I don’t know who knows to read this, but SORRY, BABY was just released! It’s a great film! However! The trailer promises a dramedy about quarter-life relationships and navigating life’s changes because that’s what the trailer promised.
While, yes, it’s partially about that, it’s first and foremost a film about processing the fallout of abuse. While SORRY, BABY handles it with grace and is certainly a film I’d point as a work that can help others understand the personal aftermath of traumatic events, it may trigger the fuck out of you and leave you stunned for days.
I hope that helps prepare anyone, because I certainly wasn’t!
As I write this, FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES is premiering across the U.S., the sixth in an unlikely slasher franchise that has no visible murderer.
Despite having attended a film screening at least once a week this year, I never once saw a trailer for it. I have no idea why Warner Bros. didn’t put a trailer for it before I saw SINNERS, as that too is a Warner Bros. picture. However, they did have an ingenious bloody logging truck driving around to promote the film which was how I found out about it, so they did that right.
Part thirty-two of an array of CD mixes I made for my wife over a long number of years! Read more about it here!
If you’ve been a tourist in Chicago, you’ve almost certainly visited Navy Pier, featured in the above cover photo (albeit from afar). I’d call it the ‘Coney Island’ of Chicago, but that’d be an insult to Coney Island. It’s basically a lakeside strip mall with a very large Ferris Wheel. (Not pictured.)
Granted, Navy Pier’s Ferris Wheel — technically called the ‘Centennial Wheel’ — is a nod to the original Ferris Wheel, which was born and built for the 1893 Worlds Fair, which was a seminal and extremely influential and inspiration technological showcase that took place in Chicago. So it has that going for it.
History aside, I think it’s a rather striking photo. Again, not much in the way of sweetening here apart from some tinting. I was lucky enough to catch the right golden hour lighting, especially since I believe I was on a booze cruise architectural tour when I snapped it.
Consequently? Pretty proud of this cover. As with the future covers, I’m not exactly sure how I shoehorned a ‘widescreen’ cover into a CD case, but that’s something past-me figured out and something that present-me doesn’t have to worry about.
Enough about temporal selfs! Onto the highlights!
EMIKA! She’s essentially on here twice — she also provides vocals on the harrowing THE BRANDT BRAUER FRICK ENSEMBLE work ‘Pretend’, as well as being the creator of ‘3 Hours’.
Emika is an amazingly astute electronic musician who has also branched out into general production and publishing work with her own label. ‘3 Hours’ is one hell of a melancholy throbber about domestic violence that, while it is difficult to listen to, the beats make it go down a lot smoother.
BLACK BOX RECORDER! Breathy, sultry indie rock that is not afraid to coast on the rails.
GRAVEYARD TRAIN! At first blush, you might mistake this for mid-era Nick Cave, but they have a bit more of a pirate-y jaunt. ‘The Ferryman’ is a great song to either wave or sink into your cup to.
Let’s get to the tracklist, shall we? (Artist / Album / Song — links go to a video of the song, if available.)
Part thirty-one of an array of CD mixes I made for my wife over a long number of years! Read more about it here!
I really miss grunge design. It was messy but deliberate and singular. I wish someone would bring it back, and this aging cover extolls that wish. I love the interwoven textures, the spatter pattern leaning into the lighting, the color punctuation popping exactly where it should (especially the central blue). Yeah, I’m pretty proud of this one. I even like the typography! It’s gloriously thin and, for once, you can fucking read the song list.
If I were someone else viewing this, I’d probably grouse that the title is almost incomprehensible, but that’s certainly by design — no pun intended — and I appreciate my utilization of negative space.
I feel so dumb for penning this title, given that it can read in many unintentional ways, but what’s done is done. If I could revise it? I’d reverse the ‘L’ and perhaps divide the I to split between black and white, as the fact that it’s supposed to represent 31 kinda gets lost. *shrug*
If I remember correctly, the photo was taken while driving down the dregs of Chicago’s Wacker Drive, which you may recognize from John McNaughton’s HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. I saw HENRY before I moved to Chicago and the moment I rode through it? I immediately recognized it. When I met McNaughton in 2023, I couldn’t help to impart how much that one scene was burned into my brain, despite the fact that nothing really happens during those moments. It’s pure visual verve that I often have to walk through whenever attending the Chicago International Film Festival.
