Pop Culture Happy Hour: "American Utopia"

David Byrne and Spike Lee collaborated on a superb concert film of Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. (David Lee)

Unless I’m forgetting something the only band Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon and I have ever gone to see together was The Magnetic Fields a decade ago. Glen has declined invitations from me to performances by many other bands. Had we known one another in 2008, and had I known of his yen for Talking Heads, I certainly would’ve asked him to accompany me to Baltimore that September for the second night of ex-Heads frontman David Byrne’s tour promoting Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his then-new album with longtime collaborator Brian Eno.

I wrote a brief review of that show for the Washington Post and then saw that tour two more times over the next year or so, at Wolf Trap and I at, I think, the Warner Theater. I loved the tour, devoted to Everything That Happens and the several other Byrne/Talking Heads albums on which Eno was a producer and/or a co-writer and performer. But I was frustrated, as I assume Byrne must have been, at the disparity in the audience’s reception of the superb new songs and the Heads classics: polite deference and ecstatic exuberance, respectively.

That’s a dynamic that repeats itself in American Utopia, Spike Lee’s superb concert film of Byrne’s latest show, which toured for a while before setting into a Broadway engagement at the Hudson Theater where Spike captured it last February, just before the Covid crisis struck NYC. Again Byrne has a strong album of recent material to work from, though only a quarter of American Utopia-the-show’s 20 songs come from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. The rest are, with one unforgettable exception, mined from his 40-year catalog. I’m sure his fellow ex-Heads Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison must think that by securing an audience for his new work by continuing to perform the most beloved material by a band that hasn’t toured since 1984, Byrne is having his cake and eating it, too. (Frantz says Byrne didn’t even invite him to see American Utopia during its Broadway run.)

I was honored to discuss most of this on a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode hosted by Glen and featuring the great Soraya Nadia McDonald, who blushed when I congratulated her on being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year. If I ever get that close to a Pulitzer, I won’t be nearly so gracious about it.

Call Me: The Telephonic Literary Union's "Human Resources," reviewed.

This is a panel from a David Mazzucchelli-drawn issue of Daredevil from the 80s, when phones were rotary and more suspenseful.

My first theater review—and The Telephonic Literary Union’s Human Resources is being presented by Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, its lack of resemblance to anything like a play notwithstanding—since I saw the Folger’s Merry Wives of Windsor back in January, when we all lived in another world and the population of the United States was more than 200,000 people larger than it is now, is in the Washington City Paper this week.

TL;DR: The show (or whatever it is) is an imperfect but worthy experiment in a form with a lot of possibility.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Enola Holmes"

Henry Cavill, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Sam Claflin as Sherlock, Enola, and Mycroft, respectively. (Netflix)

Wherein the alphabetical dream team of Klimek, Daisy Rosario, Glen Weldon, and Margaret H. Willison, LLP, breaks down Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-shepherded Netflix movie adapted from Nancy Springer’s YA novels about Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister.

The only thing I have to add to what’s in the episode is that I wanted to smuggle in a second What’s Making Me Happy pick, one with resonances both to Sherlock Holmes and the Happy I cited, Stephen Baxter’s novel The Massacre of Mankind. It’s a new track from Elvis Costello called “Phonographic Memory,” a bizarre spoken-word account of an audience in some dark future listening to a speech mashed up from various recordings of the long-dead Orson Welles. “After the peace was negotiated, and the Internet switched off, knowledge returned to its medieval cloister,” Elvis intones over an open-tuned acoustic guitar.

The track, he has said is a digital B-side, so don’t look for it on Hey Clockface, the new album he’s dropping next month. In addition to creating the most famous adaptation of War of the Worlds — his Halloween 1938 Mercury Theatre radio play, ingeniously disguised as a series of news reports — Welles played Professor Moriarty in a 1954 radio adaptation of The Final Problem.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Star Trek: Lower Decks"

Lower Decks, the latest Star Trek spinoff, is meant to show us the crew members who work the shit jobs on a Federation starship. (CBS All Access)

It’s been nine months since last I joined a PCHH panel, and they’ve been dog months. In that span I’ve bought myself a pricey new microphone, had knee surgery, run zero point zero miles, and watched in impotent rage as a global pandemic has slain hundreds of thousands of Americans who might still be with us had responsible adults been in charge when the plague hit. Police officers murdered George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, millions took to the streets (I was still too weak to do that back in May and June) to protest police violence against persons of color, and my beloved hometown of Washington, DC was invaded by the U.S. military.

Dog months. And all without the outlets of running or boxing, the strategies I have relied upon to exorcize corrosive feelings since I was a kid. I got a bicycle at the end of June, and the increasingly long rides to which I’ve been treating myself have helped.

Anyway, Pop Culture Happy Hour! And a new Star Trek series, which is both animated and fluid-rich (blood, bile… alien vomit.)

Lower Decks is set in the Next Generation era, aboard the U.S.S. Cerritos, a California-class vessel. The first shuttlecraft we see parked in its shuttle bay is the Joshua Tree, a naked play for my affection. The shuttle Yosemite gets more airtime in the early episodes.

I was delighted to dissect the show with Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and Petra Mayer.

Talking "Life on Mars" (the song) on the National Air and Space Museum's Instagram Feed

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A post shared by National Air and Space Museum (@airandspacemuseum) on Jul 17, 2020 at 4:22pm PDT

It’s been an uncharacteristically un-prolific several months for me—I’ve been busy recuperating from / dealing with complications of knee surgery while trying not to contract COVID-19 during any of my frequent in-person visits to various medical facilities. But I did get asked by my friends at the National Air and Space Museum to talk for a few minutes about departed legend David Bowie’s association with Mars on the Museum’s Instagram feed on Friday, part of an evening of Mars-themed programming they’d assembled in anticipation of the Mars 2020 rover launch—now set for sometime between July 30 and August 15. The launch has been delayed a few times, but it’s certainly going to happen before Tenet is released in theaters.

Anyway, you can watch the video here if so inclined.

Vin Diagram: "Bloodshot," reviewed.

Memento and Iron Man 3 star Guy Pearce with Vin Diesel in a comic book adaptation that shamelessly rips off Memento and Iron Man 3, among other films. (Sony)

If the last movie I ever get to see in the theater is a goddamn Vin Diesel vehicle, I’m gonna die very angry. My review of Bloodshot is here.

Bovine Intervention: "First Cow," reviewed.

Orion Lee and John Magaro play friends and business partners in 1820s Oregon. (A24)

Full disclosure: I saw First Cow, the new 19th century-set frontier drama from cowriter/director Kelly Reichardt last night at a screening that was followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker herself. At the end of the evening, she saw me crutching along—I had arthroscopic surgery to repair my meniscus two weeks ago today—and she held the door for me.

That decent gesture did not in any way influence my NPR review of First Cow, which is here.

The 58-Year Mission: "Nobody Does It Better," reviewed for The Washington Post

Daniel Craig in 2006’s sublime Casino Royale, chronicling a formative mission for a wet-behind-the-ears 007.

I was a big fan of Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross’s two-volume Star Trek oral history The Fifty-Year Mission, so I fairly leapt at the chance to review Nobody Does It Better, their new oral history of the James Bond movies, for the Paper of Record. It’s not as illuminating or contradictory as their Trek books, though I was delighted to find some comments from my pal Matt Gourley within its (seven! hundred!) pages.