire Dederer’s new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which addresses the problem of great art by horrible men. Dederer skewers a lot of the lazy thinking that permeates debates around separating the art from the artists and cancel culture in a way that really resonates.

Dederer insists the subjectivity of the consumer is at the root of the issue:

“Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art.”

In other words, maybe we can separate the art from the artist, but we can’t separate our consumption of that art from our personal history. It’s up to the consumer to decide on a case-by-case basis, and by consume I don’t mean make a financial decision about whether to support that artist. You can’t unread a book any more than you can unsee a painting or unlisten to a piece of music.

This feels exactly right to me. For instance, I can’t support the band X despite having fond memories of listening to their music. Hell, I even had the opportunity to open for X alongside my friend Sean Carswell as spoken word performers.

But when Exene outed herself as a Sandy Hook truther (i.e. the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary were a false flag operation) that ended my relationship with her band. My feelings for my friend whose daughter was murdered at Sandy Hook and who later took his own life are much stronger than my feelings for a handful of punk rock songs.

And yet I can go through my day and hear Michael Jackson playing in the background at the supermarket or in videos on my phone without thinking about the monstrousness of Michael Jackson or reflecting on the harm he did to young boys. It’s just background music to me.

But that’s me, which is Dederer’s point. It’s always up to us.

It also helps that Dederer is both a passionate consumer of art and a very funny writer who uses her own flaws as a person, a parent, and an artist to great effect. Smart, sharp, clever, and engaging, I’m low-key obsessed with her style and  can’t recommend this book enough.

Next up: Steve Turner’s Mud Ride and Tod Goldberg’s Gangsters Don’t Die.

Two records

Last week I bought a copy of Downcast’s self-titled 1991 debut from Beatbox Records in Barrio Logan and have been spinning it in my studio ever since. I don’t know much about this band but I expect that will change as I get deeper and deeper into ’90s hardcore. The SoCal band was a big influence on the San Diego hardcore scene and after they broke up the drummer was murdered by an intruder. The band got back together in 2020 and released a new record on Three One G.   

I can’t believe I’m about to link to a live performance sponsored by Taco Bell but here we are. (This newsletter, by the way, is sponsored by Taco Fiesta II, the taco shop down the street that I don’t really recommend unless you’re desperate for melted queso.)¹

Scowl has toured with Circle Jerks and Drain is yet another hardcore band from Santa Cruz. Maybe I should go live there. Get a job in a comic book shop on the boardwalk and fight vampires in my spare time…

This week I’ll be at the Recess Romp at The Sardine in San Pedro on Thursday, Friday and Saturday for Dillinger Four, Toys That Kill, Dwarves, The Spits, Very Be Careful. Maybe I’ll see you there?

1. Just kidding.