Anyway. I have two versions of the cover: the featured cover above with a sans-serif font and more like an overlay. The one below has a blocked-off serif font and is far more mannered. I wish I’d married the two, as the latter obscures the huge light bloom, but I feel the font of the former is too tall, so to speak.
I didn’t sweeten it much — mostly just tweaked the contrast and laid the text around it the brighter elements. Again, I am proud of the legit blue pop that peeks through the E. Also, yes, natural lighting — that wasn’t an insert. Work around your elements, y’all! It’s more fun for all that way!
I am not sure which I picked for the final cover. I hope it was first featured above as I really do love the light bloom that is obscured by the second.
If you don’t mind me saying? Goddamn this is a good mix! Revisiting it was such a delight. I’d forgotten about so many of these raucous bands. Hard to pick the highlights, but here we go: the verve of LE TETSUO! The thrust of FEVER FEVER! (Yes, I forgot to previously mention that they were very much a Christian band but goddamn they fucking rocked.)
SUBSTANCE B’s beats are so infectious! TEETH provides some much-needed brazen electropunk kinetics! NOISEX brings down the house! Fun fact: saw him live in New York and I fucking went wild, especially during the :WUMPSCUT: covers.
If you have good taste in TV, you’ve heard GANGSTAGRASS’s ‘Mean’ as it’s the title song for the FX show JUSTIFIED. Saw ’em at SPACE in Evanston, Chicago and goddamn did they kill. It’s not on any of these mixes, but please make sure to check out their rendition of the folk song ‘Banks of the Ohio’!
Let’s take a step back and become reacquainted with the tracklist format: Artist / Album / Song — links go to a video of the song, if available.
TOM HAGERMAN / Idle Creatures / A Death In the Harbor
ASH BLACK BUFFLO / Andasol / Misery Is The Pilgrim’s Pasture
It’s Victorian era London and Anne Stanbury has sentenced to rehabilitation in an asylum for killing her son. Her lower-class husband, Edgar, deeply resents her for destroying his chance at assuming the Stanbury estate. Compounding matters, Edgar is drowning in debt while surrounded by in-laws and servants who hate his guts, not to mention being pestered by his alcoholic parasite of a father.
This is Rachel Florence Roberts’s debut novel THE MEDEA COMPLEX, and everyone is not as they seem. Was Anne gripped by a bout of madness, or was she right-of-mind when she killed her son? Does Edgar truly love Anne? What sort of duplicity are the in-laws and staff up to?
“You’re lying to yourself.”
THE MEDEA COMPLEX is a gripping page turner, propulsive but also reflective; it has sensational action, but also features an array of interior musings by the major players in the tale. Each character is intriguingly complex, and their motives and full back-stories unfurl through the pages, until you realize that each and every one of them are selfish assholes.
I love a book chock full of despicable folks, especially when they’re acting out of faulty reasoning.
While THE MEDEA COMPLEX was spurred into existence by Roberts’s postpartum depression, it was also inspired by the Victorian-era realities of inheritance and estates, barbaric grasp of psychiatry and mental illness — which included the belief that madness in women can be induced by reading — and cruelty of some ‘baby farms’
Baby farms in the Victorian era were a service where individuals took in children whose parents could not support, either because of finances, illegitimacy, or other reasons. While some farms were well-run, others were little more than profit centers and often resulting in exploiting the children or worse: allowing them to die due to starvation, or simply killing them.
As detailed in the author’s notes, Roberts emphasizes that — while a number of the characters are absolute fabrications — some are inspired by real-life scumbags, such prolific baby farmer/serial killer Amelia Dyer. *1
There’s nothing like drawing from the well of actual historical criminals to give your morally grey character a pitch-black veneer.
While the characters often act cruel and perform reprehensible acts, they are often the actions of necessity and of survival, especially the acts committed by women. One of the few well-meaning characters, Anne’s doctor — Dr. George Savage — is extraordinarily sexist, but in a blunt manner that was professionally accepted at the time. Roberts handled the reality of the situation by having Anne and others subvert his expectations in satisfying ways, ways that come to haunt him in the end.
Colorfully dour and unsavory, with characters sinking lower and lower with every page, immersed in a historically accurate and unsentimental rendering of Victorian London, MEDEA is delightfully cynical while not quite being nihilistic. It’s a taunt work of intrigue that confidently scrutinizes the effect of patriarchy on medical matters, on generational inheritance, of the fiscal and mental fallout of motherhood.
