Tag: reviews

Sounds of the season, day 1

Last year I started to write a post about my favorite holiday songs. I didn’t get past listing the titles of seven of them. Inspired by the book week thing, I’ve decided to make it seven posts this year.

I first heard “Fairytale of New York” (Wikipedia/YouTube) as a teenager, because my brother was a huge Pogues fan.It has some lovely musical juxtapositions while still being something you can sing-along to. I understand that it’s a huge thing in the UK, so much so that not hearing it is a challenge on the scale of Whammageddon.1

a woodpecker playing a tune

Shagg Carpet would be a good name for a Shaggs cover band

via The New Yorker, I learn that the outsider rock band The Shaggs recently had a reunion just down the road from me. Writer Howard Fishman asks

Was it fair to even call this band the Shaggs? Or was it, rather, a Shaggs cover band providing a live karaoke soundtrack for the Wiggins to sing along with?

As someone who once judged a contest in which contestants tackled the question of whether a band can be its own cover band, I can’t let this pass as just a rhetorical question.

Continue reading “Shagg Carpet would be a good name for a Shaggs cover band”

Nothing leads where I expect

When I started News For Wombats, I expected to be writing slightly different stuff than I did at Footnotes on Epicycles (my old blog).

I thought I’d post about politics, but I haven’t.

The present scene is alternately too depressing and too crazy. One example of a post that almost happened: I was struck, in the aftermath of Charlottesville, that the New York Times could still whinge about Trump’s “moral standing as president.”2 I mulled it over a bit before posting, Trump doubled down on deferring to racism, and then the Time’s understatement seemed hardly worth mentioning.

I thought I’d write more capsule reviews, but I haven’t.

For example, the Netflix show Iron Fist is almost unwatchable. I ultimately soldiered through so that I could pick up the continuity of the Defenders. The biggest problem with Iron Fist is that the action scenes are terrible. I don’t just mean that the martial arts are technically poor (which they are) but also that they fail narratively. I am fine with fight scenes in old Star Trek episodes: Kirk takes out aliens with hammy rabbit punches, but it comes across that he’s supposed to be pretty good at punching. Silly fight choreography aside, the narrative is clear. In Iron Fist, Mister Fist is thrown around by even mook-level bad guys. The show doesn’t let me the viewer know that he’s supposed to actually be good at this.3

Hey, now I have written about those things. How about that?4 Continue reading “Nothing leads where I expect”