Red October's Cultural Bouillabaisse
Dig in, friends!
Greetings, Dames Nation! This week we bring you one of our good old-fashioned Internet Round-Ups of the many treasures we’ve been picking up & stashing away, obsessive beachcomber-style. Enjoy!!
Dame Karen Looks At The Internet
The Criterion Channel has blessed the month of October and put together an outstanding collection of ‘80s horror movies. There’s a lot of range here -- personal favs thus far include The Fan featuring THE Lauren Bacall being stalked by, yes, an incredibly creepy and gross “fan” as she prepares to star in an absolutely bonkers Bob Fosse-but-filter-it-through-a-wheel-of-American-cheese Broadway musical and Brain Damage, Frank Henenlotter’s masterpiece in which a parasitic penile worm creature named Aylmer with the sleazy yet refined voice of a TV horror host (literally) hooks up with a hapless dude and offers him a lifetime of pleasurable hallucinations for…a price! A very costly price! (It’s brains.) Overwhelmed by the massive selection? Gena Radcliffe, one of my favorite writers and co-host of the excellent Kill By Kill podcast, wrote an extremely helpful piece of service journalism for The Spool ranking the entire collection!
All hail Joanne Woodward who, according the the long-awaited posthumous Paul Newman memoir coming out soon, turned one of the hottest people ever to walk the earth into “a sexual creature”! Joanne knew what she had on her hands (ahem) and established a room in their house as the “Fuck Hut” for use when they weren’t, per Newman, leaving “ a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.” OUTSTANDING!
RIP, Dame Angela Lansbury. Here she is doing “Send In The Clowns” in 1993 at Stephen Sondheim’s Kennedy Honors and showing everyone How It’s Done and here’s her 1988 exercise and self care video, “Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves”. I really enjoyed this Twitter thread on “the trifecta of losing the total mensch group of TV crime-solvers: Falk (Columbo), Klugman (Quincy) and Lansbury (Fletcher).”
AJ Strosahl on the 1994 7 Year Bitch album “¡Viva Zapata!” and the 1993 murder of Mia Zapata of The Gits, which I remember well. “We were so furious, so sickened, at the threat the world posed to us. Our anger was not situational, her plight made it clear: our rage, our terror, was a permanent condition. There was a measure of quaint hope in our outrage: we were young and could still be surprised by the ugliness of the world.”
Very niche, very “oh THAT’S how we got here!”, very cool, that’s the Tedium way! “A list of programs from the all-too-brief golden era of desktop publishing that didn’t make it.” I so very proudly added my knowledge of PageMaker to my late ‘90s/early ‘00s resumes.
Dame Sophie’s Quality Assortment of Odds & Ends
After several years of enthusing about and evangelizing on behalf of Derry Girls (several times in this very newsletter), I fulfilled my destiny by being assigned to write the Vulture recaps for its third and final season. Was it as perfect as the first two seasons? No. Did they manage to stick 90% of the landing, even with having to write and shoot around the Bridgerton shooting schedule of core cast member Nicola Coughlan, and around the reality that the other core cast members were playing characters nearly half their current ages? Sure did! I’m willing to forgive that last 10%. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. And! Into the bargain, I got to recommend all sorts of ancillary material and share fun (a term I use very broadly here) facts about the show and its era. What more can a bossy dame ever ask for? If you’ve watched the third season, please do come yell with me about it. If you haven’t, and you have Netflix, and you like shows that are funny, snappy, and touching, I think it’ll be right up your alley. Just make sure you watch the subtitles on, they talk so! fast!
I know I’ve talked about KC Davis’s Struggle Care a fair amount here, and I’m going to continue to talk about it, because it’s causing a good sea change in my brain! Our societal conditioning trains us to think about the cleanliness and tidiness of our homes as a moral issue. That conditioning is so strong that it almost feels beyond critique, but what if we detached our value as human beings from the state of our kitchen countertops? What! if!!!
KC’s framing of house work as care tasks, her suggestions about how to approach them as tasks with a sliding scale of outcomes dependent on one’s capacity to complete them on a given day, and her kind insistence that we all deserve to live and work and play in spaces that are functional for us are all so simple and I can feel them reshaping my neural pathways bit by bit each day. If reading her book or following her on Instagram (where she’s @strugglecare) or TikTok (where she’s @domesticblisters) are not feasible or enticing to you, perhaps her newly-launched podcast (conveniently titled Struggle Care) will be more your speed. There are four episodes out now, with new ones dropping weekly on Mondays. So far, the episodes on executive functioning and ADHD/Kids/Care Tasks have been my favorites.
As I write this, the Philadelphia Phillies are playing some very good baseball. I’m only watching little clips on Twitter and paid about half-attention to the Dessert Week episode of the Great British Bake-Off & was trying not to be super-disruptive to the rest of my family as I not-so-surreptitiously texted friends very normal things like SCREAMING and WE ARE CRYING IN A COOL WAY and DON’T GET ANY CUTE IDEAS, EVIL EYE!!
Friends, I don’t even follow baseball closely, but I played (badly, very very badly) softball in my town’s league for a couple of years growing up, and it’s remarkable how much stuff you can remember from 30-plus years ago when you have a little Sartre moment. The sound of the bat hitting the ball – you know the specific sound, right? The one that tells everyone within earshot that It. Is. Out of heeeeeere! That’s my sonic madeleine. I am suddenly awash in memories and technical knowledge dredged way up from the furthest recesses of my mental long-term storage. Can you imagine the effect this game would have on me if I were watching it for real? I am way too romantic about baseball to withstand a full dose of these emotions in a sold-out crowd.
All of which is the wind-up to my total delight this week at learning that, among the songs the Phillies sing/chant/scream together in the locker room while pouring champagne all over each other, their favorite, their anthem is *checks notes* the GOAT of breakup dance-bops “Dancing On My Own”, by Robyn??? Strange on its face but also deeply logical. Something magical—alchemical, even!—happens when you howl crushingly lonely lyrics like “yeah, I know it’s stupid, I just gotta see it for myself” in a celebratory scrum with your best buds when you have Done The Thing.
Ok, so technically, they are honoring a remix of a cover by Calum Scott, but I respect the classics and am choosing to imagine the Phillies more complexly than that. I believe that the Phillies are all secretly enormous fans of Swedish pop music in general. They love Max Martin and all his works, and have dissected in detail the episode of Hit Parade devoted to his substantial influence. They go to see Björn Again live whenever they can. They were part of the massive post-concert sing-along on the subway platform beneath Madison Square Garden in 2018. I mean, look at this!
Do we need more proof than this video provides? The jury returns an unambiguous verdict: Clearly not. (It’s me, I am the jury.) So. Ring the Bell. Scream-sing “Dancing On My Own” with your friends. Text them your tears of joy. Listen up to your neighbors’ howls of celebration. It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive.
Couldn’t agree more about Derry Girls. Season three inspired a total rewatch and so many laughs and tears Jesus wept, indeed, Uncle Colm!