“After all, ranking is merely an accident of birth.”
If you’re interested in reading about how lurid Victorian murders were and how they were portrayed and detailed by the media, I highly recommend Judith Flanders’s THE INVENTION OF MURDER (2011). It’s telling that baby farming is only allotted a handful of pages and not considered nearly as scandalous as other acts of the time!) ↩︎
I’ve been lamenting to anyone who will listen to me that there are so few ‘dramatic punk’ films now, as compared to the audacious works of the 80s, 90s and naughts. We need more DOOM GENERATIONs! If anything, this list is a celebration of 2024 punk filmmaking because, fuck, we need punk films now more than ever.
So, barely in time for time for the Oscars, in no particular order are my favorite films of 2024:
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS
I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that Ethan Coen’s latest was overlooked, if not intentionally ignored by most. Is it ramshackle? Yes, but that’s a feature — not a bug. It’s funny, propulsive, often surprising in acts of violence as well of acts of lust. This is an extremely horny, extremely queer road-trip criminal comedy of errors and an utter delight.
I SAW THE TV GLOW
I loved Jane Schoenbrun’s weird, wild head-trip that was WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR, so I expected her sophmore effort I SAW THE TV GLOW to be a shaggy creepypasta affair.
I SAW THE TV GLOW and it is a head-trip and, yes, facets of it can be considered creepypasta — the reliance on faux-90s TV shows to blend fictional horror with reality — it is mannered instead of shaggy. It’s an emotional character study that can mean so much to so many people but is, first and foremost, a uniquely trans allegory.
CHALLENGERS
Exactly the tense, sizzling, visually inventive sort of sports film you would expect from Luca Guadagnino as in: it’s not really about sports but power dynamics. Sexy power dynamics with the backdrop of sweat-covered tennis provide a rollercoaster of movement and emotions that is only slightly marred by the nausea-inducing closing game shot from the perspective of the tennis ball.
THE PEOPLE’S JOKER
Admittedly, I almost skipped catching when creator Vera Drew brought it to Chicago. In fact, in a first I warned my friend that I might have to remove myself and that they shouldn’t take it personally.
(If you’re wondering why I was concerned? I’ll just leave this here.)
Thankfully my concerns were unfounded and I was able to enjoy this absolutely unbridled mindfuck musing on identity. THE PEOPLE’S JOKER is punk from top-to-bottom, pop culture sharply loudly blended, then vomited into your eyes and ears. It’s a cacophony that resonates in a way that’ll be heard for years to come.
THE SUBSTANCE
Hard to think of an angrier punk film this year than this feminist body horror screed that recalls TETSUO: THE IRON MAN.
THE FALL GUY
Delightful fun. Great, well-lit stunts that aren’t just a muddy blur. Colors! Chemistry! Did I mention the stunts? This should have been the summer movie and I still don’t understand why it wasn’t, because you really missed out if you didn’t see it on the big screen.
NO OTHER LAND
I’m cheating a bit, as I saw this documentary in February but, as it’s self-distributed and I saw it in theaters as soon as possible, I will count it.
Watching Israel upend and destroy the homes of the Palestinian denizens of Masafer Yatta is devastating; footage that few in the US have seen, footage that is difficult to watch, footage that is almost unbelievable.
Worse is seeing the timestamps of the coverage: 2019-2023.
All I could think the entire time was:
“Fuck. This is just the beginning. It gets so worse.”
Honorable Mentions: BETTER MAN; I’M STILL HERE; LOVE LIES CRUSHING
This post discusses trauma, including physical and sexual abuse.
I write a lot about media that tacklestrauma because, well, artistic works have helped me realize and come to terms with a lot of my own trauma. It’s not a subject that you can easily broach with others and, often, something that is buried instead of confronted. The works that do reckon with trauma can be a provocation or a balm or both.
Michelle Good’s FIVE LITTLE INDIANS was certainly both for me.
FIVE LITTLE INDIANS scrutinizes five Indigenous youths who were forced into the same Canadian Indian residential school. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice, Canadian Indian residential school system was a program instituted by the Canadian government and overseen by church members. At the age of six, one is cut off from your parents and hauled off to a boarding school. You’re taught European and Christian ideals until you’re 16 years old. You’re then booted out, left to fend for yourself in an unforgiving world.
