This Week's Writing 7/22/23

DePalma, Jason Aldean, RFK Jr, and more!

Hello all! Thank you for supporting the substack and feeding the various cats! Here’s what I wrote last week:

If You Read One Thing By Me This Week, Read:

Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car and where it can and can’t take her in country music. (EIH)

Politics

Republicans love RFK, Jr., because his conspiracy theories are theirs. (Public Notice)

Conservatives don’t hate Hollywood actors because they’re elite. They hate them because they’re workers. (Independent)

Criticism

Sara Flannery Murphy’s novel The Wonder State is like It, with less evil clowns and less trustworthy friends. (Observer)

Qanon and the Sound of Freedom rely on tired Hollywood tropes. (Bloomberg)

Jason Aldean’s racist, reactionary song continues an ugly country music tradition. (Independent)

DePalma’s Body Double and the male gaze as failure. (EIH)

Spider-Man: No Way Home keeps Peter in the closet. (EIH)

Crank treats action movies as a decadent pleasure. (EIH)

Galaxy Quest shows the difference between Hollywood and television. (EIH)

Polite Society is an antiromcom romcom. (EIH)

Poetry

A poem about stopping. Also the dog park. (New Feathers)

A poem about jellyfish and God and maybe Concrete Blonde. (Synchronized Chaos)

A poem inspired by Pessoa. (Five Fleas)

Night lost itself by day
and found itself at night.
No form, no face, no self
in too much light.