The intent was to indoctrinate and assimilate by whatever means deemed fit by their institutional headmasters. Instead it cut thousands off from their culture and heritage and ruined lives. This government-mandated cruelty lasted for over a century, well into the 1960s.
Good’s five Indians — Kenny, Maisie, Lucy, Howie and Clara — are have overlapping stints in the 1950s at the Mission School. All five of them are starved, humiliated, and suffer physical and sexual abuse from their overseers. Both Kenny and Howie manage to separately run away, whereas Maisie, Lucy and Clara serve all ten years.
All five of them, one way at one time or another, find their way to the slums of Downtown Eastern Vancouver and into each other’s lives, bound together by what they endured at the Mission.
While FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is specifically about the trauma inflicted by colonizers and how it was specifically enacted to bulldoze cultures, the ways the characters confront or cope or ignore their trauma are easy to identify with.
For example, take this exchange between Kenny and Lucy as they discuss reparations the government is preparing to make:
“They call us survivors.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think I survived. Do you?”
“I just don’t know. I’m so tired, Lucy.”
Kenny later states:
“Sometimes I think I did die, I’m just still walking around.”
Reading the two of them reflecting on the label of ‘survivor’ rattled me, as I’ve had the same exchange with my therapist when they have labeled as a ‘survivor’. The only difference? I stated that all I did was ‘continue to exist’. They responded:
“That’s surviving. A lot of people who have been through the same did not…”
That’s undeniably true, especially in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS, as all five of them have been affected by those who did not survive what the Mission had wrought. All five feel like they’ve survived nothing, that there’s no glory or satisfaction in having made it to another day.
Empathizing with the thoughts and sentiments expressed in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is why I write about works that focus on lesser-discussed topics such as abuse and traumatic experiences. These topics that are rarely discussed outside of physical and mental health offices and are assumed to be verboten and off-limits, even to those closest to you. It may make others uncomfortable, it may make them view you differently, or you simply might feel that it’s unworthy of sharing.
All of the above are touched on in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS, as they don’t have any kind of template or guide to help them process what they’ve lived through. Similarly, the Canadian government is also struggling with addressing the abuse these people endured. Mostly, it’s financial reparations, but also through acknowledgement that these acts occurred and that these acts were acts of cruelty and abuse and physically and mentally devastated so many.
It’s this recognition, not just in the past by those who have lived it, those who have inflicted it, those who were complicit in it, and Good for weaving this tale to bring attention not just to the acts, but the acts and the fallout, that is so important.
The power of words, of phrasing, of articulating, of airing these matters — both personal and sociopolitical — can help to heal, even if it hurts at first. Some may say it can bring closure. Frankly, I don’t believe that; for many reasons I know I’ll never have closure for the acts done to me, despite finally confronting it. It’ll always be there; so much of who I am, how I interact — or fail to interact — is entangled with that history that … there is no hope for closure, but that isn’t the point — that isn’t the endgame — of acknowledgement and recognition of abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
This may come across as rudimentary or obvious but reading stories like these, fiction centered around fact — be it historical events or simply lived experience woven into a tale — can elicit awareness in a number of a ways, from those who have experienced it, those who can empathize, those who can sympathize, those who can relate, and those who were previously oblivious.
FIVE LITTLE INDIANS works on all of the levels while also unfurling an engrossing multi-generational arc of nuanced characters. It might be a book you can read for some insight on the crimes of the past, or it might be something that’ll open your eyes to events others may have endured, or it might trigger you, or it might make you feel slightly less alone in the world, it may help someone talk to you or to talk to others about trauma, or maybe it’ll do all of the above as it did for me.
FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is available through Bookshop. Support indie bookstores!
This is the first of several LIFE IS STRANGE: DOUBLE EXPOSURE pieces and is an impressions piece on my first play-through and not meant as an in-depth, critical look at the game. This post and play-through reflects my decision from the first LIFE IS STRANGE that Chloe and Max left Arcadia Bay together. A later post will report back regarding a different direction.
Also: it is worth noting that DOUBLE EXPOSURE is a Deck Nine game, a company that is no stranger to the LIFE IS STRANGE series. However, Deck Nine has previously employed sexual aggressors and racists and may still. That they’ve succeeded in creating nuanced, diverse and accepting games despite the efforts of some of their staff is a testament to those who believe in the spirit of the first LIFE IS STRANGE.
I’ve played and replayed every LIFE IS STRANGE game, read all of the comics as well as the WAVELENGTHS follow-up novel STEPH’S STORY. And I wrote about all of them, some more than a few times because it’s a series that means that much to me.
So you’d think I’d have more interest in the latest LIFE IS STRANGE installment, a direct follow-up to the game that kicked it all off, that I’d be elated to revisit a world with Chloe and Max, albeit post-Arcadia Bay.
Yes, you’d certainly think that. At first, I was.
Then I heard that Chloe wouldn’t be in it. That it was about the further adventures of one Max Caulfield.
Here’s the thing: I don’t really care about Max Caulfield.
My favorite playable LIFE IS STRANGE characters are:
Max Caulfield is a bookworm, a shutterbug, a wallflower, and — as of the first LIFE IS STRANGE — she hasn’t had much in the way of life experiences. Her only other character traits are sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong and handing out unhelpful idealistic advice.
She’s someone fun to talk to in a used book store, but you wouldn’t walk out of that shop thinking that you’d met a complex, textured person.
DOUBLE EXPOSURE promised a new Max Caulfield for a new LIFE IS STRANGE adventure and, it does deliver on that. This Max no longer the doe-like youth standing in the shadow of Chloe. Despite her time rewind powers having atrophied, she’s more confident and self-assured and worldly. In my play-through, she and Chloe cut ties halfway through their cross-country roadtrip in Chicago and, following that schism, Max floated around as an acclaimed photojournalist before. Now she’s in her 20s and is an artist-in-residence at Caledon University, a small liberal arts school in Lakeport, Vermont.1
Unfortunately, despite being a respected artist, despite having lived and experienced so much — in Arcadia Bay and on the road — Max Caulfield is still pretty fucking boring.
We meet up with Max as she’s finally settling in at Caledon; she’s been there long enough to establish new friendships and know students names, but is still considered the new kid at school. Her two closest academic friends are poet and daughter of the dean Safi and astrophysicist Moses.
One night Safi and Moses and Max are having a few celebratory drinks to champion recent accomplishments. Safi gets upset by a call and takes off. Later that night, Max finds her shot dead. Max being the meddlesome kid adult she is, attempts to rewind time to prevent the murder and, instead, happens to open a portal to an alternate timeline where Safi is still alive, leading her to use both timelines to find the killer.
As LIFE IS STRANGE setups go, this one is bog standard, and shares a lot in common with Deck Nine’s LIFE IS STRANGE: TRUE COLORS: small, lush New England town, tightly-knit liberal community, death of a well-known citizen, and a protagonist with superpowers that aid in rooting out the murder mystery.
A protagonist who is an acclaimed artist with superpowers and is still pretty fucking boring.
Yes, Max has grown up. Her voice is no longer whisper thin, and she speaks in declarative statements instead of wishy-washy musings. She’s also queer now! (While I didn’t play her that way in the first LIFE IS STRANGE, yeah, a lot can change over the years!) She’s still frustratingly dull. Her taste in art and music non-offensive. She rarely has a bad thought towards anyone, even if they’re trying to -kill her-. She barely has any connections to anyone unless they’re right in front of her.
Max Caulfield in her 20s is still someone who, if you met in a bookstore or art gallery, you’d forget about the moment you walked away. Apart from her new split timeline power, very little has changed about her. That’s a problem, especially when you’re dealing with a series that has characters like the bitter and disillusioned Chloe, or Steph dealing with her queer crossroads, or Alex Chen’s dissonance juggling the good and bad in people as she’s thrust into independence after a life in foster homes.
One could make the argument that Max’s detachment and lack of decisiveness are due to enduring the weight of the events at Arcadia Bay but to that I say: “Nope, she’s always been that way.”
DOUBLE EXPOSURE could have course-corrected that, as it feels like a re-evaluation and response to the first game. Matters here are not as morally cut-and-dry, and there’s more nuance towards character motivations here in the first half of the game. It’s not all youthful indiscretions low-stakes teen criminal behavior. It’s an adult(-ish) world of academia, and motives here are far more complex.
At least, they are until you hit the second half of the game.
LIFE IS STRANGE has always struggled with its reliance on its super-powered younger protagonists, enough so that half of the games feature protagonists without powers. Unfortunately, DOUBLE EXPOSURE veers off into X-MEN-esque superhero antics. It pivots from allowing the super-human powers to enrich and deepen the narrative and characters. Instead of watching the emotional turmoil unfold by Max rewriting Chloe’s timeline in the first LIFE IS STRANGE, DOUBLE EXPOSURE turns one character into a Magneto-esque villain and force Max to either follow along or to maximize her powers to prevent something only she can prevent.
Between the superpowers and the academic politics, DOUBLE EXPOSURE is all about wielding power and influence and control. While that’s all well-and-good for say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that’s not what draws folks to the LIFE IS STRANGE games; we want out small-scale stories writ large. We want our nuanced characters and pathos and normal struggles framed against the chaos of the rest of the world. That’s entirely what the first LIFE IS STRANGE was built around: it was about Max and Chloe, their friendship and their estrangement, a world that would tear itself apart because Chloe’s continued existence was deemed that damaging, and one person who could rewind to save Chloe from her ordained fate.
DOUBLE EXPOSURE lacks that emotional core; it substitutes fleshing out Max’s personality with broader powers, more guilt, and more responsibility. If there’s any character here that shines, it’s because Max’s best friend Safi has secrets, Safi can be dangerous, Safi has objectives and goals and wants and needs.
In other words? She has a lot of what Max lacks, and what a follow-up to the first LIFE IS STRANGE needed.
DOUBLE EXPOSURE ends with the laughable declaration that “MAX CAULFIELD WILL RETURN” that, at first blush, reads almost as a threat. The majority of fans that wanted Max to return, wanted her to return with Chloe. I would have been happy if we had a more interesting Max, but on the other hand? They could have just made this game around an entirely new character, like they’ve done in the past.
However, this is meant as more an impressions piece, an examination of why — fundamentally — DOUBLE EXPOSURE was unsatisfying for me as a lifelong LIFE IS STRANGE fan. I didn’t get to touch on what Chloe is up to and how Max is dealing with it; Max’s adoption of digital versus analog; the soundtrack; the inverted scope of the game when compared to the prior major LIFE IS STRANGE entries; what exactly is canon in the LiS universe now, or even how Max Caulfield reminds me of GILMORE GIRLS’s Rory Gilmore.
And I do want to impress that, if you can let go of the franchise’s history, of all of that baggage, I would have enjoyed this game. Granted, I still would have laughed when I saw the closing placard, but I would recommend it to others. And I will be replaying it, and my opinion of it — and adult Max — may change! After all… “MEDIACLATURE’S LIFE IS STRANGE POSTS WILL RETURN”
I’ve previously penned that the LIFE IS STRANGE series often reminds me of my life growing up in Vermont, and it’s not just because both rural areas of the northeast and northwest United States have similar topography and foliage. Quite a bit of LIFE IS STRANGE is influenced by Shirley Jackson, who is best known for penning THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL as well as other darkly weird tales. Jackson spent the bulk of her life in Bennington, Vermont right by the esteemed Bennington College and its unconventional and progressive teaching styles. Jackson’s novel WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE features the Blackwell family, whereas LIFE IS STRANGE’s school is named Blackwell Academy, after the rich Arcadian Bay Blackwell real estate developers. And now, here we are, in Vermont, in a school that could easily double for Bennington College. ↩︎
Armistead Maupin’s series TALES OF THE CITY — which started off as a series of reads in the -San Francisco Chronicle- — is an array of a queer found family to be jealous of. The first collection, aptly named TALES OF THE CITY, follows the antics of naive, very straight 25-year-old midwesterner Mary Ann as she moves to San Francisco.
Mary Ann takes up residence at 28 Barbary Lane, a quaint apartment building overseen by kindly weed-aficionado Anna Madrigal. Living under Ms. Madrigal’s roof is Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, a gay man with commitment issues, free spirit Mona Ramsey, and others who help to weave Mary Ann into the fabric of San Francisco.
As you might have surmised from the title and significant cast of characters, TALES OF THE CITY is extremely Dickensian, even down to adopting some of Dickens’ predilection for the outrageous. Maupin doesn’t go as far as incorporating spontaneous human combustion into the works, but the residents of 28 Barbary Lane often do find themselves in outlandish melodramas fit for a soap opera. (It’s telling that the extreme primetime TV soap MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN is mentioned in the first fifteen pages.)
Yes, the sensational and lurid elements of TALES OF THE CITY are effectively titillating and propulsive, it’s the sense of time, place, and relationships that hooked me: Mary Ann grows more and more comfortable with counter-culture — queer or otherwise —; Mouse’s mood shifts as he longs for a substantial and fulfilling relationship, but instead fills his days with club nights and numerous hook-ups; Ms. Madrigal’s back-story and how she juggles it as well as the needs of all around her. They’re all heartfelt tales, all deeply rooted in San Francisco at the times Maupin was penning the installments for the paper: mid-70s for TALES OF THE CITY, late 70s for MORE TALES OF THE CITY, and early 80s for FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY.
As the TALES OF THE CITY books are being published to this day — although only the first five were previously published in weekly newspaper installments — it remains a fascinating document of cultural shifts, generational schisms, mores, moods, urban changes, and perceptions of societal, sexual, and gender norms. Not to mention reading about the San Francisco imagines it to be — artsy, extremely left, very weird — instead of the dudetechbro nightmare it’s become.
An aside: I’ve only read TALES OF THE CITY, MORE TALES OF THE CITY and FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY. It’s one of those series that I’m trying to slowly dole out, as its emphasis on ever-shifting culture. However, you can certainly feel the specter of AIDS looming over FURTHER TALES, ensuring that I need to emotionally gird myself for BABYCAKES, the fourth volume.
The series was wildly popular for years, was turned into a TV adaptation in the 90s which was resurrected by Netflix for a mini-series, and is one of BBC’s Top 100 Most Inspiring Novels.
However, like how MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN burned so bright in the mid 70s and is almost entirely forgotten today, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered the series. I’m certain that’s partially because some the situations and perspective and language is dated, but that’s a feature — not a bug. As we as society are rather cyclical, it’d be wise to not let the series collect cultural dust.
Lastly? Now more than ever, we need to hear liberating and enlightening and life-saving finding your own family can be, that you can find safety and security and form lifelong bonds with others.
28 Barbary Lane is fictional, but 28 Barbary Lanes exist all over. I’m currently living in my own 28 Barbary Lane, in a queer and weird slice of Chicago that I wouldn’t trade for the world. If you still haven’t found your 28 Barbary Lane, well, let Armistead Maupin pen you a map.
Not to gladhand myself — well, maybe a bit — I am a huge fan of this cover. I can’t recall where I took the picture and while I definitely sweetened it, I love the composition. I love the background pattern, and I love how the leaf at the bottom invisibly connects with the river. I love the overlaid spatter on XXX. I even somewhat like the font size!
Enough about scenery! Bring on the musical highlights!
EMA! Indie-electro at its finest! ‘The Grey Ship’ is exceptionally languid, but additional tracks escalate and feel like dirt pressed over a forlorn voice.
Unsurprisingly? Saw ’em at Chicago’s EMPTY BOTTLE for what was an incredibly emotive experience. Sadly, I doubt we’ll receive any new EMA material, but at least we have what we have.
THEE 50’S HIGH TEENS! Throwback early 60s garage rock, synths and all, helmed by righteously angry women whose temperament you can feel through this instrumental track.
WILD FLAG! I normally are not one for supergroups, but goddamn, this is one I could not resist, and the end result? Perfection. SLEATER-KINNEY’s Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss! HELIUM’s Mary Timony! THE MINDER’s Mary Timony!
‘Romance’ is absolutely succinct perfection. No flaws. It’s a raucous-but-tight production that builds perfectly from the opening synths to the Mototown infusion! Also, the chorus is so goddamn hooky and makes me grin every time I hear it.
(Yes, I also saw ’em at EMPTY BOTTLE and no one can take that stellar memory away from me.)
Back to set the scene! (Artist / Album / Song — links go to a video of the song, if available):
SOAP&SKIN / Lovetune For Vacuum / DDMMYYYY
BLAWAN / Bohla / Lavender (No official video, so enjoy this fan-made one that features John Travolta shoehorned into two scenes he shouldn’t be in.)
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